Writing Machines is the course website for English 170L at Pomona College in Claremont, California.
When Feral Hypertexts Attack
Submitted by magoo on 5 November 2006 - 3:41pm.
Given Shelley Jackson's guarantee to not republish Skin in any other format, do the criticism and discussion of those who meet her "words" not become the story itself as the original words die off?
Does Jackson not also thereby distribute authorship?
If so, is the story fictional?
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How are the "words" who meet
How are the "words" who meet each other ever going to be able to piece a story together out of the few words they can accumulate? Say you're lucky and meet 10 in your lifetime - those 10 could be from all over the book, or 10 "I"'s, or 10 "the"'s. I just don't see how this could ever work. The only one I know will ever have any idea what even one sentence from the story would be is the author herself.
Words, skin, and fictionality
I think that the Skin Footnotes page -- "by words, for words" -- is the perfect example of what Magoo suggests: that "the criticism and discussion of those who meet her 'words,'" or as the case may be, of those who are her words, might come to compose the story itself. Furthermore, doesn't Jackson stipulate in her "Skin Guidelines" that participants will be provided with a copy of the full text of the story (although they enter into a contractual agreement not to share it with anyone else)? So in that case, words who met each other wouldn't have any need to piece together the existing story, which they're already in possession of, but, as the "embodiments" of their words, they could add to it.
And this, Magoo, I think brings us back to your question of whether or not the story is fictional. We've discussed in this class how autobiography itself could be considered a fictional endeavor. In looking at the Footnotes page I linked to above, Jackson's "words" represent themselves through a diverse number of highly creative, personalized, and often poetic accounts. It is interesting to consider how, by choosing to embody a word, it seems one concurrently chooses to use that word-self as a representational, fictionalizing device. With regard to those who meet the "words," your application of the terms "criticism" and "discussion" to their interaction with the words leads me to think of them as critics. Might they, then, be the critics whose active engagement with the text disseminate its narrative and its intention, and so ultimately comes to form part of the fictional discourse itself?
Distributed narrative, text performance
I feel I need to talk to these people and talk to the people they talk to before I understand the narratology of this one -- which fascinates me, way more than wondering what text Jackson typed for this. In some bizarre way, it echoes a couple things I've read elsewhere:
Here, Magoo, might be
Here, Magoo, might be another one for your list of texts Skin echoes; this a revision of the standard copyright page disclaimer from Renee Gladman's novel, "The Activist":
Any resemblance found to actual persons, events, emotions, or gestures is merely an imaginary figment of the persons, events, emotions, and gestures found henceforth.
I'm only just started the book, and I can already attest to a very different looking (literally) narrative structure, but a premise like that on the copyright page certainly piques my interest in the sort of narratological experiment Gladman may be conducting.