Skin and Hypertext as Jigsaw Puzzles

This might seem like I am stating the obvious, but is it just me, or does Shelley Jackson seem--in addition to being super interested in bodies, as Frabby pointed out--to also be obsessed with puzzles? It seems like if we were to simplify the concepts behind Skin and Patchwork Girl, then it would seem like Jackson is creating a giant jigsaw puzzle.

When I first looked at the frontpage of Skin, I was misled into thinking that her final project was supposed to be presented as a giant collage/puzzle of the people's tattoos. Pimm also linked us to Jackson's tatooed people's community blog, in which someone mentions that "I am we," which seems like the individual does acknowledge that he or she is like a puzzle piece in a larger collective identity. Not to strip people of their humanity and say that they're/we're all puzzle pieces, but it does seem like Jackson's hinting at this concept with her work.

This idea of puzzles in Jackson's works and hypertexts in general interests me. I mean, after all, if we boil down her work and a lot of hypertext fiction, aren't they essentially puzzles that the authors want the readers to piece together? We've talked about how "violent" and disruptive these new forms of narrative are, and I also see that sometimes the authors are asking us to play a game with them, to rupture our conventional ways of reading and to piece together the puzzle. I normally visualize hypertexts--and Jackson's works--to be a giant puzzle, which the authors break into a million little pieces, and we--the oftentimes frustrated readers--have to pick up the scraps and make sense of the loose pieces. I know that, for me, I often give up before I even start.

To go along with the puzzle idea, there also seems to be a heavy reliance on exchanges between art and literature in all these new narratives. Jackson's Skin is an extreme example of how far this can go, and her participants, in her eyes, are literally art pieces.

One of the things that I also wondered about is whether these authors like to view their work in narrative terms, or whether they do see it as a "game" or "puzzle" so to speak, in which case the relationship between the author and reader seems to be a sly, tricky one where the author tests our ability to solve a puzzle.

And finally, I was googling hypertext puzzles and the first result that came up was Borges's Book of Sand. It's literally a text but the editor frames it as a puzzle. I still haven't figured out how to "play" the text yet, and it looks like another one of those cases where the puzzle looks so daunting that I give up before I even start.