Jackson and the Wunderdammer

I'm impressed that the discussion about Shelly Jackson has endured and diversified, and I am particularly grateful to Pimm and Lulu for bringing more of Jackson's work into the picture. I spent some time with the Skin community blog as well as My Body in an attempt to understand and evaluate my original reactions to skin.

I found the suggestion that Skin is intended to function as a jigsaw puzzle troubling, probably because it opposes my image of distributed narrative as "scattering the ashes" of a work of literature. So, as I read more about Jackson and her projects, I wanted to challenge my own take on the project. After looking around a little, I think I'm going to stick to my guns.

In looking at the community blog for Skin, things looked a lot more normal than I had expected. Yes, the common thread bringing these people together is a weird thread, but the message board itself seemed rather tame to me. Besides reinforcing our conclusion that Jackson decided after the project's inception to send out copies of the story, I mainly saw people who have formed a community. The fact that many "words" seem interested in connecting with each other, either online or in person, seems typical to me. What I did not see, however, was anyone attempting to get all the words and put them in order to reassemble the narrative.

My interpretation of Jackson's project is that the "words" are intended to relate to one another, but that this relationship does not imply a kind of teleology towards reassembling the whole. The "text" moves, changes, interacts with the world and eventually dies. The subtitle of My Body - "A Wunderkammer" - further reinforced this for me. The cabinet of curiosities, or wunderkammer, is a Renaissance artifact representing an attempted ordering of the natural world. Recent work with this form has included a project in London by Mark Dion. Both historically and in Dion's rendition, the cabinet functions more as an artistic collection than a scientific enquiry. This is an interesting metaphor for the hypertext autobiography that Jackson creates, which I found to work as a loosely associated group of stories rather than a unified narrative or game.

My experience with "My Body" leads me to believe that Shelly Jackson is content presenting a picture that is neither linear nor goal-oriented. I think that, much like some of our early reactions to hypertext, the desire to piece together "Skin" is baggage from a world of linear narratives that we can hold in our hands. For me, the beauty of "Skin" is its potential to defy readability at all. If the people are the words, then the text is the people. In its present state, the people are the text more than a leaked copy of the original would be. Attempts to bound the human text, even to read it, seem to defy what Jackson has created. I do not mean to suggest that other writing is not boundless; I believe that all writing is larger than a human scope can encompass. What I admire about "Skin" is its ability to bear its teeth at our attempts to comprehend it, and I think we should respect that.