Untitled - witz cultural

241RECONFIGURINGNARRATIVEogies, our prosthetic memories, to conceive ourselves. fackson's 175-year-oldprotagonist embodies the effects of the written, printed, and digital word. "Iam like you in most ways," she tells us.My introductory paragraph comes at the beginning and I have a good head on myshoulders. I have muscle, fat, and a skeleton that keeps me from collapsing into suet.But my real skeleton is made of scars: a web that traverses me in three-dimensions.What holds me together is what marks my dispersal. I am most myself in the gaps betweenmy parts, though if they sailed away in all directions in a grisly regatta therewould be no thing left here in my place.For that reason, though, I am hard to do in. The links can stretch very far beforethey break, and if I am the queen ofdispersal then however far you take my separateparts (wrapped in burlap and greasy fish-wrappers, in wooden carts and wherries,burying and burning me and returning me to the families from which I sprungunloved and bastard) you only confirm my reign.Hypertext, fackson permits us to see, enables us to recognize the degreeto which the qualities of collage-particularly those of appropriation, assemblage,concatenation, and the blurring of limits, edges, and borderscharacterizea good deal ofthe way we conceive ofgender and identity.Michael DiBianco points out, for example, that Patchwork Girl "addressesthe issue ofidentity as it is inextricably linked to the author/subject relationshipi'particularly in relation to the narrator, who appears "as much a jumbledcollection of disparate parts as her monster," something apparent in the way")ackson continually incorporates different personas, different voices, at a1llevels of the text. There is a sense of unceasingly assuming new identities,trying them on briefly, then letting the hypertextual structure of the fictionerase them, only to be subsequently replaced by new identities" ("Commentary").As the narrator puts it, "I hop from stone to stone and an electronicriver washes out my scent in the intervals. I am a discontinuous trace, adotted line." And: "I am a mixed metaphor. Metaphor, meaning somethinglike 'bearing across,' is itself a fine metaphor for my condition. Every part ofme is linked to other territories alien to it but equally minel'Sooner or later all information technologies, we recall, have always convincedthose who use them both that these technologies are natural and thatthey provide ways to describe the human mind and self. At the early stage ofa digital informatton regime, Patchwork Girl perunits us to use hypertext aspowerful speculative tool that reveals new things about ourselves while at thesame time retaining the sense of strangeness, of novelty.ll