the META code is a Gödelian self-reference, a signifier which attempts to contain its text.
It has no center, but a roving focus. (It "reads" itself.)
Each of the five roving branches of the METABLOG links to each of the other four; each of the branches also comments primarily on itself. The (META) section, for instance, mentions itself first and foremost; as it is a metacommentary on a metabranch of the blog, it then indulges in self-analysis entirely and temporarily leaves its other target of analysis aside. The section also addresses the concept of metacommentary; that is, the (META) code located throughout hypertext.
The central focus of the (META) page is on the structure and meaning of the METABLOG; this comes dangerously close to the intent (AUTHOR), but steers clear at the last moment. In this sense, since it addresses the blog (WORK) but not its creator, the (META) page -- and perhaps the entire METABLOG -- seems to support the predominance of the (WORK) code in hypertext and literary theory as a whole; that is, the paradigm of "Death of the Author" and the independence of the text (only thus freed can it be writerly). In contrast, the (AUTHOR) code points fingers, attempts to root Patchwork Girl, Stitch Bitch, and METABLOG alike in some corner of reality.
Two images appear on the (META) page, with little explanation. The first is perhaps a visual pun on Barthes' many five-pointed stars*, and on his five codes. The second, however, suggests a different interpretation. The juxtaposition of the highest level of Patchwork Girl with the highest (and only) level of METABLOG seems to imply thematic inspiration; and yet the basic concept of a five-part hypertext must surely derive either from Barthes or Jackson; there must be a (SINGLE) point of origin.
Of course, the (SINGLE) code -- denoting a linear, causal march of narration, or a single unifying vision -- is opposed by the (PLURAL) code, connoting a variety of closely-linked meanings (the multiple entrances or paths through Jackson's hypertext; the plurality of texts which is Barthes' "I", his writerly reader). This opposition then parallels the (AUTHOR) and (WORK): a readerly text is singular and authored; a writerly text stands alone but not lonely, a plural work. These four codes, together with the (META) self-awareness tying them together, constitute the METABLOG's analysis of the tensions and contradictions at play (quite playfully) in Stitch Bitch, and of course in itself.
*of course, the star is found even in particularly readerly texts, signifying a dislocation or (PLURAL) structure in the form of a footnote. A star invites the reader to briefly become a writer, or more accurately an editor; as the METABLOG would have it, it is a moment in which the (WORK) gains independence from the (AUTHOR).
the AUTHOR code is a reference to the remembered real-world context of the work
It has come to my attention that a young woman claiming to be the author of my being has been making appearances under the name of Shelley Jackson.
The authoritative tone -- "It has come to my attention" -- invokes a unifying certainty, a sense that the speaker is not only a definite figure but a (SINGLE) external objective one. It does this by implying that the speaker existed independently, before the (WORK) that contains her, and that she only then, independently, became aware of Shelley Jackson's existence.
This central conceit is however undermined or changed by its early appearance; the listener/reader is made aware of Shelley Jackson, is indeed already aware of the (AUTHOR) before the work is presented (in the original context, as speech; Jackson was on stage, inescapably present. In the archived, remembered context, as the by-line appearing in bold above its own negation.) Thus the centrality of the (AUTHOR) code to this passage; it asserts the independence not of the (WORK) per se, but of an alternative author contained in that work. (This alternative author belongs to an alternative reality, within the (WORK)).
It seems you have even invited her to speak tonight, under the misapprehension that she exists,
Again, the speech cannot quite shake its secondary nature; the knowledge, coming from outside the (WORK), that it serves a social function as an event in a calender or agenda (which, although hierarchical, is at least manifestly (PLURAL)). This social/societal context threatens to impose external meaning on the work; it fights back by explicitly commenting (META) on its role, in the course of the examination of hypertext's relation to more traditional forms.
In fact, Stitch Bitch and other postmodern works are generally more concerned with the context and authorship of a piece than some more traditional / readerly works. Traditionally, literature creates small, hermetically-sealed Universes that are consumed linearly by a reader with some implicit comparison to "real-world" context and awareness of authorship. This focus on context runs counter to the ideals of New Criticism and many of its successors; however, it cannot be directly challenged without fragmenting and reshaping the Universe of the work into something more self-referential (META), something which directly attacks its author's reality by standing next to it as an equal (see WORK).
Thus, the real world of the (AUTHOR) has become both a taboo and a major theme of postmodernism, and particularly of nonlinear hypertext (see below).
that she is something besides a parasite, a sort of engorged and loathsome tick hanging off my side. May I say that I find this an extraordinary impertinence, and that if she would like to come forward, we shall soon see who is the author of whom.
Well? Well?
Very well.
Well indeed! The (META) humor rests on the context-based notion that the (AUTHOR) Jackson is mocking or insulting herself; it comes across as rather vicious otherwise.
I expect there are some of you who still think I am Shelley Jackson, author of a hypertext about an imaginary monster, the patchwork girl Mary Shelley made after her first-born ran amok. No, I am the monster herself, and it is Shelley Jackson who is imaginary, or so it would appear, since she always vanishes when I turn up.
Doesn't that rather imply an alter-ego relation? One doesn't think of the "imaginary" as prone to vanishing, but rather as never having been present, usually. Rather, the word "imaginary" must connote that (AUTHOR) Jackson and (WORK) the monster are on equal footing somehow; That the (SINGLE) author-concept is in fact (PLURAL), that just because reality's bigger doesn't make it boss (see WORK).
You can call me Shelley Shelley if you like, daughter of Mary Shelley, author of the following, entitled: Stitch Bitch: or, Shelley Jackson, that imposter, I'm going to get her.
Here, in fact, the (WORK) explicitly claims (AUTHOR) status.
The METABLOG, of course, suffers from the same conceit: it attempts a detached analysis of itself, which falls apart upon contextualization (there is a single author; this is an assignment; THIS IS THE METABLOG; and so forth). Hypertext in general seems to deal poorly with the notion of a (SINGLE) causal root, perhaps because it is so well suited to a plurality of (META)-level references and commentaries; in contrast, any content can only ever be produced linearly, if it produced by a single author. Thus, denial of linearity (as attempted by hypertext) must come with some attempt to escape contextualization.
the WORK code implies the independent reality of the fictional universe of a text
Reality thinks it "includes" fiction, that fictional works are embedded in reality. It's the boast of a bully.
This is the traditional/readerly (SINGLE) hierarchy: reality is context, reality is up-top in the hierarchy; fiction can be multiply-embedded (Shakespeare often nested (PLURAL) plays within plays), but it is a tree, which branches from a single monolithic root out to many leaves.
The METABLOG, in contrast, is a complete directed graph (K5 to graph-theorists; this may mean komplett, but the Germans actually call it a vollständiger Graph. It may mean Kuratowski, after the theorist, but we have collectively forgotten. As usual, forgetting removes the (SINGLE) authoritative past and gives rise to (PLURAL) histories; just as forgetting, in literature, allows the writerly act of a different re-reading, per Barthes.)
(AUTHOR: the writer of the METABLOG seems to be revealing his interests/biases on the (WORK) and (SINGLE) pages, with allusions to mathematics.)
But just because reality's bigger doesn't make it boss. Every work of art is an alternate "world" with other rules, which threatens the alibi of naturalness our ordinary reality usually flaunts.
The idea of these alternate worlds is old, and implicit in the paradigm of readerly writing: a traditional novel is nothing more than a carefully-guided tour of a sort of Potemkin universe, comparable to a movie set. In contrast, a writerly text -- such as Patchwork Girl -- invites the reader to explore the universe, leave the beaten path and wander. It takes on new dimensions (PLURAL) of solidity and completeness (SINGLE), because its objects can be viewed from multiple angles and along multiple paths. In fact, Patchwork Girl goes further, leaving little arrows on the corners of the stage props that point backstage, where one can meet the actors and characters, who seem to shamelessly share a reality (as the (AUTHOR) does with her character in Stitch Bitch).
In this way, hypertext is a much more threatening kind of fictional work than most, and approaches a higher level of naturalness more on par with "reality".
Every fictional world competes with the real one to some extent, but hypertext gives us the chance to sneak up on reality from inside fiction. It may be framed as a novel, yet link to and include texts meant to be completely non-fictional.
(META): Actors and characters!
Thus the pedigreed facts of the world can be swayed, framed, made persuaders of fiction, without losing their seats in the parliament of the real, as facts tend to do when they're stuck in a novel. Hypertext fiction thus begins to turn around and look back on reality as a text embedded in a fictional universe.
This seems to presume too much. Does reality really seem less real than hypertext fiction? Or does it merely lack an immediately explicit metastructure? Does one consider all fiction and all abstractions as being part of reality as well?
the PLURAL sign deals with multiplicities and chaotic collections
We don't say what we mean to say. The sentence is not one, but a cluster of contrary tendencies. It is a thread of DNA--a staff of staphylococcus--a germ of contagion and possibility. It may be looped into a snare or a garotte. It is also, and as readily, a chastening rod, a crutch, an IDJbracelet. It is available for use. But nobody can domesticate the sentence completely. Some questionable material always clings to its members. Diligent readers can glean filth from a squeaky-clean one. Sentences always say more than they mean, so writers always write more than they know, even the laziest of them. Utility pretends to peg words firmly to things, but it is easy to work them loose.
Even the most boring, linear (SINGLE), laziest approach to the (META)BLOG (itself deliberately constructed (AUTHOR) to be quite simple and self-contained in structure (WORK)) gives rise to these 120 (PLURAL) possibilities. On the other hand, any reading order -- no matter how redundant, incomplete, or convoluted -- could be enumerated in a similar way, if at great length.
the SINGLE code refers to a meaningful, holistic entity, complete in itself
You're not where you think you are. In hypertext, everything is there at once and equally weighted.
On the face of it, this is absurd -- the length and coherence of the lexias or nodes varies wildly (PLURAL) and even within a node, the outgoing links are emphasized to a greater or lesser degree. In a deeper sense, the nodes are each identical in structure, and thus syntactically or algebraically equal*; any hypertext software initializes all nodes in the same fetal form.
It is a body whose brain is dispersed throughout the cells, fraught with potential, fragile with indecision, or rather strong in foregoing decisions, the way a vine will bend but a tree can fall down. It is always at its end and always at its beginning, the birth and the death are simultaneous and reflect each other harmoniously,
One is reminded of the ouroboros, the snake eating its own tail; hypertext threatens the same, and perhaps threatens external reality (see WORK) when, as Berners-Lee did (see image), it contains itself within itself.
it is like living in the cemetary and the hospital at once, it is easy to see the white rectangles of hospital beds and the white rectangles of gravestones and the white rectangles of pages as being essentially synonymous.
Hypertext aspires to the heterotopic and heterochronous; it wishes to be the true, final escape from reality that readerly texts can never quite reach. The grammar of hypertext -- the boxes and arrows -- leaves no room for an arrow in from the outside, as the looping paths of a cemetery only grudgingly connect to the temporal world beyond its gate. Per Foucault, the cemetery and hospital have quite a lot in common; both are outside normality, to the extent that the human experience of time is in any way normal.
Every page-moment is both expectant and memorializing, which is certainly one reason why I have buried the patchwork girl's body parts in separate plots in a zone called th cemetary, while in the story zone they are bumptious and ambulatory.
*Abstract algebra has an identity problem. There is a great deal of vagueness as to whether two isomorphic ("same-shaped", to indulge in the etymological fallacy) objects are (SINGLE) or (PLURAL); one often says that "there is only one two-element group", only to later refer to multiple two-element groups (by different names) and state that they are isomorphic (as if to say "they have a certain relationship"). This ambiguity of identity stems from the fundamental concern of algebra, which is with pure structure; it thus does not distinguish based on origin (WORK versus AUTHOR).
To give a solid example, consider the symmetries of a square: four rotations (including the trivial), and four reflections (horizontal, vertical, two diagonals). Then abstract away the square: we are left with eight objects, which can be combined in interesting ways. Now, there are actually multiple ways to map this structure back onto the square: based purely on how they interact with each other, it is impossible to say which was originally which (there is no provenance).
There are in fact eight ways to shuffle around this group which leave the relations between its elements unchanged; and these can of course be combined. Oddly enough, they are in fact identical in structure (as a group) to the eight elements of the original group of symmetries. One is tempted to say that, because they are isomorphic, they are the same ("D8 is its own automorphism group"), but this is an uncomfortably (META) juxtaposition; the observation that something can be defined as its own set of symmetries seems to uproot it from any fixed origin (AUTHOR), leaving a mathematical ouroboros. This discomfort is common, and peripheral to the actual work of algebra, and so presents only a philosophical hazard. Similarly, mathematicians don't care much that every object they work with has multiple wildly different "definitions"; they are perhaps the true masters of the (WORK) code.
