A through-line that connects many of the CYOA games and hypertext pieces we’ve been exposed to thus far this semester is a propensity for them to contain sexually explicit content–often surrounding culturally taboo sexual interactions. “My Body–A Wunderkammer” perhaps makes this thematic undercurrent most visually evident in its literal connection of the author’s physical body to the digital text. Wunderkammer itself is german for “a place where a collection of curiosities and rarities is exhibited” according to Lexico. I’d like to focus on this notion of exhibition and somaticism that hypertext and digital storytelling seem to adhere to frequently.
One interesting paradox of “My Body” is the mediation with which the story is told. Ostensibly such digital/technological intervention into autobiography would feel inherently alienating or rather disembodying. And yet, the opposite is true. Shelly Jackson invites her reader into the somatic space through the graphic fragmentation of the artistic representation of the body. Such access is made clickable, and therefore virtually tactile through the hypertext.
We as readers are literally invited to touch the body, albeit through the form of a cursor.
In our chapter on hypertext in Electronic Literature, Scott Rettberg makes a passing reference to Donna Haraway’s theory of “cyborging” in literature. In her essay “A Cyborg Manifesto” Haraway argues that “a cyborg is a cybernetic organism, a hybrid of machine and organism, a creature of social reality as well as a creature of fiction”(Haraway 1). Haraway’s manifesto is dense and complicated but can be summarized best by these above lines. Haraway is useful in an analysis of “My Body” in her theorizing of a body which inhabits a mechanical and “social reality”–one in which the body is inherently tied to the technology through which it understands itself.
To return briefly to the sexually explicit nature of the hypertext, specifically that of the passage regarding the penetrative tail, the reader, through their interactivity with the body of the hypertext, is asked implicity to participate in this sexual act. Therefore the technological mediation of the fictive text enables the reader to engage in a more embodied way with the subject matter of the text.
A similar dynamic could be seen in the game “The Girl and The Wolf“ in which the reader was provoked to analyze the most sexual and violent aspects of the story’s axis. Perhaps the formal way in which hypertext engages the tactile senses and POV of its readers/users lends itself to these more exhibitory narrative plotlines. But when these narrative lines have inherently misogynistic or sexually violent, a potentially problematic participatory voyeurism is at play
While the hypertext does mediate suh embodiment, it equally evidences and attempts to make lear its thematic concern with disembodiment. “My Body” also evidences what Rettberg references in his chapter as a medial reflexivity in which the fragmented and seeming alien nature of the intervention of technology in this deeply personal autobiography reflects the author’s view toward such embodiment. The author’s characterization of her body is told in an inherently, quite literally fragmented manner (the body parts are cut up and sectioned off). Therefore the alienating/disembodying nature of the autobiography is reflected in the games very structure.
As a final note and to harken back briefly to my time in Death in the Digital Age with Dr. Sample, the inhuman humanity of the text or rather the bodiless body that the hypertext enables is ultimately an uncanny creation: one which seems to, by its very nature, necessitate discomforting content.
.Work Cited
Haraway, Donna Jeanne. Simians, Cyborgs, and Women : The Reinvention of Nature. Routledge, 1991.
“Wunderkammer: Definition of Wunderkammer by Lexico.” Lexico Dictionaries | English, Lexico Dictionaries, www.lexico.com/en/definition/wunderkammer.