“Every crank with a web page can put forward whatever crack-potpourri she pleases.” –Shelley Jackson, “Stitch Bitch”
And here I am to prove that gem.
Shelley Jackson took that piece in so many directions that I’m not sure where to begin responding. Fortunately, I think she would be glad to hear that. Perhaps any non-linearity my writing may exhibit can be embraced as intentional in honor of Jackson.
I hope Jackson has read and appreciated David Foster Wallace. I’ll argue with anyone who will listen that the man unknowingly invented hypertext–it just wasn’t electronic. His writing included so many footnotes and tangents and parenthetical thoughts within parenthetical thoughts that there came a point while reading where I inevitably decided it didn’t matter if I made it to the end, I’d gleaned more than enough within the first three paragraphs to call it good. (Here’s an Onion article that parodies the same concept, if you’re interested.)
Foster Wallace’s writing encompasses hypertext–as Jackson presents it and as I read it–perfectly.
As I said, a mark of Foster Wallace writing was citing vigorously through footnote-heavy pieces. In light of reading “Stitch Bitch,” I wonder if a reason he did this was his own anxiety over being thought a plagiarist, unoriginal, and trying to take credit for another’s ideas. (A piece in the New Yorker explores what motivated his writing in depth. He suffered from depression, and was never convinced his work was publishable.)
Jackson, I believe, would have told him to get over that. She not only admits the borrowing of ideas as inevitable, she encourages it:
“…but your real work will be in the way you arrange all the stuff you borrow, the buttons and coins, springs and screws of language, the frames and machinery of culture.”
(In Googling the author Laurence Sterne she mentioned, this T.S. Eliot quote appeared: “Immature poets imitate, mature poets steal.”)
So while Foster Wallace may have been anxious about his borrowing, the pages upon pages of citations and disclaimers he includes visibly demonstrate the amount of borrowing that can go into a piece of so-called fiction in a way that no other author really accomplishes. And now, as the written word is assumed to be published online, perhaps we can combine Foster Wallace’s attitude of citing with Jackson’s attitude of embracing that sort of writing (the attachment of original, perhaps unrelated ideas via the hyperlink) as its own electronic entity.
Apart from seeing a connection to Foster Wallace, my other major reaction to Shelley’s piece was the seeming contradiction of her thesis with her argument that theses aren’t necessary in modern day writing. But I suppose one must destroy an army using their weapons. Or something. Is that a saying? Anyway. She effectively presented an argument against thesis-driven writing through a thesis-driven essay. And she effectively pushed me to reframe my own writing and approach to reading through the lens of the hypertext.
Let me end with one more piece of her wisdom:
“Sentences always say more than they mean, so writers always write more than they know, even the laziest of them.”