My Body a Wonderkammer and Hypertext Fiction

    I really enjoyed Shelley Jackson’s My Body a Wonderkammer. It is so simple, yet so thoughtful. I like that it combines the ‘mapping’ element of hypertext narratives with a human body. Clicking on one part of the body leads the reader to a short narrative about the narrator’s life through that body part. Then, text within that narrative are linked to other body parts or other stories. I like that reading this work feels like getting to know someone; the more you talk to someone the more you learn about them through conversation and coincidence, and by the time I finished reading My Body I felt as though I knew the narrator. This hypertext fiction is similar to the effects of a written novel and how a readers becomes more attached to the main characters by the end of the book, but instead My Body is nonlinear, and readers can explore how they want through the narrator’s body and life. I wonder the differing emotions different readers feel when they read this work, as each will discover My Body’s stories on a different path? This work reminds me of memory, nostalgia, and making peace with a body and life that the narrator maybe perhaps disliked once upon a time. It also smoothens the lifetime of the narrator’s body, by taking readers back into memories and comparing the body to past and present. The digital format of My Body allows readers to literally get lost inside the narrator’s form, which carries with it all her stories and experiences connected to the parts of her body, making it a fascinating candidate for hypertext fiction. 

    Like many hyptertext narratives, My Body relies on linking parts of a greater story through layers of code and html pages. Again I find myself returning to the quote from the textbook's chapter on hypertext, how "the subjective experience of human consciousness is messier" than a linear and orderly progression, and "memories of past and projects of the future interpellate our experience of everyday life". The narrator of My Body carries her body with her through everyday life, and Jackson has designed the work so that readers can explore the narrator's connections to her body and her consciousness in that body through nonlinear, disordered memories. The textbook also mentions "narrative structure". I think the way in which Jackson invites readers into the narrator's digital body is an extremely important part of the text working as it does, similar to how Sunshine 69 brings readers to the specific accounts of different characters, or Entre Ville invites readers into the neighborhood through different objects and windows. What I mean to say is that the medium and method a hypertext author choses to convey their work greatly effects the outcome of the work, and I feel that greatly with My Body a W
onderkammer.