Exegesis - Remix my Lit
by Amelia Schmidt
Introduction; Aims
The website Remix My Lit [www.remixmylit.com] encourages readers to interact with short stories and other texts by changing their structure, style, voice, narrative, form, genre, perspective or infinite other options. Importantly, readers are then encouraged to post their remix online so that it makes up part of a hypertextual narrative formed through repetition and subtle (or sometimes quite extreme) changes in stories. By taking part in this process as a reader/writer - that is, by reading stories, remixes and essays, then choosing a story to remix, writing that remix and eventually submitting the remix to the website, I have aimed to experience the processes of reading and writing hypertext in order to reflect on the infinite or seemingly limitless, labyrinthine nature of the hypertextual world.
1. Form and Content; Content and Form
Remix my Lit appears to quite literally interpret Robert Coover’s ‘The End of Books’ where he states,
With its webs of linked lexias, its networks of alternate routes (as opposed to print’s fixed unidirectional page-turning) hypertext presents a radically divergent technology, interactive and polyvocal, favoring a plurality of discourses over definitive utterance and freeing the reader from domination by the author. Hypertext reader and writer are said to become co-learners or co-writers, as it were, fellow travellers in the mapping and remapping of textual (and visual, kinetc, and aural) components, not all of which are provided by what used to be called the author.[1]
Although here Coover speaks rather metaphorically, the interactivity, polyvocality, plurality of discourses and co-writing aspects of hypertext are literally performed in the engagement with Remix my Lit. It is not only appropriate but indeed demonstrative that Remix my Lit creates textual links through actual hyperlinks, and multiple voices through actual multiple authors.
Sergio Cicconi’s writings on hypertext focus on the link/node (or as Coover says, lexia) aspect of hypertextual narratives. Considering Remix my Lit as a narrative in itself as a whole website may not be the reader’s immediate reaction, as one is drawn in by the narratives of each individual story and remix. However, it is through this broader narrative of the website - its narrative which begins with the reader and ends with the reader, transformed Cinderella-like, in to a writer and finally, as the clock strikes midnight, in to a reader again. Cicconi writes, of the links that hold the narrative together,
According to the most basic definition, a hypertext can be seen as a series of pages (or nodes) connected with each other in a non-linear way by means of different links. More precisely, we can think of a hypertext as a potentially unlimited net of nodes and links; each of these nodes is a complex portion of a text…[2]
In this way, through the broader narrative of the website itself, one can see that the linking aspect is represented through the links to and from stories and remixes. But these ideas and links are represented through the stories and remixes themselves also, which play on appropriately hypertextual themes.
2. Achieving Aims
In contributing to the website, the reader/writer is forced to make significant choices, not only with the path they wish to take when reading (that is, which story they choose to follow and read remixes of) but also with their own writing: how much should the story be changed, and how?
As to the first question of quantity of change: it became apparent through reading multiple versions of Danielle Wood’s ‘How to Domesticate a Pirate’[3] that the changes being made to these texts were reflections of reader’s interpretations of them combined with reader’s willingness to take risks and their respect for the textuality or inherent authenticity of the original author’s words and phrases. That is, the reader is forced to ask themselves how much they can change without losing the original text altogether - much in the same way that DJ (as from the word remix) samples and re-samples and layers songs to create aural remixes.
To this end, it is also apparent that one need not radically alter a text to remix it - that the broader narrative of the website is created by the subtle changes between texts which in themselves elucidate sometimes beautifully contrasting interpretations of texts, ideas, phrases and words. In the St Helena remix by Christopher Currie, for example, the story is transformed by perspective, beginning with, “He walks the grounds on the days before his death, a scarf muffling his face, protecting his throat from the random slashes of the wind.”[4]
3. Contextualisation
Let us summarize the principal characteristics of a rhizome: unlike trees or their roots, the rhizome connects any point to any other point, and its traits are not necessarily linked to traits of the same naturel; it brings into play very different regimes of signs, and even nonsign states. The rhizome is reducible neither to One nor the multiple.[5]
Deleuze and Guattari’s definition of rhizomes lays the foundations for the focus of hypertext: connections and links as well as multiplicities. As discussed previously, it is the concept of links that characterises hypertext but more specifically, this website. The context of this goes as far back as modernism, Mark Amerika would claim in his essay ‘Triptych: Hypertext, Surfiction, Storyworlds’[6]. In particular, Amerika references the Surfictionists of the Modernist period, providing a critical and historical context for hypertextual decisions. He writes,
…most of the early practitioners of hypertext employ a more Modernistic writing style that attempts to use hypertext as a technology that creates stories whose top priority is to make us feel whole again[7]
It is this feeling of wholeness, connectedness and communication that is ironically created through the fracturing and remixing of texts - one cannot deny that the reader shares in a sense of wholeness when reading different remixes of different texts.
4. Analysis
My remix of Danielle Wood’s ‘How to Domesticate a Pirate’ focuses on fragmentation and mixing of forms already present within the text - a kind of microcosm of the broader themes of Remix my Lit and hypertext itself. Wood’s original story contained a small poem within its structure - my remix takes the poem and mixes it in to the text, fragmenting it and then altering it, as a kind of miniature version of how the website works.
Furthermore, my remix asks questions about gender, marriage, Western societal conventions and power by reversing the linear progression from pirate becomes domestic banality to domestic banality escapes to piracy. Wood’s story emphasises the limits of marriage and domestication - my remix emphasises the limitlessness of escapism.
The twist of my remix is only a subtle change in voice - from second to first person - which allows the final paragraph to reveal the voice of the narrator-pirate, providing the reader with a tangible ending that symbolically is not an ending at all, but rather a beginning of a new journey across the sea - an appropriate irony for a medium that forms itself around the impossible concept of the “potentially unlimited” (Cicconi), the “radically divergent” (Coover), the “rhizome” (Deleuze and Guattari) - essentially, the infinite.
How to Domesticate a Pirate [What if if Only Remix]
Submitted to www.remixmylit.com
Else, else, else.
will the nappies last until Saturday?
Optus or Telstra?
what if interest rates rise?
is the car service due?
who wormed the dog?
accumulation or defined benefit?
when is enough enough?
She wonders whether she will ever again write poetry, now that her mind is full of so much else. There is nothing but else in her head these days, and else is all the language that is left between her and the man who comes home to her each night now in a suit.
Oh brave new world!
Who would have imagined
the glory of choosing
exactly the right bath tap!
Nightly on the news
American grenades
When her husband comes out of the bedroom in the morning and asks her a question, and she finds herself paralysed by its malice-less venom, she knows that she deserves it. That she’s asked for it. That she’s had it coming. That she carried the seeds of it on the hem of her small black dress, that she glimpsed the grit of it in the mucousy flesh of that oyster, that she allowed it to be slipped onto her finger, that she grew it in her womb, applied to the bank for it, wrote it on the shopping list for Saturday. She doesn’t over-react. He only wants to know if she’s ironed his shirt yet.
explode brownskinned families
while Australian tourists
fuck little seven-year-old Thai boys
up the arse while the planet coughs up
its diminishing oil reserves
The else is like packing foam, insubstantial and expansive. Her head is crammed with little dimples of it that are the same shape and colour as prawn crackers, but quite a bit smaller. Or else the else is like popcorn, clouding and crowding with sudden inflations. Soon cumulus pieces begin to tumble out of the holes of your ears. The poems from this time are, like her sheets, stained with clouds. She will never be able to wash it out, but nor would she want to.
so that humanity can
fry itself and here
in your middle class house
in your first world country
She suspects she might be depressed but finds herself too pathetic to admit it, so instead she stands in a supermarket queue and passes judgement. Here, she catches herself despising a woman in beige three-quarter pants because she has filled her trolley with her own sub-urbanity. And because, when this woman talks to her toddler, she refers to herself in the third person. But when she - in her internal voice - mocks another, she sounds just like …you.
with your husband
and your child
and your fabric softener,
you’re crying about what exactly?
Of course, though, she isn’t the person that she was expecting - she says, I never expected you. Stares at herself in the mirror, puts on a dress she’s not even looked at for twenty years. Ignores the crows’ feet that she said one day she’d do something about, remember the colour of the sea and how much it looked like her eyes that day. Thinks of the sound of the sand under the bottoms of your crunch-crunching shoes.
She experiences the strangeness of your childhood and your future blending together in a long stretch of white sand along an azure coastline, contrasting like a postcard only your imagination can send.
Puts down her Tupperware and stops the violent beating blades of the machinery in the kitchen for one quiet moment and realises that the beach is only down the road. That the sun shining through the fly-screens shines down on to the shells and the waves and that it reflects in splashes of bright, bright, blinding white as the sound of the seas hungry for shorelines wells up and down.
She leaves a note, but does not wait for it to be accepted. Looks back over her shoulder at the sad eyes of a thirteen-year-old boy whose mother can’t keep herself ashore. Looks back over her shoulder at the suburban boulevard, all grey and grey and green and white, as it disappears into a fractal pattern of a city. Looks back over her shoulder as she walks the plank.
My eyes, predictably, are blue. In my sunbrowned face this smile is a white cutlass. It forces her to seek warmth in the radiance of this man whose bare feet have the same rough-hardness as deck timber and who smells of brine and varnish.
So she steps onto my ship wearing a small black dress that is not enough to protect her from a wind that blows colder over water than it does over land. So I offer her a hat and a shirt, and wonder whether one day she, like us, will feel the dull longing for the land and sand between her toes. I ask her which way a lady wishes to sail, and she stares off towards the horizon. When I ask again, because I think she hasn’t heard, she won’t cry for a pirate and his roughbare feet. She’ll have him, and nothing else.
Else, else, else.
will the rations last until Saturday?
North or South?
what if the tides rise?
are the sails due for mending?
where’s that mangy mongrel?
scenic or direct route?
a mariner knows no limits.
Oh brave new world!
Who would have imagined
the glory of choosing
exactly the right course to follow!
Nightly we tell stories
Of how our gunfire
exploded brownskinned families
while coast-born landlubbers
took wenches to their dives,
bought them jewels and
rare treasures from ruined worlds
so that brave men of the ocean can
burn their noses bright
on the salt-stained deck
in the new, undiscovered worlds
with their lasses and broads
and their foundlings
and some rough, dirty rags
to wipe their homesick tears.
Bibliography
Amerika, Mark. ‘Triptych: Hypertext, Surfiction, Storyworlds’. Amerika On-line [http://www.altx.com/amerika.online/]. Date of publication unknown.
Coover, Robert. ‘The End of Books’. New York Times Book Review, June 21, 1992. Quoted in Birkerts, Suen. The Gutenburg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age. Faber and Faber. Boston, 1994.
Cicconi, Sergio. ‘The Shaping of Hypertextual Narrative’ trans. Giuliana Perco. From Cisenet : Cicconi Sergio Net [http://www.cisenet.com/cisenet/writing/essays/hypernarrative.htm]. date of publication unknown.
Currie, Christopher. ‘How to Domesticate a Pirate’ [St Helena Remix] . Published on Remix my Lit [www.remixmylit.com]. Brisbane. Remix published 13th August, 2008.
Deleuze, Gilles and Guattari, Felix. ‘Introduction: Rhizome’. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, in The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, ed. Vincent B. Leitch. W.W. Norton and Company. New York/London, 2001.
Wood, Danielle. ‘How to Domesticate a Pirate’. Published on Remix my Lit, [www.remixmylit.com]. Brisbane. Story published 28th July, 2008.
[1] Robert Coover, ‘The End of Books’ in New York Times Book Review, June 21, 1992, quoted in Suen Birkerts The Gutenburg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age, Faber and Faber, (Boston, 1994)
[2] Sergio Cicconi, ‘The Shaping of Hypertextual Narrative’ trans. Giuliana Perco, from Cisenet : Cicconi Sergio Net [http://www.cisenet.com/cisenet/writing/essays/hypernarrative.htm], date of publication unknown.
[3] Danielle Wood, ‘How to Domesticate a Pirate’, published on Remix my Lit, [www.remixmylit.com], (Brisbane, story published 28th July, 2008)
[4] Christopher Currie, ‘How to Domesticate a Pirate’ [St Helena Remix] on Remix my Lit [www.remixmylit.com] (Brisbane, remix published 13th August, 2008)
[5] Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, ‘Introduction: Rhizome’ from A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, in The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, ed. Vincent B. Leitch, W.W. Norton and Company, (New York/London, 2001), p1605
[6] Mark Amerika ‘Triptych: Hypertext, Surfiction, Storyworlds’ on Amerika On-line [http://www.altx.com/amerika.online/], date of publication unknown.
[7] Mark Amerika.
Exegesis - Remix My Lit by Amelia Schmidt is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 2.5 Australia Licence. You are free to copy, communicate and adapt the work for non-commercial purposes, so long as you attribute Amelia Schmidt and you distribute any derivative work (ie new work based on this exegesis) only under this licence.
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