Expressing her distaste for 'mimesis as mirror' Adrienne Rich describes a 'politics of location' which reacts to a history of exclusionary politics, a vortex that has created cultural, literary, and historical vacuums. Connie Griffin explains that 'contemporary women's autobiographical fiction articulates the painful position of having no 'place' to call one's own'. In an online environment where space takes on more than a figurative meaning, women's self-representation can be seen as a literal construction of a 'place' for themselves. The mapping then of online space is plays a pivotal role in women's online representations, even more so because current research suggests that critics do not yet, have a language with which to represent cyberspace. The politics of (hyper) representation not only encompasses a suspicion of representation on one hand and a continual quest for representation on the other (thus creating a third space where the two exist), but further, the awareness that the medium, cyberspace, is, as yet unmappable and unrepresentable . These hyperfiction writers find themselves in a paradoxical position, attempting to articulate actual experiences and identities in a virtual location, with, it may be possible to say following Landow and Moulthrop, no language.
Cyberspace which does not appear on any map and is not 'traversed point by point like Cartesian space' can be the very position where becoming is possible. Pivoting between these levels of representation where no 'reassuring ground rests beneath the writing' reveals the space, the in between, where women's hyperfictions can begin to perform.
A hypermimesis may seem an apt partner to hyperfictions which perform a tripartite mimesis although relying upon the same prefix will endorse further concepts of hierarchy, implying a mimesis which is more than the existing mimesis. A multimimesis on the other hand, a quilt-like structure which can patch together many levels of kaleidoscopic reference and concurrent scepticism, can gesture towards the myriad of ways in which Wendy Battin's Schoen Tell, Jody Zellen's Ghost City and Judy Malloy's Uncle Roger authoritatively represent their experiences.
1.1 Old Words in a New Work: Battin's Showing and Telling
Wendy Battin's Schoen Tell is perhaps one of the most complex online fictions to be discussed in this colum. Its constant challenge to a discernible narrative structure where beginning, middle and end are perceptible and present a story may, at first glance make it seem difficult to interpret. Other fictions, like Joyce's Ulysses, Woolf's The Waves, Borge's Garden of Forking Paths, Fowles' The French Lieutenant's Woman, Hejinian's works, Blau Du Plessis's criticism and fiction, Pavic's The Dictionary of the Khazars, Coover's print fiction and Cortazar's Hopscotch were and are still seen as 'experimental' fictions which have held up to thoughtful criticism. So what is it about online fiction that (re)presents itself as particularly unmappable?
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