Narrative Cartography - Mapping the Fragmented Self: Ghost City as Representation of Identity
© Jessica Laccetti
When in Blood, Bread, and Poetry Rich presented the notion of "a politics of location" and "how a place on the map is also a place in history," she was working not only with self-representational impulses, but also with dominant cultural maps and their representation of authority. When she admonishes that we "begin, though, not with a continent or a country or a house, but with the geography closest in -the body," she shifts perspective so that body is not only a 'place' but also a sign as a cultural signifier dynamically related to one's subject position. Furthermore, one's authority in the world is directly related to it, as is one's approach to authorship. Such shifts in perspective shatter rigid frames of reference, open up new ways of seeing and telling; it is at such transformative moments that subjects once relegated to the margins emerge into view.
In her refusal to be subjugated within space which "has been historically conceived...either to contain women or to obliterate them" Zellen demands, like Irigaray, a reconceptualisation of the "representations of space." Irigaray asserts that "in order for [sexual] difference to be thought and lived, we have to reconsider the whole problematic of space and time...A change of epoch requires a mutation in the perception and conception of space-time, the inhabitation of place and the envelopes of identity."
Taking up Grosz's call to:
return women to those places from which they have been dis- or re-placed or expelled, to occupy those positions...partly in order to show men's invasion and occupancy of the whole of space, of space as their own and thus the constriction of spaces available to women, and partly in order to be able to experiment with and produce the possibility of occupying, dwelling or living in new spaces, which in their turn help generate new perspectives, new bodies, new ways of inhabitating.
Zellen uses the fragmented postmodern city as a representation for her conversation between herself and society. For Zellen, her Ghost City is inseparable from her self and the specific strategies for representing the intersection of character and place are the product of the particular form of exclusion experienced by the character, author and reader. The dynamic qualities of this Ghost City (which resides in the internet - understood to be in a constant state of flux), undermines any quest for a total vision and ultimate homecoming.
Zellen describes her city as "a virtual city that has become an archive of changing web technologies" which has "no physical space or real time" other than the time and space invoked in the reading of the city." Ghost City is a labyrinthine environment through which readers can navigate; either following the linear narrative that unfolds by moving from page to page, or they can delve into the multi-linear chaos of random links. Each space constitutes various appropriated images and texts which Zellen says are "culled from various media sources' but the texts "are either found passages from urban theory or specifically written poetic musings on the city." Rather than present static images, Ghost City is a collage of moving parts; it is a pulsating grid of flashing images that loop indefinitely. The viewer joins Zellen as an urban wanderer moving through the city step by step and page by page. Travelling through space Zellen flashes fragments of identity and thought urging the reader to muse within the fluctuating confines of Ghost City. Made up of fragments Ghost City is a ghost of reality where one can discover new spaces and new meanings.
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