The Girl Who Was Plugged In

From the first lines of the story, we’re introduced to a strong and distinctive narrative voice. Throughout, this voice intervenes directly in the narrative to comment on the action, raise questions, and give asides that describe aspects of the future world. The voice is full of personality, with unusual diction and a punchy, sardonic style.

This voice is consciously aware of itself as telling a story from some point in the future to an audience of people in our present (its past). This comes across forcefully in the opening lines with the address to an implied audience of “zombies” and “dead daddies”—a male audience, obsessed with its wealth and status, and one located in the past. The narrator seems keen to educate or shock this audience in some way. She wants Burke’s story to disrupt their world view. In the conclusion, there’s an ironic concession to the limitations of this disruption, as the narrator reassures her audience there’s plenty of opportunity for “capital appreciation” (78) in the future.

At key points, the narrator steps back and lets the action unfold more directly, but her presence is never too far away. When she steps in with an ironic question or comment it disrupts the immediacy and realism of the story, reminding us we’re hearing or reading a story. Her interventions are meta-fictional devices, drawing attention to the process of storytelling. There’s an interesting thematic connection here with the way identification and immersion work in the narrative itself. As readers, we’re variously held back and drawn into the story, encouraged to identify with Burke, but then also distanced from her by the narrator’s descriptions and comments. Like Burke, we cannot lose ourselves completely in another life and story. Behind the illusion of fiction is the complex system of language and signification.

Another analogy that helps explain Tiptree’s narrative strategy is with the world of cultural production described in the story. The mainstream show, like the one Delphi is part of, are described as a kind of empty escapism and wish-fulfilment. Delphi is a hit because people “IDENTIFY” (61); they’re drawn into her and forget themselves in the process. In contrast, Paul’s underground productions work through: “bizarre techniques and unsettling distortions, pregnant with social protest” (65). These techniques have the opposite effect of identification—they distance and alienate the viewer, forcing them to remain critically alert. Arguably, Tiptree is attempting something similar in this story. Using her own kinds of unsettling distortions and interruptions, she keeps the reader alert and self-aware, focused on the social implications of her narrative, rather than drawing us into an escapist illusion, where we simply and passively identify.