Postmodern/Post-mortem Human Body-Parts: Grotesque Subjects in The Melancholy of Anatomy

Abstract

This paper critiques the literary representation of the human body as a “clean” slate, an organically wholesome subject by delving into the postmodern body-writing of Shelley Jackson’s short story collection The Melancholy of Anatomy (2002). Building upon the idea of “metabody” or grotesque body-part as subjects, the flesh-characters, namely Egg, Sperm, Foetus, Cancer, Nerve, Phlegm, Blood, Milk and Fat, breaks apart from their marginality, and evolves in a rhizomatic structure, pressing their possibilities of manifold existence in a fantastical world. Through the lens of body studies critics (Mikhail Bakhtin and Elisabeth Grosz) and recent postmodern scholarship, the paper studies the performance of flesh-characters, creating a post-mortem pathology in literature. Jackson’s deviant approach re-maps the anatomy of the human body and engages in psychophysiological parodies, thereby disclosing social phobias pertaining to the repulsive sides of the human and feminine body. Metabodies are self-reflexive, postmodern grotesque, with micro-narratives; and their innovative representations give agency and consciousness to the usually discarded body-parts and fluids, thereby making the human body a non-normative and discursive text and context.