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.
