SHELLEY JACKSON

April 8, 2004

Shelley Jackson is the author of the story collection The Melancholy of Anatomy, the acclaimed hypertexts Patchwork Girl, The Doll Games and My Body, and several children's books. Her stories and essays have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies including Grand Street, Conjunctions and The Paris Review, and she is the recipient of a Pushcart Prize and a Howard Foundation grant. She lives in Brooklyn and teaches at the Pratt Institute and the New School. She is currently tattooing a story on volunteers, one word at a time.

Introduction

Given the range and scope of Shelley Jackson’s work as a fiction writer, a hypertext author, and most recently the creator of the project "Skin"(which portends to tattoo a story one word at a time on a series of nearly 2000 volunteers), it is perhaps worthy of mention that the first time I was fortunate to hear Shelley Jackson read from her recent fiction collection, The Melancholy of Anatomy, a book store patron who intended to purchase a copy, accidentally dropped it in the restroom toilet. It was not a particularly fortuitous moment (for the book, the store owner, the patron, or, one can imagine, Shelley Jackson) and yet, far from taking it as a commentary on the book’s contents (as any author might naturally do), Shelley in fact found in this random act a noteworthy extension of her book’s internal investigation. "In The Melancholy of Anatomy," she remarks in one interview, "I take a good look at some of the stuff the body sheds or oozes: hair, milk, blood. That unnerving stain on the carpet was once part of your body. Now it's something you should probably clean up. What happened in between?"

In this particular case, Jackson was present when what happened "after" came to pass—yet in her project, Jackson makes it clear that there are aporias in our understanding of the body, of our intelligent attribution of the body in language that need further sussing out, and that investigating these qualities of the body’s "betweenness"—of scars and sutures, of half-healed wounds, prostheses and rejectamenta—can tell us something significant about the body’s habitation in the word and the world, of what kind of world a body is. It is not, she insists, the unified anatomical machine we’d like to imagine and whose smooth operation we work to promote—but in fact a collection of arcana that is often concealed from itself: a host of tin cans, and old newspapers, half-chewed gum and potting soil, of asphalt, moldy books, and ash. The body is nothing less than a lexicon in Jackson’s fictions whose humors are precarious and excessive, ultimately lyrical: a body, she reminds us, is always more than itself—a surplus of actions we not only neglect or ignore, but which take on lives that might be described as fully other than our own if we’re to learn any lessons from Patchwork Girl—a hypertext that reimagines the life of Frankenstein’s aborted female creation—or Melancholy of Anatomy: a collection of fiction in which sperm are the size of Buffalo who race in herds and ravage Midwestern wheat fields; or where an egg can grow larger than the woman who expels it and become a bloated, bilious artifact to which she is both attracted and repulsed.

And yet this isn’t a new anatomy—but one the reader might recognize with the same fatuous energy that thrills us when we discover a lost sock in the sump pump: our residues never quite disappear. They have a very rich life that goes on without us, and if we’re fortunate we’ll cross paths once again. It is perhaps of no surprise then that, as she remarks, "I remember once noticing, as an easily embarrassed teenager, that it felt strange to undress in front of an open book."

Certainly after reading Patchwork Girl or The Melancholy of Anatomy we feel quite naked to our body’s habits. Jackson gives us the perverse reassurance of knowing the discomfort is justified.