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María Goicoechea
Shelley Jackson’s Grotesque Corpus
Notes on my body − a Wunderkammer
“For no one has thus far determined the power of the body”.
(B. Spinoza, Ethics, part III, proposition II)
1. Introduction: Shelley Jackson’s Grotesque Corpus
The body −that place from which the concept of self emanates, the locus where
the subject conflates with the socio-cultural regulations that provide its frame−
is for Shelley Jackson the fundamental canvas on which to display her work. The
different metaphors of the body present in her pieces share a common aspect;
the author is not concerned with beautiful bodies, but rather with deformed,
hybrid, tragicomic, grotesque ones. These bodies deviate from the established
beauty canon in the same way that the hypertexts used to contain them overflow
the limits of a conventional reading economy. The reader generates her own
grotesque feeling when faced with a textual framework that devours her without
rhyme or reason, without revealing its confines, its routes, and where she must
advance half-blindly, groping in the dark the interior of a fragmented and inter-
twined textual body, at once vital and morbid. Jackson colonizes hypertext as a
feminine writing space, warning beforehand of its ugliness, transforming ugli-
ness in an aesthetic manifesto, a vindication of the grotesque at the hands of the
author. Shelley Jackson makes use of the disfigured body to pose a critical stance
regarding the social regulations that constrain, not only the feminine body, but
also the corpus of her creations.
As we will see, Patchwork Girl (1995) and my body- a Wunderkammer (1997) are
two variations on the same theme, the history of the body as a space in which
the subject is progressively constructed and acquires its identity traits. The mind-
body relation does not emerge from an ontological integrity, but in the imma-
nent and recursive parceling, fragmentation, and reconstruction of the whole,
the subject, by a reflexive and creative self through a variety of metaphors. These
metaphors allude to the mechanisms by which the notion of the subject is re-
constructed: acts of fictional creation like reading and writing. In the case of
Patchwork Girl, sewing, as an eminently feminine activity, becomes a synonym
for female writing and the reading mode recommended by the hypertext (“I am
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buried here. You can resurrect me, but only piecemeal. If you want to see the
whole, you will have to sew me together yourself”).
Fig. 1 and Fig. 2. First and second lexias of the “Graveyard” section of Patchwork Girl.
In my body- A Wunderkammer, the cabinet of wonders is the metaphor around
which the textual fragments as well as the reader disposition are articulated –the
body exhibits itself with the promise of surprising visitors with the revelation of
some deformity, anomaly or grotesque eccentricity.
The exhibition of grotesque bodies is a recurrent theme in Shelley Jackson’s
work, both digital and in print. We can read, for example, her first print collec-
tion The Melancholy of Anatomy, where, as Lance Olsen has observed, “the engag-
ing and the invigorating discover their source in the contaminated, the infected,
the mongrel, the ill-defined, the unhygienic, the grotesque, the interstitial (…)”
(4), Jackson’s corpus affirms the freakish, Lance states, because for her the
freaks are the real survivors in “evolutionary, gender, and narratological terms”
(4). I believe we should pay closer attention to the mechanisms by which Shelley
Jackson makes use of the aesthetic quality of the grotesque to construct her cor-
pus, both fictional body and artifact; at the same time a strategy to reflect on the
connection body/self and a critical stance regarding the expressive possibilities
of hypertext as a medium. Or, we should rather say, the grotesque is in Shelley
Jackson a mode of figuration used to explore the limits of any form of writing
to apprehend the self. As we read in Patchwork Girl: “You could say that all bod-
ies are written bodies, all lives pieces of writing” (“all written”).
The grotesque style shares with the monster of Patchwork Girl a subterranean
origin. From the Italian word grottesco (“of a cave”), the grotesque emerged dur-
ing the Renaissance as an imitation of an Ancient Roman decorative style redis-
covered when Nero’s unfinished palace Domus Aurea was excavated. As the dis-
torted mirror image of Neoclassical values, the grotesque was characterized by
excess, extravagance, lack of symmetry and proportion, by reflections of organic
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excrescence growth in arabesques and contorted shapes that yielded strange, hy-
brid bodies. The grotesque glance implies therefore a particular deformation of
reality that produces in the viewer a complex reaction of disgust and empathy, a
tragicomic relief that allows society to integrate that which is unexplainable, un-
classifiable, mysterious and absurd.
As Rémi Astruc (2010) contends, the grotesque−which profusely emerges
in times of change and transformation− provides a form of expression to a pri-
meval and universal experience of alterity and change, prior to any attempt at
conceptualization, either in philosophical or aesthetic terms. It emerges from a
sensation of curious surprise towards the world on the part of the subject, who
tries to apprehend the unknown through the anthropological operators of the
grotesque aesthetics: reduplication, hybridity and metamorphosis. And we
should not lose sight, Astruc reminds us, of the first anthropological operator
from which all human experience is constructed: the body.
In his article “The Grotesque Body: Overflow and Signification” (2008),
Barrios discusses the body as a socio-semiotic construction regulated from
highly coercive control dispositifs and the grotesque as a subversive reaction to
them. The grotesque body functions as a social destabilizer of the control appa-
ratus. Appropriating the Cynical attitude, the grotesque also identifies the body
− with its porous skin, its orifices, and the immediacy of its scatological func-
tions− as the locus of resistance against the idealized and strategic discourses of
Greek philosophy (6). In its aesthetic sense, Barrios argues: “the grotesque is
fundamentally defined by the overtaking of identity, which implies an opposition
in principle with the beauty canon as that which basically defines the status of
the body in Western culture.” (16)
i
If as Astruc and Barrios argue, the grotesque responds to a universal, an-
thropological need, artist might reach its potentialities without too much philo-
sophical scaffolding. Nevertheless, I would rather think it is the liminal status of
the grotesque as an aesthetic category, especially in literary theory, which makes
it an appealing mode of expression for such a metareflexive author as Shelley
Jackson. A deceptive or even anti-cognitive concept,
ii
it provides a space of ex-
pression where other more regimented categories, such as the absurd, the ludi-
crous or the macabre, might fail. Moreover, the grotesque is always playing at
overflowing the limits, but as it goes, it is always referencing those boundaries it
continuously trespasses, the boundaries of what is considered proper, pertinent,
respectful, and decorous.
I would like to posit that analyzing Shelley Jackson’s corpus under the light
of the grotesque as aesthetic category provides us with yet another tool to un-
derstand her work across different media, and it is especially relevant in her ap-
proach of hypertext. Shelley Jackson writes in “Stitch Bitch” (Boundary Play
Section):
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But hypertext in particular is a kind of amphibious vehicle, good for
negotiating unsteady ground, poised on its multiple limbs where the
book clogs up and stops; it keeps in motion. Conventional texts, on the
other hand are in search of a place of rest; when they have found it,
they stop.” Similarly, the mind, reading, wants to make sense, and once
it has done so it considers its work done, so if you want to keep the
mind from stopping there, you must always provide slightly more indi-
cators than the mind can make use of. There must be an excess, a re-
mainder. Or an undecidable oscillation between possibilities. I am in-
terested in writing that verges on nonsense, where nonsense is not the
absence of sense, but the superfluity of it.
The “absence of sense” could be associated with the absurd, the excess is
undoubtedly the territory of the grotesque. As the quote implies, it is both a
mode of writing and a mode of reception, the excess produces indeterminacy,
ambiguity and ever-receding horizons of expectations that do not allow the
reader to rest and find an assimilable signified. However, as I will try to show,
Shelley Jackson’s hypertexts vary in their degree of experimentation with both
the medium and the construction of a narrative voice or authorial identity with
which the reader can establish a dialogue, and in this manner, reduce the text’s
otherness.
While in my body the author apparently reveals her most intimate secrets with
resolute ease, exhibiting herself in an explicit autobiography, in her previous
work the reader ends up discovering the author’s self-portrait hidden behind
layers and layers of a complex hypertextual framework. The reader of Patchwork
Girl progressively draws a sketch of the authorial persona (a vigorous, androgy-
nous, young woman), after running through the profiles of different fictional
characters that will end up converging, in a time journey, in her figure: the fem-
inine monster created by Mary Shelley herself and the patchwork doll of Frank
Baum’s are Shelley Jackson’s alter egos. The first owners of the body parts that
will constitute the monster also leave an imprint of their personalities and vivid
memories in this pain-body, this conglomerate of stories that will form the com-
munal female body. Each micro-story deposits tragicomic sediment in the
reader, black humor becoming the subversive tool through which tragedy can
be assimilated.
The Headstone that gives entrance to the Graveyard section reads thus:
“Here Lies a Head, Trunk, Arms (Right and Left), and Legs (right and Left) as
well as divers Organs appropriately Disposed/ May they rest in Piece.” The
irony of this “appropriate” epitaph cannot be missed, but neither can the con-
notations to violent forms of death involving amputation, dismemberment, or-
gan dispersion. The links that lead to these body parts confirm this: the skull is
shattered like an ancient vase, its remembrances ignite in the reader images of
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witchcraft accusations by an angry mob (“Sometimes when it’s quiet I hear in
my ears the roaring of a crowd”), the right hand belongs to “Dominique, ambi-
dextrous pickpocket”, who lost it to “punitive justice but later extracted a silk
purse from the judge with her left”, the lungs to Thomasina, who run in the high
Alps with the goats until her father sold her to a passerby, who “took her to
polish his silver in a wood-paneled home in the valley, where she found a certain
pleasure in scaling the steep roof on dark nights until a loose shingle brought
about her first fall ever, and her last”, or the stomach, which belonged to “Bella,
an oblate simpleton. She was never dyspeptic, though she ate everything. (…)
When a ne’er-do-well by his fellow revelers at the tavern, was found crushed by
an enormous weight, the townspeople tried Bella for murder. Bella, uninter-
ested, nibbled on figs. (…)”.
Like a Bosch’ tableau, the collection of lexias in this section paints an irrev-
erent mosaic of misfortune and nonchalant subversion. In his review of the
work, George Landow remarked the distinctive voice with which Shelley Jack-
son endows each tale, “thereby creating a narrative of Bakhtinian multivocality
while simultaneously presenting a composite image of women’s lives at the turn
of the century” (1). The grotesque is regenerated by Jackson through her carni-
valesque inversion of reality and its hierarchies, producing a fantasy of interlock-
ing body parts, recollections and emotions of a female collective that converge
in the figure of the new monster, itself the fragile embodiment of contrastive
elements, the horrific and the ludicrous.
Paradoxically, as Katherine Hayles has noted in her famous study of Patch-
work Girl, “the text not only normalizes the subject-as-assemblage but also pre-
sents the subject-as-unity as a grotesque impossibility” (29). She alludes as an
example to the passage when the narrator satirizes the unified subject and the
medieval theologians’ dilemma regarding the resurrection of amputees who have
had their limbs eaten by other creatures. The bizarre scenario depicted in this
section (body of text/resurrection/remade), with diverse limbs being regurgi-
tated from the animals’ flesh, in fact serves to destabilize the notion of the Car-
tesian subject by showing the shortcomings of our use of logic in domains that
elude our understanding. By exposing the grotesque product of logic in philo-
sophical constructs of the past, Jackson invites us to reflect upon contemporary
notions of the self which are equally preposterous.
To contribute to this erosion of the Cartesian subject, Jackson offers in
Patchwork Girl a collage of discourses in which the literary history of the texts of
the body comes together with her personal story, fictionalizing in a grotesque
manner the way in which the collective memory is incarnated in an individual
female subject. The opposite movement is patent in the case of my body, in which
the body, whose diagram is the center of the hypertext structure, is a universe
where the microhistory (the author autobiography) becomes macrohistory. This
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movement is based on the mimetic nature of the reading experience, as the au-
thor writes her inventory of body memories, she is urging us to participate in a
meticulous exploration of our own bodies, using her model to find coincidences
and points of suture.
As readers, we undertake the exploration of a literary anatomy in which each
section of the body is the entry point to an associative chain of memories linked
to that zone. These memories reverberate in our mind as we proceed with the
reading, producing friction with other zones and other bodies. The body is lived
as a primeval and universal experience, connecting us more than our anatomic
differences separate us.
As we can gather from their reading, both works reflect upon the relation
between body and identity, upon the mystery entailed in the unfolding of our
being inside a space we cannot thoroughly apprehend, whose in-depth
knowledge is elusive. The body is, simultaneously, the Other, the undiscovered
territory, which provokes curiosity, and the territory of being, of our very iden-
tity. To tackle this paradox, Jackson resorts to analogies with thinking modes of
the past, with obsolete technologies, and subverts them to transform them in
literary exercises that can reveal to us new ways of looking at our relationship
with the body. For instance, Patchwork Girl’s section entitled “Broken Accents”
(Fig. 3) is inspired by phrenology to offer a graphic medium in which to inter-
weave fragments, quotes, scattered thoughts; Jacques Derrida’s texts get inter-
laced with those by Donna Haraway, Hélène Cixous, Deleuze and Guattari, Lyo-
tard or Lucrece. This is the most metareferential section of all, since in it the
author describes her understanding of hypertextual writing and reflects upon the
relation among the mechanisms and resources of memory, the eternal present
of the thinker, the text fragmentation and the whole. Hypertext is presented by
Jackson as a framework that allows her to reconstruct in a more reliable manner
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than paper her own mental rhizomes, at the same time that it becomes an over-
whelming and unmanageable monster even for its author, who gropes her way
through her writing.
Fig. 3. Entry frame for the “Broken Accents” section of Patchwork Girl
If the monstrous body of the patchwork girl is formed by a conglomerate of
limbs and organs of diverse origins, the text in which it lives as a fictional entity
is also a composite work made of multifarious elements, both originally created
and appropriated, fiction and metafiction, remediated print assembled as a hy-
pertext and newborn digital lexias that read linearly (Journal). As the narrator
notes, membrum or “limb” also signified “clause” (body of text/typographical),
which propitiated the analogy used by ancient Rhetoricians regarding a well-
written text, which should not look like a disproportioned, grotesque body.
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Throughout the work, this grotesque characteristic is often associated with
the deviant feminine writing the hypertext represents. However, despite the de-
fense of the author in “Stitch Bitch” of hypertext’s superior flexibility to capture
our train of thought, “a mesh of relationships”, without clogging, and to take
the reader beyond the comforts of certainty, Patchwork Girl does not actually
support a binary opposition between print and hypertext, as Paul Hackman has
observed (96). It is still a work heavily indebted to print modes of reading. In
his article ““I Am a Double Agent”, Shelley Jackson’s Patchwork Girl and the
Persistence of Print in the Age of Hypertext”, Hackman’s insightful reading ex-
poses the interaction between print and hypertext, rather than the celebration of
one at the expense of the other, as one the most important contributions of the
work. As the narrator expresses in Hackman’s selected lexia: “I have a letch for
sequence, don’t doubt it. I am not the agent of absolute multiplicity any more
than I am some redoubtable whole. I am a double agent, messing up both terri-
tories” (“double agent”/ Body of text). It is my contention that this “productive
multiplicity” at the borders is exactly what the grotesque celebrates, not only the
monstrous deformity of hypertext associated by Jackson to the feminine and its
deviance from canonic notions of beauty, but the unsettling of both categories,
print and hypertext, through their intermingling. As Hackman concludes: “Patch-
work Girl therefore references both print and hypertext in order to question how
our world and sense of self are structured by both the illusion of wholeness and
the impossibility of complete fragmentation” (105) or, as the narrator herself
remarks: “What holds me together is what marks my dispersal. I am most myself
in the gaps between my parts” (body of text/dispersed).
This statement would also fit like a glove in Jackson’s hypertext for the web,
my body- A Wunderkammer. In this case, we confront an apparently simpler work,
less indebted to print, which makes it, paradoxically, a more conventional hy-
pertext. However, its labyrinthine structure and complex lexia connections bring
forth with brilliant execution the enigma of human identity and its relation with
corporeality.
If phrenology tried to establish the foundation for a relation between brain
and mind by parceling out brain areas and associating them to an emotion or
type of thought, the cabinet of wonders becomes at the hands of Shelley Jackson
a metaphor through which to explore the relationship between the set of body
parts and the sense of wholeness associated with one’s identity. The body as
microcosms is a vision that finds its way back to the Renaissance, a moment in
which the body is perceived as a miniature world that reflects God’s creation in
every detail. The analogy with the cabinet of wonders carries us back to a phe-
nomenon prior to the Enlightenment, to a way of exploring the world free from
the cataloguing craze of the nineteenth century. As the author herself states in
this work: “But you don't approach a cabinet of wonders with an inventory in
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hand. You open drawers at random.” Thus, this analogy is applied not only to
the introspective work carried out by the author, but it also turns out to be a
guideline for the reader-visitor, who must adopt a certain attitude in order to
explore the work.
Fig. 4. The frontispiece of the book Musei Wormiani Historia, catalogue of the cabinet of
curiosities of the Danish physician and collector Olw Worm, 1588-1655.
Geographical and spatial metaphors have been used recursively in the history of
art to allude to and describe the body. However, I am interested here in explor-
ing the effects that the use of these analogies produces in these particular works.
With phrenology, Jackson had recurred to an obsolete science, a mode of cata-
loguing the spaces of the mind characteristic of the nineteenth century to illus-
trate the prejudices that each period projects upon its way of ordering the world,
the bodies and the minds. With the cabinet of wonders, the approximation to-
wards the body promises to unveil something shocking, exotic, out of the ordi-
nary, belonging to the world of the unwonted, even the mythical. The work
alludes, in a premeditated manner or not, to one of the predominant phenomena
of cyberspace: the exhibition of intimacy as a narcissistic pose around which
cybernauts articulate their social roles between voyeurs and exhibitionists. The
reader is supposedly endowed with a curious zeal and made nearly a voyeur in
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this exploration of the exposed body’s intimacies, which is performed without
leaving a trail, in search of a rarity, an astonishing surprise that would bring forth
exclamation.
Nevertheless, Jackson goes on to subvert the reception pattern expected of
wonder cabinets, provoking in the reader contradictory sensations of a sort, the
“minor affects” (using Sianne Ngai’s terminology) one so often encounters in
relation to the cultural products of our contemporary societies. Unlike Roman-
ticism’s sublime ideal, or the shock of the grotesque, these are low-intensity sen-
sations; they produce tenderness, laughter sometimes, uneasiness at the lack of
decorum, a certain interest, and empathy. As Ngai explores in her work Our
Aesthetic Categories: Zany, Cute, Interesting, these apparently trivial aesthetic catego-
ries have become central in our culture. These sensations produce in the spec-
tator ambivalent, nearly contradictory, feelings of low intensity, so diffuse as to
avoid a cathartic reaction. The cute versus the beautiful, irritation versus down-
right rejection, the interesting versus that which is transformative. Ngai places
Jackson’s work in the category of the comedian in the Commedia dell’Arte, a
category that has to do with performativity, with action, with doing too many
things at the same time and experiencing information overload. These charac-
teristics, which inscribe Jackson’s corpus in the aesthetics of its time, can also
offer us, as we will see next, a particular vision regarding the renewal of the
grotesque in the digital creations of the 21st century.
2. my body- a Wunderkammer
Jackson’s piece is a hypertext with the body as the narrative’s map, a historical
map of sedimented memories (scars, tattoos, life fragments associated and
evoked by the curious and thorough observation of body parts, fragmented in
different territories). This canvas-body, map-body, is a bidimensional diagram
which has, nevertheless, many layers: it becomes an index of the various lexias
or textual fragments, the origin and destination to which the reader always re-
turns –it is thus the entry to the body’s interior, which in its turn, is formed by
the intertwined nodes, some textual intestines that curl and heap up in an alea-
tory fashion. The body image is that which is external, the surface; and the text
and its meanders offer us a journey through an interior space in intimate symbi-
osis with the surface, but with multiple levels and internal pathways.
If we inspect the HTML code of the body diagram page, we can read the
list of tagged lexias, but we do not gain access to the third underlying layer,
which would show all the hidden lexias, as in the complete graphical represen-
tation of the work offered by the different maps of Patchwork Girl in Storyspace.
We can observe here that the hypertext is formed by the lexias linked to the
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body part labels and some others, which are distributed inside other lexias and
which compose alternative reading routes (for example, the lexias “theories”,
“migraines”, “cabinet”, or “other bodies”).
Fig. 5. Main page of my body – a Wunderkammer (1997).
As it becomes apparent, the “Wunderkammer” hides surprises, not everything
is labelled out, and there is space for the discovery of something unexpected.
There is, for example, even a phantom limb, which is indicated in the diagram
but its tag leads nowhere. We will actually find the “phantom limb” lexia in the
tagged lexia “arms”, if we click in the area “I roller skate”. The phantom limb is
an imaginative device conceived by the child to explain her clumsiness. And
there are moments when the highlighted word again leads you nowhere, as in
one of the few instances in which the narrator addresses the reader directly in
the lexia “tie in products”: “This is a work in progress. If you would like to
sponsor further study of your favorite body part or you are a collector, please
email me care of Alt-X”, and the word “collector” does not activate any window.
As in these cases, Jackson’s rhetoric of links is rich and playful with the reader’s
expectations: sometimes the relation between lexias has overt narrative coher-
ence, at other times it seems purely coincidental, since the same word appears
in each lexia. There are frequent loops, for instance, the lexia “skin” is connected
to the uncharted lexia “theories”, which in turn has “skin” as a hot word that
leads you back to the “skin” lexia.
These multiple levels and internal pathways are created by the intertwining
of highlighted words that provide internal routes from one lexia to another, in-
troducing different themes and trails of association that function independently
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of the route provided by the body diagram. Important themes are often hidden
in deeper layers. For example, “other bodies”, which is connected to the lexia
“skin” by the highlighted phrase “I swam in the neighborhood swim team”) is
one of the few links in which the narrator directs her attention to other bodies,
which she finds despicable, pretentious and unhealthy, and expresses the fric-
tions implicit in exchanging gazes: “It was difficult to negotiate the field of
crossed gazes between my towel and the pool”.
There is only one body area which is free of its corresponding tags in the
diagram, the head, although it also contains hyperlinks to the elements that com-
pose it (brain, eyebrows, eyes, nose, lips, ears). In this case, the territorialization
of the body seems to imply a deterritorialization of the face, following Deleuze
and Guattari’s metaphor in A Thousand Plateaus, a sort of invitation to exchange
roles. The author’s image looks straight ahead, pen and paper in her hands, ready
to draw whatever she sees, also transforming the reader/viewer in object of
scrutiny, returning our gaze. The possibility of this change of perspective, which
is made patent in the lexia “other bodies”, reminds the reader that the body we
scrutinize as tourists has eyes through which to judge us in return.
This monochromatic diagram over slate is remediated in pixels that shine
on the screen. In it, the game proposed to the reader is not based exclusively on
the exhibitionist revelation of intimate memories, but rather in a mirror game
that invites us to establish similarities with our own recollections of the body.
Soon, however, we will discover that the apparent autobiographical tone of
many paragraphs should not deceive us: the authorial persona recreated in my
body shares with the patchwork monster some freakish characteristics, the nar-
ration often jumps to magic realism, grotesque irreverence, turns a defamiliariz-
ing glance at the body as a veritable cabinet of wonders that verges on the fan-
tastic.
The textual monstrosity, however, is not as apparent as in Patchwork Girl,
which was a far more complex work to execute. Nevertheless, the exploration
of my body is neither easy nor straightforward. As we have seen, it has hidden
passages and chambers, the narrative coherence between the parts is not made
explicit and you have to traverse it as a labyrinth, undoing your steps, going in
circles, groping your way blindly through this textual body’s interior. As in her
previous work, the connection between body and text, self and writing, is also
established. In the lexia “vagina”, through sensual and indecorous provocation,
literature is incarnated in the most literal sense, as Susana Pajares Tosca has also
noted:
It wasn't a big leap from eating books to sticking them up me, a page
at a time. Fine literature in my vagina, pulp fiction up my ass, that was
my instinctive decision, that is at first, before I began to question
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whether the distinction was really so clear. I sat through English class
with Chaucer and Boccaccio here, S. E. Hinton there. One day, when I
fished out the slippery wad, laid it on my desk and teased its folds open
with a pen, I noticed that some of the words seemed changed. I took
the stinking page to the library and confirmed my discovery in the ech-
oing stacks. My vagina had rewritten Joyce. It was then I knew I was
going to be a writer.
I also found, and would like to share with other women, that a diction-
ary in a pocket edition, if well worn, can be rolled up and used as a
tampon in case of need.
As we can see, it is a matter of giving voice, of exhibiting that which is
socially inexpressible in the screen space- a place which is a cabinet of wonders
of its own right, at once public and private. The back and forth movements
promoted by the hypertextual reading draws in the mind of the reader a map of
the territory, and arboreal and rhizomatic image that progressively grows and
interlaces with one self’s childhood and adolescence memories.
my body is the representation of the interior of an imagined, mythical, surre-
alist body, and the hypertextual writing is the method to approach its knowledge.
The drawing of the body is the replica, a scale model over which one can project
the spaces of remembrance and imagination, a spatial metaphor that allows the
author to classify the snippets of memory, imagined as texts with diverse origin
and materiality (pages from journals and notebooks, school reports with pictures
and diagrams, drawings, labelled biological specimens, broken vials, etc.) which
comprise a single corpus. Overriding the knowledge of an interior filled with
entrails appears the empty space of the imagined body − “While I know that the
inside of my body is a dense press of lubricated meats/ I can’t help seeing it as
hollow space, like the inside of a trunk”–inside which lexias are organized, not
as an exercise of textualizing the body, but rather as a form of handing a corpo-
real nature to the text. The shapeless mass of the hypertext transmutes into the
ideal canvas in which to sieve the memories and overflow the forms of this gro-
tesque body/corpus. The medium is the meat, and reading becomes peristalsis,
in Terry Harpold’s words: “The docuverse could be shaped like your own intes-
tines, and reading an act of dissection turned inside out, the text traversed con-
vulsively by the contractions and dilations of the boundaries of what you used
to think of as a book” (1).
The hypertextual reading can be seen as an act of digestion of a text that
advances in peristaltic and involuntary throbs, jumping from frame to frame,
reluctantly facing a structure that challenges the reader’s orientation skills. It is
not in vain that the reading mode prescribed by the author is that of touching,
groping one’s way towards the inside. In the lexia that carries the piece’s title,
María Goicoechea | Shelley Jackson’s Grotesque Corpus
14
“cabinet of wonders”, the author gives us the key to access her work, which also
serves as guideline to make the most of this internal journey travelled by all:
As a matter of fact, I am making a replica of this text: a huge wooden
chest in the shape of my body, with innumerable drawers in which I
will store my findings. Some of the drawers will be large and c a p a c i
o u s, some smaller than matchboxes. Some will be disguised, some will
be booby-trapped. I will hide secret buttons, levers and locks in my
carved folds and crevices. You will have to feel your way in.
As she did in Patchwork Girl, warning the reader that she would have to sew
the pieces herself, in my body, the reader must dig through her senses and feelings
in this other body that it is not her own, but with which she cannot help but to
feel at least a connection. The most apparently trivial details are told in a string
of thoughts evoked by the meticulous exploration of the map of the body. One
of the points of suture with the reader’s own memories is the banality of some
memories interlaced with moments of tenderness, rebelliousness or alienation
that we have all associated with those recollected fragments (an apparent incon-
gruity of memory, a system breakdown: why do we remember this and not that?,
what is hidden behind that sketch?).
The workings of memory, fastened to body reactions, both physical –such
as pain or cold− and psychological −such as feelings of inadequacy or embar-
rassment− direct us to the body as the anthropological operator, primeval and
universal, from which all sense of identity is built. In my body, the memories as-
sociated with the body are focused on childhood and adolescence, a stage where
one is not totally aware of the social restrictions regarding the body and where
its limits are explored. The body is a cabinet of wonders for the subject herself,
who must rummage through it until she finds her talent, that which makes her
unique.
From the reading emerges the presence of the little author in the making,
an image of infancy that deviates, however, from the category of “cute” associ-
ated with childhood; Shelley Jackson’s remembrances are not tailored to trans-
form powerlessness in aesthetic experience, neither do they provoke a senti-
mental attitude towards that which is diminutive or weak. The intimate self-
portrait offered by the narrative voice is that of a person that stands out from
the crowd, an androgynous girl, vital, strong, and carefree. But she is someone
who, at the same time, searches for her space among the other bodies. In the
link “other bodies”, the narrator shows her concern with beauty, with leaving a
mark in others: “My own body was, I felt, invisible. (…) It didn’t register, I was
like a stick figure, of which you don’t ask, is it well-drawn, is it beautiful? My
body was the engine that propelled a pair of eyes through the world.” If the
María Goicoechea | Shelley Jackson’s Grotesque Corpus.
15
author has ever felt invisible, subject rather than object of the gaze, a voyeur
rather than an exhibitionist, the work my body inverts the terms, transforming
herself into an object of scrutiny. Exhibiting her rarity, the author places herself
as the central piece of a cabinet of wonders, a piece that provokes attraction and
repulsion in equal measure, since she feels half-boy, half-girl, a kind of monster,
a hermaphrodite, a candidate to represent the third sex. Nevertheless, as the
patchwork girl of her previous work also claimed, that which is monstrous can
also be beautiful, since it is unique.
Drawing as a way to explore the human anatomy is one of the recurrent
themes in this piece. As we can see in her silhouette (fig.5), her body is both
object of analysis as well as subject who draws and analyses what she sees. One
of the leitmotivs that provide a sense of coherence to the textual fragments is the
progressive learning of drawing techniques that will allow her to capture with
pen and paper the contours and shapes of different parts of the body. The little
Shelley Jackson, this artist girl, tries to approach her object as it really is, escaping
artistic or cultural stereotypes. The art of sketching is presented as an antidote
against prejudices, criticisms, against hegemonic doctrines of beauty. On the one
hand, the body’s observation, the intense gaze over the object and its transposi-
tion to the canvas, becomes a nearly erotic relation: “At one time or another,
learning to draw, I have been obsessed with every part of the human body. (…)
Could I mistake this doting attention for disinterested curiosity? Drawing is al-
most sex”. In this line, the tattoos are treated as relevant authorial elements,
traces left on purpose over the canvas of the body, which are not born of acci-
dent nor trauma, but of the subject’s decision, and which allow other bodies to
read and approach her person. The action of tattooing oneself promotes a new
instance of re(signification), of reterritorialization, of those body parts or aspects
that are affected by the social construction of the body. In the same way, the
piercings, another type of voluntary transformation of the body, manifest the
wish to exert a transgression of the beauty canon in defense of an exercise of
singularity that does not flinch at embracing the “grotesque” character of the
said transgressions. The body of Jackson, with its multifarious tattoos and per-
forations, metamorphoses itself, as modelling clay at the hands of its owner, in
the grotesque corpus of the hypertext. In fact, the interconnection between body
and text manifests itself again in the commitment to writing and the discipline it
entails as a relation of voluntary servitude: the ring that decorates her navel is
used to chain the writer to her desk, so that she does not get up every five
minutes to clip her “toenails or refill the ice trays”. And she adds: “The weight
of the links ̶ it is not a heavy chain ̶ is enough to make me aware of my bondage,
and strangely, this is a relief; it stops me from wondering where else I might
want to be” (“Stomach” lexia).
María Goicoechea | Shelley Jackson’s Grotesque Corpus
16
The central diagram foregrounds the isolation of the author’s body, privi-
leging the moment of writing, of creation, as an intimate and solitary action; the
textual nodes, on the contrary, demonstrate her interconnection with other bod-
ies, other eyes. In words of the Spanish writer Rosa Montero, “writing sews you
up, unites you to the world.”
iii
The same can be said of reading as an action that
connects you to the vital fluid and sews you up inside. In particular, hypertext is
a dialogical genre in which each link interpellates us and compels us to establish
a point of suture that would maintain the structure on its feet; the scaffolding
that works as point of reference is found as much in the authorial personality
that provides coherence to the disperse fragments as in the identity structure of
the reader himself. In each act of meaning negotiation, the narcissism of the
reader is united with the narcissism of the author.
The proposal of Shelley Jackson invites the reader to accompany her in her
chaotic reordering of the body’s reminiscences, a decontextualization (inside the
hypertext) of its original context. But, what is the effect produced by this suc-
cessive disordering and reordering of memories associated to different body
parts? The territories of memory and body are drawn and blurred, they overlap
and overflow, they merge in new associations, exerting through the hypertext’s
grotesque corpus a destabilizing and liberating function. Above all, it implies a
negotiation between the macrocosms (the society, the world) and a microcosms
(the body, the cabinet of curiosities); a negotiation between the linearity of dis-
course and its dispersion and fragmentation in the hypertext, which makes ex-
plicit the coercive pressures that regulate the social construction of the body.
In its aesthetic sense, the grotesque is fundamentally defined by the surpas-
sing of identity, which implies a clash in principle with the beauty canon, as the
body statute in Western culture is mainly defined by it (Barrios 16). In this sense,
the form and content of my body make a well-oiled gear. Both the hypertext and
the image of the grotesque body have blurred boundaries, diluted semiotic fron-
tiers, each hypertext lexia is the fragment of a conversation whose meaning is
marked, accidentally, by the order it occupies in our own reading, by its contin-
gency relations with other fragments; despite the finite number of links that the
piece contains, this becomes endless by virtue of the quantity of possible com-
binations. We could say that the hypertext, as the grotesque body alluded to in
Cristóbal Pera’s essay, “is a body never finished, never completed, always under
construction” (37)
iv
, a feature that the narrative voice also attributes to my body
in the lexia “tie in products”. This incessant action is what, according to Sianne
Ngai, characterizes the aesthetic category of “zany”, the sign of our times, in
which the frontiers between play and work are dissolved, and the gender roles
come together with those of social class to draw a stressed and surpassed femi-
nine role. However, in this piece the feminine subject does not drown in a sea
María Goicoechea | Shelley Jackson’s Grotesque Corpus.
17
of demands and exigencies, as it is evident in other digital literature works cre-
ated by women (see, for instance, Pieces of Herself, by Juliet Davis, or Fitting the
Pattern, by Christine Wilks). On the contrary, the dialogism of the hypertext is
used to show, in a subversive manner and in connivance with the reader, the
matrix of social conflict that underlies every aesthetic judgement, in relation to
the body and to the text itself. The author’s personality, which the reader pro-
gressively constructs out of the textual tangle of my body, possesses a contagious
rebelliousness and force.
As in a curiosity cabinet, where knowledge emerges not from the objects
themselves but from the relations that they keep among them, in the hypertext
the recognition of an authorial voice emerges from the personality that is gath-
ered from all the fragments that form the work, and of their relation with adja-
cent works by the same author. After reading the contents of the different draw-
ers of memory, an image is formed that gives coherence to all of them, a new
layer in which the reader reconstructs the type of personality that complements
and confirms the authorial persona of Patchwork Girl, a subjectivity preoccupied
with similar concerns regarding the power of the body to contain a fragmented
yet enduring self, and the power of writing to express the experience of living
in/through its contingent nature.
Acting as one of the central nodes of the work we find one of the longer
lexias, it is entitled “Theories” and one can arrive to it from different paths. In
it an apparently trivial anecdote is again remembered: the narrator relates the
recollection of a sudden reality jolt, the split of a branch while she was climbing
up a tree as a child and which could have ended in a fatal accident. This seem-
ingly trivial occurrence hides one of the work’s epiphanies: the awakening of
maturity, the acknowledgement of being limited, alike others, and not a magical
child chosen by the forces of nature to be something more than human. Life –
the narrative voice concludes− is still wonderful, but now one has to be careful
since one will not be granted special rights, her fantasy of belonging and mystic
union with the physical world has vanished.
Shelley Jackson’s piece brings us back to that childhood moment in which
the world, and the body in particular, is a box full of surprises, where everything
is possible, and therefore, we must try hard to find the possibilities, the talents
we have in store without knowing. At some point, this full confidence in our
own potential, and thus in the capacity of our own body, breaks and in its place
appear the vulnerability, the complex, the inadequacy feeling, which the main
character of my body manages to eschew.
Jackson’s work transpires defiance and assertiveness. Just one melancholic
moment can be singled out when the narrator asserts that, as time passes, our
body acquires the characteristics of inanimate objects, until it becomes one. As
in a cabinet of wonders, in my body the objects of nature (the body), intermingle
María Goicoechea | Shelley Jackson’s Grotesque Corpus
18
with the human-made artifacts (the texts) and the myths (the imaginary connec-
tion that binds them together). However, in this chaotic skein of memories, each
lexia does not produce the same sense of wonder and surprise than a true col-
lection object; the curiosity it provokes is ambiguous, at once narcissistic and
generous. It becomes interesting by the pure fact of being a lexia in the hyper-
text, by being singled out by the author as a photographer capable of isolating
and making meaningful any instance that is framed by her camera.
We can assert, nevertheless, that the objectification, the parceling out of
the feminine body at the hands of the female writer acquires a tone of vindica-
tion. A wunderkammer, the cabinet of wonders, exhibited, open to scientific ex-
ploration and curious tourism, shows us the body of woman as an undiscovered
territory, yet to be known, both in the physiological plane and in the psycholog-
ical. The body revealed by Shelley Jackson is certainly a curiosity because of its
androgyny, but its reading sparks the recognition that such sexual ambiguity is
part of all of us in some way. The myth that the author toils to deconstruct is
that of a sexual polarity totally univocal and defined. The deconstruction carried
out by Jackson of each memory associated with the body in fragments of text,
territorializing and deterritorializing the global image of the body, and the recol-
lection of the stark contrast between lived experience of the body and the social
restrictions imposed on each little parcel of it, produces a defamiliarization effect
that brings to the surface the subtle confinement to which the feminine body is
subjected from infancy.
Finally, the most attractive feature of the authorial personality constructed
by Shelley Jackson is that she manages to write about her insecurities in carefree,
vital, and beautiful language, transmitting the pride inherent in being oneself.
She is weak and strong, vulnerable and resilient, sensitive and unbreakable. We
could say that she revisits the grotesque as yet another non-cathartic, minor af-
fect, as she does not really fit into any of the aesthetic categories to which Sianne
Ngai refers. She is not “cute”, maybe a little “zany” and definitively interesting,
but not in the sense of “merely interesting”, since she manages to involve us in
an intimate way in her own memories. She exhibits herself without shame and
demonstrates that the authorial character can become even more elusive and
mysterious the more we learn about it: behind the grotesque exhibition of her
most private memories lies another layer, that of the real person, which contin-
ues to be unfathomable.
Our platonic heritage has excised us, our consciences, from our own bodies
in the same way that classical normativity and aesthetics have alienated our ex-
perience of reality, which often shows its ugly teeth, from an idealized represen-
tation of the world. Yet, Shelley Jackson invites us to reduce the distance be-
tween bodies and expand our knowledge towards this primeval mystery that
separates self from other, consciousness and materiality, text and body, through
María Goicoechea | Shelley Jackson’s Grotesque Corpus.
19
the grotesque mode, which becomes, in her hands, a way to approach the in-
congruous elements that compose our identity and its relation with the body in
a continuous play with the reader’s expectations. The grotesque emerges then,
not as a shocking spectacle, but at the interstices between Jackson’s memories
of the discovery of her body’ potentialities and shortcomings and our own. By
mixing triviality with transcendence, irreverence with devotion, by resorting to
a humorous, surreal distance to assimilate our ambivalent emotions towards our
own body and that of others, Jackson leads us through her particular cabinet of
wonders, at once peculiar and strangely familiar, suggesting that only a grotesque
text can hold the disproportioned, the unclassifiable, the non-canonical and even
the tragic in its bosom without losing its integrity.
Through these notes I have tried to tentatively play with Scott Rettberg’s
suggestion that hypertexts can be seen as simultaneously belonging to many sets,
and that “theory, like literature, does not ultimately operate a world in which
each passing phase obviates the other” (1). In this case, I believe that Shelley
Jackson’s corpus should definitely be counted inside the renewal of the Gro-
tesque at the turn of the 21st century, adding to this ancient style the bizarre,
hybrid bodies of our technological age.
Notes
i
In the original: “En su sentido estético, lo grotesco se define fundamentalmente por
el sobrepasamiento de la identidad, lo que supone una contraposición de principio
con el canon de lo bello como aquello que define fundamentalmente el estatuto del
cuerpo en la cultura occidental” (Translation by the author).
ii
Astrud contends that the danger the established orders perceived in the grotesque
had to do with the surprising anti-cognitive properties that are still today attributed
to it: Because it resists interpretation, the grotesque always appears as a domain
where it is expressed a certain type of irrationality, or at least, of the unintelligible
(Translation by the author of “(…) qui conduit aujourd’hui encore à concéder de
surprenantes propriétés anti-cognitives: parce qu’il résiste à l’interprétation, le gro-
tesque apparaît toujours comme un domaine où s’exprime une forme d’irrationnel
ou du moins d’inintelligible” (Le Renouveau du grotesque. Introduction, 3)).
iii
In the original: “Escribir te cose, te une al mundo” (Translation by the author).
iv
In the original: “es un cuerpo nunca acabado, nunca completado, siempre en
proceso de construcción” (Translation by the author).
María Goicoechea | Shelley Jackson’s Grotesque Corpus
20
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