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Shocking
Scripts:
Bodies of Thought in King Lear and
The Melancholy of Anatomy.
(Linking Shakespeare to Modern Hypertext.)
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“The only way we can hope to understand what
is happening, or what has already happened, is by way of a severe
and unnatural dissociation of sensibility” (Birkerts
205).
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ACTIVE
ROLE
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What would happen if you looked at the human body in literature
across hundreds of years? Sensibilities may be offended and
bodies of thought will be challenged. In the unfixed space of
your computer screen, one 'major' author and one 'avant-garde'
author come together briefly, bashing down spacial and temporal
boundaries. I intend to look at bodies and border-crossings
in Shakespeare's King Lear and Shelley Jackson's The
Melancholy of Anatomy: Stories. Both works look closely
at the tensions between unity and fragmentation. I have taken
these texts as separate bodies, cut them apart and sewn them
together into my own 'patchwork' monster. Ultimately, the collision
of the texts suggests that social systems such as language are
both unstable and not-natural. While the primary anxiety of
King Lear revolves around change, The Melancholy
of Anatomy revels in the mutability of forms. King
Lear struggles to reassert a departing concept of "natural"
authority, while Melancholy parodies the idea of the
'natural' in favor of the absurd or monstrous. Despite the radical
shifts in tone, content and form, each piece places an emphasis
on the performance of the body, the threat of the concept of
'natural' being ultimately false, and the fear of finding the
unexpected or unknown within the body. The body and the
nation are created by constantly changing texts: Shakespeare
and Jackson both suggest that in a 'material reality' that is
largely scripted by language, those in power will be writers
who continue to play an active role in creating reality.
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ATTEMPT
RECOVERY
in the
FACE OF
CHAOS
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Shakespeare’s King Lear begins with a process
of division and definition: working from the wholeness of
a ‘map’ Lear divides the kingdom in both rule
and territorial space ( 1.1.35-7).
At stake from the very mention of a kingdom “divided
/In three” is Lear’s vision of “age…crawl[ing]
toward death.” Lear (re)casts himself with his own
language into the role of a crawling child beset by his
own mortality. The king bows to death and daughters—upsetting
the hierarchy of father-daughter and king-subject. Ironically,
Lear attempts to assert his symbolic or abstract authority
over any/everything just as he “divests us” of
the state. As critic Jeffrey Stern asserts, the “love
trial” that ensues is an attempt to have his daughters
publicly announce their love for Lear, but also monstrously
resembles marriage vows. Thus, King Lear begins with a troubled
state, one complicated by concerns of division, authority,
love, and gender. The madness that besets the ‘divested’
king engages directly Lear’s own anxieties about female
sexuality and control. Indeed, the fear of the female and
the ‘nothing’ that comes from Cordelia’s
mouth (equated with genitals) threatens
to destabilize all meaning. The fear
of the Other (the female and the French) is complicated by
the fact the body often incorporates parts of the Other—confusing
and even collapsing the difference that is necessary for authority.
However, King Lear does in fact attempt a recovery
from the landscape of madness
by mapping out its various
forms: both the body and the state are charted and defined
in a way that attempts to make sense out of madness and asserts
control in the face of chaos.
--JUMP--
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GAPS
IN THE
SCRIPT
EXPOSE
the
BODY
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Shelley Jackson’s collection of short stories entitled
The Melancholy of Anatomy
works through many naturalizing narratives (of gender and sex),
in an effort to reject the idea of a subject outside (or prior
to) language and to call into being a different perspective
within the ‘matrix of power.’ Jackson embraces a
concept of the body as a socially constructed space, with a
hyperbolic eye that denaturalizes social narratives. Jackson’s
collection of stories also suggest that constructions have materiality.
Jackson’s experimental stories play with the performative
nature of scripting the body or embodying the script, enabling
her to unveil the construction behind the cultural narratives,
inviting the chance for reconfiguring narratives and bodies.
Jackson also uses texts against themselves in order to create/reveal
gaps in the natural scripts encircling them. Jackson plays with
texts by fusing them in a recursive spiral that parodies any
sense of stability or return. Jackson
engages Robert Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy,
which she quite literally turns on its head by instead moving
to “spiritualize anatomy.” The shock to the script—beginning
with the mere reversal of the title’s words—expands
rather than limits through altered repetitions. No escape from
the naturalized and powerful narratives it uses in changing
the script is attempted by the collection, nor does it call
for a return to a ‘natural’
state. Melancholy insists upon its own performativity
through overt uses of film directions and scene descriptions,
taking on a critical stance of “self-conscious”
performativity. The collection examines acts of constructing
the subject (and the body) through uncanny (laughable) juxtapositions
of the 'natural’ and supernatural. Jackson troubles
boundaries between body/language, material/immaterial, inside/outside.
Parody and the hyperbolic are also upheld through enlarged sexual
organs and bodily excretions ‘writ large’ within
Jackson’s fictional world. Melancholy embraces
an infinitely recursive sense of performance. Jackson’s
stories expose the ‘naturalization’ of the body
as an infinite process of fictional construction used for regulation
(border patrol). Jackson destabilizes the ‘natural’
form of ‘distinct’ narrative genres. While Jackson
seeks to rupture the borderlands inherent in narratives of gender,
sex, textual form and the body, she radically embraces materiality.
The immaterial and material are always already linked, but for
Jackson the material body (its parts) also has voice. Do material
objects (the body) have voices and lives of their own? Can we
translate/hear the body’s voice? What is the use of thinking
through objects?
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