Shelley Jackson's The Melancholy of Anatomy (MA) is a printed collection of stories that hyperbolize the body and its "humors." Her collection is experimental in form-including film direction, intermission, reading notes, interviews, appendices, etc. Perhaps less violently than her hypertext, MA defamiliarizes its readers from traditional, internalized practices of reading. Ultimately, Jackson shocks us with calm tone and scientific language applied to 'understanding' the body--she rips open the body and looks at it under a microscope to reveal the construction these 'natural' things always (already) undergo.

The book enacts a sort of spoof on the sterilizing capability of scientific language and often the way in which the body is a socially constructed and regulated space. Issues of PLAY are crucial to this piece! It is both playfully funny and a staging of the body on an enlarged scale. The message is a critical one: play with form and play with language can be methods for expanding consciousness. "This is the real world, I said to myself. Pay more attention to it" (MA 66).

Note on calling The Melancholy of Anatomy a Hypertext:
While her stories are printed rather than electronic (like her first hypertext novel, Patchwork Girl), the collection can comfortably be considered a hypertext. In particular, hypertext fiction involves different reading contexts and calls for a new sort of reader, promoting shifts in consciousness. Hypertext fiction is “like a printed book that the author has attacked with a pair of scissors and cut into convenient verbal sizes. The difference is that the electronic hypertext does not simply dissolve into a disordered bundle of slips, as the printed book must. For the author also defines a scheme of electronic connections to indicate relationships among the slips” (Bolter 224). Hypertext fiction creates a space in which text is literally networked to other text, allowing for a sort of collaboration to occur between author and reader through the vehicle of malleable text. The Meloncholy of Anatomy may share some of the 'linear' qualities of other printed texts, but Jackson carefully works to create a reading experience that is constantly 'frustrated' and recombined with various sections placed together in a malleable order. The 'body' of her text is ultimately fragmented into parts that have their own stories to tell, in their own voices. The reader does the work to make the links between the parts and to imagine a sort of structure to hold them. The appendices in the 'phlegm' section works as a key example of an organizing structure that complicates reading order.

In Digital Fictions, Sarah Sloane suggests the hypertext fictions enact a sort of post-structuralist attack on conventional practices (of reading, understanding the self, etc.) which serve to posit the form as a “test-bed” for radical sociocultural critique. Michael Joyce and Sloane acknowledge the power of hypertext to offer new ways of reading and writing which in turn can cause a shift in consciousness or a “paradigm shift.” In Othermindedness, Joyce argues that hypertext fiction creates a collaborative space (much like the computer-networked classroom): “There is a…language of stitches…of contours…of story spaces, a language of each of us and of every one of us…We are trying to see a truly participative, a multiple, fiction” (126). However, for Sloane, hypertext fiction disappoints because it does something unexpected and refuses to “satisfy what traditional readers and critics wish to read” (109). In essence, Sloane suggests that hypertext fictions demand that the reader leave behind the “status-quo.” Her discussion of the enjoyment of story-telling starts from a definition from E.M. Forster’s “classic text” (126), but this discussion understands plot aesthetics as tied intrinsically to linear development and narrative progression. I would critique Sloane’s assumptions here because they seem to suggest that all radical art is merely a temporary disruption. King Lear may pose a compelling counter to Sloane's understanding of a stable, classic text. The play departed from traditional comedic endings in order to shatter many boundaries (between tragedy/comedy, fragmentation/unity, past/present), radically defying the expections of Shakepeare's audience.

Hypertext fiction may present a similar disruption of genre ecologies (in the practice of academic reading), but by defying expectation and causing JUMPS in readers' minds it can be an active player in reshaping the practice and conceptualization of reality. Hypertext fiction enacts a critique of the conventional aesthetic (by breaking away from it). Sloane sees the failure of hypertext to ascribe to “classical” notions of good storytelling as ultimately fatal. Unfortunately, Sloane does not consider the possibility that traditional aesthetics and reading procedures (as objects and activities) may cease to exist as the “status-quo” changes to accommodate the freedoms of hyperfiction and networked environments. Change begins with a shock to the 'status-quo,' forcing mutation and change to jump into theoretical approaches.