Vile Jelly

Abstract

This chapter reproduces some of the claims in darkly comic form of the author’s Anatomy of Disgust. The presentation is new, but the ideas are much the same. At issue is a less than celebratory view of human embodiment. The chapter uses the Duke of Cornwall’s sickening description of the human eye as a starting point: People are something of a goopy pond held together by skin that can itself be a site of horror. People are a feeding tube that connects them to a longer tube built at taxpayer expense to send their food remade down to a sunless sea when they flush the toilet. Submerged imagery from Hamlet oozes through the discussion to justify the positions and show their well-attested commonplaceness.