Surgical body transformation can produce a hated abandoned self that returns as a double

Evidence

In Her Body and Other Parties, Carmen Maria Machado explores the relationship between the thin self and the fat self as a form of inner doppelganger. In the story “Eight Bites,” Machado’s narrator despises her body as it is—its heaviness, softness, and sagginess: “I was tired of flat, unforgiving dressing room lights; I was tired of looking into the mirror and grabbing the things that I hated and lifting them, clawing deep, and then letting them drop and everything aching.” So she undergoes bariatric surgery and shrinks down to a more socially acceptable size. But the narrator is haunted by what she first thinks is a ghost and then discovers is something much creepier: the fat she shed as a result of the surgery, one hundred pounds of it, which has taken a featureless human form in her home. It is a fat golem, the self she could not bring herself to love and so chose to cut away. “I kneel down next to it,” the narrator says. “It is a body with nothing it needs: no stomach or bones or mouth. Just soft indents. I crouch down and stroke its shoulder, or what I think is its shoulder. It turns and looks at me. It has no eyes, but still, it looks at me. She looks at me. She is awful but honest. She is grotesque but she is real.” The narrator then beats her double with terrible violence. — Naomi Klein, Doppelganger, 578

Categorization

• STORYSTEM: The fat-golem doppelganger is a ready-made horror conceit for a story about wellness/cutting away the unloved self and its literalized return.
• XREF: Extends Klein’s own doubling device — she makes herself Machado’s inner doppelganger — into the wellness body-optimization theme of the chapter. — connects to: Materializing the phantasm of the double destroys its power — Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, 322; The hologram performs surgery that extracts and kills the secret double — Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, 357