Sites Of Autopsy In Contemporary Culture (S U N Y Series in Postmodern Culture)

Sites of Autopsy in Contemporary Culture Elizabeth Klaver Sites of Autopsy in Contemporary Culture Sites of Au...

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Sites of

Autopsy

in Contemporary Culture

Elizabeth Klaver

Sites of

Autopsy


Sites of

Autopsy


Elizabeth Klaver

STATE UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK PRESS

Published by State University of New York Press, Albany © 2005 State University of New York All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission. No part of this book may be stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means including electronic, electrostatic, magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission in writing of the publisher. For information, address State University of New York Press, 90 State Street, Suite 700, Albany, NY 12207 Production by Marilyn P. Semerad Marketing by Susan M. Petrie Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Klaver, Elizabeth. Sites of autopsy in contemporary culture / Elizabeth Klaver. p. cm. — (SUNY series in postmodern culture) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-7914-6425-3 (hardcover : alk. paper) — ISBN 0-7914-6426-1 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Autopsy—Social aspects. 2. Autopsy—History. I. Title. II. Series. RA1063.4.K53 2005 616.07'59—dc22 2004009642

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

for Mike Justesen

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Contents

List of Illustrations

ix

Acknowledgments

xi

Introduction

1

1. Autopsy: A Context

9

2. Performance, Autopsy, and the Performative

37

3. Autopsy and the Subject; or, What the Dead Saw

71

4. Autopsy and the Social: The Case of John F. Kennedy

103

5. Autopsy and the Popular

129

Afterword

155

Notes

157

Works Cited

161

Index

169

vii


Illustrations

FIGURE 1.1. Andreas Vesalius, Title Page to De Humani Corporis Fabrica. U.S. National Library of Medicine.

13

FIGURE 3.1. Samuel Beckett, Play. An Institute for the Exploration of Virtual Realities production, directed and designed by Lance Gharavi. Produced at the University of Kansas, 1996. Permission and photo courtesy of Mark Reaney.

87

FIGURE 3.2. Hans Holbein the Younger, The Ambassadors. Courtesy of the National Gallery, London.

94

FIGURE 4.1. President John F. Kennedy autopsy diagram. U.S. National Archives and Records Administration (NARA).

ix

105


Acknowledgments

I have many friends and colleagues to thank for help in the preparation of this book. First, I would like to thank Cammie Sublette, my graduate student. Without her support, I would never have made it through this project. I am grateful to the medical doctors who graciously gave me their time and expertise: Eugene Arnold, Michael Jarvis, and the pathology staff of Memorial Hospital of Carbondale. A number of colleagues read the manuscript and generously offered suggestions and ideas: Kevin Dettmar, Edward Brunner, Jane Cogie, Terry Spaise, Ronda Dively, Michael Humphries, Mark Amos, and David Anthony. To my students I am profoundly indebted: Jody Price, Nathan Hill, Margie Pignataro, Mohamed Ahmed Deyab, Shota Yamabe, Yuemin (Brooke) He, Marc Herb, Gary Lewis, Diane Ferrero, Eric Pals, and Megan Reed. And to Paula Arnold: thank you. I greatly appreciate the generous assistance of the National Gallery in London, the U.S. National Library of Medicine, and the U.S. National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) in providing the illustrations. In particular, I would like to thank Mark Reaney of the Department of Theatre and Film at the University of Kansas and Lance Gharavi of the Department of Theatre, Arizona State University, for allowing me to use the virtual reality production photograph of Samuel Beckett’s Play. An earlier version of “The Savage Eye” in chapter 3 appeared in New Theatre Quarterly. For patiently putting up with too much autopsy talk during weekend get-togethers, I thank my family. I am grateful to my mother for videotaping the entire O. J. Simpson murder trial. And, in particular, I thank my husband, Mike Justesen, for engaging in discussions, contributing ideas, and offering support. xi


Introduction

The scholar as aesthete is nothing more than and nothing less than a negotiation of personality. —Ronald J. Pelias, Writing Performance

DATELINE: DECEMBER 26, 1996 In Boulder, Colorado, the body of a little girl was discovered in the basement of her parents’ house. She had ligatures around the neck and right wrist, and contusions to the face and neck. A ransom note discovered by her mother suggested a kidnapping gone terribly awry. On the face of it, the death of JonBenét Ramsey would seem to be a straightforward, but terrifying, story—the murder of a child by a stranger within the sanctity of the home. However, the autopsy performed the next day exposed some additional and troubling information. The external examination of the body confirmed a deep garrote wound to the neck matching the ligature, which indicated the cause of death to be strangulation. Otherwise, aside from minor cuts and bruises, the body’s exterior was free of injury. No scalp trauma was apparent. But the internal examination uncovered something quite unexpected. Once the scalp was reflected and the skull cap opened, a massive head injury became visible: first, a scalp hemorrhage running from the right eyebrow to the back of the head; then, a corresponding skull fracture 8 1/2 inches long with a small displaced fragment of bone; and last, a subdural hemorrhage beneath the skull. Although the head 1

2

INTRODUCTION

wound was also a fatal-type injury, petechial hemorrhaging of the eyes indicated that JonBenét was alive at the time of strangulation. Dr. John E. Meyer, who performed the autopsy, listed the clinicopathologic correlation as follows: “Cause of death of this six year old female is asphyxia by strangulation associated with craniocerebral trauma.” Now, here’s the puzzle: Why would a kidnapper strangle a child to death who had already suffered a deadly head trauma? To the Boulder police who investigated the crime, the type of event sequence shown by the autopsy—first a fatal blow, then a fatal strangulation—suggested “staging.” Together with other signs at the crime scene such as the wrapping of the body in a blanket and its placement indoors, the autopsy indicated not a kidnapping but a desperate attempt to cover up a tragic accident and deflect suspicion. Or at least this is the reading put forward by Steve Thomas, one of the Boulder detectives involved in the case, in JonBenét Ramsey: Inside the Ramsey Murder Investigation. My interest in the Ramsey example is not whether the case is “solvable,” which is the topic of a small cottage industry in JonBenét books. Certainly, a hefty dose of politics, mistakes, and money do not hold out much hope at this point. Rather, I’m interested in the performance of the autopsy, and how it opens up a set of circumstances not initially visible on the surface of things. In the example of JonBenét, the autopsy—a medicolegal procedure—complicated the initial appearance of both cause of death and manner of death: Cause of death now had to include the associated factor of (possibly accidental) head trauma. Manner of death now pointed to first-degree homicide, and additional evidence uncovered during the autopsy indicated previous vaginal trauma, most likely committed by a member of the family. Indeed, what JonBenét’s autopsy enabled was a trip “behind the scene,” in this case behind the scene of the body. The signs on the visible surface, such as the garrotting, functioned precisely as the dramatic sign functions: They were designed to reveal and hide at the same time. In fact, the autopsy unveiled the body in the best tradition of metadrama: It did not simply expose the workings of a murder; it uncovered the very workings of the murder’s “staginess.” Here were the ropes and pulleys of theatrical illusion. And it took the “doing” of an autopsy— cutting into the body and seeing for oneself—to achieve this backstage point of view. The Greek roots of the word “autopsy” (auto+opsis) contain the dead metaphor of vision together with the empirical thrust of Western epistemology since the Renaissance—to see with one’s own eyes. Interest-

Introduction

3

ingly, “autopsy” as a particular way of seeing was not coined in French (autopsie) until the sixteenth century and not until the seventeenth in English, when it became necessary to find a name for the new scientific episteme based on observation that was coming ever more forcefully of age. At first, “autopsy” was connected just to the acquisition of knowledge and not specifically to human dissection. Indeed, the earliest of the early modern practitioners of anato-autopsy, such as the sixteenth-century French surgeon Ambroise Paré, called their work on the cadaver “anatomisay,” and the modern idea of an autopsy springs from the merging of two empiricist functions: looking at and analyzing the body, and particularly in medical science, the act of “cutting up” the body (anatome \, “up cut”). Yet the initial idea lodged in the metaphor of “seeing for oneself ” as an epistemology, absent human dissection, still operates frequently today, even if it is not consciously attached to the word “autopsy.” David S. Lifton in Best Evidence, the record of his odyssey through the Kennedy assassination files which I discuss at length in chapter 4, regularly deploys the language of “trying to see with my own eyes” (28). And, in a somewhat different manner, Russell Vorpagel, author of Profiles in Murder, describes the FBI methodology of determining victim typology as a “psychological autopsy” (134–35). Neither of these usages has anything to do with actual human dissection. As such, “autopsy” operates as a concept that can navigate various disciplines with ease, traversing a number of seemingly disparate fields from medical science to the arts and humanities, for at its most fundamental denotation it simply points to the privileging of vision in Western culture. The trope of autopsy as a searching gaze deployed by the subject to ferret out meaning and significance essentially describes the position of the Western spectator, whether at a microscope, in the theater, or reading a book. However, “autopsy” should not be seen as the sort of god-like “eye” capable of a taking up a position from outside the domain of fields. Throughout this book, for instance, my “habitus,” as Pierre Bourdieu terms the particular type of knowledge or code one possesses, will be informed by my position in the cultural and literary field, even though autopsy is a concept best known in the fields of medical and forensic science. Undoubtedly, a pathologist writing on this topic would come up with a completely different book. Nevertheless, a concept like autopsy demonstrates what Randal Johnson recognizes as the sense in Bourdieu’s work “of structural and functional homologies among all fields of social activity” (8–9). In fact, deploying a concept over a range of fields is a long-standing practice in Western intellectual circles, viewed according to

4

INTRODUCTION

Bourdieu as a “heuristic virtue, the one that the epistemological tradition recognizes in analogy” (in Johnson 9). Indeed, a concept like autopsy suggests that there has been a working intersection since the Renaissance between the fields of science and the arts and humanities, despite the widespread belief in an elemental and formidable gap separating fields essentially seen as freestanding structures. Listing a few well-known intellects who have crossed this gap ought to prove how questionable is its actuality: da Vinci, Rembrandt, Francis Bacon, Jonathan Edwards, Mary Shelley, William Carlos Williams, Susan Sontag, Richard Selzer. And yet the gap persists. On the one side, the objectivity of science; on the other side, the subjectivity of the arts and humanities. Nevertheless, when an idea like autopsy is deployed, the gap begins to look more and more like a cultural construction, designed to produce (or be the product of ) disciplinary boundaries that may or may not be necessary or even accurate. To be sure, the modern university has been the major culprit in the departmentalizing of academic disciplines; it takes a village of specialists to push at the edge of Western knowledge as well as to pass it on. And yet the disciplinary boundaries of this gap are always under pressure from their own constructedness. At my university, for instance, there is currently a raging debate over who gets to teach the history of mathematics in the undergraduate core curriculum: the mathematics or the history department? In the postmodern era of interdisciplines, scholars appear more compelled to work at taking this gap apart, or at least at making the boundaries more pervious. Indeed, just the desire to tell the narrative of mathematics, or to think the narrative would be of interest to nonmath majors, is a splendid acknowledgment of value across disciplines. Similarly, in the areas of science and the humanities, the positive regard given to interdisciplinary crossover in the last few years has been changing the direction of science studies. As Evelyn Fox Keller points out in Secrets of Life, Secrets of Death, philosophical, social, and linguistic critiques have influenced science to recognize the primacy of social location, with all the economic, cultural, and political constructedness of scientific discourse, especially regarding science as a production of knowledge (2–3). The distinction between nature and culture, as well as between objectivity and subjectivity, has become less happy for science in the post-Derridean world, and scientific epistemology has become less a quest for “truth” in the metaphysical sense than the theoretical development of a workable model. We no longer discover the truth of lived experience so much as match the model with the experience of everyday life. And models, we

Introduction

5

have realized, are necessary: After all, mathematics and physics are what make it possible to build technologies. More specifically in terms of medical science, the interdisciplinary impulse is contributing to the growth of a community of humanities scholars, artists, and medical professionals who want to position medicine within a discursive and cultural context. In “Performing Persons: A Locus of Connection for Medicine and Literature,” William Monroe reports that medical professionals are beginning to apply literary theories to the doctor/patient relationship. He advocates the performative model, which combines narrative and rhetorical theory in helping doctors and patients “conceive of themselves as collaborative performers of particular and mutual medical situations” (28). It is fascinating to think that, even in the rarefied atmosphere of the modern medical autopsy suite, the pathologist and deceased could be understood as engaging in the mutual “performance” of an autopsy, a topic I cover in chapter 2. In his essay “Autopsy: The Final Diagnosis,” for instance, the pathologist Eugene Arnold writes, “The deceased and I are working together to solve a problem” (4, my italics). However, I do not want to give the impression that medicine any time soon is in danger of undergoing a leveling of power or authority with the laity in either the examination or the autopsy room. The signs in a hospital proclaiming “Authorized Personnel Only” indicate that someone or something is warranted to make performances (and, conversely, someone else is not). Interestingly, the medical profession itself considers anatomy lab in the first year of medical school—the dissection of the human cadaver—to be the rite of passage for students to the status of authorized person (Duffin 38). Moreover, the history of medicine as a history of discursive models implies an on-going authorship, medical science as the authorship of the body or at least of the model that explains the body. And the power of the model, determined by treatment success, in turn gives the model tremendous authority. Michel de Certeau in The Practice of Everyday Life even goes so far as to claim that the discursive thrust of medical science with its “tools,” or instruments, transforms “flesh” into “body,” the body being that legible or readable cultural construct produced by medicine and the law (145). In this sense, medical science is not only author of the body, but reader of it as well. Medical science, and the vast medical network associated with it, has always operated as an institution in the best of Western traditions, wielding all the power Louis Althusser attributes to the modern “ideological state apparatus” (16), a topic I explore in chapter 4. Indeed, an important

6

INTRODUCTION

aspect of the history of medical science, especially in terms of anatomy and autopsy research, has been the despotic relationship of medical researchers, backed by the authority of the state, in relation to the lower classes. Until the turn of the twentieth century, the procurement of cadavers for dissection comprises the tale of a dark underworld, a history of ruthless exploitation, which may help to explain why, to this day, many ordinary folk harbor a real distrust of Western medicine. And, not surprisingly, in our time the ability to exercise power in medicine is still an ideological function of authorization. Here’s an example: In order to get permission to observe an autopsy, I had to navigate both my university’s Human Subjects Research protocol and the local hospital administration, an exercise that well typified how the ideological state apparatus of the law and medicine work together to control the body, certainly when it comes to researching it, and to deputize authority. This is not to claim, of course, that areas of the hospital should be wide open to one and all. After all, there are important issues of hygiene, safety, respect, sensitivity, privacy, and expediency. The hospital is not a circus tent. Today, prurient curiosity is not a good enough reason for getting in to watch an autopsy, although it was up until the end of the nineteenth century. In fact, during the time in the West when human dissection was carried out only on the bodies of hanged criminals, autopsies and anatomies were great public entertainments, as popular as the executions themselves. This practice, which seems so heartless to Westerners today, is part of the history of autopsy that I cover in chapter 1, together with its considerable contributions to medical science and the humanities. I want to remark, however, that there is some controversy in science studies today over the way the history of science has been told, in particular as the “great man narrative.” Foucault has set the stage for a subjectless history with his notion of archaeology, even though, as I note in chapter 3, his project does not seem completely successful. I, too, am suspicious of the notion of history as the product of a few good men. But perhaps the “subject of science” ought to be reclaimed as the “agent of science.” On the one hand, I do not wish to detract from (or excuse) those brilliant (or nefarious) phenoms who were capable of pushing at the limits of Western medical science; on the other hand, I also want to locate such agents within important, sometimes radical, shifts in the thought of the culture as a whole. As Keller puts it, even though the subject of science is today “something of an embarrassment . . . [i]ndividual subjects are as much constituted by social structures as social structures are constituted by individual subjects” (8–9).

Introduction

7

In the following chapters, I will be grounding my discussions of autopsy in a wide range of texts, all of which I consider legitimate sites of analysis regardless of their position in the culture debates. Perhaps the most pressing reasons for covering so many disparate texts come from the very properties of autopsy in the West. Autopsy appears broadly across Western culture, whether in medical, legal, historic, generic, or media sites. Thus, simply wanting to chart its materialization at various sites in the interdisciplinary landscape is, to a large extent, responsible for the breadth and variety of the texts under examination. Further, I want to argue in the following pages that autopsy is an interdisciplinary concept— philosophical and theoretical, scientific and humanist. In order to justify such a claim, of course, I would want to show its applicability in a number of venues—literary, cultural, medical, forensic. (And I also want to interrogate meta-analytically precisely this interdisciplinary trait of autopsy.) Finally, my own theoretical outlook is decidedly interdisciplinary, which to a large degree governs my satisfaction in being able to research autopsy across an expanse of literary and cultural terrain. Here are a few of the texts I will be featuring in this book: Libra by Don DeLillo; the film JFK directed by Oliver Stone; The Anatomy Lecture by Rembrandt and novel versions by Marshall Goldberg and John Morley; the television show Alien Autopsy; the autopsy reports of Bonnie and Clyde, President Kennedy, and JonBenét Ramsey; The Last Precinct by Patricia Cornwell; Vesalius’s Fabrica; The Atheist’s Tragedy by Cyril Tournier; Under the Knife by Theodora Skipitares; Paré’s autopsy records; Gray’s Anatomy by Spalding Gray; medical videos; Obsession by John Douglas; Thomas Harris’s novels Hannibal and The Silence of the Lambs; the O. J. Simpson televised murder trial; Samuel Beckett’s Play and What Where; medical essays; the television show The X-Files; even sites of autopsy that I uncovered in The Birth of the Clinic by Foucault and Lacan’s Seminar. Chapter 1 provides a context for the book by offering a brief history of autopsy, an explanation of its practice, and my own personal observations and reflections on the medical autopsy I attended. Chapter 2 pursues the performance of autopsy, both in the highly theatrical sense of a mise-en-scène and in the more discursive context of performative and speech act theory. How autopsy and the dead body fit into, and contest, current trends in body criticism becomes an important part of this discussion. In developing a theory of models, I argue for a critical route that navigates social constructivism and the materiality of the body at the same time, a position I call constructivist Realism. Chapter 3 delves into the

8

INTRODUCTION

problematic of the subject, a topic of great concern to many body and subjectivity theorists, perhaps experienced nowhere more profoundly than at the acute moment of autopsy. What does it mean to cut open and look into the secret recesses of a dead person? I explore how such issues as the subject/object shift, agency, and selfhood come to be entangled at the performance of autopsy and, counterintuitive though it may seem, negotiate a certain degree of functional and necessary compromise. Chapter 4 takes up the question of autopsy at the level of the social. Exactly how does autopsy function as an ideological institution? And what happens when it fails? I devote my discussion to the botched autopsy of President John F. Kennedy and the conspiracy “plots” it has launched. The “lacking” autopsy, I argue, operates as a failed nodal point incapable of guaranteeing the structure of the social. And in chapter 5, I respond to the fascination the performance of autopsy holds in the popular imagination. Why do we see so many scenes of autopsy in our popular culture, from Patricia Cornwell novels to television police dramas to Internet sites? At what stage in Western culture have we reached to effect (or perhaps return to) such spectacular entertainment?

1

Autopsy A Context

Mortui Vivis Praecipiant

I

n Medicolegal Investigation of Death, Ramsey Clark, former U.S. Attorney General, laments the fact that an autopsy was not performed on old King Hamlet. Had an autopsy been obtained, “Shakespeare’s play might have turned from tragical to historical” (ix). Perhaps. Yet even today, an autopsy does not ensure the solvability of a murder. What we can feel certain about, though, is the response of Shakespeare’s public to the entrance of a human dissector in Hamlet—a mixture of fascination and loathing. Since human dissection was a public spectacle in Shakespeare’s day—it had not yet retreated behind the closed doors of medical and legal authority—the appearance of an anatomist on the stage would not have been too surprising. But threatening? Yes! And so much more threatening than the manifestation of a mere Renaissance ghost. While the actual purpose and practice of autopsy has changed little from Shakespeare to Clark, the social history has been a roller coaster, careening over a complex, even vexed, terrain of social relations in modern Western culture. On the one hand, it represented brilliant science, intellectual endeavor, hard and dangerous work, humanist dedication; on the other hand, public humiliation, criminality, execution, morbid infection, body mutilation. What follows in this chapter is a brief narrative of autopsy. I hesitate to call it a history, since my goal is modest—simply to provide a ground for the discussions of autopsy following in the rest of

9

10

SITES OF AUTOPSY IN CONTEMPORARY CULTURE

the book. As such, I hit only the peaks and valleys.1 And at the end of the chapter, I describe what it is like to go behind the closed doors of the autopsy suite today.

BEFORE CLOSED DOORS The genealogy of modern autopsy may begin at the Renaissance, but its practice actually goes back a very long way in Western culture—at least to early Greek and Roman civilization, despite widespread taboos in those societies against human dissection. We can even push the narrative back to ancient Egypt, where embalmers and artists practiced autopsies to gather and teach knowledge of human anatomy for burial preparation. After 300 BC, the Greek states did permit a limited practice of human dissection, but only on the bodies of criminals. But for Galen, the secondcentury Greek anatomist of Rome, human dissection was strictly forbidden. Despite the fact that his work became the authoritative source of human anatomy throughout medieval Europe, Galen was only able to extrapolate human anatomy from the dissection of animals and treatment of premortem injuries in humans. As one might expect, his model of the human body was often oddly skewed: For instance, he wrongly attributed five lobes to the human liver, gave the uterus horns, and speculated on a unidirectional blood movement system that had blood departing from the liver and arriving at the periphery of the body through both the veins and arteries, a model that did not change until William Harvey published On the Motion of the Heart in 1628 (Ackerknecht 76–77). Nevertheless, the taboo against human dissection did not prevent external, postmortem examination of the cadaver, a practice both the early Greeks and the Romans relied upon mainly for medicolegal purposes. For a number of reasons, it could be important to ascertain the exact cause of death and distinguish between those that occurred naturally and unnaturally: Manner of death would determine such issues as burial privileges and inheritance, as well as criminal liability. Autopsy in this sense can be practiced without ever opening the body. Indeed, after externally examining the twenty-three stab wounds on the body of Julius Caesar, the Roman physician Antistius was able to conclude that the ultimate cause of death was one particular wound in the chest (Fisher 3). By the thirteenth century in Europe, though, pressure from the medical and legal communities had increased. Christian tradition was beginning to change: The doctrine that the soul is resurrected within an

Autopsy: A Context

11

intact body, which creates a real problem for canonical acceptance of human dissection, was slowly giving way to a separation concept, complete by the time of Descartes, of the mind or soul from the body. The church would eventually decide that studying the body’s interior was a way of celebrating God. In fact, the administration of Pope Sixtus IV in the mid-fifteenth century allowed medical students to open the cadavers of plague victims in an effort to determine what was causing the disease (Iserson 115). Perhaps surprisingly to us today, it was actually the College of Physicians that stood solidly in the way of advancements in human dissection. In medieval Europe, physicians did not touch the body, whether living or dead; that lowly charge was left to the surgeons. Pedagogical autopsies were conducted with the physician standing at a podium, Galen’s book of anatomy open before him, and the surgeon at a table below making the actual incisions in the cadaver. In this text-based culture, Galen’s words, not the evidentiary body, were the reigning authority. Galen was assumed to be “true,” and any variation between the cadaver’s anatomy and Galen’s book was attributed to idiosyncratic anomaly. Given the nonhuman ground of the Galenic medical text, one can easily surmise that the suppression of a vast number of deviations would not be particularly conducive to human anatomical research, pedagogy, or treatment. It would take the onset of empiricism to effect a new episteme and epistemology. As Jacalyn Duffin writes in the History of Medicine, the method of inquiry was about to change from a theory of purpose as practiced by the ancients and their medieval followers to a strategy of “non-theoretical” observation, from teleology to empiricism (42). Assisted by contemporaneous Cartesian mind/body dualism, medical science was becoming able to posit the (dead) body as a field of study, as a group of functions (physiology) and as a structure (anatomy). This development would soon give rise to mechanistic theories which likened the body to metaphors of “pumps, levers, springs, and pulleys,” hence Descartes’s comparison of a sick man to a poorly made clock (Duffin 48–49). In fact, Rembrandt’s painting The Anatomy Lecture of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp (1632) has the good doctor manipulating the forearm muscles of a cadaver to demonstrate how the hand is mechanically leveraged. Artists like Rembrandt and da Vinci were among the first Renaissance men to recognize the significance of empirical observation of the opened cadaver. Human dissection gave rise to a burgeoning theory of art based on an understanding of human anatomy, right down to the skeleton.

12


A modern sense of interiority appeared at the same moment artists began the practice of drawing the body from the inside out: first bones, then muscles, then skin. Yet to the medical profession, human dissection was viewed as a trivial, if not useless, academic exercise. After all, if lesions in the cadaver could not be correlated to symptoms of disease in the living body, performing a research-oriented autopsy would be a waste of time. In early modern Europe, it was actually easier to advocate autopsy for medicolegal purposes than for research or pedagogy. As Michael Sappol points out, medicolegal autopsies were not considered as humiliating as anatomies, in part because the bodies were victims rather than criminals (103). In fact, Andreas Vesalius, the great Renaissance anatomist and physician, laments the fact that he had to obtain much of his information on human anatomy from corpses autopsied for medicolegal purposes (in Saunders 170). Ideally, he would have wanted healthier specimens. Nevertheless, Vesalius is responsible for giving the acceptance of human dissection in medical science a big push. Unlike other physicians, Vesalius was willing to come down from the Galenic pulpit to dissect the body himself and to propose an innovative model of human anatomy based on empirical observation rather than deductive speculation. His extraordinary book, De Humani Corporis Fabrica (1543), not only proposed a positivist basis for representing human anatomy, but did so by subtly combining the arguments, both artistic and medicolegal, that could best advocate the practice of human dissection. The series of plates affectionately nicknamed “the muscle men,” for instance, shows the human form flayed to the muscles but enlivened in lifelike poses and set in a naturalistic landscape. Vesalius states in the text of the Fabrica that the muscle men, especially the second, third, and ninth plates, are designed to be particularly useful to artists, “such as only painters and sculptors are wont to consider” (in Saunders 92). Of course, they also illustrate for physicians the arrangement of the muscles. The title page woodcut to the Fabrica cleverly combines the artistic and medicolegal arguments for the value of autopsy and the empirical study of human anatomy (Figure 1.1). The unknown artist has recorded Vesalius in the middle of an actual postmortem examination of a female cadaver to demonstrate anatomy to an audience comprised of medical men, students, and the curious public in a temporary outdoor theater. Critics such as Jonathan Sawday and Luke Wilson have analyzed the breathtaking aesthetics of this scene: its drama, theatricality, performativity, visual focus, and perspective.2 Indeed, the woodcut records how much human dissection had become a public spectacle by the time of the

14


Renaissance, available to the prurient and voyeuristic as well as the learned, a feature which it has retained to this day if the number of autopsy depictions on television is any indication. Of course, the parallels between the anatomy theater and the playhouse are striking in the woodcut, and clearly evidence the interdisciplinary tropology of “autopsy.” In both venues, the audience is invited to observe the performance, to spindle the onstage bodies with its own eyes for the purpose of constructing meaning and knowledge. And certainly, this particular performance of an anato-autopsy, the title page would seem to proclaim, is grounding the artistry of the woodcut itself. The medicolegal argument for the value of autopsy is also apparent in the woodcut and turns on the question of whether the female specimen was pregnant at the time of her execution. Claiming pregnancy was a common way of gaining a stay of execution, which this woman had hoped to obtain. After midwives examined her and found no signs of pregnancy, the prisoner was summarily hanged. But only by opening the body postmortem would the medicolegal point be proved one way or the other. In the woodcut, Vesalius has incised the abdomen and pushed aside the intestines in order to display the uterus, which is indeed without child. More significant to the historical narrative of autopsy, though, the medicolegal dispute has also provided Vesalius with the opportunity to justify the work of the anatomist, here applied to the unknown territory of the female. Since female specimens were rare at the time—most of the cadavers being male criminals provided by the hangman—knowledge of the anatomy of women was terribly misunderstood. The second edition of Vesalius’s own Fabrica, for instance, naively pictures the vagina and vulva as a hollow penis. But here in the woodcut, Vesalius’s triumphant gaze invites the viewer to agree that a more research-oriented, empirical knowledge is essential to progress in medicine. He is demonstrating the placement of the uterus, its appearance, its relation to the other organs, and so on (O’Malley 143). And he is presenting the claim that only by understanding the dead body can we hope to understand the living. The sixteenth century in Europe witnessed an increasing regularity in the postmortem dissection of humans, giving rise to what Jonathan Sawday calls a “culture of dissection” (ix), which manifested itself across disciplinary lines and spoke to the desire to partition (the things of ) the world. Certainly, advances in the epistemological paradigm enabled the use of anatomical and pathological knowledge of the body for treatment and pedagogy. To a surgeon like Ambroise Paré, a contemporary of Vesalius, practicing autopsy on deceased patients became a customary pursuit.

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Paré recorded the autopsies he performed together with his case histories, and the collection gathered by Wallace B. Hamby, MD, provides a priceless documentary of Western, early modern, research-oriented autopsy. In one case, the autopsy revealed cause of death to be an aneurysm of the pulmonary artery. After describing the condition of the thorax and the artery itself, which was “dilated to admit a fist and its inner coat was bony” (18), Paré attempts to correlate his postmortem findings to the patient’s clinical history and treatment. He also describes how he dissected the artery at the Medical School to the gratifying admiration of observers. Out of this one autopsy, Paré manages to make a diagnosis, reconsider the patient’s symptoms and treatment, and teach. Interestingly, Paré and Vesalius collaborated on at least one autopsy of which their reports are extant. The case is pivotal in its own right, for it demonstrates the effort to confirm the anatomical effect of trauma, specifically the contra-coup brain injury. In fact, in Hamby’s collection, there are three different cases where Paré considers the dual question of whether the side of the brain opposite a blow can be injured without a fracture to the skull. The first involves a serving man who was hit on the right parietal bone by a rock. Only a small cut was visible. Yet upon autopsy the opposite side of the skull was seen to be fractured with a large amount of bloody pus in the dura mater (24–25). The second case concerns a soldier who sustained a gunshot wound to the head. Although the helmet was dented, there was no external injury to the skull. During autopsy, Paré discovered that the inner table of the skull was fractured and splinters of bone had been forced into the brain. While not a contra-coup injury, this case still proved that the brain could be injured without external trauma to the skull—just as in JonBenét Ramsey’s case. Paré would use the postmortem knowledge gained from both of these types of brain injury to speculate on the deathbed condition of Henri II, whom Paré and Vesalius both attended and examined postmortem. During a tournament, Henri II suffered a blow from a tilting lance just above the right eye. Although the external injury appeared to be quite superficial, the king worsened and died eleven days later. Recognizing premortem complications similar to those in the soldier described above, Paré suspected that the king’s brain must have sustained massive trauma. The autopsy would be extremely important in this case for two reasons: It would not only determine cause of the king’s death, but would also prove whether the brain could be injured contra-coup without a fracture of the skull. Although Vesalius and Paré produced separate autopsy reports, they recorded the same information: A section of the brain opposite the blow

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had been injured and had putrefied. Paré thus writes: “After his death a quantity of blood was found collected between the dura and the pia mater in the area opposite the blow. . . . Here putrefaction was beginning, which was sufficient cause for death of the Lord, and not the eye wound” (26–27). And Vesalius: “Thus the putrid condition [of the brain] gave proof that the brain had collided with the skull and had been concussed and shocked by it, and not that the condition had been caused by an injury to the skull” (O’Malley 397). Vesalius and Paré emphasize that cause of death was not the eye wound, but an internal collision of the brain contracoup with the skull. The king suffered the same kind of injury we see in boxers today. Meanwhile, throughout the early history of medicine in Europe, medicolegal autopsies continued apace. According to Russell S. Fisher, MD, as early as the fourteenth century physicians performed autopsies for the courts to determine whether manner of death was “infanticide, homicide, abortion, or poisoning.” Complete dissections were not usually practiced before the Renaissance, but wounds on the body were opened and probed. In fact, Paré made a number of medicolegal autopsies and reported on cases of infant smothering and sexual assault (4). One interesting case in Hamby’s collection describes the instance of a monk who had died rapidly and with extreme symptoms. Suspecting murder, the governors of the Hôtel-Dieu asked Paré to perform an autopsy. Upon seeing evidence of burning in the stomach, Paré determined initially that cause of death was poisoning, which pointed to homicide. But after considering the color of the flesh under the skin and the generalized lividity of the body, Paré decided that the monk had died of a ruptured plague carbuncle in the stomach (140–41). Case closed. By early-seventeenth-century New England, medicolegal autopsies were being performed regularly. Iserson reports that one of the first examples was an investigation into the death of a young apprentice in Massachusetts. Physicians determined that he had died of a skull fracture and subsequently charged his master with the crime (140). Another example occurred in Hartford, Connecticut, in 1662. A young girl was autopsied as a suspected victim of witchcraft. Physicians found that “the gullet or swallow was contracted like a hard fish bone that hardly a large pease could be forced through” (Rossiter in Iserson 116). Today, the interpretation would be something like “upper airway obstruction, probably caused by diphtheria or epiglottitis” (116). However, given the episteme of colonial America, it is not surprising that the suspected “witch” departed Hartford in a big hurry. By the mid-eighteenth century, medicolegal

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autopsy findings were regularly introduced into trials in Europe, Britain, and the United States as part of the Coroner system. Indeed, the “Jack the Ripper” inquests of 1888 accepted into the record the results from autopsies of the victims, which provided information not only about cause of death but also about social conditions, lifestyle, and disease. Sadly, the autopsy of Annie Chapman, the second victim, determined that she was already dying of malnutrition as well as chronic lung and brain disease when she was eviscerated by the Ripper (Douglas 20). At the time, the autopsy records of the Ripper victims were also analyzed for possible clues about the murderer’s identity—the body mutilations were thought to indicate he had some medical or anatomical training. And in the ongoing quest to identify the Ripper, the autopsy records still function as one of the major pieces of victimology for developing a behavioral profile, if not a suspect. According to John Douglas in The Cases That Haunt Us, the Ripper inscribed enough of a signature on the bodies to suggest a disorganized, asocial, blitz-style, lust predator. But this type of behavioral analysis, as well as the institution of the medical examiner so beloved of popular novels and television dramas today, was not introduced until well into the twentieth century. In the eighteenth century, an enormous boon to the medical and medicolegal fields was provided by Giovanni Batista Morgagni’s book on anatomic pathology, The Seats and Causes of Diseases Investigated by Anatomy (1761). In this text, Morgagni correlates autopsy findings to clinical symptoms based on the dissection of about seven hundred cadavers (Ackerknecht 135–36). Medical science had begun to codify disease predicated on abnormalities of the organs rather than the traditional humors, which paved the way for the radical, epistemic break in the late nineteenth century upon which Foucault builds his discussion in The Birth of the Clinic: “The age of Bichat has arrived” (122). Associated primarily with Marie François Xavier Bichat, the lesion-based concept of disease looked to changes in the tissue rather than in the organ, an advancement which, to Foucault, occurred not coincidentally at the time of a great shift in Western epistemology and the gaze of the medical profession. The epistemic change is described by Foucault as a transformation in the reciprocity of the knowing subject and the object-to-be-known. While Foucault concedes that with the introduction of auscultation and percussion, the subject-physician and object-patient drew closer together, the physician actually touching the patient in an attempt to interpret the signs of the body’s interior, the crucial shift lay in the way ailment would

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be known: as a seat of disease rather than as a class of symptoms. The imprint left on the body’s interior (postmortem) would point to the originary locus of the disease, and thereby organize the range of secondary symptoms (Clinic 136–40.) Even the names of diseases changed at this time—for example, from consumption to tuberculosis. The clinical gaze of Bichat’s predecessors may have observed the (dead) body, but it did so as a one-dimensional, historical function, “linking up symptoms and grasping their language” (Clinic 126). As a limited form of medical observation, the clinical gaze still could not quite deliver to the medical community and the public the value of autopsy for clinical analysis and treatment of the patient. The medical gaze introduced at the time of Bichat, on the other hand, was based on a sense of geographic spatiality rather than historic temporality, of lesion in the dead rather than symptom in the living. The medical gaze would be able to recognize the body as a vertical and horizontal terrain as it “plunges,” “penetrates,” “advances,” and “descends” (Foucault’s verbs) into ever deeper and stratified space (136).3 To Foucault, the onset of the medical gaze should not be seen as part of an inevitable development in the history of medicine, and neither, I would add, should the sort of autopsy introduced at this time. After all, as I have shown, by Bichat’s era autopsy had had a long track record. To Foucault, the relevance of Bichat lies in the epistemological break; the medical gaze “was the result of a recasting at the level of epistemic knowledge (savoir) itself, and not at the level of accumulated, refined, deepened, adjusted knowledge” (137). The dissected cadaver had become the ground for a magnificent medicine of lesions. At least, that is, to the medical profession. But to much of the public, human dissection, even after acceptance by the Church in the fifteenth century, continued to be seen as the ground for an indecent and appalling practice and, to many people, remains so today. In a 2001 article in The New Yorker entitled “Final Cut,” Atul Gawande, MD, describes a typical response from family members to the request for permission to do an autopsy: “‘An autopsy? ’ a nephew said, horrified. . . . ‘Hasn’t she been through enough?’” (94). Such a response captures a number of reasons the idea of human dissection has so profoundly vexed the living. To this nephew, in some manner the corpse is still capable of physical and emotional feeling, as if the remnant of the body in continuing to occupy space/time continues to suffer in space/time. Somehow, the still-living are reluctant to yield the subjecthood of the other-dead to object status. It is not so easy suddenly to see Auntie as nothing more than a laboratory specimen. After all, if the other is necessary to the sense

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of coherence and identity of the self, as Western theories of subjectivity maintain, how does the subject reconstruct itself when the other dies? I examine this question of subjectivity with respect to the dead body in greater depth in chapter 3. Another reason is that human dissection appears as some sort of violation of the body, a desecration of the dead, indeed, a necrophiliac “rape” of the completely vulnerable. And, in many ways, this belief has merit. Performing an autopsy in the modern era of the West has meant surgical mutilation, penetration to the interior’s most private parts by cleaving phallic instruments, combining ana-tome \ (to cut up) and auto-opsis (to see with one’s own eyes) to produce a “piercing gaze” in the service of medical science or the courts. (Note how Foucault above uses aggressive, penetrating verbs to describe the medical gaze.) Despite its evidently pedagogical purpose, the public performance of human dissection from the fifteenth to the nineteenth centuries, recorded in such art works as Vesalius’s title page to the Fabrica and Rembrandt’s Anatomy Lecture, suggests a furtive voyeuristic pleasure, especially among the upper or bourgeois classes, in reducing the dead, usually criminal, body to the status of a sideshow freak, a dubious entertainment that smacks of indecency and seems still suspiciously active today in depictions of autopsies in the visual media. Sawday notes that horror and fascination were a significant aspect of metropolitan culture in early modern Europe; playwrights who referenced penal dissection, for instance, knew only too well how “morbid fears . . . could easily be transformed into a set of barely suppressed desires” (49). Moreover, the fashionable study of anatomy among Europe’s elite amateurs in the nineteenth century only played into lowerclass perceptions that any interest in the dead body must be unhealthy, scopophilic, even lascivious. Perhaps autopsy is one more insult the bourgeoisie, medical profession, disease, or sadism can render upon the poor person who has suffered so much. Despite mind/body dualism, folk superstitions, going all the way back to the Greeks regarding the importance of an intact body for the afterlife, endure to this day, which present a real obstacle to organ donation as well. Let Auntie go out the way she came in. But there have been other reasons as well for public disapproval of human dissection, some of which undoubtedly linger in the Western cultural Imaginary if no longer in our frontal lobes. One good way to spread disease is to handle corpses. Even before the advent of bacteriology, dead bodies were recognized as dangerous to the living and were quickly removed and disposed of. To many ordinary folk in the early history of

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anato-autopsy, digging into the interior of a cadaver must have seemed like a profoundly bad idea, and it is true that even today pathologists have one of the most dangerous, and unhygienic, jobs in the medical profession. In the early modern period, anatomy also became associated with criminality in two ways, a predicament that lasted into the twentieth century. Both of these associations deeply prejudiced the public against the practice of human dissection. One, because subject bodies were supplied by the executioner, anatomists quickly became associated with the punishing arm of the state. During the Renaissance, it was not uncommon to see an anatomist, even the distinguished Vesalius, fighting with family members over a corpse at the foot of the gallows. Edward Ravenscroft’s play, The Anatomist (1696), makes clear the similarity, in the public’s eye, of the executioner and the anatomist: “A Physitian cuts up a man with as little remorse, as a Hangman carves a Traytor” (114). Two, dissection, and most particularly public dissection, actually became attached to capital punishment in some European countries, and was treated as part of the huge spectacle surrounding execution. In England, for instance, the Murder Act of 1752 added public dissection to the death sentence as a means of inflicting “further Terror” (in Marshall 21), a decision that, in a Foucauldian sense, continued to inscribe discipline on the body after death. The Murder Act was also an effort to provide medical schools with more cadavers, which backfired in terms of public opinion. What could possibly be more humiliating, at least for the survivors if not for the decedent, than to be publicly dissected? In an effort to legitimize human dissection in the eyes of the public and to pass England’s Anatomy Act of 1832, Jeremy Bentham, humanitarian philosopher and founder of the modern panopticon penitentiary, willed his body in 1832 to an anatomy school in London for public dissection. In fact, Bentham’s body is still on display at University College in the form of the strange auto-icon, his legacy to medical science. The autoicon was built according to Bentham’s specifications and consists of waxworks formed over what was left of his body after dissection, essentially, the skeleton. Although the auto-icon bears a wax head, it was originally topped with Bentham’s preserved head, which now rests on a stool beside the seated figure as if it were the master’s favorite hound (Marshall 10). The auto-icon is an attempt on Bentham’s part to eradicate the space between oneself and the image of oneself by making the subject, or at least the subject’s remains, an essential ingredient in the representation of the subject. And, of course, as long as the auto-icon exists, Bentham’s remains

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exist. Will your body to medical science and you, too, can become a monument unto yourself! And herein lies one of the most important rhetorical functions of Bentham’s auto-icon: It demonstrates an “intact” body after dissection. But the auto-icon appeared after a long period in which grave-robbing, bribery, and even murder were the chief means of supplying cadavers to the medical community. Once human anatomy and autopsy became an essential part of medical training and research, thousands of cadavers were needed by the medical schools each year. From the seventeenth through the nineteenth centuries in Europe and continuing into the twentieth in the United States, medical students and professors were reduced to bribery and thievery, obtaining bodies against the wishes of the deceased and often stealing them from graveyards in such numbers that families had to station guards throughout the night, thus coining the phrase “graveyard shift” (Gawande 96). In the 1998 novel The Giant, O’Brien, Hillary Mantel tells the true story of the giant Irishman Charles Byrne and John Hunter, the “father of modern anatomy,” in eighteenthcentury London. Pursued relentlessly by Hunter, who, like other anatomists such as Paré, was fascinated by “monsters,” Byrne arranged to have his body buried at sea. A round of briberies, however, ensured that his body was delivered to Hunter’s surgery and subsequently dissected at the Royal College of Surgeons, where the skeleton remains on display to this day. This is a truly terrifying abuse of the public trust, particularly of someone’s faith in the requirement of an intact body at resurrection, at least to the Byrne of Mantel’s narrative. Not only depicting the rise of empirical science—the “humble cast of mind” (63) necessary to doing experimental research—as well as the acutely vexed relation of medical science to the public, Mantel deploys the act of human dissection as a means to tropologize a brutal class and colonial system. As the public grew increasingly angry at the sort of blatant exploitation so frankly recorded in The Giant, O’Brien, riots became common at the medical schools, and were so threatening as to drive medical schools out of town in both Britain and the United States. Columbia Medical School, for instance, was ransacked by an angry mob in 1788 when the public learned of a rash of body-snatching. In this grisly demand-side economics, the next logical step from grave-robbing would be murder. Indeed, the Burke and Hare case of Edinburgh in 1828 solidified public perception that “murdering to dissect,” to borrow the title of Marshall’s book, or “burking” as the public called it, was running rampant. Burke and Hare represented only a few of the many “resurrection men” who

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were ever caught and charged with the murder and delivery of victims to the back door of the surgery (Marshall 1). In a fascinating irony, autopsy testimony by a surgeon-pathologist was given at the London trial of the resurrectionists Bishop, Williams, and May that helped convict them of the “burking” of a young boy. The autopsy record reads in part: “Some coagulated blood was found laying in the [spinal] cavity opposite the blood found in the muscles of the neck. . . . I think a blow from a stick on the back of the neck would have caused those appearances” (in Iserson 140). Burke, Bishop, and Williams were all convicted, hanged and dissected. Burke’s anatomized body was publically displayed to an audience of 30,000 (Iserson 344). “Burkophobia” did end up assisting passage of anatomy legislation designed to detach human dissection and medical science from the taint of murder—either murder as punishment or as supply-line. Beginning with Massachusetts in 1831 (Sappol 4), anatomy legislation throughout Europe and America severed public dissection from the death sentence and gave surgeons access to unclaimed bodies. However, the class consequences of these anatomy acts were enormous. As Marshall points out, England’s 1832 Anatomy Act officially transferred the burden of human dissection from the gallows to the workhouse, which hardly appeased the poor. The year the Anatomy Act passed in England saw 74 percent of cadavers obtained for dissection coming from the workhouse. By 1914, this number was only rivaled by 43 percent from the asylums. By the midnineteenth century in America, a disproportionate representation of cadavers had come to be poor black people. In fact, if they were at all conscious, black patients would refuse to be admitted to the University of Maryland Hospital. The supervisors of the poorhouse in Philadelphia supplied so many bodies to the Colleges that they earned the nickname “Board of Buzzards” (Iserson 84, 338–39). Nevertheless, anatomy legislation marked the onset of changes in social attitude toward human dissection by both the public and the medical profession. Slowly retreating behind the closed doors of the morgue and laboratory, human dissection was no longer offered as a public spectacle and humiliation, and became linked, by acts like Bentham’s, to altruism rather than criminality. Medicine embarked on a vigorous program to disassociate itself from punishment. By 1949, when methods of execution such as lethal injection were replacing hanging, both the British Medical Association and the American Medical Association strongly opposed the participation of any medical personnel in executions (Sawday 78–79). While a few unclaimed cadavers still end up in the medical schools today,

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most are acquired by donation, and medical students acknowledge their indebtedness to the benefactor by performing funerary services at the end of the anatomy course. Marshall Goldberg’s novel The Anatomy Lesson, which I discuss at greater length in chapter 4, contains such an exemplary grave-side ceremony. In most Western countries today, permission for a medical autopsy must be given by the family, as Dr. Gawande’s anecdote demonstrates above. In medicolegal cases, the state has jurisdiction. During the first half of the twentieth century, medical autopsies performed in Britain and the United States reached an unprecedented number, at times as high as 90 percent of hospital deaths, and contributed enormously to major advances in medical knowledge. By the turn of the twenty-first century, though, this number has dropped precipitously, a fact that concerns the medical community and gives rise to rhetorical articles, like Dr. Gawande’s, advocating the value of autopsy in the public sphere. Interestingly, the history of autopsy seems to have come full circle, with physicians and the public again caught in a most conflicted attitude toward autopsy. Once again, physicians are standing in the way, whether for reasons of expense, malpractice, over-sensitivity to the family, or a belief in their own diagnostic infallibility. And the public is still caught between horror and fascination, reluctant to give permission for autopsies and at the same time salaciously enthralled at their depiction on television and in the movies. Recall the public’s desire to see the Brown and Goldman autopsy photos during the O. J. Simpson televised murder trial of 1995. Or, more recently, the controversy over releasing the autopsy photos of race-car driver Dale Earnhardt to the Internet. Like Vesalius’s public, we seem to harbor both an attraction to and a revulsion for beholding the opened, spectacular body. If the dissection of Hamlet’s father were to take place in a production of Hamlet today, I’m sure we would be more surprised than our Renaissance predecessors, but we would feel no less threatened.

BEHIND CLOSED DOORS For me, at any rate, the emotions of anticipation and revulsion were surely colliding the day I showed up at the hospital to observe an autopsy. Attending an autopsy had never been at the top of my list of things to do—that is, until I started this research project. I soon realized that an autopsy was something I was going to have to see with my own eyes. At the very least, I recognized the need to establish a ground from which to

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assess the various forms of autopsy I would be discussing in this book. But I also realized there was a danger of universalizing my experiences at the autopsy to assume a ground for everyone else. This is both a theoretical and a practical problem. How to write about viewing a performance of any kind without seizing the mantle of ideal spectator? I have tried to negotiate this crux by combining two strategies: one, a recognition of my own agency and the perspectives and choices that it would give rise to, what Bourdieu terms a habitus—that is, how my personality is informed by my particular individual and social position in the cultural field as a white, female, middle-class, middle-aged, Western academic, if I may be so long-winded; and two, a recognition of how this habitus may inform a style of writing. My position in the following pages functions, therefore, both as personal reflection and as representative of a certain way of analyzing the world. I have attempted to let the narrative reflect this dual condition.4 With that said, let me describe the event. On a lovely April afternoon in the year 2001, my graduate student Cammie Sublette and I walked past a series of doors in the hospital, actually empowered to obey the “Authorized Personnel Only” signs, and into taboo country indeed— the autopsy suite. We had little idea of what to expect. About the patient: Would it be male or female? Old or young? Thin or obese? Covered or naked? Would it smell? About the protocol: Where would we stand? Sit? How far back? Would we be behind glass? In a lecture theater? About our reactions: I could easily see myself behaving in one of two opposing ways—rational and calm or faint and queasy. The only thing we knew for certain was that the autopsy would be medical. The public is not allowed to view medicolegal procedures. Of course, I also went with a series of more research-oriented questions. Would the procedure, purpose, and atmosphere of the autopsy correspond to what I had read? Would the autopsy be a quest for truth in the finest tradition of Western epistemology? What would be the import of seeing, especially given the embodiment of “seeing” in the word “autopsy?” Would the gaze of autopsy be spindling and penetrating, rendering the human body to the status of mere object? Would any other ways of seeing be available? What would it be like to cut into and take apart the human body? To what extent would objectifying the corpse be necessary in order to perform the procedure at all? How “instrinsic” or how “constructed” would the dead body seem, and what of its relation to the models of Western medical science? And what would all this do to my subjectivity?

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Some of the questions were answered the instant we walked through the door. On a stainless steel table not more than two feet away lay the body—an older man, completely nude, and all ready to go. I quickly turned around and faced the wall. Which was more shocking? The genitals so frankly exposed? Or the face? I must have expected the body to be decently covered—after all, it always is on television. Even Rembrandt’s Anatomy Lecture has the genitals discretely swathed. As Cammie observed later, never before had any body to her looked so naked. And yet, even though constituting the most important “person” (or “object,” I scarcely know which) in the room, the cadaver clearly did not have the same status as the living subjects. Introductions were made all around—except, of course, to the cadaver. Oddly enough, this exclusion seemed like a social faux pax, as if the cadaver had been rudely overlooked like a child amid a crush of adults. And, in fact, the room seemed crowded. In a very small space, about twelve by twenty-five feet, were assembled ten people plus the cadaver: the pathologist, two medical technicians, five medical students, and we two observers. I retreated to an area just behind the cadaver’s head, which allowed me to see the body partially without seeming to look directly at it. Interestingly, I had been developing a theory, which I go into further in chapter 3, that the notion of autopsy as simply an objectifying and spindling gaze is too reductive. Perhaps the dead body has a glare of its own, a “power of horror” to borrow from Julia Kristeva (Powers of Horror), that collides with and disrupts the subject’s eye. Perhaps, indeed, the autopsy itself would be less a function of a gaze than a glance, a means of enabling the living to look at the dead without really seeing them. I was certainly finding ways to mediate the corpse, even peering around my notepad as if it were a curtain. I was beginning to feel quite pleased with my vantage point: I could watch the autopsy as I would a play, observing the performance not only of the actual procedure but of the medical staff and students. But I was also standing right beside the body refrigerator, which bore a sign reading “Bio-hazard: Do Not Store Food or Beverages”! There was to be no outside to this set. The inclusion of the medical students meant that this would be a pedagogical as well as a diagnostic autopsy. Dr. Q, as I shall call her, began by going over the clinical history. The deceased was a sixty-two-year-old white male who had undergone surgery five days earlier to remove a cancerous kidney. His recovery had been uneventful, but the evening before he was scheduled to go home, he began “coding” and died. The family and attending physician requested an autopsy. Dr. Q expected to find a

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pulmonary embolism (blood clot in the lung), or, failing that, a myocardial infarct (heart attack). As such, this autopsy would be limited to the chest and abdomen. The course of the autopsy, including the written report, would follow the basic procedure developed by Rudolph Virchow in the mid-nineteenth century. Dr. Q began by making the Y-shaped incision, cutting swiftly from the shoulders to the middle of the chest and then down to the pubis. Similar to many medical terms such as the “DNA misspellings,” the Y-incision contains a fascinating pun on language. Of course, tracing the form of a “Y” on the body is the most efficient way to enter the torso, but it also etches the very point of the autopsy on the outer surface, enculturating the body as text, to borrow language from de Certeau. The Y-incision opens the book, authorizing the readability of an interior structure available to the pathologist as the discourse of (Western) disease. Today, as it did for Vesalius and Paré, it opens an epistemological quest. After reflecting the skin and muscles of the chest, the technicians sheared through the rib cage and lifted the breast plate off. The procedure up to this point would turn out to be the most harrowing part for me, and I found out later for Cammie as well, of the entire autopsy. It was hard enough to see the dead body upon first stumbling into the room; it was harder still to watch it lose coherence, even positioned as I was to take full advantage of “glancing.” To anyone with a Lacanian bent of mind, what was happening would definitely seem to justify the theory of the mirror stage, or at least the mirror stage in reverse. As Charles W. Bonner points out, most interpreters of Lacan have not paid much attention to the significance of the body in his work, preferring to focus on the linguistic side or, I would add, the Orders and the gaze (232). Yet Lacan’s earlier works establish the importance of the body to the construction of the subject. Experienced initially as a heap of disparate parts, the body is straightened out or made “orthopaedic” by the subject’s desire (Écrits 4). But, of course, an autopsy takes the body back apart, puncturing its surface manifestation along with the subject’s desire; now we desire to dismember the body. The skin will no longer disguise the body as one seamless fabric, the muscles as one harmonious kinesis, the bones as one symmetrical posture. I realized that as I was looking into the body’s inchoate parts, I was witnessing the subject’s undoing. And as the autopsy proceeded, the body would, of course, lose more and more of its integrity. Indeed, at the end of an anatomy lab, the body is reduced to a few scraps. Looking at the cadaver, and especially looking into the cadaver, did seem to raise the specter of my own subjectivity, but not, it

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seemed to me, in the old tradition of memento mori. I didn’t think, “this is what I am,” so much as “this is what I am not.” Nevertheless, illogical as it would seem, I found it easier to tolerate the dissection as the autopsy went on. The more the body was taken apart, the less my sense of subjecthood was involved. Was I becoming inured to this ruthless assault on the body? In fact, I was already beginning to strike the attitude of the medical students who were among the most attentive, rapt, and fascinated groups of people I had ever seen. We could have been watching a cooking demonstration. By the time Dr. Q was drawing out and examining the organs, it was clear that two important processes had been going on: objectifying and mapping. Perhaps because the organs are so well secreted within the body, they don’t really appear to belong to the body—they do indeed seem like objects. And once they can be discretely separated as objects, we can map them according to the Western model of anatomy. So even though the body is losing coherence in one way, it is recovering it in another. Here’s the lung. Here’s the heart. I certainly would hesitate to claim that “getting used to” human dissection is a feature of human nature, or that it is universal. I can imagine someone else finding the entire autopsy utterly sickening. But I would suggest that such inurement is connected to training in Western epistemology, even for those of us in the humanities rather than the sciences. Especially when it comes to real-world knowledge, Western epistemology is still inductive and positivist, despite the critique of these empirical strategies by phenomenologists such as Drew Leder, who sees the Cartesian mechanistic model of the body as still a problematic episteme in Western medicine (which I will discuss shortly). Certainly since the advent of dualism in the Renaissance, it has been possible for the Western academy to teach objectification, to train the subject to imagine the object apart from oneself, to set the object “over there” as a field of study and to exert a topography on it. And this learning curve might develop slowly over time. Arguably, advances in medical science could not have taken place without this particular frame of mind, an attitude that works to limit the impact of the object on the subject. We can objectify if it is really essential to do so. And autopsy is one procedure demanding a high degree of objectification if its epistemological goal is to be reached. As I mentioned above, the clinical history suggested the patient’s cause of death would most likely be a pulmonary embolism. However, when Dr. Q dissected the lungs she found no evidence of clotting, although the lungs were well

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oversized. One lung weighed 1000 grams more than it should have. After inspection, the lungs went into an orange garbage bag by the cadaver’s feet. “Do you ever do an autopsy and not discover cause of death?” asked a student. “Of course, but here we still have the heart.” As Dr. Q removed and weighed the heart, she commented that it was also oversized. Once the heart dissection began, she noticed large areas of grey tissue—here was evidence of massive infarct. Everyone craned forward to get a good look at the heart. I craned forward to get a good look at the heart! How old was the infarct? Some of it could have happened a while ago (the silent heart attack); some of it could have happened during surgery. After taking tissue samples—Dr. Q would be able to date the infarct under a microscope—the heart also went into the garbage bag. As a last pedagogical gesture, she resected the adrenal gland, and showed it to the students as “something a little extra.” Although Dr. Q found no signs of clotting in the abdomen contributing to death, she observed that the liver was also enlarged and the entire torso full of fluid. Together with the size of the heart and lungs, these conditions suggested congestive heart failure. In interpreting such signs of the postmortem body, Dr. Q correlated them to Western models of disease, in this case heart disease. With all of her training in Western medicine at her fingertips, Dr. Q was able to determine at this point in the autopsy that cause of death was myocardial infarct with congestive heart disease contributing. Interestingly, this autopsy turned out to be one of the 50 percent in which postmortem lesions show that the initial diagnosis—here, the pulmonary embolism—made by the attending physician was wrong, and a classic argument for the importance of continuing to perform medical autopsies (Iserson 118). Jacalyn Duffin, an MD and medical historian, defines disease “as a theory constructed to explain the illness,” and illness as the word used to “designate individual suffering.” What Duffin calls “[d]isease concepts” in Western medicine are built structures determined by countless observations of similar symptoms of illness in patients and, I would add, similar postmortem lesions (66). This type of body criticism does not deny the intrinsic materiality or physicality of the body. Medical professionals know only too well that the body has some sort of “volition” of its own outside social constructivism—after all, it always eventually dies no matter what the social or cultural fabrications. Nevertheless, the understanding of the body is recognized as culturally constructed. In this view, I would argue that the medical history of the body in the West has been a history of models—from the humors to anatomical structure and physi-

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ological function to organ, tissue, and cellular processes, and now to genetic coding. But much of the discourse of medicine is still founded on the metaphor of “the frontier”; we have all undoubtedly heard about Harvey’s “discovery” of the circulation of the blood, as if the body were some uncharted and unknown new world. Body criticism would rather recognize Harvey’s contribution as a highly significant model, a model much better and more accurate in its descriptive power and application than any that came before. Certainly, it seems to me, we have to admit that some models are better than others—Harvey’s is better than Galen’s, for instance—if we are to explain the enormous difference in success rates of treatment between medieval and contemporary Western medicine. But this does not mean that other models would not work as well as or better than the models we have in the West today. Currently, the debate in body criticism circles seems to be over how constructed or how intrinsic we ought to consider the body, a discussion I will return to at length in chapter 2. The two major schools of thought hang on the question of how to accommodate the biophysical, fleshy matter of the body to the enculturated body of the West, to put it in the terms of Judith Butler, the body whose sex is constructed as much as its gender. On the one hand, de Certeau draws a useful distinction between the flesh and the body in The Practice of Everyday Life: The flesh is the biophysical matter that intextuation transforms into a body (145). But this distinction between the flesh and the body is exactly what Butler critiques as a mistaken Western binary, in which a prediscursive body is seen as ontologically existing before the law, before writing, before culture. In fact, in her essay “Foucault and the Paradox of Bodily Inscriptions,” Butler claims that even Foucault defeats his own project by unconsciously reinscribing a prediscursive body before the relations of power and language (308). On the other hand, Butler’s work has been criticized by Carol Bigwood for reducing the body to nothing more than cultural determinants (102), a sort of postmodern Idealism. To Bigwood, this position is of real concern, for in the act of ignoring the body’s intrinsic physicality we court the reinscription of an anthropocentric view of the world. Similarly, Evelyn Fox Keller notes that the extreme edge of cultural constructivism in science studies has claimed that any gesture to an intrinsic world is “an ideological phantasm.” Keller would rather retain the idea of a world of “nature,” even though “nature” is a highly problematic term, because at least it acknowledges an existing world outside human construction (3–4). Indeed, the desire to put human culture at the center of things reminds me of Steven Jay Gould’s quarrel in Full House with the most

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popular metaphor of evolutionary progress, the “ladder-concept.” Gould criticizes the ladder-concept for its anthropocentric bias toward modern human beings as occupying the highest evolutionary rung on earth. Yet in terms of the “full house” model, which favors variation and diversity, bacteria are far superior to humans. Bigwood comes up with an intriguing insight: that the logical extension of cultural determinism is a “disembodied body” (104). This insight seems close to Susan Bordo’s idea of the postmodern plastic body, which she critiques for its denial of “the historicity, the mortality, and, indeed, the very materiality of the body” (45). In this paradigm, according to Bordo, God as the prime constructor has been replaced by ourselves (45). Despite their differences, Bigwood and Bordo are pointing critically to the assumption made by some (Butlerian) body critics that postmodern subjects are empowered to ignore issues of biological and intrinsic facticity either through medical interventions (usually plastic surgery) or performance. I would add that the radical edge of social constructivism seems to ratify the privileging of the mind in the same ol’ Cartesian mindbody split. The disembodied or postmodern plastic body certainly does not hold up very well in the face of the dead body. Indeed, before I began this research project I was much more of a pure cultural constructivist in the Butlerian mode. But after studying autopsy and the dead body, I have had to come to a position that concedes a degree of “realness” to the body outside or beyond social constructions. Today, I consider myself something of a constructivist Realist, a position I develop at length in the next chapter. Suffice it to say for now that I combine the philosophical theory of Realism, which admits to a real world (however one may end up defining it), with a theory of cultural models (social constructs). In the course of my work, I have found that the dead body, particularly at autopsy, is just too raw, too overpowering in its own right, to be simply seen as a cultural object. For instance, we may interpret its odor as the construct “odor of a cadaver,” but surely we must accept that it really is producing the smell! The material facticity of the cadaver was, to be sure, something that struck me deeply at the autopsy I attended. This man died at the age of sixty-two in the hospital under full resuscitate orders. We can rest assured that all medical interventions would have been attempted, but for some reason his body still succumbed. Wayward, contrary, insubordinate: Here was a graphic lesson on how the body has some sort of power to compel all its own, a power that can come into play at any moment at whatever level we want to call it—anatomic, organic, or cellular—regardless of,

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indeed despite, our social and cultural constructions. Nevertheless, I am not advocating what Donn Welton terms biologism (2), even though the certainty of death seems to confirm that the body, with all its cultural manifestations, must live in the world as a biophysical entity. More specifically, I am also not promoting the (dead) body as simply a “physical thing,” a Körper, for the dead body is also the fruit of lived experience. In “A Tale of Two Bodies,” Drew Leder employs a useful term, the “lived body,” drawn from the work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty and other phenomenologists, to explain the way living bodies exist in the world that takes into account extrabiological phenomena such as time and space (123). The lived body consists of the “intended” plus the biophysical: “It is a being in relationship to that which is other: other people, other things, an environment” (123). In Leder’s model, as in Duffin’s, the body and the world exist as material, other, or more than a conflation with cultural and social constructions. In fact, this mind-set is noticeable throughout Leder’s essay by the way he positions the body in the world: When illness strikes the body, medicine intervenes (121)—this example indicates an acceptance on his part of the biophysical entity, the “bodyobject, [or] material thing” (125). However, I would not agree with Leder’s evaluation of the body paradigm in Western medicine, which he argues is based to this day on the Cartesian model of the inanimate, corpse-like, mechanistic body. A better principle, Leder suggests, would be the lived body, a patient body that is based not only on the biophysical object, but also on the human subject in space, time, and an environment. Surely no one would disagree with this proposal. Yet the problem with Leder’s analysis is the articulation of an extremist, possibly strawman, fallacy for the way Western medicine models the body. While it is accurate to say that the analysis of the human cadaver has been fundamental to the development of Western medicine since Vesalius, human dissection has always been a way of looking back at the lived body, as Morgagni, for instance, looked back at patient symptoms from postmortem signs. In fact, one of the most disconcerting aspects of Vesalius’s illustrations to the Fabrica is the pose of the dissected cadavers as enlivened subjects. Moreover, the title page to the Fabrica demonstrates that in the social sphere the benefits obtained for the living body are the only way postmortem dissection can be genuinely justified. As Foucault deftly puts it, the medical gaze at the time of Bichat becomes “the gaze of an eye that has seen death—a great white eye that unties the knot of life ” (144, my italics). Despite the importance of the cadaver to medical epistemology, I would suggest that Western medicine

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has always been primarily concerned with the lived body. Given her definition of disease as a taxonomy of similar symptoms in live patients, I suspect Duffin would agree. Moreover, some of Leder’s examples seem stretched. For instance, the routine medical exam is used as evidence for the primacy of the mechanistic model, because the patient becomes dehumanized, taking a “corpse-like pose, flat, passive, naked, mute” (121). But this description does not seem quite fair, especially when we take into consideration William Monroe’s observation that doctors and patients are developing a performative relationship in which the patient is expected to take an active role. Of course, patients do lie flat at times. Some medical exams such as the breast palpation simply work best when the patient is flat on her back, allowing the breast tissue to spread out over the chest wall. And what of surgery? Some brain surgeries are actually performed with the patient awake, because the verbal responses of the patient are critical indicators of the operation’s progress. Moreover, to the other lived bodies in the operating room—given the upright posture of humans, the way we work with our hands, our eyes situated above—expedient access to the patient’s body in the environment would seem to be eminently important. When a surgical team has to crowd around a patient, is it not wise to have that patient taking, what seems to me, a sleep-like pose? Imagine how difficult heart surgery would be with the patient in any other position. In recounting his experiences as a surgeon, Sherwin B. Nuland, author of several books on Western medicine, would seem to counter in practice Leder’s mechanistic paradigm. Nuland seems only too well aware of the fact of the patient’s lived body—and of what happens if he can’t be successful in the operating room. In the following scene, Nuland describes a truly desperate moment while attempting emergency surgery on a woman with a severely lacerated liver, sustained in a car crash: Faced with the impossibility of repairing the enormous hepatic injury with sutures, and the minimal likelihood that packing would succeed, I was promptly engulfed by unaccustomed pessimism. There seemed no way to proceed. Though our patient was still alive—with blood pressure and pulse responding, in fact, to the blood being pumped into her—I felt myself without options. I could think of no way to save the young woman whose life was in my frustrated hands. (98)

Even though some of Nuland’s discourse retains the legacy of seventeenth-century medicine—the pump, for example—the patient body is

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far from being viewed mechanistically. To him, “the young woman” is undoubtedly a live subject. Significantly, instead of using the word “liver,” which would fit the mechanistic model—and he’s actually grasping her liver—he uses the word “life,” as in her life was in his hands. Indeed, Nuland’s choice of words goes back to ancient times, well before the seventeenth century, when the liver was consider the seat of life (112).5 To apply Occam’s razor to one last point in Leder’s claim of the mechanistic model. The cadaver has assumed such importance to Western medicine, I think, not so much because of a fancy for mechanical functions, but because it has been available. To make such anato-pathological examinations—autopsies—on the lived body would have to mean something like human vivisection, not that some practitioners in the history of Western medicine would not have been up to the task. In fact, Harvey’s model of blood circulation was, in part, based on animal vivisections. But I think Leder, who is himself a medical doctor, must fathom some of these problems with his discussion, for he qualifies his argument throughout the essay. He even qualifies his comments on Descartes, founder of the mechanistic model, by allowing that Descartes, when he was at home, believed in a holistic form of medicine and advocated, as my own doctor does, the value of a good lifestyle (n129). Certainly, I agree with Leder that some healthcare institutions do dehumanize the patient, reducing it to little more than Körper or “a piece of meat” (122). But I submit that this inclination is due more to the ideology of the Western, politico-economic system, or, more crudely put, “the bottom line,” than a mechanistic paradigm of the body. Certainly at the autopsy I observed, something other than a mechanistic paradigm seemed to be engaged, although it is difficult to say exactly what it was. Contradictory as it may seem, perhaps more accurately the dead body at autopsy is less a Körper than a once-lived body. To me, the cadaver never seemed quite to attain the status of simply object, a laboratory specimen, possibly because of the “othering” impact he made to subjectivity—even though, as I argue above, objectification is a demeanor that seems necessary to performing the procedure. I also observed, though, that he retained a form of “lived-ness” to the medical staff. Dr. Q used the personal pronoun throughout the procedure, as in his clinical history. A student asked if he had smoked cigarettes, a question that surely acknowledges the relation of the lived body and its disease manifestations to lifestyle and a socio-environment. And, most importantly in terms of the epistemological project of the autopsy, Dr. Q was trying to see with her own eyes what had happened during this man’s life to bring about his death.

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Which brings us back to the question of the gaze of autopsy. At first glance, auto-opsis would seem to be a prime example of the sort of penetrating and mutilating gaze associated with vision in Western culture— the male gaze of feminist film theory is another—in which a masterful looker exerts power over an exposed and vulnerable looked-at. And, to be sure, there was a powerful sense of voyeurism with its attendant uneasiness that I experienced upon first catching sight of the cadaver. The autopsy would be not only a voyeurism of the naked body, but a voyeurism of the internal naked body. Yet the sense of uneasiness was the first clue that the position of voyeur would be problematic. As Jean-Paul Sartre describes in Being and Nothingness, the “shame” of the voyeur only comes about when the voyeur is caught watching (347–52). And so, at the autopsy, who was doing the catching? In the novel The Anatomy Lesson by Goldberg, the anatomy professor quotes Nietzsche: “Gaze not into the abyss, lest the abyss gaze into thee” (171). To the first-year medical student, anatomy lab can be a perilous misadventure, if the student takes the cadaver too personally and allows it to reflect his or her subjectivity. Based on my experience at the autopsy, the professor’s advice seems pretty good. Something coming from the cadaver, something like a glare or a power of horror, provoked in me a constant state of subjective renegotiation, right down to a navigation of space. In fact, it was only until the body had fragmented into a geography of objects that I could attain anything approaching the stance of Western epistemology—perceiving the cadaver as a field of study—and exercise anything like an inquiring gaze. But if I even momentarily cast an eye back from the heart or lungs on the dissection table to the body with its opened chest, I was caught once again by the body’s shadowy subjecthood, its once-lived-ness, its disintegrating hold on coherence. The objectifying gaze of autopsy with its “imperial” subject position seemed nothing more than a way of navigating the abyss, of looking askance, of mediating the corpse, of figuring it out and avoiding it at the same time. Kenneth Burke had never seemed so accurate: “A way of seeing is also a way of not seeing” (49). Indeed, I could detect that everyone in the autopsy suite was involved in this performing of an autopsy, although some were better practiced at it than others, for such an enabling gaze demands from all of us a certain posture and a certain way of acting. And then, suddenly, after forty-five minutes it was over. The orange garbage bag with its collection of resected organs was tied up with a suture, the excess tail cut off, and placed in the chest cavity. The breast plate was balanced on top of the garbage bag, and the reflected skin and

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muscle pulled up over the whole thing like a tight vest. The technicians sutured the body closed. Indeed, the body would be released to the family “intact,” at least in a loose sense of the word. After thanking Dr. Q— who, by the way, was curious as to why an English professor and graduate student would want to observe an autopsy—for permitting us to attend, Cammie and I left, grateful that we were not allowed to witness the next one: a four-year old boy who had been killed by a dog. As one might imagine, I have had lots of friends and colleagues ask me questions about this autopsy, questions that it would take pages to answer, such as: Did it smell? Did it change my view of life? The short answers are, respectively, yes and no. But the one question that I can give a simple answer to is: What was it like to attend an autopsy? It was a privilege.


2

Performance, Autopsy, and the Performative

Hold the knife . . . like a violin bow, and draw the belly of the blade through the skin. —Atul Gawande, “Final Cut”

“THIS IS MY THEATER. IT IS WHERE I PERFORM.”

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nyone in the theater business could have spoken this line. In fact, it is actually delivered by the medical examiner, Kay Scarpetta, of Patricia Cornwell’s novel The Last Precinct, as she surveys her autopsy suite (109). Intriguing in the medical discourse of performing autopsy is the dual significance of the word “performance,” which the theatrical connotation of this line makes clear: performance as action and performance for an audience. The word “practice” is also deployed with similar intent in the medical profession, as in practicing surgery or practicing medicine, but this sort of usage is not the same as, say, practicing the piano. Practicing in the arts suggests a liberty to take risks, to get things wrong, to get things right. There will be an audience, but not at this moment. Some wiggle room exists between performance as action and performance for an audience. Despite the function of internship, practicing in medical situations means that there is only one chance to get it right, for practice is always already a live performance before a live audience, whether that audience consists of patient, family, students, society, or legal system. In fact, several infamous examples demonstrate the effect of getting the performance of an autopsy wrong, perhaps the most recent being the O. J. Simpson murder trial. The medical examiner who performed the 37

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actual autopsy on the Brown and Goldman bodies, Dr. Irwin Golden, made so many mistakes, such as failing to document or misdescribing injuries in his report, that he very nearly sabotaged the forensic evidence. Similarly, as I discuss in chapter 4, the autopsy of President Kennedy’s body was so poorly performed, perhaps unintentionally, that the public will never know exactly what happened on that day in Dallas. Performing an autopsy, then, always points to the shadow of an audience, an audience watching right now. But what happens when there really is a live audience? With the possible exception of the fictional Kay Scarpetta, who occasionally dissects a cadaver solo in the dead of night (even then, the reader is surely watching), pathologists rarely work alone, although the audience might consist only of the medical technician. Indeed, the section entitled “The Autopsy Room” of Peter Greenaway’s 1997 installation, Flying over Water, captures a truly minimal, performative moment. “The Autopsy Room” of the piece, an ultra-real presentation of an autopsy suite, consists of autopsy table, cabinet, and pail. The resected brain of Icarus rests on the dissection shelf. Most of the theatrical codes have been stripped away. Contrary to Vesalius’s title page to the Fabrica, there is no stage, no curtain, no internal audience, no frame. It does take a “Kay Scarpetta” to survey this room as a theater, to bring out the performative aspects. And, of course, this is the role of the gallery viewers: to recognize that this “theater” is where autopsy is performed. In fact, “The Autopsy Room” offers that suspended moment right at the end of a play when the action has ended but the set still survives. Entering the installation is like arriving too late, and finding all that remains is a revenant theater. The live are absent and ironically the dead are absent as well, except for the one “remain”—the brain—that contextualizes the piece within the overall narrative of the installation. The viewers have just missed the “discovery” of the myth of Icarus, or at least the effort to know the essence of the myth as Western science would most likely attempt it. Greenaway’s piece is reminiscent of what happened to Albert Einstein’s brain. At his autopsy, Einstein’s brain was resected for future study. Would there be evidence of intellectual prowess in the very whorls and folds of his gray matter? Could empiricism reveal the mystery of the mind’s power? Performance theorists have a saying: “Performance is a way of knowing” (Pelias ix). One could also say that “knowledge is a way of performing.” In other words, performing an autopsy is thought not to be just a way performance leads to knowledge, but also a way in which knowledge itself is performed, or as Ron Pelias puts it, “a public unveiling of one’s


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understanding” (110)—even if, as in “The Autopsy Room,” the audience is privy only to what is left after the performance. A far more spectacular, and disturbing, example of “performing knowing” may be found in Alberto Furini’s The Premature Autopsy, a postmodern, allegorical (re)presentation of Rembrandt’s The Anatomy Lecture of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp. This piece captures the theatricality of performing an autopsy not seen in paintings of human dissection since the Renaissance. (Representations of the dead body tend to follow the mode of their respective schools. In the nineteenth century, for instance, paintings depict death scenes as Romantic, Impressionistic, and so on. A fascinating example is Van Gogh’s painting of Skull Smoking a Cigarette, which could be considered an expressionistic autopsy in sui generis.) The Premature Autopsy retains the circle of gentlemen watching Dr. Tulp in Rembrandt’s painting, but substitutes a female nude for the cadaver. In viewing Furini’s painting, one is immediately struck by the deliberate theatrical coding initially set up by Rembrandt—the body at center stage surrounded by an interior audience whose eyes are riveted on the spectacular scene presented for them. Dark drapery “curtains” the stage, and the frame of the painting acts as a proscenium arch. Indeed, when I saw Rembrandt’s painting at the Mauritshuis in The Hague, I was astonished at its theatrical qualities, especially once I realized the small circle of spectators around the painting was forming its live audience. Like The Anatomy Lecture, Furini’s painting includes semiotic codes to distinguish important details: The gentlemen are, of course, Rembrandt’s—dark, brooding, bourgeois. But the female body carries strikingly different codes in style and color that point to a postmodern sensibility: The female specimen is “live” (hence the prematurity), her skin rosy, her style cartoonish, her type bimbo, her pose pornographic, and her torso cut wide open. Here is the body objectified for science not just through criminality and class, as it is in Rembrandt’s painting, but also according to sexuality and gender. Autopsy is a performance that forces this woman to “give it up” for the pleasure of a viewer’s voyeuristic gratification. Even in this painting, though, the interior of woman is being made spectacular not just for prurient reasons, but for the acquisition of knowledge and its public unveiling (although those may be prurient as well). Hence the role of Dr. Tulp. The Premature Autopsy cries out for the same sort of feminist critique often performed on the title page to Vesalius’s Fabrica, and suggests a linkage between Western ways of looking in the early modern and postmodern eras. To Howard Marchitiello, in the title page the cadaver’s

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unpregnant state indicates an “empty” and therefore “meaningless” uterus, which Vesalius “savagely attacks” (544). On the one hand, I would point out that in the title page the cadaver’s interior is far from empty or meaningless, even though it is unpregnant. Vesalius is about to learn some important correctives to female anatomy, which will eventually benefit the treatment of female-specific diseases. Contrary to Marchitiello, Sawday even goes so far as to claim that the title page is depicting a uterocentric universe (71), which would make it a highly meaningful uterus. But it is true that Vesalius’s triumphant pose smacks of grandstanding on the back (literally the back) of folks who were powerless in early modern Western culture, be they criminals, the poor, or women; this cadaver represents all three. Nevertheless, Vesalius does seem savvy to the necessity of curtailing his exhilaration. What is really at stake, the woodcut asserts, is the public confirmation or “truthing” of the premortem diagnosis, a politically vital action for medical science and the state. The anato-autopsy of the title page is the ultimate arbiter in proving not only that the initial medical diagnosis of “being without child” was correct, but that the subject’s legal rights have not been contravened and that the state has not executed an innocent (potential) life. (The prisoner had claimed pregnancy in order to escape hanging.) This political thrust is one reason why the woodcut depicts the “knowing” being enacted in a public venue like a theater. But, of course, punishment and politics are not mutually exclusive, and are just two of the many discourses circulating, according to Sawday, in the title page. Similarly, in The Premature Autopsy, a complex of discourses are underway, some more disturbing that others. Dr. Tulp is still focused, as he always has been, on the body’s arm. Clearly, he is gleaning some knowledge about the mechanistic character of human anatomy. But to the painting’s spectator—that is, you and me—the female body is inviting us to “know” her interior in the biblical sense. Contrary to the cadaver in Vesalius’s title page, this woman’s guts are an undifferentiated mass—no organs, such as the uterus, are observable. Knowledge of female-specific disease and treatment is not the goal of this autopsy. This is not a uterocentric universe, but the politics (and punishment) of woman’s place in Western culture, especially in the circulation of pornography. Indeed, a girly magazine has been placed in the arms of one of the gentlemen. Furini’s painting demonstrates just how far (and Greenaway’s piece just how short) one can go in making autopsy a spectacular performance, even of the most voyeuristic and salacious kind of knowledge. This is because the performance of autopsy always already offers itself up as a scene to Western eyes.


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Given the theatrical aspect of performing an autopsy, which many artworks and novels clearly exploit, it is perhaps surprising that so few autopsies have been represented on the dramatic stage. (While highly theatrical, the public autopsy performed by Gunther von Hagens, which I cover in the afterword, is not a play in the generic sense.) Of course, there are numerous instances of autopsy as a dramatic way of looking in the theater, even looking at the dead body. The last scene of Hamlet is a case in point. And interestingly, some of the contemporary rewritings of Hamlet, such as Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead and Lee Blessing’s Fortinbras, deploy the function of autopsy as an epistemological gaze at the dead body. Put the emphasis on the word “are” in Stoppard’s title and the play becomes a quest for the courtiers to find out why they are dead, an auto-autopsy, if you will. And in Fortinbras, the dead characters of Hamlet return to haunt Fortinbras, demanding that he determine postmortem the truth of their demise. Nevertheless, despite this sort of tropological autopsy, I have found just three plays that even come close to portraying a human dissection on stage. I hesitate to speculate too much as to why playwrights have not dramatized opened dead bodies in medical or forensic situations—after all, the writing of plays is their prerogative, not mine—other than the possibility that portraying an autopsy might be considered too overpowering given the tremendous impact of live performance. And yet depictions of bloody violence to the body, dying, and death have been a theatrical mainstay since the Greeks. Or perhaps because human dissections were themselves public entertainment up until the late nineteenth century, a theatrical presentation was deemed unnecessary. After all, if you want to see a horse race, you go to the track. In fact, the anatomy theaters of the Renaissance rivaled the playhouses in popularity. And, to my knowledge, there are no plays of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in the West that depict any state of anato-autopsy. On the other hand, throughout the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, autopsies have retreated ever farther behind the closed doors of the morgue or university, and are not considered fit for public viewing at all. In part, this retreat was necessary to rehabilitate medical science in the public’s eyes from its sordid history of public dissection, grave robbing, and association with criminality. Perhaps, as well, in our prudish times the opened dead body is seen as profoundly “undressed,” as it is in Furini’s painting. Watching live performance is a highly voyeuristic activity, often uncomfortably so. Things having to do with the body even as simulations (sexual intercourse is another good example) might be better tolerated by an audience when

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delivered through more mediated venues like painting, print, or even film rather than an onstage, live performance. One of the plays I discovered offers a clever navigation of the problem of staging an anato-autopsy today and getting away with it. Under the Knife: A History of Medicine, by Theodora Skipitares (1993), uses puppets. In the episode entitled “Dissection,” four puppets representing Vesalius and three students stand ready before a cadaver on the dissecting table. While Vesalius eloquently describes his thirst for knowledge about human anatomy and the high adventure of securing his first cadaver, the students are “attacking the body frantically” (102). The disconnect between the wonder of knowledge and the violence done to the body is clearly brought home. Equally unmistakable is the prurience of the scene—the phallic instruments, the receptive flesh. Interestingly, though, this dissection is not only mediated by the puppets, but also set well back in time, right alongside the Fabrica, which helps moderate the procedure for a current audience. (Contrary to Furini’s piece, there is no indexical sign pointing to the contemporary moment of the audience.) This is as if to say, “We’re really watching history, not a human anatoautopsy.” In fact, the entire piece is constructed out of a series of embodied documents. Moreover, the Vesalian episode denotes the history of a “less-civilized” time, when human dissection was theater. The other two plays were brought to my attention by Sawday. Both were written during the Renaissance itself and address the anxiety of the contemporaneous public over the performance of autopsy, anatomy, human dissection, and its value to the community, a value not at all obvious at the time even to the medical profession. Of the two plays, The Anatomist (1696) by Edward Ravenscroft engages the topic of autopsy and human dissection most directly. A satire of an eminent Renaissance anatomist and physician, the play gets a lot of performance hay out of farcical pranks—medical impostors, switched bodies, live characters posing as cadavers, and so on. Most of the play takes place in the doctor’s laboratory, where there is much talk of dissection, anatomy, the hangman, William Harvey, and the London Barber-Surgeons. Twice, we are actually on the brink of opening a “stillwarm body”! Yet the play ultimately dodges the portrayal of a dissection (after all, the “corpses” are live characters) and opts instead for a “moral” autopsy. Cause of death? Badness! Upon making “de observation of the Visage,” the imposter anatomist concludes, “dis was one person of de fair Speech, but de fals Heart: covetous, designing, letcherous: a Robber, a Thief, a Cut-throat—Sacrament, hanging was too good for him”


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(118). But a little ripping “from the Systole to the Dyastole” will finish off the sentence just right (107). In a more serious vein, The Atheist’s Tragedy (1611) by Cyril Tourneur also looks to autopsy for a moral precondition to death. At the end of the play, the atheist D’Amville wants the body of the valorous, and wrongly accused, Charlemont for autopsy. He hopes to find the fleshy source of Charlemont’s integrity, the nobility of spirit enabling him “To die with that assurance as he does. / The cause of that, in his anatomy, / I would find out” (188). D’Amville expresses a belief similar to Descartes’s theory of the pineal gland as the bodily conduit to the soul—that is, the signs of the human spirit are imprinted somewhere in the flesh and may be correlated at postmortem dissection to premortem behavior. Unfortunately, we do not get to find out if D’Amville is onto something. He dies instead of Charlemont. And as for Descartes’s theory of the pineal gland? Hoping to actually see the “soul,” Descartes once attended an autopsy. As luck would have it, the pineal gland is one of the first parts of the corpse to decompose. By the time he got there and the brain could be dissected, the “soul” had already left the building (Descartes letter in Sawday 156).

AUTOPSY AND SPEECH ACT THEORY Apart from the explicitly theatrical aspect, there is, of course, the other side to “performance” in performing an autopsy, although undoubtedly the performative underpins theater itself. As performance theorists have pointed out, everything onstage is the “doing” of a speech act that brings a sign into existence as action. But the highly theatrical character of the above examples—the Furini painting and the plays—seems to crowd out the availability of the performative itself for analysis. It is a bit difficult to notice how the performative is operating when a rash of hilarious pranks is demanding one’s attention. Nevertheless, thinking about the “doing” of an autopsy and the “speaking” of an autopsy opens up a range of discursive issues of the performative quite apart from the mediating “theatrical tricks of the trade.” What does it “mean” when someone says, “I perform an autopsy”? And what does it “mean” when someone is actually performing an autopsy? Speech act theory, one of the grounds of performance studies, offers a way of attempting to unpack some of these discursive aspects, and, I think, provides some assistance in sorting out how autopsy and the dead body may fit into and challenge current theories of cultural and social constructivism. In the next section of this chapter, I

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will cover some important aspects of speech act theory, paying particular attention to the way it is grounded on the premise of the existence of the real world, and demonstrate how constructivist Realism may work to open up the body, and body criticism as well, to something new at autopsy. According to speech act theory, all utterances “do” something in the world simply by being said. Utterances are language constructs with real-world actuality. Without going too far into the minutiae of what is an extremely complex and extensive discipline, we can borrow a few basic definitions set by J. L. Austin and John R. Searle that are useful to the topic of autopsy. In How to Do Things with Words, Austin categorizes utterances into three kinds of speech acts: locutionary, illocutionary, and perlocutionary. The locutionary act is the basic descriptive utterance, exhibiting sense and reference. The illocutionary act is explicitly performative, involving statements that bring about the event they describe. The perlocutionary act indicates that the utterance has some effect on a hearer. Since its initial development in the 1950s, speech act theory has turned out to be a powerful, analytic instrument with wide application to disciplines beyond linguistics. For instance, drama and theater studies have benefitted enormously from the headway made into illocution—every utterance onstage may be considered a performative, because an actor uttering a line actually “does” the line, constructs the line as an event by saying it. Indeed, all the signs in a theater performance from the gestures to the costumes to the sets to the tone of voice are the “doing” of the play. In this way, a play in performance may be considered a vast collocation of illocutionary acts which construct the play world itself. Gender theory as practiced by Judith Butler, among others, has similarly benefitted from the notion of the performative: In this view, one performs gender, “does” gender in the world as a series of stylized acts rather than as a biologically proscribed identity (“Performative Acts” 270). An utterance like “I perform an autopsy” may initially appear to be an illocutionary act, by virtue of its including the word “perform.” And, as I will show, it is an intriguing statement because it denotes the acting of something in the world as well as the saying. As such, though, it is only illocutionary to the extent that, according to Searle, every complete sentence has illocutionary force (Foundations 7). By making clear the assertiveness of this sort of statement—“[I assert that] I perform an autopsy”—the illocutionary force becomes more apparent. Asserting something in the world is a performative statement, as are promising, ordering, or wagering. Nevertheless, the statement “I perform an


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autopsy” should rather be considered more locutionary and perlocutionary than explicitly illocutionary. The locutionary aspect of “I perform an autopsy” comes about by virtue of its describing something that is done but not actually doing it. In other words, saying the statement does not literally bring the action of looking at and cutting into the dead body into actuality. The statement maintains a semiotic gap between language as a sign system and the world as referent. An explicit illocutionary statement such as “I pronounce you husband and wife,” on the other hand, by naming the event it brings into existence is metalinguistic and self-referential, and fuses the sign and referent. In addition, the statement “I perform an autopsy” is properly perlocutionary, because it implies grammatically that some sign is an object of the verb—“I perform an autopsy [on a dead body]”—and that a referent, “the dead body,” will be affected. It is clear from the above description that speech act theory depends on the assumption that the real world exists and accepts a relationship between language and the real world, between the semiotic realm and a real-world other. As Searle notes in The Construction of Social Reality, to be understandable utterances must concede an external reality, where the external reality is taken for granted by speakers as a background for discourse (182). Shared utterances are grounded in a publicly accessible reality (186), certainly if they are to meet the locutionary requirement of making sense: For example, stating that one performs an autopsy on a dead body assumes a shared, public understanding of what constitutes the reality of a dead body (as opposed to a live body, a stone, or a paperweight). Whether the gap between utterance and external reality is wide or effectively imperceptible, the three modes of speech acts admit a conditionality between the statement and what the statement does. Locutionary acts have something to describe, make sense of, and make reference to. Perlocutionary acts have an effect on an other, even if the other is simply a hearer. And illocutionary acts bring social reality into existence by performing the semiotic as action. The illocutionary speech act is an especially pivotal development for contemporary criticism, for it provides a theoretical ground for constructivism. Cultural and social semiotics such as the codification of a legal system, what Searle terms “institutional facts,” construct the real world as much as the “brute facts” of physics. Austin’s discussion of the felicity of illocutionary acts shows how, early on in its development, the binding relation of speech act theory to the real world was initiated. Although he is actually considering how conditions of truth and falsity, or right and wrong, collapse in the face of

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performative statements, what is interesting to me about Austin’s six felicity conditions is the way each condition relies upon and presupposes a world of others: 1) the acceptance of a conventional linguistic procedure by certain persons in certain circumstances; 2) the particular persons and circumstances must be appropriate; 3) execution by all participants correctly; 4) and (ditto) completely; 5) a person must have those thoughts or feelings, and the participants must intend so to conduct themselves; and 6) must conduct themselves subsequently (14–15, my italics; to save space, I have abridged Austin’s descriptions and omitted quote marks). For the illocutionary force of the sentence “[I assert that] I perform an autopsy,” not only the felicity conditions of the real world must be met—for instance, agreement among persons, appropriate authority and circumstances, etc.—but also its locutionary feature: The statement must refer to something and make sense. As Benjamin Lee points out in Talking Heads, the infusion of Charles Sanders Peirce’s theory of semiotics into speech act theory makes even more explicit the assumption of an external reality. To Peirce, indexical signs point to objects and events through words and phrases such as “that,” “you,” or the explicit performative “I name . . . ,” and provide a way to maneuver between the semiotic and the real world. Moreover, the “dynamical object” and the “immediate object” are terms Peirce coined to differentiate the indexed objects of the real world, which lie outside the sign system, from the represented indexical object in the sign itself (Peirce 211). Thus, the statement “I perform an autopsy” is indexical in the sense that it points to some real-world object as well as to an event, both the real dead body and the act of looking and cutting. The immediate object would be the represented sign of the dead body (the words) in the sentence that persons can commonly agree upon, while the dynamical object is constituted by the dead body actually there on the table before us. Interestingly, at this level Peirce does not specify of what the dynamical object consists: Because the sign mediates the object, “the Sign cannot express [the dynamical object], which it can only indicate and leave the interpreter to find out by collateral experience” (211). In short, even though the immediate object as an index may point to the real-world object, it is only by communal hypothetical reasoning that we come to a best explanation of the real-world object, indeed, what Peirce recognizes as the project of science. Like Austin’s, Peirce’s sense of the function of sign systems as signs and with respect to the real world underpins, as Lee notes, current theories of “the social constitution of meaning” (133). As I pointed out above,


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the indexical weight of a statement about performing an autopsy indicates not only the existence of a real-world dead body, but also the existence of an event of cutting and looking that only comes into existence by virtue of cutting and looking. The autopsy, as something “performed,” has a different sort of real-world status than the dead body upon which it concentrates the action. The autopsy is obviously a human and social construct, an institutional fact. (In chapter 4, I argue that autopsy is even an ideological fact.) Peirce’s theory is truly elegant, for it doesn’t, on the one hand, contravene Derrida’s important notion of the iterability of signs. Indexical signs may be substituted one for the other without losing their function of pointing to a dynamical object. And, on the other hand, precisely because of their function of pointing to a dynamical object, it doesn’t collapse real-world objects into nothing but signs. Furthermore, though I would not agree with some of Peirce’s conclusions about scientific epistemology, in particular the notion of an ideal scientific community, his version of semiotics gives support to a theory of models. Rather than viewing research, whether in science or the humanities, as the “discovery” of “truth,” Peirce’s idea of abduction, “or reasoning to the best explanatory hypothesis” (Lee 132), leads to the notion that a best model exists. Of course, for any given moment or circumstance, a different best model may be operating, since the model is only constructed as the best explanation for the dynamical object in its context. For instance, physicists understand the universe today in terms of two models: the general theory of relativity and quantum mechanics. Relativity describes the large structure of “gravity,” while quantum mechanics deals with the extremely small arena of atoms. On their own, the two models appear correct, but together they contradict each other. Indeed, one of the goals of contemporary physics is to find a unified theory that will allow both models to work at the same time, a quantum theory of gravity. For the rest of us, though, who only contend with the physics of everyday life, Newton’s model of the universe works just fine, and in fact is much easier to use than Einstein’s (Hawking 10–11). In terms of medical science, human dissection has certainly opened the body to the construction of a number of models, all of which, in the appropriate circumstances, may be considered “correct”: the anatomical, physiological, cellular, and genetic, to name just a few. We wouldn’t want to claim, for instance, that the cellular model of the body is always right or better than the anatomical model, and definitely not in the middle of surgery. While Peirce argues that a hypothesis is correct if research and inquiry find it incorrigible, I would rather argue that a model is best as long as it works best. If people

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can regularly survive open-heart surgery, then the current Western model of the heart must be pretty good. And the performance of autopsy in the West has played a vastly crucial role in the development of utile models of the body, for once human dissection became acceptable to European medicine, researchers could open the body and take a look around. By working backward from correlating the signs of disease in the dead body with the symptoms of illness in the live, physicians could build better models of the body, make better diagnoses, and devise more effective treatments for the patient. As the initiator of lesion-based medicine in the nineteenth century, Marie François Xavier Bichat would challenge his colleagues to “open up a few corpses: you will dissipate at once the darkness that observation alone could not dissipate” (in Clinic 146). Anato-autopsy was able to ground the structure of anatomy in sixteenth-century Europe by physicians like Vesalius as well as the model of microscopic analysis today. In fact, a number of workable and co-extensive models seem to function simultaneously in contemporary Western medicine, a phenomenon that was certainly apparent at the autopsy I attended. Not only did the pathologist provide an anatomy lesson based on observing the opened cadaver, but she also took tissue samples of the heart to analyze later under a microscope. Using the model of disease concepts, she would be able to read the deceased patient’s history of myocardial infarcts. Interestingly, such models of medicine as anatomy and microscopy can themselves be considered speech acts by virtue of their discursive and social constructedness in the world. As vastly complex “utterances,” these models have illocutionary force because they “do” something through assertion, as well as being locutionary (descriptive) and perlocutionary (effective)—they build an entire institution. Here, Searle’s discussion of the generation of social reality, as distinct from the existence of what he terms “external reality,” is useful. Searle grounds his analysis in Realism (not to be confused with literary Realism), which is a philosophical theory of ontology. Simply put, Realism states that there exists a reality independent of our representations of it. Realism only claims that there is a way things are without claiming to say or know how they are. And Realism does not assert a single or privileged discourse for describing external reality (Construction 155).1 To the criticism offered by Idealists and some social constructionists that external reality cannot be preperceptive or prediscursive, Realists respond: “Why does ‘proof ’ of external reality have to depend on our linguistic and perceptual constructions?” It does not follow that if we cannot “prove” through our cultural constructs that exter-


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nal reality exists, it “proves” that external reality does not exist. In fact, just to get by in daily life, let alone be diagnosed and treated for disease, we already assume an external reality. From this ontology, Searle makes two basic categories: intrinsic facts and observer-relative facts. Intrinsic facts are defined as those features of a physical object that are not dependent on the attitudes or designs of observers or users. A stone, for example, exists independently of human culture. Observer-relative facts have to do with the functions—purposes, uses, positions—we as agents assign to those physical objects. The stone becomes endowed with observer-relative facts when it is used to weigh down paper (9–23). I would have to disagree, however, with one aspect of Searle’s definition of intrinsic facts. He assigns certain features of a physical object such as mass and chemical composition to the intrinsic fact category, because such physical facts “do not depend on any attitudes of observers or users” (10). This sort of statement, like Peirce’s notion of an ideal scientific community, is somewhat naive, for it concedes to science the objectivity of a “pure observer.” As science theorists have recently argued, science, as with any other human endeavor, proceeds from social and cultural locations, an array of “impure” positions, some of which are downright political and ideological (Keller x). Merely on the basis of scientific knowledge itself, surely the Heisenberg uncertainty principle contradicts Searle’s proposition. At a small enough level, the very physics of observing distort the perceived object. I would suggest that the model theory helpfully modifies Searle’s definition; in this way, mass and chemical composition can be considered two of the models physics and chemistry have developed to describe the intrinsic facts of a physical object. Interestingly, though, Searle’s notion of function as a defining feature of the observer-relative facts category does dovetail nicely with a theory of models. Although he uses the problematic word “discovery” in the sense of “discovering” natural functions in physical objects, Searle argues that such discoveries are made within an already prior set of assignments. In other words, the “natural function” a scientist may isolate in a physical entity is already within a scientific and cultural history. Searle gives the example of the pumping action of the heart. It is an intrinsic fact to say that the heart pumps blood, but an observer-relative fact to say “‘[t]he function of the heart is to pump blood.’” According to Searle, ascribing a function is the same as ascribing a value, in this case, the value of survivability. The heart pumps blood in order that the body may live. If we thought the value of the heart pumping blood was “to glorify God by making thumping noises, then the function of the heart would be to

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make a thumping noise” (15). This example denudes the “naturalness” of the heart pumping function in Western culture, for as far back as ancient Greek medicine, the purpose of the heart has been linked to this notion of survivability. Therefore, the models of blood movement developed by Galen in the second century, in which blood is understood to travel oneway from the heart to the extremities, and by Harvey in the seventeenth century, in which blood circulates around the body, ought to be recognized as part of a consistent and foregoing set of observer-relative facts, peculiar to Western culture, about the value of the heart. (Interestingly, because Harvey was able to perform empirical autopsies, the better model of blood circulation could be developed. Galen was hampered by the Roman taboo against human dissection.) Indeed, the prior assignments of functionality are locutionary speech acts that describe the physical object but do not change the intrinsic facts.

A REBUTTAL TO BUTLER Searle’s notion of functionality together with other aspects of speech act theory provide a way of thinking about how a construction of social reality occurs. Functions agreed upon in the community by what Kenneth Burke might have called a “collective revelation” (53) and assigned to intrinsic facts are capable of generating enormous and complex social constructions such as marriage and the legal code, while speech act theory demonstrates how such functions, even when they are not specifically linguistic or discursive codes, assert existence in the real world. This is because the notion of the performative underpins functionality as well as speech acts. To assign function to something is to “do” something. To cut into and look upon the dead body is to make a performance of autopsy, just as reading the signs of disease, diagnosing lesions, describing and recording findings, and teaching perform a range of speech acts. In fact, whether consciously or not, the notion of the performative underpins the major constructivist theories. Indeed, Judith Butler intentionally grounds her theory of gender construction with the performative of speech act theory. Thus, gender can be understood as something performative rather than something biologically or intrinsically determined. This position has been an important corrective to French feminism, which tends to base its theoretical axioms on biological difference. However, some of the constructionists, as Searle and Keller rightly complain, go so far as to argue that only social and cultural constructions


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exist, indeed, that even the flesh is constructed—not just written upon, as Michel de Certeau theorizes—but actually constructed “all the way down.” Such a position strikes me as a peculiar form of postmodern Idealism, a sort of Baudrillardian hyperreality on a theoretical scale. It seems to arise mainly in disciplines more philosophically inclined than those obviously dependent on an assumption of external reality. Certainly, most, if not all, disciplines in the sciences, such as medicine and physics, must assume the existence of an external reality and intrinsic field of facts in order to study it, let alone analyze and manipulate it. Otherwise, why would they have come up with a metaphor like “discovery”? Even literary and cultural studies tend to ground themselves in an external reality. It is clear by the way he positions the Renaissance body that Sawday, for instance, recognizes an intrinsic facticity to the body within a matrix of early modern European cultural constructs. As if setting a tone for the entire book, at the very outset of his discussion he refers to a “‘science’ of the body” beginning to emerge in the Renaissance, “a seemingly discrete way of ordering the observation of the natural world” (1). On the other hand, a constructionist like Butler is highly reluctant to concede much intrinsic facticity to the body at all. As a feminist philosopher, Butler tends to limit her discussions to issues of sex and gender and, implicitly, to queer theory. Nevertheless, because she has had such an enormous influence on current discussions of the body, I feel that I must address her theory in this light. In working with Foucault’s insights about sex in The History of Sexuality, Volume 1, Butler argues convincingly that sex, and not just gender, is socially constructed. Indeed, the heterosexual imperative of Western culture coerces sex in delimiting ways; thus, along with gender, sex itself is socially constrained and disciplined. I take this position to mean that the sex act is regulated in certain specific ways (any sex act falling outside of regulations is considered perverse), and the sex organs themselves put to use in closely regimented practices. Butler is clearly leading the challenge to claims that heterosexuality is “natural,” in terms of the (male/female) sex act as well as sexual preference. Foucauldian-theorized discipline exerts a huge force not only on constructing the subject, but also on what, in the very act of construction, necessarily ends up falling outside the subject: Thus, we also have abject bodies, “bodies that (do not) matter.” In her book Bodies that Matter, Butler is at great pains to correct the misreadings of her earlier book, Gender Trouble, especially the criticism that the performative of gender means that gender is somehow chosen and donned like a costume by a conscious subject (Bodies that Matter x). Rather, gender, sex, the body itself, are constructed at

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levels much deeper than merely surface, in short, at the very materiality of the body. But the question I would pose to Butler is, “If everything is constructed, what about the dead body? ” In fact, Butler acknowledges this sort of question in Bodies that Matter, though I find her response, both in terms of understanding the spirit of the question and providing an answer, somewhat inadequate. To the criticism, “If everything is discourse, what about the body?,” Butler attributes to the critic the presumption of a notion of a “prediscursive ‘sex.’” This presumption (apparently) leads the critic to accuse constructionists of linguistic monism, where a definition of constructivism is viewed as “generative and deterministic”: “Everything is only and always language.” The same presumption may also give rise, Butler claims, to a reductive sense of constructivism as verbal action, a grammar whose speaking subject presupposes a preexisting subject (6–7). However, what Butler fails to deal with is the possibility that the question itself, “What about the body?,” is arising from a particular perspective on the body, a perspective quite different from her own. While I certainly hesitate to speak for all critics who utter some form of this question—“What about the body?”—I would not be surprised if most are working, as I am, from a more scientific than philosophical take on what constitutes matter. Butler’s definition of matter, as given in Bodies that Matter, goes as follows: “A process of materialization that stabilizes over time to produce the effect of boundary, fixity, and surface we call matter” (9). A return to this grounding definition, Butler believes, will lead us out of the morass that has become constructivism. First of all, we must recognize that Butler’s definition of matter is a model of matter and, moreover, that it is simply one model within a set of interdisciplinary models. To accept it as a grounding definition introduces (the politics of ) agency, and indicates that the definition lies within Searle’s observer-relative facts category. Second, we really ought to acknowledge and consider the availability of other (scientific) models of matter, particularly, I think, when discussing the body. (Given the fact that Butler is theorizing about the body, her failure to consult current scientific and medical trends such as those presented by Jacalyn Duffin is of great concern.2) Since physics is the foundation science of microbiology and medical models of the body, we can turn to quantum mechanics for another definition of matter. Stephen Hawking offers this definition in A Brief History of Time: “Matter . . . is made up mainly of protons and neutrons, which in turn are made up of quarks” (76, my italics). If we prefer Newtonian physics, we can find yet another definition of matter by Raymond A. Ser-


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way in Physics for Scientists and Engineers: Matter is the macroscopic properties of solids, fluids, gases, and plasma (297). Interestingly, Serway’s model is useful, in a way that Butler’s is not, in actually assessing the body, certainly as to whether it is alive or dead. A dead body has no blood pressure—there is no fluid flow to measure. To Butler’s definition of matter I have added the two above definitions from physics in part simply to show, at the risk of being repetitious, that Butler’s definition is just another model available among many. In Peircean terms, none of the definitions is able to comprise the dynamical object or the “real thing” itself; each definition only operates as the immediate object or epistemological signage that points to the “real thing,” whatever the “real thing” is. Here is the important difference, though, between the Butlerian approach and physics: The scientific models given by Hawking and Serway are indeed built structures, social constructs, but which at the same time admit to “something” existing beyond themselves, something material held in abeyance beyond the matrix of the model— in a nutshell, they are constructivist Realist. Not so Butler’s model; her definition of matter claims that matter is the model—in other words, that matter is constructed all the way down. For a postmodernist theorist, Butler’s idea of matter is made further problematic by her invocation of an originary cause before an effect, a materialization before matter, a process before fixity, which also, perhaps surprisingly, ends up violating the physical Law of the Conservation of Energy. This law generalizes that matter (or matter as energy, in Einsteinian terms) cannot be added to or taken away from the universe.3 Matter simply transforms from one thing to another, endlessly. Because matter always already is, it does not undergo materialization; at most, it undergoes transformation. Oddly enough, then, Butler’s definition of matter produces the same metaphysical agenda she accuses her critics of harboring, while the scientific models do not. (For Butler’s definition to escape the Western metaphysical bias of a preexisting origin, it would have to be rewritten to some such phrase as “matter is the matter of continual process that we call matter.” ) To be fair, Butler does tip her hat to the notion of a biophysical model. In Bodies that Matter, she offers “an absolute reassurance” to her reader that “sexually differentiated parts, activities, capacities, hormonal and chromosomal differences . . . can be conceded”; but the concession is made not without “some anxiety” (10, my italics). And the anxiety to which she confesses does not really allow her to concede a body of intrinsic fact, for it arises from the point of view that the discourse making the

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concession is constitutive of the materiality being conceded (keep in mind her definition of matter). She writes: “To posit a materiality outside of language is still to posit that materiality, and the materiality so posited will retain that positing as its constitutive function” (67–68 my italics). There can be no reference to a “pure body,” Butler claims, without further positing, or constructing, that body (10). But who is talking about a “pure body”? The reference is to a fleshy, blood-and-guts body, a body that overflows culture—not “pure” in any transcendental sense at all. Of course, one might object that in critiquing Butler I am raising a “false alternative,” that I am simply fluctuating between the two poles of the body’s physicality and its social constructedness. My project, as I conceive it, is rather to navigate a track between the poles, a sort of slalom course of body criticism, if you will, a theoretical compromise which I believe is better suited to leading us out of the morass of constructivism. Most certainly, I see the stakes of this discussion as quite high, going to the immediate quarrel of what constitutes material and what constitutes culture in body criticism and elsewhere. On the one hand, it seems easy to claim that bridges and airplanes, for example, are socially constructed, and thus, obviously, not “naturally given” materials. Yet herein lies the problem: Exactly how do we determine what constitutes naturally given materials? Are the elements used to construct steel, which is used to construct bridges and airplanes, materials that are naturally given? Do the elements exist in nature or have we constructed them? (Especially problematic are the unstable elements, which do not exist without human intervention.) Ditto for the atoms and molecules, the protons and neutrons, the quarks and all the ever-smaller bits physicists have come up with to constitute the elements? For instance, according to Butler, if one claims that matter is made of atoms, one has constructed matter. I would rather say that one has constructed an atomic model of matter. Furthermore, where does social construction begin and where does the naturally given end? Butler would maintain that they don’t begin or end—it’s all constructed. I would argue, by way of Searle, that the theory of Realism enables the acceptance of a material world outside (or beyond or simply larger than) social constructs even though we may not be able to describe what that material world is like without using social constructs. Once we begin to describe it, whether as the medieval elements or quantum mechanics, we’re making social constructs of it. My solution to this nature/culture binary, then, is not to throw out nature. Rather, my solution hinges on the notion that social constructions, such as the make up of matter or the body (anatomy), are models of the material world.


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According to this position, we can admit the physicality of the world but at the same time acknowledge that we only know it through social constructs or models. This theory of models, which accommodates both the cultural and the material aspects, is quite contrary to Butler’s. In fact, in her essay “Foucault and the Paradox of Bodily Inscriptions,” Butler makes it quite clear that the intrinsic facticity of the body as part of an external reality is not, or should not be, available outside of cultural constructions. In this critique of Foucault, Butler argues that, despite Foucault’s claim of resting his genealogy on a rejection of the body’s ontological or prediscursive existence outside of power regimes, he nevertheless ends up treating the body as a surface of inscription (like de Certeau), and thus yields to the very point he has set out to demolish—that is, the notion that the body has an ontological status apart from cultural or social construction. In short, Butler is accusing Foucault of Realism, the acceptance of an external reality “independent of our representations” (Searle 155). Under this logic, Bruno Latour in Science in Action must fall victim to the same trap. In describing how facts are constructed in science—according to a long and well-established tradition in scientific method—Latour refers to a “something” that is defined according to its performance (his word) against a series of trials such as its solubility in fluids or its reaction to acids. This “something,” which exists in the real world, may emerge from the assay as a new element (87–89) within the model of the periodic table. But I would hazard a guess that Butler herself presupposes Realism, whether she consciously knows it or not. As the Latour example shows, the very effort to form a boundary, as Butler does in her definition of matter, suggests that there has to be “something” to form a boundary around (see Searle Construction 165). If Butler truly wants to establish a “culturally constructed body” with no structural or ontological origins “intact before the law” (“Paradox” 313), she has perhaps made a mistake in initially grounding her theory of gender and sex on the performative. As I have discussed above, the premises established by Austin for speech act theory bind the performative to external reality from the starting gate. Recall Austin’s felicity conditions with their positioning of the utterance in what Searle calls a publically accessible reality. In favoring the illocutionary, as opposed to the biologically determined, Butler has ignored the locutionary aspect built into speech act theory by Austin—its descriptive function. Speech acts not only do something in the world, they describe something in the world that has to make sense to others in the world. In this way, Butler has inadvertently jammed her

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spokes, for as much as she denies an ontological reality, her theory (like a Peircean immediate object) always ends up pointing to it. Indeed, Butler’s theory of cultural constructivism is, in Searle’s terms, a good example of an observer-relative fact—the performative is underpinning functionality. Butler’s model, and a model is what it is, works well in terms of understanding how gender and sex are performative and how the body is disciplined, despite her rejection of Foucault’s “blunder” in thinking that the body is inscribed upon by history and culture. But her model does not offer any assistance toward appreciating the intrinsic waywardness of the body itself—indeed, the waywardness of illness and, most profoundly, death. I am returned to the criticism of Butler by Carol Bigwood that I mentioned in chapter 1: Butler’s model places us idealistically in the domain of “purely cultural determinants” (102), a model that operates as a one-way mirror of cultural chauvinism on the body rather than as a relationship perhaps better described as a dialogic negotiation. Indeed, Butler’s position may even be a form of class chauvinism. As James Naremore and Patrick Brantlinger point out in Modernity and Mass Culture, the common person in Western culture has always been considered earthbound, while the civilized person rises above the physical realm into culture (3). In a very real way, Butler reintroduces a serious alienation of the body from the mind by downplaying the significance of the fleshy body and its own peculiar, performative “will to power.”

DESTINY’S AUTOPSY/GRAY’S ANATOMY I would argue that the performance of an autopsy is a way of trying to understand this waywardness, or insubordination, of the body. The body does many things that are insubordinate to medical knowledge and practice and that are outside the disciplining observer-relative facts of cultural constructions. I do not use the word “insubordination” to mean that the body has agency to resist our cultural categories; clearly, the body is passive to enculturation and intextuation by Western culture, the autopsy being a prime example. Insubordination rather comes in the fact that the body is capable of “performing” on its own, responding to or simply ignoring social constructs in its own material and often unpredictable ways. The fact that the body dies and eventually disappears is the best example of this sort of insubordination to culture. Certainly, one could describe the history of Western medicine as a game of playing catch-up with the wayward body. Autopsy, for instance,


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has always worked after the fact, attempting to understand how death came about based on the signs left on the corpse. Since the acceptance of human dissection in Western culture, autopsy has aimed at the correlation of lesions in the cadaver with symptoms in the live patient, the categorization of disease, and the development of treatments for the future. At this particular moment, we’re trying to catch up to AIDS, not to mention cancer, diabetes, Alzheimer’s, and many more ailments. That the body must have this performative function of its own—this doing in the world—is supported by the obvious point that illnesses not yet presenting themselves are of no concern. Of course, one could protest that diseases like AIDS, cancer, and perhaps even diabetes and Alzheimer’s culturally construct the lived body by virtue of lifestyle effects, a sort of perlocutionary force of social imperatives. I would suggest instead that the symptoms of lifestyle-related illness are the body’s dialogic response to culture and to what culture inscribes upon it, with the autopsy being the best available way of reading the remnants of this “conversation.” But what about homicide? Is not the dead body constructed, in this case, out of human brutality, perhaps even out of ideology? What about homicide as the consequence of domestic violence, political terrorism, or hate crimes directed at gays and people of color? Here, I would argue that homicide is the cultural construct, not the dead body. The dead body bears the signs of homicide, indeed, oftentimes the signs of an ideological position, but the dead body itself is still its dialogic response to the trauma. The live body in these situations cannot sustain such injuries and survive—as de Certeau writes, “Death [is] imposed from within” (197). Indeed, the two epistemological responsibilities of a medicolegal autopsy clarify this distinction: Manner of death determines cultural construct (homicide, suicide, accidental, or natural); cause of death determines precipitating mortal trauma to the body. A particularly tragic example from John Douglas’s book Obsession illustrates how autopsy and, indeed, the dead body itself can partake of the performative without devolving into a cultural determinism of the body. The chapter entitled “Katie’s Story” describes the savage murder of an eight-year-old girl, Destiny, at the hands of her aunt’s live-in boyfriend. Destiny was found beaten to death in the basement of her home. Her mother, Katie, attempted CPR, trying to ignore the bruised eye bulging out of the socket, blood coming out of the mouth, the huge blotchy brown stain under the skin of the chest, the gurgling in the lungs. Later, Detective Whildin would describe the body as “just smashed in every part” (210). The only witness to the event was the room—broken paneling and

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lights, blood on the furniture and floor, indentations in the wall from the crushing impact of Destiny’s head (207–14). Of course, an autopsy was performed on the body, but, interestingly, by two different people as two different events: a medicolegal autopsy by the medical examiner and a very personal autopsy by Katie, Destiny’s mother. Katie insisted on seeing her daughter’s body after it was released from the morgue but before it was prepared for viewing by the funeral home. Everyone involved, from the police to family, tried to dissuade her. While no one, possibly not even Katie herself, can adequately explain why seeing the dead body in this condition was so compelling, Katie says, “I wanted to see what was done to her.” Katie looked at the trauma to Destiny’s ear, her teeth, her mouth, her fingernails, and the barrette lodged in her skull. Although the funeral director was reluctant to show Katie the rest of the body, Katie insisted: “I don’t care what I’ll see, I have to know” (213). It took forty-five minutes for her to go over every inch of her child’s body. Katie also read the medical examiner’s autopsy report and had a meeting with him, reporting to Carroll Ellis of the Victim-Witness Unit that “she wanted . . . to know, step by agonizing step, exactly what had happened.” She also wanted to meet with the emergency room doctor to find out precisely where and when Destiny had died—in the basement, in the ambulance, or at the hospital (214, my italics). If we evoke the Roman notion of autopsy, which because of taboos against human dissection allowed observation only of the surface of the dead body, as well as the epistemological thrust of the procedure, it is clear that Katie is performing an autopsy on her dead child, and, oddly enough, a loving autopsy at that. Cutting into the body is not necessary to the act of performing an autopsy; in fact, cutting would only become linked to autopsy in the modern era with the rise of anatomy (ana+tome \). Note how often above, just in the few exemplary citations I have taken from Obsession, the verbs “to see” and “to know” are used. In the complete passage, there are over twenty instances of such verbs (207–15). At one point in describing the way Katie observed Destiny’s body, Ellis actually conjures up the etymology of “autopsy”: Katie was “seeing her child’s wounds with her own eyes” [auto+opsis] (212, my italics). To look upon the dead body in this way is to make a performance, to bring an event, or an observer-relative fact, into social constitution. And the autopsy Katie performs does come into existence by virtue of being performed. Moreover, by conforming to the “institutional fact” or delimiting definition of what constitutes an autopsy—the act of looking at the dead body to acquire knowledge—Katie is participating in a func-


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tion that has already been culturally assigned. This is why her desire to see Destiny’s body in such condition was so aberrant to everyone around her. Other people expected a more typical function with respect to the first encounter of a mother with her dead child—saying goodbye perhaps, or offering a prayer, but definitely not evoking an autopsy. But Katie’s behavior goes to the point that a function is itself performative, like the illocutionary statement of a speech act, in the sense that functions act in the same manner as nonlinguistic signs. The action of performing an autopsy is semiotic in the same way actions in a theatrical production are. And, by the fact of being performed, these actions constitute real cultural existence and significance. It must be quite clear, though, that what Katie is doing is very different from what the dead body is “doing.” The performance of autopsy undoubtedly has a different sort of real-world status than the child’s dead body. The dead body—Destiny’s body—is not constructed by anything other than itself. The violent beating and the manner of death are, of course, a constructed affair; but the internal bleeding and head and face injuries, even though understood through the model of Western medicine, are firmly positioned in the arena of intrinsic fact. It seems to me that death and the dead body are the best examples of the ontological theory of Realism. Recall that Realism does not claim to know why or how things are, just that there is a way that they are. Surely constructionists like Butler can concede without anxiety to the ontological imperative of the dead body, even though we must rely on cultural constructs—models—to explain it. In Peirce’s terms (his model), Destiny’s body is a dynamical object. What we can say about that dynamical object, or “do” about it with respect to the functions and semiotic constitution of culture, is something entirely different—the immediate object. And Katie’s performance of an autopsy—as told to Carroll Ellis, as told to John Douglas, as told to me as the reader of Obsession, as told to you in the pages of this book—constitutes the iteration of immediate objects. These immediate objects are not only indexical and descriptive of something, the locutionary aspect of speech acts, but they are essentially performative: “I describe an autopsy. I bring the text of autopsy into existence.” Nevertheless, none of the signs in this semiotic chain detracts from the dynamical object of Destiny’s body, even though by now Destiny’s body is long gone. Indeed, each level of sign, rather than retreating from the dynamical object, continues to point precisely to it. Katie’s desire to perform an autopsy is to live, to experience the dynamical object, the intrinsic facts of the body’s death.

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This perspective, I think, recognizes the unique “performativity” of the dead body (or any body) in a way that is different from cultural determinism, for it acknowledges the body’s waywardness, its form of “doing something” even when dead, indeed, its unique form of “willfulness” despite all efforts on the cultural and social side. In another example, the late Spalding Gray, in his monologue Gray’s Anatomy, offered a marvelous depiction of this willfulness of the body and what it is like to cope with it.4 (Indeed, this is the same willfulness Vivian Bearing must face in the Pulitzer Prize-winning play Wit by Margaret Edson.) I want to discuss Gray’s Anatomy here, even though, or perhaps because, a dead body does not appear in the performance, although it certainly does in the title! After all, like Ravenscroft’s The Anatomist, the piece is dealing with a live character. Nevertheless, regardless of how brilliant a pathologist may be, a problem lies in the fact that the dead body cannot “tell” us what it is like to be dead, to experience such waywardness of the body. The closest one may come to a conscious realization of the body’s willfulness is the type of medical problem, which Gray had, that exemplifies the intrinsic facticity of the flesh. Curiously, the monologue does depend on the tropological sense of autopsy, with the onstage performance suggesting some sort of biophysical anatomy lesson. The title of the performance clearly puns on the illustrated medical anatomy text of the same name belabored by all medical students. Indeed, the paper sleeve of the video production continues the anatomical reference by displaying a photograph of Gray superimposed onto the most famous of the early modern anatomical drawings, Leonardo da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man. This sleeve offers a crucial cultural fulcrum, for it acts as a contextual reminder of the Cartesian mind/body split, an alienation of the mind from the body still operative in the postmodern era, as Gray so eloquently demonstrated. Gray came face to face with this alienation and the demand by his body to pay attention to the body’s volition—the hey-you! factor of illness. But it is not only the Western arrogance of believing in the mind’s superiority over the body that propels the performance. Gray also had to come to think of himself in the terms of Western medical models, as anatomy. For Gray realized one day, when he couldn’t see out of his left eye, that he had a serious medical condition. In terms of what it goes into— the biophysical lesions in the body, cause of disease, diagnosis, and treatment—the piece could have been called “Gray’s Autopsy,” except that Gray was clearly too superstitious to tolerate such an immediate object and the dynamical object it would court! (And the pun on Gray’s Anatomy would have been lost). Nevertheless, at one point in the video (although


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not in the print version), he does deliberately raise the specter of a modern medical autopsy, describing his doctor’s explanation of what the pathology of his eye condition presents after death in the cadaver and the correlation to his symptoms: “Your vitriol gel has broken down and decomposed in your left eye and pulled away from the macula, which is the center of the retina and responsible for all detail in vision. . . . The breakdown of the vitriol gel is not uncommon. We find in most autopsies, the cadaver no longer has vitriol gel.” Apart from demonstrating a troubling bedside manner, these lines pose the paradoxical problem that the dead body, despite being uniquely positioned, cannot describe its position. Death may be the ultimate and best example of the body’s insubordination to cultural construction, but the dead body cannot explain, for instance, what sight would look like without vitriol gel. The dead body does not have a point of view. Interestingly, like Gray’s Anatomy, the novel The Anatomy Lesson by John David Morley (1995) offers an ingenious mediation of this problematic by lending the cadaver a point of view through the live spectators of Rembrandt’s The Anatomy Lecture. I discuss this novel in chapter 3. Keep in mind, as well, that the terms “anatomy” and “autopsy” are already bound together historically and etymologically. The Renaissance anatomist Vesalius and the surgeon Paré did not use the word “autopsy” in discussing their work, but preferred “anatomy” or “dissection” to describe the performance of cutting up the dead body whether for scientific or medicolegal purposes. At the time, “autopsy” simply meant “seeing with one’s own eyes.” Indeed, from the cover of the print version of Gray’s Anatomy, Gray seems to invoke this very gaze of autopsy, like a carnival pitchman inviting us, “Come and see with your own eyes.” Gray is shown holding a magnifying lens up to his left eye, which enlarges the eye enormously. By looking directly into the camera lens, he seems to make eye contact with the viewer, peering out at us while inviting us to peer back—right into the pathology of his monstrous eye. It would not be for another century after Vesalius and Paré that “autopsy” would come to bear the definition of dissecting the dead body with intent to learn cause of death. Concomitantly, up to the end of the nineteenth century, to undergo an anatomy meant nothing less than postmortem dissection. In this sense the title Gray’s Anatomy, whether hoping to circumvent fate or not, does end up indexing the dynamical object of the cadaver as much as the word “autopsy” does. In other words, what is important to grasp about the title of Gray’s monologue, which the two covers integrate, is the way it calls attention not just to the medical model

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of how the (live) body is biophysically constructed, but also to the performative function of “doing” an anato-autopsy on the (dead) body. Indeed, one of the things Gray fretted over was the “cutting up” he would eventually undergo: “How can I let someone cut into my eye with a knife, with a scalpel, cut into the window of my soul?” (19, my italics). But, of course, the act of “cutting up” does not take place until the very end of the monologue, the description of the actual eye surgery bearing the climax of the performance in both the theatrical and linguistic senses of the word “performance.” Before we get to that point, though, Gray must take us through the journey of coming to grips with the pathology of his left eye. The video production provides visuals of what the world looked like through Gray’s eyes. Through the right eye, the world looks usual—much the same as mine! Through the left eye, the vision is constricted to a pattern of fuzzy, colored lines. Right eye: usual. Left eye: blurry. The production values in these iconic scenes contrast the appearance of the world through eyes with and without some departure from what Gray considered his usual perspective. In fact, Gray’s left eye presented a vision of the world that was downright hallucinatory. On the one hand, a strict constructionist might say that these scenes simply confirm how the world is phenomenologically constructed to humans by humans “all the way down.” The world may look “usual” or it may look color-lined: Both are constructions of the “world.” I agree. But these visuals also demonstrate how the body, specifically, the eye in this case, propels the phenomenological perspective. Contrasting perspectives from the same individual suggest that something is going on with the intrinsic facts of the eyes. There are two eyes—yet the information they are providing to the brain is radically different, one from the other. Is there some property in the dynamical object(s) that can account for this difference in perspective of the world, a biophysical factor, to use the Western medical model? Yes. Gray had a “macular pucker” of the left retina. Gray dedicates the rest of the performance to two lines of enquiry: What is the cause of a macular pucker, and how is it treated, both of which represent the epistemological drive of the subject of Western culture. Yet the waywardness of the body plays against the desire to know. Gray’s doctor tells him that macular puckering of the eye is idiopathic. That is, there is no known cause. As Gray explains in the video, “Shit happens.” Autopsy may uncover the manifestations of macular puckering in the lesions of the eye, and may disclose it as cause of symptom, but the occasion of macular puckering in the live patient might as well be con-


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sidered random. In fact, better to think of it as random than as the result of the numerous “causes” Gray tortured himself with. Is it because of his mother’s suicide? Is it because of some sort of Oedipal fantasy? Is it because of the first-person narrative of his autobiographical novel? “It was too much, I, I, I, I, I . . . !” Or is it because there is something he doesn’t “want to see . . . ?” (10–11). Gray explores the possibility that the eye condition was caused by “error,” a tack suggested by his Christian Science upbringing. For most of the performance, he is concocting explanations out of what he recalls from Freud, narrative theory, and theology, each of which constitutes a way of culturally constructing the body. This frenzied pursuit of the “causes” of macular puckering represents, moreover, how much the mind is still alienated from the body in the West, a remnant of Cartesian dualism. Things of the mind are understood to actualize the body. Gray must come to terms with the strange idea that the body might actualize some things of its own regardless of the mind and, by extension, culture: Shit happens. Interestingly, it is medical science, as represented by Gray’s doctors, that acknowledges not only the volition of the body but also the limits of its own models. The other quest Gray was on, the pursuit of treatment, represents an all-out effort to avoid the Western medical solution of having surgery. He tried a number of alternative therapies, from diet to a Native American sweat lodge to Filipino psychic surgery (no cutting involved), but eventually came to terms with the Western model. The last section of the performance deals with the surgery itself, Gray’s memories of undergoing it, and, most interestingly, the description of how he watched it afterward on videotape, entitled by the surgeon “Swimming to Macular Pucker” (72).5 The recorded surgery, now magnificently magnified, takes on all the theatrical power Gray’s ingenious mind can come up with. A landscape of snow. A crab’s claw trailing gossamer threads, floating like cobwebs off a huge sun (73). The dramatic discourse of his description is wonderfully performative, constituting action onstage, which describes performances taking place offstage as action in the real world and action in the videotape world. All are constitutive of speech acts yet stacked according to degree of iteration, linguistic recursion, and connotation. The mind constructs the body according to the lens—the ultimate one here being literally a magnifying camera lens—of what is actually being performed on the body, the inscription of medical science according to its models of anatomy, diagnosis, and treatment. And Gray gets to watch it all with his own eye. As it turns out, the hyperbolic interpretation of the body (Gray’s lens) will be much more than just aesthetically pleasing compared to the

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body’s dialogic response. It represents hope. Gray is allowed his romantic vision of “Gray’s Anatomy” for two weeks, until the bandages come off. Blurry. The surgery didn’t work. Hands down, the body wins this one.

PERFORMING AN AUTOPSY Of course, Gray’s Anatomy deflects the taboos, performative or cultural, surrounding a live depiction of autopsy by circulating the image of the dead body through the title of the piece rather than the flesh. Perhaps it should not be surprising that a “real-live” performance of autopsy would be more readily available on videotape than in the (public) theater or even in the visual media. As I discuss in chapter 5, portrayals of autopsy on television shows such as CBS’s CSI (Crime Scene Investigation) and in films like The Silence of the Lambs never show the actual procedure—certainly not the cutting up. Relying almost exclusively on the notion of autopsy as a way of looking, these depictions attempt to sanitize the situation. All the audience gets to see is the dead body lying on a slab in the morgue, body draped, usually only the head showing. If we are lucky, we might be allowed a close-up shot of a “wound.” Even HBO and A&E seem reluctant to hurdle the contemporary prohibition against making a public spectacle of an actual autopsy on television. The marvel of videotape, though, means that one may indeed have the opportunity “to see with one’s own eyes” the performance of an autopsy in the privacy of one’s home. Bipolar Productions offers two videotapes of actual autopsies: Autopsy: Through the Eyes of Death’s Detectives—Voices of Death and Autopsy: Through the Eyes of Death’s Detectives—The Dark Side of Medicine (the videos arrive in a plain brown wrapper!). Of the two, The Dark Side offers a much more theatrical presentation. Funerary music, for instance, accompanies the dissection of the deceased, which occupies only about half of the fifty-minute video. The rest of the time is taken up with the highly polemical thrust of the narrative: Autopsies are a good thing. A multitude of pathologists, clergy, and people on the street speak to the significance, cultural context, and public perceptions of autopsy. Fascinating as the theatricality of this video is—votive candles softly backlight a priest giving the Catholic position on autopsy—I would like to concentrate on the other, less adorned, presentation, Voices of Death. As with the theatrical presentations of autopsy discussed earlier in this chapter, the highly dramatic Dark Side tends to distract from recognizing the performative in


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action. Because it tones down the theatrical aspect, Voices of Death empowers the performative of autopsy to become more conspicuous and compelling. And, because of the iterability of videotape, the performative can be more reliably analyzed in Voices of Death than in the real-life performance of the autopsy I witnessed, where I would have to rely too much on memory. Voices of Death opens with the body being taken from the morgue refrigerator and ends with it going back in. All fifty minutes are devoted to the autopsy procedure itself, from inspecting the body’s outer surface, to dissection and interior analysis, to stitching the cadaver closed. There is not one note of music. No votive candles. Only four people constitute the cast: Dr. Thomas T. Noguchi, retired Chief Medical Examiner for the Los Angeles County Coroner’s Office; a medical student; a technician; and, of course, the deceased patient. Very like Greenaway’s “The Autopsy Room,” Voices goes for an ultrareal stance of clinical detachment, epistemological inquiry, and scientific method. A polemical message has no place here. Despite the highly iconic temper of the video, Voices is still obviously cautious about what it is doing—showing the performance of an autopsy to the public. The cadaver’s genitals are discretely swathed, the nipples and face blurred out. The usual practice of autopsy—like the one I attended and describe in chapter 1—is completely indifferent to the sensibilities of witnesses. To be sure, on the one hand, Voices does certainly display all the performance devices—the functions of the performative—necessary for bringing a semiotic presentation into theatrical, however realistic, existence: It has not only a cast, but the readable signs of well-defined costumes and roles with appropriate dialogue and action. Bright blue rubber gloves make the hands of the autopsy team distinctly visible against the body. The television set forms the proscenium frame for a realistic set, a fourth-wall stage, and an Aristotelian, dramatic trajectory. The performance is live on tape; there are no second takes. As I mention above, “doing” an autopsy always constitutes performance as live action, never practice “in rehearsal.” Indeed, the video actually has a continuity glitch that exemplifies this point. Dr. Noguchi starts out wearing yellow gloves. Then suddenly he is wearing blue gloves. I suspect that the producers realized after starting to tape that the yellow gloves did not show up very well. But with this type of performance, they cannot go back for another take. On the other hand, Voices also has one less degree of iteration than the usual theatrical convention, than, for instance, Skipitares’s performance piece Under the Knife. While obviously mediated through the distancing

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and sanitizing effects of the camera and videotape (no cadaveric odor!), Voices nevertheless delivers the performance of the event, rather than the performance of a performance of the event, if I may. In fact, of the performances of autopsy I discuss in this chapter, the title page to the Fabrica is most like Voices (and its companion The Dark Side) in this aspect, for it too records in a visual format an actual anato-autopsy. Keeping in mind that the video is a mediated, semiotic production, the iconic nature of the performance nevertheless allows the viewer to see how much the performance of an autopsy constructs an event in social reality. What to do with the body once it has died? Western culture has a number of observer-relative ways of making the corpse tolerable, rescuing it from what Julia Kristeva calls “the abject.” (In Powers of Horror, the displaced corpse is her best example of the abject.) Situating the dead body in a proper place is essential: a funeral home, a laboratory, a morgue. Indeed, the corpse can be made briefly utile by assigning to it a range of scientific purposes, at least before it slides too far down the inevitable chute into waste. The dead body in Voices is just such a purposeful corpse, slated to undergo the sort of medical procedure that can be rationalized through Searle’s notion of a prior set of assignments, the epistemological and humanist project of anato-autopsy now worked out over its 500-year history. Put to a function, the dead body enters the realm of the immediate object, even as it is disappearing as a dynamical object, and therefore is capable of bearing, indeed must bear, the comprehension of language— the autopsy. The epistemological record demands that we find out what happened to the body. Which value test of survivability did it fail? Dr. Noguchi sees pus-like material on a lung, the tell-tale sign of infection. In this case, it was breathing, the purpose of the lungs being to provide oxygen to the blood, that failed. Cause of death? Pneumonia, according to the Western model of this disease. For the humanist record, how do we justify the epistemological imperative, the desire to know? Performing the autopsy may lead to better diagnosis and treatment of lung disease. At the very least, it functions in the construction of pedagogy. In fact, the construction of pedagogy is one of the most important observer-relative functions this particular corpse has been assigned, one definition of performance being communication (Pelias 109). Due to the presence of the medical student (and the viewer), Dr. Noguchi structures the procedure as the performative, “I am teaching.” Every word he utters, every gesture, every action is illocutionary, working to bring the teaching apparatus into social existence, rendering an achievement very much in


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the spirit of a Brechtian Lehrer-stück. The autopsy becomes a teaching game between Noguchi and the student, with the corpse acting as their game board. For instance, Noguchi shows the student the resected heart and asks the student to guess its weight. Throughout the autopsy, Noguchi relies on the indexical feature of speech acts, verbally pointing to every important thing he does: “Now, tip of knife goes into pulmonary artery,” “We make a survey like this,” “I’m removing tail of the pancreas.” Such statements are also locutionary in aspect, not only describing an action coming into social existence through the “doing” of autopsy, but striving to meet the felicity conditions set by Austin: The statements must make sense in a social situation to all persons involved—the medical student, the technician, and the viewer. It is very important to the construction of the pedagogy that the autopsy be understood—that is, learned— by the various viewers. And it is highly important that the autopsy and any “discovery” made during it be taken within the construction of the current scientific model and cultural context. This means that proper authority and circumstances must be assigned and recognized; in other words, the basic tenor of Austin’s second felicity condition must be functioning. Certainly, the video makes ultra real the appropriate setting: From the stainless steel table and the drip pans to the knives and saws, we are, no doubt at all, in an autopsy suite. (A bit disconcerting, though, is the soup ladle used to bail fluid out of the chest cavity.) The surgical gowns are color-coded according to who has been authorized to cut: Dr. Noguchi and the technician wear yellow, the student wears blue. The positions of the team clearly assign proper role and responsibility. The technician stands off to stage left, by the head. The student stands off to stage right, by the legs. Dr. Noguchi stands in between them, at the midsection of the cadaver. Even the viewer has been carefully stationed, placed on the side of the cadaver opposite the team, right at the fourth wall. Given the carefully orchestrated conditions and preassigned context of the autopsy, it really is no wonder that the authorities described in Obsession were taken aback at Katie’s demand to conduct an autopsy of her own on Destiny’s body. Authority is carefully defined in Voices and points directly to Dr. Noguchi as the agent of Western medicine. Everything about Noguchi, from his appearance and language to his position and actions, signifies the authority for performing the autopsy. Even the fact of his name and title—and he is the only one in the video with a name and title— empowers his authorship of this autopsy with all of the privileges and

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prerogatives of Western medical science. Indeed, the “doing” of cutting and looking that brings the autopsy into social existence is, at the same time, the way Western medicine authors the corpse as a utile, legible object. As he performs the autopsy, Noguchi performs language on the dead body, enscripting it with and by the models of Western medicine. Both what is read there (the lesions are called pneumonia) and the style of dissection—the making of a Y-shaped incision on the torso and resecting of masses of tissue according to organ classification—are done in conformity with the Western understanding of anatomy. Even the craft of cutting is specified by Western convention, as the epigraph to this chapter makes clear. Surgeons are taught to hold the scalpel like a violin bow and draw it firmly and swiftly across the body (Gawande 95). All of these functions of the performative are essential to turning the intrinsic flesh into the signified body, to borrow de Certeau’s distinction (145). In fact, the camera work itself may be analyzed as metadiscursive commentary on the performative, especially as to how the flesh, and indeed the entire event, come into the semiotic. Of course, the camera embodies the gaze of autopsy, the “seeing with one’s own eyes” offered to the video viewer. And it is a penetrating and unflinching “eye” at that— much more direct, I find, than my own gaze. At the autopsy I attended, I was able to control my perspective by finding a place to stand that made my view of the opened body somewhat oblique. No such opportunity exists with the video. In watching the video, or, more accurately, glancing at it, I have to turn my eyes away from the screen during the moments particularly disconcerting for me, at the incisions of the chest and head when the body loses its external coherence. The camera is, quite naturally, positioning the viewer for the best, unrestricted observation, most of the time at the cadaver’s knees, looking directly into the torso. But when the autopsy team incises the head, the camera moves right in for a close-up shot. And when the organs are moved over to the dissection table, the camera follows right along. Toward the end of the dissection, when the chest cavity is wide open and hollow and the scalp pulled down over the face like a mask, the camera sweeps over the arms and legs, which are the only part of the body left intact, as if to remind the viewer of the cadaver’s humanness. But, of course, the camera is still always mediating the scene, enacting a form of glancing of its own despite so uncompromising a gaze. As I mentioned above, the video sanitizes the performance and can never evoke the same sort of raw impact of actually being at an autopsy.


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Certainly, the viewer looks at the dead body through the lens not only of the camera, but also of the entire recording apparatus. There is a marvelously self-reflective moment in the video when this awareness is made crystal clear. One particular shot of Dr. Noguchi includes a television monitor situated over his right shoulder, which is showing a view of the cadaver. There are two cameras! For a brief instant the viewer sees two different points of view: One is the performance; the other is the mediated performance. The mediated performance works to reveal the body and the event as the semiotic complex of information the viewer has been watching all along. We have been given a backstage peek into the construction of the realm of iteration, the “real-life” body turned into the televisual body where the performative can be replayed over and over. And, of course, this metadiscursive commentary precisely signifies what always happens to the dead body during the performance of an autopsy, even one unmediated by the camera. It becomes the semiotic record of itself, the immediate of its dynamical object, the body of its flesh: indeed, the voices of death. “The Dead Do Speak”: So claims the headline on the video sleeve of Voices of Death. While the notion of the speaking dead is a fascinating metaphor I will thoroughly discuss in the next chapter, let me note here that the phrase raises the question of how much the dead body is thought to be “participating” in the performance of an autopsy. To some pathologists, the deceased patient is speaking, in a sense. Dr. Eugene Arnold in “Autopsy: the Final Diagnosis” most definitely sees himself as the recipient of perlocutionary statements made by the cadaver: Dr. Arnold “listens” to the dead patient (15). To other pathologists, the dead body constitutes an important member of the audience; the autopsy is done for him or her as much as for the live viewers. In this sense, the dead want “to see” a good performance from the pathologist. Certainly, the very least we can say is that the cadaver provides the most fundamental matter in bringing the autopsy into social existence, according to de Certeau’s sense of the “material which is both the support and the incarnation of the model” (145). Without the cadaver, there would be no performance of autopsy in the anatomical sense. While a “conversation” is not quite what is going on here in the usual sense of the word, there is undoubtedly a dialogic quality to the autopsy. The dead body is not passive. It wields more power in Western culture than just about anything else. Certainly, it is “doing” something, even if, as Descartes found out, it is just de-composing.

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NOW, YOU PERFORM ONE From The Pathology Guy Web site: You’re a primary care physician in the small town of Virtue, Kansas. But your strong pathology background has gotten you a job doing the rare forensic autopsy. You just autopsied Joe, a 21 year old college kid who dropped over dead while playing in the local rock band, and the cause of death isn’t obvious on “gross.” While you’re waiting for the toxicology report to come back, which would NOT make you suspect that he’s died of cocaine? A. B. C. D. E.

a little infarct in his heart, in the absence of coronary atherosclerosis a small carcinoma in the nasopharyngeal mucosa dilated, flabby heart myocarditis on microscopy single-fiber necrosis on microscopy.

Answer in note 6 to this chapter on page 158.

3

Autopsy and the Subject; or, What the Dead Saw

Everybody gets something out of every transaction. . . . Now: what do you get out of this transaction? —David Mamet, House of Games

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n the foreword to the English edition of The Order of Things, Foucault raises “[t]he problem of the subject” with respect to his archaeology of the human sciences and removal of the “great man” figure of science from history (xiii). But the problem of the subject, or perhaps better termed for my purposes “the problematic of the subject,” has continued to come up in a number of forms at least since Descartes and at no time more profoundly than in our own era of body criticism. How we theorize subjectivity and the subject has been the “world-knot” for Lacan, de Certeau, Kristeva, Z+iz=ek, Sartre, Laclau, Mouffe, Blanchot, Nealon, Butler, Phelan, the Webbs, and a host of others. My project in this chapter is to consider the problematic of the subject when faced with the dead body, particularly at the sensitive site of autopsy. I work through the chapter in three broad stages, interrogating at each stage the position(s) of the subject as well as the “position” of subjectivity: the medical gaze of autopsy, the “savage eye,” and the auto-autopsy of self-scrutiny. As I point out in chapter 1, when the performance of autopsy, whether medical or literary/cultural, is considered in terms of the Western academy, it seems to rely largely on the work of radically distinguishing subject from object in the service of humanist inquiry. One must regard the cadaver as a thing in order to “violate” it. Indeed, Dr. Atul Gawande in “Final Cut” compares the deceased patient at autopsy to an automobile with its hood up (95). Even the word “autopsy” authorizes the 71

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subject to look upon the object, where seeing with one’s own eyes deploys the sort of “penetrating gaze” that Foucault links to the medical eye. Certainly, the gaze of autopsy emerges in a number of sites in contemporary literature and culture as a spectatorial gaze generally associated with what Martin Jay terms a particularly brutal form of “Cartesian perspectivalism” (69). Several of Samuel Beckett’s dramas, for instance, align the audience with the visual representation of a “unique inquisitor,” who spends the play grilling dead characters (Play 158). As de Certeau points out in The Practice of Everyday Life, the split between the subject and object, certainly apparent by the seventeenth century in the West, was necessary for a positivist medical science to proceed (195). On the one hand, establishing a wall between the subject and object, the quick and the dead, was essential to schools of thought that gave rise to human dissection and patho-anatomy. The dead body had to become strictly classified as other, clearly objectified on some other side, helped along by alienating constructions of class and criminality. Rembrandt’s painting The Anatomy Lecture of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp (1632) is a good example of how an array of encodings can signal this subject/object division and convey its importance to epistemology, the most obvious in the painting being color code: The cadaver is grey, the live subjects are flesh-toned. But on the other hand, any built structure separating subject from object is a cultural construction, artificial and bound to be quite porous. This is because the ability to form a sense of both subjectivity and objectivity relies on a reciprocity occurring between subject and object. Steven Shaviro in The Cinematic Body describes this reciprocity as a “dialectic of mutual recognition, a dialogic relationship, or an interplay of gazes” (47). When the object is the dead body, this reciprocity becomes terribly affecting, especially noticeable in subjects who haven’t developed the Western, objective, “comfort zone” for death. For them, approaching the dead body can be a terrifying experience. The dead body not only participates in the construction of the subject (and the very idea of the subject), it makes the most extreme challenges to it, even when we try to diminish its power by fashioning those very (Western) categories of objectivity. Thinking about the problematic of the subject in terms of the dead body is further complicated by the slippery usage of the term in English as well as in other languages. In grammatical usage, the term “subject” is used to describe the doer of an action, the noun or noun clause of a sentence. In philosophical usage, the term “subject” is used to denote the mind or thinking part as differentiated from the object of thought. But


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very often in medical, social science, and political discourses the term “subject” is used to signify the object of an action, as in “the subject of the study.” At Bologna in the early modern period, for instance, the anatomy lesson began with the sentence, “Our subject for the anatomy lesson has been hanged” (in Sawday 75, my italics). One of the difficulties, then, in taking up the subject/object issue with respect to the dead body lies in simply trying to determine what writers intend by the terms. Another difficulty is, of course, that the two terms keep colliding with each other.

THE PROBLEMATIC OF THE OBJECT As a means of approaching the problematic of the subject with respect to my question of autopsy and the dead body, I begin with Foucault. I want to examine how he negotiates the subject/object dichotomy within a subjectless archaeology, especially with respect to his convergence in The Birth of the Clinic of autopsy, death, and lesion-based medicine. I situated my study by breaking down relevant passages in both The Order of Things and The Birth of the Clinic into two reciprocal subject/object categories: the first, all the ways I could determine that Foucault positions the subject; and the second, all the ways he positions the object. Initially, I came up with eleven items on my list for the subject, ranging from Foucault himself as the subject (contra there is no subject) to Death as the subject. For the object, I counted seven: from “man” as object of study to the dead body as spectacle. Of course, I am engaging in a highly artificial and distinctly Western practice by attempting to define and separate not only what I think Foucault intends to define and separate, but also whether such a separation is even possible. If Shaviro is right—that the subject and object are reciprocal, one implying the other, one unable to exist without the “presence” of the other—I have fallen into the structuralist trap of thinking of subject and object, like signified and signifier, as two separable and binary entities. Indeed, de Certeau in The Practice of Everyday Life renders the problematic of the subject in exactly this fashion—at least at first glance: The subject and object are distinguished along a clear-cut division. The subject has absolute power and knowledge over an absolutely passive object. De Certeau discusses this subject/object relationship mainly in terms of the body’s intextuation by the Law, which writes the penal and judicial codes on the body. To de Certeau, writing on the body has not only defined the flesh as an individual body (this brought the body into “view”

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as an object in much the same way the social sciences produced “man” to Foucault), but has also determined the social and body politic in a modernizing process that occurred between the fifteenth and eighteenth centuries, interestingly, during the rise of human anatomy. Like Foucault and Lacan, de Certeau associates the Law with language. But unlike them, his Law produces neither a speaking nor a split subject. Law enculturates the body by objectifying it as a text—a corpus—by working the tools of writing across it. Not surprisingly, one of his best examples is the harrow or writing machine of Kafka’s short story “The Penal Colony.” To the tools of the Law de Certeau adds the tools of medical science, which in their cutting, tearing, and attaching functions fabricate the body as much as does the Law. In fact, de Certeau gives to medicine the ability to go beyond the surface parchment to the body’s interior, adding or subtracting substance according to therapies of excess or lack. The notion of ventriloquism developed by drama theorists such as Bert O. States in The Pleasure of the Play would likely serve well as a theory for de Certeau’s model of subject/object relations at least in a medicolegal autopsy. Ventriloquism suggests that the character of drama serves as a mouthpiece for some authorial subject, whether ethical, narratological, or conventional (States 162). To de Certeau, the cadaver would read like the page the Law and medical science have already jointly written upon. And throughout all this, the body, even de Certeau’s own body, has no hint of agency or subjectivity, appearing as completely object: “My body will be no more than the graph that you write on it, a signifier that no one but you can decipher. But who are you, Law who transforms the body into your sign?” (140). This is a classic mind-body split rendered in the episteme of Cartesian modernity: The subject as ego or the subject as institution is not only perceived as completely separable from the object, but powerful enough to offer up the object to another subject’s will to knowledge. However, what of the imperative to the semiotic in the de Certeau quote above—not just a body, but a graph, a signifier, a sign? Here is the subject/object question refracted from a modern to a postmodern lens. The body does not yield up the knowledge of its secrets. Rather, cultural work “mak[es] the body tell the code” (148). And, curiously, at precisely this moment in de Certeau, we find one of several instances where he yields to a rupture in the subject/object binary, where the body is seen to tell us about some message, even though the candidacy of this semiotic subject is won through torture or coercion. Another instance is de Certeau’s invocation of the Lacanian Real—“the cry: it escapes, it escapes them,” “them” being the discourses of Law and medical science. But only at these


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extreme edges of the interminable inscriptions etched by the writing machine does de Certeau admit openly to the possibility of a postmodern lapse in the binary, to something like an explosion of the Real: “the body’s difference, alternately in-fans and ill-bred” (147–48). But what is so fascinating about these extreme edges in de Certeau is that they advance most clearly when he writes, albeit briefly, on death: “The point where relations with the meaningless are focused” (192). Initially, de Certeau views death as radically other, “the index of all alterity” (194). Death is the ultimate object of an “excluded element,” very like Kristeva’s abject, but one that can return in the disguise of language— exotic, foreign, proliferating language. Thus, in thinking about how this would apply to autopsy, the language of the dead body, inscribed on the dead body by the machinery of Law and medicine, would offer itself as a mediation for something de Certeau terms “unnamable”—death itself. As in Foucault’s discourse, death takes on a sort of subjectivity in order to define, through the medical procedure, the semiotic subject, and the dead body takes on a sort of fiduciary agency: In referring to capitalist progress, for instance, de Certeau claims it is “guaranteed by a testament that always has to be signed by a dead man” (197, my italics). No longer that well-defined object in a binary structure, de Certeau must concede that “Death is the problem of the subject” (192).1 In terms of Foucault’s work, realizing the concession de Certeau must make to death and its subjecthood helps explain why my subject/object lists, no sooner than transcribed, become unstable, and admitting to the binary trap helps explain how one list will start turning into the other. For instance, in The Order, Foucault describes “man” as the object of study which constitutes him as the subject—a living, working, speaking subject—which constitutes him as the object of study. As Gary Gutting points out, this “puzzling dual status” is what Foucault appreciates as the reality of a being “that is both an object in the world and an experiencing subject through which the world is constituted” (11). Interestingly, the object status of “man” as something in the world thus described by Gutting is another way of recognizing Foucault’s sense of an external reality, a perspective on the body critiqued by Judith Butler, which I cover in chapter 2. In The Clinic, Foucault situates the dead body as an object that, in forming a figure of finitude, defines the live body as an object through its own finitude. Yet the live body is also a subject since it gains some form of knowledge about its own dead body. The dead body is also a subject as Death anthropomorphized into “the great analyst,” enabling disease (as

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subject) to speak to the live body from the postmortem stage.2 On the one hand, the clinical and medical gazes are subject; in fact, the gaze becomes the authoritative subject postmortem.3 But on the other hand, Foucault also implies some sort of desiring subject—desire as one of the finitudes with respect to labor—that operates an epistemological gaze as an object. At the same time, though, in The Order, Foucault flatly rejects the “priority of the observing subject” (xiv) as a phenomenological illusion of origin and a dangerous phantasm of transcendental consciousness, what drama theorists would call an ideal spectator. Instead of two subject/object lists, what this exercise produced is some sort of contingent patterning of positions, with subject inevitably indexing, being replaced by, substituting for object—what one might geographically model as a fractal map. Infused with Derridian différance, this type of structure constitutes a symbol of the postmodern episteme which Foucault not only expresses in his work but, as a “great man” subject of theoretical and historical importance himself, has been instrumental in generating. The borders in Foucault’s work are generally much more porous that those he attributes to the early modern and classical (eighteenth-century) eras. The archaeology of modernity outlined in The Order, for example, is a well-articulated three-dimensional space, with three separate prongs representing 1) mathematics and the physical sciences, 2) the social sciences, and 3) the philosophies (346–47). In contrast to the social sciences, the physical sciences, including the life sciences such as medicine, do not study the object “man,” being more concerned with function than with ontology, even if their particular field is the exploration of human anatomy (352). In The Clinic, though (published some three years earlier than The Order), the prongs are rendered as quite fuzzy. Medicine as a life science of “man” is here described as participating in the archaeology as a fully involved philosophical discourse, because Death as a subject reassures “man” in his finitude of being, exorcizing death in the endlessly repeating language of science and the positivity of “man” as an object of knowledge (197–98). Medicine, and in particular the medical gaze which has looked on the dead body, acquires a fundamental, philosophical place according to Foucault, in no small part because it spearheads “the possibility for the individual of being both subject and object of his own knowledge” (197, my italics).4 I would suggest that this description in The Clinic represents more accurately than any in The Order the episteme of Foucault’s work and of his era. In Foucault, a constant negotiation occurs between subject and object: A stable position never seems to emerge whether subject or


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object is engaged as place marker, agent, force, means, operator, article, discipline, or institution. Like a fractal map, all positions are open to immediate and spontaneous slippage. This is the death of the modern construct “man” that Foucault anticipates. But what allows this negotiation to occur in Foucault’s discussions of Western medical science and anato-autopsy? After all, death is one of the two human constants (the other being taxes). Once a body crosses the bar there is no coming back. As I mentioned above, language generates a certain amount of slippage in the terms “subject” and “object,” to which Foucault is definitely subject. Further, Gilles Deleuze notes that Foucault tends to render the subject as “a set of variables,” rather than as one position. Even authorship becomes just another possible position(s) among many (55). There is also, in Foucault’s description of the advance of Western medicine and knowledge, a line between subject and object that becomes increasingly thinner. And, as Foucault nears the epistemic change to twentieth-century modernism, it becomes very thin indeed. For instance, in The Clinic Foucault defines the clinical gaze of the eighteenth century as a perceptual act sustained by the logic of its operations, a form of looking where observation coincides with inductive reasoning. Keeping in mind Foucault’s avoidance of the phenomenological subject, the clinical gaze functions as an extremely well-defined subject closely associated with the act of diagnosis of the living patient (la clinique). At death, “disease reached the end of its course,” for there were few means of distinguishing the signs of disease in the corpse from the signs of morbidity (141–42). To the clinical gaze, death is still an absolute point, an absolute absence, indeed, an absolute object. The turning point, to Foucault, arrives toward the end of the nineteenth century in the form of a medical gaze, which he associates with researchers like Marie François Xavier Bichat, a gaze that views death not as an absolute absence but as a “teeming presence” (142). With the advent of the medical gaze, death becomes multiple, progressing along a series of stages, a supremely thin separation between pathologic and cadaveric time, “join[ing], in dividing them, the series of symptoms and the series of lesions” (141). What made this advance possible in a practical way was the organization of the teaching hospitals, where bodies could be opened up and observed immediately postmortem—the crucial moment of autopsy. Two connections, then, must be seen to operate on the problematic of the subject with respect to the dead body in The Clinic: the particular gaze in question and the particular postmortem practice.

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In one of the most marvelous passages of The Clinic, appropriately entitled “Ouvrez Quelques Cadavres,” Foucault provides his own postmortem sketch correlating the “lesions” of the clinical gaze to pre-Bichat medical analysis. It is the discourse of autopsy presented at the archaeological register. Carefully avoiding any sort of observing subject, Foucault passes the torch of subject status from Life and the clinical gaze on to Death, which replaces symptom in the living body as the height of knowledge. The geometry of medical science is no longer classical, of the eighteenth century—one-dimensional and linear—but modernist, of the fin de siècle—two-dimensional and triangular—with death occupying the privileged point from which it is possible to “see and analyse organic dependences and pathological sequences”: life itself. Interestingly though, Foucault’s discourse in this passage proceeds to a three-dimensional and quasi-mythological metaphor, what Peggy Phelan has identified elsewhere in Foucault’s work as a “theological concept” (25). Outlining une trinité of life, disease, and death, Foucault places Death at the summit (le sommet) of a mountainous structure, Death figured as a sort of Moses standing in for the seer empowered to read meaning not only in the decomposition of analysis but also in the topography of the decomposing body, Foucault specifically asking us to ponder the word “décomposition.” But death also provides the topography for the medical gaze—“a great white eye that unties the knot of life” (144). The medical gaze and autopsy—working to the same purpose in the above passage—not only occupy that thinnest of lines now separating life and death, the living body and the dead, the subject and the object, but, I would argue, initiate it. For without the particular moment that Foucault calls to our attention, when “the last stage of pathologic time and the first stage of cadaveric time almost . . . collide” (141), the “teeming presence” of death would not, for all intents and purposes, exist. The clinical gaze with its well-articulated “absolutes” and its silence about the cadaver would have remained the operative model. However, subject and object imbricate in the precise moment when Bichat and his contemporaries were able to provide a conduit for the medical gaze at autopsy. Then, from Foucault’s own genealogical subject position, autopsy and the medical gaze are rendered as occupying and generating the proverbial postmodernist web through his mythopoesis of life, disease, and death. How do three things navigate a binary? This is what I found articulating itself in the form of a subject/object fractal map. In the paragraph that follows the above passage in The Clinic, Foucault does credit Bichat’s contribution to the development of the medical


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gaze at autopsy and the structures of medical thought to which it gives rise. The medical gaze enables a definition of life that is opposed to death. “[D]eath was the only possibility of giving life a positive truth” (145): Such is the way the dead body in Foucault’s discourse ends up with the ability to negotiate a certain claim, albeit a special one, on subjectivity.5 Foucault is able then to show in The Clinic how medical science goes on to straddle the border between the second and third prongs of the archaeology of fin de siècle modernism described in The Order, engaging in the discourse of philosophy and creating the positivity of “man.” Medical science is no longer limited as a classical, binary means to describe the living body as symptom or the dead body as anatomy (198). Interestingly, in order to make viable a subjectless archaeology, Foucault must grant the dead body a certain amount of negotiating “agency,” and in the passage discussed above, for example, he is clearly attempting this project. To Foucault, rather than an observer like Bichat, “Death is the great analyst” (144); death positions life in its positivity, even though Bichat is responsible for uncovering the chiasma. But what ultimately troubles Foucault’s subjectless enterprise is a Lacanian “broken discourse,” a parapraxis of death and the dead body anthropomorphized that permeates his argument. In attempting to avoid a phenomenological subject, Foucault returns like the repressed to a high-order, “theological” register of tropes—like the Moses figure—where death does much more than simply occupy the subject position(s) of an indeterminate stain—“a teeming presence”—generated by the medical gaze at autopsy. The dead body morphs into a speaking subject.

THE TALKING CADAVER While visuality is for the most part privileged in The Clinic, Foucault does regularly activate the speaking voice of the dead: “It is at death that disease and life speak their truth” (145, my italics). And at times he even combines sight with voice to create his greatest trope of death—“a speaking eye” (114).6 Interestingly, not just for Foucault but across the board— medical, humanities, and popular—the speaking subject is a common trope used in naming the metaphorical agency assigned to the dead body. In The Step Not Beyond, Maurice Blanchot draws attention to the linkage of speech and the voice with death (and writing with dying) (89) in Western culture, an ordering that, initially, seems counterintuitive. At the level of the popular, the notion of the speaking dead crops up all the time, from

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the documentary video Autopsy: Voices of Death to an article in The New York Times Magazine (2000) entitled “Dead Man Talking” (a pun on the mob expression “dead men don’t talk” and the movie title Dead Men Walking), which takes the reader on a tour of the “body farm” at the University of Tennessee. A most unusual research facility, the body farm exposes cadavers to a variety of postmortem situations and records the results, generating an invaluable database for forensic science. But what is intriguing for my discussion of the problematic of the subject is the notion in these examples of cadavers “talking.” In “Autopsy: The Final Diagnosis,” for instance, Dr. Arnold deploys two speaking subjects—the cadaver and himself as the essayist—who are linked as partners in the task of solving a problem: determining the cause of death (4). In fact, he places voice in two of the most privileged positions in an essay, the first sentence—“Let me speak frankly”—and the last word—“listen” (3, 15). In both cases, he is describing his subjectivity with respect to the dead body, “speak[ing] frankly” about the practice of autopsy and his role as one who “hears” the deceased patient. As Dr. Arnold makes plain, on the one hand the dead body really must be objectified in this situation, for the medical personnel have to overcome “[their] feelings about violation of the body of a dead person” (4, my italics). But on the other hand, as the word “person” evidences, the object maintains a problematic claim on subjectivity. Dr. Kenneth V. Iserson’s book Death to Dust clearly illustrates this paradoxical state by assigning to the cadaver a point of view: The first sentence of his book reads, “Being dead is a mutilating experience” (1). And even as Dr. Arnold describes in exquisite detail the Virchow procedure of human dissection, his tropology is always connecting the dead to voice, whether that voice is “silent,” “mute,” or struggling to “tell us,” “if we will only listen.” Part of the problematic of the subject, here, is that the cadaver, whatever it may have now, at one time had being and agency. It once was a “lived body.” In fact, the condition of “being dead,” as suggested by Dr. Iserson (“I’m Dead—Now What?” is the title of his second chapter), takes a form of experience or being. Blanchot points out that after death “the power of being continues to dominate. . . . ‘[B]eing dead’ is able to make the word ‘death’ take the attributive position” (93). Because we are reluctant, or perhaps powerless, to withdraw being and agency even from a dead person, being and agency are reassigned through a vocal tropology as compensation for the objectification of the “subject” as material for study, as “object” to violate. As de Certeau puts it, the need to possess death returns through the voice, rejecting the bar separating “two different pres-


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ences” (195). In these terms, the tension in the question of subject and object becomes especially acute at the site of autopsy, for at the precise moment Dr. Arnold begins the autopsy, dead men begin to “talk”—a terrifying “Tale from the Crypt-[space]” if taken literally. It would be tempting to explain this perceived response of the dead in terms of the sort of ventriloquism workable in de Certeau, where the pathologist would “listen” to a message that had already been sent by medical science and the Law. In this Butlerian model of social constructivism, the dead would actually have nothing to “say.” Western fabrication of the body would simply enable the pathologist to “hear” the language medical science has already assigned to human anato-autopsy. But ventriloquism does not quite work here. The dead body does indeed have its own messages, its own form of performance, as pathologists know so well. I would suggest that the tropology of hearing is standing in for the work of reading. The lesions or wounds in the cadaver are the signs of pathological events that the medical examiner reads rather than hears. Looking and reading are the operative functions—after all, seeing, not hearing, with one’s own eyes is the etymology of the word “autopsy.” In a similar fashion, while Foucault does link sight with language in The Clinic, the vocal metaphors emerge in his discourse partly because the signs of the dead body are not recognized as being of a particular sort— natural signs. (Recall that a subjectless project already commits Foucault to some form of “agency” of the dead.) The lesions or wounds of the dead body are rather treated as artificial signs, those used for “signaling purposes.” Instead, they should be treated as natural signs, and thus receivable while at the same time independent of a sender. The very existence of the natural sign is debated among semioticians, with the controversy resting on where the primacy of signification is perceived—the sender or the receiver. If one places the burden of meaning-generation on the receiver, natural signs can exist as a type of readable message separable from motivation or agency. Thus, Keir Elam defines the natural sign as being “determined by strictly physical laws whereby signifier and signified are bound in a direct cause-and-effect relationship” (20). The signifier may be a thundercloud, which is read as the signified “oncoming storm.” In this example, a message has doubtlessly been received, but without the necessity of a sender’s act. Artificial signs, on the other hand, are characterized by their reliance on the agency of a sender. Beneath the privileging of voice, Dr. Arnold’s discussion of autopsy is quite clearly about reading the cadaver, although I would caution that the cadaver does not have the same textual status as a book. Despite de

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Certeau’s compelling argument that the (live) body is indeed a text, authored most profoundly by the Law but also by scientific and medical discourses, what he terms “intextuation” of the body does not completely apply to the cadaver (140). The traces left by homicide or suicide may be recognized as etchings by a ventriloquist subject or ideological agency, but not the traces left by the body’s performative or dialogic response. The “authorship” of lesion in the body comes from the performance of the body itself. In other words, the lesions that ailment or trauma leave on the corpse are natural signs absent agency, constituting a physical link from the lesion (signifier) to the ailment or trauma (signified) that the live patient experienced. In fact, natural signs are what Dr. Arnold is reading rather than hearing, and all sorts of readerly language in his essay exposes the conceit of “listening”: graphic evidence and markers of disease are contained in the dead body; emotional states are indelibly etched on the face; information is deciphered; interpretations are made. The physical response has merely left its fingerprints. No act of motivation or agency on the part of a sender is necessary. The cadaver does indeed participate in the autopsy simply by providing (readable) perlocutionary statements. But, one may protest, cannot natural signs be sounds? Can we not listen to the sound of distant rumbling and understand the signified “oncoming storm”? Yes, of course. The difficulty with this counterexample is that dead bodies do not emit sound, or at least not the readable clues of pathology through sound. (Exploding gases in the gut do provide information about postmortem activity, but not premortem cause of death.) Postmortem examination is almost exclusively a visual act. In fact, one could argue that even the tactile aspects—palpating a lump indicative of tumor, for instance—are readerly, a sort of Braille signage of the body. So why has the metaphor of speaking and listening to the dead body taken the upper hand over reading? One way of understanding the curious phenomenon of the “talking cadaver” is through poststructuralist theories of linguistics, which have investigated language functions such as the performative, which I discuss in chapter 2, as well as the separability of la langue and la parole. As Deleuze and Guattari note in A Thousand Plateaus, performative theory has called into question the standard differentiation between language and speech, for if speech (act) is illocutionary, it cannot be understood simply as an idiosyncratic application of preformed syntax or signification (77–78). In other words, speech acts are not merely secondary to language, but have some sort of “energy” of their own. Similarly, Derrida claims that Western metaphysics has regularly privileged the function of


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speech over writing, because speech seems closer to a sense of presence, a sense of origin, or a sense of truth. While voice is seen as completely merged with and expressive of thought, and therefore closer to truth, writing, on the other hand, is understood to labor under the burden of absence—an absent author, an absent motivated subject—and therefore must be disengaged from truth or an originary moment. Derrida argues, to the contrary, that speech has no more claim on presence than writing. The sign in all its manifestations is characterized by what he terms différance, the play of difference and deferral at its most fundamental level (see Of Grammatology 27–73). To Deleuze and Guattari as well as Derrida, origin and truth do not antecede language, whether language is in the form of la langue or la parole. Like these theorists, Foucault points to the problematic of origin in Western metaphysics, especially in his discussion of the finitudes toward the end of The Order. According to Foucault, the finitudes of Life, Labor, and Law show “man” his ending within the stream of the “already begun,” the already begun indicating the vastness into which he or she has been born and out of which he or she will die. Particularly pertinent for my discussion is the finitude of Life—that is, Death—which Foucault describes as showing “man” his mode of being through the body. Nevertheless, the finitude indicated by the space of the body, as well as the desire of Labor and the progression of Law, is also profoundly other, “outlined in the paradoxical form of the endless” (314). Foucault’s project here is similar to Derrida’s: Both are critiquing the metaphysics of origin and presence. As Foucault puts it, “Modern thought, then, will contest even its own metaphysical impulses . . . the philosophy of life denounces metaphysics as a veil of illusion” (317). In terms of understanding the “talking cadaver,” these theories work well in demonstrating how easily we fall into the illusions of origin, truth, and the privileging of voice in Western metaphysics. But they offer little help in addressing the relations of subject to being-as-subject in terms of the speech acts negotiated by live bodies in the discourse of everyday life. We don’t usually experience living others in the world as writing, even though, as de Certeau claims, the body may be intextuated. We experience living others in the world more often as talking, no matter how riddled with la langue la parole may be. And talking is always entangled with the variables of body, liveness, and agency, or the concept of the lived body. If one variable—liveness, say—drops out of the equation, the other two seem to “remain.” Indeed, recall Iserson’s chapter title, “I’m Dead—Now What?” Jeffrey Nealon in Alterity Politics suggests

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that, today, dialogic intersubjectivity has replaced the monadic subject of modernism; voice and the voices of others constitute social space (33). If he is right, the trope of listening to once-lived bodies rather than reading them would seem only “natural” in the postmodern era. And so, this is why the speaking subject in Foucault’s discourse of death still implies the presence of presence and the nearest availability of truth, what he describes in The Clinic as “the truth at the dark centre of things” (xiii). The talking cadaver, even to Foucault, brings us closer to the illusion of presence of a speaking subject and back to the desire to imbue the dead body with agency, even though liveness has disappeared. In fact, one could go so far as to say that Foucault tries to give up his own agency as a subjectless subject in favor of the cadaver’s, becoming, in Dr. Arnold’s words, simply the body’s “translator.”7

“THE SAVAGE EYE” Nevertheless, the “talking cadaver” as a problematic of the subject has been negotiated in a number of fascinating settings, ranging from venues as disparate as Samuel Beckett’s plays to the O. J. Simpson murder trial of 1995. Oddly enough, what these examples share in common is the introduction of mediation, where the dead body and the live one are separated by some sort of constructed framing device like the television set or apparatus of the theater stage. Thus, the deployment of an intervening “spectator,” a third-party negotiator, if you will, introduces a number of metadiscursive twists that, perhaps surprisingly, end up enlightening the relationship of the live subject to the dead at the site of autopsy. If autopsy initiates a subject/object reciprocity signaled most clearly through the metaphor of the talking cadaver as Foucault’s project suggests, these works show how autopsy will also arrive at a deflection of the dead and a viable subject position for the living. One of the major ways of theorizing the relation of a subject to an object has been through the idea of a spindling, voyeuristic gaze, much like the male gaze of classic feminist film theory. This sort of gaze delineates a distinct separation of the looking subject from the looked-at object, and thus empowers the subject to stare objectively at the object. Certainly, “autopsy” as a way of seeing with one’s own eyes lends itself readily to this sort of approach. As I discovered during the autopsy I attended, being able to don the Western demeanor of objectivity and deploy what Foucault calls a “penetrating gaze” seems a necessary prerequisite to dissecting human


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cadavers (see chapter 1 for a description of the autopsy). But the notion of a purely masterful, even mutilating, gaze, and the relations it would seem to beget with the object, has been rendered quite naive by a number of writers in the postmodern era. As Foucault’s discourse above demonstrates, it becomes simply impossible to divorce once and for all the subject from the object. Indeed, according to Deleuze, Foucault’s notion of the double (subject/object) is precisely an interiorization of the outside: “I do not encounter myself on the outside, I find the other in me” (98). Similarly to Blanchot’s notion of “conversion” in The Space of Literature, all things in the world are transmutable to the interior of the subject (139). The reciprocity of subject and object, and the role objectivity plays in constructing and vexing subjectivity, is caught superbly in JeanPaul Sartre’s Being and Nothingness, where positioning one’s self in the world is described as dependent on being-seen-by-the-other: “I grasp the Other’s look at the very center of my act as the solidification and alienation of my own possibilities” (352). In fact, Sartre goes so far as to name the subject/object positions involved as “being-as-subject” and “being-asobject,” fortifying his claim that subjectivity is dependent on recognizing the subjecthood of the other. But, we might wonder, in these theories that depend so much on a reciprocal relation of the subject to the object, what happens when the other is dead? What happens when the other’s look is fixed and staring? What happens when being seen is being-seen-by-something that is starting to disappear? This is precisely the power of horror explored by Samuel Beckett in his last play What Where, and is especially pronounced in the television version taped in 1985. During the taping of the play, Beckett referred to television as “the savage eye” (quoted in Fehsenfeld 239–40), but it is not clear if he meant the probing eye of the camera and its spectatorial gaze or the backlit glare of the television screen. Both may be considered “savage.” Certainly, the television viewer of What Where is aligned with the masterful, penetrating eye of the camera, which allows him or her to see what most critics agree is the animated space of the grave represented by the television set. In What Where, the television viewer watches a scene wherein a sort of in-quest, to borrow a term from Ihab Hassan, is performed on the four death masks of the corpse of Bam. Significantly, the play is engaged in a never-ending round of unanswerable questions— what? and where?—and the subsequent torture of the cadaver in the hope of forcing a confession, a clear evocation of the “talking cadaver.” In fact, the theater version of What Where represents Bam as a megaphone, as if the dead person is nothing but a voice from the grave.

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Is What Where a site of autopsy? I would certainly argue so, and moreover, an autopsy essentially in the medico-scientific mode of Dr. Arnold’s tradition. The corpse of Bam is (figuratively) dissected by an interrogative gaze in the project of epistemological enquiry—the classic definition of “autopsy.” Commentators on Beckett’s work such as Enoch Brater, Herbert Blau, and Kathleen O’Gorman have studied the functions of looking in his plays and films—the camera lens, the eyes, the gaze. In an article on Film, for instance, Brater connects the camera with epistemology in what he terms “the thinking eye” (170). More directly, perhaps, sites of autopsy as a literary or artistic trope, in which an epistemological paradigm regarding the dead body is invoked, occur several times in Beckett’s drama. In Play a cruel spotlight interrogates three dead figures trapped in funerary urns (158), while in Krapp’s Last Tape the lamp that hangs over Krapp’s table provides the light in which he performs his “old P.M.s [postmortems]” (58). Surprisingly, it is exactly the ambiguity of “the savage eye” in Beckett’s postmortem plays that ends up deconstructing the subject as master of a mastering gaze. In What Where, a certain savagery also emanates from the glare of the television set illuminating the death masks of Bam that cannot help but trouble the viewer’s point of view. Like Foucault’s “great white eye” of death, the dead bodies in What Where carry the trope of agency, an anthropomorphized Death as the finitude, or interrogator, of Life. And yet the death masks, floating in the television screen, coming and going in the void of the grave, are also fading away until at the end of the play they just disappear—“I switch off ” (316). What makes Beckett’s play so disturbing to the viewer’s subjectivity is the impression that the dead body not only bears a “savage eye” of its own, but also foregrounds the blinding exposure of self-scrutiny, a topic I will return to shortly—Bam is a postmodern memento mori. Thus in this play, the gaze of autopsy cannot be cast as simply voyeuristic and unidirectional. It also reciprocates self-knowing through the circulation of the object, Sartre’s being-as-subject. The 1989 Barbie Fetish series by artist Maggie Robbins illustrates a similar sort of “savage eye” in the object, but this time from a doll’s perspective. In an act that must have required a great deal of detachment, Robbins drove nails and pins into the lifeless body of a Barbie doll. She admits that “[p]utting the nails into Barbie’s face, into her eyes, was really, really hard to do” (in Lord 263). As a profoundly significant cultural Imaginary, Barbie not only returns subjectivity to millions of girls, but supports subjectivity through ideological identification. That the doll

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course, the turmoil produced in the viewer’s subjectivity by being-seenby-this-dead-other has already been greatly curtailed by the play’s own artifice—its semiotics, theatricality, status as drama. Even without something as obvious as a television screen, the theater audience knows that these figures are not really the dead, but a representation of the dead. In a strange twist, though, it is ultimately the performance of autopsy itself that will provide the most effective way for the audience to navigate such a vexing subject/object reciprocity. The penetrating gaze of autopsy in Play is, of course, the spectatorial gaze of the spotlight with which the audience is aligned. Like the camera eye in What Where, the spotlight has the function of making an epistemological enquiry into the three dead figures, of prompting answers to some unspoken question. And, like Dr. Arnold, the spotlight as an examiner confers on the bodies a certain metaphorical agency. Induced “to speak” from the grave, the cadavers in Play begin to fill up the crypt-space with language, which in its unending repetitions will eventually stand in for the dead themselves. This is how it works: As in What Where, the dead bodies in Play are in the process of decay and disappearance. The decomposition of their faces indicates that death occurred some time ago. Yet the play itself is also in the process of disintegration. When Play is performed, it runs through its text more than once. In the closing repeat, however, the text is slightly shorter (the opening “chord” is omitted), an effect that suggests the play is not only starting over a third-plus time but is also infinitely diminishing. Its structure describes the synchronous infinity of a spiral, rotations through unending repetitions that nevertheless become ever so slightly curtailed (Blackman 97)—a spiral-bound infinity. Such a pattern is discernable in a number of Beckett’s plays, perhaps most notably in Happy Days. Here, Winnie is buried in the first act to her waist in a mound of dirt, then in the second act to her neck, a progression that suggests she will come close to disappearing, but never fully. In fact, is the mouth of Not I Winnie in some later act? Each time Play reproduces itself, the interrogative spotlight prods another round of narrative, another round of language. As in a medical autopsy, the play calls upon language to record or proxy for the dead body as the dead body slowly, inexorably disintegrates toward nothing. The act of epistemological enquiry, which compels the figures “to speak,” has the effect of deflecting the intolerable emptiness of the dead into language, thus circumventing their ultimate disappearance. The calculus of Play intimates that the limit of emptiness will never be achieved, because the body in its process of disappearance reappears in the memo-


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rialization of language—the autopsy itself. And the language of autopsy, in filling up the space of Play, acts as a mediation between the subject and de Certeau’s “unnamable.” Thus, the gaze of autopsy in Play does indeed provide the subject with a way of positioning him- or herself to the three cadavers that evades their “savage eye”—the subject is positioned to language. In fact, de Certeau’s discussion of the “ruin” in Montaigne’s writing applies to the point here: A dissemination occurs so that an intermediator might find a place, or as the case may be, the autopsy as outré-mediator (Heterologies 78). Perhaps surprisingly, given its absence of philosophical intention, the O. J. Simpson televised murder trial of 1995 extends the notion achieved in Play that autopsy itself provides a mediating position for the (viewer) subject. Moreover, the coroner’s testimony in the trial also works to confound the illusion of presence, truth, and the sort of speaking subjecthood attributed to the “talking cadaver.” Because the trial was broadcast to a huge international audience, any discussion of the televised event must take into account its positioning in the media culture. In fact, my interest in the example of the Simpson trial does not lie so much in the actual autopsy of the murder victims, but rather in how the autopsy was presented to the subject—the jury and, especially, the television audience. Indeed, the way the autopsy evidence was presented during the trial was fascinating in its own right as a “scene of autopsy.” Judge Ito did not allow journalists to broadcast or print the autopsy photographs, a decision that reflects how easily autopsy can be made a public spectacle, which it once was, and the taboos that surround our modern practice. The media, of course, wanted ratings no matter how grotesque the material. But television viewers were also eager to see the autopsy photographs, a demandside economics that speaks to the subject’s strange fascination with the dead and mutilated body and a rather unsavory desire to see it with our own eyes. What the television viewer was offered instead was the opportunity to align a spectatorial gaze with the gaze of the coroner. If Dr. Lakshmanan, the Chief Medical Examiner of the Los Angeles County Coroner’s Office, was able to see the Brown and Goldman bodies with his own eyes, the television viewers were given a vicarious experience. Like the viewers of What Where, they found themselves looking down the sight line of the camera’s eye, but in a way that had been circuitously deflected through Dr. Lakshmanan. What substituted for the appearance of the Brown and Goldman autopsies was the language of the coroner—his descriptions, diagrams, the text of his testimony.

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Dr. Lakshmanan’s testimony offered the public what is today a rare opportunity to see the inside of a medical examiner’s office, a place that is off-limits except to “authorized personnel.” As he informed the court, the main purpose of the coroner’s office is to establish, first, cause of death, and second, manner of death: homicide, suicide, accidental, or natural. Further, from the various procedures conducted, the medical examiner may also read the natural signs of the body to determine additional information about time of death, weapon, fatal wound, degree of suffering, and so on. To orient the jury (and the television audience), Dr. Lakshmanan began his testimony by providing a descriptive and photographic tour of the office and its practices. We were shown the racks and pans used for holding victims’ clothing and blood; measurement scales for body size and organ weight; the photography and X-ray areas; the cryptspace for body storage, the gurneys and the autopsy stations; and countless forms and diagrams used to record findings. The one thing we were not shown was a dead body. In this light the photographs of the autopsy stations, crypt-space, and so on that the television viewers were shown become particularly intriguing. Not only are the Brown and Goldman bodies missing, but all the bodies are missing. Of course, these scenes were obviously staged. As Dr. Lakshmanan told the court, the Coroner’s Office was deliberately cleared of cadavers before the photographs were taken. Such an action suggests that the taboo against making a spectacle of the Brown and Goldman autopsies was now extended to every body, and that language—whether as text or image—would substitute for all the dead. The viewers would hear what Dr. Lakshmanan saw, but they would not get to see for themselves. As illustrated in Play, the way language in the Simpson trial—the text, the photographs, the testimony—substituted for the dead body does represent accurately what happens in an autopsy. Once the body has died, it begins its process of decay and eventual disappearance, its return, as Blanchot puts it, to the “entropic equality of the universe” (95). The only practical way to subvert this process is to record the body in some way, to memorialize it in language, diagram, description, and, in the BrownGoldman case, in testimony. After all, a text lasts a lot longer than flesh. The autopsy reports of Brown and Goldman will be available long after their bodies have disappeared. But it is also true that if the body is made to turn into a volume of readable signs, the same signs also help deflect the fact of the body’s disappearance. While Dr. Lakshmanan may provide the viewer with a way of vicariously looking at the autopsied bodies, his


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testimony also stands between the living and the dead. Indeed, not just the television apparatus but the entire court, including Judge Ito’s ruling against showing the autopsy photographs on television, most clearly functions as a form of mediation. Having mediation enter the dialogue configures a somewhat different relation of the subject to the object than what we see, for example, in Dr. Arnold’s discourse. Dr. Lakshmanan is positioned as a vicarious subject to the television viewer as subject, and oriented toward the dead body as object. The television viewer is oriented toward Dr. Lakshmanan, thus rendering the dead body for the television viewer once-removed as object, neatly deflected “offstage.” Here, Dr. Lakshmanan can be seen as literally “speaking” for the dead—not as a translator, however, but as a negotiator. As the embodiment of the medical gaze of autopsy, he occupies and initiates the thin line between life and death that Foucault identifies in The Clinic. And yet he also deals with the problematic of agency that Foucault launched with his subjectless archaeology. Dr. Lakshmanan becomes the voice Foucault confers metaphorically on death—a “speaking eye.” Thus, in the trial the issue of “talking,” operating in Foucault’s and Dr. Arnold’s discourses, transferred from the dead body to a live subject. The agency Dr. Lakshmanan enjoyed as a subject in his own right, as well as the subject/being-as-subject configuration he possessed with respect to the television viewer, empowers an absorption and deflection of the assignment of agency to the cadaver. Interestingly, Beckett’s Play also manages a renegotiation of the talking cadaver, and achieves it precisely because the cadavers do actually speak in the play (as well as in What Where). Beckett handles the trope of the talking cadaver in a really fascinating way, for the cadaver ends up disappearing to leave nothing behind but talking—the “talking ___ .” As discussed above, in the process of rotating through its infinite diminishments, the crypt-space of Play fills up with language, which finally stands in for the dead themselves. As the play proceeds, we’re left with less and less of the body and more and more of the talking, the language of the play absent the corpse(s). Body and liveness have dropped out to leave just talking as the remains: no “talking cadaver,” just “talking.” But where does agency for the talking reside? Clearly, no longer with the dead bodies. Agency, in fact, has been transferred from the corpse to the corpus of the play—a “talking corpus,” if you will—to the language, to the text, to the writer. To chase down this line of reasoning further, we might even say that “talking” exists in the corpus as the written text, with agency deflected “offstage” to a live (writing) subject.

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In either of the two examples—the testimony or the play—the dead body, whether literally or implicitly, is made to disappear, thus ensuring that deadness disappears, indeed, disappearance disappears. The (viewing) subject can therefore approach the dead body more comfortably, because the dead body is (or becomes) absent. The consequences of mediation, then, suggest that it is possible to overcome the trope of the speaking dead, and thereby to reduce the challenge the dead body makes to the subjectivity of the viewer. In other words, the subject, while being aligned with the spectatorial gaze of autopsy, is enabled to look obliquely at the dead, to gaze upon the dead body without really looking, a privileged position that does not entangle subjectivity to the degree Dr. Arnold describes in his work. Yet I would argue that this notion of looking obliquely at the dead is itself crucial to an understanding of autopsy, whether in the morgue or in a literary or performative scene. In fact, if we return to the “originary” performative scene of the coroner’s testimony—the photographs taken of the autopsy suite—the absence of the cadavers suggests that someone, perhaps Dr. Lakshmanan himself, understood how the dead can indeed operate a “savage eye” and how important it is to figure out a way to tone down their glare. He simply removed the bodies. Surely it is easier for the viewer to position himor herself to an empty gurney than to the empty eyes of the dead. In fact, the prohibition against seeing any cadavers during the televised trial was not only a way to mediate between the living and the dead, but also a way to offer the living a viable subject position. By enabling an oblique look, viewers positioned themselves not to the object at all, but to the form of autopsy as mediation—here, rendered by Dr. Lakshmanan, the court, all the signs and language, descriptions, diagrams, and testimony.

“I HEARD A FLY BUZZ—WHEN I DIED—” I have been demonstrating that autopsy designates a site capable of profoundly raising the problematic of the subject. Autopsy not only initiates a renegotiation of subject/object positions, but also offers to mediate the dead body as a “being-as-subject” tolerable to the subject. Nevertheless, I want to complicate further this discussion by showing that the position of subject is exposed to the possibility of self-scrutiny coming from the autopsy itself. Autopsy is not only a way of mediating the dead body and its savage glare, which is subjectively tolerable, but is also a way of looking at one’s own self, which is less tolerable—the subject as subject of


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death, much like the memento mori death’s head of Bam in What Where. However, as I mention in chapter 1 regarding my own subjective response to the cadaver at the autopsy I attended, this self-scrutiny no longer seems to reside in the medieval or early modern insight into one’s earthly vanity. From my own postmodern subject position, the dissected cadaver seemed to signal a scandal of the body, the body fragmenting to its (originary) incoherent and inchoate state, a realization that reflected back on my sense of subjectivity. This experience seems to be similar to one described in John David Morley’s 1995 novel The Anatomy Lesson (no relation to Goldberg’s novel), in which a young man attends the autopsy of his brother. Set up as a situation bound to have an extraordinary impact on the subject, the scene of autopsy in this novel describes the fragmentation of the body into parts—the heart, the lungs, etc. Even though the subject is fascinated by his brother’s excised tongue, there is no “talking cadaver” here. Rather, the body is explicitly demonstrating how it gives up its “wholeness,” like an engineer’s drawing that explodes an object into parts upon “new strings of parts,” as Morley describes the body earlier in the novel (81). Of course, this sensibility of the body’s form is reminiscent of Lacan, and demonstrates how autopsy may unsettle and reorganize the subject not only in subject/object positions, but deep at the fissure of desire and self-knowledge. Indeed, I would posit that a significant site of autopsy exemplifying this claim may be excavated in the master’s work itself, precisely in the several pages of the Seminar that Lacan devotes to Holbein’s painting The Ambassadors. What captures Lacan here is the lesson of subjectivity to be found in the auto-topic field of the visible, especially provoked by the anamorphic figure, the memento mori, “flying in the foreground” of the painting. In the lifelike style of Renaissance portraiture, The Ambassadors figures two diplomats from France at the court of Henry VIII (Figure 3.2). Overflowing in symbols of earthly vanity, the painting, thanks largely to Lacan, is famous in the postmodern era for the enormous, distorted image of a skull situated between the two splendidly dressed gentlemen. Usually described as looking like a cuttlebone, the object is only recognizable as a skull when viewed from an extreme, left-side angle. According to Lacan, this refiguring occurs just at the moment when the viewer is about to head out of the room, and, turning, glances back at the painting. To produce anamorphosis—the distortion of an object along a rational perspective—in The Ambassadors, Holbein has used the available


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In Holbein’s time, as well as our own, the object in the painting is usually understood as a death’s head, a memento mori symbolizing human mortality in contradistinction to the emblems of earthly vanity pervading the rest of the painting. But like the skeleton in the title page to Vesalius’s Fabrica, the object also represents a turning point in modern epistemology: the emergence not only of visual perspective in the arts and the ability to skew it, but also of the Vesalian practices of anatomy, indeed, the new science of human dissection. The painting is very much a celebration of the arts, humanities, and sciences, symbolized by the globe and arithmetic book, with the skull representative of medical explorations being made beneath the surface of the human body. To Lacan, though, what is immensely important about The Ambassadors is the way in which it enfolds an emerging geometral optics within the onset of the Cartesian subject. Exemplifying his unique brand of phenomenology, the painting expresses to Lacan how the viewer is reduced to a punctiform by spatial geometry, and how the subject is therefore caught in the field of the visible precisely at the moment of the subject’s annihilation. The object, which lies there to be seen, is symbolic of the subject’s nothingness—so to know the object is to know the subject’s disappearance at point zero. To Lacan, the painting demonstrates how the annihilation of the Cartesian subject occurs exactly at the historical moment of its emergence and exactly by the logic of its visual, geometrical episteme. But Lacan also reads the object in the painting as a phallic ghost. In one of the most daringly idiosyncratic passages of the Seminar, Lacan asks: “How is it that nobody has ever thought of connecting this with . . . the effect of an erection? Imagine a tattoo traced on the sexual organ ad hoc in the state of repose and assuming its, if I may say so, developed form in another state” (87–88). Anamorphic distortion reminds Lacan of a number of engorged phallic images—Salvador Dali’s soft watches, for instance (88). In the Lacanian algebra, the phallic ghost is the ultimate placeholder of annihilation, lack, or, indeed, as Bowie puts it, “cancelled manhood” (173), the objet a which centers and organizes desire through the fundamental drives (89). What does it mean to have the phallic ghost and the skull wrapped up together in the field of the visible in Holbein’s painting? It means that Lacan is then able to associate the gaze of the subject and his or her annihilation marked by the skull with the objet a of the phallic ghost, and therefore exemplify how the gaze takes over as the objet a of the phallic ghost in the visible field. Because Lacan sees the geometral plane of the painting as a trap for the gaze of the viewer, what emerges “on the

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basis of vision [is] not the phallic symbol, the anamorphic ghost, but the gaze as such, in its pulsatile, dazzling, and spread out function” (89). What emerges is the engorged gaze of desire. In other words, the distorted object represents the objet a of the gaze in the field of the visible by a detour through the phallic ghost. This is why, to Lacan, its significance is only available in an oblique look, a sideways glimpse of the painting as one is going out of the room. The very nature of Lacanian phenomenology denies the Cartesian availability of an empirical look, an empirical understanding, or an empirical knowledge—the notion of autopsy as a spindling, masterful gaze. Knowledge may only arrive in the form of a glimpse, an epiphany of insight (Oh, that’s a skull!), and then a falling of subjectivity. But what if we take anamorphosis as catching Lacan (or its Lacanian spectator) not only in the gaze, but in a Freudian slip? I recall an old joke about a professor and his biology class. The professor asks the students which part of the human body can expand to three times its size when stimulated. Fortunately, no one is daring enough to hazard a guess, for the answer is “the pupil of the eye.” To this end, we could ask Lacan: “How is it that nobody has ever thought of connecting this with . . . the effect of [a dilation]? Imagine [an image] traced on the [pupil of the eye] ad hoc in the state of repose and assuming its, if [we] may say so, developed form in another state.” Indeed, if we are looking at something representative of the gaze, the hollow sockets of the skull, which are clearly recognizable holes in the anamorphic image, are just as plainly symbolic of the subject’s annihilation as is castration, a lack in the field of the visible represented by the perforated eye. The subject sees what is not there, even if it is (not) the phallic ghost. Given this line of reasoning, I would wonder what Lacan wants to see in Holbein’s painting: “Holbein has the cheek to show me my own soft watch” (90).8 But what does Lacan actually get to see? I suggest he sees the hollowed bone of Holbein’s face. I do, indeed, intend a pun—“Holbein” means hollow bone. What if we take the object in the painting as an icon rather than as a symbol? Instead of representing human frailty in the figure of the death’s head, in this case the object would simply refer to some “offstage” skull. Indeed, Holbein has a painting of two skulls reposing in a wall niche, rather literally entitled Two Skulls in a Window Niche.9 Like all parts of human anatomy, knowledge of the skeletal structure of the head was absolutely essential to the lifelike portraiture of the Renaissance. Indeed, contemporaneous art theorists caught on to the importance of human dissection


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long before the academy of physicians did. Alberti, for instance, in his scholarly treatises of the fifteenth century—De pictura and De statua— argues for the necessity of drawing the underlying skeleton and musculature before filling in the flesh (in Schultz 30). And there are numerous examples of artists who practiced this methodology. Allessandro Allori, in Three Leg Studies (c. 1575), figures first a leg as bone, then with muscle applied, and finally fully fleshed. And of course, da Vinci did a number of sketches of the skeleton, including the skull, which recorded dissections he had performed himself (Vasari in Schultz 67). Perhaps the skull in The Ambassadors even refers to Holbein himself, represented as the rebus of a hollow bone. Is the object flying in the foreground actually the shadowy self-reflected painter, thrown as a distorted projection across the skin of the canvas? Inserting a self-reflection into a painting was not an uncommon practice in the art of the period. In The Arnolfini Marriage (1434), Jan van Eyck painted his own face into the mirror as an eyewitness signature. And surely in the age of photography we have seen pictures in which the photographer’s image appears as a shadow in the foreground of an arrangement of squinting subjects. If it is analyzed iconically, The Ambassadors may be seen as offering not two portraits and a memento mori, not two men and a phallic ghost, but two bodies and a flayed and dissected self-image. Interestingly, Shaviro uses the example of the cadaver as a simile for the object’s failure to vanish, left as a trace “like a cadaver” in the image (17). In the case of The Ambassadors, I would rewrite Shaviro slightly to indicate how the painting offers the image of a cadaver (or in this case, the skull) as the trace of the subject and the subject’s failure to vanish. Jeremy Bentham’s auto-icon, which is a waxworks formed over his skeleton, is another world-class example (see chapter 1 for a description). As with the audience of What Where, the viewers of The Ambassadors are looking at an in-quest: Holbein’s selfreflected image, his skull, indeed, one might claim, his “auto-autopsy.”10 Holbein is the author of his (own) death’s head.11 Of course, the notion of a real-life performance of an auto-autopsy buckles in on its own paradoxical weight, for, literally speaking, no one (not even a Renaissance painter) can dissect his or her own body and survive. Perhaps Richard Selzer, surgeon and author of Mortal Lessons, is right in claiming that the interior of our own bodies is strictly taboo: “To how many men is it given to look upon their own spleens, their hearts, and live?” (24, 25). And perhaps Jonathan Sawday in The Body Emblazoned is also right in claiming that what makes the interior of other bodies so compelling is the impossibility of looking into (and knowing) our own.

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The interior of the body has always been most private, forbidden to our own eyes (8, 14). Even today, when we are empowered to look into our interior space through X-rays and computer imaging, the look is inevitably oblique, mediating the body through some form of representation. And yet, is the moment when the interior of the dead body suddenly made available to inspection by a subject also the moment when the West discovered, as Sawday inquires, both a sense of inside and a sense of outside (15), a private individual and a public “self,” interiority as the legacy of modernity? As Phelan claims, the new art of realistic perspective in the Renaissance may be interpreted as a response just to the rising sense of interiority, certainly by the time painting was conveying lifelike bodies (30). Is the desire to read knowledge of the interior body in the early modern period what will become, down through the mechanical and composite epistemologies of the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries, a contemporary post-Freudian confrontation with our own subjectivity? Does the Cartesian spectacular eventually become the Lacanian specular? This may be the case in the glass eye scene of Invisible Man. After removing his glass eye, Brother Jack is described as having “disemboweled himself,” a figurative explanation for the retention of power by the “dead” eye, which is “staring fixedly at [invisible man] as from the dark waters of a well.” What is shocking to invisible man is the sudden exposure of misrecognition in the exterior coherence of Brother Jack’s body, the body opened, even slightly, to the scandal of fragmentation and incoherence. Invisible man’s desire, like Foucault’s, to read Life in the “buttermilk white eye” of the dead eye in the glass may be representative of the subject’s desire to read a secret and unmasked subjectivity in the other, to know the subject in conversation with the object, to scrutinize ourselves through the circuitry of an auto-topic gaze, no matter how horrifying that scrutiny may be (Ellison 466). And in Morley’s The Anatomy Lesson, horrifying is probably the best way to describe the impulse behind brother Mort’s behest that his body be autopsied under the scrutiny of friends and family. Earlier, a visit to see Rembrandt’s The Anatomy Lecture at the Mauritshaus in The Hague revealed that Mort “identified with the corpse” (140). In fact, he wants to “see” his own dissected corpse through a perspective delegated to the eyes of his survivors, represented by the onlookers in the painting. From this punctiform point, he can project “seeing” the scandal of his own subjectivity exposed in the mirror of other (live) eyes. Of course, he won’t (and doesn’t) survive his own autopsy, but before the final


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approach of death, the painting provides him with the perspective of an auto-topic gaze, the self-scrutiny of autopsy. In the sense of self-scrutiny, then, the idea of an auto-topic gaze is not all that bizarre. “Auto-autopsy” would translate etymologically as “self-seeing with one’s own eyes,” an act that Lacan elsewhere in the Seminar proscribes as impossible, as merely an illusion of consciousness (82–83). And yet I have watched both Drs. Lakshmanan and Arnold trace the outline of autopsy on their own bodies while describing the placement of stab wounds on the Brown and Goldman bodies and illustrating the Y-shaped incision, respectively. Although their reenactment is not the same as actually opening the chest, it does demonstrate the way autopsy constantly provokes self-scrutiny, a way of glimpsing our interior from the outside of an outside object reimagined after death. Keeping in mind the notion of autopsy as an epistemological gaze at the dead, Holbein’s painting invokes a similar, circuitous way of looking at and “knowing” one’s dead self. To think of the object in the painting as such suggests that painting The Ambassadors must have been an horrific experience, a virtual exercise, indeed, as Lacan claims, in the annihilation of one’s own subjectivity. Imagine what this does to the Lacanian specular stage—seeing your skull reflected back in the mirror instead of your face, your own image flayed for inspection, your own dead eye in the glass. In fact, this is exactly the mise en scène Bam experiences in What Where. We may not be able to dissect our own bodies, but we can dissect our own images. This is the desire Mort projects onto the cadaver in Rembrandt’s painting. Similarly, Sawday notes that self-dissection as an erotic, compositional trope in early modern culture was common enough among poets like John Donne and Richard Lovelace (49–51). And anatomical drawings of the same period often pose the subject in the act of self-dissection: In Valverde’s Historia de la composicion del cuerpo humano (1556), the flayed figure holds a dissection knife in one hand and his own skin in the other. A twentieth-century example is Joe Coleman’s self-portrait, Auto-autopsy, which depicts his eye being gouged out. An auto-topic way of looking in this sense is survivable because it can be, figuratively speaking, a distortion splayed across a canvas, precisely as an illusion of consciousness (or lack thereof ), as an anamorphosis. Blanchot, for instance, in The Step Not Beyond connects dying with “looking for a displaced subject,” looking for what he terms a “self-thatdies” (123). His logic implies that if looking could be completed, the dead body would be a self-that-is-dead.

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Indeed, the painter Frank Stella claims that artists are inevitably haunted by something they cannot see—their own mortality—that resides, as he puts it, in the “dark spot that makes up his view of the back of his head” (in Bowie 169). Of course, Stella’s metaphor perfectly describes the phenomenological problematic of vision: We cannot see the back of our own heads, just as we cannot see our own skulls, without the aid of some representation. In this way, Holbein’s auto-topic gaze is survivable for Lacan precisely because Lacan has afforded it the right phenomenological terms: Stella’s “dark spot” is the objet a in the field of the visible. The annihilation of the subject (Holbein) is grasped by the subject (Holbein) only in turning away. In fact, the auto-topic gaze is survivable precisely because the subject turns away, for, to quote Blanchot, “to see properly” would be fatal (Literature 151). Nevertheless, I would suggest that what Lacan ends up missing in The Ambassadors, the dark spot in his scene of autopsy, is the particularity of the painting, especially its iconicity. The desire to find a “universal key” (Bowie 173) with which to unlock the visible register troubles Lacan’s discussion, for he fails to acknowledge an objet a, an auto-topic gaze of his own, indeed, his own epistemophilia, and thus the subsequent negotiation of subjecthood he must enter into, and in fact already has, with the image of the dead body. Ironically, he tries to give up the Lacanian project by claiming that The Ambassadors, indeed, all paintings for that matter, has the capacity to calm the anxious spirit of the subject by enabling the viewer to surrender his or her gaze “as one lays down one’s weapons” (101). Rather, what emerges in Lacan’s treatment of the painting is actually an idiosyncratic negotiation between a special kind of viewer and a special kind of viewed. In Lacan’s reading, the distorted object in The Ambassadors forces the annihilation of the subject. But it must also, therefore, open a crevice for subjectivity at the same time because, according to Lacan’s theory, the painting marks the moment of both the generation and death of the Cartesian subject or, as I comment above, the trace of the subject and the subject’s failure to vanish. And to follow the Lacanian logic of desire, it must force this circulation not just once but over and over, regenerating the subject down the generations all the way to Play and What Where, which offer themselves in some sense as “corrected” images of Holbein’s skull. The painting only allows the viewer to recognize that the “presence” of the subject’s self-scrutiny has been recorded. But knowledge of the Cartesian object (Holbein’s death) has been yielded to future generations, projected as a skull held in suspense in the foreground of the painting.


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Slavoj Z+iz=ek’s imperative interpretation of memento mori—“Don’t forget to die!” (134)—seems appropriate to an anamorphic icon of the subject that just will not quit. The distorted object in the painting positions Lacan as a punctiform being, Sartre’s being-as-object, and returns to him what he wants to see— the disturbing image of “cancelled manhood,” the soft watch of his own phallic ghost. However, I have come to suspect that something is rather disappointing in Lacan’s project: that is, in the way he ends the discussion of The Ambassadors. He misses his own self-scrutiny. Lacan doesn’t see Lacan. In fact, he attempts to surrender the Lacanian subject, or the Lacanian theory of the subject, to the same annihilating fate as the Cartesian. Contrary to the de-alienation or plenitude of the imaginary moi that Lacan thinks he finds, if anything, the object in the painting displays the annihilation of the subject at point zero by reconfirming the subject in the objective field of the visible. I would argue that no viewer has the privilege to lay down his or her gaze at the dead body in this painting, not even Lacan, for such a gaze is auto-topic: a self-scrutiny of the subject that cleaves subjectivity. Lacan’s interpretation of The Ambassadors, then, solicits a desire of its own connected to the visible field, the desire for plenitude and an originary wholeness, a sort of will to coherence. But the distorted skull in the painting really acts as both a ruin and a rune, a “revealed mystery” of subjectivity that the auto-topic gaze attempts (and fails) to uncover for Lacan—death, according to Blanchot, as “the silence of my most hidden secret” (Literature 126). The dead body persists well into the postmodern era as a troubling (and recalcitrant) “object” for the subject, one that Western culture has parried through practices that would seem to be most objectifying and empirical—the autopsy. Certainly, Foucault’s imbrication of the subject and object at autopsy demonstrates how the site of autopsy becomes a place where the reciprocity of the live and the dead is most acute, where the subject and object both occupy the thin line between pathologic and cadaveric time. Here, the subject does not harbor a single privileged position of power, knowledge, and discovery. Rather than a way of gazing directly at the dead, autopsy ends up providing a way of glancing sideways as one is, like Lacan, “walking out of the room.” Contrary to what is (ultimately) suggested in the Foucaudian and Lacanian discourses, I would point out that the (observing) subject cannot be nullified, ended, or surrendered. Rather, at autopsy the subject is resisted, discomfitted, and diffused; but it is also reorganized under an autotopic regime.

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To open the dead body is to open the problematic of the subject, even to some sort of deflection compelled by the very act of opening. But in this act of opening resides not an obliteration of subject or object, but a necessary, however uneasy, renavigating of subject and object space. Autopsy not only makes us pay attention to the position of the dead (in the next chapter it makes us pay attention to the social “subject” position of the dead), it also offers an uneasy scrutiny of our own “position” of subjectivity. After all, when Dr. Arnold touches the cadaver, it also touches him.

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Autopsy and the Social The Case of John F. Kennedy

I had breakfast this morning with the man who shot President Kennedy. He was dressed as a cop on the grassy knoll. —from The X-Files

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fter Kennedy’s assassination in 1963, the world anxiously awaited the release of the Warren Commission’s report, which would act as the congressional final word on what killed the president. The Warren Report included the official autopsy record and the determination of cause of death, the now-infamous bullet wound to the back of the head. But the autopsy, or what was lacking in it, immediately stood out as the central problematic in the mystery surrounding the president’s death, and subsequently propelled a huge web of discourse in the form of plots: novels, films, and, of course, conspiracy theories. This was no ordinary body and no ordinary autopsy, for it ultimately had to do with how a nation would cope with the subversion of its primary social Imaginary. Indeed, Kennedy’s autopsy not only launched the question of the relation of autopsy to the social, but is the question’s best example.

AUTOPSY AND THE SOCIAL The practice of autopsy, whether it is done for medical or legal purposes, has to be recognized as a function in the field of the social, in part because it is an epistemological imperative that plays out in major institutions of the West—medicine and law, to name only two. Geared to gain knowledge, autopsy always drives toward an answer to the quest(ion): What is 103

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the cause of this death? As a quest for answers and a quest for knowledge, autopsy occupies the space between vision and knowledge where “seeing” with one’s own eyes becomes “understanding” with one’s own eyes. And the answer, if the answer can be more than a gesture (which is not at all clear, as this chapter will show), is made socially utile: It determines death as the pathological or genetic remnant of disease, death as natural or unnatural, suicide, homicide, or accidental. It determines the social status of the corpse as a legal, medical, scientific, pedagogical, and/or humanist entity. Indeed, autopsy is an institution in itself. Since a vast network of subjects is involved, the practice of autopsy in the West cannot be idiosyncratic—it must be governed by highly regulated procedures as to how the medical operation is performed on the corpse and how the discourse is used to record and report it, together with stringent privacy rules and obligations with respect to the deceased, the family, and the public. Given its nefarious past (see chapter 1), by the early twentieth century autopsy simply had to be socially disciplined in the Foucauldian sense of the word. Today, autopsy takes place behind the closed doors of a literal and tropological institution under the sign “Authorized Personnel Only.” As a social construction, autopsy most certainly functions in the manner of an institution in the field of ideology, and may even be considered what Althusser has termed, along with education and the family, an ideological State apparatus (ISA) (16). What makes autopsy a part of the social field—that is, ideological— and not simply a matter of cutting and looking, are its structural features. The epistemological imperative that autopsy is organized around is already determined, the question has already been posed, or, as Althusser would say, the question is eternal in the same way Freud’s unconscious is eternal—that is, always already there (35). Because it is organized and structured in this way, autopsy is both the product and the producer of a discourse that imprints itself on the dead body as rebus (or intextuates the body, as de Certeau would say) and on the page as topology. (Autopsy records do indeed contain a map of the wounds on the body. See Figure 4.1.) And, tautologically, the message that autopsy spells out necessarily returns to the problematic of its structure. As Jacques Derrida has pointed out, all structures have a fatal flaw: What poses as the center is nothing more than a tropology repressing a play of differences, or what Lacan calls a cleft or fissure occupying the structure itself. In terms of the social, the post-Lacanians posit that the generation of totalization is a social act working to contain the clutter of

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free-floating signifiers, an act that constitutes the discursive logic of institutions, precisely, the field of ideology. The center, which this totalization is organized around, operates as a mask: For Althusser, the center masks the real conditions of existence; for Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, it masks an antagonism; and for Slavoj Z+iz=ek, it masks the fissure of the Real. The post-Lacanians operate from the premise that due to its fundamental deficit the social is not a self-defined whole, but rather an “incomplete character” (Laclau and Mouffe 111). Indeed, according to Althusser, this notion of the social as a cultural construction organized around a (decentered) center goes all the way back to Karl Marx, who construed ideology as a bricolage, “an imaginary assemblage . . . constituted by the ‘day’s residues’” (34). If autopsy is an ideological institution with its web of signifiers dominating, as Laclau and Mouffe put it, the field of discursivity (112), what would occupy the place of antagonism, or Z+iz=ek’s fissure hiding at the center? There can be only one answer: the dead body. Having said so, I must admit that this answer is not quite sufficient. Laclau and Z+iz=ek agree that in ideology the antagonism or the Real respectively “exists” as an “original” social trauma resisting symbolization and totalization (xii, 6), a description perfectly in accord with Lacan’s own notion of the Real in individual subjectivity. To explain this phenomenon in Lacan’s writings, Z+iz=ek gives the example of the wreck of the Titanic, or, more precisely, the photographs of the wreck: “Where lies the terrifying power of fascination exercised by these pictures?” he asks. It lies, he decides, not in representation but in the inert presence of a “sublime object: a positive, material object elevated to the status of the impossible [Real] Thing” (71). I would point out that, in Z+iz=ek’s example, the wreck of the Titanic suggests the remnant of a corpse (the skeleton of the ship); but what is always deliberately lacking in the photographs is the dead themselves, whose corpses are by now really absent. To Z+iz=ek, the wreck of the Titanic is marking the fissure of a “forbidden domain,” which is, to be sure, prohibited. And as such, the photographs are a perfect expression of Z+iz=ek’s sense of the paradoxical presence of the Real: something that is both impossible and prohibited (164). The dead are already not there in the wreck of the Titanic, and the photographs do not allow us to see them. Like the skeleton of the Titanic, the actual presence of the dead body fascinates as well, for it too occupies the place of fissure, designating some Real that cannot be symbolized or represented, some Thing that is impossible and prohibited at the same time—what de Certeau calls “unnamable.” Autopsy on the body acts as the nodal point of post-Lacan-

Autopsy and the Social: The Case of John F. Kennedy

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ian theory, a privileged point de capiton that attempts to suture the (impossible) Real into a discourse and attempts to fix meaning at the center (marked by the corpse) in a discursively sliding structure. Autopsy on the dead body is the effort to determine meaning in an epistemological structure, to answer the question “what is the cause of death?” in an ideological institution called autopsy. As an Althusserian ISA, autopsy performs the same sort of socialsubjectifying office as any other ideological discourse on the individual: interpellating the individual into a subject position through the lens of misrecognition in the social. The peculiar thing about autopsy, though, is that it performs this function on the dead body rather than on the living being, which introduces an issue that is ideological in itself: whether the corpse has subject or object status in the social. I have laid the groundwork for this question in chapter 3, where I discuss the problematic of the subject with respect to the object at autopsy, and what happens to the generation of the individual subject in the reciprocity of subject/object positions. Indeed, Beckett’s Play, a major part of my earlier discussion, can be understood socially as a particularly vicious allegory about the interpellation of the dead body into culture. In this chapter, I want to extend the question into the realm of ideology, by specifically referring to the social subject, the social subject of a Western institution, and how the dead body may be directed toward an acceptable place in culture. In its history, medical science in the West has tended to view the dead body as object, sometimes as little more than a commodity to be purchased, even stolen. As Althusser observes, “a science is only a science if it can claim a right to an object of its own” (154), and, for autopsy, that object is the corpse. And it is quite true that the dead body must be objectified in order for the procedure of autopsy to be performed on it, an attitude that sprang up about the same time as the Cartesian mind/body split and the onset of early modern human, anatomical dissection. As the anatomy professor in Marshall Goldberg’s novel The Anatomy Lesson advises his students, “remain as impersonal toward the task of cadaver dissection as you can” (70). Without this objectifying stance, anato-autopsy would be impossible. And, of course, the necessity of maintaining an impersonal attitude is the reason behind the ethical prohibition against performing autopsies on the bodies of one’s friends or family. However, because the dead body also marks a Z+iz=ekian sublime object and points to the fissure of the Real, it also marks the place where the social subject “begins”—that is, according to Laclau, the very fissure in the structure where the subject is located (preface xv). Usually, we think

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of interpellation as affecting only the live individual, who undergoes the passage from one state of being to another. Such is the transformation Althusser describes as “a war”: the forced humanization of the small human animal into a child, the moment of hailing into the Law of Culture, which is Althusser’s equivalent to the Lacanian Law of the Father (157, 161). But it is also true that birthing constitutes a passage and establishes a new ontology based on the register of the Imaginary. And it follows that dying also constitutes a passage (euphemistically “passing on” or “passing away”) and institutes an altogether different state of being once again. If the individual passes into a place of the live, he or she will inevitably pass into a place of the dead, a place governed as well by the Law of Culture. I think that the dead body may be considered as marking an ideological cleft of the subject as long as we do not confuse subjectivity with agency, the problem of the “talking cadaver” I cover extensively in chapter 3. The dominant understanding of the subject ongoing in theoretical circles today, I would argue, tends to fuse the subject with agency as the performer of acts issuing (sometimes consciously) from a variety of subject positions. As Z+iz=ek reminds us, though, subject positions are nothing more than the product of an imaginary richness that fills the hole in the structure of subjectivity, and are part and parcel of the misrecognition of ideology (175). Laclau puts Z+iz=ek’s criticism thus: “The category of ‘subject’ cannot be reduced to the ‘positions of subject’, since before subjectivation the subject is the subject of a lack” (preface xii). Accordingly, I would argue that agency resides in a much higher register than the subject, an order of performativity located somewhere between subjectivation and self-determination. In the postLacanian sense, then, the dead most definitely can be considered “subjects,” or at least “being-as-subjects,” certainly as far as interpellation goes. In fact, as I note in chapter 2, they even have their own peculiar, albeit heavily curtailed, form of performativity: The dead also “do” something in the world, even if they are simply decomposing. They just do not have agency, although in Western culture we have a tendency to project agency onto them. If the dead body marks the fissure of the social and autopsy acts as a nodal point to attempt the fixing of meaning in the social, what happens when the autopsy is lacking? In fact, this is the primary problematic of the Kennedy assassination. The autopsy of Kennedy’s body is lacking, both in the literal sense of the word—in that it leaves much to be desired in terms of proper procedure and in the determination of cause of


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death—and in the Zi+ z=ekian sense—in that it marks the cleft or hole in the structure which the ideological discourse of autopsy is ultimately incapable of suturing.

THE AUTOPSY OF KENNEDY Lay investigators into Kennedy’s death always seem to begin at the same place: Bethesda Naval Hospital, where the autopsy was performed on November 22, 1963. The official autopsy, conducted by Commander Humes, reported to the Warren Commission that one bullet (the “magic” bullet) entered the back of the president’s neck and exited through the throat, subsequently hitting Governor Connally. A second bullet, the cause of death, entered the rear of the president’s head and exited to the right forward side, blowing out a huge hole in the skull. Both the number of bullets and their trajectory constitute the keystone supporting the official conclusion of the Warren Report: The assassination was the responsibility of one gunman, Lee Harvey Oswald, shooting from one location, the Texas School Book Depository building. However, Edward Jay Epstein, in his 1966 book Inquest, was the first to realize a problem: There existed a second report of the autopsy, prepared for the FBI’s records by FBI agents who witnessed the procedure. The agents, O’Neill and Sibert, indicated the back wound was in the lower shoulder area, not in the neck, was about an inch deep, and had no exit. Moreover, Dr. Boswell, assistant to Dr. Humes, mapped on the autopsy drawings the location of the wound in the same shoulder area (Figure 4.1). FBI photographs of the president’s shirt and jacket also showed that the bullet hole was much lower than the neck location, at least five inches below the collar. The Warren Commission either ignored or explained away this evidence (Callahan 54–55). A second important problem, regarding the second set of bullet wounds, was revealed in 1980 by David S. Lifton in his well-documented book Best Evidence. Lifton noticed that the Dallas doctors’ description of the president’s wounds at Parkland Memorial Hospital did not correspond to the official autopsy report. The Parkland doctors located the large head wound in the occipitoparietal area, the bottom, right rear of the skull, whereas Dr. Humes described the location as chiefly parietal, higher and much farther forward. The Parkland doctors reported the diameter of the wound at 2 1/2 inches with the bones sprung outward, whereas Dr. Humes reported the dimension at 5 1/8 inches with the

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bones missing. The Parkland doctors reported no other head injury and assumed that the bullet trajectory was front to back, whereas Dr. Humes found a small entry wound at the rear of the skull just below the large hole and concluded the trajectory was back to front (310–11). As Lifton goes on to report, the limited release to a select group of medical professionals of the autopsy X-rays and photographs in 1972 contradicted yet again the official autopsy report and the Parkland doctors’ testimony. Now the head entry wound is shown high on the back of the head with the exit wound top forward, right side. Gone are the large, occipitoparietal injury observed in Parkland and the massive, chiefly parietal injury with its lower head entry wound seen in Bethesda. Even the bullet angle is different: from steeply upward in the official report to downward in the photographs (see Lifton’s table, 506). To make matters more confusing, it now turns out that Commander Humes not only altered his testimony about the head wounds, but burned his autopsy notes shortly after the procedure, a bizarre act completely against standard autopsy regulations (Lifton 14). Burned notes. Altered testimony. Three different fatal wounds. Four different views of the body (the Parkland doctors, the Bethesda doctors, the FBI agents, and the photographs). If the body is the “best evidence,” and the autopsy a way of seeing it with one’s own eyes, we’ve got a mess— four different bodies, four different sets of eyes, and three different versions of the fatal wound. In this autopsy, arguably the most important of the twentieth century, the institutional procedures that structure the ideological field have been thrust aside, and the epistemological imperative—what is the cause of this death?—drastically problematized. Perhaps the question should be: What isn’t lacking in the Kennedy autopsy? In 1978 the Dox drawings of the autopsy photographs were released to the public in the Hearings of the Select Committee on Assassinations, which was appointed to reopen the investigation into President Kennedy’s assassination. Rendered by Ida Dox, a medical illustrator, the drawings are exact replicas of the President’s autopsy photographs, and may be found in Volume 1 of the Hearings.1 The Dox drawings establish just how problematic the record truly is. Autopsy photographs are essential to fixing the record of the best evidence and allowing for future interpretation. Areas of hair on the body are shaved to enable a clear picture of the wound. Except in Kennedy’s case. The Dox drawings of the head photographs show the hair fully intact. Interestingly, Werner U. Spitz in Medicolegal Investigation of Death uses Kennedy’s autopsy as his one example of why the wound area must be shaved: “Much of the controversy surrounding


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the assassination of President Kennedy could probably have been avoided had the wound in the back of his head been shaved and adequately prepared for photography” (605). Moreover, the Warren Commission never saw the autopsy photographs, the Dox drawings, or the X-rays, ostensibly out of deference to the Kennedy family, but again contrary to standard medicolegal protocol. They viewed schematic drawings instead. The difficulty, though, with the Dox drawings lies in correlating them to the descriptions by either the Parkland doctors or Dr. Humes. They don’t go together. I discovered this predicament in trying to follow Lifton’s book, which includes the photographs and Dox drawings, and is itself structured like an autopsy whether Lifton is aware of it or not. Regularly using the trope of desiring “to see with his own eyes,” Lifton is most definitely narrating his own epistemological quest to uncover the “truth” of the Kennedy assassination. Curiously, though, the inclusion of the Dox drawings and photographs in Lifton’s book actually changes the quest pattern. What reader would not immediately go to these pages to see with her own eyes the autopsy images of the president’s mortal wounds? On the one hand, this look subverts the linearity of the quest but makes for an interesting rhetorical strategy—I found myself on a quest to figure out why the text did not support the image, why the descriptions Lifton was narrating of the head wounds in no way corresponded to the Dox drawings and photographs. Best Evidence truly became a “corpus” itself, a puzzle with its own intellectual problem to solve. How could the occipitoparietal region have a two-inch crater in it when the Dox drawings show the back of the head intact? Ditto for the chiefly parietal. The Dox drawings show a tiny hole only. And where did this massive breach depicted in the Dox drawings in the right, frontal side of the head come from? I found myself engaged in the same type of reaction Lifton narrates for himself: I, too, kept checking the descriptions against the Dox drawings, looking up the medical terms in the dictionary, touching the back of my own head—and simply could not make the text and drawings correlate. At about page 500, I found out why. They don’t correlate—and that is precisely the point. If autopsy is supposed to reveal the answer to the epistemological quest(s), this autopsy is revealing something other than knowledge. In fact, it is revealing what is “lacking” in the post-Lacanian sense of the word. The assassination of the president produced a fissure in the social Imaginary not only of America but arguably of the world. (I was a child living in Canada at the time, and can clearly remember the shock and instability felt in that country.) To be more precise, the assassination

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opened a breach not only in the president’s head, but more importantly in the misrecognition of the social wherein Z+iz=ek’s Real is located, and allowed a frightening glimpse into the volcanic “center” of the ideological field. It showed in pristine clarity the possibility of Z+iz=ek’s “impossible kernel,” the “originary” trauma eternally subverting the structure of structure, eternally subverting the process of totalization in the social. Indeed, exemplifying Althusser’s notion of the double mirror of ideology, Kennedy’s death generated a huge subversion in the social subjectivation of the living. As Althusser writes, the double mirror of ideology relies on the mutual misrecognition of the subjects and the Subject (the Subject as God, for instance), together with the mutual agreement that “everything really is so” (55). Z+iz=ek offers a similar parable in what he calls a “fetishistic misrecognition,” but substitutes the king, rather than God, for the Subject: “‘Being-a-king’ is an effect of the network of social relations between a ‘King’ and his ‘subjects’” (25). Everyone—subjects and Subject—must recognize that the king is truly the king, which makes the social bond tautological. And, of course, imagine the social explosion when the “king” is assassinated, when the coronal sutures are literally exploded—everything really is not so! And imagine the scramble to suture immediately the cleft in the ideological field that has been exposed. This is precisely what the autopsy of Kennedy scrambled to do—in fact, the Dox drawings of the autopsy photographs literally attempt to resuture the head. (One explanation for the intact rear head view in the Dox drawings and photographs is that the head had been pieced back together with chunks of the skull found at Dealy Plaza.) Together with a host of other powerful forces (the swearing in of the new president, the state funeral, and so on), the autopsy immediately went to work restructuring the structure, retotalizing American society, repositioning the subjects to the Subject. As a nodal point the autopsy attempted to fix meaning on the body, a sublime object indeed, that was marking the irruption of the Real, the body of the “king” now propelled into a chaos of signification. With this particular autopsy, the quest clearly becomes much more than just an epistemological answer to the question “what is the cause of death?” It becomes the suturing of ideology through the institution of autopsy, and stands for the relation of all autopsies to the social. In other words, what is lacking in the Kennedy autopsy would most certainly have appeared anyway even if procedures had been followed perfectly—even if the hair had been shaved, for example—for the lack arises from the “center” of autopsy as an ideological institution. The miscorrelation in the autopsy record(s) proves this point. The nodal


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point of autopsy is just a nodal point. But in the Kennedy case, the nodal point has subverted its role as the riveter of meaning. The fact that there are four nodal points in the autopsy record merely demonstrates that meaning may be fixed in any number of places along the chain of “evidence.” Kennedy’s body (or the four bodies in the public record) marks the fissure where things will not correlate, and the mortal wound (or the three mortal wounds) expresses the social wound that will not close. Indeed, the wounds mark the same kind of paradoxical Real that Z+iz=ek noted in the Titanic photographs—something that is prohibited and impossible at the same time. Whether described in language or image, the wounds mediate the Real, prohibiting us from seeing what is already impossible—the Real wounds. With the coronal sutures of the “king” now literally and permanently fractured, the double mirroring project of ideology for subjects and Subject alike is drastically curtailed. The interpellation of the dead president as a “(S)ubject” in its own right into the Law of Culture remains permanently pending—the dead body cannot undergo subjectivation, its location in the social order cannot be fixed, and its social bond cannot be revived. Where is the proper place for this body? I like to think it resides in the Cenotaph in Dallas, the empty tomb memorializing the president where the body, in being decidedly absent, marks the open wound left by his death.

AN ANATOMY LESSON Nevertheless, the open wound in the social of the Kennedy case has been filled with something: lots and lots of plots. When autopsy is lacking, in every sense of the word, discourse arrives. I would argue that this perspective explains the plethora of novels, films, and conspiracy theories on Kennedy’s assassination radiating from the attempts to suture the lack in the ideological field. To put it the opposite way, if the autopsy were not lacking, the epistemological quest would be complete. The question— what is the cause of death?—would have been adequately answered and accepted: a gunshot to the back of the head fired by a lone nut. But, of course, being unable to fix meaning produces an overabundance of meaning, an overdetermination of signification. In fact, Beckett’s Play, which I cover in chapter 3, has exactly this logorrhea. The play is never able to come up with an answer to the inquisition posed by the spotlight (let alone by the audience!) about the postmortem world the figures

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occupy, even though it tries over and over. While Beckett may pose the play as an epistemological in-quest, it is the language of autopsy that fills up the crypt-space rather than knowledge. De Certeau’s “disguise of language” may arrive with a vengeance at death, but this play has no real answers. And, indeed, it is the “disguise of language” that is actually generating Play. This scenario is precisely what happens in Marshall Goldberg’s novel The Anatomy Lesson (1974). Even though it is not about the Kennedy autopsy per se, The Anatomy Lesson well illustrates how discourse comes into play when the autopsy is lacking. Written by a medical doctor, the novel’s title clearly references Rembrandt’s The Anatomy Lecture, but it narrates the struggle of a first-year medical student with anatomy lab. The lack of autopsy in The Anatomy Lesson propels the plot. Different from the other “working dead” in the medical school’s dissection rooms, the cadaver assigned to the protagonist, Dan Lassiter, is neither aged, derelict, nor ravaged by disease; this corpse is young, well-muscled, well-nourished, and healthy. The dissection of the head, though, introduces the puzzle: a large, subdural hematoma, a blood clot the size of a saucer, is discovered pressing against the cadaver’s brain. Such an injury is indicative of a vicious blow to the head and should be a medicolegal problem. The coroner’s office, not the anatomy lab, is the proper place for this dead body. Why, then, has it arrived at the medical school? In other words, an autopsy was never performed. To find out why becomes Lassiter’s quest and the quest of the narrative; meanwhile, the desire to know will fill up all the available narrative space. The lack of autopsy leads Lassiter to research an entire biography for his cadaver, along with a name (Rick), a profession (boxer), and a plot (murder). But in the best postmodernist fashion, Lassiter’s plot for Rick turns out to be the same as the novel’s. Indeed, at one point Lassiter marvels at what a good plot this would make for an author: the story of a medical student who discovers suspicious lesions in his cadaver, believes he was murdered, wonders how he slipped past the autopsy, and investigates the crime (54–55). In following the novel, the reader is actually experiencing the lack of autopsy as it is propelling not one plot but three, and as it is filling up with meaning(s). The narrative quest is self-reflexive, producing a plot for the author and a discourse for the novel. Even the novel’s title, The Anatomy Lesson, suggests the textuality of Goldberg’s endeavor and the discursivity of the ideological field, the epistemological thrust of what is to be learned here. Not only is “the lesson” hailing Lassiter into the profession of medicine, it is also subjecti-


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vating the dead body into a once-lived being, interpellating the dead body into a narrative structure that makes sense. What began as a cadaver marking the lack of autopsy is forcefully humanized into a character, in much the same way Althusser understands the human animal being interpellated into the Law of Culture as a child. But as a “subject,” the cadaver also marks the cleft of the Real, the wound—the subdural hematoma—indicating the wound in ideology that demands to be filled with answers. What is the manner of death? It is something that can only be recuperated in language; to rephrase Lacan, ideology is structured like a language. The fact that the lack in autopsy, or the lacking autopsy, is generating an overdetermination of plots in Goldberg’s novel suggests a paranoiac structure in the narrative. In his book Discerning the Subject, Paul Smith draws a causal link between Lacanian subjectivity and the creation of the paranoiac mind. Because of the Imaginary register with its misrecognition of coherence, the Lacanian subject is always already divided, scored by lack and the desire to recuperate a sense of wholeness. To Smith, this internal economy signifies a place where the subject seeks a sense of totality, demanding that anything perceived as noxious within the interior be projected onto the external world. Through this projection of the bad things, the subject maintains the internal fiction of coherence. On the downside, though, the projection ends up threatening the subject, because it does contain the bad things expelled by the subject. Even though it is a fictional universe created by the subject and designed to protect it, the world is perceived as hostile. But Smith’s use of paranoia theories is intended to explain narrative structure rather than simply thematic content. To him, paranoiac delusions are delusions of interpretation and fictionalization. Paranoia and certain forms of narrative—classic realism, for example—share similar structural features: They pursue closure, endings, solutions to puzzles (98). Smith casts his subject at a much higher level than I do. While his subject essentially names agency, I am relying on a much more fundamental sense of the social subject, the post-Lacanian subject residing in the cleft of an ideological field. Nevertheless, Smith’s linkage between the divisions of the subject and the plots of the paranoiac is of great use in considering how plots sprout so readily out of the lack in the social. Recall that ideology attempts to suture the division at the center, and is the misrecognition of coherence and totality in the social. To a paranoiac structure, the project of ideological suturing not only hides the Real, but in the process of subjectivation it projects its divisions onto the world and allows

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the creation of a fictional universe, what Zi+ z=ek calls an imaginary richness, designed to fill in the lack. The combination of the imaginary richness and the expelling of the bad things produces the delusions of interpretation and fictionalization that attempt to totalize the social and at the same time generates a threatening universe. In terms of The Anatomy Lesson, the bad things of the subject—here recognized as the cadaver—are so bad as to be intolerable. To Lassiter, the subdural hematoma indicative of homicide is one horrible thing—the revolting condition of the cadaver as he slowly strips it of face and form adds another. At one point, Lassiter dreams that his cadaver is beating him up, smashing his nose and breaking his teeth (99), a parable of fragmented Lacanian subjectivity delivered by the cadaver’s “savage eye” if ever there was one. In fact, this gruesome encounter is marking the irruption of the Real, which has come “knocking” in the dream-state at the door of Lassiter’s unconscious mind (see Lacan 56). The social field demands that this antagonism be dealt with in some way—sutured and projected onto a fictional universe. As a consequence, at this point the novel’s plots arrive, which, in working to contain the horror, create the delusion of paranoia and the hostile world of plots that comes along with it. It is this paranoiac structure in the social that explains the discursive response to the Kennedy autopsy. The “subject” of the autopsy—that is, Kennedy’s body—is wracked with all sorts of bad things, all that is lacking: poor procedures, miscorrelations, divisions in the social. These bad things must be expelled in order for the cleft in the ideological field to be closed and in order to protect the fiction of the structure’s coherence— both the political structure of America and the institutional structure of autopsy. This is the mechanism of paranoia, according to Smith, that creates a fictional universe which, nevertheless, simply because it contains the bad things, is hostile to the social. Indeed, in Kennedy’s case, the bad things are remarkably hostile. They are permanently haunting the body and the body politic. And because the lack in the “subject” remains permanently unsutured, the lack is permanently producing plots. We get not one plot, what we might call the Warren Report, but many.

THE TEXAS SCHOOL BOOK DEPOSITORY CONSPIRACY How many plots? Bob Callahan covers at least twenty-six, and these are considered only the major conspiracy theories propagated up to 1993.


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Some of them are quite fabulous, such as the Penguin-Strikes-Fear-in-theHeart-of-Gotham Conspiracy Theory, which postulates that a bystander rapidly opening and closing an umbrella was actually firing a blow gun, or the Aristotle Onassis Conspiracy Theory, which needs no further explanation (120, 66). Callahan also cites more than 2,500 books and twice as many monographs and articles on the assassination published in the last thirty years, a few of which, like Lifton’s book, are well respected in serious circles. Callahan terms this corpus of assassination material “a strange new genre of literature—postmodern at base, wildly apocalyptic in its assertions” (11). Interestingly, “apocalyptic”—or “the birth and death of whole worlds”—is exactly the word Richard Hofstadter uses to define a certain kind of social paranoia in his essay “The Paranoid Style in American Politics” (29). The paranoid style, according to Hofstadter, is based on the central image of a vast, sinister conspiracy (29). While similar to clinical paranoia in terms of its construction of plots and feelings of persecution, the paranoid style is a social phenomenon wherein a hostile universe is seen as directed not against one person, but against many: “a nation, a culture, a way of life” (4). While citing the Kennedy assassination twice, Hofstadter nevertheless pinpoints the onset of a modern paranoid style as occurring much earlier, at the time of the income tax amendment to the Constitution in 1913. But he goes on to offer an explanation of the “origins” of the paranoid style in a definition very similar to Smith’s, albeit without the Lacanian legwork: Paranoia in the social is a projection of the self, including the unacceptable aspects of the self (32). Thus, the fictional universe created— whether in the form of communist, socialist, right-wing, governmental, or even municipal plots (as in the fluoridated water conspiracy)—is, quite logically, directed as a hostile force against a way of life for millions of citizens. One of the first plots to emerge from the Kennedy case was a short novel by Morris A. Beale, a newspaper reporter, published in 1964: Guns of the Regressive Right: The Only Reconstruction of the Kennedy Assassination That Makes Sense. An amateurish roman à clef, it nevertheless launched the paranoid style so familiar to the literature of Kennedy’s assassination. In Guns of the Regressive Right, paranoia takes the form of a conspiracy of the right-wing to undermine a way of life by destroying the American free enterprise system (2). Beale’s conspirators, whom he calls the Invisible Men, are representatives of a powerful group of large American corporations, allegorically named Amalgamated Oil, International Motors, Associated Broadcasting, and so on, who fear drastic revenue cuts at the hands of President Joe Smith. An assassination is the only solution.

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At the time of publication, the only documents readily available to Beale would have been those contained in the Warren Report, whose commissioners, according to the novel, were also deeply involved in the assassination plot and its cover-up. But, interestingly, Guns of the Regressive Right completely agrees with the official autopsy reported by the Warren Commission, even though Beale cites the Parkland doctors’ description of the dead body rather than Humes’s: “Their report: . . . Much of the right rear skull appears gone” (42) (in other words, the occipitoparietal area). Most importantly, though, for this is the “center” of the narrative’s structure, the bullet trajectory is Warren Report all the way. Perfectly in accordance with the claims of the Commission, the novel’s plot is based on the theory of three shots having been fired from the Texas School Book Depository, two striking the president. The wounds described in the narrative accurately reflect the trajectory found in the Warren Report—all rear entry. The difference lies in the number of gunmen and who actually fired from this position: In Beale’s book, two gunmen are on the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository, a professional assassin who does the job, and Osteen (Oswald) who acts as a decoy. In this way, the novel sidesteps the problem, always threatening to undo the Warren Report, of how a second-rate marksman like Oswald could get off three shots so rapidly and so accurately. As in the Warren Report, no shots are fired from the grassy knoll or any other location. In fact, much as in Goldberg’s novel, Beale’s book proceeds from a literal lack of autopsy in the narrative, a curious omission especially since the fictional autopsy of Jack Ruby (murdered in prison in the novel) is graphically described. But the literal absence of the autopsy is nevertheless pointing to the novel’s “center,” for both the plot in the novel and the plot of the novel are developed out of the bullet trajectory constructed by the official autopsy. The lacking autopsy of Kennedy not only generates a narrative cleft, a wound Beale simultaneously points to in Parkland and points away from in Bethesda, but also produces the fictional universe of the novel itself, for without marking the bad things of the subject a paranoiac world would not come into existence. And Beale’s book is definitely paranoid. Interestingly, though, the lacking autopsy of Kennedy has been projected onto a fictional universe that is both hostile and supports its findings. Unlike Lifton’s book, in Guns of the Regressive Right the epistemological quest is beside the point, notwithstanding Beale’s assertion in his title. This novel is pathologically political in Hofstadter’s best sense of the paranoid style, a manner in which things are believed, rather than in their


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truth or falsity (5). In a way, it only matters narratologically that the autopsy is lacking, for Beale’s fictional universe comes back like the return of the repressed to champion the bad things of the social field. Regardless of his citation of the Parkland doctors, of the two bodies available by 1964 Beale has picked the official one, the body created by the autopsy record of the Warren Report. Following Beale’s logic, if the Warren Report is part of a conspiracy, then Beale must be in on it. In Guns of the Regressive Right, paranoia and ideological suturing end up performing the same function. At first glance, it would seem that paranoia and ideology would be opposite functions, indeed, that one would even be the cause of the other. The failed attempts of the social to suture ideologically the cleft left by Kennedy’s death would seem to produce the paranoiac narrative of someone like Beale. On the contrary, paranoia and ideology are complementary sides of the same coin. For both, the primary discursive task is to totalize the structure. When the Real at the “center” of the social field has irrupted, ideology immediately goes to work resuturing the gap and restructuring the social field, a task reflected in the paranoiac narrative. Both discourses are designed to deflect the divisions of the subject in order to protect the structure and to protect the fiction of coherence in the social field. In Guns of the Regressive Right, it is clear that paranoia and ideology are striving to reestablish the double-mirror of ideology, to maintain the fiction of a social bond between subjects and Subject—everything really is so. Most importantly, it is apparent from the novel that both discourses are attempting to interpellate the dead body of the president (the same dead body!) into the Law of Culture where, to borrow Beale’s title, it “Makes Sense.” In other words, Beale’s book demonstrates that paranoia is not the subversion of the ideological field. Although it may raise havoc along the surface, a paranoiac narrative nevertheless ends up conspiring to support the deep structure itself.

THE CROSS-FIRE CONSPIRACY In fact, this is exactly the project of the controversial 1991 film JFK, directed by Oliver Stone—to restructure and retotalize the social though a paranoiac narrative where the ideological state apparatus is in danger of collapsing. In part because so many more documents have been released since Beale’s book was published in 1964, JFK offers a

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much more complex representation of the Kennedy assassination. Based on the 1988 book by New Orleans district attorney Jim Garrison, On the Trail of the Assassins, JFK details Garrison’s investigation and subsequent trial in 1969 of Clay Shaw on charges of conspiring to assassinate Kennedy. Since the original trial and book provoked tremendous criticism from the press, it is not surprising that the film would as well. George Will, for instance, called Stone “an intellectual sociopath, indifferent to truth,” and described the film as “execrable history and contemptible citizenship” (in Kurtz 170), a position that well illustrates how the debate turned on the film’s perceived lack of adherence to some sort of ideological, historiographical ethic (determined by George Will and the Warren Report). But as historian Robert A. Rosenstone points out, history is the “construction of a past,” not a window upon it (337). Historians seem to agree that the film, despite its flaws, makes an important contribution to the historical discourse on Kennedy’s assassination. As Rosenstone puts it, like any work of history, JFK “engage[s] the issues, ideas, data, and arguments of that ongoing discourse” (338). In fact, public response to JFK prompted the passing of the President John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act of 1992, which finally released the assassination documents to the public (Kurtz 174). The film is not simply an attempt to retell (truthfully) the assassination story, as Will would seem to have it. It also tells the story of the conspiracy literature to date, incorporating legitimate information like the research by Epstein on the FBI autopsy report and Lifton on the miscorrelation between the Parkland and Bethesda descriptions of the body. And, as Epstein and Lifton do, JFK places the lack in Kennedy’s autopsy unmistakably front and center by putting the autopsy on visual display. This occurs during the climactic trial scene where black and white footage of the autopsy suite at Bethesda as well as the postmortem procedures at the trauma center at Parkland is juxtaposed with courtroom testimony and closing arguments. Of course, the “footage” is a dramatic representation, even though some shots of the head correspond exactly to the autopsy photographs found in Lifton’s book, particularly the photograph showing the top of the head. However, both the Bethesda and Parkland “footage” depict the large wound in the occipitoparietal region of the skull, even though this wound contradicts the intact rear head view depicted in the Dox drawings of the autopsy photographs. Here is an important point that I shall return to later: The miscorrelation of the “footage” and the Dox drawings of the autopsy photographs is not addressed in the film.


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One of the most sensational aspects of JFK is just this privileging of the autopsy. Unlike other fictional representations of the assassination (Beale’s, for instance), which strive to hide the autopsy, the film creates a visual spectacle for the public usually reserved for the medicolegal sphere of authorities. In doing so, the film openly acknowledges the Kennedy autopsy as the “originary” lack in the assassination narrative. The autopsy “footage” is clearly anachronistic. By 1969, when the film is set, no autopsy images, including the Dox drawings, had been released to the public, a fact accurately reported by Garrison in the film and visually acknowledged by the performance. (Garrison subpoenaed the home movie made by bystander Abraham Zapruder which shows Kennedy being shot. The trial of Clay Shaw was its first public viewing.) Offering the autopsy scenes in black and white signals the past, yet rapid juxtapositions in color of the head wounds remind viewers that this is the present—1991. Indeed, I must disagree with Patricia Lambert in her recent book, False Witness, on the Clay Shaw trial and Stone’s film. To Lambert, one of the major offenses of JFK is the way its documentary style blurs the line between truth and fiction (xvi). Yet the presentation of the autopsy scene, as I have shown, makes a sincere attempt through its montage style and color coding to denote the invented status of the “footage.” JFK is attempting to interpellate the dead body of the president into a contemporary Law of Culture in a way that could not be done in 1969. And, interestingly, it attempts to do so by exposing just how lacking the Bethesda autopsy really was. Not only does the film show how proper procedures were ignored, it also reveals that in some cases they were halted. Dissection of the tracheotomy (throat wound) is stopped after a cursory probing; inspection of the back wound is interrupted once its shallowness has been discovered. The brain is not dissected for establishment of bullet trajectory. Moreover, compared to footage of the body at Parkland, and based on the opinion of the Parkland doctors, the film contends that the bodies are the same. The head wounds are identical. The body we see on the table at Bethesda is the FBI and Parkland body (or bodies), not the body that will be constructed by the autopsy record and the Warren Report. In fact, Stone gives the authority contained in the autopsy language over to Parkland. The Parkland doctors, as Garrison argues in the film, are the ones who “see with their own eyes” the actual condition of the president’s body. They have the best evidence, even though official autopsy findings are always taken as more authoritative than the opinion of attending physicians. And this is the importance— indeed, the necessity—of dramatizing the autopsy scene in the film: By

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showing how the autopsy was stage managed, JFK proves the discursive nature of autopsy as the nodal point of an institution more ideological than epistemological. Like Beale, Stone makes a narrative and political choice. And like Beale, the body Stone chooses forms the basis of this particular narrative and conspiracy plot. As Garrison argues to the court, the best evidence of the body indicates a cross-fire situation, a triangular shooting spree. Three teams of gunmen are stationed around Elm Street: the first at the Texas School Book Depository; the second at the Daltex building; and the third at the grassy knoll. Six shots are fired in all. The first shot, fired from behind, misses completely. The second shot, fired from the grassy knoll, strikes Kennedy in the throat (Parkland). The third shot, fired from behind, hits Kennedy’s back (FBI). The fourth shot, fired from behind, hits Governor Connally. The fifth shot, fired from behind, misses the car and nicks a bystander. The sixth and fatal shot, fired from the grassy knoll, strikes Kennedy’s head (Parkland). No shots are attributed to Oswald. This scenario well correlates not only to the FBI/Parkland body(s), but also to the ballistics evidence and the Zapruder film. Interestingly, ideological suturing goes forward much better once the official, Bethesda, body has been rejected. But something else has been rejected as well, something that makes Stone’s project appear conspiratorial itself and reflects the sinister fallout of paranoiac plots. Why has he ignored the Dox drawings of the autopsy photographs? Most certainly, they were available by 1978, long before the film was produced. Unfortunately, their inclusion would introduce a second nodal point, an impassable contradiction in the paranoiac narrative which would have to be explained away. Certainly, if the Dox drawings are kept out of sight, the paranoiac plot in the film in arising to fill the lack in the social will make more sense than the official one, and so may, by definition, do better work at ideological restructuring. And the fiction presented by Stone and by Garrison is truly watertight. The bad things of the “subject,” including the stage-managed autopsy, have been projected onto the cross-fire narrative, which conforms to all our notions of, as Garrison puts it, “common sense.” Perhaps more importantly, the bad things of the “subject,” including the irruption of the Real in the assassination and the lack in the autopsy, are being arbitrated by America’s finest ideological institution: trial by jury. Here, the paranoid style is reflecting, as Hofstadter argues, the birth and death of whole worlds, made clearly apparent in the highly politicized language of Garrison’s closing argument: “This is not the


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country in which I was born, and it’s certainly not the country that I want to die in.” It is also interpellating the dead president into the Law of Culture through the law of the people. Although the justice system, represented by the skeptical judge, is reluctant to give up the official ideological institution, the suturing of the cleft in the social accomplished by the paranoid style is actually directed at the living subjects of America—the filmgoer—and is devoted to reestablishing their social bond with the (dead) Subject. As Garrison pleads in this fascinating scene, “Do not forget your dying king.” The double mirror of ideology is in the process of being reestablished—everything really is so!—even as the film must sacrifice the Dox drawings of the autopsy photographs and a certain degree of credibility along with them. And, to be sure, the fictional universe created is threatening. It deems the assassination a vast and sinister conspiracy, a coup d’état engineered at the highest level against a democratic way of life. In fact, one could even add Lambert’s book to the list of conspiracy theories generated by Kennedy’s assassination. Her “plot,” ironically, focuses exactly on Garrison’s attempt to railroad the hapless Clay Shaw. Thus the paranoiac distrust of the government so familiar to Americans.

THE GRASSY KNOLL CONSPIRACY But conspiracy may be a more befuddled enterprise than JFK wants to represent. Don DeLillo’s 1988 novel of the Kennedy assassination, Libra, seems to arrive at this conclusion, suggesting in the metadiscourse that the paranoiac plot is, like its ideological counterpart, a highly contingent affair (440–41). Perhaps Nicholas Branch, the Ur-mind in Libra, is really talking about Libra when he claims that the Warren Report is “the Joycean Book of America, remember—the novel in which nothing is left out” (182). Libra is a book of too much of everything, an ever-expanding web of language, a plenitude of data, documents, evidence, theories, plots, and even autopsies. Like its subject, the novel is fractured in its narrative delivery, riddled with all sorts of clefts in the ideological framework, a superb example of Callahan’s strange new genre of Kennedy assassination literature—postmodern and apocalyptic. If there is indeed a “deathward-tending logic of a plot” (363), Libra tends toward death only if, as the semioticians claim, language is death. Here, the death of Kennedy is actually the beginning of the proliferation of language that is the autopsy(s), the assassination literature, and Libra itself.

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In his roomful of theories, Branch is surrounded by autopsy records, by what he calls “the language of the manner of death.” But in this library of the dead, where Kennedy is the key page, there is only one mention of his autopsy—“Shot in back of head” (57). As if Branch has shoved the Real to one side, a plethora of autopsy material surrounding the lack comes into view instead. He studies the photographs of exit velocity tests on human cadaver and goat skulls, registering the shocking display of exploded bone and tissue (299). He studies the autopsy photographs of Oswald, wondering about the failure of epistemology as he looks into the dead eyes, the wound in the body, and the heavy stitching closing the Yincision (298–99). What knowledge can possibly come from seeing with one’s own eyes the wound that does not close regardless of suturing? And this question pertains to all the autopsy photographs that Branch looks at, the corpses of all the secondary characters whose deaths are so important to the web of the plot(s)—George de Mohrenschildt, David Ferrie, Guy Bannister, Frank Vásquez, John Roselli, Sam Giancana, Walter Everett, Jr., Wayne Elko, Brenda Jean Sensibaugh, Bobby Dupard, Jack Ruby, even Francis Gary Powers. Indeed, DeLillo here is pointing to an epistemological question that pertains to a vast network of conspiracy theories in the subplots, the secondary characters associated with Kennedy’s assassination. The desire to know embedded in the performance of autopsy engenders what can only be called an epistemophelia. Ultimately, autopsy can only gesture toward knowledge, which most of the time is good enough. But in a narrative of such social magnitude as Kennedy’s assassination, the desire to know begins to spread across the paranoiac landscape like a virus, and, as I have argued, fill it up with subplots (as well as plots). Lambert’s “Clay Shaw Conspiracy” theory is such an example. Another turns on Oswald’s grave. According to a program broadcast on the History Channel in 2000—The Men Who Killed Kennedy—a rumor had been circulating throughout the 1970s that the body in Oswald’s grave was not actually Oswald’s. In 1981 an exhumation was ordered. For the television program, the star witness is the mortician who prepared Oswald’s body in 1963 and observed the disinterred body in 1981—who saw the body both times with his own eyes. According to him, the body he prepared in 1963—Oswald’s body—had undergone a complete autopsy, including the head. And the official autopsy report confirms that this is so. But the head of the body in Oswald’s grave did not appear to have been autopsied. Nevertheless, dental records obtained by the medical examiner who re-autopsied the exhumed body proved conclusively that the body in the


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grave was Oswald’s. Now, even for Oswald: two autopsies, two sets of eyes, two bodies.2 Indeed, Libra ends by opening this very “plot.” Lee Harvey Oswald is buried under the name of William Bobo (454). So, who is in Bobo’s grave? No wonder Branch can only ask, when he studies Oswald’s autopsy photographs, what sort of knowledge such an endlessly open wound can possibly produce. Even though Branch spends less time on the autopsy of Kennedy’s body than on Oswald’s, as in Beale’s book (who spends his time on Jack Ruby’s), Kennedy’s autopsy nevertheless forms the basis of the novel’s plot and especially of the scene of the assassination. Interestingly, in his depiction of the Dealy Plaza events, DeLillo manages to combine both the Parkland and Bethesda bodies, in contrast to Beale and Stone, who rely on the Bethesda and Parkland/FBI bodies, respectively. The first shot fired by Oswald from the Texas School Book Depository produces the neck/throat wound (Bethesda). The second shot fired by Oswald hits Connally. The third shot fired from the grassy knoll by a second assassin, Raymo, strikes Kennedy’s head (Parkland). The fourth shot fired by Oswald misses completely (395–402). Two bodies (Parkland and Bethesda), two opposing trajectories—and a conspiracy theory. But, as JFK makes us wonder, where in this scene is the body depicted in the Dox drawings of the autopsy photographs, especially since it has already been cited in the novel? The “shot in back of head”? Branch doesn’t “see” it. And DeLillo doesn’t include it. Admitting the shot to the back of the head would mean a rear-entry wound, placing the fatal bullet back in the Texas School Book Depository, the trajectory back to front, and authenticity on the Bethesda body (precisely what the Warren Report and Beale’s novel set out to do). Here, like Beale and Stone, DeLillo must make a narrative choice, and this choice is to prohibit what is already impossible—the Parkland/Bethesda bodies will work together to reproduce the assassination as a coherent scene but not with the Dox drawings. And, like Beale and Stone, the choice ultimately is political— the Parkland/Bethesda postmortem records will together form an ideological nodal point. But the Dox drawings would add a second nodal point which, as for Stone, subverts the role of a nodal point. The Dox drawings would expose the antagonism of the institution of autopsy by indicating that meaning may be fixed at any element along the signifying chain. Even though he chooses the grassy knoll conspiracy over the Warren Report and the cross-fire theory, DeLillo’s plot nevertheless works just as much with the ideological field to resuture the structure,

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to fix meaning, and to produce a coherent fiction—the assassination— out of what is lacking in the autopsy. In other words, if we don’t “see” what is already impossible, the reconstruction “makes sense.” In fact, in contrast to JFK, the lack of “seeing with our own eyes” the postmortem body(s) of Kennedy is deflected onto the spectacle of the assassination scene, which DeLillo represents in exquisite detail and, tellingly, in the language of autopsy. The narrative is developed in multiple perspectives through the scopes of two rifles as well as the eyes of bystanders, those who do get “to see with their own eyes”— a woman on the grass, a motorcycle escort, a secret service agent, Mrs. Connally, Mrs. Kennedy, a man in a white sweater, a man with a movie camera (Zapruder), a woman with a camera, and a girl waving (395–402). Mrs. Kennedy holds “his brains in [her] hand”; the secret service agent “see[s] right into the President’s head” (399, 402). Kennedy, by now a “bloody Shakespearean ruin,” carries a quote that seems prophetic of what the scene will come to represent: “They whirl asunder and dismember me” (393). And yet the dismembering of the body is working to make the body—the individual and the social—cohere. DeLillo lets us “see” the irruption of the Real in the ideological field—the explosion of the wound: “A misty light around the President’s head. Two pink-white jets of tissue rising from the mist” (400). What can be done with the experience of this “unforgettable thing” (399), the horror of splattering blood and brains and tissue? In the paranoid style, it can be projected onto a fictional universe able to absorb the fragments of the Subject, the bad things that the social cannot tolerate. Indeed, the living subjects who react around the dying Subject put together their fractured perspectives to construct a whole view, to resuture a social bond that coheres out of a fragmented postmodernist style in the narrative. This is the secret of cultural identity that Branch comes to think of as theology, the mythology of our dying king constructed out of the gaps in the ideological and narrative fields, the interpellation of the dead body into the social. (Is this Camelot?) In short, both the narrative and political choices DeLillo has made drive toward coherence, toward the double mirror of ideology even though the grassy knoll conspiracy ends up creating an America in which conspiracy can occur. Regardless of the careful reconstruction of the ideological field, there are two aspects of Libra that interrupt this process. One, as I mention above, is the sense of contingency in the ideological and paranoiac enterprises, most clearly demonstrated in the novel’s self-conscious


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knowledge about its own project: “The conspiracy against the President was a rambling affair that succeeded in the short term due mainly to chance” (441). In fact, Frank Lentricchia and other DeLillo critics cite this sense of contingency in the Oswald “plot” as evidence of DeLillo’s resistance to a paranoiac style in the narrative: “The true paranoid does not believe in chance or accident” (203). In this aspect Libra, like Goldberg’s The Anatomy Lesson, demonstrates a postmodernist metadiscourse capable of self-commentary about its own style that is not apparent in Guns of the Regressive Right or JFK. The other aspect is more definitively subversive and does not appear in the other examples of fiction that I have covered in this chapter. Here, I would like to take up the challenge to social analysis made by Z+iz=ek. According to Z+iz=ek, it is only by addressing the “transcendent Guarantee,” the bodily presence of a lack perceived as a supreme plenitude that guarantees the structure, that one can hope to locate the subversion of the ideological field: “The crucial step in the analysis of an ideological edifice is thus to detect, behind the dazzling splendour of the element which holds it together . . . this self-referential, tautological, performative operation” (99). The dazzling splendor of the institution of autopsy is the autopsy itself. What could be more splendid than a taxonomy capable of interpellating the corpse as a “subject” into the Law of Culture, of recuperating the social bond of live subjects with a dead Subject? And what could be more blinding? In the Kennedy case, the descriptions of the body and the visual representations in the Dox drawings and photographs are truly sublime—the face so beautiful, the head wounds so devastating. And the deflection in Libra onto the assassination scene is nothing short of spectacular—“What a horror, what a sight” (399). Out of what is lacking in the autopsy, “the bodily presence of a lack,” comes the puzzle of the twentieth century, a puzzle rendered as a plenitude of discourse in the form of assassination literature and the web of plots. But what is behind the dazzling splendor? What is the “transcendent Guarantee?” For the institution of autopsy, it comes in the answer to the question “What is the cause of death?” Strip away the glorious edifice—the records, the data, the ballistics, the trajectories, the discourse, the theories—and it all comes back to one self-reflexive statement. Death always refers to death. That is the beginning of it, and that is the end of it. There is one crystalline moment in Libra when DeLillo acknowledges this tautology. Branch is surrounded by autopsy records, wading through the grisly detritus of the assassination.

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He realizes that his roomful of theories does not represent adequately the raw nature of the event. But the autopsy photographs, on the other hand, express to him something about the intrinsic facticity of the dead body: “Here is a blown-out skull for you to ponder. Here is lead penetrating bone.” It just comes down to the body on the slab. “This is what it looks like to get shot” (299–300). That is all. Death is the cause of death. What could be more Real?

5

Autopsy and the Popular

Take two sips . . . every time Scully does an autopsy. —from Elliott’s X-Files Drinking Game Web site

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s I draw to the close of this book, I want to address a question that has haunted me throughout this project: Why is autopsy so fascinating? Not simply to me, who may assume a habitus of Western academic disinterest, but also to millions of “just regular folks,” viewers and readers alike. Just about any book on the True Crime shelf at the bookstore will describe at least one autopsy, ranging from the reports on Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman to the victims of John Wayne Gacy. Patricia Cornwell, author of the Kay Scarpetta novels, has made a best-selling career out of graphically depicting the work of a fictitious chief medical examiner. Channel surfing at prime time frequently takes you to the scene of an autopsy on any number of programming sources, ranging from CBS’s CSI (Crime Scene Investigation), NBC’s Crossing Jordan, and CBC’s DaVinci’s Inquest to the Discovery Channel’s The New Detectives and Court TV’s Forensic Files, let alone reruns of The X-Files, Quincy, and Millennium. And the Internet! There are hundreds of autopsy Web sites, many of which appeal to the popular imagination: Celebrity Morgue, The Smoking Gun Archive, Furby Autopsy. Indeed, through the Internet I have read the autopsy reports of Elvis Presley, Marilyn Monroe, JonBenét Ramsey, Presidents Lincoln and Kennedy, Robert Kennedy, John Wilkes Booth, Lisa McPherson, Dale Earnhardt, and many others. For the lighthearted, there are autopsy games like Virtual Autopsy. And for the strong-stomached there are galleries such as Deathscenes and Fleshpage. 129

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In this chapter, I want to consider specifically the relation of autopsy to popular genres and to the popular imagination. Of course, throughout the book I have discussed popular or mass culture depictions of autopsy right alongside “high” art without regard to border disputes in the popular/elite culture debates. I have talked about Beckett’s Play in the same breath as O. J. Simpson’s murder trial, and Best Evidence by David Lifton together with Don DeLillo’s Libra. Following Pierre Bourdieu’s perspective, I view the literary/cultural field as encompassing all literary, cultural, and artistic artifacts for all ranges of taste, whether they are considered refined, crude, or rude. What makes it possible to consider the significance of disparate cultural objects without making judgments of aesthetic legitimacy is the cultural code one brings to the project. With the methodologies now available to the literary or cultural analyst—semiotics, post-Marxism, post-Lacanianism, gender theory, linguistics, body criticism, to name just a few—all forms of art and literature become ripe for analysis. I do not intend, though, to squash all art and literature into one category without regard to such issues as genre, market, and medium, nor to ignore the existence of the “high/low” line, no matter how culturally constructed I think the line may be. Bourdieu has a useful way of navigating this line, by recognizing two subfields, based on their particular brand of “capital” as either symbolic or economic, within the literary/cultural field. One subfield, which we usually think of as high art, is founded on the notion of restricted production. In this arena, artistic or literary production is geared to a restricted audience of other artists, writers, scholars, galleries, aesthetes—in other words, a membership of “privileged clients and competitors.” In this category, the stakes and rewards are symbolic in the main. The other subfield is determined by large-scale production for the largest possible market where the stakes are economic. This is the area of mass or popular culture (115). Interestingly, as Randal Johnson points out, Bourdieu’s breakdown of the literary/cultural field illuminates “a misrecognized social relationship” in which cultural consumption supports the legitimization of social distinctions (25). Of course, it must be quite evident to anyone who has lately surfed the Internet that Bourdieu’s taxonomy no longer works quite as neatly as it did in the 1970s and 1980s when he came up with it. In which subfield would one place the huge number of Web sites clearly designed for symbolic rather than economic reward, intended for a niche audience of like minds, yet utterly outside the pale of the privileged elite, the legitimate gallery, museum, or press? Or does one have to create a third subfield that acknowledges overlap


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between the conceptions of restricted production and a democratic, potentially large-scale, marketing system? There certainly is no doubt that autopsies are found in all (three) subfields, just as they are in the fields of medicine and forensic science. It may be useful here to introduce the classifications of the literary/cultural field proposed by James Naremore and Patrick Brantlinger in Modernity and Mass Culture. They have devised six “artistic cultures,” the first three representing what Bourdieu would most likely consider the subfield of symbolic capital, the privileged elite of restricted production. The other two are of particular interest, for they afford a distinction between popular and mass art, what one might describe as a distinction between art from the bottom up and art from the top down. The term “mass art” is associated with Adorno’s “culture industry,” which denotes entertainment designed by institutions for mass consumption in an assembly-line style of cultural production. Hollywood movies, for example. The term “popular art” designates cultural products rising from proletarian culture, but differs from folk art in its target at an urban audience and its high degree of professionalization. Here, Naremore and Brantlinger cite Bourdieu’s notion of cultural production that has not reached the status of legitimate culture. Blood sports such as boxing come to mind (12–13). Once again, though, I find I have a problem with these categories, or at least as far as they pertain to my project on autopsy. The depictions of autopsy I want to cover in this chapter don’t fit neatly as a group into either one or the other definitions of mass art or popular art, simply because they fit into both. Numerous Hollywood movies, which would be considered mass art, include scenes of autopsy—The Silence of the Lambs, Men in Black—but so do Internet Web sites, many of which fall into the category of popular art. In fact, boxing provides a particularly intriguing, interdisciplinary example. In Goldberg’s novel The Anatomy Lesson, boxing is dealt with in two fields (the medical and the literary/cultural) and three categories: as a postmodernist novel (high art), as a blood sport (popular art), and as a television broadcast (mass art) (see chapter 4 for a discussion of the novel). And so, I will resort to a strategy practiced by academics from time immemorial—I’ll come up with my own definition for the range of works I plan to discuss. Rather than basing definitions on the mode of production or on social and class difference, I want to ground my sense of “the popular” in the delivery system. It seems to me that what unifies the popular genres and media I want to cover in this chapter, as opposed to the high culture subfield of

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elite novels, paintings, and scholarly and theoretical books, is their availability to a large number of people. This availability suggests a delivery system capable of reaching an enormous market, and would include media such as television and movies as well as large press runs. By using the word “availability,” I include the sense of a potential as well as a realized mass market. Thus, a Web site may have a relatively small number of hits, yet the Internet gives it the potential of reaching a huge readership. Moreover, grounding a definition in the delivery system enables an overcoming of the dichotomy between economic and symbolic capital. In this taxonomy, it doesn’t matter what sort of capital is forthcoming; all that matters is that the delivery system is capable of providing information, even if it is free-ware, to a large Populus.1 Moreover, much of what is considered “popular art,” at least in the United States, does not rise from strictly proletarian sources in the traditional working-class sense. Many Internet Web sites, while generated from the bottom up, are the products of the college-educated middle class. A basis in the delivery system also enables one to eclipse the question “how mass is mass?” The people do not constitute one congealed, mass audience receptive to one congealed, mass culture. For instance, as Naremore and Brantlinger point out, television today certainly recognizes its viewers as belonging to a variety of “markets” (20). Ditto the Internet. The variety of large markets made possible by the delivery system enables the crossing of all ranges of class, gender, racial, and social lines. Markets are highly fluid, formed on the basis of consumer interest. Viewers or readers who traditionally fall into certain class and social groups may easily shift and coalesce with others, often from one moment to the next. For instance, the Lifetime channel offers programming of interest to women as a group regardless of rank, age, ethnicity, or size of paycheck. And, of course, men who are interested in “women’s issues” are more than welcome to tune in. Yet these individual markets, when correlated to the delivery system, are large indeed, oftentimes constituting millions of people and cutting across class or social differences. Which brings me back to the question driving this chapter: why are such large numbers of people fascinated by the performance of autopsy?

THE CONSUMER One obvious place to launch some sort of answer is with the individual. After all, it is individual subjects with converging habiti who are focused


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on genres of autopsy scenes. Yet I am wary of psychological explanations that ground mental trait on individual trauma or inclination but at the same time universalize it across huge numbers of people, a strategy introduced by Freud and still very much alive today. A way to modify this approach lies in considering the individual as a subject contextualized in a culture. To take a page out of Katherine Ramsland’s book Piercing the Darkness: Undercover with Vampires in America Today: “Don’t look at the vampire to understand it; look at the ground from which the vampire arises” (37). Such an approach takes us back to Erich Fromm, who in the 1960s and 1970s analyzed the fascination contemporary Western people have for death and all things reified by placing it in a cultural context. In The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness, he provided a series of case histories which point to a mental condition known as necrophilia—love of the dead body (from the Greek nekros, or corpse). The term has been traditionally applied to two mental states: sexual necrophilia, or the desire to have sex with a corpse; and nonsexual necrophilia, or the desire to be around, “gaze at corpses, and particularly . . . dismember them” (325, my italics). Fromm identifies the genesis of his idea in Freud’s life and death instincts, and contends that most people are a blend of both necro- and biophilous tendencies, with a few people landing on one or the other extreme of the bell curve. He gives examples of those predominantly death-oriented (such as Hitler and F. T. Marinetti, the founder of Italian Futurism) or predominantly life-oriented (Albert Schweitzer, Albert Einstein, Pope John XXIII). But what is most interesting about Fromm’s approach is the way he contextualizes necrophilia as a cultural phenomenon located in a type of postmodern subject—the necrophilous character. He directly links the necrophilous character to a highly technologized and market culture, in which everything is reifed as commodity, or turned into a death-like object, including the person him- or herself. To Fromm, this is a new historical development. It is quite different from the production-based society of Marx’s time. And even though consumer culture was identified as early as the late nineteenth century by Thorstein Veblen, Fromm claims that it is only fully manifested in the developed capitalist nations of late-twentieth-century Western culture—specifically, since World War II (349–50). This is not to say that individuals in the contemporary West necessarily have a necrophilous nature. Rather, Fromm claims the culture has become necrophilous in character, mainly due to this collective drive to reify which, promoted by technology, gives rise to the consumer Imaginary so

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prevalent in the West today. Interestingly, Fromm’s conclusion has some similarities to Philippe Ariès’s in The Hour of Our Death, despite two quite different approaches—Fromm’s being psychological, and Ariès’s historical. Ariès also targets technology as part of the modern domestication of nature, in particular technologies of medical science that have allowed the community to avoid involvement in dealing with death (612). Since the beginning of the modern era, as opposed to medieval times, death has crept ever more steadily behind closed doors, arriving today at a state that Ariès describes, paradoxically, as “remote and imminent.” Death has retreated so far behind closed doors that it has now become fascinating, arousing curiosity, fantasy, deviation, and eroticism (608). Again, this situation does not mean that individuals necessarily want to get involved with real dead bodies, despite subcultures that apparently do, if Web sites on the Internet are to be believed. After all, there is a huge difference between being a serial killer and being interested in serial killers. In fact, Fromm goes so far as to divorce necrophilous desire from desire for the dead body, attaching it instead to sanitized objects that substitute for the corpse: “clean, shining machines” (350). What Fromm is describing is actually an extreme form of mediation, very like Jean Baudrillard’s notion of hyperreality where the real disappears completely under the image. Watching an autopsy on television or in the movies, then, would better be described as watching the substitution of the image for the real, the scene of an autopsy whereby an actor or dummy stands in for the dead body. Indeed, even when a real dead body is used, as in the video I discuss in chapter 2, the mediating apparatus of television works to sanitize the event. This may once have been a real cadaver and a real autopsy, but now it is a video, iterable as long as the videotape lasts. In fact, I honestly did not realize how much the substituting effect of mediation sanitizes an autopsy until I attended the real thing. Cadaveric odor is only the most obvious difference. Getting splattered with body fluid is the second. And sharing the same space, the same air, the same profound “liveness” of the event—a real autopsy manifests a complete immersion in the moment that mediated performance, by definition, prohibits. In fact, I saw an autopsy scene on The X-Files that seems to exemplify how much television deliberately, as well as structurally, sanitizes the corpse, including what a medicolegal autopsy does with it. In this episode, Mulder finds the body of a man who has been, perhaps, killed by some sort of contact with aliens. Alone at a remote research station in the wilds of Latin America, Mulder decides to do an


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autopsy on the body himself, even though, as he admits, he is not a trained pathologist(!). The autopsy is Roman in the strictest sense: Only a visual analysis is made of the body, no cutting, touching, or opening it up. In fact, the body remains fully clothed throughout in an undershirt, short-sleeved shirt, and long pants, although for some unexplained reason the feet are bare. Yet Mulder is able to “observe,” as he walks around the body dictating into a tape recorder, that there are no puncture wounds and no burns or singes on the skin. Due solely to the cadaveric spasm on the man’s face, he is able to conclude that cause of death was “fright”! This is an autopsy scene deliberately sanitized in content as well as unconsciously sanitized in mediating function—superficial in the extreme! Mulder has performed an autopsy of the man’s clothes more than anything else. Perhaps surprisingly, this scene from The X-Files is hypertypical of autopsy scenes on television or in the movies. In general, great care is taken to give the impression of a dead body at autopsy yet avoid showing much of the body or any cutting or dissection that would occur, which constitutes another way of glancing rather than gazing at the corpse. Inevitably, the body is obscured from full view, partially hidden by the crypt drawer, other people, or covered by sheets. If the pathologist is shown at work, the body is usually swathed like a patient in surgery. Even the most explicit program of all, Death Detectives: L.A. County Coroner, which was shown on Investigative Reports (on the Arts and Entertainment network) shortly after the O. J. Simpson trial, conforms to this pattern. For instance, when the skull is sawed open the camera is trained discretely on the pathologist’s shoes. The infamous autopsy scene in the movie The Silence of the Lambs, hailed as daring for its time, is just as superficial. The viewer is saved from having to confront fully a flayed and decaying cadaver on full display by a series of camera shots that fragment it into back, legs, arms, and face. As in the Mulder example, no pathologist is present; the FBI performs this autopsy purely as visual observation of the external surface, “seeing with one’s eyes” only. No ana-tome \. No Y-incision, no probing, no dissection, no wound trajectory. Even the one entrance made into the body is accomplished without cutting: A pair of tweezers is used to draw an insect cocoon out of the throat. The description of the scene in the novel is the same in virtually every detail. Interestingly, CSI and NBC’s new drama of Fall 2001, Crossing Jordan, seem to be competing over who can push the envelope when it comes to autopsy scenes on television. In an October 2001 episode of CSI, a flayed torso was briefly displayed (body minus head, limbs and

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skin) in a full, frontal, nude body shot. However, despite the lack of coverings, I still could not tell if the cadaver was male or female—perhaps too much of the superficial genital area had been removed with the skin. The camera shot, of course, did not allow enough time to study the situation. Initially, this presentation seemed extremely daring, until it was revealed that the torso was not a human being at all, but a gorilla. Crossing Jordan, as the promotionals promised, does seem to offer the most realistic representation yet of a medical examiner’s office. Indeed, in the pilot episode, one of the autopsy scenes showed a cadaver undergoing internal examination, with the chest fully reflected and interior exposed. But it is also clear from its composition how very carefully this scene was being staged. The camera shot was taken from a great distance and directly above, as if from a fifty-foot ceiling, which rendered the body a tiny figurine within the rest of the television frame. The camera angle made the chest cavity look flat, the entire body as two-dimensional as a cardboard cut-out. Despite the fact that the internal body was displayed rather than just the external surface, as in the examples above this autopsy was still purely about looking. The acts of cutting and dissecting were not shown; the Yincision had already been made. Of course, the genital area was covered. And there was no cadaveric odor, even though the corpse had been nicknamed “Mr. Stinky” by the medical staff. Curiously, “Mr. Stinky” is one of the signs in this autopsy scene that points to just how truly sanitized the presentation is. “Mr. Stinky” lets the viewer know that the corpse is decayed, but because of the mediating nature of the visual media, the audience doesn’t actually sense the odor. In the autopsy scene of the movie The Silence of the Lambs, a visual sign— the camphor ointment—is deployed in exactly the same way and to a similar effect. Three times we see characters apply the ointment just under their nose, a studious indexing of how decomposed this corpse must be. And yet the audience smells popcorn. Signs pointing to odor are cleverly metadiscursive: The absence of cadaveric or camphor odor tells us that the autopsy we are witnessing in Crossing Jordan or The Silence of the Lambs is being manifested as a substitution for the real thing—Fromm’s notion of reification in action. Rather than seeing the corpse with our own eyes (or smelling it), the audience is seeing a substitute, the body objectified to an image. In fact, in both shows, the camera even does the work of dismemberment for us, allowing us to gaze at the image of a body fragmented into camera shots without actually having to do or watch any of the cutting or opening ourselves. Quite a difference. Necrophilous desire to gaze at the dead body has indeed been transferred from desire to look at the


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dead body itself to a much more sanitized version. If one speaks of a cultural necrophilous character, then, it is this desire for the image rather than for the dead body per se. Intuitively, this claim makes sense. Without the promise of reification, made possible by the mediating technology of film and television, we would not be able to stand so many “autopsies” taking place right in our living rooms. Viewers who gobble up scenes of autopsy on television are invariably the same folks who gag at the very thought of seeing one “for real.” One explanation for the fascination of scenes of autopsy, then, seems to be the subject’s position in a consumer culture, where the dead body becomes an image to be absorbed just like every other available, reified body. Perhaps this is why so many tropes of consumption are attached to the dead body, including, perhaps surprisingly, the dead body at autopsy. Of course, in the West, as in many cultures, ingesting parts of the human body is much more than mere metaphor. According to Ramsland, in America today a large subculture of “vampyres” practices human blood-drinking. Certainly, at the autopsy I attended, which was serious and objective in the extreme, eating metaphors seemed naturally to abound. When the abdomen was opened, one of the medical students quipped, “It does smell like chicken!” After seeing the breast plate removed, I swore I would never eat ribs again. And to Cammie, my graduate student, the opened torso looked like “a buffet of body parts.” Except for the scalpel, the knives seemed to be the very same as those found in a well-stocked kitchen. In fact, it was quite disconcerting to see Dr. Q take tissue samples in the same way I carve London broil. Interestingly, Cammie and I actually prepared our stomachs for attending the autopsy. Knowing I would not be able to take such an event on an empty stomach, I ate quite a large lunch. Cammie thought just the opposite and ate nothing. Both strategies worked. But even vomiting at the sight of an autopsy is simply the complementary side of the eating metaphor. Mark Seltzer comments in Bodies and Machines on how much the consumer culture, and indeed its critique, is still paradoxically based on the body’s needs, especially hunger and eating (121). On the one hand, the consumer culture conceivably reflects still the Cartesian mind/body split, but updated to a postmodern, market society. Five hundred years after Descartes, the subject may still be trying to overcome the body by substituting its desires of the real with the desires of the image. In fact, the cultural determinism of the extreme social contructivists seems to fall into this dualism of consumption, which Seltzer describes as “anti-natural and anti-biological”—paradoxically, anti-body (121). On another hand, the

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consumer culture is also obviously rooted in the idea of possession, an ideology fundamental to advanced, postindustrial Western societies; economies rely on each consumer wanting to have all that stuff. And one of the most fundamental ways to possess fully all that stuff is to “eat” it. Consider all the metaphors that link biological ingestion with consumerism (having good taste, getting a sweet deal, having a deal go sour, buying a real lemon), let alone those dead metaphors that link eating with the absorption of knowledge (drinking it all in, chewing on an idea, savoring a memory, spoon-feeding students, cooking up a plan). In fact, all the eating metaphors I cite above with respect to the autopsy I attended may be understood as just the way I, as a postmodern subject, have consumed the raw data. In the novels The Silence of the Lambs and Hannibal, necrophilous character as the subject of a consumer culture seems to be presented ironically, both playing to and critiquing the desire for the image. There are too many instances of “eating the body” in these two novels to be simply stylistically coincidental, starting with Hannibal “the Cannibal” Lecter himself. In fact, in the novel Hannibal, eating builds to a fever pitch, and not just in the most obvious signs: the pigs eating Oreste, the dogs eating Mason’s face, the eel eating Mason’s tongue, Hannibal and Starling eating Krendler. Metaphors of eating actually come to permeate the discourse. For instance, when Rinaldo Pazzi yields to the great love he has for his wife, he thinks of it as a consuming passion: “Then, unaware, she ate his heart” (143). (So important is this line that in the movie it is rendered as part of the poem Lecter and Pazzi’s wife recite to each other at the opera.) And the way Starling tracks Lecter is by identifying the telltale signs of his taste in all things gourmet. However, what is really significant about this critique of consumer culture, where the body (dead or near-dead) becomes the reified object of desire, is that it nails the reader or viewer as much as it does the characters. This point is certainly easy to recognize in the movie versions of Hannibal and The Silence of the Lambs, in part because the nature of film viewing readily lends itself to such a critique. As film theorists have argued, visual media rely on a scopophilic desire on the part of the viewer to “possess” the image with the eye. In Hannibal and The Silence of the Lambs, scopophilia as possession is foregrounded in the eating metaphors, forcing the audience to come face to face with its own desire to consume the image of the body, to consume “Hannibal Lecter,” just as he consumes his victims. As Joseph Grixti points out, we no longer fear being eaten by monsters; our consumer culture has “taught us how to neutralize, eat, suck, consume them instead” (91).


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But the critique of the viewer’s desire does not stop at the outer edge of the image. Hannibal, especially, offers an uncomfortable look at the viewer’s desire to consume the opened, spectacular body, whether for knowledge or cheap thrills, and just to make sure we don’t miss the point, it displays the opened body three times. The scene grounding the critique actually comes second in the novel, and takes place in the Clarendon County Morgue. (In the movie, this scene is replaced by the autopsy suite where Lecter steals the autopsy saw. But it works to the same effect in providing the legitimate medical ground.) At this time, we get to see inside the butchered carcass of the hunter, right alongside the deer. But what is more pivotal about this moment is the scene it interrupts. When Starling enters the morgue, the pathologist is in the middle of a routine medical autopsy on a corpse to find out cause of death. The narrative accurately describes the procedure of resecting the brain: noise of the autopsy saw, removal of the skull cap, balancing the brain in the hands, weighing it on the scales, even plunking it into the chest cavity so the family will get an intact body and “everybody’s happy” (304). This droll, yet highly realistic, moment contextualizes the other two scenes as “autopsies,” but of the most spectacular and scandalous sort. The first is the disemboweling of Pazzi, his gutted body spinning dramatically above the crowd in Florence. It is clear even in the novel, let alone in the movie, how consciously this scene has been constructed for its spectacular impact—this is Debord’s “society of the spectacle” writ large. Someone on the street even manages to videotape it. And, of course, the third is the penultimate scene, which has been foreshadowed at the Clarendon County Morgue. Using the autopsy saw he purchased at the gun show, Lecter performs a do-it-at-home autopsy on the live body of Krendler (essentially a vivisection), opening his skull in much the same way the pathologist has done, incising through tissue and bone. Detaching the skull cap, he exposes the brain, slicing and removing it as if for tissue sampling. Interestingly, Lecter is following the early modern procedure for autopsying the brain memorialized in Andreas Vesalius’s Fabrica. In the brain illustrations of the Fabrica, Vesalius has made an incision across the forehead of the cadaver just above the eyebrows and around the circumference of the skull, allowing the skull cap to be removed like a lid. The preferred method today of incising over the crown of the skull and around the back is a later development in autopsy procedure, and is done solely for the sake of the body’s appearance in the event of an open casket. But contrary to the Fabrica, this scene in Hannibal is not about the desire to absorb factual knowledge (as it was in the Clarendon County Morgue),

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although it is clear from this and the Pazzi scene that autopsy may be considered the legitimate flip side of serial killer dismemberment. This scene is about the desire to possess through eating, to own fully all that stuff, to perform autopsy as a way of making a purchase in consumer culture. Taken together, the three scenes—Pazzi’s, the pathologist’s, and Krendler’s—add up to a neat little critical package. By offering the scientific ground and two scandalous deviations, autopsy in Hannibal is empowered to illuminate the necrophilous subject under ironic review, by enabling a way to gaze at and dismember the (dead) body through reification of its image. But let’s leave Lecter and Starling to enjoy their dinner, while we enjoy the scene.2 There is, of course, another way to enjoy the image other than “eating” it. And that is through sex. Sex is also bound to metaphors of possession and knowledge—to have someone, take someone, know someone (in the Biblical sense), to have sex—and comes up all the time metonymically attached to products in a consumer culture. Consider how often advertisements on television link products to sexual desire. But, as with eating, the sexual desire manipulated by consumer culture is not desire for the real body per se, but desire for the body as image. Once again, the scopophiliac subject position established for viewing by the visual media exemplifies how this substitution is initiated. The viewer is located as voyeur, watching unseen from private space, empowered to possess the body displayed gloriously onscreen just for his or her pleasure. Without interactive performance—the congress of actual sex—the looked-at body becomes the reified object of sexual desire, the sanitized and superficial image, Fromm’s clean, shining machine. And all of this is amplified when the body is dead. To Ariès, the remoteness of death in the postmodern West—“invisible death”—has actually created its spectacular character (608). Indeed, the dead body, especially when represented in the visual media, is treated as a highly spectacular object, and the dead body at autopsy becomes the most spectacular. To follow the pathologist behind the closed doors of the place of the dead is to pierce one of the great taboos of Western culture. It is even “badder” than peeking behind the bedroom door, which is not closed so very tightly any longer in contemporary Western culture. But note how the discourse of autopsy is already lending itself to sexual imagery in the desire of the voyeur to know the hidden recesses of the dead body by entering the hidden recesses of Western culture. We speak of autopsy as deploying a penetrating or piercing gaze, made possible by phallic instruments that expose the interior of the body for the benefit of


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our knowledge. Indeed, this particular habitus of Westerners, arguably in place since the Renaissance, toward the dead body as a sexual object has been unpacked in many interpretations of representations of the corpse. Vesalius’s title page to the Fabrica, which I go into in chapter 2, has been analyzed by numerous critics as flaunting an overt sexual tension between Vesalius and the female cadaver, although one might reasonably argue that the sexual tension is rather located in the interpretation than in the woodcut. But it is true that the sexual aesthetization of the cadaver, evolving so naturally from the voyeuristic subject position, creates a real dilemma for those who would represent autopsies. Images on television or in the movies, so much more so than in the print media, are highly iconic, bound to the real bodies of actors or even life-like dummies. The potential for a sexually charged display is all too imminent but, at the same time, prohibited in a culture where the dead body must be desexualized at all costs. After all, in the United States, having sex with a corpse is considered one of the great defilements and a crime punishable by a lengthy prison term. The television media censors dictate that the cadaver cannot be shown altogether nude in an autopsy scene, just as a live body cannot be seen nude onscreen, even though real medical and forensic autopsies are performed on a completely stripped corpse. Again, the Mulder example above is hypertypical of autopsy scenes, where the dead body’s sexuality must be clothed in every metaphorical respect. In a sense, autopsy scenes end up with a fascinating, built-in fort/da mechanism, where the image of the cadaver is pushed and pulled, attracting and repulsing, at the same time. And of course, the action of fort/da is essentially what underpins Ariès’s explanation of how death can so easily become spectacular. Something invisible and prohibited as the all-too-deviant Real is suddenly made visible and available as the reified image, mediated for our consumption—indeed, Z+iz=ek’s sublime object, which I discuss at length in chapter 4. The necrophilous subject responds by being utterly fascinated. On the other hand, simply because it is less iconic, the print media are positioned to offer images far more risqué than what we see on television or in the movies. In Black Notice and The Last Precinct, two of Patricia Cornwell’s novels, the sexual imagery of the autopsy scene really does come to the foreground. Throughout the course of these two novels, Kay Scarpetta, Chief Medical Examiner of the State of Virginia, has been tracking a serial killer, a necrophilous “werewolf ” type who sexually mutilates the corpse of his female victims—especially the secondary sexual areas—although he does not have actual sexual intercourse with them. In

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The Last Precinct, his actions on the dead body are overtly described as sexual: Hacking and biting are the way “Jean-Baptiste Chandonne makes love to a woman” (318). And the reason given as to why Chandonne has attacked two female medical examiners is explicitly named as voyeurism. Because the pathologists have autopsied the bodies of the victims, they have watched him “make love” to these women. In a sense, they are “more intimate with him than a lover” (318). Apart from being a way of looking at the corpse, the autopsy is shown to be a way of looking at the killer, and in a scopophiliac manner at that. In fact, in these novels the corpse itself acts as a form of mediation between two “lovers”—the killer and the pathologist—in which the dead flesh is offered up as a blank sheet, open to accepting the discourse of the killer’s necrophilous desire. The medical examiner then reads the corpse as if it were a love letter, learning how to “know” the killer just as he has “known” his victims. Interestingly, Cornwell uses the trope of the “talking cadaver” repeatedly in her novels to describe the relation between Scarpetta and the victims she works on. For example, in The Last Precinct, Scarpetta notes, “The number of blows mapped in this room are consistent with what Bray’s body told me” (329, my italics). Nevertheless, when it comes to Chandonne, Scarpetta is “listening” to the killer rather than to the cadaver. It is the killer who is “talking” by sending a message through the text he has scored on the victim, while the flesh of the body has merely succumbed to the discourse of the homicide. In a sense, Scarpetta is autopsying the killer’s autobiography rather than the victim’s body, what FBI profilers call the killer’s signature. Criminologist and author Robert D. Keppel was among the first to recognize how a serial killer always leaves a “calling card” on the victim’s body. In Signature Killers, he describes, for instance, how Richard Cottingham wrote a violent, personal narrative of power and discipline on the “body markings” (76), which turned out to be key to his capture and conviction. In The Last Precinct, though, Chandonne’s attacks on Scarpetta and the other medical examiner clearly demonstrate that he sees them as more than correspondents. They are the ultimate objects of his necrophilous desire, who someone else, perhaps another woman, will autopsy in what may become an unrelenting cycle. His “love letters” are, to all intents and purposes, foreplay. If the medical examiners already “know” Chandonne through voyeurism, he wants to “know” them through writing on their bodies. This scenario is truly a dire exposé of how sex and the corpse are linked in the contemporary West, in what Ariès calls the eroticization of death. The “penetrating” gaze of autopsy has now been equated unequiv-


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ocally with the eye of the voyeur, a position always understood as shameful in Western culture, especially if the voyeur, like these medical examiners, is going to get caught looking. And, in this case, voyeurism is punishable in the worst possible way—a violent, painful death followed by necrophilous mutilation, a metaphor for the autopsy itself. Cornwell has captured in this narrative the deep suspicion of autopsy harbored for centuries by the general public, despite our obvious fascination with it. Certainly, to the necrophilous subject of the contemporary West, scenes of autopsy hinge to one degree or another on the taboo of death and sexual possession in a culture bent on consumption. As I noted above in the example of Hannibal, autopsy can be depicted as the legitimate flip side of serial killer dismemberment, the desire to gaze at and dismember corpses, just as Fromm has defined the second form of necrophilous desire. In this sense, the dead body is most vulnerable, a blank page ready to accept passively the fantasy of a “writer,” however delegitimated that writing may be. But if autopsy is a legitimated discourse with respect to the dead body, do serial killers like Chandonne and Lecter ultimately operate as the most disruptive and subversive element of culture, so much more than any other body politic in the West? After all, their performance is a form of writing on the body that is never legitimated by any law or by any culture. It is outside all ideological positions, from the far right to the far left.

THE COLONY The serial killer narrative, so popular in the West today, seems to represent a chaotic otherness outside the bounds of legitimate culture, which the discourses of the law, science, even literature and the visual media, fight frantically to contain. But I suspect that what is really being rationalized—made rational—by the autopsy scene in these and other popular narratives is the chaotic element of the body itself, the part that cannot be contained by culture or ideology, what our forebears thought of as “unruly nature.” As the products of Western culture, we are still trying to manage the very old question of what to do about the volition of the body. After all, it is the body that has always been in charge of life and death. Can we somehow control the body before it controls us? Can we somehow make the body surrender to the will of culture instead? Oddly enough, I think the extreme edge of social constructivism is a good example of what amounts to this centuries-old attempt to overcome the body.

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Cultural determinism—or the notion that the body is constructed “all the way down”—is but another way to solve or at least avoid the problematic of death. But because the grand narrative of the afterlife isn’t acceptable to a highly skeptical people, we have turned to medical science (or sometimes alternative medicine, as in the case below) to provide us with something like a “postmodern plastic body,” a construction, according to Susan Bordo, that enables the subjects of contemporary Western culture to ignore the body’s facticity, nay, its very mortality (45). Is it possible for culture to finally win the binary war over nature? I’m reminded of the death of Kathy Acker, the postmodernist writer and artist, in November 1997. Acker saw her own body as a medium for artistic expression, a sort of clay she could construct, write upon, sculpt. Then she developed breast cancer. Despite surgery in 1996, she refused the subsequent conventional treatment, insisting that all forms of medicine are simply belief systems (reported by Richard Kadrey). She died at the age of forty-nine in an alternative treatment clinic in Mexico. Did Acker believe in a sort of postmodern idealism? Did she believe that treatment success is all in our heads and has nothing to do with the performance or dialogic response of the flesh? Was she hoping to believe herself into a healthy body? We can indeed deconstruct the prediscursive body, as Judith Butler has done. But I submit that we are still stuck with a flesh that is outside, or larger, or fuller than discourse. As the mathematician Robert Kaplan puts it in his book on the number zero, “The world may not only be more singular than we think, it may be more singular than we can think” (160). In other words, desire to control the body may be a related explanation as to why scenes of autopsy are so compelling for the subjects of contemporary Western culture. Of course, control is closely connected to possession and consumption, which I discuss above. Nevertheless, I want to approach the issue of control from a somewhat different angle, less in terms of a consumer culture and more as a typology of colonialism or even a postcolonialism of the flesh. Interestingly, as Maggie Kilgour notes, cannibalism and (post)colonialism are indeed neighbors, not only in the way a history of Western imperialism has subsumed cannibalistic societies, but also in the ravenous nature of colonial practice itself: “The modern world has built itself on the blood and bones of others” (241). Colonization as a way of partitioning and controlling the world appeared during the Renaissance, not coincidentally at the same time as the new science of anatomy, and was part and parcel of the rising episteme of partition that was taking hold in the West, what Jonathan Sawday calls a “culture of dissection” which “stretched into all forms of social


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and intellectual life” (2, 3). One of the essential tools of colonization— the partition, exploration, discovery, indeed, exploitation of these “new” lands—was the map. According to Miles Harvey in The Island of Lost Maps, during the period of European colonization, state-of-the-art maps were worth their weight in the lives of men. In Portugal, for instance, spies caught selling state cartographic secrets were sentenced to death. (Indeed, their bodies could very well have ended up on the dissection table.) An accurate map not only enabled access to a foreign land, but also made it possible to seize rights to the territory. The Ogilby-Moxon Map of Carolina (1672) is typical. Without such a map, English colonization of the American province would not have been possible, for it not only opened up the land, but made it easily managed from overseas. As Harvey puts it, the Ogilby-Moxon Map made it possible for England to settle the new land, “to hype it up, slice it up, divvy it up” (298–99). This is, of course, the very same malevolent “plot” Brian Friel uncovers in his play about the English colonization of Ireland, Translations. Maps are a way of laying a language over nature, or at least over someone else’s model of nature. Harvey points out that the Native Americans, of course, did have a way of making their land geographical—it was just not the European way. They recorded information about the land in “folktales, gestures, dances, and ephemeral drawings” (Monmonier in Harvey 298). In either case, though, the model is designed for essentially the same effect regardless of what purpose the mapping is ultimately put to: incorporating unruly nature into a utile and intelligible discourse, reconstructing what is outside culture as culture. For the Europeans, the effect of the geographical map fit perfectly with their colonial enterprise, indeed, with their entire “culture of dissection.” The map allowed them to territorialize what was outside (their) culture—the colonial other, the “Calibans” of the New World, in fact, the very fissures of nature. And this is exactly what the map of the body did as well. In terms of the body, according to Ariès, there are two great fissures of nature—sex and death. Complex defense systems have attempted to restrain them, but they continue to breach the structure of culture by their very otherness (604). The intrinsic facts of the body, its waywardness to culture, the inexplicable randomness of illness (why me?), are imperatives of the flesh that a mapping of the body tries to assimilate. Certainly, Renaissance anatomists like Andreas Vesalius and Ambroise Paré understood that some of the cracks in the structure of Galenic medicine no longer had to be tolerated, for a new model was rising, based on dissection and internal observation, that had the potential to suture a certain

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number of cultural lesions in the ramparts. That anatomy was a project of mapping is evident in the plates of the Fabrica. Every figure has become the subject of a geography; every body part is labeled with tiny letters that correspond to a legend. Many Renaissance portraits, like Holbein’s The Ambassadors (Figure 3.2), include a map or globe of terra firma in the background, as if to link the geography of portraiture with the geography of land. Pathologists today use a mapping system very like Vesalius’s, although not nearly as elegant. An essential part of the autopsy report is the diagram of the body, front and back views, upon which are plotted any abnormalities such as wounds (see the Kennedy diagram, Figure 4.1). The Renaissance drawing of “Wounds Man” could easily be considered a very early autopsy diagram, for it illustrates the wounds made on the body by a variety of weapons. In fact, this is the “autopsy” that leads to the capture of Lecter in Harris’s novel Red Dragon (71). From the autopsy I attended, it was plain even during the dissection that the discourse of Western disease was being mapped onto the body so that the flesh could be rendered readable. Even with my limited training in Western medicine, I found that I was automatically mapping, of course with the generous help of an experienced cartographer. Being able to sort what initially looked like red, gelatinous blobs into discrete organs seemed to be a necessary counter to the loss of coherence the dissected body was undergoing. Oddly enough, scenes of autopsy, which venture to make the crude facts of the flesh “civilized,” can be a great comfort to the popular imagination. Interestingly, though, some of the autopsy scenes depicted in popular culture today seem to have taken a huge swerve from the colonial project of the early modern West. Specifically, these are autopsies depicted on television programs such as The X-Files, Millennium, and Alien Autopsy (all Fox network). Of course, the autopsy deployed in these programs is still a form of colonization of the body, alien or homegrown, but now the social tables seem to be turned. The West depicted in these shows is experiencing the threat of colonization from some more powerful outside force. Programs like these, which are being produced in the most imperial nation on earth, constitute allegories of colonization of the West, a development that is really quite extraordinary in the history of modern Western culture. I would argue that such programs demonstrate how the postcolonial condition is being experienced through the position of a “colonial” power. In The X-Files, for instance, the flesh is often depicted as subject to attacks by intruders, such as colonies of bacteria, which attempt to take


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over the body. Indeed, in the episode entitled “Memento Mori,” even Scully’s cancer originates outside her body, directly linked to the implant she received while an abductee, either by aliens or by the U.S. government. The autopsy, as it always has been in the modern West, is used as a mighty tactic of the defensive strategy to defeat the illness of the flesh, by constructing a map of disease on the body. And the territory of the body becomes a war zone, as it did in colonial days: Who is ultimately going to control the flesh—nature or culture? However, the terms of the belligerents are drawn quite differently in the postmodern era than they were in the colonial sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Now, in such television programs, the colonizer is not portrayed as the West, but as the other of the West, the alien forces of something outside (human) culture. But who is it specifically? Is it aliens from outer space, or is it the U.S. government? And if it is aliens, has the U.S. government become a subaltern class, caught between betraying the West and protecting it? These are certainly the questions raised in Alien Autopsy: (fact or fiction?), originally broadcast in 1995 on the Fox network. The program presents what seems to be actual military footage from the events surrounding a supposed UFO crash into planet Earth near Roswell, New Mexico, in 1947. Despite appearing to allow the viewer to decide whether the autopsy is “real,” it is readily apparent that colonization, or the fear of colonization, is a factor taken for granted in the hermeneutic of the program. For instance, all of the “facts” surrounding the alien autopsy footage are presented through the eyewitness accounts of just plain credible folks, who as children either saw the aliens, heard about them from parents who saw them, or handled spacecraft debris. All testify to the authenticity of the aliens and a calculated cover-up by the U.S. military. Dr. Cyril Wecht, the highly regarded forensic pathologist who consulted on the JonBenét Ramsey autopsy and has written several books, including Cause of Death and Grave Secrets, weighs in with his opinion of the actual alien autopsy. He reports that the anatomy of the body’s interior is completely different from any human anatomy he has ever seen. The liver, for instance, is drastically out of place. While Dr. Wecht does not actually claim that the body is alien, he certainly concludes that it is not human—a nice bit of sidestepping by the show’s producers. But one must wonder: In this allegory of colonization, why choose an autopsy for the main event? The autopsy is the best eyewitness report. Interestingly, the autopsy footage in Alien Autopsy offers two levels from which to see the dead body, one through the eyes of those who perform the autopsy and the other

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through the viewer’s eyes. Moreover, the footage doesn’t actually offer any conclusions about the corpse; it simply shows the autopsy. The viewer must complete the work of the pathologist by coming to some sort of interpretation him- or herself, helped along, undoubtedly, by the narrative script. But not an interpretation about cause of death. Alien Autopsy is not very interested in deciding how this particular “alien” died. Other than a wound in the right thigh, the body appears flawless. This autopsy will be about identification. Of course, such an epistemological goal is not outside the bounds of a forensic autopsy at all. One of the primary concerns at any coroner’s office is establishing the body’s identity, a task that may be onerous, to say the least. Certainly, the lyrics to the theme song of CSI remind the audience of this particular purpose of the postmortem examination: “Who are you? I really want to know.” The autopsy footage in Alien Autopsy spends a lot of time on the visual examination of the body’s exterior. Indeed, the body appears to be plainly “alien,” or at least it appears just like the popular image we have of the alien: large head, large eyes, small body, humanoid but not quite human—in a word, fetal. But the external examination has its limitations in terms of establishing alien identity. So let’s open ’er up! In the program, the question of identification has been put in terms of an if/then proposition: If this is an actual autopsy, then this body is alien. Proof hinges not so much on what the autopsy will reveal about the body—for we already guess it won’t reveal a human being—but on the authenticity of the autopsy itself. And now some rather nonstandard things begin to occur. The body is not weighed or measured. The incision is not Y-shaped; it begins just under the ear and extends straight down to the pubis, yet the reflected skin and muscle stop at the clavicle. But, if you’re not going to use the textbook method for opening the chest, why go on to be finicky with the head, especially when this body definitely will not be having an open casket? Nevertheless, the skull is studiously incised in the standard, face-preserving fashion, cut along the back and up over the crown so that the scalp can be pulled down over the face. And the footage itself! There is a virtual cottage industry of criticism on the Internet regarding the film’s authenticity. If this autopsy is being filmed for the military archives, why is the camera work so poor? Why does the cameraperson consistently get the worst shot? Why does the film go out of focus at the most inopportune moments? The shot of the body incision, for instance, conveniently blurs the cut just as it is descending down the chest, making it impossible to determine how the flesh is responding.


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But Alien Autopsy anticipates, indeed, even invites, a skeptical audience making enquiries about the film’s genuineness, opening up, as it were, the footage as well as the autopsy itself to viewer interpretation. While it never addresses questions of technique, the program does bring up the issues of anachronism. Is the saw consistent with autopsy saws of 1947? Yes. Is the clock on the wall consistent with clocks of 1947? Yes. Is the type of film and its condition consistent with film of 1947? Yes. The narrative assures us that all of these items existed in 1947. Could the body be nothing more than a dummy, the same sort of effigy used by automobile companies to assess the effect of high-speed impact crashes on the body? Again, Alien Autopsy anticipates this criticism by inviting a panel of Hollywood special effects experts to discuss the body. Their conclusion? We don’t have the materials even today to construct such human-like flesh. In other words, Alien Autopsy, like any good rhetor, is careful to address the opposition (read U.S. government) by bringing up and defeating other explanations that are at least simpler if not truer: The spaceship was merely a weather or spy balloon. If the body is identified as alien, then colonization is a real threat. But wait! What if the body is a human corpse dressed up in an alien bodysuit? This dead-pan suggestion is exactly what Fox goes on to offer in one of its two subsequent self-parodies of Alien Autopsy, a hilarious 1996 episode of The X-Files entitled “José Chung’s from Outer Space.” While Alien Autopsy works hard to establish fact and authenticity for the footage, this program does the opposite, undercutting the project of Alien Autopsy by exposing the fiction behind the scenes—in other words, its theatricality. Agent Scully has been assigned to perform the autopsy on an alien corpse that has been discovered near a military base (take two sips every time Scully does an autopsy). Dressed in the same sort of decontamination suit worn by the doctors in Alien Autopsy, Scully begins her work on the body to the accompaniment of the Alien Autopsy theme song and a similar voice-over narrative. Suddenly, cries of “Roswell, Roswell” interrupt the autopsy when the loser-young-man character, with video camera in hand, breaks into the morgue and starts filming. (No wonder the camera work in the original footage is so poor!) Then, during the process of dissecting a skin area, Scully finds two levels of epidermis—and a zipper. She pulls off the alien’s mask and, lo and behold, it is a real, dead human being. The loser-young-man character gags (take four sips whenever someone gets sick during an autopsy). In this episode of The X-Files, Fox gives full credit to the “disbeliever” position, the rational, skeptical, Western spectator (all those folks

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on the Internet) who will not buy into the verity of Alien Autopsy. Interestingly, though, the autopsy itself that Scully performs works according to the same proposition as did the autopsy in the original show: Identity is proof. Through dissection and examination, the alien is now proved to be just a regular, ol’ dead human being, and, once again, we are left without the definitive evidence of being the targets of a colonial takeover that Mulder so wants to find. And the film footage is not at all authentic! As Scully laments, “They’ve edited out all the significant findings,” meaning the zipper and the mask. In the words of Jonathan Frakes, narrator of Alien Autopsy (Number One of Star Trek: The Next Generation): “Is this just a fantastic production?” Yes, indeed it is. Alien Autopsy is very good (popular) theater. The other show on Fox that parodied Alien Autopsy was a 1998 episode of Millennium entitled “Somehow, Satan Got behind Me.” This episode is divided into four vignettes, each one demonstrating just how corruptible human beings truly are. The one of interest to this discussion involves a television executive responsible for the internal policing of sex and violence levels on his network. With a little push from the devil, the effort to discipline television eventually drives him completely and violently insane. The climax of the vignette shows him bursting into the filming of the alien autopsy, being performed by The X-Files cast (take two sips), shooting up the Scully character and the alien corpse before blowing off his own head. Luckily, the camera has continued to tape throughout this bloodbath so we can get the spin-off: “When Humans Attack.” Interestingly, this particular parody of Alien Autopsy adds yet another, and unexpected, way to explain the popularity of scenes of autopsy on television and in other popular delivery systems. Social science studies responsible for developing the television ratings code make a distinction between “good” violence and “bad” violence on television. Good violence is the type that shows the consequences of violence, either the victim’s pain and suffering or the perpetrator’s punishment.3 What would be a better way of showing the consequences of violence than an autopsy scene? In fact, this is exactly what Death Detectives: L.A. County Coroner does: A scene in the program shows young offenders being given a tour of the postmortem procedures. In this way, television may please the public and the censors at the same time. Nevertheless, this episode of Millennium drives home many of the same points about Alien Autopsy, as does The X-Files parody. With disingenuous tongue in cheek, both programs lampoon the issue of fact and authenticity. Why, of course the autopsy of the alien is real—it’s real theater.


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Fact and authenticity are, of course, red-hot issues on the vast multiplex of Internet Web sites on Alien Autopsy. Indeed, very like President Kennedy’s autopsy, which I discuss in chapter 4, questions surrounding the performance of the alien autopsy, and its inability to mitigate epistemological desire, have initiated lots and lots of tangential narratives. Of course, there are the usual conspiracy theories, but these are vastly different from those engendered by President Kennedy’s assassination. There is a sense of fun, although some might argue it is desperate fun, associated with the popular response to the Fox program, mostly because Alien Autopsy has nothing close to the Real or the social tragedy of Kennedy’s death. Already a conspiracy theory, a plot, an allegory of colonization, Alien Autopsy is once removed from daily life. The “already mediated” status seems to lend itself naturally to parody such as the episodes of The XFiles and Millennium—and lots of parodies. One particular Internet favorite is “Alien Autopsy SFX,” which offers a photographic comparison between a “real” alien and a real alien. The site asks: How did special effects artist Steve Johnson make the “real” alien look so real? And the Web games based on the program are ubiquitous: “Alien Autopsy Game” ($24.95): “A lifeless alien lies upon the examination table, as 2–4 players race to complete successful autopsies.” Or “Dexter’s Alien Autopsy Playset” ($19.99): “Create and dispense your own freaky drink formulas in Dexter’s Alien Autopsy Lab.” How about “Glow-in-the-Dark Alien Autopsy,” a children’s game available at PBS stores—and add its warning label to the list of eating metaphors associated with the dead body: “Alien Autopsy is non-toxic, but do not eat it, or else valuable scientific information will be lost.” Alien Autopsy, and all its vast network of parodies, is one of those fascinating cultural phenomena of the late twentieth century, bridging, as it does, both traditional notions of popular and mass culture—mass culture in the mode of a top-down television production, but popular culture according to the definition of a grassroots sensation. In my typology, which focuses on the delivery system rather than the mode of production, I would term Alien Autopsy popular in the extreme, having the potential through television broadcasting of reaching immense numbers of people whose symbolic capital has already made them the originators as well as the propagators of the topic. However, I would not go so far as to claim that the social and ideological stakes are, therefore, much more depreciated than those of the Kennedy assassination. The date of 1947 for the UFO crash is surely no coincidence. This is just two years after the end of World War II (itself an amazing breach in the fabric of the social) and

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marks the beginning of the Cold War, a unique moment in Western history when the fear of an Axis world takeover was shifting to the fear of a Communist world takeover. And such fear has continued to feed the popular imagination of the West through the McCarthy era right up to our own time of right-wing militia and survivalist groups as well as global terrorism. “Remember Roswell” has become the rallying cry for millions of people. Is someone getting ready to colonize the colonizer? Has someone already corrupted the U.S. government, that supposed torch of middleclass liberty leading the Western world? Does someone have better maps? Popular genres of autopsy scenes clearly have to do with the control or possession of something that is outside culture. One could argue, though, that this claim has always been true at least since the Renaissance. Is there any difference between the way the public responded to the spectacle of human dissection then and now? After all, human dissections as well as executions were very popular entertainment up through the midnineteenth century, with audiences exhibiting the same sort of conflicting combination of dread and fascination that we have today. Indeed, the autopsies of gangsters Bonnie and Clyde, performed shortly after they were ambushed and shot by police on May 23, 1934, clearly exhibit this longstanding response of the public well into the earlier twentieth century. As “outlaws” of the culturally and ideologically acceptable, perhaps expressing the very desire of Depression-era Americans, the bodies of Bonnie and Clyde attracted a huge crowd outside the furniture store where they were being autopsied. Dr. James L. Wade, the coroner, had to hurry through the procedure, for the crowd was demanding to see the bodies and even threatening to break into the store. Dr. Wade was able to record, however abbreviatedly, the necessary postmortem facts: positive identification of the bodies (through tattoos, scars, and eyewitness accounts), cause of death (from itemized gunshot wounds, Clyde: twenty; Bonnie: fifty-two), and manner of death (fired on by law officers).4 After a photographer took pictures of the bodies, which could later be purchased for $5.00 a print, the bodies were openly displayed to a six-hour, public receiving line until the ambulance finally arrived to take them away (Rich 29–33). This example of Bonnie’s and Clyde’s autopsies remarkably captures the turning point in autopsy that leads to our own day. The autopsy of the early twentieth century was no longer on public display, even though the public still demanded and got to see a modified version of the autopsied bodies. (During the public viewing, Bonnie’s and Clyde’s bodies were covered to the neck by a sheet.) And even though the autopsy had


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retreated behind the closed doors of “authorized personnel,” it ended up reemerging as the image. This is the beginning of the new age of photography and a new age of consumerism: Anyone with five bucks could buy a print. What will become a highly technologized and market culture had just been initiated in the West. Erich Fromm’s necrophilous character is only a few years away. I would submit, then, that one of the main differences between our view of the dead body and earlier views continuing up through the nineteenth century lies in the way the body is able to be mediated. In earlier times, the scene of autopsy was not a scene at all. It was the real thing. But the real thing was also something that had been ejected from legitimate culture, the body of the criminal—like Bonnie and Clyde. It was okay to watch it being dissected, just as today it is okay to watch the autopsy of a gorilla or an “alien.” But today even the dead body of a criminal has legitimate rights in the social sphere. Timothy McVeigh’s petition blocking an autopsy of his body was, of course, respected, even though his execution was made a limited public spectacle through the marvel of closed-circuit television. Today, human dissection has retreated so far from the public realm that what is available to ordinary people is the image of the dissected body, the reified object of death. In a consumer culture, the image of the body can be controlled or possessed in a way that the real body cannot. The entire autopsy scene, indeed, the entire narrative in books, television programs, and film, is already “written” by its own textual destiny, mapped by a marvelous harmony of medical science, literature, and culture. Whether the West is fearful of the volition of the body or the backlash of postcolonialism, the waywardness of the flesh or invaders from outer space, we look to the image of the dissected body because it offers some sense of Western power, however misapprehended, over whatever is outside culture. We’re happy because our cultural constructs seem to be working. This is reassuring to large numbers of people.


Afterword

Is it art, science, or just bad taste? The jury is still out on the controversy surrounding Professor Gunter von Hagens’s public performance of an autopsy in an old London brewery in fall 2002, which was subsequently broadcast on BBC television. Von Hagens had already provoked a raging debate over his installation Body Worlds, which exhibited plastinated corpses in a variety of lifelike poses. What began in his medical research as a means of preserving the body by replacing body fluids with a plastinating solution has become something like art to millions of people. And why not? What’s the (aesthetic) difference between von Hagens’s semi-dissected and flayed figures and, say, Vesalius’s muscle men? Is Body Worlds a form of postmodern sculpture of the body, in which the body itself provides the “clay,” literally preserving, like Jeremy Bentham’s auto-icon, the trace of the “subject”? Disappearance is made to disappear, because disappearance is not allowed to happen. In fact, memorializing the subject after death has always been important in Western culture. Philippe Ariès’s book The Hour of Our Death (a monument in its own right!) details the history of 2000 years of body “preservation” in the West—funerary statues, portraits, headstones, grave markers. The same may be said of the practice of autopsy. Autopsy is also a form of memorialization, for the procedure substitutes the plastination of language for the flesh of the cadaver, before the cadaver slips away. Autopsy is a way of “doing” something with the corpse, of retrieving it from the garbage can of the abject, whether that “doing” turns out to be utile, spectacular, thought-provoking, or beautiful. The public autopsy von Hagens performed is no exception. Taking place under a huge reproduction of Rembrandt’s The Anatomy Lecture of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp, the autopsy had the aim of teaching the public something 155

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about the medical profession, as well as provoking them into seeing something about themselves—all wonderful humanist ideals. But to conduct it in a theater space prepped for broadcast on the most spectacular of contemporary venues! Isn’t there something rather shady in all this? Exactly who is being memorialized? After all, von Hagens is wearing Dr. Tulp’s hat. Even the spectators, like Rembrandt’s circle of bourgeois gentlemen, gain some infamy by being associated with the infamy of the event. (By the way, the deceased died of heart failure.) Has von Hagens finally knocked down the doors marked “Authorized Personnel Only”? Indeed, government authorities warned von Hagens some time before the autopsy that he would be breaking dissection laws in place since 1832. There had been no public dissection in Britain since the passage of the 1832 Anatomy Act. Would autopsies escape their reified place in Western culture and return to the public spectacle of human dissection (and execution), no matter how aesthetically justified, that was practiced so many years ago? Will autopsies again become commonplace public events? Probably not. Von Hagens’s public autopsy is a deviation from the rule. Real autopsies may be shocking and sensational, but they are also horrifying, even those couched within the terms of “high art.” Unless really dedicated to medical science (or necrophilia), not many people will be interested in watching a second autopsy. Given the opportunity, would I have attended the public autopsy performed by von Hagens? No—one autopsy is enough. What von Hagens’s performance of an autopsy (or perhaps performance art is a better term) actually shows is how much autopsy is a living idea in the history of Western culture. And, as a living idea, its cultural significance is still developing, certainly its significance across interdisciplines and to the public. It is highly unlikely that we would go back to the old ways of public dissection. That particular constellation of punishment, humiliation, and intellectual novelty is long gone. Indeed, autopsy and its role in the public sphere may develop in ways completely unimaginable to us now.

Notes

1. AUTOPSY: A CONTEXT 1. I have cited only the most specific historical information. Let this note serve as a general debt to three of the books that were most essential to developing the historical narrative of autopsy: Erwin H. Ackerknecht’s A Short History of Medicine (New York: Ronald Press, 1968); Jacalyn Duffin’s History of Medicine: A Scandalously Short Introduction (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999); and The Western Medical Tradition: 800 BC to AD 1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). 2. See Jonathan Sawday, 66–72; and Luke Wilson, 71–74. 3. In Naissance de la clinique: “enfonce,” “pénètre,” “avance,” “descend” (138). 4. I would like to express my gratitude to the pathology staff at Memorial Hospital of Carbondale for allowing me to observe an autopsy. 5. Nuland decided to amputate a large part of the patient’s liver, a procedure he made up on the spot. The patient not only survived, but her body eventually rejuvenated the missing segment of liver.

2. PERFORMANCE, AUTOPSY, AND THE PERFORMATIVE 1. Alan Nadel in Containment Culture offers what may be a useful example for conceiving of the relation of external reality to cultural constructions: the advanced Alzheimer patient. This person is stuck in a world of “raw data,” having lost the ability to transform intrinsic facts into narrative models (3).

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2. The major problem, as I see it, with Butler’s definition of matter, upon which she bases Bodies that Matter, is that it sidesteps the issue of the scientific model(s). Butler fails to appreciate that questions like “What about the (dead) body?” are very likely asking her to consider how the Foucauldian model would reasonably intersect the scientific. 3. See Asimov, 97–100, for a good explanation of the Conservation of Energy Law. 4. Spalding Gray died in the winter of 2004. 5. The surgeon makes a pun on Spalding Gray’s earlier performance piece, Swimming to Cambodia. 6. The answer is B) A small carcinoma in the nasopharyngeal mucosa. Acute or chronic cocaine abuse does not produce malignancy. All of the other possible answers are heart abnormalities that can be linked to cocaine abuse. The Pathology Guy Web site, Exam 3, Question 38. www.pathguy.com/lectures/exam3–96.tx.

3. AUTOPSY AND THE SUBJECT; OR, WHAT THE DEAD SAW 1. Jennifer Webb and Lorraine Webb, in their essay “Dead or Alive,” use de Certeau’s claim that “death is the problem of the subject” as the springboard into a superb discussion of death’s impact on the artist-subject. In Images of the Corpse: From the Renaissance to Cyberspace, ed. Elizabeth Klaver (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2004). 2. “La mort, c’est la grande analyste” (Naissance de la clinic 147). 3. “Grand oeil blanc qui dénoue la vie” (Clinic 147). 4. “La possibilité pour l’individu d’être à la fois subjet et objet de sa propre connaissance . . .” (Clinic 201). 5. “La mort était la seule possibilité de donner à la vie une vérité positive” (Clinic 147). 6. “Oeil qui parlerait” (Clinic 115). 7. I must admit that, in some of my previous writings, I am guilty of relying upon the metaphor of the “talking cadaver.” 8. “Holbein a le culot de me montrer ma propre montre molle” (Le Séminaire de Jacques Lacan 84). 9. Two Skulls in a Window Niche is attributed to Ambros Holbein, but was most likely rendered by Hans Holbein.

Notes to Chapter 5

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10. I am indebted to Peter Klaver for originating the idea of an “autoautopsy.” 11. “[C]omme le décrit l’auteur des Anamorphoses . . . une tête de mort” (Séminaire 83).

4. AUTOPSY AND THE SOCIAL: THE CASE OF JOHN F. KENNEDY 1. The Kennedy family controls the autopsy photographs of President Kennedy, and has never released them to the public. They do appear in Lifton’s book. 2. For the official report on the exhumation and autopsy of Oswald, see Norton et al., “The Exhumation and Identification of Lee Harvey Oswald,” Journal of Forensic Sciences 29 (1984): 19–38.

5. AUTOPSY AND THE POPULAR 1. Of course, “high” culture has been made widely available on the Internet, just as it has on postcards, posters, and even bed sheets. One may view the most consecrated of paintings on sites such as the webgalleryofart. In this case, high art has been popularized, or made available to large numbers of people. And, of course, art also flows in the opposite direction: Popular art finds itself appropriated into the elite art gallery. Graffiti is a good example of this. 2. In the movie version, Hannibal Lecter is never shown eating human flesh himself. 3. See UCLA Center for Communication Policy, Violence Reports, 196–97, [/http://www.ccp.ucla.edu]. 4. The full autopsy reports on Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow may be found in Carroll Y. Rich, “The Autopsy of Bonnie and Clyde,” Western Folklore 29.1 (1970): 27–33.


Works Cited

Ackerknecht, Erwin H., MD. A Short History of Medicine. New York: Ronald Press, 1968. Althusser, Louis. Essays on Ideology. London: Verso, 1971. Ariès, Philippe. The Hour of Our Death. Trans. Helen Weaver. New York: Knopf, 1981. Arnold, Eugene, MD. “Autopsy: The Final Diagnosis.” Images of the Corpse: From the Renaissance to Cyberspace. Ed. Elizabeth Klaver. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2004. Alien Autopsy: (fact or fiction). Dir. Tom McGouch. Prod. Kivat/Greene. Videocassette. Vidmark Entertainment, 1995. Alien Autopsy SFX. 25 September 2001. . Asimov, Isaac. Understanding Physics. Volume I. New York: Barnes and Noble, 1993. Austin, J. L. How to Do Things with Words. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1975. Autopsy: Through the Eyes of Death’s Detectives—Voices of Death. Dir. Michael Kriegsman. Videocassette. Bipolar Productions, 1999. Bealle, Morris A. Guns of the Regressive Right: The Only Reconstruction of the Kennedy Assassination that Makes Sense. Washington, DC: Columbia Publishing, 1964. Beckett, Samuel. Krapp’s Last Tape. Play. What Where. Collected Shorter Plays. New York: Grove Press, 1984. Bigwood, Carol. “Renaturalizing the Body (with the Help of Merleau-Ponty).” Body and Flesh: A Philosophical Reader. Ed. Donn Welton. Oxford: Blackwell, 1998. 99–114.

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Index

Abject, 66, 75, 155 A&E (Arts and Entertainment), 64 Acker, Kathy, 144 Ackerknect, Erwin H., A Short History of Medicine, 10, 17 Adorno, Theodor, 131 Agency, 8, 56, 67, 74, 75, 77, 79, 80, 81, 82, 83, 84, 86, 88, 115 Ailment, 18–19, 57, 82 Alberti, De pictura, De statua, 97 Alien Autopsy: (fact or fiction?), 7, 146, 147–52 “Alien Autopsy Game,” 151 “Alien Autopsy SFX,” 151 Allori, Allessandro, Three Leg Studies, 97 Alterity Politics (Nealon), 71, 83–84 Althusser, Louis, Essays on Ideology, 5, 104–106, 107–108, 112, 115 Ambassadors, The (Holbein), 93–101, 146 Anamorphosis, 93–101 Anato-autopsy, 14, 20, 33, 40, 41, 42, 62, 66, 81, 107 Anatomist, The (Ravenscroft), 20, 42–43, 60 Anatomy, 42, 60, 61, 63, 68, 74, 76, 79, 95, 144–46, 147: anatome \, 3, 19, 58, 135, 144–45; and dissec-

tion, 5, 6, 9, 10–23, 27–28, 31, 41, 42, 47–48, 61, 68, 72, 95, 96–97, 107, 144–45, 146, 152, 153, 155–56; female, 40; history of, 6; lesson, 73, 113–16; theater, 14, 41; Anatomy Lecture of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp, The (Rembrandt), 7, 25, 39–40, 60, 72, 98–99, 114 Anatomy legislation: Anatomy Act of 1832, England, 20, 22, 156; and colonial America, 22; Murder Act of 1752, England, 20 Anatomy Lesson, The (Goldberg), 7, 23, 34, 107, 113–16, 118, 127, 131 Anatomy Lesson, The (Morley), 7, 61, 93, 98–99 Anatomy of Human Destructiveness, The (Fromm), 133–34, 136, 140, 143, 153 Andreas Vesalius of Brussels (O’Malley), 14–16 Anthropocentric, 30 Antistius, 10 Apocalyptic narrative, 117, 123 Ariès, Philippe, The Hour of Our Death, 134, 140, 141, 142, 145, 155

169

170

INDEX

Arnold, Eugene, 69, 80, 81, 84, 86, 88, 91, 92, 99, 101 Arnolfini Marriage, The (van Eyck) 97 Art, 7, 12–16, 25, 31, 38–40, 41, 42, 43, 60, 66, 71, 72, 86, 93–101, 114, 139, 141, 146, 155, 158 Art and Anatomy in Renaissance Italy (Schultz), 97 Asimov, Isaac, Understanding Physics, 157 Atheist’s Tragedy, The (Tournier), 7, 43 Audience, 14, 37–38, 41, 69, 84, 88, 89, 113, 152 Austin, J.L., How to Do Things with Words, 44, 46, 55, 67 Auto-autopsy, 41, 42, 77, 97–99 Auto-autopsy (Coleman), 99 Auto-icon, 20–21, 97, 155 Autopsy: and art, 12; auto+opsis (to see with one’s own eyes), 2, 3, 19, 23, 24, 33, 34, 58, 61, 64, 68, 72, 81, 84–86, 89, 104, 110, 111, 121, 124, 126, 135, 136, 147–48; attendance at, 7, 10, 23–35, 48, 65, 68, 84–85, 89, 93, 134, 137, 146; and body criticism, 44; of Bonnie and Clyde, 7, 152–53, 159; and cause of death, 1–2, 10, 15, 16, 17, 27–28, 42, 57, 61, 66, 80, 103–104, 108–109, 110, 112–13, 127, 135, 139, 148; and Christianity, 10–11; and class, 5–6, 19, 21, 22, 39, 40, 72; and colonial America, 16; and criminality, 20, 22, 41, 72; of Destiny, 56, 60, 67; disciplining of, 104; of Dale Earnhardt, 23, 129; and Egyptians, 10; and empiricism, 50; as entertainment, 8, 19, 41, 152, 155–56; and epistemology, 57, 110; and execution, 20, 22, 40, 42; of female, 12, 14, 39–40; and feminism, 39; in film and movies,

23, 134, 135–36, 138–39; forensic, 1–2, 7, 9, 37–38, 41, 70, 80, 129, 141, 148; gaze of, 3, 24, 25, 26, 34, 41, 61, 64, 68, 71–72, 86, 88, 91–92, 96, 99, 101, 135, 136–67; as glance, 25, 34, 68, 92, 96, 101, 135; of Ronald Goldman, 23, 38, 89–90, 99, 129; and Greeks, 10, 19; history of, 6; as ideological, 107, 109, 112; of Jack the Ripper victims, 17; of President John F. Kennedy, 7, 38, 103, 108–13, 114, 116–28, 129, 146, 151, 159; and knowledge, 2–3, 10, 14–15, 18, 23, 38–39, 40, 42, 58–59; and lack, 108, 110, 111–12, 113–22, 124, 126, 127; language of, 88–89, 90, 113, 121, 123, 126, 140–41; as mediation, 61, 89–92; medical, 5, 7, 9, 10–11, 14–17, 18, 23, 25, 28, 61, 77, 88, 139, 141; medicolegal, 12, 14, 16, 57, 74, 121, 134–35; as memorialization, 88–89, 155; moral, 42–43; of Lee Harvey Oswald, 124, 125, 159; and pedagogy, 12, 14, 21, 25, 66–69, 155–56; performance of, 2, 5, 7, 19, 25, 34, 37–41, 42, 43–48, 50, 56, 58, 59, 61, 64–70, 71, 88, 104, 107, 124, 132, 135, 140, 141; as performance, 2, 7, 8, 14, 19, 25, 37, 38–39, 40, 155–56; photographs, 110–12, 120–23, 124, 125, 128, 159; and plague, 11; and politics, 40; and popular, 129–53; psychological, 3; and punishment, 19, 20, 22, 40; and reading, 81–82, 84, 90; and research, 6, 11–14, 15, 40, 57, 58, 61; of JonBenét Ramsey, 1–2, 7, 129, 147; and Romans, 10, 50, 58, 135; as scene, 89, 93, 121–22,

Index

129, 131, 132–37, 139–44, 146, 153; of Nicole Brown Simpson, 23, 38, 89–90, 99, 129; and social, 103–28; as spectacle, 12, 19, 20, 22, 39–40, 41, 64, 89–90, 121, 140, 152, 153, 155–56; on television, 8, 14, 17, 23, 25, 84, 85–86, 89–92, 134–36, 146–53, 155–56; theater, 12–14, 24, 37, 38, 40; as trope, 3, 14, 41, 60, 86 Autopsy: Through the Eyes of Death’s Detectives–The Dark Side of Medicine, 64, 66 Autopsy: Through the Eyes of Death’s Detectives–Voices of Death, 64–69, 80, 134 Barbie Fetish (Robbins), 86 Baudrillard, Jean, 51 Beale, Maurice A., Guns of the Regressive Right, 117–19, 121, 122, 124, 127 Beckett, Samuel, 72, 84–89: Play, 7, 72, 86, 87–89, 90, 91, 100, 107, 113–14, 130; What Where, 7, 85–86, 88, 89, 91, 97, 99, 100; Krapp’s Last Tape, 86; Happy Days, 88 Being and Nothingness (Sartre), 34, 85, 101 Bentham, Jeremy, 20–21, 22, 97, 155 Best Evidence (Lifton), 3, 109–10, 117, 118, 120, 130, 159 Bethesda body, 120, 122, 125, 130 Bethesda Naval Hospital, 109–10, 118, 121 Bichat, Marie François Xavier, 17, 18, 31, 77, 78, 79 Bigwood, Carol, 29, 30, 56 Birth of the Clinic, The (Foucault), 7, 17–19, 48, 72–79, 81, 84, 86, 91 Bishop, Williams and May, 22 Blackman, Maurice, 88

171

Blanchot, Maurice, Space of Literature, 85, 100, 101; The Step Not Beyond, 71, 79, 80, 90, 99 Blau, Herbert, 86 Blessing, Lee, Fortinbras, 41 Bodies and Machines (Seltzer), 137 Bodies That Matter (Butler), 51–56, 158 Body, 5, 7, 8, 26, 29–33, 43–44, 51–56, 62, 64, 75, 83; fabrication of, 29, 74, 81; fleshy, 29, 54, 55, 68, 69; objectification of, 24, 74; and performativity, 60, 69, 144; physical, 28, 30, 31, 54; signified, 68, 69, 90; volition of, 28, 30, 60, 63, 64, 143–44, 153; wayward, 30, 60–62, 145, 153 Body criticism, 28–29, 44, 71, 130 Body Emblazoned, The (Sawday), 12, 14, 19, 22, 40, 42, 43, 97–98, 99, 144–45 Body farm, 80 Body Worlds (von Hagens), 155 Bonner, Charles, W., 26 Bordo, Susan, 30, 144 Boswell, 109 Bourdieu, Pierre, 3–4, 130, 131 Bowie, Malcolm, Lacan, 95, 100 Brater Enoch, 86 Brief History of Time, A (Hawking), 47, 52, 53 Burke, Kenneth, Permanence and Change, 34 Burke and Hare, 21–22 Butler, Judith, 29, 44, 50–56, 71, 59, 75, 81, 144; Bodies that Matter, 51–56, 158; Gender Trouble, 51 Byrne, Charles, 21 Callahan, Bob, Who Shot JFK?, 109, 116, 117, 123 Cambridge Companion to Foucault, The (Gutting), 75

172

INDEX

Cannibalism, 144 Capital: economic, 130–32; symbolic, 130–32, 151 Cases That Haunt Us, The (Douglas), 17 Certeau, Michel de, 71, 106; Heterologies, 89; The Practice of Everyday Life, 5, 26, 29, 55, 57, 68, 69, 72–75, 80–82, 83, 89, 104, 113, 158 Church, Catholic, 18 Cinematic Body, The (Shaviro), 72, 73, 97 Clark, Ramsey, 9 Coleman, Joe, Auto-autopsy, 99 Colonialism, 143–53 Columbia Medical School, 21 Commodity, 107, 133 Conservation of Energy Law, 53, 158 Conspiracy, 103, 116–28; theories, 103, 113, 116–28, 151 Containment Culture (Nadel), 157 Construct: cultural, 31, 48, 51, 55, 55, 57, 59, 72, 106, 144, 153, 157; as homicide, 57, 59; social, 30, 31, 53, 54–55, 56, 104 Construction of Social Reality, The (Searle), 45, 48, 49–50, 55 Constructivism, 45, 46, 50, 52, 54, 62; and body, 51–52, 29, 31, 43–44; cultural, 43, 50, 51, 55, 56; discursive, 48; and gender, 50, 51; human, 46; and sex, 51, social, 7, 28, 30, 46, 48, 50, 51, 55, 81, 137, 143–44 Constructivist Realism, 7, 30, 44, 53 Consumer culture, 133, 137–40, 144, 153 Consumption, 137–43, 144 Contra-coup brain injury, 15–16 Cornwell, Patricia, 8, 129; Black Notice, 141; The Last Precinct, 7, 37, 38, 141–43

Coroner, 16–17, 89, 90 Crossing Jordan, 129, 135–36 CSI (Crime Scene Investigation), 64, 129, 135–36 Dallas, Texas, 38, 113, 125 Dallas doctors. See Parkland doctors Da Vinci, Leonardo, 11, 60, 97 Death Detectives: LA County Coroner, 135, 150 Death to Dust (Iserson), 11, 22, 28, 80, 83 De Humani Corporis Fabrica (Vesalius), 7, 12, 42, 139, 146; muscle men of, 12 31; title page to, 12–14, 31, 38, 39–40, 66, 95, 141 Deleuze, Giles, Foucault, 85; and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 77, 82–83 DeLillo, Don, Libra, 7, 123–28, 130 Delivery System, 131–32, 151 De pictura (Alberti), 97 Derrida, Jacques, 47, 76, 82–83, 104; Of Grammatology, 83 Descartes, René, 11, 27, 31, 33, 42, 60, 63, 69, 71, 72, 74, 94–96, 98, 100–101, 107, 137; and pineal gland, 43 De statua (Alberti), 97 Determinism: cultural, 30, 57, 60, 137, 144 “Dexter’s Alien Autopsy Playset,” 151 Dialogism, 56, 57, 63–64, 69, 72, 82, 84, 144 Discerning the Subject (Smith), 115, 117 Disease, 19, 28, 32, 40, 57, 66, 75, 77; disease concept, 28, 48 Dissection, 5, 6, 9, 10–23, 27–28, 31, 41, 42, 47–48, 61, 68, 72, 95, 96–97, 107, 136, 139, 144–45, 146, 152, 153, 155–56; of self, 99

Index

Douglas, John, The Cases that Haunt Us, 17; Obsession, 7, 57–60, 67 Downcast Eyes (Jay), 72 Dox drawings, 110–12, 120, 121, 122, 123, 125, 127 Dox, Ida, 110 Dr. Q. See Pathologist, Memorial Hospital of Carbondale Drama studies, 44 Dualism, 11, 19, 27, 56, 60, 63, 74, 107, 137 Duffin, Jacalyn, History of Medicine: A Scandalously Short Introduction, 5, 11, 28, 31, 32, 52 Écrits (Lacan), 26 Edson, Margaret, Wit, 60 Einstein, Albert, 38, 47, 53 Elam, Keir, The Semiotics of Theatre and Drama, 81 Ellison, Ralph, Invisible Man, 87, 98 Empiricism, 11, 12, 21, 96 Epistemology, 14, 17, 24, 27, 31, 33, 34, 39, 41, 47, 62, 65, 66, 72, 76, 98, 99, 103, 104, 107, 113–14, 118, 122, 124, 151 Epstein, Edward Jay, Inquest, 109, 120 Essays on Ideology (Althusser), 5, 104–106, 107–108, 112, 115 Eyck, Jan van, The Arnolfini Marriage, 97 Fabrica. See De Humani Corporis Fabrica False Witness (Lambert), 121, 123, 124 FBI, 109–10, 120, 121, 122, 135, 142 FBI body, 109–10, 121, 122, 125 Feminism, 39, 51; French, 50 Film, 137, 138, 141, 153 Film theory, 138, 140

173

Fisher, Russell, S., Medicolegal Investigation of Death, 10, 16 Flying Over Water (Greenaway), 38–39, 40, 65 Forever Barbie (Lord), 86 Fortinbras (Blessing), 41 Foucault, Michel, 6, 20, 55, 56, 72, 84, 85, 98, 101, 104, 158; and archaeology, 71, 73, 76, 78–79, 91; The Birth of the Clinic, 7, 17–18, 19, 48, 72–79, 81, 84, 86, 91; History of Sexuality, Vol. 1, 51; and man, 73, 74, 75, 77, 79, 83; The Order of Things, 71, 73–79, 83 Foucault (Deleuze), 85 Foundations of Illocutionary Logic (Searle), 44 Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, The (Lacan), 7, 93–102, 115, 116 Fractal map, 76, 77, 78 Freud, Sigmund, 63, 98, 104, 133 Fromm, Erich, The Anatomy of Human Destructivesness, 133–34, 136, 140, 143, 153 Full House (Gould), 29 Furini, Alberto, The Premature Autopsy, 39–40, 41, 42, 43 Galen, 10, 11, 29, 50, 145 Gawande, Atul, 18, 21, 23, 37, 68, 71 Gaze, 34, 72, 84–85, 86–87, 88, 95–101, 133, 135, 136–37, 143: of autopsy, 3, 24, 25, 26, 34, 41, 61, 64, 68, 71–72, 86, 88, 91–92, 96, 99, 101, 135, 136–67; autotopic, 98, 100–101; clinical, 18, 76, 77, 78; epistemological, 76, 88, 99; filmic, 138, 140; glare, 34, 87; inquiring, 34, 58, 86; Lacanian, 95–101; male, 34, 84;

174

INDEX

Gaze (continued) medical, 17–18, 31, 71, 76, 77, 78–79, 91; spectatorial, 72, 85, 88, 89, 92; Western, 3, 34, 39, 40 Gender theory, 44 Gender Trouble (Butler), 51 Giant, O’Brien, The (Mantel), 21 “Glow-in-the-Dark Alien Autopsy,” 151 Goldberg, Marshall, The Anatomy Lesson, 7, 23, 34, 107, 113–16, 118, 127, 131 Golden, Irwin, 38 Gould, Steven Jay, Full House, 29 Grave robbing, 21, 41 Gray, Spalding, 158, Gray’s Anatomy, 7, 60–64 Gray’s Anatomy (Gray), 7, 60–64 Greenaway, Peter, Flying Over Water, 38, 39, 40, 65 Grixti, Joseph, 138 Guns of the Regressive Right (Beale), 117–19, 121, 122, 124, 127 Gutting, Gary, The Cambridge Companion to Foucault, 75 Habitus, 3, 24, 129, 132, 141 Hagens, Gunther von, 41, 155–56, Body Worlds, 155 Hamby, Wallace B., The Case Reports and Autopsy Records of Ambroise Paré, 14–16 Hamlet (Shakespeare), 9, 23, 41 Hannibal (Harris), 7, 138–39, 143 Happy Days (Beckett), 88 Harris, Thomas, Hannibal, 7, 138–39, 143; movie, 138–40, 159; Red Dragon, 146; Silence of the Lambs, The (Harris), 7, 64, 131, 135–36, 138; movie, 64, 131, 135, 136, 138 Harvey, Miles, The Island of Lost Maps, 145

Harvey, William, 42; On the Motion of the Heart, 10, 29, 33 Hassan, Ihab, 85 Hawking, Stephen, A Brief History of Time, 47, 52, 53 HBO (Home Box Office), 64 Hearings of the Select Committee on Assassinations, 110 Hegemony & Socialist Strategy (Laclau and Mouffe), 71 Heisenberg uncertainty principle, 49 Henri II (King of France), 15–16 Heterologies (de Certeau), 89 Historia de la composicion del cuerpo humano (Valverde), 99 History Channel, 124 History of Medicine: A Scandalously Short Introduction (Duffin), 5, 11, 28, 31, 32, 52 Hofstadter, Richard, The Paranoid Style in American Politics and Other Essays, 117, 118–19, 122 Holbein, The Ambassadors, 93–101, 146; Two Skulls in a Window Niche, 96, 158 Hospital, 5, 6, 22, 23–35, 58, 77 Hour of Our Death, The (Ariès), 134, 140, 141, 142, 145, 155 How to Do Things with Words (Austin), 44, , 46, 55, 67 Humanism, 66, 71, 155–56 Humes, Commander, 109–11, 118 Hunter, John, 21 Idealism, 48, 144 Ideological State Apparatus (ISA), 104, 107, 119 Ideology, 8, 47, 49, 57, 82, 86, 104, 106–109, 110, 112–13, 114, 115, 116, 119, 123, 125–27, 138, 143, 151, 152 Imaginary: cultural, 133–34; register of, 108, 115; social, 103, 111

Index

Inquest (Epstein), 109, 120 Interdisciplinary, 4–7, 14, 52–53, 131, 156 Internet, 8, 16, 129, 130–32, 134, 148, 149–50, 151, 159 Interpellation, 107, 108, 113, 115, 119, 121, 122, 126, 127 Intextuation, 29, 56, 68, 73, 104 Invisible Man (Ellison), 87, 98 Iserson, Kenneth, Death to Dust, 11, 22, 28, 80, 83 Island of Lost Maps, The (Harvey), 145 Ito, Judge, 89 Jack the Ripper, 17 Jay, Martin, Downcast Eyes, 72 JFK (Stone), 7, 119–23, 125, 126, 127 Johnson, Randal, 3–4, 130 JonBenét Ramsey: Inside the Ramsey Murder Investigation (Thomas), 2 Julius Caesar, 10 Kadrey, Richard, 144 Kaplan, Robert, The Nothing That Is, 144 Keller, Evelyn Fox, Secrets of Life, Secrets of Death, 4, 6, 29, 49, 50 Kennedy, John F., President: assassination of, 3, 103–28, 151; autopsy of, 7, 8, 38, 103, 108–13, 114, 116–28, 129, 146, 151, 159; Assassination Records Collection Act, 120 Keppel, Robert D., Signature Killers, 142 Kilgore, Maggie, 144 Klaver, Peter, 159 Krapp’s Last Tape (Beckett), 86 Kristeva, Julia, 71, 75; Powers of Horror, 25, 66 Kurtz, Michael L., 120

175

Lacan (Bowie), 95, 100 Lacan, Jacques, 26, 71, 74, 79, 93–102, 104, 117; Écrits, 26; The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, 7, 93–102, 115, 116; and Freudian slip, 96; and gaze, 95–101; and Law, 108; and mirror stage, 26, 99; and the Real, 74, 106; subjectivity, 93–102, 115, 116 Laclau, Ernesto, 108 Laclau, Ernesto and Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony & Socialist Strategy, 71; and antagonism, 106, 107, 116, 125 Lakshmanan, 89–92, 99 Lambert, Patricia, False Witness, 121, 123, 124 Language, 26, 43–50, 72, 73, 74, 77, 82, 88–90, 91; of dead body, 26, 68, 75, 88 Last Precinct, The (Cornwell), 7, 37, 38, 141–43 Latour, Bruno, Science in Action, 55 Law, 6, 29, 55, 73–74, 81, 82, 103, 108; of Culture, 29, 108, 113, 117, 118, 121, 123, 127 Leder, Drew, 27, 31–33 Lee, Benjamin, Talking Heads, 46, 47 Lentricchia, Frank, 127 Libra (DeLillo), 7, 123–28, 130 Lifton, David, Best Evidence, 3, 109–11, 117, 118, 120, 130, 159 Lived-body, 31–32, 57, 83 London Barber-Surgeons, 42 Lord, M.G., Forever Barbie, 86 Magic bullet, 109 Mantel, Hillary, The Giant O’Brien, 21 Map, 145–47, 152; Ogilby-Moxon, 145 Marchitiello, Howard, 39–40

176

INDEX

Marshall, Tim, Murdering to Dissect, 20, 21, 22 Marx, Karl, 106, 133 Materialism, 31, 52 Matter, 52–53, 54, 55, 69 Mauritshaus, The Hague, 39, 98 Mechanism, 11, 98 Media culture, 89 Mediation, 61, 68, 69, 84, 87, 89–92, 98, 134–37, 141, 142, 151, 153 Medicine, 5, 6, 22, 27, 28, 31, 32, 37, 48, 51, 68, 73, 74, 76, 77, 103, 114–16, 131; history of, 5, 6, 11,16, 18, 22, 28, 31–33, 42, 48, 50, 56–57; and research, 11, 14, 16, 18, 28, 29, 31–33, 48, 76, 155 Medicolegal Investigation of Death (Spitz and Fisher), 9, 10, 16, 110–11 Memento mori, 27, 86, 93–101 Memorial Hospital of Carbondale, 6, 25–35, 157 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 31 Metaphysics, 53, 83 Meyer, John E, 2 Millennium, 146, 150, 151 Misrecognition, 107, 112, 115, 130 Model: of anatomy, 27, 48, 50, 60, 68; atomic, 54; Cartesian mechanistic, 27, 31–33; cultural, 30, 52, 56, 59; of disease, 28; material, 31, 69; of medicine, 28–29, 31, 33, 47–48, 52, 53, 59, 61–62, 63, 66, 145; of nature, 145; of physics, 47, 49, 52–53; scientific, 4–5, 47, 49, 52–56, 67; social, 30, 55; theories of, 47, 49, 53, 55 Modern,12, 74 Modernism, 77, 78–79, 84 Modernity, 76, 98, 134 Modernity and Mass Culture (Naremore and Brantlinger), 56, 131–32

Monroe, William, 5 Morgagni, Giovanni Batista, 17, 31 Morgue, 41, 64, 65–69, 92 Morley, John David, The Anatomy Lesson, 7, 61, 93, 98–99 Mortal Lessons (Selzer), 97 Mourning Sex (Phelan), 71, 78, 98 Murdering to Dissect (Marshall), 20, 21, 22 Mysteries Within, The (Nuland), 32–33, 157 Nadel, Alan, Containment Culture, 157 Naremore, James and Patrick Brantlinger (Modernity and Mass Culture), 56, 131–32 Native Americans, 145 Nealon, Jeffrey, Alterity Politics, 71, 83–84 Necrophilia, 133–34, 136–43, 156 New Yorker, The, 18 Nietzsche, 34 Nodal point, 8, 106, 108, 112–13, 122, 125 Noguchi, Thomas B., 65–69 The Nothing That Is (Kaplan), 144 Nuland, Sherwin B., The Mysteries Within, 32–33, 157 Object, 17–19, 24, 27, 27, 33, 34, 46, 49, 50, 68, 71–78, 80, 85, 86, 91–102, 107, 133, 134; as dead body, 18–19, 24, 25, 33, 46, 59, 60, 61, 66, 68, 69, 71, 72, 141 Objectification, 33, 39, 72, 74, 80, 101, 107, 136 Objectivity, 4, 49, 72, 80, 84–85 Objet a, 95–96, 100 Obsession (Douglas), 7, 57–60, 67 Of Grammatology (Derrida), 83 O’Gorman, Kathleen, 86 O’Malley, C.D., Andreas Vesalius of Brussels, 14–16

Index

Once-lived body, 33, 34, 80, 84, 114–15 On the Motion of the Heart (Harvey), 10, 29, 33 Order of Things, The (Foucault), 71, 73–79, 83 Oswald, Lee Harvey, 109, 118, 122, 124–25, 127, 159 Other, 18–19, 31, 33, 72, 75, 83, 85, 143, 145, 147; dead, 85–92, 98 Paranoia, 115–23, 126–27 Paranoid Style in American Politics and Other Essays, The (Hofstadter), 117, 118–19, 122 Paré, Ambroise, 3, 26, 61, 145; autopsy records of, 7, 14–16 Parkland body, 120, 121, 122, 125 Parkland doctors, 109–11, 118, 119, 121 Parkland Memorial Hospital, 109–10, 118, 120, 121 Pathologist, Memorial Hospital of Carbondale, “Dr. Q,” 25–35, 137, 157 Pathology Guy, The web site, 70, 158 Peirce, Charles Sanders, 46, 47, 49; and dynamical object, 46, 47, 53, 59, 60, 62, 66, 69; and immediate object, 46, 53, 56, 59, 60, 66, 69 Pelias, Ron, Writing Performance, 6, 38–39, 66 Performance, 14, 19, 24, 25, 30, 37, 40, 42, 43, 55, 56, 57, 60, 62, 63, 64–70, 81, 82, 88, 92, 108, 121–22, 132, 155–56; studies, 43; theory of, 38–39, 43, 82 Permanence and Change (Burke), 34 Performative, 43, 44, 46, 50, 51, 55–57, 59, 60, 62, 63, 64–65, 67, 68, 69, 82, 108, 127 Phelan, Peggy, Mourning Sex, 71, 78, 98

177

Phenomenology, 27, 31, 95–101 Physics for Scientists and Engineers (Serway), 52–53 Piercing the Darkness (Ramsland), 133, 137 Play (Beckett), 7, 72, 86, 87–89, 90, 91, 100, 107, 113–14, 130 Pleasure of the Play, The (States), 74 Police, of Boulder, Colorado, 2 Politics, 118, 122–23, 125–26 Popular, 129–53 Popular culture, 129–53, 159 Pornography, 40 Positivism, 72, 76, 79 Post-colonialism, 144, 146–53 Post-Lacanian, 104–108, 115, 130; and lack, 111 Postmodern, 60, 74, 75, 76, 78, 84, 85, 93, 101, 114, 117, 123, 126, 127, 131, 137, 140, 155; idealism, 29, 51; plastic body, 30, 144; subject, 30, 133, 138; theory, 53 Power of horror, 25, 34, 85 Powers of Horror (Kristeva), 25, 66 Practice of Everyday Life, The (de Certeau), 5, 26, 29, 55, 57, 68, 69, 72–75, 80–82, 83, 89, 104, 113, 158 Premature Autopsy, The (Furini), 39–40, 41, 42, 43 Print media, 141 Profiles in Murder (Vorpagel), 3 Ravenscroft, Edward, The Anatomist, 20, 42–43, 60 Ramsey, JonBenét, 1–2, 15 Ramsland, Katherine, Piercing the Darkness, 133, 137 Real, 74–75, 115, 116, 119, 122, 124, 126, 127, 151 Realism: philosophical, 30, 44, 48, 54, 55, 59 Red Dragon (Harris), 146

178

INDEX

Rembrandt, The Anatomy Lecture of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp, 7, 11, 19, 25, 39–40, 98–99, 114, 155–56 Renaissance, 9–16, 20, 39, 42, 51, 93–101, 141, 144–46, 152 Rich, Carroll Y., 152–53, 159 Riots, 21 Robbins, Maggie (Barbie Fetish), 86 Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (Stoppard), 41 Rosenstone, Robert A., 120 Roswell, New Mexico, 147, 148, 152 Sappol, Michael, A Traffic of Dead Bodies, 12, 22 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 71, Being and Nothingness, 34, 85, 101 Saunders, J.B., 12 Savage eye, 71, 84–89, 116 Sawday, Jonathan, The Body Emblazoned, 12, 14, 19, 22, 40, 42, 43, 97–98, 99, 144–45, 157 Schultz, Bernard, Art and Anatomy in Renaissance Italy, 97 Science, 51, 52, 155: forensic, 3, 80, 131; medical, 3, 5–6, 11, 12, 17, 19, 20, 21, 22, 24, 27, 40, 41, 47, 63, 66–67, 72, 74, 76, 77, 78–79, 81, 107, 134, 144, 153, 156; physical, 76; physics, 5, 45, 47, 49, 51, 52–53, 54; social, 76 Science in Action (Latour), 55 Searle, John R., 44, 50, 54, 55, 66; The Construction of Social Reality, 45, 48, 49–50, 55; Foundations of Illocutionary Logic, 44; and institutional fact 45, 47, 53; and intrinsic fact, 49, 50, 51, 59, 62; and observer-relative fact, 49, 50, 52, 56, 58, 68; and social reality, 48, 50, 66 Secrets of Life, Secrets of Death (Keller), 4, 6, 29, 49, 50

Self-scrutiny, 86, 92–102 Seltzer, Mark, Bodies and Machines, 137 Selzer, Richard, Mortal Lessons, 97 Seminar. See The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (Lacan) Semiotic, 45, 46, 59, 65, 68, 69, 74, 81, 88, 104–106, 112, 123, 130 Semiotics of Theatre and Drama, The (Elam) 81 Serial killer, 134, 140, 141–43 Serway, Raymond A., Physics for Scientists and Engineers, 52–53 Sex, 140–43, 145 Shakespeare, William, Hamlet, 9, 23, 41 Shaviro, Steven, The Cinematic Body, 72, 73, 97 Shaw, Clay, 120, 121, 122, 123, 124 Short History of Medicine, A (Ackerknect), 10, 17 Sign, 43, 45, 59, 65, 74, 81, 83, 90, 136; artificial, 81; indexical, 46, 47; natural, 81, 82, 90 Signature, 20, 142 Signature Killers (Keppel), 142 Silence of the Lambs, The (Harris), 7, 64, 131, 135–36, 138; movie, 64, 131, 135, 136, 138 Simpson, O.J.: murder trial, 7, 23, 37, 84, 89–92, 130, 135 Sixtus IV (Pope), 11 Skipitares, Theodora, Under the Knife, 7, 42, 65 Smith, Paul, Discerning the Subject, 115, 117 Social, 8, 103–28, 151 Space of Literature (Blanchot), 85, 100, 101 Speaking dead, 69, 79–84, 88, 92 Spectator, 3, 40, 64, 84; ideal, 24, 76 Speech act, 43, 48, 50, 55, 63, 67, 83; illocutionary (performative),

Index

44–46, 48, 50, 55–56, 59, 66, 82; locutionary, 44–45, 48, 50, 55, 59, 67; perlocutionary, 44–45, 48, 57, 69, 82; theory of, 7, 43, 44–46, 50, 55, 82 Spitz, Werner U., Medicolegal Investigation of Death, 110–11 States, Bert O., The Pleasure of the Play, 74 Stella, Frank, 100 Step Not Beyond, The (Blanchot), 71, 79, 80, 90, 99 Stone, Oliver, JFK, 7, 119–23, 125, 126, 127 Stoppard, Tom, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, 41 Structuralism, 73 Subject, 8, 20, 26, 31, 51, 52, 62, 71–102, 104, 107–108, 112–13, 115, 116, 119, 122–23, 126, 127, 133, 137, 138, 140, 141, 143, 144, 155; authorial, 74; clinical gaze as, 76; and death, 75; death as, 73, 75, 76, 78, 79; desiring, 76; as disease, 75–76; as institution, 74; medical gaze as, 76; phenomenological, 76, 77, 78, 79, 101; postmodern, 30, 138; postmortem (dead), 76, 108, 115; social, 102, 107, 112, 115; semiotic, 74, 75; speaking, 74, 75, 79, 84, 89; split, 74 Subjecthood, 27, 34, 75, 89, 100 Subjectivity, 19, 24, 26, 33, 34, 72, 74, 71, 79, 92–102, 106, 107, 108, 115, 116 Subject/object, 8, 25, 27, 73, 74, 75–78, 81, 84, 92–93, 107 Sublette, Cammie, 24, 25, 26, 35, 137 Sublime Object of Ideology, The (Z+iz=ek), 71, 101, 108–109, 116, 127

179

Talking cadaver, 79–84, 85, 88, 89, 91, 93, 108, 142 Talking Heads (Lee), 46, 47 Television, 14, 23, 25, 64, 65, 68, 84, 85–86, 88, 89–92, 131, 132, 134–37, 141 Texas School Book Depository, 109, 116–18, , 122, 125 Theater, 3,14, 37, 38, 40–41, 42, 43, 59, 62, 64, 65, 84, 85, 87, 88, 155–56; studies, 44 Thomas, Steve, JonBenét Ramsey: Inside the Ramsey Murder Investigation, 2 Thousand Plateaus, A (Deleuze and Guattari), 77, 82–83 Three Leg Studies (Allori), 97 Titanic, 106, 113 Traffic of Dead Bodies, A (Sappol), 12, 22 Tournier, Cyril, The Atheist’s Tragedy, 7, 43 Two Skulls in a Window Niche (Holbein), 96, 158 Understanding Physics (Asimov), 157 University, 4, 41 Valverde, Historia de la composicion del cuerpo humano, 99 Veblen, Thorstein, 133 Ventriloquism, 74, 81, 82 Vesalius, 15–16, 20, 23, 26, 61, 42, 48, 61, 145, 155; De Humani Corporis Fabrica, 7, 12–14, 19, 31, 38, 39–40, 42, 95, 139, 141, 146 Video, 60–64, 64–69 Violence Reports, 159 Virchow, Rudolph, 26, 80 Visual media, 19, 64, 136, 138, 140 Vorpagel, Russell, Profiles in Murder, 3 Voyeurism, 34, 39, 40, 41, 140–42

180

INDEX

Wade, James L., 152 Warren Commission, The, 103, 109–11, 118 Warren Report, The, 103, 109, 116, 118, 119, 123, 125 Webb, Jennifer and Lorraine, 71, 158 Wecht, Cyril, 147 Welton, Donn, 31 What Where (Beckett), 7, 85–86, 88, 89, 91, 93, 97, 99, 100 Who Shot JFK? (Callahan), 109, 116, 117, 123 Will, George, 120 Wilson, Luke, 12, 157 Wit (Edson), 60

Writing Performance (Pelias), 6, 38–39, 66 X-Files, The, 7, 103, 129, 134–35, 141, 146–47, 149–50, 151 Y-shaped incision, 26, 68, 99, 124, 135, 136, 148 Zapruder, Abraham (Zapruder film), 121, 122, 126 Z+iz=ek, Slavoj, The Sublime Object of Ideology, 71, 101, 108–109, 116, 127; and Real, 106–107, 112, 113, 115, 127; and sublime object, 107, 112, 141

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