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Autopsy and the Savage Eye: Some Dramatic Practices

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 January 2009

Elizabeth Klaver
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Abstract

Is performing an autopsy on a dead body simply an objective, mutilating act – and a particularly powerful example of subject/object mastery? Demonstrating the intersection between scientific, medico-legal practice, and literary-artistic tropologies, Elizabeth Klaver explores in this essay the epistemological gaze of autopsy and its ironic effect on subjectivity through a variety of dramatic practices: Vesalius's Fabrica, the O. J. Simpson trial, and plays by Samuel Beckett. Elizabeth Klaver is Associate Professor of English at Southern Illinois University, Carbondale. Her book, Performing Television: Contemporary Drama and the Media Culture is forthcoming from the Popular Press, and the present article will form part of her book in progress, Authorized Personnel Only: Sites of Autopsy in Postmodern Literature.

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Type
Research Article
Information
New Theatre Quarterly , Volume 16 , Issue 4 , November 2000, pp. 324 - 332
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2000

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References

Notes and References

1. Beckett, Samuel, quoted in Fehsenfeld, Martha D., ‘“Everything Out but the Faces”: Beckett's Reshaping of What Where for Television’, Modern Drama, XXIX (1986), p. 239–40Google Scholar.

2. Derrida, Jacques, ‘The Principle of Reason: the University in the Eyes of Its Pupils,’ Diacritics, Fall 1983, p. 4Google Scholar.

3. See Hassan, Ihab, ‘In-Quest: a Synoptic Introduction’, in Selves at Risk: Patterns of Quest in Contemporary American Letters (Madison, 1990)Google Scholar.

4. Beckett, Samuel, What Where, Collected Shorter Plays (London, 1984), p. 316Google Scholar. Subsequent citations from Krapp's Last Tape, Play, and What Where, as incorporated into the text, are also from this edition.

5. Blau, Herbert, ‘The Oversight of Ceaseless Eyes’, Around the Absurd: Essays on Modern and Postmodern Drama, ed. Brater, Enoch and Cohn, Ruby (Ann Arbor, 1990), p. 280Google Scholar.

6. Brater, Enoch, ‘The Thinking Eye in Beckett's Film’, Modern Language Quarterly, XXXVI (1975), p. 170Google Scholar.

7. Jay, Martin, Downcast Eyes: the Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought (Berkeley, 1994), p. 69Google Scholar.

8. Foucault, Michel, The Birth of the Clinic: an Archeology of Medical Perception, trans. Smith, A. M. Sheridan (New York, 1994), p. 144Google Scholar.

9. Fisher, Russell S., Medicolegal Investigation of Death: Guidelines for the Application of Pathology to Crime Investigation, 2nd edn., ed. Spitz, Werner U., Fisher, Russell S. (Springfield, 1980), p. 3Google Scholar.

10. Vesalius, Andreas, Appendix, in O'Malley, C. D., Andreas Vesalius of Brussels: 1514–1564 (Berkeley, 1965), p. 397Google Scholar. See also Paré, Ambroise, The Case Reports and Autopsy Records of Ambroise Paré, trans. Malgaigne, J. P., ed. Hamby, Wallace B. (Springfield, 1960), p. 27Google Scholar: ‘putrefaction [of the brain] was beginning, which was sufficient cause for the death of the Lord, and not the eye wound’.

11. All references are to the televised trial of O. J. Simpson, 1995.

12. Sartre, Jean-Paul, Being and Nothingness: a Phenomenological Essay on Ontology, trans. Barnes, Hazel E. (New York, 1992), p. 352Google Scholar.

13. Vesalius, Andreas, The Illustrations from the Works of Andreas Vesalius of Brussels, ed. de, J. B.Saunders, C. M. and O'Malley, Charles D. (Cleveland, 1950), p. 43Google Scholar, 45. The Fabrica was originally published in 1543.

14. See Sawday, Jonathan, The Body Emblazoned: Dissection and the Human Body in Renaissance Culture (London, 1995), p. 66–72Google Scholar; and Wilson, Luke, ‘William Harvey's Prelectiones: the Performance of the Body in the Renaissance Theatre of Anatomy’, Representations, XVII (1987), p. 71–4Google Scholar.

15. In Foucault, op. cit, p. 146.

16. For an intriguing feminist analysis of the title page, see Marchitello, Howard, ‘Vesalius’ Fabrica and Shakespeare's Othello: Anatomy, Gender, and the Narrative Production of Meaning', Criticism, XXXV (1993), p. 529–58Google Scholar.

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19. Foucault, op. cit. p. 144.

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21. Blessing, Lee, Fortinbras (New York, 1992), p. 36Google Scholar.

22. Kristeva, Julia, Powers of Horror: an Essay on Abjection, trans. Roudiez, Leon S. (New York, 1982), p. 3Google Scholar.

23. In the stage version of What Where, V as the voice of Bam is represented by a small megaphone (p. 309). The dead body is literally transformed into a speaker.

24. Ariès, Philippe, The Hour of Our Death, trans. Weaver, Helen (New York, 1981), p. 473, 600Google Scholar.