Transplantation Gothic: Tissue transfer in literature, film, and medicine

230 Pages·2020·5.915 MB·English

by  Sara Wasson

Transplantation Gothic

Transplantation Gothic
Tissue transfer in literature, film, and medicine
sara wasson
Manchester University Press
Copyright © Sara Wasson 2020
The right of Sara Wasson to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by
her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
Published by Manchester University Press
Altrincham Street, Manchester M1 7JA
www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 978 1 5261 3286 4 hardback
First published 2020
The publisher has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for any
external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee
that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.
Cover image: Andrew Carnie, Gold Elysium (2017). Gold watercolour on stitched canvas.
© Image courtesy of Andrew Carnie.
Typeset by
Servis Filmsetting Ltd, Stockport, Cheshire
In memory of my father, Stuart Alan Clark

Contents
List of figures ix
Preface x
Acknowledgements xi
Introduction • Bodies dis(re)membered: Gothic and
the transplant imaginary 1
Gothic medicine, medical Gothic 10
Gothic historiography of transplantation science 12
Transfer biopolitics 17
‘Critical interloping’: Gothic studies and critical medical
humanities 24
1 • Clinical necropoetics: medical and ethics writing of
death and transplantation 39
Reading the dead 40
The new deaths: determination of death by neurological
criteria and donation after circulatory death 43
‘Closure rhetoric’ and clinical necropoetics 49
‘Ghouls’, ‘shudder’ and ‘twitch’: Gothic in critiques of cadaveric
transfer practice 51
Ancient threats and tortured twilight: the necropoetics of
procurement advocacy 55
2 • The bioemporium: corporate medical horror in late
twentieth-century American transfer fiction 67
‘Banking’ bodies 69
‘The hospital itself harboured considerable violence’: fantasies
of medical predation and profit 72
Spectral finance and bleeding bodies: transfer horror and
the secondary life of finance 86
viii Contents
3 • Clinical labour and slow violence: transnational harvest
horror and racial vulnerability at the turn of the millennium 92
‘Intricate crimes’: predatorial harvest and victim agency 95
‘Slow violence’ and ‘machines of social death’: horror
representations of a durative present 98
‘To mourn you piece by piece’: Manjula Padmanabhan’s Harvest
and turn-of-the-millennium Indian tissue economies 99
‘Humanity is thrown away’: Stephen Frears’s Dirty Pretty Things 103
Bodies ‘in service, plundered’: African-American harvest horror 107
4 • Possession? Uncanny assemblage and embodied scripts
in tissue recipient horror 127
The imaginative work of tissue incorporation 128
Uncanny bodies and narrative opacity: vectors of donor influence
and the pre-transplant strange 132
‘Seething’ forces and ‘fantastic melancholy’ in early fantasies of
blood and hand transfer 136
‘[B]aleful ceremonial ritual’: Georges Franju’s Les yeux sans visage 143
Survival and violation: three millennial representations of tissue
transfer 147
5 • Scalpel and metaphor: ‘machines of social death’ and
state-sanctioned harvest in dystopian fiction 161
‘Machines of social death’ and ‘worthwhile’ life 162
Metaphor and ceremony in tissue disentanglement 166
‘House of Pain operating room crypt castle tower’: state-sanctioned
‘harvest’ heterotopias 169
Coda • Writing wounds 185
Filmography 189
Bibliography 190
Index 213
Figures
Cover image. Andrew Carnie, Gold Elysium (2017). Gold watercolour on
stitched canvas. © Image courtesy of Andrew Carnie.
1 A ndrew Carnie, Commonality in Liquidity. Digital drawing (2007).
© Image courtesy of Andrew Carnie 28
2 Corridors. Film still from Coma, dir. by Michael Crichton
(US: Metro Goldwyn-Mayer, 1978) 75
3 Bodies in storage. Film still from Coma, dir. by Michael
Crichton (US: Metro Goldwyn-Mayer, 1978) 78
4 S till from Parts: The Clonus Horror, dir. by Robert Fiveson
(Group I Films, 1979) 79
5 Theatrical release poster for Parts: The Clonus Horror, dir. by
Robert Fiveson (Group I Films, 1979) 80
6 Isidro de Villoldo, Milagro de San Cosme y San Damián (c. 1547),
© Museo Nacional de Escultura, Valladolid. Photo: Javier Muñoz y
Paz Pastor CE0362 93
7 P oster for Harvest, dir. by Shelby Hibbs. Designed by Taylor
Guest. University of Texas at Dallas Theatrical Production, 2018.
© Taylor Guest 104
8 The fist descends. Still from Orlacs Hände, dir. by Robert Wiene
(Berolina, 1924) 142
9 Despair. Still from Orlacs Hände, dir. by Robert Wiene (Berolina,
1924) 143
10 Stills from Les yeux sans visage, dir. by Georges Franju (Champs-
Élysées Productions, 1958; US release 1960) 145
11 Andreas Vesalius, De Humani Corporis Fabrica (Basileæ: ex officina
Joannis Oporini, 1543), p. 181. © The British Library Board,
Reference Collection C.54.k.12 186