Open up a few corpses

Autopsied cadavers in the post-boom

Bibliographic Data

ID2170033
AuthorsGlen S Close (0009-0002-3933-2523, corresponding author)
Year2008
Volume17
Issue1
Pages121-137
Publication date2008-03-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueJournal of Latin American Cultural Studies (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 1356-9325 • E-ISSN: 1469-9575
PublisherInforma UK Limited (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1080/13569320801950781
OpenAlexW2089408413
LanguageEN
References cited17

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes 1 If ‘the Boom’ was a contentious category, that of ‘Post-Boom’ is perhaps inevitably more so, but I invoke it cautiously here on the basis of the definitions offered by Roberto González Echevarría (1987), Gustavo Pellón (1996) and Donald L. Shaw (Citation1998), among others. The instability of this category recalls an incisive argument made by CitationBradley Epps precisely in relation to the figure of the putrefied cadaver in the narrative fiction of Catalan modernisme. CitationEpps relates the textual recurrence of corrupt, fragmenting and dissolute cadavers that generate ‘perplexity, confusion, uncertainty and dread’ (Citation2002: 35) and ‘render any divisive definition ... suspect’ (2002: 33) to the ‘dissolution of literary history that dogs the bibliography on modernisme’ (Citation2002: 42) and a general ‘crisis of categorization and definition ... in demarcation and order’ (2002: 44). Were it not for the risk of abusing Epps's insight, one might be tempted to develop a similar literary-historical reading of Post-Boom cadavers as a fifth allegorical level to supplement the four I propose here. 2 I cite from published English-language translations of the novels whenever possible, as indicated in the references, but translations from other novels are my own. 3 While I think it prudent to limit the principal focus of this essay to Spanish America, it would be negligent not to note here that in the same year as Puig, Barcelona novelist Juan Marsé also published a very substantial novel involving a car crash and an autopsy located very close to the scene of narrative enunciation. María Silvina Persino (Citation1989) and Aránzazu Ascunce (Citation2003) have offered readings of CitationMarsé's Si te dicen que caí that are highly complementary to mine here. 4 Although all three of these novels have been adapted into feature films, it is interesting to note that none of the morgue scenes I address here fared well in the process of adaptation. Francesco Rosi's 1987 adaptation of Crónica dispensed with the autopsy altogether. Sergio Cabrera's 2004 film of Perder opens with an impressive staging of the corpse display described below, but the morgue scene in the film eliminates the novel's emphasis on institutional decadence. Schroeder's adaptation of the culminating morgue visit in his version of La virgen, though elegantly expressive in its camera movement and acting, is ultimately frustrated, in my viewing, by the very hyperrealism of the digital video image, which does not allow the viewer to accept a very healthy and vital, though cadaverously painted, young actor as a convincing corpse. It is also worth noting the recurrence of the gutted, though not autopsied, cadaver in two more of the most successful recent films dealing with drug-related violence in Colombia. The sole image of explicit violence in María Full of Grace (dir. Joshua Marston 2004) is provided by a glimpse of the cadaver of a drug mule who has been cut open to retrieve her cargo, while the penultimate shot of Rosario Tijeras (dir. Emilio Maillé 2005) lingers on the opened corpse of the title character as it lies on an operating table immediately following her death. This is an image not included in Jorge Franco's 1999 novel, from which the film was adapted. 5 In Powers of horror (1982), Julia Kristeva provides us with perhaps the most potent theoretical framework for understanding detective fiction's deployment of the cadaver and its ritual containment of the threat it represents: that of utter indifferentiation, insignification and the terminal suspension of subjectivity. Her study opens with a sweeping consideration of the threat of ‘abjection’ of the subject by the cadaver, that ‘border that has encroached upon everything’. Kristeva writes: ‘The corpse, seen without God and outside of science, is the utmost of abjection. It is death infecting life. Abject. It is something rejected from which one does not part, from which one does not protect oneself as from an object. Imaginary uncanniness and real threat, it beckons to us and ends up engulfing us’ (1982: 3–4). It is, in this sense, detective fiction's futile and thus incessant task to subdue the abject that, for CitationKristeva, ‘simultaneously beseeches and pulverizes the subject’ (Citation1982: 5). 6 See, for example, the engraving that served as the frontispiece to Andreas Vesalius's influential anatomy treatise De Fabrica (1543), as discussed by Jonathan Sawday (1995: 66–78). 7 Though I shall not have occasion to pursue this here, this scene also recalls Elisabeth Bronfen's ideas regarding the gendering of the corpse as feminine in modern Western culture and the identification of the maternal body with death on the basis of Lacan's theory of the formation of the subject and its negotiation of the real, imaginary and symbolic orders (1992: 65). 8 A student of Darwinian theory and an advocate of animal rights, CitationVallejo directly attacks Christianity in various public statements for what he sees as its ethical indifference toward the natural environment and toward non-human animals. In a remarkable speech delivered in acceptance of the Premio Rómulo Gallegos, he introduced the notion of bioethics as follows: ‘The blood of animals is the same as that of Christ: red hemoglobin. Everything is a question of bioethics, a perspective which our popes, cardinals, priests and bishops have utterly neglected.... Man is not the king of creation. He is one species among millions who share with us a common past of four billion years’ (Citation2003). 9 Foucault in turn derives the title from an exhortation by Bichat in his 1801 Anatomie générale. 10 A news article published recently in the Colombian press perhaps signals the cutting edge of this trend in morbid spectacularity. According to El Tiempo (19 October 2006), an autopsy video made for pedagogical purposes and subsequently stolen from the Instituto de Medicina Legal has now appeared in pirate form for sale on the streets of Cali (‘La autopsia de un joven’, Citation2006). 11 Since the emergence of anatomical dissection, the spectacular and aesthetic components of the procedure have attracted the interest of visual artists ranging from Rembrandt van Rijn (The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp, 1632) to Andrés Serrano (The Morgue, 1992), Damien Hirst (The Elusive Truth, 2005) and Martha Pacheco (Mortem, 2006). A parallel lineage in literature springs less easily to mind, though Sawday (Citation1995) offers a suggestive account of the literary repercussions of the early-modern ‘culture of dissection’ in English poetry and drama of the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. 12 For a complementary perspective on posthuman bodies and the notion of the cut, see CitationJ. Andrew Brown's ‘Ripped stitches: Consumerism, technology and posthuman identity in Rafael Courtoisie's Tajos’ (Citation2006

Art · Boom · Cadaver · Comparative Literary Analysis and Criticism · Crime and Detective Fiction Studies · Engineering · Latin American Literature Studies · Medicine · Anatomy

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