A Mind-Body-Flesh Problem the Case of Margaret Edson's Wit - Article

E L I Z A B E T H K L A V E R

A Mind-Body-Flesh Problem: The Caseof Margaret Edson’s Wit

Kill, and dissect me, Love; for thisTorture against thine owne end is,Rack’t carcasses make ill Anatomies.

John Donne, “Loves Exchange”

estern sciences, in order to be science, need anobject to study. For medical science, that object is,not surprisingly, the human body, which offersitself as the field of research, the specimen under

observation, the flesh subjected to “wit.” Such is the epistemologi-cal ground of Margaret Edson’s Pulitzer Prize–winning play aboutan English-professor-cum-cancer-patient who must navigate thefrightening territory of dying while on the stage of a modernresearch hospital. What Vivian Bearing experiences in the course ofher treatment is not only the classic mind-body problem but alsohow the problem is read through the positions of cultural con-structivism, materiality, and postmodern plasticity. To what extentdoes the play address the doing of the flesh, a sense of “the inde-pendent life of disease,” as Richard Selzer, a surgeon, puts it inMortal Lessons (167), as compared to the influential cultural bodyand the preeminence of the mind—indeed Vivian’s own superiorwit? And how well can this allegory of the drama among mind,body, and flesh be resolved given the existence of two opposinginterpretations—the dualist and the materialist—suggested by theplay’s ending?

Contemporary Literature XLV, 4 0010-7484/04/0004-0659© 2004 by the Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System

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Sherry Massoni

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The play Wit (which was made into a film by HBO in 2001)joins a number of contemporary “ailment dramas,” such as TonyKushner’s Angels in America and Spalding Gray’s Gray’s Anatomy intaking up issues, cultural as well as medical, associated with illnessand the medical profession’s response to it. As theater reviewershave noted, Wit offers a stinging commentary on the attitude ofmedical researchers toward the patient, as well as a correlation toVivian’s own exacting approach to scholarly research and teachingin the area of seventeenth-century English poetry. The play demon-strates a contradictory moment in the history of Western culture:two humanist fields dedicated to a tradition of social and individualimprovement—medicine and literature—are both guilty of yieldingto a perspective that precludes compassionate treatment of humanbeings. That this perspective is a cultural construct is no surprise,having sprung from the empirical paradigm upon which Westernresearch rests, a paradigm arising at the time of the Renaissance andstill very much with us today.

As Jonathan Sawday points out in The Body Emblazoned, a “cul-ture of dissection” (ix) took hold in early modern European cultureacross all fields of human endeavor, from painting and literature, tothe exploration (and exploitation) of the globe, to the practice ofanatomy on the human body. And, to be sure, a culture whose epis-temological metaphor came to be “dissection” necessarily raisesthe binaries of inside versus outside, subject versus object, mindversus body. To early modern medical researchers such as AndreasVesalius and Ambroise Paré, it was essential to cultivate an objec-tive approach that would render the body completely separablefrom the mind. How else could one proceed to cut up (ana + tome-)and observe with one’s own eyes (auto + opsis) the secret recessesof a dead person?1 Not surprisingly, the question of mind-body dual-ism, most notably attributed to René Descartes, appeared at exactly

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1. Contrary to popular opinion today, the early modern Catholic Church did notnecessarily oppose human dissection, especially when practiced solely on criminals: assinners, criminals were already condemned to Hell and thus had no need of an intactbody at resurrection. Moreover, despite Church censure, the practice of bringinghome just the boiled bones of Crusader knights who had died in the Holy Land hadbecome customary by 1300 (Conrad 177–78). Ironically, the more serious opposition tohuman dissection came from physicians, who could see no therapeutic point to it(Duffin 24).

the same time as the beginning of anatomical medicine and hasplayed a continuing, foundational role in the philosophy of medicalresearch.2

A Genealogy

Indeed, as shown in Wit, the objective approach instilled at thebeginning of modern intellectual life is still the operative mode intoday’s medical research hospital. The play provides the medicalresearcher’s description of cancer. In response to Vivian’s questionwhy he has chosen to study this particular disease, Jason answers:“How does [cancer] do it?. . . You grow normal cells in tissue cul-ture in the lab, and they replicate just enough to make a nice, con-fluent monolayer. . . . You grow cancer cells, and they never stop”(46). This objective perspective is something Vivian can appreciate,since she has been on the looking end of the “microscope” herselfas a literary scholar; if Jason concentrates on cancer at the cellularlevel, she has been doing something very similar in “dissecting”the poems of John Donne right down to the punctuation. Vivianeven provides Jason with the appropriate adjective for cancer:“Awesome” (45). But how have we come to this pass where, in 1999when Wit premiered in New York, a horrible illness like cancer canbe described with a word of veneration?3

Jacalyn Duffin, a Canadian physician and medical historian, offersa useful distinction between the notions of disease and illness: dis-ease is “a theory constructed to explain the illness,” and illness is theword “used to designate individual suffering” (66). To the medicalresearcher, cancer belongs to the discourse of medicine. It is a “dis-ease concept,” a built model based on countless observations ofsymptoms, postmortem lesions, and, as in Jason’s work, cellularactivity. The history of modern Western medicine may be figuredas a history of built models in which the flesh has always acted asthe object of the discourse in a series of disease concepts, oneafter another: thus the earlier “wasting disease” becomes today’s

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2. Interestingly, the Ancient Israelites, a culture lacking a mind-body separation andbelieving in psychophysical unity, did not develop a medical practice based on anatomy(Hankoff 30).

3. Edson based her play on observations she had made some years earlier as the unitclerk on the cancer and AIDS wards of a research hospital (“Love and Knowledge”).

“cancer.” Interestingly, Duffin’s distinction between disease andillness is remarkably similar to the position Susan Sontag elaboratesin her seminal work Illness as Metaphor, as well as more recently inAIDS and Its Metaphors. Like Duffin, Sontag clearly distinguishesbetween the illness of the flesh and the discourse used to describeit. Her project is not to define disease—after all, she is the patient,not the doctor—but to rid the flesh of the horrible effects of themetaphors, the “language of warfare” stamped on it (64). Similarly,the cultural critic Michel de Certeau makes a distinction betweenmaterial and discourse, between the flesh and the body: the fleshis something “which writing changes into a body” (145). Despitethe many differences in their respective work, Duffin, Sontag, and de Certeau represent a general position that has come currentin the postmodern era: the flesh may be ill, but the body has disease.

As de Certeau writes, the change from flesh into a “body” occurswhen the flesh undergoes an “incarnation of knowledge” or aprocess of “intextuation” (143, 149). Western medicine con-structs the body, or at least a theoretical model of the flesh.Indeed, through surgery and other forms of treatment, disease con-cepts can literally etch themselves as signifiers on the flesh.Nowhere in Wit is this point more poignantly evidenced than in thesplit dialogue that occurs during Grand Rounds: at the bedside,Jason intones: “At the time of first-look surgery, a significant part ofthe tumor was de-bulked. . . . Left, right ovaries. Fallopian tubes.Uterus. All out.” And on Vivian’s side: “they read me like a book”(32).

The self, or the being-as-object (the “me”), read as a book is thepostmodern trope par excellence of an era where narrative discourseshave tended to override the material world. The relation of Vivian’sflesh to her body at this point in the play is exhibiting somethingvery like Jean Baudrillard’s notion of hyperreality: the real has beenreplaced by the reification of the (written) image (166–67). Ofcourse, this book-trope of the material world has some affinity withthe medieval Book of Nature, in which all of nature is open to beingread, like the Bible, as the word of God. In postmodernism, though,theology has been abstracted. Today we look not for God in the real,but for discursive structures; in the circumstance of Wit, we look for


the composition of disease in the body. Rather than the Book ofNature, Vivian’s sense of herself, or perhaps her self’s body, as read-able narrative is actually more comparable to early mechanistic the-ories such as Descartes’s comparison of the body to an automaton.Up until quite recently, an earlier counterpart of Vivian might havecomplained that her doctors “tell me like a clock.”

Even if we no longer completely believe that a sick (wo)man is likea poorly made clock, mechanistic theories of the body have beeninstrumental in the development of empirical sciences such asmedicine. Ironically, Descartes’s metaphors of machines, clocks,and automatons—metaphors he used to describe the body’s mate-riality as opposed to the immateriality of thought (which heequated with the soul) (Duffin 47–49)—would come to underpinNewtonian materialism and the very way our modern apprehen-sion of matter came into existence.4 Matter, as axiomatic Realistsunderstand it, must have material form; it cannot simply dissipateinto the fancies of our (Idealist) imagination. As material, therefore,matter can be “dissected” all the way down to the muons and glu-ons—the nuts and bolts of mechanistic theory—or to what one schoolof physicists now thinks is the basic object, a p-brane (Hawking 54).Since quantum mechanics today underpins molecular biology, thecultural dominant in medical science is currently the multilayeredmodel, a model that understands the world as hierarchically tiered,with elementary particles occupying the bottom tier and the higherorganisms with consciousness occupying the top (Kim 10–11). Thusthe mind can be understood as the symbolic reflex of material activ-ity occurring at the lower level of the brain’s neurons, an area that issealed off to the conscious subject—hence the materialist explanationof dualism as simply the impression of a mind-body split.

Of course, in opposition to a purely materialistic answer to themind-body problem, modern Western medicine has also continued

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4. Descartes identified the pineal gland as the fulcrum hinging the materiality ofthe body to the immateriality of the mind or soul. He made the famous comparison ofa sick man to a poorly made clock in Meditations (Duffin 48). The term “body” in thisessay refers to the theorized flesh, while the term “flesh” refers to the material facticity“before” theorization. In discussing the mind-body problem, I retain the term “body”partly because it is the traditional phrase and is still in use today by philosophers, butalso because the “body” in the mind-body problem is indeed theorized flesh.

to tolerate the more dualistic approach. The theory of vitalism,which hypothesized an anima or life spirit exterior to the mechanicsof the body, opposed mechanism throughout the eighteenth centuryin medicine, although by the nineteenth century the introductionof positivism was grounding medical research ever more firmlyon empirical observation of “facts” (Duffin 50–51). Nevertheless,Western medicine today, despite being strongly positivist and essen-tially mechanistic, has not resolved the dualist-materialist debate:it is quite conceivable to be a medical researcher and believe, asDescartes did, in the immateriality of the mind or soul. Fence-sittingwith respect to the mind-body problem is possible because medicalresearch demands only that the body be seen as the intextuatedobject of science (and not as a soul, subject, or person), and both thedualist and materialist philosophies empower this perspective. Inother words, whether the mind dies with the flesh or continues toexist immaterially, Western medicine views the body finally as just abody. This objectification is what set the stage for anatomical analy-sis in the Renaissance. Without it, Western medicine could not haveadvanced beyond early modern nosology.

To the layperson like Vivian, the mind-body problem is simplyan intellectual exercise until the “works” start to act up. When theydo, the thought begins to dawn that the mind-body problem is areal dilemma. Is there something that will go “toward a little light” atthe end of the play (66)? Or perhaps the body is not separable, noteven as a book, from the mind. Has the preeminence of the mindsimply been an illusion? Perhaps the flesh is in charge and has beenall along. Indeed, perhaps the postmodernists are right: the bodyand the discourse may be one and the same (postmodern) material.Is this the type of understanding of the mind-body problem thatVivian must come to in the course of her dying, and the audiencein the course of the play? Clearly, throughout much of her life,Vivian has been loath to cede much credibility to the doing of theflesh—the performative factor of illness—as well as the body ofWestern medicine. She ignores the pain in her belly for months, justas she ignores cancer risk-factors and standard medical advice.And for most of her dying, Vivian asserts, perhaps as a defensemechanism against the flesh, the mind’s superiority. As if the prob-ing of her ravaged flesh is happening to some other object, she


shares a moment of “wit” with Dr. Kelekian over the thickheaded-ness of students (34).

Indeed, while Vivian may harbor some lingering, albeit unspo-ken, hope of prolonging her life, the given justification for under-going the misery of cancer treatment is its potential for advancingWestern medical science. It makes sense to her to do this: likeDr. Kelekian, she is on the intellectual side of the mind-body coin—even if it is her own body—a subject in charge of a “text.” ToKelekian’s assurance that the chemotherapy about to be suffered“will make a significant contribution to our knowledge,” Vivianresponds, “Knowledge, yes” (12). She willingly offers up her bodyas experimental matter for medical science. And, of course, theimpression of epistemological coercion attached to this “gift”—after all, it does represent the only glimmer of hope in a “matter. . . .of life and death” (13)—brings us back to the play’s critique ofWestern medicine and its objectification of the body, and subse-quently to the play’s own political perspective.

As generous as it may be to humanism, the notion of being aspecimen, a “needy specimen,” as Peter Marks put it in his New YorkTimes review of the off-Broadway MCC production in New York, ismeant to be distasteful to Vivian as well as to the audience (as it isin Angels in America, Part II). Vivian complains late in the play of herown intextuation at the hands, or more precisely at the mind, ofmedical discourse: the being-as-object (the “me”) has become “justthe specimen jar, just the dust jacket, just the white piece of paperthat bears the little black marks” (43). That such a “specimen” couldmake life better for future generations does not quite alleviate thedeep suspicion and skepticism ordinary people (including the the-atergoer) have turned on medical science since the rise of dualism.

Indeed, medical research in the West has a truly appalling his-tory with respect to the public. Human dissection during theRenaissance was carried out mostly on the bodies of hanged crimi-nals in huge public spectacles that were as popular as the execu-tions themselves. But the gallows soon fell far short of demand asanatomical medicine became the foundation of Western medicaltraining. “Resurrecting” corpses from fresh graves was the firstsolution to a supply-side crisis; murder was the second. After all, ifanatomists were willing to pay good money for freshly dug corpses,

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why not give a few unwary victims a little nudge into the here-after?5 Not surprisingly, these practices led to public outrage, evenriots by townspeople at the doors of medical schools.

In an effort to extricate medical science from its association withcriminality, and to supply sufficient numbers of cadavers to themedical schools, most Western nations passed laws like England’sAnatomy Act of 1832, which transferred the burden of body provi-sion from the criminal class to the poor (Marshall 23). Now bodiescould be obtained from the workhouses, poorhouses, and countymorgues. Indeed, at this time in the United States, a disproportion-ate number of specimen cadavers in cities like Baltimore came to bepoor blacks (Iserson 338). By the early twentieth century, most ofthis brutality had disappeared, to be replaced with a greater sensi-tivity from the medical profession toward the public. Altruisticdonation of one’s body to medical science became quite commonand today supplies medical schools with most of their cadavers.Nevertheless, well into the twentieth century we have the exam-ples of Nazi medical researchers experimenting on Jews and thescandalous Tuskegee Syphilis Study (1932 to 1972) which, in orderto observe the long-term effects of venereal disease, denied 399African American men appropriate medical treatment.

While individual patients like Vivian (and many theatergoers)may not know the sordid aspects of the history of medical researchin the West, distrust nevertheless permeates the public imagination.Contrary to the historical narrative given by the medical commu-nity, which tends to view its protagonists as heroes, Western litera-ture is full of examples of the cruel, overreaching, or villainousdoctor—Faustus, Frankenstein, and the vivisectionist Moreau ofH. G. Wells’s The Island of Doctor Moreau to name just a few. Onewould have to be objective in the extreme to offer up one’s body tothese characters. That Wit chooses to depict its doctors according tothis tradition is made quite clear in the characters of Dr. Kelekianand, especially, Jason. As Les Gutman writes, Jason “has lost all of


5. In Edinburgh, Scotland, in 1829, two “resurrection men,” Burke and Hare, wereconvicted of murder for the purpose of selling corpses to the surgeons. Dr. Robert Knox,the famous anatomist, was implicated in the scheme but never saw trial. Burke was sub-sequently executed, anatomized, and publicly exhibited (Marshall 1, 70).

the pathmarkers to humanity.” To portray medicine in this waysuggests a perspective designed to resonate well with an alreadydeeply wary public. That the depiction may be unfair to contempo-rary medical science and practice makes it political indeed.

We Can (Re)Construct You

What does the public really want from medical science? Is it, as Witseems to suggest, to be treated like a human being? Or is it to becured? (Or both?) And if not cured today, as in Vivian’s case, per-haps in the next generation? Such questions return to the dualisticinception of modern Western medicine: still today, the collectivebrainpower of researchers like Dr. Kelekian and Jason focuses all itsresources on vanquishing the mysteries of a completely separableand empirical “specimen,” the body—all for a cure. To focus on thehuman being would mean letting Vivian die without the experi-mental treatment—conceding to the flesh—and letting a (future)cure go. But of course the dilemma lies in the fact that the play doesneither (or perhaps lies in trying to do both): ovarian cancer is notsolved, Vivian’s dying is not humane. Vivian’s flesh, no matter howcommanding, is fought by the intextuation of Western medicineright to the last, literal minute. At the end, Jason cries over Vivian’slifeless body, “She’s Research!” (64).

In other words, the mind-body problem, as I have been imply-ing, has also surfaced in the postmodern era as a discourse-fleshproblem, a subject initiated quite possibly by Sontag. To whatextent can we view the flesh as separable from, as outside, dis-course? If materialists no longer view the mind as separable fromthe body, postmodernists no longer view the mind as separablefrom discursive and cultural structures: Jacques Lacan’s famousdictum thus becomes quite literal with the simile “structured like”struck from the equation: “the unconscious is . . . language” (149).In this perspective, there are no prediscursive resources of themind available to a subject. In the language of Derridean post-structuralism, the separability of the signified (thought) from thesignifier (discourse) is inconceivable even in the literal sense ofthe word. In fact, this model of a discursive mind is essential to theresearch and development of artificial intelligence. In order to map

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some equivalency between human thought and machine thought,programmers have had to work within the discourses of mathe-matics and formal systems.

It is also true that postmodernists view the body as discursive aswell as the mind, a position that may arise from Sontag’s early workand one I most certainly agree with. But here the body is under-stood to be distinct from the flesh, to borrow de Certeau’s divi-sion, by having undergone the intextuation of the discursive mindthrough social construction, Foucauldian-type disciplining, andscientific modeling (“She’s Research!”). The most extreme edge ofpostmodern constructivists, however, led in the main by the theo-ries of Michel Foucault and Judith Butler, perceive not just the body,as the intextuated flesh, but even the flesh itself as constructed bydiscourse (or power regimes). In other words, the flesh and thebody, if not one and the same, are at least indistinguishable: theflesh does not / cannot constitute prediscursive matter. Even mat-ter does not constitute prediscursive matter. In fact, as Butler statesat the outset of Bodies That Matter, “the matter of bodies will beindissociable from the regulatory norms that govern their material-ization . . .” (2), and later, “[t]o posit a materiality outside of lan-guage is still to posit that materiality, and the materiality so positedwill retain that positing as its constitutive condition” (67–68). SinceButler has been most influential in generating (and sticking to) theextreme view, and indeed faults Foucault for falling short (asI show below), I want briefly to critique her position, especially asit appears in Bodies That Matter.

Butler bases Bodies That Matter on philosophical rather than sci-entific theories and definitions of matter (and the body), a strategythat may account for much of the critical resistance she has faced.After all, given the cultural dominance of science today, definitionsof matter, even for literary scholars, are more likely to arise frommodern physics than from classical philosophy. In fact, I find it oddthat, in a book about the body, microbiology and medical scienceplay no role at all in the discussion. Butler dispenses with scienceand any contribution the medical community might make to theo-ries of the body in a few parenthetical asides. For example: “matteris clearly defined by a certain power of creation and rationalitythat is for the most part divested from the more modern empirical


deployments of the term (32; emphasis added).6 Apparently, modernempirical deployments of “matter” exist, but they have no place inBodies That Matter. Rather, Butler is interested in critiquing thephilosophical discourse on matter and the body to which it givesrise, from Aristotle, through Freud and Lacan, to Zizek.

And, of course, it is the discourse that commands her attention.The body, to Butler, is always already discursive; there is no way toposit a body before discourse without already positing the body, noway to think about matter without already conceptualizing matter.So true. The problem with this position, though, is that it makes noparticular matter of something we might call the flesh. The flesh, asde Certeau and Duffin understand it, does not figure in Butler’stheory at all. Butler goes directly from the (discursive) “regulatorynorm” that materializes the body to the body as the sedimented his-tory or effect of that materialization, a combination of Aristotle andFoucault that she freely acknowledges (33). Under this rubric, therereally is no way to locate a materiality or fleshly substance outsidethe sign. Hence the notion arises that the body must be constructed(by discourse) “all the way down,” as it is put colloquially.

Butler anticipates and roundly denounces any suggestion thatthere is a materiality outside discourse (see pages 31, 49, 52, 187 forexamples). In her theory, if we were to consider flesh as a categoryseparate from the body, we would have simply reinscribed thenature-culture binary. In “Foucault and the Paradox of Bodily In-scriptions,” Butler chides Foucault for precisely this reinscription.Here is a paraphrase of her criticism: while Foucault claims thatbodies do not have material or ontological existence outside of cul-ture or power regimes, his theory actually relies on a notion of thebody as having subterranean depth that is repressed through theexternal forces of cultural construction (308). In other words, Butlersees a slippage in Foucault wherein the “body” has something“deeper” or “before” the apparatus of culture, something that cul-ture acts upon. I find myself agreeing with Foucault.

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6. Though she does make several references to medical science in Bodies That Matter,Butler’s purpose in doing so is simply to point out its discursive status. For additionalexamples of her treatment of medical science, see pages 66–67 and 90–91. Butler offers nosubstantial discussion of medical or scientific theories or theorists.

In fact, the body critic Carol Bigwood reprimands Butler forreducing the body to nothing but cultural determinants. Bigwoodsees in Butler a reinscription of the anthropocentric view of theworld in which the (human) mind or (human) culture exercisessuperiority over everything else (103). Similarly, in “PosthumanistPerformativity: Toward an Understanding of How Matter Comes toMatter,” a lengthy critique of constructivist theories, Karen Baradlaments the replacement of “matters of ‘fact’” with “matters ofsignification.” Indeed, Susan Bordo has coined the term “culturalplastic” for the body of such radical constructivism, a term thatquestions the assumption in extreme areas of body criticism (andpopular culture) that postmodern subjects are empowered to ignoreor construct, usually through the technology of medical science(ironically enough), the biological and material facticity of the flesh(45). Other influential critics like Evelyn Fox Keller and John R.Searle have complained (rightly, I think) that Butlerian perspectivesinclude the “natural” or “brute” world in the category of the cul-turally determined (Keller 3, Searle 2). Terry Eagleton, in his recentbook The Idea of Culture, even goes so far as to regard such positionsas Butler’s as betraying a particularly Californian form of hubris(88). I would add to these criticisms that the extreme edge ofconstructivism seems close to courting some sort of postmodernIdealism which does not recognize an “out there” apart from ourdiscursive categories. The following remark by surgeon RichardSelzer is humbling: “[I]t is the flesh alone that counts. The rest isthat with which we distract ourselves when we are not hungry orcold, in pain or ecstasy” (16).

One of the main sticking points in body criticism today hasbecome this question of whether we can consider a category “flesh”that is separable from the “body,” of whether we can accept that“something,” whatever that “something” is, lies outside discourse.7


7. An additional long-standing criticism of Butler’s work is its lack of attention topolitical concerns. For an excellent discussion of the political ramifications of Butler’sbooks, see Martha Nussbaum’s “The Professor of Parody.” Nussbaum points out that theconstruction of sociopolitical reality rests on an acceptance of the facticity of the flesh:“We might have had the bodies of birds or dinosaurs or lions, but we do not; and thisreality shapes our choices” (43).

Surprisingly, Butler inadvertently opens a crack in Bodies ThatMatter that allows this position to come in. In her chapter on SlavojZizek and the Lacanian Real, she calls upon all to agree that thereis an “outside” to the social which negatively defines the social,though she warns against the ideological move such a positionmight entail (206). Of course the “outside” she refers to is the Real,what Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe call the antagonism (122)and Zizek the impossible kernel (45), not the material world ofscience. Nevertheless, such an acknowledgment of an “outside”suggests that there is room for something to be “outside,” or to be“fuller” or “larger” than culture—dare I say some place for the fleshto occupy. I am not claiming that the flesh is “originary to” or even“before” the body in any ontotheological sense of the word. But asTerry Eagleton claims, it has givenness (88); somehow the fleshabides with-out the functions of culture or, as Searle maintains about“things,” is “logically independent of all human representations” (155).Searle’s analysis of how the sociocultural world is constructed restson the philosophical theory of Realism (not to be confused with lit-erary realism or the Real). Realism simply states that there exists areality independent of our representations of it. Realism claims only thatthere is a way things are, without claiming to say or know how theyare, for if we were to claim to say or know how they are, we put our-selves back in cultural constructs. Realism does not assert a singleor privileged discourse for describing external reality (Searle 155),whether that discourse is the modeling of science or the textualityof poststructuralism.

Most certainly, I would argue that Wit weighs in on the side ofBigwood, Bordo, Searle, and Barad in this debate. In the play, a pre-discursive body may, indeed, be deconstructable. What do we knowabout Vivian’s body except through what she, the play, and the dis-course of medical science—“disease”—tell us? As Butler rightlyclaims in Bodies That Matter, “insofar as the extra-discursive isdelimited, it is formed by the very discourse from which it seeks tofree itself” (11). Nevertheless, Butler’s point does not address thewillfulness, waywardness, or contrariness of the flesh—its hunger,cold, pain, or ecstasy—the factors we might consider the performa-tive aspect of the flesh or its doing in the world, the very conditionthat the play is addressing. In fact, Herbert Blau speaks eloquently

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to this point in discussing the relation of theater to what is outsidetheater in The Eye of Prey, what he calls the “ado” as opposed to the“doing.” Blau makes a case for an ontological gap between realityand theater, between just doing in the real world and the ado ofplays. He argues that a state (life) exists “before” theater whichwould have to be other than theater (165) and, most interestingly,that its usurpation in theater is exactly what validates “reality” the-oretically (170). Blau anticipates Zizek in saying that a negativelydefined “inside” confirms an “outside.” In Blau’s terms, then, Witrepresents the “doing” of a woman dying of ovarian cancer, whileWit itself is the “ado” of the “doing.”

Blau’s ontological distinction is important in understanding howWit works to generate such power and cultural significance. Thetheatrical form is really the best genre for such an exploration intoailment and dying, mainly because the sign has to be embodied asa real actor, a “Vivian” that is before us in all her fleshly facticity. Wedo not simply read about the deterioration of Vivian’s flesh as itresponds to ailment and treatment; we actually witness it occurring.We see Vivian become weaker and more pain-ridden as the playgoes on. Of course, the theater (and the film) is staging Vivian’sbody, intextuating the flesh just as medical science and this essayare staging it (and even as Vivian is staging John Donne). No doubtthe body is on display in these venues, as it always would be in dis-cursive structures. Interestingly, though, the play penetrates displayof the body with a continuous thread of metacommentary: Vivian’sdirect address to the audience implicates the audience, places us“on stage,” in the room, at the bedside. As Blau puts it, when thisparticular theatrical device is deployed, “the watchers are watchingthe watchers watch. . . .” (168). The discursive “ado” is breached; the“outside” seeps in. At these moments, we come closest in the playto experiencing “life,” (vicariously) the doing of dying. And, I wouldargue, it is the play’s ability to take us to the doing that is so affect-ing, so that we may respond to “[t]he actor perform[ing] the char-acter behind whom is the victim” even if “[t]here may be no ‘realperson’ at all behind the scenes,” as Richard Schechner puts it (235,234). After all, the actor will live on to act, to act Vivian, another day.But the “outside” won’t. Somewhere, someone is dying of ovariancancer. When we mourn “Vivian,” we mourn that woman.


In other words, no matter what the cultural constructions or med-ical interventions may be—that is to say, the wit—we see Vivian’sbody succumbing to the doing of the flesh. And regardless of howlong Western culture has struggled to change this situation (has itreally been five hundred years?), it is still the flesh, not the body, thatis ultimately in charge. I would suggest that, along the lines of Blau,somehow the flesh continues to overflow culture; the flesh is fullerthan the body; the flesh simply refuses to go under erasure. Ofcourse, it is quite clear in Wit that Vivian’s body is in the process ofbeing constructed. Or perhaps a better way of saying this is that herbody is being “reconstructed.” Vivian does not show up at her doc-tor’s office like a Lego set of elementary particles, as the word “con-struction” would seem to suggest. Her flesh has already beenintextuated by Western culture: to rewrite Simone de Beauvoir’sfamous saying, “she has already been made a woman.” But in thecourse of the play, this body is remade or rewritten according to themedical discourse she has now entered. Once it was a healthy body—today it is a diseased body, a statistical body, indeed a body materi-ally altered by the “penmanship” of surgery and chemotherapy. DeBeauvoir’s phrase begins to ring with ironic overtones: if women aremade, can they be unmade? What is the status of Vivian’s “woman-liness” at this point in her life? Is she still a “woman”?

So how much do the trappings of the flesh contribute to the cul-tural construct of “woman”? This, of course, is a classic feministproblematic. If those trappings are amputated, does “woman” sur-vive? Perhaps the remnant—what is left over when ovaries, uterus,and fallopian tubes are “all out”—is a woman-somehow-less-than-woman. Oddly enough, the logic of the “postmodern plastic body”would seem to suggest that this is so. I am reminded of CindyJackson, “the woman who would be Barbie”—to borrow a phrasefrom M. G. Lord—who has undergone numerous plastic surgeriesto render her body and face more like Mattel’s idealized woman-doll. Is Cindy, as she puts it herself, a “Bionic Woman” (qtd. in Lord244)? In other words, according to the postmodern paradigm of cul-tural plastic, having the (secondary) sexual characteristics and,moreover, having them to a certain degree of perfection, does seemto make the cultural construct (even though, presumably, the Barbiedoll does not have ovaries, a uterus, or fallopian tubes). Ironically,

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though, regarding “man,” Cindy advises a nonsurgical approach:“As far as I’m concerned, with men who aren’t very well endowed,it’s cheaper to buy a Porsche and probably more safe” (qtd. in Lord251).

On the contrary, one could argue that the intextuation of medicaldiscourse, the very “writing” it has done to reconstruct Vivian’sbody, makes her “more woman” than she was with the female re-productive organs intact. For one thing, if Vivian were to surviveher illness, she would be placed in a new medical category: womenat high risk for female reproductive cancers. Since ovarian cells aredistributed throughout the abdomen, she would still be susceptibleto a recurrence or even a new ovarian cancer regardless of the hys-terectomy, as well as predisposed to breast cancer. If ovarian canceris a disease only women can develop, and certain women are athigh risk, then medical science makes (postoperative) Vivian very“womanly” indeed. So too are those women who are breastless dueto mastectomy. Despite their lack of breasts (contra Barbie), in thistypology their particular cancer would seem to make these womenmore “womanly” as well, because they are more susceptible toother female reproductive cancers.

All of this goes to the question of whether cultural constructs aremakings of, or makings about, the flesh. Wit, to my mind, is strikinga position for their being makings about the flesh. Medical discourseconstructs models about the flesh, whether the models are humoral,anatomical, or genetic, indeed sometimes even sculpts the flesh; butjust as with oils or clay, it is also delimited according to the materialof its medium. In medical terms, Vivian has “an insidious adeno-carcinoma,” which Dr. Kelekian understands to mean cancer“undetectable at an [early stage]”; just as accurately, Vivian trans-lates the word “insidious” as “treacherous” (9), producing one ofthe very metaphors Sontag rails against with respect to tuberculosisas well as cancer, an “implacable theft of a life” (5). Nevertheless,both meanings of “insidious”—Kelekian’s and Vivian’s—point tosomething instigated at the fleshly, not the bodily, level, somethingvaster than the power regimes of human construction, even though“treachery” does connote a personification of the flesh, as if theflesh were capable of some sort of agency or wit. (This perceivedagency, I would argue, is simply the way we recognize the perfor-


mative factor, the doing, of the flesh.) Moreover, Kelekian’s prosaicadjective, “undetectable,” indicates a certain recognition of the lim-itations of cultural construction, here the limitations of Westernmedicine and its diagnostic tools.

The flesh and its illnesses are, for all intents and purposes, still apretty random affair even in the postmodern era. When it comes tothe body, medical science may construct disease concepts with awide range of possible causes, as Wit provides for Vivian—is itgenetic? (her mother had breast cancer)—but the purpose of thesecauses seems to be, at some level, simply the construction of a pal-liative for the epistemophilia of the Western mind. Certainly, thebody that oncologists actually work with is a statistical model.Regardless of risk factors, the statistical probability for any womanin the United States or Canada developing ovarian cancer at sometime in her life is slightly less than 2 percent, according to theNational Cancer Institute Web site. In other words, if fifty-sevenwomen were to stand in a line, one would be pulled out. “Why”doesn’t even enter the picture. As the doctor in the video perform-ance of Gray’s Anatomy explains, “Shit happens.”

The Ending(s)

Thus regarding the postmodernist discourse-flesh question, Wittakes the position of maintaining a distinction between the fleshand the body in the manner of Sontag and de Certeau. The endingof the play, however, brings the third factor, the mind, back to theequation in a way that makes the mind-body-flesh problem resur-face in a strikingly graphic and equivocal way. A hallmark oftheater, according to Schechner, is its ability to offer “multiplyingalternatives” (234). Indeed, so diametrically opposed are the twobasic alternatives available to the audience in the last scene of Witthat the play has, essentially, provided two conclusions: one for thedualist and one for the materialist. When we read Wit in my mod-ern drama course, the students initially reacted to the ending as thecorniest of clichés: “Vivian steps out of the bed. She walks away from thescene, toward a little light” (66). (Oh, come off it!) Their reaction is atestament to how thoroughly dualism has permeated the Westernimagination, for this type of scene is a popular way of “proving” the

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existence of the mind as separate from the body, and we’ve seenit everywhere from television talk-show testimonials to romanticmovies. In Wit, what we observe going toward the light, in thisinterpretation, is Vivian’s mind or soul or consciousness or anima—whatever philosophers have called it—while the body (as well asthe flesh) is left behind like an old reptilian skin. Indeed, Viviansheds her clothes.

While the ending of the HBO film production of Wit is quite dif-ferent in detail from the play, it can still be interpreted in the same(dualist) fashion. A close-up shot shows Vivian’s dead face under-going an enlightening process until the image of death is slowlyerased by the superimposition of her live face. At the same time,Vivian’s voice recites John Donne’s poem with the final line,“Death, thou shalt die.” Here is evidence that death is surelydefeated even by death, for the mind, anima, or spirit lives on afterthe flesh succumbs. Interestingly, the film clearly signals throughcolor code that the passage Vivian experiences is not a resurrectionback into life: Vivian’s dead face is in color, the postmortem imagein black and white.

But the final scene, both in the play and in the film, also offers away out for the materialist. While we may think of death as the endof life, death (like dying) is actually a series of stages. As Foucaultpoints out in The Birth of the Clinic, prior to the end of the nineteenthcentury, Western physicians understood death as an “absolute,privileged point at which time stops.” With the rise of postmortemtissue analysis, death becomes “a teeming presence” (Foucault 142).In terms of clinical medicine, this paradigm shift has demanded acorresponding shift in the definition of death. Clinical death (at thebedside) is considered the moment when the heart and lungs stopfunctioning. Yet the brain continues to live on for several minutes,and certain cells in the body live for several days. According toKenneth V. Iserson, most Western countries, because of the historyof mind-body separation, accept the definition of death standard-ized by brain criteria—that is, brain death (14–15). This outlook iswhat makes it possible for Jason to call a Code Blue on Vivian. Inother circumstances, it is also what makes it possible to turn off themachines while the patient’s body is still functioning, because theneocortex (where the mind resides) is flat.


According to the materialist position, because the brain continuesto live for some time during the process of clinical death, it is quitepossible that the light, or Jesus, or angels seen by those who havesurvived clinical death is nothing more than the brain’s hallucina-tions as it is slowly starved of oxygen. This interpretation, then,suggests that what we see going “toward a little light” in Wit, or hearreciting the Donne poem in the film, is the visionary, embodiedproduct of Vivian’s flesh in its final, agonal moments. The mind isthe flesh, or one could say that the mind is the highly abstract, sym-bolic, and specialized function of the flesh. The mind has the samerelation to the brain as walking has to the legs, and because of thisrelation, it ceases when the flesh ceases.

Such opposing ending(s) to the play circle back to the questionI posed at the beginning of this essay. If Wit is an allegory of themind-body-flesh problem, can the mind-body-flesh problem beresolved within the parameters of the last scene? Despite the initialresponse of many theatergoers, who, like my students, may opt fora dualist interpretation, it is quite easy, as I hope I have shown, tocome up with a materialist counterargument. In fact, the last sceneof Wit reminds me of a wonderfully clever passage in RebeccaGoldstein’s novel The Mind-Body Problem where a proof for dualismis presented. The proof is based on the strategy of a logical contra-diction. Though I am providing a full reproduction of the passage,I will be substituting the word “mind” for the word Goldstein uses,“person,” and subsequently altering the pronouns to make it moreanalogous to my discussion:

1. If the mind is identical with the body, the mind would not survivedeath.

2. If the mind is identical with the body, the mind would survive death.8

3. So if the mind is identical with the body, the mind both would andwould not survive death.

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8. Premise 2—the mind would survive death—is proved by a conditional proposi-tion, which Goldstein also provides in the novel. Here is Goldstein’s proof for premise 2(again, I am substituting my word “mind” for her word “person”):

A. The mind is identical with the body.B. The mind doesn’t survive death.

Since any proposition that entails a contradiction can’t be true, we candeduce from 3 that:

4. The mind is not identical with the body.(157)

While Goldstein’s proof appears to validate dualism, just a simplechange in the premises makes it prove materialism: insert the word“not” between “is” and “identical” in lines 1 and 2. Something sim-ilar seems to be going on with the ending(s) of Wit. Just by alteringslightly the premises of the scene, one can demonstrate either a dual-ist or materialist interpretation: (1) if the mind really goes toward thelight, then the mind survives the body’s death; (2) if the mind reallyhallucinates, then the mind does not survive the body’s death.Therefore, the mind either is separable from the body, or it is not.Take your pick. This ending suggests more of a mind-body binarythan a logical contradiction.

In other words, Wit neatly circumvents the mind-body problem-atic it has raised. But what else could it do? Philosophically speak-ing, the play accurately reflects the insolubility, at least so far, of thedualist-materialist question within the parameters of modernWestern culture and science. Descartes left a legacy, perhaps simplyby initiating the terms of the problem, which has remained themajor topic in philosophy of mind still today. If dualism is refutedas mere epiphenomenon, materialism is stymied by the question ofhow the brain “produces” consciousness (Griffin 1–2). The mind-body problem is perhaps the most stubborn of all the Western bina-ries, and nowhere more so than in the field of medicine. As a modernscience still resting on the “dissection” paradigm initiated at theRenaissance, medical research yet today needs an object of study,and the object of study (the body) is kept quite separate from the


Now we produce two more premises. . . .C. The body survives death.D. If the mind is the body, then if the body exists, the mind exists.From A, C, and D follows:E. The mind does survive death.But B and E contradict each other, showing you can’t assert A, B, C, and D. Since C

and D are supposed to be obvious, the inference is that you can’t assert A and B; that is,if A, then not B; [hence E].

(158)

subject. As anyone understands who has had a life-threateningdisease like Vivian’s, it is imperative, even as the patient, to cultivatean objective view of the medical situation, indeed to objectify one’sown body. Certainly, this was the stance I had to take as a breastcancer patient. Otherwise, I would start to panic. I suspect this isalso a reason why Sontag so thoroughly discourages metaphoricallanguage in the discourse of disease (Aids and Its Metaphors 102–3).For Vivian, making an endowment of her (living) body to helpadvance medical knowledge is a way to separate and master herbody as an object of science, regardless of the havoc it wreaks onher flesh.9

Moreover, theatrically speaking, given the subject matter—a fifty-year-old woman dying of ovarian cancer in the coldhearted domainof a research hospital—the play would be terribly depressing if itdid not offer some shred of hope. In fact, the play is ritualistic,especially at the ending, in the sense in which Schechner has ex-plored ritual and theater, where “[rituals] are ambivalent symbolicactions pointing at the real transactions even as they help peopleavoid too direct a confrontation with these events” (230).Schechner calls this avoidance, staged so well in theater space, amortgage (Blau’s term is “amortization” [170]), which postponescatastrophe, pays out loss slowly over time. Plays such as Wit offer“temporary and uneasy triumphs over death” (259). Theologicallyspeaking, at the play’s ending, and especially in the HBO pro-duction, where Vivian actually utters the line, we do receive theknowledge that Donne so desperately sought: “Death—capitalD—thou shalt die—ex-cla-mation point!” (57). When the line istaken within the framework of the last scene, the play does tendersome consolation: either the mind lives on after the body dies, orin our last moment the brain produces the comforting impressionthat it does.

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9. Medical science today is beginning to recognize the close linkage between mindand flesh, but still within the binary of mind and body. For instance, stress is seen as hav-ing a physical impact on health, but once the body dies, the mind either dies or departs.A true theoretical mind-body integration would resemble a principle found in JapaneseShinto, where an injury to the corpse is understood to be an injury to the deceased per-son’s soul (Iserson 67)

Impression: that particular word returns my discussion once againto the postmodern lens of the mind-body-flesh problem manifestedin Wit. If the mind is inseparable from the discursive structures ofculture, what is recognized as dualism by materialists must be a biochemical output that “steams up” from the brain and produces(somehow) an image in the symbolic field of the mind, an imagethat is the product of thousands of years of cultural construction.Indeed, the metaphor of Vivian seeing a light, as well as themetaphors of Jesus and angels attested to by clinical death sur-vivors, arguably is drawn from images common to the Christianculture of Europe. But what of the body? And what of the flesh? Isthis part of the postmodern equation as resistant to solution as themind-body binary?

Oddly enough, I don’t think so. Wit poses the classic mind-bodyproblem, which assumes the fleshly existence of the body whetherone adheres to dualism or materialism. The play does not offer, forinstance, an Idealist position. But the play also asks us to considerthe mind-body problem from a slightly different (postmodern)angle: to what extent are the body and flesh separable? As Wit makesclear, the body of Western culture is discursive whether as a medicalmodel or as surgical sculpting—in other words, the body is theintextuated flesh. But the flesh itself is also something quite distinct.I would argue that the play is grounded on a position very likeRealism, which posits a flesh independent of our cultural, social,and discursive constructions, even though the play may only beable to speak through the constructions of a cultural, social, and the-atrical “reality.” Matter is a given, whatever that matter is. Perhapsthere is an elementary particle more fundamental than a p-brane.Mathematician Robert Kaplan puts it well: “The world may notonly be more singular than we think, it may be more singular thanwe can think” (160).

Even though Wit does not explore what happens to Vivian’searthly husk after her “wit” has either departed or died, we canspeculate that, since “She’s Research,” her body would undergo anautopsy. The autopsy would be the last act of writing on Vivian’sbody, for an autopsy, as the final step in medical research, repre-sents the ultimate intextuation of the body to the corpus of Westernmedical science. And once this knowledge of the body has been


extracted, the corpse is left behind. The body goes on to a “life” inthe medical literature, while the flesh slowly disappears into thematter of the world.

Southern Illinois University Carbondale

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A Mind-Body-Flesh Problem the Case of Margaret Edson's Wit - Article

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