The best way to start these kinds of questions is with etymology, I think, and etymology is certainly needed on this occasion; it’s all in the root:
The word ‘poetics’ comes via Latin from the Greek ’poiesis’ - ‘to make’ – and is related to: ‘create’, ‘assemble’, ‘heap up’, and ‘construct’. My over-arching aim is therefore to assemble meaning and significance…
…by looking at ‘transplant’ very closely. There are far-reaching and complex usages of the word and although the medical use is the most common, it is the most recent. There is a history of significance not often written about: ‘transplant’ has been used to describe the movement of people from country to country, from farm to farm, from plantation to plantation; the grafting of plants onto other plants in the hope that the graft will take root; I’ve even found early records of the transplantation of ‘Truth’ and ‘The Word’ [of God]. A few things have happened in each case:
- A transaction has taken place
- A repositioning has taken place
- Something has taken root and is hoped to function (be that a plant, an organ, a person, or a religious idea)
- Some quality has been absorbed – or that’s the intention, at least
- …and other things that I’ve yet to uncover (any similarities you can see that might spark a burst of creativity for me, please leave in a comment!)
Excrements of the Body and Which Bits of Me Belong to Me?:
From looking at these other uses of the word and the similarities between them, I think I’ve got a workable idea of ‘transplant’ that spawns ways in which to view the process and its constituent parts. I’m thinking about applying the points above to the thinking about the body and body parts and the meaning surrounding them at different times, in different places, by different people. I like the notion that some quality has been absorbed, especially, and I’d rather like to look at this in more detail and in isolation from ‘transplant’ so that I can apply it again, with renewed meaning, later. I’m not going to go into that now but instead I’ll give an example of what I’ve been thinking of quite separately from transplant but which is something that will be centrally significant when I later think about the significance that the body can be imbued with:
I really like the writing of Michel Serres, which has only just recently come to my attention. My fantastically wonderful supervisor recommended ‘The Five Senses’ to me (which he wrote the introduction for) and, in reading the first chapter, I’ve found some wonderful descriptions of finger nails being clipped and the relationship between you and yourself (your ‘I’). He writes many interesting things about the body being both subject and object which I intend to look at in more depth but I really like his description of the event of clipping finger nails. Holding and manipulating the scissors, you aren’t cutting you, you’re cutting something external to you which is nevertheless from you. Thomas Aquinas worried about such things in relation to resurrection: when you are resurrected, is your hair resurrected? Are your nails? They are, after all, just excrements from your body. So are you resurrected bald with no teeth or nails? What happens?! Is my body mine? Which bits of me belong to me?!? Could it therefore be said that nothing belongs to me and my body isn’t sacred and no value we attach to our bodies means anything at all because it isn’t mine? How do these views on the body and how it can be viewed factor into a discussion about transplant which, after all, deals in body parts? The most obvious link here is to the teeth transplants of the 17th and 18th Century which, to my knowledge at least, is when the word ‘transplant’ was first applied to some full medical transaction. I’ll discuss those in a later post, if there is interest, as I have a wonderful cartoon and a passage from a novel describing the sordid affair! It will make your heart bleed!
More generally, and as an aside, it is interesting how transplants could not have been possible without a general de-mythologisation of the body: the body as a mechanical device (which gives permission and confidence for someone to fiddle with someone else’s insides). But it is also impossible without a general mythologisation of the body: one must be pressed into giving ‘the gift of life’. At least until the time comes when a cadaver’s organs are considered ‘communal’ with the idea that one must opt out of being a donor.
The Heart I will Avoid for all but Anecdote and Allegory:
I don’t want to focus on the heart because that must be the most written about organ – and I want to avoid being banal and espousing rhetoric – but I found a play called ‘Have a Heart Mrs. Dove’ written in 1969 (a year after the first heart transplant) that I think you will find entertaining. It is about a (presumably mad) woman whose husband is cheating on her with a beautiful young lady. The woman, Mrs. Dove, is understandably suffering from a broken heart and, obviously rather upset, requests a heart transplant at the new ‘Barnard Heart-Transplant Hospital which does not yet exist’. The receptionist-cum-doctor asks her what kind of heart she would like. (Now, to give you an idea of the kinds of hearts there are available in the future, the women coming in before Mrs. Dove, asked for all kinds of hearts for her husband who she thought didn’t have a heart at all. She asked for Casanova’s and Hercules’ hearts but they turned out to be hard to come by. She settles for a Lion’s so she can have a somewhat spicier life with her husband). Anyway, back to Mrs. Dove: she had a more blood-thirsty request than the previous customer, and asked for her own heart to be replaced by that of her husband’s mistress. The secretary-cum-doctor is shocked… because of the amount of money it would cost to hire a murderer. To his astonishment, she puts up the cash for the murderer in the hope that he would make it ‘game over’ for her husband’s mistress so that she could have her heart and win him back. The murder is arranged. We hear (but never see) that the murderer misses his target (the idiot!). In fact, in a strange twist (that no one can see coming!) the murderer is killed by the mistress. The murderer’s heart is then transplanted into Mrs. Dove instead, who then somehow acquires an unhealthy interest in guns and, with it, an equally unhealthy interest killing her husband and his mistress. The hospital of the future allows her to dilly dally around with her guns and go to the practice range to practice her shot (this was not the NHS, after all). The final scene sees the husband trying to convince the wife that he hasn’t been sleeping around and she is just mistaken… but the mistress comes to the hospital after the husband calls her to make sure his ‘bit on the side’ is alright. The play ends when the curtain drops and gun-fire is heard. BANG!
I hope I haven’t ruined anything for you there. More seriously, though, this does highlight that there exist beliefs that certain organs are imbued with particular qualities. The heart is just the most immediately evocative one. Think of the hand of Dr. Strangelove. This is why I need to look at the more obscure (and readily transplantable) body organs, parts, and members.
So, I think the first real task for me is to cast an eye on different body parts and get up to speed on the ol’ phenomenology. You know, I found out just today that some aborigines from New Caledonia assign words to body parts depending on what they perceive to resemble that body part in their natural environment. For example, their word for ’skin’ is the same as their word for ‘[tree] bark’. Isn’t that interesting? Also, in the Roman Empire, spectators used to try to eat the still-warm liver of a dead (or nearly dead) defeated gladiator believing that it would cure epilepsy.
Of course, any discussion on transplantation will touch upon identity (maybe ‘touch upon’ is an understatement) and related things like the ’self’, ‘personhood’, and the ‘I’. This may take more of a back-seat, as it were, if I am to discuss a particular historical period but I’m not ruling it out just yet (and for professionalism, I think I ought to know about it and make it relevant to the contemporary!). I’ll also post some bits and bats over the coming weeks about the link between transplantation and survival if there is sufficient interest. Sufficient interest would be one person being interested!
All this from simply repositioning something! It’s a very special process and you can hopefully see why it excites me.
End:
It is one of my intentions to think about the beginnings of the use of the word in medicine and how the things such as those mentioned above might colour the meaning. So, although I am yet to officially limit my work to a date, it looks like the task ahead needs truncating and discussing a particular time period may prove fruitful. That will probably be around the 17th and 18th Century mark. Still, I’m not ready to do that yet so, for now, I’ll just be scrutinising some body parts!
I’m claiming no voice of authority here, really, as I’m exploring my subject’s scope and would really love any feedback or comments or suggestions. They would be very much appreciated I’ll try to do similar for those of you on the social space who have similar blogs (if you like!) as, really, in discussion, I think much progress can be made!
I hope you have enjoyed reading this!
Paul William Craddock