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  • Performing Bodies in Pain: Medieval and Post-Modern Martyrs, Mystics, and Artists by Marla Carlson
  • Dan Venning
Performing Bodies in Pain: Medieval and Post-Modern Martyrs, Mystics, and Artists. By Marla Carlson. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010. xii + 228 pp. $80.00 cloth.

Somewhat paradoxically, Marla Carlson's Performing Bodies in Pain is a book that is both very difficult to read and so compelling that it is hard to put down. Carlson's book is not difficult because of her use of theoretical language or difficult concepts. While Carlson relies heavily on a wide variety of theorists—from cultural scholars to theorists of medicine and psychology—her book remains entirely accessible. The difficulty of Performing Bodies in Pain comes from how [End Page 237] vividly Carlson writes about pain: its causes, its effects, and the ways that pain (both real and imitated) can be employed in performance. Both Carlson's vivid writing and the sensational performances she examines make her book as engaging as it is challenging.

Carlson's goal is to examine how various spectacles of pain perform cultural work. She argues that this work, despite the subjective nature of pain, is conducted not primarily through individuals but through the groups that become spectators to pain. Carlson's central argument is focused on audience reception; she writes that "dramatized pain typically serves as a means to get at the consciousness of the person who inhabits the body, thereby also serving as a call to action for the spectator" (6). Carlson's book is thus an argument against Elaine Scarry's book The Body in Pain (1985), which Carlson sees as arguing that "pain is uniquely private and invisible" (16). In order to support her argument for pain as a cultural spectacle, Carlson compares examples of performances from New York City in the twenty-first century with ones from late medieval France. Carlson begins each chapter with two epigraphs illustrating the nature of the performances she will examine, and alternates between beginning each chapter with the example from New York theatre and French historical performance.

In the first chapter, "Feeling Torture," Carlson examines how the state can use pain to contain marginalized peoples. She begins with a discussion of John Kani and Winston Ntshona's The Island, a play about cruel South African imprisonment during apartheid, juxtaposing this analysis with one of Le geu Saint Denis, a fifteenth-century saint play about the martyrdom of the patron saint of Paris. Carlson argues that while The Island is designed to lead the spectator to political action, Le geu Saint Denis instead inspires personal devotion.

Carlson's second chapter, "Imagining Death," explores how sympathy ("imagining the pain of another . . . includ[ing] the judgment that the suffering is not justified" [8]) relates to capital punishment. Here she begins by studying an anonymous Parisian journal written between 1405 and 1449, in which the author describes various public executions at the end of and following the Hundred Years' War. Carlson pairs this example with Martin McDonagh's play The Pillowman, in which a totalitarian state executes an author for murders he is believed to have committed. In this chapter, Carlson discusses how execution is "a ritual of expulsion, defining the boundaries of community" (60), but she contrasts these cultures by showing how French medieval executions simultaneously reincorporated the executed person into societal hierarchy through spectacles of pain, while modern executions use the lack of pain to exclude and dehumanize the condemned.

"Enduring Ecstasy," Carlson's third chapter, contrasts body artists' speech [End Page 238] with the objectification of the martyred female mystic. Carlson begins with an exploration of Marina Abramovic's Seven Easy Pieces, performed at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in 2005, and moves on to discuss Jean Fouquet's illustration Martyrdom of Saint Apollonia (ca. 1452-60). Through these examples, Carlson examines possible intersections between the performances of femininity and pain. In contrast, the next chapter, "Whipping Up Community," goes on to explore masculine community and group identity formed through pain, first through a discussion of Giovanni del Biondo's triptych Martyrdom of Saint Sebastian and Scenes from His Life, and then through a discussion of male body artists, especially...

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