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Reviewed by:
  • Performing Bodies in Pain: Medieval and Post-Modern Martyrs, Mystics, and Artists
  • Thomas A. Oldham
Performing Bodies in Pain: Medieval and Post-Modern Martyrs, Mystics, and Artists. By Marla Carlson. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010; pp. 240.

Pain is a phenomenon that science and medicine have proven to be staggeringly complex, and the way we treat it in art is no less so. Marla Carlson’s Performing Bodies in Pain: Medieval and Post-Modern Martyrs, Mystics, and Artists is a cross-historical examination of suffering, its manifestations in performance, and the ways that it affects audiences. By juxtaposing religious play texts and iconography from Europe in the late Middle Ages with twenty-first-century theatre and performance art, Carlson investigates the cultural work done by horrific scenes of mutilation, torture, and death. The book’s title suggests the debt the author owes to Elaine Scarry’s The Body in Pain, but Carlson takes issue with some of Scarry’s ideas and clearly pursues her own goals. She suggests that “physical suffering plays a vital role in creating communities of sentiment and consolidating social memory, which in turn shapes the cultural and political realities that cause spectators to respond in different ways at different times” (2). Thus, from the perspective of two different time periods, she posits that similarities exist in the ways that performance has utilized pain over the centuries, despite a vast array of differences in subject matter and audience response.

In her introduction, Carlson lays out the historical complexities and theoretical difficulty of defining pain, since its causes are multiple and mysterious. From Descartes to functional magnetic resonance imaging, the nature of pain remains decidedly unclear, so Carlson examines it through a variety of means, devoting each of the following five chapters to one aspect of pain: “Feeling Torture,” “Imagining Death,” “Enduring Ecstasy,” “Whipping Up Community,” [End Page 632] and “Containing Chaos.” She begins every chapter with two paradigmatic examples: one from the medieval period, and one from the postmodern. Discussing torture and empathy in chapter 1, for example, she compares Athol Fugard, John Kani, and Winston Ntshona’s The Island to iconography from Le Geu Saint Denis to find that depictions of suffering that elicited spiritual compassion in medieval work are a call to political action in the name of human rights today. The same medieval French text serves as a focus in chapter 2 on execution, which also analyzes Martin McDonagh’s The Pillowman. Here, Carlson looks at the role of the state and religion in sanctioned killings, finding an inherent difference between the modern need for official exoneration and the medieval desire for Christian contrition and reintegration. Transcendent female suffering is represented by Jean Fouquet’s famous miniature of The Martyrdom of Saint Apollonia and the body art of Marina Abramović in chapter 3. Here, Carlson finds parallels among women who use pain as a speech act to effect change within their oppressive societies. Carlson takes the sexualization of violence against the male body as her focus in chapter 4, examining the work of Ron Athey and devotional art depicting St. Sebastian to discuss how such representations can create community in plague-stricken worlds. The final chapter pivots on this discussion, putting Le Mystère de Saint Sébastien in conversation with Sarah Kane’s Blasted, finding that both use dark humor to reshape society, disintegrate distinctions, and offer a chance at redemption.

The implications of Carlson’s book lie far beyond the individual works she engages. Examining textual evidence (dramatic and otherwise), imagery, and performance, it draws insights from neuroscience, philosophy, contemporary politics, and popular culture to demonstrate that representations of pain in art, onstage, and in society serve a number of purposes both personal and communal. Materials as disparate as the Parisian Journal, the films of Mel Gibson, and documentation of the Iraq War reveal how pervasive pain is, reinforcing Carlson’s argument substantially. Nonetheless, she takes care to specify her analyses to the historical and artistic contexts of both periods. Making no claims to comprehensiveness, Carlson has assembled a diverse range of materials about pain and the experience of it (including those that emphasize pleasure) to create a subtle, complex...

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