A Mind-Body-Flesh Problem: The Case of Margaret Edson's Wit

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

John Donne, "Loves Exchange"

Western sciences, in order to be science, need an object to study. For medical science, that object is, not surprisingly, the human body, which offers itself as the field of research, the specimen under observation, the flesh subjected to "wit." Such is the epistemological ground of Margaret Edson's Pulitzer Prize-winning play about an English-professor-cum-cancer-patient who must navigate the frightening territory of dying while on the stage of a modern research hospital. What Vivian Bearing experiences in the course of her treatment is not only the classic mind-body problem but also how the problem is read through the positions of cultural constructivism, materiality, and postmodern plasticity. To what extent does the play address the doing of the flesh, a sense of "the independent life of disease," as Richard Selzer, a surgeon, puts it in Mortal Lessons (167), as compared to the influential cultural body and the preeminence of the mind—indeed Vivian's own superior wit? And how well can this allegory of the drama among mind, body, and flesh be resolved given the existence of two opposing interpretations—the dualist and the materialist—suggested by the play's ending?

The play Wit (which was made into a film by HBO in 2001) joins a number of contemporary "ailment dramas," such as Tony Kushner's Angels in America and Spalding Gray's Gray's Anatomy in taking up issues, cultural as well as medical, associated with illness and the medical profession's response to it. As theater reviewers have noted, Wit offers a stinging commentary on the attitude of medical researchers toward the patient, as well as a correlation to Vivian's own exacting approach to scholarly research and teaching in the area of seventeenth-century English poetry. The play demonstrates a contradictory moment in the history of Western culture: two humanist fields dedicated to a tradition of social and individual improvement—medicine and literature—are both guilty of yielding to a perspective that precludes compassionate treatment of human beings. That this perspective is a cultural construct is no surprise, having sprung from the empirical paradigm upon which Western research rests, a paradigm arising at the time of the Renaissance and still very much with us today.

As Jonathan Sawday points out in The Body Emblazoned, a "culture of dissection" (ix) took hold in early modern European culture across all fields of human endeavor, from painting and literature, to the exploration (and exploitation) of the globe, to the practice of anatomy on the human body. And, to be sure, a culture whose epistemological metaphor came to be "dissection" necessarily raises the binaries of inside versus outside, subject versus object, mind versus body. To early modern medical researchers such as Andreas Vesalius and Ambroise Paré, it was essential to cultivate an objective approach that would render the body completely separable from the mind. How else could one proceed to cut up (ana + tomē) and observe with one's own eyes (auto + opsis) the secret recesses of a dead person?¹ Not surprisingly, the question of mind-body dualism, most notably attributed to René Descartes, appeared at exactly the same time as the beginning of anatomical medicine and has played a continuing, foundational role in the philosophy of medical research.²

A Genealogy

Indeed, as shown in Wit, the objective approach instilled at the beginning of modern intellectual life is still the operative mode in today's medical research hospital. The play provides the medical researcher's description of cancer. In response to Vivian's question why he has chosen to study this particular disease, Jason answers: "How does [cancer] do it?. . . You grow normal cells in tissue culture in the lab, and they replicate just enough to make a...