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3. The Thinking of Al Swearengen’s Body: Kidney Stones, Pigpens, and Burkean Catharsis in Deadwood
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44 3 The Thinking of Al Swearengen’s Body Kidney Stones, Pigpens, and Burkean Catharsis in Deadwood Tim Steckline “Deadwood is a show about how order arises out of the mud,” says Milch (Deadwood 135). Describing Deadwood’s main street as “a mixture of mud and animal feces puddled with snowmelt and urine and spit,” Tim Steckline considers whether order ever really comes to Deadwood and what blocks its emergence . As Brian McCuskey turns to Derrida to make sense of “paper trails,” Steckline turns to Kenneth Burke and his theory of “catharsis” to analyze Deadwood’s polluted street, challenges to propriety, and various “social pollutions.” Through consideration of the importance of “social catharsis” to the emergence of a “body politic,” Steckline addresses, often wittily, Deadwood’s grotesque treatment of human bodies and their various emissions, making sense of characters’ usually futile efforts to “clean up,” literally and symbolically. Although bodily purgations , he notes, are often blocked, offering no social catharsis, surely there are enough deaths to offer the kind of ritual scapegoats or tragic victim that Burke also identifies as crucial to “free flow” through the streets to achieve civilization and order. Steckline’s trope leaves him less confident than McCuskey that social order has been or will be achieved. Ironically, hbo’s decision to “block” a fitting conclusion to the series prevents us from ever finding out. The town of Deadwood, South Dakota, is a twenty-minute drive from my front door. I have visited the place episodically ever since my grandmother took me there when I was seven years old. I was a young tourist, so the mythological Deadwood of gamblers and gun- fighters and miners and Calamity Jane was the first Deadwood I came to know with my heart. By luck and fate I now live and work near the historical yet mundane Deadwood. One thing I have learned from some glancing familiarity with this town so singularly The Thinking of Al Swearengen’s Body 45 touched by history is this: Deadwood Gulch is a gut, a short, narrow defile with an intake orifice at one end and an outlet orifice at the other. (This is but one of several compelling reasons that Deadwood Gulch is a scary place to be when it periodically catches fire.) In 1991–92 the Deadwood Historic Preservation Commission ticketed the expenditure of some of its share of gambling revenues upon the restoration of brick streets to the downtown area (Wolfe 18, 21; “Deadwood Officials”). Brick streets hearken to Deadwood’s genteel Victorian style of 1907, not to the halcyon boomtown sprawl of the 1870s celebrated in the town’s mythos. If the historical commission was trying to re-create the frontier Deadwood that Wild Bill Hickok and Calamity Jane walked, the streets would look more like those in David Milch’s Deadwood: a mixture of mud and animal feces puddled with snowmelt and urine and spit.1 The narrow, crooked thoroughfare , always choked with horses, mules, oxen, freighters, and people afoot, was a difficult passage, when not utterly blocked. Students of literature are familiar with Aristotle’s ideas about the working through of emotional catharsis in tragic drama. Tragic figures are compelled to victimage by the plot and the inescapable fates of their characters. The emotions of pity and fear aroused in an audience by the drama’s imitative depiction purge them of their excessive passions (Kruse 162–64). Language theorist and literary and social critic Kenneth Burke has extended this analysis of catharsis . Catharsis in the classical tradition, which Burke calls “grand catharsis,” requires victims, though not necessarily tragic victims, for only a fragment of Aristotle’s work on catharsis in its tragic context has survived, and other sorts of victims may well have been part of his taxonomy. Through a “Cult of the Kill,” society can be purged of its katharma, persons who are “social pollution.”2 Burke insists that such social catharsis is mirrored by a bodily catharsis, enacted both physiologically and symbolically: “The purging of ‘pollutions’ from the body politic can be expressed directly or indirectly by the imagery of bodily purgation” (“On Catharsis” 359). He specifies among these images every bodily emission from a flow of tears to a stream of urine. Because such emissions are infantile and socially taboo, or “dirty,” [44.200.196.38] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 11:46 GMT) 46 steckline they are not spoken of in polite society. Their points of exposure...