{"id":3112,"date":"2020-04-24T10:49:55","date_gmt":"2020-04-24T10:49:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/?p=3112"},"modified":"2020-04-24T10:49:55","modified_gmt":"2020-04-24T10:49:55","slug":"goodbye-to-all-that","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/?p=3112","title":{"rendered":"Goodbye to all that"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Reading Technologies of the Human Corpse by John Troyer for the Spectator, 11 April 2020<\/a><\/p>\n

John Troyer, the director of the Centre for Death and Society at the University of Bath, has moves. You can find his interpretative dances punctuating a number of his lectures, which go by such arresting titles as \u2018150 Years of the Human Corpse in American History in Under 15 Minutes with Jaunty Background Music\u2019 and \u2018Abusing the Corpse Even More: Understanding Necrophilia Laws in the USA \u2014 Now with more Necro! And more Philia!\u2019 (Wisconsin and Ohio are, according to Troyer\u2019s eccentric looking and always fascinating website, \u2018two states that just keep giving and giving when it comes to American necrophilia cases\u2019.)<\/p>\n

Troyer\u2019s budding stand-up career has taken a couple of recent knocks. First was the ever more pressing need for him to crack on with his PhD (his dilatoriness was becoming a family joke). Technologies of the Human Corpse is yanked, not without injury, from that career-establishing academic work. Even as he assembled the present volume, however, there came another, far more personal, blow.<\/p>\n

Late in July 2017 Troyer\u2019s younger sister Julie was diagnosed with an aggressive brain cancer. Her condition deteriorated far more quickly than anyone expected, and on 29 July 2018 she died. This left Troyer \u2014 the engaging young American death scholar sprung from a family of funeral directors \u2014 having to square his erudite and cerebral thoughts on death and dead bodies with the fact he\u2019d just kissed his sister goodbye. He interleaves poetical journal entries composed during Julie\u2019s dying and her death, her funeral and her commemoration, between chapters written by a younger, jollier and of course shallower self.<\/p>\n

To be brutal, the poems aren\u2019t up to much, and on their own they wouldn\u2019t add a great deal by way of nuance or tragedy. Happily for us, however, and to Troyer\u2019s credit, he has transformed them into a deeply moving 30-page memoir that now serves as the book\u2019s preface. This, then, is Troyer\u2019s monster: a powerful essay about dying and bereavement; a set of poems written off the cuff and under great stress; and seven rather disconnected chapters about what\u2019s befallen the human corpse in the past century or so.<\/p>\n

Even as the book was going to print, Troyer explains in a hurried postscript, his father, a retired undertaker, lost consciousness following a cardiac arrest and was very obviously dying:<\/p>\n

“And seeing my father suddenly fall into a comatose state so soon after watching my sister die is impossible to fully describe: I understand what is happening, yet I do not want to understand what is happening.”<\/em><\/p>\n

This deceptively simple statement from Troyer the writer is streets ahead of anything Troyer the postgrad can pull off.<\/p>\n

But to the meat of the book. The American civil war saw several thousand corpses embalmed and transported on new-fangled railway routes across the continent. The ability to preserve bodies, and even lend them a lifelike appearance months after death, created a new industry that, in various configurations and under several names, now goes by the daunting neologism of \u2018deathcare provision\u2019. In the future, this industry will be seen \u2018transforming the mostly funeralisation side of the business into a much broader, human body parts and tissue distribution system\u2019, as technical advances make increasing use of cadavers and processed cadaver parts.<\/p>\n

So how much is a dead body worth? Between $30,000 and $50,000, says Troyer \u2014 five times as much for donors processed into medical implants, dermal implants and demineralised bone matrices. Funds and materials are exchanged through a network of body brokers who serve as middlemen between biomedical corporations such as Johnson & Johnson and the usual sources of human cadavers \u2014 medical schools, funeral homes and mortuaries. It is by no stretch an illegal trade, nor is it morally problematic in most instances; but it is rife with scandal. As one involved party remarks: \u2018If you\u2019re cremated, no one is ever going to know if you\u2019re missing your shoulders or knees or your head.\u2019<\/p>\n

Troyer is out to show how various industries serve to turn our dead bodies into \u2018an unfettered source of capital\u2019. The \u2018fluid men\u2019 of Civil War America \u2014 who toured the battlefields showing keen students how to embalm a corpse (and almost always badly) \u2014 had no idea what a strange story they had started. Today, as the anatomist Gunther von Hagens poses human cadavers in sexual positions to pique and titillate worldwide audiences, we begin to get a measure of how far we have come. Hagens\u2019s posthumous pornography reveals, says Troyer, \u2018the ultimate taxonomic power over nature: we humans, or at least our bodies, can live forever because we pull ourselves from nature\u2019.<\/p>\n

Technologies of the Human Corpse is a bit of a mess, but I have a lot of time for Troyer. His insights are sound, and his recent travails may yet (and at high human cost \u2014 but it was ever thus) make him a writer of some force.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Reading Technologies of the Human Corpse by John Troyer for the Spectator, 11 April 2020 John Troyer, the director of the Centre for Death and Society at the University of Bath, has moves. You can find his interpretative dances punctuating … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[617,78],"tags":[811,464,496],"class_list":["post-3112","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books-reviews-and-opinion","category-reviews-and-opinion","tag-corpse","tag-death","tag-spectator"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3112","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3112"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3112\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3115,"href":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3112\/revisions\/3115"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3112"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3112"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3112"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}