SOURCE: Carroll, Michael Thomas. “The Bloody Spectacle: Mishima, The Sacred Heart, Hogarth, Cronenberg, and the Entrails of Culture.” Studies in Popular Culture 15, no. 2 (1993): 43-56.

[In the following essay, Carroll explores commonalities in imagery of sacrificial violations of the human torso, including in Mishima's writing and ritual suicide.]

Of the many acts of violence in literature, few compare with that which forms the central scene of Yukio Mishima's “Patriotism,” in which a young lieutenant performs seppuku—the military form of ritual suicide—when he finds that his fellow officers have not included him in a coup attempt. David Lodge, addressing the subject of literature in translation, notes that literary narrative operates a number of codes simultaneously, and in most of them “(for instance, enigma, sequence, irony, perspective) effects are readily transferable from one natural language to another (and even from one medium to another). A flashback is a flashback in any language; so is a shift in point of view, a peripeteia, or an ‘open’ ending” (105). Geoffrey Sargent's excellent translation of Mishima proves Lodge's point, for there is one narrative quality that must have been in the original and which is forcefully apparent in the translation. This quality, however, is not one that Lodge catalogues—what Girard Genette calls focalization, a term which attempts to disentangle “to say” and “to see,” the two verbs which are implicated in the Anglo-American term “point-of-view” (Genette 189; cf. Newman 1029). In “Patriotism,” Mishima's narration profoundly privileges the gaze:

The lieutenant's eyes fixed his wife with an intense, hawklike stare. Moving the sword around to his front, he raised himself slightly on the hips and let the upper half of his body lean over the sword point. That he was mustering his whole strength was apparent from the angry tension of the uniform at his shoulders. The lieutenant aimed to strike deep into the left of his stomach. His sharp cry pierced the silence of the room.

(1187)

Mishima continues to transfix us with this bloody spectacle for several pages; he tells us—or rather, directs us to see—the lieutenant's progress as he attempts to complete the ascribed pattern, the blade becoming “entangled with entrails” which push it “outward with their soft resilience,” and then the bursting of the intestines through the self-inflicted wound, the “wildly spurting blood,” and then the “final flinging back of the lieutenant's head” (1188-1189).

It is easy to dismiss this disturbing scene as either an instance of Japanese extremism, or, at the very least, Mishima's extremism. After all, the suicide ritual is uniquely Japanese, and it has been noted that Mishima, who took his own life in such ritualistic fashion in 1970, dealt with the theme of violent death in stories like “Patriotism” as well as in the bizarre series of photographs by Kishin Shinoyama called “Death of a Man,” one of which has Mishima, hands tied above his head, his torso pierced by airbrushed arrows, in the posture of the Christian martyr St. Sebastian as seen in the Guido Reni painting (cf. Black 203).

But already any culturally specific interpretation has been undermined, for if Mishima and Shinoyama used Reni's painting as a focalizer for their own version of a violent and sacrificial death image, then certainly we are dealing with, if not a cultural universal (a somewhat discredited concept for a number of suspicious reasons), then at the very least a transcultural motif. One need not contemplate long before coming to the conclusion that images of a sacrificial victim undergoing what I will call “torsic violation” may be found in a variety of cultures and aesthetic media. The question is, what is the source of their commonality? More importantly, what needs do they satisfy? In short, why do they exist?

The image of violent death, and ritual disembowelment in particular, is something with which Mishima became obsessed, as evidenced not only by “Patriotism” and the Shinoyama photographs, but also by the fact that Mishima himself played the young lieutenant in a 1965 film based on the story; he also played-out a similar suicide scene in the 1969 film, Hitogiri, about the samurai warrior class. As Henry Scott-Stokes remarks, Mishima “endlessly rehearsed his own death” (26). However, as Joel Black reveals in The Aesthetics of Murder, we must bear in mind that Mishima's rather nationalistic interest in this distinctly Japanese ritual is at least partially informed by a study of contemporary philosophy, particularly that of Georges Bataille, who Mishima credits for inspiring the idea behind “Patriotism,” that of choosing the moment of one's own death. Bataille refers to violent suicide as a superlatively erotic experience, a moment of “rupture” in which the body overcomes its isolation and reestablishes itself as part of the greater world in a moment that is both orgasmic and transcendent; Mishima himself once referred to ritual suicide as “the ultimate masturbation” (Scott-Stokes 308; cf. Black 205), and in “Patriotism” the ritual is carried out immediately after the lieutenant and his wife make love for the last time and with the understanding that she must play the role of voyeur at this grizzly event. And thus we may posit that torsic violation, as a cultural icon and the object of visual focalization, is characterized, in terms of the phenomenology of reception, by its dual, contrary pulls, one towards the body, into the body, and hence sexuality; the other beyond the body, and hence spiritual and transcendent.

It would be rhetorically and logically appropriate to move from Mishima's highly focalized tale to the realm of iconography, for iconography is an originary cultural practice, an informing one as regards literary texts which focalize on overdetermined symbolic acts. It might, however, seem less appropriate to move from the profane to the sacred, from the culture of contemporary Japan to that of medieval and early modern France, from, in short, Mishima's “Patriotism” to the Sacred Heart of Jesus.

In its most familiar form, this icon seems to be derived from Christ Pantocrator—the image of Christ with the Bible under one arm and his hand in front, two fingers up, a gesture signifying both wisdom and authority and which is still used in our own time by the Popes. In the Sacred Heart icon, however, Christ's left hand, rather than holding the Bible, is holding open his robe to reveal his disembodied heart. The precise origins of this devotional practice are obscure; there are some passages in the Bible that make reference to the heart of Jesus, but these references, which will be discussed later, seem to have little relation to iconographic practice. Some accounts claim that it dates back to the days of the church fathers, but there is little evidence for this (M. P. Carroll 134; Bainvel 127). However clear the relationship of the Sacred Heart icon to the larger Christian theme of human sacrifice and the attendant image of the Crucifixion, the pagan elements of the worship of the Savior are the more predominant, and thus it is more likely that the icon dates to approximately the 12th century, to the pagan sensuality of medieval Catholicism rather than the post-Alexandrian intellectualism of Augustine and the fathers.

During this era, for instance, several nuns—Beatrice de Nazareth, St. Gertrude the Great, and Mechtilde of Mageburg—had visionary experiences in which they claimed to have seen the physical heart of Jesus. Further, it is from this era that the earliest extant example of the icon is found: an escutcheon of German or Flemish origin (Male 103). Clearly, when we compare the Sacred Heart image as we know it with this original, several things become evident: first there is, to our modern eyes, a peculiar grizzliness here in that the most painful and visceral elements of the crucifixion have been amplified. As historian Emile Male says, this “is a strange world. [Here] we breathe an atmosphere of ardent and almost uncivilized piety” (103). Also, during this time we hear the first promotion of this practice on the part of a clerical figure: Dominic of Treves (1384-1461) suggested that devotees kiss a likeness of the sacred heart once a day. In the next century, the Carthusian Lansperg's recommended (in 1572) that Christians might assist their devotions by using a figure of the Sacred Heart as a kind of focalizer, a suggestion later echoed by Francis de Sales in 1611. More than a Christian abstraction, then, the sacred heart is an image, a focalizer, just as Mishima's fictional, cinematic, and photographic rehearsals for his own sacrificial death served for him as a focalizer.

The ultimate acceptance of this devotion was predicated on its popularity, which in turn was predicated upon the renown of Margaurite Marie Alacoque, a French nun to whom, so it is claimed, Christ made a series of visitations (the Paray-Le-Monial visions, 1675-1693) in order to proclaim, among other things, that the worship of his heart was acceptable to him. Alacoque recorded these proclamations in her autobiography, which is, in essence, an imaginary lover's discourse between herself and Christ. Alacoque reports, for instance, that Christ said to her, “I wish thy heart to serve Me as a refuge wherein I may withdraw and take My delight when sinners persecute and drive me from theirs” (8). And later: “Our lord loves you and wishes to see you advance with great speed in the way of His love. … Therefore, do not bargain with him, but give him all, and you will find all in His divine Heart. … We must love this Sacred Heart, with all our strength and with all our capacity. Yes, we must love Him, and He will establish His empire and will reign in spite of all His enemies and their opposition” (61). Alacoque's visions yield a number of interpretations concerning, for example, the essential imperialism of Christianity and the male/female power matrix expressed within the formulation of male body/female worshiper. Also significant are the psychosexual elements—the veiled language of surrender, of penetration and of exchange. As M. P. Carroll, drawing on Kleinean psychoanalysis, suggests, there is an element of phallic symbolism in the heart image with may explain the enduring power of this icon.

Alacoque's director, a Jesuit priest named D'Columbre, promulgated this practice with particular zeal, and he was soon joined by other Jesuits. While the beatification of Alacoque did not occur until much later, in 1864, the act firmly established the practice, and since that time the feast of the Sacred Heart has been kept at Catholic churches, appropriately enough, on the Friday after the Octave of Corpus Christi. And here it is worth noting that while the Sacred Heart vision in medieval visionary history is seen only by women, men have been primarily responsible for the promotion of the ritual—Domnic of Treves, Francis de Sales, D'Columbre. This suggests a binary code in which the essential creative force is feminine while the bureaucratizing, commercializing force has been male, a code which of course in imbedded in the structure of Catholicism if not all organized religion.

In addition to its manifestation in female visionary experience, the devotion to the Sacred Heart also had an impact on a more ethereal realm of the late medieval superstructure, that of philosophy. This form of devotion was, as one might expect, subject to the controversies which resulted from the conflicts of philosophical and pagan forms of Christianity. The Jansenists, for instance, stood in particular opposition to the practice, and they denounced the “Cardiolartrae” for worshiping a divided Christ and thus giving to the created humanity of Christ worship which belonged to God alone. The conflict here is between the worldly and transcendent elements, between, appropriately enough, the heart and the head of Christianity, an elemental conflict indeed, for as Elaine Scarry remarks, the very fact of Christ's having a body is a central preoccupation of the gospel narratives, as in Luke 24:36-40, when Christ asks the apostles to touch and handle him in order to reassure themselves that he is not a spirit. Ultimately, Jansenist objections to the Sacred Heart devotion were censured as injurious to the Apostolic See, which had already approved the devotion and bestowed a large number of papal indulgences in its favor, this under the guidance of Pope Pius VI. In 1794 Pius provided official approval of the devotion in a papal bull which states that the physical Heart of Jesus is not “mere flesh,” but is “united to the Divinity.” However, the Church did continue to resist the establishment of a feast in honor of the Sacred Heart until the mid-nineteenth century, a fact which makes palpable the official ambivalence towards this practice.

But what has this devotion to do with the seppuku ritual, with the self-destructive act imaged by that personification of Japanese machismo, Yukio Mishima? First, there is the sexual dimension that attends the image of torsic violation. In Mishima's rendering of Lieutenant Takeyama's “wildly spurting” blood as well as in Mishima's adaptation of Bataille, the sexuality of death is orgasmic.

Sexuality in a far diminished form may be found in the Sacred Heart images with which most of us are familiar—any one of the thousands of the mass produced portraits, holy cards, statues, and scapulars which may be purchased in any religious goods shop and which are blessed and widely distributed by such Catholic organizations as The Sacred Heart Monastery in Hales Corners, Wisconsin. These images are characterized, in startling contrast to the early and rather gory images, by a dominant tone of sentimentality, which should not surprise us, for such images began to be distributed in an era dominated by sentimentalism—in the 1870s, following Alacoque's beatification.

Sentimentality and sexuality are not, as we know, as far apart as they might appear. In the most common of these images, Jesus gently pulls his cloak to one side with his left hand while his right elbow further parts the cloak, thus suggesting disrobment; further, the soft eyes and the generally inviting demeanor of the portrait suggest something like a “come hither” look. If this reading seems extreme, consider Leo Steinberg's The Sexuality of Christ in Renaissance Art and Modern Oblivion, in which various images of Jesus, crucifixions in particular, are discussed in terms of their sexuality, with particular attention to the iconographic tradition of ostentatio genitalium—the exposing of Christ's penis. Nor should we ignore the sexuality of the heart itself, at one time believed to be the seat of emotion, that remains to this day an emblem of passionate love in the Saint Valentine's Day celebration. And as the word “passion” has reared its, well, passionate head, we might pause momentarily to consider its dual role, in phrases like “the passion of Christ” and “passionate lovemaking.”

If the psychosexuality which informs Mishima's concept of seppuku is sublimated in the Catholic icon, so too is the violence. The exposed heart is not violently ripped from the chest, but simply hovers there, mysteriously. Nonetheless, images of violence and violation are evident. The Sacred Heart is surrounded by thorns, a reminder of the humble crown bestowed upon Christ by Pilate's soldiers; and it is pierced on the left, blood dripping from the wound made by the spear of Centurion Gais Cassius. This violent image, perhaps, finds its biblical source in John 19:34, “One of the soldiers struck a spear into his side, and immediately blood and water came forth,” while the more idealized element of the icon has its origins in Matthew 11:29, “Learn of me for I am meek and humble of heart.” Moreover, the sheer viscerality of Christ's heart is contradicted by the transcendent fire of divine love, emanating from the aorta like a sacred gas jet, and by the celestial glow which surrounds this exposed organ.

No treatment of this subject would, I think, be complete without consideration of William Hogarth's series of engravings, The Four Stages of Cruelty. This series, a typical didactic narrative, depicts the moral decline of Tom Nero, whose career of gratuitous violence includes acts such as inserting an arrow into a dog's rectum, flogging a horse, and finally, murder. The most shocking picture, however, and the one that warrants our interest here, is the finale, entitled “The Reward of Cruelty,” a thoroughly gory depiction of an autopsy being performed on Nero's cadaver following his execution. The last of the verses accompanying the engraving read: “His heart, expos'd to prying eyes, / To pity has no claim: / But, dreadful! / from his Bones shall rise, / His Monument of Shame.”

“The Reward of Cruelty” captures, as does much of Hogarth but rarely as well as here, that odd combination of civility and brutality that was 18th-century England. That dichotomy is pictorially realized in the line of descent which extends from the subordinating gaze of the chief surgeon seated at the center of the picture to the more vigorous engagement of the surgeons who are actually performing the autopsy. As James Twichell notes in Preposterous Violence, “we find one freshly killed monster being dissected by other monsters, who are made all the more frightening by virtue of their social and ethical position” (242). The dichotomy is also paradigmatically realized in the contrast between, on the one hand, the symmetry of the surgical theatre—a symmetry informed by the Enlightenment's ideology of reason and order—and, on the other hand, the random disorder of the scholars as they ghoulishly press in to see the dissection and, more significantly, the disorder of the interior of the human body. The victim's intestines and organs are spilling onto the floor, and a dog is warily sniffing at the victim's dislodged heart. One of the surgeons is gouging Nero's eye out with a knife, a gesture that emblemizes the final objectification of the human corpus by denying it the power of the gaze.

More significant still is the way in which the elements established in the discussion of Mishima and Christ—sexuality, transcendence, and focalization or gaze—dominate the picture. In spite of the detachment of the chief surgeon, his gaze suggests an almost prurient interest in the dissection. There is an almost pornographic quality to the 18th-century “medical gaze”—a gaze that lingers somewhere between scientific detachment and sexual or sadistic attraction. In this regard, the chief surgeon's posture is noteworthy: his pointer is held directly in front of his crotch, and it extends in a phallic manner from his hand to the breastbone—where Nero's heart once was. This phallocentric diagonal line follows through in the engraving in both the upheld knife of the surgeon, in the insertion of his left hand into the chest cavity, and, perhaps most explicitly, in the hand of the underling as he removes the intestines.

It is noteworthy that the first and fourth pictures of the series seem to be commonly motivated by an interest in “what's inside” the body, an interest we see in both Mishima and the Sacred Heart cult. This interest in internals in “The Reward of Cruelty” is a scientific one, but this does not sever it from other instances of torsic violation, for if Mishima's seppuku ritual is an attempt to transcend the duality of self and world, and if through the divine love of Christ, emblemized by his Sacred Heart, we may eventually transcend earthly being and earthly desire, then in this unsparingly satiric depiction of medical autopsy, we glimpse the ideology which, in Hogarth's 18th century, replaced Christianity and its notions of transcendence, or at least usurped a good measure of its authority. And that ideology, of course, is that of science. Institutionalized science is denoted throughout the picture, in the mortarboard caps and in the only object other than Tom Nero's corpse that is the subject of penetrating gaze, a medical book. As this was the era in which medicine became institutionalized, we may then see the frantic activity of the surgeons as an attempt to colonize the body, to force it to yield to scientific explanation and technological mastery. Perhaps their efforts seem so frantic and desperate because, compared to the advances taking place in the natural sciences, the medical establishment was more or less powerless in the face of the mystery of the human body, the mystery of life and death. And of course, by yoking Tom Nero's violation of a dog's body with the violation of Nero's own corpse by medical men, Hogarth suggests that science may not, after all, have gotten very far away from more primitive forms of violence.

Our probing the entrails of culture will conclude with the 1988 film, Dead Ringers, the product of the Canadian director, David Cronenberg. Cronenberg's bizarre psychodrama, based on a true story, concerns the lives of identical twins, Elliot and Beverly Mantle, who at an early age evince a peculiar fixation for the internal workings of the female body. They progress from performing mock surgery on a plastic model, to Harvard medical school, and finally into a lucrative private practice in gynecology, supplemented by research grants bestowed upon them for their innovative techniques. The first of these techniques is the “Mantle Retractor,” a device the brothers invented in medical school for holding open the abdominal wall of the patient and which later became, in the words of a speaker at their Harvard commencement, “the standard of the industry.” This idyll of prenatal identity, perversely extended into adult life and institutionally legitimated, begins to unravel when the twins are faced with the prospect of “an unexpected turn in the Mantle saga;” that is, a woman, Claire Niveau, comes between them. Niveau's presence causes a “rupture” in the brother's intense psychic bond, a bond which has its roots in the biological bond of identical twins and which lies at the very core of their identities.

And, indeed the problem of identity is the prime motivation for the Mantle brothers' obsession with the internals of the female body, for through visceral knowledge, through the subjugation of the female to their subordinating medical gaze, they hope to solve the mystery of their own origins and to obtain self-knowledge. Their obsession with female internals takes a bizarre, aestheticised turn, for as Elliot Mantle proclaims, “There ought to be beauty contests for the inside of the body—you know, most perfect spleen, most perfectly developed kidney.” In one alarming dream sequence which has the brothers conjoined at the hip like the Siamese twins, Chang and Eng, Elliot watches as Claire bites through the twin's shared flesh to draw out their shared viscera with her teeth. And in the final sequence of the film, Beverly makes a surgical incision into his brother's abdomen in an attempt to solve their psychic dilemma, a solution which proves fatal to both.

There are of course, many other examples of torsic violation coupled with the transfixed gaze. Examples that readily spring to mind include Eraserhead, in which David Lynch's existential nerd/anti-hero, in a moment of what would seem to be irrepressible curiosity, carves open the abdomen of his mutant infant son and watches in fascination as the contents hideously expand. Think also of the disembowelments in the films of Hershel Gordon Lewis, the “godfather of splatter,” whose 1963 Blood Feast inspired a host of grotesque productions: the comic disembowelments of the Andy Warhol/Paul Morrissey versions of Dracula and Frankenstein, Tobe Hooper's Texas Chainsaw Massacre, George Romero's intestine gobbling zombies in Night of the Living Dead, and not coincidentally, the work of David Cronenberg.

But we are left with the question with which we began: why, in terms of cultural motivation, do such artifacts exist? There are a number of possibilities. The most elemental factor is the quality of overdetermination that exists in the bloody spectacle, the presence of the contrary qualities of bodily death, spiritual transcendence, and sexual release, a heady admixture which gives such scenes the power to transfix the human gaze and thus make them spectacular, worthy of intense focalization. In both Mishima's death rehearsals and the Sacred Heart Icon we have phenomena which imply transcendent values, for both the seppuku ritual and devotion to Christ have at stake the same thing—the possibility of transcending the body/spirit dichotomy—and yet, the scene is inherently corporeal, inherently and perversely sexual. And as we saw in our examination of Hogarth, science too has the goal of transcendence; science too has its transcendent and sexual elements.

The human subject is brought face to face with these dichotomies as well as with the dichotomy which, as Aristotle long ago pointed out, accompanies any true spectacle, that of one's own pity and fear. The pity is inspired by the commonality that we feel for the victim of acts of bodily violation. As Little Alex, the protagonist of Anthony Burgess' A Clockwork Orange, proclaims while gazing upon a piece of his violent handiwork, the blood flows the same from all bodies; it flows “like it was all from the same factory.” As for the fear—it is perhaps better described as horror. As Milan Kundera says, the horror of death is rooted in two things: the prospect of “non-being” and the “terrifying materiality of the corpse” (171). There is likewise the horrific fear of degradation—perhaps we too will be poked and prodded like Tom Nero.

The bloody spectacle is, seemingly, a moment of truth—a literal seeing into things: into the mystery of Christ's sacrifice, or into the “sincerity,” as Mishima describes it, of seppuku, or, as in Hogarth, into the empirical truth of scientific examination in 18th-century autopsy, or, as in Dead Ringers, into one's identity in the context of twentieth century state-of-the-art gynecology.

According to Julia Kristeva, “The corpse seen without God, and outside of science, is the utmost of abjection. It is death infecting life. Abject. It is something rejected from which one does not part, from which one does not protect oneself as an object” (3-4). The bloody spectacle is often seen in the light of God, but never entirely; often in the light of another god, Science, but again, never entirely so. Thus, the spectacle of torsic violation is always somewhere between godliness and defilement, between, on the one hand, the purity of science and transcendent idealism, and, on the other, the degradation of mere brute fascination and sexual drive. It is through this overdetermination that the bloody spectacle is, and will remain, an enduring image in the gallery of culture.

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