Souvenirs of the organ trade
Abstract
TIMES HAVE CHANGED since LuXun first dissected a corpse in Japan at the turn of the twentieth century. At that time, dissection practice in China was limited to a small number of missionary-run hospital schools, and the fact that Lu Xun had such extensive training set him apart from the vast majority of his Chinese peers. One might argue, in fact, that Lu Xun's education in anatomical understandings of the body had a profound impact on his experiments in literary realism, his visions of the self, and his understanding of what constituted human (and Chinese) identity.1 Today, however, dramatic advances in technologies of the body as well as in global circulations of technology and bodies across national boundaries have replaced the understandings of physicality and selfhood that so transformed literature of Lu Xun's time with new challenges to conceptions of corporeality, identity, and individuality. As the cultural historian John Frow has observed, developments in body technologies like organ transplant practice have created new ethical dilemmas about the practical application of property law to the sale of body parts, or more generally to questions of propriety over the self (individual "owner-ship" of one's body) as arbitrated through legal and commercial channels. Furthermore, the problem is a uniquely international one, Frow notes, "since the growing trade in body parts crosses national boundaries and the hierarchies of interdependency that they represent." This growing trade in human organs across global boundaries in turn illustrates a new "complexity of the relation between the category of the person and the commodity form that it both opposes and subtends."2 How then might we expect this to manifest in art and literature in China? If advancements in turn-of-the-century dissection and anatomical practice contributed conceptual vocabulary to Lu Xun's literary innovations and by extension to his emergence as the "Father of Modern Chinese Literature," then what might we expect to see in literature and art of the new millennium, in the age of stem-cell research, cloning, grafting, transplant, and surrogacy? If, as Marston Anderson argues of realism, realist metaphysics are determined by "those features of the natural world that invasively trespass the imagined autonomy of the body," what happens when the body itself becomes the means of trespass? This essay identifies several examples of contemporary Chinese art and literature that employ images of the organ trade or commerce in bioproducts to explore questions of identity, humanity, and selfhood, and hypothesizes certain changing trajectories in literary and artistic representations of the self based on analyses of these works. In late 1980s and early 1990s fiction by Yu Hua, for example, I argue that the imagery of organ transplant and blood donorship provides an inherently powerful means of questioning categories of selfhood and (human) identity against the backdrop of post-Deng market reform. In these works, Yu Hua does not question his characters' Chineseness so much as their humanity and individual identity in a society transformed by changing market values and practices. As a result, many of the characters Yu Hua creates function as literary universals; the works themselves take an inward, reflective, and ironic turn. Recent experimental art, by contrast, takes this question of identity and corporeal embodiment from the domestic to the transnational arena by using representations of organ exchange and commerce in human bioproducts to explore, among other things, the fraught relationship between the production of Chinese counterculture and the demand for it in the Western marketplace. Consequently the identity at stake in these works-an identity that is always already lost or compromised at the outset-is precisely "Chineseness," with its problematic, emblematic identification as "Chinese" by western consumers, as well as by the artists themselves, in an increasingly transnational ideological as well as material economy. A premise of this essay is therefore that evolving trends in representation of the organ trade and related practices in contemporary Chinese art and literature-changing as they do alongside developments in technology itself-may reflect the emergence of an increasingly diasporic view of self and identity, a view according to which Chinese identity itself is subject to "harvesting," transplant, and sale in the global marketplace.