Cutting the body and text

Adam Smyth’s “Shreds of Holinesse” reads like a manuscript of casual violence, and at a certain point it’s difficult to focus on anything but the jolting repetition of “cutting.” It’s also impossible to distinguish the term “cutting” from its use in material book-making and its role in the vernacular of self-harm (which, given that the article was published in 2012, should not be a surprise to its author). This idea, however, conflicts with the author’s seemingly recuperative project and his insistence that the cutting of books “should not be seen as necessarily scandalous or destructive but rather as a potentially quotidian mode of textual consumption” (Smyth 459).

The apparent banality of cutting as represented here (spiritual component notwithstanding) called up a particularly vivid scene in Woman on the Edge of Time, where a patient in a mental hospital undergoes neurological surgery to alter and control behavior patterns.

“Near the nurses’ station a bed had its sides up. In it a black woman lay with a great white helmet of bandages on her head and a gadget perched on top of the bandage like a metal beanie.

…

…they took her by ambulance to the city, where they operated on her, and then they brought her back!

            …

            They stuck needles in her brain” (Piercy 184-85).

To the other patients, the operation the woman experienced is shrouded in mystery and provides evidence only that someone was “so crude” as to “leave visible damage” during the routine abuse they all suffer (185). It’s only when the woman becomes part of a demonstration of the surgical potential of this cutting that the other patients see what’s actually happening.

“‘The focal brain dysfunction we see in this patient has resulted in episodic dyscontrol. We believe this kind of hardcore senseless aggression can be controlled—even cured. In layman’s language, something is wrong in the electrical circuitry—some wires are crossed in the switchboard of the amygdala.’

            …

‘We believe through this procedure we can control Alice’s [the woman] violent attacks and maintain her in a balanced mental state’” (Piercy 195-96).

If we loop back around to Smyth’s article and examine his assurances that cutting the text doesn’t cause damage, and then consider this in terms of the book as a “tentative mode of embodying text,” (Smyth 469) it brings up the potential for exploring a more literal idea—of the embodied text, of treating the body as a text. What, then, happens when we run the practice of cutting through its embodied form? When we try to hold on to the concept of a productive, non-traumatic reassembling of the “text” in the face of the clear brutality of reassembling human emotions and cognition to make new (more socially acceptable) ones?

Can there be a form of book cutting that is destructive in the way this cutting of the body appears to be? Or does the difference lie in the potential multiplicity of books and the assumed individuality of the human (i.e. destroying one book doesn’t destroy all of them)? It's also no coincidence that the body and mind being cut and pieced back together in Woman is a black woman's body, a minority space that the surgeon's are "recuperating" into a body that doesn't assert itself, that doesn't experience outbursts, and that doesn't control its own interpretation.