From ‘God Builders’ to ‘Devil Workers'

What is it about?

Jáchym Topol's The Devil's Workshop [Chladnou zemí] is a dystopian novel depicting the legacies of Nazi and Communist oppression on Czech and Belarusian histories amidst the boom of Holocaust tourism industry. I propose in this paper that the embalmed bodies exhibited at the fictional Devil's Workshop Museum can be regarded as extreme and horrendous manifestation of the somatechnics of embalmment, which nevertheless deconstructs the fundamental principles of embalming. Embalming is an ambivalent act which vacillates between life and death. It renders the body a ‘twilight zone’ of power negotiation and semantic contestation. When Lenin was alive, for instance, embalming was part of the Bolshevik's ‘god-building’ campaign meant to expose the incorruptibility of Orthodox saints as fraud. Since the Bolsheviks wished to secularise the new socialist utopian state, embalming was instrumental to their mission to glorify the ordinary man. Ironically, however, the outcome was that the communist leaders became sanctified through the very religious and ritualistic paradigm the Bolsheviks attempted to challenge and uproot. This deconstructive doubleness can also be seen in the mannequin-like bodies transformed by Topol's fiction into what I term ‘hypercorposurreality’, the body which transcends the body, the sign of which signified transcends its authentic signification and evokes in readers what Merleau-Ponty calls ‘hyper-reflection’, the kind of reflection which criticises the kind of reflection which overlooks the limitations of idealisation. Since the body is situated in a particular political sphere as well as geographical location and since the body's inscribed and allocated geopolitical significance is put to the fore by violence, one's understanding of the body has to be formulated and articulated through an analysis of geocorpographies—the ways in which geography and the corporeal experience are imbricated and intertwined.

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Why is it important?

Jáchym Topol's The Devil's Workshop [Chladnou zemí] is a dystopian novel depicting the legacies of Nazi and Communist oppression on Czech and Belarusian histories amidst the boom of Holocaust tourism industry. I propose in this paper that the embalmed bodies exhibited at the fictional Devil's Workshop Museum can be regarded as extreme and horrendous manifestation of the somatechnics of embalmment, which nevertheless deconstructs the fundamental principles of embalming. Embalming is an ambivalent act which vacillates between life and death. It renders the body a ‘twilight zone’ of power negotiation and semantic contestation. When Lenin was alive, for instance, embalming was part of the Bolshevik's ‘god-building’ campaign meant to expose the incorruptibility of Orthodox saints as fraud. Since the Bolsheviks wished to secularise the new socialist utopian state, embalming was instrumental to their mission to glorify the ordinary man. Ironically, however, the outcome was that the communist leaders became sanctified through the very religious and ritualistic paradigm the Bolsheviks attempted to challenge and uproot. This deconstructive doubleness can also be seen in the mannequin-like bodies transformed by Topol's fiction into what I term ‘hypercorposurreality’, the body which transcends the body, the sign of which signified transcends its authentic signification and evokes in readers what Merleau-Ponty calls ‘hyper-reflection’, the kind of reflection which criticises the kind of reflection which overlooks the limitations of idealisation. Since the body is situated in a particular political sphere as well as geographical location and since the body's inscribed and allocated geopolitical significance is put to the fore by violence, one's understanding of the body has to be formulated and articulated through an analysis of geocorpographies—the ways in which geography and the corporeal experience are imbricated and intertwined.

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