identity

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Face Transplants

I saw this article relating to a face transplant that occurred in Maryland within the last week or so.  This article is extremely relevant to the book we just discussed (Autobiography of a Face).  The man who received the transplant needed one due to a gunshot wound and damage from about 15 years ago.  The article can be found here:

36-hour face transplant ‘most extensive’ ever

The story is an amazing one.  The medical technology and techniques that we now know are phenomenal.  I wish I could interview this guy and ask him how he feels about having a new face after hiding behind a mask for so long and having to use a breathing tube to breathe.  The transplanted face came from a donor whose other organs were also donated to save 5 lives.  The article states that the recipient’s new face is a combination of his own face and the donor’s face and a little bit of customization.  I wonder how this man feels about having another person’s face fused into his.  I also wonder how that impacts his identity.  How would you feel?  Would you be relieved to have the new face so you can appear what is “normal” to society?  Or would you have some reservations and other ideals about how this re-creates your identity?

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The Embodiment of Death

The chapter for next week about the embodiment of death – in terms of finding ground between the ‘body’ and the ‘self’ – resonated with me for various reasons. One of the biggest things I noticed was the unwillingness to deny that a person’s identity has left the body after death, which is a theme that has become prominent in various science fiction stories. Iconic characters such as the vampire or zombie relate the idea that after death we do not have to give up our bodies. Reanimated bodies, such as Frankenstein’s monster, also seem to feed into a belief that the remains of a body can be recycled to create new life (or something similar). Furthermore, the father in Pet Sematary who buried his dead son’s body within the grounds that were known to reanimate bodies did so to cling to the fact that his son would return once again after identity and body united.

These representations in literature and media walk a line between trying to beat death and keeping claim over your body, but ultimately there is something in the characters that lacks humanness. Vampires, zombies, Frankenstein’s monster, and the little dead boy from Pet Sematary all lost their identities after death and were changed completely. Something about the mysterious nature of death – one that we cannot completely have knowledge about, yet we all will experience – feeds into these representations of bodies that face the unknown. The characters definitely find an imbalance between the ‘self’ and ‘body’ being continuously connected, but for the most part these characters illuminate a world where bodies are meat and fodder. Identity may change after the cross between life and death, but the body will withstand composition (albeit disfigured and sutured, I suppose).