Liz Irvin
Worcester, Massachusetts, United States

“I experience a gagging sensation and, still farther down, spasms in the stomach, the belly; and all the organs shrivel up the body, provoke tears and bile, increase heartbeat, cause forehead and hands to perspire.”
– Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror

A cold dread crept up the back of my neck on my descent into the basement laboratory on the first day of gross anatomy. I worried some contagious agent would slip through the nitrile gloves and infect me with something deadly. Staring at the embalmed body of the deceased, I feared the dissolution of my borders, encapsulated in my fear of vomiting and inhaling some airborne contagion.

Anatomy lab is a rite of passage that intends to help us medical students find our sea legs for the weighty responsibilities of the profession. By the end of these lab sessions, we are told, we will be transformed. In the early sessions, I am not yet desensitized. I gag, I shiver, I recoil.

I recognize this encounter as an encounter with the abject: Julia Kristeva’s notion of that unknowable force that disrupts borders and order, a churning in the stomach in reaction to the power of horror.¹ I contemplate the abject in front of a painting by Hyman Bloom at the Worcester Art Museum. The Hull (1952) depicts a body amidst an evisceration.² Bright, open, and smooth, the ribs curve towards the overhead exam light over supple waves of flesh. The painting oozes a technicolor spectrum: cherry, rose, amber, teal, and tangerine. A bony knee juts out from the pile of flesh, kissed with a sickly emerald shadow. Two gloved hands and a steady silver knife approach from the head. A sliver of burnt orange rusts the knife’s edge. Tissues and organs soak up an irresistible hot pink glow. How can something so horrific be so beautiful?³

To explore this horror, let us board an 84-foot schooner in the throes of a great and terrible storm on the 25th of December 1909. The deck quakes punishingly and we toss side to side. Waves surge and crash into the boat. We are seasick, soaked in the ocean spray. Snow and sleet slice our skin. We are transformed into flesh-meat. Jettisoned: we are worse off than animals, who know not of humanity and thus the fear of losing it.⁴ More than we fear death, we fear being lost: “a wave lost among many other waves.”⁵ We fear the ocean because it symbolizes that fate: total obliteration of the (discontinuous) self.⁶ “The sea,” they say, “never gives up its dead.”⁷

The Ada K. Damon careened down the Plum Island Sound during a blizzard that would later be described by the Coast Seamen’s Journal as one of “the most fateful days in the fateful history of those waters.”⁸ The paper told of a gale that “assumed a terrific force,” leaving in its wake a “tale of wreck and disaster… as long as the coast itself.”⁹ The day after Christmas, the wrecked carcass of the Ada K. Damon washed up on Crane Beach in Ipswich, Massachusetts.

On the first day of anatomy, I encountered that image “I permanently thrust aside in order to live.”¹⁰ It haunted me, appearing in places I did not expect, such as the shimmering insides of my coffee cup. According to French philosopher George Bataille, the image of the corpse mounts an assault on the boundaries that protect us from our perpetually impending death. It makes sense, then, that one of Bloom’s critics described his works as “just plain gruesome” and “senselessly morbid.”¹¹ Bloom, on the other hand, saw a way to explore the enduring life and beauty of the dead.

Over 110 years after she was beached and abandoned, Ada was exhumed from the shifting sands. Black-green algae covered what remained of the flayed hull, slick and smooth. Cemented into the landscape, the ship hosted colonies of ants and algae and white barnacle clusters. Teeming with life, she decayed. Bataille says, “The discontinuous being does not disappear altogether when he dies but leaves traces that may even last forever.”¹² On the beach, I saw a monument to perpetual existence.

In The Hull, Bloom celebrates the lasting life of the body after the mind and spirit have departed. He refuses to obliterate his subjects’ humanity by turning them into clinical objects of scientific fascination. He explores and finds shapes like a cloud gazer. Bits of flesh take on bold, adventurous forms. He imagines his cadavers in bizarre, improbable positions: a corpse sitting upright, flesh bunched and buckled.¹³ In playful color, Bloom asserts that these bodies live on, that we can find passion, humor, rage, love, and tenderness in the body after death.

I first encountered The Hull weeks before I would be confronted with my own mortal terror in the anatomy lab. Staring into Bloom’s opalescent cadaver, I reached for “the sublime point at which the abject collapses in a burst of beauty that overwhelms us—and that ‘cancels out existence.’”¹⁴ I later met Bloom in the cold anatomy lab basement, with the donor before us. The assignment: to locate the muscular structures of the upper limbs and back, but also to see death and understand life and surrender to a momentary obliteration. In bold color, Bloom painted me towards that sublime collapse.¹⁵

Works cited

1. Kristeva, Julia. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. New York: Columbia University Press, 1982.
2. Bloom, Hyman. The Hull. 1952. Oil on canvas, 95.6 x 115.6 cm (37 5/8 x 45 1/2 in).; Tarlow, Lois. “Alternative Space: Hyman Bloom.” Art New England 4, no. 4 (March 1983).
3. Bloom asserts, “The harrowing and the beautiful could be brought into unity,” as quoted in Tarlow, Lois. “Alternative Space: Hyman Bloom.” Art New England 4, no. 4 (March 1983).
4. Kristeva, Powers of Horror, 2.
5. Bataille, Georges. Erotism: Death & Sensuality. 1st City Lights ed. San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1986, 15.
6. Bataille, Erotism, 13.
7. “Christmas on The Atlantic.” Coast Seamen’s Journal 23, no. 16 (January 5, 1910): 3.
8. “Christmas on The Atlantic,” 3.
9. “Christmas on The Atlantic,” 3.
10. Kristeva, Powers of Horror, 3.
11. Devree, Howard. “Among the New Exhibitions.” New York Times, 13, January 1946, 133.
12. Bataille, Erotism, 97.
13. Bloom, Hyman. Cadaver on Table. 1953. Oil on canvas, 132 x 102 cm (52 x 40 in).
14. Kristeva, Powers of Horror, 210.
15. Bloom, quoted in Tarlow, Lois. “Alternative Space: Hyman Bloom.” Art New England 4, no. 4 (March 1983).

Bibliography

• Bataille, Georges. Erotism: Death & Sensuality. 1st City lights ed. San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1986.
• Bloom, Hyman. Cadaver on Table. 1953. Oil on canvas, 132 x 102 cm (52 x 40 in). Currier Museum of Art, Manchester, New Hampshire, US. https://currier.org/collection/hyman-bloom/.
• Bloom, Hyman. The Hull. 1952. Oil on canvas, 95.6 x 115.6 cm (37 5/8 x 45 1/2 in), Worchester Art Museum, Worchester, Massachusetts, US. https://worcester.emuseum.com:8443/objects/16188/the-hull.
• “Christmas on The Atlantic.” Coast Seamen’s Journal 23, no. 16 (January 5, 1910): 3.
• Devree, Howard. “Among the New Exhibitions.” New York Times, 13, January 1946, 133.
• Kristeva, Julia. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. New York: Columbia University Press, 1982.
• Tarlow, Lois. “Alternative Space: Hyman Bloom.” Art New England 4, no. 4 (March 1983). https://hymanbloominfo.org/alternative-space-hyman-bloom/.