Narrativity

Abstract

Objects do not lie, but appearances can be deceiving. The iconographic collection in the Wellcome Trust’s Library holds a strange pasteboard measuring 40×25 cm. The front shows five scenes, some of which are very well known in the cultural history of torture. Although the images are numbered, it is difficult to imagine what we could learn from this sequence, which seems only to refer to the depiction of pain and humiliation in the body’s geography. The pasteboard’s owner has arranged the vignettes like hunting trophies, going so far as to encircle them with an elaborate border of maces and chains. There is a certain air of obscenity in this reiteration of images. Taken individually, each one has very little impact, but the set has far greater value than the sum of its parts. The group stands out for its diversity and suggests that pain, like Aristotle’s being, can be expressed in many different categories (see Figure 20). If the front of the pasteboard is surprising, the reverse side is no less extraordinary. On the back there are no torture scenes, but rather three photographs of nude females in positions and attitudes characteristic of late nineteenth-century erotic illustrations. In two of them, which bear a slight resemblance to one another and might even have been taken by the same photographer, two women show their bodies with an air of submission, without the least feature of disapproval or defiance. The right hand hidden behind the back, the eyes lowered, the head leaning slightly forward or lightly lifted, the eyes looking out into space are some of the rhetorical strategies that allow the objectification of these bodies and their disposition as instruments of lasciviousness.

“The chief spring or active principle of the human mind is pleasure in pain.”

David Hume