Mary Cappello

by Swallow: Foreign Bodies

  In the disciplining required to swallow a sword, a new habit is introduced that undoes what we usually experience as habitual (the autonomic reflexes discussed earlier, for starters). Sword swallowing prefigures a radical reformation of the body, but when we turn to the history of women who swallowed swords—and many have, though not nearly as many as men—the liberatory or transformational potential of the practice turns back, more often than not, into a familiar, if extreme, performance of female submissiveness.

  Diane Arbus photographed Lady Sandra Reed, the albino sword swallower, and there was Vicki Pope, the sword-swallowing Fat Lady—both women obviously having to depend on more than one over-the-top element to complete her act. There are sword-swallowing belly dancers and contortionists, and women who swallow neon tubes. Lady Vivian, aka Miss Vivian Dunning, famous in the 1920s and 1930s, was known for swallowing a sword with a pistol mounted on the end. The pistol, when shot, would “ram the sword down her throat.” Another, more contemporary sword swallower, Rhea Roma, is “blind-folded and a random audience member shoves a 22” Sword down her throat” in her famous Suicide Show. Edith Clifford, who learned to swallow swords at age thirteen in 1899, married Thomas Holmes, the Elastic Stretch Man of Barnum & Bailey Circus. Together, they performed as the Cliffords, with Holmes swallowing “razor blades, scissors, saw blades, and bayonets” while Edith “swallowed a bayonet that was shot down her throat with a gun.” Houdini, seeing this stunt, claimed that “the sensation of her act was when the point of a bayonet 23½ inches long and fastened to the breech of a cannon was placed in her mouth and the cannon discharged with the recoil driving the bayonet down her throat.” (All of this we learn on the Sword Swallower’s Association International Web site.)

  Women sword swallowers in these examples seem to be required to have the sword rammed, shoved, driven, or otherwise violently forced down their throats. No matter how expert they might be, there’s no deft handling for them. They don’t manipulate the sword but are manipulated by it, and all their training is in the service of a violating spectacle, a grotesque caricaturing of women as repository.

  A silent film with a musical soundtrack made in the 1950s drives home the banal and predictable uses to which women sword swallowers have been put. Featuring Marie Cortez, We Still Don’t Believe It has the performer wandering before a display of “Famous Historical Swords” in a made-up-sounding place called the Hollywood Museum. Numerous signs warn the viewer not to touch or handle the swords, and when she tries to ignore a sign by turning it around, she’s confronted with another sign telling her to “cut it out.” Each sword has a man’s name attached to it, ranging from Ulysses S. Grant to Ali Hassam, and we watch, with keen lack of interest (the film is so boring!), Marie shrug like a doofus or pantomime like an idiot as she takes one sword, then another, down from its holder on the burlap wall, choosing and then rejecting one after another as she might a wooing swain. (Dan Meyer also performs this trope, which we might call the irony of choosing. In one of his homemade videos, he’s in a hardware store looking for just the right pair of long-handled garden shears, but we soon discover they’re not for trimming the shrubs.) Finally, Marie Cortez hits upon an acceptable sword, swallows it, and, as she does so, ... a piece of her clothing falls off. Or rather, it pops off, as if the sword has made her burst out of her fulsome britches. With each new sword entered and removed, another piece of her clothing falls off, and at the end, left wearing nothing but her underwear, she throws up her hands in a kind of “Oops! What ya gonna do?” way.

  There is another set of swords often reserved for women in circus settings: those long blades with the tasseled hilts that a magician thrusts into the sides of a box after enclosing a woman. We’re made to imagine the worst—that she’s been pierced and bloodied and that we’re witnessing a murder—but the fantasy is soon dispelled by the emergence of the woman intact, unharmed. Sword swallowing for men seems practically like a sport, but when women are involved, I can’t help but hear the word “tawdry” whispered behind the stage’s velvet curtains. Neither as hip as go-go dancers nor as exotically erotic as belly dancers, the female sword swallowers, in the accounts that I’ve read, seem predestined for the strip clubs that Marie Cortez’s film only hints at. Except that the sword swallower bypasses the tease and instead gives herself over to the act. She appears to inhabit a specific class position: the woman who will do (or is forced to do) anything for money, which may explain why “tawdry” seems apt. A strange word, it is derived from a syllabic merging of the name Saint Audrey in referring to St. Audrey’s laces, women’s neck pieces sold in the seventeenth century at Saint Audrey’s Fair in Norwich, England, that came to be associated with a cheapening of character, the gaudy, showy, and sleazy.

  Whether we consider sword swallowing bizarre, shocking, cheap, insane, or disgusting, we cannot deny the contribution of sword swallowers to the history of medicine (see figure 31). Partners of endoscopists from the start, sword swallowers are credited in numerous histories of gastroscopy as the “inspiration” (no pun intended) for the construction of the instruments that made possible the first successful esophagoscopies, since it was from the sword swallowers that physicians learned how the human mouth, throat, and neck could be safely positioned and manipulated to accommodate rigid rather than curved devices that would make possible diagnostic and other sorts of “views.” In 1868, Adolf Kussmaul of Freiburg turned to a sword swallower as the perfect initial subject for the still precarious, untested and untried esophagoscopy, and thanks to his subject, was able to carry out what is considered the first successful pass with the instrument. Disappointed with the view his scope afforded (a method for adequately lighting the interior of the body through the scope had not yet been developed), he abandoned further research and never published the results. But Kussmaul’s attempt was picked up decades later by students and other followers, including Müller, Killian, and von Mikulicz, who sought to determine if sword swallowing was the effect of abnormal anatomy or if normal folk could imitate the technique with what von Mikulicz, according to Eelco Huizinga, referred to as a “more innocent” straight instrument. Some sword swallowers refused to introduce the “clumsy experimental instruments,” writes Dr. L. Walk in his “History of Gastroscopy.” For the most part, though, sword swallowers agreed to serve as experimental accompanists, to provide the medical community with demonstrations, and generally to contribute to medicine the conditions of possibility for inspection of the human anatomy beyond the throat and into the stomach.

  Fig. 31. Dan Meyer, sword swallower, mid-act and in X-ray. Used by permission of Dan Meyer, Sword Swallowers Association International (SSAI).

  Chevalier Jackson would not have been able to be in the same room with someone as riskily assaulting of the human throat as Dan Meyer; or would he? How is a sword swallower’s pursuit similar to or different from a scientist’s or doctor’s? It’s well worth considering how doctors encountering sword swallowers in the street or theater or circus sideshow in their off-hours were excited enough by the act to use the sword swallower’s body to think for them. “What can we do with this?” the doctor asks. “Let’s see what we can make of this.” But is endoscopy’s what and why equivalent to sword swallowing’s rationale and vice versa? I think not. The force of the idea forming within the sword swallower is different and unspoken: it is muted and bypassed by medicine’s appropriation of the act at the same time that sword swallowing’s psychosocial dimensions haunt endoscopy.

  In my correspondence with Dan Meyer about an image of a child sword swallower from the 1890s that appears on his site, Meyer wrote that “it really seems highly illogical that a child that young (7? 8? 9 years old?) could have learned to swallow a sword so young, or that an adult would allow or try to teach a child that young to swallow a sword.” Yet Chevalier Jackson taught children to swallow tubes that could aid in their recovery from stricture of the esophagus caused by lye poisoning, and apparently adults in the Jackson family scoped their children and po
ssibly even taught them to scope themselves. In an oral history of Chevalier Jackson’s granddaughter Joan Jackson Bugbee and her husband, Frank Bugbee, carried out in July 1991 by Phillip R. Seitz, the former director of the John Q. Adams Center for Otolaryngology, Joan recalls pleasant sensory memories of her grandfather roasting coffee beans, growing yellow variety tomatoes, teaching her woodworking, fishing in the mill pond, and cooking the fish that they caught. She also recalls his habit of waking at five A.M. and working for the better part of the day in his study, “where he was not to be disturbed” and where a “buzzer system alerted him to lunch.” Joan described playing with casts of plaster hands that had real hair on them, her grandfather teaching her to play the flute, and undergoing six bronchoscopic examinations by her father, Chevalier L. Jackson, for persistent bad cough and sinus trouble. “They scoped me,” as she puts it, and with that verb a whole new way of relating between humans is imagined, or at least a word is coined for a peculiar act turned average occurrence.

  Meyer has written that “the act of swallowing a sword is not really a fun or ‘pleasant’ feeling itself” but “usually does not actually hurt terribly painfully”—though “it can sure feel very uncomfortable.” Joan Jackson Bugbee reported that scopings “aren’t bad at all,” however. She said that Jackson’s close associate Dr. Charles Norris had never been scoped, and that she believed all bronchoscopists should have the experience so they know what they are doing to their patients. Arlene Maloney, widow of Walter H. Maloney, who was a close colleague of both C.J. and C.L. (as they are called by those who knew them), told me in an interview that being scoped is definitely “uncomfortable,” and offered, unprompted, a memory that contradicts Joan Bugbee’s. “My husband had a bronchoscopy done on himself and he did one on Dr. Norris,” she told me. “My husband developed a lot of allergies and he got asthma. He always felt as though something were caught, as though there was something caught. So Charlie said, ‘Come on in and I’ll scope you and see what gives.’ Then Charlie got pneumonia, he wasn’t getting over it, and he was bringing up all this gook, and he said, ‘Walter, now it’s your turn.’ So they both knew exactly what it felt like.” And then she added: “I don’t know that C.L. ever scoped his father or that his father ever scoped him. Dr. Hollinger from Chicago, he had it done once, just to see what it felt like, but I don’t remember any of the other residents doing the same thing. And there were quite a few. It was a very popular field for young doctors to go into. The Jacksons never had any problems getting residents or getting assistants, so they must have been doing something right.”

  For the Jacksons, “scoping” seems to have been a family tradition, and though Joan did not become a physician, she apparently did learn how to scope herself—which of course seems to be a kind of impossibility but is perhaps the logical next step, an amalgam of sword swallowing and scoping. Historian Louis Waddell, who also interviewed Joan Bugbee in 1991, wrote me that he “spent a fascinating morning with Frank and Joan Bugbee. . . . Mrs. Bugbee had fond memories to share and actually inserted one of CJ’s tools into her throat.” She might have been demonstrating how the instruments worked, but to actually insert a scope into one’s own throat would require practice. We don’t imagine doctors scoping themselves behind closed doors, even if they do—it’d be like a hairdresser trying to give himself a haircut—but the granddaughter of Chevalier Jackson demonstrated a mastery over an instrument that was part of her family legacy and, at the same time, unconsciously linked endoscopy with circus acts: endoscopy as stunt, endoscopy as performance. Late-nineteenth-century physicians thought that endoscopy never would evolve as a viable method for viewing and treating the stomach or the lungs because they assumed only sword swallowers would ever be able to withstand the insertion of the rigid tube. Joan Bugbee’s grandfather and a generation of his patients proved otherwise, and a medical specialty was born.

  Hardware. Swords. Scopes. Each act of self-penetration is in some sense also an act of (tabooed) self-investigation, a kind of (au)topsy-turvy in which a neat subject/object relation is undone, for, in each case, the doctor/operator is displaced, if not entirely usurped, and the distinction between doctor and patient is collapsed. Ingesting hardware. Swallowing swords. Self-scoping. These are operations performed on the self but without the alibi of healing, without treatment and cure as their reputed aim and end. Reclamations of the body, assertions of agency and will, they also seem violently to refigure the terms by which astonishment is generated inside the medical theater. The play of pulsating color that he glimpsed through his scope, that he held inside a deeply quiet yet highly orchestrated space, astonished Chevalier Jackson. The application of his instruments let awesome scenes unfold before the eye of a unique and privileged observer: the human body’s live and lit interior. Hardware, swords, and scopes admit of astonishment too, but they replace quiet with cacophony; they insist a spectator into the place of an observer; they invite an audience in; they obliterate medicine’s purchase on bodily interiority by—at least in the case of the sword swallower—enjoining viewers to watch a near self-evisceration. These acts aren’t about seeing inside but about getting inside oneself; they’re about controlling and testing one’s own borders.

  Meyer ingests a sword, and the audience responds with a deep intake of breath. They gasp. Some can’t watch when the sword goes in. Others cover their faces and mouths. Some agree to remove the sword from his throat. A few pass out in the middle of the show, as happened in his 2009 performance at Cambridge University, a reaction that Meyer has termed his third “falling ovation.”

  I have never seen Dan Meyer perform live, but when I watch his videos, my reaction is to get “choked up.” I experience vulnerability for him, and I’m afraid that one of these days he’s going seriously to hurt himself. Maybe I identify in him my own sad relentlessness in having something to prove to fellow humans as a way of receiving love. Maybe I’m like Jackson in the way I, as a kid, wondered why so many families in my neighborhood gathered around the TV set in some summer in the 1970s to watch Evel Knievel tempt fate again. I wanted to stop it all, to talk Evel Knievel out of hurling himself and his motorcycle across impossible distances—gravity does exist, you will crash, why do you want us to watch you die?—to invite him out for a milkshake and supply the craven audience with blindfolds. Now I know these peculiar forms of human behavior can neither be stopped nor turned away from and that our enjoyment of, as well as our repulsion toward, such defiantly self-penetrating acts beg to be understood.

  Reduced to speechlessness, beset by gawking, where will we find the words for understanding these phenomena and everything about them that’s left unsaid? When the Human Ostrich was forced to swallow hard, sharp bits of the object world by a hungry crowd, he was, as it turns out, not simply sitting idly or innocently in a bar; he was in the middle of a performance of legerdemain, light-handedness or sleight of hand. He was opting to perform magic acts rather than traffic in the actual for a while. Thus his audience’s violent reaction to him gains a layer, because it’s hard to know what upset them more: That he was now tricking them when he had previously done something more daring? Or that seeing the magic act reminded them that he might have been tricking them when he swallowed all that stuff before? Somehow the Human Ostrich and his audience couldn’t arrive at the mutual pact that makes performance possible—the trust that needs to exist in the medical domain and in the theater. Sword swallowing isn’t magical, that’s for sure; it can’t be magical because it has no interest in grace. It’s violent—as is Jackson’s use of the word “stab” to refer to the use of his instrument in one of his earliest essays—and, in its way, totalizing, and entirely unsubtle. The Human Ostrich’s audience was mad at him because he had given them something that was to their minds better than magic, and they wanted that again.

  One human takes another human to a gasp-making pinnacle, like the story I don’t know what to do with that appears in Poulet’s tract in which a “step-mother, desiring to rid herself of
a little daughter, made her swallow, at different times, a certain number of needles. After long suffering, these needles made their exit from different parts of the body of the child, and especially from her arms.” Maybe a fiction writer on the order of Angela Carter could do something with this, to exploit its fairytale features toward feminist ends. Maybe a magical realist could find in it fascinating symbolism for unformed desire. But what could a compassionate thinker do with this? Did the (evil) stepmother mistake her daughter for a doll, and when the needles came out through the arms, was it alarming to the child, or did she experience it as a relief, a proof of life that made her stepmother faint?

  Sometimes when I swallow, especially liquids, I have the feeling of what I’ve ingested trickling into some part of me that isn’t the bronchus, but close. It must be a stray nerve ending at work when this happens, the same way referred pain occurs inside the human mouth especially. The going in feels as though it’s going somewhere other than the stomach, like a cool spike across the ribcage, and it’s not unsatisfying. It’s temporary, this sensation, but for a moment, I am a series of estuaries rather than a chyme-producing organism. And something about that feeling I want to cultivate, or return to, or learn to like. Because there must be more than one way to take things in and give things out, to receive the world and answer to it, to enter others or oneself, to perform what there are no words for without exacting harm.

  III.

  WHAT ARE THESE THINGS?