The Corpse Reader

AUTHOR’S NOTE

I can still remember the day when, coffee in one hand, bundle of papers in the other, I sat down in my office to begin work on my new novel. At that point only two things were clear to me: first, that the plot had to move readers as much as it moved me; second, that until I found my theme, I could not begin.

I have to confess that I spent more than two months marking up dozens of pages. I was in search of a vibrant, captivating story, but in all my scribbling I only managed to come up with ideas that felt unoriginal. This was precisely what I didn’t want. I wanted something more intense, more impassioned.

By chance—which tends to be the way with these things—luck came to me by way of an invitation, in January of 2007, to attend the eighth annual meeting of the Indian Congress of Forensic Medicine and Toxicology in New Delhi. Although not a forensics expert, I have nevertheless always followed such matters out of literary interest. For a number of years, I had been attending similar meetings and formed friendships with some of the members. Dr. Devaraj Mandal invited me to the conference in New Delhi.

For a number of reasons, I was unable to attend, but Dr. Mandal was kind enough to send me an extensive report summarizing the main talks. Primarily these were on toxicology, forensic pathology and psychology, criminology, and molecular genetics. But the one that immediately drew my attention was on the most recent advances in spectrophotometry, or findings in the field of mitochondrial DNA analysis, focusing mainly on its historical origins. Specifically, it was an in-depth study of the person considered worldwide to be the founding father of this forensic discipline. A man from medieval Asia. The Chinese Cí Song.

Immediately, I knew I had it. My heartbeat quickened. I abandoned what I’d been working on and gave my all to a novel that was truly worth the trouble. The extraordinary life of the world’s first forensic scientist. An epic and fascinating story set in exotic ancient China.

The documentation process was exceedingly arduous. There were no more than thirty paragraphs in about a dozen books on Cí Song’s life, and these, though they opened the door for a fictional account, limited the chances of a biographically accurate rendering. Luckily, the same could not be said of his own output; his five treatises on forensics, all published in 1247 as the Hsi yuan lu hsiang I (The Washing Away of Wrongs), have endured through translations in Japanese, Korean, Russian, German, Dutch, French, and English.

With the help of my friend Alex Lima, a writer and adjunct professor at Suffolk County Community College, I obtained a facsimile of the five volumes edited by Nathan Smith of the Center for Chinese Studies at the University of Michigan, from a translation by professor Brian McKnight that includes a useful preface from the Japanese edition of 1854.

The first volume listed the laws affecting forensic judges, the bureaucratic procedures employed, the number of investigations to be carried out per crime and who was in charge of carrying them out, jurisdictions, behavioral protocol for inspectors, the drawing up of forensic reports, and the punishments forensic experts might receive if they made incorrect judgments. This first volume also advocated using a standard procedure when it came to examining corpses, including stipulating the necessity of sketching the various findings on palimpsest sheets.

The second volume detailed the stages of corpse decay, the variations in these according to the time of year, the washing and preparation of corpses, the examination of disinterred corpses, the exhumation of corpses, methods for examining corpses at an advanced stage of decomposition, forensic entomology, the analyses to be carried out in the case of a strangling or suffocation, the differences when looking at female corpses, and the examination of fetuses.

The third volume looked in depth at the study of bones, wound traces on skeletons, bodily vital points, suicides by hanging, simulated suicides, murders, and drownings.

The fourth volume covered deaths caused by punches or kicks or by blunt instruments used for stabbing or for cutting, suicides committed using sharp objects, murders by several wounds in which the death blow needed to be identified, cases of decapitation or cases in which the torso or the head were not present, burn deaths, deaths caused by spillages of boiling liquids, poisoning, deaths caused by hidden illnesses, deaths caused by acupuncture or moxibustion, and the registration of deaths by natural causes.

Finally, the fifth volume dealt with investigations into the deaths of prisoners; deaths caused by torture; deaths caused by falling from great heights; deaths caused by crushing, asphyxiation, horse or buffalo stampedes, and crashes; deaths by lightning strikes; deaths caused by wild beast attacks; deaths by insect, snake, or reptile bites; deaths due to internal wounds because of overeating; deaths due to sexual excesses; and, finally, the procedures for the opening up of corpses as well as the methods for dispersing stench and carrying out resuscitations.

All in all, it was a veritable array of techniques, methods, instruments, preparations, protocols, and laws, added to the numerous forensics cases solved by Cí Song, which enabled me to construct a story that not only had passion but also would be absolutely faithful to reality.

I spent a year researching and compiling information on contemporary political, cultural, social, judicial, economic, religious, military, and sexual mores; and conducting extensive research in the fields of medicine, education, architecture, diet, property, dress, measurement systems, money, state organization, and bureaucracy during medieval China’s Tsong dynasty. Once this was all organized and compared, I discovered several astonishing things, including the convulsions undergone by Emperor Ningzong’s court during the constant hostilities from the northern barbarians, the Jin, who, having conquered some northern regions, were threatening to move south; norms governing family behavior, which were strict and complicated but ultimately required complete obeisance by younger members to their elders; the importance of ritual as both axis and motor of daily life; the omnipresence of violent punishments for even the most petty of crimes; the massive penal code regulating every aspect of life; the absence of monotheistic religions and the coexistence of philosophies such as Buddhism, Taoism, and Confucianism; the triennial exams, which in many ways were ahead of their time in promoting social equality; the general air of antimilitarism; and the stunning scientific and technical advances—the compass, gunpowder, mobile printing presses, bank notes, refrigeration, watertight vessels—hatched during the Tsong dynasty.

Strange as it may seem, once I had vaguely sketched my plot, my first difficulty was giving characters their names.

When westerners read books with foreign characters, we can memorize their names and surnames and identify them with the individuals they represent because, in general, their names have Hebraic, Greek, or Latin roots, which are basically familiar to us. So family names that are unusual today (for example, Jenofonte, Asdrúbal, Suetonio, or Abderramán) are not only easily recognized but also easy to differentiate and remember. Something similar happens, for Spanish speakers, at least, when it comes to Anglo-Saxon names. Eric, John, or Peter are almost as familiar to us as Juan, Pedro, or José. Unfortunately, this is not the case with Asian names, especially Chinese ones.

The Chinese language—or languages—is extremely complex. Most of the words are monosyllabic, but a syllable can be articulated with five distinct intonations. So let’s imagine a novel with characters with the following names: Song, Tang, Ming, Peng, Feng, Fang, Kang, Dong, Kung, Fong, and Kong. There does not exist a reader who would not have given up on the book by page three.

To negotiate this, while maintaining the names of the principal historical characters, I had to change others that were too similar and might create confusion. For the same reason, I gave secondary characters nicknames representing their personalities, which was also a custom at the time.

But the difficulties didn’t end there. Pinyin, the phonetic rendering of Chinese, is an extremely useful system allowing the expression of complicated ideograms in alphabet-based words that can be spoken and written by any westerner. Nonetheless, the tonal diversity in spoken Chinese has meant that words can be transcribed differently to reflect the hearer’s perception. This means that, depending on the source, we might find Song Cí written as Tsong Cí, Tsung Cí, Sung Cí, Sun Tzu, or Sung Tzu.

Also, in China, the family name precedes the given name, and the latter is rarely used. So our protagonist, referred to throughout the novel as Cí Song or just Cí, in reality would have been referred to by contemporaries as Song Cí and, very often, just Song. So why did I change this? For three main reasons. First, to make something that resembled western naming conventions, with given name first and family name last. Second, to avoid problems of comprehension that might arise when sons and fathers are referred to in the same paragraph (Song and Song). The third reason was to get around the strange coincidence that Cí’s surname was the same as that of the dynasty to which the emperor belonged—the Tsong dynasty, sometimes also rendered as Song.

The next problem was larger. One of the greatest pitfalls for writers of historical fiction is to establish how much truth—and how much fiction—is contained in their sources, which should (but may not always) show scrupulous respect for the facts.

I have attended many discussions on the concept of the historical novel, debates which, with varying levels of vehemence, tend to turn on the degree of quality and quantity of facts a novel should contain if it is to be considered a novel of historical significance. Panelists tend to employ the semiologist Umberto Eco’s typology of three modalities: First, there is the romantic novel with a fantastical setting, in which characters and the historical background are purely fictitious, but are overlaid with the appearance of veracity (for example, Bernard Cornwell’s Warlord Chronicles novels). Second, there are what Eco terms “cloak and dagger” works, novels whose historically real characters are placed in fictional situations that never actually occurred (for example, works by Walter Scott, Alexandre Dumas, and Leo Tolstoy). Last, there are the historical novels that Eco considers to strictly adhere to the term, with fictional characters in historically veracious situations (including his own iconic The Name of the Rose).

Many would say that this typology leaves out biographical novels, false memoirs, and essays that are more or less rigorous.

In any case, my belief is that a historical novel should be a novel first and foremost. We should work from the principle that the novel is fiction, as that is the only way its magic and power to captivate can come through. Once this difficult process is complete, the key should be in the rigor and honesty with which the author deals with historical events; it is just as historical to write a novel about an anonymous slave who lost his life building a church as it is to write about Julius Caesar in Gaul. Rigor is everything. In Caesar’s case, the character is historical, but that doesn’t guarantee that our story will deal with his behavior, feelings, or thoughts. In the case of the former, the fictional character who is the slave didn’t exist, but someone like him did. And if our fictional character acts as that slave might have acted, then the story will be vivid.

Obviously, the author’s duty is to write a novel in which Caesar thinks, feels, and acts more than historians tell us to be the case; if we did otherwise, we’d be writing an essay, a biography, or a documentary. But the author also has a duty to make sure that the fiction is plausible. We would also be wrong to scorn the historical novel that employs fictional characters acting in a real world, because that world and whatever happens around the character also make up part of our larger history.

It is obligatory, in this sense—though larger events may be the only ones recorded—to point out that small, daily happenings are those that make up our lives, our highs and our lows, the things that make us believe and dream, the things that make us fall in love, reach decisions, and even, sometimes, fight or die for what we believe. The great historian Jacques Le Goff was the first to claim the history of the everyday: of medieval fairs; of the less well-off living in villages; of sickness, punishment, and pain; of the reality of the forgotten lives, in contradistinction to the brilliance and resonance of battles whose stories are related by the victors.

To anyone interested in looking into the subject further, I would highly recommend the essay “Cinco miradas sobre la novella histórica” (“Five Views of the Historical Novel”) by Carlos García Gual, Antonio Penadés, Javier Negrete, Gisbert Haefs, and Pedro Godoy, and published by Ediciones Evohé. These prestigious authors not only contribute clear perspectives on the question, but also manage to do so in an entertaining and enlightening manner.

In the case of The Corpse Reader, the protagonist is a real person, albeit one little known for his work, despite his copious writings. With that in mind, I have endeavored to reflect exactly the protagonist’s methods of working, his innovative forensic techniques, his difficult beginnings, his daring, his intellect, his love of academia, and his thirst for truth and justice. All the processes, procedures, laws, protocols, analyses, methods, instruments, and materials I have described are real. Other real people, including Emperor Ningzong and his retinue, the Councilor for Punishments and old Professor Ming, add to the cast of characters. I was also aided by historical facts such as the widely documented existence of the academy, the political instability on China’s borders, and, above all, the appearance, for the first time in history, of the hand cannon, a wholly new, and wholly deadly, innovation.

But I also added fictional elements that enabled me to re-create, with verisimilitude, the society, intrigue, and evolution of the time. In this sense, I wove together a complicated plot in which I speculated on how the top-secret formula for explosive gunpowder might pass into the hands of China’s enemies, the Mongols, and finally make its way to Europe.

The scientific name for Cí Song’s unusual condition is congenital insensitivity to pain with anhidrosis (CIPA) and is consistent with an unusual mutation of the gene that controls the neurotrophic tyrosine kinase receptor, which inhibits the formation of nerve cells responsible for transmitting pain, heat, and cold signals to the brain. I admit that there is no evidence that Cí Song suffered from it; this is dramatic license. But this infirmity, a marvelous ability allowing him to overcome certain difficulties, also has its downside—changing, toughening, and damaging the protagonist, making him feel like an accursed monster.

As a final remark, I would like to offer a personal reflection on literary genres. Everyone knows about the innate human tendency to classify, and it is only logical in an information-rich—sometimes overly rich—society. Something similar can happen with literary genres: so much is published that publishers have to decide which genre books fall under, booksellers need to know which shelves to place them on, and readers want orientation to help them choose a book to fit their tastes.

So far, so good. “Genrefication” is a way of organizing, and organization is necessary. But maybe the human tendency to give fixed labels to genres is less so. We label genres “great” or “minor,” but these labels never depend on an objective classification of each individual book.

I say this because I have often heard the historical novel referred to as a “minor” genre. Every time I hear this, I wonder whether the person making this point is talking about a specific novel or, really, is just following common opinion. To illustrate my point, let’s imagine for a moment a writer of unusual skill writing a tragic love story about two youths whose families, the Capulets and the Montagues, hate one another. Just because it is set in sixteenth-century Venice, should Romeo and Juliet be called nothing more than historical fiction, rather than the greatest love story ever told?

This leads us to the ineffable Jose Manual Lara’s definition of genres: “In reality, there are only two types of novels, those that are good and those that are bad.”