This chapter takes up the innovative ways of reading and knowing the past introduced in Chapter 1, and shows that aesthetic innovators at the fin de siècle found archaeology-inspired ways of reading portraits, crafting portraits out of prose, and creating a Decadent prose style shaped by the sensual experience of archaeological discovery. Examining Walter Pater’s collection Imaginary Portraits (1885–1887) alongside Lee’s ‘Oke of Okehurst’ (1890) and Louis Norbert (1914), as well as Lee’s essay ‘Faustus and Helena’ (1880, 1881) and some of her travel writing (e.g., Genius Loci, 1899), this chapter argues that Pater and Lee create an archaeological epistemology of portraiture—one that is both inspired by archaeological excavation and also embedded in their prose styles. Additionally, readings of Lee reveal how she draws from Decadent aesthetics in her transhistorical tales of ghosts and archival mysteries to craft an experimental Decadent prose which also gestures to the iconoclasm and severed perspectives of modernism. Exploring additional works by Pater, including Appreciations (1889), as well as Virginia Woolf’s Orlando (1928), this chapter simultaneously unearths the influence of seventeenth-century polymath Thomas Browne’s archaeological tract Urn Burial (1658) on these Decadent stylists. In its examination of the formal styles of prose portraits and archaeological meditations, this chapter teases out the archaeological methods and encounters woven into the fabric of experimental Decadent prose at the fin de siècle.

In this last chapter, the limitations of the research are presented and discussed in the context of the findings. I also describe the process of reflexivity, through which I examine how my personal background and experiences in war may have influenced the interpretation of the research results. The need for multiple rehabilitation components is also debated. We start by reflecting on the relationship between healthcare providers and patients in the two predominant theoretical models of disability, namely medical and social. Continuing with a brief overview of the change in attitudes towards disability over time, we note how attitudes in the humanitarian field have also transformed. We focus on the victims of war and their need for social recovery. This was an essential part of the rehabilitation process in past centuries but has been mostly forgotten in recent decades especially with regard to the care of civilian victims of armed conflict. The last component of rehabilitation that I discuss is symbolic healing, a component essential for the victims of war. The chapter concludes with an assessment of the potential for implementing the findings in the broader context of disability care and the proposed avenues for further research.

In Chapter 2, I follow patients and staff through their daily routines in the hospital. I describe the spectrum of emotions experienced by members of hospital staff, ranging from their personal motivation to the emotional impact on them of the daily support they provide to the victims of war. The hospital routine is marked by mutual informal interactions between patients and staff, lending a general sense of informality and friendliness to the institutional relationships. Nevertheless, providing a “healing environment” and remaining steady under the visual impact of deformed limbs carries a certain price. Interviews with staff suggest feelings of sadness, guilt, and generalized emotional distress. These overwhelming emotions are linked to the staff’s perceptions of patients. Patients are predominantly viewed as victims, lacking their own agency, and patronizing attitudes are sometimes imposed to justify the social order in the hospital. An enduring hospital culture of stereotyping is widespread. This became obvious through positive descriptions of Iraqi patients in contrast to derogatory portrayals of Yemeni patients, who are viewed as lacking proper hygiene practices, for example, or not understanding the Jordanian dialect of Arabic. Despite all of this, the hospital appears to be a successful melting pot, where cultures blend and transformation takes place. It becomes a place where a patient’s sense of self is gradually altered.

This chapter explores the overdetermined word ‘save’ – tracing its shifts from notions of salvation and paradise through to its contemporary meaning of ‘store’. This shift is not without anxiety, and this chapter argues that there is a movement from paradise to limbo which encapsulates our relationship to technology. The ability of programming such as UNICODE to convert alphabetic languages to their purest forms of presence and absence through binary makes the familiar unfamiliar; the heimlich unheimlich. The Gothic effects of this ‘shift from the tactile to the digital’ (Baudrillard, in Landow 1997) is evidenced by the hauntings and monsters depicted in two episodes of series four of the BBC TV series Doctor Who, ‘Silence in the Library’ and ‘Forest of the Dead’ (2008). The clash of the traditional and the technological embodied by the library and its terrifying inhabitants perfectly illustrates the horror of being ‘saved’.

This chapter analyses the 2018 performance of Beckett’s novel Company directed by Sarah Jane Scaife with Company SJ. This production is particularly interesting in relation to adaptation for performance, as it created an intermedial dialogue between the original textual medium of the work and its theatrical performance through voice-over and the projection of phrases from the novel onto the back of the stage. Moreover, the live actor, Raymond Keane, was doubled not only by a voice-over but also by a sculptural figure, which enabled the ontological instabilities and layers of creature/creator in Beckett’s text to be presented on stage. Company SJ’s Company is therefore an apt case study for exploring how intermedial scenography can potentially challenge the association of live performance with the presence of the actor and the material space of the stage, forging new performance languages and embodiments that address our contemporary digital age.

This chapter examines texts which imagine dead donor transfer tissue changing recipients. ‘Possession’ transfer Gothic is influenced by contemporaneous discourses of race, class and gender, but what also emerges is the sense of all human tissue as uncanny, including the recipient’s own pre-transplant’s body. Each text in this chapter resists the trend in transplant commentary to downplay any sense of the received tissue as alien or to elide recipients’ imaginative work or distress. The concepts of intercorporeality (Catherine Waldby), ‘absolute hospitality’ (Jacques Derrida) and ‘assemblage’ (Gilles Deleuze) offer a repertoire of strange relationalities between recipient and donor. I consider works from the pre-transplantation era including Frank Kinsella’s The Degeneration of Dorothy (1899), Arthur Cheney Train’s Mortmain (1907), Maurice Renard’s Les mains d’Orlac (1920), Robert Wiene’s film Orlacs Hände (1924) and Georges Franju’s film Les yeux sans visage / Eyes Without a Face (1958), and compare these with postmillennial representations of recipient experience of surgery and aftermath, autobiographical essays by Jean-Luc Nancy (2000) and Francisco Varela (2001) and Claire Denis’s film L’intrus (2004). In the latter works, Gothic tropes and intertextualities may express recipient acceptance of the fractures and contingencies of the post-transplant body, unsettling the language of either ‘possession’ or ‘self-possession’.