Revolutionary Poison
Politics, Psychoanalysis, and “The Apothecary Diaries”
This article contains spoilers for the first season of the anime “Kusuriya no Hitorigoto” (The Apothecary Diaries) streaming in English on Crunchyroll, as well as for “The Curse of the Golden Flower” (2006).
The ultimate expression of sovereignty resides, to a large degree, in the power and the capacity to dictate who may live and who must die.
— Achille Mbembe, “Necropolitics”
The 2006 film “Curse of the Golden Flower” begins with a scene of an apparently harmonious imperial court, every element in place with the help of countless faceless retainers, overseen and corrected by the all-powerful emperor, the arrangement of even the dining table mirroring celestial harmony. This harmony is of course an illusion, and, at the end of the movie, we return to a similar scene, but after an almost ludicrous number of deaths. The empress knows she is being poisoned by her husband through her morning tea. Her son, after an unsuccessful rebellion, is told that he will be forgiven his treason only on the condition that he be the one to serve his mother’s deadly “medicine.” He commits suicide instead, drops of his blood spill into the cup, the empress tosses the platter aside in shock and despair, and the last shot of the movie is the ornamentation at the center of that otherwise auspiciously-designed table corroding as the poison eats through it.
Poison can be the weapon of the aristocracy, hidden in rings (or in the vessel with the pestle) and exchanged as part of deadly court intrigues or in deadly games of wits. One of the ways that Frank Herbert establishes the setting of the Dune novels is that the processes and uses of poison are so deeply entrenched in Dune’s society that even language has warped around it, with words like “chaumurky” and “chaumas” to denote poisons in drinks and in food, respectively. On the other hand, poison is also often conceived of as the weapon of the subaltern, and particularly of women. This assumed connection to women is inherently political. There is an assumption that poison provided a “level playing field” that did not require overpowering or even directly facing one’s enemies, with the sexist presumption that women would be too weak or squeamish to commit the more “manly” forms of murder like stabbing or shooting. And likewise an assumption that women had more ready access to poisons that did double duty as household items like rat poison or weed killer (or makeup!). Women subsequently assumed as being more likely to be the preparers of meals or drinks that provide the vehicle for the poisons. The means, motive, and opportunity of the stereotypical woman as poisoner are all predicated on a particular view of gender roles in families and society.
The historical reality of the matter is of course a little more muddled. Men can of course be poisoners, women bludgeoners, and the outsized number of men who murder means that neither comparative counts nor rates are particularly diagnostic here. You’ve even got women like the notorious Belle Gunness who mixed things up with poisoning, axe murder, and arson. And of course the opposite case, where, as the story goes, the (male) murderers of Rasputin began with cyanide-laced cakes and turned to increasingly more direct methods after the man simply refused to die. As for the subaltern in general, one could argue that the “everyday” poisoning of the air and water by powerful industrial and corporate interests is far more common than the wicked tyrant being poisoned by the servant who finally got a shot at revenge. Historically, as well, when emperors or kings were poisoned, their class peers (but political rivals) would seem to be the first place to look for instigators.
It is this somewhat muddled view of the politics of poison that is the background for my analysis here. Is poison a leveling or even revolutionary tool that allows even the otherwise powerless to change the political order? Is poison a political chameleon that adapts to suit the class using it? A Deleuzean “war machine” that seems to originate as an anarchic weapon but can be captured and territorialized by the state? Or is poison merely the same as every other monopolized tool of state violence, just one that is “cleaner” than other forms (with the state apparatus itself being the “squeamish” party here that wants to keep its hands clean)? How do we relate to poisoning of the individual with the poisoning of the larger societal or political “bodies”?
The Apothecary Diaries is largely about the shaping of social dynamics through poison and politics. Maomao, the central character, is obsessed with poison to an absurd degree. She has developed resistances to most poisons through mithridatism, experiments on herself with additional poisons, and reacts to the taste of poison by licking her lips and gleefully speculating on the likely side effects in a way that would make Jacques Lacan write “jouissance” on a blackboard and circle it several times for emphasis. While she can often keep her composure, in other cases she has to be dragged away from drinking known poisons with the same techniques you might use to keep a dog from rolling in something stinky out in the yard.
The inciting incident of the series is when Maomao is rather abruptly kidnapped from her home where she assists her adoptive apothecary father and is carted off to work in the palace. Once there, despite her initial efforts to keep a low profile and hide her value, she becomes enmeshed in political intrigues between the Emperor’s concubines while falling into the orbit of the mysteriously powerful Jinshi, an (occasionally nearly supernaturally) attractive but fiercely intelligent court figure who takes a liking to her (but, in the view of many of those around him, in the same way that he would fixate and obsess over his childhood toys). Maomao, despite her desire to keep her head down, finds herself investigating and resolving cases connected to the palace. Much like the thematically similar Brother Cadfael, Maomao’s knowledge of poisons and herbs are just as invaluable as her (occasionally anachronistically modern) empiricism and ability to draw quick connections between seemingly unrelated or inexplicable events. Even so, social and political considerations often guide the conduct of her investigations more than pure Holmesian deduction.
The setting is a fictionalized pastiche of various Chinese dynastic eras, although for my (admittedly inexpert) eye, the Ming dynasty comes through most strongly in the visual, architectural, and political forms. There are anachronisms if taking a Ming interpretation, such as a formalized consort pecking order that seems more Tang in character, military forces (and the role of military councilors) that appear almost atavistically Han at times, and post-Columbian Exchange elements of varying rarity and perceived exoticism like potatoes, chocolate, and (notably) syphilis. Maomao, illustrating a chain of logical deduction, draws a Venn Diagram (introduced in 1880) for her bemused audience. But rather than make an annoying CinemaSins “ding” sound at that apparent anachronism, I view it more as a sign that the setting has a functional rather than historical definition.
A palace (or, The Palace, really) is an organized structure with known rules where a specific kind of detective work can happen, just like so many murder mysteries from the Golden Age of Detective Fiction take place in isolated estates in the English countryside, or quaint villages hiding interlocking secrets. What distinguishes the palace here from those other settings — that seem to exist mainly so that detective stories can happen in them — is that Maomao (and everybody else) has to go on living there. Cabot Cove can get away with a murder or two a week, and nobody seems to be particularly inconvenienced by the increasing pile of bodies. Likewise, when the character of Detective Columbo was being created, William Link claimed “we wanted to keep him almost mythological. He comes from nowhere and goes back into nowhere.” Maomao is not mythological. She has to eat and sleep and pay her debts, all within a place where people can be castrated, exiled, poisoned, executed, or some combination of all of the above based on both hierarchical rules to which all are subject or the simple caprice of those higher up the social or political ladders.
It’s surprising to me just how much the usual parameters of the detective genre change just with the admonition that, yes, the character has to go on living with these people and, no, living in a palace is not like living elsewhere. One scene in particular in episode 9 drives this point home. Maomao, having reflected on the arbitrariness of death, is greeted by Jinshi after the conclusion of another investigation. Another show might have the two leads engage in a “we did good today” banter, or even play up the “will they/won’t they” romance element by having some mild to moderate flirting or wordplay. But Maomao instead starts things off with this:
Jinshi is of course shocked, but, for Maomao, it’s a reasonable, perhaps even slightly romantic or optimistic ask. The nature of someone like her sticking out in this society inherently creates enemies. She narrowly escapes a purge (forced only into a brief exile from the palace) because the murderer she detected was connected via familial bonds to her kidnappers (and so to her own palace service), and punishing the murderer impacts that broader familial web as well. Every bit of brilliance or detection means potential death, and it will likely be Jinshi, despite or perhaps even because of his sense of connection to Maomao, who will be forced to carry out the order. Jinshi is not free to spare Maomao from death, bound up as he is in palace structures and rules that he can only bend, never break.
So why poison, for Maomao? The temptation is to say “power”, similar to the diagnoses behind poisoners like the “angel of death” caretakers who believe their patients to be better off dead, and enjoy the feeling of control or mastery that comes with being able to determine who lives and who dies (for instance Jane Toppan who expressed a desire to kill the helpless, and poisoned even herself to help court suitors drawn by sympathy). But Maomao is no serial killer or aspiring despot (this post was nearly twice as long because I want to compare her seeming apolitical but in fact deeply political deductive maneuverings with those of her biological father, who has nearly the opposite orientation). But she is no revolutionary, either. Her poison obsession is perhaps an obsession for self-control, however. Her arm is constantly wrapped in bandages to disguise the scars and discolorations caused by a lifetime of self-experimentation on toxins and venoms: what Lacan might call a repetition or insistence on the pleasure of approaching death (on one’s own terms) but veering away as close as one dares with the right antidote or purgative, building up a resistance that allows one to skirt ever closer to the boundary the next time.
I think, therefore, that rather than control over others, poison functions as a way for Maomao to exert a modicum of personal power and control in a place where she otherwise feels powerless. As in the Curse of the Golden Flower, the palace is a place both of mind-numbing routine and ritual, but also an almost Agamben-like state of exception where death can come for anyone, especially anyone common, at any time. But while we can debate and quibble over the situatedness of knowledge about politics or fashion or relationships, and even medical best practices about diet and general health can seem ephemeral or tendentious, poisons seem above debate: they kill you whether you believe in them or not. So maybe mastery over poisons is a type of knowledge that allows a leveling of the hierarchical structures in the palace, even as the specifics of how this knowledge is used and employed (and the repercussions for doing so) remain enmeshed in court politics and circumstances. To use a poison is still to play the palace’s game. To know of the poison, but to be able to personally overcome it: that is to escape the established order, if only temporarily.
