Arnold Weinstein - A Scream Goes Through The House (17 page)

DOMESTICATING THE BODY: CAN IT BE DONE?

Of course this theory of the human as animal is not news to anyone. Writers have produced fables based on this motif ever since Aesop, and in seventeenth-century France La Fontaine produced some of the most sophisticated, elegant, satiric, and ironic fare of his day working in this vein. Need I even mention our Age of Disney with its immortal animal stars and
vedettes?
In fact, the cartoon culture for today's children in America—starring creatures such as Rugrats, SpongeBob, and the like—is such a fantasia of altered animal/human forms that one wonders if the next generation will have the same understanding of morphology as we do. But it is one thing to endow animals with human attributes, and quite another to peel away the human facade so as to expose the animal. As long as we stick to the metaphorical, there is no problem: sly as a fox, stubborn as a mule, strong as a horse, proud as a lion, evil as a snake; such epithets and similes have been around forever, and startle no one, even if we recognize the conventionality and overdetermined

symbolism of such characterization. But what happens if we reverse direction, moving from the figurative to the literal, when the human body either acquires or exposes other, more disturbing features? Susan Son-tag describes the age-old fears and prejudices related to disfiguring diseases, and she makes some crucial distinctions: "Not every kind of alteration to the face is perceived as repulsive or shaming. The most dreaded are those that seem like mutations into animality (the leper's 'lion face') or a kind of rot (as in syphilis). . . . What counts more than the amount of disfigurement is that it reflects underlying, ongoing changes, the dissolution of the person" (128-129).

People shy away from disfigurement for many reasons, including (I think) a primitive fear that it could be contagious. Whatever rationales are at work, there seems to be a rather narrow aesthetic range for the "normal," and works like
The Elephant Man
derive their pathos from the cruelty that results from such normative assumptions, a cruelty that denies the notion of "human" to those who do not fit within the frames. Throughout history, not only lepers, but hunchbacks, dwarves, people with clubfeet, and countless other "irregularities" have been subject to derision and contempt. But also to fascination, as the history of circuses suggests, with their stable of "misfits" such as giants, the fat woman, the man-woman, etc. In our time, critics like Leslie Fiedler have reflected on such matters (in his book
Freaks
),
and photographers like Diane Arbus have exploited this mix of malaise and attraction in showing how much physical oddity there is even in everyday faces and bodies, once you look closely.

The flip side of these matters leads directly to a discussion of
beauty.
Beauty has a long history in the discourses of both philosophy and aesthetics, including a complex association with notions such as goodness and truth. Beauty is said to attract, just as ugliness repels, and we all know how much human excitement and misery have resulted from these beliefs. Needless to say, we live in a world where physical "beauty" can play a paramount role in all those arenas that count so much, especially for the young and fit: romance, friendship, happiness, profes-

sional success, self-esteem. Should any of us forget these facts of life, a casual glance at the blitz of images coming our way via advertising, TV, fashion, film, and mass culture in general will get the message across. All this has a great deal to do with bodies, especially with the postmodern view that our bodies are infinitely sculptable and alterable. Our moment is stamped by an unprecedented concern with dieting, exercising, muscle building, cosmetic surgery, and an ever-growing repertory of body-altering devices and aids. It is as if the old Pygmalion story were being played, but instead of transforming a sculpture into life, we seem to go at it from the other direction: to change our own bodies into sculpture.

It seems to me there is a considerable amount of hubris and overreaching in our body-altering culture, inasmuch as the materials we are sculpting (the deck we were dealt) may have a will of their own. The desire to remake the body is essentially Faustian (in Goethe's play of two centuries ago, one of the Faust's first exploits in his quest for knowledge and power consists in acquiring a more youthful, more handsome body), and literature is drawn to the hubris involved here, the fantasy of significantly improving the physiological givens you were born with. One of the most fascinating early accounts of such overreaching is found in Hawthorne's well-known tale "The Birthmark," from the 1840s. Hawthorne's story fits in the "Frankenstein vein" of literature, in that it is a parable about the limits and limitations of science; but it engages us today also because of its glaring gender biases: the experimental scientist Aylmer is obsessed with removing from the otherwise perfect face of his wife, Georgiana, a tiny birthmark that mars (for him) her beauty—even though Hawthorne characterizes the tiny hand-shaped mark as the gift of "some fairy at her birth hour" (204).

Most unsettling of all is Georgiana's own growing self-hatred which results from her husband's critical mania, and she begs him to remove the birthmark, no matter how risky such a procedure might be: "Danger is nothing to me; for life, while this hateful mark makes me the object of your horror and disgust—life is a burden which I would fling down with joy. Either remove this dreadful hand or take my wretched

life!" (207). Needless to say, Aylmer's experiment succeeds on both fronts: it removes the birthmark, and it takes her life. Hawthorne doubtless intended a kind of rebuke to scientific overreaching in this story, but he was prescient, indeed prophetic, in his awareness that male canons of beauty could lead women to despair and even to death. In the 1840s re-sculpting the body is portrayed, at least in literature, as a kind of black magic, and the cult of beauty turns out to be lethal.

Hawthorne's birthmark is shaped like a hand, and it seems to prefigure that omnipotent surgeon's hand that is called on, in today's culture, to rectify nature's mistakes. The well-known surgeon-writer Richard Selzer has given us, in "Imelda," a startlingly contemporary version of "The Birthmark," but more problematic and heartrending. Narrated in the first person by Selzer as a memory from his student days, the story is about a distinguished surgeon, Hugh Franciscus, who encounters during his yearly stint to Honduras the severely deformed Imelda, whose cleft lip and cleft palate—the child's shame and mark—are described with graphic detail. The surgeon confidendy plans to remake the child's face (after mapping it out like an exercise in geometry), but things go amok, and the girl dies under the anesthesia before the surgery can be attempted.

Faust enters the picture here, as Franciscus elects to operate anyway, in the dead of night, with a candle to illuminate the scene, and thus the child placed in a coffin the next day has been surgically altered. So, too, is Franciscus, for whom this episode seems to have been a turning point, a sign that it is time to slow down, to stop. Much is packed into this brief tale: the arrogance of science but also its superhuman aspirations, leading doctor and patient, man and girl, into a professional ritual that is a double dance of death. Selzer's story is nonetheless a cautionary fable and acquires a special pathos by being refracted to us through the perspective of the medical student who is pondering its significance, looking for boundaries, trying to determine exactly what can be done to and with flesh.

If Imelda's wrecked face seems a viable candidate for surgical re-

making, can one say as much for today's culture of wholesale "improvements"? In his provocative study
Illness and Culture in the Postmodern Age,
David Morris devotes an entire chapter to "Utopian Bodies" in which he discusses the "ethics and aesthetics of perfection"—so vividly on display in our bodybuilding mania as well as our media, with the corollary phenomena of anorexia and bulimia and other disorders—and he concludes with a moving plea that we make our peace with "imperfection" as our natural fate. He urges us to rethink our canons, to consider women who've had mastectomies and men who live with disabilities as candidates for a postmodern heroism.

Given the imperious role played by images in the media, and given the ongoing developments in genetic programming and reproductive technologies which seem to promise manufactured bodies to fit every specification, it is hardly surprising that the human body is thought by many today to be simply "material" that one alters at will. Hawthorne and Selzer relied on doctors for the bodywork they wanted to question, but the truly alluring question would be: could you go it alone? could this be a do-it-yourself job?

To shed still more light on the fantasies of body control and self-deification at play here, I turn now to an older text, Laclos's epistolary classic of the eighteenth century,
Les Liaisons Dangereuses.
Mme. de Merteuil, the astonishing female lead, is the grand predator of the novel, smarter by half than anyone in her entourage, shrewd about the role of vanity and desire in all human interactions, utterly cued to the signs of body language that advertise all erotic interest, and able to produce such physiological signs—blush, rapid pulse, trembling—whenever necessary. (Can you do this?) She and her (vastly inferior) male counterpart, Valmont, are embarked on an erotic search-and-destroy mission, entailing as many sexual conquests as possible, and their success depends in large measure on their readerly prowess: they decipher bodies. Merteuil is a Nietzschean figure of real proportions, and her soma comes across as a form of advanced weaponry, utterly under her control.

At the close of the novel, this unstoppable woman is stopped: she is

disfigured by smallpox. Critics have cried "foul," since such an authorial move reeks of poetic justice rather than real-life behavior, but I'd argue it the other way: Laclos wants to show that we never own our bodies, docile though they may appear during our good days. There is a Greek feeling to this ending, a recognition that the body obeys rules, speaks a language, and performs acts beyond anything of our own devising. The moralists within the text delight at Merteuil's disfigurement: her face, now hideous and monstrous, shows, according to them, the last thing she'd ever choose to reveal: her soul.

BEASTIOGNOMY: OUR ETERNAL TUG-OF-WAR

Writers are drawn to the body's often frightening eloquence and authority, especially since it displays the untamable animal we also are. Shakespeare is everywhere alive to the traffic between man and beast, and one could argue that
Othello
is entirely cued to this stark truth. The bedrock for such a view is doubdess the bed itself, as Iago implies when he screams up to Brabantio, Desdemona's father, that "Even now, now, very now, an old black ram / Is tupping your white ewe" (I.i.89-90), to be followed in short order by the pithiest figure for copulation that I know of: "your daughter and the Moor are now making the beast with two backs" (I.i.116-118). The vexed transition from beast to human signaled by Levi-Strauss in the story of the Sphinx is not very esoteric at all, when we consider the basic drives of the body, especially the sex drive.

Iago's worldview is that we are, underneath our facade, entirely animal in nature, and his plot consists in making sure that Othello becomes precisely that. At the play's exact center (III.iii) Iago feeds his poison of sexual suspicion to Othello, and in the scope of this single scene we see the noble Moor completely transmogrified. Worse is to come: driven to madness by sexual jealousy, Othello moves ever further into the bestiary: raves of "Pish! Noses, ears, and lips" (IV.i.41-42), closes his greeting to the Venetian emissary Lodovico with "You are welcome, sir, to Cyprus. Goats and monkeys!" (IV.i.265) and expresses his unbearable

sense of defilement thus: "But there where I have garnered up my heart, / Where either I must live, or bear no life, / The fountain from the which my current runs, / Or else dries up—to be discarded thence / Or keep it as a cistern for foul toads / To knot and gender it!" (IV.ii.56-61). We learn in these poignant lines how one's own inmost soul can be so tarnished through (imagined) sexual betrayal that the current runs dry and and becomes a locus of animal filth and fornication; here, too, is transformation, inasmuch as Iago's stock fable of black rams and white ewes becomes an act far more exquisitely vile and dirtying: spirit becomes hideously carnal, and
your
sexuality does that to
me.

The nineteenth-century German playwright Georg Buchner, political agitator and lecturer in comparative anatomy (with special interests in neurology), offers an appropriately politicized and medicalized version of
Othello
in his amazing play
Woyzeck,
Europe's first proletarian drama. The play is larded with puns about "beastiognomy" and the like, and its central figure, Woyzeck, is certainly bestial, cannot refrain from pissing on the street, and will be driven mad in the course of the play, ultimately stabbing his woman dead. Buchner has prophetically included an inhuman doctor who uses Woyzeck as an ongoing lab experiment (replete with forced diet); in one of the most moving scenes, Woyzeck is insane withjealousy, speaking of being ice-cold while the earth is hellish hot, talking of driving a stake into the sky and hanging himself from it, and against this Shakespearean language the doctor emotes pure clini-calese: "Your pulse, Woyzeck, your pulse, short, hard, thumping, irregular," "Facial muscles rigid, taut, jerky at times, posture erect, rigid." This text stages, along with its show of medical torture, a kind of rhetorical warfare, lets the scientific and the visionary codes do battle with each other, asks us to judge which is most attuned to the passional experience of the human animal.

Other still more famous literary texts hinge on the eternal tug-of-war between the bestial and the human. Stevenson's tale of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde is doubtless our most celebrated depiction of this monstrous duality, and it is no accident that the entire fantasia is a medical one, that