Arnold Weinstein - A Scream Goes Through The House (21 page)

We know this liberated body all too well. The asshole that takes over the host is the dread cancer that is growing inside with a will of its own, undetectable until too late; the old diseases that have always cooked in our flesh and the newer ones that outsmart our medicines; the cellular and genetic regime that got there first, that constitutes the cards we have been dealt; the baffling mutinies that characterize immune disorders; today's inexplicable syndromes such as fibromyalgia and chronic fatigue, and the old explicable ones like pounding head, sore joints, and hurting back; the stubborn, low-profile, loyal, vulgar, quotidian aches and pains that punctuate our days and nights; the monster who will have his way.

THE BODY AS CULTURAL SCRIPT: SOCIETY SPEAKS THROUGH THE FLESH

Up to now I have emphasized the unruliness of bodies and the shock value of art, so that we might recover a sense of the body's priority, its otherness. Now I'd like to shift my angle of vision and examine a rather

different question: How does treatment of the body express our values? How does the body constitute a language? I do not mean "body language" as such—the corporeal semiotics (ranging from rash to erection, from MRI to body odor) decoded by physicians, radiologists, coworkers, and lovers that is central to both medical and psychological diagnosis, a huge issue that will be examined in the following chapter. Nor do I mean the body as inadmissible locus of animality or libido, such as we saw in Bronte and others. I want to examine the body as a kind of
cultural grammar.
This expression seems perhaps esoteric, but it may help us toward an understanding of the body as material graph, the index of civilization, and it follows that bodies serve as parchment, slate, clay, record, text, the place where culture's story is told.

One of Freud's earliest forays, "The Etiology of Hysteria," theorizes a view that we might term "the body as historical document." This (now infamous) essay posits the fundamental thesis that hysteria is the belated proof of earlier sexual abuse. Freud was later accused of "waffling" on this initial theory—which seemed to point to widespread abusive behavior, largely at the hands of fathers, sometimes nurses or governesses, in proper bourgeois families—when he subsequently devised the oedi-pal theory of desire to explain the family romance, now transforming the inappropriate sexual involvement between father and child from actual event (on dad's part) to projected fantasy (on child's part). Freud's actual views and motives have been hotly debated for decades, but my interest is in the trauma-model itself: certain kinds of damage are written on and into the body. There is something at once fierce and fine in this concept: nature, it would seem, keeps its books, and nothing can ultimately be concealed, so that injuries will eventually
show,
and the violence or abuse you have been subject to, far from disappearing or remaining just a dirty secret, comes out in the flesh.

This is not the place to dwell on the contentious issue of recovered memories—we now know that coaxing and invention play their role here, that memory is more a form of construction than some simple and reliable recall—but I am struck by the virtually Old Testament view of

ills being visited upon the flesh, of history being written into the body, of flesh as ultimate terrain where one's story is to be seen and read. Trauma has long puzzled and engaged medical thinking, because the presence of undeniable injury where there is no physical lesion calls out for explanations that the bioscience model cannot easily provide.

In her book
Trauma and Recovery,
Judith Herman has powerfully argued that not only did Freud have it right the first time—yes, she says, plenty of real abuse in fin de siecle Vienna, no need to lay this on children's fantasies—but that we can see an entire serial history of collective abuse and body writing in the chain that links nineteenth-century hysteria to shell shock in World War I to contemporary phenomena such as the traumas experienced by battered or raped women as well as men suffering from combat trauma, especially that of the Vietnam War. Violence inscribes the bodies of those who experience it, leaving a legacy of disorder that requires decipherment. Whereas the traditional historian works in archives among faded written documents, whereas the archaeologist labors at restored sites of antiquity seeking material remnants of the past, we have something prodigiously different here: the human body as testimony.

The dysfunctional have a story to tell, and their dysfunction is its conclusion. We encounter here something well beyond the estrangement scenarios I have evoked in this chapter, something on the order of an ethical narrative we must learn to read. This challenge comes also as a language challenge, mandating that we translate the injuries we see back into the causes that produced them. I say
we
not to signal some kind of generosity or compassion we owe such victims, but to indicate that the narrative they embody may be rich (unbearably rich) in social significance. The French poet Mallarme once defined the task of his art as
"rendre plus purs les mots de la tribu"
(make more pure the words of the tribe), and I'd like to suggest that the traumatized body can provide a somatic script of the tribe's experience.

In her superb novel
Regeneration
(the first of three volumes on World War I), the British novelist Pat Barker has sought to make good

on exactly this challenge: making us see the horrible eloquence of the damaged body. The book is based largely on the true experiences of Dr. W.H.R. Rivers, an anthropologist/neurologist at Craiglockhart Hospital in 1917, at which time the poet/pacifist Siegfried Sassoon, along with other injured British officers, was treated for shell shock and trauma. Whereas Sophocles represented the wound of Philoctetes as the bite of the serpent guarding the shrine, Barker presents injury as the result of twentieth-century warfare. She offers us quite a panorama of the walking wounded: Anderson, the doctor/patient who can no longer bear the sight of blood; Willard, certain that his spinal cord is severed; Burns, virtually unhinged by his experience ("He'd been thrown into the air by the explosion of a shell and had landed, head-first, on a German corpse, whose gas-filled belly had ruptured on impact. Before Burns lost consciousness, he'd had time to realize that what filled his nose and mouth was decomposing human flesh" [19]); Prior, a major protagonist who (initially mute) has blocked his trauma and is hypnotized by Rivers back to the moment of horror when he is holding in his palm the eye of one of his exploded men; and Sassoon, prey to visions, eloquent, making his famous public declaration against the inhumanity and immorality of this war. Rivers, the gentle, wise, and caring doctor, fills the father role for these wounded men, and his job is to bring them sufficiently out of their traumas so that they can be sent back into the trenches.

But this may not be possible. Several times, Rivers wakes up feverish, sweating, with pains in his chest, and the reader understands that the doctor is "catching" the disorders of his patients: nightmares, hallucinations, the shakes. The novel's brilliance consists in showing that these symptoms of somatic distress and agony—all these hurting and dysfunctional bodies—constitute a new language that measures the actual reality of a key three-letter word:
war.
Barker makes these issues unforgettable by dint of her concern with actual speech: Rivers the psychotherapist bringing his tortured charges to some kind of verbal possession of their injuries, Rivers himself the son of a father who is both priest and speech therapist, Rivers himself possessed of a stammer

that surfaces when he is distraught. The book obliges us to widen our sense of what language is: references are made to the "gift of tongues," a gift of Pentecost that "had made the Apostles
comprehensible
in all known languages" (153), and that is the goal here, to translate the war into an unbearably comprehensible physical code.

Hence, we are made to contrast the cheap, evasive slogans of war—
"Lost heavily in that last scrap"—
with
the more painful, gathering, stammering report on human injury and sacrifice. The darkest episode occurs when Rivers's counterpart, Louis Yealland, appearing as the book's doctor from hell, tortures the traumatized and mute soldier Callan back into language by inserting electrodes in Callan's mouth and forcing him to speak the oppressor's code, shock jolt by shock jolt. It is a scene that might have been written by Michel Foucault, given its gruesome spectacle of subject formation (deformation) and disciplinary practice. Rivers has a nightmare about this scene, replete with deformed creatures who have horses' bits thrust into their mouths, reminding the doctor of the torture and punishment meted out to slaves in the American antebellum South. Then the doctor has his horrible epiphany: he himself is performing this kind of oral rape, this form of social engineering, on his own patients at Craiglockhart, in his efforts to send them back to France.

The body speaks. Barker's novel does not talk about war in the familiar political and ideological terms we are accustomed to; instead, she writes this brutal chapter of English history in somatic terms. And she places at its center a doctor, a man who must gradually understand that the wounds he sees are luminous in their account of England itself: not only the violence and horror of combat across the Channel, but the blindness of a culture that lives by slogans and concepts, that blithely sends its young off to death while prattling about honor and glory. Rivers, stammering and riddled with personal pain, understands through his very patients the dreadful algebra at work here: war equals injured bodies, injured minds; war equals destruction of the human.

Guernica,
Pablo Picasso, 1937.

The body speaks, and the artist listens, deciphers, and translates injury into the words of the tribe.

THE BODY: PIECED APART, PIECED TOGETHER

What Barker achieves in representing the trauma of the Great War is something we find in all real literature on war and violence, from Homer's
Iliad
to Grimmelshausen's depiction of the Thirty Years' War in
Simplicissimus
to Crane's
Red Badge of Courage
and Hemingway's vignettes of
In Our Time;
in each case the body renders testimony. And the body's testimony is most vivid, most unbearable when its very form is altered, remade.

Arguably the greatest work of modern art along these lines is Picasso's icon of war,
Guernica,
his painting done in remembrance of the Fascist bombing of a Basque village. The rending of human flesh and the destruction of home, family, man, child, and beast, all are immeasurably heightened by the Cubist and surreal elements in the painting. The shrieking creatures of flesh and legend have an unprecedented power because Picasso has wrecked the human form, has reconfigured face and body, annihilating older notions of integrity and propriety.

There is a convulsive explosion of energy in this piece, arguably as much demiurgic as it is destructive, for we cannot avoid the sense that the remaking of human and animal shapes reflects a monstrously potent can-do-ism on Picasso's part, a godlike reconfiguring of the world as we know and knew it. For me, this painting has always had the feeling of a nuclear explosion, inasmuch as I see here a frightening congruence between the violence of war and the violence of art, each understood as shape-shifting, as the unleashing of energies hitherto unknown. And yet, I tell myself, how better to honor this scene of human disaster?

War may seem an especially appropriate setting for a literature of the violated body, but it is by no means the only setting. No writer that I know helps us more in this regard than my favorite bad boy, William Burroughs, whose "talking asshole" we have already met. Burroughs's enduring legacy to American literature,
Naked Lunch,
remains absurdly underappreciated, and even when folks read it, they approach it as commentary on the Beat Generation. For my money, Burroughs qualifies as a genuine visionary whose worldview is radically body-centered. What would such a thing look like?

For starters, it is a universe of incessant
traffic.
The individual subject is immersed in a maelstrom of forces that he either craves or suffers: oxygen, food, drink, drugs, sex, electronic waves, print, ideas, politics, ideology. The Burroughs-human is an utterly porous body/mind, and is hence entered (read
violated, taken over)
both visibly and invisibly, all the time. Western metaphysics is so accustomed to granting privileges to actors and agents, so oversubscribed to the view that individuals initiate actions and that phenomena exist in discrete forms, that the Burroughs vision has been largely ignored. We assume that characters in both books and life
do
things, such as speaking, eating, loving, murdering, etc., but what about the ways they may be routinely penetrated and invaded: by air, by disease, by others' words, by images, by culture itself?