Arnold Weinstein - A Scream Goes Through The House (24 page)

Here we see the miraculous view of love that Morrison has presented, a love that at once unites and restores lovers to themselves by means of a generosity and a need so great that the dead limbs come to life, the blood flows again, the "beat and beating" heart is rediscovered. Sexual fusion acquires here the power of a blood transfusion, of opening clogged arteries, of lifesaving. "Red heart" moves out of sentimental or psychological discourse to become a cardiac term, used to denote the creatural pulse and flow of the living body.

Morrison's story is shockingly governed by the logic of the body. When Sethe first sees Beloved, her bladder almost explodes, and as she releases her seemingly interminable flow, she thinks back to the bursting of the water that accompanied Denver's birth. At other times she thinks still further back, to the jagged, precious memories she has of her own "Ma'am," a mother she never knew—slave families were separated—but whom she saw, who spoke a foreign tongue and danced like an antelope, who told her she could be recognized (if dead) by a mark on the breast. Other terrible memories circle around the theft of her milk when, pregnant with Denver, she was caught trying to escape, a scene of torture and quasi-rape that is horribly (unsurvivably?) witnessed by Sethe's husband, Halle.

Toni Morrison shows us how the body speaks, how it expresses itself in fluids such as urine, milk, and blood, how urine, milk, and blood

are the great waterways of human existence, constituting what moves in flesh. The body in this novel can shine when it is ready for mating, just as it can flip a switch and go blank when it is confronted by more horror than is absorbable (as when Denver, worried that Sethe may kill her, since she killed her other child, is without speech for a time). The human body becomes unforgettably eloquent in this story, marked by the depredations of slavery: Sethe carries a "chokecherry tree" inscribed in her back, as a gift from her white owners. How different this is from Kafka's writing machine. No "truth" written into Sethe at all, just torture; yet these "roses of blood" "blossomed" as Baby Suggs eased her pain and ministered to her wounds.
Ministered to her wounds:
No such human tenderness and solace for Philoctetes. The body in Morrison is marked also by its beauty and power, made precious in its individual integrity; Beloved has nightmares that she is exploding, hence clings to Sethe and Denver, is insatiable for contact. Remember, as contrast,
Guernica
and its fractured forms, its shrieking figures.

Above all, however, in
Beloved
the body is linked, over and over, to the bodies and lives of others. Not through chains but more imperiously through the milk that bonds infant to breast—a nurturance throughout life that is as fluid and unstoppable as the nurturance in utero—and through a love that is so thick that it exposes the fictiveness of weaning, as if, underneath the appearances of separate skin, we were actually one communal body. In this great novel we must question some of our basic facts as to life versus death, individuation versus family. Beloved's fateful return is a triumph of flesh as well as spirit, a way of showing that the mother-daughter bond is indissoluble, unfissurable, all our assumptions to the contrary.

Whereas Kafka construes writing itself as a penetration of flesh, a rending beak that inscribes meaning onto and into bodies, Morrison, too, hallows flesh as the supreme site of language, but in a radically different sense. Her great gift is to write from this site, to eschew abstractions in favor of a writerly vision that seems "cardiac," that understands trauma and repression to be a matter of dead tissue, that treats memory

and self-possession as the restoring of full circulation, that understands the mother-child bond to be so viscous that it is "thick love," that dares to reconceive the founding calamity of the Middle Passage that brought blacks to America in slave ships as a uterine passage, a kind of prenatal trauma that haunts black consciousness.

Beloved
shows us what a literature of the body might look like, what a culture of physical kindness might be: Baby Suggs kisses Sethe on the mouth when she arrives, all bloody with her baby, gives the newborn to a "young woman in a bonnet, telling her not to clean the eyes till she got the mother's urine" (92); Baby greases Sethe's tortured "flowering" back, eases her pain; Sethe bonds, during the brief twenty-eight days of freedom before the horror, with other women, yielding a radiant new image of family, one of women linked to their children and to one another, of human continuity. This domestic perspective is made possible by a female logic that is as old as the species, a logic that counts out events by monthly cycles in connection with the moon and the womb, a logic that does not shy away from oily fluids and baby spit. This logic finds its purest expression in the creatural flow of mothers and children, showing us in utterly unsentimental ways the very "milk of human kindness."

Morrison's novel seeks to restore a lost tongue to its readers, understood as the prior language of the body, focusing on the profound and unfathomable story of nurturance, of the love that binds the species (as opposed to the hate that butchers it).
Beloved
offers us a version of history unlike any that I have ever seen: the crimes of slavery are actually translated (out of the abstract political discourse we know) back into their natural organic and corporeal language. As in Barker's book and Picasso's painting, we therefore see the carnage in all its horror. But here at last the human body is shown to be the sacred material of life, sacred by dint of its capacity to triumph over death, to nurture, to seed, and to love.

CHAPTER THREE

DIAGNOSIS: NARRATIVES OF EXPOSURE

For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face.

— ST. PAUL,
1 Cor. 13:12

The wisdom to recognize and halt follows the know-how to pollute past rescue. The treaty's signed, but the cancer ticks in your bones. Until I'd murdered my father and fornicated my mother I wasn't wise enough to see I was Oedipus.

— JOHN BARTH,
Lost in the Funhouse

DIAGNOSIS: GETTING THE STORY

We live in the dark and go to doctors for light; we call that
diagnosis.
With luck, the fever or ache or impairment we are suffering from is immediately interpreted, and a quick fix is possible. Often enough, things are not this simple: further examination is required, entailing blood work or medical imaging (sometimes of astounding complexity), leading to eventual reports that are deciphered by specialists such as radiologists or pathologists; in complex cases, several expert opinions are needed to interpret the "evidence" and—maybe—to recommend treatment. Often enough, tests and imaging spawn further tests and imaging, so that our hunger for a definitive finding remains thwarted. This is a story.

While it is hard to get clear of the notion that the reality principles of literature and medicine are deeply at odds with each other, I have found that narrative itself is the unsuspected common ground between these two fields. Medicine, which has tended to define itself as a science, with

testable truth and empirical knowledge, is understandably reluctant to embrace narrative as one of its constituent principles. I use this term to signal something utterly basic: the telling of a story, the understanding of a story. Our transactions with doctors fall under this heading, and so too do our transactions with the world.

So let me shift gears: you encounter a blush, a giggle, a yawn, a cry— from spouse, lover, child, parent, co-worker, boss—and you don't know why, but you wonder. Or you experience loss of appetite or sleep, bouts of anxiety, spells of fatigue or anomie or rage: and you don't know why, but you wonder. This, too, is
diagnosis,
even though we rarely call it that. We go through life meeting, experiencing, signs and symptoms, and we want to know what they mean. Sometimes it's easy: a simple cold or a strained muscle; the giggle comes from a joke we didn't hear; the yawn from a bad night's sleep. Often enough, it's trickier: the pain isn't new, the odd glances have been going on for a while, the anxiety or anomie has been building. Those signs and symptoms didn't begin yesterday, were not produced overnight, hence they testify to some longer-term event. Sometimes these thoughts can be devastating: from news that we have cancer to tidings that we're headed for a pink slip or divorce or depression, we righdy fear diagnoses of the longitudinal variety. They tell us we are in big trouble.

In exploring the diagnostic impulse, I want therefore to speak about stories, about the surprisingly circuitous ways we come to knowledge, however much we yearn to get our answers immediately. The solution to the mystery that we expect from the doctor or the blood test or the MRI may not be definitive, can be subject to conflicting interpretations; or, worse still, it points to insidious gestations taking place in the dark, over long periods of time. And those other, nonmedical, "readings" that also matter—the state of heart and mind of self, loved ones, friends, and fellows—are equally mysterious, conjectural, puzzling, cued doubtless to a developing rhythm that remains a riddle. In saying "puzzling," I want to suggest that the notion that plays us most false in these matters of body and soul is precisely a
puzzle,
connoting something on the order of a jig-

saw arrangement whereby the final correctly placed piece of evidence yields a coherent, satisfying, luminous
truth,
no less than the mythical "big picture" we all yearn for. This moment of clarity when things are sorted out and known in their entirety is the miracle we seek, for it promises to lift us out of the murk, to give us light.

I do not think it exaggerated to say that our belief in answers, in final clarity, in solving the puzzle, is one of the most deep-seated beliefs in human civilization, constituting the driving force not only of science (which you'd expect) but also of personal knowledge and relationships. I feel that this quest (it is no less than that) is as much emotional as it is cerebral, that it drives our love lives as much as our information needs, and that it is underacknowledged in its role as fuel for human endeavor. I believe that the diagnostic impulse, the hunger for light, for the answer and the solution to the mystery, needs to be understood as a
narrative
event, as a process that unfolds over time. This hoped-for
moment of truth
turns out to be something closer to what Borges called (in his most famous story about the enigma of human identity)
a forking path
— circuitous, looping, revisiting—and that path is the temporal trajectory of our illnesses, our bodies, our relationships, and our lives. In short, our quest for truths, at least in the key areas of life that matter, such as illness or even love, hate, and self-knowledge, goes in anything but a straight line.

WHEN DO WE COME TO THE TRUTH?

St. Paul's eloquent words in First Corinthians, chapter thirteen, speak powerfully to this issue: "For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known." Paul's account of the murky mirror is part of an encomium to love and charity, and he memorably characterizes our faulty knowledge as the knowledge of children—"When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things"—leading to the conclusion that right

perception stems from love, not from reason. We are doubtless expected to also factor God into this equation: God as the clarifying moment that turns dark into light, that makes the mirror give us truth rather than blur, that produces a final
transparency
in the world, a glorious regime in which
knowing
is absolute. This is not a bad version of paradise: the world around us is clear, we ourselves are clear, everything at last can be read. But consider the insistent temporality at work in Paul's words:
now
(clothed in flesh? living in the body?) versus
then
(at death? in heaven?) When do we get to
then?
Is it in our natures to stop being "children"? to achieve at last this miraculous clarity of vision? Is the murk ever dispelled during our lifetime? Could such a path be traced?

No, living in the dark is not news from a religious perspective, since the notion of
revelation
is a familiar one, but Paul's words also have an uncanny relevance for the medical straits that humans find themselves in. I want to tell a story that repeats much of the Pauline fable, but in such a way that we see it as a narrative, as an unfurling in which those keys terms
now
and
then
take on a powerful human significance. You will also see that this becomes a story about exposure,
exposure
meaning at once the diagnostic triumph of turning darkness into light, and also
exposure
as the temporal fact of our lives, of living in the dark.

My mother, in her eighties, began having recurring bouts of skin cancer, nothing terribly serious, but growths that would come and must be removed. She was now paying the bill, her doctors explained, for years of exposure to the sun, done at a time when many of us greased ourselves up and collected as many rays as possible. At that time it was considered okay, even chic, for people to become as tan as possible, and no one had a clue that something untoward was in play. My own dermatologist has let me know that I can expect similar outcroppings in time. Here, then, is one of the chief meanings of
exposure:
to be in the presence of some force without knowing it, to be subjected to some power over time. The range of such exposures can include the sun's rays, but also pollution, smoke, fumes, radiation, asbestos, lead, Agent Orange; in short, what we call the environment, what appears to be outside, we