Arnold Weinstein - A Scream Goes Through The House (25 page)

learn now has gone inside of us, working its molecular will on our organism. As people live longer, we will see more and more of these long-term disorders, sicknesses, and growths that have been cooking inside us for decades.

If we are prepared to widen our definition of exposure, to include in it our being subjected to forces other than chemical or biological, then these issues deepen still further. The cultural and personal forces that we are exposed to, that condition our values and assumptions, and that help to construct our subjectivity, may be thought of in equally environmental terms. These forces are potent shapers in our development, but only rarely, and usually only in retrospect, can we illuminate them on some kind of chart or map, so as to say: it is my childhood exposure to X or my marriage to Y or my years living at Z or the teachings of Q or the example of R that have been, usually insidiously, shaping my life ever since. How do we diagnose that? When did it start? When do we know it? Is it knowable? And to complicate matters still further: how does this so-called new knowledge reconceive what you thought you knew, what you thought you were? Feeling no symptoms for years on end, you discover one fine day in a checkup that you are fatally ill; were you sick all along? Let us apply the same logic to our moral and emotional life: being happily married for years on end, you discover one fine day that your spouse has been deceiving you; is all that past happiness bogus? Ford Madox Ford put it beautifully in his intricate novel about delayed disclosures,
The Good Soldier:
"If for nine years I have possessed a goodly apple that is rotten at the core and discover its rottenness only in nine years and six months less four days, isn't it true to say that for nine years I possessed a goodly apple?" (7).

"Narratives of exposure" is my chapter's subtitle, but the point I want now to make, which flows from the examples I have suggested, is that exposure is itself a narrative. If we insist on thinking of exposure in the diagnostic or photographic or even journalistic sense, it may appear to be instantaneous, a kind of on-the-spot illumination that broadcasts a certain knowledge. But in returning to my mother's story, I want to em-

phasize the importance of temporality: she is not only just now experiencing the "results" of her lifelong exposure to sun, but she is only now making knowledge of it. There is a crucially retrospective cast to this kind of understanding, as if to say: you cannot know exposure until it has done its work, until it is too late. And the corollary is: there is no other way to know. Here, in the mix of night and day, now and then, that governs our understanding of our own lives, in our drama of looking through a glass darkly, here might be where literature's testimony trumps that of the sciences.

THE THREATS OF EXPOSURE AND THE POROUSNESS OF SELF

I closed my last chapter with a discussion of "readable" bodies, bodies that have a story to tell, a story whose conclusion is often some form of impairment or dysfunction. I want to suggest again that seeing this pattern is invariably a retrospective proposition: it is either too late, or if not, it is certainly after the damage is done, that we are in a position to know. Put more grimly: it is the damage itself that constitutes our knowing. As mentioned, Freud's early view of the etiology of hysteria epitomizes this kind of logic: hysteria becomes the belated confirmation of child abuse. Although Freud has been famously charged with backing away from the cultural implications of this theory, when he proposed the Oedipus complex and thereby transferred the libidinal activity from the parents to the children, we still find the etiology thesis alive and well in contemporary thinking about trauma and post-traumatic stress disorder, as evidenced in the work of Judith Herman and Bessel van der Kolk.

And surely the contemporary concern with recovered memories is cued entirely to the notion of a "founding" trauma that is discernible only later, in its delayed manifestations. In the shower, or on the thruway, you experience a hallucinatory recall; or, your job performance

and your capacity to maintain relationships is filled with problems, and you wonder if you are not paying the bill for some earlier disorder. Aside from the epistemological challenge at hand (what is the status of these memories or of the "causes" one comes up with?), there is a prior and even more urgent question: is it possible to have advance knowledge? Can we ever know how we are being harmed? How much will come back to haunt us?

John Barth, in a meditation called "Niagara Falls," wrote the following: "For ages the fault creeps secret through the rock; in a second, ledge and railings, tourists and turbines all thunder over Niagara. Which snowflake triggers the avalanche? A house explodes; a star. In your spouse, so apparently resigned, murder twitches like a fetus. At some trifling new assessment, all the colonies rebel" (101). Causality is real enough, but how often do we see it actually happening? Doesn't it take an explosion, a murderous act, a severe illness, for us to seek explanations and origins? We know that the historian works backward; he starts with effects, and he works toward the causes; the same pattern holds for the detective (who starts, who is brought into existence by, the crime, and then investigates backward) and of course for the doctor (who is confronted by symptoms and must proceed backward, inverting the causal chain, to organic origins). Retrospective is, however, not the same as retroactive, and I cite Barth once again to indicate the inherent futility, the belatedness of our knowledge: "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. Too late now to keep the polar cap from melting, Venice subsides; South America explodes" (101).

One of the great hopes of education is that others will not have to endure the determinist sequence, that they might benefit from our retrospective knowledge to create new prospects: no more asbestos pipes, no more frying in the sun, watch your cholesterol, peace rules. Yet, those of

us who are teachers or parents or, indeed, policy makers know what an uphill battle it is to impart "advance knowledge," to circumvent disaster by pointing it out. Is it really possible to be in front of the curve?

I cannot help feeling, more on a gut level than a theoretical one, that most of us live in the dark. For each new prescriptive piece of knowledge that comes our way, that could ward off damage, we will have a dozen incidents of measuring the damage already done, learning still more about what is cooking in us, what we have been exposed to without knowing it. A life in time amounts to incessant and incalculable entries within us, ranging from smoke and viruses to the words we hear and the things we see. That such exposure encompasses the moral as well as the somatic is one of the things literature urges upon medicine. All our lazy models of epistemology—starting with the flattering conviction that we are creatures of reason (at the ready) who apply our eyes and brains to whatever comes our way, that we are involved in a fair fight with experience, interpreting appearances and making judgments in response to what gets put on our plate—get skewed once you begin to think that the plate has been filled for years without your being able to know it, that life has been working on you, writing in you, forever, so that your presumably fresh and free stance on things is dubious from head to foot. This is, admittedly, not a happy picture, because it makes our deck look dreadfully stacked, not merely in the genetic ways that we know about, but more insidiously in the entire package of experiences we have been having without knowing we were having them.

To illustrate what these distressing notions might actually look like in the flesh, let me turn to Proust, whose entire work seems cued to this philosophy. One of the early episodes of Proust's monumental novel,
Remembrance of Things Past,
consists in the narrator's recalling his childhood discovery of one of the most potent home truths of his text: the deviant or "alternate" sexuality of folks whom the inhabitants of Combray think they know. In a famous scene, the boy falls asleep at the window of a house in the country, Montjouvain, and when he wakes up and innocendy peers into the window, lo and behold, strange things are

going on between the two girls inside. This lesbian scene is described with a mix of zoological language (of fowls clucking and sleeves fluttering like wings) and impassioned moral analysis, and it then disappears from view as the mammoth narrative continues.

Many volumes later, years later in the life of the protagonist, and a good deal later in the life of Proust's reader, this scene, which narrative conventions presented as "over," reappears for its shocking curtain call, now ready to reveal its deeper truth. It turns out to be a painfully personal truth for the narrator, Marcel, because he learns from his mistress Albertine that she has long been an intimate friend of these two girls of his past. If Proust is ever reprinted in hypertext or CD-ROM format, here, even more than in the concert renditions of sonatas and septuors, is where one wants to put the music in the text, the well-nigh audible sound of the Proustian subject stripping his gears, following—not leading—the imperious logical translation of this information into its charged personal significance: Albertine is now documentably a lesbian; she is exposed; and so is he. But even this juridical scenario—innocent or guilty—fails to account for the plenitude of Proust's narrative:

At the sound of these words, uttered as we were entering the station of Parville, so far from Combray and Montjouvain, so long after the death of Vinteuil, an image stirred in my heart, an image which I had kept in reserve for so many years that even if I had been able to guess, when I stored it up long ago, that it had a noxious power, I should have supposed that in the course of time it had entirely lost it; preserved alive in the depths of my being—like Orestes, whose death the gods had prevented in order that, on the appointed day, he might return to his native land to avenge the murder of Agamemnon—as a punishment, as a retribution (who knows?) for my having allowed my grandmother to die; perhaps rising up suddenly from the dark depths in which it seemed forever buried, and striking like an Avenger, in order to inaugurate for me a new and terrible and only too well-merited existence, perhaps also to make dazzlingly clear to

my eyes the fatal consequences which evil actions eternally engender, not only for those who have committed them but for those who have done no more, or thought that they were doing no more, than look on at a curious and entertaining spectacle, as I, alas, had done on that afternoon long ago at Montjouvain, concealed behind a bush where (as when I had complacently listened to the account of Swann's love affairs) I had perilously allowed to open up within me the fatal and inevitably painful road of Knowledge. (II, 1152)

What may initially seem ornate, analogy-crammed prose—Orestes, Avenger, Grandmother's death—is actually as taut and coiled as a steel trap, gathering its power and springing shut in the final, luminous notation of knowledge-as-puncture-wound. The early experience, the exposure to "aberrant" sexuality, enters the mind and body as an image that possesses "noxious power," and it sits there inside of the narrator, imbued with the kind of longevity that we associate with radioactive elements, waiting for its moment to leap out and make its power known; the entire process is shrouded in darkness, does not even exist cogni-tively, until the moment comes for it to surface and actualize its virulent force. Here is Proust's retelling of the story of Genesis, his version of both the cost and the nature of knowledge, "the road of Knowledge" imaged as a kind of internal pathway—at once somatic, cerebral, affective, and moral—that is arduously opened up, opened up the way life itself punctures us, makes inroads, and deposits within us toxic materials.

Proust invokes Orestes, ordained by the gods to carry out his avenging mission and therefore implacable, not to be deterred, as a way of characterizing the deathless potency of this image that has entered inside. It is an arresting vision of life as exposure, of the subject as porous, permeable, enterable, of experience (even the experience of listening to another speak) as a kind of time-release capsule, a capsule of disease not of medication. It would be no exaggeration to say that Proust's view of all human relations smacks of epidemiology and toxicity: the narrator maniacally seeks to control, even to incarcerate the loved object, but the

project goes awry; those whom we love are somehow transplanted inside us, like bacterial agents, foreign bodies, but their presence within us grants us no more power than the power we might have over cancer or bacterial pneumonia. This lack of power, this undoing of hegemony, is an endemnic feature of the story of exposure: our mental life is in a state of perpetual catch-up, reacting to agents and residues that go far back into our pasts. To be sure, new things happen, but they are grafted onto the older things, assessed according to older codes. We are endlessly processing the past, a past that has entered us and works its will as long as we live.

I would argue that all the important discoveries in Proust operate along these lines: the resurrection of the narrator's childhood in Com-bray hinges on the fact that the famous madeleine dipped in the tea turns out to be toxic as well, having preserved, unbeknownst to the narrator, its indigenous strength and "virtu," ready at last to live and to be made into knowledge. Memory itself now starts to resemble exposure, in that your entire past sits shrouded in the darkness inside, waiting for the right signal to flower and declare itself, to display its continuing life.

One of my college French professors used to drive me mad by claiming that reading Proust was itself a Proustian exercise, that each time he picked up a volume, all of them came bubbling up back into existence, including his memories of his past reading. I fought this view because it suggested navel gazing, endless regress, reading oneself reading oneself reading, etc. Not only do I now think he was right, but he reveals once again the striking temporality of exposure, its crucial dependence on several time frames: the initial encounter or exposure that is often blank and unsignaled, the passing time of gestation, the reexposure which now completes the picture, gives it resonance, all pointing toward still further strata in the future, further readings and exposures. On this account knowledge comes to be a mobile proposition, an affair of sedimentation, of returning to the objects and images within and without us, of unpacking them further. "New knowledge" is, at least in this regard, something of an oxymoron, in that we are always building on our exist-