Arnold Weinstein - A Scream Goes Through The House (27 page)

In his right side, near the hip, was an open wound as big as the palm of my hand. Rose-red, in many variations of shade, dark in the hollows, lighter at the edges, softly granulated, with irregular clots of blood, open as a surface mine to the daylight. That was how it looked from a distance. But on closer inspection there was another complication. I could not help a low whistle of surprise. Worms, as thick and as long as my little finger, themselves rose-red and blood-spotted as well, were wriggling from their fastness in the interior of the wound toward the light, with small white heads and many little legs. (164)

One need not be a licensed psychoanalyst to feel that something strange is on show here. Is this wound real? If so, how could the doctor not have seen it at once? If it is not "real," what is it? The persistent notations of "rose-red" point us clearly in the direction of Rosa, the maid now (probably) being raped by the groom, an event pulsating in the doctor's mind. On this reading, the worm-filled hole in the boy's side could be a displaced vagina, and indeed the groom himself may be a displaced version of the doctor, doing what the doctor has always wanted to do. Yet, wherever the doctor may be in his fantasy, he is physically in the sickroom, confronting a patient and a wound. Is this a wound of his own imagining? One thing is certain: he can do nothing to assuage it.

Things get worse. The boy only wants to die. The villagers gather around the doctor, strip him naked, and lay him on the bed next to the sick child. At story's end, the doctor crawls back into his gig, but seems permanently stalled now, with spent horses and career up in smoke. It is a bad day for the rule of reason and for the prestige of physicians. The diagnostic project has quite simply exploded into a dreamscape ruled by libido and pulsion, and we see just how subversive literature as an art form can be: it depicts a series of events, but we sense that they are merely a cover, a facade for other, darker forces. Kafka's rendition of doctoring as subjective, oneiric carnival hints at unspeakable motives

getting the upper hand, at the absolute failure of compartmentalizing (after all, one could be thinking about a rape and still do one's job; not so here). There does not appear to be much uplift in "A Country Doctor," but there is at least a warning that doctors are no freer of fantasies and obsessions than the rest of us, even when (especially when?) it comes to bedside encounters.

INTERPRETING MYSTERY: DRIVING FORCE IN LIFE AND ART

Kafka is, admittedly, the most slippery of all authors, and yet his tale is cautionary in its warning about deceptive appearances. These issues have a long history. Medicine and literature are, in some important sense, enlisted in body-reading and mind-reading activities; they are cultural institutions with a mission: to illuminate their respective objects, to reduce or even dispel the originary opaqueness that governs our commerce with ourselves and our fellows. Of course, valuations of this opaqueness, this given mystery, will vary. Not only is the transparent world not to be had—other than in theory, in the academy, in our desire—but it would be a boring place as well, offering nothing to the imagination. Such matters are remarkably present to us in the nineteenth-century novel, a period now seen as the heyday of its generic life. I am thinking in particular of the rich, teeming urban fictions authored by Balzac and Dickens and Dostoevsky, where the modern city moves from assumed backdrop to actual protagonist. These cities were changing at vertiginous speed, and the novel served as a kind of map for its readers, a genial cartography of a world that had become, for many of those who lived there, unrecognizable and unchartable, due to the influx of people from the country, due to the inroads of industrialism, due to the changing physical landscape.
London, Paris, and Petersburg were mysterious.

What the Internet is today (an information highway), the novel was for that century, which meant that the diagnostic fervor ran high in these

texts, to be found in the garrulous authorial voice that placed figures and commented on the action, but also to be found in some of the most striking characters, sphinx-like creations such as Balzac's Vautrin, or Jaggers and Bucket in Dickens. These towering, virtually clairvoyant figures, often possessed of secret information, usually allied to both criminal and police circles, go about their novels turning darkness into light. One could argue that the detective is the quintessential urban hero, for he works in the service of transparency and translation, transforming details into clues. Is it an accident that Sherlock Holmes was created by a man who was also a doctor? Whereas Watson and the reader see a world of random if bizarre features, the diagnostic gaze of Holmes espies plot, design, intentionality, the contours and sequence of events.

The city of nineteenth-century Romanticism is a place where heterogeneity and mystery add vibrancy and richness to life, stir the perceptions of city dwellers and explorers, evoke a plenitude that challenges writing. Wordsworth's depiction of Bartholomew Fair in
The Prelude
is a good example of the poetic bounty that was to be had, a kind of carnival of sights and wonders to behold. No accident, either, that so many of the novels of this period seek to impose some kind of order on this spectacle, whether it be Balzac's sociological theory of Parisians or the elaborate plots that Dickens devises to tie together his mass of disparate figures. The treatment of the
stranger
is particularly instructive here: such a fellow will invariably be yoked into the plot's tight web, perhaps shown to be a protector or a villain or even an unknown parent or child. Baudelaire, in a poem like "La Passante," fashions an erotics of mystery and passing glances—"love at last glance," one critic has called it—entirely dependent on the epistemological merry-go-round that is the city. But let these issues become medicalized, and the tone darkens. In
Bleak House,
Dickens's heroine Esther Summerson has a chance encounter with the sick child of the slums, Jo, nurses him, and catches smallpox from him. I'll return at length to this novel in my next chapter, "Plague and Human Connection," but even now we can note that the mysterious stranger (whose intentions and diseases we cannot espy)

may not be so romantic after all. Tony Kushner, writing 150 years after Dickens, picks up the same plot requirements of chance encounter and erotic connection and (potentially deadly) infection to tell his city story in his play
Angels in America.

James Joyce set out to mock the literary convention of chance encounters in the "Wandering Rocks" chapter of
Ulysses,
where psychology and depth readings are banished from the scene, yielding an anatomy of vectors, with humans randomly intersecting each other on a flat plane. Yet Joyce's hyperrealism—after all, how often do you meet your future spouse or your lost child as a stranger in a chance urban encounter?—gets it wrong about our fantasies and obsessions. Modern societies are filled with people who do not dare to walk the streets alone because of the lurking stranger who may appear; now, however, he appears as homeless beggar (at best) or rapist or murderer (at worst). How much easier it would be if all were transparent. Guessing the intentions of the stranger is indeed a detective-like formula for romance itself, and we have seen that the stakes can change dramatically over time.

You might argue that there are only strangers in the world, in that everyone is opaque when you get down to it. Getting down to it really is the issue, since these matters seem idle as long as we go our merry way and tend to our own affairs (who cares if the taxi driver or the checkout person is opaque?), but what happens when we absolutely need to know more? I am not just thinking of specific secret thoughts, but of the whole terrain, a kind of "heart of darkness" that is not easily illuminated or negotiated. Proust's Marcel embraces the fiercely (insanely, sadistically) desired Albertine, but is obliged to acknowledge that he holds only the "envelope," and that the real (and ungraspable) Albertine reached inward to infinity.

There is something quite wonderful in this cosmic view of intimacy, and I'd argue that the term
infinity
rightly conveys the sheer immensity of dark terrain that the Other is for us, even in moments of so-called fusion. Moreover, erotic and emotional transactions constitute the ideal

arena for the diagnostic project: love wants to know, has to know, is tortured by its ignorance, fills in such ignorance with its own fantasizing. But the no less immense flip side of the coin is that love may be thought of as a huge libidinal and experiential network in itself, a kind of inner (hidden) erotic history coded in each body, inaccessible to others. In love, you are also (weirdly enough) on-line. Hence, Freud is quite logical, even though he seems to drop a bombshell in observing, somewhere, that every time two people get into bed, at least six people are involved, in that he points to the invisible but enabling psychic and libidinal displacements that attend emotional and sexual relations, that tend to make all sex a form of group sex. But in an AIDS culture this formula has received a rather more drastic turn of the screw: you are sleeping with your partner's entire sexual history. Mystery is getting priced out of business.

But whatever valuation the unknown is to receive, it seems clear that both literature and medicine have long served (in the metaphor that the eighteenth-century philosophe Diderot prophetically used to characterize the novelist Samuel Richardson) as
torchbearers
illuminating the dark human mind, along with the body that houses it, we may add. It would seem that the Early Modern period marks a moment where literature and medicine become far more interdependent than in the past. Of special interest are the congruences between the evolving medical discourse and treatment of extreme states—from the influential physician Thomas Sydenham's seventeenth-century focus on close observation on through the major reforms initiated by Tuke and Pinel in the next century leading to "moral management" of madness or hysteria on the one hand, and the psychological "inward turn" of the eighteenth-century novel on the other. Consider, in this regard, major prose writers of the period, ranging from Richardson and Diderot on to the more drastic performances of the Marquis de Sade and the subtle, mannered investigations of Jane Austen. What we see on the medical front is a dawning recognition of hysteria, madness, and other dysfunctions as the

result of life history, phases of a narrative curve that could be studied and analyzed. No longer "othered" and simply locked away out of sight, the mad and the impaired become amenable to the diagnostic project.

Just how liberating this is, is another question. There is a fascinating synergy here between the goals of scientific research and the strikingly coercive plots of eighteenth-century fiction, imprisoning plots of trapped and explored women providing "knowledge" for their male captors and observers. We know that pornography comes into vogue in this period, with its inherent marketing and objectifying of the female body to elicit hunger or arousal. Richardson's account of a virtuous maiden under siege, Pamela, was long thought to be the "first" psychological novel in English literature, and Diderot's rather more scientific scrutiny of extreme states such as hysteria and aberrant sexual desire (as in
La Religieuse [The Nun],
in which the innocent victim is subjected to lesbian advances that she fails to decipher) testify to a diagnostic project of real proportions. The medical ramifications here are both huge and unsettling: the spectacle of a body under siege, conveyed through the immediacy of the victim's thoughts and sensations, is dished up as irresistible and pathbreaking literary entertainment, titillating the reader's appetites, challenging his diagnostic acumen. It could be argued that even Sade's abducted heroines who undergo sexual initiation and/or torture of all stripes likewise have a strange medical tinge to them, on the order of a laboratory experiment in which one tests how the subject/victim will respond to stimuli. Austen's gentler, fine-grained comedies of alliance and misalliance contain massive doses of characters
reading
and
misreading
appearances, in which scenes in drawing rooms, subject as they are to ironclad conventions of what is sayable and what is not, have a distinctly clinical feel to them.

The theorist whom cultural historians invariably invoke here is twentieth-century French philosopher Michel Foucault, especially his work on the birth of the clinic, in that he points to the eighteenth century as the time when the body becomes the legible object of the scientific gaze in ways that were to shape the development of modern

medicine, yielding a new episteme about the relation between the visible and the invisible, what he calls "the emergence of the doctor's gaze into a field of signs and symptoms" (91). It is intriguing to note that Fou-cault the historian of sexuality and Foucault the architect of disciplinary practices are nowhere to be found in his learned study of the scientific gaze, as if he had oddly neglected to factor in some of his own central insights about libido and power into this medical history.

Whereas in medicine it may in fact be possible to pinpoint such a paradigm shift, I am rather more leery about positing a moment in literature when so-called clinical observation moves to the fore. Surely there is much clinical acuity and diagnostic brilliance in medieval romances. And what is one to say of Shakespeare? Iago's entire project depends on his genius in reading Othellojust as Edmund knows how to manipulate Gloucester with consummate skill. As for
Hamlet,
the entire plot might be thought of as everyone's efforts to diagnose the sick prince. What may have historical resonance, however, is the fashioning of a new kind of character, one who uses the "new" scientific gaze in order to control his or her fellows. The figure of the rake who uses his knowledge of physiology and rhetoric for purposes of seduction may have been with us since Ovid, but I think we have to wait until Laclos's
Liaisons Dan-gereuses,
written in the period Foucault is studying, to see this type realize its full potential. Mme. de Merteuil and her partner, Valmont, are essentially tyrants of intelligence, and their prestige and success derive precisely from their infallible X-ray vision of others, their unerring ability to discern signs and symptoms of erotic interest in their victims who have no idea that they are as visible and on show as if they were waving flags and using loudspeakers.