Arnold Weinstein - A Scream Goes Through The House (28 page)

The gender dimensions of this drama of the scientific gaze are complex and undeniable. Pornography itself, as I have mentioned, is historically related to the triumph of the medical gaze, as it transforms subjects into objects while capitalizing on the libidinal energies and power dynamic that accompany all such transformations. And the familiar plot of such work is that of the reified woman subjected to the

machinations of male power and male gaze. From Petrarch to modern film, as Nancy Vickers and Laura Mulvey and others pointed out many years ago, we have become aware of the sublimated violence and control that underwrite this scenario at the heart of much Western art. The notion and presentation of the femme fatale, the assumption that both painting and film will pay "loving" attention to the female body, the utterly predictable cinematic technique of shot/reverse shot that almost invariably
looks
at the woman figure, the virtually unnoticeable device of examining and praising women's body parts (in poetry, in film, in novels, in life): all this displays how irresistible such diagnostic gambits seem to be, and how gendered they are.

Nancy Miller has described the entire eighteenth-century French novel as "feminocentric," and the seventeenth-century
Princesse de Cleves,
with its key scenes of voyeurism where the female is secretly observed in moments of intimacy and sincerity, belongs in this same vein. In fact, Mme. de Lafayette's novel conflates precisely the issues at hand; said to be the first psychological narrative in the French tradition, larded with self-scrutiny on the part of the female heroine, the text nonetheless subjects this analytical woman to the hungry and prying gaze of others, ranging from the man who lusts after her to the entire court world of invading eyes and loose tongues.

DYING OF EXPOSURE

One of my graduate students once wrote that Manon Lescaut, the enigmatic female at the heart of the Abbe Prevost's canonical French novel (1731) of that name, actually dies of "exposure." In using that term, I would like to move more directly into the issues of privacy, violation, and narrative that come together here. It may be recalled that Manon Lescaut is, in all senses, the desired object of Prevost's novel: she is the courtesan who can be bought, and she is the grand love interest of the male protagonist, Des Grieux. Even though there is little physical notation—students are astounded that they cannot answer the question,

"What color eyes does Manon have?"—there is indeed a nonstop, obsessive focus on her mystery, allure, and motives.

After resisting the young man's tireless hegemonic campaign during most of the novel (where she cheerfully takes up with one rich new lover after another), she finally sees the error of her ways, becomes faithful in their final New Orleans stint, sets off with her lover into the American wilderness, and dies. Death by exposure: the harsh American setting, so different from Parisian amenities, kills her; but so, too, does her newly acquired virtue and transparency, as if she were at last domesticated, brought under control, divested of her opaqueness and alterity, and—as the plot shows—no longer of interest. There is a profound narrative law at work here: once opened to scrutiny, once translated or transformed into another's knowledge, the riddling character loses its raison d'etre, and the text collapses.

There is food for thought here: narrational energy seems cued to opaqueness, and we must ponder the operation of desire itself. Of course the hungry lover seeks to know and possess. But perhaps the heart yearns—also, even more profoundly—for darkness, feeds on it, and even though human relationships produce, via the passing of time and the agency of understanding, much clarity, it still may be the case that love likes mystery. Put differently, transparency is desire's enemy, and it may well be that the commonplace, quotidian, and tragic facts of life such as divorce and cessation of love reflect the sorry triumph of too much light, too little mystery.

Medically, as well, up until our modern culture of noninvasive imaging, our knowledge was not only dependent on death, but also in collusion with it. Foucault has written eloquendy on these matters, in connection with the functioning of the scientific gaze, and enlists the cadaver in a truly baroque play of light and darkness: "That which hides and envelops, the curtain of night over truth, is, paradoxically, life; and death, on the contrary, opens up to the light of day the black coffer of the body" (166). We know that medical history reaches a turning point in the Renaissance with Vesalius's work on anatomy, work enabled entirely

by the study of cadavers. The Church lost little time expressing its stern view of such matters, but even in a comic text like
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer,
we see that the practice of robbing the grave is alive and well. Today's debates about the ethics of genetic research and, especially, cloning, suggest that this cluster of issues remains unresolved. My point in coupling the medical and the narrative wars against opaqueness is to underscore their kinship with death; the opening, invading eye does not always await the cold corpse, but rather hastens the process, turns living mystery into dead truth, "the absolute eye that cadaverizes life" (166), as Foucault says.

I am interested in that "absolute eye that cadaverizes life," because all too often our notion of "knowledge" is assumed to be an abstract, innocuous affair, a mere gathering of information. Foucault's formulation is intentionally draconian: seeing cadaverizes, seeing constitutes a form of murder. It is well known that science has been driven by an ocular imperative ever since the Renaissance, and modern medicine is, of course, stamped by this same regime. One logical and overdue reaction against the tyranny of the visual is to restore the primacy of the aural: in particular, in the crucial arena of doctor-patient relationships, in the diagnostic situation, it seems essential to reinstate
listening
as a form of medical knowledge every bit as valuable as seeing or prescribing tests. A listening doctor
restories
the patient. Needless to say, the economics and press of modern medicine tend to work in exactly the opposite direction: talking takes time; doctors have little time. Perhaps more profoundly, talking is about the workings of time, in that talking makes available to the doctor the temporal sweep of a life, at least insofar as the history of the present complaint is concerned.

Less obvious to us is the fact that
looking
is also a story, once we know how to see it. And it is often a story about power. The fundamental curiosity that drives much of science has, I think, an invasively ocular dimension: to
see
what things are made of entails getting inside them. Let me propose an admittedly sensationalist example: William Hogarth's engravings of
The Four Stages of Cruelty.
Hogarth offers a mor-

The First Stage of Cruelty,
from
The Four Stages of Cruelty,
William Hogarth, 1751.

The Reward of Cruelty,
from
The Four Stages of Cruelty,
William Hogarth, 1751.

alizing allegory of the wretched life and activities of Tom Nero, who moves from young sadist to outright murderer on to his final avatar as specimen for anatomy lessons. What is fascinating is that each of these stints centralizes the scientific gaze, the diagnostic imperative. We need only consider the first and last of these engravings to grasp the argument.
The First Stage of Cruelty
displays what seems almost an epidemic of children torturing domestic animals: Tom Nero (at the center) and his two friends plunge an arrow into the anus of a dog whose owner is trying to beg and buy his pet out of this misery; elsewhere one child deliciously watches another burn out the eye of a bird; other children look at suspended cats clawing each other; another aims a stick at an unsuspecting rooster; another ties a bone to the tail of a dog; from a window above, two people drop a cat with artificial wings. We can all agree that sadism is the unifying feature of the engraving. But so too is scientific curiosity: these children are miniature scientists, not all that different from the psychologists in laboratories today who perform experiments on animals. All of these cruel acts are animated by a powerful desire to know, a "what if?" equation that has genuine intellectual pretensions.

If you find this insistence on science overstated, then you need to examine
The Reward of Cruelty,
in which Tom Nero has come to the end of his career and receives his just deserts. With unerring logic, Hogarth locates Nero's punishment in a medical school setting, with the caveat that Nero himself is now undergoing the same kind of invasive, sadistic, yet scientific investigation that he and his friends meted out to the poor animals. Against a backdrop featuring the emblem of the Royal College of Physicians, a doctor's hand taking a pulse, we see a group of doctors reading, chatting, and laughing, while the main event consists of doctors carving up the corpse of Nero, who seems to be watching in agony. We note the pulley screw in his head, the hangman's rope still around his neck (the result of earlier nefarious deeds), the surgeon gouging out his eye (just as was done
to
the bird in the first engraving), another pulling out his entrails, which are then put into a tub, still another carving his

foot, while a dog picks up Tom's heart on the floor and puts it in his mouth. Yes, this is poetic justice, in that Tom is paying for his misdeeds. But it is also a hallucinatory depiction of the "absolute eye that cadaverizes life," as if Hogarth wanted to link curiosity, sadism, murder, and knowledge, and to say that they are the "four stages" of diagnostic understanding. What we see here is the cruelty that sometimes finances knowing, the drive for power that seems an essential ingredient in our acquisition of knowledge. What is most unmistakable is that ocular knowledge can be horribly invasive, that seeing inside the other may be tantamount to gouging him or her open. There is a great warning here.

EXPOSURE AND THE WILL-TO-POWER

And thus it is no surprise that much narrative literature treats the imperious scientific gaze, the hunger for ever more concealed material to be brought to the surface and transformed into information, with considerable ambiguity. As we shall see later, the relentless drive for clarity triggers a corresponding reverence for darkness, one that is both narrative and creatural. You can die of exposure. All of us know the familiar warnings about excessive X rays, the
need
for lead aprons, etc. My goal in this chapter is to deepen and extend our sense of such dangers, by radically widening the field of reference, so as to include key moral and emotional relationships where the diagnostic gaze plays a disturbing, sometimes lethal role.

Literature performs a service here, in that it fleshes out these concepts and principles in human stories, and thus helps us to see just how such matters play out in our lives. And I want to emphasize that the predictable gender arrangements of male gaze and female object are often inverted. In Laclos's novel, the supreme controller of the text is the female, Mme. de Merteuil, who practices her art, indeed her science, on victims of both sexes, and delights in reifying and dismantling all those who come into her orbit. Laclos's elegant epistolary novel would seem

to have nothing in common with Hogarth's moralizing engravings about Tom Nero, yet they share a conviction that scientific curiosity and diagnostic fervor are often dangerous, cruel, and power-mad.

Or, consider the work of Hawthorne, America's first prose writer of world rank, whose fictions routinely denounce the dangers of the diagnostic project. It has been plausibly argued that Hawthorne was influenced by the new wave of scientism in medical practice, especially the French methods of observation, use of auscultation and stethoscope, impacting on American thinking in the early nineteenth century. Hawthorne famously dramatizes the potential for coldness of heart and scientific violation in the depiction of the satanic physician Roger Chill-ingworth in
The Scarlet Letter,
and the general theme of the heartless and thus exploitative observer runs throughout Hawthorne's work. Yet, the victims can be of either sex, and Chillingworth significantly plies his trade on the rival male of the triangle, the minister Dimmesdale, whose secret identity as Hester Prynne's lover he is determined to flush out. It is hardly an accident that the vampirish Chillingworth is a doctor, that he is professionally licensed to subject others to his analytic scrutiny. We are a far cry from Moliere's impostors and dolts. Hawthorne's plot entails Chillingworth actually moving in with his ailing "client," and although we may sense libidinal reaches in such arrangements today, the community accepts such a move precisely because doctors do such things.