Arnold Weinstein - A Scream Goes Through The House (35 page)

For starters we note that Daddy is hardly dead at all. He invades his daughter's life no less than he did while living:
"All those years it was you who threatened to eat me up, now I find I have swallowed you, kept you inside me. I went on, I made a life, I thought I wasn't thinking of you. But now I cannot help myself, you've come back"
(113). The novel flaunts his dread presence, not only via his daughter's thoughts and memories, but even in the book's interstices, as in a scene where she is performing (with a tinge of reluctance) oral sex on Carl that is then followed by the catalog-type description of two photographs taken by Edgar of Ann in

1971, one representing sexual intercourse, the other masturbation, leaving the reader to wonder: are these simply mementos of Ann's earlier erotic life? or is Edgar Rogers somehow insidiously present in Ann's intimate marital life?

Like Fitzgerald, Harrison has written her story of abuse "large," stereophonically as it were, so that we see numerous narrative bytes that are strange analogues to the action at hand, replicating it, shoving it down our throat: a young woman belonging to a feminist group protesting the forthcoming exhibit sets fire to herself wearing a T-shirt with the name 'Ann Rogers"; with uncanny logic, this woman is blinded by the damage to her optic nerve, signaling Ann (who has eye trouble) once again; in another bizarre episode, Ann as a child is abducted by her science teacher and given what she takes to be insulin (it is really distilled water) so that the teacher can witness firsthand one of her comas (we are told that the teacher has collected untold numbers of photos of Ann, masturbates to them), and we read this horrid episode as a repeat version of Edgar's own mistreatment of his daughter, a mistreatment that reached the level of hospitalization and court case in the past. In a less garish, less lurid mode, Ann's visits to her ophthalmologist, Dr. Et-tinger, replay the father syndrome, particularly when he performs laser surgery on her damaged retina, warning her that if she moves at the wrong moment, he could blind her, translating into a medical code the lethal danger she has confronted all her life in the form of an older man with a camera.

Dr. Ettinger's laser surgery, like Ann's work with Visage Video, like her father's famous photographs, spells out the choral dimensions of Harrison's title,
Exposure.
Here, in this ultramodern text, we see state-of-the-art imaging techniques, the fine flower of a scientific practice that can now read the body "uninvasively," and what knocks us over the head is how invasive it all is. Getting your picture, getting your reading, is the bane of this young woman's life, with the added touch that she now does it for a living herself. Ann Rogers is, of course, the text's text, the body that has been photographed forever, with all its poor secrets on

view, a body that still wears signs of its history, signs present in the scars left by the times she burned herself, cut herself with a knife, just to know that she could still feel something. She tells Carl she is not a renovation, but she is very much a historical site, an archaeological dig of sorts, and the project of the book consists in excavating all this buried, repressed, unprocessed material. More even than
Daddy's Girl.
Ann Rogers is a palimpsest, a layered artifact, a written-on person, a figure for decoding and diagnosing, a figure who needs a lifetime to come to terms with the poisons cooking inside her.

Now it would seem that Kathryn Harrison has denied herself very little in choosing lurid and sensational themes for her story, and yet the most obscene moment of this text comes midway in the novel, with the reproduction of a contract between Ann's husband Carl and the elegant department store Bergdorf Goodman allowing Ann to steal freely from the store. But the contract provides that she will be under special surveillance by detectives and cameras, that whatever she steals will be billed at 50 percent markup, that any time she spends more than one hour in the store there will a $175 per hour surveillance charge, and that a deposit of $25,000 is required for this contract to be valid.

This entry in the novel effectively pulls the epistemological rug out from under the reader as well as Ann, transforming many narrated scenes (of theft) from private to public, from manic gestures of freedom to controlled exercises of sleuthing. The reader's own take is scrambled: how much of what we've read was, in fact, on camera? Nor is this document alone in its status as rug puller. Harrison has also provided other such materials: the records of the court when Ann was so comatose that her father was brought to trial, the contract and the report of the private detective whom Carl has hired to track Ann, numerous factual descriptions of photographic exhibits and catalogs of Ann's father's work in the past, a final psychological report of bipolar disorder made by the consulting physician to the court following Ann's ultimate breakdown (located appropriately at Tiffany's, where she was walking off with the

jewels). Each of these documents is also a form of exposure, and in their mix of detective and medical reporting, as well as their contractual status, they powerfully buttress the novel's major theme of a woman's private life being exposed to public gaze, just as the exhibit of the father's photographs will do.

But that is not all: the sheer variety of these nonfiction materials, impudently taking their place in the narration of a life, flaunts the very con-structedness of all such perspectives and representations, making the reader realize that the so-called narrative account of Ann's life is by no means a natural event. We do not expect to see contracts, bills, reports both legal and medical, in a novel; in novels we expect a story. Harrison's mix of documents obliges the reader to understand the factitious-ness of any novel's conventions: its day-to-day processing of Ann's life as a story, its confident narration of the past, its cavalier rendition of Ann's thoughts, those concerning the current events and those representing her memories of her father, including her inner italicized voice, which is still speaking to this dead man. These passages, we come to see, are also documents, perhaps as fabricated and debatable as the retrieved memories of abuse that present such epistemological and legal challenges today. But such passages, in a novel, are rarely provocative or disturbing, for they are indeed the conventional means of exposure by which literature presents its people for the inspection of readers. How often have you asked, reading a novel, Who's writing this? who's holding the camera? how is this knowable?

If almost all of this chapter has seemed an attack on the scientific gaze for its assault on the secrets and integrity of the human subject, I'd like now to turn the gaze on literature as well: what is literature if not a diagnostic carnival, a nonstop exploration of human motive, a culturally sanctioned version of going inside? I'd claim that literature constitutes a peculiar form of cerebral hemorrhage, a bleeding
printward
of all that is in the brain (and heart) of its characters. In Kathryn Harrison's hands, all of these procedures have become embarrassingly highlighted and denaturalized, and we grasp just how extensively she has exhausted her

theme of exposure. Late in the novel, we read this, in italics, as Ann's yearning: "
I
dreamed I was on the autopsy table, that I was dead. When the coroner cut into me he saw that I was empty. I didn't take a thing. It sounds grisly, but it was a happy dream. When I saw the knife slip in, my entrails revealed with nothing inside them, I was so relieved. I felt pure and exultant. Like an angel, I had lived on air"
(205).

Ann's dream has uncanny parallels with Hogarth's rendition of Tom Nero on the autopsy table, and she completes my parade of figures who have been opened against their will. Kathryn Harrison's dazzling repertory of invasive techniques and representational strategies seems to make a gathering statement about the genre itself, obliges us to see that our so-called private story is not very private anymore, but is smeared everywhere, in newspapers and doctors' reports, in business contracts and TV monitors. Harrison's novel closes with uncertainty over Ann's prognosis. Will she be able to live with her poisons?

I too would like to close this chapter on the same note of uncertainty. Literature and medicine are in the business of going inside minds and bodies—not those of angels who have lived on air, but those of opaque human subjects who are crammed full of pulsions and data. Narrative records these interactions, and our richer narratives refuse the blandishments of unitary truths and definitive exposures. I said at the beginning that it takes a lifetime to process what one has absorbed, that the famous Jamesian "figure in the carpet" does not jump out at us like an epiphany, but rather is the pattern on the loom that we ourselves must discover and make and alter and rediscover over time.

Perhaps "exposure" as a kind of on-the-spot discovery of the hidden truth is losing its efficacy, in both literature and medicine. The books we love resist on-the-spot illumination, because they live in time, release their secrets over time, become different as we become different, are ultimately mobile and mysterious. And as for medicine, we are well into an era where the Sherlock Holmes approach, the dramatic and definitive right reading of the mystery, of the disease, is less and less at the center of the stage. The hermeneutic adventure, so central to

the detective story and the scientific laboratory, is not likely to be the paradigm for today's hospitals and HMOs. Instead, with heightened longevity, we are more likely to die of chronic disease, or of those slow-moving poisons we have harbored for decades, than of mysterious and lethal infection. But for most of us, as we think about ways of representing our transactions with body and mind, our own and others', we would do best to seek a form that embraces temporality and indeterminacy, that acknowledges the forking path of human lives, that has room for darkness as well as light, that manages a truce between the desired closure of knowledge and the openness and freedom of living—in a word, narrative.

CHAPTER FOUR

PLAGUE AND HUMAN CONNECTION

Thebes is dying. A blight on the fresh crops / and the rich pastures, cattle sicken and die, / and the women die in labor, children stillborn, / and the plague, the fiery god of fever hurls down /on his city, his lightning slashing through us
—
/ raging plague in all its vengeance, devastating / the house of Cadmus! And black Death luxuriates / in the raw, wailing miseries of Thebes.

— SOPHOCLES,
Oedipus the King

This disease will be the end of many of us, but not nearly all, and the dead will be commemorated and will struggle on with the living, and we are not going away. We won't die secret deaths anymore. The world only spins forward. We will be citizens. The time has come.

— TONY KUSHNER,
Angels in America

THE MYSTERY OF INFECTION

You board the plane at London Heathrow feeling fine. You still feel okay when you arrive in New York seven hours later, but soon enough you begin to cough and to experience respiratory problems. It turns out, after eventual medical
consultation,
that you are in trouble: you have contracted drug-resistant tuberculosis. So have six other passengers on that plane. You think back to the trip and you remember the persistent coughing you heard on the plane, although you cannot associate a face to it. You may die. Did you have a relationship with the cougher? Yes, indeed, though you never knew it at the time.

This is a modern story, a story that has happened, that will continue to happen in larger numbers. It has a great deal to do with the failure of antibiotics in their war against bacteria and viruses, driven partly by the overuse of these former miracle drugs. It also has much to do with globalization, with travel patterns that have exploded the whereabouts of virulent bacilli and toxins, putting them on a world tour without precedent since the plane in London had just come from Ankara, and before that from Bombay or Tunis, all the while circulating and recirculating its potent contents for the breathing needs of all passengers. Who is equipped to tell this story? Doctors? The Centers for Disease Control? The Federal Aviation Administration? Your travel agent? What take would any of them have on your peculiar but life-shaping experience?

Now for an ancient version. You are a citizen of Thebes in 600 B.C., and everyone around you is becoming ill; many of the people are dying. Plague is announced. You, like your neighbors and the city elders, ask: where does this scourge come from? The best scientific information available is to be found at Delphi, where the Oracle can be consulted. A leading city official is dispatched to Delphi and returns with the explanation: Thebes is harboring a murderer in its midst, not just any murderer but the person responsible for killing the old king; the Oracle explains that this moral and political transgression is responsible for the mass deaths at hand. (The Centers for Disease Control in Adanta would never present "hidden crime" as their explanation of the disease; is it so certain they are right?) The vital leader of the city, Oedipus the King, vows to cure the sick city, to bring to light the concealed crime, to do so at any cost, in order to restore the polis to health. In the course of his investigation, it turns out that he himself is the source of the crime, that his violent altercation with an old man many years ago was actually the murder of the old king. It turns out, further, that Oedipus was this man's son, and that Jocasta, the former queen whom Oedipus has married, is his mother as well as his wife. Ultimately, it turns out that Oedipus has been having relationships he did not know he was having—not utterly without parallel to your fatal transatlantic flight—and that the health of

the entire community is strangely dependent on these transgressions. Finally, Oedipus learns the damning truth, gouges out his own eyes, and leaves Thebes; we must assume that the plague also leaves Thebes.