The Body and the Arts

The Body and the Arts Also by Corinne Saunders RAPE AND RAVISHMENT IN THE LITERATURE OF MEDIEVAL ENGLAND THE FOREST O...

Author: Corinne Saunders | Ulrika Maude | Jane Macnaughton (editors)

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The Body and the Arts

Also by Corinne Saunders RAPE AND RAVISHMENT IN THE LITERATURE OF MEDIEVAL ENGLAND THE FOREST OF MEDIEVAL ROMANCE: Avernus, Broceliande, Arden A CONCISE COMPANION TO CHAUCER (editor) CULTURAL ENCOUNTERS IN THE ROMANCE OF MEDIEVAL ENGLAND (editor) MADNESS AND CREATIVITY IN LITERATURE AND CULTURE (co-editor with Jane Macnaughton) PEARL: A Modernised Version by Victor Watts (co-editor with David Fuller) A COMPANION TO ROMANCE: From Classical to Contemporary WRITING WAR: Medieval Literary Responses (co-editor with Françoise le Saux and Neil Thomas) CHAUCER (editor) Also by Ulrika Maude BECKETT, TECHNOLOGY AND THE BODY BECKETT AND PHENOMENOLOGY (co-editor with Matthew Feldman) Also by Jane Macnaughton BIOETHICS AND THE HUMANITIES: Attitudes and Perceptions (with Robin Downie) CLINICAL JUDGEMENT: Evidence in Practice (with Robin Downie) MADNESS AND CREATIVITY IN LITERATURE AND CULTURE (co-editor with Corinne Saunders)

The Body and the Arts Edited by

Corinne Saunders, Ulrika Maude and

Jane Macnaughton

Introduction, selection and editorial matter © Corinne Saunders, Ulrika Maude & Jane Macnaughton 2009 Individual chapters © contributors 2009 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, Saffron House, 6-10 Kirby Street, London EC1N 8TS. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The authors have asserted their rights to be identified as the authors of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2009 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Palgrave Macmillan in the UK is an imprint of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan in the US is a division of St Martin's Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN-13: 978–0–230–55204–3 hardback ISBN-10: 0–230–55204–8 hardback This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 11 10 09 Printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Antony Rowe Ltd, Chippenham and Eastbourne

To our parents, Keith and Jeannette Saunders, Helena and George Maude, and Margaret-Ann and Callum Macnaughton

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Contents List of Illustrations

ix

Acknowledgements

xi

Notes on the Contributors

xii

Introduction Corinne Saunders, Ulrika Maude and Jane Macnaughton Part I

1

Thinking the Body

1 Polyclitus among the Philosophers: Canons of Classical Beauty George Boys-Stones 2 Body as Graced or Vile: Tensions in the Christian Vision David Brown 3 The Smoke of the Soul: Anatomy, Medical Spirits and the Rete Mirabile: 1538–1643 Richard Sugg

11 25

39

4 The Fizziness Business Steven Connor

55

5 Flesh Revealed: Medicine, Art and Anatomy Jane Macnaughton

72

Part II

Writing the Body

6 The Affective Body: Love, Virtue and Vision in English Medieval Literature Corinne Saunders 7 Victorian Literature and Bringing the Body Back from the Dead Francis O’Gorman

87

103

8 Modernist Bodies: Coming to Our Senses Ulrika Maude

116

9 Writing the Body: Modernism and Postmodernism Patricia Waugh

131

vii

viii

Contents

10

Detective Fiction and the Body P. D. James (in conversation with Corinne Saunders) Part III

148

Viewing the Body

11

Pygmalion, Painted Flesh, and the Female Body Martin Postle

12

Satyrs, Spiders, Jellyfish, and Mutants: Ovidian Metamorphosis in Contemporary Art Marina Warner

165

186

13

Body, Space, Time Antony Gormley

14

Une écriture corporelle: The Dancer in the Text of Mallarmé and Yeats Susan Jones

237

The Erotic and the Sacred Body in Opera: The Venusberg to Monsalvat – and Beyond David Fuller

254

15

16

Celluloid Formaldehyde? The Body on Film Judith Buchanan

Index

209

270

287

Illustrations 1.1

Polyclitus, Doryphoros, ‘The Canon’ (Roman copy) after Polyclitus (fifth century BC) 2.1 Giovanni Bernini, Death of the Blessed Ludovica Albertoni (1674) 2.2 The Angel with a Smile, Cathedral of Notre Dame, Reims, France (thirteenth century) 5.1 Group of seventeen students at dissecting table with cadaver, Postcard (c. 1910) 5.2 Operations T-shirt: ‘Incisions’ (c. 2000) 5.3 Christine Borland, Bullet Proof Breath (2001) 11.1 William Etty, Cleopatra’s Arrival in Cilicia (1821) 11.2 Thomas Rowlandson, The Modern Pygmalion (after 1811) 11.3 Walter Richard Sickert, La Hollandaise (c. 1906) 11.4 Francis Bacon, version no. 2 of Lying Figure with a Hypodermic Syringe (1968) 11.5 Jenny Saville, Rubens’ Flap (1999) 12.1 Kiki Smith, Harpie (2002) 12.2 Anish Kapoor, Marsyas (2002) 12.3 Louise Bourgeois, Maman (1999) 12.4 Dorothy Cross, Medusae (2001–2003) 13.1 Antony Gormley, Full Bowl (1977–1978) 13.2 Antony Gormley, Three Ways: Mould (1981) 13.3 Antony Gormley, Three Ways: Mould, Hole and Passage (1981) 13.4 Antony Gormley, Three Ways: Hole (1981) 13.5 Antony Gormley, Three Ways: Passage (1981) 13.6 Antony Gormley, Land, Sea and Air II (1982) 13.7 Antony Gormley, Room for the Great Australian Desert (1989) 13.8 Antony Gormley, Room II (1987) 13.9 Antony Gormley, Allotment II (1996) 13.10 Antony Gormley, Drawn (2000) 13.11–13.15 Antony Gormley, Total Strangers (1996) 13.16–13.18 Antony Gormley, Another Place (1997) 13.19 Antony Gormley, Exercise Between Blood and Earth (1979–1981) 13.20 Antony Gormley, Still Running (1990–1993) 13.21 Antony Gormley, Body (1991–1993) ix

12 30 33 74 77 80 166 171 177 180 182 190 193 200 203 210 211 212 213 214 215 216 217 218 219 221–23 224–26 226 227 228

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Illustrations

13.22 13.23 & 13.24 13.25 13.26 13.27 13.28 13.29 13.30 14.1 15.1 16.1 16.2 16.3 16.4

Antony Gormley, Insider I (1997) Antony Gormley, Inside Australia (2002–2003) Antony Gormley, Bodies in Space V (2001) Antony Gormley, Transfuser I (2002) Antony Gormley, Quantum Cloud (2000) Antony Gormley, Domain Field (2003) Antony Gormley, Feeling Material XIII (2004) Antony Gormley, Clearing I (2004) Loïe Fuller in ‘La Danse Blanche’ (c. 1898) Kirsten Flagstad as Kundry in Wagner’s Parsifal The Sideshow Wrestlers (Conseil de Pipelet ou un Tour à la Foire, 1908) The Wizard of Oz (MGM: Victor Fleming, 1939) Possessed (MGM: Clarence Brown, 1931) Rear Window (Paramount: Hitchcock, 1954)

229 231 232 232 233 234 235 236 238 264 275 280 282 284

Acknowledgements This collection of essays stems from a Public Lecture Series held at the University of Durham in 2005–2006, a joint initiative between the Centre for Arts and Humanities in Health and Medicine, and the Department of English Studies. The series followed the model of Madness and Creativity: The Mind, Medicine and Literature (edited by Corinne Saunders and Jane Macnaughton as Madness and Creativity in Literature and Culture, Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), and The Arts and Sciences of Criticism (edited by David Fuller and Patricia Waugh, Oxford University Press, 1999). The Series was generously supported by a grant from the Wellcome Trust and by the University of Durham General Lectures Committee, as well as by the Department of English Studies, the Centre for Arts and Humanities in Health and Medicine, and the School of Medicine and Health. We are grateful to the Dean of Arts, Professor Seth Kunin, for his generous contribution to the technological costs of the Lecture Series, and to Mr Archie Heslop, for his mastery of the technology. We should also like to thank the then Vice-Chancellor, Sir Kenneth Calman, for his interest and support. The Department of English Studies, the Faculty of Arts, and the School of Medicine and Health have generously contributed to the cost of the illustrations in this book. We owe particular thanks to Professor Patricia Waugh, then Head of the Department of English Studies, for her unswerving encouragement and participation. We have incurred many other debts in the making of the book. Paula Kennedy and the editorial and production staff of Palgrave Macmillan have been unfailingly helpful. David Fuller generously transcribed the contributions of Antony Gormley and P. D. James, and created the index. Shamus Smith offered invaluable technological advice, and he, Andrew Russell and David Fuller could not have been more generous in their constant encouragement, interest and support.

xi

Contributors George Boys-Stones is Senior Lecturer in Classics at Durham. He is author of Post-Hellenistic Philosophy: A Study of its Development from the Stoics to Origen (2001), and editor of Metaphor, Allegory, and the Classical Tradition: Ancient Thought and Modern Revisions (2003), both for Oxford University Press. He is also one of the contributors to a major study of physiognomy in GraecoRoman Antiquity, published by Oxford in 2007. David Brown was Van Mildert Professor of Divinity at Durham from 1990 to 2007, and is now Wardlaw Professor of Theology, Aesthetics and Culture at the University of St Andrews. He was elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 2002. His main interest is the relation between theology and other disciplines. His books The Divine Trinity (1985) and Continental Philosophy and Modern Theology (1987) focus on the intersection of philosophy and religion. He has recently completed a series of five volumes for Oxford University Press on the relation of theology and culture more generally, in particular the arts. His God and Enchantment of Place (2004) dealt with subjects such as architecture, pilgrimage and landscape painting; God and Grace of Body: Sacrament in Ordinary (2007) with such topics as body, food and music, culminating in a discussion of the Eucharist. His most recent volume is God and Mystery in Words: Experience through Drama and Metaphor (2008). He has a continuing interest in sacramental theology and spirituality, as reflected in three earlier edited volumes. Judith Buchanan is Senior Lecturer in Film Studies in the Department of English and Related Literature at the University of York. She is author of Shakespeare on Film (Longman-Pearson, 2005), of Shakespeare on Silent Film (Cambridge University Press, 2009) and of numerous articles about literary and cinematic texts in conversation with each other. She works on British and American cinema from the silent era to the present and has a special interest in questions of cinematic authorship, literary adaptation, the cultural transmission of fundamental stories across media and moment, issues of cinematic censorship and the material legacies of works of cinema. She is currently working on a study of biblical films of the silent era. Steven Connor is Professor of Modern Literature and Theory at Birkbeck College, London, and the Academic Director of the London Consortium. He is a writer and broadcaster for radio, and the author of books on Dickens and Beckett, as well as of Postmodernist Culture (1989; 2nd edn 1996), Theory and Cultural Value (1992), The English Novel in History (1995), James Joyce (1996), Dumbstruck: A Cultural History of Ventriloquism (Oxford, 2000), The Book of Skin xii

Contributors

xiii

(Reaktion, 2003), and Fly (Reaktion, 2006), on the history of the fly in poetry, painting, religion and science. He is now writing a book about the air. David Fuller is Emeritus Professor of English in the University of Durham. He has written on a wide range of topics, from the Renaissance to the Modern period. He has particular interests in poetry, religion and music, and has worked extensively on William Blake. He is the author of Blake’s Heroic Argument (1988), James Joyce’s ‘Ulysses’ (1992), and, with David Brown, Signs of Grace (1995). He has also edited Marlowe’s Tamburlaine the Great (1998), Blake’s poetry for the Longman Annotated Texts series (2000), and, with Patricia Waugh, The Arts and Sciences of Criticism (1999). His current research is on Shakespeare in modern performance. Antony Gormley is an acclaimed British sculptor, and an important promoter of the arts in the North-East. He is the creator of the Angel of the North (1998), Field for the British Isles (1993) and Quantum Cloud (2000). One of his most recent works, Domain Field (2003), was the first to make use of the BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art as an ‘art factory’. The work was sculpted using the bodies of local Gateshead residents as models. P. D. James is a celebrated writer of detective fiction. She is the author of nineteen books, many of which have been filmed and broadcast on television in the United States and other countries. Most famous for her creation of the Scotland Yard detective, Commander Adam Dalgliesh, she has also written other works of fiction and non-fiction, including an autobiography. She spent thirty years in various departments of the British Civil Service, including the Police and Criminal Law Department of the Home Office. The recipient of many prizes and honours, she was created Baroness James of Holland Park in 1991. Susan Jones is Fellow in English at St Hilda’s College, Oxford. She is the author of Conrad and Women (1999) and is co-editing Chance for the Cambridge edition of Joseph Conrad. She is currently writing a book on literary modernism and dance for Oxford University Press. Jane Macnaughton is Co-Director of the Centre for Medical Humanities at the University of Durham. She is a qualified GP and has a PhD in Philosophy. Her main interests are in the applications of the humanities to medical education, and how arts and humanities subjects can inform medical and clinical practice. She has published a number of papers on this subject as well as a book, Clinical Judgement: Evidence in Practice (Oxford University Press, 2000). With Corinne Saunders, she has edited Madness and Creativity in Literature and Culture (Palgrave, 2005). She is also a co-editor of the journal Medical Humanities. Ulrika Maude is Lecturer in English at the University of Durham. She has published essays and articles on modernist writing, perception and

xiv

Contributors

philosophies of embodiment, and is the author of Beckett, Technology and the Body (Cambridge University Press, 2009). She is also co-editor of Beckett and Phenomenology (Continuum, 2009). She is currently writing a book on modernism and medical culture. Francis O’Gorman is Professor of Victorian Literature at the University of Leeds. His books include John Ruskin (1999), Late Ruskin: New Contexts (2001), Blackwell’s Critical Guide to the Victorian Novel (2002), and the Concise Companion to the Victorian Novel (2004), as well as Ruskin and Gender (edited with Dinah Birch, 2002) and The Victorians and the Eighteenth Century: Reassessing the Tradition (edited with Katherine Turner, 2004). His Victorian Poetry: An Annotated Anthology appeared in 2004, and his edition of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Hound of the Baskervilles in 2006. He is currently writing about Victorian literature and immortal life. Martin Postle is Director of Academic Activities at the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art. He was previously curator and Head of British Art to 1900 at Tate Britain. He has worked on many major exhibitions, including William Blake and Thomas Gainsborough. He co-curated Art of the Garden (2004) and was curator of Joshua Reynolds: The Creation of Celebrity (2005). His extensive publications on British art from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries include Sir Joshua Reynolds: The Subject Pictures (1995); Gainsborough (2002); (with William Vaughan) The Artist’s Model: From Etty to Spencer (1999); and a co-edited collection, Model and Supermodel: The Artist’s Model in British Art and Culture (2006). He is currently working on an exhibition on the eighteenth-century artist, Johan Zoffany, to be shown at Tate Britain and the Yale Centre for British Art in 2010; and another on the Welsh landscape painter, Richard Wilson. Corinne Saunders is Professor in the Department of English Studies at the University of Durham. She specialises in medieval literature and the history of ideas, and has particular interests in the history of women and the history of medicine. Her publications include The Forest of Medieval Romance (1993), Rape and Ravishment in the Literature of Medieval England (2001), a Blackwell Critical Guide to Chaucer (2001), and A Companion to Romance (2004), which considers the transformations of the genre from its classical origins to the present. She has also edited Cultural Encounters in the Romance of Medieval England (2005), and a Blackwell Concise Companion to Chaucer (2006). She has recently completed a monograph, Magic and the Supernatural in Medieval English Romance, and is the English editor of the journal Medium Ævum. Richard Sugg is Fellow in Literature and Medicine in the University of Durham. His publications include John Donne (Palgrave, 2007) and Murder after Death: Literature and Anatomy in Early Modern England (Cornell, 2007). He is currently writing a book on surgery from the Renaissance onwards.

Contributors

xv

Marina Warner is a prize-winning writer of fiction, criticism and history; her works include novels and short stories as well as studies of female myths and symbols. She has a special interest in the visual arts and has curated a number of exhibitions related to her research. Her critical works include Alone of All Her Sex: The Myth and Cult of the Virgin Mary (1976); From the Beast to the Blonde: On Fairy Tales and Their Tellers (1994); No Go the Bogeyman: Scaring, Lulling, and Making Mock (1998); Signs and Wonders: Essays on Literature and Culture (2003); Fantastic Metamorphoses, Other Worlds: Ways of Telling the Self (2004); and Phantasmagoria: Spirit Visions, Metaphors, and Media (2006). She was elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 2005. She is Professor in the Department of Literature, Film and Theatre Studies at the University of Essex. Patricia Waugh is Professor of English Studies at the University of Durham. Her extensive publications in the areas of intellectual history, critical theory and modern fiction include Metafiction: The Theory and Practice of Self-Conscious Fiction (1984; 3rd edn 2003); Feminine Fictions: Revisiting the Postmodern (1989); Practising Postmodernism: Reading Modernism (1992); The Harvest of the Sixties: English Literature and its Backgrounds 1960–1990 (1995); and Revolutions of the Word: Intellectual Contexts for the Study of Modern Literature (1997). Her reader, Modern Literary Theory, is now in its fourth edition (2001). She has also edited a number of works, including (with David Fuller) The Arts and Sciences of Criticism (1999), and Literary Theory and Criticism: An Oxford Guide (2006). She is currently completing Literature, Science and the Good Society for Oxford University Press.


Introduction Corinne Saunders, Ulrika Maude and Jane Macnaughton

Descend. Be stone no more. Approach. Strike all that look upon with marvel. Come, I’ll fill your grave up. Stir. Nay, come away. Bequeath to death your numbness, for from him Dear life redeems you. Thus speaks Paulina in Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale as, summoning music, she awakens the statue of Hermione. The scene evokes wonder in the audience for its enactment of the marvellous, the return from death of the living body. But it plays too on the notion of the body as art: the statue is so ‘Masterly done. / The very life seems warm upon her lip.’; ‘The fixture of her eye has motion in’t / As we are mocked with art’.1 Where, we ask, is the boundary between art and life? And Hermione’s awakening inevitably gestures towards another art, that of theatre: in the fiction of the play, the statue may indeed live, while the body on stage becomes art, with the potential to inspire, illuminate or strike with awe those who look on it. This play is infused with a profound sense of the frailty but also the transformative power of the body, and the leitmotif of loss and recovery of the body opens onto existential questions of death, memory, faith and the possibility of resurrection. The magic of art, so vividly evoked here, responds to such questions, capturing, idealizing, memorializing or revivifying the body. Art calls similarly on the imagination, whether the body is on stage or on the page, in painting or sculpture, or on the screen. The creative, imaginative power of the arts both shapes the body and is shaped by the body’s potential. The Body and the Arts focuses on a dynamic relation: the body as inspiration, subject, symbol, metaphor and medium. The body is essential to the arts, but the relation between the body and the arts has been complex and shifting, over time, from the classical period to the present, and across different art forms, from literature to the visual and performing arts. The story of the body and the arts both reflects and reflects on cultural attitudes and changes in thought – in philosophy, religion, science and medicine. 1

2 The Body and the Arts

Yet there are constants too. Fundamental is the question of the materiality of the body – the body as real versus the body as ideal. From the classical period onwards, Western thought, literature and art have engaged with this tension, as a number of the essays in this collection attest. In literature, the body is a primary subject, intimately connected with the realization of human experience. The enduring power and multivalence of the body across different literary genres is readily apparent. Bodies are richly significant for Shakespeare, from the socio-political metaphor of the diseased body, to the multiple dead bodies of tragedy, from the bodies consumed by love in comedy and tragedy, to the romance emphasis on bodies lost and found. Vile bodies are the special emphasis of eighteenth-century writing – in particular, in the work of Swift and Pope, and the body proves a powerful tool of the satirist, while monstrous and threatened bodies are central to Gothic writing. Romantic literature both idealizes the body in its linking of beauty, nature and truth, and probes the extremes of bodily experience, especially those of illness and death. These motifs play prominent roles too in the nineteenth-century novel, where the experience of the sick body is closely linked to the discovery of the self, while the body continues to function powerfully as social metaphor. Literature of all kinds and times is haunted by the dead body and the possibility of its return in some form. Modernist writing privileges the lived and experiencing body, highlighting the body’s materiality and the subject’s contingency. In postwar writing this stance becomes more complex, and postmodernist textual play, along with an emphasis on the phenomenology of embodiment, are both prevalent, albeit conflicting, features. The history of medicine interconnects with the cultural history of the body. The probing of the mysteries of the human body in medicine, through examination of the living and dissection of the dead body, as well as diagnosis of the sick body, has profoundly influenced artistic perspectives, while the imperfect, broken, ill or diseased body in itself provides a powerful subject. The intersection of medicine and art has recently been realized graphically in the controversial work of the pathologist Gunther von Hagens, whose exhibition, ‘Bodyworks’, and public dissections have presented the dissected body as art. As well as moral questions regarding the proper use of human tissue, reflected in current ethical debates, these initiatives have raised ethical questions regarding the representation of the body itself. Does the shocking display of the blood, flesh and bones of the working body beneath the skin lead to a greater appreciation of the beauty and intricacy of the body? The tension between beauty and horror has long been present in attitudes to the body. The rich variety of the body as subject in painting and sculpture is demonstrated by the range of schools of representation, from Leonardo da Vinci’s images of the dissected body to Caravaggio’s celebration of physical beauty and eroticism. The idealized body can stand as symbol of the truth

Corinne Saunders, Ulrika Maude and Jane Macnaughton

3

and beauty of the world, as in Michelangelo’s ‘David’. The spiritual and bodily intersect in the powerful idea of the transformed body: the resurrected body of Christ, the incorruptible bodies of the saints, miraculously healed or ecstatic in suffering (Saint Sebastian offers an extreme example), or the transfigured bodies of the mystics. Opposed to this has been an alternative strand of artistic representation emphasizing the reality of suffering through the mutilation of the body, its blood, wounds and pain – a school exemplified by the art of Grünewald. The paradox of the Incarnation, the divine made flesh in the vulnerable yet perfect body of Christ, and the idea of the mysterious body of Christ in some sense present in the Eucharist, are shadowed by the recollection of the fallen, corrupted, imperfect and decaying body of man. Modern art forms in particular have engaged powerfully with the question of the materiality of the body, attempting to escape the bounds of idealism and the spiritual through an emphasis on the reality of physical being, ageing, illness and bodily functions. This engagement has in turn informed new ways of teaching doctors about the body, offering them a more holistic way of interacting with the living, as well as learning from the dead. The role of the body in the visual arts is especially complex, in that artistic representation involves a process of negotiation between the artist and the actual human body of the model, a process that has been richly suggestive for medical education. In dance and opera, the body becomes the medium of art as well as its subject, raising peculiarly complex questions of the interrelation of body and subject. In dance, presentation and medium are to a great extent aligned: technique and age enjoy an inverse relationship, and the extreme physical fitness and ability of the dancer’s body are likely to fulfil the ideals of youth and beauty. Yet the thrill of dance is in part that of difficulty, of making what is unnatural even to such able bodies appear natural. The more transsexual nature of modern dance is in contrast to the stereotypes of ballet, while the history of ballet also shifted in the late twentieth century to focus more explicitly on the body of the male dancer. The exhibition of virtuosity of the body is also key to the art of opera, but here the body of the singer is not so likely to be aligned with the subject; the body created by the physical demands of singing is not necessarily the desired, beautiful and eroticized body imagined in the drama. Yet at the same time, the pleasure of opera, as of dance, is bodily – the volupté of singing – and it is not coincidental that operas are so often dramas of the body: of male and female desire, of dying, of consumptive or wounded bodies. The definitively dynamic role of the body is witnessed too in the modern art of film, which not only enabled the scientific exploration of motion, but also seemed to offer a new language of the body, non-verbal and direct. Film rewrites questions of illusion and reality, as the body on screen is at once reduced and rendered capable of all. In recent years, the body has also been the focus of a range of theoretical analyses. The contemporary interest in theories of embodiment was


initiated by the work of Michel Foucault, for whom the body emerges as a discursively ordered product of institutionalized knowledge and power. Foucault, inheriting the nineteenth-century stance of the dandy, posits the individual body as the site of resistance to the regularization of disciplinary powers. As Anthony Giddens has argued, in modernity the body becomes the locus of self-identity.2 This stance, in turn, has triggered the proliferation of identity politics that stem from different embodied standpoints, determined by considerations such as gender, sexuality, ethnicity or social class. In cultural-materialist theory, the body is constructed, a site that responds to shifting cultural norms and values. The emphasis is on cultural practices, and the shaping force of culture on the body. While these discursive and socialized conceptions of embodiment have left their mark on various essays in this collection, the primary emphasis of a number of the chapters is on the fleshly, experiencing, living body, best theorized by Maurice MerleauPonty. In his Phenomenology of Perception (1945), Merleau-Ponty agues that the body constitutes not only the subject’s point of view, but subjectivity itself.3 It is the medium of our having a world, which is never ready-made, but is built up through a dialectical movement between the incarnate subject and its surroundings. Merleau-Ponty stresses what he calls the primacy of perception, foregrounding the importance of pre-reflective experience to our encounter with the world. A single collection of essays cannot, of course, treat this rich and varied subject comprehensively. The aim of this volume is rather to open out the multiplicity of cultural perspectives on the body over time, and explore in relation to these the fundamental and dynamic role of the body in a variety of art forms. The collection begins with a group of essays on theoretical and historical attitudes to the body, suggesting the ways in which these have influenced Western literature and visual art. In Chapter 1 George Boys-Stones looks back to classical theories of physiognomy to explore the importance of notions of beauty in philosophical thought. The question of the relation between body and character, exterior and interior, was to endure over centuries of Western thought and writing. Classical ideas are complemented by and contrast with Christianity, with its theology of the Incarnation and powerful opposition of human and divine bodies. In Chapter 2 David Brown challenges enduring assumptions that Christianity condemns the body as vile, arguing for the graced body as fundamental to Christian thought, and essential to rather than at odds with the inspiration of much religious art. The philosophical and religious attitudes to the body explored by Brown and Boys-Stones are balanced by attention to the histories of medicine and science. Richard Sugg in Chapter 3 and Jane Macnaughton in Chapter 5 both look at the discovery and demystification of the body through the history of medicine; in particular, practices of and attitudes to dissection, accounts of operations and illness, and


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the debate over the possibilities and limits of the body. Sugg’s exploration of the role of anatomy in shaping and questioning early-modern theories about the site of the soul and challenging religious assumptions, is complemented by Macnaughton’s examination of the role of artists in bringing back a sense of awe and wonder at the beauty of the human body to modern medical students. Steven Connor in Chapter 4 places medicine alongside popular culture and the arts in his consideration of an influential bodily topos, ‘fizziness’. The recurrence of fantasies of the air proves the remarkable weight of the idea of weightlessness. The notion of consuming levity is traced through the cultural history of leaven and fermentation, concoction and mass, tonics and effervescence. The body in literature is the focus of the second part of this collection, which addresses further the intersection of competing and shifting ideas of and attitudes to the body, from medieval to postmodern. The essays focus selectively on a series of prominent literary themes and emphases, and yield insights into striking connections as well as differences between periods. In Chapter 6 Corinne Saunders explores the centrality of the body to the representation of human experience in the literature of the Middle Ages. The theory of the four humours underpins the idea of a mind–body continuum, and the body becomes affective: love, sin, redemption and vision are all bodily narratives, and it is the body that opens the way to spiritual illumination and self-realization. Questions of loss, death and memory are reconfigured in Francis O’Gorman’s essay in Chapter 7, which takes as its subject the grand cultural leitmotif of the return from the dead. Literary treatments of the body are placed in relation to ideas of death and resurrection in the Victorian period, when religious faith was complicated and called into question by new scientific theories of evolution, and the imaginative potential of art offered different ways of revivifying the body. The cultural influence of scientific thought and the creativity of literary responses to this are also subjects of the following two chapters. In Modernist writing, as Ulrika Maude shows in Chapter 8, sensory perception is a prominent focus. Her essay concentrates on the impact of various technological advances, in particular medical ones, in shaping and historicizing ideas of perception, embodiment and aesthetics. Patricia Waugh continues the literary exploration of the body in Chapter 9, with a consideration of the perspectives shaped by modern science and psychology, looking especially at the prominent but often problematic analogies drawn between writing, textuality and the body. As Waugh demonstrates, literature has played a powerful role in engaging with and countering reductive scientific approaches to the body; in particular, by its emphasis on affect and the complex interrelation of mind and body. In the final essay in this section, P. D. James offers in Chapter 10 a dialogue on the special role of the body as art form and exhibit in detective fiction, and the formative influence of such narratives on moral and intellectual attitudes to the body.


The literary emphasis is complemented in the third section of the volume, ‘Viewing the Body’. Essays on visual art return to the questions raised by some of the earlier contributors regarding the tension between the ideal and material body. Martin Postle in Chapter 11 addresses the issue of the relationship between the male artist and the female model in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries: in particular, he explores the dichotomy between the artistic and cultural reception of the naked female body and the female ‘nude’. Marina Warner in Chapter 12 links many of the themes treated in earlier essays in her wide-ranging consideration of the idea of metamorphosis in myth and art. She looks back to classical literature but also considers the influence of science and psychology on twentieth- century artistic representations of metamorphosis, with special attention to the issue of gender. Finally in Chapter 13 Antony Gormley offers a discussion of the ways his sculpture is situated strikingly in the materiality of the body in time and space, and particularly of his own body. The last part of the collection focuses on dance, opera and film. Susan Jones looks in Chapter 14 at the influence of the celebrated American dancer, Loïe Fuller, on Mallarmé, using this specific intersection of the aesthetics of literature and dance to illuminate the importance of dance for modernist writers – in particular, Yeats. Dance comes to represent an ideal, minimal, symbolic form of poetic communication. In Chapter 15 David Fuller explores a different mode of bodily performance in his discussion of the crucial part played by the body in opera, and hence the fundamental sensuousness of this art form that depends on the vehicle of voice. Fuller probes the tension between the erotic and the sacred in operas that might be seen as demonizing the body, but whose musical and dramatic intensity are profoundly bodily. Opera finds a striking contrast in the ambiguous art of film. In the final essay, Judith Buchanan surveys the body on screen, looking in particular at the anxieties triggered by the introduction of sound film, the ways that the reunification of sound and vision seemed to enhance the ‘realism’ of film, the relation between film and literature, and the Hollywood creation of the image of the complete and ideal body of the star. The collection demonstrates the richness and diversity of the relation between the body and the arts, and the relevance for the arts of the cultural history of the body, so intimately connected with the histories of science, medicine and technology, as well as with shifting attitudes in philosophy and religion. Yet the book shows too the remarkable continuities that exist from the classical period to the present, and the recurrent flashpoints in the dialogue between the body and the arts: the interrelation of mind and body, body and soul, interior and exterior being; the tension between real and ideal; the fear of age, decay and death; the wonder and horror of the body; and its immense and constantly renewed influence on the imagination.


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Notes 1. William Shakespeare, The Winter’s Tale, in The Complete Works, ed. Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor, The Oxford Shakespeare, compact edn (Oxford, 1988), V, iii, ll. 65–68, 98–103. 2. Anthony Giddens, The Transformation of Intimacy: Love, Sexuality and Eroticism in Modern Societies (Cambridge, 1992). 3. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith (London, 1992).


Part I Thinking the Body


1 Polyclitus among the Philosophers: Canons of Classical Beauty George Boys-Stones

The Canon of Polyclitus At some time in the second half of the fifth century BC, the sculptor Polyclitus published a book called the Canon, in which he set out a pattern for human beauty.1 To illustrate the principles on which it was based, he cast the Doryphoros, a bronze statue of a nude carrying a spear which, owing to its association with the book, came to be known as the ‘Canon’ as well.2 Sadly, Polyclitus’ book survives only in a few second-hand references, and the statue only in later copies, and this makes it impossible to gain a very precise idea either of Polyclitus’ methods or his conclusions. What we do know, however, is that he specified that each part of the body should be of ‘mean’ (i.e. moderate) size, and relate to every other part according to some principle of symmetria (i.e. due proportion): ‘finger to finger, and all to the wrist, and these to the forearm, the forearm to the arm, and everything to everything else’.3 As far as this evidence goes, Polyclitus appears to have thought that the aesthetics of the human form was no less, but no more, than a particularly elaborate exercise in geometry.4 As a way of assimilating the human body into a more general theory of beauty, this sort of approach might seem reasonable enough. As an exercise in providing a normative standard for the body, however – and this is what the word canon in Greek suggests: a measure by which to judge something – it is easy to feel that Polyclitus’ account leaves something to be desired. Outward appearance, we might think, does not provide an appropriate, or in any case sufficient, occasion for passing judgement on a person. It is perhaps not surprising, then, that commentators have often looked to philosophy for a ‘deeper’ alternative, one that constructs human value in the beauty of the ‘inner person’, the ‘true self’ within. But to find the philosophers of classical antiquity in retreat from the body in this way is, I suggest, to misrepresent them. It is not that they failed to engage critically with a superficial concern for appearance, but we should not suppose that they took all concern for appearance to be superficial. They retained an 11


Figure 1.1 Doryphoros, ‘The Canon’, Athlete, Roman copy after an original by Polyclitus (fl.c.450–c.415 BC) in Pompeii (marble), Museo Archeologico Nazionale, Naples, Italy. [The Bridgeman Art Library]

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interest, even a normative interest, in the body and what makes it attractive: unlike Polyclitus’ Canon, however, the explanatory basis of their alternative ‘canons’ was focused more on morality than geometry.

Aristotle and his School The locus classicus for the idea that ancient philosophers were concerned with ‘inner’ rather than physical beauty is the eulogy of Socrates offered by Alcibiades in Plato’s Symposium (215ab): I am going to try to praise Socrates by means of comparison. Perhaps he will think I am doing this as a joke, but the comparison is meant to get to the truth, not raise a laugh. Because I say that he is exactly like those statues of Silenus you find in the statuary’s shop, the ones the craftsmen make holding pipes or flutes, which open in two to reveal images of the gods inside. He looks like the satyr Marsyas as well, come to that. You yourself, Socrates, wouldn’t deny that you are like them in appearance, but listen as I go on to explain how you are like them in other respects as well ... A little later on, Alcibiades tells us that it is Socrates’ virtues, and especially the virtue of self-control, that answer to the ‘divine, golden, utterly beautiful’ images within (216d–217a). Socrates is constructed in this way by Alcibiades as a kind of anti-Canon: rightly considered ugly without but, by possession of the virtues, divinely beautiful within. Elsewhere, Plato seems to encourage the idea that the language of ‘beauty’ is principally and properly used of this inner space. It is the aesthete whose use is derivative and secondary: the connoisseur of the exterior is deluded, dreaming and fixated on something that is at best reminiscent, merely, of real beauty. Such a person demeans the individual judged in these terms, poisons the wells of love, and condemns himself to perpetual dissatisfaction in that very inner being whose existence he denies to others.5 This reading of Plato is, one might think, consistent with the Socratic idea that the body is merely the ‘tool’ of the soul (cf. Plato, Alcibiades, 129e–130a). Yet it should quickly be apparent that this is a thought that can be turned in another direction. For if the body is a tool for the soul, even in the narrow sense of procuring its ends, but especially if it is so in the broader sense of being the means for living a human life, the place where the ends of the soul are themselves realized, then its condition might turn out to be very important indeed. Obviously, the body needs to be up to the job, and it might well be that some bodies are better suited to it than others. The ‘ideal’, in this case, would be the optimum physique for performing those activities in which humans might be expected to engage – and the pleasure taken in such a body by others (i.e. such that it counts as ‘beautiful’)


would be explained in terms of the value for them of having such a person around.6 Aristotle, in any case, seems to be thinking very much along these lines when he outlines his account of human beauty in the Rhetoric (1.5, 1361 b7–14): Beauty for a youth is to have a body suited to labour, and for running, and where force is required. Such a body is pleasant, and so enjoyable to look at. (This is why pentathletes are the most beautiful of all, since they require both speed and strength.) For a man in the prime of life, beauty is to have a body fitted for the toils of warfare. Such a body seems pleasant, but also formidable. For an old man, beauty is to have a body capable of doing what it is essential. Such a body is inoffensive, having escaped the ravages of old age. To be beautiful is to possess the type of body which allows you to make the greatest contribution to society – and all other bodies are assessed by the standard it sets. Note, by the way (and it is a point to which I shall return), that this is an account based self-consciously on generalization. The connection between utility and beauty is not undermined by the fact that an old man doing his bit can never be better than ‘inoffensive’ to look at, while the pentathlete is always a pleasure to see, even if we know that he has not the slightest intention of putting his physical prowess to useful service. The point is that he has the kind of body that the most useful person has. I noted above that we have no evidence that Polyclitus offered any grounds for his theory of beauty that went beyond pure geometry, but it is perhaps striking that he should have chosen a spear-bearer to illustrate it. His subjects are typically not involved in such public-spirited activity as this would-be defender of the state, and it may be that he intended an association to be made between his Canon and the values of society and service.7 Perhaps he even believed that the association was what explained the attractiveness of the Canon to start with. But however far he went along this line of thought, it seems clear that Aristotle went very much further. For Aristotle, who included the moral virtues among the foremost social accomplishments, believed that the psychological disposition to behave in ways which are wise, temperate, courageous and just was inscribed on the human form as clearly as the ability to fight tenaciously or work efficiently.8 Aristotle’s physical Canon is one which radiates not only optimum physical agility, but the best sort of character too. It might seem a bit of a leap from the idea that one can typically correlate physical capacity with the body’s appearance, to the idea that one can typically correlate ethical disposition with it, but the two ideas are more or less continuous with one another in Aristotle’s way of thinking. According to Aristotle’s distinctive theory of mind, the psychological dimension of

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human life is just one aspect of the functioning body – the body being, for its part, a mechanism designed to work in ways which, among other things, produce what we distinguish as ‘psychological’ activity. On this theory, every mental act, every thought or desire or pulse of anger, is underwritten by some physiological process. Aristotle strongly repudiates the sort of mind-body dualism associated with some of his contemporaries. The soul can no more get angry or think without bodily processes, he says, than it can weave or build a house without them (On the Soul, 408 b11–13). Given that this is Aristotle’s position, it is natural for him to suppose that, if there are genetic differences in the psychological dispositions of different people (an assumption widely held in antiquity, and supported by the idea that children naturally tend to develop characters similar to those of their parents),9 then these differences will have a physiological explanation. And if the physiological factors that underlie a person’s psychological disposition at the same underlie differences in the external geography of their body, then it is not unreasonable to hope that appearance will track – not cause, of course, but track – the dispositions of human character. The sort of ‘physiognomics’ to which this way of thinking leads, the possibility of systematically inferring character disposition from appearance, is often dismissed as an outlandish or jejune aspect of Aristotelian thought. But Aristotle’s conditions for the possibility of physiognomics (formally set out at Prior Analytics 2.27) coincide exactly with the assumptions on which modern science occasionally reports correlations between biometric data and a predisposition towards certain character traits. The difference is only that, where our scientists might appeal to the presence of certain genes or the level of a particular hormone as the common factor,10 Aristotle for the most part identified it as the quality of the blood. Variations, especially in its thickness, heat and clarity, he thinks, explain the exact form taken by all the physical structures of the body, including those which relate to psychological activity (Parts of Animals, 648 a2–1). In so far, then, as one can infer blood quality from outward appearance, one can use a person’s outward appearance as a token of the psychological disposition for which that blood will typically be responsible. Aristotle’s formal discussion in the Prior Analytics is put into practice in the course of the biological works, which throw up a number of ‘physiognomical’ correlations: between hairiness and sexual voracity, for example (Generation of Animals, 774 a36), or between flat feet and villainy (Study of Animals, 494 a16). And Aristotle went on to point the way towards the use of these principles in establishing a physical ideal. It was his insight that the best moral state was a ‘mean’ between two extremes (Nicomachean Ethics, 2.6–9: the virtue of generosity, for example, lies between the extremes of prodigality and meanness); he spelled out the implications for the blood required to ensure the best possible character disposition (a mean state of its qualities, of course);11 and he drew the obvious consequence for a normative


assessment of the body – that the best body is one whose physical attributes lie ‘in the mean’ as well.12 This, for example, is what Aristotle has to say about the eyes (Study of Animals, 492 a7–12: and note the hint it contains that it is character rather than mere physical prowess that matters): Of eyes, some are large, some are small, some in the mean: those in the mean are best. And they are either excessively prominent, or sunken, or in the mean: in all animals, sunken eyes are sharpest, but the mean type signifies the best character. And they are either blinking, or staring, or in the mean: those in the mean signify the best character (staring eyes are a sign of impudence, blinking of indecision). The subject was dealt with to exhaustion by his followers, as can be seen from the Physiognomics, a treatise which has survived since antiquity under Aristotle’s name, though it must in fact be a composite of studies by members of his school.13 Feature by feature, this treatise takes us from the feet to the ears, specifying in every case the diametrical extremes between which they can vary, always implying, and sometimes stating outright, that the mean is the best. I have traced this language of the ‘mean’ to roots in Aristotelian ethical theory, but it may be less than coincidence that, in applying the term to a normative assessment of bodily measurements, Aristotle and his followers have, as we have seen, a precedent in Polyclitus. And this is not the only feature of Aristotelian vocabulary that is reminiscent of Polyclitus. They also took on his language of symmetria, regularly praising due proportion between the parts and limbs of the body.14 And if it is true that the word ‘square’ (tetragonos) was a Polyclitan term of art, something that has been speculated on quite independent grounds,15 then it would be particularly interesting to note the recurrence of this word too in the Physiognomics, where it characterizes types of face (809 b16) and forehead (809 b21, 811 b33) which signify the highest excellence of character.16 It is, in short, not too hard to see in the Physiognomics evidence of deliberate engagement with Polyclitus. Indeed, it is hard to imagine that someone discussing the appropriate size and shape of the body, feature by feature, could fail to have him in mind. In other words, it seems quite reasonable to think that one of the ways in which the work that went into the Physiognomics was meant to be taken was as a challenge of sorts to Polyclitus: the construction of an Aristotelian Canon. Whether in physical realization the Aristotelian ideal would look any different from that of Polyclitus, it is impossible to say: most likely not. The pertinent difference in any case is the theoretical one, that the Aristotelians offer a moral explanation for the viewer’s response to it as a physical ideal. A body conforming to the Aristotelian ‘canon’ is beautiful just in so far as it raises the viewer’s expectation that it is inhabited by a virtuous character.

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Plato and the Stoics It needs to be emphasized at this point that Aristotle and his followers were not physiognomical determinists. That is to say, they did not believe that one was bound to have the character to which one’s body suggested one was naturally inclined. Very much, in fact, as their modern analogues, they will have thought in terms of genetic predisposition. For Aristotle, as for us, social factors make all the difference to how one actually turns out.17 Nevertheless, it cannot pass without comment that the school’s focus on a unique biometric ‘ideal’ quickly leads to a chauvinism more pernicious than anything for which Polyclitus might have been responsible, precisely because it is imbued with moral significance. A single example from the Physiognomics shows how fertile the ground is for prejudice (812 a12–15):18 ‘Those who are too black are cowards: compare Egyptians, Ethiopians. Those who are too white are cowards: compare women. The colour that makes for courage is in the mean of these’. It is one thing to respect the theoretical principles behind the physiognomical project, but another to approve of the way in which, in practice, it tends to invest subjective aesthetic judgements with the weight of moral censure. But note that the problem, or the source of our discomfort, is not the mere fact that Aristotle is interested in outward appearance. It is rather that he is too ready to generalize in his account of the normative ideal, to think that there is a single standard against which all bodies should be measured. In this, I wish to suggest, he was flying in the face of his own teacher. For it is this refusal to generalize, I shall argue, that lay at the heart of Plato’s revisionist account of human beauty, and not, after all, the claim that beauty is ‘really’ something inward and spiritual. The idea that Plato was interested in inner beauty rather than physical appearance is, as I noted at the outset, a powerful and well-established one. But there are several considerations that should give us pause for thought before accepting it. One is the role that we have seen Alcibiades play as Plato’s chief spokesman for the idea: it is Alcibiades who says that Socrates manifests inner rather than outward beauty. But Plato makes clear to us that Alcibiades is extremely vain, a poor philosopher at the best of times, and drunk to boot when he enlarges on this particular topic. It seems naïve to assume that we are meant to follow his lead in our own assessment of Socrates. A second consideration is that a sharp distinction between manifest external beauty on the one hand, and inner, psychological beauty on the other, must lead one quickly into territory dangerous for Plato. According to him, the pre-eminent natural entity, indeed, the pre-eminent living creature, is the cosmos itself, crafted by god in his own image (Timaeus, 29e); and, as a living creature, the cosmos also has a soul (30ab). Yet Plato does not talk about the ‘inner life’ of the cosmos, or say that the soul of the cosmos is


more beautiful than what is manifest to the senses. True, the soul is the superior part of the cosmos (34bc); but its superiority lies precisely in the fact that it is in virtue of its presence that the whole is beautiful. It explains the beauty of the cosmos, it does not outshine it.19 Finally, consider the Stoics – a school not founded until the early third century, to be sure, but one self-consciously rooted in the older Socratic tradition. The Stoics too distinguished the beauty of the soul from the beauty of the body, at least in definition. They also recognized the aesthetic advantages, ceteris paribus, of due physical proportion – for which, indeed, they too used the word symmetria, familiar to us by now from both Polyclitus and Aristotle.20 But they were adamant that virtue was sufficient to make anyone beautiful, whatever their physical geography. Plutarch, not a friend of the Stoa, waxes satirical on the idea (The Stoics Make Stranger Claims than the Poets, 1057E–1058A): The Stoic wise man was repulsive just yesterday when he was still evil. Today, all of a sudden,21 he has been converted to a life of virtue, and where before he was wrinkled and sallow, a ‘lumbago-ridden, wretched, pain-racked old man’ (as Aeschylus has it), he now cuts a fine figure, godlike in his beauty. For Odysseus to become beautiful it took Athene to remove his wrinkles, and bald patch, and other physical defects. But the Stoic wise man is not repulsive or misshapen or ugly at all, even though, if this is what he was like before, he remains hunchbacked, toothless, and one-eyed! There is no question but that the Stoics meant this ‘beauty’ to be visible, of the body: Plutarch’s satire makes no sense otherwise. But clearly, if Stoic virtue cannot straighten a hunch back, or repair the teeth, or cure warts, they must have developed a notion of physical perfection very different from the Aristotelian, let alone the Polyclitan, canon. As far as I am aware, no one has ever given anything like an adequate account of what this might be; but the comparison with Plato does something to help, especially when we notice one absolutely key feature of it. The beauty the Stoics are talking about here is specifically visual: graspable by sight (cf. SVF, 3.568). It is one of Plato’s legacies to the philosophical tradition that he discusses human beauty, in fact the human body in general, almost uniquely as an object of visual interest. He shows no interest in what bodies feel like, or taste like, or smell like. This ought to be striking, for it is not something that is determined by cultural convention, by external controls on appropriate ways of speaking about the body. Smell, taste and touch were very much part of the exploration of the body in science as well as literature during the period when Plato was applying his immense literary skill to the scientific exploration of the human condition. They are staples of Greek (as of other) erotic poetry; and they are readily employed for diagnosis in

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Hippocratic medicine.22 Yet they are pretty well absent from Plato: and, after Plato, from philosophy at large.23 The question, then, is what Plato has against these senses – or why, rather, he privileges sight to the extent that he does. The answer to this question is not, as it happens, specific to the exploration of the body. In fact Plato believes, in general, that sight is privileged among the senses.24 The reason he believes this is that sight is capable of contextualizing things in a way that the other senses are not. One of his most important discussions of the issue comes, again, in the Timaeus (47a): Sight, in my opinion, is the source of the greatest benefit to us, for if we had never seen the stars or the sun or the heavens, our present discussion about the universe could never have taken place. As it is, we are able to see day and night, and the months, and the revolutions of the years, which produce number and also give us the concept of time25 as well as the ability to investigate the nature of the universe. From all of this we get philosophy – and there is not and never can be any greater gift that the gods could give to mortals. This, I say, is the tremendous benefit we derive from the eyes. At first glance it might look as if the point of this passage is to say that sight allows us to transcend our roots, and escape to the heavens. But that isn’t quite Plato’s point. Rather, Plato’s point is that our ability to see and understand the order of the heavens enables us to start seeing the order and beauty they communicate to the whole cosmos, even down on earth, where it is least readily apparent. The Timaeus itself – ‘our present discussion about the universe’ – is offered in this passage as a reflexive model for the kind of philosophy that star-gazing inspires, and its own trajectory is very instructive. For the Timaeus, at least that part of it after the introduction that is ‘about the universe’, does begin its account with a daring and complex explanation of the heavens. But it moves on through to a no less intricate and detailed examination of human anatomy. (That is how Plato came to be talking about the eyes to begin with.) Since antiquity, interest in the dialogue has always centred around the great metaphysical questions raised in the early stages of the Timaeus’s cosmology; but the work ends – perhaps, then, culminates – in a discussion of the human body, a discussion as sophisticated (or anyway as detailed) as anything in the Hippocratic corpus. Except that I think Plato intends us to see that this is better than anything in the Hippocratic corpus – precisely because the Timaeus is not only about the body. Plato elsewhere criticizes Hippocrates for treating the body without, as he says, looking at the ‘whole’, and in the immediate context he means the whole person – body and soul (Charmides, 156e). But the Timaeus makes it clear that ultimately he means the whole world. Hippocratic


medicine views the body as an autonomous entity: an island entire of itself. What Plato does in the Timaeus is to show that it is a only piece of the greater continent. He teaches us that, as the individual organs subserve the body, so the body in its turn is part of a larger system (as he says again in Philebus, 29e). And the eulogies extended to the wonderful craftsmanship evident in, for example, the lungs (Timaeus, 70cd), or the liver (71a–72b), or the bowels (72e–73a) show us that things we might normally consider aesthetically repulsive become objects of wonder and even beauty when seen in their proper context. The body in its turn, then, derives its beauty from its place and function. The body, that is to say any body, is beautiful in so far as it contributes to the one definitively beautiful thing in the universe: the universe itself. The reason, then, that sight is the most philosophical of the senses is that it has the widest embrace: it perceives a great deal at once, and it presents things to the mind in their relation to each other. It is able to seek out order and structure between diverse elements of the jigsaw puzzle that makes up our world. The other senses, by contrast, fragment and particularize – this is especially true of taste, smell and touch. They grasp a single thing, or a part of a single thing; they isolate the individual from its surroundings in what they report.26 This is, in fact, why these senses come into love poetry and medicine – and part of why Plato is highly suspicious of both activities, at least as conventionally practised. Love poetry is generally dedicated to an individual in isolation; but when Plato talks about love, he encourages us to move on to love everyone (Symposium, 210a–e). The physician prescribes for his patients on the basis of their own organic integrity; but Plato asks the doctors of his ideal state not just to cure individuals, but to consider whether it is good for these individuals to be cured, something that is only apparent when we know how they stand in relation to their wider community (Republic, 405c–407e). The only valid perspective from which to make a judgement about the beauty or worth of a body is a perspective that takes in its context, so that it is not only its internal symmetria that matters, but also the symmetria of its relationship with the cosmos.27 Plato’s use, and extension, of this term (symmetria) would, of course, be very loaded if he had Polyclitus in mind when reflecting on the issue. No less so his recourse to the sculptor’s art for illustrations of his point, including the striking observation that a statue may, because of its relationship to the viewer, be made to look more beautiful if strict (‘internal’) symmetria is abandoned.28 My suggestion, then, is that neither Plato nor the Stoics restricted the notion of beauty to biometrics, to terms that can be reduced to physical adaptation – desirable though such a thing might be. For Plato and the Stoics, the beautiful human is the person who uses what they have well; who has the psychological capacity and inclination to fit himself into society (viewing the matter politically) or into the world (viewing it theologically); to act in harmony with his fellow human beings and with nature.

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In fact ‘living in harmony with nature’ is the official Stoic definition of virtue: and anyone can do this – whatever his particular physical assets might be. My last Stoic text is instructive in this context. It comes from a report concerning Zeno, the founder of the school, who was responsible for a ‘canon’ of his own: It seems that Zeno of Citium wanted to outline a beautiful and attractive image of a young man, whom he sculpts as follows: ‘Let his face be pure,’ he says, ‘his brow not cast down, his eyes neither staring nor drooping, his neck not held high, the limbs of his body not dangling, but taut, as with those keen for action, right-minded in speech, his alertness, his concern only for what is well said, his pose and his movements giving no encouragement to the lustful. Let his bloom be modesty and manliness’ ... What is striking here is the fact that what Zeno ‘sculpts’ cannot be rephrased in terms of particular physical attributes. As far as this canon goes, it could be anyone. But that is precisely the point. There is nothing here that we cannot all aspire to. It is all about bearing, and relationship to environment. The beauty here is a physical quality all right, and the description is a powerful physical description. Yet it is not biometrical, or physiognomical in the sense we encountered with Aristotle. It is the look of someone in perfect physical harmony with the cosmos. And this, I think, is how ‘psychological beauty’ manifests itself in Plato too. It is not other than the body; it is about how the body is set in relation to its environment.

Conclusion Plato and the Stoics agree with Aristotle, and all three with Polyclitus, that the human body is an object of legitimate aesthetic criticism. This is something not undermined but reinforced for the philosophers by their injection of a moral dimension, because in their case the ‘beauty’ to which we are invited to respond is a token of virtue – a mark of its achievement (Plato, the Stoics) or a sign of the predisposition towards it (Aristotle). Where Plato and the Stoics really differ from Aristotle, and all the more from Polyclitus, is in their belief that too much is omitted from an account that limits the relevant proportions to the boundaries of the body itself: for humans in their turn are limbs to be set in due proportion with the cosmos. For them, the ‘canon’ or standard of physical beauty is given in the cosmos, and prescribes something unique to each one of us.

Notes 1. Principal ancient testimonia relating to the Canon are collected at H. Diels and W. Kranz, Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker, 6th edn (Berlin, 1951) [DK] §40 (at vol. 1,


2.

3.

4.

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6.

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9.

pp. 391–393). See, in general for Polyclitus, W. G. Moon (ed.), Polykleitos, the Doryphoros, and Tradition (Madison, Wisc., 1995); A. H. Borbein, ‘Polykleitos’, in O. Palagia and J. J. Pollitt (eds), Personal Styles in Greek Sculpture. Yale Classical Studies 30 (Cambridge, Mass., 1996), pp. 66–90. The identification of the Doryphoros as the statue which became known as the ‘Canon’ is widely accepted, though it is as well to note that the ancient evidence is not quite explicit on the matter. So goes Galen’s report: On the Doctrines of Hippocrates and Plato, 5.3.15 = 40 A3 DK. The notion of symmetria is found in Pythagorean mathematics, which is (therefore) typically assumed to be in the background of Polyclitus’ work, even though the implications of the connection, supposing it real and significant, are quite unclear. There are also connections to be seen here with contemporary rhetorical and medical theory: see, for example, Borbein, ‘Polykleitos’, p. 86. It is sometimes asserted that Polyclitus’ aesthetic values must at the same time have been ethical values (e.g. Borbein, ‘Polykleitos’, p. 88). The possibility cannot be ruled out, but neither is there any evidence for it – and evidence is certainly not furnished by the overlap in Greek between moral and aesthetic vocabulary noted by Borbein (as if no Greek individual could conceive of a good-looking person doing evil). Other texts that suggest a contrast between the beauty of body and soul include Charmides, 154e; Symposium, 210b: Republic, 444de. (Cf. also Xenophon, e.g. Memorabilia, 2.6.32; 4.1.2; Oeconomicus, 6.16.) For aesthetes as ‘sleeping’, Plato, Republic, 476bc. ‘Platonic’ love is explored in the Phaedrus as well as the Symposium. (Cf. also Xenophon, Symposium, 8.12 ff.) Compare an idea prevalent in modern science that physical attractiveness can be explained in terms of evolutionary advantage: a recent example is G. Jasienska, A. Ziomkiewicz, P. T. Ellison, S. F. Lipson, I. Thune, ‘Large Breasts and Narrow Waists Indicate High Reproductive Potential in Women’, Proceedings of the Royal Society B 271 (2004), pp. 1213–1217. All of this is, by the way, quite consistent with a standard Socratic view that the ‘beauty’ of a thing is relative to its suitability for the task for which it was born or made: see, for example, Xenophon, Memorabilia, 3.8.5–8; 4.6.8–9; Symposium, 5.4; Plato, Republic, 457b; Hippias Major, 295de. Other well-known works by Polyclitus are the Diskophoros (carrying a discus), the Diadumenos (tying on a crown of athletic victory), the Apoxyomenos (using a strigil after exercise), and the Astragalizontes (two boys playing with the ancient equivalent of dice). For a fuller list, see Pliny, Natural History, 34.55–56. Pliny’s remark on the ‘virile’ character of the Doryphoros (echoed at Quintilian, Institutio Oratoria, 5.12.21) might be to the point here. For Aristotelian ‘ethics’ as a fundamentally political study, see his remarks in Nicomachean Ethics, 1094 a18–b11. For the evidence that physiognomics in antiquity was associated almost uniquely with Aristotle and his direct influence, see my ‘Physiognomy in Ancient Philosophy’ in S. Swain, G. R. Boys-Stones, J. Elsner, A. Ghersetti, R. Hoyland, I. Repath, Seeing the Face, Seeing the Soul. Polemon’s Physiognomy from Classical Antiquity to Medieval Islam (Oxford, 2007), pp. 19–124 (pp. 44–55 for details of Aristotle’s physiognomical theory). Seeing the Face also presents the principal physiognomical texts of classical antiquity, with English translations. For example, Plato Cratylus, 394a (with implications for eugenics: Charmides, 157de; Politicus 310cd; Republic 459a–e; Laws 773ab); the Stoics in H. von Arnim (ed.), Stoicorum Veterum Fragmenta (Stuttgart, 1903–05) [SVF] 1.518, 2.808; Cicero, Tusculan Disputations, 1.79.

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10. An interesting example, not least because it is concerned with an issue of constant interest to the ancient phsyiognomists, is T. J. Williams, M. E. Pepitone, S. E. Christensen, B. M. Cooke, A. D. Huberman, N. J. Breedlove, T. J. Breedlove, C. L. Jordan, S. M. Breedlove, ‘Finger-Length Ratios and Sexual Orientation’, Nature, vol. 404 (2000), pp. 455–456 (linking the relative length of index and ring fingers with sexual orientation). 11. Parts of Animals, 648 a2–4 and 9–11. Cf. the Aristotelian Physiognomics at 813 b11–35; and the anonymous Latin treatise on physiognomy (heavily influenced by this tradition), in ch. 12. 12. There is a curious convergence between this idea and more recent research which has shown that it is ‘average’ features that people find most attractive. See especially J. H. Langlois and L. A. Roggman, ‘Attractive Faces are Only Average’, Psychological Science, vol. 1 (1990), pp. 115–121. 13. For the authorship of the Physiognomics, and the relationship of its authors with Aristotle himself, see my ‘Physiognomy in Ancient Philosophy’ at pp. 55–58 and 64–75. 14. See Physiognomics, 808 a26, 809 b24, 810 a6, 811 b33, 813 b23, 27, 813 b35, 814 a2, 3. Cf. 810 b15–20, which discusses the size of the belly relative to the chest. 15. It is sometimes inferred from a report that Varro called Polyclitus’ statues ‘square’ (quadrata): see Pliny, Natural History, 34.56 with A. F. Stewart, ‘Lyisippan Studies 1. The Only Creator of Beauty’, American Journal of Archaeology, vol. 82 (1978), pp. 163–171; Borbein, ‘Polykleitos’, p. 86. 16. Cf. quadratus in the anonymous Latin Physiognomics (a later text, but very much in the Aristotelian tradition) in chs 17 (forehead), 47 (ears) and 52 (of the chin). 17. These are discussed under the headings of ‘habituation’ and ‘education’ in the Nicomachean Ethics: see especially 2.1. 18. This example shows that biometric polarities do not systematically map ethical polarities (which in this case would be rashness and cowardice: Nicomachean Ethics, 1107 a33). Cf. Aristotle himself on the eyes, as quoted above (impudence is not diametrically opposed to indecision, as blinking is to staring). Far from being a flaw in the science, this is a salutary reminder that no direct link is posited between individual psychological and physical traits. The latter may turn out to be signs of the former only because each have their determination in the same tertium quid – the quality of the blood. 19. This is not to deny that there is a division in Plato between the transcendent, intellectual realm and the merely visible. The world in the Timaeus is an image of god; god is more beautiful. In the au-delà of the Symposium, we find a consummation in the realm of the ‘sciences’ and the form of the beautiful which we could not find in the sensible world or through the senses at all (211e). My point is that we have no business replicating this distinction in our discussion of the psychological and physical aspects of a living creature within the realm of nature. The soul for Plato is just the life possessed by the body, at least while the two are together. 20. SVF, 3.278 contrasts the beauty of soul with that of body. Further testimony to the definition of bodily beauty: SVF, 3.392, 471, 472, 592. For bodily beauty as something ‘preferable’ (that is, worth having, ceteris paribus), see SVF, 3.122 (at pp. 29.35–36), 127; cf. 142. 21. The Stoics believe that virtue arrives in an instant at the moment one attains wisdom (itself an absolute quality), a claim that is part of Plutarch’s target here.

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22. For example, Epidemics, 4.43, 6.8.8, 6.8.17, 7.25, with J. Jouanna, Hippocrates (English translation by M. B. DeBevoise: Baltimore, MD, 1999), pp. 298–301. 23. A (roughly contemporaneous) exception is the brief discussion of smell at Xenophon, Symposium, 2.3–4, a passage that even plays with the idea that there is an odour associated with virtue. 24. See, for example, Phaedo, 65b; Phaedrus, 250d; Republic, 508b; Timaeus, 47a–d, 66d; Laws, 961d. 25. ‘Number’ here is to be understood as the measurable order of the universe, and time as the measure used for it. 26. It would seem to be a corollary of this that smell, taste and touch cannot really report beauty: and indeed, this position is stated at Hippias Major, 298d–299c. 27. So, variously, Gorgias, 525a; Timaeus, 69b, 87c–e; Philebus, 64e. 28. Sophist, 236a. See also Republic, 420cd and (if it is by Plato) Hippias Major, 290b. Much later, his follower Plotinus would comment that the living, or the lifelike, is always more beautiful than the opposite, however superior the latter may be in symmetria (Ennead, 6.7.22.27–36).

2 Body as Graced or Vile: Tensions in the Christian Vision David Brown

A common assumption in much contemporary writing about the body is that Christianity has throughout most of its history been uniformly hostile and antagonistic. Many contemporary Christians are quite happy to concede that account, but put the blame firmly elsewhere, on the influence of pagan philosophy, and in particular on Plato. While, of course, there is no smoke without some fire, in the main it seems to me that both accounts are thoroughly misleading and for very roughly the same reason. Critique is presumed to imply rejection, whereas it is precisely because the body is valued and taken seriously that it is subjected to such suspicion. Admittedly, this is less true of Platonism, since the body here has no ultimate role in the scheme of things. Souls are seen as being capable of an existence entirely separate from the body, and that should be our ultimate goal.1 Even so, this is not held to entail that either our bodies or the world in general are of no value. Plotinus, the founder of Neo-Platonism, wrote a treatise attacking the Gnostics, who made just such a claim. 2 Not only does Plato propose attraction to physical beauty as a means towards similar attitudes in respect of the moral or spiritual, but there are also some fine appreciative descriptions of nature in his works.3 So, for example, one dialogue opens in ‘an exceedingly pleasant and lovely place with a gentle breeze’ that ‘echoes with a shrill summer chorus of cicadas’, as the interlocutors sit by a stream with ‘a high, overshadowing plane tree’ and ‘a tall, fragrant willow in full bloom’.4 The Platonic theory of Forms can in fact be read in two quite different ways. In popular presentations it is often taken to betoken a real, invisible and intellectual world elsewhere that involves the demeaning or rejection of all that is available to our senses. But Plato’s two primary metaphors for the relation between the two worlds suggest something rather different. He speaks of things in this world, to varying degrees, ‘imitating’ or ‘participating in’ the world of the ideal Forms. In other words, to use the language of later Platonism, this world already has something of the divine within it. Christian theology, with its notion of creatio ex nihilo wanted no truck with such ideas.5 So there is a clear sense in which those modern 25


theologians who put all the blame on Plato for the Christian history of hostility have erred badly.6 In some respects, Platonism actually gives a higher value to the material world than does Christianity. But it is the latter that is our concern here. Once again, however, the critique needs to be set in its appropriate wider context. Whereas for Platonism this involves a higher/lower or up–down model; for Christianity (at least on this issue), more important is the horizontal or lateral perspective: the backward and forward projection of history. Backwards lies the Garden of Eden, and Adam and Eve placed in a bodily Paradise. Forward lies the eschaton or end, with all things renewed in Christ, including all material reality: ‘a new heaven and a new earth’.7 Those were the standards against which all critique had to be measured, and if such boundaries were not always respected, participation in the Church’s liturgy ensured a constant reminder that it was to resurrection of the body and not to immortality of the soul that the Church was ultimately committed.8 In what follows, I should like to alert the reader to that wider vision as the broader framework for interpreting what is in any case a complex history. I shall explore two areas of contemporary criticism: attitudes to sexuality and to suffering. My aim is not to defend everything that has been said and done in the Church’s name (all too often an impossibility), but rather to plead for recognition that the first and apparently obvious reading is not necessarily always the correct one. In understanding Christianity’s influence on the arts, it is important that this greater complexity should be acknowledged. Sometimes friend and foe alike must concede that some Christian or other has reduced the body to what is vile and despicable. But at other times, even where this appears to be the obvious reading, more sustained examination suggests something rather different in play: the critique intended as a way of enabling God to grace the body such that it is eventually transformed into a work of goodness and beauty. So, for example, it is true that the 1662 Prayer Book describes our bodies as vile, but the overall context suggests a somewhat different estimate: ‘we commit his body to the ground; earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust; in sure and certain hope of the resurrection to eternal life, through our Lord Jesus Christ; who shall change our vile body, that it may be like unto his glorious body’.9

Sexuality The basic fact of suspicion is well known. Largely under the influence of St Augustine, sexual congress came to be seen as so corrupted by the Fall that, as with all desire, baser, lustful motives were assumed to be the norm, even where the primary aim was the begetting of children.10 The result was ‘the double standard’ of the Middle Ages, according to which celibate monks and nuns were seen to be living at an inevitably higher level than the married laity. Although that contrast went with the Reformation, admiration for

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Augustine ensured that changes in attitude were not quite as marked as they might otherwise have been. So Luther can still observe, ‘all affections, desires and inclinations of mankind are evil, wicked and spoiled, as the Scripture says. Experience testifies this; for no man is so virtuous as to marry a wife, only thereby to have children, and to love them and bring them up in the fear of the Lord’.11 Indeed, sexual sin was now treated more seriously, with Dante’s placing of lust at the top of Purgatory nearest to heaven forgotten, as also earlier identifications of the primordial sin as either pride or gluttony.12 It was well into the twentieth century before Protestant Churches accepted the use of contraception, and gave a new priority to the sexual act as a way of fostering deeper relationships within marriage.13 Yet that is by no means the whole story. For a start, it cannot be claimed that the Bible was the primary impetus towards such attitudes. In the Hebrew Scriptures the single state is seen as wrong, and fruitfulness in marriage as the most obvious sign of God’s blessing.14 Indeed, there is some reason to believe that when the opening chapters of Genesis talk of human beings as made in the image of God, it is to God as a physical or material reality that reference is being made, and that the mystical view of the sexual act in medieval Judaism has its roots here.15 Nor should the purity laws of Leviticus be misunderstood.16 Recent sexual activity precluded admission to the Temple not because sex was seen as dirty but precisely because of its potency: for the Jews of the time it represented a possible source of power to rival that of God.17 Again, while the New Testament does indeed move towards a positive evaluation of celibacy, there is nothing to suggest that this stems from suspicions of sexuality as such. Although perhaps partly modelled on Christ’s own actions, the main motive seems to have been the freedom this gave in a context where the end of the world was believed to be imminent.18 It is really to subsequent centuries that the new attitudes should be traced. Monasticism arose first in Eastern Christendom. In their zeal to lead lives wholly devoted to God, monks were not always very subtle in their understanding of temptation. The extremes of denial, far from weakening the opposition, actually strengthened its imaginative power and thus objectified as supernatural demons the purely human realities that were so feared. Most influential for art were the temptations of St Antony, so powerfully captured by St Athanasius in his biography, and in numerous paintings since.19 In the West the effect was much more lasting with Augustine, as his intellectual rationalizations seemed to confirm his own personal experience. Already holding a low view of his own sexuality, he found this confirmed in his explanation of how the first pair’s disobedience could have, as Paul had claimed, an effect on us all.20 The universal human tendency towards the wrong (‘original sin’) was transmitted through sexual desire. Even so, the stain (macula) thus transmitted lay in the wrong turn to desire and not in sex as such. So, the Virgin Mary’s immaculate status derives not


from the fact that she abstained from sex (Eve too had been immaculate before the Fall) but that she was miraculously exempt from this inherited tendency towards the wrong type of desire, sexual or otherwise.21 It was easy, however, to blur or confuse the difference, and so equate Mary’s virginity with sexual ‘purity’. The inevitable result was the equation of other women with temptation, and thus the approach adopted in many a painting of Eve (as with the later Susanna and Mary Magdalene).22 But once again this is not the entire tale. Procreation continued to be seen as something planned and ordained by God, and indeed an act that human beings performed, as its Latin roots (pro) imply, on God’s behalf. In addition, in one of the Pauline epistles, marriage is compared to the intimacy of Christ’s relationship with his Church, and so is given the same positive potential. This helped to legitimate two developments, both of which pulled in quite a different direction from the Augustinian line of reflection. First, marriage moved gradually from being a purely secular institution to one that was seen as participating in the very life of God. The way in which the Pauline passage had spoken of it as a sacramentum led to its eventual inclusion among the seven sacraments of the Catholic Church.23 It was now seen as a material reality that provided access to a greater spiritual reality, with human love in effect reflecting the divine. Although there appear to have been nuptial masses as early as the third century, it would be more accurate to speak of quite a gradual development, with first a purely legal understanding predominating, then general acceptance of the need for a formal blessing at the church door, and eventually the fully fledged nuptial mass with which modern Catholics are familiar.24 It is only against such changing sensibilities that the devout Rubens’ celebration of his wife naked makes any kind of sense.25 Despite its reluctance to use the language of sacrament, the Reformation, in effect, continued the same trend. With the abolition of religious orders came a new centrality for the home as itself a locus of divine action and care. Luther’s marriage to Katherine, the ex-nun, and his pride in his son, Hans, eloquently attest to this change. So too, perhaps more surprisingly, does Robert Burns’ poem ‘The Cotter’s Saturday Night’.26 In conjunction with influence from the Old Testament ‘Song of Songs’, originally a secular love poem but interpreted by theologians as early as Origen as an allegory of Christ’s love for his Church, a rich vein of exposition and poetry developed, which did not hesitate to use erotic imagery of God himself. This ranged from St Bernard of Clairvaux’s eighty-six sermons on the theme in the twelfth century to the daring metaphors of St John of the Cross and John Donne in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Perhaps most familiar is Donne’s poem: Batter my heart, three person’d God ... Take mee to you, imprison mee, for I

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Except you’enthrall mee, never shall be free, Nor ever chast, except you ravish mee.27 For those tempted to dismiss such sentiments as a mere metaphysical conceit from a rather worldly Anglican divine, it is salutary to observe similar language in the celibate St John of the Cross’s writing: Oh flame of love so living, How tenderly you force To my soul’s inmost core your fiery probe! Since now you’ve no misgiving, End it, pursue your course And for our sweet encounter tear the robe.28 In such cases it would be a serious mistake to talk of mere metaphor, as though metaphors, unlike literal descriptions, are without influence on thought. Rather, the extensive use of such imagery helped to ensure a more positive evaluation of sexuality, whatever the official teaching of the Church might continue to be. This applies equally to the emergence of similar ideas in Baroque art. Bernini’s famous Ecstasy of St Teresa is now often ridiculed as being possible only in a pre-Freudian age. 29 But it is important to note that such imagery occurs over the whole range of Bernini’s works, and sometimes still more explicitly, as in his sculptured tomb for the Blessed Ludovica, where pomegranate seeds explode on crumpled sheets. 30 As a faithful attendant at daily mass and a father of eleven children, for Bernini there seems to have been no conflict between sexual activity and religious faith. Each could easily inhabit the other. 31 My own view is that much the same can be said of Caravaggio’s attempts a century earlier to integrate sexual imagery and religious concerns, but this is too contentious an issue to explore here. 32 Admittedly, it remains the case that the eschaton is presumed to be without sexual activity. My point is simply that, while Antony and Augustine may have had a decisive impact on the shaping of Christian thinking on this matter, theirs was by no means the last or only word. However badly things may have gone wrong, sexual activity had to be given an indispensable place as part of the divine intention for this world, since it was there in the myth of the world’s origins. Indeed, as blessed and graced, it had also to find some part even in the celibate Christ. This is why we find the shepherds in St Brigitta of Sweden’s visions wondering whether the child might be male or female;33 why too much prominence is given to Christ’s genitalia in Renaissance nativities.34 It was essential that the perfect human being should be a sexual being like the rest of us, since he came to redeem all of our human nature and not just part of it.

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Figure 2.1 Death of the Blessed Ludovica Albertoni, from the Altieri Chapel, 1674 (marble) by Bernini, Giovanni Lorenzo (1598–1680), San Francesco a Ripa, Rome, Italy. [Giraudon. The Bridgeman Art Library]

Suffering The other major objection against Christianity pulls in quite the opposite direction. If its attitude to sexuality suggests a religion that appears to disdain the body, its approach to suffering conjures up an almost masochistic preoccupation with the body, most obviously in gruesome depictions of the Crucifixion but also in injunctions to emulate such suffering in various ascetic practices. Francis Bacon’s paintings might be said to be the natural culmination of such a heritage, despite his atheism. Many of them were modelled on classical triptychs, using crucifixion-type themes to bring out what Bacon saw as the awful meaninglessness of suffering.35 Non-believers are not alone in raising such objections: similar complaints are to be found among Orthodox theologians of the East.36 The reference to Orthodoxy provides a timely reminder that this is by no means the only approach to the Crucifixion in the history of Christianity. Indeed, during its first millennium, depictions of a suffering Christ are virtually non-existent. It is not until the turn of the first millennium that

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instances occur where suffering dominates.37 The most common pattern before then was of Christ crowned and triumphant. Put simply, it is the theology of the Gospel of St John rather than of the Synoptics that is used to provide the key, with the Cross seen as already containing within it the message of the Resurrection: Christ’s triumph over sin, suffering and death. John plays on potential ambiguities between lifting up the body on a cross and exaltation, while in place of the Synoptic cry of dereliction, Christ utters a great shout of triumph.38 The ideas of such a Christus Victor theology are reflected in numerous hymns and poems of the time, as well as in visual art.39 Such presentations imply that Christ has won the decisive battle against the forces of evil, and we may now follow safely in his train. Although especially in northern Europe such imagery was eventually to yield to increasingly intense presentations of Christ’s suffering, it is important to recall that such retreat was by no means uniform. Even as Grünewald was painting his famous Isenheim altarpiece, Perugino and Raphael were demonstrating how different Renaissance assumptions could be from those of northern Gothic.40 It is often asserted that the Renaissance had more to do with Greek than Christian values, but the truth is more complicated. Greek ideals of male beauty were undoubtedly applied to Christ, but in order to deliver an essentially Christian message that was continuous with earlier, first-millennium ways of thinking. Beauty of body, even on the Cross, was being used symbolically to demonstrate the powerlessness of evil against the forces of good. Thus, over much of Christendom and for at least half of its history, significantly different conceptions were at work from those upon which critiques of Christian treatment of the body as vile are based. One reason why this is so seldom acknowledged is that the art now bestknown is inevitably the art that has survived in the greatest quantity, which also tends to be from the period nearest to us – from the high Middle Ages onwards. The Western interest in icons (which, like Renaissance art, could have given a different emphasis) is a comparatively recent phenomenon. This is not to deny the prominence of that alternative scenario, but rather to counsel caution in generalizing about the ubiquitous character of Christian hostility to the body. Most religions are chameleons in the ranges of forms they can take. In attempting to comprehend the overwhelming emphasis on suffering that has characterized late medieval and modern Western Christianity, it is therefore important to look not simply to that religion’s past, but also to the contexts that encouraged these new emphases. In their desire to maintain the continuity of their faith, conservative Christians (Protestant and Catholic alike) contribute greatly to misunderstandings of how radical change has in fact been over Christian history. Consider first Evangelical fundamentalism and its insistence on a continuity that stretches back to the New Testament itself. The preoccupations of sixteenth-century Calvinism are projected back into the nascent Christian community. The idea of penal substitution, according to which Christ

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bore in our place the suffering resulting from our sins made good sense to Calvin’s legal mind. Each wrong had to have its corresponding retributive punishment, and so great suffering on the part of Christ was an inevitability. But there is no single metaphor, penal or otherwise, that dominates the New Testament texts, and the Synoptic accounts of the Passion are notable for their restraint.41 Even the famous Cry of Dereliction in the Gospels of St Mark and St Matthew is likely to have been interpreted by contemporary readers in light of the psalm from which Jesus is quoting taken as a whole, including its positive conclusion.42 Nor will it do to say that Calvin is merely following the much earlier St Anselm. In his classic work, Cur Deus Homo, Anselm is really only interested in Christ’s death and not in any suffering that may have accompanied it. This is because, for him, nothing can compensate God except that which is not owed to him. Since, according to the Scriptures, death is a consequence of sin, it is the one thing that the Godman could offer up to God gratuitously.43 So, in trying to comprehend what led to such a sustained emphasis on suffering, we need to look elsewhere.44 Ideas began to change, though quite slowly, about the turn of the first millennium, initially in fact under influence from the east. Instead of Christ the representative, there is a desire for a more intimate, affective relationship. The growth of townships in the twelfth century is often seen as a key factor in generating greater individualism and thus a more personal framework for belief. If one result was increased stress on the suffering of a more human Christ now closely identified with man, the new interest in his humanity also resulted in charming nativities, with the intimacy of Mary’s maternal care now to the fore. Even angels were made to smile with the good news of the Annunciation, as in a famous example at Reims.45 But it was not long before the extent of Christ’s sufferings began to get out of hand. Paintings and statues soon depicted blood everywhere, and this can scarcely be explained entirely in terms of the desire for identification. Especially conspicuous in Vesperbild or Man of Sorrows images, its influence can also be seen in some Reformation hymnody, as, for example, in Isaac Watts’ ‘When I survey the wondrous cross’: His dying crimson, like a robe, Spreads o’er his body on the tree; Then am I dead to all the globe, And all the globe is dead to me. The Black Death, in which probably a third of the population of Europe perished, is often seen as decisive here. People now wanted to see Christ as identifying with the extremes of their own extensive suffering. This is perhaps the most important idea underpinning the Isenheim altarpiece. More negatively, however, suffering was sometimes explained as a deserved divine punishment for human wrongdoing, a tendency no doubt augmented

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Figure 2.2 The Angel with a Smile, jamb figure from the west portal (stone) by French School (thirteenth century), Cathedral of Notre Dame, Reims, France. [Lauros/ Giraudon. The Bridgeman Art Library]

by the Church’s new obsession with computing precisely the cost of all sin and its appropriate recompense.46 From that thought it was but a short step to viewing the suffering Christ as himself implicitly pointing the finger of accusation. Add to this over-realistic interpretations of the Eucharist with accompanying miracles of bleeding hosts, and the stage was set for even the gruesome picture of Christ’s original sacrifice not being enough, but needing to be repeated on a thousand altars.47 What this history suggests is links between late medieval Catholicism and modern Evangelical fundamentalism (mediated through Calvin) that would scarcely be welcome to the latter. What disguises the fact is the continuing unhistorical way of reading the New Testament, as though it has the meaning and consistency of a modern doctrinal text. Even so, in all of this, the more positive side to such images in art and literature should not be forgotten. A tremendous sense of divine identification with human suffering was effected, and this was taken up in much modern theology in response to the Holocaust.48 Another positive point was the way in which this often led to identification with other human beings in their suffering, and the desire to help them. Unfortunately, it sometimes also led to the view that suffering could have value in its own


right, with self-imposed suffering seen as adding to what was called the Church’s treasury of merit; that is, what might be balanced against human sin and wickedness, along with Christ’s own sacrifice. As recently as the twentieth century, Charles de Foucauld is found adding unnecessarily to his sufferings in the desert, as though this in itself were a laudable act, while the composer Francis Poulenc apparently believed that the early death of a lover compensated for his own sin, the notion underpinning his opera Dialogue of the Carmelites.49 Yet it is important to acknowledge that even such puzzling attitudes could have their positive features. Recent work on medieval female ascetics, for example, has drawn attention to a more complex pattern of motivation.50 Such asceticism in effect liberated some women from the usual social controls effected by the male hierarchies of family and Church, and allowed them an independent and often powerful voice. Even the Bishop of Norwich could not interrupt Margery Kempe’s noisy flood of tears during his sermon, while Catherine of Siena confidently reprimanded the Pope himself. But, as with sexuality, most important of all in ensuring the survival of more positive attitudes was the wider historical sweep within which the Christian story was conceived. Just as the beginning of the story in the Garden of Eden ensured that sexuality had to be seen as a divinely graced gift, so talk of a new heaven and a new earth as its culmination meant a final estimate of the body as destined for perfection. Despite his inclinations towards Platonism, Augustine remains here quite unambiguous: All the limbs and organs of the body, no longer subject to decay ... will kindle our rational minds to the praise of the great Artist by the delight afforded by a beauty that satisfies the reason ... and we may be sure that where the spirit wills there the body will straightway be; and the spirit will never will anything but what is to bring new beauty to the spirit and to the body.51 So too Luther, even if he sentimentalizes somewhat: God will create a new heaven and a new earth, wherein righteousness shall dwell ... There will be no carnivorous beasts, or venomous creatures, for all such, like ourselves, will be relieved from the curse of sin, and will be to us as friendly as they were to Adam in Paradise. There will be little dogs, with golden hair, shining like precious stones ... and we ourselves, delivered from our mundane subjection to gross appetites and necessities, shall have the same form as here, but infinitely more perfect.52 But even this aspect was not without its tensions. The Suffering Servant passages in the prophet Isaiah were very quickly applied to Christ. One in

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particular speaks of a figure who ‘had no form or comeliness that we should look at him, and no beauty that we should desire him. He was despised and rejected of men; a man of sorrow and acquainted with grief’.53 But could pain ever mar, far less destroy, a human body graced by the divine? Many of the church fathers thought not.54 Michelangelo would take a similar view.55 Others, however, argued that the wounds must remain even after the Ascension, since only the eternal nature of Christ’s sacrifice guaranteed human salvation. The poet Gerard Manley Hopkins is among those who take the contrary view: There met in Jesus Christ all things that can make man lovely and loveable. In his body he was most beautiful ... I leave it to you, brethren, then to picture him ... in his bearing how majestic, how strong and yet how lovely and lissome in his limbs, in his look how earnest, grave but kind. In his Passion all this strength was spent, this lissomness crippled, this beauty wrecked, this majesty beaten down. But now it is more than all restored, and for myself I make no secret I look forward with eager desire to seeing the matchless beauty of Christ’s body in the heavenly light.56 Such remarks may have been in part motivated by his own homosexual disposition. But it would be quite wrong to assume this to be the complete explanation. As a well-educated Jesuit, Hopkins would have known that beauty no less than truth and goodness were traditional attributes of God, and so everything in the world created by him must ultimately reflect that beauty.

Conclusion Ironically, critics of Christianity sometimes function as the mirror image of the fundamentalists they so despise, by assuming a single meaning of the Christian faith. Unsurprisingly, across two millennia a great variety of opinions have been held, and these need to be borne in mind in interpreting the art and literature they have helped to generate. Equally, the Christianity of our own day continues to change. Abandonment of claims of a primeval pair has not led to the relinquishing of talk of a fallen world, but it is now seldom associated with sexuality. Similarly, the replacement of burial by cremation underlines a less absolute approach to what might be meant by resurrection of the body, no longer seen as a fairly literal reconstituting of bodily parts, but more as something analogous to physical existence yet quite different, as indeed St Paul himself had claimed.57 Such details cannot be pursued here, but we can underline the continuing desire of Christianity to take the body seriously as integral to what it is to be human: however much the vileness of sin is stressed, a graced glory is also an essential part of


the expectation. Thomas Traherne is thus no quirky exception to the general Christian vision: Thou hast given me a body, Wherein the glory of thy power shineth Wonderfully composed above the beasts, Within distinguished into useful parts, Beautified without with many ornaments. Limbs rarely poised, And made for heaven: .................... For God designs thy body, for His sake, A temple of the Deity to make.58

Notes 1. Plato’s dialogue Phaedo offers four arguments for the independence and immortality of the soul. 2. Enneads, II, 9. 3. For beauty of body as such a medium, his Symposium. 4. Phaedrus, 229a–230e (my trans.); in Plato’s Timaeus the creation is called ‘most beautiful’; for example, 29 a5; 92 c8. 5. A key figure such as St Athanasius argues on two fronts (for example, De Incarnatione, 2): on the one hand against Gnostics who posit a Creator other than God, and on the other against Plato for failing to place the Creator on a footing totally discontinuous with his creation. 6. For example, J. Moltmann, God in Creation (London, 1985), pp. 248–250. 7. Most obviously in the Book of Revelation, as in its concluding vision, chs 21–22. 8. In the recital of the West’s two principal creeds, the Nicene and the Apostles’, even if other confessional formulae sometimes tried to have it both ways, as in the Westminster Confession of 1646. 9. From the Burial Service: the Interment. 10. The best detailed study remains N. P. Williams, The Ideas of the Fall and of Original Sin (London, 1927). 11. T. S. Kepler (ed.), The Table Talk of Martin Luther (Grand Rapids, 1952), p. 158 (no. 224). 12. Dante places the proud (in Canto X) on the lowest crevice of Purgatory, the lustful on the highest (Canto XXV). For examples of gluttony treated as the first and most serious sin, see M. P. Cosman, Fabulous Feasts (New York, 1976), pp. 116–123. 13. Only its third purpose in the Preface to the 1662 Marriage Service, but elevated to first place in the Alternative Service Book (1980) and Common Worship (2000). 14. For example, Psalm cxxvii, 3–5. 15. G. von Rad, Genesis (London, 1972), pp. 58–59. For Kabbalistic developments, C. Mopsik, ‘The Body of Engenderment in the Hebrew Bible, the Rabbinic Tradition and the Kabbalah’ in M. Feher (ed.), Fragments for a History of the Body (New York, 1989), vol. 1, pp. 48–73, esp. pp. 61, 67. 16. See ch. 15, esp. vs. 13–24.

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17. J. Milgrom, Leviticus 1–16 (New York, 1991), pp. 957–968. 18. I Cor, vii, 7 is best explained in relation to verses later in the chapter (25–31), and probably Matt, xix, 12 may be read similarly. 19. Not only are sexual temptations described vividly, but we are also told that, in rejecting them, Antony became ashamed even to let others see him eat: Athanasius, Life of Saint Antony (London, 1980), pp. 34, 65 (5 and 45). 20. Sadly, Augustine’s position was based on a misunderstanding of Romans, v, 12. Whereas the relevant Greek phrase in Paul means only ‘with the consequence that’, Augustine interpreted its Latin translation (in quo) as making us all sinners in Adam’s loins. 21. Similarly, the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception means only that original sin was not passed to Mary from her parents, not that she was conceived without sexual intercourse. 22. Even so, the extent of this hostility can be exaggerated. For a critique of oversimplistic accounts of how Mary Magdalene has been treated in the past, see my Discipleship and Imagination (Oxford, 2000), pp. 31–61. 23. Ephesians, v, 21–33, esp. 32. The Greek mysterion was translated into the Vulgate’s sacramentum. 24. For such talk in the third century, see Tertullian, Ad uxorem, 2.6. A blessing at the door (in facie ecclesiae) may be as early as the seventh century. 25. For a discussion of the painting and its significance, see M. Thøfner, ‘Helena Fourment’s Het Pelsken’, in Art History, 27 (2004), pp. 1–33. 26. For a commentary on the relevant section, see D. Brown and D. Fuller, Signs of Grace: Sacraments in Poetry and Prose (London, 2000), pp. 122–125. 27. Quoted from H. Grierson (ed.), Donne: Poetical Works (London, 1933), p. 299. 28. From ‘Songs of the soul in intimate communication’, in St John of the Cross: Poems, trans. Roy Campbell (Harmondsworth, 1951), p. 45. Erotic themes are very frequent in these poems. 29. In the Cornaro Chapel in the church of Santa Maria della Vittoria, Rome. 30. The Blessed Ludovica Albertoni in the church of San Francesco a Ripa, Rome. For some illustrations, see R. Wittkower, Bernini (London, 1997), pp. 82–87. 31. For a more detailed defence of Bernini’s approach, see my God and Grace of Body (Oxford, 2007), pp. 41–46. 32. Ibid., pp. 46–56. 33. M. T. Harris (ed.), Brigitta of Sweden: Life and Selected Revelations (New York, 1990), p. 205 (7th Book of Revelations, ch. 22). 34. For discussion, see L. Steinberg, The Sexuality of Christ in Renaissance Art and in Modern Oblivion (Chicago, 1996). 35. A pattern established as early as his Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion of 1944, seen by Bacon as so significant that he destroyed all his earlier work. 36. For example, M. Quenot, The Icon: Window on the Kingdom (London, 1992), pp. 72–83, esp. p. 80. 37. The Gero Crucifix in Cologne from 970 is often taken to be the first example, but even so parallels are rare until a century later. 38. For punning on the two forms of lifting up, see, for example, John, iii, 14–15. For the shout, xix, 30; the common English translation ‘it is finished’ is altogether too weak for the Greek perfect tense in tetelestai (‘all has been accomplished’). 39. The term Christus Victor was first coined by the Swedish theologian Gustaf Aulén in his book of the same name (1931).

38 The Body and the Arts 40. Grünewald’s ‘Crucifixion’ dates from 1516; Raphael’s (now in the National Gallery in London) from 1503. Raphael’s approach was heavily influenced by that of his teacher, Perugino, in Perugino’s Galitzin Triptych of 1485. 41. Although theologians subsequently developed these complementary metaphors into often competing theories, the more recent trend is to concede complementarity once more: for example, The Doctrine Commission of the Church of England, The Mystery of Salvation (London, 1995), pp. 102–119, where eight stories are identified. 42. ‘My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?’: Mark, xv, 34; Matt, xxvii, 46. Contrast Ps, xxii, 1 with v, 21b–31. 43. For further analysis, see my ‘Anselm on Atonement’ in B. Davies and B. Leftow (eds), The Cambridge Companion to Anselm (Cambridge, 2004), pp. 279–302, esp. pp. 290–293. 44. For more detailed consideration of which factors led to the change, see my Tradition and Imagination (Oxford, 1999), pp. 352–358. 45. For illustration, P. Demouy et al., Reims: La catédrale (Paris, 2001), no. 80. 46. Seen most obviously in the growth of the doctrine of Purgatory: explored in J. Le Goff, The Birth of Purgatory (London, 1984). 47. Strictly speaking, never the official position of the Church, for which there was only one original bloody sacrifice repeatedly re-offered. But confusion was perhaps inevitable, given miracles such as Bolsena (recorded by Raphael on the walls of the Stanza d’Eliodoro). 48. Although this stress on divine identification is not a biblical idea: see my Tradition and Imagination, pp. 358–362. 49. For de Foucauld, H. Laperinne, The Sword and the Cross (London, 2004), for example, pp. 152, 205; for Poulenc, R. D. E. Burton, Francis Poulenc (Bath, 2002), pp. 95–101. 50. For example, C. Bynum, Holy Fast and Holy Feast: The Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women (Berkeley, 1987), esp. pp. 189–244. 51. From the concluding chapter of Augustine’s City of God (XXII, 30), trans. H. Bettenson (Harmondsworth, 1972), pp. 1087–1088. 52. Table Talk, pp. 328–329 (no. 485). 53. Isaiah, liii, 2–3 (RSV). 54. For example, Origen, Contra Celsum, 6.75. 55. See my discussion in God and Grace of Body, pp. 210–212. 56. From a sermon preached on 23 November 1879: text available in W. H. Gardner (ed.), Gerard Manley Hopkins: A Selection of Poetry and Prose (Harmondsworth, 1953), pp. 136–142, esp. pp. 137, 139. 57. I Cor, xv, 35–50. 58. ‘Thanksgivings for the Body,’ lines 42–48, 462–463 in A. Bradford (ed.), Thomas Traherne: Selected Poetry and Prose (London, 1991), pp. 169–183, esp. pp. 170, 181.

3 The Smoke of the Soul: Anatomy, Medical Spirits and the Rete Mirabile: 1538–1643 Richard Sugg

The history of the soul seems to be as old as the history of literature itself. In the Vedas, and in the books later categorized as the Christian Old Testament, there is a sense of a vital principle at once continuous with breath, yet exceeding the ordinary limitations of the material world.1 In the primal event of Genesis, when Yahweh blew his ruach into Adam, he made him into a living being.2 For Christianity, which significantly altered Hebrew notions of divine and human ‘spirit’, this meant that God had instilled a soul into Adam, and thereby quickened him into life by essentially unifying body and soul. This essay considers two aspects of body–soul relations in the earlymodern period. The first is the very basic issue of body–soul unity. In Christian thought, the body was emphatically material and perishable, the soul immaterial and immortal. Potentially, then, the actual joining of these two entities was problematic. In the Aristotelian theology of thinkers such as Thomas Aquinas, this issue was effectively flattened down and controlled by purely textual and theoretical formulae. In a famous definition, the Aquinan soul was ‘in the whole body and in each part thereof’ – or, to paraphrase bluntly, ‘everywhere and nowhere’.3 But when the human interior came to be examined closely by anatomists such as Andreas Vesalius and his successors, theory increasingly conflicted with the practical realities of this complex organism. As well as raising difficult questions about the exact site of the soul, anatomy subtly but vitally materialized a once more safely theoretical body–soul relation in a variety of intriguing ways. Along with this primary question of body–soul unity in a proto-scientific context, I want, secondly, to show how human physiology had far more in common with Genesis than with any broadly modern notions of complex biochemistry or electrical impulse. In the widest sense, this discussion concerns the relations between embodiment and consciousness. More precisely, it helps us to sharpen our 39

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focus on certain details of that relationship in a still largely pre-scientific milieu. And the discussion is a literary one in two important ways. First, a fuller knowledge of body–soul relations helps us to understand numerous literary depictions of consciousness which would otherwise be relatively opaque. Second, we find that – just because the relationship is such a delicate and problematic one – it is in the creative detail of precise literary moments that the distinctive possibilities and dangers of this area are most vividly exposed.

The basic model Stated very simply, the Graeco-Christian idea of both body–soul unity and general physiology involved the blood and the three basic organs: liver, heart and brain. Although the blood carried the four humours in varying proportions, it was itself relatively sluggish. The vital principle of consciousness and activity was the ‘spirits’ of the organism, the most nimble and rarefied part of the blood, mixed with air, and continually darting rapidly through the body, especially via the arteries. The Classical anatomist, Claudius Galen (AD131–c.200), had conceived of a progressive refinement of spirits. Food turned into blood, and blood into spirits. The spirits themselves then ascended from the liver, to the heart, and up into the brain. But before they reached this last organ, they had been vigorously refined by a structure which seemed artfully designed for that purpose. In the brains of the sheep, oxen and Barbary apes which he dissected, Galen found a complex and tortuously enmeshed plexus of veins and arteries. He termed this the rete mirabile, the ‘admirable’ or ‘wonderful’ net. In fact, the structure exists only in certain animals, and not in humans. Galen himself almost certainly interpreted the rete chiefly in relation to physiological purposes. Ironically, Christianity would later come to see it as an emphatically human organ, and as the bodily organ most closely concerned with joining the perishable body to the immortal soul.

The early-modern rete mirabile The rete appears to have survived for so long for two reasons. First, it had a quasi-sacred role. Second, a newly vigorous empirical attitude to dissection was needed to challenge the canonical theories of Galen himself. The religious status of the rete prompted certain Renaissance anatomists to identify substitutes, such as the cavernous sinus. Yet this measures only 1 cm by 2 cm, and after death collapses further, so that a halogen lamp is needed to dissect it.4 In 1538, in the third of his Tabulae Sex – a set of plates produced for his notably conservative tutor, Johann Guinter – Vesalius plainly reproduced a slightly stylized version of the net. In 1543, in his own work, De Fabrica, he again displayed it in conspicuous and distinctive form. Now,

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however, he openly stated that ‘I have here set them [the arteries below the dura mater] out lest any think I do not know the difference between those animals and man’.5 As will be seen, the results of this supposed refutation were ironic, to say the least. Even Vesalius himself, though, may not have been as wholly freed from this anatomical chimaera as he claims. Why, after all, go to the considerable trouble of drawing and printing the animal rete at all in a work on human anatomy? Was there, in fact, a faint reluctance to abandon something that had so strong a hold on both lay and medical imaginations? This edge of ambivalence is more thoroughly illustrated by the peculiar sleight of hand that Vesalius employed in his dissections of the brain (until, it seems, at least 1540).6 Looking back on these in De Fabrica he states: I myself cannot wonder enough at my own stupidity and too great trust in the writings of Galen and other anatomists; yes I, who so much laboured in my love for Galen that I never undertook to dissect a human head in public without that of a lamb or ox at hand, so as to supply what I could in no way find in that of man, and to impress it on the spectators, lest I be charged with failure to find that plexus so universally familiar by name. For the soporal arteries quite fail to produce such a ‘plexus reticularis’ [rete mirabile] as that which Galen recounts!7 The only justification for this procedure would seem to be that the lamb’s or ox’s head acted as a kind of ‘magnifying glass’ to amplify the less visible structure in the human head. Odd and illegitimate as such a strategy may now appear (if it was very small, or too small, why not just admit that?) it does fit with the transitional nature of Vesalius’s period, and with the ongoing contradictions and peculiarities surrounding the rete. Vesalius’s own precise words confirm that sense of transition and uncertainty. He talks not, for example, of his ‘cowardice’ but of his ‘stupidity’: his actions were those of one unsure of his own mind, not of a timid pragmatist. Again, the desire to ‘impress’ the spectators may well correspond to the awe naturally provoked by the ‘net’, and certainly matches the scenes of near-riot implied by one spectator at Vesalius’s dissections of the brain.8 Similar uncertainty and paradox surrounded the rete in and after the lateElizabethan importation of Continental anatomy by English physicians and surgeons. As early as 1578, the Queen’s surgeon, John Banister, followed the lead of Vesalius’s eminent successor, Realdo Columbo (1516–1569), by substituting the more impressive choroid plexuses of the third ventricle for the older rete.9 Even this shift of position was problematic: ‘Columbus boldly affirmeth this (if it be any where at all) to be the marvellous net’.10 With still greater ambiguity, Randle Cotgrave’s 1611 Dictionary of the French and English Tongues first gives, under ‘Rets, a net’, a quite careful description of a ‘certain narrow skin in the head (made of a part of th’artery carotid) which


disposes itself into the form of a net’, before admitting, conversely, that ‘this net is hardly found in man’s head’. A similar dualism occurs across the two versions of Helkiah Crooke’s Microcosmographia. In the full 1615 edition of this monumental anatomy textbook, the rete is pictured, but the text states that it is ‘so small in man that a good eye can hardly discern it’. Elsewhere in the same work, however, we are told that ‘this net ... is not like a simple net, but as if you should lay many fishers’ nets one above another’. It is admirable, moreover, because ‘the replications of one are tied to the replications of another so that you cannot separate the nets asunder’.11 The seeming contradiction between a structure almost invisible to the human eye, and one permitting of such detailed (and, crucially, wondering) description may have arisen from Crooke’s opportunistic use of two different sources for his syncretic work: the influential French anatomists, Caspar Bauhin (1560–1624) and André du Laurens were, respectively, supportive and dismissive of the original, Galenic rete mirabile.12 While the 1615 Microcosmographia was itself internally confusing, a further layer of obfuscation was added by the abridged, largely pictorial version of the work which followed in 1616. In another (though not yet final) irony, a redrawing of Vesalius’s net of 1543 appeared, but now – with Crooke’s work compressed to illustrations and labels – the original caveat disappeared, leaving a bland and potentially misleading description of the pictured net.13 A more responsible and empirically rigorous stance may have been expected from William Harvey. Yet his lecture notes simply recapitulate the oldest, Galenic, descriptions of a structure deriving from the carotid artery, and note the differing opinions of Vesalius and Bauhin without judgement.14 Harvey’s surprisingly unassertive attitude may indicate cautious respect for the religious issues at stake, or genuine professional hesitancy in the face of so many polemical views. Whatever the case, his own ambivalence seems a very close reflection of the more widespread uncertainty surrounding body–soul relations at this time. One interesting consequence of the temporarily fluid state of opinion on the issue was that the new empirical dimension of the human soul was for some not a cause only of anxiety, but also of excitement. Here was an actual bodily structure in which the raw stuff of the blood was refined into an instrument of the soul. As the body itself gained in empirical immediacy, so too did the rete mirabile. In a situation broadly comparable to locating the original Garden of Eden, or identifying the Turin shroud, both professional anatomists and interested laypeople now had a variety of tangible, visible corporeal analogues to perhaps the most sacred linkage between the human and divine: one could, as it were, all but touch the immortal soul. In 1540, Vesalius had seemingly verified the existence of vital and animal spirit in heart and brain respectively, by noting that after death it was found there, condensed into water, in dissective specimens.15

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Three other references to the site of the soul further nuance and problematize the status of the wonderful net in the earlier seventeenth century. Speaking at Westminster on 25 March 1610, the preacher Alexander Chapman illustrates the devious subtleties of Roman Catholic doctrine by explaining how, Anatomists do write, that in the brain of man, there is a rete mirabile, an admirable net, that is, a heap and clod of arteries, that for the many windings, and turnings, and intricate infoldings, can not be anatomized; and so indeed, as if this of the body were for to signify that of the mind; in the brain, and the wit, and the wisdom of man, there is a rete mirabile, an admirable net, a heap and clod of manifold infolded subtlties; that for the windings and turnings, and intricate devices, cannot be anatomized; with which admirable net, we do catch the poor fish and fowl that we do deal withal: of these it is, I exhort you to repent.16 Chapman’s highly unusual metaphor is intriguing for three reasons. First, he was in fact preaching shortly before an Easter which fell on 8 April. The annual anatomy, shifting with Lent and Easter, depended on specimens derived from the executions following the Lent assizes, and it appears that, just around this time, certain preachers were beginning to acknowledge a kind of ‘dissecting season’: a period shortly before, during and after the yearly public dissection. Although the exact date of this in each year would have been difficult to predict save at short notice, the anatomies for which we have dates occurred between one month and two weeks before Easter, therefore locating Chapman’s remarks well within the dissecting season. Second, the passage typifies the sense of wonder so often evident, or at least implied, in descriptions of the rete. A little ironically, Chapman uses the anatomical vehicle of the soul to emphasize the negative complexity of Catholic sophistry. Nevertheless, he broadly echoes Crooke’s faintly dazzled evocation of the rete’s ‘möbius strip’ entanglement (‘the replications of one are tied to the replications of another so that you cannot separate the nets asunder’).17 In doing so, he confirms the impression that the wonderful net was fascinating not simply because of what it did, but also because, in its original Galenic form, it actually looked sufficiently impressive to perform a kind of alchemical operation. This operation, crucially, was a physiological process, occurring in actual space – and perhaps under pressure – rather than a dryly abstract event, as set out in Aquinan theology. Hence the clear reluctance of both anatomists and laypeople simply to accept some more-or-less convincing substitute in the human head. It was difficult to let go of something so appropriate to this tantalizing juncture between human and divine, mortal and immortal: a space which, like alchemy itself, was necessarily a place of the mind as much as a physiological entity. Compounded of usually unstated


aesthetic and psychological preferences, as well as of functional requirements, the post-Vesalian rete had an increasingly ghostly status, enjoying a strange afterlife by virtue of religious necessity and religious fantasy. The durability of this chimaera, however, while explicable in these ways, has another odd quality which partly conflicts with the impression of alchemical extension and complexity. For a third feature of Chapman’s metaphor is precisely that the rete ‘can not be anatomized’. This problem is set out, a little later, by Crooke: the early statement of it here may well be another argument for Chapman’s having attended anatomies in 1610 or before. Moreover, the most popular drawing of the net was indeed curiously unitary and compact. Without strictly misrepresenting the animal structure, Vesalius and others seemed implicitly to prefer a perspective which gave the rete a subtly iconic status. Putting it crudely, most renderings of it look strangely like a creature, rather than an ‘organ’, or a mere cluster of veins and arteries: almost, at first glance, like a heart with a single, appropriately animate eye in its centre.18 Just over ten years later, John Donne seems to have followed Banister and others in abandoning the rete altogether. Contrasting the body’s great capacities for blood and urine (‘pottles and gallons’) with its spiritual receptacles, he complains in a sermon of 8 April 1621 that these latter, the ‘ventricles of heart and brain’, are ‘not thimbles’. In terms of the brain, these ventricles would seem to be the choroid plexuses. In this passage, Donne (who, like Chapman, was speaking during the dissecting season) again refers to anatomy. Where Chapman had indirectly implied a resistance to dissective probing of this sacred structure, Donne also signals his discontent at the way in which medical enquiry had destabilized the traditional interface of body and soul. From the relative minuteness of these ‘thimbles’ he goes on to infer that finally the ‘mind’ is something which ‘no anatomy, no dissection hath discovered to us’.19 Here there seems to be both a faint disappointment, and a mingled air of defiance, as if Donne effectively thrusts an ultimate mystery beyond the hard point of the dissector’s scalpel. The third instance nominally derives from the realm of professional anatomy. In 1623, the occultist and physician, Robert Fludd (1574–1637) published his esoteric Triple Anatomy. Here we see a rete specially redrawn by Theodore de Bry, and described unproblematically in terms of traditional position and function.20 Given Fludd’s notably animistic brand of theology, it seems that the rete, in his hands, has become a self-conscious badge of philosophical identity. Its very inclusion, and especially the deliberate new drawing, suggest a faintly defiant esoteric gesture on his part. The status of the body–soul link once again appears intriguingly ambiguous. Fludd was a close friend of William Harvey, and seems to have been actively anatomizing in the 1620s.21 For all that, later developments confirm the sense that the wonderful net is now shifting from being a physiological to a psychological entity, increasingly overloaded in terms of aesthetics and

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religious value, and undermined in terms of its original form, position and function.

Spirits It was a fundamental and longstanding tenet of Galenic medicine and Christian theology that blood was somehow refined into spirits. In the early seventeenth century, the long-accepted site of this refinement had been radically challenged. The discontent that situation could produce was expressed overtly by Donne in an undated letter to his friend Henry Goodyer. Just as princes travailed with long and wasteful war descend to such conditions of peace as they are soon after ashamed to have embraced; so philosophers, and so all sects of Christians, after long disputations and controversies, have allowed many things for positive and dogmatical truths which are not worthy of that dignity. Giving various examples of this slipshod thinking, Donne then adds, ‘I think it falls out thus also in the matter of the soul’. After further considering the problems associated with generation (just when or how is the soul infused into a foetus?) he concludes that ‘there is yet therefore no opinion in philosophy nor divinity so well established as constrains us to believe both that the soul is immortal, and that every particular man hath such a soul’. Although ‘out of the great mercy of our God we do constantly believe’ as much, he is ‘ashamed that we do not also know it by searching further’.22 Never was a letter more badly in need of a date. In broad terms, we can certainly see that impulse for ‘searching further’ as a product of post-Vesalian anatomical culture. But one is more precisely inclined to feel that Donne made this statement before his sermon of 1621, when he seemed to admit that anatomy was less suited to aid this search than he had once hoped. It also seems reasonable to assume that he may have expressed his wish before Crooke’s publication, and before Harvey gave dissection greater prominence by taking up the post of public anatomy lecturer in 1616. Spiritual physiology The word ‘spirits’ is itself potentially misleading for a modern culture in which ‘spirit’ tends to be defined as something vague and otherworldly. For Donne and his peers, spirits were dynamic, tangible and real. Despite the recurrent air of danger which hovered about body–soul relations in this period, we find certain writers insisting very definitely on the exact association of blood, spirits and soul. Discussing the heart in 1621, Robert Burton notes that the left side ‘hath the form of a cone, and is the seat of life: which as a torch doth oil, draws blood unto it, begetting of it spirits and fire’. Accordingly, ‘as fire is in a torch, so are spirits in the blood’.23 A few years


earlier, in 1607, the Jacobean minister Thomas Walkington had gone further, noting succinctly that ‘in the elements consists the body, in the body the blood, in the blood the spirits, in the spirits soul’.24 At the same time, in a world where Harvey’s attempts to establish the circulation of the blood were fiercely resisted until around the midseventeenth century, spirits were required to do a lot of physiological work.25 As Shakespeare implies in Sonnet 129, referring to ‘th’ expense of spirit in a waste of shame’, spirits were integral to sexual activity, both responsible for producing an erection and being present in semen in order to transmit the soul into the embryo. Spirits were no less vital to the period’s idea of vision. They flitted down the optic nerves between the eyes and the brain. Some even believed that they could pass out of the eyes into the body of another. The idea of ‘specular contagion’ meant that you could in fact catch the plague simply from the glance of a sick person. Witches were held to ‘fascinate’ their victims demonically by sight alone, projecting malign spirits through the subject’s eyes and then into their heart.26 Some time in or before 1626, Francis Bacon asserted that the malicious or envious ‘sideways glance’ was especially dangerous, because spirits could be shot from the eye more forcefully at this kind of angle.27 Set against such beliefs, the old notion of lovers exchanging spirits by the gaze alone becomes far more empirically plausible. If we are still in doubt as to the tangible reality of spirits, we might want to recall how Gertrude describes the terrified Hamlet, as he watches the Ghost that she herself cannot see in act 3, scene 4: Alas, how is’t with you, That you do bend your eye on vacancy, And with th’incorporal air do hold discourse? Forth at your eyes your spirits wildly peep, And, as the sleeping soldiers in th’alarm, Your bedded hair, like life in excrements, Start up and stand on end. O gentle son, Upon the heat and flame of thy distemper Sprinkle cool patience. Whereon do you look? All of us have seen what we usually describe as the ‘flashing eyes’ of fear or anger. But here that sharpening of visual ‘ex-pression’ is both literalized and precisely attributed to a rush of spirits from the optic nerves. Shakespeare may here be departing slightly from conventional physiology in order to emphasize the impact of what Hamlet sees, as, in theory, all the spirits fled inwards at moments of fear, in order to sustain the heart. As the biblical scholar Joseph Mede explains, some time before 1638: ‘if the heart be in fear or danger, all the blood and spirits in the body will forsake the outward parts, and run to preserve and succour it’.28

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Had we but world enough and time, we could indeed see innumerable further illustrations of Bacon’s belief that, in human physiology, ‘the spirits do (in effect) all’.29 We might just briefly note his own explanation of bruising, which he attributed more to the congealing of spirits than to blood.30 Around the same time, we find Burton recalling (probably apocryphal) tales of how ‘to discern which [spirits] the better ... Vesalius the anatomist was wont to cut men up alive’.31 As Katharine Park has shown, in northern Europe especially, there existed a quite widespread belief in the powers of the ‘animate corpse’. A body that was apparently dead in terms of the law and of consciousness nevertheless had a residual, slowly fading spiritual potency which might last for up to a year. One supposed proof of this was the longstanding notion that a murdered corpse would spontaneously bleed in the presence of its killer. For the medical iconoclast, Paracelsus (1493–1541), these spirits were the vital principle in corpse medicine. Although attitudes to the medical use of human body parts varied, Paracelsian thought held the spirits responsible for the power of such drugs, and insisted that, if all physicians were truly aware of this, no criminal corpse would remain on the gibbet longer than three days.32 Fludd, who used anatomical specimens to prepare this kind of therapy, claimed emphatically that he felt a kind of magnetic attraction vibrating from the spirits of a corpse.33 Spiritual dangers These examples should already have suggested that human physiology could look and feel very different in a period when spirits did ‘in effect, all’. What were the pitfalls of this situation, as anatomical enquiry increasingly materialized and demystified the human body? One general issue concerns the ongoing debate as to the exact location of the soul. Galenic theory clearly favoured the brain, and it appears that, from the late seventeenth century onwards, anatomists in general tended to site the soul in this organ. But how much authority did medicine have in this area? It seems that, for many Christians, the brain was not even responsible for thought. Grounding their beliefs on Scripture, where ‘heart’ appears 826 times, and ‘brain’ not once, such thinkers could reasonably see the heart as the seat of thought. At one level, the Bible frequently referred to the ‘thinking heart’.34 Moreover, as the soul was finally the key element of ‘mind’ in this period, those who held the heart to be the seat of the soul needed no further physiological support to underpin the intellectual powers of this organ. This intriguing, now largely forgotten priority of the heart raises two vital points. One, which can only be touched upon here, involves a more universal sense of consciousness. Where do we feel that we are? Just a moment’s reflection shows us one reason for early-modern uncertainties about brain and heart. These two organs do indeed seem to vie for dominance in terms of our personal and emotional lives. But it may be that we now usually ‘feel’

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our thinking selves to be in our brains, at least partly because the brain has assumed an increasingly dominant role in consciousness since its investigation by the pioneering Restoration anatomist Thomas Willis. Physiological consciousness and our beliefs about the nature of physiology are peculiarly hard to disentangle.35 The second point again involves that lack of intellectual consistency or rigour regretted in Donne’s letter to Henry Goodyer. The Galenic model of three levels of spirit in three organs had a convincing explanatory power. In the liver there was a soul of growth, and natural spirits. In the heart there was a soul of sense, and vital spirits. Finally, after refinement through the rete mirabile, animal spirits (from ‘anima’, Latin for ‘soul’ or ‘mind’) were produced in the brain. In this way humanity was seen to possess the qualities of both plant and animal life, along with a rational faculty and an immortal soul. But those who fixed the immortal soul in the heart (following Aristotle, Scripture, or both together) threw this ascending hierarchical model out of balance. Humans now could not be distinguished so clearly from animals, and the vital spirits had not obviously been rarefied into their finest, cerebral state. Despite this, the frequent reference to ‘vital spirits’ as the most basic principle of life shows that many people gave ultimate spiritual priority to the heart rather than the brain. For some less empirically minded or less rigorous thinkers, it may have been possible to suspend judgement on such matters. After all, spirits themselves clearly must exist, as basic motor functions could hardly be explained otherwise. But this kind of stance must have become harder to maintain as anatomy in general tightened its influence, and Harvey’s theory in particular gained wider acceptance. It was surely no accident that, near the end of his long life, Harvey himself shifted emphatically from his ambivalent position on the rete mirabile. Attacking those older anatomists who had adhered to the primacy of vital or animal spirits, Harvey insisted in 1651 that ‘nowhere have they demonstrated that there is such a spirit ... or that it performs greater works than blood alone could do’. On the other hand, ‘we indeed, who in our investigations use sense as our guide, have not been able to find any such spirit anywhere’. For the older Harvey, ‘blood, not spirit, is the common bond of body and soul; and [that] by which, as a vehicle, the soul influences all parts of the body’.36 Such was the view of the increasingly irascible Harvey in a rapidly changing intellectual and political climate, with the country still traumatized by the effects of Civil War and his royal patron, Charles I, now dead. What is perhaps more remarkable is to find expressions of this pragmatic, reductionist stance in the late Elizabethan or early Tudor periods. In 1594, Thomas Nashe’s ‘unfortunate traveller’, Jack Wilton, reflected on the horrors awaiting him as a prospective anatomical (or perhaps vivisective) specimen. Having been sold to a Jewish anatomist, Wilton is then imprisoned,

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stripped, inspected, punctured, and generally treated with a remarkably proto- clinical detachment. One fear especially haunts Jack in this unhappy time: I called to mind the assertion of some philosophers, who said the soul was nothing but blood ... what a thing were this, if I should let my soul fall and break his neck into a basin. I had but a pimple rose with heat in that part of the vein where they use to prick, and I fearfully misdeemed it was my soul searching for passage.37 Who were these ‘philosophers’? They could have been the Stoics, who held that the soul died with the body. Or they could have been natural philosophers, studying blood in an empirical and anatomical context. Around the mid-sixteenth century, the notorious heretic, Michael Servetus insisted quite openly that ‘the divine spirit is in the blood, and the divine spirit is itself the blood, or the sanguineous spirit’.38 Servetus had been trained in anatomy by Guinter, who praised the Spaniard’s dissective skills as second only to those of his more famous pupil, Vesalius.39 Along with a heretical view of the Trinity that caused him to be burnt at the stake by Jean Calvin in 1553, Servetus is now also known for having discovered the pulmonary circulation of the blood. When he adds the phrase ‘or the sanguineous spirit’, one strongly suspects that he is not being cautious, but simply placing blood and spirit on the same plane as two equally viable empirical possibilities. For all the seeming flippancy of Wilton’s fears, he seems to push the identity of soul and blood yet further. The former can be spied, he imagines, in one exact pimple of a vein. Again, this is partly whimsical. But it cannot be entirely so, in a culture where the precise location of the soul was a very real subject of medical and theological enquiry. Perhaps most of all, the soul wryly imagined as ready to ‘fall and break his neck into a basin’ brilliantly encapsulates the changing relations between matter and spirit. Here we have a soul effectively perishing from damage to its body, rather than a body that dies from the loss of its immortal soul. Just over fifteen years later, Beaumont and Fletcher have Evadne confront the scheming King in The Maid’s Tragedy.40 Wholly deaf to the sovereign’s fearful blandishments (‘thou art gentle / And wert not meant thus rugged ...’) she tells him: Stir nothing but your tongue, and that for mercy To those above us; by whose lights I vow, Those blessed fires that shot to see our sin, If thy hot soul had substance with thy blood, I would kill that too, which being past my steel, My tongue shall reach ...41


We do not need to see the authors as being guilty of atheism or heresy to appreciate that these lines are highly significant as a particular expression of rage. If orthodox theories of the soul needed an extra twist of the imaginative screw to produce such a fantasy, the shift was now a slight one, rather than a violent wrench. Even Evadne’s reference to ‘thy hot soul’ is telling, implying both the hottest, most vigorously refined spirits of the brain (or heart) and the raw sensuous immediacy of hot blood itself. Many of those who saw The Maid’s Tragedy at the Blackfriars theatre must also have fallen under the spell of John Webster’s lurid rhetoric, when The Duchess of Malfi was being performed both there and at the Globe from 1612.42 Enraged with voyeuristic jealousy, Ferdinand imagines in lurid detail the supposed sexual misdeeds of his sister, his fury presently rising to wild notions of revenge: I would have their bodies Burn’t in a coal-pit, with the ventage stopped, That their cursed smoke might not ascend to Heaven. (2.5, 67–69) Compressed as these lines are, we cannot quite be sure if ‘smoke’ means simply the smoke of burnt bodies, or more precisely implies the hot spirituous vapour of the immortal soul. Yet there is no mistaking the basic thrust of this vengeful hope. Although Ferdinand imagines trapping the lovers’ souls rather than obliterating them, the underlying notion is that explored by Nashe, and (more directly) by Fletcher. Souls are presented either as equivalent with matter, or subordinate to it. Indeed, it may not be too fanciful to see Webster’s lines as a neat emblem of the changing relations between matter and spirit, in a climate where the latter is ever more oppressed and marginalized by the wonders of the interior body. That kind of relationship is forcibly underscored by the implicit attitudes of both Evadne and Ferdinand. The most awful curse they can conceive is not to wish their enemies’ souls damned in hell, but to wish them to be destroyed outright, or trapped in a makeshift earthly grave. A little more subtly, we also find that in each case they effectively seek to wrest ultimate vengeance from the hands of God. Another way of putting this is to say that, rather like the more daring anatomists of the era, they are seeking to take the soul out of the hands of God. Taken on their own, those three remarkably avant-garde imaginings must be seen as significant products of the growing friction between medicine and theology. Yet we can also see them as educated versions of those popular, non-literate beliefs which by definition are so tantalizingly inaccessible to literary scholarship. As Piero Camporesi has pointed out, Roman Catholic theologians of the late sixteenth century sought to discourage the kind of idea evoked by Webster’s stage Cardinal, warning the Italian peasantry that

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they should not ‘make an opening in the roof of the house, in the belief that otherwise the soul would not escape’ from a dying body.43 Centuries later, the anthropologist Juliet du Boulay recorded the vampire beliefs and customs that still survived among the Greek mountain villagers of Ambéli in the early 1970s. When a supposed revenant was effortfully destroyed with a corrosive mixture of boiling oil and vinegar, it was understood that the person’s soul had ‘burst’ and been utterly, irrevocably destroyed. ‘Nothing avails ... to undo the harm that has been done, and henceforward no candles are lit for the soul ... the long sequence of memorial customs lapses utterly’.44 While further data of this kind is necessarily hard to come by, such beliefs hardly seem wildly eccentric when set against the educated imaginings of early-modern writers. If someone had repeated to a Christian farm-labourer the formula stated in 1607 by Walkington (‘in the blood the spirits, in the spirits soul’) it would not have been that unreasonable for them to reach a conclusion very similar to that fantasized by the enraged Evadne. Clearly, then, the changing balance of medical and theological authority had already made itself felt some decades before Harvey so flatly denounced the idea of spirits as a bond between body and soul. Three further views of soul and spirit from the same period offer us similarly definite and radical attitudes to the longstanding conundrum of body–soul relations. It was also in 1651 that Thomas Hobbes cited the classic theological definition of the soul as ‘an incorporeal substance’. Perhaps with a certain caution, he did not refer openly to the soul in this case. But in using the phrase as a glaring case of linguistic doubletalk, the kind of error in which ‘men make a name of two names, whose significations are contradictory and inconsistent’, Hobbes makes his attitude clear enough.45 By implication, ‘incorporeal substance’ is not a definition of the soul, but a purely meaningless coinage. A decade before, René Descartes had taken a still more cautious approach to the physiological side of this problem. After making his own careful anatomical investigations of the brain, Descartes concluded that the pineal gland was both the seat of the soul and the point at which spirits reached their state of greatest refinement. In a letter of January 1640, he admits that his choice has been motivated substantially by questions of physiological suitability.46 Two other, less obvious implications can also be drawn from Descartes’ decision. A small, homogeneous, pulpous unit (named because of its similarity to a pine nut), the pineal gland was conveniently immune to further debate or probing. Second, it could hardly have been further from the tortuous entanglements of the Galenic rete mirabile. That older structure had a complexity which paralleled the laborious transformations of alchemical apparatus, while the pineal gland offered just one brief unit of matter. The quasi-alchemical distillation of material spirit into immortal soul had now been shifted from an extended process to an immediate switch. Between these two figures we find a more obscure writer whose stance was the most radical of all. In 1643, the revolutionary thinker and activist

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Richard Overton published his intensely heretical work, Man’s Mortality. As Overton points out, the soul is understood to be a kind of aerial substance. If so, then it is finally a substance, however rarefied. He imagines, therefore, that a man is put into a wholly impermeable sealed vessel and suffocated. The result, of course, is that the ‘aerial body’ of the soul itself would remain trapped within the vessel after his death. ‘He so martyred,’ Overton drily notes, ‘would have an ill-favoured Paradise ...’.47 Almost thirty years before the official founding of the Royal Society, we find Ferdinand’s fantasy of burned bodies served up ice-cold. With the hard, unwavering eye of a Restoration scientist, and the controlled conditions of the vacuum chamber, Overton experiments on the traditional Christian soul, and finds it to be just one more empirically invalid hypothesis.48

Notes For advice and encouragement on various stages of this research I would like to thank Paolo Crivelli, the late Inga-Stina Ewbank, Gerald Hammond, Paul Hammond, Paul Jump, Louise Leigh, Judi Loach, Jane Macnaughton, Chris Marlow, Ulrika Maude, Richard Moncrieff, Barbara Ravelhofer, Corinne Saunders and Keir Waddington. 1. On the Vedas, see The Rig Veda: An Anthology, trans. Wendy Doniger O’Flaherty (London, 1981), pp. 47–49, 71, 81. 2. On ruach and other Hebrew terms broadly linked to Christian ‘soul’ and ‘spirit’, see H. Wheeler Robinson, ‘Hebrew Psychology’, in The People and the Book: Essays on the Old Testament, ed. A. S. Peake (Oxford, 1925), pp. 353–382; W. E. Staples, ‘The “Soul” in the Old Testament’, The American Journal of Semitic Languages and Literatures, 44(3) (1928), pp. 145–176. 3. Summa Contra Gentiles, trans. the Fathers of the English Dominican Republic, 5 vols (London, 1923), II, p. 180. 4. I am indebted to Dr James Shaw, of Edinburgh University medical school, for his help on this and many other points of detail. 5. Vesalius quoted from Charles Singer, Vesalius on the Human Brain (Oxford, 1952), p. 116. 6. Andreas Vesalius’ First Public Anatomy at Bologna – an eyewitness account by Baldasar Heseler, together with his notes on Matthaeus Curtius’ Lectures on Anatomia Mundini, ed. and trans. Ruben Eriksson, Lychnos Bibliotek, 18 (Almqvist & Wiksells, 1959), p. 219. 7. Singer, 57, citing Bk III. 8. Heseler, 221, 287. 9. John Banister. The History of Man (1578), 96r. 10. Banister, 96r; 96v, italics mine. 11. Microcosmographia, pp. 529, 470. 12. Bauhin, Theatrum Anatomicum (Frankfurt, 1605), p. 609; du Laurens, Historia Anatomica (Paris, 1595), p. 1326. 13. Somatographia Anthropine (1616), Table 2, G8v–Hr. This work is credited to the Scottish physician, Alexander Read. 14. Lectures on the Whole of Anatomy, trans. C. D. O’Malley, F. N. L. Poynter and K. F. Russell (Berkeley, 1961), pp. 228–229. 15. Heseler, p. 235.

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16. Jesuitism Described (1610), E2v. 17. See OED, 1b.: Möbius strip n ... a surface having only one side and one edge, formed by twisting one end of a rectangular strip through 180 degrees and joining it to the other end. 18. See, again, Somatographia Anthropine, Table 2, G8v–Hr. 19. The Complete Sermons of John Donne, ed. George R. Potter and Evelyn M. Simpson, 10 vols (Berkeley, 1953–1962), II, p. 236. 20. Anatomiae Ampitheatrum Effigie Triplici (Frankfurt, 1623), p. 168. 21. On Fludd’s anatomical activities, see Annals of the College of Physicians of London, 5 vols, trans. J. Emberry, S. Heathcote and M. Hellings, 3.1, 188, 30 October 1624. 22. Edmund Gosse, The Life and Letters of John Donne, 2 vols (London: William Heinemann, 1899), vol. 1, pp. 174–176, Mitcham, 9 October. While older editors of the letters believed this to be addressed to Sir Thomas Lucy, it has more recently been seen as written to Donne’s friend Henry Goodyer (see, for example, Ramie Targoff, John Donne, Body and Soul (Chicago, 2008), p. 187. 23. The Anatomy of Melancholy (Oxford, 1621), p. 28. 24. The Optic Glass of Humours (1607), 58v. 25. Published in De Motu Cordis in 1628, Harvey’s anti-Galenic theory met with varying degrees of resistance for many years afterwards (see, for example, Roger French’s entry on Harvey in Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press). 26. See Gianbattista della Porta, Natural Magic, trans. anon. (1658), p. 231. 27. Sylva Sylvarum (1627), p. 251. 28. Works (1664), pp. 235–236. 29. Sylva Sylvarum, p. 31. 30. Sylva Sylvarum, p. 90. 31. Anatomy of Melancholy, p. 23. 32. ‘The Life of the Corpse: Division and Dissection in Late Medieval Europe’, Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences, 50 (1995), pp. 111–132, 116–117. 33. Mosaical Philosophy (1659), p. 248. 34. See, for example, Esther vi, 6; I Kings iii, 9; Acts viii, 22; Luke ix, 47. 35. For a valuable discussion of this and related issues in the seventeenth century, see Scott Manning Stevens, ‘Sacred Heart and Secular Brain’, in The Body in Parts: Fantasies of Corporeality in Early-Modern Europe, ed. David Hillman and Carla Mazzio (London, 1997), pp. 263–282. 36. De Generatione Animalium (1651), cited by D. P. Walker, ‘The Astral Body in Renaissance Medicine’, in Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 21 (1958), pp. 119–134, 130–131 (italics mine). Walker’s examination of what he terms ‘medical spirits’ has been a particularly valuable source of inspiration. 37. The Unfortunate Traveller (1594), in The Works of Thomas Nashe, ed. Ronald B. McKerrow, 5 vols (London: Sidgwick & Jackson, 1910), vol. 2, p. 308. 38. Charles Donald O’Malley, Michael Servetus: A Translation of his Geographical, Medical, and Astrological Writings (Philadelphia, 1953), p. 204. 39. Marian Hillar, The Case of Michael Servetus (1511–1553): The Turning Point in the Struggle for Freedom of Conscience, Texts and Studies in Religion, vol. 74 (Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 1997), p. 226, citing Jean Guinter, Institutiones Anatomicae (Basel, 1539). 40. The first known performance was on 20 May 1613, but it seems possible that the play was staged some time before this, perhaps in 1611, once the disruption of the recent plague outbreak was past. See The Maid’s Tragedy, ed. T. W. Craik, The Revels Plays (Manchester, 1999), pp. 2–3.

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41. 5.1, 84–91. Craik (ibid., 2) agrees with ‘the consensus of modern opinion’ that Fletcher was the author of this scene. 42. See John Webster, The Duchess of Malfi, ed. Kathleen McLuskie and Jennifer Uglow (Bristol, 1989), pp. 3–4. 43. The Magic Harvest: Food, Folklore and Society, trans. Joan Krakover Hall (Polity Press, 1993), p. 14. 44. ‘The Greek Vampire: A Study of Cyclic Symbolism in Marriage and Death’, Man, 17.2 (1982), pp. 219–238 (p. 226). 45. Leviathan (1651), ed. J. C. A. Gaskin (Oxford, 1998), p. 26. 46. Philosophical Letters, ed. and trans. Anthony Kenny (Oxford, 1981), pp. 69–70, 29 January 1640. 47. Man’s Mortality, pp. 12–13. Overton himself twice uses the word ‘anatomize’ as a metaphor in this work (pp. 11, 17). 48. Like other ‘Mortalists’, Overton believed both soul and body to perish at death, and that an individual’s afterlife only began with the general resurrection (see Norman T. Burns, Christian Mortalism from Tyndale to Milton (Harvard, 1972), esp. pp. 27–32; 174–175; 185–187).

4 The Fizziness Business Steven Connor

A mouthful of sweet air You can’t live on air, we sometimes hear, though perhaps we do not always hear the echo in that phrase of Hamlet’s: ‘I eat the air / Promise-crammed.’1 Hamlet is here comparing himself to the chameleon, which in the early seventeenth century some still believed, on the authority of Pliny, Tertullian and others, ate nothing at all, but derived all its nourishment from the air. There are many stories of saints, ascetics and other wholehog abstentionists who have attempted to live on nothing at all. The seventeenth-century Rosicrucian John Heydon, who believed in the efficacy of odours and aromas in calling forth angels and spirits – ‘for truly the spirituall body is very much incrassated by them, and made more gross: for it liveth by vapours, perfumes and the odour of sacrifices’2 – counselled his followers that eating solid food was in fact man’s original sin, and that the pious soul ought to be able to live perfectly well on the aromas rising from a dish of meat placed on the stomach. But there is another way besides inanition of living on air, and this is my burden in what follows. Gaston Bachelard refers in his Air and Dreams to the belief that ‘to fly we need wings less than we need winged substance or wing-like food’, and reminds his readers of the Angel Raphael’s explanation of angelic alimentation in Milton’s Paradise Lost: time may come when men With angels may participate, and find No inconvenient diet, nor too light fare: And from these corporal nutriments perhaps Your bodies may at last turn all to spirit, Improved by tract of time, and winged ascend Ethereal.3 I am going to consider some of the faiths and fancies that ramify from the ambition to consume levity, to cram oneself with vacancy. 55

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Leaven It is hard to appreciate how important processes of fermentation were, and how powerful and far-reaching the metaphor of fermentation was, in other historical periods. Bachelard suggests that fermentation represents the blending of airiness or spirit with the resistance of matter, and thus a spiritualizing of the ‘primary paste’ which is the ideal form of the imagination of matter.4 If human beings blend their energies with matter in forms of primary paste, folding air into earth, then fermentation appears to be the process in which the earth spontaneously moulds or transforms itself. It is not energy applied to matter, but an interior energy that spills or breeds out of matter itself. It is the way in which matter ‘works’. Fermentation is closely associated with processes of transmutation, and this accounts for the centrality of bread and wine in Christianity, as well as for fermented foods and beverages in other religions, such as the soma of Book 9 of the Rig-Veda. While not as common as discoverers of fire, myths of culture-heroes who discovered how to control the processes of fermentation are widespread. For many cultures, the first fermented alcoholic drink is likely to have been a form of mead, which is made by mixing honey with water, and allowing it to ferment for a few days. Honey itself has a kind of airy aspect. The bees who produced it were themselves long believed to have been produced through spontaneous generation (from the blood of oxen), which is a kind of parallel to the process of fermentation. In 1 Samuel xiv, the battle-weary and starving Israelites come upon a wood where honey is miraculously provided: ‘And all they of the land came to a wood; and there was honey upon the ground. And when the people were come into the wood, behold, the honey dropped’ (1 Samuel xiv, 25–26). This seems to associate honey with the manna that feeds the Israelites for forty years in their wanderings from Egypt: in the morning the dew lay round about the host. And when the dew that lay was gone up, behold, upon the face of the wilderness there lay a small round thing, as small as the hoar frost on the ground. And when the children of Israel saw it, they said one to another, It is manna: for they wist not what it was. And Moses said unto them, This is the bread which the LORD hath given you to eat. (Exodus xvi, 13–15). Indeed, the airdropped manna is said to taste ‘like wafers made with honey’ (Exodus 16, 31). A bee plays a decisive part in the account of the primal brewing of beer in the Finnish Kalevala. Rune 20 tells how Osmotar, the woman charged with preparing the beer for a grand wedding, mixes together hops, barley and water, but is unable to make them ferment, and utters the following

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appeal, as rendered in the Hiawatha-rhythms of John Martin Crawford’s translation: ‘What will bring the effervescence, Who will add the needed factor, That the beer may foam and sparkle, May ferment and be delightful?’5 Various magic creatures are produced from splinters and sent off to find the missing ingredient. A squirrel brings fir-cones, a marten gathers the angry foam from the lips of warring bears, but both leave the beer ‘cold and lifeless’. Finally, a honey-bee is generated (by rubbing a pea-pod on the thighs of a young virgin – how else?) and sent far overseas to gather nectar from special flowers and grasses: Osmotar, the beer-preparer, Placed the honey in the liquor; Kapo mixed the beer and honey, And the wedding-beer fermented; Rose the live beer upward, upward, From the bottom of the vessels, Upward in the tubs of birch-wood, Foaming higher, higher, higher, Till it touched the oaken handles, Overflowing all the caldrons; To the ground it foamed and sparkled, Sank away in sand and gravel.6 The working of the ferment not only brings the beer to life, but also incites in it a voice, one of the many dream-identifications between humans and the substances they eat. Battened down within wooden casks, the beer itself begins to sing of its desire for a singer to come and sing its praises: Stronger grew the beer imprisoned In the copper-banded vessels, Locked behind the copper faucets, Boiled, and foamed, and sang, and murmured: ‘If ye do not bring a singer, That will sing my worth immortal, That will sing my praise deserving, I will burst these bands of copper, Burst the heads of all these barrels; Will not serve the best of heroes Till he sings my many virtues.’7


The process of fermentation is highly ambivalent, as it brings together what many cultures have tended to see as opposites: putrefaction and transmutation. Fermenting milk, fruit and sugar all produce rottenness, but also valuable new products – cheese, wine and beer. This ambivalence is concentrated in Christian attitudes towards yeast or leaven. In general, Christianity inherits from Judaism a suspicion of leaven, especially in its use in bread. As Jean Soler has observed, leaven alters the nature of the substances to which it is added, and is thus to be regarded as unclean. It is to be contrasted with salt, which, far from being forbidden, is mandatory in ritual offerings: ‘ye shall burn no leaven, nor any honey, in any offering of the LORD made by fire’ commands Leviticus (Leviticus ii, 11). Where leaven alters (Leviticus ii, 13), salt preserves and consolidates.8 When leaven appears in the New Testament, however, it seems to have more positive associations. Luke xiii, 20–21, for example, reads: ‘Whereunto shall I liken the Kingdom of God? It is like leaven, which a woman took, and hid in three measures of meal, until the whole was leavened.’ In a sermon giving a history of the Church in England, W. E. Scudamore elaborated the parable, seeing in it an intention to figure ‘the effectual working of the Spirit of grace upon a heart submissive to His power’. A point-for-point explication of the analogy between fermentation and the effects of grace follows: The leaven is hidden in the meal, but its presence is soon known by its effects. There is a movement as of life within the fermenting mass: it swells and heaves, and, as if endowed with life indeed, takes to itself the properties of that which acts upon it. Thus is it with an awakened soul under the secret operation of Divine grace. A quickening influence pervades it, subduing all things in it to itself. It is agitated by new desires: it hopes and trembles, and finds no repose until the holy, saving change is wrought, and through grace it hath become gracious.9 Others used etymological evidence to support the positive associations of yeast. E. W. Bullinger alleged a link between yeast and German Geist and related words like ghost and gist, as well as words denoting airy substance or action, like gas and gust, because of a reference he found ‘to the working of some invisible power, like the “power of the air,” exciting internal motion, and producing the effect of foaming or frothing’. He even suggested a link between yeast and Easter, on account of the shared associations with rising.10 However, others made out a different meaning for leaven. Bullinger noted that ‘leaven’ appears to have a positive meaning in only three of the biblical uses of the word – Lev xxiii,17, Amos iv, 4, 5 and Matt xiii, 23. In other places – for example, Galatians v, 9 and 1 Cor v, 6–8 – ‘[t]he work of this leaven is only evil’.11 A more surprising reading of the term was brought forward by Alfred Jenour in an essay of 1855 entitled The Parable of the Leaven

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Explained. Jenour quarrels with the general interpretation of the parable as intimating the general propagation of Christianity throughout the world, making it clear that it is ‘a substance tending to putrefaction and corruption’.12 The term is ‘invariably used as the symbol of moral depravity. It represents a corrupt principle which has the power of diffusing itself, and corrupting that which comes within its influence’.13 However, it is in the alchemical tradition that the idea of fermentation has been developed most fully. Alchemy is sacred materialism: although there were religious forms of alchemy, the practice sought to find in chemistry a substitute field of operations for the spiritual. For the alchemical tradition, there was no wholly unspiritualized matter – nor, for that matter, was there a wholly immaterial notion of spirit. All matter contained within it elements of the gross or earthly, as well as elements of the airy. Many alchemists assumed the existence of a general principle equivalent to the Stoic conception of the pneuma, the informing fire or spirit which runs through the cosmos and, in different degrees of commixture with the colder, grosser elements of earth, accounts for the quality or tenor of all things. We cannot overstate the importance of the notion of composition or texture in this conception of the world: what matters most fundamentally, most formatively, are the relations between the dense and rarefied. For this mode of thought, energy is not a different principle, but rather a rarefied form of matter. Fermentation was the name given to any vigorous chemical reaction, especially one with visible effects of boiling or sizzling (ferment derives from fervere, to boil). Fermentation was thus the general name given to the process whereby material things underwent change. As the anonymous Philosophical Enquiry Into Some of the Most Considerable Phenomena’s of Nature (1715) put it: Fermentation, is that Operation of Nature, which takes place in all natural Productions, in Nutrition, Multiplication, Translation and Reduction of Every Species, and likewise, to improve, and heighten their proper Qualities, and multiply their respective Virtues. This is perform’d by the vital Spirit of the Universe (diffus’d through every Part and Member of the same) by means of an innate Ferment that is proper to every differing Member, of every differing Species, which God in his Projection and Creation of the Deep placed in the very Foundation of every seminal Virtue.14 Fermentation was thought to have two, seemingly contrary, effects. Fermentation dissolved things, breaking down their distinctness: this was often called ‘putrefaction’. But fermentation could also precipitate solid forms out of liquid ones, in which case it was known as ‘digestion’, and thought of not as decomposition but as an in-forming. It is because of this that the separation of bodies and forms can be ascribed to fermentation.


But there was a higher kind of informing that ferments could bring about, in which solid objects, or living beings, could be refined into their own spiritual essences. The most important and philosophically significant of the many misunderstandings of chemical processes in alchemy was the much-repeated doctrine that fermentation released energies or potentials that lie latent in every form of matter. ‘Ferments’, which sometimes mean catalysts, rather than chemical reagents, were believed to bring about their effects in this way. Alchemists often found spiritual analogies in the operations of brewing. The Benedictine monk, Basil Valentine, explained the operations of yeast on beer in his Triumphant Chariot of Antimony of 1604: a little Yest or Ferment is added, which excites an internal motion and Heat in the Beer, so that it is elevated in it self, and (by the help of time) Separation of the dense from the rare, and of the pure from the impure is made; and by this means the Beer acquires a constant virtue in Operating, so that it penetrates and effects all those Ends, for which it was made and brought into use: which before could not have been; because the Spirit, the Operator was hindred, by its own Impurity, from effecting its proper Work.15 Fermentation is thus regarded as the paradoxical process whereby a foreign agent brought into contact with a body releases or develops in that body its own innate or instinct spiritual principle. John Heydon declared that ‘[f]ermentation is when anything is resolved into itself, and is rarified, and ripened: whether it be done by any ferment added to it, or by digestion only’.16 The visible and audible effects of fermentation – warming, hissing, foaming, formation of bubbles and, most of all, the effect of increase in volume, the magical developing of a substance apparently from within itself – seemed to make irresistible the assumption that some inner principle was in course of production.

Concoction It was well known that the fermentation of bread or alcoholic drinks could be retarded by keeping them out of the air. Exposed to the air, by contrast, decomposing matter was quickened by invisible agencies, which were sometimes thought of as airborne ferments (in so far as this doctrine anticipates the discovery of the microscopic spores responsible for fermentation, it is prescient). This connects with the surprisingly long-lived belief in the airy nature of impregnation. The wind was believed to have the power literally to impregnate certain creatures, such as mares and vultures. But, even where the air or wind was not literally responsible, the life-giving principle was held to be airy. Aristotle maintained in his Generation of Animals that

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sperm was infused with pneuma, which both embodied the vital heat of the universe and the formative impulse which enable differentiation, and the movement of the potential into the actual.17 Aristotle closely associated sexual pleasure with the production of this generative principle: ‘The pleasure which accompanies copulation is due to the fact that not only semen but also pneuma is emitted.’18 This caused a certain perplexity, which lasted until the seventeenth century. For if, as seemed plainly apparent, women also experienced pleasure from the sexual act, and also produced emissions, should this not indicate that they too produce a generative or informing principle? Aristotle judges not. As so often, it comes down to eating and a certain kind of indigestion: ‘the female, in fact, is female on account of inability of a sort, viz., it lacks the power to concoct semen out of the final state of the nourishment (this is either blood, or its counterpart in bloodless animals) because of the coldness of its nature’.19 It is the notion of coction which brings together these material processes in the world and the human body. Well into the eighteenth century, the process of ingestion was understood in terms that chime with alchemical and other understandings of (what we would now call) chemical change. This understanding of the nutritive process was almost opposite to that which prevails now. Rather than food being understood as building or sustaining the physical frame of the body, or as providing fuel for its exertions, food was understood primarily in terms of the process of rarefaction. Digestion was thought of as ‘concoction’, a series of heatings or cookings, which separated the purer, or airier constituents of food from its grosser elements. Theories of digestion superimposed on the humoral theory, with its permutable quaternary of hot and cold, dry and moist, a simpler scheme of the gross and the refined, or the solid and the airy. The foods that were most health-giving were those that encouraged the passage of the gross into the ethereal, the progressive refinement of food, into chyle, then humours, then the three orders of spirits – natural, vital and animal. Approved foods tended to be those which were easy to digest, and encouraged attenuation. Dubious or disparaged foods tended to be those which caused sluggishness or putrefaction (which was usually identified with stoppage or obstruction). The concern with venting, preventing or loosening various kinds of clotting or congestion was intense in the medieval and early modern periods, and is never far away in the magical conceptions of the body that still prevail in the modern world. The conviction that the process of digestion involved a kind of rarefaction encouraged a discourse of abstinence. It was important not to clog or burden the body. Indigestion was believed not just to be an inconvenience, but a strain on and danger to the organism, since it distorted or threatened a fundamental principle of its workings. Michael Scot’s Mensa philosophica answered the question ‘What is the Physicians best rule for health?’ with ‘Temperance, avoyding satiety and fulnesse’, and reminded its readers of the

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legendary King Cyrus who ‘never sate downe without a stomacke, nor never rose without an emptinesse’.20 In general, foods which conduced to the production of spirit, rather than the stubborn residues of crudities, or undigested food, were preferred. However, there were good and bad kinds of endogenous air: windiness or flatulence was identified with stoppage rather than attenuation. Foods that opened the bladder, like capers, unstopped the liver, or thinned bile, like rue, or loosened phlegm, were approved. Thus, anise was thought to be good both against flatulence and to prevent vapours rising to the head.21 Aromas were an important part of dietary guidance: the smell of roses, musk, cubebs and camomile were thought to clear the head, as were sage, mustard and pepper. Some advised sleeping with the windows shut, as the night air was cold and damp and unhealthy.22 The Englishmans Docter (1607) advised that ‘Mazed Braines’ were the result of ‘want of vent behind’.23 Nightmares and madness were regarded as the effect of corrupted fumes rising from imperfectly digested food, or choler which, instead of being refined into animal spirits, had been overcooked and singed black. (That fermentation is associated with madness too is suggested by the word ‘barmy’, which derives from ‘barm’, a word for the foam on the top of beer or other fermenting liquid.) Corrupting and contagious airs were widely feared, while sweet scents and good air were fostered and sought out. South winds were regarded as unhealthy, north and east winds as most temperate. One was advised not to go out in either cloudy or windy weather; for in the former the air is too stagnant, while in the latter it is too disturbed.24

Mass Baked foods, bread, cakes and pastries seem to have a particularly close relationship to the economies of air and lightness. Such foods not only conduce to, but themselves seem to constitute, a kind of phantasmal body, compact of earth and air. Bread extends over the whole spectrum of food from everyday to sacred. Transubstantiation enacts the passage between profane or daily bread and the redeemed or transfigured bread of the Mass. Bread is both divided and broken, like the tortured body of Christ, as well as being shared among companions, with the root meaning of ‘those with whom one takes bread’. A trencherman is one with whom one shares bread in an even more literal way, the ‘trencher’ being the large flat slice of bread that served poorer medieval diners as a plate, and that would often be shared between two messmates. Despite the fact that animal flesh is biologically so much closer to the fabric of the human body, it is bread that seems most to be regarded as a kind of quasi-human substance, not least (but also not only) in the Christian Eucharist. Bread, biscuits and cakes are often shaped into human form (corn dollies, gingerbread men). Theories of human generation tended to look to breadmaking techniques of kneading, rolling and shaping for analogies to the process of forming the human organism, in

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which the sperm was thought to act not just as a kind of vitalizing ferment, but also as a plastic or fixative power, imposed upon the otherwise chaotic and insensate female matter. Some of this anthropomorphism is applied also to grain that is fermented into alcoholic drinks. The English folksong ‘John Barleycorn’ presents a Dionysian story of suffering and rebirth applied to an anthropomorphized barley, which comes to maturity in the field by growing ‘a long, long beard’, is cut down ‘at the knee’ by scythes, pricked ‘to the heart’ by sharp pitchforks, bound, ground and then brewed into liquor. Cakes often have important parts to play in rituals of transition, such as weddings and funerals, in which the social body is being dissevered and reconstituted, and they often feature in fairytales, all the way through to the little cake marked ‘Eat Me’ that Alice encounters at the beginning of Alice in Wonderland, which brings about bodily transformation. The distinction between sacred and profane bread is duplicated within the category of the profane itself, in the distinction between the coarser wholemeal, brown or black breads, and the refined white breads that grew increasingly popular from the late medieval period onwards. Refinement was signalled by the whitening of bread – achieved not only by sieving or bolting and milling of the tough outer husks of the grain, but also sometimes by adulteration through the use of bleaching agents such as white lead. Whitening was also usually thought of as lightening into the bargain. Until the nineteenth century, most breads relied on the biochemical action of what Pasteur revealed to be the microorganisms in leaven and yeast to produce the carbon dioxide gas that caused the bread to rise. In 1846, the Lancet noted with interest the development of a flour consisting of a mixture of a carbonate and an acid salt, which, with the addition of water, produced carbon dioxide as a purely chemical process – the first ‘self-raising flour’. Later in the century a certain Dr Dauglish invented a process that made it possible to inject dough with carbon dioxide by mixing it in sealed chambers containing the gas under pressure – a technique similar to those that had been in use for a century or so for producing ‘aerated waters’.25 This became known as ‘aerated bread’, which gave its name to a chain of cheap restaurants in the 1920s, the ‘ABCs’ or Aerated Bread Company. T. S. Eliot uses the name for a sardonic evocation of the flaccid and unconsecrated secularity of modern life at the end of his ‘A Cooking Egg’, where ‘weeping, weeping multitudes / Droop in a hundred ABCs’. Agreeing with T. E. Hulme that modern life shared with Romanticism a spurious gaseousness, Eliot was an early analyst of the horrors of modern lightness of being: ‘We are the hollow men / We are the stuffed men / Leaning together / Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!’26

Tonic It was not until the end of the eighteenth century that methods began to be developed for impregnating water with bubbles. One method involved


producing gas from a mixture of ‘pounded chalk or marble’ and ‘a strong vitriolic acid’, the gas produced then being bubbled into water.27 Carbonated water, with bubbles of carbon dioxide or ‘carbonic acid’ as it was known until the early twentieth century, was originally marketed as medicinal. It had been known since the seventeenth century that the bark of the cinchona tree helped to relieve the fever of malaria. It was only after the active alkaloid quinine had been isolated in 1820 that it was possible to give controlled doses of the drug. When the Schweppes company marketed their tonic water containing quinine in the 1850s, they were hoping to appeal to the Indian imperial market. In fact, quinine dissolves much better in ethanol than in water, hence the association between gin and tonic. The tonic effects of the drink clearly depended also on the associations of the effervescence. Large claims were made for carbonated drinks in the early years of their production. Aerated drinks drew on the cult of what might be called the ‘pneumatic sublime’, which prospered at the end of the eighteenth century, and encouraged belief in the curative and uplifting powers of various gases and vapours, most notably nitrous oxide, or laughing gas. This had been discovered by Joseph Priestley, who discussed his experiments in his Experiments and Observations on Different Kinds of Air of 1775. Its effects were investigated by Humphrey Davy, who pursued his research into the gas as chemical superintendent of the Pneumatic Institute, which had been set up in 1798 in Clifton by Thomas Beddoes, to explore and promote the powers of various ‘factitious airs’ in treating conditions such as consumption. Their most spectacular results seemed to come with the investigation of nitrous oxide, to the exhilarating effects of which Robert Southey, Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Beddoes himself all volubly attested. Their researches were regarded as dubious by conservatives who suspected a link between the lightmindedness induced by nitrous oxide and the excesses of the French Revolution. A satirical poem by Robert Polwhele gave these words to the chemically enraptured Southey: I spurn, I spurn This cumbrous clod of earth; and, borne on wings Of lady-birds, ‘all spirit’, I ascend Into the immeasurable space, and cleave The clear ethereal azure; and from star To star still gliding, to the heaven of heavens Aspire, and plunging thro’ the sapphire blaze, Ingulph the dephlogisticated floods Of life, and riot in immortal gas!28 The exhilarating effects of nitrous oxide meant that it quickly became known as ‘laughing gas’, The link between laughter and effervescence is a

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feature of the only joke to be found, as far as I am aware, in the work of Kant. Here is The Joke: [A]n Indian at an Englishman’s table in Surat, saw a bottle of ale opened, and all the beer turned into froth and flowing out. The repeated exclamations of the Indian showed his great astonishment. ‘Well, what is so wonderful in that?’ asked the Englishman. ‘Oh, I’m not surprised myself,’ said the Indian, ‘at its getting out, but at how you ever managed to get it all in.’29 Naturally the joke has an analytical purpose. Kant, like Freud after him, wants to show us that laughter arises from the arousing and then sudden diminishment of expectations, which itself turns out to have a gaseous dimension. We laugh, writes Kant, ‘not because we think ourselves, maybe, more quick-witted than this ignorant Indian. It is rather that the bubble of our expectation was extended to the full and suddenly went off into nothing’.30 Laughter for Kant is the exhaust formed from the differential between two nothings – a projected something, and the pricking of that expectation’s bubble.

Pop Children’s stories evince a fascination with the possibilities of bodies empowered or imperilled by lightness. Robin Kingsland’s The Fizziness Business tells the story of two convicts, the dastardly criminal genius Oswald Bingly and his dim sidekick Stig Stubble, who escape from prison by means of a balloon made from custard skins stitched together and inflated by a drink called ‘SuperFizz’. They then steal the Crown Jewels using the custard-skin balloons to float them out of the Tower of London, but are apprehended when Stig foolishly takes a swig of SuperFizz and becomes too inflated to get through the door.31 Modern life has been more and more drawn to the powers of lightness, conceived not so much as the contrary of weight, as the diminution of density. Historical bodies are laden with time; they are massy, voluminous, weighed down with clothing, conformity and the habit of obedience. Modern people have made customary the experience of flight. The modern body inhabits and seeks ethereality. We seek purification through processes either of reduction or distillation. Look around any gym and you will see men attempting to turn themselves to stone and women attempting to evaporate their substance. The bodybuilder works towards petrifaction through sculpting or selective subtraction of the body (and how odd that this so solid body should be the result of what is also called ‘pumping iron’, as though iron itself were to be rendered in some way vaporous), while the aerobic exerciser (the word ‘aerobic’ having been invented by Louis Pasteur


in the course of his work on fermentation) seeks to turn herself into holy smoke. Perhaps the most obvious examples of this light eating are contemporary diet foods, in which the inclusion of a deal of air is, for obvious reasons, touted as a positive good. During the 1970s, the television adverts for ‘Nimble’ slimming bread famously featured a young girl who seemed not only to be desirably slender, but also so trippingly light on her feet that she seemed liable to be lifted up at any moment into the air, a condition suggested by shots of her drifting in a balloon, nibbling the product, and literalized by a freeze-frame that suspended her in mid-stride at the end of the advert. As with other slimming foods, it is as though, if you ate enough of it, you would not only not gain weight, you would actually gain lightness, or become lighter than air, without losing any of your bodily volume. The promise was that you could become a svelte kind of human balloon, satiated by your surfeit of nothingness. Sweetness is also often equated with lightness – for example, in puff pastry, or in the candies and sweetmeats that are meant to inspire thoughts of lightness. This can be literally because they contain holes, like the TwirlyWhirly bar, or Polo (the ‘mint with a hole’), or are full of bubbles, like Aero chocolate or Crunchie bars, or because they have been whipped into supernatural afflatus (the Walnut Whip contains such an ethereal nectar poured into a cavity at the centre of the sweet). The fact that so many sweets have such inner cavities or enclosures suggests the importance of the idea of hollowness to the pleasure; Easter eggs obviously represent the most versatile kinds of improvization upon the idea of luxurious void. Most bizarrely of all, there is a tendency for sweets to be associated with outer space: the vast interstellar vacancies that caused Pascal such disquiet cause delight when outer space is somehow thought to have entered into the inner space of the bar’s composition, as in Milky Way, Starbursts, Galaxy, or the Mars bar, the last surely among the stodgiest and least ethereal of confections ever made. In the context of a discussion of the contrasting orders of the ‘deep’ and the ‘foamy’ in contemporary washing powders, Roland Barthes admirably and almost unimprovably characterizes the new function of effervescence in contemporary experience. Foam is now not just a principle of liveliness: its most important signification is that of luxury. Foam appears to lack any usefulness; then, its abundant, easy, almost infinite proliferation allows one to suppose there is in the substance from which it issues a vigorous germ, a healthy and powerful essence, a great wealth of active elements in a small original volume. Finally, it gratifies in the consumer a tendency to imagine matter as something airy, with which contact is effected in a mode both light and vertical, which is sought after like that of happiness either in the gustatory category (foie gras,

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entremets, wines), in that of clothing (muslin, tulle), or that of soaps (film star in her bath).32 Barthes reminds us of the spermatic and spiritual background to the powers of foam: ‘inasmuch as the spirit has the reputation of being able to make something out of nothing, a large surface of effects out of a small volume of causes’.33 His comments make it clear that both orders, the orders of comfort and power, are economic, for both depend on the magic of painless surplus, of something for nothing, something from nothing. His suggestions connect lightness of eating with a much larger range of experiences and images of lightness. Of course, the alchemical tradition is powerfully at work in these conceptions. But we must note that, in modern conceptions, the notion of matter striving ever upwards that governs alchemy has been transformed. The striving of the ferment, the difficulty and the ardour of the quest, have shifted into the production of images of ease, comfort, the narcotic, nirvana bliss of being cosseted. For the alchemists, fermentation was matter energized or spiritualized; for the advertising industry, ferment is now merely Yeats’s ‘spume that plays / Upon a ghostly paradigm of things’.34 Energy becomes a kind of busy, purposeless inertia. The role of the foamy in detergents is not to signal chemical or spiritual change, but to disguise it. The foamy is thus the opposite of the abrasive: ‘What matters is the art of having disguised the abrasive function of the detergent under the delicious image of a substance at once deep and airy which can govern the molecular order of the material without damaging it.’35 The point seems to be not potentiation, but deferral and suspension. Thus, sodas, seltzers and other kinds of fizzy drinks are marketed as ‘soft’ drinks, with their origins in the temperance beverages of the nineteenth century. The point was to mimic the sparkle of alcoholic drinks, while offering safer forms of exhilaration. But soft drinks have been blended with alcohol in more and more versatile ways, the alcopops of recent years being the most recent form. Once again, the fizz is in part the sign of a factitious safety, a way of mitigating the dangerous hardness or bite of alcohol. The airy, the foamy, the frothy, the bubbly, and their allotropes, the creamy, the milky, the misty, belong to a culture of lightness and uplift that perhaps has its beginnings, as Catherine James has admirably shown, in the culture of the Baroque, and the invention of comfort signified by the new importance of the cushion in upholstery and interior design.36 From this point on, furnishings will no longer frame or support the body, or augment its powers. The plumply-stuffed cushions of the Baroque decay into the weighty upholstery of Victorian furnishing, but are newly volatilized in twentieth-century commodity culture, which markets lightness of being in every possible mode – in food, cosmetics, clothing, alcoholic drinks, perfumery and sport. Indeed, the principle of propagation that

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had previously inhered in the idea of ferment has become the principle of modal conflation, as fizz, foam and lightness spill across different sensory realms and registers. One good example is the word ‘pop’, which, as the name for a carbonated drink, originated in nineteenth-century America, the word referring to the popping of corks. By the end of the following century, as Margaret Visser points out, the name of the drink that has come to characterize modern life, mainly through the massive spread of Coca-Cola across the world, has become wholly identified with what is popular – with pop music (which, in one of its most infantile forms, is known as ‘bubblegum music’), pop art and so on.37 Perhaps all of these possibilities come together in champagne, the emblem of the modern world’s embrace of lightness and frivolity. The anaesthetic qualities of champagne are embodied in the joke that Beckett tells in Murphy: Q. ‘Why did the barmaid champagne?’ A. ‘Because the stout porter bitter.’38 Many alcoholic drinks had natural effervescence, because of the carbon dioxide that is a by-product of the yeast’s transformation of sugar into alcohol. Wine-makers noticed that wine that had apparently completed its fermentation would occasionally be subject to a secondary fermentation in the spring following the autumn bottling. This was caused by spores of yeast that still lay in the imperfectly-filtered wine being revived by the returning warmth and light, and working on the residual sugar in the wine. This had sometimes been seen to occur in the wines of the region of Aÿ in France. Around 1700, the already-celebrated winemaker Dom Pérignon succeeded in devising a method to produce and control this secondary fermentation, by adding sugar to the wine, and stacking the bottles diagonally to allow the bubbles of carbon dioxide to rise and the yeast sediment to run down to the cork, where it could be extracted little by little.39 Champagne (‘shampoo’ in popular parlance, following the rule of lexical fermentation) has become a kind of everyday luxury, a vulgar refinement or vernacular magic, the necessary accompaniment to every office party or sporting victory. The improvident gushing or spurting of £14.99 champagne is our secularized ‘pneumatic bliss’. The paradox of the fizziness business in the modern world is that, while we have retained much of the apparatus of thought and feeling that privileges the light body, animated by airy energy, we have turned the consumption of lightness into a kind of gourmandizing. While two-thirds of the world’s population inhabit literally light or malnourished bodies, the remaining third has gorged itself into obesity on the passionate dream of lightness, the effort to become, in Yeats’s words, ‘a mouthful of sweet air’.40 Eating is the most conspicuous form of our bodily transactions with the world, which systematically contradict our view of the body as a selfenclosed, and enclosing, entity, and our projection of the body as a succession of images or states – black, white, young, aged, fit, sick or dead. Eating and drinking are the primary forms of the body’s transactions, not just with

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other bodies, but with the great, shifting, mixed body of the world, a world which, in the forms of foam, ferment and effervescence, is ever at work upon us, as well as we upon it. Eating and drinking are usually assumed to be the contrary or the complement of cognitive life and the empire of signs, and therefore to belong to the realm of mute animal need rather than cultural self-imagination. But the habitus of eating is an important part of the dreamwork whereby bodies, indeed the very notion of a body, are formed. The dream of the effervescent or aerated body provides a way for a body to encounter and to take to itself, its other: not the trivial other of other bodies, but the other of corporeality itself. The aerated body, and its dream of lightness, is a way of taking into the body the out-of-body experience of air. The body compact with air identifies itself with the body of air – that form of matter that embodies the immaterial, the spiritual, the imaginary. It is often said that we are becoming increasingly disembodied, that our technologies, our media, our knowledge, our pleasures and our appetites are removing us from the frail, painful, lonely, lovely exigencies of corporeal existence. But the body will neither evaporate nor be wholly discarded by the dissipative soul, since the intelligible itself is the concoction of the sensible. The dream of lightness is the recuperation, through reincorporation, of what we miscall our condition of disembodiment. We may say, as Dickens’ Scrooge does when confronted by the first of his pedagogic spirits, that there is more gravy than the grave in the notion of spirit. We shall need a different kind of materialism, a different kind of physics, to understand the nature of physical existence in our emerging conditions. But the second nature of the body formed largely of air has a longer history than we might suspect, and this may help us to weigh it, to take its measure. This is not least because all this lightness of being can indeed become unbearable. When ‘modern primitives’ seek to recapture the intensity of being in the body, it is through ceremonies and ordeals that painfully and remorselessly subject the body to its own weight. Hanging from hooks embedded in flesh, or from ropes lashed around breasts, the body is forced to witness and acknowledge its own ponderability. The body is made a memento gravitatis. Even here, the lightness addiction lurks. For practitioners of these and other sado-masochistic arts learn that pain leads not to knowledge, but to numbness, sham pain, the feeling, at once intoxicating and anaesthetizing, of knowing that there is a pain that you no longer feel. Eighteenth-century chemists, believing that combustion entailed the burning off of the igneous principle, phlogiston, were puzzled by the fact that objects gained rather than lost weight during burning. They sometimes resorted to the explanation that phlogiston had the property, affirmed by Aristotle in his De Caelo, of ‘absolute levity’ or negative weight: thus the burned object gained weight because it lost its lightness. By the end of the eighteenth century, the doctrine of absolute levity, which apparently dissolved the light into the minimally heavy, had been abandoned. In its place,


however, came a concern with the achievement of an ideal levity of the body. Though imaginary, this was a secular levity. Spirit was not to be achieved in this world. For the moderns, who so often seemed and even claimed to have no need of such a notion, spirit was literalized in the idiom of body which was at once fully present and entirely weightless. In previous eras, lightness had been associated with openness and expanse, while heaviness was the characteristic of dense, closed, slow bodies. The ubiquity of effervescence in the modern world has brought about a chiasmatic crossing of qualities, leading to the oxymoron of obese levity, a lightness having all the palpability and repleteness of grosser states of matter. In the ‘Monty Python’ sketch, what causes the mountainous Mr Creosote to explode is the ingestion of the ‘one more wafer-thin mint’ pressed upon him by the Mephistophelean waiter. Thus does lightness now bear down on us.

Notes 1. William Shakespeare, Hamlet, ed. Ann Thompson and Neil Taylor (London, 2006), III.2, 90, p. 303. 2. John Heydon, ‘Epistle Dedicatory’, Elhavarevna, or, The English Physitians Tutor in the Astrobolismes of Mettals Rosie Cruican [sic] (London, 1665), sig A5v. 3. Gaston Bachelard, Air and Dreams: An Essay on the Imagination of Movement, trans. Edith R. Farrell and C. Frederick Farrell (Dallas, 1988), p. 36; John Milton, Paradise Lost, V. 493–499, The Poems of John Milton, ed. John Carey and Alistair Fowler (London, 1980), pp. 705–707. 4. Gaston Bachelard, La Terre et les rêveries de la volonté (Paris, 1948), p. 178 (my translation). 5. The Kalevala: The Epic Poem of Finland, trans. John Martin Crawford, 2 vols (New York, 1888), vol. 1, p. 305. 6. Ibid., vol. 1, p. 311. 7. Ibid., vol. 1, pp. 316–317. 8. Jean Soler, ‘The Semiotics of Food in the Bible’, Food and Drink in History: Selections from the Annales: Economies, Sociétés, Civilisations, vol. 5, ed. Robert Foster and Orest Ranum, trans. Elborg Forster and Patricia M. Ranum (Baltimore and London, 1979), pp. 126–138 (p. 134). 9. W. E. Scudamore, The Working of the Good Leaven in the People and Church of England (London, 1856), p. 3. 10. E. W. Bullinger, Leaven (London, 1905), p. 4n. 11. Ibid., p. 13. 12. Alfred Jenour, The Parable of the Leaven Explained and Applied: Showing Its Important Bearing on the Present Times, 2nd edn (London, 1855), p. 6. 13. Ibid., pp. 5–6. 14. Philosophical Enquiry into Some of the Most Considerable Phenomena’s of Nature ... The Whole Conformable to the Doctrine of Fermentation (London, 1715), pp. 141–142. 15. Basil Valentine His Triumphant Chariot of Antinomy with Annotations of Theodore Kirkringius (1678), ed. L. G. Kelly (New York and London, 1990), p. 25. 16. John Heydon, ‘Chymical Dictionary’, The English Physitians guide, or, A Holy-guide, Leading the Way to Know All Things Past, Present and To Come (London, 1662), sig h2v.

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17. Aristotle, Generation of Animals: With an English Translation by A. L. Peck (London and Cambridge, Mass, 1943), I.20, p. 103. 18. Ibid. 19. Ibid. 20. Michael Scot, The Philosophers Banquet, 2nd edn (London, 1633), p. 252. 21. Jane Huggett, The Mirror of Health: Food, Diet and Medical Theory 1450–1660 (Bristol, 1995), pp. 32, 34. 22. Ibid., pp. 45, 49. 23. The Englishmans Docter. Or, The Schoole of Salerne. Or Physicall Observations for the Perfect Preserving of the Body of Man in Continuall Health, trans. John Harington (London, 1607), sig A6v. 24. Huggett, Mirror of Health, p. 51. 25. J. C. Drummond and Anne Wilbraham, The Englishman’s Food: A History of Five Centuries of English Diet (London, 1991), p. 299. 26. The Collected Writings of T. E. Hulme, ed. Karen Csengeri (Oxford, 1994), pp. 62–63; T. S. Eliot, Complete Poems and Plays (London, 1969), p. 83. 27. Directions For Preparing Aerated Medicinal Waters, By Means of the Improved Glass Machines Made at Leith Glass-Works (Edinburgh, 1787). 28. Richard Polwhele, ‘The Pneumatic Revellers: An Eclogue’, Poems, 5 vols (Truro, 1810), vol. 5, pp. 11–12. 29. Immanuel Kant, The Critique of Judgement, trans. James Creed Meredith (Oxford, 1957), pp. 199–200. 30. Ibid., p. 200. 31. Robin Kingsland, The Fizziness Business (London, 1990). 32. Roland Barthes, Mythologies, trans. Annette Lavers (London, 1972), p. 37. 33. Ibid. 34. W. B. Yeats, ‘Among School Children’, Collected Poems (London, 1979), p. 244. 35. Barthes, Mythologies, pp. 37–38. 36. Catherine James, ‘Gravity and Grace: The Culture of Weight’, unpublished Ph.D. thesis, University of London, 2004. 37. Margaret Visser, Much Depends on Dinner: The Extraordinary History and Mythology, Allure and Obsessions, Perils and Taboos of an Ordinary Meal (New York, 1988), p. 275. 38. Samuel Beckett, Murphy (London, 1973), p. 81. 39. Maguelonne Toussaint-Samat, A History of Food, trans. Anthea Bell (Oxford, 1992), pp. 284–285. 40. W. B. Yeats, Collected Plays (London, 1982), p. 219.

5 Flesh Revealed: Medicine, Art and Anatomy Jane Macnaughton

It has always been a bit of a joke – but with serious intent among medical educational reformers – that the first patient medical students meet is a dead one: the body freely given to ‘medical science’ by a kind benefactor for students to dissect system by system, often over the course of their first two years in medical school. Anatomy’s place as the Senior Service discipline in medical education was secured by the terms of the Anatomy Act of 1832, which provided a legal and secure supply of corpses for dissection.1 Until that time, bodies had been scarce and supplied at times by criminal activities such as those of the notorious body snatchers and murderers, Burke and Hare, in early-nineteenth-century Edinburgh.2 During these uncertain and sometimes dangerous times for the fledgling science of anatomy, the distinguished surgeon, John Abernethy had declared in his Hunterian Oration at the Royal College of Surgeons: Anatomical knowledge is the only foundation on which the structure of medical science can be built. Without this we should but increase the sufferings of those afflicted with diseases, and endanger their lives.3 The Anatomy Act marked a significant shift in the way in which knowledge of the human body by dissection was disseminated. Since the Renaissance, dissection had been taught through observation, and students would attend to watch anatomical displays in anatomy theatres. These public anatomies were open to medical students and members of the public alike, and were attended by both men and women.4 After the Anatomy Act, corpses were in more plentiful supply from patients who had died in hospital, and there was no longer any need for one dissection to be viewed by many people. Students now had the opportunity to wield the knife themselves. With the move from observation to active dissection came a greater professionalization of anatomy. Public dissections were no longer performed, and the study of anatomy became the exclusive preserve and distinguishing feature of the student of medicine.5

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This distinction has continued in medical education until very recently. When I and most of my clinical colleagues came to study medicine (in the late 1980s), the anatomy course was considered as something of a rite of passage for medical students. We gathered at the doors of the dissecting room where we were given a solemn lecture on appropriate behaviour within it. This was our first brush with professionalism, and the body was our first client. We were marked out from other students by the smell of formalin that hung around us and our dissection kits. Now, however, approaches to the teaching of anatomy are changing, and this change is being assisted by the insights and practical input of artists, as I shall illustrate later in this chapter. There is also some evidence of a re-democratization of the teaching of anatomy in that the knowledge until recently confined to the medical and other health professions is now being shared with the laity. Public dissections are once again being held ‘in the flesh’ and in the glare of television cameras.6 In this essay I shall reflect on some of the influences that have led to this change, and discuss the role artists are playing in it. One stimulus to change has been the negative effect of dissection on those studying medicine. The need to overcome natural fears and inhibitions about viewing and cutting up the dead contributed to the characteristic hard humour that medical students often adopt in stressful situations. In the absence of a relationship with real patients, it seems also that some medical students went surprisingly far in developing relationships with their cadavers. The historian of medicine John Harley Warner has examined an extraordinary series of images of medical students with their cadavers in anatomy classes, held in a collection at the Dittrick Medical History Centre at Case Western Reserve University.7 According to Warner, these images were characteristic of the ethos of American medical schools at the turn of the twentieth century.8 The images (an example is shown in Figure 5.1) show groups of medical students gathered around cadavers at various stages of dissection. Many of these images were intended to be humorous. In one, the students have scribbled the caption ‘the Lord giveth, we taketh away’ on a chalk board beside the dissecting table on which their partially stripped corpse lies. In another, a student lies moribund under a white sheet surrounded by cadavers seated on dissecting stools, while a skeleton rears above him, a knife held loosely in its bony fingers. These images are shocking today in that they appear disrespectful of the bodies. But Warner – while admitting perplexity at the tone of these photographs – argues that the students might in fact be indicating their gratitude for the gift of the body by presenting the cadaver as part of their group. Note from Figure 5.1 that the reclining student and the ‘student’ corpse both seem to be enjoying a last cigarette! One might assume that these images were circulated only within the medical school, but in fact some students also sent them as postcards to girlfriends and as Christmas cards.

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Figure 5.1 Group of seventeen students at dissecting table with cadaver, c. 1910. Postcard, 5½ × 3½". [Dittrick Medical History Centre, Case Western Reserve University]

That the human body should be subjected to what appear to be extreme indignities, just to amuse a group of medical students, induces feelings of repugnance and horror in a modern audience. In Ian Rankin’s crime thriller Fleshmarket Close, two medical students steal a skeleton from the anatomy department for a prank, and there is no doubt what the reader’s view of their characters should be.9 Such behaviour, like the Dittrick images, suggests some of the negative aspects that may have derived from the activity of dissection: desensitization towards death and the dying, and the development of inappropriate attitudes towards human remains in students struggling to cope with the stress of so much time spent in the company of a dead body.10 Two poet doctors have recorded their thoughts on the experience of dissection. Dannie Abse, who studied medicine at King’s College, London during the Second World War, wrote: You, dead man, Thing, each day, each week, each month, you slowly decreasing Thing, visibly losing Divine proportions, you residue, mere trunk of a man’s body, you, X, legless, armless, headless Thing, that I dissected so casually. Then went downstairs to drink wartime coffee.11

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The cadaver is a ‘Thing’ with a capital T (ghoulish, and reminiscent of some horror B movie title), and ‘X’, as it slowly loses its parts under the knives of Abse and his colleagues, even losing its dignity as it begins to look less and less human. Frank Hulyer, an emergency room physician in the United States, describes more recent experiences of dissecting his cadaver. Before the first class he ‘was trembling just a little, the fine hair on my arms rising in the air-conditioned cold of the room’.12 But he soon became familiar with his body: Our cadaver was sixty-two years old, and after a while, when we had gotten used to it, we cut around his tattoos and saved them, like a little pile of photographs which we left by his intact head. Mother. A red rose, and a woman’s silhouette. The United States Navy.13 The removal of the tattoos is an ambiguous act. On the one hand, Hulyer’s group recognized this man’s uniqueness and wished to preserve it; but on the other, the method seems ghoulish and almost cruel. Hulyer acknowledged this ambiguity, but also recognized that it helped them to preserve a necessary distance: even as we reduced him to pieces I knew that he was real, that he had stories to tell, that he had looked out at the sea from the decks of ships. I could feel it when I chose to. Mostly I chose not to. Mostly it was anatomy.14 Formal studies of the reactions of medical students to dissection reflect these vivid accounts and suggest that at least a quarter of students find starting dissection a highly stressful experience.15 Some experience anxiety and distress, while for others the detachment described by Hulyer as necessary to the act can have negative consequences for the students’ professional development.16 Sinclair, in his ethnography of medical students at a London medical school, comments on the attitude to the body encouraged by the experience of the dissecting room. The demonstrators – usually doctors studying for the first part of their Fellowship of the Royal Colleges of Surgeons – are described as ‘models of emotional detachment’. This attitude was not taught explicitly to the students, but was nevertheless learnt as part of what is called in medicine ‘the hidden curriculum’ – that part of medical education implicitly passed on through observing and copying the actions and demeanour of doctors.17 The reactions described by Sinclair of students to their bodies (‘It’s gross! It’s disgusting! ... I don’t want to go anywhere near it!’) reflect those of Hulyer and Abse. The response is one not of wonder at what dissection might reveal, but of attempted or desired detachment and (at times) barely concealed horror. In 1992, Sinclair reported that dissection of the whole body was still an important part of the pre-clinical curriculum of most medical schools,


but this is now far from true for most British institutions.18 The Peninsula Medical School (PMS) has pioneered an approach to anatomy teaching without the use of cadaver dissection. There are many reasons for this change, including practical ones: potential health hazards, including HIV, are now recognized in the handling of cadavers; since gross anatomy is no longer a field in which academics can develop a research career, lecturers in whole body anatomy are difficult to come by; and maintaining a wet anatomy facility is very expensive for universities.19 There are other, and significant, positive benefits from the PMS’s approach, as students still learn from a real human body, but a living, breathing, feeling and responding one rather than a corpse. Classes involve examination and visualization of the body using a variety of methods, including medical imaging (such as ultrasound scanning); so-called ‘surface anatomy’, which involves the examination of the appearance on the outside of the body of the deep underlying structures; and techniques borrowed from fine art and art education. Life models from the local art college have been used to demonstrate surface anatomy, and artists have been employed to paint underlying anatomical structures on to the bodies of the models.20 Recent work by John McLachlan with colleagues from the University of Ulster has led to the design of the Operations T-shirt (see Figure 5.2).21 This extraordinary garment hangs on a life model, displaying the names of surgical incisions and scars over their actual sites. Zips can be slid open over these sites in a parody of the cuts themselves, and it has been suggested that the interior of the garment might be coloured red to improve upon the metaphor. There are practical advantages to this for the student, as the T-shirt not only provides a striking visual image of the sites and effects of surgery, but also allows the student to insert a hand and examine the actual parts that may be removed from the living body. The T-shirt is at once a teaching tool and a work of art, reminding the viewer of the importance of clothing for our sense of self-worth and our self-image, and of the potential effect of (for example) losing a breast on the way in which clothes hang on a woman’s body. The viewer at one and the same time thinks of fashionable clothing and of operating theatre garb, while suppressing a shiver at the ghoulish thought of what might be revealed if the ‘skin’ was unzipped and the flesh under the ‘cuts’ was to be revealed. Here, metaphor and teaching aid are working synergistically, reminding students of technical terminology but also suggesting the importance of clothing as covering and adornment, while using the slashing openings of the zips to suggest the violent nature of surgical operations, however sensitively performed. These new methods of painting on the body, the use of ultrasound on living subjects in the classroom, and imaginative body coverings such as the Operations T-shirt, can be used while students are learning clinical examination techniques – and, unlike the cadaver, the real ‘patient’ will certainly let the students know if they are insensitive or clumsy in their approach. This

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Figure 5.2 Operations T-shirt: ‘Incisions’ c. 2000. Designed and made by Karen Fleming, Aoife Ludlow, Duncan Neil and John McLachlan. Funded by ‘Cultural Developments’ at the University of Ulster as part of the Body Origami project. [Photograph by E. M. Forbes]

move away from cadaveric dissection and towards examination, visualization and imaging of the living body reflects a wider change in the approach to the early years of medical education: instead of being closeted with the dead for two years, students meet the living in hospitals and the community, people who may eventually be their patients. This trend has, I think, emerged from a cultural change in the late twentieth century in ideas about the role of medicine in society, and a corresponding shift in medical views of the human body. This might be characterized as a shift from a biomedical perspective to a bio-psychosocial one.22 According to the biomedical perspective, the body is passive; a mechanism that is diseased and needs fixing by medical experts, and which can also be studied through the dissection of its inert remains. From the bio-psychosocial perspective, however, the body is active; patients are responsible and involved in their own well-being; and medicine is engaged in health maintenance through co- operation with patients rather than in eliminating disease through the imposition of treatments. It is more appropriate to this perspective that modern medical students observe, touch and learn about the living body; a body moving about with ease – or otherwise – in its environment, responding to touch or pain, and with views about treatment and lifestyle choices.

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It is ironic that this change seems to be happening at a time when doctors are required to touch patients less frequently; and when the traditional clinical examination skills of observation, palpation, percussion and auscultation are being rendered virtually obsolete by advances in medical imaging. However, such advances are also allowing physicians greater knowledge – and indeed wonder – at the function of the body in life. PET (positron emission topography) scans of the brain, for example, show for the first time – through mapping blood flow – how a brain affected by Alzheimer’s disease differs from a normal brain. The radiologist is thus able to visualize directly the markedly decreased activity in the cerebral cortex of the affected brain. Learning from the living is key in modern medical education and, as we have seen, the skills of artists are already being employed to assist in developing new approaches to the study of anatomy. Some medical schools (PMS, University College London, and Southampton) have even offered students the opportunity to take part in life-drawing classes to augment their understanding and improve their observational skills.23 As with most innovations in medicine, such courses have been the subject of considerable scrutiny, and studies have indicated that the use of artists as tutors, and of art as a learning tool, have improved the knowledge of anatomy and increased the manual skills of students. Less obviously, these classes also enhanced the students’ appreciation of the beauty and intricacy of the human form. The artist Christine Borland has worked with medical students by taking them into the Glasgow School of Art to learn alongside art students, and to develop creative projects using various media. In work such as To Be Set Down in the Garden (2002), situated in the grounds of the Reading Room of Glasgow University, she has often collaborated with medical scientists. In this commission she worked with staff from the Departments of Anatomy and of Biomedical Life Sciences to produce a work that would mark the discovery of a list dating from 1555 of plants for a proposed physic garden to be planted in the University’s original pre-Victorian site. The benches of Borland’s piece are topped with head-rests, the shape of which is based on the blocks used in the anatomy dissection room as ‘pillows’ to support the head of the corpse. The blocks are engraved with adaptations of the original illustrations in the sixteenth-century herbal. Christine Borland’s work has frequently engaged with anatomical themes and exhibits to reveal the beauty of the human body, as well as to challenge medicine’s sometimes unethical practices in gathering human ‘material’ for study. Her exhibition at the Fruitmarket Gallery in Edinburgh in the winter of 2006–2007 brought together a number of such works. While working on one of the exhibits, she wanted an artificial skeleton, and was surprised to find that not only was she able to obtain a real one, but also that it could be sent in the post neatly wrapped in a cardboard box. The shocking discovery that human parts were so easily available stimulated Borland to try to

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discover the identities of the individuals ‘sold’ in this way, and with the help of an expert in facial reconstruction, she created busts of those whose skulls she had purchased. The resulting work comprises two elegant bronze busts situated on tall white plinths, in the manner of classical sculpture, and entitled First Class Male, Second Class Female (1996). The ‘first class’ and ‘second class’ are, of course, ironic in that they are applied to the beautiful work of art that we actually see. These titles refer to the standards set by the osteological supplier, and to his assessment of the quality of the bones as medical specimens. There is, of course, a further layer of irony that gives the work an additional poignancy: if these individuals had really been regarded as ‘first class’ their bones would not have been bought and sold like commodities. Borland’s work restores dignity and identity to these individuals, although they remain unknown. This challenging exhibit was complemented in the exhibition by another work of extraordinary technical skill entitled Bullet Proof Breath (2001) (see Figure 5.3). This is a hand-blown glass representation of the branching bronchi of the human lung, partially wrapped in silk extracted from a golden orb spider. The work hangs from the closed lid of a Perspex box by a single thread of the silk and the delicate glass shivers precariously if the viewer accidentally bumps the box. The idea of using the silk of this spider came to Borland when she read that the American military had researched spider silk as a potentially bullet-proof material. What strikes the viewer is that the silk is destructive and constrictive to the lung, binding and preventing it from functioning efficiently. But more than this, the exhibit reveals the delicate and intricate beauty of the lung in a way that even dissection could not achieve. Doctors and other health professionals can therefore learn a great deal from the engagement of artists with the concerns of medicine, including anatomy. Borland’s work raises ethical and moral issues, but the work of other artists can explore the emotions and feelings that are part of inhabiting a particular body. At the same time as painting what something looks like, artists can paint what it feels like. In 1928, the artist Francis Bacon bought a medical textbook containing a photograph of horrific mouth disease. He used it to create his series of ‘Screaming Pope’ pictures, which focus on the mouth. In the earliest of this series of paintings, Head VI (1949), the mouth is the only part of the face to be clearly depicted, while the rest rushes upwards as if the face were dissolving into dust and being blown skyward by a brisk wind. Bacon is here painting the sensation of the scream, rather than what causes it. It is a shocking painting, and the viewer recoils in horror at witnessing the pain represented by the waves of sound that emanate from the already dissolving figure. Disability has been famously explored in the statue that has recently occupied the fourth plinth in London’s Trafalgar Square, Marc Quinn’s Alison Lapper Pregnant (2005). Quinn first came to prominence in 1991 after exhibiting a work called Self, in which he cast his own head entirely out of

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Figure 5.3 Christine Borland, Bullet Proof Breath (detail), 2001. Glass, Spider Silk, Plexiglass Vitrine Painted Steel Pedestal. 35 × 30 × 24 cm. [Courtesy of the artist]

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his frozen blood – in an ironic reference to cryogenics. Quinn’s sculpture of Alison Lapper is one of a series begun in 1999, of portraits of amputees and other models without limbs, in classical style, showing them as contemporary heroes rather than objects of pity and disgust. His Map of the Human Heart (1999) reveals the extraordinary complexity and beauty of the vasculature surrounding the human heart. It was made by filling a real heart with red and blue resin and burning off the flesh with acid. Quinn conceived the work as revealing both the wonder of this part of human anatomy and its significance as symbol: ‘It is about the power of the heart to transform in the sense that it’s a real piece of transformation [the deoxygenated blue blood to oxygenated red blood] as well as a metaphorical one.’24 Quinn used real human tissue in the creation of this work, but that tissue did not remain part of the finished work of art. And here his methods differed from those of the controversial anatomist, Gunther von Hagens, whose exhibition, Body Worlds, used human bodies in which the decomposition process had been halted by removing water and fats and replacing them with polymers in a process he called ‘plastination’. The resulting exhibits allow the general public – not just the medical profession – access to the details of the human body beneath the skin. There seems to be no doubt that people are in need of education about their own bodies. A recent Norwegian study of young men revealed that while 49 per cent knew the location of their appendix, only 9 per cent could locate their spleen, and a mere 4 per cent their liver.25 The stated aim of Body Worlds was the ‘education and enlightenment’ of the lay public, but the exhibition was also a sensational piece of showmanship, and has generally been condemned by the art world as lacking in aesthetic value.26 Yet there is certainly beauty to be seen in some of the exhibits, particularly those in which the skill of the dissector has painstakingly teased out the complex web of blood vessels supplying the leg. And I find myself unable to look upon exhibits such as that of a woman whose pregnant womb is opened to reveal the tiny figure of her never-born child without feeling great sadness for the human tragedy behind it. Whatever our views on the ethics of such exhibitions, it is clear that they and the work of some modern artists are helping to restore to those studying medicine a feeling of excitement in the discovery of the animated human form and the anatomy that underlies it. Although Body Worlds was the only recent exhibition to use real human flesh, it is one of a number exploring the links between art and anatomy; others include Spectacular Bodies at the Hayward Gallery in 2001. Such exhibitions and the work of artists such as Borland and Quinn are contributing to the renewal of the democratization of anatomical knowledge. I started this essay with the observation that the Anatomy Act of 1832 closed down that field of knowledge to the lay person by concentrating the supply of corpses for dissection within medical schools and banning the public from the opportunity to view autopsies. Now the general public are once again


being allowed to see what lies beneath their own skin. As a result, both lay person and doctor alike are wondering anew at the extraordinary intricacy and beauty of the human form. Roy Porter, in his magisterial history, The Greatest Benefit to Mankind, says that Renaissance man showed an insatiable curiosity for the here and now, a Faustian itch to explore ... no wonder they became inquisitive about human bodies, which were judged to occupy a privileged position.27 Echoing this passage, and with recent medical scandals in mind (such as that at Alder Hey Hospital, involving the removal of children’s organs without consent), Martyn Evans suggests that ‘one source of both moral and intellectual renaissance for the contemporary physician lies in recapturing a sense of wonder at the human body’.28 There are signs in medical education at least of the revival of that ‘sense of wonder’, and contemporary art is playing a significant role in this medical renaissance.

Notes 1. Simon Sinclair, Making Doctors: An Institutional Apprenticeship (Oxford, 1997), p. 43. 2. Roy Porter, The Greatest Benefit to Mankind: A Medical History of Humanity from Antiquity to the Present (London, 1997), p. 317. 3. Tim Marshall, Murdering to Dissect: Grave-robbing, Frankenstein and the Anatomy Literature (Manchester, 1995), p. 9. 4. Sinclair, p. 48. 5. John McLachlan and Debra Patten, ‘Anatomy Teaching: Ghosts of the Past, Present and Future’, Medical Education, 40 (2006), pp. 243–253 (p. 244). 6. The first public dissection in the UK for 170 years was carried out on 20 November 2002 by the German anatomist, Gunther von Hagens. 7. http://www.case.edu/artsci/dittrick/site2/museum/online/haunting/index.htm (accessed 4 December 2004). 8. John Harley Warner, ‘Anatomical Instruction and Training for Professionalism from the 19th to the 21st Centuries’, Clinical Anatomy, 19 (2005), pp. 403–414 (p. 407). 9. Ian Rankin, Fleshmarket Close (London, 2004), pp. 145–149. 10. John McLachlan et al., ‘Teaching Anatomy Without Cadavers’, Medical Education, 38 (2004), pp. 418–424 (p. 420). 11. Dannie Abse, Selected Poems (Harmondsworth, 1994), p. 196. 12. Frank Hulyer, The Blood of Strangers: True Stories from the Emergency Room (London, 2000), p. 11. 13. Ibid., p. 11. 14. Ibid. 15. J. C. Penney, ‘Reactions of Medical Students to Dissection’, Journal of Medical Education, 63 (1985), pp. 62–63. 16. McLachlan and Patten, p. 247. 17. Sinclair, p. 195. 18. Ibid., p. 171.

Jane Macnaughton 83 19. McLachlan et al., p. 421. 20. John McLachlan and Sam Regan De Bere, ‘How We Teach Anatomy Without Cadavers’, The Clinical Teacher, 1 (2004), pp. 49–52. 21. Work to design and create this shirt was supported by a grant from the Wellcome Trust. 22. B. Hughes, ‘Medicalized bodies’, The Body, Culture and Society, ed. Philip Hancock et al. (Buckingham, 2000), pp. 13–14. 23. P. S. Phillips, ‘Running a Life-Drawing Class for Pre-Clinical Medical Students’, Medical Education, 34 (2000), pp. 1020–1025. 24. www.artnet.com/ag/FineArtDetail.asp (accessed 15 October 2005). 25. T. R. Melling et al., ‘Young Males Have Scant Knowledge of Anatomy and Physiology’, Tidsskr Nor Laegeforen, 119 (1999), pp. 1080–1083. 26. A. Miah, ‘The Public Autopsy: Somewhere between Art, Education, and Entertainment’, Journal of Medical Ethics, 30 (2004), pp. 576–579. 27. Roy Porter, The Greatest Benefit to Mankind, p. 196. 28. H. M. Evans and David Greaves, ‘A Renaissance for the “Sense of Wonder” ’, Journal of Medical Ethics: Medical Humanities, 27 (2001), p. 1.


Part II Writing the Body


6 The Affective Body: Love, Virtue and Vision in English Medieval Literature Corinne Saunders

‘Why should a man’s mind have been thrown into such close, sad, sensational, inexplicable relations with such a precarious object as his own body!’1 Thomas Hardy’s question evokes ancient notions of the body as fragile, flawed, unstable, but also adopts the opposition of body and mind characteristic of Cartesian philosophy. Earlier ideas of body and mind were more integrated: to be embodied was to be human, and connection with the world was through the lived-body, fallen though this was. More apposite to medieval thought is the perspective of Wittgenstein, ‘The human body is the best picture of the human soul’.2 Although the body could be seen as the prisonhouse of the soul, it could also function to reflect and cultivate the soul’s beauty. The fallen body might through affective experience open the way to a deeper understanding of the self and the divine. Merleau-Ponty’s characteristic mysticism chimes with medieval understandings of the body: The perceiving subject must ... reach out towards things to which he has, in advance, no key, and for which he nevertheless carries within himself the project, and open himself to an absolute Other which he is making ready in the depths of his being.3 The notion of the body as affective was underpinned by ancient medical thought – in particular, Hippocrates’ theory of the humours, developed by Galen in the second century, and crucial to medieval and Renaissance thought. Just as nature was made up of four elements, so man was constituted of four humours or bodily fluids: yellow bile, related to fire, the choleric humour; blood, related to air, the sanguine humour; phlegm, related to water, the phlegmatic humour; black bile, related to earth, the melancholic humour. Humoural imbalance created illness, and disease was often treated through attempts to balance the humours; for instance, by blood-letting or purging. The humours underpinned individual temperament and complexion, 87


physical and mental health or illness, and the process of man’s movement through the conventional four ages.4 Each humour was linked to the movements and qualities of the stars and planets, identified with the classical gods. The humours were subject to the general movement and flux of the cosmos: thus winter caused an increase in the phlegmatic humour, bringing colds and rheums, while spring encouraged the sanguine humour, provoking the blood and drawing men to secular and sacred love. The entire cosmos, from the simplest inanimate object upwards, consisted in a complex system of sympathies, with God as prime mover. These natural forces were complemented by supernatural ones: the possibility of divine intervention, the benign and malevolent powers of angels and demons, and the amoral magic of the otherworld of faery, with its roots in Celtic and Germanic notions of the supernatural. The body was viewed as at once responsive to all these forces of the cosmos and reflective of the inner self – the soul. This essay focuses on three kinds of external force affecting the body: romantic love, illness, and the divine.5 In each case, the body is affective: physical experience, visibly written on the body, transforms and shapes individual identity. Such experience also shapes different, though related, kinds of literary treatment: courtly romance, didactic or penitential romance, and religious writing. The bodiliness of medieval writing is strikingly apparent in the genre of allegory. In the ‘psychomachia’ tradition, personified aspects of the self, good and evil, figure as bodies battling over the soul. Langland’s dream-vision, Piers Plowman, is rooted in this form: the narrator, Will, encounters and debates with both external and internal forces such as Anima, Conscience, Holy Church, and Scripture, and the work dramatically personifies the Seven Deadly Sins. Morality plays such as Everyman and Mankind similarly exploit the humour and didactic potential of the tradition. Allegory also follows a more courtly line of development in which the experience of love is presented through the personification of its various aspects. The archetypal opening of Guillaume de Lorris’ dream-vision, Le Roman de la Rose (c.1230), depicts a beautiful springtime garden, where the allegorical figures of Mirth, Pleasure and their companions dance: here the Dreamer is struck by the arrow of the God of Love, falling in love with the Rose, whose reflection he sees in a crystal pool; he sets out to find a way into her castle through the means of such allegorical figures as Fair Welcome, and, in Jean de Meun’s more cynical continuation, encounters less agreeable figures such as Danger and Jealousy. The work is underpinned by what is perhaps the most influential topos of the affective body, the idea of love-sickness, which finds its origins in classical writing, especially the poetry of Ovid, but figures again and again in courtly writing of the medieval period.6 Love is imagined as a physical wound: [The God of Love] loosed his arrow at me in such a way and with such force that the point entered my eye and penetrated my heart. Then I was

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seized with a chill which has often made me shiver since, even when wearing a warm, fur-lined cloak. The lover swoons, the only cure for his ‘great trouble and torment’ the beloved Rose.7 The legend of Tristan, originating in the twelfth century, and rewritten through the Middle Ages and beyond, similarly centres on this motif of the wound of love. Tristan’s poisoned wounds at the start prefigure both his ill-fated love for Isolde, imagined as a bitter sickness brought about by the love-potion, and his death as wounded he awaits her return: Isolde is both healer and destroyer. Chaucer’s great tragic narrative of love, Troilus and Criseyde, assumes and exploits these conventions: the inner journey of love is throughout written on the body.8 Love is an invasive, physical force, a wound with which the God of Love punishes Troilus for his laughter at the foolishness of lovers. On first seeing Criseyde, Troilus is ‘Right with hire look thorugh-shoten and thorugh-darted’: the image plays on the neo-Platonic convention of the eyes as the way to the heart, which is caused to ‘sprede and rise’, wounding and quickening Troilus’s affections.9 He manifests the typical symptoms of the malady of love: weeping, sighing, swooning, melancholy and physical decline. Love is depicted as inevitable, but also as a kind of death-wish. Troilus’s speeches repeatedly employ the imagery of death, and he becomes a pale figure of death reminiscent of the grieving lover in Chaucer’s earlier poem, The Book of the Duchess, who so acutely articulates the embodiment of his grief, ‘y am sorwe, and sorwe ys y’ (597). In the later books of Troilus and Criseyde, when Troilus is separated from and betrayed by Criseyde, he is literally unmade by love, his melancholy characterized by swoons, nightmares, withdrawal and abstinence until finally he wastes away to a shadowy figure of his former self: He so defet* was, that no manere man (*enfeebled) Unneth* hym myghte knowen ther he wente; (*scarcely) So was he lene, and therto pale and wan, And feble, that he walketh by potente*. (*crutch) (V, 1219–22) He complains of grievous pain around his heart.10 The associations of physical deterioration, illness and death paint love as a negative, tragic impulse. Yet, if love unmakes Troilus, this bodily force also shapes his identity, and in the first half of the poem the sufferings of love interweave with a sense of its sublimity, its capacity to elevate the individual to new realms of being. Troilus becomes the ‘lyric artist’, and the narrative is interspersed with his songs, including the first translation of a Petrarchan sonnet into English.11 The lyrics draw too on Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy, translated by Chaucer at about the same time and an important


influence on the poem as a whole. Troilus’s Boethian song, ‘Benigne Love, thow holy bond of thynges’ (III, 1261–1274), envisages the fair chain of love that binds together the universe: the affective force of individual love is woven into the natural, divinely created sympathies of the cosmos. It is not coincidental that these lines precede Chaucer’s depiction of the consummation itself, with its lyrical description of Troilus’s sensual experience of Criseyde’s body, ‘Hire armes smale, hire streghte bak and softe, / Hire sydes long, flesshly, smothe, and white’ (III, 1247–1248). The fulfilment of physical desire illuminates Troilus’s understanding of the celestial: in Criseyde’s eyes, Paradise stands ‘formed’ (V, 817). The song that concludes Book III offers a great celebration of love as a force in the universe, the elements ‘discordable’ (1753) in harmony, ruling sun, moon and tides, and holding peoples and individuals in virtuous accord. Troilus himself is depicted as surpassing all in moral excellence. The embodied experience of romantic love, then, may open on to the understanding and intense experience of divine love, moving the individual further towards perfection. Ultimately, the stance of Troilus and Criseyde is ambivalent, for the story ends in tragedy. Love both makes and unmakes the body and the world: it is paradisal and infernal, an inevitable, dangerous but also potentially inspirational affective force which is crucial to the romance genre. The ambivalent quality of love is acutely portrayed in one of the recurrent figures of romance, the desiring, otherworldly being, most often the enchantress, whose love may be attractive but is frequently dangerous and destructive.12 The body, subject to sinister and menacing power, becomes the site of conflict between unruly, predatory sexual desires and the impulse to virtue and chastity. In Sir Thomas Malory’s Morte Darthur (mid-fifteenthcentury), as in its sources and analogues, enchantresses such as Morgan le Fay repeatedly try to ensnare the bodies of the Arthurian knights. Thus Morgan and three queens cast a spell on the sleeping Launcelot, who wakes to find himself imprisoned in a ‘chambir colde’: the cost of his freedom is submission to their desire, ‘Now chose one of us, whyche that thou wolte have to thy peramour, other ellys to dye in this preson.’13 In fact, his service and loyalty to ladies leads the damsel who serves the imprisoned Launcelot to free him, and in turn he risks his body in battle for her. Most disturbing are the snares laid for Launcelot’s body by the enchantress Hellawes, ‘lady of the castell Nygurmous [of necromancy]’ (VI.15, 168). Hellawes enlists Launcelot’s aid, requesting him to enter the strange, otherworldly Chapel Perilous where skeletons grin and gnash at him, a place that turns out to be intended as Launcelot’s tomb. Had he not refused Hellawes’ request for ‘one kiss’, we learn, he would have lost his life, his corpse surrendered to the enchantress: Than wolde I have bawmed hit and sered hit, and so to have kepte hit my lyve dayes; and dayly I sholde have clypped the and kyssed the, dispyte of quene Gwenyvere. (VI.15, 168)

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Sex and death are equated in a highly threatening way, and the woman is written as the enchantress who desires the body at all costs, even the cost of life itself. Hellawes’ necromantic desire ultimately destroys her: she dies of unrequited love for Launcelot. The body of Launcelot is put at risk through his custom of serving ladies, but it is also preserved through his chaste virtue. He will be destroyed only when adultery with Queen Guinevere compromises his spiritual integrity. The threat of inexplicable, otherworldly desire to possess the body is treated most extensively and eerily in the romance of Sir Orfeo (c.1300), an anonymous reworking of the Orpheus and Eurydice story, in which Orpheus is depicted as an English king, the classical Underworld becomes the world of faery, and Eurydice’s lost body is ultimately restored. The work hauntingly probes the fear of violent death and loss of the beloved, and the wish to regain the beloved’s body. Heurodis (Eurydice) falls asleep in her orchard beneath an ‘ympe-tree’, a grafted or apple tree: such trees are conventionally associated with the otherworld in romance, perhaps because of their artificial, mixed quality, and thus the transitional space of the orchard becomes a dangerous, liminal place in which to sleep.14 Heurodis wakes to recount a strange vision of the King of Faery, who has summoned her to his realm. The violence of his command is written by Heurodis on her own body: Ac as sone as she gan awake, She crid and lothly bere* gan make; (*noise) She froted* hir honden and hir feet (*rubbed) And crached hir visage – it bled wete. Hir riche robe hie all to-rett* (*tore) And was reveysed* out of hir wit (*driven). (53–8) Heurodis’s pale, mutilated body emblematizes the sinister force of her abduction, a kind of living death, and despite being guarded by Orfeo and a thousand armed knights, she is spirited away, ‘taken’ into fairy. The purpose remains enigmatic: the King of Faery seems to desire bodies not sexually but as physical objects, and the Kingdom of Faery is peopled with bodies all caught in the throes of violent death. Fittingly, Orfeo’s grief is written on his body as he flees into the forest, becoming a Wild Man figure with his hair grown long, his body emaciated, and his skin blackened. The story implies, though it does not make explicit, the notion of healing grace, for it is in this state of exile that Orfeo, his kingly body consciously unmade, catches sight of the faery hunt, and follows them through a rock to the faery world, where he wins Heurodis back through his marvellous harping. The restoration of the bodies of the king and his wife are synonymous with the restoration of social order, and their integrity asserts the power of human love and loyalty even in the face of incomprehensible, seemingly inevitable, supernatural forces. The return of the beloved body of Heurodis speaks to the deep human desire for the return of those lost through death,


and hints too, perhaps, at the Christian promise of resurrection. The body, seized and unmade through the sinister, unruly forces of desire, is regained, remade through virtuous love. The subtext of penitence, grace and redemption in Orfeo’s physical transformation suggests that the testing of moral virtue may be literally written on the body, echoing the wounding effected by romantic love. While Orfeo consciously pursues this, the invasive force of illness may function similarly, to reflect the workings of providence and the state of the soul, but also to illuminate individual understanding and thus open the way to redemption.15 This affective process can play a shaping role in penitential or didactic romance. It is nowhere treated more graphically than in Robert Henryson’s sequel to Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde: the Testament of Cresseid (c.1475). Henryson relates how, unable to sleep after reading Chaucer’s poem, he takes up ‘ane vther quair’, which contains the tale of ‘the lamentatioun / And wofull end of this lustie Creisseid’.16 Cresseid has been abandoned by her lover Diomede and left desolate, to become a prostitute, ‘To change in filth all thy feminitie, / And be with fleschelie lust sa maculait’ (‘spotted’, ‘defiled’, from Latin, ‘maculatus’, a term often applied to lepers). The poem centres on the notion of spotted, tainted, corrupted purity, as pollution is graphically written on Cresseid’s flesh. Lamenting the unfairness of the gods of love, she experiences a dream-vision in which Cupid and Venus claim the right of revenge for her blasphemy, and Saturn (the planet associated with disease and violent death) lays a sentence on her with his ‘frostie wand’ (311); Cynthia (the moon) reads a bill that consigns Criseyde to the ‘lazarous’ sickness ominously hinted at by the goddess’s leaden hue and the ‘spottis blak’ of her cloak (343, 257, 260). Waking, Criseyde looks in the mirror to discover that she has become a leper. Henryson’s language of vivid physicality emphasizes the bodily transformation effected by the disease, ‘Sum knew hir weill, and sum had na knawledge / Of hir becaus scho was sa deformait, / With bylis blak ouirspred in hir visage, / And hir fair colour faidit and alterait’ (393–396). The symbolic resonance of leprosy was ancient and powerful: the physical symptoms of degeneration of flesh, limbs and bones characterized leprosy as a ‘living death’, although it is now known that the name was applied to many skin diseases where ulcers and sores were present. From the prohibitions of Leviticus (iii, 46) onwards, leprosy was viewed as an unclean, sexual disease, traditionally treated by isolation; local courts sometimes required lepers to leave cities or towns, and leprosy provided one of the strongest incentives for building ‘hospitals’, places that approached more nearly modern-day hospices. Leprosy was readily interpreted as a direct mark of sin and divine judgement, although it could also be seen as a ‘purgatory on earth’, with its sufferers finding ‘swifter reward in heaven’.17 Cresseid’s leprosy, argues Susan Sontag, ‘show[s] the true face of the beautiful liar’; the leper’s body becomes ‘a social text in which corruption [is] made visible’.18 Cresseid’s rotting flesh

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also renders her a living symbol of the imperfect, mutable nature of the temporal world: ‘Nocht is 3our fairnes bot ane faiding flour ... 3our roising reid to rotting sall retour’ (461–464). Yet while leprosy punishes by writing sin on the body, it also becomes a force of redemption. Banished to ‘3one hospitall at the tounis end’ (382), where she must live by begging for alms with clapper and bell, Cresseid sees a great company pass by, among whom is Troilus. Although she has become wholly unrecognizable, something in her eyes recalls to him Cresseid, and he gives her a purse of gold. The gesture of generosity triggers Cresseid’s penance and lengthy testament of guilt. Troilus’s generosity is reiterated in his forgiveness of Cresseid, and his commissioning of a marble tomb for her. The brief epitaph, ‘Sumtyme countit the flour of womanheid ... lait lipper’ (608–609), warns of the frailty of the flesh, the wages of sin, and the decay of all flesh, but the memorialization of Cresseid also betokens her redemption: her death and burial are honourable. Corruption of the body graphically images the diseased state of the soul, a marker of sin, judgement and mutability; it also occasions the need for grace, and, in part through the responses of others, shapes self-awareness and repentance. The unclean body is the means to the clean soul, unmaking and remaking the individual in dramatically didactic, affective terms. Even so marked a disease as leprosy retains a creative multivalence. While Henryson revels in melodrama, vivid detail, and the stark pattern of sin, punishment and repentance, the anonymous Middle English romance of Amys and Amylion employs the trope of leprosy in a more positive exploration of divine judgement and grace, which probes the power of friendship and virtue.19 The romance depends on a dramatic instance of the affective body: the two knights, Amys and Amylion, are from childhood ‘fairer than all’ and identical to each other, in reflection of their inner nobility and their ideal friendship. The likeness is a ready source of comedy, since even the wives of Amys and Amylion cannot distinguish one from another, but also crucial to the plot: their empathetic relationship is reiterated when Amylion offers to take the place of his friend (who is guilty of the charge of illicit love) in a trial by single combat. Although he is warned by a voice from heaven that if he does so he will become ‘a fouler man’ than any other, and likes the idea ‘ill’, Amylion continues, winning the battle, to find that his presentiment of ill fortune is written on the flesh: ‘as the angell had him ytolde, / A fouler lazar was none yholde / In this world then he’ (st. 125). Although no physical detail is given, Amylion’s experience of leprosy functions as an acute moral test. The romance complicates a simple understanding of disease as divine punishment for and reflection of sin. Both knights, as the emphasis on their fairness suggests, are fundamentally virtuous, embodying the chivalric ideal. Amylion is innocent except in his masquerade, and wins the battle because he is so, while Amys’s carnal sin of illicit love is treated sympathetically: the lady Belesawnt loves him for his chivalry, the pair plight ‘here trowthes both twoo’ (st. 54), and the affair ends in marriage; only


Amys’s betrayer, the false steward (jealous because Amys will not take him as sworn friend), is condemned. The motif of corruption of the flesh here is more complex than in the Testament of Cresseid. It does assert the absolute justice and omniscient power of God, who is not deceived by the battle won on a technicality. But its moral impact is firmly rooted in Amylion’s virtue: he is willing to sacrifice his body to disease for his friend, his living death enacting the words of Christ recorded in the Gospel of St John, ‘Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends’ (xv, 13). Amylion’s leprosy renders him a living emblem of Christ, suffering for mankind on the Cross. The virtue of others is also tested in their responses to Amylion’s diseased body: the selflessness of Amys’s wife is shown in her greeting to him, ‘As foule a lasur as he was, / The lady kiste him in that plas’ (st. 175). This example of charity finds its opposite in the rejection of Amylion by his wife and gradually his entire household, who respond more conventionally to leprosy. He is first chased from the high table, and then, ‘To eten at the monthes ende / Wolde no man sytte him be hende’ (st. 128); they thus disobey Jesus’s instruction to his disciples ‘to heal the sick, cleanse the lepers’ (Matt x, 1; x, 8). Much is made of the friendlessness (st. 126) of the man who has been the ideal, ‘beste’ friend of all. Amylion’s virtue is ultimately rivalled by the willingness of Amys to obey the divine command of curing Amylion’s leprosy by allowing him to bathe in the blood of Amys’s children. Abraham’s sacrifice of Isaac is taken two steps further, for the throats of both children are cut and then miraculously restored, ‘Withoute wem, withoute wounde, / All hole’ (st. 194). Emphasis is placed on the anguish and prayers of Amys and his wife (described only after the event), but also on Amys’s sense that he, like his friend, must take a sinful act upon himself, surrendering the body to achieve good, ‘Ffor me he shed his own blode / To save my lyfe on day’ (st. 184). The physical sacrifice of the children even more completely echoes that of Christ, and their innocent blood, like Christ’s, restores the sufferer. Their passive innocence renders the scene profoundly disturbing, yet in their death and resurrection and in Amylion’s leprosy and healing, God’s absolute power over the body is manifest. Elaine Scarry argues that stories of child sacrifice work through bodily paradox: ‘the two extreme forms of physical alteration, self-replication and wounding, converge’. The effect of the sacrifice is ‘to make an already existing God more immediately apprehensible, to remake of an unapprehensible God an apprehensible One’.20 In the miracle of healing, God is once again made flesh, and appropriately, the occasion is Christmas Eve. The story plays too on the legendary power of blood, the central symbol of Christianity. Ancient notions of sacrifice are rewritten in the concept of Christ shedding his blood for mankind, and the transformative power of blood is repeatedly celebrated in the mysterious transubstantiation of the Eucharist. Medical and folk belief emphasized the mysterious potency of blood. Medicine favoured the practices of blood-letting and of giving

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the patient, especially the madman, whose humoural imbalance might be the result of a deficiency in the blood, fresh blood, sometimes human, to drink.21 Blood also repeatedly figures as an element of magical recipes. Malory’s Morte Darthur plays on the healing power of blood in his Tale of the Sankgreal, the Holy Grail (Saint Graal) that has contained the precious blood of Christ (Sang Real). In an incident late on in the quest for the Grail, the blood of Perceval’s sister is given to heal a sick lady from a ‘malodye’ that has become a ‘mesell’, a term that suggests a leprous illness. Whereas ‘no leche cowde remedye her’, she may be healed by ‘a dysshfulle of bloode of a maydyn’: as in Amys, the blood must be pure (XVII.11, 591). The sacrifice of Perceval’s sister poignantly evokes that of Christ, for she loses so much blood in filling the dish that she dies. Earlier in this section of the Morte, Malory employs the model of the pelican, the Christ-like bird that pierces itself with its beak to save its young: ‘and so the grete birde bledde so faste that he dyed amonge hys birdys. And the yonge birdys toke lyff by the bloode of the grete birde’ (XVI.6, 564). The parallel action of Perceval’s sister, however, is rendered deeply troubling by the sinful nature of the lady she heals, whose insistence on taking the lives of all who pass by is condemned, and who is destroyed when the castle crumbles in divine retribution. The death of Perceval’s sister, unlike those of Amys’s children, does not end in a joyous miracle of healing but in a stark reminder that Christ’s healing blood was spilt for sinful, fallen, unredeemed mankind. The opening of the body and the precious power of blood do render flesh whole, but the lady gains no spiritual illumination and the example of self-sacrifice is disturbing in its pessimism. Romance repeatedly depicts bodies in need of healing from the wounds of love and sin, but also from those of battle. Wounded bodies, indeed, are required by the chivalric assumption that right and wrong may be proven on the body through trial by combat. The achievements of chivalry are visible on the knight’s body in the wounds and scars that complement the heraldic blazon on the knight’s armour. But the wounding associated with battle and the desire for healing may also have profound spiritual implications. In romances of the Grail Quest, spiritual and secular notions of the wounded body merge in the legend of the Fisher King (first told in the twelfth century in Chrétien’s Story of the Grail). The legend tells of the wounded king whose lands lie waste, who has charge of the Holy Grail and awaits the miraculous healing that a Questioner will bring. The story of the Fisher King may find its origins in primitive myths of fertility, which identify the ruler with his lands, and that of the Grail in folk tales of a horn of plenty that fulfils all desires, but these two narratives merge to create a haunting legend focused in man’s need for spiritual knowledge to complete and heal the broken self and the society that lies waste all around. This is a need more readily answered by Christian faith in the medieval romances of the Grail than in T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land. Weaving the penitential and didactic romance of the Grail


into the history of King Arthur adds to the themes of secular love, adultery and revenge those of spiritual quest and imperfection of soul and body: in combination, all these cause the fall of the Arthurian world, but we are also made acutely aware in Malory’s version of the difficulty of integrating the sacred and the secular. The virginal, ascetic body of the spiritual knight is not reconciled readily with that of the chivalric knight and lover, and this tension partly underlies the destruction of the Arthurian kingdom. Very near the end of the narrative of the Morte, after Launcelot, whose love for Guinevere means that he cannot wholly achieve the Grail Quest, has returned to Arthur’s court, Malory includes a particularly resonant instance of the wounded body. The episode, apparently Malory’s own invention, of the miraculous healing of Sir Urry functions as a reminder late on in the book of the need for but also the possibility of healing. Urry’s wounds are placed firmly beyond medicine, the result of the ‘suttyle craufftis’ wrought by the sorceress mother of Urry’s enemy, Sir Alpheus: ‘ever his woundis shulde one tyme fester and another tyme blede, so that he shulde never be hole untyll the beste knyght of the worlde had serched hys woundis’ (XIX.10, 663). As in Amys and Amylion, the body becomes the site of grace, both proving the power of human virtue and manifesting the presence of the divine in the world. The episode functions to convey the grandeur and high idealism of Arthur’s court just before the fall of the Round Table, and, in particular, to place Sir Launcelot as best of all earthly knights before his adultery with Guinevere is made public. The power of Launcelot’s hands is such that he can effect a miraculous cure in the manner of the saints. Much is made of his humility, ‘Jesu defende me ... whyle so many noble kyngis and knyghtes have fayled, that I shulde presume ...’ (XIX.12, 667), and he makes the attempt only when required by Arthur to do so. His tears (‘And ever sir Launcelote wepte, as he had bene a chylde that had bene beatyn!’) (XIX.12, 668) as he searches the wounds of the sick man reflect his awareness of his own human and flawed nature, even while the miracle of healing proves his moral virtue absolutely. Launcelot’s name thus provides the high point in Malory’s great list of all Arthurian knights, his healing hands physically demonstrating his spiritual perfection. The narrative tells us little of Urry himself: his body becomes a conduit to prove the presence of the divine and the virtue of Launcelot, who at the same time experiences through the transition from wounded to healed body a profound sense of the state of his own soul and his need of grace. The affective power of bodily experience both to reflect and illuminate the self, and the evident spiritual relevance of the themes of wounding and healing, rendered the body central to medieval religious writing as well as to romance. The increased interest in the individual in the later Middle Ages that underpinned romance also shaped the mystical tradition, which complemented and sometimes countered the cerebral, scholastic emphasis of Christianity. Mysticism stressed the individual humanity of Christ,

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and depended on the affective power of the bodily, in particular the power of images of Christ and the Passion, to move the individual to spiritual understanding and vision. Romance fuelled depictions of Christ as the ideal knight who gave his body in defence of right: the devotional text Ancrene Wisse (A Guide for Anchoresses) graphically employs this powerful trope in describing Christ’s wounded skin as the leather and painting on a shield; the image of Christ as chivalric knight, wearing the arms of man to joust in Jerusalem, recurs in medieval lyrics and is central to Piers Plowman. The bodiliness of religious writing, with the wounded body of Christ at its heart, is exemplified by the fourteenth-century poem Pearl, which offers a spiritual counterpart to the courtly dream-vision of the Romance of the Rose. The dreamer-narrator finds himself in a brilliant, visionary landscape where he encounters his lost pearl, his infant daughter, now an elegant courtly lady who instructs him in the mysteries of faith. The poem works through its piling up of physical images: the elaborate imagery of the pearl, the celestial landscape, the beauty of the Maiden herself, reflective of her inner perfection, the image of clothing washed white in the blood of the Lamb, and the final vision of the bejewelled and brilliant city of the heavenly Jerusalem. This is a poem rooted in bodily paradox: the Dreamer is shocked to see the wounded body of the Lamb who sits at the heart of the celestial city, radiating delight while ‘of His quyte syde His blod outsprent’.22 Romance and religious imagery intersect in the depiction of the virginal procession following Christ, and in the play made on the Pearl Maiden as the bride of Christ. The erotic language of courtly, romantic love, which also resonates with the imagery of the Song of Songs, occurs across mystical writing from that of Bernard of Clairvaux onwards, and becomes a powerful metaphor for the individual, affective relation with Christ. The Pearl Maiden uses the intimate, homely term ‘lemman’ (beloved) to describe Christ’s summoning of her to his ‘bonerté’ (beatitude, 761); she is the ‘maskellez bryd þat bry3t con flambe’ (spotless bride who flames brightly, 769). The imagery of fire and whiteness too is compelling in its physicality, echoing the blood and white skin of the Lamb. Mysticism, with its powerful topos of spiritual marriage, had a special appeal for women, who were unlikely to have access to the Latin theological tradition of the Church. Religious teaching directed towards women and women’s experiences of piety were informed by assumptions regarding the female nature: whereas Adam was created when God breathed life into the dust of the ground, Eve was formed from Adam’s rib, ‘bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh’ (Genesis ii, 23). Her bodiliness was affirmed in her childbearing role, but also in her susceptibility to sin. Singled out by Satan as the frailer vessel, and the first to succumb to temptation in the Fall, the woman was viewed as more bodily, more sexual, less rational. While women found a positive role model in Mary, the Second Eve, crucial to Mary’s perfection was her virginity. For all, but especially for women, to choose the life of


virginity was to pursue actively spiritual perfection, to slough off the taint of the lustful body. The virgin did not so much transcend as transform the suspect entity of the female body, turning it to the service of God; her spiritual power was rooted in her physical intactness. This integrity was symbolic of and afforded distance from worldly temptation and sin. The anchorite, walled up in the side of a church, as for instance Julian of Norwich was literally sealed off from the world, while asceticism’s harsh physical practices functioned to mortify the unruly flesh, bridling desire. Bodily separation from the world and the desires of the flesh could open the way to visionary experience, occasioning an altered or detached, privileged state of spiritual illumination.23 Julian of Norwich prays to be brought near to death, so that she may ‘lyven more to the worshippe of God’, and it is in her extreme illness in 1373 (at the age of about thirty) that she experiences her visions.24 Many of them are compelling in their physicality: the body of Christ withering on the Cross; the devil seizing her by the throat; God holding the world in his hand as if it were a hazelnut. Julian’s physical illness sets up an echo of Christ’s own agony, triggering divine vision. For the mystic, bodily experience opens the inner eye, in illness or some other extreme physical state (for instance, fasting, sleeplessness or mortification of the flesh), or in rapt contemplation of a particular image such as the Crucifixion.25 Mystical vision comprises a state of affective seeing rather than cognitive understanding: only after twenty years does Julian comprehend the meaning of her visions enough to record them in narrative form as A Revelation of Divine Love. The bodiliness of vision is especially evident in the spiritual autobiography of Julian’s near-contemporary, Margery Kempe. The lives of Julian and Margery were in many ways dramatically opposed, although both were so engaged with the tradition of affective piety. Margery bore fourteen children, and was intensely engaged in secular activities, including a brewing business; her book in part treats the difficulty of combining bourgeois and spiritual life. Everything in The Book of Margery Kempe is vividly physical: in Margery’s first vision, which follows her experience of suicidal despair after the birth of her first child, she sees Christ ‘in lyknesse of a man, most semly, most bewtyvows, and most amyable that evyr mygth be seen wyth mannys eye’, sitting by her bedside and greeting her; later in the Book, Christ emphasizes the intimate quality of their relationship, ‘Therfore most I nedys be homly wyth the and lyn in thi bed wyth the’.26 In another vision she assists at Christ’s birth, offering ‘a potel of pyment and spycys’ to the Virgin (76). Central to the narrative is Margery’s struggle to maintain a chaste marriage despite the unwillingness of her husband, and her temptations are often sexual, whether in the form of overpowering desire for a man or of grotesque sexual visions; she expresses special fear of rape. Ultimately, and unusually, the Book presents virginity as metaphorical: Margery is reassured by Christ that she is a maiden in her soul, and will dance in heaven with other holy

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virgins and maidens. Margery’s book, like Julian’s, emphasizes the contrast between the ‘bodily’ and the ‘gostly’ eye, but for Margery, intense visionary experience comprises bodily experience of the spiritual, ‘sche sey wyth hir bodily eye lych as sche had beforn wyth hir gostly eye’ (178). Margery’s visionary life continues to be accompanied by intense activity in the world: pilgrimage to holy places across Europe and to Jerusalem, and confrontations with priests and bishops. Most strikingly bodily, however, are Margery’s ‘cryings’, the physical mark of her divine inspiration. There exist numerous medieval accounts of abnormal physical manifestations of vision: swoons, convulsions, catalepsy, compulsive weeping and shrieking. Margery repeatedly describes her experience of ‘gret wepyng and gret sobbyng’, ‘that many man and woman also wondryd on hir therfore’ (209, 208). Tears play an important part in affective piety: as Christ wept for mankind, so men and women should weep for Christ and for themselves. Margery follows this example in praying for ‘a well of tears’, and is given precisely this gift. Her tears are evoked by images or reminders of holy things, but are also compulsive, public and extreme, ‘wyth plentyvows terys and boystows sobbyngys, wyth lowde cryingys and schille schrykyngys’ (222): And sche had so gret compassyon and so gret peyn to se owyr Lordys peyn that sche myt not kepe hirself fro krying and roryng, thow sche schuld a be ded therfor. (163) Margery describes how the cryings might occur anywhere, sometimes only once a month but sometimes fourteen times a day, and how, the more she tried to contain them, the more they would burst out amazingly loudly, to be followed by ‘passyng gret swetnesse of devocyon and hey contemplacyon’ (165). The cryings both render Margery a spectacle and raise questions about her holiness, and the book makes clear public uncertainty about how to interpret Margery’s behaviour: some see her as ill, others as possessed; one friar forbids her to enter the church because her noise drowns out the sermon. Margery herself never wholly comprehends her bizarre gift: she is troubled by the discomfort of her cryings, but also drawn, as in all aspects of her spiritual life, to enact them on the public stage. This strange invasion of the body becomes at once a physical sign sent by God, a spiritual test, and the means to illumination of the soul. But Margery’s cryings also seem in part to reflect the ineffability of the divine, the impossibility of fully articulating vision in language. Body, mind and spirit, then, are intimately connected in medieval thought and writing. Love is imagined as a physical wound, which brings with it transcendence of the everyday world yet is deeply threatening in its bodily invasiveness. The invasiveness of disease too is profoundly affective, as romance depictions of leprosy demonstrate with particular clarity.


Leprosy may corrupt the body to illuminate the corrupt soul, but may also bring realization and redemption through suffering. The wounded body of Christ, marking his love for mankind, resonates with the suffering body; and the spiritual experience of mystic or saint may be written on the body in extreme, sometimes conscious, ways. The body is, as Hardy remarked, ‘precarious’, yet that very precariousness may occasion a deeper comprehension of being in the world, open the inner eye, and bring spiritual illumination.

Notes 1. Michael Millgate (ed.), The Life and Work of Thomas Hardy (London, 1984), p. 265. 2. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe (Oxford, 1976), II.iv, p. 178. 3. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith (London, 1962; Atlantic Highlands, NJ, 1981), pp. 325–326. 4. See Roy Porter’s summary, The Greatest Benefit to Mankind: A Medical History of Humanity from Antiquity to the Present (London, 1997), p. 9; and further, Simon Kemp, Medieval Psychology, Contributions in Psychology 14 (New York, 1990). For general studies of medieval medicine, see M. L. Cameron, Anglo-Saxon Medicine, Cambridge Studies in Anglo-Saxon England 7 (Cambridge, 1993); Faye Getz, Medicine in the English Middle Ages (Princeton, NJ, 1998); Nancy G. Siraisi, Medieval and Early Renaissance Medicine: An Introduction to Knowledge and Practice (Chicago, 1990); and C. H. Talbot, Medicine in Medieval England (London, 1967). 5. I am grateful to the editor for permission to draw here on material in my essay, ‘Bodily Narratives: Illness, Medicine and Healing’, in Neil Cartlidge (ed.), The Boundaries of Medieval Romance (Cambridge, 2008). 6. For a comprehensive discussion of the malady of love, see Mary Frances Wack, Lovesickness in the Middle Ages: The ‘Viaticum’ and its Commentaries, Middle Ages Series (Philadelphia, 1990). 7. Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meun, The Romance of the Rose, ed. and trans. Frances Horgan, Oxford World’s Classics (Oxford, 1999), pp. 26–27. For the French, see Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meun, Le Roman de la Rose, ed. Félix Lecoy, 3 vols, Les Classiques français du moyen age (Paris, 1965–1970), vol. 1, pp. 52–53, ll. 1691–1696, 1719. 8. See further my ‘Love and the Making of the Self: Troilus and Criseyde’, in Corinne Saunders (ed.), A Concise Companion to Chaucer, Blackwell Concise Companions to Literature and Culture (Oxford, 2006), pp. 135–156. 9. Geoffrey Chaucer, Troilus and Criseyde, in The Riverside Chaucer, ed. Larry D. Benson (1987; Oxford, 1988), pp. 473–585, Book I, ll. 325, 278. Subsequent references to Chaucer’s writings will be from this edition, cited by (where relevant) book and line number. 10. On Troilus’s love-sickness, see also my discussion in ‘ “The thoghtful maladie”: Madness and Vision in Medieval Writing’, in Corinne Saunders and Jane Macnaughton (eds), Madness and Creativity in Literature and Culture (Basingstoke, 2005), pp. 67–87, 74–75.

Corinne Saunders 101 11. Barry Windeatt, Troilus and Crisyede, Oxford Guides to Chaucer (Oxford, 1992), p. 168. 12. See further my essay, ‘Erotic Magic: The Enchantress in Middle English Romance’, in Amanda Hopkins and Cory James Rushton (eds), The Erotic in the Literature of Medieval Britain (Cambridge, 2007), pp. 38–52. I am grateful to the editors for their permission to draw here on my discussion of Malory’s enchantresses, pp. 48–49. See also my Rape and Ravishment in the Literature of Medieval England (Cambridge, 2001), pp. 247–248. 13. Sir Thomas Malory, Malory: Works, ed. Eugène Vinaver, 2nd edn (Oxford, 1971; pbk edn, 1977), VI.3, pp. 151–152. Subsequent references to Malory’s Morte Darthur will be from this edition, cited by book, section and page number. I use this edition as the most accessible, since the third edition, revised by P. J. C. Field (Oxford, 1990), is out of print. 14. Sir Orfeo, in Donald B. Sands (ed.), Middle English Verse Romances, Exeter Medieval English Texts and Studies (Exeter, 1986), pp. 185–200, l. 46. Subsequent references to Sir Orfeo will be from this edition, cited by line number. See also my discussion in ‘The thoghtful maladie’, pp. 77–78, and in Rape and Ravishment, pp. 228–233. 15. See further the discussion of the divine origins of illness in Raymond A. Anselment, The Realms of Apollo: Literature and Healing in Seventeenth-Century England (Newark and London, 1995), pp. 25–30. 16. Robert Henryson, The Testament of Cresseid, in The Poems, ed. Denton Fox (Oxford, 1987), pp. 111–131, ll. 61, 68–69. Subsequent references to the Testament of Cresseid will be from this edition, cited by line number. 17. For this reference and the details given above, see Porter, pp. 121–122; see also Getz, pp. 80, 90–91. 18. Susan Sontag, Illness as Metaphor (1978), in Illness as Metaphor. Aids and its Metaphors (Harmondsworth, 1991), pp. 44, 59. 19. Amys and Amylion is based on an Anglo-Norman work of the late thirteenth century; the story is found in a number of number of other languages and was evidently popular in medieval Europe. This discussion will focus on the nuances of the Middle English text, preserved in the celebrated early fourteenth-century Auchinleck manuscript. References to this work will be from Amys and Amylion, ed. Françoise le Saux, Exeter Medieval English Texts and Studies (Exeter, 1993), cited by stanza number. 20. Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (Oxford: 1985), pp. 204–205. 21. See further Penelope B. R. Doob, Nebuchadnezzar’s Children: Conventions of Madness in Middle English Literature (New Haven, CT, 1974), p. 38. 22. Pearl, in Malcolm Andrew and Ronald Waldron (eds), The Poems of the Pearl Manuscript: Pearl, Cleanness, Patience, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Exeter Medieval English Texts and Studies, revd edn (Exeter, 1987), ll. 1137. Subsequent references to Pearl will be from this edition, cited by line number. 23. On the relationship of fasting to visionary experience, see further Caroline Walker Bynum, Holy Feast and Holy Fast: The Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women (Berkeley, CA, 1987). On the visions of Julian of Norwich and Margery Kempe, see also my discussion in ‘The thoghtful maladie’, pp. 78–82. 24. Julian of Norwich, A Revelation of Love, ed. Marion Glasscoe, revd edn, Exeter Medieval English Texts and Studies (Exeter, 1993), p. 3. 25. Jerome Kroll and Bernard Bachrach, The Mystic Mind: The Psychology of Medieval Mystics and Ascetics (New York and London, 2005), bring to bear modern biological

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and psychological research on medieval mystical experience, to explain how extreme physical practices may have affected body and brain in order to create altered states of consciousness. 26. Margery Kempe, The Book of Margery Kempe, ed. Barry Windeatt, Longman Annotated Texts (London, 2000), pp. 55, 196. Subsequent references to Margery’s Book will be from this edition, cited by page number.

7 Victorian Literature and Bringing the Body Back from the Dead Francis O’Gorman

Fantasies of the body’s return have long been the common property of human imaginings. Rituals of death and resurrection, known in ancient religions, have been indispensable to systems of, in particular, Western religious beliefs from Osiris to Persephone to Jesus. They retain their allure. But for the Victorians, contemplating the Christian doctrine of resurrection, the theological world was changing rapidly. St Paul’s words – ‘if Christ be not raised, your faith is vain’ (1 Cor xv, 17) – reminded them of what was at risk in the culture’s increasingly widespread discomfort with the Gospels’ account of the tomb. The challenges of the Higher Criticism, the New Geology, and the new scientific materialism that claimed to privilege experimental knowledge over mere authority exposed faultlines in the substance of a faith that now entered a new phase of insecurity. ‘A Christian afraid of death!’ declared the Reverend Thomas Paddon in 1875: how ‘utterly groundless are such fears; and how greatly dishonouring to Him who took upon Him our nature, that He might deliver us from the fear of death!’1 But others could not share such conviction. Matthew Arnold, conscious of a national want in moral leadership in the 1860s and 1870s, saw little that was serviceable in a religion that made from the miraculous its central claims to significance: moral authority needed more than that. At the close of the century, James Frazer’s The Golden Bough (1890) unnerved readers by confirming what the tradition of Victorian comparative mythology had long taught – that Christianity drew on other systems of ‘magical’ thought. Christianity, Frazer implied, re-formulated rituals and values common to the most primitive of beliefs – not least, as Book IV, ‘The Golden Bough’, outlined, the rituals of death and resurrection. In an intellectual climate placing serious pressures on Christianity’s claims to miracle, even imagining the return of the dead became, across Victorian culture, a matter of trouble. Might the grave be all? A genre appealing to an exceptional diversity of writers, the ghost story helped to define Victorian literature, musing on imaginative versions of human durability. That genre was for some a secret repository of cryptic hopes. And hopes were found and upset, turned to 103

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spectacle and to ridicule among the voices discerned by – or produced by – spiritualists, in their heyday from mid-century. But, for other Victorians, regardless of the public orthodoxy of their faith, the idea of death’s conquest was best understood not through the (faint) reassurances of the séance, nor in displaced literary fantasies of phantoms, but in the implications of resurrection as metaphor. If resurrection lost some of its literal credibility as a doctrine during the period, it became more suggestive as a symbol. Charles Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities (1859), a story of the recall to life, perceived symbolic resonance as being compelling: Dr Manette’s ‘resurrection’ was from the darkness of incarceration to human love (though it was unstable); Charles Darnay was ‘brought back’ from death at the beginning of the novel by a jury, and, as Evrémonde, at the end by Sydney Carton. And in ironic counterpoint to Carton’s act of atonement (in the Christian sense), which relocated a theological concept in a narrative of human romance and self-betterment, Dickens placed Jerry Cruncher as the grave-robbing ‘Resurrection-Man’.2 Literally digging up tombs, he provided a comic/gothic version of the scenes of unearthing, of life’s return, treated more seriously and symbolically elsewhere. Tolstoy’s re-appropriation of the concept as primarily one of psychological and spiritual recovery in Resurrection (1899) did not mirror Dickens3: Katusha’s and Nekhlyudov’s history was not Lucie’s and Carton’s. But Tolstoy’s text, preoccupied with internal transformations of character and values, was a development of A Tale of Two Cities’ sustained dramatization of being ‘RECALLED TO LIFE’4 all the same, just as it was also a meditation on Dostoevsky’s searching of the aftermath of crime in Crime and Punishment (1866).5 Bodily resurrection and the question ‘can these dry bones live?’, which Henry Bowler’s graveyard painting asked in 1855, formed topics of deliberation, the consequences of which were widely felt. ‘The doctrine of the bodily resurrection,’ one commentator observed in 1896 as he looked back on the century, ‘is tottering to ruin’.6 But the fall – if fall it was – had not been sudden. Tennyson’s memorable gesture to the Gospel narrative of Easter morning in In Memoriam AHH (1850), a poem thinking hard about what might survive the grave, had half a century before worried about false resurrection hopes: ‘He is not here, but far away’, lyric VII famously ended, seeming to speak of Hallam as if newly alive in another domain. But Tennyson’s enjambment showed the trick: He is not here; but far away The noise of life begins again, And ghastly through the drizzling rain On the bald street breaks the blank day.7 Repeating scriptural words from the figures in Jesus’ tomb, ‘He is not here, but is risen’ (Luke xxiv, 6), the first line proposed a momentary hope in

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Hallam’s resurrection only to confute it with the material, quotidian meaning of the dreary daybreak in the remaining three. What was emotionally persuasive was the failure of the body to last. As if extending Tennyson’s equivocations into confident, enticing refusal, Swinburne’s ‘A Forsaken Garden’ (1878) figured at once a darker, yet also a more captivating, scene: in that abandoned garden death lay dead, with any hope of revival banished in the lush, decadent melancholy of decay. Discerning little to cherish in the Christian doctrine, Swinburne found strange pleasure in the tang of permanent demise. Robert Browning, whose religious faith was carefully hidden, perceived in the trope of bodily returns an idea – reticent, compelling, provocative, hard to account for – at the centre of dramatic art. At the level of plot, Browning’s verse was drawn to deathbed scenes: ‘Holy Cross Day’ (1855), ‘A Death in the Desert’ (1864), Pompilia in The Ring and the Book (1868–1869). In narratives of bodies returning, Browning found a powerful defiance of elegy and mourning, a confrontation with Tennysonian modes of grief that had become a defining note of the age’s expressions of sorrow. ‘The Bishop Orders His Tomb at St Praxed’s Church’ (1845) dramatized a speaker on his deathbed, who could not envisage his body ever being dead. There was no need in this criss-crossing of optimism with ignorance for a doctrine of resurrection: the Bishop’s effigy would, the erroneous prelate assumed, be a conscious version of himself. Browning raised an amused eyebrow at the Bishop’s grasp of doctrines, yet the fantasy of surviving bodily life was a tempting one. Elsewhere, men and women did die – but then they came back, as if Browning could not rid himself of that early vision of the Bishop’s sustained vitality. Balaustion’s Adventure (1871) included a full version of Euripides’ Alcestis, with its account of Hercules restoring Alcestis to her husband. Another wife returned in ‘Epilogue: The Householder’ at the end of Fifine at the Fair (1872), and Alcestis made a further appearance in Aristophanes’ Apology (1875). Yet another wife came back – or nearly – in ‘Eurydice to Orpheus’ (1864), a brief poem which figured a resurrection moment stalled between the realization that the grave could be overcome and its searing opposite. Such plots acquired solemnity from Browning’s loss of his own wife. Ted Hughes, who had lost a poet-wife too, translated Alcestis (1999) while he was dying. Yet those scenes of bodily return in the soi-disant ‘revivifying’ verse were at the most important level dramatizations not of Browning’s faith in God but his faith in words. The dramatic monologue, as Browning saw it, hinted at a mythic and experiential version of bodily resurrection. If Christianity could not be sure what happened in that first-century tomb, the dramatic monologue in Browning’s hands attempted to hint at how the return of the dead might feel in the affective textures of staged speech. His art gave, or claimed to give, personality, verbal forms and the illusion of presence to the dead. Verse was possessed by fantasies of the departed: ‘ “I enter, spark-like, put old powers

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to play” ’,8 Browning remarked through the voice of a magician at the opening of The Ring and the Book, describing his revivalist poetics. Like a new Elisha, who in 2 Kings iv brought back to life the son of the Shunammite, Browning presented himself as a resurrectionist with words, a poet who made the ‘dead alive once more’,9 who, with his own life, ‘abolished the death of things’.10 In dramatizing Hercules’ recovery of the dead in Balaustion, he neatly emblematized what The Ring and the Book had declared ‘galvanic’11 poetry could do, playing out a scene from his own poetics. Forging a link between the body of a text and the implied return of the material body, Browning’s claim was one of the most disarming statements about Victorian poetry by a Victorian. But it was intended, whatever else it did, to point to the strangeness of reading such vividly recuperative verse. The vocabulary of the returning dead troped and gave imaginative momentum to the notion of writing’s perceived ability to produce illusions of human presence that could be, for the duration of reading, convincing. Browning was not adverting in such a trope to form as the peculiar quality of his art, nor to the intellectual or discursive drive of his monologues. He was underlining a psychology of reading that privileged the dramatic monologue as a mode of contact with the simulacrum of other human consciousnesses. Browning was startling. But he was not alone in his sense of the curious worlds into which reading dramatic poetry could take one, as if into a room peopled by the reanimated dead. Swinburne sometimes thought dramatic verse too a kind of resurrection-without-the-body. Reflection on revivalist intentions, with the distinctive accent of Swinburne’s ironizing regard for Christianity, was most visible in his history of Tristram and Iseult, a story in which death had more dominion than returns. Nursing an irritation with Tennyson’s Idylls of the Kings (1859–1885), Swinburne began Tristram of Lyonesse in December 1869 and eventually published the work in 1882. It recounted a history of intense human desire – Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde (1865) had written those passions on a colossal scale – and Swinburne presented his retelling as an act of corporeal revival. ‘I ... give’, he said in the ‘Prelude’, echoing The Ring and the Book and describing what he thought he had achieved in retelling the ancient myth of doomed love: Out of my life to make their dead life live Some days of mine, and blow my living breath Between dead lips forgotten even of death.12 With a frisson of necrophilia, Swinburne’s trading of his own body to recuperate the bodies of the lost invited his reader to consider, as Browning had, the disconcerting experience of otherness that defined a reader’s beguilement by the ‘reality’ of poetry’s simulacra and the way readers were made to feel about them. To be enthralled by the story of Tristram and Iseult, to suspend disbelief, as Coleridge would say, in the lure of their narrative,

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was to encounter knowledge which was signed, through the discourse of the rising body, as an alternative to non-textual, non-literary experience. Dramatic poetry was in a provocative, transformative relationship with a culture in which resurrection’s theological meaning was changing. Drifting towards the aesthetic from the theological, ‘resurrection’ for Browning and Swinburne was best understood not as doctrine, as inhering in the capacities of the body, but as a metaphor for the work of poetic language. Browning figured his dramatic language as galvanic, ‘start[ing] the dead alive’.13 But, throughout the period, a question of how words might in other ways be said to live existed beside those provocative aesthetics. Christian discourse, to be sure, could claim an indestructible vitality for the language of personal testimony. The polemicist A. J. Morris considered the gifts to future generations that strong men and women left behind them. In Prophets of God: Dying Speakers of Living Words (1848), the tenacity of human verbal witness to the divine was made to seem absolute: living words were those that confessed the Gospel for all time (Browning’s ‘A Death in the Desert’ (1864) worried, precisely, about the longevity of such a witness’s authority). Yet words might ‘live’ in other, more subtle or secular ways: their forms of testimony more unexpected. A corpus of thought about the vitality of language in the Victorian period located in the notion of a ‘living word’ concepts that sounded theological but were primarily about the material of human discourse and the survival through that of human intentions. Richard Chevenix Trench, who ended his career as Archbishop of Dublin, perceived, as he put it in his influential volume of the New Philology, On the Study of Words (1854), a word’s history as indicative of the vital presence of the past, with ‘vital’ being the operative term. In individual lexical forms, he said, ‘are beautiful thoughts and images, the imagination and the feeling of past ages, of men long since in their graves, of men whose very names have perished’.14 Accurate speech was always, in this sense, a metaphorical revival of the dead through the dark passageways of etymology. There is ‘a reality about words’, Trench went on: ‘they are not merely arbitrary signs, but living powers.’15 That conception offered no hope to the bodies of the departed. But it claimed the preservation at least of past lives in the corpora of language, which, like Browning’s poetics, privileged words as intimate with the lost, as bearers of their messages. Words carried the dim traces of just-discernible men and women whose bodies were in the tomb, but whose meanings still applied pressure on the sense that language made. In Victorian literature, the resurrection of the body also suggested further possibilities. Preoccupied with the faint chances of corporeality against the tomb, Matthew Arnold thought more of non-resurrections, and once, with a doctrinaire force, offered a frame of gloom that enabled an emotionally seductive melancholy, a pleasurable pessimism. Sidney Dobell’s hyperbolically emotional work in the ‘spasmodic’ manner, Balder (1853), was a drama of a despairing poet killing his wife, which ended with an enigma about


the finality of death: ‘if there be heaven this is not / To kill thee’,16 Balder declares, extricating himself from the guilt of murder. But Arnold’s Balder Dead (1855), returning to the northern saga tradition, looked searchingly at death’s finality. Balder Dead was a counter-Christian history to which Robert Buchanan would eventually reply with a cheerfully Christianized version, Balder the Beautiful: A Song of Divine Death (1866), in which resurrection was made possible. But for Arnold, the story of Balder was that of resurrection’s failure. Elsewhere, he was lured to fantasies of returns, as Tennyson was when speculating on Hallam’s miraculous return in In Memoriam AHH;17 but not in Balder Dead. That poem retold the Prose Edda’s account of the young god Balder, mischievously slain, who, despite Orpheus-like attempts to recall him from the underworld, was permanently immured in death. A poem narrating attempts to secure a return from the grave which almost succeeded, Balder Dead was a lament for, as well as an assertion of, the impossibility of resurrection. Doubtful of miracle, Arnold’s text, an antiAlcestis story, solemnly expressed a generation’s mourning for the failure of resurrection to seem any longer a tangible possibility. Yet bodily returns, encroaching on Arnold’s imagination, could not be kept at bay so firmly. They tempted the poet, and his verse envisaged the reprises of the dead which Balder attempted to banish. ‘Heine’s Grave’ (1867) was, to be sure, absorbed by the material factuality of Heine’s death: Arnold’s first thoughts were on loss, lifelessness, and the ‘black tombstone’ (2). Yet a glimpse of the revived German poet emerged despite the burden of the poem’s grief. Not merely a memory, this was a brief episode of revisitation. ‘See!’ the poet declared, a real presence upon him, in the May-afternoon, O’er the fresh, short turf of the Hartz, A youth, with the foot of youth, Heine! thou climbest again! ...18 Breaking away from its empirical absorption in the relics of death, Arnold’s text re-envisaged Heine alive amid the mountains. Despite a faltering Christian doctrine and despite the admonishment of Balder, at least the imagination could do this for the body. In ‘Stanzas in Memory of the Author of “Obermann” ’ (1852), Arnold probed a different kind of resurrection, located outside the imagination’s yearnings and in the heart of a scene of reading. To read was, in this formulation, to become in contact with the author somehow ‘behind’ the words. All photographs in Susan Sontag’s view are memento mori,19 but Arnold’s poem perceived reading the work of a dead man as more than memento vivere: it was not a remembrance but an experience of life returned. Looking through the pages of Senancour’s Obermann (1804), the poet felt the ‘wounded human spirit’ turning ‘on its bed of pain’.20 Senancour was brought back – ‘I feel

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thee near once more’21 – in an act of reading that expressed not the joy of a body’s return but the odd proximities texts could construct between the present and lost men and women, the collapses of history they could effect in the reader’s sense of the personalities behind the words. Writing entered a relationship with the possibility of the grave’s overthrow. And that notion that the aesthetic might somehow revive life – the fantasy of the Bishop Ordering his Tomb, Swinburne’s resurrectionist principle, Arnold’s glimpse through reading far beyond the tomb – lingered among later Victorian meditations on the nature of aesthetic experience conceived as a form of living. Coleridge, certainly, had claimed great art an organic, vital form; but Victorian meditations on the animation in the aesthetic proposed more surprising types of life’s residence in the aesthetic, of the body’s exchange with art. Walter Pater was intrigued by survivals. He took an anthropological term – E. B. Tylor influentially defined ‘survivals’ as the continuation of elements from primitive culture into civilization22 – and changed it into a marker of uncanny continuances. In the face of Leonardo’s ‘John the Baptist’ in the Louvre, Pater saw the likeness of Bacchus, the presence of one of the ‘decayed gods’ who ‘after the fall of paganism’ had ‘taken employment in the new religion’.23 In ‘Denys L’Auxerrois’ (Imaginary Portraits, 1887) and ‘Apollo in Picardy’ (1893), he presented narratives of the survival of preChristian gods into the Christian world, while his interest in Demeter and Persephone, the myths of cyclical returns, of death ‘and the promise of life to come’,24 occupied a large portion of the text published posthumously as Greek Studies (1895). Enthralled by the chance of old lives still living, of the intercalation of the dead into the calendar of the present, Pater was also intrigued by the visual or verbal artefact’s abilities to retain hints of vitality in a more particular sense. Associating the preservation of life beyond its natural duration with the pagan, Pater framed the act of reading as an occasion where real bodily life could be discerned fleetingly even in the absence of an actual body. The ‘consumption’ of art involved the recognition that something like life was safeguarded or conjured – the distinction was one for the reader – by the strange alchemy of discourse. In reading Michelangelo’s sonnets, it was almost possible for the attentive reader to approach the living dead. ‘The interest of [the] poems,’ Pater said in The Renaissance (1873), ‘is that they make us spectators of [his] struggle’. In this sense, poetry opened a window on a personality which, like Senancour, was seemingly still living. The colloquial manner of Michelangelo’s verse, Pater went on, meant that his poetry ‘brings us nearer himself, his own mind and temper’.25 Michelangelo thought about serious questions of Christian theology, yet despite that abstraction and through ‘all that range of sentiment’, Pater concluded, ‘he is the poet, a poet still alive, and in possession of our inmost thoughts’.26 In that figure was imagined the reader’s experience of the author living through his work, another sense that the dead were

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contacted through the intimate act of reading; that men and women hidden behind words were animate in a way that suspended query; that ‘resurrection’ was normalized through texts; that closing a book was a moment of bereavement in a sense more than simply metaphorical. At the beginning of The Renaissance, Pater directed the attention of criticism towards the reader’s or spectator’s experience and away from the allegedly objective meaning of works of art. But his perception of the sustained vitality of the artist introduced a presence into the work of art that was not framed so easily as a function of the spectator’s subjectivity. In the shadowy presence of the living author still present in his creation, the ghost of a permanent, unchanging significance drifted across Pater’s art object, hinting at an authorial intention that was reclaimable and stabilizing. The returning dead, in this respect, grounded an art object’s meaning as it migrated into futurity: the enduring authors provided the suggestions of certainty, the almost-lost echoes, like Trench’s, of what had once really been meant. The notion of personality giving meaning to art, and more importantly of the whole Victorian conception of the ‘living word’ standing in for the returning body, seemed to Oscar Wilde winningly absurd. In The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890–1891) those arguments reached a cul-de-sac in Wilde’s refusal to be convinced. Basil Hallward paints Dorian’s portrait as if in response to Lord Henry Wotton’s desire to ‘have something that endures’.27 But Hallward can have no clue of the kind of endurance his picture will obtain. Vitality’s presence and durability in aesthetic form is what the novel makes dreadfully literal, and the basis for a moral tale of nemesis. Catching sight of Hallward’s portrait for the first time, Dorian’s words are those of a man without faith in the body’s resurrection in glorious new form. His is a voice from the ‘tottering ruin’ of Christian doctrine, lamenting that ‘I shall grow old, and horrible, and dreadful’ while ‘this picture’ will ‘remain always young’.28 The narrative’s trick is to make Dorian and his picture change places, rendering visible, in the process, a disconcerting literalness about the ‘life’ of art. In the exchange of Dorian’s physical form for that of his deformed portrait at the close, Wilde’s text proposed a final irony, a parodic version of the aesthetic artefact sustaining the life of the dead. This artefact sustained the life of the living. And at the end, the restored and innocently charming picture offers but the empty recollection of a body for ever gone and a canvas which is lifeless in a peculiarly discomforting sense. Wilde mourned and played havoc with Victorian ruminations on the life of art, which had themselves grown from Romantic claims about the relationship between the body of the aesthetic and the vital body. Elsewhere, the end of the century remained as intrigued by the literal returns of the bodies of the dead as the middle, even if the implications of such returns for the work of the aesthetic were different. The final movement of Mahler’s second symphony (1897) found in Friedrich Klopstock’s ‘Aufersteh’n, ja

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aufersteh’n / Wirst du, Mein Staub, / Nach kurzer Ruh’29 a non-Christian affirmation of resurrection (and not one that Mahler would sustain) shortly before Tolstoy searched for a non-bodily meaning in Resurrection. But in England, Robert Browning’s distinctive sense of art’s liveliness, his conception of dramatic verse as resurrectionary, received no more challenging a reaction – one articulate of wider late-Victorian frustrations with Christian doctrine – than in the work of John Davidson. Wilde’s irony had been for a general conception of vitality in art, but Davidson’s reflections pointed more specifically to Browning’s view of dramatic writing as that which had exceeded its lifespan. As Davidson’s writing moved from pastoral romance to bleak prospects of suburban modernity, he was, like the poet of The Ring and the Book, conscious of the possibilities of dramatic verse as a form of witness from beyond the grave. But in ‘A Woman and her Son’ (written in 1896), he offered a scene of a dead body’s reprise that exuded impatience with a poetics claiming that verse relayed the testimony of the departed. ‘A Woman and her Son’ dramatized an occasion where a dying woman, believing in the Christian afterlife, is rebuked by her materialist son, confident that ‘death is the end of all’.30 In reply she promises to return from the grave with ‘news of God and Heaven’ to reassure and save him.31 Three days after her death – the number is of obvious significance – she (apparently) returns. But has she been dead or sleeping? Is this a return from the tomb or from unconsciousness? Whatever the case, she is hardly able to remember anything. ‘What must I say or do, my dearest son?’ she declares in dismay: Oh me, the deep discomfort of my mind! ... I understand the settled treachery, The plot of love and hope against the world.32 Lazarus in the Gospels had revealed nothing about the other side: ‘something sealed / The lips of that Evangelist’,33 Tennyson remarked, with sorrow – and, perhaps, a dim suspicion of a fraud. A grim sense of existence without the consoling myth of eternity was, in Davidson’s version of the silent Lazarus, stretched out in a gothic scene echoing end-of-the-century dubieties about the doctrinal substance of Christianity. Offering a speaker returning, allegedly, from the grave but unable to reveal anything of the life beyond, Davidson’s poem also, in terms of its poetic inheritances, pointed a withered finger at the misleading metaphors of Browning’s revivifying claims. Dramatic poetry could make no assertions of ‘revival’; its testimony was not of the dead (Davidson’s ‘Testaments’ certainly were not); its business was scepticism about the durability of the body and the soul; the experience of reading was one that upset rather than reconfigured faith in the power of words to transport beyond the earthly. In Davidson’s drama, time was unredeemed. The mother could not change her life of poverty, only justify it; her son could not undo a childhood in a

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‘house [that] was hell’, only lament it.34 Time might be forgotten – during the three days of ‘death’ – but that was perhaps only a premonition of the oblivion awaiting each individual. Staging the failure of words to represent the testimony of the departed, Davidson contested the notion of literature’s enchanting powers, Browning’s mage-like capacity to create illusions of the returning dead, as a sensible basis for what believing in poetry might mean. Yet that nineteenth-century seepage between the discourse of bodily resurrection and theories of the nature of the literary were not wholly brought to a halt by Davidson’s vexation. Yeats did not abjure a conviction that poetry was touched by magic, able in naming the dead to bring them in some way back to the telluric world. But no more exceptional literary preoccupation with the relationship between words and their capacity to conjure the past, to make history ‘live’ again, could be found in early-twentieth-century European writing than in À la recherche du temps perdu (1913–1927), which inscribed into the extraordinary, prolonged and densely multiple experience of its many volumes, with all the forgetfulness and recollections its reading involved, a form of literary revivalism dependent on the superabundance of words. But it was not only in the largesse of words, ‘mere’ recollection, that Proust’s past returned, for his empirical project was touched with the curious Victorian lexicon of uncanny returns. At the close of Du côté de chez Swann (1913), Swann attends a performance of the Vinteuil violin sonata, a phrase of which has become intimately associated for him with Odette. Listening, he discerns the unsettling associative power of music, its ability to create an illusion of a human presence which replaces a revived body with a luminous sense of a returning, disembodied personality: La parole ineffable d’un seul absent, peut-être d’un mort (Swann ne savait pas si Vinteuil vivait encore) s’exhalant au-dessus des rites de ces officiants, suffisait à tenir en échec l’attention de trois cents personnes, et faisait de cette estrade où une âme était ainsi évoquée un des plus nobles autels où pût s’accomplir une cérémonie surnaturelle.35 The enchantment of the aesthetic, its holding a spectator as if in a trance (tenir en échec), invites a revival of supernatural vocabulary, as if Browning’s sense of art as personal revival was still serviceable – ready, indeed, to be ritualized. Overcome by the intensity of the music, the naïve Comtesse de Monteriender proclaims its uniqueness: ‘ “C’est prodigieux”,’ she says, ‘ “je n’ai jamais rien vu d’aussi fort” ’. But, the narrator adds, her scrupulous regard for exactness forces a correction: ‘ “rien d’aussi fort ... depuis les tables tournantes!”.’36 Only the language of the returning dead, the table turning of the spiritualists, can hint adequately at the sense of a personality, disembodied but present, non-corporeal but felt, which the music implied. In the midst of Proust’s efforts to revive time through the multiplication of memorial words, the painstaking appearance of memory recollected,

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a stranger claim of art’s relationship with the dead touched the margins of his representations. As faith in the literal bodily resurrection described in the Nicene Creed lost some of its foothold, the language of non-bodily returns, or of bodily returns in the imaginary, proved hospitable to conceptions of the memorial work of language and the nature of posthumous reading. Those who, like Browning, Swinburne or Pater, invoked a lexicon of revival to think about art’s capacity to create the illusions of human presence, hinted at the surprising, non-ordinary and enchanted worlds into which reading could, intimately and riskily, lead. They marked the domain of the imaginary as one of challenging difference from the quotidian. Revivalist discourses exchanged (or tried to) the body with the book, the body with the art object, as the site of vitality. Space was in turn left for Wilde at the close of the century to make grim fun of a painting that literally appropriated the body, took over its rightful maturation, and lived in its stead. But late Victorian literary thought, disregarding the ironies of Dorian Gray, came, at the beginning of a new age, to describe a further way in which literature could be said to live. The readability of texts – their capacity to last longer than their authors – emerged, finally, as the new and rather simpler meaning of literary vitality. Swinburne, on the death of Rossetti in 1882, saluted ‘Art that mocks death, and Song that never dies’,37 and such vocabulary of literary tenacity flourished in a familiar figure of early-twentieth-century criticism. ‘[A]lthough it may seem much to claim,’ Henry Rider Haggard said in 1926, ‘my belief is that some of my tales will live.’38 Part of the work of a poet was always lost after his or her demise, A. C. Bradley had said earlier in 1914, lecturing on the decline of Tennyson’s reputation. But the other part was ‘separated out and continues to be widely read or, as we say, to “live” ’.39 Haggard and Bradley symptomatically proposed a post-Victorian twist in a nineteenth-century fascination with the vocabulary of the conquered tomb in relation to the discourse of the aesthetic. Here, in the wake of the age of Arnold and Swinburne, was a version of the relationship between the aesthetic and the vital at the jaws of death which accrued to the literary a more obvious, metaphorical sense of literary life. A complex and fraught notion re-emerged as a plain statement about the nature of fame; about, simply, texts that people did not ignore. It is easy to forget in such early-twentiethcentury uses of the concept of literature’s vitality, particularly after the meanings to which F. R. Leavis subsequently put literary ‘life’ as a criterion of evaluation, that the Victorians had found the concept so differently and importantly suggestive. Their fretful age understood elements of the arts in culturally unique ways, through the Christian language of death’s conquest. To the discourse of revival, the Victorians gave new and complicated possibilities in nineteenth-century literary theory, its conceptions of aesthetic affect and the nature of reading. In one peculiar respect, the arts for some nineteenth-century thinkers competed for what the body, in Christian

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thought, once seemed securely to possess. The ancient vocabulary of recuperated life, of the corporeal reanimated, moved freshly and challengingly into the nineteenth-century’s theories of reading and spectatorship. And as it did, art entered a distinctive relationship with the body – invigorating, contested, sincere, parodic, and impossible now fully to inhabit – that was incontestably Victorian.

Notes All translations are my own. 1. T. H. Paddon, Death Abolished or, The Saint’s Deliverance from the Fear of Death (London, 1875), p. 3 (italics in original). 2. Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities (Harmondsworth, 2000), p. 170. 3. Published in Russian as Âocêpeceíèå. 4. Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities, p. 12 and thereafter. 5. Published in Russian as Ïðåñòóïëåíèå è íàêàçàíèå. 6. Christopher J. Street, Immortal Life (London, 1896), p. 23. 7. The Poems of Tennyson, ed. Christopher Ricks, 2nd edn, 3 vols (Harlow, 1986), vol. 2, p. 326, lyric VII, lines 9–12. 8. Robert Browning, The Ring and the Book (Harmondsworth, 1971), Book 1, lines 755. For two very different approaches to a fuller understanding of Browning’s poetics of the dead, see Adam Roberts, ‘Browning, the Dramatic Monologue and the Resuscitation of the Dead’, in Nicola Bown, Carolyn Burdett and Pamela Thurschwell (eds), The Victorian Supernatural (Cambridge, 2004), pp. 109–127; and Francis O’Gorman, ‘Browning, Grief, and the Strangeness of Dramatic Poetry’, The Cambridge Quarterly 36(2) (2007), pp. 155–173. 9. Browning, The Ring and the Book, Book 1, 779. 10. Ibid., 520. 11. Cf. ibid., 790. 12. Algernon Charles Swinburne, Tristram of Lyonesse, Golden Pine edn (London, 1917), p. 12. 13. Browning, The Ring and the Book, Book 1, 733. 14. Richard Chevenix Trench, On the Study of Words, 23rd edn, revd A. L. Mayhew (London, 1892), p. 5. On Tennyson and Trench, see Patrick Grieg Scott, ‘ “Flowering in a lonely word”: Tennyson and the Victorian Study of Language’, Victorian Poetry, 18 (1980), pp. 371–381. On Tennyson and the vitality of language, see, most recently, Robert Douglas-Fairhurst, ‘Shakespeare’s Weeds: Tennyson, Elegy and Allusion’, in Gail Marshall and Adrian Poole (eds), Victorian Shakespeare, vol. 2, ‘Literature and Culture’ (Basingstoke, 2003), pp. 114–130. 15. Trench, On the Study of Words, p. 43 (my emphasis). 16. Scene XLII, lines 249–250. Text from Literature Online: http://0-lion.chadwyck. co.uk.wam.leeds.ac.uk/; accessed 3–4 May 2007. 17. See lyric XIV, Poems of Tennyson, vol. 2, pp. 332–333. 18. The Poems of Matthew Arnold, ed. Kenneth Allott and Miriam Allott, 2nd edn (Harlow, 1979), p. 514, lines. 152–155. 19. Susan Sontag, On Photography (Harmondsworth, 1979), p. 15. 20. Poems of Matthew Arnold, p. 137, lines 23–24. 21. Ibid., p. 136, line 12.

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22. See, for instance, Edward B. Tylor, Primitive Culture: Researches into the Development of Mythology, Philosophy, Religion, Language, Art, and Custom, 2nd edn, 2 vols (London, 1871). 23. Walter Pater, The Renaissance (Oxford, 1986), p. 76. Pater is, as he remarks, recalling Gautier’s recollection of Heine’s idea of pagan continuances. 24. Walter Pater, Greek Studies: A Series of Essays (London, 1904), p. 93. 25. Pater, The Renaissance, p. 52. 26. Ibid., p. 61 (italics added). 27. Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray (Oxford, 1998), p. 10. 28. Ibid., p. 21. 29. ‘Rise up, yes, rise up, you will my dust, after brief rest’. 30. The Poems of John Davidson, 2 vols (New York, 1977), vol. 2, p. 306, line 139. 31. Ibid., line 156. 32. Ibid., p. 307, lines 214–216. 33. Poems of Tennyson, vol. 2, p. 350, lyric XXXI, lines 15–16. 34. Poems of John Davidson, vol. 2, p. 305, line 92. 35. Marcel Proust, À la recherche du temps perdu, 4 vols (Paris, 1987), vol. 1, pp. 346–347. ‘The ineffable utterance of the absent solitary man, perhaps of a dead man (Swann did not know if Vinteuil was still alive) exhaled above the rites of those celebrants sufficed to hold the attention of three hundred persons, and made of that stage where a soul was invoked one of the noblest altars where a supernatural ceremony could be accomplished.’ 36. Ibid., vol. 1, p. 347; ‘Nothing so forceful ... except the table turning!’ ellipsis in original. 37. A. C. Swinburne, ‘A Death on Easter Day’, The Collected Poetical Works of Algernon Charles Swinburne, 6 vols (London, 1917), vol. 5, p. 233. 38. Sir H. Rider Haggard, The Days of My Life: An Autobiography, 2 vols (London, 1926), vol. 1, p. xxiii. 39. A. C. Bradley, ‘The Reaction against Tennyson’, reprinted in A Miscellany (London, 1931), p. 4.

8 Modernist Bodies: Coming to Our Senses Ulrika Maude

In 1945, in the aftermath of the Second World War, the French phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty published his major work, Phenomenology of Perception, in which he argued that the body, instead of being a mere object in the world, forms the foundation of all human experience.1 For Merleau-Ponty, we are conscious of the world through our bodies, or even more accurately, the body is the very condition of our having a world. Throughout his work, Merleau-Ponty stresses the primacy of perception – in other words, the senses – that function as the interface between the self and the world, and therefore mediate and bring into being the relationship between the subject and his or her surroundings. As Karl Marx observed in Das Kapital, originally published in 1867, the human senses have a history, and one of the most radical paradigm shifts in that history occurred during the so-called ‘second industrial revolution’, in which major perceptual technologies, such as the telephone, the gramophone, photography and cinematography entered popular consumption. Furthermore, medical practices were revolutionized by such ground-breaking visualizing techniques as the X-ray, invented in 1895 by Wilhelm Röntgen, which also had a radical impact on the popular imagination. As Ezra Pound argued: ‘You can no more take machines out of the modern mind, than you can take the shield of Achilles out of the Iliad’. 2 The problem of machines and technology has always puzzled writers, artists and intellectuals, but perhaps never more acutely than in the period of rapid technological advance witnessed since the second half of the nineteenth century, and intensified around the turn and early decades of the twentieth. One of the recurrent ways of making sense of new technologies has been to conceptualize them precisely in relation to the human body, as forms of prosthetic devices that function either as instances of organ or sensory extension, in a positive sense, or as a form of organ replacement, to make up for an individual deficiency or lack.3 An example of the former would be the telephone, which enhances the perceptual powers of 116

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the human ear, and indeed was modelled on the anatomy of the ear, with its vibrating tympanum. As an example of a technological device that was originally designed to supplement a lack, one could offer the typewriter, first devised in order to enable the blind to write. Freud, one of the most famous early commentators on technology, indeed argued that, ‘With every tool man is perfecting his own organs, whether motor or sensory, or is removing the limits to their functioning’.4 In 1930, Freud wrote in his now seminal essay Civilization and Its Discontents that Man has, as it were, become a kind of prosthetic God. When he puts on all his auxiliary organs he is truly magnificent; but those organs have not grown on to him and they still give him much trouble at times.5 Twentieth-century literature can be read as a chronicle of the manner in which these auxiliary organs gradually do grow on to us, producing in us a double-perception that differs from earlier modes of perceiving. In tracing this process of internalization, which changes the way in which we see, hear and generally perceive our surroundings, twentieth-century literature, and specifically modernist writing, maps the manner in which technology changes our relationship to the world and to ourselves. In Renaissance epistemology, vision was the sense most closely associated with reason. The promotion of vision by thinkers such as Descartes had a number of probable causes: unlike the so-called proximity senses, namely touch, taste and, to some degree, smell, vision respects the boundaries of the spectating subject, keeping him or her detached from the object of perception. Seeing also requires little perceptible activity on the part of the viewing subject, which entails that vision appears to exist effortlessly, in its own right, elevated to the status of the objective and the theoretical, or that which is consistently valid, while hearing and touch, partly by being more explicitly temporal, appear to pertain to the field of practice and fleeting instances. Vision also endows the perceiver with an air of immunity and detachment, because not only does it benefit from physical distance in that we get a better view of our focus of interest from afar than we do closer up; the perceiver also remains at a remove from the potentially corrupting aggressiveness and raw power of lived experience. A brief summary of the history of vision reveals that ‘[a]t least since Plato’, reason has been conceived and imagined in terms of sight.6 For Aristotle, for instance, sight was the supreme sense because it resembled the intellect most closely, ‘by virtue of the relative immateriality of its knowing’.7 The association of sight with reason only became heightened in Cartesian thought. In fact, in his essay ‘The Age of the World Picture’, Martin Heidegger characterized the essence of modernity itself as the age in which the world is ‘conceived and grasped as picture’.8 He reiterated that ‘the fact that the world becomes picture at all’ is the distinguishing essence of modernity.9

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Without delving into this issue too deeply in this context, the association of vision with knowledge does have a long tradition in Western thought. This association, however, while not exactly changed in the last hundred years or so, does become modified with the advent of new technologies, and in particular, of course, technologies of perception, those prosthetic devices that Freud and others, such as the media critic Marshall McLuhan, have characterized as enhancing the human senses. Near the end of the nineteenth century, new technologies emerged that were ‘designed to chart, explore, and record sensory phenomena that [it] had never before been possible to perceive’.10 Etienne-Jules Marey’s stop-motion photographs of flying birds and running horses turned physiological action invisible to the human eye into visual records and data.11 Early photographic procedures had not been ‘sensitive enough to record moving subjects’, and ‘anything that moved produced blur on [the] silver plate’.12 To study the flight of birds, Marey invented a camera, the fusil photographique, which resembled a ‘small portable rifle that took twelve pictures ... at intervals of 1/720 of a second’.13 The images could then be combined to represent movement. This invention of 1882 was followed by Marey’s chronophotographs, consisting of multiple exposures on single glass plates using a rotating, slotted-disk shutter. With the arrival in France in 1888 of George Eastman’s photographic paper, Marey was able to further improve his invention.14 Chronophotography had an important impact on both science (for instance studies of muscle function) and on the arts (for example, twentieth-century photography); many even consider Marey to be the real inventor of motion film. In 1894, Marey adapted the motion-picture camera to the microscope, and subsequently inaugurated microscopic film. It is no coincidence that Marey was a physician by training, for a great number of the most important innovations of the twentieth century originated precisely from medical research. In 1895, Wilhelm Röntgen developed the X-ray, which exposed the human skeleton and other organs within the living body. This device, which for the first time turned the body inside out without surgical intervention, made human beings more aware of their embodied state of being by revealing physiological processes and detailed anatomical information previously unavailable in living subjects. X-rays, furthermore, not only collapsed the distinction between the inside and the outside of the body, but also between ‘the public and the private; specialized knowledge and popular fantasy; and scientific discourse, high art, and popular culture’.15 However, the X-ray and other imaging techniques that followed in its wake also somewhat problematically reproduced two-dimensional images of the body that transformed or reduced the living organism into pixels, graphs and information code, suggesting the body’s reconfiguration. Imaging techniques therefore had a drastic and duplicitous impact on the way in which twentieth-century artists, intellectuals and the popular imagination conceived of the question

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of embodiment. The earliest-known X-ray photograph of the human body, an image of Röntgen’s wife Bertha’s hand, taken in 1896, attests to some of the cultural ramifications of the invention. The photograph was circulated around the world and reprinted in at least 1,100 publications, as proof of the wondrous new invention. It triggered a fashion among New York women, who had ‘X-rays taken of their hands covered with jewellery’ to prove that beauty was not only skin-deep, but actually resided in bone structure.16 The modernist novel that perhaps most acutely and directly addresses new modes of seeing is Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain (1924), in which X-ray technology has a prominent presence. The novel is set in a sanatorium in the Swiss alps, and when its protagonist, Hans Castorp, first witnesses his cousin Joachim having an X-ray, he is particularly taken, baffled even, at the sight of ‘something like a bag, a strange, animal shape, darkly visible behind the middle column, or more on the right side of it – the spectator’s right. It expanded and contracted regularly, a little after the fashion of a swimming jelly-fish’.17 What Hans Castorp sees, of course, is his cousin Joachim’s heart, and the experience is so strange and intimate that he feels apologetic and mildly embarrassed about peering into the inside of his companion’s body. The narrator goes on to say that ‘Hans Castorp gazed without wearying at Joachim’s graveyard shape and bony tenement, this lean memento mori, this scaffolding for mortal flesh to hang on.’18 Fascinated, Castorp then requests that an X-ray be taken of his own hand. The impact of the image is striking: Hans Castorp saw exactly what he should have expected to see, but which no man was ever intended to see and which he himself had never presumed he would be able to see: he saw his own grave. Under that light, he saw the process of corruption anticipated, saw the flesh in which he moved decomposed, expunged, dissolved into airy nothingness – and inside was the delicately turned skeleton of his right hand and around the last joint of the ring finger, dangling black and loose, the signet ring his grandfather had bequeathed him ... With the eyes of his Tienappel forebear – penetrating, clairvoyant eyes – he beheld a familiar part of his body, and for the first time in his life he understood that he would die.19 This passage reveals both the acute awareness of embodiment produced by these imaging techniques, and the manner in which modernist literature resists the body’s reduction to mere text or code, insisting instead on the body’s fleshly, visceral nature. There is also a distinct sense of wonder in the way Mann renders this experience, giving us an intimation of the fact that, in the modern world, wonder may reside less in a search for transcendental, otherworldly phenomena, than in material, commonplace experiences such as seeing or hearing, augmented now through various technological advances.


Both Marey’s and Röntgen’s methods enhanced the human eye and appropriated scopic ideas of knowledge, while simultaneously underscoring the limitations and lack in human, embodied vision. The radical new visual technologies, in other words, opened up a gap between subjective, human, ultimately fallible vision, and the so-called objective vision of technology and visual inscription methods. This awareness of the limitations of human vision had already begun in the first half of the nineteenth century, and even towards the end of the eighteenth, with studies on such phenomena as retinal afterimages, which Charles Darwin’s father, Robert Darwin, among others, had written about. However, thinkers such as Goethe, in his Theory of Colours (1810), treated the question of retinal afterimages much more thoroughly than previous researchers had done.20 The importance of afterimages was that they revealed ‘the presence of sensation in the absence of stimulus’ – that the eye, in other words, on occasion perceived things that were not there.21 Retinal afterimages also brought to the forefront the temporality of vision, which after all had been considered timeless. Several studies were conducted to measure afterimages, and although their length varied according to circumstance, the discovery was made that they lasted, on average, one third of a second. These kinds of revelations, in turn, triggered the development of a number of devices, initially for the ‘purposes of scientific observation but ... quickly converted into forms of popular entertainment’ such as the ‘thaumatrope (literally, “wonder-turner”) first popularised in London by Dr. John Paris in 1825’.22 Another gadget was the stereoscope that produced three-dimensional images by emulating the functioning of human vision. In the field of medicine, which perhaps most clearly exemplifies the impact of technology on perception, progressive technologization triggered a paradigm shift in patient care, in particular in the physician’s application of his – or more rarely, her – senses in the diagnostic process. Before the early nineteenth century, there was a prejudice against using instruments in medical practice, as this was seen as vulgar and more befitting of tradesmen such as barber-surgeons, who did not enjoy the prestige of physicians. After the invention of Laennec’s tube in 1816 – originally nothing more than a sheath of paper rolled into a tube, through which René Laennec listened to his patient’s chest, but which by the mid-nineteenth century was known as the stethoscope – instruments gradually became the hallmark of nineteenth-century diagnostic medicine, and the doctor’s task began to resemble that of the detective, ‘seeking physical evidence of particular disorders’.23 However, progressive ‘advances in chemical and physiological instrumentation and monitoring’ emerged, which no longer depended on the senses of doctor or patient, ‘but on self-registering processes that “saw” and “felt,” unaided by human perception’.24 One of the most important early devices was the thermometer, the established use of which in diagnosis was promoted by the research of Carl Wunderlich, who in 1868 wrote a book

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on The Temperature in Diseases.25 The use of the thermometer was further promoted by the work of the English general physician, Clifford Allbutt (1836–1925), who modified the device drastically. From being one foot long and requiring twenty minutes for a reading, Allbutt developed first a six-inch thermometer, which required only five minutes for a reading, and later a three-inch one.26 As a consequence, touching the body to estimate its temperature in diagnosis gradually fell into disuse, for the instrument had the virtue of not depending on the patient’s or the physician’s subjective – and hence fallible – views. In nineteenth-century diagnostic practice, the views of the patient had been replaced by those of the doctor. In the twentieth century, the data recorded by machines largely began to replace that gathered by the physician: ‘The technology of self-registration made it possible to separate the act of receiving medical data from the act of interpreting it.’27 The medical historian, Stanley Reiser, observes that, Such data had the advantage of being observable simultaneously by all members of a group. A machine which generated a picture, like an X-ray, or a graph, like an electrocardiograph, produced evidence on which all viewing it could agree. Further, this type of evidence could be compared, more readily than sensory data, with subsequently generated data. Moreover, the same evidence could be transmitted readily to others at a distance through medical records, correspondence or journals without loss of content.28 The human eye now appeared deficient and limited in its abilities in comparison with new technologically enhanced methods of seeing and recording sensory data, and modernist literature begins to pay minute attention to this ‘new’ experience of seeing. Samuel Beckett’s protagonist, Molloy, in the novel of the same title, wanders in a landscape he finds treacherous and alien, partly because he cannot master his surroundings by casting his gaze over them, and has instead only a limited, imperfect grasp of the world. Molloy, tramping through the countryside, has to conclude, for instance, that even though certain objects on the horizon may appear to be close, in reality they are probably much further away than the eye suspects, and ‘often where only one escarpment is discerned, and one crest, in reality there are two, two escarpments, two crests, riven by a valley’.29 The human eye and the information it renders is perspectival, and perception, memory and imagination have a tendency to exchange functions and merge into one. In the novella ‘The End’, Beckett’s narrator mentions the sky, which he gazes at ‘without focussing it, for why focus it? Most of the time it was a mixture of white, blue and grey, and then at evening all the evening colours’.30 From his abode, the narrator says, ‘the eyes rose to a confusion of low houses, wasteland, hoardings, chimneys, steeples and towers’.31


Again, a coherent whole refuses to present itself; instead, the human eye encounters only ‘confusion’. When the narrator reaches the river, he retorts: ‘Here all seemed at first sight more or less as I had left it. But if I had looked more closely I would doubtless have discovered many changes. And indeed I subsequently did so.’32 The knowledge rendered by the human eye is inaccurate and misleading, in fact, not really knowledge at all. In a film called simply Film (1964), Beckett uses a special gauze filter to render the experience of blurred, imperfect eyesight. Through various imaging devices and technologies of vision, in other words, we have become acutely aware of the limitations of the human eye. As David Michael Levin has argued, writing about the phenomenology of vision, What happens when we stare intensely at something? Instead of clear and distinct perception, blurring and confusion; instead of fulfilment, the eyes lose their sight, veiled in tears; instead of stability and fixation at the far end of the gaze, we find a chaos of shifting, jerking forms as the object of focus violently tears itself away from the hold of the gaze.33 Literature and the visual arts, however, often seem to exploit, even celebrate this dissociation of knowledge and vision by aestheticizing perception, and foregrounding the division between objective knowledge and sensual experience. This can be evidenced, for instance, in the various movements in the visual arts that modernity has experienced – impressionism, postimpressionism, expressionism – that emphasize the manner in which human vision is tinged with emotion, memory and imagination. Modern art, promoting, for instance, colour over line, exploits a vision now liberated by technology. This liberation of vision can also be detected in modernist literature, in modernist writers’ minute attention to a more aestheticized, subjective experience of seeing, as in the following passage from Virginia Woolf’s novel Mrs Dalloway (1925), in which Septimus Warren Smith observes his surroundings in Regent’s Park: The trees waved, brandished. We welcome, the world seemed to say; we accept; we create. Beauty, the world seemed to say. And as if to prove it (scientifically) wherever he looked, at the houses, at the railings, at the antelopes stretching over the palings, beauty sprang instantly. To watch a leaf quivering in the rush of air was an exquisite joy. Up in the sky, swallows swooping, swerving, flinging themselves in and out, round and round, yet always with perfect control as if elastics held them; and the flies rising and falling; and the sun spotting now this leaf, now that in mockery, dazzling it with soft gold in pure good temper; and now and again some chime (it might be a motor horn) tinkling divinely on the grass stalks – all of this, calm and reasonable as it was, made out of

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ordinary things as it was, was the truth now; beauty, that was the truth now. Beauty was everywhere.34 In her essay ‘Street Haunting: A London Adventure’, which dates from 1930, Woolf similarly distances vision from its received association with the rational and the empirical by observing that the eye has this strange property: it rests only on beauty; like a butterfly it seeks colour and basks in warmth. On a winter’s night like this, when nature has been at pains to polish and preen herself, it brings back the prettiest trophies, breaks off little lumps of emerald and coral as if the whole earth were made of precious stone.35 Woolf even describes the modern self in aesthetic, painterly terms: ‘we are streaked, variegated, all of a mixture; the colours have run’.36 Modernist literature, in other words, begins to revel in the subjective nature of perceptual experience, and in the process – and this is what it may have in common with science and scientific ways of seeing – it reveals to us the extraordinary nature of the everyday, what the American modernist poet, Wallace Stevens, has called the ‘illumination of the usual’.37 Woolf’s work, like that of most of the major modernist writers, in particular Joyce and Beckett, also places extraordinary emphasis on the experience of hearing. This is no doubt at least partly a result of the rapid development of various auditory technologies in the second half of the nineteenth century and the early decades of the twentieth, particularly in the period between 1875 and 1925. The telephone and the phonograph, for instance, were both invented in 1876. The sense of hearing, like vision, plays a major role in technological development. Notoriously, voice in Western culture has been associated with unmediated presence, as Jacques Derrida has argued in his critique of the ‘phenomenology of presence’. The spoken word has been invested with agency and immediacy, and has therefore been perceived as ‘authentic’ and ‘uncorrupted’, while the written word, according to this received bias, has been taken out of its original context and further ‘contaminated’ by rhetoric. Early auditory technologies, such as the telephone and the radio, however, took advantage of sound’s transgressive qualities, by exploiting the principle of spatial transport which voice and sound offer. Sound possesses a peculiar ‘strength that light cannot rival: it can penetrate solid walls, boom through the depths of the ocean, go round corners, shatter delicate glasses, or force its way through the earth’.38 As the French philosopher Michel Serres has remarked, one can ‘put the ear on the other side of the window, projecting it great distances, holding it at a great distance from the body’.39 What most fascinated early commentators about the telephone, however, was not

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so much ‘its capacity to convey messages and information as ... its faithful preservation of the individuating tones and accidents of speech and even the non-verbal sounds of the body’.40 The Times characterized this revolutionary potential of the telephone by remarking that There is no reason why a man should not hold conversation with a son at the Antipodes, distinguishing his voice, and if the instrument be applied as a stethoscope, hear his heart throb.41 Interestingly, early ‘discussions of the telephone in the Lancet were in fact concerned with its capacity for electronic diagnosis at a distance’.42 The physical presence of the interlocutor was now no longer a condition of speech, although it was implied in the manner in which the telephone transmitted the embodied quality of voice. The telephone and radio, in these early days, none the less functioned in the present tense. Radio broadcasts, for instance, were live, and there were no pre-recorded programmes. A sound, in other words, was heard and then it was gone. Hence, the radio and telephone partially ‘continued to participate in the phenomenology of presence through the simultaneity that they produced and that produced them’.43 Inscription technologies such as the phonograph, on the other hand, exploited sound’s capacity for temporal transport; it now became possible to travel back in time and re-listen to a sound event: ‘Our power to transport ourselves with sound [was] reinforced by the power to transport sound itself.’44 The most crucial consequence of inscription techniques was the manner in which they distanced sound from the conceit of interiority; ‘from the necessity of human agency and metaphysical presence’.45 In fact, although seemingly promising to reproduce the fullness and authenticity of voice, the inscription of sound, through reproduction, forms the antithesis of ‘unmediated presence’.46 Inscribed sound thus becomes a kind of writing. The audiotape, finally, exploiting both the spatially and temporally transgressive qualities of sound, added a further dimension to the already existing phonograph disks: magnetic audiotape, by being both permanent and mutable, permitted the erasure and rewriting of sound.47 Furthermore, by the middle of the twentieth century, sophisticated studio equipment ceased to be a precondition of the storage of acoustic information; anyone who had the appropriate technology could now capture sound on tape. As we can see, sound technologies function in a similar manner to visual technologies, in that they can operate as a form of prosthetic memory; can reproduce various individuating and embodied qualities, but, as in the case of visual technologies, they also somewhat problematically suggest the body’s reconfiguration, which is later reflected in the trend towards cybernetics and artificial intelligence. This stance is parodied in the Hades episode of James Joyce’s novel Ulysses (1922), where the protagonist, Bloom, attending the funeral of Paddy Dignam, observes all the graves in the cemetery and,

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worrying about how one could possibly remember all the dead, fantasizes about placing a gramophone in each grave: Besides how could you remember everybody? Eyes, walk, voice. Well, the voice, yes: gramophone. Have a gramophone in every grave or keep it in the house. After dinner on a Sunday. Put on poor old greatgrandfather Kraahraark! Hellohellohello amawfullyglad kraark awfullygladaseeragain hellohello amarawf kopthsth. Remind you of the voice like the photograph reminds you of the face.48 The first play to bring a tape recorder on to the stage is Samuel Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape (1958). Although the principle of storing acoustic data on a metallic surface had been patented as early as 1898 by Valdermar Poulsen, it was not until the second half of the 1950s that, as a result of the development of magnetic film tape, tape recorders reached popular consumption.49 Krapp’s Last Tape inaugurates a new phase in Beckett’s work for the stage, because, from this play onwards, the act of listening becomes ‘the prime visual image of Beckett’s drama’.50 Each year, on his birthday, Krapp records a tape in which he charts the events of the past year. The play is set on Krapp’s sixty-ninth birthday, but instead of recording a new tape, he ends up listening to previous years’ recordings. The stage directions describe Krapp’s initial listening posture in the following manner: ‘leaning forward, elbows on table, hand cupping ear towards machine, face front’.51 The fact that Krapp is hard of hearing only emphasizes the intensity with which he listens to the tape, his hand cupping his ear, his body ‘bent or twisted over the machine’.52 The different effects the voice has on the present Krapp can be read across his face in a succession of expressions, almost as if it were the body that became ‘the sensitive receptacle upon which the voice engraves itself’.53 Krapp’s face is a blank of annoyance, but when the memories evoked by the voice cause a change in Krapp’s level of attention, the mask of his face ruptures, ‘his body unbends, unfolds, moves away from his listening posture, the trunk and face slowly lift, a relaxation is produced of hand and face’.54 Not only, in other words, should the audience become aware of the utter concentration with which Krapp gives himself to the act of listening, but also his entire posture, ‘bent or twisted over the machine’, and his physical immobility and terseness make the act ever more acute.55 Pierre Chabert, who worked with Beckett in 1975, in the Théâtre d’Orsay production of the play which Beckett himself directed, asserts that the author ‘frequently insisted on the tension present in the act of listening’.56 Chabert, furthermore, draws attention to the importance given in Krapp’s Last Tape to all things sonorous, and goes on to specify ‘the noises of the body [such as] Krapp’s breath, panting slightly’, and ‘the sounds of Krapp moving on the stage’.57 Chabert adds that the objects on stage are themselves ‘chosen

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because of the noises that they can supply’, and mentions, among other things, the speeded-up voice when Krapp is winding the tape forward,58 which Beckett himself, in his Berlin Schiller Theater production notebook (1969), comically referred to as ‘Quatschgeräusch’.59 In the Schiller Theater production, Beckett also replaced the cardboard boxes holding the spools of tape with metallic ones, to ensure that the sound of the tins crashing to the floor would be made piercingly perceptible.60 Beckett wrote in the same production notebook: ‘As much noise as poss. with objects throughout’.61 As we have seen, magnetic audiotape turns sound into an empirical object, ‘capable of being seen, read, written, and drawn directly’.62 It is precisely this reversibility, tangibility and manipulability of sound that Beckett sets out to examine in Krapp’s Last Tape: the status of sound as a near-physical object that has the ability to make us relive the past. One thinks of Steven Connor’s words in a radio programme entitled Noise, broadcast in 1997: Our world is a world of multiple times; of variable, manufactured nows. This is largely because our world is a world of recordings, replications and action replays; and above all a world of replicable sounds. Such a world is characterised by multiple rhythms, durations and temporalities; by temporal comings, goings and crossings, of rifts and loops and pleats in the fabric of linear time.63 The theme of temporal sedimentation in Krapp’s Last Tape is brought about by the manipulation of the tapes. The noises on stage mark the present tense, while the different dimensions of the past are conjured up by the recorded voice. Beckett wanted to ensure that the body left its traces on the tape recording: he made the difference in voice quality manifest by indicating that the voice on tape should be ‘clearly Krapp’s at a much earlier time’.64 The protagonist’s different voices – a monologue turned polyphonic – function as ‘an aural invitation to the audience to speculate on differences and similarities, across time and technology, even before the voices articulate words and sentences’.65 The oscillation of the different audio-temporal levels, in other words, serves not only to make Krapp relive his past in a peculiar form of time travel; the tapes also enable the audience, as a result of the visualizing quality of sound, to see the phantom of the younger Krapp on stage, side by side with the now decrepit Krapp. The unity of time, space and action collapses in the doubling, tripling, if not quadrupling of all three through the voices on tape. Interestingly, the verb ‘to record’ comes from the Latin recordare, meaning ‘[t]o get by heart, to commit to memory, to go over in one’s mind’.66 The verb emphasizes the manner in which auditory inscription techniques function as an auxiliary memory, Freud’s prosthetic device. Krapp’s Last Tape is permeated with forgetting and gradual recollections, and the protagonist’s affinity with technology in the play hence has various implications: ‘the thirty-nine-year-old looking back at his earlier self and the

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sixty-nine-year-old who is doing the same’67 indicate not only that technology provides a means of escape from the confines of constricting identity, but more importantly that identity, like Krapp’s tapes, is perpetually written anew. As the thirty-nine-year-old Krapp on tape puts it, after having listened to ‘an old year’: ‘Hard to believe I was ever that young whelp. The voice! Jesus! And the aspirations!’68 Audiotapes, as Beckett acknowledged, function as an opportune trope for identity, because of their simultaneously permanent and mutable nature: they epitomize the stative aspects of subjectivity, as well as the active or dynamic part of us that is always in flux.69 I would like to conclude with a suggestion about modernity and enchantment. In the Metaphysics, Aristotle draws a connection between the philosopher and the ‘lover of myths ... for myth is composed of wonders’, and ‘wondering’ is the origin of all philosophizing. This view is further elaborated in the Poetics, where it is the presence of ‘the wonderful’ or ‘the marvellous’ in tragedy which prompts the audience to trace out the logical, causal and temporal connectedness of the plot, leading to a form of cognitive understanding that has an ontological status similar to that of philosophical comprehension. The wonderful, in other words, marks the turningpoint of the complex plot, triggering the moment at which ignorance gives way to knowledge. At the same time, however, Aristotle condemns what he considers to be an excess of the marvellous or the wonderful: too much of it will produce sheer incomprehensibility, rather than lead to understanding. One widely current view of cultural modernity originates in the assumption of a severed connection between rationality and enchantment – this is, for instance, the view of the German sociologist, Max Weber. In Joyce’s Ulysses, one of the key modernist texts, however, the word ‘wonder’, in its different grammatical categories, appears 136 times, mainly in connection with Leopold Bloom. The wonder of the everyday in Ulysses often translates into marvelling, evidenced, for instance, in the manner in which the inanimate repeatedly becomes animate – as in the Circe or Nighttown episode – a prominent feature also of Surrealist art. If we take Bloom to be the archetypal modern hero, then it follows that wondering as marvelling becomes a typically modern stance towards the world, as a result precisely of technological and scientific advances – such as the X-ray, telephone and audiotape – that reveal the wonderful and unexpected nature of the everyday.70 The link between wonder and rationality is hence problematized if not severed, not because of a lack of wonder, which I argue is manifest in abundance, but because of an excess of wonder that no longer translates with ease into conceptual categories. If modern wonder becomes irrational, this is because of its abundance. It is rooted not so much in the world of ideas as in the material world and its perception. Aristotelian poetics, with its emphasis on narrative causality, culminates in realism, whereas the ‘logical’ end-result of a poetics of the marvellous generates modernism and its anti-narrative aesthetic. A second modernist stance can be found in Adorno’s concept of shuddering (Schauder), a form of inverted wonder that, like marvelling, stands in


opposition to expressions of pure conceptual identity.71 Shuddering, Adorno writes in Aesthetic Theory, is a primordial reaction to non-identity which, in the face of rationalization, we are under the threat of losing.72 The centrality of art lies in the fact that it can still arouse shuddering: an immediate, involuntary, emphatically somatic reaction that bypasses concepts and the conceptual categories we impose on the world. Although shuddering is a form of revulsion that can be evidenced, for instance, in the work of Samuel Beckett, Adorno also emphasizes the redemptive side of that which cannot be articulated or translated into conceptual thought. Schauder, like the ‘marvellous’, is firmly rooted in the material world. In modernist culture, art, science and technology interact in fertile ways. If knowledge in the modern world is associated with technologically mediated images, such as X-rays or other visual or auditory inscription methods that perform acts of seeing and hearing for us, and hence provide us with quantifiable information about the body and the world, then human, embodied perception is freed for qualitative experience: aesthetic, subjective perception that exploits colour over line, beauty over fact. These two modes of seeing also often overlap, as a number of the examples I have used testify. What both of them have in common is an emphasis on wonder, for each mode of perception, whether technologically mediated or aesthetic, reveals to us the marvellous nature of the everyday.

Notes 1. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith (London, 1994). 2. Ezra Pound, ‘Machine Art’, Machine Art and other Writings: The Lost Thought of the Italian Years, ed. Maria Luisa Ardizzone (Durham, NC, 1966), p. 77. 3. See, for instance, Tim Armstrong’s fine Modernism, Technology and the Body: A Cultural Study (Cambridge, 1998), pp. 77–105. 4. Sigmund Freud, ‘Civilization and Its Discontents’, Civilization, Society and Religion: Group Psychology, Civilization and Its Discontents and Other Works, vol. 12, Penguin Freud Library, trans. James Strachey, ed. Albert Dickinson (Harmondsworth, 1991), pp. 243–340 (p. 279). 5. Ibid., p. 280. 6. Steven Connor, ‘Between Theatre and Theory: Long Observation of the Ray’, Ideal Core of the Onion: Reading Beckett Archives, ed. John Pilling and Mary Bryden (Reading, 1992), pp. 79–98 (p. 91). 7. Thomas R. Flynn, ‘Foucault and the Eclipse of Vision’, Modernity and the Hegemony of Vision, ed. David Michael Levin (Berkeley, CA, 1993), pp. 273–286 (p. 274). 8. Martin Heidegger, ‘The Age of the World Picture’, The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, trans. William Lovitt (New York, 1977), pp. 115–154 (p. 129). 9. Ibid., p. 130. 10. Laura Danius, The Senses of Modernism: Technology, Perception, and Aesthetics (Ithaca, NY, 2002), p. 19.

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11. Ibid., p. 19. 12. Marta Braun, Picturing Time: The Work of Etienne-Jules Marey (1830–1904), (Chicago, 1994), p. 43. 13. Ibid., p. 57. 14. Ibid., p. 147. 15. Lisa Cartwright, Screening the Body: Tracing Medicine’s Visual Culture, (Minneapolis, MN, 1995), p. 107. 16. Ibid., p. 115. 17. Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain, trans. H. T. Lowe-Porter (London, 1999), p. 217. 18. Ibid., p. 218. 19. I have used John E. Woods’ translation of this quotation, because it delivers the mood of the original passage more forcefully than Lowe-Porter’s version. Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain, trans. John E. Woods (New York, 1995), pp. 215–216. 20. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Theory of Colours trans. Charles Lock Eastlake, intro. Deane B. Judd (Cambridge, MA, 1970). 21. Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century, (Cambridge, MA, 1992), p. 98. 22. Ibid., pp. 104–105. 23. Stanley J. Reiser, ‘Technology and the Use of the Senses in Twentieth-Century Medicine’, Medicine and the Five Senses, ed. W. F. Bynum and Roy Porter (Cambridge, 1993), pp. 262–273 (p. 263). 24. Ibid., p. 264. 25. Roy Porter, The Greatest Benefit to Mankind: A Medical History of Humanity from Antiquity to the Present (London, 1999), p. 345. 26. Ibid., p. 346. 27. Reiser, ‘Technology’, p. 267. 28. Ibid., p. 269. 29. Samuel Beckett, The Beckett Trilogy: Molloy, Malone Dies and The Unnamable (London, 1979), p. 11. 30. Samuel Beckett, Samuel Beckett: The Complete Short Prose 1929–1989, ed. S. E. Gontarski (New York, 1995), p. 93. 31. Ibid., p. 95. 32. Ibid., p. 82. 33. David Michael Levin, The Opening of Vision: Nihilism and the Postmodern Situation (New York, 1988), p. 69. 34. Virginia Woolf, Mrs Dalloway (Harmondsworth, 1992), p. 76. 35. Virginia Woolf, ‘Street Haunting: A London Adventure’, The Death of the Moth and Other Essays (London, 1943), pp. 19–29 (p. 21). 36. Ibid., p. 24. 37. Wallace Stevens, Sur Plusieurs Beaux Sujects: Wallace Stevens’s Commonplace Book, ed. Milton J. Bates (Stanford, 1989), p. 103. 38. Jonathan Rée, I See a Voice: A Philosophical History of Language, Deafness and the Senses (London, 1999), p. 38. 39. Steven Connor, ‘Michel Serres’s Les Cinq Sens’, Mapping Michel Serres, ed. Niran Abbas (Ann Arbor, MI, 2005), pp. 153–169 (p. 160). 40. Steven Connor, ‘The Modern Auditory I’, Rewriting the Self: Histories from the Renaissance to the Present (London, 1997), pp. 203–223 (p. 205). 41. Quoted in Connor, ‘The Modern Auditory I’, p. 205.

130 The Body and the Arts 42. Ibid., p. 206. 43. Katharine Hayles, ‘Voices out of Bodies, Bodies out of Voices: Audiotape and the Production of Subjectivity’, Sound Scapes: Innovative Poetics and Acoustical Technologies, ed. Adalaide Morris (Chapel Hill, NC, 1997), pp. 74–96 (p. 76). 44. Steven Connor, Noise, prod. Tim Dee, 5 episodes, BBC Radio 3, 24–28 February 1997. 45. Douglas Kahn, ‘Introduction: Histories of Sound Once Removed’, Wireless Imagination: Sound, Radio, and the Avant-Garde, ed. Douglas Kahn and Gregory Whitehead (Cambridge, MA, 1992), pp. 1–29 (p. 18). 46. Michael Davidson, ‘Technologies of Presence: Orality and the Tapevoice of Contemporary Poetics’, Sound Scapes: Innovative Poetics and Acoustical Technologies, ed. Adalaide Morris (Chapel Hill, NC, 1997), pp. 97–125 (p. 98). 47. Hayles, ‘Voices out of Bodies’, p. 76. 48. James Joyce, Ulysses, intro. Declan Kiberd (Harmondsworth, 1992), p. 144. 49. For a brief survey of the history of magnetic audiotape, see Hayles, ‘Voices out of Bodies’, pp. 76–77. 50. Bernard Beckerman, ‘Beckett and the Act of Listening’, Beckett at 80/Beckett in Context, ed. Enoch Brater (New York, 1986), pp. 149–167 (p. 150). 51. Samuel Beckett, The Complete Dramatic Works (London, 1990), p. 217. 52. Pierre Chabert, ‘Beckett as Director’, Gambit, 7(28) (1976), pp. 41–63 (p. 51). 53. Pierre Chabert, ‘The Body in Beckett’s Theatre’, Journal of Beckett Studies, 8 (1982), pp. 23–28 (p. 28). 54. Chabert, ‘Beckett as Director’, p. 52. 55. Ibid., p. 51. 56. Ibid., p. 50. 57. Ibid., p. 57. 58. Ibid., p. 57. 59. Samuel Beckett, Theatrical Notebooks III. Krapp’s Last Tape, ed. James Knowlson (London, 1992), p. 229. Knowlson translates ‘Quatschgeräusch’ as ‘unintelligible gabble’, Theatrical Notebooks III, p. 229. 60. Hayles, ‘Voices out of Bodies’, p. 82. 61. Beckett, Theatrical Notebooks, p. 217. 62. Kahn, ‘Introduction’, p. 18. 63. Connor, Noise. 64. Beckett, Complete Dramatic Works, p. 217. 65. Hayles, ‘Voices out of Bodies’, p. 81. 66. Def. 1a, OED, 2nd edn (1989). 67. Knowlson, Theatrical Notebooks, p. xviii. 68. Beckett, Complete Dramatic Works, p. 218. 69. For a fuller discussion of Beckett, perception and technology, see Ulrika Maude, Beckett, Technology and the Body (Cambridge, 2009). 70. As Sam Slote has observed, furthermore, ‘[m]uch of the science in Ulysses is filtered through Bloom, who is an enthusiast of popular science’; Sam Slote, ‘Joyce and Science’, Palgrave Advances in James Joyce Studies, ed. Jean-Michel Rabaté (Basingstoke, 2004), pp. 162–182 (p. 163). 71. See, for instance, James Gordon Finlayson, ‘Adorno: Modern Art, Metaphysics, and Radical Evil’, Modernism/Modernity, 10 (2003), pp. 71–95. 72. Theodor Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, ed. Gretel Adorno and Rolf Tiedemann, trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor, Athlone Contemporary European Thinkers (London, 1997).

9 Writing the Body: Modernism and Postmodernism Patricia Waugh

The body is a sheet of plain glass through which the soul looks straight and clear, and, save for one of two passions such as desire and greed, is null, and negligible and non-existent. On the contrary, the very opposite is true. All day, all night the body intervenes; blunts or sharpens, colours or discolours, turns to wax in the warmth of June, hardens to tallow in the murk of February. The creature within can only gaze through the pane – smudged or rosy; it cannot separate off from the body like the sheath of a knife or the pod of a pea for a single instant.1 How should we interpret the contradictoriness of Virginia Woolf’s reflections on the body? Is the body a ‘sheet of plain glass’, unstained by any film of condensation mottling the soul’s clear and distinct apprehension of the world? Or is the body more like a ‘smudged pane’, obscuring the clarity of an optic gaze? Are we inside a body ever buffeted, scraped and sculpted by the elements, alternately softening and hardening with each seasonal shift, or are we in some way outside looking in, loose of its husk: and how would we know? Woolf’s conundrum juxtaposes the assumptions of philosophical Cartesianism with an intimation of what it feels like to be a situated body looking out, taking in the world, smudged or rosy, through a veil of tears or a glow of contentment. Descartes, of course, famously declared in his Discourse on Method (1637), one of the founding documents of analytical philosophy and modern science that, whatever he was, he was certainly not that ‘assemblage of limbs’ that constituted his body, the res extensa (extended thing in space), which had nothing to do with the self, the res cogito, the ‘I’ as a thinking substance. In the Cartesian scheme of things, the sensory body may only function as a source of betrayal, obscuring the intelligibility of the mind’s grasp of clear and distinct ideas. Through the smudgy pane of the body, knowledge of the world arrives through an existential provenance that is more emotio, than cogito, ergo sum. And as William James first recognized, it is emotion, the continuous flow of visceral, sensorimotor and 131


affective response that anchors us in, and endlessly and minutely adjusts and appraises our relation to the world, that makes us aware, more than anything, of the way in which mental life and knowledge are ‘knit up with the body’.2 But as James’s near contemporary John Dewey, the American pragmatist philosopher, further reflected in Art and Experience (1934), still we cling to a Cartesian legacy, where ‘in making mind purely immaterial (isolated from the origin of doing and undergoing), the body ceases to be living and becomes a dead lump’.3

Language variety and the body Even in speaking of the mind’s ‘grasp’ of ideas, or in Woolf’s image of the soul ‘gazing’ through the pane of the body, thinking is thought through bodily and sensory metaphors. Perhaps Woolf uses the metaphor of seeing because vision is more suggestively bound up with the object, more externalized, the least embodied of the senses: it is the human sense most associated by scientists and philosophers with objective knowledge, and the one most associated by poets and prophets with the transcendental imagination. What is seen is either outside the body, or carried into the body as an afterimage, a ‘fading coal’, which seems to supplant or ‘transport’ the materiality of the body. If I talk of the mind’s ‘grasp’ of ideas or its ‘hold’ on the world, however, I summon up, in evolutionary terms, one of the lower senses, and the least disembodied: for the hand is accorded more space in the somatosensory cortex than any other part of the body, and has more touch receptors. Perhaps everyday (non-technical) language is telling me something I prefer not to acknowledge because, as the contemporary neuroscientist, Antonio Damasio, has observed, ‘sometimes we use our minds not to discover facts but to hide them. We use part of the mind as a screen to prevent another part of it from sensing what goes on elsewhere ... one of the things the screen hides most effectively is the body’.4 But ordinary language powerfully and insistently brings back the body, if I allow it to do its work: for I not only ‘grasp’ ideas, I might also chew them over, swallow them, spit them out, mince them, flesh them out, and sometimes they stick in my throat, tear into and pierce my heart, ring or buzz around in my head, but after a while, turn lame, limp along or meander in tired arguments, sink exhaustedly and leave me finally untouched. Perhaps literary language, striving to capture a different kind of truth from that of analytical philosophy, is more an extension of ordinary language, written not so much out of the heart, as out of ‘the cerebral cortex, the nervous system, and the digestive tracts’ as in Eliot’s famous recapitulation of the creative process.5 Yet, as Woolf suggests, even in the ‘teeth of’ what ordinary language chatters to us, we continue to invest in a philosophical model of knowledge and understanding that radically denies the role of the body and of affect in cognition. Moreover, we fortify the picture with an ideal correspondent

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model of writing as a precise and transparent mirror of the world, and with a model of the self that elevates a disembodied, autonomous and purely rational mind over an irrational, or inert, or necessity-driven physical lump of a body. Whether viewed as an irrational distraction from proper rational thought (Plato, Kant, even Freud), or as an inert or mechanical substrate (Descartes, Dawkins, Dennett), the body as a place of understanding has been written almost entirely out of the history of scientific and philosophical knowledge. Dewey’s ‘lump’ brings to mind (so to speak) another recent and enormously influential movement which has claimed to repudiate and overcome Cartesian dualism. I am thinking of the flesh-eating proclivities of the postmodern turn that, according to Richard Rorty, effectively transformed all material ‘lumps’ into textual inscription.6 From around 1970, the burgeoning sciences of molecular biology and the discourses of cultural and literary theory became obsessed with an understanding of the body as ‘written’, as text, mutually reinforcing a fantasy of disembodiment and human invulnerability in the latest version of a technological sublime that required a self thinned and honed to the crystalline and sterile purity of the mathematical symbol. Jacques Derrida suggested in Margins of Philosophy that ‘each time a rhetoric defines a metaphor, not only is a philosophy implied, but also a conceptual network in which philosophy itself has been constituted’.7 As suggested above, metaphors reveal the bodily grounding of cognition, undoing the transparency of concepts; they tell us something, as Derrida sees, about the world-picture in which we live. This particular metaphor, of a material writing, itself a catachresis, can be viewed as a peculiarly postmodern extension of Cartesian ontology which further intensifies a flight from the vulnerability, impermanence and inchoateness of the flesh. Postmodern textualism, however, seems gradually to be giving way to a renewed concern with the ‘embodied mind’ in the work of second-generation cognitive scientists such as Edelman, Damasio, and Maturana and Varela, who have thoroughly repudiated the first-generation computational models of mind and body of the textualist era. In science, this had redefined the mind as an information-processing device, hard-wired by genetic evolution, and the body merely as a vehicle for the replication of DNA as the ‘script of life’: Dawkins’ view that ‘what lies at the heart of every human being is not a fire, not a warm breath, not a spark of life. It is information, words, instruction’.8 In various ways, the later generation understands the embodied mind as constituted through an ongoing process of autopoetic indeterminacy, where even the wiring and the shape of the physical brain is laid down and transformed in response to the everyday encounters of the physical and affective body with its various environments. Again, it was William James who first began to understand the brain in such terms, describing the sensorimotor action of electrical impulses running along the nerves in the hydraulic metaphor of water flowing in runnels, cutting out

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tributaries, and laying down pathways. Habits of the body are laid down as neurological pathways in the brain. What might stop or divert the flow and create new pathways are sensations and stimuli from the environment that are experienced in the body as significant and arresting affects, so that it is affect which grounds our being in the world, constituting the very foundation for thought, and it is affect which renews and replenishes that ground, allowing us to break new ground, for ‘ a purely disembodied human emotion is a nonentity ... for us, emotion dissociated from all bodily feeling is inconceivable ... whatever moods, affections and passions I have are in truth constituted by, and made up of, those bodily changes with which we ordinarily call their expression or consequence’.9 As far as James was concerned, emotion does not exist without fundamental bodily change, whether we are conscious of that change or not. What is most interesting, perhaps, about this view of the mind, from the perspective of literary studies, is the way in which its appearance at the end of the nineteenth century coincides with the felt need to provide a defence of the aesthetic as, on the one hand, lifting the veil of habit from the world (renewing perception through a formal retardation that enables us once again to see and hear the world or feel the stoniness of the stone as an impassioned concentration), and on the other hand, a felt need to distinguish such perceptual renewal from the superficial shocks and sensations provided by the world of mass culture. Described by Pater, Simmel and later, and in various ways, by Richards, Eliot and Leavis, the modern world of mass culture was experienced increasingly as a constant battering and bombardment of the nerves, producing a hypertrophied sensitivity that eventually prompted either neural shutdown, dulled sensibility, or a compensatory withdrawal into an abstract and bodiless intellectualism. Indeed, Woolf redeploys James’s word ‘runnel’ in a semantically cognate context near the beginning of The Waves (1931) as Bernard describes the experience of Mrs Constable, the housekeeper, squeezing the wet towel over his young boy’s body: water pours down the runnel of my spine. Bright arrows of sensation shoot on either side. I am covered with warm flesh. My dry crannies are wetted ... Rich and heavy sensations form on the roof of my mind; down showers the day ... Pouring down the walls of my mind, running together, the day falls copious, resplendent.10 From bodily sensation to affective response and mental cognition: to the sense of being ‘me’, alive in the moment, part of the copiousness of the day. For this is surely the ‘ordinary mind on an ordinary day’, bombarded with the ‘incessant shower of innumerable atoms’ described in Woolf’s essay on ‘Modern Fiction’ (1919).11 Both recall too the conclusion to Walter Pater’s The Renaissance (1887), where Pater recommends an attitude of

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‘impassioned contemplation’, the exertion of a continuous effort to capture, hold and suspend the flow of sensation and the arousal of affect as an act of self- conscious aesthetic reconstruction which, as the self, wisp-like, is woven and unwoven on the stream of sensation, confers the reassurance of an affective core to human identity: ‘art comes to you proposing frankly to give nothing but the highest quality to your moments as they pass, and simply for the moments’ sake’.12 But The Waves also captures, through the monologues of its six characters, Bernard’s sense of how this ‘double capacity to feel, to reason’ is invariably eroded by ageing and time. so that, middle-aged, he comes to reflect how ‘we are only lightly covered with buttoned cloth; and beneath these pavements are shells, bones and silence’.13 The idea of art as the means to ‘hold’ a ‘feeling of a feeling’, of suspending and elongating the moment between sensation and feeling, connects writers as diverse as Eliot, Woolf, Joyce, Conrad, Pater, Fry, Simmel, Proust, Shklovsky, Mauron, I. A. Richards, Huxley and Lawrence in the modern period. Art gives back the world without recourse to a florid sensationalism by offering a renewal of that wonder of emergence, of consciousness as ‘the feeling of a feeling’, which all too soon fades and hardens to ‘shells’ and ‘bones’, to hardening of the arteries, scleroticizing of the nerves and the formation of habits, skeletal runnels in the mind, and the dead routine of measuring out lives in coffee spoons. Damasio signals his own debt to James’s theory of the embodied mind but in fact from 1900 literary writers were already developing James’s understanding in ways that anticipate the sophisticated medical and evidence-based revisionism of Damasio’s analysis of the role of the body in thought and consciousness, and in the formation and maintenance of core identity. Damasio insists, like James, that the affective responses of the body are ‘integral to the processes of reasoning and decision-making’, though, more emphatically for the later thinker, affect is a response to mental as well as physical impingements on the body (memories, thoughts, afterimages).14 Feeling prompts continuous bodily readjustment to the world, protecting the organism’s equilibrium through periods of change, and providing for consciousness an ever-changing appraisal and map of the organism’s relation to its world. So the self emerges as ‘the feeling of a feeling’, a term first used by Damasio in his book, The Feeling of What Happens: Body, Emotion and the Making of Consciousness (2000), where he argues that ‘consciousness emerges when the primordial story – the story of an object causally changing the state of the body – can be told using the nonverbal vocabulary of body signals. The apparent self emerges as the feeling of a feeling’.15 It is precisely this effort to grasp the self through suspended moments of affective cognition that preoccupied so many writers during the early years of the twentieth century. The work of contemporary cognitive scientists such as Damasio appears to give scientific legitimation to an aesthetic model of knowledge that surfaced most emphatically almost a century before.

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Paradoxically, therefore, as the postmodernist fascination with ‘writing the body’ is exposed as another metaphorical extension of the Platonist/ Cartesian evacuation and elimination of the affective body, the modernist project, hitherto constructed as an aesthetics of ‘impersonality’ or Kantian disinterested autonomy, may be grasped as an attempt to bring the body back into language, thought and expression, and to overturn the crippling (pun intended) dualisms of the Cartesian tradition. Yet the modern and the postmodern share an ongoing and profound anxiety about the status of the sensory, affective and visceral body, of the vulnerabilities of flesh and blood in an era of machines and digital technologies, where ‘information’ has come to function as the modern counterpart to the mathematical sublime of the Pythagoreans. After 1953, ‘information’ has gradually come to be viewed scientifically as the very source of life. Since then, the modernist project to incorporate the body into a writing that might resist the instrumental reductionisms of science and technology has been transformed into a postmodern complicity with a technological sublime insisting that the body is always already written and fundamentally only ever writing. Let us now look a little more closely at this trajectory.

‘Inscription’ and embodiment ‘We shall not cease from exploration / And the end of all our exploring / Will be to arrive where we started / And know the place for the first time.’ As the Second World War erupted around him, T. S. Eliot wrote these now familiar lines in the concluding section of ‘Little Gidding’, the final and perhaps most theologically explicit poem in his Four Quartets (and a meditation on the Christian understanding of the word made flesh). Unintentionally or otherwise, Eliot’s words echoed that most resonant dictum of Socrates: that only the examined life is worth living. Whether or not he had brought Socrates’ words specifically to mind, Eliot would surely have been amazed to discover that his loose translation of Socratic wisdom would be employed over fifty years later in one of the most significant documents in the history of science. For these words from Four Quartets were used to provide the conclusion to the Report of the Human Genome Sequencing Consortium, published on 11 February 2000, to spell out the very ‘grammar’ of the human body as a string of three billion letters, proclaimed as the recipe for knowing, and therefore creating, a human self. The recipe for life conveyed by the report of the human genome consortium was soon transferred to and made available on a CD-ROM: the biological body seemed to have achieved its final disembodiment as fully digitalized ‘information’. From 1840, scientists had begun to conceive of the body as a kind of steam engine: a thermodynamic machine distributing flows of energy and wastes, maintaining equilibrium homeostatically, and in need of maintenance, ergonomic attention, dietary regimes and regulation of flows. One hundred years later, statistical

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thermodynamics was merging with information theory to produce the first phase of the mathematization of biology, in which the chemical or electrochemical machine becomes fully an informational flow. Oddly enough, T. S. Eliot had shared his Christmas dinner in 1914, just as the First World War was erupting, with a fellow Harvard expatriate who was none other than the mathematician, Norbert Wiener. Some thirty years later (just as Eliot was completing his Four Quartets), Wiener was being recognized as the founder of cybernetics and the father of modern information theory. He was another crucial figure in the run-up to the genetic revolution which began with Crick and Watson’s paper on the double helix (1953) and the so-called ‘breaking’ of the genetic code in the early 1960s.16 Fascinating ironies abound. Both Eliot and Wiener were attending Bertrand Russell’s class on symbolic logic, but Eliot, who records the Christmas dinner in a letter, says little about his dining companion, except to note his almost disembodied presence at the table, his minuscule appetite and his strict avoidance of meat.17 Eliot’s thoughts now seem uncannily resonant. By the time Eliot was composing ‘Little Gidding’ and preoccupied with the idea of poetry and Christianity as fundamentally embodied practices which might resist the reductionist Cartesianisms of the modern era, Wiener was arguing that it was possible to telegraph a human body: that the body could be dematerialized into an informational pattern and reconstituted in another place. In 1948, Eliot published Notes Towards the Definition of Culture, with its ethos not so much of the body but of embodiment (as ritual, practice, tacit knowledge ‘in the bones’) as the answer to the problems created by Cartesianism. In the same year, Wiener published Cybernetics: or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine: the outcome of military research on gunnery processes, conceived as circuits where machine and human are equivalent components, feedback systems engineered to produce maximally efficient transmissions of information. Humans are understood to be intelligent machines; feedback systems and homeostasis render intention redundant: metaphors give way to models, and very quickly the machinic and information model of the human is perceived as the human. Even before Crick and Watson’s momentous discovery of the code of DNA, reported in Nature in 1953 as a writing that carries the genetic information, Weiner’s insights had made possible the understanding of bodily life as a kind of stored digital programme. The idea that the human body can be coded in a decipherable sequence of four letters is based on the epistemological assumption that computer language, like molecular ‘language’ or codes, can be an unambiguous and direct inscription of the living, breathing body. The quality of incarnation is conferred on the concept of inscription in an elision that entirely facilitates the evacuation of embodiment as affect and viscosity. But, again, language is trying to tell us something if we pay enough attention. The description of DNA as a code that carries the genetic information or a ‘grammar

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of life’ is strictly a metaphor, as a code operates on linguistic entities and the analogy between combinatorial elements in a molecule and the letters of the alphabet is problematic, to say the least. In this kind of ‘writing the body’, the digital and silicon become interchangeable with the visceral and carbon, and if we are, literally, information, then what carries that information ceases to matter: the human body is interchangeable with the Boolean logic of the computer. If modernism can be understood in part as a response to the demonic supplementation of the machine (or what Hal Foster has called the ‘double logic of the prosthesis’, which both extends and constricts/shrinks the living human body), then the development of the cybernetic and ‘intelligent’ machines of the 1940s gave rise to the bio-informatic ‘body’ of a flesh-eating postmodernism where the human is constructed in the terms of a technological sublime and the (genomic) machine is regarded increasingly as the epitome of the (optimum late capitalist) human: intelligent, responsive, efficient, controllable, engineerable.18 The algorithmic perfection of the intelligent machine exposes the frailties and imperfections of the human body, and so the machinic and the genomic become desirable extensions of, and finally substitutes for, flesh and blood. As I produce this sentence or erase it, perhaps my hand is no longer a ‘warm scribe’ or chasing the ‘scent of words’, as Woolf so often suggests in her diaries, but instead has become a disseminated extension of an integrated circuit between keyboard and monitor connected by thousands of wires and electronic connectors in a global economy of information: it is hard even to discern which is the prosthesis: my body or the machine? But if this is one version of ‘writing the body’, it says very little about what it feels like to inhabit a body. Embodiment is not required for writing the body, because here the medium counts and is foregrounded and unignorable, and, for humans, involves the living, suffering, feeling and thinking flesh, being in the world, incorporation rather than inscription. In his Principles of Psychology (1890), James (anticipating Nagel’s famous meditation on the mind of a bat) had argued that the body can be thought of as part of outer nature, as third person, or it can be understood as me, in the first person: its breathing is my thought; its constant sensory shifts and adjustments are my attention; its visceral disturbances are my emotions. Genomic fantasies of the discovery of the code for the book of life perpetuate the dream of writing and discovering the pure mathematical language of nature, of offering a third person ‘theory of everything’ that informs the ethos of scientific modernity. Transferred to writing itself, the power of that ancient scriptoral metaphor of nature as a book written by the hand of God also promises the fulfilment of a Pythagorean dream of discovering a mathematical consonance between the structure of thought and the physical structure of nature.

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Fiction, embodiment, and the resistance to ‘method’ The rise of the novel coincided historically with the scientific revolution. And novelists registered an ambivalent interest in the new philosophical discourses on method rapidly informing the scientific appraisal of the body in anatomy, optics and physiognomy, but largely without reference to what it feels like to be an embodied organism in the world, what I have called ‘incorporation’. The novel also developed in conjunction with the new philosophical discourses of aesthetics; and both share a cognitive sense of art as an embodied or ‘tacit’ knowing, complementary and resistant to the methodological reductionisms of science as a ‘mirror of nature’. For the emotions of the body register a knowledge of the world given value for me as a creature seeking to flourish within it: they are effectively appraisals or value judgements on the world and therefore intrinsically part of knowledge and understanding, eudaemonistic and fundamentally concerned with human flourishing and the ethical question of how we should live. In this view, the novel’s view, the body provides our first epistemological and ethical orientation to the world. The novel has always mediated the world through textual representations that effectively reproduce in the reader actual qualia, James’s sense of the experiential body as ‘me’. However, the flexibility of its narrative modes and uses of voice also allows for complex metalevel reflection on the relations between language, feeling and cognition in the representation of qualia. The perception of the novel as an instrument for the education of feeling is an implicit recognition of the tapestry of tacit and reflective knowledge made available through its reading: inherently metafictional, novels enact the flows and relations of embodied minds in specific worlds, providing us with powerful models for the understanding of human consciousness. But as scientific method took hold, the more pronounced too became the sense of an insurmountable gap between language and the body, and it is in the earliest novels, in fact, that those aporias later associated with romantic irony, modernist linguistic self-consciousness or the deconstructionist critique of presence first opened up. Novelists such as Laurence Sterne intuited that although science might claim to provide a more accurate map of the human body, its methodological reductions effectively eliminate the affective body, so that not only does knowledge become impoverished, but the very foundations for value are ruthlessly stripped away. If we accept that affect is not irrational but is instead a fundamental appraisal of the world, only an embodied or affective knowing might imbue the world with meaningfulness and value. Interestingly, this preoccupation with the scientific separation of fact and values, which provided an important philosophical context for the early novel, reappears with new intensity at the beginning of the twentieth century: in G. E. Moore’s Principia Ethica (1903), his extension

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of Huxley’s Darwinian repudiation of the ‘naturalistic fallacy’; and in the axiomatic repudiation of value as an object of knowledge in logical positivism. Though not explicitly engaged in similar philosophical terms (until Iris Murdoch produced her series of philosophical critiques of Moore in the 1950s), this extirpation of the affective body in the epistemologies of modern analytical thought conditions both the forms of eighteenth-century fiction and those of the novel in the early twentieth century as it responded to the nineteenth-century crisis of epistemology. A central preoccupation of the novel form has always been how to come to terms with a scientific realism that builds a picture of physical Nature premised on the separation of mind and body and entirely unable to legislate for, or sanction, human purposes or ends. Throughout Sterne’s Tristram Shandy (1759–1767), for example, typographic play, the iconic representation of a cross as Dr Slop blesses himself, the black page as Yorick dies, the pre-Freudian double entendres around Uncle Toby’s wound and his fortifications, all serve to flaunt the materiality of the book and the word, and to draw attention to the problem of reincorporating the body into language. Here is Sterne’s description of Corporal Trim preparing to deliver his sermon in Tristram Shandy: But before the corporal begins, I must first give you a description of his attitude; – otherwise, he will naturally stand represented, by your imagination, in an uneasy posture, – stiff, – perpendicular, – dividing the weight of his body equally upon both legs; – his eye fixed, as if on duty ... His attitude was as unlike all this as you can conceive. He stood before them with the body swayed, and bent forwards just so far, as to make an angle of 85 degrees and a half upon the plain of the horizon; – which sound orators, to whom I address this, know very well, to be the true persuasive angle of incidence ... The necessity of this precise angle of 85 degrees and a half to a mathematical exactness, – does it not show us, by the way, – how the arts and sciences mutually befriend each other?19 From the first playful punning with the term ‘attitude’, Sterne insinuates the complex relations between mind and body mediated through language: here, the comic effect is produced as an ironic and multi-layered performative contradiction. The narrator strives, through the prim and precise language of science, to deny Trim’s affective unease by representing his body as an affectless machine. Paradoxically, the description both reduces Trim to an automaton, but in so doing prompts the sentimental reader’s response of empathy with the naturally-felt human strains and stresses attendant on the experience of public oratory. For although fiction cannot ‘write the body’, literary language is in some sense more embodied, closer to and arising out of the rhythms and pulsations of the body, and more able to produce bodily effects in its readers,

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than the so-called transparent language of science. The novel as a genre has always allied this with a preoccupation with knowledge and with knowers as bodies in the world, drawing its earliest inspiration from the discovery of perspective in Renaissance painting, and developing its own subtle and complex relations between voice and focalization, situatedness and omniscience. Even before the development of sophisticated varieties of free indirect discourse in the nineteenth century, the novel form is oriented towards the foregrounding of epistemology: as soon as a perspective shifts, the corporeal limitations of a knower are exposed. And even later, once the blurred edges of the doubled voice of free indirect discourse pull even slightly apart to reveal an existentially impossible hybrid of ‘it’ and ‘me’, of the body in the perspective of a view from nowhere and the body experienced from inside its sensory mechanisms, then the play of ironies and uncertainties intensifies. Feeling and affect inevitably start to bridge the gap and point towards a provisional resolution which pure reason alone cannot provide. Moreover, as knowledge becomes more uncertain, the dependence on sight and vision as the highest of the senses is also contested, and with the perspectivalism of James and Conrad, fiction starts to become self-consciously preoccupied with the limitations of the ocularcentric as an outgrowth of scientific modernity. The famous moment of recognition in James’s The Portrait of a Lady (1881), for example, may be read in such terms, as Isabel stumbles on the tableau vivant that unconceals the true nature of the intimacy between Madame Merle and Gilbert Osmond: What struck Isabel first was that he was sitting while Madame Merle was standing ... the thing made an image, lasting only a moment, like a sudden flicker of light. Their relative positions, their absorbed mutual gaze, struck her as something detected. But it was all over by the time she had fairly seen it.20 Through a visual apprehension of the disposition of bodies in space, Isabel Archer first registers ‘a flicker of light’, a non-conformity to social etiquette, but the moment, though barely held, allows ‘something’ to be detected, a kind of transmission of affect, which puts Isabel momentarily in touch with feelings long sublimated or repressed through her life-long training in cultural etiquette and feminine denial of the body. Emotion allows appraisal of the situation even if that knowledge and judgement is largely tacit: from this moment, Isabel Archer knows. So too in another famous modernist moment where the eyes fail and cannot see (despite the prosthetic enhancements of technology and science): in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1902), it is the echo of Kurtz’s own feeling of horror, doubled in Marlow’s experience even before the shrunken heads of the inner station come slowly into the lens of his telescope, that allows him finally to begin to understand Kurtz and to begin to formulate a judgement


on him that allows some understanding of the sources of his own complicity and self-deception. Ironically, of course, that judgement stands or falls on whether Kurtz’s own protestation of ‘The horror! The horror!’ is read simply in terms of an expressivist enunciation of a dark heart or a cognitivist judgement that constitutes a true moment of tragic anagnorisis. Either way, human knowledge is shown to be always open to revision, uncertainty, contestation and if knowledge itself seems finally provisional, then judgement can only be a matter of tact: of suspending and holding ambiguous and dense moments of fundamentally affective experience, rather then attempting to impose regulation, classification and law. By the twentieth century, a preoccupation with reincorporating the body into language, and selfconsciously examining the affective body as central to the processes of cognition and proper judgement, becomes one of the definitive characteristics of modernist fiction. In 1907, Joyce wrote ‘The Dead’, the story that would eventually complete Dubliners: throughout the text, moments of bodily and affective recognition plot moral transformations arising out of a knowledge that is finally revealed to be fully related to an affective and authentically appraising cognition, rather then the intellectual cerebration characteristic of Gabriel at the start of the story. Initially, Gabriel theatricalizes his sense of existential isolation (and alienated superiority) at the Misses Morkan’s annual ‘at home’, stepping to the back of the room and away from the convivial gathering after delivering his pompous speech on the importance of the living, to register the touch of a cold window pane on his warm fingers. He imagines how cool it must be outside, identifying with its blank silence. However, after the revelation of his wife’s amorous past, he first feels a jealous tumult coursing through his blood like fire, a warm flood in his arteries; then the beat of anger through his veins which renews the throb of a possessive lust, until the final empathetic transformation begins as Gabriel comes to feel the significance of all that he has been feeling: shame burns as he sees himself ludicrously shrunken and incapable of passion; terror seizes him, as he feels for Greta’s limp hand, at the thought that a man had died for her; and then, as earlier, the turn to the cold pane of the window as the snowflakes tap on the glass. But Gabriel’s eyes fill with tears as his proud alienation melts and he feels the living and the dead mingle: intellectual arrogance, spite, jealousy, rage, lust and derision give way to the knowledge of love. Modernist fiction becomes a performative vehicle of understanding for a theory of knowledge that accepts (contra positivism) that value already shapes what is apprehended through an implicitly cognitive theory of emotion. And the deeper into mind, the more one arrives at the body. Meanwhile, modernist critics were attempting to theorize and make explicit this mode of return to the body: in F. R. Leavis’s insistence (later supported by his admiration for the work of Michael Polanyi) on the grounding of scientific knowledge in a more essential and tacit knowledge always already mediated through the body; in Cleanth Brooks’ ‘heresy of paraphrase’; in

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John Crowe Ransom’s poetry as ‘the world’s body’; in T. S. Eliot’s insistence on practice over theory or ideas, and his belief that the great writers always write with ‘tradition’ in their bones and out of the ‘deeper unnamed feelings which form the substratum of our being, to which we rarely penetrate; for our lives are mostly an evasion of ourselves, and an evasion of the visible and sensible world’.21 Richards’s organicist idea (in Principles of Literary Criticism, 1924) of poetry as harmonizing and maximizing the greatest number of neurological ‘impulses’, without asserting or shaping any beliefs whatsoever about the world outside, managed to reconcile the modernist preoccupation with aesthetic holding and suspending the moment as a source of powerful cognitive affect, with his argument about literature as ‘pseudo-statements’ which release and order psychic and emotional energy without implying any propositional truth whatsoever. The disappearance of art would constitute a ‘biological calamity’.22 Roger Fry’s Vision and Design (1920), negotiating a path beyond Clive Bell’s disembodied aesthetic of autonomous ‘beauty’, argued that all art arises from affective cognition of an evolutionary attuned body in the world, constantly adjusting its pulsations, spatial orientations and perspectives to provide the bodily ground for the formal properties of art: rhythm, colour, light and shade, and figural blending; line, for example, is described as the extension of a gesture linked to a feeling. So in Woolf’s To the Lighthouse (1927), a novel closely indebted to Fry’s aesthetics, Lily Briscoe tries to capture in paint the feeling that arises in the body as ‘the jar on the nerves, the thing itself before it has been made anything’: and as masses loom and press on ‘her eyeballs’, she loses personality, loses all sense of her name, and takes up her brush, possessed by a bodily rhythm at last that flicks her brush and extends into ‘nervous lines’.23 According to Fry, whereas the evolutionary imperative deploys bodily self-awareness instrumentally to focus on the object of attachment as either threatening or life-enhancing, in art, the relations between visceral adjustment, emotion and form are contemplated for their own sake, and in order to reproduce through the suspension of formal equivalence, the ‘feeling of a feeling’ which anchors our core sense of selfhood. Sensation is felt, but the immediate and utilitarian response is inhibited and held off, and that is how we may again feel the stoniness of the stone, see the blue of the sky, respond as ‘words give off their scent and distil their flavour’.24 In her 1925 novel, Mrs Dalloway, the text opens with Clarissa’s sense of entering the day with a ‘lark and plunge’, as she opens the window to experience the sensation of early morning sunlight and air hitting her face, chill and sharp, like ‘the kiss of a wave’. The sheer intensity of the sensation, unmediated by reflection or conceptualization, transports her back to girlhood and to Bourton, a reminder of her youthful passionate immersion in life. This is incontrovertibly the representation of the experience of James’s body as me: its visceral perturbations are my emotions and my emotions are effectively judgements on life. In the next passage of the novel, the discourse


shifts into the third person, so that Clarissa herself is perceived externally, the body as ‘it’ through the perspective of Scrope Purvis, a random passer-by, and the copiousness of Clarissa, all the doing and expanding, now shrinks: to something frail and birdlike, anonymous, ageing and pale from illness. A moment later, and as Clarissa responds to the mingled smells, the buzz and hum of Bond Street, the image of the puritanical Miss Kilman comes to mind, she who would most certainly disapprove of such hedonistic pleasure, and instantly Clarissa’s body feels ‘scraped’, she feels ‘hurt in her spine’.25 The refrain of ‘fear no more the heat of the sun’, repeated throughout the novel, and the leitmotif of clock-time as Big Ben sombrely strikes the hour, insistently reminds the reader that to be human is to be a body situated in time and space, constantly adjusting itself through affective responses to internal and external pressures, forming its judgements out of that endlessly shifting provisionality of a ‘feeling of a feeling’.

Prosthetic gods and body parts But, of course, that same capacity to imagine and anticipate, and to emote in response to the imaginary as well as the present environment also functions in evolutionary terms as the stimulus for territorial fears, defensiveness and aggression, and the production of technological defences, armaments and prostheses which, ironically, then most threaten the integrity of that body and awaken its most primitive affects. Central to the political liberalism of modernity is the principle that possession and self-possession are the basis of law and identity: that the body works on nature, mingles with and transforms it and, in converting nature to culture, takes possession of and makes meaningful its inert materiality. But that transformed nature is then reincorporated through an internal rewriting of the body which may threaten the very foundations of identity. As Freud noted in Civilisation and its Discontents (1930), we have become prosthetic gods who seem to control nature absolutely, but who seem to have lost our own natures in our internalization of technological efficiency.26 So we should accept that any aesthetic ‘return to the body’ will inevitably also be drawn to engage with hysteria and terror, alienation and horror as likely expressions of this dependency. The visual arts, in particular, in the modern period are full of bodies hovering between meat and machine, softness and hardness, solidity and fluidity; bodies fragmented, tortured and suffering without means of redemption or sense of self-possession. The paintings of Francis Bacon are perhaps the most complete expression of such horror: images of flesh and bone surrounded by bits of prosthetic technology; skeletal and taut frames with flesh dripping from them. Perhaps, then, it is not surprising that, as the twentieth century progressed, science and postmodernism increasingly seemed in flight from the body in writing, and effectively abandoned the project of affective recovery of the body undertaken in the work of the earlier moderns.

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For in an increasingly utilitarian mass culture, the body may come to be regarded as waste and dirt; fear of the body as waste within capitalist economies is what produces those ergonomic regimes of bodies as efficient systems, thermodynamic machines, informational bio-feedback systems, which must regulate their own orders (the metaphor appears increasingly in management parlance, just as it does in the biological sciences). A recent and brilliant meditation on how the ideological construction of a metaphysics of materialism that was the logical extension of the modern rational state in converting the body to ‘lumps’ also prepared the way for its postmodern conversion to text is Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go (2005). Ishiguro stages a debate about the place of art in a capitalist and scientifically materialist culture that views the human body in entirely utilitarian terms, through an account of a group of apparently privileged boarding-school children who gradually become aware that they are in fact clones, farmed to supply organs and body parts to the rich and diseased. The children’s lives at Hailsham, their school, are in some sense redeemed by their guardians’ inculcation, through a ‘noble lie’ of a belief in self-expression as a way of conferring on them the illusion of the possession of a ‘soul’. The crazy rage of Tommy, his grotesque ‘becoming animal’ dances and gesticulations, are an occasional but very real protest against his profound but buried sense that the children are a threatening reminder to their guardians, that we are all merely zipped-up bags of organs if viewed from the perspective of a utilitarian materialism. Looking into the face of Madame, Kathy H sees a disgust and fear of the alien (of spiders, she imagines) that humans feel for what is projected as abject or waste: the human body reduced to material functions. The last image of the novel, as Kathy moves across the flat horizon of the Norfolk field after Tommy has died from his final ‘donation’, is of a barbedwire fence where rubbish has blown and caught: flapping plastic and bits of debris stand out against the bleak, chill light of the dying afternoon. The image is simply left to resonate: rubbish, waste, consumer culture, materialist philosophy, the Angel of History. ‘Look in the toilet,’ Ruth shouts as the children search for their originals, their parents: inspect the gutters, trawl the underclass, interrogate the dropouts and druggies and prostitutes who sell their bodies to survive.27 Pity and terror are invoked as we, as readers, contemplate a possibility no longer in the realms of the fantastic and made possible not simply as a consequence of scientific ‘progress’ but through the naturalization of a metaphysics of materialism where the body as James’s ‘me’ is supplanted by the body as James’s ‘it’. Indeed, the novel intimates that the famous postmodern waning of affect that Jameson claimed throughout the 1980s as definitive of our postmodern condition was never quite what vulgar-minded critics of Jameson took him to mean. The very recognition of a waning of affect comes through an affective perception, and this is the strange quality of mood that Ishiguro manages to evoke in this novel: that we respond emotionally to a fiction, an artefact, just as the human clones


who are its characters respond to each other, suggests that our humanness indeed rests on our biological nature but also, and just as importantly, on how we represent to ourselves symbolically what we take that nature to be. Without acceptance of the body of the other as the equivalent of the body as ‘me’, the visceral, emoting, affective body is reduced to the body as ‘it’, as waste, a source of disgust and shame, and justification therefore for regimes of ethnic cleansing, pogroms and prejudice. If our shared bodies prompt us to acknowledge our vulnerability and mortality, providing a powerful source of compassionate sympathy and identification, then to reduce the body to an ‘it’, lacking affect, viscerality, qualia, is perhaps an expression of the anxious stoicism of our age of information whose denial of the body as ‘me’ may yet come back to haunt us, murderously.

Notes 1. Virginia Woolf, ‘On Being Ill’, The Crowded Dance of Modern Life, ed. Rachel Bowlby (Harmondsworth, 1993), pp. 43–44. 2. William James, Principles of Psychology, vol. 2 (New York, 1950), p. 467. 3. John Dewey, Art and Experience (London, 1934), p. 263. 4. Antonio Damasio, The Feeling of What Happens: Body, Emotion and the Making of Consciousness (London, 2000), p. 28. 5. T. S. Eliot, Selected Prose (Harmondsworth, 1953), p. 120. 6. Richard Rorty, ‘Texts and Lumps’, in Objectivity, Relativism and Truth (London, 1991), pp. 78–92. 7. Jacques Derrida, Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago, 1982), p. 230. 8. Richard Dawkins, The Blind Watchmaker (Harmondsworth, 1986), p. 112. 9. William James, Principles of Psychology, vol. 2, p. 452. 10. Virginia Woolf, The Waves (Harmondsworth, 1964), p. 22. 11. Virginia Woolf, ‘Modern Fiction’, The Crowded Dance of Modern Life, ed. Rachel Bowlby (Harmondsworth, 1993), p. 8. 12. Walter Pater, The Renaissance (London, 1928), p. 223. 13. Woolf, The Waves, pp. 65, 97. 14. Antonio Damasio, Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason and the Human Brain (New York, 2000), p. xiii. 15. Damasio, Feeling, pp. 30–31. 16. James D. Watson and Francis H. C. Crick, ‘General Implications of the Structure of Deoxyribonucleic Acid’, Nature, 171 (1953), pp. 964–967 (p. 967). 17. For an account of the Eliot–Weiner relationship, see Donald J. Childs, From Philosophy to Poetry: T. S. Eliot’s Study of Knowledge and Experience (London, 2001). 18. Hal Foster, Prosthetic Gods (Cambridge MA, 2004), passim. 19. Laurence Sterne, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman (New York, 1960), pp. 99–100. 20. Henry James, The Portrait of a Lady (Harmondsworth, 1966), p. 408. 21. Cleanth Brooks, The Well-Wrought Urn: Studies in the Structure of Poetry (1947) (London, 1968); John Crowe Ransom, The World’s Body: Foundations For Literary Criticism (New York, 1938); T. S. Eliot, The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism (London, 1964), p. 155.

Patricia Waugh 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27.

I. A. Richards, Principles of Literary Criticism (London, 1924), p. 234. Virginia Woolf, To The Lighthouse (London, 1960), pp. 297, 244, 245. Woolf, ‘On Being Ill’, p. 46. Virginia Woolf, Mrs Dalloway (Oxford, 1992), p. 15. Sigmund Freud, Civilisation and its Discontents (London, 1930). Kazuo Ishiguro, Never Let Me Go (London, 2005), p. 153.

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10 Detective Fiction and the Body P. D. James (in conversation with Corinne Saunders)

CS: It’s a very great pleasure to be here in conversation with you. We’ve agreed that we’ll talk in particular about the focus on the murdered body in your fiction, and especially about the troubling idea of murder as art form. We’ll also consider issues about description and perspective, and questions about morality. But perhaps we could begin by talking a bit about how you came to write detective fiction? PDJ: Well, I knew from very early childhood that I wanted to be a writer. Almost as soon as I knew what a book was I told stories, rather exciting stories I think, to my younger brother and sister. We had one large nursery with a double bed for my sister and me, and my brother had a little bed against the wall, and they wanted a story every night before they went to bed. But I was a late beginner in a professional way, and I won’t bore you with all the reasons. I was nineteen when the war broke out, I married young, my husband came back ill from the war, and I had to earn a living, so it was quite a late start. And why a detective novel? Well, I very much enjoyed reading them. This was my reading when I was an adolescent. I thought I could do it and, if I could, the novel would stand a good chance of being accepted; it’s such a popular form. But there were other reasons. First, I was setting out with rather high ambitions. I don’t think I ever really imagined I would one day be an international best-selling author. They weren’t as high as that. But I did have high artistic ambitions. I wanted to be regarded as a good and serious novelist. And the detective story is quite difficult to do well – very easy to do badly – and I thought this would be a wonderful training, a wonderful apprenticeship. And also I love structure in a novel. It’s not surprising, I think, that my own favourite novelist is Jane Austen. And you have to structure a detective story. You have to have a beginning, a middle and an end. You have to hold the tension between plot and setting, characterization and puzzle. But then as I continued in my craft I came to believe that it’s possible to stay within the conventions of this popular form and be a good and serious novelist, and to say something true about men and women and the society in which we live. That’s my credo; what 148

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I try to do as a novelist. And so here I am, still working within this form after all these years. CS: It’s nice to think of you shaping the genre into something new, something experimental, perhaps? PDJ: I hate the word challenge, because everything I write is a challenge, but I wanted to see what I could do with the genre while remaining within the structure and still having a mystery which the reader should be able to solve by the last chapter – playing fair, keeping to all the old rules, but doing something different. CS: What detective fiction did you read most as a young girl? PDJ: Of course, I read Conan Doyle. His influence has been pretty lasting: the ability to deal with rather grim things, a lack of sentimentality, and a non-academic intelligence. Then The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins influenced me, and I liked the women crime writers – Dorothy L. Sayers, Ngaio Marsh, Josephine Tey. I think the older members of our audience today will remember them. And they gave me great pleasure. I still re-read Dorothy L. Sayers. Now, of course, this is very much period literature. CS: But her novels are, again, very carefully crafted. PDJ: Oh very. And Dorothy L. Sayers wrote well. Of course, the Thirties novels are criticized for snobbery and racism, but you have to look at them in the light of the time in which Sayers wrote. She took her art really quite seriously. And I think she’s an example of something that’s interesting about the detective story. It does tell you far more about the time in which it was written – the social ethos of the time, how people thought and acted – than does more pretentious literature. If we want to know exactly what it was like to work in an advertising agency between the wars, we read Murder Must Advertise. CS: And you need that kind of detail for the detective story. PDJ: I think you do, yes. And it’s because the detail has to be right that you do get this accurate view of life. That’s why I like to set my books unambiguously in the age in which I’m writing. CS: I wonder if we could hear a little bit about your career before you became a detective fiction writer. I know you worked for a long time in the civil service. PDJ: Yes, when it became apparent that my husband wouldn’t get a pension, I started working, first of all in the Health Service, and then I took an exam for the senior Civil Service and went into the Home Office, first to the Police Department, and then into the Criminal Law Department. In all those jobs I gained very useful information. When I was in the Home Office I was at one time in the division concerned with the forensic science service. I was,

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of course, a bureaucrat, not a scientist – I wasn’t responsible for a laboratory – but the job was very useful because I get a great deal of help even now from forensic scientists, and a great deal from the police. CS: It must be quite unusual for a writer of detective fiction to have that kind of practical training, as it were. PDJ: Well, it was just making contacts with people, really. I was at the Detective Training Centre just a few weeks ago, watching detectives being trained. It was absolutely fascinating. There’s the mock scene of a crime. You can’t help saying, ‘Well, that handbag’s only been there recently, you can see that.’ It was very interesting. CS: This could be your future career. PDJ: Oh, a bit late at eighty-five, I think! CS: So, did you end up with the police and the criminal policy department because you knew that you wanted to write detective fiction? PDJ: I think it was a bit of luck. I had to take a competitive examination, and if you came very high you had a choice, and I put Home Office first, and then Education, and I got Home Office. It was lucky that I started off in the Police Department, then moved into the Criminal Law Department, and then I became a magistrate, so that too was useful. In fact, you know, practically everything that happens to a writer is useful – everything, I think, even the terrible things, and the horrible things, and the sad things. CS: I wonder if we can talk about historical murder cases too, because I think those have been a special interest of yours, along with your civil service work. I know you wrote an actual study, didn’t you, of the Ratcliffe Highway murders? PDJ: My then boss had written a definitive history of the police in England and Wales. There were terrible murders mentioned in the book Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts by de Quincey. I read the book, and I didn’t think that the person who was regarded as guilty of the Ratcliffe Highway Murders was guilty. So we had great fun trying to get hold of all the old records. It’s the only book I’ve written about a real-life murder. But I suppose I am rather interested in the Edwardian and Victorian ones, and I have a complete set of Notable British Trials, which are really fascinating. It’s the contrast between those cluttered respectable Victorian lives and the seething emotions going on underneath. In those days, before the Married Women’s Property Act, if a husband married you for your money, he got your money. He got it all. And if he was particularly cruel and horrible, divorce would mean you were cast out from society. Why they bothered so much about being cast out from society I don’t know, but I suppose if you hadn’t got anything else, you did bother. There was a tremendous temptation to buy

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flypapers and soak them for the arsenic. Murder destroys all privacy, both of the living and the dead, so it’s a kind of catalyst which affects everybody. I think I made that plain in one of my books, when every single life which comes into touch with the murdered body is in some way changed, in some way altered. I think that’s fascinating. CS: And, of course, it may be changed even though the person’s story has no direct relation to the actual murder, and in a more enclosed society like the Victorian one, you have even more a sense of this network of connections underneath, of a very intense kind. Perhaps we might move on now to looking a bit more precisely at your fiction, beginning with what I think is a particularly important aspect to you – the landscape or the place of the novel. PDJ: Yes. The novels with me nearly always begin with a place. People sometimes say, how does it begin? Is it a new method of murder, or a particular character, or something you’ve read in the newspaper, something you’ve seen on television, or a real-life crime? But it’s a place, and the place is tremendously important. It really directs almost everything for me. Auden felt that it should be the great good place. I know you’ve read his essay, ‘The Guilty Vicarage’, in which the poet examines the detective story in the light of Christian theology. And he said that there should be contrast between the horror of the deed and the place, which should represent normality, peace, goodness, hierarchy. And, of course, to an extent that is true. The horror is intensified, as I suppose it is in The Lighthouse, when we have this rather beautiful island. Sometimes you can have a place that is grim and dreadful and full of menace, but on the other hand sometimes you can have a place that does stand for something that is good. In A Taste for Death the bodies are found by Miss Wharton, a kind, gentle lady. She is going to the church to rearrange the flowers and do a little dusting, and encounters the appalling sight in the vestry of two butchered bodies. The description is full of the word ‘blood’, but there again, it’s the place. It wouldn’t be anything like as powerful if the bodies had been found by Dalgliesh in the basement of a sex club in Soho, would it? CS: I’ve noticed too that you tend to select very striking settings – the lonely coast of Norfolk, or the island, or the museum of murder, or the black tower, or the church. PDJ: Usually it’s a place I know or have visited, but with the island in The Lighthouse it was an imaginary island. I wanted to set the book on an island, and I knew that a great many detective writers had used islands, simply because you have people there together and they can’t get off, so it’s this wonderful idea of a closed community. I wanted it to be a unique island, something entirely different. But very often it’s a place that I know. In Original Sin it was an imaginary Venetian building on the Thames and the


idea there was to have the river flowing through the novel, almost as if the river were a character. And, yes, it will always be a place. And now, when I’m wondering where the next novel is going to be set, I wait for inspiration. I hope it will come. CS: Perhaps you will get it in Durham. Doesn’t Auden say that a college is one of the ideal settings? PDJ: Well, a lot of novels have been set in schools and colleges, haven’t they, so in a way that’s been rather overdone. That’s the difficulty. You want a place where people are thrown together, sometimes in unwelcome proximity, where all sorts of rather deplorable emotions, like jealousy, envy, dislike, continual irritation, even hatred, can bubble up and erupt into this final, contaminating and, to most of us, still the ultimate crime. CS: And that’s certainly what Auden says, isn’t it? And I suppose he’s interested in that idea of the enclosed or closed community. Perhaps it’s not easy to write a detective story in a city. You need some kind of place where there’s a network. PDJ: You can use the city as a background and have wonderful descriptions, but in the end there has to be one place where the body is found. You have to somehow limit the number of suspects, because you can only deal with perhaps five or six – six, I should think, would be the absolute ultimate number – because each of them has got to be a real, living, credible, suffering human being, not just someone put in to be a suspect, and then just knocked down in the last chapter. It’s important that the same attention is given to all the suspects if the story’s going to be credible. CS: Yes, so you need some way of limiting it. But Auden’s quite restrictive, isn’t he? He says he doesn’t like to read novels that aren’t set in rural England. You’ve been rather more adventurous than that. PDJ: He’d be quite an admirer of Miss Marple, wouldn’t he, and St Mary Mead? And indeed, we do like Miss Marple, and St Mary Mead – although I don’t think I like the present modern, sexually experienced Miss Marple on television very much. She’s not in accordance with the character Agatha Christie created. CS: It’s interesting that you seem to need either a fearful place, like the very lonely coast, or the eerie black tower, or you need the contrast between violent death and a beautiful landscape or place of harmony, like the church. PDJ: Yes. One novel, An Unsuitable Job for a Woman – featuring Cordelia Gray, not Dalgliesh – was set in Cambridge, one of Europe’s most beautiful cities, in high summer, and there was the contrast between all that beauty, the young detective and the horror of the deed. And Cordelia, sitting on a

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bench outside King’s College chapel, remembers some words from Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress: ‘Then I saw that there was a way to Hell even from the Gates of Heaven’. CS: That would be very relevant to A Taste for Death and your other recent novel, Death in Holy Orders. PDJ: Death in Holy Orders, yes, set in a theological college. I very much enjoyed writing that. Well, I enjoyed writing most of my novels, but that was a particularly enjoyable one to write. CS: So you have that sense of a rather enclosed world, with perhaps a special landscape of some sort, a world that takes the detectives away from their normal lives, and you get a kind of specialized, almost timeless setting of horror with the murder at its heart. I suppose we could see the murdered body, and especially the discovery of the first murdered body, as the core of a detective novel. PDJ: I think the moment when the body is discovered is certainly one of the most important parts in the book, and I feel that the reader should share the horror and the emotion of the person finding the body. I always describe the finding through the eyes of the person who makes the discovery, and that very much influences the writing, so that in the scene when Miss Wharton finds the two corpses, the word ‘blood’ is reiterated through the whole of the passage, because that is what she saw. Blood was drumming in her eyes and her ears; she just saw this welter of blood. When Dalgliesh finds a body on the seashore in Devices and Desires he is very interested in his own emotion, and how different it is to stumble over a body from being called out professionally, knowing that it is there. And he acts from the very beginning like a detective. He’s careful not to destroy any clues, he’s careful not to approach, he manages to touch her hair to see if it’s dry because she has obviously been swimming. So, two very different descriptions. CS: In Devices and Desires, I think that’s very clear – Dalgliesh looks at this body, which is in an eerie landscape, because it’s on the coast, by night, lit by the moon – and she looks almost unreal. And you write, ‘now, as he looked down on her, his mind analyzed the difference between the reaction of an expert summoned to the scene of crime knowing what to expect, and this sudden exposure to ultimate violence, and he was interested both in the difference and in the detachment which could so coolly analyze it’. PDJ: He was detached. Yes. CS: I think that’s fascinating, because you’ve got the sense of what it’s like to suddenly come upon a body, and then the detective’s expert response. PDJ: Dalgliesh is never unaffected by murder, and very often he does feel a sense of outrage. He does see his job as an important job. We know that he

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does it partly because he doesn’t want to be a professional poet. The poetry is probably the most important thing in his life, but he doesn’t want to be seen as a professional poet. He wants to do a job in the world, preferably one with some danger, preferably one that brings him into touch with many other people from all walks of life. And, of course, that’s exactly what he’s got. But he’s also somewhat concerned, and a little guilty, to feel that he takes such care to preserve his own privacy, and yet he has a job that not only enables him, but imposes on him, the duty of tearing down the privacy of everyone concerned with the crime. That’s an ambiguity which does worry him. CS: And perhaps the more he has to investigate the privacy of others, the more closed off he becomes. PDJ: I think that probably is so. Well, that’s why his love affair has been in some ways difficult for both of them – but still, we shall see what happens there, won’t we? CS: We’re all very curious. PDJ: He doesn’t always confide in me, you know. CS: Perhaps we might talk about the body itself. In these examples, I’ve been struck by the fact that we haven’t simply got a dead body, though that in itself would be shocking, particularly if it were a murdered body. These are quite bizarre, violent deaths – the two figures with their throats slashed in the church vestry; the strange crime in Devices and Desires, which is made to look like a kind of sexual crime. PDJ: I suppose most of them are. It isn’t really necessary for crime writing that they should be. In most of them there’s something rather bizarre about the murder – either the place in which the body is found, or the sort of situation in Original Sin with the snake round the victim’s neck. And, of course, the murder is very bizarre in The Lighthouse – very horrific. Not many victims are found with poison by the bedside, lying peacefully in their beds. CS: And is that a difference between you and, say, Agatha Christie, who didn’t spend time describing the dead body? PDJ: I think she rather disliked the idea of having anybody dead in her books at all, because she doesn’t really describe the horror. And in one book – I’ve forgotten which one it was – we’re told that the body was killed in one way at the beginning of the book and in another way at the end, rather as if she’d forgotten how she did despatch her victim. And certainly they’re not horrific books at all, are they? They’re not frightening books. Parents might complain that children are not doing their homework, but they don’t say, ‘all he reads are those terrifying, horrible books by Agatha Christie.’ And it’s extraordinary how popular they are all over the world. She was not

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a distinguished writer, I have to say that. But she did give relief or entertainment to millions of people, in all countries, through very bad times, through war and through peace. And that’s a considerable achievement. And she was extraordinarily ingenious. But there isn’t a single murder in her books that would actually work in real life – not one! We don’t care because we’re in Christie-land; we’re not supposed to worry about little things like that. We’re just supposed to apply our little grey cells and work it out, not worry that it couldn’t possibly happen in that way. CS: So it’s the puzzle that’s important for Christie, whereas there is a strong sense of realism with your writing. PDJ: I hope there is. The mystery novel is a paradoxical form of writing. It is read partly for entertainment, partly for relief, and yet it has murder at its heart. It is concerned with finding out the truth, and yet it deals in deception because the writer tries to deceive the reader, and the murderer tries to deceive the policeman or the detective. But I think the reasons we enjoy detective stories, and the reasons we read them, are absolutely fascinating. And, thinking of bodies, we live within our bodies, don’t we? Everything we experience, we experience because we are living in our bodies. We can look in the mirror and see how we look. We can feel our bodies when we are washing them. We are our bodies. We may feel that we have something which we don’t understand, which we might call our soul or our spirit, but if we have, it’s here, in our bodies. And yet when the body is lying there dead, that’s the one time we shan’t be able to look at it: we shan’t be able to experience it. Other people will. In a sense I show in the books how the dead body then becomes an exhibit. Dalgliesh says that. It’s wrapped, it’s labelled, and the pathologist cuts it up, and it becomes the centre of a trial. It’s very curious, because it’s dead, and yet it is – as you said earlier – at the heart of the novel. It’s an interesting crime, murder, because it’s the one which the police never give up on. All the exhibits are kept. And that’s proved useful because, now that we have DNA, the police are solving cases which are thirty years old, simply because they’ve got the exhibits. The cost of solving a murder is extraordinarily high, because so many officers are involved. And yet we still regard it, rightly I think, as the ultimate crime, one which we need to solve. This is the worst we can do to each other. Because we can never give back what we’ve taken, we can never restore it. So we regard it, I think from the very beginning, with a kind of awe. CS: Which does make it disturbing that we so like to read about murder as well. PDJ: Auden had things to say about that too, didn’t he? There’s a book by an American academic, George Dove, which I found difficult to understand, which looks at the detective story in the light of Freudian psychology. The author says, ‘The writer of detective stories is not just the formulator of

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clever puzzles and the fabricator of baffling clues. The writer’s role is rather to lead the reader through a mythos of life and death, violence and redemption, without the reader suffering hurt or distress.’ And Auden touched on this. He wrote, ‘I suspect that the typical reader of detective stories is, like myself, a person who suffers from a sense of sin. Such people do not read detective fiction to sublimate their own murderous desires, but rather to gain the illusion of being dissociated from the murder.’ I don’t know about a sense of sin, but I think to be human is to have a sense of guilt. We all feel guilty about something. It may be quite irrational: ‘I feel guilt, therefore I am.’ And at the end of the book, when the detective points – whether it’s Adam Dalgliesh, Poirot or Miss Marple – we, the reader, can always respond with a confident ‘not guilty’. I think the mystery novel distances for us the fear of violence. It intellectualizes violence and murder, and I think it does this both for the writer and for the reader. CS: Auden is very good as well, I think, on the cathartic aspect. He compares detective fiction to tragedy, and discusses the way that you move on from the worst kind of crime, which can only be redressed by society: the person can’t be given back their life, but some form of restitution can be made through punishment. Auden argues that that sort of movement is in some way satisfying to the reader, because it asserts order again at the end. PDJ: Yes, it is the assertion of order. Some critics have said that the reason why the detective story is so popular in Britain is that it very much follows the tradition of the canon of English fiction. It supposes that we live in a rational world, that goodness and order are the norm; murder and violence are the aberration, and that it is the duty of human beings to bring order out of disorder. A great deal of English fiction has that underlying belief. But not some modern fiction, when you can have people who feel that, just as in science nothing is ever certain any more, nothing can be certain in our lives. The difference between Agatha Christie and the modern writer is that, even when a murder takes place in Mayhem Parva, it doesn’t much disturb anybody. The vicar may find the body on the drawing-room carpet, but he’ll still get on with his Sunday sermon. And in the end everything is restored. But, of course, with the modern, far more realistic, detective story, we find that murder is a contaminating crime – that no life that is in touch with it is unchanged. We do get justice in the end, but it’s only the fallible justice of men; it’s not divine justice, it’s not complete justice. But at least we get a resolution, we get a solution. If you didn’t have a solution, it wouldn’t be a detective story. It might be a crime novel, but it would not be a detective story. We do have to have the solution. CS: That is a very interesting distinction. You wouldn’t, for example, like to write about a psychopath, because then you can’t have that sense of resolution.

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PDJ: No, you can’t. Patricia Highsmith has a psychopath as killer, but she doesn’t write mysteries. They’re crime novels. I think, myself, that the detective story should have a rational murderer, because the interest is in exploring how somebody with advantages, usually educated, and supposedly normal, can actually step over that invisible line which divides the murderer from the rest of us. And that’s very interesting for a writer to explore. In the so-called ‘golden age’ between the wars, you could say that A murdered B because B had discovered that A was sleeping with his secretary and she was going to expose him. Well, nowadays, if people have interesting sex lives they write to the Sunday papers about them. It is because murder is the ultimate crime, and the sanctions against it – legal, and social and religious – are so strong, that it is difficult now to find a motive that’s really convincing. The old motives don’t stand up, and you have to think very hard to find what would in fact compel someone to kill. Money is still a motive, but also the wish to help or protect someone who’s greatly loved. I certainly think that that is still a credible motive. And also hatred, the feeling that a character can find no peace in life while this other person so hated is walking the earth. I think those are three fairly credible motives, but finding one isn’t easy. CS: I think those are all themes you’ve explored at different times. I wonder if we could return to that notion of embodiment that you spoke about a bit earlier. The idea that we experience everything through our bodies has been a vastly important theme for this series, so it is paradoxical that the murdered body is at the centre of the books. You talked about the body becoming a kind of exhibit, and for me that links up with the bizarreness of many of these murders, because it’s as if the murdered body becomes a kind of art object, in a very strange way. Do you think that’s right? PDJ: Yes, I can see that. I think the body sometimes looks as if it were part of something being filmed – as if any minute the victim was going to get up and dust himself down and get ready for the next take. Yes, I think that’s true. The body is so important, it can almost be thought of as an art form. And it also acts as a catalyst, doesn’t it? It’s absolutely powerless, and yet it can make people examine their own lives, examine their own motives. It can bring secrets to light. It can, as you said earlier, strip away privacy. Once the investigation gets going it can change people; it can change the way things happen; it can destroy relationships, and set up relationships – just through that one lifeless exhibit, which is what the body has become. CS: The whole issue of lifelessness, the blurred line between life and death, and the mysterious way in which the life force can be removed, so that the body is almost inhuman, seems to be something that you explore. I was struck by how so many of these scenes used animal comparisons. In A Taste for Death you make the comparison to butchered animals, for instance. And in Devices and Desires, the woman’s mouth is compared to that of a snarling rabbit.


PDJ: That’s very true. And it’s also in Death of an Expert Witness, when the body is found by the young girl who works in the forensic science laboratory as a receptionist. She’s a farmer’s daughter, and the corpse looks like a dead sheep, or a dead beast, to her. Yes, I hadn’t realized that. There’s a lot of reference to animals in the descriptions of the body. CS: There’s a moment when one starts to question what it is to be human; bodies become bestial. PDJ: And exactly the same process happens as would happen with a dead animal, the same process of decay. It’s almost as if the humanity has been destroyed by the act, and perhaps that’s why it is so particularly horrific. I think Dalgliesh says in The Lighthouse, or perhaps in an earlier book, that a dead man always seemed to him so much more dead than any animal, because with the death so much had been lost, not just the stilling of a heart and the body itself, but all that human personality, that collection of experiences and loves and hates and living, just wiped away. It is something very potent, I think. CS: It’s disturbing too because often there’s an aspect of the grotesque, almost a strange black comedy to some of the descriptions. PDJ: I don’t think I meant there to be black comedy. It might be there in the reaction of the people looking at the body. CS: Yes, I think that’s what I mean ... of course they don’t think it’s funny, but one of the responses to horror is to laugh, isn’t it? PDJ: Yes, it is. And in one of my early books – A Mind to Murder, the second book I wrote – there is also an example of how subjective our experience is, and how there can be a scene in which several people participate, but their reactions are different, they don’t see the same thing. The novel is set in a psychiatric outpatient clinic, and the very unpopular administrative officer is found dead in the basement where all the records are kept. One of the psychiatrists is called to the scene by the member of staff who finds the body, and he has always disliked the victim, Miss Bolam, very much. But he is of a nervous disposition and, when shocked, he is apt to giggle spontaneously. Of course this horrifies him, so he turns away, and grasps the sides of a steel filing cabinet, and manages to control himself. And then we have the Sister, who was there, describing what happened to a nursing friend with whom she shares a little house. She says that what was so surprising was ‘Dr So-and-so’s reaction, because he’d never liked Miss Bolam, but he was so upset that he was crying, he had to turn away to control himself.’ And you get two entirely different views of what happened, which is interesting in a detective story. CS: We’re especially aware of differences of perspective in your novels, because you don’t tend to describe bodies through a third-person omniscient narrator, but through the eyes of a particular character.

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PDJ: Yes, I tell the story by changing viewpoint. When you begin a novel, it’s one of the first decisions you have to make, whose viewpoint you are going to use. Of course, with Sherlock Holmes stories it was often Watson, or Holmes himself, but I like to move from character to character because I think it adds complexity, and enables you to see people’s different responses to the job, to the body, and the situation. CS: And that sense of unreality recurs from one perspective to another, so, for instance, in A Taste for Death and Original Sin, there’s that sense of the murder as staged – the body, and the flesh, and the blood seem unreal, painted. PDJ: Yes, that’s it. In Death in Holy Orders it’s almost as if they are filming, and you expect somebody to say, ‘Stop shooting now. Right, relax now, time for tea’, and for everybody to get up and go about their own business. The bodies do look dramatic. The situation in which they are found is usually very dramatic – much more so probably than many real-life murders would be. CS: So you get a sort of blurring between art and actuality, perhaps partly to do with the impossibility of comprehending death and what it is? PDJ: Well, death is a universal experience for everything living, isn’t it? But it still remains a mystery for us. CS: One of the things you’ve engaged with quite frequently is how the detectives respond to the question of death and to moral issues; that tension between whether they are detached or human. PDJ: As I have said, Dalgliesh is worried that he can use his job for his own purposes, and yet he causes pain. Inevitably, a murder investigation causes pain to the innocent as well as to the guilty – probably more pain to the innocent than the guilty. CS: I suppose we become very gripped by the detectives in particular, and perhaps can’t be as drawn into the psyches of the other characters because they’re suspects? PDJ: That’s one of the problems. Dorothy L. Sayers said that the detective story couldn’t reach the heights of literary excellence because you couldn’t explore the character of the murderer sufficiently, since nobody should know that he is the murderer until the last chapter. But there are ways of getting over that, which I’ve used. A lot happens before the murder, and as long as the murderer hasn’t already planned how he’s going commit the crime, I think it’s rational that we should be in his mind, and appreciate his feelings towards the victim. But it is certainly one of the problems. The detective in a sense represents triumphant individualism. However lifelike he is, however reasonably described, he’s still the great hero. He can’t be corrupt.


You have to feel that this is a good man in a not very good world. And the detective story is like a modern morality play. It serves much the same purpose as the old morality plays did. We have this contaminating crime, we have a society – if not in a state of grace, in a state of reasonable order and decency – and then it’s blown apart by murder, and the detective comes in, rather like an avenging deity, to solve the crime and put things right again. So he has to be very strong. He has to be there, present. The dead body and the detective are the two most important parts of the plot. But I think that the other characters and the other detectives should be real people. We should sympathize with them. I like writing about Detective Inspector Kate Miskin, and we should know exactly who Kate is, what she feels, and what her relationship is with Dalgliesh, and with her subordinates. They shouldn’t just have walk-on parts. CS: It is fascinating to read of their engaging with some of these issues. And it’s also interesting that they seem themselves to have to live rather isolated existences, as if their job takes over. It’s a kind of vocation. PDJ: I suppose in real life it can take over, and certainly police officers can live rather solitary lives. Dalgliesh up to now has lived a solitary life. Kate has lived a solitary life. And none of my detectives has a wife and children waiting for him back home, has he? In real life, of course, there would be a husband or wife and child – probably several children. But I think once the detective is engaged on a case, it must take over very strongly, because there is this huge wish to solve it. And a huge wish on the part of the bereaved to see it solved. That’s part of natural justice. If a murder remains unsolved, I think that the bereaved and those who are mourning are left in a perpetual no-man’s-land of grief. We do need to know. We do need to have murder solved and settled. It’s very strong, I think, that wish to have it solved. CS: I think you have a strong sense of justice. PDJ: I think I have; I think we all have. One of the first things a child says is, ‘It’s not fair!’ We feel strongly about things that aren’t fair. We all do, throughout our lives. I think that probably is why some people, particularly in America, still advocate the death penalty. I don’t myself; I’ve always been an abolitionist. But I saw one television series, in which the relatives of people who had been the victims of atrocious and appalling crimes felt that they couldn’t get on with their lives while the murderer was alive. After the execution, they felt they could begin to put the tragedy behind them, because there’d been some kind of justice. And, of course, we are not expected to feel that. We are expected to feel that there should be mercy, although I’m not sure that being in prison for life is mercy. But one can begin to have some inkling of that desire, to feel that something rather more than just sending a killer to prison for ten years has been achieved. It may be the desire for

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revenge, which again is not a thing we are expected to feel, but I think it has its roots in this desire we all have to see justice done. CS: That sense of justice perhaps links up with your strong interest in Anglicanism, and in religion. PDJ: I’m not sure, really. But, yes, I am certainly a deist. I don’t think I’m a particularly good Christian, but I am certainly a deist, and I’m a communicant member of the Church of England and a great supporter of the Book of Common Prayer. The poor Church of England is in a bit of a mess at the moment, but then periodically it does get into a mess, so that’s part of its nature. I stay loyal to it. I can’t assent intellectually to a great deal of the dogma, and I think that is a problem for many people, but I don’t have any doubts about the existence of God. That’s a thing one either has personal experience of or one hasn’t, and I have friends who are very devout Christians, friends who are atheists, and those who are in between. Dalgliesh would call himself a reverent agnostic. A lot of my friends would describe themselves as reverent agnostics. CS: That’s a lovely phrase. Well, we should be thinking of drawing to a close. We’ve touched on so many fascinating issues concerning the craft of detective fiction: realism, setting, motivation, character, the description of the murdered body and its status as exhibit or art object. And complicated questions of detachment, morality, justice and belief, which shed light on why we so love to read detective stories, complete with graphic descriptions of the murdered body. I wonder whether we could ask you to finish by reading a passage from The Lighthouse. It would seem peculiarly appropriate to end with a finding of the body, read by the author. The conversation finished with Lady James reading from her novel, The Lighthouse, pp. 76–77. © P. D. James, 2006 All rights reserved The conversation draws particularly on the following works: P. D. James: Adam Dalgliesh Series: A Mind to Murder (London, 1963) Death of an Expert Witness (London, 1977) A Taste for Death (London, 1986) Devices and Desires (London, 1989) Original Sin (London, 1994)

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Death in Holy Orders (London, 2001) The Murder Room (London, 2003) The Lighthouse (London, 2005) Cordelia Gray Series: An Unsuitable Job for a Woman (London, 1972). P. D. James with Thomas A. Critchley, The Maul and the Pear Tree: The Ratcliffe Highway Murders, 1811 (London, 1971). W. H. Auden, ‘The Guilty Vicarage’ (1948), in The Complete Works of W. H. Auden: Prose, Volume II: 1939–1948, ed. Edward Mendelson (Princeton, NJ, 2002), pp. 261–269. T. A. Critchley, A History of Police in England and Wales 900–1966 (London, 1967). George N. Dove, The Reader and the Detective Story (Madison, WI, 1997). Thomas de Quincey, ‘Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts’ (1827), in On Murder, ed. Robert Morrison, Oxford World’s Classics (Oxford, 2006), pp. 8–34.

Part III Viewing the Body


11 Pygmalion, Painted Flesh, and the Female Body Martin Postle

Since the start of the nineteenth century, the visualization and conceptualization of the naked female body in British art has undergone a profound shift. It is a shift that can be characterized as the movement away from a desire to deny the flesh-and-blood presence of model, sublimated into an idealized art object, to a position where both artist and model comply and even compete to celebrate the body as a cipher of an unidealized – even morbid – mortality. The dichotomy between the real and the ideal body was explored notably by Walter Sickert, both in his Camden Town nudes and in his essay of 1910, ‘The Naked and the Nude’, where he observed how an ‘inconsistent and prurient Puritanism has succeed in evolving an ideal which it seems to dignify by calling it the Nude, with a capital “n”, and placing it in opposition to the naked’.1 Since that time, British art has witnessed what might be termed the victory of the naked over the nude, from the ‘confessional’ quasi-erotic paintings of Stanley Spencer of the 1930s to the ‘celebrity’ naked portraits of Lucian Freud. So, how and when did this victory come about? In 1821, William Etty, a thirty-four-year-old baker’s son from Yorkshire, exhibited a large painting on a Shakespearean theme, Cleopatra’s Arrival in Cilicia (see Figure 11.1), at the Royal Academy. The dazzlingly colourful picture portrayed the eponymous heroine lounging semi-naked on a barge, surrounded by a retinue of scantily clad handmaidens.2 It was greeted warmly by the mainstream art establishment; but it also had its critics. And, the following year The Times newspaper pronounced: we take this opportunity of advising Mr. Etty, who got some reputation for painting Cleopatra’s Galley, not to be seduced into a style which can gratify only the most vicious taste. Naked figures, when painted with the purity of Raphael, may be endured; but nakedness without purity is offensive and indecent, and in Mr. Etty’s canvass [sic] is mere dirty flesh.3 Indeed, as his Victorian biographer stated, Etty was the ‘unrivalled painter of Flesh’.4 William Etty was something of a paradox in the 165


Figure 11.1 William Etty, Cleopatra’s Arrival in Cilicia, exhibited 1821, oil on canvas, 106.5 × 132.5 cm, The Lady Lever Art Gallery, Port Sunlight. [Board of Trustees of the National Museums & Galleries on Merseyside]

early-nineteenth-century art world. A confirmed bachelor, marked out by his peers for his abstemiousness and personal sobriety, Etty was remarkable also for devoting his entire working life to pursuit of a quest to translate the flesh of the living model – above all the female model – into art. Drawn like a moth to a flame, Etty dedicated countless hours in the evening life class of the Royal Academy to the close scrutiny of the naked female body. Here his teacher, as Etty recalled, ‘used sometimes to come to me and say if he was to prick my study with a pin it would bleed’.5 For Etty, the activity of painting the naked female body was tantamount to a form of religious worship: ‘Finding ... God’s most glorious work to be WOMAN, that all human beauty had been concentrated in her, I resolved to dedicate myself to painting ... God’s most glorious work, more finely than ever had been done.’6 His face scarred by smallpox, with a voice ‘shrill and feeble of tone’, Etty seems never to have been able to form any personal or physical attachment to the opposite sex, and ‘could in nothing, boast himself “a lady’s man” ’.7 His modern biographer has speculated, therefore, that ‘his devotion to the female nude was a form of sublimation’.8 And Etty himself,

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although anxious to refute any accusation that the penetration of his gaze might possibly be equated with voyeuristic sexual engagement, admitted freely that ‘the female form, in its fulness [sic], beauty of colour, exquisite rotundity, may, by being portrayed in its nudity, awake like nature in some degree an approach to passion’.9 When Etty painted the naked female figure, he showed comparatively little interest in the head of the female model, or her extremities. Rather, as has been noted, the focus of his attention was directed particularly to the area between the neck and the knees: breasts, bottoms, and thighs, which he often exaggerated or amplified.10 It is perhaps therefore not surprising to learn that, while his art was applauded in artistic circles for its exploration of vivid colour, and the traditions of Rubensian form, Etty’s obsessive naturalism was also perceived by the artist’s detractors as an art form that degraded its subject, presenting, ‘in the most gross and literal manner the unhappy models of the Royal Academy’ – women who attended upon the artist in penury and out of sufferance.11 As Alison Smith has remarked, ‘Etty’s colour, far from connoting health and vigour, was viewed by several critics as unwholesome, suggesting mutability and decay’.12 His art was, from such a perspective, less a celebration of flesh than a mortification. With this idea in mind, it is also worth recalling that at the very time Etty was exploring a more naturalistic approach to the female body, a parallel debate divided the British art world, centring on the role of dissection in artistic training. The proponents of dissection argued that first-hand knowledge of anatomy was essential, and encouraged young artists – such as Etty – to attend practical courses on the subject. Within the Academy, however, the official view was that, in order to understand the body, the artist needed only to have recourse to the paradigm offered by Greek statuary, complemented by the study of living (male) athletic specimens.13 The dissected body, with its grim links to grave-robbing and the mutilation of corpses of convicted murderers, was distasteful to polite society, and, like Etty’s all-too-fleshy nudes, provoked a moral dilemma. Both practices were arguably ‘necessary’, but the inherent danger was that both, in their close engagement with flesh and blood, might provoke perverse enjoyment for their practitioners – and their audience. In the early 1820s, The Times newspaper suggested a polarity between the ‘naked’ and the ‘nude’ female body through opposing the ‘dirty flesh’ purveyed by the contemporary painter, Etty, with the classical ‘purity’ of the Italian Renaissance master, Raphael. Since the late 1500s, Raphael had been promoted as a paradigm of the academic ideal. In the French academy of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, where naked female models were forbidden, teachers exposed students to the female body through drawings and plaster casts of antique statuary, and the work of the Old Masters, notably Raphael. Louis Cheron (1660–1725), who taught life drawing in both France and England, constantly referred back to Raphael for the bodies and


faces of his nude studies, the face in his work invariably a ‘mask’ derived from Raphael.14 Even in the eighteenth-century English academy, where the female model was permitted, the living presence was invariably suppressed in favour of an invisible ideal, notably by Sir Joshua Reynolds, who, in his celebrated Discourses on Art, promoted a generalized form at the expense of the particular. This Reynoldsian ideal did not merely represent corporeal perfection but also a moral superiority, which by the early nineteenth century had been accepted as a central tenet of British academic pedagogy. Thus, when The Times was compelled to ‘endure’ the spectacle of the naked female body in art, it sought to banish any carnal desires through an appeal to the purity of Raphael, which was in turn sanctioned by academic precedent. As the century wore on, particularly after the ascent to the throne of Queen Victoria, Raphael’s position as a guardian of chaste and pure form intensified, so that the ‘pure’ body of Raphael was inevitably interposed between the artist and the individual model. In such a climate it is not surprising that the individual female model was found wanting, physically, spiritually or even mentally. In all this, there was an irony of which the Victorian guardians of purity seemed wilfully oblivious: namely, that Raphael’s artistic veil of purity was not matched by his personal purity. As his contemporary Georgio Vasari noted, Raphael was ‘a very amorous person, delighting much in women and ever ready to serve them’.15 Yet, though Victorian society was content to dissociate Raphael’s appreciation of the naked female form from his personal history, it was more cautious about the possible contamination of contemporary artists by the female bodies that served to inspire and inform their creations. Although there was an abiding distrust of Etty in certain conservative circles, his art attracted the patronage of a wide variety of individuals, including aristocrats, industrialists, and even clergymen. Those who supported him did so in the understanding that their taste, in common with the artist’s, elevated them above considerations harboured by an uneducated audience, and that despite the suspicions that his art engendered, its motivations were morally upright. Etty, who had studied the art of Rubens and Titian in Europe, was by inclination a colourist. Indeed, it was the innovative use of colour by modern British artists – notably Turner and Lawrence – that attracted the admiration of the international art world at that time. It could be argued that Etty was doing no more for colour and truth to nature in the art of the nude than Turner was doing in historic landscape painting. The problem for the self-appointed guardians of public morals was that the highly naturalistic manner in which Etty painted a particular (as opposed to a generalized) body undermined its status as art, and focused attention, possibly for the first time in British artistic discourse, on the semantic issue of the naked and the nude; the illicit versus the licit body; the ‘degraded’ body, all too clearly composed of flesh and blood, versus the incorrupt, idealized form epitomized by the art of Raphael.

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Etty’s direct approach in painting the female nude underlined the fact that the process involved the inspection and evaluation of the naked human body. Yet, in order to maintain the legitimacy of the process, successful artistic negotiation of the naked female body relied heavily upon the topos of the Platonic ideal, relayed through a series of classical pictorial paradigms. Of special influence was the narrative, originally related by Cicero and Pliny the Elder, of the Greek painter Zeuxis who selected the five most beautiful women in the city of Croton as the models for his painting of Helen of Troy, in order to compose an ideal of beauty. Countless artists addressed the female body through such narratives, which gave both authority and legitimacy to the male artistic gaze, as well as an opportunity to portray the naked female body. They included Edwin Long (1829–1881), whose earlier career had been inauspicious, but who eventually found a successful formula in the 1870s through a series of historical narrative pictures with classical and biblical subjects, invariably featuring partially clothed women. In 1885, Long exhibited at the Royal Academy a large painting entitled The Chosen Five, which depicted Zeuxis in the process of selecting his models, a subject which gave authority and credence to his own position as an historical painter: he assumed the mantle of Zeuxis redivivus. As a critic of the period observed: ‘the academic atmosphere throws, as it were, a veil over those undisguised humanities which should, I think, tend to keep them pure ... from the category of “hussies” ’.16 While Long maintains a sacerdotal presence, his privilege to view and evaluate the naked female body sanctioned through an adherence to a classical narrative, the women who have agreed to model for him are tainted, since, without the protecting veil cast over them by the artist’s educated sensibility, they might quite easily revert to their true corporeal forms – ‘hussies’ posing as purified classical virgins. The classical narrative of Pygmalion, originally told by Ovid in the Metamorphoses, gets to the very heart of the physical and moral dilemma presented by the naked female model in Victorian art. The sculptor Pygmalion, disgusted ‘by the many faults which nature has implanted in the female sex’, avoided the company of women, and instead carved a statue from ivory with which he fell in love. ‘Often,’ says Ovid, ‘he ran his hands over the work, feeling it to see whether it was flesh or ivory ... kissed the statue ... and embraced it, and thought he felt his fingers sink into the limbs he touched, so that he was afraid lest a bruise appear where he had pressed the flesh.’17 Frustrated with the non-compliance of his ersatz lover, Pygmalion prays to Venus to give him a wife ‘like the ivory maid’. Venus goes one better and brings the statue to life. Thus Pygmalion achieves his ultimate goal of attaining a virginal soul mate who is free from the taint of original sin, having been conceived not through the sexual congress of debased humanity, but through the creative genius of the artist. She is his creation, his automaton, his creature. Artists and sculptors had addressed the subject of Pygmalion and the model on numerous occasions. In the eighteenth century, in the hands of

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the French sculptor Etienne Falconet, for example, or the painter François Boucher, Pygmalion provided a pretext for rococo confections redolent of more generally popular themes of courtly love. Yet although the imagery was erotic, it was still determinedly a form of high art, which by its narrative appealed to the intellect as well as the senses. In the early years of the nineteenth century, the British satirical artist Thomas Rowlandson created a coloured print entitled The Modern Pygmalion (see Figure 11.2), an energetic piece of populist post-revolutionary erotic satire. Here, the naked statuecome-to life clambers upon the naked artist, and seizes his erect member – much to his evident delight. While Rowlandson’s image may be dismissed as pornography (a form of visual representation in which he excelled), it also stands as a provoking subversion of a revered artistic paradigm.18 At a stroke, Rowlandson undermined the vaunted shamanistic position of the male artist vis-à-vis the female model/muse. The female model is presented here not as a source of spiritual or intellectual inspiration but as a sexual predator, whose advances are clearly welcomed by the aroused artist. Rowlandson punctures the pretence that the naked and the nude are discrete states, bringing the all-too-corporeal presence of the model into the purified realm of classical art. Far from banishing thoughts of earthly pleasures, Rowlandson suggests, the narrative of Pygmalion and the model merely serves to feed a fantasy based on the privileged nature of the relationship. Despite Rowlandson’s aberrant iconography, the Pygmalion myth served well into the nineteenth century to legitimize the artist’s control over the model as well as the art object. In his celebrated Pygmalion series of 1868– 1878 (Birmingham City Art Gallery), Edward Burne-Jones presents a memorable image of the artist’s relationship with his statue as one of sanctified purity, wherein the artist-creator, through divine intervention, performs a sacerdotal act of transubstantiation. Even when his creation takes mortal form, she remains marmoreal, iconic and virginal. The problem, unacknowledged by Burne-Jones, is that, although – as in the act of transubstantiation – the appearance of the object remains unchanged, the creation of a living flesh-and-blood presence inevitably de-sanctifies the figure. Pygmalion’s living statue is attainable not merely as a soul mate, but as a tangible, physical presence. In the original Ovidian narrative, Pygmalion is fundamentally a misogynist, who, having despised the sullied women about him, makes his own virginal female – and then has sex with her: the result of which is a son, Paphos. It is therefore relevant that, in the course of 1868, while he was first contemplating his Pygmalion series, Burne-Jones became infatuated with his model, the Greek sculptor Maria Zambaco. During the course of their tempestuous affair, Burne-Jones used Zambaco as the model for an erotically charged mythological painting, Phyllis and Demophoön. In the fictive narrative, Phyllis, thwarted by her lover, eventually hangs herself. In life, Maria Zambaco, increasingly frustrated by Burne-Jones’ failure to desert his wife for her, made a number of suicide attempts – none of which, fortunately, was successful.

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Figure 11.2 Thomas Rowlandson, The Modern Pygmalion, after 1811, engraving. [The Trustees of the British Museum]

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Even though Maria Zambaco was – unlike the majority of women who modelled for artists – a well-educated, professional, middle-class woman, any sexual relationship between a male artist and a female model remained beyond the bounds of accepted convention. This was not, however, unusual by the second half of the nineteenth century. By this time, as a result principally of the artistic and social adventures of various members of the PreRaphaelite Brotherhood, the distinction between the model and the fictive character portrayed was deliberately obscured. The lives of female models, so-called ‘stunners’ such as Elizabeth Siddall, Fanny Cornforth and Jane Morris, were intertwined with the heroines they portrayed, blurring, as Elizabeth Prettejohn has argued, the boundary between imagination and ‘reality’.19 In this sense, their presence in the works of art in which they feature is more notable than that of models in previous generations. However, for the most part, these ‘celebrity’ models are not truly representative of the contested territory occupied by the female model. Their faces, not their bodies, were the principal attraction, in an age in which the exposure of the naked female body was still taboo. For the middle classes – even those who enjoyed close sexual relationships in licit heterosexual relationships – the naked female body remained off-limits, and as such an object of greater curiosity than we might suppose from a contemporary perspective. As a marriage manual of 1839 posited, ‘tranquillity, silence and secrecy are necessary for a prolific coition’, and those women who exhibited any notable signs of possessing an active sex drive were deemed by majority opinion to be, as Lawrence Stone has observed, ‘morally, mentally or physically diseased’.20 Even so, the naked female body had been used by British artists since the early eighteenth century. The first recorded use of the naked female model in a British art school was in 1720 at the London-based St Martin’s Lane Academy, then housed in a disused Presbyterian meeting house. At that time, public academies in Europe employed only male models; William Hogarth, a founder-member of the St Martin’s Lane Academy, recalled that ‘the addition of a woman figure’ was intended to make their art school ‘the more inviting to subscribers’.21 Before long, the presence of the naked female model attracted the attention of non-artists, and in 1722, the Prince of Wales (the future George II) paid a visit to the Academy with several of his cronies. The prince, who otherwise had no interest in art (and was famously to declare his disdain for ‘bainting and boetry’), stayed for an hour, and on leaving paid the model five guineas – considerably more than the few shillings she would have received from the subscribing artists for an evening’s work. The episode, apparently unique in the annals of Royal visitations, highlights the financial value of the naked female model in a scopic economy, where licit opportunities of this kind were limited. Well into the nineteenth century, exposure to the naked female body continues to be remarked upon by male artists in ways that are highly voyeuristic, and even prurient. The landscape painter John Constable, for example,

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in connection with his forthcoming stint as a teacher at the Royal Academy Schools, observed: ‘The next week I have a little girl, aged 17. She is procured by Etty our grand “curator”, and I am to have her maiden “sitting” on Monday week.’22 As well as attending the life class assiduously, Etty took a keen interest in selecting the Academy’s female life models, and in a note to Constable, reported: ‘A young figure is brought to me, who is very desirous of becoming a model. She is very much like the Antigone and all in front remarkably fine’.23 Artistic voyeurism of a similar kind surfaces in a letter, probably written in the 1850s, by another prominent Royal Academician, Edwin Landseer. Here he recommends a young female model to a fellow Academician, explaining that she needs a favour as she has been ill and unable to work. As well as being a ‘good kind of young woman’, able to read and write, Landseer notes that her ‘flesh is nice ... I really think you may like to look at her forms’.24 The recipient of the letter was the Irish artist, William Mulready, who was then considered to be among the most accomplished draughtsmen of the male and female nude. Admirers of Mulready’s painstaking naked figure studies included Queen Victoria, although John Ruskin, a proponent of the ideal female form in art and in life, found them to be ‘most vulgar, and in the solemn sense of the word, most abominable’.25 Mulready’s assurance in transforming the naked female figure into an art object was inseparable from the physical attraction he felt towards his models. And it was perhaps in an effort to stave off such feelings that he penned a curious memo in which he proffered advice to female models on how to conduct themselves, and how to repel potential advances by male artists: ‘a very coarse, or a very delicate suitor might be the actor in this scene – I know it’.26 Certainly, Mulready himself had a reputation as a womaniser, a fellow artist noting in 1856 that the seventy-year-old Mulready had recently seduced a young model, resulting in the birth of an illegitimate child.27 The model in question had apparently sat for him, ‘for the head’, indicating that she was posing clothed for a character study rather than nude. She would also, at least in the Academy, have been paid less than the model who posed naked, the implication being that the higher fee paid to women for posing naked was not only an inducement to remove their clothes, and compromise their respectability, but also a form of compensation for shame. While male models were admired for their athletic prowess (they were often soldiers or professional pugilists), and looked upon as equals by the male artists who employed them, the equation between the naked female model and prostitution was commonplace in the minds of artists and the public, both being in receipt of ‘shame’ money. And for an ‘honest’ woman, modelling naked in the academy was a last resort, as a young tearful woman told the Victorian genre painter William Powell Frith: ‘I did it to prevent my father going to prison. He owed three pounds ten, and if he couldn’t have paid it by that Saturday night he was to have been arrested. The Academy paid me three guineas for the week, and saved him. I never sat in that way

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before, and I never will again.’28 The inherent shame that accompanied the exposure of the body is revealed by a request made in 1871 by the eminent biologist Charles Darwin to the sculptor Thomas Woolner: ‘I daresay you must often meet and know well painters. Could you persuade some trustworthy men to observe young and inexperienced girls who serve as models, and who at first blush much, how low down the body the blush extends?’29 Ultimately, however, he relied on the testimony of the surgeon and pathologist Sir James Paget, who enabled him to pronounce that ‘with English women, blushing does not extend beneath the neck and upper part of the chest’. None the less, Darwin also cited earlier evidence supplied by a ‘celebrated’ French painter ‘that the chest, shoulders, arms and whole body of a girl, who unwillingly consented to serve as a model, reddened when she was first divested of her clothes’.30 To locate a precise moment when the naked female model was accepted without shame or embarrassment into the academic framework of the British art establishment, and, more generally, when the public (or indeed the male artist) ceased to assume a connection between prostitution and modelling, is not possible. Nor it is possible to define a moment when the model herself began to regard the activity of posing naked as a matter of professional pride or even self-fulfilment. However, significant changes did occur gradually between the 1870s and the First World War, over a period of about fifty years. The factors involved were multiple and various, but we can identify a number of issues that contributed to the acceptance of the naked female body as an object worthy of study in its own right, without reference to the authority of the classical period or the purity of an invisible ideal. One important development was the increased presence of women as artists in art schools and academies, as students and latterly as teachers. Coventry Patmore’s fabled ‘angel’ may still have been in the house, but she was also, as Anthea Callen has revealed, in the workplace, the art school and the studio.31 Young women artists such as Gwen John (1876–1939) and Nina Hamnett (1890–1956) drew from both male and female models, and themselves acted as models. In art schools, female models began to lose their anonymity, as the detailed registers of models’ names retained by the Royal Academy indicate. By the 1890s, a number of young women combined their work as artists’ models with other career ambitions. Ethel Warwick, for example, trained as an artist at the London Polytechnic, and while posing at the Royal Academy, also pursued her career as an actress.32 In England, the 1880s had witnessed an intense political campaign, led by the Church of England and the Social Purity Alliance, to outlaw the naked female model from public art academies, but by the following decade they had effectively lost the battle. There was also by the end of the century a far greater confluence between British and continental art schools, as art teachers, students and even models travelled between major centres of art education such as London, Paris, Rome and Brussels. One by-product of this

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internationalizing of the British art scene was the popularization of the female model as a Bohemian cult figure – spearheaded by George Du Maurier’s overnight success, Trilby, whose eponymous heroine endowed the female model with a gamine charm and vulnerability. As ‘Trilbymania’ swamped Britain and indeed America, the female model became a popular figure on the stage and in the music hall as well as in the art school and the studio. And within a decade she was firmly established in café society, complete with trademark beret, beads and baggy jumper. By the early twentieth century, the female model was made flesh, but while her ability to expose her body had gained a certain legitimacy, not to say cachet, was she none the less still firmly in the thrall of the modern Pygmalion? To be an ‘Augustus John’ model in London, or a ‘Rodin’ model in Paris was a mark of distinction for any aspiring young female model, but their Pygmalion, unlike his Victorian forebears, arguably bore a closer resemblance to the priapic parody created by Rowlandson a generation or so earlier. In 1956, Sir Kenneth Clark (1902–1983), already long-established as the country’s leading arbiter of taste in the visual arts, published The Nude. A Study of Ideal Art. At once authoritative and populist, Clark’s text confidently reaffirmed the absolute dichotomy between naked as a condition and the nude as an object: ‘To be naked is to be deprived of our clothes and the word implies some of the embarrassment which most of us feel in that condition. The word nude, on the other hand, carries, in educated usage, no uncomfortable overtone.’33 In other words, for Clark those who belong by virtue of their cultural education to a community of taste experience the nude – an art object in its own right – as a licit focus of visual stimulus, and thus can contemplate it objectively as a purely aesthetic experience. Clark’s thesis has since been opposed as ‘an act of regulation’ and containment imposed by the author’s viewpoint as a ‘male, heterosexual connoisseur’.34 It has also been suggested that Clark’s concept of nudity is only maintained ‘by caricaturing a real body to which the nude is the other’; that his book attests to ‘the author’s evident distaste for the human (and particularly the female) biological body’.35 It is indeed curious that Clark, who grew up during the early decades of the twentieth century, when the concept of the ideal human body was questioned extensively by artists, identifies the evolution of the ‘unidealized’ naked body with Christian iconography in which the ‘shamefully naked ... are undergoing humiliations, martyrdoms or tortures’.36 And yet, had Clark looked closer to home, he would have observed in the art of Stanley Spencer or Francis Bacon (neither of whom feature in his book) a more complex and provocative approach to the naked female form, which could not be framed neatly within a postlapsarian narrative. Between 1905 and 1912, Walter Sickert, in a series of unashamedly downbeat paintings and drawings of naked women in seedy Camden Town boarding houses, challenged the academic ideal of the purified female nude. As he remarked at the time, the ‘modern flood of representations of vacuous

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images dignified by the name of the Nude, represents an artistic and intellectual bankruptcy that cannot but be considered degrading, even by those who do not believe the treatment of the naked human figure reprehensible on moral or religious grounds’.37 Rather than goddesses or nymphs, Sickert portrayed unidealized, fleshy, female forms in drab, subfusc surroundings; images which evoke a collective image of disturbed sexuality (see Figure 11.3). As a French critic noted of a display of Sickert’s nudes in Paris in 1907: ‘Here is a series of nudes, painted at twilight, amongst the impoverished disorder of cluttered hotel rooms. Here are whores collapsed on the unmade bed, whores with withered bodies, weary from the harsh work of prostitution.’38 The series culminated shortly afterwards in the infamous Camden Town murder paintings, in which he ‘restaged’ the death of a young prostitute named Emily Dimmock.39 Several critics have suggested that Sickert’s ‘modern’ portrayal of the naked female figure, which sent shockwaves through the respectable Edwardian art world, was an important influence on subsequent ‘realist’ painters such as Lucian Freud and Frank Auerbach. Yet it is pertinent to recall that Sickert’s works were also produced under the slowly receding shadow of Victorian England, where the female model was synonymous with prostitution, so that the identities of the women who posed for Sickert were elided with the hapless victims of random sex crimes. Far from encouraging a rapport or relationship with his models, Sickert relished his remoteness from them, insisting that they were paid for their services, and that his own personality was banished from the ‘theatre’ he had created. While Etty, nearly a century earlier, had attempted to achieve a moral high ground for himself, his art and the object he painted, Sickert was deliberately perverse in suggesting that the naked bodies of the women he portrayed were little more than the anonymous agglomerations of ‘mere dirty flesh’ decried by The Times in the 1820s. As Sickert himself observed, the tasteful, acceptable ‘nude’ of public exhibitions had paradoxically become an ‘obscene monster’, sanitized and ‘regularized ... with a certain sanctimonious unctuousness by the press’. If the nude was to provide pleasure, argued Sickert, it required ‘a gleam of warmth and life’.40 With ‘warmth and life’ came flesh and blood, but also – as Sickert acknowledged – death and decay. To label Sickert a misogynist, or even a serial murderer (as has been suggested recently) is ludicrous, not least given the fundamental place of role-play in his art and its fictive narrative content.41 It is, however, plausible to see Sickert’s manipulation of the female model as yet another manifestation of the ‘modern’ Pygmalion, as well as the work of an avant-garde painter of ‘modern’ life. In Sickert’s art, the model, like the fictive prostitutes she represents, is not licensed to seek spiritual or even physical union with her maker, but to submit to her master’s will, which demands mute and absolute compliance. In tracing a trajectory for the portrayal of the female body in twentiethcentury British art, Sickert is inevitably placed at the beginning of a tradition that leads to Stanley Spencer, Francis Bacon and Lucian Freud, to name but

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Figure 11.3 Walter Richard Sickert (1860–1942), La Hollandaise, c. 1906, oil on canvas, 51.1 × 40.6 cm, Tate.

three of the most significant artists whose debt to Sickert is apparent. Yet, while there are undeniable similarities between the approaches of all these artists to the unidealized human body, their motivations and their manipulations of the subject are quite different. Consider Stanley Spencer: like Sickert, his


graphic portrayal of the female nude is focused on a relatively small group of works, in Spencer’s case the paintings he made of his second wife, Patricia Preece, in the years leading up to their marriage in 1937. In his paintings of the forty-something-year-old Preece, Spencer revealed his fascination with middle-aged flesh; its colour, texture and form. Unlike Sickert or Etty before him, Spencer had no interest in the professional female model, either in the life class or the studio environment. Spencer’s exploration of flesh was directed exclusively towards one woman whose bodily presence obsessed him, but who was ultimately unattainable. Spencer painted Preece as a form of courtship (while still married to his first wife), and she agreed to pose naked for him, evidently as a perverse means of asserting domination and control. In one startlingly original painting, Spencer depicted himself and Preece naked, in the presence of a leg of raw lamb (Tate). Preece, herself a startlingly raw presence, sprawls across the foreground of the painting, her pelvis thrusting forward in an act of sexual abandon. Yet her mind is elsewhere; her eyes glazed. Spencer gazes at her longingly, his crouched pose carrying perhaps unconscious echoes of the hunched homunculus in Henry Fuseli’s The Nightmare – among the most celebrated visions of frustrated sexual desire in Western art. Like The Nightmare, Spencer’s image is a fiction, since the intimacy portrayed in the painting existed solely in the artist’s imagination. Preece, who was a lesbian, and who considered herself Spencer’s social superior, apparently viewed sex as ‘ribald’, and Spencer’s sexual urges as ‘working class’.42 The meaning of Spencer’s nude paintings of Preece is inextricably bound up with the personal relationship of Spencer to his model and muse. Yet this is Pygmalion with a twist. Preece, by agreeing to pose naked to Spencer, becomes flesh incarnate. At the same time she remains physically unattainable. Spencer can look at his model but he cannot touch, while she cynically exploits the artist in exchange for a share of his material possessions and fame. Here, we are reminded once more of Rowlandson’s ‘Modern Pygmalion’, where the naked artist also consorts with his naked model. Yet, unlike Rowlandson’s priapic artist, Spencer in the double portrait with Preece is flaccid, his penis dangling uselessly between his legs, a signal of the lack of sexual fulfilment in their relationship. Double Nude Portrait: The Artist and his Second Wife entered the collection of the Tate Gallery in 1974 and is regarded today as an iconic work. Yet the picture was regarded by some in the artist’s lifetime as an affront to morality and decency, the President of the Royal Academy, Alfred Munnings, threatening Spencer as late as 1950 with a trial for obscenity, a threat that compelled Spencer to keep the picture wrapped in a blanket under his bed.43 Yet by the time of Spencer’s death in 1959, a tide of post-war hedonism had already engulfed more avant-garde sections of the British art world, ensuring that the views of establishment figures such Munnings were regarded as, at best, irrelevant. And whereas Spencer’s radical views on sexuality and

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his frank portrayal of the female nude had been frowned upon, they now became positively de rigueur. The shift in attitude in the 1950s towards a liberal approach to the naked female body as an art form in its own right was in no small measure linked to an acceptance of the female model as a sexual being in her own right, and the infiltration of the persona of the individual model into the artwork. Emblematic of the new ‘liberated’ artist’s model was a frustrated shorthand typist named Wendy Abbott, who as Henrietta Moraes became something of a celebrity in the bohemian world of post-war Soho society. The reality was far less glamorous. As she stood one day modelling naked in a life class, Moraes felt an itch in her pubic hair: ‘I looked down at my stomach. A grey, many-legged insect was crawling steadily up my navel. I watched it with amazement, moving relentlessly upwards between my breasts, and gave a shriek of horror: crabs’.44 For Henrietta Moraes, her life as model and muse was inextricably linked to her personal history, as she eagerly bed-hopped her way towards minor celebrity, while turning increasingly to drink and drugs. Among her more celebrated artistic conquests was the young Lucian Freud, their relationship ‘consummated’, according to Moraes, ‘on the edge of an unwieldy kitchen sink’ in Brewer Street, Soho. ‘I was,’ she later proclaimed, ‘in Lucian’s power, like a mesmerized rabbit’ – though when she found another woman’s menstrual blood in Freud’s bed, the spell was broken.45 Although Freud took on Moraes as a model as well as a lover, it was Francis Bacon, a homosexual artist with no physical desire for her, who got closest to expressing in his art the more disturbing aspects of Moraes’ persona. Needing images of a naked female figure for a painting he was working on, Bacon commissioned the photographer, John Deakin, to take a series of photographs of Moraes. In the event, the enterprising Deakin took two sets of photographs, one more explicit set for himself, which he sold off in a local public house as pornography for a few shillings; the other, used by Bacon in composing the tortured naked form in Version No. 2 of a Lying Figure with a Hypodermic Syringe (see Figure 11.4), sold at Sotheby’s, New York, in 2006 for over US$15 million. While Moraes’ body might have been a vehicle merely for Bacon’s art, his awareness of her reckless attitude towards life and penchant for self-abuse may have caused him not only to use her as a model in so disturbing an image of human self-destruction and degradation, but also actively to conspire with Moraes in a perverse celebration of the downward spiral of her life; a life in which her body did not represent a high-minded ideal of beauty but rather an emblem of fleshly mortality and decay.46 Henrietta Moraes died early in 1999, aged sixty-seven. In the decades since she first attained celebrity as an artist’s model, probably to some extent because of her own vanity, other models have increasingly been accorded, and accorded themselves, celebrity status, their willingness to expose their bodies being regarded as a badge of honesty and courage, especially if their bodies do not conform to conventional norms of beauty. Foremost

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Figure 11.4 Francis Bacon, version no. 2 of Lying Figure with a Hypodermic Syringe, 1968, 198.1 × 147.3 cm, Private Collection.

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in encouraging a cult of baring the flesh as a means of self-promotion and personal self-regard has been Lucian Freud. In a major retrospective exhibition of Freud’s work at Tate Britain in 2002, among the artist’s most prominent images of the female nude featured an otherwise unknown middle-aged woman named Sue Tilley. According to a reviewer in The Observer, Tilley was ‘the other star’ of the Tate show: the ‘20-stone benefits officer from London is being feted as one of the biggest stars of the British art world’.47 ‘Big Sue’, as Freud nicknamed her, is built on generous lines. She has also become something of a celebrity. In addition to her day job, Sue Tilley has written the biography of another of Freud’s ‘celebrity’ models, Leigh Bowery, and carved out a niche playing vignette roles in pop videos and stage performances. Clearly, Tilley feels empowered by Freud, his artistic intervention having given her the platform to pursue her own artistic agenda. Yet Lucian Freud, now in his eighties, continues to wield the real power. Tilley’s body shape may not resemble Pygmalion’s classical ideal, but she remains his creation. Unlike his artistic predecessor, Etty, whose painted nudes were derided by The Times in the early 1820s, Freud is courted by fashionable society, as models and socialites vie for his attentions. Recently the gamine supermodel Kate Moss stated in a magazine interview that modelling for Lucian Freud was one of her few remaining ambitions. Freud duly obliged and painted a portrait of the naked, pregnant Moss. In 2005, auctioned as ‘Naked portrait’, it fetched £3.9 million at Christie’s, the second highest price recorded for Freud’s work at auction. Freud’s fascination with the naked body even in his eighties has ensured that he is regarded as a virile presence. This is a construct sanctioned by the artist himself, not least in a work of 2005 unveiled at London’s National Portrait Gallery, entitled The Artist Surprised by a Naked Admirer, in which the legs of the octogenarian artist are clasped by a fawning, crouched, nude female model, the daughter of a Welsh baronet who described herself coyly as a ‘very good friend’ of the painter.48 In the two hundred years since Etty first enrolled in the life class of the Royal Academy in 1807, and began to draw and paint the nude figure, the relationship between artist and female model, and indeed the function of the model in artistic practice, has undergone an immense change. The female body, then only a study aid and a cipher for transmitting grand historical narratives, has become an object of study in its own right, as the genre of the nude has been transformed into naked portraiture. And while in 1807 the physical imperfections of the female model were criticized or suppressed, folds of sagging flesh, potbellies and varicose veins are now exhibited defiantly as a form of homage to the mortality and mutability of the human frame. What has not changed, perhaps, is the willingness of the male artist and of his audience to endorse unquestioningly the ‘Pygmalion’ construct, whereby the authorial omnipotence of the artist/creator gives him the power of expression over the appearance of the naked female form – whether idealized or not.


Figure 11.5 Jenny Saville, Rubens’ Flap, 1999, oil on canvas, 120 × 96, 304.8 × 243.8cm © Jenny Saville. [Courtesy of Gagosian Gallery]

In the early 1990s, the British painter Jenny Saville (born 1970) began to paint the naked body, her treatment of female flesh inevitably being compared to a tradition stretching back from Freud to Rubens. Yet there are several crucial factors that dissociate Saville’s work from these eminent

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predecessors. From the outset, Saville took an intense interest in deformity and disease; in bodies which were ‘excessive’ and in which fat was most definitely a feminist issue. Significantly, Saville uses her own body as a model (see Figure 11.5), viewing herself from angles that are deliberately unflattering, and far removed from the sexual allure associated with the traditional male gaze. In her paintings, flesh is squeezed, distorted and incised, as she surveys the interstices of the human body’s terrain, invariably with the aid of the camera as well as the paintbrush. Saville’s uncompromising approach to flesh has inevitably produced a crop of innuendo-laden headlines in the art press: ‘She Ain’t Heavy, She’s My Sister’, ‘Meaty Issues’, ‘Bring on the Blubbernoughts’, ‘Vile Bodies’, and so on.49 Yet, as Nisa Ari has argued, the value of Saville’s paintings of the naked female body does not lie in the viewer’s delight or repulsion. Rather, as she observes, the ‘intersection between political messaging and self-portraiture is what distinguishes Saville from many of her contemporaries’.50 Saville uses her own body, as she has stated, as a ‘prop’ through which she can express her anxieties, while for the female viewer, observes Linda Nochlin, she provides a ‘brilliant and relentless embodiment of our worst anxieties about our own corporeality and gender’.51 While Saville has been labelled ‘the latest prodigy from the Freud–Bacon school of British fleshmongers’,52 she does not in any way regard herself as a ‘pupil’ or disciple.53 In Saville’s art, the naked female body is shaped not by the age-old intervention of an external male fantasy fuelled by frustrated sexual desire, empowerment, or even the strictures of an academic curriculum, but by the determination of a woman as artist and model to visualize and conceptualize her own flesh-and-blood presence.

Notes 1. Walter Sickert, ‘The Naked and the Nude’, from The New Age, 21 July 1910, in Walter Sickert, The Complete Writings on Art, ed. Anna Greutzner Robins (Oxford, 2000), p. 261. 2. See Alex Kidson, Earlier British Paintings in the Lady Lever Art Gallery (Liverpool, 1999), pp. 56–58. 3. Dennis Farr, William Etty (London, 1958), p. 31. 4. Alexander Gilchrist, Life of William Etty, 2 vols (London, 1855), vol. 1, p. 54. 5. William Etty, ‘Autobiography of William Etty, R.A. in Letters Addressed to a Relative’, The Art-Journal, 11 (1849), p. 38. 6. Quoted in Alison Smith, The Victorian Nude: Sexuality, Morality and Art (Manchester, 1996), p. 86. 7. Gilchrist, Life, Vol. 1, p. 136. 8. Dennis Farr, ‘William Etty (1787–1849)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography; http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/8925. 9. Etty, ‘Autobiography’, p. 40. 10. See Smith, Victorian Nude, p. 7. 11. The Times, 23 May 1835, quoted in Farr, ‘William Etty’, p. 73; and Smith, Victorian Nude, p. 88. 12. Smith, Victorian Nude, p. 88.

184 The Body and the Arts 13. See Ilaria Bignamini and Martin Postle, The Artist’s Model: Its Role in British Art from Lely to Etty, Exhibition catalogue, University Art Gallery, Nottingham and the Iveagh Bequest, Kenwood (Nottingham, 1991), pp. 22–23. 14. Ibid., p. 12. 15. Quoted in Bette Talvacchia, ‘Raphael’s Workshop and the Development of a Managerial Style’, in Marcia B. Hall (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Raphael (Cambridge, 2005), p. 168. 16. Mark Bills, Edwin Long RA (London, 1998), p. 21. 17. The Metamorphoses of Ovid, trans. Mary M. Innes (Harmondsworth, 1955), Book X, lines 243–297, pp. 230–231. 18. For Rowlandson’s erotic prints, see Gert Schiff, The Amorous Illustrations of Thomas Rowlandson (np: Cythera Press, 1969). 19. See Elizabeth Prettejohn, ‘The Pre-Raphaelite Model’, in Jane Desmarais, Martin Postle and William Vaughan (eds), Model and Supermodel: The Artist’s Model in British Art and Culture (Manchester, 2006), pp. 26–46. 20. Lawrence Stone, The Family, Sex and Marriage in England 1500–1800 (New York, 1977), p. 676. 21. See Postle, ‘Naked Civil Servants: The Professional Model in British Art’, in Desmarais et al., Model and Supermodel, p. 9. 22. Farr, William Etty, p. 77. 23. Ibid. 24. Desmarais et al., Model and Supermodel, p. 14. 25. Kathryn Moore Heleniak, William Mulready (New Haven, CT and London, 1980), p. 158. 26. Desmarais et al., Model and Supermodel, p. 14. 27. Ibid. 28. W. P. Frith, My Autobiography and Reminiscences, 2 vols (London, 1887), vol. 1, p. 59. 29. Charles Darwin to Thomas Woolner, 7 April 1871, in Amy Woolner, Thomas Woolner, R.A., Sculptor and Poet: His Life in Letters (London, 1917), p. 288. 30. See Charles Darwin, The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (London, 1872; New York, 1898), p. 314. 31. See Anthea Callen, Angel in the Studio: Women in the Arts and Crafts Movement 1870–1914 (London, 1979), passim. 32. See Simon Toll, ‘Ethel Warwick (1882–1951), Artist’s Model and Actress. The Life and Career of a Real-Life Trilby’, The British Art Journal, 3(1) (Autumn 2001), pp. 51–55. 33. Kenneth Clark, The Nude: A Study of Ideal Art (London, 1956), p. 1. 34. Lynda Nead, The Female Nude: Art, Obscenity and Sexuality (London, 1992), pp. 6, 13–14. 35. Marcia Pointon, Naked Authority: The Body in Western Painting 1830–1908 (Cambridge, 1990), pp. 12–13. 36. Clark, The Nude, p. 303. 37. Sickert, ‘The Naked and the Nude’, p. 261. 38. See Barnaby Wright (ed.), Walter Sickert. The Camden Town Nudes, Exhibition catalogue, The Courtauld Institute of Art (London, 2007), p. 70. 39. Wright, Walter Sickert, pp. 82–89. 40. Sickert, ‘The Naked and the Nude’, pp. 261, 263. 41. For the suggestion that Sickert was Jack the Ripper, see Patricia Cornwell, Portrait of a Killer – Jack the Ripper: Case Closed (London, 2002). 42. Kenneth Pople, Stanley Spencer: A Biography (London, 1991), p. 332.

Martin Postle 185 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49.

50.

51. 52. 53.

Ibid., p. 470. Henrietta Moraes, Henrietta (London, 1994), p. 24. Ibid., p. 31. William Vaughan, ‘Overexposed? The Model in British Figurative Art from Sickert to Freud’, in Desmarais et al., Model and Supermodel, p. 117. Stephanie Theobald, ‘How Big Sue Became Art’s Biggest Muse’, The Observer, 23 June 2002. Jack Malvern, ‘The Freudian Muse Without a Slip’, The Times, 31 April 2005. Andrew Graham-Dixon, ‘She Ain’t Heavy, She’s My Sister’, The Independent, 8 February 1994; Sergio Miller, ‘Meaty Issues’, Art Review (April 1994); Catherine Milner, ‘Bring on the Blubbernoughts’, The Sunday Telegraph, 14 August 1995; Peter Ross, ‘Vile Bodies’, The List 328 (20 March–2 April 1998). Nisa Ari, ‘The Personal Is Political: The Intersection of Feminism and SelfPortraiture in the Artwork of Jenny Saville’, Unpublished conference paper, Stanford University, 27 November 2005; http://www.stanford.edu/-njbuff/ conference_fall05/papers/nisa_ari.htm. Linda Nochlin, ‘Floating in Gender Nirvana’, Art in America (March 2000), p. 2. Mark Stevens, ‘Fresh Meat’, New York Magazine of Art; online at http://nymag. com/nymetro/arts/art/reviews/1655. Jenny Saville, interview with Elton John, Interview Magazine (October 2003), p. 1.

12 Satyrs, Spiders, Jellyfish, and Mutants: Ovidian Metamorphosis in Contemporary Art Marina Warner

‘All things are always changing ...’ At face value, the concept of metamorphosis simply evokes a transformation of outer form. Examined more closely, however, its meanings move in two contradictory directions, especially with regard to personal identity. In classical myth, for example the great closing scene of Plato’s The Republic, in which souls choose the form of their future existence,1 metamorphosis governs natural phenomena, and human personality or essence survives changes of shape. A man or a woman can be changed into a flower, a tree, a rock, an animal, a mountain, a river, a bird or indeed anything at all; as Ovid’s Metamorphoses elaborates, individuals can become unhoused from their bodies while their souls remain alive, and wander from one form to another. The poor nymph Io is one of the many young women who, pursued by a rapacious god, undergoes metamorphosis, in her case into a cow. An anonymous sixteenth-century illustrator of Ovid realized that it would be difficult for viewers to tell that the cow was Io, so he opened a window in the animal’s flank to show her still inside, looking out. As the philosopher Pythagoras puts it in the closing section of the long poem: All things are always changing, But nothing dies. The spirit comes and goes, Is housed wherever it wills, shifts residence From beasts to men, from men to beasts, but always It keeps on living. As the pliant wax Is stamped with new designs, and is no longer What once it was, but changes form, and still Is pliant wax, so do I teach that spirit Is evermore the same, though passing always To ever-changing bodies.2 186

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This Ovidian vision of a person and of personal possibilities diverges radically from the principle of body-soul integrity in the Judaeo-Christian tradition, which holds that every individual is unique, embodied, unified and indivisible, consistent over a lifetime and destined to live in a single body, die once in this world and be resurrected in person in eternity. Consequently, shape-changing, involving different appearances of the same entity, connotes the work of the Devil, the master of lies and deception, and of witches, who can assume different mutable forms and commune with their familiar animals. The demonic body is imagined as a wild, mutating, terrifying assemblage of animal parts, while ignorance takes the form of a beast. At the same time, however, with the rise of humanist individualism, metamorphosis also conveys a person’s selffashioning over time – in some profound way, you are what you make yourself. 3 In contemporary art, a significant concentration of new work now explores variations on the metamorphic concept of identity, with many artists treating the wilful performance, even fabrication, of self or selves, as well as reflecting on a refreshed pagan vision of personality as unstable and multiple, shifting between phenomena, leaping boundaries of genera, and changing radically over time. These experiments with identity do not always inspire comfort: the vision beckons and seduces, threatens and repels. Interest in different ideas of persons as no longer unified, but split, doubled or even multiple – haunted by an evil genius, or illuminated by a familiar daimon – has combined with new instruments of perception and knowledge, to reconfigure ideas about personal character and human experience in space-time. The main forces shaping this growing concept not only radiate from classical myth, but also from contact with the thought of cultures from Asia, Africa and the Americas, chiefly through imperial encounters with their peoples.4 The potential extent of metamorphosis raises many of the most vexed and complex technological and moral issues of our time: cloning, stem cell research and other reproductive technologies, ‘cyborg’ prostheses, the transplantation of animal organs and cells into humans, and the genetic modification both of foods and, ultimately, of ourselves. It also haunts the fantasies of cosmetic pharmacology and surgery: endless self-fashioning, self-modification, beautification and rejuvenation. With the credit card enticement, ‘Be whoever you want to be’, we have reached an extreme stage in the liberal individualist dream of personal development, self-expression and self-creation. The biologist, Freeman Dyson, a great sage of our time – aged 84 at the time of writing – recently conjured up a remarkable picture of the future when biological interventions will have transformed the ecosystem. He imagines genetically engineered worms that eat cars and pick out precious rare metals from mobile phones and other electronics that are now devouring and wasting them; genetically modified crops with black


leaves that soak up more sunlight; and, in relation to beasts, he creates this scene: Domesticated technology, once it gets into the hands of housewives and children, will give us an explosion of diversity of new living creatures. Designing genomes will be a personal thing, a new art form as creative as painting or sculpture. ... Few of the new creations will be masterpieces, but a great many will bring joy to their creators and variety to our flora and fauna. The final step in the domestication of biotechnology will be biotech games ... Playing such games, kids will acquire an intimate feeling for the organisms they are growing. The winner could be the kid whose seed grows the prickliest cactus, or the kid whose egg hatches the cutest dinosaur.5 This is a Promethean myth – or a Faustian one – depending on whether you look at these developments with excited anticipation at the expansion of human technologies, or in horror at such hubris and interventions into nature. At the same time, however, the earlier connection of metamorphosis to the supernatural persists, above all in contemporary visual technologies: in films, videos, computer games, comic strips, metamorphoses take place in exuberant profusion, as morphing techniques take leaps far beyond the limits of human perception and possibility into realms of multi-dimensional virtuality. The current boom in fantasy entertainment draws on the capacity of new media to simulate and represent endless metamorphoses. Contemporary media of representation – including, above all, digitization – also contribute to spreading a plural and labile theory of consciousness that installs alter egos, virtual presences and metamorphic accompanying daimons in the ordinary way of things. Artists are feeling out the warps of memory and being, the disembodied ubiquity of psychic travel, the farther reaches of consciousness, and the bewildering intersheaving of actuality and imaginings, of dream and reality. The World Wide Web, needless to say, reveals an inextinguishable famishing for the virtual and the fantastic. It seems that the nightmare banquet at the end of Through the Looking Glass, where Alice wakes up to ask whether she was part of the Red King’s dream, or was he part of hers, has become an everyday state of experience, though no less disorientating for that. If the mythic episodes in Ovid belong properly to the category of the supernatural, and wonders such as the life cycle of butterflies to the natural order, then the new marvels that writers and film-makers entertain today can be ascribed to the ultra-natural – beyond the expected course of things.

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Metamorphosis has become a key concept in grasping the changes in ways of thinking about ourselves and our relations with one another, other species, and the world; artists are doing some of the most acute, expressive and memorable thinking in the field. They are modelling the metamorphic person of today in at least four different ways. First, many formal experiments are taking place. The graphic representation of transformed bodies can take place with ever-increasing inventiveness through technical and computer software programmes and their particular intrinsic, fluid, optical morphologies. We see this prominently on the one hand in architectural innovation, in Frank Gehry’s buildings, Santiago Calatrava’s engineering, Daniel Libeskind’s torsions and spirals. My example of formal transformation will be the work of Anish Kapoor: the colossal warped and stretched crimson sculpture Marsyas, installed in Tate Modern in London in 2002.6 This monumental piece embodies the new geometry that has come into being through computerized visualization programs, which produce flowing lines and curved, metamorphic spaces, pulling a cube into a parabola, or a cone into a hyperbola. In this respect, it is appropriate to quote Goethe, whose aesthetics were steeped in new scientific approaches: ‘The beautiful is a manifestation of natural laws that otherwise had remained hidden forever’.7 This kind of metamorphosis alters bodies from without: it describes a physical and external change in space–time. Second, new metaphorical meanings are expressed: metamorphoses body forth inner nature, make visible an idea of the subject. This derives closely from one of the functions of stories in Ovid’s founding poem, in which the victims frequently stand condemned to bear the character of their faults, or their fates, in their outer form. This second, metaphorical function of visual metamorphosis finds full, passionate expression in the imagery of such artists as Louise Bourgeois (see Fig. 12.3) and Kiki Smith (see Fig. 12.1).8 This mode corresponds to the scholastic tradition of tropological exegesis, for the metamorphosis bodies forth the meaning latent beneath the trope: for example, the very first story in Ovid’s Metamorphoses describes the punishment of Lycaon, a king who murders a prisoner and serves him up for dinner to test the insight of Zeus, supreme ruler of the gods. For this sacrilege, Zeus turns Lycaon into a werewolf, the first werewolf, forever condemned to rampage and devour, and so make plain to all the monstrosity of his true nature.9 This presents an internal, semantic transformation as well as an outward transmogrification of identity. Metamorphosis also produces meanings at an ethical level – this third aspect is closely bound up with the earlier metaphorical use, as in the case of Lycaon. But it is more directly philosophical. Physical transformations can supply a pejorative demeaning identity, but they can also more happily and optimistically transvalue their subjects, so that a monster or a beast, changed by the powers of metamorphosis, acquires another character, not simply by rising in a hierarchy, but also by drawing new perceptions towards his or

Figure 12.1 Kiki Smith, Harpie, 2002. The shunned, foul monster of Greek myth is transformed by the artist into a self-portrait, one of several works that transvalue inherited female symbols. [Reproduced by kind permission of the artist and Pace Wildenstein, New York]

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her condition. Later in this chapter, I shall look at the transformed beasts and monsters of Louise Bourgeois, and then bring in recent work with poisonous jellyfish by the Irish artist, Dorothy Cross. Such art works have a political, feminist, anti-imperialist thrust, transvaluing formerly despised and rejected low life forms, such as insects, hybrids and corpses – abject, informe, monstrous functions, processes, shapes and creatures. There is an allegorical tendency to this, but in artists’ hands, it can avoid the ponderous didacticism of allegory. Fourth (and this is most resonant of all), metamorphosis remodels ideas of the self psychologically – with regard to those axioms invoked above: mind–body unity and integrity of memory, embodiment, and consistency over time. Many artists – for example, Tony Oursler, Chris Bucklow and Pierre Huyghe – are unsettling these foundational principles of personal identity by performing metamorphoses on themselves and their subjects.10 These are not animal changes of shape, or sci-fi alien mutations, or even visions of monsters; instead they recast concepts of consciousness itself, presenting it as mutable, apt for occupation, zombified, split, multiple, disunited and free-floating. Metamorphic imagery answers to disjunctions between experience and fantasy, it renders phantoms in the mind’s eye. In many ways, the consciousness of the newly-conceived personal subject operates as an extension of contemporary media, and of the potential and virtual universes these have opened. In other words, the faculties of this new kind of protagonist – fantasy, memory, sensory responses and emotions – exist in symbiosis with televisual communications, the laws that organize them and the loops and warps in the manifold planes and volumes of space-time they have brought into play. Here the meanings fall into the fourth of the exegetical methods applied to texts in humanist thought: the anagogical mode, which seeks out the mystical significance. A form of psychological techno-mysticism runs a live current through much contemporary art.11 Slavoj Žižek quotes the writer Tom Wolfe’s quip (‘Sorry, but your soul has just died’) in an essay discussing the new brain sciences and the idea ‘that the biogenetic threat is a much more radical version of “the end of history”, one that has the potential to render the free autonomous subject of liberal democracy obsolete’.12 Žižek goes on to ponder the issues raised by biogenetic (and more generally cognitivist-evolutionary) reductionism and make suggestions as to how these could be challenged. He produces as an example of the danger the case of the rat with a chip embedded in its brain, which made it possible to direct it by remote control. ‘[W]hat was new in the case of the rat,’ writes Žižek, ‘[w]as that, for the first time the “will” of a living agent, its “spontaneous” decisions about its movements, were taken over by an external agency’. In the end, Žižek concludes a little shakily in favour of confronting this threat of unselfing the self through scientific methods: ‘Reducing my being to the genome forces me to traverse the phantasmal

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stuff of which my ego is made, and only in this way can my subjectivity properly emerge.’13 Artists and writers have been struggling with this context of changing identities for some time, in response to themes of popular culture and the potential of new media, its power to take possession of users’ minds, and its virtual creation of people and histories. Sarah Kember in Virtual Anxiety diagnoses how the fear of technological invasion and contamination excites conflicting stratagems: ‘The subject responds defensively with fantasies of boundary reinforcement, or alternatively disembodiment.’14 In The Prisoner of Azkaban, Harry Potter finds Voldemort leaking into his mind, breaking through his defences, like a recovered traumatic memory. The metaphor also conveys the suspected actions of a smart bomb, a stealth plane or a chemical weapon. None of these four different streams of meaning in metamorphosis today remains separate or distinct, of course: they ooze and flow into one another; they meet and morph in contact and become transformed into rich symbols, often tending to fast-moving allegory.

Manifold geometries: Anish Kapoor The dramatic, vast, raked hangar-like entrance to Herzog & de Meuron’s interior of the Tate Modern in London has inspired dramatic and eloquent installations in the Turbine Hall, the first in the series being a monumental trio of towers by Louise Bourgeois. The sculptor Anish Kapoor chose to emphasize the plunging length and extent of the space, not its height; he spanned it entirely with his Marsyas, stretched on three rings and suspended from cables, rather in the way that Santiago Calatrava hung his lovely bridge on a minimal structure over the river Guadalquivir in Seville (1992–1997).15 The sculptor’s narrative title (unusual in his work) recalls Titian’s great late work, The Flaying of Marsyas (1575–1576),16 itself a re-visioning of one of Ovid’s most ferocious tales of divine vengeance in the Metamorphoses. The satyr’s fate resonates with Kapoor’s long-time formal experiments in sculpture, and his explorations of the ancient connections between art, sacrifice, and human aspiration. Ovid tells the story of Marsyas, the satyr whom Apollo skinned alive, in the midst of a sequence of divine revenge killings; these follow one upon the other at a speed and pitch of intensity that make the reader gasp and shrink and grieve and cry out in protest. Satyrs are a kind of Arcadian wild thing, and like centaurs have their own skills, wisdom and powers. But they are always distinguished from the human order: they figure as uncivilized creatures of instinct and appetite who dance at drunken parties and peep at girls who have passed out. Something of this clash, between one kind of order and another, may reverberate beneath the story of Apollo’s revenge on Marsyas. As Ovid tells the story, Marsyas picks up a pair of pipes made from bones and begins to play them so well that he attracts the admiration of

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Figure 12.2 Anish Kapoor, Marsyas, 2002, PVC and Steel, Inst: Tate Modern, 2002– 2003, Photo: John Riddy, London. Courtesy: Tate, London. Installed in the Turbine Hall in Tate Modern, the sculptor’s biomorphic, blood red colossus took its name from the flayed satyr whom Titian turned into a symbol of the artist and his striving. [Reproduced by kind permission of the artist]


everyone who hears him. It is almost always fatal to draw attention in myth (nobody is more jealous than a god or goddess), and when Apollo hears of Marsyas’s growing fame, he challenges him to a contest. Midas, he of the golden touch (from another tale), is drafted in as judge, and he declares the satyr to be the better musician. Whereupon, a furious Apollo turns his lyre upside down and plays it as deftly as before, then defies Marsyas to do likewise with his pipes. When Marsyas fails to do this, Apollo strings him up – also upside down – on a pine tree and has him skinned alive. ‘Don’t rip me away from myself!’ cries out the poor victim, and in this becomes a resonant figure of the paradoxical irreducibility of the self in extremis.17 Marsyas in his torment is butchered, reduced to meat on a hook, to the non-individualized raw flesh of form-before-form. Mary Jacobus, in a most sensitive essay about the British psychoanalyst, Marion Milner, has explored her thoughts about the psychic envelope of the self, of which skin is the physical emblem.18 Stripping a body of skin thus exposes interiority so violently as to annihilate it. For Marsyas, time is being run backwards: hanged, he turns back into a placental lump of origin, as the integument that holds his person – and his sexuality – is stripped from him. Marsyas in agony also gives voice, in some ghastly mimicry of Apollo’s lyre. So Ovid first sketches out one transformation, the satyr into a raw, bleeding, screaming carcass, before closing with the reprieve of Marsyas’ natural metamorphosis into a river, fed by the tears of his mourners. Marsyas was a frequent subject of classical art: the satyr who made music from a pair of bones embodied the possibility of human expression, of instinct, vigour, appetite changed wonderfully into song, into art. (The skin was exhibited, Herodotus reports, within historical memory: almost a vera icon, or holy shroud of Turin.) The flaying cruelly represents an exchange of inner and outer: the écorché paradoxically shows forth the generic human body organs at the same time as symbolizing interiority unclothed, nuda veritas. Michelangelo paid tribute to Marsyas’s potent ancestral ghost in his Last Judgement through the figure of St Bartholomew holding his flayed skin, on which Michelangelo depicted his own features, stretched and distorted anamorphically in the folds of this fabric of flesh. There is a comment on the illusion of art here too: painting flattens figures onto a plane, as flaying stretches the wrapped integument of a body onto a surface. Frank Stella comments that Titian ‘reveals the blood-filled sinew and bone of pictorial technique, showing us how difficult it is for the artist to nurture and manipulate the body of his creation without mutilating it’.19 Skin focuses Kapoor’s imagination as a sculptor: his work continues to explore obsessively the translation of forms from plane to volume, from line to surface, the tension between contour and space, and the boundary of inner and outer bodies. He allows the intrinsic heft of the materials to reveal the interdependency of bulk and membrane, and delights in the complexity of light’s movements, giving play to reflection and refraction

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on surfaces until the sculptures themselves become etherealized and almost vanish from view. The myth of Marsyas is just one of the ways into the mysteries that Kapoor plumbs with regard to this most polymorphous of the body’s organs. He has said, ‘There’s a kind of implied unreality about skin which I think is wonderful.’20 Skin, unlike the eye or the tongue, resists visualization: it constitutes a boundary in itself, but, existing only in extension, eludes delineation. The theme also engages with the meditations on meat of several artists: Kapoor has invoked Soutine’s carcasses in association with his Marsyas. Soutine was himself responding to both Rembrandt and to Rubens; in this tradition of heroic painting, massive expanses of living creatures, emblazoned in death, force a confrontation with the very limits on the humanity of humans. Kapoor aligns himself increasingly with this painterly lineage: he has called one of his shows simply ‘Painting’.21 Meat offers a metaphor for degree zero of survival, just as cannibalism appears whenever savagery or barbarians are at issue, while painted (or sculpted) meat performs a metamorphosis in itself of rawness into something other, changed by the act of imitation. Anyone who looks at Titian’s painting feels a terrible and eerie disquiet stirred by the lack of visible agony in this scene of torture. The artist clusters the cast of characters very closely together, and yet depicts no mutual interaction or even engaged eye lines; the paint strokes are scumbled, famously feathery, and loose and tender; as the flesh of Marsyas is exposed, the satyr does not show agony, and Apollo looks on seraphically, while another angelic being plays a viol. It is possible that Titian’s picture reconsiders the economy of Christian sacrifice (Christ’s crucifixion) which ransoms human iniquity through atrocious and extreme suffering unto death, and instead affirms a pagan, Ovidian vision of continual organic transformation, in which death cannot take place: his Marsyas escapes suffering because, as the poet writes, the soul lives on and nothing dies. This would reverberate with Kapoor’s inspiration from Indian aesthetics, drawing on Sanskrit myths of cyclical return and the eternity of forms. His work invokes for me – though he disclaims this – a metaphysic of svayamatrnna or ‘self-perforates’, connected to sacred ring-stones through which the breath of heaven flows. Coomaraswamy, the great aesthetic philosopher, whom Kapoor reads, has written about this mystical idea of ‘doors in the sky’. Votaries were passed through them in rituals of blessing and initiation.22 The three vast annular mouths of Kapoor’s Marsyas (2002), bonded to steel rings, indeed open funnels heavenwards, like one of John Martin’s visionary vortices. Many other sculptures pierce cavities in stone, carve shapes in the void, and invite a fall deep into matter. Echoing classical thinking on the sublime, Kapoor also declares that he wants to ‘turn the world inside out and upside down’.23 ‘Where the sublime is present,’ wrote Longinus, ‘... the whole universe is turned upside down and torn apart.’24

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Terror of a kind stirs when you find yourself plummeting into the depths of a mirror piece by Kapoor, or become disoriented by the play of reflections and detached from familiar moorings; the sheer scale of his works belittles you, changing the sense of your own corporeality. The contours of each observer’s body may be undone: a kind of pleasurable dissolution of the container, or perhaps a kind of flaying. When encountering the work, this sensation of terror does not call to mind Edmund Burke’s ‘incomprehensible darkness’ – a horrific and engulfing chaos – but the vast and unknowable made beautiful by form, an aesthetic principle that coheres with the Kantian sublime, turning away from the broken and horrifying body of chaos and meaninglessness into a pacific order where the hole is rendered whole and the void is dispelled, to be transformed into plenitude. Looking at Marsyas at Tate Modern was an experience that was both amplifying and perforating for the viewer, making one aware of human unimportance and the grandeur of the world, while at the same time drawing up the viewer to soar and resound with it. In the act of identifying contemplation, the viewers could feel thought falling into the sculpture’s spaces, experience their own bodies peeled away as they touched yielding here and resisting there, and the edges of their consciousness moved through physical laws made visible by Kapoor. Thomas McEvilley has savaged what he calls the ‘tamed sublime’ in contemporary art, yet it still seems to me that the abstract containment of violence, as in Kapoor’s Marsyas and other pieces, performs a valuable move within the aesthetic of the sublime; it does not ‘tame’ it or conceal its darkness from view, but offers it up to enrapturing metamorphosis.25 Kapoor has ‘forever wanted’, as he has memorably declared, ‘to turn the red of earth and body into sky’ – and this most eloquent and inspired phrase touches the core of his achievement. The visceral vibrations of Kapoor’s aesthetic strike resonances with processes of emergence, with the enfleshment of all bodies, and above all with the maternal body as the vessel in which all bodies are formed, and from which they make their entrance, often upside down, bloody and howling. His alembic-like sculptures, highly satisfying swelling receptacles with narrow necks, closely resemble the alchemical flasks in which the Philosophical Child gestates. The deep, branching red trumpet cones of Marsyas, asymmetrically lifting from a lower, central sphincter, open as a gullet and as whorled ears, but they also echo the arrangement of the birth canal and the fallopian tubes (this association arises even more strongly in Kapoor’s working drawings). Story translates into geometry: in Marsyas, the satyr who embodies in classical myth the relation between art and nature metamorphoses and makes visible the fundamental geometric law that straight lines threaded on a warp will form curves in space. This is what happens when ‘surface bends into structure’, as the engineer Cecil Balmond wrote about the project.26

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He continues, ‘The guessing game is between structure and metaphor.’27 Through the vast and passionate web of crimson skin, the skied body of Marsyas reveals to the viewer the invisible fabric of the world, the very impress of the impalpable forces that shape phenomena, vibrate and pulse in the air, fold and stratify mountains, stellate snowflakes, and cause waves to break in scalloped rills.

Dream hearths: Louise Bourgeois Marsyas the satyr, defaced and destroyed, rises up through Ovid’s lines, and the works of art they have inspired are transfigured into an abiding and transcendent spirit of art itself. With the story of Arachne, Ovid focuses on a spider as another metamorphosis of human artistry born in opposition to the vengeful and protean energies of the gods. He tells her story in the same book as the Marsyas episode, and she also represents, even more directly than Marsyas, a figure of the artist. Her skills also pit her against the gods and bring down divine fury on her head, but in her case her transformation conforms to the very nature of her art, as she is turned into a spider, destined to spin and weave perpetually. The transformations Ovid narrates frequently explain aspects of natural phenomena: these are just-so stories, as when the raven’s feathers turn from white to black, or the peacock’s eyes appear in its plumage. But within this complex of aetiology and retribution, another important principle patterning Ovid’s poem depends on metaphor: the metamorphoses develop according to common linguistic bonds, tied by verbal association, even by punning. The story of Arachne, for example, seems to offer an answer to the question, how did the spider come to spin? It develops from the interwoven metaphors of spinning and weaving in relation to telling stories, to women’s work and the constraints on their activities; indeed, it follows the thread that leads from the narrative text woven by someone like Ovid himself to the image of the spider, actively spinning silk out of her body to make her web. The episode in Metamorphoses unfolds the story with the visual vividness that makes Ovid read so cinematically: the goddess Minerva, patron of the loom, hears of the consummate skill of a young woman from Lydia called Arachne, who boasts that her weaving surpasses Minerva’s. So the goddess approaches her as she works, in the shape of an old woman, ‘panting and leaning on a stick’, and warns her to show some humility and gratitude. But Arachne ‘reared like a cobra, scowling’28 and taunts the crone, who reveals herself to be none another than Minerva, and then challenges the mortal to a competition. During the weaving contest that follows, Minerva makes a tapestry to warn the girl: she fills it with stories of the feats of gods and goddesses. She makes her own self-portrait in the founding contest for the patronage of Athens, between herself and Poseidon, god of the sea. He strikes the rock of the Acropolis and brings forth a spring; she strikes it with


her spear and the olive tree springs up: she is declared the victor, and Athens is given to her care. On the edges, Ovid tells us, Minerva tells the cautionary tales of mortals who have presumed against the gods and come to grief, punished by degrading metamorphoses – into stone, or animal form. With a final, bitterly ironic flourish, Minerva encloses the whole in a border of olive branches – her own emblem, betokening peace. Arachne pays no attention – either to the warning, or to the goddess’s overtures. For her own tapestry, she treats the crimes of the gods – and principally Jove’s and Neptune’s pursuit and rape of women: Europa, carried off by the bull, and many, many others – Leda, Danaë and so on. Arachne uses her dazzling fingers to portray the gods’ malignant uses of shape-shifting – which are distinguished from permanent metamorphoses of nature (woman to rock, youth to flower, nymph to spring), as well as from the transformational processes of art itself, which bring figments to life through thread and dye and stitch. In Ovid’s poem, Arachne, stubbornly defiant, does indeed surpass the goddess in the impact of the tapestries she embroiders. The figures appear cinematically vivid in Arachne’s web: ‘the girl appeared to be looking back to the shore behind her, / calling out to the friends she was leaving ... .’29 Perhaps enraged at being eclipsed, perhaps angry at the mortal’s continuing arrogance, Minerva beats up Arachne, hitting her with ‘her shuttle of hard Cytorian boxwood’ – a precise designation which makes it sound especially hard. As a result of this assault, Arachne hangs herself from a beam in her house, and Minerva then sprinkles her with a bane of Hecate until the girl shrinks to become a spider. Ovid writes that the goddess is moved by pity to preserve Arachne’s life in this form: he often likes his metamorphoses to offer benign explanations for the wonderful variety of natural phenomena, but this comment might belong in his deep store of irony.30 As early as the fifteenth century, the humanist and poet Christine de Pizan found in Arachne a beckoning figure of female genius: ‘[she] had a marvellously subtle mind. Thanks to all her reflections, she was the first to invent the art of dyeing woollens in various colours and of weaving art works into cloth, like a painter’.31 Since then, the themes of female knowledge in conflict with confinement, of female art and its heroic, exemplary contents, have spiralled out in long, shining threads from classical stories of female weaving: writers as different as the radical feminist Mary Daly and the novelist A. S. Byatt have claimed Arachne as the pre-eminent figure of women’s work. This tale’s progeny operate a profound metamorphosis on the metaphorical range of meanings that spiders traditionally express; spiders are generally consigned, in the language of the imaginary, among low, abhorrent insects that creep and bustle, as well as among poisonous and vicious creatures in general. The spider, like the snake or the octopus, has so many unique properties that it – she – is a mythopoeic being in itself – provoking shivers and terror in response, and a vast repertory of horror stories.

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The French philosopher, Surrealist and natural scientist Roger Caillois called certain phenomena foyers de songe (dream hearths) – intrinsically incubating fantasies. Tentacular, buggy, creepy-crawly, primordial things, such as squid and spiders, crabs and jellyfish, belong for him in an instinctive, universal symbolic lexicon across time and culture, which he terms ‘la logique de l’imaginaire’: ‘I am convinced,’ he wrote, ‘that a different bold step ... would lead to discover the grid of basic analogies and hidden connections which constitute the logic of the imaginary.’32 With Caillois’ ‘logic of the imaginary’ in mind, I see creepy-crawlies, slithering and scuttling things, insects that hatch and lurk, predators and metamorphosing, emerging forms as belonging in a section of the grid where responses of fear are kindled. The reproductive process of hatching from an egg appears to be especially charged with this ambiguous fascination and generates from the start a double valence: it implies the sudden emergence of a new being and this moves in contrary motion, airborne (bird) or earthbound (reptile) or ambiguous (amphibian), between winged creatures whose habitat encompasses skyward, those condemned like the serpent to crawl on their bellies – snakes, lizards and other oviparous reptilian and amphibian creatures required for the witch’s cauldron. In an essay La Pieuvre (‘The Octopus’), written in l973, Caillois produces a passionate, lyrical manifesto that ‘contrary to appearances, fantasy will have done nothing but obey (truth), if I am right to claim that the imagination necessarily figures as one of the possible extensions of nature’. He then develops sustained, elaborate, Heraclitean metaphors about natural flux and crystallization before affirming, ‘there is continuity between matter and imagination’.33 This continuity illuminates the power of such symbols in the work of Louise Bourgeois, who has adopted the spider as an alter ego with multiple associations (see illustration 12.3). She draws on the biological life-cycle of the insect, its spinning and weaving methods of trapping its prey, its remarkable capacities and character, as well as the mythological stories it has inspired.34 She has given the title Lair to sculptures that would not otherwise evoke animal haunts, but rather human pyramids and tombs.35 Her own personal memories, fantasies, and desires have also enriched this web of myth: as a child, she helped her mother, who worked restoring tapestries near Paris for the Gobelins factory, and so needlework connects this artist to a personal past as well as to a figure in the repertory of female symbols. Her mother came from a line of tapestry merchants and menders, and pioneered a method of restoring fragile Aubusson and Gobelins fragments. Many of these had been mutilated deliberately, the genitals of putti scissored from the web, and her mother was employed to restore these lacunae. Bourgeois’ spiders are often at work on repair, on weaving and patching fragments of cloth and even old dresses that belonged to the artist; these relics evoke past comfort and luxury, and the mother spider conserves them in her web. She

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Figure 12.3 Louise Bourgeois, Maman, 1999. One of several variations the artist has created inspired by the symbol of the female spider, both maker and destroyer, here installed on the plaza outside the Guggenheim Museum, Bilbao. [Photograph: Marina Warner]

shifts the Arachne metaphor of human creativity towards maternity, for several of these sculptures of spiders, such as the colossal piece on the terrace outside the Guggenheim Museum, Bilbao, are even called Maman.36 ‘What is a drawing?’ she has asked, and then, answering herself, written, ‘It is a secretion, like a thread in a spider’s web ... What is a drawing? It is a route ... [a ‘chemin parcours’]. It is knitting, a spiral, a spider web and other significant organisations of space’.37 Bourgeois also told the critic, Robert Storr, ‘ “The female spider” has a bad reputation – a stinger, a killer. I rehabilitate her. If I have to rehabilitate her it is because I feel criticized.’38 The sculptor’s way with symbols is not formulaic, and her private mesh of memories and symbols casts the spider as a mother: high up, between the spider’s legs, in a mesh basket under her swollen body, glass vessels stand in for her eggs. Glass vessels recur in Bourgeois’ oeuvre as a symbol of herself as a little girl, while other hard, burgeoning and fragile bulbs – of marble, stuffed cloth, cast latex or carved wood – evoke with bizarre sensuality the soft bulges of female flesh. This huge spider is no simple redemptive avatar of Arachne, celebrating neglected female skills of weaving: she is a selfportrait of the artist as a hoarder and a predator, who attracts loathing and repulsion because her love can also be lethal. In l990, she said, ‘Working oscillates from extreme aggression to repair and a need for pardoning’, and she has often spoken of the ambivalence at the heart of her enterprise, her fantasies of murder as well as fierce motherlove: ‘If I’m in a positive mood I’m interested in joining. If I’m in a negative

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mood I will cut things.’39 The needle has largely replaced the knife these days as the artist’s preferred tool. Where she once gouged stone, she now sutures with big, overlapping stitches. The philosopher, Adriana Cavarero, has commented on the creativity of this kind of art, work or act, particularly in relation to women’s identity as embodied by Penelope.40 Louise Bourgeois’ processes similarly do the work of winding the psyche back on to the sensory plane, weaving and knotting its colours and figures, its memories and stories, into visible form, to allow us to become party to her remembered experiences, her hidden thoughts. Louise Bourgeois has twined her personal history into a symbolic language of the body that draws on literature and classical iconography to an unusual extent for a contemporary artist; but her use of stories and motifs is never simply allusive. She has a rare ability to make a symbol odd and fresh and unprecedented. Her sculpture itself enacts metamorphoses of its elements to create original forms with strange subtleties of pleasure and apprehension. She has laid claim to the phallus as her very own plaything, with a kind of witty defiance unmatched by other less intrepid spirits: Germinal (l967) arranged a number of sprouting forms on a dish.41 Burgeoning, swelling, emergent forms proclaim metamorphic vitality in its sexual aspect, but cross borders of entities or individuals to cast potency as belonging to female energy, a virtual and latent dynamism of the flesh. Taken over its remarkable duration – over half a century – it performs a vigorous, even savage act of restoration and renovation on the tired humanist language of the body, not in the interest of refiguring the visible world, but to reproduce her inner vision, to render material her internal processes of suffering and knowledge and growth.

Elective affinities: Dorothy Cross Bourgeois’ art transvalues the spider: Maman counters every arachnophobe with a disturbing, even weird statement about nurture and courage and power. A comparable act of recovery, making abhorrent or monstrous creatures her own, recurs in the work of Dorothy Cross, an Irish artist with a Roman Catholic background. She has claimed a tender, fleshly creatureliness as made in her image, first by creating several sculptures incorporating cow hides, udders and teats, thus performing through her art metamorphoses of an ethical kind in order to oppose conventional values. The works fashion a new beauty, a novel moral aesthetic, from the rubble of Christian taxonomies of good and evil, pure and impure. Cross has focused especially on dethroning the remote sense of sight in favour of eliciting responses of touch, smell, and animal identification. Earlier sculptures using cowhides, their udders in evidence, aroused strong, strange, shivery-pleasurable, deep and old memories of contact, smell and taste as they confronted the animal in the human.42


For the complex project Medusae (2001–3), Cross chose to work with another animal, one of the strangest and most ancient in nature, the jellyfish, a creature that provokes horror and fear at the thought of contact. While jellyfish are ‘overwhelmingly beautiful’, she says, they are also ‘terribly alien’, with their viscous, trailing, slimy shapelessness, their sometimes ferocious sting, their seemingly monstrous lack of brain or faculties or eyes or face. Smogairle róin is the Irish word for a jellyfish and translates as ‘spit of the seal’. Jellyfish were called ‘medusae’ in Latin by Linnaeus, after one of the three Gorgons, Medusa, who was afflicted with snakes for hair and given the baneful power of turning to stone all who looked at her. In the Renaissance, Medusa’s severed head symbolized the defeat of unruly, discordant rebellion: political unrest taking the form of a female monster. Caravaggio’s Medusa, with the blood splashing up from her neck, and screaming in agony as if at the very moment of death, is painted on a shield, where she acts as a defensive emblem, like the demonic guardian of a threshold, repelling anyone who approaches the warrior wearing this dramatic, lifelike piece of armour. But the Medusa’s repugnance has above all strong sexual associations: Sigmund Freud famously interpreted Medusa’s petrifying powers as phallic, and placed her image at the centre of his castration theory. Dorothy Cross’s Medusae returns to this symbol to refashion and transvalue an animal body and its processes, as it journeys through the cycle from spawning to decay. The word istoria in Greek means inquiry, and Dorothy Cross, collaborating with her brother Tom Cross, a biologist, embarked on a passionate inquiry into the very nature of these mysterious genus, especially the species Chironex fleckeri, the deadliest jellyfish of all, responsible for more deaths in Australia than sharks or crocodiles. Both brother and sister are excellent swimmers, and Tom coached Dorothy when she swam in the Ireland team, so together they were able to experiment at close quarters with their subjects. In ‘Jellyfish Lake’, a film she made of herself swimming in Palau, Micronesia, where a unique species exists, she appears to fuse with the marine creatures, her long hair floating out on the currents like the trailing tendrils of the Aurelia aurita and Mastigias winking and bobbing in galaxies around her body. In many ways, she performs a physical metamorphosis herself, becoming an aquatic creature, a mermaid, a selkie, a fish. But the contact Dorothy and Tom made with their subject goes far deeper than the mermaid-like vision of her streaming through galactic shoals of gently pulsing, frilled jellyfish. Moving so gracefully, unharmed, through their glinting, winking bells and fronds, she brings about one of those transformations of sensibility: the creature still belongs, according to that ‘logic of the imaginary’, to the category of disturbing things, but she has unsettled our response and changed the story. Medusae tackles the hierarchy of inherited values, about beauty, about animals, about pleasure and disgust. Dorothy Cross is insisting in this work on her own creatureliness as a woman and a human being. She refuses

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Figure 12.4 From Dorothy Cross, Medusae, 2001–2003, a complex multi-media work that explores the jellyfish, a species whose zoological names refer back to the Greek repertory of dangerous enemies. [Reproduced by kind permission of the artist]

to shudder at any living thing, and instead recovers an aesthetic of wonder before the assumed vile body of the jellyfish. In another, yet more profound way, the communion of medusae, artist and scientist strikes at conventional aesthetics, especially sculptural. Jellyfish are loose, fluid, invertebrate, informe, even ‘snot-like’ (Dorothy’s words); these carnally rebarbative phenomena are, paradoxically, nearly disincarnate: 98 per cent water, only 2 per cent animal, they shrink in size all over rather than lose weight when they starve, or fail to thrive. They have no being outside their element, and so exist in harmony with the sea, almost emanations of its currents and eddies. They embody contingency and interdependence, announcing the reciprocity of our relations as living creatures with the stuff in which we survive. The fringes of the jellyfish cannot be reconstructed outside the sea; the animals are so insubstantial that a shadow on the bottom is the strongest index they are there. All this lightness makes them a sculptor’s paradox: sculpture here has done with the column and the skeleton, the scaffold and the rock. They are consubstantial with water, and in this transparency and elusiveness, medusae represent,


for both Dorothy and Tom Cross, the enigma that still surrounds them – in the scant records of scientific inquiry; in their troubled and fragmentary appearances in art’s stories. Their two different approaches meet as they both test the unknowability of the jellyfish and yield before its resilient strangeness. Medusae does not unweave the rainbow in this respect, as Keats famously complained that Newton had done, but effectively realigns our senses so we can share in the artist’s knowledge, and can experience with our own senses the re-enchantment of these dreaded creatures.

Conclusion: cybermystics and the multiple self Finally, a few closing words on the psychological import of the contemporary uses of metamorphosis: artists also meditate on its implications with regard to personal identity. Soul migration from one body to another constitutes one of the fundamental principles of classical metamorphosis: not external transmogrification but body-hopping, replicant usurpation, Doppelgängers. The theme has flourished in literature since Romantic fables of lost and haunted identities. It is now taking a different form, chiefly under the impact of the mass media, and preoccupying artists as well as writers. Magic psychology which involves soul-wandering and metamorphoses has been ravelled up together with scientific discoveries, especially through mass communications, since the nineteenth century, and the revelation that there was more in the empty air than light and dark, that harmonic maps hummed beyond the reach of human senses, and the universe was vibrating with imperceptible forces. Both radio and photography unsettled the unity of body and self, and seemed to move an individual through time and space. Mechanical communications technologies, such as Morse code and telegraphic signalling by means of taps and rapping, began to render possible the broadcasting of the human voice over the airwaves and its recording for the gramophone, and they brought the acoustic presence of a person, living but impalpable, into everyday experience. As in photography, someone could be there, but not there. The cinema has been implicated in this growth of magic psychology from its beginnings, and many narrative stratagems developed in film have increased the ever more popular skewing of the real and the fictive, the warping of imaginary into actual, and vice versa. Invented memories correspond to the fabricated images of the movies; the disappearances and reappearances of characters, the ghosts incarnate, flying characters, and beings who can teleport from one place to another, who can communicate telepathically by sheer mental power, achieve realization on the big screen and the home monitor. They belong, as it were quite naturally, to the lexicon of cinema: Star Trek, Buffy the Vampire Slayer and The X-Files. Such eerie powers of communication are interwoven with disembodied identities and metamorphic potential: you can move your thoughts out of your body

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into another, or another can take up occupancy inside yours. The critic Ato Quayson has suggested replacing the classical and pagan principle of metamorphosis with a more contemporary term: volatile proximity.43 Through volatile proximity, the ghost of Beloved, for example, in Toni Morrison’s novel of the same name, inhabits her mother’s house, howls to her through the air, and throws the furniture about; similarly, and more threateningly, individuals can absorb transmitted feelings and perceptions from outside their own personal borders, which then effect changes to their core, and mould their identities. These exchanges between outside and inside, between time past and time present – volatile proximities, metamorphic compression and expansion – are the preoccupation of many artists, including Susan Hiller, Pierre Huyghe, Chris Bucklow and Tony Oursler. Oursler’s earlier work with dummies and automata realizes the point where spooks and spectres coincide with the phantoms of film, LEDS (lightemitting diodes) and other digital means. He displaces the artist as observer, and beams himself up into the condition of the earth-angels, inhabiting the elsewhere of virtual reality systems. In 2000, he created an outdoor urban phantasmagoria, semi-séance, semi-son et lumière, called ‘The Influence Machine’.44 At twilight, he projected, on to trembling foliage and interlaced branches, and high up on to the surrounding buildings of an urban park/ garden (Soho Square in London), vast and looming close-ups of out-of-body messengers, men and women with stories to tell of wanderings in other worlds. This son et lumière spectacle, projecting looming spectres on to the trees and buildings and accompanied by rappings as in séances, dramatized the psychic as well as the psychotic fallout from this alliance; this work embodied, in its insubstantial, phantasmagoria-like way, a highly symptomatic stage in the present anxiety about the human image and its relation to ideas of person. ‘The Influence Machine’ departed from conventional orthodoxy about identity, mind–body unity, and space–time confines. It dramatized spirit visions and wandering: Oursler also drew on existing accounts of messages transmitted from other worlds, and projected on one wall of the square a huge fist rapping, as in the first Spiritualist séances in the l840s in Rochester, when the Fox sisters reported ghosts knocking for admittance in a kind of performance of Morse code. Oursler projected his wraiths and mediums on to the trees and even on to smoke, so that they dissolved and expanded, loomed and shrank, vaporized and materialized, in a sequence of hypnotic anamorphoses. The story that Oursler’s phantasmagoria tells concerns the end of Romantic individuality. He investigates selves unselved, personhood decentred, evacuated and occupied, haunted and unhoused; he tracks cellular memories, multiplied and scattered, rampant and contradictorily on the loose inside the mind and body of a person; and he presents this story as generic in our time: ‘The Influence Machine’ was no less than a mise-en-scène of contemporary existence, or, in his words, a psycho-landscape.


The concept of metamorphosis contains multitudes. I have tried to indicate some of its aspects in relation to contemporary artists and their engagement with the conditions of present day experience. Ovid’s stories and their Greek forebears continue to inspire thoughtful, fierce, and experimental images, as they did for the artists of the Renaissance. Such metamorphic envisioning, with its fantastic and prodigious suspension of apparent and apprehensible realities, once described the plenitude and gorgeous diversity of natural mutation and change. Now it seems that metamorphosis reflects the shifting character of knowledge and attitudes to the human, of theories of fragmented selves, and models of unstable consciousness.45 The natural beauty and the energy of metamorphosis, celebrated in Ovid’s Pythagorean theory of eternal rebirth, and later in Renaissance paganism, have found new interpreters among artists who probe their own plural identities, frequently fusing with animals and transvaluing the ascribed degradation. But explorations of identity also reflect on technological symbioses of humans and machines, and disclose a growing unease with the menace of external and mutable personae, beyond bidding or control, taking possession of that inner self that Ovid thought of as the migratory but irreducible spirit.

Notes This essay has been adapted from the lecture delivered at Durham University on 14 November 2005. It draws on material included in the Carpenter Lecture, Institute of the Visual Arts, Harvard University, November 2003; discussions of the individual artists are developed more fully elsewhere, as cited in the notes below. 1. Plato, The Republic, 617e, ed. and trans. Allan Bloom, revd edn (New York, 1991), 620a–d, pp. 302–3, p. 300. 2. Ovid, Metamorphoses, Book XV, lines 165–8, trans. Rolfe Humphries (Bloomington, IN, 1983), p. 370. See also the Loeb edition: Ovid, Metamorphoses, trans. Frank Justus Miller, revd G. P. Goold, 2 vols (Cambridge, MA, 1916, 1977); Ovid, Metamorphoses, trans. Mary M. Innes (Harmondsworth, 1973); and trans. David Raeburn (London, 2003); Ted Hughes, Tales from Ovid (London, 1997). My understanding of Ovid has been greatly helped by Jonathan Bate’s fine study, Shakespeare and Ovid (Oxford, 1993); Shakespeare’s Ovid: The Metamorphoses in the Plays and Poems, ed. A. B. Taylor (Cambridge, 2000); Sarah Annes Brown, The Metamorphosis of Ovid: From Chaucer to Ted Hughes (London, 1999); and Raphael Lyne, Ovid’s Changing Worlds: English Metamorphoses, 1567–1632 (Oxford, 2001). 3. With Sarah Bakewell, I explored these ideas in an exhibition, Metamorphing: Mythology, Art, and Science, which ran at the Science Museum in London from September 2004 to February 2005. See www.wellcome.ac.uk/node77105.html for installation shots and catalogue. 4. Marina Warner, Fantastic Metamorphoses, Other Worlds: Ways of Telling the Self (Oxford, 2002), esp. ‘Introduction’, pp. 1–28. 5. Freeman Dyson, ‘Our biotech future’, New York Review of Books, 19 July 2007. 6. For installation shots, see www.tate.org.uk/modern/exhibitions/kapoor. 7. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Werke, sect. 1, no. 48 (Weimar, l897), p. 179, quoted by Sixten Ringbom, ‘Transcending the Visible: The Generation of the

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8.

9. 10.

11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18.

19. 20. 21. 22.

23. 24.

25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33.

Abstract Pioneers’, in The Spiritual in Art: Abstract Painting l890–1985, catalogue of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (New York, 1986), p. 147. For a fuller account of Kiki Smith’s work, see Marina Warner, ‘Wolf-Girl, Soulbird: The Mortal Art of Kiki Smith’, in Kiki Smith: A Gathering, exhibition catalogue, (Minneapolis, MN, 2005). Ovid, Metamorphoses, trans. David Raeburn (London, 2004), Book 1, lines 163 ff., pp. 13–17. See Marina Warner, ‘Psychic Time; or, The Metamorphoses of Narcissus’, in If This Be Not I. Christopher Bucklow (London, 2004); and ‘ “Ourself behind Ourself – concealed ...”: Ethereal whispers from the dark side’, in Tony Oursler: The Influence Machine (London and New York, 2002). See Marina Warner, Phantasmagoria: Spirit Visions, Metaphors, and Media (Oxford, 2006), esp. pp. 319–332. Slavoj Žižek, ‘Bring Me My Philips Mental Jacket’, London Review of Books, 22 (May 2003), pp. 3–5. Ibid. Sarah Kember, Virtual Anxiety: Photography, New Technologies and Subjectivity (Manchester, l998), p. 15. See Marina Warner, ‘Anish Kapoor: The Perforate Self, or Nought Is Not Nought’, Parkett (Spring 2004). http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Image:TItian_-_The_Flaying_of_Marsyas.jpg Ovid, Metamorphoses, trans. Raeburn, Book 6, lines 382–400, pp. 228–229. Mary Jacobus, ‘Inside Out: Marion Milner, Psychic Space, and the Myth of Marsyas’, Paper delivered at the conference ‘Spaces & Places’, Delphi, September 2003, kindly loaned by the author, and now published in The Poetics of Psychoanalysis: In the Wake of Klein (Oxford, 2006). Frank Stella, Working Space (Cambridge, l986), p. 100, quoted in Mary Jacobus, ‘Inside Out’. Anish Kapoor and Donna De Salvo, ‘A Conversation’, in Anish Kapoor, Marsyas, exhibition catalogue (London, 2002), p. 61. At the Lisson Gallery, London, 2003. A. K. Coomaraswamy, ‘Svayamatrnna: Ianua Coeli’, in The Door in the Sky: Coomaraswamy on Myth and Meaning, ed. Rama P. Coomaraswamy (Princeton, NJ, l997), pp. 6–61. See Thomas McEvilley, ‘Turned Upside Down and Torn Apart’, in Sticky Sublime, ed. Bill Beckley (New York, 2001), pp. 57–83. Longinus, Peri Hypsous, in T. S. Dorsch (trans.), Classical Literary Criticism: Aristotle, On the Art of Poetry; Horace, On the Art of Poetry; Longinus, On the Sublime (Baltimore, MD, 1965), p. 111; quoted by McEvilley, ‘Turned Upside Down’, pp. 57–83. McEvilley, ‘Turned Upside Down’, pp. 57–83. Cecil Balmond, ‘Skinning the Imagination’, in Anish Kapoor, Marsyas, pp. 66–69. Balmond, ‘Skinning the Imagination’, pp. 66–69. Ted Hughes, Tales from Ovid (London, l997), p. 176. Ovid, Metamorphoses, trans. Raeburn, Book 6, lines 5–145, pp. 210–217. Ibid. Christine de Pizan, The Book of the City of Ladies, trans. Earl Jeffrey Richards (New York, 1982), p. 81. Roger Caillois, La Pieuvre: Essai sur la logique de l’imaginaire (Paris, l973), p. 230 (my translation). Ibid.

208 The Body and the Arts 34. See Marina Warner, ‘Nine Turns around the Spindle’, in Louise Bourgeois (London, 2000), pp. 18–30; also Frances Morris (ed.), Louise Bourgeois, exhibition catalogue (London, 2006); also www.tate.org.uk/modern/exhibitions/bourgeois. 35. See www.sammlung-frieder- burda.de/content_e/skulptur/bourgeois/bilder/417. shtml; and www.tate.org.uk/modern/exhibitions/bourgeois. 36. www.guggenheim-bilbao.es/ingles/exposiciones/permanente/seleccion_obras/ seleccion_obras.htm. 37. In Louise Bourgeois, Disenhos (Rio de Janeiro, l997), pp. 14–24, quoted in Paolo Herkenhoff, ‘Louise Bourgeois, Femme-Temps’, trans. Anne Ellis Ruzzante with Stephen Sartarelli, in Jerry Gorovoy and Pandora Tabatabai Asbaghi, Louise Bourgeois: Blue Days and Pink Days (Milan, l997), n. 42, no page nos. 38. Interview with Robert Storr, Parkett, 9 (l986), pp. 82–85, quoted in Louise Bourgeois, The Destruction of the Father: Collected Writings and Interviews, ed. Marie-Laure Bernadac and Hans-Ulrich Obrist (London, l999), p. 217. 39. Quoted in Christiane Meyer-Thoss, Louise Bourgeois (Zurich, l992), in Bourgeois, Destruction of the Father, p. 223. 40. Adriana Cavarero, In Spite of Plato: A Feminist Rewriting of Ancient Philosophy, trans. Serena Anderlini-D’Onofrio and Aine O’Healy (Cambridge, l995), pp. 28–29. 41. www.albany.edu/museum/wwwmuseum/crossing/artist3.htm. 42. For a fuller account, see Marina Warner, ‘Medusae: Dorothy Cross/Tom Cross’, in Experiment: Conversations in Art and Science, ed. Bergit Arends and Davina Thackara (London, 2004); and ‘Passionate Cruces’ in Dorothy Cross, exhibition catalogue, Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin, 2005. 43. Ato Quayson, ‘Fecundities of the Unexpected: Magical Realism, Narrative, and History’, Paper presented in ‘Making Waves’, a conference in honour of Gillian Beer, 4–5 July 2003, Cambridge; a version of this appears in Franco Moretti et al., (eds), Il Romanzo, vol. 2 (Turin, 2002), trans. in Franco Moretti et al., (eds), The Encyclopaedia of the Novel (Princeton, NJ, 2005) vol. 1, pp. 726–56. 44. www.artangel.org.uk/pages/past/00/00_oursler.htm 45. See Gerald M. Edelmann, ‘Building a Picture of the Brain’, Daedalus (Spring l998), pp. 37–69; Marina Warner, ‘Le Mythe et la féerie: reécriture et recuperation’, in Actes du colloque ‘Où en est-on avec la théorie littéraire?’ (Paris VII, 1999), ed. Julia Kristeva and Evelyne Grossman, Textuel, 37 (April 2000), pp. 85–97.

13 Body, Space, Time Antony Gormley

Antony Gormley offered these insights into his work at an informal lecture given at the University of Durham on 6 February 2006. I called this lecture ‘Body, Space, Time’ to connect with the hundredth anniversary of Einstein’s great equation, which encouraged us to think of time as a dimension of space, and space as a dimension of time. Modernism, the engine of the past century’s art, could be seen as having excluded the body. It was a time in which art emancipated itself from the duties of representation, of illustrating the grand narratives, of being a functional instrument in the social world. It withdrew into its own realm, meditating on its own internal conditions, emancipating itself, and in the process the artist, who became a paradigm of the free individual able to give his or her life value through making work. It is time to look again at the body. I was a pioneer in the late 1970s in thinking again about the body in sculpture, less in terms of what one might do after Rodin, or of the representation of appearance, more about the body as a place, as a zone of transformation. It is a curious thing to be in this position, because sculpture exists in silence, and here I am making a verbal argument, but the work makes its own argument. I think of sculpture as a form of physical thinking, an organic process. The work dictates to me what needs to happen. I’m an instrument serving its demands. What is the nature of sculpture? I was attracted to sculpture because it is about making things, dealing in facts, dealing with objects in space that we have somehow to share the world with. But how do sculpture and the sculptural object declare their specificity? This is a very early exercise called Full Bowl (see Figure 13.1), a nest of forty-two bowls in which every bowl has been beaten inside the previous one.1 I wish to go behind appearances, behind surfaces, and make a connection between a space that is contained within a skin, and the space that the skin, as it were, displaces. So that dark void in the centre of this work has a resonance with the space that contains 209

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Figure 13.1 FULL BOWL, 1977–1978 Lead 6 × 17 × 17 cm Photograph by Stephen White, London © Courtesy of the artist & Jay Jopling/White Cube, London.

the work, and conveys the vibration between the two. It accepts its smallness, it sits in the hand (it’s about 8 inches across), but at the same time suggests infinite extension. There is a figurative element to it, evoking the behaviour of liquids and the way that a drop of water might make a series of

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repeated concentric rings when it falls on to a still, flat surface of water, but I hope it also connects with time and sculpture’s ability to hold it: the Lessing moment. The challenge to the sculptor is to choose a moment which is the result of everything that has happened, and the seed of everything that will happen. I reject the traditional way this is interpreted as a responsibility to find the most telling moment in a known narrative, and supplant it with a space/time axis that uses the silence and stillness of sculpture positively without making it act something out. The old idea was that, through understanding the relationship of skin to muscle to bone, we could illustrate key moments in a shared mythology, but it seems to me a very bad idea to treat stone as a movie moment. So, this is the very first body work, called Mould (see Figure 13.2). You can look in through the hole at the mouth at a void, dark interior. All of these works start from a real event, they’re indexical, not symbolic, not representations, not signs. They are, in the same way that a thumb-print is, registers, traces of a lived moment. This mould, which I call a ‘corpograph’, is a

Figure 13.2 THREE WAYS: MOULD, 1981 Lead, fibreglass, plaster 60 × 98 × 50 cm Installation view, Tate Gallery, London © Courtesy of the artist & Jay Jopling/White Cube, London.

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Figure 13.3 THREE WAYS: MOULD, HOLE AND PASSAGE, 1981 Lead, fibreglass, plaster Mould: 60 × 98 × 50 cm, Hole: 62 × 123 × 80 cm, Passage: 34 × 209 × 50 cm Installation view, Tate Gallery, London © Courtesy of the artist & Jay Jopling/White Cube, London.

register of a real moment of lived time, of a particular body in a particular position. I made this work, not realizing that I was going to go on using my own body as instrument, material and tool for another twenty-five years; and I’m still doing it. The final work is in three parts and shows the primary portals between the internal space of the body and the outer world (see Figure 13.3). The second part is called Hole (see Figure 13.4). The anus is open, and again you can see the thickness of the plaster mould and into a dark interior. The third is Passage, which has a hole at the tip of the erect penis (see Figure 13.5). There’s a formal exercise here. Passage occupies a horizontal plane; the work called Hole is like a mountain, pointing up like a pyramid; and Mould is like an egg, resting on one point. If you think about this in relation to the Bernini David, there is no action here: these are bodies are at rest. But they each indicate a potentiality. They are a true register of a real event. They make an evidential fact out of the existence of a particular body in a particular position at a particular time,

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Figure 13.4 THREE WAYS: HOLE, 1981 Lead, fibreglass, plaster 62 × 123 × 80 cm Installation view, Tate Gallery, London © Courtesy of the artist & Jay Jopling/White Cube, London.

but by acknowledging their particularity, I think they declare that this is where my body once was, and by implication, your body, any body, could be. The potential of imaginative inhabitation is important to me – that the void space that lies inside the lead carapace is a space of potential. Why the lead skin? It amplifies the hermeticism of the internal space. When I am working, the action all happens around me. I’m simply trying to concentrate on maintaining a position, a feeling. If you think of the classic sculptor – male sculptor – making an idealized, sexualized female body at arm’s length out of a block of white marble, what I do is almost entirely the opposite. The material is the only bit of the material world that I consciously inhabit, being worked on from the inside, in the dark. I’m not aware of what is happening or how, or what it looks like. The resulting mould ends up as part of the second of three groups of three body-case works, Land, Sea and Air II (see Figure 13.6). Here I was thinking more about perceptual gateways: the standing piece has its eyes open, and

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Figure 13.5 THREE WAYS: PASSAGE, 1981 Lead, fibreglass, plaster 34 × 209 × 50 cm Installation view, Tate Gallery, London © Courtesy of the artist & Jay Jopling/White Cube, London.

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Figure 13.6 LAND, SEA AND AIR II, 1982 Lead, fibreglass Land (crouching) 45 × 103 × 50, Sea (standing) 191 × 50 × 32, Air (kneeling) 118 × 69 x 52 cm © Courtesy of the artist & Jay Jopling/White Cube, London.

looks out to sea; the kneeling one, called ‘Air’, has its nostrils open and faces the sky; ‘Earth’, the crouching one, has its ears open and attends to the earth. The idea here is to use the objects as instruments to connect a perception through a posture to an element. I may have photographed this on the beach, but these are instruments for thinking about the relationship of a human body to the elemental world, and it doesn’t really matter where they are placed – you could put them in a multi-storey car park and they would still work. For the first time there’s an implied matrix – with the previous work I didn’t know there were going to be three elements: with this, I knew from the beginning that there were going to be three, and there are clear horizontal divisions every seven and a quarter inches running through all three works; each is divided into two axes from the uppermost point, an objective mapping of this subjective space of the body, articulating an instrumental space.

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So in Three Ways and Land, Sea and Air II I’m making this very exclusive space that is purposefully pierced, to make an intimate architecture that can be imaginatively inhabited. But I’m also interested in using architecture itself as the second body: if life inhabits the body, the body inhabits architecture. Is it possible to substitute the second for the first term: for the body of architecture to replace the anatomical body as a repository of the imagination? I made this piece of architecture as the smallest shelter necessary for a man to inhabit: Room for the Great Australian Desert (see Figure 13.7). It is in the central Australian outback at a place not unlike the site of the first atomic bomb tests. Its coordinates are undisclosed. It’s very important to me that this is a work for the imagination, not for going to visit. However, it exists in space and in time. It’s important to me that there is no other construction between it and a completely flat 360˚ horizon. There are no eye-holes in this architecture. There are four apertures: one at the mouth, two at the ears, and one in the anal-genital region.

Figure 13.7 ROOM FOR THE GREAT AUSTRALIAN DESERT, 1989 Concrete 92 × 58 × 51 cm © Courtesy of the artist & Jay Jopling/White Cube, London.

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That work then gave birth to another Room, whose internal dimensions can enclose my body standing with the positions and dimensions of all of the apertures in precise relation to my own, so that the mouth-hole, for instance, is the width of my mouth; the ears, which are battered so that they actually angle inwards from an external dimension, are given the height of my ear; the anal and genital holes are angled at 45 degrees. It is a kind of sentry post for the future (see Figure 13.8). That work then gave rise to Allotment (see Figure 13.9), made twelve years after the first body mould. It marks a trajectory between my body and your body, and invites the viewer to bear witness to the collective body, and the condition of urban living. This was made with the collaboration of 300 individuals from Malmö in southern Sweden, each participant very carefully measured with twelve measurements. The work is divided into twelve blocks that aren’t immediately apparent. When you are in the work the pathways within it are not obvious, and you have to make your own way as through a labyrinth, and it takes time. I think you have to slow down when entering this space. At first it feels like a ghost town, but you can begin to intuit relationships. Relationships between these seemingly inert masses become important: between children, for instance – a couple are standing back to

Figure 13.8 ROOM II, 1987 Concrete 208 × 51 × 66 cm Installation view, Serpentine Gallery, London, 1987 © Courtesy of the artist & Jay Jopling/White Cube, London.


Figure 13.9 ALLOTMENT II, 1996 Reinforced concrete 300 life-size elements derived from the dimensions of local inhabitants of Malmö aged 1.5–80 years Installation view, Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead, 2003 Photograph by Colin Davison, Newcastle © Courtesy of the artist & Jay Jopling/White Cube, London.

back; between parents that are standing side by side. The intimations of family relations are confounded by the avenues and the cross-streets, which impose grid systems on to the articulation of the whole. The way the living body of the viewer and these voided personal spaces of the individual relate is critical. The avenues and cross-streets are 65 cm wide and the divisions within the blocks are much greater, so that you are encouraged to make your own way through and across the field. By 1996, I’d given up using lead because I had too much lead in my system. I was no longer interested in making boxes but in making massive forms, and was looking for ways in which they might introduce themselves into space differently, and engage with architecture. This is a work called Drawn (see Figure 13.10). These body-forms still evoke the space behind appearance, but now materialize in mass the void space previously held within the lead body-cases. Each of these elements weighs about 700 kilos, and in the same way that the lead had a surface grid that mapped the skin of the work, they have lines that map the surface, which now show how the mould was divided into pieces, and therefore how it was made. The issue that I was trying to grapple with was where you put the sculptural object when sculpture has come off the plinth; when the body doesn’t have a very

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Figure 13.10 DRAWN, 2000 Cast iron 8 elements, each 154 × 133 × 187 cm Installation view, White Cube Gallery, Hoxton Square, London, 2000 Photograph by Stephen White, London © Courtesy of the artist & Jay Jopling/White Cube, London.

secure place even in sculpture – how do you re-insert it into the world? In the earlier work, I was not privileging the standing body but somehow trying to re-articulate how a body might sit in the world. Here I am continuing that enquiry, and rather than simply occupying or colonizing space by putting a standing work in the centre of a room, and using it as a container, I was trying to activate the space in the room by using the body as a frame. There are eight identical pieces that occupy the part of the room that is most useless, the furthest from the centre, leaving the room as empty as it can be. I am trying to use this body as a fulcrum, as a lever that undermines your certainty about those Kantian subjective projections on to space. All of our articulations – ‘in front’, ‘behind’, ‘left’, ‘right’, ‘up’ and ‘down’ – are projections onto space; of a subjective point of perception from the body onto that which is not the body. By putting these surrogate bodies in different

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orientations I was hoping to undermine your certainty of your position in space. And, by implication, undermine an assumption about the stability of the known world, and by the same token making you, the viewer, the subject of the work. This is my big project: how do you return to the viewer the emancipation that art gained for itself in Modernism? How do you make the experience of art less about looking at the exquisite facture of a discreet and valuable object of surplus capital exchange, which stabilizes known values, and return the experience of art to the viewer as an emancipating and freeing experience of uncertainty, where the object has no intrinsic value (this is a mechanically produced industrial fossil flung into the corners of the room), and makes you, the viewer, the subject of the work? So there’s another tension that I am working through: object/space. Sculpture is a discrete thing in the world but its real power lies in how it creates space. Space itself (which is the absence of objects) could be said to be the real ground of sculpture – its real value lying in the spaces it activates, allowing viewers to participate in the process of being in it, with it, and through it, perhaps to feel their own lives more intensely. I think the background to this is again space/time, conveying a sense that we are spinning at a thousand kilometres an hour around our own axis on this planet, which is itself rotating around the sun even faster than that, that the universe itself is expanding, and that there are no fixed points, and therefore no defined positions, in space, and that this has a profound relationship to the way in which we conceive human freedom. If one challenge is to make the statue again, to make a vertical male bodyform, how do you do it in a way that is adequately radical for it not to be misread? This is Total Strangers (see Figures 13.11–13.15), made in Germany at the Kunstverein in Cologne. I emptied the museum: there is a single work, contained within the space. You come in: it’s silent and still, I removed all the lighting apart from a single line of light bulbs in the apex of the roof. You walk towards a body form. This is actually made on the cusp between the lead works and the making of the solid iron body forms, so these are still cast from the exterior surface of a mould. You walk towards this, perhaps expecting some encounter with the representation of an individual, but it’s denied you. The surface does not tell you through the turn of a lip, or the way that an eye is achieved, anything about the appearance of an individual (though it might convey something in the set of the body). Maybe you realize that actually you are subject to another gaze, or anyway the presence of another body, which is identical but lies outside the building, and looks back at you through the window. And maybe you look out through that window back at the world that you have left as a kind of picture of itself, and in that world you see that there are more reproduced body forms, which in some way are interacting with the world out there, and one of them has fallen over. And a little old lady came at 8.30 in the morning and banged on the door of the museum and said, ‘Herr Director, Herr Director, one of

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13.15 Figures 13.11–13.15 TOTAL STRANGERS, 1996 Cast iron 195 × 54 × 32 cm Installation view, Kölnischer Kunstverein, Köln, 1997 © Courtesy of the artist & Jay Jopling/White Cube, London.

them is fallen, and you must put it up, because this is not right.’ The lying one was a very important way of reinforcing the fact that these are inert, possibly redundant objects, but the relationship between us, or between lived time, moving time, mechanical time, and these inert objects is really the place of interest. This project used the museum as a resonating chamber, as a seashell lifted to the ear of consciousness, suggesting that art might not pertain to what is contained in the institution or within the unique object, but within the dynamic between the living and its surrogate body. What for me was unexpected was the way in which these things became invisible, and how it was an open question as to who was the outsider, the stranger, the ‘fremde’, in this situation. At night, there was a constant dynamic between the state of life and the state of these surrogate bodies. Having made Total Strangers, I then asked, can this notion of time, the time of the city, the city-time, be extended? Can I engage in other rhythms of time? And I took a similar idea to the sea. So I made a work which was placed first at Cuxhaven, Germany, on the North Sea. This work is presently on Crosby Beach, Merseyside, UK (see Figure 13.16), rather like Cuxhaven,


Figure 13.16 ANOTHER PLACE, 1997 Cast iron 100 elements, 189 × 53 × 29 cm Permanent installation, Crosby Beach, Merseyside Photograph by Stephen White, London © Courtesy of the artist & Jay Jopling/White Cube, London.

except that it’s even better because it’s got two or three quicksands, a couple of very nice sewage pipes, a pile of scrap metal at one end and an oil-drilling platform at the other: an industrial beach. How do you engage with real space and make it into imaginary space? Another leitmotif is that sculpture is a thing in the world, it can work as a kind of acupuncture, which turns the real into the imagined, so that through the presence of these things that exist in a different zone of time, the world we inhabit and share becomes a place of reverie. It’s very important this isn’t an escapist exercise: finding the wilderness or proposing an estrangement from nature – it is very much to do with meditating on the current state of nature, which contains us and container ships that move materials and manufactured objects around the surface of the planet. Both Cuxhaven and Crosby Beach are on the estuaries of big working rivers, and both have thousands of tonnes of container transport-ships

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Figure 13.17 ANOTHER PLACE, 1997 Cast iron 100 elements, 189 × 53 × 29 cm Installation view at Cuxhaven, Germany, 1997 Photograph by Helmut Kunde, Kiel © Courtesy of the artist & Jay Jopling/White Cube, London.

coming in and out of them (see Figure 13.17). Reinstalling the same piece on a beach in Belgium changes it again (see Figure 13.18). At the Belgian site, modernist apartment blocks, a kind of inhabited cliff, face the sea. The burial of the pieces was more extreme. They make a continual plane. In the original installation, it was two and a half kilometres long and a kilometre deep, and absolutely horizontal. The Belgian installation is horizontal, but is much less deep: it’s only a hundred and twenty metres from the furthest out in the sea to the ones closest to the shoreline. Again it’s the relationships between people walking their dogs, children playing with their beach-balls, and these works that in some way talk about time, mortality, and indeed whatever we dream about when we think about what lies on the other side of the horizon. This is a drawing called Exercise between Earth and Blood (see Figure 13.19), another way of dealing with the body in extended space, drawn for my Whitechapel exhibition in 1981. There is a silhouette of a running man in the core of it, and the skin of that silhouette is repeated again and again and again, until the line at the outer limit becomes egg-shaped. I recreated this

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Figure 13.18 ANOTHER PLACE, 1997 Cast iron 100 elements, 189 × 53 × 29 cm Installation view at De Panne Beach, Belgium, 2003 © Courtesy of the artist & Jay Jopling/White Cube, London.

Figure 13.19 EXERCISE BETWEEN BLOOD AND EARTH, 1979–1981 Chalk on wall Diameter: 184 cm Photograph by Stephen White, London © Courtesy of the artist & Jay Jopling/White Cube, London.

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Figure 13.20 STILL RUNNING, 1990–1993 Cast iron, air 317 × 276 × 148 cm Photograph by Jan Uvelius, Malmö © Courtesy of the artist & Jay Jopling/White Cube, London.

in three dimensions and made a number of Expansion Pieces, which were also at the Baltic in 2004. Still Running derives exactly from the ‘exercise’ of drawing the expansion, stopped at the point between the representation of bodily locomotion and explosion, an expansion into space from a single point (see Figure 13.20). The notion of making a connection between a cosmic event – the singularity of the beginning of the universe with the beginning of a human life – is suggested by the work called Body, which uses a body-case in a foetal position as its point of expansion (see Figure 13.21). When the group of works is shown together you can go on a space journey through these forms that engage with gravity, which look not like abstract sculpture so much as found objects, the result of an organic process that relates both the absent body at the core of the work and the body of the viewer to space at large. This is an experiment in the opposite direction from the skin: Insiders – going into the core of the body by a very precise process of proportional concentration. This was the very first Insider (see Figure 13.22), 60 per cent


Figure 13.21 BODY, 1991–1993 Cast iron, air 229 × 259 × 219 cm Photograph by Jan Uvelius, Malmö © Courtesy of the artist & Jay Jopling/White Cube, London.

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Figure 13.22 INSIDER I, 1997 Cast iron 195 × 55 × 26 cm Photograph by Stephen White, London © Courtesy of the artist & Jay Jopling/White Cube, London.

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of the body’s mass removed, and I made another one with 66.6 per cent or two-thirds of the body-mass removed, leaving a one-third body-form, which is the most you can do without the hands and feet falling off. Back in Australia in 2003, I used this process to give form to a community in retreat within a relatively non-inscribed landscape with a 360˚ flat horizon. Paddy Walker, the elder of the Wangatha People, allowed us to use the site on the west end of Lake Ballard. We used a cyberware body scanner to scan everybody – we didn’t body-mould the volunteers, we moulded them digitally. All they had to do when they got inside the scanner was stand still. One volunteer was Lorraine Williams, whose body was reduced to two-thirds in polystyrene before being translated into an alloy of metals that all derive from the area – molybdenum, iridium, titanium, vanadium and steel. The fifty-one sculptures were heat-treated, and then taken out on to ten square kilometres of dried salt-lake. Here the journeys of their original installation, which became a direct drawing on the surface of the earth, were replaced by the drawing of the footsteps of people who went to visit them (see Figure 13.23). So the work is an ongoing process by which the highly concentrated individual ‘corpographs’ are exposed in extreme elemental conditions and in a very wide space, continually held together by a web of perceptual and traced connections.

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13.24 Figures 13.23 & 13.24 INSIDE AUSTRALIA, 2002–2003 Cast alloy of iron, molybdenum, iridium, vanadium and titanium 51 elements based on 51 inhabitants of Menzies, Western Australia Installation view, Lake Ballard, Western Australia Commission for 50th Perth International Arts Festival, Western Australia, 2003 © Courtesy of the artist & Jay Jopling/White Cube, London.

The volunteers were of all ages – there are fifty-one sculptures: we wanted to make a hundred, but in the end we ran out of cash. The first sculpture you come to when you arrive on to the lake is Jaden, aged six (see Figure 13.24). The relationships between the absent, possibly remembered, body and the living body of the viewer are located in a context of three layers of human habitation of the land – indigenous and colonial in its phases both of pastoral occupation and mining exploitation – asking questions about to whom and how this land belongs in its territorial and representational aspects. The most recent meditations on body in space, or space in the body, have involved lots of different approaches. This is called Bodies in Space (see Figure 13.25) and applies molecular structures to describe internal body space. Another work, Capacitor, evokes the singularity at the heart of the expansion works. And then, having expanded, contracted, and exploded, there seemed to be nowhere else to go but to make an entirely transparent body-form in which the zone of appearance, the skin, was completely left out. Transfuser, has two skins, one inside the other, one an extension

Figure 13.25 BODIES IN SPACE V, 2001 Forged ball bearings 200 × 106 × 70 cm Installation view, Galerie Xavier Hufkens, Brussels, 2002 Photograph by Vincent Everarts, Brussels © Courtesy of the artist & Jay Jopling/White Cube, London & Galerie Xavier Hufkens, Brussels.

Figure 13.26 TRANSFUSER I, 2002 Mild steel rings: inner figure: 30 × 3 × 3 mm; outer figure: 38 × 3 × 3 mm 196 × 54 × 33 cm Photograph by Stephen White, London © Courtesy of the artist & Jay Jopling/White Cube, London.

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Figure 13.27 QUANTUM CLOUD, 2000 Galvanized steel 29 × 16 × 10 m Installation in the Thames at Greenwich, London Photograph by Stephen White, London © Courtesy of the artist & Jay Jopling/White Cube, London.

100 mm bigger than the limit of the body, the other a reduction of 60 mm, which completely ignore the zone of the skin (see Figure 13.26). The Domains were the first time that I lost the idea of a containing skin, which was present in all the work, whether pierced or open, solid or hollow, right up to this point. Losing the skin, the point of division between inside and out, turned the zone of the body into a kind of energy field. I extended these into Quantum Cloud (see Figure 13.27), but soon realized that actually the way to do it was to make a collective body, similar to Allotment, but with


Figure 13.28 DOMAIN FIELD, 2003 Stainless steel bars, 4.76 mm × 4.76 mm Various sizes: 287 elements, derived from moulds of local inhabitants of Newcastle-Gateshead aged 2.5–84 years Commission for BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead Photograph by Colin Davison, Newcastle © Courtesy of the artist & Jay Jopling/White Cube, London.

300 domains, which I would make an energy field: in Domain Field (see Figure 13.28), shown at the Baltic, the whole process of the genesis of the work was public. The important thing was the relationship this produced between the viewer and the field, and what kind of reverie, what kind of experience? The extraordinary thing was how the visitors slowed down, and how the looks on their faces changed. And there was a sense in which there was a participation in the work that had absolutely nothing to do with looking at the known, but rather with summoning the unknown. This was the exciting thing – the way in which there was an interplay between life and art that was a generative process. The implications now take me and the work into a whole new realm, work which I call Feeling Material (see Figure 13.29). Unlike the domains, which

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Figure 13.29 FEELING MATERIAL XIII, 2004 5mm square section rolled stainless steel bar Dimensions variable according to room size Installation view, Galleria Mimmo Scognamiglio, Naples, Italy 2006 Photograph by Peppe Avallone © Courtesy of the artist & Jay Jopling/White Cube, London and Galleria Mimmo Scognamiglio, Italy.

are straight trajectories made into a random matrix, these are continuous lines up to a kilometre long that describe the space of the body, the place of the body, and are no longer determined by having to sit on the floor, but just hang about. The latest breakthrough is in leaving the description of the body out altogether. So, rather than describing the space around or internal to the body, I take the idea of Drawn, and activate the space of the room by a continuous line, in this case five kilometres long. This is the work at White Cube in London in 2004 (see Figure 13.30), and the same work remade in New York. The body in question here is entirely the body of the viewer, and people take up their own positions within the space. The experience of the work is the experience of being there with others; somehow it’s the activation of space itself, and your position within it, that is the subject of the work. And I’d like to suggest that, in a way, this is the returning of the emancipation of art from its duties of representation to the viewer as a free, experiencing individual in space.

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Figure 13.30 CLEARING I, 2004 10 km of 12.7mm × 12.7mm 16swg aluminium tube Dimensions variable Installation view, White Cube, London, 2004 Photograph by Stephen White, London © Courtesy of the artist & Jay Jopling/White Cube, London.

Note 1. All works referred to in this essay can be viewed in colour at www.antonygormley. com.

14 ‘Une écriture corporelle’: The Dancer in the Text of Mallarmé and Yeats Susan Jones

In 1893, Stéphane Mallarmé published a short but significant essay describing his responses to a performance at the Folies Bergères in Paris given by the celebrated American solo dancer, Loïe Fuller.1 Fuller, hailed by Frank Kermode as the incarnation of the Symbolist figure, was famous in her time for her innovative performance style.2 When Mallarmé saw her he was already an avid patron of the theatre, attending drama, opera and ballet on numerous occasions, but often expressing dissatisfaction with what he considered to be a banal spectacle failing to live up to ‘the divine Idea’ he sought in poetry and in the dramatic arts.3 However, on this occasion he was transported. He lavished praise on Fuller’s dancing, describing her musical embodiment, entwined in swirling materials shimmering in the play of light, as that of an ‘enchanteresse’ engaged uniquely in mystical sorcery (208). Most significantly, he praised her solo as ‘la forme théâtrale de poésie par excellence’ (207).4 Why did Fuller so entrance the poet? The following discussion explores this question, identifying dance’s fundamental contribution to fin-de-siècle Symbolist aesthetics and offering it as a starting point from which to investigate emerging literary responses to the body in the early years of modernism. In 1900, W. B. Yeats encapsulated a shift in literary aesthetics, distinguishing nineteenth-century realism, with its tendency to ‘lose itself in externalities of all kinds, in opinion, in declamation, in picturesque writing, in word-painting’, from fin-de-siècle Symbolism, where ‘writers have begun to dwell upon the element of evocation, of suggestion’.5 French and German writers, painters and composers, including Heine, Mallarmé, Laforgue, Moreau and Massenet, all drew on the trope of the dancer as an evanescent symbol, but the impact of a European Symbolist aesthetic also accounts for the appearance of the dancer in the work of Arthur Symons, Oscar Wilde, W. B. Yeats and T. S. Eliot.6 Symbolist representations of the dancer (usually female, and sometimes deadly, as in the figure of Salome), emphasized the 237


Figure 14.1 Loïe Fuller in ‘La Danse Blanche’ c. 1898. Photograph: Taber, San Francisco. [Reproduced with permission from the Jerome Robbins Dance Division, The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, Astor, Lenox, and Tilden Foundations]

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beauty and erotic allure of the dancing figure and the expressive eloquence of her movement. But elsewhere, as in Mallarmé’s essay on ‘Ballets’ (1886), Symbolism also credited dance with an economy of form akin to that of poetry, acknowledging the body’s gestural potential, and showing the elegance with which ‘une écriture corporelle’ might offer alternative forms of communication to the written word (201). My discussion focuses primarily on the way in which the idea of dance and the dancer facilitates a critique of language at a period when literature was beginning to turn away from realist methods and conventional poetics, and when performance dance was distancing itself from its traditional association with mimetic forms. In this context, Mallarmé’s influential but often elusive remarks on dance, which Bertrand Marchal claims ‘suggère la dimension choreographique de toute poésie’,7 enable us to explore a relationship between contemporary developments in dance and literature. Mallarmé’s poetic innovations, from the three sections of Hérodiade8 through L’Aprèsmidi d’un faune (1876) to his most radical experiments in typography for Un coup de dés (1897), suggest an increasing attention to ‘choreographic’ patterning in his work, where the disrupted poetic line alludes to the ‘bodily’ movement of the text and encourages the ‘bodily’ engagement of the reader in the reading process. Furthermore, Mallarmé’s reference to the disciplined medium of the dancer’s body, perhaps paradoxically, aids his discussions of poetic impersonality, an issue that became a central preoccupation for both Eliot and Yeats. Before describing Mallarmé’s writing on Fuller, we need to situate her solo in the context of performance dance in the period. Throughout the nineteenth century the narrative ballets of the European opera houses were predominantly associated with an enduring Aristotelian perspective on dance: narrative ballets were performed according to traditional conventions using balletic technique and style. Mallarmé’s essay on ‘Ballets’, for example, was inspired by a performance at Paris’s Éden-Théâtre of the Italian ballerina, Elena Cornalba, in a romantic narrative ballet of 1886, Les deux pigeons (Marchal, 494). But many sources of experimentation in dance provided alternative inspiration for the writers of the fin de siècle. Between 1870 and 1900, new dance forms associated with the music hall, such as the ‘skirt dancing’ of Kate Vaughan in London, and in Paris the ‘cancan’ of ‘Cyrene’, La Goulue, and Jane Avril, prefigured and overlapped with the work of individual artists such as Fuller (who first performed her famous ‘Serpentine’ dance in Paris in 1892), Isadora Duncan (who began performing in 1896 in New York but quickly moved to Europe), and Maud Allan (who made her début in Vienna in 1903). Fuller and her protégé Duncan emphasized the authority of individual physical expression, incorporating improvisational techniques and offering a radical alternative to elaborate ballet productions. They moved away from the representational function of dance towards a greater formal abstraction in an increasingly expressivist mode, initiating


the notion of choreography as an art form that, practised for its own sake, would gain greater autonomy among the performing arts. Fuller distinguished herself from numerous ‘look-alikes’ who were appearing in the European music-halls around the same time that Mallarmé attended her performance.9 In addition to her compelling stage presence (supported by acute business acumen), her experimental use of stage technology and costuming gave her an innovative edge. Moreover, considering the physicality and apparent sensuousness of her performances, where the contours of the body could be glimpsed through the swirls of coloured silk, her selfpresentation as artist was curiously un-eroticized and focused on the spiritual qualities and naturalism of her self-expression. In unpublished notes written in preparation for her memoir, she wrote, ‘I cannot explain ... how I do it ... It is intuition, – instinct’,10 a statement that may have been compatible with finde-siècle writers’ preference for the ‘organicism’ of symbolic form. Her dance ‘technique’, as far as can be determined from extant photographs and a brief film clip, abandoned any overt references to classical ballet traditions.11 Yet her dances required considerable strength and command of the moving body in order to control the unwieldy costumes (beneath them she held long rods in her hands to extend the circumference of whirling silk). Her choreography was based on a unique and sophisticated technological craftsmanship, capturing the audience’s imagination with highly experimental uses of lighting and manipulation of materials, and creating the effect of a sometimes lyrical, sometimes forceful moving being whose physicality drove the swirling material yet whose bodily presence seemed to dissolve within it. When Fuller appeared in London, one reviewer described her movement as a luminescent spiral emerging from an almost palpable darkness: ‘The stage, by means of black hangings, was made perfectly dark, and the dancer went through her graceful and beautiful evolutions amid an iridescent glow from the lime lights.’12 In Paris, Mallarmé delighted in the artifice of her performance, and in an important move for the history of dance, recognized the contemporaneity of Fuller’s innovations as she released dance from traditional balletic presentation where ‘la mobilité choréographique’ was hampered by ‘décors permanents ou stables’ (208), and where her performance resulted in ‘[l]a scène libre, au gré de fictions’ (208) [‘a stage freed, at the will of invention’].13 Mallarmé’s description of Fuller needs to be explored in relation to his other writing on dance. He often seemed to harness his thoughts on dance to the service of poetry, treating dance as he treated Wagner’s ideal of the ‘Gesamtkuntswerk’ when he declared that the art work of the future must emanate from ‘the literary principle’.14 Yet later critics such as André Levinson, who in 1923 described him as a ‘metaphysician of Ballet’, hailed Mallarmé as an important theorist of dance.15 In a much-quoted passage from ‘Ballets’, Mallarmé wrote: A savoir que la danseuse n’est pas une femme qui danse, pour ces motifs juxtaposes qu’elle n’est pas une femme, mais une métaphore résumant

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un des aspects élémentaires de notre forme, glaive, coupe, fleur, etc., et qu’elle ne danse pas, suggérant, par le prodige de racourcis ou d’élans, avec une écriture corporelle ce qu’il faudrait des paragraphes en prose dialoguée autant que descriptive, pour exprimer, dans la rédaction: poème dégagé de tout appareil du scribe. (201) [That is to say the dancer is not a woman who dances, for the combined reasons that she is not a woman, but a metaphor summing up one of the elementary aspects of our form, sword, cup, flower, etc., and that she does not dance, suggesting, through a miracle of shortcuts and dashes, with a bodily writing, what would take in the composition several paragraphs of dialogue or descriptive prose to express: [she is] a poem freed from any instrument of the writer.16] Mallarmé compares dance directly to poetry, but the dancer’s poem is written without the writer’s tools: ‘elle ne danse pas’ but rather, through a miracle of abbreviation, she suggests in ‘corporeal’ writing what the written work could express only in several paragraphs. He identifies a relationship between creative writing in the Symbolist mode and dance (‘the elementary aspects of our form, sword, cup, flower’). The dancer may represent material objects, but Mallarmé shifts the aesthetics of dance away from a tradition of literal representation, instead emphasizing the creative input of the dancer who ‘suggests’ forms as she moves. Dance is ‘bodily writing’ in the sense that it retrieves the Greek etymology of the word ‘choreography’, but the relationship between ‘suggestion’ and ‘expression’ is also paramount. The Latin derivations of these verbs of action move us a little closer to the distinction: suggere – to point one towards or promote a kind of action, and exprimere – to ‘squeeze out’, both indicating the quality of action that may have appealed to the writers of the fin de siècle. The economy of dance form allows the dancer to evoke through bodily movement alone a particular mood or situation. She suggests with great immediacy, with a single gesture or turn of the head (as in Eliot’s ‘La Figlia Che Piange’), what the writer may need several pages to squeeze out. Mallarmé refers to an uncompleted action, one that aligns itself more distinctly with the notion of process, of passage, a gesturing towards, a ‘becoming’. Mallarmé’s remarks thus allude to a poetics of potentiality and signifying practice that, in its most abstract and ideal form, dispenses with the generation of verbal meaning through customary relationships between signifier and signified. But the dancer’s symbolic ‘suggestiveness’ also possessed a non-teleological quality enticing the spectator to strive for meaning. Mallarmé remarks on the difficulty of ‘reading’ dance, asking ‘ “Que peut signifier ceci” ou mieux, d’inspiration, le lire’ (205) [‘ “What does this signify” or better, out of inspiration, how do we read it?’]. This difficulty arises in part because her ‘vision’ is written ‘à la façon d’un Signe qu’elle est’ (206) – she dances in the manner of a sign, producing a kind of meaning frequently sought after by the writer through the medium of poetry, though


her ‘writing’ is not precisely equivalent. The key to her signification nevertheless incorporates a metaphorical equivalence: she herself is that sign. The dancing body suggests verbal signification for Mallarmé but, unlike the written word, which is produced by the body and leaves it at the moment of production, her physical presence at every moment in the dance is simultaneously the sign itself and its production. She provides a vision of creative subjectivity in action in the present. Fuller’s performance illustrated for Mallarmé this fundamental identity of the dancer with the dance. While traditionally in ballet the dancer and choreographer had separate functions, Fuller’s solo dances combined both (Yeats would later ponder over the dual identity of the dancer: ‘How can we know the dancer from the dance?’17). Fuller’s dance, Mallarmé writes, ‘comme son expansion’ (207) [‘as extension of herself’], establishes a predominantly subjective rather than an objective mode, in which the mimetic function of dance is incorporated into her very identity as creator. She herself becomes the ideal form of art, the woman as metaphor for the poetic symbol. As Kermode duly observed, Mallarmé’s account of Loïe Fuller provided literary modernism, in its early years, with ‘an emblem of the Image of art, “self-begotten” in Yeats’s favourite word’ (Kermode, 41). Fuller’s practice as choreographer and performer of her own work was compatible with Mallarmé’s ideas about impersonality. He characterized her performance in terms quite different from Symons’ and others’ descriptions of dancers of this period, with their praise of the blatant eroticism and immediacy of the uninhibited movement of visible flesh. Rather, it was Fuller’s transcendence of the material world, created through the careful disciplining of body and technological effects, ‘Au bain terrible des étoffes se pâme, radieuse, froide la figurante’ (207) [‘bathed in wondrous clothes the performer swoons, radiant, cold’], her dance flickering between the presentation of flesh and its disappearance, that provided him with the visual analogy for the effect produced by a Symbolist poetics (from the audience’s perspective, her entire body was at times obliterated by the moving spiral of material). Fuller’s elusive gestures, fading and reappearing in swathes of swirling light, suggested a poetic spirituality acquired through the subsumation of corporeal presence to the artistic ideal. Mallarmé’s writings on dance are thus consistent with his poetic experimentation. He wrote in a letter of 1864 that, as he began work on Hérodiade, he was initiating a ‘new poetics’, whose function was ‘To paint, not the thing itself, but the effect it produces’ (Weinfield, 169). While the poem ‘remains deeply enmeshed in history’ (Weinfield, 170),18 it nevertheless relies only obliquely on the biblical context of its title, evoking mood and situation rather than denoting narrative in a strictly linear fashion. At the same time, Mallarmé’s emphasis on poetic impersonality accompanied his experimentation with form. While Mallarmé worked on Hérodiade and ‘L’Aprèsmidi d’un faune’ between 1866–1867, the poet’s letters bear testimony to

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‘an extraordinarily rapid and intense’ development. Mallarmé’s ‘emphasis on poetic impersonality, which was to have such an important impact on Yeats, Eliot, and twentieth-century poetry in general’, found expression in these letters, not as a concrete idea, but as an ‘experience born out of the creative process’ (Weinfield, xi–xv).19 Fuller’s embodiment of an innovative dance poetics might well have inspired Mallarmé as he approached the terminus of his radical aesthetics in Un coup de dés. The typographical experimentation of this work (published four years after Mallarmé saw Fuller) draws attention to the disposition of the printed word in space, and hints at a choreographic element in the construction of the poem. However, in order to place this poem within a specifically ‘choreographic’ context, we might paradoxically think of the poem’s formal innovations in relation to one of dance vocabulary’s most conventional terms of reference, that of the ‘arabesque’. 20 ‘Arabesque’ is commonly the term given in ballet technique to a pose in which the dancer stands on a supporting leg with the other raised at ninety degrees behind, one or both arms raised in opposing elongation in front of the body. The dancer thus creates with her/his body the illusion of a line connecting the fingertips of the forward extending arm and the pointed foot of the backward extending leg. While arabesque is normally thought of as one of the foundational positions of a strict classical vocabulary, one could argue that, if performed with grace and energy, it is not actually a position as such, but one point on an arc of movement. This expression of ‘ornament’ entails the movement of the body in a natural extension of the arms and legs outward from the central structure of fifth position with arms en bas, a place that occupies the starting point and the natural ‘telos’ of expectation inherent in classical technique. The arabesque has proved extraordinarily versatile, enduring, albeit in sometimes unrecognizable forms, as a useful syntactical device denoting a basic unit of vocabulary even in the most radical of modern dance forms. And while Fuller’s dance vocabulary contained no obvious analogy to the classical arabesque, the image of her body’s folding and unfolding of material (Mallarmé uses the word ‘déferlement’ [207] to describe this effect) suggests a trajectory analogous, albeit in a ‘contemporary’, free dance form, to that of the classical dancer who draws an invisible arc from closed fifth position to extended arabesque line. Metaphorically speaking, Mallarmé offers a not dissimilar relationship to traditional versification in Un coup de dés, where word clusters draw us constantly towards the teleological expectations of rhyme and metre, while also frustrating those expectations, engaging us in a continuous unfolding and folding in of meanings. Thus the words of the full title of the poem, ‘Un coup de dés jamais n’abolira le hazard’, are separated from one another, and distributed, in uppercase, bold-face type, throughout the body of the text, where they may be linked by an effort of the reader to form this phrase. At the


same time, read individually as they occur in the order of the poem, each word initiates or terminates quite different word clusters, distinct from the title phrase. If we attend carefully to the reading process when encountering Un coup de dés, especially for the first time, we see how certain combinations of word clusters point towards certain meanings only to break away from any fixed determinacy, instead initiating yet other potential meanings in new combinations. We may also perceive that the rhythmical disruptions, phonetic patternings, interconnected vocabularies and imagery (of seafaring, shipwreck, and tempest) do not just create in the mind of the reader the effect of sonority, as McCombie convincingly shows. In their typographical disruptions they generate visually a corporeal response much closer to that of viewing (or perhaps even participating in) a cluster of movements, choreographed phrases whose signs (the printed letters in their various styles and the white spaces of the page) resemble the aesthetics of a dance in which moving and still bodies interact with each other in space. In his introduction to the poem on its initial publication in Cosmopolis, Mallarmé himself uses a performative image, showing this conjoining and breaking of words as a meeting ‘dans quelque mise en scène spirituelle exacte’ [‘some exact and spiritual stage setting’].21 He writes of the ‘literary advantage’ of his idiosyncratic disposition of the ‘blancs’ as a way of increasing and decreasing the movement of the poem, while also drawing attention to the poet’s activity of writing: L’avantage, si j’ai droit à le dire, littéraire, de cette distance copiée qui mentalement sépare des groupes de mots ou les mots entre eux, semble d’accélérer tantôt et de ralentir le movement, le scandant, l’intimant même selon une vision simultanée de la Page ... La fiction affleura et se dissipera, vite, d’après la mobilitéde l’écrit, autour des arrest fragmentaires d’une phrase capitale dès le titre introduite et continue. (417–418) [The literary advantage, if I have the right to say it, of this aped distance which mentally separates groups of words or words from each other seems to quicken at times and at times to slow down the movement, stressing it, summoning it, even, in terms of a simultaneous view of the Page ... the theme will break through or will vanish, rapidly, following the speed of the writing, around the fragmentary pauses in one capital phrase introduced by the title and continued.]22 The emphasis on the writing’s speed and movement (not just on the poem’s rhythms and sounds, which he invokes elsewhere), implies a choreographic analogy, allowing us to think of Mallarmé’s arrangement of the ‘blancs’ as giving depth and substance to an apparently two-dimensional form, offering a continuum between the white spaces and the presence of the printed signs on the page. At first, the printed characters attract our eyes and initiate the bodily rhythms of the poem, but subsequently we realize

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that the ‘blancs’ equally create, and likewise disrupt, the rhythm in dialogue with them. Un coup de dés thus expresses the centrality to Mallarmé’s work of the breakdown of metrical, stanzaic and narrative conventions. It also illustrates his sense of the bodily movement of the text, of the movement of the writer in the text, who operates simultaneously through the disciplined reserve of ‘impersonality’, crafting the disposition of signs and space on the page, and evades ‘authorial’ direction that might allow coherent meanings to take hold. The onus of interpretation is thrown onto an active reader, invited to engage ‘bodily’ with a continuous formation and disruption of unfolding rhythms, breaking and renewing the line or telos of expectation. Mallarmé may have found in Fuller’s ‘poésie par excellence’ a model for the generation of non-teleological ‘reading’ to which he aspired in his poetry. Un coup de dés has widely influenced modernist literature,23 and Mallarmé’s debt to literary modernism in general has been fully acknowledged. But whereas we can only speculate on the relationship between Mallarmé’s ‘dancer’ and his most radical poetics, we can trace a more direct link between the Symbolist dancer and protomodernist and modernist thinking about the body. Certainly the metaphor of the dancer appears in the work of Valéry, Wilde, Yeats and Eliot, among others.24 However, in order to illustrate the endurance of Mallarmé’s ‘dance poetics’ in the twentieth century, I shall turn to W. B. Yeats’s engagement with dance in his later drama. Yeats acknowledged his debt to Arthur Symons for introducing him to the work of European Symbolist writers such as Mallarmé, Verlaine, and Maeterlinck,25 and in 1902 he expressed a preference for the ‘wizard frenzy’ of the symbol over the extended metaphor and extended narrative element of allegory.26 However, through Symons, Yeats also became familiar with the ‘wizard frenzy’ of Loïe Fuller, who continued to perform until the late 1920s, and in ‘Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen’, Yeats refers to her by name, describing her dramatic incorporation of materials and lighting effects into her dances in a way that suggests his familiarity with innovative dance forms at this time: When Loie Fuller’s Chinese dancers enwound A Shining web, a floating ribbon of cloth, It seemed that a dragon of air Had fallen among dancers, and whirled them round Or hurried them off on its own furious path. (Collected Poems, p. 212)27 Like Mallarmé, Yeats may have perceived in Loïe Fuller’s ‘free dance’ something closer to ritual expression than anything offered by the artificiality of ballet. While the symbol of the dancer inhabits a whole range of Yeats’s writing in all the genres, the ritual aspect becomes more prominent in his later plays, especially in his shift away from realism and his engagement

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with Noh drama, introduced to him through Ezra Pound’s work on Ernest Fenellosa, his associations with the Japanese performer Michio Ito, and Edward Gordon Craig, the stage designer and director.28 In Yeats’s development of a new drama incorporating verse, music and song, dance was an essential element, drawing on poetic suggestion and economy of gesture while favouring the impersonality of ritual forms. Frank Kermode, in The Romantic Image, describes the visual effect of Yeats’s dancer, implying its close links to the symbolist figure of the dancer: The image is to be all movement, yet with a kind of stillness ... She has the impassive, characterless face of Salome, so that there is nothing but the dance, and she and the dance are inconceivable apart, indivisible as body and soul, meaning and form, ought to be.29 Yeats adopted the idea of the solo dancer for his plays by exploiting the impersonality of stylized movement (often using masks to increase the impassive quality), suggesting a kind of transformation from body to artefact, and reminding us of Fuller’s creation of a ‘self-begotten’ image through technical ‘sorcery’ and subsumation of personal identity. Many of the plays are also distinguished by the fact that dance replaces dialogue at a point of extreme emotional intensity in the drama (Ellis, 264–265). ‘Bodily writing’ itself becomes the symbol of ideal art, for which the sacrifice of detachment from personal identity must be made. Yeats’s preoccupation with this theme in his late work appears most strikingly in A Full Moon in March (1935) and in King of the Great Clock Tower (1935), a reworking of the same play. Yeats’s dedication of King of the Great Clock Tower (1935) to Ninette de Valois, the dancer who took the part of the Queen, shows the importance to him of the element of dance in his late work.30 However, for the purposes of this discussion, I shall turn to A Full Moon in March, which also requires a dancer, but where the greater economy of form and setting offers a more striking comparison with Mallarmé’s Hérodiade. Allusions to the Salome myth appear in both, and Yeats continued to refer to it in his last play, Death of Cuchulain (1939), where an Old Man, its fictional ‘author’, suggests that ‘Emer must dance, there must be severed heads ... severed heads for her to dance before.’31 Yeats had read Mallarmé’s Hérodiade in Arthur Symons’s 1896 translation, and in 1910 he remarked in ‘The Tragic Generation’ that he was compelled to create ‘some Herodiade of our theatre, dancing seemingly alone in her narrow moving luminous circle’.32 In King of the Great Clock Tower, the Queen is silent and only dances after her husband has commanded the beheading of the Stroller. But in A Full Moon in March, where the setting is a timeless ‘anywhere’, agency is given solely to the isolated Queen, who has no husband and whose language and actions remind us of the obsession and cold yet despairing cruelty of the virginal protagonist of Mallarmé’s poem.

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The play’s situation is expressed economically through verse, music, song and dance. A lowly Swineherd is beheaded for his presumption in expressing his passion for the Queen (she has promised to share her kingdom with the man who successfully woos her with his song). The action closes with the Queen dancing as she embraces the head, reproducing an aspect of the Salome story that appears in Heine’s poem, Wilde’s play, and Laforgue’s narrative – the act of kissing the dead lips. Yet in other respects, Yeats’s presentation of the role of the Queen is closer to Mallarmé’s Hérodiade, whose virginity is complicated by her enduring self-isolation. Rather than expressing the youthful passion and fury of rejection of many fin-de-siècle representations of Salome, Yeats’s Queen reflects the tone of Hérodiade’s outpourings to her Nurse, trapped as she is in an unbearable stasis of her own choosing, her self-conscious exercise of power predicated on a fervent suppression of intense desire: ‘J’aime l’horreur d’être vierge et je veux / Vivre parmi l’effroi que me font mes cheveux / Pour, le soir, retirée en ma couche, reptile / Inviolé sentir en la chair inutile’ (Weinfield, 34) [‘I love the horror of virginity, / The dread my tresses give me when I lie / Retired at night, reptilian on my couch, / My useless flesh inviolate to the touch’]. Yeats’s Queen may be a more mature woman, but in commenting on the price of her beauty she echoes the tyranny of Hérodiade: Men hold That woman’s beauty is a kindly thing, But they that call me cruel speak the truth, Cruel as the winter of virginity.33 Helen Vendler links the role of the Queen to Phase 14 of Yeats’s A Vision (1925), where aloof beauty is the ‘pre-eminent symbol of the poetic image’ and where ‘the Image is considered as the thing-in-itself’.34 Like Mallarmé, who used his poem’s expression of frigid beauty to explore the painful creation of poetry, Yeats uses the pathological cruelty of the Queen to evoke her tragic status, and to illustrate the ideal of art and the impersonality of the artist, whose sacrifice of detachment comes at a terrible price (poetry is created by the Swineherd at the moment of his death – when the severed head sings). But Yeats also suggests the inadequacy of language to communicate these themes as the Queen’s speech gives way to the expression of the body in a dance whose function is connotative rather than denotative, self-referential rather than producing explicit meaning. The stage directions clearly show how words cede to dance to express the extremity of emotion. The veiled Queen is initially played by a speaking actress who commands the death of the Swineherd and unveils herself so that his last earthly view will be of her face. Then, following the beheading, ‘When the inner curtain rises for the second time the player who has hitherto taken the part of the Queen is replaced by a dancer’ (390). Thus the climax of the play occurs as

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the verse dissolves into the dance, the dancer-Queen ‘partnering’ the head, the play closing as ‘she sinks slowly down, holding the head to her breast’ while two attendants comment chorus-like, in song, on the bleak situation. All that is left is ‘Their desecration and the lover’s night’ (396). We need to consider this moment in relation to Mallarmé’s poem, which was not finished in his lifetime but whose three completed sections were published in the Collected Works (in the Pléiade edition). These texts allude to Hérodiade’s relationship to John the Baptist only as an oblique intimation of the future, and no dance is mentioned. Yeats has ostensibly departed from this version. But he may have been closer to Mallarmé’s thinking about dance than is evident from the Collected Works. Gardner Davies, in his edition of undated draft manuscripts for the poem, reproduces a section that was to have followed the dialogue of Hérodiade and her Nurse. Mallarmé intimates in the notes for this scene that Hérodiade desires the Baptist’s head because he unnerved her with his uncompromising gaze and that, having had him destroyed, she commences a solitary dance, the severed head before her: l’ambiguité d’Hérodiade et de sa danse ... elle mâitrise cette tête révoltée qui a voulu penser plus haut – ou s’éteint l’idée inouïe et ... 35 [the ambiguity of Hé- / rodiade and her / dance ... / she overpowers this / outrageous head / who wanted / to think higher – / or to extinguish from him the extraordinary idea and ... ] Mallarmé’s intentions for Hérodiade are made doubly perplexing by the presence of these unfinished sketches, and, as Weinfield notes of the completed sections of Hérodiade, ‘A definitive text of the poem will probably continue to elude scholars because, as the manuscript shows ... the poet may very well have returned to older solutions or may have arrived at entirely new ones if he had actually prepared the work for publication’ (171). But the fact that Mallarmé drafted a sketch for ‘une sorte de danse / effrayante esquisse / – et sur place, sans / bouger / – lieu nul’ (Gardner, 114) [‘a sort of frighteningly exquisite dance, on the spot without moving – any place’] tantalizingly offers a potential version of Hérodiade in which the character’s ambiguity (her cold yet desirous beauty; her death-in-life existence) transcends the words of the poetic drama, to be expressed bodily in a dance. Words are transformed into a movement of frenetic energy, a perpetual

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expression of emotional intensity remaining nevertheless ‘fixed’ in its spatial and historical moment, ‘on the spot’ and in ‘no place’. Yeats’s Queen, dancing with the head, seems to echo this Mallarméan moment, but Yeats developed the role to suit his individual account of the relationship between artifice and eternity – something ‘absorbed into the poetic consciousness’, as in Phase 15 of A Vision (Vendler, 145). Critics often point to the excessively artificial and cold inhumanity of Mallarmé’s Hérodiade, her complete withdrawal into the realm of ‘artifice’ being one of the drawbacks of his presentation of her as a symbol of ideal art. Yeats, however, emphasizes the humanity of the Queen’s conflicted desires (for the man who presumes to woo her, and for her autocratic power), and from this point of view the choreographed action is fundamental to his account. Yeats’s stage directions suggest the anagnorisis of the Queen who ‘in the dance lays the head upon the throne’, thereby acknowledging the Swineherd’s right to share her kingdom, and the fact that she has fallen in love with him. Thus the dance emblematically fulfils its function as bodily expression beyond language, leaving the audience with a Mallarméan elusiveness that, in spite of its narrative gestures, only points towards meaning, never explicitly reaching it. It is difficult today to appreciate the experimental nature of Yeats’s drama, and with its highly idiosyncratic and obscure forms it is often dismissed as esoteric or élitist. Yet the self-referentiality, scepticism about language and modernist attitude to the body link the dance plays to the dance dramas of German expressionism, and anticipates the anti-romanticism of Beckett. At the time of writing, the plays are rarely performed, but a video-recording of a production of 1972 by the choreographer Jean Erdman for the Theatre of the Open Eye in New York leaves a compelling account of Yeats’s interdisciplinary modernism. The quality of the tape is poor, and some of Erdman’s production decisions tinker with Yeats’s dramaturgy, combining aspects of Full Moon with King. Yet her revival follows the poetry to the letter, and for the most part his stage directions. The production is faithful to Yeats’s economy of form, producing a surprisingly powerful sense of the original. Erdman’s production notes also reveal a sympathy with Yeats’s aesthetics when she outlines her idea of doubling an actor with a dancer (in her version, the Queen and Swineherd each have a double in a dancer), showing how the dancers’ roles express, among other things, essential moments of dialogue or aspects of character not otherwise conveyed by the actor.36 Her explanations seem entirely in keeping with Yeats’s sense of the function of dance in his verse drama, inherited from a Mallarméan poetics of dance, where bodily writing offers an alternative and a complement to verbal poetics, and shows the potential for collaboration between both aesthetic practices. From the perspective of developments in dance modernism, Yeats’s dance plays also occupy an important position between Mallarmé’s Symbolism


and twentieth-century choreography. Mallarmé’s writing on performance dance articulated his sense of dance’s new focus on itself, its transition to a modernist aesthetics privileging abstraction, and a non-representational, non-narratological potential. Mallarmé’s poetry provided inspiration, both directly and tangentially, for a number of important developments in modernist choreography. To name but two famous examples, Nijinsky’s L’Après-midi d’un faune (1912) and Martha Graham’s Hérodiade (1944) show the endurance of Mallarméan subjects for dance in the twentieth century. But they also illustrate many of his aesthetic themes in ways often overlooked by critics, from the impersonality of Nijinsky’s choreography for the nymphs of L’Après-midi, with its stylized detachment in frieze-like movements, to Martha Graham’s appropriation of a Mallarméan ‘tone’ of poetic indirection for the choreographic style and structure of Hérodiade, which, as in the poem, focuses on a ‘dialogue’ between the eponymous heroine and her companion. Graham’s piece expresses, albeit through her individual modern dance ‘language’, a curiously ‘Yeatsian’ interpretation of Mallarmé’s poem, its ineffable economy of form rendered in the gestures of an impersonal but suggestive style. These examples show the ways in which experimental modernism has drawn on close encounters between the body and the text, illustrating a more extensive reciprocation between symbolist literary aesthetics and dance than has sometimes been acknowledged.

Notes 1. Stéphane Mallarmé, ‘Autre étude de danse’ (1893–1896) from Divagations (1897), in Igitur, Divagations, Un coup de dés, ed. Bertrand Marchal (Paris, 2003), pp. 206–211. This essay was an amalgamation and revision of two pieces. The first initially appeared as ‘Considérations sur l’art du ballet et la Loïe Fuller’ in National Observer (13 May 1893); the second was written expressly for Divagations. Other significant discussions of dance, collected for Divagations, include ‘Crayonné au théâtre’ (1887), ‘Ballets’ (1886), and a note on Wagner, ‘Parenthèse’ (1886–1887). All references to these essays are taken from the above edition and page numbers included in the text. 2. Frank Kermode, ‘Poet and Dancer before Diaghilev,’ Salmagundi, 33–34 (1976), p. 41. 3. For an account of ‘the Idea’ in Mallarmé’s poetics, see Henry Weinfield, ‘Introduction’, Stéphane Mallarmé: Collected Poems, trans. Henry Weinfield (Berkeley, 1994), p. xii. 4. For further discussions of Loïe Fuller’s dance aesthetic, see her autobiography, Fifteen Years of a Dancer’s Life (Boston, Mass., 1913); Rhonda. K. Garelick, Electric Salome: Loie Fuller’s Performance of Modernism (Princeton, NJ, 2007), pp. 19–62. See also Sally R. Sommer, ‘Loïe Fuller’s Art of Music and Light,’ Dance Chronicle (1981), pp. 389–401; Ann Cooper Albright, Traces of Light: Absence and Presence in the Work of Loïe Fuller (Middletown, CT, 2007); Julie Ann Townsend, ‘The Choreography of Modernism in France: The Female Dancer in Artistic Production and Aesthetic Consumption, 1830–1925,’ Ph. D. dissertation, UCLA, 2001; Felicia McCarren, ‘Stéphane Mallarmé,

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5.

6.

7. 8.

9.

10. 11. 12. 13.

14.

15.

16.

Loïe Fuller, and the Theatre of Femininity,’ Bodies of the Text, ed. Ellen Goellner and Jaqueline Shea Murphy (New Brunswick, NJ, 1995), pp. 217–230. Quoted in Symbolism: An Anthology, ed. and trans. T. G. West (London, 1980), p. 15. Yeats and Eliot recognized in Symbolism an aesthetics that opened a space for modernism’s anti-realist strategies, though some twentieth-century modernists such as Wyndham Lewis regarded Symbolism as romantic and decadent. Textual accounts of Salome/Herodias include those in Flavius Josephus and in Mark vi, 14–29; Matthew xiv, 1–12. Varied interpretations appear from Roman times to the fin de siècle, when Salome often became a symbol of decadence. Salome and Herodias are often confused or conflated; John the Baptist’s responses oscillate between disapproval of Herodias’s marriage and her daughter Salome’s lust for him; and blame for his beheading is apportioned variously to Herodias, Salome or Herod. Nineteenth-century texts alluding to the story include Heinrich Heine, Atta Troll (1841); J. C. Heywood, Salome, the Daughter of Herodias (1862); Stéphane Mallarmé, Hérodiade (1866); Théodore de Banville, ‘La Danseuse’ (1870) and ‘Hérodiade’ (1874); Gustave Flaubert, Hérodias (1877); J. K. Huysmans, À Rebours (1884); Jules Laforgue, ‘Salomé’ (1887); Oscar Wilde, Salomé (1893); and Arthur Symons, ‘The Dance of the Daughters of Herodias’ (1897). Paintings and opera include Gustave Moreau’s Salomé and L’Apparition (1876), and Jules Massenet’s, Hérodiade (1881). Performances of the role (acted and danced), included those of Sarah Bernhardt, Loïe Fuller and Maud Allan. Bertrand Marchal, Notes, Igitur, p. 494. Mallarmé began working on Hérodiade in 1864 but never completed the poem. According to Weinfield, he ‘seems to have collapsed Herodias and her daughter Salomé into one figure’ and the story is ‘a pretext for the real subject of the poem, Beauty’ (169). Only the second section, ‘Scène’, a dialogue between Hérodiade and her Nurse, was published during his lifetime (1871). The first section, whose speaker is the Nurse, initially appeared in 1926 in the Nouvelle Revue Française; the third, ‘Cantique de Saint Jean’, where the speaker is John the Baptist at the moment of his beheading, appeared in the 1913 edition of the Poésies. See Jody Sperling, ‘Loïe Fuller’s Serpentine Dance: A Discussion of its Origins in Skirt Dancing and a Creative Reconstruction’, in Proceedings of the TwentySecond Annual Society of Dance History Scholars Conference (Stoughton, Wisc, 1999), pp. 53–56. Loïe Fuller, Holograph Notes, p. 2 (undated), for Fifteen Years, ch. 6, ‘Light and the Dance’, Jerome Robbins Collection, New York Public Library of Performing Arts. See Garelick, pp. 118–155 for Fuller’s relationship to Romantic ballet. Unnamed reviewer, The Times, 12 July 1893. For a discussion of Fuller’s relationship to the technological emphasis of Futurist theatre, see Ted Merwin, ‘Loïe Fuller’s Influence on F. T. Marinetti’s Futurist Dance’, and Amy Zornitzer, ‘Revolutionaries of the Theatrical Experience: Fuller and the Futurists’, Dance Chronicle, 21(1) (1998), pp. 73–105. Quoted in Kate van Orden, ‘On the Side of Poetry and Chaos: Mallarmean Hasard and Twentieth-Century Music’, in Meetings with Mallarmé in Contemporary French Culture, ed. Michael Temple (Exeter, 1998), p. 160. Quoted in Mary Lewis Shaw, ‘Ephemeral Signs: Apprehending the Idea through Poetry and Dance’, Dance Research Journal, 20(1) (1988), p. 8, n.1. Levinson’s remark appeared in La Revue Musicale, 5 (1923), pp. 21–33. Modified from the translation by Rosemary Lloyd and Mary Ann Caws, Mallarmé in Prose, ed. Mary Ann Caws (New York, 2001), p. 109.

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17. W. B. Yeats, ‘Among Schoolchildren’, from The Tower (1928) in W. B. Yeats, The Collected Poems (1933; London, 1982), p. 245. 18. In the second part, ‘Scène’, the reference to ‘une chose inconnue’ (Weinfield, p. 35) anticipates Hérodiade’s meeting with John the Baptist. 19. Henry Weinfield, Introduction, Stéphane Mallarmé: Collected Poems, pp. xiv–xv. 20. See Elizabeth McCombie, Mallarmé and Debussy: Unheard Music, Unseen Text (Oxford, 2003), pp. 95–154. McCombie reads Mallarmé’s poem against Debussy’s Jeux, alluding to the musical figure of ‘arabesque’, inherited from the linear ornament of early Islamic visual art and adopted by nineteenth-century composers such as Schumann, and writers such as E. T. A. Hoffman and Edgar Allen Poe. McCombie identifies in Debussy’s and Mallarmé’s methods a shift away from the notion of arabesque in musical parlance as purely ornamental, ‘namely a florid melodic line free from harmonic constraint’ (p. 101). She suggests that both artists give a greater structural centrality to fragmentation. Facilitated by the arabesque’s ornamental nature, its diversion from linear progression and its sense of always promising but never reaching absolute coherence, it becomes the central, rather than peripheral focus of the work. 21. Mallarmé, ‘Observation Relative au Poème: Un Coup de Dés jamais n’abolira le Hasard’, Cosmopolis, VI(xvii) (1897), p. 417. 22. Brian Coffey, ‘Introduction’, ‘Dice Thrown Never Will Annul Chance’: A Translation of ‘Un coup de dés jamais n’abolira le hazard’, a poem by Stéphane Mallarmé (Dublin, 1965), no page number. 23. See Coffey, ‘Introduction’, on the relationship between this poem and Joyce’s writing. 24. Paul Valéry drew on many of Mallarmé’s remarks about dance in his Socratic dialogue ‘L’Âme et la danse’ (1921). 25. ‘The Symbolism of Poetry’ (1900), in The Collected Works of W. B. Yeats, vol. 4, ed. George Bornstein and Richard J. Finnernan (New York, 2007), pp. 113–118, where he cites Arthur Symons, The Symbolist Movement in Literature (1899) as an important influence. 26. ‘Edmund Spenser’, in Collected Works, p. 275. 27. See Sylvia C. Ellis, The Plays of W. B. Yeats: Yeats and the Dancer (Basingstoke, 1995), pp. 160–177. In April 1919, Fuller’s dancing girls (not Chinese dancers) appeared at the Coliseum in London. Fuller had toured earlier in the century with Sada Yacco (Japanese). In fact, Yeats mistakenly identifies Fuller as leader of a troupe of Chinese dancers. 28. Yeats contributed to the foundation of an Irish national theatre with Lady Augusta Gregory and Miss A. E. Horniman at the Abbey Theatre, Dublin in 1904. Paradoxically, he first developed ideas for a drama to be conducted in intimate drawing room settings for private audiences. Pound was working on Fenellosa’s manuscripts of the Noh plays for publication in 1913. Yeats worked closely with Craig, the stage designer and theatrical producer he had first met in 1902. He published ‘The Tragic Theatre’ in Craig’s journal The Mask in 1910. 29. Frank Kermode, The Romantic Image (1957; London, 1971), p. 99. 30. Ninette de Valois, who founded the Sadler’s Wells (later Royal) Ballet in 1931, remained masked and silent throughout, although a ‘Second Attendant’ latterly sang ‘as Queen’. 31. W. B. Yeats, The Death of Cuchulain, Collected Plays (New York, 1952), pp. 438–439. 32. W. B. Yeats, Autobiographies (1955; London, 1973), p. 321.

Susan Jones 253 33. W. B. Yeats, The Collected Plays (New York, 1953), p. 392. 34. Helen Hennessy Vendler, Yeats’s Vision and the Later Plays (Cambridge, Mass., 1969), p. 145. 35. Gardner Davies, Stéphane Mallarmé: Les Noces d’Hérodiade (Paris, 1959), p. 111. See Ellis (pp. 25–28) for further discussion of Gardner’s edition. 36. Jean Erdman, Unpublished manuscript notes for A Full Moon in March (1972), Jerome Robbins Dance Collection. New York Public Library for Performing Arts. Manuscript consulted with permission from the estate of Jean Erdman.

15 The Erotic and the Sacred Body in Opera: The Venusberg to Monsalvat – and Beyond David Fuller

In Peter Hall’s production of Richard Strauss’s Salome, as the princess (Maria Ewing) removed the last of her seven veils, she stood for a moment, facing the audience, entirely naked. Salome offers the sight of her body, eroticized by dance, as payment for satisfying her desire for another body, eroticized (for her) by holy abstinence. Peter Hall took equal care with the presentation of that body, choosing a singer (Michael Devlin) who could appear precisely to match the terms in which Salome describes the birth of desire, as the drama presents it: ‘Wie abgezehrt er ist! Er ist wie ein Bildnis aus Elfenbein’ [How emaciated he is! He is like an ivory statue].1 Rarely in opera is the body so eroticized, and rarely can singers so present that erotic subject with such realism.2 In one way, the sensuousness of the body is central to all opera. Singing is a sensuous experience: the lips, teeth, tongue and throat are powerful vehicles of sensory awareness; the voice comes from the whole body – not just the vocal chords and the resonators of the head, but the lungs, the diaphragm muscles that support breathing, and the whole network of muscles and tendons with which the diaphragm is connected. Opera frequently taxes these physical capacities to their limits. But perhaps because singing is so physical an activity, some operas especially foreground the body as a subject – from the pathos of disease, especially diseased women (La Traviata, La Bohème), to the horrors (or pleasures) of inflicting pain (rape, beating, flogging in the early operas of Benjamin Britten). This essay considers the body as subject in four operas, in which the treatment ranges from the erotic to the sacred: Salome; Wagner’s Tannhäuser and his Parsifal; and Schoenberg’s Moses und Aron. With Salome, the treatment of the body depends on the presentation of the central figure. Salome cannot readily be placed in any moral scheme. She is corrupt, but she is also innocent. Her fascination with the prophet Jokanaan (John the Baptist), which begins before she sees him, is prompted by the 254

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mystery of his pronouncements and his denunciation of the sexual ethos of the Herodian court, with which she too is ill-at-ease. Her part-innocence is established by this, and reinforced as the action develops. The moon is an index: each character sees it differently, and in terms more indicative about them than it. To Salome it is ‘kühl und keusch ... wie die Schönheit einer Jungfrau die rein geblieben ist’ [cold and chaste like the beauty of a pure virgin].3 Jokanaan’s repudiation of Salome, identifying her with her mother, Herodias, shows that he thinks in moral terms simpler than her complex nature requires. The libretto separates and even contrasts the two women. Jokanaan’s visionary nature is not free from the fanaticism and bigotry that characterize the opera’s disputant Jews. The contrast between the diatonic simplicity of his music, expressing a vision of the power and purity of the prophet of whom he is the herald, and the chromatic complexity of Salome’s, expressing her erotic fascination with Jokanaan, reflects the fundamental oppositions of the drama, but it does not offer a ground of choice between them. Both musical modes, in their contrasted ways, offer real beauty. Salome’s extended orgasmic address to Jokanaan’s severed head (with which the opera ends) horrifies Herod, but his horror can be recognized as in part the product of his guilt: he has betrayed himself into the compact which leads to the Baptist’s execution (as he acknowledges) by illicit desire. Though Salome’s dealing with the head is a kind of rape – a sexual act, based on violence, performed against its victim’s will – for the audience the effect of the climactic kiss should not be simply horrifying. The opera fully acknowledges the fascination of being able to fulfil without restraint a forbidden desire, and a desire which, whatever its final form, has in its origin feelings about beauty and purity. The authorities who banned the play by Oscar Wilde on which the libretto is based knew what they were doing: the play does not offer an object lesson in corruption, and no more does the opera. The opera begins sympathetic to Salome, and, because of the errors and corruptions with which she is surrounded, that sympathy is never entirely lost. The suicide of the young captain Narraboth, caused by his erotic fascination with Salome and horror at her parallel (albeit more explicitly physical) response to Jokanaan, pre-figures the destructive nature of erotic obsession, but not unsympathetically. Salome is even in a way admirable in her commitment to the truly perceptive and imaginative vision of what she sees as the beauty of Jokanaan. Her initial exotic perception of his body as like lilies and roses, his hair as like cedars and clusters of grapes, his mouth as like a slash of pomegranate on a tower of ivory, is no less from the Old Testament (‘The Song of Songs’) than Jokanaan’s repudiation of her in terms of Babylon, Sodom and the sin of Eve. Though Salome’s final monologue begins in triumphant sensuality followed by repulsive mockery and violence, it returns to her primary perceptions of Jokanaan in a glowing lyrical outpouring which culminates in a musically radiant vision of his beauty as


epiphanic: ‘Wenn ich dich ansah, hörte ich geheimnisvolle Musik’ [When I looked at you I heard mysterious music] (333–338). Whether one takes it as a truth applicable only to her own actions or to love more generally, what Salome discovers through kissing the severed head is a real revelation. ‘Es war ein bitterer Geschmack auf deinen Lippen’ [There was a bitter taste on your lips]. ‘Hat es nach Blut geschmeckt? Nein! Doch es schmeckte vielleicht nach Liebe. Sie sagen, das die Liebe bitter schmecke’ [Was it blood I tasted? No! But perhaps this was the taste of love. They say that love has a bitter taste] (356–357). The music treats this as a genuine epiphany. The themes associated with Love and with Desire are played together, in an unmixed tonality (C sharp major), unusual in the constantly shifting dissonance and chromaticism of the score: full melodic statement and unusual tonal clarity express complete consummation, in which the music leads the audience to share. Strauss’s treatment maintains Wilde’s fundamental ambivalence: Salome’s desire – congruent for Wilde with the forbidden desires of the Victorian homosexual – in so far as it is corrupt, is corrupt partly as a result of being treated as horrifying. The same perspective governs Strauss’s work. The body is demonized by Jokanaan, but not by the opera. Salome; Tannhäuser; Parsifal; Moses und Aron: each taken simply demonizes the body. But each in its music and drama taken together articulates specific counter-currents, and as a group they suggest something more general: at least in this period, and in this fundamentally Wagnerian and postWagnerian musical language, it is not possible for opera to demonize the body wholly. Like Salome, Tannhäuser und der Sängerkrieg auf der Wartburg might appear to do this. Tannhäuser is the most revised of Wagner’s works, and the revisions bear on how it treats the erotic. It was first performed in 1845, and the final version of that so-called ‘Dresden’ form was completed in 1860. It was then substantially revised for performances in Paris in 1861, and the final form of the ‘Paris’ version was completed (after further revisions for Munich performances in 1867) for performances in Vienna in 1875. These multiple re-workings, over thirty years, make Tannhäuser unique in Wagner’s oeuvre.4 The basis of the drama is the struggle in Tannhäuser between Venus, archetype of the erotic, and Elizabeth, an actual woman, who is associated with religious purity and with the Virgin. The main changes of the Paris version are the addition of a ballet in Act 1, which very much extends the presentation of Venus, and a re-working of the Song Contest in Act 2 by which Tannhäuser introduces what he learnt from Venus more impatiently and provocatively. The revisions complicate, and in some degree change, the meaning of the work as a whole. The first act shows Tannhäuser in thrall to Venus and trying to escape from her. The second act is complementary: it shows his love for Elizabeth, but, in its Song Contest, Tannhäuser rejects the conventional purity-in-love of the songs of the other contestants because he remembers Venus. He recognizes

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that his feeling for Elizabeth cannot be separated from what Venus personifies: love is not love without desire, and desire is bodily as well as spiritual. The association between Venus and Elizabeth – the fact that they can be construed as complementary aspects of a single being – is sometimes symbolized in performance by having the two roles sung by the same singer. To articulate the bodily, erotic aspects of love-and-desire, for the Paris performances Wagner added to his 1845 score all that he had, by 1861, learned about the its musical portrayal from the composition of Tristan und Isolde (1856) – chromatic harmonies that restlessly evade resolution, frenetic rhythms, exotic orchestral colouration, all of which (following a French convention in opera) are used to accompany dance. And dance, of course, bears on the whole presentation of the body and the erotic. Wagner’s stage directions for the Venusberg Bacchanal indicate the tone: [Youths and nymphs] mix together in pairs; pursuits, flights and charming acts of coquetry enliven the dance ... Bacchantes ... break through the ranks of the amorous couples, inciting them to wilder pleasures ... By gestures enthused with intoxication [they] urge on the lovers to further abandonment ... The drunken revellers throw themselves into each other’s arms with the most ardent passion ... The general tumult rises to the maddest climax. (Paris version, pp. 32–56) ‘Wilder ... further ... most ardent ... maddest’: this stage vision of frenzy piled on frenzy is what the music conveys, and the choreography must embody.5 The Bacchanal shows the purely erotic, isolated from other kinds of feeling, which is what Tannhäuser rejects. But his rejection is not a total repudiation of all that Venus represents.6 The opera’s overall account of love incorporates this. When Tannhäuser dismisses the other knights in the Wartburg Contest with his song in praise of Venus, the audience on stage is scandalized; but the ideal audience in the theatre is thrilled. The view of Tannhäuser’s culture in the drama – that he is a sinner – is not the view of the opera. It is not the view of the music; it is not wholly the view of the libretto. Even Elizabeth, the drama’s great exemplar of sexual purity, holds that view only in her mind, not in her whole being: there is a conflict in her between intuitive response and conscious ethics. She loves Tannhäuser because he is different from the other knights, including his rival for her love, Wolfram, who presents a view of love endorsed by their society. The question on which the song contest is based is ‘Könnt ihr der Liebe Wesen ... ergründen?’ [Could you fathom the fundamental nature of love?] (220). Tannhäuser is prompted to intrude his song to Venus in answer to this question by Wolfram’s contribution to the Contest, ‘Und sieh! Mir zeiget sich ein Wunderbronnen’ [See! A miraculous spring is revealed to me] (230), which denies the body any place in love, and by Biterolf’s denunciation of his objection that this is

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falsely religiose sublimation.7 In ‘A Communication to my Friends’ (1851), Wagner describes Tannhäuser as ‘the spirit of the whole Ghibelline race [opponents – originally Germanic – of papal domination in central Europe: representatives of proper political and ethical freedoms] ... embraced within one only, clearly cut and infinitely moving form’.8 In the terms indicated by the music, Tannhäuser is right: a fully human love ethic needs what Venus represents, and what Wolfram denies.9 The opera as a whole implies that modes of love that incorporate what is best in Wolfram’s ethic but also go beyond it are not easily found. Between Acts 2 and 3 Tannhäuser goes on a pilgrimage to Rome to expiate his sins. Act 3 is concerned mainly with his return. His attempted penitence – which he admits has not changed his feelings about the place of desire in love (383–384) – has been rejected by the Pope, and, since he apparently cannot be forgiven, he decides to console himself with Venus. Act 3 presents a more radical opposition between Elizabeth and Venus. Even here, however, Elizabeth’s main statement, her prayer to the Virgin, ‘Allmächt’ge Jungfrau, hör mein Flehen!’ (357–360), gains much of its musical interest from the way in which the plain, diatonic harmonies of the outer sections, powerfully expressing religious dedication, frame a more dissonant, chromatic and modulatory central section admitting struggles with ‘ein sündiges Verlangen’ [a sinful longing] – that is, the kind of feelings expressed with exuberant and not at all sinful pleasure in her Act 2 greeting to the Hall of Song, ‘Dich, teure Halle’ (158–162). Similarly Wolfram’s soliloquy to the evening star – conventional in form though it still is (in effect an accompanied free recitative followed by an aria) – in its key structure is far more musically adventurous than his Song Contest offering: when Wolfram utters from the heart in private he is less bound by the conventions that restrained him in the formal public situation. The ethical conventions endorsed by his society are conterminous with musical conventions that inhibit the full beauty of expression of which he is capable. And even the more positive presentation in these two great setpiece solos of modes of feelings disjunct from those of the Venusberg is further qualified by the drama: the simple religious view – that Tannhäuser is damned – is rebutted by the miracle with which the opera ends – the blossoming of the Pope’s staff, which signifies his salvation. Tannhäuser dies, but the more comprehensive love ethic towards which he struggled is endorsed.10 The central issue of Schoenberg’s Moses und Aron is Incarnation – how the idea of a God who is ‘unvorstellbar’ [inconceivable] should be embodied. Moses and Aaron take opposite views. Moses is the prophet, working at the limits of what can be thought and expressed, opposed to offering any kind of image. He is an extreme representative of the anti-symbolic point of view, even beyond his Old Testament representation. He rejects the symbolism of the pillars of fire and cloud, and complains about Aaron communicating

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by symbols as debasing. Aaron – who is supposed to be the mouthpiece of Moses, the articulate one charged with communicating his brother’s ideas – is his complement: priestly and practical, he believes that embodiment is required to convey an adequate sense of the divine, not only to address the weaknesses of ordinary people, but inherently, so as to communicate with the full nature of humans as intellectual and emotional beings. Schoenberg expresses this difference in music by having Moses ‘sing’ in Sprechgesang, a form of speech-song which is pitch-notated, but is more spoken than sung, so that his method of communication does not distract from the Word with the auditory pleasure of beauty of sound; Aaron is a lyric tenor who is given vocal lines of (relatively speaking) a traditional kind. The contrast in their modes of expression reflects their opposite positions about how religious ideas can be conveyed. Acts 1 and 2 of the opera were written between 1930 and 1932, but though the text of Act 3 is short (it occupies only a single page of the published score), Schoenberg was never able to finish the work, which therefore ends, not, as planned, with the triumph of Moses’ view, but with Moses in despair: ‘O Wort, du Wort, das mir fehlt!’ [O word, you word, that I lack!].11 As the score stands, therefore, the music of the lyric tenor, Aaron, and the associated music of the worship of the golden calf, is simply more compelling than the music – the Sprechgesang – of Moses. There have been few productions of the opera. One of the earliest full stagings was in 1965 at Covent Garden. The director, Peter Hall, followed Schoenberg’s stage directions faithfully. Schoenberg’s widow attended, and pronounced the production just what her husband had imagined. It was a scandal. The worshipping of the golden calf is a series of orgies – ‘orgy of drunkenness and dancing’; ‘orgy of destruction and suicide’; and finally, ‘erotic orgy’. The directions Peter Hall followed include: A naked youth runs forward to a girl, tears the clothes from her body, lifts her high and runs with her to the altar ... Many men follow this example, throw their clothes off, strip women and drag them off the same way. (437–438) ‘The same way’, and for the same purpose: copulation. And there is much more in the same vein. For once the Royal Opera House attracted the attention of the popular press. The money of ordinary hard-working tax-payers was being used to subsidize filth for the rich (and so on). The News of the World (20 June 1965) headlined its report ‘Orgy Night at Opera’ (‘the outstanding scene ... is an orgy to end all orgies’). The sensational aspects were covered by local papers (the Worcester Evening News, the Aberdeen Evening Express, the South Wales Echo), few of whose readers can have been likely to attend a performance. Reporting was not confined to reviewing the production. Under the headline ‘Strip-tease trial for “orgy” opera’, the Daily Mirror


(22 June 1965) reported that ‘no stripper has yet been actually engaged’; but though the naked virgins sacrificed in the orgy of drunkenness were singers in body-stockings up until the last moment, Peter Hall finally decided they should sing from the wings, and what the Evening Standard (26 June 1965) described as ‘show girls from West End clubs’ were hired to do whatever West End show girls normally did in less exalted circumstances. A cartoon in the Daily Sketch indicates that some popular papers covered the issue so fully that it could be treated allusively.12 Seldom can the body in opera have attracted so much general attention.13 Peter Hall argued that he was trying to convey Schoenberg’s meaning: to stylize is to intellectualize, obscuring the issue – the physicality, embodiment, manifestation that makes a concept of the divine real to experience. Aaron is not simply lapsing into paganism. He has a genuine idea – that the whole being, body as well as spirit, has to be engaged. Moses accuses him: ‘Verraten hast du ... den Gedanken an die Bilder ... das Aussergewöhnliche an die Gewöhnlichkeit’ [You have betrayed the idea to images, the extraordinary to the commonplace] (503). But Aaron is not lost for a defence: ‘In Bildern sollte ich redden, wo du in Begriffen, zum Herzen, wo du zum Hirn sprichst’ [I was to speak in images, while you spoke in ideas; I was to speak to the heart, you to the mind] (503). It is a real debate, carried on in the music as well as the libretto, about how ideas can be made fully present to experience – about the place of incarnation. Aaron’s miracles, which make ideas vivid through images that give them physical form, are performed under the direction of the divine voice which at first emanates from the burning bush. The staff transformed to a serpent, seen as the Law (das Gesetz) or shrewd wisdom (die Klugheit); the leprous and cured hand, as the people’s sickness of spirit or strength of heart; the water or blood of the Nile, as Pharaoh’s kingdom nurtured by nature or nurtured by slaves: these are Aaron’s brilliant symbolic interpretations which are also practical in their astute good sense. ‘Das Sinnbild erweitert zum Abbild sich’ [the symbol enlarges to become a true representation] (180): even Moses does not object to this judgement of the people. But in his accommodation of Moses’ vision to the understanding of the people Aaron can also be seen as a deceiver: how far Moses’ promise of a sustaining ‘Reinheit des Denkens’ (purity of thought) can be translated legitimately into Aaron’s alluringly material ‘Land wo Milch und Honig fliesst’ [land flowing with milk and honey] (204) is surely questionable.14 However, though Schoenberg intended finally to endorse the view of Moses, he never composed the music that was to articulate his positives. For all his brilliance in inventing melodic and rhythmic motifs, harmonies and musical structures to express the inconceivable, the tendency of these elements – even when (as in Wagner) they are deployed and developed in specific textual and dramatic contexts – is towards pure music, or at most towards music loosely allied to meanings suggested by text. This is in part

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because Schoenberg’s harmonic technique makes such elements so much more difficult to hear than the motifs, harmonies and structures of Wagner; and in part because the texts with which they are allied are often multiple, and their meanings complex and philosophical. As a result, what analysis of the score can show, only the most extraordinarily developed ear could hear.15 In musical terms, the argument of Moses, the argument against incarnation, remains merely notional. It is a debate that bears specifically on how, in drama, words and music can convey ideas simultaneously to the intellectual and the emotional faculties; and more generally on how art can convey religious ideas. Schoenberg’s opposition to concrete representation, as articulated by Moses, negates the validity of any kind of drama, but especially the kind of drama that Wagner called a Gesamtkunstwerk [total-artwork] which conveys meaning through music, singing, and dance.16 Wagner’s Parsifal draws these lines of thought together and gives a somewhat different view. Parsifal is concerned with the sexual and the sacred body – the quest of a brotherhood of knights to recover the Spear associated with the Holy Grail, and so heal their wounded leader, Amfortas, whose sickness both epitomizes and entails their loss of spiritual power. Amfortas has failed by being lured into sexual sin. His wound, which cannot heal, symbolizes the insatiable nature of the desire to which he succumbed. But, though the wound’s origin is specific, the dramatic treatment and the music of Amfortas’s agonies, which dominate the first act, also embody a more general human angst: he is a representative figure of sin, suffering, and penitence; or (yet more generally) a figure who perceives fully and continuously the emotional and intellectual horror of the human condition. The work shows the birth of understanding in the agent of redemption, Parsifal, when he witnesses Amfortas’s sufferings;17 his temptation in a Magic Garden – an extended portrayal of the arousal of sexual desire; the failure of this temptation when, on the point of succumbing, he recoils, identifying with Amfortas and understanding the significance of Amfortas’s wound; and finally his return to the brotherhood, on Good Friday, to heal the wound and renew the fellowship of the Grail. The basis of Parsifal’s power lies partly in his innocence, partly in his sympathetic and imaginative understanding. The key phrases describing the salvific figure for whom the brotherhood must wait are: ‘Durch Mitleid wissend, der reine Tor’ [Understanding through compassion, the innocent fool] (99–100) – one, that is, whose understanding is not narrowly intellectual. Parsifal is a ‘fool’ in this sense – that he does not understand as understanding is usually conceived. His understanding is not of the mind: it permeates his whole being – hence his gestures of physical response, in Act 1, when he witnesses Amfortas’s celebration of the Eucharist (224, 225); and in Act 2, when he recalls that moment as the kiss of the seductress Kundry reveals to him the meaning of Amfortas’s wound (366) – the same gesture in each case of convulsively clutching the heart, because his understanding

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is a response based in the whole physical–mental being. The knowledge to which Parsifal’s compassion points becomes clearer to his intellect when further physical knowledge – through Kundry’s kiss – completes his understanding, and again the process begins as a physical response prompting the intelligent imagination. The subject therefore involves the sacred body, seduction and the sexual body, physical suffering and a miracle of bodily healing, and the body as an organ of understanding – understanding as an emotional–imaginative–intellectual continuum. Wagner called Parsifal ‘ein Bühnenweihfestspiel’ [a festival play of consecration], and he wanted it performed only at Bayreuth. It is clearly a work about religion. Its title description and performance arrangements might make it also appear a religious work, almost in the sense that a mass written for liturgical performance is a religious work. Certainly it deals with the sacred to an unusual degree and in unusual ways. Most obviously there is the onstage celebration of the Eucharist, which stresses the bodily suffering and the bodily gift of Christ, and uses words of consecration which recall those of the Lutheran Mass. Then, Parsifal is not only presented as salvific: he is described (by Kundry) in terms usually used of Christ – ‘Heiland’, ‘Erlöser’ [‘Saviour’, ‘Redeemer’]. In Act 3, the penitent seductress washes Parsifal’s feet, dries them with her hair, and anoints them – that is, she performs the actions of the penitent woman forgiven in the Gospel of St Luke (vii, 36–50). Amfortas identifies with the bodily sufferings of Christ: his body was wounded with and is healed by the Grail spear – the spear with which Christ was wounded on the Cross; his wound breaks open and flows afresh with blood when he acts as celebrant of the sacrament of Christ’s body and blood. So the reference to Christian narrative and ritual is various and overt. This need not be taken to imply Christian belief. Wagner saw Christian myth and ritual as having a human reality independent of their belief status. As he put it in ‘Religion and Art’ (1880), written while he was working on Parsifal: Where Religion becomes artificial, it is reserved for Art to save the spirit of religion by recognising the figurative value of the mythic symbols which the former would have us believe in their literal sense, and reveal their deep and hidden truth through an ideal presentation.18 Nevertheless, Parsifal presents peculiar problems in the sometimes uneasy relation between its non-Christian and Christian elements – the quasiBuddhist attitude to suffering and compassion, which Wagner derived from Schopenhauer, with its view of sexual desire as evil life-assertion, and the Christian view of the Incarnation that fundamentally underlies the Grail and the Eucharist, which entails the finally redeemable nature of physical existence (the credal ‘resurrection of the body’). It may be that, for the ideal audience, the contrast between the beauty of sensuous life embodied in

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the music of the Magic Garden and the horror of submission to sensuality which is the pivotal act of Parsifal’s development can be explained: Parsifal’s response to the sufferings of Amfortas is self-abnegating, an identification with what lies beyond the self; his response to Kundy’s kiss saves him from what is potentially a movement into evil self-absorption. But the variety of responses the work has elicited indicates that musico-dramatic coherence is not easily discovered, even by the composer’s most fervent admirers.19 In so far as the music and drama of Parsifal do cohere, it is because, unlike Tannhäuser, in which the ‘Paris’ additions particularly weight the musical argument towards the drama’s nominally negative pole, in Parsifal every area is presented with equal power of musical invention. The music of seduction – beautiful as it is – is beautiful in an idiom in which Wagner had written before Parsifal. The music of the brotherhood – stylistically the simplest in the opera – is simple in a new way: it is in part modal (so has a kind of antique simplicity), and in part striking for its harmonic inventiveness within (for Wagner) unusually disciplined limits (the re-harmonization of the Act 1 motif in C major in Act 3 at the same pitch but in E minor – a simple but highly expressive invention to characterize continuity with change). But most radically inventive of all – proto-Schoenbergian in its dissonance and its freedom with tonality – is the music of suffering and penitence, associated in Act 1 with Amfortas and with Kundry, and in Act 3 with Parsifal’s struggles on which the redemptive conclusion is based, the recovery of the healing celebration of the sacred body. Here, drama and music accord in presenting extremes, both of which engage the body in their articulation – an erotic–sacred polarity. *

*

*

A photograph of the great soprano Kirsten Flagstad as Kundry (see Figure 15.1) shows something of why her Wagner singing is among the most beautiful that has been preserved by recording: an action shot of the singer in performance, it shows the magnificent capacity of the lungs, which gave her a perfect legato combined with enormous, unforced vocal power, and the wonderful musculature of the diaphragm to support the breathing. Kundry, Wagner said, should look like a naked Venus of Titian. Fashions in beauty change: Titian’s Venus is not in the modern fleshless mode, but neither does she have the lung capacity and diaphragm musculature of Kirsten Flagstad.20 Like the body as subject, the body as medium in opera can be considered from many points of view: from the vogue for the castrato in heroic roles in eighteenth-century opera, to the so-called ‘trousers’ role – the female soprano as adolescent boy, overtly representing the pubescent sexuality of youth, covertly (at least for sections of the audience) presenting Sapphic sexual relations. The underlying issue common to all these forms of the


Figure 15.1 Archives]

Kirsten Flagstad as Kundry in Wagner’s Parsifal. [Metropolitan Opera

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body as a medium concerns the nature and importance in opera of dramatic illusion. Music in opera often places demands on the body which are at odds with the implications of the drama. How singers, stage directors and film-makers deal with this common musical–dramatic mismatch is revealing about the nature of opera itself. The career of Maria Callas exemplifies the problem. Photographs taken in the early 1950s show Callas with round face, sturdy arms and ample bosom. Photographs from the mid-1950s show her with thin face, slender arms and slim waist. Callas was famous not just as a vocalist but also as a singing actress, and in the mid-1950s she dieted in order to look more like her idea of the romantic heroines she portrayed. The reasons that Callas’s career was short – scarcely more than a decade – are multifarious, but one is almost certainly that drastic weight loss left her without adequate support for her voice, particularly for the top of her range, which became famously squally, thin and unreliable. Similarly exemplary – though with a difference – is the career of a great contemporary soprano, Deborah Voigt. Ms Voigt is not unusually Junoesque, for the music she sings. Other well-known recent singers of her roles in Wagner and Strauss – Rita Hunter, Jessye Norman, Jane Eaglen, Christine Brewer – are similar in physique. In 2005 Ms Voigt was engaged by the Royal Opera House Covent Garden to sing one of her most famous roles, the Prima Donna in Strauss’s Ariadne auf Naxos. In the event she did not sing in the production, it is thought because the designer said she would not suit the costume he planned. The diva who would like to look a more conventional form of the goddess she sounds does not now need to rely on dieting. She can choose surgery – the abdomino-dermato-lipectomy, an operation which involves making a small pouch out of part of the stomach and connecting it to part of the small intestine, which restricts the amount of food that can be eaten. Ms Voigt chose to have this operation, as a result of which she lost about 100lbs (45kg). She reports that she has now to use her stomach muscles differently to support her breathing. Whether this will affect her singing in other ways will only be clear in the longer term. On stage, the problem of matching the physical demands of the music and the implications of the drama can be addressed variously, from dieting and surgery to imaginative costuming and production. A competent director and designer will not present Deborah Voigt in Salome as Peter Hall presented Maria Ewing. And, within limits, on stage small roles can be acted and sung by different performers – the naked virgins of Moses und Aron as off-stage singers and on-stage ‘show girls’, for example. On stage the possibilities are limited. In film they are not. In opera films the sound-track is usually dubbed, and this can mean that the actors seen and the singers heard are not one and the same: the visual ideal and the aural ideal can both be achieved by employing different performers for each. Whether the physical ideal imagined by the drama or the presence of an actual singing

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body is more important to the expressivity of opera is in part a matter of degree: a ‘consumptive’ Violetta who appears hearty and statuesque, an Otello who is short and fat performing alongside a Desdemona who is tall and slim, are unlikely fully to satisfy the most hardened devotee of live performance, however beautifully they sing. But the possibilities opened up by film also suggest that in opera the visual implications of the drama are always secondary. Some opera films do simply use singers – the Peter Hall Salome, shot in an opera house, with the sound track and the visuals recorded together; the Huillet–Straub Moses und Aron, shot on location, with the sound track and visuals recorded separately, but with the singers actually singing when on camera. But some opera films make a complete or partial divorce between actors and singers. Petr Weigl’s film of Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin (1988) has two complete casts: one visual, one aural. The actors mime in time to the music, but they do not sing: their bodies therefore have none of the expressivity characteristic of the singing body. Some actors not only mime in time to the music, they actually mime singing, so that the performer on screen looks much more like a singer. Some films mix actors and singers: the singers who look suitable to their dramatic roles appear on screen; those who are in physique, age or whatever other way inappropriate, are represented on screen by actors. In Hans-Jürgen Syberberg’s Parsifal (1982) all these things happen: some of the cast are singers (the principal role of Gurnemanz is taken by the singer Robert Lloyd), some of the cast are actors who not only mime in time to the music but mime singing (Edith Clever as Kundry). But the role of Parsifal is treated in yet another way. The role is sung by Reiner Goldberg, but performed on screen two non-singing actors, one male, one female. The young man mimes in time to the music, but does not otherwise mime the physical actions of singing. He suggests an appearance compatible with the implications of the drama, though he looks nothing like a person who could make the sounds that purport to come out of his mouth. The young woman mimes singing: in this way she looks more plausible, but the sound that purports to come from her is even more radically impossible. With both on-screen performers there are notable but different disjunctions between what is seen and what is heard. Syberberg uses film for a radical experiment, trans-sexualizing the pure hero and so changing the gender dynamics of Wagner’s myth, as just one aspect of a multi-dimensional alienation. (The film uses Parsifal as the basis for a critique of Wagner and his place in twentieth-century German history.) This is quite different from making conventional expectations about appearance predominate in a form in which so many elements combine to make verisimilitude largely irrelevant. It does, however, bring out in a striking way a central issue about the aesthetics of opera: the importance of the physicality of singing to the expressivity of the form.

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Perhaps more than any other live performance form of high art, opera lives on an exciting edge of disaster. Performers are pressed to extremes, and at times, because of the nature of the voice, these are physical extremes. Being at the limits of possibility must sometimes mean going beyond those limits. Anybody who goes regularly to opera is likely to have seen performances in which, over-strained and exhausted, a singer gives up. But this terrible hazard of the frailty of the body as instrument has a contrary which is as thrilling as failure is excruciating – performers whose delight in the physicality of singing, and of mustering all the bodily resources required for the exuberance of success, are among the elements that draw audiences of this total art form into that state of total intellectual and emotional concentration which gives opera its peculiar intensity.

Notes 1. References to Salome are to the orchestral score published by Boosey & Hawkes (London, 1943), using Strauss’s section numbers (hereafter in the text), 78. Except as noted (for Wagner’s prose), translations are my own. 2. The production was first staged at the Royal Opera House, London, in 1992, and published on DVD by Covent Garden Pioneer. 3. The contrasted visions of Narraboth and the Page establish the motif of the moon as symbolic of the viewer’s psyche (1–3). To Herodias (prosaic) the moon is just the moon (158); to Herod she is (like him) drunk and seeking lovers (157–158). 4. See Carolyn Abbate, ‘The Parisian “Vénus” and the “Paris” Tannhäuser’, Journal of the American Musicological Society, 36 (1983), 73–123. The Peters orchestral score, Tannhäuser und der Sängerkrieg auf der Wartburg (Leipzig, 1982), gives full variants. References are to this score, by page number (hereafter in the text). 5. Among recorded productions, this is well conveyed by the 1970s Bayreuth staging, directed by Götz Friedrich, with choreography by John Neumeier (for details, see References, below). 6. In the Paris version, Venus’s apologia for herself as Queen of Love and goddess of all the graces (‘Königin der Liebe ... Göttin aller Hulden’; 147–148) is very much extended, including a whole new lyrical section of appeal (147–150), which tends to be endorsed by her accurate prevision of how the ethics of those opposed to Tannhäuser will judge him (136–140), leading to his tragic fate in Act 3. 7. In the Paris version, Tannhäuser’s critique of Wolfram’s love-without-desire ethic is expanded and more forceful, and the transition to his song to Venus more direct, because Wagner cut the song of a second minnesinger (Walther von der Vogelweide). 8. Richard Wagner’s Prose Works, trans. William Ashton Ellis, 8 vols (London, 1892– 1899) vol. 1, pp. 269–392 (p. 315). 9. Wolfram’s song, for all its beauty, is harmonically conventional. Tannhäuser’s, in its initial three-verse form (Act 1), is highly unconventional in its sequence of keys (each verse a semitone higher: D flat, D, E flat). In the Song Contest, this effect is recalled by having Wolfram’s re-assertion of his view of love end in E flat and the music lurch wildly within two bars into E for Tannhäuser’s single-verse response (257–258), thus completing the cycle of rising semitones begun in Act 1. 10. Cf. Wagner’s account of the Pilgrims’ Chant in the overture as incorporating a ‘redeemed’ Venusberg, uniting the ‘dissevered elements, soul and senses, God


11.

12.

13.

14.

15. 16.

17.

18. 19. 20.

and Nature’ (‘Overture to Tannhäuser’ (1852), Prose Works, vol. 3, pp. 229–231 [p. 231]). Whether or not one can hear the overture Pilgrims’ Chant in this way, the account shows an attitude to the apparent sacred–profane polarity made more evident musically and dramatically elsewhere. References are to the Schott orchestral score, ed. Christian Martin Schmidt (Mainz, 1977–1978; 2 vols paginated continuously) by page number (hereafter in the text), p. 502. A middle-aged man holding a paper bearing the headline ‘Moses and Aaron’ directs a young couple setting off for an evening out, ‘Straight to the ‘X’ film, mind, and no sneaking off to Covent Garden Opera’ (Daily Sketch, 21 June 1965). The Daily Mirror (22 June 1965) was less confidently allusive: its cartoon, showing the audience stripped and joining in, incorporated an explanatory note about the ‘most realistic orgy ever staged at Covent Garden opera’. Other productions, perhaps taking a cue from the fact that Schoenberg first conceived the work as an oratorio, have steered clear of the problem by following the stage directions at most partially. The 1974 film directed by Danièle Huillet and Jean-Marie Straub (see References, below), though realist in its presentation of the miracles of the staff/snake, healthy/leprous hand and Nile water/ blood, shows the orgy of drunkenness and the erotic orgy only obliquely, apparently as part of a pro-Aaron extension of what Schoenberg achieved rather than what he intended. The only recorded production generally available, directed by Reto Nickler (see References, below), is similarly non-literal with Schoenberg’s directions. A television programme about the rehearsals for the Covent Garden production of 1965 (‘Music International’, BBC 2, 5 July 1965) has not been preserved (information from the British Film Institute and BBC archives). In the opening scene the promise of the divine voice is even more forbidding: ‘Ich will euch dorthin führen, wo ihr mit dem Ewigen einig und allen Völkern ein Vorbild werdet’ [I shall lead you where you will be at one with the Eternal and a model for [example to] all people] (24–26). For what combined musical and textual analysis can show, see Karl H. Wörner, Schoenberg’s ‘Moses and Aaron’, trans. Paul Hamburger (London, 1963). That all four of the operas considered here include dance suggests that dance is congruent in its aesthetics with opera, a natural extension of the physicality already inherent in the act of singing. Though these works use dance as part of their demonizing of the body, dance can equally be associated in opera with the good, as in works ranging from Gluck’s Orfeo, in which the Elysian Fields are represented by dance, to Britten’s Death in Venice, in which Tadziu, with all he represents about ideal beauty, is a dance role. Not, as Gurnemanz proposes (138–139), when he witnesses (or joins) the celebration of the Grail Eucharist: see Parsifal’s account in Act 3 (568–569). References are to the Peters orchestral score (Leipzig, n.d.), by page number (hereafter in the text). Richard Wagner’s Prose Works, vol. 6, pp. 211–252 (p. 213). On this variety of response, see Lucy Beckett, Richard Wagner: ‘Parsifal’, (Cambridge, 1981), ch. 5. Some recent medical research on why singers are often corpulent suggests that this may result not only from maximizing breathing capacity, but also from overproduction of leptin, a protein that helps the brain assess how much fat the body is storing. Over-excretion of leptin, triggered by unusual use of the lungs, may build up a resistance which means that the brain fails to recognise excesses of fat (Dr Peter Osin, Royal Marsden Hospital, reported in The Times and BBC Music Magazine, both 28 October 2005).

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References Archive materials Moses and Aaron (in English, trans. David Rudkin), radio broadcast from the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, 1 July 1965. British Library, National Sound Archive, T59W-T59R. Radio broadcast discussion of the Royal Opera House performances of Moses and Aaron in 1965 in the series ‘Talking About Music’ (including contributions from Peter Hall, Georg Soltì and Mrs Gertrude Schoenberg). British Library, National Sound Archive, 1LP0151842. Materials related to the 1965 production of Moses and Aaron, Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, archives (production photographs, press cuttings).

Orchestral scores Arnold Schoenberg, Moses und Aron, ed. Christian Martin Schmidt, Sämtliche Werke, Abteilung III: Bühnenwerke, Series A, vol. 8/1 & 2, B. Schott’s Söhne: Mainz, 1977– 1978 (reprinted in one volume, London, 1984). Richard Strauss, Salome, London: Eulenberg, 1943. Richard Wagner, Tannhäuser und der Sängerkrieg auf der Wartburg, Leipzig: Peters, 1982. ——, Parsifal, Leipzig: Peters, n.d.

Books and essays Carolyn Abbate, ‘The Parisian “Vénus” and the “Paris” Tannhäuser’, Journal of the American Musicological Society, 36 (1983), pp. 73–123. Lucy Beckett, Richard Wagner: ‘Parsifal’, Cambridge Opera Handbooks (Cambridge, 1981). Wagner, Richard Wagner’s Prose Works, trans. William Ashton Ellis, 8 vols (London, 1892–1899). Karl H. Wörner, Schoenberg’s ‘Moses and Aaron’, with the complete libretto in German and English (a translation for singers by Allen Forte), trans. Paul Hamburger (London, 1963).

Audio-visual materials Schoenberg, Moses und Aron, dir. Danièle Huillet and Jean-Marie Straub, cond. Michael Gielen; Austrian Television/ARD, 1974; DVD, Kinokuniya (Japan), 2006. ——, dir. Reto Nickler, cond. Daniele Gatti, Vienna State Opera; DVD (Arthaus Musik, 2006). Richard Strauss, Salome, dir. Peter Hall, cond. Edward Downes, Royal Opera House, London; DVD (Covent Garden Pioneer, 1992). Wagner, Tannhäuser und der Sängerkrieg auf der Wartburg, dir. Götz Friedrich, cond. Colin Davis; Bayreuth Festival; VHS, Philips, 1978 (the Paris Act 1, with full Venusberg Bacchanale; the Dresden Act 2, with Walther von der Vogelweide). ——, Tannhäuser und der Sängerkrieg auf der Wartburg, dir. Wolfgang Wagner, cond. Giuseppi Sinopoli, Bayreuth Festival; DVD (EuroArts, 1989) (the Dresden version, with adaptations). ——, Parsifal, dir. Hans-Jürgen Syberberg, cond. Armin Jordan; TMS Films Munich, 1982; DVD (Corinth Films, 1988).

16 Celluloid Formaldehyde? The Body on Film Judith Buchanan

Explosion of a Motor Car (Hepworth, 1900), The Mystic Swing (Edison, 1900), The Haunted Curiosity Shop (Robert W. Paul, 1901), Rêve et Réalité (Pathé, 1901), The Sideshow Wrestlers (Georges Méliès, 1908), Possessed (Clarence Brown, 1931), The Wizard of Oz (Victor Fleming, 1939), Rear Window (Alfred Hitchcock, 1954). A body on screen is a mediated thing, ontologically distinguished from a body on the stage. The latter breathes the same air, occupies the same dimensions and is subject to the same laws of causation, circumstance and senescence as its audience. The former, by contrast, offers the trace memory of a person, but is not itself that person. By alluding implicitly to a prior time and another place – the place and moment of filming in which the flesh-and-blood body of the actor was physically present – the cinematic body renders conspicuous a corporeal absence from the specific space and moment of exhibition. As a testimony to personal absence, the body on screen is impervious to the presence (or otherwise) of an audience. Unlike the present-ness, substantiality and sensory responsiveness of the spectator’s body, therefore, the cinematic body is, in essence, nothing more than the two-dimensional projected play of light and shadow on a screen. Nothing more than this, and yet so much more than this. Unlike the painterly depiction of a body on canvas, for example, the cinematic body has an exact, material connection to the anatomical character, style of movement and atmospheric charge of the real-world body it formally remembers. Its particular lines and form, patterns of light and shade, anatomical, gestural and facial configurations have all, in pre-digital film-making, been imprinted on to the materiality of a sensitized strip of celluloid; and, in digital film-making, been read as optical pulses that are then converted precisely into binary code. The presentation of a body on film will necessarily be subjectively inflected by the creative interventions of director, cinematographer and lighting designer. Nevertheless, unlike the body in fine art, a body on film is not only the result of subjective artistic processes: it is also a 270

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technologically imaged reproduction of the specific body that was physically present at the pro-filmic event. It therefore bears the weight of ‘photographic truth’ – and, significantly, of the expectation of photographic truth. Moreover, in its cultural significance, the body on film is a potent force in our world: a point of desire, emulation, identification, inspiration or abhorrence. It infiltrates our individual and collective imagination, helps us to construct both ideals and monsters, and influences the way we think about ourselves and each other. It is not just ontologically, but also psychologically and socially, therefore, that the cinematic body transcends its baseline status as the mere play of light and shade on a screen. There is, inevitably, something disingenuous about the singularity of ‘the body’ to which the title of this chapter (and volume) allude: just as there is no homogenized, singular version of ‘the body’ in the real world, so there is no such unified entity in cinematic representation either. Nevertheless, by way of a sample illustration of a large subject, in this chapter I attend to bodies in their various forms as they appeared (and disappeared) in the early cinema period (1895–1913). These early years of the silent era provide an illuminating laboratory moment in which to examine bodily representation: questions of presentation and representation were still subject to unfettered experimentation during these years, but from them emerged the cinematic practices, in embryonic form, subsequently to become conventionalized in classical narrative cinema. From early cinema’s disruptive and unruly engagements with the human body, I then move to a study of how, subsequently, classical era Hollywood itself reflexively dramatized the effects of cinematic reproduction on the representation of ‘the body’ per se.

Anarchic approaches to anatomy in the early cinema period Before the emergence of cinema, the beauty and functionality of the human body had already been a subject of attentive study in Victorian optical devices. An English photographer and adventurer called Eadweard Muybridge, for example, who lived mostly in the United States, diligently produced a prolific series of still photographs of naked men and women running, jumping, wrestling, turning somersaults and otherwise displaying their form and musculature. These movement photographs were taken in quick succession, at a rate of approximately twenty-four per second. In 1887, he published the resulting extensive photographic record as part of his lavishly illustrated Animal Locomotion report.1 His studies of both people and animals in motion could be inserted as a series of still photographs into zoetropes, which, when spun, tricked the eye into eliding the space between the individual images (by means of the ‘phi phenomenon’), thus creating the illusion of movement. With his 1879 invention, the zoopraxiscope, Muybridge had also found a means of simulating continuous movement on a screen for a short action sequence by projecting at speed a limited


number of still images mounted on to a rotating glass disk. Equipped with this innovative projector and his myriad photographic studies of movement, Muybridge toured America and Europe through the 1880s and early 1890s, thus giving international audiences educative access to his tireless investigations into bodily forms, and simultaneously providing an unparalleled insight into some of the early (pre-film) possibilities of moving picture technology. Such technologies were, however, soon to be succeeded, for in December 1895, the Lumière brothers held their pioneering cinematograph screening in Paris and there followed a time of radical, heady, free-wheeling and joyous experimenting with the possibilities of the medium. If the human body had been an apt subject for Muybridge’s screen projections, it was no surprise that the new medium, with its sensitive rolls of celluloid, more versatile vertical-feed cameras and mass audiences, was happy to inherit this interest in the aesthetics and workings of the human form. In the late 1890s, cinema produced a succession of films of women dancing and of men fighting, which focused attention on bodily grace and bodily power. Additionally, production companies were not slow to capitalize on the commercial possibilities of more salacious cinematic subjects. Thus it was that short films with titles such as The Artist’s Model, Yvette Retiring to Bed, A Parisian Lady’s Bath, The Undressing of a Model, Should Ladies Wear Bloomers?, Mixed Bathing Allowed, and Why Marie Blew Out the Light frequently made the erotically-presented female body the (profitable) centre of cinematic attention in the late 1890s. Moreover, cinema’s interest in the human body was not restricted to the documentary, skittish or pornographic: its interest could also be scientific. By a remarkable coincidence of timing, the new medium was able to trade on the development of another new technology to present the workings of the body with an unprecedented level of investigative attention. At the very moment that cinema was first pointing a camera at people to display them in realistic movement for a mass audience, the human body was simultaneously becoming a renewed object of medically purposeful scrutiny through X-ray photography.2 Within two years of its first official use, the film industry had appropriated X-ray photography as a supplementary spectacle through which to market itself as a purveyor of visual marvels. Thus it was that, in 1897, a Scottish doctor, John MacIntyre, made the first of a small rush of X-ray films in Britain. Among other anatomical wonders, these made their audiences privy to the extraordinary sight of a heart pumping and a knee joint flexing. In these pioneering years of the industry, the human body could, therefore, be put on show as never before – not just, post-1901, in revealing, animated close-up, but even in its internal workings. One aspiration of the film industry in the pioneering years was, therefore, to document the world as it was, and present its wonders (including its anatomical wonders) with awe-inspiring realism in the displaced environment

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of the penny gaffs, shop-front theatres, fairground booths, variety halls and, post-1906, nickelodeons, where pictures were exhibited. Realism was not, however, the industry’s only goal in this period. A parallel movement within the industry was less interested in recording the world as it was than in transforming it into something else through the manipulative effects of trick photography. Cinematic technologies made the cinematic world amenable to a control and to fantastical experiment in excess of anything possible in the less pliable real world. One of the things that moving pictures offered was the opportunity to take the material world apart and put it back together again – and sometimes in impishly perverse or variant constructions. A fairly frequent subject of early short, comic film sketches, for example, was a mini-drama in which someone (usually a male character) was run over or otherwise caught in a disastrous accident that promptly dismembered him. Through the simple technique of stop-motion shooting (freezing the action, stopping shooting, changing one aspect of the scene and then rolling the camera again, thus creating the impression of seamless continuity in the finished film), the live actor could be substituted by a collection of scattered prosthetic body parts. Then, once a kindly passer-by with a taste for tidiness – a conscientious policeman takes on this role in Hepworth’s 1900 Explosion of a Motor Car – has collected up all the body parts and arranged them back in approximately the correct anatomical configuration to reform a person, a further invisible cut replaced the loosely reassembled body parts with the live actor once again, as if he had been magically restored to his former wholeness. At this point, he would typically hop up, dust himself down and walk away jauntily, apparently none the worse for wear for his unceremonious dismembering and matter-of-fact ‘re-membering’. It was fully evident to all that the action of such ‘trick films’ could not really have happened in the real world as presented in the cinematic one, but the films traded on the medium’s reputation for veracity to savour their own mischievous betrayal of the very ‘photographic truth’ that the actuality films of the period were simultaneously promoting. Fundamentally, the jaunty appeal of these films lay in their energetic and inventive rejection of realism, and their entertainingly uninhibited re-creation of the world their audiences inhabited. One key feature of this remade world was that bodies in it were both graphically damageable and gloriously, even comically, repairable in ways that bodies in the extra-cinematic world unfortunately were not. Relative to the total population, partially dismembered bodies were more numerous in Britain in the early years of the twentieth century than they are now. In addition to the 20,000 troops who perished in the 1899–1902 Boer War, for example, 23,000 men were also seriously injured, many of whom were shipped home, giving some social visibility to the injuries they had sustained in the cause. In addition, frequent workplace accidents (in heavy industry, foundries, mines) in both Britain and the United States, and an inability to treat


wound infections effectively, made amputees a significantly more common sight in 1898 and 1908 than they are in 2008.3 (And they were, of course, to become a yet more common sight once, post-1914, the Great War started returning shattered bodies from the front in alarming numbers.) Finding a realm – even a fantasy realm – in which the limbless could be restored to full health and mobility was, therefore, not only a comic celebration of the manipulability of the technology but also the otherwise impossible realization of a collective societal dream about bodily healing. It was this societal longing that repeatedly found breezy expression in early cinema. In a self-consciously nutty Gaumont film of 1908, The Good Child and the Veteran, it was even explicitly an old soldier to whom the child of the title conscientiously returned each of the limbs he had previously ‘borrowed’ (in an act of unsentimental and ungory dismemberment).4 However unrealistic the circumstances by which this particular old soldier had come to lose his limbs, the putting back together again of a character specifically identified as a dismembered war veteran may be seen as epitomizing a societal fantasy with some clarity. A two-minute Georges Méliès film from 1908 entitled The Sideshow Wrestlers illustrates the same phenomenon with characteristically zany insistence. It begins by showing two women in bathing suits wrestling on a variety stage. As they take their bow, they undergo a double act of bodily occlusion, their short costumes first of all being magically converted into long dresses over the top of which they then pull large veils. After a piece of obvious but effective cinematic stop-motion trickery (a Méliès signature edit), what then emerges from under the veils are not the original women, but two male wrestlers, the smaller of whom is Méliès himself. The men now continue the bout. Méliès’ opponent is floored and substituted (invisibly to the eye when the film is run at a standard projection speed)5 by a similarly sized and identically dressed dummy. The dummy is then flung wildly around Méliès’ head with apparently reckless, superhuman abandon. When dropped to the ground, the dummy – by another slyly executed stop-motion substitution – is replaced by the live actor again who leaps exuberantly to his feet to assert his rude good health, despite the apparently robust treatment he has received. Re-entering the fray, he in turn floors Méliès, and, through a further stop-motion substitution of a dummy, promptly removes his head, arms and legs. Having at first ostentatiously exulted in the dramatic disintegration of his opponent’s body, the wrestler now decides instead to put the fragmented body back together from the various parts lying strewn around the stage. Accordingly, he first lifts the torso on to a bench, replaces the limbs and the severed head in more or less the appropriate places, and then watches as the assembled body parts miraculously fuse themselves back together in a trice and jump up in the restored person of Méliès, fully anatomically coherent, to take a final bow. This was not the first time that Méliès had interfered with the coherent logic of anatomical organization. In The Mysterious Box of 1898, he had

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Figure 16.1

The Sideshow Wrestlers (Conseil de Pipelet ou un Tour à la Foire, 1908)

The cinematic body parades its liberation from the laws of anatomical frailty (and gender consistency) that govern the extra-cinematic body. Two female wrestlers magically convert into male wrestlers, one of whom is then flung around with abandon and the other chirpily dismembered before being pieced back together again. Restored to his proper self, each appears gleefully resilient and unharmed. This anarchic approach to the integrity of the body and to anatomical coherence was characteristic both of the film-maker (Méliès) and of the early cinema period more generally.


seemingly split a small boy into two with an axe, thus magically turning him into twin boys. When the twins started fighting, by means of the standard stop-motion trick, he turned one into a piece of paper (which he then ripped up) and made the other disappear inside a box. In Man with the India-Rubber Head (1902), his own head is unnervingly inflated like a balloon, getting bigger and bigger until it bursts, and in Turn of the Century Surgeon (1902), a cheery surgeon first removes, and then replaces, each of his patient’s limbs.6 In the highly inventive film, The Melomaniac (1903), as the leader of a marching band, Méliès magically produces six versions of his own head which he tosses up to act as musical notes on a giant stave in the sky (composed of telegraph wires), until his multiple heads finally turn themselves into birds and fly away. Nor was Méliès alone in pursuing such subjects. In the United States, the Scottish film pioneer William Kennedy Laurie Dickson made a film of himself with two heads, another of himself with no head at all, and yet another of himself with his head tucked under his arm. In Edison’s 1900 film, The Mystic Swing, in a series of magical demonstrations performed competitively by ‘Mephisto’ and ‘the professor’ (as the Edison catalogue describes them), two young women on a swing are made to disappear successively, one of them undergoing the prophetic and salutary business of being replaced by a skeleton. The skeleton too then disappears (again through stop-motion shooting) and by a further ‘mystic pass’, both girls magically reappear and step forward to take a bow.7 In a 1901 Robert Paul film entitled The Haunted Curiosity Shop, in a neat reversal of the usual processes of mortality and disintegration, a disembodied ghostly head becomes a woman’s head which then magically acquires an upper body and summons to itself its own smartly skirted legs, which it firmly appropriates as they glide past. Once upper and lower body are joined, the body is entire. The resulting woman performs a little jig to demonstrate her delight at her own newfound wholeness. In films of the pioneering years, therefore, not only were limbs regularly severed and put back in a spirit of madcap comedy and collective wish-fulfilment, but whole bodies were duplicated, divided, rendered transparent, converted into skeletons and made to disappear completely. The fluid manipulability of the human form was a regularly revisited subject for moving pictures. Such subjects provided the software through which the hardware of the entertaining and transformative technology of the cinematograph could be brilliantly showcased for the new audiences who were lapping up the subversive, darkly comedic and delightfully shocking viewing pleasures on offer. The cinema proved an appropriate vehicle in which to couch a recurring fantasy about release from material constriction: in its insubstantial play of light and shade on a screen, it was itself similarly released. Film subjects that rejected the real-world constraints of flesh and blood therefore demonstrated a particular affinity with their medium of presentation: bodies on screen could be nimbly manipulated because cinema itself was a highly

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manipulable medium. And while gendered identities or the inability of the body to withstand multiple amputations became subject to playful challenge in moving pictures, the chief constraint defied by the medium was mortality itself. It was perhaps no surprise that the processes of decay, disintegration and succeeding ghostliness should have been actively inverted in a film such as The Haunted Curiosity Shop, or that the grisly skeleton in A Mystic Swing should ultimately have been banished by the restored figure of the flesh and blood young women. These metaphorical reversals of the usual processes of death and decay inadvertently expressed the medium’s confidence in its own ability to preserve bodies from the ravages of time. In some respects, this confidence was not misplaced, for cinema could indeed allow its on-screen bodies to communicate their engaging nonsense, elliptical sense and, in some cases, earnest actorly endeavours, across generations beyond the natural lifespan of their real-world counterparts. Indeed, for stage actors struck by their own place in the scheme of things, it offered the means of ensuring not only the broader transmission of their genius but, importantly, the enshrining of their greatness in lasting form for posterity. The medium’s capacity to defy mortality was foreseen immediately. As early as 1895, indeed, Dickson (of the mutable head) commented admiringly on the kinetograph’s ‘ability to immortalize our fleeting but beloved associations’,8 and one of the first press reviews of the Lumière showing had been struck by something similar: ‘With this new invention,’ he wrote, ‘death will no longer be absolute, final. The people we have seen on the screen will be with us, moving and alive, after their deaths.’9 A primordial urge to preserve life by finding lasting representation for it, or better, by capturing and freezing the thing itself for all time, has a long history. In What is Cinema? André Bazin playfully suggests that a ‘mummy complex’ hovers behind the emergence and development of all the plastic arts, a desire to side-step the most fundamental rule of life and preserve the human form for the appreciation of future generations.10 One of the things the cinema incidentally does in two-dimensional, animated form, is, therefore, what embalming also tries to do: it has a stab at cheating death. But the arrival of the new medium did not strike everyone as a consoling means of preserving life. Some early picturegoers, disconcerted by the near-persuasive semblance of life coupled with its actual absence, found that images of life offered in evacuated, illusory, pulseless form were almost akin to deathliness. Maxim Gorky, for example, who was among some of the earliest audiences for a moving picture show, was unnerved by this world which he considered ‘not life but its shadow ... not motion but its silent spectre ... It is terrifying to see, but it is the movement of shadows, only of shadows’.11 It was an impression that did not entirely fade, even as the medium matured. In 1913, for example, Georg Lukács argued that the key difference between cinema and theatre was the cinema’s unsettling ability

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to turn the real substance of the world into ‘a life without a soul’.12 Its association with death came partly through its allusion to the other body, the one with three dimensions and a pulse that had been present at the pro-filmic event and was now elsewhere, not preserved, but ageing, dying or indeed already gone. Like an inversion of The Picture of Dorian Grey, the cinematic body offered a standard against which the degradation of its flesh and blood equivalent could be measured the more disturbingly. For those inclined to read it thus, therefore, cinema was a medium implicitly inscribed with the very mortality that others saw it as defeating. Some of the subjects of early films even dramatized this anxiety about the cinema’s theft of life, in more or less comic vein. In a 1901 film entitled The Big Swallow, from British production company Williamson, for example, a man is so profoundly disconcerted that someone is presuming to capture his image on film that he retaliates by advancing on, and apparently swallowing, both camera and cameraman. Another British film from 1903 shows Isadora Duncan, in a piece of neatly executed superimposition, being invited by a group of male film-makers to view a framed moving picture of her own self dancing, the framed image propped incongruously on a studio easel. Having perhaps expected to be shown a still painting in this studio context, Isadora appears so profoundly troubled at the sight of her own animated image, that she picks up the picture containing her dancing self and smashes it to the floor in a fit of pique: evidently, this was not the form in which she might have wished to be preserved for future generations. Such a feisty piece of female intervention into the male appropriation of her own screen image unwittingly prefigured some of the debates about how film has typically engaged with the female form. These debates – to become temporarily central to film theory seventy years later – grew out of what was perceived as an objectifying and reifying tendency that idealized the female form while simultaneously paralysing it in terms of determining the aesthetic or narrative drive of a film. Such representational tendencies, identified in the 1970s,13 were, in fact, established early in the history of cinema. In Rêve et Réalité (Pathé, 1901), for example, a man in his middle years enters a restaurant with a young, beautiful woman. They sit and chat vivaciously and she darts him little flirtatious looks. Encouraged, he leans in for a kiss: she acquiesces happily. As his lips touch hers, however, the scene cuts from what is now retrospectively understood to have been a dream to the considerably less glamorous waking world. The woman he now finds himself kissing turns out not to be the desirable companion of his imagination but his toothless crone of a wife sitting up in bed next to him in a disappointingly sensible nightshirt. In this early film’s contrast between worlds, it is, characteristically, the male character whose subjective vision finds cinematic expression. And what transformations from the disappointments of the everyday does his

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fantasy effect? A flawed and ageing female body is reconfigured as a young, attractive and sexually accommodating one. It is an early example of a cinematically-realized fantasy that has found repeated expression in the ways in which women have appeared on screen since.

Self-reference and the privileging of the cinematically framed body Structuring a film around a comparison between the prosaic stuff of the quotidian world and a glamorized dream version of it was to remain a popular cinematic device. As the industry developed, however, the comparison between rêve and réalité was often additionally to assume self-referential overtones. MGM’s The Wizard of Oz (Victor Fleming, 1939), for example, colourfully illustrates the way in which counterpointed worlds of dream and waking could also trail an allusive interest in the relationship of the cinematic world to the real one. At the film’s opening, Dorothy imagines herself transported from the ordinary world of rural Kansas to a far from ordinary place ‘over the rainbow’. She reaches the new world of heightened (techni)color and transformed bodies by being carried in her own farmhouse up into a twister. While up in the cyclone she is made privy to a show that seems to be taking place within the frame of her own bedroom window. This window conspicuously trails its kinship with a cinema screen. Its aspect ratio mimics that of a 16:9 film frame, and Dorothy’s own position looking on is evocative of that of the cinema spectator. And what does Dorothy see on this cinema-imitative screen? She initially sees the characters from her own world in Kansas floating past her field of vision: Aunty Em doing her knitting in a rocking chair; two of the hapless but well-meaning farm hands who lack courage and brains respectively; and Miss Gulch, the mean-minded neighbour. Each is neatly framed for her by the casement of her window, which contains and so implicitly privileges the images that appear within its circumscribed borders. As Dorothy watches, however, the seemingly ordinary, familiar figures in her window take on a heightened charge. So it is, for example, that Miss Gulch on her bicycle morphs alarmingly into a witch on a broomstick. And we know that in good time the film will complete that process of transmutation suggestively begun within the window frame: the good-hearted farmhands will themselves be magically converted into more sympathetically exaggerated versions of their former selves (a lion, a tin man and a scarecrow) while Professor Marvel, the kindly travelling Kansas magician and small-time charlatan, will become reconfigured as the Wizard of Oz himself. Witnessing the potential of a screen-evocative window to transform the ordinary fabric of life into a more compelling version of its former self serves

Figure 16.2 The Wizard of Oz (MGM: Victor Fleming, 1939) In the out-of-kilter, sepia-world of the cyclone, mean Miss Gulch (Margaret Hamilton) appears on her bicycle in the window frame of Dorothy’s bedroom, where she is transformed in stages into a heightened version of herself as the wicked witch. Dorothy (Judy Garland) looks away in fright.

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as an apt aperitif to one of the concerns of The Wizard of Oz as a whole. The film’s engagements with the processes of cinema, referenced so directly in the window scene, permeate the entire story, the implicit parallelism between the transformative world of Oz and that of the cinema screen forming a sustained part of the film’s sub-text. In the land of Oz, as in the cinema itself, the personnel on offer have been inspired by the familiar components of the everyday world. They are not, however, obliged to adhere consistently to the rules that govern operations on this, the Kansas-side of the rainbow. The dimension they inhabit is richer, more colourful, more dramatic, more narratively and plastically permissive. It is precisely such a process of privileging and transformation that Gilberto Perez sees as characteristic of all cinematic images: [I]mages on the screen carry in them something of the world itself, something material, and yet something transposed, transformed into another world: the material ghost. Hence both the peculiar closeness to reality and the no less peculiar suspension from reality ... of the film image.14 However mundane or uninspiring people might be in the extra-cinematic world, as they appear on the screen significance is vested in them by virtue of the fact that they occupy the brightly-lit, bounded space at which we are invited to gaze. The Wizard of Oz appropriates this truth and turns it into a story of hyperbolized dimensions. The dual play of proximity to and distance from the stuff of the ordinary world that animates The Wizard of Oz had been poetically encoded in distilled, offhand form several years before in a memorable scene from MGM’s Possessed (Clarence Brown, 1931). A provincial girl (Joan Crawford) finds herself on a railway station platform dreaming of the exciting metropolitan places from which the train might have come and to which it might be going, while she, by contrast, remains dead-ended in her more humdrum small-town world. Pre-figuring Dorothy’s private quasi-cinematic experience while up in the cyclone, the scene self-consciously enacts the relationship of the spectator’s body excluded from a moving picture frame to that of the characters displayed within it. The girl looks in through the carriage windows at a series of mini-narratives taking place in different, brightly-lit compartments within the train as it moves slowly along the platform past her. Not only are the train windows of an appropriate shape and dimension once again to suggest a series of cinema frames, but even the rivets around each window are neatly evocative of sprocket perforations, creating a clear visual rhyme between the slowly moving train and a gently unspooling strip of film. Unremarkable details of life glimpsed within the train – waiters mixing cocktails, a maid folding laundry, a man shaving, and, more glamorously, a

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Figure 16.3

Possessed (MGM: Clarence Brown, 1931)

A small-town girl (Joan Crawford) laps up glimpses of another world exhibited in the windows of a slow-moving train.

woman dressing and a couple dancing – act as signposts to another world, offering enticing cameos to the girl on the platform and through her to us. The encasing frame in each case focuses and enhances the appeal of the figures it exhibits – even in their apparently inconsequential detail. And it simultaneously configures the girl on the platform, here serving as on-screen proxy for us, as a voyeur, beguiled but excluded from the central action, invited in but simultaneously allowed the luxury of anonymous observation as a looker-on and a looker-in. What in The Wizard of Oz is a briefly-alluded-to parallel that then implicitly informs the rest of the film, and in Possessed a poetically conjured but passing self-referential metaphor, in Rear Window (Paramount: Alfred Hitchcock, 1954) becomes explicitly the central visual and narrative conceit. As Jeff’s (James Stewart) wheelchair-bound fixed position at his own window makes of him another on-screen spectator, the film reflects on the processes by which the ordinariness of the extra-cinematic body assumes an intensified significance and appeal by being placed within the removed space of a two-dimensional frame. The temporary incapacity that Jeff’s broken leg visits upon him gives him access to the lives showcased in little cinema-evocative windows in the apartments across the rear

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courtyard. Although the delectable Lisa (Grace Kelly) floats temptingly around his apartment wearing an array of heavenly dresses and making herself plainly available to him, he is unmoved by her, attending obsessively instead to the objectively less appealing lives playing out on the other side of a pane of glass, in the apartments opposite. These include a near-suicidal middle-aged single woman, ‘Miss Lonely Hearts’; a henpecked, murderously-inclined husband, Thorwald; and the ultra-bendy ‘Miss Torso’, a less classy version of stereotypically desirable womanhood than the one explicitly on offer in the unmediated space of Jeff’s own apartment. It is only when Lisa (Kelly) leaves that shared space and, breaching the implied fourth wall, crosses consciously into the domain in which those other, more distanced narratives play out that Jeff’s desire for her is then aroused. Her body as it appears within the window frame of the apartment opposite, in the space the film implicitly designates ‘cinematic’, and, yet more explicitly, as viewed through Jeff’s telephoto lens, seems to carry a more vivid, a more dramatic, a more arresting, and, in context, a more appealingly vulnerable charge than it had done when telegraphing its availability to him in his own domestic space. With a wry intuition about how to engage his interest, Lisa has entered the plane of his fantasizing gaze and he quite literally now sees her differently, through an intervening lens and, therefore, as a character whose narrative merits attention and whose body – distanced, objectified and now titillatingly placed in danger – has become desirable partly as a result of its newly acquired combination of visibility and inaccessibility. Rear Window’s self-conscious reflection on the heightened fascination of a cinematically framed body suggests that the appeal of that body rests in part on its tantalizing separation from the fabric of our own world. Cinematic images play out in what Perez calls a ‘spellbinding elsewhere’ (my emphasis). In that elsewhere, we can gaze at, admire, despise and even imagine ourselves as that cinematically framed body with impunity, enjoying its imperviousness to our unabashed scrutiny, to our processes of identification and rejection, and indeed to our very existence.15 In Rear Window, the delicious impunity of Jeff’s surveillance mimics our own. His, however, is finally compromised when the threatening character from the world he has been observing breaks the bounds of the frame in which he has been so minutely scrutinized and, reversing Lisa’s own movement into the frame of the action, exits that realm to stage a troubling counter-invasion of Jeff’s spectatorial space. In our own movie-going, the space of the cinematic fiction and the space of real-world reception may sometimes give the illusion of being permeable in the temporarily but intensely engaged world of our cinematic imagination.16 In fact, however, in ways that should, perhaps, chiefly reassure, the two domains remain mutually impenetrable.

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Figure 16.4

Rear Window (Paramount: Hitchcock, 1954)

One of the cinema-evocative windows in the apartments opposite – ‘Miss Lonelyhearts’ entertains an imaginary suitor to dinner. 2. The intensity of Jeff’s (James Stewart) voyeuristic interest in the lives of those on ‘cinematic’ display. 3. Jeff’s lack of passionate engagement with the unmediated presence of Lisa (Grace Kelly) in his own apartment. 4. Lisa enters the plane of Jeff’s obsessive gaze. 5. Once in that space, she places her own body self-consciously on display to Jeff, suggestively drawing his attention to the wedding ring she has donned, both as evidence of a crime committed and, presumably, to suggest a possible future for herself. 6. Jeff’s anxiety and desire for Lisa are now assured.

*

*

*

Having flown over the rainbow in a twister at the opening of The Wizard of Oz, Dorothy lands with a bump in Oz. She emerges from her sepia-toned little farmhouse into a world of heightened design and transmuted body

Judith Buchanan 285

forms. She looks at this remade world, turns to her little dog and utters the memorable line: ‘Toto, I have a feeling we’re not in Kansas any more.’ We smile at the wry understatement of the moment. This transformed world is certainly not Kansas. It is wonderfully, hyperbolically removed from the stuff of the everyday. As a metaphor for the processes of cinema itself, The Wizard of Oz reminds us of the symbolic journey we undergo as we pay for our cinema ticket and take our seat. It is, after all, a luxurious thing to be able to participate – if only temporarily – in a projected world of shifting patterns of light and shadow in which even the mundane can become interesting when caught within its own cinematic frame, where stories are narratable and even completable, and where the bodies put on display for our desirous and self-identifying gaze, unlike the disappointingly mortal version that we inhabit in the material world, are gloriously impervious to the inexorable processes of disease and decay.

Notes 1. Eadweard Muybridge, Animal Locomotion: An Electro-photographic Investigation of Consecutive Phases of Animal Movement (Philadelphia, 1887). 2. Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen developed the process in late 1895. 3. See C. Eastman, Work-accidents and the Law (New York, 1910); J. K. Corn, Response to Occupational Health Hazards: A Historical Perspective (New York, 1992). 4. See Ian Christie, The Last Machine: Early Cinema and the Birth of the Modern World (London, 1994), pp. 85–86. 5. Amid a variety of projection speeds used in the silent era, approximately 16 frames per second was relatively standard. A stop-motion substitution between frames would therefore be implemented in the sixteenth of a second – not clearly discernible to the human eye. For an account of variable projection speeds, see Kevin Brownlow, ‘Silent Films – What Was the Right Speed?’, Early Cinema: Space, Frame, Narrative, ed. Thomas Elsaesser (London, 1990), pp. 282–292. 6. Compare this with a three-minute 1903 German medical film entitled Unterschenkel-amputation (a surviving print of which is held at the Thackray Museum of Medicine, Leeds), which faithfully recorded a real surgeon, Professor Dr. Ernst von Bergmann of the University of Berlin, efficiently amputating a lower leg. (Needless to say, the leg was not in this case subsequently restored to the amputee.) 7. Edison films catalogue, n. 105 (July 1901), p. 85. 8. W. K. L. Dickson and Antonia Dickson, History of the Kinetograph, Kinetoscope and Kineto-phonograph (New York, 1895), p. 52. 9. Quoted in Neil Sinyard, Silent Movies (London, 1990), p. 16. 10. André Bazin, ‘The Ontology of the Photographic Image’, in What is Cinema?, Vol. I, trans. H. Gray (Los Angeles, 1967), pp. 9–16 (p. 9). 11. From Maxim Gorky, ‘The Kingdom of Shadows’ (1896), Authors on Film, ed. Harry M. Geduld (Bloomington, Ind. and London, 1972), pp. 3–7 (pp. 3, 4). 12. Georg Lukács, ‘Thoughts on an Aesthetic for the Cinema’, Framework, 14 (1981), p. 3. First published in Frankfurter Zeitung (10 September), 1913. 13. See, most influentially, Laura Mulvey, ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’, Screen, 16 (3) (Autumn 1975), pp. 6–18.

286


14. Gilberto Perez, The Material Ghost: Films and their Medium (Baltimore, MD. and London, 1998), p. 29. 15. Perez, The Material Ghost, p. 1. 16. Some films themselves fantasize about that permeability. The Purple Rose of Cairo (Fox: Woody Allen, 1985), for example, allows a desirable movie character to walk straight out of the screen and into the life of a female spectator. And Last Action Hero (Columbia Pictures: John McTiernan, 1993) shows a fan first of all himself being absorbed into the fictional world of the screen and then chased back into the extra-cinematic world by criminals from that screen world.

Index Note: Illustrations are listed in italic.

Abernethy, John, 72 Abse, Dannie, 74, 75 Adorno, Theodor, 127–8 Alcestis, 105 alchemy, 59–61, 67 Alice in Wonderland, 63 Alice Through the Looking Glass, 188 Allan, Maud, 239 Allbutt, Clifford, 121 Alzheimer’s disease, 78 Amys and Amylion, 93–4, 96 Ancrene Wisse, 97 Aquinas, St Thomas, 39 arabesque, 243 Arachne, 197–200 Ari, Nisa, 183 Aristotle, 13, 14–17, 18, 21, 48, 60–1, 69, 117, 127 Arnold, Matthew, 103, 107–9, 113 Auerbach, Frank, 176 Auden, W. H., 151, 152, 155–6 Augustine (St Augustine of Hippo), 26–7, 29, 34 Austen, Jane, 148 Avril, Jane, 239 Bachelard, Gaston, 55, 56 Bacon, Francis (painter), 79, 144, 175, 176, 179, 180, 183 Bacon, Francis (Viscount St Alban), 30, 46–7 Balmond, Cecil, 196–7 Banister, John, 41, 44 Barthes, Roland, 66–7 Bauhin, Caspar, 42 Bazin, André, 277 Beaumont, Francis, 49 Beckett, Samuel, 68, 121–3, 125–8, 249 Beddoes, Thomas, 64 Bell, Clive, 143 Bernard of Clairvaux, 97

Bernini, Giovanni, 29, 30, 212 Bible, 27, 32, 34–5, 47, 56, 58, 93, 94, 255, 258 Epistles of St Paul, 28, 35, 103 Genesis, 39, 97 Gospels, 31, 32, 94, 103, 104, 111, 26 Song of Songs, 28, 97, 254 Boethius, 89–90 Book of Common Prayer (1662), 26, 161 Borland, Christine, 78–9, 80, 81 Boucher, François, 170 Boulay, Juliet du, 50 Bourgeois, Louise, 189, 191, 192, 196–201, 200 Bowery, Leigh, 181 Bowler, Henry, 104 Bradley, A. C., 113 Britten, Benjamin, 254, 268 Brooks, Cleanth, 142 Browning, Robert, 105–7, 111–13 Bry, Theodore de, 44 Buchanan, Robert, 108 Bucklow, Chris, 191, 205 Bullinger, E. W., 58 Bunyan, John, 153 Burke, Edmund, 196 Burne-Jones, Sir Edward Coley, 170 Burns, Robert, 28 Burton, Robert, 45, 47 Byatt, A. S., 198 Caillois, Roger, 199 Calatrava, Santiago, 189, 192 Callas, Maria Meneghini, 265 Callen, Anthea, 174 Calvin, John (Jean), 31–3, 49 Camporesi, Piero, 50 Caravaggio, Michelangelo Merisi da, 2, 29, 202 Cavarero, Adriana, 201 Chabert, Pierre, 125–6 Chapman, Alexander, 43–4 287

288

Index

Chaucer, Geoffrey, 89–90, 92 Cheron, Louis, 167 Christ, 3, 29, 30–5, 94, 95, 97, 98, 99–100, 195, 262 Christianity, 4, 25–36, 39, 94, 96–7, 103–14, 136, 161, 262, see also Bible, saints; fundamentalism Christie, Agatha, 152, 154–6 Christine de Pizan, 198 Cicero, Marcus Tullius, 169 Clark, Sir Kenneth, 175 classical period, see under individual artists, philosophers and writers Clever, Edith, 266 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 64, 106, 109 Collins, Wilkie, 149 Columbo, Realdo, 41 Conan Doyle, Sir Arthur, 149, 159 Connor, Steven, 126 Conrad, Joseph, 135, 141–2 Constable, John, 172–3 Coomaraswamy, A. K., 195 Cornalba, Elena, 239 Cornforth, Fanny, 172 Cotgrave, Randle, 41 Craig, Edward Gordon, 246 Crick, Francis, 137 Crooke, Helkiah, 42, 44, 45 Cross, Dorothy, 190, 201–4, 203 Cross, Tom, 202, 204 Daly, Mary, 198 Damasio, Antonio, 132, 135 dance, 3, 6, 237–50, 257, 268 Dante Alighieri, 27 Darwin, Charles, 174 Darwin, Robert, 120 Davidson, John, 111–12 Davies, Gardner, 248 Davy, Humphrey, 64 Dawkins, Richard, 133 de Quincey, Thomas, 150 Deakin, John, 179 Dennett, Daniel, 133 Derrida, Jacques, 123, 133 Descartes, René, 51, 117, 131, 133 Devlin, Michael, 254 Dewey, John, 132, 133 Dickens, Charles, 69, 104

Dickson, William Kennedy Laurie, 276, 277 Dittrick Medical History Centre, 73, 74 Dobell, Sidney, 107–8 Donne, John, 28–9, 44, 45, 48 Doryphoros (classical statue), 11, 12 Dostoevsky, Fyodor, 104 Dove, George, 155–6 Du Laurens, André, 42 Du Maurier, George, 175 Duncan, Isadora, 239, 278 Dyson, Freeman, 187–8 Eastman, George, 118 Edelman, Gerald M., 133 Edison, Thomas, 276–7 Einstein, Albert, 209 Eliot, T. S., 63, 95–6, 132, 134, 135, 136–7, 143, 237, 239, 241, 243, 245 Erdman, Jean, 249 Etty, William, 165–8, 166, 173, 176, 178, 181 Evans, Martyn, 82 Everyman (play), 88 Ewing, Maria 254, 265 Falconet, Étienne, 170 Fenellosa, Ernest, 246 film, 3, 6 Flagstad, Kirsten, 263, 264 Fletcher, John, 49–50 Fludd, Robert, 44, 47 Foster, Hal, 138 Foucauld, Charles de, 43 Foucault, Michel, 4 Frazer, Sir James, 103 Freud, Lucian, 165, 175, 179, 181, 182, 183 Freud, Sigmund, 65, 117, 118, 126, 133, 144, 202 Frith, William Powell, 173 Fry, Roger, 135, 143 Fuller, Loïe, 6, 237–43, 238, 245–6 fundamentalism (Christian), 31–2 Fuseli, Henry, 178 Galen, Claudius, 22, 40, 87 Gehry, Frank, 189 Giddens, Anthony, 4 Gnostics, 25

Index Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 120, 189 Goldberg, Reiner, 266 Goodyer, Henry, 45, 48 Gorky, Maxim, 277 Gormley, Antony, 6, 209–36 Allotment II, 217–18, 218, 233 Another Place, 223–5, 224, 225, 226 Bodies in Space V, 231, 232 Body, 227, 228 Clearing I, 235, 236 Domain Field, 234, 234 Drawn, 218–20, 219, 235 Exercise between Blood and Earth, 225–7, 226 Feeling Material XIII, 234–5, 235 Full Bowl, 209–11, 210 Inside Australia, 230–1, 231 Insider, 227–30, 229 Land, Sea and Air II, 213–15, 215, 216 Quantum Cloud, 233, 233 Room II, 217, 217 Room for the Great Australian Desert, 216, 216 Still Running, 227, 227 Three Ways: Hole, 212, 213 Three Ways: Mould, 211–12, 211 Three Ways: Mould, Hole and Passage, 212, 212, 216 Three Ways: Passage, 212, 214 Total Strangers, 220–3, 221, 222 Transfuser I, 231–3, 232 Graham, Martha, 250 Grünewald, Matthias, 3, 31 Guillaume de Lorris, 88 Guinter, Johann, 40, 49 Hagens, Gunther von, 2, 81 Haggard, H. Rider, 113 Hall, Peter, 254, 259–60, 265, 266 Hamnett, Nina, 174 Hardy, Thomas, 87, 100 Harvey, William, 42, 44, 45, 46, 48, 51 Heidegger, Martin, 117 Heine, Heinrich, 108, 237, 247 Henryson, Robert, 92–3 Hepworth, Cecil, 273 Hercules, 105, 106 Herodotus, 194 Heydon, John, 55, 60 Highsmith, Patricia, 157

289

Hiller, Susan, 205 Hippocratic medicine, 19–20, 87–8 Hitchcock, Alfred, 282–3 Hobbes, Thomas, 51 Hogarth, William, 172 Holocaust, 33 Holy Grail, 95–6 Hopkins, Gerard Manley, 35 Hughes, Ted, 105 Huillet, Danièle, 266 Hulme, T. E., 63 Hulyer, Frank, 75 Huxley, Aldous, 135 Huyghe, Pierre, 191, 205 Ishiguro, Kazuo, 145 Ito, Michio, 245 Jacobus, Mary, 194 James, Catherine, 67 James, Henry, 141 James, P. D., 148–61 Death in Holy Orders, 153, 159 Death of an Expert Witness, 158 Devices and Desires, 154, 157 The Lighthouse, 151, 154, 158, 161 A Mind to Murder, 158 Original Sin, 151–2, 154, 159 A Taste for Death, 151, 153, 157, 159 An Unsuitable Job for a Woman, 152–3 James, William, 131–2, 133–5, 138, 139, 143, 145 Jameson, Fredric, 145 Jean de Meun, 88 jellyfish, 202–4 Jenour, Alfred, 58–9 Jesus, 103, see also Christ John, Augustus, 175 John, Gwen, 174 ‘John Barleycorn’ (folk song), 63 Joyce, James, 123, 124–5, 127, 135, 141 Julian of Norwich, 98–9 Kalevala, 56–7 Kant, Immanuel, 65, 133, 196, 219 Kapoor, Anish, 189, 192–7, 193 Keats, John, 204 Kember, Sarah, 192 Kempe, Margery, 34, 98–9 Kermode, Frank, 237, 242, 246

290 Index Kingsland, Robin, 65 Klopstock, Friedrich Gottlieb, 110–11 La Goulue, 239 Laennec, René, 120 Laforgue, Jules, 237, 247 Landseer, Sir Edwin, 173 Langland, William, 88, 97 Lawrence, D. H., 135 Lawrence, Sir Thomas, 168 Leavis, F. R., 113, 134, 142 Leonardo da Vinci, 2, 109 leprosy, 92–4, 95, 100 Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim, 211 Levin, David Michael, 122 Levinson, André, 240 Libeskind, Daniel, 189 Lloyd, Robert, 266 Long, Edwin, 169 Longinus, 195 Lukács, Georg, 277–8 Lumière brothers, 272 Luther, Martin, 27, 28, 34 MacIntyre, John, 272 Maeterlinck, Maurice, 245 Mahler, Gustav, 110–11 Mallarmé, Stéphane, 6, 237–50 Malory, Sir Thomas, 90–1, 95–6 Mankind (play), 88 Mann, Thomas, 119 Marey, Etienne-Jules, 118, 120 Marsh, Ngaio, 149 Marsyas, 192–7 Martin, John, 195 Marx, Karl, 116 Mary (Mother of Christ), 27–8, 32, 97–8 Massenet, Jules, 237 Maturana, Humberto, 133 Mauron, Charles, 135 McCombie, Elizabeth, 244 McEvilley, Thomas, 196 McLachlan, John, 76 McLuhan, Marshall, 118 Mede, Joseph, 46 Méliès, Georges, 274–6, 275 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 4, 87, 116 metamorphosis, 186–206, see also Ovid, Arachne, Marsyas, Pygmalion Michelangelo Buonarroti, 3, 35, 109, 194

Milner, Marion, 194 Milton, John, 55 modernism, 2, 5, 116–30, 141, 209, 220, 237, 245, 249–50, see also individual writers monasticism, 27 Moore, G. E., 139–40 Moraes, Henrietta (Wendy Abbott), 179 Moreau, Gustave, 237 Morris, A. J., 107 Morris, Jane, 172 Morrison, Toni, 205 Moss, Kate, 181 Mulready, William, 173 Munnings, Sir Alfred, 178 Murdoch, Iris, 140 Muybridge, Eadward, 271–2 Nagel, Thomas, 138 Nashe, Thomas, 48–9, 50 Neo-Platonism, 25 Newton, Sir Isaac, 204 Nijinsky, Vaslav, 250 Nochlin, Linda, 183 opera, 3, 6, 254–67 Origen, 28 Osiris, 103 Oursler, Tony, 191, 205 Overton, Richard, 52 Ovid (Publius Ovidius Naso), 88, 169–70, 186–7, 192–4, 197–8 Paddon, Thomas, 103 Paget, Sir James, 174 Paracelsus, 47 Pasteur, Louis, 65 Pater, Walter, 109–10, 113, 134–5 Patmore, Coventry, 174 Paul, Robert, 276–7 Pearl, 97 Peninsula Medical School, 76 Perez, Gilberto, 281, 283 Persephone, 103, 109 Perugino, Pietro, 31 physiognomy (classical theories of), 4, 15–17 Plato, 13, 17–21, 25–6, 117, 133, 168, 186 Pliny the Elder, 55, 169 Plotinus, 24, 25

Index Plutarch, 18 Polanyi, Michael, 142 Polwhele, Robert, 64 Polyclitus (Polykleitos), 11–13, 14, 16, 18, 20, 21 Pope, Alexander, 2 Porter, Roy, 82 Possessed, 281–2, 282 Poulenc, Francis, 34 Pound, Ezra, 116, 246 Preece, Patricia, 178 Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, 172, see individual artists and models Prettejohn, Elizabeth, 172 Proust, Marcel, 112, 135 Puccini, Giacomo, 254 Pygmalion, 169–71, 178, 181 Quayson, Ato, 205 Quinn, Marc, 79, 81 Rankin, Ian, 74 Ransom, John Crowe, 143 Raphael (Raffaello Sanzio), 31, 167–8 Rear Window, 282–3, 284 Reiser, Stanley, 121 Rembrandt (Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn), 195 resurrection, 103–14 Reynolds, Sir Joshua, 168 Richards, I. A., 134, 135, 143 Rig-Veda, 56 Rodin, Auguste, 175, 209 Roman de la Rose, Le, 88–9, 97 Romanticism, 2 Röntgen, Wilhelm, 116, 118–20 Rorty, Richard, 133 Rossetti, Dante Gabriel, 113 Rowlandson, Thomas, 170, 171, 178 Rubens, Peter Paul, 28, 166, 168, 182, 195 Ruskin, John, 173 Russell, Bertrand, 137 St Anselm, 32 St Antony, 27, 29 St Athanasius, 27 St Bernard of Clairvaux, 28 St Brigitta of Sweden, 29 St Catherine of Siena, 34

St John of the Cross, 28–9 St Paul, 27, 28 St Sebastian, 3 Saville, Jenny, 182–3, 182 Sayers, Dorothy L., 149, 159 Scarry, Elaine, 94 Schoenberg, Arnold, 254, 258–61 Scot, Michael, 61–2 Scudamore, W. E., 58 Senancour, Étienne Pivert de, 108, 109 Serres, Michel, 123 Servetus, Michael, 49 sexuality (attitudes to), 26–30 Shakespeare, William, 1, 2, 46, 55, 165 Shklovsky, Viktor, 135 Sickert, Walter, 165, 175–6, 177, 178 Siddall, Elizabeth, 172 Simmel, Georg, 134, 135 Sinclair, Simon, 75 Sir Orfeo, 91–2 Smith, Alison, 166 Smith, Kiki, 189, 190 Socrates, 13, 17, 136 Soler, Jean, 58 Sontag, Susan, 93, 108 Southey, Robert, 64 Soutine, Chaim, 195 Spencer, Stanley, 165, 175–9 spiders, 197–200 Stella, Frank, 194 Sterne, Laurence, 139, 140 Stevens, Wallace, 123 Stoics, 18, 20–1 Stone, Lawrence, 172 Storr, Robert, 200 Straub, Jean-Marie, 266 Strauss, Richard, 254–6, 265 suffering (attitudes to), 30–5 Swift, Jonathan, 2 Swinburne, Algernon Charles, 105, 106–7, 109, 113 Syberberg, Hans-Jürgen, 266 Symbolism, 237–8, 241, 242, 246 Symons, Arthur, 237, 242, 245, 246 Tchaikovsky, Piotr Ilyich, 266 Tennyson, Alfred, Lord, 104–5, 106, 108, 111, 113

291

292

Index

Tertullian, 55 Tey, Josephine, 149 Tilley, Sue, 181 Titian (Tiziano Vecellio), 168, 192, 194–5, 263 Tolstoy, Count Leo, 104, 111 Traherne, Thomas, 36 Trench, Richard Chevenix, 107, 110 Tristan legend, 89, 106 Turner, J. M. W., 168 Tylor, E. B., 109 Ulster, University of, 76–7 Valéry, Paul, 245 Valois, Ninette de, 246 Varela, Francisco, 133 Vasari, Giorgio, 168 Vendler, Helen, 247, 249 Verdi, Giuseppe, 254, 266 Verlaine, Paul, 245 Vesalius, Andreas, 39–42, 44, 47 Victorian period, 5, 6, 103–15, 150–1, 168–9, see also individual artists and writers Visser, Margaret, 68 Voigt, Deborah, 265 Wagner, Richard, 240, 254, 256–8, 260, 261–3, 266 Walkington, Thomas, 46, 50 Warner, John Harley, 73

Warwick, Ethel, 174 Watson, James, 137 Watts, Isaac, 32 Weber, Max, 127 Webster, John, 50 Weigl, Petr, 266 Weinfield, Henry, 248 Wiener, Norbert, 137 Wilde, Oscar, 110, 111, 113, 237, 245, 247, 255–6 Willis, Thomas, 48 witches, 46 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 87 Wizard of Oz, The, 279–81, 280, 282, 284–5 Wolfe, Tom, 191 Woolf, Virginia, 122–3, 131, 132, 134–5, 143–4 Woolner, Thomas, 174 Wunderlich, Carl, 120–1 Xenophon, 22, 24 X-ray photography, 118–19, 262 Yeats, W. B., 6, 67, 68, 112, 237, 239, 242, 243, 245–50 A Full Moon in March, 246–9 Zambaco, Maria, 170, 172 Zeno of Citium, 21 Zeuxis, 169 Žižek, Slavoj, 191–2

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Communications and the Arts

Hinduism and the Religious Arts (Religion And The Arts)

Awakening the Performing Body. (Consciousness, Literature & the Arts)

Imagination, Philosophy and the Arts

Geometry and the Liberal Arts

The Arts and the Creation of Mind

Cultivating Demand for the Arts: Arts Learning, Arts Engagement, and State Arts Policy

Body embodiment: Symbolic Interaction And the Sociology of the Body

Patron of the Arts

Bullying in the Arts

William Blake and the Body

Time and the Warm Body

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Patron of the Arts

Patron of the Arts

Patron of the Arts

Physics in the Arts

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Patronizing the Arts

Discourse, The Body, and Identity

Implementation of the Arts

The Big Fish: Consciousness as Structure, Body and Space. (Consciousness, Literature & the Arts)

Understanding the Arts and Creative Sector in the United States (The Public Life of the Arts)

The Body and the Self (Bradford Books)

The Female Body and the Law

Federalizing the Muse: United States Arts Policy and the National Endowment for the Arts, 1965-1980

Explanation and Value in the Arts (Cambridge Studies in Philosophy and the Arts)

Schopenhauer, Philosophy and the Arts (Cambridge Studies in Philosophy and the Arts)

The Body and the Arts

Emotion and the Arts

Communications and the Arts

Hinduism and the Religious Arts (Religion And The Arts)

Awakening the Performing Body. (Consciousness, Literature & the Arts)

Imagination, Philosophy and the Arts

Geometry and the Liberal Arts

The Arts and the Creation of Mind

Cultivating Demand for the Arts: Arts Learning, Arts Engagement, and State Arts Policy

Body embodiment: Symbolic Interaction And the Sociology of the Body

Patron of the Arts

Bullying in the Arts

William Blake and the Body

Time and the Warm Body

Patron of the Arts

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Patron of the Arts

Patron of the Arts

Physics in the Arts

Patron of the Arts

Patron of the Arts

Patronizing the Arts

Discourse, The Body, and Identity

Implementation of the Arts

The Big Fish: Consciousness as Structure, Body and Space. (Consciousness, Literature & the Arts)

Understanding the Arts and Creative Sector in the United States (The Public Life of the Arts)

The Body and the Self (Bradford Books)

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Federalizing the Muse: United States Arts Policy and the National Endowment for the Arts, 1965-1980

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