A Plea for Eros (21 page)
Authors: Siri Hustvedt
It is interesting that this new fixity arrives only through the task of giving the story to another person. Memories that have never been told aren’t yet solid stories; they are potential stories. It may be that the interlocutor is the self, as in John Harmon’s monologue, but it is always the self in relation to the idea of another, the “I” addressing a “you,” because the desire to tell implies that the tale must become comprehensible to a listener. Zazetsky wrote both for himself as an other and for real others. He hoped that his descriptions of his illness would be of use to those studying brain injury, and in this he triumphed: His writing has proved invaluable to researchers. It is this dialogical character of speech and storytelling that Dickens insists on as
living,
not
dead,
language. Through his telling, Harmon recovers the
I
Headstone loses. The only time Mr. Dolls says the word
I
in the novel is when he asks Eugene Wrayburn for a few pence to buy a drink. However pathetic Dolls’s request, he is engaged in a real dialogue and receives an answer. For a brief moment, he has situated himself in the axis of discourse and emerges as a subject.
Harmon’s full rehabilitation will come later in the novel. Mrs. Boffin, who acted as a surrogate mother to Harmon when he was young, is subject to strange visions of faces in the decrepit mansion where the boy grew up with his sister. One night Mrs. Boffin sees them everywhere: “For a moment it was the old man’s, and then it got younger. For a moment it was both the children’s, and then it got older. For a moment it was a strange face, and then it was all the faces.” The strange face belongs to the ghostly hero of the novel, and when Mrs. Boffin fills in that blank, she brings the unrecognized spirit back from the dead and is able to call him by name. She also situates him in a narrative that is beyond himself, one that includes his father and images of generational resemblance that link parents and children in a mirroring vision over time.
The novel charts a course that moves back and forth between the unrecognizable, unnamed, unconscious drowned no-body to the recognizable somebody who is a conscious, speaking subject. We all travel a path that moves from the relatively oblivious and fragmentary state of infancy to a working internal image of the self, to a conscious, articulated “I” within the structures of language. Nobody has actual memories of intrauterine life or early infancy, but we experienced it nevertheless, and traces of that floating undifferentiated world remain in us and return to haunt us even in the everyday—in fears, anxieties, longings, sex, sleep, and nameless sorrows. It is part of a corporeal life that is mostly hidden from us, and nothing is further from that early experience than the attempt to inscribe that reality or some version of it in writing. And yet I think this is what Dickens was drawn to—that fragmentary unformed space, or what I’ve often thought of as the
underneath.
In hallucinations, in psychoses, in various forms of brain damage, in dreams, and in some moments of making art, the underneath seems to roar to the surface: Whole pictures disintegrate and time is disrupted. This story we call the self and articulate as
I
, Dickens tells us, is fraught and fragile,
and
we must fight to keep it together.
The human experience of the world is not direct but mediated through what Wegg calls the “framework of society.” This framework is inescapable and necessary, but its articulations may also be seen as the ordering fictions that make life livable. Both whole object representations in the brain, which organize things in space, and language, which reorganizes that material sequentially through abstract symbols, serve as internal shields from the assault of stimuli coming from the real world. They provide us with categories that create the borders of perception and through expectation give external reality both shape and sense, a truth that many artists, philosophers, linguists, and psychologists have long intuited. Without these shields we would be unable to construct an internal representation of a self. Brain scientists have located these two dynamic structures, the spatial (right hemisphere) and the audio-verbal (left hemisphere), but for me what is fascinating is that Dickens seems to have glimpsed what the world would be like without these protections, that fragmented, inchoate reality we all must have experienced as infants before our brains had structured that external “stuff” into things and words. It seems obvious that because our genetic identities and personal histories are all different, our brains, while similar to one another, are also unique. In other words, some people are more sensitive to stimuli than others. They feel what’s happening inside and outside themselves. Dickens was one of these people. He understood or rather felt what Karen Kaplan-Solms and Mark Solms describe, using words that echo Dickens’s own. “From a subjective viewpoint, an excited state of arousal in which the organism is forced to respond equally to all stimuli necessarily produces ego-fragmentation or annihilation. The ‘I’ is overwhelmed by a multitude of ‘its.’“
We are always accommodating
its
into articulated frameworks that make life livable, but there are times when that integration fails, when the bone, as Mr. Venus says, won’t fit, nohow. I think of these moments or states as holes in the structure—windows onto nonsense. We all long for fixity— and for some of us it’s found in writing. Zazetsky’s desire to record what he could of his life was sparked by a need to fill in the holes, to re-create coherence from what refused to cohere and to make his account sensible to a reader outside himself. Whatever its strengths or weaknesses, a written text has a solidity and permanence that spoken language can’t have. We forget or misremember conversations, but a book can be quoted again with assurance. It doesn’t change. In
Our Mutual Friend,
Dickens includes a tacit acknowledgment of his own fiction as a response to a shattered reality that is both outside and inside the self and a desire to make whole what has been broken in space and time. His artist is a crippled visionary child—Jenny Wren, once Fanny Cleaver, who has reinvented herself as an unhurt, airborne, fictional being. Like a novelist, she has characters—her dolls—whom she moves through stories borrowed from the known vocabulary of fairy tales and whom she dresses in scraps of fabric, which are referred to as “damage and waste.” Jenny Wren’s fictions are born from this damage, and although they don’t allow her to throw her crutch away, in her reveries and stories she is whole and uninjured.
Dickens was preternaturally sensitive to distortions of language. He knew that words could be used as a tool for obfus-cation, hypocrisy, and self-deception. He also knew that language was arbitrary and limited, that there were parts of human experience where words fall apart—in the choked stammerings of loss, of madness and delirium, and when we come close to the reality of our own inevitable deaths. He knew that the memory of every person is broken, interrupted by lapses and silences, and that our wholeness and continuity aren’t givens but made in us and by us. He knew deeply that the self is an entity under threat and the trick of piecing it together isn’t a solitary game. It is rooted in the other, where we find a mirroring wholeness, dialogue, and finally story. The journey in the book is from “it” to “I”to “We.” This Dickensian
We
is language itself and the essential stories made from it, which not only bind us together but make sense of the world out there and keep the morbid fragment at bay.
2004
Wounded Self
THE FIRST STORY BELONCS TO MY MOTHER. SHE IS THE ONE
who tells it, and when she tells it, she always includes a single terrible moment. She was at home taking a bath, and she thought to herself, How is it possible for a person to be as sad as I am? My mother was miserable because I was born too early. My lungs were undeveloped, and the doctor told my parents I might die. For two weeks, I lay in an incubator while my mother and father waited for my fate to be decided. In those days, the nurses didn’t touch or massage babies left in incubators. I was separated from my mother in the first days of my life, and I now think that experience marks the beginning of a particular personality When I suffered from convulsions on the day of my christening party, I scared my mother yet again. If I felt warm, my mother grew alarmed, and a single sound from my crib brought her to me. I was the firstborn child of a loving mother who lived in fear that she might lose me. We can’t remember our infancies, but they live in our bodies, and had I not been frail at birth, I would have been someone else, and I would have had other thoughts. When I look back, I can’t remember a time when I didn’t carry around inside me a sensation of being wounded. The feeling ranges from the very slight to the acute, but the ache in my chest, dim or strong, has remained a constant in my life.
It is night, and I am lying in bed. Above me I notice a large drill thrust into the wall. No one is holding it; it begins to turn on its own, and as it turns, I see that long, thin cracks are forming in the wall. The cracks get larger, and then the wall begins to break open. I am overwhelmed with terror and throw myself against the wall to try to keep the fragments together, to stop the wall from collapsing. I’m screaming. I wake my mother. She remembers the night vividly and says that I must have woken my younger sister Liv, who panicked and also began to shriek. When my mother entered the room, we were both howling in fear. She said I had thrown myself against the wall and it looked as if I were trying to climb it. I don’t remember Liv or my mother, but I remember the gaping fissures in the plaster and the revolving drill as if it had happened yesterday. I thought I was awake, but it must have been a dream, one without a threshold
—/
occupied the same place in the dream and in reality. The fear has never diminished in memory. I must have been about five years old.
This dream, hallucination, or night terror has haunted me as an adult because it is so simple, nearly abstract in its purity, and like no other in my experience. The bulk of my dreams as a child were long, shifting narratives with witches and ogres and people I knew that took place in streets and meadows and rooms and corridors. The crumbling wall remains an efficient metaphorical expression for both my obscure but omnipresent wound and the fear that often accompanies it. I’m afraid that thresholds and boundaries won’t hold, that things will go to pieces.
My sister Liv and I left our mother and father for the first time to visit our grandfather’s cousin in his little house in High-wood, just outside Chicago. After what was probably a week of our pining for her, our mother came to see us and then a couple of days later take us home by train. If I’m not mistaken, it was a cloudy afternoon. I remember how glad I felt as the three of us walked together through downtown Chicago and the feeling of my hand in my mother’s. On our way, we crossed a bridge and saw two policemen restraining a man who had apparently climbed over the railing. Whether my mother said that the man had been intending to jump off the bridge or I simply knew it I can’t say, but the officers and the desperate man made me feel the city’s danger, and I found that air of menace more inspiring than upsetting. Very soon after that, we turned onto a sidewalk. There was a large gray building to my left, and to my right a crowd of people had gathered around someone lying on the pavement. I know it was a woman, but I have no memory of her. I can’t see her face or body anymore. My mother, Liv, and I all looked at her, because I remember my mother’s distress at the thought that we had seen her. When we walked away, my mother explained that the woman was having “an epileptic seizure” and couldn’t help what was happening to her. We then crossed a wide street on our way to have lunch at Marshall Field’s department store. The light was green and we began to walk, but in the middle of our crossing it changed to red and the cars moved forward as if we weren’t there. This amazed me. My visual memory of that intersection, the cars, the looming building across from us, and the arching ramp above is exceedingly vivid. It may be that what I had witnessed immediately before, a chaotic body, heightened my recollection of what came afterward—the chaotic street. The honking cars that suddenly whizzed past us replaced the other, more threatening image of a woman who had lost control of herself.
In my first novel, I included an epileptic seizure witnessed from the roof of a building in New York. In the book, the woman’s convulsive movements are photographed by one of the characters, and I now wonder if I wasn’t returning to that street in Chicago and recording in fiction what I was unable to remember in fact. I am not an epileptic, but the shuddering body I saw must have echoed some tremor in myself, and it frightened me enough to swallow the picture whole and leave in its place an absence filled only by my mother’s words
epileptic seizure.
Like many children, I was prone to inward reveries—long dreaming sessions in which I would lose myself and look out at the world. How strange it is, I would think, that we see and smell and speak and eat and feel, that there are trees and cars and houses, barbed wire, cornfields, and cows. These thoughts were accompanied by a lifting within me that I experienced vaguely as closeness to God and nature (the two mingled in my mind) and as a form of private magic, a secret belief in my own power that set me apart from other people and would take me very far in the world. I have often wondered where this inner conviction came from. I was in no way a prodigious child. My early memories of school are mostly sad ones. I learned to read easily but suffered terribly over numbers. Even now, I cringe when I remember the long rows of intractable digits that never came out right. The complex relations among children—the ins and outs of friendships and alliances, the hierarchies of dominance and weakness on the school ground—puzzled and often hurt me. I wasn’t athletic either, a serious deficit in most places but probably even more so in the Midwest, where physical prowess could catapult both boys and girls into a heroic position among their peers.
And yet, despite evidence to the contrary, I held fiercely to the lonely idea of my own great destiny, and I suspect that I clung to this irrational position for a single reason: my parents loved me very well. It was plain that my mother and my father thought I was wonderful. They made me feel that nothing was beyond me, and their belief in me and in my three younger sisters was unshakeable, a fortress into which we could retreat whenever we needed it. Years would pass before I understood that I came from a family that was remarkable in this respect, not ordinary. We are, all of us, made from our parents, physically and emotionally, and the quality we call “character” partakes of both genetic givens and the mysterious meanderings of a particular psychic history.
Some people are more prone than others to numinous experience—those moments or minutes of transcendence, disassociation, or euphoria. It seems clear to me now that I had a neurological as well as an emotional predisposition to these curious transports of the spirit. As a child I suffered from headaches, and at eight I remember my shock when a friend told me she had never had one. All my life, I have shivered at the mere sight of an ice cube, even on a sweltering day. Little more than a passing thought about ice produces a genuine shudder of cold in me. I once asked a neurologist about this, but he seemed not to know what I was talking about. Around the age of eleven, I suffered from commanding inner voices and rhythms that terrified me with their insistence. They always came when I was alone, and they seemed to want to impose their will on me, to press my body into their marching orders. The danger of madness seemed very real to me then, and I’m lucky they vanished. When I was twenty, I was struck with my first migraine, which lasted for eight months and then lifted. In the years that followed, it became obvious that my nervous system was unstable. I lived with auras that ranged from the very mild—a few black spots and brilliant white lights—to the more dramatic, such as a sudden seizure in my arm that hurled me against a wall. Once, I was subject to the very curious phenomenon known as “Lilliputian hallucinations,” during which I saw a small pink man and his little pink ox on the floor of my bedroom and believed they were actually there. I have also had several euphoric episodes before getting sick, and despite the inevitable aftermath, I recall these moments with pleasure: My vision takes on a sudden heightened clarity that makes me imagine I am seeing what I normally can’t, and then, just as I remark to myself on the fantastic quality of my eyesight, I feel an overwhelming joy.
Common wisdom designates this kind of happiness as aberrant, false, a mere trick of the brain that heralds an oncoming migraine or seizure, and there is some truth in this, but the experience is as real as any other, and it may be that trying to disentangle any emotion from the nervous system is futile. It is the interpretation that matters. However morbid my sensitivities may be, they are inseparable from the story of myself, and my reading of these peculiarities over time has been decisive in determining who I was and am.
I don’t remember having any “rules” at home. We had routines that my three sisters and I accepted without question: getting up and eating breakfast, brushing our teeth, dressing for school, doing our homework, and going to bed early. Although we were sometimes scolded, we weren’t punished. A look of disappointment in my mother’s or father’s eyes was usually enough to prompt a heartfelt apology from a momentarily wayward daughter. School, on the other hand, was all regulations, prohibitions, and punishments. I was well behaved, not only because I dreaded the cloakroom where children were rumored to be beaten but because I believed in an idea of goodness. I wanted to be pure, truthful—a diminutive saint. It’s a good thing I wasn’t an only child. My three younger sisters did me a great service when they laughed at my pious notions, my seriousness, my overdeveloped need to be responsible, conscientious, perfect. I’m afraid this unattractive portrait of my earlier self is accurate. I felt so much all the time that I longed for a way to order my inner tumult. Although I was a kind child, I could also be a rigid, humorless little person who took almost everything too hard. I wish I could say these flaws in my character have vanished, but that would be a lie. I remain attached to order, to moral thresholds, to all the forms that keep chaos at bay.
At Longfellow Elementary School, talking in the lunchroom was forbidden. Not even a whisper was tolerated. We ate in silence. If the rule was broken, the miscreant was sent to the far end of the room by an adult person known as a “lunchroom monitor” to eat at one of the brown tables with folding chairs. The tables for good children were white with long, smooth benches. The world of the brown tables was a remote place, inhabited by the naughty, the restless, the high-spirited—mostly boys who hadn’t mastered the art of keeping quiet. I was in the first half of my second-grade year when it happened to me. The school principal, an intimidating, immensely tall person with the uncannily apt name of Mr. Lord, strode into the lunchroom to deliver an announcement. He began speaking, stopped suddenly in mid-sentence, and, to my horror, pointed in my direction. “You!” he bellowed. “Go to the brown tables!” I was stunned. I hadn’t uttered a word. I had done nothing, but I picked up my tray and made the long, mortifying journey past the other children to take the brown seat of humiliation.
I was so troubled by the incident that I mustered the courage to speak to Mr. Lord on the playground after lunch. I walked toward him, looked up at his face, and said, “What did I do? I wasn’t talking.” I detected embarrassment and discomfort in his expression. He hesitated, and in that brief moment when he said nothing, I could already feel my triumph. He peered down at me without looking me in the eyes and muttered,
“You were swallowing your food while I was talking.”
I was seven years old, and I knew this was ridiculous. He was ridiculous. The sentence burned itself into my consciousness as a sign of absolute sadistic stupidity. It had the force of an inner revelation: Some adults are as mean as some children. It was my innocence that had given me the strength to speak up and my innocence coupled with the Stalinist whims of Mr. Lord that removed every trace of humiliation from my trip to the brown tables.
My internal moral compass was extremely sensitive, however, and that same year I did something that tormented me for a long time afterward because the sin I may or may not have committed hinged on the interpretation of a single word. The class was doing arithmetic problems. As usual, I was struggling with the little numbers and the dreaded subtraction sign, which for some reason was so much worse than its friendlier companion, the plus sign. Our teacher, Mrs. G., left the room, and after she was gone, I realized I had to pee. I paused for a moment, then stood up and walked downstairs to the lavatory. My memory of that walk includes no feeling that I was doing anything particularly wrong. It’s almost dream-like now. I wandered into the murky green hallway, made my way down the steps, peed alone in the little toilet stall, and then walked out the door marked GIRLS. As I left, I saw Mrs. G. straight ahead of me. It was time for the official bathroom break, and she was leading the class down the steps in two lines. She looked me in the eye and said,
“Was it an emergency?”
I said, “Yes.” Immediately after I had spoken and for years to come, I asked myself whether I had lied. It wasn’t really an emergency in the true sense of the word, was it? Could I have held my pee? Probably. Would it have been hard? Maybe. Did just having to go pretty badly constitute an emergency?