A Woman Looking at Men Looking at Women: Essays on Art, Sex, and the Mind

by Siri Hustvedt

  “Why One Story and Not Another?” began as the Southbank Centre Lecture at the London Literature Festival in July 2012 but was later revised to be included as my contribution to a scholarly book, Zones of Focused Ambiguity in Siri Hustvedt’s Works: Interdisciplinary Essays, edited by Johanna Hartmann, Christine Marks, and Hubert Zapf and published in 2016. I delivered “Philosophy Matters in Brain Matters” in Cleveland, Ohio, in 2012 at the International Neuroethics Conference: Brain Matters 3 organized by the Cleveland Clinic. “I Wept for Four Years and When I Stopped I Was Blind” was given in Paris at the winter meeting of the Société de Neurophysiologie in 2013. Both talks address the mysteries of hysteria or conversion disorder, an illness that dramatically illuminates the psyche-soma quandary, and in both cases, the organizers of the conference invited me because they had read my book The Shaking Woman or A History of My Nerves, in which I explore the ambiguities of neurological diagnoses through multiple disciplinary lenses.

  In Oslo, Norway, in September 2011, I delivered “Suicide and the Drama of Self-Consciousness” for the International Association for Suicide Prevention (IASP). That version of the lecture was published by Suicidology Online in 2013 and revised for this book. Suicide research is by its very nature interdisciplinary. It draws on work in sociology, neurobiology, history, genetics, statistics, psychology, and psychiatry. In the year and a half I had to prepare for the lecture, I devoured dozens upon dozens of books on the subject. I now consider myself lucky to have been given the assignment, which prompted me to think hard about what I had not thought hard about before. Suicide is a sad subject, but there are few people who are untouched by it. “Why kill one’s self?” is a profound question to which there is still no ready answer.

  In early June 2014, I was one of about twenty people at a three-day symposium held at the Villa Vigoni above Lake Como called “As If—Figures of Imagination, Simulation, and Transposition in Relation to the Self, Others, and the Arts.” Representatives of both cultures attended. We heard from scholars in aesthetics, architecture, philosophy, psychiatry, psychoanalysis, and neuroscience. There was even a neurosurgeon among us who gave a fascinating presentation on corrective surgery for children who were born with deformed skulls. Despite our motley backgrounds, the conversations were lively. Did we all understand one another perfectly? Did everyone present glean every point I hoped to make in my paper “Subjunctive Flights: Thinking Through the Embodied Reality of Imaginary Worlds”? No, I think not. Did I fully comprehend the architect’s abstruse presentation? No. Nevertheless, I left the conference with a sense that at least for those three days in that enchanted place, the gulf between the sciences and humanities had grown a bit narrower. “Remembering in Art” is a lecture I gave at an interdisciplinary symposium in Finland called “Memory Symposium—From Neurological Underpinnings to Reminiscences in Culture,” sponsored by the Signe and Ane Gyllenberg Foundation.

  The last essay in this book was the opening keynote lecture at an international conference on Søren Kierkegaard’s work, held at the University of Copenhagen in honor of his two hundredth birthday in May 2013. The great Danish philosopher has been an intimate part of my life since I was a child, and I jumped at the chance to write about him. Again, the invitation arrived so far in advance of the actual lecture that I had plenty of time to immerse myself yet again in the passionate, ferociously difficult, maddening but sublime world of S.K. For the first time, however, I also read secondary work on the philosopher. Kierkegaard scholarship is a culture unto itself, a veritable paper mill that churns out thousands of pages of commentary on the many thousands of pages Kierkegaard left behind him. There are superb books about S.K. I quote from some of them in my speech, and the Søren Kierkegaard Research Centre, which has overseen the complete edition of the writer’s work, is nothing if not a model of scholarly rigor.

  Burying myself in works not only by but on Kierkegaard, however, served to sharpen the ironies of the philosopher himself, whose stinging references to assistant professors and wayward scholars toiling over their paragraphs and footnotes are crucial to his particular form of comedy. Beside the neat stack of admirable writing on S.K., there is a mountain range of desiccated, forgettable, picayune, pompous, and badly written papers that turn the fleet brilliance of the man himself into weary, plodding dullness. My lecture was written in part as a response to those piles of professorial tedium. I wanted my paper to play with Kierkegaard’s formal, often novelistic strategies, to echo his pseudonymous poses, and to demonstrate that his philosophy also lives in the prose style itself, in its structures, images, and metaphors. I wrote in the first person because S.K. insists on the first person as the site of human transformation. I am sometimes ironic about Kierkegaard’s irony. The lecture is, I think, highly readable. Nevertheless, it was written for Kierkegaard scholars, and there are jokes and references in it that will no doubt be lost on those who haven’t personally struggled with the author.

  “Kierkegaard’s Pseudonyms and the Truths of Fiction” was not published before now. After working for days on my footnotes to tailor them to the highly specific demands of a Kierkegaard journal, I looked over the requirements for submission once again and was shocked to discover that it did not accept papers written in the first person! A journal devoted to a philosopher who championed the “I” and the single individual apparently wanted no part of anyone else’s “I.” To be fair, a Kierkegaard scholar I know told me he thought an exception would have been made in my case, but I didn’t know that at the time. It turns out that even within Kierkegaard studies there are at least two cultures. Religious and secular Kierkegaardians do not see eye to eye, but there are other fundamental divisions among the devotees as well. But then, what possible fun would there be in universal agreement?

  IF YOU READ this book from cover to cover, you will find that I return to thinkers and to ideas that have become fundamental to my own thought over time. The seventeenth-century natural philosopher Margaret Cavendish, the neurologist and philosopher Pierre Janet, Sigmund Freud, William James, John Dewey, Martin Buber, the French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty, the American philosopher Susanne Langer, the anthropologist Mary Douglas, and the English psychoanalyst D. W. Winnicott make frequent appearances, to name only a few of the writers whose works have forever altered my own. I repeatedly return to a distinction made in phenomenology, one many philosophers have stressed, between a prereflective, experiencing conscious self, one I believe belongs to both babies and other animals, and a reflectively conscious self that belongs to a being who can think about her own thoughts. I return to mirror systems in the brain and to research in neuroscience that binds memory to the imagination, to findings in epigenetics, to infant research on development and attachment, to the startling physiological effects of placebo, to the role of expectation in perception, and to what I regard as the glaring failures of classical computational theory of mind, or CTM, and its quasi-Cartesian legacy.

  While each essay is part of this three-part book as a whole, each must also stand alone as a coherent work, and therefore the repetition of essential ideas is not the result of laziness but of necessity. Although these essays were written over the course of four years, they are the result of many years of intense reading and thinking in a number of disciplines. If I can be said to have a mission, then it is a simple one: I hope you, the reader, will discover that much of what is delivered to you in the form of books, media, and the Internet as decided truths, scientific or otherwise, are in fact open to question and revision.

  Although I sometimes feel a little depressed about the fact that I have come to live in the gulf Snow made famous years ago, more often than not I am happy about it. I make regular excursions to both sides and have close friends in each culture. There has been much talk about building a big beautiful bridge across the chasm. At the moment, we have only a makeshift, wobbly walkway, but I have noticed more and more travelers ambling across it in both directions. You may think of this book as an account of my journeys
back and forth. I dearly hope I can continue to make them because there remains much unexplored territory on both sides.

  S. H.

  I

  * * *

  A WOMAN LOOKING AT MEN LOOKING AT WOMEN

  * * *

  A Woman Looking at Men Looking at Women

  * * *

  Art is not the application of a canon of beauty but what the instinct and the brain can conceive beyond any canon. When we love a woman we don’t start measuring her limbs. We love with our desires—although everything has been done to try and apply a canon even to love.1

  —Pablo Picasso

  The important thing is first of all to have a real love for the visible world that lies outside ourselves as well as to know the deep secret of what goes on within ourselves. For the visible world in combination with our inner selves provides the realm where we may seek infinitely for the individuality of our own souls.2

  —Max Beckmann

  Maybe in that earlier phase I was painting the woman in me. Art isn’t a wholly masculine occupation, you know. I’m aware that some critics would take this to be an admission of latent homosexuality. If I painted beautiful women, would that make me a nonhomosexual? I like beautiful women. In the flesh; even the models in magazines. Women irritate me sometimes. I painted that irritation in the “Woman” series. That’s all.3

  —Willem de Kooning

  WHAT artists say about their own work is compelling because it tells us something about what they believe they are doing. Their words speak to an orientation or an idea, but those orientations and ideas are never complete. Artists (of all kinds) are only partly aware of what they do. Much of what happens in making art is unconscious. But in these comments, Picasso, Beckmann, and de Kooning all connect their art to feeling—to love in the first two cases and to irritation in the third—and for each artist, women have somehow been implicated in the process. For Picasso, loving a woman is a metaphor for painting. His “we” is clearly masculine. Beckmann is giving advice to an imaginary “woman painter,” and de Kooning is trying to explain how his “women” were created by evoking the woman in himself, albeit in a defensive and worried way. All three claim that there is a fundamental feeling relation between their inner states and the reality of the canvas, and in one way or another, an idea of womanhood haunts their creativity.

  What am I seeing? In this exhibition, Women, which includes only paintings of women by the three artists, I am seeing images of one woman after another by artists who must be called Modernists and whose depictions of the human figure were no longer constrained by classical notions of resemblance and naturalism. For all three painters, “woman” seems to embrace much more than the definition in Webster’s: “an adult human female.” In The Second Sex, Simone de Beauvoir argued that one is not born a woman but becomes a woman. It is certainly true that meanings of the word accumulate and change even over the course of a single lifetime. Since the 1950s, a distinction between sex and gender has emerged. The former is a marker of female and male biological bodies and the latter socially constructed ideas of femininity and masculinity that vary with time and culture, but even this division has become theoretically perplexing.

  We have no recourse to living bodies in art. I am looking into fictive spaces. Hearts are not pumping. Blood is not running. The markers of the human female in biology—breasts and genitalia that I see in these images (when I see them)—are representations. Pregnancy and birth do not figure explicitly in these pictures, but sometimes what is not there is powerful nevertheless. I am looking at inhabitants of the world of the imaginary, of play, and of fantasy made by painters who are now dead, but who were all making art in the twentieth century. Only the signs of the artist’s bodily gestures remain: the traces left by an arm that once moved violently or cautiously in space, a head and torso that leaned forward, then back, feet planted beside each other or at an angle, and eyes that took in what was there and what was not yet there on the canvas, and the feelings and thoughts that guided the brush, that revised, altered, and established the rhythms of motion, which I feel in my own body as I look at the pictures. The visual is also tactile and motoric.

  I do not see myself as I look at a painting. I see the imaginary person in the canvas. I haven’t disappeared from myself. I am aware of my feelings—my awe, irritation, distress, and admiration—but for the time being my perception is filled up by the painted person. She is of me while I look and, later, she is of me when I remember her. In memory, she may not be exactly as she is when I stand directly in front of the painting but rather some version of her that I carry in my mind. While I am perceiving her, I establish a relation to this imaginary woman, to Picasso’s Weeping Woman, to Beckmann’s masked Columbine, to de Kooning’s goofy monster, Woman II. I animate them, as do you. Without a viewer, a reader, a listener, art is dead. Something happens between me and it, an “it” that carries in itself another person’s willed act, a thing suffused with another person’s subjectivity, and in it I may feel pain, humor, sexual desire, discomfort. And that is why I don’t treat artworks as I would treat a chair, but I don’t treat them as a real person either.

  A work of art has no sex.

  The sex of the artist does not determine a work’s gender, which may be one or another, or multiple versions thereof.

  Who are the female figments of these artists, and how do I perceive them?

  My perception of the three canvases is not exclusively visual or even purely sensory. Emotion is always part of perception, not distinct from it.

  Emotion and art have had a long and uneasy relation ever since Plato banned poets from his republic. Philosophers and scientists are still arguing over what emotion or affects are and how they work, but a stubborn sense of emotion as dangerous, as something that must be controlled, put down, and subjugated to reason has remained a part of Western culture. Most art historians are similarly queasy about emotion and instead write about form, color, influences, or historical context. Feeling, however, is not only unavoidable; it is crucial to understanding a work of art. Indeed, an artwork becomes senseless without it. In a letter to a friend, Henry James wrote, “In the arts feeling is always meaning.”4 In his book on his fellow art historian Aby Warburg, E. H. Gombrich quotes Warburg: “Moreover, I have acquired an honest disgust of the aestheticizing of art history. The formal approach to the image devoid of understanding of its biological necessity as a product between religion and art . . . appeared to me to lead merely to barren word mongering.”5 The German word Einfühlung was first introduced by Robert Vischer in 1873 as an aesthetic term, a way of feeling oneself into a work of art, a word that through various historical convolutions would become “empathy” in English. Contemporary neurobiological research on emotion is attempting to parse the complex affective processes at work in visual perception. As Mariann Weierich and Lisa Feldman Barrett write in “Affect as a Source of Visual Attention,” “People don’t come to know the world exclusively through their senses; rather, their affective states influence the processing of sensory stimulation from the very moment an object is encountered.”6 A vital aspect of any object’s meaning resides in the feelings it evokes of pleasure, distress, admiration, confusion. For example, depending on its emotional importance or salience, a viewer may perceive an object as closer or more distant. And this psychobiological feeling is a creature of the past, of expectation, of having learned to read the world. In this neurobiological model what is learned—feelings in relation to people and objects and the language we use to express them—become body, are of bodies. The mental does not hover over the physical as a Cartesian ghost.

  She Is Sobbing

  I look at Picasso’s Weeping Woman, and before I have time to analyze what I am seeing, to speak of color or form or gesture or style, I have registered the face, hand, and part of a torso on the canvas and have an immediate emotional response to the image. The picture upsets me. I feel a tension in the corners of my own mouth. I want to continue looking, but I am al
so repelled by this figure. Although I am looking at a person crying, I find the depiction cruel. What is happening?

  The face is the locus of identity—the place on the body to which we give our attention. We do not recognize people by their hands and feet, even those intimate to us. Infants only hours old can imitate the facial expressions of adults, although they do not know what or whom they are looking at and will not be able to recognize their own images in the mirror for many months to come. Babies seem to have a visual-motor-sensory awareness of the other person’s face, what some researchers have called a “like-me” response that results in imitation, also referred to as “primary intersubjectivity.” A friend of mine, the philosopher Maria Brincker, who is working on theories of mirroring, was musing aloud to her six-year-old daughter, Oona, about infant imitation.