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

by Siri Hustvedt

  I have always had to be on guard against the jangling, disorienting riot of bodily sensation that can be produced in me by both sights and sounds. It is important to stress that if I see someone touched or hit, my feelings of that touch or hit are only dull echoes or shadows of what I would feel if I were the person actually being touched or hit. Nevertheless, as a girl, I could not fathom how the other children were able to look at horror movies, watch daredevil stunts, or calmly inspect the cuts, bruises, and broken bones of an injured friend. I found the rambunctious antics of Looney Tunes characters on television unbearable and preferred the soothing adventures of Casper the Friendly Ghost. When my husband and I watch films on television, I leave the room during fights or battering episodes. A walk down a crowded New York City street can leave me tingling with sensation or feeling bumped and banged. I experience the emotional weather and shifting moods of the people I am with as a sensible quality, a pain in my stomach, a pressure under my ribs or in my face.

  The pleasures of heightened sensuality should not be discounted, however. When I lightly caress my husband’s arm or cheek, I feel the touch myself, albeit as a weaker trace. When I walk on the street and see a father caress a child, or a young woman press her mouth to her lover’s, or a toddler rubbing her head into her mother’s chest, the gentle sensations the gestures produce are gratifying, and they make me feel that I am deeply in and of the world. Colors induce moods in all of us, and I have felt soothed, amazed, anxious, stunned, but also attacked by colors. In The Shaking Woman or A History of My Nerves, I give an account of looking at a lake in Iceland: “Its water was a glacially pale blue-green. The color assaulted me as if it were a shock. It ran up and down my whole body, and I found myself resisting it, closing my eyes, waving my hands in an effort to expel that intolerable hue from my body.”1 My relation to ice and my physical inability to look at a particular color struck me as unusual. My tactile responses to seeing someone hurt, the sounds that jolt and burn through me, and the emotion that seems to originate in you and is felt by me—these never struck me as anything other than an empathic response, or what my mother called being “too sensitive for this world.”

  When a thing is named it emerges from an undifferentiated background into an illuminated foreground. It takes on a shape and borders. After mirror touch became one of the many categories of synesthesia in 2005, my lifelong hypersensitivity—my sisters called me “princess on the pea”—began to look less like a character defect and more like a neurological condition, not unlike the migraines I have had since I was young. But I have come to believe that untangling personality from the complexities of the nervous system is both artificial and futile. I do not will my responses to looking at ice or colors or other people. They simply happen. They are not under my conscious control. What I can control, to one degree or another, is how I understand and live with my crossed senses as a permanent feature of my daily existence.

  The most fascinating aspect of mirror-touch synesthesia may be precisely that it lies at, indeed appears to cross, the border between self and other, but does so in a way that forces us to examine the limen itself and what it means for empathic and imaginative experience. It is fair to say that the question of borders between a me and a you, the problem of a self or an identity in relation to others, and the nature of intersubjectivity have been obsessive themes in both my fiction and nonfiction. Is my insistent questioning of this self/other border related to my mirror-touch synesthesia? We all have intuitive attractions to some ideas more than others. Many academics and scientists find it distasteful to admit this, sullied as the notion is with subjectivity, but character (and the nervous sensitivities that are inextricable from it) is often predictive of thinking style and content. As the American philosopher William James noted in a lecture, “Temperaments with their cravings and refusals do determine men in their philosophies, and always will.”2

  In the following conversation from my third novel, What I Loved (2003), Violet Blom has just told the narrator, Leo Hertzberg, an erotic story about herself and two men and proposes a way to think about the self in relation to others.

  “I’ve decided that mixing is a key term. It’s better than suggestion, which is one-sided. It explains what people rarely talk about, because we define ourselves as isolated, closed bodies, who bump up against each other but stay shut. Descartes was wrong. It isn’t: I think, therefore I am. It’s: I am because you are. That’s Hegel—well, the short version.”

  “A little too short,” I said.

  Violet flapped her hand dismissively. “What matters is that we’re always mixing with other people. Sometimes it’s normal and good, and sometimes it’s dangerous. The piano lesson is just an obvious example of what feels dangerous to me. Bill mixes in his paintings. Writers do it in books. We do it all the time.”3

  I share Violet’s anti-Cartesian position and, although her summation of Hegel is “too short,” she has a point. For Hegel the road to self-consciousness, the ability to know that we know, turns on a combative relation with another person. It is only through the eyes of another person that you can become an object to yourself. Hegel argues that an embryo (or infant) is not yet conscious of itself.4 Violet’s declaration “I am because you are,” however, can be expanded beyond this Hegelian reflective “for itself” being to a kind of “in itself” being, what is now called a prereflective or minimal self, a bodily sense of self that does not involve thinking about itself, a lived self-awareness that does not include knowing that you know.5

  Violet proposes open, dynamic, bodily subjects that are continually “mixing” with one another, for better and for worse, subjects that negotiate porous self-other boundaries, not fixed boundaries. After all, everyone’s head is filled with other people, with memories of their faces and voices and movements and touch. And we are all made through those others and the culture we find ourselves in. No one grows up nowhere alone. Violet further suggests that the visual and literary arts necessarily partake of this mixing, that mixing plays a role in imaginative work. Where do fictional characters come from, after all? I am not Violet or Leo, and yet they emerged from me or, rather, from an internal geography made from my experience with others, both conscious and unconscious. They are not remembered persons but figments, which I believe are born of a self-other relation.

  How do I know that I am I and you are you? Each one of us is enclosed in an envelope of skin. Each one of us feels the movements of his or her body in the world as “mine.” Unless a person is mad or has terrible brain damage, through which he has lost his bodily boundaries, he takes for granted his feeling of being I and not you. Scientists now believe that a prereflective, minimal self is present from birth. The newborn baby is not a confused blob of flesh who cannot tell where she ends and her mother begins. The infant researchers Andrew Meltzoff and M. Keith Moore have filmed, photographed, and theorized about newborns as young as forty-five minutes old and their capacity to imitate the expressions of adults.6 The newborn’s ability to imitate facial expressions is taken to indicate the presence of a body schema, an unconscious dynamic motor-sensory orientation in space, a sense of location and corporeal boundaries.7 But at what moment does the fetus acquire a body schema or a minimal, prereflective self, and how is that self lived as separate from the mother? Signs of “nonrandom” fetal movements in utero suggest a form of intention well before birth and a degree of bodily integrity, but it is not obvious how we should interpret this.8

  Some authors, such as the philosopher Jane Lymer, have criticized Meltzoff and Moore for their “overly mentalist” conclusions. Lymer thinks the two researchers have attributed too much cognitive ability to newborns and have ignored the role the mother’s feelings and movements play in prenatal life and the creation of a fetal body schema. At some point during gestation, probably in the second trimester of pregnancy, Lymer suggests, one can begin to speak of a relation of some kind between mother and fetus rather than a merged or fused identity of the two, but before that, she argu
es, the earliest fetal movements belong to the mother.9 Focusing exclusively on the development of the fetus, as if it could be lifted out of its amniotic world and studied separately, is absurd. It would be strange indeed if the mother’s rhythmic heartbeats, her even or quickened breathing, her movements that rock the fetus to sleep or conversely wake it up have no effect on its gestation. In any event, we all start out inside and attached to another person via the umbilical cord and placenta, a connection that is not severed until after birth.

  Merleau-Ponty developed the concept of intercorporeality from Edmund Husserl, the philosopher who founded phenomenology—the study of consciousness. Intercorporeality is a bodily connection between people that does not require a reflectively conscious analogy—I do not have to think of what it might be like to be you and then try to work out a likeness between us.10 It is not a thinking connection but one made possible by my already existing body schema. The neuroscientist Vittorio Gallese’s concept of embodied simulation is the neurobiological sibling of intercorporeality, a word he uses to explain his theory. Through mirror systems in the brain, we are able to participate virtually in the other person’s body. We have an automatic motor-sensory, affective relationship through simulation of the other person, what Gallese also refers to as “we-space,” his words for framing a two-in-one interactive between-zone, through which we inhabit another person’s acts, intentions, and feelings directly, not through the use of declarative representations.11 In “The Philosopher and His Shadow,” Merleau-Ponty writes, “Each one of us is pregnant with the others and confirmed by them in his body.”12 For those of us with mirror-touch synesthesia, others are continually confirmed in us through bodily sensations that arrive just by looking at them, a heightened form of embodied simulation. Mirror touch may involve greater activation of mirror systems that results in actual sensation, but there are broader implications as well. The imagination itself, the “as if” realm of human life, is not generated by purely mental activity, by conscious thinking processes, but originates in our fundamental intercorporeality.

  There is growing evidence that everyone begins life as a synesthete, that in babies the senses are merged, creating a multisensory cloud of touch and taste and smell and sight and sound. Although there is controversy about how this all works and what it means, the idea has been around for some time. In The Interpersonal World of the Infant published in 1984, Daniel Stern used the term “amodal perception” to characterize a baby’s experience. “The information is probably not experienced as belonging to any one particular sensory mode. More likely it transcends mode or channel and exists in some unknown supra-modal form.”13 In most people, the senses become differentiated. In other words, synesthetes retain what others lose. In a 1996 paper on the subject, the psychologist Simon Baron-Cohen wonders about “the cost to reproductive fitness” in those of us for whom “one sense [is] leaking into another.”14 He admits that many people with synesthesia don’t consider it a handicap and that this is odd from an evolutionary point of view because if most people acquire distinct senses, lasting synesthesia should be maladaptive. Psychologist Philippe Rochat takes a different position. He considers our early sensory conflation a form of “competence” not “incompetence,” because he views it as important for a baby’s acquisition of affective meanings that are crucial to subjective experience.15 From this point of view, adult synesthesia might simply retain some of the cross-modal richness of early life.

  What is certain is that no subjective meaning is achieved alone. The human infant is born strikingly premature and is weak and dependent for a long time. His fate is in the hands of others, and he grows through his interactions with them. The pediatrician and psychoanalyst D. W. Winnicott wrote about how a meaningful, imaginative subjective life comes about. It is interesting to note that he was influenced by Jacques Lacan, the French psychoanalyst, who was himself influenced by the philosopher Alexandre Kojève, who lectured on Hegel at the École Pratique des Hautes Études in the 1930s in Paris. Lacan’s “mirror stage” turned Hegel’s battle for self-consciousness into a purely intrapsychic drama. Hegel’s other became the child’s own self-image in the mirror. When she recognizes herself, she sees a unified self-object.16 Winnicott moved this dialectic back in time and returned it to a relation between two real people: “In individual emotional development the precursor of the mirror is the mother’s face.”17 For the infant, a responsive mother comes before the “me” recognized in the mirror. The child sees himself in his mother’s face because in her expressions he finds what she sees—himself. Self and other are intimately and expressively linked. When I lose the face of the other, I also lose something of myself.

  Researchers no longer talk about transitivism, a phenomenon explored by the child psychologist Charlotte Bühler, but it is something every parent witnesses.18 A little boy watches his friend take a tumble and bursts out crying. A child slaps her friend hard and then insists it was she who was hurt. Very young children appear to move back and forth between self and other in ways grown-ups do not. Transitivism looks a lot like mirror-touch synesthesia, does it not? How do we parse this imitative, vicarious, virtual between-me-and-you zone in a newborn or in toddlers? Do we find a distinct “I” and “you” or, perhaps, a more blurred “we”?

  Winnicott created an opening between child and mother that might be called a blurred zone or a form of we-between-ness. He referred to it as “transitional space,” and although he does not say it, he borrowed it from Freud’s idea of transference in psychoanalysis. For Freud, transference took place in an “intermediate area” between patient and analyst. Among other descriptions, Freud used the word Tummelplatz to describe this charged between-zone of projection, which then became “playground” in James Strachey’s translation.19 Winnicott’s transitional space is not entirely inside a child, but it is not entirely outside her either, and it is a place where she can play. “Transitional objects” and “me-extensions” are things a baby uses, a chewed bit of blanket or beloved stuffed toy, for example, but also rhythmic babble, words, or songs, through which she creates an illusory, symbolic connection with her mother, things that are neither quite here nor there, neither me nor the not-me of the external world. This potential or imaginative space is where the child plays and the artist works; it is “a third area,” one Winnicott maintains we never outgrow but to which we continually return as part of ordinary human creativity. One might say there is a form of normal mixing going on. The making of art takes place in a borderland between self and other. It is an illusory and marginal but not hallucinatory space.20

  Transitional phenomena necessarily mingle self and other. They are the product of development and have a symbolic function as representations of a connection to the maternal body. What the prelinguistic, rhythmical realm of inchoate senses in infancy is actually like can only be imagined (even for those of us who retain some sensory overlaps), and yet I am convinced it lives on in us and is crucial to the meanings we make. It lies at the root of all meaning, including linguistic meaning. Philosopher and psychoanalyst Julia Kristeva’s semiotic chora is a maternal space, an affective, patterned, shifting reality dominated by biological drives that predates the speaking subject. After a person learns to speak, to represent the world in symbols, Kristeva argues that the semiotic and symbolic exist in a dialectical tension within language itself. The semiotic is especially present in poetic language because it is metaphorical, cadenced, musical.21 Kristeva’s semiotic is similar to what the American philosopher Susanne Langer called the nondiscursive. Langer does not evoke infant experience but rather “mythic thinking” as a prior historical source for the nondiscursive mode.

  For Langer, works of art are not bound by discursive logic because they render experiences that lie outside it: “The rhythms of life, organic, emotional, mental . . . are not simply periodic, but endlessly complex, and sensitive to every sort of influence. All together they compose the dynamic pattern of feeling. It is this pattern that only non-discursive sy
mbolic forms can present, and that is the point of artistic construction.”22 Although their explications are different, Kristeva and Langer share an insistence that there is a bodily, sensory, temporal presence in symbolic artistic expressions that goes beyond bounded rationality. I have argued elsewhere that the rhythmic, sequential, dialogical multisensory patterns of exchange during early life generate what will become story.23 They serve as a proto-narrative, which with language acquisition becomes true narrative, and a narrative is always directed at another person. There is always an I talking to a you—a teller and a listener—and one is not possible without the other. A story’s meaning is never purely semantic. It lives also in affective bodily rhythms, in juxtapositions and repetitions, in surprising metaphors, in which one sense invades another, that jar or lull the listener and evoke in him felt bodily memories. They summon musical patterns of harmony and dissonance and fused, mobile sensory experience, established long ago between a prereflective infant self and a grown-up reflective self.

  One can argue that there is a synesthesic quality to all art experiences, that art revives a multimodal-sensory self. While looking at a painting, for example, don’t we feel the brush? Studies have shown that mirror systems are active when people look at visual art and are also activated by written accounts of actions or emotional situations.24 If we do not feel our way into works of art, we will not understand them. I do not sense the touch of persons depicted in paintings, but I do have strong felt responses to the marks left by the painter’s brush, but then arguably this is a common experience, one hardly limited to people with mirror touch. In an essay on Chardin, written well before mirror-touch synesthesia had been identified as such, I wrote the following: