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

by Siri Hustvedt

  The brush strokes are visible even at some distance, and an impression of dabs, touches, and pricks is fundamental to the effect of the canvas. The stiff peels of garlic so clearly seen from a distance are just strokes of paint when you move close to the canvas—the clear traces of the painter’s hand . . . We recognize not only the worth of the painter’s labor in the rectangle that hangs in front of us, but we see in the paint the presence of a man who worked with intelligence and love. I don’t think that to mention love in Chardin’s work is either mystical or unscientific. Touch lies at the heart of all human life. It is our first experience of another person, and the physicality of Chardin’s stroke is evocative of both caresses and touches of reassurance.25

  Should this passage now be read through my crossing of two senses, the visual becoming tactile, a demonstration of my mirror-touch synesthesia? In this case, the art object is the other, one I know is not alive but that is the product of an artist who once lived and whose touch is mine through vision. The experience of all art has a deeply metaphorical intersensual quality. Without an ability to transpose imaginatively one sense into another, none of us could speak of loud or soft colors or cold and warm people. And how could we read Emily Dickinson’s lines “The Music in the Violin / Does not emerge alone / But Arm in Arm with Touch, yet Touch / Alone—is not a Tune”?26

  Metaphor is more than a mental dance; it emerges from embodied experience, which is at once biological and cultural.27 Looking at a painting, reading a poem or a novel, listening to music requires a natural loosening of sense boundaries, a blur that invigorates artistic experience. A character is round or flat. A musical passage can burn, and a line may taste bitter. These transpositions open avenues into the otherness of the artistic work, which is more than a thing; it is always also the traces of a life.

  When I write as one of my characters, I move into that person while I am writing. I know I am sitting at my desk typing and yet the person’s voice takes over. I occupy a transitional space. I do not believe I have actually been turned into someone else, and yet the character’s voice is distinct and unlike my own. I inhabit her or him, or rather, she or he inhabits me. The character seems to take over my internal narration and begins to direct it. The story moves in directions I do not expect. The words begin to write themselves. This is a common experience for fiction writers. Every writer is pregnant with others. One could argue that the characters are “me-extensions,” transitional phenomena made only of words, but then, language itself is always shared; it belongs to you as much as to me.

  Reading a novel, too, requires not just an ability to move with the figurative metamorphoses of the book’s language but the further empathic ability to enter the characters, to lose yourself in them and feel their sufferings and their triumphs, to give up your inner speech and allow the words on the page to take possession of your thoughts. And this experience does not just happen in the proverbial cave of your mind. You read and laugh, or read and flinch, or read and weep. If the whole of the person is not engaged in the motion of the narrative, then the meanings of a text will be betrayed.

  As the Russian language theorist M. M. Bakhtin has argued, language is not a closed dead system of revolving signs and their designated impersonal meanings. It is alive and flexible in speakers and writers and readers who engage in the to and fro, the ricochet of dialogue. Words cross the borders of our bodies, and they are fundamentally dialogical. “Language lies on the borderland between oneself and the other . . . the word in language is half someone else’s.”28 To write or to read a novel means becoming others, while knowing I am still myself. Where do I end and where do the characters begin? is not a simple question. Don’t all consumers of art have to be open to “falling” into the work before them? Don’t we all enter or become another in the process of digesting a poem or a sculpture?

  Everyone’s sense of bodily borders and feeling of corporeal ownership can be manipulated in the rubber hand illusion. By replacing a person’s own hand with a rubber hand viewed in a mirror, and synchronously stroking the hidden hand and the fake hand, people experience “proprioceptive drift.” They take on the rubber hand as their own. The same applies to one’s own face while viewing another person being touched in the same spot at the same time. It creates a sense of merging between viewer and viewed, subject and object. It is important to remember that before about eighteen months none of us recognized ourselves in a mirror, so the “mirror test” assumes a significant moment in human development. These experiments suggest, however, that self-representations are dynamic, not stable, that we have a multisensory self, which is “updated” continually.29 I would argue that it also shows we all “mix,” and we all carry transitivist and intermodal tendencies. By its very nature, intercorporeality partakes of reversibility and ambiguity. All human beings are intertwined in reciprocity, and that reciprocity is also culturally marked.

  In Western culture, which places a high value on autonomy and the individual subject—a subject that has almost universally been coded as male—transitional, blurred, between states will be seen as feminine, weak, or sick. Drawing on Mary Douglas’s ideas in Purity and Danger about bodily borders, their symbolic role in society, and the role they play in pollution taboos, Kristeva argues that the feminine and the maternal body is a highly charged territory of uncleanliness precisely because it blurs discrete borders.30 The mother who carries an infant inside her, gives birth, and feeds the baby milk from her body is a figure of mingling par excellence, a body that threatens the neat divisions of self and other. Research has found that mirror-touch synesthetes are more vulnerable to blurred self-other boundaries, identity shifts, and feel more empathy for other people.31 None of these findings seems startling, but it is vital to understand that science does not escape cultural frames, that its understanding of the body is also interpreted according to normative ideas.

  In their 2014 paper, “What Can Mirror-Touch Synaesthesia Tell Us About the Sense of Agency?” Maria Cristina Cioffi, James W. Moore, and Michael Banissy comment on research done on mirror-touch synesthetes and normal controls, which suggests mirror-touch synesthesia compromises agency, the sense of having control over one’s own actions. The authors do not say that mirror-touch synesthesia is pathological. They refer to it as a “‘disorder’ of [bodily] ownership, which can have consequences for a SoAg [sense of agency] and which in turn can further worsen ownership disturbance.” Notably the word “disorder” appears in quotation marks. They mention neurological and psychiatric conditions that also compromise agency and refer to a study by Elena Daprati et al., in which schizophrenics have “difficulty identifying origins of an action.”32 It is interesting to ask to what degree mirror-touch synesthesia affects one’s sense of agency. Do we suffer from a damaged or weakened autonomy? I suspect this is a question of the degree to which one “feels” the other’s sensations.

  My sensory mirroring while looking at others does not partake of the radical displacements of schizophrenia. Schizophrenics suffer from what Louis Sass has described as a diminished sense of “existing as a vital centre or source that anchors, possesses and often controls its own experiences and actions . . . It involves a kind of experiential self-coinciding, a coherent subjectivity that involves the sense of existing as a vital conscious presence or first-person perspective whose experiences are unified and owned rather than merely ‘fly[ing] about loose.’ ”33 The loss of this bodily self-ground, this coherent subjectivity, the locus of every person’s perspective, can result in depersonalization, in an internal sense of bodily disintegration, and even a confusion of pronominal identity: “I” may become “you.” A schizophrenic patient of Angelo Hesnard, a French psychiatrist in the early twentieth century, wrote, “I am no longer myself . . . I feel strange, I am no longer in my body, it is someone else; I sense my body but it is far away, some other place . . . it seems to me that it is not me who is walking, talking or writing with this pencil.”34 The writer Antonin Artaud, who suffered from schizophrenia
and brilliantly documented its onset and development, wrote, “In matters of feeling I can’t even find anything to correspond to feelings.”35 This is a profound remark. Without located self-affect, feelings are literally disembodied. As a mirror-touch synesthete, the other is present in me as sensation, but the feeling is in my ankle, my arm, my face, not across the room somewhere.

  And no one would argue that schizophrenia is a state of extreme empathy. Indeed, the schizophrenic inpatients I worked with as a volunteer writing teacher in a psychiatric facility in New York often lacked all outwardly expressive feelings for other people. They were deeply involved in their own inexplicable self-states. Many had elaborated complex cosmologies, some with deities, others with machines, to explain a universe that had lost an essential Newtonian principle: gravity. The patients were prone to hyper self-conscious and often, but not always, convoluted verbal explanations for what was going on with them. Sometimes their language took on a abstract quality, a kind of mad parody of symbolic logic or a purely discursive form of language in which words have been stripped of all figurative, embodied, and affective meanings.

  Not once, even at a pitch of mirroring pain—watching someone being beaten in a movie, for example, when I feel intense squirming sensations from the delivered blows—have I lost ipseity, the knowledge that I am I. I do retain a sense of agency. I can always close my eyes or leave the room. While my sensations in relation to what I see happening to someone else never create a delusion of my actually being the other, they serve as an involuntary means of connecting with the other, a powerful as if state. Mirror touch is a liminal experience, one that takes place at or in the “between,” where there is a danger of overmixing, especially when the seen image or emotion is powerful or the person seen is someone you love. In such cases, I may perceive your sad feelings or your pain also as my sad feelings or my pain, and your feelings may take on the quality of a demand on me: Do something to make it better! I want to relieve you because I, too, need relief. I do not, however, lose me in the process. This is between blur, not displacement of my anchoring self.

  The asthmatic, hypersensitive Marcel Proust did not have mirror-touch synesthesia, as far as I know, but he did have various hyperesthesias, including “auditory hyperaesthesia,” the term Proust’s character Robert de Saint-Loup uses to describe the narrator’s ears in À la recherche du temps perdu.36 The author wrote his masterwork in a cork-lined bedroom with the window shades drawn at 102 Boulevard Haussmann in a Parisian apartment he also labored to keep odor free. From this cocoon cleansed of sensory stimuli, Proust wrote an immense work of precise and often voluptuous sensuality, but also of human sympathy. The irony is vivid, and it is easy to turn Proust into the ultimate example of the quivering artistic sensibility, so delicate it had to be wrapped in layers of protective gauze. And yet, Proust illustrates the complexity of human character. His extreme sensory sensitivity was coupled with extraordinary endurance, will, and strength.

  Mirror-touch synesthesia partakes of a continually shifting, dynamic intercorporeal between space we all find ourselves in, a space of difference and sameness, of back and forth exchanges in feelings, gestures, and words. We imitate and we empathize because human beings are not closed, wholly autonomous creatures. We are born of another person and open to others from birth on, and this openness is by its very nature ambiguous, reciprocal, and mixed. People with mirror-touch synesthesia may live more intensely in the between. There are times when it seems we are too sensitive for this world, but at other times that very same sensitivity may be a catalyst for making or entering new worlds—in music and in paint, in dance and in words.

  Why One Story and Not Another?

  * * *

  WHY one story and not another? For the fiction writer, any and all stories are possible. Theoretically, there are no restrictions. If I wish to write a story about a child who grows wings and a tail at age thirteen and then flies into another world, no one will stop me. I am entirely free to do what I want, but that is not my question. Why does a story feel right or wrong while I am making it? How do I know that a character must smash another character over the head at this moment in the narrative? And conversely, why do I know that the paragraph I have just written is false and must be erased and redone? I am not talking about changing sentences to make them more elegant or cutting out a paragraph after reading a text because I realize the story can do without it. Such alterations belong to editing, and, usually, I can explain my decisions and understand why I made them. I am asking where fictional stories originate and what guides their creation. Why, as a reader, do some novels feel to me like lies and others feel true? When I read, what do I bring to the text? Are there times when I am simply unable to see what is there? I think these are significant questions, but they are seldom asked. There is, however, a related question, one universally maligned and ridiculed by writers around the world, a question that dogs every novelist at countless events because someone out there in the audience inevitably asks it. But the dreaded question, regarded as the province of morons, is actually profound. The question is: Where do you get your ideas?

  The word “idea” catapults us instantly into philosophy. What does it mean to have an idea? What is an idea? For Plato ideal forms were more real than our world of flux and perceptual sensation. For Plutarch an idea was by its very nature bodiless. Descartes posited thought as the only verifiable aspect of human existence and separated body and mind. But what is the relation between our ideas or thoughts and our feeling, sensing bodies? Where do ideas come from? The mind-body question appears as soon as the person in the back of the room asks me or any other writer where our ideas come from. Are ideas in brain tissue? I have discovered that even when presented in highly lucid language, readers have difficulty grasping the problem. In my book The Shaking Woman or A History of My Nerves, I pose the question again and again from multiple perspectives, and yet I was amazed to find that in interviews about the book, my interlocutors ignored it entirely.1 I will try to articulate the problem yet again. As a culture we are so deeply inculcated with the idea that mental faculties (thoughts, ideas, memories, fantasies, and feelings) are different in kind from physical faculties (walking, running, having stomachaches, farting) that bridging the divide makes little sense to most people and rather than think about it, they avoid it altogether.

  Margaret Cavendish attacked Descartes’s idea that human beings are made of two substances, mind and matter, which meet and interact in a small part of the brain called the pineal gland: “Neither can I apprehend, that the Mind’s or Soul’s seat should be in the Glandula or kernel of the Brain, and there sit like a Spider in a Cobweb, to whom the least motion of the Cobweb gives intelligence of a Flye, which he is ready to assault, and that the Brain should get intelligence by the animal spirits as his servants, which run to and fro like Ants to inform it.”2 Her analogy is elaborate, but her point is taken.

  Indeed, we all know that a head injury or dementia can make us forget who we are, can change our personalities, our ideas and thoughts. We know that the psychological and the physiological are not unrelated. And yet, how the private inner subjective experience of ideas, thoughts, and memories is connected to the objective outer reality of brain anatomy, neuronal connections, neurochemicals, and hormones remains unanswered. There is no agreed-upon theoretical model for brain-mind function. There are huge amounts of empirical data, and there is a lot of theoretical speculation and guesswork. Some ideas strike me as better than others, but that does not mean we have figured it out. The terms “neural correlates,” “neural underpinnings,” “neural representations” for fear, joy, sex, or anything else are used because the scientists and philosophers are reluctant to say that those brain systems are fear, joy, or sex. The words expose the gap between mind and body rather than close it. I cannot solve the division, but it is important to keep in mind that ideas, whatever they are and wherever they come from—a story overheard on a bus or a sudden inspiration that has no known source—must
be embodied in the material reality of a person. “Where do you get your ideas?” is a big question.

  So how can we think about where the ideas for stories come from? How do we frame the question? It is common to point to writers’ biographies, if even a remote connection between a writer’s experience and his or her novel can be found. Many writers have robbed their own lives and the lives of their families and friends for material. Writers frequently place their stories in real places. In my own work, I have moved between New York City, where I have lived since my early twenties, and Minnesota, the midwestern state where I grew up. The city and my hometown are intimate spaces for me, and when I write I imagine my characters moving down a familiar street or looking at a cornfield I remember from childhood. I call up known places in my mind and insert my characters into them. Just as conscious autobiographical memory needs a space and ground, the characters in a work of fiction do not float in an empty world. The reader and writer must share a sense of spatiotemporal reality.3 Even if the story takes place on another planet, there must be aspects of this altered reality a reader can grasp.

  The art of fiction cannot be reduced to a writer’s autobiography. In my case, the geography of fiction is borrowed from landscapes and cityscapes I remember. And yet, the characters’ stories must also come from somewhere, and they must in one way or another relate to their authors, to their perceptions of the world and their experiences of it. A writer’s imagination is not impersonal, and it is necessarily connected to his or her memory. Homer’s Odyssey begins with a call to the muse Mnemosyne: “Speak, Memory.”