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

by Siri Hustvedt

  Decapitation is not an archaic form of violence. Those of us who live far from war nevertheless have immediate access to the grisly beheadings of ISIS on the Internet, should we choose to view the documentary footage. As spectators to such horrors, we might be haunted forever, but the films cannot kill us. We see the violence occur in miniature; our vision of it is literally framed by a screen, and yet knowing that the victims are real people, not actors, increases our terror. The three people in this Baroque canvas are flat painted figures that do not move. They “live” inside a frame. Still, this image of a woman beheading a man is a terrible one, and embodied mirroring is at work in us, an “as if” kinetic participation in the scene that elicits, at least in me, both fear and fascination. The woman’s braced forearms, her strong grip on the sword with one hand, and the fist she makes with the other, which is pressed so hard into the man’s forehead that she has pushed the skin of his face into a fold of wrinkles over his eye, and the way she leans back from the blood that spurts from the severed neck of her victim, perhaps to protect her clothing, all create a startling feeling of a fixed, frozen, eternal now.

  But I am also feeling the painter’s kinetic melodies in the paint itself, the gestures of intense or precise movement, an expressive style in a delimited space that pulls me into an I and quasi-you relation, and it is in this encounter that the image’s meaning is created, a meaning I may have to struggle to articulate, but if I look long enough and hard enough, the self/other distinction begins to blur. Doesn’t the canvas, perceived by my remembering body, virtually enact the represented bodies I see? Doesn’t this further summon Merleau-Ponty’s evocation of Husserl’s Ineinander, a back-and-forth or entwining relation, in which the thing outside is also the thing inside me? I ask myself, for example, what the expression on the murderous woman’s face means, and, asking it, I am shaken by past feelings of rage and vengeance and seem to recognize in her countenance the cold purpose of hate. The past reappears in me, not as a sequential horizontal march of autobiographical events, but as a nameless vertical eruption of emotional memories I cannot identify, but which nevertheless permits me to step back when needed, to reflect within the safety of the aesthetic frame.

  The story of Judith beheading Holofernes was rendered many times at different moments in the narrative. In the deuterocanonical text, Judith seeks out the enemy general, Holofernes. Enchanted by her beauty and with seduction on his mind, he invites her into his tent, drinks too much, and, as he lies in a drunken haze, she cuts off his head and saves the Jewish people from the Assyrian threat. We are therefore looking at a heroine, not a monster, and remembering the story will necessarily affect your reading of the canvas. But stories, too, whether they are true or fictitious, are learned and differently remembered, and their forms inhabit us corporeally as a left-to-right direction, for example, but also as rhythms of tension, crisis, and resolution, evoked by the words we have heard or read. Stories enter and reside in us, bias our expectations, infect our perceptions, and help us decode what we see. The story is the invisible surround for the painting. We know what happened before and we know what comes next.

  Compare Gentileschi’s canvas to one painted earlier by Caravaggio in 1599. I instantly read this picture from left to right because its long rectangular form is divided exactly in two—with one figure dominating the left side of the canvas and two others dominating the right—so it invites a conventional narrative movement from left to right. In fact, the only thing that brings the two sides of the canvas together is the dark red drapery that hangs in space between the left and right spaces, but there is a bit more fabric on the right. If we consider the spatial agency bias for a moment, it is clear that the person being acted upon (the victim) is on the left and the actor (the murderer) is on the right, a violation of the subject-comes-before-object grammatical structure through which we have come to read space.

  Gentileschi’s Judith canvas does not conform to the spatial agency bias either. Judith is to the left of Holofernes, but she looms over him. The strength of her sword’s motion is evident in her taut arms. I, the spectator, am witness to the fact that the general’s head in the immediate foreground will soon fall from his body and drop to the floor if it is not instantly gripped by the heroine. Unlike the Caravaggio painting, the narrative in the Gentileschi painting is one of immediate, terrible violence, produced in part by its spatial configuration of verticality. Judith and her active collaborator, the maidservant, have subdued the man beneath them, which creates not a linear sense of movement from one to the other, as in reading a text, but a disruption of that sequential temporality.

  Verticality, unfamiliar as a metaphor for time, is a conventional signifier for rank, power, and worth, so deeply engrained in us that it is inescapable. It finds its way into countless binaries, mind over body, male over female, or the simple fact that feeling high is better than feeling low. I would argue that in the Caravaggio image, the placement of Holofernes to the left, which causes us to read the picture from left to right, undermines the obvious fact that he is the victim in the canvas. He may be a victim, but he’s a potent one. What captivates me in this canvas is solely the agonized face of Holofernes, which I find extraordinary and awful. It is he who is the painting’s emotional “agent,” the doer. It is his suffering the viewer feels, not Judith’s violence. In stark contrast to her victim, this pretty, benign, delicate Judith appears to have flown in from another world of feminine futility. She does not look as if she could slice a loaf of bread much less a man’s neck, and the expression on her face is one of pique and minor discomfort, not rage or determination. Without the presence of Holofernes, one might surmise that she had just spilled wine on someone at a dinner party. The old crone beside her is less an accomplice in assassination than a voyeur.

  Artemisia Gentileschi was a renowned and controversial painter in her day, but after she died, her work languished in obscurity until it was rediscovered in the twentieth century. She is now regarded as a brilliant painter of the period, but the fact that she was a woman, that she was the daughter of a prominent painter, Orazio Gentileschi, and that she was raped by another painter, Agostino Tassi, in her father’s house, which resulted in a public trial, the records of which are extant, are all part of her complex artistic legacy. Caravaggio was also controversial, rumored to be homosexual, frequently in trouble with the law, and an artist who influenced both Gentileschis, father and daughter.

  These biographical facts are part of what some in science call semantic memory. A fact, such as Helsinki is the capital of Finland, is not personal to me, and I don’t need a spatial mental image of the city to call it up. But semantic memories may become the center of emotionally charged interpretations of all manner of things nevertheless. For years, art historians ascribed paintings, even those signed by Artemisia Gentileschi, to her father, especially when they were particularly good. Some scholars have seen Artemisia Gentileschi’s Judith as the image of revenge for the artist’s rape or “defloration,” as it was then conceived. Others say no, this is a misinterpretation; we cannot impose our contemporary ideas about rape onto past events. She was a creature of the period and is shaped by its discourses, which do not belong to us.30 No doubt both stories carry some truth. Gentileschi also defied the conventions of her time by painting subjects usually forbidden to women. Her version of Judith Beheading Holofernes shocked her contemporaries and has continued to shock onlookers ever since. The electric charge of the painting has not died.

  It seems to me that Gentileschi may have wanted to outdo Caravaggio’s canvas, to take on the painter who had influenced her style, and knew she had the stuff to do it. To my mind, anyway, she won this competition hands down. No one can know whether the painting was born of her own traumatic experience, although it is not mad to think this. It is nevertheless true that the tendency to reduce works of art by women to the details of their biographies is nauseatingly familiar. Biography also figures in interpretations of works by men, including Caravaggio, o
f course, but the male artist is granted a transcendence of his circumstances the female artist is not. Gentileschi has certainly suffered from this diminishment. Then again, every artist carries memories, habit memories, conscious autobiographical memories, and emotional memories, and it is foolish to suppose these do not enter the work along with cultural, collective memories.

  Violent acts are read in different ways in different cultures. In the United States, marital rape did not become a crime until the 1970s, and not until 1993 did every state remove the marital exemption from rape law. Laws define and frame actions, but the visceral shock of violent acts, of being beaten, hurt, or forcibly violated is not uniquely human. In response to extreme threats, the parasympathetic nervous system responds with tonic immobility—heart rate and breathing slow, blood pressure drops, muscles relax, and in people, dissociation, a strange feeling of indifference to the life-threatening situation, may take hold. Representations of violence, however, are not violence. It is impossible to pick apart Gentileschi’s motives or the feelings she had while she worked on her canvas or the degree to which her thoughts, both conscious and unconscious, were invested with outrage and revenge fantasies. She was an artist, and sublimation in self-reflection is necessarily a part of making art, even when your subject matter is horrific.

  Aby Warburg suffered a psychotic break in 1918 and was hospitalized for several years, finally ending up in a clinic in Kreuzlingen, Switzerland, under the care of the psychoanalyst and physician Ludwig Binswanger. Warburg’s psychosis was severe. He threatened to murder his family, but he was also under the delusion that his doctor was an anti-Semite advocating the mass liquidation of the Jews. While this fantasy was decidedly false about Binswanger, Warburg’s delusions now appear uncannily prescient about Germany’s future. And, just as it is tempting to interpret Gentileschi’s Judith as an image of revenge for her rape or “defloration,” it is tempting to attribute aspects of Warburg’s thought to his mental state. His brilliance is, at least in part, due to an almost preternatural sensitivity to images, as well as an electric connection to and fear of their bodily meanings. He was a man who had to fight his way back from psychotic confusion to the distance that arrives with symbolic thought, and he did. Although Binswanger diagnosed Warburg with schizophrenia, he was, I think, more accurately diagnosed by Emil Kraepelin, another famous doctor, as suffering from manic depression. One could say Warburg actually lived the extreme poles of his Pathosformel.

  It is crude to reduce art or thought to an artist’s or thinker’s biography, as it is crude to posit art as either the result of purely cultural constructs or, conversely, of biological “mechanisms.” The story is far more complicated. We, all of us, are body subjects, both acted upon by the world and creators of the world in which we live. There is a dynamic reversibility in this that turns us back to remembering. Art historians often march through linear, horizontal time with its periods and changing styles, their language colored by an almost phobic relation to the emotional, pretheoretical, vertical qualities of art viewing, a fear related to biases of agency and power and to the fact that passion and the body have been understood as effeminate and reason and the mental as manly, a dualist tradition that infects our memories, our expectations, and our perceptions. That divide, however, is at once false and dangerous.

  “Fixed ideas,” Kierkegaard wrote in a journal entry, “are like cramps e.g. in the foot—the best remedy for them is to trample on them.”31 It has been my purpose here to open rather than to close the question of memory in art, to propose plural ambiguities rather than a single “inherited” fixed idea or expectation, borrowed from philosophy, science, or aesthetics. Time is inevitably understood in spatial terms, and it is valuable to upend our fixed metaphor of left-to-right horizontality in the West without abandoning it. It is useful as a concept. But time and memory have verticality, too, if we understand that verticality as part of our mammalian heritage, as part of a prereflective reality that is also embodied experience. Warburg’s spatial notion of Denkraum, a room for thought or an interval for contemplation of and reflection on the otherness of an artwork, given to us in a protective, aesthetic, symbolic frame, remains fertile. I see. I feel. I remember. The work in front of me is at once of me and not of me. I muse and I wonder. I interrogate my responses. I take time.

  Philosophy Matters in Brain Matters

  * * *

  IN my novel The Blazing World, the central character Harriet Burden writes, “Every dying person is a cartoon version of the Cartesian dualist, a person made of two substances, res cogitans and res extensa. The thinking substance moves along on its own above the insurrectionist body formed of vile, gross matter, a traitor to the spirit, to that airy cogito that keeps on thinking and talking.”1 Illness can make almost every person vulnerable to a mind-body split. If the ill person can still think clearly, he often suffers an acute feeling that his body has betrayed him, that it has gone its own way without him. The thinking, speaking ego, what I like to call the internal narrator, appears to exist independently of the afflicted body and becomes a floating commentator who watches as the disease attacks the poor mortal body. Subjective experience often includes a self that observes illness, even though the very idea of the self remains a philosophical and scientific conundrum.

  René Descartes’s dualism—his assertion that human beings are made of two stuffs, spirit and matter—is unfashionable these days and has, in fact, been highly controversial since his own time. In her Observations upon Experimental Philosophy of 1666, Margaret Cavendish, an adamant materialist, refers to Descartes’s idea that the pineal gland in the brain is where soul and body interact. “Some learned conceive, that all knowledge is in the mind, and none in the senses: For the senses, say they, present only exterior objects to the mind; which sits as a judge in the kernel, or fourth ventricle of the brain . . . and judges of them; which, in my apprehension, is a very odd opinion.”2 She goes on to wonder exactly how these two distinct substances go about their business. Do the senses run back and forth as mindless servants to the judge in the brain? Neuroscientists, many of whom, I daresay, have read little Descartes, repeatedly echo Cavendish’s complaint about Cartesian dualism (one I share). The neural coordinates of consciousness, NCC—which might help explain the chattering internal narrator inside each one of us—have not been found. What we have are overwhelming amounts of data, much of it from scans, but from other research as well, and that data is racing far ahead of any overarching theory of brain function.

  Why is this important? And what does it have to do with doctor-patient ethics and medically unexplained symptoms? Medical knowledge is continually evolving and is always dependent on new research. But as Thomas Kuhn pointed out in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, the course of that research also rests on paradigms, primary assumptions that lie beneath all scientific investigation, and sometimes those paradigms shift.3 There is increasing recognition that the terms “functional” and “organic” may be misconstrued from the start and rest upon an artificial psyche-soma divide. As I pointed out by quoting Cavendish, materialist monism is hardly new. In his introduction to Outlines of Psychology (1895), Wilhelm Wundt carefully articulates the debates between metaphysical and empirical psychology and comes down clearly on the empirical side, arguing that from his point of view “the question of the relation between psychical and physical objects disappears entirely.”4 Biophysicists, such as Hermann von Helmholtz in the nineteenth century, were materialists, as was Jean-Martin Charcot, the French neurologist who never ceased hoping he would discover during autopsy the brain lesions that caused hysteria.5 And Sigmund Freud, who coined the term “conversion” for hysterical phenomena, never lost sight of the fact that psychoanalysis was a psychology rooted in biology.6 In Borderlands of Psychiatry, published in 1943, Stanley Cobb, echoing Wundt, wrote:

  I solve the mind-body problem by declaring there is no such problem . . . I would insist that the old dichotomies “functional or organic,” “mental or physic
al” are not only wrong, but lead to bad habits of thinking because they lead to static and obsolete ideas and do not allow for modern pluralistic and dynamic ideas of matter and structure . . . Anyone who stops to think realizes that no function is possible without an organ that is functioning and therefore no function takes place without structural change.7

  This is indubitably true. Every phenomenal thought and feeling is accompanied by brain changes.

  In my 2004 edition of Campbell’s Psychiatric Dictionary, the word “psychogenic” carries the following definition: “Relating to or characterized by psychogenesis; due to psychic, mental or emotional factors and not to detectable organic or somatic factors.”8 The definition may be saved from dualism by the word “detectable,” but probably not. Nevertheless, it is interesting to ask the radical question whether the distinction between psychological and physiological should be erased from medical vocabularies or whether it continues to serve some useful purpose. I think it does, but the words shouldn’t be used thoughtlessly.

  I am one of countless people in the world beset by an undiagnosed and medically unexplained symptom of a neurological character. I wrote a book about it called The Shaking Woman or A History of My Nerves that was published in 2009. The book is an interdisciplinary investigation of my symptom, which draws on insights from philosophy, the history of medicine, psychiatry, psychoanalysis, neurology, and neuroscience research. Early in the book, I describe the first shaking episode that occurred two years after my father’s death in May 2006. I had been asked to give a speech in memory of my father at a ceremony held on the campus of the college where he had been a professor for more than forty years.

  Confident and armed with index cards, I looked out at the fifty or so friends and colleagues of my father’s . . . launched into my first sentence, and began to shudder violently from the neck down. My arms flapped. My knees knocked. I shook as if I were having a seizure. Weirdly, my voice wasn’t affected. It didn’t change at all. Astounded by what was happening to me and terrified that I would fall over, I managed to keep my balance and continue, despite the fact that the cards in my hands were flying back and forth in front of me. When the speech ended, the shaking stopped. I looked down at my legs. They had turned deep red with a bluish cast.