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

by Siri Hustvedt

  In Injured Brains of Medical Minds: Views from Within, edited by Narinder Kapur, a compilation of physicians’ self-reports on their neurological disorders, a general practitioner named John Lisyak, who developed epilepsy late in his life, meditates on questions of illness and agency. “Understanding,” he writes, “does not necessarily change the reactions but it makes a difference to their severity.”29 After stopping his medication because he had been free of seizures for three years, he had another tonic-clonic convulsion that was followed by a depression. “However,” he writes, “because of the knowledge I had gained this depression was not accompanied by the feelings of hopelessness. And even the ‘funny’ smell that returned together with the emotional dread wasn’t nearly as disturbing because I understood what was happening.”30 His symptoms haven’t changed. He uses the words “depression” and “dread” to describe them, but he acknowledges that his feelings have nevertheless been transformed by an increased understanding of the nature of his disease.

  Knowledge creates a change in him, a change that I would argue is psychobiological and related to a greater sense of agency that arrives with understanding and narrative mastery. When I learned to accept my migraines as a permanent fixture in my life and to practice biofeedback in the face of them, my life changed and my pain lessened. The change is not just “mental.” It is physical or psychobiological. There are increasing numbers of neuroimaging studies on depression, for example, that demonstrate that the abnormal activity of the prefrontal cortex seen in depression becomes normal after remission, when a patient has been treated with either fluoxetine or placebo.31 Placebo effect involves beliefs, beliefs that bring on physical improvement both through the release of endogenous opioids in the brain and by nonopioid mechanisms.32 Exactly how a belief, an idea, transmutes into physiological processes wasn’t understood by Janet, and it is not understood now. In all events, there is increasing evidence for similar prefrontal normalization after talk therapy,33 which may involve precisely the understanding Lisyak cites as having altered his relation to his epilepsy. And this brings us back to the internal narrator and Descartes’s Cogito ergo sum—that powerful subjective, if illusory, feeling of an “I” that exists beyond the body.

  What human beings have that animals do not is a highly developed reflective self-consciousness that makes it possible for us to alienate ourselves in symbols. We can represent ourselves to ourselves in language. We can say “I” and that “I” can tell a story, and how the story of an illness is told is crucial to how it is lived. I cannot emphasize this enough. Looking back on his life, John Lisyak remembers “not being able to do what other children could. The village fair,” he writes, “that filled everyone with wonder and excitement made me feel uneasy, and I was never happy to go on the Ferris wheel.”34 Nor was I. I simply couldn’t understand why the rides that caused intense nausea, dizziness, and disequilibrium in me seemed so pleasant to other children. The neurological hypersensitivity—visual, auditory, tactile, olfactory—that arrives with migraine and/or epilepsy is not all bad. I, for one, am not willing to trade in my childhood sensitivities and raging pains, my many auras followed by headache, or even my peculiar epileptiform, maybe, maybe not pseudo-seizures, for a more normal trajectory because these events are not only part of my story, they have been crucial to my life as a writer of both fiction and nonfiction. I have sometimes wondered if I would have become a writer if I had not had my particular neurological disposition. But my pathological hypersensitivity (let us call it by its right name) has also served me well because I have been able to frame this quality of my being to my advantage through a self-narrative that recognizes strength in what is often regarded as weakness. Moreover, my insatiable reading in many disciplines and my subsequent thinking about the question “What are we?” have brought me what can only be called compensatory joy. If you can’t cure yourself, you can certainly learn as much as possible about what ails you.

  Philosophy matters because it informs diagnosis. Should “functional” and “organic” go the way of humors? Perhaps not, but replacing them with other words might create more a subtle understanding of biological processes. In the face of so much that remains unknown about brain function, intellectual humility matters, and, as a physician, intellectual humility may involve explaining to a patient that you don’t know what is wrong with him or her. It may mean being wishy-washy and ambivalent, rather than firm and confident. It may mean recognizing implicit prejudices in yourself against psychogenic and/or emotional, psychiatric illnesses as somehow effeminate and less “real” than a brain lesion. As a young woman with debilitating migraines, I was at times treated with condescension and exasperation by neurologists and medical professionals. Although some empathy in one’s doctor is certainly desirable, an ethical position requires respect, above all, the simple recognition that the patient in front of you has an inner life as full and complex as your own.

  Kierkegaard’s Pseudonyms and the Truths of Fiction

  * * *

  Prologue

  I will say “I” to Kierkegaard’s pseudonymous brood. I will not adopt the authoritative, objective, third-person, professorial voice in which most academic prose is written. My first-person pronoun will not duck underground and become what Émile Benveniste called histoire—that form of telling in which “no one speaks”—the authorial voice from nowhere.1 I will stay securely in the personal discours. And yet, it is not without anxiety that I step into the shoes of “hiin Enkelte,” that single individual. I am a reader, surely, but am I the dear reader, the beloved reader? Am I Mr. X, or the bird S.K. sees diving to retrieve his book? Am I the one to be deceived into the truth with a capital T? No, but I will take on my “I,” to whom the poetized personalities may say “you,” as one side of an intimate dialogical relation. After all, the crowd, Maengden, is not a reader. Every book is read one person at a time. The question “Who is speaking?” in the pseudonymous texts is surely mirrored by the question “Who is reading?”

  “One of the tragedies of modern life,” Kierkegaard wrote in his journals, presumably as himself, “is precisely this—to have abolished the ‘I,’ the personal I. For this very reason real ethical-religious communication is as if vanished from the world. For ethical-religious truth is essentially related to personality and can only be communicated by an I to an I. As soon as the communication becomes objective in this realm, the truth has become untruth. Personality is what we need. Therefore I regard it as my service that, by bringing poetized personalities who say I (my pseudonyms) to the center of life’s actuality, I have contributed, if possible, to familiarizing the contemporary age again to hearing an I, a personal I speak (not that fantastic pure I and its ventriloquism).”2

  And who are these multiple pseudonymous speechifiers brought into life’s actuality, into virkelighed? They are not just masks as George Eliot and Ellis Bell were for Mary Ann Evans and Emily Brontë. Are they not imaginary authors, some of whom give birth to more imaginary characters, all of whom are chattering in a fictive space? And don’t names such as Victor Eremita, Johannes de Silentio, Notabene, and Hilarious Bookbinder announce their roles as airy beings rather than actual residents of nineteenth-century Copenhagen? And yet, they speak in an I voice and are animated by the reader’s I. They live in me. What does it mean to say I, anyway? In the unfinished philosophical fragment written near the end of 1842, Johannes Climacus, writing in a highly Hegelian mode, says, “Immediacy is reality; language is ideality; consciousness is contradiction,”3 and “therefore it is language that cancels immediacy; if man could not talk he would remain in the immediate.”4 And so, when I say I, it is already alien to the sensual, felt particularity of my embodied here and now because it’s a word. Between the immediate and the ideal is a chasm or gap, but the two collide in human consciousness because they are both present in it.

  The linguistic “I” emerges only with reflective self-consciousness, in the realm of Hegel’s für sich, not an sich.5 And that I is mobile, a roam
ing abstract shifter dependent on who speaks it, and it is this “I” that moves backward and forward in time, that recollects the past and catapults itself into an imaginary future. The “fantastic pure I,” it seems, is one caught up in an objective impersonal system, Hegel’s churning machinery of thesis and antithesis, a Schattenspiel of abstraction, which is not a subjective Virkelighed at all. And yet, once the “I” has found its way into a book, it is even more alienated from the body of the writer and its immediacy, whomever she or he claims to be, or however many characters populate the text.

  To say this: When I read Hegel I do not see what I see when I read Kierkegaard’s poets and their vivid imagery. No matter how difficult, indirect, or maieutic (no work can stand alone but must be read and interpreted in the context of its dialogue with other works) I may find their ideas, my brain is crammed with particular mental images I remember: In the preface to Either/Or, I see an enraged Victor Eremita, hatchet raised. He delivers a “terrible blow” to the writing desk, and a secret door springs open.6 The violence forces two manuscripts from a piece of furniture—a textual twin birth. I see Cordelia embracing a cloud. I see the strange, silent figure of the mother blackening her breast to wean her child in the otherwise wholly patriarchal drama of Fear and Trembling. I see the forest described by William Afham in his “Recollection” in Stages on Life’s Way, not only as a replay of Plato’s Symposium, but as a sinister version of Shakespeare’s wood in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, a haunting oneiric prelude to a banquet and its misogynistic speeches. I see the breathless chase scene in The Concept of Anxiety. Sin advances. Repentance follows, but it is always “a moment too late.” Repentance, like the mad Lear, grieves over its losses, but cannot catch up. Now Anxiety peaks, turns into Repentance, and Repentance loses its mind. “The consequence of sin moves on; it drags the individual along like a woman whom the executioner drags by the hair while she screams in despair.”7 The passage is bloated with images. The metaphors multiply: a kingdom has lost its reins, a horse stops and gasps; a storm is felt in the bones before its onslaught. These are words carried away with themselves, and the imagery and metaphors create meanings in my mind that are not easily summarized in abstract philosophical concepts.

  For example, in Concluding Unscientific Postscript, recurring tropes of traveling, of foreign countries, of fencing and the continual self-reflexive commentary on texts, dialectics, as well as three pointed references to Don Quixote have created my own visual scenario that resembles an animated cartoon. I see my all-time favorite pseudonym, Climacus, as a “stark naked dialectician” with his sword raised.8 I see him as a miniature Quixotic figure, without horse or companion, on a journey through the book itself. I see him feinting and counterparrying his way through the clauses and dependent clauses, extra-long parentheses, and footnotes that together make up the objective system of the dastardly Hegelians. I see him slashing at the great edifice of abstract illusion and obfuscation so beloved by assistant professors until it lies demolished behind him. Not until the end of the book can the reviled assistant professor, cleansed of his abstractions, and the simple person, who never dreamed of reading Hegel to begin with, finally meet. Climacus halts and looks ahead at the ditch or chasm that lies in front of him. He has returned to the first question. How can I become a Christian? Will the humorist jump? I don’t know. Will I, the reader? I do know that no one can read herself into faith.

  But I also see Climacus’s editor, Søren Kierkegaard, behind the scenes smiling broadly, like Cervantes before him, guffawing over the riddles of authorship and authority, over who wrote what, and the blinding effects of books on readers, of the double nature of the self and subjectivity, of the imaginary and the real, of what the world calls madness in its myriad ambiguities, of jesters, humorists, and holy fools. I also know that the single article I could find on Cervantes and Kierkegaard, by Óscar Parcero Oubiña (“Miguel de Cervantes: The Valuable Contribution of a Minor Influence” from volume 5 of Kierkegaard Research: Sources, Reception, and Resources), is an assiduous treatment of every reference to the Knight of the Sad Countenance S.K. ever made. Does our careful scholar see some connections? Yes, he does, and near the end, he timidly suggests, “An interpretation like this would be to propose a parallelism between Cervantes’s novel and Climacus’s Postscript.”9 The two master ironists might be excused for grabbing their bellies, bursting into laughter, and rolling on the ground. One of the passages Oubiña quotes from is an 1836 journal entry, in which S.K. muses about writing a novel, “A Literary Don Quixote.” Kierkegaard then remarks that the significance of books has been totally misunderstood “in the learned world . . . because the learned people are forever producing learned works and losing themselves in the footnotes.”10 Alas, this is still the case, and the irony is rich indeed.

  Whoever is speaking in the pseudonymous texts of indirect communication, in whatever mood—and mood, Stemning, is crucial—from whatever perspective, S.K.’s texts embody a novelistic specificity in ways Hegel and many other philosophers never do. Even when the “I” that speaks is a poetic creature of another character—as is Johannes the Seducer, who belongs to A, a cold phantom born of an esthete’s fever dream—he is more concretely human than Hegel’s stick figures of master and slave, for example. This particularity is of the philosophy. And the mental images generated in the reading and the feelings that accompany them—uneasiness, elation, humor, dread, sadness—admittedly various and admittedly dependent on the reader—become part of the works’ multiple and proliferating meanings.

  In “A First and Last Explanation,” which comes after Johannes Climacus’s “Conclusion” to Concluding Unscientific Postscript and also after an appendix by Climacus called “An Understanding with the Reader,” S.K. steps forward as himself to begin and end yet again. In his Forklaring, he takes legal and literary responsibility for his creatures but otherwise severs all ties with them: “I am impersonally or personally in the third person as a souffleur who has poetically produced the authors, whose prefaces in turn are their productions, as their names are also. Thus in the pseudonymous books there is not a single word by me.”11 In that case, what is he to them? “An indifferent foster father.”12 Nota bene, not a real father; they are not flesh of his flesh, not the fruit of his loins, not the beloved offspring. No, his role is off to the side as an observer, policeman, judge, watchman, spy, or a prompter in the wings (all metaphorical characters that recur in the pseudonymous books). After insisting that his commentators cite the pseudonyms by name, S.K. asks that he be separated from his characters in such a way that the passage cited “femininely belongs to the pseudonymous author, the responsibility civilly to me.”13 Femininely? Are the male pseudonyms giving birth while the foster father reluctantly agrees to sign the adoption papers? A “Mysterious Family,” then—with its distant surrogate father, absent mother, and slew of fertile boys spawning paragraphs. And famously or infamously in the journals: no mother of Søren either. She does not exist in his words. She is the unarticulated, the hole, gap, the silence in the productivity. But maternal metaphors abound—pregnancy, labor pains, birth. Three will suffice: “There never was an individuality more beautiful and noble than one who is inclosed in the womb of a great idea.”14 “Longing,” S.K. writes, “is the umbilical cord of the higher life.”15 And in Either/Or part 2, “By the individual’s intercourse with himself he impregnates himself and brings himself to birth.”16

  Beginnings and endings are fraught throughout the pseudonymous works. Notabene’s prefaces introduce no texts, like a man clearing his throat before a speech that never comes. On the first page of Repetition, Constantin Constantius, his name itself a stutter, invokes Diogenes, who paces silently back and forth to refute the Eliatics’ denial of motion. It is an act, not a thought or a speech. And the young man so desperately in love grows old in the relationship at its start. His mistake is that he “stood at the end instead of the beginning.”17 His imagination has run ahead to look back before its time, but he himself
is an imaginary creature of Constantius. And every time I have finished the book (an obsession of my own), I am so puzzled by what I have read, I reenact Diogenes’s motion as a reader by going back to the beginning to read the book all over again to the end, which is, in effect, never the end. “Repetition and recollection are the same movement, except in opposite directions.”18 As a reader I am going back and forth. In Either/Or: “The Unhappiest One” is forever “absent from himself”19 “hoping for what lies behind him; what he recollects lies ahead of him. His life is not backwards but turned the wrong way in two directions.”20 The Janus face of time as the imagination, as a subjunctive poetic flight backward and forward in the absence of immediacy and a refusal to choose the self but remain suspended in endless possibility. In a journal entry from 1837, S.K. writes, “Unfortunately my life is far too subjunctive: would to God I had some indicative power.”21 Kierkegaard feels for his aesthetic characters. Climacus concludes his mammoth Concluding Postscript and then revokes it, which is not the same as not having written it, he says. It is a gesture that enacts the philosophy. Isn’t this what Kierkegaard called “mimical”? Isn’t this like mime or miming? He has passed beyond Socrates and Religion A. Now he cannot go backward; he can only go forward if he chooses.

  The danger involved in writing about S.K.’s family of voices—they do have a strong family resemblance as siblings and they talk about one another—is not only to miss their indirection and attribute their thoughts to S. Kierkegaard, there is another danger, too, which is to free the texts from their lush imagery and dancing tropes and abstract them into “regular philosophy” or “professorial works” by paraphrasing what they or he, S.K., as their creator, really meant to say and to deny the unconscious, creative forces that are at work in them, forces even the self-proclaimed genius souffleur himself did not fully understand.