A Woman Looking at Men Looking at Women: Essays on Art, Sex, and the Mind
Page 61
Medical history, from ancient days onward, is filled with stories of prophesying epileptics. In his book The Falling Sickness, Owsei Temkin cites a patient of Krafft-Ebing from his Lehrbuch der Psychiatrie, published in 1879. “Several times a year, usually before or after an accumulation of seizures . . . he fell into an irritated and excited state, condemned his godless environment, mistook others for devils, thrashed out, and wished to be crucified for the true faith. At the height of his ecstasy he saw God face to face and declared himself . . . God’s true warrior, prophet, and martyr.”43 This does not describe our circumspect, dialectical, if passionate S.K., but it might describe Adler, the former Hegelian and dismissed pastor, a man S.K. knew, and to whom he devoted an entire book, which was not published in his lifetime, who claimed to have had a direct revelation from Christ. When is prophesy nervous madness? In the psychiatric hospital where I worked, there was a taciturn, wild-eyed young man, a Hasidic Jew, who believed he was the Messiah. I also had a woman in my class who told me her husband was God.
Every person’s profound emotional history affects her or his philosophical outlook or, in S.K.’s case, Inblikk—in-look or insight. Feeling plays a far greater role in the ideas we adopt than the long Western philosophical tradition that hails reason over emotion has ever been able to admit and, furthermore, even when scholars busily work to undermine that split tradition—to denounce Cartesian dualism or humanism or the Enlightenment subject, or what-have-you, they usually do it in a dispassionate, abstract, objective mode uttered in a voice from nowhere. As I wrote in my book The Shaking Woman or A History of My Nerves, people gravitate to certain ideas for reasons that are far from objective. After a lecture I attended on neurobiology and empathy, a man stood up at the back of the room, introduced himself as an engineer, and declared loudly and emphatically that empathy did not exist. Rightly or wrongly, I immediately formulated a diagnosis of high-functioning autism. In the book, I write:
Surely it is difficult to believe in an emotional state you never experience. It is not like believing in Antarctica or neurons or quarks. Even if one has no personal knowledge of these entities, has never actually seen them, they may be taken on faith, part of our intersubjective cultural knowledge. In contrast, the world of our feelings is so internal, so inseparable from being itself that every notion we entertain about normality becomes highly subjective. To argue that the man at the back of the room has a “condition,” currently a fashionable diagnosis, that makes him abnormal does not detract from my point: it is often difficult to untangle personality and feeling states from belief systems, ideas and theories.44
We judge our truths not only logically but emotionally, and the insistence on the limits of logic and abstraction is very Kierkegaardian indeed. In the Postscript Climacus argues, “With respect to existence, thinking is not at all superior to imagination and feeling but is coordinate.”45 This surely, as the humorist would say, “is almost earnestness.”46 A human being’s access to faith and the eternal is not reasonable, and reason is no test of actual lived bodily experience, what Husserl called Leib. Emotional states, “fear and trembling,” “anxiety,” and “despair” are elevated in Kierkegaard’s works to philosophical concepts that describe the human condition, the particular reality of the single individual and his subjectivity, and the possibilities in the closed secret room of the true self for access in the Moment to the divine, where finite and infinite meet, where the temporal and the eternal touch. This is the personal raised to glorious heights of ultimate, absurd, absolute, stupefying contradiction.
After explaining in a journal entry that he wrote Either/Or for Regine, Kierkegaard remarks, “On the whole, the very mark of my genius is that Governance broadens and radicalizes whatever concerns me personally. I remember what a pseudonymous writer said about Socrates: ‘His whole life was a personal preoccupation with himself, and then Governance comes along and adds world-historical significance to it.’ ”47 And yet, Kierkegaard refuses to say he is God’s own pseudonym, a prophet. “But anxiety bordering on madness,” he writes in The Point of View, “is not to be regarded as a higher form of religiousness.”48 The powerful emotional conviction that God has an invisible hand in his writing coincides with an equally strong conviction that he is not religious enough, that he remains a poet. “There is still an element of the poetic in me that from a Christian point of view is a minus.”49 And so, after hoping to be done with pseudonyms and indirect communication, Anti-Climacus must speak in a voice above S.K., as the one who is more religious than he, but this voice is not simply religious or direct either. In the papers, S.K. writes about Anti-Climacus, “His personal guilt, then, is to confuse himself with ideality (this is the daemonic in him), but his portrayal of ideality can be absolutely sound, and I bow to it.”50
In Practice in Christianity, Anti-Climacus asks the question, “But if the essentially Christian is something so terrifying and appalling, how in the world can anyone think of accepting Christianity?” He answers that it is through consciousness of sin, then writes, “And at that very same moment the essentially Christian transforms itself into and is sheer leniency, grace, love, mercy. Considered in any other way Christianity is and must be a kind of madness or the greatest horror.”51 All I can say is that this passing over the chasm from horror to grace appears to be well-nigh impossible. No wonder S.K. had to give this particular job to Anti-Climacus.
Images, metaphors, or direct references to madness or the borderline of madness appear again and again in Kierkegaard’s pseudonymous texts. I cannot help but think of Quixote again, when the crazy knight learns that he is a character in a novel called Don Quixote. He is himself the product of two authors, after all, neither of whom is called Cervantes, not to speak of the author of the fake Quixote Part II, who enters the novel as well. When he was twenty-five, Kierkegaard wrote in his journal, “A man wishes to write a novel in which one of the characters goes mad; while working on it, he himself goes mad by degrees and finishes it in the first person.”52 Despite the comedy of this passage or, perhaps because of it, the slippage from one person to another in this miniature story—I assume it is from the third to the first—is from author to character, who merge in a single “I.”
Creation is not an activity without risk. All creative acts, whether of poetic worlds, philosophical systems, mathematical formulas, or scientific research tap into unconscious regions of the self. In opposition to Lombroso and other thinkers of the period, F. W. H. Myers, a nineteenth-century philosopher and psychical researcher, described genius as an evolving process, in which the barrier between what he called the subliminal and the supraliminal self was more permeable than in other people. “The ‘inspiration of genius,’ ” he wrote, “will be in truth a subliminal uprush, an emergence into the current of ideas which the man is consciously manipulating of other ideas which he has not consciously originated, but which have shaped themselves beyond his will, in the profounder regions of his being.”53 It must be added that here the subliminal self is not a primitive zone of mammalian drives. What is now referred to as “the cognitive unconscious” contains a world of digested, sophisticated material a person has mastered to the degree that it has become unconscious and automatic. Therefore the uprush can feel unwilled, can feel as if you are being prompted, being directed, being written. It can feel as if God or a demon or some imp from a fairy tale were whispering in your ear.
Perhaps writing fiction and the kind of pseudonymous philosophy Søren Kierkegaard wrote, with its greater and lesser affinities to the novel, harbors particular dangers. The authors of the author, the narrators, the characters that appear, seemingly from nowhere, with their peculiar speeches and their unaccountable actions are sometimes unconscionable beings, even monsters. The Seducer’s Diary practically quivers with sadistic joy. By applying the Chinese-box effect, forfatteren (the author), Søren Kierkegaard, made sure that forføreren (the seducer), Johannes, was removed several times from his own person. The book’s editor, Victor Eremi
ta, has a name that means hermit and, in The Point of View, S.K. claims the book was “written in a monastery,”54 but he also confesses in his journal that he wrote the Diary to repulse Regine. Another paradox: I am as far away from that creep Johannes as a monk in his cell, but at the same time I hope you, my love, to whom I devote all my work, believe that I am as horrible and calculating as he is.
But then who would claim our emotional lives are free of riddles? We are all strangers to ourselves, are we not? And the single individual may contain plural I’s within her. This is what we are told happened to Cordelia after Johannes got hold of her: “It is oppressive for her that he has deceived her, but still more oppressive, one is almost tempted to say, that he has awakened multiple-tongued reflection, that he has so developed her esthetically that she no longer listens humbly to one voice but is able to hear the many voices at the same time.”55 This is indeed the polyphonic truth of fiction, which is always indirect communication. It consists of many small truths, a plurality of voices that create the glorious racket M. M. Bakhtin, author of The Dialogic Imagination, understood as the way of the novel—Bakhtin, who read Kierkegaard carefully, but who, like Heidegger and Sartre, hid the master’s influence.56
But there is silence, too, at once unspeakably terrible and ineffably beautiful, demonic and divine. It is hidden in a sealed box where the True Self may be protected but where it longs for the other and for otherness. The unwritten mother lives in the box with the father’s unspeakable secret. “I am a silent letter,” S.K. wrote to his friend Boesen, “which no one can pronounce and which does not say anything to anyone.”57 But he circled the silence and the wound with torrents of words, with multitongued reflection, and I for one am grateful for those worlds within worlds within worlds.
Postscript
Philosophy may arrive in the form of a novel. Story, vivid metaphor, emotion, sensuality, the particular case—none of these is an enemy of philosophy. S.K. danced from the single case to abstraction, from the personal to the universal and back again. The meanings proliferate. If we are to read him and his masks well, we must dance with him.
Books by internationally acclaimed author Siri Hustvedt
Longlisted for the prestigious Man Booker Prize and hailed by The Washington Post as “Siri Hustvedt’s best novel yet, an electrifying work,” The Blazing World is a masterful novel about perception, prejudice, desire, and one woman’s struggle to be seen.
The Blazing World
* * *
ORDER YOUR COPIES TODAY!
AUTHOR’S PREVIOUSLY PUBLISHED ESSAYS
“Pina: Dancing for Dance.” DVD essay for Pina, film directed by Wim Wenders. New York: The Criterion Collection, 2011.
“Mapplethorpe/Almodóvar: Points and Counterpoints,” in La Mirada de Almodóvar/Almodóvar Gaze: Robert Mapplethorpe. Madrid: Galleria Elvira with La Fábrica, 2012. Exhibition Catalogue.
“A Woman Looking at Men Looking at Women,” in Women: Picasso, Beckmann, de Kooning. Edited by Carla Schultz. Munich: Pinakothek der Moderne with Hatje Cantz, 2012. Exhibition Catalogue, 188–202.
“Borderlands: First, Second, and Third Person Adventures in Crossing Disciplines,” in American Lives. Monograph (Book 234). Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag, 2013, 111–38.
“Philosophy Matters in Brain Matters.” Seizure: The European Journal of Epilepsy 22, no. 3 (2013): 169–73.
“Suicide and the Drama of Self-Consciousness.” Suicidology Online 4 (2013): 105–13.
“Investing in Balloon Magic: Jeff Koons and the Business of Art,” www.250words.com/2014/01/investing-in-balloon-magic/.
“I Wept for Four Years and When I Stopped I Was Blind.” Neurophysiologie Clinique/Clinical Neurophysiologie 44 (2014): 305–14.
“Anselm Kiefer: The Truth Is Always Gray,” in The Broad Collection. Edited by Joanne Heyler with Ed Schad and Chelsea Beck. The Broad Museum/Prestel, 2015, 75–84.
“Much Ado About Hairdos,” in Me, My Hair and I: Twenty-Seven Women Untangle an Obsession. Edited by Elizabeth Benedict. Chapel Hill, NC: Algonquin, 2015.
“No Competition,” published as “Knausgaard Writes Like a Woman.” Lithub.com, December 10, 2015.
“Sontag on Smut: Fifty Years Later.” Salmagundi Magazine, Spring–Summer 2016, 37–55.
“Why One Story and Not Another?” in Zones of Focused Ambiguity in Siri Hustvedt’s Works: Interdisciplinary Essays. Edited by Johanna Hartmann, Christine Marks, and Hubert Zapf. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2016, 11–25.
© MARION ETTLINGER
SIRI HUSTVEDT has a PhD in English literature from Columbia University and is a lecturer in psychiatry at Weill Medical School of Cornell University. She is the author of six novels, three collections of essays, and a work of nonfiction. In 2012 she won the International Gabarron Award for Thought and Humanities. The Blazing World was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize and won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for fiction in 2014. Her work has been translated into over thirty languages. She lives in Brooklyn.
MEET THE AUTHORS, WATCH VIDEOS AND MORE AT
SimonandSchuster.com
authors.simonandschuster.com/Siri-Hustvedt
ALSO BY SIRI HUSTVEDT
FICTION
The Blindfold
The Enchantment of Lily Dahl
What I Loved
The Sorrows of an American
The Summer Without Men
The Blazing World
NONFICTION
Mysteries of the Rectangle: Essays on Painting
A Plea for Eros
The Shaking Woman or A History of My Nerves
Living, Thinking, Looking
We hope you enjoyed reading this Simon & Schuster eBook.
* * *
Join our mailing list and get updates on new releases, deals, bonus content and other great books from Simon & Schuster.
CLICK HERE TO SIGN UP
or visit us online to sign up at
eBookNews.SimonandSchuster.com
NOTES
I
A WOMAN LOOKING AT MEN LOOKING AT WOMEN
A Woman Looking at Men Looking at Women
1. Pablo Picasso, quoted in introduction, Picasso on Art: A Selection of Views, ed. Dore Ashton (New York: De Capo Press, 1972), 11.
2. Max Beckmann, “Letters to a Woman Painter,” in Max Beckmann: Self-Portrait in Words; Collected Writings and Statements, 1903–1950, ed. Barbara Copeland Buenger, trans. Barbara Copeland Buenger and Reinhold Heller (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 314.
3. Willem de Kooning, “Interview,” in Selden Rodman, Conversations with Artists (New York: Capricorn, 1961), 102.
4. Henry James, quoted in Leon Edel, Henry James: A Life (New York: Harper & Row, 1985), 250.
5. Aby Warburg, quoted in E. H. Gombrich, Aby Warburg: An Intellectual Biography, with a Memoir of the History of the Library by F. Saxl (Oxford: Phaidon, 1986), 88f.
6. Mariann Weierich and Lisa Feldman Barrett, “Affect as a Source of Visual Attention,” in The Social Psychology of Visual Perception, ed. Emily Balcetis and G. Daniel Lassiter (New York: Psychology Press, 2010),140.
7. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1962), 350–53.
8. Arlene S. Walker-Andrews, “Infants’ Bimodal Perception of Gender,” Ecological Psychology 3, no. 2 (1991): 55–75.
9. Aby Warburg, quoted in Mark A. Russell, Between Tradition and Modernity: Aby Warburg and the Public Purposes of Art, 1896–1918 (New York: Berghan Books, 2007), 119.
10. John Richardson, A Life of Picasso: The Triumphant Years, 1917–1932 (New York: Knopf, 2010).
11. Françoise Gilot, quoted in Brigitte Léal, “For Charming Dora: Portraits of Dora Maar,” in Picasso and Portraiture: Representation and Transformation, ed. William Rubin (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, Abrahms, 1996), 395.
12. Angela Carter, quoted in Griselda Pollock, Vision and Difference: Feminism, Femininity, and the Histories of Art (London: Routledge, 1988),
218.
13. Elaine de Kooning, quoted in Ann Eden Gibson, Abstract Expressionism: Other Politics (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997), 135.
14. Max Beckmann, “Thoughts on Timely and Untimely Art,” in Buenger, 116.
15. Ibid., 117.
16. Alfred H. Barr, German Painting and Sculpture: New York 1931, Museum of Modern Art (New York: Plandome Press, 1931), 7.
17. Karen Lang, “Max Beckmann’s Inconceivable Modernism,” in Of ‘Truths Impossible to Put in Words’: Max Beckmann Contextualized, ed. Rose-Carol Washton Long and Maria Makela (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2008), 81.
18. Max Beckmann, “The Social Stance of the Artist by the Black Tightrope Walker,” in Buenger, 282.
19. Max Beckmann, “Wartime Letters: Roeselare, Wervicq, Brussels,” in Buenger, 160.
20. Jay A. Clarke, “Space as Metaphor: Beckmann and the Conflicts of Secessionist Style in Berlin,” in Washton Long and Makela, 79.
21. Max Beckmann, “Letters to a Woman Painter,” in Buenger, 317.
22. Reviews quoted in John Elderfield, De Kooning: A Retrospective (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 2011), 27.