Arnold Weinstein - A Scream Goes Through The House (20 page)

Gregor's family debates endlessly over whether this can still be Gregor—my students invariably accuse the family of heartlessness, but put yourself in their place, I tell them, your son just acquired multiple legs and beetle paraphernalia—and much of the story centers around

the question: what is a person? At what point does alteration alter you out of being human? (The deformed, the chronically ill, and the elderly know something about these matters.) We the readers grant Gregor human status largely because the story is written from his perspective, which is to say: this giant beetle has a consciousness that governs the story, and it is that consciousness we come to know. There is no one quite like Kafka in this department, inasmuch as every reader anticipates Gregor's voice to be one of horror and pathos—here, certainly, we expect a scream to go through the house—but finds, instead, the calmly (madly?) reasoning thoughts of a many-legged bug that still wants to go to work, still wants to play the role of loving son, still thinks he is human. Much of the power of stories such as that of the human beetle or the Elephant Man stems from our shocked awareness that this monstrous thing we see with our eyes is, yes, human.

In Kafka's most interesting work, human status is precisely what is being taken away. Not by any act of cruelty, but rather by a writerly imagination that sees the
human
as a category you could exit. The postmodern analysis of Kafka written by Deleuze and Guattari is provocative along just these lines: instead of "translating" these stories into allegory or psychology—according to which, Gregor might be the artist or Jesus or the schlemiel—they point out that Kafka's recurrent plot entails
becoming-animal.
We have Josephine the singing mouse, we have the ape who makes his "report to the academy," we have the astonishing narrator of "The Construction" (some kind of beast dug into the earth, insanely paranoid about attackers and threats, obliged to use its head as battering ram, offering up Kafka's grisly version of Homo sapiens). Literature performs its immemorial humanizing role in these fables by endowing these creatures with thought and speech, enabling (obliging) us to grant them human status. And that's fine. But they also strike terror in us by bracketing the human, by reminding us that the transition from animal to human—at issue since the encounter between Oedipus and the Sphinx—is a two-way street.

"I" VERSUS "IT": SELF VERSUS BODY

It does not take all that much for us to see the endless traffic on this two-way street. Disfigurement has been discussed already, but I'd argue that advanced senility, nervous tics, neurological dysfunction, the gestures of palsy or Parkinson's: these instances of motor impairment or spastic gesticulation signal the same kind of outbreak and alterity that was visible in the liberated hand that Malte was stunned by. Mutations into ani-mality cause unease. One of Oliver Sacks's beguiling collection of stories, "clinical tales" he calls them, is entitled
The Man Who Mistook His Wife for His Hat,
and in these pieces the genial doctor shows us over and over how neurology itself is to be understood as the war between "I" and "It," between self and soma. Sacks has, I think, a rare gift for seeing what is human and precious in his patients, for illuminating how rich even the most impaired lives can be, and we can see his credo in the quotation from Ivy McKenzie that he offers as epigraph: "The physician is concerned [unlike the naturalist] . . . with a single organism, the human subject, striving to preserve its identity in adverse circumstances." In case after case—the amnesiac, the woman with proprioceptive dysfunction, those with phantom limbs, the aphasiac, the migraine visionary, the idiot savant, the autistic child—Sacks helps us to gauge the dance of our species, the tradeoffs and compensations and stunning adaptations we are capable of, in this struggle to maintain an "I." This dance is especially visible in figures like "Witty Ticcy Ray," who has Tourette's syndrome and manages a fragile truce between the mutinous high energy of his tics (which fuels his music, Ping-Pong, and repartee) and the constraining control of his drugs (making married life and work something manageable), leaving us with the conclusion that the "real" Ray is a composite of animal and medication.

Sacks claims that Ray's case is special because he must go to such lengths to control the animal, to yoke his rebellious system into at least partial submission; most of us, the neurologist implies, are blessed by

our "normalcy" and do not require such ministrations. But is this true? In a culture that is increasingly aware of attention deficit disorder, dyslexia, anxiety disorders, and that much more familiar slew of somatic ailments such as high cholesterol, high blood pressure, and endless other litde failings or deviations from the norm, do we know anyone who is not on medication of some sort, who doesn't require some adjusting? I have colleagues who say, only half in jest, that Prozac (or its successors) will soon be in the water supply, just as chlorine is. Witty Ticcy Ray breaks out in spectacular bouts of motor and verbal fireworks, and he receives medicine. The recent film
Shine
gave a heart-wrenching version of a similar conflict between physiological determinism and free will. I personally, who am not (yet) diagnosed as neurologically impaired, find increasingly that my whole life is a series of negotiations between "It" and "I"; I discover this in my sleeping patterns, the waxing and waning of appetites, my spells of temper, my dealings with colleagues and students, my bubbling fears, my unyielding features (physical as well as psychological). I doubtless owe large chunks of what is good as well as bad in my life to somatic givens of which I have no inkling. Hamlet signs a love letter to Ophelia: "Thine evermore, most dear lady, whilst this machine is to him, HAMLET" (II.ii.122-123). But there's the rub: these machines have a priority and agenda all their own, and we cannot answer for them, even though we are shackled to them.

Witty Ticcy Ray takes Haldol; I'll spare the reader a list of the substances I routinely ingest to remain me. Is this not a version of bodies eating bodies? American pills are so tiny and anodyne that they seem innocuous, but anyone who has filled a prescription in a French pharmacy knows how weighty and technicolor these matters can be: shiny colors, neon lights, glass vials, signs that this stuff means business.

In story after story, Oliver Sacks the doctor seduces us the readers by dint of his faith in the human person, his warm yet brilliant capacity to assist his impaired patients in their "I"/"It" conflict, their struggle to retain their form, their selves, despite the mutinies at hand. Some would have it that "being yourself" is a full-time job under any circumstances,

with or without pills. Yet it seems to be the very basic drive of our lives, the supreme plot of a species that is born in a body but wants to maintain a self. Arguably, the most profound consequence of this philosophy, in my view, concerns medicine itself, by which I mean that the quintessential task of the physician is
maintenance of self
for
his or her patients, entailing, especially in life-threatening situations where life-altering therapies may be on the docket, a complex understanding of the ill person's selfhood. The Hippocratic injunction, "at least do no harm," surely stems from a comparable belief in the integrity of the patient as that which antedates illness, and that which must not be compromised.

TAKEOVER

Dr. Sacks seeks to fashion some kind of harmonious existence for his impaired patients. He gives Witty Ticcy Ray Haldol in hopes that the pills can effect some kind of truce with Ray's skewed neurochemistry. At best, he reaches a compromise. Bodies have a will, sometimes an anarchic will of their own. The charade of civilization has it that we lead our bodies, but as we've seen, the truth may be the other way around. They are the controllers, the bullies. What if they could talk? Not just in ways we know about, via unbidden noises such as screams, laughs, hiccups, groans, belches, and farts, but really talk? I invoke here, for your delectation, one of the most dazzling passages in modern literature, William Burroughs's story of the man who taught his asshole to talk:

"This ass talk had a kind of gut frequency. It hit you right down there like you gotta go. You know when the old colon gives you the elbow and it feels sorta cold inside, and you know all you have to do is turn loose? Well this talking hit you right down there, a bubbly, thick stagnant sound, a sound you could
smell.

"This man worked for a carnival you dig, and to start with it was like a novelty ventriloquist act. Really funny, too, at first. He had a number he called 'The Better "Ole" ' that was a scream, I tell you. I

forget most of it but it was clever. Like, 'Oh I say, are you still down there, old thing?'

" 'Nah! I had to go relieve myself.'

"After a while the ass started talking on its own. He would go in without anything prepared and his ass would ad-lib and toss the gags back at him every time.

"Then it developed sort of teeth-like little raspy in-curving hooks and started eating. He thought this was cute at first and built an act around it, but the asshole would eat its way through his pants and start talking on the street, shouting out it wanted equal rights. It would get drunk, too, and have crying jags nobody loved it and it wanted to be kissed same as any other mouth. Finally it talked all the time day and night, you could hear him for blocks screaming at it to shut up, and beating it with his fist, and sticking candles up it, but nothing did any good and the asshole said to him: 'It's you who will shut up in the end. Not me. Because we don't need you around here any more. I can talk and eat
and
shit.'

"After that he began waking up in the morning with a transparent jelly like a tadpole's tail all over his mouth. This jelly was what the scientists call un-D.T., Undifferentiated Tissue, which can grow into any kind of flesh on the human body. He would tear it off his mouth and the pieces would stick to his hands like burning gasoline jelly and grow there, grow anywhere on him a glob fell. So finally his mouth sealed over, and the whole head would have amputated spontaneous . . . except for the
eyes
you dig. That's one thing the asshole
couldn't
do was see. It needed the eyes. But nerve connections were blocked and infiltrated and atrophied so the brain couldn't give orders any more. It was trapped in the skull, sealed off. For a while you could see the silent, helpless suffering of the brain behind the eyes, then finally the brain must have died, because the eyes
went out,
and there was no more feeling in them than a crab's eye on the end of a stalk." (132-133)

Each time I read this passage aloud in a lecture hall (assigning and citing aloud Burroughs to Ivy League students furnishes a good argument for having—or abolishing—tenure), I encounter the same evolving response: giggles at first at the raunchiness of the topic, followed by full-throated laughter at the routines devised by both the asshole and the man in their joust, their fleshly pas de deux, and finally an increasing sense of unease that closes with utter silence. No one laughs at the end.

Burroughs has writ large for us a fable of somatic usurpation, inflected initially with Rabelaisian humor but stamped finally by a tragic sense of human undoing. His story acknowledges the crucial cooperation between "I" and "It," man and animal, self and body, that characterizes our lifelong stint in flesh. And so long as this relationship is harmonious, we don't even know it exists, much less that we have grown accustomed to giving orders to the body every moment we live—I see myself typing these words on a page at this instant, see the docile fingers doing what the brain commands, and am grateful—even if we suspect that sickness and aging are likely to spoil this party whenever they crash the scene. Much of this tale's humor and malice derive from the crucial
education
it depicts: the man teaches his asshole how to talk. Speech, we know, is what distinguishes humans from animals, and one might argue that the asshole rises to the position of counterplayer via this transcendence of realms, almost as if this were a mythic fable, on the order of Prometheus stealing fire from the gods, but cast rather differently as an asshole with attitude and pretensions, an asshole that usurps human trumps, an asshole that declares war.

One thing is certain: the story has its place in the academy, not only because its salty language serves as an overdue reality check for the highfalutin professorial lingo of abstractions and fifty-dollar words we usually sling around, but because it is a parable about learning, about learning as power. It also graphs a kind of corrida in which the bull slays the matador. But this conflict doesn't have two actors, just one, yielding something on the order of a somatic civil war, a literally internecine

struggle to the death. With a little exaggeration, I'd go on to say that a complete cultural belief system in socialization is going up in smoke.

After all, growing up consists in schooling the body, teaching it discipline, imposing decorous law on bladder and colon, repressing belches and farts, disapproving of nose-picking and scratching-where-it-itches, eating with utensils, hiding pain, postponing pleasure, not to mention learning to cultivate what is prized: physical beauty, good posture, our best features, perhaps voice, a winning smile, an entire host of mannerisms designed to please.
Il faut cultiver notre jardin,
Voltaire said, and the garden-body that is tended and pruned, clothed and perfumed, sent out into world as a chief engine in our schemes: all this is being cashiered in front of our eyes. Burroughs is announcing an end to the oldest tyranny of all: the self's control of the body. The former contracts are breached, the dike is broken, and we can see that the Terror is coming. Bye-bye, agency.