Arnold Weinstein - A Scream Goes Through The House (22 page)

Naked Lunch
seems like a surreal, hallucinatory carnival, a parade of scenes that we cannot easily label real or imaginary, but there is a grisly structure in all this turbulence: the opening of the body by a foreign ob-

ject. This is Burroughs's only plot, because it is the only game in town. This is the
Urform
of reality, and we can see that it covers a lot of ground: eating, drinking, fornicating, infection, ingesting substances of any stripe (from aspirin to heroin), genetic engineering, and all of that crucial figurative stuff as well where we are entered: language, image, thoughts. Reading Burroughs, we understand that all bodies are porous, all bodies are the sites on which stuff (whether material or mental) goes in and out.

The novel goes on, in its shocking fashion, to chart the geometry and geography of such openings: the syringe penetrates the skin and the junk enters the bloodstream; the penis or its substitute enters the vagina or the rectum; the bacteria or the seed enters the body to grow; the scalpel or the rusty tin can cuts open the flesh; the genes are tampered with and "re-form"; the worm enters the egg; the pregnant woman carries the "little stranger"; the cells revolt through cancer and take over the body; the body's physiology is redesigned by doctors and scientists; the mind is altered by ideological and chemical programming. The actors may change, but the fable remains the same: the parasite enters the host to control it. No other writer has ever presented such a viral picture of the world.

This view of reality as body traffic cashiers a number of hallowed concepts: willpower, ethics, propriety (in every sense), integrity, agency. The picture it offers of the human subject is that of an organism held hostage to need, prey to invasion, meshed with others, from the moment of first breathing air to the moment of death. Burroughs picks up one of the oldest motifs of American thinking, the
frontier
(where its reach goes from the so-called Virgin West to American politics, financing an industry of cowboy films along the way, extending on up to outer space, always signifying that American holy of holies: a free space beyond culture), but he locates it where no one else has thought (or dared) to: on the body. Burroughs is our cartographer who maps the new world of the body, and he makes us see that the body's traffic is an affair of
entries and exits,
giving us a version of
ecstasy
that is etymologically sound—ex

stasis—and posited as the goal of human activity. Thus it is utterly logical, even if shocking, to read the following: "Gentle Reader, we see God through our assholes in the flashbulb of orgasm. . . . Through the orifices transmute your body. . . . The way OUT is the way IN . . ." (229).

Ultimately, Burroughs commands our interest as a writer who recon-ceives the grammar and syntax of our lives, by offering a vision of the embodied subject and the dance of the species unlike any we are familiar with. If we insist on thinking that such a view is overdetermined by mind-altering drugs, it is worth remembering that Burroughs said, as far back as the 1950s, that
Time
magazine is a more powerful hallucinogen than any chemical you could ingest. His work explodes the polite codes of speech, behavior, and perception, and urges upon us a chastened (as well as exalted) sense of our place in the pulsating world: chastened because will and control are for naught as we emit and receive, enter and exit; and exalted because all those separate spheres of reality—such as food and drink, sex, drugs, language, media, ideology, politics—are shown in their radiant unity as a form of intercourse with the body.

Most of us will not be cheered up by the Burroughs model of bodies in the world. Yet, it would be a mistake to assume that the very idea of the "opened body" is horrific. Might the rupturing of the body actually be an entry of the
spirit?
Might it even be necessary to break the body so that the dross can be removed, and the soul be displayed? Let me bring into this discussion of pieced-apart bodies one of the strangest prose writers of the twentieth century, Flannery O'Connor, whose regional focus on rural life in Georgia and whose fierce Catholic beliefs have tended to position her as all too minor a figure in American letters. O'Connor reconceives the mind over body dyad by positing the body (often the grotesque body) as the true locus of grace and miracles. The religious vision that fuels O'Connor's art is savage: it reminds us that the sacraments of baptism and the eucharist are inexorably corporeal, and that the body—far from being "God's temple" in the traditional sense— is a carnal mystery beyond our knowing.

Perhaps O'Connor's masterpiece along these lines is "The Dis-

placed Person," one of the longest and most ambitious stories she wrote. In this retelling of the Passion play in rural Georgia, she chronicles the odd life and death of Guizac, the displaced person who, with his family, has fled from the Nazi terrors in Poland and has landed on Mrs. Mcln-tyre's farm. Much of the story's pathos, bile, and humor stem from the fact that it is told, in large chunks, from the point of view of the inimitable Mrs. Shortley, the almost white-trash figure who, along with her husband, stands to be replaced by the cost-efficient, incomprehensible Guizac (whom she calls Gobblehook), a man who can handle tractors, believes in hard work, and is so unfazed by the racial givens of life in Georgia that he aspires to bring his niece from war-ridden Poland to the farm, to marry her with one of the black workers. This rich narrative comes into our argument about bodies through the musings of Mrs. Shortley, a woman about to be displaced, who has vaguely heard about the goings-on "over there," in Europe:

Mrs. Shortley recalled a newsreel she had seen once of a small room piled high with bodies of dead naked people all in a heap, their arms and legs tangled together, a head thrust in here, a head there, a foot, a knee, a part that should have been covered up sticking out, a hand raised clutching nothing. Before you could realize that it was real and take it into your head, the picture changed and a hollow-sounding voice was saying, "Time marches on!" This was the kind of thing that was happening every day in Europe where they had not advanced as in this country, and watching from her vantage point, Mrs. Shortley had the sudden intuition that the Gobblehooks, like rats with typhoid fleas, could have carried all those murderous ways across the water with them directly to this place. If they had come from where that kind of thing was done to them, who was to say they were not the kind that would also do it to others? (196)

In the depiction and reaction of Mrs. Shortley, O'Connor is dishing up for us a Georgia version of "blood and soil" no less virulent than its

counterpart in Nazi ideology. The Holocaust is imaged here as an exotic freak show, and this display of severed limbs is coded as plague, as dangerous proof that "others" are infectious barbarians. What is regionalism if not a conviction that one's own stomping grounds and language are special, are not to be invaded? O'Connor is scrutinizing the very ground she stands on, and she finds it hard-hearted, without charity. But, sure enough, this image of genocide as dismembered body parts will reappear at story's end when Mrs. Shortley, in a furious exodus away from the farm, experiences her fateful and fatal vision of grace:

Fierce heat seemed to be swelling slowly and fully into her face as if it were welling up now for a final assault. She was sitting in an erect way in spite of the fact that one leg was twisted under her and one knee was almost into her neck, but there was a peculiar lack of light in her icy blue eyes. All the vision in them might have been turned around, looking inside her. She suddenly grabbed Mr. Shortley's elbow and Sarah Mae's foot at the same time and began to tug and pull on them as if she were trying to fit the two extra limbs onto herself.

Mr. Shortley began to curse and quickly stopped the car and Sarah Mae yelled to quit but Mrs. Shortley apparently intended to rearrange the whole car at once. She thrashed forward and backward, clutching at everything she could get her hands on and hugging it to herself, Mr. Shordey's head, Sarah Mae's leg, the cat, a wad of white bedding, her own big moon-like knee; then all at once her fierce expression faded into a look of astonishment and her grip on what she had loosened. One of her eyes drew near to the other and seemed to collapse quietly and she was still. (213-214)

Grace comes through the flesh, and the response that O'Connor presents to the pieced-apart, dismembered body is a vision of violent corporeal linkage, a vision that would be
recombinant,
would enlist the

old Frankenstein scenario of cobbled-together body parts into a new paradigm of the human family as a collective body, as the sublime gesture of putting the pieces back together. Note that Mrs. Shortley says none of this: her body says it. Like Picasso's nightmarish depiction of sundered flesh and remade contours in
Guernica,
O'Connor shares a reverence for the integrity of flesh, and gives warning that erasing or collapsing or otherwise destroying the contours of the body is tantamount to nuclear fission: an invasion of the existing armature of reality, leading to an explosion of power and violence. (The fierce heat swelling into Mrs. Shortley's face as her body experiences fusion with others says as much.)

O'Connor's fable at once harks back to one of the oldest stories we know—a story of crucifixion in which displacement (Jesus is no less displaced than Gobblehook) becomes dismemberment—and it also looks forward to our culture of genocide and atomic war. Her signature consists in her unswerving focus on the human body as the place where the action is, where love might be, where grace will come. We are all familiar with the fatigued cliche,
the body politic;
O'Connor, Barker, Picasso: so many artists show us the human body as the unacknowledged currency of political discourse, the syntax and grammar through which ideology's story is told.

WRITING THE BODY:

ART, COMMUNICATION, OR TORTURE?

Franz Kafka's dark story "In the Penal Colony" demands inclusion in this chapter as the most troubling account I know about the violated body as a site for knowledge, spirit, or truth. This story has the anthropological sense of estrangement that we have seen in figures like Burroughs, Sacks, and Barker: an explorer arrives at an island to witness their bizarre penal system and to pronounce judgment on it. Prisoners are placed in a "harrow," and for twelve hours the sentence is
written

into the body by the beak of what looks like a monstrous sewing machine. At about the sixth hour, we are told, even the thickest of the condemned begins to understand, to read the body script that is being produced. The system is wildly authoritarian: prisoners are presumed guilty not innocent, no defense is possible, and of course the custom itself looks a great deal like torture. But the officer in charge of the "machine" explains that it has profound religious significance, inasmuch as it displays (to an entire community, with children up front, in the old days) the workings of justice and the attainment of truth on everyone's part: prisoner's as well as society's. We note as well that the prisoner in this exhibition case is described in utterly animal terms: thick-skinned and uncomprehending.

There can be no doubt that the reader is meant to reflect on this frightening model of penal justice, not simply to indict the system as barbaric. But in teaching this story, I invariably find that no one is interested in such reflections, given the unmistakable horror of the system. Kafka, I think, knew all this. Most modern readers and critics are united in feeling that this is torture, not justice; some have even claimed that Kafka's story prophesied the experiments of the Nazi doctors, suggesting that art can be horribly prescient, can even help to produce evil by giving us a vision of it.

But things are not this simple. The story is indeed about justice and truth, and it seems to be asking: how will we know them? where do they reside? what can deliver them? how can they "get" to us? The penal system on show here is actually the penal system on show throughout this chapter: our lifelong imprisonment in a body. Kafka's vision is not all that different from Burroughs's: the human subject must be opened up if truth is to enter. Kafka knows that the human organism lives by ingesting food and excreting waste, that the human species depends on sexual congress of sperm entering uterus if it wants a future. Body life for our species involves entries and exits. Not that Franz Kafka ever made peace with these elemental facts of life. "Coitus is the punishment for human happiness," he once wrote, and no one can fail to be struck

by the kinds of incompatibility expressed here: not only are agape and eros different, but the body's needs are disastrously at odds with "ours."

Yet the desire for contact is nonetheless central to Kafka's work, just as it is central to the work of any writer or artist. The great subject of "In the Penal Colony" is human communication. Everything broadcasts it: the desperate effort of the officer to persuade the explorer that the machine is just, the operation of the machine itself as it inscribes its message into human flesh, the modus operandi of the story we are reading. Do any of these (extreme) gestures bear fruit? Kafka is asking us to weigh language as an adequate or inadequate bridge between humans. Yes, food and sex require material entry into the body—the kind of entry that Kafka had trouble negotiating—but human language would seem to promise a finer intercourse, a penetration that does not maim.

Hence the story about communication zeros in on the body. Thick-skinned humans are trapped within their bodies, cannot cross the bridge from me to you. This is what the machine is designed to correct. The beak that rends the flesh of prisoners, that writes into their bodies the "sentence" they receive, is a writing machine. Kafka has devised a kind of fleshly semiotics that aims at no less than a miracle: the production of a language that would be one with what it says, that would collapse the classic sign/referent division. Try to imagine a language that is
immediate,
so that the letters "1-o-v-e" actually
become
"love" rather than a word designating love.