A Body, Undone

by Christina Crosby

  What one scholar has called the “realist consensus” upholds the widely shared belief in the morally complex characters realist conventions create, characters whose depths are accommodated by the expansive, three-dimensional space in which they appear.1 We take “depth of character” for granted, as characters repeatedly display the attributes that we recognize as belonging to them, seen first from this angle and then that, which is one of the reasons that Victorian novels are a pleasure to read. A masterful writer like Eliot can create and populate a whole town and its environs. Her narrators encourage readers to pass moral judgments, though with a writer as accomplished as Eliot, we’re not readily tempted to become moralistic and imagine ourselves above it all. So even when a novel governed by the realist consensus takes a melodramatic turn and ends tragically, as happens in The Mill on the Floss, the narrative has created an ordered imaginative world where my mind can rest, and characters whose contradictions I can understand.

  Realism progresses through chronologically sequential time toward a knowable future, and creates an imagined world you find continuous with your own. Most importantly, the realist consensus urges certain beliefs, perhaps most importantly the idea that “we” are all complexly motivated, but knowable human beings, fundamentally alike. I have grave reservations about such beliefs, which presuppose history as progressive and unified in space and time—imagined from a European point of view, of course, since Europe is clearly where humanity is furthest advanced. These premises are contradicted by the world we live in. I know that the “realist consensus” does not produce novels that “reflect real life.” Rather, a comprehendible world is conjured by the imagination of an artist, illuminated by the austere, searching light of the Anglo-European Enlightenment, and laid out on the premises that history progresses organically and that we all belong to the family of man. Knowing how these books call upon readers to participate in the realist consensus and legitimate its claims does not, however, diminish my pleasure in entering into an imaginary world ordered according to its unspoken rules. To the contrary—it’s a familiar and reassuring domain that offers the substantial comfort of knowing where I am, especially since I needn’t believe what I read.

  “Of course you have to begin with the preface!” I said decisively from the hospital bed where I was lying for a third day awash in the bright lights and encompassing whiteness of the intensive care unit. “You can’t skip!” I was instructing Janet, who was sitting in a chair by my bedside, holding Middlemarch on her lap. Apparently I had asked for this book the previous day when I’d emerged from my induced unconsciousness, which suggests the hold that this novel has on my imagination. “You know it’s a parable that situates the ‘ardent’ and ‘theoretic’ character of Dorothea—besides, there’s the voice of that comprehensively instructive narrator!” (Several years before, Janet and I had gone to a conference on narrative form, where she met some of my Victorianist friends, and came away amused and impressed by my colleagues’ belief that you must attend to every detail, down to the very syntax of Eliot’s sentences.) So she began at the beginning. Middlemarch is Eliot’s penultimate novel, and demonstrates her truly masterful control of realist conventions. No heavy-handed forecasting or “if only” regrets, just the slow accretion of detail that populates an imagined provincial manufacturing town and its surrounding countryside with a multitude of fully rounded characters and their intricate web of interactions over time.

  I was so bewildered by my injuries and sedated by drugs that I have no memory of Janet reading aloud to me. I do know that when I got to the Hospital for Special Care, she borrowed from the public library in Middletown a twenty-three-cassette edition read by an accomplished speaker of British English. That way I could enter the imagined provincial world of Middlemarch when Janet was not there and I was not doing therapy, during the long, empty hours in the unimaginable world I had entered and the incomprehensible body I’d become. I was far better off in the Vincys’ hospitable house, or the oppressively evangelical Mr. Bulstrode’s office at the bank, or with young, vibrant Dorothea in the Lowick house of the Rev. Mr. Casaubon, where she is slowly coming to understand that her husband is far from the great divine she had imagined him to be. Day after day, I had only to patiently wait for the CNA to answer my call bell when I needed to have one cassette taken out and another put into the small boombox sitting on the table next to me.

  The realist consensus is an achievement of Renaissance humanism and Anglo-European Enlightenment, and the world it represents is expansive, comprehensible, and rationally ordered. Not so the neurological storm of spinal cord injury. I was lost in its vastness and shades of unilluminated darkness, and in desperate need of familiar things. Of course I asked for Middlemarch! Given this fact, I can hardly fault memoirists who answer to the dictates of the realist consensus when writing about disability. Many accounts of living with a disabling incapacity begin at the beginning—the discovery at birth of a supposed “defect,” the account of a genetic anomaly, diagnostic test, or catastrophic accident. The narrative develops chronologically after the advent of incapacity, all the while implicitly articulating events into a consequential order. Moving through time is simultaneously moving through space, of course, and that space is three-dimensional, oriented by a single vanishing point in the distance toward which the narrative moves as it develops. You conjure this space in your imagination as you read, and discover the common horizon that organizes the trajectories of all the characters, including yourself as you become absorbed in the story. You enter into the scenes and follow the incapacitated person as she seeks to regain lost abilities or discover new ones, and sympathize when she must persevere through setbacks and disappointments. Authors and audience alike rely on common sense, and the story moves sequentially from beginning to end.

  From the very first pages, you are reading with the “anticipation of retrospection.”2 Readers attend to the details of the emerging narrative with the expectation that the author has organized his story to end with a satisfying sense of conclusion. Frank discussions of setbacks tend toward workable solutions and the discovery by the protagonist that he is, in fact, living his life—a difficult life, yes, and certainly different from what he had expected, but a life with its satisfactions and pleasures. The quadriplegic poet Paul Guest has written a memoir I admire, One More Theory about Happiness, in which he describes the blankness that followed from his terrible bicycle accident when he was thirteen, just on the verge of puberty. He does not shy from representing the dark moods and thwarted desires that inform his writing and shadow his growth into manhood and his development as a poet. The poem “My Index of Slightly Horrifying Knowledge” is a catalog of indignities large and small that I read with a wry, nearly bitter, laugh of recognition. Yet the narrative of his memoir, which begins in childhood and ends when he is engaged to be married, is motivated by his longing for a fully adult life, imagined as the familiar story of reciprocated heterosexual fulfillment. This happy narrative arc is at odds with the dark comedy of the horrifying knowledge he represents with an enviable poetic precision. A longing for heterosexual normalcy drives Guest’s narrative, which in consequence I can’t reckon as one more theory about happiness. Narratives of disability may be grim at some points, but they almost always move toward a satisfying conclusion of lessons learned and life recalibrated to accommodate, even celebrate, a new way of being in the world.

  Nothing of the sort is happening here, because I can’t resolve the intractable difficulties of disabling incapacity, any more than I can suggest that everything will be (more or less) okay. Even the most accomplished cripple you can imagine is undone, and living some part of her life in another dimension, under a different dispensation than that of realist representation. In my case, spinal cord injury casts a very long shadow, the penumbra of which will only grow darker as the years pass and the deficits of age begin to diminish me still further. I’m living a life beyond reason, even if I have invoked some of the stabilizing conventions of re
alism in this narrative. Those conventions are the ones I know best, but profound neurological damage actually feels to me more like a horror story, a literary genre governed not by rational exposition but rather by affective intensification and bewilderment.

  In horror stories “the boundary between the real and the fictive, the interpretations of experience by the audience and the characters, is continually drawn and effaced,” Susan Stewart writes in an essay on the epistemology of the genre. “Both the story and its context of telling dissolve into a uniformity of effect. Hence, the ‘didn’t really happen’ of the fiction is transformed into a ‘really happened,’ a fear which is ‘real,’ yet which has no actual referent.”3 In other words, such a story depends on the feeling of fear that it evokes in its characters, and the simultaneous unease it engenders in you. Edgar Allan Poe’s story “The Fall of the House of Usher” works this way. From the opening paragraph’s “dull, dark, and soundless days of the year, when the clouds hung oppressively low in the heavens” to the “full, setting, and blood-red moon” of the end, Poe’s first-person narrator inhabits a terrible world, and as you read, you discover that there’s never a relief from the sense that something very bad is upon you.4 Every element of the narrative is overcharged with significance, every detail mysteriously endowed with a blank surplus that oppresses rather than enlightens. Horror stories insist on this referential surplus to overwhelm our efforts to figure out what’s going on. Such stories defy the cerebral undertaking they seem to encourage, because their meaning is affective, not referential. The fear they induce is the fear of fear itself.

  In Poe’s story, the unnamed narrator, who in his anonymity could be any one of us, begins the story as he is approaching the House of Usher, where he comes in response to the urgent call of an old friend who is terrified. Of what? He doesn’t know, but the setting is desolately foreboding and the narrator increasingly uneasy. He attempts to soothe his friend, to no avail. His friend has a twin sister, but she is ill, and he glimpses her but once. “[T]he lady Madeline . . . passed slowly through a remote portion of the apartment and . . . disappeared. I regarded her with an utter astonishment not unmixed with dread—and yet I found it impossible to account for such feelings.” After several gloomy days, her brother “informs him abruptly that the lady Madeline is no more.” She has died—of what? We never know. His host fears her medical men, implying they would dig up the corpse for dissection, though the story affords meager evidence of this particular threat. It must be, he declares, interred in a crypt below the mansion. The men together do the work. The atmosphere of foreboding grows only stronger in the days following, and at last the narrator finds himself giving way to “unaccountable horror.” As a wild storm whirls outside, he discovers his friend in a kind of trance, muttering that he’s heard his sister alive in her coffin, when a great gust blows open the heavy door that communicates with the crypt. There she stands in her shroud with arms outstretched, his terrifying doppelgänger, only to pitch forward in her final agony into her brother’s embrace. Her death calls for his, and both fall lifeless at the feet of the narrator. In great haste he leaves the mansion, and just in time, for as he looks back, a jagged fissure divides the House of Usher down the middle. “My brain reeled as I saw the mighty walls rushing asunder,” he tells us, and “there was a long tumultuous shouting sound like the voice of a thousand waters—and the deep and dank tarn at my feet closed sullenly and silently over the fragments of the ‘House of Usher.’” In this horror story, the brother and sister twins in their mimetic relationship terrify as René Girard says they must always do.

  The tumultuous end leaves unanswered all causal questions, which actually never had purchase in the story, anyway. In a horror story, how the characters and events of the story are ordered and discussed collapses into the what of those events that gathers affective force. The result is generalized fear, a feeling that doesn’t refer to anything real, but is itself real. From the title of “The Fall of the House of Usher” forward, we’ve been waiting for a collapse, an end that’s reached as the narrator flees. The house first splits in two, a violent rending apart of what had been perversely conjoined, and is then entirely obliterated. Readers have been aligned throughout with the narrator by virtue of the first-person address to an implicit “you,” and with him readers experience the fear of fear that amplifies into horror. This horror detaches the audience from the realm of the ordinary and precipitates us elsewhere.

  I find myself repeatedly, daily, relentlessly, and wearyingly horrified by the elsewhere of spinal cord injury. All too often I feel as if I’m living in another world, a dark realm overshadowed by the life-threatening accident that didn’t kill me, but obliterated the life I had been living and put me in a mimetic relationship to my brother. I’m advancing toward something that evokes horror in me, the referent of which is shrouded in a baleful mystery rendered more menacing as I proceed, my horror gathering as I realize that whatever “it” is, it has already happened, yet worse lies ahead. I’m not writing a horror story, I’m living one. In becoming Jeff’s twin, my world was destroyed, and the terrifying aura of neurological destruction and paralytic incapacity encompassed me.

  What is it I’m so afraid of? I’ve turned this over in my mind repeatedly, and think that I have some glimmer of what’s at stake. I don’t relive the day of the accident. The fact is, I don’t remember anything about the accident itself. My memory stops about a half mile before the spot where the branch caught my spokes, pitching my bicycle sideways in an instant—in a nanosecond—so quickly that I arrived at the hospital with my chin obliterated, and not another scratch on me. My face was smashed and I broke my neck. Yet my fear is not retrospective, incessantly returning to the accident that so wrecked my life, but prospective. Something horrible awaits—the future. Life will go on, day after day, until I die. I fear getting older and bearing the trials of aging in my deeply compromised body. I fear living with interminable pain, both neuropathic and emotional, and I fear interminable grief. It colors the world and is just too hard sometimes to bear. I fear not death, but living.

  Otto Kernberg, in a psychoanalytic account of the process of mourning, makes this observation:

  Daily reality militates against the full appreciation of a loving relationship, and only retrospectively emerges the possibility of a perspective that fully illuminates the potential implications of every moment lived together. The paradox of the capacity to only appreciate fully what one had after having lost it, a profoundly human paradox, cannot be resolved by communicating this experience to others. It is an internal learning process fostered by the painful, yet creative aspect of mourning.5

  No. Damn it, no! I appreciated every moment of the life that Janet and I made together and I fully appreciated her. I knew what I had. I could not integrate my intellectual and sexual passions until I was forty-six, so all the more reason to be alert to the joys of daily life. Take the motorcycle, for example.

  I had always wanted a bike, and bought a used Honda Nighthawk 750 in the first year of my life with Janet. It was a great bike. The world of motorcycles now breaks down into sport bikes with engines whining at really high RPMs and seats that pitch the rider aggressively forward into a racing position, versus low-slung cruisers with engines that rumble, the louder, the better. Cruisers put the rider in a cool laid-back position—think Easy Rider. The 1984 Nighthawk is what’s called a hybrid, more of a sport bike, but with a bench seat that can accommodate a passenger. I happily rode it the fifty-mile round-trip to New Haven when I was in psychoanalysis—the only happy part of my analysis, I might add—but it wasn’t really comfortable for Janet. To celebrate my fiftieth birthday, we decided to buy a bike that would be great for both rider and passenger. Looking around, I found a black Honda Shadow, a cruiser with great lines, the kind of bike I thought I wanted. But when I took it out for a ride, I didn’t like how cumbersome it felt, with its wide handlebars and foot pegs set out in front. Leafing through the classifieds on a Sunday mornin
g in spring 2003, we found the right bike—a black-and-silver Triumph with a lovely 900cc “speed triple” engine and the shorter turning radius and maneuverability of a sport bike, plus the lower carriage of a road bike. It had a seat contoured to carry a passenger, was highly polished, beautifully cared for, and looked brand-new. It even came with black leather saddle bags. When we went over to Poughkeepsie to get the motorcycle, I came back on Interstate 84 among the tractor-trailers, which reminded me of riding my bicycle in the scrum of taxis in New York City. I was proud of myself and loved the bike. I printed a photo from the Triumph website that showed it to perfection, and Janet had it hanging on the door to her office.

  On September 2, my birthday, I had meetings in the morning, and went off to work carrying anxieties about my job that year as chair of the faculty, a highly visible position that burdened me with responsibility even as I was glad my colleagues thought well enough of me to vote me into it. When I returned home for lunch, my worries about work vanished. There was Janet, all proud and happy, dressed in a sexy, sleeveless black velvet top, a silver velvet skirt, and silver sandals. The garage door was open, showcasing the black-and-silver bike with black-and-silver wrapped gifts piled on it. A red ribbon accent picked up the thin red sporting stripe on the gas tank. The presents themselves were little things—on this occasion, the real gift was the presenter and presentation. I vividly remember how happy I was.