body shots
I've always loved Virginia Woolf's fiction, but I'm afraid I've overlooked her essays. I've read many of them, but have maybe never enjoyed them so thoroughly as I am "On Being Ill." Though I've had the good fortune never to suffer a protracted illness, the way Woolf did, I'm interested in the ways ficiton deals with the physical body. So I get chills over a passage like:
“Literature does its best to maintain that its concern is with the mind; that the body is a sheet of plain glass through which the soul looks straight and clear, and, save for one or two passions such as desire and greed, is null, and negligible and non-existent. On the contrary, the very opposite is true. All day, all night the body intervenes; blunts or sharpens, colours or discolours, turns to wax in the warmth of June, hardens to tallow in the murk of February. The creature within can only gaze through the pane—smudged or rosy; it cannot separate off from the body like the sheath of a knife or the pod of a pea for a single instant; it must go through the whole unending procession of changes, heat and cold, comfort and discomfort, hunger and satisfaction, health and illness, until there comes the inevitable catastrophe; the body smashes itself to smithereens, and the soul (it is said) escapes. But of all this daily drama of the body there is no record.”
Good, right? It sends me scrambling towards books that do offer some record of the daily drama of the body, or try to anyway. Lynne Tillman comes to mind. The Gillian Flynn book, maybe, that I just read. Lorrie Moore and Amy Hempel's stories about illness. The freakish bodies of Noria Jablonski's "Human Oddities" ("Freaks are where it's at," the freakishly lanky Todd Zuniga -- no relation to Daphne, he was quick to clear up -- said to me at this cocktail thing this week, as we were discussing midgets and dwarves) -- or the parahuman beings in Arthur Bradford's "Dogwalker" stories. (I just put in that example so my "parahumans" topic tag could get some play.) (And while we're on the subect -- are we? -- how about these twins. I love it.) I'm sure there are lots of better examples but I can't think of them right now.
Anyway. Reading Woolf reminds me of how I want to write, and read, and causes a pleasant, zinging sensation in my brain-folds.
“Literature does its best to maintain that its concern is with the mind; that the body is a sheet of plain glass through which the soul looks straight and clear, and, save for one or two passions such as desire and greed, is null, and negligible and non-existent. On the contrary, the very opposite is true. All day, all night the body intervenes; blunts or sharpens, colours or discolours, turns to wax in the warmth of June, hardens to tallow in the murk of February. The creature within can only gaze through the pane—smudged or rosy; it cannot separate off from the body like the sheath of a knife or the pod of a pea for a single instant; it must go through the whole unending procession of changes, heat and cold, comfort and discomfort, hunger and satisfaction, health and illness, until there comes the inevitable catastrophe; the body smashes itself to smithereens, and the soul (it is said) escapes. But of all this daily drama of the body there is no record.”
Good, right? It sends me scrambling towards books that do offer some record of the daily drama of the body, or try to anyway. Lynne Tillman comes to mind. The Gillian Flynn book, maybe, that I just read. Lorrie Moore and Amy Hempel's stories about illness. The freakish bodies of Noria Jablonski's "Human Oddities" ("Freaks are where it's at," the freakishly lanky Todd Zuniga -- no relation to Daphne, he was quick to clear up -- said to me at this cocktail thing this week, as we were discussing midgets and dwarves) -- or the parahuman beings in Arthur Bradford's "Dogwalker" stories. (I just put in that example so my "parahumans" topic tag could get some play.) (And while we're on the subect -- are we? -- how about these twins. I love it.) I'm sure there are lots of better examples but I can't think of them right now.
Anyway. Reading Woolf reminds me of how I want to write, and read, and causes a pleasant, zinging sensation in my brain-folds.
Labels: bodies, virginia woolf
posted by amy at
7:11 AM
6 Comments:
Don't forget Gaitskill. And read Half Life!
One of the things I liek so much about SF is that bodies are often peered at and picked over, either in service of the setting or character building, or as a theme, usually in the gender capacity, but sometimes regarding illness or death.
I wish I were reading some right now, but all I got are these short story collections...
Just as Woolf addressed transgenderism in Orlando, so does Yann Martel in his novel Self, which I've just finished reading and quite enjoyed. It follows a character born as a male whose body transforms to a female around puberty. It has interesting meditations on sexuality and the body.
Oh, I looooove Orlando. I hadn't heard of this Self book -- sounds great! Thanks for the tip.
My favourite illness novel is Philip Roth's The Anatomy Lesson, about a guy who succumbs to a mysterious illness that manifests as pure pain, beginning at his shoulders and eventually invading his entire body, then his spirit. It also has the classic first line, "When he is sick, every man wants his mother; if she's not around, other women must do." We laugh because it's true.
A poetry professor of mine, Hilda Raz, would say almost every week that all good writing comes from the body. This is probably why I liked Zola's Germinal so much—it is all bodies moving and doing other bodily things on every page.
I tell this to my students as much as I can but they never listen: Just as really good athletes use only their bodies to produce acts of artistic and almost scientific complexity, writers must do the opposite and use sensory detail to make the wholly intellectual act of reading into some kind of physical experience.
Man, is it hard to do.
I loved the quoted paragraph, but my problem with the essay–besides the fact that i read it for my MFA list because it was short–is that my experience of sickness is ENTIRELY MEDIATED BY TELEVISION. I can't read anything when I'm sick and am baffled that anyone can. I just want to watch Ellen Degeneres dance.
You have to check out Woolf's book reviews. They are fantastic.
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