It is not quite true that I have a body, and not quite true that I am one either

Letters

Vol. 15 No. 13 · 8 July 1993

From Jonathan Sawday

Terry Eagleton’s dismissal of what he terms the ‘fashionable turn to the somatic’ (LRB, 27 May) demands a suitably corporeal answer. As he points out, those ‘eager masturbators’ amongst us who are trying to make sense of a set of problems undoubtedly inherited from the work of Foucault (together with that of Plato, Aristotle, Origen, Aquinas, Descartes and Hob bes) may be doing no more than providing footnotes to a theoretical posture which has run its course. Here, though, are three reasons why the undertaking may (still) be worthwhile.

First, I very much doubt that the body which is used or possessed by either Terry Eagleton or me (our own bodies, I assume) is no more than a ‘material object’ which is simply there as ‘an essential component of anything more creative we get up to’. Isn’t this the missionary position which the Catholic Church has long wished people would adopt rather more firmly than they appear to in their daily lives? Bodies exist in at least two other forms besides those encountered in Eagleton’s account: namely, representation and history. That’s to say that, once we have established where our left feet are at any given moment, we are no closer to uncovering an ‘intimate mode of cognition’ than we were at the outset. Or to put it another way, why is it that, in a medieval medical manual (say) or a Renaissance painting, people are represented with two left feet, two right feet or no feet at all? Is it that they were just desperately in need of the compass which Eagleton has so confidently thrown away? To object that this is to pose a different problem altogether is to accept that any understanding of what it is either to be or to have a body is independent of any wider cultural construction. I doubt, for example, that many of us, now, would want to endure phlebotomy. But the fact that such an activity once took place on a fairly regular basis at least begs the question of the extent to which the practice tells us of a quite different conceptual understanding, not only of the mechanics of the body’s operation, but of the relation of the body to the world which surrounds it. To answer that question, we might need a fusion of philosophical enquiry, cultural anthropology, history of science, art history, and (even) literary criticism – the new somatics, in other words.

But what’s the point of asking (let alone answering) such a question? To the jacket-off, sleeves-up objection that this is so much ‘idle anecdotalism’ – my dismembered body v. your disciplined body – one can only answer that one of the chief ways in which (historically, again) we have come to understand ‘our’ bodies is through the stories we tell about their origin, difference from each other, function or dysfunction, beauty or ugliness, and eventual decay. What this plethora of narratives seems to tell us is that (pace Sartre and Merleau-Ponty) any understanding of what it is to have or to be a body seems to shift according to a complex interplay (as Eagleton quite rightly points out) of ideas about Nature and Culture. That those who are working on these questions may not be producing, at the same time, ‘truly innovative theoretical moves’ prompts a different series of questions: just how often, and through what means, do we produce ‘theory’, and what do we mean by that term? In Eagleton’s version, it is as it there truly is a ‘theory of the month’, and if you can’t come up with a new one, then all you’re doing is writing footnotes. So, either way, the somaticists are hanged, drawn and quartered: either they’re unbearable fashion-victims, or they’re still wearing turn-ups whilst the avant-garde has reverted to flares.

Thirdly, I can find no awareness, in Eagleton’s denunciation of all this ‘bizaire stuff’, of the ways in which somatic criticism is engaged in two areas which are (still) ideological battlegrounds: gender and identity (and their interrelationship). To deny the contingent nature of the body as both the subject and object of various regimes of knowledge is to shy away from asking a host of perhaps uncomfortable questions: why, for example, in the West (as Eagleton so adroitly demonstrates), is the body held to be such a central focus of attention? How are we to understand the technologies which now encompass the body in our culture? Or do we just ignore the response of a Melanesian (recorded by another somaticist, David Le Breton) to the question of what the West ‘contributed’ to his culture – ‘what you have brought us is the body’?

Jonathan Sawday
University of Southampton

Vol. 15 No. 14 · 22 July 1993

From John Bayley

Like the medieval church it resembles, the new academicism offers no salvation outisde itself. Nearly thirty years ago I had a mild argument in print with Frank Kermode about the importance of things and bodies in books. Frank, who had just published The Sense of an Ending, was doubtful of their existence. Now Jonathan Sawday tells us that there is a ‘truly innovative theoretical move’ in the direction of a new ‘somatics’ (Letters, 8 July). Old-fashioned bodies are being taken over as the ‘theory of the month’: the new must always be new.

Literary theory would OK if, like dental mechanics, it stuck to its own ‘discipline’. But it wants to own and control the whole process, to create art by theorising about it. The body of Larkin’s awful pie becomes a construct for the new ‘somatics’? Even such an evidently reasonable academic as Tim Trengove-Jones (Letters, 8 July) abhors ‘minimising the role of institutions’ in moralising the poems actually written by non-institutional poets. And in the great malignity race betwen Larkin and Tom Paulin (Letters, 27 May and 8 July) Larkin surely wins hands down. His ‘calculated, concentrated malignity’ was at least his own. Paulin must have learnt his from academic theology, perhaps at the same seminar where he learnt to write poetry.

John Bayley
Oxford