The Object and the Sense of the Object: Taking a Bite
¶ 1 Leave a comment on paragraph 1 2 Harry Harrison’s Bill, the Galactic Hero begins with the narrator’s Freudian observation, “Bill never realized that sex was the cause of it all” (1). How that made me laugh when I was fourteen. Yet, some decades later, it is difficult to get away from the realization that comes with regarding the bald, comic statement as a matter of absolute truth. At its most basic level, it conveys the information that we are all part of a biological continuum, or, at least the products of one, whether we choose to literally continue the process or not. Of course, at fourteen, I was already learning some graphic and frequently upsetting lessons about the animality of my existence. I was fairly well committed, even then, to attempting to see beyond biology, because, frankly, it was gross. The problem with seeing beyond the physical, however, is that the senses which come part and parcel with embodiment are necessary tools for approaching the higher orders, the platonic ideals, that I hoped were lurking somewhere, ready to relieve me of the imperatives of the flesh. After all, how may art be considered without interaction of the senses? In a way, I suppose that is what my research focus comes down to. While I now acknowledge the necessity of those senses and have grown used to the biological bases of them, I cannot help pondering at their interrelation with our spiritual selves.
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¶ 3 Leave a comment on paragraph 3 1 In literature (a haven from the corporeal), the issues of this dichotomy are most expressly dealt with by Oscar Wilde in The Picture of Dorian Gray. Wilde writes: “the true nature of the senses had never been understood, and that they had remained savage and animal merely because the world had sought to starve them into submission or to kill them by pain” (67). Dorian’s stated object is to direct his senses so that living is a symphony of experience with the understanding that experience is good, in itself, apart from any moral judgments that may have become attached to those experiences as conveniences for the social structure. In a nutshell, the problem that Wilde poses is: why would our bodies tell us something feels good if it is bad for us? For Dorian, the senses, the conduits between the world and our inner being, should be the arbiters of morality for that inner being. Arguably, that particular experiment does not ultimately work out entirely positively for the character. However, while observing the foreseeable results of dissipation might allow for an argument against trying this mode of life, it does not negate the validity of the original question. Strictly from the point of view of survival, why would our sensuousness, our affectability, lead us into danger? Why does it not correspond directly to the satisfaction of need?
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¶ 5 Leave a comment on paragraph 5 0 To be clear, I know I am playing loose with my terms here, interchanging the stimulation of senses with the emotional impact that accompanies such stimulation, but I consider the process too intertwined within us to deserve a formal disentanglement. In refusing to do so, I join ranks with Jung, who likewise tossed in whatever likely synonym for emotion struck him at the moment, showing his Swiss disdain for both neat definitions and the thankfulness that posterity might have had for them.
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¶ 7 Leave a comment on paragraph 7 0 In Touching Feeling, Eve Sedgwick confronts the divide between the senses and the intellect, as it impacts the consideration of these problems. She notes: “The distance of any such account from a biological basis is assumed to correlate… with its potential for doing justice to difference” (93). In short, the way that we are taught to explain affect is by abstracting it as far away from the body as possible. Metaphorically, it is like an internal Orientalism, where the subject is only to be understood through the mirror of another subject, a method which is dubious in its possibilities and, strictly, absurd when the original subject is present and viable. I will admit that it is, at least, a starting place (as I must, since it is where I started, above), but it literally cannot be the place of conclusions. A more potent hook to get ahold of the importance of considering affect lies in the trauma studies of Ann Cvetkovich. Affects of the past resulting from traumatic events form a basis for a kind of remembrance that is based upon the body’s reaction to the past which is carried over into the present. This concept goes hand in hand with that offered by Avery Gordon in Ghostly Matters, where she explicates the sense of “rememory” contained within Morrison’s Beloved. There, experience becomes embodied, the horror of Sweet Home lurking with the potential to re-affect those who are not wary. These instances are dramatic, as befits the categories of trauma that they recall, but the example that they provide can be related to a more mundane level. Sensations need not be traumatic in order to be fundamentally associated with memory, and through memory, with our experience and our perceptions of self.
¶ 8 Leave a comment on paragraph 8 0 Judith Halberstam, in The Queer Art of Failure, seeks to suggest new ways of knowing that are based on forgetting, but I would suggest that we rather consider how we know what we do actually know (or think we know), focusing on the interpretation of the empirical from our own senses. My chosen medium for examining this is within literature where the essential art lies within presenting a convincing storyworld which the reader may inhabit. The measure of success for such inhabitation is the degree to which we feel the needle inscribing the sentences upon our bodies as we read, the degree to which the author successfully conveys the sense of being for his characters. To pointedly explore this, my central interest has become examining sensations as they presented within literature, moments that are clearly meant to evoke an affective echo within the reader. These are frequently paired with a self-reflexive memory for the character within the fiction. More than this, however, I have become fascinated with the superimposition of judgment onto these fragments of sensation: are they right or wrong?
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¶ 10 Leave a comment on paragraph 10 2 In keeping with my original determination to sidestep the cause of it all (s-e-x, in case you forgot), and to make it that much easier on myself, I have limited my observations to a single sense, that of taste. No need to make the connection to sex through the oral fixation, as one of my motivating texts is the Kilgore Trout story within Breakfast of Champions which, if it does not originate the concept of “food porn,” fulfills its potential admirably for my purposes. For the “L”iterature crowd, I will toss out two of my favorite considerations: the exchange of consumption between Mina and Dracula in Stoker’s classic, and the delicious but deleterious produce bartered in Rossetti’s “Goblin Market.” I ask, why is tasting wrong? Can it be right? As always, I consider literature as an artifact, a product of humanity that demonstrates that humanity by its existence. I acknowledge that this appeals to me on a very basic level because of the distance it puts between me and the thing itself, but I trust that an awareness of my limitations is a good guard against falling prey to those limitations.
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¶ 12 Leave a comment on paragraph 12 0 Works Mentioned
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¶ 14 Leave a comment on paragraph 14 0 [As a warning, if you are ever inclined to seek out Harrison’s work, note that in the 90’s an updated version of Bill was published which reassigned a lot of the cultural references from their original 60’s targets to more current – then – ones. This upset me. Subsequently, Harrison sloppily co-authored a short series of novels with Bill as the central character. These were spoofs on many current SF films, Alien, for instance. So, if you must, do look for a vintage text of the original. The story originated in Galaxy magazine in 1964 under the title “The Starsloggers,” and, if I am going to be honest, might just as well have finished there, except for the pleasure it gave me in its expanded form, decades down the line.]
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¶ 16 Leave a comment on paragraph 16 0 Gordon, Avery. Ghostly Matters. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2008. Print.
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¶ 18 Leave a comment on paragraph 18 0 Halberstam, Judith. The Queer Art of Failure. Durham, Duke UP, 2011. Print
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¶ 20 Leave a comment on paragraph 20 0 Harrison, Harry. Bill, The Galactic Hero. New York: Berkley, 1966. Print.
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¶ 22 Leave a comment on paragraph 22 0 Rossetti, Christina. “Goblin Market.” Christina Rossetti: The Complete Poems. London: Penguin, 2003. Print.
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¶ 24 Leave a comment on paragraph 24 0 Sedgwick, Eve. Touching Feeling. Durham: Duke UP, 2003. Print.
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¶ 26 Leave a comment on paragraph 26 0 Stoker, Bram. Dracula. Ed. John Paul Riquelme. Boston: Bedford, 2002. Print.
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¶ 28 Leave a comment on paragraph 28 0 Vonnegut, Kurt. Breakfast of Champions. New York: Rosettabooks, 2000. Print.
¶ 29 Leave a comment on paragraph 29 0 Wilde, Oscar. The Picture of Dorian Gray. San Francisco: Ignatius, 2008. Print.
I find it continually fascinating the weird stuff that gets our attention and hold onto it. Though I really feel like I ought to point out some sort of Freudian connection here, like some comment on how your exposure to literature or the text you chose references sex in such an outright manner. Has to make you wonder a bit, eh?
I find your argument for taste really interesting, especially as it stands in relation to forgetting. There is a way in which they’re opposites, as you explain… but there’s also a way in which they’re very similar in standing in opposition to the ‘usual’ way of knowing.
It occurred to me to read this emphasis on taste back through the idea of the archive and the repertoire, tasting is a present, fleeting and bodily knowledge that is very different from the archived knowledge of what the food or flavor is.
It also popped into my head that tasting is also a way of knowing-by-forgetting. It means forgetting the memories or ideas or facts of the thing to focus on the presence, the taste in the present. It is a very different sort of thing to immerse oneself in the moment and taste, and not simply have known, have learned that something tastes like that.