...God-figure in the Masonic symbology. on the wall in the upstairs bathroom. Alice raised this issue. Obviowsly a recurring one. ‘It sees you, Alice,”’ Jack told her, “even when you pee.”
"My God doesn’t watch me when I pee.” Alice said. "My God Is a gentleman.”
"As I get it,’ Jack said, "Your God is two gentlemen and a bird.”
For all her reputation as a coolheaded businesswoman, Sally is high strung, nervous, inordinately proud of he fame and given to fits of anger in which she has been known to scream piercingly. These angry demonstration, usually have a natural climax when, no matter what the provocation, Sally cries out in a voice redolent of ham, I'll sue!”
And for all her fame as a sharp bargainer, she has been taken in again and again. She once bought a boxcar full of elegant statuary which, the man told her, was produced by the great sculptors of ancient Italy. She wrapped and stored the pieces in a barn on her California property against the day when she might own a castle. Then she found out that the statues of cherubim and crusaders and whiskered saints had all been stolen from a Middle Western cemetery. ;
Once I had an evening appointment to see Sally backstage at the Casa Mafiana. Somehow I happened to de velop a technical interest in a bottle of scotch and missed the date. On the next evening I walked into her dressing room. She was in a fury.
“You are no gentleman!” she shouted, hitching up het girdle. “You can’t do this to me. I won’t stand for it. Not one minute. I'll sue you!”
In a little while she was sitting down and talking about a play in which she hoped to make a Broadway appear ance within the next six months.
On another day I called on Sally in her rooms at the Park Central and found her nervously plucking hairpins from her blond tresses.
“Pardon me from here to there,” she said, “while J take my hair down. I’m sorry you came in on me like this, with my face bare of make-up. I don’t mind if you see any other part of me bare, but not my face.”
Not a mother alone raises a prince; the entire state is responsible. Having endured the labor, you discharged the major duty—God often welcomes a young mother to Paradise at that point. By giving the infant suck for a year, you performed what many a noble lady, fastidious of her high bosom, delegates to an uncouth peasant girl. As Amleth learned to walk, to lisp, to string together sentences, to make sense of letters, to begin to grasp the tools and usages and necessities of the world, you were attentive beyond the accustomed royal behavior. Shamefully often, a child born to be God’s agent on earth is worse neglected than the offspring of a trull and a passing highwayman. You have done lovingly by your boy. Let go, my good queen. Amleth at thirteen is formed for good or ill. The quirks that disturb you I would lay to his predilection for the actor’s trade. He must try on many attitudes in rapid succession. To be sincere, then insincere, and then sincere in his insincerity; such shifts fascinate him, How marvellous, to his student mind, is this human capacity to be many things, to take many roles, to enlarge one’s preening, paltry identity with many half-considered feints and deceptions. You have noticed, I am sure, his animation and awe when a troop of players travels to Elsinore- how avidly he studies their rehearsals, takes note of the fine points of their illusions, imitates while private in our lobbies and cloisters the rolling cadence of their recitations.”
“Yes,” the Queen interrupted eagerly, “I hear him in his solar, orating to himself!”
Corambus held to his chain of thought. “The Church has done ill, I sometimes believe, in letting up, in these lax times, its imprecations against this unholy travesty of theatrical performance, which, aping Creation, distracts men from last things and from first things as well.
And how close, come to think upon it, the boy clung to the late Yorik, unul that tireless jester, shaky from all his merry dissipations, joined the mass of mankind in the last, best joke on us all. Your son loved him, madame, and loves all clowns and triflers, as releasing him from heavy thoughts of rule and self-discipline. Your husband sets the boy, it may be, too stern an example. But I have no doubt, when clear duty is set before him, that Amleth, though turning it this way and that in his mind, will end in doing the needful.”
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what blissful submission, nailed down, dispatched. Feng, Horwendil’s brother, had returned from adventuring in the south, having placed his sword and lance and versatile tongue at the service, most recently, of the masters of Genoa in its long struggles with Pisa over the control of Corsica and Sardinia. “The Mediterranean,” Feng explained to Gerutha, “is warm enough for a man to swim in pleasurably, if certain transparent bell-shaped creatures do not sting him to death. On the other shore lies Africa, where the Muslim infidels refine their tortures and abominations, and to the east lies an empire of curious Oriental Christians, who send armies to dispute the presence or absence of an ‘1’ in a Greek theological term, and who permit their priests to marry and wear beards. I would like, next, to visit there. Their nobles, rather than wield the cudgel and broadsword as in these backward northern lands, prefer the dagger and have greatly developed the art of poisoning, so I have been told.
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“He doesn’t talk to me about what he thinks,” she said, “or indeed about anything. But I understand from what Corambis has let drop of what Laertes tells him, there’s a ferment going on in cultivated circles to the south, various bits of ancient knowledge the Crusaders brought back, the Arabs and the Byzantine monks have been transcribing them for centuries but nobody read them, something about a new way of looking at the world scientifically, whatever that is, letting nature tell us about itself in little details, one after another, as if women and children and millers and farmers haven’t been doing that all along. Instead of taking everything on faith from the priests and the Bible, I mean. Instead of arguing from first principles, you deduce your principles from a host of observed particulars. I’m sorry, ’m not making a great deal of sense; it’s still too early in the morning, my dearest.”
“You confirm my worst suspicions. My son is down there on the Elbe learning how to doubt—learning mockery and blasphemy when I’m trying to instill piety and order into a scheming, rebellious conglomeration of Danes.”
“What else did Corambis say?” Geruthe mused, as colorful electricity played about her head. “Something about man being the measure of things, which makes a kind of sense, really, since men and women are right here all around us while God, though we can all feel He’s here somewhere. is a lot harder to observe. Still you can't help wondering if people are ready to be the measure of things. We can hardly measure ourselves. We are the only animal that makes mistakes.”
“We must get Hamblet back, or the regional thing will choose another when I—if I were toAs I say, I have these uncanny spells of fatigue.”
I wanted to know if this edition of Rabbit, Run had some front matter I had not read. Finally my resistance collapsed and I pulled the weighty collector’s volume off the shelf. The padded, bright red binding was somewhat more reminiscent of a comfortable corner booth at an all-night, all-vinyl coffee shop than one might have thought fitting for so aggressively “classic” an enterprise; but even so a bible-ready black fabric bookmark did curl with high seriousness out of the gilt-edged, acid-free solidity of the massed pages like a dried umbilicus: I said, “Wow!”—moved to mingled feelings of tenderness and stern disapproval by the prematurely ornate, bootstrappingly heirloomish, “undercooked” look it had, and I was unable to keep from opening it up. Within I saw a Reader’ Digestive illustration of boys playing basketball, and then...
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I wondered whether the tone I took in places here might share its quality of unease with Beckett’s book—an unease that arose from intense, rivalrous, touchy admiration combined with an impatience with criticism as a literary form. Updike himself, I recalled, had in an essay neatly maneuvered past Beckett’s exegesis of Proust: “rather acerb,” he’d called it. (The same essay on Proust, by the way, contains one of my favorite things in all Updike, when he mentions that a page or two of his copy of Moncrieff’s translation is stained with drops of his now-alimonied wife’s suntan oil: suntan oil, the thicker exstillation of summer and leisure, crushed from the Palm at the End of the Mind—and I wonder, is this Stevensian sense of “palm” the explanation for why Updike mysteriously changed the title of one of his best early stories from “Walter Briggs” to the less good “Walter Palm” in an eighties trade paperback reissue?—has a Proustlan viscosity, I think; I envision the near transparency that the drops of lotion must have created in the paper as methylparaben portholes in Marcel’s prose through which we glimpse for a moment the knowable, verifiable life we have now, in America, with spouses and deck chairs and healing sunlight, as opposed to the unknowable life of a homosexual genius in France before the First World War.)
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Most good novelists have been women or homosexuals. The novel is the triumphant evolved creation, one increasingly has to think, of these two groups, who have cooperated more closely in this domain perhaps than in any other. This important truth couldn’t hit us over the head until fairly recently: my own generation was the first to grow up with hard-core stars like Annette Haven a mere seventeen-year-old bike ride away, but more important, we were the first generation to grow up exposed to the range and subtlety and complexity of distinctively gay interests and ways of acting. These became common knowledge: they were no longer sexual semaphore among a gay elite, but were now a constant subject of discussion, delight, disgust, amusement, and enlightenment across an entire educated middle class. Our generation, I think it is fair to say, thinks it knows more about the moeurs of gaiety than any group so big and so mixed ever knew before, and armed with this marginally more sophisticated and less sniggering knowledge as we read past minorpieces and masterpieces, we gather hints and leap to conclusions with a confidence that would have horrified Edwardian bachelorettes. And slowly, with dawning amazement, as the results of our various informal surveys come in, we realize how staggeringly disproportionate our debt is to gaydom, in every possible area of literary deportment, but especially in the novel; and we mingle this knowledge with the long. recognized preeminence of women in the invention and perfection of the form, and we begin to get the uncomfortable sense, if we aren’t gay or female, that we may have chosen a field we can’t quite master. Heterosexual male nov. elists don’t for the most part really get it, instinctively: they agree with Jane Austen that the novel is a magnificent thing, toward whose comprehension all other forms of writing, and indeed of art, aspire, and this big-time grandeur attracts them, but they find, much to their perplexity, that they can’t internalize and refine upon its ways with quite the unstraining unconscious directness they displayed when thrashing happily through earlier intellectual challenges. At first they blame their false starts and archnesses on their own inexperience and continuing apprenticeship, and they redouble their efforts, but little by little they come to see, at first dispiritedly and then soon righteously, that they “stand outside the tradition”—that it is in a fundamental way alien to them. But they ave smart, and ambitious, and hardworking, some of them, and they find that they can bleed off and redirect some of their other proficiencies in order artificially to bulk up the central novelistic understanding they want s© badly and don’t innately possess. They stretch the stretchiest of all forms so that it embraces what they do well. And finally they produce things that are, though great, oddities: Ulysses, War and Peace, Pnin. In a field, then, in which heterosexuals end up so often on the periphery—as the legal counsel, drunken reviewers, imitative followers, codifiers, interpreters, academic apologists—for homosexual greatness, a person like Updike, who can be as tarabiscoté as George Saintsbury or Henry James, as foxily ironical as Lytton Strachey, as stylistically up to snuff as Pater, as metaphorically mother-witted as Proust, as zealously thematic as Melville, and who is thus in the same league at least with the bachelor-adepts of history, becomes supremely important to a writer like me, as a model of a man who has in his art successfully moved outside the limitations of his carnal circuitry.
I offer this line of argument tentatively, with every expectation that I will be laughed at for believing in so primitive a form of sexual determinism; it seems, however, unusually convincing to me at present because many of the novels that I’ve liked lately (The Beautiful Room Is Empty, The Swimming-Pool Library, A Single Man) have been so directly premised on gaiety: you feel their creators’ exultation at having so much that wasn’t sayable finally available for analysis, and you feel that the sudden unrestrained scope given to the truth-telling urge in the Eastern homosphere has lent energy and accuracy to these artists’ nonsexual observations as well, as if they’re thinking to themselves, Well fuck it, while ’'m humming along at this level of candor, why should I propagate all the other received fastidious. nesses? Truths are jumping out at me from every direction! My overemphasis on sex is leading me back toward subtler revelations in the novel’s traditional arena of social behavior, by jingo! (Have people talked, incidentally, about the prompting influence that Angus Wilson’s Hemlock and After may have had on Lolita? Nabokov must have seen this gay book from 1952, in which the sole pure baddie is the heterosexual child molester, and thought that it was finally possible to amplify his reluctantly incinerated short story and show, now that gaiety was to an extent fictionally normalized, that even Humbert’s unthinkable perversion was more complicated and remorse-filled than Angus Wilson had made it out to be. Nabokov must have noticed how the undisguisedly gay angle of attack lit the old, overnovelized mores from new angles, and that a similarly reawakened sense of nanomanners might result from a fictional situation whose raking unthinkableness stirred his own endocrines more.) Of course, Edmund White’s apostrophe to the narrators boyfriend’s bottom (in a recent story in Granta) would not have been possible without Updike’s wide-screen description of a neighbor’s pussy; but nonetheless it is the homosexual novel right now, perhaps to an unusual degree, that seems to be driving us all toward advances and improvements.
Raskolnikov is both a completely realized individual and emblematic of the condition Dostoevsky explored most extensively in the tour-de-force monologue Notes From the Underground (1864), in which the speaker is self-divided: forced to try to connect with his world, but unable to sustain integration. Philip Rahv has written: that Dostoevsky is the first novelist to have fully accepted and dramatized the principle of uncertainty or indeterminacy in the presentation of character. In terms of novelistic technique this principle manifests itself as a kind of hyperbolic suspense—suspense no longer generated merely by the traditional means and devices of fiction, though these are skillfully brought into play, but as it were by the very structure of human reality. , To take this hyperbolic suspense as a literary invention pure and simple is to fail in comprehending it; it originates rather in Dostoevsky’s acute ree awareness (self-awareness at bottom) of the problematic nature of the hit modern personality and of its tortuous efforts to stem the disintegration iy threatening it. h | tk As Rahv makes clear, all of Dostoevsky’s protagonists are marked by a é sense of “spiritual and mental self-division and self-contradiction,” in which he criminal becomes an archetype of a peculiarly modern psychological condition of alienation and self-destruction.
Sutherland
Spillane himself acknowledged the influence of only one crime writer on his work, Carroll John Daly, creator of the private eye, Race Williams. He flaunted his lack of authorial polish, claiming, mischievously, never to introduce characters with moustaches or who drank cognac because he could not spell those words. I, the Jury introduced the series hero Mike Hammer, whose tough-talking, woman-beating, whisky-swilling machismo answered the needs of the post-war ‘male action’ market and its nervous uncertainties about masculinity now that there weren't Japs or Krauts to kill. Estimates suggest global sales of around 200 million. By 1980, seven of the top fifteen all-time bestselling fiction titles in America were Hammer novels. ‘People like them,’ Spillane blandly explained. The climax of a Mike Hammer narrative invariably features sadistic execution. The most hilarious is in Vengeance is Mine (1950), which ends with the line (just before she/he gets it in the gut) ‘Juno was a Man!’
_ fo that real Venice, the desire for Christian community lay somewhere between a dream and an anxicty. The impurities of difference haunted the Venetians: Albanians, Turks, and Greeks, Western Christians like the Germans, all were segregated in guarded buildings or clusters of buildings. Difference haunted the Venetians, yer L exerted a seductive power.
When they shut the Jews inside the Ghetto, the Venetians claimed and believed they were isolating a disease that had infected the Christian community, for they identified the Jews in particular with corrupting bodily vices. Christians were afraid of touching Jews: Jewish bodies were thought to carry venereal diseases as well as to contm More mysterious polluting powers. The Jewish body was unclean. A little detail of ritual in business illuminated this unease of touch; whereas among Christians a contract was sealed with a kiss or with a handshake, contracts with Jews were sealed with a bow, so thar the bodies of the parties need not touch. The very contract Shylock draws with Antonio, the payment in flesh, conveyed the fear the Jew would defile a Christian’s body by using his power of money.
Ja the medieval era, the Imitation of Christ made people more sympathetically aware of the body, especially the suffering body. The fear of touching Jews represents the frontier of that conception of 4 coramon body; beyond the frontier lay a threat—a threat redoubled
because the impurity of the alien body was associated with sensual. ity, with the lure of the Oriental, a body cut free from Christian constraints. The touch of the Jew defiles, yet seduces. The segre. gated space of the Ghetto represented a compromise between the economic need of Jews and these aversions to them, between practi. cal necessity and physical fear.
The making of the Ghetto occurred at a crucial moment for Ven. ice. The city leaders had lost a great advantage in trade, and suffered a crushing military defeat, a few years before. They blamed these losses largely on the state of the city’s morals, bodily vices provoked by the very wealth now slipping from its grasp; from this moral cam. paign to reform the city came the plan for the Ghetto. By segregating those who were different, by no longer having to touch and see them, the city fathers hoped peace and dignity would return to their city. This was the Venetian version of Brueghel’s tranquil dreamscape in Landscape with the Fall of Icarus.
It is easy to imagine today that Jews had always lived in Europe isolated in ghetto space. Indeed, from the Lateran Council of 1179 forward, Christian Europe had sought to prevent Jews living in the midst of Christians. In all European cities which harbored colonies of Jews, such as London, Frankfurt, and Rome, they were forced to live apart. Rome typified the problem of enforcing the edict of the Lateran Council. Rome had what is now called its Ghetto from early medieval times; a few streets in the Jewish quarter of medieval Rome were gated, but the urban fabric was too disordered for the Jews to be totally sealed in. In Venice, the physical character of the city made it possible finally to realize the rule prescribed by the Lateran Council—Venice a city built on water, water the city’s roads which separated clusters of buildings into a vast archipelago of islands. In the making of the Jewish Ghetto, the city fathers put the water to use to create segregation: the Ghetto was a group of islands around which the canals became like a moat.
If the Venetian Jews suffered from the struggle to impose a Christian Community on the economic mosaic, they did not suffer as passive victims. The formation of the Jewish Ghetto tells the story of a people who were segregated but who then made new forms of community life out of their very segregation; indeed, the Jews of Renaissance Venice gained a certain degree of self-determination in the Ghettos. Moreover, the city protected a Jew or a Turk against Christian mobs at Lent or at other times of high religious passion, so Jong as the non-Christian was in the space reserved for the outsider.
...the desire for Christian community lay somewhere between a dream and an anxicty. The impurities of difference haunted the Venetians: Albanians, Turks, and Greeks, Western Christians like the Germans, all were segregated in guarded buildings or clusters of buildings. Difference haunted the Venetians, yer L exerted a seductive power.
When they shut the Jews inside the Ghetto, the Venetians claimed and believed they were isolating a disease that had infected the Christian community, for they identified the Jews in particular with corrupting bodily vices. Christians were afraid of touching Jews: Jewish bodies were thought to carry venereal diseases as well as to contm More mysterious polluting powers. The Jewish body was unclean. A little detail of ritual in business illuminated this unease of touch; whereas among Christians a contract was sealed with a kiss or with a handshake, contracts with Jews were sealed with a bow, so thar the bodies of the parties need not touch. The very contract Shylock draws with Antonio, the payment in flesh, conveyed the fear the Jew would defile a Christian’s body by using his power of money.
Ja the medieval era, the Imitation of Christ made people more sympathetically aware of the body, especially the suffering body. The fear of touching Jews represents the frontier of that conception of 4 coramon body; beyond the frontier lay a threat—a threat redoubled because the impurity of the alien body was associated with sensuality, with the lure of the Oriental, a body cut free from Christian constraints. The touch of the Jew defiles, yet seduces. The segre. gated space of the Ghetto represented a compromise between the economic need of Jews and these aversions to them, between practical necessity and physical fear.
The making of the Ghetto occurred at a crucial moment for Ven. ice. The city leaders had lost a great advantage in trade, and suffered a crushing military defeat, a few years before. They blamed these losses largely on the state of the city’s morals, bodily vices provoked by the very wealth now slipping from its grasp; from this moral cam. paign to reform the city came the plan for the Ghetto. By segregating those who were different, by no longer having to touch and see them, the city fathers hoped peace and dignity would return to their city. This was the Venetian version of Brueghel’s tranquil dreamscape in Landscape with the Fall of Icarus.
It is easy to imagine today that Jews had always lived in Europe isolated in ghetto space. Indeed, from the Lateran Council of 1179 forward, Christian Europe had sought to prevent Jews living in the midst of Christians. In all European cities which harbored colonies of Jews, such as London, Frankfurt, and Rome, they were forced to live apart. Rome typified the problem of enforcing the edict of the Lateran Council. Rome had what is now called its Ghetto from early medieval times; a few streets in the Jewish quarter of medieval Rome were gated, but the urban fabric was too disordered for the Jews to be totally sealed in. In Venice, the physical character of the city made it possible finally to realize the rule prescribed by the Lateran Council—Venice a city built on water, water the city’s roads which separated clusters of buildings into a vast archipelago of islands. In the making of the Jewish Ghetto, the city fathers put the water to use to create segregation: the Ghetto was a group of islands around which the canals became like a moat.
If the Venetian Jews suffered from the struggle to impose a Christian Community on the economic mosaic, they did not suffer as passive victims. The formation of the Jewish Ghetto tells the story of a people who were segregated but who then made new forms of community life out of their very segregation; indeed, the Jews of Renaissance Venice gained a certain degree of self-determination in the Ghettos. Moreover, the city protected a Jew or a Turk against Christian mobs at Lent or at other times of high religious passion, so Jong as the non-Christian was in the space reserved for the outsider.
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On March 13, 1512, the Venetian Senate, at the behest of Giovann; Sanuto, voted in a decree whose aim was “to placate the anger of ou Lord” by preventing “immoderate and excessive expenditure.” The decree defined moral reform in terms of a new bodily discipline. The decree of 1512 sought to put an end co the overt display of sensual. ity: jewelry was regulated for both men and women; “transparent materials were forbidden and lace could not be used [by women}, Men were forbidden attire which would increase physical attrac. tiveness. Shirts should cover the entire upper part of the body and close neatly around the neck.”!4
Fifteen years before the Venetians enacted their laws against sensuality, the monk Girolamo Savonarola had led a similar campaign against “vanities” in Florence, after that city had also been defeated by a foreign power in 1494. In Florence, as later in Venice, “inglorious defeat and inexplicable reversal were necessarily seen as signs of God’s displeasure.”!? Like Sanuto, Savonarola had also called for a stricter code of sexual behavior and a renunciation of jewels, perfumes, and silk clothes in order to restore the city’s fortunes. However, Savonarola’s attack on the sensuous body was meant as 4a recovery of the supposedly severe virtues of the early Florentine Republic; the Venetian revulsion against the sensual body could not be framed in the same terms. It was a city whose fortunes were too bound to pleasure; moreover, many of the diseased bodies in Venice were heathens and infidels who could never have a place in a Christian Community.
The Venetian attack against the Jews intertwined with this revulsion against bodily sensuality. Syphilis was one focus of the attack, buc the ways Jews made money also focused discussion and decision. Jews made money through usury, and usury had a direct connection to bodily vice.
As practiced in Venice from the twelfth century on, usury co sisted in lending money at rates from 15 to 20 percent, which w less on the whole than rates charged in late medieval Paris. Usury
contrasted to an honorable loan, which had a lower and also a variable rate of interest. More, an honorable loan was one in which the lender would not collect on the security offered for the loan, if ig would destroy the borrower; instead, as in modern bankruptcies, collecting on a bad loan meant renegotiating the relations between creditor and debtor in future dealings.
Usury appeared to medieval Christians as a “theft of time.” An even more ancient charge was made against usury: its connection to sex. In the Politics, Aristotle had condemned usury as a “gain out of money itself,” as though money could breed like an animal.!° “During the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries,” the sociologist Benjamin Nelson writes, the definition of usury “took its shape from the analogy of the prostitute in the brothel.”!? A contemporary of Shakespeare’s declared, in The Seven Deadly Sins of London, that “The usurer lives by the lechery of money, and is bawd to his own bags.”!® The Jews who lent money were all thought to engage in usury, and therefore to be like prostitutes; another Christian critic of the Jews wrote that the usurer “puts his money to the unnatural act of generation.”!? Moreover, the sinful practice of usury among Jews could not be cleansed through confession. In Venice, this economic stereotype now co-existed with the official effort to purify the bodies of Venetians and so recover the fortunes of the city-state.
The refugee doctors in Venice provoked Christians in the city in an even more direct way. Touch is a bodily experience deeply encoded in Christian culture. “The image of touch, from Eve touching Adam ... through the seduction of Bathsheba or the healing touch of Christ’s ministry that cleanses Mary Magdalene,” asserts the historian Sander Gilman, “haunts all of the representations of biblical images of sexuality.”2° For St. Thomas, the sense of touch was the most base of all the body’s sensations.”! If the touch of Jews seemed like a physical, sexual infection, as Jews became associated in the public mind with the spread of syphilis, Jewish doctors were also called on to treat the disease. The race of the doctor became in the public mind inseparable from the taint of the disease itself. In 1520 Paracelsus railed against these Jews who “purge {syphilitics], smear them, wash them, and perform all manner of impious deceptions”; again in their impurity Jews were associated with the leper’s touch: “The Jews were more subject to {leprosy} than any other people... because they had neither linen, nor domestic baths. These people were so negligent of cleanliness and the decencies of life that their legislators were obliged to make a law to compel them even to wash
re ‘ Serer TB, 1)
Up to the eighteenth century, Christian doctors hotly debate where the soul lurked in the body, whether the soul made cont with the body via the brain or the heart, or if the brain and heir were “double organs,” containing both corporeal matter and spiriru essence. While in his writings Harvey clung to the medieval Chns tian notion of the heart as an organ of compassion, by the ume te published his findings he knew that it was also a machine. He insted
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on scientific knowledge gained through personal observation a experiment rather than on reasoning from abstract principles. Some of Harvey’s adversaries, such as Descartes, were prepared to believe that the body is a machine, just as the Deity itself might operate by ,kind of celestial mechanics. God is the principle of the machine. To che question, “Does the rational (immaterial) soul have physiological functions?” Descartes answered yes.* Harvey’s science led to answering no. In Harvey’s own view, though the human animal has an immaterial soul, God’s presence in the world does not explain how che heart makes the blood move.
Harvey's researches into the blood prompted other researchers to jook at other body systems in similar ways. The English doctor Thomas Willis, who lived from 1621 to 1675, sought to understand how the nervous system in the body operates in some fashion through mechanical circulation. Though he could not see the visible movement of “nerve energy” along the nerve fibers as Harvey could watch blood pulsing, Willis could study the tissues of the brain. Like Harvey’s pupils he found, by comparing the brains of human beings and animals, that there was “little or no difference . . . as to the Figures and Exterior Conformations of the Parts, the Bulk only excepted ... from hence we concluded, the Soul Common to Man with the Brutes, to be only Corporeal, and immediately to use these Organs.”? Willis’s successors in late seventeenthand eighteenthcentury neurology discovered, by experimenting on living frogs, that throughout a living body the ganglia of nerve fibers responded equally to sensory stimulation; by experimenting on fresh human corpses, the doctors found that the ganglia in human beings continued to respond as did frog nerve fibers, even after the soul had presumably departed the body to meet its Maker. In terms of the neural system, the body had no need of “spirit” in order to sense. Since all the nerve ganglia seemed to operate in the same fashion, the soul might hover everywhere, but existed nowhere in particular. Empirical observation could not locate the soul in the body.4
Thus mechanical movement in the body, nervous movements as well as the movements of the blood, created a more secular understanding of the body in contesting the ancient notion that the soul (the anima) is the source of life’s energy.
This shift led researchers to challenge the hierarchical imagery of the body which governed medieval thinkers like John of Salisbury. Long before the discovery of the electrical nature of the movements between nerve fibers, for instance, it had become evident to eighteenth-century doctors that the nervous system was more than a sim
through the body, and the skin is the membrane which allows the body to breathe air in and out. Dirt seemed to Platner the prime enemy of the skin's work; Platner maintained, in the words of the historian Alain Corbin, that dirt clogging the pores “held back the excremental humors, favored the fermentation and putrefaction of substances; worse, tt facilitated the ‘pumping back of the rubbish’ that loaded the skin.”® The movement of air through the skin gave a new, secular meaning for the word “impure.” Impurity meant dirty skin rather than a stain on the soul. Skin became impure due to peo. ple’s social experience rather than as a result of moral failure.
In the country, among peasants, dirt crusted on the skin appeared natural and seemed indeed health-giving. Human urine and faeces helped nourish the earth; left on the body they also seemed to forma nourishing film, especially around infants. Therefore country people believed that “one should not wash too often . .. because the crust of dried faeces and urine formed part of the body, and played a protective role, especially in [swaddling} babies. . . .””
Scrupulously cleaning excrement off the body became a specifcally urban and middle-class practice. In the 1750s, middle-class people began to use disposable paper to wipe the anus after excretion; chamber pots were by that date emptied daily. The very fear of handling excrement was an urban fear, born of the new medical beliefs about impurities clogging the skin. More, purveyors of that medical knowledge lived in the city. “Peasants and physicians were literally unable to communicate within an agreed world of representations of the body and its fortunes,” the historian Dorinda Outram writes; the peasants knew men of science only in the persons of barbers who also served as surgeons in villages, and these barber-surgeons numbered only about one in a thousand by 1789 in France, while licensed doctors numbered one in ten thousand and lived mostly in cities.'°
Such beliefs in the importance of letting the skin “breathe” helped to change the way people dressed, a change which became evident as early as the 1730s. Women lightened the weight of their clothes by using fabrics like muslin and cotton-silk; they cut gowns to drape more loosely on the human frame. Though men kept the artifice of wigs, which in fact grew more complicated during the eighteenth century, below the hairline men too sought to lighten and unbind the clothing around their bodies. The body free to breathe was healthier because its noxious vapors were easily dispelled.
More, for the skin to breathe, people had to wash more frequently than they had before. The Roman’s daily bath had disappeared by
medieval times; bathing was considered by some medieval doctors to be, in fact, dangerous, since it radically unbalanced the temperacure of the body. Now people who dressed lightly and bathed often ao longer had to disguise with heavy perfumes the smell of swear; che perfumes used by women, and the tonic waters used by men, had been compounded in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries with oils which frequently caused skin rashes, so that men and women gained sweet-smelling bodies at the price of blotchy skins.
The desire to put into practice the healthy virtues of respiration and circulation transformed the look of cities as well as the bodily practices in them. From the 1740s on, European cities began cleaning dirt off the streets, draining holes and swampy depressions filled with urine and faeces, pushing dirt into sewers below the street. The very street surface changed in this effort. Medieval paving consisted of rounded cobblestones, between which pieces of animal and human excrement clung. In the middle of the eighteenth century the English began to repave London using flat, squared granite flagstones which fitted closely together; Paris first laid these stones down in the early 1780s around the streets of the modern Odéon theatre. The streets could then be cleaned more thoroughly; below them, urban “veins” replaced shallow cesspools, the sewers in Paris carrying dirty water and excrement to new sewage canals.
These changes can be charted in a series of municipal health laws in Paris. In 1750, the city of Paris obliged people to sweep away the dung and debris in front of their houses; in this same year it began to sluice down major public walkways and bridges; in 1764, it took steps to clear overflowing or blocked gutters throughout the city; in 1780, it forbade Parisians to throw the contents of their chamber pots into the streets. Within houses, Parisian architects used smooth plaster on walls for the same purpose; the plaster sealed the wall surface, making it easy to clean.
Enlightened planners wanted the city in its very design to function like a healthy body, freely flowing as well as possessed of clean skin. Since the beginnings of the Baroque era, urban planners had thought about making cities in terms of efficient circulation of people on the city’s main streets. In the remaking of Rome, for instance, Pope Sixtus V connected the principal Christian shrines of the city by a series of great, straight roads on which pilgrims could travel. The medical imagery of life-giving circulation gave a new meaning to the Baroque
