In 1995, Oliver Sacks published a book titled An Anthropologist On Mars. It’s a collection of “case studies” about people with neurological disorders. The virtue of Sacks’s writing is that it’s accessible to the lay reader: he presents his subjects without technical jargon while preserving the important questions which their conditions raise. If there is a common theme to these questions, it might be: what does it mean to be human? The piece that gives the book its title first appeared on December 27, 1994 in the New Yorker. Sacks attributes the phrase of the title to its subject, Temple Grandin, an autistic (Asperger’s Syndrome) woman who is an expert on livestock management. She uses the phrase in her book, Thinking In Pictures: And Other Reports From My Life With Autism (1996) and it is repeated in Sacks’s introduction to the 2005 edition. However, so far as I’m aware, the phrase doesn’t appear in print before 1994, at least not from this particular quadrant of the planet.
However, I’ve stumbled upon a phrase sufficiently similar that it raises a question of cross-pollination. In his 1990 book, Public Eye: An Investigation Into The Disappearance Of The World, Brian Fawcett continues on the path he first mapped in Cambodia. As in Cambodia, he splits the page. On the top half, he writes in a familiar mode—straight up narrative, a blend of autobiography and fiction (it’s hard to tell where one ends and the other begins). On the bottom half, he writes in an abstract mode—theoretical musings, technical language, analytical thoughts. The two modes play off one another and, in the process, provide a commentary on postmodern concerns like the tension between globalism and local culture, mass media and our capacity to engage in private personal reflection, consumerism and the future of arts and letters.
Near the end of the book, Fawcett offers a “story” on the top half called “Invisible Man”. The story introduces us to an inmate at a maximum security prison. Tony’s life of incarceration began before he had a chance to be inculturated into many of the assumptions and modes of being and seeing that you and I take for granted. Only years later does Tony take up the process of inculturation. He enrolls in a literacy program that Fawcett (or his narrative stand-in) teaches at the prison and, partly thanks to his exposure to great literary hearts and minds, he develops what might be called wisdom, or at least personal insight. His behaviour improves and he finally gets a day pass. The narrator accompanies him on his visit to the outside world and they end up in a hotel lobby.
We were sitting in the lobby of the city’s oldest and grandest hotel, drinking coffee and watching the mostly elderly clientele come and go, when Tony began to fuss.
“These people,” he said. “They look so comfortable here. They act like they’ve been doing this all their lives, and that they’ll go on doing it for the rest of their lives.”
“Yeah, I agreed. “Homers, they’re called.”
“They make me feel invisible,” he whispered unhappily. “It’s like I don’t exist.”
“You don’t exist,” I agreed. “Not that way. But the way they live isn’t all that great. Most of them live like blind people. They only recognize what’s familiar, and nothing else registers. Because they don’t bother to imagine the way other people have to live, they don’t know what’s really valuable, and they can’t—or don’t—protect what they have. It’s pleasant for them, but there’s no particular virtue involved.”
“I’ll never get to be a homer,” he said.
“Nope. And you shouldn’t waste time trying. I don’t feel at home here, you know. Very few people in this world are not, in one way or another, living in exile. So whenever I get around these kinds of people I pretend I’m an anthropologist who’s just arrived from Mars, and I try to figure out what the interesting-looking homers are trying to accomplish. It gives me a working identity. And it keeps me from getting too self-conscious, like you’re doing.”
So what do you think? Does Fawcett get to stake the ground here and claim title as first to utter the phrase? It’s entirely possible (probable, in fact) that Grandin and Fawcett each came up with their phrase in isolation. Maybe each tapped into a Jungian pool of unconscious phrase-turning. Or maybe there was a ripeness in the times for just such a phrase, so it burst into consciousness wherever it could find a fertile brain.
On closer examination, we discover that the phrases are not identical. They differ by a preposition. Grandin speaks of an anthropologist on Mars; Fawcett, of an anthropologist from Mars. Logically, Fawcett’s phrase makes more sense. If the point of the phrase is to convey a feeling of alienation from typical experience of “normal” human beings, then there’s nothing about being an anthropologist on Mars that precludes a person from understanding the typical experience of “normal” human beings, whereas an anthropologist who comes from Mars is unlikely to be human and therefore will be, necessarily, alienated.
I recently stumbled upon a similar situation of competing claims to provenance while reading Milan Kundera’s 1990 novel, Immortality. This situation differs in that it operates across media, but it still raises the question. I’ll leave off describing Immortality. Maybe in another post when I’ve reread the novel and have a better sense of what the hell it’s about. For now, I’ll focus on a brief episode involving (as one might expect from Kundera) a threesome. It’s a sexual encounter involving a woman known as “the lute player”, a painter named Rubens (not that Rubens), and a third man. Kundera presents us with a tableau: the three stand naked before a mirror, the woman in the middle with a man on either side. In a later scene, Rubens visits a gallery of Gothic painting in Rome where one image, in particular, fascinates him. This is what follows:
It was a Crucifixion. What did he see? In place of Jesus he saw a woman who had just been crucified. Like Christ, she was wearing only a piece of white cloth wrapped around her hips. The soles of her feet were braced against a wooden plank, while executioners were tying her ankles to the beam with strong ropes. The cross was situated at the top of a hill and was visible from far and wide. It was surrounded by a crowd of soldiers, local people, onlookers, all of whom watched the woman exposed to their gaze. It was the lute player. She felt their gaze and covered her breasts with her hands. On each side of her were two other crosses with a criminal tied to each. The first leaned over toward her, took her hand, pulled it away from her breast, and extended her arm in such a way that the back of her hand touched the horizontal beam of the cross. The other malefactor grasped her other hand and pulled it the same way, so that both of the lute player’s arms were extended. Her face continued to remain immobile. Her eyes stared into the distance. But Rubens knew that she wasn’t looking into the distance but into a huge imaginary mirror, placed before her between earth and sky. She saw her own image, the image of a woman on a cross with extended arms and bare breasts, she was exposed to the immense, shouting, bestial crowd, and along with the crowd she gazed, excited, at herself.
Kundera’s tableau calls to mind a sculpture I have passed a thousand times or more, either as a student walking to class or, later, as a nearby resident daily walking my dog. It’s the Crucified Woman by Almuth Lutkenhaus which stands behind Emmanuel College on the grounds of Victoria University in the University of Toronto. It had been commissioned and created in the late 70’s and was formally installed in its current location in 1986. It is a bronze sculpture of a woman naked and posing as if crucified, although there is no cross.
The sculpture predates Kundera’s tableau by at least a decade. Although I doubt one inspired (or was “stolen” by) the other, nevertheless it’s interesting to place the two crucified women in dialogue. The sculpture concerns the suffering of women. The cruciform pose and the context (a theological seminary) offer a particular gloss on the suffering of women. The incarnation, Emmanuel, God-with-us, the radical identification of God with the human condition—in other words, the foundational account of the Christian religion—must be for all humans, including women, however they may suffer. And so the Lutkenhaus sculpture has been adopted as an expression of liberationist and feminist concerns.
Kundera takes the image and sexualizes it. The crucified woman stares into a mirror and, along with the bestial crowd, feels excitement at what she sees. It’s hard to know how to take this excerpt, especially pulled from its context in a novel that settles layer upon layer of interpretive sediment over simple human gestures, like the wave of a hand, or its extension as if nailed to a cross. My instinct is to assume that Kundera never closes interpretation. Sexualizing the female crucifixion may stand more as a question. After all, it’s not clear what the word “excited” means here (especially given that it’s a translation).
It would be easy to say of Kundera: well isn’t that just like a man to get himself all worked up about a naked woman. In turn, it’s tempting to suggest that it’s precisely because men are willing to sexualize even suffering bodies that women need to reclaim their bodies. Art is one of the ways women can do this. But based on the little I’ve read of Kundera, I’m inclined to assume that he is neither a simple nor a simplistic thinker who would present a naked female body for mere titillation. Returning to Kundera’s image, the painter, Rubens, imagines that the crucified woman is staring into a huge mirror. She sees herself as the bestial crowd sees her. She shares in the crowd’s excitement. Maybe Kundera is presenting us with one of the perennial frustrations of helping victims: they see themselves as their oppressors see them. I deserved it; if I hadn’t been so stupid, he wouldn’t have hit me. And we of the bestial crowd shout our delight at the spectacle and our shouts affirm the dominant view: she deserved it. And when she sees herself in the mirror, she knows exactly why.
If we take Kundera’s mirror to its logical conclusion, then we have to apply it to the Jesus crucifixion too, and ask whether he is offering a sly theological comment. If we take the incarnation seriously, then the radical identification with suffering has to include every element of suffering. To experience the full extent of human suffering, Jesus would have had to hang from the cross and view himself as if in a Roman mirror. He would have thought: well, I guess I deserved it seeing as I’m just a dirty Jew.
While I doubt Kundera had the Lutkenhaus sculpture in mind when he wrote this scene, it’s still worth wondering what it would look like with a mirror in that garden behind Emmanuel College.