Steve_Bamlett_blog

‘I can smell him from across the room’[1]: Alex Allison (2019) ‘The Art of the Body’ London, Dialogue Books. Making art from unacknowledged ambivalence between desire and disgust about the body for the 21^st Century.

‘I can smell him from across the room’. This is a brief sentence that tells us very little, say for the point of a literary critical start, about the role of syntax in the art of the novel, being independent of, and perhaps even having a couldn’t-care-less attitude about, the mastery of complex periodic sentences.

That demand of literary art developed from Henry James forcing readers to equate nearly plotless novels, in the way plot is often thought about, like The Golden Bowl to amaze mainly as a result of the art in his sentences. It’s a great tradition. In a debut novel to look reflexively to another basis for literary art is a bold move. It is even more bold to focus that task in your title: ‘The Art of the Body’. You can’t do this now without taking with you a whole raft of new ‘theories’ of the role of embodiment and affect in literary art. That art will be built on realisations of networks between language, body and emotion that divert direct contact between language and meaning. In truth I’d say, masterly complex sentences do this too.[2]

Smell is the sense we most equate with ambivalence, but ambivalence is important for all of them. The senses organise for us some basis bodily affects: such as attraction or repulsion, desire or disgust, motive for closeness or distance. In this simple sentence in the title, it is the distance travelled and the spaces filled by bodily smells which animate the art. The source of the smell is the body of a man, Sean, whose physical disabilities make independent management of his body impossible. He cannot hide or disguise the fact that bodies produce sweat, excrement and urine that become the focus of disgust responses or indeed of desire, or mixed desire and disgust,  responses in some formulations of the uses of bodily contact.

 The novel opens with its narrator, Janet, evoking the smells that show one way in which the ‘dignity’ (if that is indeed what it is)  of our humanity is preserved.  His flat is ‘heavy with the polite, chemical smell of air freshener’ and all ‘human materials’ are made to look ‘polished’.[3]

Scratches, rawness. I have to be conscious of it all. I am responsible for fashioning a socially acceptable version of Sean. A version of Sean that raises fewest questions. The version which attracts fewest lingering stares.

… Without the cast, Sean’s hand curls into a shape more like an inelegant question mark, turning his gesture into something critical and cutting.

Allison (2019:4)

The flesh of the body has to be made ‘socially acceptable’ in order to ensure our sense of what bodies are and mean edits out the ‘socially unacceptable’. That means eradicating bodies that raise questions and make us check our perceptions of them. Sean’s body is even straightened out by a cast that otherwise would not only ‘raise questions but visually represent the sign of an inelegant question. From whence, in this writing comes the ‘critical’ and ‘cutting’. It is in the recording of the fact that disabled bodies make the body itself more visibly estranged from social norms.

That the art of ‘caring’ for a disabled body is often the eradication, not of any pain or discomfort felt by the person who is differently-abled, but the eradication of those questions and issues about the body that the normatively enabled prefer to repress from consciousness. Not least these are questions about the body’s ability to disgust not only others but its owners – questions about the proximity of socially normative ideas of the body as an object of desire and self-worth to its functions in the processing of food and drink from mouth to the organs through which waste is excreted.

The ambiguities run through the words we use to express relationships of love and attachment, carefully taking away from the higher meanings of both spiritual and body attraction, consciousness that body functions are maintained by body care. If you are doing this body care for yourself it can be done in private spaces if you are thus enabled by body and environment. In Sean’s, they are done for him. Moments where these ambivalences in the notion of what it is that constitute a caring relationship emerge in sometimes unnoticeable interactions where bodily affect expresses itself in gesture and uncontrolled reaction. For instance when Sean has an epileptic seizure, paramedics come to assist:

“Really, everything is okay,” I say, smiling. “I know what I’m doing.”

“You his girlfriend?” asks the female paramedic. She has a northern accent and a wide, blemished face.

“No,” I say in a disgusted voice, “No – carer. I’m his carer”.

ibid: 18

 To be mistaken as a lover rather than a carer raises disgust in Janet and a desire to distance herself from Sean. However, even the body of the ‘paramedic’ is seen, as narrators take the license to do, as a thing to which we relate coldly and with judgement. It’s a defining moment in the novel, as reader’s discover that the affect emitted by Janet is uncomfortable and lacks the empathy that we, as readers struggles, as I think we do, to empathise with Sean, despite the barrier of her narrative distancing. It is only when we realise that Janet contains the worst of us as human readers as well that we realise that ‘caring’ is not necessarily the name of a soft emotion but of, at times, a cold and clinical response to persons and bodies that carry, if only usually by normative repression, negative as well as positive affect, with sometimes even the latter repressed too. This is at its most complex when Janet describes Sean as the ‘Agnus Dei, a la Francisco de Zurbaran’.[4]

Allison deals with the fact that Janet is a complex witness by constantly drawing our attention to her unreliable narration and the growing self-doubt that arrives with an accusation about her potential to bully others. The novel becomes a story of uneven moral growth of which Janet is often unconscious but I would say that this is not because the reader easily sloughs off attitudes to the disabled body, and bodies in general that she also carries through the novel.

Her relationship to Sean is paralleled by her relationship to her actual ‘boyfriend’, Jordan, but although Jordan is clearly admired he is none the less often transformed into a totally objectified body. For instance when questioning him on past operation scars, jet another concern with bodily blemish, she describes him, ‘rolling onto his front, legs cocked in the air, powerful as weapons’.[5]

Reduced to a weapon, this male body is marked by her desire but is also attached to a conversation that turns to the role Janet played in her father’s funeral parlour in helping work with the corpses: ‘”So you had to touch the bodies”’ says Jordan.[6] This constant play with the body as object of desire, disgust or something in-between, a fascinated obsession is where the reader becomes located in these necessary ambivalences, some of which are not only those of Janet. Like all of her boyfriends though no reader is ‘willing to admit’ the effect on them of her ‘interesting and different’ view of bodies, dead or alive.[7]

Sean, a student of Merleau-Ponty (the modern originator of those theories we name ‘embodiment theory’), alone realises that the body is art and that art is about the experience of the body under its agency and manipulation by others. He seeks to ‘bind’ himself as not only object but subject, its inbuilt subjective self-perception, of such art. His art disappears once he detracts his body from the way he binds it:

…, each of Sean’s bindings is unique and unpreserved. They’re the entropy of the body, the collapse of design. All tension and strangeness of proportion.’

ibid: 42

The body of Sean’s art and the art of his body is about body wrested from notions of normative (misread as positive) development and examined outside of its norms – art and bodies take up a queered space, in which entropy and disproportion are made to be estrange those who gaze on or sense them. In these estranged body-spaces, we might come to see what bodies mean when all of the functions of discourse they support are available, not just those we find comfortable like the convention of the ‘healthy body beautiful’, unblemished faces and queered forms, one that are like questions marks.

Art is therefore an important theme, from Zurbaran’s strangely and actively maimed sheep body to Gormley’s over-perfect body casts to Bridget Riley, who:

“forces you to engage with her art as a body. The sensory flare. …

… ”She blurs the line between consciousness and the body. She reminds you we are totally physical things”.

ibid: 45

But art only does this because it manipulates form such as that even the most normative intention has to be represented as a distortion, whether consciously like Picasso, or with a problematic interest in queered bodily form as in Velasquez and Zurbarán.

This novel is immensely intelligent about art but it is in the service of a more conscious take on the affect and cognitive representations with which people with a disability challenge norms and the audiences dependent on those norms – including those people who ask inappropriate questions and stare. But also including those who are encouraged to see being a carer as a means of making unusual bodies conformable to those others sensing it rather than those possessing it. Does Janet ever hear Sean, for instance when she is translating, and often doing so in reductive ways, his words to art students, ‘a few words at a time’?

“My body is a political site. I like art that you experience as a body in space. I want to use my body to provoke reactions in you. I am interested in your reaction to my body as other. …I am interested in the beauty of vulnerability”.

ibid: 81

This is indeed Sean’s role in the novel, however mishandled that role is by the mediating effect of Janet’s narration. She makes ‘socially acceptable’ the challenge Sean poses to all of us that we ‘confront the places where we are uncomfortable to look’.[8] The discomfort is part of it and Janet as narrator, carer, friend and lover will not be approachable by the reader in this novel until she learns to tolerate and live with her own discomfort and learn through this both love and empathy. Hence the novel significantly ends with this interaction with which Sean welcomes her willing and free desire to be with him: ‘his eyes drifting back closed, his body at peace’ (my italics). [9]

How different is that final moment from that, where forced to share the same room with Sean, her ‘latex gloves and a plastic apron’ are used like her actions to ‘build a fortress of towels and pillows around him to keep his body in place’.[10]

Steve

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[1] Allison (2019: 129)

[2] In Garth Greenwell’s Cleanness (2020) for instance

[3] Allison (2019:1)

[4] ibid: 13. The emotional content of this image covers notions of the scapegoat, the sacrificial element of love and its cruelty.

[5] ibid: 28

[6] ibid: 29

[7] ibid: 35

[8] ibid: 81

[9] ibid: 259

[10] ibid: 149f.