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Seeing
the Difference
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Session
Three: Vision--Confronting the Margin
I was greatly intrigued when Christina Gillis first told me that she planned an institute on death, and that the title that she was considering was Seeing the Difference. What I found most provocative was the word "seeing" used in the title; I have good cause to be sensitive to this appellation. For one thing, seeing has occupied a very large part of my life; as a practicing pathologist, seeing is what I have done for a living. Moreover, the pathologist's gaze must, sooner or later, rest upon the dead. To see, to look, to inspect, to study visually, either through a microscope or with the naked eye: this activity has been my livelihood for nearly forty years. I would add that my dependency upon the visual function was complete and unrestricted. Had I been unable to hear, to smell or to taste, I could still do my job quite well. Had I been impaired in my capacity to speak, or to move, it would have been a great personal tragedy for me, but not with reference to my skills as a diagnostic pathologist. These would have remained intact, so long as I could continue to be able to see, to think and to remember. My job is therefore emblematic, in a way, of what is now fashionable to call "oculocentrism": excessive reliance on optics to obtain knowledge. This constitutes both the strength and the weakness of my job. It is also a thorn in the side of epistemological discourse in Western civilization. As you know, the notion that knowledge of the nature of reality can be acquired simply by looking, the "spectator concept of epistemology," as John Dewey called it, has come under harsh criticism. But it is not my role--fortunately--to discuss arduous philosophical questions. I simply wished to set into relief the heavy load of significations in the title Seeing the Difference. Especially so when the topic is death. What is the "difference" being alluded to? Is it the difference that we see between the living and the dead? Or is it the different forms of seeing or understanding death? (For "seeing" is metaphorically used to mean "understanding" in everyday life. We say "I see, I see" when we finally understand, and we "overlook" when something escapes our notice.) Let me, first, take "seeing" in an entirely literal sense. Thus, I should interpret the meaning of "seeing death" as, rather, "seeing the dead." This is always a complex act, subject to various interpretations, stemming from different motives, and yielding diverse perceptions. The sight of a cadaver is both avoided and sought. It exerts a unique, ambivalent fascination. It attracts and repels at the same time. The sight of a dead person hands us an obscure premonition of our own future dissolution. Thus, the presence of a cadaver carries that morbid fascination that one experiences at the edge of a precipice. Our instinct is to flee, but there is also a pull towards the void. The result is an ambiguous sensation of double valence, an anguishing kind of contradiction, a sort of metaphysical vertigo. The sight of a cadaver poses a riddle. It has been said, using a technical and somewhat pretentious language, that "the corpse remains as an empty signifier devoid of its phenomenal causation." In plain English, we see a presence that remits us to an absence. For we see someone who is no longer there, who has already departed. But perhaps we should correct this statement, and say that we see not someone, but something. The awful, indescribable transition from person to decomposing lump of matter has already been accomplished. This is what the sight of a cadaver reminds us of, either consciously or subliminally. But I have commented here, in this institute, that there is no possible description of death. There are no words in the English language, or any language, that may express what has happened. It is not right to say "change" because change implies continuity, and in death there is no continuity: it was John or Mary last night, or a few minutes ago, and now it is a piece of decomposing organic matter. This is not a change, as happens in aging, or weight loss, or changing one's shirt. This is transmutation of a completely different order, immeasurable and incomparable, whose nature utterly escapes us. Thus, the presence of the cadaver is fundamentally paradoxical. It is a presence which is also an absence. This is why the absence of a cadaver is doubly distressing. The presence of the corpse is essential for the relatives and the loved ones who survive. They must perform the funeral rites, whose goal is to fill the void of the absence that they experience. In preliteral societies, to die far away from home is often thought to be the worst kind of death. It is hurtful to the one who dies, and to those who survive: to the one who dies, because he shall be deprived of the funeral rites, which ensure his proper accession to a peaceful afterlife; to the survivors, because they will suffer a perturbation of the social order. The dearly departed who is not there cannot be seen, cannot be symbolically questioned. One cannot make confessions, address reproaches, or elicit common souvenirs with the absent. This is why a badly disfigured cadaver is, in this regard, equivalent to an absent one: it cannot be identified. Thus, a man who dies away from his loved ones is doubly absent: absent because he is dead, and absent again because he is not physically--corporeally--present. This is an absence of an absence, an absence with an exponent, an absence to the second power. To avoid this twice-tragic fate, various human societies have devised fake burials: ceremonies in which a substitute, a symbolic corpse is buried. This may be a garment of the deceased, an effigy of the same, or a ritual object of some kind. The cenotaph may be the refined, European equivalent of these customs: it is a monument to a dead person whose cadaver is not there, but elsewhere. The same metonymic principles seem to be invoked in a European cenotaph, and in the fake burial of a preliteral society. Therefore, seeing the dead is always ambivalent. It is a sight that we avoid, as the all-too-obtrusive reminder of the precariousness of our own life. It is also a sight that we seek, as the only concrete reality on which we can anchor the illusion of a living presence. We know it is only a mass of quickly decomposing proteins, but it is the only material form of a presence that we used to love, and thus we are ready to invest it with personal attributes. This is how the sight of the dead is yearned for, that we can address to them a last farewell, and that they can continue to exist in our gaze for yet a little longer. That we can keep on seeing them for a while. Seeing the human attributes in the dead, seeing the humanity in the corpse as something that is inseparable of the corporeal form, is inevitable. It is automatic in all of us. This is why the workers at the morgue, the dissectors, like the embalmers who must open the body of the dead, instinctively cover the face of the cadaver. It is unsettling to contemplate the face of the dead while performing, on their bodies, a troubling act that is something of a desecration. There are other motives, some of dubious nature, for seeing the dead. In the course of my professional years, I was approached by numerous persons, from many walks of life, for permission to watch an autopsy. I found it difficult to understand why they wished to see a cadaver being dissected. It was easy to agree that, for nurses or medical students, this was part of their professional schooling. But many others had insufficient justification. I was often compelled to deny them permission to enter the autopsy room. Throughout the years, I had requests from technicians, photographers, lawyers, amateur artists, journalists, and even hospital secretaries. On one occasion, hospital security guards approached me for permission to watch an autopsy, under pretense of instruction. I found out later that, during a private party, after much spiritous libation, the security men had crossed bets among themselves, as to who would be courageous enough to witness a cadaver's evisceration without flinching. Another incident, equally childish, concerned night shift employees of hospital administration, who made it a test of courage to come to the morgue alone, in the dark, armed with only a flashlight, to open the refrigerators where cadavers are kept. The morgue of the hospital was located in a remote, usually deserted part of the building. Seeing the dead seemed to have been, in these cases, a test of mettle, or perhaps some form of ritual fazing, or childish initiation ceremony. And what are we to think of seeing the dead as sheer spectacle? The idea may shock contemporary sensibilities, but not too long ago, in the city of Paris, the morgue functioned as an institution of theatrical display, as a form of entertainment. Ostensibly, the reason for exhibiting cadavers to the public was that those individuals who died in the public domain, away from home, could be identified by their friends, relatives and acquaintances. The social order would thus be preserved, and the appropriate manner of burial and grieving could take place. But against these professed, laudable social ends, the administrators of the Parisian morgue could not have predicted that their institution was to become the best show in town: public theater, open to the public from dawn to dusk. And best of all, it was free. The description is familiar to many of you. Cadavers were placed on slabs, naked except for modesty-inspired covering of the genital area, behind large glass windows that could not have failed to evoke the large windows of department stores, which at the time were just beginning to appear and to displace the small family businesses. The crowds of watchers, people from all walks of life, young and old, pressed against the windows, and manifested their displeasure when the slabs were empty and there was nothing to see. If the registrar came to evacuate the exhibit room, he was apt to hear loud complaints, even insults, from an irate public that protested against the sudden closure of the spectacle. The best description of this, in my opinion, is offered by Emile Zola in his masterful novel Therese Raquin. He tells us of groups of workers that wander in at lunch time with the instruments of their trade under their arms; retirees who come to watch the corpses because they find nothing better to do; rowdy schoolboys who shout catcalls and invent nicknames for the cadavers; and elegant ladies, one of whom Zola describes watching the naked body of a statuesque construction worker who had succumbed in an accident on the job. There is an intimation of sickly erotic undertones in the gaze of this watcher. Zola reminds us, in this passage, that seeing the dead is indeed different, depending on who does the seeing. Enormous crowds visited the Paris morgue in those days. Up to 40,000 persons in one day. The Thomas Cook tour of the city included a stop at the morgue. English tourists were particularly interested, presumably because there was no such spectacle in London. Or so they said. Every guide book listed the morgue. As Vanessa Schwartz points out in her interesting scholarly work on this Parisian institution, it is puzzling to consider why, in a city that certainly did not lack visual attractions, such a vast number of people (a million in one year, according to estimates of a contemporary newspaper) opted to crowd the salle d'exposition, the exhibition hall, of the city morgue, to watch the cadavers of people who had died an unexpected, often violent death. Be that as it may, the Paris morgue was finally closed to the public. The decree of its closure came as late as 1907. A campaign against the public exhibition of cadavers had started long before--not on account of hygienic considerations or medical concepts, but based strictly on moral principles. The keeping of cadavers in view of the public, and in proximity to the crowds, was condemned because, according to an important sector of the bourgeoisie, it was disrespectful to the dead, and potentially capable of arousing the base instincts of the people. Critics of the morgue called it a "bloody spectacle," and opposed it on the same grounds as the spectacle of public executions, namely, because harrowing spectacles of that sort would stir the shady part of the soul, might excite cruel and barbarous feelings, and thereby would increase crime. What one may actually perceive in the spectacle of death depends on the individual. Seeing is invariably in the eye of the beholder. I shall briefly refer to two styles of seeing that I may call "culturally dependent," for lack of a better term. In the traditional Mexican culture, which is permeated by a strong current of Indian naturalism, death is something very concrete. I am not an anthropologist, but this much I can say from my subjective impressions during my youth: death in Mexico is always embodied. Death is this cadaver, right here. It is something that may be palpated, touched, weighed, turned around. I was always impressed by the directness with which the survivors addressed the cadaver during a funeral ceremony in the lower socio-economic strata. There is much display of emotion, and the bereaved talk to the deceased. It is a new form of relationship. The survivors speak to the dead person: they reproach him for having left this world; they remind him of the joys and sorrows that they shared together; they make confessions, grant absolutions or admit having wronged him; and they promise him that they will remember him forever. They talk to him, not at him. I am sure that, if these addresses were only monologues, they were the kind of monologue that absolutely required the presence of the cadaver as mediator of the monologizing. The present-absent is much more present than absent, if I may thus express this unique status. In other words, the corporeal reality of the departed is strongly felt. It is a powerful sign that propitiates the illusion that the dead are still with us. Death is primarily a presence. When the dead are deprived of their corporal wrappings--the flesh, the nerves, the arteries (by now utterly superfluous)--there remains the skeleton. The skeleton is the almost universal emblem of death. But because it is eminently tangible and concrete--solid, stone-like--it has had a great career in Mexico. In the Mexican culture, the symbolic skeleton, the calavera, is not only felt, palpated, and even played with, but is also tasted, in the form of the sugar skulls that are consumed on All Souls Day, the day of the dead. For it is not only recent death that has a presence. Death is recurrently present, eminently present in the mind, at least on All Souls Day, the Dia de los Muertos, the "Day of the Dead," year after year. It is otherwise for cultures in which death is primarily an absence or a disappearance. In one philosophical tradition of Anglo-American culture, the living person is easily destroyed. Recall that John Locke says that personal identity is "inseparable from thinking," a mere consciousness displaying unity across time. And David Hume saw the person as "a train of perceptions" glued together by certain relations. Consciousness must attach itself to an animal body, or, as we say today more specifically, to a functioning brain. But body and brain were secondary, and in a sense irrelevant. Consciousness alone conferred identity. Consciousness alone embodied the essence of personhood. But if the person is merely a precarious bundle of mental activities, the dead person must be flimsier yet. The "Great Iceberg of Cotton Wool" of which Henri Michaux speaks in one of his poems, can erase all traces of the person. Death thus becomes an erasure, that is to say a disappearance, an absence, or a mere attribute of the insubstantial mind, of the fleeting consciousness, like the person itself. Not a concrete osseous framework--as is the Mexican skeleton, the calavera--but a wholly immaterial entity. Defined as an absence, it absented itself. Because it could not be seen, it ended up suffering the fate announced in the popular saying "Out of sight, out of mind." It was proscribed, and it became the Unmentionable. To finish these comments, I wish to say that I believe there is a parallel between the death-related Mexican naturalism, and--strange to recount--certain ideas that I have found in the pages of Russian novelists. It has been remarked that Tolstoy never approached death as a philosophical problem. He never seems to be looking for comprehensive concepts, conclusions, or intellectual approaches to death. He is not striving to create a philosophy of death; he is merely describing the experience of living beings. Since death cannot be understood, conceptualized, reduced to system, or dealt with syllogistically, the only thing left is to look at it. Such is the gist of the Mexican attitude. The gaze will not penetrate to the essence of the problem. It will barely skim its surface, but that is all we can do. And this is what Tolstoy does: to describe tirelessly, to evoke every detail of the external corporeality of death, to all the minutiae. Read the last pages of Ivan Ilyich, to find there a recreation of every sensory impression, the sounds, the sights, the odors that impressed a child. Vladimir Jankelevitch points out that this is one constant throughout the whole Tolstoyan work. He revels in the details, in the concrete particularities. Tolstoy's objectivity is a clinical objectivity. I venture to say that he must have been like one of those physicians that Guy Micco told us about yesterday, who can tell precisely when a person is dying. In Three Deaths, one of his unexcelled short stories, he observes of one of the dying personages that "she had that attentive and concentrated gaze of the dying." In Anna Karenina, when narrating the death of Nicolas Levine, he writes: "He looked straight out before him, with the same tense and concentrated expression." Turgenev's Diary of a Superfluous Man, contains very similar observations: the diarist tells us, in a line or two, how the eyes of his dying father seemed fixed. The meticulous observations of Russian writers lead us to believe that those who die are seeing something. They seem attentive. What do they see? Certainly not their immediate surroundings. Not the objects of the mortuary chamber close by, but something else, something remote, infinitely distant. But what this may be, neither Tolstoy, nor you or I, can ever know. For as long as we live, we shall be condemned never to know. |