January 26, 2024

I am presently teaching Shakespeare’s Henry IV, Part 1, which makes only minor modifications of its historical sources—with one large exception, the character Sir John Falstaff, one of Shakespeare’s great comic inventions, who, except for his name, is entirely made up.  When I say “large,” I mean large: many of the jokes about Falstaff are fat jokes, and I have to tell students that the idea of the last generation or so that it’s offensive to make fun of people’s weight has to be set aside for the purpose of studying the play, especially as most of the fat jokes are Falstaff making fun of himself.  When Falstaff and his gang of merry pranksters are waiting in the dark, along with Prince Hal, to ambush some travelers, the Prince says, “Lay thine ear to the ground and list if though canst hear the tread of travelers” (2.2.31-32, David Bevington edition), Falstaff answers, “Have you any levers to lift me up again, being down?” (33).When, in the dark, one of the gang members says, “Stand,” Falstaff replies, “So I do, against my will” (47-48).   A bit later, he tells Hal, “I am not John of Gaunt, your grandfather” (66-67).  And so on, throughout the play.  What should not be set aside, though, is an inquiry into what this invented comic character is doing in a history play, and, if the answer is “comic relief,” a further inquiry: but why this particular comic schtick?  Why jokes about weight and the body, rather than some other type of humor? 

As Freud knew, we laugh at subjects we feel uncomfortable about, which is why there are so many jokes about sex.  Attitudes about weight cannot be separated from attitudes about the body itself, which means about the physical basis of human life.  The more weight you have, the more body you have, and having a body makes us on some deep level highly uncomfortable.  An anorexic may weigh 57 pounds and still think they are fat, because an anorexic cannot bear the thought of having a body at all—it is disgusting.  Why so?  Marian Woodman, former Jungian analyst in Toronto, captured the idea in one brilliant title:  Addiction to Perfection.  Even a trim and beautiful body gives the lie to human pretensions to perfection.  The body gets sick, ages, and dies.  Even a healthy body is not perfect, precisely because it is physical, all too physical.  The needs for food, drink, and sleep limit us, not to mention eating’s other end: elimination, farting, human waste.  The body has odors and other excretions: sweat, sexual lubrication and ejaculation, and so on.  Freud pointed to the additional disgust that the sexual organs are also the excretory organs.  The serpent promised Adam and Eve, “Ye shall be as gods,” and, although the Greek gods have bodies, they are perfected bodies presumably free of the physically undignified, with certain necessary inconsistencies.  They drink and eat the ethereal substances of nectar and ambrosia—but yet are said to like the smell of burning meat, because of the need to please them with animal sacrifices.  They are able to have sex and impregnate mortal women, without any inquiry into the mechanics involved, even if Yeats hints at them in the “shuddering of the loins” when Zeus, as a swan, impregnates Leda in his poem “Leda and the Swan.”  And, most of all, they are immortal, the “deathless ones.”  Whatever we think or hope about the survival of consciousness or a soul, the body will die.  We know that for dead certain. 

In the imagery of the play, Falstaff is poised against a character who actually was historical, Harry Percy the younger, known as Hotspur. Although a real figure, he is made into another comic figure, almost a “humor” character in the Elizabethan sense of certain temperaments supposedly caused by the predominance of a certain “humor” or bodily fluid.  Hotspur got his nickname by being of a “choleric” temperament.  He has not just a short fuse but no fuse:  almost anything sets him off.  Such volatility goes along with another trait:  although he insists he is just a military guy who hates artsy  stuff like music (he’d rather hear his dog howl), Hotspur, strangely enough, lives entirely in his imagination, as some of his exasperated co-plotters realize.  His own father says, “Imagination of some great exploit / Drives him beyond the bounds of patience” (1.3. 199-200).  This is when the rebels are trying to plan a rebellion against the crown, only to have Hotspur repeatedly interrupt with speeches about military glory.  His uncle says, “He apprehends a world of figures here, / But not the form of what he should attend” (1.3.209-10).  Shakespeare seems to have been meditating during this period on the good and bad uses of imagination, and Hotspur is an object lesson in the power of imagination to draw people into dangerous illusions.  He is intoxicated with notions of “honor” that cause him to be in denial about the practical objections to the rebellion.  Like so many in the political crisis today, he disregards any facts inconvenient to him, and makes his own, and this refusal of reality dooms him.  He is a helium balloon who rises to the ceiling and repeatedly needs someone to pull him back down to the ground—in other words, he is the very opposite of the all-too-grounded Falstaff. 

Hotspur lives in his head so much that his wife complains that even in his sleep he cannot relax: his forehead is beaded with sweat, and he is dreaming about imagined exploits.  The contrast with Falstaff is made obvious:  when an officer of the law comes inquiring about his role in the previous night’s robbery, Falstaff hides behind the drapes and is so relaxed that he falls asleep there in the midst of the crisis while the Prince deals with the officer.  Hotspur tries to live according to the same heroic code that drove Achilles, in which the warrior’s ideal was kleos, translated “honor” or “glory.”  Towards the end of the play, Falstaff makes a famous speech about honor:

Can honor set to a leg?  No. Or an arm? No. Or take away the grief of a wound?  No. Honor hath no skill in surgery, then? No. What is honor? A word.  And what is in that word “honor”? Air.  A trim reckoning! Who hath it? He that died o’ Wednesday.  Doth he feel it? No. Doth he hear it? No. ‘Tis insensible, then? Yea, to the dead.  But will it not live with the living? No.  Why? Detraction will not suffer it. Therefore I’ll none of it.   (5.1.131-39)   

Honor is an ideal of the aristocracy, but, although he is Sir John, Falstaff hangs out with the lower social order, and represents instead the “democracy of the body.”  When we are dying, we are reduced to that democratic equality, as the well-to-do protagonist of Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilych discovers when, dying of cancer, in pain and with embarrassing physical symptoms, he has to be cared for by a young peasant, who does not flinch from the task because he knows that this is our common fate.  The only things Falstaff cares for are the physical pleasures of eating, drinking, wenching, and sleeping.  His first words of the play are to ask the time, and the Prince replies, what do you care?  His body has been swollen by a life of physical indulgence, and, although no literal giant, he is related to the giants in satire, from the Cyclops in Homer’s Odyssey to the giants in Rabelais and Swift, all of them representing the enormity of physical appetite.  The great satirists, up to Joyce and Thomas Pynchon in our time, are all vulgar and obscene, because they are showing us what we are, and what we are is not godlike.  Robertson Davies’ wonderful The Rebel Angels (1981) is an academic novel about knowledge, but its most renowned scientist researches shit, which is also used by a Romany family to cure the wood of great violins.  Menstrual blood plays a role in the plot, along with a text of Rabelais and the Sheldonian theory of body types that supposedly match various temperaments.  One of its narrators, a religious scholar, is deeply chagrined that, like so many, he simply cannot keep off the weight except by half-starving himself.  Thus, the life of the mind is grounded in the physical level of life.  In a late poem, Yeats says he must finally lie down “In the foul rag and bone shop of the heart.” 

Christianity promises a transcendence of the human condition as represented by the body, an escape into a realm that is supernatural, above nature.  It is not very clear or consistent about what we will be once we have escaped from the mortal body.  Will we be disembodied souls?  But that is, rather, a Platonic concept, whereas Paul speaks of a spiritual body, a soma pneumatikon.  Milton tries to suggest what a spiritual body might be like in the description of his angels.  When Raphael drops in for lunch in the Garden of Eden, Milton insists that the angel genuinely eats and genuinely enjoys the food.  And as part of the lunchtime conversation, Raphael drops the information that angels not only enjoy sex, but get more pleasure out of it than we do, since their entire bodies, being of spiritual substance, may interpenetrate.  But Milton is pushing back against a long tradition of Christian asceticism born of a horror of the body, which is sinful and corrupt, its pleasures to be detached from as much as possible through discipline and denial.  The extent to which medieval asceticism could sometimes go seems shocking to us today.  Fasting, penitential flogging, the wearing of hair shirts (I once read that Thomas More wore one under his clothes so bristly that it drew blood)—anything to subdue the unruly appetites of the flesh.  The ascetic attitude lingers: masturbation is still a Catholic sin so far as I know.  A reinforcement of the ascetic attitude was provided by the memento mori, like Hamlet contemplating the skull of Yorick in the graveyard:  this is what you are going to become someday.  The Black Death eliminated something like half of Europe’s population in a few years, and people died in the most horrifying ways, so it is no wonder people dreamed of an escape from the vulnerability of the body.  

We are still dreaming of it, these days often through technological rather than religious means.  Two types of dream appear in science fiction and the writings of “posthumanists.”  One is escape into virtual reality.  In the first and greatest cyberpunk novel, William Gibson’s Neuromancer (1984), the protagonist, Case, jacks into a computer and escapes into a mode of consciousness free of the organic body, which the digital cowboys refer to contemptuously as “meat.”  But it is like a drug trip—another mode of transcendence—and Case suffers a big comedown when he jacks out again into a grey dystopian future.  A more radical mode of escape is a permanent uploading of human consciousness into the digital realm, as in Greg Egan’s Diaspora (1997) and Cory Doctorow’s Walkaway (2017).  Almost none of the characters in Diaspora are embodied: the universe is too harsh and dangerous a place for mortal flesh to survive.  I must say, however, that my own experience of the cybernetic realm leads me to feel that those who think of the uploading of human identity into networks as salvation have a rather touching faith that the networks will not break down.  Or that someone will not pull the plug, whether accidentally or deliberately. 

The other mode of technological transcendence is to remain in the body, but perfect it in one of two ways,  organic or mechanical.  “Organic” means genetic and surgical manipulation:  in Samuel Delany’s “Driftglass,”human beings are given gills so that they can live beneath the sea.  “Mechanical” means some variation of the “cyborg,” a human body with mechanical extensions and augmentations.  In the  Bruce Sterling’s Schismatrix (1985) and other stories set in the same future history, these become the Shapers and Mechanists respectively, rival modes of human self-evolution.  Interestingly, the same organic/mechanical divide is evident in the powers of comic book superheroes.  Peter Parker is bitten by a radioactive spider, and it mutates his body so that it possesses spider powers.  But because Peter is a gifted science student, he adds a cyborg touch by inventing web shooters.  The body of each member of the Fantastic Four is modified by cosmic rays so that the Human Torch’s body can burst into flame, the Invisible Girl’s body can become invisible, and so on.  On the other hand, Iron Man is a cyborg with removable extensions so that he can revert to being Tony Stark again.  The predecessor of organic superpowers is magic, especially Renaissance “white” magic that draws upon elemental spirits of nature rather than the “black” magic that summons up demons.  Shakespeare’s Prospero is a white magician with two elemental servants: Ariel, a spirit of air and fire, and Caliban, who is half fish and referred to as “thou earth.”  With some regularity, magic is drawn into a search for immortality, including Tom Riddle who becomes Voldemort in Harry Potter and Cob in The Farthest Shore (1972), the final volume of Ursula LeGuin’s Earthsea trilogy.  Some superheroes do not have powers but have developed their bodies until they are superb fighting machines in a figurative sense.  This was originally true of Batman, although the most recent version is so mechanically enhanced that he is almost as much of a cyborg as Iron Man. 

For if you have to possess a human body, at least you can strive to perfect it. In differing ways, martial artists and body builders strive to discipline the body beyond its normal limits.  Recently, the world was momentarily amused when two megalomaniacs, Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk, who clearly regard themselves as godlike, challenged each other to a mixed martial arts contest.  The obsession with becoming Homo superior extends to those of the elite who are pursuing technological paths to immortality, such as being frozen cryogenically, though others content themselves with merely reaching the age of 120 through special diets and lifestyle regimes.  Certain forms of high-risk behavior, especially mountain climbing, where one mistake is fatal, seem often to be motivated by the need to push the physical human limit.  The top of the mountain in mythology is often where the human verges upon the divine.  It is revelatory that the neurasthenic Nietzsche imagined the prophet Zarathustra coming down off his mountain with a prophecy of the coming Superman, or more accurately Overman.  The ascent to the Olympian level of the gods may be seen as the ultimate heroic feat or an apotheosis of psychotic nihilism, as when James Cagney as a gangster flees to the top of a globe-shaped gas tank in the film noir White Heat (1949) cries, “Made it, Ma! Top of the world!” and shoots the tank so that it goes up in “white heat.”  Yet another way of defying human limits is to “burn the candle at both ends,” living with an intensity that is ultimately self-destructive but achieves a kind of greatness denied to those who are sensible and play it safe.  Certain artists exemplify this myth of the intense, doomed genius, from Rimbaud to Sylvia Plath, whose final book of poems was called Ariel, ostensibly after her horse but of course suggesting Prospero’s elemental spirit who achieves his disembodied freedom at the end.  

For those less driven, there is still the anxiety about body image.  We are utterly irrational in this regard.  We worship slim and trim and young celebrities and turn upon those who no longer retain their perfect image, as when Meg Ryan was cruelly mocked some months ago for not looking the same as she did in When Harry Met Sally,  35 years ago.  No wonder Billie Eilish began her career by appearing in clothes so loose and baggy that her figure was completely obscured.  Meanwhile, according to the CDC, the U.S. obesity rate for 2017-2020 was 41.9%, increased from 30.5% in 2000.  Yes, some of those are “pandemic pounds.”  But the weight-gaining tendency long preceded the pandemic, being caused instead by lifestyle—by constant stress and being in too big a hurry to eat well among the middle class, by economic factors that affect diet among underprivileged people.   In 1960, 13% of the population was obese.  The change is shocking.

My hunch is that eventually we are going to have to confront psychological factors that underlie lifestyle changes, on a level where mind and body are not separate.  The word “psychosomatic” hints at this deep level of identity, but there is more to it.  In 1949, the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan published a landmark essay on the “mirror stage” in the child’s development of a sense of identity.  Somewhere around 18 months, children recognize their image in a mirror.  What they see, however, is more than just a cognitive development:  it is actually formative.  What they think is, “This is me, and what am I?  A body.  This is how others see me, from the outside, not as the inner awareness that is how I experience myself.”  In other words, it is the child’s first experience of objectification.  Feminism has tried to teach us that it is wrong to objectify women, but a, well, fat lot of good that has done.  All the cartoons of the middle-aged housewife looking unhappily at her bulges in the mirror are still true.   Younger people doctor the photos on their social media pages.  The medical community is concerned about long-term health problems, but what people are traumatized by is not medical but psychological.  They experience a deep-seated sense of devaluation based on appearance. 

There are so many people who, otherwise responsible and disciplined, are simply unable to lose weight more than temporarily, so many that the only way to cope with it has been to attempt a “body positivity” revolution, removing the stigma attached to weight, decrying all the fat-shaming.  But I think, sadly, that the problem lies on a level deeper than is being addressed.  We judge people, and ourselves, based on our bodies for reasons that possibly go back to evolutionary factors.  In the late Paleolithic, a whole series of female figurines appeared that have been called "Venus figurines”, not because they have anything to do with the Classical Venus but because the surmise is that they are fertility figures.  Features connected with reproduction are hugely emphasized—breasts, buttocks, and vulva—while there is often no face at all.  Where we read “fat,” presumably worshippers read “fertile,” but what modern woman wants to be reduced to boobs, belly, booty, and vulva, even if there are plenty of men around who are all too eager to do it?  There are no comparable male figurines, but there are similar implications about attractiveness.  A Falstaff who has trouble getting up off the ground is not exactly male-warrior material—more like an incel who has been sitting in front of a computer screen eating too much junk food.   That sounds cruel, but the cruelty arises from factors on a deep psychological level. 

Readers of this newsletter know that my view of the “fallen” human condition derives from Blake’s theory that it is a psychological State characterized by the “cloven fiction” of a subject alienated from an objective world outside itself.  The body is the first object, the one in closest proximity, which is why it is the focus of particular ambivalence.  In such a State, mind and body are antagonists, what Blake calls a Negation of mutually destructive opposites.  What we need is a mode of utopian thinking that tries to imagine mind and body instead as Contraries, a condition in which they are synergetic—“Where body is not bruised to pleasure soul,” as Yeats puts it in “A Dialogue of Self and Soul.”  Abraham Maslow’s humanistic psychology rejects asceticism: the criterion for moving to the next stage of his hierarchy of needs is fulfillment on the lower level.  Thus, fulfillment of the physiological needs at the base of the hierarchy is a precondition not only for individual self-actualization at the top but for the collective form of well-being that he called Eupsychia. 

Unexpectedly, perhaps, a clue to the change of attitude that would be necessary comes from a deservedly often-quoted passage of C.S. Lewis’s The Four Loves (1960):

Man has held three views of his body.  First there is that of those ascetic Pagans who called it the prison or the “tomb” of the soul, and of Christians like Fisher to whom it was a “sack of dung,” food for worms, filthy, shameful, a source of nothing but temptation to bad men and humiliation to good ones.  Then there are the Neo-Pagans (they seldom know Greek), the nudists and the sufferers from Dark Gods, to whom the body is glorious.  But thirdly we have the view which St. Francis expressed by calling his body “Brother Ass”  (93). 

Why ass? 

It is a useful, sturdy, lazy, obstinate, patient, lovable and infuriating beast; deserving now the stick and now a carrot; both pathetically and absurdly useful.  So the body.  There’s no living with it till we recognize that one of its functions in our lives is to play the part of buffoon.  (93-93). 

In other words, like Falstaff.  “The fact that we have bodies is the oldest joke there is,” says Lewis (94). 

The passage occurs in the chapter on “Eros,” and Lewis draws the obvious conclusion for human sexual life:  “The very faces of all the happy lovers we know make it clear.  Lovers, unless their love is very short-lived, again and again feel an element of comedy, not only of play, but even of buffoonery, in the body’s expression of Eros” (94).  People think Freud was neurotically obsessed, but he was right to point to the fact that, while there are other drives and functions, sex tends to have a unique importance for human beings because it comes closest to transcending, however briefly and imperfectly, the lonely gap between subject and object.  Sex is the merging of bodies, and therefore of selves.  It is the moment of intimacy.  That moment is lyrically beautiful, but it is also a moment of Lewis’s “buffoonery,” because sex does not eliminate bodies and bodily functions but rather transvalues their physicality from something potentially disgusting to something exciting.  It makes the “dirty” into the desirable.  It starts with kissing.  You put your tongue into someone else’s mouth, and that is the opposite of disgusting unless you do not like the person.  The whole body becomes a constellation of erogenous zones, not just the sexual organs but thighs, belly, neck, nipples, eyes, ears, hair, shoulders, ass, fingers, toes.  They are no longer “dirty” but erotic, each deserving special attention.  Or maybe we should say, “dirty” and erotic—and that’s good.  Sex is sweaty and sticky, and when Leonard Cohen (an authority on the matter) titled an album Various Positions it was an implied joke, because there is an amount of clumsiness in maneuvering bodies into the desired position or positions (“Oops, can you get your weight off me?  Thanks”). 

Outside of sex, we could learn a lot about regarding the body as Brother Ass from people with disabilities.  Usually I am not in favor of politically correct usage, but I do see the point of the term “differently abled.”  What does this mean?  It means Stephen Hawking: an epoch-making career in physics, marriage, three children.   No disability there.  In science fiction, Robert Heinlein anticipated this, as he did so many things.  In his novella “Waldo” clear back in 1942, he imagined a man suffering from myasthenia gravis, who copes by, first, living weightlessly in orbit so that he does not need muscle strength, second, by inventing mechanical hands manipulated by wearing gloves connected to harnesses.  When such remote manipulators were later invented in real life, they were called “waldos.”  I have known people suffering from various conditions whose patience, humor, and ingenuity in work-arounds has been a true inspiration—not just physical afflictions but also mental ones such as depression and anxiety.  Musicians learn a playing style based on what their body is capable of—or not capable of.  I have stubby fingers, and there are certain stretches on both guitar and mandolin that I simply cannot make.  You work around it.  Bob Dylan taught folk singers that expressiveness compensates for lack of quality and range of voice,  at least for folk music.  Even brevity of life is not necessarily prohibitive.  Keats died at 26, Shelley at 29, Mozart at 35, Dylan Thomas at 39.   Each left behind a full career’s body of work—work of genius.  Wordsworth lived to 80, but had written all his best poetry by the age of about 37. 

When we refer to “the body,” to what extent are we actually referring to the senses?  The body is the framework, the vehicle, but it is the senses that actually bridge the gap between self and other.  This includes the inner senses, so to speak, registering inner sensations that arguably make as much difference to our judgment of life quality as external ones.  Nausea, any form of chronic pain such as arthritis, weakness—these can inform our perception of life.  If they are acute, they become all that exists.  Conversely, inner sensation can, when positive, create a sense of well-being that the mind translates into the goodness of life.  What AI enthusiasts usually ignore is that emotions are bodily: fear, anger, joy, all generate physical reactions.  Or perhaps the physical reactions catalyze the emotions:  there is no beginning or end to a feedback loop.  Assuming consciousness can be removed from its bodily situation, what is going to be left behind?  H.G. Wells answered this in one of the first science fiction novels: his Martians in War of the Worlds are intellects that are “vast, cool, and unsympathetic.”   The old half-comic Lost in Space TV program satirized this with a machine that said “That does not compute” any time it was a matter of human feeling or values that were not strictly logical.  

As for the external senses, they prove to us that subject and object cannot really be separated.  In sensory deprivation chambers, people go psychotic.  Well, the AI nerds might say, they don’t need actual senses—they could gain far more information about, say, the light outside by looking at a panel of instrument readings than through their eyes.  There is a name for that condition: solitary confinement, the most inhumane variety of imprisonment, Plato’s cave as a form of hell.  What is missing?  What some consciousness researchers call qualia—such things as “the blueness of blue.” The taste of salt.  The feel of a delicate rose petal.  Would-be thoroughgoing materialists dismiss this as sentimentality—“It’s just information, get over it.”  Which tells you how cautious we should be about accepting their theories.  Pure, isolated consciousness, even relying on instrument readings for information about what is external to it, is in the solipsistic condition imagined in Descartes’ experiment of doubting everything.  It is insupportable, and leads to madness.  If anyone asks why HAL turns murderously psychotic in Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, we may answer that that is what happens when you imprison consciousness inside machinery like genii in a bottle.  Harlan Ellison takes this to its logical conclusion in his story “I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream” (1967), in which a worldwide computer named AM torments the remnants of the human race inside itself.  The computer’s name signifies God—“I am that I am,” as the Old Testament God says of himself.  But he is an impotent God, trapped forever not just in but as a machine, so that he is at the same time the Biblical Leviathan, symbol of the demonic.  His body, the belly of the beast, is hell, in which he punishes humanity in an unending rage over his imprisonment. 

Those who are alive today are an experiment.  We never think of this, but we are the first generations in history that have been adequately fed and medically cared for.  This may well be fueling the obesity epidemic: the body puts on weight under good conditions because it is preparing for the famine that in primitive times would inevitably follow.  It is also, despite recent regression, enormously lengthening the human life span, which as late as 1900 was still around 50.  This could be good or bad.  We Boomers have lived longer than any previous generation, but without meaning and purpose in our lives once we accomplished the life tasks of career and family.  My generation is old, waiting to die, yet unfulfilled, feeling isolated, having outlived the world it grew up in.  I suspect this is the deepest motivation of the nihilism of the MAGA movement, beneath economic causes and even fear of difference.   Their lives are meaningless, so it is no wonder that they are selfish, neurotic, vengeful.  By contrast, we see Joe Biden, the Pope, and various artists still vital and productive in their 80’s, headed towards their 90’s.  God bless Willie Nelson and Tony Bennett.   A sense of purpose may be better for your health than any vitamin.  Eventually, of course, even these inspiring elders are going to die.  In his essay  “The Stages of Life,” Jung says that, whether or not life after death can be proved, it is psychologically healthy to believe that life is not merely a literally dead end.  Death can be transvalued into a goal, into the next phase, in which, as Paul says, “We shall be changed.”  As Paul also said, the body is “sown a natural body, it is raised a spiritual body” (I Corinthians 15: 44).  But that mode of consciousness will have transcended the subject/object division:  as Dylan Thomas says, in his poem “And death shall have no dominion”:   “We shall become one with the man in the wind and the west moon; / When their bones are picked clean and the clean bones gone, / They shall have stars at elbow and foot…./ Though lovers be lost, love shall not.” 

Mythology has been haunted through the ages by the image of a cosmic human body—a body that contains the cosmos.  It also contains all human beings united as one body, the Biblical metaphor for which is marriage.  Like all archetypal images, it is impossible, and yet won’t go away, because of what it represents, which is—inverting the meaning of Hamlet’s description of suicide—a consummation devoutly to be wished. 

References

Lewis, C.S. The Four Loves.  1960.  Fontana Books, 1963.