Since Weir was the only author for today I wasn’t familiar with, I wanted to think about the ways in which he represented war, but not only how he represented war but also embodiment and how the loss of his limbs affected his overall being or sense of existence.
I naively assumed that this story was in fact non-fiction and that Weir had actually fought in the battle of Chickamauga.There was also no short biography about Weir, which may have added to the ambiguity surrounding this story. (Ambrose Bierce also writes a famous short story about the battle). However, the scientific discussion of the nervous system and even the confession that “I saw one man who had lost both legs, and one who had parted with both arms; but none like myself, stripped of every limb” didn’t seem quite right, so I googled Weir, and he was in fact someone more akin to a medical professional and not a solider. Even with that information aside, why represent the body and mind dichotomy in this way? The mind is often revered and the body devalued, but the point Weir appears to be making is that the mind is not all that important without the body (or at least a complete body).
It is clear that the loss of the narrator’s (who does not ever state his name although the case is about him) limbs leaves him without control over his own actions. He is “forwarded to Philadelphia” “carried out an in arm chair and placed in the library” (360) as if an object. Nurses and Doctors often read to the narrator and even lent him medical books. Even with these materials, “he thus reached a conclusion that a man is not his brain. . .but all of his economy, and that to lose any one part must lessen his sense of his own existence” (363). The implications are that a man is not made whole by his mind, contrary to belief : the narrator gives credence to the power of the body, and how the body can significantly impact the mind. Even though the narrator in Weir’s story seems to spend a majority of his time thinking, this thinking isn’t enough. Books can surround him but it does not seem to increase his propensity for learning. When this sentence is used into the lens of James, it contradicts the idea that men who lead a cultivated, lifestyle are smarter than those who live a natural one, regardless of brain size. It’s interesting the role environment plays for James in development of culture and how detrimental it can be for one’s overall state of being.
What I found most fascinating about Weir’s story was his descriptions of the nerves. Although the narrator is disembodied (like his fellow soldiers) he can still at times feel the limbs that he has lost. In regards to how power functions, is the body playing tricks on the mind or the mind playing tricks on the body? Also, the idea of authority or power seems like an important one in that who is transcribing this man’s story?
In a sense, every though those body parts are literally gone, they have not left him due to how their nerves function. For instance, the narrator explains “Where the pains come and go, as they do in certain cases, the subjective sensations thus occasioned are very curious, since in such cases the man loses and gains, and loses and regains, the consciousness of the presence of the lost parts, so that he will tell you, “Now I feel my thumb, now I feel my little finger.” I should also add that nearly every person who has lost an arm above the elbow feels as though the lost member were bent at the elbow, and at times is vividly impressed with the notion that his fingers are strongly flexed.” Just as Alice is often referred to as a scientist albeit a child one, this narrator also plays out the role of the scientist. He has been able to study those like him as if a doctor and is then providing the reader with data about his experiences.
Lindsay I hope you dont mind if I merely post as a comment to your ideas. I actually think we are basically talking about the same thing in different terms.
ReplyDeleteWe see much of what a trauma theorist would call “the shattering of the self” in Poe’s (rather Vankirk’s) words; “organs are contrivances by which the individual is brought into sensible relationship with particular classes and forms” (404) describes what psychoanalysts would simply call “the mirror stage.” Organs here are emissaries of the concrete world of sensory information, but only in service to understanding a difference between the subject and the outside world. That Vankirk supposes that there is an ultimate breaking down of the boundaries between what the self perceives and calls it “the ultimate, unorganized condition” can be related to what occurs when a person experiences a severely traumatic event. Similar to “the external world reach[ing] the whole body” (405) which Vankirk describes, a person who undergoes trauma is sometimes overloaded with the reality of the intense sensory experience and can no longer regulate the difference between the Self and anything else (in the terms Poe uses, external and internal stimuli). I was inspired to think this by Poe’s own description of mesmerism--something which is difficult to reconcile with reason but usually seems to get results. This would be consistent, I think, with mesmerists uncovering traumatic experiences in patients which result in a similar shattering.
This idea is interestingly connected to another of our readings. S Weir Mitchell’s “The Case of George Dedlow.” which in my ignorance of the 19th century I original thought was autobiographical because of the agony he expresses in writing about the experience of a lost limb, is similarly invested in the relationship between the self and the external world (here the regulator of sensory stimulus is still configured as the “body;” the “mind” is a tool for organizing that information into a sense of individual existence. The shattering I referred to above is obvious in passages like: “At times the conviction of my want of being myself was overwhelming, and most painful. It was…a deficiency in the egoistic sentiment of individuality” (362). Of course, Mitchell does give his protagonist something to offer other than ennui: a command of the language he uses to express himself.
He describes the phantom limb condition as causing much more pain than comfort in its absence, but seemingly only because of his fear that, as a torso, he has become little more than object and his condition destroys his ability to separate himself from other objects. To use psychoanalytic terms again, this would reaquaint the titular hero with the frightening realm of oneness, of plentitude, known as the Real. I find it interesting that Mitchell imagines this as a first-person narrative. That George Dedlow is given command of the language to describe his condition, that it is not a clinical (or even third-person) perspective which informs the reader of his case is indicative of a desire to retain his position within a Symbolic order which grants signs in the service of naming things (thereby separating and delineating them from himself). The scientist here is confronted with trying to imagine one of the wonders of the human body, namely nerves left over from the loss of a limb exciting actual sensation, but recoiling with shock and unable to illuminate his condition (to himself or readers) in language which does not threaten to utterly destroy him in its telling.