Phenomenology is a branch of philosophy that attempts to describe the world as it is experienced directly by a subject; it is an examination of the embodied experience. Phenomenology is rooted in the sensual body; it is a way of viewing and feeling the world, and it is a way in which the body comes to know and respond to experience. With this in mind, is it possible to relay or transcribe the embodiment of experience on the surface of a 2-dimensional object, like an essay? Can a writer ever truly express, or a reader ever fully receive, the bodily experience that the phenomenological approach wishes to convey? The text itself seems to be disembodied, as it is an object crafted by words, words that are perhaps composed at a desk or in front of a computer screen completely distanced from the initial bodily experience. Most importantly, how does one write about the embodied writing style of an author while avoiding the disembodied analytical literalism that often plagues literary criticism? Too often literary criticism, my own included, seems to focus its attention on content—what a work means—not how it arrives at its meaning. My love for language and its ability to creatively shape words into ideas is what initially drew me into the field of literary studies. However, somewhere along the way my love for language did not translate onto the pages of my own writing. My focus became the content, instead of how the content was carried by style—the very thing that keeps me returning to the pages of Marcel Proust or William H. Gass. In an attempt to reconcile this divergence from my love of language, I will try to take Susan Sontag’s advice to heart while examining Alphonso Lingis’ essay “Animal Bodies” and attempt to “show how it is what it is […]” instead of solely focusing on “[…] what it means” (Richter 696).
American philosopher, Alphonso Lingis is perhaps uniquely able to convey the embodied experience through a weaving of language, imagery, and metaphors that evokes an emotional and participatory response from the reader. Lingis’ writing style is not analytical or literal, but is figurative and multi-sensorial in its crafting of style. Lingis does not conform to traditional philosophical exegesis, which strives to arrive at or present truths. Instead, Lingis’ writing is expressive and poetic, not removed or distanced. From the very start, Lingis’ essay opposes the tradition of stale analytical literalism by beginning his essay with an engaging metaphor, in which he states: “Sea anemones are animate chrysanthemums made of tentacles” (194). Lingis’ use of the metaphor is creative and generative in its allusion, which works from the known to the unknown in order to make relationships between things that might not otherwise be connected. Lingis then begins to present a detailed, almost cinematic, close up view of the mysterious sea creature. He steadily moves from an exterior description of the sea anemone to an interior description, revealing the sea anemone’s “inner algae garden”(194). What stirs my imagination here is not the marine biology lesson, but the sensitivity to which each word supports his initial comparison of the sea anemone being an animate chrysanthemum. Lingis’ imagery and comparison immerses me in language, which makes the reading of his text participatory, because I must use my imagination to engage with the words by creating my own visual interpretation.
In the Cartesian tradition, the world is negotiated through the mind’s ability to make sense of the world. The mind is disembodied, as René Descartes once stated, “I think, therefore, I am.” In this tradition the body is an appendage of the mind—the body moves because the mind governs its actions; the body feels because the mind authorizes it; the world exists because the mind says it does. The mind is the command center that dictates and controls how the world is confronted and constructed. However, Lingis focuses on bodily existence as the referent to which we relate and describe the world. In other words, the body is a presence in the world, and it is the referent in which perception is measured. For Lingis the body is a mind physically embodied; it is both body and mind that encounter and experience the world. For Lingis, the body is not outside of consciousness, but is a way of being present in the world and being conscious of it. Lingis translates the lived experience of the body by representing in words the intertwining relationships of existence stating, “There is perhaps no species of life that does not live in symbiosis with another species” (194).
The body’s experience in relation to the world is corporeal and sensual, and Lingis affectionately presents this inter-relation through a web of imagery, which projects a poetic and sensual voice that resonates as the voice of the body. Lingis’ embodied writing style presents subjects in a manner in which I often feel like I am experiencing or viewing things for the first time. Victor Shklovsky might call this the “defamiliarization” of the subject (Richter 721). For instance, Lingis puts forth the idea that “Human animals live in symbiosis with thousands of species of anaerobic bacteria, 600 species in our mouths which neutralize the toxins all plants produce to ward off their enemies, 400 species in our intestines, without which we could not digest and absorb the food we ingest” (195). This detailed description of the body’s interior network of organisms, or macrophage, makes me feel like a stranger in my own skin. I cannot help but ask: do anaerobic bacteria really colonize the human body—my body? The “defamiliarization” of the subject, the human body, stirs my imagination, which forces me to view my body in a different way than I had before. By calling attention to what is concealed or hidden from consciousness, Lingis compels me to confront an interior world that I have ignored or perhaps have successfully hidden from myself.
Lingis’ prose also embodies rhythm and tempo that vibrates through my body like the incessant beating of a drum. Lingis manages to do this by creating lengthy labyrinthine sentences, built with layers of imagery and repetition that produce a rhythmic momentum, mirroring the sensory or emotional tone of the experience described. For instance, when Lingis begins to describes the body’s movements, he explains: “Most movements—things that fall, that roll, that collapse, that shift, that settle, that collide with other things, that set other things in motion—are not goal oriented” (196). The sound and rhythm of the words replicate a forward progression that is paced by punctuation and repetition. I can essentially follow Lingis’ words as he moves from one movement to the next, but the rhythm seems to transcend the content, because as I read silently with my eyes, simultaneously the sonorous sounds of the words echo in my head, and the rhythm and tempo is felt throughout my body.
The pacing of Lingis’ narrative is also felt throughout my body, because it mimics the personal experience of listening to an oral narrative. When Lingis begins to narrate the story of the carpenter it feels intimate, as if I am being addressed in person, able to witness the subtle rise and fall of his voice’s cadence. For instance, Lingis explains, “The carpenter climbs up the roof to nail shingles; almost at once his mind lets loose the alleged objective and the rhythm dum-dum-dum-DUM-dum-dum-dum-DUM continues his movements as it does the dancer in the disco, and the force he feels in those movements is not the force of his deciding will but the vibrant and vital intensity of his muscles on the grip of his fine, smoothly balanced hammer he likes so much” (197). Lingis’ pacing somehow makes me feel like I am standing next to the Lingis as he “[…] composes with the rhythm of the wind currents passing […]” (197).
Lingis tells the story of the body with a mindful and loving attention to detail. He does not present the body or it’s actions in the style of cold scientific objectivity. Instead, his observations are concrete, invoking experience that is accessible and personal. When Lingis begins to describe an infant’s discovery of the world, there is a personal and affective tone. For instance, he states: “In contact with the cockatoo who, though he can clutch with a vice-grip around a perch while sleeping, relaxes his claws on the arm of an infant and never bites the ear he affectionately nibbles at, and who extends his neck and spreads his wings to be caressed in all the softness of his down feathers, the infant discovers that her hands are not just retractile hooks for grabbing, but organs to give pleasure” (199). I feel like I am moving alongside Lingis as his consciousness filters through his childhood memories. It is like listening to his inner voice, the voice of the body’s contact with the world. Lingis words are an invocation of the body’s memory, which is perhaps also my body’s memory, because his words resonate within my body. Language is invocatory; however, it is limited in its ability to describe with certainty, a universal description. Even the most gifted of writers, like Marcel Proust, cannot describe with complete accuracy the taste of a madeleine cookie in a way that would resonate the same for every reader. The senses are unique to each individual. But language’s limitation is precisely what stimulates my imagination when reading Lingis’ essay. While reading, I must draw from my personal storehouse of sense perceptions—sights, sounds, tastes, and textures—and this helps to build a personal relationship with Lingis’ text. I may not have had the good fortune, or pleasure as a child to have a cockatoo nibble on my ear, but through Lingis’ narrative, I somehow feel as if I did.
Lingis begins to slowly move away from the affectionate story of infancy to the story of adulthood when the body is indoctrinated into culture. At this point in his narrative, he does something quite startling; he suddenly shifts his use of pronouns. From the start of the essay, Lingis used the pronouns he and she interchangeably; however, the he or she is unexpectedly transformed into “we” or “our.” This change of pronouns is participatory, like Lingis is speaking directly to me or perhaps for me. Lingis then goes on to explain that humans mask or limit potential experiences when speech, thought, and garments become a uniform of uniformity. For Lingis, uniforms create a protective role or barrier that is projected outward; however, when we undress, he explains, we “denude” ourselves and come into contact with the sensuality of the flesh, of experience and “Our impulses, our passions, are returned to animal irresponsibility” (201). At this point, I come to realize, through Lingis’ narrative, that culture has shielded me from the sensual bodily experience. The body is, in fact, a sensory organ that can receive and be received in turn without the government of the mind. He explains that the body’s experience in the world is reciprocal and once we come to realize this, “The sighs and moans of another that pulse through our nervous excitability, the spasms of pleasure and torment in contact with the non-prehensile surfaces of our bodies, our cheeks, our bellies, our thighs, irradiate across the substance of our sensitive and vulnerable nakedness” (201). Lingis does not succumb to the clinical description of the physical body, or for that matter the orgasm, his description is sensual, just as the act is in itself. For Lingis, the body is a receptor that can see and experience the naked body standing erect, hear the utterances of nighttime arousal, breath in the intoxicating fragrance of desire, feel and taste the moist flesh upon parted lips. In this bodily experience of life, passion, and pleasure, the “other” is articulated in its many features.
While reading Lingis’ essay “Animal Bodies,” I quite unexpectedly found myself swimming within the rhythm of Lingis’ text, moving alongside the cascading flow of words and ideas, like a buoy thrashing back and forth against the glassy walls of a watery wake. I became completely and physically engrossed in Lingis’ embodied writing style, which embraces language. I have tried throughout this essay to make up for my past, hopefully not continual, blunder of focusing solely on content by showing how Lingis arrives at meaning through his use of language. Whether Lingis is speaking of digestive tract of the sea anemone, the pollination process of the Brazilian nut tree, or the microbes that colonize the human body, there is a sense of personal investment in his subject. Lingis’ essay is not a disembodied 2-dimensional artifact filled with ink soaked pages of words, sentences, paragraphs, and a thesis; it is a textual expression of the embodied experience. He manages to convey the content through the vehicle of style without being analytical or literal. He is a master wordsmith, able to forge words in a manner that serves as a translation of the body’s contact with the world. The body is given a voice, one that is intimate and sensuous, using tone, imagery, and repetition to connect with the body’s multi-sensorial perceptions of the world. He does not tell you what truth is; instead he makes you feel it in your body; he makes you feel like it was your own, or could, in fact, be your own experience.
