Speaking of the life of the mind, I've just finished reading The Life of the Mind, a novel by Christine Smallwood focusing on the travails of Dorothy, an adjunct instructor teaching in an English department in New York City who is, from the first line, deeply engaged with the frailty of the body. The novel covers a period--and suddenly I see why it's going to be difficult to summarize this novel, because it's relatively plotless but covers a short span of time from the beginning of Dorothy's unfortunate miscarriage to the restoration of her menstrual period.
Yes, there's a whole lot of blood in this novel, as well as sweat and tears and lumpy tissue and other bodily excretions. I wouldn't want to try to count the number of scenes that take place inside a bathroom. Dorothy struggles with an intransigent photocopier in the university library, attends an academic conference in Las Vegas, sings karaoke disastrously at a party, and talks (or fails to talk) to her therapist (or one of her two therapists), but she also frequently attends to bodily functions that are never mentioned in 19th-century novels. It is impossible, for instance, to imagine Dorothea Brooke engaging in any way with a chamber pot, but Smallwood's Dorothy does a lot of her best thinking in the bathroom.
And much of the novel focuses on Dorothy's thoughts, most of which remain unspoken. As she agonizes over whether or how to share the fact of her miscarriage with the people closest to her, she thinks about Coleridge's ancient mariner:
She did not want to be the mariner, forcing the story of her shame on unwilling ears, yet she could not deny that only by telling his tale was the mariner released from his shame. But to be the mariner--to hold the attention of others--involved some combination of tragedy and gruesome charisma, some sheer skill, that she lacked.
But if Dorothy can't tell her story to the people closest to her, Smallwood can tell her story to us, making readers the wedding guests who "cannot choose but hear."
Well, I suppose we could choose to not hear simply by closing the book, but I didn't want to. It's refreshing to see an academic novel focusing so closely on a female protagonist who is whip-smart and witty but also oddly inept in social situations. The book is funny, particularly regarding the petty posturing common to academe--the chapter set at an academic conference is worth the price of admission--but it is also deeply philosophical and engaged with a wide range of literature and ideas.
For instance, while Dorothy is getting an ultrasound to determine whether her miscarriage is complete, she recalls the point in Thomas Mann's Magic Mountain when Hans Castorp views an x-ray of his own innards:
Hans Castorp had been looking at bones, so maybe that explained the gravity of his feelings, the concreteness of his epiphany, his sense that he was meeting his own future self. His confrontation was with the very structure of the, his, human form, and with, no less, the hand--the part of the body that reaches out, that is manipulative, active, external, that writes and drives and builds and prays and feels. The hand. Dorothy was looking at a spongy interior, a disused room, a warehouse for a shell company, a cavern or cave. She knew from her undergraduate education that the shadows projected on the walls of a cave are never to be trusted, that they lack the reality of flesh, and of philosophy. If the womb was a grave it was also a junk drawer.
There's so much going on here regarding gender and Thomas Mann and Plato and the limits of human knowledge--the passage seems to keep opening up passages to new understanding while folding back in on itself. Everything is complicated, including the connections between mind and body.
It's no wonder that this chapter ends with Dorothy wishing for a place where "she could put her body down for a while, just a little while, before getting back into it." But this is just the problem with the life of the mind: it can't be separated from the frailty of the body. Christine Smallwood brings this conundrum to vivid life in The Life of the Mind, inviting readers to dig into the grave, fumble around in the junk drawer, and peer inside the bloody cave to see what blurry outlines of new ideas might eventually emerge.
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