The Nervous System - Department of English and Comparative ...

The Nervous System
Homesickness & Dada
woman in labor, the flight is not only explicitly male, but is tracked by
Holmcr and Wass6n and, following them, in a justly celebrated essay, by
Claude Levi-Strauss, "The effectiveness of Symbols," as identical to the
movement of the penis along her vagina.
It is this phallic penetration, according to Levi-Strauss (who, like me,
never did fieldwork amongst the Cuna), which gives to this text its "exceptional
interest." Indeed, he regards it as "the first important South-American
magico-religious text to be known," and this on account of its "striking
contribution" to the solution of the problem of how "specific psychological
representatives are invoked to combat equally specific physiological disturbances."
To the native mind, he writes, Muu's way and the abode of Muu
"are not simply a mythical itinerary and dwelling place. They represent
literally the vagina and uterus of the pregnant woman, which arc explored
by the shaman and nuchu [meaning wooden figurine/spirit-helper] and in
whose depths they wage their victorious combat." He refers to this as "the
myth being enacted in the internal body [which] must retain throughout the
vividness and the character of lived experience." He emphasises how the
spirit-helpers, "in order to enter Muu's way, take on the appearance and
the motion of the erect penis," and he advises us that "the technique of the
narrative aims at recreating a real experience in which the myth merely
shifts the protagonists. The nelegan [spirit-helpers] enter the natural orifice,
and we can imagine that after all this psychological preparation the sick
woman actually feels them entering."
This is indeed extraordinary, and for all the talk here of merely shifting
the protagonists and of "recreating a real experience [for the woman]," it
surely stretches credulity to claim that the shamans and/or their spirithelpers
assume phallic form such that they actually enter the actual vagina
and the sick woman "actually feels them entering." I cannot but feel that
the rhetorical device here wherein Levi-Strauss writes, "We can imagine
that after all this psychological preparation the sick woman actually feels
them entering," is indicative of a strategic move for his own technique of
narrative whereby through "the first important South American magicoreligious
text to be known," he is mimetically evoking a wildly improbable
yet stunningly dramatic mis en scene for the staging of his own magical
performance. "We can imagine. . . ."
And what do we imagine? Where will our imaginings through this body
Guillermo Hayan's drawing of wooden figures used in song for
obstructed labor.
of (Indian) Woman take us? Why! Into the rhapsody of ordering chaos,
creating meaning and therewith a physiological cure. Levi-Strauss's aim is
nothing less than to provide an explanation of how symbols work, of how
this song can have a beneficial physiological effect on the laboring woman
and, beyond that, to use this song as a vehicle for illustrating how Structuralism,
derived from the linguistics of Saussure, serves to explain the effect of
mind on body. All this in a handful of pages hanging from the thread of a
healer's chant.
His principal claim is that the song provides the woman with a "structure,"
which, like a language, makes her condition meaningful—"meaningful" in
' fa o ' b o
such a way that the form developed by the song becomes the form to be
developed by the laboring body on its way to cure. Obviously a great deal,
indeed a world, depends on the power of the meaning here of "form," an
innocuous word, not like "magic" or "spirit." He fortifies his argument by
characterizing the woman's initial state of soul-loss as one in which the plug
O I O
has been pulled from structural cohesion. In other words, we are back in
the familiar terrain not of Indian but of Western mythology in which, as
with Dante, lost in the woods of confusion, ritual's aim and the source of
its transcendent power is to establish order (through the encounter with evil
and then with woman), and order is at one with the Godhead itself. And
just as the woman's body is designated chaotic, so likewise the spirit Muu,
having abducted the woman's soul, is described by Levi-Strauss as a "force
gone awry." Hence his (ethnographically unsupported) assertion that "In a
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