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

The Nervous System
event as illustration of an abstract idea. For I am arguing that in this Cuna
essay, there is a strategic slippage; something essential to what is to be
explained enters into the power-apparatus used to explain. More than an
ends-means reversal, this is a fascinating, unnoticed, and probably very
common representational bleed in which the referent referred to, in this
case the laboring woman's body and the curing mis en scene, creates the
sensuous correspondence—not formal or structural ones—necessary for the
conceptual thought and abstract theory brought by the anthropological
theorist to bear on it. Moreover, I am not so sure that this mimetic piggybacking
procedure does not significantly parallel the mimetic magic, specifically
the Cuna magic, it purports to explain yet rests upon. In any event it is
also crucial to point out that on closer perusal this representational bleed
infusing western structuralist science founders grievously, for the reason that
far from sustaining order, this infusion subverts it in a thoroughgoing manner.
That which is deemed chaos, the woman's body and the spirit of the womb,
turns out not to be so easily recruited for the higher cause of structure; the
famous arbitrariness of the sign turns out not to be so easily systematized;
and the mimetic principle, on which this representational bleed as much as
Cuna magic is based, turns out to be the Nervous System par excellence in
that magically potent copies are faithful and faithless representations at one
and the same time. On this massive dilemma, in my opinion, both magic
and shamanism are founded, and the lust for Order proves to be yet another
feint in the Nervous System's phantom objectivity. This can be seen by some
further consideration of the famous structuralist incantation.
The Gang of Four
In good part this phallic narrative of redemption is deemed by Levi-
Strauss to work around a simple structural device whereby the spirit-helpers
fight their wav through the vagina in single file, followed bv their successful
return four abreast with the woman's soul. The chant owes its (alleged)
effectiveness therefore to the fact that it thus widens the birth canal byproviding
the laboring woman with a structure bv means of which the
disorder of her body can be made intelligible (to her, of course), hence
orderly and capable of giving birth. "No doubt," writes Levi-Strauss (in his
analysis which ignores the performative, social, colonial and micro-historical
Homesickness & Dada
contexts of the song-text), "the purpose of such an alteration in the details
of the myth is to elicit the corresponding organic reaction, but the sick
woman could not integrate it as experience if it were not associated with a
true increase in dilation [of the birth canal]." In point of fact the shaman's
song-text barely mentions single file/rows of four; the former once, the latter
twice, in a text that spans twenty-four pages. Nor does the song indicate in
ways direct or metaphoric that this transition is a key feature in the dilation
of the birth canal. Rather, rows of four is first mentioned when the forcible
entry into Muu's abode occurs (line 388), and the second and final mention
is made (line 428, but merely as "march in a row," not quite the same as
"rows of four") at the same anatomical juncture, namely Muu's gate, now
juxtaposed with the woman's "gate" when her soul is restored into her from
outside her body and not, as Levi-Strauss writes, simply when the spirithelpers
emerge from Muu's abode in some allegedly cathartic release cascading
through "homologous structures." That line reads in a far more complex
fashion: "The spirit helpers go out, the spirit helpers march in a row, they
are going to enter by the woman's gate." Exit is conflated with entry, inside
with outside, and leaving with restoration. What must be grasped here is
that the mimetic evocation becomes an elusive and complicated action, no
less so than the representation of the body in question and its relation to its
simulacrum in the soul upon which the magical mimesis so utterly depends.
Moreover, one cannot ignore that "rows of four" is here to do with forcible
entry into the body, and not with "downwards" movement out of it,
"isomorphic" with the expulsion of the fetus.
What needs emphasis, therefore, is that this body of primitive woman,
as represented, does not so easily provide the raw material for the staging
of a structuralist psychodrama empowering Theory. Indeed Holmer and
Wassen, the authors of the song-text used by Levi-Strauss, had already
struggled manfully with contradictions within the text. There was a deeply
puzzling feature about this body of woman being traversed internally by a
spirit-helpers who, when they gained possession of the lost soul, addressed
it: "Your body lies in front of you in the hammock" (line 430). Previously
all the action appears to have been inside the woman's body. Now, suddenly,
it's outside, just when the laboring woman's soul is being restored. Holmer
and Wassen say here that "The Indian trend of thought is neither always
strictly logical nor consistent in a text of this kind." Yet they seem
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