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

The Nervous System
Homesickness & Dada
Mimetic Vertigo
A dramatic illustration of representational dizziness is provided by the
nature of the body traversed by the shaman's helpers. We have already had
occasion to note the perplexity it created for Homer and Wassen, when
being inside suddenly became being outside. An apparent solution to this
disorientation is provided by Chapin, who claims that Holmer and Wassen's
rendering (and therefore that of Levi-Strauss too) is grievously in error
because, in this world of spirit replicas, these interpreters have too literal an
understanding of the woman's body. Instead of it being an actual woman's
body that is penetrated, says Chapin, the song depicts (and therefore, on my
argument, gains mimetic magical force from) a spiritual journey through a
spiritual copy of the woman in question. For those with supernatural vision,
he writes, the soul of the woman "is in every detail, identical in appearance
and behavior to the body in which it is housed." What is more, this copied
body of the laboring woman becomes in some inexplicable manner the body
of the Great Mother, Muu, from whose womb came all things (including the
magically powerful wood, such as balsa, from which the shaman's curing
figurines are made). During pregnancy a woman's soul becomes "one with
the cosmos itself. The two spiritual realms are fused together in the neverr
o
ending process of creating offspring and replenishing the Earth's stock of
living beings." Thus the song enacts a vaginal journey in two spirit-streams
at one and the same time; into the cosmic body of the Great Mother, and
into the soul or spiritual copy of the actual women's material body. This
puts Levi-Strauss, "We can imagine ..." on a new footing.
So far, so good. At least everything seems matched up, copies of copies,
plus a little magical fusion between the soul and the cosmos. Then comes
i
to
the decisive play of scene-changing. To quote Chapin once again. "When
the spirit helpers arrive at Muu's house [cosmic level], they come to the
[real woman's] spiritual womb. At this point in their journey, however, the landscape
alters (as often happens in the exotic world of spirit) and Muu's house becomes
the woman's spiritual body." The walls of Muu's house are now her ribs,
the door is her vulva, the door frame is her thighs, and the door chain is
her pubic hair—all this, I might add (emphasizing the terms of my own
interpretation), in a song designed to alter reality by acting on faithful copies
of it.
A dizzying passage indeed—"as often happens in the exotic world of
spirit"—just when they reach telos, the cosmic womb, no less, the archeorgan
of reproduction of simulacra with which the magician and healer set
to work. Far from ensuring the fidelity of his master's voice, to evoke this
telos for the celestial harmonies of order is to merely give the Nervous
System another fix.
Understanding Understanding and the Chaos of Woman
But maybe all this concern with the true and real meaning of the text is
irrelevant, anyway. For not only does it appear to crumble at our analytic
touch, resisting interpretation that would reduce it to another sphere of
reference, such as the chaotic body or the straightened-out-body, but one
has to bear with a considerable weight of hermeneutic doom because—and
o
one can hardly over-emphasize this—we have to seriously question how
much of the song the laboring woman actually understands. (And of course
once one raises this doubt, it takes root. What, after all, is meant by "actually
understands"?) All this on account of an observation in the Holmer and
Wassen text that Levi-Strauss overlooked:
Like so many other species of literary composition of a magical or mystical
nature, the song of Mu-lgala cannot be rightly understood except by the
Indian medicine man himself or bv those initiated by him.
The point, in Cuna theory, is that the chant is addressed not to the patient
but to the spirits and therefore has to be sung in their language, not that of
colloquial Cuna. Yet for Levi-Strauss it is crucial that the woman herself
understands, Everything depends upon this. "The shaman provides the sick
woman with a language" he writes with emphasis, "by means of which
unexpressed and otherwise inexpressible psychic states can be immediately
expressed." This language makes it possible for her
to undergo in an ordered and intelligible form a real experience that
would otherwise be chaotic and inexpressible—which induces the release
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