Warts & Teeth & All
Sometimes the body of a literary character isn’t merely a container but, instead, part of the story
There are many things I love about Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, including the huge cast of characters filling crowd scenes at horse races and ballrooms, and stand-alone chapters — like those devoted to Dolly’s trip to Vozdvizhenskoe to visit Anna and Vronsky — which interrupt and then restart the novel while illuminating some facet of the story we hadn’t considered important. But what continues to astonish me is Tolstoy’s decision to tear open his tragic tale by giving Vronsky a toothache as the doomed lovers’ fate draws to a close. We never completely outgrow these shells, our human wrappers, and Tolstoy daringly uses a toothache to uncover the body’s ridiculous imperialism, reminding us that we live inside settings with their own designs and defects, oblivious and often constitutionally unable to be of much help.
Even as he’s devastated by the miserable state of his relationship with Anna, Vronsky’s tooth is killing him. How does a tiny bit of enamel stack up against everything he’s relinquished because of his torturous love for a married woman? Vronsky is a decorated military officer, so surely he can handle blood or excruciating pain; but Tolstoy has decided that bringing this man to his knees by a tooth rather than with a bullet or sword makes more sense. This ladies’ man who is also a bit of a mamma’s boy lives inside a place of rebellion.
Sociologists tell us that biology is geography because zip codes determine life chances, but neurologists suggest that practice allows us to flip the switch and rewire our nervous system. Our responses to the rest of the world can be transformed merely by doing something (anything) 16 times: we can train our bodies to behave like pet seals and lead our lives like an assortment of card tricks. These different ways of thinking about biology construe our bodies as accomplices but also as rivals, subject to some control or manipulation, equally liable to give out, make us stumble, promise us things or pull us away.
The pain of a toothache doesn’t merely scrape away civilization or reduce us to children or make us resemble animals but instead converts the human body to pure surface, so that every one of Vronsky’s nerves is exposed. At the same time, experiencing unusual freedom can make the body more elastic, as Toni Morrison suggests in The Bluest Eye when Cholly’s young friend Darlene, excited by the prospect of being alone and outside at night with a boy, huddles herself into the shape of a “D” to signal her daring, defiance, and delight.
More often, though, bodies are ignored or safely kept in the background in our stories, with the aggravations of bathroom breaks or new shoes or menopause turned down low, and disabling dental pain almost completely imagined away.
Few writers seem interested in the lifelong relationship we have with the bones, nerves, cells, and blood that power our movements, require regular outlays of calories and sleep, and occasionally demand serious medical attention. Biological needs are far too boring, common, or enduring to merit attention, so instead we focus on Vronsky’s love for Anna, which has ruined his career, spoiled his prospects, and distracted him from any opportunities for a glorious future. But the aching tooth distracts him from these distractions, reminding him and us that our bodies’ claims ultimately supersede everything else.
Shakespeare sometimes put these rude physical claims at the center in fleshy face-offs, so that Hamlet’s extreme grief over his father’s death is mixed with disgust that his aging mother has gotten remarried — her eyes don’t work correctly, he tells Gertrude, and her blood is far too tame for arousal. Bodies show up as unwelcome guests or gruesome ghosts in this play, but such distaste isn’t always the case, and Shakespeare’s Cleopatra continually showcases her wrinkled form as a way to celebrate her birthday. The Merchant of Venice refers to “flesh” at least 20 times, and when it enters conversations flesh makes demands on speakers who need to measure its weight, speculate on marks of circumcision, appear at court in order to carve it up, and prevent it from bleeding in order to avoid criminal charges. If the body is something that must be exorcised in Hamlet, it needs to be adjudicated here, determined to be legal or illegal, alien or Christian, worthy or unworthy of the protections of the state.
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When characters fail to safeguard or regulate their bodies on Shakespeare’s stage, troubles start, but sometimes comedy ensues. In Twelfth Night, Viola imagines cancelling her period when she becomes a eunuch and ends up redirecting the flow of power and love in the rest of Illyria, but the silent Cordelia, possibly hobbled by a speech impediment in King Lear, destroys her father’s hopes for an easy retirement and peaceful transfer of authority. Philip Roth plays with Cordelia’s ailments in American Pastoral, where the central character’s daughter Merry Levov now has a stutter. Bodies rake up debts and the payback is disastrous in both versions; instead of the sins of the father being visited on his children, shared DNA makes the bodies of children destroy the bodies of their parents.
Broken, tattered, scarred bodies show up in older stories, too, usually belonging to heroes in disguise. Oedipus, whose name means “swollen foot,” probably walks with a limp after having his ankles bound together when he was a toddler, left for dead on a mountaintop so that his family could escape a curse. He’s rescued and lives to reappear before a mother who fails to recognize him even though she comments that his build is similar to her late husband’s. Sophocles makes Oedipus’s body work as an echo, threat, aphrodisiac, legal tool, and instrument of torture.
Missing for twenty years, Odysseus is first recognized by his dog when he finally returns home and then by his childhood nurse, who sees the scar on his leg, right above the knee. As in Oedipus Rex, the body of the hero retains its shape as a site of smells and wounds, finally acknowledged not by build or speed or strength, but for signs of wear, its odor or tang, or the holes on its shell.
Just as bodies corroborate characters in The Odyssey and Oedipus Rex, flesh fleshes out personalities, as Victorian novelist Wilkie Collins enjoys telling us. Although he’s nowhere near as famous as his contemporary Charles Dickens, Collins shares Dickens’ commitment to thinking about the room characters take up in large or small spaces, whether their voices barrel out or disappear in mutterings, and whether ornate physical gestures involving umbrellas, handkerchiefs, and envelopes display charm, connote special training, or hint at malice. Collins’ 1862 novel No Name involves a stupendous array of disguises, illegitimate births, stolen inheritances, and false identities, but my favorite character Matilda Wragge sticks out because she literally sticks out, given her unusual height, “smooth, white round face — like a moon,” eyes that look “straightforward into vacancy,” and cap and slippers usually sliding off her large frame.
Her husband Captain Wragge says that Mrs. Wragge is “constitutionally torpid” and so he regularly shouts “More to the right!” when his wife needs to push her headdress back to its proper place, but Collins also suggests that this woman’s elongated form, prone to sudden fits of sleep, has been disturbed by constant “buzzing” because of years of work as a waitress in Darch’s Dining-Rooms, where she had to keep straight the separate orders of gentlemen diners. Run ragged in this way, Mrs. Wragge’s body continues to remember what her brain kept getting confused, but this isn’t really a picture of disability or disease. Like Oedipus or Odysseus, her body is a veteran of a difficult past, and it trails her now as both an affliction and uncomfortable home. Mrs. Wragge is thus always acknowledging her body as something she must deal with, make friends with and allowances for — usually after a nap.
I wonder if writers who really, truly love their characters feel the need to depict, protect, and take careful inventory of the ingredients of their physiology. Matilda Wragge is a wonderful example of what philosopher Peter Sloterdijk calls the outrageous and “improbable stance” of the position humana — the lofty human form that is, Sloterdijk argues, “frivolously” “erect,” confidently trusting that gravity can be overcome. It is this relaxed state which explains why Mrs. Wragge’s dress is slipshod, her gaze foggy, and her command of space uncertain, with her husband often yelling at her while explaining that “I am merely loud with her . . . . as a necessary stimulant to her ideas.” While the reasons for their marriage seem less clear, Captain Wragge’s devoted attention to how her body is operating keeps them close together: “Put your cap straight” he commands, before confiding to the rest of us: “Externally speaking, Mrs. Wragge is, to my infinite regret, the crookedst woman I ever met with.”
Perhaps the considerable trouble Mrs. Wragge experiences in making an omelet for her husband’s breakfast provides a better idea of Collins’ philosophical agenda. The omelet is a “leathery mess” which spills on the stairs and scalds her landlady’s son when he sits on it; “it isn’t as half as nice as it looks,” Mrs. Wragge admits before she serves it to Captain Wragge, who gives her full permission to share it with the dog. Perhaps Collins’ challenge to the position humana is outlined by the suggestion that not all human eggs are prepared properly or receive the same attention: some forms might be overcooked or undercooked or subject to other accidents; some of them get burned or sat upon; and some of them also burn others.
Tolstoy shares Collins’ interest and skill in making the body a mischief maker, interloper, catalyst, loyal assistant, and crooked scene-stealer, with Anna Karenina’s legs working perfectly just when they shouldn’t (like Vronsky’s tooth) and acting as a magnet to command suffering in a single direction. Anna has been agonizing over the affair with Vronsky for much of the novel, but she’s particularly depressed and confused about her future when she goes to the train station, preparing to kill herself. The weight of the bag she’s carrying slows her down, but she’s figured out how to time things so that she might throw herself under the train wheels at precisely the right moment:
She tried to fling herself below the wheels of the first carriage as it reached her; but the red bag which she tried to drop out of her hand delayed her, and she was too late; she missed the moment. She had to wait for the next carriage. A feeling such as she had known when about to take the first plunge in bathing came upon her, and she crossed herself. That familiar gesture brought back into her soul a whole series of girlish and childish memories, and suddenly the darkness that had covered everything for her was torn apart, and life rose up before her for an instant with all its bright past joys.
The working of her legs stimulates the “familiar gesture” of her hands crossing, and so Anna’s body momentarily recalls her to life and to hope at this moment: the same physical machinery which brings her down lifts her up, gravity balancing itself with memory, physiology improbably reminding her of joy and briefly altering the dimensions of Anna’s flesh so that happiness can ripple across it. A train then rushes by and rolls over this body momentarily freed from but also returned to itself.
How strange and curious that Anna is crushed by something huge while her lover is brought low by something tiny. Our bodies are subject to age and time, polluted air, contempt and prejudice, rough neighborhoods and unloving homes, sugary foods and heat waves, cancer, cigarette ads, fast-food, empty cupboards, gun violence, car crashes. Our bodies can also powerfully summon us to the memory of some earlier moment when we were different people even though we inhabit the same form, carrying or plunging or hurling us forward now.
