Where the Bodies are Buried: Cartesian Dispositions in NarrativeTheories of Character

Babb, Genie.

Narrative, Volume 10, Number 3, October 2002, pp. 195-221 (Article)

Published by The Ohio State University PressDOI: 10.1353/nar.2002.0017

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Genie Babb is Associate Professor of English at the University of Alaska Anchorage. This essay ispart of a larger project on the mind/body problem in nineteenth-century literature in English.

NARRATIVE, Vol. 10, No. 3 (October 2002)Copyright 2002 by The Ohio State University

Where the Bodies are Buried:Cartesian Dispositions inNarrative Theories of Character

Bodily being does not mean that the soul is burdened by a hulk we call thebody. . . . We do not “have” a body; rather, we “are” bodily.

—Martin Heidegger, Nietzsche (qtd. in Levin 124)

Our own body is in the world as the heart is in the organism: it keeps thevisible spectacle constantly alive, it breathes life into it and sustains it inwardly,and with it forms a system.

—Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception (203)

What does the recent explosion of work on the body have to offer narrative the-ory? And what does narrative theory have to offer work on the body? These twoquestions frame the following essay. Such questions presume that the intersection ofthe two areas of inquiry has not been mapped out, and indeed, this is the case. AsDaniel Punday has recently observed, “Despite its signal importance to so manyschools of contemporary criticism, the human body has largely failed to garner a sig-nificant place in narratology” (227). On the other hand, though much work on thebody addresses the body’s representation in written discourse, very little if any of itoperates from a specifically narratological frame of reference. Nowhere is this theo-retical gap more pronounced than in theories of character formation, which through-out the twentieth century have focused on action, interiority, and consciousness.

Narratology’s neglect of the body when analyzing character can in part betraced to Gotthold Ephraim Lessing’s influential Laocoön (1766). Lessing’s famousdictum “[S]uccession of time is the province of the poet just as space is that of thepainter” inaugurated a distinction between the two media that has been taken as ax-iomatic in twentieth-century narrative theory (91). What has been equally influential,

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though rarely noted, is Lessing’s relegation of the body to the representational spaceof painting and description. Lessing asserts a homology between poetry/painting andnarration/description, and within poetry, Lessing makes a distinction between the ex-plicit body displayed through description and the implicit body suggested throughthe action of a hero. Early in Laocoön, Lessing states as “unquestionable” the fol-lowing proposition: “[S]ince the whole infinite realm of perfection lies open to [thepoet’s] description, this external form [physical appearance], beneath which perfec-tion becomes beauty, can at best be only one of the least significant means by whichhe is able to awaken our interest in his characters. Often he ignores it entirely, beingconvinced that once his hero has won our favor his other qualities will either occupyus to such a point that we do not think of his physical form or, if we do think of it, wewill be so captivated that we give him of our own accord if not a beautiful form, atleast an ordinary one” (23 my emphasis). Lessing devalues the “physical form” ofthe hero as a means to appeal to the reader’s sympathy. True beauty is somethingspiritual “beneath” the physical exterior, and to convey this spiritual beauty, thewriter “often . . . ignores [the hero’s body] entirely” and relies on the hero’s “otherqualities” to “[win] our favor.” For Lessing, the hero’s body doesn’t matter verymuch in the larger scheme of things, since “the whole infinite realm of perfection liesopen” to the poet’s pen.

Twentieth-century narratology has, in large part, absorbed these assumptionsabout the representation of the body and character construction. Not only has classi-cal narratology conceived of narrative in temporal terms, it has conceived of charac-ter in terms of either action or interiority or both. Michael Hoffman and PatrickMurphy conclude their survey on twentieth-century theories of character with aquestion that makes explicit the primacy of consciousness: “What then is character:a speaking voice, a thinking mind, a feeling of spirit?” (10). Structuralists and narra-tologists, of course, have posited the most fundamental feature of character to be thefunction of actant. Beyond that, they have also subscribed in large part to some ver-sion of mind, psychology, consciousness, or personality as the essence of character.The pioneering Russian Formalist Boris Tomashevsky defines character strictly interms of psychology: “A character is recognized by his characteristics. . . , the mo-tifs which define the psychology of the person, his ‘character’” (88). Fernando Fer-rara envisions character “vertically” as having three levels: the surface structure,which is the “story of a character that develops in time and space”; the middle struc-ture, which is the “personality of the character itself”; and the deep structure, whichis the set of values of the character (254–55). James Garvey’s model of charactershows how almost any textual information about a character can be reduced to “psy-chological [attributive propositions]” through the processes of inference and impli-cation (74 my emphasis). Similarly, Seymour Chatman formulates character in termsof traits that are defined as “relatively stable or abiding personal qualit[ies]” (127).Tzvetan Todorov asserts that while certain characters may simply be “agent[s] of aseries of actions,” others have a psychological component: “But, as soon as psycho-logical determinism appears in the text, the fictional character becomes endowedwith character: he acts in a certain way, because he is shy, weak, courageous, etc.”(413). Uri Margolin allows for several types of character: character as actant, as role,

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as individual or person, and as narrative device (2),1 but he focuses on character as“individual or person,” and defines this type of character in terms of the psyche:“The [narrative agent] is seen in terms of inner states, mental properties, personalitytraits, and general or specific complexes of such properties, i.e. individual personal-ity models or personality types” (2). Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan, whose model takesmany of these others into account, writes of character in terms of defined personalitytraits such as ambivalence, jealousy, and so forth, and sees description of “externalappearance” as an indirect means of “imply[ing]” the essential “character-traits,”which are psychological (65).2

More recently, James Phelan, in his work on character from a rhetorical per-spective, also focuses almost exclusively on personality traits whenever he lists theattributes of the characters he analyzes. Browning’s Duke of Ferrara, for example, is“the meeting place of many predicates or qualities” which include “imperiousness,power, unscrupulousness,” “vanity,” “possessiveness,” “appreciation of beauty,”“mental instability,” and “boldness” (4). Phelan’s tripartite model of character (ashaving mimetic, thematic, and synthetic functions) does move away from simplyequating character with personality; his notion of the mimetic function could accom-modate a discussion of the body, though he does not develop this aspect. Most narra-tological models, however, end up ignoring characters’ bodies or relegating them tothe ornamental space of description, which is in turn neglected because of its supposed spatiality and lack of congruence with narrative as a temporal, linguisticactivity.

What recent work on the body offers narratology is a fuller understanding of thehistorical and philosophical contexts for Lessing’s, and by extension narratology’s,conception of the body in the formation of character. Closer examination shows thatembedded in Lessing and in subsequent narrative theory are dispositions towards adualistic account of the mind/body relation. Contemporary studies of the body chal-lenge narrative theory to reframe conceptions of character to include the body—andultimately to reconceive the production and consumption of narrative as not simply amental operation, but as an embodied activity.

In the following essay, I aim to unearth the body in narrative. In the first sectionof the essay, I draw parallels between Descartes’s conception of the mind/body rela-tion and that found in Lessing and in twentieth-century theories of character con-struction. In the second section of the essay, I propose the phenomenologicalconception of the “lived body” as an alternative to traditional narratological concep-tions of character-bodies. Finally, in the third section, I apply this concept of the“lived body” to Robert Louis Stevenson’s 1894 novella The Ebb-Tide to illustrate itsexplanatory power. I argue that if we incorporate embodiment into our theories ofcharacter, we expand and enrich our ability to explain what narrative texts really do.

THE CARTESIAN LEGACY

Though the distinction between body and soul goes back to the Greeks,Descartes’s particular formulation of the distinction has been tremendously influen-

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tial. Descartes saw the mind as equivalent to the self, as a “thinking thing” (res cogi-tans) distinct from the body: “I am therefore, precisely speaking, only a thing whichthinks, that is to say, a mind, understanding, or reason, . . . I am not this assemblageof limbs called the human body” (Meditations 105). In contrast, the body is an ex-tended thing in space (res extensa), which we cannot know except through the medi-ation of the mind (163). Nor is the body a reliable medium for accessing sensorytruth: “various experiences have gradually ruined all the faith I had attached to mysenses. For I have observed many times that towers, which from a distance seemedround, appeared at close quarters to be square” (154–55). The mind is the seat ofidentity for Descartes because it is knowable and trustworthy in a way that the bodyisn’t.

Moreover, Descartes conceived of the mind as autonomous from the body: “[I]tis certain that I, that is to say my mind, by which I am what I am, is entirely and trulydistinct from my body, and may exist without it” (156 my emphasis). For Descartes,the mind and the body were distinct substances; he sharply distinguished the mindfrom the brain and posited the pineal gland as the mechanism for communication be-tween the two. Descartes’s notion of the mind’s autonomy constitutes the self as ut-terly private and unavailable to the external world. The self negotiates between the“inner” world and the “outer,” between “a private world of subjective conscious ex-perience and a shared public world of objective facts” (Burwood et al. 13). It is dif-ficult to overstate the pervasive and powerful influence of Cartesian dualism even to the present day. Challenges to dualism in the nineteenth and twentieth centurieseffectively discredited it in its purest forms, the immaterial substance of mind and its ability to act on the material world being impossible to verify scientifically.Moreover, notions of immaterial substances suggest a firm distinction betweenhuman and nonhuman that is at odds with what we know about the continuity of lifeacross species. Among contemporary philosophers of the mind, such difficultieshave led to a monist approach, which typically takes the form of reductionism—theattribution of mental phenomena to physiological causes (Burwood et al. 3).Notwithstanding the insoluble problems with dualism, the mind/body split continuesto permeate contemporary thought across a wide spectrum of disciplines in the hu-manities and in the social and natural sciences. The persistence of dualist tendencieshas produced a series of critiques from a variety of perspectives, and these critiquesrepresent what has come to be called “body studies.” There are at least three distinct(though usually intertwined) strands to the critique: philosophical, empirical, andpolitical.

The philosophical critique includes, of course, all of the objections already lev-eled at dualist thinking since the nineteenth century. Beyond that, a particularly fruit-ful development can be found within the phenomenology of Edmund Husserl(1859–1938) and Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908–1961). I focus in some detail onthis phenomenological approach to the body here because it grounds the model I willpropose below. Early in the twentieth century, Husserl theorized the body as involv-ing two aspects: “Körper,” the physical, objectified body studied by science—thesense of the body inherited from Descartes; and “Leib,” the lived sensation of em-bodiment:

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Hence the Body is originally constituted in a double way: first, it is a physicalthing, matter; it has its extension, in which are included its real properties, itscolor, smoothness, hardness, warmth. . . . Secondly, . . . I sense “on” it and “in”it: warmth on the back of the hand, coldness in the feet, sensations of touch inthe fingertips. I sense, extended over larger Bodily areas, the pressure and pullof my clothes. Moving my fingers, I have motion-sensations. . . . And thus, myBody’s entering into physical relations . . . with other material things providesin general not only the experience of physical occurrences, . . . but also the ex-perience of specifically Bodily occurrences of the type we call sensings. (25)

Others have developed this concept of Körper/Leib further. Merleau-Ponty ar-gued that cognition is enacted through the body—it is not prior to the body: “Con-sciousness is in the first place not a matter of ‘I think that’ but of ‘I can’”(Phenomenology of Perception 137). Merleau-Ponty insisted on the impossibility ofseparating the operations of the mind from embodiment in the world, arguing insteadthat “the experience of perception is our presence at the moment when things, truths,values are constituted for us” (Primacy of Perception 25). Throughout his work,Merleau-Ponty investigates bodily being-in-the-world as contingent on “corporealand historical situatedness” (Moran 402). Merleau-Ponty’s conception of embodi-ment allows for an investigation of embodied experience as an intertwining of phys-iological, psychological, cultural, and historical phenomena. We will return to the“lived body” below.

Another, much more recent critique of dualism comes out of second-generationcognitive science, which draws from a range of disciplines—philosophy, linguistics,psychology, and computer science, among others. In The Body in the Mind, MarkJohnson outlines the “overwhelming” empirical evidence that has challenged dualis-tic tendencies in traditional cognitive science and that supports Husserl’s and Mer-leau-Ponty’s conceptions of the “lived body.” Johnson demonstrates that processesof abstract reasoning are shaped and determined by the fundamental fact of our em-bodiment in the world: “our consciousness and rationality are tied to our bodily ori-entations and interactions in and with our environment. Our embodiment is essentialto who we are, to what meaning is, and to our ability to draw rational inferences andto be creative” (xxxviii). In the past decade or so, cognitive science has begun to takeinto account the role of embodiment in cognitive processes, and research in the fieldsof cognitive science, linguistics, historical linguistics, cognitive psychology, devel-opmental psychology, gesture analysis, and discourse analysis, bear out the implica-tions of Johnson’s 1987 book.3

The third strand of critique has arisen out of poststructuralist, feminist, andqueer theory, and it focuses on the Eurocentric, patriarchal, heterosexist ideology un-derpinning dualist thought. Foucault has been credited for reviving an interest inbodies and embodiment, though Susan Bordo argues that feminists have equal claimto raising the issues (17). Foucault has elucidated how the body is formed and disci-plined through social and cultural practices. Feminists have shown how themind/body binary has been mapped onto other binaries—most notably male/femaleand self/other—in such a way as to valorize the masculine as the site of transcen-

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dence and subjectivity and to denigrate the feminine and/or Otherness as immanentand objective (Bordo 144–45; Butler, Gender Trouble11–12, Bodies That Matter48–49). For Bordo, Judith Butler, and others, the fantasy of disembodiment enablesand justifies certain kinds of control and oppression of those who are identified asembodied, hence these theorists’ attempts to reconceptualize the body in less nega-tive and restrictive terms.

CARTESIAN DISPOSITIONS IN NARRATIVE THEORY

Given the persistence of dualism in other fields, it is not surprising that narrativetheory continues to manifest dualist tendencies. Both Descartes and Lessing opposedthe body in space to the non-physical—in Descartes’s case the mind (“a thinking,nonextended thing”) and in Lessing’s case the “character,” revealed as it is through“progressive actions” that “occupy us to such a point that we do not think of [thehero’s] physical form” (23). Lessing’s discussion of description focuses on its func-tion as the site of the body displayed as Körper. As though to rid poetry of as muchreference to the body as is possible, Lessing puts rigorous strictures on descriptiveexcess. However, he also naturalizes the relationship between description and certainkinds of bodies—those of women and those of the Other—and allows for more lee-way in descriptions of bodies that fall in those categories. Lessing’s formulation hasthe result of subordinating, feminizing, and exoticizing description and its objects.

Nonetheless, Lessing does not succeed in banishing the body from poetry. Infact, Lessing betrays his own embodiment (Leib) in that he judges individual de-scriptions on the basis of his corporeal reactions to them. He believes a descriptionof a beautiful woman should produce “gentle pulsations of the blood which accom-pany the actual sight of beauty”; success is judged in terms of the description’s abil-ity to “[stir] our passions,” to evoke the “desire to see [the transitory beauty] againand again” (112). By the same token, Lessing judges the taste of readers by their re-actions to descriptions of ugly bodies: “the more delicate our temperaments, themore we will feel in our bodies those sensations which precede nausea” (131). In ef-fect Lessing splits Körper from Leib, creating a web of associations between de-scription, the objectified body, femininity, foreignness, and immanence on the onehand, and narration, the lived body, masculinity, Europeanness, and transcendenceon the other.

In his twentieth-century discussion of description, Gérard Genette invokes thenexus of associations with description found in Lessing and underwritten by Carte-sian dualism. Though Genette ultimately asserts that the difference between descrip-tion and narration is not “sémiologique” but semantic, and as such is an “internalfrontier”—an “aspect” of narration rather than one of its “modes” (136–37)—heemphasizes description’s subordinate relation to narration. Description “is neverfound in a . . . free state,” whereas narrative “constantly [plays] the major role”; de-scription is “quite naturally ancilla narrationis, the ever-necessary, ever-submissive,never-emancipated slave,” whose development in nineteenth-century realism “rein-force[s] the domination of the narrative element,” and whose elaboration in the twen-

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tieth-century nouveau roman has served “as a striking confirmation of its irreduciblenarrative finality” (133–35). In addition, Genette defines the aim of description asrepresentation of the spatial dimension and uses the image of extension in space forthe effect of seeming “to suspend the course of time and to contribute to spreadingthe narrative in space” (136), thus echoing Descartes’s definition of the body as a resextensa. Genette also builds on the notion that description represents “objects orcharacters” as Körper; narrative itself cannot be divested of its descriptive elements(“no verb is quite exempt from descriptive resonance”), but the presence of the de-scriptive is signaled by the degree of “precision that it gives to the spectacle of theaction,” the way that it depicts narrative “processes themselves as spectacles” (134,136 my emphasis).

Though Genette was writing in the 1960s, his pronouncements on descriptionhave more or less stuck, and very little subsequent attention has been given to de-scription per se.4 What has been done has not essentially deviated from Genette’soverall claim that description is subordinate to narrative, associated with stasis andspace, and less interesting than the dynamic of narrative. The subordination of de-scription to narrative, which clearly manifests dualist tendencies, has informed theo-ries of character formation, as we saw above. Narratology has by and largeprivileged those aspects of character that represent interiority and consciousness;character’s bodies are negligible, and, if theorized at all, are treated simply as illus-trations or symbols that serve as vehicles for the tenor of subjectivity. Moreover,bodies are typically understood as Cartesian things—as discursive objects limited todescriptions of external physical features. Such an understanding of the body leadsto the inevitable conclusion that characters and narrators who are not so describedescape embodiment altogether. Punday, for example, asserts that a lack of descrip-tion of external characteristics is a de facto “disembodiment”: typically, he says, “pe-ripheral” characters are “heavily embodied,” whereas the “heroic central characters”are “relatively disembodied” (234). Moreover, Punday argues, this disembodimentallows for a closer identification between reader and hero because “emphasizing cor-poreality frequently objectifies a character rather than encourages identification”(234). Such a position rings true if one conceives of “body” in Cartesian terms.

If we utilize the concept of the “lived body,” however, we begin to see how fun-damental embodiment is to practically every aspect of character representation—in-deed to the project of narrative itself.

EMBODYING THEORIES OF CHARACTER

What does the incorporation of the body into narratological theories of charac-ter involve? In the remainder of this essay, I will sketch out a comprehensive modelof the features of embodiment based on the phenomenological conception of thebody (Körper/Leib), and then I will turn to Robert Louis Stevenson’s novella, TheEbb-Tide, to illustrate the model. Two preliminary comments are in order. First ofall, the model for character that I propose assumes that narrative itself is grounded inthe body. Johnson demonstrates that embodied experience shapes abstract concep-

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tions through what he terms “image schemata”—“cross-modal” schemas that arisethrough embodied experience and are “projected” onto other realms of experience(“Embodied” 93). One such schema, the “source-path-goal” schema, has direct rele-vance for narrative. This particular image schema originates in the innumerable ex-periences we have of ourselves and others moving through space: “Hundreds oftimes each day we move our bodies through space to achieve some goal, such as,walking to the refrigerator to get some food, or moving to a door to exit a room. Wealso track the movements of other people and objects as they move across our per-ceptual space, from some initial point, over a series of contiguous points, to somedestination, in order to achieve some purpose they have” (“Embodied” 94). Out ofthese embodied enactments of beginning at a source, taking a path, and reaching agoal, abstract concepts of orientation, motivation, process, progression, completion,and closure come into being. Certainly, all of these concepts are germane to Westernnotions of narrative; what is plot but a “source-path-goal” image schema?

My second comment takes the form of a caution. For the sake of ease in discus-sion, I differentiate between various aspects of embodiment: those traditionally asso-ciated with description (Körper) and those that pertain to the lived experience ofembodiment (Leib). However, these distinctions should in no way be taken as ab-solute. Rather, the goal is to move beyond, on the one hand, the rigid binary model ofthe mind/body relation and, on the other hand, the reduction of one side of the binaryinto the other, to a richer, “thicker” conception of “mindful embodiment.” ElizabethGrosz articulates the challenge clearly when she stresses that conceptions of thebody “must avoid the impasse of dichotomous accounts of the person which dividethe subject into the mutually exclusive categories of mind and body. Although in ourintellectual heritage there is no language in which to describe such concepts . . . ,some kind of understanding of embodied subjectivity, of psychical corporeality,needs to be developed. We need an account which refuses reductionism, resists dual-ism, and remains suspicious of the holism and unity implied by monism” (21–22). Inwhat follows, my separate discussions of the various aspects of Körper and Leibshould be seen in light of the ultimate goal of understanding the mutually constitu-tive nature of all aspects of mindful embodiment.

Representing Körper

Description is the means by which the body has been traditionally assumed to beinserted into the text. Certainly description often enacts the body as Körper—as an ob-ject perceived from the outside. Drawing on the work of Johnson and George Lakoff,moreover, we can say that the descriptive function itself grows out of embodiment inat least two respects—in terms of spatial relations and in terms of categorization.

First of all, description draws on spatial-relation concepts that “arise from theway we schematize our own bodies and things we interact with daily” (Lakoff andJohnson 36). I don’t mean to limit description to spatial, non-temporal representa-tions in the way that Genette does, however; for one thing, time and events are notpossible to conceive of without space—thus space always entails some relation totime and events. Lakoff and Johnson give a representative list of the “relatively small

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collection of primitive image schemas that structure systems of spatial relations inthe world’s languages” (35). The list includes such schemas as “part-whole, center-periphery, link, cycle, iteration, contact, adjacency, forced motion (e.g., pushing,pulling, propelling), support, balance, straight-curved, and near-far,” also vertical,horizontal, and front-back orientations (35). Certainly description invokes thesebasic spatial-relations concepts, as any random sample will show.

A second function of embodiment, categorization, is clearly operational in de-scription. Categorization is one of the most basic functions of animate life. Lakoffand Johnson state that categories are “structures that differentiate aspects of our ex-perience into discernable kinds” and are “an inescapable consequence of our biolog-ical makeup” (18). Categorization allows one to orient oneself in the world in orderto operate within it competently, and in fact all living beings categorize at somelevel: “Even the amoeba categorizes the things it encounters into food or nonfood”(17). A description of any length will necessarily employ implicit or explicit formsof classification; as Philippe Hamon has noted, description is “simultaneouslyknowledge of words (the lexical competence of the describer), knowledge of theworld (encyclopedic competence) and knowledge of the schema and grids of classi-fication (taxonomic competence)” (Introduction 119 my translation). Of course thecategorization process instantiated by description occurs on many levels in manyrealms beyond the biological and draws from embodied experience as encoded in awide range of discourses: aesthetic, literary, rhetorical, sociological, psychoanalytic,scientific, and medical.

Representing Leib

Beyond descriptions of the external appearance, narratives also invoke charac-ters’ subjective experience of embodiment. The representation of Leib involves thoseaspects of bodily experience that are available to conscious awareness, such as sen-sations arising from external and internal stimuli, as well as those aspects of bodilyexperience that are beyond conscious awareness or control—involuntary visceralprocesses and unconscious habitual practices.

Exteroception. One of the most obvious aspects of Leib is exteroception, theawareness and experience of external stimuli via the surface organs of the body. Inthe case of visual and aural stimuli, exteroception often leads to focusing away fromthe body, which gives a sense of disembodiment despite the fact that visual and auralperceptions are enabled by the body. As physician and philosopher Drew Leder ob-serves, “Human experience is incarnated,” yet our experience of that incarnation is“paradoxical”: “While in one sense the body is the most abiding and inescapablepresence in our lives, it is also essentially characterized by absence. . . . When read-ing a book or lost in thought, my own bodily state may be the farthest thing from myawareness. I experientially dwell in a world of ideas, paying little heed to my physi-cal sensations or posture” (Absent Body 1). The paradoxical nature of embodiment assimultaneous presence and absence can be attributed, in the first place, to the mech-anisms of perception whereby awareness of the sense organ is “lost” or subsumed inawareness of the object of sensation. This “forgetting” of the body’s role in visual

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and aural perceptions has led to certain assumptions about the disembodied nature ofnarrators. Certainly, the question of the disembodied narrating voice has causedsome controversy, as Marie-Laure Ryan discusses in a recent essay. Ryan is particu-larly scornful of Susan Sniader Lanser’s assumption that narrators are bound by thesame constraints as a real person in that Lanser “attribut[es] to third-person narratorsall the properties of an embodied individual,” particularly when she “insists . . . thatgender is a fundamental feature of all types of narrator, even when the text does notspecify any such property” (136). Ryan satirizes what she imagines to be the logicaloutcome of such a position: “It is of course impossible to tell whether or not the nar-ratologists who advocate a necessary gendering of the narrator for ideological rea-sons actually engage in an act of imagination appropriate to their theoreticalposition. Do they mentally picture the narrator of Pride and Prejudice as an embod-ied female observer, hiding behind the curtains of drawing rooms or invisibly fol-lowing the heroines on their walks through the English countryside?” (136). In thisstatement, Ryan assumes that the only marker of embodiment is the body seen-from-without. I would argue, however, that we do not picture the narrator of Pride andPrejudice hiding behind the curtains because we do not experience the narrator’sbody as Körper but as Leib. The narrator frequently operates as our default bodywithin the world of the text, providing eyes, ears, perceptuomotor sensations, and soforth. Thus, even when not connected to specific characters’ bodies, exteroceptionplays a role in the narrative. Descriptive passages bespeak not only objective sightsand sounds, but also the perceptual mechanisms of apprehending those sights andsounds. Though descriptive passages often attend to anything and everything but theperceiving body, they presume the perceiving body. If we note the ubiquity of refer-ences to sight (and sound) in narrative texts, we begin to get a sense of how deeplyembodied narratives are.

Interoception. I follow Leder in utilizing this term to refer to those internalsensations, originating in the viscera, that are available to conscious awareness.Sensations such as the euphoria of an adrenalin rush, the heaviness of fatigue, thepangs of hunger, and so on, all fall into the category of interoception. Leder elabo-rates on the differences between exteroception and interoception; the former is“multidimensional,” constituted by “five sense-modalities which . . . have radicallydivergent spatiotemporal and qualitative properties” while the latter only has a “sin-gle dimension of perception, i.e., ‘inner sensation’” (Absent Body 40). Leder notesthat interoception is characterized by “spatial ambiguity”—that is to say, by a cer-tain indefiniteness as to location: “visceral sensations are often vaguely situatedwith indistinct borders” (41). Moreover, our conscious awareness of interoceptiveprocesses, such as digestion, is discontinuous; we may feel the pangs of hunger andthe repletion of satiety, but beyond that the digestive process is not easily availableto consciousness. Particularly important for the study of character is the fact thatoften interoceptive sensations are invoked through or invested with emotion: “Thelimited interoceptive vocabulary largely centers around sensations that are affec-tively charged. . . . visceral sensations grip me from within, often exerting an emotional insistence” (40).

Motility. The movement through space is enabled by the intertwining percep-

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tions of environment, kinesthesia, internal sensations, and control. Merleau-Pontystates that “there would be no space at all for me if I had no body”; objective space ismeaningless without the means to apprehend it. He continues, “By considering thebody in movement, we can see better how it inhabits space (and, moreover, time) be-cause movement is not limited to submitting passively to space and time, it activelyassumes them” (Phenomenology of Perception 102). Descriptions of spatial and tem-poral orientation and the “active assumption” of these coordinates by the charactersare standard conventions of narrative. What Merleau-Ponty helps us see is that theseconventions bespeak embodiment—the mimetic embodiment of characters and theactual embodiment of readers who, because embodied, need cues of spatial and tem-poral orientation in order to make sense of who, what, and where the characters are.Along with exteroception and interoception, motility involves proprioception, whichrefers to the double sense of one’s own body as a possession and a position. Thissense of ownership and spatial orientation is invoked implicitly any time a charactermoves volitionally.

Viscerality. Thus far, we have examined elements of embodiment that are ac-cessed through conscious awareness. However, Leder argues that equally importantfor an understanding of embodiment are the automatic and semi-automatic visceralprocesses, such as digestion and circulation, that we have very little, if any, con-scious awareness of or control over. Merleau-Ponty’s work is largely concerned withembodiment as it registers itself in conscious perception; as Leder notes, Merleau-Ponty privileges perception above all else in his discussion of embodiment, implyingthat Leib inheres in the conscious awareness of perceiving and being perceived(“Flesh and Blood” 203). Leder posits the visceral processes as another dimension toLeib, a “‘vertical’ synergy” between the visible and the visceral (204): “[the] sensi-ble/sentient surface cannot be equated with the body as a whole. It rests upon adeeper and visceral foundation” (203). Leder uses the example of sleep to show howthe “sensible/sentient surface” is rooted in the visceral foundation; sleep is essentialto the proper functioning of all aspects of corporeal existence, yet it is never avail-able to us as conscious experience: “Nightly, I give my life over to those vegetativeprocesses that form but a circumscribed region of my day-body. Surface functions allbut abandoned, I become a creature of depth, lost in respiration, digestion, and cir-culation. My experiential world rests upon the restorative powers of this unconsciousbeing. I can surface for only a limited time before requiring resubmergence in theimpersonal” (Absent Body 59). Leder’s extension of Merleau-Ponty’s “flesh” adds adimension to Leib that suggests we look for the impact of these visceral processes incharacter-formation.

Habitus. Another “vertical” aspect of Leib that tends to operate beyond con-sciousness and thus beyond narratological formulations that limit character to con-sciousness are those actions that have become habitual and automatic. Here I turn toPierre Bourdieu’s concept of habitus, the automatic, habitual nature of embodiedpractice repeated over time, which “do[es] not occupy conscious thought; [a practiceis] habitual precisely because [it is] done more or less automatically” (Hayles 204).Merleau-Ponty discusses the necessity of the habit-body to ensure spontaneity, butas we saw above, he privileges perception as the fundamental mode of phenomeno-

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logical apprehension. Bourdieu complicates Merleau-Ponty’s point by positing thehabitus, a “bodily unconscious,” as it were, that situates and shapes conscious per-ception. The habitus refers to those habit-forming processes that are instituted by so-cial arrangements, such as the way spaces are delineated and used within domesticand public buildings, the way roads demarcate the cultural and political terrain. AsDavid Couzens Hoy notes, Bourdieu adds “the social dimension to Merleau-Ponty’stheory of embodiment” (11); Bourdieu differs from Merleau-Ponty in seeing the so-cial dimension, not as “a secondary layer on top of the primary layer of perception,”but as itself “conditioning” the perceptual. This dimension of social embodiment,which permeates the individual’s sense of bodily being in the world, and which islargely unconscious, habitual, taken for granted, constitutes the lived sense of differ-entiation among individuals and among groups: “Habitus are [sic] generative princi-ples of distinct and distinctive practices—what the worker eats, and especially theway he eats it, the sport he practices and the way he practices it, his political opinionsand the way he expresses them are systematically different from the industrialowner’s corresponding activities. But habitus are also classificatory schemes, princi-ples of classification, principles of vision and division, different tastes. They make adistinction between what is good and what is bad, between what is right and what iswrong, between what is distinguished and what is vulgar, and so forth” (Bourdieu,Outline 8). The habitus is formed through and privileges the early experiences of em-bodiment “that are themselves prior to or simultaneous with the emergence of oursubjective sense of our individual identities” (Hoy 14). Children internalize socialarrangements through bodily practices: “the ‘book’ from which the children learntheir vision of the world is read with the body” (Bourdieu, Outline 90), and early ex-perience has a proportionately greater impact than later experience, forming the de-fault mode, as it were: “[P]ractical estimates give disproportionate weight to earlyexperiences . . . produc[ing] the structures of the habitus which become in turn thebasis of perception and appreciation of all subsequent experience” (Outline 78).Katherine Hayles stresses how these practices, as they are repeatedly performed,“sediment into habitual actions and movements . . . [where] they achieve an inertiathat can prove surprisingly resistant to conscious intentions to modify or changethem” (204). Consequently, agency is not solely or even predominantly a matter ofconscious, deliberative choice; Bourdieu states that the “habitus fulfills a functionwhich another philosophy consigns to a transcendental conscience” (Practical Rea-son 81).

Bourdieu further stresses that the habitus can be brought into crisis when, forwhatever reason, there occurs a disjunction between habitus and environment: “prac-tices are always liable to incur negative sanctions when the environment with whichthey are actually confronted is too distant from that to which they are objectively fit-ted” (Outline 78). Thus, when historical and social forces contrive to provide unfore-seen situations, obstacles, and opportunities, the habitus tends to respond in aconservative way, privileging those familiar and comfortable practices already in-stalled over any radical changes however salutary: “The hysteresis of habitus, whichis inherent in the social conditions of the reproduction of the structures in habitus, isdoubtless one of the foundations of the structural lag between opportunities and the

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dispositions to grasp them which is the cause of missed opportunities and, in partic-ular, of the frequently observed incapacity to think historical crises in categories ofperception and thought other than those of the past” (Outline 83). Thus, when a per-son or a society is confronted with new, unexpected situations, the habitus makes itdifficult to “seize the day,” because the habitus has been formed in tandem with a dif-ferent set of circumstances.

Embodiment and Agency

What many have postulated as the heart of character—its role as actant—needsto be rethought in terms of embodiment. As even Lessing admits, the ability to actimplies a body that is acting: “poetry also depicts bodies, but only by suggestionthrough actions” (78), which brings to mind Merleau-Ponty’s much stronger state-ment: “The union of soul and body is not an amalgamation between two mutuallyexternal terms, subject and object, brought about by arbitrary decree. It is enacted atevery instant in the movement of existence” (Phenomenology of Perception 88–89).Theories of character need to address the way the representation of embodimentshapes the trajectory of the character’s actions. In her discussion of character pre-dictability, Mieke Bal notes that description of external features of character is cru-cial to the complete understanding of the character and the actions it takes: “Aportrait, the description of the exterior character, further limits the possibilities evenmore. If a character is old, it does different things than if it were young. If it is at-tractive, it lives differently from the way it would live if it were unattractive” (Nar-ratology 84). Phelan distinguishes between traits that simply add “dimension” to acharacter and traits that have “functional” significance: “A dimension is any attributea character may be said to possess. . . . A function is a particular application of thatattribute made by the text through its developing structure. In other words, dimen-sions are converted into functions by the progression of the work” (9). The traits thatare “relevant to later actions” (“converted into functions”) are more significant thanthose traits whose only purpose is to help the reader remember and recognize a char-acter, for example (“the detective who always eats junk food” [11]). Dimensions ofembodiment can be analyzed for whether they are converted into functions as theplot progresses.

Applying this very rich sense of the body and embodiment to character willdemonstrate how fully narratives evoke embodiment. I’m not arguing, of course, thatcharacters are ever anything more than textual constructs, but rather that in order tobe intelligible to us as fully embodied readers, characters and narrative texts mustspeak to our embodied experience. Representations of characters’ bodies and em-bodiment cannot be dismissed as so much window dressing of the soul, but must beanalyzed as relevant constituents of the character’s narrative trajectory. Examining atext for representations of the body brings to awareness how issues of embodimentsaturate narrative; how representations of the body and embodiment become the siteof negotiation between the many different discourses that have inscribed the body(aesthetic, religious, medical, sociological, psychological, historical, political, etc.).In fact, the representations of Körper/Leib often foreground the problematic of the

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mind/body relation itself and can be analyzed for dualist tendencies and resis-tances—not only narrative theory has been shaped by dualist assumptions, but alsonarratives themselves.

THE EBB-TIDE: A CASE STUDY

Stevenson’s 1894 novella The Ebb-Tide: A Trio and a Quartette exemplifieswell how the lens of Körper/Leib enables a deeper sense of the body’s role in consti-tuting character. I choose The Ebb-Tide for two reasons: first of all, the text thema-tizes the body, making the necessity to theorize the body’s role more urgent; second,the text is a typical readerly text that utilizes familiar narrative techniques and con-ventions for representing characters. Stevenson himself was acutely aware of the ex-igencies of the body due to the fact that he suffered from ill health all his life. AsRobert Kiely notes, an “enchantment” with able-bodied life fueled Stevenson’s earlyfiction: Stevenson longed for “the good fleshly stupidity of the woods, the body con-scious of itself all over and the mind forgotten, the clean air nestling next your skin,”in contrast to his invalid’s state which required “both hands and a book of stoicalmaxims [to pull yourself together], and a sort of bitterness at the heart by way of ar-mour” (Stevenson qtd. in Kiely 48–49). Because his failing health necessitated thathe live in a tropical climate, Stevenson made his home in the South Seas in the finalyears of his life. The Ebb-Tide was published the year of his death.5

In a letter to Henry James, Stevenson described The Ebb-Tide as a story whose“grimness . . . is not to be depicted in words” with a “troop of swine” for heroes(452). The so-called swine are three destitute, starving “beachcombers”6: the protag-onist Robert Herrick, an Oxford-educated, down-on-his-luck gentleman; Davis, amiddle-aged American captain with a guilty secret; and Huish, a “vulgar and bad-hearted cockney clerk” (127). The story begins in Tahiti, where the three have beenexisting some months in a wretched state, “[d]renched with rains, broiling by day,shivering by night, a disused and ruinous prison for a bedroom, [their] diet begged orpilfered out of rubbish heaps” (126–27). In a last desperate attempt to salvage theircondition, Davis agrees to assume command of a quarantined schooner whose cap-tain and first mate have died of smallpox. Davis persuades Herrick and Huish tocome with him, and he also persuades them to head, not for Sydney, the original des-tination, but for Peru—which effectively means stealing the schooner and selling thecargo of champagne for their own profit. Once on their way, Davis and Huish spendtheir time getting drunk on the champagne, leaving Herrick, a landsman, to watchover the ship and the crew until a terrible storm brings Davis to his senses. However,at that point the men make two devastating discoveries—one, that the cargo ofchampagne is a fraud (most of the bottles are filled only with water); and, two, thattheir stores of food are almost depleted. Thus, when one of the hands spots an un-known island in the distance, the men are compelled to land there in hopes of gettinghelp. The island, it turns out, is a “private” island, run by the aristocratic WilliamAttwater, a Kurtz-like figure who for the past ten years has been quietly (and ille-gally) amassing a small fortune in pearls and shells. Davis and Huish plot to murder

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Attwater and confiscate his pearls, but Attwater, supremely competent, utterly ruth-less—and a zealous evangelist to boot—easily foils their plan. In total despair afteran unsuccessful suicide attempt, Herrick betrays his comrades and becomes lackeyto Attwater, who proceeds to execute Huish and convert Davis.

Traditional Interpretations of The Ebb-Tide

The majority of nineteenth- and twentieth-century critics have diagnosed Her-rick’s problem as psychological and moral deficiency in “will power.” In a letter toSidney Colvin, Stevenson himself labeled Herrick an example of a “weak man”(453). Contemporaries agreed with Stevenson. An unsigned review characterizesHerrick as having “sunk through utter want of moral tone” (Saturday Review 454 myemphasis). Israel Zangwill praises the novella as a “subtle study of the psychology ofblackguardism in diverse shades and degrees,” assessing Herrick’s particular“shade” as “want of backbone” (461 my emphasis). Twentieth-century critics havetended to concur in their assessment of Herrick’s problem as essentially one of psychological and moral weakness. Kiely diagnoses Herrick’s problem as an “un-derdeveloped will” (184). In his examination of Stevenson’s proto-modernist charac-teristics, Alan Sandison asserts that The Ebb-Tide “is a novel about moralconsciousness” and poses the conundrum “which is [Herrick], a moral conscious-ness looking for a literary form through which to represent itself—or a literary formlooking to realize itself in a moral consciousness?” (317, 327 my emphasis). DavidDaiches criticizes the depiction of Herrick’s “decline into a Polynesian beach-comber” as being “perhaps the least convincing in its psychological perception,”stating that the causes of Herrick’s decline are “never fully explored” (xxiv my em-phasis). On the face of it, these characterizations seem justified. Herrick repeatedlyclaims to adhere to a certain moral code while repeatedly failing to live up to thatcode, and he suffers from an unrelieved sense of shame and self-disgust at his owninconsistency.

Incorporating embodiment into the equation gives us a much richer sense ofwhy Herrick finds it so hard to transcend his situation. In the remainder of the essay,I will apply each of the features of embodiment discussed above to The Ebb-Tide.

Körper in The Ebb-Tide

When we look for Körper in The Ebb-Tide, we find that the description of en-during physical characteristics is minimal, at least in regard to the three central char-acters. We learn that Herrick is young with a brown beard; Davis has a “stalwartframe”; Huish is a “dwarfish person” with “pale eyes” and a “toothless smile” (127).The most extensive physical description given is that of Attwater as he is first seenapproaching the Farallone in a small boat:

He was a huge fellow, six feet four in height, and of a build proportionatelystrong, but his sinews seemed to be dissolved in a listlessness that was morethan languor. It was only the eye that corrected this impression; an eye of an

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unusual mingled brilliancy and softness, somber as coal and with lights thatoutshone the topaz; an eye of unimpaired health and virility; an eye that bid youbeware of the man’s devastating anger. A complexion, naturally dark, had beentanned in the island to a hue hardly distinguishable from that of a Tahitian; onlyhis manners and movements, and the living force that dwelt in him, like fire inflint, betrayed the European. He was dressed in white drill, exquisitely made;his scarf and tie were of tender-coloured silks; on the thwart beside him thereleaned a Winchester rifle. (191–92)

This description of Attwater invokes the spatial relations characteristic of descrip-tion, most obviously in describing Attwater’s size. He’s “huge”—as big as or biggerthan any of the three beachcombers—and gives the impression of being immenselystrong both in sinew and in willpower. Moreover, Attwater’s description elaborateshis appearance according to certain categories: size, manner, facial expression, skintone, clothing, and accessories. Attwater embodies immeasurably more physical, so-cial, and economic power than the three beachcombers combined. And we are meantto read his description against those brief descriptions of the three fugitives and tofeel the disparity between Attwater’s literal and symbolic size and theirs. Though Ido not have the space to develop it here, it is also noteworthy how Attwater’s Euro-peanness is constituted in part by a series of comparisons and contrasts with theTahitians.

More often in this text, Körper is displayed in descriptions of temporary physi-cal traits, such as facial expression, tone of voice, gesture, posture, manner, physicalcondition, motility, though these traits are usually not foregrounded or elaborated. Atvarious points, characters’ faces become “ghastly,” “sickly blue,” “white,” “flushed,”“deadly pale,” lit with a “strange excitement” (128, 164, 172, 148–49). Charactersspeak with “quailing” or “faint” voices, or with “renewed vigor,” or “stiffly,” or“thickly” (148, 150, 161). Characters shiver with cold, shake with anger, heave withsobs, stumble with drunken unsteadiness, and so forth. Changing physiological con-ditions are described; at the beginning of the story, Huish suffers from influenza, butonce on board the Farallone “the food and the sea air had soon healed him of his dis-ease, and he began to lay on flesh” (164). These descriptive touches are ubiquitousand applied to all four of the major characters; nonetheless, Attwater’s expressions,gestures, and tones are perhaps the most extended and vivid. When Attwater seeks toconvert Herrick, his gentlemanly demeanor is transformed into religious fervor:“[Attwater] spread his arms like a crucifix; his face shone with the brightness of aseraph’s; in his voice, as it rose to the last words, the tears seemed ready” (206). Her-rick’s unequivocal rejection of Attwater’s evangelism evokes another change: “Therapture was gone from Attwater’s countenance; the dark apostle had disappeared;and in his place there stood an easy, sneering gentleman, who took off his hat andbowed” (206–207).

Following Punday, we could conclude that because Attwater is the characterwhose external appearance is most fully described, readers identify with him theleast. This lack of identification seems a result of two factors: in the first place, thevivid depiction of a character’s external appearance positions the reader “outside”

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the character, especially if the character’s thoughts and intentions are not made avail-able; in the second place, the more vivid a character’s external appearance, the moreaware the reader is of the disparity between reader and character. If we use descrip-tion of external appearance, whether temporary or enduring, as a rubric for the de-gree to which these characters are embodied, we would conclude that compared toAttwater, Herrick and the others are “relatively disembodied.” But if we extend em-bodiment to include all manifestations of Leib, we find that Herrick and, to a greatextent, Davis and Huish, are decidedly embodied. Evocations of Leib are every-where; the beachcombers collectively, and Herrick individually, provide a kind ofvirtual embodiment through which readers enter the world of the text.

Leib in The Ebb-Tide

Representations of Leib saturate The Ebb-Tide. Though we learn little of themen’s external appearances, we learn a great deal about their external and internalsensations, their spatial orientation and motility, their visceral needs and instincts,and their habitual practices.

Exteroception. As mentioned above, perceiving or experiencing external stimulican result in the body’s receding from awareness, even though the body is what en-ables us to perceive anything at all. An example from The Ebb-Tide occurs whenHerrick is lost in the beauty of his first sight of Attwater’s island: “Herrick stoodtransported. In the gratified lust of his eye, he forgot the past and the present; forgotthat he was menaced by a prison on the one hand and starvation on the other; forgotthat he was come to that island, desperately foraging, clutching at expedients. Adrove of fishes, painted like the rainbow and billed like parrots, hovered up in theshadow of the schooner, and passed clear of it, and glinted in the submarine sun”(189 my emphasis). Though Herrick momentarily forgets his precarious situation, itremains real; moreover, the beauty of the island is accessible to him precisely be-cause of his embodiment. Thus, his perceptions of the fish, sun, and birds are mark-ers of embodiment.

At other moments in the text, exteroceptive sensations are the focus of the char-acters’ awareness; as the story begins, the beachcombers are seeking refuge from athunderstorm in an abandoned prison, experiencing tactile and aural sensationsalong with the visual:

Now there was heard a roar, which drew impetuously nearer; the face of the la-goon was seen to whiten; and before they had staggered to their feet, a squallburst in rain upon the outcasts. The rage and volume of that avalanche one musthave lived in the tropics to conceive; a man panted in its assault, as he mightpant under a shower-bath; and the world seemed whelmed in night and water.

They fled, groping for their usual shelter . . . in the old calaboose; camedrenched into its empty chambers; and lay down, three sops of humanity on thecold coral floors, and presently, when the squall was overpast, the others couldhear in the darkness the chattering of the clerk’s teeth. . . . the three crept to-gether into one wet mass, and lay until the day came, shivering and dozing off,

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and continually reawakened to wretchedness by the coughing of the clerk. (133my emphasis)

The three men experience the sights and sounds of the storm as it approaches andfeel the drenching rain when it arrives. Inside the calaboose, they feel the chill of thecoral floor and hear Huish’s teeth chattering, they attempt to warm themselves byhuddling together; their sleep is only intermittent, since the cold floor and Huish’scoughing keep waking them up. An important feature of this passage is the collec-tive, shared condition of exteroception. The exteroceptive sensations are felt by allthree men, and as they run for shelter and huddle together, they effectively become“one” in their response to the environment. Individual, private subjectivity is swal-lowed up in the common experience of a world “whelmed in night and water.”

In addition, this particular passage invokes the reader’s own embodiment andthe degree to which he or she can identify with the exteroceptive sensations of thecharacters. The narrator cautions that those who have not seen a tropical storm maynot grasp its fierceness, then gives an analogy for the uninitiated: the rain was like a“shower-bath.”

Interoception. The sensations of internal stimuli are regularly invoked in thetext. From the beginning, sensations of hunger and misery are vividly depicted aspart of the common plight of all three men—internal sensations that, in their inten-sity, distract from external sensations. The morning after the thunderstorm finds themen so hungry and exhausted that they cannot enjoy the sunshine: “But not even thebeauty and the welcome warmth of the morning . . . could engage the attention of theoutcasts. They were still cold at heart, their mouths sour from the want of sleep,their steps rambling from the lack of food; and they strung like lame geese along thebeach in disheartened silence” (134 my emphasis). The chill of the coral floor lingersin their bones, despite the warmth of the sun, as does the disagreeable taste in theirmouths; their hunger leaves them weakly stumbling across the beach. Intense exter-nal stimuli often evoke intense internal sensations, as in the following passage,which occurs immediately after the men have almost lost their schooner in a terriblestorm and have discovered their cargo of champagne is largely water: “As for Her-rick, the successive agitations and disappointments of the day had left him whollyreckless. He was conscious of a pleasant glow, an agreeable excitement; his headseemed empty, his eyeballs burned as he turned them, his throat was dry as a biscuit”(183 my emphasis).

What is perhaps most noteworthy is that such bodily sensations are almost in-variably invested with psychological reactions and emotions. Fatigue and hungergenerate the men’s “disheartened silence.” The “successive agitations and disap-pointments” make Herrick light-headed and thirsty. Herrick’s repulsion toward hiscomrades in crime is repeatedly articulated in terms of his embodied experience ofthose emotions—to the point that it would be impossible to separate the two: “Awave of nausea overcame Herrick at the wheel. . . . He sickened at the thought of histwo comrades drinking away their reason upon stolen wine. . . . a heat of rage andresolution glowed in his bosom. . . . his belly quivered with disgust and rage. . . .Fear thrilled in Herrick’s vitals” (163, 164, 171 my emphasis). In these passages and

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many others, emotion is experienced in a holistic way—as both psychic and bodilyphenomenon; emotion cannot be seen as exclusively belonging to the province of thepsyche or the mind.

Motility. In the passage quoted above, the men are able to meander “like lamegeese along the beach” because they have a sense of where they are, what they want,and how to move their bodies through space to get it. When the three beggars strag-gle along “combing” the beach for breakfast, they are “actively assuming” space toachieve a goal:

It was toward the town they moved . . . ; and as they went, their hungry eyeswere upon all sides, but they were only scouting for a meal.

A small and dingy schooner lay snugged against the quay, with which it wasconnected by a plank. On the forward deck, under a spot of awning, fiveKanakas . . . were squatted around a basin of fried fei, and drinking coffee fromtin mugs. . . .7

[The captain] came close up to where the plank rested on the grassy quay;turned his back upon the schooner, and began to whistle that lively air, “TheIrish Washerwoman.” It caught the ears of the Kanaka seamen like a precon-certed signal; with one accord they looked up from their meal and crowded tothe ship’s side. (134–35 my emphasis)

This passage demonstrates Merleau-Ponty’s statement that “motility [is] basic inten-tionality” (Phenomenology of Perception 137). The three men move through spacemotivated by hunger to find food, see the Kanakas eating, stop, attract the attentionof the Kanakas, who in turn move to the ship’s railing to watch Davis’s performance.Ultimately, Davis’s ploy works; the Kanakas invite the starving men on board forbreakfast.

Needless to say, the instances of exteroception, interoception, and motility aretoo numerous to count. What these few examples demonstrate is how deeply embod-ied the characters are, despite the relative paucity of reference to external appear-ance.

Viscerality. As we saw above, Leder uses sleep to exemplify those visceralprocesses that are beyond conscious awareness, yet are absolutely essential for func-tioning as embodied beings. The Ebb-Tide is punctuated with references to sleep andto the consequences of getting a good night’s sleep (or not) on character behaviorand experience, as we have already seen. Much more central to this particular textare the processes associated with hunger, nourishment, and digestion. Hunger is the-matized in The Ebb-Tide, and the characters are quite conscious of its role in their ac-tions. Herrick is painfully aware of the power of hunger, which drives him to dothings that he normally would be ashamed of. When Davis dances and sings “like apoodle dog” in front of the breakfasting Kanakas, Herrick “look[s] on heavy-eyed,hunger for the moment conquering all sense of shame” (135). When the Kanakasoffer the three white men breakfast, they eat ravenously “[w]ith the unsightly greedof hounds” (135). Appetite drives the plot from beginning to end; all of the beach-combers’ actions—stealing the schooner, landing on the island, and plotting to kill

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Attwater—are motivated most immediately by hunger. The greed with which thecastaways contemplate Attwater’s pearls arises from their desire to have enoughmoney never to have to live on the edge of starvation again.

Herrick realizes the momentous power hunger has to tempt men into crimes.When they have their first meal aboard the schooner, Herrick initially resists the foodout of a noble disgust at their enterprise: “Herrick sat inert and silent. It was impos-sible after these months of hopeless want to smell the rough, high-spiced sea victualswithout lust, and his mouth watered with desire of the champagne. It was no less im-possible . . . not to perceive . . . the gulf where he had fallen. He was a thief amongthieves. . . . He could not touch the soup” (159). However, the captain finally per-suades Herrick to have some champagne, and his view of the situation changes. Hedrinks “instinctively” and “with unquenchable pleasure and desire of more,” cryingout “There is something to life after all! . . . Wine, food, dry clothes—why, they’reworth dying for, worth hanging for!” (160). He wonders why all “poor folk” are not“foot-pads” (160). Notwithstanding the men’s painful awareness of hunger, diges-tion and nourishment are involuntary, visceral processes that largely exceed the di-rect control of subjectivity while at the same time affecting subjectivity. The mood,strength, and rationality of the three beachcombers are all clearly colored to the de-gree that bodily discomfort reigns, in the form of cold, hunger, illness, and lack ofsleep. When Herrick eats the soup, it “strengthened and quieted [his] nerves” (160).“I didn’t know I was so much run down,” he confesses (160). Food enables Herrickto be more clear-headed about his current situation, which demonstrates the inter-twining of subjectivity and embodiment.

Habitus. Bourdieu’s concept of habitus facilitates an understanding of how allthe aspects of embodiment discussed so far—exteroceptive and interoceptive sensa-tions, positioning and movement through space, visceral processes—are comman-deered by culture to produce embodied practices that enact class hierarchies, genderroles, etc., whose power derives from the fact that these practices remain largely “in-visible” due to their habitual, automatic nature. Herrick’s reading of Virgil providesa good example of how the formation of habitus occurs. In his state of destitutionearly in the book, Herrick takes consolation from the Aeneid because it brings tomind “visions of England . . . the busy schoolroom, the green playing-fields, holi-days at home, and the perennial roar of London, and the fireside, and the white headof his father” (125). The narrator comments that the circumstances under whichLatin is learned impacts the images associated with the text ever after—more so thanthe content of the text or the intent of the writer: “For it is the destiny of those grave,restrained and classic writers, with whom we make enforced and often painful ac-quaintanceship at school, to pass into the blood and become native in the memory; sothat a phrase of Virgil speaks not so much of Mantua or Augustus, but of Englishplaces and the student’s own irrevocable youth” (125). The “painful enforcement” oflearning Latin gradually “passes into the blood” and forms corporeal memories ofthe scenes, experiences, and dispositions of childhood—in schoolrooms, on theplaying fields, during holidays, in the metropolitan whirl of London, at home withthe family. The learning of Latin serves as a metonym for a whole cluster of upper-middle-class practices Herrick has incorporated during his formative years; his fa-

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ther, an “intelligent, active, and ambitious man,” had been successful enough in busi-ness to send Herrick to a “good school” and thence to Oxford. As a youth, he hadlived a cushioned life of material prosperity; at Oxford, he had been free to “wander”after his own interests even though they were “bypaths of study . . . music or meta-physics” and led to a “paltry degree” because he had assumed he was destined for alife of luxury (125).

The deeply ingrained and unconscious nature of habitus accounts for its relativeinflexibility in the face of radical changes in environment. Herrick provides a partic-ularly good illustration of this aspect of habitus. In the opening pages of the story,the narrator explains how Herrick has wound up “on the beach.” After taking his de-gree from Oxford, Herrick had been faced with his father’s sudden and unexpectedfinancial ruin and had been obliged to go to work to help support the family. Herrickhad had to adjust at all levels, psychologically, socially, economically, corporeally, tothese exigencies, and his inability to adapt successfully demonstrates the power ofhabitus. Though Herrick had dutifully “relinquished his ambitions” and “consentedto embrace that way of life in which he could most readily assist his family,” theseconscious decisions had not led to his success, in part because of the disjunction between habitus and environment: “He had no head for figures, no interest in af-fairs, detested the constraint of hours, and despised the aims and successes of mer-chants. . . . Bringing no interest to his duties, he brought no attention; his day was atissue of things neglected and things done amiss; and from place to place and fromtown to town, he carried the character of one thoroughly incompetent” (125–26).An unsuitability for business had been educated into Herrick through habitus; hisincorporated mode of being in the world did not include “constraint of hours” andconcerted attention to the vulgar and tedious details of trade. Herrick had foundhimself caught between a deeply embodied sense of duty and a deeply embodiedsense of disdain for money-making, and his shame at his own failure is felt at a profoundly visceral level: “No man can bear the word [incompetence] applied tohim without some flush of colour, as indeed there is none other that so emphaticallyslams in a man’s face the door of self-respect. And to Herrick, who was consciousof talents and acquirements, who looked down upon those humble duties in whichhe was found wanting, the pain was the more exquisite” (126 my emphasis).8 Theirony of his inability to “seize the day,” as his Renaissance namesake would haveurged, is likely not lost on Herrick.9

So strong is habitus for Herrick that even when he changes his name and fleesto Tahiti, he finds he cannot “stoop to fall” (126–27). A new name has little power totransform habitus. As elsewhere, in Tahiti Herrick has no success holding down jobs;as elsewhere, his code of honor causes him to “suffer no less sharply” at his failures.He is caught between the deeply embodied drive toward survival and his deeply em-bodied sense of himself as an honorable gentleman. It is pure torture for him to beg,though he does it; the breakfast with the Kanakas is interrupted by the return of thecaptain of the boat, who chases the beachcombers away, and Herrick flees, “his facedark with blood, his knees trembling under him with the hysteria of rage,” and flingshimself on the beach, grinding “his face in the sand. . . . ‘I can’t stand it,’ broke fromhim” (138). The difference between Herrick’s and Huish’s reaction at this moment is

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clearly illustrative of the difference of habitus among classes. Huish asks ironically,“Wot can’t he stand now? . . . Asn’t he ‘ad a meal? I’m lickin’ my lips” (138). Her-rick responds by “rear[ing] up his wild eyes and burning face” and screaming “Ican’t beg!” (138). Huish has no visceral reaction to the incident other than a satisfiedstomach and a restored temper; Herrick, in contrast, is wracked from head to toewith shame and rage.

Later in the story, when the three men encounter Attwater for the first time, Her-rick experiences a visceral sense of his social relation to the man, who as Davis putsit, is a “real, first-rate, copper-bottomed aristocrat” (197). The moment Herrickspeaks, Attwater recognizes Herrick’s university accent, and from that point on, hetreats Herrick with courtesy and snubs Davis and Huish with well-bred insolence.Herrick is both angered and gratified at Attwater’s obvious preferment of him: “Her-rick was embarrassed; the silken brutality of their visitor made him blush; that heshould be accepted as an equal, and the others thus pointedly ignored, pleased him inspite of himself, and then ran through his veins in a recoil of anger” (193 my em-phasis). Through the rest of the story, Herrick alternates between resistance and ca-pitulation to Attwater as a representative of all that Herrick has been born and bred toadmire and identify with. When he finally capitulates to Attwater, Herrick agonizes,“Why do I come to you? I don’t know; you are cold, cruel, hateful; and I hate you, orI think I hate you. But you are an honest man, an honest gentleman” (230). The con-cept of habitus gives insight into Herrick’s capitulation; he is defaulting to the mostfamiliar, because most deeply embodied, mode of being in this time of stress. ThatHerrick cannot quite articulate why he does it does not mean that the act is unintelli-gible within the context of habitus; Hoy’s paraphrase of Bourdieu sums this point upclearly: “the body is where the practical belief is instantiated, and the habitus is whatone is born into, such that one can never completely know what one is doing, al-though what one does has more sense than one knows” (14). Applying the concept ofhabitus to Herrick deepens our understanding of his character.

Embodiment and Agency in The Ebb-Tide

Incorporating embodiment into the equation gives us a much richer sense ofwhy Herrick finds it so hard to transcend his situation. If the visceral demands ofhunger and the internalized practices of habitus are taken into consideration as legit-imate features of character, his actions are at the same time clarified and compli-cated. Moreover, his embodiment is shown to be functional with relation to the plot.Herrick’s choices are motivated by deeply ingrained habits of being, powerful instincts for survival, external opportunity and importunity, and his own narrativearticulations of embodiment. The climax of the story occurs when Herrick tries tocommit suicide and finds that he is unable to do so.

Throughout the story, Herrick has salved his conscience by telling himself thathe can always commit suicide, and thereby retain some remnant of honor, if thingsget bad enough. Near the beginning of the story, when there’s no hope in sight, hewrites a final letter to his sweetheart in England, telling her “I am well and strong. . . .And yet I am dying” (140). Later that day, when Davis proposes that taking the

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schooner is their last hope, Herrick refuses, saying, “You forget, captain. . . . There isanother way. I can die. . . . a few strokes in the lagoon—and rest!” (149). Davis man-ages to dissuade Herrick from suicide, but Herrick continues to dream of it as a dooralways open to him if things get too unbearable. On board the ship, he comforts him-self with the thought that he can “throw himself overboard, and drown—an honestman” (160). When they encounter the terrible storm, Herrick imagines himself meet-ing death head-on: “he clung in the weather rigging, exulting; he was done with life,and he gloried in the release” (172). Herrick reaches the nadir of his despair onAttwater’s island. Caught between succumbing to the brilliant, powerful, sinisterAttwater, on the one hand, and aiding his bumbling, derelict, criminal comrades intheir doomed scheme against Attwater, on the other hand, Herrick quietly slips intothe lagoon “thank[ing] ‘whatever Gods there be’ for that open door of suicide” (227).He imagines noble beings looking down on him from the stars, pitying him, but isjerked back to reality by the exteroceptive sensation of “the growing coldness of thewater.” He tells himself that the moment has come to stop swimming, a thing “easyto say, easy to do” (228). But he discovers that he cannot do it:

He was aware instantly of an opposition in his members, unanimous and invin-cible, clinging to life with a single and fixed resolve, finger by finger, sinew bysinew; something that was at once he and not he—at once within him and with-out him; the shutting of some miniature valve in his brain, which a single manlythought should suffice to open—and the grasp of an external fate ineluctable as gravity. To any man there may come at times a consciousness that thereblows, through all the articulations of his body, the wind of a spirit not whollyhis; that his mind rebels; that another girds him and carries him whither hewould not. . . . The open door was closed in his recreant face. . . . There weremen who could commit suicide; there were men who could not; and he was onewho could not. (228)

Herrick has imagined all along that he should easily be able to control his bodythrough mental willpower, even though he has been repeatedly proven wrong. Her-rick conceives of himself in Cartesian terms: he imagines a “miniature valve in thebrain”—the pineal gland?—through which he should be able to vanquish his bodywith a “single manly thought.” When his body resists his will to drown, he dissoci-ates from it as something “not wholly his,” something taking him “whither he wouldnot.” Yet Herrick is also forced to admit how deeply he belongs to his body, which is“at once he and not he.” When he discovers he cannot commit suicide, he experi-ences it as a loss of a cherished narrative: “With the fairy tale of suicide, of a refugealways open to him, he had hitherto beguiled and supported himself in the trials oflife; and behold! that also was only a fairy tale, that also was folklore. . . . He had notears; he told himself no stories. His disgust with himself was so complete, that eventhe process of apologetic mythology had ceased” (229). Herrick realizes, if dimly,that his stories of transcendence don’t square with the realities of embodiment.

If we bring Herrick’s embodiment into the character equation, we are betterable to understand the significance of his inability to kill himself. The Ebb-Tide

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becomes a study of the interrelationship of consciousness and embodiment, one inwhich consciousness may be unaware of embodiment as a force in the formation ofsubjectivity, a force “surprisingly resistant to conscious intentions to modify orchange” it. What Herrick faces, without fully realizing it, is the inexorability of hisown embodiment, the ways in which habitus “defines the boundaries within which”his own “conscious thought takes place.” Moreover, Herrick’s own narratives of em-bodiment, which are fundamentally Cartesian, are demonstrated to be unproductivebecause they are so much at odds with his experience. The Ebb-Tide can be read asStevenson’s critique of Cartesian narratives of embodiment.

To conclude, the dualism implicit in narrative theory has simply not allowed usto see where all the bodies are buried. The analysis of The Ebb-Tide demonstrates theextent to which narratives are grounded in embodied experience—from the “source-path-goal” structure of plot to the minutiae of individual descriptions with theirmarkers of spatial orientation and classification, from the vivid evocations of thelived body to the deep structures of viscerality and habitus. When embodiment istaken into consideration as part of character construction, many avenues of inquiryopen up: How do representations of embodiment vary with individual characters andnarrators? How fully and in what ways is the lived awareness of embodiment—exteroception, interoception, proprioception, kinesthesia—represented, and in con-junction with which characters? How do visceral processes figure into a narrativetrajectory? What role does habitus play in the depiction of agency? What patterns ofembodiment are utilized in the construction of gender, class, race, ethnicity, nation-ality? What can the markers of embodiment tell us about the positioning of the nar-rator? What can the markers of embodiment tell us about the positioning of thereader? In short, how do narratives shape the complicated relationships amongworld, consciousness, agency, embodiment, narrating, reading, and imagination? In-corporating embodiment into the analysis of narrative adds dimension to our under-standing of how characters are constructed and provides a richer understanding ofnarrative and of our own embodied existence.10

ENDNOTES

1. For Margolin the fundamental distinguishing characteristic of character is agency.

2. Rimmon-Kenan’s discussion of external character traits (65–66) is based on Joseph Ewen’s work,which is available only in Hebrew.

3. See Chapter 6 in Lakoff and Johnson’s Philosophy in the Flesh for a more detailed discussion of the re-search in these areas.

4. Philippe Hamon’s work is an exception to this; his full-length study Analyse du Descriptif was pub-lished in 1981, followed by La Description Littéraire De L’Antiquité à Roland Barthes: Une Antholo-gie in 1991. See also a special issue of Yale French Studies: Towards a Theory of Description, as wellas the work of Mieke Bal and Peter Klaus.

5. Stevenson collaborated with his stepson Lloyd Osbourne in the early stages of work on The Ebb-Tide.The title refers to the famous line from Julius Caesar, and at several points in the story the symbolicmeaning of the turning tide is evoked.

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6. “Beachcomber” is a term that originated in the mid-nineteenth century as a pejorative expression forEuropean men who came to the South Pacific expecting an easy life, and once there, unable or un-willing to make a living, subsisted “on the beach” as beggars and scavengers.

7. “Kanaka” is a Polynesian word for “human beings,” which the Europeans used derogatorily to referto native Pacific islanders.

8. The problem of the well-educated but destitute young gentleman is one that Stevenson addresses inThe Wrecker, a novel published just before The Ebb-Tide; in it, there are two central characters whofind themselves in the same situation—having the education and tastes of a gentleman without themeans to sustain the lifestyle. Stevenson himself, due to his ill health, had to rely on his own father’sgood graces for support well into his thirties, and this dependence on his father may have caused himto question whether or not he would have been able to support himself if his father had refused to doso.

9. Robert Herrick shares the name of the English Renaissance poet (1591–1674) who is associated withthe theme of carpe diem.

10. My special thanks goes to James Phelan and the readers at Narrative for their invaluable encourage-ment and suggestions, as well as to my colleague Dr. Kerri Morris in the English Department at theUniversity of Alaska Anchorage, for her astute suggestions in response to an early draft.

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