F. González-Crussí begins his latest reflective work, On Seeing: Things Seen, Unseen, and Obscene, with Jules Michelet’s anecdote of the 1791 massacre on the Champ-de-Mars. As it turns out, a boorish hairdresser, disgusted with the turn of events in France that was threatening the heads of the nobles, and thereby his livelihood, set out to lessen his woes by inviting an equally boorish old sailor to attend a public event. The occasion was a pageant celebrating the anniversary of the storming of the Bastille, replete with an elaborate “Altar to the Fatherland” and surrounding grandstands. The men, drunk and intending to grow more so, hid themselves under the stands and began to bore holes in the structure. Their purpose: to obtain a view of women’s bodies beneath their skirts. Unfortunately for them, their presence was discovered by an old woman. She alerted others, who made their way to the scene in short order, plucked the two men out, and demanded an explanation. What were two drunken royalists doing so close to the display, and why were they hiding under the stands? What followed-the misunderstandings, the furor, the attacks, the retaliation-became a catalyst in the French revolution and led to the Reign of Terror in which some twenty thousand people died. And all from an attempt to get a peek, to view the forbidden; all from simply trying to see.
González-Crussí, a professor emeritus of pathology at Northwestern Medical School, turns the care and concern of his profession toward our most profound sense, sight, and reveals a captivating history of the relationship man has had with what most would count among our greatest gifts. For sight, as González-Crussí explains, affects what we know and how we know it, our exterior world as well as our interior, and in more ways than can be counted, sets boundaries and plots courses for our imagination. Sight acts as another pair of “hands,” as it were, by which we can take hold of expanses both vast and minuscule, and in some deeply atavistic way, assure ourselves that we have control over what lies within the perimeter of our vision. González-Crussí has spent his time as the attention’s object, in his role as professor, and an equal number of years as the attentive subject, in his role as physician, so he has experience on either side of the lens. And with a skill that owes something both to pedagogy and to medicine, he presents for consideration surprising aspects and intriguing angles of what it means to see. His explication is not without its critical stance, though; he admonishes those who wish to behold more than decency permits: “Sex, birth, death, or the discharge of those physiologic functions for which even animals seem to prefer seclusion, most human beings would loathe to expose. Yet, into these shaded recesses of private life some would shine the brightest light, and of things which are best concealed they make an ostentatious display.”
Despite this rebuke, he shows us examples of man’s keenly intrusive vision. For instance, the historical desire not only to see the “taboo,” of which the Champ-de-Mars incident is representative, but also to watch the “idol of the tribe” in even the most private of predicaments. In giving birth, for example, queens were often scrutinized to make sure that the newest leader arrived under the view of witnesses, who could attest to his or her rightful claim. Authenticity in both person and phenomenon has always required someone to take hold with the eyes, so as to assure others that there has been no fraud by substitution or invention. Sexual intercourse itself was sometimes witnessed, to verify the purity of a claim. Even when nature called, the King was never let out of sight and had to be attended by watchers. The eyes act as notaries, taking precedence over all other means by which civilization keeps its world in place.
Equally intriguing is an essay on what different societies have chosen as their objects of attention. González-Crussí’s point is that what we see is often a function of what we are looking for. Some ancient peoples, such as the Aztecs, were sophisticated in various ways, applying their strong minds to the plotting of the stars and to the architecture of the world. Still, their interest in the interior of the human body seems to have stopped at the point of its violation; the body was the stuff of sacrifice, but its own wondrous systems, arrangements, and coordinations held no fascination. The flip side of this disinterest is the morbid attention that St. Augustine cautioned against, a curiosity of the eyes that seeks to behold the grisly in the name of “knowledge” and ends in a vain superiority. Nevertheless, nothing is more common than the theatrics of a crowd gaping to see mangled misfortune. Appreciation of the body as a thing of art and engineering, mysterious in its own rights, had to wait until the Catholic Reformation; the natural good of the body was celebrated to both glorify God and to refute the Platonizing notes of the Protestant cause. In such examples, González-Crussí reminds us that we are “beings” before we are “beholders,” and what comes before our eyes-and consequently our interest-is often of our own choosing.
That perspective colors perception is illustrated by the famous 1999 photograph that appeared in USA Today. During fetal surgery at twenty-one week’s gestation to correct the child’s spina bifida, a photojournalist captured the moment when the baby’s arm protruded through the womb; the tiny hand clutched the finger of the surgeon performing the operation. The moment had a profound effect on the photographer, radically changing his views on life issues, and the publication of the picture made an impact worldwide. But as González-Crussí points out, the same impact was not made on everyone. Matching those who found the sight to be incredibly tender and life-affirming were groups who interpreted the event as nothing more than reflex, and an anesthetized reflex at that. In the end, for better or worse, we still have the last say; we still tell our eyes what it is that they have shown us.
Even the angle from which the view is taken has consequence. In the West, González-Crussí points out, the eye moves beneath surface to depth, while in the East it moves in the opposite direction, from depth to surface. The “clinical eye” of the Western physician, a skill that bordered on talent and was actually cultivated during González-Crussí’s time in medical school, sought to read interior maladies from exterior signs. Conversely, the Eastern physician saw counterparts between the organs beneath and the skin above, treating pain and disease through acupuncture.
In some ways, On Seeing is a further dimension of González-Crussí’s previous work, On Being Born and Other Difficulties. There, the author meditates upon the birth process, upon the mysteries of virginity, breach births, birth “cauls,” male and female genetic contributions, and all that they have meant historically and imaginatively. Here he narrows his focus to the experience of vision, and provides elegant disquisitions that range from the power of the gaze and the “evil eye,” to the history of “mesmerizing” through eye contact, from the strange properties of mirrors and “double vision,” to the long literary legacy of “blurred vision” or “half-sight.” The iconography of sight in the figurative and written arts is also explored, and deepens our appreciation that this faculty is intricately involved in what it is to be human.
González-Crussí’s use of language is refreshing in its rhetorical command. There is a charming decorum to it, as though he was long schooled by volumes of tropes and figures. In an age in which so much sounds trite and hackneyed, he writes with a slightly antiquated air that all at once seems new. The Renaissance masters had grown tired of their exhausted ways of talking and envisioning, and went back to the classics to revitalize themselves; the way González-Crussí writes, it is possible to understand how going back to a formalism of syntax and vocabulary could be invigorating for a tired, desiccated age that thinks it has seen all there is to see.
