The Hospital Body: Misterios del hospital

The Hospital Body: Misterios del hospital Noël Valis is Professor of Spanish at Yale University. She is the author o/The Decadent Vision in Leopoldo Alas, The Novels of Jacinto Octavio Picón, and co-editor of In the Feminine Mode. She has edited noveh by Pereda and Picón and Carolina Coronados PoesÃ-as, and translated Salinas' VÃ-spera del gozo, as well as Julia Uceda's poetry. Baudelaire once wrote, "Life is a hospital in which each patient is consumed by the desire to change beds" ("Cette vie est un hôpital où chaque malade est possédé du désir de changer de lit") (161). This nineteenthcentury notion of life as a pathology of restless movement is grounded in the materiality of the human body. Baudelaire, however, speaks only of his soul, of his soul's hunger to be somewhere else, anywhere, provided it is out of this world ("N'importe où! n'importe où! pourvu que ce soit hors de ce monde!") (162). Yet the very image that is intended to transport the poet, in a kind of ontological frenzy, out of this world is a hospital filled with beds and sickness: a paradoxical image of stationary decay, of enforced desire. At the same time, the poet appears to elide the existence of patients' bodies and their diseases. But not altogether. The lyrical impulse infusing Baudelaire's prose poem focuses on the same object that clinical medicine made its own: the patient. The poet as potential patient imagines a self of discontent, of profound disease , a self that occupies the visible space of morbidity. This is, then, the pathologically embodied self, the same object that both clinical medicine and realist-naturalist literature appropriated as a field of knowledge. In dialogue with his soul, Baudelaire pushes outward toward transcendence, n'importe où. He cannot bear the thought of finitude. He cannot see himself in one of those bodies trapped inside a hospital bed. In this sense, he has split himself off from the knowing eye/I that does see him there. In other words, if Baudelaire ultimately rejects his patient status, he also chooses Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies Volume 4, 2000 Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies not to be the doctor. In "Any where out of the world," he tries desperately to be neither here nor there, neither object nor subject , to be somehow beyond the position of authority. The exercise of that specific kind of medicalized authority—strikingly present in Baudelaire's contemporary, Flaubert—characterizes a significant number of nineteenthcentury realist and naturalist novels. Taking his cue from Foucault's analysis of the eighteenth-century clinical gaze as a new way to see and say what constitutes experience {The Birth of the Clinic), Lawrence Rothfield in Vital Signs suggests that nineteenthcentury fiction incorporates that particular institutionalized discourse as a legitimating form of authority, in which "the doctorpatient relationship stands as an emblem for the less manifest and more fundamental relationship between writer and text" (xvii). Medical power, he writes, is the power to act upon, to control, and ultimately to constitute its intellectual object—the embodied self— without coming into direct contact with it or even being visible to it. (40) The author as clinician is thus enabled to practice a kind of "professional exactitude " upon the pathologically and complexly embodied selves of his characters. The power of the professional in both clinician and novelist lies in information, the control of knowledge. From the intricate play between the internal (and multiple) discursivity of the novel and the discourse of the novelist proper emerges a doubly enhanced sense of authority that is both textual and professional. The novelist's use of medical authority reinforces the writer's literary authority (Rothfield 45, 188-89). Baudelaire's desire to escape outward can be juxtaposed to the medical mode of projecting downward into corporal density. The epistemological imperative to know the secrets of the human body plunges inward into the deepest pathology of all, what Foucault calls "the discursive space of the corpse: the interior revealed" (196). This need for clinical revelation is of course strongly tied to the naturalist experiment in fiction writing . In the...