Physicality: Desire Objects in Modern Narratives

Author: Brooks
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2005-05-01
Features: A fascinating and profoundly thought-provoking book. — Juliet Mitchell
An extraordinary book is indeed a major achievement. — Fredric Jameson
The Body in Pain—The Making and Unmaking of the Modern Subject primarily interprets the works of writers such as Rousseau, Balzac, and Flaubert, as well as artists like Manet and Gauguin, through a psychoanalytic lens. It elucidates the intricate relationship between the body as a desired object and modern narration, visual representation, and even the very, architecture, and concealment of language itself—without requiring any specialized knowledge. The desire to know the body is a powerful force in storytelling. Peter Brooks argues that modern narration is obsessed with revealing the body to uncover a truth that can only be written in the flesh. In this book, which delves into a wealth of literary and artistic works, Brooks demonstrates how imagination strives to bring the body into language and, in turn, tells stories on the body. From Rousseau, Balzac, Mary Shelley, and Flaubert to George Eliot, Zola, Henry James, and Marguerite Duras, from Manet and Gauguin to Mapplethorpe, writers and artists have been fascinated by the body—the inescapable other of the soul. Brooks is well-versed in psychoanalysis, which enriches his argument: the cognitive imperative—the desire for knowledge—how it guides the plot of novels and our reading. It is through the body of the sexes that symbol and, ultimately, language itself provide the very components that distance us from the body. Yet the mind and language need to reclaim the body as the other primary domain for their definition. Brooks shows why and how the female body became a site for displaying the society's desires, anxieties, and contradictions. He also explains how writers and artists discovered the dynamics and driving forces of storytelling in the female body.