Articulating breath: Writing Charcot’s hysteric with performance writing

Abstract

The overlap between the visual and textual in practice research provides an opportunity to explore ways of presenting knowledge through performance writing. The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate how a performance writing practice can be incorporated into and shape research writing. This text uses descriptions of Jean-Martin Charcot’s photographic documentation, medical–historical documents and the deconstruction thereof to create a piece that demonstrates performance writing as a means to bridging practice research and research writing.

Keywords

Art as research articulation breath hysteria performance writing written bodies

Part one

The challenge that my participation in the symposium ‘Practice Makes Perfect’ at Swansea Metropolitan University in September 2012 posed was to demonstrate how performance writing performs and conveys research within an academic setting. Creating my performance through a reading of the works of Didi-Huberman (1982, 2003), Bronfen (1998) and Hustvedt (2011), my aim was not to present a new reading of the history of hysteria, Jean-Martin Charcot’s medical practices or of the life of Louise Augustine Gleizes (Augustine), one of Charcot’s patients, but rather to find a new way of experiencing the material. Utilising the wealth of written observations and photography documenting Augustine’s experience – and performance – as Charcot’s most photographed hysteric patient, I created articulations of the text through performance writing.

The use of the term ‘performance writing’ in this piece refers to an artistic practice as described by Allsopp (1999: 78): ‘the field of performance writing defines writing in its widest sense as the investigation of the performance of language’. Allsopp refers to performance writing in terms of space, calling it a ‘field’. Bergvall (1996: 5) defines it as ‘an area of joint practical and critical investigation of the many uses writing and language are being put to and push themselves into’. The way that both writers choose to write performance writing, as an intersection, make it both spatial and active. Bergvall describes performance writing as inclusive and incorporating every aspect of the writing-making process as part of the work:

Any treatment, any font, any blank, any punctuation, any intonation, any choice of materials, any blob, however seemingly peripheral to the work, is part of the work, carries it, opens it up, closes it in, determines it. This is its performance. (Bergvall, 1996: 6)

Allsopp and Bergvall describe writing as an active, not passive, process; a doing or a making. This addresses the point of failure in most practice research methodologies: although the practice is active, the writing is passive. This fractures the research process into artistic practice (making) and critical analysis (writing), a breach that Macleod and Holdridge (2004) attempt to resolve in ‘The Doctorate in Fine Art: The Importance of Exemplars to the Research Culture’. Advocating a reflexive research process, Macleod and Holdridge (2004: 157) attest that the ‘relationship between the two can be extremely productive … it is about the tension between them, as each visits and revisits the other and constantly revises, rethinks and (re)presents each to the other’. However, Macleod and Holdridge still operate from the position that artistic practice and writing are separate. I propose that performance writing offers a solution to this problem when it is employed as both the mode of knowledge-making (practice) and the mode by which that knowledge is conveyed (writing). Rather than rehabilitating the practice into writing, performance writing allows practice to incorporate writing and to expand the ways in which academic research is communicated.

This piece was originally written for performance. It was written to be accompanied by a series of slides (10) showing writing by Octave Mirbeau and Jean-Martin Charcot and others in negative (white text on a black screen). The writing shifted from third person descriptions of a female body in an ecstatic, inarticulate state to (re)written descriptions of photographs taken by Bourneville and Régnard (1877, 1878) for Iconographie photographique de la Salpêtrière vol. II and III, and concluded with an excerpt of Augustine’s speech. As I rewrote my writing, reading these writings, I began to read the piece images in contrast to the single photograph I had chosen to work with: Hystero Epilepsie, Contracture, Planche XXIX [Contracture] (Bourneville and Régnard, 1877 in Didi-Huberman, 1982: 248). Writing, rewriting, layering projected writing over the spoken and reading writing as image — these are all ways of questioning the way in which writing is used and can be used within practice research.

Writing this paper, now, I have to alter my performance for the page. In my performance, the slides of text were projected as I spoke, reading from my writing, and the audience reading that writing. Having rewritten the descriptions I projected, I read these new descriptions simultaneously, playing with the articulations taking place in Charcot’s medical literature. Articulation refers to the act of dismantling a carcass into joints – and the setting or joining of distinct parts. Distinguishing thoughts and separating concepts, articulation describes the dual-natured process of writing: assembling and disassembling the body of text. Using articulation, contracture and exposure as ways of engaging with the text, the final slides depicted a gradual rewriting of a narrative that had been written over and an approaching to narrative defined by its own inarticulacy.

Part two

With this paper, now, below, I include a rewritten portion of the original piece, keeping the division between the spoken text and projected text distinct by presenting the former in italic and the latter indented. This unfortunately only allows for a linear reading of the various texts and with that in mind, I have broken up the original length of the contrasting texts to create more oscillation between the two.

All her muscles tightened, swelled and contracted frightfully … An expression of horrible suffering, all the more horrible for being silent, masked her face … A little froth foamed at her lips … We held her wrists, to prevent her from belabouring her face with her nails … In the last convulsion her body was arched from her heels to her neck and taut skin quivered. Then, little by little the crisis abated. Her muscles relaxed and she fell back exhausted on the bed, her eyes full of tears. (Mirbeau, 1990 [1899]: 117--118)

‘She’ does not make a sound. No air, no breath, no noise. How do you write an inarticulate state like this? What would it look like? How would it sound? Maybe inarticulate writing would just be indistinct. Mirbeau ends his 19th century novel with his female antagonist, Clara, in the throes of a hysteric fit. The fit, marked by breathlessness and inarticulacy, stands in for speech and is an expression of her excessive and consequently perverted sexuality. His depiction is based on the research and work of Jean-Martin Charcot.

Beginning of the Attack. Breathing is irregular, the oppression is obvious, words are broken off; feeling that the attack is immanent … tries to restrain herself: ‘It’s … hard … to breathe … I … ’ There are heaves in the belly; an intermittent chewing motion; the nostrils flex, the forehead frowns, the eyelids flutter rapidly, the gaze fixes, the pupils dilate, the eyes roll upwards; the patient has lost consciousness. (Bourneville and Régnard, 1877 in Didi-Huberman, 1982: 114)

Jean-Martin Charcot, a noted physician and later director of the Salpêtrière Hospital who established neurology as a medical field, is most predominately linked to the study of hysteria in the 19th century. Charcot catalogued his patients’ identities through methodical documentation of their bodies and performances, separating his patients into sets and subsets of physical manifestations and behaviours. He mediated their speech through transcriptions and controlling the means by which his patients were allowed to articulate their experience to a larger audience.

Debut D’une Attaque, Cri, Planche XXVIII. Onset of an Attack. The cry. Or, she should be crying but her tongue protrudes so far out of her mouth that the only sound she could make would be a gagging. She is lying on a bed, her body propped up against white pillows and her white gown blends into the white sheets. She hugs her body with her arms. Her eyes are closed. If I hold my finger over her tongue, she could be sleeping. Something is supposed to be coming, but it feels like that something has already happened. (Bourneville and Régnard, 1877 in Didi-Huberman, 1982: 260)

Charcot’s body of work, specifically the photographic studies of hysteric states, depicts artistic and erotically ambiguous representations of medical conditions. Using images to portray illness, Charcot created a document that was ‘universally legible’ (Goetz, 1991: 421-425). The reproduction of these photographs was accompanied by lengthy descriptions of what was depicted, fixing a specific meaning or purpose to often ambiguous photographs. The visually rich language and theatrical presentations that he used to record and depict hysteria ultimately undermined the scientific rigour of his research and his (posthumous) standing within the medical community.

Here, I would have shown the photograph, Contracture. Contracture was shown in positive, unlike the projected texts. It was the only photograph shown during the performance. Each new slide was projected as a negative to the audience, designed to create a series of exposures culminating in an afterimage, a collage of articulations.

The photograph, Contracture, is of Louise Augustine Gleizes (Augustine), a young woman who entered La Salpêtrière Hospital at the age of 14 in 1875. Her history is marked by sexual abuse and her rape by her employer at the age of 13 subsequently led to a series of increasingly violent and frequent convulsions culminating in her commitment to La Salpêtrière (Hustvedt, 2011: 151). Augustine was prolifically documented during her stay at Salpetriere by the photographer Paul Régnard who was employed by Charcot to create an album of medical documentation. As a patient and resident of La Salpêtrière, she discovered early on in her stay that her participation in Régnard’s photographic documentation could win her privileges.

The photograph remains. Augustine wears an inscrutable expression and a white gown.

Being young and attractive, Régnard included many photographs of Augustine in the Iconographie photographique de la Salpêtrière, vol. II but it was her unique ability to hold dramatic and physically demanding ‘hysteric’ poses for long periods of time that led to her continued and frequent employ. This ability allowed Régnard to obtain comparatively consistent results, despite working with collodion, a notoriously fickle photographic process that also demanded extremely long sittings. This photograph was published in the 2nd volume of Iconographie photographique de la Salpêtrière and is from a wet-plate (collodion) negative. The term in the title, Contracture, is used to describe muscles in an extended state of spasm; it describes a body that refuses.

Hystero Epilepsie, Contracture, Planche XXIX. The woman in the photograph wears very little. She is not wearing a gown, or maybe it is a gown, but it does not cover her body. She bares the shoulder facing the camera. She wears a sleeve over the shoulder away from us. The one we are not meant to see? Her legs are bare. The gown (it is a gown) is pulled up. She pulled it up? No, the photographer pulled it up. She is unaware—the gown is contracted. The leg closest to us stretches out straight, showing us its whiteness and form. The other leg bends at the knee. If you were to change the angle, ever so slightly, you would get the smallest glimpse. Do you think she knows it? Her head is cocked to say that she knows it. (Bourneville and Régnard, 1877 in Didi-Huberman, 1982: 248)

Barthes (1980: 8) describes a certain resistance on the part of the photograph ‘to any reductive system’. He writes that photographs deny total analysis by any one discourse or by any single linguistic form of analysis. Knowledge about the subject, the circumstances surrounding the photograph as well as subjective experience will always inform the viewing of an image. With the collodion photograph, the exposure times were extremely long – often as much as 10 minutes – and the sluggish response of the suspended particles would often result in hazy or blurred images. Rather than depicting a moment, a collodion negative would often be a collated articulation of individual moments over a period of time – effectively not one image, but many possible images.

Here, the photograph is projected once again, filling the screen to the degree that the entirety of the image is only possible to view in sections. The slides flash to expose the segmented body, showing first the head, then the torso, the legs and finally returning back to the face.

Barthes (1980: 26–27) used the term punctum, ‘that accident which pricks me (but also bruises me, is poignant to me)’ to describe elements in a photograph that make it distinct in the eyes of the viewer. Punctum interrupts the symbolic and literal meaning of a specific photograph and creates a point of articulation. Those are the points to which we return to try once again to write what it is we are seeing.

all joints are rigid; the fore-arm is in exaggerated pronation, the fingers are energetically flexed on the palm of the hand, the thumb is placed between the ring finger and the middle finger … The pain in the right leg remains intense and the contracture of the limbs on the right is as total as possible. (Bourneville and Régnard, 1877 in Didi-Huberman, 1982: 246)

Charcot wrote over and in the place of the speech of his patients, seemingly usurping their capability to add to the discourse being formed around their bodies (Baer, 2002: 34). In some photographs the face is entirely obscured or even absent, showing only contorted limbs attached to a headless body. Charcot’s studies lack air. They show bodies caught in a state of tension, holding their breath, straining their limbs, contracted. We see physical states of inarticulation, contracted bodies written into a medical discourse. The writings accompanying Régnard’s photography invite rewriting, just as Charcot’s writings have been rewritten through contemporary scholars. Contracture invites articulation as a process rather than a single utterance, title or paragraph: a making distinct of the many small parts that comprise it.

Everything about her, moreover, announces the hysteric. The care she puts in her toilet, the arrangement of her hair, the ribbons which she is so happy to don. The need for ornaments is so keen that if in the course of an attack there is a remission, she takes advantage of it to attach a ribbon to her garment; this distracts her and gives her pleasure: ‘When I am bored,’ she says, ‘all I have to do is make a red knot and look at it.’ It goes without saying that the sight of men is agreeable to her, that she likes to be seen and wants to be coddled. (Bourneville and Régnard, 1877 in Didi-Huberman, 1982: 65)

Everything about her announces the hysteric. The care she puts in her toilet, the arrangement of her hair, the ribbons which she is so happy to don. The need for ornaments is so keen that if in the course of an attack there is a remission, she takes advantage of it to attach a ribbon to her garment; this distracts her and gives her pleasure: she says. It goes without saying. She goes without saying.

Everything about her the hysteric. The care she puts in her toilet, the arrangement of her hair, the ribbons which she is . The need is so keen that if in the course of an attack there is a remission, she of it to attach a ribbon to her garment; this her ‘When I am bored,’ she says, It goes without saying , that she likes to be and wants.

‘I confide secrets in you … Words fade, writing remains … Listen, all that is turnstiles, that aren’t worth even one of them … That means nothing at all … The thing is fixed, in a word … I think you’re trying to worm it out of me … Insist as you will, but I say no.’

I confide secrets in you … Words fade, writing remains … Listen, all that is turnstiles, that aren’t worth even one of them … That means nothing at all … The thing is fixed, in a word … I think you’re trying to worm it out of me … Insist as you will, but I say no (Bourneville and Régnard, 1877 in Didi-Huberman, 1982: 83).

The performance ended with a reading of a transcription of speech attributed to Augustine that was simultaneously projected on the screen. She is, in the text, aware of the presumed permanence of writing and doubts the power of speech. However, there is a clear negation of every ‘fixed’ thing when she says ‘no’. Ending the performance with this single articulation allows it to permeate the entirety of the discourse – the ‘no’ projected on the screen becomes the punctum.

Charcot’s writing tries to articulate the experience of individuals who are defined by their inarticulacy, an aim that is adopted by subsequent works by Showalter (1998), Didi-Huberman (1982, 2003), Bronfen (1998), Hustvedt (2011) and others. These works revisit available documentation, critiquing Charcot’s work and methods as they try to rearticulate the experience of the hysteric patient. Hustvedt in particular posits that Augustine may well have utilised her modelling to communicate her experiences. Writing is central to this examination: a reworking of text often being the sole means by which these various articulations are revisited. However, as much as we attempt to bring the hysteric patient to articulation, this is not a project at which we can truly succeed because of the resistance on the part of the subject. As Augustine states, ‘The thing is fixed, in a word … I think you’re trying to worm it out of me … Insist as you will, but I say no’ (Bourneville and Régnard, 1877 in Didi-Huberman, 1982: 83).

This site of failure is what equally concerns artistic research. While there are many possible points of articulation, the notion of articulacy is complicated when dealing with artistic research because it produces forms of knowledge that are not always best communicated (and certainly not experienced) through writing. Rather than trapping artistic research within a passive subject position not unlike that of the hysteric patient – where many write about [her] but no one can ever write for [her] – performance writing allows us to couple traditional forms of knowledge-communication with a process of knowledge-making. Although it may not be possible to bridge the gap between all forms of artistic research and critical analysis, performance writing indicates one way wherein the individual parts that comprise practice research can be allowed to merge into a whole.

Footnotes

Author biography

Jessica Worden is an artist who lives and works in London. She is currently undertaking a practice-based PhD, focusing on breathlessness, at Brunel University.

References

Allsopp

(1999) Performance writing. PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art 21(1): 76–80.

Baer

(2002) Spectral Evidence: The Photography of Trauma, London: MIT Press.

Barthes

(1980) Camera Lucida, trans, Howard R. London: Vintage Books.

Bergvall C (1996) What do we mean by performance writing? In: The 1st symposium of performance writing, Dartington College of Arts, Devon, England, 12 April, pp.1--8. Available at: http://www.carolinebergvall.com/content/text/BERGVALL-KEYNOTE.pdf (accessed 28 April 2009).

Bourneville D and Régnard P (1877) Iconographie photographique de la Salpêtrière vol. II. Paris: Progrès Médical. Excerpt in: Didi-Huberman G (1982, 2003) Invention of Hysteria, trans. Hertz A. London: MIT Press.

Bourneville D and Régnard P (1878) Iconographie photographique de la Salpêtrière vol. III. Paris: Delahaye & Lecroisnier. Excerpt in: Didi-Huberman, G (1982, 2003) Invention of Hysteria, trans. Hertz A. London: MIT Press.

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