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CHAPTER 1

The Rhetoric of Sex/The Discourse of Desire

1. Apples and Pears. In the two dozen years between 1488 and 1512, Leonardo da Vinci produced a series of fascinating anatomical drawings that strike the modern viewer as highly realistic and rich with the texture and look of the bodies whose dissections he observed or, no doubt, took part in, as he drew from life — or more accurately, from death — his schemas of the blood vessels, the workings of the heart, the bladder and urinary system, the womb and the fetus inside it. These drawings are clearly and carefully observed, detailed, and rich in layerings and representations of tissue texture — and practically useless to a modern anatomist.

For as we look closer, we find there are no atriums or auricles in his depiction of the human heart; rather, he shows a two-chambered affair with only ventricles; and while here and there we can recognize the aorta and the esophagus, as well as the larger organs, the circulatory system and the alimentary system are depicted in gross form; there are no articulations shown between the stomach and the intestines (mostly absent from his drawings, though not his writings). And in an early anatomic depiction of heterosexual copulation, a "wholly fictitious piece of plumbing" (to use the commentator's term from the 1989 catalogue of the Haywood Gallery da Vinci exhibition in London) runs from the man's penis, bypassing the testicles, to the small of the back, where many during the Italian Renaissance believed "the seed of life" was manufactured. Indeed, hardly any vessel shown in any of Leonardo's anatomic interiors connects up to what, today, we are fairly certain that it does.

And what are we to make of Leonardo's depiction of the womb? For the modern anatomist, the uterus is traditionally described as pear-shaped, small end down, and connected by means of the cervix to the vaginal cavity. The pear-shaped bulge at the upper end is largely a product of the entrance into the uterus of the fallopian tubes, which, left and right, lead back from the outer ends of the ovaries to conduct the egg to the wall of the uterine cavity.

Leonardo's womb, however, whether it is engorged with a "four month old fetus" as in the pen and ink drawing with wash over traces of black and red chalk from 1510–12, "The Fetus in the Womb," or whether it is without child, as it is in the 1507 drawing of pen and ink and wash on washed paper, "The Principal Organs and Vascular and Urino-Genital System of a Woman," is as round as an apple. In "The Fetus in the Womb," while an ovary is indeed shown, only the vascular connection about the base is drawn; there is no connection at all from the business end of the ovaries to the womb proper. The fallopian tubes and all the muscular protuberances of the upper end are omitted as tissuey irrelevancies to the womb's presumed perfect, Renaissance sphericality. Nor is this surprising.

The assumption of the times was that the material relation obtaining between a man and his offspring was that between seed and plant. The relation between a woman and her offspring, however, was that of contiguity, sympathy, resemblance through imposed distortion — of environment to plant. Certainly, people had noticed that a child was as likely to resemble its mother or people in its mother's family as it was to resemble its father or people in its father's family. But the assumption was that paternal resemblances and maternal resemblances were of two different orders. You resembled your father because you were grown from his seed. You resembled your mother, however, because you spent so much time in her womb that you picked up her traits — because her food had been your food, her pains your pains, her sorrows your sorrows, her soul your soul.

In one of the notes on the drawing "The Fetus in the Womb," in da Vinci's famous mirror writing, we find Leonardo's clear expression of the maternal sympathy between the body of the mother and the body of the child:

In the case of the child the heart does not beat and ... breathing is not necessary to it because it receives life and is nourished from the life and food of the mother. And this food nourishes such creatures in just the same way as it does the other parts of the mother, namely the hands feet and other members. And a single soul governs these two bodies, and the desires and fears and pains are common to this creature as to all the other animated members. And from this it proceeds that a thing desired by the mother is often found engraved upon those parts of the child which the mother keeps in herself at the time of such desire and sudden fear kills both mother and child.

We conclude therefore that a single soul governs the two bodies and nourishes the two. (McCurdy 173)

On the same drawing, fascinatingly enough, there is talk of a female seed:

The black races of Ethiopia are not the product of the sun; for if black gets black with child in Scythia, the offspring is black; but if a black gets a white woman with child the offspring is gray. And this shows that the seed of the mother has power in the embryo equally with that of the father. (McCurdy 173)

But from what one knows of the range of Renaissance writings, the maternal seed, for all its presumed equality with the male, was a highly metaphorical one — just as the male "seed" was to become mere metaphor upon discovery of sperm and egg reproduction. But in the common course of things, it was generally not given much credence as long as one was within the country, the family, the race.

Leonardo died in France during the late spring of 1519.

Four years later in 1523 at the tiny town of Modena, Italy, Gabriello Fallopio was born. Soon Fallopio became canon of the Modena cathedral. He studied medicine at Ferrara, then embarked on a world tour, during which he spent a while working with the great Belgian anatomist, Andreis Vesalius. He returned to Ferrara, where he now taught anatomy, having long since switched his name to the Latin form that befit a Renaissance scholar and under which he is more widely known today: Fallopius. Thence he removed to Pisa, and from Pisa, on the installation of the new grand duke of Tuscany, Cosimo I, to Padua, where, besides the chairs of anatomy, surgery, and botany, he was also created superintendent of the new botanical garden. It was Fallopius who discovered the opening of the ovarian tubes of the human female into the abdominal cavity. As well, he named both the vagina (after the Latin for scabbard) and the placenta (after the Greek for pancake). He died in Padua in 1562, a year after publishing (in Venice) his single treatise. The fallopian tubes (which retained a capital F desultorily into the 1830s but lost it by the 1870s) have borne his name ever since.

With Fallopius's anatomy, the spherical womb of Leonardo gave way to the pear-shaped womb we are familiar with from the modern anatomical vision. But what I have tried to dramatize in this little narrative is the force shaping the very sight itself of a visionary as great and as revered as any in our culture, Leonardo da Vinci. It is the till-now-in-our-tale unnamed structuring and structurating force that can go by no better name than "discourse." For what has metamorphosed between Leonardo and Fallopius is the discourse of the body itself — medical discourse, anatomical discourse — and that force seems strong enough to contour what is apparent to the eye of some of the greatest direct observers of our world. We find it at work in Leonardo's anatomy, as we find it at work in Gray's.

2. Interlogue One. I pause here to say that, thanks to my title, I feel somewhat like the man who shouts, "Sex," then continues on to say, "Now that I have your attention ..."

For we have come to the real, i.e., the political, topics of my essay, which are rhetoric and discourse. Sex and desire — while they may now and again provide some of the more dramatic narratives through which we shall endeavor to show how discourse can manifest and problematize itself through rhetoric — will in my essay remain largely occasions for the exploration of rhetoric and discourse themselves.

And though we will return to sex and desire again and again, and even try to plumb them for the secrets of the misfiring of so many relations called "sexual" between men and women, men and men, women and women, we shall stray from them again and again — to areas as diverse as children's picture books and children's games around a fountain in Central Park, to tales told over a calabash of beer in the rainy season of the West African Tiv, to very similar-sounding criticisms of writers as different as Ursula Le Guin and Toni Morrison, to dimly perceived objects in a house in Amherst at the edge of dawn, to the lack of operationalism in AIDS research.

But now we ask: What is this "discourse" that has for so long protruded its rhetorical stumbling block into the jargon-heavy realms of literary theory, either since the Middle Ages or World War II, depending on whose account you read?

Well, here's a tale of a tale.

3. Pictures and Books. I have an eighteen-year-old daughter. And fifteen years ago, when she was three and just beginning to read (and, even more, enjoying being read to), like so many parents of those years I noticed that there were precious few children's picture books with female protagonists. Somehow, with the exception of Frances the Hedgehog, the illustrated bestiary in these books was overwhelmingly male. This struck me as ridiculous as well as unfair — and even, perhaps, dangerous.

Who knew what happened to children whose only identificatory objects resided outside their race, their class, their sex, their gender — not to say their kind?

Indeed, having proved itself powerful enough to stabilize the process by which the nation's schools had been desegregated, an entire discourse from the fifties was already in place with its unpleasant suggestions precisely about the answers to that seemingly rhetorical question.

What was a parent to do with such books when little girl animals were simply not extant?

One book that fell into my hands, back then, was a charming and well-drawn affair, about a little bear called Corduroy. What's more, Corduroy wore a pair of denim Oshkosh overalls — as did my three-year-old on most of her days at playschool. Certainly, there was a point of correspondence. Why couldn't I simply up and change Corduroy's sex in the telling? With white-out and felt-tip pen, I went so far as to remove the he's and change the pronouns to she's — in case Iva's reading had actually progressed further than I suspected.

Then I sat down, with my daughter.

I began the story — and at the first pronoun, Iva twisted around in my lap to declare: "But Daddy, it's a boy bear!"

"I don't think so," I said. "The book says 'she' right there."

"But it's not!" she insisted.

I was sure of my argument. "How do you know it's a boy bear?"

"Because he's got pants on!"

Surely she had fallen into my trap. "But you're wearing pants," I explained. "In fact, you're wearing the same kind of Oshkosh overalls that Corduroy is wearing. And you're a little girl, aren't you?"

"But Daddy," declared my three-year-old in a voice of utmost disdain at my failure to recognize the self-evident, "that's a book!"

During the same three or four months' reading in which I was learning of the rhetorical failure of the discourse of children's picture books to provide an egalitarian array of multigendered protagonists, my daughter, of course, had been learning that discourse itself.

And the fact was, she was right — I was wrong. Corduroy was a boy. No matter how unfair or how pernicious it was or might prove, the discourse of children's books made him a boy. And that discourse was so sedimented that a single instance of rhetorical variation, in 1977, registered not as a new and welcomed variant but, rather, as a mistake self-evident to a three-year-old.

"Well," I said, "let's make Corduroy a 'she.' We'll pretend she's a girl, just like you."

Iva had also learned the discourse of "let's pretend" — surely from the same books that had taught her pants (in books) meant male. She settled back in my lap and seemed satisfied enough with the revised story.

Today, in the shadow of its shelf, Corduroy has dust on its upper edge. But days ago I phoned Iva in the city where she was getting ready to go off to college next year, and — in preparation for this essay — I asked her whether she had any memory of the incident.

No, she didn't. "But once I was looking through some of my old picture books, and I remember finding Corduroy and realizing someone had taken a pen and changed all the he's to she's. I remember wondering why they'd done it."

4. Interlogue Two. Perhaps here is the place to state some principles, then, of discourse. Discourses are plural and are learned, with language, where they function as a particular economic level in the linguistic array. They are not a set of criteria that are to be met or missed by a text. Rather, they lodge inchoately in the processes by which we make a text make sense — by which we register a text well-formed or ill-formed. They are revisable, often from within themselves. The maintenance of a discourse, like the revision of a discourse, always involves some violent rhetorical shift — though the final effects of that violence may well be in some wholly unexpected area of understanding that the discourse affects. And most discourses worth the name have complex methods — starting with simple forgetfulness — for regularly healing themselves across such rhetorical violences. And this is also the place to recall a comment by my fellow science-fiction writer, Ursula Le Guin: Only adults confuse fantasy and reality; children never do.

From this anecdote of a parent, a child, and a picture book, it is not too great a leap to the suggestion that wherever the world appears (in Plato's phrase) "illuminated by the sun of the intelligible," the light that does the illuminating is discourse.

But what our earlier tale of Fallopius and Leonardo reminds us is just how powerful a light that is. For it may make a pear look like an apple — or, indeed, an apple look like a pear.

5. Text and Text. Here are two texts that I think might have been much clarified by the notion of discourse: For here is a young woman, who signs herself J. R. Dunn, writing a critique of a recent article by Ursula Le Guin in a letter to Monad, an informal critical journal devoted to science fiction:

In her opening pages, Le Guin stated that: "... in the European tradition the hero who does great deeds is a white man ... human women were essentially secondary, taking part in the story only as mothers and wives of men, beloved by or the seducers of men, victims of or rescued by men. Women did not initiate action, except passively ... the great deeds were men's deeds."

I don't think I'm mistaken in taking this as the essay's key premise. That being so, it's unnecessary to go on any further: My argument with Le Guin lies right there.

That passage represents the standard feminist historical model in action: that before the modern era women were victims at best, a mute inglorious mass marked by biology, allowed no contribution to any branch of human endeavor, the history of the female sex is a vast boneyard of oppression, suffering and degradation. This interpretation has been institutionalized for two decades and it's late in the day to pick a fight over it. But I believe that it is in error, and those adhering to it are seriously contradicted by the record.

Dunn then goes on to give a catalogue of great women of accomplishment in the West, from warrior queens such as Telesilla of Argos, Zenobia of Palmyra, and Boadicea of Great Britain, on to women cultural figures, such as Sappho, Anna Comnena, Juliana of Norwich, Christine de Pisan, Vittoria Colonna, and Anne Bradstreet, punctuated with a list of the great tragic heroines from Greek drama.

And toward her conclusion (I abridge), Dunn writes:

I'm not suggesting that Le Guin doesn't know any of this. I'm sure she does. It just doesn't connect. I won't speculate on why except to note that ideology tends to restrict critical thinking. This happens to the best of us. It's happened to me....

I accept the proposition that feminism is divided into egalitarian and various radical branches. I strongly support the egalitarian position on grounds of logic and common sense. The other variants, "gender" or "radical" feminism, what have you, I can only reject, seeing the nature of the "facts" they're based on. I object to any contention that the two streams are in any way one and the same.

I'll go on to say I can picture few greater social tragedies than egalitarian feminism collapsing in the wreckage of the weirder varieties.

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Excerpted from "Shorter Views"
by .
Copyright © 1999 Samuel R. Delany.
Excerpted by permission of Wesleyan University Press.
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