Baldwin's /Another Country/: Queering the Surface (a work in progress), Part II

Continued from: http://queerviewmirror.blogspot.com/2005/12/baldwins-another-country-queering.html...

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Thinking through Another Country's character's skins -- through the skins of Rufus, Vivaldo, Ida, Cass, Eric, or Yves -- is a way to make queer desire and a queering body, subject, and identity legible. It also makes legible the way the touches in the novel queers the skins, the bodies, the identities, and the social categories that Baldwin imagines and touches with his words. For Ahmed and Stacey, thinking through the skin begins with Didier Anzieu's The Skin Ego, which is a rearticulation of Freud's notion of the bodily ego (which appears in The Id and the Ego), and with Maurice Merleau-Ponty's phenomenological notion of inter-corporeality or inter-embodiment.

First, Anzieu's skin ego refers to the "mental image of which the Ego of the child makes use during the early phases of its development to represent itself as an Ego containing psychic contents, on the basis of its experience of the surface of the body" (as qtd. in Ahmed and Stacey 7). William Cohen, in his essay "Deep Skin," explains that Anzieu's skin ego "develops the psychical topography Freud outlined in The Ego and the Id (1923), at whose center is the proposition that the ego is 'first and foremoest a bodily ego'--which is to say, precisely mapped onto the surface of the body" (73). Anzieu's skin ego possesses three functions: "as a containing, unifying envelope for the Self; as a protective barrier for the psyche; and as a filter of exchanges and a surface of inscription for the first traces, a function which makes representation possible" (as qtd. in Cohen 73). It is through the skin ego that theories of skin seek to conceptualize, problematize, and articulate bodily and identificatory differences and embodiments.

Second, Merleau-Ponty's inter-corporeality emphasizes "embodiment, not only as fleshy and material but also as 'worldly', as being in an intimate and living relationship to the world, which is a world made up of other bodies' (Ahmed and Stacey 5). Merleau-Ponty's model is all about experiences, about interconnected experiences. In othe words, as theorist Gail Weiss explains, "[T]o describe embodiment as intercorporeality is to emphasize that the experience of being embodied is never a private affair, but is always already mediated by our continual interactions with other human and non-human bodies" (as qtd. in Ahmed and Stacey 5). Here is the natural pick-up for theories of thinking through the skin and thinking through surfaces since the skin and body and world are mediated and made knowable through touch. Merleau-Ponty's inter-corporeality is predicated on the reversibility of touch, the skin-on-skinness of bodies: "The handshake too is reversible; I can feel myself touched as well and at the same time as touching" (as qtd. in Ahmed and Stacey 5).

Anzieu, Merleau-Ponty, and Probyn's points of view can be seen as allied, collaborative, and coalitional. They offer the lenses, the archaeological tools, and the curiosity to examine, excavate, and exfoliate the matter of skin, the surface of skin in knowing ourselves and knowing others. Jay Prosser, in his essay "Skin Memories," catches on Anzieu's expression that the surface of the body, the skin, is a sheet or interface saying, "The skin ego is the interface between psyche and body, self and others" (65). At the risk of collapsing Anzieu, Merleau-Ponty, and Probyn, the skin ego and inter-corporeality and surface come together, touch, and (possibly) explode at this notion of interface. A productive reading of Baldwin then would be to see the novel as all about the skin and most importantly about touch as inter-corporeal, as intervening, as queering. Another Country is all about the skin of its characters, all about the touches (or lack thereof) between characters.