Live Experience, Embodied Knowledge

Megan Arkenberg and Aaron Benedetti

In her discussion of Civil War battle reenactment, Rebecca Schneider suggests that historical reenactment uses the body as both a medium for inquiry and a site for knowledge.  In the process of reenactment, some participants believe that

if they repeat an event just so, getting the details as close as possible to fidelity, they will have touched time and time will have recurred.  Thus, “enthusiasts” play across their bodies particulars of “what really happened” gleaned from archival “evidence” … .  But they also engage in this activity as a way of accessing what they feel the documentary evidence on which they rely misses—that is, live experience.  (10)

Historical events are re/performed through and with the body, and the knowledge produced by this exercise (“live experience”) concerns the bodily sensations that escape documentation in traditional, archival history.

In “Ghosts, Cowboys,” the narrator, Claire, similarly privileges the body as a site of historical knowledge.  She deems “inadequate” the knowledge available through historical documents such as “a book, a diary, a newspaper, a coroner’s report” (176–7) because it cannot provide access to certain past experiences of embodiment and affect:

I can tell you the shape of the stain left by H. T. P. Comstock’s brain matter on the wooden walls of his cabin, but not whether he tasted the sour of the curse in his mouth just before he pulled the trigger.  I can tell you the backwards slant of Himmel Green’s left-handed cursive but not whether Leo loved him back.  I can tell you of the silver gleam of Helen Spahn’s tumors but not whether she felt them growing inside her.  …  Everything I can say about what it means to lose, what it means to do without, the inadequate weight of the past, you already know.  (177)

History, for Claire, is located simultaneously in observable imprints of past events—the stain, the handwriting, the appearance of tumors under a microscope—and in what historical figures “felt” or sensed, which Schneider calls live experience.  Claire’s formulation, history possesses physicality and tangible “weight,” but the weight of her particular history is “inadequate” because it lacks, or perhaps because she lacks access to, these affective and embodied knowledges.

Interestingly, when directly questioned about this affective past that she cannot access—“Tell me about your father” (176)—Claire answers with a description of a seemingly unrelated sensory (bodily) experience, that of smelling “the heavy earth scent after a desert rain” (177).  This signals a shift in Claire’s orientation toward embodiment’s relationship to history.  Embodiment not only provides a medium for historical knowledge, but also an immediate experience (bodily and affective) through which Claire negotiates her relationship to history.

This negotiation becomes manifest in the final scene of the story, where it is performed through the act of eating.  When Claire offers a bite of a hot dog to her half-sister, this shared experience of eating becomes a vehicle for the mutual acknowledgement of their affinity:  Razor Blade Baby responds, “I could be your sister” (179).  The sisters enact a relationship that has until this point existed only as conjecture from historical documentation.  Claire describes this ­­­­­­­enactment metaphorically as “carry[ing] that weight [of history]” and “paint[ing] over the past” (179).  Painting over the past is both a form of erasure, such as the erasure of a historical document, and a resurfacing, the addition of new layers to history—layers that can be understood as embodied sensation, “live experience.”  If the body, for Claire, provides both a privileged locus of knowledge and a medium for inquiry, it is also a medium for living with the “inadequate weight” of history.  Can we generalize from this reading to argue that embodied experiences that are not reenactments (in the strictest sense of this term) still constitute responses to history?

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