Talking His Way Back to Life: Spalding Gray and the Embodied Voice
[In the following essay, Brewer examines Gray's attempt to integrate the mind and body in his autobiographic monologues. According to Brewer, "The reciprocity between life and stage, audience perception and validation of the 'real,' is crucial to Gray's art and its complexity."]
Spalding Gray's art is the autobiographic monologue, a composite of reality and artifice. His works, most prominently Swimming to Cambodia and Monster in a Box, share adventures achieved in the pursuit of artistic expression and colored by an obsession with the unattainable—life as art, encapsulated and preserved. The vanity of the unceasing voice—neurotic, amusing, revelatory, self-indicting—conflates with the artist's purpose, the eventual formulation, with practice, of perfect autobiographical "moments." In interviews, Gray realizes the illusoriness of such a goal, "the search for paradise and perfect moments and the mistaken idea of paradise as being a place outside of the mind." The achievement of the perfect moment is to be both sought and avoided, the imperfection of contemporary society being a primary impetus for Gray to be wandering voyeur and raconteur. "Perfection" in this context constitutes a release from the restrictions of Gray's hyperactive mind. The integration of mental and physical then approaches a rare spiritual gratification. Gray's artistic process of organizing his life into public performance parallels a movement that his monologic stories generally demonstrate in content, from isolated experimentation to reunion with audience, and finally, in Gray's Anatomy, to the central importance of the body. Despite being a performer ostensibly empowered by "talk," Gray in his latest work reveals the body to be as crucial as the voice to his artistic quest. The body centers the performer and offers itself to be witnessed and adored. Without a foundation in the physical, "perfect moments" sought by the mind/voice cannot be sustained.
In Swimming to Cambodia, the author reacts with paradoxical relief to a barely failed "moment" that would have ended his adventure by fulfilling it. "Oh My God!—almost. About a number nine on my scale of ten for Perfect Moments." If this ambivalently sought "perfection" had been achieved, he "would have had to go home that afternoon." Nevertheless, a coalescence of persistent themes shortly follows; water, baptism, and male initiation all manifest Gray's attraction-repulsion to immersing himself uninhibitedly in the waters:
Suddenly, there was no time and there was no fear and there was no body to bite. There were no longer any outlines. It was just one big ocean. My body had blended with the ocean. And there was just this round, smiling-ear-to-ear pumpkin-head perceiver on top, bobbing up and down. And up the perceiver would go with the waves, then down it would go, and the waves would come up around the perceiver, and it could have been in the middle of the Indian Ocean, because it could see no land.
This passage offers insight into Gray's central preoccupation—the loss of self and submersion of the "I." Here nature is the catalyst, and escape from narcissism, albeit momentarily, marks the event's special quality. Richard McKim notes that the "unstated … irony" of the scene "is that he, like so many of us, finds it easier—and more pleasurable—to experience oneness with the universe than with other people." What is particularly interesting in Gray's case is that he continually defines and grounds himself in the context of others, in being "perceived" more than in "perceiving." The two are integral for him, and inescapable. As soon as the "perfect moment" is achieved, Gray rushes to an audience to validate his experience.
For Gray, this dependence upon audience is crucial to the crafted persona of his monologues. The author makes no distinction between the necessity of audience to his performing stage self and to his living, "real" self: "I tend to disappear when I'm alone. It's hard to explain. It feels like I'm not there, like I'm psychically disappearing, that I don't exist…. I think the eyes actually inflate you, make you larger than you are through their energy. When you lose that, it's almost like withdrawal. No one's seeing you, so you're not seeing the things around you." Gray traces his discovery of the importance of the audience's "eyes" to his long run as Hoss in Sam Shepard's Tooth of Crime. He realized that rather than work with and off of fellow actors, he preferred the relationship between himself and the audience, the bathing glow of uninterrupted attention on his physical body in the theatrical space: "I even found I was more intensely alive during the performance than I was when I wasn't performing…. Everything disappeared in the room and the audience and I were one…. That was the most exciting point for me because it allowed a confrontation with the audience's eyes that I would never forget." Such a response clearly led to the blooming of Gray's monologic style, a theatrical device by which he is "interested in working my way back to life through theatre…. Now I'm trying to use theatre as a tool to come back to reexamine my everyday life as Spalding Gray."
In his seminal essay "Spalding Gray's Swimming to Cambodia and the Evolution of an Ironic Presence," William W. Demastes establishes that Gray indeed "creates a sophisticated theatrical persona, who himself reenacts an awakening onstage designed to sensitize the audience to its own awareness." Demastes usefully divides the "several Spalding Grays" at work into the private citizen "observer-of-events," working in a "nearly reportorial fashion," who turns his results over to Gray the artist; the piece is then "presented by Gray the naive performer, who appears fully incorporated into the system and is unaware of the ironies introduced into his presentation by the artist Gray, who shaped the material reported by the observer Gray." The result of what Demastes sees as this "espionage" is that "while Gray's work may appear supportive of the status quo, it presents a persona who ironically utilizes an empowered naivety to undermine itself and the authority it seems to uphold." For the purposes of discussing Gray's monologues, the "Spalding Gray" referred to is the "naive" raconteur, the "character" Spalding Gray relating his picaresque episodes. The more complex intentions of Spalding Gray the self-conscious artist are behind and implied by the actions of the stage persona, with the audience left to infer the subversions. Demastes offers the distinction that "Gray the performer is immersed; it is the behind-the-scenes artist Gray who is ironically detached and subtly confrontational." This style "charms as it undermines," mesmerizing both self and audience by the development of a community feeling. "Gray observes that we've all been consumed; in fact, he demonstrates it by 'leading' with his own presence." Recently, Gray applied a dance analogy to his stage work: "it's like dancing with a partner. You're reciprocal, you're going back and forth, you're leading sometimes, sometimes they're leading you. It's interactive."
The reciprocity between life and stage, audience perception and validation of the "real," is crucial to Gray's art and its complexity. Gray denies being a writer in any traditional sense, and he has also shied from the term "artist": "First of all, I don't think of myself as a performance artist. Artist I am not. I am a humorist. I don't think many artists have a good sense of humor. I do first person narratives…. The other thing to remember is that I was trained as an actor. Bob Dylan used to say, 'I may look like Robert Frost, but I feel like Jesse James.'" In the tradition of his self-claimed profession, Gray bears the sadness of the clown. The audience may laugh, but he is not allowed to: "I can't tell the difference between the world's sadness and my own." Gray equates the elusive dichotomy between humor and sadness, between his responsibility to his audience and a talent divisive to his own personality, with an essential division in his psyche: "I have an enormous sense of humor in a public space and I can make people laugh. I help people laugh. But I don't laugh a lot myself. I'm rather morbid and have a somewhat depressive nature…. I'm a Gemini. Split. The name Spalding in Old English means a meadow cleft by a spring." Gray acknowledges that the psychological causes of such a split are elusive, perhaps rooted in his severe upbringing and in a discomfort with the physical body often present in his work: "Growing up a Christian Scientist, it took so long for me to realize I had a body. I had to use a mirror to prove I had a body … the mirror is a witness. You become a lover of yourself."
The analogy is obvious: the audience as mirror, the self-reflection seen in hundreds of eyes the amplified reflection of a child in his mother's bedroom. The term "witnessing," moreover, lends a religious implication to theatrical appearance and to the revelation of personal experience: "For whatever reasons, it seems to me that nothing is real until it's witnessed. That's part of why I work in front of audiences…. A terrific need for witness, and when it's not there, I have the witness within me, which is the writer, the writer's eye that watches." This internal eye, for Gray, is the constant monitor and recorder that he knows will transform what it witnesses into monologue and then performance. An elaborate paradox emerges, essential to this continuing voice—the dependence upon an audience to test and validate experience, which in turn heightens the dangers of experience turned directly into product: "I turn things into a story so quickly that I don't feel them…. Often, if someone asks me how I feel I tell them an anecdote rather than the feeling, because I'm so fast, I'm so good at it…. When I'm not in front of an audience, I tend to need one so badly that I get in situations where I just begin to perform." Ironically, Gray turns himself into pure perceiver, a filtering, theatrical machine that produces story from experience, leaving individual human feeling and reaction stranded. Performance is integral to a manic attempt at definiteness, at an impossible wholeness approachable only through public witness, the witnessing itself the very culprit of the experience's susceptibility to disintegration. David Denby senses much of this in his apprehension of the fleeting, frantic quality of Gray's delivery:
In Swimming to Cambodia, the actor and monologuist Spalding Gray talks fast—faster than an evangelist working a country fair, faster than a stand-up comic in Las Vegas, or a late-night-TV appliance salesman, or a patient on an analyst's couch trying to make himself interesting. Gray, who bears a fleeting resemblance to all those American types, gives the impression of someone trying to express everything he's ever felt or thought—at once, before it flies away…. Although he always comes back to himself, he cannot be accused of narcissism and monomania. Before our eyes, his ego shreds.
This sympathetic, inescapable cycle of neurosis renders Gray's talking head—and its preoccupation with self—tolerable, troubling, and endearing. Live audiences are bound up and incriminated in this process, if only unconsciously. The act of artistic expression is, for Gray, inseparable from the notion of composition and revision: "My monologues are not prewritten. They are developed with audiences…. You play phrases like a jazz musician might. It would never be there the first night. There would just be the struggle of telling a story…. The audience doesn't know that. It knows what it sees, and what it sees is not a rewrite, it's what the monologue is at that point." Performance is both validation and purgation, with the audience cast as therapeutic testers, "perceivers" of the artist's ongoing "life" art. Gray is his own most accomplished creation, a tiring commitment that partially explains his attempt to create a more distanced Fictional voice in the novel Impossible Vacation. The impulses to be "perceived" and to be the released "perceiver" are equally necessary to artistic assimilation. Throughout Gray's work he surrenders to the voices of others, often with no more judgment than a flat recollection of events that supplies its own irony. Always Gray is a willing audience, and his willingness suggests, again, the reciprocal attention the audience receives from any speaker. Indeed it is difficult to maintain, in Gray's world, a meaningful distinction between perceiver and perceived. In Swimming to Cambodia, a large portion of the material is derived from reenactments of conversations in which Gray is a passive, secondary participant: with the director Roland Joffe, Jim the coked-up Marine, the U.S. ambassador, Ivan the "devil," the actors and technicians on the set, his girlfriend Renée, and so on, a stream of characters already recorded, placed, selected, and returned to Gray's audience as offered experience. In other words, what Gray often witnesses is his own not-quite passivity, an acute ear and mind enlivened by the circle of its apprehension-performance-response.
The idea and nature of film and its technology constitute another important issue framing Gray and his relationship to his audience. Both Swimming to Cambodia and Monster in a Box were filmed live, although with the oddness that Gray performed chiefly to the lens. "The idea of having a live audience was essential for me." With Monster, he "went out and thanked them for coming and told them that they would be looking at me looking at a camera and I hoped that would be interesting for them. I like working with cameras but I prefer having an audience present." For the audience watching the films, the peripheral "live" audience lends an added dimension of theatrically to the viewing, but as several critics pointed out, film viewers can't get over the experience that the performances aren't quite live to them, that the technology of the camera causes a separation from the performer. For Gray, this gives the film audience a requirement "to make their own film…. You have seen so many movies before that offer a kind of literal representation of reality. When it's not there, there is the motivation for the audience to make self-cinema." In Swimming to Cambodia, the actor relates a similar revelation about his own performance in The Killing Fields. On camera "[i]t didn't matter what I was thinking, so long as I was thinking something. Because everyone looking at the film would be thinking their own thoughts and projecting them on me." As an actor, Gray eschews a psychological approach. Performance is about surrendering to the rhythms of spoken language; audience reaction is imagination and projection. This self-revelation, too, can be pinpointed to the Tooth of Crime production: "The fact that the language was so well constructed allowed me a sort of private self within which to daydream, to have my own associations." The primary triangle of performance—and indeed of energized, sustainable existence—is "the audience movement, my movement, and the rhythms of the language."
Fluidity of speech is paramount for Spalding Gray, and J. Hoberman is correct in the assessment that Gray's frantic delivery is symptomatic of a voice barely controlled, a verbal release valve for a tumultuous psyche: "Like America itself, he's at once affably self-absorbed and eerily detached—he gives the sense of watching his life unreel like a movie"; the monologues' "natural subject is an anxiety seemingly held in check through a combination of pithy detail and cascading language." The stage version of Swimming to Cambodia is severely edited for the eighty-seven-minute Jonathan Demme film. Roughly, the film is focused on the actual filming of The Killing Fields and Gray's performance in the eroticized camera space. In the published monologue, the entire second section takes place after filming is completed, detailing difficulties Gray has both leaving Thailand and reintegrating into America. Within this section the actor says farewell to "Joy … my Pal Pong girlfriend." Neither speaks the other's language, and what Gray has perceived as an easy enjoyment of the body, beyond language, erodes into self-incrimination:
but there were times when I was able to steal a secret glance and then I would see another side of Joy. I would catch her in a slightly drained and more reflective melancholy state, and I realized … how little I knew or wanted to know. Most of all realized that I could never get to it without language….
… And when the stage lights went out and the house lights came up at quarter to one, I could see everyone scatter like cockroaches under fluorescent light. And I could see the bruises like rotten fruit on the girls' legs.
Stranded by silence, the Gray persona can detect only the glossy sheen of the Asian pleasure houses, staged performances of which he is a willing, guilty audience. This scene culminates, on the personal level, the themes of American culpability persistent throughout the monologue, with Gray himself representing the emotional and geographic isolationism for which he indicts his country.
"I am a fan of the spoken word," asserts Gray, and "spoken word" should be interpreted as referring to both his own words and those of others. This issue of language, however, is problematic. On the one hand, the spoken word suggests dialogue, openness, avenues of communication and, perhaps, understanding between peoples. On the other, it leads back to Gray's primary dilemma, the separation from a direct experience with life. The inability to distinguish between play and real and the difficulty of living in the present are bound up with the predominance of a torrential, omnipresent language which cannot be quieted. Near the end of the stage version of Swimming to Cambodia, Gray, summering in the Hamptons, is overcome with regret about his failed "mission" in Thailand. Always he desires the other place, the lost perfection approachable only in memory and language. "And I looked up from the hammock to see Tom Bird, this mighty Vietnam veteran, standing over me saying in a deep strong voice, 'SPALDING! BE HERE NOW!'… And Tom bellowed again, 'SPALDING! BE HERE NOW! Do you think I want to be here?' And suddenly I realized that this strong, silent man was also suffering. He just knew how to shut up about it." Torn between self and other, between experience and recollection, between media and history, between the practical and the exotically spiritual, Spalding Gray's dichotomous, conflicted, neurotic voice cannot be silent. This is both his affliction and his salvation. In the monologue Terrors of Pleasure, Gray recounts auditioning for a television movie, a love story in which he plays an artist. Trying to find his character through his sketching, Gray is chastised for overreliance on a simple prop. Isn't what he truly desires the flesh-and-blood woman in front of him by the fire? His response epitomizes the paradox of his monologic persona and perhaps the "real" man as well: "'Oh, you mean I'm not really an artist?' Because any real artist would rather sketch than make love."
Gray followed Swimming to Cambodia with Monster in a Box (1991), a monologue that deals extensively with the author's anxiety in trying to complete his novel Impossible Vacation. Much of Gray's difficulty with his nineteen-hundred-page "monster" is rooted in the central concern of all his work: the relationship of performer with audience, the blurring of perceiver and perceived. The monologues, "written" with audiences, represent a very different process from the isolated activity of novel writing: "It felt too much as if I were losing my body; why would I want to turn a well-choreographed eyebrow into a word? I was also losing silence: a theatrical pause always gives space for the ineffable, and there's no place for that in print." Gray's point is a cogent one, stressing not only the importance of audience but also the crucial significance of the actor's physical body during performance. Although Gray's "talking head" on-stage offers an ocean of pure language, the importance of the present living body cannot be overstressed. Critic Stanley Kauffmann sees the lack of Gray's physical presence as the primary deficiency of the filmed monologues. Anyone who has witnessed a live Spalding Gray performance would be unlikely to argue with such an assessment. The live shows are funnier and more vivid and moving than the films, and the films more than the printed texts, as if the words are vitiated as they move farther from the performer's body.
Gray anticipates this problem of distance, romantically attempting to incorporate the physical into the creative process: "I write in longhand, because it's the closest to speaking; it feels like an extension of my body, coming from the muscles, like painting." In Monster in a Box, Gray explains beginning the novel as a kind of experiment in regression, an inward-seeking attempt at private therapy: "I thought the monologues were making me too extroverted. I wanted to pull back into my more introverted self and go back in and explore the private self, the shadow self." The result is a novel notably darker in tone than the Spalding Gray of stage, but a text only truly effective to the extent that the well-known monologic voice nevertheless informs one's reading. The title Monster in a Box itself suggests the antagonism between Gray and his venture into fiction. Painful physical limitations imply the experiment's failure: "Then I got down to the writing, and it was awful. I don't know why anyone would want to do it. It stinks. It's like a disease. It's an illness, writing. It steals your body from you. There's no audience. You're alone. My knuckle was swelling up. I had an arthritic knuckle from the pen pressing against it so hard while writing longhand." Even in this situation, the author transferred the written word into the spoken: "I really had no idea what I was writing until I read it aloud for the tape. I saw how I had split myself—I'd become my own audience."
Gray accepts the offer of a Nicaragua fact-finding expedition as a happy interruption: "I would much rather be actually going to Nicaragua than staying in L.A. not being able to write about not being able to go to Provincetown." However, the performer's anxiety is far from ended. Although Monster in a Box assumes the comic picaresque structure that has become Gray's trademark, its particular recurring theme is the actor's separation from audience and the neurosis that ensues from this estrangement. While Swimming to Cambodia finds Gray continually in the company of other actors and artists, Monster in a Box deals more with a persona increasingly isolated by its growing celebrity. The subplots of writing the novel and of life in Hollywood—the movie capital where much of the monologue is set—suggest that these other arts intrude on a life in the theater. As he stares at a blank page or into a lens, where is the audience that Gray has always depended upon as "my receptor, my editor, my therapist"? One reviewer noted that "much of Monster in a Box shows Gray confronting a culture that's just as self-absorbed as he is: Hollywood." A recurring joke in the work is Gray's despairing attempts to locate anyone to interview on-stage who isn't involved in the movie industry. Even an earthquake only momentarily interrupts the universal topic of one's "project." The moment in Swimming to Cambodia when Gray feels invincible in the eroticized space of the camera is recalled by a similar experience in a movie theater: "And what's amazing is that every time I notice a celebrity looking at me, and I'm in their gaze, I'm not afraid of death or dying." If recognition within the gaze is crucial to the author's integrated existence, then this power is heightened within the gaze of the celebrity elite in Hollywood, the world capital of celebrity worship. The image on the film is immortal, and if Gray feels inexplicably safe in the camera's lens, then by extension why not in the refracted gaze of its stars? One reviewer commented, "Gray appears to have identified a 20th Century strain of hubris—the arrogance of pride that, in Greek drama, was a provocation to the gods—peculiar to moviemakers: They feel immortal and infallible on a shoot." For Gray, who finds health and solidity before an audience, what safer haven than the eyes of the movie gods?
"I speak rather than write. My words on a page are like everyone else's, but when you give it voice, it's different. The Spalding Gray of the monologues is a combination of Huckleberry Finn and Candide." As critics have occasionally pointed out, Gray's monologues are essentially novelistic in their narrative emphasis and languid, circular structure, making Gray's venture into proper fiction, while perhaps inevitable, nevertheless unnecessary. The Spalding Gray of the monologues—a creation identified by its author as part fiction and part real, a synthesis of innocence, wit, and adventurousness—suffers through the first half of Monster in a Box without the audience that relieves and defines him. With no pressure released through performance, Gray is overcome with too much raw experience:
By now I'm hysterical and desperate. I come back to the house saying, "Renée, they told me I should find a therapist. I don't know what to do. They're probably right, but I have to interview the L.A. people. I don't have time to find a good therapist. I'd have to look at so many—and the Monster and—K.O.'s outside—and the mothers of the heroes and the martyrs want me to go tell President Reagan—!"
Gray the author is fully aware of his dependence on performance, and the fractured, suffering Gray depicted in Monster in a Box can only be cured by one method. Busy with the "L.A. Other," in which he is forced to move outside of his own neuroses and question others in front of an audience, Gray escapes for the interviews' duration his own introverted fragmentation: "I didn't find a therapist, but I completed the project. And I went and collapsed in front of my dressing room mirror and I thought, now that's interesting. I haven't thought about death or dying for two weeks. Isn't it therapeutic to surround yourself with people weirder than yourself!" Both his mental and physical states are improved, clarifying the notion that it is not merely monologic performance that restores Gray but also the ameliorative effect of dialogue, interaction, and discovery in a theatrical space. Shortly after the interviews, perhaps enabled by them, Gray finds his therapist, a Freudian psychoanalyst comically anachronistic in Los Angeles. Gray recognizes the rightness of "the old slow talking cure" for his hypochondria. The doctor dismisses Gray's physical symptoms—sweating feet, dry mouth—as psychosomatic and suggests to his patient that "your problems have to do with what's in that book. Would you tell me the story of that?" As Gray has already demonstrated to us, writing the novel is a failed therapeutic exercise. In an interview, he has added that "[a]t one point I thought that in order to write my book I'd have to have my therapist in Los Angeles come over and sit in a corner of the room, so he could witness me, as a writer." Telling the novel to an audience is in essence the purpose of Monster in a Box. The monologue addresses Gray's need, if not to "talk" his novel as he does to the doctor, at least to "talk about" the work and thereby complete and validate it with an audience. Apparently, the method works. Dr. Peter announces that Gray is "much better" and "able to relate to me now in a non-performance mode." He clears his patient for the next episodic adventure, a Russian film festival. Gray is ready to assimilate and take notes on more experience.
In Russia, Gray quickly locates an audience, as is always his concern, but this section of the monologue continues to discredit the notion that Gray is primarily dependent upon language. While one might assume that the performer would be at a disadvantage in front of a volatile foreign crowd, an opposite truth emerges. Only the film of Swimming to Cambodia, which loses its Russian translation, is sabotaged by faulty language. "I said, 'Stop! Stop the film, please!' People were walking out in droves, the place was a shambles, everyone was talking. 'Stop! Misha, please tell them to stop. I want to get up and apologize.'" Once Gray locates his audience and is able to initiate a spontaneous live performance, he is seductive and confident within his body: "I thought, maybe I should stand up and show the Russians my body. So I stand up. It's cabaret situation…. I myself would like to just get up and moonwalk, if I could, for the Russian audience—but, I don't know how to moonwalk—or do a body roll from the sixties with a little B. B. King music, you know." The story he finally communicates through his translator Misha is archetypal Gray—"flocking" through the Hermitage in the safety of movie stars and being recognized by a group of American high school students. It is a slapstick treatment of familiar themes: the self-defining empowerment of celebrity, the American worship of flash—literally, with the children's cameras—over art and history, and finally, Gray's compulsion for recognition to validate his presence. "I've been recognized—thank God I've been recognized—for being on the David Letterman show. They are over there asking me, 'What is David Letterman really like?'"
Throughout Monster in a Box, the Gray persona finds, through his need to be physically seen, a hyperreality on the stage, a heightened sense of the "now." Paradoxically, this discovery conflates the present with a realized past, artifice with reality. For Gray, insight happens only in the context of performance. He explains the attraction to his novel's fictional protagonist Brewster North of playing Konstantin, the young writer in Chekhov's The Sea Gull: "he likes the fact that Konstantin gets to shoot himself in the head at the end of every performance and then come back the following night to play himself again." Play, therapy, repetition, rebirth—these are the salve for a dislocated psyche. In the film Clara's Heart, Gray plays a grief counselor signing books. "They want me to sign his name on camera? I won't do it—I won't sell my soul for that price. I'm keeping the book off camera and signing my name across the picture and then handing it out to all the extras, pretending it's my book, finished at last." The problems of "real" life are solved in the camera's eye, and for the duration of performance the actor is cured. He knows who he is.
Gray realizes the therapeutic repetition of performance in his role as the Stage Manager in the Broadway revival of Our Town: "And now here I was going to a funeral—Emily's funeral—eight shows a week and this was giving me a sense of closure around the issue of having missed my mother's funeral." It is appropriate, perhaps inevitable, that a monologue about the necessity of audience and the preferred "reality" of stage ends with a lengthy retelling of Gray's involvement with the Wilder production. Through the play's language, Gray is "swept back to New England where I used to believe in God and eternity and all the things the play is about." This "softening up" that the play causes allows him to purge himself of the novel and to transcend the failure of isolated writing. Gray has been "on-stage" continuously during the last episode, and the self recalled is by far the most peaceful, calm, and integrated to be found in Monster in a Box. Performance is existence: "And as I pull the curtain closed at the end of the play—I'm not acting—I'm crying." Not coincidentally, the closing of the Wilder play marks the conclusion of Gray's monologue, and in turn the "monster" is also quieted. Its protagonist wonders whether he should write his own story or "skip the story and try to take a vacation instead." The peace found on-stage has passed into the fictional world, implying that the best vacation is an escape into the reality of theater.
The importance of the body in Gray's theatrical performances emerges as the primary theme of his most recent monologue, Gray's Anatomy (1993). In this work, the human body, with its imperfections and frailties, literally and thematically takes center stage. Through Gray's discovery of a debilitating eye condition, his mortality is rendered immediate to him. As the author searches for alternative healing, he meditates on his own existential doubts and fears, on his desire for magic over the "real," and on the relationship of his self-consciousness and his language to the failing ability of clear sight. Gray has noted that he wavers "from a very practical, cynical, hard-core view of life and then am drawn towards flighty, more spiritual things…. I am a doubter, and I haven't doubted my doubt yet. But I am curious about ways of thinking, ways of coping. I'm most interested in how someone deals with the fact that at any moment they could disappear forever." These are the conflicting pulls, and the fearful curiosity, that inform Gray's Anatomy.
Gray's attitudes toward neurosis and the unsatisfiable longing for the "other" place isolate the separation between mind and body central to his predicament: "I'm a Freudian to that extent, that I believe culture breeds neurosis…. The way that I would define neurosis—I think really it has to do with not being present. If I think of anything that's neurotic in me it's the inability to be in the place that I'm in when I'm in it, with my body and mind, and that I'm longing for someplace else." Such a separation happens not only in daily life but in the nightly life of theater, where the body is present but the actor's mind casts back to the other place: "That's the shadow side of my work, because my work is recollection…. What I quite simply mean is I mine my neurosis, that's the thing that I'm chipping away at." While the mind is engaged in the mazelike recalling of the previous night's memory, the body remains present and central: "So when I sit down at a table now, all I'm doing is centering myself at the base of my spine to that chair. And I'm moving out of that all the time. I'm coming up. I'm three inches off the chair. My feet are moving, my arms are moving. I'm sweating. It's a physical event for me to tell these stories. They're very animated." In the newest monologue, the author admits he can see only the "internal film of the place I've just left." Such is the "disease" of which he wants to be cured. The prescription he receives from a bemused healer is a drawing of a Balinese icon, a headless man: "His eyes are twinkling in his chest and his nose is in the center of his body. He had no mouth, which I could relate to." The little man is an appropriate companion for Gray—a being without spoken language whose centrality and intelligence originate from the chest. Gray finds himself "embarrassed" and "self-conscious" talking aloud to the drawing. Their relationship is founded on faith, magic, and the body.
Spalding Gray has increasingly focused his work on the physical. Gray's Anatomy, as its title suggests, moves slightly away from Gray's motifs of performance and language except as they contextualize his failing sight and an exploration of doubt realized in the body. In his recollections of Christian Science healing, Gray delineates an upbringing that equated health with the power of language: "Look, when you're dealing with a Christian Science practitioner and you're talking about the disease, you really have to be quite careful not to name it…. because to name it gives it power. You're supposed to refer to it as 'an error.'" Gray contacts a healer, who insists on ambiguous references to the eye problem and to fidelity—no other treatments are allowed. Gray rejects him. "I hung up, realizing why it was I had left Christian Science in the first place." For Gray, despite his superstition and doubts, the "not naming" is impossible. The predominance of language in his self-absorption—and his livelihood—makes "naming" unavoidable and amplifies its danger: "I listen enormously to the spoken word and have a more vivid image from the spoken." Later in the text, a Filipino psychic surgeon again warns of the danger of fixating—a form of internal naming?—on an illness: "Also, if you are thinking of the AIDS all the time, and I'm sure you do, you will get it. You will manifest it through your thought, you see." Gray responds with the story of "the man who was told that if he stirred a pot of water long enough without once thinking of elephants, it would turn into gold." Hypochondria is therefore made real. Sickness originates in the body through the mind. If Gray cannot escape the self-consciousness that may induce his illness, he can nevertheless seek a similarly mystical cure. He considers possible first causes of the eye's injury. Tellingly, all suggestions of cause are mental or psychological rather than physiological. An explosive "tear" of mourning over his mother's suicide? Too much "I" in his novel's first-person? Or as his "New Age friends" suggest, "Well, what is it you don't want to see …?"
Gray realizes that his livelihood is dependent upon his sight and ability to discern the physical specifics of the world: "This is what I totally depend on in order to tell stories. I tell stories about the details of things. If I lost the detail in my right eye, what could I possibly do?" In Monster in a Box, the performer needs an audience; in Gray's Anatomy, the failing body needs an outlet of physical labor. In a bizarre anecdote that culminates in Gray cleaning up debris at a Jewish synagogue, the author is liberated by work that draws him out of the mind's self-concerns. He is "pretending" to be a Bowery bum, "Peter with perfect eyes," and is energized by the character's new identity and strong body: "I'm feeling great. I'm raking up the leaves, I am sweeping up the broken white plastic knives and forks, and paper cups and plates left over from parties, and I'm whipping it up!" He refuses a ride back from Williamsburg and walks "over the Brooklyn Bridge back to the city feeling triumphant! I think, there is something I can do if I lose my sight in my right eye. I can do something other than tell stories!" Repeatedly in the monologue the emphasis is on the present human body, usually Gray's own. When Azaria Thornbird recounts her astral projections, Gray's response is one of physical self-adoration: "Didn't you ever consider making love to yourself? Because, I mean, that's the first thing I would want to do if I found myself leaving my body." Instead of being able to move outside of the body, however, Gray feels trapped within its condition, isolated by the peculiarity of his affliction and his entrance into the "Bermuda Triangle of Health" between fifty and fifty-three years old: "I was coming into it, and I was feeling lonely, because I was the only one I knew with a macula pucker."
The theme of vision in Gray's Anatomy is an effective metaphor for the author's delving into notions of doubt, darkness, uncertainty, and a pervasive chaos. One critic notes Gray's talent for making "grand, inductive leaps to social and moral philosophy from isolated, personal experience … [his] seamless transitions between the ridiculous and the tragic." The comic revelations perpetuated by increasingly arcane healing treatments symbolize the refusal to age gracefully, to adapt to decay, and to acknowledge the whole notion of chaos and fuzziness—that is, uncertainty—that the subject of failing eyesight inevitably produces. Gray is informed by his therapist that "[a]ll things are contingent, and there is also chaos…. In other words … shit happens. Give up on this magical thinking and this airy-fairy Disneyland kind of let's pretend and your Hollywood la-la fantasy, please. Do the right thing. Get the operation." A "joke" throughout the piece is that not only are Gray's psychological explanations for his illness misguided, but that his "condition is idiopathic. Meaning, no known cause."
Gray's Anatomy is one of the author's most universal and timeless pieces. The monologue's themes are two: aging rendered graceless by the fear of meaningless death, and the acceptance of "reality." These may signal the beginnings, at middle age, of maturation beyond the child's world of hope and magic. Gray grasps at every slim chance of faith and ritual—an Indian sweat lodge, palming, a Brazilian healer, a Filipino psychic surgeon—to ward off aging, entropy, and death. These treatments are highly theatrical, with comic yet compelling "performances" by the participants. Nevertheless, they supply no cure to Gray as actor or audience. The palming treatment, which leaves its patient in a self-created and self-imposed darkness, exemplifies his anxiety: "I also realize that the more I look inside, the more I don't see a self to heal. I can't get any sense of such a thing. There's no core, no me. All I see is darkness, which is more and more frightening for me. It feels just like death." Gray acknowledges, employing the appropriated term, "I don't know who my Creator was. I always thought I was idiopathic. You know. No known cause." Shortly afterwards, in the doctor's waiting room, he admits that he has grown "used to this by now, waiting in the fuzz." Even after Gray has exhausted every alternative and undergoes traditional surgery, no miraculous recovery occurs. "After fourteen days, I go into the hospital to have the patch removed. I know this is supposed to be the dramatic part of the film: Will the man see again or not? It's nothing as dramatic as a movie." He sees as if "driving in a rainstorm" or looking through "the bottom of an empty Coke bottle." He has chosen a solution free of magic, but the results are "not great. Things are less distorted, but they are really blurry." That is as good as he can expect "it"—the eye, the life, the doubt—to get; the operation brings neither crippling disaster nor clarity and true resolution.
The complementary subplot to the play's subject of physical isolation is the engagement of Gray and his long-time companion Renée. Her practical reason for wanting commitment is to assure access to Gray as he grows older: "you're going to get sicker a lot more and you'll be in the hospital again. I think it's time we got married." The impending marriage centers the monologue and its concerns of mortality, adult responsibility, and self-doubt. The movement from boyfriend and girlfriend to husband and wife—"It sounds so serious. It sounds so biblical, so Old Testament"—is a difficult semantic leap for the fifty-year-old man, one which epitomizes the journey from magic to reality and from childhood to maturity, a journey not fully desired. When the topic of marriage is initially broached, Gray gets "fuzzy" trying to think about it, linking the subject with vision. Not until he has had the eye surgery is he able to agree to the reasonableness of the union. The two acts represent a necessary movement toward acceptance of mortality and the limitations of human life: "I begin to realize that there are tricks in the world, and there's magic in the world. But there's also reality. And I have to begin to cope with the fact that I'm a little cockeyed…. But I don't have a whole lot of time to dwell on it. Because Renée—who is over to my right—wants to get married." His fiancée is aligned with the right, the right eye, the blurry, cockeyed quality that Gray begins to recognize as life.
As the wedding day approaches and Gray's anxiety predictably escalates, he turns a final time to the body to alleviate the tension of his overactive mind: "The one thing that kept me sane during that time was bodysurfing. I love to bodysurf, particularly when the water's cold; it really grounds me and wakes me up at the same time. I was in the water bodysurfing every day." This activity culminates in the play's hilarious and poignant climax, in which Gray, caught in a "sea puss" that threatens to drown him, turns his cry for physical survival into a wail of human angst: "HELLLLLLLLLLLLLP! I'M DROWNING! HELP, I'M GETTING MARRIED! HELP, I'M GROWING OLD! HELP, I'M GOING BALD! HELP, I'M GOING BLIND! HELP, I'M GOING TO DIE! HELP, I'M GOING TO LEAVE THIS EARTH FOREVER ONE DAY! HELLLLLLLLLLLP!" Gray is the hyped-up Everyman, a Prufrock drowning in a sea of his own hysteria, fear, and regret. The scene parodies the "perfect moment" from Swimming to Cambodia. The men who rescue Gray recognize his bobbing head from the earlier movie poster and turn the near-tragedy into a photo opportunity. One senses that what Gray identifies as the center of his neurosis, the inability of mind and body to be integrated in the present, has somehow been addressed. He has been "rescued" from the danger of a disintegration that he has pursued and cultivated in earlier works. The body, preeminent throughout Gray's Anatomy, here returns as a symbol of the entire person's inadequacy and uncertainty, suggesting a moment of terrified unity with the mind.
Gray goes through with the marriage, indulging in pleasures which may have contributed to his eye problems: "We run down to the sea together to look out, and then we went back to the house to celebrate. I drank vodka and I drank white wine and I ate big fish. I ate steamed vegetables and I ate wedding cake. I drank coffee and I smoked a cigar." Despite the context in which the marriage takes places—the irreparable blurring of Gray's vision, the hurricane damage that nearly postpones the wedding—one can't help but notice that Gray's Anatomy concludes on a note of union and qualified optimism. It is perhaps Gray's funniest work, despite its theme, and ultimately may be his most life-embracing. Despite the limitations of body and language, despite the continual disappointments of the ideal versus the real, life is livable and can be enjoyed. "And I ate and I drank and I smoked … everything that could make me blind." The pleasures which destroy us also sustain us; death is part of living. Gray implies that in moving over the threshold, to traditional medicine and traditional union, he has faced and accepted this central paradox. He brings the drawing of the Balinese man down to the beach wedding "to be a witness"; there is after all magic in the world to offset reality, and finally the body and mind will not be separated.
Get Ahead with eNotes
Start your 48-hour free trial to access everything you need to rise to the top of the class. Enjoy expert answers and study guides ad-free and take your learning to the next level.
Already a member? Log in here.