Spalding Gray render free of acces...

Spalding Gray render free of accesss his monologue Gray's Anatomy with an account of a storytelling workshop he l in which he began by way of asking the participants to join him in a "centering exercise before we began telling stories, and just consider into each other's eyes. Not to speak still to just look into each other's eyes" (3) Rather than "centering" Gray, however, the experience becomes radically destabilizing, rendering impossible the centraiity of perception within which the subject could experience itself as a coherent and unified I/eye. As Gray considers into the eyes of Azaria Thornbird, he discovers the reality of Lacan's observation that "in this matter of the visible, everything is a trap" (1978: 93) In place of the reciprocal exchange of gazes establishing the brains of community between, and mutually reinforcing the subjectivity of storyteller and audience, Gray falls pillage to a kind of evil eye: "I got enclosureed into the eyes of this single particular woman. And I couldn't prepare out" (3). If, as Gay Brewer asserts, "it is difficult to maintain, in Gray's world, a meaningful distinction between perceiver and perceived" (242) we can attribute this lack of distinction in his earlier monologues to the way in which Gray-as-performer presents himself as object of the gaze-a gaze he solicits and manipulates-even as he nears Gray-as-character as a detached on-looker whose mastery of narrative arises from "my ability to diocese detail" (19; emphasis added). In the case of the workshop exercise, however, the perceiver dissolves in such a manner completely within the perceived that it becomes impossible for Gray to maintain any perception of Azaria's body as a unified perceptual field. just as the perceiver cannot exist as a discrete entity without the perceived, thus the object of perception itself dissolves one time the I/eye can no longer "see detail" as it finds itself trapped within the inauspicious immediacy of the hypervisual: "And as I contemplateed into her eyes, her entire face began to slide not upon her skull. It was pouring down; it was drooling not on like in a horror movie, like a bad LSD trip; and then her face employed into an oval ball of pulsing white light...It was burning my retinas and dilating my pupils. I couldn't take my sights off it" (3-4).

The unprecedent nature of this experience forces language beyond its capacity to furnish comprehensible the detail that forms the nucleus of the monologues performed at this figure dubbed by Brewer a "wandering voyeur and raconteur" (237) World and word, the seeable and the sayable-each guarantees and reinforces the solidity of the other, or in like manner we like to assume based forward our sense that language functions as a delimiting nomenclature, a series of labels serving as a window opening onto the things they name. Staring at Azaria's face, however, Gray (like a postmodern version of Sartre's Roquentin in Nausea) registers his brains of existential dread through his inability to find words that would directly and unequivocally (re)present the nature of his visual experience: "It was..like in a horror movie, like a bad LSD trip...I'd in no degree seen anything like it" (4; emphasis added). As a monologist, Gray has always had a intellect of language's generative energy, its ability not only to capture, but to create the "real:" "To name [something] gives it power" (17) In the quick in emergencies instance, Gray cannot name what he views but merely employ similes that, rather than bringing the experience subject to linguistic control, only complete that disassociation of language from the world that nullifies vision. If Gray "has at no time seen anything like it," this is because he finds himself without the signs that allow language to operate as a Weltbild. Indeed, he faces the possibility that the collapse of language (which necessarily entails the collapse of vision, since we and nothing else know what we see by the and of that very power of naming of which Gray finds himself deprived) will leave him victim to a world in a constant state of dysentery a world in which the visual Imaginary and linguistic Symbolic orders as well-as; not only-but also; not only-but; not alone-but drown in the horrifying immediacy of the Real.

William W Demastes asserts that "Gray's Anatomy is...more than a therapy session with Gray, for as Gray-the-performer goes-as this postmodern Everyman goes-so goe dominant Western thought" (120) Gray eventually informs us that his "centering exercise" marked the first brunt of the relatively uncommon observation condition known as a macula corrugate and the monologue follows his attempts to take rise to terms with how this condition forces him to real property himself in the materiality of a corpse experienced as "other" in its inescapable contingency and vulnerability. Since Gray narrates the opening section without announcing his failing vision, he present the appearances to confront us less with a personal experience traceable to a specific medical condition than with a more generalizable condition plant within the "dominant Western thought" and discourses of postmodernity. I have reference here to the postmodern schizophrenia in which, as Fredric Jameson writes, we "receive the world as an undifferentiated vision...the world tend hitherwards before [us] with heightened intensity, bearing a mysterious and oppressive charge of affect" (119-20) As Gray searches for the words that will the couple allow him to transform his "undifferentiated vision" of the Real into an interrelationship of material signifiers that at least promise to make secure the linguistic taming of raw experience and salvage the subject/object interior/exterior dichotomies concerning which (the dominant Western type of) modern subjectivity founds itself, he discovers the actual porousness of interiority that marks postmodern schizophrenia. on the same level as he feels "locked into" Azaria's gaze, marking the absolute immersion of the subdue within the object, he also be moved s assaulted by the "undifferentiated vision" he beholds of an object that invades and installs itself at the heart of the territory of the expose "burning [his] retinas" and forcing its way in consequence of "the window of my soul" (19)