CorporealSemiotics:TheBodyoftheText/theTextoftheBody 389
Very early on after the onset of the initial symptoms, Grace turns
away from "the sharp new double-edged blades" (46) of razors she has
bought. During the night, she takes long walks looking for broken
bottles thrown away by other people which she uses to cut herself: "I
made myself an expert in bottles, the different kinds, thicknesses,
shapes, colors; and different ways of breaking them; and the different
vulnerabilities of the body: where to get the most blood, the most
pain"(51). In the grips of her psychosis, she inflicts pain on herself
increasingly often and more and more intensely. Her wounds are, one
might say, the remaining semantic register to come to terms with her
somaticcondition.Onlyinthiswaycansheexperienceherselfashaving
a self, even though it is a self-in-pain: "And thus you know that you
exist; that you have not disappeared. Like scraping your hand along a
brick wall to see the blood: you see the blood, you know you are real"
(34). Pain here is not, as in existentialist thought, agiven, pain here is
activelysought, as an anchor, or a hermeneutic device, reassuring the
suffering individual that she still is somehow "real." And Grace's active
desire for self-inflicted pain at some point reaches an intensity which
makesitimpossibleforhertofunctioninsocialcontexts;sheisreduced
toherpainexperience.Assheputsit:"Themepartispurepain"(67),so
much so, in fact, that Grace does not trust the professional readers of
pain, and especially her analyst, Nakhla. She reads or misreads his
analytic efforts as "a mere glimpse or sight or signal of what I feel,
scratchingofsurfaces"(61).
As the previous quote makes clear, pain in this text is more than a
somaticsymptom:thetextestablishesaveritablesemanticchainofpain
significationin which physical pain (visible, by means of the scars on
Grace'shands)operatesasasignifierofmentalpain(invisible)which,in
schoolbook deconstructivist fashion, remains forever out of reach,
cannot find its eventual representation. Grace seems to be curiously
awareofthisfact:"Iwillneverstopsmashingglass,becauseIwillnever
reach whatever it is I am wanting to reach" (52). While she feels an
insatiable desire to represent her pain, also to herself, Nakhla, as a
professional analyst, must, in turn read the chain of signification
backwards, as it were, and "reach" the origin of this representational
urge.
Picking up the Piecesis thus "about" the situation which Virginia
Woolf alluded to in the quote above, that of an ill person "try[ing] to