Arnold Weinstein - A Scream Goes Through The House (15 page)

Ishmael holding Alexander.

iological sense?—caresses his flesh, and tries to ease his burden of hatred and rage.

Now the Hamlet project reaches its full pitch, as Ishmael taps into Alexander's fierce desire for revenge, and we begin to see that release is not only possible but inevitable. But whereas Shakespeare requires swords and cadavers, it all goes much faster in Bergman, as if revenge were part of the information highway, a click of the button away, and powerful feelings could achieve the immediacy and deadly accuracy of electronic currents. Ishmael midwifes Alexander's hatred, even as the boy resists and tries to keep it in, and the delivery is enunciated in terms that govern this book: "The doors are to be thrown open—a scream is to go through the house" (200).

What doors are these? Those of the bishop's quarters, to be sure, but also, one feels, those of the human subject who is now dropping his load, firing his shot, projecting his violence outward, like a guided missile, onto Edvard, who has received the fatal visit of his aunt in flames. But this fire is not to go out, and one even thinks of the footage we have

seen of planes opening their bomb compartments, of rockets leaving their launchers. As we hear Ishmael's words, we also hear a scream. At first one thinks it to be that of the burning aunt. But, like the doors, it too is becoming symbolic, generic, echoing. We are entitled to think laterally here, to remember Munch's bloodred sky that is convulsed by an unending shriek, to recall Blake's soldier's muffled sigh that is also unending, that ultimately flows in blood down palace walls.

In fact we have heard this scream once before. Earlier. This is Em-ilie's voice, and the mind doubles back to an earlier crisis: Alexander, asleep, is awakened by muffled screams, wakes up Fanny, makes his way through the dark Ekdal house, opens door upon door, and comes to the final door, which opens only partway to frame the culminating vision of Oscar the father lying dead on the bed, center frame, and the keening, screaming figure of Emilie, who moves left to right, right to left across the scene, showing Alexander and us the awful mystery and mobility of death, its reality as hieratic spectacle and shrieking voice. All the screams now fuse together: the flaming aunt, the grieving Emilie, the shrieking Isak. That is the charged, resonant noise we hear as Ishmael lightens Alexander's load, liberates his hatred into winged instrument.

And it flies. With consummate craft, Bergman cuts back and forth, between Ishmael "delivering" Alexander, on the one hand, and its target, Edvard, fatally pursued by his sick, now burning, incandescent aunt, on the other. Film becomes magic here, illuminates the flux that is reality (because this systematic splicing is the very logic of Bergman's story), and writes large for us the shocking extension of human feeling. Alexander strikes Edvard as a rocket would, causing him to burn to death, and the filmic cutting initiates us into the spectacle of fateful linkage. This is Hamlet's revenge, but it is also a new human geography, in which the boundaries of self are erased, and the currents of feeling emerge in all their horrible force.

Alexander's murder of Edvard constitutes the purest example of the scream that goes through the house, the most perfect embodiment of

the artist's rival universe that is now ordered entirely by the power of feeling. We may well decide that there is little to celebrate in this view of the reach of lethal emotions. We have long been taught that feeling is dangerous only privately, when inside: it gnaws within, eats us up, can cause dysfunction, cancer, or simple misery. But the unstated corollary has always been: feeling is invisible and inoperative in the public world, the phenomenal world. My pain may be the basic fact of my life, but it is doomed to be a fiction in yours. This book is written in full awareness that most of us subscribe to this view: that pain is considered ultimately incommunicable and unsharable. And because we believe that, our pain islands us, makes of our life a form of exile. All who have been in emotional pain, or very sick, or even a little sick, know this. The expressions to be seen on the faces of the suffering and the ill, whether in hospitals or in our memories, bear this out.

Here are exactly the reasons why I believe the views of feeling and pain put forth by art—and embodied in Blake, Baldwin, O'Neill, Munch, and Bergman—demand our attention. They help us to a radically different picture of our situation and our resources. Our bodies and our emotions neither begin nor end where we think they do. Our gut feeling that we are real, while others are ghosts—a gut feeling rarely acknowledged—may be egregiously wrong. Above all, our belief that our own hurt is private, fated to be our individual reality but no one else's, that conviction is challenged by art. Reality, art suggests, may actually be communal, networked. Blake's poem implies that the map of London is flawed, that the Thames (and, indeed, the City) cannot be chartered, that the victims of the ideological order—the poor, the exploited—are not only a community, but also the luminous and deafening agents of counterattack, trafficking in blood that runs down palace walls and apocalyptic revenge in the form of the "Marriage hearse."

Baldwin celebrates the immense and
homing
power of the blues, so that Sonny's dirge reverses the outcome of the Humpty-Dumpty story of human life (the center cannot hold, we fall apart, we are alienated

from one another) by enabling the players actually to assemble the broken parts, to put it all back together again, via the power of feeling, as conveyed by the blues.

O'Neill records the symphony of the family as well as the cacophony of people living together over time, discovering ever more sharply and richly how intertwined they are, including their ghosts from past generations, how no single piece of any of them stands alone. His play stages our embeddedness in one another.

Munch actually illuminates the amazing reach and dimensionality of our feelings, our affective career—desire, anxiety, fear, sickness, dying— which is social and relational to the core. His paintings position us in shocking landscapes and postures, and his blank faces are almost unbearably eloquent about the pain and turmoil within.

These eruptive tidings are at once the flow that carries us, and the shapers of our life story. We waltz (or crawl) through our lives, keyed to a thin narrative of reason and surface truth—one person, one body— that is beggared and exploded by the testimony of art. Bergman exploits ever more brilliantly over his career the magic lantern that he loved as a child, so as to make visible to an audience the tentacular reach of feeling, to convey the depth, truth, and power of our experiential lives. Bergman closes my discussion of the scream that goes through the house, because in his work we finally see and hear that long trajectory that charts the length and breadth, the height and depth of feeling. The new dispensation brought into view by these works of art is utterly at odds with the post-Enlightenment worldview that informs modern life in the West, and many may find it fanciful, mad. But for those who are sick or in pain, those who know the law of sentience and the power of feeling, these tidings may be of value.

What value? you may ask. How can a body of film or paintings or literature alter what we know of our givens? especially our bodily givens? So much of the art under discussion here is about misery, suffering, human pain. Don't we have enough of that in the flesh, without signing on for more of it in art?

The greatest unhappiness that sickness produces is the
shrinkage
it occasions in our lives. We find ourselves confined to sickroom, to bed, to reduced function, to an intractable body that seems to have taken over. No work of art that I discuss can deny this state of affairs. The issue is: what can be done? And my answer is: literature and art
expand
our estate, enable us to move—conceptually, imaginatively, vicariously—out of the physical jail we (we the healthy, as well as we the sick) live in. This is not a cheat or an illusion. It is as real as the flesh that hurts, or even the death that is coming. The experience of art sets the brain and the heart going; it vitalizes and it quickens. I have argued, indeed, that it socializes and empowers, because it bids to redefine "home" for us: art from other lands and times comes into us and enriches our estate; we move outward, into new territories that become ours. By offering us its special mirror, by showing how resonant and capacious the human story can be, art restores feeling to its proper place in life.

CHAPTER TWO

LIVING IN THE BODY

As Gregor Samsa awoke one morningfrom uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect.

— FRANZ KAFKA, "The Metamorphosis"

"Here," she said, "in this place, we flesh; flesh that weeps, laughs; flesh that dances on bare feet in the grass. Love it. Love it hard. Yonder they do not love your flesh. They despise it. They don't love your eyes; they'd just as soon pick 'em out. No more do they love the skin on your back. Yonder they flay it."

— TONI MORRISON,
Beloved

SEEING THE BODY: THE VISION OF ART

In this book about human feelings, about art as a place where those feelings are illuminated and shared, I want nonetheless to say that the dominant fact of life that governs somatic creatures from birth to death is this: we are
embodied.

Counterintuitive though it may seem, literature and the arts afford us a royal way into the body, and this is a trip worth making because the acquaintanceship in question is, of course, with ourselves.

You did not choose the body you were born in. You will spend your entire lifetime "following" (rather than leading) its dictates and nature. To be sure, contemporary society regards the body as ever more malleable to our aesthetic and personal wants, but you're still going to be stuck with (and stuck in) an apparatus that is, to say the least, strange: protuberances everywhere, holes in it, larded with organisms, animated

by potent forces, changing over time. This creature who we are is, oddly enough, invisible to us most of the time, even though it is calling the shots and running the show; scientific description does not really convey it, and mirrors tend to keep its secret.

It is not easy to see our generic equipment for the strange apparatus it is. Eyes, ears, a nose and a mouth, a pair of arms and legs, hands with fingers and feet with toes: from infancy on, we regard these features and forms as natural, as inevitable. What might they look like to a Martian? Or to a bird or a dog? And that only covers the cover: what about the in-sides? Heart, lungs, liver, kidneys: surgeons may know what they look like, but most of us have long forgotten whatever images we may have seen in school science classes, and rarely stop to think that these entities live in us, and may indeed determine our fate.

When we are healthy, the body behaves. We do not need to command our organs to function: breathing and blood circulation miraculously just happen. And the commands that are necessary—the brain's relays and the operation of the nervous system—seem invisible, a gift of nature, bypassing our awareness, so that walking and talking, moving your body and using your head, seem natural, immediate, unlabored. Most of us live in a head-world, a world of ideas and images, often a realm of abstractions (such as money, success, happiness, failure, ambition, remorse, depression, etc.), where the corporeal, the somatic, play little if any role. You wake up in the morning, and although your first act may be to get out of bed, your thoughts are doubtless elsewhere: on breakfast, on today's agenda, on projects of all stripes. How often do you think about the wondrous set of cooperating bones, muscles, and brain commands that make it possible for your body to leave the bed in the first place?

Our schooling, our mental, verbal, and perceptual habits, everything conspires to make us think we are in the driver's seat. Our organic equipment is not all that different from the other equipment that we own and use. All of it—bodies, automobiles, computers, the whole list of "assets" that seem to be ours—is there to be harnessed, there to serve our

purposes. In these last three sentences I have used the possessive pronoun
our
no less than five times, to signal a fundamental proprietary scheme that is so basic, so taken for granted that few of us ever think about it. So let me now ask: do we really own our bodies? Does anyone have a contract or a lease of this sort? Could our bodies be far more independent and autonomous than we realize? Aren't sickness and death shocking for just this reason: they remind us how illusory our ownership is.

In reflecting on the phenomenon of the death of the body, Faulkner's character Doctor Peabody, in
As I Lay Dying,
considers the nihilist view that death is the end, versus the fundamentalist view that death is the beginning, and decides that "in reality it is no more than a single tenant or family moving out of a tenement or a town" (29). That tenement is no docile habitation, but has its own laws and customs, and is strange to us in the way that other cultures are strange to anthropologists. To take the body for granted, to fail to
see
it, is to put on blinders or to
naturalize
a set of corporeal and visceral arrangements that is in fact most unruly. So unruly that I want to use the word
beast
to evoke that tenement of flesh and blood that we inhabit.