Arnold Weinstein - A Scream Goes Through The House (4 page)

Chapter One spells out the central truth that informs my vision: a scream goes through the house. The house is your own body when animated by feeling or racked by pain. We enter life screaming, and I contend that our entire journey through life is parsed by (unheard, unsounded) screams. The house is the larger world of living beings to whom feeling relates us. Finally, the house betokens the very institutions of literature and art, those capacious structures and dwellings we enter when we read a book or gaze at a painting, and there, too—there especially—we encounter the ongoing, unfurling scream, the music of human sentience that is life's blood and art's blood. The ramifications of this view are key: pain courses outward, into the world, into art (rather than remaining imprisoned in us, as is generally assumed); art constitutes an imaginative and affective bridge that allows us to exit our cramped quarters and enter the flow, to accede to other worlds and other times, always following the royal road of feeling as our means of entry and understanding. At its most transcendent, art simply remakes the world, reshuffles that tired deck, stuns us with a larger apprehension of human affairs
and our place within them,
for we see how tentacular and linked the world really is, how arterial art's pathways truly are.

To make good on these claims, I focus on single exemplary works of art in each genre (poetry, fiction, theater, painting, and film) that explore with immense power the vision of feeling-as-connective-tissue I have articulated. Each of these artists—William Blake, James Baldwin, Eugene

O'Neill, Edvard Munch, and Ingmar Bergman—makes us see and hear the scream that goes through the house, by presenting a world that is linked and meshed, a world in which pain and feeling bind us rather than divide us, an ecosystem that flaunts the primacy of emotion itself as human bridge. Such art makes at last visible nothing less than a new map for displaying our true arrangements. But the complacent cover of conventional wisdom and everyday logic—received ideas about boundaries that are supposed to separate me from you, now from then, here from there—is blown sky-high in these bold, revelatory works.

Chapter Two is about living in a body. We customarily define where we live in geographical terms: New York or Paris, New England or the West Coast, perhaps Europe or the Far East. We might even be metaphorical: "I am living in the dark ... in misery ... in pain." Prior to these spatial or figurative arrangements, however, is the stark fact that we are, first and foremost, from birth to death, inhabitants of bodies. Bodies that we did not choose, bodies with a will of their own. Here is a lifelong form of bondage and housing that we incessandy negotiate, as witnessed by the extraordinary body culture of contemporary life, as witnessed also (and more profoundly) by crucial somatic events that structure every existence: puberty, desire, anxiety, and, of course, illness and death. Less visible, perhaps, is the sheer alterity and authority of the body we live in, a creature with its own laws, language, and agenda. Literature and art can be especially provocative here, inasmuch as they are capable of radically
defamiliarizing
our givens, casting off our blinders, and thus illuminating the peculiar yet generic tug-of-war between I and It (identity and body) that no one escapes.

As far back as Oedipus' solution to the Riddle of the Sphinx— "Man," Oedipus replied, in answer to the question, What is on four legs in the morning, two legs at midday, and three legs in the evening?—writers and thinkers have pondered the transition from animal to human. Literary testimony—from Shakespeare's
Othello
to Charlotte Bronte's
Jane Eyre,
and into the twentieth century with Kafka's beede-protagonist in "The Metamorphosis" and William Burroughs's bestiary

in
Naked Lunch
—reminds us that the "animal" is with us forever, that the project of becoming exclusively mental or spiritual beings—free of flesh—is a fantasy. And perhaps a harmful fantasy, inasmuch as basic drives such as desire, appetite, even emotion, have an inescapable somatic dimension, so that any fuller view of our condition must come to terms with the animal.

But the animal-body is no less the site of our richest human experiences—tenderness, pleasure, passion—and this chapter closes with Toni Morrison's masterpiece,
Beloved.
Here we actually see what a "writing of flesh" might look like, and how the story of slavery—the very system whereby your body is owned by another—might be translated into a somatic language of great beauty as well as horror.

Chapter Three makes its way more directly into the medical arena by focusing on the central issue of
diagnosis.
As a layperson I know relatively little about the incredibly complex systems that make my body the living thing it is. Doctors are trained precisely in this area. My peculiar knowledge and expertise are on the other side of the equation: the lifelong experience of being in the dark, of guessing about (worrying about) what is actually going on inside. Laypeople consult doctors because they—the physicians with their education, trained eyes, and assortment of imaging and scanning devices, blood tests, and the like—can
read the body.

Here would be the great promise of science, and here is one of the skills at once clinical and personal that we tend to prize, in school, at work, and in life: the diagnostic gaze performing its semiotic labor by translating symptom into disease, random detail into cogent pattern. Analytic prowess is the hallmark of the good doctor.

Might it be more than that? Are there issues of power, too, even exploitation, that accompany, willy-nilly, the diagnostic act? To be sure, we value the power of the doctor when it comes to reading our symptoms right. But how do we feel about people who can "see through" us, who are preternaturally keen in figuring out the motivation, even the secrets of others? The testimony of art and literature is sharp, sometimes fero-

cious, in this area—as if artists sensed that diagnosis and scrutiny can all too easily turn invasive, can violate both the seer and the seen. In writers as distinct as Choderlos de Laclos, the author of
Les Liaisons Dan-gereuses,
or the Americans Nathaniel Hawthorne and Henry James, or the German playwright Georg Buchner or the supreme analyst in fiction, Marcel Proust, we discover how voracious and manic the diagnostic impulse can be, and also how victimizing, even lethal, its operation can be, in that most central arena of both life and art: human relations.

Chapter Four, "Plague and Human Connection," puts onto the world stage all the issues dealt with—the primacy of feeling, the authority of bodies, the hazards of diagnosis. A scream goes through the house: private illness makes its fateful itinerary to collective disaster and plague, writing large the mystery of human connection/infection and the crucial social mechanisms enlisted to save the community. Once again, Sophocles'
Oedipus
(among other works) comes to the fore, this time as the master plot for how a community copes with catastrophe. The apparent backdrop of the Greek play, plague—people dying like flies in Thebes, the Oracle's tracing of the scourge to a concealed murder—provokes a central question that recurs throughout history: who is responsible for this epidemic? The great Sophoclean theme of illicit connection, at once political and sexual—a man kills his father the king, sleeps with his mother the queen—is also to be understood bacte-rially. Of course, Sophocles was no epidemiologist, but his account of mass deaths intrigues us because it turns on the key issue of secrets, both erotic and communal, and thus tells us (in the way literature tells us things) that the story of plague is a shockingly broad, social story, a revelatory story that thrusts the culture's connections, both licit and illicit, into full view.

The Sophoclean story of a city or culture threatened with plague— with apocalypse—is replayed throughout history. In narratives by Daniel Defoe and Charles Dickens we see London under siege, and these stories echo strangely still today, evoking for us what it might well have looked like, had we been citizens of Thebes, of Sodom or Gomor-

rah, of Dresden or Hiroshima or Grozny, or what it could look like in the wake of bioterrorism, with its threats of anthrax and smallpox and other toxins.

The very word "plague" has—or used to have—a yesteryear ring to it, an archaic condition located either in the past or in underdeveloped societies where medicine has not made the advances we take for granted in the West. But we are increasingly aware that mass disease and lethal infection cannot be ruled out of modern life. For just this reason my chapter closes with several stunning works of the twentieth century: Albert Camus's allegorical novel,
The Plague;
Ingmar Bergman's groundbreaking film of 1956,
The Seventh Seal;
and Tony Kushner's epochal play about AIDS,
Angels in America.
All these works face up to apocalypse, but they use the specter of mass death to posit
human connection
—the mysterious bonds of love—as civilization's most precious legacy.

"Saying Death" is the title of Chapter Five, and it should be recognized for the impossible proposition that it is. Bergman may well outfit Death with black cape and clown face, but for most of us this most generic of all outcomes has no profile and no voice. Death is silent, but literature is constandy drawn to the finale that gives point and shape to so much of our performance. Death punctuates life. All our notions of growth, development, and maturation are hardwired with death's certainty. Life and love are precious because death is real. Still: how to say it?

One death all of us can say is the death of others. I investigate the testimony of literature on the subject of mourning, because mourning constitutes the great paradox of our life: our encounter with finality, the disappearance of those we love, the impossible absence of those who were ever present in our lives. I say "paradox" because the dead do
not
disappear: we see them in photographs and letters; we hear and speak to them in our minds and dreams; we incorporate them in our behavior and genetic makeup. No writer can rival Marcel Proust on this topic, and it will be seen that his extreme focus on the processes of loss and

survival is both Herculean and Promethean, gifting us with something as precious as fire: a fresh grasp of our own most intimate doings.

If the deaths of others are survivable and sayable, our own, stricdy speaking, is not. But we can spend years worrying about its schedule, and we can sometimes chart its approach, not unlike an air-traffic control tower that tracks incoming planes. Tolstoy's famous novella about dying,
The Death of Ivan Ilych,
is among our premier literary accounts of how botched and dreadful these matters are likely to be. Poets and dramatists have also sought to say death, and this chapter will close with a look at the remarkable nineteenth-century American duo of Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson—one titanic, the other sibylline—as well as discussing the only effort I know to actually stage dying: Ionesco's tragicomic
Exit the King.
Contrary to all expectations, these meditations on death are not in the least morbid: instead, they possess a mix of pluck, humor, and radiance that exemplify the gift of art, enabling us to take a readier and richer stance when it comes to final things.

Finally, in the concluding chapter, death-in-life is my target: I am thinking of
depression
as a form of dying that can set in tragically early, well before our bodies give out, causing a wreckage that may be worse than death, producing that "mass of men who lead lives of quiet desperation," as Thoreau memorably put it. I consider depression to be arguably the greatest scourge now facing modern Western society, a form of plague without lesions or other telltale signs, a plague no amount of safe sex can protect you from.

Hence, I close with a brief discussion of
Hamlet
as Shakespeare's brilliant mapping of a new species, a species increasingly with us today.
Hamlet
is the ever-fascinating study of a life crisis, of a discovery that one's mission is impossible, and—much worse, much more prophetic— that one's self is unownable. Shakespeare has given us a portrait of dys-functionality, and this melancholy prince casts a long shadow over the centuries to come. In Hamlet's predicament we will recognize each of the problems and crises illuminated in my book: the mutinous body that takes over (this is what Hamlet cannot forgive his mother), the merry-

go-round self that defies diagnosis (this is the riddle that Hamlet presents to his peers), the plaguelike sickness that rots in the state of Denmark (this is Hamlet's discovery), the sovereign undoing of meaning and purpose that is death's awful legacy to the living (this is the secret of the grave diggers). Little surprise that this young man suffers from what the Elizabethans would have called
melancholy.

This legacy of the afflicted prince carries through the centuries, and I close my conclusion with a glance at one of his most fascinating literary descendants, William Faulkner's Quentin Compson (from
The Sound and the Fury)
as my version of what Hamlet might look like in the twentieth century, speaking American prose. We close with two young men, one a Renaissance prince, the other sent by his family to Harvard, each fatally incapacitated, each encountering the randomness of self and the musical chairs of life, each head and heart rendered indelibly by the institution of writing, writing that goes so deeply into the maelstrom to deliver its tumult, its sound and fury, that our picture of mind and consciousness is irrevocably altered. Literature discovers for us who we are.

Depression, yes. Depressing, no. The sheer genius of these two portrayals is life-affirming, awakening. The boldness of vision, the pith of language, the keenness of feeling, and the beauty of art
lift
us rather than lower us, cut through our frozen sea (as Kafka put it), and restore to us a sense of life's actual plenitude, of our own echoing reaches. Hamlet claimed that "readiness is all," and I want, many centuries later, to claim that art makes us readier, provides rehearsals (workouts, if you will), expands the scene, enables us to envision, to see, to experience
vicariously
the range of human feelings and fates recorded over time. I mean this book to be something of a guided tour for that special voyage, a way into feeling via art, a way of reading literature as emotional highway, a way of attending to the scream that goes through the house.