Arnold Weinstein - A Scream Goes Through The House (49 page)

mestic, later impersonal as a marathonlike climb nearing the longed-for finish line.

As the piece moves toward closure, it opens out into a grand vista— "Below, my whole life spreads its surf, / all the landscapes I've ever known / or dreamed of"—and we begin to see the amplitude of
Trauer-arbeit
as the memories of the loved one shade into something enormous and totalizing, the entirety of one's life (and dreams) now at last on show, at last overseen. These lines are eerie in their plenitude, making us realize the reach of this "recovery," entailing nothing less than
all
of one's self that is laid bare. It is as if "you" were everywhere, and to call you up so as to dig you out—the way a surgeon digs under the cancer to see how far it has spread, to gauge how much diseased tissue there really is—were tantamount to leaving one's own life and self. Haven't we always heard that the dying see their entire life unfurl in their last moments? With admirable brevity, Pastan returns from the alpine trek to the domestic stairs, and calls "Grief" a "circular staircase," leading to the devastating conclusion: "I have lost you."

It is at this point we begin to realize how subversive Pastan's poem has been. Far from merely illustrating Kubler-Ross, the poet has wanted to announce the ugly secret that crowns successful mourning: permanent loss, death a second time (now in us). And this loss is a form of diminution, much the way amputation is, so that the recovery is, yes, a victory for life, but also a maiming of the mourner. Pastan is obliging us to ask just what it means when the ego finally becomes, once again, "uninhibited and free." What ego is this? To be sure, the driving engine that fuels our libido and runs our life does indeed come to terms with the reality principle, does indeed finally bury its dead, so as to move on, to find new attachments. But at what cost? The ego continues its fierce life-drive, but the self is permanently altered. Pastan wisely stops here, and does not explore the further ramifications of mourning; instead, she leaves us with a bittersweet image of successful convalescence that is also awful.

Other, more famous poets have written about the death of loved

ones, but Pastan's account of mourning seems especially apt for our purposes because of its insistently domestic, insidiously familiar terms. This poem's power derives from its reversals: not only the stunning shift at the end, when I discover that "I have lost you," but the less noticeable, arguably still more painful strategy of inventorying all the accoutrements of domesticity, setting up precisely the familiar icons of shared experience. I call this painful because all this is what now must die, must be seen as illusory, indeed delusory, even mocking in its cruelty. I have lost not only "you," I have lost our life together. Death cashiers a world that is saturated with thick feelings, that shimmers with memories; the camera would merely record a table, a paper, a bottle, whereas the poem registers the intolerable human density of these objects. Is there any wonder that death causes survivors to change surroundings, sometimes even to change mates and lives, in order to get clear of the funereal residue that refuses to die? We sometimes act as if fidelity and memory were some testament of will, some act of virtue, whereas they are also evidence of life's stubborn hold, evidence of the enduring presence of the dead we loved, with us not only in our minds, but in our homes, photos, music, clothes, beds. For the nonreligious among us, this environmental afterlife—half cognitive, half material—may be as good a proof as we are likely to have, that such a thing as "soul" exists.

PROUST: GRANDMOTHER'S DOUBLE DEATH

Perhaps poetry cannot easily manage a longer story than Pastan's account of the five stages. But narrative can, and it may tell us that the Freudian journey toward severance and healing can be murkier, richer, and more complicated than the linear trajectory up the mountain or the stairs. In this regard I would argue that Proust's massive
Recherche du temps perdu
is our premier exemplar for actually rendering the twists and turns that mourning may entail. Now, reading Proust is, in itself, something of a lifelong activity, and the world is full of well-meaning, educated people who will go to their graves with Proust as unfinished

business, as a reading task that one never quite completed or got around to. This long book, which opens with the famous phrase
"Longtemps je me suis couche de bonne heure"
("For a long time I went to bed early"), virtually announces that it is for the insomniacs among us. Only they will find the time for it; and it may even cure their problem. Proust's
Recherche
is almost certainly the great unread classic of the twentieth century, despite his ever-fashionable reputation, as evidenced by the spate of recent books talking about what sort of a personal payoff the author found in tackling such a monster. Most folks would probably still consign Proust to those telling categories such as the book-for-a-desert-island, or its slightly less fantastic analogue: the book I'll read when I either get a humongous vacation near a beach or become permanently bedridden. (Hamlet's "readiness is all" comes into play here.)

As someone who has studied and taught Proust for a good chunk of my life, I have a longitudinal sense of how reading Proust has been rationalized over the years: psychological acuity, social satire, portrait of neurosis, doctrine of art, philosophy of time, nuggets of wisdom. And still more: there are few "ism's" that haven't claimed Proust. He belongs in a chapter about death because his view of life is so insistently and staggeringly vertical, as if people and events presented to the naked eye only their cover, their cover story, whereas one can size them up only by accounting for their historical density. Time is, of course, what fuels this attitude, but death is what parses it and gives it pathos. Moreover, only art can deliver all the substrata that underlie the surfaces we see, and this lesson is meant to teach us humility, to help us toward a more capacious and resonant sense of our fellows and our world, rather than taking them merely for the momentary figures they appear.

In this light, time weaves a special tapestry, so that a glance at a loved one should be four-dimensional, remembering as well as seeing, and if we remember, then the person now seems covered "with the beautiful and inimitable velvety patina of the years, just as in an old park a simple runnel of water comes with the passage of time to be enveloped in a sheath of emerald" (III, 1020). Proustian psychology is often described

as narcissist, but I would be hard put to find lines of such generosity in any other writer. It does not seem fanciful to say that Proust's reader is gifted here, for the author urges us to factor "time" into our perceptions and valuations, to discover something of the actual scope and scale of our lives. Routines and habits become silvery (rather than dulling), yielding a layered world of magic and richness; the quotidian world we live in and take for granted—family, friends, lovers—becomes echoing and resonant, rather than the dimensionless silhouettes that habit nastily produces. All this bears directly on how we might understand death.

There are two major deaths in Proust's book: first that of the grandmother, and then that of Albertine. They are handled differently. Proust depicts the grandmother's actual experience of sickness and dying in extraordinary detail, beginning with her first stroke (while out with the boy in the Tuileries gardens) and continuing into her stint with the "medical regime" at the hands of the novel's Doctor Cottard (social nincompoop but shrewd diagnostician), as well as other specialists who come to her bedside. It is worth recalling the remarkable stature of this woman within Proust's narrative world—her sensitivity, generosity, and culture make her arguably the only truly admirable figure in the book, surely the only figure capable of utterly selfless love—if we would measure the stakes of her dying. One cannot avoid the feeling here that this valiant woman—a culture heroine of sorts who can cite Mme. de Sevigne or other classics with ease and appropriateness, who exemplifies moral stature and makes you believe that the work of civilization matters—is somehow targeted in the novel; this woman is to be felled with stunning brutality.

All of us will die. Grandmothers perhaps more than most. Consider the poignant description of Bubeh's dying in Sherwin Nuland's fine recent book
How We Die.
The physician-author describes her entry into dying almost melodically: first we get an account of her increasing bouts of forgetfulness, weakness, and incapacity, as seen by her loving grandson, Sherwin; then we get the grown-up physician's medical analysis of the same episodes, now understood in their terrible physiological co-

gency as the rigorous and orchestrated breakdown of an old body, with groups of organs and systems beginning to give out. This binary narrative does justice to the human and scientific vantage points, mediates between them, makes us see their terrible congruence.

Yet, the "naturalness" of Nuland's account has none of the horror that Proust's treatment of the grandmother possesses. I say "treatment" advisedly because we feel that the French novel is downright punitive in its assault on this woman. If she represents the noblest virtues of culture, then the novelist is out to show how utterly weightless such virtues are when it comes to dying. To be sure, she dies with valor, but who can forget the indignities that the text visits upon her? There is something systematic in the book's attack: she will be deprived of one sense, then of another, sight, then hearing, then speech; she will be given one protocol, then another. Each will alter her, each will assert its molecular will. She even undergoes leeches, and (to the horror of her grandson) experiences a creatural relief. And throughout this storm, this storming, the lady seeks to hold on to her "self." The pathos of Proust's rendition (which takes up hundreds of pages) lies in the very scandal of flesh which knows only entropy. Proust, unlike Nuland, has an ax to grind, wants us to see how grisly and unfair this contest is, how reductive, coercive, and transformative illness can be. Wakened in the middle of the night to bid her a final farewell, the child does not recognize his grandmother, sees only a "beast" lying on his grandmother's bed, wonders where she really is.

It seems fair to say that this is how many of us experience the death of old people: as systems that are playing out before our horrified eyes. Here is the physiological indignity that comes with age, and one understands the customs of certain tribal cultures where the old and feeble are sent out to die. Any traditional view of maturity and aging as a form of wisdom—a view that has to fight for its life anyway in youth-centered cultures like America—seems particularly vulnerable when physiological deterioration starts to speed up. It is as if the body looms larger and larger in the scheme of things, as if moral or intellectual attainment were

crowded out of the picture, so that the spectacle of debility and undoing usurps the stage. Undoing: the seemingly systematic erasure of poise and stature and ease. Ease is when our bodies flaunt their indwelling powers, yet this flaunting hardly registers as such, so natural and effortless it all seems. Most young people inhabit this world of ease, hardly knowing it, never suspecting how time-bound it all is. Sickness puts paid to these arrangements, but once well we mercifully forget how stacked the somatic deck can be against us. Aging and dying make us— all of us, diers and witnesses—excruciatingly aware of this physiological endgame that we cannot win, and they may make us wonder whether all reports of human "mastery" are naive in character, fair-weather fictions that are destined to fade away when the storm comes. One can well ask what literature has to offer here, since these issues are so dreadfully material and eloquent in their own, nonartistic right. Why invoke literature when the aging body's decrepitude is visible to any and all? These are things we can see.

But is there something to death that we cannot see? To answer this, I want to return to Proust's depiction of the grandmother. In keeping with the downhill trajectory of the body that nature insists on, the old lady dies. The physical horror show is over. But Proust now plays out his own version of mourning, a view that recognizes the survivalist impulse of the mourner, just as Freud and Kubler-Ross do, but which nonetheless offers a rich, rival fable of its own. The grandmother has died as dispossessed beast, as occupant of a body that is held hostage to entropy. In charting her decline, Proust has even saluted Moliere by choreographing the comedy of her posturing physicians. No way, Proust tells us, of stopping this journey toward annihilation. But then something quite wonderful happens. The leave-taking that was so brutal and merciless on the physiological front—the helpless spectating that attends the exit of a loved one—gets played out a second time, in different colors now, as the boy is "visited" by the dead grandmother in the beautiful chapter "Les intermittences du coeur." This episode appears in
Sodome et Gomorrhe,
more than a year after the woman's death, and

hundreds of busy pages later in the life of the protagonist, now a young man acquainted with various forms of sexuality, now returning to Bal-bec, the resort area that he and his grandmother had visited many years hack. Now, the reader assumes, death is out of the picture.

However, what one needs to remember about that first visit is that it began with utter disarray on the part of the child (a disarray typical of his "neurasthenia" and hypersensitivity to new environments), and the frightened, miserable boy survived this first stint largely through the generous, sustaining love lavished on him by the old lady. Proust had beautifully imaged their intimacy by means of a little semiotic miracle: the boy, when visited by his demons, would rap on the wall that divided his room from that of his grandmother; the raps would be timid and faint, not too strong so as to startle her, not too feeble so as to be unheard. And she heard, understood, rapped back, came, and nurtured, time after time, producing this long novel's only (but radiant) example of pure communication and pure balm. For all intents and purposes, however, the intervening year has done its work, the ties have been cut, the grandmother is dead, gone, and forgotten. But the return visit to Bal-bec turns out to be "uncanny," in the doubling and displacing sense that Freud gave to the term, because this place is to be the locus of the grandmother's second death—utterly unlike the somatic catastrophe of the first one—as Proust rewrites the rules concerning what lives and what dies, radically challenging the biological and public record.