Arnold Weinstein - A Scream Goes Through The House (55 page)

larger, entailing the rites of passage of an entire nation. In reading Whitman's account today, those of us who were alive in the sixties will be hard put not to think of more recent assassinations, more recent coffins traveling through the land, more recent periods of national division. Might poetry serve here?

Whitman's poem combines earlier motifs such as the poet-warbler (of "Out of the Cradle") with signs of apocalypse (a star that falls out of the western sky) and pagan offering (bestowing of the lilac sprig to the traveling coffin that carries the body of the slain president). These motifs will be orchestrated ever more richly and tightly as the poem gathers speed and density, yet it is this latter feature, the poem's kinetic energy, that warrants our attention. Whitman shows great skill in conveying the pilgrimage of this coffin, so that we see it moving across the great land, betokening the poem's deeper meaning: to bring the divided, fissured land back into some kind of wholeness. Rarely have English syntax and rhythm been more majestically extended, as if the poet were out to bend the very grammar and verbal tools themselves to his totalizing purposes:

Over the breast of the spring, the land, amid cities,

Amid lanes and through old woods, where lately the violets peep'd

from the ground, spotting the gray debris, Amid the grass in the fields each side of the lanes, passing the endless

grass, Passing the yellow-spear'd wheat, every grain from its shroud in the

dark-brown fields uprisen, Passing the apple-tree blows of white and pink in the orchards, Carrying a corpse to where it shall rest in the grave, Night and day journeys a coffin.
(260)

These magnificent lines speak the capaciousness and order of poetry, coming to us as a paean to the land and to the ceaseless life that nour-

ishes it, so that death is effectively cradled here, posited as serene and harmonious, rhythmically at home in the round of life, not a catastrophe but a rest, not a cessation but a journey. City and country, fields and lanes, are the composite terrain this dead body must pass, but the poet already hints that nature does not know death, that this seeming end may well be a beginning, just as the wheat emerges from its "shroud in the dark-brown fields uprisen." The poem enacts a countrywide procession, attended by the poet with his lilac sprig, the singing thrush, and the falling star, soon to be joined by death itself, figured as walking companions holding the poet's hands, framing his march. The poem asks what can be retrieved from the night; can we ever have back again what "was lost in the netherward black of the night"?

One answer is, of course, the song, the death-inspired song that constitutes poetry. This much we already know, from "Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking," but the stage is dramatically expanded now, encompassing the country at large, a sick country, sick unto death through the loss of Lincoln and the ravages of war. Whitman wants to endow poetry with national purpose by emphasizing that the song, if it is large-souled enough, can bring about healing and renewal, and that the torn country can bind its wounds. Thus, Whitman does more than reference both North and South, he "works through" the disaster (much as, in the next century, Freud was to theorize the work of both mourning and neurosis), rehearses even the slaughter, brings it back horribly into view— note the insistent "I saw"—that it might finally be transcended:

And I saw askant the armies,

I saw as in noiseless dreams hundreds of battle-flags,

Borne through the smoke of the battles and pierc'd with missiles I saw

them, And carried hither and yon through the smoke, and torn and bloody, And at last but a few shreds left on the staffs, (and all in silence,) And the staffs all splinter'd and broken.

I saw the battle-corpses, myriads of them,

And the white skeletons of young men, I saw them,

I saw the debris and debris of all the slain soldiers of the war,

But I saw they were not as was thought,

They themselves were fully at rest, they sujfer'd not,

The living remain'd and sujfer'd, the mother sujfer'd,

And the wife and the child and the musing comrade sujfer'd,

And the armies that remain'd sujfer'd.
(265)

In this sequence the poet returns to the scene of the crime and gazes head-on at the horror, seen in utter silence (almost like a silent film), first in the decimated batde flags, shredded and splintered, then in the corpses themselves, now white skeletons, twice described as "debris." But this vision of detritus suddenly becomes a scene of peace, of bodies at rest, just as Lincoln is at rest, and only the living now suffer. Like the shroud of wheat from which life will rise up, these peaceful white skeletons must be transformed into conduits of life so that the grieving can finally be done. Whitman, writing at a moment of unprecedented national hurt, moves well beyond the fables of death-memory-alteration in which Pastan and Proust depict mourning; death, faced fully enough, transmuted into poetry, is the catalyst of healing. And that is the office of song. Whitman closes his elegy by insisting on this song, a song that "passes," just as the visions "pass," so that the country too can "pass" beyond. The song bestows on life, in the form of the poet's offering, the "lilac with heart-shaped leaves . . . blooming, returning with spring." Songs cannot prevent death, but the songs
of
death are music made of pain, not romantic warbling but "the song of the bleeding throat," as if the real language of grieving were a peculiar form of hemorrhage. Such songs are a kind of human doing set against the monstrous undoing that is death; they are "retrievements out of the night," a raid on that "undiscovered country," a living legacy for the survivors, measuring what has been lost, yet flowering. Death is more than a wound from which the survivors recover; it seeds life.

THE LIFE OF IVAN ILYCH

Death, as is tolerably clear now, is a staple item in much literature, a fertile source of imaginative writing, a subject that seems to authorize language rather than install silence. But what about
dying?
The enabling premise of the texts examined up to now, the enabling premise that underwrites mourning, is that utterance comes from the witnesses, bystanders, and survivors. As Poe's M. Valdemar shows, dying itself holds on to its secrets, yields only a mess of putrescent flesh. If we widen our angle, however, we realize that all of us have a tale of dying to unfold, in the sense that all of us die a little every day. Mercifully it is not a story we like to attend to, nor is the quotidian entropic deterioration of our body easily noted (equally mercifully). Still, the dismanding work of time is hardly a secret for the old and infirm, and toward life's end, it begins to have contours that no one can mistake. But could that crucial
exit
—a generic event if there ever was one, the equivalent of birthing—be spoken? written? storied? What could we learn from such a story?

Arguably the most famous tale of this stripe is Tolstoy's novella
The Death of Ivan Ilych.
The piece begins, cunningly enough, with the announcement of Ilych's death and the ensuing social charade of friends and family who pay their respects. Here is precisely how most of us encounter dying, as obituary, as ceremony where we are the visitors free to leave. Still, it is a sticky situation. With surgical acuity, Tolstoy illuminates the malaise of the living, the downright ignorance that most of us have, vis-a-vis the proper behavior one accords a corpse. Likewise, we note that the grieving widow is mightily concerned with monetary arrangements, with making sure that she gets every last ruble to which she is entitled out of the government's pension. I call the first pages of this story "cunning," in that Tolstoy wants to establish the utterly secular tone of these events right from the outset, a formula that figures death as an affair of mourning clothes, inheritance, and jockeying for position to fill the bureaucratic seat now emptied. It is the secular note that is to be the dominant theme of the story he wants to tell, the story of Ilych's

life that preceded his death. It is hardly a stretch to say that little has changed since Tolstoy's time. Death is most prominent in many people's minds as a matter of insurance policies and estate planning. Death destabilizes material interests, and prudent people take measures to see that their survivors will manage. Ivan Ilych, as we first know him, was an eminently practical man, good at marshaling resources so as to get on in his life.

This life, as the author reminds us again and again, is hardly that of a saint or hero, is in fact completely unremarkable, patterned along the lines that characterize the lives and careers of other successful functionaries. Ilych's childhood, education, marriage, and professional advancement read like a textbook primer for getting along and climbing the ladder in his social sphere. Only a few discordant notes are sounded, but we need to attend to them. We learn that Ilych's marriage turns a bit rocky with the birth of his first child. His wife, already in her pregnancy, seems a different woman, impatient, demanding, no longer the comrade he married. With utmost brevity and parsimony, Tolstoy informs us that the Ilyches had several children, that more than one of them died, that the experience of sick or fragile babies, of difficult nurturing, was a hard, disagreeable experience, an experience for which Ilych is unequipped. We read that Ilych throws himself ever more fully into his professional career as a result of the unexpected problems and souring of his domestic life, that he and his wife become gradually estranged. All this is recounted in the third person yet according to Ilych's own perspectives and priorities, inasmuch as his choices—to distance himself from wife and children, to attend ever more assiduously to his career—seem logical, innocuous. Who among us has not seen behavior like this? And so Ivan Ilych succeeds. In a Russia with a labyrinthine bureaucratic system, Ivan Ilych does okay, suffers a few reverses, but manages ultimately to come out ahead. The Ilyches seem fine at story's midpoint.

Unless you want to take account of the odd, quite minor, pain that Ilych has in his side, nothing serious, yet
there.
With this persistent little

ache, Tolstoy is going to shift gears in his story. It is here that the logic of the body—a logic seen but not underscored in the travails of pregnancy and childhood sickness and death, tiresome events that Ilych chose to keep at bay—enters the picture and begins to assert its horrid autonomy. It is also here that Ilych is fated to enter what today we call "the medical regime." That pain which he knows to have resulted from a slight "fall" while furnishing his new lodgings takes him to doctors, and in his constantly, maddeningly frustrated engagements with specialists—why won't they simply tell him if it is serious? if he is going to die?—Tolstoy is shockingly of our age as much as of his own.

Ilych is essentially stonewalled by the specialists, fated to try this therapy after that, this protocol after that, as the men of medicine go about theorizing what is the matter with the poor man. Tolstoy makes us see what a guessing game medicine is, how hard it is to illuminate, by dint of scientific knowledge, the dark interior of the body where something is amok. Much worse still, we come to realize (as Ilych himself does) that the song and dance of the medical people is precisely the song and dance that Ilych himself has performed all his life as a successful practicing magistrate. Tolstoy shows us the very antics of professionalism: its codes and protocols, its strictly internal logic, its intricate conventions. The doctors perform the ritual moves of their field, just as Ilych has waltzed through the appropriate categories and precincts of the law. Only now does he understand how independent, hermetic, and free-floating these discourses are, how completely unrelated they are to the plight and misery of the human being who has sought relief or sustenance through them. (This is hardly a quaint nineteenth-century Russian problem; you are likely to encounter it today in any medical or legal emergency.) As patient, Ilych experiences the helplessness and insignificance of all those who appeared in his court, of all those over whom he sovereignly pronounced the rulings of law. Mind you, Ilych was a fine magistrate, one who truly attempted to fit the legal judgment to the situation at hand, one who dealt kindly and graciously with those who were brought to him; in fact, we sense that Ilych's nuanced mastery

of the law was akin to his love for bridge, for a complex set of conventions that superior people learn to master.

Tolstoy's novella is insidious because it initially seems so innocuous; it could be an account of our neighbors. By the end of it, most readers are feeling pretty queasy. What we have is a proto-existential fable about the gap between culture and life, between our vast array of models and procedures that govern how we do business (law, medicine, teaching, writing) and our creatural condition. We understand that the purpose of this story is to expose the nullity of a purely secular philosophy of life— Ilych's own dance was like that of his doctors, Ilych's own life has been cued entirely to secular aims—so that the religious vision that gradually makes its way into the story can be seen as a more inclusive picture of what living finally entails. The death of Ivan Ilych is meant to expose the absurdity of Ivan Ilych's life. It was a fine life while he was well; Ilych mastered the rules of the game as it was then played. There is pleasure in such mastery, just as there is pleasure in being promoted, selecting furnishings, making a grand slam, dressing and eating well. Tolstoy's rich sense of the creature comforts, games, and pastimes that occupy most of us most of the time recalls, once again, the rather fiercer argument put forth by Pascal in the seventeenth century; the French philosopher railed incessantly against "distraction," what he called
divertissement,
by which he meant the entirety of secular life, most flagranuy visible to us in the arena of hobbies, entertainment, sports, gambling, and the like.