Arnold Weinstein - A Scream Goes Through The House (57 page)

marguerite: There are still some cords that bind you which I haven't yet untied. Or which I haven't cut. There are still some hands that cling to you and hold you back.
(Moving around the King, Marguerite cuts the space, as though she had a pair of invisible scissors in her hand).

king: Me. Me. Me.

marguerite: This you is not the real you. It's an odd collection of bits and pieces, horrid things that live on you like parasites. The

mistletoe that grows on the bough is not the bough, the ivy that climbs the wall is not the wall. You're sagging under the load, your shoulders are bent, that's what makes you feel so old. And it's that ball and chain dragging at your feet which make it so difficult to walk.
(Marguerite leans down and removes an invisible ball and chain from the King's feet, then as she gets up she looks as though she were making a great effort to lift the weight.)
A ton weight, they must weigh at least a ton.
(She pretends to be throwing them in the direction of the audience; then, freed of the weight, she straightens up.)
That's better! How did you manage to trail them around all your life!
(The King tries to straighten up.)
And I used to wonder why you were so round-shouldered! It's because of that sack!
(Marguerite pretends to be taking a sack from the King's shoulders and throws it away.)
And that heavy pack.
(Marguerite goes through the same motions for the pack.)
And that spare pair of army boots.

king
(with a sort of grunt):
No.

marguerite: Don't get so excited! You won't need an extra pair of boots any more. Or that rifle, or that machine-gun.
(The same procedure as for the pack.)
Or that tool-box.
(Same procedure: protestations from the King.)
He seems quite attached to it! A nasty rusty old saber.
(She takes it off him, although the King tries grumpily to stop her.)
Leave it all to me and be a good boy.
(She taps on the King's hand.)
You don't need self-defense any more. No-one wants to hurt you now. (88-89)

Conrad once defined the purpose of his prose as "to make you see," and I can think of no more startling triumph along these lines than Ionesco's transformation of aging, injury, and the small, lifelong deformations that experience has worked upon us, into something dazzlingly
visible.
And yet "visible" only by the magic of theater, as Marguerite "speaks" this inventory of weaponry and defenses, "pretends" to remove it, and thereby gives it presence.

Dying as
illumination
is a familiar concept, that moment when all at last becomes luminous. But there is still more happening here because Ionesco's art is showing us things with words and gestures that we would not have without the words and gestures. This play causes us to realize how inert and lame our customary labels are; yes, we have talked about defenses and injuries forever, and we have always known that life works its will on the living, that the damage done by experience is somehow on show, in our mannerisms, our dodges, perhaps in our very postures and tics and body movements. Even a cursory glance at a body that has lived for any period of time can be a scary proposition in that we see the toll that life exacts, the traces, marks, and scars left by experience. But who has ever seen it quite as explosively and materially as it appears in the King's final disrobing? This affair of ball and chain, rifle, machine gun, and saber constitutes an unforgettable portrait of civilized man, of what we might call the "cost of living."

With perfect logic, Ionesco carries out the striptease to its necessary end, as still more accoutrements and "aids" are now seen and discarded, but we are now in the end zone, and we have moved from weaponry to even more basic equipment. Marguerite carries out Death's decree: naked you came into the world, naked you shall leave it; from dust you came, as dust you will exit. All of us "know" this; Ionesco actually
shows
it happening as Marguerite helps lead the dying King to his final throne:

marguerite: Higher, up again, up you go, still higher, higher, higher!
(The King is quite close to the throne.)
Now turn and face me! Look at me! Look right through me! Gaze into my unreflecting mirror and stand up straight! . . . Give me your legs! The right one! Now the left!
(As she gives him these orders, the King stiffens his legs.)
Give me a finger! Give me two fingers . . . three, four . . . five ... all ten fingers! Now let me have your right arm! Your left arm! Your chest, your two shoulders and your stomach!
(The King is motionless, still as a statue.)
There you

are, you see! Now you've lost the power of speech, there's no need for your heart to beat, no more need to breathe. It was a lot of fuss about nothing, wasn't it? Now you can take your place. (92-93)

Those are the play's last words, but its last act—our last act—is shot through with mystery and beauty: Marguerite disappears, the King is seated on his throne, the doors, windows, and walls now disappear as well, and then the King and his throne disappear, slowly but implacably, even serenely. This disappearance act, which is the culminating moment of all somatic beings—far from being the nightmarish removal and abduction that many of us suspect it to be—is invested with grandeur. And this grandeur, this final occupancy of the throne, is revealed as the exact opposite of conventional kingly arrangements: no pomp, no circumstance, no possessions whatsoever. Berenger dismantles into majesty. His dying, we understand, is a form of purification, a return to basics, a putting aside of all dross, not unlike a spring cleaning or an existential scouring that gets rid of all the clutter and rubbish that has collected over a lifetime. Berenger's final state has an austere freshness—on the far side of heroics, on his part, on the far side of mourning, on ours. He has completed his trajectory.

I am not such a fool as to believe that many secular readers are prepared to regard dying as a triumph. I believe that Ionesco, like Tolstoy, writes about death in order to speak of life. Life is imaged here as a miraculous gift, or more precisely, a series of miraculous gifts, such as a functional body and mind. The rationale of this chapter on death and dying as reflected through literature turns on the key notion that we are poor at imagining death, that literature adds to our stock. I want now to say that our greatest poverty is the laziness with which we approach
life,
the insidious way in which routine and blankness bathe so much of what we do. Ionesco's play is about the discovery of life: its quotidian splendor, its dazzling plenitude, its muffled drama. Berenger's dying constitutes an explosive burst of light not entirely unlike the "Let there

be light" of Genesis, which is also a story about coming into one's estate. The playwright has taken on and has then reversed the oldest of metaphors about death, "night" and "darkness." Remember Othello's grave line as he stands before Desdemona's sleeping body: "Put out the light, and then put out the light: / If I quench thee, thou flaming minister, / I can again thy former light restore, / Should I repent me; but once put out thy light, / Thou cunning'st pattern of excelling nature, / I know not where is that Promethean heat / That can thy light relume" (V.ii.7-12). In Ionesco's play dying produces light and life.

EMILY DICKINSON: THE FAR SIDE OF DYING

If Ionesco clothes dying in regal colors, there is a poet who presents it in the widest array of tones and tropes, but always with a stamp of utter familiarity, sometimes whimsical, sometimes pedestrian, sometimes virulent; I am referring to Emily Dickinson. Today Dickinson is the darling of the academy, and for good reason: unrecognized in her moment, she is seen now as arguably the boldest American voice in the nineteenth century, employing a sibylline writing style—reordering English grammar to suit her needs—in the service of a powerful philosophical vision. But the other side of the coin is this: her poems are grounded in daily experience, in the domestic routines of her time, but they subject this world of habit and manners to a veritable crucible of fire and feeling, yielding a visionary world that is at once recognizable and wondrous strange. Nowhere is this more the case than with her poems about dying. As much as anything else, I want to focus on the
example
of Dickinson, the artificer who remakes the world, who ceaselessly transforms the known (our own familiar, fatigued, cliched arrangements) into something arresting, unsettling, often unforgettable. We can use her to rethink our lives. And our death.

Writing at a time when death was a household item, especially for women who were expected to tend to the sick and dying, Dickinson manages, time after time, to infuse the quotidian occurrence with a

dosage of wit, indeed of madness and genius, that stands as her signature in the poetic tradition. Poems such as "There's been a Death, in the Opposite House" (no. J389) are almost anthropological in their scrupulous notation of the local signs by which death is signaled: doctor's visit, mattress being aired, minister's arrival, milliner on the scene, and finally the arrival of you-know-who: "the Man of the Appalling Trade." Okay, this is the side of death we know about, even if Dickinson's cool report has the earmarks of the census taker or statistician—or of a Martian who happened to witness this odd parade of stuff coming out the window and people going in the doors, and who then wondered what it all signified. At least we are not threatened, since the trouble is in the "opposite house."

Usually, however, there is a bite, and sometimes more than that, as the death poems go through their paces. Therefore, it is worth acknowledging how vicious and sadistic the demure Emily can be with this (usually sober, high-minded) theme. One little ditty begins, "If I shouldn't be alive / When the Robins come" (no. J182), and goes on to say that she would like to thank the birds for their visit, but that it is hard "With my Granite lip!" Camille Paglia, in her provocative book
Sexual Personae,
has explored the nature and limits of Dickinson's nastiness, and has persuasively argued that it is time to recognize the sheer violence and savagery of this poet's imagination. The dead, lying in their tombs, are frequently characterized as victims of industrial accidents such as "soldered mouth" or "rivets" or "hasps of steel" that considerably hamper their maneuvering room. Paglia's version of Dickinson as "Amherst's Madame de Sade" is often over the top (and not much loved by the scholars), but it is also salutary as a way of peeling off the layers of Vic-toriana and maidenly decorum that, like cobwebs of yesteryear, sometimes coat these poems in misleading prissiness and that obscure their pith and rage.

Other pieces express their malice more finely, as in " 'Twas just this time, last year, I died" (no. J445). The tide alone (merely the first line) leaps out at us with its tidings of Dickinson's mind-wrenching breakthrough.

Every text we have considered up to now views death as a limited situation, as a state that can be spoken by others, but never from the inside, from the angle of the dier. Dickinson blithely cashiers that silly notion and proceeds to write from the grave. As you might guess, it is a fascinating sight/site, offering a perspective that stands alone in American literature (or any other literature that I know). The speaker in this poem remembers the trip to the grave, remembers wanting to get out ("But something held my will"), and then goes on to evoke the harvest time and the grand get-togethers at Thanksgiving and Christmas, family gatherings where she will be absent.

We feel in the presence of a kind of narcissist fantasy here, a mix of "oh, won't they be missing me" cut with undertones of Perry Como's "I'll be home for Christmas"; but just wait, this is Dickinson, and so the final stanza releases all the held-back venom: "But this sort, grieved myself, / And so, I thought the other way, / How just this time, some perfect year— / Themself, should come to me—." It is not easy to get your mind around the closing vendetta staged in folksy tones here, but it adds a bit of spice and vinegar to the grieving models put forth by Freud and company. Yes, we miss each other, but I'll have my chance to play hostess soon enough when
they
die and come for dinner. Here is a zinger for our time, wise about the warfare that informs love no less than hate, that pirouettes genteel nineteenth-century notions of hospitality with such oomph that we can almost taste the Schadenfreude that finances the poem's conclusion. Pyschologists have told us that anger is a necessary stage to go through when loved ones die; it's not nice, they say, but you have to accept the fact that you have trouble forgiving people for dying. But who ever had the wit to turn this logic full circle, and to propose that the dead themselves, angry lot that they are, are so unseemly as to hunger for our arrival among them?

Dickinson's registers in this arena are varied. "Because I could not stop for Death" (no. J712) is probably her most famous poem about dying, and it too invokes the perspective of the tomb. This time, Death is a courtly gentleman caller who escorts the dying one to her final destina-

tion, past the school, past the "Fields of Gazing [!] Grain," to arrive at "a House that seemed / A Swelling of the Ground." The topographical realism of this charming coach ride to the grave closes with a jolt as we realize this memory goes back "Centuries," constitutes the last remnants of an earthly existence. One finds no shocking expose of what death is like, merely a blow-by-blow rendition of the trip to the cemetery, but a rendition infused with a wit and gentleness and mellow wisdom that are not so far from Shakespeare's "The readiness is all." This often anthologized piece—I remember it as one of the first poems I ever read in grade school—soothes more than frightens, invests dying with a school-girlish charm that would not be out of place in describing a hayride. Yet, reconsider the first two lines, "Because I could not stop for Death— / He kindly stopped for me—," and try to measure what kind of kindness is expressed in that shocking adverb, "kindly." The slow, measured pace of the rest of the poem applies to dying, but living, confined to the first verse, is an altogether more hectic and busy proposition, a time when we cannot stop for death, when we cannot stop at all. Not to worry: death will do the stopping.