Arnold Weinstein - A Scream Goes Through The House (6 page)

tual "caring" or "concern" for others; on the contrary, I am claiming that art overwhelms us with its news of feelings and relationships, that it brothers and sisters us, binds us in some almost visceral way beyond our choosing. The mere encounter with an image, the absorption of a story, are events grafted onto your flesh, entered into your body and blood and heart as well as your brain.

The territory the artist colonizes, the vineyard he toils in, is you. It is precisely inside of us that art releases its meaning and its riches. Emerson calls the poet
representative
in this sense: he "apprises us not of his wealth, but of the commonwealth" (448), inasmuch as the poetic vision we apprehend becomes
ours,
perhaps always was ours, needed only the poet to complete the transaction, the gift.

In saying that art enters our bloodstream—not like an infection, but like a transfusion—I again have Emerson in mind, especially his view of the Oversoul which he defines utterly along cardiac lines: "And this, because the heart in thee is the heart of all; not a valve, not a wall, not an intersection is there anywhere in nature, but one blood rolls uninterruptedly an endless circulation through all men, as the water of the globe is all one sea, and, truly seen, its tide is one" (399). In echoing John Donne's famous line, "no man is an island," Emerson radically challenges our intuitive and empirical conviction of being contained within individual borders, bound within our skin, creatures who can be opened up only at great risk.

To see the human circulatory system as a version of the water of the globe is to posit flow and connectedness as the central facts of life. Self and other, self and world, partake of each other. Is it possible that the life-giving blood that animates us only seems to be housed in our organism? Might it also come from afar, just as the air we breathe does, just as the words we read and the sights we see do?

Not only is art our commonwealth, the larger estate that is ours, but
in
art we sometimes discover this same shocking sense of a world that is entirely networked, tentacular, linked: a waterway and bloodstream that all creatures share, are nourished by.
A scream goes through the house:
the

utterance of human feeling floods out into the world through literature and art. But it is no less true the other way around: the voices of the world enter into us, move from house to occupant, from wind to word.

The
house
through which the scream goes is to be understood as the terrains of both time and space. Space signifies the larger stage—family, society, universe—on which we are located. Time would be the two-way flow from past to present and back. Time brings Sophocles and Shakespeare to us, and us to them. This flow conveys the still living power of the dead, the heritage of feeling that enters you via their texts, the living emotive current that constitutes the bloodline, the central traffic of all art.

Time would also be the historical flow of your own life, a flow that art is equipped to register, but which normal perception cannot. Just as dreams bring your entire life into composite form, so too does art yield something precious, on the order of a four-dimensional portrait, rendering the shape of your life in a way that neither the eye nor casual thinking can perceive.

At the end of Proust's very long novel, the narrator, now an old man, hears the tinkling of a bell that reminds him of the same portentous sounds of long ago when the neighbor Swann used to close his evening visits (portentous because now he would have Maman all to himself), and he then wonders, with terror, if this is not the same bell indeed, if the ringing has ever stopped, if somewhere deep within us some things go on forever. Is it possible that key moments in our lives—moments of pleasure or pain, moments diat mark us—echo and resonate endlessly, ordinarily just below the threshold of consciousness, but suddenly perceivable in times of heightened experience? Do we ever stop screaming?

We all know the cliche of wearing one's heart on one's sleeve, and we think it a cliche because our emotional life is thought to be invisible. But what if it were not? What if literature and art were a new code that expressed the hidden story of feeling that truly tells who we are, who we have been? What if others could perceive this? When Sophocles' Jo-casta finally sees, with inescapable certainty, that Oedipus is her son as

well as her husband, she emits a scream: "Aieeeeee— / man of agony— / that is the only name I have for you, / that, no other—ever, ever, ever!" (223). Given that the entire play is devoted to the riddle of Oedipus' identity, the many different and transgressive roles he has played, Jocasta confers on this man perhaps his truest name: "Aieeeeee— / man of agony." Her scream also illuminates the horror of
her
life—whose fatal pattern is only now visible—constituting a tragic existence every bit as awful as Oedipus'.

Art helps us to see and to hear the "Aieeeeee" that may punctuate our lives, to feel the truth that the past—especially its injuries or transgressions—is rarely past. For many these may not be welcome tidings. After all, one wants to believe that the past is past, that pain can be truly over, the wound can heal, the damage be transcended. And it is true that people get well, survive trauma, live in the present, and have a shot at a future. But it is also true that the past and its screams break through, are real, that a life-in-time amounts to a prodigious amount of processing older materials, and that few of us are "clear" of the earlier events that have marked us.

True, too, is the sheer scale of a life that recovers its dimensionality and sweep, and I have long felt that Sophocles wanted, in some strange fashion, to tell the story of a man who came slowly into possession of his life and who had the courage to chart his real narrative line, even to the tune of embracing the horrors (of parricide and incest) that were his; and that Sophocles then presented this
recuperation
of a life as at once something noble and also the secret medicine for a dying community: Oedipus' life story becomes therapy for Thebes.

Our lives are so filled with days and years, with details and routines, that few of us possess that magic thread, that figure in the carpet, which would give a distilled picture of who we really are, of what our life really means. Art does just this. However you turn it, art challenges the thin, "over with" testimony of daily experience. Art is true to the stubborn, enduring, shaping power of feeling, the longitudinal reach of feelings. In the realm of feelings we cannot easily close up shop or leave it in the of-

fice; we bring it home with us, we relive it, we work through it, and it works through us. Art is echoing, committed to depths, hence shows the surface to be a shimmering thing that speaks in many tongues; literature is invested in orchestrating all the critical data of a life—and even of a culture—into a picture of depth, relationships across time, connections across space.

Art has common cause with dreams, those nightly experiences of the reaches and odd patterns of our lives, those episodes where longitude and latitude come together so that the people of the past and the present do their dance of musical chairs, displaying for us a tapestry of our doings (and failures to do) that bears little resemblance to our resumes and chitchat. Such vistas enlarge us even as they intimate that almost all human business is unfinished business. The familiar myths that we can "compartmentalize" and find "closure" may have some narrow authority, but art tends to take down, to deconstruct, these fences, to breach the dikes as dreams do, and to let the flow in. The resultant flux flows across boundaries and can take many forms: it can create a new amalgam of personal past and present; it can be a shocking conflation of people and things you'd thought separate, now seen as glued together, and glued to you.

What is wrecked in these configurations of art and dream is our conventional sense of self, our habitual view of personal contours and identity. In its stead, we perceive something wondrous and strange, not totally unlike those odd moments when we see ourselves in a three-way mirror, or worse still, in a fun-house mirror, and yet sense that this is also us, the side of us we ordinarily omit, the fuller shape we customarily miss. But the ultimate significance of the shock of recognition that art provides has to do with the now visible lineaments of feeling, the now visible emotional ties that have shaped us, that still shape us, even though no photograph can render them.
Epiphany
is one term that has been invoked to convey this moment of perceptual truth, when our "true form" is grasped. "Four-dimensional portraiture" is another way of characterizing the plenitude of self that art makes available.

All of these concepts are a way of attending to the scream that goes through the house, a way of seeing our lives as they truly are: crisscrossed with ties, bound to others, and as shot through with feelings as are those ultraviolet photos that reveal the presence of rays we normally cannot see.

JAKE EYRE

Consider as an example of fourth-dimensional portraiture, of how the fully sentient self could be depicted, a seemingly realist novel such as Charlotte Bronte's
Jane Eyre.
The book starts, logically enough, with Jane's unhappy childhood as poor relation and orphan in the Reed family. This stint with misery is epitomized in the episode of the "red room," where Jane is locked up as punishment for resisting the Reeds' emotional, even physical abuse. Terrified of ghosts (she is in the dead uncle's room), Jane sees her own reflection in the mirror ("visionary hollow" is Bronte's term) and fails initially to recognize herself; she sees only "glittering eyes of fear," and thinks of phantoms, fairies, and imps. Shortly thereafter, Jane is certain a ghost is coming, sees a light moving, and then she experiences an extraordinary moment of visitation, of panic and capsizing: "My heart beat thick, my head grew hot; a sound filled my ears, which I deemed the rushing of wings; something seemed near me; I was oppressed, suffocated; endurance broke down"; a moment later, the servants unlock the door and rush into the room, claiming to have heard a scream, something prodigious: " 'What a dreadful noise! It went quite through me!' exclaimed Abbot" (49).

We,
however, have read nothing of the sort: the text says nothing about Jane screaming. The servants leave, Jane is again locked up, and this time she falls unconscious: "a species of fit." Everything in this sequence broadcasts the imperiousness of feeling, feeling so strong that it makes you unrecognizable, travels as a ghost, is characterized by beating heart and hot head, bypasses consciousness altogether, snuffs out Jane's lights, has the run of the house.

In the next chapter Jane recounts awakening to the face of a kindly man standing over her, asking," 'Well, who am I?' " Not a bad question for this book, it will turn out. Bronte is redrawing the map of the self, by attending to the scream that traverses it, the emotional injuries of which it is made. The novel then seems to go on its merry linear path, narrating Jane's subsequent adventures at Lowood School, then at Edward Rochester's Thornfield, then at Marsh End, and finally back to Rochester at book's close. But the only way to really understand
Jane Eyre
is to realize that the episode in the red room—a visit from phantoms and fairies and imps, sound in the ears, rushing of wings, eventuating into a scream that comes from her without her knowing it, but then goes "quite through" all those around her—sets the stage for the entire novel, gets replayed throughout Jane's life, is ultimately the scream that goes through the house. For Jane is presented already in childhood as split, fissured, porous, entered by spirits, a shrieker of screams.

How would you truly show the enduring effects of emotional injury, the actual reality of trauma? I'd want to say that the penetrating scream in the red room is a signal of Jane's own continual emotional turmoil
that will not be silenced or stay put,
a kind of libidinal flow that courses through the house and the story. In this regard, Bronte is stunningly Freudian (even though she antedates him by over half a century), in that the red room episode is given to us as a textbook illustration of the mechanics of child abuse, of a wound that stays open, so that the language of phantoms and shrieks becomes eloquent as an index of damage that leads to potent feelings and to alteration of self. Bronte has wanted to tell the story of an injured child, and it is no accident that the motif of abandoned or unsavable children runs in filigree throughout the novel, appearing in Bessie's songs and in Jane's own fitful dreams. After all, what does emotional abuse of a child truly look like? At the surface, with a camera or notebook, you could describe it in terms of
something happening,
a physical or sexual injury; but how would you graph what is happening
under
the surface, what continues to smolder throughout one's life?

Bronte's invasion of the spirits in the episode in the red room does exactly that, shows us a little girl in the process of becoming a haunted house. Yet her scream not only escaped, but it seems ultimately to script the key events of the novel. For Bronte writes her narrative in such a way that the surface realism—from episode A to episode B and so forth—is disrupted, imploded by the libidinal virulence generated in the red room. This virulence is so great that it becomes the novel's reality principle by
twinning
its characters. Hence, Charlotte Bronte has taken the fissured, spirit-ridden Jane, and has systematically
doubled
her in this novel by her raging, carnal, libidinally charged counterpart self: Bertha Mason Rochester, the madwoman in the attic.

To see that proper, diminutive, wrenlike Jane and libidinal, corpulent, murderous Bertha might be the
same person
is to break all the rules of both realist fiction and common sense, but the poetic logic here is irresistible. Punish a young girl enough—and this book loads on the punishment—and she'll either die or explode. To see Bertha's violence as Jane's revenge is to see how the scream that goes through the house sovereignly reshapes reality, gives it a devastating emotional cogency.