Arnold Weinstein - A Scream Goes Through The House (63 page)

Foucault, Michel.
The Birth of the Clinic,
tr. A. M. Sheridan Smith (New York: Vintage, 1975).

Freud, Sigmund. "Mourning and Melancholia," tr.Joan Riviere. In
A General Selection from the Works of Sigmund Freud,
ed. John Rickman (New York: Anchor,

1957)-

Gilman, Charlotte Perkins.
The Yellow Wallpaper
(New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1993).

Harrison, Kathryn.
Exposure
(New York: Random House, 1993).

Hawthorne, Nathaniel. "The Birthmark." In
The Celestial Railroad and Other Stories
(New York: New American Library, 1963).

-------.
The Scarlet Letter
(New York: Norton, 1978).

Hemingway, Ernest. "Indian Camp." In
In Our Time
(New York: Scribners, 1970).

Hodin,J. P.
Edward Munch
(London: Thames and Hudson, 1972).

Ionesco, Eugene.
Exit the King,
tr. Donald Watson (New York: Grove Press, 1963).

James, Henry.
The Turn of the Screw
(New York: Norton, 1966).

Joyce, James.
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
(New York: Penguin, 1992).

-------.
Ulysses
(New York: Vintage, 1961).

Kafka, Franz.
Briefe, 1902-1924
(New York: Schocken, 1958).

-------
.
"A Country Doctor." In
The Penal Colony,
tr. Willa and Edwin Muir (New

York: Schocken, 1971).

-------. "The Metamorphosis." In
The Penal Colony,
tr. Willa and Edwin Muir (New

York: Schocken, 1971).

Kushner, Tony.
Angels in America, Part One: Millennium Approaches
(New York: Theatre Communications Group, 1993).

-------
. Angels in America, Part Two: Perestroika
(New York: Theatre Communications Group, 1994).

Morrison, Toni.
Beloved
(New York: New American Library, 1988).

O'Connor, Flannery. "The Displaced Person." In
The Complete Stories
(New York:

Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1983). -------. "The Life You Save May Be Your Own." In
The Complete Stories
(New York:

Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1983). O'Neill, Eugene.
Long Day's Journey into Night
(New Haven: Yale University Press,

1956). Pastan, Linda. "The Five Stages of Grief." In
The Five Stages of Grief
(
New
York:

Norton, 1978). Poe, Edgar Allan.
Selected Poetry and Prose of Edgar Allan Poe
(New York: Modern

Library, 1951). -------. "Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar." In
Edgar Allan Poe: Poetry and Tales
(New

York: Library of America, 1984). Proust, Marcel.
Remembrance of Things Past,
tr. C.K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence

Kilmartin (New York: Random House, 1982). Rilke, Rainer Maria.
The Notebooks ofMalte Laurids Brigge,
tr. Stephen Mitchell

(New York: Vintage, 1985). Rowling, J. K.
Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone
(New York: Scholastic, 1999). Sacks, Oliver.
The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat
(New York: Perennial, 1987). Selzer, Richard. "The Surgeon as Priest." In
Mortal Lessons
(New York: Touchstone,

1987)-

----—. "Imelda." In
Letters to a Young Doctor
(New York: Harvest, 1996).

Shakespeare, William.
Othello
(Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968).

-------1
Hamlet
(New York: Norton, 1992).

Sontag, Susan.
Illness as Metaphor
and
AIDS and Its Metaphors
(New York: Anchor,

1989)-

Sophocles.
Philoctetes.
In
Electra and Other Plays,
tr. E. F. Wading (London: Penguin, 1953).

-------.
Oedipus the King.
In
The Three Theban Plays,
tr. Robert Fagles (New York:

Penguin, 1984).

St. Paul.
Corinthians 1$
(New York: Abradale, n.d.).

Strindberg, August.
Inferno/From an Occult Diary,
tr. Mary Sandbach (London: Penguin, 1979).

-------. "The Ghost Sonata." In
Strindberg: Five Plays,
tr. Harry G. Carlson (New

York: New American Library, 1984).

Stevens, Wallace. "Sunday Morning." In
Poems Wallace Stevens
(New York: Vintage,

1959)-Weinstein, Arnold.
The Fiction of Relationship
(Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1988).

-------.
Nobody's Home: Speech, Self, and Place in American Fiction from Hawthorne

to DeLillo
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1993). Whitman, Walt.
Leaves of Grass and Selected Prose by Walt Whitman
(New York:

Modern Library, 1950). Williams, William Carlos. "The Use of Force." In
The Doctor Stories
(New York,

New Directions, 1984).

A SCREAM GOES THROUGH THE HOUSE

Arnold Weinstein
a reader's guide

AN INTERVIEW WITH THE AUTHOR

Q: What made you want to interrupt your academic work to write
A Scream Goes Through the House?

Arnold Weinstein:
One reason for writing
A Scream Goes Through the House
was to
demystify
the reading and study of literature. We know that educated people love to read: we see it on planes and trains and buses, we see it on beaches and in book clubs, and we know it is a major activity where we can't see it: happening on sofas and in comfortable armchairs, being the routine event between getting in bed and falling asleep. Yet folks are very, very uneasy and suspicious around "literary critics" and professors of literature.

Q: Why do you think that is?

AW:
I think it is largely our own fault. We professors have created a specialized language and set of interests, as well as a massive theoretical scaffolding, in order to discuss our field. Like all specialized languages, the language of literary criticism or literary theory serves as common currency between the specialists themselves, and serves as an insurmountable barrier for everyone else. We seem to live in an "era of expertise," and it is taken for granted that "you," the lay people, do not have the tools to understand many of the issues of our time. How knowledgeable are folks about the environment, or about the geopolitical consequences of foreign policy developments? Most of us do not have the background.

Q: What makes literature a different kind of endeavor?

AW:
Literature is about life. Everyone lives, has a body, has loves and losses, dreams and fears, work and leisure, illness and health, and finally dies. These are the basic issues dealt with in literature. But you might not know that in glancing at the titles of the books we write or the conference papers we present. And it might not be all that evident even in the courses routinely taught today in English departments. For all these reasons I wrote my book, to show that literature is not esoteric or only for specialists. I have always felt that it deals with the meat and potatoes of life, with the gut issues that all thinking and feeling people experience, wonder about, and grapple with.

Q: What did you hope to achieve in writing this book?

AW:
People read, many people read voraciously, and thus it is all the sadder that we professors have lost our way to this larger public. But I also believe that this great hunger for reading is an innate force that we have not truly measured or understood. Folks read hungrily, not for evasion, but for fulfillment, perhaps even for wisdom. It is almost as elemental as breathing, and needs to be seen as such. But I am not sure they get much help from the credentialed people who are the supposed experts on books, and that is what I thought I could do in this book. Especially in this book that deals with so many dark issues: pain, illness, depression, death.

Q: As
both a professor and someone who generally loves to read, to what do you attribute the disparity of thought and the lack of communication between academia and the general public?

AW:
Published literary criticism and literary scholarship are understood as a scholarly pursuit for information, so that the scholar can show how his or her in-depth research over the years has led to specific discoveries or data about, say, Shakespeare or Dickens or Postmodernism. There is a crucial "informational" dimension here, a sharing of the fruits of one's professional labors. What is not found—and not sought—in

such publications is the personal relevance of either the literature itself or the scholar's experience of that literature. I do not want to overstate this; of course the best scholarship often has a personal tinge to it. In teaching literature, I have come to understand that the far richer and more engaging story is
not
informational, but personal, tied over and over to our own private lives, wants, needs, dilemmas, and hopes. In short, I think the academy has it wrong—we go through the wrong motions, talk about the wrong things, and simply walk right by the actual treasures in front of us. We are warned to be "professional," and above all not to be "confessional"; yet I have noted, over and over, the surprised look of interest and excitement in students' eyes each time I become personal, each time I relate a point to my life, to their life. There is an elemental logic in play here, the logic of a species that is seeking the best nourishment it can find, that inevitably asks of what it encounters: What good will this do me? What is of sustenance here? And very often, we the professors come up short.

Q: In your own course work at Brown University, you focus on the relationships between literature and medicine. What, for you, is the allure of this combination of pursuits, and how did you decide that this relationship would provide the right road map for
Scream?

AW:
When someone would ask me about the current work I was doing, and I answered "literature and medicine," I would get expressions of puzzlement and mystification. Literature and medicine? What does that mean? How do you possibly connect those two areas? And that was when the fun began for me, because it was astonishingly easy to convince people that these two fields
do belong together,
must be brought together, if we are ever to have a richer understanding of those fundamental life issues, those which I have chosen to deal with in
A Scream Goes Through the House:
the reign of
feeling
in human life, the strangeness and the anarchy of our bodies, the siren song of diagnosis and
reading
body and mind, the threats of disease on a large scale such as AIDS or bioterrorism, the fear and mystery of death, the dread of depression.

These are issues that everyone thinks about, and yet—where can we actually learn about them? My answer—an answer that had been building for three decades of teaching and writing—was: The great books from the Bible and Greek tragedy on through Shakespeare all the way to the Moderns tell us precisely about these issues. And they can be stupendously eloquent and challenging, calling into question our received views, adding to our "stock," our "repertory," just by dint of our having read them.

Q: In translating your academic work for a trade publication, what challenges did you face? How did you move between the languages of academic investigation and general criticism?

AW:
When I decided to write a book that would make sense for non-specialists, I didn't anticipate it would prove as difficult a job as it did. In each successive draft of this book, I tried to remove what was too "academic," too specialized, too narrow, in order to keep my eyes on the central matters at hand. It was hard to wean myself entirely from "professor-speak." But then something unpredictable happened: By foregrounding the human aspects of the literature at hand, I somehow managed to loosen my own tongue, to feel freer about offering my personal vision, about drawing on my personal experiences as child, student, husband, father, and grandfather. And the more I did this, the more dimensional my book became, since I was no longer so bound to particular texts, but able now to weave a more personal, even intimate kind of tapestry, to bring my readers into what was more a conversation than an analysis, more an exploration than any kind of argument.

Q: Since you've opened yourself up to this new way of looking at your work: How did this shift in professional perspective make you feel?

AW:
I
had a strange sense of being in a "win-win" situation, since the fuller and more evocative my words might be, the better chance I had to win over my reader to the central matter at hand: the richness of litera-

ture as guide to the human heart, as magic resource for tracking human feeling over the ages, as even more magic opportunity for time travel and self-enhancement for all readers. Oddly enough, I discovered that my "personal" digressions were not digressions at all, but the meat of my argument, since I was actually showing how literature feeds life.

Q: What did you learn about yourself and your work through writing this book?

AW:
I wrote this book hoping, initially, to find some wisdom for myself by revisiting these writers, and discovered that the best role I could play was that of Guide: As someone who has worked with these books over a lifetime, I could be the fellow who revisits this or that novel or poem in order to "unpack" it and muse over it, who mulls over and plays out the often staggering ramifications of these books and paintings and films. In short, I could bring, not so much my expertise, as my deep familiarity and love for literature into play here, by taking a more leisurely, more probing, more extended look at these works of art than most rushed readers would be likely to do on their own. And maybe my fuller account of these books would whet the appetite of my readers, make them also feel that literature can be profoundly gratifying, a resource for the long haul.