Arnold Weinstein - A Scream Goes Through The House (64 page)

Q: Did you take anything away from the experience of writing
Scream
that surprised, excited, or inspired you?

AW:
While I do not think I found any wisdom (I am still as afraid of pain and death as I was before), and while I cannot be sure how much help I can truly give the hurting and dying with my book, I am sure that I have succeeded in packing a lifetime of encounters, feelings, and thoughts into this book about literature and life, and there is true exhilaration in that. By opening my sights, by including my feelings, by speaking directly to my reader, I hope to have shown that reading books is in fact an affair of feeling, a human exchange. That would be a satisfying achievement.

In writing
Scream,
I also learned to "open up" my texts, my arguments, and above all myself. I learned to descend more directly and ambitiously into my own depths. I felt an injunction to approach each page of my book with the terrifying question: Why say this? What's in it for my reader? And I found, to my amazement, that I had real answers, full excursions, even extended vistas that I could unfurl to address these central existential issues. I found that a lifetime of teaching and loving books had prepared me for just this kind of opening, this kind of adventure.
Scream
is punctuated by the motif of "trip," "adventure," "journey," and, indeed, that expresses my own extraordinary voyage as writer, my own act as self-explorer and as guide for self-exploration. While I had often done this in passing in my courses, I was now doing it systematically, full throttle, and I found it exhilarating, remarkably fruitful, gratifying, like a fabulous dessert that followed my lifetime meal of teaching and writing.

Q: What overall impact has the experience of writing
Scream,
and the self-discoveries associated with it, had on your work and on your life?

AW:
It is hard to overstate the significance of these discoveries for me. At sixty-two, I had already begun to wonder how much longer I want to teach, to work full time. In some utterly unanticipated way, the writing of
Scream
has been a revelation for me about these matters, because I now know that there are more books I want to write exactly along these experiential lines. I know that whatever my "gift" is, it has to do with making exactly those connections between life and art that I made in
Scream,
connections that I now feel poised to make in newer ventures, on other themes, about other books. It is as if I myself have gone through the looking glass.

Q: What are you, the Guide, reading now?

AW:
I am currently rereading Proust. He's rather applicable to this conversation, in fact. One of his central, daunting insights is that we may

well die before coming to true self-knowledge or self-possession, and that the goal of life is to reach that stage so that at least that one possession—the only one Proust believes in—may be brought about: the possession of our life. It sounds exalted and over-the-top to compare myself to Proust, but in some sense, the writing of
Scream
has led me to a startling sense of my own rich quarry, the materials that I am now prepared to mine, exploit, and share.

Q: What are you currently working on?

AW:
I
am at work on a book that could open the way for readers to enter some of the greatest but most mystifying books of the twentieth century, books that everyone knows but that few feel comfortable with: Proust's
Remembrance of Things Past,
Joyce's
Ulysses,
Woolf's
Mrs. Dalloway
and
To the Lighthouse,
Faulkner's
The Sound and the Fury
and
Absalom, Absalom!,
Morrison's
Beloved.
I do not profess to have any "key" to these marvelous books, but I have spent a lifetime reading and teaching them, and I am convinced that they tell us about the most basic human issues: consciousness, love, self, desire, fear. These writers broke radically with the nineteenth-century realist novel in order to create a style and a vision that are startlingly new. My goal is to show how intimately and explosively these books tell
our story.
Once again, as in
Scream,
I want to clear away some of the academic cobwebs surrounding these novels so that we can see these dazzling performances for what they are: an unprecedented picture of how the mind works, how feelings live, how the past and the might-have-been dance in our heads. Such writing jolts us out of the often narrow and tidy views we have of life—of our own life—by showing us how prancing, kaleidoscopic, and incomparably rich it actually is. It is going to be fun to write this.

QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION

1.   In the Introduction, Weinstein asserts that the bookshelf is comparable with the medicine shelf, because of the way that each can serve as a basic resource for the body and the mind. This analogy fuels a great deal of what is to come. Do you agree with the parallel? Do books have therapeutic value for you? If not, might they? If so, what kinds of books have this value? Familiar favorites or new discoveries?

2.   Weinstein claims that science does not deal with pain and illness in terms of how we experience them, how they make each individual feel. Does this ring true in your own experience? Do you feel that doctors do or do not address these matters? Should they? How could the literary testimony which this book presents have a bearing on your own doctor/patient relationship?

3.   It has been claimed that "happy love has no history," meaning that great literature tends to dwell on the problems and crises of life. Yet happiness and pleasure are certainly real. Does this book scant them? Is it over-focused on the dark side of things?

4.   Weinstein argues that through art we discover that we are not alone. Is this an exaggerated or romantic claim? How do you connect with other people by sharing the experience of reading a certain book, or

looking at a certain painting? In your experience, can art counteract loneliness?

5.    Weinstein's discussion of William Blake's poem "London" closes with an assertion that this poem offers its readers an experience of eighteenth-century London that no other source could match. What about history? Or painting? Or actually walking the London streets with a good guide or guidebook?

6.    The account of James Baldwin's "Sonny's Blues" mentions Ken Burns's recent TV documentary onjazz as an example of what Baldwin is trying to do. What do you make of the familiar notion that the "blues" are "pain turned into music"? Do you subscribe to the notion that suffering produces art? What other artists or writers come to mind as exemplars of this notion?

7.    Weinstein says that the paintings of Edvard Munch are not depressing. Given the very dark subject matter of so much of Munch's work, do you agree with the author's claim?

8.    The chapter "Living in the Body" asserts that art and literature
de-familiarize
our received notions about our bodies. What does that mean? Is it true? If so, might it be a general feature of successful art? Do such "surprises" strengthen or undermine your sense of who you are?

9.    Weinstein focuses a good deal on the authority, even the tyranny, of the body. Are you persuaded by this view? Could you argue that we do control our own bodies? How do you feel these issues are seen in contemporary culture? What might be said about the beauty or pleasure of the body? What do you make of the "I/It" correspondence that the author discusses? Do you experience your body as an "It"? When?

10. Weinstein's chapter on "Narratives of Exposure" is much taken up with the issues that go into
diagnosis.
Do you feel that literature is a diagnostic enterprise? Do books help you "see more clearly"? Could one argue the opposite: that books often confuse us, make the world a murkier place than it was? Would that be good or bad?

11. To what extent do you believe modern life in America—with its regular medical checkups, routine testing of children for disorders, and huge array of imaging procedures—is a diagnostic culture? Do you see a risk in the enormous advances made possible by diagnostic imaging and testing? With the advent of ever-improved genetic research, some have argued that our lives will be a kind of readable "blueprint" from infancy on; will this be a benefit or a curse? Are we now able to diagnose beyond our capacity to heal?

12. In his chapter on plague and contagion, Weinstein quotes the French visionary Artaud, who argues that plague is revelatory, and that it has a kinship with theater. Is this a mad claim? What could be said for it? What might be said against it? What can we learn about plague or epidemic from artists and writers that we cannot learn from epidemiologists?

13. We are familiar with the spate of films and books that deal with "coming plagues." Does this topic have a new resonance in post-9/11 America? Has your own sense of vulnerability been altered? Can we learn something about our own time from a book like Defoe's
Journal of the Plague Tear,
written almost three centuries ago? If so, what? Are there modern poems or novels that speak to this dilemma?

14. We usually think of grieving as a private experience connected to the loss of our loved ones, but Weinstein also deals with public grieving, as reflected in Whitman's poem about the death of Lincoln. Does an

entire society go through the work of grieving? Do you think the assassinations of John and Robert Kennedy and of Martin Luther King catalyzed a national mourning experience? We know that holidays and memorial events commemorate these deaths, but might literature or art or film play a role here?

15. Weinstein's chapter "Saying Death" closes with a discussion of the "post-death" poems of Emily Dickinson. Is Dickinson's perspective whimsical? Mad? None of us knows anyone who has died and come back to tell about it; what are we to make of poems that seem to do that? What can we the living learn from material like this?

16. Given that depression tends to shut down one's appreciation of life, can there be a literature of depression? How can we square the gray-ness and anomie of clinical depression with the fireworks, the "sound and fury," of performances such as Hamlet's and that of Faulkner's Quentin Compson? Weinstein alleges that the collapse of "I" is central to the experience of depression. Could you argue that it is also central to every chapter in this book? Can art help us in this dilemma?

SUGGESTED READING

Many of the primary texts mentioned in
A Scream Goes Through the House
are discussed only in passing, and they too belong on the following list.

Chapter 1. A Scream Goes Through the House

Works of art in which the flow and power of feeling are central, carrying over time and space.

Stephen Crane,
The Red Badge of Courage:
a coming-of-age story set in the Civil War, written in impressionist, hallucinatory prose

Euripides,
The Bacchae:
collective hysteria, trauma, psychological extreme states

Romantic poetry: Wordsworth, Coleridge, Keats, Shelley, Byron, Whitman, Goethe

F. Scott Fitzgerald,
The Great Gatsby:
tender, lyrical account of the American dream, and the power of belief

Gustave Flaubert, "Un coeur simple": moving story of a servant's passionate need to find a love object

William Faulkner,
Light in August
and
Absalom, Absalom!:
spellbinding yet arduous novels about race and violence in the South, both present-day and in the Civil War era

Zora Neale Hurston,
Their Eyes Were Watching God:
lyrical story of a tumultuous love relationship and female self-assertion in a paroxystic natural setting

Arthur Miller,
Death of a Salesman:
heartbreaking account of Willy Loman's "fall" and the collapse of an entire ethos

Jean Rhys,
Wide Sargasso Sea:
modern "prequel" to Bronte's
Jane Eyre
which focuses on the tragic life of Bertha Mason Rochester, "the madwoman in the attic"

Tim O'Brien,
The Things They Carried:
searing Vietnam War counterpart to Crane's Civil War story

Chapter 2. Living in the Body

Works in which the human body is depicted with power and strangeness, and the culture's grip is inseparable from, the body's fate.

Lazarillo de Tormes:
anonymous sixteenth-century picaresque tale of starvation and coming of age

Ernest Hemingway,
In Our Time
and
The Garden of Eden:
early and late works of
the
master of desiring and injured bodies, the first about violence and trauma, the second about self-creation and gender-bending

James Joyce,
Ulysses:
the paramount modernist fiction in the English language,
with
unforgettable somatic notations in the representation of Leopold Bloom; a very difficult "read," with commensurate rewards

Toni Morrison,
Sula:
gorgeous and troubling story of female rites of passage, written in the style of "magical realism"

Francisco Quevedo,
The Swindler:
seventeenth-century picaresque story of hunger and street life, written in almost surreal fashion

Francois Rabelais,
Gargantua and Pantagruel:
rollicking, bawdy sixteenth-century French account of giants with giant needs and ways

Philip Roth,
Sabbath's Theater:
dazzling, over-the-top story of Mickey Sabbath's insatiable erotic and intellectual hunger; an American version of Rabelais