Arnold Weinstein - A Scream Goes Through The House (7 page)

Bronte would hardly have understood the word
uncanny
in the way Freud did—as an intuition that the place we enter for the first time is oddly familiar, that we've been there before—yet her novel beautifully depicts just such a world. It is a deceptive physical world, deceptive because it is drenched in spirit and emotion, ordered by libido rather than Newtonian logic, a space that is entirely scripted by our past history. Is this not what it means when the scream inside goes through us, then through the house? It spills out, shapes what we see, governs and becomes our reality.

Freud invokes the uncanny because he knows that we
create
the world (rather than merely taking it in), and we do so by projecting onto its physical surface our own emotional and libidinal needs and circumstances. Art, on this heading, is the supreme subjective record of life, the personal vision of things that might be at complete odds with the objective picture. Proust once claimed that film was an inferior art form for

just this reason: it was shackled to the existing physical world of appearances and could not represent our inner picture of life. Through art, however, all of us have access to these interior universes. And these inner realms brought to expression in art can reveal what actually matters in our lives, what our deep story is, what our personal take on (and from) life is. (If these notions seem exaggerated, just ask yourself what
meaning
or
aura
the objects that surround you might have for a camera or distant observer, objects such as the photographs on your desk, the old toys you've not quite discarded, the jewelry or clothing you've inherited, indeed the very faces that surround you, including the one that looks at you in the mirror.)

In serving both the dictates of realism (agreed-on public reality) and the inner vision, Bronte remains a shrewd writer, giving us large chunks of objective data, but nonetheless governing her story, at key moments, according to the laws of feeling, the power of injury and emotion. At its most extreme, however, when the private view is not even checked by objective conditions, such art can become outright visionary. The agreed-on physical world that our retinas take in is then quite simply metamorphosed, reshaped by the emotional and libidinal currents of the seer. I use that word
seer
advisedly: the visionary prophet and the ordinary human subject who sees—might they not be one and the same? Might it not be that all of us carry within us a pulsating world of emotions and experiences that is overflowing all the time, spilling into and onto the scene we inhabit, ultimately and deviously composing the scene we inhabit, transposing the people we see into figures from our inner worlds?

We all are familiar with the old chestnut that ten people sitting around a table repeating from one to the next the same story will alter it to the tune of being unrecognizable: version ten will have no relation to version one. Why is this so? It will not do to chalk this up to sloppiness or inattentiveness; closer to the mark would be an acknowledgment that listening—like seeing, like all thinking—is an aggressively shaping activity, a complex process of inserting what we hear into the ongoing story

we are always thinking (if not telling). We are all lifelong artists, shaping (secreting) our hidden, inner story from birth to death.

This example may be banal, but in the hands of a great artist, the docile, contoured world we take for granted is liberated from its material envelope, transformed into vistas of starding traffic, yielding new amalgams, leading to a rich but staggeringly unified picture of both self and world. All this differs entirely from the humdrum, daily experience of life in the office or at home, life filled with objects that are there, but hardly "cohere" or express any sort of deep truth about who we are, and how we have lived. Those deep truths are on the inside, often resistant even to ourselves, which is why many of us go through life feeling that our true coordinates, our genuine melody, our actual meaning, remain hidden and unknown.

The work of art shocks us with its cogency, its way of ordering things so that the truer pattern of life—the unstilled longings of Proust's narrator, the actual shape of Oedipus' existence, the emotional wounds of Jane Eyre—comes to the fore. You may think that such "unity" is merely the private, obsessive vision of the artist, illuminating a hermetic inner world, and thus has no wider relevance for us, the readers or spectators. But at its best, the visionary model—the personal vision that does justice to feeling as the secret law of life, the form-giver of life—can be fiercely social, can be luminous in its reshaping of
our
world. Art that hallows feeling, art that heeds the scream that goes through the house, is ultimately public in nature, illuminating our own private arrangements within the larger family or culture in unforgettable ways. Yes, we are enriched, enlarged, and in some wonderful but awful sense,
implicated
— advised of our fit (our responsibilities) in arrangements we had not foreseen, in families and communities we had thought to be distant, unrelated, nothing to us. Art that is suffused by human feeling upends our complacent sense of individual sovereignty, our lazy certainty that we are freestanding and self-sufficient. "Nothing to us" may be our trusty safe-conduct pass through life, but art challenges such immunity.

Let us move now to the real evidence, by looking carefully at selected

artistic visions, drawn from poetry, narrative, theater, painting, and film, each illustrating the reach and shaping power of feeling. The scream that punctuates individual life does not stop there, but goes out into the world, is shown to be the governing principle of reality; it recasts discrete phenomena into a new mesh, providing a startling discovery of linkage and connection, forcing us to reconsider what a family is, what a society is. Each of these works hallows the authority of feeling, seeks to show how feeling is the primary pulsion and cohesion of life, with enormous moral and political consequences. Ultimately, we discover, as we experience these works of art, that feeling is not only pulsion, but actually
propulsion,
propelling
us
into larger realms, larger selves. I begin with William Blake's canonical poem of 1794, "London," to show how one prodigious poem reconfigures the position of the human subject (and the human reader) in the busding life of the metropolis.

IT ALL FLOWS TOGETHER: WILLIAM BLAKE'S "LONDON"

Blake's "London," a sixteen-line poem, has probably received as much critical scrutiny as any text in English literature. This piece is, I think, particularly beloved among teachers because it seems to speak even to the most unschooled readers, seems to resonate and to cohere in ways that every reader senses, even if obscurely. It goes like this:

I wander through each chartered street, Near where the chartered Thames does flow, And mark in every face I meet Marks of weakness, marks of woe.

In every cry of every Man, In every Infant's cry of fear, In every voice, in every ban, The mind-forged manacles I hear.

How the Chimney-sweeper's cry Every blackening Church appalls; And the hapless Soldier's sigh Runs in blood down Palace walls.

But most through midnight streets I hear

How the youthful Harlot's curse

Blasts the new born Infant's tear,

And blights with plagues the Marriage hearse.
(144)

This is an explosive poem, or rather a series of explosions happening stanza by stanza, sometimes line by line, or even image by image. If you negotiate it evenly and coolly right to the end, how do you maintain composure when hit by the apocalyptic last line? Much of the poem's power comes from the awesome view of human society as one of flux and inescapable linkage among disparate individuals; the view that it enunciates is awesome because it unseats, unhinges our notions of self and stasis.

"Self" and "stasis" are the best words I can muster for the fundamental notions of fixity that regulate and undergird ordinary perception and thinking. We take ourselves to be finite, bounded creatures, each of us an "I" who goes through life under those arrangements: that is
self.
And each thing we see or conceive is (and remains) that thing we see and conceive; our world behaves, stays inside its definitional skin, doesn't pirouette or go on outings: that is
stasis.
Blake's poem, even though it sits nicely in its sixteen lines, wrecks all this, and tells us—a bit the way a merry-go-round tells us—about collapsing boundaries and swirling pathways, about how other people inescapably collide into us, about new communities into which we find ourselves thrust as card-carrying members of humanity with heavy obligations for one another, like it or not. Put more simply, the poem makes us see and hear—what an astonishing verb
make
is here, as if poetry could be coercive and engendering, could actually force a change in our registers—the feelings of

others, shatters us with its scream that goes through the house: we are interconnected, inevitably and across boundaries of all kinds.

The poem's first stanza rips apart the notion of "chartered," precisely by contrasting the man-made (government-ordained) order of city streets against the fluid, uncontrollable river whose course may be traced but whose power cannot be regulated. More than two centuries after the writing of this poem, at a time when we are numbed by the ecological disasters that seem almost routinely to lay waste to our orderly landscapes—floods, earthquakes, hurricanes (along with the famine, disease, and social catastrophes they leave in their wake)—we rediscover something of the inherent unruliness in Blake's ironic lines, an un-ruliness that points up the arrogance of complacent urban and political design. But that first stanza also broadcasts the quintessential breakthrough of the poem: the poet reads individual pain as a collective grammar ("marks of weakness, marks of woe"), sees every London face as luminous and legible, like a billboard announcing its message. Something insistendy diagnostic, downright medical, is happening here: the translation of human countenance into affective and ideological symptom.

For this doctor-poet the city dwellers are indeed ill. It comes through the ears as well as the eyes. "Cry" is twice stated, to tell us that acculturated adults are hardly different from newborn babes in their expression of life's hurt. But the poet's aural apprehension reaches a new plateau altogether when he assesses London noise as "mind-forged manacles." Is there any formulation in English that quite rivals these terms for saying ideological repression? With remarkable economy and pith, these words denote culture itself as imprisonment, as internalized ("self-willed" in some horrible, almost artisanal sense) incarceration, a building project (it would seem) of lifelong duration whose (mad? tragic? evil?) purpose is penal. But perhaps the most striking feature of Blake's notation is this: this act of penitential submission and deformation, this systematic undoing of agency, far from being silently at work in the dark (as one would expect) is
heard.
The poet hears the manacles—

I think of Jacob Marley clanking up those stairs on his way to Ebenezer Scrooge—and we must wonder: just how metaphoric is this? Just as every urban face is an open book, so is every London sound rendered as the clink of chains and prison. One might cavil that such perception is reductive (after all, London is a big and various place), but it is also grand in its incessant translation of
inner life
—pain, misery, powerlessness—into
public notation,
indeed into spectacle, uncannily seen and heard. And this is the poem's central strategic gambit: to transform locked-in, hidden, personal hurt into explosive, luminous public script.

The force of such a move is felt only if we contrast it with what we know of common experience. The initial premise I began with, notably that we are alone in our misery, can be complemented by premise number two: we are likewise in the dark when it comes to the misery of others. But in this poem private misery crosses a representational threshold, becomes a common language. One might counter that only the visionary poet is privy to this public broadcast, but the very act of reading the poem forces us to realize that the institution of poetry is a public broadcast, bringing every reader into Blake's field of vision.

Reading
is the visionary experience of civilized life. Reading Blake's "London" zones you into frequencies you've never heard, assaults you with images of the living city as carnivorous and corrupt as Moloch devouring its citizens. (Fritz Lang's great film of the 1920s,
Metropolis,
with its man-eating machines and herdlike workers, is not a bad analogue for Blake's vision of systemic exploitation.) On this head, art itself gets reconceived, moved from the esoteric margins as high-culture frill all the way to the center, now seen as nuts-and-bolts public utility, as basic as electricity, light, gas, and water, a means of articulating and disseminating news of the common weal, a barometric project that is always measuring and announcing the culture's weather. In today's electronic era of instantaneous and encyclopedic information gathering, we find nothing remotely comparable to the collective utterance brought about in this poem. The Internet can tally heads and bodies

and data, but it does not have the "accessing reach" to tell us what is going on
inside.
Moreover, recent research has confirmed that traveling on the information highway is experienced by many as a lonely enterprise, reinforcing the anomie of modern life, contributing to a culture of data-drenched self-enclosure quite at odds with the empowerment rhetoric that heralds this new technology. Blake's poem moves toward solidarity.

I claimed that we think ourselves alone in our misery, and whereas this is true in general (even if banal), it is still truer, and less banal, when it comes down to those victimized and abused in society, those whose hurt is systemically caused and just as systemically ignored. In the second half of his poem, Blake gets down to business, spells out just whose pain and misery he has in mind.