Read Arnold Weinstein - A Scream Goes Through The House Online
Authors: What Literature Teaches Us About Life [HTML]
The Family at the Road,
Edvard Munch, 1903 (© Munch-Museet, MM
reg. nr. P.569 [Thielska Galleriet, Stockholm])
52
Self-Portrait: Between Clock and Bed,
Edvard Munch, 1940 (© Munch-Museet, MM reg.nr. M.23)
53
The Scream,
Edvard Munch, 1893 (© Munch-Museet, MM reg.nr. M.514)
55 The vampirish embrace between Elisabet and Alma.
Persona,
Ingmar Bergman, 1965 (Svensk Filmindustri)
60
Alexander and his magic lantern.
Fanny and Alexander,
Ingmar Bergman,
1983 (Svenska Filminstitutet)
62
Isak's scream.
Fanny and Alexander,
Ingmar Bergman, 1983
(Svenska Filminstitutet)
67
Bergman instructing Erland Josephson (Isak) how to make the scream.
Fanny and Alexander,
Ingmar Bergman, 1983 (Svenska Filminstitutet)
67
Ishmael holding Alexander.
Fanny and Alexander,
Ingmar Bergman, 1983
(Svenska Filminstitutet)
69
Puberty,
Edvard Munch, 1894 (Scala/Art Resource, N.Y., National Gallery,
Oslo, Norway)
95
Guernica,
Pablo Picasso, 1937 (John Bigelow Taylor/Art Resource, N.Y.,
Museo Nacional Centra de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid, Spain)
115
Los Caprichos,
plate 40, "De que mal morira?" Francisco de Goya y
Lucientes, 1746-1828: Reunion des Musees Nationaux/Art Resource,
N.Y., Musee des Beaux-Arts, Lille, France
147
The First Stage of Cruelty,
from
The Four Stages of Cruelty.
Engraving,
1751 (William Hogarth, Victoria & Albert Museum, London/Art
Resource, N.Y.)
161
The Reward of Cruelty,
from
The Four Stages of Cruelty.
Engraving, 1751
(William Hogarth, Victoria & Albert Museum, London/Art Resource,
N.Y.)
161
Self-Portrait (Might Wanderer),
Edvard Munch, 1923-1924 (© Munch-
Museet, MM reg.nr. M.589)
170
Locked Up,
Lena Cronqvist, 1971 (Galleri Lars Bohman)
178
Private Conversation,
Lena Cronqvist, 1971 (Galleri Lars Bohman)
179
Melancholy (Laura),
Edvard Munch, 1899 (© Munch-Museet, MM reg.nr.
M.12)
183
The flagellants.
The Seventh Seal,
Ingmar Bergman, 1956
(Svensk Filmindustri)
264
The monk's harangue.
The Seventh Seal,
Ingmar Bergman, 1956
(Svensk Filmindustri)
265
The "witch" Tyan at the stake.
The Seventh Seal,
Ingmar Bergman, 1956
(Svensk Filmindustri)
269
The "sacrament" of strawberries and milk.
The Seventh Seal,
Ingmar Bergman, 1956 (Svensk Filmindustri)
270
Death opening his cape.
The Seventh Seal,
Ingmar Bergman, 1956
(Svensk Filmindustri)
272
The Dance of Death.
The Seventh Seal,
Ingmar Bergman, 1956
(Svensk Filmindustri)
272
Self-Portrait with Skeletal Arm,
Edvard Munch, 1895 (© Munch-Museet,
MM reg.nr. G. 192-7)
293
The Sick Child,
Edvard Munch, 1885 (© Nasjonalgallerist, Oslo, Inv. no.
NG.M. 00839)
323
Death in the Sickroom,
Edvard Munch, 1895 (© Munch-Museet, MM reg.nr.
M.418)
326
The Midwife,
Lena Cronqvist, 1972 (Galleri Lars Bohman)
327
The Wake,
Lena Cronqvist, 1980 (Galleri Lars Bohman)
328
Mamma and I,
Lena Cronqvist, 1987 (Galleri Lars Bohman)
329
The Mother,
Lena Cronqvist, 1975 (Galleri Lars Bohman)
330
INTRODUCTION
WHAT THE HEART IS
That I may learn in my own life . . . what the heart is and what it feels.
— JAMES JOYCE,
Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
"How many of you are hurting now?" I once asked my students at the beginning of a literature course I was teaching. There was nervous silence, then a few students tentatively raised their hands. But gradually more and more of these young people acknowledged that they were in some kind of pain, whether physical or emotional. They seemed puzzled that I should be asking. What did their feelings have to do with literature? Was this merely personal solicitude on my part? For they thought there could scarcely be any connection between the books we were to read together and the pain they were dealing with. As for me, I sensed that I had stumbled on to something I had been moving toward for a long time, something large and important about the connection between art and life. The book you have in your hands grew out of that discovery.
My students were displaying a deep-seated, widely assumed conviction diat pain is private and that literature can do litde to assuage it. It's assumed we are isolated in our experience of pain, not because of decorum, but because we think it is locked inside of us, diat it exists as a kind of bedrock personal reality that no one else can really know or feel or share. Literature, on the other hand, is assumed to be an affair of large themes and universal truths, of thoughtful utterances and fine words, with litde direct connection to our private feelings or sensations or pain. But the trudi is, I believe, that art and literature provide us with a reservoir of
shareable human feelings and experiences, a storehouse of emotions and insights about body and mind, a storehouse we can visit and take from via the elemental magic of reading, of encountering works of art.
Here, then, are my twin beliefs
: feeling is the basic but invisible fact of life; feeling is the basic but unacknowledged fact of literature and art.
Literature—and painting and music and sculpture and film—offers us access to, and a way to share in, the entire range of human feeling over the ages. This is a gift like no other.
From Sophocles' ancient fable of Oedipus and his double transgressions of incest and parricide to Kathryn Harrison's contemporary novel of child abuse and breakdown,
Exposure,
literature explodes with news about the world of feeling. We move throughout history from Sophocles to Harrison, passing through such exemplary figures as Hamlet, the prophetically dysfunctional prince, or depictions of death and dying in the poetry of Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson and in the prose of Tolstoy, Proust, and Joyce; from the renditions of trauma and injury in Kafka to full-scale accounts of warfare and abuse in Pat Barker and Toni Morrison, from the evocation of disease as both private secret and urban disaster in Defoe and Dickens to recent work such as Tony Kushner's play about AIDS,
Angels in America.
Not all is cosmic and extreme; art also conveys the mystery and pathos of the mundane and the quotidian: puberty and old age, desire and anxiety, marriage and divorce, love and loss. This is our world, seen through lenses not our own, reconfigured and constituted at different moments of history, yet always telling us about human feeling, about what is deepest and most enduring in our lives. Such is the public—and I would say, private, individual—role of art. In the story "Sonny's Blues," James Baldwin's character Creole sums up what I mean:
Creole began to tell us what the blues were all about. They were not about anything very new. He and his boys up there were keeping it new, at the risk of ruin, destruction, madness and death, in order to find new ways to make us listen. For while the tale of how we suffer,
and how we are delighted, and how we may triumph is never new, it always must be heard. There isn't any other tale to tell, it's the only light we've got in all this darkness. (31)
"The only light we've got in all this darkness,"
Baldwin says. The darkness he means goes beyond the miseries that life could mete out to you; it signifies the universal opaqueness in which we live: the opaqueness of others to us, of our own bodies and minds, the fuzziness of our real lives (despite the brave clarity of resumes, blueprints, and statistics). Art is light. This dazzling light illuminates us, enlarges our field of operation, enables us to have a bigger, richer, nobler take on things—things such as self and reality.
But my argument is not only that literature and art provide more light. Art also gives us access to more wisdom, more harnessing of our resources, a deeper grasp of how extensive those resources are, how much more dimensional our lives are or could be. I am focusing here on feeling, pain, and illness as ways to get at life. The biologists tell us that pain is nature's way of signaling trouble; I suggest that art reconceives this signal system by making feeling and pain
vehicular
as well as communicative, furnishing us entry into dramas, perspectives, and exis-tences not our own. Such a journey is educative, in the etymological sense of the word: leading us out.
The education in question here is not about facts and data; art's purposes have little to do with information. No, the voyage is visceral and experiential, it entails vicarious immersion in others' lives, endowing us with new eyes and ears, perhaps changing our hearts. Such transactions are, of course, exciting, but their true rationale has a more ethical and existential cast to it: to bring us closer to the world's heartbeat, to bring to—and into—us something of the world's great theater, even to function like a lightning rod, so diat the great energies and forces that have coursed through history might, via art, strike us, jolt us with their vibrancy and intensity.
Feeling moves, and feeling moves us.
A scream goes through the house,
and by this I mean that human feeling travels the world, passes from person to person, and especially stamps our connection to art. The books we read and the paintings we see are vital energy sources, rippling through us, however staid or contained we or they may appear. Art galvanizes. By this I do not mean a Gothic scenario of horror or hauntings. Nor does this scream that goes through the house have much to do with the dread facts of war and violence that crowd our newspapers and TV screens, reminding us over and over of old, sometimes ancient feuds and blood conflicts that pit one group against another in never-ending cycles of hate. Art honors what is best in feeling: pith and keenness of sensation, radiance of thought, enchantment of the heart. Art restores us to full circulation.
"How many of you are hurting?" I asked my students. I could have asked, "How many of you are delighted?" and they would have been equally surprised. Feeling—personal pain and personal pleasure—may well be the central currency of our lives, but we do not expect to find such items in a college curriculum. The curriculum, the materials of an education: theirs, mine, yours. Why is feeling absent from the list? My answer is: knowledge, as it is packaged in universities, as it seems packaged in books, is thought to be an affair of reason, consisting of concepts to be mastered and facts to be learned. From kindergarten to university, there seems to be a disconnect between education and the whole person—body, mind, feeling.