Arnold Weinstein - A Scream Goes Through The House

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Authors: What Literature Teaches Us About Life [HTML]

"A breakthrough book... What a treat it is to have Weinstein guide us through some of the canonical works of literature and show us what we have intuitively suspected: that literature does more than just entertain— literature educates, literature provides us with a map for our journey, and literature gives the journey meaning..'.. A book for the ages."

—Abraham Verghese, author of
My Own Country

In the tradition of Harold Bloom and Jacques Barzun, esteemed Brown University professor Arnold Weinstein explores how great works of art, literature, and cinema reveal deep levels of human feeling, sustenance, and connection, through which "we discover that we are not alone." Reflecting on works by Sophocles, Shakespeare, Dickens, Charlotte Bronte, Proust, O'Neill, Ingmar Bergman, DeLillo, Tony Kushner, Toni Morrison, Edvard Munch, and others,
A Scream Goes Through the House
examines how writers and artists give us an expanded sense of what human life actually feels like. Art is an affair of the heart as well as of the mind, illuminating the rich emotions that govern our lives, especially fear, pain, illness, loss, depression, death, and love.

This provocative, beautifully written, and essential book traces the human cry that echoes in the arts through the ages—joining us together in a vast and timeless community.

"Gives today's readers a rare gift... brilliantly and feelingly argues that literature is not a solitary game of the intellect but 'a precious human resource, a map of human feeling.' "

—
The Boston Globe

"A searching, ardent book... Bravo for Weinstein's central point—that literature and art revive our sense of common humanity."

—San Jose
Mercury Mews

Arnold Weinstein is the Edna and Richard Salomon Distinguished Professor of Comparative Literature at Brown University and the author of
Vision and Response in Modern Fiction; Fictions of the Self: 1550-1800; The Fiction of Relationship;
and
Nobody's Home: Speech, Self, and Place in American Fiction from Hawthorne to DeLillo.
He also gives a series of audio and video lectures on world literature for The Teaching Company. He spends his time at Brown University, Block Island, Stockholm, and Brittany.

2004 Random House Trade Paperback Edition

ISBN 0-8129-7243-0

To Ann, as always

PREFACE

The heart of this book about life, literature, and art is precisely the human heart: the pump that keeps our body alive and the
feelings
that course through us and link us to others. Literature and art live in these two ways, as a bloodstream that connects us to the world, as a mirror for our emotions; and as a magic script that allows us both to sound our own depths and also to enter the echoing storehouse of feeling that goes by the name of Sophocles, Shakespeare, Dickens, Munch, Proust, and all the great writers and artists whose work exists to nourish us. I see the great books as a feast for the heart.

For too long we have been encouraged to see culture as an affair of intellect, and reading as a solitary exercise. But the truth is different: literature and art are pathways of feeling, and our encounter with them is social, inscribing us in a larger community, a community composed of buried selves and loved ones, as well as the fellowship of writers over time. Literature and art provide intercourse of a unique sort. Through art we discover that we are not alone. These discoveries can be as revelatory as those dreams in which the world turns fluid, so that the living and the dead, the far and the near, come together in a dance that recasts our life. That picture of connectedness, of a universe that is umbilical

and strange—a picture that no camera can take—takes the measure of our true lives.

And so this book is framed by two dreams. The first one, prophetic, occurred in October 1960 when I was a student in France, and its an-nunciatory fable of a monster on the loose—representing our somatic fate—will be dealt with in Chapter Two, "Living in the Body." The second dream, about the reach of feeling, about the bloodstream of feeling that carries us into others and others into us, took place in the summer of 2001, also in France, when I was putting the final touches on this book. More than any daytime argument I might marshal, it captures, with frightening purity—frightening to
me
—the meaning and purpose of this study, and I therefore offer it as a prefatory note, first as the dream itself unfurled, and then as I unpack and understand it.

July 25,2001. Brittany, France. My wife and I have been here a week. My daughter, her husband, and their two children—seven-year-old Anna and two-year-old Gustav—arrived today. We allow Anna a special treat: to sleep in the trundle bed in our bedroom. All are asleep and I dream. I am in Memphis, where I grew up, and my mother and father are speaking, in low but urgent tones, in the bedroom next to me. Their voices grow louder, more insistent, moving from what seems a lament to what I can only call a wail. My father, who is depressed and dying, expresses his misery over and over to my mother, but she too utters her pain and anguish. In waves, in a singsong, systolic and diastolic, like a dirge, these sounds of my parents' hurt traverse the wall and invade our room. And, sure enough, Anna, now awake, says to me, "They're making noise." "Yes," I reply. "Yes."

I awake. All is quiet. Anna sleeps in her trundle bed, and my wife sleeps next to me. A minute later, I hear, from the third bedroom, Gustav wake up and cry, and I hear my daughter go into his room to comfort him. He goes back to sleep. But I am awed by the cogency and reach of this dream. My father has been dead for twenty years, and my mother now lies, stroke-ridden, in a nursing home in Memphis. Yet, time avails not, and their plaint enters me, through this dream, with sweet and bru-

tal force. A scream goes through the house, one person's pain becomes another's, across time and space; there are no borders separating us. Life is a shadow play, and we are mummers all, visited and doubled by the ghosts of the past, invested with their pain, living a continuous drama that does not know closure. Brittany is Memphis, my children and grandchildren are my parents, the dead still live, the voices are not stilled.

And I think: this is my book. Above all, this is my life. This dream expresses to perfection the true coordinates of my life, coordinates not to be found on any calendar or gravestone, coordinates that disappear in the harsh light of day, when, like most of us, I cease to be haunted. Yet dreams are evanescent, while art endures; the novel, the poem, the painting, even the film, are splendidly material, accommodating us whenever we visit, casting forth their net—and indeed their network— each time we experience them. They are a force field of coursing energy, containing the still living pulse of both the artist and his or her time, made accessible by the simple miracle of reading. The encounter with literature adds to who we are. And I realize this is why I have spent my life teaching literature and art—because they are reflecting pools, soliciting our entry and immersion so as to gift us with a new sense of self, a new awareness of our actual dimensions.

Henry James used the expression
figure in the carpet
to signal the secret pattern that unifies works of art. But the figure in the carpet that most matters to each of us is that of our
life,
the yearned-for picture that would render our true arrangements in time and space, in body and mind, in heart and soul. For surely the surface story of our quotidian lives—the story we find in a newspaper or a resume, the story an outsider could tell—misses utterly these rich and secret extensions: our past, our loves and losses, fears and dreams. A new geography, indeed a new cosmography would be needed to represent our actual plenitude and reach. It is that new cosmography that I mean to chart in this book.

While dreams provide this magic map, so, too, does art—literature, painting, film. Art reveals and expresses our real but hidden story: that

which lies under the surface, in the realm of feeling, unavailable to the naked eye; that which still resonates, though long past, through memories or fantasies or the thoughts that course through our minds. The literature discussed in this book quite simply reconceives our place in the world, and thereby redraws our own contours, showing us to be porous and connected. Literature and art move us into our fuller selves. The mirror they proffer enables more than seeing; it makes it possible for us to understand, even to hear our feelings. The scream that goes through the house is the heartbeat that makes audible, at last, who we are, how resonant we are, how connected we are. The subtitle of this book is "What Literature Teaches Us About Life." The word to remember is
Life:
mine, as the dream in Brittany suggests, yours too, as you enter the looking glass that art provides, and so come into and repossess your estate.

CONTENTS

PREFACE - IX

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS - XV

INTRODUCTION: WHAT THE HEART IS - XIX

1. A SCREAM GOES THROUGH THE HOUSE - 3

2. LIVING IN THE BODY - 74

3. DIAGNOSIS: NARRATIVES OF EXPOSURE - 133

4. PLAGUE AND HUMAN CONNECTION - 211

5. SAYING DEATH - 290

CONCLUDING THOUGHTS ON DEPRESSION:

HAMLET AND HIS PROGENY - 372

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS - 397