Arnold Weinstein - A Scream Goes Through The House (3 page)

Yet, we are somatic creatures, living in bodies, having emotions, bathed by sensations, at times bubbling and simmering, at times dawdling and eddying, hot and cold, nervous and calm, fearful and yearning, hungry and satiated. We are pulsions. Life is feeling. Our lives are affective from the get-go: from infancy to death, from getting out of bed in the morning to getting back in it at night (not to mention the time spent in it, in between). We all know this, yet the knowledge we acquire in school, and are taught is in books, seems not to take into account these home truths.

Sometimes I think that the brave picture we have of humans as rational beings is utterly misleading, a kind of photograph of our surface composure, and thus unreflective of—and unattuned to—the seismic emotional and psychic reality underneath,
our true reality,
one of nerves and visceral traffic that is hard to measure. Art reflects this realm; art takes this measure. Novels and poems and plays are not just "stories." They are, to borrow Dostoevsky's title,
notes from underground,
or, to put it another way,
reports from the front:
our underground, our front. Literature illuminates who "we" are: the repertory of selves we harbor within, the countless feelings we experience but never express or perhaps even acknowledge, the innumerable other lives we could but do not live, all those "inside" lives that are not on show, not included in our resumes. The arts put onto the page or the stage or the canvas or the screen a special portraiture that does justice to our depths.

Without literature, we would be bereft and impoverished creatures, denizens of a flat and dimensionless world, a world with no more depth than a photograph, that has no more scope than a resume or a medical report. Art and literature go
in.
Ask yourself: who could write your biography? The external data are available—birth, schooling, marriage, work—but what exact relation does this fact sheet have to your life? How much does it tell? We do not know the inner lives of others. And all too often we scant our own interior world. How strange it is, in a culture defined by information technology and globalization, that we are so often locked out of ourselves. We have electronic access to the globe, we can go on the most exotic trips, yet we are often exiled to our own surface. The encounter with art offers, then, a rare form of self-encounter; it enables a voyage into our own depths.

In his effort to make Gertrude see the true nature of her soul, Hamlet casts his words as "a glass / Where you may see the inmost part of you" (III.iv.18-19). In marshaling together works of art and literature that illuminate our heart of darkness—yes, I believe we are often in the dark when it comes to our hearts—I hope this book will do the work of

Hamlet's glass: enable us to see within, to reach the inmost part of being human, as expressed by great writers, painters, and filmmakers over time.

Because the special mirror that civilization has devised for this labor is art. Over the centuries writers and artists have at once mined their own personal experiences and also been weather vanes to their historical moments, so that the work they have left us is astonishingly resonant and murmurous, speaking in tongues both private and public, mapping out realms that we can not only visit, but make our own. Moreover, art does not know death, even though artists die, whereas each of us, even the most long-lived, is allotted, like actors strutting and fretting their hour upon the stage, precious little time and space. This, too, is why art matters: created and compiled over the ages, as much doubtless through suffering as through joy, art is a form of personal inheritance, waiting for our encounter and our use, a legacy for which no deaths are required.

This book is meant to help you access that legacy, to bring you more fully into the storehouse of human experience and possibility that artists have bequeathed to us. Such a trip is easier than you might expect, for a number of reasons. First of all, you may be more ready now than you were when you first read some of the works of literature I write about. Many of us initially encountered great works of art and literature at the wrong time and under the wrong circumstances: when we were altogether too young, too inexperienced, too distracted, too inundated, and we were perhaps badly taught, to boot. It's not surprising that many thoughtful people still feel either locked out of the classics, or that those much touted works have an exaggerated prestige. Having taught these books to students and laypeople for three decades now, I can say, with some assurance, that you can make your way into these writers and artists—that these writers and artists will make their way into you—for this simple reason:
art connects.

The cardinal belief of this book, undergirding a view of both life and art that is umbilical to the core, is that the experience of art yields a view of human reality as something networked, crisscrossed with ties and

bonds, quite at odds with the individuated world we take to be real: our private body and mind as the fixed enclosure where we think we live as individuals. My view of art is quite at odds also with the electronic network that stamps our age, because the Internet culture, however capacious it may be, is also largely soulless and solipsistic—informational rather than experiential—when contrasted with our engagement with art. Through literature, other lives enter our own as richly and mysteriously as air enters our lungs. Through art we access realms of experience that are life-enhancing, sometimes life altering. This encounter is properly Odyssean, because the journeys at hand lead us back to our own Ithaca. We are at once altered and homeward bound, where we are better able (like Odysseus himself) to meet life's challenges, richer for the trip.

Ralph Waldo Emerson coined the term "Oversoul" in order to reconceive the individual's connection to nature and to others: Over-soul as a kind of current in which we are all bathed, a spiritual medium that nourishes and links creatures with the creation. Not surprisingly, his view of literature and art follows the same model, and it also stamps the thinking of this book: great artists unfold a vision and map a territory that is as much ours as theirs, that we make our own by dint of discovering and experiencing it. It would be closer to Emerson's logic to say that the artist explores
our
space, making us heir to what he has charted. Whereas the conventional view is that the artist expresses his or her private landscape, Emerson turns this notion upside down, claiming that the great vistas in art—those of Homer, Shakespeare, and, I would add, those who come after Emerson, such as Munch, Proust, Faulkner, Morrison—make beautiful sense to us because they are "happening" inside us. How else could we understand them? Soul, on this account, is everywhere, albeit shrouded in darkness for many of us, and the mission of the artist is no less than to illuminate it, make it more available. We all know that material goods are unevenly distributed on this earth of ours, but in some quite wonderful sense,
spiritual
goods, the gift of art and literature, are a profoundly democratic resource, not only accessible to each of us, but actually residing within each of us.

One of Emerson's central motifs is that of a
waterway,
a kind of flow which we navigate in our engagement with art, and at times this image is richly corporeal, becoming no less than a
bloodstream.
In this vision, the capacious world of art can be seen as a living organism, so that the act of reading or seeing a painting or play or film can be understood as an arterial event, a cardiac proposition, while remaining a nurturance that is as much spiritual as it is material. To see art in these terms is to get clear of several cliches that might clutter our minds. First, the arts are not esoteric or frills, not at a remove from reality, but quite the opposite: they are immediate, experiential, and life-expanding. Secondly, this view envisions art as not a private affair, supposedly cued to the artist's personal world or even confined to your own personal sphere, but rather as an opening out, bidding to transport you (time-bound, landlocked you) to new times, new places, and ultimately new selves.

I come now to the rationale for my focus on feeling, pain, and illness. Precisely because art is visceral and experiential, precisely because it alters our vision and expands our stock, it can be a resource of inestimable value to those who hurt. Once again I go back to my students, who had not suspected that literature might speak to their individual condition, might reshape their ideas about pain, about disease, about doctors, about death and dying. On the contrary, the testimony of the arts teaches us things about living in a body, about the nature of feeling, about our condition as imaginative, somatic creatures, that we can find nowhere else.

I imagine that in most homes there are two shelves: one, the medicine shelf (in a room close to where you sleep, a room where you cleanse yourself and minister to your body), and the other, the bookshelf. On the medicine shelf you put those pills that you need to ingest when you're in trouble, when you feel emotional, mental, or physical pain, or all three. Many of us have recourse to this shelf several times a day, even when "well," because it contains the ingredients necessary for us to stay functional.

On a different shelf, the bookshelf (in a different room, a place where you usually go fully dressed), you seek out, when time permits or when you cannot sleep, materials for edification or relaxation. Some people, including those in my profession, may go to the bookshelf as often as they go to the medicine shelf, but most people don't. One of the purposes of this book is to show that the bookshelf is as basic a resource for body and mind, especially the body and the mind in pain, as the medicine shelf.

By this I do not mean that books will distract you, and of course I do not mean that books will reduce your fever or regulate your blood pressure or cholesterol. But I am saying that books—the so-called great books as well as contemporary fiction, and indeed all the arts: painting, film, music, and so on—have more to say to you about your mind and body, well or ill, than you will ever find if you look stricdy in the sciences, in medicine, or in the pills on the medicine shelf.

The institution of modern medicine, derived from an ever-growing understanding of disease, approaches disorders of body and mind as biological or physiological events. Western organ-based medicine constitutes a sort of zoned map, and your particular ailment must be aligned within this cartography. Put most reductively, we take our parts to specialists. The sights of medicine are focused on your somatic makeup, not on your hurt. Whether it is your yearly checkup or a life-threatening event in the hospital, at issue is invariably your
disease
(the bio-science problem you present), not your
illness
(the existential dilemma you experience). This helps us to understand the glaring paradox of modern Western medical culture: never has there been such a sophisticated scientific grasp of disease, and never has the individual patient, the person who hurts, felt more out of the loop. And that is not all: not only is the individual
story
elided here, but so too are the larger social and ethical dimensions of illness beyond the scrutiny of science proper.

Might there be another story to tell here, a varied and capacious story that both honors the private sphere of individual feeling and also reflects on the larger ramifications of the body's experience and medicine's

aims? And might this fuller story do justice to the reach and primacy of feeling, enabling us to see that the great issues of pain—sickness, fear, death—are also the great issues of life? The dread hallmark of illness is the reduction and diminishment that it brings to our lives, the apprenticeship with pain and worry that close in on us, make us closed to others, and to ourselves. However, could we not see it the other way: illness as threshold, pain as opening, feeling as conduit to something larger, not smaller, something that draws us out of ourselves into a deeper relationship with others, art, and life.

I call this book
A Scream Goes Through the House
to signal the staggering
reach
of feeling and pain, to denote its role as pathway and journey. Art writes large and luminous the penitential experience of illness, and in so doing, it opens the prison. The great wealth of artistic testimony about emotion and disease, about breakdown, about doctors and death, translates directly into
our wealth,
and such riches are all the more precious given the impoverishment of body and mind that illness (and even aging) can bring on. When our own straits seem to have narrowed and we feel bereft, the glimpse of new territories (for thinking, feeling, and living) in literature can be priceless. But make no mistake about it, these discoveries are no less valuable even when we are well, inasmuch as such exposure to humanity jars and stirs us, makes us readier to reach out. Ultimately, the scream that goes through the house communalizes us, puts us in touch with the sentience of others, quickens (through its tidings) our own sense of life and possibility. There is a startling economy at work here, a two-way street, inasmuch as the books we read flow inward into us, add to our stock, enrich our perceptions, stir our inmost feelings; yet art and literature also, quite wonderfully, draw us out, hook us up (imaginatively, emotionally, neurally) into other circuits, other lives, other times.

In gathering together art's testimony about bodies, feelings, pain, and life, I have wanted to cast my net wide, to show just how far-reaching and eye-opening these vistas are. After all, even if pain itself can be dreadfully numbing, the story of somatic life is astonishingly broad

and various, and I choose to be adventurous and exploratory, to move inward into the psychic and experiential landscapes that scientific notation ignores, but also to move outward into the social and even ideological issues that are woven into the story of pain and illness. Each of my chapters is meant to generate new horizons, to move you from the agreed-on notions we all share to the more surprising and challenging depictions art provides. My ultimate aim is enrichment rather than provocation as such, but some of the artistic performances on show here may disturb. It is my hope that, by book's end, your ideas about bodies, illness, art, and life will not be quite the same as they were.