Arnold Weinstein - A Scream Goes Through The House (19 page)

Some critics have suggested that the ominous black shadow that seems to grow out from the girl's genital area could signify menstruation or perhaps the dark and large space of female sexuality, but I'd want to

look at it more broadly as a sign that a new regime is coming into being, a regime that houses "self" but has an "agenda" of its own. Somatic equipment that has been embryonically present since conception now starts to make itself seen and felt, inflecting personality in massive ways (ways camouflaged by our bland terms such as
growing up
or, indeed
puberty).
Young girls, now and since time immemorial, are acculturated to "know" that this chapter awaits them, but this painting, intended to restore the impact and turmoil of life's shaping events, illuminates the gulf between abstract information and visceral experience.

The body shifts gears in puberty. I think it shifts gears as long as we live, but aging gives this clanking operation an edge and insistence that are particularly hard to ignore. Everyday experience presents many of us with firsthand information of this sort, and it makes for tedious conversation. But in the hands of gifted writers, somatic entropy can be hilarious, and I want to cite Vernon here, a character from Don DeLillo's wicked novel
White Noise,
whose inventory of troubles is the perfect counterpoint to Munch's annunciatory painting:

"Don't worry about me," he said. "The little limp means nothing. People my age limp. A limp is a natural thing at a certain age. Forget the cough. It's healthy to cough. You move the stuff around. The stuff can't harm you as long as it doesn't settle in one spot and stay there for years. So the cough's all right. So is the insomnia. The insomnia's all right. What do I gain by sleeping? You reach an age when every minute of sleep is one less minute to do useful things. To cough or limp. Never mind the women. The women are all right. We rent a cassette and have some sex. It pumps blood to the heart. Forget the cigarettes. I like to tell myself I'm getting away with something. Let the Mormons quit smoking. They'll die of something just as bad. The money's no problem. I'm all set incomewise. Zero pensions, zero savings, zero stocks and bonds. So you don't have to worry about that. That's all taken care of. Never mind the teeth. The teeth are all right. The looser they are, the more you can wobble

them with your tongue. It gives the tongue something to do. Don't worry about the shakes. Everybody gets the shakes now and then. It's only the left hand anyway. The way to enjoy the shakes is pretend it's somebody else's hand. Never mind the sudden and unexplained weight loss. There's no point eating what you can't see. Don't worry about the eyes. The eyes can't get any worse than they are now. Forget the mind completely. The mind goes before the body. That's the way it's supposed to be. So don't worry about the mind. The mind is all right. Worry about the car. The steering's all awry. The brakes were recalled three times. The hood shoots up on pothole terrain." (255-256)

While this tirade is not
King Lear,
DeLillo shares with Shakespeare a knowledge of bare, forked creatures, as well as a graveyard view of things that would not be out of place in
Hamlet.
Proust once wrote, in his rich and pathos-filled way, that bodies are the material of which time is made, and the well-known late scene, at the Guermantes reception, presents the spectacle of aging as a kind of masquerade in which people you used to know are now wearing white wigs, are now stooped and bent, obeying at last the tug of gravity that will carry them all the way into the earth.

All of us are positioned on this temporal treadmill, and it is fair to say that we are prone to be shocked by just these arrangements our whole life long: when we are stunned by the transformation of infants into "people," of our parents into old folks, of ourselves into our parents. The Sphinx knew what it was doing when it asked Oedipus what creature walks on four, then two, then three legs; borrowing Cecil B. De-Mille's famous words, I say it's the greatest show on earth. What is most endearing in DeLillo's paean to decay is its sheer pluck, its song and dance, its zest for turning nature's badjoke into a shtick of one's own. In our time- and gravity-defying culture of wellness, diets, workouts, and cosmetic enhancements, the gallows humor of this creatural countdown seems at once tonic and a reality check.

METAMORPHOSIS AND AGENCY: THE MONSTER ON THE LOOSE

Rilke's Malte sees the strange other hand coming out of the wall and senses he is about to be taken over. Artist's neurosis or generic condition? How much control do we really have? One of the key terms enshrined in contemporary intellectual parlance is
agency.
There was a time when this word merely signified some bureaucratic office, but no longer, at least where I work. In today's academy it represents a cluster of crucial issues including authority, freedom, independence, and integrity. You will find it front and center in "emancipation" language of all stripes, and usually the forces preventing individual agency are cultural or ideological, having to do with patriarchy, late capitalism, sexism, and the like, frequently channeled through the media, but most often invisible to the naked eye, blithely
naturalized
as the "way things are."

A good bit of world literature, from all ages, is now assessed by critics along these lines, and the recurring plot that one encounters hinges on the struggle for agency. There can be stirring drama in this view, as well as a laudable focus on the workings of power within any culture. I have no quarrel with this, but am convinced that we are held in a somatic bondage that is distinctly prior to social arrangements. And I am not sure that any act of Congress or revolution is likely to alter this.

Art and literature, even film, open our eyes to this anarchic situation—this picture of enslavement that is fleshly rather than ideological— and I think that horror films derive much of their fascination from their attack on agency, an attack that is often located in the flesh. "Mutations into animality" was Susan Sontag's explanation of the widespread fear that attends disfigurement, and what better formula to describe the fascination enjoyed by the Dracula and Wolfman stories? All of us are familiar with those moments on-screen, usually in the reflection of the full moon, when the human face and body become animal, become covered with hair, acquire claws and fangs, exit from the human.

The more modern variants of this plot often have a sci-fi character.

The popular film
Men in Black
spoofs the serviceable convention that our planet is filled with aliens; in this case, we seem to have a cockroach fantasy at play, and the film is larded with roach innards and juices on the clothes and faces of the protagonists. Other films, like
The Matrix,
are more ambitious in their claim that the human-scale world we think we see is actually a vast illusion foisted on us by the beastlike machines that have taken over and reengineered our conceptual frames so as to naturalize the spectacle. And every so often we can count on a remake of
Invasion of the Body Snatchers,
since the topos of being taken over by the animals (or vegetables) is irresistible. It is worth asking what service these fables provide, since anything popular (that people are drawn to, want to see) is doing something for us, performing some sort of unstated cultural labor. My answer is that the successful outcome of such stories—the reestablishment of the human scale and human enterprise, the victory over the animals—is a story that ministers to our deepest fears and offers us a flattering fiction. In much the same way detective fiction closes with the arrest or death of the criminal, not merely as a way of restoring order itself, but as a shimmering proof that killers and monsters are caught, that it is "safe" out there once again.

I'd like to add one more story to this familiar genre. It concerns a dream I had more than forty years ago when I was a student; not only have I not forgotten it, but I suspect it underwrites a good bit of this book. In the dream I find myself amidst a nineteenth-century circus scene, a kind of
fete foraine
with hawkers and freaks (greatly resembling Fellini's
La Strada
or Bergman's
Sawdust and Tinsel,
which I had not yet seen), but all abustle with nervous energy, energy quickly approaching mass panic. The reason for this panic, one hears from countless figures scurrying about, seeking to escape, is that the Monster is loose, is headed our way, and there is a general, unstated certainty (the kind of certainty you have in dreams, the real kind) that he may be among us, but that we cannot recognize him.

Quickly the scene becomes paranoid and inquisitorial as we all scru-

tinize one another, trying to identify the Beast, and it gradually becomes clear that we have found him, a strange man, a "marked" man, marked only by our certainty that he is the scourge, the miasma. This man is then subjected to questioning and examination in which we apply every possible technique of analysis, at once legal and scientific, but he passes each test, documents repeatedly his innocence and his normality. We are still suspicious, but can prove nothing.

At this point, noise and hubbub enter the scene from the periphery, and voices start to scream that the Monster is sighted, is coming, is among us. In a rather fuzzy transition I then find myself in a small coach, trying to exit the circus, and I realize there is a second passenger as well: the "marked" man. Now the coach gathers speed, again the voices come, shrieking that the Monster is here, just outside the coach. Panic overtakes us all, and I desperately peer outside my window, glimpsing vaguely a figure being pounced on by the crowd, and I realize that this is It, that at last I will see the Beast. I then turn to my companion to share my news, and I see only his teeth as they approach my neck. I wake up, screaming and drenched in sweat, and the dream remains with me all my life.

For years I interpreted this dream as a parable about the failures of logic and security, about the limits of reason and analysis as guides to truth. In particular, once I became a professor, I saw the story as an allegory of the academy, with its carefully constructed postulates of truth testing and investigation, its aura of rationality. Of course, I was quite aware of the Gothic side of the story as well, the way it fit a Poe-like scenario, had a Jekyll-and-Hyde feeling to it, might even be a version of factual cases that were half mythic, such as the saga of Jack the Ripper or the Boston Strangler. In short, it proclaimed that a monster is loose in the community, and that none of our protective strategies or conventions—police, human reason, courage—will do us the least amount of good. Finally, the teeth at my throat smacked of Dracula, a particular kind of monster that battens on to human flesh and drinks our blood. In

recent years, other aspects of the dream have taken on importance. Why the circus and carnival atmosphere? (Is this what lurks under the sober facade of professional activity: a roiling spectacle of tumbling forms? a no longer disguisable animality starting to break through the surface?) I now think that the most terrifying element of the dream is its mobility, its incessant slippage and shape-shifting, so that the world we think we know suddenly moves into action, sloughs off the perceptual skin we are used to, lurches into spasms, explodes into carnage.

It is no accident that J. K. Rowling reserves just such a Gothic moment to cap the terrors that make up Harry Potter's agenda in the first volume of her series,
Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone;
Harry is in a tight place, trying to outsmart Quirrell (instead of Snape, whom he expected), and he hears the high, awful, unplaceable voice of Voldemort demanding a face-to-face. There is only the turbaned Quirrell in the room, but the boy, mesmerized, has a surprise coming:

Petrified, he watched as Quirrell reached up and began to unwrap his turban. What was going on? The turban fell away. Quirrell's head looked strangely small without it. Then he turned slowly on the spot.

Harry would have screamed but he couldn't make a sound. Where there should have been a back to Quirrell's head, there was a face, the most terrible face Harry had ever seen. It was chalk white with glaring red eyes and slits for nostrils, like a snake. (293)

Rowling seems to have conflated elements of the Medusa fable: the creature looks at you, but
it
(rather than you) turns into a snake. Yet, the real frisson at work here, in my view, comes from the shocking head-action itself, suggesting that the in-your-face violation of the human form is the most potent expression of evil imaginable.

Metamorphosis
seems so sweet and innocuous when it comes to butterflies, but it spells catastrophe when we recognize it in the human sphere. Dreams work via metamorphosis, and this is one reason we ex-

perience such relief upon awakening: at last (at least) things are back in place. But are they ever? Bodies alter constantly, not only through aging, but through sickness and infirmity. Even garden-variety alterations, such as growing fingernails, toenails, hair, pimples, rashes, and countless other minor afflictions that flesh is heir to, should give us pause. (They do give us regular pause as we go about domesticating them with clippers, files, combs, brushes, powders, and ointments, but who construes such hassles as commerce with the beast?) Most unsettling, as we have noted, is when the body is no longer recognizable as "human."

Franz Kafka is a writer whose mind and work seem outright stamped by
metamorphosis,
and it is, of course, the title he gave to his most famous story. That story's opening lines are chilling: "As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect" (l). The reference to bed and dreams has led many critics to psychoanalyze the story, but the full force of Kafka's genius is felt only if we grant him the literalness of that first sentence. Gregor is a bug (which is rather different from feeling
like
a bug). We also get to know what it might actually feel like, if you are a bug: how hard it is to get those "numerous little" legs off the bed, how to open a door when you have only a mouth but no hands, how garbage might gradually taste better than your favorite "earlier" dishes, how you might be more comfortable on the ceiling than on the floor, how strange liquids might issue from your body when your father makes craters in your flesh by hurling apples at it/you. In today's literary scene we are constantly asked to imagine the
other
—women, minorities, folks of a different race or ethnicity or sexual preference—but nothing quite matches the gauntlet Kafka throws down at us: to try out a new body, a horrendous insect body. If ever reading was an entry into something else, this is it.