Arnold Weinstein - A Scream Goes Through The House by What Literature Teaches Us About Life [HTML]
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down, to deconstruct, these fences, to breach the dikes as dreams do, and to let the flow in. The resultant flux flows across boundaries and can take many forms: it can create a new amalgam of personal past and present; it can be a shocking conflation of people and things you'd thought separate, now seen as glued together, and glued to you.
What is wrecked in these configurations of art and dream is our conventional sense of self, our habitual view of personal contours and identity. In its stead, we perceive something wondrous and strange, not totally unlike those odd moments when we see ourselves in a three-way mirror, or worse still, in a fun-house mirror, and yet sense that this is also us, the side of us we ordinarily omit, the fuller shape we customarily miss. But the ultimate significance of the shock of recognition that art provides has to do with the now visible lineaments of feeling, the now visible emotional ties that have shaped us, that still shape us, even though no photograph can render them. Epiphany is one term that has been invoked to convey this moment of perceptual truth, when our "true form" is grasped. "Four-dimensional portraiture" is another way of characterizing the plenitude of self that art makes available.
All of these concepts are a way of attending to the scream that goes through the house, a way of seeing our lives as they truly are: crisscrossed with ties, bound to others, and as shot through with feelings as are those ultraviolet photos that reveal the presence of rays we normally cannot see.
JAKE EYRE
Consider as an example of fourth-dimensional portraiture, of how the fully sentient self could be depicted, a seemingly realist novel such as Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre. The book starts, logically enough, with Jane's unhappy childhood as poor relation and orphan in the Reed family. This stint with misery is epitomized in the episode of the "red room," where Jane is locked up as punishment for resisting the Reeds' emotional, even physical abuse. Terrified of ghosts (she is in the dead uncle's room), Jane sees her own reflection in the mirror ("visionary hollow" is Bronte's term) and fails initially to recognize herself; she sees only "glittering eyes of fear," and thinks of phantoms, fairies, and imps. Shortly thereafter, Jane is certain a ghost is coming, sees a light moving, and then she experiences an extraordinary moment of visitation, of panic and capsizing: "My heart beat thick, my head grew hot; a sound filled my ears, which I deemed the rushing of wings; something seemed near me; I was oppressed, suffocated; endurance broke down"; a moment later, the servants unlock the door and rush into the room, claiming to have heard a scream, something prodigious: " 'What a dreadful noise! It went quite through me!' exclaimed Abbot" (49).
We, however, have read nothing of the sort: the text says nothing about Jane screaming. The servants leave, Jane is again locked up, and this time she falls unconscious: "a species of fit." Everything in this sequence broadcasts the imperiousness of feeling, feeling so strong that it makes you unrecognizable, travels as a ghost, is characterized by beating heart and hot head, bypasses consciousness altogether, snuffs out Jane's lights, has the run of the house.
In the next chapter Jane recounts awakening to the face of a kindly man standing over her, asking," 'Well, who am I?' " Not a bad question for this book, it will turn out. Bronte is redrawing the map of the self, by attending to the scream that traverses it, the emotional injuries of which it is made. The novel then seems to go on its merry linear path, narrating Jane's subsequent adventures at Lowood School, then at Edward Rochester's Thornfield, then at Marsh End, and finally back to Rochester at book's close. But the only way to really understand Jane Eyre is to realize that the episode in the red room—a visit from phantoms and fairies and imps, sound in the ears, rushing of wings, eventuating into
What is wrecked in these configurations of art and dream is our conventional sense of self, our habitual view of personal contours and identity. In its stead, we perceive something wondrous and strange, not totally unlike those odd moments when we see ourselves in a three-way mirror, or worse still, in a fun-house mirror, and yet sense that this is also us, the side of us we ordinarily omit, the fuller shape we customarily miss. But the ultimate significance of the shock of recognition that art provides has to do with the now visible lineaments of feeling, the now visible emotional ties that have shaped us, that still shape us, even though no photograph can render them. Epiphany is one term that has been invoked to convey this moment of perceptual truth, when our "true form" is grasped. "Four-dimensional portraiture" is another way of characterizing the plenitude of self that art makes available.
All of these concepts are a way of attending to the scream that goes through the house, a way of seeing our lives as they truly are: crisscrossed with ties, bound to others, and as shot through with feelings as are those ultraviolet photos that reveal the presence of rays we normally cannot see.
JAKE EYRE
Consider as an example of fourth-dimensional portraiture, of how the fully sentient self could be depicted, a seemingly realist novel such as Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre. The book starts, logically enough, with Jane's unhappy childhood as poor relation and orphan in the Reed family. This stint with misery is epitomized in the episode of the "red room," where Jane is locked up as punishment for resisting the Reeds' emotional, even physical abuse. Terrified of ghosts (she is in the dead uncle's room), Jane sees her own reflection in the mirror ("visionary hollow" is Bronte's term) and fails initially to recognize herself; she sees only "glittering eyes of fear," and thinks of phantoms, fairies, and imps. Shortly thereafter, Jane is certain a ghost is coming, sees a light moving, and then she experiences an extraordinary moment of visitation, of panic and capsizing: "My heart beat thick, my head grew hot; a sound filled my ears, which I deemed the rushing of wings; something seemed near me; I was oppressed, suffocated; endurance broke down"; a moment later, the servants unlock the door and rush into the room, claiming to have heard a scream, something prodigious: " 'What a dreadful noise! It went quite through me!' exclaimed Abbot" (49).
We, however, have read nothing of the sort: the text says nothing about Jane screaming. The servants leave, Jane is again locked up, and this time she falls unconscious: "a species of fit." Everything in this sequence broadcasts the imperiousness of feeling, feeling so strong that it makes you unrecognizable, travels as a ghost, is characterized by beating heart and hot head, bypasses consciousness altogether, snuffs out Jane's lights, has the run of the house.
In the next chapter Jane recounts awakening to the face of a kindly man standing over her, asking," 'Well, who am I?' " Not a bad question for this book, it will turn out. Bronte is redrawing the map of the self, by attending to the scream that traverses it, the emotional injuries of which it is made. The novel then seems to go on its merry linear path, narrating Jane's subsequent adventures at Lowood School, then at Edward Rochester's Thornfield, then at Marsh End, and finally back to Rochester at book's close. But the only way to really understand Jane Eyre is to realize that the episode in the red room—a visit from phantoms and fairies and imps, sound in the ears, rushing of wings, eventuating into
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