Arnold Weinstein - A Scream Goes Through The House by What Literature Teaches Us About Life [HTML] Page B
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art, however, all of us have access to these interior universes. And these inner realms brought to expression in art can reveal what actually matters in our lives, what our deep story is, what our personal take on (and from) life is. (If these notions seem exaggerated, just ask yourself what meaning or aura the objects that surround you might have for a camera or distant observer, objects such as the photographs on your desk, the old toys you've not quite discarded, the jewelry or clothing you've inherited, indeed the very faces that surround you, including the one that looks at you in the mirror.)
In serving both the dictates of realism (agreed-on public reality) and the inner vision, Bronte remains a shrewd writer, giving us large chunks of objective data, but nonetheless governing her story, at key moments, according to the laws of feeling, the power of injury and emotion. At its most extreme, however, when the private view is not even checked by objective conditions, such art can become outright visionary. The agreed-on physical world that our retinas take in is then quite simply metamorphosed, reshaped by the emotional and libidinal currents of the seer. I use that word seer advisedly: the visionary prophet and the ordinary human subject who sees—might they not be one and the same? Might it not be that all of us carry within us a pulsating world of emotions and experiences that is overflowing all the time, spilling into and onto the scene we inhabit, ultimately and deviously composing the scene we inhabit, transposing the people we see into figures from our inner worlds?
We all are familiar with the old chestnut that ten people sitting around a table repeating from one to the next the same story will alter it to the tune of being unrecognizable: version ten will have no relation to version one. Why is this so? It will not do to chalk this up to sloppiness or inattentiveness; closer to the mark would be an acknowledgment that listening—like seeing, like all thinking—is an aggressively shaping activity, a complex process of inserting what we hear into the ongoing story
we are always thinking (if not telling). We are all lifelong artists, shaping (secreting) our hidden, inner story from birth to death.
This example may be banal, but in the hands of a great artist, the docile, contoured world we take for granted is liberated from its material envelope, transformed into vistas of starding traffic, yielding new amalgams, leading to a rich but staggeringly unified picture of both self and world. All this differs entirely from the humdrum, daily experience of life in the office or at home, life filled with objects that are there, but hardly "cohere" or express any sort of deep truth about who we are, and how we have lived. Those deep truths are on the inside, often resistant even to ourselves, which is why many of us go through life feeling that our true coordinates, our genuine melody, our actual meaning, remain hidden and unknown.
The work of art shocks us with its cogency, its way of ordering things so that the truer pattern of life—the unstilled longings of Proust's narrator, the actual shape of Oedipus' existence, the emotional wounds of Jane Eyre—comes to the fore. You may think that such "unity" is merely the private, obsessive vision of the artist, illuminating a hermetic inner world, and thus has no wider relevance for us, the readers or spectators. But at its best, the visionary model—the personal vision that does justice to feeling as the secret law of life, the form-giver of life—can be fiercely social, can be luminous in its reshaping of our world. Art that hallows feeling, art that heeds the scream that goes through the house, is ultimately public in nature, illuminating our own private arrangements within the larger family or culture in unforgettable ways. Yes, we are enriched, enlarged, and in some wonderful but awful sense, implicated — advised of our fit (our responsibilities) in
In serving both the dictates of realism (agreed-on public reality) and the inner vision, Bronte remains a shrewd writer, giving us large chunks of objective data, but nonetheless governing her story, at key moments, according to the laws of feeling, the power of injury and emotion. At its most extreme, however, when the private view is not even checked by objective conditions, such art can become outright visionary. The agreed-on physical world that our retinas take in is then quite simply metamorphosed, reshaped by the emotional and libidinal currents of the seer. I use that word seer advisedly: the visionary prophet and the ordinary human subject who sees—might they not be one and the same? Might it not be that all of us carry within us a pulsating world of emotions and experiences that is overflowing all the time, spilling into and onto the scene we inhabit, ultimately and deviously composing the scene we inhabit, transposing the people we see into figures from our inner worlds?
We all are familiar with the old chestnut that ten people sitting around a table repeating from one to the next the same story will alter it to the tune of being unrecognizable: version ten will have no relation to version one. Why is this so? It will not do to chalk this up to sloppiness or inattentiveness; closer to the mark would be an acknowledgment that listening—like seeing, like all thinking—is an aggressively shaping activity, a complex process of inserting what we hear into the ongoing story
we are always thinking (if not telling). We are all lifelong artists, shaping (secreting) our hidden, inner story from birth to death.
This example may be banal, but in the hands of a great artist, the docile, contoured world we take for granted is liberated from its material envelope, transformed into vistas of starding traffic, yielding new amalgams, leading to a rich but staggeringly unified picture of both self and world. All this differs entirely from the humdrum, daily experience of life in the office or at home, life filled with objects that are there, but hardly "cohere" or express any sort of deep truth about who we are, and how we have lived. Those deep truths are on the inside, often resistant even to ourselves, which is why many of us go through life feeling that our true coordinates, our genuine melody, our actual meaning, remain hidden and unknown.
The work of art shocks us with its cogency, its way of ordering things so that the truer pattern of life—the unstilled longings of Proust's narrator, the actual shape of Oedipus' existence, the emotional wounds of Jane Eyre—comes to the fore. You may think that such "unity" is merely the private, obsessive vision of the artist, illuminating a hermetic inner world, and thus has no wider relevance for us, the readers or spectators. But at its best, the visionary model—the personal vision that does justice to feeling as the secret law of life, the form-giver of life—can be fiercely social, can be luminous in its reshaping of our world. Art that hallows feeling, art that heeds the scream that goes through the house, is ultimately public in nature, illuminating our own private arrangements within the larger family or culture in unforgettable ways. Yes, we are enriched, enlarged, and in some wonderful but awful sense, implicated — advised of our fit (our responsibilities) in
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