A Scream Goes Through the House

A Scream Goes Through the House is professor Arnold Weinstein's title for the 2003 book whose subtitle, "What Literature Teaches Us About Life," might more aptly be changed to "What Literature Teaches Us About Life's Connections."

I bought the book a year and a half ago and got bogged down after reading the preface, introduction, and first chapter. The author's premise attracted me: "literature and art are pathways of feeling, and our encounter with them is social, inscribing us in a larger community. . . . Through art we discover that we are not alone." But, according to his approach, the feelings which predominate are pain and suffering. Joy and delight take a back seat. I wasn't ready for that then.

I seem to be ready for it now, though explaining what has changed is a bit difficult. In Jesus before Christianity, another book which I never finished and which I have lately been rereading, Albert Nolan makes the point that Jesus was motivated primarily by compassion for those who suffer — that's point number one. Point number two is the effect Martin Scorsese has had on me as I've immersed myself in his documentary My Voyage to Italy, a retrospective look at the Italian cinema of the 1940s, '50s, and '60s.

The films of Rossellini, de Sica, Visconti, Fellini, Antonioni, et al. which Scorsese extols were never the type I would, in my younger days, seek out for diversion or grand amusement. But Scorsese now shows me how — if I can just barely manage to identify myself with the wideness of his personal mercy — to draw spiritual sustenance from even those characters and situations the puritan in me finds repellant.

So here's what I'm thinking. All this time as a human being and as a Christian, I've been blind to what Christianity is really all about. I'd like here and now to suggest what I mean by that.


To begin doing so, let me first lay out a few choice quotes from Weinstein's book:

Literature and art provide intercourse of a unique sort. Through art we discover that we are not alone. . . . That picture of connectedness, of a universe that is umbilical and strange — a picture no camera can take — takes the measure of our true lives. (pp. ix-x)

. . . the bloodstream of feeling that carries us into others and others into us . . . . (p. x)

. . . time avails not, and their plaint enters me, through this dream, with sweet and brutal force. A scream goes through the house, one person's pain becomes another's, across time and space; there are no borders separating us. (pp. x-xi)

[Art is] the yearned-for picture that would render our true arrangements in time and space, in body and mind, in heart and soul. . . . a new geography, indeed a new cosmography . . . to represent our actual plenitude and reach. (p. xi)

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 and fantasies . . . . [Art] quite simply reconceives our place in the world, and thereby redraws our own contours, showing us to be porous and connected. . . . 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. (pp. xi-xii)

Those words from Weinstein's preface should be enough to make it clear that (if we agree with the author) there is a hidden connectedness among us that is most readily seen in the universality of our secret suffering. Art exposes that universality.


Following the book's preface, a James Baldwin quote from his character Creole in the story "Sonny's Blues" expresses the theme of Weinstein's introduction in a nutshell:

Creole began to tell us what the blues were all about. They were not about anything very new. He and his boys up there were keeping it new, at the risk of ruin, destruction, madness, and death, in order to find new ways to make us listen. For while the tale of how we suffer, and how we are delighted, and how we may triumph is never new, it always must be heard. There isn't any other tale to tell, it's the only light we've got in all this darkness. (pp. xx-xxi)

Of "the sheer excitement I see generated in students by the encounter with art," Weinstein goes on to say:

I think of this excitement as a kind of creatural nourishment, on the order of a transcendent meal, even of a blood transfusion, so that reading literature and looking at painting become a life-giving exercise. . . . Art is sustenance. Art is transformation. Such transactions are properly inspiriting, not unlike the project of the cannibals of old: to ingest the body of warriors they revered was to take into themselves the spirit of those warriors. (p. xxxvii)

As a Catholic, I couldn't help thinking of the Eucharist at the Mass, when I read that. We get spiritual sustenance from ingesting the body and blood of Jesus, do we not? At the same time, we imagine that all of us communicants are ourselves members of the One Body, of the mystical corpus of Christ.


Of course, I need hastily to add, theologically we are to do more than simply imagine these things. They are as real as real can be.

The question is, how can we make this "fact" more than theologically true? How can we make it (to use a word Weinstein adores) existentially true? How can we experience it?

I experience it when I read in Nolan's book that the spirit of God, as revealed in Jesus, is one preeminently of compassion with all who suffer and whose suffering is spat upon.

I experience it when I hear Scorsese talk lovingly about wayward movie characters who are so "lost," they would never be welcomed (and would never appear) at a church social.

I experience it when I read in Weinstein's book of Shakespeare's Hamlet and William Faulkner's Quentin Compson and many other characters who are "fatally incapacitated" (p. xxxv), and I realize that I am, too, in my likeness to them, one of the "sinners" or "little ones" whom Jesus forgave.