Arnold Weinstein - A Scream Goes Through The House by What Literature Teaches Us About Life [HTML] Page A
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and even though his play is a long, heavy, and ponderous read or evening in the theater, it is anything but morbid: it vitalizes us by making its people finally alive to one another. In this, art's work is done.
MAKING THE SCREAM VISIBLE: EDVARD MUNCH
Blake's "London" articulates urban and cultural disease in terms of victimization and "marking," and he succeeds in transforming private suffering into public and political indictment, so that it may at last become visible and legible. It is an affair of voice and metaphor. We call this piece "visionary," but have only the words encoded in a sixteen-line poem. But what would urban plague look like? Could the narrative of human feeling and illness actually be shown? The work of the Norwegian painter Edvard Munch is richly cued to the governing premises in this argument, because Munch's entire long career is devoted to finding a pictorial language for binding moments of intense emotion. Who else has tided his pictures The Scream or Jealousy ox Anxiety?
We find in Munch's work an astonishing kind of creatural grammar, a syntax of sorts, that seems to say: our affective and experiential lives are punctuated by key episodes of explosive, unhinging feeling, episodes that attend the temporal trajectory of the body as it moves from birth to death, with all the varieties of sickness and mania and fear and desire in between. What seems to undergird this body of work is a conviction that our episodes of upheaval have a special graphic character and can be represented in painting, lithograph, and woodcut. Munch's fame, I would submit, hinges on these qualities, this fidelity to feeling that surfaces over and over in his work; it has earned him a reputation for precariousness, neurosis, melodrama, and even posturing, but it is time to reconceive these matters, and to appreciate his power as por-trayer, not only of libido and affect, but of the social pathways such forces take, pathways of a new human geography.
Evening on the Karl Johan, Edvard Munch, 1892.
The irresistible segue from Blake and Baldwin to Munch passes through the painter's famous Evening on the Karljohan, done in 1892 and fully illustrative of the mature Munch style. A century after Blake diagnoses his fellow Londoners, and well before Baldwin depicts Harlem suffering, Munch passes in review the citizens of Christiania (today's Oslo). He does not focus on the chimney sweeper or the soldier or the harlot or the teacher or the musician or the addict, to make his indictment; instead, he renders the parade of proud burghers themselves, making their ritual procession down the main thoroughfare, the Karl Johan, to see and to be seen, a consummate moment of social vindication, meant to shore up these citizens in their sense of gravity and purpose. Munch had dealt with crowd scenes earlier, in his realist portrayal of the Military Parade on the Karljohan, and in a pointillist version as well.
But none of these earlier forays prepares us for the march of zombies that we encounter here. On the one hand, Munch's crowd is a new
urban constellation, with a form and synergy that accompany the growth of city populations and that intrigue the nineteenth-century artist and writer: Poe's "Man of the Crowd" and Baudelaire's "Les Foules" ("Crowds") testify eloquently to the explosive albeit anonymous energies to be found here, the sort of thing already at hand in the mass uprisings of the French Revolution. But merely to mention this activist model of the crowd is to measure how radically different Munch's rendition is. These denizens of Christiania would appear to be ghouls, the walking dead, and if we seek parallels with literary figures, one might invoke Thoreau's contemptuous reference to "the mass of men who lead lives of quiet desperation," except that this mass is represented by Munch in surreal, ghastly form now.
Above all, Munch reveals here his soon-to-be trademark style of vacancy and blankness, of white, featureless,
MAKING THE SCREAM VISIBLE: EDVARD MUNCH
Blake's "London" articulates urban and cultural disease in terms of victimization and "marking," and he succeeds in transforming private suffering into public and political indictment, so that it may at last become visible and legible. It is an affair of voice and metaphor. We call this piece "visionary," but have only the words encoded in a sixteen-line poem. But what would urban plague look like? Could the narrative of human feeling and illness actually be shown? The work of the Norwegian painter Edvard Munch is richly cued to the governing premises in this argument, because Munch's entire long career is devoted to finding a pictorial language for binding moments of intense emotion. Who else has tided his pictures The Scream or Jealousy ox Anxiety?
We find in Munch's work an astonishing kind of creatural grammar, a syntax of sorts, that seems to say: our affective and experiential lives are punctuated by key episodes of explosive, unhinging feeling, episodes that attend the temporal trajectory of the body as it moves from birth to death, with all the varieties of sickness and mania and fear and desire in between. What seems to undergird this body of work is a conviction that our episodes of upheaval have a special graphic character and can be represented in painting, lithograph, and woodcut. Munch's fame, I would submit, hinges on these qualities, this fidelity to feeling that surfaces over and over in his work; it has earned him a reputation for precariousness, neurosis, melodrama, and even posturing, but it is time to reconceive these matters, and to appreciate his power as por-trayer, not only of libido and affect, but of the social pathways such forces take, pathways of a new human geography.
Evening on the Karl Johan, Edvard Munch, 1892.
The irresistible segue from Blake and Baldwin to Munch passes through the painter's famous Evening on the Karljohan, done in 1892 and fully illustrative of the mature Munch style. A century after Blake diagnoses his fellow Londoners, and well before Baldwin depicts Harlem suffering, Munch passes in review the citizens of Christiania (today's Oslo). He does not focus on the chimney sweeper or the soldier or the harlot or the teacher or the musician or the addict, to make his indictment; instead, he renders the parade of proud burghers themselves, making their ritual procession down the main thoroughfare, the Karl Johan, to see and to be seen, a consummate moment of social vindication, meant to shore up these citizens in their sense of gravity and purpose. Munch had dealt with crowd scenes earlier, in his realist portrayal of the Military Parade on the Karljohan, and in a pointillist version as well.
But none of these earlier forays prepares us for the march of zombies that we encounter here. On the one hand, Munch's crowd is a new
urban constellation, with a form and synergy that accompany the growth of city populations and that intrigue the nineteenth-century artist and writer: Poe's "Man of the Crowd" and Baudelaire's "Les Foules" ("Crowds") testify eloquently to the explosive albeit anonymous energies to be found here, the sort of thing already at hand in the mass uprisings of the French Revolution. But merely to mention this activist model of the crowd is to measure how radically different Munch's rendition is. These denizens of Christiania would appear to be ghouls, the walking dead, and if we seek parallels with literary figures, one might invoke Thoreau's contemptuous reference to "the mass of men who lead lives of quiet desperation," except that this mass is represented by Munch in surreal, ghastly form now.
Above all, Munch reveals here his soon-to-be trademark style of vacancy and blankness, of white, featureless,
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