Arnold Weinstein - A Scream Goes Through The House by What Literature Teaches Us About Life [HTML] Page B
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hollowed-out faces, spectral countenances with gaping, staring pinpoint eyes, frozen and hieratic in their ghostly parade. No rippling energy in sight here, not even any signs of the picturesque variety that engaged other writers and artists. Instead, Munch has, as it were, plunged into the interior, has laid waste to any psychologizing or affective signs, has produced a spectacle as eerie and depleted and ghostly as some of the arctic landscapes in Melville's sublime chapter in Moby-Dick on "The Whiteness of the Whale," where he too elects to go "in," to peel away all the colorful surface trappings that give point to our variegated phenomenal world, so as to settle into the Nothingness that is his real interest.
Munch is Melville's fellow traveler in this regard, and his spectral citizens seem risen from the dead, like some kind of Last Judgment where the dead resurface (resurface as surface), put on their frock coats and top hats and fine gowns, while remaining dazed mannequins, moving (being moved?) in mass formation, but will-less and soulless. We are tempted to fast-forward to the great Fascist crowds of the 1930s, but Munch's emphasis is on the spectral, insubstantial character of these denizens, already prefiguring T. S. Eliot's "hollow men." Their performance gives the lie to all notions of stability, solidity, and solidarity
(virtues they seek to display), and the self-congratulatory belief system that finances such rituals and parades has been eaten away entirely, turned inside out.
Munch's breakthrough here is to have worked through negation and erasure, to have refrained from all surface notation, in such a way as to yield a result of shocking power and violence. Evening on the Karl Johan jolts us in his depiction of modern life, because it forgoes any minute particulars—grimace, pain, suffering, even delight—in order to land at rock bottom, to get to the horror that lies underneath. Munch's people have bottomed out, are shown to inhabit a sphere beyond emotion itself, a blankness that seems prior, a bedrock of Nothing that all our song and dance seeks to camouflage. Yet—and here is the miracle—this painting broadcasts the same "marks of weakness, marks of woe" that characterized Blake's Londoners and Baldwin's denizens of Harlem. This, too, is in some terrible sense, a community, even a family of sorts, a whole class of like-minded, like-appareled citizens, aware of the surface features that unite them, wholly unaware of the inner void that unites them. All of the vacancy, the sucked-out vacuum of these faces and lives, exerts an irresistible pull on the spectator, draws us in, makes us gauge the horrible theft (of feeling, or meaning, of reality) that has taken place here. Munch is cunning in his use of blankness and emptiness, as if he knew that the viewer not only would rush in to fill the gap, but would experience the affective black hole as the true horror of these lives, the final record of what life has done to them.
And that is what lays ultimate claim to our attention. Through Munch we see what is not otherwise visible: the sickness at the core of things. This mob-gestalt that seems to flow down the Karl Johan, less animated than even the windows of the buildings, is contaminated, sick unto death, as Kierkegaard might have said, a billboard for epidemic plague. Such a painting obliges us to ask if, indeed, the human soul might be representable, representable most horribly as absence, vacancy. These figures are demonstrably paying the price for the culture that has formed them: their hollowness seems to be a form of "scalp-
ing," a lifelong process of erosion that we now see in its graphic insolence. An entire material culture (of surface prosperity, of agendas and plans, of "success" as something real) seems on the block here—seen, drawn, painted, weighed, and found horribly wanting—as the artist brings us into his field of vision. No plaint is heard, yet this piece seems dirgelike all
Munch is Melville's fellow traveler in this regard, and his spectral citizens seem risen from the dead, like some kind of Last Judgment where the dead resurface (resurface as surface), put on their frock coats and top hats and fine gowns, while remaining dazed mannequins, moving (being moved?) in mass formation, but will-less and soulless. We are tempted to fast-forward to the great Fascist crowds of the 1930s, but Munch's emphasis is on the spectral, insubstantial character of these denizens, already prefiguring T. S. Eliot's "hollow men." Their performance gives the lie to all notions of stability, solidity, and solidarity
(virtues they seek to display), and the self-congratulatory belief system that finances such rituals and parades has been eaten away entirely, turned inside out.
Munch's breakthrough here is to have worked through negation and erasure, to have refrained from all surface notation, in such a way as to yield a result of shocking power and violence. Evening on the Karl Johan jolts us in his depiction of modern life, because it forgoes any minute particulars—grimace, pain, suffering, even delight—in order to land at rock bottom, to get to the horror that lies underneath. Munch's people have bottomed out, are shown to inhabit a sphere beyond emotion itself, a blankness that seems prior, a bedrock of Nothing that all our song and dance seeks to camouflage. Yet—and here is the miracle—this painting broadcasts the same "marks of weakness, marks of woe" that characterized Blake's Londoners and Baldwin's denizens of Harlem. This, too, is in some terrible sense, a community, even a family of sorts, a whole class of like-minded, like-appareled citizens, aware of the surface features that unite them, wholly unaware of the inner void that unites them. All of the vacancy, the sucked-out vacuum of these faces and lives, exerts an irresistible pull on the spectator, draws us in, makes us gauge the horrible theft (of feeling, or meaning, of reality) that has taken place here. Munch is cunning in his use of blankness and emptiness, as if he knew that the viewer not only would rush in to fill the gap, but would experience the affective black hole as the true horror of these lives, the final record of what life has done to them.
And that is what lays ultimate claim to our attention. Through Munch we see what is not otherwise visible: the sickness at the core of things. This mob-gestalt that seems to flow down the Karl Johan, less animated than even the windows of the buildings, is contaminated, sick unto death, as Kierkegaard might have said, a billboard for epidemic plague. Such a painting obliges us to ask if, indeed, the human soul might be representable, representable most horribly as absence, vacancy. These figures are demonstrably paying the price for the culture that has formed them: their hollowness seems to be a form of "scalp-
ing," a lifelong process of erosion that we now see in its graphic insolence. An entire material culture (of surface prosperity, of agendas and plans, of "success" as something real) seems on the block here—seen, drawn, painted, weighed, and found horribly wanting—as the artist brings us into his field of vision. No plaint is heard, yet this piece seems dirgelike all
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