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arrangements we had not foreseen, in families and communities we had thought to be distant, unrelated, nothing to us. Art that is suffused by human feeling upends our complacent sense of individual sovereignty, our lazy certainty that we are freestanding and self-sufficient. "Nothing to us" may be our trusty safe-conduct pass through life, but art challenges such immunity.
Let us move now to the real evidence, by looking carefully at selected
artistic visions, drawn from poetry, narrative, theater, painting, and film, each illustrating the reach and shaping power of feeling. The scream that punctuates individual life does not stop there, but goes out into the world, is shown to be the governing principle of reality; it recasts discrete phenomena into a new mesh, providing a startling discovery of linkage and connection, forcing us to reconsider what a family is, what a society is. Each of these works hallows the authority of feeling, seeks to show how feeling is the primary pulsion and cohesion of life, with enormous moral and political consequences. Ultimately, we discover, as we experience these works of art, that feeling is not only pulsion, but actually propulsion, propelling us into larger realms, larger selves. I begin with William Blake's canonical poem of 1794, "London," to show how one prodigious poem reconfigures the position of the human subject (and the human reader) in the busding life of the metropolis.
IT ALL FLOWS TOGETHER: WILLIAM BLAKE'S "LONDON"
Blake's "London," a sixteen-line poem, has probably received as much critical scrutiny as any text in English literature. This piece is, I think, particularly beloved among teachers because it seems to speak even to the most unschooled readers, seems to resonate and to cohere in ways that every reader senses, even if obscurely. It goes like this:
I wander through each chartered street, Near where the chartered Thames does flow, And mark in every face I meet Marks of weakness, marks of woe.
In every cry of every Man, In every Infant's cry of fear, In every voice, in every ban, The mind-forged manacles I hear.
How the Chimney-sweeper's cry Every blackening Church appalls; And the hapless Soldier's sigh Runs in blood down Palace walls.
But most through midnight streets I hear
How the youthful Harlot's curse
Blasts the new born Infant's tear,
And blights with plagues the Marriage hearse. (144)
This is an explosive poem, or rather a series of explosions happening stanza by stanza, sometimes line by line, or even image by image. If you negotiate it evenly and coolly right to the end, how do you maintain composure when hit by the apocalyptic last line? Much of the poem's power comes from the awesome view of human society as one of flux and inescapable linkage among disparate individuals; the view that it enunciates is awesome because it unseats, unhinges our notions of self and stasis.
"Self" and "stasis" are the best words I can muster for the fundamental notions of fixity that regulate and undergird ordinary perception and thinking. We take ourselves to be finite, bounded creatures, each of us an "I" who goes through life under those arrangements: that is self. And each thing we see or conceive is (and remains) that thing we see and conceive; our world behaves, stays inside its definitional skin, doesn't pirouette or go on outings: that is stasis. Blake's poem, even though it sits nicely in its sixteen lines, wrecks all this, and tells us—a bit the way a merry-go-round tells us—about collapsing boundaries and swirling pathways, about how other people inescapably collide into us, about new communities into which we find ourselves thrust as card-carrying members of humanity with heavy obligations for one another, like it or not. Put more simply, the poem makes us see and hear—what an astonishing verb make is here, as if poetry could be coercive and engendering, could actually force a change in our registers—the feelings of
others, shatters us with its
Let us move now to the real evidence, by looking carefully at selected
artistic visions, drawn from poetry, narrative, theater, painting, and film, each illustrating the reach and shaping power of feeling. The scream that punctuates individual life does not stop there, but goes out into the world, is shown to be the governing principle of reality; it recasts discrete phenomena into a new mesh, providing a startling discovery of linkage and connection, forcing us to reconsider what a family is, what a society is. Each of these works hallows the authority of feeling, seeks to show how feeling is the primary pulsion and cohesion of life, with enormous moral and political consequences. Ultimately, we discover, as we experience these works of art, that feeling is not only pulsion, but actually propulsion, propelling us into larger realms, larger selves. I begin with William Blake's canonical poem of 1794, "London," to show how one prodigious poem reconfigures the position of the human subject (and the human reader) in the busding life of the metropolis.
IT ALL FLOWS TOGETHER: WILLIAM BLAKE'S "LONDON"
Blake's "London," a sixteen-line poem, has probably received as much critical scrutiny as any text in English literature. This piece is, I think, particularly beloved among teachers because it seems to speak even to the most unschooled readers, seems to resonate and to cohere in ways that every reader senses, even if obscurely. It goes like this:
I wander through each chartered street, Near where the chartered Thames does flow, And mark in every face I meet Marks of weakness, marks of woe.
In every cry of every Man, In every Infant's cry of fear, In every voice, in every ban, The mind-forged manacles I hear.
How the Chimney-sweeper's cry Every blackening Church appalls; And the hapless Soldier's sigh Runs in blood down Palace walls.
But most through midnight streets I hear
How the youthful Harlot's curse
Blasts the new born Infant's tear,
And blights with plagues the Marriage hearse. (144)
This is an explosive poem, or rather a series of explosions happening stanza by stanza, sometimes line by line, or even image by image. If you negotiate it evenly and coolly right to the end, how do you maintain composure when hit by the apocalyptic last line? Much of the poem's power comes from the awesome view of human society as one of flux and inescapable linkage among disparate individuals; the view that it enunciates is awesome because it unseats, unhinges our notions of self and stasis.
"Self" and "stasis" are the best words I can muster for the fundamental notions of fixity that regulate and undergird ordinary perception and thinking. We take ourselves to be finite, bounded creatures, each of us an "I" who goes through life under those arrangements: that is self. And each thing we see or conceive is (and remains) that thing we see and conceive; our world behaves, stays inside its definitional skin, doesn't pirouette or go on outings: that is stasis. Blake's poem, even though it sits nicely in its sixteen lines, wrecks all this, and tells us—a bit the way a merry-go-round tells us—about collapsing boundaries and swirling pathways, about how other people inescapably collide into us, about new communities into which we find ourselves thrust as card-carrying members of humanity with heavy obligations for one another, like it or not. Put more simply, the poem makes us see and hear—what an astonishing verb make is here, as if poetry could be coercive and engendering, could actually force a change in our registers—the feelings of
others, shatters us with its
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