Free Arnold Weinstein - A Scream Goes Through The House by What Literature Teaches Us About Life [HTML]

victims, to give at least some sense of the victims' humanity, their story. But this poem, in its own way, goes much further: each victim trumpets forth—not via scream but by a sigh—his fateful indictment, and the virulence of such utterance turns it into a liquid script, into the visible blood that runs down palace walls.
    We all know that the institution of language is at a crucial remove from things themselves, that words are differential, part of an endless semiotic chain that signifies ever more words, never at one, as Kant said long ago, with the thing itself, das Ding an sich. And many have bemoaned the "prison house of language," not just theorists and scholars and revolutionaries, but all those who feel that words always come up short and are not commensurate with what one actually wants to utter.
    For just these reasons, Blake's achievement matters. Blood running
    down palace walls has a clarity and immediacy that are shockingly eloquent. Here is a pre-dictionary language (no schooling required), a violent but cogent text of abuse-and-punishment, an unmistakable graphic display of power relations that says: palaces send soldiers to their deaths, and churches are complicit with the exploitation of the weak. Blake has remained true to his initial image of the flowing Thames that cannot, we now realize, be "chartered," that does indeed flow, flows into and becomes running blood. Blake presents "flow" as the motor principle of the world, a flux that links victim back to institution, that becomes a fluid script for how power actually works, that eternal spectacle of the strong hurting the weak now become an actual spectacle, a kind of urban sound and light show, son et lumiere, in which our relations are at last on show.
    To say that flow is the law of the world is to challenge all notions of fixity: here versus there, now versus then, even you versus me. Blake's poem overturns these binarisms and categories, and in this new dispensation the rulers and their victims are umbilically connected and exposed as such. Power is at last visible, yes, but so too is pain. We return to those "marks of weakness, marks of woe," and we see that it all began there, that pain and suffering are a language, are "marks" of a story that can be told. In "London," such "marks" seem demiurgic in their thrust, capable of reconfiguring the world, demanding to tell their story of hurt and abuse. The poem closes with Blake's darkest and most apocalyptic images, as we realize (with a jolt) that it is indeed midnight, and that London is as diseased venereally as it is morally and politically. The inclusion of the harlot not only echoes back to the biblical Babylon as den of iniquity, but caps the poet's series of exploited figures, thereby defining the modern city almost exclusively as a human market, a place for buying and selling humans themselves (chimney sweeper, soldier, prostitute), a serial parade of use and abuse. The young prostitutes participate in the life and logic of flow: they pass on their venereal disease to the husbands who give it to their wives who extend it to the babes, and a generation itself is now doomed.
    The City's great needs—warmth, security, sex—are serviced by its victims, but their day comes, here, as we witness the great reflux, the insidious two-way traffic that is fatally egalitarian in its operation, exposing the trumps of privilege and power to be, ultimately, illusory. Finally, the last stanza keeps covenant with Blake's "liberation theology," his transmutation of hurt into indictment, of isolated victim into public revenge. Everything speaks. The harlot's curse has the clarity and virulence of ancient curses, those moments when language acts on the world: she helps tell the story of her city and her time, links her plaint with that of others, as the poet weaves her voice into the visionary tapestry at hand. A scream goes through the house, and we follow its ideological itinerary, as luminous and