Phenomenology of the Scream

Phenomenology of the Scream Peter Schwenger We will begin with a single remarkable scream or, at any rate, with the literary description of one. This scream is emitted in the second canto of Comte de Lautréamont’s Maldoror. The narrator, like a perverse St. John, has a vision of an anthropophagic god, his feet immersed in a “vast pool of boiling blood, to whose surface two or three cautious heads would suddenly rise like tapeworms from a full chamberpot,” in reserve for the god’s next course. Maldoror is paralyzed with horror until, “my tight chest unable to exhale the lifegiving air quickly enough, my lips parted and I cried out . . . a cry so earsplitting . . . that I heard it!”1—a fact remarkable only because the narrator has been deaf from birth. Now this medical miracle is of less interest to me than what is said about this scream, and screams in general, by Douglas Kahn in his history of sound in the arts, Noise, Water, Meat. He writes of Maldoror: His scream neither addressed the Creator nor reached the ears of his creations. It merely announced the presence of himself as a subjugated creature. . . . He was empathetic to his fellow creatures’ plight, but most immediately as a means to constituting his own identity. He had become aware of the presence of his voice.2 I am going to resist this analysis, not out of pickiness or crankiness but because it implicitly raises a number of questions that may lead us to answers regarding the nature of the scream. And first I must point out that 1. Comte de Lautréamont, “Maldoror” and the Complete Works, trans. Alexis Lykiard (Cambridge, 1994), p. 77. 2. Douglas Kahn, Noise, Water, Meat: A History of Sound in the Arts (Cambridge, Mass., 1999), p. 6. Critical Inquiry 40 (Winter 2014) © 2014 by The University of Chicago. 0093-1896/14/4002-0007$10.00. All rights reserved. 382 Critical Inquiry / Winter 2014 Kahn seems to resist his own formulations. Having dismissed the notion that Maldoror’s scream is meant to communicate with either the Creator or his unhappy victims—obviously unlikely auditors—Kahn later writes this about screams: “That they are resolutely communicative and meant for others is demonstrated by the fact that people who have been in a life-threatening situation often must be told by others that they were screaming.”3 Of course this factoid demonstrates no such thing; in fact it indicates the exact opposite. That people are unaware of their own screaming means that the scream is not a conscious call for help to another but an unconscious reflex, one that would have taken place whether or not there was anybody there to hear it. It arises, then, from reasons other than communication. In the passage I first quoted, Kahn suggests another reason: self-presence, the constitution of one’s own identity. I will be arguing later that what is at stake here is not the constitution of identity but an attempt to escape it. First, though, I would like to stress that Kahn is not alone in his reading of the scream as communication. Mladen Dolar has argued that “the scream, unaffected . . . by phonological constraints, is nevertheless speech in its minimal function: an address and an enunciation.” This is so, he says, because “the moment the other hears it . . . , the moment it responds to it, scream retroactively turns into appeal, it is interpreted, endowed with meaning, it is transformed into a speech addressed to the other.”4 No doubt this is true, but all this is a transformation of something that need not have had this function, a function that, as Dolar himself says, is assigned “retroactively” and externally by one who is other than the one who is screaming. Approaching the scream through the auditor rather than the one who emits it does make it possible to apply paradigms of interpretation, of meaning making and so of communication. But it is moving in the wrong direction. We must reverse this direction—must follow the scream back into the mouth to find out what impels it, beyond any particular horror, 3. Ibid., p. 345. 4. Mladen Dolar, A Voice and Nothing More (Cambridge, Mass., 2006), pp. 28, 27. P E T E R S C H W E N G E R is professor of English emeritus, Mount St. Vincent University, and resident fellow in the Centre for the Study of Theory and Criticism at the University of Western Ontario. His recent books include The Tears of Things: Melancholy and Physical Objects (2006) and At the Borders of Sleep: On Liminal Literature (2012). He is now at work on a book about the theoretical implications of asemic writing. Email: [email protected] 383 384 Peter Schwenger / Phenomenology of the Scream and to consider why it takes the form that it does. Let us begin, then, with the mouth—the open, screaming mouth. In his short piece “Mouth,” Georges Bataille observes that one who is screaming “throws back his head while frenetically stretching his neck so that the mouth becomes, as far as possible, a prolongation of the spinal column, in other words, it assumes the position it normally occupies in the constitution of animals.”5 Despite the emphasis Bataille places on this sentence, it can hardly be the last word on the subject. Though animals scream in moments of extreme danger or pain, they are not in a constant state of screaming for which their buccal orifice has adapted. And to say that there is something animal about screaming is too vague to be useful. There may be something inhuman, or beyond the human, but that is another matter. And I will be suggesting later other reasons why this prolonged position might be instinctively appropriate to the forces that impel the scream, forces connected to a desired prolongation beyond the body. Gilles Deleuze does better on the mouth in his study of the paintings of Francis Bacon: It is important [he says] to understand the affinity of the mouth, and the interior of the mouth, with meat and to reach the point where the open mouth becomes nothing more than the section of a severed artery. . . . The mouth then acquires this power of nonlocalization that turns all meat into a head without a face.6 So long as a mouth is open and screaming, then, it is no longer the feature belonging to someone’s individual face. Antonin Artaud speaks of a moment “when all the air has passed into the scream and there is nothing left for the face.”7 Something beyond the personal is here revealed, something as terrifyingly impersonal as the pain that is often the scream’s impetus. So, Deleuze continues, in screaming the mouth is “no longer a particular organ, but the hole through which the entire body escapes, and from which the flesh descends” (LS, p. 26). There seems to be a contradiction here: if the entire body escapes through this hole, there should be no flesh left to descend from it. It is more accurate to say, as Deleuze has said earlier, that the body attempts to do this (see LS, pp. xii, 16). There remains, though, the 5. Georges Bataille et al., Encyclopœdica Acephalica: Comprising the “Critical Dictionary” and Related Texts and “The Encyclopaedia Da Costa,” trans. Iain White et al., ed. Robert Lebel and Isabelle Waldberg (London, 1996), p. 62. 6. Gilles Deleuze, Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation, trans. Daniel W. Smith (1981; London, 2003), p. 26; hereafter abbreviated LS. 7. Antonin Artaud, “The Theatre of the Seraphim” (1936), Selected Writings, trans. Helen Weaver, ed. Susan Sontag (New York, 1976), p. 274. Critical Inquiry / Winter 2014 FIGURE 1. Francis Bacon, Study after Velázquez’s Portrait of Pope Innocent X (1963). question of why the body should make this attempt, and make it in this particular way. We can begin to formulate an answer in the same way that Deleuze did: by examining a painting. The painting is Francis Bacon’s well-known screaming pope (fig. 1). Its proper title is Study after Velázquez’s Portrait of Pope Innocent X, and we can begin by comparing it to that original portrait (fig. 2). Clearly Bacon has made something entirely different from it, and that difference is first and foremost the scream. Deleuze’s comment is as follows: 385 386 Peter Schwenger / Phenomenology of the Scream FIGURE 2. Diego Velázquez, Portrait of Innocent X (1650). Bacon creates the painting of the scream because he establishes a relationship between the visibility of the scream (the open mouth as a shadowy abyss) and invisible forces, which are nothing other than the forces of the future. It was Kafka who spoke of detecting the diabolical powers of the future knocking at the door. Every scream contains them potentially. Innocent X screams, but he screams behind the curtain, not only as someone who can no longer be seen, but as someone who cannot see, who has nothing left to see, whose only remaining function is to render visible those invisible forces that are making him scream, these powers of the future. [LS, pp. 60–61] Critical Inquiry / Winter 2014 These “powers of the future”—a vague phrase to be sure—may as yet be invisible, but they are also beyond the subject or sitter for the portrait— “beyond” not just in a temporal sense but in the sense that these powers of the future arise from outside the subject, whereas I am going to argue that the scream arises profoundly from within. Deleuze’s analysis in fact applies much more precisely to another terrifying portrait, El Greco’s Portrait of a Cardinal (fig. 3). The cardinal’s eyes have shifted to the left, and his left hand has convulsively gripped the arm of the chair. On that side his robes have risen, blown by who knows what wind from hell. The cardinal has just become aware of a certain power of the future, one that has not yet revealed itself in its full intensity. A terrifying image, but for reasons that are different from Bacon’s, whose declared purpose—repeatedly cited by Deleuze—is “‘to paint the scream more than the horror’” (LS, p. 38). If the horror is not fully revealed in El Greco’s version, it is implied; and the scream that responds to it has not been painted, though it will come. In Bacon’s image no external horror is depicted or even implied. The scream is itself the horror, when read as Deleuze reads it: as a gaping hole through which the body tries to escape itself but from which the flesh descends in all the materiality of meat. If the function of this figure is, as Deleuze has asserted, “to render visible these invisible forces that are making him scream,” Bacon has rendered these visible in ways that we must now consider more closely (LS, p. 61). And first there is the matter of what Deleuze calls a “curtain,” which is not a curtain, nor any material or even symbolic object. Rather we have something like lines of force, descending like a heavy rain. There are also—not mentioned by Deleuze—those lines that splay out from the chair in a most uncurtain-like way. The chair is, in a sense, encased within itself through prolongations of the gilt arms and back, now become a sort of brass geometry. Within this, the pope sits, his white robes shading off into semitransparency, cut off from any contact with the ground or chance to walk away on nonexistent feet. What we have here is a horror of situatedness—both a relentless physical situatedness and a situatedness in time. This is not the horror of a future time but of a present time that descends continually and heavily upon one. So it is that Bacon rejects certain of his paintings as too “sensational” because, Deleuze reports, “the figuration that subsists in them reconstitutes a scene of horror, even if only secondarily, thereby reintroducing a story to be told: even the bullfights are too dramatic. As soon as there is horror, a story is reintroduced, and the scream is botched” (LS, p. 38). There is horror, of course; in this canvas, we see it in the scream and in the external forces that seem to impel the scream into being. But the scream is ultimately a matter of the flesh, of situatedness, of being-there. 387 FIGURE 3. El Greco, Portrait of a Cardinal (ca. 1600). Critical Inquiry / Winter 2014 We may be able to understand this better if we turn now to another version of the horror of being-there, Emmanuel Lévinas’s notion of the il y a, developed in his treatise Existence and Existents. Resisting Martin Heidegger, Lévinas asks, “Is not anxiety over Being—horror of Being— just as primal as anxiety over death?”8 This primal anxiety manifests itself when the continually changing agendas of our self-defined existence in relation to the world are stilled, and we become aware of Existence as such. For to say we exist is only to say we participate in existence; but existence as such is something altogether other. We are beings by virtue of Being, but that Being is indifferent to our self-defined status as individual beings. Being is rather a continual imposition, an insistence that we fill the time that unremittingly descends upon us and that we occupy a certain space as a fleshly body. This vision of existence, and the horror that accompanies it, emerges at certain moments when, Lévinas says, “the continual play of our relations with the world is interrupted” (EE, p. 8); Lévinas’s case studies are insomnia, indolence, and fatigue. At such moments our relations with the world are suspended, and what is there is only “there is”—what Lévinas calls the il y a. The case of fatigue may be sufficient to give an idea of what is involved in the il y a before I move on to connect this concept to the scream. Lévinas is not speaking of physical fatigue—though physical fatigue may often detach one from the sense of being an individual existent—but of a psychological fatigue; for that reason he soon switches to the term weariness (lassitude). There exists a weariness [he writes] which is a weariness of everything and everyone, and above all a weariness of oneself. What wearies then is not a particular form of our life—our surroundings, because they are dull and ordinary, our circle of friends, because they are vulgar and cruel; the weariness concerns existence itself. . . . In weariness existence is like the reminder of a commitment to exist, with all the seriousness and harshness of an irrevocable contract. [EE, pp. 11–12] That contract, foisted upon us, in a sense is us; it is the fact that as beings in the world we are hostages to Being, to the reiterated insistence of the present moment that we continue to be. And to our flesh, that meat insisting that we inhabit a certain position in space—our “too too solid flesh,” as Hamlet calls it. In weariness we find ourselves detached from our state as existents and are made over to the sense of anonymous and relentless 8. Emmanuel Lévinas, Existence and Existents, trans. Alphonso Lingis (1978; Pittsburgh, 2001), p. 5; hereafter abbreviated EE. 389 390 Peter Schwenger / Phenomenology of the Scream existence. And in this there is a horror, a horror that is related to the scream. Fernando Pessoa makes the connection in “No, It’s Not Fatigue”: No. Fatigue, why? It’s an abstract sensation Of concrete life —something like a scream to be screamed, something like anxiety to be suffered. To be suffered completely Or to be suffered as . . . Yes, to be suffered as . . . That’s it: as . . . As what? If I knew I wouldn’t have this false fatigue within me.9 This is a poem of rich ignorance, which opens up in all sorts of directions, some of which we have already taken. It’s not fatigue, because it is nothing so simple as physical tiredness. Instead it is a Lévinasian weariness, weariness of the concrete life of flesh and time. Yet this is not weariness of any of the specifics of life— rather, an “abstract sensation,” a sensation of the great abstraction that is Existence. If that sensation is something like a scream, it is because the sensation is described in a parallel construction as “something like anxiety to be suffered.” This is not an anxiety for the body and its continued existence but an anxiety of the body, the body that insists on existence, and whose insistence can only be “suffered” passively. The notion of anxiety brings us to another painting, which it is impossible to avoid: Edvard Munch’s The Scream (fig. 4). People often assume that this work portrays an actual scream, even to the point of finding lines depicting sound vibrations around the figure, lines that do not in fact exist. An entry from Munch’s diary, recomposed with variations, is repeatedly cited by him in regard to this image and is even at times incorporated into artistic variations on the theme by being written around the picture’s margins. The diary entry clarifies just what this theme is: I was walking along the road with two friends. The sun set. I felt a tinge of melancholy. Suddenly the sky became a bloody red. I stopped, leaned against the railing, dead tired and I looked at the 9. Fernando Pessoa, “No, It’s Not Fatigue,” epigraph to Roberto Harari, Lacan’s Seminar on “Anxiety”: An Introduction, trans. Jane C. Lamb-Ruiz, ed. Rico Franses (New York, 2001), p. v. Critical Inquiry / Winter 2014 FIGURE 4. Edvard Munch, The Scream (1893). flaming clouds that hung like blood and a sword over the blue-black fjord and city. My friends walked on. I stood there, trembling with fright. And I felt a loud, unending scream piercing nature.10 10. Quoted in Reinhold Heller, Edvard Munch: The Scream (London, 1973), p. 107. This description is reproduced by Munch in close association with numerous artworks—not only variations on The Scream but also a related work, Despair—sometimes even forming part of 391 392 Peter Schwenger / Phenomenology of the Scream Clearly, the scream is not emitted by the human figure. It is rather nature that is screaming, as indicated by its convulsive shapes. These press in upon the human figure rather than emitting from it, so the face seems convulsed as well by a pressure upon it, becoming unnaturally elongated and bulbous. The movement is thus an inward one rather than that of the outward thrusting scream. And the hands of this figure are raised to its ears—or rather over the place where its ears would be if it had any. To be sure, the figure’s mouth is open and there is some possibility that the pressure upon the body could be released through that opening in the way described by Deleuze; but we do not get the sense of an outward thrusting, not yet. For Žižek, indeed, “the crucial feature of the painting is the fact that the scream is not heard. . . . since the anxiety is too stringent for it to find an outlet in vocalization.”11 What this expressionist painting expresses, then, is—in the words of Pessoa’s poem—“something like anxiety to be suffered.” It is even, perhaps, “something like a scream / to be screamed.” But it is not a scream, for the scream has not yet found its outlet. Munch has painted the horror more than the scream; and his painting serves us best as a way of defining what the scream is almost, but what it ultimately is not. What it is, is depicted best by Bacon, who does indeed “paint the scream more than the horror.” There is horror in his screaming pope, but it does not emerge from nature. It is rather innate in the pope himself, in what I have described as his relentless situatedness within time and space, the sheer fact of his existence. The trappings of his office—his thronelike chair, his luxurious dress, everything that might lend him a sense of his identity—these lose definition and solidity under dense and relentless lines of force. And out of a face that has now become meat, an entirely involuntary scream is torn; this is someone who probably does not even know he is screaming. In this, Bacon’s pope is very different from Munch’s “homunculus,” as Žižek calls it, whose eyes are aware of his surroundings and whose open mouth seems only to be saying, “Oh my, what is going on here?”12 The painting’s undoubted power comes from what is going on around the figure—comes from a state of anxiety projected onto its surroundings and described metaphorically as a scream. The only metaphor in Bacon’s painting might be paint itself, which translates an audial stimulus into a visual one. But if we those works. A comprehensive collection of the textual variants of the diary entry can be found in the “Appendix,” pp. 103–9. 11. Slavoj Žižek, Enjoy Your Symptom! Jacques Lacan in Hollywood and Out (New York, 1992), pp. 116–17. 12. Ibid., p. 117. Critical Inquiry / Winter 2014 cannot hear the scream, we can sense it through this image. It does not arise from an external horror but from the trap of existence. Let us leave the painting now to see how this hypothesis might play out in more familiar cases of screaming. Despite Bacon’s desire to avoid portraying an external horror that might “explain” the scream’s origin, the fact remains that people do scream when they are confronted with a scene of horror, even if that scene leaves them technically intact—I’m thinking, for instance, of people who witness other people’s violent and messy death or the even more messy aftermath of a decomposed body. The other circumstance under which people scream is of course when their own bodily security is jeopardized in life-threatening situations or when their bodies are invaded by pain. As with other bodily manifestations of affect, such as laughter, there is doubtless a range of false, semifalse, or strategically deployed versions. But these two basic impulses to scream—at witnessing another’s horror and experiencing or anticipating one’s own—probably cover the matter. Of course both could be explained by the fear of death, either experienced firsthand or extrapolated from what one witnesses. I am arguing, though, that the physical mode of the scream lends credence to the idea that the horror of existence is involved as well. For behind both screamgenerating scenarios is a desperate and forceful NO. And this negation is not just a desire that things be otherwise in the world; it is, quite unconsciously perhaps, a desire not to be in the world: not to have to see this unendurable scene of horror, not to have to suffer this unendurable pain in one’s own body, a body that one cannot escape, a vision that one cannot shut out by simply closing one’s eyes. One is condemned to experience this. As the skidding car crosses the line and heads straight for your car, no doubt you and your passengers are experiencing many things; nor will all of you necessarily scream. But all of you will have an intense sense of your situatedness in time and space. The fact that this body, this body that is you, is located here rather than in the car ahead, which is moving away, oblivious to your plight—this fact comes over you with the horror of an entrapment. Your body is about two feet wide, and now two feet either way could make all the difference. And “Now” comes over you with an equal sense of entrapment; all the other nows that you have lived through are as nothing, for this present moment is your presence itself. What we have at such moments is a version of Lévinas’s il y a: an awareness, an “abstract sensation” we might call it, of what it means to be condemned to the primal conditions of existence as such—which are precisely, at such moments, what threaten our existence as self. These take us by surprise, interrupting our being-inthe world with the anonymous indifference of Being. It is often a sudden interruption and, in this regard, is very different from the slow descent into 393 394 Peter Schwenger / Phenomenology of the Scream a Lévinasian weariness. When this slow horror is speeded up, we have no time to be weary, to consider the interesting philosophical conclusions that can be drawn from such a state. We instinctively want to escape from the trap of our own existence—which we suddenly sense is not our own, never was our own. Our Bodies, Our Selves has become not an affirmation but a condemnation. We wish to escape from the body, from its localization in space and time. And so we scream. Without even knowing it, perhaps, we open our mouth, and it becomes, in Deleuze’s formulation, “the hole through which the entire body escapes”—or tries to escape. It is our only recourse, this projecting of oneself out of that hole in the body through the power of the voice. To expel from the body breath alone is not enough. In a rather peculiar formulation Maldoror tells us that he is “unable to exhale the lifegiving air quickly enough,” and so he screams. Because the scream is vocalized, it gives body to breath, makes of the breath a body. To expel the breath alone is merely to collapse. A scream is the opposite of this; it is a force. It forces its way, to begin with, through the vocal chords; and it then fills the air, makes of the air a blunt instrument or a sharp one. It is an embodiment of force, moreover, that projects itself outside the body. This is why, in the martial arts, a blow becomes stronger when accompanied by a cry; it is not a matter of scaring one’s opponent but of adding to the outward-directed force of the blow in a way that could not be done by a soundless exhalation of the breath, however abrupt. The scream is also a projection of the self out of the body, an alternative acoustic body. Michel Henry comes close to saying as much in an interview: When I let out a scream [he says] it produces a phenomenon of redoubling in the sense that I hear the scream that I have formed because I am first the power that pronounces the sound. That is why hearing is basically only a redoubling. There is something like a circuit that causes me to hear the sound that I have uttered. There is a sonorous outpouring.13 This outpouring is both us and an elsewhere, an outside of us, the only way that we can find an outside that takes us out of our too solid flesh. If this attempt could succeed, existence would die away with the echoes of the scream, and with it the primal horror that propelled the scream. But it cannot succeed; the flesh unrelentingly persists. And as for that alternative acoustic body, that “redoubling,” it is not the 13. Michel Henry, “Art et phénoménologie de la vie,” Phénoménologie de la vie tome III: De l’art et du politique (Paris, 2004), p. 306; my trans. Critical Inquiry / Winter 2014 “means to constituting his own identity” that Kahn speaks of in regard to Maldoror’s scream, treating it as if it were merely another version of communication. I’m afraid that Henry too goes on to conflate the speaking voice with the vocalized scream: There is a sonorous outpouring, a sound that I hear, but to know that it is me who is speaking and not you, this primordial, dynamic, pathetic power of phonation must be within me, the power with which I coincide. That is because I know, there where I form the sound, that I am the one who forms it, that there is an ipseity in this power, that I can say, “I am the one who said that, and not you.”14 Nothing in this description fits with the actual experience of screaming— which, far from being a kind of self-congratulatory assertion of identity, is so far beyond our proprietorship that we may not even know that we are screaming. Nor is one scream particularly different from another, marked by one’s own identity. Bataille is right to this degree: that the scream returns us to a primal realm devoid of any characteristics that we might claim as our own. There is then a final irony in the scream: if it is forced from us as a response to the horror of pure existence, to being trapped by existence, it belongs itself to the order of things that are wiped clean of personal being. Essentially, every scream is like every other; and no scream can reconstitute the I that emits it. And so the redoubling of the scream is not an acoustic cloning of our personal selves; what it redoubles is the horror of existence at degree zero. 14. Ibid. 395