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

Author:What Literature Teaches Us About Life [HTML] [Life, What Literature Teaches Us About]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Like Fitzgerald, Harrison has written her story of abuse "large," stereophonically as it were, so that we see numerous narrative bytes that are strange analogues to the action at hand, replicating it, shoving it down our throat: a young woman belonging to a feminist group protesting the forthcoming exhibit sets fire to herself wearing a T-shirt with the name 'Ann Rogers"; with uncanny logic, this woman is blinded by the damage to her optic nerve, signaling Ann (who has eye trouble) once again; in another bizarre episode, Ann as a child is abducted by her science teacher and given what she takes to be insulin (it is really distilled water) so that the teacher can witness firsthand one of her comas (we are told that the teacher has collected untold numbers of photos of Ann, masturbates to them), and we read this horrid episode as a repeat version of Edgar's own mistreatment of his daughter, a mistreatment that reached the level of hospitalization and court case in the past. In a less garish, less lurid mode, Ann's visits to her ophthalmologist, Dr. Et-tinger, replay the father syndrome, particularly when he performs laser surgery on her damaged retina, warning her that if she moves at the wrong moment, he could blind her, translating into a medical code the lethal danger she has confronted all her life in the form of an older man with a camera.

Dr. Ettinger's laser surgery, like Ann's work with Visage Video, like her father's famous photographs, spells out the choral dimensions of Harrison's title, Exposure. Here, in this ultramodern text, we see state-of-the-art imaging techniques, the fine flower of a scientific practice that can now read the body "uninvasively," and what knocks us over the head is how invasive it all is. Getting your picture, getting your reading, is the bane of this young woman's life, with the added touch that she now does it for a living herself. Ann Rogers is, of course, the text's text, the body that has been photographed forever, with all its poor secrets on

view, a body that still wears signs of its history, signs present in the scars left by the times she burned herself, cut herself with a knife, just to know that she could still feel something. She tells Carl she is not a renovation, but she is very much a historical site, an archaeological dig of sorts, and the project of the book consists in excavating all this buried, repressed, unprocessed material. More even than Daddy's Girl. Ann Rogers is a palimpsest, a layered artifact, a written-on person, a figure for decoding and diagnosing, a figure who needs a lifetime to come to terms with the poisons cooking inside her.

Now it would seem that Kathryn Harrison has denied herself very little in choosing lurid and sensational themes for her story, and yet the most obscene moment of this text comes midway in the novel, with the reproduction of a contract between Ann's husband Carl and the elegant department store Bergdorf Goodman allowing Ann to steal freely from the store.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.