Morning, Noon, and Night: Finding the Meaning of Life's Stages Through Books (10 page)

Twain’s page or so on the (penal) working of conscience and the courage required to leap clear are worth reams of theoretical pronouncements about the operation of ideology. “All right, then I’ll
go
to hell” is arguably the most luminous utterance in nineteenth-century literature. I cannot imagine a book that brings out more forcefully, more unhingingly, what we have to gain by reading about the experience of growing up. Huck Finn’s gradual but inexorable recognition of Jim’s humanity, and therefore of his own existential choice, writes large for us how we might move from darkness to light, from the lawfulness of prior arrangements to a shimmering moment of freedom. Nothing is easy here. Huck is prepared to pay the full price he’s been told he’ll have to pay. That is what gives this scene, and this novel, its astonishing gravity. Twain creates here a fleeting glimpse of truth, of seeing through the constructs that we’ve taken for real, of the challenge that life metes out to us as unaccommodated mapless spiritual creatures with living responsibilities, regardless of fog.

I find it especially sad that Twain’s novel has become a battleground for what is sayable or not, offensive or not, when it comes to race in America. I do not think Twain can be absolved of his own racist assumptions, so that the intermittent characterization of Jim as minstrel-show figure has its undeniable ugly truth. Yet the book’s very failures speak to us about the racial fault lines of our society. The book wants to adjudicate who is to be Huck’s “father”: Pap or the Widow and the Judge? But whoever reads Twain’s novel has seen that the father in this story is Jim: a man of deep feelings who misses his wife and loves his children, as is exquisitely shown when he tells Huck about having struck his child for disobeying, not realizing the girl was deaf; Twain’s genius is on show on the next page, where Jim is decked out by the King and the Duke as King Lear. No commentary is given, and none is needed. Both texts are about blind fathers, but Jim’s remorse in that instance illuminates the whole man for us. And that is what Huck painfully remembers when he is on the verge of turning him in: kindness, tenderness, generosity, love, meted out to a boy who has seen precious little of them in his life.

That love is what makes this novel so moving. That it has nowhere to go, that both the novel and Huck will “forget” about Jim and his plight, is a heartbreaking commentary on what Martha Nussbaum has called “the fragility of goodness.” Toni Morrison has rightly said that every reader knows that “no enduring adult fraternity will emerge” in
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
. Human nature is fickle, the flights of the soul are hard to sustain, racism is real, America is a hard place. Huck himself lights out for the Territory at novel’s end, and it does not seem far-fetched to see him as a lost boy, someone rudderless and destined to be manipulated, despite his good heart and decent soul. We know that Twain was haunted by the magic he had—momentarily, all too briefly—achieved in this novel and that he returned to Huck and Jim in later life, in sequels and drafts, yet never succeeded in finding a future for the white boy and the black father. It is not entirely unlike the dream of childhood itself: unforgettable, unrecoverable.

Mark Twain seemed to have virtually stumbled into the richness and beauty and edge that might result from a vision that is radically unschooled. One returns to
Huckleberry Finn
for its inexhaustible freshness and poetry, and it is hard to disagree with Hemingway’s assessment that all American literature stems from this vernacular account of an uneducated child’s adventures. For that matter, to present the wonder (and horror) of the world by refracting it through the lens of innocence and simplicity is a writerly injunction that we find even earlier, in Grimmelshausen’s seventeenth-century
Simplicissimus
and Blake’s poems of the 1790s, as we have seen. But it remained for William Faulkner in 1929 to introduce into American literature the voice of the idiot. Benjy Compson, the leadoff “speaker” in
The Sound and the Fury
, is unmistakably Faulkner’s response to Shakespeare, whose famous lines in
Macbeth
equate all of life with the vision of the idiot: “a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.” Yet we will see that Faulkner’s sights have little to do with the nihilism expressed in Shakespeare; on the contrary, he intuits that the idiot’s tale can be unbearably rich and full, as well as being a unique conduit for conveying radical innocence. With Benjy, we move a quantum leap beyond the unschooled Huck: we encounter a vision arrested in infancy, doomed to infancy. Never before had innocence been put to such use.

The first page of
The Sound and the Fury
is justly famous for its rendition of Benjy’s retarded vision: looking “through the fence,” he tells us of people hitting, hitting repeatedly, coming forward, of hunting in the grass, of a flag taken out and then later put back, of hitting again, of people going on, of hunting again in the grass; this soundless notation is capped by two spoken words: “Here caddie.” Faulkner then writes, “He hit. They went away across the pasture. I held to the fence and watched them going away.” Such prose, oddly blinkered, is trouble for most readers, yet its most obvious secret is easily found out: the scene being described is a golf course. We know this. The innocent Benjy does not know this; all he knows is hitting and flags. Once we realize it is a golf course, we see “Here caddie” as a logical expression, but at this point the rules of the game appear to have changed, because we now understand, from the spoken words of his keeper, Luster, that Benjy is moaning.

“We now understand,” I wrote. But why is he crying? To understand, we must look again at what is in plain sight: “They went away across the pasture.” Plain sight on the page, perhaps, but in our minds it is a golf course. What’s going on? In due time—after a few pages, perhaps after reading the entire novel, perhaps never?—we should realize that this golf course is indeed a pasture for Benjy: it was the family pasture (now sold, now become a golf course, but not for Benjy). This is the fence where he has always gone to wait, ever since childhood, for the return homeward of his sister, Caddy—
Caddy
, indistinguishable orally from
caddie
—from school, bringing him the only love he has ever known. Once we know this, things become rather clearer, and the most crystalline utterance of the book, we now see, is “Here caddie,” or rather “Here Caddy,” a phrase as freighted with significance as the sounds of the Delphic oracle. In two simple words it expresses the living tragedy of Benjy Compson’s life: Caddy is not here, Caddy is gone, love won’t return. Benjy will never go past this rupture; instead he is fated to rehearse it continually, because every event in his experience seems marked “Caddy”: the voice heard on the golf course, the remembered sight of his niece Miss Quentin sitting on a swing with her beau (recalling Caddy on a swing), the sight of some girls walking home after school, walking by the fence as a daily dare, to watch the strange man inside it respond by running along its edge, moved, desperate.

The novel’s most heartbreaking episode occurs on the fateful day, long past, when the girls came by and Benjy went beyond holding to the gate; he got out:

As Benjy’s desire to embrace Caddy/the girls—for we realize they are for him versions of each other—fuses with the forced anesthesia given to him prior to castration (for that is what is happening), we may measure a number of things: not only the (surgical, sexual) closure that life has meted out to him but also the incomparable power and poignancy of an “innocent vision.” We readers parse Benjy Compson’s life of injury, and we see that the absent Caddy—run away, married because pregnant, long gone—courses through his memories in passages that can break your heart: Caddy feeding Benjy, Caddy explaining “ice” to Benjy, Caddy holding Benjy, Caddy taking Benjy for a walk, Caddy giving up perfume because it makes Benjy cry, Caddy resisting the very march of time so as to remain the loving sister her brother needs, so as to be forever the Caddy “who smells like trees.”

We will never fully know what it felt like to be Caddy. Yet she remains, for me, one of Faulkner’s most beautiful characters: generous, loving, feisty, loyal, irrepressible, true. Her story is never told as such—and Faulkner has been roundly chastised for representing her largely through the eyes of her hungry brothers—but she is the book’s living heart, the life principle that the male siblings, especially Benjy and Quentin, cannot survive without. Would she be as moving if she had been granted a chapter of her own? I somehow doubt it. Faulkner loved her, referred to her as “my heart’s darling,” and must have sensed that she would move us most if refracted through her brothers’ eyes. Her own tragic tale of growing up is brutally compacted by the book we have, leaving us to imagine the terrible hand that life dealt her: loveless mother, alcoholic father, two insatiable brothers, Don Juan lover, unwanted pregancy, desperate marriage, plunge into dishonor, separation from child, permanent final residence beyond the pale; a story never quite written.

What we do know is that Benjy never grows past his almost animal need for her: at every point in his trajectory, she is the compass, the source of love, the horizon of living. We the adult readers see all too clearly the sweeping curve of time that bathes Compson lives, we see Caddy grow into adolescence and rebellion and finally exile. We see the monstrousness of a thirty-three-year-old man with the mind of a three-year-old. But Benjy himself seems to exist entirely outside of time, as we measure it. We distort the novel if we say that Benjy remembers Caddy; you must forget in order to remember, and he cannot forget. I cannot think of any fate more awful. Time heals nothing for him. Every day he goes to the fence, awaiting her return. Every gesture is capable of making her present to his awful hunger. Any event can signal to him the love he once had, a loss that he now recovers with all its immediacy and hurt.

Benjy is frozen in time, and in that regard he is deprived of the essential learning process that life confers on the living. Innocence and experience were Blake’s grand terms. The chimney sweep of the “Experience” poem grasps in retrospect what has been done to him, in the name of Church and king. Huckleberry Finn comes gradually to understand that Jim is a human being with dignity and feeling, no matter how “unnatural” it might appear in his environment, indeed to his customary way of thinking. But Benjy realizes nothing. Huck, at book’s close, lights out for the Territory, ahead of the others. Benjy has no place to go. He cannot outgrow his hurt. He cannot turn it into wisdom. He cannot mature. Such permanent stasis is tragic. And perhaps that is the secret strength that fuels human development: to get past injury, to work through it, to find ways to go beyond it, to learn how to deal with the irremediable, the unacceptable.

Benjy is at once the most poignant and resourceless figure of my book. I do not want to make him emblematic. We have seen coping and surviving aplenty among even the most innocent children up to now: Blake’s chimney sweep, Simplicius, Huck, and still more to come. But no figure in literature is as unfurnished as Benjy, and no figure in literature lives quite the daily calvary that he does. Faulkner’s genius is to write Benjy in such a way that we—the schooled, the thinking, the privileged—experience vicariously this boy/man’s incessant hurt. When you finish
The
Sound and the Fury
, you will never be able to hear those two simple words “Here caddie” in the same way, given their awful, freighted significance in the life of Benjy Compson. The stream-of-consciousness narration hurls us (without guideposts) into his sensations, and I can think of no nobler reason for having art than to provide us with experiences of this sort.

What does this tale of an idiot teach us about growing up? I have emphasized all that Benjy has lost and continues to lose every day. Is there anything gained? Not for him, that is certain, but for us? The answer is yes: his uncomprehending vision of things, his to-the-death fidelity to his sister, both convey to us in words an immediate luminous fragrant noisy poignant unlabeled world we have long ago exited. We could not return even if we wished to. Yet I believe that at some primitive level of psyche—a level prior to all the abstractions we adults live among—this is how it once was for all of us: an incessant craving for love, a total helplessness, an unfiltered picture of bright shining shapes that rush upon us, an existence parsed only by crying or not crying.

Little Marjane, the child heroine of the graphic novel
Persepolis
(2003), is doubtless based on the real life of the author, Marjane Satrapi, herself distantly related to an earlier shah of Persia (1848–1896). This matters a great deal, for Marjane’s perspective is indeed that of a privileged child, even if she and her family are targeted by the regime. She is privileged but also perky, feisty, and irresistibly winning as she offers her little testimony of the events in Tehran from 1979 to 1982: events of enormous political moment, as the (current) shah loses his grip on power and is replaced by the Ayatollah Khomeini, who installs a no less repressive order of militant Islam and militant communism. But it is also a time of enormous personal change, as Marjane moves from childhood into adolescence, identifying ever more closely with the seductive Western culture that is demonized by the (new) forces that be. This is a potent artistic mix, and the force of this memoir stems unmistakably from an innocent child’s evolving angle of vision.