Morning, Noon, and Night: Finding the Meaning of Life's Stages Through Books (25 page)

This rich, elephantine novel is studded with figures of damaged children, and, for the most part, theirs are stories Dickens can tell. Ada and Rick’s is a touching if tragic love story, and it closes with the birth of Ada’s child and Rick’s death. Esther, the central heroine of the narrative, enacts a tale of maturation and understanding, one that flirts with bad outcomes but finally closes with marriage and happiness ever after. But Jo, the marginal figure I want to emphasize, does not have a story. He does not even have a last name. He is the exemplary creature of the great London slum Tom-all-alone’s, yet it might be claimed that he is the book’s most potent and influential figure: he alters lives. The recipient of nonstop harassment, told incessantly to “move on,” sick, Jo does move on, hides out at Bleak House, is cared for by Charley (Esther’s maid), infects Charley with his smallpox, and ultimately infects Esther, whose face will be permanently scarred because of this human encounter.

Potent, influential, but without a story, he dies later in the book, but we know nothing of his parents or his background and little even of his feelings.
He does not grow up;
by this I mean that there is no cultural plot available to him, no trajectory imaginable. Jo’s actual death, late in the novel, is presented with the pathos one expects from Dickens, as the dying boy repeats, in the manner of a countdown, the words of the Lord’s Prayer. But we can scarcely miss the fact that this child’s death has a coherence and symbolism even beyond the coping strategies of the book’s surviving children. Parentless, he is the creature, indeed the offspring, of the pestilent slum Tom-all-alone’s, figured as an omnipotent “miasmic” force that out-trumps even Chancery in determining human fate. Jo—without resources, contaminated by the city’s filth and disease, unsavable—is the living proof that nineteenth-century urban and social arrangements ground up children. His bereftness exposes, with an embarrassment Dickens could not have intended, just how lucky Esther, Rick, and Ada are from a material point of view. Those children have their own obstacle course, but they benefit from Dickensian paternalism at its most heightened: the rich John Jarndyce steps in to adopt and save all of them. I mentioned earlier that few young people in college today receive the omniscient counsel of a Vautrin; even fewer real abandoned children receive the helping hand of a “rich uncle” who wants to save them from ruin.

To have conceived of Jo as illiterate is a mark of Dickens’s genius, for it takes his victim status a quantum leap further, disem-powers him still more radically. Dickens wants us to measure just what it might feel like to be a stranger to written language. Jo’s recurrent phrase throughout the novel is “I don’t know nothink.” The (intended?) pun is telling: being shut off from words is to be shut off from thinking, to be exiled from what is most human about the human community. He sees a world of utter, complete mystery—a mystery far beyond that of unsolved crimes, a mystery of blankness and absurdity, as if he were an alien from another planet—and he has no connection to it:

Jo’s estrangement is total. Even the Dickensian prose that conveys his lostness is doubtless articulated and nuanced in ways far beyond Jo’s own ken, for the novelist can only point toward the black hole that is this boy, the daily discovery of his nothingness in the larger scheme. He is toolless. Beyond even the material abuse he suffers, he moves us most by his islanded state, his doom as a stranded figure of another species, abject, reified, turned into the book’s carrier of disease, its walking time bomb. We need to see that language can be as great an asset as money when it comes to the story of growing up. Already in the exploits of Pablos we noted that verbal prowess can be a mighty resource in redressing material circumstances. And in studies still to come, language will play a still greater role in self-empowerment, enabling the young to comprehend ever more fully the culture they inhabit, the history that precedes them, so as to complete their journey to adulthood. Jo has none of this. In his disenfranchisement he looks horribly forward to Kafka’s sacrificial stories of exiting-the-human.

Childhood is a state that matters for Henrik Ibsen.
A Doll House
, his breakthrough play of 1879, unforgettably stages the drama of Nora’s recognition that she has never left childhood, that she is still inhabiting a dollhouse, even though she is married and the mother of two children. Infantilized by her father, then by her husband, Torvald, defined as the property of males, Nora comes increasingly to understand that she has never developed any full sense of selfhood or agency. How to emancipate oneself? We know that Nora’s own solution—to exit this bad marriage, leaving her children with her husband, in search of herself, en route to becoming fully, genuinely “adult”—utterly shocked nineteenth-century audiences, who could not believe that a decent woman could behave in this fashion.

Little license is needed to see growing up as the central drama that Ibsen writes over and over. Sometimes this process comes late in life: Helene Alving (in
Ghosts
) is a widow with a grown child before she fully gauges the injuries inflicted on her as a young girl, the coercions she experienced and even handed on, due to the repressive conditions in which she was brought up. A later heroine, Hedda Gabler, comes to a comparable discovery, as she desperately tries to find stimuli and freedom in the caged life she has bought into, as the wife of the dull Tesman, as a proper bourgeoise who is being asphyxiated by the air she breathes, by the walls that are closing in on her. Ibsen’s men are not immune from these dilemmas, even if the coloration is different, since their penal condition is of another stripe, voluntary rather than male-imposed; I’m thinking of the two male protagonists of
The Wild Duck
, the neurotic, indeed fanatic, idealist Gregers and the pampered, self-deluded, soi-disant “inventor” Hjalmar, each of whom is hopelessly egocentric and infantile in his behavior and blindness, each of whom contributes to the death of the child Hedvig.

Hedvig dies, the doomed plaything of the two puffed-up males arguing over principles. So too dies Oswald Alving, Helene Alving’s talented artist-son, who has inherited syphilis from his dead, dissolute father, who returned to Norway from Paris to die because his brain was turning to mush. And there are other dead children in Ibsen: the little twin boys in
The Master Builder
who had to die, it seems, so that Solness could somehow be liberated to do his great work (before he too goes on the block, escorted out of the play by its child-executioner, Hilde). The most poignant of these victims is Eyolf, the title figure of
Little Eyolf
, crippled at birth because of his parents’ neglect (and sexuality), destined to death by drowning at the end of Act I, so that the adults on the scene can settle their scores and begin to see clear in their own arrangements.

There are lots of dead children littering the stage of these plays or buried behind the scenes. We can scarcely avoid perceiving a rather grisly coherence, a pattern being worked out on the loom: namely, that the moral emancipation of adults is darkly cued to the sacrifice of children. These plays seem to obey a zero-sum logic, according to which the price of my freedom is yours. There is also an anti-Oedipal impulse of considerable force here, condemning the next generation to death as their elders make their way toward light and clarity. The grand paradox is that Ibsen’s energies are profoundly liberal in character; his protagonists are all moving toward a greater sense of agency and self-knowledge. These plays are about education. It is all the more awful, therefore, that the young themselves fare so badly, end up sacrificed. “I refuse the ticket,” Ivan Karamazov proclaimed when he realized that accepting God also meant accepting the torture of children; in Ibsen, all too often, the children
are
the ticket for whatever emancipation is to be achieved.

The most surprising feature of Ibsen’s work is how occulted this business of systemic child sacrifice is, how you have to take a step back from these plays of adult emancipation in order to see the disturbing machinery that lies behind it. We know that Ibsen himself had an unhappy childhood, replete with parental financial ruin, and that he remembered himself as undersized and underendowed. That hurting child would become the Great Man of nineteenth-century European theater, who rang a death knell for what was culturally ossified around him. In looking at the compromised adult Norwegian society around him, he fastened onto Truth and Light as his two authority principles. His grown-ups make their way circuitously but unstoppably toward this luminous horizon, yet, as we’ve seen, the children seem shunted into the dark, slated for destruction.

There seems to be a kind of libidinal unfinished business that whips and goads Ibsen’s psyche, meting out punishment and death to children. The persistence of outright or veiled infanticide in these plays speaks of the gruesome price that might be exacted if one is to grow up. Becoming adult is inseparable from
Kindermord
. Is that what successful maturation means: the destruction of the child oneself was? What gears need to be shifted, for all of us, to cross over the gulf from child to adult? Did Ibsen have to “off,” in play after play, a “child self” that could not live? A child that had to be sacrificed precisely because growing up and adult success required it? The moves I have traced in this book from innocence to experience to love’s successes and failures: what do they spell for the child we were? Might the familiar cliché “one’s inner child”—a notion that conjures up a vital infant still living within us, with its own needs and values—be a fantasy that cloaks something much grislier: a corpse? Rethink your own life: no cadavers? no early self put to death so you could become you?

One of Franz Kafka’s most beautiful utterances is “Art is the ax that chops through our frozen sea.” It’s a forbidding statement, perhaps, but also uplifting when one construes it as a recognition of the murk and torpor that routinely characterize our psyche and our sentiments, while positing art as the cutting edge that makes its way into us, awakens us, arouses us to life. But of course the phrase is edgy in more ways than one, since it figures this awakening as a wound, as a potentially violent, potentially lethal entry into both mind and body. I am also struck by the verticality of the metaphor, its way of representing our interior as dead depths, its implication that art might be akin to trauma in its penetration of our surface, its rupturing entry into our all-too-insentient reaches. If we view art as a kind of depth charge, we begin to sketch the landscape of Kafka’s strange world, a place of surfaces that are at once real and penetrable, a material scheme that is at once solid and oddly porous, yet haunted and infected by the “immaterial,” thereby generating the key metaphors of his work: the radiance of truth that shimmers behind a series of closed and guarded doors; the routine failure of protagonists to get past obstacles or find their way; the figurative landscape of a writer trapped in the phenomenal scheme of flesh and matter while hungering for something beyond them.

Kafka once expressed admiration for Flaubert’s declared envy at the sight of low-to-the-ground, simple people anchored in their reality:
“Ils sont dans le vrai,”
sighed the French novelist. It seems to me that Kafka imagines functional adulthood in terms of a sought-after stability, a fit within the system, an at-homeness in flesh and world, an incorporation of the deep rhythms of life and love. The pathos of his work is that children rarely make it this far. One does not grow up in Kafka; one goes under. Kafka’s
Letter to the Father
offers a richly articulated account of a failed childhood, an experience of growing up as constant injury and humiliation. But the famous fictions go even further in their account of children going under.

One could claim that Georg Bendemann, the protagonist of “The Judgment,” is not a child. After all, he is taking care of his infirm father, is ready to take over the family business, has a fiancée, is poised to move securely into the stream of life. Except, as we will see, that this cannot happen, cannot be allowed to happen. Kafka regarded this short story, written frenetically in one fell swoop at the very onset of his career, as a breakthrough, describing it as a mucus-covered fetus emerging from the womb, a “birthing” text for his coming work. Very curious: Franz is to be born as writer via the account of Georg’s being arrested as a child.

For that is what will transpire. Georg seems initially to be an anchored figure, reliably informing us of his prospects and responsibilities: readying himself for marriage to his fiancée, corresponding with his faraway, self-exiled friend in Russia, and moving more and more centrally into managing the affairs of the business, given his father’s evident decline. We have no reason to doubt any of these statements, since they behave just as literary utterance always has, nailing down a person’s situation and thoughts in language. Hence we anticipate nothing more than a mild exchange of views when Georg at last enters his father’s darkened bedroom to have a look at him; Georg fills in his father on matters relating to fiancée and friend, yet is struck by the enfeeblement he now perceives, worries that he has neglected the old man for far too long. Georg goes on to lift his bedridden father up so as to better arrange his covers. “Am I well covered up?” asks the old man.
“Bin ich gut zugedeckt?”
Can fathers ever be under cover?