Morning, Noon, and Night: Finding the Meaning of Life's Stages Through Books (26 page)

One has to be a veteran Kafka reader to hear the ticking bomb that
must
accompany such seemingly innocuous notations. For there is an explosion. It is Father exploding, Father rising and deploying his gathered energy, Father preparing himself to pronounce judgment on his hapless son, Georg. Little in literature matches this moment of upheaval and transformation: we suddenly realize that nothing is what it seemed to be, that the relation between these two figures is loaded in ways we hadn’t seen, and that the text is in the process of turning it all inside out. Father now revisits Georg’s little agenda items: fiancée, friend in Russia, general prospects of taking over. Of becoming the man in the house. And we are stunned by the virulent, withering indictment we now hear: Georg is accused of role playing, of plotting, of make-believe, of disloyalty and betrayal. There is no friend in Russia, Father says; then, a minute later, yes, there is a friend in Russia, but he is Father’s friend, not Georg’s. As for the fiancée, this cheap little trick, this pathetic effort at sexual assertion, is nipped in the bud, recast as vulgar titillation, as defiling of the dead mother, as inconsequential.

Every first-time reader wonders: what’s going on here? If what Father is saying is right, everything Georg told us is wrong, false. What, we also wonder, is Georg’s response going to be to these vicious, hallucinatory accusations? Which one is nuts? Initially, Georg treats Father’s diatribe as a sign of his disturbed senses, but very soon, all too soon, the Father’s declarations start to usurp the field, to acquire in front of our eyes a dreadful kind of authority and power, as if the words were generating their own truth as they issued from Father’s mouth. Georg, wounded in his very reality, backs up further and further, seems to be shrinking in authority, seems slated for some horrible kind of erasure. And sure enough, it comes. Father speaks: Georg, you seemed like a good child, but in reality you’ve always been a devilish creature, and now I pronounce your judgment: death by drowning. And lo and behold, it will happen. Georg accepts the death sentence—it is a genuine death sentence since each word is imbued with lethal power—and Kafka virtually lifts/sweeps/sucks him out of the story (and out of life) in the last sentence of the story: Georg is literally propelled out of the apartment, down the stairs, onto the street, up onto the bridge, and over the bridge into the water to his death, all the while intoning “Dear parents, I always loved you.” He goes under.

What is one to make of this surreal exercise? We say to ourselves: life isn’t like this, even the most despicably bullying parents do not act like this, even the most victimized child does not exit like this. No, this is not a “slice of life” notation that obeys daytime logic. But as nightmare, as fantasy, indeed as deep-seated truth about the tyrannical power of the father and the helplessness of the son, this will do quite nicely indeed. The reader’s commonsensical questions as to why this happens and what it means simply have no purchase, no traction. No explanation is offered, but the sacrificial message is clear: one does not grow up in Kafka.

Georg Bendemann’s fate is repeated in even more monstrous fashion in the famous story of Gregor Samsa, the equally docile good little son—the breadwinner this time—who has the misfortune to wake up one morning as an insect. Much can be, and has been, said about “The Metamorphosis,” but its anti-Oedipal punch is unmistakably one of the things we most remember. But note how much further Kafka has taken it: the child will not only be prevented from making his way, he will be transmogrified.

Gregor does not quite pose the threat that Georg Bendemann did—he’s not preparing to get married, and it would seem that he’s already replaced Dad as provider—but the bill comes anyway: he is to be undone.
Undone
. When we remember that the etymology of the Bildungsroman is “formation,” we understand better the morphological fantasia on show in this story: a person is to be deformed, re-formed, unformed. Poor Gregor goes through his calvary of being systematically weaned from humanity—his body is now that of a beetle, he can no longer speak (other than to us), his human habitation is transformed into a lair, and finally he dies of starvation (after being wounded by the apples thrown at him by his father)—without ever proffering a word of anger against his progenitors, just like Georg. Yet at story’s end the dead beetle will have invigorated and rejuvenated his entire family: his mother and father are brought back into circulation, turned vital, and his sister, Grete, is seen stretching her nubile body in the last line of the narrative. I can scarcely imagine a more brutal reversal to the story of growing up: instead of evolving and maturing, one is metamorphosed and put slowly to death, in order to seed change for others.

Einstein is said, perhaps apocryphally, to have read this story with astonishment that the human brain could be that complex, and I think I share the physicist’s stunned admiration for the weird processes of loss and gain, displacement, and empowerment enacted by the narrative. For somewhere in this food chain, there is one Franz Kafka, the “injured” son-writer, busily composing devious fables of son sacrifice; this Kafka lives and grows by sentencing to death his alter egos in story after story. If growing up means entering the adult world of marriage and responsibility, of entering
“dans le vrai,”
Kafka’s message seems clear: you can’t get there from here. But keep your eye on the ball: Kafka did indeed get somewhere: into world literature, into our minds, into our nightmares. He found a way to transform his sense of (permanent) injury and arrestedness and fear into an art form that is as supple, indeed muscular and vital, as that of sister Grete, whose nubile, outstretched body is the last image we see in “The Metamorphosis.” But maybe what we are supposed to remember is not the swept-away, dried-up beetle carcass of Gregor Samsa but the flowering body of the sister who lives, who has made it through from cramped nightmare to fresh air. We’d have to be blind not to see that there is indeed a passage to life encoded here. But—a sacrifice is needed for it to happen.

Ibsen and Kafka: both place children “in the penal colony” (as Kafka might have said); both devise a logic that requires children to die. But note: in both cases, they serve as sacrificial, enabling figures. “I died so that you might live.” It is a phrase—indeed, a view of life—that we have heard before. The master narrative of Christianity requires a son’s death, and the amount of sacrifice demanded in other, older traditions—remember Iphigenia and Isaac—is substantial. To propitiate the gods, someone or something must be slain. There is a disturbing coherence on show here, a machinery of power that seems to announce that the affairs of the adults—indeed, of the community—need a young corpse if they are to prosper. One wonders how far we have come, in modern times, from these infanticidal injunctions. Doesn’t war itself exact its portion of child blood? Aren’t children the first and foremost casualties in famine and disaster? Is it only because they are weak? Or is there something ghastlier still at work in this ancient sacrificial covenant? It’s a conundrum worth pondering.

If Dickens, Ibsen, and Kafka offer us the anatomy of child sacrifice—a repeating plot of done-in children, seen as offerings to propitiate either economic order or family—Faulkner has left us perhaps the most moving account of how it might feel on the inside, to
know
one is slated for going under. I return to
The Sound and the Fury
, to Quentin Compson, the boy who will commit suicide. Unlike his brother Benjy, Quentin has hyperkeen neural and intellectual equipment, is all too able to make knowledge of his injuries, and hence he evolves. After all, he got out of the South and is now at Harvard; it almost looks like an advertisement for freedom. But the exit from Yoknapatawpha is only apparent, for he is as stuck in time as his idiot brother, even more so, since time itself looms impossibly large in his consciousness as a ticking, indicting sentence: the hands of his watch, the position of shadows, the obsessive sense of leading a mummer’s life at Harvard, outwardly free but inwardly cued forever to the damning family history back home: sold pasture, dysfunctional family, frigid mother, alcoholic father, helpless brother, and above all, as the very figure of doom: Caddy. He loves her as maniacally as Benjy does but with more punitive twists, since he is expected to protect her honor (ha), whereas the nasty truth is that he himself is the virgin (ha ha), failing in every department: fearful of sex (rendered in the novel as asphyxiating honeysuckle), jealous of her lover, impotent (in all senses) in measuring up to the code he’s inherited.

Faulkner’s rendition of Quentin Compson’s final day in life is a tour de force in modernist writing: his psychic equipment resembles that of his brother, so the memory of Caddy not only is plastered everywhere but is subject at any moment, via any stimulus whatsoever, to burst into his mind and take over. Mixed up with his life in Cambridge and his exchanges with his roommate and others are whole conversations of the past still playing out in his consciousness, leaving us with the sense of a human being who is damned, who is drenched (on the inside) with lethal material. One feels that one is looking at a psychic X-ray, so that the still-upright surface figure we (and all his peers) see is horridly hollowed out and honeycombed by the noxious living residue of the past, a past that pulsates and speaks and usurps everything. Kafka’s children are executed, but we are never told why; Quentin’s descent into death is horribly illuminated from the inside, showing us how and why at every juncture.

Nowhere is this entrapment more spectacular than in the Kafkaesque episode in which Quentin makes a last pathetic bid for freedom by taking a tram outside Cambridge—as if any tram could transport him out of himself—where his stroll leads him into a bakery where he encounters the little Italian girl who spells fate. “Hello, sister,” he says when he first sees her. The child cannot speak English, carries a phallic-looking loaf of bread, becomes glued to the young man, cannot be sprung loose. Trouble. In come honeysuckle and more damning memories of sex disarray: the recall of a man who castrated himself, of himself wrestling with Caddy, all leading to upsurging chunks of narrative, vomited onto the page, relating Quentin’s fiascos with Caddy (who’ll make love with him if he wants), as well as his shameful showing with her lover Dalton Ames, when he faints while trying to fight. The version I have just presented of these materials is accurate as far as Quentin’s psychic story goes, but it is flagrantly wrong in one key respect: it’s all psychodrama; Quentin is reliving all this in his mind, while at the same time, in the public arena, going through the last stages of the little-girl imbroglio outside Cambridge, which closes with his being quasi-arrested and then, as grand finale, duking it out with the Harvard Lothario Gerald Bland and being bloodied up in the process. Quentin has disappeared into his past. Thinking he’s hitting Dalton Ames, Caddy’s lover, he is in fact being pummeled by Gerald Bland. I do not know of a fiercer way of choreographing someone’s exit from the stage, someone’s final, definitive succumbing to ghosts.

Each of us arguably jousts with ghosts on a permanent basis. Perhaps we do more of it asleep than awake. The balancing act consists of compartmentalizing, forgetting, locking up, burying, plugging one’s ears: so many different strategies for saying yes to life as it comes, to ourselves as works in progress, to freedom as conceivable, to growing up. Faulkner’s young people fail at tuning out the past. There are in real life no cameras or speakers to represent this intercourse that takes place on the inside, that is cued to a there and then that is invisible and inaudible to our fellows. Faulkner writes as no one else ever has exactly this dialogic dance of death, and Quentin Compson is its purest incarnation.
The Sound and the Fury
has the rigor and horror of a scientific experiment in which the toxins of the past are uncontainable, immutable, and therefore free to assert their absolute reign. It is a ballet of takeover. One’s family, one’s memories, one’s feelings, one’s entire past, all cohere into a gathering scene of execution.

Yet it has its severe beauty. It is worth remembering that Quentin elects to commit suicide in order to reject the “temporary” philosophy of his father, a philosophy doubtless shared by all of us who survive and subscribe to the adage that time heals. That, Quentin realizes, is what cannot be brooked: that he will heal, that he will get over Caddy, that he will go on to live. I call this beautiful inasmuch as it is a radical choice: he refuses change, refuses the forking path that marks all unfurling lives, and instead fastens onto his past as the self that cannot be let go. It is, in its way, a permanent endorsement of childhood—no matter that that childhood contained so much suffering—for that is where he found himself in his entirety, and he will not debase it/himself by moving into a future where he will be different. He commits suicide not as an escape but as a self-enactment, as a Pyrrhic victory over time. Something in this story whispers to us that growing up is a form of betrayal, an abandonment, perhaps a desecration of the child we once were. This may not resemble the ticket of complicity that Ivan Karamazov refused, but it is a ticket nonetheless, and Quentin Compson refuses it.

In my account of Grimmelshausen’s
Simplicissimus
, I focused on a subject that is all too real to us, century after century: children victimized, deranged, destroyed by war. There has been no war that has not had this impact, and we have a memorable literature—often written by the survivors themselves, grown to adulthood, delivering their testimony, often simply imagined by those who were not there—devoted to this topic. Crane’s
The Red Badge of Courage
does not lose any of its power when we learn that Crane was “only” a journalist, that he did not experience the chaos of war firsthand as a combatant. On the other hand, Hemingway encountered much of war’s carnage as an ambulance driver in World War I, and his Nick Adams has an apprenticeship with the dissolution caused by the horrors of combat—bodies rotting, forms altering, things returning to the primal ooze—that is doubtless traceable to the author’s experience.