Morning, Noon, and Night: Finding the Meaning of Life's Stages Through Books (3 page)

Nor does literature prescribe. No writer worth reading is likely to tell us: here is the best way to grow up, to grow old. Oedipus’s life entailed considerable wreckage, but there is no villain, no false step or bad move to point to. Huck Finn ends up “lighting out for the Territory”: has he succeeded, has he failed? King Lear is close to annihilated and is plenty arrogant to boot, but we can scarcely look in, point out his errors, and redirect him. Literature records experience—not wisdom or stupidity—and it is for us to gauge what to make of it, what to learn from it. These works of art have no lesson plan, no sermon, nothing remotely resembling a “how-to” (or “how-not-to”) payload. Hence, I will not be judgmental in the pages that follow, even though I will be on the lookout for what they might teach us, how they might bear on our own lives. For growing up and growing old do have a generic character, and even the most distant tales shed light on our own doings.

Much changes throughout history, but much remains the same. The story of growing up is always a story of innocence leading to experience, of the acquisition of knowledge (of oneself, of one’s world). It is always a story about how to achieve either vision or power, how to enter or exit society, how to take or make one’s place on the stage. It is always a story of education, frequently contrasting prior beliefs with hard facts, and it is therefore invariably far-reaching, for its trials shed light on the values (open or hidden) of a culture. And it is ultimately cued to survival: of the body but also of the heart. Hence growing-up stories are about the cost of living, as the young make their way.

The story of growing old also possesses generic features throughout history. The forward drive of the young—the propulsion that fuels their trajectory—undergoes a sea change, since in old age the “territory ahead” is death. Hence, first and foremost would be the challenge to the old of the entropic force of time: one becomes weaker, one must learn to relinquish power (which one has spent a lifetime amassing). The ramifications of this drama at once natural and cultural are immense. What happens to authority? If eros goes, as it eventually must, what follows? Does love age? What have the old built, and will it remain? Are there lessons to be learned? To be taught? Is there ultimately a final harvest? Here too the great writers have much to show us. I repeat: each of us lives once as “ourself”; through art we are repeatedly invited to live as “other.”

In the discussions to come, I want to capture that fuller drama recorded by art, making it possible for us to examine the contours of fictional lives, to gauge how characters in books go through their paces, are shaped or altered by events, become who they are, cease to be who they were. In starting out, let us look again at the life and death of Oedipus, the most spectacularly benighted figure of Western culture, the man whose grasp of his plenary form was nil from morning to noon and unbearable from noon to night. Remember the ingredients of growing up and growing old: innocence, experience, entropy, harvest; these are the ingredients of Sophocles’ work, but horribly intertwined. Cast-out infant becomes king. King is cast out again. Undone by exile and age, cursed old man nonetheless becomes savior. This story of the man who confronted the Sphinx and answered its riddle limns unforgettably for us, afresh, the contours of the human trajectory through time.

Sophocles’
Oedipus the King
scarcely seems to most of us a work about childhood. It is usually read as a disquisition on tragedy, knowledge, fate, irony, you name it. Yet in its account of a young man finding his place in the world, coming to realize the elusiveness of truth and the limits of power, it also does something that is monumental and scandalous: it speaks out loud for Western culture, as Freud helped us see, the relation between father and son as homicidal (not to mention what happens between mother and son; about daughters it says little). Oedipus exits the stage at play’s end, blind, dependent on his two daughters, but his trek is not over. If we bring the Greek playwright’s later
Oedipus at Colonus
into our discussion as well, so as to perceive a single master narrative, we can see that Sophocles has, cumulatively speaking, sketched the trajectory of human life: from conception and abandonment on to the threshhold of parricide and incest, thence to blindness and curse and exile and miserable old age, but closing with a radiant, socially redemptive death. Here is the fuller arc that can be said to stamp the concerns and analyses of my book: growing up and growing old as the two riddling challenges meted out to us by time.

If we are to understand Oedipus’s childhood as echoing, we must remember that this man who limps off the stage at the end of
Oedipus the King
has been limping for a long time prior to that, given that he was cast out as an infant, with pins put into his ankles. It is not easy to stomach the brutality of this story: a child sentenced to death because of a curse, a mother having her infant torn from her, a shepherd and a messenger swapping this baby around, so that, perchance, it lives rather than dies. It’s a harsh beginning. Can knowledge be made of this? Whereas many of the books we will study go “inside” a child’s life, Sophocles is content to give us only its terrible outline, so as to put into place the
machine infernale
that will twist this life into a horrid pattern. Of a child’s consciousness, there is none; Greek tragedy has little interest in the formation of children. But how not to imagine injury here? We certainly register in Jocasta’s laments how much damage oracles inflict on mothers. She too is crushed by the machinery: thinking she has experienced the worst—having her infant taken—she is of course destined for still more horror when she learns the child did not die but lived on to become her husband. One is entitled to feel that Sophocles chose perhaps the wrong tragic story to tell here, that Jocasta’s fate is more drenched in sorrow than anyone else’s. But his sights were on that little boy who survived and grew up to be a man, and then an old man.

To be sure, we never see young Oedipus as such, and from what we know of his story, he was a loving, respectful son who did everything in his earthly power to avoid the parricidal/incest curse attached to him: he fled Corinth and his adoptive parents, thinking that he was thus protecting the man and woman he had every reason to think were his father and mother, all the while running full tilt toward that dreadful crossroads where he struck down a man in anger, having no inkling that he was Laius. Sophocles achieves a mix of tragic irony and cinematic immediacy in Oedipus’s account of this faraway moment when he responded to the Oracle’s terrible prophecy:

This sequence makes my heart beat and my skin crawl each time I read it, so magnificent and overdetermined and echoing are its words and images. Running away from fate turns out to be running toward fate. (Good-bye, human volition, human orientation, sweet belief in knowing where you’re going.) And then comes the breathless present-tense narration of the encounter itself (yes, the past is present tense, that’s the meaning of the story), as it moves inexorably into focus, like an unfurling zoom shot: herald, colts, wagon, and then … a man, a man determined to force Oedipus off the road, an old man watching from his higher position in the wagon as his wheels are about to crush Oedipus, an old man assuming his fuller form as he brings down his prod and strikes. One feels that this is the very machinery of destiny: the death battle between old and young, father and son. And so the son commits the species-defining act of libido, as Freud saw it: he slays his father. Again one is stunned by the eloquence: “Short work,” Oedipus claims, little knowing that this work will be immortal, framing not only his own entire temporal existence but that of all others to come; “every mother’s son,” the young killer exults, “I killed them all”: how can we fail to see what is damning here, that the fruits of this act will be for Oedipus the son to enter his own mother’s bed, something Freud saw as the desire of “every mother’s son”?

Yet the ironies are for us, not for Oedipus. Even at play’s end, his knowledge would seem to be about men’s limits and gods’ powers. At no point does he ponder the relationship between father and son or mother and son, as such. He is crushed by his transgressions, but he can make no sense of them, other than as a curse. They have for him no logic. True enough, Jocasta tells him it is not unusual for men to dream of sharing their mother’s beds, but she says nothing to him about murder or parricide. It took Freud, in
The Interpretation of Dreams
, to theorize these matters: “It is the fate of all of us, perhaps, to direct our first sexual impulse towards our mother and our first hatred and/or first murderous wish against our father.” Yet the image of a wagon with an old man bearing down on a young one, seeking to remove him from the road, from life, has a residual power that gives pause, as if to ask: Who will stay on the road? Who will move forward? Who will give way? We cannot avoid seeing a generic conflict here about the prerogatives and rights of the young versus the old, and the setting makes it amply clear that only one of them can maintain his position, can occupy the road. In this regard, final things are on show: the young must burst through and conquer, the old must yield and abandon the road. There must be blood. And perhaps motivation is irrelevant: whether the son thinks himself respectful and pious or desires murder and power counts somehow less than the bare facts themselves: yielding or fighting, dying or killing, as the grim logical outcome of nature’s station drama: growing up versus growing old, coming into strength versus moving out of strength. All living creatures are primed for this showdown.

And perhaps all young people are doomed to a benightedness resembling that of Oedipus when it comes to the forces and vectors that rule over life—maybe not to the Sophoclean tune of parricide and incest, but condemned to the murk nonetheless. We the readers can make this dark fable luminous, can see in it the dreadful work of prophecy and fate, can savor its fierce ironies and shapely horrors. We are gifted with the vision of Tiresias. But no child is born with such a gift.
Agency
is what Oedipus—the man who brilliantly bested the Sphinx, the man who personified the culture of intellectual daring in Periclean Athens—never has, never will have. Here is one of the legacies of the play: the imperative of the young to see clear, to understand the workings of their world. Sophocles is not soothing on this score: yes, Oedipus fully assumes his fate, his identity, at the play’s bloody end, but as for seeing clear, it is not to be done. Reason—insatiable reason, blind reason—is his sole and grand trump as he moves unstoppably, rashly (as ever) toward the damning light, but truth is doomed to be after the fact, to be ever belated and retrospective.

It has often been argued that the chief values of Western culture are adumbrated in the drive to light that fuels the Oedipus story. Nietzsche saw in this brash young man a culture hero who invaded the secrets of Nature, of the gods. Surely the most admirable feature of the play is the king’s own relentless truth seeking. Our modern era prides itself on its Enlightenment legacy of rationality and scientific progress, but no one in the twenty-first century can avoid feeling that this legacy is in horrible trouble. That old Delphic oracle still wields considerable lethal power, it seems to me, even though we tirelessly speak of liberty and agency. Even the new genetic knowledge that we are on the cusp of possessing about the “prophecy” of our bodies—none of this signals especially good things about freedom or seeing clear. Already our diagnostic prowess has outrun our ability to cure. As John Barth wrote, “The wisdom to recognize and halt follows the know-how to pollute past rescue. The treaty’s signed, but the cancer ticks in your bones. Until I’d murdered my father and fornicated my mother I wasn’t wise enough to see I was Oedipus.” Sophocles’ play is about sweet reason being a latecomer, about our understanding being always behind the curve, being the plaything of forces beyond our ken. “Be what you want to be! Be fulfilled!” we Americans like to tell our children. Oedipus’s fate suggests otherwise. You do not and cannot know who you are, where you are going, or what you have wrought. This is not a happy formula for growing up.

I give Oedipus’s story pride of place in this book in order to emphasize the mystery and benightedness that accompany growing up. Frequently I tease my students by urging them to look critically at the résumés they construct with such teleological fervor: From conception on, including my education and each position I’ve had, life has destined me for … (fill in the blank indicating the job applied for). Whereas, I suggest, if you actually remember the true checkered course of your life, you will doubtless find that the youngster at ten, the student at fifteen, the undergraduate at twenty, the professional at thirty, probably didn’t have a clue as to what was coming, as to what was being built. Yes, retrospective logic is awfully good at cramming causality and purpose into one’s life, thereby transforming the haphazard into pattern. No harm done. But it is tonic to recognize the dosage of deceit in it all. True enough, most of us are unlikely to have the monumental bad luck that Oedipus had. But all of us share in his blindness. He made the moves he thought best—running from his mother and father after learning of the curse, striking the tyrannical old man at the crossroads who wanted to run him down, accepting the crown and the bed of the queen as his rightful due after answering the Riddle of the Sphinx—and he got all of them catastrophically wrong.