Morning, Noon, and Night: Finding the Meaning of Life's Stages Through Books (32 page)

Like so many experiments, it must eventually fail. At story’s end Sula grows ill and is dying, and Nel visits her for some final home truths. Sula repents nothing, claims she has lived her own life, only for herself, and has no regrets. Shocked, Nel reminds her that she is now sick and alone, to which Sula replies, “Yes. But my lonely is
mine.
” Finally the big question comes: “How come you did it, Sula?” The answer: there was a space, and Jude filled it up. That’s all. Nel won’t let go: didn’t I count? I never hurt you. “I was good to you, Sula. Why don’t that matter?” Again a brazen reply: “It matters, Nel, but only to you.” A venerable Judeo-Christian ethos is biting the dust here.
An experimental life:
Who has the courage to go right through existence with this ticket? Iago did; Sula does. And anyone in her path, much less someone who thinks herself her friend, is in for trouble. But what a bonfire it is. The flames of Plum and Hannah’s joint death by fire seem pale in comparison to the incandescence that Sula radiates. Such people strew wreckage in their wake. The soft verities are no more. Volition, desire, curiosity, and a weird outright aesthetic imperative for self-making, self-sculpting, rule the day, rule the night, rule the book.

It is worth remembering the series of “wild children” we’ve seen: Goethe’s Mignon, Hawthorne’s Pearl, Faulkner’s Joe Christmas and Lena Grove, Vesaas’s Unn. Each of them is unchartable. Each goes off the map. Each exposes the artifice of rules and moral precepts. It is as if Morrison wanted to sketch out just where such wildness might go, what a truly unbounded self might do, in its quest for freedom and play. Sula stops us in our tracks. She is the
enfant sauvage
, the free, the freed spirit of this study, beholden to no one, sprung clear of the ethical gravity that most of us take to be natural. In Sula we see a new species. I don’t think it will do simply to pronounce moral judgment, because that is precisely what is at issue: the weightlessness of judgment, of moral categories. If we want to invoke our central motif of growing up, we have to say that Sula grows right out of the human community. No less than Kafka’s Gregor Samsa, she simply exits the human.

Like Vesaas, Morrison has paired her wild child with a civilized girl. Nel Wright has her own painful story, her own sensitive psychological responses to the injuries of race and sex. Her formative experience would seem to be the train trip to New Orleans to meet her grandmother, encountering en route white men’s contempt, no toilets, urine running down her leg, the fear that her mother was all custard underneath her clothes. Back home, her only recourse is to save what can be saved: “ ‘I’m me,’ she whispered. ‘Me.’ ” By which she means “I’m me. I’m not their daughter. I’m not Nel. I’m me. Me.” One senses easily enough that this novel was meant to be evenly balanced between these two black girls: one sensitive and insecure, one independent and virtually demonic. But Sula’s magnetic pull is so stupendous that Nel fades into the background. Yes, she is there for the duration, but what we remember is Sula.

And indeed that is what Nel also remembers at book’s end. In an almost Proustian passage, Nel realizes that Sula is inseparable from her childhood, from herself: “ ‘We was girls together,’ she said as though explaining something. ‘O Lord, Sula,’ she cried, ‘girl, girl, girlgirlgirl.’ ” We are to understand that the wild, destructive freedom that Sula lived and died is somehow a core truth of growing up itself, of perilous human promise, of a passionate self that precedes all rules and codes. “Girlgirlgirl” tells us something about essences. “We was girls together.” Perhaps the most enduring feature of Morrison’s novel is the hint that Sula and Nel are indivisible. At the deathbed scene, Nel preened about her own moral goodness, only to hear Sula ask, “How you know?” Nel is confused. “Know what?” Sula answers, “About who was good. How you know it was you? … I mean maybe it wasn’t you. Maybe it was me.” This secret sharing, this blurring of lines—reminiscent of Vesaas’s double face in the mirror—is beautifully reflected toward the novel’s close when Nel visits the old, senile Eva Peace, who insists that she, Nel, was the one who killed that little boy. Nel remonstrates, but Eva perseveres: “You. Sula. What’s the difference? You was there. You watched, didn’t you?” And later, as Nel is leaving: “Just alike. Both of you. Never was no difference between you. Want some oranges? It’s better for you than chop suey. Sula? I got oranges.”

What is one to make of this haunting sequence? Sula’s spirit seems to inhabit Nel, just as the dead Unn can never be forgotten by the living Siss. Maybe it goes further still: the wild child stands for a secret truth in all of us, a free spirit that cannot be acculturated, cannot grow up, yet cannot quite be forgotten or discarded or fully destroyed. Literature is home to such creatures, and we recover in them, through reading, something primordial about ourselves, a kind of primitive self hidden deep inside, influencing nothing (thank God) yet free. Eva’s parting words about oranges also signal the sweet, if unhinging, freedom of this book, its willingness to mock logic, its love affair with herons and ballooning knickers and fat grasshoppers, its serene certainty that the story of childhood takes you off the map, brings you closer to that faraway place where lemon trees blossom and blood oranges glow that Mignon sang of. The wild child is the emancipated, doubtless doomed creature that all of us who live choose not to be, and we can do so only by letting this creature perish so that we do not. Such stories show us that this unreformable, unsurvivable creature still lives. Literature charts places to go and places to avoid going as it maps out possible life trajectories that sometimes become anthems about death. One reads such tales with a special gratitude that they were imagined and told with such purity and force and with equal gratitude that one—or one’s children—did not end up there.

Lazarillo finishes as town crier, Pablos lands in America, Des Grieux returns to France, Jane Eyre marries Rochester, Huck lights out for the Territory, Lena Grove exits with baby and “father,” Marjane leaves Tehran, Artie writes his father’s story, Oskar Schell lives through his father’s death. Perhaps all of them, the living, speak, as Ellison’s Invisible Man said, on the lower frequencies
for us
. Even when damaged, most young people grow up. Sometimes the mere feat of not dying, as in the case of Vladek in
Maus
, is a heroic victory. But one wants, deserves to see more than this. What would a success story look like? Given the amount of dark material that has been under discussion, what are the credible criteria for successful growing up?

To answer this question, I want to close this portion of my book by looking at two remarkable narratives: Faulkner’s
Go Down, Moses
and Walker’s
The Color Purple
. In my view neither of them is dewy-eyed, for both record struggle and enduring injury on all levels: personal, regional, national, international. Each of these books moves through virtually all of the rubrics we have seen up to now: the voyage from innocence to experience, the significance of love and of abuse, the threats of familial and cultural sacrifice. Each depicts, as well, the systemic forces of racial and gender prejudice, not to say warfare. Yet these two narratives also portray growth, and they are both profoundly inscribed in a project of education. It is that education that most engages me at this juncture: what have these tested young people learned? It will be seen that language and history loom surprisingly large in both of these accounts. Language appears, albeit in radically different ways, as the key enabling resource for maturation and agency, as the indispensable tool for seeing and making one’s way. And history is the inevitable mesh in which the young—of every culture and every age—are caught; history—one’s own and one’s society’s—is what must be understood if change and emancipation are to be possible. These principles may sound self-evident when posited as abstract notions, but in real life they are murky, difficult, and often bloody.

Go Down, Moses
is late Faulkner (1942), autumnal in many ways: as a grand pronouncement about the South, about its tragic history as God’s curse, this rich and ambitious mix of black-and-white stories often has a prophetic, oracular ring to it, bearing witness to the depredations of race and also those of property, yielding a gathering indictment of ownership (of people, of land) as the moral failing of an entire culture. Two central figures dominate this collection of stories: the white Ike McCaslin, whose coming of age as hunter and spiritual citizen of the South is narrated with great pathos, and his counterpart, the wily, humorous black sharecropper Lucas Beauchamp, who stems from the same McCaslin blood as Ike but via the old patriarch Carothers McCaslin’s fornications with his black women slaves. Each of these figures has a story. Ike will be nobly initiated into the rituals and sins of the South; Lucas will go through his splendid but comic antics revolving around hidden stills, moonshine, and buried treasure. Lucas has some searing memories about the racial “curse” besetting his family, but in Faulkner’s South he fundamentally has no future to grow into. But Ike does have a future; he grows into his legacy, and that is the trajectory I want to sketch in this final salute to Faulkner.

With great delicacy and miraculously limpid prose, Faulkner limns the portrait of the child Ike learning from his Native American mentor, Sam Fathers, both the skills and the ethos of hunting. Every year a group of Mississippi men (women have no place here) gather for a ritual weeklong immersion in the Wilderness, in pursuit of the great totemic animal, Old Ben the bear. Carrying ancient echoes of hunter-gatherer tribes, these male rites, lubricated by much swapping of tales and considerable whiskey, adumbrate an old code of honor and reverence for life, for the hunter must both love and be worthy of “the life he spills.” Ike’s entire life is cued to the eventual moment when he will be initated into this group as a hunter himself, worthy to take his part and play his role. We see the boy go through his paces, from the killing of one buck to the sighting of another, larger and mythic in character, on to the supreme gambit: the hunt for Old Ben. The old rites live: the child is marked by Sam with the blood of the buck, and the ancient words “Oleh, Grandfather” are spoken by the side of the slain beast, signifying at once the boy’s increasing prowess and humility, his gradual entry into the great family.

This apprenticeship is brought to its conclusion in some of the most spellbinding pages Faulkner ever wrote, depicting Ike’s initiation into the Wilderness as a spiritual pilgrimage of sorts, entailing a severe self-baring—exposure to the point of erasure—an entry of the soul, unprotected, into nature’s heart. Ike has to divest himself of all the accoutrements of civilization, all the tools of mastery and orientation—gun, watch, compass—if he is to take his place as an equal in this spiritual arena, if he is to earn his vision and encounter with the bear. With a rare mix of naturalness and cunning, Faulkner writes this as an exercise in decipherment, in reading tracks. Able, even at a distance, to discern Ben’s special markings from those of other beasts, Ike, having discarded the implements of culture, now enters that other world—sylvan, not human—following a very pure, primitive logic of crossing the threshold to adulthood. The light rain is falling, and thus the prints are at the very edge of visibility, legibility:

There is something mesmerizing in this sequence of tracks moving into and out of visibility, holding the key, it would seem, not only to the hunt but also to the very positioning of the human subject finding or losing his way, going through his rites of passage. Please note: the end stage of this process of maturation is not so much power as vision. Ike does not kill the bear, he
sees
the bear. We have here a virtual allegory of growing up. The goal of education is at once conceptual and visionary: it is an affair of deciphering prints, so as to arrive at what the prints signify. We begin now to realize that this is also an allegory of reading, now seen as the basic modus operandi of growing up. And I think we are meant to ponder the paradox in play here: the flesh-and-blood bear produces tracks in real life, yet the hunter’s skill and devotion reverse this procedure, depending on the tracks to produce the bear.
The tracks produce the bear
. Is that not what reading is about? We are exiled into a world of markers, of traces, and it is for us to transform them into presence. In this luminous passage, the tracks give birth to the reality behind them; reading is commensurate with meaning. To use Derrida’s famous term,
différance—
the fateful gap between sign and meaning, representation and reality—is overcome.

Perhaps all this sounds abstruse. Faulkner is a novelist, not a linguist or a philosopher. Yet
Go Down, Moses
is his richest meditation on reading as the index of growing up. Benjy, Quentin, and Joe Christmas had no such options. They translated nothing, turned nothing into lesson, found no salvation through awareness. Reading is culture’s most beautiful luxury item. We are meant to realize just how pervasive and profound the motif of tracking is in this text; and once we see this, we are ready to take the next step: tracking means reading. Hence the hunt for Old Ben is sandwiched in among other hunts in this rich collection of stories: hunts for escaped slaves, runaway wives, or even dead loved ones. Faulkner has imbued the motif of tracking with powerful, indeed epochal, echoes, evoking the racial sins and the gender injustices of the South. We have the makings here of a “thick” ideological discourse, in which one narrative strain turns out to be linked and keyed to another, figuring it also for us at some level, yielding a prismatic fiction. Thus it is that Ike McCaslin’s growing up, his education as a hunter, is inseparable from his education as a reader. He must learn to read the South.