Morning, Noon, and Night: Finding the Meaning of Life's Stages Through Books (5 page)

Or did they? It is well known that our current ideas about childhood as precious are profoundly inflected by the tenets of Romanticism, which did much to single out that special time of life as special: unspoiled, innocent, closer to nature, formative, holding in potential all that we might conceivably become or destroy. This discovery of the purity and preciousness of children is doubtless related as well to the increasing socioeconomic exploitation of them as it occurred in the Industrial Revolution of precisely that time period, as if to show that the value of young lives only becomes visible when those same lives are at risk and under attack. (Blake provokes along just these lines.) Here would be a belatedness hardwired into our thinking: it is damage that instructs.

But go further back than nineteenth-century Romanticism, and you find nothing so sweet or so value-laden. There was no mystique about children then. Their (virtually invisible) fates could be arduous indeed. As we saw,
Oedipus the King
traces such a fate, but Sophocles is not interested in child measures, only in adult measures. One is struck, in reading literature from antiquity to the nineteenth century, by the harshness and marginality of children’s lives, and it seems essential to pay heed, today, to those earlier, sterner accounts. Shakespeare and the authors of the seventeenth-century picaresque and baroque tales and eighteenth-century writers such as Abbé Prévost and Pierre Choderlos de Laclos had little interest (or belief) in angelic children, nor did they believe that the child was “father to the man,” as William Wordsworth famously put it in the following century. Even later writers who believed in the sanctity of children—the Brontë sisters, Dickens, Dostoevsky, Twain, Ibsen—surprise us with their findings, not merely about the vicious treatment children often received but also about their liabilities, vices, and blind spots. Of course, moderns such as Kafka, Faulkner, Ralph Ellison, and Toni Morrison and figures of our own moment are acutely aware of the ideological forces that not only beset children but also “compose” them, bleed into them as the work of culture, thus making us see that the consciousness of children is inflected by all manner of things beyond their ken.

In examining the suite of growing-up stories to come, many of them brutal and dark, I am concerned with illuminating the coming-of-age drama that each contains. Coming of age is of course a conceptual as well as somatic or temporal proposition, and we rightly see it as a kind of education, a movement toward understanding and maturity. What kind of education, understanding, and maturity? That is what these materials so richly display. Let me first clarify that my terms “childhood” and “old age” are not strictly age-specific. Faulkner’s Benjy (in
The Sound and the Fury
) is only a few years younger (thirty-three) than Joyce’s Leopold Bloom (in
Ulysses
), who is all of thirty-eight, yet I regard Benjy as a child and Bloom as man growing old. My reasons are simple: Benjy is constructed as an idiot who possesses no powers of ratiocination and is thus permanently infantilized, but Bloom sees himself as crucially past his prime, mindful of a more vibrant but long-gone past, obliged to find gratification via substitution. Each depiction is wise in lessons for us, regarding how life is parsed at distinct phases of our trajectory. Indeed, each is cued to a past that cannot be recaptured, but Benjy does not know this and Bloom does. One is permanently arrested on the front side of life, whereas the other reflects incessantly on his belatedness. We see (frozen) childhood and (reflective) old age in these postures.

Yet I am all too aware that growing up and growing old can—indeed, must—coexist in each of us, and that sense of tandem has a special pathos of its own as we go through life remembering and experiencing and taking stock. Finally, many of us who get to old age may find that we are still children or, worse, made into children, infantilized, either by culture or by senility. So if childhood is not a calendar truth, what is it? What follows are some of the generic features that shape and cohere the story of growing up.

William Blake titled two major poetry collections
Songs of Innocence
and
Songs of Experience
, and nothing, I believe, stamps the perceptual drama of growing up more profoundly than this crucial binary. These two radically different lenses make visible how fatefully perspective shapes what we make of our lives. One thinks, initially, that we all move from innocence to experience (with whatever happy or catastrophic results that may occur), but it is no less true that we move from experience to innocence, inasmuch as experience alone makes prior innocence visible. Yet innocence also makes visible, which is what Blake’s greatest poems show us. “Out of the Mouths of Babes” is, like its folkloric sibling, “The Emperor’s New Clothes,” a window onto human foible and distortion or masquerade. It cannot surprise us that many of the books we most love move along such axes, often signaling in both directions: the child records more than he or she can know, while the sense-making of retrospect sifts and takes measures of what has occurred. Maybe that old Sphinx who tested Oedipus knew that every life is ultimately on four feet, two feet, and three feet,
at the same time
.

If Blake’s disturbing poems exploit innocence as optic, the great German novel of the seventeenth century, Hans Jakob Christoffel von Grimmelshausen’s
Simplicissimus
, appearing more than a century before Romantic conceptions of childhood set in, is still more brutal in its use of naiveté as lens. Once again the optics are double—the book counts on us to “know” what its character does not—but this earlier text widens the stage immeasurably beyond Blake’s late-eighteenth-century London, giving us a rare sense of what “history” (bloody history) might look like at “ground zero,” prior to all abstractions. This shattering account of a simpleton’s experience of the Thirty Years’ War, written by a man who was there, reads almost like an allegory of the soul: how can it preserve its purity and integrity in a time of horror? The novel’s punch comes from its angle of vision: to render the convulsive antics of a world out of control, as perceived by an unknowing victim.

We continue our investigation of innocence as lens with Twain’s much-beloved
Huckleberry Finn
. Twain enlists the vision and voice of a school dropout, an uneducated boy with zero cultural capital, to tell the story at hand. What would slavery look like to such a person? The novel’s grandeur is to be found in the evolving moral education of Huckleberry Finn as he gradually, fitfully, registers the humanity of Jim, the runaway slave whom he is helping to free, who becomes his figurative father. Huck faces a shockingly modern dilemma, a dilemma no child escapes: can one possibly get clear of the dictates of mainstream ideology, especially if those dictates are lodged inside one’s head and go by the name of conscience?

Faulkner’s Benjy is my next and, arguably, supreme instance of innocence as vision.
The Sound and the Fury
obliges us to negotiate the jumbled perceptions of a mind that is completed unfurnished, along cognitive lines, while the emotions rise and fall and careen in roller-coaster fashion, as he responds to the sole and enduring tragedy of his life: Caddy (his sister) is not there (in reality) but is always there (in his heart). Benjy is one of the grand readerly challenges in modern literature, but this is not some intellectual puzzle; rather, his responses to life write large for us the fate of love: our need, its beauty, its loss.

I want to conclude this discussion of childhood innocence by examining one of the most endearing characters of contemporary literature, the little girl Marjane, the protagonist of Marjane Satrapi’s poignant graphic novel
Persepolis
, which depicts a female child’s coming-of-age drama in Tehran in the fateful years between the shah’s expulsion and the beginning reign of the ayatollahs. A daughter of privilege, good-hearted but politically unaware, Marjane not only registers the Iranian change of regime but also embodies the dynamic of a young girl moving toward adolescence, and this combination of forces at once personal and ideological achieves a surprising pathos and poetry in the graphic format.

In all five instances—Blake, Grimmelshausen, Twain, Faulkner, Satrapi—the eyes and voice of the unknowing child become our conduit toward knowledge, toward a shock of recognition: this, we understand, is what exploitation, war, racism, terrorism, and even love actually look like, feel like. We may have known those terms forever, but we have never envisioned the world from this angle, never put on these particular glasses, never inhabited this position. A curtain goes up, and the innocent child is our teacher.

Experience
is the name we give to what life either shows us or does to us. At the opposite pole from
innocence
, it is the tally sheet that records our actual passing through, and as such, it is in frequent warfare with the expectations of innocence. All coming-of-age stories negotiate these two poles, as if they made up a magnetic field that the young traverse. Experience almost always has a pedagogical tinge to it—“this is what life has taught me” or “this is what it
really
was like”—and its greatest virtue is its open-eyed, unflinching acknowledgment of things as they are, rather than as they might or should be. In this light, it will be seen that our greatest works of art record the gradual accumulation of experience on the part of the young, as if the task of narrative were to put them on time’s treadmill and then show what they encounter and how they alter. Here is the schooling of life itself, an education often at odds with the precepts that are drilled into us by culture.

One of the chief aims of this book is to see how that story of coming of age alters over time and space. We begin with one of the oldest narratives we have: the anonymous
Lazarillo de Tormes
of 1550. This brief picaresque tale records a young boy’s brutal entry into a hard life, and it is thus a fable about adaptation, about the school of hard knocks. We already glimpse an ethos coming into focus: success, survival, i.e., what it takes not to die. Which in turn means what is needed not to starve. The first school lesson meted out by life is: fill the belly. We speak to our children about “fulfillment,” but we are rarely literal about this:
fill full
. You won’t grow up if you have no food.

A seventeenth-century, more sophisticated installment in this genre is Francisco de Quevedo’s
The Swindler
, which tracks the adventures and misadventures of Pablos, en route to becoming a consummate con man (after painful stints with starvation and abuse). The pedagogical lessons of
Lazarillo
are expanded. Larded with puns and wordplay (as well as considerable filth), Quevedo’s book makes the monumental discovery that wit and language can be enlisted as trumps in life’s game and that you might recoup verbally what you lose materially. We are not far from a street-smart philosophy of survival via cunning, of artistry redefined as performativity, and we recognize Pablos’s maneuvers as a tool kit for hard times, as a way of getting ahead when you have neither rank nor funds.

Our next book of experience, Balzac’s masterpiece of 1835,
Père Goriot
, graphs an exemplary capitalist education via the career of the law student Rastignac as he moves from the provinces to Paris. In this novel of would-be mentors advising a student, blood ties yield to the cash nexus, and selling out is the order of the day. Can you serve God and Mammon at the same time? I see this story’s daunting challenge writ large each year as my undergraduates head off to law school or business school, trying to gauge the potential trade-offs between “success” and “conscience.”

If Balzac initiates the genre of “success” as loss of ideals, Dickens amplifies and deepens it still further in
Great Expectations
. Pip’s trajectory from blacksmith to snob, from country boy to Londoner, is a more ambitious and layered affair, cued to the Balzacian model of selling out but also concealing copious amounts of rage and resentment that have no course but to go underground or to be sprinkled into the margins of the story. Pip’s life is a muffled one, since there is so much in it that can never acknowledge the light of day, but great writing illuminates such matters by tracking libidinal energy in all its guises, as if to say that there can be a psychic cost to material success, and though the retina cannot perceive it, art brings it to visibility.

Visibility:
the novel of experience invariably sheds light on the actual—as opposed to the touted—laws that govern society and inform human consciousness. This is what Lazarillo, Pablos, Rastignac, and Pip found. It is the education and evolution that the young everywhere are destined to undergo, no matter how distant it may be from the teachings of school or Church. Recognizing the requirements of “the system” is no less central in the experiential education of my next protagonist, Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man. Ellison inverts Twain: instead of the serenely racist Huck, who comes to understand Jim’s humanity, the Invisible Man must discover how power truly operates in mid-twentieth-century America and what stratagems a man with black skin needs to employ if he is to succeed. At issue is the same epistemological question: Can you see the operative laws of the culture you inhabit? And if you do see them, what next?

In all these texts innocence is exposed as naiveté, as gullibility, while experience opens your eyes. This, one might demur, we already knew. But literature’s illumination of these matters creates surprising new vistas, brings to visibility the workings of culture in a way that few of us know. Through the perception of innocent children an eerie, unsettling world comes into focus: the young, we realize, often serve as fodder for the institutions of power, whether they be called Church, Throne, War, or Race. Belief undergirds power. Such are the gift and price of innocence.