Morning, Noon, and Night: Finding the Meaning of Life's Stages Through Books (12 page)

Experience lessons: that is the inescapable law of life, the secret of both survival and success. Experience is the crucial education that very frequently dwarfs the formal schooling we receive. In so doing, in displaying how different the world actually is, in contrast to the world one either expected or fantasized, texts about experience possess a powerful economy: they show the incompatibility between our notions and our lived life. Can we be surprised that Dickens called his great novel of growing up
Great Expectations
or that Balzac’s supreme opus in this vein is titled
Illusions perdues
? There is something profoundly utilitarian about such art, for it goes about the principal business of our species: finding what will do, discarding what will not, figuring out how to live.

The following studies interrogate works of art from the sixteenth century to our own moment, yielding a rich historical curve, obliging us to see just how variously experience can be defined, how arduous the search for both truth and the “right path” can be. Each of these novels is larded with collisions as the hard world breaks into the young, smashing their assumptions, delivering its educational payload. I who teach at a university marvel at the sheer pedagogical verve of these narratives, how brilliantly they shine their beam of light on the adapting human response—for good, for evil—to circumstance. When one considers the institutions in place for teaching the young how to live—family, school, Church, state—it is surprising to me that “art” never shows up in the equation. But art and literature are all too often misconstrued as frills, as marginal to the nitty-gritty basics that must be taught; yet such a view has it backward. Here is perhaps the most pragmatic reason we consult literature: as a way of adding to our tool kit, as that special mirror that shows us both how others have come through and how we might learn from them.

How apt it is that the sixteenth-century anonymous
Lazarillo de Tormes
—often credited as being the first true narrative in Western literature because it renders the consciousness of an “I” responding to the experiences that beset it—tells the story of a hungry beggar child making his way through the school of hard knocks, learning from adversity, becoming a person. At story’s end, the child is Lázaro, an established figure, a town crier, married to a woman who is the archpriest’s “maid” (with all that implies) and sure at last of solid meals every day. It was not always so.

The
“fortunas y adversidades”
of Lazarillo tell a double story, focusing on the material poverty and brutal conditions that assault the child but adumbrating an even more severe fable about the extinction of spirit and inwardness in the barter world of sixteenth-century Spain. Lazarillo becomes Lázaro through a rigorous education: he learns that fulfillment is a literal concept—filling the belly full—but its figurative dimensions come at too high a price and must disappear from the equation. Here is a freighted story, a classic drama of selling out, written centuries before Balzac and Dickens came to the theme, and it serves as a bitter lesson about the realities of survival, about what life teaches us.

The most persistent and frightening note of this early fiction is its fierce rendition of hunger as the primary sensation and need of life. A glance at the animal world of creatures clamoring for sustenance—baby birds in their nest with beaks open, desperate; babies of all species who will die unless fed—confirms this unyielding material view of life’s requirements. Lazarillo’s story obeys similar laws, but there is no mother bird to supply him with his wants: he must use his wits if he is to eat. We are treated to a number of hallucinatory scenes where the pleasures of food and drink are cut with violence and cruelty. An early notation involves the child sneaking wine from his first master, the blind man: face turned to the sky, eyes closed, savoring the precious liquid, Lazarillo is struck brutally by his master, who takes the jug and smashes it against the boy’s face with all his strength. This passage is written in apocalyptic terms—“So it seemed like the sky and everything in it had really fallen down on top of me”—and the reference seems just: gratification makes you vulnerable, the hard world can fall on you, destroy you. At another juncture the blind man asks the boy to put his ear next to the statue of a bull, to hear what is inside, but when the child obeys, the adult doubles up his fist and knocks the boy’s head into the stone statue with all his might. It’s the same lesson: the world is a hard surface; going “inside” is risky business. “Wake up!” the boy says to himself. To what? we wonder.

The most surreal moment of this sometimes grisly tale comes when Lazarillo has stolen and wolfed down some black sausage; the blind man suspects as much, grabs the child tight, opens the boy’s mouth, and inserts his own nose inside, so as to smell the sausage that lurks down below. It’s a dicey move, it turns out. The pointy nose of the master hits the boy in the throat, and the visceral response comes at once: “before the blind man could take his beak out of my mouth, my stomach got so upset that it hit his nose with what I had stolen. So his nose and the black, half-chewed sausage both left my mouth at the same time.” What is one to make of this savage warfare, traffic going into and out of the body? It conveys to us what a world of pure somatic hunger might look like: corporeal passageways with traffic in both directions. There is something tonic as well as chilling about the primitive conflicts and needs depicted in this story: later fictions will be psychologically subtle, will ponder a great deal about that other (more modern) meaning of fulfillment, about how to live right, how to be happy in love or career, but this lean tale has no truck with such frills. Instead, it sticks with the basics: how to eat and drink enough to survive.

As mentioned, Lazarillo succeeds; he survives to tell the story. What is fascinating about the narrative, however, is that its protagonist fudges more and more as he grows older and finds his place. The brutal episodes of hunger and punishment are a lead-in to more sophisticated accounts of subsequent masters, with a dosage of satirical observation about the workings of the world. But the Lázaro who emerges as town crier has lost all authenticity as speaker, covers up the dirty bargains he has had to make with experience. Such a transformation, never acknowledged but shimmering on the page, tells us, as nothing else could, what the price of growing up might be: the loss of one’s integrity, one’s commitment to truth, one’s ability to face the truth. There is a grim but coherent social parable on show here: let circumstances be punitive enough and the soul goes out of business, is tossed out because it is no longer affordable or bearable.

Lazarillo is the child hero of hunger. There is no anguish or breast-beating in this slim piece from more than four centuries ago. We cannot even see in him anything that might go by the name of “innocence.” He brings no doctrines, no expectations with him. Yet his alteration by life is eloquent.
He adapts
. He has seen what must be done to get by, and he does it. His hunger will live on in literature: it will become a richer and more figurative affair—no more pointy noses and black sausages—encompassing the erotic needs of some, the emotional needs of others, the economic and political designs of still others. The young are born hungry. What must they do or pay to satisfy their needs?

We know that
Lazarillo
begat an entire genre of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century fiction called the
picaresque
, devoted to the lives of rascals, down-and-outers, often children at the margins of society surviving through their wits, often becoming tricksters or con men. An argument can be made that this tradition remains vital throughout the history of the novel: we see it in such well-known later books as Dickens’s
Oliver Twist
, Twain’s
Huckleberry Finn
, Mann’s
Confessions of Felix Krull, Confidence Man
, Bellow’s
The Adventures of Augie March
, Ellison’s
Invisible Man
, Grass’s
The Tin Drum
. We would be well served to recover some of this fare, because its pedagogical verve and acuity, its fascination with “getting by” (against harsh odds), are essential to the story of growing up, no matter when or where.

Francisco de Quevedo is largely known as a poet, yet his single venture into the picaresque,
Historia de la vida del Buscón
(
The Swindler
), published in the 1620s but written earlier, is an exemplary tale of education—a young boy’s development into con man and trickster—like
Lazarillo
, yet with a playfulness and verbal brio that we identify with Shakespeare and Donne. The book insists on the dichotomy of a mean and tawdry world on the one hand (the
pícaro
’s setting), and the magisterial transformations afforded by language and wit on the other. I call this text modern because it is wise about “street smarts,” about the multiple avenues of disguise and invention open to someone with sufficient ingenuity and chutzpah. One might not go far afield in referencing today’s rap culture; it too is a heady verbal thing, concerned with getting by through performance.

Quevedo’s protagonist, Pablos, is subject to miseries beyond even those experienced by Lazarillo, and they invariably highlight the vulnerability and shamefulness of the body: he is spat on, peed on, and shat on. Perhaps the book’s most poignant scene comes when the boy, crouched under his covers, fearing that the older schoolboys wish him harm, falls asleep and dreams of his family but wakes up to see brutal whippings being carried out. He hides under the bed, but while he is there, “the bastard who slept next to me got into my bed, crapped in it and covered the mess up.” Pablos returns to his bed, twists and turns in his sleep, and wakes up “smothered in shit.” It is essential to see the punitive dimension of these indignities: in bed, dreaming of kin, you are most vulnerable, and that is when you will be initiated into the regime of shit. For it is an initiation and a regime, depicting the final stage of both hunger and ingestion, depicting a caricatural model of human creativity, input and output. At some level this text seems to be asking: do we ever get past shit? Excrement is the base currency of the bare, forked creature’s life. The body’s frailties loom large in this text: we hear of starvation, diarrhea, farting, hernias, sodomy, and finally cannibalism. Flesh is heir to so many disasters in
The Swindler
that many readers find it too filthy to enjoy.

Yet it is a text for our time. Lazarillo learned duplicity. Pablos goes much further: he sees that poverty and stinking flesh can be offset by wit, language, and art. For purposes of education, this constitutes a quantum leap, from the animal to the human. Hence the novel is stamped by a delirious kind of aesthetic vision, so a scene of starvation becomes a threshold for verbal fiat: “Then our masters ate an infinite meal, by which I mean it had no beginning and no end.” One needs to consider the peculiar equilibrium of that phrase, the manner in which the savvy wordplay counterbalances the needs of the gut. Might there be a real dialectic here? Pablos encounters a series of fascinating lunatics: one would capture Ostend by sucking up the sea with sponges; another claims to be a swordsman but mouths only complex geometric formulas; another tries to pass a plague scar for a military wound but then finds that his “papers” are construed as toilet paper. All of these instances involve shape shifting, implying that the hard world might be alterable, that “things” might yield to “words.”

The prizewinner is one Magazo: “he’d been a soldier, in a play, and fought the Moors, in a dance. When he spoke to men who had been in Flanders he said he’d been in China, and he told the China veterans he’d been in Flanders.… He was always going on about Turks, galleons and captains, but he got it all from a few songs about them. He didn’t know a single thing about the sea; the only naval thing he knew was navel oranges.” One is humbled, I think, by the transposition of realms parading in this spoof, as if verbal clout were enough to replace actual doing. Note the lovely ongoing tit for tat: to be a soldier/in a play; to fight the Moors/in a dance; naval ships/navel oranges. An entire ballet is on show here, dishing up for us the supreme trump of language as reality making. To dismiss this performance as a mere lie is to close one’s eyes to the metamorphic power on display. All writers, all speakers, play this game. From eloquence to outright lying, words are our weapons. Quevedo is shining his light on the oldest sleight of hand in history, and he has the genius to posit this kind of skill as a tool kit for a child.

We tend to think of the “saving virtues of language” as a late-stage acquisition, the sort of thing someone well advanced into life might finally come to enjoy in some bittersweet fashion, as compensation for losses; but Quevedo makes us consider childhood itself, especially disadvantaged childhood, as a kind of linguistic playground, a site where verbal prowess might stand in for material deficits. Pablos encounters a world of wordsmen, and we realize that this is an education in itself, for he is discovering how peculiarly egalitarian life just might be, how you might, if you were clever enough, pass off the word for the thing. With this in mind, consider the games children play, the extraordinary power granted to virtuality in children’s lives, as they point fingers and go “Pow!” or make salubrious signs and piqued expressions. Children are not outfitted (yet) with muscles or money or weapons, so they make do with simulacra, facsimiles, representations; they become experts at displacement and magic; they believe in the living extensions of the words that leave their mouths. They reimagine power. To use a figure that is at the heart of this story, they reclothe themselves in garments of their own making.

On this front,
The Swindler
is wildly vestimentiary, paying extravagant attention to clothes and uniforms and medals and saddles and horses, all implements of station. We know that the Spanish notion of
quedar bien
(“looking right”) governs much of the postures and impostures of these denizens, but in Quevedo’s hands, the artisanal rises to something more dizzying and empowered. At one point, the boy Pablos joins up with a group of “gentlemen thieves” who are masters of make-believe, covering their bare asses with cloaks, covering holes in their clothes with capes, meticulously picking their teeth in public even though they’ve eaten nothing. Pablos tries his own hand at disguise: donning elegant chothes, giving himself a pretentious name, going through the various paces that denote the behavior of a gentleman (mounting an “available” horse and pretending to your aristocratic acquaintances that it is yours, walking behind servants in the street so as to pretend they are your own pages). With a sure hand, Quevedo brings his episodic plot home by having Pablos give his greatest performance in counterfeit and disguise in front of no less than Don Diego, the true aristocrat whom he served as a child. Here is the book’s high noon: Will Don Diego recognize Pablos, or will the swindler’s art carry the day? Can wit trump reality?