Morning, Noon, and Night: Finding the Meaning of Life's Stages Through Books (13 page)

Strictly speaking, the comic logic of exposure seems to win out. Pablos is recognized and is severely punished: he is beaten up and slashed from ear to ear, his face cut in half. One does not escape one’s past, Quevedo appears to be saying. Make-believe can go only so far. Here would be the confirmation of traditional values, of a preexisting reality base that no amount of tricks will alter. Except that the story does not end there. Your face is cut in half? Well, sew it back together. Skin is not so different from cloth. And then up again, and into the fray. Pablos continues his career, leaves Spain for the New World (after a few more criminal deeds, including murder), and that is where Quevedo leaves him.

What does this tale tell us about growing up in the twenty-first century? Much, in my opinion, that Francisco de Quevedo could have neither seen nor intended but that art nonetheless makes visible. Wit—not the wit of the court, but that of the street—turns out to be a genuine resource, an incomparable tool of persuasion and success. Wit has clear siblings in this seventeenth-century text: lying, disguise, conning, creating one’s own persona. It’s not pretty, I agree. But after all, does truth really have much of a track record, when it comes to gauging how we make our way in the world? (I write these words at a time of Ponzi schemes and credit default swaps, at a time when blogospheres house truths and Wikipedia vouches for them.)
The Swindler
is one of our great tales about performativity as the force that generates success. Pablos has no cultural capital to begin with and must figure out what his weapons are to be if the world is to do his bidding. Wit is the trump card that people without trumps nonetheless may possess. The people we encounter in life do not have X-ray vision; if we are sufficiently good at producing ourselves, we are likely to carry the day. Who knows—indeed, who cares—what you are
really
like? It has been argued that Pablos actually has an inferiority complex, that he is ashamed of his parentage, his origins. But such reasoning goes in the wrong direction, backward toward origin rather than forward toward performance, and it thereby misses the vitality, gaiety, and joy—and wisdom—of this prancing tale about a poor boy’s exploits.

And it misses perhaps what counts most for our purposes: the career of the
pícaro
, Pablos, is a parable about education, about learning what you need in order to get ahead. In this instance, there is nothing very distinguished or elevated in sight: no diploma, no professional horizons, and absolutely no implantation of sonorous moral principles that would earn him our respect or a ticket to the afterlife. On the contrary, Pablos has done graduate work in the field of self-production and deceit. He has realized that the world is a gullible place, that folks without credentials still have the option of manufacturing their credentials. (In our age of computerized identity theft, he looks nostalgically like the genuine article, an artisan/artist of identity snatching rather than a mere technician.) What I have called
wit
has little to do with clever words or metaphysical conceits but denotes instead a willingness to reshape both self and events to carry the day.

That is what amazes: that both self and events are subject to reshaping, repackaging. One does not learn these things in any school, but life teaches them nonetheless. Pablos sees, early on, the immense cleavage between high-sounding principles and the actual talents needed to get by, to achieve mastery. His hunger is very different from that of Lazarillo: one feels that his greatest joy comes in exploiting the marvelous resources of his intellectual and artistic equipment. Quevedo’s pungent narrative deserves a modern audience. The tale measures, without ever saying much about it, the abyss between professed ideals and the actual carnival in front of our eyes. It is in this sense that it is luminous as a parable of education, because it calls the great bluff that has ever characterized our schools: what they teach has little to do with reality; what you need for success is something else altogether; what you actually encounter in life has nothing to do with adages and pieties. Some of our great rites-of-passage stories of the nineteenth century will pick up where the picaresque left off, adding more depth and pathos to this cynical wisdom, but few will possess the sheer verbal exuberance of Quevedo’s romp.

Balzac is the giant who presides over much of nineteenth-century fiction, yet he seems little read today, despite the fact that his legacy shines in the work of writers as different as Tom Wolfe and Don DeLillo.
Père Goriot
, his early masterpiece of 1835, has a place of pride in this study of growing up and growing old, because it presents an unforgettable picture of both sides of the equation: the young man from the country, Rastignac, comes to Paris to study law but receives a radically new education; and the old Goriot, Balzac’s candidate for King Lear, being bled dry by his two ambitious daughters, ranks among our most compelling images of fathers run amok, of the horrible finishes that are possible.

I will discuss Goriot later in this study, but Rastignac’s exemplary nineteenth-century “career” in the big city can be meaningfully investigated as an extension of the picaresque adventures of an earlier epoch. To link Balzac to the picaresque would surprise many literary historians, since he is usually situated within the Bildungsroman tradition, and a word is in order. Inaugurated by Goethe at the beginning of the nineteenth century with his account of Wilhelm Meister’s adventures, the Bildungsroman—the novel of “formation”—stamps a good deal of that century’s fiction, as it tells the story of the young seeking their place in society. This focus on the choices available to the young sounds the modern note, since it is their story, their engagement with a rapidly changing world, that most deeply engages the writer. This is not innocent. Why centralize the story of the young? One answer is that they are peculiarly barometric figures, displaying at once the adequacy and inadequacy of their “formation” (a word still used in Europe to indicate education itself), i.e., bringing to light the clash of generations and the shifting values and upheavals in culture.

In a well-known passage, Balzac explicitly contrasted the challenges faced by Rastignac with the idealistic historical narratives of Walter Scott, and he sounded the modern note by claiming that the contemporary story that mattered was a story of selling out, a kind of dance whereby young men with principles, encountering in the city a culture driven by the cash nexus, must decide whether to save their souls or to plow ahead at all costs and succeed.
Parvenir
—“Succeed!”—is the battle cry. It is the battle cry today as well, I believe. In some restricted sense, it was the call heard by Lazarillo and Pablos, even though their circumstances were radically straitened when compared to those of the Parisian law student. Equipped with notions of honor and integrity, outfitted with a distinguished name, Rastignac arrives at a Parisian boarding-house, the Maison Vauquer, and from that point on, the original game plan of legal study and hard work is increasingly thrown into doubt. This happens because the moral world he had thought to be permanent and true, the moral world he assumed was conquerable by dint of diligence and drive, is shown, via what he encounters in Paris, to be something else entirely, to be collapsing like a house of cards.

What does he encounter? The spectacle of three figures of stature, indeed three potential mentors, spiritual advisers, caught in the Parisian rat race, each one either suffering or exposing the ethical bankruptcy of his time. The title figure, Goriot, functions as a living allegory of what happens to fathers in this culture. Having enriched himself through shrewd and murky dealings during the Revolutionary period, Goriot came to the boarding-house a wealthy man, but by the time of Rastignac’s arrival, he is a broken figure of ridicule, living in a garret. There is talk of his being visited by beautiful young women, but soon enough we realize that they are his married daughters: one squanders her money on her conniving lover, the other is unhappily wed to the book’s venture capitalist, and each comes repeatedly, insatiably, to the father for more and ever more money. Rastignac is stunned by Goriot’s almost bestial love for his daughters and sees that they are eating him alive. The second mentor is the student’s elegant
grande dame
cousin, Mme. de Beauséant, a queen of society but unknowingly on the verge of a ruthless betrayal by her lover; she gives her country cousin unillusioned instructions about how to succeed in Paris: use others like packhorses, and if ever you feel true sentiment for someone, keep it a secret, never expose your heart.

The third mentor, Vautrin, almost runs away with the book. A master criminal in disguise, possessed of qualities at once satanic and seductive, frightening and irresistible, Vautrin comes to us as the book’s great Sphinx: the man who sees through everything (people’s secrets, Parisian mores, what-have-you) but is himself impenetrable. Rastignac is irritated by his manners, and it appears as though the two might end up in a duel, but instead Balzac delivers himself of one of the greatest scenes in nineteenth-century fiction as the older man takes the student aside and gives him a grand lesson in Parisian life management. Vautrin is the narrative’s Nietzschean superman figure—amoral, fearless, at once amused and contemptuous—who shows Rastignac exactly (as if it were a computer printout) what his chances are if he sticks to the straight and narrow, completes his law degree, tries to make a career. Rarely has the “sweat ethic” been given such a cuffing. A life of honest hard work will yield … yes … a life of honest hard work … although both the work and staying honest will be harder than imagined. And that’s it. Four or five pages of brilliant, insolent, mesmerizing social analysis, a countercultural almanac in brief compass, that you will not easily forget.

It is worth pausing over these three mentor roles for a moment. This book exists for me as a mirror for the struggles of my university students in the twenty-first century, trying their very hardest to do the practical and moral calculus necessary to determine what is needed to
parvenir
, to get ahead. Law school or not? Business school? And what about your major at college? Be careful of too much humanities, since everyone knows it won’t get you to the next stage. And what use are the arts, after all? In my humanistic corner of an institution, where it costs well upward of six figures to get a degree, I too wonder, as they do, what the right course is. What is missing, truly missing, however, is mentors. Today we call them “deans” or the occasional friendly professor who is willing to listen and to advise. But even at its very best, with an apparatus of informed and committed administrators and teachers, my university will never come up with a Vautrin, much less a Mme. de Beauséant or an old Goriot. Balzac’s novel etches the generational hurdle with great clarity and force: three figures, each destined to finish rather strangely, each representing a code of values and behavior, each available to Rastignac. Yet Vautrin alone possesses a systemic vision of how the game is composed and played.

One of the supreme ironies here is that the novel itself (as genre, as institution) enjoys a kind of moral and pedagogical authority in the nineteenth century that is long gone today. Back then, there was no competing art form, and certainly no media such as TV or the Internet, where the young might go to find out about the culture they’re soon to enter. Back then, Parisians read Balzac to better understand the city they lived in, just as Londoners read Dickens and denizens of Saint Petersburg pored over the books of Gogol and Dostoevsky. But Balzac’s authorial voice out-sounds all of them. His Vautrin is a master of the game.

Whatever his initial sentiments of suspicion might be regarding the sarcastic Vautrin, Rastignac starts to listen up when the older man takes him aside and spells out his chances as an eventual lawyer in Paris. I am reducing this exchange to its core, but in the novel itself we are treated to vivid, authoritative detail regarding every prospective avenue that lawyer-Rastignac might take, replete with exactly the revenue to be received and the (human) price paid. Much sweat and hardship, little money or happiness. But why go that route? If life as a lawyer can’t make you rich, what can? Crime, for starters, explains Vautrin—every fortune in France rests on a concealed crime, he informs us—but he knows that the student has no stomach for something quite so vigorous.

Yet it turns out that there is a solution much closer to hand. There happens to be a young girl, Victorine—also in the boardinghouse, impoverished because her wealthy father prefers his son, taken in hand by her aunt—who has been making eyes at the handsome Rastignac ever since he arrived. It is really quite simple: Rastignac must woo Victorine now, because soon (very soon) she will be rich, because her father is going to give her all his money, because her brother is going to be dead, because Vautrin is going to see to it that he is murdered in what looks like a legitimate duel (but is really an assassination). No problem, Papa Vautrin will take care of everything.

Well, there is a problem. Rastignac thinks he’s enamored of Goriot’s daughter Delphine (the one married to the fat financier Nucingen), and he’s not one to redirect or sell his affections. Still, Victorine is awfully sweet. And she is making eyes at him. We can feel the net closing in. With the little lucidness remaining to him, he asks Vautrin why he’s looking out for him in this way and what would be in it for him. What’s in it for Vautrin is spelled out: a portion of the huge fortune that will be Rastignac’s wife’s, so that a chunk of land in the American South can be bought, enabling Vautrin to live there with a goodly number of black slaves. Why is only hinted at; Vautrin coyly says he’ll whisper it in Rastignac’s ear one day. (Later we are actually told that Vautrin doesn’t like women.) The student is stunned by this bold proposition for immediate wealth, and so is the reader. And the wheels of the plot start to turn as Vautrin sets his scheme into motion.