Morning, Noon, and Night: Finding the Meaning of Life's Stages Through Books (15 page)

I am not suggesting that Dickens’s Pip is already a random unbounded figure such as we find in Kafka, Beckett, or Camus. But I do want to say that this story of moral promiscuity, of molded and deformed children, of losing one’s soul while seeking one’s fortune, is cued to the elemental restlessness and miasma of the marshes, to a psychic mobility that will not be easily corralled into characterological form. Pip’s relation to Joe and Biddy has the markings of a ballet: as the boy grows up under the shadow of his expectations, they recede, recede existentially, become unreachable. This is of course social: Pip the snob is ashamed of (what he sees as) their coarseness. But Dickens derives a painful poetry out of it, as in the late sequence when Pip is alone in London, but injured and delirious with fever, and Joe comes to nurse him. We see a heartbreaking return to childhood—Joe ministers to the boy, carries him, feeds him, nurses him—that cannot be sustained, and we watch Joe’s manners become ever more stilted and “contrefait” as Pip regains strength. You can’t go home. When Pip does go home, at novel’s end, all prepared to ask Biddy to marry him, he relearns the same lesson: it is always/already too late, Biddy is marrying Joe, Pip is doomed to be alone. And strangely alien to himself. Even in sequences that seem entirely sociological, such as Pip’s crushing awareness of his commonness in the eyes of Estella, one senses a disconnect that is also existential: “I was a common labouring-boy … my hands were coarse … my boots were thick … I was much more ignorant than I had considered myself last night … I was in a low-lived bad way.” He is discovering that he is not who he thought he was.

Dickens’s great genius as a writer is to convey to us this same kind of discovery. Philip Pirrip Esq. is a strange bird. There is much that Pip can see clearly: he intuits the identity of Estella, figures out who her parents are, fathoms the role of Compeyson in Miss Havisham’s undoing, turns much mystery into fact. But the darkness at the core remains: I cannot see I. The most grotesque instance of the masquerade is the episode with Trabb’s boy: Pip, demonstrably well heeled, saunters back to his village, receives the dripping homage of Pumblechook, but then encounters the fabulous treble mockery of Trabb’s boy, who goes through an elaborate triple series of baroque gestures of bogus fealty, closing with just the right refrain: “Don’t know yah, don’t know yah, pon my soul don’t know yah!” Comedy? Or central misprision? Do not forget the opening page: a child in a cemetery reading gravestones, trying to pin himself down, slated for upheaval and murk.

This young boy who discovered he was in a “low-lived bad way” is also haunted by guilt: guilt at helping the convict, guilt at being a blacksmith in training, guilt at becoming a snob. One might think that guilt is a solid feature of self, but Pip’s guilt is of a different sort, shadowy and ungraspable, pointing to reaches in his makeup that are entirely beyond his ken or scrutiny. He can be other unto himself. We see this perhaps most pointedly in the early pages of the book, the so-called idyllic time, the time of the sweet childhood innocence that is (said) to be cashiered by his great expectations. Or so the story goes in traditional readings. But take a closer look: the early, bucolic Pip is already a tortured fellow. He may look back to this time as one of peace, but we can see it as one of strife and injury. All the colorful “types” that Dickens surrounds Pip with—Pumblechook, Wopsle, and most especially his own sister, Mrs. Joe—are an impossible lot to live with. Pip can never tell us this, but he cannot avoid showing us. Hence, as Mrs. Joe gives her recital of Pip’s misdemeanors, the boy looks at Wopsle’s Roman nose and confides to us “that I should have liked to pull it until he howled.” Pumblechook is of course larger game, and when he pours himself a brandy that is actually half tar, Pip is certain that he “had murdered him somehow.” By novel’s end, Pumblechook comes to resemble Flaubert’s Homais as a monstrous creature who invents his own fables and then imposes them on the community, in this case the fable of being Pip’s true, genuine sponsor; and this moves from being comic to something darker and deeper, as Pip realizes that Pumblechook’s deceit actually slanders Joe: “I had never been struck at so keenly, for my thanklessness to Joe, as through the brazen impostor Pumblechook. The falser he, the truer Joe; the meaner he, the nobler Joe.” How not to see the true casualty here, the book’s central impostor: Pip himself? Might not have been so bad to have “murdered him somehow,” old Pumblechook, as a way of getting rid of the evidence.

My point is that Dickens is doing something quite radical in this novel: he is writing Pip all over this text, displaying his darker, unavowable wants in the text’s nooks and crannies—and sometimes right out in the open, if we could but see. I am thinking of the key melodramatic scene of Miss Havisham’s burning. Here is the book’s sole moment of fierce somatic violence, and it takes place right where it should: on the floor, with the maggot-filled wedding cake on top of the players, accompanied doubtless by the spiders and beetles and rats whose home the cake has been. And who are the players? Pip and the old lady he’s (wrongly, tragically) thought to be his benefactress. A man and a woman, body to body. On the surface, this is a heroic gesture on Pip’s part: to try to save the life of this bitter old woman who has recognized her sins, and to do so at considerable personal cost (serious burning). But Dickens’s language gets our attention here, makes us wonder if something else is also transpiring: “we were on the ground struggling like desperate enemies … the closer I covered her, the more wildly she shrieked and tried to free herself.” Critics who have seen a form of sublimated sexual violence here, bordering on rape, are onto something, I believe, and it has to do with the layers of Pip’s smoldering psyche that lie beneath his consciousness but that are now coming to expression. For this old woman is indeed the novel’s witch: it is she who has introduced him to the cold Estella, made him think he was destined to marry the princess, led him on in exactly that delusion for years and years. How could he not—in some place deep inside—hate her? How could he ever admit it?

But the most sensational indictment of Pip as Other requires no textual sleuthing on our part: it comes via the good services of Orlick, who is hell-bent on murdering Pip to avenge himself for all the problems Pip has caused him earlier.
“Moi?”
Pip demurely asks. And we need to remember that Orlick courted Biddy, but that was cut short by Master Pip; and that Orlick was working at Miss Havisham’s, until that too was cut short by our young man. Orlick’s revenge comes in two installments, separated over time: he murders Mrs. Joe, and now, many years later, he is about to murder Pip. Beyond even the motive of lost jobs is his undying hatred for the little boy who was favored, who basked in the affections of the blacksmith, who occupied the sole place in the sun. He was loved, I was not: so goes Orlick’s plaint.

But that is the least of it. Orlick murdered Mrs. Joe on Pip’s orders: “Wolf … Old Orlick’s a going to tell you somethink. It was you as did for your shrew sister.” Now, at last, the evil story of envy and murder is out in the open:

Dickensian mysteries lead to murk as well as to light. Orlick says far more than he knows. He is functioning here, as he has in the past, as Pip’s alter ego, as the unsayable enraged side of Pip. Hence we are obliged to ponder just how “favoured” Pip was, and just why being favored would somehow bring about murder: “It was you as did for your shrew sister.” And we remember all those apparently comic touches about being brought up by hand, about being reminded of every small misdemeanor, of being incessantly hounded throughout one’s childhood, and we conclude: Can one get past injury? Could Orlick’s words have their psychic truth? The figurative rape of Miss Havisham and the figurative murder of Mrs. Joe weigh heavy in the docket against Philip Pirrip Esq., demanding that we incorporate their affective tidings into our emerging portrait. They confirm him as a citizen of the marshes. Not that they make him a villain—he remains decent, and he remains our essential conduit for the story, our own surrogate—but they testify to the indelible stain of human experience, to the reality of emotional damage and psychic injury. They give this beloved book a Dostoevskian tinge.

Above all, they limn a portrait of childhood that is arguably richer than any other of the nineteenth century, for it registers the actual slings and arrows that Pip has suffered, slings and arrows that make it through the genial comic defenses of the novel and point to its costs. Pip is the lonely fellow whose graveyard tears open the book, who is terrified by his complicity with the convict, who is riddled with guilt, who is heir to visions (he repeatedly sees Miss Havisham hanging), who has a good bit of garbage in him. He is haunted forever by returnees from the past: Magwitch, Compeyson, Orlick, Mrs. Joe. He can neither return nor exit. Homeless (both inwardly and outwardly), haunted (both inwardly and outwardly), Pip is the caught child. Experience will exercise his ghosts, but it will not exorcise them. This is why the book finishes perfectly, whichever ending one prefers, because both endings are twilight endings, chastened endings, endings to lives that have been misspent and error-driven, prey to spirits and pulsions beyond his ken. Lazarillo, Pablos, and Rastignac completed their education by learning how their respective cultures operate and then devising their own coping strategy. For the lacerated Pip, it is tougher going, mistakes are made, self-knowledge is hard to come by, no one gets clear, the ghosts are on the inside; he finishes as he began, injured. He is testimony to bad news that we do not expect from a seemingly sentimental writer: that growing up is hard to do.

Balzac’s Vautrin dreamed, in the early nineteenth century, of finishing his days in America as “Mr. Four-Millions,” surrounded by black slaves to do his bidding. Racial business as usual in America, Vautrin has to have thought. But of course we in latter-day America know that these arrangements were and are anything but neutral. Major white and black writers have tackled these matters: one thinks of Faulkner, Zora Neale Hurston, Richard Wright. But Ralph Ellison’s
Invisible Man
stands especially in our minds as a stunning mid-twentieth-century installment of the Bildungsroman, approaching race through a prism quite different from those of any of his predecessors, while also committed to a remarkable investigation of the workings of power and how it impacts the story of growing up. Ellison had his debts to the great modernists James Joyce and T. S. Eliot, and he sought to create a playful, improvisational account of a young man’s difficult education, reminiscent of the techniques of jazz and the blues. But I cannot help seeing the shadow of Balzac in this novel, especially the Balzac who is on show in the figure of Vautrin; Ellison is not going to give us a comparably omniscient figure with a blueprint, but his aims are the same: to explore the huge gap between polite versions of how society operates, on the one hand, and the grisly yet systemic nastiness underneath, on the other. It seems fair to say that the protagonist negotiates this crucial divide his entire life. Like Lazarillo and Pablos, he needs to wake up to how things actually work, so that he can finally take charge of his own life. That will not be easy. But once again, experience is to be the teacher.

In a way that echoes
Père Goriot, Great Expectations
, and
Huckleberry Finn
, Ellison’s novel is in search of fathers, but the results are going to be dire. We follow the protagonist’s slow, seemingly dense, certainly arduous transformation from docile believer in Booker T. Washington’s doctrine of uplift via humility and submission on to increasingly violent and picaresque adventures in New York, most notably his long stint with the Brotherhood, a Marxist collective aimed at altering society through strict application of dogma, and finally on to the spectacular close in the famous Harlem race riots, after which our man assumes his key position underground. At issue in each of these ventures is the burning desire to see clear, to devise a strategy and a posture for effecting genuine social change.

At its best,
Invisible Man
is an incandescent fiction, larded with startling, over-the-top episodes that are luminous, even surreal, in their workings, even if mystifying to the protagonist. These episodes carry the book’s abiding vision of power, its vision of what you must know in order to grow up. The
you
referred to is not merely the hero of the fiction; it is also today’s reader, for whom this story of growing racial awareness, although more than a half century behind us, still writes large a number of key, scary, not easily forgettable dictates in American culture.

Let’s start with the first failed initiation: the Battle Royal. Here is the book’s first ugly piece of business: black youths are invited to a white smoker, and our protagonist, the class valedictorian, is eagerly awaiting his opportunity to give his speech to this assembled group. Expecting an opportunity to display his earnestness and oratory, he has failed to ponder just why he and his cohort would be told to put on their boxing togs. Half-naked, in a ballroom filled with half-drunk bankers, judges, doctors, and the like, he and his cohort now see the other attraction: a naked blonde doing a slow, writhing dance, arousing the elders, arousing also the young blacks (whose erections are all too visible). As the woman goes through her bump and grind, the men lose control, start to grab her, but order is established by launching into the next number: putting the black boys, blindfolded, into the ring. The crowd’s frenzy grows greater still as the black youths are ordered to strike one another, blindly, with increasing panic and ferocity. All the while our boy is wondering when he’ll give his speech, even though blows are landing on him constantly. Finally the boys are invited to come up and receive their money, placed on a rug, but the rug is electrified, it turns out, creating a spectacle of wet, twitching, jerking bodies whose every contact with the money violently jolts them with flowing current.