Morning, Noon, and Night: Finding the Meaning of Life's Stages Through Books (30 page)

Huck lights out for the Territory ahead of the others; he does not want to be “sivilized” by the Widow or the other right-thinking folks he knows. Topsy is destined by her moralizing author to become a moral creature residing in Vermont. And Pearl exits
The Scarlet Letter
with her mother en route to London, where she becomes a wealthy heiress and where, it seems, her heart also gradually develops a capacity for feeling. Pippi remains an enchanting child, a young “Supergirl” ready to right wrongs as she sees them, but she never truly challenges or threatens the adult world she is placed in. But what would happen if the wild child were placed in an adult setting but remained “incorrigible” right to the end? If the wild child obeyed Ivan Karamazov’s injunction and refused the ticket? If the wild child saw its wildness as a program, as a veto of the world as we know it? How would you tell such a story?

After creating the doomed Benjy and Quentin in
The Sound and the Fury
, Faulkner must have realized that public morality and racial hatred are as virulent and instrumental as lost love is, in determining whether the young survive or not.
Light in August
(1932) can be seen as a virtual laboratory experiment along these lines, for it is outfitted with two key characters who are each, in radically different ways, countercultural, marked by taboo: Lena Grove is the pagan figure of the novel, obeying nature’s injunctions without regard to “moral law,” nine months pregnant without a wedding ring or a scrap of guilt; and Joe Christmas, the violent man with parchment-colored skin (“written on”), thinking he has “a little nigger blood,” troubled by all social rituals, including food and sex. Each is a stranger. One is headed for marriage and social incorporation, the other for crucifixion. We are a far cry from Mignon, Pearl, and company, it may seem, yet Lena and Christmas represent Faulkner’s most extreme effort to imagine young people alien to culture’s prescriptions, impervious to the social contract. The novel seems to be asking: is this possible?

Let us begin with Christmas, Faulkner’s version of Oedipus, the child cursed by unknown parentage. Christmas is given a glimpse of the epistemological calvary in store for him by the black yardman at the orphanage. Little Joe has asked why the black man is a “nigger,” and the response/indictment goes like this: “And the nigger said, ‘Who told you I am a nigger, you little white trash bastard?’ and he says ‘I aint a nigger’ and the nigger says, ‘You worse than that. You don’t know what you are. And more than that, you wont never know. You’ll live and you’ll die and you wont never know.’ ” With Christmas there appears to be a double whammy: a birth shrouded in (racial) mystery yet followed by an upbringing at the hands of his Calvinist foster father, McEachern, that is all too clear in its deforming power. It is as if Faulkner wanted to massively overdetermine Joe Christmas’s fate—first ungrounded, then ground down—to explore degrees of separation from the human and social order and the violence that results.

For Christmas is headed for the pit every bit as much as Quentin was, and that pit is repeatedly imaged in this book along racial, gender, and libidinal lines as “Womanshenegro,” a swamp where the male goes under. In Christmas Faulkner has fashioned his fullest portrait of a misfit—a mix of fury and fear regarding the creatural side of life, especially when it comes to women’s fluids but extending all the way toward food and sex in general, yet visible also in the out-of-sync nature of his neural equipment, his delayed responses, his frequent capsizing, his rages—and then taken the rather enormous step of naming this child after Jesus. (Was Jesus the first wild child?) Perhaps the Christ appellation is apt in one sense: his life is a calvary, he will be dismembered at death. Perhaps it is right in another sense as well: this man may have no redemptive spiritual vision (he has none at all), but he does come across as an exemplary victim, held hostage by his ambiguous skin color, his firing and misfiring neurons and synapses, his horror of all that is soft, his formative “othering” stint in the orphanage, his further (mis)shaping via McEachern’s loveless iron discipline, his being maniacally scapegoated by his frenzied grandfather Old Doc, his ultimate cold-blooded execution/castration by Percy Grimm in the name of an entire racist culture: not to put too fine a point on it, a systemwide hounding Faulkner himself calls “an emotional Roman barbecue.”

In this light, Christmas’s story is an ongoing reversal of the Bildungsroman ethos, it is a tale of how not to: how to fail every social test, how to refuse all adaptation, how to turn your life into a calvary. Joe Christmas seems like a nightmarish creation, embodying everything Faulkner has to have thought of as diseased and dsyfunctional in modern life. “You little nigger bastard!” the orphanage dietitian screams at him after he has unwittingly eavesdropped on her frantic lovemaking. And he fares only nominally better with his foster parents the McEacherns, where he is routinely beaten for not learning his catechism, where he learns to live under cover, where his sexual initiation triggers the kind of somatic cyclone of violence we will see more of, leading eventually to the murder of his lover, Joanna Burden, by beheading. By story’s end he is the novel’s
thing:
tracked, ceasing to distinguish between night and day, asleep and awake, being weaned from life, awaiting final dispatch through the good offices of Percy Grimm. He is the man to whom things are done, and among the things done to him are his own uncontrollable mind and body, in addition to a Mississippi culture that is ready to kill.

One is stunned by Faulkner’s packaging of all this venom as a story of failed rites of passage. We are meant to take the full measure of the making of Joe Christmas. The novel begins in medias res, with the murder of Joanna, but then works ever more profoundly backward as well as forward, giving us the lineaments of Christmas’s birth, infancy, childhood, adolescence, and final full flowering. He is not a monster. Alfred Kazin rightly called him “the loneliest figure in American literature,” and Faulkner seems obsessed with tracking him, showing us how early and definitively he was weaned from humane care. He is the Thanatos figure of the book, the death instinct.

It is for that reason that Faulkner matches him against the nine-months-pregnant, vegetable-like, pagan figure of Lena Grove, his opposite number in every respect. If Christmas is sapped by his past, (mindless) Lena is at one with her future, which means finding a father for this soon-to-be-born child. A figurative one will do as well as the biological one, so that Byron Bunch becomes the book’s Joseph, exiting the community at story’s end with Lena and baby to re-create some form of the family, at once comic and holy. Teaching this novel today can be hard, since none of my female students is eager to fill the Lena Grove slot, yet there is something magnificent and profound in Faulkner’s story of life’s rhythms, his tribute to natural forces as triumphant over cultural ones. She carries in her womb nature’s sovereign answer to culture’s rules, and her baby is arriving on schedule, following the oldest and most reliable plot known to our kind. The unswerving and integral Lena breaks as many social rules as Christmas does, but the outrage of the community—does the unmarried pregnant woman really think she’ll find her husband waiting for her?—comes across as weightless, whimsical, given the authority of her species’ mission and the success with which it is crowned.

Lena’s ascent is unstoppable, but so, too, is Christmas’s descent. Faulkner strains mightily to invest this man’s failed life and spectacular death with meaning, so that his castration is written as (also) a moment of miraculous salvation, as if death and love, murder and generation might be fused into one: “And from out the slashed garments about his hips and loins the pent black blood seemed to rush like a released breath. It seemed to rush out of his pale body like the rush of sparks from a rising rocket; upon that black blast the man seemed to rise soaring into their memories forever and ever.” The following sentence uses words such as “serene,” “steadfast,” and “triumphant” to characterize its victim, but we cannot fail to see that these are Lena’s terms, that he is strangely wedded to her by the beauty and figurative logic of Faulkner’s writing. The two pariahs of the community, the ones beyond the pale—one giving birth, one being castrated—seem to leave our Earth altogether, to come together, as the orgasmic language boldly approximates that of the Holy Spirit, as if Christmas were actually seeding Lena and sowing a possible future; Christmas, the dead outsider, is said now to inhabit the minds and dreams of the very community that slew him.

Light in August
is an unflinching account of community violence, prejudice, and hatred—all the forces that militate against growing up—but its very violence is transformed by Faulkner’s genius into a parable about family, union, children, and the round of life. At that poetic level—and only there—the story of carnage, misfit, and even pariah status undergoes a sea change, yielding a vision in which the wild child finds a home. One way to follow Faulkner’s lead in imagining the fate of the wild child would be to use a pairing strategy—one “wild,” one “straight”—in the manner of a control study, to gauge what it might mean to opt out of culture altogether. The costs and gains will be on show. On show too will be the price of admission that each of us has long ago been asked to pay.

Two of the most remarkable accounts of children in twentieth-century literature illuminate just these matters: the exquisite and largely unknown Norwegian novel of 1963
The Ice Palace
, and Toni Morrison’s brazen, sometimes surreal story of two girls,
Sula
, of 1973. What most astonishes me about both these books is their purity and rigor: they refuse to compromise or to pull their punches, and they therefore go right off the tracks of all prescribed behavior.
The Ice Palace
and
Sula
are at once fresh and unhinging, for they dare to imagine otherwise, to sketch out a vision of childhood and growth on the far side of all adaptation and socialization. Each of these books is about the majesty and terror of real freedom, about freedom itself as a compulsion that is virtually terrorist in its sirenlike ferocity.

I have been waging a one-person war for some time now to garner recognition for Tarjei Vesaas’s
The Ice Palace
, largely by finding a way to include it in virtually every course that I teach, as well as writing about it in my recent book on Scandinavian literature; I was gratified to learn that the famous Parisian bookstore for books in English, Shakespeare and Company, shares my conviction about this book and its author and touts the novel as one of its “finds.” This account of two eleven-year-old girls is a tale of life versus death, of the reaches of childhood, and of the extraordinary good luck that enables the young to grow up rather than to die. We all know today that childhood is a time of risk: never, in my view, have parents been more aware of the threats lurking out there in the form of predators and bad guys and drugs and so much else that can wreck children’s lives and turn them into nightmares. We read daily about such matters. But Vesaas has no interest in illuminating the risks we know about; on the contrary, he is after larger game, because he positions the menace of death and annihilation on the inside, as the signature openness, vulnerability, hunger, and beauty of the young.

Vesaas writes about the simplest subject of all: the passional life of two eleven-year-olds. Here is something all parents have seen, but from afar: the mercurial, giddy, sometimes raging feelings of the young, their capacity for infatuation, the (lovely) ignorance of limits, their (no less lovely) lack of experience. Today such matters are often pathologized, and hence we are, as a culture, leery and even frightened of affective outbursts in the young; indeed, we are equipped with the drugs to tamp them down, so as to ease things. But no one reading these pages can have entirely forgotten the tumultuous emotional life that we had when young, especially regarding our peers. Every day in school had its riotous and explosive moments: conflagration, tragedy, bliss, upheaval, cataclysm. And every day Mom or Dad asks the returning child, “How was school?” and receives the standard answer: “Okay.” An entire internal operatic life of desire and frustration and excitement and hunger burns in the young but rarely makes it over the threshold into language for parental benefit.

And one generally gets through it, over it. Life sees to it that such unchecked emotions are gradually—by dint of experience, by dint of being burned, by dint of the graying of life that sets in so early—reined in. We become wiser, not through any volitional effort but rather as a curbing of hunger and checking of desire that our organism seems to learn all on its own. Or, worse still, as the implacable entropy that time itself imposes on desire, as if we possessed at birth only a specific amount of it, and we spend it wildly and gloriously when young, to find that it is in ever-shorter supply as we age, like grains of sand slipping through an hourglass, like the incessant minor hemorrhaging that goes by the name of living.

That is not the case with
The Ice Palace
. I call it “simple,” but I have in mind the kind of “simplicity” that Tom Lehrer expressed decades ago in his song about the new math: “It’s so simple that only a child can do it.” We are challenged by this book because it obliges us to go very far backward, to remember a time and a self that were open, flowing, and porous. Vesaas’s novel is a love story. Siss, the putative heroine of the narrative, is more or less smitten by Unn, the death-haunted one. Siss is anchored: decent parents, school leader, most popular, self-aware, at once reasonable and open to feelings. Unn is the newcomer to the school—the setting is rural Norway—and she has proven to be unreceptive to the few overtures of friendship that have come her way, as if she chose to be the loner she is.

But the moment she and Siss set eyes on each other, things change. This happens where so much childhood sound and fury takes place: at school. Yes, school is the great formative experience of our lives, even though it may have precious little to do with teachers or books or subjects taught; rather, it is the cauldron where we encounter human heat in all its diverse forms. These forms can look calm, staid, and cool, as in small sheets of paper being passed from child to child with messages scribbled on them; but such language sizzles, and in this instance, the note saying “Must meet you, Siss,” signed “Unn,” has an imperious power that few poems ever possess. From initial body tingling to formal rendezvous, destiny is gathering. Their meeting that day after school will alter both their lives forever.