Morning, Noon, and Night: Finding the Meaning of Life's Stages Through Books (7 page)

These dark stories fascinate as well as disturb, for they point to a powerful systemic logic that damns the young, and they situate this logic frequently in the very heart and pulse of family. Once again we measure the horrific failure of love—or perhaps the still more horrific cost of love: the nest you are to exit is toxic, so you do not exit; the bonds you have will strangle you, for you are entrapped in their mesh. These materials tell us something we are often reluctant to recognize: that growing up takes place against a human backdrop that got there first, that can be rife with injury, even lethal.

All of the varieties of coming of age discussed up to now centralize the encounter between the young and culture—innocence to experience, love, abuse—but could there be instances when culture itself exits, is destroyed? Instances where love’s absence produces slaughter and genocide? I have elected to close my account of sacrificed children by examining the “delayed reactions” to such upheaval: not the immediate child victims but rather the inheritors of destruction, the children who grow up among ruins either real or figurative. The outright number of destroyed children pales when we compare it to the still greater number of those who do not experience such horrors firsthand but have to live with and through them secondhand, trying to make sense of things.

I turn to World War II, in which real Holocaust occurred, and my text is the stunning graphic novel Art Spiegelman’s
Maus
, which depicts the difficult efforts of Artie, the son of Vladek, a Holocaust survivor, to find a form for this horrendous chapter in our history. Spiegelman confronts a radical double challenge: how to understand Father? and how to represent the historical nightmare that (de)formed Father? “My Father Bleeds History” is Spiegelman’s subtitle, and it points to the awful learning experience inflicted on the young when the world seems to come apart.

My last book of sacrifice, Jonathan Safran Foer’s
Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close
, focuses on the downing of the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001, and on a grieving child who must come to terms with it. History again bled. Several thousand people died almost at once in that catastrophe, but many more thousands were threatened with dying more slowly, with being undone by the loss of a parent, spouse, or child. In linking his story of the American disaster to the Dresden firebombing of 1945, Foer shows us what growing up can be like, as the sky falls in on the heads and hearts of our children.

If the literature about growing up is a barometer of sorts, which gauges the “cultural weather” and measures the absorption of the young into the adult society that awaits and confronts them, the question arises: Can one say no? Can you “refuse the ticket,” as Ivan Karamazov proclaimed one should? We all know about Thoreau’s idyll at Walden Pond, and there is something deeply seductive about finding a “free space” beyond culture. For many of us, childhood itself may seem bathed in just such colors.

Implicit in my last paragraph is the conviction that society is at once flawed and escapable and that nature is our true home. But there are darker and more unsettling views of these matters, and there exists a handful of books that look unflinchingly at the consequences of “rejecting” society—or the even more disturbing consequences of obeying nature. I begin with the story of Lena Grove and Joe Christmas, Faulkner’s protagonists of
Light in August
(1932), one nine months pregnant without a ring and serenely happy, the other living out the sacrificial fate coded in his name. Thinking he has “a little nigger blood” in him, at war with “natural” processes such as food and sex, Christmas the ungrounded, cast-out child rewrites the story of Oedipus in violent racial terms, doomed to misfit and calvary.

Two very pure and brave narratives about the child who says no appeared in 1963 and 1973: the Norwegian Tarjei Vesaas’s
Ice Palace
and Toni Morrison’s
Sula
. Not only does each offer girl protagonists, but each uses the strategy of paired girls, one “straight,” one wild, one committed to life, the other to death, so as to derive maximum contrast from the topic. The tonalities are different—Vesaas’s mysterious Unn elects to exit the human realm and enter nature’s dance through her death in the Ice Palace, whereas Morrison’s “experimental” Sula is the most untamable and hell-bent-for-freedom figure of this study—but each leaves us with a profound grasp of natural and social law: what it costs to obey it, what it costs to deny it.

If you can read these lines, it means you have grown up. Most of us do. It would seem to be the plan of both nature and culture. What measures do we have for doing it well?

I want to close my treatment of growing up by looking at two rich twentieth-century narratives that are unflinching in their account of the obstacles that beset children, yet bequeath a vision of complex yet successful maturation: Faulkner’s
Go Down, Moses
and Alice Walker’s
The Color Purple
. We will see that these two narratives are profoundly cued to the phases and rubrics that structure my book: innocence, experience, love, abuse, sacrifice, freedom. Each is invested as well in an exploration of history, race, gender, and empowerment, as they inform the course of growing up and taking—or not taking—one’s place in society. Finally, each has the merit of following its protagonists from childhood—sheltered in one instance, abusive in the other—all the way to old age, thereby setting the stage for the second half of my study, which is devoted to growing old.

We begin with Ike McCaslin, the young/old protagonist of Faulkner’s autumnal
Go Down, Moses
(1942). Given the quasi-sacrificial fates of Benjy and Quentin Compson and Joe Christmas, it is fascinating to see a wider-angled view now of growing up. Faulkner moves toward myth: the myth of the hunt, of the immortal wilderness, into which Ike is to be initiated. But we soon realize that the initiation—so similar to that of tribal cultures in form, so opposed in consequence, for it leads to exit rather than incorporation—brings to Ike a terrible knowledge of his own society’s racial and gender fault lines, inscribed in his own family history. But it is knowledge nonetheless, construed in the key figure of reading: reading the forest as hunter, reading the South as culture. Here is a luminous model for education, for literature.

I close my study of growing up with a narrative that manages to create eventual but lasting uplift out of early horror: Walker’s
The Color Purple
. Celie is the most victimized figure of my entire study: impregnated by the man she takes to be her father, robbed of her loving sister and her two children, married off to another man who beats her, finally loved but ultimately rejected (erotically) by the book’s femme fatale, Shug Avery. Yet this story shimmers with self-flowering as it chronicles Celie’s hard-earned ascent into selfhood and authority, an ascent allied to resiliency, self-affirmation, empowerment through language, and triumph of love. Walker’s pain-larded novel affirms something wonderful: strong children can work through trauma and injury; human growth is real and triumphant. Love, volition, and life have their say; the Oedipal saga of blindness and coercion can be overcome.

William Blake’s
Songs of Innocence
(1789) and
Songs of Experience
(1794) arguably present the quintessential binary that governs our perceptions and underwrites any notion we might have of education or maturation. Blake himself was rather supple about his categories, and he juggled a number of pieces from one collection to the other over time. If we approach these poems with the Romantic conception of the “child as father to the man” or with a view of childhood as the bliss we seek throughout life to recover, I think we go seriously astray. Blake is tougher, more countercultural, more destabilizing than that. It will be seen that these two modes, innocence and experience, are at once perspectival and time-drenched. They have everything to do with
when
we examine the affairs of our life—“we” of the poem, but also “we” as readers, since a second or third (or fiftieth) reading of these poems is no longer “innocent” but rather “experienced”—and how our understanding of things hinges on just this.

To see how this works, I want to discuss his two famous accounts of chimney sweeps, one published in each cycle. We are about to take a course in optics: what will the condition of chimney sweep look like from each of these perspectives? The poet focuses on one of the great ills of late-eighteenth-century London life: the use of young boys (and girls), aged between four and seven, sent up into the London chimneys and destined for a life of almost incredible hardship and pain. It is known that some died in the chimneys (when fires were lit with the chimney sweep still there) and that many developed skin cancers, due to the fact that they often worked naked, so as to spare the cost of replacing ruined clothes.

What is breathtaking (and heartbreaking) about these poems is what they teach us about acculturation, about the the shaping and importance of values. Hence, the “Innocence” and “Experience” poems can be read in some sense as before and after, inasmuch as the poet often seeks to render the child’s “uncritical” angle of vision in the first set, whereas the tone of the second set is likely to be much more judgmental. In so doing, Blake wants to expose the forming and working of ideology. This is crucial, since ideology is exactly what none of us can see, for it is the air we breathe and the soup we swim in. But it might indeed come to vision, using a consort of innocence and experience, enabling us to get a sighting on how we are both formed and deformed as creatures of culture. For all these reasons, it makes sense to look first at the later poem, the rendition of the chimney sweep in
Songs of Experience:

There is nothing difficult at all here. The poem is a broadside against the gross exploitation of children, all the grosser by being trumped up in the clothes of piety. The retrospective voice of the child is experienced, and it speaks clearly its victimization: reduced to a “thing in the snow,” with only “weep” as language, it spells out its lesson of violation and victimization. Clothed for death, uncomplaining, it is sacrificed by its parents to the spurious claims of both Church and Throne. The equation could not be more obvious, and Blake ends with a fine spatial, even artisanal, metaphor: the “heaven” posed/constructed by that (vicious) trio of God, priest, and king is made up, literally composed, of children’s misery. Most shocking of all, perhaps, is the “innocence” of the parents themselves, who think they’ve done the child no injury. Anyone reading this poem sees it as a clear indictment, expressed by the comprehending victim, of a religious and political order that manifestly commoditizes its children.

Now, “knowing” (from the later poem) that chimney sweeps are victims of abuse at the hands of family, Church, and state, we are in a position to read the earlier poem with the same motif, but seen from the optic of innocence:

Few poems in the English canon move me as much as this one. At first we see the resemblances with the later, overtly critical piece: the child’s only words are the telltale “ ’weep! ’weep! ’weep!”—the child’s garbled version of “sweep”? or the natural language of pain?—but the parental arrangements are more severe: the mother is dead, and the child has been sold into servitude, to sleep in soot. One next expects—“one” being a reader with some sense of justice and some belief in children’s rights—a tirade lambasting such treatment, but instead our child speaker tells us of his comrade Tom Dacre’s experience. Little Tom’s head was shaved, but he was comforted by our speaker, who explained the advantages of such a procedure to Tom, namely that his white hair could no longer be soiled. Comforted, Tom dreams and has a vision. It is a vision of liberation and purity: all the sweeps (there are thousands of them now) are rescued from the black coffins where they are locked up (hardly a metaphor, this, if you think of them dying in the chimneys), and the rescuer is an Angel with a “bright key.” Free at last, the children run and laugh and play on the green plain, and wash in the river and shine in the sun. It is a chimney sweep’s vision not only of paradise, but also of resurrection itself: to move from life in death to joy in Heaven. And their pleasures grow: naked (no longer a hazard), free of their bags, they rise to the clouds and “sport in the wind.” Further, they now have a kind Father to look after them and keep them in this state of happiness, requiring only that they be “a good boy.”