Morning, Noon, and Night: Finding the Meaning of Life's Stages Through Books (17 page)

The book is now poised to complete the learning curve, via the protagonist’s long stint with the Brotherhood, acting as its agent in Harlem. The story of maturation has acquired its defining contours. After all, he has been turned invisible and let loose, quasi-lobotomized. He has yet to act on the key principle that invisibility is the precondition of power if you know how to harness the system, to operate the machinery (rather than being operated by it). The long political education that constitutes the book’s second half is stamped by the hero’s growing awareness of being used (again) by others. He gradually realizes that he is a pawn of the Brotherhood; he also comes to understand that its ideology is utterly unequipped to take the measure of race as the dominant factor in the social misery that needs changing.

And, reminiscent of both
Père Goriot
and
Great Expectations
, the novel reworks its family tropes, redefines the unit that matters, makes us rethink notions of both family and community, so that the young man increasingly realizes that his search for “fathers” must yield to a recognition of his true “brothers,” brothers with no connection to the Brotherhood. Rastignac had to choose between Goriot and Vautrin; Pip has to recognize that Magwitch is his figurative father. Ellison’s protagonist, at book’s end, has to define himself against a cluster of black brothers: Tod Clifton the Jesus figure, who is shot down by the police; Raz the Exhorter, who wants to jolt Harlem into militant action against white folks; and most mysterious of all, Rinehart the numbers runner and ladies’ man, with whom our protagonist is significantly mistaken. All three of these “brothers” are figures of racial reaction. One is sacrificed, one preaches war, and the third works via mask and cunning. Together they constitute a weave of black positions, all geared to a central awareness of race as the governing principle of behavior. The protagonist elects at the end to take on their collective mantle, via his move to the underground, living in a blaze of electric lightbulbs, thinking through his next moves, and telling his story.

Invisible Man
, despite its sound and fury, can often allow the protagonist himself to remain marginal to events, including events where he is at center stage. One feels that the fellows administering the electric shock treatment may have succeeded in emptying the protagonist, in making him a cipher. He is muffled throughout, from the thick incomprehension displayed at the Battle Royal on through his encounters with power figures who know how to work the system: Bledsoe, Brockway, folks applying electrodes, Brotherhood chiefs, and finally the triad of black brothers who represent the possibilities of taking a genuine existential stand. What is to be his stand? How will he go about altering society? By going underground. By assuming the mantle of invisibility. By entering the machinery. He reminds me a great deal of Rastignac at the close of
Père Goriot:
the law student makes his fateful choice of living masked, of hiding the heart. And perhaps that is the grimmer truth that shines through this long novel. Purposive behavior goes out of business. Social change remains beyond the pale. Ellison has limned a portrait of a man responding to the system by virtually disappearing, by being almost erased.

But not entirely. He has not lit out for the Territory, he is not dead, he is not living in a cave in Crete. He lodges quite comfortably, thank you, in his extravagantly well-lit laboratory, taking current from the system without paying for it, thinking through his options, recognizing his place in a long line of American thinker-tinkers, beginning with Franklin and Edison. He has come a long way. And, like the Ancient Mariner, he has a tale to deliver himself of, a story about race in America and how hard it is to see clear. Ellison’s chastened protagonist, so unequal to circumstances throughout his picaresque adventures, evinces considerable wisdom in his final parting shot: “Who knows, but that, on the lower frequencies, I speak for you?”

And he does. I’d suggest that we live in a time when the curse of invisibility—so long a trope of science fiction—bids to become the ideological truth of our own dark age, stamping not merely racial differences but economic, class, religious, ethnic, tribal, and national differences. His arduous journey toward light, so triumphantly and literally enacted at the book’s klieglike shiny close, reads like a modern-day Ibsen tale of maturation and seeing clear. With considerable pizzazz and brio, Ellison has written this odyssey in musical fashion, giving us a rhythmic, often dazzling spectacle of figure and mask, of the paths to self-enactment as motifs in a score, as improvisational riffs in a performance. It is a provocative model, for it transforms what is hardest about the weight of facts and experience—the hardness of the jug or statue that Lazarillo’s head collided with, the hardness of racism in mid-twentieth-century America—into something malleable, musical, and even masterable.

The noted scholar Henry Louis Gates has posited “signifyin’ ” as the central strategy of much African-American literature, by which he means that the freedom of the oppressed lies in their ability to rework and twist and put to their own uses the forms handed down by the oppressor. It is a handsome thesis, at once creative and unillusioned, and perhaps it gestures toward a can-do-ism that is broadly American and not exclusive to black artists, for perhaps we are always doomed to fashion whatever freedoms and fictions we can out of the facts that hold us in bondage. Lazarillo finishes as town crier, Pablos as con man, Rastignac as someone poised to sell out, Pip as chastened young man. They do not change the world. So it is that the Invisible Man liberates no one—certainly not the oppressed of Harlem—other than himself. But all of them live to tell the tale. Perhaps the story of experience can go no further than that.

Roughly a third of the way into Laurence Sterne’s brilliant eighteenth-century narrative potpourri,
Tristram Shandy
, the author informs us that it is time to write his preface. Hence, well into my account of the business of childhood, the trip from morning to noon, I now come to the central, abiding life force that reigns over the experience of growing up, often determining whether it is even-keeled, nurtured, ecstatic, deprived, or destroyed: love. Happy love, sad love, twisted love, abusive love, no love: surely our trajectory through childhood (and life itself) is deeply, crucially enabled or disabled by this basic motor force. Whether it be the role of family, the discovery of passion, the treatment of peers, the victimization by society, or the grieving for the dead, the young are formed and deformed by their apprenticeship with this primal feeling in all its many guises.

One reason I place this topic so late in the book is that I’ve been talking about love all along, since there is no way to imagine growing up without referencing it or its lack. Blake’s innocent chimney sweep is at once deprived of love and overflowing with it, as he comforts and counsels little Tom Dacre. What Huckleberry Finn feels deep inside him, so deep that it is at war with all the received views of his culture (including the voice of conscience), is a tender, abiding emotional attachment for an escaped slave, an attachment that is profoundly familial, for Jim emerges as Huck’s figurative father. Given the racism of the culture, it is indeed a love that dare not speak its name. The
pícaros
Lazarillo and Pablos seem untouched by love—it would seem an incredible luxury item as well as a vulnerability in their straitened affairs—but the same cannot be said for Rastignac, whose affection for Delphine is real and whose beautiful ministrations for Goriot constitute whatever “heart” Balzac’s novel has. Pip’s entire life can be seen as parsed by the presence, absence, construing, and misconstruing of love: hopelessly pining for the cold and haughty Estella, painfully recognizing the humanity and tenderness of Magwitch the convict, realizing too late that Joe and Biddy offered him the true kindness, nurturance, and affection that can never be regained.

How do we measure the love we receive or lack? Neither science nor psychology can give us a definitive answer, for neither empirical research nor sustained introspection yields a bottom line. Many of us spend our entire lives trying to get a fix on this elusive equation, and we do so because we realize it is the factor most responsible for determining who we are, who we’ve become. Yet just as we cannot see the oxygen we must inhale in order to breathe and live, we cannot easily gauge the lines of force that are so regnant in our development over time. In that regard literature can be invaluable to us as a map of human feelings, a curious map that writes large what must forever elude our retina: the reality of connection, the linkages we seek or suffer, the relationships that nurture or coerce the self we take ourselves to be. Novels offer a strange cartography along just these lines, for they are perforce ecosystems, charting the individual’s comings and goings within a mesh that contains others: loved others, hated others, ignored others, sometimes fatal others. Still more remarkably, these categories do not rule one another out: the story of love invariably runs the gamut of all these poles and positions, for they constitute its force field. What is love, if not the elemental opening of self onto something larger, whether it calls itself parents, lovers, society, country, even God? That crucial opening is the precondition of our moral and emotional growth, but it is also the threshold stage that exposes us to hurt as well as ecstasy, to injury or death as well as fulfillment and happiness. These are the inevitable, generic conditions of growing up.

In the pages ahead, we will examine love’s place in the story of growing up by discussing four distinct areas of human experience: falling in love, suffering abuse, being sacrificed, coming to terms with the nightmare of history. As different as these may appear, their significance in the development of young people is cued directly to the basic need for love and the consequences thereof. Literature gifts us with a sighting on these matters and thereby helps us to a clearer understanding of where we ourselves have been and what has happened to us on our journey.

Falling in love is the glorious, liminal experience that so many of us place at the center of growing up. It does not seem exaggerated to regard it as the greatest show on earth, as the defining adventure of growing up, as the primordial challenge to both identity and society, for it bids to alter both. I would hope that anyone reading these pages has some firsthand knowledge of the topic. But it is also true that much of what we know about this crucial phase in human life comes to us from books. Don Quixote was doomed to see the world through the prism of courtly romances; Emma Bovary went into adulthood nourished (blinded) by the love stories she had read in the convent. Well before puberty all of us are acculterated into notions of love, notions we inevitably (even if unknowingly) bring to our love life. It can seem strange that love—seemingly the most intimate and personal of human experiences—is also something of a readymade, something molded and pre-contoured in our minds and hearts well before we try it out in reality. Time for a closer look. I want now to tackle this rich, explosive theme head-on by looking at a sequence of exemplary texts about such matters that might serve as a baseline for our understanding of what young love means.

Who does not know the story of the star-crossed lovers from Verona? “Romeo” has passed,
as name
, into the popular culture, designating a “lover-boy.” Love may be born inside the human heart, but it quickly extends, via Shakespeare’s lyricism, into the firmament, displaying its fuller cosmic dimensions. Here is a form of emotional space travel antedating by many centuries our scientific era but possessed of comparable boosting power. Romeo, hidden, is mesmerized by the sight of the fair Juliet on her balcony, and he proffers the well-known Petrarchan comparison of eyes to stars, feeling that the heavenly stars “entreat her eyes / To twinkle in their spheres.” Love makes curious as well as tender: he takes his own metaphor seriously and asks, “What if her eyes were there, they in her head?” To this fine query comes an answer, and what was a cliché explodes into something far richer: “The brightness of her cheek would shame those stars / As daylight doth a lamp; her eyes in heaven / Would through the airy region stream so bright / That birds would sing and think it were not night.”

There we have it: love propels the loved one into the heavenly bodies, but as a force of transfiguration and power, deifying the human while refiguring the natural order, so that human beauty “shames” that of the heavens and Juliet’s radiance becomes outright demiurgic, turning night into light, tricking the birds and triggering their song. Young love alters all givens, redistributes light and dark, sound and silence, makes a world of its own. “Brave new world,” Miranda will say in
The Tempest
, announcing the core truth about love’s explosive, quasi-colonializing power, inserting the human into a richer, grander world than before, put there as monarch. Each love text we will study reaffirms this elemental fact: love rebirths us, gifts us with a new homeland. (There can be terror as well as beauty in these arrangements.)

Later in the play, married but not yet “enjoyed” (as she puts it), Juliet wonderfully reverses the radiance scenario imagined by Romeo, for she awaits her lover/husband. And again the cosmos is refigured: “Come, gentle Night, come, loving, black-browed Night, / Give me my Romeo, and when I shall die, / Take him and cut him out in little stars, / And he will make the face of heaven so fine / That all the world will be in love with night / And pay no worship to the garish sun.” Night, gentle and dark, is the time for lovemaking. But we can scarcely fail to note what is more broadly dark in her words: her death leading to a dead Romeo, cut into little stars, even if still so entrancing that he will overtrump the sun and command the love of all.

The laws of gravity also yield to love’s indwelling power. Romeo asserts to Juliet that love endowed him with wings, and the Friar informs us that “A lover may bestride the gossamers [spiderweb] / That idles in the wanton summer air, / And yet not fall,” displaying yet again love’s unique vehicular power. But leaping over walls, leaping even into the firmament, implies feeling’s outward reach; Shakespeare is no less concerned to speak of its inward weight and measure, and there are few domestic notations in literature that match Romeo’s exquisite desire, when he is transfixed by her on the balcony, to touch Juliet’s face: “O that I were a glove upon that hand, / That I might touch that cheek.” The playwright’s large-souled register comes into view here: among the stars, bestriding spiderwebs, becoming a glove, all this writes large the mix of ecstasy (propelling outward) and intimacy (flesh to flesh) that charts love’s course. This is exquisite: young love thrusts us into new precincts, so that body and universe intermingle, each empowering the other.