Morning, Noon, and Night: Finding the Meaning of Life's Stages Through Books (19 page)

One reason I myself love this book is because of the blindness at its core. Des Grieux is a self-proclaimed apostle of love, but he never for a moment suspects his own hypocrisy: he cadges money from his best friend, he lies incessantly to get it from others, he cheats at cards but claims it’s a peccadillo, he even shoots a guard when he breaks out of the prison where he has been put (for theft and other little infractions, committed in the name of love). Yet there is not a whiff of guilt about him. On the contrary, he virtually preens with pride over the intensity of his feelings for Manon. There is something astonishing about a novel using a flawed hero to fight a just war. For the war is just: love should be a noble passion, and the barter culture of quasi prostitution that Des Grieux battles is a philistine culture indeed. The young man finds himself repeatedly (and literally) imprisoned by the structures of authority (family, Church, prison), and one cannot miss the Oedipal dimensions of this plot. Romeo and Juliet faced a family feud; Des Grieux is battling the entire system.

But this is literature, not sociology, and Prévost gives us in the portrait of Des Grieux a remarkable psychological confection, replete with longings and fears beyond the scrutiny of his consciousness. As said, his self-image remains blithely intact, even as we watch him sink into the mire of deception and self-deception. But there is a splendid network of images to convey insecurity and anxiety underneath his rhetoric and bravado, especially along sexual lines. For do not forget: he is a sexual champion of sorts, for the bliss he works feverishly to maintain is the sexual union with Manon (and we have textual evidence to suggest that she finds him an unparalleled lover); when you see that pattern, you realize that all the scenes of forced separation—many of them yanking the two of them directly out of bed—are virtually a form of coitus interruptus. Society does not want those two together.

The supreme moment of (textual) sexual trouble comes when Des Grieux and a friend are trying to rescue Manon from the dreaded prison L’Hôpital. Getting into her cell requires
“une clef d’une grandeur effroyable”
(a frighteningly huge key), eh, but once there, the intended disguise scheme—they will dress up Manon as a man in the clothing they’ve smuggled in—is in trouble, for they forgot to bring pants for her. No problem, we’re told. “However, there was only one thing to be done, and that was for me to leave my own breeches for Manon and get out somehow without them. My cloak was very long, and thanks to the help of a pin here and there I was fit to pass through the door with the decencies preserved.” Yes, the decencies are preserved, but one need not be a card-carrying Freudian to wonder at what is going on here: a man giving up his pants to his mistress, a man walking out of a prison with no pants on, a man exposed in his genitals (cloak or no cloak). Prévost’s story is an echoing one: it outfits its swooning oratorical hero with a plot and textual details (a gun that seems both loaded and not loaded, a sword that breaks, etc.) that call into question precisely the erotic battle against the fathers that is at its core.

Growing up is invariably about the young discovering and assuming power, and it is naive not to think about these matters sexually as well as physically, cognitively, and economically. Erotic war between father and son is at the core of
Oedipus
, and its familial frame tells us that the ascent of the young may well be inseparable from the vanquishing of the old. It will be seen, in the second half of this book, that the story of growing old is crucially inflected by these issues as the young challenge the power of the old in every domain, including the sexual. What is fascinating in
Manon Lescaut
, however, is the sneaky recognition that the young might also be an anxious lot, however much bravado they display. It is not clear to me that Prévost intended to signal such uncertainty in the role of Des Grieux, but the great beauty of art is that it always exceeds the intentions of the artist, so that we are justified in weighting these textualized moments of figurative anxiety to get a fuller picture of how complicated the trip from morning to noon can be. Art’s testimony about life is special in just this sense.

But I want to conclude my discussion of young love by returning to two of the motifs I’ve already emphasized: love itself as a surreal nightmare setting and the generalized problem of blindness. The strange new world that Des Grieux is obliged to chart and negotiate is more than Paris’s mercantile ethos. Of course, he fails utterly to see that money is the key to his systemic troubles, that all his talk about fate and the gods is twaddle: his love affair with Manon needs money just as a fire needs oxygen. But that is the least of it. The world he repeatedly collides with is Manon Lescaut. His high-flying rhetorical love code is not only maladapted to the Parisian culture of his moment but is alien, unattuned to the very woman he loves. Remember her words: “Do you really think we can love each other with nothing to eat?” Des Grieux is shocked by her vulgarity, but we who have read Marx and know that there is a material substratum to even the most ethereal pursuits must understand that she has a point. At another juncture, she tells him that the fidelity she expects of him is the fidelity of the heart. What is the fidelity of the heart? It denotes a view of love that can see beyond sexual possession. Des Grieux can make nothing of it.

What is a gal to do? Is that not the quintessential (unstated, unexplored) dilemma of Manon Lescaut? Des Grieux comes from a noble family, and he easily enough finds people to support his cause. He has cultural capital even if he is short of funds. He is the book’s first person, its impassioned speaker, conferring on this subversive novel an emotional immediacy of great power. Manon has only one thing: her beauty, her body. That is her currency. Hence she uses it every time she has to, to make her way in a setting that reifies her, that classifies her as sexual merchandise.

Lazarillo, Pablos, Huck, Rastignac, and the Invisible Man used wit and cunning to make their way. Manon’s assets are of a different stripe, but she understands their market value in a patriarchal society. So too does her anxious lover, a lover bent on staving off all male rivals. What is most cunning about
Manon Lescaut
is how much we have to work at it to understand Manon Lescaut; our work consists in taking her seriously as a person with her own values and formation, rather than judging her exclusively by Des Grieux’s exalted love code. This is not easy, for his is the eloquent hungry grandiose voice of possessive male desire, and his needs are indeed real.

So too are hers. And that is perhaps what we most need to take from the literature of young love: that each of the lovers is real, that each has wants, that the story of human relations is a perspectival story that mandates generosity everywhere, on the part of its characters and even its readers. Romeo and Juliet squabbled about larks versus nightingales. This young couple has considerably more to overcome than warring families, but perhaps their greatest problems lie closer to home, in the very makeup of consciousness and its inevitable blindsightedness, its constitutive myopia. Written long before Marx and the materialist philosophers challenged the tenets of idealism, written long before feminists fought to establish the rights of women, this brief tale, written so long ago, is much more than the account of a lover’s infatuation. It is an exploration of subjectivity itself, as well as an anatomy of its time, and it shows us that young love brings, as nothing else can, the complex forces and vectors of ourselves and our world into focus. The experience of love has caused both to grow, but there is little to celebrate and no diplomas are in sight. At story’s end, Manon, though reformed, dies, and Des Grieux, old beyond his years, is penitent. We do not know what they have learned. It is for us the readers to grasp the painful wisdom of this short novel: young love is grand, but it is also blind. Conflict, misunderstanding, and benightedness—about ourselves, our lovers, and our world—are constituent elements of the story of growing up.

Wuthering Heights
(1848) is one of the most powerful and heart-wrenching love stories ever written. It is also among the most primitive, savage, and frightening. Catherine Earnshaw, the spoiled and impetuous daughter of a prominent family, and the mysterious Heathcliff, a gypsylike orphan found in the Liverpool slums and adopted into the Earnshaw household, create in earliest childhood a bond that is indissoluble, that will turn out to be fateful for both of them. As tyrannical as the love potion that Tristan and Ysolde innocently swallow, the linkage between these two children fuses them—psychically, emotionally—into one being, and the novel helps us to see that a love of this sort is as much a curse as a blessing, for it erodes the contours of the two young people—they are still children—in such a way that each is permanently “inhabited” by the other.

At a pivotal moment in the novel, Catherine explains to Nelly, the shrewd housekeeper, that she is indeed fond of the genteel Edgar Linton, who courts her, but that her feelings for the lowly Heathcliff are of a different stamp altogether:

Brontë finds here a language for love that rivals the glory of Shakespeare. There are no references to the stars, nor to gloves or kisses, but the natural world is invoked with a rare pith and beauty, providing a code for what is transient and what is permanent, what is peripheral and what is essential. If Shakespeare and Prévost emphasized the ecstatic thrill of young love, Brontë bypasses pleasure altogether in order to speak of more basic and elemental things: “I
am
Heathcliff.” It is an astonishing statement, and there is nothing romantic about it. Further, Heathcliff could have said it about Catherine. Each contains the other, as “core” of identity, as fused subject. Desire has no role to play here. Love, at the level Brontë is articulating it, is a morphological truth, a redefinition of who and what you are, prior to sentiment or even cognition. Brontë’s oceanic depiction of young love is staggering in its implications, for it spells the end of individual agency and offers a view of human connection as structural, as if the loved one were an implant, were lodged inside oneself. Subjectivity seems overcome, and a new double creature, an amalgam of Catherine and Heathcliff, shimmers in front of our eyes. Such a view of human connection is, in my view, terrifying, on the order of a genetic liability rather than a glorious choice, and
Wuthering Heights
goes a long way toward measuring the horror that may result from such a scheme.

I call this scene pivotal because Heathcliff has overheard only Catherine’s initial remarks to Nelly about his being too low and degrading to be married and thus exited the house for good before those beautiful words are spoken, not to return for many years. The entire revenge plot hinges on this
malentendu:
Catherine will indeed marry Edgar, thinking Heathcliff is gone forever. But the rest of the novel will show us, in the most extraordinary and painstaking detail, just how sublime, awful, and true Catherine’s words are. When Heathcliff later returns—man-grown, distinguished, and powerful-looking, even rich—all hell breaks loose. He despises Edgar as too wimpish and unmanly for Catherine, is ready to throttle him, chastises Catherine viciously for her choice; Catherine herself senses that a storm is now coming that is beyond anyone’s control, that the raving Heathcliff is both demonic and correct, that her proper marriage will never withstand this violence, that her mental composure is beginning to come apart. And we see a sort of meltdown as the demons, the psychic forces let loose by human feeling, run their course, leading to a collapse that finishes in her death. As she is dying, Heathcliff, still hounding her, has the temerity to tell her that he can forgive her the homicidal injury to himself but not the suicidal one to her. And he is right; her marriage to Edgar is not far from a double murder. Her death maims him forever even though it does not kill him. She dies and he will live on, to enact his revenge. Love shines here in all its glory and horror. It looks more than a little psychotic.

How on earth can one imagine a successful growing-up model here? Catherine and Heathcliff are tormented, possessed creatures, as paralyzed and fixated on each other as the idiot Benjy on his lost Caddy. Des Grieux looks like a free agent by contrast. Later I will discuss in more detail the unprecedented violence, ferocity, and abuse of
Wuthering Heights
, but it is clear to me that Brontë’s creation is a profoundly ambiguous one: the Edenic fusion between these two young people has a beauty we are not likely to forget, but it is steeped in a kind of libidinal frenzy that must somehow be mellowed if life is to continue. And that is how one makes sense of the generational plot: the children of these plot-crossed lovers will be called upon to reorient things, to insert some degree of measure and rationality into these affairs. It is a brave effort in the right direction, but it can scarcely make us forget the Gothic to-the-death version of maniacal young love at the core of the book. The sick and sheltered Emily Brontë, who had seen so little of the large world, delivered herself of a primitive tale that seems to hark all the way back to Greek tragedy, a world where the gods sliced and diced, handing out to mortals whatever manias they felt like distributing, yielding a view of humans beset/composed by demonic forces beyond anyone’s control. We would not hesitate to pathologize such a scheme today and seek medical redress. Growing up finds itself in a tight corner.