Morning, Noon, and Night: Finding the Meaning of Life's Stages Through Books (22 page)

If we are in the dark when it comes to measuring what is cooking inside us—not so much tumors or aneurysms but the fixed yet evolving emotional patterns we are acting out—literature can be helpful in getting a sighting. But literature is not graffiti: it does not shriek out its significance on every page. Often enough, literature requires that we ourselves perform an interpretive labor that goes well beyond just making out the story: we need to read ethically as well as cognitively, in the sense of espying damage or abuse even when it is not signaled. This is not easy, in art or in life. Just as no one I have ever known carries a sign indicating the injuries he or she has received, so too do characters in literature go about their lives, feeling, thinking, speaking, acting, but often enough leaving it up to us to gauge the deeper impact of what has been done to them. In this segment of my book, focusing on stories of abuse, our work can be downright diagnostic. This amounts to an ethics of reading, and it seems particularly mandated when discussing the fates of children, who may possess precious little agency or not even garner much attention in the stories in which they appear.

Some writers put child abuse up front. One of the most painful set pieces in Dostoevsky’s
The Brothers Karamazov
is when Ivan speaks of the torture of children. Dostoevskian psychology in general is cued to insult and injury, and most of the relationships depicted in the novel have their share of gleefully inflicted pain. But nothing compares with the list of horrors that Ivan recounts, horrors that make (for him) any notion of God unacceptable (not incredible, just unacceptable): I will return the ticket, he says; no amount of later forgiveness or justice can eradicate the damage done to children as children. We learn of Turks ripping fetuses out of their mothers’ wombs and catching them on bayonets for the visual pleasure of the dying mothers; of the child Richard, brought up by shepherds, who was not even given pig mash to eat but beaten when he stole it; of an intelligent lady and gentleman who flog their seven-year-old daughter with ever more zest to arouse themselves; of a five-year-old girl flogged, kicked, and locked out all night in the outhouse, face smeared with excrement, forced by her mother to eat excrement; of an eight-year-old boy guilty of hurting the paw of a general’s hound and therefore made into the object of the hunt: undressed, hunted down in front of his mother’s eyes, torn to pieces by the dogs. (Note the twisted role of the caregivers in several of these anecdotes.)

Dostoevsky’s main story does not shy away from such abuse either, and we see an attenuated version of it in the fate of Ilyusha, the child who witnessed the angry Dmitri’s prolonged and vicious humiliation of the child’s father. The novel seems to want to measure how much damage children can stomach without dying. Ilyusha actually does die, but his father—buffoon though he is—recounts to Alyosha just how much torture the boy went through, making us realize that emotional pain beggars physical hurt: the hurt child—by having seen his father brutally taken down, literally pulled by his beard; our worst injuries can come to us via looking—is desperate for revenge, promises even to slay Dmitri when he grows up, then asks his father how much it costs to move, if they might move, if somehow, through spatial distance, one could find a way to erase what happened. These pages are hard going, as Dostoevsky explores vulnerability, showing it to be a huge country of its own, making us understand how bruising life in a family can and must be, how powerless children (and even their parents) are in a hierarchical culture.
The Brothers Karamazov
has more curiosity than any other novel written in the nineteenth century, and very much of it is cued to injured children.

And, still more awful, to
injuring children
. We see, for starters, the gang of children taunting Ilyusha, stoning him. But the pièce de résistance is to be found in the depiction of Lise, the partially crippled girl whom Alyosha will later marry: in a scene that defies comprehension or digestion, she reveals to her saintly older beau her fascination with torture, recounting the story of a Jew who captured a Christian child and tortured him to death for four hours. These four hours seem to her “delicious” in their slowness. They come close, in inflicted pain, to a crucifixion, but a crucifixion that provides virtually orgiastic pleasure for its onlookers and executioners. This sumptuous confection of horror reaches its pinnacle as Lise tells Alyosha that it would be capped off by her eating pineapple compote while watching the show. We have no maps for measuring such moves of the heart, such strange hungers, but any normative view of childhood is simply undone by such evocations. I believe that Lise’s recital of wonders is meant to send us back to Ivan’s proud view that God—even if he exists—must be rejected, given not only the world of executioners and victims he has bequeathed us but also the vile snake pit he placed deep inside us regarding pleasure and pain. Child-crucifiers ingesting pineapple compote as accompaniment would seem to be the ne plus ultra of crossed wires, of an abuse-world we cannot afford to believe in.

But think, for a moment, backward to what we’ve seen. Lazarillo, Pablos, and Simplicius were exposed to routine violence: nose in the throat, spat on and beshat, drugged and experimented with. Blake’s chimney sweep told us that “God and his priest and king, / … make up a heaven of our misery.” Remember Orlick’s venomous envy of Pip, which caused one, and almost two, murders. Or the treatment meted out (by other children as well as adults) to the orphan Heathcliff and the little Jane Eyre. Or even sweet Huck’s mockery of Jim in the fog episode. Or Ellison’s strapped-down boy receiving electric shocks. Dostoevsky’s pineapple compote takes us farther into the pit than many of us are prepared to go, but the heart has dark recesses, and the slaughter of the innocent takes place every day.

What role is there for art, even for journalism, here? Can these faces be looked at? Susan Sontag’s last book deals with our terrible complicity with suffering, our dreadful readiness as witnesses, willing and able (and desirous?) to take into us the vilest that life offers. Sontag poses a very severe question, it seems to me: does our apprehension of horror and abuse ever lead to social change? One knows that the photographs of the My Lai massacre in Vietnam did actually play a role in changing Americans’ attitudes toward that war, just as the photographs of torture in Abu Ghraib have altered Americans’ thinking about the Iraq war. Nonetheless, I think back to Rousseau’s troubling essay in the mid–eighteenth century against building a theater in Geneva: art’s representations, he argued, do nothing whatsoever to improve moral behavior. We weep at suffering in the theater and then walk serenely past the beggar outside, having already paid our dues, as it were. Can the story of abuse make a difference?

Dostoevsky’s broadside about injured and injuring children is in your face. But I have tried to argue that literature is often more indirect in its portrayals, hence requiring that we readers espy and measure the damage threatening children. Consider, for example, Thomas Mann’s celebrated
Death in Venice
, which charts the fascination/undoing of the writer, Aschenbach (a model of discipline and form), who sees in Venice a fleshly embodiment of the beauty he has always worshipped, but now in the form of the exquisite Polish boy Tadzio, with whom he falls tempestuously in love. About Aschenbach’s ensuing downfall, the textual evidence is in, but about Tadzio himself we know very little indeed—we see how his family, siblings, and friends treat him, we note his shimmering beauty—and I wonder what
his
story might look like, how it might feel to be this boy on vacation in Venice on the receiving end of Aschenbach’s desire.

Tadzio is the object of someone’s appetite, and we simply do not know how to measure these things. In every sense of the term: measure their ethical significance, measure them at all. Ponder this: What if appetite were visible? What if affect had a color? What if my lust or revulsion for you or anyone in the crowd were a Technicolor affair, a bright umbilical cord extending from me to my “target”—or had a smell like a fart—so that it would be known to all? Brave new world, indeed. Perhaps we should be grateful that we see through a glass darkly. In life, others’ motives are invisible, but in art it is different. Yet even there we are on the line, having to grasp what “Here caddie” actually means.

I am not asking that we always read against the grain, but that we read generously, that we widen our sense of the moral life, extending it to minor as well as major players. Minor versus major players: the egocentric nature of subjectivity mandates that each of us is the major player of his or her life, but are we not the minor players in the lives around us, the lives of those we love, those we hate, those we touch, those we ignore? So the pressing question is: can imagination get us beyond our own precincts? We again bump into the general utility of literature: it schools us in feeling, sometimes around corners (where we are likely to be most deficient), by asking us to take seriously—as real—the fates and feelings of the people it presents, especially when they are children growing up.

Consider, in this regard, what is in store for little Miles and Flora in Henry James’s masterpiece “The Turn of the Screw.” Given that the story is (brilliantly) refracted through the lenses of the governess, what we most see in this fiction is her valiant and arduous and nonstop effort to protect her young charges from evil, namely from what she perceives ever more clearly as the sinister designs of the “dead” ghosts, Quint and Jessel, who seem to her bent on initiating the angelic little ones into some kind of awful sexual complicity. But here too, if you take a step back from this piece and give your head a good shake, so as to free it from the tug of the governess’s angle of vision, you see two children exposed to the increasingly passionate wants of the woman who is supposed to be protecting them, and one feels that these wants have a libidinal character of their own. The story climaxes with the exit of the injured girl, Flora, and the death of the boy, Miles; I cannot help ultimately viewing him as a victim of the governess’s appetites, even though her conscious motives are noble. Miles does not grow up. He dies at/in the hands of his caregiver. James never even whispers to us to pass judgment, but I sometimes feel that Jamesian indirection may tell us more about the muffled, actual character and nature of abuse than Dostoevskian pineapple compote does.

In this vein of bringing occulted things to the light, let me now address “the saga of Cécile Volanges.” I suspect that most readers will have no clue as to whom I am referring to. Cécile Volanges is a somewhat minor character in the elegant but deadly eighteenth-century French epistolary novel
Les liaisons dangereuses
by Pierre Choderlos de Laclos, a text devoted largely to showcasing the astonishing erotic campaigns of the two key seducers at the core of the novel: the Vicomte de Valmont and Mme. de Merteuil. The novel is complex, but essentially two major relationships—or liaisons—remain embedded in our minds long after we’ve read the book (or seen any of the fine films made of it): the front-and-center seduction plot involving Valmont’s increasingly desperate courtship of the virtuous Mme. de Tourvel and the more occluded but ultimately more fascinating and venomous relationship between Valmont and Merteuil themselves, which progresses in the novel from a strategic partnership to a fatal libidinal war of two. As for Cécile Volanges, she is, as it were, the cannon fodder of the novel: the convent-educated, utterly naive daughter of Mme. de Volanges who is in love with the equally naive music teacher Danceny. She becomes cannon fodder by falling into the clutches and designs of Valmont and Merteuil.

Initially the perfidious Mme. de Merteuil—seen by all as virtuous, in the confidence of both Mme. de Volanges and Cécile—seeks to help Cécile and Danceny acknowledge (and perhaps consummate) their mutual affection, but soon enough things change. Valmont becomes apprised of the fact that Mme. de Volanges is cautioning Mme. de Tourvel to have nothing to do with him, given his reputation as a world-class rake, and his furious reaction is to take sexual revenge, not by attacking the old mother (no sexual payoff there) but by seducing the young daughter (while pretending to be furthering her relationship with Danceny). All this takes place, as so much eighteenth-century fiction does, in a country house, where Valmont’s aunt Mme. de Rosemonde has invited her friends for a visit: Mme. de Tourvel, Cécile and her mother, and of course her dashing nephew Valmont. Our seducer goes to work by arranging to get himself into Cécile’s bedroom at night, ostensibly to speak to her of Danceny—remember her naiveté—and he successfully initiates her into the erotic life, at first by bullying and soon enough in a consensual manner. She is a good student.

A not pretty, but not unfamiliar, story, you might think. But it acquires some spice thanks to Valmont’s manner of going about his business. First of all, Cécile is a sufficiently silly goose—sexually hungry though she is—to believe that what she is doing with Valmont has no relevance to her continued devotion to the sweet Danceny (who is told by Valmont that he, Valmont, is working hard for his young friend, to bring the two young ones together). Second, as part of his revenge strategy, Valmont has decided to corrupt Cécile by trying out all forms of sexual coupling, by equipping the young girl with an erudite technical vocabulary for the postures they are assuming (a vocabulary calculated to produce some shock on the wedding night for whoever marries the virtuous Cécile). Third, Valmont regales the young girl with stories (when he is not fornicating with her), and these stories are filled with dirt about her own mother, about Mother’s putative earlier sexual escapades (suavely invented by Valmont). But his most productive move of all is that he has systematically avoided taking any precautions in his intercourse with Cécile.

As you might expect, this cannot end well. Cécile becomes pregnant and miscarries, without even knowing exactly what her body has conceived and is now expelling. The young girl nonetheless realizes that her life has gone terribly amok and asks her mother to be sent to a convent to finish out her days. Mother understands nothing and is miserable at this outcome, is now prepared even to let her daughter marry the penniless Danceny, but when she asks Mme. de Rosemonde for advice here, the old lady—who has learned of the manifold deceptions carried out in her house by her nephew—advises the mother to consent to her daughter’s request and never to ask why. There is much pathos here: lose your daughter forever, never ask why. The old Mme. de Rosemonde functions virtually as the container of the novel, the residual recipient of all its horrors, and she feels personally defiled at book’s end, sickened by what has been possible in her house and family (Valmont is her favorite), by what predators can do to children.