Morning, Noon, and Night: Finding the Meaning of Life's Stages Through Books (31 page)

In Unn’s bedroom (where Auntie is prominently not welcome), Siss will discover just how wild Unn is: shy, reclusive, yet filled with forbidden things that seem to seep out of her, such as the news that her (dead) mother wasn’t married, such as the intuition that she might not go to Heaven, such as the disturbing question she puts to Siss when they both disrobe and compare bodies: “Did you see anything on me just now?” What might there be to see on a naked eleven-year-old body? (My students have been trying to answer this question for decades now, coming up with theories of bad conscience, hidden injury, concealed sexual abuse, pregnancy, and much else.) All we will ever know for sure is that Unn feels marked. But what the book thrusts at us even more powerfully is how Siss is going to be marked by this bedroom encounter, an encounter that achieves its most magic and troubling form when the two naked girls look into the mirror. What, Vesaas asks, did they see?

I’m not sure that prose gets better than this. (The Norwegian original is no stronger than the translation.) We see here an elemental fusion of beings—the kind of thing adults strive to achieve, fitfully, in their adult fashion later in life—and it is at once beautiful and terrifying, for it spells out the erasure of who one is, the collapse of boundaries and contours that delineate us. Instead, there is the hole, the abyss, that draws us in like a vortex; call it eyes, call it a mouth, but you cannot name its owner, for that figure is now multiple, twinned, and moreover the mirror asserts its own irresistible tug, its pull into elsewhere. There are no good terms for this.
Love
or
desire
will take us only so far, for we can also sense the capsizing and shipwreck adumbrated here, the dissolution of “I”: so many signs of the fluid hungry promiscuous self that can no longer maintain its borders.

Can we be surprised that one of these children will die? Of course it will be the unanchored one, the one with the least ballast to offset the tug of desire that has made its way into their lives. But whereas Mignon and Pearl exit discreetly from their books, because they are closer to the margins of the stories being told, Unn’s departure from the living is among the most haunting things I know in literature. She will be initiated into the Ice Palace. My phrase may suggest a fairy-tale dispensation, but Vesaas stays true to the world we know—the world we think we know—by having Unn gradually, increasingly, tragically leave the path of safety to heed the call she experiences. She will not go to school after the bedroom rendezvous with Siss, she cannot face those eyes again, she will instead (!) make her way toward the much-bruited palace of ice that has formed at the end of the lake as it overflows into the river. By page fifty-six Unn is dead; one is shocked in the same way that Mrs. Ramsay’s death in Virginia Woolf’s
To the Lighthouse
shocks: we feel that rules have been breached, that central characters are “supposed” to make it to the end alive. This is especially true of child characters, and Unn’s dying advertises the steely truth that fuels Vesaas’s book: desire can kill, openness to love and life can kill.

But it doesn’t happen at once. As I said, she is initiated. Burdened by her own never-specified ghosts—“Did you see anything on me?”—Unn thinks incessantly of both Siss and the Other as she traverses the woods, remembering an early episode when she almost drowned, lying on the icy surface of the lake and seeing its denizens dart toward her, sensing deep underneath the steady roar and current of the river: “flowing through her and lifting her up and saying something to her which was just what she needed.” Growing up is the concept of this book, but Vesaas gives us to understand that children are most capacious, most dimensional, most alive
as children
, that what we call maturation is likely to be a time of setting limits and closing doors, not of growth. The wild child is coextensive with the vast structure of ice—“an enchanted world of small pinnacles, gables, frosted domes, soft curves and confused tracery”—that she finally enters, exploring it room by room, finding that passages open for her for one reason only: her desire to enter. One room is a forest, another is the home of the cold, another is a room of tears. She has flitting images of her dead mother, of Auntie, of Siss. She is being writ large. She is exploring her domains.

At first reading, one keeps hoping she will snap out of it, find her way back, her way out, but of course it all flows in the other direction: she must enter, even when it requires removing her thick coat so she can slip through the next fissure; and we know, now, that death will claim her. But how grand it is. A great eye of ice, full of light, sees her, sees through her. Her final thoughts are “Here I am. I’ve been here all the time. I haven’t done anything.” The winter solar god reclaims his palace, along with the child caught within it. Unn has lost ties with everything but light. The fiery eye drowns the room in flames, causes it to dance as the child—“languid and limp and ready”—merges with the elements. I find no spiritual payoff here, no moment of personal revelation, but rather an initiation of the child into nature’s endless pageant. Whatever Unn may be concealing is dwarfed by the transformation she is undergoing. Vesaas has charted a trajectory that is commensurate with all the fierceness and wonder and desire on the far side of our rules of decorum and preservation, and it leads ultimately to the dissolution of the human subject. I see a kind of purity and valor here that are at once beautiful and heartbreaking. “Here I am,” Unn says to propitiate the solar god, who will kill her, but the book’s truth is other: “I” is not here, “I” is undone. The prophecy in the mirror—“I” is a fiction, fusion is everything—has come true.

The rest of the novel is devoted to Siss, and it probes, with great tenderness and wisdom, how it feels to survive and what it means to mature. You may recall the pairing strategy I ascribed to Vesaas—juxtapose the “raw” and the “cooked,” if you wish to take their joint measure—and it is time now for Siss to make sense of her friend’s death and of that single spellbinding moment they shared, a moment that the entire community believes to hold the secret of Unn’s fate. Hence Siss is hounded to tell what she knows about Unn, but what she knows—in her marrow—has to do with the four-eyed figure in the mirror and is essentially untellable. But that is not all: her response to Unn’s disappearance—no one quite wants to acknowledge that she must be dead—plays out along the lines of Freud’s thesis in “Mourning and Melancholia”: crucial wires seem to get crossed, and instead of systematically cutting ties with the dead one, Siss seems to blend ever further into her, en route not only to assuming Unn’s antisocial, outsider status—do not forget, Siss was the class leader, the solid one—but ultimately moving toward a second death, so that she too will leave the living. Mercifully, wisely, that does not quite happen; instead, we follow Siss’s painful recovery from trauma and grieving, as she is increasingly weaned from her lost comrade, indeed weaned from the tug of death itself.

Siss gets through her ordeal; she heals. Her parents, her friends, and the reader watch this child slowly wend her way back into the social fabric of the community, to align herself finally and solidly with the living. But the route to that secure and benign end station requires virtually reliving Unn’s own dissolution. Nothing is volitional here. We seem to be watching the primitive moves of the organism itself that must sever its bonds with the dead, must say no to the sirenlike tug of love if it is to survive. Vesaas writes the story of survival as finely and movingly as he does the story of dissolving (for that is what Unn does: she dissolves among the elements). Siss has her own calvary, and it is arguably far more painful than anything that the doomed Unn ever went through, for Siss has lost love and must somehow be healed. It is little short of amazing that Vesaas can make us believe in the depth and dignity of what was, crassly speaking, a one-night stand, a brief encounter between two little girls in a bedroom. Yet at some spiritual level it works, and I think it does so because we are perhaps freer, more available, more flowing, less bounded at eleven than we ever are later. Hence Siss must go through her ordeal. Her parents, friends, and community understand to perfection that this child has been touched by death, that she too may succumb. That she does not is cued to a clear seasonal logic that moves through winter into spring, through frozen ice into flowing sap. At the novel’s close, Siss is threaded back into the community and life prevails.

But death has had its mesmerizing run, and no one—neither Siss nor the reader—is likely to forget it. And that, I think, is what Vesaas most wanted to depict: how life sorts out who lives and who dies. Not through weakness or strength, but through something more complex and unjudgeable: the ability, or the inability, to resist going all the way, to resist nature’s magnetic call or love’s unraveling force. Here, it seems to me, is what the trajectory of the wild child can make visible to us: how much luck and grace are needed for the most beautiful among us to get through childhood intact, for Unn remains in our mind the exquisitely damned one, the one without defenses or cover, the one incapable of compromise or adaptation, the one doomed to go under. You cannot read this book without feeling that hers is at once the keenest and fullest life of the novel, brief though it is: keen in the way knife blades are keen and full in the sense of taking her place in that larger scheme that knows nothing of human doing. This feeling is perhaps tantamount to an intuition that Vesaas has graphed childhood itself in his lyrical novel: childhood as our time of maximum reach and promise, a time prior to the hardening of skin that accompanies growing up, while it quietly goes about closing the doors of experience.

Toni Morrison’s Sula, in the 1973 novel of that name, is the enfant terrible of my study. The mysterious Unn, albeit fatally open to the call of desire, remains a closed figure for the reader, who can make no more of her psychology or actual secrets than Siss can. Sula Peace, however, is a different piece of work, and by book’s end we have an unforgettable sense of just how wild—how free and terrifying and doomed—the wild child can be, because we have seen up close a genuine philosophic program of untrammeled, indeed unstoppable, self-emancipation that has no truck whatsoever with community values or any other kind of ethical constraints. I cannot help thinking that Morrison was trying to get something out of her system when she wrote this Rimbaud-like story of a young girl who went right over the edge and kept on going. Like Vesaas, Morrison has enlisted a binary scheme for getting Sula across: she is paired with the sensitive but “straight” Nel Wright, and the contrapuntal fireworks of this arrangement pay real dividends.

Vesaas’s Unn is significantly without parents (even though she lives with Auntie), and much of her mystery comes from the riddles and anxiety of her past. About Sula’s origins, however, we know a great deal, and we realize that the wild child can have a wild pedigree, can in fact be a chip off the old block. The Peace women are unforgettable: the mother, Hannah, is easygoing, free-loving, and destined to die in spectacular fiery fashion. But the grandmother, Eva Peace, ranks high on the list of astonishing Morrison creations: one-legged (and rich because of it, they say; something to do with insurance), the murderess of her drug-addicted son, Plum (whom she saved as a baby by inserting lard into his anus and whom she sets ablaze in a sequence that deserves to be anthologized: Eva descending the stairs on crutches, “swinging and swooping like a giant heron,” then dousing her sleeping boy with kerosene and throwing lit newspaper on him). Poetic justice sets in when Hannah is subsequently in flames—you can be incandescent in Morrison’s world—and Eva hoists herself to the window, aims her body at her burning daughter, and misses by twelve feet, as Hannah “her senses lost, went flying out of the yard gesturing and bobbing like a sprung jack-in-the-box.” This is Sula’s lineage.

The first signs of what Sula is made of appear when she (and Nel) encounter older white bullies aching to humiliate the black girls: Sula pulls out a paring knife, puts down her lunch pail, books, and slate, puts her left forefinger on the slate, and slashes off the tip of her finger. Then she informs the boys, “If I can do that to myself, what you suppose I’ll do to you?” The next installment occurs when Sula helps the little boy Chicken Little climb a tall beech by the river: she helps him up, she helps him partway down, but before getting to the bottom, she swings him around and around. Here is how Morrison writes what happens next: “His knickers ballooned and his shrieks of frightened joy startled the birds and the fat grasshoppers. When he slipped from her hands and sailed away out over the water they could still hear his bubbly laughter.” And that’s it, at least until his swollen body is found by a bargeman later that afternoon. Giant herons, a sprung jack-in-the-box, ballooning knickers, startled birds, fat grasshoppers: Morrison has positioned her children in a landscape and a language every bit as animistic and roiling as that of Tarjei Vesaas.

Unlike Unn, who exits early, Sula has a lot of work to do before dying. She goes off to college and returns home ten years later, ready to make good on the apprenticeship with chaos that began with the tip of a finger and a drowned child. She walks into Eva’s house and puts the old matriarch on notice that all the old contracts are breached. Told that she should make some babies and settle down, she replies that she intends to make herself. Called “pus mouth” and told that God is going to strike her, she replies, “Which God? The one watched you burn Plum.” Called a “crazy roach” and told that hellfire is burning inside her, she replies, “Whatever’s burning in me is mine!” This is rough stuff: Promethean, rebellious, out to corral the elements themselves in her quest for self-enactment, self-deification. Can we be surprised that her favorite area of actualization is sex? Here is self-assertion: “particles of strength gathered in her like steel shavings drawn to a spacious magnetic center, forming a tight cluster that nothing, it seemed, could break.” Lying under a man, she felt not submission but “her own abiding strength and limitless power.” This power is on show when her dear friend Nel opens a door to find Sula and Jude, Nel’s husband, down on all fours, naked, nibbling, barely even touching. Sula is her own creation, indeed her own experiment: “As willing to feel pain as to give pain, to feel pleasure as to give pleasure, hers was an experimental life.” Nel is burned, ruined by Sula’s play.