Morning, Noon, and Night: Finding the Meaning of Life's Stages Through Books (46 page)

But she imagines, as well, an Edenic love for this young couple—so different from how Racine has depicted them, for Hippolyte is anything but proud of his appetite, feels almost defiled by it—as if Eden had come into being as the lost, utterly fantasized homeland of those exiled to Hell.
“Tous les jours se levaient clairs et sereins pour eux.”
Each of their days is clear and serene. Told that the young lovers will not get away with it, that they will be caught and punished and even killed, Phèdre sublimely counters,
“Ils s’aimeront toujours.”
They will love forever. Not unlike the ecstatic descent into the Labyrinth, we see here a dream of innocent lovemaking, of desire sanctioned, of desire gratified forever. The borders of the play are being expanded almost beyond recognition, as Racine charts the landscape of the soul: not what it gets but what it wants yet cannot have. Is age significant here? Yes. This is an older person’s plaint about craving more from life than she has received. There is wistfulness, perhaps even nostalgia, as well as bitterness and outright mania in Phèdre’s imagined Eden, an Eden for the young. It’s not that Racine bears a grudge against the old but that Phèdre is on the wrong side of the divide, that her yearnings are unnatural in more ways than one.

That is why I insist on this woman’s lucidity as one of her claims to greatness: she sees it all, sees the entire dark machinery of lust and revenge that is driving her, sees her own actions as taking place on a larger stage, one that includes the gods, her ancestors. Thus, in midimprecation against the offending couple, she stops, looks up, takes measure, realizes to the full just what she is doing, just what she has become.
“Je respire à la fois l’inceste et l’imposture. / Mes homicides mains, promptes à me venger, / Dans le sang innocent brûlent de se plonger. / Misérable! Et je vis? Et je soutiens la vue / De ce sacré soleil dont je suis descendue?”
It is one of the great recognition moments in literature. It has none of the self-servingness that one detects even in Oedipus and Othello as they confront their actions at play’s end. Instead, this woman sees herself as the miasma, the living proof of a wrecked world: she breathes incest and deceit; her hands want to plunge into human flesh, burn to do so, reminding us of ancient sacrifice, primitive rites. How can it be? she asks. A granddaughter of the sun itself, mythically, she is a blot against the light, even as she creates more and more light, unbearable light, illuminating every nook and cranny of her libidinal wants, beyond anything that, say, Ibsen will do in his light-obsessed theater. Her crime? Sexual desire.

I quite realize that a seventeenth-century tragedy about an older woman’s forbidden desire for her stepson may well seem out of step with today’s cultural assumptions and views about sexuality. And I am the first to admit, even to emphasize, the extreme severity of Racine’s vision. Yet I feel this play has no rivals when it comes to depicting the landscape of desire and the mechanics of both jealousy and injury. Phèdre’s reenactment of the descent into the Labyrinth with her young lover—an erotic journey possible only as ecstatic dream scenario, a scenario slated to be smashed to pieces by the male’s horrified rejection—stands as one of the great formulations in our literature about the dimensionality, the cartography, of feeling, the yearned-for, even if censored, fusion that is not to be. Is this not the terrain of art: to chart a territory that is true to the magnitude of our longings even if it is never to be actualized?

Likewise, I find her anguished certainty that Hippolyte and Aricie loved innocently, were free to love forever, even beyond death, no less stirring and unforgettable as testimony about the workings of human longing and its sibling, jealousy: when we cannot have what we desire, we all too easily imagine others, especially hated rivals, having it all. As readers of the play, we know how erroneous Phèdre’s fantasies are: the young lovers are as ill fated as she is, and Hippolyte is almost as guilt-ridden as she is. So what? She projects onto them exactly the pleasure and ease that will never be her portion. Jealousy is horribly creative. It may be that rebuffed desire knows no age, but I sense in Phèdre’s grand twisted emotions, in her dashed hopes and self-flagellation, in her being inflamed by a beautiful young man, something particularly cued to her moment in time, akin to a dawning awareness that she is on the far side of things. She has exceeded her rights. To burn, as she has burned, as she still burns, is pollution, is a crime against nature and cosmos. At play’s end, she, dying, and Theseus, haunted by his murderous oath, both know that the world is darkening, the story of love has come to an end.

A final word on this ravaged woman. She is admittedly no matriarch, and she certainly botches her son’s chances for the throne, so I can scarcely claim political clout for her. But she is a queen. And even if she suffers horribly, she has a kind of sheer authority that dwarfs all the other characters, including her legendary husband, Theseus. I have noted both her lucidity and the magnitude of her desire, but I want also to say that she simply radiates power, even when it is in the form of agony: she cannot choose not to love, but otherwise hers are the supreme acts of the play, hers the governance of events, including her own self-removal. She is the mesmerizing figure of the drama, and her affairs turn out to be those of the cosmos. Her grand mythic aria about descending into the Labyrinth with her youthful lover is a testament to the greatness of her soul.

The Greeks followed their tragedies with a satyr play, and I will do likewise. Racine’s Phèdre is a tragic character of immense dignity, but the desires of the old are often enough the subject of ridicule. Doubtless the prizewinning old satyr in literature is Fyodor Karamazov. He is also a doomed father. Dostoevsky reprises the Oedipal drama but in grotesque fashion. If Oedipus unknowingly killed his father, Fyodor’s son Dmitri expresses, from the outset, an unbearable loathing for his progenitor, whom the author describes in meticulous detail: bags under his little, leering eyes; huge, fleshy Adam’s apple; at once sensual and repulsive. Repeatedly, Dmitri warns us that he just might kill the old man. Of course, all readers come to understand that Dmitri is innocent of the parricide, that Smerdyakov is the actual murderer, and that Dmitri’s brother Ivan will be posited as the “secret sharer” in the slaying: technically innocent, psychically guilty. It seems amazing, given how much he’s hated, that the old guy lives as long as he does.

But Dostoevsky needs the sexual rivalry between father and son if his plot is to hold water. And we must confess that Fyodor does hold up his end as womanizing lecher right on through. “Even in the whole of my life there’s never been an ugly woman for me,” he proudly tells his sons and then goes on to flesh out the theory by expatiating on his manner of taking (sexually) his late wife “by surprise”; this little strategy is spelled out as a mix of crawling, cringing, and commanding—guaranteed to set the woman off into shrieking spells; she’s called the “shrieker”—closing with juicier forms of warfare, such as spitting on the lady’s crucifix, causing her to collapse straight out. All this is offered as conversation with his children.

To be sure, Dmitri cannot stomach him as a rival for Grushenka’s favors, but we readers of the book find ourselves sometimes savoring this old man’s incorrigible prurience. Only he would cite Scripture to the Elder Zosima in the following fashion: “ ‘Blessed is the womb that bare thee and the paps which thou hast sucked’—the paps especially!” Keep your eye on the ball, or the paps, seems to be his motto. Karamazov sensuality is cited over and over as a signature family trait, to be found (in different guises) in all of the old man’s sons. Yes, the novel tackles the great metaphysical debates of the nineteenth century, but the rendition of Fyodor—his egalitarian lust for women, his unflagging sexual energies, his bid for Grushenka, his malicious view of all the book’s pieties (as shown in his delicious account of the “hooks” of Hell, which are supposed to drag him down to perdition; Which hooks? he asks; Where do they make them? Is there a hook factory down there?)—remains in our minds as a zaftig portrait of impudent, old, unbending testosterone slated, yes, for execution, but getting a number of laughs on the way.

What can it mean to enjoy, as a reader, a character who fully deserves to be taken down? I think old Karamazov appeals to the lawbreaker in us, for he is the man who mocks all pieties, including the existential ones that his author takes seriously. Given the stupendous amount of metaphysical jousting in this novel, given the hyperspirituality of Father Zosima and company, we groundlings are perhaps a bit grateful for the dependable maliciousness of Fyodor, the guy with the salty tongue and riotous appetites, the fellow who incorporates id into the Dostoevskian scheme. He is the novel’s chthonic figure, a sensualist of a different stripe from his son Dmitri, an older man who seems redolent of brandy, earth, flesh, semen, and feces. But die he must. So it is that his murder becomes the grand nineteenth-century showpiece of detective fiction, the whodunnit that fuels the entire novel, the emblematic removal of the father. Who knows, he might have been happy to know what an ambitious fate was in store for him.

Lusty Fyodor Karamazov’s death is predictable: joker, buffoon, lecher, failed father, despised target of most of his sons; there are plenty of reasons for him to exit the stage. Thomas Mann’s elderly male hero, undone by a fateful trip to Venice, my final instance of unsanctioned lust, represents a very different kind of sexual overreaching. This famous tale from 1911 seems, when read in the twenty-first century, curiously dated by its marmoreal style and its many overwritten passages yet remarkably prescient as well, for it not only speaks openly of homosexual passion but is susceptible to a “pedophiliac” reading (as was noted in part I of this study). An aging man—widower, father of a married daughter, national icon of German literature whose work epitomizes the virtues of clarity, discipline, and reason—falls in love with a Polish boy while on vacation in Venice: Is this a story of growing old? Or is it a view of aging as a grisly form of truth telling, of truth “outing,” about one’s most basic intincts and arrangements? Do we lie to ourselves all the way till the end and only then confront who we are? Do all our efforts and dodges and feints and attempts at mastery simply evaporate or unravel when we age? What remains then? Mann’s story asks these questions.

William Burroughs once quipped that a well-run police state would need no police, because we do it to ourselves. Hence Gustav von Aschenbach is a culture hero (of severe morality, of contempt for the “bohemian”) who has proudly and publicly and influentially said no to the abyss. It has never occurred to him that he might one day be headed there. And not by accident or by bad luck or by some evil call of fate but as the grisly but logical consequence of his own deepest artistic and philosophical beliefs. It all began on a spring day in Munich when the famous writer, tired, goes to the North Cemetery on his walk and sees a strange man who stares at him with unconcealed boldness, exposing “long, white, glistening teeth.” This encounter then triggers a hallucinatory vision of a “primeval wilderness-world of islands, morasses, and alluvial channels,” a tropical setting rife with monstrous growth, causing Aschenbach to feel both fear and longing. This is all a bit heavy-handed, I suppose, but it functions nonetheless as handwriting on the wall: cemetery, male hunger, raw and rank and fertile nature, yielding a composite message to our man: you are to choose between death and life, but the life you choose (the life that is about to choose you) is going to be anarchic, primitive, and utterly contrary to the denials and repudiations you’ve glorified so long. Aschenbach’s response to all this? Time for a vacation, time to go to Venice.

The ominous signposts and markers start to pile up, and they signal especially the portentous drama of age. On the boat he sees a party of riotous young people, all absorbed in drinking and carousing, but the closer he looks, the more certain he is that the loudest of the group is no youth at all: he is an old man, with rouge on his cheeks, dyed mustache, and false teeth. Later, still more darkly, he notes that the pretender cannot hold his alcohol, that he stutters and giggles and leers, that he is more than a little obscene. What Aschenbach cannot know, of course, is that this figure in disguise is exactly what he himself will become. It will all come to pass. Late in the story, when Aschenbach has doubtless already contracted the cholera that will technically kill him, he nonetheless signs on for whatever cosmetic aids he can get in his hopeless effort to woo the Polish boy Tadzio: he has his hair dyed black, his skin “freshened up,” his “dry, anemic lips” turned the color of “ripe strawberries,” the lines around his eyes are treated with facial cream. It is thus, trumped up in garish colors, a clown pretending to roll back the clock and retrieve the accents of youth and vigor, that he will die on the beach, still hoping to capture Tadzio’s gaze, waging his final war against time, succumbing.

What makes this story so rich and provocative is that Aschenbach’s trajectory from hero of discipline to pining old man is larded with echoes, has a reach beyond its apparent bounds. One sees in it a reworking of Nietzsche’s famous theory of the Apollonian and the Dionysian (as argued in
The Birth of Tragedy
), so that Aschenbach’s late-life encounter with bestiality and frenzy are to be understood as an overdue corrective to his severely classicizing view of art (and life). His cult of form as containment—which is how Nietzsche saw Greek tragedy: as a formal frame with chaos inside—is reconceived. Still another perspective has to do with Venice itself—a lush, romantic site of dark lagoons and throbbing desire, a place where the frail structures of order and decorum might easily come undone—suggesting that this vacation is also a rebuke to the austere earlier ethos of the writer. And then there is the issue of plague itself, an imperious onslaught of disease and rot and decay and sickness that visits Venice at exactly this juncture and thereby functions as the precise analog to Aschenbach’s own rotten erotic secret of lust for a young boy. All these threads are woven into Mann’s text. Now, one might demur and claim that these different versions of Aschenbach’s “fall” are awfully literary, awfully symbolic; but I’d want to claim just the opposite: Mann has sketched this older man’s climacteric in a stunningly rich fashion, and thereby shown us that the assault of sexual desire upon the old is a multilayered event, reaching further than just some kind of libidinal itch or lecherous want or delayed coming out of the closet.