Morning, Noon, and Night: Finding the Meaning of Life's Stages Through Books (63 page)

To be sure, I am looking only at the physical: the psychological and the moral are another story, less subject to view retinally, even if recorded in literature. That larger perspective, entailing the psychological and the moral, is what I want to explore and discuss in these final pages, for it seems appropriate to a book that has focused so intently on these two key phases of life. Commencement is a semiotic spectacle, made up of both seen and unseen elements. The young poised for takeoff. The fate that awaits them in their next phases. The old returning. The countdown of the generations graphically on show in the alumni parade. The beautiful if delirious project of recapturing the past. And my own final encounter with the young people, their parents, and their grandparents at the end of the show. How can one do justice to these segments of life? How can one go about gauging the plenitude of adventures and achievements and reversals and failures that are writ large inside this array of young and old going through their paces? How can one make the imaginative move that is so necessary, from the biological spectacle I have described on to the hidden stories of heart and mind that have their own density, truth, and sinuous reach? I have intentionally described these groups as virtually different species, for that is how I remember seeing them when I was twenty-one, and that is somehow the way I still see them, not only at Commencement but also every week in my classroom, where my white hair and lined face seem to put us in different worlds altogether.

It seems fair to say that virtually no child thinks much about growing old, other than the occasional wonderment felt at the sight of Grandma and Grandpa. I am all too aware of the allergic reactions of my students whenever I hold forth to them about issues of aging and mortality. These issues do not engage the young (other than abstractly); even to bring it up is bad form. For that reason one is surprised and moved when one does run into moments of widened child perception in literature along those lines: Rastignac’s tenderness toward Goriot (
Père Goriot
), Hilda’s understanding of Solness’s climacteric (
The Master Builder
), Artie’s need to make sense of Vladek’s experience of the Holocaust (
Maus
), Marjane’s dawning awareness of the suffering of her grandfather (
Persepolis
). And sometimes it can take a whole life—and then some—for us to imagine with any depth and scope the lives of our parents. Virginia Woolf’s beautiful novel
To the Lighthouse
is especially stirring in this regard, for in it Virginia seeks, long after Mother’s death, shortly after Father’s death, to depict them as they might have been, unto themselves. How many of us are capable of this?

If children seem programmatically averse to imagining the affairs of their elders, the same cannot be said for adults, who are often obsessed with childhood, usually their own but sometimes that of others, including, of course, their own children. Why is this so? Nostalgia? Yearning to recapture what was best? Reunions point in this direction. We, the old, yearn and think backward for other reasons too. A nastier explanation might be that we are still working through the injuries of childhood, still settling scores, still tied to scenarios of long ago. Certainly Brontë’s Heathcliff operates along those lines. Of course other, nobler reasons exist: our solicitude for the young and vulnerable, our role as stewards. But the most powerful stimulus is likely our certainty that our own childhood holds something of a key to who we are, what we have become, and what we have left or lost. One remembers “Rosebud” in
Citizen Kane
, a sign of a purity and beauty that fueled life but cannot be recaptured. Our own lost innocence, also that of others. Willy Loman (
Death of a Salesman
) stands in our minds as a man marked entirely by the beauty and promise of his children: it was among his prime articles of belief, it is cruelly exposed as illusory. The Blakean move from innocence to experience, the master narrative of childhood, can be a curtain going up all throughout one’s life, as though disappointment or disillusionment—regarding oneself, regarding one’s children or even one’s parents—were a time-release punishment against which there is no immunity.

These matters can be even more punitive and coercive. You can be put into reverse gear, “childed.” It was Lear’s fate, according to the Fool. Strindberg’s Captain (
The Father
) is systematically regressed in time, infantilized, whereas his Officer (
A Dream Play
), equipped with a doctorate, nonetheless cannot answer what two plus two makes and has his hair pulled by the schoolmaster. Bernlef’s Maarten (
Out of Mind
), a victim of Alzheimer’s disease, finds that his own childhood and past are usurping his life, brutally inserting themselves into current affairs, transforming everything into their terms; this is childhood relived with a vengeance. That the old become childlike is a truism that makes us smile until we begin to think harder about what is entailed. Must one end as well as begin in swaddling clothes?

Some of the works we have discussed display the longer trajectory of a human life: Oedipus’s emblematic fate from cast-out infant to dying old man, Celie’s curve from abused “thing” to fully realized woman, Moll Flanders’s comparable trajectory through roles and partners, Faulkner’s Ike McCaslin’s journey from youngest hunter to old Uncle Ike, Roth’s Everyman, who goes the full route and finally goes out. As I have repeatedly said, such representation remains one of the great trump cards dealt out to narrative as a genre: to package the plenitude of a life between the covers of a book. None of us possesses, on our own, that plenary vision about our own affairs.

Yet what strikes me in most of the books under discussion is how powerfully they delimit youth versus age, as if they were spheres that could never touch or interact. Who can truly imagine Blake’s chimney sweep old? Jane Eyre old? Pip old? Huck Finn old? Siss old? And what of those who died: Kafka’s Georg and Gregor, Faulkner’s Quentin and Joe Christmas, Vesaas’s Unn, Morrison’s Sula? They are not to be imagined outside the arena of childhood. Still harder, I think, would be to imagine Lear or Othello young, child Goriot, Gertrude or Phèdre as a girl, Mother Courage before she became a mother, even Santiago in his youth or David Lurie coming up the ladder. Their texts are not written. Could one write them? Could knowledge of the one point us toward the other? I am quite intentionally fencing off these two phases of life as clear and distinct—even though I know there is always traffic in between, perhaps incessant traffic—because I am at pains to get at the dimensionality and reach of them both. My purpose in examining a wide swath of literary depictions of growing up and growing old is to expand, as vigorously as I can, our sense of possible trajectories for each stage, of how the voyage of these characters sheds its light on the trip that we too have made and are making.

That is why it is good to bring the golden fruits of arts and literature—stories of growing up and growing old, from Sophocles to Coetzee, dense with time and interiority—into our possession, for we are immeasurably the fuller for it, attuned to, even accosted by other voices and fates, times, and places. Here is an inheritance you can receive without anyone needing to die. Here is a fabulous voyage you can make without passport or suitcase. We territorialize through reading and imagining, we expand our repertory. And perhaps we learn to sense the reaches and depths of those we know and love, even of those we scarcely know and do not love. Literature schools us in this way.

One walks into a library or bookstore and thinks: so many stories, so little time. But the truth goes the other way: each of these stories gives time, rather than taking it. Each of these works adds to our stock. Each one of them grows us. That is where I want to put my final emphasis. Stories of growing up and growing old are stories that extend who we are. Morning to noon, noon to night: the arc of the sun and the arc of a life, from birth to death. Human life would seem end-oriented—whether it be the route from innocence to experience or the apprenticeship with dying—and that is what gives the drama of growing up and growing old its inevitable pathos. Each phase seems keyed to loss. But art reverses these matters; remember again Andrew Marvell’s sweet lines:

That is the propulsion of desire, but also of art. Hence, the two phases of my study are about the continuing heat of life, not only its eager launch or its inevitable close. One measures our coming, the other measures our going; both measure trajectories and velocities; both are kinetic. Both add to our energy and our estate.

From Lazarillo to Oskar Schell, passing through so many other young people seeking their way—Rastignac, Jane Eyre, Pip, Huck, Benjy, Joe Christmas, Sula, Unn, Celie, Marjane—literature tracks the trip from morning to noon. There is nothing servile or merely denotative here, but rather something demiurgic and world-making. Not unlike the bear tracks that Faulkner’s Ike McCaslin learned to read, the print on the page gives birth to lives and fates, sweeps those of us no longer young into nineteenth-century London or onto a raft on the Mississippi. From Lear to David Lurie, passing through so many old and not-so-old people obeying the law of time—Phèdre, Goriot, Solness, Leopold Bloom, Willy Loman, Blanche DuBois, Santiago, Aureliano—literature tracks the trip from noon to night but converts it into light, our light. Art’s sun never sets. It knows only birth. It is Commencement. We live other and again through the books we read and the travels of mind and heart they enable. Four-legged, two-legged, three-legged: each one of these forms of locomotion comes to us as readers, moves us as readers, even as supine readers. Art: a worthy answer for the Sphinx who interrogates us all.

This book is at once the most—and the least—professional book I’ve ever written. In it, I draw on more than four decades of reading, writing, and teaching, and it is not possible to gauge how many others’ voices and visions are paying their way here, under-girding my own say, making it possible, at least in some measure, for me to have the ideas I have. Rather than naming any particular scholars or teachers who matter to me in this book, I want to acknowledge that utterance itself hinges on prior exchanges, a lifetime’s exchanges, that find their most perfect home in the university: its classrooms as well as its libraries. That is the subsoil, the accretion of loam, that comes from a life in the academy, that nourishes a good bit of what I have come to know about literature.

“You have to rake up the leaves before you can have the bonfire,” Faulkner wrote in
Absalom, Absalom!
I have been raking leaves for some time now, and I feel this book is what I have to show for it. The personal tone of this book, its seesawing between life and art, trying to discern how each illuminates the other, doubtless makes
Morning, Noon, and Night
as much memoir as literary criticism. But consciousness itself is relational, communal. So, let me acknowledge my major sources of help in this enterprise: a life of talking with—growing old with—my wife, Ann; my brother, Philip; my children, Catherine and Alexander; indeed my grandchildren, Anna and Gustav. They have all played their role. My grand topic—growing up and growing old—is scarcely a specialist’s domain: not only does everything teach me about it, but it also refuses to stay in books; it leaps out at me in my life.

Nonetheless, books, as I repeatedly claim, are unique, for they capture, as nothing else does, the passing of time. Yet they do not know age, whereas authors do, and it pleases me greatly to dedicate this volume to Catherine and Alexander, each at their noontime.

Others have also played a vital, if less intimate, role in this project. Cristina Serverius has helped me with the arduous job of locating permissions, Charles Auger and Carol Wilson-Allen have graciously assisted me in numerous clerical tasks, Brown University has given me the kind of material as well as moral support I almost take for granted: writing a book is a distinctly corporate undertaking. I want especially to signal the remarkable assistance I received from Millicent Bennett at Random House: she has taken my words and ideas with the kind of seriousness and generosity that all authors hope for, helping me to transform a sprawling manuscript into a more orderly book. For all these gifts, I am grateful.