Morning, Noon, and Night: Finding the Meaning of Life's Stages Through Books (14 page)

I have been describing these events as drama, but it is patently clear that they constitute a significant piece of the education that Rastignac is undergoing, a series of lessons and principles that are not to be found in any of his lawbooks or lecture halls. But Balzac has more in store for Rastignac. The student’s growing affection for both Delphine and her father, Père Goriot, bring him ever more deeply into the growing family tragedy at hand: namely that the decrepit old man is feverishly, indeed suicidally, trying to gather funds to help out his two daughters, most especially Anastasie (who, though married to an aristocrat, is channeling money nonstop to her lover). The social game is now being played at both ends: Rastignac is making his entry, while Goriot is moving toward exit.

This side of the novel is far more complex than I have indicated, but the upshot of it is that the egocentric wishes of the two daughters are going to become ultimately a death sentence for the old father, who has given them everything they ever wanted, who has nothing left except his febrile schemes for pawning his few remaining furnishings and somehow getting hold of more francs. As Goriot becomes increasingly desperate and moves from sick and miserable to intermittently comatose and finally dying, Balzac’s
machine infernale
rachets up its speed. The great late scene in the novel is Mme. de Beauséant’s reception—filled with false friends who are there to witness her being betrayed by her lover, not unlike a public execution—to which Delphine insists on going with Rastignac, since it marks her upward rise in high society.

Unfortunately her father is dying at exactly this time—dying and wanting nothing more than to have his two daughters at his bedside. And this too is an education: a Parisian education. Rastignac acquires an almost hallucinatory sense of Parisian values as he looks at all the (specious, morally empty) finery and riches at the Beauséant reception and sees—simultaneously, retinally, it would seem—through it to the squalid garret where Goriot lies dying, abandoned by his daughters. He sees, as it were, the cost of living in Paris. None of his law books has this kind of information in it. Not even Vautrin hinted at quite this. Here is the deeper vision of the novel, and the reader comes to it as one comes to a three-dimensional film: the text confers on you the red and blue lenses that convert what seemed flat into something bristling, with heights and depths, yielding an unforgettable larger picture. It all fits together. Something vital (if tragic) is being learned.

The novel ends with the funeral of Goriot. It is a funeral procession attended by empty coaches bearing the insignia of his daughters’ married names. (Empty coaches: an emblem for this text.) The only living friend who is there is Rastignac: too poor even to pay for the service, sickened by what he has witnessed of betrayal and coldness of heart, now agonizingly aware of what it takes to succeed in Paris. One senses that more than Goriot’s body is being buried in this scene. An entire cluster of ideals and principles is on the block. The final lines of the novel depict the law student standing at the cemetery overlooking the city of Paris and issuing his famous words of defiance:
“À nous deux, maintenant!”
Balzac writes that the student’s first insurrectionary act was to accept an invitation and go to dinner with Delphine. Lazarillo and Pablos had learned to play the game by dint of wits; Rastignac realizes something further: love must be cashiered. The sellout is complete; he has learned his lesson.

Have we learned ours? Vautrin is arrested, Victorine is made rich, Mme. de Beauséant cloisters herself in the country, and Rastignac moves into a life of Parisian conniving, of doing as his cousin recommended: hiding the heart. To be sure, this much is clear. But ultimate meanings in both life and art are more complex than my equation suggests. Reading
Père Goriot
constitutes, I believe, an ethical experience of its own, one that goes counter to the cynical wisdom of some of its players, complicating the moral import of what has been witnessed. The most powerful scenes in this novel depict close human encounters: between Rastignac and Vautrin, Rastignac and Mme. de Beauséant, and Rastignac and Goriot. In particular, the many pages devoted to the misery and dying of Goriot are, in every sense of the word, the book’s heart. Yes, the old man is delirious, shrieking for his two daughters, dying alone. It makes for hard reading.

But that is just it: he does not die alone. The reason we have the story at all is that he is attended by Rastignac (and by his friend at the boardinghouse, Bianchon the medical student). The tenderest notation of the novel comes when the two boys minister to the dying man’s needs, staying in his miserable room, helping him when he cries out, writing letters home and studying their books when he sleeps or is unconscious. I call this “tender” because it is the very pulse of family, of human connection. Increasingly, in those pages, Rastignac calls Goriot “Papa.” With considerable panache, Balzac writes the actual moment of death as a moment of sublime error: the old man, held up by the two students, clutches at their hair and murmurs,
“Mes anges!”
The novel then says that Goriot was foiled yet one final time, thinking the boys were his daughters. But the deeper reality of this scene is what it shows, not what it says, and we see a scene of family-making, a scene of poignant substitution, as the two young boys lovingly help this man in his exit from life. In a way that literature alone documents, they have become his children.

I want to close my discussion of growing up by insisting that the lessons of this book are richer and deeper than first appear. Goriot’s actual dying makes it onto the page only because two young students are there to care for him and soften his exit. That we would see this thicker story of allegiance subtending betrayal is a tribute to the resources of literature. After the old man’s death, one of the boarders at the Maison Vauquer quips that it is high time to stop talking about Goriot, that one of the virtues of living in the great city of Paris is
anonymity
. You can live and you can die, and nobody notices, thank God.

But the law of art goes the other way. This novel tells us to attend to Goriot, care about his emblematic life and fate, see how the student experiences his destiny, see how the human heart lives as well as dies. What Rastignac is to make of this is an open question. What my own students (who are poised to confront their own Balzacian dilemmas) make of it, or of their own looming choices, is unknown to me. They do not tell me; they do not even know. But a novel published almost two centuries ago does indeed refract their own lives. That is what it means to say that art mirrors nature, and that is how books live.

Near the very end of
Great Expectations
, Dickens’s tragicomic masterpiece about a young boy whose trip from childhood to maturity, from blacksmith to gentleman, is all too easily read as social allegory, the ever-mysterious lawyer Jaggers—a man who knows everyone’s dirty secret but who is himself inscrutable, calling to mind Balzac’s Vautrin in a different key—discloses one of the novel’s key secrets: his role in saving the child who grew up to be Estella.

With some license I would claim that Jaggers lays bare the generic conditions besetting children in Dickens: grisly, tending toward misery, death, or the gallows. It is against this that Jaggers has acted. But it seems crucial to recognize that Jaggers’s heroic gesture has met with dubious results, to say the least. Yes, the child was saved, but the person it became—the cold and beautiful Estella, molded by the vengeful Miss Havisham to break men’s hearts—is scarcely a success story. We are hard put not to see in her evolution from child to adult the same tragic pattern that Pip’s trajectory reveals: failure of feeling, failure of judgment. One sought to be a gentleman; the other was raised as a gentlewoman. Each transgressed against the heart. In some disturbing sense, this ill-fated couple deserves each other, even though the narrative suasion of the novel seeks to persuade us of Pip’s moral superiority over the insentient girl he worships. Is this the cost of experience? To deny human feeling? To realize it only late in life?

One pretty little child out of the heap who could be saved
. Yes or no? To answer this question we turn, of course, to Pip, the child whose maturation seems so allegorical to us, readable as the fate of a boy who tackled caste and class in order to lift himself (or be lifted), as we Americans might say, by his bootstraps from blacksmith to gentleman. Remember that Balzac’s Rastignac comes from a noble family; Pip, however, has no cultural capital, no manners, no ease. We already see Fitzgerald’s Gatsby in the wings, even though Pip’s rise is cued more to mysterious dark dealings by the fates, rather than titanic energy or some “green light.” The social ramifications of this fable are not hard to grasp; one saw them in caricatural form in Quevedo’s seventeenth-century story of Pablos, for whom border crossing is a comic convention, but the rising middle class (and its tidal swell) is no longer a subject for simple caricature in mid-nineteenth-century England. It is a fact—a fact that Charles Dickens himself lived out, in all its complexity, from drudge to world-famous author. He knew something about that journey.

What makes
Great Expectations
unforgettable is its rendition of Pip’s tortured psyche. All of the wonderful touches of humor that Dickens can muster—the depictions of Pumblechook and Wopsle, the routines of Mrs. Joe, Joe’s own sweet mannerisms, the touching relations between Wemmick and the Aged P, the fawning efforts of the female Pockets to pocket Havisham money—light up this story at the edges but do little to soften its dark center. Our abiding feeling from this novel stems from our conversance with Pip himself: genial, capable of wry humor and self-reflection, downright philosophical at times, yet deeply and incurably wounded from the outset and continuously injured as the book goes forward. Can it be an accident that the novel opens in a cemetery set among the marshes? Pip is there looking at the gravestones of his father, mother, and siblings, doing his countdown, trying to understand “the identity of things.” Getting clear of the dead may not be easy.

The elements themselves rule here, more potent than the buried humans, more active in their role as impossible site, as ground zero for all human doing. The marshes are where Pip returns for many key encounters—sometimes figurative, as when Herbert begs him to give up Estella and Dickens writes, “I turned my head aside, for, with a rush and a sweep, like the old marsh winds coming up from the sea”; sometimes associatively, as Pip wonders why his entire past seems tainted by a mix of “prison and crime” forever bound to “lonely marshes on a winter evening”; sometimes invading London itself with their penetrating wind and rain, as when the long-lost convict makes his way into Pip’s elegant lodgings to deliver his tidings, “Look’ee here, Pip. I’m your second father. You’re my son—more to me nor any son”; reappearing as “stagnation and mud” and sheer primal ooze in the failed effort to escape by boat with Magwitch; and finally present as literal fate, as when the burned Pip makes his way back onto the selfsame marshes to the selfsame lime kiln, where he meets the crazed Orlick and comes close to meeting his death. The marshes parse his affective life.

Nonetheless, the marshes in
Great Expectations
constitute a dreadful mockery of
Heimat
, a place of raw inhuman corrosive energy where you cannot live but from which you cannot escape. They are “the identity of things.” It is in this sense that Dickens’s novel is more than a social parable about the price paid for becoming a “gentleman.” More profoundly, it tells the story of a young boy whose only pact is with the marshes. To see Pip as moving from “grounded” blacksmith to “alienated” gentleman gets this book wrong, because its starkest testimony is in front of our eyes on the first page as we see Pip interrogating the gravestones and then meeting the convict. The little boy is lifted up violently by the convict and turned upside down—all with a kind of immediacy reminiscent of Grimmelshausen and announcing Faulkner—and we are to understand that the solid world can be turned upside down, might be just a stage set. Pip is, in some final way, homeless from the outset. Standing outside the forge, as a mere child, he looks up at the stars and considers “how awful it would be for a man to turn his face up to them as he froze to death, and see no help or pity in all the glittering multitude.” He is looking at his fate: not just Estella (as the star imagery suggests), but the entire about-to-unfurl scenario of life with Miss Havisham and Co., then life in London.

Later in the novel, after Magwitch has returned and announced himself the source of the great expectations, Pip is mightily concerned to see that his benefactor eludes those tracking him: the law (which has no choice but to hang the returned criminal if it finds him), but especially Compeyson, the fiend of the book. All the pieces of the puzzle are beginning to assume their dark, damning coherence. Pip is returning home, tired, after a depressing visit with Miss Havisham and an Estella set upon a loveless marriage, but when he gets to Whitefriars Gate, he is handed a scribbled note with these fateful words: “Don’t Go Home.” Pip, unable to sleep in a strange lodging he’s had to find, parses this injunction in every possible way: “Do not thou go home, let him not go home, let us not go home, do not ye or you go home, let not them go home. Then potentially: I may not and I cannot go home; and I might not, could not, would not, and should not go home.” Wemmick has written this warning to signal trouble coming in the form of Compeyson, but we cannot escape the feeling that it broadcasts the novel’s larger theme: there is no home to go to. There is no ground to stand on. Perhaps worst of all: there is no firm self to hold on to.