Morning, Noon, and Night: Finding the Meaning of Life's Stages Through Books (35 page)

I cannot think of a purer example of an empowered woman in all of literature. Albert is, after all, no fool: he recites Celie’s weaknesses, indeed her stigmata (as he sees it): black, poor, ugly, woman. With this against you, what is going for you? The answer is: the universe; the trees, the wind, and the air are in collusion with Celie’s declaration of independence, have given them a fierce authority on the far side of any social logic. She is a chthonic force. I referred to the Oracle, because the utterances from Delphi were thought to have the character of fate itself, to be the language of the gods. And that is what is put forth here. Not only is Celie invincible, but her power has a frightening boomerang dimension to it, so that it reverses all efforts at resistance. Whatever Albert
does
—hit, dream, speak—will be
done to
him, will be part of Celie’s own arsenal. And this will happen: Albert will suffer, will be unable to sleep, will stay up listening to his heart, listening to it go crazy, “beating so loud it shook the room. Sound like drums.” Africa again. There is a stunning economy at work here, and perhaps we are meant to see this as a parable about justice and revenge.

But given the abased and abused life Celie has led in this book, I want to insist on the verbal as the key to the spectacle. Language is Celie’s greatest strength: we see it move from early unvoiced reflections all the way to oracular indictment, and Walker wants us to recognize that it is vehicular, galvanizing, capable of changing the order of things. One might cavil that such a view confirms our suspicion that we are reading a fairy tale, but I’d want to argue the opposite: such a view confirms the unsuspected indwelling potency of language and thought, a shape-shifting energy that operates on the world. Celie’s progression from thing to person centers on the power of language as tool, as means of self-enactment, as currency. Here is a resource that even the most deprived possess. It might be said that virtually all of the growing-up stories we’ve studied are reprised and transfigured in the humble Celie’s rise to power.

That is why this book satisfies. Gloria Steinem remarked that it resembles the great nineteenth-century Russian novels with their intricate plots and far-flung relationships far more than it does the minimalist fare being written at the time of its publication. This story of a fissured family and a fissured globe moves toward healing and oneness. To see that as a fairy tale, as something beyond the logic of human doing, is to sell the book short, because Celie’s empowerment is no tinsel fable borrowed from children’s literature, no Cinderella parable requiring a magic prince. On the contrary, Walker’s novel is rooted in the stubborn potentials of human feeling and human development, in the belief that adversity—terrible adversity—may, yes, destroy you but may also leaven your character, catalyze what is strongest and most vital in you, bring you to (and into) life. Especially if love enters the frame. Shug Avery—the splendid bitch-goddess of the text who is all heat and much tenderness—midwifes Celie, helps her birth herself, catapults her onto her own road of selfhood. Growing up is an organic concept. Celie’s marvelous rise to power and adulthood testifies to the marvel of our species: we grow in time. Yes, time can be ferocious, and Walker does not dodge this: flesh changes, desire withers, beauty goes; Celie, Shug, and Albert learn this lesson. But at novel’s end, they are more—not less—than they were at the beginning.

Walker’s closing image of two old ladies, two separated sisters, hugging each other—one came all the way from Africa to do so, bringing the other’s biological children with her—offers a beneficent model of what we harvest, what we grow. And we can scarcely avoid seeing what is most triumphant in this affirmative fiction:
family
. From beginning to end, Walker positions the individual subject within a larger framework, and Celie’s trajectory displays how that cocoon changes from prison house to enabling construct.
Construct
. Walker moves right past blood bonds to show us that the family is built, is a made thing. As if to carry further the symbolic logic of
Père Goriot
and
Great Expectations
—each driven by a family-making impetus, even in a corrosive setting, as the father-son gestalt takes shape: Rastignac and Goriot, Pip and Magwitch
—The Color Purple
breaks clear of fathers and redefines family altogether by casting its light on what women of generosity and heart can do: hence Squeak fills in for Sofia when she is imprisoned, takes on the mother role for a sister, and we see this throughout the book: strong, capable women banding together, nurturing children, reconceiving family beyond the lines of blood.

Thus it is right to close on a family reunion: two old ladies feeling younger than they ever have before and some grown-up children, outfitted with scarification markings, looking bravely at the new world they have come to, knowing they are in it together. Is this not the richest outcome of growing up? To realize that one is always part of the human family, that one’s maturation is never just an individual performance but rather a growing recognition of one’s fit within the larger community? The old rites-of-passage paradigm dear to anthropologists finishes on just this note: the final stage of maturation is reincorporation. To say this is to acknowledge how rarely we find such an outcome in the books we read. The modern focus is inevitably, perhaps tragically, on the individual’s fate, the individual’s dance with fate, the individual’s final tally. It is what I find in the young people I teach: a hunger to achieve their private form, a sense that their (expensive) education is intended to outfit them, to credentialize them, for the Darwinian struggle ahead. Out of the nest and into the world. Alice Walker dares to close her novel on a different note altogether. Growing up, in this novel, is not a single runner’s marathon through life; at its wisest, it codes misery as solitude and understands happiness as the miracle of human relation, of the ties that sustain, nourish, and fulfill.

But it is worth remembering how this novel started: with the young girl Celie being sexually abused by the man she believed to be her father. Given this diseased picture of family—on the surface as incestuous and damning as in Sophocles’ play—we are in a position to measure how much ground, both conceptual and existential, has been traversed. That is the point I wish to emphasize: that our capacity to overcome horrors is real. Alice Walker has tapped into a kind of native resilience that does honor to our species. Over and over in this study I have remarked that we are not equipped to look inside people’s hearts, to read their story. And often enough, my meaning has been that we cannot see the scars that show what life has done to them. But scars themselves testify to healing, to the stubborn affirmative drive of life. You are cut, perhaps cut badly, but your skin knits, your skin toughens, you go on. The triumphs of the human spirit are also genuine.

Picture this: two old ladies embracing, saying they’d never been so young before. Is Eden behind us or ahead? Is it reachable? Staying safe by reversing time: many of the hurt figures of this book could have wished for just that. Sophocles’ chorus says it is best not to be born; Heathcliff is wrecked by his Edenic bond with Catherine; Jane Eyre never fully escapes the Red Room; Joe Christmas’s grandmother wished for her grandson the reprieve of just one free day; Oskar Schell reverses in his mind the falling Twin Towers, so as to retrieve a father telling his son a story. But it is not to be.

The unfurling of time not only puts an end to innocence but positions us on the treadmill that leads to all the crossroads that must come: the old man in the wagon bearing down on you in anger, the blind man who smashes your head against the stone, the Capulet masked ball where your life changes altogether, the Parisian boardinghouse with its exploited old man and its cynical seer, the mysterious inheritance that takes you to London with great expectations, the runaway slave who joins you in your escape on a raft, the Mississippi commissary with the yellowed pages you must decipher, the trip from Tuskegee to Harlem as your racial education takes form, the glittering ice palace from which you do not return, the ferry crossing near Saigon where the Chinese man watches you, the streets of New York after your father’s death on 9/11. These are some of the fates that attend growing up. They are not to be reversed. The sun goes from morning to noon.

But as literature, each of these trajectories can be made again and again. The virtuality of art turns it into a precious tool for expanding human experience and growth, for repeated use, without expiration date. Readers are the most privileged folks on the planet: fellow travelers, frequent flyers, but with special benefits. Even as you near your own path’s end, you are free to start over with books, to live other, to immerse yourself, as the case may be, in stories of growing up and coming of age. One, then another, perhaps a third, even dozens or hundreds, and as many rereads as you wish. As many trips from morning to noon as you can manage. Plots end stories, but reading knows no end. Tracking characters, pondering their fates, trying them on, is a renewable activity, can even be thought of as a renewable energy source that fuels our craft, even if along vicarious, imaginative lines. No one has ever taken the measure of this kind of traffic, for it is immeasurable in every sense: not subject to any statistical tool we might devise but also endless, curbed only by our own appetite. Such psychic voyages furnish our minds, for—fictive though they are—they help us to espy the figure in our own carpet. One is enriched and lessoned by the shifting shapes and evolving selves of the young in literature. Our own affairs are enlarged when echoed and shadowed and nourished by stories of the past. Art grows us.

I now come to the part of my book that has a decidedly existential flavor for me, as well as constituting a subject—indeed, a field, an arena, sometimes a pit—that I explore more fully, more wonderingly, and often more painfully every day I live: growing old. There is no way these essays will not appear biased in that regard. Innocence and experience apply as much to me as they do to the growing-up and growing-old stories I analyze, because all authors occupy the experience position. That is what I write out of: the experience of working a lifetime with these books, but also the experience of growing old. I believe that my personal angle of vision has its place in this book, for there can be no panoptic view of growing old, and hence there will be many moments when personal asides accompany analysis.

Again I will draw on a wide historical sweep of materials, from Shakespeare to our time. As always, I choose the books I love, since they are the ones about which I may have something of value to say. And I cluster them in order to delineate the phases of a gathering, unfolding, larger critical narrative about the trip from noon to night: how growing old has been recorded and interpreted by the great writers. It comes as no surprise that many of the categories in play in the discussion of growing up will again be referenced, but this time from a different perspective. Our familiar major themes—the dialectic of innocence and experience, the joys and trials of love, the acquisition of knowledge and power—are no less central in the journey from noon to night, even though they will be accented in radically different fashion, seen now from “the far side.”

Growing old entails many things that have been viewed differently at different historical and cultural moments: becoming wise (is this fully credible today?), losing one’s powers (physical and sexual, but also professional, social, familial), exiting from the center of the stage, suffering the onset of illnesses, becoming acquainted with death (one’s friends’ and loved ones’, eventually one’s own), looking at a horizon that must bring loss yet might bring gain. Old, we ponder our “estate,” in every sense of the term: what our life has been worth, what worth it still has, what value we will leave. Let us recall the respect accorded to the old in all traditional societies: they were the repository of knowledge, they were revered, they were at the center of the story. Maturity, gravitas, experience, wisdom: these were the virtues and rewards that time brought to those who lived into old age. Is this still true?

Even the rites-of-passage paradigm—as articulated by anthropologists who have studied traditional (as opposed to modern) cultures—so evident in the first half of this book is inseparable from this maturation scheme that venerates age: the young make their way into the adult world in order eventually to take their place, indeed to become old in their own right. Nonetheless, the privileging of childhood in European Romanticism and the arrival of the Bildungsroman in the late eighteenth century signal to us, as literature and intellectual history, epochal transformations, for they place the young at the center of things, and they affirm for us that the story of the young has become the key story within culture. That story—the subject of the first half of this book—is, as we’ve seen, one of either adaptation or critique, inevitably shedding light on the adult values, recognized or not, that inform society and bear on all young entrants taking (or abandoning) their place. Where does that position the story of the old?

Yet if one widens one’s angle of vision and looks back far enough, one finds a very different kind of ranking. Homer would not have dreamed of giving as much weight to the plight of Telemachus as he does to the adventures and trajectory of Odysseus. And I cannot help feeling that Shakespeare is more deeply and creatively alive to the issues of age than those of youth: to be sure, we have the wonderful romances, the saga of Romeo and Juliet, and we have a fascinating variant of the youth/age relationship in the dyad Prince Hal/Falstaff in the
Henry IV
plays, not to speak of the immortal saga of Hamlet’s revenge, but the tragedies by and large have a different hue, seem inevitably death-haunted, age-haunted, as seen in Othello’s sexual anxieties, Macbeth’s late remorse, Prospero’s islanded powers, and most spectacularly, of course, the unforgettable fates of Lear and Gloucester.