Morning, Noon, and Night: Finding the Meaning of Life's Stages Through Books (36 page)

The old, whatever their station or centrality in society, have never been impregnable, have always been subject to aging and loss of power, have always been potentially tragic figures. The Oedipus story writes this large for us: Laius is slain by Oedipus, and Oedipus himself later suffers the erosions of time. In short, even if contemporary society glorifies the culture and positioning of the young, it is merely accentuating the oldest story of all: out with the old, in with the new. That tale of exit and entry was told in skeletal form by Sophocles; it has been told throughout the centuries, and each time it is told, it teaches us something vital about our own affairs. To “make friends with the necessity of dying,” as Freud characterized the plot of
King Lear
, is the most arduous friendship any of us is to encounter. But the only way to escape it is to die young. Even the most reactionary patriarchal culture cannot keep its old from perishing, from knowing they will perish. Nor can it keep the young at bay. That is the larger prey I am after: to see how the experience of aging has been understood and told throughout the centuries—and how such understanding might enrich our own personal trajectory from noon to night.

The story of aging is a coat of many colors. It can be comic or tragic, it can betoken recognition or ignominy, it can inspire or repulse, it can be fueled by adaptation or revolt, it can be riddled with both somatic and mental infirmity or it can conjure up a final grandeur, it can depict love’s triumph or failure, it can gesture toward wisdom or catastrophe. But no matter what its coloration may be, it is always about power: holding on to it, ceding it, refiguring it. In approaching this broad canvas of literary depictions of old age, I want to spell out some of its major articulations, its chapters, so to speak, with a view toward bringing into ever-greater focus the scale and weight of my topic, the building blocks of an edifice we can call the narrative of old age, the voyage from noon to night.

As we saw in
Part I
, all growing-up stories are cued to the workings of power, inasmuch as they depict the efforts of the young to make their way in and understand the culture they inhabit. If the forward drive of the young is keyed to this educational project, the story of the old is caught between two crucial directionalities: a future that must betoken eventual death and a past that still (and only) lives in memory. Whichever way you look, authority is in trouble, especially in regimes we think of as patriarchal, where male power has exercised its so-called rights: the creation and imposition of law; the governing and policing roles that accompany the law, including the power to deny or oppress; the control of women and children, derived from sexual function and titular authority; ownership of property; even control of language.

What happens when this traditional construct of power is subjected to the ravages of time? What happens when men age? One might answer: theoretically, nothing changes. Old men still are (notionally) in control. Eventually power will pass from old man to young man (or first son). But everything we have seen about the coming of age of the young suggests that these matters are more vexed and precarious, more conflicted and subject to change, than would appear. For starters, as the parricidal act of Oedipus implies, the young are active, impatient; they want to take over, to move the old from the stage or destroy them altogether. The old are slated to lose their physical powers and are hence seen as increasingly vulnerable, but their authority in other areas as well—intellectual, moral, political—is liable to waver and shrink. As their prowess diminishes, they experience the generic drama of decline, of entropic fate. This can be very hard medicine.

Just how hard it can be is what we stand to gain by examining some of the major Western texts that address this crisis. And crisis it is, in the most famous of all literary works devoted to the undoing of a father: Shakespeare’s
King Lear
. Lear, and his counterpart Gloucester, will be made to drain the cup of suffering and indignities meted out to them as fathers. To be sure, Lear is also a king, and hence his travails have a profound political character as well, but it would seem that the most virulent punishment each receives—one going mad, the other being blinded—is, above all, familial, thrust upon them by their own children, coming as a kind of savage, internecine war that is virtually cannibalistic in its operation.

Balzac’s
Père Goriot
consciously replays Shakespeare’s tragedy in nineteenth-century Paris, locating it in the fate of an old man being bled dry by his two rapacious daughters, and hence displaying in his very calvary the inhuman workings of the new capitalist order, which reveres the cash nexus at every turn, thereby wrecking all traditional codes of family loyalty. Goriot, deranged and delusional though he is, nonetheless takes the measure of his fate: the collapse of fathers, the repudiation of the old law. My final instance of troubled fathering is Arthur Miller’s classic
Death of a Salesman
. Willy Loman completes the parade of progenitors facing obsolescence, and it is hard going, but much of the play’s heartbreak lies in the collapse of yet another American dream: the success of our children as the reward awaited in the fullness of time. Each of these texts is at once luminous and heartbreaking in its account of parenting as eventual time bomb and of power and authority under siege.

One remembers the old man in the wagon bearing down on Oedipus, trying to force him out of the road. But he fails. The young are destined, by both nature and culture, to take over the stage, and the old must learn when and how to exit.
King Lear
exemplifies this injunction, and we will follow its legacy in two remarkable plays, Ibsen’s
The Master Builder
and Ionesco’s
Exit the King
. Ibsen’s protagonist, the architect Solness, does all in his power to resist the inexorable rise of the young, but the burden of the plot is to escort him from the stage. Rarely has the male climacteric been written with such poetry. If Lear speaks of moving “unburdened” toward death, Ionesco succeeds in finding a magnificent theatrical language for showing us what those burdens are, and we realize that they are the injuries and scars written onto and into us by life itself but that dying might be our moment of healing, of freedom, indeed of retrieved majesty.

Falling in love was deemed a central, indeed defining experience of growing up. And of course love confers pleasure and pain, pith, complexity, and meaning to our life at any temporal stage. Moreover, I will later close my discussion of growing old by focusing on mature love—enduring love—as its highest and richest quarry. But I want now, in this segment of my book, to examine the problems of “old love,” ranging from dysfunction to inappropriate lust, for the issues of sexuality can loom very large in the affairs of the aging. Literature shines its beam here, sometimes offering a mirror in which we may be surprised to recognize ourselves.

It might be thought that old age is (at last) a time when one is free of sexual passion. Arguments for this view may have a somatic or philosophical cast to them. (One’s views on these matters may well vary according to age.) Yet just as the old often do not “go gentle into that night,” so too is sexual need often enough a stubborn thing, all the more stubborn when at odds with culture’s prescriptions. Gender is also frequently at issue here, given that male sexual desire is often accommodated by social mores, whereas (older) women’s libidinal needs can be subject to very different, very severe judgments of value and decorum.

Arguably the hero of the postsexual (male) life is Washington Irving’s Rip Van Winkle, who slept twenty years, right through his marriage, and woke up to reap the benefits. August Strindberg’s overheated play
The Father
turns ostensibly on the issue of unknowable paternity, but it also speculates on what a world of “bearded women” and impotent men might be like. We close with a discussion of William Faulkner’s Joanna Burden, the New England spinster of
Light in August
, who moves fatefully from frenzied desire to menopause, her “Indian summer” of passion, and pays for it with her life. Is there a male vendetta here?

And then there is the issue of sexual anxiety and performance. These matters are rarely trumpeted, either in literature or in life, but some of our great literary works hinge intriguingly on them. Shakespeare’s Othello can be fruitfully understood along just those lines, for we must ask ourselves what goes into the making of a man who murders his wife because of suspected infidelity; and once we pose that question, issues such as Othello’s age and unfamiliarity with Venetian mores acquire a surprising pertinence. Tennessee Williams’s heroine of
A Streetcar Named Desire
, Blanche DuBois, a creature of romantic dreams and fading charms, finds herself libidinally underequipped in an overheated New Orleans setting, replete with her stud brother-in-law, Stanley Kowalski.

From time immemorial, however, the still-hungry or oversexed old have received their comeuppance in literature, regardless of how they may have fared in reality. Molière’s plays often deal with old (rich) men obsessed with possessing young nubile females, and even though this scheme invariably finishes poorly, the tone can be more complicated than you’d think, as in the fate of Arnolphe of
L’école des femmes
. Dostoevsky builds his patricidal plot in
The Brothers Karamazov
around old Fyodor, lecher of the first rank and sexual competitor of his son, slated to be murdered but getting off some wonderful lines in the process. These renditions make for broad comedy, but there can be pathos, cruelty, and violence there as well—and a standard that may be rather different for men than for women, as we discover in revisiting Hamlet’s mother, Gertrude, enmeshed in a full-blooded sexual relationship with Claudius and therefore subject to an almost hysterical diatribe about deviance, delivered to her by her anxious and indicting son. Early literature’s richest instance of an older woman’s sexual yearning is found in Racine’s
Phèdre
, in which the force of desire reaches mythic proportions, no matter how censured it may be otherwise. Racine is unequaled when it comes to the depiction of human longing, especially forbidden longing. This segment closes with a discussion of Thomas Mann’s Gustav von Aschenbach, the writer-champion of discipline who is destined to be inflamed with desire at the sight of the Polish boy Tadzio while vacationing in Venice. Aschenbach’s feelings are out of bounds both morally and temporally. In each of these texts about desire and hunger, whether comic or tragic, we may detect the sound of a ticking clock, adjudicating the rights of eros.

Metaphors matter. “Growing up” and “growing old” may seem to be innocuous phrases, but they invoke growth, organic process, as their modality. As for growing up, all of us can agree that there is a dosage of literal truth in the expression that infants grow into children who grow into adults. They actually get bigger. But what about growing old? What kind of growth is this? Nature is eloquent here: an apple or a bottle of wine moves from new (young) to mature (ready to eat or drink) to dead (rotten, vinegary). Harvest matters in another sense as well: it figures a tantalizingly seductive picture of our last chapter: finally we possess the fruits and plenitude of our days and works.

Or do we? The story of growing old is often cued to this brutal dialectic: harvest, yes or no? It is, if you like, a replay of the innocence/experience paradigm so central to growing up but now seen in a more complex, sometimes corrosive fashion, since experience itself evolves, can even move from certainty to mirage.

We now investigate a number of dark but fascinating texts that explore major trouble: old age as a time of disastrous discovery. What might one discover, beyond the obvious slights of time? In Ibsen’s final play, we get the proposition that we learn we have in fact never lived. This is tough medicine. In Henry James’s “The Beast in the Jungle,” this vexing issue is presented as a perceptual trap: the protagonist learns that he has walked right past possible happiness, unable to see it right (and thus seize it). In Kafka’s “Before the Law,” it turns even more sibylline as we see that the long wait for truth and illumination has functioned as paralysis, as a spending of days and years with no payoff. These issues become most heartbreaking of all in the beautiful yet remorseless film of Ingmar Bergman
Wild Strawberries
, in which the eminent old doctor is obliged to learn that he has been a cold, unloving fraud all his life. Each of these works pulls the rug out from under us, wrecks our fond notions of happy harvest, but they disturb most of all because they point to our own blind spots and faulty vision, to our capacity to go amok and only realize it at the end.

This is harsh material—but valuable. Texts about missing your life, about discovering its fraudulence at the end, are texts we need to read for the simple reason that life is too important to miss, that the fraudulent might be followed by the genuine, and that skewed vision may be more rightly aligned to the truth.
Art enables us to imagine things we cannot afford to experience
.

Many religions promise an afterlife. Hard-bitten fellow that I am, I cannot escape the feeling that such a beautiful and inspiring belief is meant as a radiant alternative to the entropic spectacle of decay that time imposes on flesh. Could we end up victorious on this side of the grave? We will examine two unflinching, yet satisfying, accounts of this last chapter of life, to see what literature offers us, in the way of staying the course, with honor and pride. Hemingway’s
The Old Man and the Sea
deserves to be read as a tale about finalities, about what is left when age sets in—a great deal, as we shall see. In this spare account of an old man and a fish, Hemingway amplifies our understanding of the resources that remain. Philip Roth’s
Everyman
is a beast of a different stripe altogether: Roth’s protagonist takes the often bitter measure of a life ruled by fleshly wants and finally condemned by fleshly frailties. A good life? A bad life? That’s for you to decide. I see no transcendence in either of these books, no grand visionary moments, yet they are satisfying in their rendition of life as contest. In both of these books there is fight, even glorious fight, left in the old, and that struggle does honor to our species.