Morning, Noon, and Night: Finding the Meaning of Life's Stages Through Books (40 page)

I have already discussed
Père Goriot
as the story of Rastignac’s education in learning how to get ahead without losing his soul. But we know that Balzac had
King Lear
in mind. How would you imagine in Paris in 1835 the story of a king who gave away his fortune to two ungrateful daughters, failed to appreciate the one true child, and never stopped paying for his errors? Well, if you can’t make him a king, you might nonetheless transform him into an echoing symbolic figure of this newer moment, so we can hardly be surprised—even if we’re a little embarrassed—when old Goriot is called
“le Christ de la Paternité.”
Nothing if not direct, Balzac signals that this story of an old man’s passion is to be understood as a variant of the Passion itself, that (blind, obsessive) love for one’s daughters can be a formula for crucifixion in modern times. It is a sobering view. As if nineteenth-century Paris were not sufficiently inhospitable to fathers with poor judgment, you also remove Cordelia from the scene. Then you go on to evoke a new, emerging world order in which blood ties have little traction, can and will be stamped upon when worldly pressures demand it. Because that very same order, into which Goriot has managed to marry both of his daughters, is ravenously hungry for money, your modern Lear is going to be bled dry—blood ties do count for something, one sees—over the course of several hundred pages, for his two daughters function very like vampires, returning for their required ration of blood, their regular infusions of cash.

How does one get to this pass? Balzac is bent on conveying Goriot’s evolution as a cautionary fable that is rich in information. The novel goes into considerable detail in describing how Goriot made his fortune during Revolutionary times by dint of shrewdness, cutting corners, wrangling and finagling and outright muscling himself into property and francs. This “success story” from the first years of the nineteenth century is recognizably modern, for it suggests that volition and smarts are adequate resources for making one’s way. This would not have been possible in Shakespeare’s class culture, but we can already imagine Gatsby here. A man with sufficient appetite could do this. But that is the easy part, we understand. Goriot’s troubles come via his children, the two beautiful little girls whom he cannot spoil enough—his wife is dead—who become increasingly his lifeline, his reason for living. One reads this tale today and sees at once that this man has done his two daughters no service whatsoever by agreeing to all their whims, by understanding his role in life as absolute provider for his children. Bad parenting, we may murmur, may produce problems for the girls.

But himself? What happens to parents who live through their children, not entirely unlike the dreadfully sick who are hooked up to respirators and can breathe in no other way? Goriot doesn’t have a life; he has no other interests, no other views, than the welfare of his daughters. True enough, the old fellow still understands how money is made—he is rightly suspicious of all the various men (husbands, lovers, sharpers) who want to get their hands on his daughters’ dowries and knows to perfection how many sharks are out there—but no reader can avoid the feeling that this old father, Christlike though he be, is also deranged, a cretin of sorts, is offered to us as a kind of pathological specimen, a case study. An overinvested parent, a doting father, an old man whose life takes the shape of his daughters: well, now, in the new Parisian culture Balzac is chronicling, this kind of fellow is going to be a doomed species, a ticking time bomb.

All of Balzac’s intended fireworks—Goriot as Lear, Goriot as Christ, Goriot as worthy tragic victim—cannot succeed in veiling for us the author’s mixed feelings about such a creature. He is one of Balzac’s supreme monsters, a crazed figure of staggering passion that has but one libidinal outlet: his daughters. Balzac never flirts with incest as such, and indeed the daughters display no physical affection whatsoever for their progenitor, but his involvement in their lives and fortunes has a distinct erotic tinge to it, never more visible than when he and Delphine arrange to buy in secret an apartment for Rastignac, where he may meet the (married) daughter Delphine at his ease. Goriot is well-nigh ecstatic in this episode, almost pimplike in his role as go-between, thanking the young student profusely for making his daughter happy, behaving like a child: kissing his daughter’s feet, gazing into her eyes, rubbing his head against her dress. Balzac informs us that the young couple is not fully at ease here, and Rastignac confesses to himself that he feels twinges of jealousy. It is a little kinky. And what the boy cannot quite say is: I can never love her, perhaps even never desire her, as her father does. Is that the fate of fathers? To love their daughters too deeply, in too fleshly a fashion? Goriot emerges as the most (and only) sensual figure of the book, the man who genuinely palpitates with desire, whose affect is red hot and volcanic. One senses that his death will be ghastly, for he will die like a spurned lover, in addition to being a tortured, played-out, doomed body.

Monomania is a narrow thing, a narrowing thing. Its deep vein of sentience seems to require closed passages elsewhere and everywhere. At a key moment late in this melodramatic tale, a moment when stupendous things have happened in the boardinghouse—Vautrin has been exposed and arrested as a criminal, Michonneau and Poiret have been expelled from the premises, young Taillefer has been murdered in a duel, Victorine (now rich) has exited for better things—Rastignac seeks to apprise Goriot of the happenings, only to learn that the old man is utterly indifferent, couldn’t care less. Why? He’s going to dine with his daughters. The world could go up in smoke (as it seems to be doing), and he cares not a fig. One feels that Balzac has an intuitive sense of weights and measures, that the depths of a man’s passion cancel out its breadth and scope. If you live intensely enough “here,” you are dead “there.” It is an intriguing arithmetic: one would like to know how Lear or Christ would show on a scale of this sort. Old age, too, seems on the line, even pathologized. We tend to think that the impassioned ones are the young, but this novel tells us otherwise: in Balzac, the old are the crazed ones, the old are those who burn and lust and rage, the ones who smolder in their narrow way.

This is queasy-making because it comes to us as intensely somatic. Goriot has no decorum at all. He is not easily manageable; even old and dying, he has heft, can be violent. He is a lit fuse on the subject of his daughters and a vegetable on other subjects. To have this kind of love, this kind of absolute passion, is a form of sickness, indicates either crossed wires or staggering deficits in your equipment. It’s little wonder that Goriot is the object of the medical gaze in so many passages or that Bianchon the medical student regards this suffering, soon-to-die old man with a mix of compassion and scientific curiosity. The entire novel has a laboratory aura.

All of this reaches predictably operatic proportions in the late segment of the novel devoted to Goriot’s dying, to what the French call
l’agonie
. Here is where the medical and moral discourses come fully and unforgettably together. We have so sanitized dying today, by relegating it to hospices at best and impersonal hospital rooms at worst, that Balzac’s pages have a rare power to shock and move us. Ugly, unpleasant, indecorous, in our face: this fully rendered death—apoplexy, cerebral edema, leaking exudate, groans, hot and hard belly, incessant pain, exploding head, all taking place in a squalid, unheated garret—squats heavily and immovably at the center of things and dares us to duck it. This death seems to announce: I am important. My dying matters. My exit is not merely personal but downright allegorical. Measures are being given here, and measures must be taken.

Lear died horribly, but he was reunited with Cordelia and managed to slay her murderer before his final exit. Goriot dies utterly abandoned by his two daughters (after they have competed in raids on his last remaining francs). Anastasie is kept at home by her furious husband, Delphine has a major ball to attend, namely the one where Mme. de Beauséant will be revealed as betrayed. Rastignac initially begged Delphine to comfort her dying father but then intuited that nothing would come of this: “she was quite capable of treading on her father’s body in order to go to the ball.” Note the systemwide failure: Delphine’s, Rastignac’s, and even Mme. de Beauséant’s lover. Human relations, even blood relations, are shown to be fair-weather friends, fickle and disposable, unbinding. Both the young and the old experience love’s failure. But whereas the young make knowledge of it—this will be Rastignac’s great lesson—the old are crushed entirely. Yes, Goriot too is learning something, but he cannot bear it, for it announces the end of his world, as well as the end of his life: when children cease to love their parents, apocalypse is nigh.

The vermicelli trader who made his fortune by sharp dealing now understands that more than pasta is in play, that sharp dealing, no less than serpent’s teeth, wrecks the human family. Like Lear, Goriot perceives that one seeds one’s death by having children: “You give them life, they give you death. You bring them into the world, they drive you out of it.” Unlike Lear, he held on to some of his money, dribbling it out in installments, recognizing that the finally emptied purse spawns a hardening of heart: “Money buys everything, even daughters. Oh! where is my money? If I still had wealth to leave, they would be tending me, looking after me.” It is a businessman’s truth. But at the height of his agony, this mercantile truth triggers an awareness that is more cosmic in nature, more frenzied in tone: “My daughters, my daughters, Anastasie, Delphine! I want to see them! Send the police after them, force them to come! Justice is on my side, everything is on my side, nature, civil law. I protest. The country will perish if fathers are trampled down. That’s obvious. Society, the world, turns on fatherhood, everything breaks up if children don’t love their fathers.” Here is the Shakespearean moment: the
agonie
in question, the death rattle one hears, is not solely that of this old man but of his universe, which is imploding, shedding its skin, becoming monstrous. Fatherhood is the oldest contract of all, and it is being breached. What is fascinating is the secular brilliance of these outbursts: police, justice, civil law, and society are undone when fathers are undone. There is no help anywhere. Even the logic of the marketplace is defiled: “I want my daughters! I made them! They are mine!”

I made them! They are mine!
Children are—or should be—the last possessions of the old. They are the one property that one has bought with one’s flesh, that one has paid for with one’s love, that one relies on for one’s waning; the law of nature should ensure that they remain ours. That is what is annihilated here. Old age dispossesses us entirely. Money, health, children: nothing can be retained, however great the purchase price was, whatever role we had in the production. Balzac’s mix of economic insight and scientific curiosity lays bare a brutal scheme that has parallels with Lear’s chastened vision of “unaccommodated man,” of “bare, forked animals.” At our end, we have nothing, not even a clean sheet to die on, not even enough francs for the funeral. For a very long time, money and goods shield us from this stern truth. But not forever. The young law student alone attends the old man’s funeral—there are no daughters in sight, just empty coaches sent by their husbands—and sheds “the last tears of his youth” as he watches the body being lowered into the grave. Much is being buried here. Rastignac has completed his own little course on growing up and growing old.

What about us? What have we learned, we who were not in that garret ministering to the dying, abandoned old man? And please note that the other two mentors finish badly also: Mme. de Beauséant exits Paris to bury herself alive in the country, and Vautrin is en route to prison. The old vacate the scene altogether. Maybe that is what we are meant to grasp: Goriot is presented by Balzac as something of a freak because the conditions of modern life (as seen in 1835) spell disaster for fathering. There is no comfortable way to exit this novel, inasmuch as advice to “hold on to the money” seems altogether too cynical to be called wisdom. No less disturbing is Goriot’s outright mania for his children, warning us that obsession of this stripe is a recipe for disaster. I think Balzac knew all this, knew that his version of
Lear
offered little in the way of rules for living. And perhaps that is the French writer’s ultimate strength: to link the Father with Christ is to say that parental love, when absolute (and blind and quasi-bestial, as it is for Goriot), leads to crucifixion.

Goriot had no idea he had become obsolete. Willy Loman knows it all too well, for it stamps both his life and his work. The doomed father-protagonist of Arthur Miller’s
Death of a Salesman
, Willy may seem, in the light of the twenty-first century with its Internet shopping and telemarketing, a sepia figure of yesteryear, a time when salesmen got into their cars and crisscrossed the country with their satchels full of wares, constituting a breed that is bordering on extinction. There is a distinctly elegiac feeling to this play: we see in it an America of the 1950s that bought everything on the installment plan, only to find out that the products are cunningly programmed to fall apart just when they’re finally paid for: the car, the refrigerator, even the house (Linda has made the last payment in the play’s last lines, but it will be an empty place). Worse still, the man paying the installments is also caught in this time trap, also subject to wear and tear, threatened with obsolescence and death.

Time is the great cheat, and much of the pathos of the Loman family derives from the sweet poetry (fantasy?) of their earlier days: the boys endlessly simonizing the Chevrolet, Biff accomplishing his mythic exploits on the gridiron, Willy himself treated as the prince of the road, the man who “knocked ’em cold in Providence, slaughtered ’em in Boston.” Willy boasts to his boys of the warm reception he receives everywhere he goes, and we get a glimpse of an America that has largely disappeared: “America is full of beautiful towns and fine, upstanding people. And they know me, boys, they know me up and down New England. The finest people.”