Morning, Noon, and Night: Finding the Meaning of Life's Stages Through Books (43 page)

This clock is still ticking when it comes to the “affairs” of the old, and that is crucial for the issues we now turn to. If puberty seems like a natural miracle in the lives of the young, thrusting them into a new somatic career, it has a very different resonance for the aging. To exit the stage can also mean to exit sexual passion, to stop being a candidate for it, to stop being “authorized” for it, to stop being (physically) capable of it. These issues can be comic or tragic, depending on circumstances. How does society judge older sexuality or indeed lust? Are the rules different for men and women? How graciously do the old accept “quittin’ time”? How worried are the old about their sexual aura or chances or performance? (Modern Western culture and media seem fanatically invested in a view of libidinal sufficiency—armed with the right cosmetics or medications—that knows no end other than the grave.) Yet even if we know that life itself is longer than romance, what does the postsexual life look like?

Ever since Plato, the philosophers have claimed old age as the happy reprieve from the pressing wants of desire: “For certainly old age has a great sense of calm and freedom; when the passions relax their hold, then, as Socrates says, we are freed from the grasp not of one mad master only, but of many.” We see here a view of the passions as taskmasters, as despots that rob us of agency and dignity. From this perspective, aging moves us finally into peace and thence into wisdom, for at last we are free to judge according to our inborn reason, unhampered by the sting of flesh. As I have implied, modern life seems distinctly at war with this view of old age as sanctuary, as liberation from flesh and desire. In part this has to do with the valence accorded to peace and calm: Are they indices of wisdom or of death? Do we regard roiling feelings and libidinal hunger as curses or blessings? One’s own age also has a great deal to do with judgments in this area. The young may find it not only unseemly but downright unthinkable that old folks continue to be sexually active. The old, I venture to say, find that their views on these matters are murky, evolving, and difficult.

In early-nineteenth-century America, Washington Irving created an emblematic figure for these issues. Rip Van Winkle may stand in our imagination as the fellow who slept for twenty years and then woke up and returned home. But if you look closely at Irving’s classic story, you note that Rip was a distinctly ineffective husband even in his salad days and particularly so in the conjugal sex department: “but as to doing his family duty … he found it impossible.” Dame Van Winkle, we gather, was a demanding, indeed shrewish, figure, whom Irving describes in a rather menacing fashion: “a sharp tongue is the only edged tool that grows keener with constant use.” Is there a hint of castration anxiety here? One thing is certain: our man Rip, out for a walk, comes upon the gods at play in their splendor and games and falls into a twenty-year slumber thanks to the liquid in their flagon. Waking up to a changed world—Irving is especially interested in contrasting the pre- and post-Revolutionary Americas that this plot allows him to sketch—Rip is discomfited by what he sees, but there is one piece of good news: his wife is at last dead. A long sleep has some benefits: no more “petticoat government”; “he had got his neck out of the yoke of matrimony.”

And that is how we leave the old fellow: reunited with his daughter, idle, sitting with the elders, telling stories. Free at last. The story closes with Irving’s generalization: “it is a common wish of all henpecked husbands in the neighborhood, when life hangs heavy on their hands, that they might have a quieting draft of Rip Van Winkle’s flagon.” Rip’s flagon is a potion for aging: but how many of today’s drug companies would buy into that? There is much concern today with the riddance of wrinkles and the arrival of erections, but not much interest in getting past the sexual altogether.

Is getting past sex such a good thing? Consider, in this regard, Miss Havisham in Dickens’s
Great Expectations
. Her life seems to have stopped at the moment of sexual betrayal at the hands of Compeyson, so everything remains frozen in the most ghastly way: clocks stopped, wedding cake still on the table, inhabited by spiders, beetles, and rats. Yet this panorama of arrested time is deceiving, since the old lady not only continues to live but exercises her will and her revenge on the two young people who come into her orbit: Estella, who is systematically deformed by her mentor into a cold, heartless beauty, a beautiful puppet/bloodsucker, and Pip, who thinks she is bankrolling him, who is convinced that she has arranged for him to marry Estella, who insists on seeing her as a fairy godmother. In my account of Pip’s education, I drew attention to the grisly scene where she catches on fire and Pip leaps upon her, wrestling with her on the floor, and I suggested that there were overtones of rape in the language Dickens used; I’d go on to say that that sequence constitutes a peculiar climax for Miss Havisham, that it images precisely the sexual act that has been monstrously held in abeyance, prevented from happening.

In his play about male sexual anxieties,
The Father
, the Swedish playwright Strindberg is obsessed with the issue of time-bound potency (male and female), and although the overt concern of the text is patrimony—can a father be sure he’s sired his child?—the strongest passages evoke the crisis of male sexuality as a primal force in the universe. What happens when engendering stops? Consider, for example, the following crazed speech as a hallucinatory figuring of what a postsexual regime might look like:

In these compressed lines we discern the lineaments of a truly postsexual geriatric world, one where the spawning and fertility principles have gone out of business, and Strindberg is nothing if not democratic, for he locates this condition among the animals too, while finally linking it to the engendering work of Genesis itself: let there be light. But in this new dispensation, conception, photosynthesis, and growth are all gone. Bearded women, impotent men, capons, dysfunctional hens inhabit the scene: no roosters in sight to signal the beginning of the day, no sun left to irradiate the earth and its living creatures with heat and warmth and the life principle; just moonlight and ruins. It is a surreal evocation of what time does to life, of the end of “siring” of any stripe, and it is no accident that Strindberg’s male title figure is entirely cashiered by such arrangements and ends up in swaddling clothes, having been systematically regressed by the machinations of his shrewd wife and his own paranoia. Growing up, growing old: Strindberg’s Father makes the trip in reverse, and ends up
infans
.

I include the Strindberg piece because it turns its man into both child and woman; maybe that is what we are to learn from it: that time alters the forms we took to be stable, so that old parents rebecome babies and are ministered to by their children. But it also posits a notion of what the Creation might look like, if impotency and menopause were the new dispensation of things. (What would Strindberg think of our modern sperm banks, substitute wombs, and test-tube babies?) Once the play’s male is sufficiently undone, the misogynist author has no choice but to declare the young wife the winner. Laura triumphs entirely, becomes the “man of the house” by play’s end. Her husband has been reduced to silence; patriarchal power has been dealt a severe blow. She wins; she may have lovers to come. But what future is there for the bearded women? Even Strindberg couldn’t imagine that scenario.

These matters achieve a surreal, indeed sublime form in his late play
The Ghost Sonata
, an unforgettable account of the living dead, of desexed ghouls who cannot die but live behind elegant walls and continue to feast on one another’s entrails with lies and deceptions, capping an entire existence of betrayals and poisoned relationships. The crown jewel in this viper’s nest is Polly, a woman turned literally into a mummy, living in her closet-cage, staring intently at a beautiful statue of her in her youth, measuring incessantly the dismantling life has done. When her now-old former lover stumbles upon her in her lair and cannot believe his eyes, she sets him straight: “Yes, this is how I look!—And
(pointing to the statue)
that’s how I
used
to look! Life teaches us so much.”

Strindberg’s surrealism frees him to give material form to time’s lessons. Our eyes have trouble registering the progress of aging, for the human face and body evolve so very slowly, but look what a playwright can do: a lady now transformed into a mummy lives in a cage with her eyes fixed on a statue of a nubile girl. Live long enough, Strindberg tells us, and you are the grotesque twisted living dead, permanently on the far side of libido, but there is a catch: you never quite forget the beauty you long ago had, a beauty whose every feature you remember with bitterness, which is there in sculptural form permanently to haunt you. Stone does not age; mummies cannot die; put them together, and, voilà, the story of growing old—the generic heinous two-way traffic between statue and mummy—is told once again.

In other writers these matters can be more virulent. Faulkner’s
Light in August
seems entirely cued to the war between conception and entropy, as illustrated in the thematic tug-of-war between the fertile, unmarried, about-to-deliver Lena Grove and the neurotic, death-oriented Joe Christmas (who thinks he has “a little nigger blood” in him). Their joint stories occupy center stage in this violently overheated fiction, but the figure whose fate is inseparable from these matters is Joanna Burden, the older woman, the white New England spinster who becomes Christmas’s lover (“nigger lover” according to her neighbors, once they find out about Joe) and whose tempestuous awakening to late sexual frenzy occasions some of Faulkner’s most remarkable writing. One feels that the Mississippi writer is pulling out all the regional and libidinal stops in fashioning a nymphomaniac New England spinster who explodes into mad lust, profanity, and excess in her trysts with Christmas. (It is in these sequences that breathy coinages such as “womanshenegro” enter the text, displaying Faulkner’s sense of crossed wires, of racial taboo as fierce aphrodisiac on the woman’s side, whereas the male sees himself entering “the pit,” drowning in the female genital morass.
Light in August
is Faulkner’s most unzipped novel.)

Joanna perhaps comes most fully into our argument at the point when she tells Christmas she thinks she is pregnant, but this assertion is followed by increasing evidence that her pregnancy is either mendacious or illusory. It is not to be, and Faulkner graphs her entry into menopause by insistently representing her passage through erotic fury on to quiescence in the charged imagery of Indian summer, “that final upflare of stubborn and dying summer upon which autumn, the dawning of half-death, had come unawares.” There is a clear seasonal logic to this novel, and it is grisly in its ramifications: “ ‘You haven’t got any baby,’ he [Christmas] said. ‘You never had one. There is not anything the matter with you except being old. You just got old and it happened to you and now you are not any good anymore.’ ” This exchange reaches its conclusion in homicidal violence: Christmas cuts off her head.

Granted, Joanna has designs on him that he cannot abide—such as acknowledging his black blood, going to a Negro college—but her primary offense seems to be that she is “not any good anymore,” and that suffices as a death sentence. The severity of this indictment testifies to a crazed but stubborn prizing of potency and fertility as the gauge of one’s human viability. Faulkner’s older women often come across as a postsexual, embittered, even smoldering lot. Caroline Compson (in
The Sound and the Fury
) stands indicted for coldness of heart, Addie Bundren (in
As I Lay Dying
) exercises steely and vengeful control over her husband and progeny even beyond the grave, Joanna Burden’s false pregnancy and affair with Joe Christmas leads to decapitation, more minor figures such as Mrs. Armstid and other decent farmers’ wives come to us as pinched and bruised and pickled, as victims of a system that has been busily coercing them for some time now, drying them out, taking their juices, leaving them only with a fine residual rage at what life brings them. Rosa Coldfield (in
Absalom, Absalom!
) is imaged as both enraged shrew and living mummy, as if she were sealed (while at full boil) in formaldehyde after the insult Sutpen meted out to her more than forty-three years earlier. Her fateful journey out to Sutpen’s Hundred at the novel’s close is written by Faulkner in orgasmic language, as an affair of moaning and panting and outright somatic release: her life too is climaxing at last.

Is that how male writers see it? Wait long enough, old bearded women, and some violently displaced form of sexual deed comes to finish you off: your head gets cut off by your younger lover, you burn alive with a boy writhing on you to put out the flames, you whimper and pant and moan en route to the encounter of your life (with a wasted ghost whom you finally see in the decaying flesh after all these years) so that you can at last die. It’s a severe script. Are there no accommodations with time’s injuries? Might appetite and libido be more sinuous and creative than these scenarios suggest?

It must be the case that the young also experience sexual anxiety, but time is on their side, their equipment is new, and they are on the front side of a glorious chapter in our species’ affairs. In my discussion of
Manon Lescaut
I did point to some passages that evoke a kind of figurative sexual doubt, but the general tone of the growing-up stories is one of confidence. But the drama of aging can scarcely be understood if we refuse to factor in doubts in this key department of our emotional and libidinal careers, doubts brought on by the passing of time or even by the outsize amorous expectations cultivated by our media culture. Life, as we know, can be devilishly complicated when it comes to the bedroom, and I have no interest in studying outright dysfunction or sexual failure. Great literature is neither pornographic nor clinical, yet it sometimes speaks powerfully to these very issues of power at risk.