In Time

by C K Williams

  The literature of the Middle Ages and Renaissance offers similar examples. Dante’s Beatrice, when he first sees her and exalts her as the image of love and redemption that will inform his Divine Comedy, is eleven. Although Shakespeare’s young lovers, Romeo and Juliet, are teenagers and act that way, they are provided none of the excuses nor solace we would assume for our own confused young lovers: their actions are considered imprudent in adult terms, in any terms, and they, like Pentheus, will die.

  The shifts in attitude that make adolescence a definite concept arrive gradually, which shouldn’t be surprising considering that such a radical change of vision altered not only our ideas of postpubescence but also, by extension, that of the child, encroaching, as Aries says, “upon childhood in one direction and maturity in the other.”

  The most marked of these changes date from the time of the Enlightenment and the great eighteenth- and nineteenth-century revolutions. The new epistemological concepts that evolved at the end of the seventeenth century were extreme and represented a clear rupture with more traditional ideas that had been grounded in theological rather than philosophical speculation. Locke’s tabula rasa, the notion that the newborn’s mind was a clean slate, a perceptual and structural void that would be imprinted with whatever impressions and values with which its society instilled it, evolved further into Rousseau’s vision of the purity and innocence of the child and, then, to the concept of the possible recuperation of that innocence in a just society. If we are imperfect and corrupted, as we surely are, it is not because of either original sin nor our weak wills but, rather, because we have been perplexed and distorted by a culture that not only doesn’t know how to shape judiciously its own forms but doesn’t really even understand how properly to educate its citizens.

  Rousseau’s idea, that education is reeducation, is profound, and I believe that much of the new vision of adolescence was grounded directly in that perception. Before the eighteenth century, education, practical and moral, presumed there was a body of cultural knowledge that was to be absorbed as well as possible and then lived by. After the Enlightenment, and up to our time, practical and moral education comes to be considered a process, an investigation, a dialectic of testings between the self and society. The culture must in a sense prove itself again to each of its participants before they will share wholeheartedly and with moral conviction in the collective.

  This same shift has been reinforced by political history as well. The French and American Revolutions, with their new vision of individual citizens participating in their own governance and in the creation of themselves as persons beyond whatever their inherited status might be, brought about a whole new sense of self, of the self’s potentials and responsibilities. In a society in which privileges and duties are inherited, they have to be assumed at the age at which they arrive: “minority” is a much vaguer and more flexible status, much more subject to social expediency. One arrives in one’s ultimate life situation in a sense “made,” completed. With the age of commerce and industrial expansion, which coincided with the age of revolution and of heightened expectation, the individual’s identity not only can be self-created, in most cases it must be. We have to be educated, and to educate ourselves, not only in order to govern ourselves but also to make our way and our place in a world that has been thrown open to undreamed of possibilities of material and spiritual ambition. And also, we should note, to undreamed of chances for failure. The disruptions and uprooting of the early age of capitalism and industrial expansion were experienced by much of the population of the West with brutal directness; the education of the self became not a luxury for the spirit but a necessity for the survival of the body. The Romantics, themselves children of the age of revolution, had to live out their disappointments and disenchantments by participating in reactionary counterrevolutions at the same time as the new common man, fighting the old fight for bread and sustenance, seemed to betray the very hopes that so shortly before had granted him freedom. As Shelley put it: “Can he who the day before was a trampled slave suddenly become liberal-minded, forbearing, and independent? This is the consequence of the habits of a state of society to be produced by resolute perseverance and indefatigable hope and long-suffering and long-believing courage.” Shelley might be describing the adolescence of an entire culture. We can find the same attitude a little later in Emerson’s essays, particularly “Self Reliance” and “Nature,” which seem to speak directly to the insecurities and uncertainties of the young American nation and the young industrial capitalist century.

  In a society charged with so many challenges, an extended period of education, maturation, and social growth was clearly needed for acquiring the strength of will needed to confront the daunting task of making a way through this new reality. Our coming to consider adolescence as a natural developmental phenomenon, rather than a cultural one, is both an expression of this and, perhaps, a complicating factor in the way we experience it. If we regard adolescence as being as natural and inevitable as physical puberty, rather than a cultural fact, perhaps we can’t help but impose on it expectations that muddle even more the already difficult task of self-making. There has come to be in our culture, for example, a terrific blurring as to exactly whom should be considered an adult. Our society prescribes various passages and rituals—school, career choice, sex, and marriage, among others—but none has the definiteness of our biological life. And the question of when and how one really does achieve adulthood, in terms of both how other “real” adults deal with us and how we regard ourselves, becomes one of the crucial issues of our lives—and the most uncertain.

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  This confusion, these expectations, and the potential violation of them have themselves become the source and subject of much of the literature of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The configuration and quality of the family, the separation of the youthful protagonist from his or her parents, the young hero’s confrontation with society, and the turbulent emotions these projects entail are the themes of a large proportion of modern Western literature. Sometimes the characters of these works are portrayed as succeeding in their struggles, sometimes they fail, and sometimes they’re subjected to endless Promethean conflicts that absorb all their energies—and life itself—but the theme, what Thomas Mann called in the title of one of his works, “disorder and early sorrow,” remains remarkably constant.

  The approach to all this varies widely, from Goethe to Fielding, from Wordsworth to Joyce to Philip Roth, but the literature can be divided into two tendencies, what might be called “example” and “image.” I mean, by example literature, works that offer, or seem to offer, guidance, direction, and helpful patterns for the project of maturation. Most popular literature is in this category: the old Horatio Alger stories, as well as all the boyhood and girlhood evocations of usually parentless adventuring through the world. Westerns are a more sublimated mode of the same thing, offering clear, however woefully misguided, enactments of heroism, as is a small proportion of more serious literature. The Sun Also Rises, in the sense I’ve discussed it, can be taken as an instance of example literature.

  Works of “image” literature, which compose the greater portion of thoughtful enactments of the trials of adolescence, offer no instruction or advice, no direct routes through the quagmires of growing up. Rather, they hold up mirrors to the young by which they can behold themselves in another, behold their own consternation and helplessness, thereby, hopefully, aiding, even abetting, them on their own journey. Sometimes the images in these mirrors can be quite devastating—Byron ridiculed generations of properly educated young Englishmen in his satires—and sometimes they’re more flattering, as in Wordsworth’s autobiographies of himself in his changing society.

  The key work of example literature during my own adolescence was J. D. Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye. When I read the book at sixteen, it was as close as I’d ever come to revelation. Salinger’s relatively simple, though tonally very complex, story about a sixteen-year-o
ld on the verge of a breakdown shed light on so many of the dark corridors of my own life, my secret life, that I felt illuminated, enlightened, enchanted. In reading the book many years later, a certain imaginative sympathy is called for. The book doesn’t really hold any surprises—most of the issues it deals with have by now, thank goodness, been resolved in my life—but, as with Hemingway, I realize it was Salinger’s prose style that had been most meaningful for me. The book begins like this:

  If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you’ll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don’t feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth. In the first place, that stuff bores me, and in the second place, my parents would have about two hemorrhages apiece if I told anything pretty personal about them. They’re quite touchy about anything like that, especially my father. They’re nice and all—I’m not saying that—but they’re also touchy as hell. Besides I’m not going to tell you my whole goddamn autobiography or anything. I’ll just tell you about this madman stuff that happened to me around last Christmas just before I got pretty run-down and had to come out here and take it easy.

  We are very far here from the prose world of Hemingway’s hero. Holden Caulfield, Salinger’s sad young man, is recounting his narrative from a mental institution, and though he says he is about to be released, he is still evidently in a quite agitated state. While Hemingway’s narrator speaks to everyone and no one—he is alone, solitary and secure in his solitude—Salinger’s Holden introduces another person, “you,” someone to be with him in his story, by the second word, long before he himself, the very contingent “I,” is actually introduced. There are no simple and declarative statements in Holden’s speech. His sentences are contorted, turning in on themselves, going on and on past where anyone in a normal state of mind would end a thought to start another. Compared to Hemingway’s world, which is purified of almost all adjectival activity, everything in Holden’s speech is modified.” Probably . . . and all . . . all that . . . kind of . . . quite.” Holden is thinking very fast, too fast, with a complexity that’s almost beyond him; he can barely keep up with himself, even without his little slip about his parents, “They’re nice and all—I’m not saying that,” it’s clear that his relationship to his family is overwhelmingly complicated.

  Holden is conscious that he offers nothing like a good example of anything, and he will even take a swipe at another fictional character who does, who is in fact a key character of the literature of example, David Copperfield, Dickens’s ever resourceful, ever ethical, never neurotic or overly libidinal hero whose goodness and good deeds in the end conquer all adversity. Holden, later in the book, will try to deflate another potential literary hero, one of Hemingway’s this time, from A Farewell to Arms: “It had this guy in it named Lieutenant Henry that was supposed to be a nice guy and all. I don’t see how D.B. [Holden’s writer-brother] could hate the Army and war and all so much and still like a phony like that.”

  It’s not always so easy, however, to distinguish between the literatures of example and image. Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn not long ago was the center of a controversy about just such a difficulty. Some in the African American community have objected to the apparent racism of Huck, to his mistreatment and belittling of the runaway slave, Jim. Huck seems genuinely to love Jim, and even saves his life, but his response to Jim’s actual humanity is contaminated by his acculturation, by the very language he uses to speak of his relations with Jim, and it is this that has been most abrasive. I feel that Twain meant Huck’s essential conflict to be precisely his attempt at moral self-awareness, his beginning to understand what racism and intolerance have really meant to his society and to him. But Huck’s ironic hectoring of Jim and the outright racism of most of the adult characters in the book are depicted so vividly that it’s easy to see how the question of whether Twain meant Huck to be an image, a pedagogical device, as I feel he is, or an example—a depiction of malign racial attitudes—as those who protest the book believe, is hard to resolve.

  Huck, at any rate, is a prototypical adolescent, with a part of him still in childhood and a part straining to bring him to the moral consciousness of maturity. Twain clearly grasped the issues of the new adolescence: the self, set adrift from family, trying to cobble an acceptable identity for itself in a community of adults that has no precise definition for him. Some adults treat Huck as one of themselves, others regard him as still a child. Along with this, Twain satirizes the absurdities of much of the example literature of the time. When Huck is trying to free Jim from captivity, his even less mature friend, Tom Sawyer, finds the adventure insufficiently exciting and proposes adventuresome complications that have their origins in literature. Tom chides Huck: “Well, if that ain’t just like you, Huck Finn. You can get up the infant-schooliest ways of going at a thing. Why, hain’t you ever read any books at all?—Baron Trench, nor Casanova, nor Benvenuto Chelleeny, nor Henry VI, nor none of them heroes? Who ever heard of getting a prisoner loose in such an old-maidy ways as that?” And poor Jim’s situation becomes even more fraught as a result of Tom’s fantasies and meddling.

  As I’ve pointed out, Twain was only one of many nineteenth-century writers who concerned themselves with adolescence, and once literature began to produce reflections of the turmoil and illusions of adolescence, young people began to respond to them in shaping their own lives; the phenomenon becomes a kind of hall of mirrors. Some of our greatest literature deals with the problems adolescents have with these complicated interchanges between life and art. Raskolnikov, in Dostoevski’s Crime and Punishment, who is Huck Finn’s near contemporary, is driven not only by the intolerable social situation in Tsarist Russia, nor by his own repressed and turbulent sexuality: he is also led, or misled, by the radical literature that was being produced throughout Europe at that time, particularly by his reading of Nietzsche’s Thus Spake Zarathustra. Nietzsche, in his best-known work, promulgated an überman who would inaugurate a new morality, based on a more accurate reading of human psychology rather than on the delusions of metaphysics and religion. Nietzsche’s exhilarating ideas mean to redeem the lost hopes of the age of revolution: in his vision, it will not be society that produces his new man because society is incurably corrupted. But the enlightened individual, the Zarathustrian hero, will leap past those who are unconfident and self-demeaning as a result of their unexamined moral compromises. In some ways Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, the character himself, can be regarded as a sort of ultimate adolescent: in his petulance and bravado, as well as his flamboyant brilliance, he is the apotheosis of example literature. Raskolnikov, to his sorrow, takes him as even more than this, attempting by his own act of absurd violence to unmoor himself from the pettiness of his culture.

  The heirs of Raskolnikov, and of Huck, are not to be found only in our literatures. The new vision of life, of moral development and of social potential, and the dark underside of all these hopeful promises—disruption, disjunction, uncertainty, loss of security, and the terror of a moral nihilism—have been endured by the young for several centuries now. The Bohemian, the Dandy, the Dadaist, the Surrealist, the Beatnik, the Hippie, the Punk, the Rapper: all have been offered as images of fulfillment and completion. Toward the end of my own adolescence, Jack Kerouac delineated characters who were much like Hemingway’s tight-lipped, ill-rooted heroes but set absolutely adrift in their own country, fleeing themselves in joyrides across the continent, voyages that are no longer travels towards anything, no longer a search for meaning or certainty, but ends in themselves, an incessant series of arrivals and departures, frantic attempts to shake loose and be set free into the process if not the reality of self-revealment and self-creation.

  Now, hardly more than a few generations after Kerouac, the situation of the young is yet more complex and more acutely dire. The conflict today between the models our
adolescence have bequeathed to them and the reality they have to endure has intensified the tensions of their quest. The young today must cope with readily available hard drugs, those deceptive, wily, and maiming means of evasion and escape. And they must deal with a culture that has commercialized the very act of rebellion that was once the treasured possession of the young. Today’s adolescents can behold themselves on television and the Internet and can behold, too, enactments of their most outrageous fantasies. Gestures of revolt are readily available, but at the same time their desperate energy is radically disvalued by their very accessibility.

  And the social-political world toward which the young strive resonates with anxiety and despair. Aside from the cynicism with which the terrorist threat has been used as an excuse for everything under the sun, to many young people, the adult world seems almost frenziedly stupid in its refusal to deal in constructive ways with the social and environmental havoc it has perpetrated. The youth of our time set out in life in a situation of extreme economic uncertainty; the uncertainties of globalization, a slash-and-burn economics that is being used to inaugurate the most regressive and mean-spirited reactionary programs: the young can feel, perhaps properly, that our whole culture is being frighteningly manipulated and it is they who experience this most painfully, and most passionately.