Angels and Absences: Child Deaths in the Nineteenth Century (62 page)

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Authors: Laurence Lerner

Tags: #History, #Modern, #19th Century, #Social Science, #Death & Dying, #test

BOOK: Angels and Absences: Child Deaths in the Nineteenth Century
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Page 168
To the archaic language is added Echo's habit of twisting or mispronouncing words ("Swie" for "wie," "swer" for "wer"; ''Got" for "Gott"we might say "Goad" for "God"). Another prayer runs:
Merkt, swer für den andern bitt'
sich selber löset er damit.
Echo bitt' für die ganze Welt
Daß Got auch ihm in Armen hält.
Whoso prays for other's weal,
His own offences he shall heal.
Echo prays for all mankind.
So God in his embrace me bind.
This unleashes a discussion between Adrian and Zeitblom, the narrator, in which Adrian observes that disinterestedness is surely suspended once one sees that it is in one's own interest (Uneigennützigkeit ist doch aufgehoben, so bald man sich merkt, daß sie nützlich ist). Zeitblom wonders where Echo learned these strange prayers; Adrian replies that he prefers to let the question rest unasked, assuming that Echo would not be able to tell them anything about it (O nein, ich ziehe es vor, die Frage auf sich beruhen zu lassen, und nehme an, er wüßte mir keinen Bescheid). The suggestion is that Echo, not being altogether of this world, has brought the prayers from the elfin land he inhabited.
Mann's first masterpiece,
Buddenbrooks
, published at the very beginning of the century, which contains the moving death of little Hanno and the consequent extinction of the family (a gentler version of Hardy's "coming universal wish not to live"), is in all essentials a nineteenth century novel.
Rosshalde,
twelve years later, though its theme is that of Yeats ("The intellect of man is forced to choose Perfection of the life or of the work") has not fully crossed the divide that distinguishes nineteenth from twentieth century fiction, the novel of autonomous subject and omniscient narrator from the subversions of modernism. But
Doktor Faustus
, published in 1947, is truly modernist, wrestling with the problem of the artist who rejects tradition only to embrace it in strange and difficult ways, depicting the breakdown of humanist values, and the disturbing connections between aestheticism and barbarism, between artistic experiment and fascism. For some it is
the
modern novel, self-conscious and deeply skeptical;
 
Page 169
yet it is Echo, far more than either Hanno or Pierre, who takes us back to the high Victorian sensibility, and recalls Paul Dombey. For it is Echo who is the modern version of the "old-fashioned" child, not only in his ability to disconcert by the mischievous and the unexpected, but also in a very literal sense: he uses old-fashioned language. When it has rained, he delights Adrian by saying "daß der 'Rein' dieser Nacht das Erdrich 'erkickt' habe"; Adrian is fascinated both by the image and by the oddness of the vocabulary. Zeitblom, being a scholar, is able to explain to him that the forms Echo is using are medieval variants, "Rein" or "Reigen'' for "Regen," "erkicken" for "erquicken." This makes the passage untranslatable: Lowe Porter, whose efforts to find English equivalents are always heroic and often brilliant, is forced to omit some of it. Perhaps we might say, "last night the ren kickened the earthling." Echo, playing childishly with words, is somehow able to speak medieval German: he is a kind of word-spirit, an embodiment of the language itselfmore, indeed, than Paul, who has Toots to do his inventing.
Echo listens to his uncle's musical box as Paul might have, but Dickens would not have added the coolly analytic remark that he listened "always with the same rapt attention, with eyes in which delight, astonishment and a gazing dreaminess mingled in unforgettable fashion" (in immer gleichem Gebanntsein lauschte, mit Augen in dem Amüsiertheit, Erstaunen und tief schauende Träumerei sich auf unvergeßliche Weise mischten). This may not be a Dickensian sentenceMann the intellectual has far more taste for abstract nouns than Dickens the popular entertainerbut it could be a description of Paul.
And is Echo an angel? He belongs among those who are new to the world, half strange and inexperienced (auf Erden noch Neuen, halb Fremden und Unbewanderten); he is a "holde Erscheinung," a holy apparition;; he is childhood itself, conveying a feeling of having come down to be among us (das Gefühl von Herabgestiegensein); he is a little ambassador from the land of the children and elves. There are pagan elements in this, but there are also explicitly Christian elements: he rocks Reason to sleep in dreams that transcend logic, tinged with Christianity (die Vernunft in außerlogische, von unserem Christentum tingierte Träume wiege). Echo lying in his bed to recite his prayers, his shallow hands brought together in front of his breast ("immer vor anbetenden Heiligen seine Händchen zum Kreuzeszeichen [erhoben])" recalls both the Christ child worshipped by saints and little Nell laid to rest. And like the Christ child, he must be
 
Page 170
taken out of timeas a response to the infinitely sad thought that a child like Echo will grow up and fade into the light of common day. Zeitblom self-deprecatingly admits that as a teacher, given to didacticism, he is especially aware that Echo's charm will, sooner or later, ripen and fall victim to the world, that his Engelsmienchen (his little angel features), with all their individual charming childlike details, will turn into the face of a more or less ordinary boy. No doubt the same would have happened to Paul if death had not rescued him. That was what Mrs. Marcet, with her devilish cuteness, must have realized, and if she had survived to read
Doktor Faustus
she would presumably have predicted Echo's death.
The reason Echo, Phil, and Pierre all die of meningitis is obviousdepressingly obvious: because it is such a horrible death. So it is not surprising to find perhaps the most famous of all child deaths in modern fiction resulting from something equally horrible. The son of M. Othon, judge, at Oran dies of plague in the 4th section of
La Peste,
and we are given a very matter-of-fact account of his sufferings, in the terse dry prose for which Camus was so celebrated.
Sans mot dire, Rieux lui montra l'enfant qui, les yeux femés dans une face decomposée, les dents serrées à la limite de ses forces, le corps immobile, tournait et retournait sa tête de droite à gauche, sur le traversin sans drap.
28
Without a word, Rieux showed him the child, who, with his eyes closed in his distorted face, his teeth clenched with all his strength, his body immobile, kept turning his head from right to left on the bolster without a sheet.
There is no sensationalism in this clinical writing, except for the deliberately blasphemous climax:
De grosses larmes, jaillissant sous les paupières enflammées, se mirent à couler sur son visage plombé, et, au bout de la crise, épuisé, crispant ses jambes osseuses et ses bras dont la chair avait fondu en quarante-huit heures, l'enfant prit dans le lit dévasté une pose de crucifié grotesque.
Large tears, shooting out under the inflamed eyelids, began to run down his face the colour of lead, and at the end of the crisis, exhausted, stiffening his skeletal legs and his arms from which the flesh had melted away in forty-eight hours, the child, lying on the disarranged bed, took on the posture of someone grotesquely crucified.

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