Morning, Noon, and Night: Finding the Meaning of Life's Stages Through Books (8 page)

How does one go about being a good boy? The final stanza answers that (unposed) question by returning us to the waking world of reality—dark, cold, replete with bags and brushes and work: exactly what one had been freed from by the good graces of the Angel—with a strategy for happiness: do your duty, and you need fear no harm. We realize, of course, that duty consists of going back (forever) into chimneys, but now armed with a vision of beatitude. And that is where the poem leaves it. But where does it leave us?

In my view, Blake has reprised the oldest and most potent political critique of the Church known to civilization: its delicious promise of salvation, its solemn pledge of an afterlife, and its clear exhortation to accept current conditions as they are, to do your duty, as the ticket to that radiant afterlife. For we cannot fail to see that the vision of happiness, gaiety, and freedom is a dream, a vision, and that it accords smoothly with a sociopolitical order that requires children in chimneys. The pathos of the poem stems from our sentiment that the great joys of this paradisal vision—running, laughing, playing, washing in the river, shining in the sun—should be available to children in reality, not merely in dream. And Blake’s terms prefigure our own more cynical discourse, for how can we not see that the miraculous washing at the core of this beatific vision (miraculous for chimney sweeps, shorn and sleeping in soot) is a version of brainwashing? Brainwashing means altering someone’s moral perspective to suit the needs of power. Brainwashing means that one’s moral perspective is actually alterable, and power knows how to do it. Brainwashing is Blake’s tragic yet profound view of growing up.

Why is none of this critique I’ve elaborated stated in the poem? Because it is a poem of innocence. And here we approach what is most sublime in this short poem: the radical distinction between what we see and what the child sees. And more still: the world-altering power of innocence. We see in this poem a portrait of victimization, carried all the way into the soul. But that is not what the child speaker sees. He sees a radiant dream of purity and salvation and bliss, and that dream is enough to carry him through the darkness of his life as chimney sweep. He is warmed by his vision of radiance, by the promise of joy to come. And that is why no easy final verdict is possible here. One does not know whether to pity or to envy this child. What, after all, is the ideal mind-set of a chimney sweep? To want to take to the barricades and tear down the system? Or to do one’s duty, with the ardent conviction that it will lead to final bliss? It is seductively easy, I think, to come down hard, as I have to believe Blake himself did, because an ideologically savvy twenty-first-century reader is likely to see exploitation in every word of this poem. But I am no less stunned by the wisdom of innocence, for make no mistake about it: it pays its way, it warms the child, it generates the energies needed to live a life of toil.

Growing up, for Blake, at least in this poem, is shown to be a tragic operation, for it signifies a kind of ideological brainwashing, whereby the power culture permeates your very dreams, constructs your subjectivity, makes you who you are, makes you into an accepting social subject. Blake announces Freud a century in advance, for he understands that consciousness is a hivelike discourse of voices and injunctions that wash into you without your knowing. He prefigures the French theorist Louis Althusser, who would erect an entire system based on such views, claiming that ideology is utterly invisible, that our enmeshment within it is profoundly if unknowingly consensual. Blake’s most explosive formula is found in his poem “London,” when he states what he hears on every street of the city: “mind forged manacles.” It can’t be better said: the true incarceration, the true penal work of culture, is an inside job, done every day one lives. In Blake you hear it.

Writing of this stamp proves, as nothing else can, why we need to consult literature if we are to understand what it means to grow up. Written in the mode of innocence, “The Chimney Sweeper” yields a rich and echoing double script: it tells a story of victimization and of belief, of coercion and of escape, of reality and of dream. It makes us want to change the cruel world, yet it makes us realize that faith is a great (if blinding) armor. It displays the extraordinarily sinuous workings of power. Blake utilizes the angelic vision of innocence to bring to light the drama of ideological formation, of how the mind and the soul become what they do. Whereas Blake is brief, almost lapidary, in his account of the child’s innocent vision, other writers unpack the deep and rich human consequences—ethical, perceptual, political, emotional, even comical—of such a vision. Hans Jakob von Grimmelshausen, writing more than a century before Blake, and Mark Twain, William Faulkner, and Marjane Satrapi, coming in the centuries afterward, are among them.

Hans Jakob Christoffel von Grimmelshausen is not a household name for many readers today, and that is at once a great pity and a great injustice. The author of two seminal works in the seventeenth century—
Der Abentheuerliche Simplicissimus
and
Die Lanstörtzerin Courage
—he is the greatest German writer of his time and on a plane with Rabelais and Cervantes as a founding figure in the development of the novel. Bertolt Brecht, who brilliantly pastiched so many earlier authors, wrote what is arguably his greatest play,
Mother Courage
(to be discussed later in this book), by rewriting Grimmelshausen. In
Simplicissimus
, a hurdy-gurdy, carnivalesque account of life during the Thirty Years’ War (1618–48), Grimmelshausen’s central figure, Simplicius, is a tabula rasa on whom experience writes its lessons.

Living as shepherd in the woods with his father, his
Knan
, Simplicius is told of only one real threat to be on the lookout for: the wolf; should the wolf come, play your bagpipe, he is told. Okay. But there is one problem: what is a wolf? He hears figures approaching, and he plays the bagpipe for all he is worth, which brings the soldiers—for that is what they are—right to him. Soldier to us, wolf to him: “ ‘Aha,’ I thought to myself, ‘so here we are! These must be the four-legged rogues and thieves my Dad told me of.’ ” Men on horses look to him like four-legged creatures. No mortars or shells or overhead planes are needed here, since this Thirty Years’ War turns life itself inside out, brings marauding soldiers from village to village, drinking, gambling, whoring, torturing, beating, “nothing but hurting and harming and being, in their turn hurt and harmed,” whether they be Protestant or Catholic, Swedes or Austrians. (Note the chiastic construction Grimmelshausen uses: all those “ing” verbs denote, first, what you do, and, second, what is done to you: utterly egalitarian, like a boomerang.)

Horrors abound, but
horrors
is an adult word, an adult notion even, in this text, so that raping the hired girl, pouring liquid manure down the serving man’s mouth via wedge and pail, brutalizing even parents and sister, all are recounted as flatly as changing wallpaper, as set design, as moving stage, as “things that happen.” It would be hard to overstate the pith and reach of this condition whereby one inhabits a toppling, tumbling world of moving pictures, shifting shapes.

These wolf creatures destroy the child’s home in short order, and he escapes into the wilderness, only to come upon another strange figure: a man with long hair, tangled beard, heavy chain, and “a huge crucifix, some six feet high, which he clasped to his breast.” Again he thinks: wolf. Given the conventions of seventeenth-century literature, we are not surprised to learn later that this hermit is actually the boy’s real father, but what most strikes us is Grimmelshausen’s use of naive perspective, of innocence as point of view. It can be a devastating point of view. The child at one point looks into a large house and sees “men and women twirling and swirling around … stamping and bawling” with sweat pouring out of them and breathing noisily. What can this be? They are dancing. How strange the signs of pleasure must be if you do not know them. Farther down this road, he observes a pair in a goose shed, hears noises, and sees strange postures, but then the boards “began to creak and groan, and the girl to moan as if in pain,” and he thinks they are like the maniacs who tried to stamp through the floor, that they might next come out and attack him too, as part of their campaign of destruction. Again, as with Blake’s chimney sweep, the “experienced” reader fills in the blanks, translates into the adult code.

Simplicius is captured many times, and his captors are always unsure whether he is a simpleton or a spy, so they test him: by giving him drugs, by displacing him into staged settings, by trying to destroy his reason. The parade of masks now begins: Simplicius is sequentially disguised as a calf, as a woman, as a devil, as an actor and gigolo in Paris, as a quack doctor, as a pilgrim, as a farmer, as a nobleman, as an underwater visitor to the Mummelsee kingdom. The kaleidoscopic nature of this novel is its enduring truth: life is a merry-go-round; one goes through a repertoire of roles; the world is crawling with wolves, hermits, and madmen, as well as soldiers and captors. We hear stories of mania: someone thinking he’d become an earthenware jug and would be broken, another thinking he was a rooster, another convinced that his nose trailed on the ground. Languages swirl too: as gigolo, Simplicius calls himself the
“beau Alman”
(handsome German) and sings French songs (which he does not understand) to the Parisian women who purchase, groupwise, his services in the dark. The boy’s most triumphant role is as the Huntsman of Soest, the quasi-mythic figure whose finest trick is the creation of shoes that point both ways, that leave no reliable tracks, that render you untraceable, anonymous, no one.

The fuller novel is far more complex than I have suggested, with a serious spiritual vision, but its view of growing up should now be fairly clear: maturation is not possible in this topsy-turvy world. Holding on to one’s soul, so that it can be nurtured, is next to impossible in a situation where one lives in drag, ingests strange chemicals, vomits out one’s insides, has nothing to hold on to or nurture: Thirty Years’ War. For most of us living today in industrialized societies, learning about war through news clips on the TV or via the Internet, it is hard to imagine existing for three long decades in a swirling regime of capsizing forms and figures. It is an education in morphology, in the deceitfulness of stable appearances, in the roller-coaster nature of perception and identity.

Simplicissimus
above all deserves recognition because it is our premier European story about growing up in war, forcing us to realize that most of our notions of growing up are peacetime notions, presupposing a huge measure of stability, so that a young person can make his or her choices in life and move through it with some composure and directionality. Put more bluntly, our concept of coming of age assumes (without ever realizing it) that the world itself stands still, that the human subject is the moving figure, and that the stage remains immobile. But if you are born into a raging war, if the terrain where you live is invaded and reinvaded continuously by soldiers and pillagers and scavengers of all stripes, if you yourself are picked up and packed off as a child, a thing moved from one place to another, well, then, any ideas about a stable, unmoving reality go up in smoke.

We do not sufficiently measure or appreciate our debt to stability and sameness—one expects one’s room and one’s body to be the same tomorrow, just as one expects one’s loved ones to retain their shape—and we ignore thereby our royal good luck when things actually stay still around us, when we as humans have some kind of agency or maneuvering room, when sweet notions such as
ours
(our money, our house, our body, our life) with their proprietary promise seem to make sense. Children in war zones have none of this. War’s violence and disruptive power extend well beyond weaponry’s impact; they upend the world, make it into a place where things jump out of their skin, where ownership (including of self) disappears.

Grimmelshausen’s war novel would be prodigiously fertile for Western literature, even if no direct lineage is invoked. The adventures of Simplicius already beckon to the experience of Stendhal’s Fabrice del Dongo as he encounters unreadable pandemonium on a field called Waterloo; Tolstoy will pick up the same threads in
War and Peace
as Prince Andrei is initiated into battle, discovering how divorced real combat is from all the labels and frames we have for it. Stephen Crane’s
The Red Badge of Courage
takes these matters still further, offering us a galvanizing, capsizing, impressionist account of military action. The list goes on. Hemingway’s war stories toil in the same vineyard, and Nick Adams emerges as a young man nearly undone by what he has seen of violence and anarchy; Frederic Henry, in
A Farewell to Arms
, experiences the obscene fictiveness of all our docile labels and Big Words for saying “war.” Norman Mailer’s
The Naked and the Dead
, Joseph Heller’s
Catch-22
, and Tim O’Brien’s
The Things They Carried
are later installments in the same genre, bringing us news from the front, refracting this news through the vision and response of the young themselves, trying to make sense of the horrors and absurdities coming their way. Is it too much to say that the project at hand here is to transport us to ground zero so that we realize the bankruptcy of our notional world when it comes to measuring chaos?

At his most pungent, Grimmelshausen calls the bluff on us, much as Galileo did when he asserted, contrary to received views and retinal evidence, that
it moves
. He was referring to the planet itself, but texts of innocence school us in metamorphosis and whisper to us that our notions of fixity and sameness are just that: notions. Just take a longitudinal look at your own life, and you will find swirling forms: the cells live and die, the body marches on its treadmill, desires and fears and relationships and careers have no truck with stability, perhaps not even with pattern, try though we may (via résumés and the like) to domesticate such matters and pin them down in some permanent form.
Growing up:
the very term testifies to a kinetic regime, to life on the move. Art restores this mercurial scheme to our vision.