October 18, 2024

In 1960, the historian Philippe Ariès published a book called Centuries of Childhood that was as controversial as it was celebrated.  The book could very well have been titled Centuries without Childhood, for its premise is that childhood is a recent invention that did not exist until modern times.  In earlier periods, children were seen—when they were noticed at all—as “miniature adults.”  This of course sounds rather strange.  I am neither a historian nor a psychologist, and have no professional expertise about child development.  But, as a literary scholar, I think I can see what Ariès is talking about.  It is a bit startling to realize that children and childhood are largely absent from older literature.  Ariès is focused on the Middle Ages: for him, the idea of children emerged after the 15^th century.  I would say later:  childhood as we now think about it appears to have emerged, along with much else, around the 18^th century, as one aspect among many of a transformation from traditional to modern mythology. 

The most-discussed variety of evidence in Ariès is not from literature but from art history, where it is fairly inarguable that he is pointing to something real.  Typing into a search engine something like “Why do babies in medieval art look like ugly old men?” will result in numerous examples, including from some of the greatest artists.  It is not the case painters had not yet learned how to draw realistically.  In his famous watercolor of 1502, Albrecht Dürer observed a rabbit with extraordinary accuracy.  Yet when he portrayed the Christ child—by far the most frequent occasion for portraying a baby or child in Renaissance art, he invariably produced an image that is, to us, unappealing.  Far from being simply uninterested in observing more closely, Dürer actually made studies of babies and young people.  The results are not likely to inspire people today to think, “Well, maybe JD Vance is right and I intend to do my share in reproducing the race.  I want one of those.”  However, it is worth stopping a moment to interrogate ourselves, to ask whether we are dissatisfied with earlier pictures because they do not fit our preconceptions of what babies and children should look like.  In particular, they are not cute.  They are not sweet and innocent.  They are not sentimental, which is something we more or less expect, even though we know rationally that children are most definitely not always cute, especially when they are being cranky or throwing a tantrum.  Dürer knew that.  The Classical and Renaissance counterparts to images of the Virgin and Child are what are called putti, or sometimes “cherubs.”  These are winged babies who sometimes lurk in the corners of paintings.  They derive from the Classical god of love, called Eros in Greek and Amor or Cupid in Latin.  Venus with her winged son Cupid are a parallel to paintings of the Madonna and Child, but the love they represent is of course of a very different kind. 

A rather odd type of “miniature adult” appears in Shakespeare in the form of a child who speaks far beyond his years with wit and oracular wisdom.  Such an uncanny child appears in Macbeth in the form of the son of Lady Macduff, who engages in a contest of unchildlike wit with his own mother about his father, telling her that “If he were dead, you’d weep for him; if you would not,  it were a good sign that I should quickly have a new father” (4.2, Bevington edition).  He dies denouncing a murderer sent to kill them as a “shag-haired villain.”  The Winter’s Tale has another disconcertingly precocious boy named Mamillius, who tells one of the ladies babysitting him that he likes her best,

Not for because
Your brows are blacker; yet black brows, they say,
Become some women best, so that there be not
Too much hair there, but in a semicircle,
Or a half-moon made with a pen.   (2.1)

When the lady asks where he learned this, he replies “out of women’s faces.”  It is he who begins to tell the “winter’s tale,” because, he says, “A sad tale’s best for winter” (2.1.25).  But he is interrupted, and the tale is never told, because he dies offstage.   These children are “weird” in both senses of the word, which means both “strange” and “referring to destiny.”  When time is out of joint, a witty, oracular wisdom may come out of the mouths of babes.  Such wisdom is unearthly, and it is not surprising that both boys die.  The miraculous survival of Mamillius’ sister Perdita is surrounded by symbols of springtime rebirth, but Mamillius is not included in the “happy ending” of The Winter’s Tale, which is not a comedy but a “tragicomedy.” One of the things that means, apparently, is that not all of what is lost in time can be restored.  The death of Mamillius is final. 

When they appear at all, children in earlier literature tend to be not realistic but symbolic.  Another symbolic type is the female figure who dies young and thereby becomes a psychopomp, a guide to the world beyond.  One such figure is the girl being mourned by the speaker of the Middle English poem Pearl, probably by the same poet as Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.  The lost “pearl” is the speaker’s daughter, and may have been named Margaret, which means “pearl.”  She appears to the mourning speaker in a dream-vision and instructs him in Christian truth, especially about life in eternity and its relationship to time’s transience.  She is sometimes compared to Dante’s Beatrice, who plays a similar role, though as a grown woman rather than a child.  In the 17^th century, John Donne has two long, difficult poems, the First and Second Anniversaries, the anniversary being that of the death of a young woman named Elizabeth Drury at the age of 15, which Donne commemorates for two years running.  The first Anniversary is titled An Anatomie of the World, and is, figuratively, an autopsy:  the world is a corpse now that its ideal spirit has departed from it.  The second is called The Progresse of the Soul, following the girl’s spirit toward a better world.  However, all ideal images have ironic counterparts. Poe said that the death of a young woman was the most poetical subject in the world, but all the speaker of “Annabelle Lee” can do is lie down by his beloved’s tomb. 

The young people in Pearl and the Anniversaries belong to a higher world, and in dying they return to that world, beckoning us to follow.  In this of course they are types of Christ, an association that risks a kind of idolatry: Ben Jonson reportedly disapproved of the First Anniversary, saying that “if it had been said of the Virgin Mary it had been something.”  In an extraordinary poem, “The Burning Babe,” by the Jesuit poet Robert Southwell, Christ himself appears in a dream-vision to the poet, descending like the tongues of flame that lit upon the heads of the disciples at Pentecost.  Southwell’s divine babe says that his breast is a furnace containing a refiner’s fire that purifies people’s souls.  He is thus, remarkably, a kind of incarnate purgatory.  Dylan Thomas was caught by this image and borrowed it in two of his own works, one ironic and one ideal.  In an early horror story called “The Burning Baby,” the corpse of a murdered infant is thrown into a fire.  But Thomas also has a late narrative poem called “The Winter’s Tale,” as if it were the tale that Shakespeare’s Mamillius never got to tell.  In it, a man bereft in the midst of winter prays for love, and a burning “she bird” descends, gathers him into her flames, and departs.  The imagery is the Eros imagery of white snow and red flames, and the consummation is a love-death, probably with a nod at Shakespeare’s own visionary poem “The Phoenix and Turtle” in which two birds, a white turtledove and fiery red phoenix have simultaneously been incinerated and liberated into a higher existence. 

The realistic portrayal of children as individuals rather than symbols or supernatural visitants had to wait until the coming of individualism in the 18^th century.  Leftist criticism has done its best in the last century to make “individualism” a term of contempt: it has been dismissed by some theorists as merely a disguise for the narcissism of a middle class rationalizing its own privilege. The course of literary and cultural theory over the last 60 years has been  strange.  The Marxist allegation that individualism reduces everything to self-interest and denies the claims of the larger community has some point to it: that is quite true of, for instance, Ayn Rand-style libertarianism and laissez-faire capitalism of the greed-is-good variety. Some versions of individualism are in reality manifestations of narcissistic personality disorder.  But a good deal of cultural criticism in the 1970’s through the 1990’s swung so far in the other direction that it denied the existence of the individual altogether.  The individual is an ideological illusion, a construct of systems of power.  “Man” is a recent invention, said Foucault, and “humanism” is a lie.  These power systems are not the product of evil individuals: they are impersonal and all-pervasive, so they cannot be opposed by any revolutionary uprising.  This is as true of the textual world as of the social and political.  French post-structuralism said that the author does not exist.  Stanley Fish said that the reader does not exist, only various “interpretive communities” which are in fact not communities of people but sets of codes and conventions that interpret texts in predetermined ways.  Deconstruction said that texts do not exist but are effects of language, yet language itself is an impersonal system, a play of signifiers that never arrives at “meaning.”

This intellectual rage against the machine was sometimes said to be a form of social activism aiming at the liberation of “the oppressed,” and it is true that far too many groups were excluded from the ranks of the “human,” and from the literary canon.  It is also true that words like “truth” were all too often ideologically contaminated.  Truth meant what was congenial to Western rationalism, with some conservative thinkers claiming that only the West knew “truth” because it had supposedly invented philosophy.  But to say that individuals are nothing but ideological constructs generated by systems of power is to collectivize the human race in a way that is not liberating but dehumanizing.  Such collectivizing has affinities with that of the kind of positivistic materialism that passes so often for the philosophy of science, in which consciousness is only an “epiphenomenon” of material processes, and the individual only an automaton programmed by “selfish genes.”  Such positivism is enthusiastic about the possibility of AI because it has no concept of intelligence as self-awareness and interiority.  Intelligence is just programming, and we are just machines who will someday be superseded by better models. 

Extremes meet, and the collectivizing of the radical left in the past has a resemblance to the collectivizing of the radical right at the present moment.  Both lead in the direction of a combination of anarchistic tribalism and authoritarianism.  Intellectual Marxists try to distinguish between “vulgar Marxism,” which is authoritarian, and their academic brand, but in fact vulgar Marxism is real Marxism.  It is not by mere perversion that Marxism led to Communist dictatorships.  When Marx spoke of the dictatorship of the proletariat, he meant it.  Collectivism, which means the overpowering of the individual by forces from the unconscious, is the danger that the human race has always faced since self-consciousness first emerged and separated us from the other animals. 

But ideological reduction obscures the fact that something new came into the world around the time of the Romantic movement:  the idea of psychological development, the unfolding of an inner potential into a unique individual, subject to social conditioning but not a mere product of it.  Shakespeare seems to be working towards such an idea in his final four romances, which show characters growing  and changing over the span of an entire generation rather than being suddenly converted out of their neuroses or “humours” as in the comedies.  Traditional societies, whether tribal or urban or imperial, were collective societies.  Within them, the individual was treated as a social construction, and what constructed the individual was ritual, especially those rituals called rites of passage, the most-studied type being the “initiation rites” by which children are reconstructed as adults.  In societies all around the world, when young men reached adult age, they underwent a ritual ordeal whose outcome was the “death” of the old, childish self and the “birth” of a new, adult self.  But “adult” was a role, and only secondarily an individual.  The fact was minimized that we are not just roles or types.  Even from birth babies show distinctive personalities that cannot possibly be the result of environmental influence.  That is true even of animals.  It amazes me how people deny that animals are individuals with individual personalities.  But I know that there is an underlying need to deny that, to see animals collectively as “just” animals.  That way you don’t have to care about them as much, don’t have to treat them as humanely as if they were in all essential ways your equals. 

Parents have always loved their children.  Theorists have claimed that before the invention of childhood parents did not get as attached to their children because of the appalling rates of infant and child mortality, but the heart does not work in that way.  I assure you that knowing that guinea pigs only live an average of five years does not produce any form of detachment that keeps them at an emotional distance as just “pets.”  They win your heart, and then they break it, and, well, that’s love.  Each is a unique personality: each is irreplaceable.  It is true, though, that social roles are involved in the love of parents and offspring, and that is especially true of the relationship between fathers and sons.  What Freud saw correctly is that we all begin originally attached to the mother—literally attached, since we come out of her body and are nourished by it even after birth, but also psychologically attached because the world of childrearing and childcare is traditionally feminine—and stubbornly remains so after 50 years of feminism.  The equality in childcare advocated clear back in the 1970’s as a way of producing adult men who are less sexist has simply not happened.  Children belong to the women’s world until adulthood.  Fathers traditionally want sons, but rear them only the the limited sense of coaching them in tasks, such as athletics and war, to prepare them for their adult roles.  This has not really changed, and it is why young men are psychologically damaged in our society.  They are not encouraged to develop social skills, especially those involving interdependence and nurturing, and are discouraged from having intellectual and artistic interests, which are “feminine.”  All they know is the dominance behavior of athletics, the only bonds the bonds with teammates.  And we wonder why they are attracted to toxic-male influencers and vote for toxic male politicians.

In the Iliad, we see Hector’s son Astyanax under the anxious care of his mother Andromache, who worries what will happen to him if Hector is killed.  But it is the theme of fathers and adult sons that dominates the end of the Iliad, the love of Priam for his son Hector, the love of Achilles for his absent father that is projected instead upon Priam in the moving final book.  The father-son bond comes into its own at adulthood, as the father helps initiate his son into his adult role.  In the Odyssey, Telemachus has difficulty becoming a man because his father Odysseus has been absent and he has been raised by a household of women, though he is saved by his father’s timely return just as he is on the threshold of adulthood.  In Virgil’s Aeneid, Aeneas becomes a single parent when his wife dies during the fall of Troy.  But his boy Ascanius has no personality.  He is important insofar as the family line descends through him, and he will be the founder of what will become Rome.  In Shakespeare’s second history play tetralogy, the theme of fathers and sons is likewise dynastic.  Henry IV loves his son, but as his sucessor, the future Henry V.  When Prince Hal seems to reject that role, Henry calls him a traitor to his face, saying he wishes that Hal’s rival Hotspur were his son instead, even though Hotspur is a genuine traitor on the side revolting against him.

Freud was also right, however, that the relationship between fathers and sons is ambivalent.  Ideally, the father is mentor and role model, helping his son to become “one with” him in the sense of becoming another version of him.  But the father is also a rival, as all men are rivals, so that the patricide of Oedipus is a psychological paradigm for masculine adulthood.  Yeats opposed Oedipus and Christ: the son who kills the father and the son who allows himself to be killed by the father.  Some of the hostility to myth as “eternal truth” derives from the fact that to the extent that individuals are in the grip of archetypal roles, playing out the old mythical narratives, they are not free, their individuality subsumed into the old collective patterns.  One of the defining traits of modernity is the break with the old mythical patterns in the name of human freedom, despite the loss of the security of living within “tradition.” 

The idea of growth and development is sometimes said to have been facilitated by Christianity, which values inward states of being more than outward behavior.  The Confessions of St. Augustine is rightly regarded as a milestone in this regard.  It is a conversion narrative, but it differs from typical conversion narratives, in which the metanoia or turning in a new direction, is sudden and dramatic, the conversion of Paul on the road to Damascus being a typical example.  It is exactly the point of such conversions that they are not “caused,” but are, rather, miraculous, the result of divine grace falling from above and disrupting the horizontal chain of causes and effects.  Their effect is like that of initiation rites: the instantaneous death of an old self and the birth of a new one.  This instantly transformative rhythm resembles that of dramatic comedy, in which the plot makes a sudden twist, often implausible, towards the happy ending.  Blocking characters that are “humors,” that is, comic types with a fixed behavior pattern, may suddenly be “cured” of their obsessions in order to be included in the comic resolution. 

The Confessions does not deny the role of grace, but it shows grace working invisibly and providentially within the development of Augustine’s life in time, so that the final conversion is a telos, the goal towards which his life is designed to lead.  This kind of slow development is more like that of a novel, and it is the novel’s capacity to show growth and change over time, as opposed to the sudden peripeteia or reversal of tragedy and comedy, that makes the novel perhaps the quintessentially modern form of storytelling.  We note in passing that this is a difference between the novel and the short story, which resembles drama in turning upon a single epiphany. 

The idea of human identity as an unfolding of an original potentiality over time is what created the idea of childhood, for the child is the seed out of which the individual grows.  Like the seed, the child harbors “information” within itself: what the person will become is latent from birth.  Locke’s idea that the individual is a tabula rasa, a blank slate that the environment writes upon, is really a regression to the old idea that identity is collective and externally imposed, and therefore at odds with Locke’s own democratic ideals.  Such a view leads to the idea, popular among the behaviorists in the early 20^th century, that we can train children the way that Pavlov trained his dogs, through rituals of stimulus and response.  It is dictators, however, who want to shape their subjects through propaganda and conditioning.  Democracy begins with the concept of the autonomous individual who is inner-directed, developing according to inner signals that Maslow called “impulse voices.” 

Where do those inherent impulse voices come from?  The whole mystery of human identity is bound up in that question.  Scientific types do not like the idea of anything that cannot be accounted for by the law of causality: to them, a mystery is simply an effect of which we have not yet found the cause. The idea of something that cannot be reduced to a cause is irrational mysticism.  Hence the tendency to reduce the psyche, both consciousness and the unconscious, to material causes.  But there is no way to jump the gap between mind and matter, to show that mind is a byproduct of matter and energy.  Mostly, the problem is ignored:  the materialist explanation is simply assumed to be true, based on the faith that we will find the proof for it someday.  But in fact the origin of consciousness is a mystery.  One nonscientific way of explaining it is to fall back on the old supernaturalist paradigm and assume it has been brought down from “above.”  Catholic theology assumes this:  God has implanted a soul into every fertilized fetus, which means that every child in a sense repeats the Incarnation, when spirit descended into flesh.  However, the supernaturalist explanation no longer seems to inspire the modern imagination.  I know it is among the most famous of all Romantic poems, but I have always felt that Wordsworth’s “Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood,” despite some memorable passages, is an unconvincing reversion to traditional Christian doctrine:

Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:
The Soul that rises with us, our life's Star,
                      Hath had elsewhere its setting,
                      And cometh from afar:
                      Not in entire forgetfulness,
                      And not in utter nakedness,
But trailing clouds of glory do we come
                      From God, who is our home:
Heaven lies about us in our infancy!
Shades of the prison-house begin to close
                      Upon the growing Boy…

   This foreshadows the Wordsworth who tried to be a conventional Christian in his later years, but to me it comes off as a rhetorical exercise.  Wordsworth’s real mythology was the Romantic one, which, as Northrop Frye showed in “New Directions from Old,” reverses the direction of traditional mythology.  Wordsworth’s epic, The Prelude, traces the development of his imagination from childhood, and what controls and providentially directs that development is “nature,” considered as a vital process that is immanent rather than transcendent, downward and inward rather than on high.  “Spirit” is not a God who descends from above but a mysterious power that ascends through nature from unknown depths.  The same mysterious power ascends from the depths of the human mind, as what the Romantics called the imagination.  The power within nature and the power within the human mind are one, and both are what we know of God. 

   The most unsuccessful part of the “Immortality Ode” is where Wordsworth postulates yet another uncanny child:

   Thou, whose exterior semblance doth belie
                      Thy Soul's immensity;
Thou best Philosopher, who yet dost keep
Thy heritage, thou Eye among the blind,
That, deaf and silent, read'st the eternal deep,
Haunted for ever by the eternal mind,—
                      Mighty Prophet! Seer blest!

This motif of the wisdom of innocence is traditional.  Christ said that we must become as children again, and Isaiah said that, when the Messiah comes, the world will be returned to paradise, the wolf will dwell with the lamb, and “a little child shall lead them” (Isaiah 11:6).  Children are wise because they are yet unfallen and still live in paradise.  Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Experience shows that growing up means a fall from Innocence into Experience, a fall that repeats the original Fall of humanity, an idea still going strong in Dylan Thomas’s “Fern Hill” and in Citizen Kane’s “Rosebud,” the name of the sled from his childhood.  But the fall is necessary, because it is not a mistake or wrong action but simply identical to maturing.  In Blake’s The Book of Thel, the young title character lives in the paradisal Vales of Har, but when it is time for her to descend into the adult world of Experience, she is so horrified by it that she runs shrieking back into the Vales.  Yet that is simply a refusal to grow up, Peter Pan syndrome, the problem of what Jung called the Puer Aeternus, the eternal child.  Marie-Louise von Franz, a Jungian analyst, in her book Puer Aeternus, characterizes the ambiguity of the symbol of the child, whether it occurs in dreams and fantasies or is acted out by an analysand:

When the child motif shows up, it represents a bit of spontaneity, and the great problem—in each case an ethical individual one—is to decide whether it is now an infantile shadow which must be cut off and repressed, or something creative that is moving towards a future possibility of life.  The child is always behind and ahead of us.  Behind us, it is the infantile shadow which we leave behind, and infantility which must be sacrificed—that which always pulls us backwards into being infantile and dependent, being lazy, playful, escaping problems, responsibility and life.  On the other hand, if the child appears ahead of us it means renewal, the possibility of eternal youth, of spontaneity and new possibilities—the life flow towards the creative future.  (29)

Wordsworth’s rhetoric about his child-philosopher is overblown, and his Christian metaphors not quite convincing, yet the moving part of the poem is its ending, which speaks of a new type of adult wisdom that compensates for the loss of the innocent wisdom of childhood.  This wisdom is a new empathy, an ability to hear “the still sad music of humanity.”  That is a fairly conservative compensation, akin to the Stoic resignation of Matthew Arnold’s “Dover Beach” that says that all we can do is be true to one another in this dismal place.  Other Romantics are not so resigned. 

The first educational treatises appeared in the later 17^th century, along with the idea of public education itself.  The question they wrestled with is how to nurture individual development—or, more precisely, how to balance the contradictory needs of supporting individual development while socializing  individuals, which means fitting them into a social mold.  This is the liberal-versus-practical educational dilemma about which we are still arguing today.  A primary influence on this controversy in the 18^th century was Rousseau’s thesis-novel Emile (1762), which tries to lay out a program of education for children that is designed to preserve the “natural man,” or innate self, from being destroyed by a corrupt society.  Rousseau’s Confessions (1782) forms a striking contrast with St. Augustine’s.  Augustine portrays his conversion as the only way in which he achieved control over his natural self, especially his highly-driven sexuality.  Rousseau affirms his natural self and natural impulses, whether society approves of them or not.  There is a direct line between Rousseau and Freud, who, to the disgust and horror of respectable society, revealed the secret desires and fantasies that lurk under the mask of “normality” in all human beings, desires and fantasies that go back to childhood.  The late Victorians were particularly scandalized by Freud’s “revelation” of child sexuality—revelation in the sense of saying publicly  what everyone knew secretly but was in denial about, clinging to the notion that children were pure and “innocent of” sexual desire. 

Who knew that childhood was so complicated an idea?  But actually, we all know it, because we remember it.  Augustine and Rousseau are diametrically opposed.  According to Augustine’s doctrine of “original sin,” human beings are born into this world fallen, selfish, and corrupt.  There is no such thing as an innocent child: children are innately selfish, and socializing them means teaching them to control their impulses and discipline their self-centeredness.  To Rousseau, desire is innocent, or at least neutral, and the selfishness and antisocial cruelty result from the repressiveness of the social order.  Both are right, in a complex, dialectical way.  Rousseau affirms the natural impulses we share with the animals, impulses rooted in the body and the senses, and there is no doubt that a lot of people are controlling and sadistic and sexually obsessive because they are neurotically repressed.  But Augustine is right that it is also true that we are tempted by a will to power (as discussed in last week’s newsletter) in a way the animals are not. 

However one regards it, the natural self belongs to the world of Experience, and it sentimentalizes childhood to insist that children live in a world of paradisal Innocence all the time before they grow up.  If we are honest, we admit that it is only certain moments of childhood that, in memory, seem sacred because they are moments in which our realistic experience was momentarily sacralized, transformed into something magical, something we will remember all our lives.  The child lives in both Innocence and Experience at the same time.  I remember magical moments of Christmas right out of Dylan Thomas’s “A Child’s Christmas in Wales”—and I remember my father’s inevitable drunkenness and the arguments with my mother.  One does not invalidate the other. 

The idea that understanding who and what we are now involves looking back and trying to recapture and understand what we were in childhood has resulted in the Bildungsroman, the tale of development from childhood to maturity, of which a special type is the Küntslerroman, in which the climax is the characters’ recognition of their vocation as an artist.  The most famous example in English is probably James Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, the opening pages of which daringly attempt to capture what experience is like for a very young child.  It is an experience grounded in the senses:  “When you wet the bed first it is warm then it gets cold.  His mother put on the oilsheet.  That had the queer smell.”  Yet at the same time the young Stephen Dedalus, a fictionalized version of Joyce himself, is being imprinted by stories and music.  The very first lines of the book are “Once upon a time and a very good time it was there was a moocow coming down along the road,” and the narrator comments, “His father told him that story.”  Out of such humble beginnings grows the fictional counterpart of the most complex literary artist of the Modernist period.  “The Child is father of the Man,” wrote Wordsworth in the poem “My heart leaps up,” but the relationship between the child and the adult is a mystery.  In one of my two earliest memories, I am still sleeping in a crib, not an adult bed.  I must have been having a nightmare, because my father comes in and asks if I am all right.  In the other memory, I am waiting by my little bookshelf of Golden Books for my mother to get off the phone and read me a bedtime story.  Like Stephen Dedalus, my childhood world was double, divided between the senses and the imagination.  These are commonplace moments.  Do I remember them, not because they are special in themselves but because of what they symbolize, namely, my double identity? 

But there are special moments.  In Book 1 of his autobiographical epic The Prelude, Wordsworth is able to convey how a boyhood skating episode was unforgettable simply by the magic of his language:

All shod with steel,
We hissed along the polished ice in games
Confederate, imitative of the chase
And woodland pleasures,--the resounding horn,
The pack loud chiming, and the hunted hare. 
So through the darkness and the cold we flew,
And not a voice was idle; with the din
Smitten, the precipices rang aloud;
The leafless trees and every icy crag
Tinkled like iron; while far distant hills
Into the tumult sent an alien sound
Of melancholy not unnoticed, while the stars
Eastward were sparkling clear, and in the west
The orange sky of evening died away. 
Not seldom from the uproar I retired
Into a silent bay, or sportively
Glanced sideway, leaving the tumultuous throng,
To cut across the reflex of a star
That fled, and flying still before me, gleamed
Upon the glassy plain…

The incantatory power of phrases like “with the din / smitten” and “To cut across the reflex of a star” lift the experience beyond itself.  As M.H. Abrams points out in Natural Supernaturalism, the story of the development of the artist often comes full circle, ending in the decision to write the very book we are reading.  That is true of The Prelude, and it is true of Proust’s autobiographical Remembrance of Things Past, which begins with the child Marcel’s trauma because he does not get his goodnight kiss from his mothr. The novel of development from childhood may provide a modern version of the uncanny child, featuring children who are marginalized and therefore detached observers of the strange and irrational world of adults.  It is in the modern period that children’s literature develops out of the fairy tale, with its orphaned heroines like Cinderella and its wicked stepmothers, but the child outsider, often an orphan, runs through adult works as diverse as David Copperfield and Huck Finn, as well as through modern developments of the fairy tale such as Harry Potter. 

Jung’s name for the pattern of human development is carefully chosen:  the process of individuation.  Some people complain that Jung’s map of individuation is a reductive formula:  first we encounter the shadow, then the anima or animus, and finally the Self, blah blah.  But this is wrongheaded.  Incompetent Jungian interpretations may be reductive, but to say that we all live out the same process of development, with the same phases, is no more reductive than saying that we all  develop through the common phases of childhood, adolescence, adulthood, midlife, and old age.  Jung constantly insisted on the word “individuation.”  Each of us develops through the universally human phases in a unique way—at least if social conditioning does not succeed in repressing our individuality, turning us into identical, mass-produced stereotypes useful to bureaucracy and consumer capitalism.  The word “liberal” in the phrase “liberal education” refers to the attempt to liberate students from social conformity and the herd instinct into the beginnings of true individuality, which is exactly why some people hate it. 

Wordsworth. looking back on the stages of his own development, says, “Praise to the end! Thanks likewise for the means,” going on to say that the difficult and even tragic periods of his life were somehow necessary in making him the individual he is.  Frankly, I am not up to such a ringing affirmation.  There were some things I definitely could have done without.  But, affirm it or no, one of the purposes of old age is to look back and see that there was a pattern, that life was not just random, not the result of blind chance.   Did I create that pattern by the choices I made, even from childhood, whether I was aware of doing so or not?   Up to a point, we have to believe that we have free will and are responsible for our choices.  Yet sometimes I can understand the old notion of destiny.  Sometimes I feel my life has been shaped, that there is a will deeper than my own that has made all the real decisions.  Jung always said that you become aware of the Self, the identity that is greater than the ordinary ego, when it thwarts you, opposes what your ordinary ego is sure it wants, or doesn’t want.  Everyone who creates knows this feeling.  The imagination, or whatever name you want to give to that shaping power, that numinous Trickster of the psychic depths, is in charge, and all you can say is, “Thy will be done.”  Or not—my favorite Biblical story may well be that of Jacob wrestling with the “angel,” in which it is only by resisting, by fighting the unknown spirit, that Jacob earns a blessing.  Perhaps there are two types, the obedient type and the rebel, and I have always been the rebel.

In Jungian psychology, the Self, the identity bigger than the ego, is a shapeshifter who appears in many symbolic forms.  The commonest, expectably enough, is perhaps that of the Wise Old Man.  But another is that of the Puer, the child who still lives within us, still young despite our increasingly decrepit aging bodies, the Puer that von Franz speaks of who represents “spontaneity and new possibilities—the life flow towards the creative future.” Perhaps that is what Kubrick meant by the end of 2001: A Space Odyssey, when the 100-year-old astronaut metamorphoses into the cosmic child in the womb, looking down upon the earth as if ready to descend and begin again. 

Reference

Von Franz, Marie-Louise.  Puer Aeturnus, 2^nd Edition.  Sigo Press, 1970.