Read Online Morning, Noon, and Night: Finding the Meaning of Life's Stages Through Books by Arnold Weinstein - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Arnold Weinstein
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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.
Innocence and Growing Up in the Thirty Years’ War:
Simplicissimus
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,
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.
Innocence and Growing Up in the Thirty Years’ War:
Simplicissimus
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,
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