THE LIGHT AT THE END OF THE LITERARY TUNNEL
Tunnels,
more than bridges, transport us from one world into another. The Eisenhower Tunnel in Colorado takes us
from the climate and ecology of the Eastern Slope of the Continental Divide to
that of the Western Slope. In New York,
we enter the Lincoln Tunnel in the midst of Tenth Avenue’s tenements and
garment warehouses, and come out of it into the Jersey Marshes. The Chunnel takes us from the language,
customs and culture of England into the very different language, customs and
culture of France. And the transition is
dramatic. A tunnel has a punctuated
point of both leaving one world and arriving in the other, with a dark, and
possibly even dangerous, interlude of no man’s land between the two. Those are the characteristics of tunnels that
gives them their metaphorical character.
One
of the great themes in literature is that of an individual’s passage from one
state of existence to another, such as the passage from childhood to adulthood,
from a state of sin to a state of grace, from ignorance to enlightenment, from
innocence to awareness, from atheism to belief, or some other equally
life-changing transition. These passages
are very analogous to going through a tunnel:
the protagonist enters in one state, passes through a dark and
threatening time, and emerges in a different state. Now, it’s true that in the case of the
literal tunnel we can reverse our direction through the tunnel and regain our
former state, while life’s passages are strictly one way, but then any analogy
can be strained too far if you quibble with it too much.
So that’s my topic tonight: the passage story, the literary tunnel.
What is a passage story? What are its characteristics? Essentially, it’s a story in which the protagonist suffers some traumatic experience—emotional or physical—that propels him into a situation in which his familiar world is distorted. He must find his way back to his normal world, usually by means of a journey through a terrain in which natural and familiar things are present but appear strange, and in which strange things are encountered that appear natural and familiar. The journey may be a literal journey through the real world, or it may be a fantasy journey taking place entirely in the protagonist’s mind. And the journey may or may not involve the accomplishment of one or more difficult or hazardous tasks en route, or a quest, a search for something important. But at the end, the protagonist is restored to his normal world, but now views it from a new perspective, as befits his new, altered, state. The journey was a necessary stage in the protagonist’s development; without the journey, without having had to undergo the experience, he would not have become what he was meant to be. Another metaphor for such a passage, maybe better than the tunnel, might be the chrysalis stage in the development of a butterfly or moth.
Now, there’s a difference between the passage story and the type of story we call “picaresque”. A picaresque story, by definition, involves a journey and/or a series of trials, but the journey, or the series of trials, is itself the point of the story. The events of the journey, the adventures that befall the protagonist in the course of it, serve to illustrate and illuminate the hero’s character, but have no important formative impact on his development as a human being. A couple of examples. The most famous picaresque story in the English language is undoubtedly Don Quixote, who travels through Spain with his faithful Sancho Panzo doing all kinds of odd things. But Don Quixote was mad at the outset, remains mad throughout his travels, and at the end returns to his Lady Dulcinea mad. Only on his deathbed, some time after his return, does he renounce his obsession with the dream of chivalry, and declare himself sane. The story, in other words, is about the thin line that divides the world of dreams from the world of reality, not about Don Quixote’s becoming cured of madness and taking up a responsible position in the world. Another good example, I think is Huckleberry Finn. This book, though describing a journey down a mighty river, and replete with all kinds of mythic overtones, is basically a celebration of rebellion against the constraints of conventional civilization. Huck was a boy living outside the conventional life of boyhood when we first met him in Tom Sawyer, he’s still rebelling against the well-meaning ministrations of the Widow Douglas when we see him at the outset of Huckleberry Finn, and he’s still the same rebel, and still a boy, at the end of Huckleberry Finn, when conventional civilization tries to recapture him at the conclusion of his journey down the river, and he decides that the only escape left to him is to "light out for the Territories”. His journey didn’t change him one bit.
So now let’s turn to the passage story. I’m going to skip over what is undoubtedly the great grandfather of passage stories in the English language—Moby Dick—and talk (briefly, I promise you) about just three examples of the genre which I think can better illustrate the variety of forms this kind of story can take. Then I’d like to throw the meeting open to a discussion of some other stories that might or might not be pertinent, or some passages that some of you may have undergone in your own lives.
The first passage story I want to take up is a modern masterpiece: The Wizard of Oz. I don’t mean the original story by L. Frank Baum written in 1902, I mean the brilliant movie that was made of it in 1938. By stripping Baum’s story of its excesses, by sharpening the dramatic shape of the story, and by giving the whole story a point transcending the pure entertainment, a classic passage story was created. We’ll never know whether Frank Baum had such a concept in mind when he first wrote the book, but it doesn’t matter: MGM has given us, for all time, the indelible image of Dorothy Gale in transition from a restless, discontented adolescent farm girl into a young lady ready to take on life’s adult responsibilities.
I’m sure you all remember the movie. You’ve probably also, as I have, taken children and grandchildren to see it. At the opening, we see Dorothy running away from home with her dog, Toto, because an unfriendly neighbor had accused Toto of nipping at her, and was threatening to have him taken away. Not far from home, Dorothy meets a traveling sideshow magician, who persuades her to return home. On the way back, she is overtaken by a tornado, and is struck on the head by a piece of flying debris. She goes into a coma, or dream state, in which she finds herself in a fantastic country, the Land of Oz. The fantasy nature of her new surroundings is signaled, of course, as I’m sure you all remember, by a switch from black and white photography to color. She learns that the only person who can help her find her way home is the Wizard of Oz, and that she must travel to the city of Oz to ask him for that help. She starts for Oz on the yellow brick road, and meets, on the way, her famous friends, the Scarecrow, the Tin Woodsman and the Cowardly Lion.
They go on in company, and, after braving some perils, reach Oz and find their way into the presence of the Great Wizard. He tells her that he can help her, but she must first slay the Wicked Witch of the West. With some difficulty (and considerable help from her new friends), she accomplishes this trial, and returns to Oz to claim her reward. It turns out that the Wizard is a fraud and can’t help her after all, but a good fairy shows Dorothy that she had had the power to go home all along, but simply didn’t know it. She exercises this power (it consisted simply of clapping her heels together three times), and we see her next, back in black and white photography, waking up in her own bed, the tornado gone and her loving family by her side. She remembers the experiences of her coma period, but realizes that it was a fantasy, and that the characters in her dream journey were all manifestations of the real people of her life: the farm’s three hired hands, the traveling magician, the neighbor whose threats had caused her to want to run away in the first place, and all the others.
As a result of her experience, she realizes now where her real place is in the real world, and, in the famous closing words of the movie, she says, “If I couldn’t find what I was looking for right here in Kansas, I never really lost it in the first place”. Trite, perhaps, but a good way to express the basic truth that an important element in finding happiness in this world is the willingness to recognize the worth of the life you find yourself thrust into, and the futility of wishing for an imagined life elsewhere. We all know that that’s something no child understands. You could even say that one of the definitions of the difference between a child and an adult is the ability to recognize that basic, if trite, truth. With that declaration, Dorothy is announcing her new adulthood. The movie of the Wizard of Oz is a pure passage story, with some very good songs and dancing included.
Here’s another: Stephen Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage. I think you all know the bare bones of the story. A young man has enlisted in a New York regiment in the Civil War. He has a name, Henry Fleming, which his fellows use in speaking to him, but Crane always refers to him simply as “the youth”. He is young enough to be in awe of the men around him, imagining them to be braver and more experienced of war than he is, and he is very afraid that he will fail to show courage in battle, and be publicly humiliated as a coward. And in his very first battle, as rebel forces rush the Union lines, he does in fact give way to a mindless panic, and “skedaddles”, to use the contemporary term.
He comes to himself some distance away from the battlefield, and learns from some overheard conversation that his battalion had held the line after all, and that the Rebel attack had been driven back. His emotions at this point are very mixed. He’s overcome by shame and self-disgust at the way he’s behaved. He’s also afraid of the consequences of his behavior, not only the dreaded public humiliation but also the very real possibility that he might be court-martialed, maybe even shot, for deserting his post in the face of the enemy. He also feels resentful and put-upon, ill used: it was unjust, he thinks, that anyone should expect him or any one else to undergo such an experience. He’s angry at the Union Army leadership for exposing him to such danger. But above all, he feels the relief of being alive and safe in the quiet sunshine of a peaceful countryside, out of hearing of the terrible guns.
Not knowing what else to do, the youth sets out to find and rejoin his unit, and here is where the passage journey begins. The first thing the youth does is make for some deep woods nearby, welcoming what Crane describes as “the dark and intricate obscurity”. He sees a squirrel, which flees up a tree at his approach; he feels heartened by this sign that Nature’s way of dealing with danger is no different from his own. But after that, he comes to a clearing where the high, arching boughs of the trees create a space like a chapel. Sitting against one of the trees, in the subdued half-light of the sun filtered through the branches, is a three-day-old corpse, which the youth imagines is looking at him reproachfully, much like the image of Christ in the church he used to attend with his family back home. He panics again, and rushes out of the woods, to find a column of wounded men struggling to the rear. He joins the column, trying to hide the fact that he has no visible wound to justify his presence there. He wishes that he, too, had a wound, a little “red badge of courage” to remove the stain of cowardice.
Then he sees, among the straggling wounded, a fellow member of his unit who had been fatally wounded in the morning’s fighting, and who now walks along the road with “a gray complexion and a spectral expression on his face”. This man recognizes the youth, and asks him to help him, which the youth does. Very soon, however, the wounded man tears himself out of the youth’s grasp, and staggers off the road into a field, where, to the youth’s horror, he dies.
For a third time, the youth panics and flees. Now, he finds himself by the side of a road crowded with troops marching up to the battle, which is still in progress. He wonders how these soldiers can march forward to the death that he feels surely awaits them, and thinks at first he will redeem himself by joining them and fighting with them. But immediately, he invents a variety of reasons why he shouldn’t do so. He suddenly envies those already dead, and wishes he were, too, relieved in that way from the shame he feels. But almost immediately, he has another wish: that the battle turn in the Rebel’s favor, and that the entire Union Army will have to retreat. Then he can return to his unit among them, the fact that he had retreated earlier and more precipitously than they conveniently forgotten.
Suddenly, the second of his wishes is answered. The road he is on is suddenly overrun with retreating Union Soldiers, running just as he himself had run earlier in the day. He tries to stop one of them to find out what was happening, but the soldier, desperate to get to the rear, swings his rifle at the youth and clubs him on the head, drawing blood. The youth has received his red badge.
Later, after dark, he finally finds his unit, and fearfully walks in. He finds that nobody had observed his flight, and that he had been given up for dead when he was found not to be present when the regiment camped. In his exhaustion, and with the head wound, which is pronounced by some one who examines it as having been caused by a grazing bullet, he passes as someone who has acquitted himself with perfect honor. The youth is happy: he is back in his real world with his honor intact. But the sights and sounds and emotions of his day-long flight are not forgotten. He has been deeply altered by them, and when his regiment is sent into another battle soon thereafter, the youth this time is caught up in a frenzy of fighting just as mindless as the frenzy of panic that sent him flying from his first battle. He fires his rifle as fast as he can reload, he charges forward to snatch up the Regiment’s colors when the bearer is hit and falls, and in general acquits himself like a hero and attracts the favorable notice of all around him. The Regiment carries the day, and is marched, victorious, to the rear.
As they march back, the youth, musing on his recent heroics compared to his earlier cowardice, discounts the latter as the simple result of inexperience, the memory of which, he thinks, might even prove to be a virtue, in that it would temper, in future times, any inordinate egotism he might otherwise display. But mostly, he is confident that now he will be able to acquit himself well in any future battle. In Crane’s words, “He had been to touch the great death, and found that, after all, it was but the great death.” In simpler words, he has come, as every human being must, to be able to contemplate his own inevitable mortality with equanimity. Henry Fleming’s passage from frightened youth to confident manhood, in other words, has been successfully negotiated.
In The Red Badge of Courage, the passage was a journey in the real world, involving perfectly real, natural things and events that appeared to him fantastic and surreal. Dorothy’s journey, by contrast, took place in a fantastic, surreal, world, peopled by fantasy creatures that she accepted as real. What gives both journeys their importance and impact is the heightened perception of the protagonists: heightened in Dorothy’s case by her restlessness and discontent, and in Henry Fleming’s case by his fear and shame. From whatever cause, and whether real or imagined, the experiences of the journey wrought permanent changes in the hero (or heroine, as the case may be).
Let’s look at a passage story with still a third kind of journey: T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land. This poem is somewhat obscure, and difficult to understand, but if you read it as a passage story I think it yields up some of its meaning. The poem is set in contemporary (i.e., 1920’s) London, and is narrated by a young man, perhaps Eliot himself, whose experiences we are going to see as we follow him on a night-long Odyssey through the city. This young man has been thrust into a state of overwhelming grief and despair by the death of a deeply loved friend. His grief and despair are so great that he sees the world around him, without his friend, as a wasteland, strewn with “stony rubbish” and “broken images”, “dead trees that give no shelter”, “dry stones with no sound of water”. At the outset of the poem, we see him struggling to recover from his grief. He finds the process of recovery to be extremely painful, perhaps the spiritual equivalent of the pain felt in a foot or an arm when the blood rushes back into it after it has “gone to sleep”, and he wonders if plants and trees, coming back to life in the spring, undergo the same pain. If so, he thinks, then April must be “the cruelest month, breeding lilacs out of the dead land, mixing memory and desire, stirring dull roots with spring rain…” and so forth.
He seeks solace from his sorrow in the streets of night-time London. At first, he encounters only people leading joyless, purposeless lives: a nervous, edgy, overwrought woman dressing for dinner; two women in a pub at closing time, talking about their husbands; a typist who lovelessly entertains an equally unloving, “carbuncular” boyfriend: a homosexual middle-Eastern shipping merchant who invites him for a weekend at a resort hotel; a waiter in a restaurant who can talk only of death by drowning. He sees surreal sights: an empty church with broken windows, surrounded by tumbled graves; bats crawling head downward down a blackened wall; fog shrouding crowds of people flowing over London Bridge. But, little by little, as he wanders through this landscape, he begins to remember his earlier, happier life. He remembers a girl to whom he gave hyacinths. He feels the presence of an indistinct companion, whom he can’t identify but who gives him a sense of comfort. Toward morning, he hears the sound of thunder, promising rain to refresh the dry landscape. The rain, real or symbolic, will restore life to him as well.
The journey of The Waste Land can be interpreted in several ways. I’ve talked about it as the story of the young man’s return to normality after a shattering emotional experience. But it can also be read as the struggle of a man seeking expiation for some terrible sin or crime. Or, at still another level, the story of a man who has lost his faith in God and is desperately seeking to regain it. A whole shelf of books has been written about this poem and its “true” meaning, but for present purposes we don’t need to go into all that. Whatever scenario you care to attach to the circumstances that impelled the young man to embark on his journey through the nighttime London streets, and whatever identity you care to attach to the narrator/protagonist, the fact remains that The Waste Land powerfully describes a life-changing passage from one state of being to another.
So there are three examples of the passage story: one a film, one a novel, and one a poem. And I think all three of them, in their different ways, do what a passage story is supposed to do, and do it very well. But one important question needs to addressed, and that is, “So what”? Are passage stories just fanciful entertainments, or do they express some life-experience reality? If only the former, I’ve wasted your time here tonight. But I think the latter is the case: passage stories do speak to a deep reality. I think most of us undergo transformations of one sort or another in the course of our lives, and those transformations are almost always triggered, or accompanied, by some particular event or experience that was either physically or emotionally traumatic. The reason most of us don’t recognize these experiences for what they are is just that they’re not usually explicit or dramatic enough to be recognized as such, much less labeled as “passages”. In fact, we often don’t realize, until much later, that a transformation even took place. Passage stories show us heightened versions of the transformation experience, and thereby enhance our awareness of this real and important aspect of the human experience.
Thank you all, very much.