A Complicated Progress
The winter solstice is a time to contemplate rebirth. November was the month of “no”, no leaves, no flowers, no life, no hope. December brings a more refined awareness, as optimistic Sagittarius ushers in light and longer days. It is a time of celebration, marked by festivals such as Christmas and Hanukkah. After a period of sickness, I am beginning to venture outdoors again, enjoying the feel of the cool wind and the mellow sun as I watch the dance of the last plane leaves on the Calle Parlament in Sant Antoni, Barcelona.
The Winter Solstice is also a time for reflection, for thinking about the passing year and making sense of it. Perhaps the popularity of the bildungsroman has less to do with a taste for accurate depictions of reality than a desire for a comprehensible structure amid the chaos of emotions. The typical three-part structure of a bildungsroman is easy to digest. Person lacks something. Person experiences. Person learns and is transformed. How wonderful if real life were so! Humans seem better at absorbing simple tales than serious analysis. Think Mark Antony and Brutus from Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar. The art of demagoguery is about understanding how emotions work, not workable policies. Or look at the predominance of nationalism. There’s nothing easier than flag waving. Forget the class and race relations, the George Floyd moments, the ironies of history, the housing crisis and the inequalities. Just close your eyes and sing the national anthem.
Writers often try to reconcile the bildungsroman formula with real life. The results of their experiments are varied, with mammoths like Joyce’s Ulysses (the opposite of digestible, yet nonetheless depicting odysseys of character) and Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, with its sensitivity to every paradox of change. Then, there are slenderer visions, such as those of Gertrude Stein or Molière, whose characters go round in circles, trapped inside the limits of their self-awareness, achieving only superficial progress. A darker core remains unsolved.
A personal favourite is Tarkovsky’s autobiographical film, Mirror, which flows between the narrator’s childhood, dream sequences and his adult life; the same actress plays his mother and wife, and the same actor his childhood self and son, as if to evoke a Marquezian sense of generations repeating themselves unconsciously. There is no discernible progress, only vivid snapshots, and the resonance of memories.
A still from Tarkovsky’s Mirror
Of course people change. The process is simply more complicated than the average bildungsroman. Echoes of a younger self reverberate in the present. Different circumstances evince different personalities. Your wonderful, mature, self-confident adult self might crumble before an old school bully, or even a situation reminiscent of a former vulnerability. We have our fault lines and our blind spots, our self-awareness and our self-awareness in development. We move not only forwards, but also sideways and backwards. Perhaps we even mourn the loss of childhood. Picasso once said: “It took me four years to paint like Raphael, but a lifetime to paint like a child.” Can we encapsulate such nuances or do we always dwell in absences, impossible to know, except in rare moments of clarity? And even then, those crests of vision roll back into the sea of being.
Some writers say a man can be all men; and all men are a single man. In his Book of Disquiet, Fernando Pessoa writes: “Let us make ourselves into sphinxes, albeit pretend ones, until we reach the point where we no longer know what we are. The only way we can be in accord with life is to be in disaccord with ourselves. The absurd is the divine.” In another instance, he writes: “…knowing myself completely, I know humanity just as completely. There is no base impulse, no noble instinct, that has not flashed upon my soul; I know the gestures that accompany each one.” In the disillusioned latter days of his life, the Kabbalist and astrologer Agrippa of Nettesheim writes an epigraph to De Incertitudine et Vanitate Scientiarum: “I disdain, I know, I do not know, I pursue, I laugh, I tyrannise, I protest. I am philosopher, god, hero, demon and the whole universe.”
The writings of Borges are riddled with similar pronouncements. In one of his earliest essays, “The Nothingness of Personality”, he writes: “I propose to prove that personality is a mirage maintained by conceit and custom, without metaphysical foundation or visceral reality.” And then in a later essay: “To the classical mind, the plurality of men and of eras is incidental; literature is always one and the same.” And still another: “So complex is reality, and so fragmented and simplified is history, that an omniscient observer could write an indefinite, almost infinite, number of biographies of a man, each emphasising different facts; we would have to read many of them before we realised the protagonist was the same.” Similarly, Antonio Machado, musing on Proust, writes: One shouldn’t forget our spirit contains elements for the construction of multiple personalities, each of them as rich, coherent and final as the one we’ve chosen or been coerced to call our self.” Perhaps the apotheosis of such sentiments is the Buddhist doctrine of anatta (which Borges mentions on numerous occasions): the idea that personality is an illusion, a temporal assembly of psycho-physical constituents that do not abide by Ultimate Reality.
To return to the problem of oversimplification in the bildungsroman. How does one remain faithful to the complicated nature of reality while crafting a narrative with psychological appeal? Not everyone can be a Tarkovsky, Joyce or Proust. Are story tellers condemned to falsification, presenting flawed models of life and making Faustian bargains with their muse? The truth is probably somewhere in between. A flawed model, even a “false” yet resonant three-part bildungsroman must surely contain enough truth to exonerate the structural weakness. Otherwise there wouldn’t be any point in reading anything. Despite ourselves, despite our flawed models, we do learn something occasionally. We do expand our minds. We do advance. Or do we.