From Redemption to Initiation

...In the United States, it is through murder rather than sex, death rather than love, that the child enters the fallen world...

...In a sense, this represents a transition from the worship of innocence to that of experience, from a concern with the latency period of the child to a concentration of the moment of adolescence...

...Most serious writers in the 20th century, however, have given up the notion of seduction as well as that of redemption...

...True to his preceptor, Dostoyevsky sees the world as a conspiracy against the child...

...His works are full of child-victims, typified by Ilyusha in The Brothers Karamazov, infant martyrs whose death redeems those who crush them...

...and these preclude the fortunate fall we call initiation...

...but the typical American convention, where the vicarious initiation is spurned, is quite different...

...Little children and big Africans," writes William Lyon Phelps condescendingly in an introduction to Stephen Crane's Whilomville Stories, "make ideal companions, for the latter have the patience, inner sympathy, forbearance, and unfailing good humor necessary to such an association...

...So in the more genteel, apparently asexual terms of child-adult fiction, the same question is posed: Will Fagin win out or Oliver, Tiny Tim or Scrooge...

...for that theme is more, finally, than an evasion...

...This is the crime which haunts Svidrigailov in Crime and Punishment and Stavrogin in The Possessed...

...The first three articles appeared in the March 31, April 14 and April 28 issues...

...In Treasure Island and David Balfour, Stevenson adds to the tale of adventure the boyish romance: the passionately ambivalent relationships of Jim Hawkins and Long John Silver, David Balfour and Alan Breck Stewart...

...and so the perfection of a formal device makes possible the development of a new theme...

...but in pulp fiction and outdoor books it is repeated over and over on the level of the stereotype...

...Pamela and Clarissa the question is posed: Will the Seducer seduce the Redeemer before the Redeemer redeems the Seducer, will the conflict end in the victory of the (good, female) heart or the (evil, male) head, in marriage or death...

...The Negro, however, is not in such fiction taken any more seriously than Rip...

...and his ambiguous unfallenness is used ironically to portray the implication of us all in the guilt he shares but about which he has not yet learned to lie...

...An initiation is a fall through knowledge to maturity...

...In various forms its victimized small saviors survive: as the Salinger girl heroines of Catcher in the Rye and "To Esme with Love and Squalor...

...Yet Dostoyevsky boasted at least once in public that he had raped a 13-year-old girl in the bath, and the image of the violated child appears again and again in his works...

...they are no more moved by the concept of corruption than they are by that of salvation, substituting for the more traditional fable of a fall to evil that of an initiation into good-and-evil...

...Yet the child remains for us, less sanguine about the ''natural" though not less concerned with it, still a fascinating literary theme...

...In the modern version of the Fall of Man, there are four participants not three: the man, the woman, the serpent, and the child (presumably watching everything from behind the tree...

...In 19th century literature, particularly in England and America, this ambiguous insight is somewhat naively projected as the innocent flirtation...

...Indeed, the stories which it informs embody in various disguises one or another of the two major crises of pre-adolescent emotional life: the stumbling on the Primal Scene, mother and father in the sexual act...

...and The Fallen Idol is the desexualized substitute father caught out in the final defection...

...Yet typically, in Anglo-Saxon literature at least, the child is not a participant in the fall, but a witness, only vicariously inducted into the knowledge of sin...

...Yet we are asked apparently to accept the act of self-destruction as a kind of salvation...

...The original innocence of Huck is not his ignorance of evil (he is the son of his father, after all) but his immunity to experience, his resistance to responsibility...

...It is tempting to read the conclusion of his book, in which the super-children he has imagined desert this world utterly, as a symbolic prophecy that we are through with them as they are with us...

...Rip Van Winkle himself is not, however, a clear-cut example of downright villainy, but a figure as ambiguous as that of the Good Bad Boy...

...as the poisoned, tormented children of the Reggie Fortune mystery stories...

...In the boys' flirtation with the pirate and the outlaw, Stevenson is clearly projecting his own ambivalence as a writer (whose function he describes somewhere as "playing with paper like a child") before the criminal and outcast, before what is taboo to his own lowland, Protestant conscience...

...It is Robert Louis Stevenson who most clearly develops the theme in his books, which, like The Lamplighter or Huckleberry Finn or Alice in Wonderland, appeal to that odd late 19th-century audience which made adult bestsellers of children's literature...

...though every other crew member on the Pequod is committed temporarily to Ahab's diabolic quest, the cabin-boy Pip is un-seduced...

...The drunken, miserly, heartless master, the caricatured exploiter (it is a theme easily adapted to Marxian uses) replaces Svidrigailov, the tormented lover of what he destroys...

...a refusal to portray the child as an actual sinner, though it is no longer possible to postulate his innocence as absolute...

...not so much because the children themselves are travestied, as because their true enemy, the lover-seducer, is not candidly portrayed...

...he is devirginated into maturity by the kindly, aging whore, who is the high priestess of this rite de passage in the stories of writers like Colette or Alberto Moravia...

...And it was certainly a fantasy that possessed the author all his life, an obsession he was driven to confess as fact and to rewrite continually as fiction...

...but he dies pure, the innocence of his vision only refined by his suffering...

...According to surviving notes, it was originally to have been one of the sins of Dmitri, too...

...and in such treasures he was rich enough to begin with...

...for the former seems to him to possess a spontaneity and grace more like his own than anything in the safe, dull world of grown-up virtue...

...Both Stephen Crane and Booth Tarkington have given us permanent drawings in black and white...

...and, indeed, its author, Arthur C. Clarke, has reached the end of a much-exploited myth of childhood...

...Even in drama, where point of view is hard to maintain, in Inge's Darkness at the Top of the Stairs, for instance, writers are driven to emulate the prototype, to render the experience of evil in terms of what the child sees...

...Eventually this underground perception will develop into the revelation of the moral coquetry of the child, a sense of how his flaunted innocence is an invitation to violation...

...Implicit in the fable of the love-affair of Seducer and Redeemer is the barest hint that the child seeks out evil not only to transform it, but also out of a dim, uncon-fessed yearning for it...

...The last will appear presently...

...Clearer examples are to be found in the standard American storv in which the Good Bad Boy enters into an alliance with the town idler or drunk (William Faulkner's "Uncle Willy" is a classic instance) against the world of conscience and womanhood...

...and the initiatory story has become popular almost to the point of triteness...

...What did he do it for...

...as the little Jew of Salinger's "Down at the Dinghy" hearing the cook call his father a "kike...

...The confrontation of adult corruption and childish perception remains a contemporary subject, though we no longer believe in the redemption of our guilt by the innocence of the child...

...Yet even this last device, so implicated in the cult of nature which everywhere influences American life, cannot replace completely the theme of the vicarious initiation...

...But, even as the sexually inexperienced boy is redeemed by the old tart, so the child unused to death is initiated by the old Negro or Indian, the dark-skinned primitive who mediates between him and the world of wild beasts, and prepares him for this bloody First Communion...

...if he is at all different at the end of the book from what he is at its start, it is only in possessing a few more nightmares...

...There is a hint of such a flirtation with evil in Huck Finn's apparent choice of the Duke and Dauphin over the Widow Douglas: but he is more their prisoner than their accomplice, and in the end he feels for them not love but pity...

...and he may even, released from the burden of innocence (as in the recent movie The Game of Love), then induct the young girl into the world of experience he has entered/Sometimes, even in European fiction, the initiation is the sexual experience fumbled rather than fulfilled, the visit to the whorehouse which ends in impotence or even in flight at the very threshhold, as in Flaubert's Sentimental Education...

...on occasion, it has gone beyond providing useful tags for the stages of infantile sexuality or making explicit insights already implicit in earlier fiction...

...and one of the most perceptive recent interpretations of that novel is James Cox's "The Sad Initiation of Huckleberry Finn...

...But why have our writers welcomed so indirect an evocation of the child's passage from innocence to experience...

...Implicated in aggression and sexuality, he projects nonetheless an un-fallen way of perceiving the world...

...Hemingway and Faulkner are, of course, the leading serious exploiters of this theme, and "The Bear" its classic expression...

...In Dostoyevsky, leading Russian disciple of Dickens, however, the lesson of the master had long since been translated out of sentimentality into hor-or...

...In such fiction, the child in his simplicity finds himself attracted to adult evil rather than adult good...

...in "A Fine Day for Banana Fish" he shows how Seymour Glass, a not entirely vicious adult, is awakened by the innocence of a child to enough awareness of the lost world he inhabits to kill himself...

...The flirtation of the child with evil becomes transformed into a genre picture of the nature-loving bey and the watermelon-stealing darky...

...Such stereotyped black-and-white portraiture sets a bad example which even serious later writers like Sherwood Anderson and Faulkner have not been able to escape...

...as the upper-class child confronted with the vulgar sin of servants in Graham Greene's "Basement Room" or Walter de la Mare's "The Perfect Craftsman...

...In the fiction of France and Italy, indeed, the initiation of the boy into manhood is portrayed in frankly sexual terms...

...Even in Russian and in Yiddish literature, so closely linked to it, the Dickensian image of the starved and brutalized child, as it passed on via Dostoyevsky, is once more expurgated, deprived of its erotic overtones, and (in writers like Chekhov or Peretz) restored to senti-mentalism...

...or the Redeemer may live and the Seducer die unredeemed as in the case of Oliver and Fagin...

...or the discovery of heterosexual "treachery" on the part of some crush, idolized in innocent homosexual yearning...

...as the protagonist of Poile de carote, whose motion-picture success has insured his survival beyond that of the novel in which he first appeared...

...Childhood's End, the most successful of such fictions is called...

...Only he was capable of understanding the secret to which Dickens obliquely alluded when he spoke of Quilp (the deformed, grotesque persecutor of Little Nell) as a self-portrait...

...The ambiguity of the attraction to childhood remains as unperceived in Salinger as in any 19th-century Anglo-Saxon Dickensian...

...Sympathy he does not learn, for he has as much when he sets out as when he returns, and always it alternates with an astonishing callousness...

...At the track the air don't taste as good," Sherwood Anderson makes his disillusioned Peeping Tom declare...

...Once James has achieved the convention and the image, once he has established the child as Peeping Tom, it is adapted everywhere, on every level of literature from highest to lowest...

...The Seduction-Redemption theme is not easily surrendered...

...It is Henry James who sets the pattern once and for all in What Maisie Knew, in which the details of a particularly complicated and sordid adulterous tangle are presented to us as refracted through the half-ignorance of a pre-adolescent girl...

...as the baffled boy of Sherwood Anderson's "I Want to Know Why...

...Up to the very last moment, it is possible for Scrooge to find grace through Tiny Tim and Tiny Tim to be spared...

...In, say, This is the fourth of a series of five articles on the changing concepts of the child in modern culture...

...The threatened inheritance or the contested (and innocently won) treasure in their possession, they return from fabulous highlands or legendary islands to the grey world of unattractive virtue...

...The Negro, portrayed as shiftless, vain, thievish and even sexually promiscuous, is an alternative lover or pseudo-father for the Good Bad Boy, particularly in popular fiction...

...In a way, it seems the last genteel reticence...

...His act of perception is portrayed as the beginning of his initiation into full-blown, self-conscious evil—the start of moral life...

...In its sentimental form, the fable of the encounter of the child and adult represents, it must be remembered, a bowdlerized version of the seduction theme...

...The child is, however, considered an exemplar not of the innocence of the spirit but of the eye...

...behind it there persists the myth of the Garden of Eden, the assumption that to know good and evil is to be done with the joy of innocence and to take on the burdens of work and childbearing and death...

...Such children are the presiding geniuses of modern fiction, reborn in a hundred guises: as Hemingway's Nick Adams overhearing the gossip about his Indian girl...

...in no case, at any rate, is the child-redeemer won over to evil...

...Eye to the crack in the door, ear attuned from the bed where he presumably sleeps, curious or at idle play, the innocent observer stumbles upon the murderer bent over the corpse, the guilty lovers in each other's arms, the idolized jockey in a whorehouse, a slattern on his knee...

...or, as we have seen,, redemption may be bought by the death of the Redeemer, Dombey ransomed by the sacrifice of Little Dombey...

...He is not asked, to be sure, to kill a fellow human, only an animal, deer or bear, or even fish, some woodland totem, in slaying whom he enters into a communion of guilt with the natural world in which hitherto he has led the privileged existence of an outsider...

...The influence of depth psychology has not always stopped at the superficial level...

...True, he cannot, though he is endowed with all the symbolic attributes of natural virtue (he is a child and a Negro and mad to boot), redeem Ahab to the "humanities," and he dies with the rest...

...Initiation" is the favorite word of an age which aspires not to "salvation" but to "mautrity...

...indeed, he is perhaps only the Good Bad Boy grown old without growing up...

...How finally melodramatic and cloying all those East European portraits of tortured apprentices and starving schoolboys appear...

...WRITERS and WRITING From Redemption to Initiation By Leslie A. Fiedler Though the treatment of the child in 20th-century fiction is often merely an up-to-date adaptation of sentimental prototypes, this is by no means universally true...

...In the end, however, both author and characters are Good Bad Boys, who return from playing at evil to working at good...

...Even Melville in Moby Dick is unwilling to portray the corruption of a child...

...In the dream of Dmitri in The Brothers Karamazov, the vision of Russia as a wasteland is explained by the cry, "The child is weeping...

...indeed, writers have come to depend rather more than less on the child's eye, the child's fresh vision as a true vision, a model of the artist's vision itself...

...What Maisie Knew is the same old scandal that brought her into being...

...and most lately as the child mutants (telepaths, teleports, superhuman monsters of virtue as well as intelligence) who in a score of science-fiction tales struggle with the dull world their merely human parents have made...

...And Dostoyevsky himself in his journal reminds himself over and over, "Do not torment the children, do not soil or corrupt them...

...This quasi-devirgination, the fall via sexual queasiness rather than sexual satisfaction, has become a cliche in stories both here and abroad...

...But he does know already and Maisie know it before him: the knowledge that was to make us as gods and taught us that we die...

...But it is hard finally to believe in Huck's having been initiated into anything...

...he is a symbol not so much of one who has fallen from morality as one who has not yet begun the arduous climb toward it, and as such is merely another version of the Boy himself...

...His child-like Saviors go out to the children, Myshkin rescuing the little Swiss girl from her small persecutors and Alyosha becoming the hero of the pack of boys who cheer him at the novel's close...

...The boy with "buck fever," the kid trembling over the broken body of his first rabbit or the first bird brought down with a sling, is the equivalent in the world of violence to the queasy stripling over the whore's bed in world of passion...

...It's because a man like Jerry Tilford . . could see a horse like Sunstreak run, and kiss a woman like that the same day it spoils looking at horses and smelling things and hearing niggers laugh and everything...

...The fictional working out of the vicarious initiation presupposes the invention of a technique (the famous Jamesian point of view) which leaves no doubt in the reader's mind about who is witnessing the events related...

...J. D. Salinger (the last reputable exploiter of the sentimental myths of childhood) pushes the redemption theme a step further into blackness...

...Child-lover and child-rapist—these are two sides of a single coin, the sentimental and demonic aspects of that cult of the child which elsewhere in the 19th century is presented as if it possessed only a single, benign side...

...I want to know why...

...Huckleberry Finn is sometimes thought of as the prototype of this newer kind of fable...

...Beyond these comic and tragi-comic resolutions, neither Dickens nor his more genteel American followers were prepared to go...

...Most crucially, it has helped undercut the moral optimism of sentimentalism by restoring a concept of the child (and of the world of impulse he represents) more like that of Augustine than that of Rousseau...