Beards

A couple months ago, my dad happened to say to me in passing, "You know, why don't you try growing out your facial hair?" I was irritated and vaguely alarmed by the suggestion, and it took me a moment to settle down enough to realize there was nothing intrinsically offensive in what he had said. It was just an idea. I could take it or leave it. And there was nothing wrong or immoral about growing out a beard, was there? So why had I reacted with anxiety and a flash of anger? 

It required some introspection before it occurred to me that the beard here was symbolic of something greater in my private psychology--some proposed treachery to myself. As soon as I was able to grow facial hair, after all, I had been shaving it smooth, and therefore the suggestion to let it grow was an insinuation that I might violate my own inner taboos and habitual practices. And what my dad hadn't realized when he spoke was that I was precisely in the midst of contemplating such a self-transformation--just not in the realm of facial hair. So for him to suggest a change along these lines made me feel caught out in the open. 

Reading André Gide's The Immoralist, one finds a curiously similar episode-- but in reverse. The protagonist has for a long time felt growing in him a strange metamorphosis. A bout of tuberculosis has taught him-- hitherto a sickly and bookish antiquarian with little passionate interest in anything-- that he actually longs for life. His recovery from the illness leaves him feeling born into a second chance at existence-- one in which he is not obliged to return to his previous settled ways. As an act of symbolic self-sublimation, he decides for the first time in his life to shave his beard. 

Now, I'm sure with all this talk so far of fathers and beards and passions long stymied and sublimated, the Freudians would have a field day. An overly-literal psychoanalytic reading of Gide (or of my personal anecdote above) would try to equate the ritual act of shaving to a symbolic castration-- and then run head-on into the fact that Gide's protagonist only attains his sexual awakening and liberation after trimming the beard for the first time in his life, not after growing it out, so as metaphor it wouldn't quite work. 

What Gide's novel is really about is a sense that many of us carry through life: the impression that we have been guilty of some mysterious wrongdoing at some point in the past of which we have since lost all memory, but for which we must atone. This is not precisely the Christian dogma of original sin; for we do not see the will to live as sinful when it expresses itself in others. They are permitted to want the things that other people desire and pursue them without fault. It is only some of us who have been marked out by the obligation to deny the privilege of normal existence and do penance for the crime of life. 

Here again, more literal-minded psycho-sexual readings might intrude. Many people would see Gide's "secret sin" as hiding in plain sight in the book-- his Uranian sexual inclinations-- and would interpret the novel as nothing more than an exploration of the guilt of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century sexual nonconformist (which in Gide's case does not map comfortably onto our modern categories). But the illicit sexual content of Gide's book, however notorious, is actually scant-- confined to a furtive kiss and a few slightly less oblique references in the novel's final pages. 

I would submit, moreover, that The Immoralist could have said all it wishes to say even without these passages. A novel like Gide's later Strait is the Gate-- really a more emotionally powerful book even than the highly-charged and more famous Immoralist-- contains not a hint of illicit homosexual longings; and yet manages to convey a similarly nebulous sense of irremediable guilt. Like so many of Gide's works, it is a story of people destroying their chances for happiness through misguided acts of self-sacrifice--and, just as in The Immoralist-- Gide is in no way certain that they made the wrong choice by doing so. 

The Immoralist cannot be reduced to a rumination on Gide's conflicted emotions about his own homosexuality, that is to say, any more than a beard can be reduced in Freudian symbolic terms to a phallus; and it may well be that the artist in Gide resented having to resort to such direct innuendo at all in order to make himself heard (as his protagonist observes at one point, perhaps most extreme ideologues started out by making more subtle hints, and were only forced into ever-more literal-minded modes of expression by their failure to make themselves understood by subtler means).

I submit that what Gide is really talking about is irreducible to a single sexual or sociological dilemma and comes closer to a central problem of human life itself-- the Schopenhauerian distrust of the will to live. When Gide's protagonist Michel begins his recovery from consumption, his taste for life, for sensuous enjoyment, the very feel of the blood coursing through his veins are all equated with a moral slackening. We ought not to read these episodes-- such as ones in which Michel sneaks off to watch his peasant tenants at labor-- as innuendos that decorously elide some implied sexual encounter. When his character actually has sex, Gide tells us about it; though not in many words. Rather, I think we should take these incidents on their face. 

Many will resist doing so, of course, because they struggle to relate to such a patently morbid attitude to existence. When Gide says he feels guilty for reading history books about late-antique Goths, for trimming his beard for the first time, for lounging in the sun and getting a tan-- he can't really mean he feels so guilty and discomfited by those things, right? They must all be code for something else. 

Many people won't be able to take Gide's novel on its face because they aren't troubled by any doubts about their own moral entitlement to live and enjoy life. But I understand Gide perfectly well. 

My own transformation has involved episodes much like Michel's sunbathing and beard-trimming-- things like doing push-ups, investing in the stock market, playing video games-- in short, doing things that other people would regard not as sinful at all, but a part of taking an ordinary interest in life. But in my case, they feel utterly sneaking and transgressive: because they let slip that perhaps I want the same things out of life that other people do; that I have a body and not just a mind; and that virtue and intellect are not wholly-sufficient sustenance for every waking moment. 

Part of what Gide's novel is about is the realization in early-to-mid adulthood that it is possible to be more than one person, and to live more than one life. The person governed by the set of rules and mores they inherited may not actually be the person one is bound to remain for one's whole span on Earth. 

This must always come as a revelation to each of us, no matter how many people have discovered it about themselves in the past, because no one else ever tells us it might be true of us. Other people regard us as a separate and self-contained being-- a sort of object-- and therefore one with an essentially fixed character. They attribute traits to us and assume they will never vary. Michel is "sickly, intellectual, bookish," and the like. 

What Michel discovers, however, is that he is not such a fixed quantity to himself. He contains, instead, unplumbed depths and strengths and potentialities. Upon recuperating from his illness, he finds he does not wish to return to his earlier studies. History has become a dead letter to him. He does not wish to be confined to the past-- either the human past as a whole or his own personal history. Might there not be time still for him to become something entirely different? 

So too... I went to law school assuming that I was submerging myself back in school for a few years in order to acquire new skills and then return to take my place in the same line of work, pursuing the same causes, thinking the same thoughts, and entertaining the same interests as I did before-- just at a higher level. This is the narrative that makes the most sense and that I still share with other people, when asked. But all the time there has been growing within me a Michel-like realization... that the true reason I came here was so I might escape all of that, to shed the bonds of the past, and become someone different... though who and what I still have no idea.

At age twenty-two, of course, one was concerned only with finding a single identity-- of locating a plausible niche in society and sticking to it. But a decade later, one starts to realize that life is long enough that one has time to find more than one.

Yet, because the first niche was deemed by society-- and declared by oneself-- to be the true and right one; and especially so if the first one was characterized by virtue and intellect-- then one can only regard the possibility of escaping from it as an adventure into evil-- as becoming an "immoralist." Could I take up... business? Finance? Is it too late for those things? Untold millions have already opted for those careers and interests without a flicker of conscience. They think of these things simply as ways to live. But for me, who was pledged to martyrdom... life itself is an unholy choice. Does this mean these things are forbidden? Is it wrong even to think of them?

And what if my thoughts-- if my temptation to escape into a "normal life," one where people simply work to pay the bills and put food on the table, and not for some ultimate and undefinable and possibly futile purpose-- is not actually as secret as I think? What if, somehow, I am wearing it on my face?

This is what troubles Michel too, when he goes to shave his beard. He knows full well that simply getting a trim is not a criminal act, according to most codes. But he knows what it represents-- his temptation to transform; to become someone else; to (to quote Rilke) "change one's life." And so, when he has shaved and regards himself for the first time in the mirror, he feels as if he had let down "a mask." [T]he fear," he adds, "grew out of my sense that others could read my thoughts now, thoughts which to me seemed suddenly fearful." (Howard trans.)

And so it was, I realized upon reading this, with me and my dad. This was the fear that gripped me when he advised me to grow out the beard. Had he seen? Did he know? Had I somehow revealed, despite my efforts to dissimulate, that a change was working within me... a liberation, or-- perhaps-- a damnation? A fall from grace?...

Or was he just thinking I might look handsome with some scruff?