Belittlement

 It's final exam period of the first semester of law school and--against all my inclinations and better judgment--I find the anxiety creeping into me. "Don't worry," the deans and professors and administrators all say. "I wasn't worried," I reply. "But should I be? You're making it sound like maybe I should be worried." The tests are just 100% of my final grade for each course, so if I do poorly then all my work earlier in the semester will have been pointless; but I shouldn't worry. The tests are just rigorously curved so no matter how well I do it might not count: the only real question is how everyone else did; but I shouldn't worry too much about it; it's not that big a deal.

And I stand there listening to all this and try to stuff the rising anxiety back down my gullet. "No!" I bellow to the anxiety; "I am NOT going to worry about this! You can't make me care about this! I'm a grown man! I'm over thirty. I don't have to care about school or tests or grades anymore. I've been through all that. I've worked for a living. I've done work for pay, and no one there ever said I needed to be anxious. So why should I be anxious over work that I'm paying for the privilege to do! You can't trick me into believing this is real life. I've seen real life and it does not resemble school!" Such are my inner lines of resistance, as the fear nevertheless inevitably burbles within me. 

Going back to school in one's early thirties--especially if that school is law school--is inevitably to face the terror of infantilization. It means confronting all over again certain humiliations and rites of passage one thought one had already passed: the terror of being graded, of being called upon, of coming up short in a head-to-head comparison with one's peers. One thinks to oneself, "Ah, but this is different from when I had to deal with all those things at age fifteen. Because now I'm facing them at age thirty-two. What held terror for me once can frighten me no longer. I have grown strong. I can face all enemies. Law school will be a piece of cake."

And the deepest fear is that one might be wrong. What if... one thinks; what if... I don't go through life feeling stronger and more confident because I'm actually more mature? What if I only felt stronger in the real world because that world no longer thrusted me into situations of daily humiliation where my autonomy was constantly threatened and compromised? And thus, if I were to be thrust back into such juvenile situations, who is to say that I would not suddenly crumple and discover that I was still the same frightened child after all-- "a boy in a playground, suddenly surrounded" (Tranströmer/Robertson trans.)-- under the right conditions? 

Well, I've found the perfect novel to read if you--like me-- happen to go through law school or a similar experience in your thirties or later, because it is about precisely this terror. Witold Gombrowicz's quirky and surreal classic, Ferdydurke, opens with a dream in which the protagonist (a thirty-year-old writer) envisions himself as an awkward, gangly teenager. He is struck by the sudden fear that his adulthood, his thirty-year-old "maturity," is really just a pose that is about to be stripped from him. His true nature as an awkward and incompetent adolescent is about to be found out. And this dream is soon followed by a "real" incident that justifies his dread. 

A mysterious "professor" descends upon the author while he is at work. He instantly begins treating him as a child, chucking him under the chin, describing him as adorable, seizing his stillborn work and subjecting it to various patronizing comments. The author resists at first, but inevitably finds himself falling into his appointed role as student and teenager, through the sheer force of the professor's authority. He fidgets nervously; he raises his hand before speaking. Finally, the professor takes him by the hand and installs him as a new student in his school, where he undergoes a process of thoroughgoing "belittlement" against his will. 

Here the author has to contend with all the anxiety-inducing elements of juvenile life he thought he had escaped and transcended. He has to confront schoolyard fights and taunts in the form of an elaborate "face-pulling" competition. He has to avoid being called upon as one student after another is asked to construe a passage of Caesar and they realize that none of them did the assignment. "There is nothing more horrible," opines the author, epitomizing the lesson from these encounters, "than to delve into issues one has long outgrown, the old issues of youth and immaturity that have long since been pushed into a corner and settled." 

Going to law school in one's thirties and breaking out in a sweat at the prospect of a potential cold call, or casting anxious glances around the room during a review session to try to gain some impression of how much everyone else is studying, is precisely analogous. And the reason it is so awful is just as Gombrowicz states. It's not just that these incidents are anxiety-producing in themselves. It's that they threaten the  mask of maturity and adulthood that one has painstakingly built up. They pose the question: what if all of that was a lie? What if, at every moment, I am actually prepared to revert-- given the right ingredients--to my sniveling child-self? As Gombrowicz writes: 

A person who is mature and sagacious in his dealings with mature matters becomes, in the twinkling of an eye, painfully immature when confronted with matters that are too puerile or too far in the past [....] Truly there is no easier way of inflicting naiveté and infantilizing humanity than by presenting it with problems of this kind[.] (Borchardt trans. throughout)

One fears, that is to say, that under inhospitable conditions one will lose all adult trappings and retrogress to a state of childish helplessness. As Tomas Tranströmer writes about an encounter with sudden terror: "My name, my girls, my job, all/slipped free and were left behind, smaller and smaller,/further and further away. I was nobody:/a boy in a playground, suddenly surrounded." (Robertson trans.) What if-- one thinks-- maturity is a lie? A myth? And the appearance of it really just comes from being no longer trapped in a state of humiliation--what Milan Kundera (a writer whose style bears a certain family resemblance to Gombrowicz) would call the feeling of "litost"?

The solution to this problem--to the extent there is one--may be to accept and embrace the universal "belittlement" as an aspect of the human condition. Instead of trying to efface the quivering juvenile self, we should keep faith with him. 

By the end of Gombrowicz's meandering, delightful, and utterly sui generis tale--which takes his protagonist from digs as a student lodger with a family of "enlightened" and "modern" engineers to a country estate where they still beat their servants, with stops in between for unrelated surreal stories, prefaced by comments in which the author insists his sole purpose is to take up space-- everyone in the story, regardless of pretensions to "enlightenment" or "lordliness," has been reduced to the same writhing heap of fist-fighting juvenility. And the moon as ultimate "pupa"--a Polish term for buttocks that stands in Gombrowicz's tale as a universal symbol of childishness-- shines supreme over all. 

There is no escape, Gombrowicz seems to imply, from the universal infantilization and juvenilification. So one should not try to fight it. Instead, one should do as his author/protagonist does in the novel's first scene. After initially trying to banish the dream image of his awkward teenage self, he decides to embrace it with laughter; and the novel that he has left in our hands is the ultimate testament to this impish laughter--the only possible response to the plight of being re-juveniled and unexpectedly belittled in the midst of one's adult life-journey.