A Child in the Spanish Mines?

In the National Archaeological Museum of Spain in Madrid, in a dim hallway where funerary stelae, bronze tablets, and objects of everyday life vie for the attention of passers-by, a small tombstone sits in a glass case. It depicts a young boy, holding a pick and a basket, gazing out at the viewer (though his face has largely worn away). The inscription, whose reading is somewhat disputed, says, “QARTVLVS/ ANORV IIII [or ANOR VIIII] SI/ [TIBI] TERA LE[VIS],” “Quartulus [or Quintus Artulus] of four years [or nine years]. May the earth lie lightly on you.” The accompanying museum description explains that the stele comes from a mining region, and that Quartulus was probably a child laborer in the mines.

For me, one of the strongest pleasures of our recent trip to Spain was the richness of the museums, especially their abundance of objects related to everyday life. In the city of Rome itself—which was, after all, the home of the emperors and highest elites—there are so many of the most impressive statues, paintings, and mosaics from the Roman period that objects more tied to ordinary life get lost in the shuffle, either not displayed at all or relegated to back rooms. In museums of the Roman provinces, you are more likely to see these objects front and center. From Madrid to Tarragona to Mérida, we saw plenty of marble and mosaics, but also much that was humbler and more personal. My own research primarily concerns the Roman economy, and I was duly delighted by coins, weights, and measures. In the end, however, I was most struck by the funerary commemorations. Their personal nature, and often inherent sadness, have a way of collapsing time more dramatically than any other object.

Quartulus’s stone is particularly poignant, for obvious reasons: he is young, and he seems to have already been working hard. There are some mysteries surrounding the stone. The museum label claims his age as four, but a recent reading has argued for nine. The image of the boy himself does not help much in deciding. To me, he looks small, with round arms and legs, and a head rather big in relation to his body—much closer to four than nine, in other words. But Roman visual images of all kinds, including funerary ones, were notoriously unreliable about age. Some of those who died relatively old, like the emperor Augustus, were depicted as young for their entire lives. In funerary commemorations, children were sometimes shown as being younger or older than the accompanying inscription claimed, either for symbolic reasons or because the monument was pre-carved. Finally, bodily proportions might simply reflect the skill of the sculptor. Quartulus’s appearance is thus not definitive, but he does look four.

His age may have some bearing on how likely he was to have been an actual worker. He might not have worked at all: perhaps he simply belonged to a mining family, and is shown with the tools his father expected him to use one day. Still, it is just as likely that he worked. Child labor was not unusual in the Roman world. Since he had only one name and the inscription says nothing of parents, Quartulus may have been a slave (although many free, non-elite children would have worked as well). But while many of us can probably comprehend without much surprise (if with chagrin) that children would have worked as servants, messengers, and so on in Roman houses, could they have really worked in mines? Surely such labor was too hard?

If we think so, we forget more recent history. Children labored frequently in mines in Europe in the 19^th century. Various laws in different countries sometimes set restrictions on ages—children younger than thirteen, ten, or nine, depending on the time and country, were prohibited from working in mines. The need for a prohibition suggests that children younger than this were working when the laws were passed. Children can fit into spaces that adults cannot, which was probably one reason for their employment. Some ancient authors, most notably the 2^nd-century BCE Greek writer Agatharchides, describe children working in mines, although often in texts that seem to stress the misery of mine workers for rhetorical purposes. Agatharchides claims that children carried out the debris created by the adult workers. We need not imagine all such children as slaves; even free workers in mines might have worked as whole families. Quartulus’s basket would make sense for carrying debris. His pick is more likely to be symbolic, perhaps signaling that he worked in a mine as opposed to somewhere else. But even if he was only carrying, surely he could not have carried much at the age of four?

The question remains unanswerable. We know that, according to Roman law, slave children were assigned a value from the age of five, perhaps suggesting both an awareness of child mortality and some idea that children could work from that age. We might prefer to think they only worked at light tasks, but skeletons of children as young as five and seven from Herculaneum show evidence of work-related injuries. Unfortunately, even if he was only four and not nine, Quartulus may have been working, and there is no guarantee that his work was light.

A final mystery remains for me, however, and that is the commemoration itself. Funerary monuments, even small ones, were not very cheap in the Roman world and were not ubiquitous even for free Romans. Many Romans who were poor or slaves must have died with no monument at all, and commemoration of individual children was only frequent in certain periods and places. Perhaps surprisingly, however, commemoration of slave children was not that rare. Most of these were vernae, slaves born into households, often freed early and often (in the funerary monuments, at least) objects of affection. But some monuments even commemorate servi, ordinary slaves. And most of these children are not shown working, but instead have the same attributes (animals, toys) that free children have. A few even wear a toga (the very symbol of a free child), even though they were not free when they died. Quartulus is thus unusual not so much in being a commemorated slave (if slave he was), but in that he is shown working. Why was his work seen as so important? Who commissioned the stone? An owner? A parent, whether slave or free?

Whoever they were, they were making a rare gesture in commemorating a child in Spain. Of all the provinces in Jason Mander’s Portraits of Children on Roman Funerary Monuments, Spain had the fewest commemorations of children: only 18 in total over four centuries (other western provinces each had over 100). Several of these Spanish monuments follow a pattern very similar to Quartulus’s: a brief inscription, single name, and the phrase “May the earth lie lightly on you,” a phrase that (upon a brief skim, at least) seemed to be uncommon in other provinces. But none of the others in Spain show children working. How old Quartulus was, how much he worked, his status, why he was shown working on his monument when even most slave children were not, and who commemorated him—all remain mysteries. But his image lingers in my mind.

Sources:

Laes, Christian. “Child Slaves at Work in Roman Antiquity.” Ancient Society 38 (2008): 235-283.

Mander, Jason. Portraits of Children on Roman Funerary Monuments. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013.

Counter Counter-Investigation

(This is the second of two posts on Camus and Daoud.  See the first here.)

I have to make a confession: I felt bored throughout most of Meursault, contre-enquête (The Meursault Investigation). When I first heard about it, I was extremely eager to read it. I don’t usually like spinoffs of famous novels, but an Algerian responding to Camus seemed so perfect. Because of this, my disappointment was twice as strong.

But the disappointment didn’t keep me from feeling that there is much to say about it, starting with the fact that many of the things that made it frustrating for me to read were clearly deliberate choices, possibly even brilliant ones. After all, judging by Goodreads and Amazon reviews as well as major critics, I am very much in the minority in not liking it.

The book is structured as a confession in a bar. Haroun, the younger brother of Moussa, the Arab murdered in L’Étranger, is talking to someone- a young student, it seems- over a series of nights and days. He is old, and the time seems to be more or less the present. Haroun has seen Algeria’s war for independence and its long aftermath, and now he is watching his country become increasingly religious. His days drinking in bars are numbered, and he does not believe in God. He is bitter over the French colonization and (of course) the death of his brother, but whatever he imagines freedom to be (he never says exactly), it’s not this.

The story is thus not really about the murdered Arab in L’Étranger, but about his little brother. Moussa remains foggy; we do get a few details about his personality, but not much. He was the older brother, adored by their mother, and he was sometimes angry at the pressure this placed on him. His activities are mysterious, as is the reason he died. His body is never found. But his death consumes Haroun’s life: their mother (the father is long gone) is obsessed with Moussa and first forces (so Haroun feels anyway) Haroun to become his brother’s ghost and finally to murder a French man right after the war ends, as a kind of revenge or balancing.

It was this fogginess of detail I found frustrating and yet interesting: the story is very unsubtle emotionally yet unfailingly slippery when it comes to concrete events. On the emotional level, Haroun’s rage is upfront. He is angry that his brother was not named in Meursault’s story. In his world, as in ours, this story was published as a famous book- though by Meursault himself, who incidentally was pardoned and never executed (making the trial a rather obvious and heavy-handed miscarriage of justice instead of the subtler travesty it was in L’Étranger). And Haroun is mad about it. He is angry about the success of “Meursault’s” book. And he is especially angry that the language of the book is so beautiful. After a while, this starts to look like special pleading. Haroun’s own prose is fine, but that’s all it is. In fact, as if to underscore the point, whole sentences and paragraphs of it are lifted straight from L’Étranger.

Haroun has the right to rage, especially since his own life, as he presents it, has been utterly warped by the murder. Still, I kept thinking of what truly majestic rage looks like- Ta-Nehisi Coates’ Between the World and Me comes to mind- and feeling that this was not it. But after a while I wondered if Daoud was in fact, gradually and insistently, telling us that this was not it. And the book became more interesting to me because of this. Daoud, after all, is not in the position of Ta-Nehisi Coates, who rages against a society still mired in injustices hundreds of years old, a society still feeding on the same dream (that empty American Dream). For Daoud (and for Haroun) the reckoning came long ago, and it has proved a farce. And after a while, Haroun’s pain beings to look like a farce as well.

Or like a charade. For one thing, the improbabilities keep piling up. The oddest is that Moussa’s body is never found. In L’Étranger, he is killed on the beach with friends, and that these friends (who were surely the ones who reported the murder, because otherwise who would have ever known that Meursault had done it? Except Raymond, who surely would have said nothing?) somehow lost track of the body- that the coroner who counted the bullets lost track of the body- that the authorities who put Meursault on trial bothered to put him on trial without a body- struck me as highly unlikely. Other material clues, such as addresses, relatives, supporting characters in the stories, are also missing. We know that, according to Haroun, Meursault got facts wrong or lied about them. But Haroun tells us we can verify nothing he says either. And he reminds us of it repeatedly.

In fact, Haroun himself only knows what happened because a girl named Meriem showed up with the book (L’Étranger) and told him it was about his brother. Haroun read it to learn the details of his own story. But what if it wasn’t in fact his story? What if Haroun’s brother died, but not this way? Or what if Haroun’s brother didn’t die? What if Moussa simply left, like their father? What if Haroun never even had a brother?

Settings, characters, and details remain persistently vague, especially the war itself. Haroun apparently stayed on the sidelines, and the only reason anyone is bothered by the murder he commits is because it happens just as the war is over, and thus at the wrong time. The war, as a historical event, creates no tension. It’s just a prop for the murder and a way for Haroun to have his own Meursault-ish trial. His disillusion with religion echoes Meursault’s, sometimes down to the same words and phrases. And his only love story is also curiously claustrophobic, refracted through L’Étranger. Meriem, the object of his affection, is the student working on Meursault’s book, and she and Haroun seem to talk about nothing else.

In other words, L’Étranger has either eaten Haroun’s life so completely that no detail outside it can acquire clarity….or he is making everything up, and is conjuring a history for himself from a book he both loves and hates. After all, Haroun doesn’t seem to want revenge against Meursault so much as to become Meursault. And we never do get Moussa’s story. We certainly don’t get the story of the other nameless Arab, the woman who was supposedly the catalyst for the murder. (We do get a possible name for her, but we’re not sure it’s the right name. And we’re assured that this woman- an Algerian moving in a kind of demi-monde of the French part of the city, perhaps a prostitute- is certainly NOT any sister of Haroun’s or Moussa’s). In fact, we don’t get any aspect of Haroun’s life that is not reactive against L’Étranger. We get, instead, a distorted mirror- killings, trials, confrontations with religious figures, failed love stories- that echoes events in L’Étranger according to a rigid pattern, so that when Haroun says, at the end, “I too hope that my spectators will be many, and their hate savage…” the reader can only sigh at the predictability.

In the end, I was left wondering if Daoud does, in fact, want us to doubt Haroun, or if he wants us to doubt ourselves instead. Haroun is unreliable, but is he unreliable because he was robbed of his story, which is what postcolonial interpretations of L’Étranger have argued and what Haroun himself seems to argue? Or is he unreliable because he is lying, and has claimed a tragedy that is not his so that he can make his own life into a different kind of story (a story of rejecting a futile postcolonial order, perhaps)? The confessional structure of the book echoes another Camus novel, La Chute (The Fall), which I haven’t read. I don’t know much about La Chute, but I do know that it centers on the hero’s self-deception and his slow realization that he has lived (morally) a lie. And I wonder if Daoud is very clever indeed, and is saying something not just about structural injustice but about the various ways we claim victimhood or break out of such injustice.

Probably this interpretation is not correct. But either way, I suspect the ultimate mockery is aimed at us, the readers, for wanting a sympathetic story, for wanting an object of compassion or guilt. It is not easy to sympathize with Haroun. But maybe sympathy is condescension, and freedom is something more jagged.

All Stories Are Traps

(This is the first of two posts on Camus and Daoud. The second is here.)

I just read Camus’ L’Étranger (The Stranger) for the first time. I am long past high school, when most people seem to encounter this book. But I chose a good moment to read it: Algerian writer Kamel Daoud’s response to L’Étranger (a novel called Meursault, contre-enquête or, in English, The Meursault Investigation) has revived discussion of Camus’ uncomfortable fable. I will devote two posts to these books- this one to Camus, the next to Daoud.

I read both in French. The starkness of L’Étranger would come across in any language, but the French enhances certain things- “Maman,” which should really be “Mama” in English; the use of the passé composé, which makes the prose even more childishly staccato. French also sharpens the colonial edge in both stories: Meursault as a Frenchman murdering an Arab, on trial by fellow Frenchmen; Daoud writing in what was the language of the colonizer and is now, paradoxically, a language representing a kind of freedom for him.

The French edition of L’Étranger I read has an extensive commentary at the back, which is aimed, I assume, at high school or university students. This commentary is all about the relationship between Camus and Sartre, the meaning of existentialism, the kind of hero (or antihero) Meursault is, and what kind of freedom he represents. You could come away from the commentary with barely any idea that Algeria had ever been a French colony. Meursault’s trial is discussed a good deal, but the murder itself not at all. This is no more than what the book itself pushes us to do, or tricks us into doing (on which more below) but nevertheless it is startling. Evidently France does not want to discuss the Algerian war, or colonization, any more than it ever did. This is especially notable given France’s present troubles integrating its Muslim and immigrant population. An Arab-French student reading this copy of L’Étranger would come away, I think, with the feeling of being erased twice over- first in the murder itself; second in the blithely navel-gazing commentary, with its focus on internal French philosophy.

The colonial thread IS in the story, however, and is not especially subtle. As many have pointed out (or so a cursory Google search of “Camus colonialism The Stranger” suggested to me), Arabs in the story are nameless. The casual violence of the murder itself, and the fact that Meursault is effectively not tried for murder but for his behavior at his mother’s funeral, show the underpinnings of pied-noir life: a life built on force and on the narrative of a certain kind of Frenchness. By failing this Frenchness test, Meursault becomes “other,” truly a stranger or foreigner, and according to David Caroll, effectively Arab- or Jewish. L’Étranger becomes a story about the fictions of colonial life and, considering its context of publication (two years into France’s occupation by the Nazis), the fictions of occupied life.

I like this reading, but it is really only a partial reading. And it is a neat reading somewhat divorced from the power of the prose itself and what the prose is doing.

That prose is extraordinary. It is opaque and, as mentioned above, staccato. It insists on linear progression and on physicality. It is very hard to get a sense of Meursault’s past, because he is not interested in the past (or the future). Crucial moments in the story- his mother’s funeral, the murder itself- are obscured by the heat and the sun, so that Meursault seems to tell no more than the literal truth when he says that he commits the murder because of the sun. In fact, the landscape, the buildings, and the light are all far more palpable presences than most of the people, whose motivations are obscure, histories unsaid, and bodies fragile (death does not seem very far away from anyone). It is hard to weigh and judge events, because Meursault narrates them all on the same level. He is, of course, famously unmoved by his mother’s death (at least on the surface), but as the story goes on we learn this indifference extends to many other things. He has no reaction to his neighbor Salamano’s beating of his (Salamano’s) dog, and even less to his friend Raymond’s beating of his (Raymond’s) Arab girlfriend (which ultimately leads to the murder…sort of), and he is indifferent to his own girlfriend Marie’s declaration of love. After his arrest, we as readers are encouraged to see the hypocrisy and ridiculousness of the proceedings, especially the fact that Meursault is not really on trial for the murder itself. It is from this second half of the book that it becomes easier to construct various interpretations, both the colonialist one (Meursault being made “other”) and the French high school one (Meursault as existentialist antihero).

But both of these interpretations require forgetting much of the first half of the book. Because in the first half, we don’t only attend Meursault’s mother’s funeral (which is largely the focus of the second half). We are led step by step through every possible human relationship- family, romantic love, friendship, pity and mercy, meaningful work- and Meursault’s indifference to all of them. The genius of this method is that the murder itself, when it finally happens, does seem trivial. Such is the claustrophobic power of Meursault’s mind. Of course, all this is heightened by the fact that the victim is not named, and by the colonial situation, but you get the feeling Meursault could have easily “accidentally” killed pretty much anyone, not just an Arab.

And yet, by the end of the book, it is equally hard not to have assented to his special brand of heroism. The trial is a farce. No one else’s motives (including the priest’s) seem pure or powerful, and Meursault gives several passionate defenses of physical life, in the end both expressing a kind of love for his mother and embracing his own separation from the people executing him. As readers, we don’t want to be on the side of the ridiculous lawyers, the hypocritical judges and priests, the empty platitudes. We want to be on Meursault’s side, which by now has become the side of life, and especially the lack of hypocrisy. We almost forget that Meursault’s side is also the side of murder (or of indifferent killing, since murder is thought to have a motive). The trial has created his heroism. The false narrative creates the powerful counter-narrative. Meursault does not really become “other.” He becomes the perfect French hero, the marginal figure who makes an art out of exile. He is Baudelaire, Sade, Sartre.

But because it is only the trial that creates this kind of heroism, the first half of the novel undermines it. The heroism narrative is shown to be false. Camus, in fact, was no Sartre.

L’Étranger is sometimes thought to be about the kind of morality that results without God (especially the Judeo-Christian one). If so, it seems a bit dated today. Most contemporary atheists would be quite impatient with the idea that morality disappears with God, that physical amoralism and indifferent murder are all that remains. In fact, I think Camus’ point is much bigger. “God”- the Catholic God- is only one of many narratives he is creating and undermining in the book. As the colonial critique points out, this God is part of the French colonial narrative. But there are other narratives too. Family bonds. Work. Marriage. Relationships with friends or animals. Heroes and antiheroes.

Meursault, in the first half of the book, is trying to live without any narrative; hence he has no past and no future. But the inevitable result is that he is constantly assenting to other peoples’ narratives. True, he does not claim to have emotions he does not have, and maybe this is a kind of refusal to play games. But having no narrative of his own means he continually acts according to the dictates of others. (He goes to the funeral, he agrees to marry Marie, and most fatally, he assents to Raymond’s plan to beat his girlfriend and participates in the violent cat-and-mouse game with her brother that follows, ultimately resulting in the murder). Meursault’s focus on physical presence makes him not so much free as infinitely suggestible. The trial is more of the same, yet also different- he no longer assents to the narrative created for him, but his own counter-heroic narrative would not be possible without the trial.

Camus shows that we cannot live without a narrative. Not without becoming someone else’s pawn. Yet the creation of our own narrative- truly our own- is impossible. The only antihero Meursault can become is a quintessentially French one. He certainly does not become “Arab.” The Arabs have completely dropped from view. Perhaps that- dropping from view, erasure- is the reality of colonialism (and of people truly without narratives), and so Meursault triumphs by becoming very un-Arab indeed.

However, I suspect that Camus would be skeptical of a response that included creating narratives for these unnamed characters. Haven’t I just shown, he might say, that all narratives are traps?

The Moral Universe of Donna Tartt

At the end of The Goldfinch, the recent novel by Donna Tartt, the narrator, Theo, poses the question, “What if one happens to be possessed of a heart that can’t be trusted?”

Many reviewers have called The Goldfinch Dickensian, and in several ways it is. Theo is orphaned early on, when his mother dies in the explosion of a terrorist’s bomb at the Metropolitan Museum in New York. He then lives with a series of characters who are all considerably more vivid in personality than he:  the Barbours, rich and unhappy; an elderly antiques dealer named Hobie; and finally, Theo’s own gambling, alcoholic father, in a sand-blasted Las Vegas suburb with more than a hint of apocalypse. As in a Dickens novel, many of these characters do not wish Theo well. As in a Dickens novel, children are used, abused, and left adrift. And as in a Dickens novel, people burn both brightly and tragically: Theo makes friends with Boris, a doomed, dramatic Russian, an alcoholic even as a teenager, the Steerforth to Theo’s David Copperfield, the two tied together in ways that become clear only years later.

I suspect all this is very deliberate on Donna Tartt’s part. I suspect the eventual contrast with Dickens is also very deliberate. The heart is a saving grace in Dickens- David Copperfield unites with Agnes at last, and Pip, even in the bleaker, original ending of Great Expectations, says of Estella: in her voice, and in her touch, she gave me the assurance, that suffering had been stronger than Miss Havisham’s teaching, and had given her a heart to understand what my heart used to be. In Dickens, the heart is the source of love, and love is redemptive.

But Theo’s heart can’t be trusted.  We get hints that this is true even before tragedy strikes: Theo is in trouble at school, and is less sorry about anything he has done (from smoking to theft) than about his mother finding out. What might have been a minor flaw in him, however, is compounded when he and his mother, on the way to school, take a detour into the museum, where his mother dies. Theo blames himself, and the hairline crack through his character spreads. We see throughout Theo’s life the wreckage of his inability to love well- friends abandoned, indifferent lovers, drug addiction. At the antique shop, Theo forges and sells furniture, at first to get the business out from debt but gradually on an enormous scale, simply because he can. Hobie stands to lose the most from this fraud, but Theo, although agonized by the idea that Hobie will think badly of him, continues.

We also see the suggestion that Theo never had a chance of loving well, because he is his father’s son and learns from example (his father’s alcoholism, abuse, and abandonment). This causation is murky, however. There is the example of his mother’s love. There are Pippa and Hobie, as pure of heart as any Dickens characters.  We are left wondering where the crack started, where the flaw lies, how to trace it or name it.

This, the rot at the root of the soul, is Donna Tartt’s preoccupation.  The problem with this rot is that it is pervasive and untraceable.  What part of Theo is not Theo?  Where did Theo begin?  Theo is unreliable, as a narrator.  His visions of goodness- his mother, Pippa- are extravagant, dramatic, distant.  We don’t know if these people are as he describes them.  We grow claustrophobic and weary from the closed spaces in his head, from the sickness and paralysis he so often feels.

But of course the linchpin of the story is that Theo’s great love is not a person at all- but a painting. This is the Goldfinch of the title, a small, priceless picture of a bird, held captive by a golden chain around its ankle, which Theo takes from the museum after the explosion, hides and keeps for years, loses without knowing it, and then finds again through his old friend Boris, under dangerous and extraordinary circumstances. Theo commits murder to get the painting back, and then once again loses it. He is guilty, horrified, sick, disgusted by the murder- but mostly, you think, he is terrified of having actually been active in the world. In the end, however, the painting is saved, and Theo offers the reader a justification of himself in terms of a love of art, a love of beauty- “the first glimpse of pure otherness, in whom you bloom out and out and out.”

Does this love of beauty make him trustworthy? Not at all.  But for Theo, for whom “life is catastrophe,” it’s enough.

There is something sacramental in this attitude.  In finishing The Goldfinch, I was reminded not of Dickens but of Graham Greene’s Catholicism, of The Power and the Glory, and the alcoholic priest wandering Mexico, unable to be faithful or pure, yet on a desperate, absurdist quest to keep performing the Eucharist even though Catholicism has been outlawed.  The goldfinch painting and the sacraments are both eternal and unsullied by the imperfect people who preserve them. But both stories also have a profound despair.  Theo’s redemption by the painting, and the priest’s by the sacrament, are left ambiguous at best.  Is beauty worth preserving if it doesn’t create love? Is God in the sacraments if they don’t bring peace?  Neither Theo nor the priest could answer, probably.  But they make their choices, whistling in the dark.