childhood appears to have become a fictional status that guarantees constant despair and a wandering journey of self discovery
In a 2018 article, titled “What Kids Need to Learn to Succeed in 2050,”[1] Yuval Noah Harari suggests that “the art of reinvention will be the most critical skill of this century,” a claim that echoes some of the premises of decolonial theory – which became an epistemological doctrine in the voices of scholars like Walter Mignolo and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak during the recent fin de siècle period -. Decolonial theory, as it was formulated in the American continent, called for a relearning program that, as Harari suggests, aimed at reinventing our intellectual behavior in order to apprehend the world around us through a new set of epistemological lenses. This, in turn, would transform the experience of adulthood into a new form of intellectual infancy, which didn’t imply a devolving state per se, but it did push adults into new patterns of intellectual behavior as the means to transform both social and economic dynamics for the sake of a more egalitarian global order. The novel Ferdydurke (1937) by Polish Witold Gombrowicz, without being a decolonial literary text, portrays the experience of a writer who is forced to attend Elementary School again. Ferdydurke has been often described as a cult novel or an ode to stupidity and immaturity, for the thirty-year-old main character wanders through a limbo that does not allow him to put himself together in a coherent manner, as he confesses in the beginning of the novel:
“I even imagined that my body was not entirely homogeneous, and that parts of it were not yet mature, that my head was laughing at and mocking my thigh, that my thigh was making merry at my head, that my finger was ridiculing my heart and my heart my brain, while my eye made sport of my nose and my nose of my eye, all to the accompaniment of loud bursts of crazy laughter- my limbs and the various parts of my body violently ridiculing each other in a general atmosphere of caustic and wounding raillery […] according to my papers and my appearance, I was grown up. But I was not mature.”
As the novel progresses, we follow Ferdydurke – whose name is also a form of mocking him – through a series of absurd situations that ultimately drive him into a pathetic derangement that only emphasizes his immaturity and lack of preparedness for adulthood. One of the failures of Ferdydurke is his lack of imagination to reinvent himself, as he becomes a mere witness of his life and he endeavors his time to escape from the absurd challenges that reality poses in front of him. Unlike Kafka’s Gregor Samsa – who has to die in order to free his family of the ominous weight of his presence -, Ferdydurke seems doomed to an ever-lasting childish existence anchored to the absurd violence shaping the sociopolitical landscape of his times. In a form, reducing the population to a subordinated existence during the formative years is one of the mechanisms to both shape individuality and preserve the ruling order, even if it is an asphyxiating regime that establishes immaturity as the ideological status quo.
Less than one decade before the publication of Ferdydurke, Jean Cocteau published Les Enfants Terribles, a novel that paved the ground, in terms of historical literary reception, for works that explored the meaning of childhood within an environment determined by the confinement and alienation brought by WWII. Cocteau’s novel, written in a few weeks while he was recovering in a hospital, portrays the coming to age experience of the siblings Paul and Elisabeth, who grew up without a father and with a mother constantly sick and thus anchored to the vanishing existence of living in a bed.
The novel’s foundational event introduces Dargelos, a character that will bring disgrace to Paul since childhood. While Paul and Dargelos are playing during winter time with other kids, Dargelos hits Paul with a rock covered in snow, producing in the latter an illness that will accompany him up to his death. While Ferdydurke illustrates the vicissitudes of an adult reduced to a sort of mandatory childhood, Les Enfants Terribles portrays quite the opposite, as Elisabeth is forced by the illnesses of his mother and Paul to become an adult since her childhood. Due to this, both Elisabeth and Paul experience an iconoclastic teenagehood that takes place within the walls of their bedroom. Growing up in such an environment, which Elisabeth fills with constant avant-garde elements, provides Paul a melancholic and pessimistic view of reality that ultimately drives him into a drug addiction that will provoke his death. This way, both Ferdydurke and Paul become paradigmatic examples of men that – recalling Harari’s article – fail at reinventing themselves due to their immaturity and atavist relationship with their historical time.
Even though these works were produced almost a century ago, under the light of both Ferdydurke and Les enfants Terribles – as the world progressively becomes the permanent host of Coronavirus – childhood appears to have become a fictional status that guarantees constant despair and a wandering journey of self discovery that will promise constant failure to those children that come from disadvantaged backgrounds. Almost silently, the Coronavirus pandemic has dismantled the fundaments of familiarity and social solidarity for the sake of an invisible race to preserve a foggy and disjointed sense of individuality. Just a fast glance to the world news reveal that global society is under constant attack. Violence against children and women within the household has reached unprecedented peaks, while public spaces are a permanent battleground shaped by police and military brutality and the ideological confusion sprung by all sorts of protests on both extremes of the political spectrum.
In addition, the irregular and parenthetical go-back-to-school process has left millions of children away from educational settings and in many cases it has also produced a very early retirement from formal education. The question, thinking about Harari’s 2050 generation of successful individuals able to reinvent themselves, is if the world itself will be at all the home for humanity as we keep envisioning it in 2020. If historical memory prevails, the 2050 generation will probably blame the Coronavirus pandemic and its political artifices for their failure, just as Ferdydurke and Paul point towards institutional fractures – thinking about both family and the public sphere – as the obstacles that prevented the full development of their human capacities. It might be due to constant illness or the redundancy of being confined to a mental childhood what will unleash the last breath of modern society just to open up the path for a kind of social order that in the long run seems a mere fable of science fiction, a place where cars fly, people float giving up to the endeavor of walking, and everyone works from home and a simple blink of the eyes brings food to the door, all while human politics has collapsed to the automated and hyper-intelligent global design of a Super Artificial Intelligence.
In the meantime and thinking about childhood, the present seems an iterative replay of the last scene of the film High-Rise (2015), which frames an isolated and critical child sitting on the top of an all-in-one building smoking from a water pipe while all the adults from the building have surrendered to a decadent lifestyle that has ultimately brought the total collapse of the infrastructure and living conditions of a building that was designed with the sole intention of bringing the maximum comfort to its residents. As an early Millennial that was constantly fed by the cultural remnants of the X-Generation, if I had the opportunity to choose my role in such a building, I would be inevitably the child smoking a water pipe, rendering oblivion to the struggles of a decadent adulthood, and giving up my senses to the sky that appears in front of my sight. Only from that perspective, the 2050 generation appears to me as a possibility, for the remnants of modern life, with all the excesses, brutality, and incoherent forms of government have proved to be the best way to exhaust both individuality and social allegiances.
Works Cited
Ferdydurke, Witold Gombrowicz, Yale University Press, 2000.
High-Rise, directed by Ben Wheatley, 2015.
Les Enfants Terribles, Jean Cocteau, Vintage Classics, 2011.
“What Kids Need to Learn to Succeed in 2050,” Yuval Noah Harari, Medium, Sep. 13, 2018, web.
[1] https://forge.medium.com/yuval-noah-harari-21-lessons-21st-century-what-kids-need-to-learn-now-to-succeed-in-2050-1b72a3fb4bcf
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