Free Morning, Noon, and Night: Finding the Meaning of Life's Stages Through Books by Arnold Weinstein

first, what you do, and, second, what is done to you: utterly egalitarian, like a boomerang.)
    Horrors abound, but
horrors
is an adult word, an adult notion even, in this text, so that raping the hired girl, pouring liquid manure down the serving man’s mouth via wedge and pail, brutalizing even parents and sister, all are recounted as flatly as changing wallpaper, as set design, as moving stage, as “things that happen.” It would be hard to overstate the pith and reach of this condition whereby one inhabits a toppling, tumbling world of moving pictures, shifting shapes.
    These wolf creatures destroy the child’s home in short order, and he escapes into the wilderness, only to come upon another strange figure: a man with long hair, tangled beard, heavy chain, and “a huge crucifix, some six feet high, which he clasped to his breast.” Again he thinks: wolf. Given the conventions of seventeenth-century literature, we are not surprised to learn later that this hermit is actually the boy’s real father, but what most strikes us is Grimmelshausen’s use of naive perspective, of innocence as point of view. It can be a devastating point of view. The child at one point looks into a large house and sees “men and women twirling and swirling around … stamping and bawling” with sweat pouring out of them and breathing noisily. What can this be? They are dancing. How strange the signs of pleasure must be if you do not know them. Farther down this road, he observes a pair in a goose shed, hears noises, and sees strange postures, but then the boards “began to creak and groan, and the girl to moan as if in pain,” and he thinks they are like the maniacs who tried to stamp through the floor, that they might next come out and attack him too, as part of their campaign of destruction. Again, as with Blake’s chimney sweep, the “experienced” reader fills in the blanks, translates into the adult code.
    Simplicius is captured many times, and his captors are always unsure whether he is a simpleton or a spy, so they test him: by giving him drugs, by displacing him into staged settings, by trying to destroy his reason. The parade of masks now begins: Simplicius is sequentially disguised as a calf, as a woman, as a devil, as an actor and gigolo in Paris, as a quack doctor, as a pilgrim, as a farmer, as a nobleman, as an underwater visitor to the Mummelsee kingdom. The kaleidoscopic nature of this novel is its enduring truth: life is a merry-go-round; one goes through a repertoire of roles; the world is crawling with wolves, hermits, and madmen, as well as soldiers and captors. We hear stories of mania: someone thinking he’d become an earthenware jug and would be broken, another thinking he was a rooster, another convinced that his nose trailed on the ground. Languages swirl too: as gigolo, Simplicius calls himself the
“beau Alman”
(handsome German) and sings French songs (which he does not understand) to the Parisian women who purchase, groupwise, his services in the dark. The boy’s most triumphant role is as the Huntsman of Soest, the quasi-mythic figure whose finest trick is the creation of shoes that point both ways, that leave no reliable tracks, that render you untraceable, anonymous, no one.
    The fuller novel is far more complex than I have suggested, with a serious spiritual vision, but its view of growing up should now be fairly clear: maturation is not possible in this topsy-turvy world. Holding on to one’s soul, so that it can be nurtured, is next to impossible in a situation where one lives in drag, ingests strange chemicals, vomits out one’s insides, has nothing to hold on to or nurture: Thirty Years’ War. For most of us living today in industrialized societies, learning about war through news clips on the TV or via the Internet, it is hard to imagine existing for three long decades in a swirling regime of capsizing forms and figures. It is an education in morphology, in the deceitfulness of stable