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Aging in Modern Fictions
Modern literary fictions offer a wide range of representations of aging, from vitalism to nihilism. For example, in Doris Lessing's "The Grandmothers" the two female protagonists retain their vitality and zest for life as they grow older. In Gabriel García Márquez's The General in the Labyrinth the elderly Simón Bolívar has lost most of his vitality, but he still reflects on his life with calm and curiosity, unlike Hagar Shipley in Margaret Laurence's Stone Angel, who rages against growing old. A lightly ironic attitude to aging is a further step away from vitalism. In Thomas Mann's Death in Venice the aging writer Aschenbach interprets Plato's Phaedrus—and misinterprets, as Helen Small demonstrates (35–52)—in an attempt to manage his infatuation with the young boy Tadzio, with the narrator incorporating Aschenbach's interpretations into his story to an ironic effect which foreshadows Aschenbach's realization that he cannot live up to Plato's ideal. Gustave Flaubert's Bouvard and Pécuchet is more openly satirical about aging by depicting an assortment of outlandish occupations in which two retired friends engage in order to stave off the monotony of old age. The protagonist in J. M. Coetzee's Disgrace has no illusions about this looming monotony, and yet even he tries to delay it when he has a chance. Another step away from vitalism is the theme of wasted opportunities: a missed opportunity that is not recognized as such (e.g., John Marcher in Henry James's The Beast in the Jungle), one that is recognized (e.g., James Stevens in Kazuo Ishiguro's The Remains of the Day), and an overpowering feeling that one has squandered one's entire life (e.g., Ivan Ilych in Tolstoy's The Death of Ivan Ilych). Georgi Gospodinov's The Physics of Sorrow is a variation on this theme, but no longer with any trace of vitalism. Gospodinov's autobiographical protagonist-narrator views aging melancholically, as a growing realization that human existence is intrinsically hollow: "longing for something lost or that had never taken place" (75). In Thomas Bernhard's memoir Gathering Evidence, as well as in his later novels—for example, Reger in Old Masters and Franz-Josef Murau in Extinction—the hollowness of existence loses its melancholic undertone and becomes nihilistic: "Nothing mattered—that was the truth of it. It...