MAKING SENSE OF LITERARY AGING: Relevance of Recent Gerontological Theory JON HENDRICKS* CYNTHIA A. LEEDHAM University of Kentucky

ABSTRACT: Literature provides rich resources for interpretations of the meaning of aging in cross-cultural and historical circumstances. A theoretically informed understanding of such literature should be rooted in contextual understanding of literature as an art form, including consiaerations of style, genre, intentions of authors, and of audiences; an awareness of perspectives of analysts; and explanatory frameworks drawn from gerontology. Early theories in gerontology focus on the individual kzveL taking structure as a given Second generation models-modernization and age stratifuation-focus on structure excluding the individuaL Recent frameworks, namely political economic approaches cognizant of intentionality, and structurally informed social psychological perspectives, address the confluence of individual and structural factors. A hermeneutic-dialectical framework incorporates the dynamic interpLay between structural factors, individual meaning-giving and action To illustrate, five brief vignettes fromcross-cultural literature are analyzed drawing on recent gerontological theory. A hermeneutic-dialectical approach to literature provides a forum for debate, research and theory-building, rather than an overarching model of aging in cross-cultural context.

INTRODUCTION In recent years, there has been growing interest in the nature of aging in other cultures and historical periods, and its import for the ways in which we construe the meanings of growing old (van Tassel 1979; Hendricks 1980; Steams 1982). In this article we explore one primary means of gaining an appreciation of the texture of aging in other times and places: an analysis of their literature. Making sense of cross-cultural and historical literature on aging is a complex process, demanding a certain degree of theoretical sophistication. Those who attempt to *Directall communicationsto: Jon Hendricks, Depanment of Sociology, University of Kentucky, Lexington KY 40506. JOURNAL OF AGING STUDIES, Volume 1, Number 2, pages 187-208. Copyright @ 1987 by JAI Press, Inc. All rights of reproduction in any form reserved. ISSN: 0890-4065.

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use writing as a data base need to be aware they are dealing, not with straightforward attempts to describe aging and its impact, but with literature as an art form. As Derrida (1978), Foucault (1972) and other minions of hermeneutic inte~retation so cogently assert, a text can be read at many levels and for many purposes: to make sense, it must be analyzed in terms of its diverse internal meanings. Yet literature is neither created nor read in a vacuum. A broader perspective must be used to understand the implications of descriptions of aging for what it means to grow old. All of this implies a number of considerations with regard to the nature of literature, its purposes, functions, and various traditions of literary interpretation. The ways in which structural and cultural factors shape the woof and warp of aging in individual cultures-and hence its portrayal in literature-must also be taken into account. Neither is interpretation itself context free. It is a function, not only of the orientation and purposes of particular authors writing within a given sociocultural milieu, but also of the implicit and explicit models commentators employ. To an extent, these models spring from the metatheoretical worldviews of critics: their attitudes toward aging, social issues, and the meaning and purpose of life. In part, they will be a function of the level of analysis-be it literary, psychological, cultural, historical, sociological, or some combination-and of the explanatory models implicit in each. Analyses of aging through literature have been conducted on several levels, using a variety of implicit and explicit models. They highlight illustrative passages from works of diverse periods (McKee 1982); set analyses within the context of particular works (Nitecki 1982); examine the intentions and psychology of historical authors (Albright 1972; Woodward 1980); or focus primarily on effects on readers (Ansello 1977; Charles 1977; Porter and Porter 1984). McKee (1982), for example, provides an anthology of extracts, with minimal commentary, from a variety of periods and countries as representing the philosop~c~ foundations of gerontology. Freeman’s (19’79) bibliographic essay surveys literature manifesting insights pertaining to the study of old age from the earliest time to the present. At the other end of the spectrum, we predominantly have literary studies on the portrayal of aging by particular authors and works, such as Koester’s (1966) study of the development of the portrayal of old age in Herman Hesse’s narrative poetry; Bondy’s (1967-68) study of old age in the work of Italo Svevo; and Nitecki’s (1982) analysis of Chaucer’s original use of the convention of the old man’s plaint in the Pardoner’s Tale. Broadly speaking, there are two major foci in gerontological, and, to a lesser extent, literary analyses of aging. There is a body of criticism examining negative portrayals of aging in literature throughout history. In some cases (I-Iaynes 1963; Hendricks and Hendricks 1978; Fowler et al. 1982), the goal is to dispel the myth of a “golden age of age.” In other cases (Ansello 1977; Charles 1977; Sohngen and Smith 1978; Loughman 1977), the authors lament the ways in which widely read literature may reinforce negative stereotypes of the aging. Mignon’s Crabbed Age and Youth (1947) is a literary analysis of the barbed wit directed against the aged in the seventeenth-century English restoration comedy of manners, a genre which relied heavily on stereotypes for its humor. Generally, literary critics’ studies of aging tend to fall within the other focus, which turns its attention to literature as expressive of an individual’s creative response to aging. In gerontology, this approach springs from the tradition of humanistic geron-

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tology (Spicker et al. 1978; Porter and Porter 1984; Cole 1984), which relies heavily on an Eriksonian psychology of the life course and the debates it engenders. Humanistic gerontology, however, also has implicit roots in modernization, in that it treats the analysis of individual creativity as an antidote to the dehumanization of the elderly resulting from economic and industrial modernization. It includes a number of papers examining affirmative human responses to aging in particular genres (Sohngen 1977, 1981; Clark 1980); works (Wyatt-Brown 1986); authors (Berman 1986); and the treatment of particular themes (Loughman 1980). Kellam (1968) and Moss (1976) provide bibliographies- of works exemplifying a humanistic perspective. Literary analyses of individual creativity in aging (Albright 1972; Edel 1979; Woodward 1980; Woodward and Schwartz 1986) tend to be allied with other forms of psychoanalysis in addition to Eriksonian psychology, and, in some cases, with mysticism. In his introduction to Memory and Desire, a study of aging, literature, and psychoanalysis, Schwartz (Woodward and Schwartz 1986, p. 5), however, recognizes that forms of consciousness depend on prevailing social, economic, and cultural conditions, thus implying the need for a sociological model of aging to set individual-level analyses in context. The fruitfulness of an implicit model of this kind is ably demonstrated by Kebric’s (1983) study of portrayals of aging in the letters of Pliny the Younger, which subtly traces the interweaving of personal, cultural, and socioeconomic themes, and of historically grounded meanings, and their significance for modem readers. We seek to make such a model explicit in this article.

TOWARD A HERMENEUTIC-DIALECTICAL FRAMEWORK The framework for interpreting literature on aging presented here, which is basically sociological in its intent, derives from the same broad tradition as Bleicher’s (1982) proposal for a hermeneutic-dialectical perspective in social theory. Our thesis is, given the need to take account of the contextuality of authors and commentators, interpretative frameworks derived from early theories of gerontology should be supplemented by more dynamic modes of interpretation better suited to capturing the complex interplay between structural factors and personal intentional&y. The framework we delineate is drawn from recent theorizing in social gerontology, and is closer to what Foucault proposed from the standpoint of a structuralist reading of history than Derrida’s deconstructionist mode of interpretation. Like Foucault and Bleicher, we seek to transcend the dichotomy between persons as meaning-giving subjects and persons as objects of knowledge-between individualism and objectivism. Foucault sees this dichotomy as having its roots in the late-eighteenthcentury Kantian definition of human beings as knowing subjects, and, at the same time, as objects of their own knowledge (Dreyfus and Rabinow 1983; Bleicher 1982). Dreyfus and Rabinow (1983) identify three broad responses to this dichotomy in Western thought as crucial to an understanding of Foucault’s enterprise. Structuralism comes down on the side of objectivism, by attempting to find objective laws governing human activity, and thus dispensing with both meaning and subject. At the other extreme, phenomenology, as exemplified by Husserl, understands the person as subject, focusing the investigation on the meaning-giving activities of the transcendental ego. Hermeneutics renounces the attempt to understand the person as a meaning-giving subject,

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and locates meaning in the social practices and texts persons produce. Foucault sees both structuralism and hermeneutics-the normalization of meaning-as contributing to social control, or stabilization of the status quo, by failing to highlight the crucial role of power in the constitution of society (Dreyfus and Rabinow 1983). Similarly, Bleicher critiques the objectifying methods of scientistic sociology, and particularly structuralism, for their failure to grasp the historic character of unconscious social processes which are used to explain human behavior, and for contributing to reification of social interactions by treating them as natural phenomena. Yet, he sees a purely hermeneutic perspective as lacking in that it does not provide for an analysis of the situational context in which communicative processes occur- for instance, of the cultural hegemony exercised by privileged groups and reinforced by economic structures. He therefore proposes a hermeneutic-dialectical sociology that intercollates intended and objective meaning with one another by interpreting social phenomena within a framework that includes reference to the context of social reproduction. This framework depicts the history of social groups or classes against a backdrop of the level of material production, political domination, and cultural tradition. It also incorporates and develops reflexive accounts of everyday occurrences. It leads not merely to a widening of horizons, but to a change in one’s interpretation of self and others. Finally, it calls for critical self-reflection on the part of the interpreter (Bleicher 1982). The issue of what we mean when we talk about the meaning of a literary work has been hotly debated among literary critics, sociological and philosophical analysts (for example, Ogden and Richards 1980; Dreyfus and Rabinow 1983). To some extent, the position taken depends on whether the analyst is closer to a phenomenological or to a hermeneutic perspective (Dreyfus and Rabinow 1983). Some would concentrate on the intention of the author, narrowly focusing on the meaning the text had for him or her. Others would claim, once written, the text takes on a life and meaning of its own, which may be discovered by those who explore it (Empson 1956; Detrida 1978). Still others would interpret the text in terms of its meaning within the culture in which it was created-either in terms of surface cultural meanings shared by authors and contemporary readers, or in terms of “deep meaning” accessible only through disciplined analysis. Others again contend a work holds valid, new meanings for each succeeding generation or people of other cultures who read it. Consequently, some hold that we should lay aside our own culture and personal preconceptions to uncover the significance of aging for the author and/or make sense of the intrinsic meaning of the text. At the other extreme, the meaning of the text may be seen as whatever we read into it: we need not be concerned with divesting ourselves of our preconceived ideas or reaching out to capture meanings intended by the author. Our impressions as we read are the best barometer of the meaning of aging in the work-a meaning that will be different for other people, at other times, in other cultures. While recognizing the validity of diverse levels of analysis of aging in literatureincluding the purely literary-we assert that a sociologically informed hermeneuticdialectical perspective calls for an analytic framework that facilitates an understanding of the interaction between structure, culture, and individual. That is, one that focuses on the interplay between political and structural factors operating beyond the control of the individuals, culturally constituted meanings, and the meaning-giving activities and intentionality of persons. This implies an awareness of the nature of

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literature and its cultural context, as well as a grounding in relevant social theory which taps into the interaction between meaning, purposive action and structural factors. In the discussion to follow, we draw on both basic concepts of literary criticism and on theory in social gerontology in order to develop such a framework. We begin by examining some ways in which a realization of the nature and functions of literature is basic to the formulation of a hermeneutic-dialectical model. Next, a review of main trends in theories of social gerontology reveals that recent theories provide a context for exploration of the interactive processes shaping aging whereas earlier theories tend to segment structural and individual levels from each other making it difficult to move toward an appreciation of other cultures in their own terms. Specifically, we explore ways in which perspectives based on political economy are better suited to these purposes than is modernization theory; and the relevance of dynamic, social psychological orientations of authors such as Marshall (198 1, 1986). Finally, applications of the resultant framework and directions for future research are suggested.

CROSS-CULTURAL LITERATURE ON AGING AS LITERATURE A variety of constraints are placed on the ways in which aging is presented by the nature of literature as an art form. Broadly speaking, these have to do with the purposes and functions of literature on the one hand, and, on the other, with literary conventions of style and genre.

The Purposes and Functions of Literature Images of aging in literature, and the effect they have upon readers from other cultures, will be influenced by the import of the literary medium for the author, his or her contemporaries, and for the outside reader. In keeping with a hermeneutic-dialectical perspective, we need to consider these dimensions in making sense of cross-cultural literature on aging. We should thus begin with an awareness of how the ends of a particular work will be reflected in its depiction of aging. Those who venture to interpret it should ask themselves a number of questions. What were the multiple functions of differing types of literature in the society under question? Who was the piece in question written for and why? Did authors, audiences, and those who commissioned, published or marketed the literature see it as serving differing functions? In turn, what constraints might this place on the ways in which age and the aging process are presented? If, for instance, the primary purpose of a body of literature is didactic, seeking to convey a particular religious viewpoint or philosophy of life, we are liable to find allegorical representations of the elderly, placed there to convey symbolic meaning: the old man who serves as an illustration of where the follies of the world are likely to lead. If, however, a work, such as Shakespeare’s historical plays, seeks to explore the dynamics of a historical, political situation, we might expect to find examples of participants who just happen to be old. Where the focus is on the personal interpretation of experience, we may find carefully sculpted, intimate portraits of what it means to grow old, as in Laurence’s Stone Angel (1964). In works written for patrons drawn from a powerful elite, one would not expect to find overtly sympathetic descriptions of the elderly poor. Where the

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work forms part of a naturalistic tradition of social protest, designed to arouse indignation, one may find searing details of what industrialization does to marginal elderly, as in the novels of Emile Zola. In all instances, what the author says, and how he or she says it, is to some degree constrained by the need to capture and retain the reader’s interest and sympathy. Thus, rather than stating the message directly, an author may craft the work in a way that will unobtrusively lead the reader with shared cultural assumptions to a particular conclusion -or challenge those assumptions without compromising the sympathy of the reader. In some instances, an author will have a more central interest in conveying a particular impression of age and aging. In others, depiction of aging will be peripheral to primary concerns. One’s approach to literature constitutes another facet of interpretative efforts. It is naive to assume interpretations are or can be value free. It behooves the critic to be aware of his or her own expectations, and how these affect an understanding of cross-cultural literature on aging. If, for instance, one sees literature as offering naturalistic portrayals of psychological experience, one will fall wide of the mark in attempting to interpret allegorical literature. To be sure, one may offer psychological, or even sociological interpretations of such literature, but first the allegorical structure must be grasped. Then one may penetrate through the literary structure to psychological and social forces shaping it.

Style and Genre Some grounded knowledge of style and genre is vital for understanding authors’ use of these, and the impact their pictures of aging have or had on contemporaries. Creative writers tend to observe relatively flexible or rigid conventions with regard to the form and style of writing, which influence what they say and the way they say it. Seventeenth-century Classical French tragedy, with its insistence upon the unities of time, place and action, is an extreme example of the limits imposed by genre, but even the stream of consciousness novel imposes implicit limits by its form. Stylistic constraints are most obvious in poetry, particularly in traditions which make elaborate use of meter and rhyme. All literature, however, tends to draw on a variety of stylistic devices. These may be articulated as part of a philosophy of literature; as, for instance, with the seventeenth-century French “prCeux” insistence on avoiding “vulgar” language resulting in the loss of a vast wealth or terms open to sixteenth-century writers;’ or the campaign by William Wordsworth and the English Romantics (1798) for a return to ordinary language (Wordsworth and Coleridge 1963). Stylistic devices may arise as a result of the circumstances in which literary forms develop: in the Old French epic, for instance, which arose out of an oral tradition, descriptions of people’s appearance follow a highly stylized configuration with variations only in the details. This device served the purpose of cuing the narrator’s memory, and its use eventually became so routinized that it served as fuel for parody in later, twelfth-century epics such as the L..eChar& de ZVhes (1972). In still other cases, such as personal journals or the modem novel, the use of style may be more eclectic, less self-conscious or formal; nonetheless, it does impose certain constraints on the medium of presentation. Literary conventions and the ways they are used may tell us something about what people consider to be important. In a related field, some art historians claim medieval

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painters simply did not know how to use perspective. Others suggest, however, that medieval artists were concerned with highlighting aspects of reality which overrode perspective. Or, to shift back to literature, the use of tenses in the Old French epic seems chaotic and haphazard to the modem reader, prompting some to maintain their authors did not have a good sense of the relationship between tenses and time. A more careful reading, however, reveals that different tenses were systematically used to convey varying degrees of immediacy and duration. The way in which an author represents facets of the human condition-such as age and social standing-in a particular character should not be interpreted as directly reflecting his or her beliefs about the human condition per se. Rather it should be set within the Gestalt of the work-which may raise more questions about the human condition than it answers. To uncover the intended meanings of a piece of literature, be it about aging or anything else, takes careful evaluation of genre and style, and of the ways in which they give expression to the underlying intent and assumptions of the author and culture in which he participates. At times, an author may actually employ a parody of literary conventions to make apparent or ridicule the underlying assumptions. The hapless reader, unaware of the nuances of intentional exaggerations of style, is likely to misread such overdrawn imagery. An overdrawn stereotype of an old man, for instance, may confront us, in a lighthearted way, with the absurdity of ageism. Yet such a picture can also be seen as a valid indication of current values shared by the author unless cast against the broader flow of artistic conventions. In comedy and satire, one may find caricatures of the foibles of both youth and age. To take an oft-cited example from Shakespeare’s Hamlet (c. 1600), in Polonius, Shakespeare may be making fun of the sententiousness of some older men-but in Rosenkrantz and Guildenstem in the same play, we find a parody of the foppishness of youth. The famous seven ages of man speech, in Shakespeare’s As You Like It (c. 1600), frequently cited as a harsh portrait of old age, can hardly be said to be kinder to the other ages than it is to old age. Jacques, who speaks it, is a world-weary misanthrope. Set within the context of the work in which it occurs, part of the import of this speech is to convey a sense of the futility of life without the kind of human warmth portrayed in the friendship between Orlando and old Adam.

GERONTOLOGICAL THEORY AND THE HERMENEUTIC-DIALECTICAL PERSPECTIVE Underlying Theoretical Framework In addition to an ability to penetrate the significance of literary idioms, interpretation contains implicit theoretical frameworks allowing us to set literary vignettes of aging in their wider social context. Many authors readily admit that now and in the past, individual life courses are inextricably intertwined with social structure, but few attempt to spell out the mechanisms linking the two. What is needed is a perspective which transcends the structure-meaning dichotomy (Dreyfus and Rabinow 1983). This entails an examination of the dynamic between political and economic factors, culture, meaning, and intentionality from a variety of levels. Clearly authors’ lifeworlds, and consequently their literary productions, will be shaped by the social organizations in

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which they are embedded. Yet writers take, an active stance in interpreting societal constraints, and, in some cases, they may actually use their works to try to provoke social change. Charles Dickens or Jonathan Swift, both reformers of the first order, are good examples of novelists whose works have a not so subtle sociopolitical agenda. Any interpretive framework must also be flexible to allow for differing patterns of the structure-culture-individual dialectic in a variety of cultures. Models that are too explicitly rooted in particular cultural or subcultural origins will have limited applicability in cross-cultural analysis. An examination of the metatheoretical frameworks underlying major developments in gerontological theory leads us to conclude that more recent theoretical perspectives are better suited for literary analysis than were first and second generation theories. While such a schematization obviously does not do justice to the complexities and very real contributions of individual theories, we would suggest that it is useful to conceptualize the generational emergence of gerontological theory in terms of thesis, antithesis and synthesis. First phase theories provided an original statement that focused on aging at the level of the individual, taking social structural factors as unexamined givens. Grounded in a structural-functional perspective, individuals were cast as adapting to societal imperatives. Accordingly, models such as disengagement, and activity theory pose the question of which individual lifestyles are most likely to be adaptive. No attention was paid to the way in which social structure itself is constituted and negotiated. Furthermore, their empirical derivation from studies of middle Americans limits their cross-cultural utility. Second generation theories such as modernization theory or age-stratification theory-the antithesis-focused on social organization to the neglect of cultural factors and individual intentionality, by positing universally found structural factors with their own internal dynamic. Thus, again, they fail to allow for the exploration of cultural relativity, and, because their emphasis is on structure at the expense of all else, they do not facilitate examination of the interplay between it, culture and individual (Hendricks and Hendricks 1986). In terms of Foucault’s and Dreyfus and Rabinow’s schematization outlined above, we see certain early theories, such as disengagement theory, and second generation theories-modernization theory being the best example-as leaning toward objectivism in their attempt to find covering laws goveming the process of aging and its relationship to industrialization. In reaction to these, some psychologically oriented gerontologists moved toward a predominantly subjective approach, developing theories such as personality theory and continuity theory which focus on individual personality differences. (Neugarten et al. 1964; Neugarten et al. 1968; Bultena 1969; Neugarten 1977; Fox 198 1; Covey 198 1). Generally speaking, more recent theories may be said to be synthetic, falling within a hermeneutic-dialectical paradigm. Theories grounded in political economy concentrate on the ways in which social institutions are shaped by individual and corporate actors, and in turn circumscribe the lifeworld of individuals. Certain social psychological perspectives (see Marshall 198 1, 1986) examine the constraints imposed by structure from the individual level, focusing on the meaning of these for particular individuals, and on options available within them. Both of these perspectives provide a means of linking structural and individual levels though with slightly different emphases. Taken together, they allow for a multidimensional analysis of the interplay between societal constraints, cultural meanings, individual meaning-giving and social power, which

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constitutes the dynamic and continually renegotiated fabric of social structure. In the sections to follow, we examine some theoretical models developed within this synthetic framework with an eye to the ways in which they afford a richer approach to literary analysis than earlier theories. We focus especially on ways in which dependency theory is preferable to modernization theory, and on the relevance of sociocultural and social psychological perspectives. We emphasize, however, that the utility of this synthetic framework goes beyond the individual theoretical models discussed, allowing for development of a variety of specific theories to explain diverse social, cultural, and political configurations.

Modernization Theory: A Problematic Paradigm One hypothesis widely accepted by social scientists, historians and others who try to unravel the workings of the modem-day world, as well as its historical antecedents, is that there is a tendency for structural similarity among societies undergoing industrialization. The convergence hypothesis, as it is known, maintains that industrialization carries with it certain systemic imperatives that level differences between cultures, bringing about structural similarity (Weed 1979; Kerr et al. 1964). Whether such homogeneity is a consequence of functional requisites of economic rationality or results from a kind of economic colonization by those cultures that have already become industrialized, the outcome as far as older people are concerned is thought to be status displacement. Cowgill (1972) put the issue most succinctly when he noted, “the status of the aged . . . is inversely proportional to the degree of modernization of the society.” With this general principle in mind, many cross-cultural analyses set out to demonstrate a relative decline in the position of old people, pointing to new economic, technological, occupational, and educational components of status hierarchies. This is not to say there has been universal acceptance of the idea that modernization brings disadvantages to the elderly (Laslett 1976, 1985; Quadango 1982; Cohen 1982). Yet, the “world-we-have-lost syndrome” has become so pervasive it is often taken for granted. The tacit conventions of the modernization paradigm, drawn from the work of the sociologist Talcott Parsons, have become deeply ingrained in gerontological research as an explanatory tool in the examination of the human impact of social change (Cowgill 1985). Furthermore, historians frequently employ an implicit modernization template to organize their presentation of tracts thought to verify the impact of modernization on older people (Achenbaum 1983; van Tassel and Steams 1986). A functionalist model of social change sees societal evolution as a dynamic process based on certain universal pattern variables intrinsic to social structure. As applied to modernization, this model assumes that structural differentiation takes a uniform avenue of development regardless of context (Parsons 1964). With each successive phase of development-Parsons originally outlined a five-step trajectory-all aspects of society are thought to move away from diffuse activities based on closed ascriptive status systems, with extended kinship networks, to technologically intensive industrial economies, based on achieved status. Since modernization is a “package,” changes begun in one sphere will, through what are termed “eurhythmic changes” rapidly spread across all others in an irreversible way. Part of the hypothesized reason for the convergence of modern structural arrangements is the need for integration, bringing

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forth administrative bureaucracies, money market economies, and intemationalscientific worldviews. By means of secondary carriers of modernization: language, religion and other belief systems, new cultural values appear that justify the emergent dimensions of the human condition. At each stage, these values increasingly stress secular, instrumental rationality, and contractual relationships (Hendricks 1982). Focusing on nation-states and other geographic entities as the unit of analysis, modernization theory casts all such changes as interconnected and utilizing instrumental or economic rationality as the defining criterion for all events. Inevitably, then, similar arrangements will evolve and revise the bases on which personal identity is grounded (Eisenstadt 1974). In the initial version of modernization theory, these changes were seen as being relatively benign for the elderly, in that they prepared the way for an economic prosperity which would, in the long term, lead to renewed security. As a conceptual tool, however, the modernization perspective has been employed by gerontologists from diverse disciplines to explain how the rate of social change, economic activities, organization, literacy and mass education, health technology, and other concomitants of the movement toward postindustrial society all converge to depreciate later life (Cowgill 1979, 1985). Nonetheless the model proposed by modernization theory may be ill-suited for an analysis of the impact of structural factors on cross-cultural literature on aging for a number of reasons. In its search for objective laws it eliminates meaning and intentionality. Its positing of a universal evolutionary process based on the pattern variables is both ahistorical and acultural. It does not allow for consideration of the ways in which specific historical circumstances, including the structure of political relations either within or between countries, and local events, influence the ways in which countries develop or fail to develop toward industrialization. Neither does it address uneven patterns of development. By assuming that evolution toward economic and scientific rationality is both universally found and uniformly desirable, it slights the ways in which diverse patterns of culture may lead people to seek varied ends as they encounter modem technology. Especially lacking is attention to the different sociopolitical circumstances surrounding the historical industrialization of today’s postindustrial societies as opposed to the efforts of today’s developing countries to industrialize. Underlying all this, since development is seen as a closed process at the structural level, is an inattention to the ways in which economic and political development are shaped by and shape the lives of individual actors. Thus, all too frequently proponents of the modemization perspective fail to appreciate the diversity found in Third World societies or the fact they are not unaffected by the presence of postmodem societies in the world. They tend to cast traditional societies as ideal types, merely as the converse of present-day societies. While many of the assumptions could be empirically investigated, since the emphasis is elsewhere, they are left as unquestioned assertions. Only a handful of historians have bothered to question the starting point of the whole neoclassical view of modernization (for example, Steams 1976, 1982; Achenbaum and Steams 1978; Achenbaum 1976; Fischer 1977; Stout 1975; Brown 1976; van Tassel and Steams 1986). All of this renders the modernization paradigm particularly problematic for our purposes since precisely what one can expect to find in cross-cultural literature on aging is an intimation of the living interplay of processes of socioeconomic and cultural change, as well as reactions to them.

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An Alternative Structural Approach: The Political Economy of Aging Many of these problems may be avoided by adopting a framework underlying a recent wave of theorizing that attempts to tie individual experiences to macrolevelstructural factors by investigating the nature and constitution of structure itself. This approach links variations between individuals within specific cultures to the location of older persons with particular types and subtypes of social systems. The quality of the individual’s lifeworld is seen as arising, in part, from the distinctive qualities of social relations stemming from the organization of different social systems in a given time and place. This sets the stage for an investigation of these social relations, and their roots in a complex interplay of individual, group, and world interests, along with foreseen and unanticipated structural consequences and constraints (Estes et al. 1982; Hendricks and Hendricks 1986). It is useful for conceptual purposes to subsume theories adopting this perspective under the general rubric of “political economy.” These theories present a rich diversity of models because they arise horn a broad analytic framework rather than a substantive picture of the way society is or ought to be. The starting point is analysis of the relationship between the distribution of power and the form of economic organization. This is a dynamic and everchanging relationship: While the mode of production in many countries might be characterized as “capitalistic”-based on free-market economies-the mode of organization in such markets themselves is in constant flux. The observation that the economy of the United States in colonial times, or in the 1800s is quite different from today’s is indicative of this kind of change. Similarly, there is no “unified” group which dominates all others. Rather, while power may be intimately tied to position in the economic structure, it is something that cannot be taken for granted and which must be constantly reasserted (Hendricks and Calasanti 1986; Hendricks and Hendricks 1986). Thus, the framework opens a window on the complexities of cross-cultural aging by its assumption that no one static structure should be taken as a given: In explaining the life of older people, the specific political context must be carefully specified and examined. Changes that come about over time are viewed not as evolutionary concomitants of modernization, but as shifts in relations between individuals and groups as socioeconomic beings. Retirement problems, for example, do not simply revolve around socialization to new roles, but involve the process of socially negotiated allocation of the roles themselves. Why, in most industrialized countries, are proportionately fewer people in their sixties in the labor force in 1986 than in 1946? In turn, how does this reflect and reshape the political economic context? What are the structures of the social relations of aging in developing countries? How are these influenced by changing sociopolitical relations both within specific countries themselves, and between industrialized and Third World countries? Finally, how are these changes reflected in the literary record? No one model can adequately serve as a template to identify the fluid structure of aging as it is reflected in the literature and lifeworlds of various countries and subcultures. Yet one model deriving from the framework of political economy-namely dependency theory-may be especially apt for an analysis of the situation in today’s developing countries. It is based on an adapted version of the worldsystems approach (Langholm 1971; Wallerstein 1973). As well as being adopted by some gerontologists

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interested in structured dependence in cross-cultural contexts (Hendricks 1982; Neysmith and Edwardh 1984), dependency theory has been promulgated by Latin American theorists as an indigenously grounded means of explaining how world economic relations shape the structure of social relations in their countries (Prebisch 1978,1980, 198 1; Pinto 1979; Rodriguez 1977). For dependency theorists, the unit of analysis is not the nation-state, but interaction between advantaged core areas and peripheral locales: within particular countries, or between core elites from industrialized nations, and developing countries. In the beginning, some given locale may have a richness of resources: It is a port of call, a communications hub, there is an abundance of material resources, and it is occupied by an elite group or is otherwise advantaged. It serves as a nucleus, a core or central place, from which innovations emerge. Beyond the center is a less advantaged periphery region that may be set apart by a distinct language, government, or form of agricultural production, religion and related social patterns. A symbiotic relationship develops as each region offers something to the other, be it raw materials or markets for finished products. This interaction does not bring commonality as the modernization perspective would have it, but a lopsided duality by which the dominant core grows more complex while the periphery becomes a satellite. The changing relationship is not grounded in autonomous structural imperatives, but in the interaction of negotiated policies and power with unforeseen consequences and contingencies at the structural level. This is not to say that the outlying area is totally vanquished. Such would not be in the best long-run interests of the core. Development is in fact encouraged, but the particular forms of urbanization, indust~alization, commercialization or agriculture, and political reform are designed to ensure continuing profits for the core, With those benefits, the core is able to expand its catchment area, thereby fostering specialized regional development that will assure even further its ascendancy. The dynamic is one of recursive expansion and exploitation with the lion’s share of the return going to core interests. There is no doubt that the standard of living rises in the periphery-at least for some-but cash crops replace subsistence agriculture, and growth in production of material goods is concentrated on those produced, designed and exported to the core. Per capita income may also increase, but real earnings growth is likely to be confined to a small minority in the employ of core interests. Railway lines, roads, communication technology and social services may improve, but primarily in central enclaves or along supply corridors (Hechter 1975; Hoogvelt 1977). As technology is imported and development induced, entrenched hierarchies based on old line subsistence activities will be realigned to reflect the dominant influence of the export economy. There will probably be unequal pockets of surplus labor; and state, local, and other public services will be channeled to fit the image of the future held by the new bourgeoisie. As far as the elderly are concerned, there is a tendency to model social programs for them on those of advanced industrialized nations, rather than on a needs assessment cognizant of indigenous conditions and resources (Neysmith and Edwardh 1984). Accordingly, some old people will fare relatively well. Others will lose ground as the social security systems support but at the same time reduce their potential as consumers of material goods, Others will not be covered by social programs, but will find themselves edged out of their traditional economic activities. As momentum is gained, decisions made by new agencies or institutions will take on the power of

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normative accord. The impact of this changeover includes a complete restructuring of domestic social orders, together with a radical restructuring of precontact relations of production (Portes 1976). While largely in agreement with those who claim that the status of older people tends to be debased in the process of industrialization of peripheral areas, gerontologists who adopt a dependency perspective focus on the political economy as it influences the definition of what it means to be old. The “structured dependency of the elderly” (Townsend 1981) comes about because of changes in their relative abilities or “use value”-as producers or consumers. Such an assertion is based on the supposition that economic systems produce the broad parameters of social organization which then reproduce the values underpinning the economy (Giddens 1984). By focusing on the relations of production, a dependency-world systems approach will examine the situation of the elderly in terms of the interactive processes depreciating the old not merely because they are elderly, but because they embody values, behaviors or potentials inimical to core interests. Thus, modernization is not seen as a broad ranging selfpropelled process, of which inequalities are an unintended and unfortunate consequence. Rather disadvantages for the elderly stem from interest group policies and deliberate structural arrangements brought about by those who control new components of industrial production (Dowd 1980; Neysmith and Edwardh 1984; Tigges and Cowgill 198 1; Myles 1986). The impact on the elderly may thus vary significantly with their structural location vis-a-vis the core.

Relevance of Dialectical Theories in Social Gerontology The political economy approach, particularly dependency theory, gives rise to a number of questions that may be used to set literary images of aging in a sociological context. Does the author identify with core or periphery, or does he or she seek to give a more transectional view, presenting the viewpoint of both? What is the structural location of characters portrayed in novel and plays? How are the relationships depicted in the work affected by structural factors? To which segment or segments of society does the author address his or her work? Is he or she dependent upon powerful patrons or commercial interest for its reproduction and distribution? All of these factors will influence the dimensions in which aging is drawn, and, in turn, the interpretations that legitimately can be made. It is also enlightening to look at the function of particular forms of literature in a given society from the perspective of political economy. While we would not endorse a view that sees literature as being determined purely by economic factors, we do maintain that social structural factors color the ways in which social phenomena, such as aging, are depicted in literature. In some cases, as Horkheimer and Adomo suggest (1972), literature may for one reason or another serve to turn attention away from the dynamics of power and from the harsh realities of life. In other cases, authors may seek to lay bare and challenge the dynamics underlying perceived social injustices. Altematively, they may present unique and creative ways of reacting to situations created by the distribution of power. Sometimes the role played by structural factors in particular pieces may not be apparent at first reading. Yet uncovering them may lead to a sharpened understanding

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of the dimensions of aging reflected in the work. Attention to structural factors needs to be balanced, however, with an awareness of the part played by meaning, both cultural and individual, in their interpretation. Social psychologists of aging, such as Marshall (198 1,1986), draw attention to the way in which social structure is both created by and creates the individual. Marshall sees a constant tension between stability flowing from structural constraints and social consensus, and instability flowing from human intentional&y. Economic factors, political power, and social norms create real but not always obvious boundaries in the lifeworld of the elderly (Keith 1982). Still, individuals with their unique life histories, their particular potentialities and their personal priorities interpret and live within these socially constructed constraints with a style uniquely their own. In some cases they may transcend or even transform imposed limitations. A brief analysis of five pieces of literature from different social situations will serve to illustrate the importance of taking account of structural, historical, and social psychological factors, and the relevance of dependency theory for the analysis of contemporary cross-cultural literature. In the twelfth-century French epic poem, The Sung of Roland (Whitehead 1962), we find a favorable portrayal of old age among medieval war lords, in which religious and symbolic, but also cultural elements are evident. Indeed, one of the underlying themes of the epic is a celebration of maturity, and the good judgment, social solidarity, wisdom and humility that it brings. At the beginning of the poem, the aging emperor, Charlemagne, has been in Spain for seven years, fighting the Saracen. He contracts to return to France on condition that King Marsilion surrender. The traitor, Ganelon, however, agrees to have Roland, Charlemagne’s nephew, assigned to the rearguard with the twelve peers of France, the idea being that this will give the Saracens a chance to destroy Charlemagne’s best fighting men, leaving the old emperor powerless. Roland, whose fatal flaw is youthful rashness, essentially sacrifices the twelve peers to his vanity. He refuses to take an adequate number of men, and, when ambushed, will not sound the Olifant to summon reinforcements. He does, however, finally sound it to call Charlemagne to take vengeance on the Saracens. Although Charlemagne is more than two hundred years old, he is a formidable warrior in his own right. With his humility, his concern for his men, and his reliance on the Deity, Charlemagne is able to accomplish what Roland could not and defeat the Saracens, himself slaying Baligant, the Lord of all Islam. The poem, particularly in the climactic quarrel between Roland and Oliver during the disastrous battle of Ronceval, heavily condemns youthful recklessness and individualism in warriors. Roland’s gradual repentance and realization of the consequences of his feckless behavior occupy a central place in the epic. The work of the fifteenth-century poet, Francois Villon, furnishes a very different, somewhat unsettling picture of aging at the periphery of late-medieval French society. Villon, a kind of marginal man, lived on the fringes of courts of the day. He was allied with the aristocrat, Charles d’OrlCans, himself a poet. Yet Villon was often in trouble with the law: he murdered a priest during a brawl, and committed a number of robberies. At the age of thirty, he was sentenced to death, although his sentence was later transmuted to ten years’ exile from Paris. His writing was mainly addressed to a courtly audience, yet it reflects the vicissitudes of life in the uhi-monde, and the paradoxes of Villon’s role as both a courtier and a common criminal. His Tesmnent or will (Dillon 196 l), his best-known work, is filled with images of aging and death. It contains two

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ironic, mocking, yet poignant portraits of aging among the poor: one male and one female. The fust is the jester who lived during his youth by his ready wit, but who is now forced to beg. Life has become so miserable he longs for death and contemplates suicide. Nothing he can do or say pleases anyone. The second: an old helmet seller, laments the lost beauty of her youth. Years earlier she was the mistress of Nicolas d’orgemont, the archdeacon of Paris: a courtesan whose fortunes depended upon her youthful charms. These gone, she is reduced to being a street seller. While young, she took a pimp, who died thirty years previously, having cruelly exploited her. She therefore urges her young companions not to be deceived by love, but to take advantage of men while their beauty lasts. Unlike women of position who are assured of a place in society in their old age, such women will be despised, like devalued money, when old. Villon’s alienation and disillusionment come out in the shockingly realistic details of his description of death that awaits both rich and poor alike. Generally in medieval literature, the theme of death the leveller-and the closely allied theme of the wheel of changing fortune-carry politically radical implications in that they serve to remind the powerful that they, like everyone else, are mortal and subject to reverses of fortune: They should therefore be careful how they use their power. Villon’s use of this theme, however, like his portrayals of the aging poor, is tinged with a note of cynicism and bitter hopelessness. Clearly, these works were written during very dissimilar epochs. The Song of Roland dates from the high middle ages, a time when attempts to build national unity in a society threatened by continual warfare. Villon wrote in an atmosphere of growing individualism which heralded the Renaissance. If we consider them purely from a structural point of view, we may attribute their different pictures of aging and death to the fact that the Song ofRefund is dealing with aging among a privileged elite, whereas Villon is writing from first-hand experience of aging among the poor. If, however, we take a social psychological point of view, we may see the differences as being primarily a matter of attitude and lifestyle. We may argue that Villon was an antisocial type, a relatively unrepentant murderer and thief, whose work exemplifies the kind of old age that awaits those who flaunt social norms. He himself says that if he had studied and lived a stable life during his youth, he would have a house and a soft bed in his old age. The Song of Roland idealizes the respect due the elderly who dedicate themselves to societal well-being, a task that is not, by any means, portrayed as always being easy. Either of these interpretations would, however, be too simplistic taken alone. Structural and attitudinal factors-and literary intent-are intertwined in these two divergent perspectives on aging. Our third piece, Bertholt Brecht’s The UnseemLy Old Lady (Brecht 1983) illustrates the freedom of the middle classes in our own century to transcend the circumstances of their earlier lives. This short story describes the last two years of the narrator’s grandmother: the seventy-two-year-old widow of the owner of a small lithography business in a little town in Baden. This woman had led a conventional life, raising five children on rather scant means, doing all the work for the family, and refusing to take part in outings. After her husband’s death, however, she started to eat at the inn, go to the cinema, and take excursions. She even went to the races in a neighboring town. She made friends with a middle-aged cobbler who had knocked about the world, never made much of himself, and who was a Social Democrat. She apparently mortgaged her

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house without her children’s knowledge, and gave at least some of the money to the cobbler: After her death, we are told, he was able to move to another town, and start a fair-sized business in handmade shoes. She became great friends with a young girlwho, in the estimation of her son, was slightly feebleminded-buying her gifts and taking her out. She would get up at three on a summer morning, and take walks along the deserted streets of the little town. She would spend time gossiping with the crowd who gathered at the cobbler’s. She consumed the bread of life to the last crumb. She was able to reach out beyond the bounds imposed by her class and culture to touch and change the lives of others. This reaching out may be seen as being made possible both by her social situation, including free access to a modicum of financial means, accompanied by freedom from enmeshment in overpowering controls, and by her own unique personality. The relevance of specific perspectives derived from political economy, is also illustrated by examples from recent Third World literature. The play, Down the Gully (1905), by the Uruguayan, Florencio Sanchez (198 l), may be seen as dealing with the effects of internal colonialism on the gaucho in the Rio Plata region at the turn of the twentieth century. Sanchez, a journalist as well as a dramatist, was an advocate of Uruguayan traditionalism and localism, although he later took a more universal, humanist, socialist stance. Uruguay, in his day, was undergoing a number of changes disruptive of the world of the gaucho: the affirmation of private property rights; attempts to reorganize cattle farming; the development of the refrigeration industry; and the exodus into the country of capitalists eager to participate in these economic developments (Rela 198 1). Down the Gully recounts the tragedy of Don Zoilo, a proud old gaucho, who is deprived of his ancestral lands by the legal machinations of an outsider, Juan Luis. Juan Luis and Captain Butierrez alienate the affections of Don Zoilo’s daughter and sister from him. They even send a sergeant out to arrest the old man so that his family can pack up and leave without a confrontation. Don Zoilo complains: They take a healthy, good, hard-working man; rob him of all he has.. . his possessions accumulated through the sweat of his brow, the consolidation of his family’s affection, his honor . . . even his name. Despairing, his spirit broken, he hangs himself. Once again, it is possible to see the interplay of structural and social psychological forces in sealing the fate of the old man. Though Don Zoilo’s tragedy is shaped largely by changing social forces, it arises as well from his own personality and his tendency toward isolation and inflexibility. From Africa comes a work that may be fruitfully interpreted using the tenets of dependency theory: The Old Man and the Medal, by Ferdinand Oyono, a novelist from the Cameroons (Oyono 1971). This novel, originally published in 1956, tells of an encounter between Meka, an old tribesman, and the French colonial authorities. Meka’s two sons have been killed in the war, fighting for the French. He has given his land to the Catholic mission. The French therefore decide to present him with a medal as a sign of friendship and brotherhood. He is the envy of his friends; they are sure he will be invited to eat with the High Commissioner and be in a position to ask for a much-needed road between villages. During the ceremony, however, the Africans are treated with poorly concealed scorn. A young man shouts out that Meka has lost his sons and his lands for a mere medal, whereupon Meka’s wife runs home weeping. Meka falls asleep in the African community center that is destroyed in a storm. Having lost

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his medal, he is picked up and badly manhandled by the police. His pleas to respect his age go unheard. He is condescendingly released with a warning, when Gullett, the chief of police, recognizes him. Tragic, yet humorous, and full of life, this novel is replete with allusions to the exploitativeness of the white settlers: “These whites were very funny people. They didn’t even know how to tell lies properly and yet they expected Africans to believe them. Of course they built roads, hospitals, towns.. . . Yet no African owned a car. And you often came out of these hospitals feet first. As for houses, well they built them for themselves.” (Oyono 197 1, p. 134) They also cheated the Africans on their cocoa harvest. Under the French, yesterday’s masters, like Meka, have become today’s slaves, living in poverty. At the end of the book, he declares: “I’m just an old man now.. . .” Yet Meka is a very different figure from Don Zoilo. Even in his humiliation and misery, he is able to laugh at the resemblance between his old sow and the French High Commissioner. Though powerless to change things, half the village comes to drink palm wine and commiserate-also there is a hint, near the end, that changes may be in the offing.

CONCLUSION Considerable effort has been expended in attempts to understand the social realities of aging through literature. As social scientists of various stripes have tried to reconstruct the past, gain insight into dissimilar cultures, and grasp the values implicit in the formulation of present day attitudes, they have turned to historical and cross-cultural writings. In doing so, there is a temptation to treat these as unproblematic data sources which speak for themselves in a straightforward and verifiable fashion. Two underlying issues need, however, to be addressed. First, has the analysis paid sufficient attention to the idiom of style, genre and context? Unless we attend to the particular constraints imposed on depictions of reality by literary conventions at the time of writing, we are unlikely to be attuned to intended meanings. Second, how is our own orientation reflected in the interpretations offered? For these will be influenced by perspectives current in the culture-be it literary or academic -in which the analyst is working. Successive generations of literary commentators have drawn out diverse meanings from the same excerpts. Is it reasonable to assume that those who follow are better informed than earlier interpreters? Or are they merely reflecting the currents of the time in which they live? How can a self-conscious awareness of one’s own perspectives, those of the author, and of previous interpretations help one arrive at a more synthetic view? Social gerontologists analyzing novels, plays or any written record from other cultures face the task of interpretation much like any social scientist. They must work through issues of literary form and technique and their own dependency on explanatory frameworks in vogue in their discipline. With theory building in social gerontology now moving into its third decade, there are a multitude of models that can be utilized for exegetic purposes. Any theoretically informed analysis must seek to capture the interplay between structural factors, cultural conditions and the meaning-giving activities of individuals. Early efforts to understand aging in literature employed an individual-level theoretical framework to interpret portraits of older persons. Foremost among early models were the well-known and much discussed disengagement and activity models (Ricciardelli

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1973; McKee 1982), with a subsequent move toward Eriksonian developmental perspectives. Their emphasis on adaptive modes of individual actors tended to neglect the importance of institutionalized social organization and its normative effect. Recognizing the one-sided focus on individuals as the unit of analysis, the next stage of gerontological theorizing shifted to a macro-level orientation. Here the primary model was one drawn from the functionalist inspired modernization theory. Breaking new ground, gerontologists quickly discovered that the situation of the elderly was largely dictated by conditions far removed from their personal involvements. Hard work and suitable motivation were not sufficient to secure a respected place for older workers when industrialization was undermining the traditional basis for the accordance of respect. Cowgill (1979, 1985) and others honed the modernization perspective to the point where it was applied almost universally to all manner of cultures and historical circumstances. As often occurs when one conceptual perspective replaces another, the focus of attention swung so far in the opposite direction that the interactive nature of social facts came to be neglected as the modernization template was used to explain essentially divergent historical circumstances. Now, the pendulum having swung once more, dynamic perspectives grounded in political economy and social psychology offer fresh insights into what it might mean to be old in diverse circumstances. They do so in a fashion that avoids the one-sided and simplistic emphasis of the two early phases of theorizing in social gerontology. Analysis informed by a political economic frame of reference cognizant of intentionality, and a structurally informed social psychological viewpoint, address the confluence of individual and structural factors. The negotiated process by which societal interests establish the arena wherein individual actors play out their socially constructed roles-and the ways in which individuals react to and shape those interests-is central to those who adopt this latest conceptual orientation. Included in their focus is thoughtful consideration of the role of power and economic concerns in the interrelationships between individuals, groups and nation-states. In the vignettes provided to illustrate the relevance of a dialectical perspective for analysis of literature, we stress the structural level constraints that influence individual patterns of aging since these are too often neglected. A more complete analysis would further explore the import of literary convention, historical circumstances, and individual meaning-giving. As additional applications of political economy broaden the literary base on which interpretations are made, the interplay will be cast in even bolder relief. What will not-and, according to the tenets of a dialectical approach, should nottake place, is the formulation of an overarching or unified model that can be used to explain all facets of aging in every time and place. Rather, a careful analysis of a variety of literature from other cultures using the paradigm outlined above, will widen our horizons by sensitizing readers to the variability of aging under diverse structural, historical and cultural conditions. Attention to the social and historical background of authors, the literary intention of the work and the audience to whom it is addressed, is called for-as well as an awareness of the ways in which our own contextual&y shapes interpretation. Such an approach is likely to lead to informed debate-rather than unitary consensus-and hence to a gradual enrichment of our perspectives on aging, both in our own and in other societies.

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NOTE 1. See Moliere’s “Les Prtcieuses Ridicules” (1969) for a parody of the “precieux approach to language and literature.

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