Stranger Shores: Essays 1986-1999

by J. M. Coetzee

  There is one respect, however, in which it would be rash not to take Borges’s lead, namely when he offers privileged access to his own intentions. Un alfajor can be any of a variety of regional sweetmeats. Which did Borges have in mind? A sugared cake, his translation reveals. Hurley pretends not to know this and calls it, vaguely, a ‘sweet offering’. (CF, p. 277) If one puts one’s ear against a certain stone column in Cairo, says Borges, one can hear the rumor of the Aleph inside it. ‘Rumour’, says Hurley, where Borges could have helped with ‘hum’. (CF, p. 287)

  A quick check against Borges—di Giovanni could even have prevented plain errors. The desert nomads need foreigners to do their ‘carpentry’, says Hurley. (CF, p. 288) The word is albañilería, masonry.

  Borges has had distinguished translators in the past, among them Anthony Kerrigan, Donald A. Yates, and James E. Irby, to say nothing of the collaborative versions with di Giovanni. Nevertheless, there is much to be said for an integral retranslation of the whole of Borges such as Viking has sponsored. Hurley’s versions are generally excellent, marked by accuracy of word choice and a confident sense of narrative style. If there is one general weakness, it is that Hurley’s feel for the level of formality of English words is not always reliable. This gives rise to colloquial effects for which there is no parallel in the original. Examples: ‘the leery light of dawn’, where ‘wary’ is a more appropriate adjective; priests who ‘hornswoggle’ rather than ‘cheat’ (embaucar) penitents; a taxi that deposits its fare ‘a little ways’ from the station rather than ‘a little way’. (CF, pp. 138, 204, 122) Hurley also performs a disturbing revision of his own. In ‘The Circular Ruins,’ a story about male generative power and male birth, Borges writes, A todo padre le interesan los hijos que ha procreado, ‘Every father feels concern for the sons he has procreated’. Hurley translates this, ‘Every parent feels concern for the children he has procreated.’ (CF, p. 100)

  14 A.S. Byatt

  I

  IN THE 1970s A.S. Byatt (born 1936) embarked on a major project: a sequence of novels that would trace the growth of an Englishwoman of her class and generation and education, a woman who would and would not be herself, from the drab early 1950s through the cultural revolution of the 1960s.

  Byatt planned four novels. The Virgin in the Garden (1978) follows the struggles of her heroine, Frederica Potter, also born 1936, to shed the sexual morality of her parents and the narrow lifestyle imposed by the austerities of the postwar years. 1953, she feels, ought to be the first year of a happier era. Years will pass before she can recognise to what an extent the new Elizabethan Age is underpinned by fake ceremony and mere nostalgia.

  Still Life (1985) takes Frederica through her Cambridge years. Although the novel contains tours de force of realistic description – performed, one guesses, as a tribute to the great English realists – it is very much a novel of ideas, assembling intersecting circles of characters whose conversations allow Byatt to explore the Zeitgeist of the England of the late 1950s. It ends in 1958, with Frederica in the arms of Nigel Reiver, visiting for the first time the wilder shores of love.

  Babel Tower (1995), the third in the as yet (1999) unfinished series, opens six years later. The marriage with Nigel is not going well. Cooped up with his horsy sisters and odious housekeeper in a house in the Home Counties, Frederica feels stifled. She would like to see her old college friends, now making names for themselves on the buzzing London cultural scene, but Nigel doesn’t like them. When they write to her, he intercepts their letters. An ex-commando, he has no scruples about roughing her up in ways that leave no telltale marks. She becomes a virtual prisoner.

  Frederica flees to London with her four-year-old son. Nigel pursues, leaving a trail of violence in his wake, demanding her back, or, if not her, then the child.

  At the ever-so-polite cocktail parties that Frederica begins to frequent, the talk is dominated by men; the women huddle in corners exchanging notes on anti-depressants. It is this kind of future, as much as marital violence, that Frederica resolves to escape.

  Frederica has been brought up in ‘that tolerant, non-conformist, cautiously sceptical tradition that requires you . . . to look for the good and the bad in everything’.1 Though she fears and hates her husband, she is unnerved by her own hatred; her urge to cut all ties is held in check by a puritanical determination to be fair. Furthermore, she continues to be fascinated by him. Even at the divorce trial she feels a hot rush of desire.

  It is the Lawrentian flavour of her response (‘the dark dark look, the intentness that always stirs her’) which, to Frederica, identifies it as a symptom not of a merely individual masochistic dependence, but of a sexual pathology afflicting a generation of young women who came to maturity in the 1950s taking as gospel Lawrence’s fictions of women who abnegated the intellect to find salvation in the service of the phallus. ‘That was our myth,’ thinks Frederica – ‘that the body is truth. Lady Chatterley hated words . . . [whereas] I cannot do without them.’ (Babel Tower, pp. 241, 129)

  Just as, in The Virgin in the Garden, Frederica and her sister had felt Lawrence’s Brangwen sisters, Ursula and Gudrun, thrust upon them as role-models, so in Babel Tower she finds herself resisting the model of Connie Chatterley. The trial scene that ends the novel parodies the famous obscenity trial of 1961; but this is not the only way in which Lady Chatterley’s Lover looms over Babel Tower. In making a new life for herself as a woman and a sexual being in the 1960s, Frederica has to question and in many respects repudiate her earlier moral education, an education imbibed from parents and teachers who had sat at the feet of Lawrence’s influential champion at Cambridge, F.R. Leavis.

  The conflict between Frederica and Nigel comes to a head in a divorce hearing, an extended scene into which Byatt throws all her considerable resources as a writer. The hearing is a chastening experience for Frederica, who, under the remorseless interrogation of her husband’s lawyer, backed by a private detective hired to spy on her and Reiver sisters prepared to perjure themselves, emerges before the court as a selfish, promiscuous woman, unfit to care for her son.

  Yet there is a surprise to come. Dominated though it may be by men from the public-school network, men who might be expected to gang up against a woman who has not only bucked the system but, coming from the north of England, from a different class and a different political tradition, has never really been part of that system, the court, in its patriarchal wisdom, and to the rage of the Reiver family, decides that a child belongs with its mother.

  Frederica’s son is anything but cute. Fiercely he demands that she subordinate her happiness to his. For her part, Frederica – who to her secret shame had planned to abscond without him – slowly discovers the centrality of motherhood to her life, ‘a love so violent that it is almost its opposite’. (p. 237)

  Frederica spends a lot of her time reading stories to her son, stories that pay him the compliment of taking him seriously as a moral intelligence. What Byatt has to say via these stories – often given in extenso in the text – is interesting and challenging in times when the orthodoxy in educational circles is that young children should not be exposed to disturbing material. Just as she is in favour of Racine in secondary school, Byatt is in favour of tales of magic and terror, of heroism and resourcefulness, for under-fives. The education of the imagination comes first: it is because the creative imagination is still alive among the writers and painters and scientists with whom Frederica chooses to cast her lot that they are better people than Nigel, his Shires family and his business friends.

  In this respect Byatt belongs squarely in a liberal-humanist Arnoldian tradition. In times of crisis, her people do not go into therapy. Salvation is a matter of private wrestling; the best aids are applied intelligence, hard work and a knowledge of the classics, preferably in several languages. In the struggle of life happiness is not the ultimate prize but self-improvement; childhood is not an island of joy but a time of preparation.

  Yet all is not as simple or as
puritanically grim as that. At the very moment when Frederica and her closest woman friend agree that their own childhood was a hell of in authenticity, the key poem on childhood, for people of English culture, comes unbidden to mind: Wordsworth’s ode ‘Intimations of Immortality’, with its evocation of ‘those shadowy recollections’ from our childhood years which ‘Are yet the fountain-light of all our day, / Are yet a master-light of all our seeing’.

  A telling moment, as the voice of their culture speaks through the two women. Byatt evokes another such moment when a friend of Frederica’s, tramping through the countryside, experiences what he calls ‘the English feeling’, a feeling of belonging to a soil that his ancestors have been born out of and buried in for thousands of years, yet nuanced and coloured by lines of verse so well remembered that ‘like turf and stones, [they] are part of the matter of the mind’. (p. 20)

  II

  Though a brilliant student at Cambridge, Frederica has resisted becoming a teacher. Now the need to make a living in London forces her to take on evening teaching and extend her horizons. She reads Nietzsche and Freud, begins to see how insular her typically British education has been. She reads the great European novelists, from Flaubert to Mann, while putting behind her some of the writers who have formed her outlook. Lawrence and E.M. Forster now seem to her latterday religious writers, trying to elevate the Novel to where the Bible used to be. (T.S. Eliot, another formative influence on the youthful Frederica, is more kindly treated.) The unified self begins to look like an outmoded goal; she prefers that the various identities, linguistic, intellectual, sexual, which make her up be left ‘juxtaposed but divided’. She has a presentiment of the kind of art-work in which such a self as hers might express itself: ‘an art-form of fragments, juxtaposed, not interwoven, not “organically” spiralling up like a tree or a shell, but constructed brick by brick, layer by layer’. (pp. 318, 363)

  Taking a lead from William Burroughs, Frederica experiments idly with cutting up her husband’s divorce lawyer’s letters and rearranging the fragments. She enjoys the effect so much that she does cut-ups of Lawrence and Forster too. Her notebooks become a mosaic of diary entries and quotations from writers of the day (Allen Ginsberg, Samuel Beckett, R.D. Laing, William Blake, Nietzsche, Norman O. Brown) as well as from the newspapers. They take on an avant-garde, even Parisian tone.

  Frederica calls her textual experiments ‘laminations’; the theory of laminations had already been set out in The Virgin in the Garden. An ambition grows in her to turn her notebooks into ‘a coherently incoherent work’, a ‘plait of voices’ from the ‘many women in one’ of whom she is made. (Babel Tower, p. 466) The implicit promise is that in the fourth volume Frederica will grow into a writer. (The main character in Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook, published in 1962, also wrote in a layered set of notebooks corresponding to her various identities: dissatisfaction with the organic novel as much as with the organic, integrated self was clearly in the air.)

  Like the occasionally essayistic Still Life, Babel Tower is a novel of ideas, and many of its situations are contrived as frameworks for the discussion of ideas. Not only does the new Parisian structuralism come up, but advances in the sciences: in genetics, biochemistry, animal psychology, linguistics, computer science. To an extent these conversations bring to life the intellectual excitement of the mid-1960s. But much of the material is now so outdated as to be of historical interest only. Byatt’s motive for preserving it at length is unclear.

  Frederica’s attitude toward the new fashions of thought remains cautious. ‘In a world where most intellectuals are proclaiming the death of coherence,’ comments her author in one of her more magisterial interventions, ‘Frederica is an intellectual at large . . . driven by curiosity, by a pleasure in coherence, by making connections.’ (p. 383) The promise is thus that Frederica will outgrow the 1960s as she outgrew the 1950s.

  The Bildung of Frederica continues on the personal front too. There is no shortage of men in her life. But, having spent the first novel of the series trying to lose her virginity, and the second having friendly sex with fellow students, she is now learning to enjoy the companionship of men without sleeping with them. In 1953 she had acted Elizabeth I in a play celebrating the coronation of Elizabeth II. Now she begins to appreciate the power of separateness, the power of the Virgin Queen.

  In her restless intelligence and scrupulousness of mind, and her steadily growing sense of herself as a being formed not only by books but by the larger narratives of family history and national history, the Frederica of Babel Tower is one of the more interesting characters-in-progress in contemporary fiction, both as woman and as social type, even if one sometimes wonders whether her author has not given her an historical self-awareness beyond her years.

  III

  One of the tensions in Byatt’s work since the 1980s is that, formed though she has been, as writer and as woman, by the interpenetration of natural landscape and literary tradition that makes up ‘the English feeling’, she has had to confront the exhaustion of that tradition as a resource for the practising novelist.

  Her more recent fiction shows a great deal of textual variety (embedded stories and documents and so forth) and plays with some of the devices of postmodernism. Nevertheless, it continually falls back on the close social observation and moral attentiveness of the great English realists. Though Babel Tower shows Frederica (whom it is impossible not to read, in this respect, as a stand-in for Byatt) reflecting (rather tentatively) on the poststructuralist critique of realism, it is hard to see that this critique has had any thoroughgoing effect on Byatt’s own fictional language. In Still Life she quoted William Carlos Williams with approval: ‘No ideas but in things.’2 In her respect for the truth of accurate observation, Byatt has been formed by Pound (what are Pound’s Cantos but ‘laminations’?) and Williams: her practice is modernist rather than postmodernist.

  In an interview from the years when she was writing Still Life, Byatt listed some of the features she admired in George Eliot’s novels: their ‘large number of characters, wide cultural relevance, complex language’. ‘It’s important for a writer to have a large canvas and plenty of characters,’ she emphasised.3 Babel Tower is a recognisably late-twentieth-century novel. Nevertheless here, as in the earlier two books, Byatt aspires to a large canvas, wide cultural relevance (cultural, not social: her social range is rather limited), and, by no means least, plenitude of characters. This plenitude is not always a boon. Babel Tower has over a hundred characters: one hundred names to remember, one hundred roles, most of them minor. I doubt that even Dickens wrote as many names into a single novel; and Dickens’s minor names are thumbnail sketches in their own right, whereas Byatt’s could come straight out of the telephone directory.

  Mark Twain remarked that, when an American writer does not know how to end a story, he shoots everyone in sight. When Byatt does not know what to do next, she trots a set of new characters on to the stage.

  IV

  By dint of some rather contrived plotting, Byatt has Frederica attend a trial at law in which the author of a book named Babbletower is being prosecuted for obscenity. Babbletower is an anti-utopian fiction with a strong debt to the Sade of 120 Days of Sodom, aimed at all utopian projects spawned by the Enlightenment, from Fourier’s to Mao’s. It follows the progress of an ideal community in France from its beginnings (dismantling of family ties, reconstruction of language) to its degeneration into a savage tyranny, with the children revealing themselves to be no less proficient in evil than the adults.

  Byatt is able to use the occasion of the trial for some tepid satire on the vanity and muddleheadedness of typical 1960s intellectuals who appear as expert witnesses for the defence. Apart from this, the incorporation of whole chapters of this fictive book, written in a mannered, pseudo-archaic, soft-porn prose so stickily rich as to be almost unreadable, constitutes a sorry miscalculation on Byatt’s part. Babel Tower is in fact far too long a book, at 622 pages, for its material.r />
  Byatt is a gifted literary ventriloquist, as she proved in Possession (1990), where she created the lovers Randolph Henry Ash and Christabel LaMotte by the herculean means of forging a body of poems and letters for each. But Possession was a highbrow detective story and satire of academic manners, a considerably less ambitious project than the tetralogy. Because the realism of Possession was purely textual, a matter of imitating surfaces, such real-world questions as why an academic industry should be devoted to such mediocre and derivative creative spirits as Ash and LaMotte could be finessed.

  Is Babbletower just another a piece of literary ventriloquism, carried this time to tedious lengths? Byatt makes the question hard to answer by failing to reproduce (or, more accurately, to produce) the key passage for the prosecution, a passage in which – we are to understand – a woman is put to death with particularly repulsive sadistic salaciousness. Why recount at length, in a work of fiction, the trial of another work of fiction whose substantial offence is not only fictive but a matter of hearsay?

  V

  Byatt’s own Babel Tower winds down in 1967 with the smoke of catastrophe in the air. The newspapers are full of the Moors Murders and Vietnam. ‘Happenings’ take place involving blood orgies and the burning of’skoob’ towers (‘books’ back to front). The prophecy of Babbletower, the bad twin of Babel Tower, seems on the point of coming true: that energy without restraint leads ineluctably to apocalypse.

  Frederica, in her periodisation of history, had thought of herself as a child of the 1930s and 1940s, the grey era which had ended, symbolically, with the accession of Elizabeth II in 1953. Her generation had grown up ‘politically placid’. (Still Life, p. 300) Now, in 1967, she must face up to the reality of the new age, an age not only of turbulence in the arts and exciting advances in the sciences, but of nuclear power plants on the Yorkshire moors and ‘lifeless lakes where no bird sings’, of a blighted countryside in which ‘the English feeling’ as she has known it will have a hard time surviving. (Babel Tower, p. 60)