The Child that Books Built

by Francis Spufford

  *

  In the meantime a child is sitting reading. Between the black lines of print and the eye, a channel is opening up which information is pouring; more and faster than in any phone call, or any micro-coded burst of data fired across the net either, if you consider that these signals are not a sequence of numbers, not variations on a limited set of digital possibilities, but item after item of news from the analogue world of perception, each infinitely inflectable in tone and intent. The Prince sighs as his sick horse refuses to take sugar from his hand. Oatmeal sky over dank heather. It is a truth universally acknowledged that a man in possession of a fortune must be in want of a wife. Engage the star drive! Yet the receiving mind files away impression after impression after impression. (Sometimes, to be sure, only in a mental container marked DON’T GET IT.) This heterogeneous traffic leaves no outward trace. You cannot tell what is going on by looking at it: the child just sits there, with her book or his. It cannot be overheard, makes no incomprehensible chittering like the sound of a modem working on a telephone line. The subtlest microphone lowered into the line of the transmission will detect nothing, retrieve nothing, from that incalculable flow of images.

  CHAPTER TWO

  The Forest

  At the beginning of my life, there was a forest. I grew up in a staff house on the campus of Keele University, surrounded by institutional concrete. Occasionally the fantastical qualities of the times showed themselves. In 1968 the students all took their clothes off to protest the Vietnam War. Two students who baby-sat me painted a map of Middle Earth across an entire wall of their lodgings. Rumour had it that a Tolkien-loving academic gave a lecture in Elvish. Across the road from our front door, though, the Keele woods began. They were the plantations of an eighteenth-century park that had run wild during the neglectful reign of Keele’s last squire, and never been completely taken in hand again once they’d passed into the cash-strapped public sector. What had been designed as a grand garden of many different botanical moods – like a cabinet with many different drawers – was shaggy now, overgrown and intergrown. Species had crept; the seams between Capability Brown’s separate ideas had closed; the cells of the wood had knitted together. Yet the design remained, fuzzily, because the woods contained many zones, samples of different kinds of forest close together in space but far apart in spirit. I didn’t know the names of the trees – I still don’t, mostly – but there was an area where broad, resinous black-green pines kept the ground shadowed and bare, and the turning path was carpeted with dry needles and fir-cones; a stand of high beeches whose elephant-hide bark rose out of drifts of small gold leaves like coins; a neat conical hill which had been colonised by yellow and green sycamore saplings. There were oceans of shiny-leaved rhododendrons, which I’d crash into deliberately on my bike later, so that I somersaulted over the handlebars and disappeared into the branches in an explosion of pink petals. There was a dark zone dominated by alders around a stagnant pool, some kind of folly once, like the sandstone amphitheatre elsewhere in the woods, but given over now to algae and leaf mould.

  There was a forest at the beginning of fiction too. This one spread for ever. Its canopy of branches covered the land, covered every form of the land, whether the ground beneath jagged or rolled. The forest went on. Up in its living roof birds flitted through greenness and bright air, but down between the trunks of the many trees there were shadows, there was dark. When you walked this forest your feet made rustling sounds, but the noises you made yourself were not the only noises, oh no. Twigs snapped; breezes brought snatches of what might be voices. Lumpings and crashes in the undergrowth marked the passages of heavy things far off, or suddenly nearby. This was a populated wood. All wild creatures lived here, dangerous or benign according to their natures. And all the other travellers you had heard of were in the wood too, at this very moment: kings and knights, youngest sons and third daughters, simpletons and outlaws; a small girl whose bright hood flickered between the pine trees like a scarlet beacon, and a wolf moving on a different vector to intercept her at the cottage, purposefully arrowing through thickets, leaving a track of disturbance behind him as an alpha particle does when it streaks across a cloud chamber. These people, these dangers were not far away, but you would never meet them. The adventures could never intersect, although they shared the forest; although they would be joined in time by more, and still more, wayfarers, the more elaborated beings who came from the more elaborate worlds of privately-read story, rather than the primitives of fairy tale. Mole from The Wind in the Willows would pelt in hunted panic through a night-time tract of the forest, whose bare boughs jutted ‘like a black reef in some still southern sea’. Through twisted foliage would creep the Wart, in The Sword in the Stone, past pale-eyed predators and baby dragons hissing under stones, to his first sight of Merlyn swearing at a bucket. But each travelled separately, because it was the nature of the forest that you were alone in it. It was the place in which by definition you had no companions, and no resources except your own uncertain self. It was the Wild, where relationship ceases, where connection is suspended. There would be encounters, of course. Eventually the state that the whole wood represented would be embodied. One of those rustlings would become a footfall, would become a meeting, and you stepped forward to it as best you could. You could no more avoid the encounters of the wood – all significant, all in their way tests – than you could cross it on a neat dependable path. It existed to cause changes, and it had no pattern you could take hold of in the hope of evading change. You never came out the same as when you went in. Here and again, an old tree had fallen, and a dozen saplings were competing for its access to the sky. Depending which succeeded, that unit of woodland space would be coloured one particular green out of a dozen possibilities. The forest had been made by a million events equally lacking in intention. It was rich and it was strange: mile after mile, a carpet without a design.

  And there was a forest at the beginning of history. The summerhouse in Cambridge where I sit writing this and watching a sycamore throw down its dry leaves one by one, stands on what was once the marshland edge of a wood as total as the forest of story. The botanist Oliver Rackham called it the ‘wildwood’ as a technical term, after Kenneth Grahame’s Wild Wood. I sit in the ghost of the wildwood’s Lime Province, a wonderful name, the title for a polity of trees alone. It stretched from sea to sea. Painted people slipped through its shadows, among the other animal species of the wildwood, indistinct in the slatted light. They left no permanent trails. They hunted and gathered, they retreated to basketwork houses where lakes had opened the land for them. Undoubtedly they told stories about the unending thicket whose signs they forever tried to read.

  But those stories are lost. From the picture books of history I read in the early seventies I learned a version of the British past in which the wildwood endured into the Middle Ages, to be the Old English Jungle the Wart got lost in. Then men wearing hoods and woolly tights grubbed up the trees. It was a traditional history that produced an almost moralised contrast between the wild and the tame, and it fitted the fortunes of the landscape neatly together with the characteristics of the different inhabitants of the country. I had a vivid picture in my head of dead-straight Roman roads cleaving through endless green, joining square little white cities in clearings; and another image for what happened when the Saxons came and overthrew all the neat diagrams that made up Roman civilisation. I saw trees sprouting back through the roofs of smashed villas. The mosaics bubbled like boiling water as the tree roots writhed under them, and spilled into fragments lost in the undergrowth. In other moods I knew the forest was the domain of magic, and I was sorry it had been lost, I was on the forest’s side. I wanted the place under the leaves that had never been owned or designed, where everything might happen that had withdrawn from the tamed landscape of the present. But the Saxons represented a fearful disorder. They were wreckers, they were the enemies of all exact lines and reliable shapes. They were chaos. When the wildwood was their ally
it seemed purely fearsome.

  However, while I was imagining this vegetable holocaust circa 1972, Rackham and other investigators were using pollen analysis and archaeological data to displace the chronology it depended on. Roman Britain and Saxon Britain were both, in fact, cleared landscapes. Woods coppiced for firewood and building poles stood amidst open fields. The wildwood had arrived at the close of the last Ice Age, around 11,000 BC, reached its climax state about 4000 BC, and began to be whittled back as soon the Mesolithic discovery of agriculture reached Britain. By 2000 BC there were big open spaces on the chalk uplands; by 500 BC half the wildwood had gone and a rising population with axes in their hands were constantly forcing up the clearance rate. The significance of these dates is that they put the death of the British wildwood before recorded memory. Memory in the forms of history or chronicle we could be without, and still inherit the shadow of the trees. But the death of the wildwood precedes story too; it happened before the oldest legends that now survive were first told. It is out of legend’s reach. For stories to descend from then till now, there has to be a chain of peoples passing along mythology. They garble it, they subject it to the chaotic changes of Chinese Whispers, like the Celts of the second century BC who copied copies of Greek money till the chariot on the back disintegrated into a fluid whirl of dots and lines. Still, a signal arrives. Stories do not lapse easily into time’s white noise because they are not passed on passively. There’s a counter-chaotic imperative at work. Whenever static threatens to overwhelm them, whenever too much detail becomes meaningless, a teller will reform them in the act of transmission so that once more they make (a kind of) contemporary sense. But the wildwood predates the earliest, obscurest functioning link in the chain. It sends us no signal at all. It was just too long ago. We tell no stories of the great wood from memory in England.

  Instead, we narrate it in the same spirit that the Hopi Indians of the American South-West tell tales hinging on orphans being cruelly abandoned in the wilderness. There are no orphans in traditional Hopi society. It would be culturally impossible for a child to fall right through their densely failsafed weave of family, no matter who died. If there was no father or mother, there would be an aunt; if there were no aunts or uncles, there would be a cousin; if there were no cousins, there would still be someone. But even for Hopis, the situation of abandonment seems to be a necessary one to imagine, to hug to oneself in the form of a story. It focuses a self-pity that everyone wants to feel sometimes, and that perhaps helps a child or an adolescent to think through their fundamental separateness. The situation expresses the solitude humans discover as we grow up no matter how well our kinship systems work.

  The forest is necessary in the same way, whether or not real woodland figures much in the daily experience of those telling stories. Some of Britain’s most famous forest tales are imports from more wooded cultures: Hansel and Gretel and Little Red Riding Hood were moulded by the real landscapes of Germany and France respectively. When they travelled across the Atlantic with the English-speaking settlers of America, they were re-introduced into an environment where actual forests gave a daily corollary to the tales. But even in England it made sense to tell them, despite Rackham’s anti-magical discovery that by the time of the Domesday Book in 1086 it would already have been impossible for Hansel and Gretel to walk more than four miles through any English wood in any direction without bursting back out into open fields. The trail of white pebbles would really not have been required. With real forests or without them, we tell the story regardless, knowing that when the lost children recede through deep after deep of the trees, they are plumbing a different geography. They are journeying into the deep spaces of myth, which does not demand a location, only a vivid referent – a tree line imprinted onto the imagination.

  Like the desert or the mountain where the Hopi child struggles, the forest too is concerned with solitude; the forest too symbolises the place in which the traveller must realise their separateness. ‘In many European fairy tales,’ wrote Bruno Bettelheim, ‘the brother who leaves soon finds himself in a deep, dark forest, where he feels lost, having given up the organisation of his life which the parental home provided, and not yet having built up the inner structures which we develop only under the impact of life experiences we have to master more or less on our own.’ So far so similar. But the forest has other, particular qualities. It’s thick wilderness. You cannot see far through it: it thwarts perception. It’s a place of formless impressions you must somehow understand, of aboriginal darkness and confusion. No one in a story was ever taken to a forest and offered all the kingdoms of the earth, or invited to turn stones into bread. Jesus was being tempted on the mountaintop and in the desert to show mastery, and empty sands or gulfs of air are sites that challenge the traveller’s powers, divine or otherwise. But the forest is where you are when your surroundings are not mastered. In the psychoanalytic tradition the forest is therefore identified as the great symbol of the unconscious. ‘The dark, hidden, near-impenetrable world of our unconscious,’ said Bettelheim, in his psychoanalyst’s account of the fairy tale, The Uses of Enchantment. It is the mind’s necessary wilderness. It is entwined because its separate growths have never been distinguished or uttered. It is dark because the fears and desires that grow here have not been admitted to the light of awareness. And it is trackless, because you never visit here in the state of conscious attention needed for path-finding – unless, says the tradition, you make the analytical journey, take the couch trip under the sky of leaves, with its special dialectic of understanding between patient and therapist.

  Strict, antique psychoanalytical thinking would leave it at that, privileging only the one science (or art) of discovery. Dreams carry you there, but they bring you the classically unconscious access to the unconscious, a night-ride to the forest that plunges you down through its canopy, hurtles you through its thickets of material as if the Wild Hunt were at your heels (and perhaps they are, it depends what you’re dreaming). Stories were once viewed by Freudians as doing essentially dream-like things with their unconscious content: they were valuable as reservoirs of pattern and insight, but they were documents to which the explanatory system of psychoanalysis had to be brought. Freud praised writers for knowing intuitively what analysts studied laboriously, a judgement which, if you think about it, comes precious close to complimenting writers on having natural rhythm. So stories were too much of the forest to orient you in it. But, first tentatively, then with accelerating fervour, the active and shaping powers of story began to be conceded. Stories were admitted as conscious instruments to handle the unconscious, in sync with a humbler perception of psychoanalysis itself as producing a kind of story from the interplay in the consulting room.

  They’ve now come to be seen as deliberate journeys to the forest, which may enable self-knowledge all the more profound because they speak directly, in the mind’s own rich language of symbols. They have shifted from the problem to the solution side of the ledger. Bettelheim himself pointed out that ‘A fairy tale is not a neurotic symptom’: you are not trying to dissect it to make it go away. He described the ancient Indian practice of prescribing a story to the troubled in mind, for them to sift and contemplate. That was 1975. His endorsement of stories as therapeutic made him a pioneer. Since then, a crowd has followed him, offering all the deliberately crafted ‘myths’ of pop-psych self-help: Iron John, the Woman Who Runs With the Wolves, the promotion of the Tarot pack as a ‘box of stories’ tailored to individual needs. Whether this cultural move is an over-compensation for the previous error depends on whether stories are truly benign just because they are potent in their operation on the psyche; whether they are guides to the forest just because they give powerful commentary on it.

  Different schools of therapy of course produce different forests. The Freudian unconscious, therefore the Freudian forest, is a firmly individual affair. It contains only those unacknowledged fears and desires that our own life has laid down there. It’s a private
wood, growing differently in everybody. Jung’s collective unconscious, on the other hand, provides a shared forest. A million separate paths lead into the one terrain. Then, we don’t just tell parallel stories, or dream similar dreams. We tap an elemental experience: an idea verging on mysticism or magic if you let it be more than a metaphor. The place, of course, in which such a metaphor can become concrete less problematically is – a story, for fictional magic does not amount to a claim for magic’s reality. One of the best English writers working in fantasy now has used the Jungian forest to circumvent the post-Rackham chronology for the English landscape. Robert Holdstock’s Ryhope Wood reconciles everyday and mythic geographies by being, like the Tardis, bigger on the inside than the outside. To look at from the ploughed land beyond its boundaries, it is a modest mixed-oak stand of trees. Find the way in – read the leaf-sign and the earth-sign aright – and its boughs become green arches over a territory of wonder and horror that extends backward and backward and backward into the past. You have found the door to the wildwood. As you journey inward, you descend a well of time, that distends the landscape just as a gravity well stretches space. The further in you go, the stranger grow the people of the wood, the remoter the mythology from which they come, until they far precede memory. At Ryhope’s impassable centre the Ice Age comes into view. Yet the outlaws and the tribes, the shamans and the monsters, unknown though they are, remain familiar. Ryhope is populated by every mythic figure ever placed in the forest, whether or not they are consciously remembered. The wood’s responsive; it’s a field of force, acted on by minds beyond its perimeter. It vivifies thought. Only, what comes alive in Ryhope, alive and dangerous, is the Jungian collective unconscious, a complete history of our species’ time beneath the trees, coiled unnoticed in our brain-stems. ‘Did she form out of the leaf-litter? Did wild animals carry sticks together and shape them into bones, and then, over the autumn, dying leaves fall and coat the bones in wildwood flesh? Was there a moment, in the wood, when something approximating to a human creature rose from the underbrush, and was shaped to perfection by the intensity of the human will, operating outside the woodland?’