Babel Tower

by A. S. Byatt

“You don’t have to.”

  “It’s quicker. More peace, in the end.”

  “What would happen if you didn’t, if we didn’t?”

  “He might hit me. He might leave.”

  “Do you really think so?”

  “Yes.”

  A sharp laugh. “So do I.”

  They are the chorus. All Frederica can see of them are two huge knitted hats, one black, one white, and two fake-fur coats, one orange, one shocking pink. Their voices are pleasant BBC voices, with humour in them. Their husbands are one indistinguishable He, and in the context of those husbands, these women are also one indivisible voice. This is the narrative of women talking, women watching children, talking. Owing to accidents of fate, or quirks of personality, Frederica has never really been part of groups of women talking. She was hated at school; her Cambridge friends are men; she cannot make common cause with Olive and Rosalind and Pippy But she can recognise an archetypal, anonymous female narrative, and wonders suddenly how this talk affects the relations between the women and the men they return to. Does the speaking of mocking criticism turn Cyril and Fred and Louis and Sebastian into He He He He when they are seen again, does it strengthen opposition to Him or dissolve Him in laughter? She thinks this because she knows already, in a pale and partial way, that the legal narrative she has just constructed has changed several people: Nigel into the Husband, herself into the Plaintiff, Thomas Poole into something he is and is not.

  She finds this rather exciting, as an idea about the dynamics of human behaviour.

  She finds it frightening as a human experience of her own. She has always thought her life was her own, and she was in charge of it. Even when the axe hit her, she was filled with the rage of the hurt of her, with the fury of her own intention to get out, to regain her freedom.

  But this narrative is like a fishnet, a trap. It redefines her and so changes her.

  She thinks further, as she goes back to Thomas Poole’s flat, about antechambers. There are times in life, she thinks, when I am most conscious of being myself, and these are all times of waiting: before journeys, between the first and the worst birth pains, before exams, before going on stage. Times when I was complete because something was about to happen, but was not happening. I have a life which is a string of these moments of completeness, which I remember so clearly, although they are not important, they are nothing. I stand outside a door, and cannot imagine action that will happen.

  She cannot remember how it was before she married Nigel. She cannot remember how she came to do so.

  She is afraid of divorce, which will free her, as she was not enough afraid of marriage, which trapped her.

  I was not thinking, she concludes, thinking now, harshly, of her then self. I was a fool. I gave him something that didn’t exist, because I wasn’t thinking, a wife, like the simulacrum of Helen who went to Troy whilst the real one did nothing in Egypt.

  Why did I?

  It was something I thought I had to do.

  Why?

  It is what people do do.

  Why?

  She sees in her mind’s eye the heavy figure of Daniel, who married her sister. She sees her sister, her head on the café table, crying and laughing and saying she is happy.

  I married Nigel because Stephanie married Daniel and died.

  Nonsense.

  Then, why?

  The three friends stood outside the Chapel of Tongues, which was crowded with folk who had come to hear the new confessions of the young Narcisse, who stood before the derelict altar and recounted to them his early seduction by a hirsute nursemaid, and his subsequent enthralment of a flute-playing tutor. His lovely face was, as I have said, white as alabaster and ruddy as a rose, and his hair was black as ebony.

  “These tyrants of our childhood,” said he, “direct our young inclinations when we have neither force nor knowledge to resist. They teach us titillation, secrecy and control, and in turn become our victims when we learn their lessons too well, when we obtain in our turn power over their desires and their weaknesses. They teach us shame, and treachery, when all should be innocence and freedom. I have confessed before you how I betrayed my friend Hyacinth to the police because his love wearied me: I have confessed how I drove Amaryllis to despair with indifference and neglect. I have reflected much, and see that the creature I was was licked into shape—oh, most literally—by that great brutal nursemaid with her hairy lips and her shaggy breasts, in whose loathsome, suffocating, hot embrace I was so frequently and with such taunting endearments crushed. She made me desire what revolted me, and as she made me, so I am.”

  “He goes back and back,” said Turdus Cantor. “He began with a man’s guilt over the selling of Hyacinth, and called another meeting to say he had found its source in a schoolboy’s betrayal of his friend’s secret acts to save himself a whipping. Now he says the schoolboy is the son, so to speak, of the too-much tickled nurseling. He will go back and find treachery in the womb, mark me, and they will listen.”

  “He does not mention the pieces of silver he was paid for Hyacinth,” said Colonel Grim. “It is all the body’s desire and the perversion of desire. He might speak of the desire for silver amongst his elaborations on tweakings and pokings, lickings and twistings. Cool silver roundels that buy sweetmeats and men’s lives, that represent indifferently any object of desire.”

  “And desire shall fail,” said Samson Origen. “Our great Projector bids us clarify and examine our desires, acknowledge each dark wriggling thought and appetite, bring them into air and light, and make them clean, and healthy, and innocently wise. But I say that which is crooked cannot be made straight: and that which is wanting cannot be numbered.”

  “You are a man of few desires,” said Turdus Cantor. “What is hard for many is easy for you.”

  “I have one deep desire,” said Samson Origen. “I desire to be at that point when desire shall fail. I desire not to be. Fat Silenus, with grease and winelees oozing from every pore, told the King who caught him that the most desirable state was never to have been born, and the next best was to die soon, for that peace is true peace, which our young friend will not find, whatever he unearths in his memory or his imagination to confess, whatever burdens he unloads into the minds of others, whatever hurts he shares about and about. True wisdom is to stand silent, and neither to give nor to take, but to be still.”

  “You have not been so silent since you came amongst us,” said Turdus Cantor. “You eat and drink. We profit from your conversation. We take pleasure in your company.”

  “Truly, the gabbing and optimistic atmosphere of this place has had its effect on me,” answered Samson Origen. “And your two dry minds, my two friends, have almost made a dent in my resolve to have no attachments. But it cannot last long, as we three all see. The day of blood will come, desire shall be slaked, Culvert will see where he is going, and I shall look on.”

  Frederica and Alan Melville stand outside the Life Studio, under the glassy lights of the Samuel Palmer School. A group of students are gathered, sitting in a rough semi-circle on the floor, listening to these words, to which Frederica and Alan also listen, at some distance. The reader is Jude Mason, who holds a great heap of untidy typescript on his naked knees. He is wearing nothing but a shiny red dressing-gown which hangs open, revealing his iron-grey body. His face is buried in his long, long iron-grey hair, which is greasy and gleaming. His filthy feet grip the step of the dais on which he is sitting, almost prehensile.

  “Here endeth the second lesson,” he says, tossing back the curtains of hair. “All is vanity.” He beckons to Frederica and Alan, who approach cautiously, entering the perimeter of his pungent smell.

  “You no doubt think it is great vanity to read my opus to this captive audience,” he says to Frederica, in his clear, sawing voice. “You are a literary person, and I have written a work of literature. But I dare not expect you to take an interest in it.”

  “I don’t see why,” says Frederica. “It surprised me. I
t excited me. I’d like to read it.”

  The gaunt face peers out between the hair, the deep eyes glittering.

  “It’s not a nice book, my dear. It’s not a book for nice young women.”

  “Don’t be pretentious. I don’t care if it isn’t nice. I said, it excited me.”

  “Books can hurt you.”

  “I know. If you don’t want me to read it, that’s OK. I’ll go and get on with Madame Bovary.”

  “That’s not a nice book. That’s a mischievous work of despair. My nasty book has more hope in it than that cartload of clay.”

  He is over-excited by her interest, and unattractive in his over-excitement. Frederica finds herself staring at the defining limits of his taut belly, in order not to meet his eye.

  “You didn’t think I could write, confess it, you thought I was rubbish, talking rubbish.”

  “And if I did, you meant me to.”

  “You can read it. In manus tuas. Here.” He prances towards her, on a wave of his odour, and thrusts the heap of paper into her hands. “I appoint you my reader. Greater love hath no man than this. Though it will require a modicum of love on your part, to go through all that bumf, oh, what a word, what a good word, bumf, bumf—I am overcome with over-excitement.”

  “Is this your only copy?”

  “Are you hesitating? Do you regret your commitment? Shall I take it back?”

  “Please, stop all that. I daren’t be responsible for your only copy.”

  “You aren’t. I sell my body, I purchase carbon paper. I write it all out by hand also, and primarily, I exude, I excrete, little black threads of meaning and bodily anguish along feinted lines on scholastic paper. I would not bring my only copy here in this plastic bag, do not think it. It is the child of my body, it is my only delight, I keep copies at my humble home, clones, versions. This is my mundane copy, fit for crushing with me if I go under a car. At home I have an immortal copy in many-coloured inks. Do not say many-coloured inks are derivative, I forestall you, I tell you freely it is a tribute to him, to Father Rolfe, to the great Baron Corvo, who taught me the bliss of scarlet and emerald inks.”

  Thomas Poole tells Frederica that an inspector is coming to her evening class. It is February and dark in the evenings. The class has held together, despite Christmas, and the dark days of the solstice. Thomas has told Frederica that it is important to make her students present papers to the class. They are reluctant, Frederica says, they are there voluntarily, why should she make them? If, indeed, she can make them. They like to hear her, her cleverness, her passion. She is afraid that they may bore each other. Thomas Poole says that the classes function as therapeutic groups, and that speaking out is part of the therapy. Frederica retorts that she is not a therapist, and that her students are not sick. They are intelligent people, who need to think hard and deep, and don’t get the opportunity. She holds it against Poole, later, that he has used this word, “therapy.” He persists. She will find that they are grateful to be made to speak, he says. Students, even adults, require you to be the authority that requires effort out of their lassitude and self-mistrust. If he is wrong, in Frederica’s judgement, about therapy, he is right about authority. Frederica has learned to make the students speak, and she, and they, are excited by what they say. Nevertheless, the inspector has chosen a difficult day. The evening’s presentation is on Kafka’s Castle. Who would speak on The Castle, she asked the class, a month ago. She expected an enthusiastic offer from Ghislaine Todd, the psychoanalyst, who often refers to Kafka, but in fact the one who raises his hand is the quiet blond man in a suit, who never misses a class, and never speaks, except occasionally over coffee to the other suited man, the owner of the Lambretta, whose attendance has become spasmodic.

  “Oh, good,” said Frederica then. “Are you specially interested in Kafka?”

  “Yes,” said the blond man. Frederica waited. “Yes, I am,” said the blond man.

  And now he is about to speak. Thomas Poole and the inspector are in the back row of the circle, which is two rows deep. The lights are dismal. Someone is crunching a Polo mint. John Ottokar stands up, holding a neat white sheaf of papers. His face is classical, broad-browed, blue-eyed, quiet-mouthed, amiable. His hair is massed and thick.

  “I think I remember at school being told you must never say ‘I think,’ ” he begins. “But all I can do is say what I think, since there is no other reason for standing here. I am fortunate if you listen. No one in this book listened to K the Land Surveyor, except the official whose bed he invaded by accident, when he had the chance to speak, and he only fell asleep.

  “I didn’t really read before I came to this class. So I can’t make the connections some of you make between this book and other books. This is the book of all the books we have read that has told me most about what it is to be a human being, although what it says is that to be a human being is almost nothing.

  “What you notice at first is two things: the Land Surveyor who can’t get himself accepted or recognised, and the Castle.

  “He can see the Castle in the distance, but there is no way of getting there, or speaking to it.

  “In the village, where he seems to have to stay, everything is full of human bodies and human emotions—sex, and competition, silly quarrels and status problems like hens in a barnyard.

  “You might suppose the Castle would be fine, or imposing, or a fortress. But is isn’t. It resembles the village, or a rock. Or an optical illusion. Kafka tells you several things about it, and the things give contradictory impressions, contradictory feelings. It is in the ‘glittering air’ in the white snow, it ‘soars light and free.’ It also resembles his home village he came from. ‘It was only a wretched-looking town, a huddle of village houses, whose sole merit, if any, lay in being built of stone, but the plaster had long since flaked off and the stone seemed to be crumbling away.’ Also there is a tower, ‘graciously mantled with ivy, pierced by small windows that glittered in the sun, a somewhat maniacal glitter.’ It is a mad tower. Kafka says it seems ‘designed by the trembling or careless hand of a child … as if a melancholy-mad tenant … had burst through the roof.’ What is this Castle? It’s where he wants to go and can’t go, it’s the place where he isn’t now, it’s gracious and glittering and mad. Kafka’s words don’t hang together. Nor does the Castle.

  “Life in the village is a muddle and a mess. Like the worst ideas any of us have of life in groups, groups like families or also people who work together, full of sudden hostilities and equally sudden warmth between people which isn’t real, hasn’t a reason. Everyone talks all the time. They gab and gabble, they explain and excuse themselves, they are shifty and evasive. It is all really power struggles at some level. You don’t know if the Castle is different or the same, since you can’t go there.

  “Everything is like a dream, where you can grasp on to thinking processes or complicated human emotions, but only to be denied by the obtuseness of your own sleeping body. Or you are denied by unresponsiveness or animosity in the other creatures in the dream world.

  “Kafka was a clerk who got pushed about by bureaucracies. He couldn’t bring himself to get married. He writes about love and power in a world of struggling maggots and puppies and dreamy muddle. He could be writing about the survival of the fittest. But although the Castle officials are well fed, they’re sleepy, too, they can’t sit up and take notice, they don’t know what’s going on.

  “That’s the key to it, really, they don’t know what’s going on. They have language, but they can’t think with it, they fuss about. They talk about love and influence but they mess those words up, they don’t mean anything. And freedom, what is it? If you’re sleepy to death you can’t be free. The words of this book are all dilapidated like the Castle itself. When K tries to phone the Castle at the beginning, before he knows better, he hears a funny buzz in the telephone. ‘It was like the hum of countless children’s voices—but yet not a hum, the echo rather of voices singing at an infinite distance—blen
ded by sheer impossibility into one high but resonant sound which vibrated on the ear as if it were trying to penetrate beyond mere hearing.’

  “Children singing is like heaven, but the idea of them humming and buzzing is like the playground, where you can get hurt, where there’s no order.

  “All the people in this book are in a way no more than cross children. I’d like to discuss this idea more.

  “Language gets you nowhere, society seems to be just a mad structure that has only one function—to keep itself going in an unthinking sort of a way—not for any reason.

  “I read another story by Kafka, ‘The Penal Colony,’ in which there is a terrible instrument of torture, which has a bed, on which the condemned man lies, gagged, and a Harrow, which writes his sentence on his body with needles, in his own blood, and kills him with writing. It is worked by an official who loves it. He keeps telling the other man, the explorer, that the condemned man can’t read his sentence but he can feel it in his body. There isn’t any order except this mad mechanical precision—and the torture machine, like the Castle—isn’t so good close up, its cogs make a nasty noise, its felt gag is worn out with earlier tortures. K is a Land Surveyor but he can’t get far enough out of the mess to survey. K thinks Barnabas the messenger is an Angel stepping in the blizzard, but he is ‘really’ only a boy in a dirty jerkin. The messages aren’t messages. But Kafka can write in this non-language, like an angel, about there not being any angels, and nothing to survey. This is an inhuman book about being human. Or a human book about being inhuman. Or am I just playing with words?”

  The discussion is heated. Ghislaine Todd, the psychoanalyst, and Rosemary Bell, the hospital almoner, have developed a running argument about the reasons for male fear of women in the early twentieth century. Todd sees K’s impotence as a result of his demonisation of mother-figures, whilst Rosemary Bell sees it as a result of social oppression. Sister Perpetua observes that both these interpretations may relate to the disappearance of God, who was or is both Father and Authority, and whose Presence would make sense of the senseless Castle and the frantic earthly desires and struggles. Humphrey Maggs says Sister Perpetua may be right, but you can’t make God exist just because it would make sense of things. Ibrahim Mustafa says that God does exist, and that Kafka knows it, whether he thinks he does or not. An argument develops about K’s “assistants”—are they hostile siblings, or anarchic employees in a society without purpose, or perhaps the testicles beside the phallus. Or schizophrenic emanations from K’s own damaged psyche, says John Ottokar, or the Id running away from the controls of the Ego and the Superego. He has never said so much before: Ghislaine Todd smiles at him warmly. The inspector is delighted. He makes notes.