by A. S. Byatt
Like many human beings who feel that they are exploding with grief, confusion, or anger, Frederica has thought of controlling or venting (both contradictory verbs are appropriate) her pains by writing. She has even bought an exercise book in which to record what she feels, in which, she told herself in the stationer’s shop, to reduce the lawyers’ language to plain expressive English. The exercise book is golden in colour, with a laminated plastic cover, on which is a purple design of geometric flowers, like those we learn to make in school, with overlapping swoops of the compass, shifting the centre and the circumference to make petal in petal, half-moon meeting half-moon. Inside, it Frederica has written a first sentence.
“Much of the problem appears to be one of vocabulary.” Which led to no sequel. As far as it goes, this sentence is acceptable, but there is no vocabulary to provide the next sentence. A week later, like a terrier shaking a rat, Frederica wrote:
“There is no vocabulary to provide the next sentence.”
A month later, she wrote:
“Try simplicity. Try describing a day.”
I woke up too slowly. My tongue was furry. There was a taste of—what? Metal, decay, old wine. I want to write “death” but that’s exaggerating. I got up. I went to the bathroom. I did the things you do in the bathroom, piss, shit, replace the death-taste with an alien taste of nasty (?artificial) mint. I hate mint. I have always hated mint but I go on putting it in my mouth. I know I ought in this style to write about the pleasure and relief of pissing and shitting but I don’t want to. It is ordinary and satisfactory and writing about it would be shocking, would look as if it were meant to be shocking, which would be the opposite of what I am trying to do. Do I know what I am trying to do? I am not enjoying writing in this style. When I had come out of the bathroom I went to wake Leo. His face was buried in the pillow: it was pink and sweaty where it touched it: it was dry and warm on top. I kissed it. Leo’s smell—all his smells—are the best thing I know. I find I don’t want to go into what they are like or why they are the best thing. This style won’t do that, although it leads you in that direction, it makes you think, aha, yes, now I describe Leo’s smell. Keep going. We had breakfast. We had boiled eggs and toast. The bread was a bit old. It always is. I like fresh bread but not enough to go out and get it. If I wrote about the pleasures of fresh bread in this style for long enough I might entice myself to go out and get some, but probably not. We had the usual fight about who ties Leo’s shoes because we are late. The usual fight. Describe it. Come on. I can’t. This style fills me with a dreadful nausea. People write whole books like this. It looks so clever and it’s a cop-out. I wanted to try and think about what had gone wrong and what I am for and it is nothing to do with furry mouths or one-verb sentences or noticing things you notice all the time gracefully, but as though they hadn’t been noticed before, as though they were shocking or surprising. At this rate I could write hundreds of thousands of words and get further and further away from thinking anything out.
Tonight I am teaching Madame Bovary. The thing about Madame Bovary was, she didn’t teach Madame Bovary.
That’s banal too. Writing things down makes everything slightly worse. Slightly worse, what a fate. Writing is compulsive. And useless. Stop writing.
Frederica considers these abortive beginnings. The desire to write something is still there, accompanied by the nausea. Once, after John Ottokar had made love to her and slept, she had tried to write what she felt about him, about lying with the blond head breathing on her breasts, about wondering whether he would come again, or stay, or settle, or vanish, about whether she herself could bear to hold herself open to him, or would close, would turn her face away, would retreat in a flurry of ink like a cuttlefish (her habitual metaphor for this manoeuvre). Do I love him, she had made herself write, a real question, but the sight of it, and the sight of the rows of sentences beginning with the first person singular had filled her with such distaste that quickly, quickly she had torn the pages out of the book, ripped them into scraps and flakes, and ground them down amongst tea-leaves and sprout-peelings in the bucket under the sink.
“I hate I,” she had written in the notebook. This was the most interesting sentence she had written yet. She added the intellectual’s question. “Why?” And an answer.
I hate “I” because when I write, “I love him,” or “I am afraid of being confined by him,” the “I” is a character I am inventing who/which in some sense drains life from me ME into artifice and enclosedness. The “I” or “I love him” written down is nauseating. The real “I” is the first I of “I hate I”—the watcher—though only until I write that, once I have noticed that, that I who hates “I” is a real I, it becomes in its turn an artificial I, and the one who notices that that “I” was artificial too becomes “real” (what is real) and so ad infinitum, like great fleas with lesser fleas upon their backs to bite ’em. Is the lesson, don’t write? It is certainly, don’t write “I.”
This page had not been torn out. Frederica finds it faintly nauseating, but interesting.
She thinks, perhaps cut-ups. She has a vision of controlling the miseries of the divorce and its dragging negotiations by cutting it all up into a kind of nonsense-diary, which produces occasional gems of scrying, like “my client does not care for the boy,” though Frederica’s innate fairness cannot find much satisfaction in that. The problem is that Mr. Tiger’s client does care for the boy. That is the problem. And beyond that how anyone as clever as she, Frederica Potter, once was could have got herselfinto the present mess. She gives a little laugh, rummages through her cyclostyled lecture-notes, and comes up with the quotations about wholeness from Forster and Lawrence. She cuts them away from her text, and slices them up in approved Burroughs-mode. A vertical snip, a horizontal snip, re-arrange. This method produces something interesting and loosely rhapsodic from the Lawrence:
She wanted to be made much of the age, was a dead distance of silence between the immanence of her peace superseding knowledge, height or colour, but something was only the third, unrealized could he know himself what not as oneself, but said “Your nose is beautiful being in a new one, a new, sounded like lies, and she was the duality. How can I say “I,” he said, whispering with truth to be, and you have ceased to the real truth. It was transcended into a new oneness of having surpassed one because there is nothing to answer, old existence. How could travels between the separate new and unknown, not him, there is perfect silence of self at all. This I, this old letter.
In the new, superfine bliss she could not know there was no I and you, there to be adored. There were wonder, the wonder of existing between them. How could he tell summation of my being and of beauty, that was not form, or paradisal unit regained from the strange golden light. How love you, when I have ceased, her beauty lay in, for him. We are both caught up and your chin is adorable. But where everything is silent, disappointed, hurt. Even when all is perfect and at one. Speech “I love you, I love you,” it was parts. But in the perfect Oneself, of having transcended the bliss.
Which says more or less what it was originally saying, with more or less the same rhythm, as though all the breathings of all the words were interchangeable. The Forster, more tightly constructed, will not deconstruct until cut into considerably smaller segments, when a certain effective contrast of high and low, abstract and solid words begins to work.
Outwardly he was cheerful, could only point out the salvation, all had reverted to chaos and in the soul of every man. By an incomplete ascetic whole of her sermon, only connect husband or widower, he had always, and both will be exalted, passion is bad a belief that is at its highest. Live in fragments passionately. Religion had connect, and the beast and the monk were read aloud on Sunday, life to either, will die. No gift of her own she would only connect! That was the form of a “good talking.” The prose and the passion would be built and span their human love which she was never prepared to give. Only connect his obtuseness robbed of the isolation that there was no m
ore to give. It need not take the souls quiet indications the bridge a white-hot hatred lives with beauty. One quality in Henry saints and love the Infinite, however much she reminded could be a little ashamed simply did not notice things she said. He never noticed bothers about my own inside, the sneaking belief that bodily desirable only when held respectable.
She pastes the three cut-ups, the solicitor’s letter, the adjuration to connect, the ode to Oneness, next to each other in the notebook.
She thinks: I am being unjust. I am not thinking clearly. I am accusing Forster and Lawrence of making me marry Nigel, out of some desire for Union of Opposites, of Only Connecting the Prose and the Passion. Whereas in fact, at least in part, I married him for exactly the opposite reason, because I wanted to keep things separate. I thought the sex was good, was satisfactory, which is better than good, and I think I thought that because he was rich, I wouldn’t have to be a housewife like my mother. I thought all the other parts of myself could go on being what they were, and marrying Nigel would deal with negotiating sex, and with not being a housewife. I deserved what I got, whatever that was: it includes Leo, who is not a question of what I deserve, but of his own life.
But the desire to Only Connect, the romantic bit, that was there too, we are a mixture of impulses. Here I go again, connecting to John Ottokar, disconnected from him.
She writes a word, underlining it, as a title. Laminations. She senses the shape of a possible form, a space where a form will be, that is not yet there to be apprehended. Laminations. Cut-ups are part of it. It is a form that is made partly by cutting up, breaking up, rearranging things that already exist. “All writing is in fact cut-ups. A collage of words read overheard.” These sentences of Burroughs’s sent a spiky thrill of recognition through her brain. The point of words is that they have to have already been used, they have not to be new, they have to be only re-arrangements, in order to have meaning. If you write “ragdon” or “persent” those are nothing, but write “dragon” and “serpent” and the thoughts and stories and fears and inventions and colours and stinks and softnesses and violence of human beings everywhere drag and float at the end of them like giant kites sailing from thin strings or monsters of the deep caught on fishermen’s lines. Where the cut-ups go wrong is in an over-valuation of the purely random, a too great reliance on the human capacity to insist on finding meaning in the trivial, the flotsam and jetsam of the brain’s tick and tock, messages on scraps of paper with one word on. Anything is a message if you are looking for a message. But the glare of an eye looking for a message anywhere and everywhere can be a mad glare, a pointless glare.
She writes down, slowly, under Laminations:
I found my own growing inclination, which I discovered was not mine alone, to look upon all life as a cultural product taking the form of mythic clichés, and to prefer quotations to independent invention. (Thomas Mann, Die Entstehung des Dr. Faustus)
Quotation is another form of cut-up; it gives a kind of papery vitality and independence to, precisely, cultural clichés cut free from the web of language that gives them precise meaning. The Mann quotation looks solemn and academic compared to the cut-ups, but it has more life in it. Or a different life. “Only connect” is a cliché, and so is Lawrence’s Oneness; also they are ambiguous words of power. You could quote other things, Frederica thinks, as the beginning of the form of what will be Laminations goes in and out of focus in her mind’s eye. You could quote newspapers. Dostoevski made his novels from the clichés and the reported facts that are newspapers. In this context even the faux-naïf style of “I did the things you do in the bathroom” would be one cliché amongst the rustling others, and therefore admissible, contained, laminated. She thinks: I need a card index, not a notebook, I need to shuffle. You could quote your own life. Lawyer’s letters amongst lectures on Mann and Kafka. Raw material, worked motifs.
That week, she adds:
James told of how, when walking on a summer evening in the park alone, watching the couples make love, he suddenly began to feel a tremendous oneness with the whole world, with the skies and trees and flowers and grass—with the lovers too. He ran home in panic and immersed himself in his books. He told himself he had no right to this experience, but more than that, he was terrified at the threatened loss of identity involved in this merging and fusion of his self with the whole world. He knew of no half-way stage between radical isolation in self-absorption or complete absorption into all there was. He was afraid of being absorbed into Nature, engulfed by her, with irrevocable loss of his self; yet what he most dreaded, that also he most longed for. Mortal beauty, so Gerard Manley Hopkins said, is dangerous. If such individuals could take his advice to meet it, then let it alone, things would be easier. But it is just this which they cannot do. (R. D. Laing, Divided Self, p. 91)
To this she adds:
The god ascends the stage in the likeness of a striving and suffering individual. That he can appear at all with this clarity and precision is due to dream interpreter Apollo, who projects before the chorus its Dionysiac condition in this analogical figure. Yet in truth that hero is the suffering Dionysos of the mysteries. He of whom the wonderful myth relates that as a child he was dismembered by Titans now experiences in his own person the pains of individuation, and in this condition is worshipped as Zagreus. We have here an indication that dismemberment—the truly Dionysiac suffering—was like a separation into air, water, earth and fire, and that individuation should be regarded as the source of all suffering, and rejected. (Nietzsche, Birth of Tragedy, p. 66)
And:
World declaration hot peace shower! Earth’s grass is
free! Cosmic poetry Visitation accidentally happening
carnally! Spontaneous planet-chant Carnival! Mental
Cosmonaut poet-epiphany, immaculate supranational
Poesy insemination!
Skullbody love-congress Annunciation,
duende concordium, effendi tovarisch illumination,
Now! Sigmatic New Departures Residu of Better
Books & Moving Times in obscenely New Directions!
Soul revolution City Lights Olympian lamb-blast!
Castalia centrum new consciousness hungry
generation Movement roundhouse 42 beat
apocalypse energy-triumph!
You are not alone!
Miraculous assumption! O Sacred Heart invisible
insurrection! Albion! awake! awake! awake! O
shameless bandwagon! Self-evident for real naked
come the Words! Global synthesis habitual for this
Eternity! Nobody’s Crazy Immortals Forever!
Esam, Fainlight, Ferlinghetti, Fernandez, Ginsberg,
Paolo Lionni, Daniel Richter, Trocchi, Simon Vinkendog,
Horovitz. Invocation to First International Poetry
Incarnation at Albert Hall.
And:
Vladimir: Rather they whisper.
Estragon: They rustle.
V. They murmur.
E. They rustle.
Silence
V. What do they say?
E. They talk about their lives.
V. To have lived is not enough for them.
E. They have to talk about it.
V. To be dead is not enough for them.
E. It is not sufficient.
Silence
V. They make a noise like feathers.
E. Like leaves.
V. Like ashes.
E. Like leaves.
(Waiting for Godot, p. 63)
And:
The head Sublime, the heart Pathos, the genitals Beauty, the hands & feet Proportion.
As the air to a bird or the sea to a fish, so is contempt to the contemptible.
The crow wish’d every thing was black, the owl that every thing was white.
Exuberance is Beauty.
If the lion was advised by the fox, he would be cunning.
Improvement makes straight roads; but the crooked roads without Improvem
ent are the roads of Genius.
Sooner murder an infant in its cradle than nurse unacted desires.
Where man is not, nature is barren.
Truth can never be told so as to be understood, and not be believ’d.
Enough! or Too much.
(Blake, Marriage of Heaven and Hell, Plate 10)
It is like any student’s commonplace book. It rustles with uneasy energies. One night, on an impulse, Frederica adds an anecdote.
After the extra-mural class, in the pub, Humphrey Maggs told us the story of a friend of his whose mother died and left her nothing but debts and a bacon-slicer. She had had a shop which had gone bust, and all that was left was a bacon-slicer. She took it into the cold store of the butcher’s shop, which was empty and about to be sold, and tried to slice her wrists with it. It was hard to get her wrists near the blade, and it was too cold in there for her to go on trying: she collapsed in there, in a mess of blood, “a welter of gore, you could say,” he said. The cold stopped the blood running and “they” found her and took her to hospital. They tied her up and stitched her up. She liked it there. She became a hospital orderly and after a bit trained as a nurse. She works in an operating theatre. She likes that. She feels needed. No, I don’t know what became of the bacon-slicer, he said when I asked him. I expect she sold it. I expect it’s slicing bacon somewhere, doing what it was designed for.
