by A. S. Byatt
“It’s very difficult for a group to write something. It’s quite interesting to see what kinds of manoeuvres we go through to get it done. We’ve got two people in overall charge of the writing—Agatha and myself—we co-ordinate what will be the chapters. Then we’ve got little sub-groups, working together on different areas—we’ve got a group on ‘Spoken and Written English,’ and one on ‘Classroom Conduct—Love and/or Authority,’ and one on ‘The Class Problem in the Class—the Question of What Is “Correct” and What Should Be Corrected,’ and one on ‘The Principles of Education—Is It Child-Centred or Community-Oriented, and Can It Be Both?’ And one on what sort of grammar to teach, and how much, and why. And that one has a sub-heading, language as an object of study, like zoology, or mathematics. It’s amazing what terrible passions it all arouses—real, important passions, mind you, about real, important things. You get evidence in from schoolteachers saying they want to create ‘whole personalities,’ ‘friendly atmospheres,’ ‘full and satisfying lives,’ ‘full development of potentialities,’ ‘satisfaction of curiosity,’ ‘confidence,’ ‘growth,’ ‘perseverance,’ ‘alertness,’ and that sort of thing—and when you actually start looking at what they do, how they behave, what they mean by these phrases, you find that the words are like sand slipping through your fingers, you feel you’re staring through a microscope at a lot of life-forms that suddenly look like great thick snakes curling round and biting each other. We’re writing about teaching language and the language we write about teaching language won’t stick to the thing we’re writing about. Won’t describe it. Steerforth himself said almost nothing for months of our deliberations and then suddenly made a little speech about how profoundly resistant the mind was to studying its own operations. He and Hans Pachter and Wijnnobel are writing a kind of preface pointing out how ‘children’ and ‘language’ have both been profoundly changed in our time by becoming objects of intense study, of focused attention.”
“Agatha never talks about all this. It’s fascinating. Go on.”
Alexander goes on. He describes the drafting groups, and the unexpected alliances, oppositions and alignments. The journalist, Malcolm Friend, who has contributed almost nothing to the debate, turns out to be a brilliant drafter of pellucid paragraphs and is in charge of the “child-centred, community-oriented?” debate. The teachers are divided on the question of classroom authority—some oppose learning anything by rote, and are in favour of the child “discovering naturally when he needs to,” using the model of language acquisition by untutored two-year-olds. Some believe equally strongly that children need to know things they are reluctant to learn, as a store for when they will be glad of them, or because “society” needs them to know these things. The word “society” is not yet the problem it will become, but it is a problem. A majority of the committee, probably, dislike grammar and teaching grammar: the minority in favour of it are ferociously moved by its order, its beauty, its complexity. Emily Perfitt believes in learning poetry, but in eschewing grammar, which she defines as “mental cruelty,” quite simply—an interesting locution, according to Wijnnobel, Alexander says. He describes how Agatha keeps the drafting groups in order by threatening to second Magog and Mickey Impey to join them. These two are part of no group and act as ambassadors “from one to another.”
Frederica says she met Magog at Bowers and Eden. She recounts the meeting of that committee. She says the lawyers were endlessly qualificatory and endlessly subtle about the nature of expert witnesses. She says life is full of lawyers and committees defining the in-definable, like childhood, tendencies to deprave and corrupt, language, pre-nuptial incontinence, adultery, guilt. She says she feels terribly guilty towards Nigel, because she should not have married him, but that she is not technically guilty of most of the things of which she now stands accused. Some, yes, she says. But it’s nobody else’s business.
Alexander says he knew before he joined the committee that there would be one lucid moment when he knew what teaching was, and children were, and language did, and that this knowledge would disappear in a welter of study and definition and complexity. He says it has happened exactly so, and that the complexities are real and substantial. He says that the good teachers they have observed know, as he knew then, what teaching and children and language are, and act on their knowledge.
He says he is sorry Frederica feels guilty but he is sure she will soon be able to put it all behind her.
Frederica tries to say: I am afraid of losing Leo. She is so afraid of losing Leo, that she cannot utter the sentence.
So she says, “They were discussing asking you to give evidence for Jude.”
“Do I want to?”
“You ought to. He’ll die if they condemn his book.”
“I don’t like it.”
“No. But you don’t want it suppressed.”
“I suppose I don’t.”
They hear Agatha come in. “Well,” says Frederica. “Off to your drafting then.”
Laminations
My mother groan’d! my father wept.
Into the dangerous world I leapt:
Helpless, naked, piping loud:
Like a fiend hid in a cloud.
Struggling in my father’s hands,
Striving against my swadling bands,
Bound and weary I thought best
To sulk upon my mother’s breast.
William Blake,
Songs of Experience
Our work has been concerned with two things, or concepts, which have in recent history become both absorbing subjects of study, and problems, as perhaps they were not in the past. We refer to “the child” and “language.” Before the nineteenth century the child was either an infant or a small adult, wearing the same clothes as his parents, subject to the same legal penalties, including hanging by the neck, and controlled by the same moral codes. Now we take account of the length of time it takes a human creature to become an independent, responsible being, both physically and mentally. We take an intricate interest in the processes—including the learning of language—by which such independence and responsibility are achieved.
Language, too, has become, not merely the glass through which we see “the world outside” but the instrument with which we shape and limit our purposes and our apprehensions. Our philosophy is a philosophy of language: Wittgenstein sees philosophy, indeed, as “language-games” which are “forms of life,” whereas the school of “Language, Truth and Logic” sees linguistic forms as productive of both facts and fictions about the nature of things. There is a growing belief in some schools of thought that “language is divorced from the world,” that it is perhaps simply a partial system which best describes only its own interrelations and structure. At the same time, there is a proper and increasing interest in language as an instrument of power, of subjection and manipulation, and a concomitant belief that even young children should be familiarised with and alerted to language’s manipulative potentialities. There is, in this context, the vexed question of the relation of such political uses of language to the ingrained British habit of defining “correct” speech and writing in terms partly of the speech habits and linguistic structures of a particular group or class, of identifying the “rules” of grammar with the rules, both helpful and restrictive, of prevailing interests and power-structures.
(Draft, subsequently heavily revised, of the Introduction to the Report of the Steerforth Committee of Enquiry on the Teaching of the English Language)
We are likely to withdraw our willingness to listen when we are told that infantile sexuality is polymorphously perverse. And Freud must mean that polymorphous perversity is the pattern of our deepest desires. How can this proposition be taken seriously?
If we divest ourselves of the prejudice surrounding the “perverse,” if we try to be objective and analyse what infantile sexuality is in itself, we must return again to the definition. Infantile sexuality is the pursuit of pleasure obtained through the activity of any and all or
gans of the human body. That this is Freud’s notion becomes abundantly clear if we examine the specific nature of the “perverse” components in infantile sexuality. They include the pleasure of touching, of seeing, of muscular activity, and even the passion for pain.
Freud and Blake are asserting that the ultimate essence of our being remains in our unconscious secretly faithful to the principle of pleasure, or, as Blake calls it, delight.
In man the dialectical unity between union and separateness, between interdependence and independence, between species and individual—in short, between life and death—is broken. The break occurs in infancy, and it is the consequence of the institution of the human family. The institution of the family means the prolonged maintenance of human children in a condition of helpless dependence. Parental care makes childhood a period of privileged freedom from the domination of the reality-principle, thus permitting and promoting the early blossoming, in an unreal atmosphere, of infantile sexuality and the pleasure-principle. Thus sheltered from reality by parental care, infantile sexuality—Eros or the life instinct—conceives the dream of narcissistic omnipotence in a world of love and pleasure.
But if the institution of the family gives the human infant a subjective experience of freedom unknown to any other species of animal, it does so by holding the human infant in a condition of objective dependence on parental care to a degree unknown to any other species of animal. Objective dependence on parental care creates in the child a passive, dependent need to be loved, which is just the opposite of his dream of narcissistic omnipotence. Thus the institution of the family shapes human desire in two contradictory directions, and it is the dialectic generated by the contradiction which produces what Freud calls the conflict of ambivalence.
But the contradiction in the human psyche established by the family, is the contradiction between the life and death instincts as previously defined.
(Norman O. Brown, “Death and Childhood,”
Life Against Death, p. 113)
When they finally woke, it was already dark night. Gretel began to weep, and said, “How are we now to get out of the Forest?” Hansel, however, comforted her: “Wait a little while, till the moon has risen, and then we will find out our way.” And when the full moon was up, Hansel took his little sister by the hand and they followed the flinty pebbles, which glittered like newly minted groats, and showed them the way. They went on all night and at daybreak came to their father’s house.
Other echoes
Inhabit the garden. Shall we follow?
Quick, said the bird, find them, find them,
Round the corner. Through the first gate,
Into our first world, shall we follow
The deception of the thrush? Into our first world …
Go, said the bird, for the leaves were full of children,
Hidden excitedly, containing laughter.
Go, go, go, said the bird: human kind
Cannot bear very much reality.
T. S. Eliot, Four Quartets,
“Burnt Norton”
A Dream
A woman, waiting for a divorce hearing, finds herself on the banks of a quick little stream, very English, overhung by trees, with sun and shadow chasing each other along it, and a breeze, too, stirring the leaves and the water. She is walking in a meadow in long grasses, by this stream, wearing her engagement ring, which is a row of alternating blue and white stones, sapphires and moonstones. The clasps of the setting spring open and the stones of the ring fall and roll in the grass, blue and white stones rolling everywhere, tiny and glittering, more than the ring ever contained. She tries to gather them up: they slip like drops of water through her fingers and bounce, as tears bounce when wept with great force. The dreamer, who is not the woman now, “sees” the woman’s face with empty eyeholes like the empty sockets of the ring, and blue and white stony tears pouring down her cheeks.
In the river, hidden under the bank, are “water-babies” wrapped like caddis-grubs in shreds of old leaves and broken snail shells, glued into a housing; they peer out, they hang in the current which rushes and bubbles past them but does not detach them.
The tears and stones trickle into the river and melt like waterdrops on water.
The thought of our past years in me doth breed
Perpetual benediction: not indeed
For that which is most worthy to be blest—
Delight and liberty, the simple creed
Of Childhood, whether busy or at rest,
With new-fledged hope still fluttering in his breast:—
Not for these I raise
The song of thanks and praise;
But for those obstinate questionings
Of sense and outward things,
Fallings from us, vanishings;
Blank misgivings of a Creature
Moving about in worlds not realized,
High instincts before which our mortal Nature
Did tremble like a guilty Thing surprised …
William Wordsworth,
“Ode: Intimations of Immortality”
From the moment of birth, when the stone-age baby confronts the twentieth-century mother, the baby is the subject of violence, called love, as its mother and father have been and their parents before them … We are effectively destroying ourselves by violence masquerading as love.
(R. D. Laing)
At least 83 people, mostly children, are dead, and 46 were still entombed early today on the hillside at Aberfan, near Merthyr Tydfil, after a rain-soaked coal-tip avalanched on Pantglas Infants’ School, a farm and a row of houses yesterday morning. Eighty-eight children are safe and 36 are in hospital.
Mr. S. O. Davies, Labour MP for Merthyr Tydfil, said that debris from a local colliery was still being tipped on the slag heap when the disaster happened …
Among those brought out alive and taken to hospital was the headmistress, Miss Ann Jennings, 64. The body of the deputy head-teacher, Mr. D. Beynon, was found, with five little children in his arms, all dead …
… Because of early morning fog, 50 children from the neighbouring village of Mount Pleasant escaped the tragedy. Their school bus was delayed and they arrived at the school 10 minutes late, and just after the landslide had occurred. The mother of one of them, Mrs. Olwyn Morris, said, “If there had been no fog, my boy, Joel, 14, would have been in the school. He ran home crying and told me what had happened.”
The desires of the heart are as crooked as corkscrews,
Not to be born is the best for man:
The second best is a formal order,
The dance’s pattern; dance while you can.
Dance, dance, for the figure is easy,
The tune is catching and will not stop;
Dance till the stars come down from the rafters;
Dance, dance, dance till you drop.
W. H. Auden, “Death’s Echo,” 1936
XIX
“Put your coat on, Leo, hurry up.”
“I don’t go to school today.”
“Oh yes, you do. Agatha and Saskia are waiting.”
“But we are being divorced today. I am coming to be divorced.”
Frederica has said nothing to Leo about this event.
“You can’t come,” she says. “Little boys don’t go to the divorce courts.”
“I do.”
“No, you don’t. You must go to school.”
He holds her dressing-gown: she means to change for her court appearance when he is gone. He stamps. He shrieks. “I will, I will, I will.”
“You won’t,” says Frederica, raising her voice to match his. Both are near tears, white with anxiety.
“I am coming with you.”
Agatha appears in the doorway.
“We are going to be divorced,” says Leo.
“You aren’t. You are going to school, with me. Don’t upset your mother.”
Leo glances from one woman to the other, weighs up the effect of further demonstration, and takes Agatha’s
hand, refusing to meet Frederica’s eye.
“See you later,” says Frederica, adding “alligator,” on an uncertain, quavering false note.
Leo does not reply. He stomps off with Agatha. It is a bad beginning.
• • •
Frederica puts on a black dress. It is a black wool crepe shift with a pointed shirt-collar and buttoned cuffs at the end of long sleeves. She looks at her face in the mirror and thinks she looks respectable and urban. She thinks about make-up, sees that she would be better without it, fox-faced and clean-cut between the knife-blades of red hair. She applies the make-up nevertheless, to mark the occasion, perhaps, to hide behind it, perhaps, because the natural look of unmade-up skin has not yet come in, perhaps. As she always does on important occasions, she makes a dab with the mascara brush at her red-pale eyebrows, which normally she never touches, and as she always does, botches and blotches it, leaving gouts of black in the ginger, scrubbing them out, raising red welts. She wonders about relieving the black with a necklace or a brooch—she is not given to wearing jewellery—but the only thing she can find is a pretty Indian string of garnet and pearl beads, given to her by Nigel, which seems tactless.
She has refused offers to accompany her to the Court. She has tried not to think about it too much—she is not, she thinks, afraid of appearing in public, even in the witness box, for is she not a good public speaker, a charismatic teacher, an articulate person? She has been afraid of losing Leo, but not of losing him because of anything she may say or do. She has her confidence. She puts on a pair of black, shiny high-heeled shoes, slings her bag on her shoulder, and sets off for the Underground. The time ahead is a kind of blank. But at the end of it, something will be over, will be settled. She will be—not free, the word is beginning to be meaningless—but responsible for herself to herself again. The inside of her mouth is dry.
Inside the Court building she meets Arnold Begbie, who has with him her Counsel, Mr. Griffith Goatley, holding her brief and a whole heap of other briefs. Mr. Goatley is a blond, clean-cut, fastidious-looking person, with a beautiful pale skin and beautifully manicured hands. He tells Frederica not to be nervous, and she says she is not. He tells her to speak out, and to say everything she has to say, clearly—“Even what you may find it distasteful to say, Mrs. Reiver, just speak out.” He says that she is the only witness he will be calling, in her own suit. “We have signed affidavits from your doctor, in the matter of the little infection you unfortunately had, and from a barmaid at the Tips and Tassels Club, and from a waitress and the doorman at the Honeypot, in the matter of your husband’s probable adultery. This should be quite enough—would certainly have been quite enough—had the counter-petition not been brought. My colleague Laurence Ounce, who is appearing for the opposition, seems to be calling a considerable number of witnesses in person. Only one of the persons named as corespondents has entered an appearance—”
