by A. S. Byatt
Sir Augustine rises to cross-examine. He measures the novelist with his eye.
Q. You quoted yourself just now. You said that the book was a lesser art-form than the purely aesthetic because it had designs on you, it moved to action.
A. It is didactic, yes.
Q. In your review—your very perceptive and brilliant review of the book—you do not only say that the book moves to action because it is didactic. You associate the didactic and the pornographic as “moving to action.” You associate them in this book.
A. That is so. You have understood the review.
Q. So the book is pornographic as well as didactic.
A. It is not high art, in which everything is resolved in a balance, a form that can be contemplated with aesthetic pleasure. It is a mixed form, a hybrid form, which makes its effect by moving to action. That does not mean it is not a work of art, or that it should not be published. We can’t suppress every book that isn’t as good as Ulysses. Or The Rainbow.
Judge. Indeed not. I must remind the jury that the opinion of literary experts on whether or not the book is obscene should not be taken into account.
Q. Mr. Burgess, I am going to ask you, as I have asked others, whether the book gave you any sexual pleasure? Moved you sexually?
A. Oh yes. It did. It’s a good book, it does its work. It stirs you up. Most good books do. Reading and sexual excitement are intimately connected.
Q. Except in Ulysses?
A. In Ulysses of course, too. That’s an unworthy question. But differently.
Q. Differently?
A. It’s rawer, here. In Babbletower.
Q. Mr. Burgess, you are a writer. A daring writer, you take risks. When you write about sexual excitement, or even more, about cruelty, do you imagine your reader as you write?
A. Yes.
Q. How do you imagine him or her?
A. As like myself. Excited when I am. Detached as I am.
Q. Do you imagine the effects of your writings on the less educated, the more imaginatively restricted persons who may also read your books?
A. That is harder. It would be silly to pretend everyone reads in the same way. It would be silly to pretend one could gauge the effect of a piece of writing on all its potential readers.
Q. Do you feel responsible for the weak, the uninstructed, the excitable readers of your books?
A. You can’t be, wholly, responsible for all readers. But up to a point, yes, I do. And, in answer to your unspoken hint or question, I am quite sure that Jude Mason is not trying to work up ignorant readers into a state of irresponsible excitement. But you can’t predict that that will never happen.
Q. You can’t predict that that will never happen.
The next witness is a novelist too, who is also lead reviewer for a serious Sunday newspaper. He is a dapper, pretty man called Douglas Corbie; he is little, with a melodious but insistent voice, and time is beginning to etch nutcracker lines in his cheeks. His hair is the cream colour of metallic blond hair going white. He has written many thick and well-received novels—A Pernicious Influence, Hengist’s Horse, The Voice of the Mock Turtle, Life in a Glass House—and has sat on the committee of the Society of Authors and the Literature Panel of the Arts Council. He is examined by Samuel Oliphant. Douglas Corbie agrees that he is himself a novelist of some importance, that he is a leading critic, that he has read Babbletower, and admires it.
Q. It is a serious work of literature, in your opinion.
A. Without any doubt. The young man is extremely promising. He has much to learn but he is extremely promising. He should be encouraged; young writers should be encouraged, as I know to my cost, having found the going hard.
Q. Can you say why it is a serious work of literature?
A. Oh yes. Because it treats of evil. We don’t consider evil, in our society, you know. We are English and ever so nice and we are obsessed with problems of right and wrong manners, with little details of social correctness, yes, with silly things like fish-forks and placements, and whether people have the right accent, or whether their shoes are or aren’t nasty. And this in the time of Auschwitz and Hiroshima, so shaming in many ways, all our fuss about flowerbeds and whether white flowers ought to be in herbaceous borders, or whether they are vulgar, you know?
Q. But does Jude Mason tackle the problem of evil?
A. Oh, well, yes, he does, indeed he does, and with gusto, with such gusto almost too enthusiastically, all those Gothic chains and dungeons, a bit bathetic, in a way, but very effective, very effective, no doubt. William Golding has treated evil. Lord of the Flies, a book about the evil of schoolboys let loose, very revealing. Mr. Mason’s dormitory life in Babbletower is the evil of schoolboys let loose too, a Grand Guignol version. I myself prefer to embed my depiction of evil in the day-to-day, in drawing-rooms and theatre bars and suburban kitchens and school staffrooms, I prefer to embed it in felt life, as James said, yes, to notice the social detail. As Auden said, “A crack in the teacup opens / A lane to the land of the dead.” Teacups will suffice, though Mr. Mason appears to think not, he chooses the full panoply, beatings and hangings, a more dangerous way, difficult to bring off—he does bring it off, very largely, of course—but I myself believe the study of evil is more effectively embedded in felt life. The people at Auschwitz, you know, the torturers, they went home at night to suburban kitchens and pink lampshades and knuckles of pork, all that stuff, you can do it through lampshades and pork, you don’t need …
Q. What do you say of Mr. Mason’s book? Is it serious? Is it good?
A. Oh yes, as I said, he’s good, he’s learning, he will be very good, it’s important to let him keep trying, very important. Yes.
Sir Augustine says, “No questions, my lord.”
The next witness is Professor Marie-France Smith, from Prince Albert College. She wears an elegant suit, in fine black wool piped in white.
Hefferson-Brough is gallant with this witness, who is both lovely and fragile. His gallantry rattles Professor Smith, who is trying to produce a dry, scholarly account of what she believes to be the intellectual background of Babbletower. Hefferson-Brough takes her through her Encounter review of Babbletower step by step.
Q. You say in this article, Professor Smith, that this book which the ladies and gentlemen of the jury have just read is “in the mainstream tradition of European intellectual history and philosophical debate.” That is a large claim.
A. I could prove critically, I think, that the author has a very wide acquaintance with French thought, with French controversy, at the time of the Revolution and later, about how far human beings should be free and how far it was necessary for them to be restrained.
Q. You mention the names of certain thinkers in your review. A certain Charles Fourier, for example. Can you tell us about his thought, and about how it is to be found in this book?
A. Fourier was a gentle and eccentric thinker who like many thinkers at the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth centuries believed that a revolution in human feelings and lifestyles could introduce an age of Harmony. He believed “civilisation” (the last few centuries) was evil, repressive and decadent. He believed human harmony could be achieved by indulging all human passions and desires, of which he identified, I think, 810. He believed “civilised,” decadent men thought all human beings were roughly the same, but that in fact they differed greatly. He felt that lesbians, sodomites, flagellants, fetishists, nymphomaniacs and so on could and should be accommodated rather than punished. He wrote a Nouveau Monde Amoureux which depicts the journey of a group of colonists to Cnidus in Asia Minor, where they found a community, a phalanx of erotic freedom. They organise sexual orgies, and also gastronomic orgies—Fourier saw warfare, in Harmony, as a civilised contest between chefs as to the making of little pastries, of which he was very fond. He liked inventing hierarchies—he had a court of love with high priests, pontiffs, matrons, confessors, fakirs, fairies, bacchantes …
Q. And all this,
you say, was very gentle?
A. Oh, wholly, yes. It was like Watteau’s Embarkation for Cytherea, a dream world with a serious political imagination behind it. Fourier really believed that the Terror in the French Revolution might, pushed a little further, have ushered in one desirable further breaking down of rules and conventions—the abolition of marriage, which made almost everyone, in his view, unhappy. “In Harmony,” he wrote, “every mature man and woman must be granted a satisfying minimum of sexual pleasure.”
Q. And you see Babbletower as in that tradition?
A. The first part, yes. The characters are setting off to found a Nouveau Monde Amoureux, a New World of Love. What happens owes as much to de Sade as to Fourier.
Q. Tell us about de Sade. You take him seriously as a thinker?
A. You must. He is important. He represents the line from the Enlightenment philosophers who extol human reason and free will, in its cynical vein. He asks, If we are free to follow our passions, who can prevent us from following our desire to hurt others, to kill, to rape, to torture? Those are, he says, human passions; they are natural. Voltaire, Rousseau, Diderot, the freethinkers, lead, according to one view, to the guillotine and the Sadeian boudoir. Mr. Mason has understood this. He has shown it.
The prisoner looks at his hands. He does not look at Professor Smith. Some of the jury notice this.
Q. What is your evidence for this diagnosis?
A. Well, let us start with the title. La Tour Bruyarde translates as the noisy, or shouting, or howling tower—the word “bruyard” suggests the noise made by hound dogs. It is an image of the Tower of Babel, which was constructed to displace God from Heaven, and was punished for its presumption by having a spirit of discord sent amongst its members, so that their languages were confused, they could no longer understand each other. It is a communal enterprise, set against the Authority of God. The Babbletower community is Fourier’s Nouveau Monde Amoureux. It is also Sade’s Château de Silling, where the libertines cut the bridge that connects them to the outer world so as to perform their terrible deeds.
Hefferson-Brough thanks Professor Smith for her clear exposition of the gravitas of Babbletower. He sits down. The prosecutor rises.
Q. Thank you for your charming lecture, Professor Smith. You have painted a very convincing picture of a very French intellectual document, a philosophical dialogue called La Tour Bruyarde. These books you speak of, de Sade, Fourier, they are in print in France?
A. Yes.
Q. Freely available?
A. Yes. Not all of Fourier. Much was never edited, the manuscripts are in the Bibliothèque Nationale.
Q. These preoccupations are very French preoccupations, are they not? Your country has always given more latitude to sexual freedom?
A. In some ways.
Q. English people have had to go to France and buy books thought unsuitable for English readers, to see the Folies Bergères, and so on. Some people think it is a good thing to have these latitudes. Some believe that our greater care for our own public morals, our greater concern for restraint of the things M. Fourier was so anxious to promulgate, has something to be said for it. Those who drafted the British Act of Parliament according to which this case is being tried might have been of the second party, you may think.
Samuel Oliphant rises to object that this is a statement, not a question.
Q. Tell me, Professor Smith—you have spoken with such cool clarity, such French analytic vigour, both of de Sade and of Babbletower. You do not, if I may say so, seem like a natural devoted reader of the lucubrations of the satanic Marquis. Do you enjoy de Sade?
A. Enjoy? No, I do not. (This is clearly a true statement of revulsion.)
Q. But you read him because you think you should?
A. Yes. As I said, he is important. I prefer Fourier.
Q. The gentle, the dotty, the permissive Fourier. The verbal Watteau of fairies and flagellants. And Babbletower, Professor Smith. Did you enjoy Babbletower?
A. No. I admired it.
Q. But the author would have liked you to enjoy it?
Both the beautiful professor and the prisoner at the bar cast down their eyes, flushed.
A. We are taught, these days, that authorial intention is something we cannot know, and is irrelevant to our critical judgement.
Q. And—forgive me—you felt no frisson of sexual pleasure during your reading?
A. (Very flushed) I may have. I do not remember. It was neither my primary nor my predominant response.
Q. Thank you, Professor Smith.
The next witness is a theatrical director, Fausto Gemelli, who has worked with Peter Brook and Charles Marowitz, who speaks with enthusiasm of Edward Bond’s Saved, which presents the murder of a baby in a pram as an acting out of Blake’s “sooner murder an infant in its cradle than arouse unacted desires.” He speaks of Genet’s Maids and Balcony, of Artaud’s Theatre of Cruelty, which aims to be, in Artaud’s words, “like victims burned at the stake, signalling through the flames.” Samuel Oliphant asks him if, in the time of Genet, Bond, Artaud, the Marat-Sade and Peter Brook’s Lear, he finds anything culturally out of bounds in Babbletower. He replies that he does not. He is passionately enthusiastic, gesturing, crying from a cloud of long black hair. Sir Augustine says, “No questions,” judging perhaps that Mr. Gemelli speaks to his own audience and alienates others in about equal proportions.
The trial is now in its third day. The Defence calls Elvet Gander, who says he is a medical doctor, a psychiatrist, and a psychoanalyst. He agrees that he works with schizophrenics, with disturbed adolescents, and that he writes general books on language and society, on the psychic health and sickness of the community in which he lives. He agrees that he is the author of Language Our Straitjacket, The Oppressor’s Tongue, Am I My Brother’s Keeper?, and that he has a particular interest in the links between language and repression (“and expression, of course,” he adds).
Elvet Gander in the witness box has a hardness and polished look. His skull shines, his nose shines, his long teeth shine brightly. His eyes are huge, sculpted and hooded; he speaks, as he gives his evidence, in an increasingly incantatory flow, even, towards the end, swaying slightly like a snake-charmer, and tapping gently with his hand on the ledge of the box. He wears a crumpled corduroy jacket—black—over an off-white polo-necked jumper and cord trousers. Frederica sees him, fancifully, as polished ivory, polished creamy marble. Hefferson-Brough asks him a series of questions designed to establish that he believes Babbletower to be important as a depiction of private psychic disintegration and of a more important malaise in society at large.
Gander speaks at length, plangently, musically, weaving his audience briefly into an assenting union, although afterwards many, most of them, cannot remember all he said, cannot, some of them, remember almost anything. He says human beings are divided creatures, more and more divided, more and more cut off from each other and from any sense of themselves and their identity. He says that Babbletower reflects both dividedness and a deep desire for unity of self and of community, as indeed does the original myth of the Tower of Babel. He says that human beings experience themselves as projections of other people’s ideas (primarily their families’), or of their own fears and hidden wishes. He says that we live in a world where we are labelled, judged and punished as criminal, madman, pervert, sadist, when other words might apply as well, or better: desperate, affectionate, logical, confused. Language destroys us as language creates us—Lady Chatterley was condemned for honest no-nonsense four-letter words describing bodily functions we have erected a whole cage of euphemisms and evasions to avoid naming, so dividing ourselves from ourselves. There are physical ailments—Tourette’s disease—where the body, the nerves, involuntarily ejaculate the unspeakable, “fuck,” “shit,” “piss.” He does not apologise to the Court for the use of these words. They are nocturnal emissions of the human corpus, to be wiped away like stains, like the ejaculations they are in truth. Yes, we muck about with the langua
ge of our bodily selves at our peril, and Jude Mason has shown us the consequences, the leather tongues and steel tools we make when we are forbidden to use tongues and tools.
Godfrey Hefferson-Brough, faint but pursuing, tries both to stem the flow and to concentrate his witness’s attention on “the book in hand, so to speak.” This coincides with Gander’s intent and rapturous comparison of dialogue to coition and masturbation to interior monologue. “There is evidence that the sexual discharge in male onanism is greater than it is in intercourse.”
“Is this relevant?” asks Mr. Justice Gordale Balafray. “How does this connect to the matter in hand, to the question of the subject-matter of this book?”
“I am saying it is onanistic babble, consciously and conscientiously exposed, my lord. I am saying it is a product of isolation and a sense of unreality.”
He rushes on. He talks of the community of Babbletower, La Tour Bruyarde, in search of a lost primeval unity. “An impossible identity, polymorphously perverse, one. I could quote Rilke, my lord, who prays to be made a self-sufficient hermaphrodite.”
“Does he indeed?”
“Mach Einen herrlich, Herr, mach Einen gross,
bau seinem Leben einen schönen Schoss,
und seine Scham errichte wie ein Tor
in einem blonden Wald von jungen Haaren.”
“I do not know,” says the judge, “whether I want to ask you to translate that for the benefit of the jury, Mr. Gander, or whether I want to ask that it be struck from the record as irrelevant. My German is a little rusty. In so far as I can follow your quotation it seems a little—a little—well. Perhaps Mr. Hefferson-Brough can enlighten us on whether we should ask for a translation.”
Mr. Hefferson-Brough says that the general argument was, if he has understood Mr. Gander correctly—Mr. Gander’s enthusiasm, though infectious, has carried him away perhaps—the point appeared to be that the community was sick and that it desired, and failed to achieve, unity.
