by A. S. Byatt
Judge. What has this to do with “onanistic babble” and quotations from Rilke?
Gander. May I answer? D. H. Lawrence said he would make his world—his novel’s world—healthy, by inviting into it every little black snake that coils and curls at the edges of the marshes of the unconscious. The French surrealist Leiris said, “Masochism, sadism, almost all vices in fact, are only ways of feeling more human.” I am saying Culvert, the hero of Babbletower, like Fourier, as Professor Smith has pointed out, sets out to include everything in his Tower, in his community, so there shall be no lost soul, no sour rejected creature prowling, but all shall be one. It doesn’t work, of course, in his book, but the desire is noble, is noble, is sane and healthy. I offered Rilke’s metaphor because it amused me, as an image of wholeness—of the impossibly yearned-for hermaphroditic polymorphously perverse beautiful self-satisfying wholeness.
Judge. I am not sure I ought to; we may be wasting the Court’s time, but I am going to ask you to translate it.
Gander. Thank you, my lord. It goes—let me see—it goes
Make One beautiful one, Lord, make One big one,
build a beautiful womb inside for its Life,
and erect its Shame like a Pillar,
in a blond forest of young hairs.
Judge. Thank you. Thank you very much. I am sure the jury would rather know that that was what it said than not know.
Gander. It is very strong. Very beautiful.
Judge. It may be. It sounds better in German, it is true. Mr. Hefferson-Brough, I do think we should return to the gravamen of this matter.
Hefferson-Brough. Certainly, my lord. Mr. Gander—can you say, in your own words, what you think are the purposes and effects of what have been called the—the sado-masochistic passages that become more frequent as the story becomes, so to speak, darker.
Gander. Certainly, I can. They have been well defined as degradation ceremonies. I would refer the jurors to an article by H. Garfinkel in the American Journal of Sociology LXI (1956) on “Conditions of Successful Degradation Ceremonies.” In modern society these ceremonies are part of our alienation and take place in all our institutions—R. D. Laing in his article in a book called Ritualisation of Behaviour in Animals and Men—a Royal Society publication—defines many modern psychiatric diagnoses as ceremonials of alienation, degradation ceremonies precisely. Some public confessionals are the same thing. I think the institutions of the confessional and the theatre in Babbletower function as degradation ceremonies. You could compare them to the rituals enacted in certain brothels where men are compelled to dress up as naughty children or martyrs in chains and be degraded. As Genet has shown, people also need to enact the masters of ceremony, degraders, judges and bishops and generals, yes. In brothels as in real life. A movement of violence, of bloody revolt, is often necessary to pierce through to our authenticity.
Judge. I am not quite sure I understand you. You are saying that courts and psychiatric hospitals and perhaps the Church are designed to degrade people? You are saying that Mr. Mason says this?
Gander. No, no. Only that from certain angles such institutions can be perceived as degrading, and Babbletower deals, profoundly, brilliantly, fluently, with the riddles and ambiguities of our degradation of each other. You could say, my lord, that the desire to degrade is an aspect of Original Sin, an aspect of that force of division of people which is represented by the Lord God in the Bible smiting the presumption of the original inhabitants of Babel.
Judge. Your own expressions are precise and convoluted, Mr. Gander. Do I understand you to be accusing the Lord God of a kind of sin in dividing people by smiting them?
Gander. The Lord God is a human myth, a human projection, so yes.
Judge. You were sworn in, I must remind you, on the Bible.
Gander. I said, I swear by Almighty God. I did. I do. But that God is a force of unity, a field of light, of beauty, not a harsh judge smiting people.
Judge. You enlighten me.
Gander. I have a quotation, my lord, from Simone de Beauvoir on Sade which makes quite clear what I am saying.
Hefferson-Brough. It may be that we can dispense with this quotation, and return to Babbletower and its depiction of cruelty, which, you were saying, I think, is a profound study of human misery, malaise, you said, exactly, a French word, meaning sickness or misery.
Gander. But my quotation does just that, it explains Sade and also Jude Mason. Listen. Simone de Beauvoir is very clear. She is a major writer, a respected thinker. She says: “To sympathise with Sade too readily is to betray him. For it is our misery, subjection and death that he desires; and every time we side with a child whose throat has been slit by a sex-maniac, we take a stand against him. Nor does he forbid us to defend ourselves. He allows that a father may revenge or prevent, even by murder, the rape of his child. What he demands is that, in the struggle between irreconcilable existences, each one engages himself concretely in the name of his own existence. He approves of the vendetta, but not of the courts. We may kill, but we may not judge. The pretensions of the judge are more arrogant than those of the tyrant; for the tyrant confines himself to being himself, whereas the judge tries to erect his opinions into universal laws. His effort is based upon a lie. For every person is imprisoned in his own skin, and cannot become the mediator between separate persons from whom he himself is separated.”
Hefferson-Brough. You are not saying, Mr. Gander, that Mr. Mason is arguing that “we may kill, but we may not judge.”
Gander. Oh no. He rejects de Sade, he rejects him. But he gives the argument a run for its money. We live in a free society, a serious argument has a right to a run for its money.
Judge. A serious argument. “He believes in the vendetta, but not in the courts.”
Gander. It is an argument. You are a wise man, this is a wise Court, you must see—I am sorry, I put that badly—I know you know that is a serious argument. You, and Jude Mason, must both reject it. Even I, with all my scepticism about judgements, labelling, projections, emanations, spectres—even I prefer this Court to a vendetta, to a simple killing. I reject Sade. But I recognise his profound importance. You cannot ban him. Or Jude Mason.
Judge. Very well, Mr. Gander. Very well. Mr. Hefferson-Brough, your witness has taken us into deep water.
Hefferson-Brough. It is clear that we are speaking of a deep novel, my lord. Not a pleasant novel, but not a trivial one. One that goes deep.
Sir Augustine asks Elvet Gander whether there are any books he would suppress, if it were up to him. The witness replies that he would suppress the novels of Barbara Cartland, which are lies, and bring untold misery to those who believe them. Sir Augustine says that even these are surely evidence of some human velleities, some mind-set worthy of serious study. Gander smiles and agrees. “I was hasty. I was making a rhetorical point. You are right. There is no good reason for suppressing anything at all.”
Q. Anything goes, in the end?
A. Oh yes, I think so. Anything goes.
Q. No further questions, my lord.
Godfrey Hefferson-Brough is beginning to look red and heavy. He consults with his junior and with Rupert Parrott, obviously in doubt about further witnesses. Nevertheless, he calls Avram Snitkin, who entrusts his tape-recorder to Frederica for the duration of his evidence.
Snitkin has been called, essentially, to describe various pieces of sociological research which claim to show that those with a propensity to offend, sexually, are less, rather than more, likely to do so if they have access to “explicit literature.” He is a bad witness, because he can hardly bear to make a statement without enclosing it in a cocoon of “on the one hand” and “on the other hand,” and “so to speak” and “in some very precisely delineated circumstances.” He is also a bad witness because it is easy for the Prosecution to enquire whether the writings used in the experiments referred to were classifiable as “pornography.” Snitkin speaks for a long time about this, saying at vast length that the term depends o
n the definition of the word “pornography,” which itself depends on the uses to which the material described is put by the people whose habits in the context of the use of what might be defined as pornography are being studied …
The judge cuts him short, perhaps already rendered irritable by the jousting behaviour of Elvet Gander.
Snitkin also argues that there are studies that have shown that obscenity is traditionally a weapon of the alienated and frustrated. He is prevented by the judge, and by Hefferson-Brough, from defining “obscenity,” “alienated” and “frustrated” at great length. He describes the beliefs of “the young, the idealistic who hope to remake our society.” He says:
“If anarchy is an essential precursor to the creation of an alternative society, so the deflowering of language, rendering it obscene and useless, is part of the process of structuring a new one.”
Sir Augustine asks him if he is saying Babbletower IS “obscene.”
Hefferson-Brough objects—the witness’s opinion as to the obscenity of the book is inadmissible.
The objection is sustained.
Sir Augustine asks him if he considers Babbletower an example of the “deflowering of language desiderated by the young.”
Snitkin says no, not at all, quite the opposite. It’s against the deflowering of language, it’s hyper-articulate. It’s literary. “I was simply saying,” he says, “that we live in a climate of opinion where it’s not particularly shocking. That’s what I’m saying.”
Sir Augustine. Some of us live in such a climate. Some of us try not to.
The next witness is Canon Adelbert Holly, white mane flowing, nicotined fingers gesticulating, dog-collar shining. He is identified as a Canon of St. Paul’s, a writer on theology and psychology, a trained “sexual therapist” and the director of a charity which mans telephone lines to provide help to the despairing.
Hefferson-Brough asks him if he finds Babbletower to be a well-written book with a moral message. Canon Holly agrees that it is both well written and moral.
Q. You would, in your capacity as a Christian pastor, encourage people to read this book?
A. Oh yes. It is a deeply, a profoundly Christian book.
Q. Can you tell us why you are able to describe it in this way?
A. It is a book about suffering and the infliction of suffering. Suffering and the infliction of suffering are at the centre of the Christian religion. We venerate the dead body of a man who has been whipped, tortured, crowned with thorns, pierced by a sword and hung by his hands, pierced with nails, until he is dead. We claim, moreover, that our God exacted all this suffering from this Man—who was part of Himself, who was Himself—as payment for our sins. Our God is a cruel God and a jealous God. The Bible tells us so persistently. Cruelty and suffering are at the centre of our creed and our ritual. The Christian religion is an expression of the perception that what we now call sado-masochism is a central truth of our existence.
Judge. You are telling us that you, a Christian priest, believe that God is essentially cruel, and that this book says so?
A. Part of what we used to call God is cruel. The other part is Human, is Christ. I am with William Blake, who wrote, in his Vision of the Last Judgement, “Thinking as I do that the Creator of this World is a very Cruel Being, and being a Worshipper of Christ, I cannot help saying: ‘The Son, O how unlike the Father!’ First God Almighty comes with a Thump on the Head. Then Jesus Christ comes with a balm to heal it.” We must worship Christ’s Humanity. We must eat his battered body and drink his spilt blood in remembrance of Him, as he adjured us to do.
Hefferson-Brough leads, or attempts to lead, his witness back to a moral analysis of some of the events in Babbletower, the hunting of children, the death of Roseace. He attempts to get his witness to say that these episodes are morally shocking, not sexually titillating. He does not quite succeed, as Canon Holly’s responses to his questions are rapturous and wild—“Oh, superbly horrible, brilliantly effective, beautifully dreadful.” Canon Holly divagates into general reflections on children and death, drawn, according to him, from the profound psychoanalytic insights of Norman O. Brown. Babbletower, the Bible, and the works of Norman O. Brown, cries Canon Holly, deal with the generation of love and death in the human community. Neither the germ cell nor the One Spirit of the human community know death, says Canon Holly. Death comes with individuation, when the infant is separated from the breast that suckles it and becomes a separate sexual being—at the moment when, within the family, the individual separates and starts a new nuclear family, death is born—when the Son becomes the Father, the Father can die, must die. “The human family is created by an intense mode of love and creates an intenser mode of death, that’s what Brown says, my lord, that’s what Jude Mason demonstrates.”
Judge. Is it? You have lost me, Canon, I fear. I can understand your individual sentences, but your general drift I find hard to follow.
Holly. I can clarify.
Judge. No, don’t. I trust the jury to have understood as much as they need. I trust the members of the jury to see whether this theological interpretation concurs with their reading of the book in question.
Samuel Oliphant questions the Canon on behalf of the author.
Q. You are acquainted with Jude Mason?
A. I have known him some little time.
Q. How would you describe him? Is he a serious writer?
A. He is a very gifted young man, with very severe difficulties, as the very gifted often have. His relations with society have not always been easy, and his living is hard, but he struggles to communicate his messages, to create his art.
Q. He has persisted with his writing despite severe personal difficulties?
A. He has lived on the edges, at extremes, in poverty. His attitude is a symptom of a sickness—he has been socially persecuted and derided, he is a scapegoat and a victim.
Mr. Oliphant, who has not quite expected this answer, hesitates, and then decides that to go on is better than to go back.
Q. You are saying he lives in difficulties, and knows the pain of modern life?
A. I always think of him as a kind of Holy Fool, like Jean-Paul Sartre’s Saint Genet, in his book of that name. Or Dostoevski’s Idiot, an innocent at large in a cruel world. Sartre sees Genet as a shaman, he is dismembered, chopped to bits, by the spirits in death and is reborn, wise. Jude Mason has the wisdom of the resurrected. His life has been hard, but he has been reborn, renewed, in his work.
Jude Mason does not look grateful for this odd encomium. The Defence barristers look intensely embarrassed. Sir Augustine rises to cross-examine.
Q. I am interested in your observations on Christianity and sadomasochism. Are you saying that the tortures in Babbletower are presented as a religious experience of the cruelty of the world, or of its Creator?
A. I am, yes. I am. I do believe it is so.
Q. You think that the motive for describing these explicit sexual cruelties is one of pure religious fervour, a desire to bring the reader to know every depth of degradation of pain, of sexual pain?
A. The divine Man knew every depth—he died in pain—and we need to know.
Q. He was not, I think, subjected to sexual degradation.
A. All degradation is sexual. He was a Man; he suffered as a Man.
Q. And you think the reading of this book—with its recondite sexual horrors—is in some—distant, perhaps—some way related to the Passion of Jesus Christ?
A. I cannot think we are not meant to know what is possible in this world.
Q. Let us be quite clear—you think it a Christian act to encourage the reading of this book?
A. I would quote John Milton’s Areopagitica: “I cannot praise a fugitive and cloistered virtue, unexercised and unbreathed, that never sallies out and sees her adversary, but slinks out of the race, where that immortal garland is to be run for, not without dust and heat.”
Q. But did not Our Lord Himself say, and tell us to pray, “Lead us not into tempta
tion”?
A. The translation has altered. We say now—“Do not put us to the test.”
Q. Do we indeed? No further questions, my lord.
Frederica misses several further witnesses, as she has to spend time with the Court Welfare Officer, who comes to interview her before the custody hearing. The Court Welfare Officer is a Mrs. Anthea Barlow, a middle-aged lady in a Persian lamb coat, with a fur hat and bright, wide-apart eyes. She has greyish fair hair and a slightly ecstatic expression, which does not inspire confidence in Frederica, who sees her as the same sort of churchy woman as Charity Farrar, the wife of Gideon, who has founded The Children of Joy. Mrs. Barlow asks sensible enough questions in her light, rushing voice. Has Frederica thought that Leo might be happier in Bran House, in the fields, in the paddocks and orchards? Frederica says yes. She says she nearly left him behind, for those reasons. Mrs. Barlow asks why she did not?
“Because he wanted to come, and for the first time really I saw he was mine, my child, I am the mother he has, his genes are mine, not Pippy Mammott’s, he needs me with all my imperfections, we look at each other with the same look.”
“And his father?”
“Him too. That’s the disaster. But he is a little hoy, and a clever boy, and a sharp-willed boy, and he does know what he wants.”
“Do you love him?”
“More than anything else, including myself, including my books, whether I want to or not. It’s just the nature of things. It’s a ridiculous question.”
“I know. I just like to see what sort of answer I get to it. You’d be surprised what some people say. They make it a function of a battle, or they say, ‘I’ve got to, haven’t I?’ ”
“Well, I have got to, haven’t I? It’s part of my biology.”
“I have no doubt that you love him.”
