A Whistling Woman

by A. S. Byatt

  Electric waves travel through space and disperse human faces through the atmosphere, concentrating the image, you might almost say the engram, again, in boxes, through tubes, glimmering and shimmering in the grey out of nowhere, as though the disembodied lurk in waiting in every cupboard, over every rooftop, perched on forked aerials, driving in the wind, eddying in breezes cutting through clouds, in sunlight, and moonlight, and starlight. So Luk Lysgaard-Peacock, sitting down in his rooms in Long Royston to consider the wreckage of his hopes, pressed an idle button and saw Frederica Potter’s bony face speed towards him out of a spinning point. She smiled knowingly at him, and he glowered back at her. He told himself he was not immediately turning her off again because he was interested in Hodder Pinsky, who was coming to Wijnnobel’s Conference. In fact, he found her a useful focus for his fury.

  Like all television watchers, he saw the faces first and the ideas as functions of the faces. An aggressive female, an insistent voice, too long a neck, a mistaken coquettish tilt to the chin. The cartoons included an image of Alice as bird-serpent, peering into the birdsnest. Pinsky’s glasses made him look shifty and furtive.

  Luk didn’t like the subject of the discussion, either. He didn’t like, and never used, the word “creativity” himself. He considered the mental operations discussed by psychologists under that heading as hopelessly imprecise. The poetic evocations of Gander struck him as hopelessly vapid and pretentious. “None of you are really talking about anything,” he told them, scornfully, enjoying disliking them.

  The Picasso cock-hen-woman he thought was a monstrosity. And then Pinsky embarked on the story of Freud and the young man who was waiting anxiously to hear that his girl-friend was bleeding, and Luk shivered with disgust at the coincidence, and distaste for the subject matter. He thought of his non-child, for whom he was oddly in mourning, and felt that it was very vulgar of Frederica Potter to keep on harping on menstruation, and pregnancy, in this technical way in public. He was simply repelled by the idea that Through the Looking-Glass appeared to be connected in an arcane way to his own life. He did not like Jungian ideas of synchronicity, or ethereal messaging. He was a rational man. He was a fanatically rational man.

  His dislike of the word “creative” as applied to human beings had in fact religious roots. He had been thinking of his parents over the last few days, because of his approaching marriage, because of the need to organise a wedding. He had been thinking of them also as a geneticist, because the child he had so clearly imagined would have had their genes, which would have been combined with those of Jacqueline’s pleasant parents to make someone quite new. They were about to be ancestors and now were not.

  He had been remembering his religious upbringing in Langeland. His father had told him as a child that God had created the world, and that God would, in his own good time, destroy the world. Toger Lysgaard was a follower of Grundtvig, bard, theologian, and world historian. Grundtvig’s Christianity was intricately woven into his resuscitation of Norse mythology. “Highest Odin, White Christ,” Grundtvig wrote.

  He had asked his father, once, as a little boy “Why is there something, and not nothing?”

  His father had replied that the question showed that the boy had a truly religious soul. The answer was, that there was something because the Lord had created it, and had seen that His work was good. And that the Lord maintained it, at every moment, through His loving care, upholding it.

  As a boy, Luk had been reasonably devout. Jesus Christ had been his friend, a better friend than any human one. He had tried to be good, and had not been prevented from being curious. As an adolescent he had come to find keeping up his belief strenuous and somehow “thin.” One day, walking amongst trees in a wood, in sunlight, he had had an intense flash of vision, which because of his education he compared to the Pauline flash on the road to Damascus. Except that what he saw—what was revealed by the brilliance of the ordinary light—was that the stories they had told him were stories and were not true. And when he saw that, suddenly everything was differently real, shining with clarity, with particularity, and with a mystery which was to be a calling. He saw flies and worms, leaves and roots transfigured because they were not transfigured, they were what they were. He thought of his religious faith as a horny lens over his eyes which were now washed clean.

  His experience was not unusual. But one thing it had in common with the religious conversion of which it was mirror-twin was a tendency to dogmatism, to extremes. His new world was washed clean of human stories. With human stories went other sets of mind, not necessarily connected. He particularly loathed—with a religious intensity—scientific ideas about the “anthropic principle” which claimed that the Universe somehow spread out from the infinitely large to the infinitely small on a scale of which the human body and brain just happened to be the centre. He also did not like, very much, most works of art and most non-religious human stories. He read neither novels nor histories. His time-scale was evolutionary, the forms of his imagination were elastic but always factual. He noted, scientifically, that biologists shared his fiercely defended pragmatic agnosticism. Physicists, for some reason, found it easier to construct or retain beliefs.

  He found Frederica’s Picasso vase-cock-hen, with its painted eye on its dead clay spout, both ludicrous and faintly obscene. It was an artefact, a form of the non-existent, of nothing. Forms of what was real were always more interesting. He found Frederica ludicrous, too. She was wasting her life. He enjoyed the intensity of his dislike of her. It relieved his grief, and was energising. He was a man who appeared gentler and kinder than he was. Jacqueline’s rejection had cast him into some other compartment of himself, where he found a sardonic cynic.

  Anger gave him restless energy. He packed a bag, and got out his car, and drove in the dark out into the moorland, back to Gash Fell. He drove through dark pinewoods, and out on to the mountainside where his small house sat, cold and dark. He went in, lit an oil-lamp, and took a torch. His own shadow loomed at him, a bearded demon reaching over white walls and ceiling. He lit stoves, and considered his bower-decorations. He thought he would sweep them all away, in a rite of renunciation, pile them together, skull and shell, burn them and stamp on them.

  Then he thought that the objects were objects, and had done nothing. They were what they had been before, and would continue to be. So he disturbed his aesthetic arrangements, piled everything together differently, heaped anyhow. He took the lacquered vase of peacock feathers and honesty out on to the terrace. He had a foolish and satisfying image of himself ripping them apart, the iridescent eyes, the glimmering moony windows, unhooking the hooks and eyes he had so lovingly joined. And throwing them out into the cold wind that was starting up, to whisk around the mountainside, green and gold and pearly, the shreds of his hopes. What was it Jacqueline had said? “I was always told it was unlucky to have peacock feathers in the house.” Nonsense, superstition, rubbish. The feathers had disgusted Darwin and were lovely. They were male excess, and had been rejected. There was still no clear explanation of why the bird indulged in such fantastic, costly display.

  He thought of the quadrilateral of dividing cells in a sexually engendered embryo, and thought, not for the first time, that the whole business of sex could be argued to be expensive and wasteful. Anything that reproduced itself parthenogenetically could produce twice as many direct descendants for half the energy cost of meiosis and sexual division. The maths was more complicated than that. He thought of his slug experiments, on Arion ater and Arion rufus which seemed to be proving that populations above a certain altitude reproduced themselves parthenogenetically, were genetically identical, and lived harmoniously. Whereas those who lived in warmer—possibly more disparate—environments, were both male and female, and fought to the death, or consumed each other cannibalistically. Maybe the advantages of sex were to do with environmental variety, or difficulty? To do with dispersal? It came to him that he would write his paper for Wijnnobel’s conference on something like
“The Cost of Sex and the Redundant Male.” It would amuse him, and be interesting, and could encompass various thoughts he’d been having about kin selection, selfishness, and altruism. Male and female created he them, he thought with self-induced irony, firing himself. Two by two. There are all sorts of other ways of doing it. Microscopic parasitic males, buds, hermaphrodites. He looked at the honesty. Judaspenge, Judas money. A window on nothing. An empty seed-pod. Contaminated with grandiose human stories. An empty seed-pod is an empty seed-pod. Sex is sex. Is dispersal, is aggression, is (almost) endlessly diverse and interesting.

  He stood in the dark, on his cold terrace, with his jacket-collar up against the wind. He listened to the silence, and the small sounds in the silence, branches, rustlings, hurrying feet, a faint cry of a creature cut off. He had a sense of his house sailing like an ark on a waste of dark water, out into space. The sky was full of stars.

  Chapter 13

  From Kieran Quarrell to Elvet Gander

  Thank you for your last, and for your mediation with the Spirit’s Tigers. I shall personally drive my two “patients” to Four Pence, to hand them into your care, and that of the community. As I said, the problems of Lucy Nighby’s future are becoming acute. Her husband, Gunner, is largely recovered from his wounds, and asserts vociferously that she attacked both him and their three children. One of the children is still quite sick and disturbed. Of the other two, one asserts that Lucy attacked Gunner and the children and the other that Gunner attacked Lucy and the children. There are witnesses to the finding of Gunner in the hen-house (at some distance from the farm. What was he doing there?) who met Lucy, covered in blood and apparently in a state of shock. They say she was “going through the motions” of egg-collecting. No one—that is to say, the police, and the social and medical experts—really believes Lucy instigated the violence. Gunner has a long history of heavy drinking and wife-beating (much of it hearsay, of course, and he was not drunk at the time of the attack). The courts cannot really move—either to prosecute anyone for assault, or to decide the future of the children—whilst Lucy remains mute. Gunner of course asserts that her silence is “her usual cunning.” My own view is that it is quite genuine. She cannot speak. It has been decided to try the experiment of bringing her to the more humane atmosphere of Four Pence, in the hope that a little TLC and openness will unlock her.

  I am also bringing Josh Lamb. Not for the same reasons. But the protracted stay in Cedar Mount is killing something in him—he is a trapped animal with human eyes. He has a right to an exorcism of his terrible history, and here again the more relaxed, warmer, more “spiritual” atmosphere of the Tigers may be what he needs. I think he will intrigue you. I do not want to sound, old friend, as though I am an entomologist offering you a choice specimen. On the contrary—if the creature is a winged creature, it is a caged eagle, or trapped angel. He is not quite a human being—but he is institutionalised, wary, and battered. I should like to see what he is in freedom.

  It will be v. good to see you. I too can do with an excursion outside these asylum walls. Institutions affect all their inmates, not only the “certified.” You can make mistakes with tongue, and facial expression, and lapses of attention, just as much as with hypodermics and electric shocks. I need a rest. An injection of life. You have always provided that, usually in surprising forms.

  Yours ever,

  Kieran

  Dear Avram,

  I enclose three cassettes, for safe-keeping. Please put them away somewhere safe, so that you are not tempted to festoon the bushes with them, or wind them round your head when you are happily spaced-out. (I remember very clearly what happened to my unique record of the interview-candidate’s conversation in Woolworth’s.) If you have facilities in your Anti-University for getting things copied—without danger to the material—I should be doubly grateful, and will reimburse you.

  You will notice, if you try to listen to the tapes, that they contain longish periods of silence. This is not because the tapes are defective. It is because they are covert recordings of Quaker “Meetings,” which alternate silences with extempore interventions. (The degree to which these interventions are genuinely extempore appears to vary. Some appear to be as well-prepared as the normal sermon. I shall have to work on the indications from which I formed this conclusion.)

  I am not sure whether I am observing a therapeutic group, or a religious community. Various elements from various recognised organisations are present here, in official and unofficial capacities. There are the Quakers, several of whom double their functions as medical, or social workers. There are at least three Church of England clergymen, one of whom is definitely the “leader” of a group, which in this instance is a group-within-a-group, that is, both an “inner group” of the Church of England, called the Children of Joy, and also a “group-within” the Spirit’s Tigers, though there is some conflict as to which—Tigers or Children—will, so to speak, “swallow” the other, and indeed, whether it is “better,” in this instance, to be a “swallowed” “inner” group, or a more loosely-formed, proactive “outer” group. There must be sociological studies of splinter groups which I wish I could consult. But I am constrained by my role here as a “member,” though it is not quite clear, since the boundaries keep shifting, what I am a “member” of.

  You wrote a very interesting letter about the degree to which you were conflicted in writing ethnomethodologically about “teaching” ethnomethodology in an anti-methodological environment such as an anti-university. I think you are fortunate in that, in the context in which you find yourself, you are at least doing what you appear ostensibly to be doing. You present yourself as an ethnomethodologist. You are part of the Anti-University. If you are observing and analysing it, this is only to be expected by all concerned. Whereas here, I am to some extent, to a great extent, playing apart, presenting myself as what I am not, at least by default. I present myself as a person desiring to participate in a group, indeed, to be a member of that group. I do not present myself as a sociologist studying the methodology by which the group defines itself, pursues its aims, achieves its coherence etc. etc. If I did so, I would change the dynamics of the group so that it was not what I was observing, or what I wished to observe. However, it could be argued that my very presence as a group member is not neutral. I am a visible woman, not an invisible “bug” on the wall of the jury-room. As such, I am faced continually with little conflicts of interest. For instance, it is perfectly clear to me that the “leader” of the Children of Joy, Gideon Farrar, rules, or leads, the majority of his flock or circle by a system (conscious, half-conscious or unconscious) of sexual manipulation—promises, threats and inducements. He makes people feel “special” by giving them the thrill of his attention. In some cases I am sure this goes quite as far as intercourse, certainly with the women, and I believe I have observed him to be in the process of extending his charisma to the men. You will hear various remarks of his on the tapes about love “without limits, without conventions, without exceptions.” When he says “love” he always includes the idea of “sex” as a sub-set, or maybe the other way round.

  Here his vocabulary interestingly tangles with that of the psychoanalyst, Elvet Gander. Both are of course sexually interesting because they are professionally forbidden to offer sexual contact with patients or congregation. Both use this prohibition to induce desire. My question is, what effect do I have on the dynamics of the group(s) whose ethnomethodology I am observing, if I adhere to a strict scientific distance and objectivity when I am myself (as a female group member) the object of the charismatic seducers’ attentions? This has, of course, happened, this is not a hypothetical question only. Gideon Farrar has stroked my buttocks repeatedly, and once accused me in a confessional session of being “numb” and “dumb.” Elvet Gander has stared “mesmerically” into my eyes and told me I am “an enigma.” This is tiresome, as I don’t want to draw attention to myself. You see my dilemma, Avram, which is not without its methodological interest
. I have always held as my ideal the exemplary behaviour of the two psychologists who got themselves admitted to hospital and then behaved perfectly normally declaring themselves to be sane, and even stating that they were psychologists—which is, of course, a frequent delusion amongst the insane. You know the case? They had all the difficulty in the world in getting out of the hospital, since no one believed them, and the structure of the institution did not permit the idea of a mis-diagnosis, or a fraud. But I cannot, perhaps, behave perfectly normally, as an undercover observer of a therapeutic group/religious community. I have to ask myself whether, if I was “for real” I would have to either a) repel the advances of priest and doctor or b) give in to them, on the assumption that the dynamics of the group life would carry me along in that direction. If I was “for real” and was repelled by them, it is likely that I would leave the group, and be no longer in a position to observe it.

  If I were to succumb, for my own research purposes, I should be dramatically shifting and deflecting the group dynamic. Anyway, I don’t know if I could bring myself to. I have to record—as part of the total situation—that I personally find Gideon Farrar’s “charm” and “vitality” and “spontaneity” somewhat manufactured—I must analyse how I came to that conclusion—and don’t respond to it. I prefer Dr. Gander—but he thinks of himself as a wild force, an individual, and I don’t think it matters to him so much if one doesn’t respond. I’m more afraid of him “unmasking” me.

  There is a man here—one of the other clergymen—who works with the Listeners (a telephone confessional) and seems to me to have the essence of the charismatic in him, if he wanted to use it. Only he turns it off. Quite deliberately. Like a tap. That isn’t a scientific observation, it’s simply a human observation. His name’s Daniel Orton. Sometimes I think he’s already unmasked me, and is simply watching to see what happens next. He’s a watcher. He’s a better watcher than I am. I don’t know what he’s watching for. He notices people’s feelings, in the abstract, so to speak, if that isn’t a contradiction in terms. He stops quarrels. Just because he knows how to do it, not because it adds glory to him. (Vide Farrar and Gander.) He appears to have no sexual atmosphere round him at all. He’s fat, you might say ugly. I’d settle for him if we all had to have partners. I don’t believe that absence of desire is “sexy.” But perhaps absence of anxiety is. He’s not an anxious man. I was going to say, he’s sad, dreadfully sad, but I have no evidence for that. It may be a projection of my own.