If conscious novelists are the novelists who cannot begin writing until they know what they’re going to say, then unconscious novelists are the ones who have no idea what they’re going to say until after they’ve said it. Though no writer has ever managed to achieve either perfect consciousness or unconsciousness, there is nonetheless an observable difference between a writer like Charles Dickens, who tends to figure out what it all means at the end of his novels, and one like Henry James, who tends to know from the beginning.
What makes A. S. Byatt’s new work, Babel Tower (Random House, 623 pages, $ 25.95), so fascinating is that the author — who is as severely conscious a novelist as we have writing in English today — has for the first time attempted to write an unconscious novel. Byatt, who found wide popularity with her Booker Prize-winning Possession in 1990, typically uses her books to nest narrative within narrative, like closefitting Chinese- boxes. But in Babel Tower she has sent those narratives out to clash like ignorant armies on the page — in the hope, one presumes, that some meaning will emerge victorious.
If Babel Tower were about anything other than London in the 1960s, the confusion of it all would be enough to wreck the book. As it is, the 60s probably were this confusing at the time, and the novel manages to catch the real tenor of those strange days. But the most interesting aspect of Babel Tower is watching a writer like A. S. Byatt, whose instincts are always to tie off the loose threads, write a book about all the threads coming unraveled.
After a pair of carefully constructed novels in the 1960s — one of which, The Game, is thought to describe the sibling rivalry her sister, Margaret Drabble, described from the other side in her own novel A Summer Birdcage — Byatt embarked upon a series of books about Frederica Potter, a young lady- in-waiting of the “new Elizabethan Age” that began with the coronation of Elizabeth II in 1953. Babel Tower is the third volume in a planned tetralogy relating Frederica’s life and times, following The Virgin in the Garden and Still Life. Byatt interrupted the sequence in 1990 to write the witty and wellreceived Possession (a sort of highbrow takeoff of The French Lieutenant’s Woman in which the lives of modern scholars parallel and parody their Victorian subjects) and the superb 1992 novella Morpho Eugenia (a tale of High-Victorian research into manners, eugenics, and the social life of ants, recently filmed as Angels and Insects).
In Babel Tower, she takes up the life of Frederica, now with a young son and a failing marriage, after the death of her sister with which Still Life closed. A studious schoolgirl and a university success, Frederica grew up almost entirely on books, and a constant theme of Babel Tower is what reading does to people. Almost no one in the novel has a sane understanding of the written word. Frederica’s school-age son still hasn’t learned to read. Her husband, the blueblooded Nigel Reiver, keeps pornographic magazines locked in his briefcase and despises his wife’s world of books. A wouldbe pop star — the twin brother of the lover Frederica finds in London after escaping from her squire husband — sets a tower of classic books on fire during a concert. The flames spread across the stage and badly injure him.
But he’s not the only one to be burned by books: Frederica’s life is seared by reading. Taught to believe that only literature offers wisdom and salvation — but at the exact moment at which literature itself, under the influence of D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover, was declaring that salvation lies only with sex — she has been unable to escape her self- conscious, booklearned desire for unselfconscious surrender. But though her antiintellectual husband is the only man whose performance in bed brought her a hint of what Lawrence might have been writing about, her marriage has grown unbearable. And early in the novel Frederica — the sexy bookworm, the fishnet bluestocking — scapes her Chatterley life in the country for a chattering life in London’s world of books. Byatt devotes the largest portions of Babel Tower to Frederica’s attempt to build a career in the city while her divorce, with its spying detectives and bitter custody battle, slowly comes to trial.
Frederica assumes the usual work of a literary scrounger: teaching adult education and evening courses, hacking out book reviews, and vetting manuscripts for publishing houses. On her recommendation, a publisher takes on an author, Jude Mason, and prints his anti-utopian fantasy, “Babbletower” – – a sort of J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit meets George Orwell’s 1984, with a dash of the Marquis de Sade’s 120 Days of Sodom thrown in for flavor. The book (long portions of which Byatt sets throughout Babel Tower) is promptly confiscated as pornography, and London’s literary scene buzzes with the comments of its supporters and detractors.
Meanwhile, Frederica helps to gentrify her rundown London neighborhood. Her son Leo plots to bring his mother and father back together. Her bereaved brother-inlaw (an Anglican priest) organizes a dial-up spiritual hotline. Several of her friends help a Royal Commission investigate the British public school system that may have twisted her husband into a prostitutefrequenting sadist and Jude Mason into a homosexual misanthrope. And again meanwhile — one of the ways in which Byatt captures the compressed feel of the 60s is by making Babel Tower a book of innumerable “meanwhiles” — the swinging 60s of the Beatles and Carnaby Street begins to gather steam. The sadistic “Moors Murders” of the Nietzsche-quoting Ian Brady and Myra Hindley capture the British headlines. Sex seems easy. Kennedy dies.
As though admitting the impossibility of making a single narrative of it all, Frederica begins to keep a commonplace book in which she sets down her random thoughts, interspersed with newspaper clippings, letters from her husband’s lawyers, quotations from fashionable 60s authors, and snippets from D.H. Lawrence and E. M. Forster.
Jude Mason’s “Babbletower” — which recounts the collapse of a would-be utopia based entirely on sensuality into murder and sexual torture — serves as a deliberate shadow of the novel that contains it, allowing Byatt to record her reservations about the Decade of Love and her 1990s knowledge of how it all turned out. Though Frederica and her friends are outraged when a jury finds “Babbletower” obscene, Byatt’s presentation of the conflicting experts’ testimony suggests she herself is not so sure. Byatt is willing to grant the old order at least some virtues: The divorce court that allows Nigel’s lawyer to brutalize Frederica — and thus seems an example of the oppression the new order needs to destroy — is the same court that goes on to resolve the custody fight over Leo with sensitivity and wisdom.
If “Babbletower,” the book-within-the-book, is one shadow of Babel Tower, Frederica’s commonplace book is another shadow, reminding the reader of the confusions the 1960s wrought in English literature. Frederica has become ” juxtaposed but divided, not yearning for fusion,” and her paste-up job here is “an art-form of fragments, juxtaposed, not interwoven, not ‘organically’ spiralling up like a tree or a shell, but constructed.” She has given up on making a single narrative of her life and times, content instead to rest in confusion.
Byatt’s usual Chinese-box technique, ordinarily very neat and well- considered, gives way in Babel Tower to juxtaposed stories and battling voices. Passages from “Babbletower” jostle with passages from Frederica’s commonplace book, only to be elbowed aside by court transcripts, long discussions about the latest trends in 1960s science and pop music, and Frederica’s reader-analyses for her publishing house. Real literary and historical figures from the 60s make cameo appearances, undifferentiated from the fictional characters.
And yet Babel Tower is not simply a postmodern collage like the commonplace book — and for the same reason that Frederica Potter-Reiver is not Antonia Susan Byatt. Frederica is only a passive reader, but A. S. Byatt is an active writer. The fictional character may unconsciously represent the swirling confusions of her times, but the author has to perform the conscious work of making her character a representative figure.
The result is that Byatt remains a conscious novelist, even when trying to write an unconscious novel. If she seems designless, it is by deliberate design; if she seems confusing, it is by clearheaded choice. Confusion is not a very satisfactory answer to the puzzle of the 1960s, and one wishes Byatt — with the unique resources of her ongoing history of Frederica and the New Elizabethan Age — had found something better. But of the puzzle itself, we’re not likely to find a more deliberate, clearheaded account than Babel Tower.
By J. Bottum
