Babel Tower
A. S. Byatt
Language: English
Pages: 640
ISBN: 0679736808
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
At the heart of Babel Tower are two law cases, twin strands of the Establishment's web, that shape the story: a painful divorce and custody suit and the prosecution of an "obscene" book. Frederica, the independent young heroine, is involved in both. She startled her intellectual circle of friends by marrying a young country squire, whose violent streak has now been turned against her. Fleeing to London with their young son, she gets a teaching job in an art school, where she is thrown into the thick of the new decade. Poets and painters are denying the value of the past, fostering dreams of rebellion, which focus around a strange, charismatic figure -- the near-naked, unkempt and smelly Jude Mason, with his flowing gray hair, a hippie before his time.
We feel the growing unease, the undertones of sex and cruelty. The tension erupts over his novel Babbletower, set in a past revolutionary era, where a band of people retire to a castle to found an ideal community. In this book, as in the courtrooms, as in the art school's haphazard classes and on the committee set up to study "the teaching of language," people function increasingly in groups. Many are obsessed with protecting the young, but the fashionable notion of children as innocent and free slowly comes to seem wishful, and perilous.
Babel Tower is the third, following The Virgin in the Garden and Still Life, of a planned quartet of novels set in different mid-century time frames. The personal and legal crises of Frederica mirror those of the age. This is the decade of the Beatles, the Death of God, the birth of computer languages. In Byatt's vision, the presiding genius of the 1960s seems to be a blend of the Marquis de Sade and The Hobbit. The resulting confusion, charted with a brilliant imaginative sympathy, is as comic as it is threatening and bizarre.
The Duel in Early Modern England: Civility, Politeness and Honour (Ideas in Context)
Large comfortable woman, an elderly man in a tweed jacket, and a nun. Frederica stares at this uncomfortable ring of unrelated faces. “They can’t expect you to sit like that,” she says. The nun says, “It has been known. Sometimes the only available chairs are infant chairs. I knew a woman who got down and her bones set into that position, and she had to be carried home bent up like a ladder, most unfortunate.” “My astronomy class,” says the elderly man, “has more or less acceptable chairs.”.
Does not tingle as it did. He strokes her spine and the flame lies low, flickers sullenly. He puts his warm, mute hand suddenly, swiftly, between her legs, holds her gently, waits for the shift in her pulse, the very slight relaxation of her tense muscles, and says, “This is real. Remember. Now I’m going.” He goes. Frederica is on the whole pleased that John Ottokar has met Leo in this public, uncompromised way. This is more because she does not enjoy the fact that her relations with John.
She knows, as dreamers know, is what is used to roll condemned men, unable to walk, close enough to the hangman. She pushes it towards the keyhole. Its wheels are wooden, and crank and grumble. She mounts the steps and grips the bar in front of her. She can see in. The keyhole is like a long telescopic tunnel. Dark. Beyond is a garden. It is in many ways the Long Royston garden where she played the young Virgin Queen in Alexander’s Astraea. It has wide lawns, with croquet hoops and rose trees,.
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.
He thought it was something more natural, more intrinsically part of the nature of things, a tongue in which there were words for lion, lamb, apple, snake, tree, good, evil which wholly contained and corresponded to all their power and meaning. Elephant spoke elephant, earwig spoke earwig. The young Gerard Wijnnobel listened and watched. He listened, watched, was revolted, and revolted. The lesson he drew, quite clearly from his father’s Bible commentaries, and more reluctantly—for aesthetic.