• 1 A.S. Byatt, Babel Tower, London: Chatto and Windus, 1996.
• 2 This paper was written before the publication of the novel, in 2002.

1I would like to begin by amending my title, the Anglo-Saxon brutality of which will be seen in due course to result directly from the nature of the novel in question. A.S. Byatt’s Babel Tower¹ is the third in the projected tetralogy which began with The Virgin in the Garden and Still Life, the completion of which is expected imminently, with A Whistling Woman.² As my topic suggests, I have chosen to concentrate on the darker aspects of this novel, placing it in two distinct schemas of intertextuality — that of the tetralogy, and that of Byatt’s work as a whole — and looking also at how the text functions intratextually, by examining the relations between the various parts of the diegesis, which reach a climax of virtuosity in Babel Tower. This, given the very dark subject-matter of the novel, creates unpleasant and disturbing effects. I will begin with a general overview of as much of the novel as is necessary to situate the ensuing intertextual critique.

• 3 The first novel in Angels and Insects, London: Chatto and Windus, 1992.

4Babel Tower is different from the two novels which begin the tetralogy in that the interaction between the various diegetic levels is considerably more complex. The narrative schema of Babel Tower brings to mind more that of the more recent Possession, with its two distinct temporalities, although in Babel Tower one of these temporalities, incarnated in the extracts from Jude Mason’s novel, is entirely hypodiegetic, which is not the case in Possession. Babel Tower is a complex mosaic of texts juxtaposed and superimposed: as the title suggests, the work is highly polyphonic. Babel Tower can also be considered as a sequel of a sort both to Morpho Eugenia³ and to “The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye”, in that it continues to vehicle through endlessly varied textual play, including the weaving of vast webs of intertextuality, the themes of marriage and childbirth.

• 4 The definition of pornography with which I am working is based on the work of Andrea Dworkin: “The (...)
• 5 Byatt herself refers to the equivocal reception of this, her most recent work, and particularly its (...)
• 6 Susan Hill: “‘A Bit Too Clever’, Review of Babel Tower by A.S. Byatt”, Literary Review, May 1996, 3 (...)

5To turn for a moment to the reception of Babel Tower, it must be said in fairness that the novel was a disappointment to many, and an offence to some. The very dark ambiance of the story is announced by the Man Ray illustration of the Marquis de Sade on the back cover of the hardback edition of the book. Published almost a decade after the essentially comic, although erudite, The Virgin in the Garden, Babel Tower had been long and eagerly awaited, and, when it did appear in April 1996, many of the reviewers showed a simple lack of comprehension, comparing it unfavourably with the ever-popular Possession, and, particularly, denouncing its use of pornography and the references to Sade. That a female writer, and one who had been read rightly or wrongly as championing the “feminist” cause, should write pornography⁴ was seen as a betrayal — notwithstanding the technical brilliance of the framing of the pornography in question, which seemed to pass largely unnoticed.⁵ Susan Hill demands rhetorically, “How do you write about decadence without being decadent, violence and pornography without being violently pornographic?”, and goes on to assert, “[t]he novel is all of these things […]. Reading it is like being plunged into a hideous nightmare full of appalling and vicious people, a pit of nastiness and corruption”.⁶ She refers, apparently, particularly to the scene of the death of Roseace, the main female character in Jude Mason’s novel, Babbletower, who is tortured to death by means of penetration with a many-tongued instrument. The reader’s sentiments regarding this scene, which it is difficult not to qualify as repulsive, are likely to echo Frederica’s when she thinks of the death of her sister: “The violent ending makes the whole story appalling” (99). The extracts from Babbletower, breaking up the long-awaited continuation of the diegesis about Frederica may be experienced as brutal interruptions in more senses than one.

• 7 Culvert has an ontological status similar to that of William Adamson in Morpho Eugenia, a character (...)
• 8 The name Fabian seems to refer, albeit anachronistically, to the English Fabians, founded in 1884. (...)

7Against the historical and metaphorical background of the French Revolution, Babbletower tells the story of a group of aristocrats and their servants who, in order to escape from the Terror (to which some of their number already owe their lives), go with their leader, Culvert, and his lady, Roseace, to the Tour Bruyarde, an immense and isolated castle, far away from “the old world”, and from “rhetoric, fanaticism and terror” (11). They try to create an ideal society, with self-government and a form of communism by children, and those goods which they still possess are held in common. The Tour Bruyarde is peopled with workmen and domestics, but, according to the wishes of Culvert, who has egalitarian ideals, the company dispenses with the idea of social rank, as well as with the institution of the family.⁷ The necessary work is performed by the high and the lowly alike, and each member of the community is free to pursue his or her leisure. The aim is to create a new race of children, who will live unhindered by the problems of their parents. This utopic project goes badly wrong, and the attempt at ultraliberalism swings to extremism, for Culvert is heedless of the warnings of the significantly named Fabian.⁸ The principle of egalitarianism on which the community is supposed to be founded gives way — inevitably, as Jude Mason shows — to untrammeled sexual vice dangerously coupled with ideological tyranny, engendering a spirit of murderous violence, and it is thus that Roseace is killed.

• 9 James M. Glass comments, “If anything in these times approaches the Sadeian rejection of convention (...)
• 10 “Both the intellectual and the more popular branches of the counterculture launched a critique of t (...)
• 11 “Barriers, thresholds and doorways, which must be blown up or broken down, are pervasive metaphors (...)

8Babbletower functions as a sort of fable, extracts of which are dotted through the diegesis, without necessarily being framed by an act of reading on the part of one of the characters, although it is understood that Frederica reads the whole text at some point in the events of the diegesis. Babbletower provides a complement to the analysis of the 1960s which is made in the main diegesis, and certain characteristics of the end of the eighteenth century are taken up in the portrait Byatt draws of the 1960s.⁹ The political ideas of the Revolution find their parallel in this period, the decade which is still celebrated for its rejection of “norms”, of institutions, of the family, of religion, and for its quest for liberty, personal and absolute. Babbletower, which overtly proclaims itself didactic and boasts a moral intention, condemns the ideological and artistic excesses of the counter-culture.¹⁰ However, whereas the diegesis of Babel Tower aims at a limpid analysis of the socio-political movements of the 1960s, Babbletower is clearly a mise en abyme of this treatise on the ideology of that period, evoking in the fantastic mode the conflict between the counter-culture and the establishment (as well as the conflicting currents within the counter-culture).¹¹

• 12 This brings to mind “Bethany”, the household of independent women founded by Christabel and Blanche (...)

9The idea of the “alternative society” is the great theme of Babbletower, but this idea also appears in an attenuated form throughout the diegesis of Babel Tower: the inhabitants of Bran House form a microcosm, as do the pupils of the public schools (real and imaginary) which crop up in the narrative. Other examples range through the evangelical group founded by Gideon Farrar in Still Life, “The Children of Joy”, which continues to grow, the encounter group organised by psychoanalyst Elvet Gander, and the experimental community of women and children formed by Frederica and Agatha Mond.¹²

• 13 “[B]ran House was an ordinary dwelling-place, so that its dairies and conservatories, outhouses and (...)

10What interests me for the purpose of this article is the insertion of Babbletower in the novel. As well as functioning as a mise en abyme for the ideology of the 1960s and a forum in which it can be parodied and satirised, Babbletower can also be read as a mise en abyme of the story of Frederica and her search for a place within the community, which will be seen in turn to be a part of her long apprenticeship as a writer. Clear parallels are established, between the narrator of Babbletower — the observer, the giver of dire warnings — and a character in the hypodiegetic narrative called Turdus Cantor, who warns, “Culvert will see where he is going, and I shall look on” (283-284), and also between Nigel and Culvert. The principal parallel is between Frederica and Roseace, for while in Babbletower, the portrait of a utopia (tending towards a dystopia) takes its most explicit form, utopia is a trope which also characterises the diegesis of the 1960s. Bran House, Nigel’s family seat, with its vast stables and outbuildings, as well as its moat,¹³ is also an isolated society, functioning according to particular rules which impose tyranny, and silence dissenting voices. By means of the interpenetration of the diegetic levels, a parallel is drawn between Frederica’s destiny and Roseace’s.

• 14 The husband’s absence, the near-fatal curiosity of the young wife, the search for the key and the s (...)
• 15 “Inside his wardrobe are various locked cases and briefcases […] She tries various […] keys on vari (...)
• 16 Jean Ricardou terms this process “intertextualité restreinte”. Quoted in Lucien Dällenbach, “Intert (...)

12In what I have called the Bluebeard scene — for Babel Tower contains, among a host of other intertextual references and reworkings, a rewriting of this tale, with Nigel as Bluebeard¹⁴ — Frederica, in the process of trying to recuperate a letter stolen by her husband, finds an unknown key which fits a trunk, the existence of which she was unaware of, and thus discovers a stash of pornographic magazines.¹⁵ This scene can be analysed intratextually along two axes: by comparing Babel Tower with Byatt’s other work,¹⁶ and by analysing the parallels between the various parts of the diegesis within Babel Tower. The unhappy discovery of one lover or spouse by the other recalls the many other such discoveries, attached to the myths of Melusina and of Cupid and Psyche, and to the tales in the Arabian Nights, which are particularly concentrated in Possession, Morpho Eugenia, and “The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye”. Alternatively, taking Babel Tower in isolation as our frame of reference, the scene is prefigured, in a manner which amply demonstrates the device of interpenetration, by an apparently innocent scene in which Frederica reads a story to her small son at his bedtime, ostensibly creating a charming tableau of maternal-filial love. With this, the narrator ironically juxtaposes, in the space of sixty pages, another way of going to bed, as well as another way of perceiving the female role: the peaceful bedtime of a little boy, reassured by his mother’s presence, is vividly opposed to that of a grown man, Nigel, whose only satisfaction lies in inflicting pain and humiliation on women he sees as his playthings.

• 17 I refer to the ideas of writers such as Rousseau and Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, as well as to the E (...)
• 18 The names which Byatt gives to the two independent boys’ boarding schools which she invents in Babe (...)

14Leo’s delight in this scene sets up a parallel with the Romantic notion of the innocence of the child brought into question in Babbletower.¹⁷ The evocation of this little story by Beatrix Potter is used to show that Leo, like his father, is attracted by cruelty — “I love it when they do horrible things to each other” (105). It serves also to introduce into the text the word “Brock” (Tommy Brock being one of the characters in The Tale of Mr Todd). “Brock’s” is the name of the preparatory school where the sons of the Reiver family have been sent for three generations, and where Nigel, to Frederica’s horror, is determined to send Leo. We can identify a semantic hinge here, for “brock” means badger, an animal renowned for its dirty habits — and moreover a frequenter of tunnels, or culverts, which plunges us back into the dark world of the Tour Bruyarde; and Brock’s School, according to Frederica’s suspicions and Jude Mason’s confirmations, is indeed a place where small boys are sexually abused, where “normal” instincts are perverted, so that the abused become in turn the abusers of others.¹⁸

• 19 At Rugby School until the 1980s, pupils were forbidden to carry an umbrella until their third year. (...)

15The suggestion of bodily orifices misused is reflected in the unpleasant infiltration of one level of the text by another. Later, in a more condensed version of the device of suggestive juxtaposition, William Burroughs-style cut-ups of letters to Frederica from Nigel’s lawyer regarding his request for custody of Leo are used to suggest veiled accusations to these establishments: it is thus that Brock’s School is described as having “French facilities Latin elementary all confusion” (425). The “French facilities”, in the context of the oscillation between Babbletower and the main diegesis, beg to be read as a reference to Sade, while “Latin elementary” brings to mind Latin anatomical terms. Moreover, through her evocation of Brock’s and Swineburn, which turn on a hierarchised world and on petty rules and disproportionately severe punishments for breaking these rules,¹⁹ Byatt makes an implicit comparison with the evil and disturbing world of the Tour Bruyarde.

• 20 In The Virgin in the Garden, Edmund Wilkie observes that, according to Winnicott, “People were afra (...)

17The child’s bedtime scene thus has to be read in association with Nigel’s pornographic reading material, the one contaminating the other. Disturbingly, while Leo’s “innocence” is sullied by the evocation of his father’s tastes, Nigel’s virility is also brought into question. The titles of his preferred magazines — My Bad Little Bedside Book, Naughty Girls Well and Truly Punished — are at first view as innocent and childlike as the world of Beatrix Potter. Nigel’s abstruse desires are thus brought down to the desire of the child for the comfort of the mother, and the reader is presented with one of the classic theses concerning male violence towards women: the seed is sown in the mother’s affection for her son, which can later be transformed into hatred of all women, who are seen as emasculating and suffocating (282-283).²⁰ This theme is played out in Babbletower at one of Culvert’s confessional-cathartic theatre sessions (based on Artaud’s Theatre of Cruelty). The interpenetration of the bedtime scene and the Bluebeard scene brings into question the relativity of the behaviour of father and son: is Leo, at four, corrupted by his father’s penchant for cruelty, or is Nigel unable to come to terms with the needs and impulsions of his childhood?

• 21 The field of reference of these objects does not only concern intratextual relations between parts (...)
• 22 “[H]e gives a great whoop of laughter, and throws the axe at her […] She feels blood and blood, her (...)
• 23 The device of the key is thus used less restrictively and more insidiously than in Morpho Eugenia, (...)

19The key to Nigel’s trunk can be seen as representative of the narrative device by which, in Babel Tower, certain nodal points or points of connection are set up between the two principal diegetic levels.²¹ These nodal points are often signalled by objects, the appearance of which in one diegesis points at the interpretation of the other and of the interaction between the two. The axe which Nigel uses to try to prevent Frederica from leaving²² is transmuted into the many-tongued instrument of torture which kills Roseace in Babbletower, and immediately after the chapter of Babbletower in which Fabian’s wife, Mavis, finds herself incapable of living according to the laws of the Tour Bruyarde, and jumps off the tower, Frederica goes to see a lawyer, Arnold Begbie, to instigate divorce proceedings, and finds that his tie is “spattered regularly with blood red dots” (267). The use of such hinges is significant in that it allows Babel Tower to oscillate between metonymic and metaphoric progression, a tendency in Byatt’s work which can be observed to intensify as time goes on.²³

• 24 A.S. Byatt, The Game (1967), London: Penguin, 1983.

20This short paper represents a brief moment only in my analysis, and leaves many questions unanswered, but it is thus that the two principal diegetic levels interreact, reflecting each other in a darker and more insidious way than in Possession. At the interfaces of the 1960s diegesis and Babbletower, we find indications that the latter can be read as elements in an allegory of the life of Frederica (an allegory in the sense that there is to a certain point a correspondence between the apparent discourse and the implicit). In certain respects, Babbletower functions in Babel Tower similarly to the embedded tale, “Things Are Not What They Seem” in Morpho Eugenia, which is addressed by Matty Crompton to William Adamson, even if Babbletower is not addressed exclusively to Frederica, who is never its only reader. In spite of my initial reservations as to this novel, it is irrefutable that Babel Tower deploys a rich and original romanesque, very far removed from the emergent “feminist realist” texts actually written in the 1960s, which Byatt treats so satirically in The Game²⁴, at the beginning of her career.