A Whistling Woman by A. S. Byatt
The glass box for this programme had been rhythmically divided into ghostly cells, which could be seen, on closer examination, to be the plastic wells of egg-boxes. Behind the three chairs at the table Tenniel’s Humpty Dumpty sat precariously on his gridded wall. There were eggs on the table, and cartoon eggs-with-legs ran across the foreground, pursued in an endless circle by cartoon chickens and cartoon disembodied eyes behind spectacles, observing which might come first. There were also modern versions of the slithy tove—something like badgers, something like lizards, something like corkscrews—and the mome raths—flying green pigs. There were ostrich eggs and Fabergé-decorated eggs and neat drawers of egg-collectors’ eggs.
The subject of discussion—agreed in advance by both speakers—was Freud.
The object was a Picasso ceramic. It was not a real one, but a good copy. The studio did not run to the insurance, even in those days, of a real Picasso.
Elvet Gander looked, with his high bald crown and his long marbly face, like another variation on the egg theme. The heavy studio make-up accentuated this pallid look, and also the deep oval lids over his deep-set eyes. He had two characteristic expressions—a brooding stillness, with the lids dropped, and a flashing mesmeric attention when he raised them, and his dark eyes glittered. He was mobile and labile, he gestured with his long fingers, he shrugged and hunched his shoulders, he pursed his big lips, or stretched them in an alarming grin. He was wearing a flowing shirt in tie-dyed blue Indian cotton, embroidered with little stellar mandalas of mirror-glass, and round his neck a silver crescent moon on a leather thong.
Hodder Pinsky was tall, white-gold, and extravagantly symmetrical, Frederica immediately thought, taking his large hand in the Hospitality Room. His hair was a Nordic blond, his face chiselled, his cheek-bones perfect, his long mouth exactly held between control and relaxation. His fingernails were square and elegant. He wore a charcoal flannel suit, a sky-blue shirt, and a tie patterned with a design of reversible cubes, in black and white. His eyes were invisible, because he wore glasses—heavy-framed—with very thick blue lenses. He explained—it was almost the first thing he said—that he wore the glasses not as an affectation, but because he was “purblind, that is, I can see my computer print-out, I can read, but you are an elegant blur.” His voice was American, East Coast, easy. He watched them—Wilkie, Frederica, Gander—with parts of his body that were not his eyes.
On air, Frederica asked them both to say what they thought creativity was.
Pinsky gave a definition in scientific terms. Creativity was the generation of new ideas, new explanations. He was, he said, in agreement with Noam Chomsky that the human mind is born, to use a metaphor, wired to construct grammar, and other forms of thought, as beavers are born wired to make dams, or birds to make nests. A human child can make endless new sentences it has never heard before, precisely because it is physiologically formed and ordered to be able to do so. A creative person makes a new idea as a child makes a new sentence. Some are more useful, or more surprising, than others. Some make previously unsuspected connections between things in the world. Part of his own work was to devise computer programmes, and laboratory experiments, to study the thought processes by which new ideas might be generated. To simulate thought. To examine choice.
Gander said that scientists always took scientific discoveries as their paradigm of creativity. Whereas the great work of art—at once unique and universal, at once open to explanation and resistant to categorisation—showed us the true extent of human powers. You would never, he said, make a laboratory programme that would “explain” King Lear, you would never simulate in a laboratory the sublime pathos of Beethoven, or the perfect balance of mathematical precision and cosmic understanding in Piero della Francesca’s Baptism of Christ.
Pinsky said Gander had to explain not only how he recognised “sublime pathos” but what it was, and how people came to agree that they had identified it.
Gander said the great work of art was a raid by the intrepid conscious mind on the inchoate seething mass of the undifferentiated unconscious. The unconscious, Freud has shown, is without any sense of time or space. Its energy is the energy of the pleasure principle, desire, not reality. The great artist descends like Orpheus into the abyss, embraces the demons of his unspeakable desires and fears—of all our unspeakable desires and fears—and returns them to consciousness where he makes an image of them which allows them to be contemplated steadily. So Sophocles went and stared at the Oedipus—lascivious and murderous—who inhabits all infants—and brought back the knowledge of it, so that we might experience the horror as beauty and order. So Shakespeare went with Hamlet, to look at the roots of fratricide, patricide, incest and inhibition—and even deeper, at the desire of all life to return to inertia, the secret that the life instincts are all indifferently death instincts—and clambered up from amongst the dark roots of time and space to the ordered organic world, to make iambic pentameters which contained the terror—sluggish or stabbing—in the rhythms of time and space, of the conscious mind.
I am a Freudian, not a Jungian, said Elvet Gander. But I have recently come to the conclusion that the Master’s religious scepticism was a little limiting. I think Jung may be right in seeing the great work of art as a mandala, a formal design which enables us to contemplate truth.
Pinsky, smiling whitely, said his ambitions were more mundane. But he did believe that cognitive psychology—as opposed to psychoanalysis—which, if Dr. Gander would forgive him, was itself a poem, used language with poetic imprecision and resonance—he did believe cognitive psychology might have something eventually to say about the geometries of mandalas and indeed the regularities and irregularities of iambic pentameters. He was interested in the multifarious, simultaneous operations of the mind, in the way consciousness pictured and ordered the patterns it worked with.
There is, he said, an interesting computer programme called Pandaemonium, which is psychologists’ everyday comic poetry, not sublime, though it takes its name, I suppose, from the industrious underworld of Paradise Lost. This programme has a hierarchy of mechanical demons who are devised, or designed (by us, their masters), to recognise patterns in rushes of random information, to create order from noise. It depends on what we call “parallel processing.” There are the “data demons” who recognise images, and shout. There are the computational demons who recognise clusters of recognised images, and shout. There are the cognitive demons who represent possible patterns, and collect the computed shouts. And there is the “decision demon” who identifies the stimuli by the loudest shouting. The system can learn. It can identify printed letters, and morse code. It may one day understand what is so—unrepeatable—about Hamlet, or Beethoven’s Third.
It will hardly save lives, or sanity, said Gander.
It may organise cities and communities of scientists to make justice—and art—said Pinsky. It may make us wiser about what we are. It may teach us not to misdescribe ourselves. I am not sure that your Freudian unconscious—however beautiful your poetry—exists. I think it is a reification of a fear, or a wish.
Frederica directed the conversation towards Sigmund Freud, whose bearded, bespectacled face, dark-eyed, wise, apprehensive and somehow uncertain, she thought, which was the best thing about it, filled the screen briefly, replacing Humpty Dumpty.
Gander spoke of Freud in much the same terms as he had spoken of Freud’s understanding of Oedipus and Hamlet. He used the image of the dauntless hero, his self-analysis an unprecedented feat of discovery. He said the Master had changed the whole cultural world of his time, had changed the way everyone saw their bodies, their minds, their desires and their fears.
Had changed the imagery of daily life, said Frederica. Had changed the form of advertisements, which had gone through being conscious attempts to play on unconscious sexual metaphors and were now blatantly ironic about them.
Gander looked a little baffled. The camera rested on Pinsky’s blue lenses. Frederica wondered if he saw a
Pinsky said he felt that Freud’s romantic description of the unconscious mind had detracted from various very useful practical explorations of its workings. For we must all be aware that we lived in a stream of thoughts and observations and stimuli, only a very few of which could be ordered or used at any one time. It was like travelling in the tail of a comet, which was made up of a battering turmoil of lumps of ice and stone and flares of gas. One of the great mysteries of the mind was the storage of memory. Things we have known, and lost, but know we can find again. A name, an event. Why do we remember one thing more than another. How? What is the mechanism?
Freud, Gander said, had been quite sure that all attempts to locate ideas and excitations in specific nerve-cells or brain locations would fail.
That was then, said Pinsky. But we might agree that both our disciplines study the ordering of this doubleness of thinking. It’s had various names. We can call it rational and intuitive, logical and prelogical, realistic and autistic. To come back to the subject of our programme, it’s been labelled “constrained” against “creative”—as though the creative was always irrational, on the side of chaos and multifariousness. In computer terms we call it parallel and sequential processing. It may correspond to what Freud called “primary-process” as opposed to “secondary processing.” And all of us notice when the primary process seems, so to speak, to invade the rational, to cause a blip, a Freudian slip, which might also be a “creative” error or intuition. In the end we may be able to describe the mechanisms which make the ineluctable associations of memory and forgetting with the help of which Freud performed his analytic revelations. I should like to tell you a Freudian story.
Gander put inscrutable finger-tips to pursed lips and dropped his eyelids.
Here is the story Hodder Pinsky told, which is the story Freud told, which is in some sense the story Virgil told. It was also to play an odd part in other stories, including Frederica’s. It is a story which carries an immediate, wholly satisfactory verbal pleasure in pattern, and reaches out into biology, and human history, like rings round a stone in a dark pool.
Freud met the young man in a train. He knew him already—he was Jewish, of an academic background. They fell into conversation (Freud says explicitly that he forgets how) about the social status “of the race to which we both belonged.” The young man said his generation “was doomed (as he expressed it) to atrophy, and could not develop its talents or satisfy its needs.”
He ended an impassioned speech with a misquotation from Virgil’s Dido, committing her vengeance on Aeneas to posterity.
Exoriar(e) ex nostris ossibus ultor.
Freud, appealed to, supplied the missing. Exoriar(e) ALIQUIS nostris ex ossibus ultor. The young man challenged Freud to use his theory that nothing is forgotten for no reason, to explain the inaccessibility of an indefinite pronoun. It was psychoanalysis as a train-game. Freud instructed him to free-associate to the word ALIQUIS.
He divided it. A liquis.
He added. Reliquiem. Liquefying, fluidity, fluid.
Have you discovered anything so far?
No, said Freud, but go on.
The young man, who appears to have been given to scornful laughter and irritability, went on.
He remembered Simon of Trent, and the accusations of ritual blood-sacrifice brought against Jews. He remembered a thesis that the slaughtered were incarnations of the saviour to come. He remembered an article in an Italian newspaper. “What St. Augustine Says about Women.”
Freud waited.
He remembered various other saints. Simon, Benedict. He remembered Origen.
He remembered St. Januarius and the miracle of his annually liquefying blood.
Freud pointed out that January and August were to do with the calendar.
He remembered Garibaldi threatening the priests and saying he hoped the liquefaction-miracle would take place shortly.
He remembered, hesitantly, “a lady from whom I might easily hear a piece of news that would be very awkward for both of us.”
“That her periods have stopped,” said Freud, putting together calendar, blood, origin, child-sacrifice, the avenger who would rise up ...
Frederica said the compression, the condensation, the interconnected-ness made it seem like a work of art.
Or made it seem, said Gander, that works of art arose from such driven, condensed associations.
Pinsky said that somewhere in the brain was a mechanism for retrieving associations that worked like Pandaemonium. That Freud was an unusually lucid computer.
They laughed.
And so they went on to the Picasso. The clay pot was curved, and full-bellied, standing on hens’ claws, with a cockscomb over its delicate beaked spout, and the pointed breasts and pleated navel of a human woman. Its handle was a curved tail. It was made in white earthenware, dabbed with smoke and black paint; it had wicked staring eyes, and pretty nipples, and a flurry of wing-pinions. All three laughed when they saw it, as though laughter were the appropriate response. (Hodder Pinsky raised it close to his face and scanned it with his blue gaze.) Frederica read out a description by Picasso’s son of how, in Vallauris, he would seize the potters’ vases on the wheel.
“My father grabbed it, wrung its neck, pinched it round the belly, pressed it down on the table, bending the neck. A pigeon. A hen. The hands had worked so fast that I hadn’t noticed the head had been shaped. A pencil picked up, a few dashes gouged the surface—eyes, texture of feathers. How swift and sure the hands were.”
Frederica said it was a solid, tangible metaphor. Hen-in-woman. Woman-in-hen. Gander said we loved polymorphs for sexual reasons of childhood sensuality and for religious reasons to do with integration into the Cosmos—look at the human-animals in cave paintings. Pinsky said the cock-hen-woman-vase was, as the programme designer had cleverly known, an analogon of the Carrollian slithy toves and mome raths. A cross between badgers, lizards and corkscrews, he said, was a nice parody of the Lascaux stag-men, the jungle owl-men. Rendered comic and innocuous by the mechanism of the corkscrew.
It was all under the aegis of Humpty Dumpty, said Frederica. Who introduced the idea of portmanteau words to the language, and to the dictionaries. Who thought words should do as he said, and behave themselves. There was some sort of intense pleasure she didn’t understand in the inventiveness of compression. Hen/woman, From-home = mome.
Humpty Dumpty, said Pinsky, believed that he was the master of language. He was either a grammarian or an anti-grammarian.
Gander grinned wickedly. “Look where he ended up, the master of language. In a shattered heap of egg shells, that no amount of creativity can put together again.”
Overconscious, H. Dumpty. Overweening.
Frederica had grown more confident about addressing the camera. She smiled foxily at it, and told the invisible watchers that she hoped they’d enjoyed the various ideas of creativity they had looked at, which had ranged from raids on the underworld to a humming pandemonium of sequencing wires, from the compression of metaphor to the expansion of the chaotic comet-tail across the heavens, from the sphinx-like face of Freud to the creative fingers of Picasso and the tragic verbal overconfidence of Humpty Dumpty. She was herself no more certain why we cared so much about metaphor, or mental connections, or great works of art, than she had been to start with. But she had many more metaphors and stories to think with, her world was richer. She remembered, she said, as their faces faded and the screen filled with midnight blue-black, in which little points of light appeared, the creation myth in which everything had sprung from the Mundane Egg laid by Night in the lap of primeval chaos.
The Hospitality Room was underground, a somewhat aimless place full of stale smoke and magnetised dust-particles. In those opulent days there was a trolley full of bottles—whisky, gin, vodka, red and white wines. There were sofas with bright blue and tomato covers round low tables. Frederica went to sit near Hodder Pinsky, partly so that he should be able to see her, and partl
“I assure you,” he said, “that it is unusual to be able to utter consecutive sentences on the screen. I predict it will not last. For two reasons. Human beings will become used to thinking in rapid bytes. Sound-bites. And advertising will cut our thoughts to ribbons.”
He opened and shut his amiable mouth. His teeth were white and even.
Frederica hesitated.
“We play visual games. We have wandering cartoon creatures, and transparent screens. Chickens and eggs and Humpty Dumpty himself.”
“And you are wondering if I can see them?”
He ran his finger-tips over the contours of the Picasso jar, which had come with them.
“I am still a visual animal. I place the gestalt of this creature—flesh and feathers—on geometrical planes. I have to teach myself to think with my fingers. Here—the little breasts—it is smooth, here the clay is roughened. You get a different surprise at the junctures—where a human curve slips into an avian one—with your fingers. But I think with my eyes.”
Elvet Gander had moved purposefully and silently across the carpet and sat down on Frederica’s other side.
Hodder Pinsky said suddenly
“Do you want to see what I see?”
He handed his heavy glasses to Frederica.