Sometimes the biggest challenge for a critic is getting to know a new writer. That's kind of a misstatement, in this case, however. For one thing, not only is the English novelist A.S. Byatt an established name in her own right, she's also one of those authors who often gets touted as a very Important Name. Entertain conjecture of a time when it was possible to speak of something known as an Ivory Tower. It is, or was (once upon a time) something like a catch-all term to describe the hallowed halls of academe. To tell you the truth, I don't know what that's like. I never got the chance to experience whatever this type of setting was supposed to be. However, everything I've either read or heard on the subject tells of a brief span of time (possibly from an inception dating to somewhere in or about the 1920s, all the way to a quiet and unremarked upon downfall at or near the mid-60s) when this academic establishment was meant to be a summation of all the best and brightest in terms of the Arts and Sciences. In the fields of literary study, this amounted to the creation of a kind of hierarchy of what was considered the "Best Kind" of literature, if you can believe it. I'm not sure that this was a mindset that ever took a real hold of the general audience, yet it was a criterion of a collection of critics and college professors such as Edmund Wilson, William Empson, and F.R. Leavis. If you don't know who I'm talking about, let that be history's verdict on guys like them.
In retrospect, it becomes easy to see just how misguided the whole idea of an Upper Echelon of the Written Word is, when you stop and think it over. There will always be too many stories for even a single lifetime (at least I hope that's true), and beyond a general ability to say that this narrative works while the other one doesn't. it's always going to be perhaps impossible to claim any one text as the Greatest Novel Ever Written! I think the best any of us will ever be able to do is to point to which stories are our favorites, and then see if we have it in us to defend our enthusiasms. As long as you're not hurting anyone while doing so, then go nuts, I say. Still, the historical record does show that there was a time when a lot forgotten critics and English Lit 101 instructors seemed to have concocted a shared mission to both define and limit whatever it was that constituted a real book. Looking back on all that now, the one defining feature that probably still stands out the most about the thought of guys like Wilson and Harold Bloom is that most of them saw fit to dismiss the Literature of the Fantastic as beneath consideration. This is something they took as a fundamental, axial type of mindset. It meant there was always going to be this disconnect between what Bloom thought Literature with a capital L was supposed to be, and the actual reading and movie going habits of the public at large. They were all working with a picture which, due to their snobbery, was always going to remain incomplete.
It meant that there was always going to be a very short list roster of Important Names that would ever be considered worthy of the Ivory Tower. Here is where you'd find the likes of John Cheever, John Updike, Eudora Welty, Williams Carlo Williams, and Henry James. The upshot of all this academic hoarding was that it now looks like this close guarding and proselytizing means that there were a lot of good literary talents that had their chances at fame squandered by a bunch of opinion makers who were more concerned with being the In-Crowd, rather than alerting readers to the merits of the artist. It's a categorical shirking of the critic's proper job, and perhaps that's the most telling verdict of the efforts of Bloom, Leavis, and the artistic outlook they once represented. The funny part is that they claimed to set their sights forever against the Popular Genres, while also allowing in a handful of scribblers who just so happened to give Horror, Fantasy, and Science Fiction their modern identities. Hence the Tower could admit the presence of Fantasists like Vladimir Nabokov, Jorge Luis Borges, John Milton, Dante, Homer, and or course, Shakespeare and Charles Dickens. The idea that any of these guys might have considered themselves popular authors writing to entertain the popular masses never seems to have occurred to Bloom, or a lot of the former chalk dusted gate keepers of the Tower who preceded him.
A.S. Byatt was one of the few women authors who were allowed to have a seat this once so vaunted table. Looking at the works that bear her name, it's kind of easy to see why they would be willing to let her past the gate (even if she was just a girl). Not that sexism ever had anything to do with it, heavens no. After all, didn't Jane Austen and the Bronte sisters have their own spot in the Tower (they'd helpfully point out, all while ignoring the emergence of new talents like Shirley Jackson, Flannery O'Connor, Angela Carter, and Toni Morrison). The Tower cares nothing for the gender of a writer, of course it doesn't. All that matters is that you write what we deem
our kind of story. I guess the subgenre of Slice of Life social dramas of the kind pioneered by the likes of Updike and Arthur Miller in the 40s and 60s was considered the "right kind" of literature for them. Let's just ignore the presence of a Gothic bodice ripper like
The Witches of Eastwick, or the haunted presentation of the Salem Witch Trials in
The Crucible. A bit of dystopian Fantasy such as
Toward the End of Time, meanwhile can always be written away as a one-off. Let's just bury these facts under a tailor-made identity that we've constructed for all of these ink-stained wretches, one that is meant to occlude their otherwise obvious liking for, and considerable skill in both the Popular and Dramatic forms of art and storytelling.
Looking back on her career now, it makes the most sense to claim that a combination of luck and timing was one Byatt's side. When she was allowed entrance to the Tower, her two biggest works at the time (Shadow of a Sun, and The Virgin in the Garden) could both be said to have fit the mold the gatekeepers were looking for. Both works just mentioned almost deserve to be described as a pair of roman a clef as more than anything else, and so it's it's not too difficult to see why the Ivy Covered Citadel might have thought her to be a worth addition to their trophy collection Library. As time went on, Byatt proved herself to be one of those literary types who also possessed a deft skill at handling the settings and characterizations from the worlds of Myth. This appears to have always been something of a latent ability with Byatt, though I think it's telling that she never brought this aspect of her skills as far out to the fore until sometime starting in the early 90s, when it was clear that the heydays of the Tower had begun their long recede into the current level of cultural obscurity that it continues to enjoy today. It was with novels like Possession, The Children's Book, and in particular short story collections like The Djinn and the Nightingale's Eye that the writer began to show the extent her true literary colors.
The curious thing about all this lies in the way she almost had to allow, or learn to grant herself permission to shrug off the demands of the Ivory Tower, and learn how the realm of Myth might be a safe haven for her own true voice. It's curious because there's the sense of the author learning how to work her way toward an understanding of the proper expression of the Fantastic that she was able to call herself comfortable with. It's this idea of struggling to know how to be at ease in the world of once upon a time that is the most striking and permanent feature of just about every word that Byatt wrote. It starts out as a muted background note in early novels like
The Game, until it becomes the over-arching theme in
Ragnarök which was her last published work. It's this notion of finding out if you can ever be at ease with the Fairy Tale that is the hallmark not just of Byatt's novels, but also of the semi short story that's placed under the microscope here today. This is the modern myth of
The Thing in the Forest.
The Story.
"There were once two little girls who saw, or believed they saw, a
thing in a forest. The two little girls were evacuees, who had been sent
away from the city by train, with a large number of other children. They all
had their names attached to their coats with safety-pins, and they carried
little bags or satchels, and the regulation gas-mask. They wore knitted
scarves and bonnets or caps, and many had knitted gloves attached to long
tapes which ran along their sleeves, inside their coats, and over their
shoulders and out, so that they could leave their ten woolen fingers
dangling, like a spare pair of hands, like a scarecrow. They all had bare legs
and scuffed shoes and wrinkled socks. Most had wounds on their knees in
varying stages of freshness and scabbiness. They were at the age when
children fall often and their knees were unprotected. With their suitcases,
some of which were almost too big to carry, and their other impedimenta, a
doll, a toy car, a comic, they were like a disorderly dwarf regiment,
stomping along the platform.
"The two little girls had not met before, and made friends on the train.
They shared a square of chocolate, and took alternate bites at an apple. One
gave the other the inside page of her Beano. Their names were Penny and
Primrose. Penny was thin and dark and taller, possibly older, than Primrose,
who was plump and blonde and curly. Primrose had bitten nails, and a
velvet collar to her dressy green coat. Penny had a bloodless transparent
paleness, a touch of blue in her fine lips. Neither of them knew where they
were going, nor how long the journey might take. They did not even know
why they were going, since neither of their mothers had quite known how
to explain the danger to them. How do you say to your child, I am sending
you away, because enemy bombs may fall out of the sky, because the streets
of the city may burn like forest fires of brick and timber, but I myself am
staying here, in what I believe may be daily danger of burning, burying alive, gas, and ultimately perhaps a grey army rolling in on tanks over the
suburbs, or sailing its submarines up our river, all guns blazing? So the
mothers (who did not resemble each other at all) behaved alike, and
explained nothing, it was easier. Their daughters they knew were little girls,
who would not be able to understand or imagine.
"The girls discussed on the train whether it was a sort of holiday or a sort
of punishment, or a bit of both. Penny had read a book about Boy Scouts,
but the children on the train did not appear to be Brownies or Wolf Cubs,
only a mongrel battalion of the lost. Both little girls had the idea that these
were all perhaps not very good children, possibly being sent away for that
reason. They were pleased to be able to define each other as “nice.” They
would stick together, they agreed. Try to sit together, and things.
"The train crawled sluggishly further and further away from the city
and their homes. It was not a clean train—the upholstery of their carriage
had the dank smell of unwashed trousers, and the gusts of hot steam rolling
backwards past their windows were full of specks of flimsy ash, and sharp
grit, and occasional fiery sparks that pricked face and fingers like hot
needles if you opened the window. It was very noisy too, whenever it
picked up a little speed. The engine gave great bellowing sighs, and the
invisible wheels underneath clicked rhythmically and monotonously, tap
tap-tap-CRASH, tap-tap-tap-CRASH. The window-panes were both grimy
and misted up. The train stopped frequently, and when it stopped, they used
their gloves to wipe rounds, through which they peered out at flooded
fields, furrowed hillsides and tiny stations whose names were carefully
blacked out, whose platforms were empty of life.
"The children did not know that the namelessness was meant to baffle or
delude an invading army. They felt—they did not think it out, but
somewhere inside them the idea sprouted—that the erasure was because of
them, because they were not meant to know where they were going or, like
Hansel and Gretel, to find the way back. They did not speak to each other of
this anxiety, but began the kind of conversation children have about things
they really disliked, things that upset, or disgusted, or frightened them.
Semolina pudding with its grainy texture, mushy peas, fat on roast meat.
"Listening to the stairs and the window-sashes creaking in the dark or the
wind. Having your head held roughly back over the basin to have your hair
washed, with cold water running down inside your liberty bodice. Gangs in
playgrounds. They felt the pressure of all the other alien children in all the
other carriages as a potential gang. They shared another square of
chocolate, and licked their fingers, and looked out at a great white goose
flapping its wings beside an inky pond.
"The sky grew dark grey and in the end the train halted. The children got
out, and lined up in a crocodile, and were led to a mud-coloured bus. Penny
and Primrose managed to get a seat together, although it was over the
wheel, and both of them began to feel sick as the bus bumped along snaking
country lanes, under whipping branches, dark leaves on dark wooden arms
on a dark sky, with torn strips of thin cloud streaming across a full moon,
visible occasionally between them.
"They were billeted temporarily in a mansion commandeered from
its owner, which was to be arranged to hold a hospital for the long-term
disabled, and a secret store of artworks and other valuables. The children
were told they were there temporarily, until families were found to take
them all into their homes. Penny and Primrose held hands, and said to each
other that it would be wizard if they could go to the same family, because at
least they would have each other. They didn’t say anything to the rather
tired-looking ladies who were ordering them about, because with the
cunning of little children, they knew that requests were most often counter
productive, adults liked saying no. They imagined possible families into
which they might be thrust. They did not discuss what they imagined, as
these pictures, like the black station signs, were too frightening, and words
might make some horror solid, in some magical way. Penny, who was a
reading child, imagined Victorian dark pillars of severity, like Jane Eyre’s
Mr. Brocklehurst, or David Copperfield’s Mr. Murdstone. Primrose
imagined— she didn’t know why—a fat woman with a white cap and round
red arms who smiled nicely but made the children wear sacking aprons and
scrub the steps and the stove. “It’s like we were orphans,” she said to Penny.
“But we’re not,” Penny said. “If we manage to stick together . . ."
"The great house had a double flight of imposing stairs to its front
door, and carved griffins and unicorns on its balustrade. There was no
lighting, because of the black-out. All the windows were shuttered. No
welcoming brightness leaked across door or window-sill. The children
trudged up the staircase in their crocodile, hung their coats on numbered
makeshift hooks, and were given supper (Irish stew and rice pudding with a
dollop of blood-red jam) before going to bed in long makeshift dormitories,
where once servants had slept. They had camp-beds (military issue) and
grey shoddy blankets. Penny and Primrose got beds together but couldn’t
get a corner. They queued to brush their teeth in a tiny washroom, and both
suffered (again without speaking) suffocating anxiety about what would
happen if they wanted to pee in the middle of the night, because the
lavatory was one floor down, the lights were all extinguished, and they
were a long way from the door. They also suffered from a fear that in the
dark the other children would start laughing and rushing and teasing, and
turn themselves into a gang. But that did not happen. Everyone was tired
and anxious and orphaned. An uneasy silence, a drift of perturbed sleep,
came over them all. The only sounds—from all parts of the great dormitory
it seemed—were suppressed snuffles and sobs, from faces pressed into thin
pillows.
"When daylight came, things seemed, as they mostly do, brighter and
better. The children were given breakfast in a large vaulted room. They sat
at trestle tables, eating porridge made with water and a dab of the red jam,
heavy cups of strong tea. Then they were told they could go out and play
until lunch-time. Children in those days—wherever they came from— were
not closely watched, were allowed to come and go freely, and those
evacuated children were not herded into any kind of holding-pen, or transit
camp. They were told they should be back for lunch at 12:30, by which
time those in charge hoped to have sorted out their provisional future lives.
It was not known how they would know when it was 12:30, but it was
expected that—despite the fact that few of them had wrist-watches—they
would know how to keep an eye on the time. It was what they were used to.
"Penny and Primrose went out together, in their respectable coats and
laced shoes, on to the terrace. The terrace appeared to them to be vast, and was indeed extensive. It was covered with a fine layer of damp gravel,
stained here and there bright green, or invaded by mosses. Beyond it was a
stone balustrade, with a staircase leading down to a lawn, which that
morning had a quicksilver sheen on the lengthening grass. It was flanked by
long flower-beds, full of overblown annuals and damp clumps of stalks. A
gardener would have noticed the beginnings of neglect, but these were
urban little girls, and they noticed the jungly mass of wet stems, and the
wet, vegetable smell. Across the lawn, which seemed considerably vaster
than the vast terrace, was a sculpted yew hedge, with many twigs and
shoots out of place and ruffled. In the middle of the hedge was a wicket
gate, and beyond the gate were trees, woodland, a forest, the little girls said
to themselves.
“Let’s go into the forest,” said Penny, as though the sentence was
required of her.
Primrose hesitated. Most of the other children were running up and down
the terrace, scuffing their shoes in the gravel. Some boys were kicking a
ball on the grass. The sun came right out, full from behind a hazy cloud,
and the trees suddenly looked both gleaming and secret.
“OK,” said Primrose. “We needn’t go far.”
“No. I’ve never been in a forest.”
“Nor me.” “We ought to look at it, while we’ve got the opportunity,” said Penny.
"There was a very small child—one of the smallest—whose name, she
told everyone, was Alys. With a y, she told those who could spell, and those
who couldn’t, which surely included herself. She was barely out of nappies.
She was quite extraordinarily pretty, pink and white, with large pale blue
eyes, and sparse little golden curls all over her head and neck, through
which her pink skin could be seen. Nobody seemed to be in charge of her,
no elder brother or sister. She had not quite managed to wash the tearstains
from her dimpled cheeks.
"She had made several attempts to attach herself to Penny and Primrose.
They did not want her. They were excited about meeting and liking each
other. She said now:
“I’m coming too, into the forest.”
“No, you aren’t,” said Primrose.
“You’re too little, you must stay here,” said Penny.
“You’ll get lost,” said Primrose.
“You won’t get lost. I’ll come with you,” said the little creature, with an
engaging smile, made for loving parents and grandparents.
“We don’t want you, you see,” said Primrose.
“It’s for your own good,” said Penny.
Alys went on smiling hopefully, the smile becoming more of a mask.
“It will be all right,” said Alys.
“Run,” said Primrose.
They ran; they ran down the steps and across the lawn, and through the
gate, into the forest. They didn’t look back. They were long-legged little
girls, not toddlers. The trees were silent round them, holding out their
branches to the sun, breathing noiselessly.
"Primrose touched the warm skin of the nearest saplings, taking off
her gloves to feel their cracks and knots. She exclaimed over the flaking
whiteness and dusty brown of the silver birches, the white leaves of the
aspens. Penny looked into the thick of the forest. There was undergrowth—
a mat of brambles and bracken. There were no obvious paths. Dark and
light came and went, inviting and mysterious, as the wind pushed clouds
across the face of the sun.
“We have to be careful not to get lost,” she said. “In stories, people make
marks on tree-trunks, or unroll a thread, or leave a trail of white pebbles—
to find their way back.”
“We needn’t go out of sight of the gate,” said Primrose. “We could just
explore a little bit."
"They set off, very slowly. They went on tiptoe, making their own narrow
passages through the undergrowth, which sometimes came as high as their
thin shoulders. They were urban, and unaccustomed to silence. At first the
absence of human noise filled them with a kind of awe, as though, while
they would not have put it to themselves in this way, they had got to some
original place, from which they, or those before them, had come, and which
they therefore recognized. Then they began to hear the small sounds that
were there. The chatter and repeated lilt and alarm of invisible birds, high
up, further in. The hum and buzz of insects. Rustling in dry leaves, rushes
of movement in thickets. Slitherings, dry coughs, sharp cracks. They went
on, pointing out to each other creepers draped with glistening berries,
crimson, black and emerald, little crops of toadstools, some scarlet, some
ghostly-pale, some a dead-flesh purple, some like tiny parasols—and some
like pieces of meat protruding from tree-trunks. They met blackberries, but
didn’t pick them, in case in this place they were dangerous or deceptive.
They admired from a safe distance the stiff upright fruiting rods of the
Lords and Ladies, packed with fat red berries. They stopped to watch
spiders spin, swinging from twig to twig, hauling in their silky cables,
reinforcing knots and joinings. They sniffed the air, which was full of a
warm mushroom smell, and a damp moss smell, and a sap smell, and a
distant hint of dead ashes
"Did they hear it first or smell it first? Both sound and scent were at
first infinitesimal and dispersed. Both gave the strange impression of
moving in—in waves—from the whole perimeter of the forest. Both
increased very slowly in volume, and both were mixed, a sound and a smell
fabricated of many disparate sounds and smells. A crunching, a crackling, a
crushing, a heavy thumping, combined with threshing and thrashing, and
added to that a gulping, heaving, boiling, bursting steaming sound, full of bubbles and farts, piffs and explosions, swallowings and wallowings. The
smell was worse, and more aggressive, than the sound. It was a liquid smell
of putrefaction, the smell of maggoty things at the bottom of untended
dustbins, the smell of blocked drains, and unwashed trousers, mixed with
the smell of bad eggs, and of rotten carpets and ancient polluted bedding.
The new, ordinary forest smells and sounds, of leaves and humus, fur and
feathers, so to speak, went out like lights as the atmosphere of the thing
preceded it. The two little girls looked at each other, and took each other’s
hand. Speechlessly and instinctively they crouched down behind a fallen
tree-trunk, and trembled, as the thing came into view".
(3-14)
A.S. Byatt's Multi-Faceted Dragon.
The idea of an encounter with the Fantastic in the Heart of the Woods is probably one of the oldest tropes in the history of storytelling. There might even be a case for labeling this particular archetype as one of the prime examples of a form of literary primitivism. That's because this kind of story has its beginnings roughly at, about, or not long after the beginnings of human civilization. It's the sort of Myth that humans begin to tell themselves after they've discovered how to make a collective sense of home for themselves in a setting that is otherwise wild and untamed. This appears to be one of those facts of artistic history that are so fundamental that even an essentially urban fantasist like Peter Straub once began one of many nesting doll narratives tucked within the folds of his 1982 novel
Shadowland in the following fashion. "A long time ago, when we all lived in the forest and none of us lived anywhere else (
web)". In granting those words a strange immortality of their own, all Straub has done is to highlight the primary historical fact that set the conditions and parameters of the first tales ever spun by the first storytellers. Mankind's initial stories where shaped by our shared environment. In most cases, those environs were the floor, canopy, glades, and understory of the world's forested sections. It was here that most of our ancestors had to fight for their very survival on a constant, and daily basis. In struggling for their very life, the first humans also seem to have found an Inspiration in the woods.
Of course, the great irony of the Forest is that men make their homes out of it, just as much as it serves as a threat or shelter. It is a setting which contains the promise Fear and Enchantment on an equal basis. Perhaps this explains the strange dichotomy at the heart of stories dealing with the Fantastic in the Woods. Even as we began to discover it was possible to live both within and off of the trees, we never seem to have lost that inherent sense of co-mingling duality that marked one of our first homes. This is something that late Bardolotrist Anne Barton observed in her study, The Shakespearean Forest. As she liked to point out, "Men and women innocently walking in them, or attempting to journey through to the other side, have never known what they might suddenly meet, whether animal, human or (still worse) a disconcerting mixture of the two (A. S. Byatt’s ‘The Thing in the Forest’, published in 2004 in her Little Black Book of Stories, is yet another variant on the last). Although woods may continue to shrink and be demolished all over the world, the dread of encounters there with the uncanny or even (as Actaeon discovered long ago, to his cost, when he surprised a goddess bathing) the divine, refuses to go away. In 1999...The Blair Witch Project owed much of its enormous box-office success to the fact that large numbers of cinema-goers believed that what they were watching was a documentary: that all of these horrifying events had really occurred and been clumsily filmed by the young and doomed student researchers investigating supernatural manifestations in the Maryland woods (2)".
It was another English critic (this time long forgotten) by the name of Charles Williams who I think offers the best summation of the intertwining modes of storytelling that make up the Archetypal Forest. It's no more than
a passing comment in a study on Dante, yet it's worth repeating here in full. "The image of the wood has appeared often enough in English verse. It has indeed appeared so often that is has gathered a good deal of verse into itself; so that it has become a great forest where, with long leagues of changing green between them, strange episodes of high poetry have place. Thus in one part there are lovers of a midsummer night, or by day a duke and his followers, and in another men behind branches so that the wood seems moving, and in another a girl separated from her two lordly brothers, and in another a poet listening to a nightingale but rather dreaming richly of the grand art than there exploring it, and there are other inhabitants, belonging even more closely to the wood, dryads, fairies, an enchanter's rout (107)". It might also be added that here is where you can find a lot of lost children. One of them is a little girl in a red hood being stalked by animals. Another are a brother and sister pair who have the bad luck to stumble upon the dwelling of a wicked enchantress who may or might not also be their very own adopted mother, depending on the variation. Williams continues.
"The forest itself has different names in different tongues - Westermain, Arden, Birnam, Broceliande; and in places there are separate trees named, such as that on the outskirts against which a young Northern poet saw a spectral wanderer leaning, or, in the unexplored centre of which only rumors reach even poetry, Yggdrasil of one myth, or the Trees of Knowledge and Life of another. So that indeed the whole earth seems to become this one enormous forest, and our longest and most stable civilizations are only clearings in the midst of it (ibid)". This, then, is the Tradition of which Byatt's story makes up just one expression of Individual Talent. Even with this knowledge in mind, there's still a further question to be asked. Which template does her own efforts fit into along the sliding scale between the two poles of Fear and Enchantment? Well, strange as it may sound, I get the feeling it rests somewhere in a little of both. Let's start with the most basic and defining fact of this short story. The plot centers around an encounter that a pair of children have with what we'll call an Agent of the Fantastic, during a chance stroll though the woods. It's a setup so basic that most us today will have to ask for clarification just to even know which particular fairy tale (ancient or modern) the narrator was even trying to tell us.
We could be dealing with a large handful of protagonists in any number of world famous scenarios. The one that's most likely to suggest itself to us is that of Hansel and Gretel. However, what makes it's way into the clearing of Byatt's tale is an interesting sort of compound ghost. You get the sense there's something familiar about it, even if you've never laid eyes on it before. You certainly can't forget it once you've seen it. "Its head appeared to form, or become first visible in the distance,
between the trees. Its face—which was triangular—appeared like a rubbery
or fleshy mask over a shapeless sprouting bulb of a head, like a monstrous
turnip. Its colour was the colour of flayed flesh, pitted with wormholes, and
its expression was neither wrath nor greed, but pure misery. Its most
defined feature was a vast mouth, pulled down and down at the corners,
tight with a kind of pain. Its lips were thin, and raised, like welts from
whipstrokes. It had blind, opaque white eyes, fringed with fleshy lashes and
brows like the feelers of sea-anemones. Its face was close to the ground,
and moved towards the children between its forearms which were squat,
thick, powerful and akimbo, like a cross between a monstrous
washerwoman and a primeval dragon. The flesh on these forearms was
glistening and mottled, every colour, from the green of mould to the red
brown of raw liver, to the dirty white of dry rot.
"The rest of its very large body appeared to be glued together, like still
wet papier-mâché, or the carapace of stones and straws and twigs worn by
caddis-flies underwater. It had a tubular shape, as a turd has a tubular shape,
a provisional amalgam. It was made of rank meat, and decaying vegetation,
but it also trailed veils and prostheses of man-made materials, bits of wire
netting, foul dishcloths, wire-wool full of pan scrubbings, rusty nuts and
bolts. It had feeble stubs and stumps of very slender legs, growing out of it
at all angles, wavering and rippling like the suckered feet of a caterpillar or
the squirming fringe of a centipede. On and on it came, bending and
crushing whatever lay in its path, including bushes, though not substantial trees, which it wound between, awkwardly. The little girls observed, with
horrified fascination, that when it met a sharp stone, or a narrow tree-trunk,
it allowed itself to be sliced through, flowed sluggishly round in two or
three smaller worms, convulsed and reunited. Its progress was achingly
slow, very smelly, and apparently very painful, for it moaned and whined
amongst its other burblings and belchings. They thought it could not see, or
certainly could not see clearly. It and its stench passed within a few feet of
their tree-trunk, humping along, leaving behind it a trail of bloody slime
and dead foliage, sucked to dry skeletons.
"Its end was flat and blunt, almost transparent, like some earthworms.
When it had gone, Penny and Primrose, kneeling on the moss and dead
leaves, put their arms about each other, and hugged each other, shaking with
dry sobs. Then they stood up, still silent, and stared together, hand in hand,
at the trail of obliteration and destruction, which wound out of the forest
and into it again. They went back, hand in hand, without looking behind
them, afraid that the wicket-gate, the lawn, the stone steps, the balustrade,
the terrace and the great house would be transmogrified, or simply not
there. But the boys were still playing football on the lawn, a group of girls
were skipping and singing shrilly on the gravel. They let go each other’s
hand, and went back in. They did not speak to each other again (14-16)". Now, I think I have a good idea of what most us reading this for the first time will be thinking. "Holy shit, it's John Carpenter's
The Thing! Run! Get a flamethrower! Kill it!
Kill it with fire"! The reason I'm able to assume this will be one of our go-to reaction for the image Byatt's Imagination has provided for us is because, at the end of the day, all of the stock responses we might have to any given work of fiction are determined for the most part by what we know from whatever other forms of media entertainment we consume. Also, you've got to admit, that's an eerily accurate description for Carpenter's semi-Lovecraftian version of E.T. Recall that I also said that there was something familiar about it as well.
Let me explain what I mean by asking a question. While most of us found our minds rummaging through whatever bits and detritus of remembered pop culture might still be lying around in our mental attic spaces, how many at the same time we're busy thinking, "Where have I seen that before"? I can't say how many of us fit that description. However, for those who do, my advice would be to not ignore an idea like that. It can be a useful response sometimes; indicating that we've either remembered some vital piece of past information that can help to make sense of what we're reading or watching in the present, or else its the promptings of the kind of open-minded curiosity to explore the meanings of the stories we like. That's the sort of thing which can end up as one hell of a benefit even outside the realm of literature. In terms of Byatt's story, my own response seems to have been a mixture of the two. I remember being impressed at the writer's skill in being able to tap into whatever level of the Imagination it is that can conjure up that level of literate grotesquerie. On a sheer emotional level, Byatt seems to have wedded the lowest and highest levels of Stephen King's hierarchy of reactions elicited by the Gothic genre. This creature combines the Gross-out with a genuine artistic Terror.
At the same time, while all that was going on, I also recall wondering if this was something I'd either seen or heard mentioned somewhere in any other possible story I'd read or watched. This creeping sense of the familiar was enhanced when, much like the work of King, the two child protagonists meet up together once again, this time as adults. Each of them is haunted by the glimpse they caught of that "Whatever It Was" they saw in the forest, and the trauma of that encounter is basically what drives them back to the castle where they were more or less billeted during the War. When Penny and Prim make their way to the castle by the forest, they discover "a medieval-looking
illustrated book. Primrose thought it was a very old book. Penny assumed it
was nineteenth-century mock-medieval. It showed a knight, on foot, in a
forest, lifting his sword to slay something. The knight shone on the rounded
slope of the page, in the light, which caught the gilding on his helmet and
sword-belt. It was not possible to see what was being slain. This was
because, both in the tangled vegetation of the image, and in the way the
book was displayed in the case, the enemy, or victim, was in shadows".
"Neither of them could read the ancient (or pseudo-ancient) black letter of
the text beside the illustration. There was a typed explanation, or
description, under the book, done with a faded ribbon and uneven pressure
of the keys. They had to lean forward to read it, and to see what was
worming its way into, or out of, the deep spine of the book, and that was
how they came to see each other’s face, close up, in the glass which was
both transparent and reflective. Their transparent reflected faces lost detail
—cracked lipstick, pouches, fine lines of wrinkles—and looked both
younger and greyer, less substantial. And that is how they came to
recognise each other, as they might not have done, plump face to bony face.
They breathed each other’s names, Penny, Primrose, and their breath misted
the glass, obscuring the knight and his opponent. I could have died, I could
have wet my knickers, said Penny and Primrose afterwards to each other,
and both experienced this still moment as pure, dangerous shock.
"But they
stayed there, bent heads together, legs trembling, knees knocking, and read
the caption, which was about the Loathly Worm, which, tradition held, had
infested the countryside and had been killed more than once by scions of
that house, Sir Lionel, Sir Boris, Sir Guillem. The Worm, the typewriter had tapped out, was an English Worm, not a European dragon, and like most
such worms, was wingless. In some sightings it was reported as having
vestigial legs, hands or feet. In others it was limbless. It had, in monstrous
form, the capacity of common or garden worms to sprout new heads or
trunks if it was divided, so that two worms, or more, replaced one. This was
why it had been killed so often, yet reappeared. It had been reported
travelling with a slithering pack of young ones, but these may have been
only revitalized segments. The typed paper was held down with drawing
pins and appeared to continue somewhere else, on some not visible page,
not presented for viewing (21-22)". It's one of those rare passages in a story of this type where the author seems willing to dole out some form of background information about the Fantastic element at the heart of it's mythological narrative. Based on what the story tells us, there are two sets of reactions that are available to the reader at this point.
The first one will seem obvious, and I agree, it would be interesting to see if you could take the premise of John Carpenter's
The Thing and see if it could work in a medieval setting. The second kind of reaction, which is the one I went with was, again, to swear I'd heard of this story somewhere once before. What it reminded me of in particular was this Old English legend I'd heard about in connection with the Lewis Carroll poem known as
Jabberwocky. It must have been something I'd read in an online article somewhere about the influences or literary predecessors that made up the ingredients of one of the few examples of 19th century poetry that most of us still have tucked away somewhere in the back of our heads. The piece of folklore that I read about concerned a creature known as the Lambton Worm. So I looked it up, and in doing so, the first thing even the casual reader is struck by is the remarkable level of shared similarities the legend has with the title creature at the heart of Byatt's short story. "
The story revolves around John Lambton, an heir of the Lambton Estate, County Durham (in ceremonial Tyne and Wear), and his battle with a giant worm (dragon) that had been terrorizing the local villages (web)". All we're dealing with, then, is the typical hero slays dragon trope of Fantasy.It's when you dig into the details that the correspondences between the Lambton myth and Byatt's forest dwelling monstrosity begin to jump out at you. For instance, the legend recounts that, much like with Penny and Prim's Loathly Thing, "
A number of brave villagers try to kill the beast, but are quickly dispatched. When a chunk is cut off the worm, it simply reattaches the missing piece. Visiting knights also try to assault the beast, but none survive. When annoyed, the worm uproots trees by coiling its tail around them, then creates devastation by waving around the uprooted trees like a club (ibid)". One almost begins to wonder if some of the knights who took on the Wyrm (to give it the proper Tolkien phrase) were ever named Lionel, Boris, or Guillem. As I've said, it would be neat to see what John Carpenter could do with a scenario like that. In the meantime, what Byatt does with this borrowed material is interesting. It's here that we as readers are left to consider the implications and even possible symbolism of the Thing, or rather the meaning of the Wyrm. To start with, I almost wonder if someone like J.R.R. Tolkien can be of assistance here. The reason why is because of the unique properties of Byatt's Thing. It's labeled a Worm, yet it's descriptions and motifs all match up with the lore of Dragons, and of one local dragon legend in particular. Hence, the more proper terminology of Wyrm.The word itself was used interchangeably to describe the Fire Drakes and their ways. And in her short story we see the writer borrowing heavily from the lore of these beasts for the purposes of her own creature. So this begs a question in my mind. Is it right to call Byatt's Loathly Worm a Wyrm? Even if we consent to go with this view of things, it's clear that nothing about this creature fits the ordinary description of a typical dragon. We may be given the faintest hint of scales, yet it's complete appearance is more akin to something out of Clark Ashton Smith, rather than Tolkien or Spenser. Let's be honest. If I hadn't uncovered all the connections between Byatt's Thing and the Lambton Worm, would we even be discussing this beast in terms of dragon lore? With all these details in mind, it soon becomes clear that the author is alerting her readers to a very specific and outré example of the legendary fire breathers. This is an incarnation of the trope with borrowings from Medieval ideas of giant snakes such as the Basilisk, or the Midgard Serpent spliced together with the figure of the Hydra, the many headed monster of Greek myth that was almost impossible to kill, because every time one head was chopped off, another would simply grow in it's place. Byatt has taken and melded each of these variations together.
This was the second type of stock response that the image of the dragon could invoke in its audience. All Byatt does here is take that note of dread, and heighten it up to levels that Lovecraft would have been proud of. Dragons can be fearsome as well as majestic, and here that Gothic note is taken about as far I think I've ever seen any writer go with it. If I am unable to grant Byatt any points for originality, she definitely earns the prize for turning the dragon archetype into a genuine figure of fear. The question now becomes why does she do this? What purpose could there be in taking the dragon myth, and turning it into this nightmare straight out of a film by Carpenter or Stuart Gordon? A lot of the answers to that seems to lie in the kind of themes the story is after. The playwright and novelist Thornton Wilder once claimed that "Art is confession", that all storytelling amounts to little more than "the secret told". It's a maxim that other artists like James Baldwin were inclined to agree with, and I think that's the main purpose here behind the dragon at the heart of Byatt's tale. It's here to make a confession, of sorts. The question is what's the nature of the secret that the Wyrm has to tell us?
Conclusion: A Story (and a Life) that Hovers between Fear and Longing.
I never get the sense that she could enjoy her work the way others she admired, such as Tolkien, were able to do. When you read anything from the creator of Hobbits, even if it's just a series of discarded, collected rough drafts, odds are even you'll soon find yourself caught up in the simple pleasure that comes from the artist being able to tap into their own creativity. Tolkien had that capability in spades, and it's that sense of enjoyment that the author derives from the sheer act of secondary creation that accounts for a perhaps unrecognized, yet genuine part of why we're drawn to his narrative efforts, and why he always somehow knows how to leave us wanting more. Byatt never seems to have had that kind of easy sense of union with her own Imagination. I get the impression I'm dealing with someone who might have been able to go there, like Tolkien did, it's just that there was always this idea of, was it doubt, fear, or some other sense of shortcoming, whether personal, or otherwise, that made it difficult for Byatt to take a bit of joy in the work of creativity? Well, I think I found the answer to all of that. A lot of it seems to be rooted in the author's biography, and if I had to find the right words to describe what can be a very delicate subject, than I guess I'd have to describe her life as a Dickensian novel.
It's the kind of childhood that no young girl should ever have to be put through, considering the kind of damage that can do on a young psyche. It made being just a kid the sort of place that was always better to come from than to go back to so far as Antonia Susan Drabble was concerned. The one solace left to the young girl during what appears to have been a troubled and troubling time for her were the stories she read through in various works of Fantasy. At the same time, unlike Tolkien, an almost nonexistent childhood composed in the main of neglect (if never any discernable, outright physical abuse) left her with a "well bred" tendency to skepticism and distrust, even, it seems, with any possible offerings of genuine comfort and solace, whether from stories or other people. It's an outlook Susan took with her all the way to Cambridge University, where she came under the wing of F.R. Leavis. The best way to describe this gentleman is to call him a tenured literary critic and lecturer in English 101 at a University level. The fact that his name is unfamiliar now is a pretty good testament to whatever legacy he may have left behind. F.R. Leavis is a prime example of someone who is won over by the Mythical Modernism of T.S. Eliot, and yet who is unwilling to share that poet's sense of self-awareness, coupled with the kind of humility that is always willing to have his mind changed on a lot of important matters.
Part of what might have helped her steer clear of such a close-minded approach to literature was her growing love for the poetry of William Wordsworth, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. These two seem to have amounted to the best twin influences that the writer ever encountered in her life. They were like an oasis of nourishment for Susan in an otherwise dry and barren personal waste that someone like T.S. Eliot would have recognized all too well. It seems to have been the artistry of Wordsworth and Coleridge together who kept alive that same Imaginative spark that allowed Susan the ability to enjoy the tales of once upon a time that she used to turn to for solace as a child. It's not too surprising if you realize that all the poems of the Lake Poets amount to a collection of fairy tales for adults told in verse. If these are the two good halves of her life, then to her credit, Susan Drabble somehow managed to hold on to them, even when coming under an less than helpful influence such as that of Leavis. After she'd graduated from Cambridge, Antonia Susan Drabble married her first husband, and kept his own name of Byatt for herself the rest of her days. She also began to find a voice for herself as a creative novelist. If there's anything like an appreciable irony to that voice, it's that we find the author in an almost constant state of internal struggle. A lot of Byatt's novels are like an ongoing back and forth game of see-saw.
To read just about any of her books is to catch of a glimpse of the novelist trying to decide where she belongs in the grand scheme of things. Now, to be fair, this in and of itself, doesn't have to be any problem whatsoever. Indeed, there have been actual times in real life when this question of "Where do I fit in?" has been an essential path for women to gain their own bearings. In many cases, the outcomes of this inner searching has been all to the good. That's about as much of a problem as being able to breath clean oxygen. The trouble only comes in when the woman in question can be qualified as the product of an abusive and broken household. That's when the usual slew of horror stories begin. There's little need to go through such a catalogue, it's same gut churning stories of heartache and mistreatment. Did you ever notice how that stuff tends to fall into repeating patterns? It's got to say something about human nature. The only reason I can have for pointing that out is maybe to offer some small bit of hope. Maybe the regularity and cyclical nature of abuse holds a key to its cure, in some fashion. I don't know. What I am willing to hazard as an educated guess about Byatt's place in all this is fourfold. 1. It's possible to describe her as the victim of an abusive household. 2. The nature of this abuse was emotional, and not physical. Her parents neglected her for the sake of her younger sibling, Margaret Drabble, and this neglect, in turn, nursed a lifelong inferiority complex that the author seems to have carried with her all her days. Sometimes abuse leaves scars that are visible only on the inside.
Because of her troubled upbringing, Byatt found it very difficult to shed a lifetime's worth of anxieties that were instilled in her by her parents. It meant that she tended to approach even the stories she loved with a frustrating sense of suspicion. The worst part about that is, the more she loved a book, the longer her tendency to see it like a skeptical race track tout eyeing a champion horse under the reservation that she could always be dealing with nothing more than phony thoroughbred. To be fair, a level headed approach to examining stories will always be warranted. However, to approach the art of Good Reading through such a narrow, obsessive-compulsive lens goes a long way toward helping both the amateur and professional critic to miss wide of the mark. That's the kind of outlook that kills both Art and it's legitimate criticism right then and there in the crib, before either aspect ever has an honest chance to show their wears. I'm sorry, but there's no way any of that can ever work as a justifiable approach to reading or writing stories. It can't be done. The whole thing proves unworkable sooner or later.
Lambton Loathly Wyrm has about it. It gibes with a reading I've seen applied to one of HPL's own efforts. I'm thinking specifically now of how critics have described "The Dunwich Horror" as an example of the American author making an indirect confession of how he felt or viewed himself and his troubled family as this collection of internal monstrosities. In his edited anthology The Dunwich Cycle, Mythos enthusiast Robert M. Price points out how one aspect of the Cyclopean short story mentioned above is that one of it's main characters functions "in many ways as a Lovecraftian autobiographical analogue. Wilbur's being raised by his grandfather instead of a father, his home education from his grandfather's library, his insane mother, his stigma of ugliness (in Lovecraft's case untrue, but a self-image imposed on him by his mother), and his sense of being an outsider all echo Lovecraft himself. Many similar features can be seen in the figures of Charles Dexter Ward, Jervis Dudley...in "The Tomb", Edward Derby in "The Thing on the Doorstep", Randolph Carter in "The Silver Key", and Ward Phillips in "Through the Gates of the Silver Key (236)". Price then gives his readers a key bit of information which I argue can help us unlock the meaning of Byatt's otherwise unconnected fairy tale for grown-ups. Of each character mentioned in the quoted passage just above, Price concludes that, "They are all in some measure Lovecraft and thus they are all one in some manner each (ibid)". I don't know how crazy this may sound, yet I'm going to go out on a limb here with the suggestion that the same rubric applies to the four main leads of little Susie Drabble's short story.
In other words, I think the best way to make sense of the meaning of this text is to view it through the same autobiographic-allegorical lens that Price applies to Lovecraft. The only major difference is that Byatt's Thing can't claim any familial relations with the creatures inhabiting the pages of the Necronomicon. Instead, it belongs more to the various levels of dragon lore that dot the author's native, British landscape. Much like the protagonists, and perhaps even some of the otherworldly villains from Lovecraft's corpus (an here I am thinking of stories like "The Outsider", which, I'd argue, has a similar autobiographical slant) we're dealing with a case in which a semi-biographic reading of the the story's Horror puts its entire nature into a proper perspective. I've read papers, and other essays that argue the presence of Byatt's creature is meant to act as a commentary upon the trauma suffered by British survivors of the Second World War. It's possible to agree with a lot of these readings up to a point, however the narrative continues on from there all the way to a moment when it's clear that the traumas of that conflict have all but vanished from living memory. This is driven home by the fact that when Penny and Primrose, the story's two main leads, visit the castle where they saw the Thing as kids, they're surprised to discover that no record of their visit as evacuees is part of the site's history.
I agree with those scholars who point out that this could be a case of the writer subtly bending the lines between truth and reality within the confines of her secondary world. It begins to raise a note of doubt in minds of both readers, and Byatt's make-believe heroines. This creeping sense of disbelief raises a number of possibilities that are both frightening and a relief at the same time. It begins to leave room open for the idea that maybe one or both women only imagined that they saw some horrible, snake-like
thing in the woods behind the grounds of an old castle when they were young. It's a comforting in the sense that it might lift one burden off their shoulders. The sense of unease comes from wondering what it means that both girls saw it at the same time, even if it was just an illusion? A sudden case of Folie a Deux? A momentary lapse of reason shared by two? A collective hallucination brought on by the strains and anxieties of war? Are such things even possible? These are all the questions that Byatt's prose starts off dancing around in our minds until we come to the page about the Loathly Worm, and both readers and main characters realize it wasn't a hallucination, but a case of myth and legend being little more than a case of stone-cold, albeit grotesque and inexplicable facts of the world they're in.From that point on, the narrative is taken up with the ways in which Penny and Prim respond to their sudden encounter with the Fantastic. What's interesting to me about the conclusion that's reached is the inescapable impression that some sort of moral judgment call is being made and carried out. There's the lingering suggestion of an ethical boundary that's been trespassed in some way. I'm not sure it's a matter of the main cast seeing something they shouldn't have. Instead, it all seems to come down to the manner in which each young girl lets this newfound instant of knowledge determine the woman they both grow up to be. It's something that the narrative is at pains to draw our attention to. Byatt devotes a great deal of ink to what becomes of the story's two leads. We learn how "After the war, their fates were still similar and dissimilar. Penny’s
widowed mother embraced grief, closed her face and her curtains, moved
stiffly, like an automat, and read poetry. Primrose’s mother married one of
the many admirers, visitors, dancing partners she had had before the ship
went down, gave birth to another five children, and developed varicose
veins and a smoker’s cough. She dyed her blonde hair with peroxide when
it faded. Both Primrose and Penny were only children who now, because of
the war, lived in amputated or unreal families. Penny developed crushes on
poetical teachers and in due course—she was clever—went to university,
where she chose to study developmental psychology. Primrose had little
education. She was always being kept off school to look after the others.
She too dyed her blonde curls with peroxide when they turned mousy and faded. She got fat as Penny got thin. Neither of them married. Penny
became a child psychologist, working with the abused, the displaced, the
disturbed. Primrose did this and that. She was a barmaid. She worked in a
shop. She went to help at various church crèches and Salvation Army
reunions, and discovered she had a talent for story-telling. She became
Aunty Primrose, with her own repertoire. She was employed to tell tales to
kindergartens and entertain at children’s parties. She was much in demand
at Hallowe’en, and had her own circle of bright yellow plastic chairs in a
local shopping mall, where she kept an eye on the children of burdened
women, keeping them safe, offering them just a frisson of fear and terror
that made them wriggle with pleasure (18-19)" There is the subtlest hint of an autobiographical tinge to these words. It's not anything like a complete and direct one-for-one correspondence.
Rather, the sense that what we're reading amounts to a form of confession couched as narration can be seen in a handful of details, combined with overall tone of the passage. Like Penny, there is a sense in which Byatt belonged to an "unreal family" when her own parents liked her sister Margaret as their favorite.
To give an idea of what I mean about how such a thing would play out in real life, imagine if NASA started receiving broadcast signals of unknown origin from somewhere in the depths of space. Suppose these hypothetical signals were of such a nature that they repeated at intervals too artificial to be called merely natural. Also that when put through a computer, these sounds could be translated into some form of actual words, and those words made up a greeting! When I try to think of how I might respond to such a revelation, all I can imagine is myself just sat limp at my writing desk staring at the very laptop I'm using to write these words in a state of mind that's somewhere between literal slack-jawed wonder, and a gnawing sense of unease ready to shade at any moment into panic. Part of me would want to burst out of my chair with excitement at the thought that we were not the only intelligent species in the universe. Part of that excitement would stem from the fact that from this point onwards, everything (and I mean everything) would have changed. Not just mankind's knowledge of the cosmos, but also of our own place and nature within it. From there, the mind would almost have to hit a blank wall at the possibilities that such a discovery would open up to us as a species. The other part of my mind, the one at the basement level where all the alligators, and apes live, would go as follows.
"She had become a psychotherapist “to be useful.” That was not
quite accurate or sufficient as an explanation. The corner of the blanket that
covered the unthinkable had been turned back enough for her to catch sight
of it. She was in its world. It was not by accident that she had come to
specialize in severely autistic children, children who twittered, or banged, or
stared, who sat damp and absent on Penny’s official lap and told her no
dreams, discussed no projects. The world they knew was a real world. Often
Penny thought it was the real world, from which even their desperate
parents were at least partly shielded. Somebody had to occupy themselves
with the hopeless. Penny felt she could. Most people couldn’t. She could (38)". The major problem with this strategy is that it's just a dodge to help her avoid the crux of the problem, instead of confronting it. It's as if the author has paused in the middle of her artifice in order to introduce a surprising moment of reality into the proceedings. This is more in keeping with what a natural response to such an event would be like. At the same time, it's just a failed attempt to run away, and sooner or later, as is expected in this kind of fairy tale, the hero must have their confrontation with the dragon. I'm not going to spoil the ending for the reader. The best you're going to get out of me is to recall that old Robert Frost poem about two roads diverged in a yellow wood. Only one road remains untaken, and that's the one that makes a world of difference.
The Personal Unconscious basically serves two functions. It is (1) that part of the mind where thoughts vanish into whenever the conscious ego is no longer using them for whatever purpose, or (2) it's where many of us tend to stow and (as they say) lock up any and all thoughts that trouble us, or that we don't like, whether it's about people, places, things, and events external to the personality, or else it's where you try to hide away aspects of yourself that you don't like. In other words, the Personal Unconscious lives up to its title by serving as a place where you try to place troubling and unwanted thoughts and concepts that bother you on some psychological level. This also happens to be the place where many try and stow away traumatic memories and events. It's were someone like Byatt might well have tried to stash all her fears, bitterness, and resentments regarding her parents, her sister Margaret, or her eleven year old son who she lost to a drunk driver. The trouble with putting all of this trauma into the Personal Unconscious, as any psychologist will tell you, is that it's a good way to let all of that negative energy just build up and fester. When you couple that trauma with personal grief, like the kind Susan suffered at the loss of her own son, it's a recipe for a potential mental breakdown just waiting to happen.
Sometimes this means writers can be lucky. Stephen King once described an author as anyone who has trained their mind to misbehave. One of the perks of this practice is that it can give the Collective Unconscious access to those traumatic elements that make up the personal side of the unaware part of the psyche and allow them an outlet it otherwise wouldn't have. In that sense, you might described the Imagination as the mind's backup system for protecting it's sanity, and therefore it's chances of survival. It takes that trauma, and finds the right way of transmuting it into the best possible artistic expression, thus allowing the subject a chance to come to grips with difficult aspects of their own experience. It's what happened to Tolkien while his was busy dreaming up Middle Earth. That act of sub-creation is what enabled him to deal with the most common trauma of all, combat experience. He was able to take all the horrors he saw on the field of battle during the First World War, and create an outlet that was also something of a memorial at the same time as it amounted to some of the greatest prose the world has ever known. A similar process appears to have been going on when Byatt's Thing shambled its way on stage. It's overall appearance is meant to convey and idea of suffering, and Byatt's life is the blueprint.
Of all the figures in the story, it is the figure of Primrose who winds up giving me the most pause. The reason for this is she seems to be the one character with the closest connection to the Collective Unconscious. She ends being the story's highest point of Inspiration. Again, here's the point where I don't dare go too much into spoiler territory, yet the ending left a pleasant sense of surprise for me, as it ends with one of the cast assuming this latter day Mother Goose type role. In doing so, I'd have to argue that what Prim represents are all the best qualities that Susan was able to either embody or add to her life. In her case, it seems like the best thing that ever happened to her was being able to find a kinship with the likes of Wordsworth and Coleridge. I can't help thinking that it was her eager contact with the works of the Lake Poets that wound up offering her a kind of constant anchor for the rest her days. It could very well have been what helped her through a lot of the rough patches. If so, then this is no more than what an engagement with the Imagination was able to do with Coleridge himself. I also can't help but wonder if maybe the final image we have of Primrose in the story might be an Inspired bit allusion in their direction. The way she bows out of the tale is in a fashion that makes her look like one of those wise, old washer-women figures that dot the symbolic landscape of Wordsworth's Prelude.
The same feat happens here with Byatt's unorthodox story of a long lost dragon. The entire short work has to build up to this one horrific moment of revelation, and when it comes time for that moment's stage debut, Susan is able to blend the two modes of Horror and Enchantment like a long time fan girl turned polished pro. She's able to allow her title character to become this literal Thing of Horror, Wonder, and Pity. These were all the right sort of notes to hit if you wanted to tell a true Fairy Story, according to Tolkien, and it's what happens here. I think a lot of what makes Susan's effort work so well as they do is because of this subtle, yet undeniable note of what can only describe as Big Heartedness. There's an odd yet unmistakable sense of joy emanating from the tale. It starts out as an almost inaudible background note that soon grows into the dominant theme of the finished product. It's almost as if a dragon had been slain. I think that's down to the possibility that with this story, we see the author has made her way closer at least to that needful sense of balance she'd been searching for with every passing year, and each published book. I don't think I can tell you how much, or even if A.S. Byatt was able to achieve that necessary sense of closure for all the mistakes of the past, yet the final note of this story makes it sound like she might have found a decent measure of solace for what had gone before.
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