by A. S. Byatt
Desolation, however, is not the wrong word.
I was in one of those little streets around Bond Street when I saw the Maelstrøm. It was in the window—narrow but deep—of a small shop which advertised itself, in sky-blue lettering on pine green, as Puck’s Girdle. The Maelstrøm was made of a kind of bravura and exaggerated origami, a funnel of scissored and foaming navy-blue paper with spiring silver coils and feathery snipped and streaming froth. It was suspended on nylon thread in a slight current of air, and swayed in a gyre. Balancing it on the other side of the window was a creamy paper replica of the Alhambra, with delicate windows and tracery, colonnades and courtyards. In the middle was a small jungle, a paper rainforest with a parrot or two, some golden frogs, several winding paper snakes and receding jungle paths under the canopy like a set for a children’s theatre. Whoever was good with the scissors was good with lettering. They had scattered shadowy grey bird-like words over the top half of the glass. GET AWAY. LOOK FORWARD TO. GO OUTWARD. CLIMB. DREAM. LOOK. LISTEN. SUN. RAIN. WIND. ICE. WATER. FLY. FLOAT. HURTLE. PERIPLUM.
I liked hurtle. I liked periplum.
The floor of the window was deep in small things. Pebbles, little lamps, glass bottles, feather butterflies, wax fruit, winding ribbons of sand, snowflake crystals in plastic.
I stared. The only conventional poster said, “This is not a bucket shop. We sell solid pleasure at reasonable prices.”
There was another notice, handwritten.
“Part-time person wanted, frankly as a dogsbody. With possibility (eventually) of travel.”
Naïve critics are accustomed to saying that life is random, things do not turn out, or present themselves, in life with the glittering appositeness and fated inevitability that they do in literature. Everyday experience contradicts this silly wisdom every day.
I went in.
Inside was also decorated in the very agreeable mixture of sky-blue and pine-green, with touches of a paler, apple-green, and a ceiling studded with little halogen lights like stars, on a midnight ground. The counter was a crescent moon, behind which, one at each end, were two men, one large and blond, one slight and dark. They both wore oil-coloured seamen’s sweaters, wide-necked and cable-stitched. They both wore large, round spectacles, with frames in that iridescent multi-striped light-weight metal (is it titanium?) that is fashionable in Sweden. They asked simultaneously if they could help me. I said I was interested in being a part-time dogsbody. If the job was still available.
They said, again simultaneously, that the notice had only just been put in the window. They introduced themselves as Erik and Christophe. “We sell odd holidays,” said Erik. “Literary holidays—the golden road to Samarkand, haunts of the Lorelei, Treasure Islands. Brontës’ Brussels. Anywhere that isn’t a Heritage site. The battlefields of the Hundred Years War. Green Hells. And so on. Sometimes we employ individual guides for little groups, but the dogsbody we want would only be required to play around in here with a computer and a filing cabinet.”
I said I had been drawn in by their window. By the origami Maelstrøm, by hurtle and periplum.
“That’s good,” said Christophe, the thin one. “Our favourite customers are tempted by words and images. We do have a vulgar brochure or two of beach umbrellas and pedalos for those who have an aesthetic taste for the banal. We have a Fourieriste ambition to cater to all tastes. I had the idea, speaking of Fourier, of a world tour of nineteenth-century glassed-over shopping arcades …”
I said it was unlikely in the extreme that they would have an applicant dogsbody who had read Fourier, and his dreamed phalansteries under glass arcades, but that I did happen to have done so.
They had a mild look, of satisfied pleasure, which they shared with each other. I thought they were almost certainly a couple, from the way they looked at one another. I had—for almost the first time in my life—the sense that if I said what came into my head it would be the right, not the wrong, thing. I said I had come in because I had been reading various accounts of the Maelstrøm and had been attracted by the cutout. Also, as I had said, by the words, by hurtle and periplum. I supposed, I said, that they risked disappointment in clients seduced by words and images. Not really, said Erik. People who live amongst words and images take them around with them like baggage. He asked if I had ever been to the Cimetière Marin of Valéry. I had not. I have travelled very, very little. It was, said Erik, not as he, a northern European had expected. He had expected greensward (he used exactly that word) and low headstones. Not a cramped stone town of dog-kennel mausoleums, with stony streets and blind, blank frontages. But the sea was the same as the image he had taken there. “La mer, la mer, toujours recommencée,” they said, in unison.
I said I would very much like to be their dogsbody, if they would have me. Erik asked what else I did. I told the truth, more or less. That I was thinking of writing a book that had run into the ground for lack of information. That I wanted eventually to see the Maelstrøm, though I was not quite sure why. My “subject,” I said, had possibly, not certainly, drowned in or near it.
They consulted each other with silent stares and smiles, a flick of an eyebrow, a movement of a mouth. I wondered if this couple was asking itself how I would fit into their intimacy. I have noticed that I arouse questions in the minds of those I encounter—those who are interested in me at all, that is—as to my sexual orientation. I think these things may be harder to diagnose in the very small. I stood equably there, offering no help on the sexual front, but expressing, I hoped, silent enthusiasm for the general aesthetic of Puck’s Girdle.
“Would you change the name of the shop?” asked Christophe, as though he read my thoughts.
I replied that I had wondered. It was hard to know how to take a word like “girdle” on a modern shop. But I had decided it was totally memorable. Once seen, never forgotten. And representing exactly the desired travel connotations. “You could call it ‘Periplum,’ ” I found myself saying, “but that does look exclusive. That might be thought to be arcane.”
“You’ll do,” said Erik. I think he was reserving judgement on my sexuality. I didn’t mean him to solve the problem; it was not his business.
When I left, I had learned that they were an ex-artist and an ex-athlete. The artist, who had constructed Maelstrøm, trees and paper colonnades, was the burly Erik, who was a Dane. The athlete was Christophe, who had been an 800-metre runner—until the Kenyans came, he said, and until my hamstring went for the third time. He watched me flinch in my own body at this thought. “We met in Kashmir,” said Erik. “Where we had gone to think our way out of separate impasses,” said Christophe. “And we found a joint way out.”
It was agreed that I should begin work in two days’ time, for a probationary month, to see if we suited each other. Did they do visits to the Maelstrøm, I asked, my hand on their spherical steel door-knob. “Frequently,” said Erik. “It is a regular request.”
I went on my way towards the Linnean Society, considerably encouraged. The entrance, as I said, is in the shadow in the gateway to Burlington House. I went in; there was a small entrance hall, with a glass case containing memorabilia and portraits. A very steep spiral staircase went up inside the building. I was surprised to see that both hall and stairway—essentially austere—were decorated with very large mushrooms and toadstools constructed, solidly but fancifully, from velvet, tweed, lace and broderie anglaise. Several of these monster fungi—as large as two-year-olds—sprouted in the stair-corners and squatted on the landings. They made me uneasy, though their general appearance was sprightly. I was not at all sure what I wanted to ask the librarian, who had kindly agreed to show me round. I wanted to find a whiff, a trace, a smudged fingerprint, so to speak, that would indicate the presence—in the past—of Destry-Scholes. After all, I thought, as I circumvented the velvet fungi, if he had drowned in the Maelstrøm, the exiguous evidence I possessed suggested he had gone there in search of Linnaeus. Who had gone there, according to the document I had a copy of, whic
h Ormerod Goode said was “shifty.” I had decided to explain myself briefly but truthfully—to say that I was investigating someone who appeared to have been researching Linnaeus at the time of his own death. I had brought my folder containing the fragmentary narratives about the three personages. Much depended on the nature of the librarian.
I need not have worried, as it turned out. Several people were gathered in the library office to be shown the library and the collections. I was merely an anonymous extra in the group, all of whom were attending a conference on pollens and spores, which was indeed advertised in the downstairs lobby. There were two Englishmen, an American, a Dutchman and a Swedish woman, who reminded me of a Picasso ceramic. Not the long-necked, leggy, swanlike kind of jug, the stocky, stout kind. Like a squat S, with breasts pushing forwards and buttocks pushing backwards, and solid calves under a denim skirt with a leather belt. The most striking thing about this woman, however, was not her resemblance to a jar, but her hair, which had a life of its own, appearing so abundant and energetic that it was almost a separate life-form. It was dull gold and frizzy and springy, and long. It would have stood out from her head like sun-rays if she had not caught it back and confined it, on the shelf of her skull, in a plum-coloured elasticated velvet band. It flew out behind this compressed bottleneck like a comet, defying gravity, rushing, so to speak, behind her. I did not notice her face, having taken in her form. I suspect this usually happened. She was introduced to us as Fulla Biefeld, pollination ecologist. We were shown the elegant little library, which had a vertiginous narrow gallery, with a quite inadequate iron rail, that looked as though it might detach itself at any moment. I asked the librarian whether she would have any record of any visit by Scholes Destry-Scholes, and she said it was possible, but not certain. She would have to retrieve and consult the archive. I said I believed he had been considering a biography of Linnaeus when he died. She offered to search the Society’s correspondence files.
The party then moved down to the strongroom, which houses what is left (it is a good part) of the Linnean collections. We were asked if there was anything specific we wished to see. The room is richly dark—one wall has Linnaeus’s library, leather-bound, gold-lettered on warm skin, polished and stamped. I ran my eye along the shelf, Virgil and Aristotle, Descartes and Rousseau, and Vaillant. It was a large library for a gentleman of that time, and considerably smaller and more compact than my own rambling and ramshackle heaps of paperbacks. Another savant’s library of that time would not have been dissimilar. There was a central desk with specimen cabinets in the space, which had the airless feel of a mausoleum. (I have never gone into a mausoleum, but was thinking about houselike tombs because of Erik’s revelations about Valéry’s marine cemetery.) Fulla Biefeld said she wanted to see bees. She wanted to know very precisely the physical state of the Linnean specimens of certain solitary bees—though she was also generally interested in butterflies, moths and wasps—from the region round Izmir, and from certain parts of Mexico. She hoped to get permission to put them under an electron microscope to study ancient pollen caught in their hairs, or fur, or scales. For a moment or two we all clustered round the fine drawers of bees, with their twisted corpses contorted on their eighteenth-century pins. One of the men said he had heard that the fish specimens were interesting. I followed him to these drawers, where the fish lay in neat files, one above the other, bisected laterally and pressed like flowers, with their spines displayed and their gaping faces turned sideways to show cheeks, teeth and faded colours. Some of these, the librarian said, were Artedi’s fish. Artedi would have been the greater man, said one of the scientists. I did not know anything about Artedi, beyond that he was Linnaeus’s friend. I was beginning to suffer mildly from claustrophobia, amongst all this long-dead life. What did I want to see? the librarian asked courteously.
I thought about Destry-Scholes’s narrative. The journey to Lapland, I said, was what interested me. They had the manuscript itself, they said, Linnaeus’s own account of his journey north. They fetched it out—leather-bound, its ink now root-brown on onion-skin tawny paper. The Maelstrøm, I murmured, would interest me. And the last part of the journey, the climbing in the Torneå fells. Fulla Biefeld looked up from her trays of dead bees. “He didn’t go there,” she said, in her flat, singing, Swedish voice. “He never went to the Maelstrøm. He never went to Torneå.”
Shifty, Ormerod Goode said.
I said I was sorry. The document I was working on had a very circumstantial description of those parts of his journey.
“He said he went there,” Fulla Biefeld said. “It is Linnaeus’s little untruth. Big lie, maybe. The weather stopped him from going to Maelstrøm. He just rowed about in a little boat and did a trip to Rörstadt. And the Kaituma trip, you know, was another 840 miles, in less than two weeks available. He never went. He romanced it.”
I said nothing. I thought about Destry-Scholes, who, it was beginning to appear, had romanced further what Linnaeus had already romanced. I looked at Linnaeus’s scribble. The librarian with practised hands turned to Linnaeus’s curious drawing of the plant he named Andromeda—Andromeda polifolia, marsh andromeda or bog rosemary, previously known as Chamaedaphne. I attach a photocopy of a copy of his drawing, as I find myself unable to describe its particular kind of incompetence, neither endearing nor ridiculous. The legend in the middle, between the human personification and the botanical representation, reads:
Andromaeda
ficta et vera
mystica et genuine
figurata et depicta
His description of the relations between mythic woman and flower was both far-fetched and in a way sexy. One of the pollination-men read it out to me in English, mellifluously.
“I noticed that she was blood-red before flowering, but that as soon as she blooms her petals become flesh-coloured. I doubt whether any artist could rival these charms in a portrait of a young girl, or adorn her cheeks with such beauties as are here and to which no cosmetics have lent their aid. As I looked at her I was reminded of Andromeda as described by the poets, and the more I thought about her, the more affinity she seemed to have with the plant; indeed, had Ovid set out to describe the plant mystically (mystice) he could not have caught a better likeness …
“Her beauty is preserved only so long as she remains a virgin (as often happens with women also)—i.e., until she is fertilised, which will not now be long, as she is a bride. She is anchored far out in the water, as always on a little tuft in the marsh and fast tied as if on a rock in the midst of the sea. The water comes up to her knees, above her roots; and she is always surrounded by poisonous dragons and beasts—i.e., evil toads and frogs—which drench her with water when they mate in the spring. She stands and bows her head in grief. Then her little clusters of flowers with their rosy cheeks droop and grow ever paler and paler …”
Andromeda polifolia
The flower, I observed, looked sexier than its mystic counterpart. One of the things I did know about Linnaeus was that his taxonomy was based on the sexuality of plants. We had all read our Foucault, Les mots et les choses. I had looked it up again when I first made the identification of Destry-Scholes’s arctic pilgrim.
What follows is not of course what went through my head as I stood amongst the pollination people in the Linnean strongroom. It is what I have later revisited and adumbrated for this document. I have resisted the temptation to insert several pages of Foucault. One of the reasons why I abandoned—oh, and I have abandoned—post-structuralist semiotics, was the requirement to write page upon page of citations from Foucault (or Lacan or Derrida or Bakhtin) in support of the simplest statement, such as that a scene of Shakespeare may be simultaneously comic and tragic—which earlier critics were able to say without all this paraphernalia. But it would be very wrong of me not to give these thinkers their due where it matters—and Foucault did fit Linnaeus’s desire for a complete taxonomy into a view of language and languages which extends beyond and includes it. The pleasure, for me
, I suppose, as I write, is that this time I was thinking of Foucault, and even more of Linnaeus, amongst things, shaved fish-skeletons, great blue butterflies, leather bindings, drawings done by the man himself even if the drawings involved (why not?) levels of meaning, analogies between plants and other creatures, real and invented, accurate and far-fetched.
Linnaeus calculated that the 38 organs of generation, containing 4 variables of number, figure, situation and proposition, allowed 5,776 combinations which were sufficient to define the genus. From the precise definitions afforded by the 5,776 combinations, it was possible to give precise names to the entire vegetable and animal kingdom, and these names would indicate all the relationships, all the connections (manifest or hidden, Foucault says) between the plants of the same kind, and further, of related kinds. Natural history, for Linnaeus, according to Foucault, was fundamentally designed to order and to name the world. The French word I have translated as “order” is “disposition,” and the translation isn’t quite right. It means “place,” “arrange”—order is too strong. Linnaeus took the sex of plants and the sexual organs of other living things as the basis of his system. This wasn’t inevitable. Cuvier, for example, was interested in the morphology of bones as a starting-place. Foucault makes the point that we moderns do not like the idea of an immobile nature, which is to some extent implicit in a classificatory system—we like, he says elegantly, “a swarming continuity of beings who communicate amongst themselves, mingle and perhaps transform themselves, shift shapes, one into the other.” He himself remarks precisely that the essence of the idea isn’t in the conflict of these two visions of nature, but in the relationship, precisely between words and things. It all resides, he says, “dans le réseau de nécessité qui en ce point a rendu possible et indispensable le choix entre deux manières de constituer l’histoire naturelle comme une langue.” His two ways of making a language were the System and the Method. The System is Linnaeus, the taxonomy, the mapping and naming of a finite structure. Linnaeus published his thesis—Praeludia Sponsaliarum Plantanum—in 1729. It expatiated in a learned way on stamens and pistil, pollen (sperm), seeds (ova), castration and infertility. Also on polyandry, polygyny, incest, concubinage and marriage-beds of petals, with a strong erotic charge. He aroused considerable moral opprobrium with this work. I looked at his sad little Andromeda, with her far-fetched fictive, mystic and figurative senses. The network of myth and legend intertwines like vines or ivy with the branches of the Linnean system, through his predilection for classical nomenclature. His butterflies are Greek and Trojan heroes, and here was a curious concrete image of the net of connections, even containing drawings of an inadequately attached chain of links, a crossing-place of languages. I murmured something anodyne about the sexuality of plants and the librarian opened another volume for me, showing me the complicated plans of the flower, leaves, sepals, petals, as bridal chambers for monogamous or polygamous weddings, “public” and “clandestine.” The whole family of ferns, mosses, algae, fungi, he called Cryptogamia (plants that marry secretly). The Dutchman said, surprisingly, that many of Linnaeus’s drawings of polygamy and cryptogamy were felt to be satirical representations of the clandestine relations of the Swedish court. I bent my head over the spidery black petal-divisions, tiny lettering, linking lines. Other heads bent beside mine.