SOURCE: “Beryl Bainbridge: The New Psychopathia,” in The Hidden Script: Writing and the Unconscious, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1985, pp. 59-77.

[In the following essay, Punter examines the presentation of psychological trauma in Bainbridge's novels and the struggles among her characters, particularly those who are female, to deal with both familial and cultural forces of alienation, deprivation, abuse, and rejection.]

Beryl Bainbridge has acted Krafft-Ebing in response to the self-aware Freudianism of many of her fellow-writers; where Lessing, Carter, Barth, have paraded analysis, she has presented herself during the 1970s as a meticulous chronicler of ‘everyday’ events, who would raise an innocent eyebrow at any mention of psychosis, whether attached to writer, character, reader or text.¹ The calamities she depicts are, so the surrounding authorial fiction goes, conventionally implicit in our lives: they are a mechanical consequence of our upbringing, and either they will spring out, fully armed, at a later date; or, indeed, they have happened already, and only a thin skin of self-protection prevents us from remembering the terror of adolescence or of poverty. We do not need psychological sophistication to see through to the depths: events are hideously transparent, naturally manifesting the results of age-old cultural trauma. Yet of course in her descriptive and guileless way she forces us back to the schoolroom, back to early occupational experience: did we not then, she asks, experience the fear of being alone, of being unversed in the ways of our parents/employers? Were we too not brought on to a scene where everybody else understood the conventions, and then victimised for not possessing that unobtainable knowledge?

The question below that runs again in terms of gender, and has a curiously symmetrical relation to the question Nabokov poses to his audience. Where he asks whether we too shared, long ago, his experience of dividing the world (of young girls) into the ‘knowing’ and the ‘unknowing’ (and he is not so unsubtle as to be referring merely to carnal knowledge), Bainbridge asks whether we shared in the more dire experience of being known (as inferior, as junior, as incomplete); and whether, if as readers and particularly as male readers we claim not to remember such a time,² we are thereby collaborating in a great refusal, a refusal of understanding which perpetuates hegemony and the transmission of fear between the sexes. The central characters in Bainbridge's fables of psychosis are mostly small, by nature or by nurture:³: they experience, indeed, the undeniable fact that, through murder, rape or anger, they produce large effects in the world, but there is a gap between cause and effect, between desire and achievement; and is this not, runs the apparently supplementary but really more important question, something which has been specifically done to women? Are not these acts of moral and carnal outrage precisely the inverted reflection of what a masculine culture has visited upon women, and are not male desires in the end fulfillable only through violence, of one kind or another?

None of this is to deny that Bainbridge writes about victims; but when her victims turn, there is a gleefulness in the outcome, even with the young Hitler. All of this, all this grotesquerie and bloodshed, is after all only to be expected while you (the reader?) capitulate in subjecting others to inhumanity. Thus there is in Bainbridge a wish for rebellion, but no special interest in the rebel: the excitement is more pure than that, more focused on downfall and the upturning of a deadly world. The time for the Other, the inversion, to emerge is, of course, the traditional moment:⁴ it is the moment of celebration, the bottle factory outing, the particular exemption granted in the form of injury time. It is at these moments, when we most hopefully imagine that some form of ritual is going to crown our efforts and achievements, that the voices of those whom we have suppressed in our facile forms of organisation, of those whom we have never prepared to understand the pleasures of our parties, will be raised; in a scream which, at first, we may mistake for participation, but which is eventually revealed as a cry of anguish and fury, the inarticulate sign for all that has been swept under the carpet in order to prepare the (primal) scene for a confirming ritual.⁵

During the 1970s, the furrow Bainbridge has ploughed has appeared a lonely one, in that she has consistently refused the displacements which have become conventional in the ‘new fiction’, the construction of a mythicised future or the return to a putatively explanatory past; she has also refused to parenthesise her fiction, to frame it within a satisfyingly self-conscious exploration of the writerly task. Her stories stand on their own, largely unweighted by a tacit compact between writer and reader: the signifier remains uncompromisingly rooted in the signified, resisting that increasingly convenient tendency towards play which could convince us that these traumas and psychoses are merely ‘effects of the text’. If anything, they are the effects of Liverpool, as a sign for the anti-metropolitan, as the standing rebuff to the existing modes of economic and social organisation, as the continuous ‘harbour’ of a freer interplay between the material and the aesthetic, as, implicitly, the place where art is determined by the mere resources available and the imagination which seeks to soar over the Mersey is more or less severely punished. For every success which emerges from the North-West, Bainbridge suggests to us, there are a hundred enactments, not of failure, but of simply not breaking through: a hundred endeavours hurled against the wall of deprivation, which receive only the answer, ‘Not here, dear’, or, at least, ‘Not now’. Bainbridge country is a land where the most bizarre of denizens may be found, but only on sufferance: anything can be entertained, but only a few transplants ‘take’, in either direction. Mostly, we will be condemned to tread the same gravelly roads, only as time goes on they will be all the more bitterly sprinkled with the detritus of hope.

The volumes are therefore slim, and motionless: they stack, like the early recordings of forgotten pop groups, redolent of spent sweetness, of untasted deadly nightshade, of ambitions carried through in thought only. The fact that, so often, the narrator comprehends a larger portion of the story than any one character does not serve as a guarantee of readerly wisdom, real or to be attained, but as a reminder of interpretations unmade, of understandings unreached, of all the moments we could have seized to construct patterns which might have continued to inform us. It is thus that childhood and adolescence are the essential terrain: for it is only back there, in the painful rememoration of the fear of parental absence, that we can be brought to admit to the continual defeat of expectation. If, Bainbridge says, these fables appear to resonate with present experience, that is by chance: it is too late to learn those lessons, and when the lessons were on offer we were usually looking out of the window. All that remains is a ‘quiet life’, a life in which those peremptory voices are content to remain silent, having weighed up their chances of audibility; yet it is also within those quiet lives that our secrets are held, every moment of collapse held sequestered in the continuing story of a locked family, an individual reduced to silence by the pressures of conflict. Each family, each place of work, stands as a silent monument to our past; each gesture we made is replicated at large in the frozen posture of some group locked into fear, incomprehension, worst of all guilt. Behind the net curtains, our own past survives; we can be brought, by the narrator, to see it, but the possibility of learning has probably been eclipsed, many years ago. These situations survive as hieroglyphs, encapsulated signs in the language of the unconscious, visible warnings on the road; but we give them little credit, and cannot predict the future moment when we too will see ourselves in the waxworks, will realise that our movement, our escape to the bright lights, has been illusory, that we too are being observed in our role as monitory sculptures, turned to permanent stone in the very moment of indignity.

In Harriet Said (1972), the narrative plays delicately around the problem of signification: that is to say, the central characters are clearly enacting a script, but we are never certain whose, and thus the meaning of events remains in doubt. At a fairly obvious level, Harriet is the succubus, the ever-present whispering self who eggs the narrator on (harries her) to mate with her father (the Tsar) and kill her mother (Mrs Biggs—who is, just before her death, ‘huge and menacing’,⁶ the frozen statue of adulthood before whom the narrator initially quails, but who has to be reduced to dust.)⁷ Yet at every turn Harriet's plans are in fact undercut by the narrator's; this blank and terrible ‘I’ takes Harriet's words and injunctions and twists them to an unconscious but preformed plan of her own. Thus there is an inversion: Harriet becomes the blank slate on which the narrator inscribes the record of her own desires, the ambiguous authority who can be invoked to justify any practice. If the unconscious is indeed structured like a language, the narrator's ritual progress through puberty is depicted as a dramatised encounter with that language, and as a subjugation of it: Harriet ends up baffled and threatened by the power of the narrator (who is, of course, structurally the only agent who can confer meaning) to distort her comparatively puny imaginary crimes into a realised tale of sex and murder. Thus the narrator acts as a pure ‘embodiment’: she exists to give carnal form (and the form of carnage) to the promptings of the unconscious. She is thus herself empty (nameless); and the fear we experience as readers springs from our uncomfortable proximity to a superior shaping power (Bainbridge incarnated) before whose unseen plans we can manifest only a shudder. What Harriet says is significant only insofar as it provides the pretext for the narrator's interpretation: Harriet offers, for instance, the category of humiliation (the Tsar/father must be ‘humbled’),⁸ but it is the narrator who connects this empty signifier with the available contents of the unconscious, and carries the desire through to a dreadful completion before which the prompter can only stand aghast—for a moment, before she begins again to act her role and fabricate cover stories after the event. Yet for the narrator, it is vital to maintain the claim that Harriet is the true ‘agent’:

How could I not understand her? I would have given all the power of my too imaginative mind and all the beauty of the fields and woods, not to understand her. And at last I gave in to Harriet, finally and without reservation. I wanted the Tsar to be humiliated, to cower sideways with his bird's head held stiffly in pain and fear, so that I might finish what I had begun, return to school forgetting the summer, and think only of the next holidays that might be as they had always been.⁹

What is thus enacted is the story of the girl-child's revenge against the father (the real father is constructed as a caricature, compounded of practical ineffectuality and swearing, absurdly laying claim to a power which is actually wasted beyond recall), in its full duplicity: the narrator constructs a false Other (the script of Harriet) in the name of which (in the name of the sister) she is then freed to humble and mutilate the masculine.¹⁰ As well as an absent father, the text also presents us with an actual absent sister (Frances); we are invited to suppose that the narrator acts under an imperative to fill in those blanks in the familial text, even though violence is the only sign under which they can come to have meaning: only through death can life be affirmed.

The narrator is stout and imaginative, body-full and fantasy-full: Harriet's dry and slender presence provides only a frame within which this over-present femininity can perform a drama, the drama. And yet there is no fullness in the narrator's response: the subjugation of the male and mother-murder contain a meaning to which she (so we are invited to suppose) has no conscious access. It is only by reference to the mythical authority of Harriet that she can convey to us the significance of her actions. Before this mirror (and filling the empty reflection with her own wishes), she can experience fullness, but in so doing she renounces the claim to interpretation: thus we are drawn into a circle of shared naivety, and invited to examine the Others we erect as justifications, as objective correlatives, for our crimes.¹¹

How often had Harriet recoiled from me, telling me I was ugly, that I must modify and govern the muscles of my face. It was not that my feelings illuminated and transformed me, as Harriet became transformed in diabolical anger or joy, it was more a dreadful eagerness and vulnerability that made my face like an open wound, with all the nerves exposed and raw.¹²

Thus Harriet provides the pretext on which the ‘wound’, the assumed castration, can be made manifest, and the Tsar can be ‘un-manned’; we suspect that this ‘ugliness’ is the outward sign of something quite different, of the unmanageability of female trauma, something before which Harriet, like the Tsar, cowers. We are thus presented with a drama of female omnipotence: if, as Cixous claims, the feminine consciousness is plural, in part a defensive linking of many in the face of the demanding, phallic ‘one’,¹³ then we should not be surprised if this plurality begins to act like a team of bent detectives, endlessly covering for each other in an unscripted spiral so that the excuses for crime are themselves multiplied as the alibi becomes totally secure. Like Macavity, the narrator was never there, and so the story of her own burgeoning sexuality and its links with violence is again buried. There is no growth possible in the text, only an increasing complexity of cover stories:

At last I was allowed to go to bed. I lay in the dark wide-eyed. I had avoided real displeasure, I had been kissed, I had explained the broken window. They would never trace it to me, the more so as Harriet had been home early. I had lied very well and cried effortlessly; I would look white and ill in the morning. I thought of the beautiful night and my god-like strength in the church and I began to smile when I remembered the Tsar's banged nose under the lamp. Harriet could not have managed better.¹⁴

It is thus, Bainbridge suggests, that the girl-child grows to maturity: fragmenting, developing a spurious self-management, endlessly referring desire to a hypothesised Other (Harriet is the spurious plural, ‘Woman’), and thus becoming, paradoxically, the means for enacting the necessary vengeance for the thousands of years of male domination.

The construction of the female superego, and its purposes (which are quite different from those of the male equivalent), are again the ground against which The Dressmaker (1973) takes its form, and here again we are given a story which we are invited to see through: coupled with female vengeance, we are invited to a view of female ‘transparency’, as the writer's own revenge for generations of pornographic scopophilia. The tiniest of devices is significant:

Afterwards she went through into the little front room, the tape measure still dangling about her neck, and allowed herself a glass of port.¹⁵

In the ‘allowance’ to her self, a severance of the female subject already suggests that one part is going to be capable of anything; there is a ridding of scruple, a preparing for the feast, and this premonition is confirmed by the description of the fleshy young male American:

A great healthy face, with two enquiring eyes, bright blue, and a mouth which when he spoke showed a long row of teeth, white and protruding. It was one of those Yanks. Jack was shocked. Till now he had never been that close. They were so privileged, so foreign; he had never dreamt to see one at close quarters in Nellie's kitchen, taking Rita and Marge, one on each arm and bouncing them out of the house.¹⁶

The masculinity evidenced here is expressed in consumerist metaphors: yet also this manifestation of flesh is to be consumed and discarded, the developed but useless teeth finally helpless against the deprivation which breeds a truer violence. For the overall sign of The Dressmaker is deprivation: as in Harriet Said, it is as though Bainbridge is chronicling the grotesque shapes which the passage to maturity may take if the main channel (and the coastal setting makes the metaphor apt) is no longer negotiable; the difficulty of transit through dried tributaries and across unmeasured sandbanks, which always carry the threat of permanent beaching, of a sudden and premature halt after which we can never again progress. Nellie and Marge between them, riven and full of friction as they are, incarnate a solid maturity before which Ira (the ambiguous name, anger with a feminine ending) cannot even begin. In any case, he is simply a refraction of ‘Rita’, but thus, of course, derives the complexity of the story: for the vengeance the aunts wreak is displaced, does not fall on the phallic (Chuck, the drill-bit) but on a junior manifestation of masculinity, and similarly Rita fades from the narrative as the aunts reassert a complementary hegemony.

This displacement is crucial, because Bainbridge is not trying to offer a simple reversal of norms, or to claim that the force of the feminine can somehow rejuvenate society: on the contrary, she is showing the destruction which has been visited on the female in order to convert it into a force for conservatism, and therefore the insurrection performed is not a real insurrection but rather one which re-enacts the dominance of the phallic. The dressmaker ‘wins’ her battle through her employment, by sticking pins in wax effigies, but also through a fake penetration in a more general sense, a penetration of the potential links between the other characters. Partly she is enabled to achieve this by the fact that the forces of masculinity are already really dead: in the triumvirate of Nellie, Marge and Rita the entire force of the family is contained, with Marge (a name-changer; she is also Margo, but she cannot ‘go’, she is stuck, familially and sexually, within rememoration)¹⁷ as the substitute father, especially since she alone is presumed to have had previous sexual experience. Within that drama, what is predicted is that the line of communication which carries the sexual charge (father/daughter, but here Margo/Rita) falls within the control of the mother as the transmitter of inhibition: Nellie can sever that relationship at will, and thus reaffirm the future Rita-as-mother as the only possible shape for progression. It thus falls to Nellie, as the reincarnation of an unchangeable and frozen past, to lay down the tracks into the future; thus Rita is herself symbolically killed when Ira meets his (masculine) fate, but more significantly thus is depicted the fate of an entire culture, starved of meaning (in the shape of products for consumption, but also of the affections, sexual relations, feelings presented in the world) and thus trapped into a murderous resentment of change. The phallic sign which Ira represents, in however weakened and limp a form, cannot penetrate the tensed surface of this constructed and well-defended world, in which men have been reduced to Jack's role as absent provider; but meanwhile, within that hygienic bubble from which the male is excluded, significance has drained away and been replaced by a discourse of ritual.

It is in ways like this that Bainbridge, for all her surface naturalism, nonetheless provides us with a map of unconscious process: for her narratives are situated at those points where the covering operations are ceasing to be effective and the barbarous shapes of desire are poking through the torn fabric. The doubling of roles which lies at the root of Harriet Said reappears in Brenda and Freda in The Bottle Factory Outing (1974), and accompanied, as in The Dressmaker, by a diminution of the phallic. Here the men are almost all Italians, illegal immigrant workers, hidden and cowering, often described as a group of children and largely unable to speak the language of power: Rossi's sexual desires extend only as far as rumpling Brenda's clothing to the accompaniment of a meaningless and evasive patter. In this world of masculine midgets, the abundant Freda draws into herself all the power of conveying signification: it is only through her suggestions, her ideas, her interpretation that the world has any meaning at all, and it is only she who retains a potential for change, although this potential becomes increasingly unreal. Not surprisingly, this gigantism is the prelude to humiliation and death: and when Freda dies, she too has to be hidden away, in a barrel, to show that the forces of weary containment have won another battle. Yet, in a sense, it is Brenda, thin and anxious, who has won a Pyrrhic victory: it is her emaciated version of femininity which proves the only one able to survive in a run-down and barely moving world. It is as though she projects all the hope and desire into Freda, thus pumping her up into an unstable shape which causes her death: symbolically, Brenda wonders whether it was Freda's horse-ride which caused the bruises found later on her body, speculating really on whether any manifestation of sexuality might be irrevocably linked with Thanatos. Thus Freda's death acts, for Brenda, as a redemption of an awful kind: she is confirmed in her knowledge that there is nothing to be done about fate. After the death, she has a dream, and when she wakes ‘she didn't feel ill any more or cross’:

She had been in a cinema with Freda: Freda was wearing a trouser suit and one of those floppy hats with cloth flowers on the brim. She complained bitterly that she couldn't see the bloody screen. The men in the row behind said ‘Sssh!’ loudly and kicked the back of the seat. Brenda whispered she should take her hat off. ‘Why should I?’ said Freda; and Brenda remembered a little doggerel her mother had taught her, something about a little woman with a great big hat … went to the pictures and there she sat, Freda shrieked and recited rapidly … man behind couldn't see a bit … finally got tired of it. Somehow it made Brenda very happy that Freda too knew the little rhyme. She beamed in the darkness. She turned and kissed Freda on the cheek and woke instantly.¹⁸

What appears to cheer Brenda up is her recognition that Freda too, despite her ambitions, knows that underneath it all women are merely laughable, that the big hat is only a sham and below it lies fear and withdrawal. In this dream, Freda is an honorary man, trouser-suited and swearing, but this does not make her acceptable, it only renders her a target because she has dared to put her head above the parapet. She confuses the men, who cannot see past her; but this does her no good, for she herself cannot see either. By transgressing the stereotypes to which Brenda rigidly adheres, she turns into a kind of chimera and hence cannot survive. Brenda finds comfort in her mother's ‘doggerel’, as Rita is reduced to belief in the defeatist wisdom of Nellie: in Freda's trajectory through power to death, Brenda watches an enactment of what might happen if femininity were to cut itself loose from these apron-strings, and learns the lesson that it is better, in the end, not to have emerged into the world at all than to risk the violence visited on the admired.

What is appalling in The Bottle Factory Outing is the portrayal of low expectations: that nothing can be hoped for except the shoddy and the inappropriate, and thus the outing itself, hilarious though it is, is also sinister. Throughout it there is the fear that, really, even if we get the chance we shall not remember how to enjoy ourselves; and the concomitant fear that, in our flailing efforts to remember the nature of pleasure, we shall go too far and the ‘games’ will turn into mayhem and inarticulate rage. It is as though, for Brenda, all experience is bracketed: as though she is waiting, exhausted by past attempts to participate (her defunct marriage), for her mother to call her in for tea. At the end, she calls herself in, and regresses: the entire process of the story comes to seem as though it has itself been only an outing, an excursion into activity; the ‘real life’ which will be resumed by those who survive will be a life devoid of incident, in which Brenda can subside into a role of pure observer, those parts of herself which she has invested in Freda safely cut out, buried, forgotten.

Sweet William (1975) describes a similar trajectory: Ann is presented, in the shape of the ambiguous William, with a text which she makes a continuous series of attempts to read, in that she involves herself in an effort to bring her own life into an intelligible relation with the life of another. But as she reads this text, she becomes increasingly aware that such completeness of comprehension is not possible: that there are always further corners which cannot be explored, always unexplained absences and erasures.¹⁹ As the book moves on, Bainbridge signifies the way in which understanding eludes Ann by talking increasingly over her head to the reader; thus we sense Ann slipping away, as only we, for example, divine the probable secret of William's relationship with Mrs Kershaw, or the reasons for his reported fight with Roddy. No matter how close Ann seeks to draw to this reincarnation of the father, there is always something in the way, some surviving element of his earlier life, some continuing manifestation of his previous wife or wives. Ann, of course, goes through a period of strong ambivalence towards Edna, the principal incarnation of William's past, sensing the appropriateness of Edna's ‘theatrical’ manner to William's way of life: it is only by considering action as though it were bracketed on a stage (William is a playwright) that we can bring ourselves to refrain from asking illicit questions. Where do the actors go at night? Do they even continue to exist? Or are they, in fact, merely two-dimensional, and must we settle for a version of living in which facts are reduced to whatever William wants to present as his current fiction?

The splitting of the female self which is a habitual theme in Bainbridge is present here too, in the relation between Ann and Pamela; and its contours are becoming clearer.²⁰ The nameless ‘I’ of Harriet Said, Brenda in The Bottle Factory Outing and now Ann experience an impossibility of role: they cannot hold on to their ability to observe the world if they simultaneously have to be themselves observed objects, and so they slide into invisibility and project the contours which they seek to shed into their Others, Harriet, Freda, Pamela. It is as though the body itself is too much of a burden to bear, and must be exiled so that its shapes will not give away anything of the self's identity or gender; but whereas in Harriet Said, this process still permits of a terrible victory, and thus the disguise enables a real crime, by the time of Sweet William there is less to achieve, and disguise has become an unconscious device for its own sake. Where Sweet William, however, diverges more radically from the previous fictions is in its insistence on the role of the male in producing this projective self-mutilation: it is William's capacity for generating self-justifying fictions which reduces women to the actants of roles in a predetermined script. Thus also, by a reticulative process, it is male writers who have laid down the terms of female ‘character’.²¹ and Bainbridge's response is to move towards dispensing with this concept of ‘character’ altogether, rendering her women progressively more emptied, so that, paradoxically, they shall not fall victim to the domineering habits of masculine interpretation. What is rejected is the familiar recourse to the portrayal of a ‘rich inner life’ as a substitute for thwarted action: these women do not have rich inner lives, or if they do they salvage them only at the expense of articulacy, because their words are not valued. William, we are invited to suppose, is at best a pretty poor playwright, a second-rate Pinter, yet even as that he is in a position to transmit within the social body: to the extent that he is given credibility, as playwright, director and philanderer, there is a concomitant societal refusal to credit the different accounts of women, and at the same time a blocking of the paths for communication within the feminine. William's need to separate his life into compartments is itself a reflection of fear, fear that for women to talk about him rather than through him would be to produce him too as an object, and that this would sap his agential status in the world.

But for Alan, in A Quiet Life (1976), the choices available for the male are themselves limited by the ineradicable record of parental defeats and disasters.

Most of the time he thought about Janet Leyland—the way she looked at him, what she said, a certain mannerism she had, of touching the lobe of her ear when she was unsure. He wasn't lovesick or anything like that. He wasn't off his food. It was more that he was engrossed in her acceptance of him—his ideas, his cleverness. She thought he knew a lot. He came from a household that regarded men as inferior; they were fed first and deferred to in matters of business, but they weren't respected.²²

Yet this experience of subjugation does not lead to rebellion: for Alan, ingrained habit is far too deeply laid.

He knew, somewhere at the back of his mind, that he could only hope to be an extension of his parents—he'd step a few paces further on, but not far. His progression was limited, as theirs had been. … He'd always be polite and watch his manners. Most likely he'd vote Conservative, in rebellion against his father.²³

Thus rebellion is converted into political regression, and the lesson Alan learns has also to do with not taking risks, with adopting a discretion which will ensure that he does not, indeed, end up despised like his father; but there is a terrible price to be paid. His life is to be led in the same way as, in childhood, he moves nervously about the cluttered living-room stuffed with reminders of richer and better days. The wish is to vanish, to become part of the pattern in the over-ornate wallpaper; and now it is he who, in his ‘wild’ sister Madge, watches warily as adolescence shudders its emergence from the chrysalis. Claustrophobia can itself become a habit: Alan experiences no desire for the wide open spaces, but wants instead to turn himself into the ideal and non-frictive inhabitant of a space seen as inevitably closed.

The inversion of the oppressive interior and its burden of partially visible trauma is in the pinewoods, where Madge not only encounters more real experiences, but simultaneously covers them under a patina of lies. Seen like this, the question posed by the text is symmetrical with that posed in Sweet William: in a world where knowledge can never be complete because the story (the play) began before we arrived, how are we to make the necessary adjustment to an acceptable level of incomprehension? And worse than that, in a real or projected sibling situation, where the Other has somehow already adopted or grown into the admired role, the role of freedom, how are we to find another space to occupy without falling prey to the sneaking suspicion that all we have done, every shape with which we have wrestled in the process of self-formation, is not simply itself an inversion, a fitting into a space already unconsciously designed by our elders? This, certainly, is Alan's fear, and it recurs to him when he meets Madge again years later: ‘immediately he felt disturbed. He hated reviving the past, the small details of time long since spent. Seeing her, he was powerless to push back the memories that came crowding into his mind.’²⁴ What, of course, he is also scared of is the possibility which was ever present to him as a child: that Madge, from her position across the boundary of the family, from her magical haven in the pinewoods, might in fact also have a story to tell, a story about him, which would invalidate the years of patient and painful self-suppression; the possibility that, in fact, the neurosis now so carefully grown over might have been there and evident all along and that Madge might have seen it more clearly than he had cared to see himself.

Thus to be watched, indeed to be seen at all, is to be humiliated: the net curtains, the unused parlours do not seem strange to Alan, because he shares with his parents a despairing assumption that what might otherwise be seen would not bear the light of day. His own watchfulness, initially of his parents and later of himself, can survive and continue to operate as a protective mechanism if he is himself out of the reach of harm or affect. At the end, coming back to his wife from the brief meeting with Madge which frames the earlier narrative of memory, ‘turning his back on the house, in case his wife watched from the window, he let the flowers spill from his folded newspaper on to the pavement. Then’, freed from any incriminating evidence and thus restored to his conception of untrammelled masculine strength, ‘squaring his shoulders, he walked up the path’.²⁵

In many ways, Edward in Injury Time (1977) shares Alan's situation, as a conformist whose tissue of habits papers over early cracks: but here there is something softer in the writing, some flicker of hope as Edward, forced towards a change of behaviour by his bizarre encounter with a gang of bank-robbers, has to attend again, if only momentarily, to voices he believed he had silenced. Here, for the first time, there is a fair match between the major subtexts: Edward and Binny, telling fragments of their own stories, have perceptions which at least connect with each other's, even if, time after time, the possibility for an actual sharing of these perceptions is lost, and shafts of light cross the gloom to no avail. This is structurally Bainbridge's most conventional narrative: a complex set of marital secrets, already on the point of blowing themselves apart, are thrown into full relief by the chance appearance of the criminals, and we are led to believe that, as usual, some kind of growth, if only into a deepened realisation of inadequacy, will occur—as indeed, to an extent, it does. But what is foregrounded is the essentially regressive content of this narrative structure. Edward's obsession is, like Alan's, with childhood events, with a difficult matrix of public-school betrayal and paternal excommunication: what the eruption of violence achieves is a return to that world. Edward, Binny and the others are themselves plunged back into a realm where callow bids for leadership and adolescent resentments replace previous emotions; and in this they enter into a curiously mirrored relationship with the invading gang. Where the dramatic interest of previous Bainbridge texts, and the apparent interest of the first part of Injury Time, lay in a splitting and redoubling of individuals, here the interest shifts to the redoubled interaction between the two separate groups.²⁶ At some points where the various representatives of the bohemian and respectable middle classes are being held hostage by the workers, the two groups crosscut and intermingle; elsewhere, they hold themselves rigidly apart, fastidiously drinking their breakfast tea in the separate halves of Binny's kitchen/diner. The criminals, on the whole, are shocked: by Edward's infidelity, by the squalor of Binny's house. There is no change at stake for them; it is only the unstable syntheses of the initial appalling dinner party which might get remade, but in the end there is little felt impact across the groups, except perhaps for Edward himself: forced at one point to ‘stand in’ for Ginger, and purged by his repetition of an early cricketing incident, he becomes able to seize a moment of potential heroism, with—as we might by now predict—the proviso that it almost certainly entails his death.

But behind this drama lies another one, more marginalised, and more to do with youth and age than with gender relations. In the face of the toughness of their children, women like Binny and Alma are reduced to meditating on their own softness, and the relationship between Binny and Edward becomes a mutual consolation for ageing. Binny's elder daughter has acquired masculine disguise, army boots and overalls, although this is curiously parodied by the female disguise of one of the criminals, a disguise to which Edward proves completely unable to accommodate, continuing to treat him as a woman despite full evidence to the contrary. It is, indeed, as the title suggests, as though the time given to Edward and Binny for their faltering relationship does not really count: as though it is extra time, snatched from death, in which boundaries become unimportant, and the yearning is for the state of undifferentiation which age might bring. And this, in fact, is what is enacted, as under pressure the characters start to swap roles at regular intervals, and become immersed in a common predicament. The reader is soothed by suggestions of collectivity: but the price to be paid is a desexualising, as though we are supposed to share in a welcome abandonment of real concerns to the young, and to approximate ourselves to the image of Mrs Montague, over sixty yet still looking for a suitable hedge behind which to take her pleasures. Binny is made to feel young and old in dizzying succession, ending up in a grey area where nothing much matters any more, but where also, consequently, there is no need to accept the damaging descriptions offered by her children, by the criminals, by Mrs Montague: once again, there is a kind of invisibility to be achieved, and thus it is Binny, by virtue of her lack of determinate outline, who is the one chosen by the robbers to serve as a continuing hostage. Edward, with his suspect high profile and his suddenly found new reserves of energy, cannot survive: his final inducement of himself to take a risk is fatal, as, symbolically, the entire risk of the affair with Binny has been bracketed within the sign of an imminent heart attack. Bainbridge presents us, for once, with images of at least partial success in the acquiring of self-knowledge, but only by suggesting that the boundaries of the self are in any case pointless, that we may as well resign ourselves to the unpreventable invasion signified in the hostage process and in Binny's ambiguous rape.

Thus in Injury Time, the body is frail, softened by careless living and weakened by corrosive memories; we are in the constant whispering presence of imminent paralysis, shadowed for Binny by imminent menopause. There is a sense in which the main characters are already ghosts, although the arrival of the gang does not increase their reality: rather, it is as if two species of half-beings seek to inhabit the same space in the unconscious hope that, somewhere among the tangle of crossed wires, a spark might jump and a whole might be formed. It is mostly around Binny that these hopes are encouraged to coalesce, as though, perhaps because of her extensive motherhood, she might possess the alchemical skill necessary to convert waste material into gold, but her experiences with Edward and Ginger demonstrate bitterly for us that the hope of resurrection is a foolish one, and that nothing is about to be born of these sterile and furtive unions. The doubling of relationships passes down the line: from the public and ceremonial life of Edward and Helen (whom we never see, who is, perhaps, herself already an emptied shell), through the apparently more broadminded marriage of George and Muriel Simpson, which turns out to be a vicious fiction barely covering hatred and envy, through the relationship between Edward and Binny, which is finally forced to ‘go public’ by the intrusion, and on to the brief and ‘ineffectual’²⁷ encounter between Binny and Ginger: at each point of intersection, we are invited to share a moment's hope that here at last there may be some form of life which has both shape and content, but it is never the case. The symbol with which we are left is the one offered to us in despair by Muriel: of the house prepared for union, where one partner never arrives.

If the secret of Injury Time is sterility (a lack of the materials for birth, but also a multiple sealing-off of incompatible areas of life), then Young Adolf (1978) offers us a monstrous birth which provides an ironic exit from the dilemma. Adolf Hitler, we know, at least went on to make a mark on the world; but equally, that ‘mark’ was to be a gigantic magnification of the marks inflicted on Adolf himself by his environment and upbringing. The text is riddled with the signs of displaced violence and birth trauma: most significantly in the extraordinary sequences which feature the appearance and disappearance of the hole in the wall of the third-floor room.²⁸ Time after time, the apparently solid surface of that wall shatters (‘Old Shatterhand’ is Adolf's ‘alter ego’) and Adolf, among others, is flung violently through it in a parody of birth, to find his account unbelieved. His trajectory, then, becomes bound up with the attempt to discern the secret of the appearing and vanishing point of entry into the world; and that act of continuing displacement underpins his sexual hatred. The problems of accounting for his origins are further symbolised in his role at the hotel where his brother Alois finds him a job: although here is a luxurious sign of the kind of world for which Adolf longs, he is condemned never to enter or leave it by the front entrance, his complicated circuits through side and rear doors becoming ever more bizarre as he becomes increasingly involved with criminal designs. Through these symbols, a world is established where all the principal doors and windows are blocked up, and Adolf—and the reader—has to creep furtively around the edges, often occupying spaces apparently actually within the walls: the wider implication is of a world twisted so far out of true by divisions of birth and class that we have to make our passage through it in secret and by night, and where the questions we might need to ask, in order to explain how we got to our present point, are always thwarted.

As with many of Bainbridge's previous fictions, there is a tissue of interlocking texts and plans, half-revealed, constantly conspiring to prevent achievement. It is not, indeed, that we are drawn to feel much sympathy with Adolf; but it is suggested that, after all, from this tangle of errors and deprivation nothing much better can be expected, unless it be the passivity of Bridget, who acquiesces, half helplessly and half resentfully, in manipulation and inarticulacy. Kephalus and Meyer try to ‘save a few’,²⁹ prevent one or two of the most deprived from falling directly victim to the presumed cruelty of the authorities, but not much real hope is attached to their activities: indeed, it may even be that their efforts are misplaced, a romantic charade which does not touch upon the roots of evil. Whatever location we seek to establish for ourselves as subjects, the very word ‘subject’ carries a fatal duplicity of meaning: our subjectivity involves also our continuing subjection, and we are left perennially listening through the wall for intimations of the real agency of the story in which we are acting a minor and subjugated part. It is this inevitable subjugation, Bainbridge suggests, which produces the hideous fantasies of domination which Adolf will go on to act out; this sense of rootlessness which will engender the fantasies of ‘roots’ which emerge into the world as racism and sexual violence; this knowledge of being battered which will make us in turn find people to batter. Alois and Bridget act as substitute parents for Adolf, but we know that this is merely a displacement: the real father exists only as a portrait on the wall, and as a nameless sign around which contradictory narratives are constructed; there is no path back to the truth.³⁰

Taking the fictions as a series, we find ourselves in the presence of a detailed investigation of familial conditioning and of the baroque shapes for the self generated in a world where wholeness is not possible. The key process of splitting, from which later shapes derive, is between the acceptable and the rebellious, between the self as defined by an already present pattern and the self as a point of divergence from the familial norm. The problem is that neither choice actually leads away or forward: both enter us into an endless circuit where the only possible dialogue is with father or mother, the only reaction to the possibility of other relationships a terrified probing to see whether this stranger has the quasi-parental gift of seeing through the fictions we wish to present as our life story. The most feared figure is thus the sibling: because at the moment when we settled for an option, or claimed to have done so, he or she was there, observing, and might have a different account to give which would undo all the decades of self-suppressive work. And even if there was no real sibling, or not a significant one, the problem still remains: there is still the fear that our disguise is inadequate, that we have not sufficiently approximated ourselves to the shape we want, and that this will be glaringly obvious to the Other.

Thus, at all costs, we must not be seen: and it is, of course, at this point that the account of familial development (or lack of it) interlocks most importantly with the account of gender differentiation. For observation is also objectification, freezing the Other and turning it to stone; and principally, says Bainbridge, this is what men do to women, partly by regarding them as sexual objects and founding an entire culture on a violent pornography, but also by in a thousand other ways using the ‘gaze’ as an instrument of control.³¹ Not, of course, that this does the men much good: by replacing real women with moving statues, they in fact create a world of monsters before which they can only cower. Thus the ambition towards control is shown as fundamentally circular; and while we are embedded in these self-defeating ways of dealing with the outer world, we also stand no chance of achieving control over ourselves.

Bainbridge's characters can rarely interpret each other's behaviour: they are too preoccupied with trying to fight clear of acknowledging the constraints on their own. And, certainly, there is no freer, better, less ritualised life available at those levels of society where we might expect to find the regulations less rigorously observed; on the contrary, ‘down there’ is where deprivation makes itself most clingingly felt, and where there is barely enough substance available to flesh out the form of the individual. The experience is of an overwhelming scarcity, either actual or imagined: and that scarcity is itself a reflection of a deprivation of love, of an endless competition to achieve the security of having at least one parent, for a time, all to ourselves. By splitting, perhaps we hope that we might double our chances: that we might become, on the one hand, the competent agent in the world who might expect to attract a father's approval, and on the other the figure of pathos who might hope for a reincarnation of a mother's love. In fact, the trick results in a locked solipsism, in which the only object on view is our self-as-agent; meanwhile we, as subjects with an inner life, are further starved of the resources for survival.

And thus, in the end, this fiction which apparently makes little concession to the modernist habit of self-consciousness produces a highly self-conscious reader: because we are made increasingly aware that, in gazing at the squirmings of these Others, we too are looking only at parts of ourselves, that all these enactments are ones in which we too have shared or will share, objective correlatives for the dilemmas of maturation. And further, we become uncomfortably aware that the readerly position is itself voyeuristic: that we are being treated to a banquet of secrets which we would rather not have known, are being beckoned into the empty and sheeted front parlour where every framed photograph tells a story of defeat. And thus of course, if this is possible, if we can be beckoned through the net curtains and shown the skeletons, what of our own secrets? Is it that we too in time will find ourselves listening dumbfounded to the other story, to the narrative about our self which we have refused to acknowledge, but which nonetheless remains, somewhere, to haunt us with the possibility that our self-development has been a massive artifice built on willed ignorance, and that our power of relating is built on half-subdued hatred and half-known fear?

Notes

1. Richard von Krafft-Ebing was ‘the great clinician of sexual inversion, rather than … its psychologist’ according to Havelock Ellis, Studies in the Psychology of Sex (2 vols, London, 1897-1900), vol. I, p.30; see, of course, Krafft-Ebing, Psychopathia Sexualis, trans. F. S. Klaf (London, 1965).

2. It seems to me that Bainbridge's fictions are in fact directed towards the male reader, and that the tacitness of the text thus becomes a silence and a reserve in the presence of the masculine: as a male reader, I am forced to enact my own responsibility for this silence, and to experience, as an object, the grimace of contempt.

3. Cf. Freud, Notes upon a Case of Obsessional Neurosis (1909) (the Rat Man case history), in Standard Edition, vol. X, pp.241, 244. The most relevant development in Freudian discourse, and one which is, naturally, radically undermining is Juliet Mitchell, Psychoanalysis and Feminism (London, 1974).

4. I use the term ‘Other’ throughout in the strong sense, often thought of now as the property of psychoanalysis but in fact reaching back into older Hegelian traditions. The depiction of historical and interpersonal process in Alexandre Kojève, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel, ed. A. Bloom (New York, 1969), at, e.g., pp.45-60 and elsewhere still remains a relevant model for dialectical interpretation.

5. Cf. Freud, The Claims of Psycho-analysis to Scientific Interest (1913), in Standard Edition, vol. XIII, p.173; Introductory Lectures on Psycho-analysis (1916-1917), in Standard Edition, vol. XVI, pp.264-70; and the continuing discussion of the ‘primal scene’ in From the History of an Infantile Neurosis (1918) (the Wolf Man case history), in Standard Edition, vol. XVII, pp.7-122.

6. Bainbridge, Harriet Said (London, 1972), p.154.

7. Freud's arguments in this area, as in, for instance, An Outline of Psychoanalysis (1940), in Standard Edition, vol. XXIII, pp. 193-4, are of course problematically phallocentric. See, for instance, ‘Women's Exile: Interview with Luce Irigaray’, Ideology and Consciousness, No. 1, (May 1977), pp.62-76.

8. Bainbridge, Harriet Said, p. 134.

9. Bainbridge, Harriet Said, p. 135.

10. Cf. Freud, ‘Some Psychical Consequences of the Anatomical Distinction between the Sexes’ (1925), in Standard Edition, vol. XIX, pp. 243-58; clearly what is suppressed in this brief text has to do with the power of women together. There is no entry under ‘sister’ in the Index volume to the Standard Edition.

11. I have in mind, of course, Lacan's comments on mirroring:

    The mirror stage is a drama whose internal thrust is precipitated from insufficiency to anticipation—and which manufactures for the subject, caught up in the lure of spatial identification, the succession of phantasies that extends from a fragmented body-image to a form of its totality … and, lastly to the assumption of the armour of an alienating identity, which will mark with its rigid structure the subject's entire mental development.

    (‘The mirror stage as formative of the function of the I’, p.4). But the relation between ‘armouring’ and the substitution of an Other for the evacuated self remains unclear.

12. Bainbridge, Harriet Said, p.105.

13. See Hélène Cixous, ‘The Character of “Character”’, New Literary History, V (1973-4), 383-414.

14. Bainbridge, Harriet Said, p.99.

15. Bainbridge, The Dressmaker (London, 1973), p.5.

16. Bainbridge, The Dressmaker, p.28.

17. Cf. the parapraxes concerning names cited by Freud in The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, pp. 224-5 (also pp. 83-4, 240-2).

18. Bainbridge, The Bottle Factory Outing (London, 1974), p. 146.

19. I mean ‘erasures’ in the sense used by Derrida in Of Grammatology and elsewhere; but there is also a connexion here with the Freudian erasure of women's specificity (and its frequent historical return in the ghostly).

20. Cf. Breuer and Freud, Studies on Hysteria (1893-5), in Standard Edition, vol. II; and particularly Breuer's case history of Fräulein Anna O. (21-47). For instance, the characteristics of her illness are said to have comprised:

    the existence of a second state of consciousness which first emerged as a temporary absence and later became organised into a ‘double conscience’; an inhibition of speech, determined by the affect of anxiety, which found a chance discharge in … English verses; later on, paraphrasia and loss of her mother-tongue, which was replaced by excellent English; and lastly the accidental paralysis of her right arm. (42)

    Each of these symptoms appears imagistically in Bainbridge's writing.

21. See again Cixous, ‘The Character of “Character”’, where this history is connected with Freud on the primal horde.

22. Bainbridge, A Quiet Life (London, 1976), p. 41.

23. Bainbridge, A Quiet Life, p. 42.

24. Bainbridge, A Quiet Life, pp. 7-8.

25. Bainbridge, A Quiet Life, p. 156.

26. There is a complex further mirroring going on here, because each of the groups is searching symbolically for a way of (sexual) relating which will give birth to the future: the pram which is present throughout contains only money and a doll. Binny is pulled out of her group to occupy a space in the middle, between two groups of four: whereupon much of the puzzling seems to be around the question of whether the group symbol, or totem, into which she is thus fashioned represents hope or despair.

27. Bainbridge, Injury Time (London, 1977), p.134.

28. It is only when the hysteric renounces being what men fight over—we will have to precede her there—that she will be ready to conquer the truth. … It is then that we learn from her, from this mother in sufferance, that there is only one pertinent trauma: that of birth.

    (Moustapha Safouan, ‘In Praise of Hysteria’, in Returning to Freud: Clinical Psychoanalysis in the School of Lacan, ed. S. Schneiderman (New Haven and London, 1980), p. 59.) The paternalistic tone matches precisely the Bainbridge response, in the discursive hall of mirrors: thus the frozenness of trauma is re-enacted, not only within the unconscious but also in the conflicts of discourse around the unconscious.

29. Bainbridge, Young Adolf (London, 1978), p.134.

30. In any case, man cannot aim at being whole …, while ever the play of displacement and condensation to which he is doomed in the exercise of his functions marks his relation as a subject to the signifier.

    (Lacan, ‘The signification of the phallus’, in Écrits, p.287.) Cf. also Lacan on the ‘Name-of-the-Father’ in, e.g., ‘On a question preliminary to any possible treatment of psychosis’.

31. See, for instance, Colin MacCabe, ‘Theory and Film: Principles of Realism and Pleasure’, Screen, XVII, 3 (Autumn 1976), 7-27, as one introduction to the politics of ‘the point of view and the look’; and, in more detail, Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts, pp.67-119.