A. S. Byatt by Sugar & Other Stories

Author:Sugar & Other Stories [Sugar & Stories, Other]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2012-01-25T23:57:25+00:00

She did not like, as a woman, to be thus marginalized. She did not like all these separate differences to be lumped heterogeneously together in one anger. The Third World was not one, it was many. Except when it faced the First World, from which she came, as an enemy.

“I think perhaps we should be studying Third World Literature. We should think about imperialism. And economic imperialism.”

There was a place in the city where it had been supposed she desired to go, where you were clutched by the arm from shack doors by fluent girls and eager grandmothers, come buy, come buy, Gucci bags, St Laurent battleblouses, Zeiss cameras, Sony Walkmen and Cabbage Patch dolls, the mimetic products of the miracle, indistinguishable from their platonic forms and a tenth of the price. You could buy a teeshirt with a tomato-pink and brassy Iron Lady, or one with mushroom-cloud and capering mutants proclaiming, “We’ve learned to live with the Bomb.” Vanity Fair, Celia had self-righteously thought, and had corrected herself, no, economic growth.

She turned kindly to her radical young neighbour.

“Perhaps you should study it. Perhaps you should. I am told I should. But Milton and George Eliot are my roots, I do not want them to vanish from the world.”

“Nor do I. But it may not be of great importance if they do.” She turned to him again and said, “I know how you feel.” He put his hand across his lower face. “I wonder if you do. No, I don’t think you do.”

It was then she made the mistake of asking his name. His face expressed, she could read it, baffled hurt succeeded by indignation and contempt. He brought from his pocket, wordlessly, the circular disc that had been pinned to his coat during their earlier deliberations and had been removed now, for they had all become friends, had exchanged ideas, they knew each other, did they not? He was not like Professor Sun, he was Professor Sun. Not to have known him was to annihilate everything that had been said or acted, to break the frail connections that had been made. She had failed to distinguish between oriental faces. You can’t tell them apart, she might just as well have said. She had lost face absolutely. Her hand went up to her mouth. She told the truth.

“Tonight you look twenty years younger.”

He said frostily, with his old attacking note. “I am forty-six. Young for a professor.”

“You look twenty-six.”

“Yes. Well.”

All the way home, through the day-long dark of the perpetual night of flying, she brooded on this failure. She thought about the delicate process by which we recognize faces. Something in the brain constructs a face from circular elements, a visual equivalent of the hypothetical deep structure of language. Infants in their hospital cots are teased or titillated by perceptual research workers, who dangle over them paper suns or moons, adding eyes maybe, or a smiling mouth, sketched universals. And from there to the exact particular, how does the mind

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