Free The Biographer's Tale by A. S. Byatt Page A

for some reason, appeared to him to be
contra rationem
, against reason. But he recorded it. He recorded the delights and salutary benefits of iced snow-water.
    He kept those liquid brown eyes open wide in the land of the arctic sun. Early in his journey he had named a pretty plant,
Andromeda polifolia
(bog rosemary), for the chained princess, blushing with blood-red shame (“as soon as she flowers her petals become flesh-coloured”) but pale after fertilisation. He had written lyrically of her drenching by “poisonous dragons and beasts—i.e., evil toads and frogs” during their mating. He had made an amateurish drawing of maiden and flower on boggy rocks, and of unrecognisable amphibians. Having created the genus
Andromeda
with this poetic fancy, he nearly, but not quite, failed to see another, in his confusion on a mountain summit. His notes are the precise notes of a scientist:
    â€œAt midnight—if such I may call it when the sun never sets—I was walking rapidly, facing the icy wind and sweating profusely … but always on the alert, when I saw as it were the shadow of this plant, but did not stoop to examine it because I took it to be an
Empetrum
. A moment later, however, I suddenly thought that it might be something new and retraced my steps; I would again have taken it for an
Empetrum
had not its greater height made me examine it more carefully.

    First Swedish illustration of
Linnaea borealis
, a woodcut published by Rudbeck the Younger in
Acta Literaria Sueciae
, 1720–24
    â€œI don’t know what it is that at night in our mountains disturbs our vision and makes objects far less distinct than by day, for the sun is just as bright. But from being near the horizon its rays are so level that a hat affords no protection to the eyes. Moreover, the shadows are so extended, and by gusts of wind made so confused, that things not really a bit alike can hardly be told apart …
    â€œThe
Andromeda
was over, and setting seed; but after a long search I managed to find a single plant still flowering; the flower was white, shaped like a lily of the valley but with five sharper divisions.”

II
    [The second document, to which I gave the provisional title “G …”]
    H E WAS INTERESTED in the unconscious mind. What he was interested in was not the Freudian Id, but more what William James called “the deep well of unconscious cerebration.” He was a profoundly and delightfully rational man. He conducted many experiments on the activities of the mind, including a word-association test of 100 words to which he submitted himself several times, writing down his immediate responses to each, controlled every four seconds by a stopwatch. He divided the associations (which he found remarkably constant) into groups: those—“abbey, aborigines, abyss”—which gave rise to visual images, those—“abasement, abhorrence, ablution”—which induced represented histrionic scenes, and those more abstract words—“afternoon, ability, abnormal”—to which the most probable responses were purely verbal, quotations or definitions. He was later to conclude that most powerful intellectuals neither formed, nor thought with, mental images, whichwere much more common amongst women and children. He thought that the paucity and steady recurrence of his personal associations suggested that “the mind is apparently always engaged in mumbling over its old stores, and if any one of these is wholly neglected for a while, it is apt to be forgotten, perhaps irrecoverably.”
    He concluded:
    â€œPerhaps the strongest impression left by these experiments regards the multifariousness of the work done by the mind in a state of half-unconsciousness, and the valid reason they afford for believing in the existence of still deeper strata of mental operations, sunk wholly below the level of consciousness, which may account for such mental