What novel is the following extract
from?
As if in a dream he found himself, somehow, seated in the driver’s
seat; as if in a dream, he pulled the lever and swung the car round
the yard and out through the archway; and, as if in a dream, all
sense of right and wrong, all fear of obvious consequences, seemed
temporarily suspended. He increased his pace, and as the car
devoured the street and leapt forth on the high road through the open
country, he was only conscious that he was ____ once more, ____ the
terror, the traffic-queller, the Lord of the lone trail, before whom
all must give way or be smitten into nothingness and everlasting
night. He chanted as he flew, and the car responded with sonorous
drone; the miles were eaten up under him as he sped he knew not
whither, fulfilling his instincts, living his hour, reckless of what
might come to him.
I’ll give you a clue: it’s not by
J. G. Ballard. It was first published in 1908 and is usually
regarded as a celebration of homely pleasures and as an elegy for the
fading idyll of the English countryside. It’s also an examination
of mania and addiction, and of how weakness and desire may be
overcome. It’s The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame
(the missing word above is ‘Toad’ of course), and, according to
Professor Robson in his 1982 essay ‘On The Wind in the Willows’*
it is emphatically not a children’s book. Well, his
argument is really that it isn’t a childish book, and I go
along with that. It has passages of tightly rhythmic descriptive
force (see above), whole chapters of mesmeric prose poetry (‘The
Piper at the Gates of Dawn’ and ‘Wayfarers All’), and moments
of surprising psychological insight. What it has to say about
progress and human weakness seems to me to be both prescient and
relevant.
The extract above is from the sequence
in which Toad steals a car and runs amok. But what trouble has he
landed himself in by giving in to his automobile addiction? Well,
the judge hands him twenty years in the deepest, darkest
dungeon in England: pretty brutal, and presumably without a hope of
parole. And does prison work? Locking up the Toad hadn’t worked
the last time, when under Badger’s supervision he had been confined
to his room. Here he is, going cold turkey:
When his violent paroxysms possessed him he would arrange bedroom
chairs in rude resemblance of a motor-car and would crouch on the
foremost of them, bent forward and staring fixedly ahead, making
uncouth and ghastly noises, till the climax was reached, when,
turning a complete somersault, he would lie prostrate amidst the
ruins of the chairs, apparently completely satisfied for the moment.
Toad exemplifies the disjunction
between desire and reason which is addiction. But even though he’s
infuriating, foolish and selfish, he also has the reader’s
sympathy. Why is that? Professor Robson suggests that what we have
is only confusion: Toad is aligned with progress because he is the
victim of a reactionary judiciary, but progress also means the motor
car and the destruction of the countryside, something which the
judiciary would defend as lawful. In Robson’s view, Grahame has
failed to sort out which cause gets our sympathy here - justice, or
progress: “It may be right for us, the readers, to be uncertain
whether Toad has done anything bad or not, but the author should not
be uncertain”. But I think Grahame is certain, and that Toad
gets our sympathy because he is a victim of progress aligned
with a reactionary force**. Robson is nonplussed by the Alice in
Wonderland-style troop of surreal creatures - the judiciary - that chase Toad after
his prison break, but they are made to look divorced from reality
because they are punishing Toad for reacting in an understandable
human way to the system they are enforcing.
Like the London rioters of 2011, Toad
is severely punished for reacting in a way in which “all sense of
right and wrong” can be “temporarily suspended” in the heat of
the moment. Both Toad and some of the jailed looters are due at least an amount of sympathy
not only because the punishment is out of
proportion to the crime, but because the stimulus was so
intense and hard to assimilate. Today we understand that we are to be
punished if, like Toad, we use the motor car for what it is seemingly
designed for (speed, danger, individualist freedom), and its
oppressiveness comes not from sudden violations of the pristine
countryside, but from its banal ubiquity, its visual pollution of
friendly curves and high-gloss colours, its unchallenged predominance
over everything else. It’s now totally assimilated, but it’s
still an object of desire – as are the various consumer goods
looted by the rioters. In their case, the over-stimulus comes from a
world of consumerism inculcated almost from birth by advertising and
constructed ‘needs’; in a world where infantile impulses are
constantly being indulged – in which, for example, we are
encouraged to view our cars as cute little sentient beings - how do
you assimilate the fact that your desires are not always to be
fulfilled, that indulgences come at a cost hard to perceive or
calculate? The result, again, is the divorce of desire from reason:
mania, addiction and criminality follow.
But what does The Wind in the
Willows offer by way of alternative to all this? Religion could
be an answer: in ‘The Piper at the Gates of Dawn’ Mole and Ratty
are humbled and awe-struck by a visitation from a God. I agree with
Robson that this chapter is “moving and convincing as a religious
poem”, but the encounter with Pan and his music seems to offer only
a different kind of mania, a different expression of human weakness:
“It’s gone!” sighed the Rat, sinking back in his seat again.
“So beautiful and strange and new! Since it was to end so soon, I
almost wish I had never heard it. For it has roused a longing in me
that is pain, and nothing seems worth while but just to hear that
sound once more and go on listening to it forever.”
The unbearable euphoria is beautifully
expressed, but how different is this from Toad and his monomania?
Doesn’t this remind even more of actual drug addiction? At the
least it doesn’t seem a very sensible foundation for a way of
living. Presumably that’s why the Mole and the Rat have to
afterwards be hard-reset by Pan, their memories wiped, ready to face
normal life again. So is there another answer? In ‘Wayfarers All’
Ratty – who in the end seems just as susceptible to outside
influence as Toad – overcomes the terrible temptation to leave his
river, brought about by the hypnotic Sea Rat, only with the help of
the Mole, a piece of paper, and an almost-forgotten joy in composing
poetry:
The Rat pushed the paper away from him wearily, but the discreet Mole
took occasion to leave the room and, when he peeped in again some
time later, the Rat was absorbed and deaf to the world; alternately
scribbling and sucking the top of his pencil. It is true that he
sucked a good deal more than he scribbled; but it was a joy to the
Mole to know that the cure had at least begun.
What better answer than creativity –
the determined working out of ideas into forms that can be
appreciated by others – to the problem of malign external
influences, to ‘progress’ which is aligned to reactionary
forces? Toad, Ratty and Mole have experienced mania, addiction,
fallibility and religious fervour. Well, they’re only human, and
The Wind in the Willows is, after all, a very human story.
* The Definition of Literature &
Other Essays by W. W. Robson, Cambridge University Press, 1982.
