Roman à clef

What is a key?

There are certain parts of the country where you can still get by without using a key all day, but in London you need a employ a key every time you move between your house and the world.

At the moment, having tired of carrying a metal hedgehog around with me, I have cut my key-ring down to just the five small daggers. Two house keys, the car key, a key for my pedestal at work, and a squat key housed in black plastic, the function of which temporarily escapes me, but which is probably important. Furthermore, minor keyrings serve each of the doors at home. The French doors in the sitting room are particular culprits, needing six separate actions to lock and unlock.

How is it that I carry on this daily ritual of clanking and turning with almost no consciousness of its deep strangeness? How is that I carry around these things, these bolts of metal, with no measurable sense of burden?

After all, my keyring is one of only three things the location of which I am always sure; the others are my wallet and, these days, the vile mobile phone.

Yes, yes, of course in the future we shall all speak, friend, and enter, with our voice-recognition systems, our fingerprint scanners, our retinal checking heat-sensitive thumbprint-activated microchipped radioactive subdermal transponders. I have experience of these things. I carry a credit card that gets me into work when I wave it over the doorframe. It sits in my wallet and slowly zaps that other sort of key, my tube pass, so that for the last week of the month I have to call on the services of the Underground staff every time I reach the barriers. After being shown the pass, they reach for the only reliable solution; a metal key that unlocks the barrier and lets me through. So you see, I expect to be carrying these lumps of metal in my pocket long into the era of voiceprint analysis at the local bank.

But what, after all, is a key?

The OED has the primary meaning as a device to operate a lock. It also throws in about a dozen supplementary meanings for good measure.

A key is:
The legend to a map or illustration
The base note in a musical scale (’the key of C’)
The scale itself
An important position or item (’the key work of Goethe is Faust‘; the key dog in a pack)
The means of understanding an obscure or otherwise unknown knowledge (’the key to Britten’s music is the sea’; Casaubon’s The Key to All Mythologies inMiddlemarch)
The levers on a keyboard or wind instrument pressed to obtain a note
The element upon which all other rest or depend (a keystone)
The roughness of (for instance) a wall which enables the plaster to grip as it is applied

It was this last that got me thinking about keys in general. What on earth has the grip of plaster or paint got to do with unlocking doors?

I think - or at least it feels as though - it’s to do with the texture of the wall. This is perhaps easier to grasp now that we all know about the ways in which molecular structures interact. Think of those stick and ball models of proteins that clutter up the edges of science labs in schools. A portion of a complex protein, for example, will have a particular landscape, a particular pattern to its irregular shape. An enzyme that operates upon the protein latches onto it by virtue of containing the negative of that specific shape. It matches it, snugs up tight against the protein so that the strange music of the atoms can be played out through the bonds. It fits the way that, in Pangaea, north Africa fitted into the accomodating bosom of the Americas. The key is made to fit the lock. The rough edges shuffle up against their negatives and rest with a minimum of interstitial space.

When you apply plaster to a wall, somewhat counterintuitively, the rougher the surface, the less likely you are to end up with air trapped between plaster and wall. It is a key without a lock; or a lock that is made by the plaster itself oozing around the roughness of the wall, like plasticene curling around a Yale key that’s about to be slyly copied while you’re not looking.

So a key and a lock are yin and yang, male and female, positive and negative, opposites not attracting but gripping each other close.

But this much we already knew, or sensed, behind our everyday use of ‘key’. What about ‘key’ as in ‘important’? This doesn’t utilise anything of the male-femlae connector, this sense of snap-to-fit solidity. The key dog sets the behaviour of the rest of the pack. The keystone is not only the centre of the arch, it is the one which supports the rest - though remove any stone from a gothic arch and you’ll soon regret it (and every day I pass a rescued stone arch in a builder’s yard that has everything except the keystone, requiring only discreet support from a metal brace).

‘Key’ in this sense seems to mean ‘centre’, but I suspect that this is misleading. My guess is that ‘key’ here indicates the focus of the user; it’s where you interact with the object as a whole. The key dog in a pack is the only one you have to direct; the rest will follow. The key hill in a battle is the one you must control; the rest will fall to you as a result. The keystone (subtly different here) is the one that permits to finish the arch; it controls the distribution of weight across the rest, and it is this element of control, of interaction, that makes it appear ‘central’, but only in the sense of being in the middle of things, rather than necessarily in the middle of the thing, the object.

Now, with this sense of the key as a means of control, an interface, we can move quickly to the other meanings.

The keys on a piano interface between the musician and the strings. They transform one sort of action (the movement of fingers) into another (the hammering of the strings). The same idea applies for that other sort of keyboard, the one on which I am writing this. The key to a map performs a similar function of interfacing, of transforming one sort of symbol (for example, a cross on a map) into another (the word ‘Church’).

Naturally, the idea of a key as an interface also works for door keys. A lock is a device which effects a very simple form of access control. You interface with it using a key. I now realise that password interfaces on software, websites, ATMs are not just based on the metaphor of the key; they are analogues of it; they are keys.

Importantly, what the interface controls is the transition between the inside and the outside. This applies not just to keys that open houses, cases, cabinets, or files (affording you, on the outside, access to the interior contents), it also applies to keyboards (allowing you to interface with the machine inside, be it a church organ or a computer). Less obviously, it pertains with the key dog in a pack (allowing you to interface with the pack as a whole, through the influence of the key), the key objective in a battle (you interface with the battle as a whole through this one objective), and so on.

So, a key carries at least three senses which are strong enough to generate subsidiary meanings (that is to say, metaphorical keys which depend on widely-understood aspects of the semantic space of the word ‘key’). A key implies unlocking, it implies the central point of focus, it implies an interface between inside and outside. The ‘Key to All Mythologies’ would not only unlock all mythologies, it would provide the only way in to all mythologies, and it would operate as the interface between us (the outside world) and the inner world of mythology itself. At the other end of the scale, the roughness of the wall provides not only a negative for the positive of the plaster, it is the interface between wall and plaster. At the same time, it is the centre of the relationship, the sole point of rest between the two elements.

The relative weight of these three related elements is far from even; some senses of ‘key’ lean more heavily on one than another. This is nothing unusual. I can’t imagine how a semantic space could develop evenly in all directions, and I suspect that the resulting roughness in language, its uneven texture, is important in enabling it to cling stubbornly to the experiential world, giving meaning to real things rather than carefully demarcated abstract concepts.

Part of this roughness is the sense that there is more to be said about the word. I’m sure that there are elisions and collisions of meaning, over time, langugage and culture, that really ought to be acknowledged. I haven’t touched on the etymology or pronunciation of the word, which would inevitably bring in yet another sense of ‘key’.

A ‘key’ is also a low island or atoll, as in ‘Key West’ and of course ‘quay’. Whether it makes sense to think of a quay as an interface between land and sea, or as a crenellation on the edges of both, I don’t know. It would be interesting, as ever, to spend more time pursuing meanings. It would also, inevitably, end in confusion. Structures of meaning like this don’t have a keystone of irreducible truth holding them together; they hold only if you know when to stop building, when to stop adding weight to it. While building, though, it has been a pleasure to act, however spuriously, as an interface between us and the term itself; to be, for a little while, your key.