And Now For Something Completely Different: Wahoolazuma!

One of the few pleasures of being young in the 1980s was the thrill that came from wandering into a comics shop when the new comics came out. In those pre-internet days, you had no idea what the hell you were going to find. Similarly, if you went to another city and found a comics store you’d never seen before, you had the chance not only to pick up back issues not available in your home town, but also to be exposed to a new selection of titles. This mattered, because in the heady days around the alt-comics explosion of the mid-80s, all kinds of oddities flourished. Most of these books were awful, some were good, one or two were excellent, and many were just plain weird. One thinks of George Alec Effinger’s Neil & Buzz in Time and Space, or Arn Saba’s Neil the Horse — I don’t know how to begin describing these things.

Even the popular books were almost self-consciously odd; I mean, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles? Really? And the more self-consciously artistically ambitious books were also made out of unexpected materials: Cerebus, combining parody of old Marvel Conan comics with the Marx Brothers and Canadian politics; or Love & Rockets, mixing magic realism and women’s wrestling and punk and Archie comics. But the point is, whatever the level of artistic or commercial success, you just had no idea what you’d find on a store’s shelves — you’d see some fifth-generation Elfquest knock-off beside a sensitive and realistic story of a young boy in the Depression wandering the country with a tramp calling himself the King of Spain, or a cheap comics bio of a heavy metal group beside a wise-ass story about Christ returning to earth to fight the world’s only super-hero, the Anti-Christ. I’m not saying the comics field was producing better material then than now, only a wilder mix of things; and, somehow, the fact that it was all contained within a single store — that comics specialty stores were the only place you’d find them, mixed in with Marvel and DC on the one hand and The Comics Journal on the other — gave this disparate collection of stuff a sense of unity, of cohesion.

It’s this latter point, I think, that distinguishes comics-as-they-were from the webcomics field of the moment, which is the closest area I can think of to something like the weirdness of the comics field of the 80s. There are a lot of different webcomics out there, covering a ridiculously wide range of genres; but without the store as a place where these things are all physically gathered together, the feel, to me, is much looser. Then again, it may be only that so far webcomics haven’t yet come up with an Alan Moore or a Love & Rockets; a creator or a work that hits the heights of artistic and formal ambition. At any rate, if such a person or creation exists, I’ve not heard of them yet. One assumes it’s only a matter of time.

But if the current era doesn’t have quite the same creative feel of the years past, it does have this going for it: masses of material, from that time and others, are coming back into print (which was certainly a characteristic of times gone by; classics weren’t easily available. Curiously, although this was obviously a hardship in many ways, in some ways it might actually have been useful — not everything hailed as a classic can survive a close look with older and wiser eyes). So this extended trip down memory lane is all by way of trying to begin talking about Larry Marder’s Tales of the Beanworld, which is now being reprinted by Dark Horse, along with all-new material. 

Very roughly, it’s the story of a society of anthropomorphic beans living in a wonderland-like secondary world — simpler than Alice’s wonderland, the sense of the Beanworld as a place which operates by its own rules of logic and character is still vaguely similar. Much of the story of the comics had to do with various members of the Beanworld — its hero Mister Spook, or its artist Beanish, or its scientist Professor Garbanzo, for example — trying to solve some riddle of the Beanworld’s nature or exploring the world in some new direction. With, always, further riddles appearing once one was solved.

The Beanworld has its own logic, but it also has its own feel. It’s a little like what one thinks of as an underground comic, especially in its early issues; but it’s also gentler, Seussian, and more mythic. The first couple of issues, among the nine collected in the first reprint volume Wahoolazuma! (a cry of joy in the Beanworld), have a satirical tone which is immediately abandoned — for the better, as the book actually gets deeper and more involving without it.

Reading Tales of the Beanworld — now just Beanworld, in its new edition — is like nothing else I know. Not only like no other comics experience, but no other experience overall. It’s gentle, but also ominous, in the way a fairy tale is ominous. It’s vaguely like a computer game, as actions have consequences and the world is built on interlocking riddles; but it’s more organic than that, and the characters are stronger. But then again, those characters are archetypal, as in a folktale. But then on the other hand, the vocabulary and sometimes imagery is more modern than that.

So Beanworld is a mix of a lot of things, and the result is something wholly individual. Something compelling, too; it had been years since I’d read an issue of Beanworld — years since a new issue had been published — but everything came back as I read the collection, in a way that’s unusual with old comics. The thing sticks in the mind.

Some of that may just be due to Marder’s way with craft. Beanworld is in a lot of ways a simple book, literally suitable for readers of any ages, but the comics storytelling is very clever, notably in terms of the Marder plays with page layouts and panel transitions. It’s incredibly clear work, which is impressive given that Marder’s laying out the workings of a world pretty far removed from common experience.

In the end, perhaps the most impressive thing about Beanworld is the sense that it’s managed to find a way to do without conflict as a drive for narrative. It’s vaguely like a really good Hayao Miyazaki film, where the more you learn about what’s happening and why, the more you come to realise that apparent conflicts are simply reflections of a lack of understanding; that, in fact, things are unfolding as they should, and our own slow increase of awareness is itself a part of that unfolding process. At its best, this sort of story is involving, teaching us perhaps something about ourselves that can’t be got at in any other way. Beanworld is in that class of stories; it operates at an almost preconscious level. It bills itself as “A Most Peculiar Comic Book Experience”, and it is that. It’s also a valuable one, and one I’m glad to see back on shelves.

ByattBlogging: A Provisional Conclusion

Any assessment of a living writer’s accomplishment must be at least in part provisional. Still, when dealing with a body of work like A.S. Byatt’s — eight novels, five short-story collections, and one book of paired novellas — it should be possible to make at least a few observations.

Certainly one can spot recurring motifs. Texts, interleaved into a main text; stories-inside-stories. A concern with women’s roles and the place of women in society over the past fifty years (a concern I have perhaps not highlighted enough in these posts).  Zoology, particularly in the later novels but also present in The Game, her second book (and it is interesting that the zoologist Simon Moffit, from that book, is mentioned towards the end of Byatt’s most recent novel as well). Fantasy, or fairy story, either as a form in itself or as a contrast to a realist work which contains the fantasy as a fiction. A concern with story and storytelling; with the nature of reality. A distrust of theory, and of facile attempts to explain the world. Scandinavia and Scandinavians; as characters, typically male, usually helpful or admirable. Quakers and Quakerism. A concern with the life of the spirit, a search for something resembling God, a modernist deity. A concern with character, and the form of the novel. A recurring interest in certain writers, including Proust, Tolkien, Tennyson, Milton, George Elliot, the Brontës. A concern with painting and visual art, especially Matisse, luxe, calme et volupté. The south of France as a place of light and of enlightenment. The university as a haven for the intellect, a model of reason and a vital element in society. Colours: red and white, green and gold, or else blue and white, gold and silver — linking characters and situations. Mythic images, especially females: the Medusa, Venus Anadyomene, Proserpina.

There’s a lot in there, but over the thousands of pages of Byatt’s books they become recognisable touchstones — enough to create a world, enough to populate it, enough to give it an identity without seeming enclosed. For all the list of motifs above, Byatt is still capable of being surprising; every new book seems to bring in some new concern, or else amplify an existing concern in a surprising way. Crucially, she develops her ideas, her themes, her images, in not only innovative but consistently intriguing ways. They’re like gears, in a sense; they interlock, turning as the pages go by to fit together in new configurations. 

This is quite necessary, I think, for Byatt’s is not primarily a narrative art. Her novels in particular are not hesitant about interrupting their narrative drive to give the gist of a character’s speech on a technical issue of biology or philosophy. They earn the title “novel of ideas”, but at the expense of the forward motion of story. This is much less the case with Byatt’s short fiction, which tends to be focussed on the tale and its telling. In a way, her novels are like her short fiction expanded with more character detail and digression — there is more in them, but more does not necessarily happen.

What makes them compelling, even vital, is not the ideas as such, though; it’s their expression. Byatt is attentive to words, their roots and their development. From this interest she has crafted a powerful style. It’s not based on intricate sentence structure; she rarely tries to dazzle the reader with page-long sentences. Instead, she has developed a language based around hard nouns and precise adjectives. Her narrative voice, her vocabulary, had a clarity to it that compels the reader’s attention. For me, an unfortunate side-effect is that she has not yet found a voice in the first-person (unless one counts the apparently-autobiographical short story “Sugar”) which reads as strongly as her third-person fiction.

Her character-work generally is above reproach. That she thinks about her characters in depth, and their relation to the world around them, is obvious. It’s something that’s been a constant since Shadow of the Sun, her first book. In that book, the story seemed to move fitfully between pages-long character analyses; since then, Byatt has become much better at working her character description into the unfolding tapestries of her stories. At the same time, her characters seem more prone to come alive, to do things that surprise themselves and the reader, and perhaps even the author. Most important, Byatt’s routinely capable of creating interesting, lively personalities who can carry a novel, or indeed several novels.

I’ve read that Byatt doesn’t like her four-book series — The Virgin in the Garden, Still Life, Babel Tower, and A Whistling Woman — to be described as the Frederica Potter quartet. But it is Frederica who is the most vivid character in these books, the most alive and the most constant. She is what most clearly defines them for the reader; intelligent, strong-willed, highly sexual, unafraid, working through a society not always congenial to a woman who is any of these things much less all of them. In any event, these books stand out the most in Byatt’s bibliography to date; obviously her longest work when viewed as a unit, they also contain some of her best writing, and some of her most experimental. The last of them, at this moment, is her last major long work. They are, all in all, a good display of her characteristics; they are what she is, as a writer. With the quartet now finished, it will be fascinating to see where she goes from here; how will she change?

Paradoxically, despite a notable lack of jokes or obvious humour in her books, I think it’s possible to view Byatt as a comic novelist. There is a warmth to her writing, for all its ruthless clarity. There is bemusement and invention. There is a constancy of tone, in other words, which is engaging and generous. There’s an optimism about the human condition, married with a real concern about the effect of humans on the planet around them. Byatt is a writer with real concerns, then; but, primarily, she is an artist with a passion for language. It is this which makes her worth reading. Worth thinking about and writing about. She is a writer from whom it is capable to learn much, about language and imagery and structure; she is also a writer who it is interesting to follow across the course of her career. I don’t see any reason to expect that to change in the future.

• Other posts in the ByattBlogging series may be found here.
  

ByattBlogging 14: The Little Black Book of Stories

Byatt’s most recent collection of short fiction covers a wide range in its five tales. Not all of them are explicit fantasies, but all of them play with genre and with what is beyond the real. There’s also an element of darkness to them; hence, perhaps, the blackness of the book. 

“The Thing in the Forest” is the story of two girls, evacuated during the Second World War to a house in the country, from which they will be sent on to foster homes; so it begins like The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. The girls go exploring, and see a hideous monster in the forest. Life goes on. The girls join their foster families, get sent back to their homes, their fathers die and decades later their mothers follow. By this time one of the girls, Penny, has gone on to university and become a psychologist who works with autistic kids; the other, Primrose, has become a nanny to the kids in her community, a caregiver and tale-teller. The two women meet each other back in the country, back in the house to which they were evacuated (where they see a book identifying the monster they saw as a folkloric local dragon); later, first Primrose and then Penny investigate the forest for some sign that can explain the experience of their youth.

The key to this story seems to be the different paths the two women take in life, and then their different reactions to the woods. The point is to compare and contrast; Primrose is inspired as a writer, learning about languages and finding names, while Penny goes further, challenging the boundary of what is the real world and what belongs to the sphere of dreams. But it is Primrose who gets the last word, turning their experience into art, making dreams into language.

“Body Art” is superficially more realistic. A doctor, Becket, at a hospital, St. Pantaleone’s, meets a young art student at Christmas; she’s helping to decorate the wards. The story follows his interactions with her, and with Martha Sharpin, an art historian involved in the administration of the hospital on behalf of one of the institutions which fund it; the hospital has the materials of an artistic and anatomical collection in its basement. So this is another of Byatt’s stories which focus on visual art.

It also, as in her story “Christ in the House of Martha and Mary”, embroils art with the contrast between the active and contemplative life. Martha, unsurprisingly, is Martha; the student, Daisy, is the unexpected Mary — a botched abortion having left her supposedly unable to bear children, it is described as a “miracle” when she conceives Becket’s child (Becket, incidentally, is a lapsed Catholic, who at one point sees his ex-wife on television playing in — what else? — a Beckett play. It may be significant that he works at a place named for a Commedia character, two different kinds of absurdity; more likely, it’s a symptom of a clash between a godless cosmos and one with some sort of meaning to it). The title of the story nods to the use of art; art and body are united in a number of ways, from the hospital’s collection, to Daisy’s work, to Daisy’s body piercings, to a suggestion by another artist to make art from blown-up x-rays. The ending is surprisingly inconclusive, except in that Martha takes charge; she will be a part of the lives of Daisy and Beckett as they go forward. 

“Stone Woman” is remarkably straightforward; after the death of her mother and an unspecified abdominal surgery, a woman, Ines, slowly metamorphoses into stone. She meets an Icelandic sculptor, who takes her back to his home; the story, it turns out, has been about her finding the strength to go off with the trolls who haunt Iceland — to abandon all that she formerly knew, all that she had been. In some ways, it’s reminiscent of “The Next Room” in Sugar and Other Stories; a mother’s death frees an elderly woman to find her true path. But here she’s not alone; here it’s clear that she’s becoming something new, something grand, something monumental. This is a beautifully-written fantasy, with the inevitability and grandeur of continental drift.

In some ways, “Raw Material” is the most intriguing of these stories: a failing novelist, Jack Smollett, is teaching a Creative Writing class to adults at an arts centre, when he is impressed by — creatively revitalised by — the work of one of his students, a very elderly women who writes detailed, introspective recollections of the domestic chores of decades past. His other students aren’t as impressed, and criticise her harshly; he sends her work off to a contest, which it wins (ironic, as Jack imagines himself being in some way judged by her), but before he can tell her this he finds that she has become the victim of violence, deriving from some unknown past wrong. The other students are secretly happy; they have written stories about murder and violence, and are happy to see that their world has caught up to the writer of elegant slice-of-life recollections.

What’s interesting here is Byatt’s use of a strong prose style as a symbol of both physical and mental cleanliness. Smollett thinks to himself of clichés as a stain, contrasting with the theme of cleanliness in his student writer, Cicely Fox. In the end, her concern with cleanliness may be a function of repressed guilt — there seems to be some connection between her and the woman who ends her life — but it remains as an ideal; and ideal style, in contrast to the trite horrors and slack adjective-filled style of the other students.

If “Raw Material” is the most fascinating of these tales from the point of view of Byatt’s perspectives on prose and style, “The Pink Ribbon” is perhaps the most emotionally immediate. An elderly man is caring for his wife, who lost her mind long ago; he meets a younger woman, who turns out to be his wife’s ghost, or fetch. She instructs him on what he must do. It’s the only story I can think of that balances references to The Aeneid with references to the Teletubbies.

For all the strong emotional material in these stories, Byatt resolutely avoids wringing extra tension out of them. Her style is spare, in a sense pure. She also avoids many of her usual tropes; some appear — a reserved Scandinavian male here, the intense description of a piece of artwork there — but on the whole this collection is filled with new images, new symbols. It’s a strong book, and very promising for Byatt’s future writing as she moves on from the conclusion of her Potter quartet.

• Other posts in the ByattBlogging series may be found here.
  

ByattBlogging Bonus: Potter vs. Potter

Well, not really. More like ‘Potter-maker versus Potter-maker’. In 2003, A.S. Byatt, creator of Frederica Potter (and family) wrote an article criticising the Harry Potter series of books, at that time five books in. I though it’d be worth looking at here, insofar as the piece got Byatt a certain amount of notoriety. Some commentators were eager to make her out to be a snobbish member of the literary élite, decrying popular fiction just because it was popular. This, of course, was a profoundly idiotic reaction. 

To begin with, in the same article in which she criticises J.K. Rowling, Byatt praises Terry Pratchett, not exactly the act of a dyed-in-the-wool snob. More crucially, the snob argument is an ad hominem attack, which is usually made by somebody losing a debate. Whether Byatt is a snob or not, it shouldn’t invalidate the critical points she makes either way. If you believe in the distinction between good writing and bad, then the article should stand or fall on the strength of the argument it presents. If you don’t believe in that distinction, then you have several thousand years worth of human aesthetic reaction to language to explain away; you’re also in fundamental opposition, I think, to several major elements of Byatt’s philosophy.

So what exactly did Byatt say in her Potter article? This, I think, is where the article becomes interesting. It’s uncharacteristically slipshod in its construction, and in its thought.

Byatt begins by asking why children like the Potter books so much, and then why adults like them. Her argument to the first question: “they are written from inside a child’s-eye view, with a sure instinct for childish psychology.” As will soon become all too clear, I don’t agree with this statement. But never mind that; Byatt believes that this answer precludes, for some reason, adult appreciation of the books — she doesn’t explain why — and that there must be another reason why adults read Rowling.

(I might as well note here that I can enjoy the Potter books, though I wouldn’t say that they’re particularly good except in certain specific limited ways. I think the plot mechanisms and riddles are ingenious and clever. I think the prose is weirdly readable in a way I can’t explain — it’s literally more difficult to lift one’s eyes from the page than to slide them sideways over the text. And I think that the structure of most of the books, following the school year through, is attractive; the seasons and holidays give Rowling a basic skeleton to follow for each book. For me, the last book, in which she abandoned the school and the school-year structure, was far and away the worst of the seven. If I had to say why I think kids enjoy the books so much, I’d say it’s probably a mixture of the easiness of the texts, the outsized characters — not unlike Silver Age Marvel Comics — and the way the common childhood experience of going to school becomes the whole basis for a fantasy and a magic world.)

Byatt tries to justify her statement about child psychology by the use of Freud, a difficult trick these days. Byatt complains that while the earlier books present a preadolescent “latency-period” fantasy, Order of the Phoenix fails to translate that fantasy into a convincing portrait of adolescence. Which is true enough, but is surely a problem in the earlier books as well; by fifteen, as Harry and his friends are in the fifth book of the series, most kids are well into adolescence.

Let me skip back a bit. Byatt argues that the Dursleys, Harry’s adoptive family, represent, in a Freduian decoding of the stories, Harry’s real family — the world of reality, as distinct from the fantasy-world of Hogwarts. “The Dursleys are his true enemy,” Byatt says. “When he arrives at wizarding school, he moves into a world where everyone, good and evil, recognizes his importance, and tries either to protect or destroy him.” 

It’s sadly ironic that Byatt, who mocked the metaphors of Freudian thought in her novels, sees no difficulty in applying its comfortable theories to another text. Probably more importantly, one is also uncomfortably aware that she’s misreading the text at issue in at least two crucial ways. One, the Dursleys have at least some clue as to Harry’s importance; they fear and hate him, for all that he’s effectively sworn to protect them — Marvel Comics, once again — and those emotions are explicitly tied into their actions and dialogue in the framing sequences of the books. Two, the Dursleys are as much a fantasy as Hogwarts; they’re caricatures. To treat them as in any way “real”, much less a “real” fantasy, is about as difficult as treating, well, Hogwarts as a real educational system. The idea of reality is embodied by one about as much as another.

Byatt goes on to say that “Ms. Rowling’s world is a secondary secondary world, made up of intelligently patchworked derivative motifs from all sorts of children’s literature — from the jolly hockey-sticks school story to Roald Dahl, from “Star Wars” to Diana Wynne Jones and Susan Cooper.” This is true, but so what? Every secondary world, including Tolkien’s, derives from pre-existing sources. Byatt seems to be trying to say that the patchwork in this case is unconvincing, or perhaps that it does not rise above its sources. It’s a viable point, but it needs to be supported. 

The closest she comes to this that I can see is to say that “Derivative narrative clichés work with children because they are comfortingly recognizable and immediately available to the child’s own power of fantasizing.” I can’t see why this statement would apply to children any more or less than it would to adults. In either case, it seems to me an issue of temperament — not everyone has the same “power of fantasizing”. “Derivative narrative clichés” (which sounds redundant) work with children because they don’t have the same experience with cliché that adults do; they encounter them for the first time.

“The important thing,” Byatt tells us, “about this particular secondary world is that it is symbiotic with the real modern world. Magic, in myth and fairy tales, is about contacts with the inhuman — trees and creatures, unseen forces. Most fairy story writers hate and fear machines.” To me, this is where the article really falls down; the statement is not only untrue, it’s a howler. Or, put another way, it’s only true if you’re very selective about who you call a “fairy story writer”. If you’re prepared to eliminate many modern fantasy writers — Michael Moorcock, say, or China Miéville — then maybe you can make the statement work. Though I frankly have no idea how you get around Frank Baum. 

Byatt goes on to say that “Ms. Rowling’s magic world has no place for the numinous. It is written for people whose imaginative lives are confined to TV cartoons, and the exaggerated (more exciting, not threatening) mirror-worlds of soaps, reality TV and celebrity gossip.” This is a hell of a statement to make, but set it aside for a moment. “Nobody is trying to save or destroy anything beyond Harry Potter and his friends and family,” Byatt continues, again displaying a breathtaking ability to ignore the text she’s supposed to be analysing — by Order of the Phoenix it’s very clear that the whole magical society’s in danger — and then goes on to say “So, yes, the attraction for children can be explained by the powerful working of the fantasy of escape and empowerment, combined with the fact that the stories are comfortable, funny, just frightening enough.” If this is so, the question still remains as to why Rowling happened to hit that combination just right when no other author in recent decades has managed the trick. What is it that makes the Harry Potter books so different?

Not only do I think this is a poor analysis of Harry Potter’s appeal, but it also seems to me logically confused; Byatt seems to be arguing that children who like Potter follow “soaps, reality TV and celebrity gossip”. Which seems unlikely. That’s without even getting into the question of what she means by “TV cartoons” — I can easily think of a number of Japanese cartoons, and even some American cartoons, which seem to me to be more valuable and imaginative than the Harry Potter books; whereas Byatt’s implication seems to be that the Potter books work because they’re more imaginative than the cartoons. (I would agree that there’s a lack of the numinous in the Potter books, but I think that’s a function of the limitation of Rowling’s writing talent, not necessarily of the nature of the story.) 

Weirdly, Byatt claims that “These are good books of their kind.” Her problem is a suspicion that people derive from them mainly comfort, with none of the “compensating seriousness” of writers like Susan Cooper, Alan Garner, or Ursula K. Le Guin. This seems to me to be an odd way to read books, and not much to do with what Byatt then goes on to find in these writers: “a real sense of mystery, powerful forces ... we feel we are being put back in touch with earlier parts of our culture, when supernatural and inhuman creatures — from whom we thought we learned our sense of good and evil — inhabited a world we did not feel we controlled.” This is I think a good sentence, and a good assessment of the experience of reading Cooper, Garner, and Le Guin. What she’s talking about is, basically, numinousness again. 

I’d agree that there isn’t much of this in the Harry Potter books, but, again, I think that’s a function of Rowling’s lack of talent, not of something inherent in the structure of the story or in the nature of Rowling’s invention. “Ms. Rowling’s magic wood has nothing in common with these lost worlds,” argues Byatt. “It is small, and on the school grounds, and dangerous only because she says it is.” But had Rowling more of a knack for atmosphere, that patch of forest would have the danger, the resonance, Byatt is missing; I think that’s what Rowling was trying for in her depiction of the forest. Put bluntly, I think Byatt is talking here about something caused by a lack of skill, and ascribing it to a defect of invention.

(Before I continue, I also have to express my disagreement with Byatt’s opinions about “regression”. She observes that “In a recent BBC survey of the top 100 ‘best reads,’ more than a quarter were children’s books,” and concludes from this that “We like to regress. I know that part of the reason I read Tolkien when I’m ill is that there is an almost total absence of sexuality in his world, which is restful.” Restful for some, perhaps; for others, it’s perhaps not particularly noticeable. The idea of returning to a preadolescent state as “regression” seems problematic; who’s to say that it’s not actually a healthy step up? In up and down worlds, up and down are equivocal; one person’s regression is another’s growth. Byatt seems to recognise this herself: “If we regress, we regress to a lost sense of significance we mourn for.” But then, part of my dissatisfaction with the article is this sort of equivocation. For example, the BBC survey she cites seems to me to be undermined later in the article when she observes that “A surprising number of people — including many students of literature — will tell you they haven’t really lived in a book since they were children.” There’s no need to go on about “comfort” when this characterises common reading experience. If people haven’t lived in a book as adults, of course they’ll pick their childhood favourite as their best read.)

Parallelling her comments on reality shows and the like, Byatt goes on to say that Rowling “speaks to an adult generation that hasn’t known, and doesn’t care about, mystery. They are inhabitants of urban jungles, not of the real wild. They don’t have the skills to tell ersatz magic from the real thing, for as children they daily invested the ersatz with what imagination they had.” I don’t agree with these statements. It seems to me to be fatuous to suggest that a basic human experience is not present in the current generation of adults. It seems even more fatuous to suggest that “inhabitants of urban jungles” are in some way emotionally stunted because they live in cities instead of ... well, what? Deep wilderness? Farmland? The “real wild” has been dwindling in Britain for centuries; I don’t know how much of what a Canadian would think of as wilderness was present in that island even a hundred years ago. Finally, the statement about the ersatz seems logically unfounded to me — if your imagination only has the ersatz to work with, won’t that strengthen the imagination? More crucially, the kind of sense Byatt’s talking about here — of numinousness, of mystery, of magic — seems to me not to be dependent on external training, but on inborn nature; this, though, is a position that seems to me incapable of proof or disproof.

Byatt’s next-to-last paragraph seems to me to simply be incoherent. Adults reading Rowling revert to a childlike state in so doing, she tells us, then switches topics to note that many people haven’t “lived in a book” since they were children, a sad side-effect of English classes. If adults are able to live in books, one might reasonably ask, doesn’t that say something in favour of the books that do draw them in? Rather than answer this question, Byatt says: “But in the days before dumbing down and cultural studies no one reviewed Enid Blyton or Georgette Heyer — as they do not now review the great Terry Pratchett, whose wit is metaphysical, who creates an energetic and lively secondary world, who has a multifarious genius for strong parody as opposed to derivative manipulation of past motifs, who deals with death with startling originality. Who writes amazing sentences.” I will say that Byatt mentioned Blyton and Heyer previously in the article. Beyond that, I cannot see how these statements logically follow any point Byatt’s made. I’m not sure they even follow each other — she seems to be saying ‘once, nobody reviewed Blyton or Heyer, who are bad writers, just as now they don’t review Terry Pratchett, who’s a good writer.’

Byatt begins her next, final, paragraph by saying “It is the substitution of celebrity for heroism that has fed this phenomenon.” I presume she doesn’t mean Pratchett writing amazing sentences. It seems that she doesn’t mean the lack of reviews for him either. It’s hard to see what she does mean; the paragraph is simply an attack on relativistic cultural studies, except that it’s not. Cultural studies are said to have a “leveling effect”, and to be “as interested in hype and popularity as they are in literary merit, which they don’t really believe exists.” But then: “There is nothing wrong with this,” she says. But then again: “it has little to do with the shiver of awe we feel looking through Keats's “magic casements, opening on the foam/Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn.”” 

It’s as if the incoherence and equivocation that’s been at work all through the article bubbles to the surface here, and the conclusion of the essay is lost in a swamp of dithering. It’s a pity. Had the article been as denunciatory as Byatt’s critics suggested, it could have been genuinely interesting on a critical level. Had it been more interested in what the Harry Potter books really were, and how fantasy really worked, it might have been a useful examination of fantasy fiction. As it is, it seems only confused, unsure how to really grapple with its subject, slipping away whenever it gets close to a definitive statement.

• Other posts in the ByattBlogging series may be found here.
  

ByattBlogging 13: A Whistling Woman

Fittingly, the book begins with an ending. Agatha Mond reaches the end of the fantasy story she’s telling to her daughter Saskia and Frederica Potter’s son Leo; the children are outraged, demanding to know more. It’s a clever way to open the final book in the Potter quartet, and foreshadows a book structured around an artful series of anti-climaxes. In turn, this is an odd structural reflection of a major theme: otherness, the reflection. The thing, and the anti-thing.

On a story level, A Whistling Woman nominally follows Frederica Potter through her developing career as a television personality — she is the anchor of a show called, appropriately, Through the Looking-Glass — while she also deals with ongoing love affairs and the mothering of Leo. Practically, though, Frederica is on the periphery for much of the book. Instead, much of the book is filled with the story of Josh Lamb, née Joshua Ramsden; he is a Manichean visionary who sees sheets of blood overrunning the world. He’s also an intensely interesting figure, a true charismatic; he brings together Gideon Farrar’s Children of Joy and Paul Ottokar’s mystic Quaker group the Spirit’s Tigers. But one theme of the book is the absence of easy faith in the modern world, the need to doubt, the impossibility of returning to old ways of thinking; we know he and his flock will come to no good end.

A major sub-plot in the book is the interplay between a university in Yorkshire and an anti-university which springs up in the town nearby — in fact, on the land where Lamb and his group will ultimately find a home. Lamb’s Manichean thought provides a structure by which to understand the anti-university, an angry, stinking lot which produces no good and only threatens the destruction of the Body-Mind conference the main university is hosting. For Lamb, creation is divided into realms of light and darkness, one (despite the apparent mixed metaphor) a mirror image of the other. So the anti-university is an uncreative parody of the real thing, whose liberal Vice Chancellor underestimates their radicalism; he is himself too good a moderate liberal to understand the dangers of extremism.

If this sounds like a very conservative imagining, well, it is. None of the students, in either the university or the anti-university, are shown as minds worth reckoning with (unless you except some of the graduate students, who we know as characters from earlier books and who are essentially apolitical). The university is shown as caring and humane to a fault in its dealing with the anti-university, which itself is irrational and violent. The deck is stacked, and convenient as it may be for the story, I found it a major flaw in the novel’s construction; it falls flat as satire because it doesn’t feel like an exaggeration of reality, so much as the writer deforming reality in a convenient way.

The title of the book comes from a saying quoted as an epigraph (along with a passage from Alice in Wonderland about Alice’s identity as a girl or a serpent, and a passage from Marvell’s The Garden comparing the soul, freed of the body, to a silver-winged bird) claiming that “A Whistling Woman and a Crowing Hen / Is neither good for God nor Men.” If part of the book has to do with the various problems with God in the modern world, much of the rest of it — along with the other Potter books — has to do with issues of female identity and expectations of proper behaviour foisted on women. At the same time, the novel links women and hens through a series of images and verbal play (Men, by extension, are, well, cocks. Which itself plays into a subtheme of the book in which a romantically-rejected scientist examines the utility, or lack thereof, of males and sexual reproduction); Frederica holds a “hen party” on one of her TV shows which is actually a parody of real hen party; the farm on which Lamb’s group eventually settles frees the hens formerly kept there, with mixed results. Oh, and there are also semi-monstrous Whistlers, whistling harpy-like figures, in Agatha’s fantasy, who end up as helpful figures when properly approached; winged, they are halfway between earth and air, belonging to neither, choosing to forego mates either human or fowl, but, perhaps, partaking of the nature of those other winged humanoids, the angels.

So, as with most of Byatt’s books, this is a novel dense with images and significance; symbols cluster, and link each to each in unexpected ways. And sometimes take on multiple levels. Lucy, the woman who owns the farm where Lamb and his group end up, joins them after a tragedy mirroring Lamb’s own past; she becomes his follower, and she herself owns a lamb which believes it’s a dog, so: Lamb has a Lucy who has a little lamb.

Certainly the book gains a lot by playing with perspectives. We see Frederica finding her way on her TV show; we see her broadcast with the other two women, then we see another broadcast with two males, a superficially more intellectual program (but we are encouraged to wonder how much of this is actually display by the men for Frederica’s benefit). In the next chapters, the book then moves back to show us what’s happening with another group of characters; we end up seeing Frederica’s broadcasts through their eyes. Then Byatt does the same, following yet another set of characters, and showing us their reaction to the broadcasts. In each case significant correspondences are found; intentionally or not, the characters react to the broadcasts as though they had something to say about their own lives, as though the TV was somehow oracular. 

This is literalised by Josh Lamb, who looks for visions in the snow of dead channels. He finds one, a terrifying hallucination in which he is brought down among the dead, a Blakean experience out of The Marriage of Heaven and Hell; but where real-world experience is something shared among different characters, albeit seen from individual perspectives, the visionary experience is by definition singular. Reality, then, emerges from multiplicity, not from individual charisma; while two scientific observers are present in Lamb’s group, they see events differently — one is clear-eyed and reserved, but one has bought into the hope of vision, and loses his sense of events as a result.

Similarly, one of the actual climaxes of the book comes at the Body-Mind conference sponsored by the university, an image of multiple voices uniting. It is also a chance for Byatt to allow her characters to expound on symbolically-resonant ideas for several pages. This works because, in this book as in the previous Potter books, much of the movement in the novel is a function of the ideas it contains. So even though the story may come to a halt for pages in order to enunciate ideas, it works. The story is there, in part, to get the ideas out. The important contrast in this particular case is with the anti-university, which essentially opposes all ideas, and all enunciation.

Byatt stands foursquare behind the university, traditional education, rote learning. Frederica’s son cannot learn to read until he is weaned off the easy-going educational approach which encourages him to go at his own speed; he must be taught phonics. The appreciation of rote learning, of the power that comes with mastering something in the mind, is linked with memory; as a contrast, Josh Lamb thinks he remembers his past, but his recollections are filled with lacunae.

There’s an elegaic yet hopeful tone to the book; a sense of change. Not the revolution desired by the various utopian groups — which is in a sense the end of all changes — but the evolution (a key word, given the book’s zoological preoccupations) of ideas and of science. The development of new ways of looking at the world; new ways to diagnose what is around us. The movement from the first book to the fourth is a movement of ideas, a movement of metaphors; Frederica thinks about metaphors, about the way they changed in history — and that in itself is a metaphor for the change of ideas and images from the 50s through the 70s: metaphor a metaphor for metaphor.

How does it fit with its predecessors in the quartet? The four books strike me as remarkably unified, in tone and conception. The balance of character, story, and ideas are the same in each book, and in all these things each book builds on the one preceding. The use of overlapping temporal perspectives means they fit together with some intricacy, gaining power from the understated sense of a whole life, its shape an inevitability and yet somehow an accident.

Taken all in all, the Frederica Potter books are a success. They’re not particularly dramatic in any traditional sense, but the interplay of ideas and perspectives is made to have its own quiet fascination. Byatt’s sense of intellectual history, both of the eras she writes about and of the eras which gave birth to them, gives a sense of moment to the progression of time, and the development of character and language and science. 

Ironically, these books are in some ways about the ascendance of television, from the tiny black-and-white presentation of Elizabeth II’s coronation to the colourful, monstrous glass box which came to dominate society. Ironic, not only because the nature of TV is inherently opposed to the structural form of the novel in general and these novels in particular, but because in the years immediately following the publication of the last of the books, we are seeing the end of TV’s reign. The internet has replaced television as the most ubiquitous of media. Who will miss it? In a way, the nature of these books makes them an intriguing project for the internet age; their density of symbol seems to cry out for annotation. The images act as non-technological hyperlinks, associating ideas and characters, and await only some future indexer to identify them all.

Still, when all’s said and done, these books are about Frederica Potter, oddly contradicting Byatt’s own statements about the nature of the novel; she has spoken about preferring multi-centred novels, but while individual books may have other characters who can stand as contrasting centres, overall there’s no doubt Frederica’s is the dominant personality. An interesting personality, too, driven by intelligence. There’s almost a sense in which the books perhaps don’t give her a chance to really demonstrate all that she is, or could have been; but then that’s the nature of life for many people. The fact that Frederica has enough in her life for four books is a sign of her vitality — vitality which animates the books, and which gives us reason enough to keep turning pages when the smoothness of the prose and the fascination of the ideas aren’t enough. For all that character, in certain ideological circles, is suspect, it is Frederica who makes these novels a success; or, more precisely, it is in the creation of her that they are most memorable.

• Other posts in the ByattBlogging series may be found here.
  

ByattBlogging 12: The Biographer's Tale

You could look at this book as a departure for Byatt, or as an experiment in voice. It’s told in the first person, by a male protagonist, and the voice of the book follows from that, using the language that’s natural for the narrator. You could also look at it as a self-satire, Byatt’s own parody of Possession. Like that book, the hero is a scholarly male who becomes sceptical of literary theory; who tries to uncover the truth about the life of a dead writer; who finds love during the course of his journey; and who learns to focus on the world of physical fact rather than on scholarly theory. Like Possession, the book is stuffed with other texts, providing other perspectives on the novel’s themes. Unlike Possession, though, the protagonist fails in his quest; rather than become a poet, he abandons writing for the tangible world of things, threatened as it is by human agency; and rather than find love once, he finds it twice.

The tone is different, too. It feels like a satire; Possession, of course, consciously modelled itself after a romance, which almost by definition makes that book ripe for satire. The Biographer’s Tale deals with things like sex and money in a way that’s not so much clear-eyed as perhaps corrective. So the main character doesn’t begin with a girlfriend supporting him. Sex isn’t the end of the story, it’s something that happens along the way, and not always at obvious points. And new texts or diaries or letters aren’t conveniently found to answer questions or suggest new ones.

The Biographer’s Tale is harder to like for all these reasons, but also for deeper reasons as well, I think. The language of the book isn’t as rich as Possession, or most of Byatt’s other work, and while there’s a gain in terms of the depth of character presented, there’s a loss of linguistic felicity which probably wasn’t worth the sacrifice. This was a characteristic of Byatt’s first-person short story “Jael” as well; I can’t help but wish Byatt had tried for the best of both worlds, creating a character who reveals himself or herself through the use of a rich style. Still, at a deeper level, I think The Biographer’s Tale suffers because, hand-in-hand with the (relatively) emptier style, there’s also less going on than in Possession; less incident, less imagery, less variety of character, less thematic richness. The book is still too varied to really gain the intensity of a stripped-down vision, though. In all, it feels like an interesting experiment, but one which, at least in part, never quite comes off.

This is not to say that it’s a bad book, or an uninteresting one. Byatt still layers in a number of clever ideas. Phineas Gilbert Nanson, a postgraduate English student, decides to give up his current scholarship in favour of producing a biography; he ends up choosing to write about Scholes Destry-Scholes, the biographer of a Victorian traveller, romancer and translator named Elmer Bole. So the book, Phineas’s journal, is an autobiography of a would-be biographer of a biographer of a translator — although Phineas resists, for as long as he can, the idea that he’s writing an autobiography. 

Phineas fails to write his biography, unable to gather enough primary source material to unlock the life of the mysterious Mr. Destry-Scholes; he finds other consolations, and ends up moving away from writing to focus on “the too-much loved earth” that “will always exceed our power to describe, or imagine, or understand it.” Phineas’s rejection of theory leads him to the concrete; no longer thinking of a work of literature as a self-contained structure leads him to focus on language’s inability to completely capture the thing-in-itself, and thus to move beyond language. Presumably, this is reflected in the way Destry-Scholes is a kind of layer between Phineas and Elmer Bole, whose own name identifies him, basically, as a tree, a part of the natural world.

Phineas’s somewhat half-hearted efforts to learn about Scholes Destry-Scholes (School Destroy Schools? Schools Destroy Souls?) lead him to three documents which seem to hint at a work or works Destry-Scholes was planning before his untimely death in the Maëlstrom. They’re fragments of writings about Linnaeus, Francis Galton, and Henrik Ibsen (men interested, in one way or another, with the definition and classification of reality, the depiction and nature of character). Phineas also meets Destry-Scholes’s niece, and finds a set of index cards holding fragments of other texts; also 366 marbles (one, I imagine, for each possible day of a year) and a list of names which may go with the marbles — though each word may fit several marbles, and each marble may fit several words; so names and the things named have a slippery relationship.

Phineas also starts a relationship with another woman, a bee taxonomist named Fulla Biefeld. The novel builds a strong case for the importance of Fulla’s research, for her subject, but Fulla herself never comes alive. We don’t understand what it is that attracts her to Phineas. Nor, for that matter, so we understand the attraction he has for Vera Alphage, Destry-Scholes’s niece (whose name, I suppose, may mean something like “true letter-eater”). At any rate, Phineas continues to sleep with both women through the book, not bothering to inform either one of the other’s existence, not unlike Elmer Bole, who also maintained two households.

If the two-timing makes Phineas sound like an unattractive character, one can only say that this fits the characterisation the book gives us. He’s not particularly intelligent, not particularly good with words, not fast on his feet, not perceptive, not particularly driven or competent at what he chooses to do, not particularly empathic, and lacks a considerable amount of self-knowledge. In other words, he has few definite, positive qualities, for good or ill. It’s a coherent picture, but not, on the whole, either sympathetic or interesting.

The novel could overcome this if its ideas were interesting, or were dramatised in an interesting way; personally, I found that neither was the case. There’s a series of reference to the body, which seems to look ahead to Phineas’s choice for a world of things, and to fragmentation, which seems to be a commentary on the book’s form. These images don’t seem to combine with the felicity with which Byatt usually links her symbols; an early nod to Frankenstein is a good start, but the end of the book suggests merely that the world is full of variety and interest, to much to fit into a coherent order. This may be so, but the fatal weakness of The Biographer’s Tale is that it doesn’t convince us of this fact. For all Phineas’s desire to move beyond writing, the only way for literature to look beyond literature is to succeed as literature. The Biographer’s Tale, while interesting, while not without grace notes, does not. It’s worth reading, but I can think of no way to consider it as other than a minor work in Byatt’s bibliography.

• Other posts in the ByattBlogging series may be found here.
  

ByattBlogging 11: Elementals

It’s difficult to find a literal meaning to the title of this short story collection. The significance seems to be that the characters in these stories have to do with elemental forces, but in at least one case, “Jael”, the story is about a character evading her realisation of the elemental significance of her actions. It could be said to investigate characters who are out of their elements, but then again “A Lamia in the Cevennes” doesn’t really fit that pattern. Some of the stories are fantasies, some are not. 

Perhaps the closest one can come is to say that the stories involve stripping the characters down to some core element, some key aspect of what they’re about. That’s a good dramatic principle, and it does fit with the six stories in the book. But then the subtitle is “Stories of Fire and Ice”, and ice isn’t really an element, and anyway on a literal level the statement is inaccurate — not all the stories are about ice and fire. So whatever meaning we get from the phrase must derive from an interpretation we put over the story. It may be as meaningless a phrase as “fairy story” was on the Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye collection. Or it might refer to the meeting of opposites, which is a theme we might be able to find, or imagine, in many of these tales.

The first story in Elementals is “Crocodile Tears”. Superficially, it seems simple: a woman, Patricia, loses her husband unexpectedly, and the shock leads her to step away from her life up to that point and flee to the south of France, to Nîmes, where she meets a Norwegian fellow-tourist, Nils, also fleeing loss; the two gradually restore each other to something approaching normal life. The artistry here is in the way the plot of the story is handled, the delicacy of the language, the closeness of observation.

Also, of course, the complexity of the symbol-structure in which the characters move. Bullfighting, a preoccupation of Nîmes, is linked to ceremony, to rites and mysteries, and then debunked. The warmth and sun of the south is contrasted with the Norwegian cold, and both those things are unified by Nils’s theory that Valhalla was a mythic recollection of a Roman arena. Perhaps most structurally significant, a Norwegian folk-tale Nils retells, in which a man is helped three times by the ghost of a man whose burial he ensures, is reflected in the events of the story, as Nils three times saves Patricia’s life from half-aware suicide attempts. Time is significant; the opening of the story tells us “Patches of time can be recalled under hypnosis”, referring to the experience of looking at pictures in an art gallery; Patricia is looking at a dandelion clock when she has her last words with her husband; later, she reads Proust (in a city on a plain) and a guidebook in the Place de l’Horloge.

The title refers literally to crocodiles, a recurrent decorative motif of Nîmes, we’re told. It was a sacred beast to the Egyptians, and crocodile mummies are seen in a museum. Patricia remembers a line her husband once delivered on stage: “Your serpent of Egypt is bred now of your mud by the operation of your sun: so is your crocodile.” So the crocodile is a sign, perhaps, of the union of two dissimilar things. And water, in fountains, in the source of the water which underlies the city, is another recurring image; so Patricia wanders in the Jardin de la Fontaine, where there is a crocodile made of bronze plants. This is the core of the story, I think: dissimilarities united.

“A Lamia in the Cevennes” is almost the opposite; characters here do not necessarily unite, and are better for it. A painter in the Cevennes finds a Lamia, a magical snake-like beast, in his swimming pool; the Lamia consents to model for him, if he will kiss her and turn her human and be her lover. But this is not what the painter wants, and he postpones this destiny until it is no longer a threat.

This story doesn’t have quite the emotional weight of “Crocodile Tears”; it’s too wry. It is quite effective on its own terms, though. Byatt has a real talent for fantasy; her style gives these stories a grounding in reality which makes them live. This is another tale which touches on the importance of Matisse, of luxe, calme et volupté, but that ideal works here in a way it didn’t always in The Matisse Stories, because the painter, Bernard Lycett-Kean, seems to embody those virtues, to consciously make them a part of his life and work, in a way that the quieter Matisse Stories did not as effectively dramatise. Bernard insists on the primacy of his art, giving up the magic of the Lamia and its love to focus on his painting; and he is, in a way, rewarded for it — at the end of the story, his creativity finds a new focus, leaps from one subject to another. It’s a story about the magic inherent in the world, and the depiction of that magic, the freedom of spirit that allows an artist to move from one theme to another (in a way that Robin Dennison could not, in “Art Work”).

It’s tempting to view “Cold” as the central story of the collection. It’s another fantasy, and certainly one in which ice and fire are dominant. A princess is born; at puberty she turns out to be an icewoman, who needs cold to survive. But when a competition is held for her hand, the prince who wins her heart comes from a desert country. How will she survive in her lover’s arid kingdom? As it turns out, by the power of art, by his ability to remake the world in a new medium, to create a space for her to live and imagine: “We can make air, water, light, into something both of us can live in,” he says, and the ‘we’ seems to me important; again, two dissimilar things find their union.

The prince, Sasan, is a glassmaker; in “The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye”, Byatt told us that the magic of glass lies in the way in which it unites all the elements in one form. So it is here, as Sasan creates models of the Tree of Life to impress Fiammarosa, the ice Princess. As glass was important in “The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye”, it’s tempting to think that glass and fantasy have some connection for Byatt — glass as magic, glass as a way to recreate the world in art. But then again, glass has had similar meaning for her in other stories as well; one thinks of the glass serpent in The Game.

“Baglady” is the shortest story in the book. The wife of a businessman visiting the Far East goes with the wives of her husband’s colleagues to a high-class shopping mall; she loses track of time, loses her purse, loses her identification. She’s left hoping her husband will come for her, for if he does not she will either be locked in the mall forever, or else evicted to join the “human flotsam and jetsam, gathered with bags and bottles around little fires of cowdung or cardboard” which she has glimpsed earlier in the story. It’s a story about an aging woman; “Time has passed at surprising speed” once the main character, Daphne, enters the mall. Bit by bit, she loses her identity, who she thought she was; it is stripped from her, as though time was moving at a super-accelerated rate. 

The story is vaguely reminiscent of “Loss of Face”, from Sugar and Other Stories, in that it’s about a well-off Western woman facing a cultural divide with the Far East. Two dissimilar things. But this is a simpler, terser, story; there is no potential point of connection here. Indeed, the Good Fortune shopping mall has something sinister about it; it is likened to Aladdin’s Cave, which we might remember was originally the haunt of thieves. As Daphne’s panic mounts, she finds that it “extends maybe as far into the earth as into the sky”; there is something hellish here — shopkeepers are “watchful in their cells”, “fire-escape-like stairways” lead back into mall corridors. Daphne ends the story alone, threatened by a policeman, sans watch, sans purse, sans everything; stripped to some elemental essence of who she is, able only to sit and wait and hope that her husband will come, unable to imagine escaping Good Fortune.

“Jael” is a story of treachery. The main character recalls drawing the Biblical story of Jael, who led the Canaanite Sisera into her tent before killing him in his sleep; she recalls her childhood at school, where she committed an act of treachery she can’t let herself remember; she is betrayed in the present, as her assistant schemes to displace her from her job as a director of television commercials. The lead character fears being judged, even for minor and unknowing transgressions; she has convinced herself that her childhood act of violence, which had repercussions she did not intend, is only a fiction. The result is that she’s locked herself into a cycle of treachery, of betrayal and being betrayed.

Unusually, this story is told in the first person. Byatt captures her character’s voice, but at the expense of her usual precision of prose. Still, it’s a worthwhile endeavour, as we learn to question everything the character says, to consider how her memory is betraying her, how she betrays herself. Her tragedy is that, shallow as she is, she isn’t shallow enough to work in television — perhaps her brief touch with the elemental character of treachery, much as she might try to hide it from herself, has given her too much depth. A far cry from her assistant, Lara, who “lives in a world of interactive computer-generated gladiators, bomb-lobbers, kamikaze scantily-clad dolls, headsmen with swords and laser duellists”. 

The last story in the collection, “Christ in the House of Martha and Mary”, returns to Byatt’s concern with painting. A cook in an upper-class household, Dolores, is brilliant at her job, an artist, but unhappy in her place, angry at being below her mistress in the social scale. Her friend Concepción tries to console her, to remind her of her status; Concepción’s friend, a young painter (who we might eventually conclude is Diego Velázquez, from which we could deduce this is 17th-century Spain), asks them both if he may paint them, put them in the scene from the Gospel of Luke of Christ in the house of Martha and Mary. They agree, and to Concepción’s surprise, although the painting shows that Dolores is unattractive — hard and unlovely, she is caught as though in the life — still Dolores is delighted by it, and so the three of them sit down to eat together.

In the Gospel story, Martha, serving dinner, demands that her sister Mary cease listening to Christ to help with the dinner, only to be gently rebuked by Christ. Martha thus became the image of the active life, Mary of the contemplative. So in the story Concepción asks Velázquez if Dolores should not be content and submissive; Velázquez says no, that Dolores investigates the nature of things in food as he does in oil, and that the world is not divided between servants and masters so much as it is between the inquisitive and the incurious. “The Church teaches that Mary is the contemplative life, which is higher than Martha’s way, which is the active way,” he says. “But any painter must question, which is which? And a cook also contemplates mysteries.” His painting unites them all, active and contemplative, and so they sit down together to the meal; but more even than this, his painting of Dolores’s anger dispels it — “The momentary coincidence between image and woman vanished, as though the rage was still and eternal in the painting and the woman was released into time.” It’s a powerful note on which to end the collection.

This may be Byatt’s strongest collection of short fiction overall. It’s more diverse than Sugar and Other Stories, structurally and dramatically; there’s a greater range of characters, style, and situation. It seems to me to be perhaps less united but more thought-through than The Matisse Stories. There’s almost a sense of liberation to the collection, as though dealing with elemental subjects frees Byatt in some way to more daringly investigate her favourite themes. She takes some risks here, does some uncharacteristic things, working with fantasy and first-person perspectives, and by and large they pay off handsomely.

• Other posts in the ByattBlogging series may be found here.
  

ByattBlogging 10: Babel Tower

This book is about language, like many of Byatt’s books, and the misuse of language, and the gaps in language. It’s also about education, about the teaching of grammar and about formative experiences; about finding a voice. It’s about the formation not of individuals alone, but of groups. It’s about the structure of things, about race — in that it is about the four-letter DNA alphabet that makes living things what they are. It is about class, in all the senses of the word: school classes, social classes, scientific classification. It is about the way all these things come together.

More precisely, this is the third book in the quartet which follows the life of Frederica Potter. This volume opens in 1964, with Frederica stuck in a terrible marriage to Nigel Reiver, and now the mother of a young son, Leo. Over the course of the book she leaves Nigel in dramatic circumstances, moves to London, builds a life, and engages in divorce proceedings. She becomes a teacher, a writer, and is tangentially involved in the publication of a book, Babbletower, which troubles the powers-that-be. By the end of the book, the court case for the suppression of Babbletower is moving in parallel to Frederica’s divorce.

The book opens with several hypothetical beginnings: “It might begin ... Or it might begin ...” Slowly, these openings come to cohere, to draw together as parts of one narrative. We’re reintroduced to Frederica’s brother-in-law Daniel, now manning a suicide help-line in a London church; we’re introduced to a text, which turns out to be from Babbletower, in which a group of friends seek escape from the French Revolution inside a vast tower where they will form a utopian society; we follow one of Frederica’s old London friends as he runs into her by chance, which meeting leads to a conspiracy among Frederica’s friends — a group unified by their care for her — to get her out of her unhappy situation.

(But the first hypothetical beginning of the book is a scene of ruin, a broken tower, accompanied by a thrush — which bird later recurs in a fairy-tale imagined by the woman Frederica comes to live with — and broken alphabets. Among the fallen letters are the signifiers of the four DNA amino acids, G, T, A, and C; also the sign for infinity, which was perhaps derived from the letter omega, and the letter alpha, so that in a sense in the end is the beginning is all things. Snails are there, too, with helical shells; the helix is a recurring image in this book, referring back to the shape of DNA. The thrush sings a limited song which nevertheless gives pleasure; questions are thus raised of the nature of art and the perception of the beautiful and in what does pleasure consist. So this collection of images symbolises much of what will come later in the book.)

The book covers three years in details; it moves through Swinging London, presenting a cynical, outsider’s view of the period. It’s effectively done; it feels incomplete, but for the most part incomplete in an appropriate way — the book, the characters, are watching something without being inside it, seeing the folly and errors those who have absorbed the values of the time are blind to. Youth culture is parodied by Babbletower, which itself is ironically put on trial by The Establishment. Utopian dreaming falls apart, again and again, when faced with the real world. This in a sense is the novel taking the easy way out: easy to mock the weak-minded utopians, but what if a utopian is found who has a tougher understanding of human nature, who understands, as the author of Babbletower does, the human urge to hurt others? 

In this way, the novel’s use of Blake and Tolkien is instructive. There’s some appreciation of both authors (though Frederica finds fault with the language of Blake’s poetic books, a judgment perhaps appropriate to someone of her intellectual background but one with which it is difficult to sympathise), but a different appreciation than the uncritical adulation of the counterculture. Near the end of the novel, idealists put on a “happening” celebrating the mythopoeic imagination of both writers — which event is invaded by another, more radical, wave of dreamers; the Girondists are deposed by the Montagnards. While Byatt uses the images of Blake and Tolkien in various ways, it’s hard not to think that these are writers who are in some way not central to her preoccupations; there’s a quality of vision that they have which doesn’t find its way into the book. The book has other antecedents, is in that way more purely a novel; that is what is in Babel Tower’s own DNA.

But in a sense to speak of DNA is problematic. The book seems concerned more with the fusion of many fragments of experience into one artistic whole than with genetic integrity. We get an early intimation of this when the windows of Daniel’s London church are described — shattered in the war, the splinters gathered and re-fused into a new whole. It becomes especially clear with Frederica, on her own, asserts her creativity and intellectual independence by filling a notebook with pieces of text, literary and non-literary, in an attempt to make a coherent work out of them. Laminations, she calls it, things separate yet joined together. We’re given some excerpts of Laminations, appropriated passages that happen to have recurrent themes — one set of selections, for example, seems focussed on femininity, blood, evil or the perception of evil.

Laminations is one example of the way in which individual things can be put together to make something new by their configuration; so it is with people. A committee or a school class is defined by the list of people which make it up, some of whom we later come to know as individuals and some of whom we do not; the committee or class is subsequently referred to as a unit, an entity unto itself. Frederica forms a new group around herself, just as Nigel has his family group, his women; these two groups come into conflict by the end of the novel, just as the debate over Babbletower is fought out as a debate over, in essence, community standards and community views.

The climactic court cases bring together much of the disparate symbolism of the book. The Old Bailey becomes a literal manifestation of the Tower of Babel, of the destruction of language; the law uses language to distort, not to clarify. The court system, which Frederica is told works on the principle of opposition, of confrontation, becomes a venue for the dissolution of meaning — again and again the legal language becomes parodic, ironic, as when the prosecutor responsible for trying to suppress Babbletower praises the “decent society where [a witness] is free to say what he pleases because his rights are protected by the vigilance of courts like this”. Oddly, the results of the trials are either acceptable, or understandable — that is, the wrong results in Frederica’s trial are produced not by a misuse of language, but by simple deception. By lies, and the creation of a false story.

It’s difficult to know what to make of Babbletower as a book, despite the lengthy extracts from it which make up part of the substance of Babel Tower. Nobody seems to doubt that it’s shocking, and contains radically transgressive passages; the text in Babel Tower hints at that, but avoids what must have been the more explicit passages — even given the tamer morality of the mid-60s, it’s hard to imagine the writing on offer provoking the outrage Babbletower supposedly did. Then again, many of the characters who provide testimony about the book suggest that good writing contains an element of sexual pleasure, which is difficult to understand (perhaps it’s meant to be an example of the 60s pleasure principle at work); even harder to grasp is the fact that they uniformly state or imply that Babbletower gave them sexual pleasure — that the book was sexually stimulating. I can accept that I’m less likely to be sexually stimulated by a novel than most, but even so, I wouldn’t expect a book written in the style of Babbletower to be likely to create a genuine sexual frisson; it’s so thickly ironic it’s impossible to sympathise with emotionally. As pornography, it seems neither heated, inventive, nor even especially explicit. Still, as Byatt wisely withholds the full text of the novel, it’s at least possible to imagine that the rest of the book was lurid enough to provoke the trial.

In a way Babbletower can be seen as a kind of mirror to Babel Tower; as the names suggest, a near-twin, with significant differences as well as similarities. Babel Tower is certainly concerned with this kind of otherness; Frederica takes a lover, John Ottokar, who has an identical twin — amusingly, the twin is named Paul, so that the parody of 1960s counterculture finds a new level. Paul is mentally troubled in a way that John isn’t, a distinct, if troubled, personality; so Babbletower is a troubled mirror to Babel Tower, a helical contrast to its framing text. The book is described by a prosecution witness as “a text that twists round and round itself like the snake round the tree”; its author, Jude Mason, is seen as a kind of scapegoat. He and his book are made into the Other, made evil, sacrificed.

Both books are concerned with the use of language, the nature of language. Culvert, the leader of the utopians in Babbletower, entrances his followers with rhetoric, which slowly disintegrates when faced with reality (when, near the end, his wife flees and he hunts her down, she hears the noise of his hounds as a “babble”; such is the ultimate state of decrepit language). Babel Tower, on the other hand, considers language from a host of perspectives. Is language use learned or innate? What is grammar, and how is it to be taught? One of the surprising contentions we find in the novel is that language is a function of the body; Nigel Reiver is inarticulate in every other way, but his body speaks a common language with Frederica’s, and this is why their marriage can work at all. The discovery of the photos changes this; the language becomes babble; there is no ground for communication left between the two of them, and so the marriage must end. 

(And all this is anticipated by Babbletower: “language is a bodily product,” Culvert proclaims, “a product of our earliest intimacies and desires, from the babble of the infant at the breast to the impassioned discourse of the visionary who tries to speak what is yet unformulated and unshaped.” Babies and visionaries, and babble, and the speaking of the unshaped — these things become preoccupations of Babel Tower, so again the two books circle around each other, like a helix, like a DNA strand.)

Conversely, one of the charming aspects of Babel Tower is the way it analyses itself; the way its characters are aware of the resonances within the languages they use. Frederica goes wandering through her husband’s ancestral home when he’s away, and discovers a box of pornographic pictures, to which she reacts with all the shock, horror, and naïveté that 1964 has to offer. There’s an obvious parallel, given Nigel’s status as a figure out of romance, with Bluebeard (indeed, the unshaved Nigel is described as having a “mussel-blue” shadow of a beard); Frederica and the other characters soon realise as much, and say so. And if Frederica’s own reaction to the pictures seems extreme, she herself later refers to this, noting her surprise at her own visceral response. So the characters of the book are briskly aware of the resonances through which they move, almost challenging the reader to keep up with them. When Frederica sees Jude Mason, in the witness stand, staring at his wrists and imagining shackles, we’re almost pleased that we recognise the reference to Blake’s “mind-forg’d manacles” but Frederica doesn’t. Mason’s own name is unpacked for us, its weight of meanings laid out, but the unspoken irony is that the most obvious associations of the name aren’t spoken — Jude, patron of lost causes; Mason, a builder of towers.

Babel Tower’s reconstruction of the 1960s, its attitudes and prejudices, seems to me who did not live through these things to have the ring of truth to it (although I do note that Byatt has the Batman TV show debut several years before it actually did, and apparently in black-and-white; perhaps British TV ran the old serials in the early 60s). I wonder, though, whether there isn’t an omission in the description of the debate over Babbletower: there’s no hint about any international reaction to the book. This seems odd, given the reception of the novel — we are given reviews which appeared in many of the newspapers and journals of the day, including an article by Anthony Burgess (who also takes to the stand during Mason’s trial; perhaps an ironic nod to the controversy around the film version of A Clockwork Orange), and you’d think a book that got that amount of press, and was then prosecuted for obscenity, would gather interest in the rest of the world.

Still, as a novel, Babel Tower is remarkably well-designed. It manages to bring alive a host of characters and ideas. It’s packed with incident, with colour. And it builds nicely; there’s the feel of a story gathering momentum, of events of importance manifesting like a storm which slowly gathers and then breaks. It’s not metafictional in the way of Still Life, but it’s still a ferociously self-aware book. Rather than have the text try to break down the text, the characters analyse the text in which they live — while a counter-text within the main text provides contrast, the second half of the double helix, an otherness that gives the book as a whole another dimension. Babel Tower is structurally adventurous, its prose is compelling, and its thought is graceful; it’s a fit successor to The Virgin in the Garden and Still Life.

• Other posts in the ByattBlogging series may be found here.
  

ByattBlogging 9: The Djinn in the Nightingale's Eye

The subtitle of this collection of short fiction is “Five fairy stories”, which isn’t quite right. Four stories could be described as ‘fairy stories’ — they’re told in a style that’s a pastiche of traditional fairy tales or folk tales, with much of the armature of princesses and ghosts and stock motifs that make up those kinds of stories. But the last story, the title story, which takes up more than half of the book, is nothing of the sort. It’s set in the modern world, and is told in much the same voice Byatt uses for her other fiction; it deals with love and power through the relationship of a woman and a djinn, and feels like what it is — a fantasy story, something you could find in a genre magazine like Fantasy & Science Fiction. So “fairy story” here is apparently meant to be read like “magic realism”; a marketing term, an attempt to signify to an audience that a given fantasy story is meant to be read as literary fiction, and more precisely that a book of fantasy stories is aimed at the readers of literary fiction. 

I mention this mainly to explain why I don’t intend to discuss the “fairy story” aspect of the collection, especially with respect to the title piece. That tale aside, this is a fairly slim book. Two of the remaining four stories, “The Glass Coffin” and “Gode’s Story”, were originally written as part of Possession. They stand alone quite well, but to my mind don’t gain anything by being removed from their framing novel.

“The Story of the Eldest Princess” was written (Byatt notes in an afterword) for a volume of stories in which writers were asked to make fairy tales of their own lives. Byatt chooses here to play around with fairy tale motifs; as the eldest child, she makes her heroine the eldest princess of three, rather than the youngest. But she also makes her princess aware of the standard way these stories play out; the Princess expects to fail, knowing that it is always the youngest who is destined to succeed, and so abandons her given quest to seek out another story entirely. 

Much of what follows is simply an inversion of standard fairy tales, in which the Princess is helped not by traditional archeytpes, but by a scorpion, a toad, and a cockroach (who all insist on their status as animals, explicitly disavowing any hidden human part). They teach her to shun a fowler, a huntsman, and a woodcutter. The Princess, having refused the quest she has been given, believing herself doomed to fail, instead finds a witch with power to heal — again, the image of the evil hag inverted — and a kind of resolution: “We are free, as old women are free,” the witch tells her, “who don’t have to worry about princes or kingdoms, but dance alone and take an interest in the creatures.” Which sounds good at first blush, but the more you think about it the more you wonder: to what extent is that really freedom, and to what extent is it sour grapes, an excuse for being content with a life others have defined? Can a Princess really simply choose not to worry about Princes? This Princess never accomplishes what she sets out to do because she chooses not to try; it is unclear whether she finds a new goal, or remains with the witch, acting like an old woman while still young.

On the other hand, we’re given a tale told within the story, which follows her sister as she does accomplish the needed task; and then another tale of the third sister, finding her own way. So the most engaging aspects of “The Story of the Eldest Princess” are its insistence that every creature has its own story, and that the proper response to these stories is to believe them as they are being told and then to use them as a guide to one’s own action. The problem is that these things aren’t particularly new or weighty, and there’s no kind of real critical reaction to the stories being told — a surprising omission from Byatt. It’s hard, reading this story, not to feel that it’s a bit too facile, a bit too easy; if it subverts old tropes, that subversion is by now almost as hoary as the tropes themselves.

“Dragon’s Breath” is to my mind more successful. But I wonder if it can be said to be a proper fairy story. In essence, it follows three siblings in a village, which is menaced by a number of unstoppable earth-dragons that come down from the mountains, slowly grinding along in the earth breathing fire. The village is abandoned, the dragons burn and destroy and kill, and finally meet their end through no human action, reaching a cold lake into which they vanish. The survivors must return and rebuild their village.

So this is a story about surviving violence and devastation. It’s well-written, but the story’s meditation on the relationship between truth and fiction, especially fairy story, seems to me to be misguided. At the very end, stories are made out of the dragon attack, but: “Some things they made into tales, and some things they did not speak.” Bravery is celebrated, but not “the day-to-day misery of the slowly diminishing hope” that someone lost in the dragon attack might survive. “And these tales, made from those people’s wonder at their own survival, became[,] in time, charms against boredom for their children and grand-children, riddling hints of the true relations between peace and beauty and terror.” The bit about boredom refers to the joy of the villagers in simply being alive after the coming of the dragons: “Such wonder, such amazement, are the opposite, the exact opposite of boredom, and many people only know them after fear and loss.” Which is fair enough, but how is that really transmissible to children?

There seems to me to be an implication that these are lesser stories because they leave out certain aspects of the true experience, the lived emotion. But as the stories are re-told by later generations, surely these things would be added back in, if they make for better stories? Even if “slowly diminishing hope” is used as no more than a single line in a folk tale to help break up the action, it can do something for that tale.

“Dragon’s Breath” is a story about the absence of heroism — not the absence of good intentions or strength of will, but about the inability of people to do anything in a life-threatening situation. Which is fine, but I’m not sure that can be said to be a “fairy story” in any meaningful way. I don’t know whether its plot and structure can be said to fall under the definition of “fairy story”. Again, it’s a fantasy story, told in a certain style with a certain kind of vocabulary. Like “The Story of the Eldest Princess”, it celebrates a kind of quietism, a withdrawal from the broader world to focus on more local concerns and an awe of the meaning in everyday life. “Dragon’s Breath” seems to me to be much the stronger, more emotionally coherent and far less vulnerable to the question of the abdication of responsibility. 

Still, I wasn’t entirely convinced by either. After reading both of them, I had a distinct feeling that Byatt hadn’t quite worked out how to use the style she was employing to get the most power out of the stories. There seemed to be a struggle between what she wanted to say and the half-memories of traditional fairy tales; as though they had gone part of the way toward revising the fairy tale, but not all the way. If “The Glass Coffin” and “Gode’s Story” worked because Byatt was able to inhabit another voice to tell them — the voices of the characters in Possession — “The Tale of the Eldest Princess” and “Dragon’s Breath” seemed to me to be hampered by an inability to fully inhabit the voices of the narratives.

“The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye”, though, is literally another story. The lead character is Gillian Perholt, one of Byatt’s scholarly elder women, who goes to Turkey to deliver a speech at a narratological congress. Her surname may be meant to evoke French fairy-tale writer Charles Perrault; at any rate, her speech deals with the story of Patient Griselda, a medieval tale of a long-suffering women which appears in Chaucer and Boccaccio. While in Turkey — after assorted visits to museums and the Hagia Sophia allow Byatt to bring in references to ancient Mesopotamia and unaging mother goddesses and the like — a friend gives Perholt a glass bottle, made of a type of glass called Çesm-i bülbül, literally “nightingale’s eye”. The bottle turns out to have a djinn within it, and the rest of the story essentially follows Perholt as she and the djinn fall in love and find a sort of modus vivendi.

This is largely a story about love and freedom; about the different kinds of bonds lovers may put upon one another. It’s also about the passage of time — Gillian has a terrifying vision of an aged, desiccated woman during her discussion of Griselda, an image of what she fears awaits her; the story of Gilgamesh is retold, at one point, in such a way that the object of Gilgamesh’s quest becomes the restoration of youth rather than the resurrection of his best friend; Gillian’s first request to the djinn is that he make her younger. Aging and the restrictions of love are recurring themes for Byatt, but the introduction of the djinn gives her a new way to explore them. Further, in addition to the obvious fantasy element, Byatt uses references to other mythologies to create a certain kind of atmosphere within her tale, linking it to a tradition of storytelling. At the same time, of course, she’s analysing the nature of story; so Gillian speaks of the Griselda story as an example of the way in which women’s stories may be seen as being about “stopped energy”, which returns not only to the theme of aging women but also hints at the image of the djinn within the stoppered bottle.

But primarily one notices the range of other tales which Byatt brings into this story. The Arabian Nights, of course; also Coleridge (a later conference, in Toronto, is held at the Xanadu hotel), The Thief of Baghdad, Solomon and the Queen of Sheba (with whom the djinn has interacted), The Winter’s Tale, Persephone — the latter two of which point to a theme of rebirth, not unconnected to the issue of aging. “The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye” is almost overrun with other stories, complementary stories, contrasting stories. Even tennis becomes viewed as a kind of story; story is the lens through which we see and understand the world.

“The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye” is a success as a story in its own right, and a success as a fantasy story. Byatt’s prose and use of imagery is as fine and detailed as ever, but the ability to transgress the limits of realism gives her work a new force. Stopped energy is released. Fairy story or not, it shows a writer exploring new resources, new possibilities for form. It may be Byatt’s strongest short piece to date.

• Other posts in the ByattBlogging series may be found here.
  

ByattBlogging 8: The Matisse Stories

The Matisse Stories are three short pieces, each of which is based on and refers to a different painting by Matisse. “Medusa’s Ankles” uses Le Nu Rose, “Art Work” uses Le Silence habité des Maisons, and “The Chinese Lobster” uses La Porte Noire. It would seem immediately obvious that Byatt’s concern with representation in art will be a major theme in these stories. But why Matisse? This is far from the first time Byatt has used the art of painting, or indeed a specific artist, as a motif; what does Matisse give her that is different than Van Gogh?

The answer seems to come in the last story of the volume, “The Chinese Lobster”, as two professors discuss Matisse and other matters over a meal in a Chinese restaurant. One of them shares a recollection of visiting the aging painter, at that time living in dimness to avoid going blind; “black is the colour of light,” Matisse allegedly said, to which anecdote the other professor observes that Matisse also said “I believe in God when I work.” Which seems to track with the theme of the presence or absence of divinity, explored in Angels & Insects and Possession. Divinity, here, is rediscovered, associated with creativity.

But also Matisse is described as the painter of “silent bliss”, of, in his words, “luxe, calme et volupté.” This does not sound terribly dramatic, yet nevertheless seems key to the stories. Each of the three tales in this collection can be seen as depicting a tension between that calmness, that silent bliss, and acts of rage or violence which would disrupt it. Another way to put it is that each of the stories, in their own way, depicts the way in which calmness can, unexpectedly, overwhelm rage or chaos; these are stories about the often-unnoticed and sometimes-equivocal triumphs of silent bliss.

Consider the first story, “Medusa’s Ankles”. The story is about Susannah, an aging scholar, a linguist and translator, and her relationship with her hairdresser; a non-sexual relationship, a relationship in his professional capacity alone. Now, Byatt knows that Freud considered the Medusa as a symbol of male fears of castration and of women, and she knows that Sartre considered it a symbol of the fear of being watched. So: the Medusa with snakes for hair becomes the coiling locks the hairdresser works with; the fear of being watched is generally at work in the way in which women have their hair styled to present themselves to the world (especially Susannah, who must appear on TV); the fear of women appears, perhaps, from the way in which the hairdresser, Lucian, keeps himself distanced from the women in his life — not only his clients, but also his wife, whom he leaves for a younger woman, and his daughter, whose age he can hardly remember. More specifically, Lucian cuts himself, his finger, with his own scissor in front of Susannah — “He waved the bloody member before her nose”, we’re told — as a way of justifying a break from working on her hair (which ends up going long, and so setting the stage for the climax of the story).

But echoes of profundity are everywhere in the story. Lucian plans to go on holiday with his girlfriend to the Greek islands, underlining not only the Medusa image but also perhaps a reference he makes to the religion of Mithra, a temple uncovered in London — Lucian is flighty, and hops from subject to subject knowing little about any of them. For Susannah, though, her surroundings are as it were pregnant with meaning. Hair salons, for example; when she was young, the old dome-like hairdryers “had seemed like some kind of electrically shocking initiation into womanhood.” Even today, without those old dryers, “on either side of her mysteries were being enacted”, if only the craft mysteries of hairstyling. Mysteries, blood, initiation; it’s a lot of meaning to extract from a hair salon.

And Matisse? Le Nu Rose hangs in Lucian’s shop; it’s what drew Susannah. Lucian picked it out because it fit the colour scheme of the shop. Later, he remodels, changing the atmosphere, tinting the story emotionally, moving Susannah in an uncomfortable direction. But the Matisse: Lucian asks Susannah about it during a chat about his “inner life” and the Mithraic Temple (he characteristically flits from subject to subject); so the art is related to the life of the spirit. 

There’s another resonance, though. We’re told in the first paragraph of the story Susannah is drawn by the painting’s unconventional depiction of a woman: large haunches, steady stare, mature — it’s not one of the pictures of young girls usually on display in a hair salon. And aging is a major theme in the story. Susannah starts having her hair done by Lucian, after decades without visiting a stylist, because she’s aware of her own aging, her own disintegration. Lucian leaves her wife because she is aging; her ankles have gotten fat (which, incidentally, although it provides the title of the story, is something not a part of my experience; I’ve heard women fret about their ankles, but I’ve never in my life heard a man evaluate a woman’s ankles except as part of an overall assessment of a pair of legs. Other people tell me it happens. At any rate, here it is in the story, and it’s hardly a deal-breaker). The climactic moment of the story follows Susannah’s realisation that she is, as she says, a middle-aged lady with a hair-do.

And that climax, without going into detail, is an explosion of rage — gendered rage, female rage. It follows a vision of Susannah’s mother, imagined in a mirror like a Japanese demon. And this rage is, we are told, as we might expect, petrifying. Manifestations of the medusa usually are. And yet ... following the rage, there is a calmness. Silent bliss. Susannah’s husband, all unaware, puts the final perfect cap on the events of the story. Rage can be potent, perhaps can even be transformative; but it is best when it passes, when it brings about a calmness that follows.

The second story of the collection, “Art Work”, cleverly balances the two elements of its title. The lead character, Debbie Denison, is a design writer who supports her husband, a struggling artist named Robin, and their two kids. She employs a cleaning-woman, Mrs. Brown, who draws the ire of the tetchy Robin by moving things in his studio; objects he keeps for their colour, mostly, but sometimes elements of the still-life portraits he obsessively produces. Occasionally Robin lectures Mrs. Brown about the importance of these items, why they matter, the nature of colour. Debbie lets Mrs. Brown take home bits of cloth and old clothes the family can’t use anymore. And then, after Robin fails to get a gallery show, Sheba Brown (for such, to Debbie’s surprise, is Mrs. Brown’s first name) succeeds — using cast-off clothes and the colour sense Robin has perhaps helped teach her to create an art of collage and unexpected invention.

So: Robin works at art, and fails; though there’s more than a hint that the events of the story will push his art into a new direction. Sheba Brown is a worker who creates art out of what she gets from her work. Debbie tries to balance her work with her feel for art, and again the events of the story push her into a new direction.

What the experience of Sheba Brown’s art does is effectively recontextualise the old lives of the Dennisons; what was old is made new. The old relations of things change. Debbie, however belatedly, comes to understand that her cleaning lady is a person of her own, with a life and talent of her own, and a perhaps-regal first name; with a culture to go along with her exotic skin colour. Robin, who we are explicitly told deflected his resentment of his wife onto his cleaning lady, finds a new, “slightly savage” energy in his painting; perhaps his emotions have found their proper release. Perhaps not; he still roars at the new cleaning lady.

Robin Dennison is the story’s most troubled presence. He’s immature in many ways; one paragraph uses the words “boy”, “insubstantial”, “adolescent”, and “colt” to describe him. But he appreciates Matisse, and his courting of Debbi was marked by long discussions of how “the pure sensuousness of Luxe, calme et volupté could be a religious experience of the nature of things.” It is his impromptu lecture on colour which helps Sheba Brown create her own art; sadly, he himself is disproportionately given to “seeing red”. 

The colour discussion seems to echo the action of Matisse’s Le Silence habité des Maisons, which is the painting that inspired the story. It’s described in detail at the beginning of the story; ironically, it is a reproduction that is described, a black-and-white copy. From there, the story moves to describe the “inhabited silence” of the Dennison home — a silence inhabited but, at that moment, voiceless. Byatt quotes a commentator on the painting as claiming that “At last Matisse is wholly at ease with the fierce impulse”, as Robin is not; the story is, in a way, a story about his fierce impulse impeding his ability to find luxe, calme et volupté.

Which phrase comes up a lot in the next tale. “The Chinese Lobster” is in many ways a simple story. Dr. Gerda Himmelblau, director of a Women’s Studies program, meets with her colleague Peregrine Diss over a sexual harassment complaint filed against him by a student working on her art history thesis. The thesis, as it turns out, takes the form of reproductions of Matisse’s paintings smeared with bodily waste and garbage. This outraged Diss to the extent that he said and did certain things which he admits were excessive, though not of the order that the student alleges. Himmelblau immediately believes him, and the two academics go on to find deeper and deeper levels of common experience.

The conversation between Himmelblau and Diss is essentially the entire story; this is a story about the meeting of their minds. It feels curiously slight, though, as there hardly seems to be much of an obstacle to their communication. They deal with each other easily from the start, and find successively more profound levels on which to communicate as the story goes; that’s nice, but not compelling. The disturbed student, Peggi Nollett, is clearly a much more difficult person to reach and probably to deal with; but there doesn’t seem to be much of an attempt, on the part of either professor or of the author, to deal with her as an individual. She’s there just to give the scholars a reason to talk to each other.

“She can’t see, can’t you see?” asks Diss, somewhat repetitively, summing up Nollett’s failure as an artist. For Byatt, that inability to see the world as it is makes for false art; Nollett’s work is the equivalent of putting a moustache on the Mona Lisa. Her obsession with victim-consciousness produces facile, unconvincing travesties of art. All this may be very accurate, but it seems a very simple idea for a character, and it makes for a very facile story — one wishes, almost, that Nollett had been allowed by her creator to actually show some potential, demonstrate some artistic power.

Frankly, it’s very easy for the reader to feel sympathy for Nollett as the story unfolds. Himmelblau presents Diss with Nollett’s account of events, which include statements that Diss made sexual advances toward her; Diss denies the account; Himmelblau believes him. She then goes on to discuss how troubled a person Nollett is, as demonstrated by her anorexia and two failed suicide attempts. Let me repeat that: the director of a Women’s Studies program discusses a student’s mental health issues and suicide attempts with the man that student has accused of sexual harassment. I cannot think of a single way that action could be justified. But neither can I find a hint in the story that Himmelblau’s action should be viewed ironically, or that she’s been taken in by Diss.

The two of them discuss Nollett at arm’s length, as a specimen. Her issues become the background for the scholars to have a conversation about “luxe, calme et volutpé”, and find their common ground. Byatt’s perspective on Nollett does not seem to extend to asking why “luxe, calme et volupté” lacks the power for Nollet that it does for Diss; Byatt herself seems to not look at Nollett as she is, does not represent the horror of Nollett’s life — only shows us other people reacting to the horror, and noting how far away she is from Matisse’s ideals. To extol “luxe, calme et volupté” without any meaningful confrontation with that horror, or at least a convincing explanation of why that confrontation is impossible, undermines the whole story. Nollett’s defacing of Matisse’s work is taken by the scholars to suggest that she is, at some level, aware of her inability to reach “luxe, calme et volupté”; does this not then imply that the action of the story should be taking place in and around Nollett’s head? And by contrast, if this ideal is one which is completely inaccessible to Nollett, what then is the value of the ideal?

Diss, with his almost wistful recollection of Matisse, his evocation of La Porte Noire (the painting which inspired the story), of Matisse’s ability to portray the pleasure in an old armchair, is a convincing character. So is Himmelblau. But there’s a disconnection between them and the issues they deal with. They’re uninvolved. Near the end of the story they consider the titular lobster, on display with some crabs in the restaurant where they’re eating; the animals are slowly drowning in air, and their pain of the animals is presumably meant to echo Nollett’s, who is thus identified lobster, its exoskeleton an image of the anoraks and baggy clothes Nollett wears to keep out the world and hide her anorexia. The academics observe the creatures suffering, and comment on them, but do nothing. They maintain their comfortable distance. They do not complain to the management. They do not even swear never to patronise the restaurant again. They simply watch, and do not care. 

Byatt seems to be trying to create a sense of “luxe, calme et volupté” as a means of consolation — both Himmelblau and Diss have suffered their own pains, and Diss at least views himself as past his prime, “doddering” and a failure. But being reduced in power to help others does not mean being powerless. Their inaction in the face of pain seems to me to subvert the virtue of “luxe, calme et volupté”. If this were intentional, it would be a fine stroke, complicating the easy acceptance of Matisse’s phrase. But I can’t find any indication in the text that this is what Byatt meant. Evidently we are meant to conclude that one of the benefits of “luxe, calme et volupté” is that it allows us to be untroubled by the pain around us; allows us to be untouched by others. 

To me, in this story, Byatt fails to look at the world as it is. It’s a failure which calls into question much of the collection; if this is the ideal, where is the virtue in these stories? If this is "Luxe, calme et volupté", what of Robin Dennison's sense of it as "a religious experience of the nature of things"? Byatt’s prose is as strong and allusive as ever. Her characters are as sharp. But her moral sense, here, demonstrates a peculiar and unaccustomed blind spot.

• Other posts in the ByattBlogging series may be found here.
  

ByattBlogging Bonus: Degrees of Freedom

A.S. Byatt wrote Degrees of Freedom, a book of criticism dealing with the novels of Iris Murdoch, in 1965. I have an edition from 1994, which adds a number of articles Byatt wrote about Murdoch’s work during the intervening years, and tops it off with a short essay reviewing Byatt’s own then-recently-published Angels & Insects. This piece, “The Religion of Fiction”, written by Michael Levenson, considers Byatt’s work in relation to Murdoch’s; it talks about some of the points of congruity between the writers, describes some ways in which Byatt is indebted to Murdoch, and generally suggests ways of looking at Byatt’s fiction in light of Iris Murdoch’s accomplishment. So the book as a whole seemed worth considering, if only briefly, as I try to find my way through Byatt’s works. Since the edition I read concludes with the review of Angels & Insects, I’ve chosen to put these comments after my post on that book.

The Levenson essay first. It begins by considering whether Byatt should be considered postmodern, a difficult word in many respects. On the one hand, she shares a postmodern tendency toward pastiche, and a habit of playing games with narrative. On the other, Levenson argues, “you miss a good deal of what is most interesting in Byatt, and what is most significant in the movement of which she is a part, if you ignore the way her postmodernity finds its ground in something else, something older, namely an earnest attempt to get back before the moderns and revive a Victorian project that has never been allowed to come to completion. What you have in Byatt is an odd-sounding but perfectly intelligible creature, the postmodern Victorian. She knows where we live and when; she knows her Joyce and Woolf and Beckett; but she is undeterred in the belief that the road into the twenty-first century winds exactly through the middle of the nineteenth.”

This, I think, is a good description of the nature of Byatt’s work. I should note that I don’t think writing of this nature is as unusual as Levenson apparently does. It seems to me that while modernism in many ways rebelled against or subverted traditional literary forms, much of what is called postmodernism is actually a late form of modernism which took that rebellion further. So, say, Eliot’s free verse and use of myth in a parodic way in The Waste Land challenged traditional ideas of what poetry was (for me, the grail motif in The Waste Land specifically looks back to and revises The Idylls of the King for a new century); but something like Nabokov’s Pale Fire goes further, challenging the idea of interpretation of a work of art, and extending parody into new forms — the book parodies its own central text, the poem to which much of the novel is an extended commentary. So if modernism tried to bring out meaning through new and mroe fragmented forms, this sort of postmodernism uses that fragmentation to call the idea of meaning into question.

I’d argue, though, that the sort of postmodernism Byatt represents is a truer postmodernism: it takes up the structural ideas of the moderns and late moderns, and uses them in a way which is both knowing and also a deliberate attempt to connect with generations before modernism. It is, literally, what happens after modernism. So for true postmodernists — I’d include someone like Peter Ackroyd in this category, as well as Iain Sinclair — the modernist revolution is simply another phase in the ongoing development of literary traditions. It seems to me that one way to distinguish between ‘true’ and ‘false’ postmodernism is in the use of pastiche as opposed to parody; pastiche, as in Byatt’s work, uses the voices of previous times or traditions for contemporary purposes, while parody tends to be more destructive in nature. So Levenson’s “postmodern Victorian” uses the techniques developed over the course of the twentieth century as a way of revivifying the nineteenth.

Now, what about Iris Murdoch? “Murdoch,” says Levenson, “has been [Byatt’s] literary mother.” He’s referring to Byatt’s championing of an essay by Murdoch, “Against Dryness”. For Levenson, it’s been a constant throughout Byatt’s career, and it’s tough to argue with him; images of dryness — and its reverse, water — are constant in Byatt’s work. Degrees of Freedom begins with an examination of “Against Dryness”, which Byatt describes as essentially a critique of modernist, or symbolist, ideas; dryness has to do with structure in art, with form, at the expense of the living, of “the accidental, the idiosyncratic happenings of life, or [Shakespeare’s] power to arouse in the audience an immediate emotional attachment to Falstaff.” Dryness, for Murdoch and Byatt, also has to do with the small and the crystalline, and is opposed to the nineteenth-century novelistic conception of character. 

Further, Murdoch (as Byatt presents her) suggests the main twentieth-century alternative to dryness is a sprawling, shapeless, “journalistic” novel. Both the journalistic novel and the “dry” novel fail to grapple with human character; the dry novel in particular, says Byatt, tends to present main characters who are self-contained, not depicted as part of a society. Dryness is equated with a facile sincerity which is self-centred, as opposed to truth, which is other-centred. The title of Byatt’s book on Murdoch comes from “Against Dryness”; for Byatt, the phrase seems to suggest the freedom inherent in the idea of the naturalistic or novelistic character, as balanced against the society in which that character is a part and the values which form both society and character — “a rich and complicated world,” as she quotes Murdoch, “from which as a moral being he has much to learn.”

I’ve never read Murdoch’s novels (though Degrees of Freedom intrigues me enough to want to start), but it certainly seems to me that this is a very good description of the values underlying Byatt’s own writing. Her characters are not only well-rounded, but, crucially, clearly function as part of a society — they act as people in a given time and a given place, and in many cases must struggle to define their own freedom of action or of thought against the conscious or unconscious barriers of the world around them. Thus Frederica Potter. At the same time, they are capable of surprising things, or of having surprising things happen to them; thus Stephanie Potter.

Levenson suggests (and Byatt in her introduction to this book implicitly endorses his view) that this idea to character should be seen as a very nineteenth-century approach. There seems to be a link here: Victorian character, Victorian settings in Angels & Insects and Possession. But at the same time, the setting is in a sense incidental; the aim is to show an individual in relation to society. So the Potter books, set in the nineteen-fifties and -sixties, also show the societies of their times and individuals acting in relation to them. This seems to me to justify the use of these past settings, if they needed justification — by seeing individuals set against the confines of their own societies, we gain an insight into our own relationship to the world around us. The degrees of freedom we have, or lack, in our own life and thought.

Against the complexity of character and society, against the transcendent Good which Murdoch (says Byatt) believes to exist and to be comprehensible in art, Murdoch places egoism and theories which claim to explain the world. Freudian theory, for example, or Marxism. Again, this seems relevant to Byatt’s work, especially Possession, which explicitly questions the value of ideology in interpreting the world; but then much of Byatt’s fiction may be said to be warning us about allowing theory to be our guide to reality, about difficulties of perception, of the slipperiness of analogy. More: when Byatt discusses Murdoch on the question of representing the world in language, or on the way we now think about language, it’s impossible not to recall Byatt’s use of painting (in Still Life, for example, or the short story “Precipice-encurled”) as a way to discuss problems of representation in her own work.

So when Byatt writes about Murdoch’s first novel, Under the Net, it’s interesting to find an examination of an image which seems to me to be important for this theme and for Byatt’s work in general. That is the image of the net; which also turns up as a mesh, or perhaps as needlework. It’s a symbol from Wittgenstein; the net is meant to be a simplified image of reality, a unification of the world which must leave out fine details. The net here is roughly analogous to a low-resolution TV or computer monitor. You get a picture, but not an entirely true picture. Any description of the world is a kind of net, which must leave out some level of detail. But, conversely, the net itself can be shaped into art; thus, perhaps, the embroidery which turns up in much of Byatt’s later fiction. This shaped net, this distortion of the world, is the crystalline consolation of form against which Murdoch wrote; but it is also, perhaps, an element which should be seen as being in creative tension against the shapeless of the journalistic novel.

One can find incidental observations in Degrees of Freedom on other symbols which have turned up in Byatt’s own writing. For example, speaking of Murdoch’s use of the Medusa, Byatt refers to the Freudian idea that it represents the male fear of castration and the female genitals, while Sartre saw it as simply the fear of being watched; either of these might suggest something of the way she used the image of the Medusa head in Possession. Byatt notes that Murdoch’s choice to name a character Jesse may refer to the Biblical Tree of Jesse; it’s hard not to remember that Byatt used two characters named Jesse (historical people, it has to be said) in her novella “The Conjugal Angel”.

Similarly, some of the asides in the book are oddly striking not for what they say about Murdoch but for how they might describe Byatt’s fiction. In particular, Byatt quotes Murdoch as stating that “all novels are necessarily comic” (also that “Art is adventure stories”, which seems suggestive in light of Possession); it’s intriguing to consider this dictate in light of Byatt’s own work. Her writing has rarely seemed to me to be laugh-out-loud funny, but she certainly has an eye for the absurd. Should Byatt be considered a comic novelist? Can comedy be considered as a generosity of spirit and invention, a straight-faced exuberant creation? A matter of warmth? It’s a question of definition; but also, to some extent, of perspectives.

In her introduction to this book, Byatt asks that it be seen “not as a book about my writing, but as a writer’s book about writing, a book by a writer reading.” So it is unwise to try to read too much into a quotation here, an aside there. Still, the book displays something of the nature of Byatt’s thought, in a discursive as opposed to narrative form. We can see what her concerns are. By seeing what she thinks, we can perhaps intuit something about how she thinks. Which then can be used, tentatively, to inform a reading of her fiction.

• Other posts in the ByattBlogging series may be found here.
  

ByattBlogging 7: Angels and Insects

This book is made up of two novellas, loosely connected by plot and more tightly connected by theme. In the first story, “Morpho Eugenia”, an impoverished explorer of the Amazon takes a position with an aristocratic family at an English country house, helping to teach the children and to catalogue the vast accumulation of materials collected by the head of the household; only to fall in love, across class lines, with the eldest daughter of his master. The second story, “The Conjugal Angel”, is the tale of a spiritualist group, of two seances they conduct, and of the experiences the members of the group have — not only with the other world, but with each other. 

Both stories deal with the Victorian rage for knowledge, and the countervailing fear of a godless universe. In some ways, the anguish the characters feel at the possibility of a world without a guiding Divine intelligence recalls Sartre and the existentialists, who refused to believe in God even if, for them, atheism inspired despair; it’s as though Byatt is urging us to look again at this problem, to really consider the nature of the world around us. The Victorians feared a world without meaning, a world driven by brute instinct, bereft of the soul. Thus angels and insects: on the one hand agents of the deity above human understanding, on the other crawling things we consider far below us. But among the insects are butterflies, beautiful winged things that traditionally symbolise the soul. And there are differing schools of thought regarding the nature of angels; according to myth, after all, some of the angels fell.

In “Morpho Eugenia”, William Adamson, the explorer, has long dialogues with wealthy Harald Alabaster, a baronet and a Reverend; Alabaster desperately wants to believe in God, and is trying to write a theological tract answering the claims made in Darwin’s recently-published Origin of Species. If Harald’s first name glances at a possible state as a herald of good news, his surname definitely implies something lifeless, perhaps something of the whited sepulchre — a characteristic common to his whole family. His wife, Gertrude, is a fat, often-motionless, presence at the centre of the household, explicitly compared to the queen of some insect hive. Eugenia, their daughter, with whom William falls in love (and whose name means “well-born”, as well as glancing at the scientific name of an Amazonian butterfly which gives the story its title), is viewed by William as a pure and indeed almost angelic presence; she hardly seems to come alive as a character, but then, as we see her mainly through William’s eyes, this is less of a flaw in the story’s construction than it sounds. Her half-brother Edgar is much more lively, resentful of William for having ambitions above his station (he insults William by telling him he has “bad blood”) — and, we eventually learn, resentful for other reasons as well.

Ironically, given Harald’s interest in angels, the Alabasters are something of a serpentine family. Harald compares himself to the old dragon in Beowulf. Edgar, in a rage at William, is compared to an “angry dragon”. After sex on their wedding night, Eugenia rolls away from William “quick as a lizard on a hot stone”. William himself once had a drug-inspired nightmare in the Amazon of being “lost in a forest surrounded by serpents”. William observes that the connection of women and snake is made even in the beliefs of the people in the “virgin forest” of the Amazon; so all these images must refer back to the oldest of dragons, even as the novella ultimately has the breaking of one of humanity’s oldest taboos at its heart.

Byatt, though, extends her portrayal of the household beyond the aristocratic family. The governess, Matty Crompton, slowly comes more alive, more of a presence, as the story goes on. The rest of the army of servants which kept a Victorian manor going are less individualised, but are strong symbolic presences in the book. Harald is at one point compared to a deist God, who set the world of the house in motion but himself makes little or no intervention within it. More frequently, though, the house is depicted as an anthill or bee-hive, almost a creature in itself. Towards the end of the book, a message William receives which triggers off the climax of the story is ascribed, apparently seriously, to the will of the house rather than to any individual character. Just as ants have different positions in their social structure, so do humans; just as ants take other ants as slaves, so do humans — Byatt makes a point of noting how the Alabasters’ fortune derives indirectly from the slave trade. If the Alabasters’ servants overall are mostly undifferentiated, one can plausibly say that this is a function of William’s perspective; one of the engaging paradoxes of the man is the way in which his ability to perceive the society around him is hampered, not only by his inveterate habit of contrasting it with Amazonian societies he once knew, but also by his inability to see, to really observe, the relations around him. (A characteristic, incidentally, which prefigures the twist at the end of the story.)

So this is a socially-aware story; but it’s also a story about change, about transfiguration. Any era can be said to be a time between times, between whatever came before and in the process of changing into whatever comes next, and that of course is a characteristic of the Victorian period as well as any other. But in this story Byatt closely examines the human ability to change — or to fail to change, or to fail to allow others to change — at an individual level. Class is a factor, of course. And religious beliefs play into this theme: will humans at death become angelic spirits, or food for bugs? 

But clearly gender politics are key to this theme. The sexual dimorphism of insect life is compared with human (or, at least, Victorian) gender roles. Women are locked into certain lives or states; so marriage, while a transformative experience, also helps to enforce the predetermined course of female life — not wholly unlike insect species where sex and social function is determined before birth. If you are aware of how society limits you, can you overcome its dictates? Or can you just escape from it? In this context, it is perhaps significant that William is an explorer of the Amazon, somewhat like Simon in The Game; but the resonances of the name of the jungle is more pointed here, helping to point to the story’s fierce insistence on freedom, and on the human ability to change. To evolve: the fear of Darwin’s godless universe is also the fear of a changing world, a world that will develop away from traditional hierarchies.

Of course in a story about transfiguration the butterfly is a key symbol. The butterfly’s metamorphosis, glanced at in the title, becomes the metamorphosis of a psyche — of Psyche herself, seeking Cupid. Perhaps the soul (the meaning of the name Psyche) doesn’t need contact with the divine if it has the ability to transform itself like an insect, and become in that way something new. Monarch butterflies, we are told at the end of the story, migrate vast distances, and may be blown far away from their hoped-for destination, but still are alive and bright.

Like Possession, this story is stuffed full of other texts: Harald’s theological work (at or near the centre of the novella), in which the cruelty of the natural world is answered by the faith presented in Tennyson’s In Memoriam; a book on English insects composed by William, Matty, and the Alabaster children (the product, therefore, of collaboration between genders and generations); a fable written by Matty for William, warning him of the true nature of events in the Alabaster household (based around the scientific names of insects and their mythic resonances, it’s a mash-up of the Bible, the Odyssey, the myth of Persephone, the myth of Psyche, and The Golden Ass, told in a style not unlike George MacDonald's). This seems natural, as the characters most alive in the book are those who most naturally live in language, as readers or writers or both. Most of them, as well, are concerned, as Byatt is concerned, with the representation of the world in prose, of the difficulty of perception and interpretation. “Analogy,” says William, “is a slippery tool.”

The story at one point contrasts “the fairy story with its bridal triumph” and “the novel, with its hard-won moral vision, and the brief glimpse of death and due succession”. In the end, it can be seen to have elements of both, or to contain both within itself. It’s not unlike the Amazon, which William can describe as a “Paradise on Earth” in one sentence, and as an “Inferno” in the next. This is less transformation, perhaps, than the ability to harmoniously reconcile two states, like the human condition; now aspiring to angel, now sinking to insect. “As long as you are alive,” we’re told at the end, “everything is surprising, rightly seen.”

A character who comes in at the very end of “Morpho Eugenia” provides the most obvious link to “The Conjugal Angel”, which follows the wife of said character some years on. Lilias Papagay is part of a group of spiritualists who, as spiritualists do, conduct seances. And who sometimes see spirits and ghosts as a result; Mrs. Papagay’s friend, Sophy Sheekhy, is particularly gifted in this field. Other members of the circle are Mister Hawke, a Swedenborgian eager to explain the Swedish mystic’s views on angels and conjugal love, and Mrs. Hearnshaw, a matron who has buried five young daughters in a row. (Presumably, the names of the latter two indicate that the spiritualists are not to be taken as lunatics — they can tell a Hawke from a Hearnshaw.)

But most notable of the spiritualists are Captain and Mrs. Jesse — the latter of whom is the sister of Alfred Tennyson, Poet Laureate. Emily Jesse loved Alfred’s friend Arthur Hallam, years ago when they all were young; but Hallam died, and Emily later married Jesse, prompting a cordial dislike from the members of Hallam’s family as well as some members of her own. Alfred later wrote In Memoriam, one of the greatest of all English elegies and the poem which saved Harald Alabaster’s faith, in Arthur’s memory.

The dominant plot thread in this story is the life of the Jesses. Emily loved Arthur Hallam, or so she believed when she was young. What, then, of her love for her husband? How can the two men, and her feelings for them, be compared? The story gives us this Victorian question — many thought Emily would have been better to have lived as a sort of nun devoted to Hallam’s memory — as it gives us many other attitudes, on gender and religion and other issues. It feels oddly distant; Byatt makes little attempt to justify Victorian thought in contemporary terms. We instead have characters (some of them based on real people) for whom these beliefs are the soil out of which they have sprung; for whom, in other words, it’s difficult to conceive of alternatives, to articulate even the possibility of rejecting them.

We also have angels. Tons of them, oddly involved in mortal love. Hawke expounds Swedenborg’s ideas of angels and love: souls that find each other on earth, that find their true love and unite, ascend as angels. There is mention of the story of the Watcher angels, who came to feel carnal desire for mortal women; hence, it is suggested, the reason women wear hats, so that the angels do not lust after their hair. Tennyson, in a chapter in which the poet recalls Arthur Hallam and wrestles with his own sexuality, feels an angel walking on his grave. He also imagines that a poem might be perceived as an angel, in the same way Swedenborg in his visions saw psychological states as physical objects. Underlying all this the recurring question in this book: are human beings angelic in nature, or gross matter?

In a sense, the story takes the form of an extended meditation on In Memoriam. Tennyson’s biography, attitudes, and sexual nature are reconstructed and examined; it feels as if the whole of the poem is quoted at some part of the story, analysed critically, given further meanings. The verse reaches into the cores of the characters, even those not directly related to the poet, and moves them; it drives them, it teaches them about beauty, it inspires their faith. The story is about belief; it is also about poetry. And about love: the crucial choice which is the climax of the book unites these things, making a statement about the nature of love, an affirmation of this world in the face of intimations of the next.

Lilias Papagay is the frame through which we see this choice, and much of the story, unfold. She and Sophy begin and end the story together, before the first seance and after the last. Lilias, who is a writer, who imagines scenes — creating characters in her head based on the people around her — is given a folkloric ending, straight out of Homer (cleverly, and subtly, connected to a motif in Matty's fairy tale for William in "Morpho Eugenia"). It is a final unexpected conjunction, a unity of dissimilar principles. It’s a fine touch on which to end the book.

Both “Morpho Eugenia” and “The Conjugal Angel” have that sense of dissimilarities united; hence Angels and Insects as a unified work, two dissimilar novellas in one. The plots of the two stories of this book are strong, and the characters convincing (though one wonders about the lack of a relationship between William Adamson and his children), with the result that the metaphysics rise naturally out of circumstances. Both stories work as individual pieces, both gain from the juxtaposition. One character, unexpectedly, ties the two together; so does the setting, the culture in which they take place. And, as well, the questions with which the stories wrestle, like Jacob; questions and themes which can never be fully resolved, and hence are as relevant in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries as they were in the nineteenth. 

The book suggests, I think, that in a sense we belong equally to the world of angels and to the world of insects; we see both these things as reflections of ourselves, and so in the stories we make about them we unify their tensions. Metaphysics and fantasy — story-telling, the shaping of tales, the perception of angels — are as natural as death, sex, and life. To me, this self-conscious concern with fiction is a constant in Byatt’s writing; this book is as fine an example as any.

• Other posts in the ByattBlogging series may be found here.
  

ByattBlogging 6: Possession

Fittingly, the novel called Possession begins with a theft. Young scholar Roland Michell requests a copy of a book formerly owned by Victorian poet Randolph Henry Ash, from the safe of the London Library (where it sat between two unrelated books to do with love and sex); when the volume arrives, it’s filled with notes and slips of papers filed between its leaves, texts inserted within the book’s own text. It is, in fact, a model of the structure of Possession. The book turns out to hold two letters hinting at a previously-unsuspected love affair; Roland steals the letter, and sets about trying to uncover the mystery of Ash’s unknown life. 

He’s soon led to another Victorian poet, Christabel LaMotte, and to contemporary scholar Maud Bailey, a feminist and a descendant of Christabel’s neice. The relationship between Roland and Maud unfolds in parallel with the relationship they uncover between Ash and LaMotte. Just as the poets had to try to find a way to love each other in a society where that was apparently impossible — Ash being a married man — Roland and Maud must uncover the truth about their subjects while keeping their quest secret from the world of jealous scholars around them.

This is a multi-voiced novel; the story of Roland and Maud unfolds in the third person, but is frequently interrupted by the parallel narrative of Ash and LaMotte. Their letters, poems, and diaries, or journals kept by others in which the poets figure, collectively tell a tale which aligns with and occasionally contrasts against the present-day story. This sounds simple, but Byatt is consistently clever in the way she executes this structure. And in the way she allows the two strands to make something new, something different, out of their interplay; the way LaMotte’s fables hint at fantasy, the way the mysterious letters and old houses and potent storms Roland and Maud discover draw the story beyond a parody of a romance novel into something deeper, into whatever it is that romances strive to capture.

There’s something mythic in the book. You can see it in its structure, in the way Roland’s theft of the letters blossoms into a quest. And not a quest for him alone; this is the late twentieth century, and the nominal hero is accompanied by his lady fair every step of the way. This is their joint quest, a conscious reworking of previous stories, a revision of the past. They walk in the footsteps of poets before them; the poets lead them to places they cannot expect (to an act of creation, to a hidden legacy), but they escape the traditions which bound the men and the women of previous times. They make a new myth of their own.

Consider the mythic resonance of names. The characters of Possession are some of the most intensely-named characters you’ll ever meet. Roland Michell recalls, in his first name, Charlemagne’s paladin and Browning’s character, as well as, in his surname, the war-leader of archangels and the French historian Jules Michelet (there’s also an offhand reference to a “Sir Rowland Michaels” who was one of Ash’s pallbearers; the stories interpenetrate). Maud Bailey calls to mind thoughts of Tennyson’s Maud, and of Yeats’s Maud Gonne (while her former lover, Fergus Wolff, calls up thoughts of Yeats’ Irish heroes, and, inevitably, Fenris Wolf who will kill the King of Gods at the end of time); ‘Bailey’ draws us to thoughts of motte-and-bailey castles, which draws us to Christabel LaMotte, whose given name comes from Coleridge. Ash (almost certainly, alas, unrelated to similarly-fictive Victorian poet William Ashbless) wrote poems based on Norse myth, including Ask to Embla, describing the Norse Gods creating man, the male, from an ash tree, which the characters all note is a direct reference to the poet’s own name. The arrogant American scholar Mortimer Cropper has something of the ghoul about him, taking treasures of British poets to his American museum; hence his name, a reference to death and dead seas (morte mer; seas and water are key symbols in the book), and a synonym of the Reaper, appropriate for one associated with the figure of the Ankou. James Blackadder, Roland’s boss and a pre-eminent Ash scholar, works in a basement in the British Museum, like the serpent Satan cast down from heaven, but more like the dragon Nidhogg which lies in the Norse Hel and gnaws at the root of the world-tree. 

How far does this go? Seeking LaMotte’s letters, Maud takes Roland to meet relatives who might hold a clue to their whereabouts, members of the squirearchy with a vast crumbling house (in which the scholars will ultimately read long-lost texts while winter howls outside). These relatives are Sir George Bailey, a proud Englishman who resents Cropper taking his country’s heritage away, and who therefore is not only named for England’s patron saint, but is at one point described as a goblin protecting the local woods; and George’s wife, the wheelchair-bound Joan, possibly named for the fabled Pope, but also in her chair a kind of Fisher Queen — Roland’s first act on meeting her is to save her life, in a low-key way, and this good deed opens the door of a quasi-literal castle for him. So the pattern of romance, of chivalry and adventure, turns up in the nominally-disenchanted modern world.

Fiction and fact become related in a host of ways. The poets cast each other and themselves in their poetry, as Ash does with his creation-poem. The scholar-critics recapitulate in their own actions the lives and writings of their poet-forebears, sometimes revising them in the process. Thus: LaMotte wrote a long poem on the subject of Melusine, a fairy woman who, when her mortal husband spied upon her in her bath through a keyhole, turned out to have the nether quarters of a snake; Roland looks through a bathroom keyhole in a house where he and Maud are staying, trying to determine if Maud is within — she is, and opens the door, to his surprise. Or: LaMotte, at one point, makes a voyage to Brittany (historically associated with troubadours and Arthurian romance) for secret reasons, a liminal place, a land half-bound-up in fairy tales; so Roland and Maud, pursuing their own quest, go to Brittany seeking traces of her, and are changed as a result. The actions of the past, of two lovers struggling to connect, are revised for a new era, in large ways and small.

It has to be noted that the book is ferociously intelligent in terms of its awareness of scholarship and of gender issues; by that I mean both that Byatt is able to bring out the real implications of her fictive poets’ texts, and also that she’s able to do so while using and parodying feminist, Lacanian, and post-modern theorising. It fits with much of her previous work, which can be seen as being incidentally an intellectual history of twentieth-century England. Here, the vogue for post-structuralism is both considered and rejected. So Roland rather uncomfortably reads a paper by one of Maud’s colleagues which makes extravagant claims for the way in which LaMotte used water as a symbol of female sexuality; but water is consistently linked with female sexuality in Possession. It’s a clever trick — the perhaps-flawed perception becomes the reality, and again as in much of Byatt’s previous work, this book actively considers the ways we perceive the world, and the way our theories about the world help construct the world we end up inhabiting. 

And the novel ultimately comes out against theory. Thus Freudian thought, used cunningly throughout the book, is ultimately dismissed as a myth, a misreading common to our times, an inaccurate apprehension of the world. And, at one significant point, Roland, inspired into poetry (while going into his former landlady’s garden, an odd reversal of Frederica in The Virgin in the Garden), begins to write down a list of concrete nouns, things which cannot be abstracted; we are told that this is the beginning of true poetry, the creative act as escape from criticism.

Unsurprisingly, given its density of theme and allusion, the novel lends itself to close reading. Consider this paragraph, isolated in a section of its own, on page 425, about Roland leaving Brittany: “During his stay he had become addicted to a pale, chilled, slightly sweet pudding called Îles Flottantes, which consisted of a white island of foam floating in a creamy yellow pool of vanilla custard, haunted by the ghost, no more, of sweetness. As he and Maud packed hurriedly, and turned the car toward the Channel, he thought how much he would regret this, how the taste would fade and diminish in his memory.” Why does it get to be marked off on its own? It’s tempting, certainly, to see it as Byatt playing with Proust, revising his famous passage about madeleines; here this is an anticipation of memory to come, and the fading of memory, instead of memory recalled vividly. But it’s also a passage about ghosts — the ghost of sweetness in this case. So ghosts, and the past; these are themes of the book (describing the complexity of the reference to ghosts would require much unpacking of plot; enough to say that LaMotte’s journey to Brittany was surrounded by ghost story, and that Ash wrote a bitter poem about a seance, and that these two things are not unconnected). Moreover, the name Îles Flottantes calls to mind something out of a fable; it also perhaps inverts the image of the drowned city of Is, a Breton legend turned by LaMotte into a poem. This is a fair amount to pack into two sentences about custard.

What I hope to imply with this catalogue of allusions is the sheer richness of the book. In terms of structure, in terms of style, in its character development, in its range of forms, it’s incredibly fertile, endlessly clever. It forces you to slow down, to consider the resonances that pile on top of each other. Consider the many meanings of the title, all of which get explored in the book: possession of a material artifact, possession by the dead (metaphorically or literally), emotional self-possession, possession of a writer by the creative impulse, possession of a lover (metaphorically or carnally).

So what does it all add up to? With all this creative fecundity, what’s the book actually about? To me, Possession is about the search for truth, in art and history and love, and how it is possible and how it is impossible, all at the same time. You have something, and you don’t have it; this is the paradox I find at the heart of the book. Texts can be understood, and not understood, perhaps least of all by their authors; we can find some biographical meaning for a poem, but only if we already know the key (and the autobiographies we compose in our own heads, filled with our own insecurities and arrogances? We cannot know how much we give ourselves away, there). But if we make a real effort with another person, and that other makes a matching effort, then perhaps there can be real understanding, real possession; Roland and Maud share books, exchanging critical philosophies, ideologies, outlooks. Yet, of course, they already share a background, an approach to the world, a critical language. And, as an epilogue makes clear, there are always things we do not know.

Perhaps the point is that this is for the best. The book makes play with riddles (Maud solves a riddle hidden in a poem to find some of the letters, for example), and with the idea of a lover seeing his beloved lady as a riddle to be solved. So LaMotte writes a simple riddle early in her correspondence to Ash; recalling one of Bilbo’s riddles in The Hobbit, the answer (immediately revealed here) is ‘an egg’, an inherently feminine image. The idea, I think, is that a riddle can be solved, but a person cannot. Not finally and absolutely. We cannot, thankfully, possess another in that way. We may not even be able to possess a work of literature, not even if we memorise it; always, there are more connections, more symbols, more meanings to it for us to find. Such, in any case, is the nature of Possession.

• Other posts in the ByattBlogging series may be found here.
  

ByattBlogging 5: Sugar and Other Stories

The eleven tales in this collection of short fiction aren’t all ghost stories, though some are, but they all share a sense of desolation, of loss; there’s something haunting about them. Which is to say that they’re effective as short stories, working in a distinctively different fashion than the novel, which can be as discursive and encyclopaedic as it likes. Without being parables, these are stories which work by implication. 

The strongest of these stories show, in slightly different ways than her long fiction, some of Byatt’s key strengths — her ability to depict characters thinking, and thinking about thinking, and feeling about thinking; also, her ability to find meaning in unexpected images, and then meaningful connections between those images. On the other hand, the weakest of the tales, I think, have a sense of borrowed form; of stories written in the shape of other stories. In the form of the stereotypical literary short story, for example, building to a character’s moment of epiphany which resolves in some way the tensions of the story.

The first story, “Racine and Tablecloths”, follows familiar ground for Byatt; it follows a young girl, Emily, struggling to live the life of the mind and escape a repressive school atmosphere for the intellectual life of an elite university. Gender politics are clearly an issue, but at the same time, the antagonist of the story — named as such in the first sentence — is Emily’s teacher, Martha. Emily also has problems interacting with her less-gifted female schoolmates, with whom she signally fails to connect (Emily joins the class as the twenty-ninth girl in the group, when all the other students are already paired off as friends; she is literally the odd girl out). That said, the norms of a patriarchal society clearly underlie the way this nominally female group functions, and even underlies Emily’s own thinking; at one point, we’re told that Emily invents an imaginary ideal Reader for her essays, a male figure modelled on the male Gods she reads of and is taught to believe in.

Emily reads Racine at school, and his Phèdre becomes one of the symbolic touchstones of the story, an image of not-clearly-perceived adult emotions, a world of passion and divine anger. The image of tablecloths derives from a memory of Emily’s aunt, another intelligent woman whose circumstances did not allow her develop her mind; instead, she had to look after her family, doing needlework and embroidery. These things come together as Emily sits for her French exam: “Why go on, a soft voice said in her inner ear, what is all this fuss about? What do you know, it asked justly enough, of incestuous maternal passion or the anger of the gods? These are not our concerns: we must make tablecloths and endure.” The ending of the story, carrying Emily’s story forward into another generation, is powerfully ambiguous while still being clear and precise.

If “Racine and Tablecloths” is one of the stronger pieces in the story, it seems to me that the next story, “Rose-coloured Teacups,” is one of the weaker. It’s a very short anecdote about a mother trying to connect with her daughter while at the same time envisioning a gathering of herself, her mother, and her grandmother. The image of embroidery as a sort of ambiguously-valued female art — beautiful, but domestic — returns. It’s a story of mothers, but also of the influence of fathers; still, it’s very slight, and the form of it feels too simple, too derived from other writing.

“The July Ghost” is an odd story of recurring actions, partly told by one character to another and partly not. It’s a ghost story in the vein of M.R. James, but without the scholarly detachment; there’s a far greater sense of family life here, and of the absence of that life. It’s a story of connections missed; of cycles, and the need for rebirth. And of the refusal of new birth. It’s quiet, melancholic, and very effective.

“The Next Room” is another ghost story, and again changing homes — the main character changing the place where they live — affects the plot significantly. Family matters also play a role; the main character is an aging woman whose mother’s death leaves her free to live. Is it too late, at fifty-nine, for her to have the life she wanted? Byatt gets at a lot of substance in this story, with clusters of significant imagery; death and burial in the earth, miners also digging into the earth, roots in the earth giving new life (a spiritualist with the too-direct name of Mrs. Roote shares a near-death-experience with the main character), the rootlessness of guests in a hotel, then the loss of a tooth as a sign of aging, a real estate agent (who deals in land, in the selling of earth) named Maw. It has to do with restless spirits, with men left for dead by changing times, and with the desire, which may or may not be realised, to make things better for the future and the past.

“The Dried Witch” is a departure, the first story by Byatt not set in England, and perhaps not set in the twentieth century. It takes place in an Asian (probably Chinese) village, with an aging woman, A-Oa, whose family has died and who now has no other option than to desire to be a witch. This does not entirely go well, as the desires of the village around A-Oa, and her own desire for desire, lead her to cast dangerous spells — which might have an effect, and might not. Dryness, an image Byatt has played with in her novels, here takes centre stage; it is the antithesis of desire, of life. A-Oa’s attempt to escape it seems to lead to tragedy; but the ending allows for another reading. That said, although well-written, the story never quite rises to the level of being surprising; it plays out much as one would expect from a story about a neophyte witch in late middle-age living in a male-dominated society.

“Loss of Face” is also set in Asia, this time in Korea (which is not explicitly named). It’s one of the stronger stories in the anthology; an English professor tries to communicate across the cultural divide with Korean scholars, successfully in the case of Professor Moon but failing disastrously in the case of Professor Sun. As in popular stereotypes, the visiting professor has problems distinguishing faces. This is particularly poignant, as the professor’s name is “Celia,” which can mean ‘blind’; Celia is also a popular name in seventeenth century writing, which this Celia teaches; and, of course, images of the sun and moon with human faces are common images from the Renaissance. In other words, the symbols of sun and moon interact here with another set of symbols Byatt has introduced (starting in the title). This is a story about misreadings and the difficulty of translation and intercultural understanding; the Tower of Babel is another image introduced, a literal midpoint between east and west. The tale is slight on a plot level, but, as with the best of Byatt’s stories here, potent on a thematic level, an imaginative level — the writing, the symbols, light a fire in the mind.

“The Day That E.M. Forster Died” is perhaps the most explicitly self-aware story in the book, the most artificial and literary. These are not necessarily bad things, and Byatt makes her main character — Mrs. Smith, a novelist, who is inspired to write what could be her masterwork — lively enough that the story works. As Smith wanders out into London, turning over her projected book in her head, she finds out that Forster has died; and then she runs into an old acquaintance, Conrad, who believes that he is a secret agent. So this is a story in many ways about the interface not only of art and life, but of art and art; of the different stories we create to make sense of our lives. Forster, but also Conrad. And Tolkien, and epic; Smith’s vision for her story is of unity, tying together a number of different plots, including a semi-parody of Tolkien, into one whole work. But Conrad, with his paranoid ramblings about super-scientific weapons, about reversing death — the idea of which saves us, Byatt tells us by way of quoting Forster — delays her, impedes her, and sets up a powerful, tragic ending. It’s a story about art, and about art which is about art, and about the world which is not art; it’s about time, and the inevitability of death. It’s about beginnings coming together; and about inevitable endings.

“The Changeling” is another story about a writer, in this case Josephine Piper, a writer of books for and about lonely teens. A friend of hers, a school headmaster, asks her to take in a boy which reminds him of one of her most prominent characters, Henry Smee. She used to do this frequently, along with her son Peter, taking in guests from the school at holidays — Lost Boys, she called them. So: Peter, Lost Boys, Smee. But the first two are notable by their absence, and the last doesn’t take the role you’d expect. Josephine writes about fear; her adolescents know fear from the inside out, and that’s the main characteristic of Henry Smee. But the presence of Smee inhibits Josephine, who’s used to putting up a shell, a facade, around other people. She can’t have one of her own characters — or something like one of her own characters — live with her, not and continue to write. Josephine’s shell of self-possession inhibits communication with Smee (whose name can also be read as a cry for individual identity); like Daniel in Still Life, she is in part too strong for her own good. The result of the story feels both inevitable and natural. It’s a well-constructed story, but still feels oddly hollow.

“In the Air” is the tale of an elderly lady, Mrs. Sugden, who lives alone and is becoming increasingly afraid of the outside world. Taking her dog for a walk, she sees a blind woman, and then a man following the blind woman; fearing that this man is a mugger, a rapist, a thug, Sugden strikes up a conversation with the other woman, Mrs. Tillotson. Rather than leave them, the man also begins speaking with them, with the result that Tillotson invites them back to her apartment for tea. In essence, this is a story about Sugden and her growing fears — fear of men, fear of the outside world, fear of all the things that are in the air. The ending, though, is problematic. Is the man — Barry, whose name suggests that he’s a literalised manifestation of the fear, the barrier, that keeps Sugden isolated, alone, unable to connect with others — actually the criminal Sugden fears? The ending implies too strongly that he is. It seems an oddly flat, direct conclusion. Byatt’s successful stories often have particularly strong endings, not only unexpected in terms of their plot, but also throwing a new light on the symbols or themes of the story as a whole; in this case, it feels as though things didn’t quite come together, as though the final mesh of elements resulted in a deflation rather than an explosion.

“Precipice-Encurled” is a multilayered story, with Robert Browning as a peripheral character (the title being a phrase in one of his poems); it can’t help but look forward to Possession. But it also looks back to Still Life; this is largely a story about a moment when vision changed, when incipient modernism — here, as in Still Life, in the form of painting — challenged old ways of seeing the world. It’s a story about intricately-linked lives, including Browning’s, and it plays with perspectives — one of the characters is a twentieth-century scholar studying one of the nineteenth-century characters. The problem is that the different lives we’re given are mostly given in the form of scenes, rather than narrative, which makes it difficult to really grasp them. In a sense, that may be the point; the story is largely about connections missed, opportunities thwarted by fate. So, like many of the other stories, it’s also about the tensions of life and art — the attempt by artists to develop a vision large enough to encompass the unpredictable and cruel world.

Finally, “Sugar” is an apparently autobiographical story about the narrator’s parents — this is the only story in the book, and the only one of Byatt’s stories published to this point, to use a first person narrator — and family myths. It’s about how these fictionalised stories are a manifestation of the story-telling instinct. Legends about the narrator’s family touch the cosmic stories of Ragnarok. Specifically, it’s about the death of the narrator’s father, and his life, and about the difference between her father and her (story-making, untruth-telling) mother. It is about the creation of life, of what we think a life is, from the stories we are given. If it seems autobiographical, it’s because, like the best autobiographies, it’s intensely aware of the multiple levels of truth and fiction, of how a narrative account is defined by what is elided as well as what is included. It’s a strong note on which to end the book.

Overall, these are well-written stories. Byatt’s precise prose style carries even the weakest of them. Her ability to find and manipulate symbols, to draw out unexpected connections, make the best lively and unexpected. The authorial voice is remote from the characters, but this in no way impedes our ability to identify with them, to feel for them. Stylistically, there isn’t a great variation in tone between the stories, though there’s enough difference in terms of plot, setting, and character that this is no real problem — it could be seen as a unifier, in fact, lending the book a cohesion. It’s difficult to read any story here as a masterwork (though the title story and “Precipice-Encurled” are very strong, with considerable structural play), or as possessing the power of Byatt’s novels. But they show Byatt trying out new ideas, new themes, and of course new forms. They’re worth reading in their own right, make no mistake, but gain another level of interest as suggesting a new stage of Byatt’s development as a writer.

• Other posts in the ByattBlogging series may be found here.
  

ByattBlogging 4: Still Life

The second book in the Potter quartet, Still Life continues the stories of Frederica Potter, briefly an au pair in southern France and then a Cambridge student; her sister Stephanie, married and working through joys and discontent; and their brother Marcus, a broken natural mystic. Woven into their stories are familiar supporting characters, notably Daniel, Stephanie’s husband, and playwright Alexander Wedderburn. Alexander, now working in TV, is contemplating a new piece about Vincent Van Gogh; from this play Still Life takes its title, theme, and several images.

It’s an ambiguous title — obviously referring to a genre of painting, but also implying a range of qualifiers to ‘life’: quiet life, or life continuing, or mere life. In view of the ending, featuring an unexpected death, there’s an irony at work. But let’s look at that first meaning, the form of painting. It’s a reference to a mode of representation; and that is a key theme of the book.

There’s much less figurative or descriptive language in Still Life than in its predecessor The Virgin in the Garden. There’s some play with colour, especially contrasting qualities of gold and violet (hence, perhaps, a play on suffocating purple prose), of rainbows and of the polyvalent symbol of the rose,  but for the most part this is not that kind of book. Its language is not of that order. In a prologue — which takes place in the Royal Academy of Arts in 1980 just as the prologue to The Virgin in the Garden, featuring the same characters, took place in 1968 in the National Gallery — we are told that Alexander Wedderburn had hoped to write a plain verse with no imagery, but was betrayed by the nature of language — by the metaphors lurking in the roots of words — into figurative speech. Later in the book, we are told by Byatt herself that she began the novel with a concern echoing her character’s; like him, she found her plans for her language impossible to achieve.

A long discussion in the book on language and its inaccuracies includes a disquisition on the impossibility of attaching a precise meaning to a term like “plum coloured” (because it only raises the question of what sort of plum we’re talking about, what shade the fruit is itself, which can ultimately only be defined by looking at it); the next chapter uses “plum-coloured” as an adjective. The point seems to be that while you can question the precision of language as much as you like, it nevertheless accomplishes its task of communication quite nicely. On the other hand, the adjective refers to the eyes of a painting, and the painting “annoyed Frederica [the sitter], whose eyes were not that colour.” So visual art can be as misleading as language. It’s all perception.

What Byatt realises, what this book expresses, is that the point is not to represent life. It is instead, like Van Gogh, to represent the medium by which we understand life. It is not to paint what we see; it is to paint the air through which we see colour. This means turning aside from realism, perhaps; if so, it is to turn inward, to the emotional colouring by which we understand the world. “We all remake the world as we see it, as we look at it,” Byatt tells us on page 108, and “we always put something of ourselves — however passive we are as observers, however we believe in the impersonality of the poet, into our descriptions of the world, our mapping of our vision.” This understanding, Van Gogh’s understanding, “is new and the opposite of innocent: it is seen, and thought, and made.”

So the book is concerned, like the poet Raphael Faber whom Frederica meets at Cambridge, with the disjunction between language and meaning; a fall from the Edenic unity of name and named object (and, perhaps, namer). Frederica initially is drawn to Faber, intellectually and sexually, but ultimately turns away from him, from his skepticism of “English nature mysticism”, his dislike of Blake and Powys and Vincent Van Gogh. Instead she takes up with an unexpected and unlikely figure out of a romance novel, who exalts Tolkien and adventure stories; it’s as if the book has gone completely past problems of narrative representation of the stuff of life, past the concern of the realistic novel and of the novel of ideas, and come out the other side. It has emerged into Romance — and, indeed, Byatt’s next long work would insist upon its identity as a Romance, not as a Novel.

But this novel is not at an end, and that comes about only through the unexpected incident, the unforeshadowed stuff of life. Through misfortune, which could have been tragic in a lesser work but here is merely the occasion for pain. Through death, and learning to live after death. Through a literalising of the Venerable Bede’s image of human life as the brief flight of a bird through a lit hall in winter, coming from the night out into darkness again; only for a moment in a human space, among fire, among colour, perceptible.

The book could justifiably be called a Novel of Ideas. Which may sound overly intellectualised, but the novel is nothing of the sort; even when the narrative is on hold, there’s the sense of something vital happening. If the book feels plotless, formless, at some level that has to be deliberate. The concern with representation extends to the structure of events, or lack of same. Rather than detailed scenes showing character development, we are told about, for example, Frederica’s progress through Cambridge and the young men thereof — not unlike a 19th century novel, mixing anecdote and direct address. Other parts of the book pause the narrative to consider an idea, a notion, to present at length the gist of a speech a character gives — at the opening of a University, for example, a long discussion on picture-making (the male artist gazing at the female subject) against the reality pictured, the search for truth in art and science. 

The book’s art lies, in large part, in concealing its art (even while proclaiming its artfulness). The result, as with most great novels, is curiously like life: the characters go through and help to shape events, and are changed in meaningful ways, but at the moment things occur those things seem mysterious if not random; it is only at the end that the significance of events comes clear. And here even that may be only in part, for more of the characters’ stories will come in later books.

Certainly this book contains themes from The Virgin in the Garden, and indeed from Byatt’s other works. The suffocation of an intelligent woman in marriage and family is dramatised by the domesticated Stephanie slowly losing her vocabulary, her words — losing, specifically, her book of Wordsworth (a name almost inherently significant, especially here), thus losing poetry. On the other hand, early in the book, Frederica has intimations (a peculiarly Wordsworthian word) that “Wordsworth’s language was for his time and place only”; still, his language, and her ability to modify his language, gives her a voice, a way to express herself, if not understand Wordsworth’s mythic vision of the world. Frederica’s wrestling with these tensions looks forward to the end of the book, to the aesthetic and life choices — the two, here, are one — that she makes then. And, meanwhile, she attends presentations of Shakespeare in French, Macbeth “more damned troubadour than Scots butcher”, speaking “strange, denuded fast prose”. Translation; the finding of the right language for the right representation.

Like The Virgin in the Garden, the book plays different times against each other to gain a sense of perspective, of layering. Still Life goes beyond its predecessor, though, being in no way shy about its own status as a fiction; but rather than weaken belief in the story, it strengthens it, as though the fourth dimension was not enough to make things real. So Byatt address the reader directly, as in expressing her concern over language; and then later, in a crucial discussion of fertility and the germ that is life, which gives rise to her revelation of the germ of the novel: a woman and a child considering seedlings. An imagined scene? A real scene? It touches the quick of the book, the patterns of death and rebirth barely perceptible in its language and its story.

The book is concerned with patterns of this sort, the patterns we see and those we only imagine. The spectre of Freud is raised, examined, discarded. A character takes an unfashionable anti-modernist stance, insisting that there is order of some kind to human experience, scientifically verifiable if not with our present science; he is described as “prophetic”, and in many ways seems to be speaking with something like the author’s voice. 

How are we to perceive or understand works of art? Hospitals and other institutions in the book hang prints on walls. The Reaper and the Sower, paintings meant by Van Gogh to illuminate (we are told) the extremes of experience, come to be “bourgeois brightening-up”. But then again, visual art isn’t writing: “Pigment is pigment and light is light in any culture. But words, acquired slowly over a lifetime, are part of a different set of perceptions of the world, they have grown with us, they restrict what we see and how we see it.” Stephanie’s loss of language is the loss of her world. This perhaps marks a difference from the previous novel; where unheard melodies were sweet in The Virgin in the Garden, here the things not said seem to cry out to be articulated — to be understood, in the case of Frederica’s intellectual development, or to be revealed, in the case of sexual abuse which never quite gets made public.

Still Life is a major book. It’s heftier than The Virgin in the Garden, more powerful, and more passionate. It carries on from the previous novel, and expands its scope — theme, character, and structure all become weightier, denser. It’s sometimes wearying to read, yet, curiously, at the same time it is invigorating — Byatt’s characters think with passion, which is both fatiguing and inspiring. It is a book that literally challenges its readers to consider how they see the world; its strength may be that it justifies the challenge, and helps suggest a new and better vision.

• Other posts in the ByattBlogging series may be found here.
  

ByattBlogging 3: The Virgin in the Garden

Byatt’s third novel is as far beyond her second novel as that book was beyond her first. Character is more varied, more comprehensive, and the sense of a society — the society within which the characters move, and which they in part make up — is much stronger. Description is much more powerful, more varied; the book is filled with colour and with flowers, with milk and with blood. Curiously, though, it also seems more imperfect than her previous novel. The first book in a series of four, it consciously finishes without an ending. Sub-plots connect to each other, but not strongly. And as the book juggles narrative strands, it can be hard to make out a dominant shape to the story — just as the sheer fecundity of its description makes it hard to pick out major images. Still, these end up as quibbles. Comic, parodic, yet also tragic, The Virgin in the Garden is a profound book.

Set in 1953, the book revolves around the three children of Bill Potter, a fiercely humanistic school-teacher: Stephanie, Frederica, and Marcus. Frederica, the eldest, is the book’s main and perhaps most memorable character: brilliant and strong-willed, her egotism is monstrous yet charming — she is emphatically seventeen, thoroughly alive. Stephanie, her elder sister, recedes somewhat by comparison; caring, sweet, thoughtful, she enters into a relationship with Daniel, an ironically-named stolid clergyman, thus setting up considerable family tension. Marcus, meanwhile, sees visions of geometry and light, and strikes up an odd relationship with another teacher, becoming as it were the Edward Kelley to the older man’s Doctor Dee.

And if the latter seems like an odd comparison, in the context of this book it makes a bit more sense. The main motor of the plot is a pageant written by Alexander Wedderburn, a local playwright beloved of both Potter girls, to celebrate the coronation of Elizabeth II by way of presenting the life of Elizabeth I. The idea calls to mind John Cowper Powys’s A Glastonbury Romance — a novel following the production of a pageant in a provincial English town, in this case in Yorkshire — but feels very different. The play recedes for long stretches of the novel, especially the middle third, which follows Stephanie and Daniel. Structurally, the pageant is less present than you might expect — its images and themes lend themselves to the story of the novel, yes, but not in any obtrusive way. It’s a subtle motif, art which lends significant touches to life, but which does not dominate or determine events.

Similarly, the coronation of Elizabeth II, the ostensible motivator for the pageant and thus the book, is described closely in one chapter, but is otherwise mostly absent from the lives of the characters. In a book deeply concerned with English culture — with English traditions, with English literature — this seems an implicit statement about the place of the monarchy in English lives. It’s as though the coronation is itself a pageant, a distant and isolated event. On the other hand, it’s an event fixed in time: the characters stop the progress of their own plots to watch it on television (and the state of the medium itself, and their reaction to it, helps define that historical moment), and the book allows itself to slip forward in time to view reactions to the coronation decades later. This double temporal perspective is something Byatt uses to good effect in the book; much as the pageant is a view of the original Elizabethan Age, Byatt reminds us that this book is a 1970s view of the 1950s. Every age is parodied by those which come after it, even as a web of culture and references binds each to each.

If the book is dense with references — mostly to English art, but also to Racine and Proust — it is nevertheless the parodic aspect which comes to dominate. Wedderburn’s play is dismissed as ultimately a period piece because it lacks parodic bite (mirroring Wedderburn’s role in the prologue, where he considered the nature of parody in 1968). Stephanie’s relationship with Daniel could perhaps be seen to be parodied by Frederica’s seriocomic attempts to lose her virginity and her pursuit of Alexander (these two things related, but not one and the same). It’s a novel, then, which consciously undercuts itself as a way to further its themes; a devious and complex strategy.

Another way to look at it is by saying that the novel investigates the uses of parody, what parody means. Where does recurrence form a pattern, and where does it undercut that pattern by mocking it or showing its inadequacies? Where are patterns of representation inherently inadequate, parodic by nature, or by their inability to reach nature? What things can be said, and what must remain unsaid? What points of similarity and divergence are there between the coronation of Elizabeth II, seen on television, and the life of Elizabeth I, seen on stage?

This concern with the nature of artistic representation (occasionally contrasted here with Daniel’s ruthless concern for good works to others) represents a thematic continuity with Byatt’s earlier books. Also like both her previous novels, there’s the dramatisation of the situation of an intellectual woman in a male-dominated society. Stephanie’s choice for a domestic life contrasts with Frederica’s lust for the life of the mind. So there is a concern with gender issues, and with the representation of women — Elizabeth I is embodied on stage by Frederica, but also by another actress who plays her in her later life, highlighting difficulties of representation, of depicting a life in art. With the pageant’s inclusion of the figure of the goddess Astraea, the personification of justice and a frequent image for Elizabeth, the play presents an Elizabethan, female, trinity; elder Elizabeth, young Elizabeth, and Astraea as counterparts to the Christian Father, Son, and Holy Ghost.

Alexander, the artist, is quietly a significant character: in crafting the play that drives the story, he writes the language which Frederica must speak, just as he dresses Stephanie at one crucial point in the story and so sets her into a certain role. But in the climactic chapter (perhaps more accurately, a chapter which refuses the expected climax) things do not come out as he had expected. The virgin leaves the garden. Still, it is through Alexander’s eyes that we are introduced to the novel, in the prologue set in the National Gallery of a later date — introducing at once issues of representation, issues of Englishness and national culture. Alexander introduces us to Frederica, the most powerful personality of the book; they are there, the first sentence tells us, to see Flora Robson (so the flower imagery, in the novel’s first words) perform as Queen Elizabeth in a brief theatrical interlude. And: watching the crowd, Alexander observes a number of notable figures of the day, including Renaissance scholars Helen Gardner and Frances Yates, as well as “a dumpy woman in a raincoat”, who it’s tempting to read as Byatt herself — the representer thus become the represented.

This is a dense and challenging book. These are good things. There’s a tension here between the form of a novel — the shape of a story — and the stuff of life. It’s a creative tension, which is what makes the book work. It’s rigorous and complex, and consistently does what is not expected. It’s a strong work in itself, and also a strong beginning to a quartet. 

• Other posts in the ByattBlogging series may be found here.
  

ByattBlogging 2: The Game

The Game, A.S. Byatt’s second novel, seems almost to contain her first novel, The Shadow of the Sun, in the same way a cube contains a square. One of the main characters, Julia, is a novelist, a writer of books about women enclosed in the circumscribed world society prescribed for women in the mid-to-late 60s. Novels, that is, very like The Shadow of the Sun, though perhaps less thoughtful, less artistically ambitious. But in the first two chapters we also meet Julia’s husband, Thor, and her sister, Cassandra; and besides these two mythically-resonant names there is Simon, an old flame of both Julia and Cassandra, who now presents television documentaries about snakes in the Amazon rainforest — another mythically-resonant name, and a setting expressly compared to the Garden of Eden.

Much of the book is about the interaction of these characters, along with Julia’s daughter Deborah, and Ivan, a television producer who puts Julia on an arts discussion programme and becomes her lover. Thor is a Quaker, like Julia and her parents; he believes in doing good in this world, and putting imagination to the side. Cassandra has become an Oxford don, a rare female professor; she’s a medievalist, concerned with symbols and abstraction. So as much as the book’s about the interaction of characters, it’s also about Julia’s situation as a creative artist between these two points of view. The Game is not shy to bring in self-conscious and nearly-metafictional discussion about the role of abstraction in art and art’s place in society, while maintaining The Shadow of the Sun’s concern with the details of character. In fact, the character work here is probably more detailed, more sophisticated, the characters more aware of the effects they have on each other, even as the themes and symbols are more allusive, more complex.

And these things dovetail through clever irony. By the end of the book, Thor the pacifist Quaker turns out to have more in common with his namesake than we at first see. And Cassandra, fascinated by the meaning of costume in Arthurian epic, is appalled by a novel which finds moral significance in the fit of a modern woman’s dress. Julia goes from watching Simon on television discussing snakes to watching snakes through glass in a zoo with Simon beside her. Snakes are associated with rebirth, a shedding of the skin; that association becomes subsumed in a discussion characters have about fertility myths; but by the end of the book at least one character has sloughed off an old self and been reborn.

The book is much concerned with reality and with symbol. The titular game, a childhood pastime of Julia and Cassandra, created by them and incorporating maps and miniature figures and medieval stories (sounding in all oddly like Dungeons & Dragons, which would not be created until several years after The Game was published), is an image of reality simplified or reality heightened by being made symbolic. “A common myth,” Cassandra describes it at one point, which perhaps “contained and resolved [their] difficulties.” Myth is key in this book, sometimes the same as and sometimes in contrast to religious faith: characters ponder their relationship to their Creator, even as some of them consider their relationship to the act of creation.

Cassandra associates the game with innocence, which she had previously dismissed as unreal. But then Cassandra meditates often on images of glass, models and windows and mirrors; things which sometimes afford a clear view, and which sometimes frame or confine. And if this seems like formal play, its relevance to life is made ruthlessly clear by the end of the novel: we create reality, especially the reality we call other people, by the stories we tell ourselves about them.

This last point is crucial, because it informs the style and structure of the novel. Consider this sentence, from late in the book: “In the old days she would have attributed Simon’s persistence in telling her about Julia to a largely conscious malice, a desire to stir things up; now she was sure that he thought he wanted simply to prove, both to himself and to her, that he lived on a neutral level, they were all together, people with equal weights in the world.” That’s Cassandra speaking, a naturally rigorous thinker. But consider how much that sentence does. We get a hint of Cassandra’s growth, and her awareness of her own growth, in the first clause. Then the complexity of “she was sure that he thought he wanted” — emphasising her perception of Simon’s motives, and how certain she is, but implying also the multiple levels of desire: what he wants is not what he thinks he wants, there is something more. But the novel is also aware that this is Cassandra’s view of him, not necessarily the reality. So: what is striking here is not the sophistication of thought or of character, but the sophistication of the character’s thoughts — and of the limits of that sophistication.

The book seems to me a vast improvement on its predecessor. There’s more to the plot, more choices and agency given the characters, more action to follow. The characters have more scope to develop themselves, and their motivations are more complex and more concisely described. The prose keeps a level tone, rarely rising to the heights of visionary description of The Shadow of the Sun but never bogging down; instead, items acquire symbolic weight, making a simple declarative sentence heavy with thematic resonance, with meaning. And the theme itself is more complex and allusive. Images are better-developed. Published only three years after The Shadow of the Sun, this seems a far more mature and accomplished work.

On a final note, it’s interesting to see echoes of previous and later work in this novel. “There is no possession,” Julia thinks in a curiously striking passage near the end of the book. More resonantly: virgins and gardens are obvious symbols in this book of innocence, which itself is a somewhat-debated concept. But it’s also difficult to forget that The Shadow of the Sun began with young Anna Severell in a garden shed, her secret retreat where she developed a kind of proto-artistic sensibility. And for those looking back over Byatt’s career, it’s interesting as well that her next novel, published eleven years later, is titled The Virgin in the Garden.

• Other posts in the ByattBlogging series may be found here.
  

Readings 2K9: March summation

Reading A.S. Byatt's work in preparation for this month's series of posts took up pretty much all of March. I stopped noting when I'd completed each book as it became clear that was all I was going to be doing. So ... final tally: eight books read, five of them my own. That's thirty-two books on the year so far, sixteen of them my own.  Not too bad, but if the McGill book fair is anything like last year's, I'll have to step it up or else I'll end the year with more books bought than read. Still, I'm optimistic.

ByattBlogging 1: The Shadow of the Sun

This is Byatt’s first novel, begun in the 1950s while she was an undergraduate, and published in 1964. The edition I read was a later reprint, with an introduction by Byatt written more than a quarter-century later; it gives an interesting look into her thoughts when she was writing the book, and goes some distance toward making up for the fact that this is one of the most horribly-proofread books I’ve ever seen, with major typos coming (it seems) every couple of pages.

Anyway: the novel follows the development of Anna Severell, seventeen when the novel opens, and her attempt to carve out a life and perhaps some sort of artistic identity while maturing in the shadow of her father, novelist Henry Severell. This attempt is complicated slightly by her mother and younger brother, but mainly by Oliver Canning and his wife Margaret. Oliver is an intellectual of a working-class background, an Angry (and somewhat Priggish) Young Man. On a pragmatic level, the book follows the mutual attraction and occasional repulsion between Anna and Oliver, while tracking the effects on her family and his wife.

But on a more profound level, the book is a meditation on art, vision, and the capacity of a talented woman to carve out a space for herself. The means by which the book gets at these themes is through the creation and close examination of character. Other aspects seem relatively undeveloped; plot and story are rudimentary. Long stretches of the book are analysis of character, presenting background and history, pointing out gaps in self-awareness, telling us (not showing us) what the character thinks or feels. This ought not to be compelling, as typically character in motion is more intriguing than character described; but it mostly works, thanks to Byatt’s close thinking about the characters. The depth of them is what is intriguing. There’s still a sense, at least to me, that something is lacking, that the weight given to the characters is not justified by their relative inaction; character is defined by choice, which means that character is not separable from story, and so in the end the novel feels slight.

Still, the character-drawing is excellent. The character of Henry Severell, for example, is one of the novel’s great successes, a well-drawn and credible visionary. We come to know him inside and out, we know the sights he sees, we know where he takes leave of the common earth, and we know also what his creative limits are, the bounds past which he cannot think, the bounds of himself which he cannot even see. He is in one sense the sun of the novel’s title, a Powysian magus, and probably the most intriguing thing about the book. It may a part of the weakness I find in the book that his work is described, but not shown to us; we do not read what he writes, and so he remains, in a sense, less real to us than he might have been.

His daughter is his equal in terms of depth; she’s probably the most thoroughly-built character in the book. Even Henry has elements in him which seem sketched-in, not wholly formed; his war experience, most notably, and a spell in a Burmese prison camp. Anna, though, is credible down to the last bit of her, her every attempt at a creative act, her every attempt to renounce her future. The only perplexing aspect to Anna is her attraction to Oliver, himself difficult to read; he’s unpleasant and shallow, but it’s hard for me at my remove in space and time to assess whether that’s a failure or whether that represents something about the sort of men who were produced in England half a century ago.

I suspect it’s the latter. One of the intriguing things about the book is how much it feels like an artifact of a past era. That’s not to say that it’s dated, as such; just that it has the sense of something produced by a vanished culture. It seems to accurately present people as we know them, but shaped by a society that is now history, and very different from our own experience. Obviously gender issues have transformed society over the past several decades, but I suspect there’s more to it; I wonder whether changes to specifically English society would not make this a very different book if it were written today, even if it were set in the same era. There’s a difference between historical fiction and fiction written at a historical time about its own time. The latter doesn’t have the distance that we do. On the other hand, a workable definition of great literature might be ‘writing that speaks to readers directly across different eras.’

So the book is a product of its time, perhaps. That’s fine. It’s still quite readable, and not without its virtues. Light on story or plot, it succeeds by being intensely inward; by its fierce focus on the internal lives of its characters. Byatt’s style is impersonal in the best sense — objective, almost clinical, while still being sensuous. The novel avoids obvious displays of fine writing, but there’s a sustained strength to its prose which makes it worth reading. Many of the puff quotes in the book note that the book displays promise, which I think is accurate; it’s an intriguing debut, a hint that here is an author worth watching out for.

• Other posts in the ByattBlogging series may be found here.
  

ByattBlogging: Introduction

Several years ago, I bought a secondhand copy of A.S. Byatt’s novel Possession. I was greatly impressed by it. So much so that I began to keep an eye out for more of Byatt’s writing, buying any books of hers that I found at used bookstores or book sales. Earlier this year, I learned that Montréal’s Blue Metropolis festival was awarding Byatt its International Literary Grand Prix, and that Byatt would launch her new novel The Children’s Book in Montréal; as a Montréaler myself, this seemed to me to be a good impetus to finally sit down and read through her collected works. And it seemed equally to be worth setting down my thoughts on her writing on this blog.

I’m going to try to have posts up daily, eventually covering all of Byatt’s fiction books published to date, starting with her first novel, Shadow of the Sun, and going through to Little Black Book of Stories. That’s fourteen books; eight novels, and six collections of shorter works. I’ll be breaking that up with some other bonus posts on ancillary material. I’m going to update this page with links to the each of the individual posts as they go up.

Byatt’s writing is dense with symbol and theme; I want to talk about those things, and try to work out what’s happening in each book. If over-arching ideas occur to me, I’ll be sure to point them out, but I’m less interested in comparing book to book than with observing the different manifestations of Byatt’s talent and seeing what sort of images and devices are used in a given story. It means that some of the posts will probably end up on the long side, but then there’s no space limitation on the internet. At any rate, if this can lead to some discussion about Byatt’s work, all the better.

Posting starts tomorrow.

• ByattBlogging 1: The Shadow of the Sun
  

• ByattBlogging 2: The Game
  

• ByattBlogging 3: The Virgin in the Garden
  

• ByattBlogging 4: Still Life
  

• ByattBlogging 5: Sugar and Other Stories
  

• ByattBlogging 6: Possession
  

• ByattBlogging 7: Angels and Insects
  

• ByattBlogging Bonus: Degrees of Freedom
  

• ByattBlogging 8: The Matisse Stories
  

• ByattBlogging 9: The Djinn in the Nightingale's Eye
  

• ByattBlogging 10: Babel Tower
  

• ByattBlogging 11: Elementals
  

• ByattBlogging 12: The Biographer's Tale
  

• ByattBlogging 13: A Whistling Woman
  

• ByattBlogging Bonus: Potter vs. Potter
  

• ByattBlogging 14: The Little Black Book of Stories
  

• ByattBlogging: A Provisional Conclusion
  

• ByattBlogging Postcript: On Histories and Stories