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