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A.S. Byatt : Before and After Possession Recent Critical Approaches
Edited by Armelle
Parey and Isabelle Roblin
Book Practices & Textual Itineraries Series, N°8 Presses
Universitaires de Nancy / Éditions Universitaires de Lorraine, 2018 Broché. 197 pages. ISBN 978-2814303294. 15 €
Reviewed by Georges Letissier Université de Nantes
A.S. Byatt, the versatile English writer, whose name
raised to fame thanks to Possession in 1990, has always kept a special
relationship with Caen University. Indeed this is where Jean-Louis Chevalier, the
acclaimed translator of her Booker-winning novel partly set in France, used to
teach. It is no surprise therefore that this selection of eleven stimulating
essays should come from a symposium organised in the Norman city. It was attended
by the novelist herself, as is evidenced by some of the footnotes in the
volume. That Possession, often regarded as the high-water mark of
Byatt’s œuvre, should have been chosen as the linchpin of the collection is
perfectly consistent with the diachronic order in which the contributions are
organised – ranging from The Game (1967) to Ragnarok, an
unclassifiable work which came out in the Canongate series of reworked myths in
2011. Between these two landmarks is deployed a life-long intellectual and aesthetic
adventure since the writer is primarily concerned with experiments – involving forms,
patterns and fiction-writing as heuristic quest. Precisely, Possession,
a postmodernist montage steeped in Victorian culture to an unprecedented level
of erudition, stands as a paradoxical beacon which has often divided critics.
There was to be a before, and an after, Possession in Byatt’s œuvre. The concise, albeit efficient, introduction sets
unambiguously the terms of the debate. Indeed, if Possession is a one-off in
Byatt’s production, poised between the realistic provincial novel (the writer
hailed from Yorkshire) and the more experimental works that followed, the whole
of the writer’s output could be easily split between fictions sticking to a
conventional agenda – in the wake of the novels of the Great Tradition – and
those which overly flag an innovative approach. The unchanging feature, though,
remains the constant commitment to knowledge formation and cognitive processes.
This fundamental aspect is amply demonstrated through the varied perspectives
offered through the diversity of angles proposed. Fiction is correlated in turn
with science, chiefly biology; historiography, wonder / fairy tales, or else studied
through the prism of literary forms (the Künstlerroman, the
time-novel, Gothic romance, and the whole gamut of hyphenated realisms
– from “self-conscious realism”
(Byatt’s own coinage) to “aesthetic realism” [Mari, 161-173]. What the
collection charts is the writer’s ever-evolving engagement with story-telling
which eventually abuts on its impossibility with the “literary non-fiction
prose”, exemplified through Ragnorok
aptly concluding the volume. By focusing on the rivalry
between two sisters both involved in literary pursuits of their own, one asacademic the other as novelist – any resemblance with the fraught sibling relationship between A.S. Byatt and Margaret Drabble is of course all but
purely coincidental – Isabelle Roblin reads The Game as a blueprint for Possession.
In hindsight the clues
are indeed striking: dramatisation of literary creation, textual montage with
journal entries and pastiches of book reviews and a metafictional commitment to
escaping the risk of reification by being turned into a fiction character. Two
essays then document novels belonging to A.S. Byatt’s Frederica Quartet: The
Virgin in the Garden, Still Life, Babel Tower and A
Whistling Woman. Alexa Alfer, a recognised Byatt scholar, proposes a
retrospective appraisal of The Virgin in the Garden (1978), a novel set
in what was then referred to as “The New Elizabethan Era” to identify what was
to remain subsequently a major paradigm of Byattian scholarship, i.e. “a curiously symbiotic relationship
between old realism and new experiment” [35]. In many respects, Possession could
afford a novelistic illustration of such an unprecedented negotiation between
the old and the new. By homing in on The Virgin, Alfer propounds
an alternative to the crude realism vs.
experiment dichotomy in which the English novel was trapped in the late 1970s.
Drawing from Paul Ricoeur’s narrative configuration of time she proposes a new
take on Byatt’s specific appropriation of realism: “a realism that stresses the
fictional qualities of reality through the specific reality of the fictional” [38].
Carmen Lara-Rallo tackles another feature of Byatt’s many talents, namely the
dialogue that she initiates with the sciences, thus contributing in her own way
to invalidate C.P. Snow’s idea of an unbridgeable two-culture divide. Lara-Rallo’s
epistemological study encompasses the four novels of the Quartet as well as Byatt’s
non-fiction publications on the subject of science, showing how the author both
extrapolates pseudo-scientific theories and applies already-existing scientific
ones to use as fictional matter or to think up new narrative forms. The
key-word could be E.M. Forster’s “only connect !” as, among many other
thought-provoking remarks, the link between neurobiology and literature is
shown through metaphors which activate neuronal transmission and the one
between microbiology and ethics is established through the possibility of the
genes’ altruism enabling the continuity of the species in their generational
transmission. Three contributions give Possession pride of
place and another one treats of this major novel alongside with novellas that
may be seen as companion pieces: “Morpho Eugenia” and “Cold”. Christian
Gutleben argues that Possession ticks off all the boxes of what would
qualify as both the archetype and prototype of Neo-Victorianism. The 1990 novel
would be the perfect illustration of the “memory fever” which has taken hold of
our post-industrial societies whilst encouraging a positive epistemological and
emotional engagement with history production or at least collective anamnesis. Then
stimulating parallels are proposed between the neo-Gothic revival and
post-Derridean haunto(n)logy. Ultimately, it is suggested that Possession partakes
of the ethical turn, both by lending itself to the call of the other: Levinas’s
“excedence” and by fostering an ethics of vulnerability predicated on a
consideration of the other through his/her irreducible singularity. Emilie
Walezak’s contribution articulates historiography and psychonalysis in a way
reminiscent of De Certeau’s intellectual stance. She takes the “pierre vive”
poetic motif, borrowed from Michelet’s historiography, as an instantiation of
Lacan’s “trait unaire” to argue that the poetic motif is transformed
into plot operator. Moreover the stone inscription, somehow bridging the gap
between signifier and signified, contributes to shape-shifting female
identities by substituting geology (a metamorphic discipline) for genealogy
(trapped in deterministic blood ties). Armelle Parey takes up a reflection once
conducted by her former mentor, Jean-Louis Chevalier, on Possession’s
puzzling (un)ending. To give the previous analysis a new lease on life, she
reconsiders Thomas Rymer’s notion of “poetic justice” (1678). She shows that
paradoxically it is the 20th-century plotline that is granted poetic
justice by tying up all the narrative threads in a neat, and ethical resolution
while the Victorian level remains for ever open to conjectures. Byatt, for her
part, provokingly claimed that in the era of suspicion resulting from Modernism
and the French Nouveau Roman, closure had become the true revolutionary
narrative mode. Alexandra Chiera, like Michel Pastoureau, shows the semantic
content and interpretive potential contained in a colour, or perhaps a shade,
white in the present instance. Indeed, white affords a whole chromatic spectrum
with two symbolic limits, with, on one hand, the Grimms’ “Snow White” (a
possible archetype for Coventry Patmore’s “Angel in the House”) and, on the
other, Andersen’s “Snow Queen” (a possible variant of the fallen woman).
Following in the footsteps of Gilbert and Gubar and Bacchilega, Chiera argues
that even if Byatt regularly disclaimed the label of woman writer or feminist
writer, her adaptation of wonder tale tropes ultimately pleads for an inclusive
definition of femininity eschewing patriarchal binary opposites between angelic
figures and diabolical ones. “In fact, her heroines do change and are
‘ever-constant’ in [their] ‘changefuleness’ in that they do not remain chained
to a single definition of womanhood ” [124]. So each and everyone of them
combines, as it were, a whiteness of many hues. The volume does justice to the diversity of A.S.
Byatt’s literary output by including a chapter on the short story. Helen E.
Mundler’s study of “Baglady” explores what starts off as a seemingly anecdotal
account to morph into the uncanny and fantastic. In particular she shows how
the eponymous (non-)heroine, by ending up stranded in a shopping mall somewhere
in the Middle East during a stopover between two flights, unwittingly crystallises
power forces between the West and the Orient, between former colonising
countries and colonised ones. However the pattern of exploitation is reversed
as in her dishevelled condition, the so-called “baglady” (the title is a wink
at Margaret Thatcher’s own bag as synecdochic of power-wielding) the diminished
English lady finds herself at the mercy of the local guards. Two essays bear on The Children’s Book, Barbara
Franchi’s in a joint study with Possession and Catherine Mari’s through
the concept of “aesthetic realism”. Franchi investigates the crucial topic of
filiation and ancestry by drawing from Judith Halberstam’s concept of queer
mothers. This antisocial form of engagement with femininity breaks the mother /
daughter bond. So by choosing mother-figures who also double as literary
creators, A.S. Byatt establishes writing as an all-absorbing pursuit eclipsing
self-sacrificing mothering. Christabel LaMotte (Possession) and Olive
Wellwood (The Children’s Book) are seen as the emblematic
representatives of this distortion of the female nurturing model. If, as has
been claimed by Sally Shuttleworth, neo-Victorianism could be said to reinforce
two primary strands of Victorianism: family continuity and individualism, this
is only true, according to Franchi, if we allow for a skewed genealogy,
skipping generations and crossing genders. Catherine Mari adopts a radically
different perspective by exposing echoes and resonances between the different
levels of the novel: the historical backcloth, the main narrative and the
embedded tales. Byatt has always evinced an interest in insectology and geology
and the dragonfly or the iterative allusion to stone contribute to weaving
together the different narrative threads. Shape-shifting and metamorphoses are
apposite themes in a novel chiefly concerned with the process of growing up. Besides,
the Shakespearean intertext superimposes “a new description of reality” [Ricoeur
qtd. 169]. In short, The Children’s Book may be said to fulfil a
double agenda, firstly by satisfying the reader’s desire to come to the plot’s
final resolution, through an overall compliance with the
rules of verisimilitude, and secondly by blurring reality through successive
representations and extending the possibilities of meaning. This is precisely
the significance of “aesthetic realism.” The volume ends with a contribution on the neo-Baroque in A.S. Byatt’s Ragnarok :
The End of the Gods, a prose poem taking up the Norse eschatological myth formerly
revisited by M.W. MacDonall’s Asgard and the Gods at the end of the 19th
century. At the dawn of the 21st century, the age-old legend resonates with the
current looming ecological disaster. Tomás Monterrey argues that the Deleuzian
concept of the “fold” (le pli) is perfectly adapted to account for
Byatt’s own version of Ragnarok. Indeed, her generically unputdownable work
translates a process of unfurling through its odd format. Byatt’s appropriation
of Ragnarok (incidentally also present as autographic poetic epigraph in
Possession) is an intertextual, and to some extent, intermedial montage
exhibiting a dynamics of chaos, fractals and labyrinths. The chief quality of this much-needed
volume on A.S. Byatt resides in the diversity of approaches from a
well-informed array of various contributions. In spite of its insightful
reflections and width of knowledge the collection of essays remains accessible
throughout and provides the reader with a gratifying intellectual experience.
What stands out forcefully is the aesthetic and intellectual itinerary – the
two cannot be separated with an artist like Byatt – of a writer both curious of
any new scientific disovery liable to modify our outlook on an ever-changing
world and convinced that this altered apprehension calls for new forms of
artistic representation.
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