A.S. Byatt: Critical storytelling 9781847792594

Table of contents :
Front matter
Contents
Series editor’s preface
Acknowledgements
Copyright acknowledgements
A. S. Byatt
Abbreviations
Introduction
Fathers, sisters and the anxiety of influence
Writing the contemporary
Two cultures
Tradition and transformation
The dark side of the tale
Critical storytelling
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

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A. S. Byatt

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Contemporary British Novelists Series editor: Daniel Lea

already published J. G. Ballard Andrzej Ga¸siorek Pat Barker John Brannigan Jim Crace Philip Tew James Kelman Simon Kó´vesi Iain Sinclair Brian Baker Graham Swift Daniel Lea Irvine Welsh Aaron Kelly Jeanette Winterson Susana Onega

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A. S. Byatt Critical Storytelling

Alexa Alfer and Amy J. Edwards de Campos

Manchester University Press Manchester

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Copyright © Alexa Alfer and Amy J. Edwards de Campos 2010 The right of Alexa Alfer and Amy J. Edwards de Campos to be identified as the authors of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

Published by Manchester University Press Altrincham Street, Manchester M1 7JA, UK www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data applied for ISBN 978 0 7190 6652 8 hardback First published 2010 The publisher has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for any external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

Typeset by Florence Production Ltd, Stoodleigh, Devon

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Contents

Series editor’s preface Acknowledgements Copyright acknowledgements A. S. Byatt: biographical outline Abbreviations

vii ix x xii xiv

1

Introduction

2

Fathers, sisters and the anxiety of influence: The Shadow of the Sun and The Game

11

Writing the contemporary: The Virgin in the Garden and Still Life

36

4

Two cultures: Babel Tower and A Whistling Woman

63

5

Tradition and transformation: Possession and fairytales

92

6

The dark side of the tale: The Children’s Book, The Biographer’s Tale and Angels and Insects

116

Critical storytelling: peopling the paper house

138

Bibliography Index

157 192

3

7

1

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Series editor’s preface

Contemporary British Novelists offers readers critical introductions to some of the most exciting and challenging writing of recent years. Through detailed analysis of their work, volumes in the series present lucid interpretations of authors who have sought to capture the sensibilities of the late twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Informed, but not dominated, by critical theory, Contemporary British Novelists explores the influence of diverse traditions, histories and cultures on prose fiction, and situates key figures within their relevant social, political, artistic and historical contexts. The title of the series is deliberately provocative, recognising each of the three defining elements as contentious identifications of a cultural framework that must be continuously remade and renamed. The contemporary British novel defies easy categorisation and, rather than offering bland guarantees as to the current trajectories of literary production, volumes in this series contest the very terms that are employed to unify them. How does one conceptualise, isolate and define the mutability of the contemporary? What legitimacy can be claimed for a singular Britishness given the multivocality implicit in the redefinition of national identities? Can the novel form adequately represent reading communities increasingly dependent upon digitalised communication? These polemical considerations are the theoretical backbone of the series, and attest to the difficulties of formulating a coherent analytical approach to the discontinuities and incoherencies of the present. Contemporary British Novelists does not seek to appropriate its subjects for prescriptive formal or generic categories; rather it aims to explore the ways in which aesthetics are reproduced, refined and repositioned through recent prose writing. If the overarching

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Series editor’s preface

architecture of the contemporary always eludes description, then the grandest ambition of this series must be to plot at least some of its dimensions. Daniel Lea

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Acknowledgements

We would like to thank the following friends and colleagues for their ideas, encouragement and support during the long genesis of this book: Jane Campbell, Miguel Campos, Mike D. Crane, Juliane Funk, Dorothea Löbbermann, Gráinne Walshe, our parents Dieter and Rosemarie Alfer and John and Brenda McAuliffe, and all the staff at Manchester University Press. We are particularly grateful to Michael J. Noble for his friendship, generosity and goodwill. He has been instrumental in getting this project off the ground. Finally, we are deeply indebted to A. S. Byatt for her enthusiasm, generosity and unfailing support. Alexa Alfer and Amy J. Edwards de Campos

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Copyright acknowledgements

The authors and publishers are grateful for permission to quote from the following copyrighted material in this book: From Angels and Insects by A. S. Byatt, published by Chatto & Windus, copyright © 1992 by A. S. Byatt. Reprinted by permission of The Random House Group Ltd and Random House, Inc. From Babel Tower by A. S. Byatt, published by Chatto & Windus, copyright © 1996 by A. S. Byatt. Reprinted by permission of The Random House Group Ltd and Random House, Inc. From The Biographer’s Tale by A. S. Byatt, published by Chatto & Windus, copyright © 2000 by A. S. Byatt. Reprinted by permission of The Random House Group Ltd and Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc. From The Children’s Book by A. S. Byatt, published by Chatto & Windus, copyright © 2009 by A. S. Byatt. Reprinted by permission of the author c/o Rogers, Coleridge & White Ltd, 20 Powis Mews, London W11 1JN, and Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc. From The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye by A. S. Byatt, published by Chatto & Windus, copyright © 1994 by A. S. Byatt. Reprinted by permission of The Random House Group Ltd and Random House, Inc. From The Game by A. S. Byatt, published by Chatto & Windus, copyright © 1967 by A. S. Byatt. Reprinted by permission of The Random House Group Ltd and the author c/o Rogers, Coleridge & White Ltd, 20 Powis Mews, London W11 1JN. From Imagining Characters by A. S. Byatt, published by Chatto & Windus, copyright © 1995 by A. S. Byatt and Ignês Sodré. Reprinted by permission of The Random House Group Ltd and the author c/o Rogers, Coleridge & White Ltd, 20 Powis Mews, London W11 1JN. From the Little Black Book of Stories by A. S. Byatt, published by Chatto & Windus, copyright © 2003 by A. S. Byatt. Reprinted by permission of The Random House Group Ltd and Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc.

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Copyright acknowledgements

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xi

From On Histories and Stories by A. S. Byatt, published by Chatto & Windus, copyright © 2000 by A. S. Byatt. Reprinted by permission of The Random House Group Ltd and the author c/o Rogers, Coleridge & White Ltd, 20 Powis Mews, London W11 1JN. From Passions of the Mind by A. S. Byatt, published by Chatto & Windus, copyright © 1991 by A. S. Byatt. Reprinted by permission of The Random House Group Ltd and Random House, Inc. From Possession by A. S. Byatt, published by Chatto & Windus, copyright © 1990 & 1991 by A. S. Byatt. Reprinted by permission of The Random House Group Ltd and Random House, Inc. From The Shadow of the Sun by A. S. Byatt, published by Chatto & Windus, copyright © 1964 and renewed 1992 by A. S. Byatt. Reprinted by permission of The Random House Group Ltd and the Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. From Still Life by A. S. Byatt, published by Chatto & Windus, copyright © 1985 by A. S. Byatt. Reprinted by permission of The Random House Group Ltd and the author c/o Rogers, Coleridge & White Ltd, 20 Powis Mews, London W11 1JN. From Sugar and Other Stories by A. S. Byatt, published by Chatto & Windus, copyright © 1987 by A. S. Byatt. Reprinted by permission of The Random House Group Ltd and the author c/o Rogers, Coleridge & White Ltd, 20 Powis Mews, London W11 1JN. From The Virgin in the Garden by A. S. Byatt, published by Chatto & Windus, copyright © 1978 and 1979 by A. S. Byatt. Reprinted by permission of The Random House Group Ltd and Random House, Inc. From A Whistling Woman by A. S. Byatt, published by Chatto & Windus, copyright © 2002 by A. S. Byatt. Reprinted by permission of The Random House Group Ltd and Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc.

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A. S. Byatt: biographical outline

1936

1954–1957 1957–1958 1958–1959 1959

1962–1971 1964 1965 1965–1969 1967 1969 1970 1972–1981 1974–1977 1978 1979 1981–1983

Born Susan Drabble on 24 August in Sheffield, England, the daughter of John Frederick Drabble, QC, and Kathleen Marie Bloor. Reads English at Newnham College, Cambridge. Pursues postgraduate studies at Bryn Mawr College, Philadelphia, USA. Embarks on doctoral research at Somerville College, Oxford; thesis eventually abandoned. Marries Ian Charles Rayner Byatt (Sir I. C. R. Byatt), marriage dissolved 1969; one daughter (one son deceased). Extra-Mural Lecturer, University of London. Publishes first novel: Shadow of a Sun. Publishes Degrees of Freedom, a full-length critical study of the novels of Iris Murdoch. Lecturer in Literature, Central School of Art and Design. Publishes The Game. Marries Peter John Duffy; two daughters. Publishes Unruly Times: Wordsworth and Coleridge in Their Time. Lecturer in English, University College London. Member of Social Effects of Television Advisory Group, BBC. Publishes The Virgin in the Garden, the first volume of the Quartet. Member of Booker Prize panel. Senior Lecturer in English, University College London; leaves academia to become a full-time writer.

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A. S. Byatt: biographical outline

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1983 1985 1986 1987 1987–1988 1990

1990 1990–1998 1991 1992 1993 1994 1995

1996 1998 1999 2000 2001 2002

2003

2009

xiii

Named Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature Publishes Still Life, the second volume of the Quartet. Member of Betty Trask Prize panel. Wins the PEN/Macmillan Silver Pen Of Fiction prize for Still Life. Publishes Sugar and Other Stories, her first volume of short fiction. Member of the Kingman Committee of Inquiry into the teaching of English Language. Publishes Possession. Wins the Booker Prize and the Aer Lingus Irish Times International Fiction Prize for Possession. Appointed Commander of the British Empire. Member of Literature Advisory Panel, British Council. Publishes Passions of the Mind, a collection of critical essays. Member of Hawthornden Prize panel. Publishes Angels and Insects. Publishes The Matisse Stories. Member of the judging panel for Granta’s Best of Young British Novelists. Publishes The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye. Awarded Premio Malaparte, Italy. Publishes Imagining Characters: Six Conversations about Woman Writers (with psychoanalyst Ignês Sodré). Publishes Babel Tower, the third volume of the Quartet. Publishes Elementals. Appointed Dame of the British Empire. Publishes On Histories and Stories and The Biographer’s Tale. Publishes Portraits in Fiction. Awarded Shakespeare Prize, Toepfer Foundation, Hamburg. Publishes A Whistling Woman, the last volume of the Quartet. Awarded the Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres, France. Publishes the Little Black Book of Stories. Awarded Blue Metropolis International Literary Grand Prix, Canada. Publishes The Children’s Book, which is shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize.

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Abbreviations

Works by A. S. Byatt which are cited parenthetically throughout this book are abbreviated as follows:

AI AWW BGT BT CB DNE E G IC

LBBS MS OHAS P PF PM S SL SS

VG

1992. Angels and Insects. London: Chatto. 2002. A Whistling Woman. London: Chatto. 2000. The Biographer’s Tale. London: Chatto. 1996. Babel Tower. London: Chatto. 2009. The Children’s Book. London: Chatto. 1994. The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye: Five Fairy Stories. London: Chatto. 1998. Elementals: Stories of Fire and Ice. London: Chatto. 1967. The Game. London: Chatto. with Ignês Sodré, 1995. Imagining Characters: Six Conversations About Women Writers. Ed. Rebecca Swift. London: Chatto. 2003. Little Black Book of Stories. London: Chatto. 1993. The Matisse Stories. London: Chatto. 2000. On Histories and Stories: Selected Essays. London: Chatto. 1990. Possession: A Romance. London: Chatto. 2001. Portraits in Fiction. London: Chatto. 1991. Passions of the Mind: Selected Writings. London: Chatto. 1987. Sugar and Other Stories. London: Chatto. 1985. Still Life. London: Chatto. 1991. The Shadow of the Sun. London: Vintage. Rpt of: 1964. Shadow of a Sun. London: Chatto. (All references in the text are to the 1991 edition.) 1978. The Virgin in the Garden. London: Chatto.

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Introduction

‘I select and confect’, the narrator of A. S. Byatt’s 1987 short story ‘Sugar’ states, for ‘[w]hat is all this, all this story so far, but a careful selection of things that can be told, things that can be arranged in the light of day?’ (S: 241). ‘Sugar’, the last and eponymous piece in Byatt’s first collection of short stories, is essentially a story about the act of storytelling – about its place in and its shaping of our everyday lives, our individual and collective identities, and our complicated sense of what, if anything, can be said to constitute a ‘truth’ and what a ‘lie’. Interestingly, however, ‘Sugar’ is also the most openly and avowedly autobiographical piece of writing A. S. Byatt has produced to date. Byatt has been outspoken on many occasions about her personal as well as intellectual dislike of the kind of literary criticism that places too heavy an emphasis on a writer’s life, neglecting the text, the work of fiction, in the process. In her essay ‘Reading, Writing, Studying’, she describes such ‘biographical emphasis’ as downright ‘painful’: I received, for instance, a letter from a student who was comparing my works with my sister’s as examples of the conversion of biography into fiction, and hoped I would send him such biographical information about myself as I thought would be useful in his undertaking. I find this puzzling, as well as upsetting – who did he think I was? A supervisor? A Byatt/Drabble scholar? A walking text? A source? Certainly not someone who weaves careful structures out of truths, lies, slanted comment, several originals, and wants her texts read as texts. (Byatt, 1993c: 6)

Such strongly worded comments are not just born of an understandable irritation with strangers prying into one’s private life. They are also a writer’s response to what Byatt (1993c: 7) has called

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contemporary criticism’s ‘[m]istrust of the author’, which ‘began with Wimsatt and the Intentional Fallacy and progressed to Barthes and the Death of the Author’. According to Byatt at least, a writer’s lifestory assumes, under such conditions, a renewed and highly paradoxical importance, since ‘the moment the writer is not allowed any authority, he creeps in by the back door, so you can apply his biography to his novel’ (Friel and Newman, 2004: n.p.). In ‘Sugar’, we find an alternative model to both openly and covert biographical readings of works of fiction. The narrator of ‘Sugar’ repeatedly and no doubt advisedly chooses to refer to her story as ‘this fabrication’, and alongside her narrative run the inevitable ‘long black shadows of the things left unsaid, because I don’t want to say them, or dare not, or do not remember, or misunderstood or forgot or never knew’ (S: 241). What is more, authorship, in this as in any other story, is never single: handed-down and half recollected stories compete with storied memories for a retelling that artfully – and selectively – commingles memory and the imagination. The metaphor Byatt chooses to describe this process does itself take the form of an imaginatively embellished memory, namely that of witnessing the boiling of sugar at her paternal grandfather’s sweets factory. Thus sugar, and ‘Sugar’, emerges as a complex metaphorical structure that doubles as a condensed ars poetica of a writer whose passionate ‘respect for truth’ (S: 215) habitually runs alongside her equally passionate conviction that every event is always already a ‘storied event’, and ‘[t]he real thing, the true moment, is as inaccessible’ (S: 248) as the trapped air transformed into pure colour in the sugary treats of her childhood. Taking its cue from ‘Sugar’, the present book, while including a biographical timeline for reference purposes, aims at an intellectual charting of the development of A. S. Byatt’s career as a writer. Retracing major themes and aesthetic concerns from Byatt’s earliest works through to her latest and increasingly experimental fictional offerings, this book not only introduces the reader to a body of work that has gradually come to be regarded as one of the most diverse and imaginative in late twentieth and early twenty-first-century British writing but also explores the wider cultural and critical contexts with which Byatt’s work grapples, engages and indeed intersects. From the earliest stage of her career, Byatt has been not only a prolific and highly respected writer of fiction but also a critic in her

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own right. Her debut novel, Shadow of a Sun (1964), which was later reissued under its originally intended title The Shadow of the Sun (1991), was closely followed by her first book-length work of criticism, a study of the novels of Iris Murdoch entitled Degrees of Freedom (1965). Inspired by her personal enthusiasm for Murdoch’s thoughtprovoking fictions as well as by ‘a writer’s curiosity about techniques’, Byatt’s study presents both a defence of Murdoch’s highly idiosyncratic novels of ideas (novels which, at the time, regularly met with widespread critical bewilderment) and a formative exercise in analysing the art of the novelist. It was avowedly ‘written out of a passionate curiosity about how Iris Murdoch’s novels worked, what the ideas were behind them, how the ideas related to the forms she chose, how her world was put together’ (Byatt, 1994b: viii). Byatt appears to have emerged from this exercise with renewed respect for Murdoch’s interest in the nineteenth-century novel, for her unfashionable defence of the notion of objective truth against philosophies which claimed that human notions of truth were circumscribed by perception and language, and for her emphasis on the moral quality of ‘attention’, the act of suppressing the self in the attempt to perceive external realities. Such themes have regularly surfaced in Byatt’s own fiction, and even some thirty years after the publication of Degrees of Freedom, Byatt (1997b: 28) was to comment: ‘[i]t is not often, either as a writer or as a person, that one comes across a body of writing that changes everything. [Murdoch’s] essays, even more than the novels, changed me and the way I looked at the world.’ While the critical engagement with contemporary fiction may not be all that surprising in a young novelist with a simultaneously burgeoning academic career, the sheer scope of Byatt’s output during the 1960s must nevertheless strike one as remarkable. Byatt’s second novel The Game (1967) appeared only three years before her next critical offering, a contextualising study of the Romantics entitled Unruly Times: Wordsworth and Coleridge in Their Time (1970). Chapter 2 of the present study explores the early intersections of Byatt’s fiction with both contemporary debates on the novel and the continuing, if difficult, relationship of mid-twentieth-century literature with the Romantic legacy. What emerges from our readings of The Shadow of the Sun and The Game in this chapter is an early indication of what we would describe as Byatt’s life long project of ‘critical storytelling’, a practice of storytelling, that is, which does not separate the literary from the critical imagination, but rather aims at a

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thoughtful and deliberate commingling of these two ways of seeing and describing the world. Byatt’s commitment to the mutually informative discourses of fiction and literary criticism has nevertheless earned her a somewhat mixed critical reception over the years, particularly among literary journalists. Press reviews of Byatt’s fiction have often been love-orhate affairs: some reviewers, notably a high number of practising novelists among them, do not hesitate to label works such as The Virgin in the Garden (1978) and Still Life (1985), but also later novels such as Byatt’s Booker-winning Possession: A Romance (1990) or The Children’s Book (2009), as ‘masterpieces’ (King, 1978: 27; see also Murdoch, 1978; Brookner, 1985; Nye, 1985; Coe, 1990; Kemp, 1990; Norfolk, 1993; Lively, 1996; Hensher, 1996 and 2002; Lowry, 2009; Tonkin, 2009), while others have dismissed them as rather papery achievements which offer little more than self-regarding displays of erudition and literary self-consciousness (Irwin, 1978; Paulin, 1979; Widman, 1979; Kemp, 1985: 45; Mars-Jones, 1985 and 2009; Karlin, 1990; Butler, 1992; Hill, 1996; Barnacle, 1996; Craig, 2002; Yeazell, 2002; Walden, 2009). Few reviewers on either side of this uneasy divide agree with Anthony Burgess (1985: 31) that ‘[w]e are in the presence of a remarkable intelligence which recognises how essential it is for literature to absorb literature’. In her first published collection of essays, Passions of the Mind (1991), Byatt herself has remarked that ‘[f]rom my early childhood, reading and writing seemed to me to be points on a circle. Greedy reading made me want to write, as if this was the only adequate response to the pleasure and power of books.’ Conversely, [w]riting made me want to read – it is often argued with some justice that a university training in English Literature is inhibiting to the desire to write, but I thought this out at eighteen, and decided that the only way to deal with it was to read so much and so variously that no particular writer or system could overpower me. (PM: 1)

This ‘greed’ for reading is something Byatt shares with many of her literary-minded characters, who, as readers, writers and critics, often seem to labour far more strenuously than their creator under the weight of influence from other writers and systems of thought. Chapter 3 of this book ponders this weight, as well as the notion of co-creative reading that will prove central also to several of our subsequent discussions of Byatt’s fiction, through a reading of The

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Virgin in the Garden and Still Life, the first two instalments in Byatt’s Quartet of ‘self-consciously realist novels about my own time and my own culture’ (PM: 22) that was eventually concluded by Babel Tower (1996) and A Whistling Woman (2002). Focusing on Byatt’s engagement with realism, the premises, possibilities, pitfalls and puzzlement of which the first two Quartet novels explore in terms of highly original fictional enquiries into, respectively, notions of historicity and the nature of representational art, we contend that Byatt’s longstanding preoccupation with ‘[t]he problems of the “real” in fiction, and the adequacy of words to describe it’ (PM: 3–4) does not, as a number of critics have argued, indicate a donnish traditionalism (Dyer, 1994), far less a stubborn resistance to ‘theory’ (Franken, 2000). Rather, Byatt’s fictional probings of realism’s quandaries are, much like Iris Murdoch’s, informed by the notion that an acknowledgement of the constructed nature of human thought does not necessarily preclude the existence of objective realities, or their legitimacy as objects of intellectual enquiry. In Byatt’s scheme, moreover, fiction proves a uniquely suitable site for such enquiries. Babel Tower and A Whistling Woman, the third and fourth volumes of Byatt’s Quartet, appeared with a considerable temporal distance from The Virgin in the Garden and Still Life. The intervening years had seen the publication of Byatt’s first volume of short stories, Sugar and Other Stories (1987), as well as the appearance on the literary scene of Possession: A Romance, the runaway public success of which no doubt contributed to the swiftness with which the essays collected in Passions of the Mind and then, only a year later, the two novellas comprising Angels and Insects (1992) were issued. More short fiction followed in the form of the stories and tales collected in The Matisse Stories (1993) and The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye (1994), the latter volume published in the same year as Imagining Characters: Six Conversations about Woman Writers, Byatt’s critical dialogues with psychoanalyst Ignês Sodré. By the time Babel Tower came along in 1996, received critical opinion had already diagnosed a marked shift in style and thematic emphasis from Byatt’s pre-1990 work to Possession and its satellite fictions. Previously regarded as a rather difficult writer of involved and academically minded fictions, Byatt was now feted as a trail-blazing exponent of the particular brand of historical (meta-)fiction so fashionable during the last one and a half decades of the twentieth century. Babel Tower thus came as a surprise

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to many of Byatt’s readers and critics. While at last returning our attention to the mid-twentieth century and thus to many of the Quartet’s familiar themes and characters, the novel did nevertheless not represent a straightforward return to the rather earnest realism of the first two Quartet novels. Rather, and in keeping with its 1960s setting, bold formal experiments and seemingly chaotic proliferations of story-lines compete for the reader’s attention in this long and highly complex novel. Its sequel, A Whistling Woman, continues this theme of disjointedness with a decidedly polyvocal narrative that brings the story of Frederica Potter and the large cast of her friends, family and colleagues to its mid-1970s conclusion. In Chapter 4 we explore the formal and thematic (dis)continuities between the earlier and later Quartet novels through the prism of Byatt’s engagement with contemporary notions of the breakdown and fragmentation of language in Babel Tower and her fictional ponderings of the narratives of science in A Whistling Woman. The prominent place of scientific discourse amongst the languages at work in the late Quartet novels reflects, we argue, Byatt’s growing preoccupation with the relationship between science and literature in recent years. Indeed, her later fictions often probe the conceptual pitfalls and possibilities of ways of world-making across the ‘Two Cultures’ divide as their plots keep ‘dividing and spawning new story lines, as though by narrative parthenogenesis’ (Merkin, 2003: 10). This biological image of spontaneous and disorderly growth rather aptly describes a writerly practice that not merely references the sciences but strives to weave scientific thought into the very fabric of fiction. To the wider public, A. S. Byatt is undoubtedly best known for her reimaginings of the Victorian past, prefigured in short stories like ‘Precipice-encurled’ (1987), cultivated in the virtuoso poetic ventriloquism of Possession: A Romance, and continued and refined even further in Angels and Insects. Much discussion has been devoted to Byatt’s fictional negotiations of (literary) history, and variations on the ‘postmodern’ as both a critical and an aesthetic paradigm tend to dominate critical debate at this level. However, postmodern appropriations of Byatt’s work have tended to obscure the view onto a larger project of novelistic reclamation that we deem distinctive of Byatt’s endeavours as a writer. The resurrection of the Victorian past, we argue, represents but one facet of the cultural and literary inheritance Byatt accepts and elaborates on in her fiction. Part of this

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inheritance is the novel form itself, and in Chapter 5 we propose a reading of Byatt’s oeuvre as an ongoing series of reimaginings of the art of storytelling and its various (dis)contents. Focusing on Possession and, in the latter part of the chapter, on Byatt’s growing interest in the fairytale form, we explore the essentially hermeneutic concept of co-creative reading that Byatt’s fictions not only participate in but also habitually advocate. What emerges from our own readings of Possession and several of Byatt’s shorter tales is an emphasis on a practice of reading that is fundamentally grounded in the ‘use of . . . stories in a culture’ (Byatt, 1995d: n. p., emphasis added). Viewed from this angle, Byatt’s reimaginings of the past, as well as her simultaneous engagements with the impossible and fantastic realm of the tale, do not so much serve as playfully subversive illustrations of the postmodern paradigm but rather present as much of a continuation as a challenge to the forms and traditions they engage with. Byatt, we would contend, is, much like Robert Browning (about whom she has written lucidly in a critical capacity), a ‘witness of difference’, and her historical as well as her more fabulous fictions are imaginative ‘resurrections’ not only of past (or wholly imaginary) men and women but also of texts, ‘all separately incarnate, all separately aware in their necessarily and splendidly limited ways, of infinite passion and the pain of finite hearts that yearn’ (PM: 71). As Byatt herself has noted in yet another one of her critical works, a collection of essays fittingly entitled On Histories and Stories (2000), these resurrections are born out of ‘a sense that I [am] myself partaking in the continuity’ of the stories handed down to us ‘by retelling’ and, one might add, by reading and rereading them ‘in a way [both] old and new’ (OHAS: 131). Another ostensibly historical novel of Byatt’s appeared in 2009 under the title The Children’s Book. Shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize in the same year (Byatt was eventually beaten to the coveted prize by Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall, which tells the story of Thomas Cromwell’s rise to prominence at Henry VIII’s court), The Children’s Book is set in a historical period previously uncharted by Byatt. The novel explores the fin-de-siècle world of a large cast of ‘socialists, anarchists, Quakers, Fabians, artists, editors, freethinkers and writers’ (CB: 29), chief among them the rather flamboyant character of Olive Wellwood, a writer of such tales of adventure and enchantment as were highly popular with both children and adults during the period depicted in

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the novel. While undoubtedly continuing and further complicating Byatt’s interest in ‘the difficult modern enterprise’ of ‘writing serious historical fiction . . . in the “same” words, now’ (OHAS: 94), The Children’s Book also doubles as a meditation on the darker side of the storytelling imagination, and on the fairytale form in particular, as Olive’s fictions, over the course of the novel’s sprawling narrative, gradually prove an even more destructive force than the First World War itself (the wholesale slaughter of which naturally concludes Byatt’s story). As The Children’s Book pits the fabulatory pleasures and pitfalls of the tale-telling imagination against the stark realities of the Great War as well as, more generally, against depictions of the mundane laboriousness of life in the English Potteries, a French field hospital or the cut-throat world of the City of London, Chapter 6 of our study explores Byatt’s growing concern with the ‘thinginess’ of human existence over and against the fantasy worlds afforded by the fairytale form and, in doing so, draws illuminating parallels between The Children’s Book and a number of Byatt’s slightly earlier fictions, notably The Biographer’s Tale (2000) and ‘Morpho Eugenia’ from Angels and Insects. What ultimately emerge from our readings of these texts are glimpses of a curiously un-novelistic and antiindividualistic ethos. All of the texts considered in this chapter present the reader with powerful images of humans as types, composites or mere representatives of a species. Read alongside the tales of empowerment and emancipation discussed in the previous chapter, however, such images point to a more complex issue that remains unresolved in Byatt’s oeuvre to date, namely the question of the extent to which human fate is written by biological and discursive forces, and the extent to which understanding these forces may yet be capable of bringing freedom. Concerns about notions of human identity in a post-Darwinian world, the uncertain place of history in an increasingly non-humanist universe and the doubtful capacity of language to describe this universe are, of course, not exclusive to Byatt’s oeuvre, but also reflect the broader preoccupations of her – and our – time. What is more, Byatt has not only participated in and indeed contributed to contemporary debates on these topical questions through her fictions, but has also explicitly discussed many of these issues in her criticism and, indeed, in her role as a reviewer and respected cultural commentator. A regular participant in television and radio debates, adhoc literary discussions at festivals and other live events, as well as

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a prolific contributor to the arts and culture pages of many newspapers both at home and abroad, she has, throughout her writing career, been an active player in the wider cultural field she inhabits and has also undoubtedly helped to shape in important and sometimes surprising ways. Chapter 7 of this book reflects this fact. Considering Byatt’s critical output and its manifold intersections (as well as occasional battles) both with the institutionalised study of literature in university departments and with the contemporary book market, we conclude our study with an exploration of Byatt’s role as public intellectual and illuminate the concept of ‘critical storytelling’, elaborated on from the perspective of her fiction in previous chapters, through the prism of Byatt’s critical writings and journalism. Central to our discussion is what we describe as Byatt’s commitment to the paradigm of dialogical criticism, or criticism as conversation, which not only encompasses the relationship between readers, be they lay or professional, of the same text, but also that of reader to text. Habitually advocating a critical attitude essentially characterised by an openminded curiosity about what a given text is trying to ‘say’, Byatt has, on occasion and often quite deliberately, found herself thoroughly at odds with the academic establishment of her day. At the same time, however, it has been precisely this open-mindedness that has contributed to her ever growing public profile over the years, and, particularly in her role as a reviewer and literary commentator, she has broadened our literary horizons by pondering British fiction in its larger international context, intervening in debates on the supposedly doomed state of the novel at the end of the twentieth century, and, above all, by tirelessly championing new writing. A closer look at Byatt’s engagement with, and active public encouragement of, a younger generation of writers not least also reveals a final curious fact. By the turn of the millennium, Byatt seemed to sit much more comfortably on the map of contemporary British writing than she had done as a young novelist in the 1960s and 1970s. Back then, and in an environment in which novels of gritty social realism, at one end of the spectrum, or anglicised reworkings of the nouveau roman, at the other, were considered to be desirable literary models, it was somewhat easier to dismiss Byatt as an elitist or overly intellectual literary figure than it is in today’s literary climate, where more and more contemporary novelists are rediscovering the power of narrative to grapple with important

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questions of our time. If the last two decades have seen an emphatic revival of the pleasures of intelligent storytelling in British fiction, A. S. Byatt has undoubtedly played an important part in bringing about this sea change – a part that has also finally sealed her reputation as a major British author and confirmed her status as a key figure in late twentieth-century and early twenty-first-century British writing. What unites the arguments presented in this book is an appreciation of A. S. Byatt not only as an important and eminent storyteller of our time, but also as an insightful critic and public intellectual. Indeed, all of Byatt’s works are, as we will show, characterised by intricate negotiations of both literary and critical traditions, and her acute awareness of the often problematic, always richly complex intersections between fiction and critical thought have also provided the first impulse for our own exploration of her oeuvre to date. Throughout this book, we argue that it is essentially within Byatt’s fictions that her own emphasis on the necessary interplay between fiction and criticism, reading and writing, body and mind, tradition and transformation unfolds its fullest potential. Internalising the theoretical puzzlements that have cast such long shadows over the twentieth-century novel, and actively reinscribing their discourses into the textual fabric of fiction itself, Byatt’s novels and short stories productively worry about issues such as the nature of representational art, the relationship between perception and language or the cultural constructions on which the genre of the novel itself is said to rest. In doing so, her fictions not least also substantially complicate our notions of traditions of thought and storytelling as such, and we invite our readers, over and across the individual chapters of this book, to explore the often startling, always stimulating vistas of the narrative and critical terrain that Byatt’s writings map out for us.

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Fathers, sisters and the anxiety of influence: The Shadow of the Sun and The Game To latter-day readers and critics, the early works of any established writer undoubtedly hold a special kind of attraction. Do their first forays into fiction ‘reveal’, as Kuno Schuhmann (2001: 75) puts it, ‘a personality that may be more carefully hidden in later texts? Does the first shaping of themes throw additional light on the later novels?’ In relation to A. S. Byatt’s early work, Kathleen Coyne Kelly (1996: 14), in her monograph on the author, provides at least a partial answer to these questions when she remarks that ‘[w]hile Byatt’s art has certainly matured over the past thirty years, her preoccupation with the artist, the imagination, . . . the impossibility of love and the inevitability of loss has remained constant’. Jane Campbell (2004: 27) elaborates on these constants in Byatt’s oeuvre and lists as ‘main preoccupations . . . already apparent’ in the early fiction recurring character types (‘the ambitious young woman, the disappointed older woman, the visionary genius’), a concern with ‘the tendency of fiction to be parasitic on life and the tendency of criticism, in turn, to feed off and distort creative writing’, a preoccupation with the ‘human cost of the writer’s life’ and, above all, the ‘exploration of the female imagination’. Retracing the themes, strategies, concerns and conditions of A. S. Byatt’s early career as a writer a little further, this chapter focuses on her first two novels, The Shadow of the Sun (1964) and The Game (1967). Both of these works place writers, if not at the centre of narrative gravity, then at the structural centre of their respective plots. The Shadow of the Sun ostensibly tells the story of a seventeen-yearold girl, Anna Severell, trying to free herself from the all-consuming centrifugal force that is her father, a celebrated novelist prone to exalted visions of artistic apprehension and an approximate cross

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between D. H. Lawrence and Vincent Van Gogh. We follow Anna from sulking teenager, through university and on to an uncertain future without a degree, pregnant with her mentor Oliver’s child and on the cusp of a marriage of convenience to fellow student Peter Hughes-Winterton. But The Shadow of the Sun is not simply or merely Anna’s novel: significantly, her story is set off against Byatt’s portrayal of the figure of Anna’s father Henry, whose position in the narrative is typified, early on, by Byatt’s description of the Severells’ household, where Henry’s private study marks the centre of the house, and round what went on in it everything else was ordered – by [his wife] Caroline, because she had decided that this was how her life should be, by the children because they had never supposed that it could be otherwise, by friends and visitors because they were almost always in awe of the idea of Henry Severell, and assumed that his needs must be different from and more pressing than those of others, a feeling which Caroline did her best to encourage. (SS: 5)

As this passage already suggests, Byatt’s novelistic debut, while very much a first novel by a young if ambitious writer, sketches a theme that will recur time and time again in her later fiction: The Shadow of the Sun is centrally concerned with what is commonly taken to be the conflict between ‘life’ and ‘art’. In this novel, this is a very tangible and mainly generational conflict, played out between father and daughter, with the characters of mother/wife and friend/ critic acting as intermediaries. As the title’s obvious allusion to the Platonic cave allegory signals, however, the scope of the narrative canvas is not wholly domestic. Projected on to it is the larger conflict between ‘reality’ and its symbolic representations, and the novel centrally deals in and dramatises this conflict while simultaneously striving to position itself in a literary landscape ravaged and torn by the continuing debates on, precisely, the age-old question of the pitfalls and possibilities (if any) of representational art. In her 1991 introduction to the paperback reissue of The Shadow of the Sun, Byatt reflects on the genesis of her first published work of fiction and recalls thinking out the primitive first idea of it, which was that of someone who had the weight of a future life, amorphously dragging in front of her, someone whose major decisions were all to come, and who found that they had got made whilst she wasn’t looking, by casual acts she

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thought didn’t impair her freedom. That the battle fought itself out between sexuality, literary criticism, and writing, was inevitable. The way in which it shaped itself was more instinctive. (SS: viii)

As befits the first novel of a very young writer taking her first soundings in the literary landscape she is seeking to inhabit, the narrative of The Shadow of the Sun does, in many ways, double as a search for artistic identity, a probing beyond the shadows cast by models of the past and a careful meditation on the traditions of thought and storytelling to which a continued alignment might still prove profitable. Thematically, the search for identity and the mechanisms of its formation are most obviously present in Anna’s story. We first encounter her having run away from boarding school, on a hot summer’s day at her parents’ rural home at Darton, where the Severell family are preparing for the imminent arrival of their house guests, Oliver and Margaret Canning. The atmosphere is one of waiting and of festering family tensions carefully kept under wraps. Anna, having escaped to her private hide-out at the bottom of the back garden, sits sulking, ‘wondering what to do next . . . without allowing herself to upset herself too much by thinking about intangibles like sex, or her own future, or why she was alive at all’ (SS: 14–15). Like most teenagers, Anna is wrapped up in trying to find out ‘who she was, or what she wanted, in her own right’, and, again like most teenagers, she tries her hand at writing in the process. Indeed, ‘[i]t was to be expected that she would want to write. People who met her, knowing that she was Henry’s daughter, assumed it’ (SS: 15). Yet the very fact of having a famous novelist for a father does not exactly help matters here: ‘when it came to the writing itself he [her father] was crushing. He presented a standard that it was already impossible for her to attain’, so that ‘whenever she began to think in that direction, she came up against Henry’, whom she ‘knew she could never emulate’ (SS: 16–17). It is certainly tempting to compare such passages from the novel to Byatt’s own comments on the themes and conditions of her early writing as expressed in the 1991 preface. There, she speaks of the influence that F. R. Leavis’s ‘moral ferocity which dismissed all literature but the greatest’ had on her during her student days at Cambridge: He could show you the toughness of a sentence, the strength and the grace of it, the way another one failed and betrayed itself, but you paid

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a terrible price for this useful technical knowledge. It went without saying in his world, as later in Helen Gardner’s, that anything you wrote yourself would fall so woefully short of the highest standards that it was better not to try. . . . In his shadow his pupils, would-be critics and would-be poets and novelists alike shrivelled into writing-blocks. (SS: x–xi)

In view of comments such as this, it is perhaps not surprising that the search for potential biographical parallels between Anna Severell and her creator has tended to dominate the rather sparse body of criticism produced on The Shadow of the Sun so far. Campbell (2004: 28), for example, classifies the novel as an elaboration on the form of the ‘female bildungsroman’ and states that ‘[t]hrough Anna, Byatt examines a problem from her own experience. . . . Anna’s problem – of finding her own vision and the means of expressing it – is . . . the same as that encountered by her creator.’ Discussions like Christien Franken’s or Kathleen Coyne Kelly’s similarly take their cue from Byatt’s (unusually sympathetic) pronouncements on the subject of gender and art in the 1991 preface and propose a reading of the character of Anna in terms of Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar’s feminist reworking of Harold Bloom’s dictum of the ‘anxiety of influence’ as the female artist’s fundamental ‘anxiety of authorship’.1 Byatt’s own comment that her ‘novels all think about the problem of female vision, female art and thought’ seems to support such readings (SS: XIV). And yet, as it will turn out, Anna, unlike Byatt, is precisely not an artist but an artist’s daughter, ‘a descendant’, in Byatt’s words, also of D. H. Lawrence’s Birkin, ‘a portrait of the artist with the artist left out’ (SS: xii). Significantly then, the denouement of the plot Anna feels trapped in for much of the duration of The Shadow of the Sun will finally release her into authorship not of fiction but – simply enough – of her own life. What is more, Byatt explicitly states that what she very much did not want to do in The Shadow of the Sun was to write what she calls ‘a me-novel’, and, if the narrative’s thematic concern with identity does, to some extent, reflect ‘the eternal first novelist’s problem’ of not ‘knowing anything – about life, at least’ (SS: viii), there is a more serious, and more seriously aesthetic dimension to Byatt’s probing beyond the confines of limited knowledge than Anna’s rather simple coming-of-age story suggests. Through Henry Severell, cast as an archetypally Romantic figure of artistic genius, and through his sidekick, the critic Oliver Canning,

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broader issues of tradition and transformation, art and life, mimesis and human action are introduced and negotiated. The aesthetic argument ultimately turns on the perceived paradis perdu of a Romantic-cum-Lawrentian belief in the potential totality of the artistic imagination as represented by Henry, as opposed to Oliver’s socially committed and essentially Leavisite pragmatics of reading. Byatt, a student, as we know, of Leavis at Cambridge and an avid reader in her youth of D. H. Lawrence – ‘whom I cannot escape and cannot love’ (SS: xii) – comments that The Shadow of the Sun was in many ways ‘about the paradox of Leavis preaching Lawrence when if the two had ever met they would have hated each other. It was about the secondary imagination feeding off, and taming, the primary – to use Coleridgean terms’ (SS: xi). Unlike Leavis and Lawrence, the fictional novelist Henry and his equally fictional explicator Oliver do meet at regular intervals. Shortly after the Cannings’ arrival at Darton at the beginning of the novel, Oliver and Henry take a turn in the back garden. The atmosphere created by this ‘curious intimacy, between a writer and his intelligent reader’ (SS: 33) is somewhat tense. Oliver’s attempts at conversation naturally – and significantly – turn on the view, yet his tone remains decidedly antagonistic. Cornfields and trees, the very emblems of Henry’s creative powers, hold little attraction for urban and analytical Oliver: when I come to the country, when I see real grass and trees, I don’t believe in it, I imagine it’s all a show specially put on and preserved for my benefit, you know, like ancient monuments – filled up with period chairs fetched from everywhere else to make the house lived in again – as it never was, not with those chairs. I think they’ve put a tree here and corn there, and let some water run across the corner of the picture, so I can have a bit of everything and see what country used to be. (SS: 31)

To perceive the landscape that stretches before him as mere imitation, as a poor copy of what Oliver, with marked cynicism, calls ‘a pocket of England as it used to be, . . . before subtopia got it, before concrete and corrugated iron and diesel fumes, before London and Birmingham and Manchester started putting out feelers towards each other and spreading smoke further than that’ (SS: 31), is, of course, in many ways a deeply Platonic stance to take. Yet aesthetic Idealism is not what primarily motivates Oliver here. Pressing Henry to agree with him on the irreality and irrelevance of the scene, Oliver proceeds

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to launch an explicit attack on both the sujet and the conditions of production of Henry’s work as a writer and the social responsibility that, for Oliver, ought to go with it: ‘don’t you feel, sometimes, that this is a bit thin, now, you must know what I mean – that it’s not what’s important now? Doesn’t it make you feel guilty? Don’t you think you should go out and come to grips with the horror?’ (SS: 31). Henry, at last stirred out of his increasingly irritable silence, responds in kind: ‘Come to grips? . . . Do you mean describe, or condemn, or both? No, I can’t say I do. And I wouldn’t know how else to come to grips. I’m not going to live in it, or near it. I don’t have to. Why should I?’ ‘Because it’s real. Because it’s urgent.’ ‘I find this real and urgent enough,’ Henry muttered into his beard. (SS: 31–2)

And indeed he does. Prone to ‘attacks of vision’ since his youth, Henry has long been accustomed to what, invariably and in line with Romantic tradition, are exalted – and very ‘real and urgent’ – moments of artistic apprehension of nature which, in his wife’s experience, are ‘almost always only a prelude to fits of really strange behaviour’ (SS: 8), but which Henry himself perceives as ‘a direct source of power’ (SS: 58–9). When, during one of his solitary walks in the countryside, Henry contemplates the cornfields stretching before him and sees intense light moving across them, the narrative becomes positively overwrought with literary allusion and ornate and unmistakably Lawrentian imagery: And still the light poured, heavy, and white, and hot, into the valley before him and collected, molten and seething, on the corn beneath him; he could hear it thundering into the silence; and still he had to see, so that his cone was now an hourglass funnel, opening both ways, and the wide light all pressed and weighed in the point of intersection which was himself, and the gold figures, hieratic, with gold faces and swords of flame, walked in the sea of corn in ordered patterns, like reapers. . . . They burst like dragon’s teeth men, one by one, from the bright land; he knew they were not tangible, nor presences, nor differentiated one from the other; they were a way of seeing. . . . To see like this was to be alive. (SS: 80)

Judith Plotz (2001: 43) has noted of this passage that Henry’s ‘highly imaged consciousness of the vision . . . links it to mythological patterns, [and] the ecstatic vocabulary makes this into a moment of

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high imagination’ that allows Henry ‘conscious insight into and a felt kinship with such figures as Blake, Coleridge, Böhme, and Henry Moore, whom he reveres as visionaries’. What is more, Henry’s own literary genius, undisputed by any of the characters around him, seems to ‘certify these experiences as revelations rather than delusions’. Habitually – and perhaps significantly – brought on by periods not of creative but of academic work on his interminable Analysis of the English Romantic Movement, Henry’s ‘visions’ are, however, clearly constructed out of, or at least firmly enmeshed in, an already existing set of intersecting texts. They are, in a word, revelations of a textual rather than of a truly transcendent nature.2 Furthermore, the narrative presentation of these ‘visions’ in the mode of gentle and somewhat ambiguous pastiche introduces, at a formal level, an element of knowing irony that casts some doubt on the continuing validity of such moments of exalted insight in a postRomantic age.3 Unknown to Henry, his visions seem doomed to be an imitation – a double (and doubly ironic) imitation, first of textualised versions of his ‘visionary’ predecessors, and second of an unmediated ‘real’ posited by precisely these textual predecessors as apprehensible through, but ultimately remaining beyond, textual structure. The narrative of The Shadow of the Sun thus provides us with anything but an unequivocal endorsement of Henry’s visionary spells and his sense of being the ‘master-knot’ in a world in which ‘everything connected’ (SS: 59). Henry’s intellectual counterpart Oliver is, by contrast, cast from the outset as an analytical, compartmentalising critic. Appropriately enough, we first encounter Oliver Canning and his wife Margaret in a railway compartment travelling from London to Darton. They present ‘an odd couple’ (SS: 23). Physically unconventionally matched, the Cannings also have little in common either intellectually or temperamentally. During the train journey, Margaret is passing her time leafing through the pages of The Listener underneath which ‘she was hiding one of the glossier cheap women’s magazines, which she had bought from the station bookstall when it became apparent that Oliver was not going to talk to her during the journey’. She ‘was ashamed of this now, and . . . had tried to pretend she hadn’t got it’. Oliver, as Margaret is well aware, ‘believed the reading of such papers to be positively morally wrong’ (SS: 22), and she recalls, with considerable unease, overhearing ‘one of his fierce, absolute little speeches’ on the topic: ‘one has never time to read that kind of stuff.

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. . . One has so short a life and there is always something one could be reading that would add to one’s knowledge, or give one some insight into things’ (SS: 23). This, presumably, is exactly what Oliver is doing as the train rattles on towards Darton. Margaret, meanwhile, ‘looked out of the window at cornfields and allotments . . . and then down at her own lap again and met the small blurred newsprint eyes of Henry Severell’ (SS: 25). In this scene, the focus first of all lies on different ways of seeing, on a hierarchy of vision, so to speak, that both mirrors and informs the hierarchy of character on which the plot of The Shadow of the Sun ostensibly rests. What Margaret sees are not the symbolically charged images of Henry’s artful apprehensions of similar scenes but mere ‘glimpses, constantly whisked in and out of sight’, no more resonant than Henry’s ‘blurred newsprint eyes’ on the title-page of the magazine. Margaret belongs, and perceives herself as belonging, to the group of mere mortals from which Henry stands singularly apart: ‘Henry Severell was after all a genius, they said; he saw some things more clearly than other people, and was preoccupied with larger issues than those they were struggling with’ (SS: 25). Predictably, Oliver himself is far less inclined to submit to the role of secondary Severell-satellite. During the conversation between the two men in the garden, Oliver cannot help but once again challenge Henry’s synaesthetically totalising mindset, remarking: ‘I always find the south a bit tame, myself, . . . coming from where I do – I expect the land to be all rocks and heather, and sharp edges, and ups and downs, you know. The south’s a bit rounded off, for me. A bit too finished’ (SS: 32). Yet Oliver’s bid for identifiable contrasts, ultimately a bid for an aesthetics of difference, falls on deaf ears on this occasion. Henry is still annoyed and ‘angry that Oliver . . . should act as the forerunner of his condemned subtopia, imposing it where it was not, talking limits into land Henry lived in, and found, easily, limitless’ (SS: 32). He, for one, could, ‘look at anything until he was lost and saw, and heard, nothing beyond it’ (SS: 33), and what Henry says to Oliver about what he views as the critic’s interference with his work – ‘my work – you go on driving that round and round’ – applies as easily to the symbolically charged landscape that inspires it: ‘Why can’t you just look at it, and leave it alone?’ Oliver’s response is apt: ‘“It’s not in me,” said Oliver, with mock sorrow. “It’s not the way I go on. It may work for you. Only I am full of care, and I don’t stare, I think”’ (SS: 32–3).4

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Ostensibly, and at the most basic level, the conflict negotiated in the scene between Henry and Oliver is one between creativity and criticism, ‘seeing’ and ‘thinking’, writing and reading, synthetic versus analytical ways of imagining and perceiving the world. Discussed in explicitly aesthetic terms that pit a holistically inspired symbolism against a socially committed realism, however, this conflict also reflects the historical split between Romanticism and realism that has not only run between and within authors from the nineteenth century onwards but that has also significantly shaped our ways of discussing evolving reading and writing practices since that time. Terry Eagleton, in Literary Theory, offers a helpful summary of this historical state of affairs as he retraces this split from the Romantic fetishisation of the symbol as a ‘semi-mystical doctrine’ within which, it was felt, ‘a whole set of conflicts . . . – between subject and object, the universal and the particular, the sensuous and the conceptual, material and spiritual, order and spontaneity – could be magically resolved’ (Eagleton, 1996: 19) through to Leavis’s ‘moral and cultural crusade’ (Eagleton, 1996: 29) for an equally fetishised ‘Great Tradition’ of largely realist novels as the moral bulwark against the ills of degenerative mass culture. For Leavis, however, not even Romanticism’s realist successors were ultimately capable of conveying the ‘organic’ whole(some)ness and vitality that characterised all that was (morally) good about the version of ‘English Literature’ he chose to champion. The Leavisite golden age of English lay, much in accordance with T. S. Eliot’s ‘theory’ put forward in his 1921 essay ‘The Metaphysical Poets’, in a decidedly pre-Miltonic realm. Eagleton summarises this stance: ‘After Milton, . . . English literature degenerated into Romanticism and Victorianism.’ In this scheme of things, ‘some poets could think but not feel, while others could feel but not think’, and ‘it was not until the appearance of T. S. Eliot that English literature began to recuperate’ (Eagleton, 1996: 33–4). It is at this juncture – a juncture explored again and in much greater detail in Byatt’s The Virgin in the Garden (1978) – that the argument between Oliver and Henry in The Shadow of the Sun finds its most obvious historical anchor. In the mid-twentieth century, the presumed split between Romanticism and Victorianism still dominated critical discourses at a conceptual level and F. R. Leavis and T. S. Eliot were alive and well. For a younger generation, caught between Eliot’s famous dictum of modernity’s ‘dissociation of sensibility’ (Eliot, 1921: 64) and a sneaking suspicion that neither

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modernism nor Romantic or Victorian models were ultimately capable of healing the rift between ‘thought’ and ‘experience’, ‘words’ and ‘things’, the question of where contemporary fiction and its criticism were going to go from here was a difficult one to ponder. Debating precisely this question within the framework of fiction, The Shadow of the Sun offers, at first sight at least, rather inconclusive answers. As we have already seen, Henry Severell is no latter-day metaphysical poet. Thought for him may temporarily ‘modify his sensibility’, but it is certainly not ‘as immediate . . . as the odour of a rose’ (Eliot, 1921: 64); at best, a rose, a cornfield, or intense sunlight conjure up a remembered line from Coleridge’s ‘The Ancient Mariner’ or Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Experience; at worst, the ‘struggle toward unification of sensibility’ (Eliot, 1921: 65) descends into Lawrentian pastiche. Oliver Canning, meanwhile, may be an astute thinker and a pragmatist, but what he knows to be ‘real grass and trees’ he nevertheless cannot help but ‘imagine’ as a mere ‘show specially put on and preserved for my benefit’ (SS: 31; emphasis added). Representational language and the gap – perceived to be ever widening – between words and things seriously obstructs, it seems, the quest for authenticity of both thought and experience here. This quest for authenticity is one that Oliver and Henry ultimately share, but, while Oliver is conscious of its attendant representational puzzlements, Henry, it seems, is not. Largely unaware of the deeply textual nature of his ‘visions’, Henry both resents and rejects ‘Oliver’s view of his world as a picture, sandwiched into a frame of man-made tidinesses’ (SS: 61); instead, he habitually sets out to ‘loose’ himself – ‘the division of his senses and the sense of his own identity disintegrating from moment to moment’ (SS: 79) – and celebrates, in his post-visionary moments, what he perceives as ‘a language new and washed clean’ (SS: 84). Rather than a ‘language new and . . . clean’, however, the novel which Henry inhabits reserves, as we have seen, its most obvious moments of pastiche for Henry’s most heightened states of consciousness. It is worth noting that The Shadow of the Sun deploys such elements of pastiche with some degree of ambivalence on its own part. Situating itself at a palpably post-Eliotesque and post-Lawrentian threshold of late twentieth-century writing, the novel (re)produces, within the structures of its own discourses, the conflict between the desire for unmediated experience and a ‘new and clean’ language to express it in, and a more knowing view of language and subjectivity

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which, at this historically specific moment, is perceived to be surging to the surface of the collective literary consciousness. This, of course, is a conflict that Byatt has gone on to explore time and again both in her criticism (notably in her 1979 essay ‘People in Paper Houses’ (PM: 165–88), where she discusses the impact of this new self-consciousness about language on the competing forces of realism versus experiment in post war British fiction and criticism) and in her later novels, there gradually working towards, if not resolution, then at least a creatively productive mode of reconciling different literary and intellectual allegiances and notions of tradition and experimentation by drawing on what she has called, in a different context, the ‘both-and’ rather than the ‘either-or’ of ‘serious historical fiction today’ (OHAS: 94). In The Shadow of the Sun, however, the focus still lies mainly on a fictional diagnosis of a specific historical state of affairs rather than on the resolution of the conflict it is perceived to have produced. A closer look at the last two chapters of the novel may serve to illustrate this point. After the facts of Oliver’s affair with Anna, the end of the Cannings’ marriage, Anna’s pregnancy, her resolve to marry someone else altogether, and Henry’s belated and ultimately failed attempt to open the lines of communication with his daughter have been laid bare, Oliver and Henry meet for the last time at the Severells’ house. Neither of them may regret the loss of their ‘curious intimacy’ (SS: 33) much at this stage, but for Henry at least there is more at stake here than the damaged relations with his daughter or the end of a friendship that has been uneasy and quarrelsome at the best of times. Alone in his study after Oliver’s final departure, Henry is contemplating the price he may now have to pay for his habitual detachment from the affairs of others and the human damage this has caused: ‘part of the payment’, his ‘fall’, as he perceives it, ‘was to consist of a real but almost imperceptible loss of solitude, of a growth in him of what Oliver would have praised as humanity’ (SS: 279). What is ultimately at stake here is the potential loss of Henry’s powers as a writer, intimately bound up, as we know, with his carefully guarded solitary position. Ironically, it is precisely the encounter with the processes of art extending into the social sphere, a recognition, that is, of the seemingly ubiquitous power of fiction and its mechanisms, that makes Henry most acutely aware of the danger of such a loss. Contemplating his current predicament,

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[h]e thought, he had tried to tempt Fate, though that was not what it had looked like at the time. . . . He had it all planned, he saw now, like a sketch of a novel, the dramatically suitable punishment for hubris, he had quite ludicrously, in some unconscious way, organized – or at the very least, invited it all. (SS: 278–9)

Henry, it seems, is faced with a classic case of life imitating art. Rather than recognising and embracing such intimations of (inter)textuality, however, rather than reading this state of affairs as occasion to conceive of the (artistic as well as social) mimetic act as, in Michael Riffaterre’s words, a ‘praxis of interpretation’, not representation (Riffaterre, 1984: 159), its reading has to be kept at bay if Henry’s writing is to survive. So, as dawn begins to fill Henry’s study and the (natural) pale morning light gradually supersedes the (man-made) glow of the fire that has been burning all night in the fire place, his surroundings dissolved like the flames. Walls folded and opened like curtains, the light tore at them and probed their flimsiness, the window split and opened finally, an infinite tunnel of bright glass into a live and turning sky. He was contained now by the light only, he was abandoned to what he knew was not human. (SS: 280)

The language and imagery in which Henry’s final escape into such dehumanised realms of visionary genius is described, are, of course, only too familiar by now. The suspicion, however, that – even for Henry himself – the ‘tunnel of bright glass’ this time does not herald ‘a language new and clean’ but rather brings into view the stiff and brittle branches of a dead metaphor, a stale pastiche of a pastiche, is more than palpable at this late stage in the narrative. When, at the end of the penultimate chapter of The Shadow of the Sun, ‘the clamour of light leaped and increased’ and ‘Henry unknitted his shoulders and went out with it, gathering speed’ (SS: 280), the reader is left with a highly ambiguous image of a man whose capacity for renewed textual agency is anything but certain. Anna, for her part, appears similarly muted at the end of The Shadow of the Sun. She has, for the time being, escaped both her father and Oliver to London, where her fiancé Peter, apprised of all the facts and specifically of Oliver’s paternity of Anna’s unborn baby, is looking after her while ‘Anna let him slowly construct the story as he saw it’:

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the great emptiness that had been her childhood, Henry’s large shadow, Oliver’s determined move into the emptiness, how she had managed finally, at what cost to herself, to evade his clutches, and last, almost casually, the pregnancy, as though this solid difficulty was just another strand in the psychological net she was or had been entangled in. (SS: 281)

For much of the duration of the final chapter, Anna is (and is allowing herself to be) carefully written out of this familiar story, and written instead into the story of Peter’s family. Safely, if uneasily, installed as the prospective daughter-in-law at the Hughes-Wintertons’ ancestral home in Yorkshire, Anna, however, gradually comes to realise that this rewrite has resulted only in one plot, one ‘psychological net’, being replaced by another. In submitting to Peter’s plans for their future together, Anna, as she now recognises, ‘had not allowed for herself, or her own modes of knowledge; here, she would be halfhuman; a child in a nursery. Which she might have wanted blindly for a moment, but she could do better than that’ (SS: 295). Ultimately, however, the question is whether she, or anyone, truly can. If Henry had been longing to abandon himself ‘to what he knew was not human, to where he was alive’ (SS: 280, emphasis added), it is precisely the humanity of a fully self-determined life that Anna is striving for at the end of The Shadow of the Sun. In her hastily scribbled leaving note to Peter, Anna writes: ‘I have suddenly come to see that I must do things for myself. Because what one does affects one more than it looks as though it is going to when one does it’ (SS: 295). Ironically, Anna will understand the precise extent of the truth of this last sentence only after she has run away to York, determined to start her own life at last, free not only of Peter, of his family as well as of her own, but also of Oliver, whom, contrary to previous arrangements, she is resolved not to meet at the city’s Station Hotel. Having arrived early at their appointed meeting place, Anna’s overriding impulse is ‘to go, now. Alone.’ But In the doorway, Oliver caught her elbow. He said, ‘Where are you going, in that inappropriate hat?’ Anna turned slowly to him, waking up out of a dream, seeing that what one did was indeed done, one was what one did, this as well, this above all, watching her last chance, or illusion, which? slip away as Oliver held her from it. ‘I was just going,’ she said, ‘But it doesn’t matter. I wouldn’t have gone far, I suspect.’ Oliver’s grip was like a claw on her elbow. (SS: 297)

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Unlike the eponymous heroine of A. S. Byatt’s 1992 fairytale ‘The Story of the Eldest Princess’ (DNE: 39–72), who quite literally rewrites the classic fairytale plot and lives happily and independently ever after, Anna, it seems, can ultimately only submit to her fate, ‘the feared and expected end’ of a story of which Oliver, for better or for worse, has been a part from the very beginning: ‘Seeing Oliver, now, Anna saw that it was silly to imagine it could have been done without him’ (SS: 298). At the end of The Shadow of the Sun, then, both Anna and the reader are left with an image of ‘[g]reyness, and remembered brightness, things done and things to do; one had to contain them, and continue somehow’ (SS: 298). If this final image accurately reflects the complicated ordinariness of Anna’s decidedly antiromantic predicament at the end of a story that both has and has not been her own, it also provides an extremely fitting metaphor for the realist desire for, and fear of plot, for the ‘world-producing power of mimesis’ and the simultaneous attempt to distance oneself from it (Gebauer and Wulf, 1995: 219). Most importantly, however, such ‘[g]reyness, and remembered brightness, things done and things to do’ offer an apt metaphor for A. S. Byatt’s plotted analysis within the fiction of The Shadow of the Sun of the state of the novel at the beginning of the end of the twentieth century – its uneasy nostalgia for both Lawrence and Leavis, George and T. S. Eliot, and the tentative hope that there might just be a space for contemporary fiction that could be illuminated by its own and decidedly worldly light – neither Coleridge’s secondary Moon nor the bright primary rays of the Sun, but the knowledge that ‘one had to contain them, and continue somehow’. Like The Shadow of the Sun, A. S. Byatt’s second novel The Game has, over the years, attracted its fair share of biographical criticism. Commentary on this novel tends to focus on the perceived parallels between the portrayal of the two main characters’ sibling rivalry, around which the plot of The Game revolves, and the fraught and often publicly embattled relationship between A. S. Byatt and her younger sister, the novelist Margaret Drabble.5 The temptation to read The Game as a roman à clef is certainly an obvious one. It should, however, be equally obvious to the attentive reader that Byatt’s novel itself not only serves as a cautionary tale against precisely this way of doing criticism but also grapples with a wealth of aesthetic

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paradoxes that reach far beyond the immediately autobiographical. Again, it is the perceived conflict between ‘art’ and ‘life’, their difference and their similarity, that lies at the intellectual centre of Byatt’s fictional musings. But if the emphasis in The Shadow of the Sun had been on a historical diagnosis of the relations between these two poles of the representational spectrum, and on Byatt’s attempt to map her own as well as her text’s specific literary-historical context, The Game turns its attention more immediately to an examination of itself as a work of fiction, and thus centrally to fiction’s conceptual relation to traditional art/life dichotomies. As Sabine Foisner (1989–90: 193) rightly notes, the novel’s central ‘conflict is not domestic, but a battle between mimetic fiction and autotelic metaphor’. The Game narrates the story of two sisters, one an Oxford don, the other a successful popular novelist. The fictional siblings are bound together as much as entrapped by the lingering aftermath of a childhood bond of intense imaginative activity (the Game of the title) and a shared teenage crush on the boy next door. Coming together as adults for their father’s funeral, the physical reality of the parental home makes academic Cassandra ‘realize that she was just as much as ever an object of Julia’s speculation, Julia’s tale-telling’ (G: 108). Julia, meanwhile, as the younger and more worldly sister of the two, notes in a letter to a friend: ‘I’ve always been scared stiff of waking up and finding out that I was nothing but a thought in Cassandra’s mind’ (G: 104). Much of what follows centres on Julia’s predatory use of Cassandra’s life as material for her fiction, an act of mimetic plundering prefigured by a more obvious ‘theft’ of literary material that occurred during the Corbett sisters’ teenage years, when Julia published as her own a version of a story which had initially been devised by Cassandra for the girls’ childhood ‘Game’ and which, up until then, ‘was, or had been, common property’. Cassandra ‘had felt outrage’ at the time and ‘punished Julia by silence’. The teenage Julia, meanwhile, ‘tried independence and wrote another story, which was rejected by the magazine; she could not keep up the Game alone, and had little else to do; she suffered a wild and aimless despair’ (G: 84–5). Years later, Julia finally does assert her independence by writing, and publishing, A Sense of Glory, her fictional account of Cassandra’s tortured pining for the sisters’ childhood friend Simon Moffitt. Julia’s novel had initially been conceived therapeutically as ‘a way of coming to grips with what’s frightened me, with what I

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could, but don’t, understand. . . . It would be a way of coming to grips with Cassandra, but also of detaching us’ (G: 148). The detachment, however, turns out to be horrifyingly absolute: in the immediate wake of A Sense of Glory’s publication, Cassandra, admittedly already well on her way to mental instability, kills herself. In her journal, Cassandra cites as the reason for her suicide that Julia ‘does a little more than simply see me, and that little is intolerable’ (G: 276). The ‘little more’ that proves too much for Cassandra ultimately also proves an inadequate strategy for Julia herself: ‘We think, Julia thought, that we are releasing ourselves by plotting what traps us, by laying it all out to look at – but in fact all we do is show the trap up for real’ (G: 251). Throughout The Game, what is at stake – not only in the conflict between Julia and Cassandra but also in the novel’s exploration of its own discursive mechanisms – is what Byatt, writing about Iris Murdoch, has described as ‘the tension between the attempt to tell, or see, the truth’ and ‘[t]he inevitability of fantasy, the need for concepts and form and the recognition that all speech is in a sense distortion, that novelists are fantasy-mongers’ (Byatt, 1976b: 35–6). This tension is something the characters of The Game experience and grapple with on a daily basis. The blurred boundaries between the sisters’ subjectivities have troubled both of them ever since the shared storytelling of their childhood Game had come to an end with Julia’s public appropriation of the common imaginative material. As adults, distant and ostensibly estranged, the sisters still struggle to perceive themselves as distinct from one another. Watching a television appearance of Julia’s, Cassandra sees her sister as ‘a mirrorimage of myself’ (G: 16–8). Similarly, Julia feels that ‘[a]ll her life, Cassandra had always been the mirror where she studied the effects of her actions. It was Cassandra’s reactions that proved her existence’ (G: 283). In Cassandra’s case, the effects of these unstable demarcation lines have long since been internalised – to the extent that, as her priest confides to Julia, the adult ‘Cassandra has . . . only a very tenuous connection with reality. She is aware of this, which makes it, in some ways, worse’ (G: 146). Significantly, both Cassandra’s awareness of her mental state and her rationalising constructions upon it regularly find expression in writing – in her case, in the most private and interior form of writing, the journal, which to her has become ‘an increasingly necessary means of distinguishing between what was real and what was

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imagined’ (G: 26–7). Julia’s far more public work as a novelist serves, it could be argued, a very similar purpose: ‘She wrote, she said, compulsively, in order to understand events, in her own life, or others’ (G: 168). Unlike her earlier work, however, which rarely rose ‘above a level of complaining about facts’, Julia’s latest project about her sister will, she hopes, be ‘a real novel, with a real idea behind it, not a complaint’ – a novel, ironically, ‘about the dangers of imbalance between imagination and reality’ (G: 148). Turning thus to writing in their respective quests to lift themselves above the level of disturbing fantasy and strike a workable balance between what is real and what is imagined, both sisters look beyond the immediately personal to gain an aesthetic or conceptual purchase on their sibling relationship, and the distorting power of language. Julia, who notes that ‘I don’t . . . use my imagination enough, and she [Cassandra] uses hers too much’, thinks of herself and her sister as contrasting yet complementary figures of the romantic imagination, [l]ike Wordsworth and Coleridge, one trying to ‘give the charm of novelty to things of every day’, whilst the other – Julia’s memory struggled with a disquisition on the topic she had heard from Cassandra years ago – the other likes ‘persons and characters supernatural, or at least romantic’. How did it go on? Something about transferring human interest from our ‘inward nature’ and ‘a semblance of truth sufficient to procure for these shadows of imagination that willing suspension of disbelief for the moment . . .’ – ah, yes – ‘that constitutes poetic faith’. (G: 148)6

Cassandra, meanwhile, ponders George Herbert’s poem ‘The Elixir’ in one of her journal entries. Her reflections on Herbert’s, her own and, one might argue, Byatt’s uses of the metaphor of glass throughout the narrative of The Game double as a comment not only on the ambivalence of Cassandra’s private writings but on the general problematics of a writing based on the paradigm of vision: It could be argued that I resent the simple idea of reality conveyed in the solid presence of chair and paper-weight. I am particularly disturbed by glass-objects . . . because they contain, being transparent, the suggestion that they are not simply solid. A man that looks on glass On it may stay his eye Or if he pleases through it pass And then the heaven espy. Here is the paradox of all vision. But let it be remembered that these objects have weight, as well as transparency. Not only surface, and heaven beyond the surface, but ponderous weight. (G: 166–7)7

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In Byatt’s later work, glass regularly and explicitly figures as an affirmative metaphor for the writing of fiction – ‘a solid metaphor, it is a medium for seeing and a thing seen at once’ (DNE: 274–5). Here, however, Cassandra’s deliberations on the nature and metaphorical potential of glass ultimately lead her to reject this particular ‘image of vision’ as revealing only ‘partial truths, like certain putative works of art. Like almost all works of art’ (G: 167). Not for Cassandra then, the ‘semblance of truth sufficient to procure for these shadows of imagination that willing suspension of disbelief . . . that constitutes poetic faith’. Instead, Cassandra muses: ‘I pursue, professionally, self-indulgently, any metaphor to the death, fantastical or truth-revealing, who knows which’ (G: 170). Exploring precisely this question, the fantasy–truth debate that informs the intellectual agenda of Byatt’s novel revolves to no small degree around traditional oppositions and tensions between the cognitive potential of art on the one hand and science on the other. Within the narrative framework of The Game, both turn on a conceptual axis of visual perception, embodied time and time again in the medium of television, the modern looking-glass world with the camera-eye projected on to the television screen, the ‘mirror of our desires’ (G: 167). Early on in the novel, Cassandra watches a nature documentary on butterflies presented by Simon Moffit, now a herpetologist and television naturalist, in which he propounds: the scientist with a camera . . . can, as it were, rediscover innocence. The innocent eye, not ignorant, but trained, detached, seeing everything for itself, for what it is, with no apprehensions and very fluid preconceptions. Once one has one’s own feelings in hand – once one’s fears are real fears and one’s needs are real needs – everything else can be seen with that pure curiosity which is one of the highest human qualities. And I would call it innocence. An achieved, an informed innocence. (G: 24)

Cassandra’s reaction to Simon’s anything but innocent on-screen performance is characteristically literary. Invoking Coleridge’s poem ‘Psyche’, she notes in her diary: ‘I wish I could tell you, Simon, how much I enjoy the irony of your self-projection as a scientific observer in a topsy-turvy Eden. Well, cherish your illusory neutrality; there is no love . . . that does not deform and kill. We cannot combine butterfly and serpent without corrupting the butterfly’ (G: 25).8 According to Cassandra’s reading of both poem and programme, then, it is not only body and soul but also ‘Nature’ and our textual constructions

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upon it that are inescapably and – to Cassandra’s mind at least – corruptingly intertwined. Simon, it thus seems, ignores the textuality (as well as the culturally laden subtexts) of his hybrid endeavours as scientist and scientific entertainer and mediator at his peril – his deceptively visual medium is textual to the core, however unwilling he may be to confront, much less to embrace the (inter)textual entanglements that inevitably and always-already obstruct the view. Cassandra’s observation that Simon ‘had always been, . . . as a scientist, unduly given to the vague and loaded generalization’ (G: 24–5) is as apt as her ironic scepticism towards his ‘illusory neutrality’. Christien Franken (2001: 64–5; 74), in her discussion of The Game, delivers a feminist critique of the ‘dissociative function of the visual metaphor as a model of knowledge’ as employed in Byatt’s novel and classifies Simon’s longing for ‘impersonal vision’ as an emblem of patriarchal domination over Cassandra’s prophetically symbolist and Julia’s ‘proto-feminist vision’ as an artist. In our view, however, The Game makes a somewhat more complex point here. Throughout the novel, visual perceptions compete with verbal representations for cognitive primacy, and the question of their similarity and/or difference as modes (or models) of knowledge is pondered by Byatt’s characters against the backdrop of a densely woven narrative canvas of predominantly visual metaphors of textuality. The tendency to privilege vision – however uneasily – over verbal usage is, of course, not unique to the characters of The Game. Most traditional theories of imagination (and imaginative representation) similarly – and centrally – ground themselves in vision as the primary cognitive paradigm, and the resulting devaluation of the verbal has potentially serious consequences, not least for the novel form. Interestingly, however, it is precisely the narrative of The Game as a whole that ponders this age-old tension by dramatising how, on the one hand, acts of seeing can reify the object, and, on the other, how they are always-already linked to discourse if and to the extent that they render either the object or the act meaningful. During yet another television programme, in which Simon and Julia appear together with a poet, a musician and a sculptor to reflect on television itself ‘as the new art medium’ and to explore ‘what sort of areas of human experience can be treated in different media’, acts of seeing vis-à-vis acts of verbalisation are once again explicitly discussed by the characters, this time also forming the anchor for a popular variation on the ‘Two Cultures’ debate. During

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the programme, Simon repeatedly protests that ‘I’m not an artist’ (G: 185; 186; 191) and gets increasingly irritated by what he perceives as the other panellists’ relentless over-interpretation of his work as a television naturalist: ‘Those snakes are real snakes,’ he said. ‘You watch a snake eating. You watch it eating. First, you watch that.’ ‘O.K.’ said Ben. ‘So you watch it.’ ‘Well, you might just be curious about how it does it. Why not? You might just want to know.’ ‘Well, that affects you,’ Percy said. ‘It might not. Why should it? Why should it be anything to do with you? It’s filling its own stomach. We don’t know what it feels like. It’s simply there. I – I wanted simply to – learn, to measure.’ ‘Simon –’ said Julia urgently. ‘Scientific knowledge –’ said Simon, ‘the thing itself –’ Percy burst into speech. ‘No, honestly, you can’t get away with that. I mean, with all this rubbish about the pathetic fallacy. Snakes are absolutely weighed down with meanings for the average man – you kept referring to them quite naturally on your programmes – death and rebirth, evil and healing, water and light, oh, you know, and sex, look at your Freud. . . . Now, why shouldn’t the thing itself really “mean” something? Since it has had these mythical meanings through the ages, why do we suppose science is the only truthful way of approaching it? . . . It seems to me as much a pathetic fallacy to pretend we can have an impersonal and neutral relationship with – Nature – that it’s entirely alien – as to pretend it simply reflects our passing moods. We’re part of it.’ ‘You are confounding science, art, and religion,’ said Simon. ‘Why not?’ said Percy. (G: 195–6)

Why not indeed. Viewed from one angle, the ultimate fates of all of The Game’s main characters certainly suggest that the boundaries between discourses need to be preserved for viable meaning to emerge in the first place. As we have seen above, much of Cassandra’s psychological dilemma stems from her inability to distinguish categorically between what is real and what is imagined. Julia’s failure to transfer and transform the real-life material of her sister’s story into fiction – ‘I tried to – tug it away – from her – and I think perhaps I’ve not tugged it far enough. The truth is so much more compelling, you know’ (G: 175) – equally serves as a cautionary tale against conflating and confounding what ought properly to be kept separate. At the same time, however, Simon’s insistence on a neatly differential

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order of discourse does not seem to offer a workable aesthetic or moral alternative either. When he derides Julia’s book as ‘a lie, at worst, and – and a piece of imagination at best’, Cassandra replies: ‘Fictions – fictions are lies, yes, but we don’t ever know the truth. We see the truth through the fictions – our own, other people’s’ (G: 270–1). True to her resonant name, Cassandra here voices what can be regarded as one of the central hypotheses of The Game’s exploration of itself as a work of fiction, namely the hypothesis of fiction’s capacity to function as a ‘meeting-place of two opposing but connected ways of thinking, acting, and making: similarity and difference’ (Melberg, 1995: 1). Fiction, according to this scenario, would indeed describe a place beyond the dichotomies of truth and fantasy, perception and articulation, the camera-eye and the lookingglass, secular and religious uses of language, the snake and the butterfly – a place, in short, in which we could speak meaningfully of our being ‘both the suffering creature under the glass and the watching eye over the microscope’ (G: 241). For the characters of The Game, as indeed for those in The Shadow of the Sun, such a meeting place does, of course, remain an elusive goal to the end. For Cassandra, its doubleness, its potential surplus of meaning, proves positively and quite literally life-threatening. Picking up George Herbert’s metaphor once again, she notes in her journal: I live in two worlds. One is hard, inimical, brutal, threatening, the tyranny of objects where all things are objects and thus tyrannical. The other is infinite: heaven, through the pane of glass, the Looking Glass world. One dreams of a release into that world of pure vision and knows that what would be gained would be madness; a single world, and intolerable. (G: 170–1)

While Cassandra is fighting a losing battle against the ever proliferating configurations of a ‘single world’ in desperate need of differentiation, Julia seems to suffer from precisely the opposite problem. In her writing, she habitually forges rather too simplistic congruences, disregarding both the human cost and the full implications of the concept of fiction in the process. The indiscriminately plotted net Julia has thrown over both her own and her sister’s life thus ultimately does come back to haunt her.

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Discussing A Sense of Glory with her lover Ivan shortly after she has completed the manuscript, Julia describes the fictional meeting between her heroine and the Simon character in her book: I make him go on one of these Missions the Church is always having, to Oxford, and they meet. And he sort of remembers her, and the pathetic thing is he likes her, he really likes her, but what the hell can she say to him with all those – those forests of imagination between them? She lets him go, she won’t put out a hand. But of course she can’t go on imagining, either. She sees him off on a train. I leave the end open. (G: 176)

Unbeknown to Julia, Simon does indeed go to Oxford to visit Cassandra, who has, contrary to expectations, managed to ‘put out a hand’ at last. But it is too late for both of them. Julia’s book is already out there, and the irony is complete when Cassandra notes in her final conversation with Simon: ‘What can we ever say to each other now that won’t be seen in terms of Julia’s fiction? Our course is plotted for us in it’ (G: 271). Julia, meanwhile, upon learning that Simon has visited Cassandra at Oxford just as she had ‘made’ him do in her novel, also had nothing to say. . . . For the first time in her life her curiosity completely deserted her. She did not want to know, she wanted passionately not to know what Simon was doing in Oxford. She also wanted passionately never to see Simon again. She thought: I did it, he went there because I feared it, because I planned it, because I imagined it. . . . Who had stolen whose action? (G: 252)

Nobody, as it turns out. As Jane Campbell (1988: 160) notes, ‘Simon’s visit to Cassandra in Oxford is the best instance of contingency in The Game: it arises from a need Julia could not have imagined and produces results she could not have foreseen’. And if, to Julia, the imminent ‘[p]ublication day [of A Sense of Glory] began’, in light of these recent events, ‘to look like an approaching execution; except that she had few illusions about her own powers of survival’ (G: 252), she is, of course, once again severely mistaken in her reading of the plot as it is yet to unfold. Ultimately, it is Cassandra who will not survive – who, more precisely, will actively choose death in a final bid to stray from the course she feels is plotted for her by her sister. Ironically, it is precisely Julia’s ‘failure to conceive of Cassandra’s freedom and potential for growth [that] proves fatal’ here (Campbell, 1988: 151).

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If Julia’s fiction ultimately fails to balance and articulate ‘the inevitability of fantasy, the need for concepts and form and the recognition that all speech is a distortion, that novelists are fantasymongers’, there is yet another form of unresolved duality present in Julia’s writerly attempt to ‘detach’ herself from her sister, and one that distinguishes her novel markedly from the narrative she inhabits as a character. Prompted by Ivan, Julia readily concedes that her fictional heroine Emily Burnett ‘is a composite portrait, like any. And of course Cassandra and me – it’s a composite creature, in a way, a sort of binary fission’ (G: 176–7). And yet, as Ivan reminds her, A Sense of Glory still presents a decidedly ‘one-sided equation. Onesided, that is, because you’ve left out the persecuting female novelist’ (G: 175–6). Campbell (1988: 160) comments that ‘[b]y including the novelist in her novel – as Julia did not in hers – Byatt takes account of the moral problems of art and shows herself to be a better novelist than Julia’. And indeed, the structural doubleness resulting from the novelist-within-the-novel ploy accounts to no small degree for The Game’s success in showing ‘that it [is] possible for a text to be supremely mimetic, . . . and at the same time to think about form, its own form, its own formation, about perceiving and inventing the world’ (PM: 22–3). In the exact middle of Byatt’s novel, the two Corbett sisters share a rare moment of mutual understanding when they jointly contemplate a gift Julia has brought for Cassandra on occasion of her visit to Oxford. The gift is an artfully crafted glass snake: It was rigid from head to tail, although the surface was moulded to suggest a certain curving bumpiness; the head rested level with the body and the under-surface suggested to the hand the spread of slackened and easy muscles. . . . Inside, flowing and turning under the green and gold, was a confused network of crimson lines, suggesting viscera, or a mapping of the nervous system. It had crimson, slightly convex eyes, which were the orifices of crimson funnels whose pointed ends met inside the skull. Between the flat lips, inside the delicately curving teeth, lay a black thread of forked tongue, whose root was at the juncture of the eyes. (G: 135–6)

Coiled within this densely descriptive passage lies a double image, two entwined metaphors that have presided over the narrative of The Game throughout – glass and serpent. As Cassandra, again with reference to Coleridge’s ‘Psyche’, had noted in one of her imaginary

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journal conversations with Simon: ‘The serpent is traditionally, as I told you, a symbol for our horror at finding ourselves necessarily embodied’ (G: 27). Furthermore, the repeated references to Coleridge’s poem throughout the novel link, as Campbell (1988: 159) has it, ‘the snake with the activities of predation and ingestion and thus with the novel’s main subject, the devouring power of the imagination’. At the same time, however, the snake also explicitly functions as a symbol of life, creativity, eternity, and rebirth (G: 22), and thus provides not only an effective counter-image to Cassandra’s resigned insight that ‘[w]e are food for thought’ (G: 276) but also an image of the operations of the productive imagination that inform the The Game in fundamental ways and principally distinguish its discourse from the manifold and potentially deadly narrative motions the characters find themselves ensnared in. In the words attributed to Coleridge and cited by Byatt as one of her epigraphs to The Game: ‘The principle of the imagination resembles the emblem of the serpent, by which the ancients typified wisdom and the universe, with undulating folds, for ever varying and for ever flowing into itself – circular, and without beginning or end.’9 Ironically, Julia and Cassandra’s joint contemplation of the glass snake could itself be read as an apprehension of such a principle of productive circularity, although neither sister is subsequently able to act on its inherent potential. The productive aspect of the duality they are facing escapes them to the precise extent that the mutuality of this moment – ‘This was between the two of them’ (G: 136) – remains anathema to their life-long attempts to escape the doubleness of their sibling relationship. And yet, their exchange doubles, we would suggest, as a comment on The Game as a whole, and specifically on the work of fiction as, precisely, fiction: ‘It’s terribly realistic in a funny way,’ Julia said. ‘I mean, considering how artificial it is, it’s realistic. And so very three-dimensional – I suppose because it’s transparent.’ ‘A dimension of inwardness,’ Cassandra said slowly. . . . ‘You could look at it for a long time [. . .] and not come to the end of it.’ (G: 136)

Notes 1 2

See Bloom, 1973; and Gilbert and Gubar, 1979: 45–92, here p. 49. Indeed, ‘[l]ater, when he was an artist again, he found parts of Blake banal and some of Coleridge’s notes meaningless, but at the time

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everything connected, all meanings were a network, and his coming experience the master-knot’ (SS: 59). For Byatt’s pastiche of Lawrentian imagery, compare the passage describing Henry’s ‘vison’ in The Shadow of the Sun to, for example, Anna Brangwen’s reverie in Lawrence’s The Rainbow ([1915] 1995: 150): ‘Day after day came shining through the door of Paradise, day after day she entered into the brightness. . . . [T]o know that all this lived and waited and burned on around her, a terrible purifying fire, through which she had passed for once to come to this peace of golden radiance . . . with all the many angels hand in hand. She lifted her throat to the breeze that came across the fields.’ If Henry had privately invoked Blake during this conversation – ‘I can look at a knot in a piece of wood till I am frightened at it’ (SS: 33) – Oliver, it seems, does not even have much time for William Henry Davies ([1911] 1972: 836): What is this life if, full of care, We have no time to stand and stare. No time to stand beneath the boughs And stare as long as sheep and cows. ... No time to see, in broad daylight, Streams full of stars like skies at night. No time to turn at Beauty’s glance, And watch her feet, how they can dance. No time to wait till her mouth can Enrich that smile her eyes began.

5 6 7 8

See, for example, Creighton, 1987; Giobbi, 1992; and Bradbury, 1968. See Coleridge, 1817: vol. 2, ch. xiv, pp. 1–3. See Herbert, [1633] 1961. See Coleridge, [1806–7] 1974: The butterfly the ancient Grecians made The soul’s fair emblem, and its only name – But of the soul, escaped the slavish trade Of Mortal life! – For in this earthly frame Ours is the reptile’s lot, much toil, much blame, Manifold motions making little speed, And to deform and kill the things whereon we feed.

9

S. T. Coleridge, qtd by Hazlitt, 1903: vol. xviii, p. 371.

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Writing the contemporary: The Virgin in the Garden and Still Life In her 1979 survey of contemporary fiction, ‘People in Paper Houses’, A. S. Byatt ponders the ‘curiously symbiotic relationship between old realism and new experiment’ perceived to be at the heart of the English postwar novel (PM: 170). The conflict between literary experimentation and realist allegiances, with all its connotations of avant-garde innovation and linguistic astuteness on the one hand, and the socio-political impulse to return to a portrayal of ‘understandable characters in a reasonably straightforward style: no tricks, no experimental foolery’ (Kingsley Amis qtd in Morrison, 1980: 299) on the other, had become something of a commonplace in criticism of British fiction between the end of the Second World War and the early to mid-1970s. The debate was not a new one, of course. Mrs Woolf’s earlier quibbles with Mr Bennett are by now part of twentiethcentury critical folklore. In the immediate postwar period, with modernism itself largely conventionalised, and in the face of a radically transformed world order in which not just literature was feared to have lost its bearings, the battle between literary experimentation and realist formats of storytelling flared up with a renewed sense of urgency. Literary practitioners themselves again fuelled the argument. C. P. Snow’s (1958; 1978) influential attacks on the experimental legacy of modernism are matched in acerbity by B. S. Johnson’s ([1973] 1974: 13–14) characterisation of post-nineteenth-century realism as ‘anachronistic, invalid, irrelevant, and perverse’. And while the works of a substantial number of mid- to late twentieth-century writers cast significant doubt on the notion of a categorical opposition between ‘old realism and new experiment’, literary criticism for its part nevertheless largely accepted and indeed perpetuated this dichotomy. Its echoes continue to haunt the academy to the present

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day, as recent debates over the relative merits of postmodernism as an aesthetic and/or critical paradigm attest. Significantly, A. S. Byatt’s focus in ‘People in Paper Houses’ is on symbiosis, on productive rather than combative relations between the two poles of the storytelling debate. Her broader allegiances are, however, clear. Or are they? ‘If I have defended realism, or what I call “self-conscious realism”’, Byatt (PM: 4) writes elsewhere, ‘it is not because I believe it has any privileged relationship to truth, social or psychological, but because it leaves space for thinking minds as well as feeling bodies’. At first sight, this is not such a far cry from the liberal-humanist mindset that underpins the classic case in favour of realism. Indeed, as Michael Westlake (1989: 33), in a thoughtful but not entirely favourable review of Still Life, writes, Byatt’s fiction must appear, at one level at least, like an elaborate defence ‘of a certain kind of literary and philosophical faith’, namely that of an epistemological humanism reaching back before, and at odds with, ‘Continental theory’ and post-structuralism in particular. Overtly, Westlake (1989: 35; emphasis added) continues, Byatt’s project ‘owes much to considerations of realism, coupled’, however, ‘with a suspicion that the narrative form as such must inevitably put that realism into question’. What Westlake is inclined to view as a potential (and potentially fatal) flaw in the fictional argument presented in Still Life reveals itself, on closer inspection, as a double intimation of the ‘curiously symbiotic relationship’ not only between literary realism and experiment but also between the creative and the critical imagination. As both writer and critic, A. S. Byatt is acutely aware of the formal and philosophical difficulties that have bedevilled the realist project from the outset. If she professes ‘a strong moral attachment to its values’, such attachment is always already bound up with ‘a formal need to comment on [these values’] fictiveness’ and a profound sense that all ‘models, literature and “the tradition” are ambiguous and problematic goods’ (PM: 181). ‘The problems of the “real” in fiction, and the adequacy of words to describe it, have preoccupied me for the last twenty years’, wrote Byatt (PM: 5) in the introduction to her 1991 collection of essays, Passions of the Mind. Almost two decades on, Byatt’s fictional output has diversified to an extent that may well call the continuing validity of this statement into question. Much has been made of the postmodern credentials of Possession (1990); teasingly, Byatt’s

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subsequent fictional offering, Angels and Insects (1992), then presented its readers with suspiciously unproblematic simulacra of the classic realist text; the fairy stories collected, often alongside more conventional short stories, in such volumes as The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye (1994), Elementals (1998) or the Little Black Book of Stories (2003) also seemed to signal, if not a departure, then a considerable detour on the road towards a ‘self-conscious realism’; The Biographer’s Tale (2000), as well as Babel Tower (1996) and A Whistling Woman (2002), were seen to mark further turning points with their audacious forays into fragmentation and disjointedness, and Byatt’s Man Booker-shortlisted novel The Children’s Book (2009) similarly foregrounds its own decentredness as it delves deep into symbolist territory and explores the dark underbelly of our predilection for the fantastical. And yet, if Byatt’s writing – perhaps late twentiethcentury writing in general – has increasingly freed itself from the constraints imposed by the realism/experiment dichotomy, the variety of possible forms recovered and (re)invented in the process nevertheless reflect a continued and undiminished preoccupation with ‘the problems of the “real” in fiction, and the adequacy of words to describe it’. The old battle over whose ‘real’, whose ‘words’, may be gradually relinquishing its central place in our debates about the novel, its history and its future, but the question of ‘the relations between truth, lies and fiction’ remains as urgent as ever (PM: 21).

The Virgin in the Garden (1978) and Still Life (1985), the first two volumes of Byatt’s tetralogy of condition-of-Britain novels that are now collectively known as the Quartet, ponder this question from distinct and very specific angles. As ‘self-consciously realist novels about my own time and my own culture’ (PM: 22), they are among those of Byatt’s writings that attest most fully to her habitual weighing of the nature of fiction and the problems of representational art. The Quartet retraces the lives and times of a sprawling cast of characters during the period from 1953 through to the early 1970s. Over the course of the first two volumes, the focus lies on the North Yorkshire Potter family. The father, Bill, is Head of English at a local boys’ school. A self-confessed Leavisite and a zealous advocate of the humanising value of literature, he proclaimed the weighty agnostic morals of Sidgwick, George Eliot and the first Matthew Crowe. He worked ferociously at his own version of Ruskin’s and Morris’s popular culture, with a dour respect for real

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workers and their lives and interests more akin to Tawney’s work in the potteries. The vigour behind what local cultural life existed in 1953 was in large part his. (VG: 22)

At home, Bill Potter’s unpredictable temper tends to make life difficult for his wife Winifred and the couple’s three children. Their eldest daughter Stephanie has, at the beginning of The Virgin in the Garden, just returned home from Cambridge to take up a teaching post in English at Blesford’s grammar school for girls. As the narrative progresses, Stephanie finds herself falling passionately in love with local curate Daniel Orton. Their wedding, fiercely disapproved of by Bill, coincides with the production of Alexander Wedderburn’s play Astraea, a nostalgic homage to Elizabeth I and to Renaissance England, in which Stephanie’s somewhat precocious younger sister Frederica – in The Virgin in the Garden still a schoolgirl preparing for her A Levels – plays the part of the young Elizabeth. Stephanie and Frederica’s shared crush on Alexander, their father’s junior colleague, mildly echoes Julia and Cassandra’s passion for Simon in The Game, but, unlike in the earlier novel, the sisters’ collective pining here forms part of a sibling bond that will be transformed by, rather than preclude, their respective journeys into adulthood. The youngest Potter child, Marcus, meanwhile, has, from early childhood, been believed by his father to be a mathematical genius and is still, as a teenager, prone to synaesthetic mathematical visions that both please and perturb him. Over the course of The Virgin in the Garden, he undergoes mental and emotional anguish as his friendship with the increasingly unstable biology master Lucas Simmonds takes a somewhat sinister turn. In an unpublished interview with Olga Kenyon (qtd in Kenyon, 1988: 75), Byatt has commented that, with The Virgin in the Garden, she ‘wanted to write a historical novel. The Coronation allowed the comparison with Elizabeth the first and the metaphor of her life.’ With its deft and complex blend of mid-twentieth-century realism and Renaissance allegory, The Virgin in the Garden is, however, first and foremost a novel about history, a ‘time-novel’ much in Thomas Mann’s ([1924] 1950: xxiii, our translation) sense of the term: It is a historical novel in so far as it aims to evoke the inner picture of a historical epoch . . ., but it also takes up pure time itself as its subject, a subject that it not only treats in terms of its hero’s experiences, but explores in and through itself.

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Later in her career, Byatt has, of course, gone on to write historical novels that are more immediately recognisable as such. The Virgin in the Garden and its sequels, meanwhile, run as a thoughtful counterpoint to Byatt’s neo-Victorian fictions in that they explore the fractured historical sense of the postwar period alongside the concept of contemporaneity and the possibility (or, as the case may be, impossibility) of its representation. ‘“Contemporary” was in those days synonymous with “modern” as it had not been before and is not now (1977)’, the narrator comments at one point in the novel, momentarily arresting the 1953 action of the story with this uneasy intrusion of a voice, a narrative authority moreover, from a specified future present (VG: 242). The allusion to Stephen Spender’s (1967) famous distinction between ‘Moderns’ and ‘Contemporaries’, heavily biased as it is in favour of the ‘Moderns’, is not lost on the reader here. Byatt’s momentary emphasis may lie on the (discredited) contemporary in Spender’s sense, but The Virgin in the Garden transforms Spender’s dichotomy – a dichotomy ultimately between realism and modernism – into a complex interplay of competing temporal narratives in which memory and history alike form, dissolve, and reform again as part of a narrative structure that seeks to turn itself into a meditation on the history of modernity as such. In the prologue to The Virgin in the Garden, set in 1968, three of Byatt’s characters come together at the National Portrait Gallery in London to ‘hear Flora Robson do Queen Elizabeth’ as part of an exhibition entitled People, Past and Present (VG: 9). On his approach to the Gallery, Alexander Wedderburn, in whose company we first enter the scene, ‘considered those words, once powerful, at present defunct, national and portrait. They were both to do with identity: the identity of a culture (place, language and history), the identity of an individual human being as an object for mimetic representation’ (VG: 9). At the same time, Alexander finds himself aesthetically amused by his surroundings. There was the black circling curve of railings to which was tied a repeating series of pale reproductions of the Darnley Portrait of Elizabeth Tudor. (VG: 9)

The notion of historical representation as a ‘repeating series of pale reproductions’ is taken further over the following pages. On his way to Trafalgar Square, Alexander had, for example, ‘passed several recruiting posters for the First World War, pointing accusatory fingers

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at him, and a shop called “I was Lord Kitchener’s Valet”, full of reproduced bric-à-brac of the British Empire’. The steps of the National Gallery, meanwhile, are populated by the ‘new ancient faces’ (VG: 9) of the hippie folk of the era – ‘variously uniform, uniformly various. Grimy thonged feet under, silky, fluffy, matted beards over, sari and saffron robe. Military jackets from Vietnam and the Crimea.’ American tourists ‘under English macintoshes, English tweed, English cashmere’ complete the cultural carnival of London in the Swinging Sixties, and a bemused Alexander is prompted to ponder the nature of modern parody. It seemed to him who did not understand or like it, undirected and aimless: they imitated anything and everything out of an unmanageable combination of aesthetic curiosity, mocking destructiveness and affectionate nostalgia, the desire to be anything and anywhere other than here and now. (VG: 10)

At first sight, Alexander’s own, though admittedly fragile, sense of presence in the face of history seems to differ from such ‘stagey’ (VG: 9) displays chiefly in its degree of cultured sophistication. In contrast to the ‘hysterical continuation of childhood dressing-up’ (VG: 11) that he perceives all around him, Alexander himself . . . could place a shift of seam or change of cut in relation to tradition and the individual talent almost as well as he could a verse-form or a vocabulary. He watched his own clothes and his own poetry in the light of these delicate shifts of subdued innovation. But he was apprehensive that at this time there was no real life in either. (VG: 11)

The allusion to T. S. Eliot’s influential essay ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’ is clearly no slip of the pen here: Byatt’s tentative pitting of a ‘repeating series of pale reproductions’ against such ‘delicate shifts of subdued innovation’ – against, that is, what Eliot (1919: 38) called the ‘historical sense, which . . . involves a perception, not only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence’ – proves nothing if not programmatic at this early stage of the novel, suggesting as it does a relationship between past and present that is productive rather than reproductive. As a poet and verse dramatist at work in the 1950s, Alexander clearly perceives himself to be writing in the shadow of T. S. Eliot, whose critical legacy hovers over The Virgin in the Garden as a ubiquitous if uncertain presence. In ‘Still Life/Nature morte’, an essay which retraces the genesis and design of the early Quartet

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novels, Byatt highlights the extent to which Eliot’s ideas did indeed dominate critical discussion during this decade and describes The Virgin in the Garden as, in part, ‘a response to T. S. Eliot’s ideas of the history of poetic language, and the nature of the poetic image’ (PM: 9). T. S. Eliot’s sense of tradition as a dynamic relationship of mutually innovative generation and regeneration, meanwhile, accurately describes not only the intellectual and literary aspirations of many of Byatt’s characters but, more importantly, Byatt’s own project here: [t]his historical sense, which is a sense of the timeless as well as of the temporal and of the timeless and of the temporal together, is what makes a writer traditional. And it is at the same time what makes a writer most acutely conscious of his place in time, of his own contemporaneity. (Eliot, 1919: 38)

In 1953, the time in which the main action of the novel is set and on which the characters look back from a fifteen-year distance in the prologue, Alexander Wedderburn is writing Astraea, his Eliot-esque verse-drama on the Virgin Queen, which is steeped in the complex dilemma of how to square the ‘then’ with the ‘now’ – of how to accommodate difference and the desire for historical continuity. Performed in the year of the second Elizabeth’s coronation, the play is favourably received by an audience ignited by national enthusiasm for a postwar ‘Renaissance’ (VG: 242) and a ‘New Elizabethan Age’ (VG: 239). Fifteen years later, however, Alexander’s play has, somewhat ironically, itself suffered the effects of changing historical tides. In 1968, during their meeting at the National Portrait Gallery, Frederica Potter mainly remembers ‘[a]ll the singing and dancing’ that went along with the original production of Astraea, while Alexander, who ‘had sometimes thought of more modern, more artificial ways of rendering that matter, the virgin and the garden, now and England, without undue sentiment or heavy irony’, is now certain that ‘he would not try’. Indeed, having just come face to face with the original of the iconic portrait of Elizabeth I, he muses that ‘[t]o be here, now, with the Darnley Portrait, was like being in a room with a woman you had once been led to assault, unsuccessfully, with whom no other relation was now possible’ (VG: 15). In retrospect, Alexander is thus forced to recognise that his doubly nostalgic project of imitating Eliot’s attempt to revive the Renaissance form of the verse drama was an embarrassing failure. His sense of

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‘the irreversibility of art and time’ (VG: 16) and his realisation that, in 1968 (perhaps even in 1953), the time for history as a living dialectic in Eliot’s sense had long passed, seems confirmed by the narrator, who, interrupting the action from yet another temporal vantage point a little later on in the novel, informs us rather laconically that, [i]n the fifties, they wrote critical articles on ‘Blood and Stone Imagery in Wedderburn’s Astraea’. In the early sixties helpful lists of these images were published in Educational Aids to help weak A-level candidates. In the seventies the whole thing was dismissed as a petrified final paroxysm of a decadent individualist modernism, full of irrelevant and damaging cultural nostalgia, cluttered, blown. (VG: 103–4)

Such interjections on the part of the narrator are a common and indeed prominent narrative feature of both The Virgin in the Garden and Still Life. In the latter novel, they are, as we will see, chiefly the site of reflective and often running commentaries on the genesis and processes of the narrative at hand. In the Virgin in the Garden, however, they also add a further layer to the already highly elaborate temporal structure of the novel, and while these multiple temporal perspectives appear, at one level at least, to hold past, present and future together in the moment of narrative, they also serve to emphasise historical discontinuities and the inaccessibility of times past. As historical musings, personal memories, recollections and hindsight are played out against one another in this ‘novel about my own time and my own culture’, it is often the narrator who reflects – or reports on the characters’ future selves’ reflections – on the battle against temporal discontinuity that wages throughout the novel. Consider, for example, the following observations on the part of the narrator: It is an irony possibly worth recording . . . that whilst Alexander, perhaps because he had imagined an unreal and vanished world too intensely, perhaps more simply because he was already too old, . . . was never able in retrospect to see this high moment of his career as any kind of archetypal golden age, Frederica was easily able to do so. . . . At seventeen the world was all before her, unspotted, whatever it might become, whatever it was already doomed to be. Disembarrassed, in the sixties, of the awkwardness of being seventeen, a virgin, and snubbed, she was able to fill her memory theatre with a brightly solid scene which she polished and gilded as it receded, . . . seeing the lawns, the avenues, the lanterns in the branches and the light winking on half-obscured singing bottles, in the still eternal light through which we see the infinite unchanging vistas we make, from the height of one year old, out of

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suburban gardens or municipal parks in summer, endless grassy horizons and alleys which we hope to revisit, rediscover, inhabit in real life, whatever that is. (VG: 317)

‘True Paradise, Proust said, is always Paradise Lost’ (VG: 242), the narrator comments at another point in The Virgin in the Garden, and if the rather lyrical and meandering passage just quoted does itself take on an unmistakably Proustian style and sentiment, it is, despite sounding a note of bathos and irony at its end, indicative of the intense sense of nostalgia that The Virgin in the Garden both participates in and comments upon at a variety of narrative planes. This is a nostalgia not only for the celebrated prewar bouts of modernist creativity but also, and more fundamentally, a ‘nostalgia for a paradis perdu in which thought and language and things were naturally and indissolubly linked or, to use an Eliot metaphor, fused’ (PM: 9) – a nostalgia, that is, for a pre-‘dissociation of sensibility’ mindset (Eliot, 1921: 64) that had also formed an intellectual undercurrent to the portrayal of Henry Severell in The Shadow of the Sun. As Byatt comments in ‘Still Life / Nature morte’, the notion of such a paradis perdu is also linked to what Michel Foucault, in The Order of Things ([1966] 1970), had, independently of Eliot, described as the arrival of modern consciousness in the sixteenth century, an event that occurred, according to Foucault, when people stopped believing that language was a God-given symbolic system in which words were absolute and transparent signs for things. The Virgin in the Garden’s ‘“ruling” metaphor of metamorphosis – of flesh into stone, or flesh into grass’ (PM: 10), as well as its conspicuous symbolic patternings of blood and stone, virgins and paradisal gardens, clearly gesture towards this harmonious and orderly Renaissance language world. At the character level, both Alexander’s play and the larger efforts on the part of the Blesford community to mark the 1953 coronation in style stand as the most obvious and prominent attempts ‘to embody, here, now, in the present time and place, the vigour, the sense of form, the coherence lost, lost, with the English Golden Age’ (VG: 111). Daniel’s battles with his own faith, with his Church of England superiors and with his fiercely agnostic future father-in-law, or Matthew Crowe’s efforts to restore Long Royston to its former Tudor glory in the run-up to the staging of Astraea, are just two of the many other instances of the characters’ struggles to retrieve what seems irretrievably lost – to retrieve, that is, that which, as the novel

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knows, is itself always already ‘a moment of history, and fiction’ (VG: 100). Interestingly, it is the relatively minor character of Felicity Wells, a local woman and parish helpmate who devotes much of her time and energy to flower arranging and costume sewing, who sounds a fittingly private and barely audible note of caution against the nostalgic excesses that accompany the preparations for Blesford’s coronation festivities. Felicity is undoubtedly, and along with everyone else, filled with ‘a happy sense of coincidence, superimposition even, of past grandeur and present business’, but she nevertheless instinctively knows that ‘[i]t was not her business to fuse any of these into new wholes. She just saw’ (VG: 111). The tension between ‘fusing’ and ‘seeing’, and thus the doubtful validity of the characters’ harking back to a mythical golden age in which a thought was felt ‘as immediately as the odour of a rose’, where ‘thought . . . was an experience; it modified . . . sensibility’ (Eliot, 1921: 64), is played out on yet another symbolic plane in The Virgin in the Garden when Marcus Potter’s mathematical visions present the reader with the ‘impossible simultaneity’ (VG: 27) and profusion of forms and coherences that assume a decidedly menacing power and are anything but glowing or golden; rather, they regularly leave Marcus with an alarming sense of himself as disembodied – ‘spread’ over the landscape he inhabits (VG: 28) – and fearing for his sanity. Significantly, Marcus’s visions, which bear more than a passing resemblance to Henry Severell’s visionary bouts in The Shadow of the Sun, lack the creative potential ascribed to them in the earlier novel. Indeed, ‘madness in this [the Potters’] literary household had overtones of raving, vision and poetry which were nothing to do with what was bothering him’ (VG: 118). Judith Plotz (2001: 33) has commented lucidly on the ‘resolutely incommunicative’ and so exclusively mathematically minded character of Marcus Potter. A clinical synaesthetic, Marcus may, as a child, have indeed experienced true instances of ‘figured thought, . . . felt abstraction’, but their erstwhile power ‘has vanished under the pressure for explanation from his father and a scrutinizing expert’ (Plotz, 2001: 36), so that now his visions regularly fail to resonate with meaning and his sensibility remains a profoundly dissociated one. As Plotz (2001: 39) demonstrates, however, Marcus, ‘in his isolation, his seeming selfsufficiency, his private interior world, his visions of pure form and his apprehensions of a world charged with life’, also ‘resembles a Romantic wise child’ with distinct Wordsworthian overtones that are

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anything but coincidental to the overall project of this novel, perhaps even to Byatt’s project of novelistic reclamation as a whole. At first glance, Stephanie Potter’s dilemma in The Virgin in the Garden is a great deal more conventional than that with which her brother Marcus grapples. Stephanie has fallen in love with the wrong man, and is subject to the vocal disapproval of her family. In an ironic twist on a well-worn literary theme, the suitor here is a respectable curate, while the father of the bride is an atheist ‘[i]n revolt against his upbringing’ (VG: 40). Bill reacts ‘histrionically’ to the match, telling his daughter that, if she marries Daniel, she will be ‘[like] a race-horse in a milk-float’ (VG: 198). And indeed, as a Cambridge graduate with a decidedly literary sensibility and a strong instinctive repulsion against the church, Stephanie is herself baffled by her attraction to Daniel, a rather corpulent and stolid man, who is not at all given to intellectual pursuits but rather ‘completely committed to practical solutions’ (VG: 55). Stephanie, in this constellation, represents the life of the mind, while Daniel, despite his occupation, represents the life of the flesh. Their relationship of earnest altercation and genuine attraction is, however, sealed during a trip to the seaside at Filey where, standing in the sea spray like a latter-day Venus Anadyomene, and carried away by a sudden ‘revelation’ (VG: 188), a moment of apparent fusion of intellect and sensuality, Stephanie finally agrees to marry. It is a decision which is to cause her great angst, however, as she is swept along by Daniel’s energetic and characteristically pragmatic project of turning his dreams into reality, and Stephanie into ‘a good vicar’s wife’ (VG: 183). In a chapter knowingly entitled ‘On the Interpretation of Dreams’, the narrative relates a night-time dream that Stephanie experiences shortly after the fateful excursion to Filey. Replete with sexual symbolism, literary allusion and embodied fears, the dream leaves Stephanie, upon waking, ‘in terror . . . her face wet and slippery with tears’ (VG: 250). At one level, she feels plain wrath at what had been made willy-nilly of a real, complex and vigorous memory. The roaring wind and blown sea, the local precision and true drama of the day at Filey had been in this dream, without her will, unified, internalised, drained and stilled. (VG: 250)

At the same time, ‘[e]nds of verses curled and coiled in vacancy’ in her barely wakeful mind ‘like clues of thread, like shining ends

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of flying gossamer’, and Stephanie’s wrath also extends to the fact that her real and tangible memories of the day at Filey have been turned into ‘[h]igh art, modernist shored fragments of allusive high art, pickings, flotsam and jetsam of a foundering culture. . . . She had called up this impotent ghost of English poetry, but could offer it no blood to make it utter’ (VG: 250). Stephanie, however, is nothing if not an intelligent and pragmatic reader, both of poetry and of her own dreamscapes: ‘She drew her quilt round her shoulders and sat up to apply her mind to the matter’, unpicking, one by one, high forms of high language, ghostly grammatical skeletons of forgotten periods, inchoate remembered cadences and unheard melodies with continuing lines of singing rhythms. . . . ‘Which is death to hide’ was Milton, talking about literature and the loss of it, talking about blindness, cross-referring his own inertia to the terrible story of the unfaithful servant who cravenly buried the one talent instead of multiplying it. There was the Grecian Urn. Thou still unravished bride of chastity. The non-sensous sensuality in the mind. . . . Association looped irrelevances together. White, pale, cold, urn, horse, sky, sea. (VG: 250–1).

At the centre of these looped and looping associations lie, as Stephanie soon discovers, precisely remembered sequences from Wordsworth’s Prelude, specifically the dream sequence that occurs in Book V (entitled Books), in which a rider flees ‘the ultimate flood to bury a stone and a shell, which were, in the dream, an impassioned Ode and Euclid’s elements, language and geometry’ (VG: 251). This Wordsworthian core adds another complex intertextual layer to Stephanie’s already highly intertextual dream, and it is, characteristically for literary-minded Stephanie, the discovery of this intertextual core that makes her own dream readable to her. Wordsworth’s dream sequence in The Prelude is, of course, itself a complex poetic metaphor for the act of reading, for the conservant as well as regenerative power, moreover, of the act of reading vis-à-vis the transience and perishability of books as physical receptacles for human thought. Fittingly then, Stephanie reaches for her old copy of Wordsworth and begins to read: What Stephanie found in Books was a superfluous fear, a fear of drowning, of loss, of dark powers, ambivalent about whether it was life or the imagination that was the destroyer, or where these two became one, where, if at all, the undifferentiated narrator tells a solid tale. (VG: 252)

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Significantly, it is in the instance of active and actual reading that the ‘bleached and vanished’ quality of Stephanie’s ‘inchoate remembered cadences’ of verse are finally rendered meaningful to her. Through an active engagement with the literary images that initially so besieged her, Stephanie comes to understand that to marry Daniel will require her to embrace ‘life’, to embrace, that is, both the physical realities and the social obligations which threaten to encroach on or even drown the life of the imagination. The life of the imagination is, however, also deep water, and Stephanie senses that she cannot ‘immure’ herself in poetry indefinitely. Paradoxically, then, it is her poetic dream which convinces Stephanie that she should go ahead with her plans for matrimony. For the time being though, ‘[s]he turned back to the beginning of the book and began wildly to read it all, as though her life depended on it’ (VG: 252). In an essay tellingly entitled ‘The Irreplaceable Importance of Reading’, Byatt (1992f: 16) has described reading as a self-making activity, which ‘reflects, and constructs, the inner life’, and which gives readers ‘a set of concepts and a complex language for understanding what is happening to us, exactly who we are, and what we are doing’. For characters in a novel, however, reading is a precarious business, and it is even more precarious for a narrator tasked with describing such acts of reading to his or her own readers.1 The narrator of The Virgin in the Garden is characteristically conscious of the difficulties involved: ‘In Wordsworth’s dream and Stephanie’s the undifferentiated narrator made clear the nature of the events. It is not so easy to describe a careful, conscious reading as an event’ (VG: 252). Byatt’s narrator does, nevertheless, make a go of it, and the narrative voice’s further reflections on this subject are telling in more ways than one: Some passions are the regular subjects of fiction and some, though certainly passions, are more recondite and impossible to describe. A passion for reading is somewhere in the middle: it can be hinted but not told out, since to describe an impassioned reading of Books would take many more pages than Books itself and be an anti-climax. Nor is it possible like Borges’ poet, to incorporate Books into this text, though its fear of the drowning of books and its determination to give a fictive substance to a figure seen in a dream might lend a kind of Wordsworthian force to the narrative. (VG: 251–2)

Byatt herself has commented elsewhere that ‘[f]rom my early childhood, reading and writing seemed to me to be points on a circle.

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Greedy reading made me want to write, as if this was the only adequate response to the pleasure and power of books’ (PM: 1). Such an essentially hermeneutic model of the relationship between reading and experience is one that is often reflected on in Byatt’s fictional worlds, and while Stephanie’s reading of Books in The Virgin in the Garden certainly does not prompt her to try her hand at writing, her ‘careful, conscious reading’ is nevertheless portrayed as a creative and constructive, rather than as a reconstructive event. What is more, the description of the co-creative intertextualties at work here also doubles as a fitting image of the narrator’s own strategies, not only in the passage quoted above but in The Virgin in the Garden as a whole. Again commenting on the interdependence of reading and writing in her own intellectual universe, Byatt notes that ‘[m]y teaching always felt to me only a more complicated extension of the reading and writing circle – a seminar on The Prelude was a lesson in how to use language, and an encounter with other minds’ (PM: 1). It is a lesson that seems to have found its way into the pages of The Virgin in the Garden, where the ‘fear of the drowning of books’ and the ‘determination to give a fictive substance to a figure seen in a dream’, in spite of or perhaps because they are ‘hinted’ rather than ‘told out’, do ‘lend a kind of Wordsworthian force to the narrative’. They do so, moreover, in the very instance of ‘impassioned’ and essentially cocreative reading – Wordworth’s, Stephanie’s, the narrator’s and our own, there and then, here and now. The take-home message thus seems to be that our encounters with the ‘impotent ghost of English poetry’ can ‘offer it . . . blood to make it utter’, however ambivalently, if we are prepared to read the ‘high forms of high language . . . of forgotten periods’ (VG: 250), rather than merely seek to replicate them. Another of the many impassioned readers who populate the pages of The Virgin in the Garden is, of course, Stephanie’s younger sister Frederica. Studying Racine’s Phèdre in preparation for her A Levels in 1953, she finds herself required to produce ‘endless character analyses’ that ‘made Racine seem exactly like Shakespeare and Shakespeare exactly like Shaw’. Alternatively, Frederica and her classmates are asked to ‘trace recurrent images. Blood and babies in Macbeth, blood and light and dark in Phèdre. This made both Shakespeare and Racine seem very like Alexander Wedderburn’ (VG: 201) – and not wholly unlike the rather schematic metaphorical

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patterning of the novel at hand, one might add. In any event, such blurred boundaries, uncritical fusions of disparate historical periods, languages and cultures, are intensely frustrating to bright and analytical Frederica: There ought to be a way of describing the difference. . . . It was to do with the Alexandrine. You had to think differently, the actual form of your thought was different, if you thought in closed couplets, further divided by a rocking caesura, and if you thought in French. (VG: 202, emphasis added)

Frederica’s rather abstract meditations on differentiation, which take place during a solitary day trip to the Yorkshire moors, are interrupted by a brief, rather comic and ultimately unsuccessful sexual encounter with a travelling salesman. Returning home on the bus in the evening, Frederica is mildly irritated by the web of symbolic and literary associations through which she instinctively views the day’s events – the Brontëesque associations of the moorland and ‘the crude Freudian view of the upthrust of the spire of Calverley Minster’ – which collectively form ‘an organic image that was, there was no question, extremely depressing, if undoubtedly powerful’ (VG: 209). Not unlike Stephanie in her attempts to unravel her disturbing dream, Frederica makes a determined effort to keep all these images, associations and events ‘separate’ in order to see ‘them more truly’, and to ‘let all these facts and things lie alongside each other like laminations, not like growing cells’ (VG: 209). Frederica will continue to explore the concept of such ‘laminations’ in Babel Tower, the third volume of the Quartet. In The Virgin in the Garden, meanwhile, her burgeoning literary sensibilities may instinctively tend towards differentiation, but her coming-of-age story plays out a much more mundane version of the ‘fusion’ theme as it traverses her various intellectual, cultural and sexual initiations, all of which, she believes, will finally release her into the wholeness of a self-determined adulthood. The final irony of Frederica’s story is, of course, that, having spent most of the novel feeling bored, cynical and sexually frustrated, she will, eventually and much later, emerge as the character with perhaps the most unified, certainly the most rose-tinted memories of the period. At the 1968 gallery reading, Frederica is prompted to reminisce about the events of 1953: ‘Funny, the Fifties. Everybody thinks of it as a kind of no-time, an unreal time, just now. But we were there, it was rather beautiful, the Play, and the Coronation and all that.’

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‘A false beginning’, said Alexander. ‘All the beginning there was’, she said. ‘My beginning, anyway. That was what did happen.’ (VG: 15)

Significantly, it is only with the benefit of hindsight of her thirtytwo-year-old self that Frederica can assert so confidently that ‘we were there’, that that was indeed ‘what did happen’. In 1953 itself, ‘reality for her was the future’, and ‘[o]nly when Frederica was old enough to equate the tenuous pastel hopes of 1953 with her own almost-adult knowledge that everything was a new beginning . . . did she come to feel nostalgia for what at the time she diagnosed boldly as blear illusion’ (VG: 242). ‘Time and art are twin architects of the forms which human beings use to define and thereby create what is real’, Juliet Dusinberre (1982: 56) reflects in her essay ‘Forms of Reality in A. S. Byatt’s The Virgin in the Garden’, and in an interview with Byatt, Dusinberre (1980: 184) observes with reference to this novel: ‘You seem to suggest that things become real by moving into the past, and also that literature creates a reality more durable than lived experience’. In reply, Byatt remarks: When I read I inhabit a world which is more real than the world in which I live, or perhaps I should say I am more alive in it. It is a language world. Language tries to capture and make permanent a moment in time which won’t be captured. . . . The present only becomes a real point in time when time has moved on and made it past’. (Dusinberre, 1980: 184–5)

The Virgin in the Garden certainly suggests that time, art, ‘language worlds’, their ‘reality’, the way we live in them and the way they come alive in the process of readerly inhabitation will continue to pose their own paradoxes. No amount of self-referential experimentation, nor the stubborn insistence on the possibility of unproblematic correspondences either between disparate historical periods or between the world that surrounds us and the names we bestow on it will finally unravel them. Thus, at this early stage in the narrative of the Quartet, a temporary conclusion is reached, for the novel suggests that what we can do in spite of this dilemma is to continue to read and write stories that speak of these paradoxes and articulate, in and through themselves, ‘[t]he problems of the “real” in fiction’ and the quest for ‘the adequacy of words to describe it’. The inherited forms and values of realism are not the worst models one could choose in this

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endeavour, although they are certainly not the only ones. If anything, Byatt’s experiments with these forms, and her weighing of them against such competing models and traditions as Renaissance allegory or the totality of the Romantic artistic vision, show how realism, far from being epistemologically naive, can indeed be a profoundly selfconscious mode of storytelling, productively worried about its own premises, and centrally concerned not so much, nor so simply, with the faithful representation of reality as with the problems and pitfalls of our desire for such representations, and the always essentially textual strategies we employ in pursuit of them. If The Virgin in the Garden pondered ‘[t]he problems of the “real” in fiction and the adequacy of words to describe it’ in terms of speculations on the nature of time and historical knowledge in the context of provincial life in 1950s Britain, its sequel Still Life doubles as an enquiry into the origins of representation as such. Still Life tells the continuing story of the Potter family from 1953 to 1957, although the focus of the narrative is somewhat diffused as the Potter siblings pursue their separate lives and interests. Stephanie is tied down by marriage and motherhood, while Frederica travels to Provence as an au pair before taking up a place to study English at Cambridge. In Yorkshire, Marcus gradually recovers his mental equilibrium as he develops a new interest in the natural sciences, and in London Alexander Wedderburn continues to pursue disastrous love affairs as he writes a new play on Vincent Van Gogh. A number of new characters are introduced, some of whom will make their mark on the story in surprising ways. Alexander’s work for the BBC brings him into contact with Gerard Wijnnobel, soon to be the ViceChancellor of the new university now under construction at Long Royston and a central character in the latter half of the Quartet. Stephanie’s life, meanwhile, is complicated by the arrival of her cantankerous mother-in-law, Mrs Orton, and the new parish vicar, Gideon Farrar – larger than life characters who contribute to the dark comedy of a novel which presents the banal aspects of everyday life alongside the tragic and the profound. These various strands of the story unfurl against the backdrop of an intellectual project that runs through and athwart the narrative of Still Life as Alexander’s second play, The Yellow Chair, gives rise to new aesthetic and representational dilemmas that also define the cerebral preoccupations of the novel at hand. If Astraea, in The Virgin

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in the Garden, had sought to give dramatic form to T. S. Eliot’s mythic dictum of the ‘dissociation of sensibility’ and Alexander’s own time’s belated ‘nostalgia for a paradis perdu in which thought and language and things were naturally and indissolubly linked’, Alexander now has ‘trouble finding an appropriate language for [Van Gogh’s] obsession with the illuminated material world’ (SL: 2). Indeed, his preoccupation with Van Gogh and his paintings gradually invades even the most mundane moments of Alexander’s waking life: sitting at breakfast one morning, Alexander struggles to find the right words to describe the exact colour of the plums on the table. What follows is one of the novel’s recurring instances of fused narrative consciousness, in which Alexander and/or the narrator ponder that ‘[l]anguage might relate the plum to the night sky, or to certain ways of seeing a burning coal, or to a soft case enwrapping a hard nugget of treasure. Or it might introduce an abstraction, a reflection, of mind, not of mirror.’ Paint, on the other hand, ‘declares itself as a force of analogy and connection, a kind of metaphor-making between the flat surface of purple pigment and yellow pigment and the statement “This is a plum”’ (SL: 165). And yet, the narrative goes on to reflect, it is impossible not to think about the distance between paint and things, between paint and life, between paint and the ‘real world’ (which includes other paintings). It is not at all impossible, it is even common, not to think about the distance between words and things, between words and life, between words and reality. (SL: 165)

The mental image is here seen to operate in a different dimension from the visual image: a painting clearly both resembles and is separate from that which it signifies, but what is the relationship of the word to the world? Once again with the benefit of considerable hindsight, Alexander’s dilemma is reflected upon in Still Life’s prologue: At first he had thought that he could write a plain, exact verse with no figurative language, in which a yellow chair was the thing itself, a yellow chair, as a round gold apple was an apple or a sunflower a sunflower. . . . But it couldn’t be done. Language was against him, for a start. Metaphor lay coiled in the name sunflower, which not only turned towards but resembled the sun. (SL: 2)

In ‘Still Life/Nature morte’, Byatt herself comments in remarkably similar terms on Still Life: the idea behind this novel, she writes, ‘was that it should, by contrast, be very bare, very down-to-earth,

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attempt to give the “thing itself” without the infinitely extensible cross-referencing of The Virgin [in the Garden]’ (PM: 11). Most strikingly, however, it is midway through the novel itself that the narrator notes: I had the idea, when I began this novel, that it would be a novel of naming and accuracy. I wanted to write a novel as Williams said a poem should be: no ideas but in things. I even thought of trying to write without figures of speech, but had to give up that plan, quite early. (SL: 301)

This passage of metafictional self-appraisal curiously echoes the sentiments expressed by some of the apologists for the nouveau roman – aptly enough, given that Still Life is set in the era that would come to be regarded as the heyday of this new form of novel. Alain Robbe-Grillet (1965: 54) had famously rejected discursive ‘meaning’ in favour of pure description: ‘we should try to construct a solid, more immediate world to take the place of this universe of “meanings” (psychological, social, functional meanings) so that the first impact of objects and gestures continues to dominate’. This project, which David Lodge (1972: 466) later described as ‘the achievement of a “scientific” objectivity or neutrality in the imitation of reality by disinfecting literary language of all those figures of speech which – covertly or explicitly – attribute human meanings to the inanimate world of things’, sounds uncannily like the sort of project that Byatt, or at least her narrator, appears to have had in mind when planning Still Life – ‘no ideas but in things’ (SL: 301). It is the project of a stripped-down ultra-realism, which eschews the use of metaphor and analogy. However, at the points at which the narrative of Still Life actively strives for such freshness of vision (as, for example, in chapter 7, where the narrator attempts to describe a new-born baby’s first experience of light), objectivity proves impossible as the narrator constantly rediscovers the muddled, metaphorical nature of the language at her disposal. In articulating the infant’s inarticulate experience, the narrative voice is repeatedly forced to take recourse to poetic comparisons: the new-born boy’s mother’s face is pale and distant and round, like the ‘moon’ (SL: 108); his eyes, which have not yet been trained to focus in light, see the world as if ‘through water’ and as the narrator archly observes, ‘if he had been capable of simile, which he was not, he could have said that the glistening particles he saw were like overlapping transparent fish scales’; even the distinction of different colours in a bunch of flowers requires

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both narrator and reader to tap into their pre-existing knowledge of entities such as ‘chrome’ and ‘citron’ (SL: 107). In Still Life, the complete objectivity sought by Robbe-Grillet ultimately proves unattainable: ‘Art is not the recovery of the innocent eye, which is inaccessible’ (SL: 108). Instead, Still Life has become a record of, and a complex fictional meditation upon, what Byatt recognises as the failure ‘to name without metaphor, to describe simply and clearly, to categorise and distinguish, one specimen from the other’ (SL: 301). As the rhetoric of this comment suggests, Still Life’s weighing of the languages of representation reaches beyond considerations of the strictly literary; the seemingly irreducible difference or distance (as well as the occasional and unexpected kinship) between visual and verbal forms of perception and description is negotiated against the backdrop of scientific speculations on prelinguistic cognition and the semantics of biological enquiry. All add layers of complex intertexts, rather than mere corroborating evidence to the narrative. When young Marcus Potter, recovering from the nervous breakdown he suffered in the word-heavy world of The Virgin in the Garden, finds, in Still Life, respite and pleasure in the taxonomical study of grasses, ‘in listing and drawing’ them, ‘simply naming the multitudinous things to be seen, for the sake of seeing them more clearly’, he is supremely – and ironically – safe from Jean-Paul Sartre’s as well as his own earlier ‘existential terror at the formless otherness of the root of a chestnut tree’ and ‘would not have understood Sartre’s sense that matter escapes our naming, bulges beyond it’ (SL: 300–1). The novel itself sides neither with Sartre nor with Marcus on this count. What it does do, however, is recover from the names of Marcus’s grasses – ‘differentiations, a taxonomy, Adamic names, muddled metaphors’ – an image, or the Gestalt of an image ‘for the relation of words to things’: temporary, local, unstable, ‘inventive, imprecise, denotative, practical, imagined’ (PM: 20). ‘Form, as an element of human experience, must begin with the perception of difference’ George Eliot (1868: 232) wrote in her ‘Notes on Form in Art’. What Byatt stresses in Still Life is that to articulate, to know, and to speak of this difference is to embrace the serpentine ‘processes of distinction and combination’ (Eliot, 1868: 232) that lie at the heart of language itself. If metaphor emerges as an integral function of representational language in this novel, it also seems to share with non-literary figures of thought (taxonomy, a yellow chair)

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a more fundamental relationship to narrative fiction – one that can itself be said to take the form of metaphor and may provide a way into a productive reformulation of ‘the problems of the “real” in fiction, and the adequacy of words to describe it’. In ‘Still Life/Nature morte’, Byatt points to Paul Ricoeur’s philosophical work on metaphor as one of the intellectual cornerstones of her abandoned yet accomplished ‘novel of naming and accuracy’ (PM: 15), and it is profitable to take up the cue Byatt has left us here and explore her relationship with Ricoeur in a little more detail. Over his long career as a philosopher, Ricoeur was himself a highly vocal and inspiring advocate of a mutually informative relationship between abstract thought and fiction, and Byatt’s self-consciously ‘philosophical’ fictions provide an interesting creative correlative to some of Ricoeur’s positions. At the same time, Ricoeur’s insistence on fiction’s capacity to take philosophy beyond its own perplexities also, and perhaps paradoxically, frees the literary imagination from some of its most puzzling impasses. One of Ricoeur’s most basic and exciting philosophical assumptions in this context is that there is a power to fictional narrative to redescribe a reality inaccessible to direct description. Interestingly, it is precisely in his studies on metaphor that such productive interrelation between fiction and philosophy finds its grounds. In works like The Rule of Metaphor (1978) or his 1974 essay ‘Metaphor and the Main Problem of Hermeneutics’, Ricoeur demonstrates how metaphor not only operates essentially discursively, but can, and indeed should, be viewed as a model of discourse in its own right. Rather than being ‘confined to a role of accompaniment, of illustration’, metaphor, in this scheme of things, ‘participates in the invention of meaning’ at the level of the text as a whole (Ricoeur, 1979: 123). First and foremost, however, the metaphorical statement emerges as supremely referential – albeit with a difference. In his introduction to the first volume of Time and Narrative Ricoeur (1984: xi) argues that the poetic function of language is not limited to the celebration of language for its own sake, at the expense of the referential function, which is predominant in descriptive discourse. [Rather,] the suspension of this direct, descriptive referential function is only the reverse side, or the negative condition, of a more covered over referential function of discourse, which is, so to speak, liberated by the suspending of the descriptive value of statements. In this way poetic discourse brings to language aspects, qualities, and values of reality that lack access to

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language that is directly descriptive and that can be spoken only by means of the complex interplay between the metaphorical utterance and the rule-governed transgression of the usual meanings of our words.

This is not an appeal – in time-honoured humanist fashion – to a metaphysical ‘higher truth’ or ‘reality’ of poetic discourse. Neither metaphor nor the operations of mimesis, which Ricoeur (1984) later recasts in the mould of metaphorical reference, pretend to any privileged relation to an external given, but rather produce meaning, ‘redescribe’ or ‘resignify’ their referent, along a seamless hermeneutic circle of linguistic activity: ‘only the image which does not already have its referent in reality is able to display a world’. When, by the same token, ‘the image is made, it is also able to remake the world’ (Ricoeur, 1979: 129). Marcus’s list of names of grasses – ‘denotative, . . . imagined’ – comes to mind again: Alopecurus (Fox-tail) – from alopex, a fox, oura, a tail Phalaris – canary grass – from phalos, shining Gastridium – nit-grass – from gastridion, a little swelling Aira – hair-grass – from aira, to destroy (darnel) Arrhenatherum – oat like grass – arrhen, male, ather, an awn Panicum – Panick-grass – from panis, bread Anthoxanthum – vernal grass – anthos, a flower, xanthos, yellow. (PM: 20; see SL: 300)

All these names, Byatt writes, are ‘small metaphors – human perceptions, the nit, the little swelling, seeing the likeness in the difference of foxtail or haretail and grass’. Even the double metaphors arising purely ‘out of etymological confusion’ – Panick-grass – come to signify out of their very surplus of meaning: we see ‘the grass both quaking with fear and providing wheat-ears for bread’. Above all, however, these names ‘are in their business a counter-image to Sartre’s experience of namelessness’, and they are so because they are mimetic icons, productively referential, giving local embodiment to the impossible, paradoxical ‘relation of words to things’ to the precise extent that they allow us to perceive identity and difference not only between foxtail and grass but also between word and thing, ‘simultaneously and dependent on each other’ (PM: 20; 15). Over the course of Still Life, not only metaphor but also the inextricably metaphor-bound language use that is narrative itself proves a powerfully productive force. For, despite its prominent passages of

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earnest, metafictional commentary about the nature of language, the most distinctive and remarkable feature of Still Life is the extent to which Byatt is successful in realising her fictional world. Throughout the novel, the reader is invited to imagine a wide range of sensuous experiences, from the heat of the sun and the fragrance of herbs in Provence to the taste of baked ham and apples served up at a family lunch. In a contemporary review of Still Life, Anthony Burgess (1985: 31) paid tribute to the novel’s vivid evocation of ‘the flesh . . . the taste and the colour’ of the 1950s. As well as being full of sensations, however, the novel is – true, in this respect, to its original programme – also full of things: memorable period details include Winifred’s mental inventory of the ‘small objects with very limited functions’ on her dining table – ‘the butter dish which exactly held a standard half-pound block of butter, the little butter-knife with its blunt blade, the teapot stand in faded green pink and gold, the cheese dish, its wedge-shaped lid ornamented with brown floppy flowers, its handle a twisted pottery rope’ (SL: 146–7). These ephemera both function nostalgically, as mnemonic touchstones of a forgotten era, and signal a deliberate focus on the material side of existence. Significantly, though, even in this most ‘thingy’ of descriptive passages, we are far from the nouveau romanesque project of ‘no ideas but in things’. For Winifred, even the teapot stand is replete with symbolic significance: all these small objects, which she had once ‘been pleased to acquire’ and which, back then, represented a platonic ideal of domestic order, now reflect her own sense of physical redundancy in age, and her ‘swollen and grotesque’ menopausal body (SL: 147). Indeed, this overpowering awareness of the physicality of the human body is a recurring theme in the novel, which, in spite of its ultimate acceptance of the fact that the symbolic lies coiled in our language, insists that – stripped of symbolic meaning and pared down to its basic physical components – human existence is essentially a matter of flesh and blood. Winifred’s predicament prefigures that of her eldest daughter Stephanie, who, at the beginning of Still Life, is pregnant with her first child and seems destined to repeat the grimly eternal cycle of birth, pregnancy, age and eventual physical redundancy that currently looms so large in her mother’s thoughts. In a scene set in the queue of an ante-natal clinic, Stephanie, still on a quest to reconcile her experiences as thinking mind and sensate body, attempts to continue her readings of Wordsworth while coming to terms with

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the uncomfortable and inconvenient physical symptoms of pregnancy. Feeling acutely ‘sunk in biology’ (SL: 13), she gains some relief from reading and rereading Wordsworth’s Lucy poem ‘A slumber did my spirit steal’. The poem, which describes a dead spirit as buried beneath the immovable bulk of ‘rocks and stones and trees’ rather aptly reflects Stephanie’s own sense of encumbrance, and, as the novel progresses, Stephanie does indeed sink ever deeper into the social and biological role of wife and mother, finding it ever harder to find the time to think and eventually despairing that she has even lost the rich vocabulary with which she was once able to form complex thoughts: I suffer from having to use a limited vocabulary. All the time. . . . Discourse. Discourse of reason. Sophistical. Ideal – in a Platonic sense. Catalyst. Anacoluthon. Mendacious. Realism. The worst things are the words that do have meaning in the tiny vocabulary I do use, like real and ideal, words that lose half their associations. (SL: 306)

In a journalistic piece entitled ‘Fiction Informed by Science’, Byatt (2005g: 2–3) has described Still Life as a novel ‘about biological existence – sex, birth and death’, and indeed the novel is characterised by its bold attempts to describe the fundamental experiences of human life. In the ante-natal clinic, Stephanie’s solitary reading is briefly, and shockingly, interrupted by a fellow expectant mother suffering an undignified miscarriage in the hospital corridor. Stephanie blames herself as well as the other patients and hospital personnel for the ‘foolish’ pointlessness of this loss of life: ‘I didn’t listen. Nobody did. We taught her to stand in line’ (SL: 15–16). Worse, Stephanie had simply picked up her copy of Wordsworth again once ‘Mrs Owen, now chalk-white and motionless on her trolley, was wheeled behind curtains’ (SL: 15). Stephanie’s own pregnancy will, of course, continue to full term, and the scenes depicting the birth of her son William represent another pungent example of the narrative’s unflinching engagement with the bodily realities of human life. The physical sensation of the birth is presented from Stephanie’s point of view, in a potent mixture of precise descriptive prose and suggestive metaphor: It had the appalling uncontrollable nature of severe diarrhoea pains but was otherwise different, in that nothing knotted: Something heavy and hard and huge inside her opened her out like a battering ram and the pain was no longer defined and separate from her but total, grasping, heating, bursting the whole of her, head, chest, wrought and pounded

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belly, so that animal sounds broke from it, grunts, incoherent grinding clamour, panting sighs. (SL: 92)

This passage, with its rapid, sliding clauses, is part of a sequence that depicts the human body in transformation as Stephanie is transfigured from an eloquent human being into a grunting animal. As she fulfils her biological role, Stephanie is likened to a piece of meat on a block, pushed open ‘as though by butchery the belly is severed and the flanks fall’ (SL: 92). While the indirect first person voice present in this passage effectively conveys Stephanie’s subjective experience of the birth, the precise biological observations of the narrator simultaneously communicate a much less personalised version of events: Stephanie’s identity as thinking subject coexists with a much starker vision of her as a physical object, a replicator of genes, a fragile physiological mechanism. If Still Life describes the process of birth in the language of violence and struggle, the choice of vocabulary here is not merely motivated by the narrative’s concerns with the bare blood-and-bones realities of our physical lives. Rather, this stark imagery is later paralleled by a scene which imagines the process of death: Still Life ends with a shocking plot twist as Stephanie, perhaps the key character focus in this instalment of the Quartet, is killed in a freak accident. In various interviews, Byatt has indicated that the arbitrary and unforeshadowed death of a major character was planned from an early stage in the genesis of the Quartet as a ‘technical’ device, and inspired both by literary models (including Monica Dickens, E. M Forster and Angus Wilson) and by a real-life accident that she had suffered herself.2 She had also previously discussed the concept of accidents in fiction with Iris Murdoch, in relation to the latter’s An Accidental Man, where Murdoch described her own use of an accident as ‘a deliberate attempt to explode the central nucleus’ of the plot (Toomey, 1978: 12). The accident in Murdoch’s novel served as a device which exemplified her notion of ‘contingency’, one of the cornerstones of Murdoch’s defence of the realist novel in essays like ‘Against Dryness’ (1961) and ‘The Sublime and the Beautiful Revisited’ (1959). In Byatt’s novel, the killing off of a principal character in the middle of the Quartet’s story is equally effective, both in dramatic and in intellectual terms: it is unconventional and therefore unexpected (despite retrospective readings that can, as Westlake (1989: 37) has done, be applied to the novel’s Bede epitaph or to its repeated references to ‘A slumber did

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my spirit steal’), and in its deliberate arbitrariness, the accident simulates the element of chance – of contingency – that necessarily governs so many events in real life. Stephanie is electrocuted by an unearthed refrigerator as she attempts to rescue a sparrow trapped underneath, and her death is both tragic and absurd. The sparrow later escapes unaided, and Marcus, who is present at the time of the accident, is not quick-witted enough to turn off the power and save his sister. Stephanie’s ultimate moments of consciousness fuse language and experience: And then the refrigerator struck. She thought, as the pain ran through her, as her arm, fused to the metal, burned and banged, as her head filled, ‘This is it,’ and then, with a flashing vision of heads on pillows, ‘Oh, what will happen to the children?’ And the word, altruism, and surprise at it. And then dark pain, and more pain. (SL: 334)

The image of the fridge ‘striking’ both epitomises Stephanie’s sense of violation and reflects the human need to ascribe meaningfulness, to impose narratives of cause and effect, onto the inanimate world, where such accidents are, by definition, meaningless. The surprising intrusion of the word ‘altruism’, meanwhile, testifies to Stephanie’s continued existence as a linguistic being, even at this moment of extremity. Moments later, however, Stephanie dies with her arm fused to the metal of the refrigerator, indicating that she is at one with it, has become part of the insentient world of ‘rocks and stones and trees’ described in the Wordsworth poem she so admires. The novel she once inhabited, meanwhile, continues its assault on the reader’s emotions by refusing to end with Stephanie’s disappearance into an absence of ‘dark pain’, which might at least have provided an aesthetically satisfying moment of catharsis. Instead, the narrative relentlessly drags out the aftermath of the death in three further chapters which convey Daniel’s sense of shock and spiritual emptiness at his wife’s death. Byatt’s imaginative recreations of extreme human situations in Still Life are economical, unsentimental and terribly effective, in spite or perhaps because of the novel’s intensely realised self-reflexiveness about its uncertain status as a verbal artefact. In the final analysis, Still Life thus stands as a rather triumphant endorsement of the continuing power of realist prose in the face of critical caveats, and of language’s ability effectively to redescribe and thus make the world in the imagination of the reader. As Byatt remarked in a public

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dialogue with Iris Murdoch at London’s Institute of Contemporary Arts on occasion of Still Life’s publication: [W]e live in a time where there are a great many theories about the untrustworthiness of language, and not many theories about the enormous power of it, the enormous accuracy of it, the enormous descriptive energy it has so that you can describe a flower or a hospital room. None of your readers will see the same flower in their minds. But none of them will not see it more accurately. (Murdoch, 1985: 29)

Notes 1

2

Tom Paulin’s (1979: 77) scathing response to The Virgin in the Garden’s programmatic literary allusiveness is typical of that of many of the novel’s contemporary reviewers: ‘for every emotion there is a quotation . . . the story displays such a high level of literary self-consciousness that it never acquires any autonomy’. This last comment, however, is rather poorly targeted, as The Virgin in the Garden clearly insists that literary texts are, precisely, not autonomous entities. Byatt has discussed the accident in Still Life in various interviews, including Toomey, 1978: 12; Hughes-Hallet, 1985: 23; Friel and Newman, 2004: n.p.

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Two cultures: Babel Tower and A Whistling Woman

The ending of Still Life and the start of Babel Tower both feature surprise events which shift the plot of the Quartet in unexpected directions, and make manifest a quality that Iris Murdoch (1961: 23), in her seminal essay ‘Against Dryness’, proposed as an essential characteristic of realist prose: ‘contingency’. Still Life ends with the sudden death of one of its main characters, an event avowedly designed to simulate the emotional impact caused by a real-life accident. Six years further on in the story of the Quartet, Babel Tower begins with a surprise reunion as the poet Hugh Pink stumbles across his old friend Frederica walking in a quiet Herefordshire wood. The woman is wearing country clothes, jodhpurs, boots, a hacking jacket. She has a green headsquare knotted under her chin, in the style of the Queen and her royal sister. . . . He does not recognise her. She is in the wrong clothes, in the wrong place, at the wrong time. (BT: 3)

Pink is surprised by this chance meeting in more ways than one. He is surprised because, since ‘vanishing’ from her old social circle six years earlier, Frederica’s whereabouts have been a mystery to her former friends. He is surprised, also, by his encounter with Frederica’s son Leo, who appears to have sprung into the world from nowhere and seems wise beyond his years. Most of all, Pink is surprised by the dramatic transformation in Frederica herself. Feisty Frederica, whom Hugh remembers from their Cambridge years as a ‘fierce and striving’ girl (BT: 15) who ‘never stopped talking’ (BT: 16), now cuts a quiet, subdued figure. Once a nonconformist Potter, Mrs Frederica Reiver sports the attire of the upper classes and seems to have embraced the establishment. Readers of Still Life, too, will remember Frederica as a rather selfish, headstrong young woman, apparently

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without an ounce of maternal instinct, who made an indifferent aunt and a decidedly lacklustre au pair. Now she follows her son around as if physically attached to him, tending to his needs ‘humbly’ (BT: 15). For Hugh Pink, as for the reader, this transformation is intriguing, particularly since the implicit ‘narratives of the six years that have passed’ (BT: 14) largely remain untold, even though, clearly, much has happened. As Pink notes, ‘You’ve done a lot of living, Frederica. Real things have happened to you’ (BT: 16). But Frederica’s own account of the breakdown of the Potter family after Stephanie’s death and her own headlong rush into an unsuitable marriage is a ‘practised’ tale (BT: 15), designed to conceal more than it reveals and leaving a sizeable narrative gap to be filled by the hermeneutic imagination, both Hugh’s and the reader’s. Babel Tower thus introduces a new-look Frederica and, it may appear to the reader, the start of a new-look Quartet. Certainly, this third instalment in Byatt’s tetralogy depicts a changed world: the England of the 1950s, so affectionately and meticulously recreated in The Virgin in the Garden and Still Life, is gone, and we are now in the semi-mythical Swinging Sixties, the decade of sexual and social revolutions. With this temporal leap, the Quartet enters not only uncharted social but also uncharted narrative territory; there is a palpable sense of a change of pace, style, perhaps even subject matter, and the storytelling takes on a satirical edge as the antics of students, artists and gurus are mocked and social phenomena such as educational reform, liberal politics and new-age religion are scrutinised with a sharp and unsentimental eye. Meanwhile, bizarre ‘happenings’ and new-age rituals add a distinctly surreal flavour to the story. Significantly, there was a gap of eleven years between the publication of Still Life in 1985 and the publication of Babel Tower in 1996 – a time of unprecedented literary productivity for Byatt, during which she published three volumes of short fiction, two novellas and, of course, Possession. From the late 1980s onwards, Byatt’s writing had become increasingly typified by formal experiments and polyvocal narrative textures, as well as by a growing preoccupation with myth, the fairytale form and the Victorian era. These developments were widely thought to represent a move away from Byatt’s earlier concern with a contemporary and ‘self-conscious realism’ (PM: 4) and led many critics and commentators to welcome this previously ‘difficult’ and stubbornly ‘traditional’ writer into the

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postmodern fold. With the publication of Babel Tower, however, Byatt confounded critical expectations yet again. Did her return to the Quartet signal, as many of her more traditionally inclined readers and critics hoped, a return to her old preoccupation with ‘the problems of the “real” in fiction, and the adequacy of words to describe it’ (PM: 5), or did Byatt’s latest experiments with new and often radical narrative strategies reflect a new set of theoretical interest altogether? Certain elements of Babel Tower do indeed signal a fresh start: for example, the novel teasingly offers the reader at least three alternative openings.1 ‘It might begin’, we are told, with Pink’s meeting with Frederica; or ‘it might begin’ in the subterranean crypt of a London church, where Daniel Orton now works for a telephone helpline, ‘hearing desperate voices subside into meaningless babble and the burring of an empty telephone, or rise more and more shrilly before the sudden severing of the link across the air’ (BT: 10). Alternatively, ‘it might begin’ with a curiously gothic tale about a group of courtly refugees who escape a bloody revolution to establish a new ‘community of entire freedom’ (BT: 13). Each of these beginnings at first appears to lead the reader into separate stories, although all of these stories will eventually become intertwined as the narrative progresses. We later discover, for example, that the provocative caller whom Daniel has nicknamed ‘Steelwire’ is in fact Jude Mason, the author of the Sadean tale which will metamorphose into Babbletower, the scandalous novel-within-the-novel. Jude and Frederica, in turn, cross paths when she finds a teaching job at the art school where he models, and all three characters are gradually drawn together as the events of the novel unfold. With its multiple beginnings, Babel Tower explicitly announces itself as a point of new departures and as a complex, multi-layered narrative that allows the provocative and feverishly experimental atmosphere of its 1960s setting to spill over strategically into the novel’s own narrative structures. In describing Frederica’s literary experiments, for example, Byatt makes explicit reference to the cutup-technique so famously used by the Beat writer William Burroughs in the late 1960s. Babel Tower’s experimental features, which also include numerous passages of pastiche and quotation, inlaid narratives and stories within stories, can thus, in part at least, be read as deliberately (and often ironically) placed period details. After all, narrative form and literary experiment were hot topics during the period in which Babel Tower is set, with the self-styled avant-garde

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of the era, anxious to respond to Alain Robbe-Grillet’s (1965) call for a ‘new novel’ to reflect a new reality, vocally rejecting the linear narratives of traditional realist prose and its purported claims to transparency in favour of radical experiments in literary form. John Fowles, in large part inspired by the French nouveau roman, famously provided alternative endings to his 1969 novel The French Lieutenant’s Woman, avowedly in order to relinquish his authorial control over the narrative and strike at the realist illusion. In ‘People in Paper Houses’, Byatt had delivered a perceptive critique of Fowles’s methods, pointing out that the projected multiple endings to his novel ultimately ‘do not suggest a plurality of possible stories’ but rather constitute the ‘programmatic denial of the reality of any’, so that they ‘cancel each other out, and cancel their participants, rendering Fowles as arbitrary a puppet-maker as he declared his desire not to be’ (PM: 174). If, in Babel Tower, Byatt suddenly seems to participate in this kind of discursive multiplicity, this is done not merely in order to imitate the contemporary idiom but also, and characteristically, in an attempt to explore and comment upon the legacy of literary experimentation in and through the medium of fiction itself. Uniquely out of the Quartet novels, Babel Tower is narrated in the present tense, creating a documentary effect that is further reinforced by the snippets of reportage that place the action of the novel within a framework of historical events: August comes. The Beatles go to meditate with the Maharishi and Brian Epstein kills himself. The Beatles return. They say the Maharishi has told them not to mourn. Jude Mason is still lost, and Frederica, restless and lonely, goes to the Middle Earth with Avram Snitkin. (BT: 603)

The 1960s marked the high point of a period which, some historians have argued, saw the most rapid, dramatic and universal social transformations in human history, and the increased narrative pace of Babel Tower seems intended to convey this social dynamism. The storytelling is economical and brisk; scenes are often short and truncated, with many key moments conveyed by fast-paced dialogue. When, for example, Frederica visits Agatha Mond with a view to sharing the latter woman’s house in Hamelin Square, the third person narrative metamorphoses into a dialogue which dramatises the complex nature of communication. Both women struggle to verbalise the instinctual misgivings they have about sharing their personal space and employ an elaborate politeness to mask their anxieties –

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the verbal equivalent of the helmet and sword that Leo has put on in this scene. Agatha Mond’s voice is full of efficient clarity, fear, and doubt. She is a Civil Servant, vulnerable through her child. ‘Do you have parties?’ ‘Oh no. But that’s because I don’t like large parties. I’m quite sure, by arrangement . . .’ Frederica says, ‘I don’t think it would work. I don’t think I should come here. I don’t think my way of life –’ She has no idea what her way of life is. Agatha Mond says, ‘I quite understand, I do understand –’ (BT: 296)

Paradoxically, it is only when the ‘threat’ of living together is removed that the women can relax enough to feel genuinely interested in each other, and discover common ground. Their mutual icy reserve is melted during the course of a brief conversation about William Blake and childhood. ‘I’ve never had this conversation,’ says Frederica. ‘Nor have I. More cake?’ A turmoil in the playhouse ends their talk. Frederica has made a friend. Three weeks later, Frederica and Leo move into the lower flat in 42 Hamelin Square. (BT: 299)

Here, as elsewhere in the novel, dialogue moves the story forward: words make things happen. Interestingly, some of Byatt’s uses of dialogue in Babel Tower seem indebted to Iris Murdoch’s writing, another – albeit quite different – example of Byatt’s active engagement with the literature of the 1960s. Consider, for example, the resemblances between the scene of Frederica’s party (BT: 339–43) and similar scenes from Iris Murdoch’s 1971 novel An Accidental Man where the ‘he said, she said’ background prose is cut, leaving the reader to work out from the context which character is behind each disembodied voice. Babel Tower is a book full of chatter, babble and disembodied voices, both human and literary. As the biblical myth enshrined in the title implies, the novel is centrally concerned with the perceived breakdown and fragmentation of language, a theme not least inspired by historical circumstances. Byatt (1996d: 1) has commented that [m]y immediate experience of the 1960s was that ‘closed languages’ were proliferating, sociological and political languages, the riddles of

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death of god theology and Laingian psychiatry, the closed group worlds of the hip and the cool, the interest in silence and the impossibility of speech – Zen Buddhism, Waiting for Godot and Endgame.

Her own novel both mimics this cacophony of voices and critically engages with the contemporary sense of a crisis in language, exploring the beginnings of a post-structuralist vision of society and culture as textual constructions against the backdrop of what Byatt herself has defined as one of the Quartet’s overarching themes: ‘the shifting relation between language and reality – language and social life, language and ideas’ (1996d: 1). Thus, for all its stylistic innovations, Babel Tower falls squarely within Byatt’s wider project of critical storytelling – it is a complex novel of ideas which embodies and explores the theoretical problems of perception, language, truth, fiction and narrative that have preoccupied Byatt throughout her career.

Babel Tower forges interesting connections between the failure of confidence in language and contemporary social upheavals. To a large extent, the novel reflects the historian Eric Hobsbawm’s (2001: 334) verdict that the social revolution of the 1960s ‘can best be understood as the triumph of the individual over society, or rather, the breaking of the threads which in the past had woven human beings into social textures’. Byatt’s novel, itself replete, formally, with broken threads and ruptured textures, depicts a society focused on individualism. Perhaps this is why so many of the artists and intellectuals who populate the pages of Babel Tower are attracted to Romantic images of the individual: Jude Mason, for example, has modelled himself on the Romantic type of the mad genius, and there is a widespread revival of interest in the private fantasy worlds of William Blake and his anti-authoritarian stance. Pop-poet Mickey Impey unsuccessfully tries to incite school children to rebellion by quoting Blake, and Richmond Bly inspires his art students with rhapsodies about the Prophetic Books, ‘free, as he said, of the monotonous Cadence – the bondage – the fetters of rhyme and blank verse’ (BT: 162). By contrast, Frederica, perhaps reflecting the views of her creator in this instance and certainly echoing Iris Murdoch’s (1961: 22–3) call to discard ‘the consoling dream necessity of Romanticism’ in favour of ‘a new vocabulary of attention’, regards Blake’s fantasy worlds as a self-indulgent example of a ‘closed language’: ‘infant babble, not true language-forging’ (BT: 161).2

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In Byatt’s depiction of the 1960s, the old social structures that traditionally bound people together are falling apart as rapidly as traditional modes of storytelling do during the period. A prominent theme in Babel Tower is the breakdown of family units: the fragmentation of Stephanie’s family after her death (the children have lodged with their grandparents in Yorkshire since Daniel’s departure), the disintegration of Frederica and Nigel’s marriage and their tug of war over son Leo. Significantly, Frederica’s own personal crisis is reflected in her literary experiment Laminations: she feels herself to be ‘a woman whose life appears to be flying apart into unrelated fragments’ (BT: 379) and responds by compartmentalising her experiences and recording their different facets in a gold-covered scrapbook that clearly invites comparison with Anna Wulf from Doris Lessing’s 1962 novel The Golden Notebook. And like Anna Wulf, Frederica’s experience leads her to develop a distinctly postmodern sense of herself as a multiple or fragmented identity: ‘she is many women in one – a mother, a wife, a lover, a watcher’ (BT: 462). Frederica’s dilemma is, of course, part of a wider social trend. Throughout society, there is a widely proclaimed ‘death of coherence’, a breakdown of traditional codes and systems on a mass-scale, from a personal to a social level. As one of Babel Tower’s characters, the publisher Rupert Parrot, puts it in a conversation with Frederica, the decade seems to herald [t]he breaking up of our moral structure as we know it. All the trouble about Christine Keeler and the Establishment – it’s all cracking up, the conventional visions we were happy to live by even if we didn’t believe them. And now it isn’t possible, and people want to read about it all, they want to know what to think. We’re moving into a period of moral ferment, moral realignment, fruitful chaos, people want to know what’s going on. (BT: 147)

Seemingly in response to its characters’ curiosity and concerns, Babel Tower offers a wealth of metaphors and images which make productive comparisons between the perceived crisis of language and the socio-historical upheavals that appear to be rocking the foundations of society. Consider, for example, this description of the reconstructed stained glass window in St Simeon’s church: It once had gaudy nineteenth-century stained glass, of no particular merit, depicting Noah’s Ark and the story of the Flood on the one side, and the stories of the raising of Lazarus, the appearance of the risen

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Christ at Emmaus and the tongues of fire descending at Whitsuntide, on the other. All these windows were sucked in by bomb blasts, leaving heaps of brilliant blackened fragments strewn in the aisles. A devout glazier in the congregation undertook to rebuild the windows, after the war, using the broken lights, but he was not able, or even willing, to reconstitute the narratives as they had been. What he made was a coloured mosaic of purple and gold constellations, of rivers of grassgreen and blood-red, of hummocks of burned amber and clouded, smoke-stained, once-clear glass. (BT: 6–7)

This descriptive passage, while vividly recreating the visual impact of the stained glass window, damaged in the war and now itself resembling a burnt-out battlefield with ‘rivers of grass-green and blood-red’, operates on a number of different discursive levels. Firstly, the idea that these visual representations of old biblical narratives have been smashed to pieces in the Blitz hints at the glassy fragility of the narratives themselves, as if they are inadequate to sustain the Christian faith in the modern age. This, after all, is a society which no longer believes in the Bible; it is a society in a moral and cultural vacuum, turning to ‘happenings’, mysticism, new-age cults, and revisionist theology to revive its flagging spiritual ardour. On another level, the image of the burnt glass is an image of language: whereas glass, a prominent if problematic metaphor also, as we recall, in Byatt’s The Game, has historically been employed as a metaphor for the transparent nature of language, here the glass has become clouded and opaque, just as the question of language has become increasingly problematised by the linguistic empiricism and materialistic behavourism that dominated debates in the 1960s and gave rise to ever more extreme forms of literary and cultural theory. The form of the new window is similarly suggestive. The unnamed glazier, rather typically of artists of his generation, had little faith in traditional forms and overcame his practical and artistic problems by rearranging the old fragments in new ways. Questions of how to make the old new, how to recreate and revive the forms of the past or whether to reject them outright, are, of course, at the very heart of the representational problems grappled with by many artists and writers of the postwar period, including Byatt herself. The motley stained-glass window can thus also be read as an image of the novel form – and of Babel Tower itself – as it both ponders and participates in the transformation of linguistic linearity into a many-textured verbal collage, a mosaic of cut-and-pasted quotations, snippets of journalism, letters, court

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transcripts, fables, ventriloquised voices – and passages of seemingly straightforward descriptive prose such as the one quoted above. Not surprisingly, the puzzlements over ‘the adequacy of words’ and the resulting problems of communication, ever present in Byatt’s work, are also a prominent theme throughout Babel Tower. The pastiche report of the Steerforth Committee (a fictionalised version, as Jane Campbell (2004: 239) notes, of the Kingman Committee of Inquiry into the Teaching of English Language, on which Byatt served), which is pasted into Frederica’s Laminations, already hints at the theoretical problems that lurk behind the failure of confidence in language: ‘There is a growing belief in some schools of thought that “language is divorced from the world”, that it is perhaps simply a partial system which best describes only its own interrelations and structure’ (BT: 479). Over the course of the novel, concerns about the slippery nature of language are borne out by the two court trials that form the dramatic climax of Babel Tower. During the Babbletower obscenity trial, none of the ‘expert’ witnesses can convincingly explain why Jude’s book has a defence on the grounds of literary merit. Alexander’s subtle reactions to the book have to be simplified to abstraction as the language of literary criticism does not mesh with the matrix of legal discourse. The psychoanalyst Elvet Gander responds to the book ‘at length, plangently, musically’, and yet none of the jury members can later remember what he said: he speaks in a language which is elaborate, idiosyncratic and entirely devoid of content (BT: 547). Furthermore, when the prosecution lawyer tries to explain the Obscene Publications Act to the jury, every word he glosses – ‘obscene’, ‘deprave’ and ‘corrupt’ – only demands a fresh gloss. The effect is one of différance in action, with meaning endlessly deferred. Thus, while the case against Jude’s book is based on the premise that its words have power in the real world – the power to ‘hurt’ its readers – the overall effect of the trial is to demonstrate how language does not seem to touch the world at all. At a more personal level, Frederica and Nigel’s divorce proceedings painfully illustrate the effects of the imprecision of language, the clumsy second-hand nature of words. Frederica’s divorce affidavit, written in a flat legalese, simplifies and distorts the complex realities – physical, emotional and instinctual – behind her marriage to Nigel: ‘The document is nauseating because it is the skeleton of a document that could truly plead, that could make its reader weep for pity and laugh grimly at human folly’ (BT: 307). And while Frederica’s reading

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of Burroughs had ‘sent a spiky thrill of recognition through her brain. The point of words is that they have to have already been used, they have not to be new, they have to be only re-arrangements, in order to have meaning’ (BT: 384), the divorce trial leads her to feel that she is trapped within a self-contained system, a closed discourse produced by ancient ideologies that are weighted against her: The net is made by words which do not describe what she feels is happening: adultery, connivance, pre-nuptial incontinence, petitioner, respondent. . . . These legal words carry with them the whole history of a society in which a woman was a man’s property, and also a part of his flesh, not to be contaminated. And behind continence and incontinence is the alien, ancient, and powerful history of Christian morals. (BT: 324)

The divorce trial itself is presented as a series of verbal traps set for Frederica, who cannot justify her unconventional lifestyle using the language of ‘the domain of public morals’ (BT: 323): she is neither the stereotype of the loose woman and bad mother described by Nigel’s lawyer nor the naive ‘over-educated young woman’ described by her own. The trial soon develops into a clash of opposing narratives, and truth remains elusive, hidden behind ‘lies and equivocations and painful approximations’ (BT: 508). Nigel’s justification for the lies told by his family to blacken Frederica’s reputation is that ‘[a]ll’s fair in love and war’, and indeed, if language does not touch the world, if all truth is constructed, then lying is not only acceptable but inevitable (BT: 520). In ‘Against Dryness’, Iris Murdoch (1961: 19) famously deplored the fact that twentieth-century culture had come to substitute ‘a facile idea of sincerity’ for ‘the hard idea of truth’, and she voiced her concerns, at the beginning of the 1960s, about the proliferation of sceptical philosophies that reduce truth or reality to a state of relativism. Traditionally pitted against such relativism are, of course, the discourses of science, founded on the premise that there is an external world and objective truths that humans can come closer to understanding through experiment and research. Throughout her fiction, A. S. Byatt has evoked the project of science as a symbol of patient attention to the world beyond the word, and the prominent place of scientific discourse amongst the languages at play in Babel Tower not only testifies to Byatt’s growing preoccupation with the

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relationship between science and literature in recent years but also runs as a fitting counterpoint to the novel’s engagement with the twentieth-century crises of language. Since the early 1990s, the acknowledgements that Byatt typically appends to her works of fiction, citing reference books and thanking people who have advised the author, have included an increasing number of scientists and science writers. Byatt is perhaps unique amongst contemporary fiction writers in her enthusiasm for communicating and collaborating with scientists. Broadcasting work, because of its interdisciplinary nature, has often provided her with a useful point of contact with the scientific world. For example, in 1993, an invitation to talk about time and the novel on the radio programme Blue Skies (Byatt, 1993g) led to a fruitful dialogue with the geneticist Steve Jones, whose input was to prove crucial to Babel Tower, A Whistling Woman and also The Biographer’s Tale. Byatt and Jones have since collaborated in a number of television and radio programmes, and Jones’s widely respected work on snail biology is the model for many of the snail experiments described in the Quartet. In Babel Tower, a sizeable portion of the cast of characters is preoccupied by questions of a scientific nature. Marcus and his friend Jacqueline Winwar, for example, are both inspired and appalled by Rachel Carson’s classic eco-text Silent Spring (1962), which describes the damage inflicted by pesticides on the eco-system. Similarly, the interest in genetics shown by many of the characters involved with the fictional University of North Yorkshire is an apt historical detail, reflecting the mass of literature and popular speculation generated in the decades that followed Watson and Crick’s crucial discovery of the double helix structure of DNA in 1953. Jacqueline and her supervisor Luk Lysgaard-Peacock are studying snail populations, which have their genetic histories ‘written’ on their shells, while Gerard Wijnnobel enjoys speculating about the possible links between genetically inherited neurological structures and the human capacity for language. Indeed, most of Byatt’s scientist characters are fascinated by the similarities they perceive between the transmission of genetic information and linguistic communication. Luk, for example, envisualises DNA as a simple alphabet that can produce a rich and varied language: ‘[t]he alphabet of the DNA has only four letters, but they can produce an apparently infinite variety’ (BT: 358). Inevitably though, such analogies cannot be used uncritically; in the novel, it is, quite aptly, the philosopher Vincent Hodgkiss who cautions against

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comparing genetic ‘information’ with linguistic ‘information’ that can be recorded and passed on in writing (BT: 251). Byatt recognises that Luk’s alphabet comparison is essentially a figure of speech, but nevertheless insists that it is a meaningful one. Scientists have, after all, always used abstractions and metaphors to deepen their insights and communicate their ideas, and the notion of a ‘language of the genes’ has proved popular and enduring. Steve Jones (1993: xi), for example, has elaborated this metaphor to suggest that genes have both a ‘grammar’ and a ‘vocabulary’, and proposed even further resemblances: ‘[b]oth languages and genes evolve. Each generation there are mistakes in transmission and, in time, enough differences accumulate to produce a new language – or a new form of life.’ More recently, the scientist and writer Peter Atkins (2003: 32) has compared the beginnings of life to the beginnings of culture, in that both involved the invention of a language, ‘a way of passing on intricate, unpredictable information’. In choosing genetics as one of the focal points for her novel, Byatt has hit upon what is perhaps the most recent manifestation of the famous ‘Two Cultures’ debate that raged sporadically throughout the twentieth century. Although the initial debate between F. R. Leavis and C. P. Snow regarding the incompatibility and mutual antagonism of scientists and non-scientists has long cooled, the area of genetics continues to be the site of much debate in this context. In the 1970s, popular science writers such as E. O. Wilson and Richard Dawkins generated much controversy by suggesting that human behaviour and culture might be determined by genetic factors. This is, of course, the antithesis of the stance adopted by literary and cultural theorists who perceive human culture and identity to be ‘constructed’ and contingent, and regard language as an anonymous, autonomous textual matrix which governs not only how we may express ourselves but also how we may think. Replace ‘language’ with ‘genetics’ in this last clause and one gets a rough picture of the resulting ‘nature versus nurture’ debate that is still current today. In Babel Tower, the constructivist notion of a textual reality is deliberately set against the contrasting scientific perspective. As literature’s traditional ‘other’, science should afford a vantage point from which to critique literary culture, a task all the more pressing since science now seems to provide the narratives that have replaced those of religion and humanism as our major interpretative paradigms.

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As we have seen, Babel Tower examines the twentieth-century crisis of language by dramatising a clash between the fragmented, mutually incomprehensible languages of literature, psychology and the legal system. This quasi-biblical chaos, however, is countered by the recurrent image of a universal language of the genes. Both of these contrasting metaphors are present in the novel’s prologue, which teases the reader with its riddling image of a thrush cracking snails on its anvil. The anvil is a ‘fallen stone’ carved with the fading characters of a dead human language, ‘maybe runes, maybe cuneiform, maybe ideograms’; meanwhile, the stripes of ‘gold, rose, chalk, umber’ which cover the snail shells bear testament to the living language which links them to their fossilised ‘congeners’ (BT: 1).3 Throughout the novel, constructivism, relativism and the literary obsession with formlessness are depicted in sharp contrast to the scientific perception of inherent patterning and order. In Byatt’s recreation of the 1960s, scientists are engaged in mapping the natural world and building systems of knowledge. Luk, for example, is trying to determine whether the patterning of the shells of Helix hortensis is caused by genetic inheritance or environmental factors. Jacqueline’s future supervisor Lyon Bowman studies ‘the structure of the cells of the brain’ (BT: 247), while Marcus Potter is interested in how natural forms, such as the spiral of a snail shell or the branches of a tree, seem to construct themselves along the Fibonacci spiral. Contemporary artists, meanwhile, are depicted as fixated by the idea of chaos, and the breakdown of cultural consensus. Scenes such as the ‘birdman’ sequence (BT: 442), for example, recall the Prologue to The Virgin in the Garden, where Alexander, visiting the National Portrait Gallery in 1968, perceives a world of signs without meaning: there are a lot of striking visual details with no underlying message, no sense of a coherent code. Predictably then, it is the non-scientist characters in Babel Tower who regard language as a problem. The psychoanalyst Elvet Gander, for example, has written a book called Language Our Straitjacket, a metaphor which his publisher Rupert Parrott takes a step further by producing a blank dummy book. For these intellectuals, language or discourse is a repressive medium that traps its speakers and restricts human potential, an attitude echoed in the new liberal ethos in education, dramatised in Babel Tower when the Steerforth Committee finds that discipline and rote-learning in British schools are giving way to a paradigm of education through ‘self-directed

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choice’ and play (BT: 172). Alexander and his colleagues on the committee keep coming up against the objection that ‘[l]earning English grammar, even to passionate readers, is peculiarly repugnant and somehow unnatural ’ (BT: 177). Nature is assumed to be free and formless, while the imposition of structure is interpreted as a repressive political act. The scientists in the novel, meanwhile, take a much more benign view of language. Gerard Wijnnobel, for example, believes that ‘[a]s beavers are born knowing how to make dams, and as spiders are born with the ability to make webs, so human beings are born with the ability to speak and think in grammatical forms’ (BT: 192). In other words: although language may be, to an extent, determined by our genetic makeup, it is seen to be an organic product of the human animal. Interestingly, this conceptualisation of language bears a curious resemblance to the Leavisite notion of an organic culture, which the radical thinkers of the 1960s were trying so forcefully to dismantle. As the narrative of Babel Tower suggests, their indignation is the result of a misapprehension; a confusion of grammatical and political rules. Here as elsewhere in Byatt’s oeuvre, the motif of science is employed to challenge the notion that structure is inherently unnatural, or even ‘repressive’. Thus, Babel Tower’s interest in DNA is at once a period detail and an illustration of a universal principle of organisation that is determined by biology, not political power. As Babel Tower probes the conceptual pitfalls and possibilities of ways of world-making across the ‘Two Cultures’ divide, the dispute between those who see nature as chaotic and those who see nature as ordered brings Babel Tower back to one of the Quartet’s most persistent and recurrent themes: is reality ordered, or is the order we perceive in the world only a reflection of our own minds? The question is, of course, not a new one. In 1871, George Eliot famously raised it when she inserted her ‘pier-glass parable’ into the narrative of Middlemarch.4 More recently, scientists have addressed this puzzling aspect of human nature by suggesting that the order we detect in our environment reflects the physiological composition of our brains. In Still Life, the narrator contemplated these theories: ‘Human cognition has been called “order from noise”: or it may be, contrariwise, the patterning of the world with a constructed map, crystallised in the genes, repeating laws already informing the growing mind’ (SL: 237). In Babel Tower, this idea is revisited by Gerard

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Wijnnobel, who is excited by Noam Chomsky’s early formulations of his theory of generative grammar and speculates that scientists ‘may find out the forms of language in the forest of the dendrites, in the links of the synapses’ (BT: 193). Sympathetic as Byatt undoubtedly is to the scientific viewpoint in Babel Tower, the novel nevertheless questions Wijnnobel’s belief that elegant scientific theories can tame the world into a coherent whole. Wijnnobel is, in many ways, a naive figure, characterised by an idealistic faith in science, progress and liberal-humanist morality, and hankering after a ‘theory of everything’ that seems decidedly simplistic. Elsewhere in the novel, however, more complex models of natural order are discussed. In a conversation with Vincent Hodgkiss, the character of Abraham Calder-Fluss, a biochemist with ‘a cautious interest in the new disciplines of neuroscience’ (BT: 247), reflects on Erwin Schrödinger’s earlier speculations about the nature of genetic inheritance and the structure of the living world: life, organic life, feeds on both order – the aperiodic crystals – and also disorder – random atomic vibrations and collisions. And then we begin to see that the whole universe might be an information system – of messages flowing through crystals amongst parasitic noise – and human thought then becomes a way of transmitting order between parts of the universe – of informing it – (BT: 251)

Here, Byatt finds an apt metaphor for the construction of her own novel and, as ever, it is not simply a question of ‘either-or. At its best, it is both-and’ (OHAS: 94). ‘Noise’ (in the sense of unwanted electrical or electromagnetic energy that diminishes the quality of a signal) becomes a pungent image in Babel Tower, which plays with ideas of language and communication while it teases the reader with intricate codes, loose ends, inexplicable details and conceptual patterns, forging a close relationship between form and content. The provisional coherence of Byatt’s novel thus seems designed to mirror the human experience of making order from noise; in doing so, it asks the reader to be more than a passive consumer of stories, ‘to think’, in Philip Hensher’s (1996: 34) words, ‘about the questions, and not to be bullied into premature conclusions’. Recalling Henry James’s unflattering image of the nineteenth-century novel as a ‘loose baggy monster’, the novel’s ambitious, large-scale structure does seem to border on excess. Babel Tower does not ultimately attempt to reduce the phenomena of the world to neat patterns; instead, its

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patterning resembles the brightly coloured jumper worn by John Ottokar during one of Frederica’s evening classes: ‘it’s the prefect combination of order and chaos. Every other triangle . . . is in the strict order of the spectrum, from violet to dark red. And between the building-blocks of order, everything is random, yellow and orange and pink and green in any order, as they come’ (BT: 331). Babel Tower is a noisy and often garishly colourful book which talks in many voices and conducts debates on a number of different levels – at times even struggling to contain its own discursive energies. Nevertheless, Byatt manages to connect her subjects – language, society, literature and science – with a series of elegant and coherent metaphors. Ultimately, Babel Tower is not, therefore, a fragmented experimental narrative designed to thwart the linearity of realism, but a narrative collage skilfully assembled from many voices – quoted, imagined or ventriloquised, yet all dynamically connected and contained by the novel form. If Babel Tower asked questions about our problematic relationship with language, A Whistling Woman, the final volume in Byatt’s Quartet published in 2002, makes the act of storytelling itself one of its central thematic concerns, exploring the different forms that narrative may take, and the crucial role of narrative in the building of human knowledge. Drawing the reader’s attention to the issue of narrative from the very start, the novel opens with an excerpt from Agatha Mond’s children’s story Flight North. At the end of the tale, it becomes apparent that Agatha has been reading aloud to Leo, Saskia, Frederica and Daniel. The opening of the novel thus serves, quite literally, as a depiction of storytelling in action. This premise leads to a rather self-reflexive discussion among the characters about the problem of ending a narrative. When Agatha reaches the conclusion of Flight North, her audience cannot contain their disappointment: There was no satisfaction in the end of the story. It was as though they had all been stabbed. Agatha looked shaken by their vehemence; but closed her mouth, and closed her hands on the book. ‘That is where I always meant it to end,’ she said. Her voice was not completely steady. ‘Tea,’ said Daniel, making his way into the kitchen. Putting on the kettle, he heard Leo’s clear voice, absolute as his mother’s. ‘But it wasn’t an end, it wasn’t a real end –’

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‘What’s a real end?’ said Frederica. ‘The end is always the most unreal bit . . .’ ‘No, no, no,’ said Leo above Saskia’s sobs, ‘There are good ends and this isn’t one, this isn’t an end . . .’ (AWW: 10)

As well as teasing the reader about what s/he will find at the end of the novel at hand, this opening scene asks us to consider why we have certain expectations about the shape and structure of stories. The debate recalls well-known narratological discussions, particularly The Sense of an Ending (1967) by Frank Kermode, Byatt’s colleague at University College London from 1972 to 1983. Kermode’s argument that individual experience is naturally understood in terms of narrative, and that narrative humanises time by giving it form, is echoed throughout A Whistling Woman as the novel draws attention to the narrative shapes of peoples’ lives. This is particularly evident wherever the reader is presented with the mini-biographies of new or relatively unknown characters. Often, these life-stories are abbreviated into a short sequence of defining moments. Joshua Ramsden’s story is a tragedy, triggered by the shocking death of his mother and sister at the hands of his mentally ill father. Jacqueline’s story is a bildungsroman shaped by her unrequited love and her growing thirst for knowledge. Luk’s story is a journey of discovery precipitated by his adolescent rejection of the religious beliefs of his parents. Narrated in a rapid, bare-bones style, these life-stories acquire an almost fabular quality and prompt us to examine our responses to stories in literature and the way they relate to our sense of ourselves as stories with beginnings, conflicts and resolutions, and ends. A similarly questioning treatment is given to the narrative structure of relationships, regardless of whether or not they resemble the generic plot of a romance. Indeed, Frederica often meditates on the narrative qualities of her own love affairs, noting how a new beginning can also be seen not as a pathway to a ‘happy ever after’ but as the precursor to an inevitable end (AWW: 12; 379). The unhappy romances of Luk and Jacqueline or Eva and Gerard Wijnnobel assume a similarly generic shape when compressed into a few short pages. Such passages might seem rushed to the reader, but their brevity accentuates the narrative structures that, according to A Whistling Woman, are to be found beneath everyday life. If Babel Tower depicted a world in the grip of individualism and the resulting fragmentation of society and its languages, A Whistling Woman, by contrast, is deliberately organised around larger groups

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of characters and is centrally concerned with the bigger and collectively shaped narratives that affect their (as well as our own) lives. Again reflecting the intellectual trends of its late 1960s setting, the novel suggests that religions, philosophies, histories and ideologies can indeed be read as stories. These master narratives provide whole societies with systems of explanation and knowledge; they are, in short, stories that make sense of the world, and A Whistling Woman both problematises and presents us with a wide-ranging variety of such ‘grand’ or ‘meta’-narratives: there are ancient mythical narratives such as astrology, which Luk Lysgaard-Peacock dismisses as mental ‘cobwebs’ (AWW: 350), but which Lady Wijnnobel believes is ‘truth in a form that all those . . . molecules and things – couldn’t express, couldn’t begin to express’ (AWW: 343). Then there are philosophical narratives: Gerard Wijnnobel tries and fails to develop the University of North Yorkshire according to his own enlightenment model, a belief in scientific progress and humanism. His authoritarian approach is resented by the members of the Anti-University, who hold with their own political narratives such as the neo-Marxism preached by the anarchist Johnny Surtees, who ‘believed in the logic of history. He believed that the Revolution must come, and therefore could come, that the old order must be overthrown, and therefore would be overthrown, and that he must and would help it along’ (AWW: 365). Religious narratives loom even larger in A Whistling Woman: Joshua Ramsden is attracted to the arcane cult of Manichaeism because it makes sense of his largely unhappy experience of life, his traumatic childhood and his adult manic depression. Lacking any sense of time or structure in his life, and feeling a Cartesian disjunction between the ‘bone-cage’ of his body and his thinking self, Ramsden is reassured by the physical constraints that his faith imposes: ‘To eat no meat, to thwart and constrain no vegetable, to abstain from sex, to kill nothing’ (AWW: 128). Manichaeism’s story of an epic battle between darkness and light mirrors Ramsden’s troubled sense of the reality and power of evil in the world, and it appeals to his followers, who crave a heightened spiritual intensity in their lives. To scientists such as Luk LysgaardPeacock, by contrast, human life is more truthfully described by the Darwinian story of sex, struggle and survival. Luk even sees religions themselves as part of a universal Darwinism, as ‘organisms, struggling for existence’ (AWW: 358).5

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Again, Byatt employs a variety of different narrative modes and methods to tell these stories as well as her own. Much of the story of the religious cult forming around Joshua Ramsden, for example, is conveyed through letters, written by the psychoanalysts Elvet Gander and Kieran Quarrell, or by the gonzo sociologist Brenda Pincher. There is also much use of the free-indirect authorial voice to convey different characters’ reflections on their own lives, and the novel’s explicit and deliberately crafted polyvocality not least serves to highlight one of its central hypotheses, namely that narrative in its various guises is precisely not just a technical device to be found in the pages of works of fiction; rather, it is a phenomenon that pervades all of human life and underpins people’s daily existence, their sense of self and their sense of reality. And while the realities explored in A Whistling Woman may at first appear to be slightly parochial – a localised debate conducted at a provincial university – the novel dramatises, on closer inspection, a complex ideological conflict played out between different groups of people with different sets of beliefs that reaches far beyond its immediate relevance to the students, university authorities, scientists, anarchists and religious cult members that make up its cast. Lingering behind the ideological tensions explored in A Whistling Woman is a historical crisis in defining human identity in the new post-religious age. Gerard Wijnnobel’s ‘Body and Mind’ conference, the planning and execution of which occupies large chunks of the novel’s narrative, aptly reflects the intellectual atmosphere of the day. At a time at which new pictures of human identity – as conglomerations of cells, as carriers of genes, as constructed subjects – were proliferating across the academic disciplines, Wijnnobel’s conference is designed to bring different disciplines together in order to create a composite picture of human identity. His mind drove towards inclusiveness. There would be linguists, philosophers, biologists, mathematicians, sociologists, medical men. There would have to be physicists, there would have to be discussion of the way modern physics saw the observer affecting – changing – the observed. Embryologists, psychologists, psycho-analysts, Freudian, Jungian, Kleinian. He smiled at himself. He was desiring a biologicalcognitive Theory of Everything. (AWW: 26)

The issues to be explored at the conference are not only topical but also familiar from much of Byatt’s post-1990 fiction: are our identities constructed or determined? Are we, to borrow the title of

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Byatt’s 1992 volume of novellas, angels or insects? Again, the discourses of science feature prominently in Byatt’s fictional exploration of these themes and in both Babel Tower and A Whistling Woman, scientific knowledge is presented as a multi-layered discursive entity, rather than as a body of self-evident truth. Some of the ideas relating to genetics, for example, allude to scientific literature which postdates the period of the novel – notably works by Dawkins, Wilson and other popular science writers credited by Byatt in her Acknowledgements. Similarly, some concepts (e.g. Chomsky’s generative grammar and McConnel’s theories of memory transfer) are eagerly discussed even though the reader will be aware that these have been discredited since the 1960s – an aspect of Babel Tower which led an exasperated J. M. Coetzee (1996: 17), in his not wholly favourable review of the novel, to question why Byatt should devote so many pages to discussions of ‘outdated’ science. As in The Virgin in the Garden, however, Byatt’s highlighting of historical discontinuities appears to be intentional. In a thoughtful discussion of science in A Whistling Woman, Alistair Brown (2007: 67) has argued that anachronism here represents a deliberate strategy by which an ‘agnostic’ stance towards scientific knowledge is maintained: ‘This anachronism ensures that science is contested in terms of other branches within science, and as part of a historically adaptable series of paradigm perspectives, rather than simply by an aesthetic shudder against reductionism of any sort’. Indeed, the novel questions all reductionist beliefs, including the ‘fiercely defended pragmatic agnosticism’ (AWW: 188) which drives Luk’s work as a scientist. Luk’s loss of faith, which he remembers as a moment of blinding revelation during which the ‘horny lens’ of religion fell from his eyes, is presented as an inverted ‘road to Damascus’ narrative, an irony which belies Luk’s sense of having freed himself from a web of myth, of having recovered (to quote from Still Life) ‘the innocent eye’ (SL: 108). Fittingly then, Luk’s vision, rather than opening onto an unembellished objectivity, a reality not shaped by human narratives, is described as a religious conversion in reverse, with his new secular beliefs clearly echoing the old, rejected biblical narrative. A similar ambiguity is evident in Byatt’s description of Marcus and Jacqueline’s response to Silent Spring: Their waking dreams were haunted by the idea of sumps, and desert wastes, and rotted tree-trunks, and lifeless lakes where no birds sing.

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Every pleasurable walk on the moors looking for snails, listening to larks climbing and plovers calling was as surely accompanied by the vision of all this rotting and vanishing, as their ancestors’ ramblings might have been by the vision of hell-fire, red-hot pincers, and eternal thirst. (BT: 56–7)

The passage hints at the twentieth-century displacement of religious narratives by scientific ones, a displacement that, perhaps inevitably, involves the recycling of key images: hell is now a wasteland on earth, the apocalypse is now a man-made event rather than an act of divine retribution. Jacqueline fears that ‘[w]e are a species that has gone wrong somewhere. We shall kill everything’ (BT: 56). Her perceptions may be informed by a scientific ‘eco-narrative’, but the image of humankind as inherently destructive bears more than a passing resemblance to the old Christian narrative of original sin. The history of science is, of course, itself full of stories and metaphors that have captured the public imagination and have found literary expression in poems and novels. The impact of scientific narratives on the literary imagination has been elaborated by Gillian Beer in Darwin’s Plots (1983) as well as by George Levine in Darwin and the Novelists (1988). Both critics looked at ways in which science was assimilated into the popular cultural discourse of the nineteenth century, and concluded that Darwin’s history of the development of species created a potent new myth that permanently reshaped the western imagination. As we have seen, Byatt habitually and productively reflects on this intellectual state of affairs in her own fiction, and much of her literary criticism has been similarly preoccupied with Darwinism and its continuing hold over our cultural imagination. She has often suggested that our literary narratives are shaped by our belief narratives and that, in the contemporary age, these belief narratives are more likely to be supplied by science than religion. Here too, however, Byatt’s deliberations are characterised by a thoughtful attitude of the ‘both-and’ rather than a simple ‘either-or’. In her essay ‘A New Body of Writing’, published in the volume of New Writing which Byatt edited with Alan Hollinghurst in 1995, she provided an overview of recent British fiction in which she detected an anti-humanist ethos which she felt was symptomatic of the popular acceptance of Darwinian or neo-Darwinian scientific ideas. Byatt (1995c: 440) suggested, not wholly uncritically, that the

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recent popularity of unfocused diatribes against Thatcherism and capitalist greed, and the recurrent image of ‘the human body as an object of desire and butchery’ in British fiction of the 1980s and early 1990s, were creative responses to the same underlying ideological current, a neo-Darwinism fed by popular science writing, which appeared to have displaced humanism as the ideological touchstone of the novel: I think it is possible to connect the obsession with the rutting and dying body with the now almost obsessive recurrence of Darwin in modern fiction . . . The 1960s novel was intensely religious . . . Now, I think, novelists are thinking about what it is to be a naked animal, evolved over unimaginable centuries, with a history constructed by beliefs which have lost their power. We look for our morality in works like Richard Dawkins’s The Selfish Gene or E. O. Wilson’s On Human Nature. (Byatt, 1995c: 442–3)

Byatt revisited this theme in her lecture ‘Ancestors’, published as an essay in On Histories and Stories, again investigating the claim that science had replaced religion in the popular consciousness as the provider of fundamental interpretative paradigms, and that the ‘neo-Darwinian’ narrative now best reflects our sense of who we are, and our place in the world: [T]he stories we tell about ourselves take form from the large paradigmatic narratives we inhabit. Human lives used to be thought out in terms of the Biblical narrative. Related narratives were made of the significance of lives – the allegory of Everyman, of Pilgrim’s Progress, the saints’ lives and Confessions against which the Bildungsroman formed itself in turn. . . . In the nineteenth century, as Stephen Jay Gould has shown in Time’s Arrow, Time’s Cycle, the discovery of ‘deep time’ shook concepts of history, of the purpose and significance (if there was any) of individual lives. At the same time Darwin’s patient experiments on adaptations, selection, inheritance, created a very different narrative of human origins – and by implication, of human destiny – from the Biblical one of creation, salvation, and resurrection. (OHAS: 65)

Viewed from this perspective, neither religious narratives nor the humanist narratives of what we commonly class as classic realist fiction ring true in an age in which, in Steve Jones’s (2002: 4) words, ‘the science of life explains, or so it seems, all we need to know about our sexual and even our social selves’. Characteristically for Byatt,

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however, it is precisely within the framework of fiction that these ideas are put to the test, and A Whistling Woman duly explores the extent to which the neo-Darwinian narrative can indeed explain our social, sexual and moral selves. Wijnnobel’s conference, designed to create a consilience between the sciences and the humanities, breaks down when the proceedings are disrupted by student riots, bringing the conference to a premature end and wrecking the university buildings.6 The rioters are ostensibly motivated by politics: the conference’s keynote speakers hold controversial views about human intelligence which are at odds with contemporary liberal politics. Both Hodder Pinsky and Theobald Eichenbaum are advocates of human nature in the form of innate ideas or capabilities that shape human behaviour. Eichenbaum, an ethologist modelled on Konrad Lorenz (whose uncompromising views about innate human aggression he shares), is deemed to be ideologically suspect because of the ‘compromises with Fascism’ (AWW: 29) he made during the war when he wrote a paper on human herd mentality. The other key speaker, Pinsky, is politically left-wing, but the anti-university activists object to his theories of ‘cognitive psycho-linguistics’ (AWW: 29), which suggest that the mind is biologically programmed to work in certain ways. As in Babel Tower, such theories are denounced for being complicit with institutional repression and control: ‘[t]o believe that linguistic competence is both innate and unalterable, in the present world, smacks of determinism, smacks of predestinarianism, and of more unpleasant things, a suggestion that heredity, not environment, differentiates between men’ (BT: 192). The fictional conference and its aftermath also provide a fitting backdrop against which to dramatise the extent to which scientific ideas upset pre-existing social and cultural norms at the end of the twentieth century. Luk’s conference paper, for example, based on the Darwinian premise that the aim of all life is successful reproduction, turns the old biblical assumption of the primacy of the male on its head. Luk provocatively argues that men are redundant, that sex is disadvantageous for reproduction and that women would be better off reproducing their genes through parthenogenesis. However, even Luk is aware that science cannot explain everything: the figure of the male peacock (notably Luk’s namesake), whose elaborate plumage exceeds its reproductive purpose, illustrates the perplexities that we face when we try to fit the world into neat explanatory patterns. There

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is also the problem of explaining altruism in the great Darwinian scheme of things. If life is really a question of the ‘survival of the fittest’, then helping others makes no sense, unless one supposes, as Luk does, that the only real altruism is biological altruism, or creatures acting ‘for the benefit of the species’ (AWW: 357). These new ideas throw traditional ethics into chaos, and leave people with difficult moral choices, and without a coherent belief structure into which to place the instinct for ethical behaviour. Daniel sums up the problem when he justifies his continued attachment to the church, despite his lack of faith: I do the things somebody has to do since religion died in the world. Not for ‘humanity’s’ sake, but because we are religious beings, and caring for each other is what is left of what we used to know or believe about how everything worked. (AWW: 400–1)

Ultimately, A Whistling Woman portrays humans both as genetically determined beings and as thinking individuals who are capable of creating their own destinies. On the one hand, the mass hysteria of the students and anarchists seems to reinforce Eichenbaum’s argument for nature over nurture – his paper on herd mentality is, appropriately enough, interrupted by a group of protesters chanting ‘We are Many We are One’ (AWW: 368). Clearly, the reader is supposed to see this demonstration of volatile mass emotion as herd-like behaviour, despite the revolutionary rhetoric of the protesters; and perhaps the novel even hints at resemblances between the horde of maimed animals that are released during the storming of the laboratories and the protesters themselves (AWW: 374). The impression of the crowd as an undifferentiated swarm of invading ants or rats (Eichenbaum’s analogy) is certainly a powerful and unsettling one that is not wholly alleviated by the passages dedicated to explaining one individual’s part in the chaos. The ‘naturally lawful’ Nick Tewfell, the UNY’s student representative, turns to vandalism during the riot. He participates in the arson attack on Long Royston and smashes a precious piece of Renaissance glass in a frenzy of aggression which he can neither understand nor control: ‘He wished to hurt someone. He was not used to the feeling’ (AWW: 372). At one level, this might be thought of as support for the determinist view; although Eichenbaum’s description of the human herd is extreme, the idea that people are driven by instinct does at least provide some means of understanding irrational behaviour:

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[H]uman beings, like all other creatures, were full of an energy he called aggression. . . . It was said that he believed that this force was nature, and its suppression was damaging to animals, including the human animal. He had no time for those who believed in universal gentleness, or the possibility of teaching lions to lie down with lambs (unless the lions were denatured). (AWW: 347)

In another interpretative paradigm, however, Tewfell’s actions could be read as evidence for the religious notion that the dark side of human nature is ultimately mysterious and inexplicable in terms of simple individual choice; that evil simply exists. This view is represented in the novel by Joshua Ramsden, who confounds his psychoanalyst by insisting on the existence of an ‘active evil’ (AWW: 56) and holds that to think of evil in terms of human choice is mere anthropocentric vanity. Ultimately, however, human identity is (as Wijnnobel’s conference attempts to demonstrate and A Whistling Woman succeeds in showing) prismatic – instinct is only one facet of human behaviour. As the novel highlights predetermined patterns in the behaviour of the human species, it nevertheless also examines the place of the individual – the traditional province of the humanist novel. Amidst the smouldering wreckage of the university, Marcus Potter and Vincent Hodgkiss come to the realisation that they are ‘shape-shifters’ who do not fit into any culturally or biologically determined scheme and have the power to forge their own destinies (AWW: 375). Their relationship indeed appears to have no place in any Darwinian or biblical narrative. Jacqueline Winwar’s tale similarly involves the triumph of the individual will over genetically or socially programmed behaviour: She had grown up in a suburb of Calverly, with a pharmacist father and an infant-teacher mother, who had been pleased that she did so well at school, but had never said to her ‘you will go to a good university’, let alone ‘you will be a scientist’ or ‘you will make discoveries.’ Nature studies had seemed wholesome, and Jacqueline’s ability to throw herself into them showed she had a nice, uncomplicated, enthusiastic nature. Jacqueline’s parents, and Jacqueline, supposed that these were interesting hobbies. They assumed that she would marry, and bear children, and the hobbies would come in useful for teaching the children about the world, keeping them occupied. . . . But she was beginning to recognise the inexorable force of her own curiosity, her desire to know the next thing, and then the next, and then the next. It lived in her like a bright dragon in a cave, it had to be fed. (AWW: 23–4)

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After her abortive attempt to settle down in a conventional marriage with Luk, Jacqueline decides to devote herself to her work, ironically choosing to ignore her ‘biological clock’ in order to make a contribution to biological science. Even when offered the chance to adopt Ruth’s orphaned baby at the end of the novel, Jacqueline consciously rejects the role of motherhood. Jacqueline, like the heroine of Byatt’s revisionist fairytale ‘The Eldest Princess’, rewrites the conventional plot that has been written for her and becomes the author of her own destiny. This surprising and strongly feminist strand of the novel is positioned against the views of determinists like Eichenbaum and ultimately, if perhaps ambiguously, reasserts the existence of the free individual.

A Whistling Woman weighs up many different kinds of belief narrative without settling on any clearly defined narrative format itself. The novel is characterised by a confusing discursive flux which appears to range backwards and forwards between humanism, religion and science, and the resulting inconclusiveness is heightened by some surprising and unconventional narrative developments. What is more, the previous Quartet novels had been held together by strong personal storylines involving Stephanie and Frederica; A Whistling Woman, by contrast, offers no such central narrative focus. Frederica graces fewer than a quarter of the novel’s 421 pages, and the parts which describe her personal life often merely recall events already described in Babel Tower. Meanwhile, characters such as Eva and Gerard Wijnnobel, Brenda Pincher, Luk Lysgaard-Peacock, and Jacqueline Winwar, who made only fleeting appearances in Still Life and Babel Tower, have come to prominence in A Whistling Woman. Even Simon Moffit and Julia Corbett, whom we have so far only encountered in The Game, seem to have wandered into the Quartet at this point. Most curiously, however, Byatt also suddenly produces two new major characters – Lucy Nighby, a battered wife who suffers a mental breakdown, and Joshua Ramsden, the charismatic mental patient with religious delusions. This would seem an unusual move for a novelist attempting to draw a story to its conclusion. This being the final instalment in the tetralogy, one might have expected A Whistling Woman to have a more shapely, finished form than its predecessors – but, instead of tying up loose ends, Byatt is busily introducing new ones. The Quartet, it seems, is not Frederica’s bildungsroman after all.

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In ‘Ancestors’, Byatt had argued that the bildungsroman was the intellectual descendant of old anthropocentric biblical narratives, ‘the allegory of Everyman, of Pilgrim’s Progress, the saints’ lives and Confessions’, and the embodiment of a religious conception of human identity and purpose that had been challenged and undermined by science (OHAS: 65–6). A Whistling Woman presents itself as an exercise in finding an appropriate form of narrative for this postreligious, post-humanist age, and the Quartet, rather like Frederica’s new life, takes on a ‘new, fluent, elegantly provisional shape’ (AWW: 412) with this, its final volume. The Quartet thus never becomes a conventional ‘portrait of the artist’, and, contrary to what several reviewers of Babel Tower predicted,7 Frederica does not become a novelist in the end. Instead, she decides to channel her energies into a television career. Appearing to have lost her faith in literature, she is now interested in broadening her vision, and seeing what other disciplines, or other narratives, can teach her about the world: I don’t want to be in an English Department, stuck with Eng. Lit. I saw that when you were talking, when Hodder Pinsky was talking, I saw the world was bigger. . . . Explaining genes, and chromosomes, and the language of the DNA. You know, the new metaphors, the ones now, are in that box. (AWW: 411)

Frederica, like Byatt, had been raised and educated amidst highminded Leavisite ideas about the novel as a moral and spiritual force, representing the supreme expression of humanist values. By the end of A Whistling Woman, when ‘Paradise Lost’ seems an outdated biblical narrative, the bildungsroman an outdated humanist narrative and evolution is still proving its fitness while man-made Armageddon, in one form or another, is a distinct possibility, Frederica at least seems disillusioned and self-consciously rejects Leavis’s intellectual crusade as ‘nothing more than a Darwinian jockeying for advantage, a territorial snarl and dash’ (AWW: 364). To her, literature is an inadequate pseudo-religion: it is not a secular guide to life but a depository of human thought that reflects the bigger ideas that shape our lives, including the new and compelling narratives offered by science. Once again, Frederica’s reflections on the subject seem to echo, in many respects, Byatt’s own misgivings about the literary imagination at the end of the twentieth century, as well as her reallife career choices – Byatt notably gave up academic teaching in the 1980s, but, unlike Frederica, she explicitly did so to become a

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full-time writer. Thus, against all the odds explored at length in the Quartet, she has ultimately kept faith with the novel form and, in the process, has made it her own. As Daniel Orton remarks, the desire to make meaningful narratives of our existence is, after all, ‘only human’ (AWW: 400). Notes 1

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Todd (1997: 12) identifies ‘three openings that correspond to the three main strands of [the] story, prefaced by a fourth’, namely the opening image of a thrush cracking a snail on a stone, ‘that provides a kind of “continuo”’. See also Noble (2001), who suggests that the prologues to The Virgin in the Garden and Still Life ought properly to be read as constituting a fifth opening into Babel Tower (71–3) and discusses the novel’s multiple beginnings as both ‘mnemonic devices’ and ‘doors’ leading into the imaginative architectural structure of a ‘contemporary memory theater’ (62–3). Murdoch’s essay ‘Against Dryness’ does indeed seem to hover as a kind of guiding presence over Babel Tower, counterbalancing the novel’s engagement with 1960s avant-garde writing by providing a thoughtful model for a contemporary realism that is undoubtedly also close to Byatt’s heart. Statements such as the following thus cast an interesting light on Byatt’s own project in Babel Tower and are indeed echoed across Byatt’s oeuvre: ‘We are not isolated free choosers, monarchs of all we survey, but benighted creatures sunk in a reality whose nature we are constantly and overwhelmingly tempted to deform by fantasy. Our current picture of freedom encourages a dream-like facility; whereas what we require is a renewed sense of the difficulty and complexity of the moral life and the opacity of persons.’ To this end, literary prose, to which Murdoch assigns a particularly important role, ‘especially since it has taken over some of the tasks formerly performed by philosophy’, ‘must recover its former glory, eloquence and discourse must return’. We are thus called upon to reject ‘the consolations of form, the clean crystalline work, the simplified fantasy-myth’ in favour of contingency and ‘the now so unfashionable naturalistic idea of character’ (Murdoch, 1961: 22–3). The double metaphor of the piece of rock carved with redundant human runes on the one hand and the snail shell bearing the involuntary marks of an eternal language of nature on the other hand is further complicated by the fact that, elsewhere in Byatt’s oeuvre, rock itself appears as a symbol of ‘the living language of nature’ (see Byatt’s quotation of Charles Lyell’s Principles of Geology in Possession: 458), while Jane Campbell (2004: 233) correctly notes that, throughout Babel Tower, ‘the snail itself is a text’.

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See Eliot ([1871–72] 1985: 297): ‘An eminent philosopher among my friends, who can dignify even your ugly furniture by lifting it into the serene light of science, has shown me this pregnant little fact. Your pierglass or extensive surface of polished steel made to be rubbed by a housemaid, will be minutely and multitudinously scratched in all directions; but place now against it a lighted candle as a centre of illumination, and lo! the scratches will seem to arrange themselves in a fine series of concentric circles round that little sun. It is demonstrable that the scratches are going everywhere impartially, and it is only your candle which produces the flattering illusion of a concentric arrangement, its light falling with an exclusive optical selection. These things are a parable. The scratches are events, and the candle is the egoism of any person now absent – of Miss Vincy, for example.’ Luk’s views mirror Richard Dawkin’s socio-biological hypothesis of the so-called ‘meme’, formulated in The Selfish Gene (1976). Memes are units of information (or instruction for behaviour) stored in a brain and passed on by imitation from one brain to another. Examples include ideas, tunes, scientific theories, religious beliefs, fashions, and skills. Memes are, according to Dawkins, contagious ideas, all competing for a share of our mind in a process of Darwinian selection. See Wilson ([1998] 2003), whose attempts to bridge the ‘Two Cultures’ gap centre on the notion of ‘consilience’ or ‘unity of knowledge’ among the sciences, humanities and arts as all these branches of knowledge study subsets of reality that depend on factors studied in other branches. See Coetzee (1996: 17), who took it as an ‘implicit promise’ that Frederica would eventually turn to writing fiction, and Sage (1996: 24), who commented that the Quartet ‘more and more resembles a game of hideand-seek’ that Byatt is playing with herself as well as with her readers: ‘Her creature, Frederica, keeps not quite turning into a novelist, and Byatt continues to avoid catching up with herself.’

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Tradition and transformation: Possession and fairytales

Possession: A Romance came as a surprise to many of Byatt’s longstanding readers and critics when it was published in 1990 and won the Booker Prize that same year. Those who had expected another meditative study of life in 1950s Yorkshire were either bemused or delighted to discover that a strange and colourful new hybrid – part contemporary campus comedy, part historical romance, part literary detective story – had been added to Byatt’s oeuvre. By 1990, Byatt had gained a reputation as a traditional, academically minded novelist, whose work embodied a Leavisite vision of English culture and Arnoldian standards of ‘high seriousness’. It was therefore unsurprising that many commentators saw this flamboyant historical romance as a dramatic change of direction for Byatt.1 Although in some respects still aimed at an academically minded readership, Possession seemed not only far more playful but also far more accessible than Byatt’s previous novels. As well as being an erudite novel that showcased Byatt’s extensive knowledge of both the Victorian literary world and contemporary discourses on literary theory and criticism, it was also a tightly plotted mystery novel that exploited and indeed pandered to the very basic readerly appetites of those eager, simply, to know ‘what happened next’. Byatt had, by her own admission, pulled off the same feat that Umberto Eco had achieved with The Name of the Rose (1980): she had created a complex novel of ideas that was also a popular page-turner.2 With the plot effortlessly shifting between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the narrative crux of Possession lies in the discovery of an illicit love affair between two fictional Victorian poets, Randolph Henry Ash and Christabel LaMotte, by two world-weary (and equally fictional) modern-day academics, Roland Michell and

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Maud Bailey. As ‘literary critics make natural detectives’ (P : 237), Byatt has her academic sleuths gradually uncover the facts of the Victorian affair through the solving of literary clues: an inspired insight into a lyric about dolls leads to the discovery of a secret cache of letters (P : 82ff), and the close reading of a poetically charged landscape pinpoints the Victorian pair to a particular location in Yorkshire where the affair was consummated. As the narrative unfolds, this initial ‘Quest’ develops into a ‘Chase and Race’ as Roland’s suspicious girlfriend Val, Maud’s overbearing colleague Leonora Stern, the unscrupulous Ash scholar Mortimer Cropper and a whole host of further characters, all with their own agendas, get wind of the sensational discovery. From this basic formula, Byatt offers the reader a huge number of alluring narrative tangents. The novel is full of intertexts and embedded stories, told in a rich variety of voices, through pastiche poems, letters, journals and biographies that create a multiplicity of alternative imaginary worlds. These include extracts from Ash’s narrative verse, retelling old myths such as those of Hercules and Ragnarök, or dramatising the lives of historical figures such as Jan Swammerdam in Browningesque monologues. There are fragments of LaMotte’s epic poem The Fairy Melusine, as well as tales from her two collections of fairy stories. There are amusing send-ups of contemporary critical writing that, as Chris Walsh (2000: 185) has argued, constitute ‘stories of readings’ which complicate and further enrich the novel’s textual fabric. And there are various examples of life-writing: Mortimer Cropper’s imagined autobiography and, more prominently, his definitive biography of Ash, or extracts from the journals of characters such as Christabel LaMotte’s companion Blanche Glover, Christabel’s Breton cousin Sabine de Kercoz and Ash’s wife Ellen. Embedded within these various quasi-sources, yet further mini-narratives unfold: Ellen’s diaries, for example, hint at a scandalous story involving her maid Bertha, while Ash tells the story of the giants Wade and Bell in a letter home, and Sabine’s diary includes a story told to her by her servant Gode. The overall effect of these interlaced and interweaving texts is a layered, palimpsestlike narrative in which tales proliferate and resonate on a variety of levels. So far, one might say, so postmodern. Unsurprisingly then, Possession, of all of Byatt’s works to date, is the book that has made the most impact in the academic world. It has found its way on to

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countless undergraduate reading lists as an exemplar of the ‘postmodern novel’ and has spawned a wealth of scholarly articles that discuss Byatt’s postmodern credentials under various headings.3 When Frederick Holmes (1994: 320) compares Possession with John Fowles’s 1969 novel The French Lieutenant’s Woman 4 and places both novels within a ‘sub-species of postmodernism’, specifically that class of text Linda Hutcheon (1988: 5), in her influential study A Poetics of Postmodernism, has termed ‘historiographic metafiction’ or ‘novels which are both intensely self-reflexive and yet paradoxically also lay claim to historical events and personages’, he offers a characterisation of Byatt’s novel that has met with an almost uncanny consensus amongst academic commentators. Undoubtedly, Possession is a clever, self-reflexive book that, at one level at least, readily offers itself up for critical analysis while setting the terms of its own criticism with clearly signposted literary allusions and a tendency to draw attention to its own narrative ironies. Its rigorous yet mocking mimicry of both Victorian and contemporary philosophies, genres and styles, its abundance of narrative parody and pastiche, and the unashamedly flaunted parallels of story and time all serve to foreground underlying questions of narrative playfulness and (meta-)historical representation and suggest strong – if perhaps suspiciously blatant – allegiances to the critical ideas concerning fiction, history and identity so fashionable in the late 1980s and early 1990s. At the same time, however, many of the pleasures Possession affords seem decidedly more akin to the old-fashioned pleasures of character development and plot than to Roland Barthes’s plaisir du texte, and while it is certainly possible to discuss Possession from start to finish as if it were purely an intellectual puzzle without commenting on the language or exploring the novelistic qualities of narrative and imaginative world-making that contributed to the novel’s popular success, criticism in this vein runs the risk of merely reassembling a puzzle that has been prefabricated by the author. In view of this dilemma, critics such as Jackie Buxton (1996), Christian Gutleben (1997) and Elisabeth Bronfen (1996) have wondered whether Byatt might not be exploiting the stylistic tics and tricks of the postmodern in order to produce a fiction that is actually highly critical of postmodernism. Buxton’s assessment of Possession is probably the most helpful in this context. Retracing the debate over Byatt’s postmodernism, Buxton uncovers a critical tendency to ‘possess’

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Byatt’s novel as ‘postmodern’ that ignores an inscribed resistance to any easy appropriations of both the historical past and literary fiction. On the subject of Byatt’s postmodernism, Buxton (1996: 102) thus concludes: ‘If Possession is a postmodern text then it is one that is deeply suspicious of postmodernism, whether it is construed as an aesthetic practice or as an historical condition.’ Similarly, even Holmes (1994: 324) ultimately concedes that ‘[i]f it is true . . . that Byatt’s postmodernism renders her treatment of the conventions of the nineteenth-century novel ironic, it is also true that the Victorian subject matter can be seen as a critique of the postmodern condition’. Upon closer inspection, Possession thus seems to defy, even defeat, critical labelling, and the novel’s interlinking narrative claims to ‘intense self-reflexivity’ and ‘historical events and personages’ can consequently also be viewed in a somewhat different and perhaps less blinding light than that commonly cast on it by the postmodern paradigm. What postmodernism theorises as a paradox with considerable and almost automatic subversive potential is, we would contend, more productively considered within what we have identified in the Introduction as Byatt’s larger project of novelistic reclamation. Like Browning, A. S. Byatt is a ‘witness of difference’, and her reimaginings of the Victorian past are fictional ‘resurrections’ not only of past men and women but also of texts, ‘all separately incarnate, all separately aware in their necessarily and splendidly limited ways, of infinite passion and the pain of finite hearts that yearn’ (PM: 71). At the same time, works like Possession, Angels and Insects and indeed Byatt’s various forays into the realm of the fairytale double as twentieth-century intellectual responses to nineteenthcentury fiction. They are active re-in(ter)ventions of the novel of ideas at the end of the twentieth century, and, by re-emphasising the place of storytelling within this project, we hope to situate Possession and its satellite fictions more firmly within the context of Byatt’s long-term artistic concerns with both nineteenth- and late twentiethcentury fiction. In her essay ‘Choices: On the Writing of Possession’, Byatt (1995b: 17) describes how the idea for Possession first came to her in the British Library watching the Coleridge scholar Kathleen Coburn at work: I thought: she has given all her life to his thoughts, and then I thought: she has mediated his thoughts to me. And then I thought ‘Does he

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possess her, or does she possess him?’ There could be a novel called Possession about the relations between living and dead minds. . . . I imagined my text as a web of scholarly quotations and parodies through which the poems and writings of the dead should loom at the reader, to be surmised and guessed at.

How is such sense of ‘looming’, of mutual possession, achieved within the pages of the novel? At a formal level, it finds skilful expression in the palimpsest-like structure of the novel, which, among its many voices, notably also includes that of a figure much battered in late twentieth-century literary criticism: the third-person narrator. There is a pivotal moment at the centre of the novel when Byatt introduces her third person narrator to tell the nineteenth-century story directly. In a scene which clearly makes reference to, and answers, Fowles’s The French Lieutenant’s Woman, Byatt describes Ash and LaMotte’s elopement to Yorkshire. Whereas, up until now, the reader has known the poets, and been acquainted with their innermost thoughts, through their letters, Byatt now presents them purely from the outside, as if through the eyes of a fellow passenger. Fowles ([1969] 1992: 97) notoriously created an authorial character whom he inserted in the seat opposite his fictional protagonist in a train carriage, in a gesture intended to disrupt the realist illusion and challenge the presumption that ‘the novelist stands next to God’. In ‘People in Paper Houses’, Byatt had already criticised such dramatic gestures as a way of pretending to give the reader freedom while in fact fiercely circumscribing his or her freedom to participate imaginatively in the fiction. What is more, the third person narrator (arguably the most purely textual construct conceivable) ‘does not aspire or pretend to be “God” – simply the narrative voice, which knows what it does know’. Herself thus rejecting Fowles’s crude ‘Bloomsbury’ rejection of Victorian art and culture (PM: 174), Byatt does not distance herself from the Victorian world she describes by taking recourse to avant-garde narrative devices but rather relishes engaging with its unfamiliar vocabulary and concepts. Her third person narrator, meanwhile, invites readers temporarily to suspend their twentieth-century scepticism and imagine themselves into a world in which spiritualism, the science of phrenology and the realist novel are all still part of the intellectual landscape. Michael Levenson has written lucidly about Byatt’s particular brand of ‘resurrecting’ the past in this manner, defending her against the

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charge of a nostalgic traditionalism in the process. In ‘The Religion of Fiction’, he comments on Angels and Insects: In a more than clever analogy, Byatt has drawn a connection between the ‘afterlife’ of the Bible and the ‘afterlife’ of the nineteenth-century novel. We live in the shadow of both. But the task, as Byatt sees it, is not to get out from under the shadow into the white modern light. It is to respect and to love our old shadowy needs, to keep faith with faith, and with realist fiction. (Levenson, 1993: 343)

The difficulty, as Levenson (2001: 172) muses elsewhere, lies ‘in finding figures for this continuity’, figures of thought and language that reach beyond mere nostalgia and easy analogy. In Possession, part of this continuity is, of course, realised through the interweaving of the nineteenth- and twentieth-century story-lines. Some critics have remarked, however, that Byatt’s present-day characters seem stilted and lacklustre in comparison with their nineteenth-century counterparts. Buxton (1996: 97), for example, argues that ‘[w]ith two notable exceptions, the world of Ash and LaMotte is a wholly removed one, only accessible through its surviving documents, yet it is presented as more vital and immediate than the constrained world that Roland and Maud (and we) occupy’. This effect is no doubt intended. Nevertheless, Maud and Roland’s world is – in spite of their (and our) intellectual dispositions – also solidly realised and sensuously engaging. At one point in the novel, Byatt’s third person narrator declares that ‘[i]t is possible for a writer to make, or remake at least, for a reader, the primary pleasures of eating, or drinking, or looking on, or sex’ (P : 470), and Possession does indeed invite us to imagine a fictional world we can see, hear, smell, taste and touch. This emphasis on sensuous experience not least provides a foil to Maud and Roland’s rather dry and intellectualised vision of reality as a discursive phenomenon, and of themselves as constructed subjects, ‘a crossing-place for a number of systems . . ., ideological beliefs and responses, language-forms’ (P : 424). Food, in particular, is often described in abundant detail, and the characters munch their way through large amounts: ‘an immense white sandwich of two plate-sized fillets containing a good half-pound of prawns between their solid flaps’, ‘profiteroles the size of large tennis-balls, covered with a lake of bitter chocolate sauce’ (P : 243), ‘[f]resh brown bread, white Wensleydale cheese, crimson radishes, yellow butter, scarlet tomatoes, round bright green Granny Smiths’ (P : 268), and ‘a white

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island of foam floating in a creamy yellow pool of vanilla custard’ (P : 425). This, as Flint (1997: 301) notes, is ‘language as plenitude’, a language that joyously defies Derrida’s claim that language never denotes, but only defers. As the narrative voice thus continuously pits a banquet of sense against the dry language-world of post-structuralism, it also demonstrates that even the least promising of subjects can prove rich and fascinating. Curiously enough for a novel subtitled ‘A Romance’, Possession begins with a disappointed romance – one of the great themes of the classic realist novel – and rather brilliantly creates the world of Roland Michell in densely descriptive prose that conveys, from the outset, a sense of place and character. Roland’s strained relationship with his girlfriend Val and their claustrophobic existence in a basement flat is evoked in pungent and comic detail: Their flat was described as a garden flat when they came to see it, which was the only occasion on which they were asked to come into the garden, into which they were later told they had no right of entry. They were not even allowed to attempt to grow things in tubs in their black area, for reasons vague but peremptory, put forward by their landlady, an octogenarian Mrs Irving, who inhabited the three floors above them in a rank civet fug amongst unnumbered cats, and who kept the garden as bright and wholesome and well-ordered as her living-room was sparse and decomposing. . . . ‘You would think,’ said Val, ‘that the cats would do the garden no good.’ That was before they found the patches of damp on their own kitchen and bathroom ceilings, which, when touched with a finger, smelled unmistakably of cat-piss. (P : 17–18)

Val and Roland’s numerous disappointments, with life and with each other, are outlined in rapid, economical paragraphs. Their gardenless ‘garden flat’ is just one of these. We are also told that the couple were lured into a dwelling that was not all it seemed – a Hansel and Gretel gingerbread house – by an old witch who offered them apricots and spun beguiling tales about the garden’s literary heritage (P: 17). Beneath the realist surface, the language thus moves playfully between the literal and the symbolic, simultaneously suggesting a fairytale, a garden of paradise with forbidden fruit and a faintly biblical basement hell. Even when describing the mundane minutiae of Roland’s working day – notably the day of his discovery of Ash’s drafts of a first letter to Christabel – the narrator never loses her poetic touch:

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He had no office in his old college, but inhabited an office on sufferance, for his few hours’ part-time teaching. Here, in an empty silence, he unpacked his bicycle panniers and went up to a pantry where the bulk of the Xerox squatted amongst unsavoury tea-towels beside a tea-stained sink. Whilst the machine warmed up, in the din and hum of the extractor fan, he took out his two letters and read them again. Then he spread them face down, to be scryed on the black glass, under which the rods of green light floated and passed. And the machine spat out, hot and chemical-scented, spectograms of these writings, black-rimmed by imaged empty space as the originals were edged by a century’s dust. . . . Roland’s Xeroxes were cleaner and clearer than the faded coppery-grey script of the originals; indeed the copy-ink had a black and gleaming freshness, the machine’s rollers must have been newly inked. But he wanted the originals. (P : 22–3)

Here, the prose recreates heady sensations for all the senses – the visual impression of the dingy, dirty room, the hum of a photocopier’s cooling system, the heat and smell of the printed copies are minutely observed details evoked with well-chosen adjectives (‘unsavoury’, ‘teastained’, ‘chemical-scented’) and unexpected verbs (‘squatted’, ‘spat’, ‘scryed’). Indeed, the range of verbs used to describe the activity of inert objects here gives a feeling of energy and movement to what is, outwardly, a very quiet and ordinary scene (appropriately enough, given that Roland’s innocent photocopying is not all it seems to be). The impression created is of a hum of activity concealed beneath a placid surface. What is more, the episode exemplifies the novel’s arch awareness of the theoretical readings it produces in abundance as Byatt hints at postmodern notions of simulacra and the end of history. To Roland, the photocopied letters look newer than the faded originals – just as the restored house in which LaMotte once lived with Blanche Glover ‘would have looked older. When it was younger’ (P : 211). As late twentieth-century academics, Roland and Maud are quick to perceive this sort of paradox: both have the sense that they are living in a world of simulacra without originals, a world full of phantom hauntings from a history that no one seems to believe in any more, a world in which ‘connections proliferate apparently at random, . . . with equal verisimilitude’ (P : 421). The notion of such ‘haunting’ is, however, not a new one. Back in the nineteenth century, Ash also feels haunted by voices from the past and claims that his ‘poetic belief in the mental universe of his characters’ is almost overwhelming (P : 25). Indeed, the theme of

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spiritualism, ‘the religion of a materialist age’ (PM: 62), is present in both the contemporary and the historical strands of the narrative. It will, of course, rise to full thematic prominence in Byatt’s 1992 novella ‘The Conjugial Angel’ from Angels and Insects. In Possession, meanwhile, the last time that Ash and LaMotte meet is at a séance, disrupted by Ash, who suspects LaMotte is trying to make contact with their child (P : 390–1; 456–7). A very similar spiritualism appears to operate in the contemporary world, and not only in Mortimer Cropper’s obsessive collection and fetishisation of Ash memorabilia or James Blackadder’s sense that ‘all his thoughts . . . have been another man’s thoughts, all his work another man’s work’ (P : 29). When Roland, who has, up until now, also spent his days ‘recuperating a dead man’s reading’ (P : 4), photocopies Ash’s letters, the scene is laced with the vocabulary of spiritualism, ‘scryed’ and ‘spectrogram’, thus also linking the theme to a somewhat different kind of literary scholarship. Merja Polvinen (2004: n. p.) has noted that, in Possession, hauntings and literary influences seem equivalent. Such hauntings might be thought of as the opposite of ‘the anxiety of influence’ and are more akin to the ideas expressed in T. S. Eliot’s ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’, a text that, as we have seen in previous chapters, tends to hover over much of Byatt’s fiction. In interviews, Byatt – for whom ‘reading and writing’ have always ‘seemed to be points on a circle’ (PM: 1) – has said that the writing of the pastiches in Possession was made easier by knowing so much poetry by Browning and Tennyson off by heart (Wachtel, 1993: 82). The fact that her poetic ‘ventriloquism’ has indeed more in common with Eliot’s concept of a gleeful theft from the past than with Fredric Jameson’s ‘speech in a dead language’ (1991: 17) is exemplified by a passage from one of Byatt’s more recent essays, ‘True Stories and the Facts of Fiction’. There, she ponders the ambitious attempt to truly embody an earlier narrative mode or historic event – to analyse not so much through subversion of convention but through faithful, scrupulous adherence to it. Taking her cue once again from Robert Browning, she writes: It is always said of Browning’s various resurrected pasts in his dramatic monologues that they are about Browning and the nineteenth century, and of course this is true – but it is not always added that they are also truly about the time when the New Testament was written, or Renaissance Christianity and Art, though they are, and are illuminating about those matters. It is not either-or. At its best it is both-and. I do

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believe that if I read enough, and carefully enough, I shall have some sense of what words meant in the past, and how they related to other words in the past, and be able to use them in a modern text so that they do not lose their relations to other words in the interconnected web of their own vocabulary. . . . Writing serious historical fiction today seems to me to have something in common with the difficult modern enterprise of Borges’s Pierre Menard, rewriting the Quixote, in the ‘same’ words, now. (OHAS: 94)

In her own fiction, Byatt has repeatedly ventured that despite the necessary and irreducible difference between the ‘then’ and the ‘now’, it is indeed possible to recuperate the past and to give it a voice. Rather than celebrating postmodern parody and pastiche, Byatt, in Possession, joins in the serious and ‘difficult modern enterprise’ of writing and rewriting ‘in the “same” words, now’. She does so not least by insisting that, if the past is indeed both living and dead, this condition is achieved not by blurring the boundaries but rather by plotting them out in detail. In strikingly similar mode, Roland, in a near-epiphany towards the end of Possession, discovers a hitherto unknown confidence and pleasure in language that leads him, albeit tentatively, to reject poststructuralist ideas about language not touching the world, and also signals the beginning of the end of his romantic quest. He has earned his princess – the relationship with Maud has at last been consummated – and has prospects of leaving England for a relatively prestigious academic job abroad. Most importantly, however, he has freed himself from the all-consuming spectre of Ash. Looking up from his books, Roland ponders the various likenesses of Ash that adorn his study and realises, towards the end of the following passage, that he might – just might – be a poet himself:5 These dead men, and Manet’s wary, intelligent sensualist and Watts’s prophet were all one – though also they were Manet and Watts – and the words too were one, the tree, the woman, the water, the grass, the snake and the golden apples. He had always seen these aspects as part of himself, of Roland Michell, he had lived with them. He remembered talking to Maud about modern theories of the incoherent self, which was made up of conflicting systems of beliefs, desires, languages and molecules. All and none of these were Ash and yet he knew, if he did not encompass, Ash. . . . What Ash said – not to him specifically, there was no privileged communication, though it was he who happened to be there, at that

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time, to understand it – was that the lists were the important thing, the words that named things, the language of poetry. He had been taught that language was essentially inadequate, that it could never speak what was there, that it only spoke itself. He thought about [Ash’s] death mask. He could and could not say that the mask and the man were dead. What had happened to him was that the ways in which it could be said had become more interesting than the idea that it could not. (P : 472–3)

Appropriately enough, this epiphany, this release into potential writing, has been brought about by a particular instance of reading. Roland has returned to the poems of Randolph Henry Ash, the same ones that he had laboured over for years with very little pleasure, and now reads them afresh, ‘as though the words were living creatures or stones of fire’ (P: 472). Not for the first time in this chapter (nor, as we have seen, in the novel as a whole), the third person narrator suddenly steps in to address the reader directly, and in a way that recalls the distinctive authorial meditations that already characterised Still Life: There are readings – of the same text – that are dutiful, readings that map and dissect, readings that hear a rustling of unheard sounds, that count grey little pronouns for pleasure or instruction and for a time do not hear golden or apples. There are personal readings, that snatch for personal meanings, I am full of love, or disgust, or fear, I scan for love, or disgust, or fear. There are – believe it – impersonal readings – where the mind’s eye sees the lines move onwards and the mind’s ear hears them sing and sing. Now and then there are readings which make the hairs on the neck, the non-existent pelt, stand on end and tremble, when every word burns and shines hard and clear and infinite and exact, like stones of fire, like points of stars in the dark – readings when the knowledge that we shall know the writing differently or better or satisfactorily, runs ahead of any capacity to say what we know, or how. In these readings, a sense that the text has appeared to be wholly new, never before seen, is followed, almost immediately, by the sense that it was always there, that we the readers, knew it was always there, and have always known it was as it was, though we have now for the first time recognised, become fully cognisant of, our knowledge. (P: 471–2)

While the narrative acknowledges that reading can be a solipsistic, personal experience, it also defends a meaningful, shared world created by reader, writer and text. What is more, it also insists that reading is a sensual experience that is not divorced from our

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experience of a world of sense. If, as Chris Walsh (2000: 193) has argued, Possession ultimately stands as ‘a celebration of reading’ and as a rejection of restrictive critical readings, Roland here emerges as a model reader and his ‘attention’ to the text is duly rewarded in several ways: by (re)solving the mystery of Ash and LaMotte, by feeling pleasure in the text and, ultimately, by the discovery of his own poetic creativity. His quest thus comes to an end not so much with the numerous conventional rewards of the romantic hero but ultimately with the realisation that, in fiction, there are indeed ‘ways in which it could be said’ that are ‘more interesting than the idea that it could not’. But endings are a tricky business in Possession – they, too, are not quite what they seem. Jean-Louis Chevalier (1993) has dedicated a whole essay to the problem of ‘Conclusion in Possession’, and the title of his paper already indicates that we have more than one ending to contend with here. The two most obvious of Possession’s endings (according to Chevalier, there are more) are notably complete and revelatory. Perhaps this is the most important element that the novel borrows from popular fiction: in contrast to the open-ended roman fleuve narrative of Byatt’s Quartet, Possession is not a novel structured around the psychological development of its characters, but has a plot ‘written backwards from the end’ (Sutcliffe, 1989: 32), designed to tie up loose ends and bring the story to a consumable and satisfying end. The first ending, then, comes at the end of the twentieth-century story. The Victorian mystery appears to be solved, secrets are revealed, the hero is rewarded, villains punished and the most unlikely of lovers paired off ‘like the ending of a Shakespearean comedy’ (P : 482–3). At the gathering that provides the setting for this finale, the romance plot thus ends true to form as a new order emerges from the old: in addition to Roland’s new-found freedom, Maud is revealed to be the direct descendant of Ash and LaMotte and therefore the rightful owner of their correspondence, heiress to their kingdom, the ‘true princess’ and, as such, a worthy prize for valiant Roland. All’s well that ends well? Not quite. The contemporary romantic quest may have come full circle, but in Possession the novel, the Victorians, their story, or rather the third person narrator – ‘the narrative voice, which knows what it does know’ (Byatt, 1995b: 17) – has the last word. The final

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chapter, entitled ‘Postscript 1868’, opens with a statement that is nothing if not programmatic: There are things which happen and leave no discernible trace, are not spoken or written of, although it would be very wrong to say that subsequent events go on indifferently, all the same, as though such things had never been. (P: 508)

What follows is a brief account of how ‘[t]wo people met, on a hot May day, and never later mentioned their meeting. This is how it was’ (P: 508, emphasis added). The two people are, of course, Randolph Henry Ash and his and Christabel’s daughter Maia, and their encounter constitutes a historical event of which the modernday characters are – and will remain – wholly ignorant. As Chevalier (1993: 121) remarks, ‘it is told us, outside the narrative, yet at the very heart of the story’. What happened, then, is this: out on a walk near LaMotte’s ancestral home, Ash meets a little girl he recognises as his and Christabel’s daughter. They chat, he weaves her a flowery coronal, asks her to convey a message to Christabel, ‘[a]nd on the way home, she met her brothers, and there was a rough-and-tumble, and the lovely crown was broken, and she forgot the message, which was never delivered’ (P: 511). It is a painfully ‘life-like’ and poignant ending to a story subtitled ‘A Romance’, though it should be noted that the first epigraph to Possession – an extract from Nathaniel Hawthorne’s preface to The House of Seven Gables – signals a reading of this designation so far not touched upon in our discussion of the novel’s romance plot: ‘The point of view in which this tale comes under the Romantic definition lies in the attempt to connect a bygone time with the very present that is flitting away from us.’ Viewed in this light, the ‘Postscript’ complicates rather than settles questions as to the novel’s engagement with history: on the one hand, it could be argued that the modernday narrative upholds the idea that history is a textual construct and that historiography and fiction are roughly equivalent, while the Victorian postscript appears to insist on the existence of historical realities. Indeed, Richard Todd (1994) has been prompted to liken Possession to a revisionist hidden history novel, which operates in the gaps of historical records, a type of history that, notably, also has Victorian literary precedents. Dana Shiller (1997: 540), meanwhile, has pointed out that the phrasing of the ‘Postscript’ is strikingly similar to that used by George Eliot in Middlemarch and suggests a view of history that is fundamentally quotidian.6

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There is, however, yet another reading, suggested by the very fact that the ‘Postscript’ ultimately provides a somewhat misleading end – after all, a message, if not the message, finally is ‘delivered’ in the present day of the novel, and ironically by means of undelivered letters: the unfinished letter concealed in the pages of Ash’s copy of Vico, with which the novel opened, and LaMotte’s unread letter to Ash, with which, in a fashion, it closes. Shiller (1997: 546) notes that although, in her own lifetime, Chistabel’s story is deprived of a denouement as the letter she sends never reaches its intended reader, it can be seen to culminate posthumously in Maud’s reading of it, just as the third person narrator, in the ‘Postscript’, provides the denouement to Ash’s story. Ultimately, however, this complex and complexly mediated act of communication is completed by the reader, that is to say, through the act of reading ‘the “same” words, now’. Byatt (1995d: n. p.) has said that her own ‘impulse to write came . . . from years of reading’, specifically from her childhood reading of ‘myths and fairytales under the bedclothes, from the delights and freedoms and terrors of worlds and creatures that never existed’. Some of these delights, freedoms and terrors are recreated in the pastiche folk or fairytales found in Possession, presented there as either fragments or complete narratives. The inclusion of these tales in Possession first signalled Byatt’s growing interest in this form of narrative at this mid-stage of her career, an interest which combined with her new-found enthusiasm for the short story. Throughout the 1990s, Byatt’s output of short fiction increased dramatically. After her well-received debut collection Sugar (1987), the two novellas that comprise Angels and Insects were published in 1992 and were closely followed by the short-story collections The Matisse Stories (1993), The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye (1995), Elementals (1998) and the Little Black Book of Stories (2003). Each of these volumes draws extensively on the fairytale form as well as on fables and folktales. Having spent most of her career to date writing lengthy novels which probed ‘the problem of the relations between truth, lies and fiction’ (PM: 21), Byatt now expressed enthusiasm for the compact minimalism of the ‘tale’: I have myself become increasingly interested in quickness and lightness of narrative – in small discrete stories rather than pervasive and metamorphic metaphors as ways of patterning and thinking out a text. . . . By the time I wrote Possession in the 1980s my interest in

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both character and narration had undergone a change – I felt a need to feel and analyse less, to tell more flatly, which is sometimes more mysteriously. . . . I found myself crossing out psychological descriptions, or invitations to the reader to enter the characters’ thought-process. I found myself using stories within stories, rather than shape-shifting recurrent metaphors, to make the meanings. (OHAS: 130–1)

What Byatt (1990d: 18) has referred to as her burst of ‘silver power’ had apparently whetted her appetite for experimenting with unfamiliar modes of writing. The escapist, entertaining and, above all, unambiguously fictional qualities of the tale made fairy stories especially suited for inclusion in Byatt’s self-proclaimed ‘Romance’. Like the myriad other interwoven texts and voices in Possession, the tales form an integral part of the novel’s structure and several critics have commented on the obvious parallels to be drawn between the characters and events in the fairytales and those in the main narrative of Possession. Roland, for example, bears more than a passing resemblance to La Motte’s little tailor, while both Maud and LaMotte are explicitly compared to enchanted princesses. Catherine Burgass (2002: 55) thus suggests that Possession’s fairytales provide ‘simple allegories for the reader to decode’. Helen Mundler (1997: 9), meanwhile, describes the tales as fulfilling an ‘anticipatory role’, sending out ‘coded messages’ both to the characters in the novel and to the reader, and obliquely commenting on the action of the main story. Also at the level of plot structure, Victoria Sanchez (1995: 34) has argued that the parallels effected between the two different orders of the imaginary world create a sense of narrative continuity: ‘This continuity invites comparison of these analogous situations, ultimately resulting in the linking of the nineteenth century and the twentieth century – plots, characters, lovers, worlds – in the timeless realm of the fairytale.’ And Monica Flegel (1998: 413) even goes so far as to suggest that, in some respects, the whole novel – with its odd characters, improbable coincidences and fantastic adventures – itself resembles a fairytale. Although fairytales originally derive from the oral tradition, all of the tales in Possession are unmistakably literary tales or Kunstmärchen. The ironic exception is ‘Gode’s Story’, an ostensibly oral tale told to Sabine de Kercoz by her maid and recorded in Sabine’s journal. De Kercoz laments the ‘literary note’ it has acquired in transcription (P: 362), though her desire for a pure and naive form

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of storytelling, untainted and untextualised, is, of course, hardly possible in Byatt’s fictional world. As one of many inlaid narratives in a vast textual mise en abyme, ‘Gode’s Story’, like the other tales that appear in Possession, is anything but naive or rustic – all of these tales are sophisticated compositions that self-consciously reference a range of critical discourses. Note, for example, Byatt’s claim that ‘The Threshold’ was written ‘very deliberately’ in the terms of Freud’s famous 1913 essay on ‘The Theme of the Three Caskets’: I loaded my simple narrative with imagery of sun, moon and stars, life, sex and darkness, and gave the narration to my heroine, Christabel, who like myself could never understand why Paris had not chosen Athene and wisdom over silly Aphrodite and the trap of love, and who warned her readers in an arch Victorian female voice that it would have been better to choose the sunny woman, though the knight desired the moony one, and the story insisted on the third. (Byatt, 1995d: n. p.)

In more ways than one, the story thus seems designed to encourage a psychoanalytic critique of the sort that Byatt (1995d: n. p.) has, almost in the same breath, described as ‘exciting but limited’. In a similarly ambiguous vein, Byatt (1995d: n. p.) has referred to LaMotte’s tale ‘The Glass Coffin’ as ‘a kind of patchwork or jigsaw tale’ assembled from archetypal motifs and characters from the Grimm Brothers’ tales. As such, its composition sounds almost like an exercise in narratological analysis, albeit one that is reconstructive rather then deconstructive. To focus on the knowing constructedness of the fairytales in Possession, and to proceed from this premise to a view of them as some kind of Rosetta Stone to a critical appreciation of the novel as a whole does, of course, run the risk of producing somewhat reductive readings. We have seen above that the romance format so intricately realised at various narrative levels throughout Possession suggests a rather more complex state of affairs, and it is the novel’s emphasis on reading, closely related to Possession’s play on our conceptions of the romance, that, in our view, suggests consideration of the fairytales as an invitation to the reader to ponder a facet of storytelling that particularly insists on a practice of reading grounded in the ‘use of . . . stories in a culture’ (Byatt, 1995d: n. p.; emphasis added).7 Fittingly then, ‘The Glass Coffin’ and ‘Gode’s Story’ were later republished in Byatt’s short story collection The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye. Torn from the nineteenth-century narrative frame

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and the epistemological justification that this context provided, ‘The Glass Coffin’ here no longer functions as an expression of Christabel LaMotte’s sense of social or artistic frustration, her unconscious desires and prohibitions (Ashworth, 1994: 93–4; Mundler, 1997: 9), and ‘Gode’s Story’ is no longer narrated in the voice of a Breton peasant.8 As a result, the language of the tales may seem less natural, the narrative procedures more strange and thought-provoking. But then these stories never were concerned with probability, cause and effect, and are not shaped by the psychological development of their characters. Indeed, Byatt has commented that, when creating the pastiche fairytales for Possession, she relished working with a narrative form that seemed so alien to the realist mode: The pleasure in writing it was in handling the old, worn counters of the characterless persons, the Fate of the consecutive events, including the helpless commentary of the writer on the unavoidable grip of the story, and a sense that I was myself partaking in the continuity of the tales by retelling them in a new context in a way old and new. (OHAS: 131)

What is more, originality and individuality, the aesthetic necessities of the realist novel, were ‘neither here nor there’ (OHAS: 132) with regard to the tales, which instead deployed ‘the plain, negotiable coin of the fund of generally available motifs and anecdotes’ (OHAS: 144). Nevertheless, Byatt has unearthed many surprising affinities between the realist tradition and the fantastical world of tales in her critical writings. ‘Great novels’, she writes, ‘always draw on both ways of telling, both ways of seeing’ (Byatt, 1995d: n. p.); and ‘[t]he novel in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries has always incorporated forms of myths and fairy tales, working both with and against them’ (OHAS: 130). Imagining Characters (1995), Byatt’s collaboration with the psychoanalyst Ignês Sodré, duly explores the use of fairytale forms and motifs – ‘[t]he Cinderella story and various other fairystory structures of brothers and sisters and mothers and fathers and renewal and balls and princes’ (IC: 30) – in nineteenth-century novels by Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë and George Eliot. What ultimately unites these novels with the fairytale form is, according to Byatt and Sodré, the common characteristic of having ‘both a “universal” and perhaps a private significance’ (IC: 230). Responding to and expanding on a tradition thus defined, Byatt’s own tales often take a truly hybrid form and present the reader with a heady mix of realism and fantasy.

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They might be alternately described as realist stories with fairytale touches, or as fairy stories injected with realism: they, too, are ‘bothand’, and much of their interest, but also much of their humour, arises precisely from the unexpected juxtaposition of these two very different modes of narrative. The title story of Byatt’s collection The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye: Five Fairy Stories exemplifies this quirky humour. The two main characters are Gillian Perholt, a middle-aged English academic, and the Djinn, a semi-immortal oriental genie. Gillian inadvertently releases the Djinn from a çesm-I bülbül glass bottle she has bought during a conference trip to Turkey. What ensues is both a clash of the ‘East-meets-West’ variety and a chaotic yet fruitful meeting of realism and fantasy, narratology and the pleasures of narrative. The amusing consequences are evident in a scene in which Gillian and her newly released Djinn relax together in a hotel room. While Gillian whiles away the afternoon watching a tennis match on television, the Djinn suddenly plucks a bewildered Boris Becker out of the ‘glass box’, prematurely foreclosing the ‘open-endedness’ of the live match and leaving Becker to wonder, in true fairytale fashion, what strange fate might have befallen him: A small Boris Becker, sandy-browed, every gold hair on his golden body gleaming sweat, was standing on the chest of drawers, perhaps twice the size of his television image, which was frozen in mid-stroke on the screen. He blinked his sandy lashes over his blue eyes and looked around, obviously unable to see more than a blur around him. ‘Scheisse,’ said the tiny Becker. ‘Scheisse und scheisse. Was ist mit mir?’ (DNE: 198–9)

Faced with this surreal occurrence, Gillian’s response is uncompromisingly pragmatic: ‘Put him back. He will lose the set’ (DNE: 199). Her English empiricism is at odds with the fantastic world of Middle Eastern myth in which she finds herself, and the cultural clash is nowhere more evident than when Gillian and the Djinn swap life stories. The Djinn tells a story spanning hundreds of years which, in the narrative tradition of the Thousand and One Nights, is a never ending tale that constantly spawns fantastic new stories. Notably, Gillian is a narratologist – an expert on storytelling, who can even analyse the narrative structure of a game of tennis – yet, when pressed for her life story, she reverts to cultural type and produces a narrative of somewhat parochial realism. There is no metaphysical aspect to her tale – aside from the disproportionate symbolic value assumed

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by ‘a three-piece suite in moquette’: ‘All English stories get bogged down in whether or not the furniture is socially and aesthetically unacceptable’ (DNE: 239). The Djinn, who has no prior knowledge of the cultural context from which this story emanates, finds it incomprehensible: ‘Your stories are strange, glancing things. They peter out, they have no shape’ (DNE: 242). ‘The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye’, along with many of Byatt’s other tales, foregrounds the persistent operations of emplotment as the structural equivalent of fate. In a critical capacity, Byatt (2004b: xviii) has commented that fairytales are essentially characterised by their formulaic narrative structures, and their limited choice of character types and motifs: ‘princesses and goose-girls; youngest sons and gallant princes; ogres, giants, dragons, and trolls; wicked stepmothers and false heroes; fairy godmothers and other magical helpers, often talking horses, or foxes, or birds; glass mountains; and prohibitions and breaking of prohibitions’. ‘The Glass Coffin’, one of the tales that, as we recall, first appeared in Possession and was subsequently reprinted in the Djinn collection, both draws on these formulae and undermines them. It begins with the little tailor journeying through a generically dark and disorienting forest, and from the very first paragraph it is clear that his fate is preordained, the shape of his story already fixed along predictable narrative lines. We are told, not that he discovered a house in the forest, but that he ‘did come upon the little house that was waiting for him’ (DNE: 3, emphasis added). The household is predictably strange and enchanted, and filled with animals, for which the little tailor is instructed to cook and clean. Once the little tailor has completed this task, he is rewarded in the traditional way by being offered a choice of three gifts. The tailor chooses a glass key, both because he admires its craftsmanship, and because he is curious: he has heard many fairytales and the key is the only gift whose symbolic value he is unfamiliar with (his unusual choice poignantly indicating, of course, that he is only too familiar with the codes of the narrative he inhabits). This done, he dutifully follows the rules that govern his adventure, because he trusts the tale – he knows that, if he follows the plot, no unscripted hazards will cause him harm. When he finds the enchanted princess, ‘he knew – it is always so, after all – that the true adventure was the release of this sleeper, who would then be his grateful bride’ (DNE: 14). Once the key has unlocked the glass coffin, the little tailor kisses the fair

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maiden’s cheek ‘because he knew this was what he must do’ (DNE: 15). Nevertheless, once she is released from her enchantment, he questions the convention that she must marry her rescuer: ‘Of course I will have you,’ said the little tailor, ‘for you are my promised marvel, released with my vanished glass key, and I love you dearly already. Though why you should have me, simply because I opened the glass case, is less clear to me altogether, and when, and if, you are restored to your rightful place, and your home and lands and people are again your own, I trust you will feel free to reconsider the matter, and remain, if you will, alone and unwed. (DNE: 20–1)

This sort of self-questioning analysis rarely, if ever, happens in a conventional fairytale: it is a moment at which the realist novel invades the fairytale and disorders its narrative codes. Interestingly, this disordering occurs at precisely the point where the little tailor becomes an attentive and intelligent reader of his own tale – and thus ultimately also the author of his own fate. In the age of critical theory, traditional fairytales have, of course, often been critiqued on ideological grounds, and their rigid forms have been said to embody equally fixed socio-cultural values regarding class and gender.9 Conversely, and perhaps somewhat paradoxically, fairytales have also been revered by feminists and postmodernists alike for their rich symbolic value. Despite Byatt’s well-documented resistance to feminist theory, there is a strong element of the revisionist ethos associated with these critical discourses evident in her own tales. Both ‘The Glass Coffin’ and ‘The Eldest Princess’, another tale from the Djinn collection, can be – and indeed have been – read as feminist revisionist fairytales,10 with the densely applied sexual symbolism in the former story apparently owing much to Angela Carter’s oeuvre. In ‘The Eldest Princess’, a similar disruption to that effected by the ponderous little tailor in ‘The Glass Coffin’ occurs when the eponymous heroine realises that, as the eldest sibling, she has, according to the formulae of fairytales, no chance of succeeding in her designated task. Suspicious of the charms of the woodman and her own hopes of a conventional happy ending and married bliss, she decides: ‘I could just walk out of this inconvenient story and go my own way’ (DNE: 52). Having literally deviated from the path laid out for her, the Eldest Princess carves out a decidedly unconventional life for herself. Turning her back on civilised society, with its conservative predilection for blue skies and tradition, to live in a new-age commune with the wise old lady of the forest and various woodland

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creatures, the princess ‘felt she had come home to where she was free’ (DNE: 67). Again, we do well to note that the Eldest Princess is described early on in the tale as ‘by nature a reading, not a travelling princess’ (DNE: 47). Like the little tailor in ‘The Glass Coffin’, the Eldest Princess makes good use of this predisposition: by literally rewriting the classic fairytale plot and by breaking some of the key conventions of the genre, both the Princess and her creator thoroughly upset generic expectations and flaunt the tension between form and formula to surprising effect. The fairytale form, Byatt (1995d: n. p.) comments in ‘Fairy Stories’, gives form and coherence to formless fears, dreads and desires. Recognising a fairy tale motif, or an ancient myth, Cinderella or Oedipus, in the mess of a life lived or observed gives both pleasure and security and the sense – or illusion – of wisdom. But I never forget the warning contained in the reaction of Doris Lessing’s heroine, Anna Wulf, in The Golden Notebook, to her psychoanalyst’s pleasure when she ‘recognises’ Hansel and Gretel, or the Little Mermaid, in her own experience, or in her dreams. Lessing and her heroine reject the pleasure of these orders for the difficulty of knowing that the muddle of her actual modern life remains what it was – a muddle, a conflict. Fairy tales don’t cure. But they are necessary, and they delight, and they join us to each other.

More often than not, the consolations and delights the fairytale form affords are, in Byatt’s tales, concretely physical, literally bodily ones. Sabine Coelsch-Foisner (2003: n. p.) has detected a prominent theme of ‘female transformation’ in the tales, which she describes as ‘inseparably connected with the body and ageing’. This sort of transformation is, once again, exemplified in ‘The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye’. As a divorced woman, ‘past childbearing’, whose two grown-up children have flown the nest, Gillian Perholt feels herself to be ‘floating redundant’ and ‘largely irrelevant’ (DNE: 95; 100) in the Darwinian scheme of things. She knows she is ‘lucky’ compared to her ancestresses, who ‘would probably have been dead by the age she had reached’ (DNE: 104). And yet, her middle age has proved both a liberation and a curse. She has freed herself from the fetters that society and biology have imposed on her, but her ageing body impedes and frustrates her. While giving her conference paper on the story of Patient Griselda, a wronged, ‘redundant’ woman with whom she clearly empathises, Gillian experiences an alarming vision

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of decay and death, in the form of ‘a cavernous form, a huge, female form’ with a ‘windy hole’ for a womb (DNE: 118). As a narratologist, Gillian is sceptical and critical of fairytale stories that describe human life as if it were vegetable life, a perpetually renewable cycle. Nevertheless, when the Djinn grants her three wishes, her first is ‘for my body to be as it was when I last really liked it’ (DNE: 201). This being a wondrous tale, her wish is, of course, duly granted. It should be noted, however, that transformations of renewal, such as Gillian’s, coexist with transformations of decay, though these, too, ultimately prove empowering. In ‘A Stone Woman’ from the Little Black Book of Stories, a woman’s physical metamorphosis is precipitated by her mother’s death: ‘Ines, who had been the younger woman, became the old woman, in an instant’ (LBBS: 129). As the result of an operation, she is left with a scar that petrifies and then appears to become hard and mineral. What, at first, seems like a poetic metaphor for various real life phenomena – the loss of sensation in scar tissue, the loss of emotional sensation brought on by grief, the gradual stiffening of old age – becomes a literal transformation into stone. Ines’s body soon becomes grotesquely malformed, yet the narrative insists that there is much unconventional beauty in her metamorphosis: The first apparition of the stony crust outside her clothing was strange and beautiful. She observed its beginnings in the mirror one morning, brushing her hair – a necklace of veiled swellings above her collar-bone which broke slowly through the skin like eyes from closed lids, and became opal – fire opal, black opal, geyserite and hydrophane, full of watery light. She found herself preening at herself in her mirror. (LBBS: 140)

In age, Ines is transformed into a sculptural work of art and finds an appreciator in an Icelandic stonecutter. ‘Her metamorphosis obeyed no known laws of physics or chemistry’, yet the reader is invited to take pleasure in the precise descriptions of the rocks that served as a symbol of natural history in Possession and are here both metaphorical and real ‘living stones’ (LBBS: 147). As we have seen, Byatt’s tales often juxtapose the perpetual cycles of the natural world, imitated in the narratives of romance and fairytales, with the realist narratives of the ‘muddle’ and ‘conflict’ of human life. Here, a potentially tragic and nightmarish scenario is transformed into a liberating fantasy – Ines’s fate is not death, as might be expected,

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but the immortal life of a troll that recalls the stone trolls of Terry Pratchett’s Discworld series. In her essay ‘The Greatest Story Ever Told’, Byatt comments: We are all, like Scheherezade, under sentence of death, and we all think of our lives as narratives, with beginnings, middles and ends. Storytelling in general, and the Thousand and One Nights in particular, consoles us for endings with endless new beginnings. (OHAS: 166)

Tales do indeed have a certain life of their own and a far greater longevity than our own biological lives. In ‘The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye’, Gillian compares her own mortality with the longevity of the mythical characters that surround her in Turkey: She was suddenly aware of every inch of her own slack and dying skin. She thought of the stone eyes of the goddess, of her dangerous dignity, of her ambiguous plump breasts, dead balls, intact eggs, wreathed round her in triumph and understood that real-unreal was not the point, that the goddess was still, and always had been, and in the foreseeable future would be more alive, more energetic, infinitely more powerful than she herself, Gillian Perholt. (DNE: 166)

Ultimately, however, it is not the ‘goddess’ or even her magically restored thirty-five-year-old body that reconciles Gillian to her human fate, but an objet d’art, a glass paperweight that, much like the glass snake in The Game, itself becomes a complex metaphor not only for the story Gillian inhabits but, more generally, for the ‘use of . . . stories in a culture’. Pondering her parting gift from the Djinn, Gillian exclaims: ‘Oh glass, . . . it is not possible, it is only a solid metaphor, it is a medium for seeing and a thing seen at once’ (DNE: 274–5). Real-unreal is indeed not the point, and if Byatt’s protagonists are all, in a sense, Scheherezades, at once powerless and yet surprisingly adept at rewriting their fates, we, as readers, are, in turn, invited to be critical of our own life stories, both those we have created and those that have been imposed on us. Richard Todd (1997: 39) has suggested that Byatt’s forays into fantasy should perhaps be more appropriately placed within the German tradition of the ‘wonder tale’ or ‘märchen’, a term altogether more conducive ‘to the feel of the marvellous, and . . . indeed in every way less constricting, in conveying the sense of what are more usually referred to in English as “fairytales” or “fairy stories”’. What Todd fails to note but what, in the context of Byatt’s work, seems even

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more important than the element of wonder he chooses to emphasise is that the German term ‘märchen’ also and crucially retains its etymological link to the storied event it not only relates but which it itself constitutes. For Byatt, tales and their telling converge onto a single act of world-making, and the wonder tale is a form that proves uniquely capable of accommodating both the inevitable self-reflexivity and the sense of magical transformation that must accompany any such act. Notes 1 See, for example, Coe, 1990; Kemp, 1990; Stout, 1991. 2 See Kenyon, 1993, p. 19. 3 See, for example, Todd, 1994; Holmes, 1994; Boccardi, 2004b; Janik, 1995; Gutleben, 1997; Buxton, 1996; Bronfen, 1996; Flint, 1997; Giobbi, 1994; Marsh, 1995. 4 See Byatt, 1993f, in which Byatt comments at length on literary models and predecessors to Possession and discusses The French Lieutenant’s Women in a not entirely favourable light. 5 For a more detailed treatment of Roland’s poetic initiation, see Hulbert, 1991. 6 See Eliot, [1871–72] 1985: 896. 7 Cf. Bettelheim, 1976. 8 Cf. Sanchez, 1995: 34, who discusses how the tales incorporated in Possession add historical depth to the narrative by reflecting the literary and sociological interest in folk literature in the nineteenth century, as well as attendant interests in oral culture and national identity. 9 Cf. Zipes, 1986. 10 See, for example, Campbell, 2001.

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The dark side of the tale: The Children’s Book, The Biographer’s Tale and Angels and Insects As the previous chapter has shown, many of A. S. Byatt’s stories and tales offer their subjects and, one might add, their readers, the possibility of empowerment and liberation. And yet, not all of Byatt’s tales prove a liberating force for good. Indeed, Byatt also often chooses to foreground the darker side of the storytelling imagination – the part which is concerned, to quote Rifat Orhan from ‘The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye’, ‘with Fate, with Destiny, with what is prepared for human beings’ (DNE: 125). Inevitably, this prepared fate is not always a happy one. Characters such as Daphne Gulver-Robinson in ‘Baglady’, Mrs Sugden in ‘In the Air’ and A-Oa in ‘The Dried Witch’ meet with magically unhappy endings which uncannily echo their deepest fears. In her essay ‘Fairy Tales’, Byatt (1995d: n. p.) notes that ‘[f]airy stories are related to dreams’, and by extension they are also related to nightmares, giving ‘form and coherence to formless fears, dreads and desires’. The use of stories to give an imaginative form to indescribably horrible events is particularly notable in two of Byatt’s tales, ‘Dragons’ Breath’ from The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye and ‘The Thing in the Woods’ from the Little Black Book of Stories. Characteristically blending elements of realism and fantasy, both tales attempt to reimagine the chaos and horror of war by giving it a mythical form. In ‘Dragons’ Breath’, a quiet rural village is devastated by ‘great worms with fat heads’ (DNE: 81), which creep slowly but insistently down the mountainside like a flow of lava. Byatt (1995d: n. p.) described the story, which was originally written to be performed as part of a benefit project for Sarajevo, as ‘the best and most decorous way of approaching the terror of what is happening in Sarajevo from

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outside it’. The worms may be an imaginative figure of the ugliness of war, but they are also very concrete and vividly described monsters, ‘[t]heir bodies were repulsive, as they humped and slithered and crushed, slow and grey and indiscriminate’ (DNE: 83). The dragons or worms are embodiments of ‘fear and mindlessness . . . death and decay’, which are later turned into stories by the surviving villagers, who, having ‘believed themselves to be trapped by boredom in peace, and who are truly trapped by destruction, . . . rediscover, and see differently, the fragments of their world, their culture, in the ruins’ (Byatt, 1995d: n.p.). ‘The Thing in the Woods’ is a similarly nightmarish tale which, although set in a realistically rendered wartime Britain rather than a generic fairytale village, also features an encounter with a hideous dragon or worm. This time the monster, or Thing, is glimpsed by two young evacuees, Penny and Primrose. Again, the fantastic creature is described with great precision, and its unpleasant solidity is pungently evoked: its smell is the ‘liquid smell of putrefication, the smell of maggoty things at the bottom of untended dustbins’, its colour ‘the colour of flayed flesh, pitted with wormholes’, and the expression on its quasi-human face is one of ‘pure misery’ (LBBS: 15–16). The monster destroys everything in its path, including a small child who has been evacuated with Penny and Primrose, and leaves a trail of ‘bloody slime and dead foliage, sucked to dry skeletons’ (LBBS: 17). The Thing obviously serves as a symbolic representation of the war, its destruction of normal family life, its unremittant slaughter. At the same time, however, the girls’ encounter with the Thing is presented as a very real event. When Penny and Primrose chance to meet as women many years later, both are reassured to find that the other woman remembers the worm as a real creature, not a fantasy born of childhood terrors: ‘we needn’t be afraid we’re mad’ (LBBS: 29). Neither woman can forget the Thing in the forest, and neither can speak of it to others. Yet the women deal with their shared traumatic memory in different ways – Penny, now a psychologist, returns to the forest to try and confront the Thing and reproduce the experience; Primrose, a storyteller, turns it into a children’s tale. Both of these are valid and indeed common responses that also represent two by now rather conventionalised ‘use[s] of . . . stories in a culture’ (Byatt, 1995d: n. p.), but Primrose’s approach is perhaps the most fruitful here: she understands that children enjoy hearing tales that

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offer ‘just a frisson of fear and terror that made them wriggle with pleasure’ (LBBS: 21), and, by turning her memory into one such narrative, she gives it a form that can be shared and contemplated in safety. As Byatt (1995d: n. p.) has remarked, ‘[f]airy tales don’t cure. But they are necessary, and they delight, and they join us to each other.’ In Byatt’s Man Booker-shortlisted novel The Children’s Book (2009), the stakes on the relative terrors and delights of the fairytale are raised, at least as far as Byatt’s oeuvre to date is concerned, to an unprecedented degree. In The Children’s Book, real and imaginary worlds collide and intermingle once again – in this case a comfortably upper middle-class Edwardian world populated by ‘socialists, anarchists, Quakers, Fabians, artists, editors, freethinkers . . ., writers’ (CB: 29), their numerous children and the occasional banker on the one hand and, on the other, magic realms full of ‘half-beasts, people and creatures who could change their skins and sizes, sometimes by choice and sometimes by accident, so that you might find that you were a human child one moment, and a hedgehog the next’ (CB: 80). As its title suggests, The Children’s Book revolves, at one level at least, around tales of adventure and enchantment, both old and new, and is set in what is commonly regarded as a golden age of children’s literature when ‘the books that were loved . . . were . . . written for children’ (CB: 480). The novel makes reference to several of these children’s classics, including Andrew Lang’s fairy books, which introduced new readers to the pleasures of traditional folklore, and the newly minted fantasy worlds of Rudyard Kipling’s Puck of Pook’s Hill, Kenneth Graham’s The Golden Age, E. Nesbit’s The Railway Children and J. M. Barrie’s Peter Pan. The principal purveyor of wondrous worlds in The Children’s Book is Olive Wellwood, ‘the author of a great many tales, for children and adults, and something of an authority on British Fairy Lore’ (CB: 10). Olive, who is clearly modelled on E. Nesbit, shares not only something of the well-known children’s writer’s fertile imagination but also her unconventional lifestyle. Her tales, much like Nesbit’s (and, indeed, somewhat like Byatt’s) ‘hold romance – magic and adventure – in a vibrating tension with the reality principle, common sense and the harsh facts of experience’ (Briggs, 1987: xx). The extracts from Olive’s popular tales that appear in the novel do indeed often seem

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to have dark, sinister overtones. Olive herself has a fascination with frightening underground worlds and observes that ‘children liked to glimpse the unbearable, in manageable doses’, although we are told that her own tales ‘often came close to overstepping’ the ‘limit of the bearable’ (CB: 83). Interestingly, although Olive ably demonstrates the ability to reimagine the terrors and delights of childhood, her tales appear to be written by someone who does not especially like children. Almost all of Olive’s child protagonists are slightly demonic, such as Pig, the little boy in ‘The Shrubbery’, who laughs when his mother trips and bloodies her face, or else are subjected to rather harsh moral lessons, such as Rosie, the little girl in the ‘sinister and sly tale’ (CB: 301) of ‘The People in the House in the House’. As with other examples of Byatt’s fiction, notably The Virgin in the Garden, Babel Tower and Possession, the form of the novel incorporates many features of the intellectual world it inhabits, including the somewhat didactic tones of children’s literature of the Edwardian era. The Children’s Book strategically ‘incorporate[s] forms of myths and fairy tales, working both with and against them’ (OHAS: 130). Many of its characters are related to fairytale types: Olive is both mother and stepmother to her brood, both careworn ‘Mother Goose’ and wicked witch. Her philandering husband Humphry is a pied piper enchanter, who has attractive young women, rather than children, dancing to his tune. Olive’s eldest son Tom is clearly to be identified with Peter Pan, the play which The Children’s Book itself identifies as the defining myth of the era. And if the novel as a whole resembles a fairytale, as several of Byatt’s novels and novellas do, it is the shadowy, nightmarish tale, rather than the wonder tale of magical transformations and happy endings, that has served as a model here. A taste of things to come is provided near the start of the novel, in the prologue to the ‘Golden Age’ section of the novel, at the Wellwoods’ midsummer celebrations. The visiting German puppeteer Anselm Stern has been engaged to amuse the children, but his production of Aschenputtel or Cinderella is anything but light entertainment: The final scenes were gruesome. One disdainful sister, her proud expression unchanging, aided and abetted by her mother took a kitchen cleaver to her big toe, splat. ‘When you are Queen, you will not need to go on foot,’ said the mother, falsetto. The bride and groom set off on horseback, on a finely caparisoned horse made of real hide. The

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gold shoe brimmed with blood. Several of those children remembered, well into their future, that they had seen the red liquid dripping from the shoe. (CB: 50)

The children are mesmerised, or perhaps rather traumatised, by the gruesome Germanic version of this much-loved tale, but this shocking intrusion of blood and gristle into the Arcadian lifestyle of the Wellwoods also functions, albeit rather obviously, as a foreshadowing of the horror and the bloodshed that will be visited upon their generation by the Great War – the inevitable conclusion to The Children’s Book, which none of the characters can predict but which every reader will be aware of. In the final part of the novel, entitled ‘The Age of Lead’, the slaughter is thus inevitably unremitting: the Robins (Wellwood and Oakeshott), Harry, Geraint and Leon Stern are all swiftly despatched over a couple of short chapters. Those young men who are not killed in the war are either seriously wounded (Julian Cain, Florian and Philip) or psychologically traumatised (Charles/Karl and Wolfgang). The story thus concludes on a sombre note: They all had things they could not speak of and could not free themselves from, stories they survived only by never telling them, although they woke at night, surprised by foul dreams, which returned regularly and always as a new shock. (CB: 614)

There are no happy endings in The Children’s Book. As the narrator notes, according to Hesiod’s five ages of man (a myth of Paradise Lost which underpins the whole of The Children’s Book), in the Silver Age, ‘the people lived for 100 years as children, without growing up, then quite suddenly aged and died’ (CB: 394). So it seems here, as a long and rambling narrative about the pleasures and preoccupations of middle-class Edwardian life ends in a sudden shower of death. Indeed, the series of tragic events is so systematic that, as in the fairytale, one may feel that some sort of sinister logic or fate is at work. Are Humphry and Olive finally punished for their unconventional lifestyle? Is a whole generation being punished for its inability to tell reality from fantasy, for being so easily seduced by ‘real and fictive seams of gold’ (CB: 57) and clichéd notions of a ‘Golden Age’? The theme of children’s literature implies that there might just be a moral to this tale. Byatt depicts an era that escaped into magical children’s stories, in which the runaway success of J. M. Barrie’s play Peter Pan about a boy who never grew up reflected the popular mood.

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This popular appetite is seen to be both ironic and poignant – many young men of the period would indeed never reach maturity, not because of magic but because of the Great War. The Children’s Book is undoubtedly a story of lost innocence, but also a cautionary tale about storytelling itself. In an interview with Sam Leith on occasion of The Children’s Book’s publication, Byatt comments on ‘one of the steady themes of my writing that I don’t understand – as opposed to several that I do. I don’t understand why, in my work, writing is always so dangerous. It’s very destructive. People who write books are destroyers’ (Leith, 2009: 13). Readers of The Children’s Book certainly cannot but recall the tragic and indeed destructive consequences of Julia Corbett’s ‘taletelling’ in The Game (G: 108) when, towards the end of The Children’s Book, Olive is faced with an almost analogous turn of events – the suicide of her son Tom. Olive, whose prolific publications soothe ‘the relentlessly busy inventiveness of her brain’ and earn ‘real bankable cheques in real envelopes’ (CB: 82), also pens continuously evolving private tales for each of the children in her household: ‘each child had his or her own story . . ., written in its own book, hand-decorated with stuck-on scraps and coloured patterns’ (CB: 80). These books are ‘kept in a glassfaced cabinet in Olive’s study’ and all the children are encouraged to dip in and out of their respective stories as composition advances page by page. However, only Tom, who is Olive’s eldest and favourite son and whose tale is by far the longest and most intricately developed, takes up the offer on a regular basis and indeed well beyond his early years. His story, Tom Underground, follows an imaginary boy, ‘sometimes called Tom and sometimes Lancelin’, on his quest to be reunited with his own shadow, ‘which had been stolen by a Rat, when he was in his cradle’. Tom/Lancelin’s journey takes him deep beneath the surface of the Kentish idyll that the Wellwoods inhabit, into a world ‘full of tunnels, passages, mines, and strange folk and creatures, benign, maleficent, and indifferent’ (CB: 80). The fact that the real Tom will, over time, find it increasingly difficult to resurface from this fantastical underworld escapes Olive’s notice until it is far too late. She does, at any rate, ‘ignore a great deal, in order to persist in her calm, and listen steadily to the quick scratch of the nib’ (CB: 301). Even more significantly, however, ‘Olive plundered the children’s stories sometimes, for publishable situations, or people, or settings’ (CB: 81), and the ultimate act of plundering occurs when Olive turns

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Tom Underground into a highly public – and publicly acclaimed – stage play, which, as one of its enthusiastic reviewers puts it, ‘had the magic of Peter Pan combined with something dark and Germanic’ (CB: 526). Characteristically, Olive ‘had not told Tom, either that they had adapted his story, or that they had taken his name’. She had, simply, ‘not thought about Tom whilst the work was going on’ (CB: 520). The tragic sequence of events that Olive’s thoughtlessness precipitates serves to highlight the less pleasant aspects of her highly ambivalent character. In some respects, Olive should be admirable in Byatt’s reckoning – she is a woman writer who has had the will to follow the life of the mind, who has literally and figuratively attained a room of her own, and paid for it by her own handsome earnings. And yet, she has, it is implied, gained this at the expense of her immediate family. She has neglected her children, having delegated the role of carer and mother to her sister Violet so that she can indulge herself in imaginary worlds and romantic affairs. If the moral imperative of the writer is, as Iris Murdoch (1959: 267) claimed, to recognise that ‘other people exist’, then Olive is found to be decidedly lacking. She is the centre of her own imaginative world, and her perceptions of others, even of Tom, her ‘golden boy’ (CB: 187), are tinged with narcissism. Olive’s appropriation of Tom and his story thus betrays more than a simple lack of judgement: she ultimately sees Tom as an extension of herself, rather than as a separate person in his own right. As the first night of the play is looming, Olive tries to tell herself, again unmistakably echoing Julia Corbett in The Game, that it might just be ‘possible Tom would be pleased that his name was at the centre’ (CB: 520). Predictably, he is not. ‘I wasn’t asked. Or told’, he states flatly (CB: 521), and, installed in the Wellwood box on opening night, Tom’s ‘skin crawled’ as he ‘refused grimly to suspend disbelief’. In a scene that recalls Marcus Potter’s darker moments in The Virgin in the Garden, Tom ‘knew he was undergoing a trial or test. He must not for one moment, not for one second, believe. The test was not to be taken in . . . by illusion’ (CB: 523). In a rare moment of insight during the auditions for Tom Underground, Olive herself has had to acknowledge that she ‘was not really a playwright. . . . A true playwright makes up people who can be inhabited by actors. A storyteller makes shadow people in the head, autonomous and complete’ (CB: 518). As the production advances,

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however, Olive, unlike Tom, is only too willing to be ‘taken in by the glamour, the illusion’ (CB: 523) of the theatricals, which have not only taken distorting possession of her original tale but also violated her son, once as ‘autonomous and complete’ as his shadowy alter ego. With the public staging of Tom Underground, Olive has, quite literally, stolen Tom’s shadow, and unlike the imaginary Tom/ Lancelin, the real Tom has no hope of regaining it. Olive’s play has left him feeling ‘shut in a box, and there was nothing he could do’ (CB: 524). When, at the end of the play’s first performance, Tom disappears into the night, he thus embarks not on a quest but, simply and terrifyingly, on a long journey on foot from London all the way to Dungeness, where, eventually, he will walk ‘down the shingle and on, without hesitating, into the waves and the lashing wind, the flying froth and the sinewy down-draft. He was still walking . . . when he slipped, and the wave threw him into the current. He didn’t fight’ (CB: 533). Humphry Wellwood’s reassuring words to his wife when Tom’s absence is first noticed – ‘He’s always going off on his own. He doesn’t like crowds. He’ll surface’ (CB: 527) – prove haunting indeed. As Olive cautions in one of her own fairy tales, ‘[w]ords have their own life’ (CB: 102).1 In The Children’s Book, the characters’ readiness to immerse themselves in imaginary worlds, to revel in ‘an awareness that things had invisible as well as visible forms’ (CB: 81) and to suspend disbelief at the drop of a hat, does not solely, or primarily, belong to the realm of magical tales or to the world(s) the novel’s large cast of children inhabit. Rather, it is, above all, the world of the adult characters, ostensibly rooted in Edwardian reality and certainly narrated in a realist mode, which most frequently references, and indeed resembles, the enchanted world of myth and fairytale. Almost all of the adults in The Children’s Book show ‘a paradoxical propensity to retreat into childhood, to read and write adventure stories, tales about furry animals, dramas about pre-pubertal children’ (CB: 300), and deeply allegorical amateur dramatics, elaborate puppet shows, and all manner of extravagant revelries abound alongside the vast palette of social, political, psychoanalytic, sexual and artistic utopias that are acted out in bucolic settings. Even individual family units labour under the spell of their adult members’ insistence on a happy-ever-after that becomes increasingly unsustainable as secrets drift to the surface and reality invades.

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Olive Wellwood stands for any number of mothers and fathers in The Children’s Book: she ‘had constructed her own good picture of [her] family, which was innocent and comfortable’ (CB: 301) – a fiction readily consumed by contemporary journalists, who publish gushing articles on Olive’s ‘perfect house’ and ‘charming’ lifestyle (CB: 527). Indeed, Olive herself ‘could not, and did not, imagine any of the inhabitants of this walled garden wanting to leave it, or change it, though her stories knew better’ (CB: 301). They do indeed – Olive’s tales are a great deal more trustworthy than their teller, and one of her stories in particular epitomises the sinister undercurrents that run beneath the family idyll she has created, ‘had written’, with the same ‘inventive power with which she told her stories’ (CB: 301). ‘The People in the House in the House’ tells the tale of Rosy, a girl who imprisons a flock of tiny folk in a doll’s house, only to find herself, in turn, imprisoned alongside her miniature captives by a giant child. Unmistakably a commentary on Olive’s own life and, incidentally, a neat emblem of The Children’s Book’s own plot structures, ‘The People in the House in the House’ also stands as a fitting image of the fate the children in The Children’s Book have to grapple with. They serve, quite literary, as a captive audience for the complex fictions their parents have created, and, held hostage by the adults’ various plottings, they struggle to assume authorship of their own lives. In ‘The People in the House in the House’, it is notably the little people who prove resourceful enough to engineer an escape, taking Rosy, the original author of their predicament, to freedom with them. In The Children’s Book, Olive, once described as ‘smell[ing] of roses’ (CB: 23), is somewhat less fortunate than her fairytale proxy. While her surviving children and their friends eventually venture, for better or for worse, out into the real world, Olive, still grief-stricken for Tom, takes to her bed and sets about ‘depleting Humphry’s stocks of whisky’ (CB: 542). Worse is, of course, to come as the Great War traps and indeed claims further young lives. For the time being, however, ‘[l]ife – for the living – went on’, albeit ‘[l]eached of much of its colour, still where it had been full of movement’ (CB: 543). Not unlike the complexly structured Children’s Book itself, the tales Olive once wrote for the Wellwood children ‘were, in their nature, endless. They were like segmented worms, with hooks and eyes to fit onto the next moving and coiling section. Every closure of plot

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had to contain a new beginning. There were tributary plots, that joined the mainstream again, further on, further in’ (CB: 81). Within the main narrative of The Children’s Book, one tributary plot – one among many – concerns the gradual disclosure of the thoroughly mixed parentage of the Wellwood brood. As Olive’s astute (and actual) daughter Dorothy, echoing Matty Crompton from Angels and Insects on an eerily similar subject, observes: ‘nothing was what it seemed’ (CB: 364). Significantly, it is precisely at the point where Dorothy first learns that her mother may not be her mother (as it turns out, it is Humphry Wellwood who is not all he seems) that she stops ‘reading her fairytale, in its leaf-green notebook’ (CB: 316). Dorothy refuses to lend her imagination to Olive’s myth of the happy family. Admittedly never much of a reader in the first place and longing, above all, ‘not to be imaginative’ (CB: 315), Dorothy is, nevertheless, in many respects the Eldest Princess of The Children’s Book. Like the Eldest Princess in Byatt’s eponymous tale, ‘sharp Dorothy’ (CB: 177) is deeply ‘ambivalent about fairytales’ (CB: 344) and just as determined to throw away the script. Her challenge to the conventional plot here, however, raises the narrative stakes by insisting on a decidedly realist twist to the tale. ‘[I]nterested in the human body’ (CB: 149) from an early age, Dorothy rejects both escapist fantasy and fantasies of escape: ‘Tom had run away. Running away was what children in stories did. There was no point in hurrying off to be a wild woman in the woods. She wanted to be a doctor’ (CB: 347). And she will be. Unlike Tom, she resists the pull ‘towards the dark queen weaving her webs, and snares, and shrouds’ (CB: 235) and decides that instead of words, ‘[w]ork was what mattered’ (CB: 514). The theme of work as an antidote to folly, and as a very real and tangible means of escape from seemingly prescribed fates, dominates a number of The Children’s Book’s story-lines. Philip Warren, the young runaway whose discovery in the storerooms of the South Kensington Museum provides the opening scene to the novel, has escaped the miseries of life in potteries, where ‘[m]e mum works in th’ paint-shop. All of us work there, one way or another. I loaded kilns’ (CB: 13), ostensibly to pursue his art. Art for Philip, however, is itself grounded in a strong work ethic that, later on in the novel, saves him from the sinister fantasies made clay, and flesh, by the master potter Benedict Fludd, whom Philip soon finds himself apprenticed to. ‘I wanted to make something’ (CB: 13; 14), Philip

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states repeatedly during what Olive Wellwood and Prosper Cain no doubt believe to be a benign questioning of the boy whom their sons have just discovered in the museum basement. ‘I thought saltglazed stoneware. Or mebbe earthenware’, Philip elaborates a little later on (CB: 14), and it is indeed his interest in, and evident talent for, the craft – rather than the mere toil – of pottery work that sets him on a path not only to a meaningful vocation but also to eventual self-sufficiency, freeing him, in the process, from the class constraints that have proved inescapable for so many of his workingclass contemporaries, whose invariable fate, long before the First World War casts its devastating shadow over the narrative of The Children’s Book, has been an early death from either lead poisoning or exploding kilns. Benedict Fludd’s son Geraint similarly chooses work – in his case, however, over the more than bohemian household arrangements of his childhood home in the Romney Marshes. When Olive, during one of the various families’ frequent get-togethers, asks Geraint, ‘And you? What do you mean to do with your life? Are you artistic?’, Geraint, ‘with excessive vehemence’, replies: ‘Good Lord, no, . . . I’m clumsy with my hands, and my family say I have no taste. . . . What I want . . . is to make a lot of money and be comfortable. I’d like to be in a bank, or something’ (CB: 155). The world of finance, mocked by the likes of Humphry Wellwood (who is nevertheless happy to profit handsomely from it where he can) as a dismally mundane pit where ‘poor young creatures were confined in the shadows with no outlet for their animal energies’ (CB: 20–1), not only provides Geraint Fludd, who will indeed become a banker in due course, with the prospect of financial security that has been so painfully lacking from his parents’ unconventional existence but also serves as a means of escape from, precisely, the ‘animal energies’ that have blighted his own and, even more so, his sisters’ childhood in the form of Benedict Fludd’s incestuous molestations. Moreover, during his time in the City, Geraint takes ‘intense pleasure’ in the discovery of his ‘facility for accurate calculation’, which ‘was of no use in a dusty old house in a dismal marsh’, but which, in London, opens both actual and intellectual doors to him that remain closed to most of the other characters in The Children’s Book: ‘it came to him vaguely that what was at the centre of it all was both a thing, and a symbolic key or clue to all other things, the gold that lay quietly in sovereign pieces and stacked ingots in the vaults of the Old Lady of Threadneedle

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Street’, and ‘the figures he scribed and arranged in his elegant ink columns, the telegrams and the bankers’ drafts, were also symbols of things, whose solidity delighted his imagination’ (CB: 280). Ironically, such delight in the simultaneously actual and symbolic solidity of things is something Geraint, ‘clumsy’ with his hands, shares with Philip, his father’s prodigy apprentice, and it seems that Geraint and Philip are the only two among the sprawling cast of The Children’s Book’s characters who are truly able to comprehend and indeed appreciate both the actual and the symbolic without sacrificing the one at the expense of the other. Work also throws vital life-lines to Philip’s sister Elsie, first in the form of providing her with shelter and keep in return for bringing some much needed order to the dysfunctional Fludd household, and then by saving her from the seemingly prescribed fate of the fallen woman after she has been seduced by the serially predatory and unmistakably Lawrentian writer-figure Herbert Methley. With the energetic help of ‘a little feminist committee’ (CB: 352) of three very resourceful ladies, the seducer’s knowing and long-suffering wife Phoebe among them, Elsie is able to keep and, over time, provide for her daughter by becoming a teaching assistant to Marian Oakeshott (herself an erstwhile conquest of Humphry Wellwood and working single mother to Robin, one of two Robins Humphry manages to father over the course of the novel). When Herbert Methley is told by his wife that ‘Elsie Warren has given birth to a daughter. . . . Her name’s Ann. She’s a very sweet, tiny little thing’, his response is characteristically stoic, to put it mildly: ‘He said he had, today, made enormous progress with his new novel, it had finally settled into shape, and was flowing along like water in a river-bed’ (CB: 352). When Phoebe presses on ‘sternly and bravely’ in the hope of eliciting a practical response on the future welfare of the child, the conversation that ensues is even more insulting given the circumstances, both to Phoebe and to the absent Elsie. Habitually far happier scaling the lofty heights of his writerly imagination than being weighed down by the humdrum realities of actual life, Methley launches into an enthusiastic discourse on his work-in-progress, which features at its centre ‘a figure – a kind of Green Man, a kind of Wild Man of the Woods – who is known as Wodwose. I discovered, to my delight, that country people still talk about Wodwoses but call them Wodehouses. It is to be the tale of a timid man who retreats to a cottage in the woods to live

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naturally – a man who at that stage temperamentally resembles Mr Woodhouse from Emma – who coddles himself with woolly comforters and embrocations – and meets the Wild Girl who is living freely in the depth of the forest –’ ‘You said it was a wood.’ ‘It is an English wood that symbolically takes on the properties of the deeper Forest – where he learns to walk free and naked in Nature –’ ‘What is she like, the Wild Girl?’ ‘I haven’t wholly invented her. She has your eyes, of course. I cannot invent a – a beloved woman – who does not have your eyes. But she is hard for to tame. Yes.’ ‘And how does it end?’ ‘I don’t know that, yet, either. Wonderfully, I think. But, it may be, with a wonderful disaster. I need to find it out, I need to follow my instincts. Which is why I need particular peace and quiet in the next few months – such as you have always protected for me, my darling.’ (CB: 352–3)

Thus runs the only conversation the Methleys will ever have about ‘wild’, working-class Elsie, and about Herbert’s fleeting relations with her. As Elsie remarks in a slightly different context: ‘Nice to have a choice. I should like such a choice’ (CB: 440). In The Children’s Book, it seems that the imagination is not to be trusted. Not reading proves critical not only for the survival of the Methley’s marriage but also for the survival of the novel’s children into adulthood – the willingness of a whole generation to suspend its disbelief, to cling to myths in the face of urgent physical realities, it is implied, leads to dire and far-reaching consequences for all. Nevertheless, as ever with Byatt, the ultimate message is a rather more complex one. If The Children’s Book is centrally concerned with the potential as well as the actual abuses visited upon the young by their elders’ overactive and often predatory imaginations, the novel nevertheless also insists that there remains value in the ‘use of . . . stories in a culture’: while Dorothy is busy pursuing her medical career, her cousin Griselda enrols as a research student at Newnham College, notably working ‘on the folktale, starting out from the Grimms’ (CB: 546). Julian Cain, the son of an old family friend, has, meanwhile, embarked on research into the English Pastoral at another Cambridge college. Griselda and Julian’s choice of subjects may seem unfortunate, or, at the very least, ironic, and indeed Cambridge

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occasionally seems to both of them like yet another ‘enchantment, a spider web from which they needed to break free in order to taste and touch reality’ (CB: 546). Neither of them is a mere consumer of fictions, however. As an astute reader and critic, Griselda is driven by an essentially questioning imagination: Why does the stepmother always say the heroine has given birth to a monster? And why does the King then order her hands to be cut off and hung around her neck, and put her in a boat and push it out to sea? And why can the hands always be miraculously grown back? (CB: 488)

In order to break the spell, in order to take ownership of these stories, and their uses in culture, Griselda feels that she needs to understand ‘all the ways in which fairytales aren’t myths . . . They work according to some sort of rules and I’d like to work out what they are’ (CB: 488). Like Gillian in ‘The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye’, Griselda is an instinctive narratologist who is able to gain a critical understanding, not only of the tales she reads, but also of the narratives that she herself participates in. If Dorothy has chosen the body in becoming a doctor, Griselda has chosen the mind in becoming a scholar. As embraced by these two serious young women, both body and mind are a million miles away from their parents’ generations’ ultimately leaden and muted flights of fantasy and fancy. Three Caskets indeed. Dorothy’s choice of the practical, physical world of medical work over the imaginary world of literature echoes the choices made by various other characters in Byatt’s later novels. In A Whistling Woman, one may recall, Frederica turned her back on the literary life to pursue her interests in a wider world of scientific discoveries and the broadly interdisciplinary milieu offered by television work. Likewise, in The Biographer’s Tale, Phineas Nanson abandons his biographical project and says ‘farewell to Literature’ (BGT: 255) in order to assist Fulla Biefeld with her conservation work. The Children’s Book thus sits comfortably alongside other of Byatt’s later novels in its strong ambivalence about the value of art and literature, and even of the novel form itself. In The Biographer’s Tale, an attitude of scepticism about the value of literature is combined with a questioning of the humanist values that are traditionally seen to underpin the realist novel. In this compact

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and schematic narrative, the only one of Byatt’s book-length works of fiction narrated in the first person, Phineas G. Nanson, a disillusioned literary theorist, decides to quit his studies in favour of writing that most anthropocentric of artefacts – a biography. The fateful decision is made during a university seminar on literary and cultural theory. Afterwards, Phineas cannot remember what primary text the seminar was actually based on, only the critical metatext – a comparison of Empedocles’ creation myth with the post-structuralist self: ‘Here sprang up many faces without necks, arms wandered without shoulders, unattached, and eyes strayed alone, in need of foreheads’ (BGT: 1). Fed up with what he sees as the endlessly selfgenerating verbal smokescreens of literary theory, Phineas longs for ‘a life full of things . . . Full of facts’ (BGT: 4). A conversation with the Anglo-Saxon scholar Ormerod Goode convinces him that biography is indeed ‘an art of things, of facts’ (BGT: 5). Goode describes biography as a celebration of the uniqueness of the human self, a liberal-humanist vision which Phineas initially finds appealing: a great biography is a noble thing. Consider, he said, the fact that no human individual resembles another. We are not clones, we are not haplodiploid beings. From egg to eventual decay, each of us is unique. What can be nobler, he reiterated, or more exacting, than to explore, to constitute, to open, a whole man, a whole opus, to us? (BGT: 5)

This lofty speech, like so much in the novel, is deeply misleading. As Phineas’s quest gradually descends into failure, he is confronted by a picture of his chosen subject – the fictional 1950s scholar Scholes Destry-Scholes, himself the biographer of the equally fictional Victorian polymath Elmer Bole – which recalls the fragmented, disembodied self of the theory seminar, rather than the ‘whole man’ described by Goode. The essential Destry-Scholes keeps eluding Phineas, and the bits and pieces of physical evidence which he has left behind refuse to cohere into the image of a recognisably rounded human being. Thus, if The Biographer’s Tale is quite clearly a tale about the futility of biography, this futility is as much to do with the slippery nature of human identity as with the inevitable difficulty of recovering historical truth. Indeed, Destry-Scholes appears to have been a man who was himself so absorbed in his dead subjects (much as the scholars in Possession are ‘possessed’ by the dead poets to whom they devote their working lives) that he had no autonomous identity of his own. Nevertheless, the failure of Phineas’s project is

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ultimately seen in a positive light, as it leads him to a greater engagement with the physical world and the people who inhabit it. Phineas’s scholarly solipsism is particularly challenged by his encounters with two women. Being a literary man, he instinctively turns them into mythical figures in his imagination – Vera Alphage is his dark ‘silvery’ maiden, ‘a sailing moon in an indigo sky’ (BGT: 219) whose job at the hospital links her to death, whereas Fulla Biefeld is a ‘liquid gold’ (BGT: 215), sunny woman whose research interests (bees and pollination) link her to fertility and life. Nanson thus faces his own three caskets dilemma, although (unlike in the world of myth and fairytale) he does not ultimately have to make a choice between them: at the end of the novel, he continues to ‘go from Fulla to Vera (and back to Fulla)’ (BGT: 216). The women both draw Phineas away from his insular scholastic existence and into the physical world. Vera’s collection of X-rays and stories of death and disease serve as a reminder of the physiological basis of human existence, the ‘life of the bones, under, in the invisible world of the body’ (BGT: 216), whereas Fulla makes Phineas aware of the human place within a wider ecological narrative, emphasising the ‘interdependence of things’ within the biosphere (BGT: 121). The contrast between Fulla’s and Phineas’s worldviews is highlighted when they discuss Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, a text which, we may recall, also preoccupied Marcus and Jacqueline in Babel Tower and A Whistling Woman: ‘Have you read Silent Spring, Mr Nanson?’ Indeed I had, I said. I had written a paper on literary and popularcultural images of induced panic and mass fear. I had contrasted seventeenth-century evil spirits with the idea of Napoleon the bogeyman, and fear of the Bomb and heaps of dead birds in a wasteland in our own time. ‘Literary and popular-cultural images,’ said this fizzing woman, ‘are neither here nor there. As you say in English. Neither here nor there. Whereas both here and there and now this species is destroying, every day, 6,000 species perhaps, many unknown, some perhaps essential – certainly essential – to the survival of a whole chain of others.’ (BGT: 120)

Phineas treats Carson’s book as he treats any text, as an object for semantic deconstruction, whereas Fulla cares in a far more practical way about the ecological consequences of species extinction. While both points of view are undoubtedly valid and, taken together, unfold a potential for critique that either one is incapable of generating on

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its own, one nevertheless senses that the author’s sympathies lean, once again, towards the scientific perspective here. Instead of seeing humans in a privileged position in relation to their environment, ecocritical narratives such as Carson’s contemplate their part in the wider ecological web, and the human animal as one species among many. As in A Whistling Woman, Byatt’s appropriation of this narrative can be understood in the context of her remarks about the decay of humanism in her essay ‘People in Paper Houses’: ‘The fictional texts of the Great Tradition are indeed the texts of the Religion of Humanity; . . . They are the source of enlightenment, but not true. Or not true for us’ (PM: 167). The Biographer’s Tale duly asks how meaningful the liberal-humanist concept of the unique, free individual is within this wider biological and ecological context. In his lecture on ‘The Art of Biography’, Scholes Destry-Scholes had written: ‘A life assumes the value of an individual. Whether you see that individual as unique or as a type depends on your view of the world and of biography’ (BGT: 26). It could be argued – and The Biographer’s Tale certainly appears to argue – that popular science revisits the ancient concept of literary character ‘type’ by describing human beings as the representatives of a species, or as the carriers of replicating genes. Even more than the postmodern idea of the constructed self (which, like the existentialist self, is often directed towards personal fulfilment), scientific discourse discourages us from thinking of humans as unique individuals. Byatt’s writing, both here and elsewhere, highlights striking and unexpected similarities between the relatively modern scientific discourses of neo-Darwinism and eco-criticism, and the ancient narrative form of the tale. In On Histories and Stories, Byatt suggests that the recent revival of interest in the fairytale on the part of other contemporary writers (such as Angela Carter and Salman Rushdie) and scholars (such as Marina Warner and Jack Zipes) is similarly related to contemporary uncertainty about notions of selfhood and personal autonomy: Some of this interest in storytelling is to do with doubts about the classic novel, with its interest in the construction of the Self, and the relation of that Self to the culture, social and political, surrounding it. A writer can rebel in various ways against the novel of sensibility, or the duty (often imposed by literary journalists) to report on, to criticise, contemporary actuality. You can write anti-novels, like the nouveau

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roman, deconstructing narrative and psychology. Or you can look back at forms in which stories are not about inner psychological subtleties, and truths are not connected immediately to contemporary circumstances. (OHAS: 124)

However, in Byatt’s writing, such tactics often form part of a more complex exploration of how far humans can understand and indeed change the various narratives that control them. Her neo-Darwinist 1992 fable ‘Morpho Eugenia’, which formally draws on both fairytales and popular science, is shaped by the central theme of sexual selection. As Byatt (1996f: n. p.) herself has commented on ‘Morpho Eugenia’: Darwin had said there is a kind of autonomism in our choice of mates, a kind of determinism, driving people to choose a mate for beauty rather than for moral reasons. So I wanted to put that in too, and once you got that in place, the characters didn’t have to have an awful lot of character. It’s driven by the story and the metaphor.

The theme of biological determination appears to be reinforced by the novella’s overdetermined plot and its proliferating number of parallels, coincidences, and puns (on Eugenia’s name, in the game of anagrams, etc.), which collectively produce the sense of a tightly determined, fairytale fate. The narrative’s indebtedness to the fairytale form is further highlighted by the presence of other tales in the text, including the tale of the dancing princesses, the myth of Cupid and Psyche, and Matty’s pastiche fairytale ‘Things Are Not What They Seem’. As in Possession, the ubiquity of fairytales in the narrative is partly a period detail, which reflects the nineteenth-century scholarly interest in such tales as expressions of national consciousness, or the ‘natural history’ of societies. However, although ‘Morpho Eugenia’ at first appears to be a conventional realist narrative written in a pseudo-Victorian style, it soon metamorphoses into a fairytale-like form itself. From his arrival at Bredely Hall, William Adamson thinks of himself as a ‘fairytale prince trapped by invisible gates and silken bonds in an enchanted castle’ (AI: 21) and of Alabaster’s eldest daughter Eugenia as an untouchable princess shrouded in ‘a cloud of magic dust that at once drew him in and held him off, at precisely the distance of the invisible barrier’ (AI: 20). Impelled by a mixture of ‘pheromones and Victorian romantic love combined’ (OHAS: 81), Adamson falls in love with his princess. Conventional wisdom (as Adamson realises) would regard this as a hopeless match: he is a man with no wealth or social status, and yet he wins Eugenia’s hand in marriage with surprising ease.

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However, the dream tale eventually turns into a nightmare when Adamson discovers Eugenia’s incestuous relationship with her brother Edgar. At the end of the tale, the ‘lovely, and complacent, and amoral’ Eugenia is not presented as an object of pity to the reader: like the queen ant, she has used her male consort ruthlessly, and now wishes only to ‘resume her self-nurture and self-communion’ (AI: 159). Her incest is presented as a form of narcissism, or else as a mindless, insect-like activity, but the narrator does not stop to analyse the ‘psychological subtleties’ of Eugenia’s inner life – this is a fable about the human species, rather than a realist narrative concerned with the life of the individual. Similarly, Adamson’s cool response to the discovery of his wife’s secret might, in a conventional realist novel, be thought to lack compassion, but the moral of this Darwinian fable is survival, not forgiveness – biological rather than moral altruism. Adamson does, of course, eventually demonstrate his Darwinian fitness by selecting a more suitable mate, and by choosing Matty and work over Eugenia and the fairytale that once enthralled him. Adamson also, and significantly in this context, asserts what turns out to be a very human, and humanist, free will. By leaving England behind and setting out to the uncharted territory of the New World, both Adamson and Matty break free from the social conventions that have determined their lives, and effectively rewrite the stories that once entrapped them. Fairytales are a collective cultural product, rather than an expression of individualism, and might therefore be seen as related to what Adamson calls the ‘Spirit of the Nest’ (AI: 40). This sense of speciesconsciousness is again invoked in The Children’s Book, where several characters subscribe to the nineteenth-century conception of the folktale as an expression of a collective racial consciousness.2 Toby Youlgreave, for example, expresses the belief that ‘fairy tales were the old religion – the old inner life – of the German people’ (CB: 358) and August Steyning states that his artistic aim is to create ‘new versions – but only versions – of the old, deep tales that are twisted into our souls’ (CB: 467). While such ideas are no doubt contemporaneous with the novel’s Edwardian setting, it would appear that Byatt herself also finds them intriguing. She has described fairy stories as ‘part of my deepest sense of being European, of the ground of European culture, which I do believe exists’ (Byatt, 1995d: n. p.),

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and the science writer Steven Pinker (2002: 420) has praised Byatt as being amongst only a handful of contemporary writers (alongside Iris Murdoch and John Updike) able to convey the idea of literature as ‘the voice of the species’. The Children’s Book, with its sweeping narrative and large cast of characters, its ‘endless new beginnings’ and its simultaneous concern with the human experience of finite, ‘biological time’ (OHAS: 166), certainly appears to be a novel that is concerned as much with, if not the or a species, then at least with a collective culture and the era that defined it, as it is with the individual human stories that took place within it. One striking pecularity of The Children’s Book is the sense of narrative urgency that the novel assumes towards its end, when describing the senseless bloodbath of the Great War. In a novel which is often briskly narrated, the rapid rise of the death toll is none the less astonishing. As in A Whistling Woman, the brevity of the storytelling in The Children’s Book draws attention to its underlying narrative concerns. There is no sustained attempt on Byatt’s part to imagine the war (as there is, for example, in Pat Barker’s Regeneration trilogy, for which Byatt expresses great admiration in her essay ‘Fathers’ in On Histories and Stories). Instead, Byatt’s narrative strategies at the end of The Children’s Book emphasise the mechanical nature of war, as well as the horrible efficiency with which battalions of men are slaughtered, only to be replaced by more cannon fodder. ‘Tragedy had become so commonplace that it was impolite to mention it’ (CB: 588), says the narrator, noting that no attempt was made on the part of the authorities to individualise these deaths, all of which were announced ‘with the same phrases of admiration, affection, for their boy, of sorrow and regret for his death’ (CB: 586). Clearly, war, in this scheme of things, is an inexplicable human aberration, though born of a deep human instinct, which sucks thousands of innocent individuals into its nightmarish narratives. War, the inverted, or perverted, other side of the fairytale coin, appears, like the fairytale, to be a product of the collective unconscious, of humans working together as insects in a nest – a conception eerily akin to Fulla Biefeld’s – admittedly rather more mundane – picture of the human condition in The Biographer’s Tale: [A]nyone going to an airport might suppose that humans are a superorganism. We are held together by threats of dependence as much as the ants. Mechanics and pilots, air traffic controllers and clerks, liftoperators and restaurant managers, police and passengers, electricians

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and painters and escalator-attendants and terrorist scanners – we’re all part of each other. Maybe your Destry-Scholes was trying to describe that. (BGT: 240)

The Biographer’s Tale, ‘Morpho Eugenia’ and The Children’s Book all choose to foreground and explore this species aspect of human identity. It is notable, however, that, in The Children’s Book, the carnage of the war is preceded by a number of deaths which are not war-related: two almost identical suicides, and Violet’s abrupt and almost comical demise: ‘Violet, coming in with cream cakes on a plate said ‘Ah’ and fell forward, crashing to the ground with her face in the cream, on top of one of Philip Warren’s early Dungeness plates, decorated with seaweeds and umbellifiers’ (CB: 542). Violet’s death, we are told, ‘was not a story’ (CB: 543) – as with the young soldiers, her death is apparently of no consequence or significance whatsoever (indeed, the narrator appears to show more interest in the pattern on the crockery than in the dead woman). It is hard to tell whether this is a comment on the self-effacing domestic persona that Violet has created for herself, or an illustration of the cosmic unimportance of human life. All of Byatt’s narratives discussed in this chapter reveal glimpses of a decidedly un-novelistic and anti-individualistic ethos. All of them present the reader with powerful images of humans as types, species, composites, races – or, to use Ibsen’s image quoted in The Biographer’s Tale (BGT: 233–4), shiny buttons cast from the same smelting pot. Read alongside the equally powerful tales of emancipation contained in Byatt’s later fictions, however, these images ultimately seem like simplifications of a more complex issue that remains unresolved in Byatt’s oeuvre to date, namely the question as to the extent to which human fate is already written by biological and discursive forces, and the extent to which understanding these forces and plots may yet be capable of bringing freedom. Notes 1

Elizabeth Lowry, in her review of The Children’s Book for the Times Literary Supplement, adds a further dimension to our reading of Tom’s suicide. Picking up on the narrative’s frequent references to Peter Pan, the shadow, in Lowry’s reading, symbolises adulthood, and Tom’s ‘refusal to embrace his shadow comes to represent his resistance to change’. As the logical response to his awareness ‘of the possible cost of overhauling

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the existing social order’, Tom’s death thus prefigures the demise of a whole generation, his generation: ‘As the shadow falls on Europe in 1914, the bucolic Edwardian dream is shown for the fragile thing it is. The younger generation, brought up on fairy tales, “on tales of knights-atarms and Icelandic warriors . . . [could] not imagine blood”. When they go to war, the massacre is wholesale: they are like the children charmed away by the Pied Piper, tricked into following a destructive force “docile, under the earth”’ (Lowry, 2009: 20). Indeed, even in the trenches, Harry can hardly believe in the reality which he has signed up for in a gungho moment, telling himself that ‘nothing was real, and hardly even comprehending the shell that kills him’ (CB: 592–3). Such ideas are still present in much contemporary commentary on the fairytale: see, for example, Carter, 1990: i–xxii. For a similar scientific perspective, see also Dawkins, 1976: 192–201, and Dawkins, 1999: 302–6.

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Critical storytelling: peopling the paper house

Throughout her writing career, A. S. Byatt’s fictional output has been matched, in both scope and in volume, by her work as a literary and cultural commentator. Indeed, Byatt has embraced the full spectrum of contemporary critical activities, from the scholarly editions, monographs and essays one might expect of a former university lecturer, through an impressive amount of reviews and commentary in newspapers and journals, to participating in television and radio debates and ad-hoc literary discussions at festivals and live events. Assuming the role not of reclusive writer but of public intellectual, A. S. Byatt has never disappeared neatly under cover of fiction, but has taken every opportunity to communicate her enthusiasm for all matters literary – and indeed beyond. Readers of Byatt’s oeuvre thus do well to consider not only her fiction, in all its narrative forms, but also the vast range of essays, interviews and art and literary criticism Byatt has produced over the past five decades. In doing so, however, one ought to be mindful not to mistake Byatt’s critical writings as some sort of Rosetta Stone to translate or index her fiction; rather, Byatt’s essays and criticism become most valuable when taken as part of the aggregate dialogue that not only characterises her own practice of what we have termed ‘critical storytelling’ but also informs, at its best, Byatt scholarship and indeed scholarship in general. Fiction and criticism have gone hand in hand for Byatt from the earliest days of her career as a writer. In 1965, only a year after the publication of her own debut novel The Shadow of the Sun, her study of the early novels of Iris Murdoch, Degrees of Freedom, was issued by Chatto & Windus. The book initially provoked comment from reviewers who felt that Murdoch was too young and too fashionable a novelist to warrant a full-length critical study. As an unsigned review

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in the Times Literary Supplement observed: ‘What, the reader may well ask, is the literary world coming to when we are offered critical studies of novelists like Iris Murdoch, whose first novel appeared only nine years ago and who, on Mrs Byatt’s own admission, is “still in the middle of her career”?’ (Anon., 1965: 630). These sentiments were echoed in the following year, when S. W. Dawson (1966: 330) reviewed the book for Essays in Criticism. What is more, contemporary reviewers tended to regard ‘Mrs Byatt’ as an amateur enthusiast rather than as a fellow literary professional. The Times Literary Supplement reviewer, for example, described Degrees of Freedom as ‘an attempt by an ordinary reader – that is to say someone who reads for pleasure – to get to grips with the ideas of a professional philosopher’ (Anon., 1965: 630). Although this was clearly intended as a slight, Byatt might not have been wholly displeased with such an evaluation. In her introduction to the 1994 reissue of the book, she writes: ‘I never wanted to be thought of as a literary critic, and want that still less now’. Instead, she describes the study as ‘a writer’s book about writing, a book by a writer reading’ (Byatt, 1994b: ix), claiming that it was ‘written out of a passionate curiosity about how Iris Murdoch’s novels worked, what the ideas were behind them, how the ideas related to the forms she chose, how her world was put together’ (Byatt, 1994b: viii). ‘Curiosity’ is a word that, in many ways, encapsulates Byatt’s critical outlook. Her wide-ranging journalistic output as well as the essays collected in such volumes as Passions of the Mind (1991) or On Histories and Stories (2000) amply attests to the fact that Byatt has rarely been conventional in her choice of subject matter or critical approach. Although she has edited and introduced classic novels by, among others, George Eliot (Byatt, 1979c; 1994d; 1999c) and Willa Cather (Byatt, 1980a; 1980b; 1982a; 1982b; 1984b; 1985b), she has also written discerningly about the works of less canonical writers such as Georgette Heyer and Monica Dickinson (Byatt, 1969a; 1970a). Indeed, Byatt rarely allows contemporary syllabuses or academic trends to dictate her critical agenda, and her range of interests has always been wide and eclectic, bringing to mind the intellectual odysseys of her own fictional polymaths Gerard Wijnnobel from the later Quartet novels, Randolph Henry Ash from Possession or Elmer Bole in The Biographer’s Tale. What is more, she has, in her journalism and broadcast work, touched on a huge number of topics that naturally include, but are by no means restricted to, English studies. World literature, language, politics, genetics, film, television,

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memory, smell, social history, pop music, football and fairytales have all been tackled by Byatt in print or on the airwaves.1 Visual art, in particular, is a subject to which Byatt frequently returns – she has written catalogue essays for various art exhibitions, produced art journalism for newspapers and magazines, commented on painters and art exhibitions in her broadcasting work and woven discussions of art into her literary criticism (as indeed into her fiction). Perhaps one of the reasons why she seems to enjoy her engagement with the media, in all their multiple forms, is that it provides informal platforms for discussion, which seem to facilitate cross-fertilisation of intellectual disciplines that would traditionally have little to do with each other in the academic world. This tendency to cross disciplinary boundaries has led to some exciting hybrid works of criticism, among them Portraits in Fiction (2001), which considers the role of real and imaginary portraiture in a wide-ranging discussion that spans Balzac, Monet, Oscar Wilde, Holbein, Manet and Proust. As well as providing thought-provoking commentary on the paintings themselves, the study offers strange and exciting new angles from which to consider the written word. Based on the Heywood Hill Annual Lecture delivered at the National Portrait Gallery in May 2000, Portraits in Fiction takes is most basic cue from the premise that ‘[p]ortraits in words and portraits in paint are opposites, rather than metaphors for each other’. Specifically, a ‘portrait in a novel or a story may be a portrait of invisible things – thought processes, attractions, repulsions, subtle or violent changes in whole lives, or groups of lives. Even the description in visual language of a face or a body may depend on being unseen for its force’ (PF: 1). The emphasis on ‘invisibility’ and the ‘unseen’ may seem unremarkable, indeed pretty obvious, in a context in which Byatt is, after all, merely comparing descriptive prose-writing to the art of portraiture. Works such as ‘Christ in the House of Mary and Martha’, The Matisse Stories and many other of her fictions do, however, also habitually make explicit reference to, indeed often include lengthy passage of descriptive prose about actual paintings and other works of visual art. As Michael Worton (2001: 16) notes, these ‘paintings themselves are necessarily absent from the texts’ and the necessity of their absence is not simply imposed by the physical constraints of book publishing. Rather, one could argue that here, too, successful description crucially depends on the paintings

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being, and remaining, unseen. This, of course, is not to say that the verbal is ultimately privileged over the visual, or to deny ‘any significant semantic functioning that goes beyond the hallowed linguistic’. Rather, such ‘textual absence both fractures and creatively complicates the text, since, in order fully to understand the narrative, the reader has to visualise the painting’, a process by which the reader is, by necessity, referred ‘outwards from the text to a world that is decidedly non-verbal’ (Worton, 2001: 16). Paradoxically then, painting, as an ‘artist’s record, construction, of a physical presence’ (PF: 1), is transformed, by becoming an object in fiction, perhaps also by becoming an object of criticism, into an icon of absence that points us to the realities that exist beyond the written text. The knowability of a world beyond the written word has, as we have seen over the preceding chapters of this book, preoccupied Byatt throughout her career as a writer, and, in this context, it is surely no coincidence that many of Byatt’s critical engagements, such as radio programmes and literary festivals, actively involve talking (to list just a few representative examples: a discussion on science and literature with the Czech microbiologist and poet Miroslav Holub at the Cheltenham Writing Festival in 1995; a discussion with Joan Bakewell on the subject of ‘Belief’ aired on BBC Radio 3 in 2002; and a discussion on the biology of consciousness with neurology professor and writer Antonio Damasio at the Oxford Union in 2004). In general, Byatt appears to favour a paradigm of criticism as conversation. She has likened a lively radio discussion to ‘a really good jazz improvisation’ (Carver, 1990: 45) and has praised radio and television programmes – which ‘essentially operate in the open world, not the university’ – as an opportunity to discuss literature ‘without the panoply of specialised methodology’ so characteristic of academic debate. Outside of academia, Byatt claims somewhat provocatively, ‘there are no fixed views – . . . you have to read like an intelligent reader’ (Carver, 1990: 47–8). While Byatt would, in a more conciliatory mood, probably agree that even university departments occasionally harbour the odd intelligent reader, it is certainly true that academic debates often tend to be adversarial in tone and character, whereas the radio discussion, at its best, is more of an interactive group performance, encouraging a productive dialogue rather than a contentious debate. As Byatt notes: when it worked you felt you were all weaving a kind of ribbon tapestry and there was a green strand, and a red strand, and a blue strand –

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and out of it came a kind of vision of a work of art which was both immediate and informed and variegated. (Carver, 1990: 46)

One tangible result of such variegated vision is Imagining Characters: Six Conversations about Women Writers (1995), which, as its title states, takes the form of an extended conversation between A. S. Byatt and the psychoanalyst Ignês Sodré. Having initially met to discuss Middlemarch at the Cheltenham Literary Festival in 1992, Byatt and Sodré later broadened their discussion to include Daniel Deronda as well as novels by Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë, Willa Cather, Iris Murdoch and Toni Morrison. The format of this book is, inevitably, unusual. It deliberately recreates, in the words of its editor Rebecca Swift, ‘the atmosphere of spontaneity and the pleasure of joining in a live debate’ (IC: xii). Moreover, Imagining Characters is a very inclusive literary study designed to appeal to a wide and varied audience – not only students of literature but also reading group members and general readers. No prior knowledge of literary theory, academic methodology or indeed psychoanalysis is required as the discussion is deliberately modelled on an ordinary conversation. In the concluding chapter, Byatt comments: I feel we’ve discovered or reintroduced conversation as a form of shared reading – a pleasure and a way of learning which has almost vanished. We have allowed ourselves to talk about the characters in the novels as though they were real people, which is an almost primitive mode of discourse which literary criticism has eschewed for a long time. We know now so well that they are not real. We are constantly told that they are hypotheses, narrative functions. We have lost the capacity to talk about them as their creators must have wanted us to, and as indeed we do in normal, unprofessional conversation. (IC: 253)

What is striking about these observations is, first of all, the strong sense of collaboration they communicate. As a novelist on the one hand and a practising psychoanalyst on the other, Byatt and Sodré represent quite different intellectual backgrounds and come to the text armed with very different sets of interpretative tools. Moreover, although Byatt has elsewhere expressly described psychoanalysisinspired readings of literature as ‘exciting but limited’ (1995d: n. p.), the interaction between the two speakers nevertheless develops into a journey of discovery towards common ground, and it does so precisely because it eschews the traditional form of a debate. The overall impression is thus of two different readers who stimulate

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each other, are genuinely interested in what the other has to say, and ultimately share a belief that fictions are necessary to human beings. Byatt’s comments at the end of Imagining Characters thus also explicitly draw attention to the notion of criticism as ‘conversation’, which here describes the relationship not only of reader to reader but also of reader to text. It implies a dialogical engagement with the text, and an open-minded curiosity about what the text is trying to ‘say’. As Byatt suggests, this model of reading had become fairly uncommon by the 1990s and would still seem more than a little naive according to prevailing critical doctrines. Yet Imagining Characters represents a credible attempt to engage attentively with works of literature as, above all, sites of reading – dialogically and without the need to impose the usual critical schemata. In Passions of the Mind, Byatt describes herself as an ‘agnostic’ literary critic, emphatically declaring that ‘my temperament is agnostic, and I am a non-believer and a non-belonger to schools of thought’ (PM: 2). Byatt’s choice of phrase is certainly thoughtprovoking here: implicitly comparing schools of criticism to belief systems, she endorses, with some force, a pragmatic and open-minded approach to literary criticism that nevertheless tends to belie her often passionate interest in and engagement with the philosophical as well as the technical aspects of fictional world-making. In view of Byatt’s often less than friendly comments on institutionalised critical practices, however, it is nevertheless not surprising that certain critics have, over the years, accused Byatt of being stubbornly resistant to critical theory. In his essay review of Still Life, for example, Westlake (1989: 33, 37) objects to the novel’s perceived ‘ideological project’ – a parochial British resistance to theory – and criticises what he sees as ‘Still Life’s resistance to comprehending its own discourse’. In another essay on Byatt’s critical ideas, Christien Franken (2000: 202) adopts an image once used by Byatt during a television debate to describe herself as a ‘turtle’ who retreated into her shell when ‘besieged’ by the theoretical onslaughts of the 1970s and 1980s. Franken concludes that Byatt has consciously resisted literary theory in favour of a more traditional ‘Leavisite’ model of criticism. Any careful reading of Byatt’s fiction or, indeed, her critical works will reveal that this is a vast over-simplification of Byatt’s position: as we have not least seen over the course of the preceding chapters of the present book, Byatt is clearly intrigued by post-structuralist

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theories about subjectivity, hermeneutics, semiotics, narratology and other related concepts, and, if she appears to have felt besieged by literary theorists in the 1980s, it is partly because she objects to the indiscriminate application, so common in contemporary academia, of critical metanarratives to a work of fiction, be they post-structuralist, postmodernist or Leavisite. To Byatt, the best methodology is to have no fixed methodology: I think those of us who write about modern writing have a duty to keep the discussion open and fluent and very broad-based. We need to create new paradigms, which will bring new books, new styles, new preoccupations to the attention of readers. We don’t know what novels of this year, or last, or of ten years ago, will be being read in fifty years – if any of them will. We need to keep thinking of new – even deliberately provisional – ways to read and to compare what we have read. (OHAS: 3)

Byatt’s ostensible antipathy to most things academic is, of course, discernible not only in her critical writings but also in her fiction, and her often expressed exasperation with the critical doctrines of her (and our) day recalls that of Phineas Nanson in The Biographer’s Tale when he is faced with yet another of the poignantly named Gareth Butcher’s theoretical seminars: ‘They were repetitive in the extreme. We found the same clefts and crevices, transgressions and disintegrations, lures and deceptions beneath, no matter what surface we were scrying’ (BGT: 1). Indeed, Byatt’s fictional academics – Maud Bailey and Roland Michell aside – rarely cut sympathetic figures. Oliver Canning of The Shadow of the Sun was the first critic to appear in Byatt’s fiction. In her 1991 introduction to the paperback reissue of the novel, Byatt describes him as the sort of professional reader she had no desire to be when she left Cambridge, ‘a scholar, a critic, a user of literature’ (SS: x). It is implied that Oliver’s interest in Henry and his work has an element of perversity to it. He is an underminer rather than an acolyte, and his readings of Henry’s fictions reflect his controlling personality: It’s the fascination of what’s alien, I suppose – there’s lots of good stuff written that I don’t find alien – stuff one hasn’t produced oneself, but quite easily might have, you know. Stuff one takes possession of when one’s reading it, and feels one has a right to criticize the direction of, with authority, if it goes wrong. But not him. I have a constant struggle to read him, and I always feel he’s battered me into agreement. (SS: 52–3)

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Henry, for his part, feels equally violated and threatened by Oliver’s constant scrutiny: I’ve always hated your reviews. Thought what I’d written was less good than I’d thought it was, when you’d been at it. Forgotten what I felt like when I wrote it, or whether what I’d written meant what you said it did, or something more or less, or different. Thought you were trying to take possession of me – I mean, of what I wrote. (SS: 217)

Notably, the phrase ‘take possession’ is used by both parties, and the relationship between writer and critic is essentially portrayed as a struggle for power and intellectual supremacy. This uneasy constellation does, of course, later resurface in Possession, where Mortimer Cropper’s mania for the work of Randolph Henry Ash, and his possessiveness regarding Ash’s manuscripts and personal effects, point to a bizarre psychic conflict. For Cropper, Ash is a totemic figure whom he simultaneously idolises and wishes to control. On reading The Great Ventriloquist, Maud notes that Cropper ‘had a particularly vicious version of reverse hagiography; the desire to cut his subject down to size’ (P: 250). Furthermore, Cropper’s biography is ‘as much about its author as about its subject’ (P: 246), suggesting an oedipal desire on Cropper’s part to supplant his hero, a critic’s version of the ‘anxiety of influence’ which, according to Harold Bloom, impels poets to misread and misappropriate their literary forebears and thus stake their claim in the Tradition. Byatt herself – notably commenting from a writer’s point of view – has often expressed a far more positive view of the influence of those that have gone before her. In an interview with Boyd Tonkin (1999: 15), she has spoken of having no impulse to ‘knock down’ her predecessors, be they literary or critical, commenting that ‘I don’t feel the King has to be slain’. On the contrary, and much like Roland Michell, who, after years of diligent reading, eventually discovers ‘a voice he didn’t yet know but which was his own’ (P: 475), Byatt has repeatedly stated that she has found creativity to be the natural end product of academic research: It is customary for writer-academics to claim a kind of schizoid personality, and state that their research, or philosophical thinking, has nothing to do with their work as makers of fiction. I don’t know whether this is from fear of being thought to be amateurs in one or the other of their professions, or from fear, particularly in Britain, that the rigorous forms of the life of the intellect might be felt to inhibit

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their ‘creativity’. I have myself always felt that reading and writing and teaching were all part of some whole that it was dangerous to disintegrate. (OHAS: 92)

As we have seen time and time again over the course of this book, reading and writing are, in Byatt’s universe at least, indeed intimately related activities. Both involve an active engagement with the text, and the homely hermeneutic model supplied by Frederica in her lecture to the art students in Babel Tower serves as an apt image of the fact that, ultimately, criticism, too, is a form of storytelling as it inevitably involves responding to one narrative with another narrative, unravelling a text and reweaving it with a subtly new texture. As Frederica explains to her students, ‘[a] novel, Women in Love for instance, . . . is made of a long thread of language, like knitting, thicker and thinner in patches. It is made in the head and has to be remade in the head by whoever reads it, who will always remake it differently’ (BT: 213). If criticism thus ignores the hybrid nature of its own narratives at its peril, the dangers nevertheless cut both ways. Both in her fiction and in her criticism, Byatt has repeatedly taken issue with critics who appear to be more interested in the story that they themselves are spinning than in the text with which they are purportedly engaging. Byatt’s deeply satirical rendering of Leonora Stern’s heavy-handed application of French feminism and Freudian theory to Christabel LaMotte’s The Fairy Melusine in Possession (P : 244–6) is just one of any number of examples from her fictions one might care to cite in this context. In a critical capacity, meanwhile, Byatt pungently expressed her concerns about this way of doing criticism in ‘The Trouble with the Interesting Reader’, a review of Mary Jacobus’s Romanticism, Writing and Sexual Difference (1989), a collection of essays on Wordsworth’s The Prelude, claimed by their author to be ‘energised’ by poststructuralism, psychoanalysis, feminist theory and deconstruction (Jacobus, 1989: viii–ix). Byatt was later to recall reading this book with ‘a mixture of admiration and irritation’ (OHAS: 100), though irritation is certainly the most easily discernible note in her unusually hostile review. Byatt’s passionate response was, in part at least, undoubtedly also an indication of the strength of her own personal interest in the Romantics. Byatt’s own critical study on Wordsworth and Coleridge In Their Time was first published in 1970 and reissued as Unruly Times by

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the Harvester Press in 1989, notably the very same year that Jacobus’s book was published. The two works could not be more different in style and are revealing of the changing academic climate over the two decades that separate their initial publication dates. While Unruly Times explored the poetry of Wordsworth and Coleridge against a socio-historical backdrop and sought to appraise the poets according to their own critical writings, Jacobus’s reading of Wordsworth goes rather more against the grain. Peppered with quotations from Lacan and DeMan, and abounding with comments of a feminist or post-colonial kind, the study is, at points, downright provocative. Statements such as ‘[t]he very invisibility of the relation between Wordsworth’s autobiographical poem, Isaac Newton, and the slavetrade at once marks the site of a historical absence and identifies the entire Prelude as a site of historical repression’ (Jacobus, 1989: 68) seemed to confirm Byatt’s misgivings about the dominance of critical metanarratives in contemporary academia, and in her review of the book Byatt duly argued that Jacobus’s ‘verbal manipulation’ and ‘argument by wordplay’ exposed the solipsistic mindset that allegedly underpinned contemporary trends in literary theory: Such glib opportunism can now excuse itself on the grounds that accuracy is impossible and uninteresting, that what a reader finds in a text is there to be found. But this in turn implies that the real interest is in the reader who finds, not in the text. (Byatt, 1990e: 310)

Returning to this theme in 2000 in her essay ‘True Stories and the Facts in Fiction’, Byatt concluded that ‘Mary Jacobus’s project is to reread, and in a riddling sense to rewrite The Prelude in the light of her own political preoccupations’, which were, inevitably, ‘the worthy political preoccupations of the 1980s’ (OHAS: 100). Theoretically minded literary critics of the 1980s certainly liked to sneer at their predecessors for making culturally conditioned value judgements about literature. Byatt, however, effectively argues that Jacobus’s approach is no less moralistic than that of, say, F. R. Leavis – the only difference being that Jacobus’s criteria for moral judgement are not the humanist values of Leavis’s ‘Great Tradition’ but the politically correct mores of her own time. Thus, the ‘erudite and not-so-erudite jokes and puns’ (OHAS: 99) that Jacobus artfully produces are usually directed towards chastising Wordsworth for being immature, egocentric and complicit in the nineteenth-century slave trade. As Byatt shrewdly comments, ‘[t]his is a kind of rewriting, or writing

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between the lines which fiction does with more tact, less whimsy and infinitely more power’ (OHAS: 100). It is precisely this power, and tact, of fiction that is explored in ‘True Stories and the Facts in Fiction’, in which Byatt sets out to investigate ‘the relations of precise scholarship and fiction’ (OHAS: 92) in relation to her own work Angels and Insects. Both of the novellas comprising Angels and Insects were inspired by academic research into Victorian literature and culture. In the essay, Byatt explores how and why her findings ‘form[ed] themselves into fictions’ and not academic papers on ‘Swedenborg, Spiritualism, the energetic principle of love for the beautiful, The Human Form Divine and other uses of the human body in In Memoriam’. Or ‘Arthur Hallam, Alfred Tennyson, Emily Tennyson and Emily Tennyson: Male Friendship and Victorian Women’. Or ‘The Life after Death in the Victorian Imagination’ or ‘Sexual Selection and Insect Societies in Victorian Thought’. Or ‘The Earthly Paradise: Adam, Linnaeus, Wallace, Bates, the English Hedgerow and the Amazon Jungle’. (OHAS: 92)

Byatt’s deliberations here are informed by a sense ‘of fiction’s preoccupation with impossible truthfulness’ vis-à-vis ‘modern scholarship’s increasing use of the techniques and attitudes of art. And indeed, artfulness. It is as though the two have changed places in a dance’ (OHAS: 98–9). This dance is, of course, one in which Byatt herself habitually twirls around with considerable skill, as both her deeply ponderous fictions and her elegantly creative works criticism attest. Indeed, Byatt’s 1991 essay ‘Robert Browning: Fact, Fiction, Lies, Incarnation and Art’ covers very similar ground to that explored in ‘The Conjugial Angel’, the second of the two novellas comprising Angels and Insects. Both texts explore ‘the Victorian fear that we are our bodies, and that, after death, all that occurs is natural mouldering’, and suggest that ‘[s]piritualism offers precisely the reassurance of the bodily identity of the departed’ (OHAS: 108–9). Significantly, however, Byatt reports that her understanding of this predicament was considerably deepened by the ‘feeling out’ of these concepts during the writing process of ‘The Conjugial Angel’, a ‘hidden history’ story inspired by a brief anecdote, or ‘marginalising footnote’, about Tennyson’s sister Emily (OHAS: 102), around which Byatt imaginatively hypothesises scenarios, builds characters and teases out the ideas that shaped the nineteenth-century literary imagination. Lifting

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ideas from the existing textual fabric of the era and reconfiguring them in a narrative form that invites an individual response ultimately allowed, at least by Byatt’s own account, for a greater number of mental avenues to explore, for both reader and writer, than an essay would have done: I do not think I would have made many of the connections I made between Hallam’s aesthetic, his theology, Emily’s Swedenborgianism, the sociology of spiritualism, body and soul, by thinking in an orthodox scholarly way – or, for that matter, in a deliberately unorthodox scholarly way, in feminist-deconstructionist critical puns. (OHAS: 114)

Instead, the novella indirectly – and tactfully – produces a critical ‘reading’ of Tennyson and Hallam through, precisely, an imaginative interaction with the intellectual world they inhabited. The Victorian séance,2 which features in both ‘The Conjugial Angel’ and Possession, seems an appropriate image for this kind of critical and imaginative engagement which resurrects and approximates the voices of the past to create a multiplicity of differing perspectives – a polyvocal tapestry rather than a series of monolithic pronouncements from an authoritative professional reader. It not least exemplifies the provisional quality that Byatt endorses in critical writing which keeps the open-ended intertextual dialogue between writers, readers and texts in productive flux. If Byatt’s general mistrust of the professionalised and institutionalised study of literature has earned her, in some critical quarters at least, a reputation for being resistant, or even downright hostile, towards explorations of the theoretical dimensions of the literary imagination, her lifelong commitment to the mutually informative discourses of fiction and literary criticism has – nevertheless and surely more than a little ironically – also rather frequently led to her being dismissed as a drily academic and all too literary-minded novelist. She has been variously tagged as ‘too clever’, ‘donnish’, ‘studiously cerebral’ or even ‘pretentious’ by commentators and reviewers (Hill, 1996: 38–9; Karlin, 1990: 17–18; Yeazell, 2002: 19–20), and, despite having retired from lecturing in 1983, Byatt continues to be strongly identified with the educational establishment by the media, where her fiction is often regarded as ‘uncompromisingly literary critical’ (Kemp 1990: 6). What tends to be obscured by discussions that locate themselves on either side of this often uneasy divide is the fact that both Byatt’s

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fictions and her wide-ranging critical activities, notably, though by no means exclusively, her work as a prolific reviewer for both the British and the international press, have not only earned her a prominent if sometimes embattled public profile; the sheer breadth of her engagement with contemporary literature and culture should make it equally clear that she has, throughout her career, actively shaped the cultural and intellectual landscape she has inhabited for almost five decades now. In her role as critic and commentator, Byatt has, for example, broadened our literary horizons by pondering British fiction in its larger international context (see, for example, Byatt, 1996b, as well as several of the essays collected in On Histories and Stories and her editorials to Byatt and Hollinghurst, 1995, and Byatt and Porter, 1997) at the same time as revisiting, in her capacity as editor of The Oxford Book of English Short Stories (1998), themes of Englishness at a period when such topics of enquiry were anything but de rigueur; she has collaborated with the film-maker Philip Haas not only on his highly original cinematic rendering of ‘Morpho Eugenia’, released by Playhouse International Pictures in association with The Samuel Goldwyn Company in 1995 as Angels and Insects (see Byatt, 1996f ) but also on his latest exhibition catalogue Butchers, Dragons, Gods & Skeletons (see Byatt, 2009b); she has bridged the ‘Two Cultures’ divide by engaging in public debate with scientists of all persuasions, acted as a member of various public advisory committees and sat on countless literary prize panels. Most notably, however, Byatt has, particularly in latter years and in a wide variety of roles, been a tireless champion of new writing and new writers. Byatt has, of course, long been an apologist for British writing, even at times when its reputation was at its lowest. Never one to side with the pessimists who habitually claimed that the late twentiethcentury British novel was dead, or at least moribund, or simply irrelevant, Byatt’s partisan colours are already on full display in her 1979 essay on postwar British fiction, ‘People in Paper Houses’. Significantly, ‘People in Paper Houses’ was originally published in The Contemporary English Novel, a collection of essays expressly intended, in the words of its principal editor Malcolm Bradbury (Bradbury and Palmer, 1979: 7), to challenge the ‘folklore’ that had accumulatively contributed to the generally negative assessment and overwhelming critical neglect of contemporary British writing of the mid- to late twentieth century. ‘People in Paper Houses’ fully supports

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Bradbury’s theme and offers intelligent readings of living authors such as Angus Wilson, Iris Murdoch and Doris Lessing which deftly demonstrate how these writers’ heterogeneous and sophisticated uses of varying traditions of prose writing testify to the complexity, significance and variety of contemporary British writing beyond ‘irritable territorial definitions’ of the realism versus modernism kind (PM: 166). Years later, and in a markedly changed critical atmosphere, Byatt’s habitual defence of British authors can be seen to have evolved into a veritable celebration of the vibrancy and variety of contemporary British fiction. Throughout the 1990s, Byatt, by now a public figure of considerable clout and intellectual influence, actively championed a new generation of British writers with exactly the same passion and commitment that she had previously displayed in her apologias of earlier generations of writerly compatriots. Accepting engagements in a variety of cultural enterprises, Byatt seemed to relish the opportunity to shape and engage more widely in the literary scene of her day. In 1993, for example, she judged Granta’s Best of Young British Novelists, alongside Salman Rushdie and Waterstone’s then marketing manager John Mitchinson. The experience, which she was later to reflect on in a journalistic piece for the Daily Telegraph (Byatt, 1993h), not only prompted her to reflect on the changing ethos of British fiction but also sowed the seeds that were later to develop into a more sustained argument about the predominance of postDarwinian narratives in contemporary writing, which she elaborated on in ‘A New Body of Writing’ (Byatt, 1995c) and ‘Ancestors’ (OHAS: 65–90). Back in 1993, however, Byatt’s article was primarily intended to counter disparaging voices in the media, who complained that the 1993 Granta list of authors was vastly inferior to the original Best of Young British Novelists authors selected in 1983. Byatt, despite bemoaning having to wade through a slush pile of somewhat repetitive and derivative homages to Martin Amis, found much to admire in the final 1993 line-up, which included, among others, Kazuo Ishiguro, Lawrence Norfolk, Tibor Fischer and A. L. Kennedy, all of whom also feature prominently on the critical map of contemporary British writing Byatt delineates, seven years later, in On Histories and Stories. Also among the 1993 Granta finalists was Louis de Bernières, whom Byatt has elsewhere praised for his enthusiastic and uninhibited ‘rediscovery of the conventions of storytelling’ (Tonkin, 1999: 19) and whom she has described as representative of ‘a new energy of

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storytelling’ increasingly discernible in British writing of the final decade of the twentieth century (1994e: 27). This ‘new energy of storytelling’ was also actively nurtured by Byatt through her involvement with the New Writing project, an initiative set up by the British Council in the early 1990s to promote British writing abroad. Byatt edited two volumes of the series, as well as contributing several of her own short stories and extracts from work-in-progress to volumes edited by other prominent figures from contemporary British literature. Unsurprisingly, New Writing 4, co-edited by Byatt and Best of Young British Novelists short-listed author Alan Hollinghurst (1995), included no fewer than seven contributions by writers from Granta’s 1993 list. One of these pieces, an extract from Lawrence Norfolk’s then novel-in-progress The Pope’s Rhinoceros, which described, in imaginative and exhaustive detail, the formation of the Baltic Sea, was later discussed by Byatt in her essay ‘Ancestors’. According to Byatt, the effect of Norfolk’s use of a shoal of herrings as the central consciousness in his narrative here ‘is double – to diminish the importance of human events, and at the same time to create a paradisal nostalgia (there are Miltonic echoes also) for the plenitude of a natural world unpolluted by humans’ (OHAS: 69). This double effect is, of course, one that readers of Byatt’s own fiction are already familiar with from the neo-Darwinian story-lines in works such as ‘Morpho Eugenia’, The Biographer’s Tale or indeed the various characters’ scientific deliberations in the Quartet novels. Interestingly, however, it is Norfolk, almost thirty years Byatt’s junior, whom she cites, in ‘Ancestors’, as a key example of recent fiction’s preoccupation with, and reconfiguration of, the notion of natural history. Indeed, in her introduction to On Histories and Stories (OHAS: 3), she places Norfolk, alongside only a handful of other novelists, ‘at the centre’ of recent British writing. Byatt’s generous support of younger writers is, we would argue, characterised by the same qualities of curiosity and engagement (as opposed to generational conflict) that she exhibited, and continues to exhibit, towards her literary progenitors: just as Byatt feels no impulse to ‘knock down’ the older generation, she does not appear to feel at all threatened by the younger either. Indeed, Byatt has said that she perceives Norfolk to be ‘doing all sorts of things that I would never have thought of doing but seem to me to be akin to what I do’ (Friel and Newman, 2004: n. p.). Unsurprisingly then, when Byatt and Norfolk shared the platform at a literary event held at Cambridge

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University in 2002, their discussion on history and fiction revealed much common ground. Norfolk’s attempt to represent both biological time and cosmic time in narrative, and his vision of a post-humanist history, a vast cosmic expanse of time against which the torments and passions of human life appear as barely discernible margin notes, certainly appeared to strike a chord with Byatt, who was to explore similar territory in, for example, her short story ‘A Stone Woman’, where the heroine Ines undergoes a strange metamorphosis, which is also an embodied metaphor, as she is literally turned to stone by grief. As her skin and flesh gradually take on mineral colours and textures, Ines’s consciousness adjusts to geologic time – ‘her thoughts and feelings had slowed to stone-speed’ (LBBS: 139) – to the extent that she can see lichens growing at ‘visible speeds’ (LBBS: 177). Despite her fears, she eventually discovers that she is not dying. On the contrary, she is ‘full of – quite abnormal – energy’ (LBBS: 178) as she enters the world of ‘living stones’ (LBBS: 147). If this ‘energy’ is here portrayed as ultimately incomprehensible to human narrative, it nevertheless, and perhaps somewhat paradoxically, also functions as an apt image of the ‘new energy of storytelling’ that Byatt habitually celebrates in the generation of writers that have come to prominence in more recent years. Another young writer who has been publicly feted by Byatt is David Mitchell: as well as tipping him for success in a feature on ‘Talent 2000’ for The Independent (Byatt, 2000e: 12), Byatt wrote glowing reviews both of his debut novel Ghostwritten (1999g: 7) and of the Man Booker short-listed Cloud Atlas (2004d). Byatt’s admiration for Mitchell’s narrative vitality (in the later review, she compares him to a latter-day Scheherezade) is both a sign of her continued enthusiasm for contemporary writing and an indication, again, of shared intellectual and creative interests with a younger generation of writers. Significantly, the figure of the narrator in Ghostwritten, a ‘noncorpum’ consciousness inhabiting the bodies of various people across different cultures and weaving their voices together in a colourful narrative tapestry, recalls Byatt’s own practice of ‘ventriloquism’, although the hauntings in this novel are not perpetuated by the ghosts of the past, but rather by a kind of zeitgeist. What is more, Mitchell’s work, with its surreal plots, sense of the uncanny and predilection for Tokyo record shops, clearly paid tribute to Haruki Murakami and was, more generally, illustrative of an increasingly global outlook amongst young British writers.

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This broadening international outlook was also something that the aforementioned New Writing project explicitly sought to encourage. Malcolm Bradbury’s introduction to the first issue (Bradbury and Cooke, 1992: 9) had already argued that ‘[t]he growth of bi-cultural writing (Kazuo Ishiguro, Timothy Mo) or multi-cultural writing (Salman Rushdie) has made phrases like “the English novel” and “English poetry” into misnomers’, and expressed an intention to ‘make British writing more internationally visible’ and ‘to encourage the internationalisation of that writing’ (Bradbury and Cooke, 1992: 10). Byatt’s potent essay on contemporary writing, ‘A New Body of Fiction’, written for publication in New Writing 4, took Bradbury’s agenda further forward by looking at British fiction in an international context and expressing pleasure at the ‘excitingly mongrel nature’ of recent writing – ‘Little Britain crosses Europe, Asia, Africa and America in splendidly inventive ways’ (Byatt, 1995c: 441). Ghostwritten (an extract from which was later anthologised alongside Byatt’s story ‘Crocodile Tears’ in New Writing 8, edited by Tibor Fischer and Lawrence Norfolk) certainly appears to epitomise the new ethos Byatt describes in her essay. Drawing on the spy novel, the ghost story, ‘lad lit’ and travel writing, Mitchell’s gleeful transgression of generic and cultural boundaries amply illustrates Byatt’s thesis and exemplifies the way in which many British writers have, in recent years, looked increasingly outwards for inspiration. Indeed, Byatt herself has used fiction, and short fiction in particular, to make similarly imaginative journeys: consider, for example, ‘The Dried Witch’, set in China; ‘Crocodile Tears’, which embraces the mythology of the Mediterranean; ‘The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye’, set in a modern-day yet mythical Turkey; and, again, ‘A Stone Woman’, which centrally derives inspiration from Nordic myths and tales of trolls. Byatt’s emphatic identification of herself as ‘a European writer’ (OHAS: 1), as well as the explicit connections she draws between her interest in fairytales and her sense of being ‘European’ (OHAS: 4), can surely be seen as part of this wider tendency. In her 1996 essay ‘Parmenides and the Contemporary British Novel’, an essay written for the British Council newsletter Literature Matters, Byatt (1996b: 8) noted that many contemporary writers such as Penelope Fitzgerald, Kazuo Ishiguro and Angela Carter, but also Lawrence Norfolk, A. L. Kennedy, Tibor Fischer, Patricia Duncker, Philip Hensher and many other younger writers, were ‘tale-tellers . . . fabulists in a European tradition’ and had, in various ways and

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guises, much ‘in common with the Isak Dinesen of the Gothic Tales, with Calvino, Eco, the Dutch Nooteboom, the Austrian Ransmayr, with Kundera and Nabokov’. Citing Parmenides’ poetic argument that ‘anything that can be named exists’ as a model for these ‘fabulists’, whose work crossed over all the usual generic, national and critical boundaries, and who seemed possessed of unlimited imaginative licence, Byatt (1996b: 6) concluded that ‘British fiction at the moment is confident, brilliant, inventive and full of variety’. Such a verdict both affirms Bradbury’s optimistic critical prophesies on the direction of British literary culture at the close of the millennium and provides a compelling account of Byatt’s own work during this period. In 1999, interviewed on the theme of ‘sources and influences’ by her late French translator Jean-Louis Chevalier, and asked whether she herself may have been an influence on other writers, Byatt, somewhat curiously, remarked: [T]here aren’t really any English novelists of my generation. There is a generation older than me, which consists of, say, Anita Brookner, Malcolm Bradbury, David Lodge, Penelope Lively, Penelope Fitzgerald, who is older than those, and Iris [Murdoch] . . . [a]nd Doris Lessing who is more than ten years older than I am. Then there is what I think of as the flamboyant generation, which is largely male and a lot of it not British in origin: Barnes, Rushdie, Mo, Ishiguro, Graham Swift, Caz Phillips, all of whom write wonderfully, but I don’t think they bear much relation to what I do. And then, there’s the generation after that, which does interest me, the generation of Lawrence Norfolk, Patricia Duncker, A. L. Kennedy. . . . But I don’t think there is a kind of school of Byatt. (Chevalier, 1999: 25)

While Byatt seemingly places herself in a position of splendid isolation in relation to other postwar British writers, the inventory she makes of her near-contemporaries nevertheless emphasises the impressive length of her career and the wealth of contexts and backdrops against which it has unfolded. Intriguingly, however, Byatt does indeed often appear to have more in common with a younger generation of writers than with those (including her sister, the novelist Margaret Drabble) who are nearer to her in age. Having launched her writing career during a period of uncertainty, in which the novel was seen to be in crisis, both Byatt’s fiction and her criticism often appeared to cut against the grain of popular critical narratives about the state of contemporary British writing, and the direction in which

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it should be heading. In an environment in which novels of gritty social realism, at one end of the spectrum, or anglicised reworkings of the nouveau roman, at the other, were considered to be desirable literary models, it was certainly somewhat easier to dismiss Byatt’s writerly outlook as elitist, irrelevant or reflective of (to quote from Byatt’s own 1992 short story ‘The Chinese Lobster’) ‘the possibly crabbed view of a solitary intellectual’ (MS: 98). As progressive generations of writers of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries gradually gravitated back towards storytelling, subjecting avant-garde notions of the superiority of literary fragmentation to fictional scrutiny (and thus to a taste of this avant-garde’s own medicine) and taking in thematic concerns such as history and its representational conundrums, the forms of reality that defy narrative shapeliness, and our ever evolving notions of identity on the way, Byatt seemed to sit ever more comfortably on the map of contemporary British writing than she had done as a young novelist in the 1960s and 1970s. The last two decades in particular have undoubtedly sealed Byatt’s reputation as a major British author and confirmed her status as a key figure in late twentieth-century and early twenty-first-century British writing. Notes 1 2

See, for example, Byatt 1994f; 2000f; 1978c; 1997c; 1998g; 1998f; 2001c; 1996g; 1993i; and 2003c. The fact that Byatt’s explorations of nineteenth-century spiritualism were developed through imagining herself into the minds of historical figures, and ‘channelling’ their thoughts into the minds of fictional characters, is an irony that has already been noted by Michael Levenson. In ‘The Religion of Fiction’, he observes that: ‘[a]t the end of “The Conjugial Angel”, when the ghost of Hallam appears to appear, Byatt’s reader must experience an unnerving double response. The first instinctive mockery of those who sees ghosts gives way to a second, less cosy recognition that we novel readers are always seeing ghosts. Every character is an apparition. Whenever we lend solidity to the stories we follow, we are living proof of a visionary capacity almost always undervalued. Byatt’s purpose is to push this fact about fiction into the foreground of consciousness, so that reading novels becomes the training of vision.’ (Levenson, 1993, qtd. from Byatt 1994b: 343–4)

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I. II. III. IV. V. VI. VII. VIII. IX.

Novels and collected short fiction by A. S. Byatt Uncollected short fiction by A. S. Byatt Collected non-fiction by A. S. Byatt Selected uncollected non-fiction by A. S. Byatt Books edited by A. S. Byatt Selected interviews with A. S. Byatt Selected reviews of A. S. Byatt’s fiction Selected criticism of A. S. Byatt’s fiction Other works cited

I. Novels and collected short fiction by A. S. Byatt (First UK editions only) 1964a. Shadow of a Sun. London: Chatto. Rpt 1991a as The Shadow of the Sun. London: Vintage. 1967a. The Game. London: Chatto. 1978a. The Virgin in the Garden. London: Chatto. 1985a. Still Life. London: Chatto. 1987a. Sugar and Other Stories. London: Chatto. Contains: Racine and the Tablecloth Rose-Coloured Teacups The July Ghost. First publ. in T. J. Binding, ed., 1982. Firebird I. Harmondsworth: Penguin, pp. 21–37. The Next Room The Dried Witch Loss of Face On the Day E. M. Forster Died. First publ. in Encounter, Dec 1983, pp. 3–9. The Changeling. First publ. in Encounter, May 1985, pp. 3–7.

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Bibliography

In the Air Precipice-Encurled. First publ. in Encounter, Apr 1987, pp. 21–31. Sugar. First publ. in New Yorker, 12 Jan 1987, pp. 28–50. 1990a. Possession: A Romance. London: Chatto. 1992a. Angels and Insects. London: Chatto. Contains: Morpho Eugenia The Conjugial Angel 1993a. The Matisse Stories. London: Chatto. Contains: Medusa’s Ankles. First publ. in Woman’s Journal, Sep 1990, pp. 182ff. Art Work. First publ. in New Yorker, 20 May 1991, pp. 36–51. The Chinese Lobster. First publ. in New Yorker, 26 Oct 1992, pp. 90–100. 1994a. The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye: Five Fairy Stories. London: Chatto. Contains: The Glass Coffin. First publ. as part of Possession: A Romance. Gode’s Story. First publ. as part of Possession: A Romance. The Story of the Eldest Princess. First publ. in Caroline Heaton and Christine Park, eds, 1992. Caught in a Story: Contemporary Fairytales and Fables. London: Vintage, pp. 12–28. Dragon’s Breath. First publ. in Index on Censorship, Sep-Oct 1994, pp. 89–95. The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye. First publ. in Paris Review, 133 (Winter 1994), pp. 14–112. 1996a. Babel Tower. London: Chatto. 1998a. Elementals: Stories of Fire and Ice. London: Chatto. Contains: Crocodile Tears. First publ. in Paris Review, 146 (Spring 1998), pp. 1–41. A Lamia in the Cévennes. First publ. in Atlantic Monthly, July 1995, pp. 56–9. Cold Baglady. First publ. in Daily Telegraph, 15 Jan 1994, p. 11. Jael. First publ. in Guardian, 27 Dec 1997, The Week, pp. 1–2. Christ in the House of Martha and Mary. First publ. in Mail on Sunday, 31 May 1998, You, pp. 71–4. 2000a. The Biographer’s Tale. London: Chatto. 2002a. A Whistling Woman. London: Chatto. 2003a. Little Black Book of Stories. London: Chatto. Contains: The Pink Ribbon The Thing in the Forest. First publ. in New Yorker, 3 Jun 2002, pp. 80–9.

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Raw Material. First publ. in Atlantic Monthly, Apr 2002, pp. 83–92. Body Art. First publ. in Hildi Hawkins and Danielle Olsen, eds, 2003. The Phantom Museum and the Henry Wellcome’s Collection of Medical Curiosities. London: Profile Books, pp. 1–42. A Stone Woman. First publ. in New Yorker, 13 Oct 2003, pp. 90–6, 98–101. 2009a. The Children’s Book. London: Chatto.

II. Uncollected short fiction by A. S. Byatt (First date and place of publication only) 1976a. Daniel. Encounter, Apr, pp. 3–8. 1989a. Repeating Patterns. Storia, 2, pp. 137–46. 1997a. The Distinguished Thing in a Bottle. Daily Telegraph, 8 Feb, p. A6. 1998b. Heavenly Bodies. Sunday Times, 20 Dec, Culture, pp. 12ff. 1998c. Repeating Patterns. Voyager, Nov, pp. 64ff. 1999a. Brief Lives. In: Tibor Fischer and Lawrence Norfolk, eds, New Writing 8. London: Vintage, pp. 50–82. 2005a. The Narrow Jet. Paris Review, 173 (Spring), pp. 81–104.

III. Collected non-fiction by A. S. Byatt (First UK edition only) 1965. Degrees of Freedom: The Novels of Iris Murdoch. London: Chatto. Rpt 1994b (with additional material) as Degrees of Freedom: The Early Novels of Iris Murdoch. London: Vintage. 1970. Wordsworth and Coleridge in Their Time. London: Nelson. Rpt 1989b as Unruly Times: Wordsworth and Coleridge in Their Time. London: Hogarth. 1976b. Iris Murdoch. Writers and Their Work 251. Harlow: Longman. 1991b. Passions of the Mind: Selected Writings. London: Chatto. Contains: Still Life / Nature morte. First publ. in David Kelly and Isabelle Llasera, eds, 1986. Cross References: Modern French Theory and the Practice of Criticism. London: Society for French Studies, pp. 95–102. Sugar / Le Sucre. First publ. as an introduction to Byatt, A. S., 1989c. Le Sucre, translated by Jean-Louis Chevalier. Paris: Éditions des Cendres, pp. 11–19. Robert Browning: Fact, Fiction, Lies, Incarnation and Art. An expanded version of Byatt, 1991c. George Eliot: A Celebration. First publ. as a pamphlet for inclusion with a boxed set of George Eliot’s novels. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1980. George Eliot’s Essays. An edited version of Byatt, 1990c.

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Bibliography Accurate Letters: Ford Madox Ford. Based on Byatt, 1981, and 1984a. The Omnipotence of Thought: Frazer, Freud, and Post-Modernist Fiction. First publ. in Robert Fraser, ed., 1990. Sir James Frazer and the Literary Imagination: Essays in Affinity and Influence. London: Macmillan, pp. 270–308. People in Paper Houses: Attitudes to ‘Realism’ and ‘Experiment’ in English Post-War Fiction. First publ. in Malcolm Bradbury and David Palmer, eds, 1979. The Contemporary English Novel. London: Arnold, pp. 19–41. William Golding: Darkness Visible. Rpt of Byatt, A. S., 1979a. A. S. Byatt on Darkness Invisible. Literary Review, Oct, p. 10. The TLS Poetry Competition. Rpt of Byatt, A. S., 1988a. Writing and Feeling. Times Literary Supplement, 18 Nov, p. 1278. A Sense of Religion: Enright’s God. First publ. in Jacqueline Simms, ed., 1990. Life by Other Means: Essays on D. J. Enright. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 158–74. Willa Cather. Based on Byatt, 1983, 1981b and 1981c. Elizabeth Bowen: The House in Paris. Rpt of Byatt, A. S., 1976c. Introduction. The House in Paris, by Elizabeth Bowen. Harmondsworth: Penguin, pp. 7–16. Sylvia Plath: Letters Home. Rpt of Byatt, A. S., 1976d. Mirror, Mirror on the Wall. Rev. of Aurelia Schober Plath, ed., Sylvia Plath: Letters Home. New Statesman, 23 Apr, pp. 541–2. Toni Morrison: Beloved. An Honourable Escape: Georgette Heyer. Rpt of Byatt, A. S., 1969a. Georgette Heyer Is a Better Writer Than You Think. Nova, Aug, pp. 14ff. Barbara Pym. Rpt of Byatt, A. S., 1986. Marginal Lives. Rev. of Barbara Pym, An Academic Question, and Robert E. Long, Barbara Pym. Times Literary Supplement, 8 Aug, p. 862. Monique Wittig: The Lesbian Body. Rpt of Byatt, A. S., 1974. Give me the Moonlight, Give me the Girl. Rev. of Monique Wittig, The Lesbian Body. New Review, Jul, pp. 65–7. Coleridge: An Archangel a Little Damaged. Rpt of Byatt, A. S., 1972. Coleridge: ‘An Archangel a Little Damaged’: An Analysis of the Power and Failure of the Poet’s Mind in Solitude and in Companionship. The Times, 2 Dec, p 8. Charles Rycroft: The Innocence of Dreams. Rpt of Byatt, A. S., 1979b. Downstream. Rev. of Charles Rycroft, The Innocence of Dreams. New Statesman, 4 May, p. 646. Van Gogh, Death and Summer. An expanded version of Byatt, A. S., 1990b. After the Myth, the Real. Rev. of Ken Wilkie, The Van Gogh File: A Journey of Discovery, Martin Bailey, Young Vincent: The Story of Van Gogh’s Years in England, David Sweetman,The Love of Many

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Things: A Life of Vincent Van Gogh and Tsukasa Kodera, Vincent Van Gogh: Christianity Versus Nature. Times Literary Supplement, 29 Jun, pp. 683–5. 1994b. Degrees of Freedom: The Early Novels of Iris Murdoch. London: Vintage. Rpt (with additional material) of 1965. Degrees of Freedom: The Early Novels of Iris Murdoch. London: Chatto. with Ignês Sodré, 1995a. Imagining Characters: Six Conversations about Women Writers. London: Chatto. 2000b. On Histories and Stories: Selected Essays. London: Chatto. Contains: Fathers Forefathers Ancestors True Stories and the Facts in Fiction Old Tales, New Forms Ice, Snow, Glass. First publ. in Kate Bernheimer, ed., 1998. Mirror, Mirror on the Wall: Women Writer’s Explore Their Favourite Fairy Tale. New York: Doubleday, pp. 64–84. The Greatest Story Ever Told. Rpt of Byatt, A. S., 1999b. Narrate or Die: Why Scheherazade Keeps on Talking. New York Times, 18 Apr, Magazine pp. 105–7. 2001a. Portraits in Fiction. London: Chatto.

IV. Selected uncollected non-fiction by A. S. Byatt (excludes journalism, reviews, art criticism and broadcasts except pieces directly quoted in this volume) 1967b. [Untitled contribution]. In: James Mitchell, ed., The God I Want. London: Constable, pp. 71–87. 1969a. Georgette Heyer Is a Better Writer Than You Think. Nova, Aug, pp. 14ff. 1969b. The Lyric Structure of Tennyson’s Maud. In: Isobel Armstrong, ed., The Major Victorian Poets: Reconsiderations. London: Routledge, pp. 69–92. 1970a. The Lady’s Not for Moaning. Nova, March, pp. 26, 28, 30. 1978b. Wallace Stevens: Criticism, Repetition, and Creativity. Journal of American Studies, 12, pp. 369–75. 1978c. Words. BBC Radio 4, 8, 15, 22 and 29 Jan. 1979c. Introduction. George Eliot, The Mill on the Floss. Harmondsworth: Penguin, pp. 7–40. 1979d. Introduction. Grace Paley, Enormous Changes at the Last Minute. London: Virago, pp. iii–vi.

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1980a. Introduction. Willa Cather, A Lost Lady. London: Virago, pp. v–xiv. 1980b. Preface. Willa Cather, My Ántonia. London: Virago, [n. p.]. 1980c. Introduction. Grace Paley, The Little Disturbances of Man. London: Virago, pp. 5–8. 1981. Impressions and Their Rendering. Times Literary Supplement, 13 Feb, pp. 171–2. 1982a. Introduction. Willa Cather, My Mortal Enemy. London: Virago, pp. v–xiii. 1982b. Introduction. Willa Cather, The Song of the Lark. London: Virago, pp. xiii–xix. 1984b. Introduction. Willa Cather, Shadows on the Rock. London: Virago, pp. vii–xii. 1985b. Afterword. Willa Cather, Lucy Gayheart. London: Virago, pp. 233–40. 1987b. Introduction. Pamela Hansford Johnson, An Error of Judgement. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. v–ix. 1987c. Identity and the Writer. In: Lisa Appignanesi, ed., The Real Me: PostModernism and the Question of Identity. ICA Documents 6. London: ICA, pp. 23–6. 1988b. Introduction. Rachel Ferguson, The Brontës Went to Woolworths. London: Virago, pp. iii–xiii. 1990c. Introduction. A. S. Byatt and Nicholas Warren, eds, Selected Essays, Poems and Other Writings. By George Eliot. Harmondsworth: Penguin, pp. ix–xxxiv. 1990d. Home Thoughts. Independent, 19 June, Magazine, p. 18. 1990e. The Trouble with the Interesting Reader. Times Literary Supplement, 23 Mar, p. 310. 1991c. Introduction. Robert Browning: Dramatic Monologues. Selected by A. S. Byatt. London: Folio Society, pp. vii–xxxi. 1992b. Introduction. A. L. Barker, A Case Examined; John Brown’s Body; The Gooseboy. London: Vintage, pp. 2–6. 1992c. A. S. Byatt. In: Antonia Fraser, ed., The Pleasure of Reading. London: Bloomsbury, pp. 127–32. 1992d. George Eliot, 1819–1880 and George Henry Lewes, 1817–1878. In: Isaiah Berlin, ed., Founders and Followers: Literary Lectures Given on the Occasion of the 150th Anniversary of the Founding of the London Library. London: Sinclair, pp. 49–76. 1992e. In Memoriam. Poetry in Motion 2. London: Channel 4 Television, pp. 54–70. 1992f. The Irreplaceable Importance of Reading. In: Rachel Van Riel, ed., Why Read? Birmingham: Birmingham Library Services, pp. 15–18. 1993b. Introduction. Jane Austen’s The History of England from the Reign of Henry the 4th to the Death of Charles the 1st. Chapel Hill: Algonquin, pp. v–viii. Rpt 1993 as Jane Austen, the ‘Prejudiced Historian.’ Folio (Winter), pp. 10–15.

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1993c. Reading, Writing, Studying: Some Questions about Changing Conditions for Writers and Readers. Critical Quarterly, 35 (4), pp. 3–7. 1993d. Facilitator. In: Tristram and Georgia Powell, eds, A Dedicated Fan: Julian Jebb 1934–1984. London: Peralta, pp. 90–1. 1993e. Willa Cather. In: Virago Birthday Keepsake. London: Virago, pp. 16–19. 1993f. The Reader as Writer, the Writer as Reader. The Beall-Russell Lectures in the Humanities, Baylor University (1 Nov 1993), published as an untitled pamphlet by Baylor University (1993). 1993g. Time. Blue Skies, BBC Radio 3, 8 Jan. 1993h. Twenty Ways to Avoid Despair. Daily Telegraph, 24 Apr, Books, p. xxv. 1993i. Hits of the 60s. BBC Radio 3, 11 May. 1994c. Introduction. In: W. Bronzwaer and H. Verdaasdonk, eds, Kees Fens: Finding the Place: Selected Essays on English Literature. Amsterdam: Rodopi, pp. vii–ix. 1994d. Introduction. George Eliot, Middlemarch. New York: Modern Library, [n. p.]. 1994e. Music and Morals in the Time of War. Evening Standard, 21 Apr, p. 27. 1994f. Middlemarch: A User’s Guide. BBC 2, 9 Feb. 1995b. Choices: The Writing of Possession. Threepenny Review (Fall), p. 17. 1995c. A New Body of Writing: Darwin and Recent British Fiction. In: A. S. Byatt and Alan Hollinghurst, eds, New Writing 4. London: Vintage, pp. 439–48. 1995d. Fairy Stories: The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye. Available at www.asbyatt.com/Onherself.aspx [accessed 29 Apr 2008]. 1996b. Parmenides and the Contemporary British Novel. Literature Matters, Dec, pp. 6–8. 1996c. [Untitled contribution]. In: Nicholas Royle, ed., The Tiger Garden: A Book of Writers’ Dreams. London: Serpent’s Tail, pp. 40–1. 1996d. ‘Introduction to Babel Tower’. A. S. Byatt, Babel Tower. Pennsylvania: Franklin Press, pp. 1–3. 1996e. Introduction. The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyam, translated by Edward Fitzgerald. New York: Quality Paperback Book Club, pp. v–xii. 1996f. A. S. Byatt on Angels and Insects: The Architectural Origins of a Provocative Film. Architectural Digest, 53 (4), pp. 100, 104, 106, 108. 1996g. I was a Wembley Virgin. Observer, 30 Jun, Review, pp. 1–2. 1997b. Her Philosophical Essays Changed Everything. Literary Review, Jul, pp. 27–8. 1997c. Electoral Swings 1945–1997. Newsnight, BBC 2, 29 Apr. 1998c. Introduction. A. S. Byatt, ed., The Oxford Book of English Short Stories. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, pp. xv–xxx.

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1998d. Introduction. The Song of Solomon. Edinburgh: Canongate, pp. vii–xviii. 1998e. Hauntings. In: Brian Cox, ed., Literacy Is Not Enough: Essays on the Importance of Reading. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 41–6. 1998f. Memory and the Making of Fiction. In: Patricia Fara and Karalyn Patterson, eds, Memory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 47–72. 1998g. Francis Galton. BBC Radio 3, 11 May. 1999c. Introduction. George Eliot, Daniel Deronda. London: Folio Society, pp. vii–xiv. 1999e. Introduction. Iris Murdoch, The Bell. London: Vintage, pp. vii–xv. Rpt 1999 as The Bell Revisited: 41 Years After. Kyoto English Review, 3 (2), pp. 1–12. 1999f. Arachne. Threepenny Review (Summer), pp. 20–3: Rpt 2000 in Philip Terry, ed., Ovid Metamorphosed. London: Chatto, pp. 131–57. 1999g. Wild Whirl of a Ghostly World. Mail on Sunday, 26 Sep, p. 7. 2000c. Half-Angel and Half-Bird. Browning Society Notes, 26 (May), pp. 7–20. 2000d. Introduction. Anthony Burgess, Abba Abba. London: Vintage, pp. 1–6. 2000e. Talent 2000: A. S. Byatt on David Mitchell. Independent on Sunday, 30 Jan, Culture, p. 12. 2000f. The Romantic Road. BBC Radio 3, 8 Mar. 2001b. Novels and Biographies. The Reader, 8 (Spring), pp. 37–40. First publ. 2000e as Nothing Is Too Wonderful to Be True. The Times, 7 Jun, Books, pp. 12–13. 2001c. Odours Savour Sweet. . . . In: P. D. James and Harriet Harvey-Wood, eds, Sightlines. London: Vintage, pp. 257–67. 2001d. Introduction. The Arabian Nights: Tales from a Thousand and One Nights, translated and with a preface and notes by Sir Richard F. Burton. New York: Modern Library, pp. xiii–xx. 2001e. Introduction. Charlotte Brontë, Villette. New York: Modern Library, pp. xiii–iv. 2001f. Introduction. Cevat Çapan, Where Are You, Susie Petschek?, translated by Michael Hulse and Cevat Çapan. Todmorden: Arc Publications, pp. 13–17. 2001g. Introduction. Penelope Fitzgerald, The Means of Escape. New York: Mariner Books, pp. ix–xxx. 2001h. Introduction. A. J. A. Symons, The Quest for Corvo. New York: New York Review Books, pp. ix–xvi. 2002b. Introduction. Lewis Caroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass. New York: Modern Library, pp. xi–xxi. 2002c. Introduction. Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary, translated by Birger Huse. Oslo: De Norske Bokklubbene Verdensbiblioteket, pp. 7–22. 2002d. Belief. BBC Radio 3, 25 Mar.

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2003b. Introduction. Henry James, The Bostonians. New York: Modern Library, pp. xi–xxiv. 2003c. Happy Endings. The Times, 27 Nov, T2, p. 7. 2004a. Foreword. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, The Man of Fifty, translated by Andrew Piper. London: Hesperus Press, pp. vii–xi. 2004b. Introduction. Maria Tatar, The Annotated Brothers Grimm. New York: W. W. Norton, pp. xvii–xlvii. 2004c. Soul Searching. Guardian, 14 Feb, Review, pp. 4–6. 2004d. Overlapping Lives. Guardian, 6 Mar, Review, p. 9. 2005b. A Child’s Dickens. The Dickensian, 101 (1), pp. 5–6. 2005c. The Death of Lucien de Rubempré. Kenyon Review, 27 (1), pp. 42–64. 2005d. Introduction. Mikhail Bulgakov, A Dog’s Heart, translated by Hugh Aplin. London: Hesperus Press, pp. vii–x. 2005e. Preface. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Faust: Part I, translated by David Constantine. Harmondsworth: Penguin, pp. vii–xx. 2005f. Introduction. Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain, translated by John E. Woods. New York: Everyman’s Library, pp. vii–xxi. 2005g. ‘Fiction Informed by Science’. Nature, 434, 17 Mar, pp. 2–5. with Sodré, Ignês, 2005. On Writing Madness. In: Corinne Saunders and Jane Macnaughton, eds, Madness and Creativity in Literature and Culture. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 202–21. 2006a. Introduction. Toni Morrison, Beloved. New York: Everyman’s Library, pp. vii–xxi. 2006b. Feeling Thought: Donne and the Embodied Mind. In: Achsah Guibbory, ed., The Cambridge Companion to John Donne. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 247–57. 2007. A Cabinet of Curiosities. In: Dan Crowe, ed., How I Write: The Secret Lives of Authors. New York: Rizzoli, pp. 84–7. 2008. Introduction. In: A. S. Byatt and Harriet Harvey-Wood, eds, Memory: An Anthology. London: Chatto, pp. xii–xx. 2009b. Moving Pictures. In: Butchers, Dragons, Gods & Skeletons: Film Installations by Philip Haas. Fort Worth: Kimbell Art Museum, pp. 1–30.

V. Books edited by A. S. Byatt 1998c. The Oxford Book of English Short Stories. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. with Warren, Nicholas, 1990. George Eliot, Selected Essays, Poems and Other Writings. Harmondsworth: Penguin. with Hollinghurst, Alan, 1995. New Writing 4. London: Vintage. with Porter, Peter, 1997. New Writing 6. London: Vintage. with Harvey-Wood, Harriet. Memory: An Anthology. London: Chatto, 2008.

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VI. Selected interviews with A. S. Byatt Anon., 1996. Lit Chat: Ant Heaps and Novelists. Salon [online]. Available at www.salon.com/08/departments/litchat.html [accessed 6 Sep 2009]. Aragay, Mireia, 1994. The Long Shadow of the Nineteenth Century: An Interview with A. S. Byatt. BELLS: Barcelona English Language and Literature Studies, 5, pp. 151–64. Carver, Robert, 1990. In Pursuit of the Fugitive Good. Criticism and the Arts on the Air: A. S. Byatt in Conversation with Robert Carver. In: Robert Carver, ed., Ariel at Bay: Reflections on Broadcasting and the Arts: A Festschrift for Philip French. Manchester: Carcanet, pp. 45–54. Chevalier, Jean-Louis, 1994. Entretien avec A. S. Byatt. Journal of the Short Story in English, 22 (Summer), pp. 12–27. Chevalier, Jean-Louis, 1999. Speaking of Sources. Sources: Revue d’Études Anglophone, 7 (Autumn), pp. 6–28. Collins, Clive, 1999. A. S. Byatt: In Conversation with Clive Collins. Eigo Seinen / Rising Generation, 145 (4), pp. 182–95. Dusinberre, Juliet, 1980. A. S. Byatt. In: Janet Todd, ed., Women Writers Talking. New York: Columbia University Press, pp. 181–95. Enkemann, Jürgen, 1996. New Writing in Britain: An Interview with A. S. Byatt. Hard Times, 56 (Spring), pp. 12–16. Friel, James, and Newman, Jenny, 2004. An Interview with A. S. Byatt. Cerces [online]. Available at www.cercles.com/interviews/byatt.html [accessed 7 Oct 2009]. Abridged version published as: A. S. Byatt. In: Sharon Monteith, Jenny Newman and Pat Wheeler, eds, Contemporary British and Irish Fiction: An Introduction Through Interviews. London: Arnold, pp. 36–53. Frumkes, Lewis Burke, 1997. A Conversation with . . . A. S. Byatt. Writer, 110 (5), pp. 15–17. Gerard, David, 1999. David Gerard Talks to A. S. Byatt. Reader, 5 (Autumn–Winter), pp. 15–23. Greenfield, George, 1989. A. S. Byatt. In: Scribblers for Bread: Aspects of the English Novel Since 1945. London: Hodder, pp. 42–9. Hensher, Philip, 2001. A. S. Byatt: The Art of Fiction CLXVIII. Paris Review, 43 (159), pp. 38–77. Hughes-Hallet, Lucy, 1985. Ruling Passions. Observer, 23 Jun, Review, p. 23. Kenyon, Olga, [1993]. The Writer’s Imagination: Interviews with Major International Women Novelists. Bradford: University of Bradford Print Unit, pp. 9–21. Leith, Sam, 2009. Writing in Terms of Pleasure. Guardian, 25 Apr, Review, pp. 12–13. Murdoch, Iris. 1985. Still Life with Sunflowers: Iris Murdoch talks to A. S. Byatt at the ICA. Books and Bookmen (Jul), pp. 28–9.

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Noakes, Jonathan, 2004. Interview with A. S. Byatt. In: Margaret Reynolds and Jonathan Noakes, eds, A. S. Byatt: The Essential Guide. London: Vintage, pp. 11–32. Todd, Richard, 1991. Interview with A. S. Byatt. Netherlands Society for English Studies, 1 (1), pp. 36–44. Tonkin, Boyd, 1999. Antonia S. Byatt in Interview with Boyd Tonkin. Anglistik, 10 (2), pp. 15–26. Toomey, P. 1978. A. S. Byatt: A Sense of Timelessness. The Times, 28 Oct, p. 12. Tredell, Nicolas, 1994. A. S. Byatt. In: Conversations with Critics. Manchester: Carcanet, pp. 58–74. Wachtel, Eleanor, 1993. A. S. Byatt. In: Writers & Company. Toronto: Knopf, pp. 77–89. Walker, Jonathan, 2006. An Interview with A. S. Byatt and Lawrence Norfolk. Contemporary Literature, 47 (3), pp. 323–42.

VII. Selected reviews of A. S. Byatt’s fiction

Shadow of a Sun Anon., 1964. New Novels. The Times, 9 Jan, p. 13. Hardy, Forsyth, 1964. Fiction. Scotsman, 9 Jan, Weekend Magazine, p. 2. [Johnson, Marigold], 1964. Living with a Genius. Times Literary Supplement, 9 Jan, p. 21. Levin, Martin, 1964. Reader’s Report. New York Times Book Review, 26 Jul, pp. 32–3. Maynahan, Julian, 1964. Mrs Gaskell up to Date. Observer, 12 Jan, Weekend Review, p. 25. Raphael, Frederic, 1964. Girl in a Trap. Sunday Times, 12 Jan, Weekly Review, p. 38.

The Game Anon., 1967. New Fiction. The Times, 12 Jan, p. 14. Bradbury, Malcolm, 1968. On from Murdoch. Encounter, 31 (1), pp. 72–4. Haltrecht, Montague, 1967. Within the Space of an Evening. Sunday Times, 15 Jan, Weekly Review, p. 30. Levin, Michael, 1968. Reader’s Report. New York Times Book Review, 17 Mar, p. 36. Nye, Robert, 1967. Chips off the Modern Block. Guardian, 13 Jan, p. 7. Wardle, Irving, 1967. Secrets of a Glass Menagerie. Observer, 15 Jan, Review, p. 26. [Wilmers, Mary-Kay], 1967. Child’s Play. Times Literary Supplement, 19 Jan, p. 41.

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The Virgin in the Garden Dinnage, Rosemary, 1979. England in the 50s. New York Times Book Review, 1 Apr, p. 20. Irwin, Michael, 1978. Growing Up in 1953. Times Literary Supplement, 3 Nov, p. 1277. King, Francis, 1978. Grand Scale. Spectator, 2 Dec, pp. 26–7. Murdoch, Iris, 1978. Force Fields. New Statesman, 3 Nov, p. 586. Naughton, John, 1978. Leavisites in Yorkshire. Listener, 16 Nov, pp. 658–9. Nye, Robert, 1978. Common Room & Kitchen. Guardian, 2 Nov, p. 9. Paulin, Tom, 1979. When the Ghost Begins to Quicken. Encounter, 52 (5), pp. 76–7. Thwaite, Anthony, 1978. The New Elizabethans. Observer, 5 Nov, Sunday Plus, p. 30. Widman, R. L., 1979. Shades of Brit. Lit. Washington Post, 16 Mar, p. B2.

Still Life Barber, Dulan, 1985. Spinning Faster. Times Higher Education Supplement, 19 Jul, p. 21. Brookner, Anita, 1985. Sisters and Lovers. London Evening Standard, 26 Jun, p. 21. Burgess, Anthony, 1985. The Courage of the Clear Eye. Fiction Magazine, Aug–Sep, p. 31. Dick, Kay, 1985. Full Life. Literary Review, Jun, pp. 48–9. Fenton, James, 1985. The Tale of Two Sisters. The Times, 27 Jun, p. 11. Jones, Lewis, 1985. What’s Wrong with Somerville? Spectator, 20 Jul, p. 31. Kemp, Peter, 1985. Still Life with Books. Sunday Times, 30 Jun, p. 45. Lewis, Roger, 1985. Larger than Life. New Statesman, 28 Jun, p. 29. McManus, Jeanne, 1985. Brain Children in Britain. Washington Post Book World, 22 Nov, p. B18. Mars-Jones, Adam, 1985. Doubts about the Monument. Times Literary Supplement, 28 Jun, p. 720. Naughton, John, 1985. Potters’ Tale. Listener, 8 Aug, p. 31. Nye, Robert, 1985. The Iliad from a Local Row. Guardian, 27 Jun, p. 11. Parrinder, Patrick, 1985. Thirty Years Ago. London Review of Books, 18 Jul, p. 17. Sage, Lorna, 1985. How We Live Now. Observer, 23 Jun, p. 22. West, Paul, 1985. Sensations of Being Alive. New York Times Book Review, 24 Nov, p. 15. Westlake, Michael, 1989. The Hard Idea of Truth. PN Review, 15 (4), pp. 33–7.

Sugar and Other Stories Brookner, Anita, 1987. Fear in a Handful of Pages. Spectator, 11 Apr, pp. 35–7. Craig, Patricia, 1987. The Grace of Accuracy. Sunday Times, 12 Apr, p. 58.

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Duchêne, Anne, 1987. Ravening Time. Times Literary Supplement, 10 Apr, p. 395. Durrant, Sabine, 1987. Shavings and Splinters. New Statesman, 15 May, pp. 29–30. Feinstein, Elaine, 1987. Solace of Intellect. The Times, 9 Apr, p. 13. Schwartz, Lynne Sharon, 1987. At Home with the Supernatural. New York Times Book Review, 19 Jul, p. 5. Spufford, Francis, 1987. The Mantle of Jehova. London Review of Books, 25 Jun, pp. 22–3.

Possession: A Romance Brookner, Anita, 1990. Eminent Victorians and Others. Spectator, 3 Mar, p. 35. Coe, Jonathan, 1990. Byatt’s Pendulum. Guardian, 1 Mar, p. 23. Dirda, Michael, 1990. The Incandescent Spell of Possession. Washington Post, 17 Oct, pp. C1ff. Feinstein, Elaine, 1990. Eloquent Victorians. New Statesman, 16 Mar, p. 38. Heller, Susan Anderson, 1990. Chronicle. New York Times, 17 Oct, p. B5. Heron, Liz, 1990. Fiction. Times Educational Supplement, 6 Apr, p. 26. Jenkyns, Richard, 1990. Disinterring Buried Lives. Times Literary Supplement, 2 Mar, pp. 213–14. Karlin, Danny, 1990. Prolonging Her Absence. London Review of Books, 8 Mar, pp. 17–18. Kemp, Peter, 1990. An Extravaganza of Victoriana. Sunday Times, 4 Mar, p. H6. Koning, Christina, 1990. Ladies of Letters Look in the Mirror. Observer, 11 Mar, p. 68. Lehmann-Haupt, Christopher, 1990. Books of the Times: When There Was Such a Thing as Romantic Love. New York Times Book Review, 25 Oct, p. C24. McAleer, John, 1990. Satirizing the Academy. Chicago Tribune, 18 Nov, p. 14. Murphy, Nicola, 1990. A Romance of Literary Crit. The Times, 1 Mar, p. 17. Parini, Jay, 1990. Unearthing the Secret Lover. New York Times Book Review, 21 Oct, p. 11. Rifkind, Donna, 1991. Victoria’s Secret. New Criterion, 9 (6), pp. 77–80. Rothstein, Mervyn, 1991. Best Seller Breaks Rule on Crossing the Atlantic. New York Times, 31 Jan, pp. C17ff. Saunders, Kate, 1990. One Party that Proves a Best-Seller. Sunday Telegraph, 21 Oct, p. 5. See, Carolyn, 1990. At a Magic Threshold. Los Angeles Times Book Review, 28 Oct, pp. 2ff. Shrimpton, Nicolas, 1990. Victorian Eco-Chamber. Independent on Sunday, 4 Mar, Review, p. 18.

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Smith, Anne, 1990. Sifting the Ash. Listener, 1 Mar, p. 29. Stout, Mira, 1991. What Possessed A. S. Byatt? New York Times, 26 May, Magazine, p. 121.

Angels and Insects Barrell, John, 1992. When Will He Suspect? London Review of Books, 19 Nov, pp. 18–19. Butler, Marilyn, 1992. The Moth and the Medium. Times Literary Supplement, 16 Oct, p. 22. Coetes, Joseph, 1993. A. S. Byatt’s Victoriana: Questions of Passion, Faith, and Science in 19th-Century England. Chicago Tribune, 13 Jun, Section 14, p. 3. Gerrard, Nicci, 1992. Butterfly Netted. Observer, 18 Oct, p. 60. Glendinning, Victoria, 1992. Angels and Ministers of Graciousness. The Times, 7 Nov, Saturday Review, p. 45. Hawthorne, Mary, 1993. Winged Victoriana. New Yorker, 21 Jun, pp. 98–100. Hodgson, Godfrey, 1992. A Struggling Society Well-Read in Tooth and Claw. Independent, 14 Nov, p. 29. Hughes, Kathryn, 1992. Repossession. New Statesman, 6 Nov, pp. 49–50. Kemp, Peter, 1992. A Near Myth. Sunday Times, 18 Oct, Section 6, p. 13. Kendrick. Walter, 1993. Fiction in Review. Yale Review, 81 (4), pp. 135–7. Lanchester, John, 1992. Angels and Insects. Guardian, 10 Nov, G2, p. 12. Lesser, Wendy, 1993. Séance and Sensibility. New York Times Book Review, 27 Jun, p. 14. Masello, Robert, 1993. A Cloud of Butterflies. Los Angeles Times Book Review, 13 Jun, p. 8. Moore, Caroline, 1992. A Rare Specimen. Daily Telegraph, 14 Nov, Weekend, p. 22. Norfolk, Lawrence, 1993. Troubled Souls: Tales of Murder, Mystery and Obsession. Washington Post Book World, 2 May, pp. 1ff. Taylor, Paul, 1992. A Mixed Benison from Tennyson. Independent on Sunday, 25 Oct, Review, p. 28.

The Matisse Stories Bawer, Bruce, 1995. What We Do for Art. New York Times Book Review, 30 Apr, pp. 9–10. Brookner, Anita, 1994. It’s Nicer, Much Nicer, than Nice. Spectator, 15 Jan, pp. 28–9. Clark, Alex, 1994. Artists and Models. Times Literary Supplement, 14 Jan, p. 21. Dunmore, Helen, 1994. Demolish, then Rebuild with Care. Observer, 2 Jan, Review, p. 17. Dyer, Geoff, 1994. Precious in the Pink. Guardian, 11 Jan, G2, pp. 7–8.

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Glendinning, Victoria, 1993. Pleasure Principles. The Times, 30 Dec, Books, p. 32. Kemp, Peter, 1994. Still Lives. Sunday Times, 2 Jan, Books, pp. 1–2. McWilliam, Candida, 1994. Death, Decay and Hairdos. Independent on Sunday, 9 Jan, Review, p. 31. Roberts, Michele, 1994. Matisse: All the Nudes That’s Fit to Print. Independent, 22 Jan, p. 30. Robson, David, 1994. Painting in Prose. Sunday Telegraph, 9 Jan, Books, p. 4. Spurling, Hilary, 1994. The Art of the Sensual. Daily Telegraph, 8 Jan, p. AB9.

The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye: Five Fairy Stories Adil, Alev, 1995. Obeying the Genie. Times Literary Supplement, 6 Jan, p. 20. Beckett, Andy, 1995. Confessions of a Stout Sheherazade. Independent on Sunday, 1 Jan, p. 34. Cusk, Rachel, 1994. Then we all Lived Happily Ever After. The Times, 29 Dec, p. 33. Dunmore, Helen, 1995. Magic in the Palm of a Hand. Observer, 1 Jan, Review, p. 17. Holloway, David, 1995. Princess and Boris Becker. Daily Telegraph, 7 Jan, p. 7. Shilling, Jane, 1995. The Powerful Magic of the Fairy-Tale. Sunday Telegraph, 15 Jan, Review, p. 10. Smith, Sarah A., 1995. Unexpectedly Witty. Literary Review, Jan, pp. 9–10. Spufford, Francis, 1995. A Djinn in the Tale. Guardian, 17 Jan, G2, p. 9. Willard, Nancy, 1997. Dreams of Jinni. New York Times Book Review, 9 Nov, p. 38.

Babel Tower Adair, Tom, 1996. Too Many Tongues Twist the Message. Scotsman, 19 May, Spectrum, p. 11. Barnacle, Hugo, 1996. Has A. S. Byatt Lost the Plot? Independent, 4 May, Weekend, p. 11. Coetzee, J. M., 1996. En Route to the Catastrophe. New York Review of Books, 6 Jun, p. 17. Fox, Nick, 1996. Stemming the Tide of the ‘60s. Los Angeles Times Book Review, 16 Jun, p. 6. Good, David, 1996. Speaking in Many Tongues. New Scientist, 18 May, p. 50. Hensher, Philip, 1996. Her Shaping Spirit of Imagination. Spectator, 11 May, pp. 34–6.

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Heron, Liz, 1996. Resuscitating the Forgotten Sixties. Times Educational Supplement, 17 May, p. 7. Hill, Susan, 1996. A Bit Too Clever. Literary Review, May, pp. 38–9. Hughes-Hallett, Lucy, 1996. Swinging in the Sixties. Sunday Times, 5 May, Books, p. 9. Hulbert, Ann, 1996. Hungry for Books. New York Times Book Review, 9 Jun, p. 7. Kellaway, Kate, 1996. Tall Stories. Observer, 5 May, Review, p. 14. Lively, Penelope, 1996. Truth in Many Tongues. The Times, 9 May, p. 40. Moore, Caroline, 1996. Of Love, Loss and Depravity. Sunday Telegraph, 5 May, p. 14. Sage, Lorna, 1996. Frederica’s Story. Times Literary Supplement, 10 May, p. 24. Seymour, Miranda, 1996. An Idea Too Big for Its Plot. Financial Times, 11 May, p. 12. Taylor, D. J., 1996. My Generation. Guardian, 10 May, G2 p. 11. Tharoor, Shashi, 1996. Tongues of Fire. Washington Post Book World, 12 May, pp. 3ff.

Elementals: Stories of Fire and Ice Clark, Alex, 1998. Byatt’s New Short Stories of Fire and Ice. Guardian, 5 Dec, Saturday Review, p. 10. Emck, Katy, 1998. The Consolations of a Kindly Genie. Times Literary Supplement, 13 Nov, p. 25. Gardam, Jane, 1998. Women Breaking Out. Literary Review, Nov, p. 49. Grant, Katie, 1998. Tricks of the Light. Spectator, 14 Nov, p. 54. Hughes-Hallett, Lucy, 1998. Welcome to the Pleasure Zone. Sunday Times, 8 Nov, Books, p. 13. Perkins, Emily, 1998. Naming Nîmes. Observer, 22 Nov, Review, p. 14. Stern, Gabriella, 1999. Elementals: Stories of Fire and Ice. Wall Street Journal, 9 Apr, p. W10. Wagner, Erica, 1998. Size Doesn’t Matter for Brief Inspiration. The Times, 12 Nov, p. 42.

The Biographer’s Tale Briscoe, Joanne, 2000. Polymathy and Pastiche. Independent on Sunday, 18 Jun, p. 50. Clark, Alex, 2000. Mischief Maker. Guardian, 3 Jun, Saturday Review p. 10. Franklin, Ruth, 2001. Inauthentic Fabrics. New Republic, 23 Apr, pp. 37–40. Jensen, Hal, 2000. Unexaggerated Lions. Times Literary Supplement, 2 Jun, p. 23. Lee, Hermione, 2000. Just Get a Life. Observer, 28 May, Review, p. 11. Norris, Pamela, 2000. Better Write Novels. Literary Review, Jun, p. 50.

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Ridley, Jane, 2000. Missing the Connections. Spectator, 10 Jun, p. 38. Seymour, Miranda, 2000. History Lesson. New Statesman, 12 Jun, pp. 53–4. Scurr, Ruth, 2000. Underlings. London Review of Books, 10 Aug, pp. 38–9. Shields, Carol, 2000. Lives that Nestle within Lives. Daily Telegraph, 20 May, p. A2.

A Whistling Woman Adams, Lorraine, 2003. Lady Novelist. New Republic, 17 Nov, pp. 37–41. Allardice, Lisa, 2002. So Much Freedom. Daily Telegraph, 31 Aug, p. A5. Brace, Eric, 2002. In ‘Possession’ of Little Substance. Washington Post, 16 Aug, Weekend, p. T50. Clark, Alex, 2002. Trials by Fire. Guardian, 7 Sep, Review, pp. 28–9. Craig, Amanda, 2002. When Ideas Get in the Way of Fiction. The Times, 28 Aug, T2, p. 20. Davies, Steve, 2002. Birds of Paradise. Independent, 7 Sep, Magazine, p. 24. Deveson, Tom, 2002. When More Means Less. Sunday Times, 8 Sep, Culture, p. 44. Hensher, Philip, 2002. An Ending but not a Conclusion. Spectator, 7 Sep, pp. 31–2. MacFarlane, Robert, 2002. A Very Bad Case of Birds on the Brain. Observer, 15 Sep, Review, p. 17. Massie, Alan, 2002. Satirical Swing Through the Sixties with Modern George Eliot. Scotsman, 7 Sep, Weekend, p. 6. Merkin, Daphne, 2003. The Novel as Information Superhighway. New York Times, 19 Jan, Section 7, p. 10. Moore, Caroline, 2002. Era of Pseuds and Cults. Sunday Telegraph, 8 Sep, Review, p. 15 Norris, Pamela, 2002. Foxy Sexuality. Literary Review, Sep, p. 51. Scurr, Ruth, 2002. The Winter of the Virgin Queen. Times Literary Supplement, 30 Aug, p. 6. Taylor, D. J., 2002. Farewell to the Virgin in the Garden. New Statesman, 26 Aug, pp. 34–5. Turner, A. K., 2002. Spreading Their Wings. Washington Post, 8 Dec, p. T3. Yeazell, Ruth B., 2002. Overindulgence. London Review of Books, 28 Nov, pp. 19–21.

Little Black Book of Stories Abell, Stephen, 2003. Making It a Just So Story. Spectator, 29 Nov, p. 58. Craig, Amanda, 2003/04. A Monumental Woman, Literary Review, Dec/Jan, p. 58. Davis, Barbara Beckerman, 2005. Little Black Book of Stories. Antioch Review, 63 (2), pp. 398–9.

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Dunmore, Helen, 2003. I Am Woman, Hear Me Roar. . . . The Times, 25 Oct, Weekend Review, p. 13. Matthews, Samantha, 2003. Monsters, Trolls and Creative Writers. Times Literary Supplement, 31 Oct, pp. 21–2. Owen, Katie, 2003. Jam, Scones and Horror. Daily Telegraph, 17 Nov, Review, p. 16. Smith, Ali, 2003. Her Dark Materials. Guardian, 6 Dec, p. 30.

The Children’s Book Armstrong, Isobel, 2009. How Byatt Works. London Review of Books, 22 Oct, p. 4. Craig, Patricia, 2009. A Tale Fashioned from Sturdy Strands. Irish Times, 25 Apr, Weekend Review, p. 12. Dunmore, Helen, 2009. The Children’s Book by A. S. Byatt. The Times, 25 Apr, Review, p. 7. Gee, Sophie, 2009. A Darker Magic. Financial Times, 2 May, Arts & Books, p. 16. Kemp, Peter, 2009. Out of this World. Sunday Times, 26 Apr, Culture, p. 47. Lowry, Elizabeth, 2009. The Stuff of Dreams. Times Literary Supplement, 15 May, pp. 19–20. Mars-Jones, Adam, 2009. The Danger of Losing the Plot. Observer, 3 May, Culture, p. 22. Shilling, Jane, 2009. Book of the Week: The Children’s Book by A. S. Byatt. Sunday Telegraph, 26 Apr, Culture, p. 27. Tonkin, Boyd, 2009. Passions in Clay. Independent, 1 May, pp. 26–7. Walden, George, 2009. Period Pains. New Statesman, 23 Apr, pp. 48–9. Wood, James, 2009. Bristling with Diligence. London Review of Books, 8 Oct, pp. 6, 8.

VIII. Selected criticism of A. S. Byatt’s fiction Adams, Ann Marie, 2003. Dead Authors, Born Readers, and Defunct Critics: Investigating Ambiguous Critical Identities in A. S. Byatt’s Possession. Journal of the Midwest Modern Language Association, 36 (1), pp. 107–24. Adams, Ann Marie, 2008a. Defending ‘Identity and the Writer’: A. S. Byatt’s Delineation of the Proper ‘Function of Criticism at the Present Time’. Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction, 49 (4), pp. 339–56. Adams, Ann Marie, 2008b. Reader, I Memorialized Him: A. S. Byatt’s Representation of Alfred Lord Tennyson in ‘The Conjugial Angel’. Literature Interpretation Theory, 19 (1), pp. 26–46. Alban, Gillian M. E., 2003. Melusine the Serpent Goddess in A. S. Byatt’s Possession and in Mythology. New York and Oxford: Lexington Books.

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Alexander, Flora, 1989. Versions of the Real: A. S. Byatt, Still Life. In: Flora Alexander, Contemporary Women Novelists. London: Arnold, pp. 34–41. Alfer, Alexa, 1999. ‘A second that grows first, a black unreal/In which a real lies hidden and alive’: The Fiction of A. S. Byatt. Anglistik 10 (2), pp. 27–48. Alfer, Alexa, 2001. Realism and Its Discontents: The Virgin in the Garden and Still Life. In: Alexa Alfer and Michael J. Noble, eds, Essays on the Fiction of A. S. Byatt: Imagining the Real. Westport (CT): Greenwood, pp. 47–59. Alsop, Derek and Walsh, Chris, 1999. Postmodern Readings: Possession. In: Derek Alsop and Chris Walsh, The Practice of Reading: Interpreting the Novel. London: Macmillan, pp. 163–83. Andres, Sophia, 2006. From Camelot to Hyde Park: The Lady of Shalott’s Pre-Raphaelite Postmodernism in A. S. Byatt and Tracy Chevalier. Victorians Institute Journal, 34, pp. 7–37. Ashworth, Ann, 1994. Fairy Tales in A. S. Byatt’s Possession. Journal of Evolutionary Psychology, 15 (1–2), pp. 93–4. Avci, Elif Öztabak, 2005. Mrs. Brown’s Work in A. S. Byatt’s ‘Art Work’. Interactions: Ege University Journal of British and American Studies, 14 (2), pp. 25–32. Baena, Rosalía, 1998. Challenging History, Challenging Fiction: A. S. Byatt’s Possession. In: Enrique Banús and Beatriz Elío, eds, Actas del IV Congreso ‘Cultura Europea’, Pamplona: Aranzadi, pp. 1169–73. Bear, Bethany, 2007. ‘Truny, Trunt, and the Trolls in the Fells’: Natural Jouissance in A. S. Byatt’s ‘A Stone Woman’. Philological Review, 33 (2), pp. 67–86. Becker, Susanne, 2001. Postmodernism’s Happy Ending: Possession! In: Beate Neumeier, ed., Engendering Realism and Postmodernism: Contemporary Women Writers in Britain, Amsterdam/New York: Rodopi, pp. 17–30. Beli, Vesna, 1998. Intercultural Reading of A. S. Byatt’s ‘The Chinese Lobster’. Studia Romanica et Anglica Zagrabiensia, 43, pp. 61–8. Bell, Hazel, 1991. Indexing Fiction: A Story of Complexity. The Indexer, 17 (4), pp. 251–6. Bernard, Catherine, 2003. Forgery, Dis/Possession, Ventriloquism in the Works of A. S. Byatt and Peter Ackroyd. Miscelánea: A Journal of English and American Studies, 28, pp. 11–24. Bigliazzi, Silvia, 1999. ‘Art Work’: A. S. Byatt vs. Henry Matisse, or The Metamorphoses of Writing. Textus: English Studies in Italy, 12 (1), pp. 185–99. Boccardi, Mariadele, 2001. Biography, the Postmodern Last Frontier: Banville, Barnes, Byatt, and Unsworth. Q/W/E/R/T/Y: Arts, Littératures and Civilisations du Monde Anglophone, 11 (Oct), pp. 149–57.

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Notes: Literary works can be found under authors’ names. ‘n.’ after a page reference indicates the number of a note on that page. art 53, 70, 140–1 Barker, Pat Regeneration 135 Barrie, J. M. Peter Pan 118, 119, 120, 136n.1 Barthes, Roland 94 Blake, William 34n.1, 35n.4, 67, 68 Songs of Innocence and Experience 20 Bloom, Harold 14, 145 Browning, Robert 7, 95, 100, 148 Burroughs, William 65, 72 Byatt, A. S. Angels and Insects 5, 6, 38, 95, 105, 148 ‘The Conjugial Angel’ 148–9, 156n.2 ‘Morpho Eugenia’ 8, 125, 133–4, 136, 150, 152 Babel Tower 5–6, 38, 50, 63–78, 79, 85, 88, 90n.1–3, 119, 131, 146 The Biographer’s Tale 8, 38, 73, 129–32, 135–6, 139, 144, 152 The Children’s Book 4, 7–8, 38, 118–29, 134–6

Degrees of Freedom 3, 138–9 The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye 5, 38, 105, 107–14 ‘The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye’ 109–10, 112–13, 114, 116, 129, 154 ‘Dragons’ Breath’ 116–17 ‘The Glass Coffin’ 107–8, 110–11 ‘Gode’s Story’ 106–8 ‘The Story of the Eldest Princess’ 24, 88, 111–12, 125 Elementals 38, 105 ‘Badlady’ 116 ‘Christ in the House of Martha and Mary’ 140 ‘Crocodile Tears’ 154 The Game 3, 11, 24–34, 70, 88, 114, 121, 122 Imagining Characters 5, 108, 142–3 Little Black Book of Stories 38, 105 ‘A Stone Woman’ 113–14, 153–4 ‘The Thing in the Woods’ 116–18 The Matisse Stories 5, 105, 140 ‘The Chinese Lobster’ 156 On Histories and Stories 7, 139, 147–52

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Passions of the Mind 4–5, 37, 139, 143 Portraits in Fiction 140 Possession 4, 5, 6–7, 37, 64, 92–107, 113, 115n.4&8, 119, 130, 133, 139, 145, 146, 149 The Shadow of the Sun 3, 11–24, 31, 44, 45, 138, 144–5 Still Life 4, 5, 37–8, 43, 52–62, 63, 64, 76, 82, 88, 90n.1, 102, 143 Sugar and Other Stories 5, 105 ‘The Dried Witch’ 116, 154 ‘In the Air’ 116 ‘Precipice-encurled’ 6 ‘Sugar’ 1–2 Unruly Times 3, 146–7 The Virgin in the Garden 4, 5, 19, 38–53, 55, 64, 75, 82, 90n.1, 119, 122 A Whistling Woman 5, 6, 38, 73, 78–90, 129, 131, 132, 135 Carson, Rachel Silent Spring 73, 82, 131–2 Chomsky, Noam 77, 82 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor 3, 15, 24, 27, 34, 35n.6, 8&9 ‘The Ancient Mariner’ 20 ‘Psyche’ 28, 33–4, 35n.8 Darwinism 80, 83–8, 132–4, 152 Davies, William Henry ‘Leisure’ 35n.4 Dawkins, Richard 74, 82, 91n.5 de Bernières, Louis 151–2 Drabble, Margaret 24, 155 Eco, Umberto 155 The Name of the Rose 92 Eliot, George 24, 139 Middlemarch 76, 91n.4, 104 ‘Notes on Form in Art’ 55 Eliot, T. S. 19–20, 24, 41–2, 44–5, 53 ‘The Metaphysical Poets’ 44–5 ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’ 41–2, 100

fairytale 7, 8, 38, 64, 98, 105–25, 132–4 feminism 14, 29, 111 Fowles, John The French Lieutenant’s Woman 66, 94, 96, 115n.4 Foucault, Michel 44 Freud, Sigmund 107 Haas, Philip 150 Herbert, George 31 ‘The Elixir’ 27 history 7, 39–45, 56–7, 99–101, 104, 148–9, 153 Jacobus, Mary 146–8 Johnson, B. S. 36 Jones, Steve 73, 74, 84 Kermode, Frank 79 Kipling, Rudyard Puck of Pook’s Hill 118 language 8, 20–1, 44, 54–5, 57–8, 61–2, 67–8, 70–6, 90n.3, 101–2 Lawrence, D. H. 12, 14–16, 24, 25, 127 The Rainbow 35n.3 Women in Love 14 Leavis, F. R. 13–15, 19–20, 24, 74, 76, 89, 147 Lessing, Doris 151, 155 The Golden Notebook 69, 112 memory 43–4 metaphor 53–7 Mitchell, David 153 Ghostwritten 153–4 Cloud Atlas 153 Murdoch, Iris 3, 5, 26, 60, 62, 67–8, 122, 135, 138–9, 151 An Accidental Man 60, 67 ‘Against Dryness’ 60, 63, 72, 90n.2 ‘The Sublime and the Beautiful Revisited’ 60

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narrative 78–81, 109–11 narrator 40, 43–4, 48, 53–4, 60, 96, 102, 103–4 Nesbit, E. 118 Norfolk, Lawrence 151, 152–3, 154 The Pope’s Rhinoceros 152

Sartre, Jean Paul 55, 57 science 6, 28, 30, 55, 59–60, 72–8, 82–9, 131 Snow, C. P. 36, 74 Spender, Stephen 40 spiritualism 100, 148–9, 156n.2

postmodernism 6–7, 37, 65, 94–5, 99 Proust, Marcel 44, 140 psychoanalysis 107, 142

Tennyson, Alfred 100, 148–9 Tennyson, Emily 148–9

reading 4, 9, 47, 102–3, 105, 107, 111–12, 128–9, 141–3, 146, 156n.2 realism 5, 16, 19, 21, 24, 36–9, 51–2, 54, 64–5, 90n.2, 108–11, 156 religion 46, 70, 74–5, 80–4, 86, 89 Ricoeur, Paul 56–7 Robbe-Grillet, Alain 54–5, 66 Romanticism 3, 14–17, 19, 27, 45, 68 Rushdie, Salman 151, 154–5

Wilson, O. E. 74, 82, 91n.6 Wordsworth, William 3, 27, 45, 146–8 The Prelude 47, 146–8 ‘A slumber did my spirit steal’ 59, 60–1 writing 11, 13–14, 21–2, 26–7, 48–9 Van Gogh, Vincent 12, 52, 53 vision 16–17, 18, 27–9, 45–9, 54–5