UNIT 2. BYATT\'S Possession PDF

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Resumen del material básico de consulta: LITERATURA IV. EL GIRO A LA POSMODERNIDAD...

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Antonia S. Byatt. Ventriloquizing the Victorian Past from the Perspective of the Postmodern Present: Possession (1989)

Byatt’s personal experience of life in her works Byatt herself suffered from analogous situations represented in her works: her professional success as a teacher and a literary critic was counterpointed by her divorce. She experienced the tragedy of losing a son. Most of Byatt’s narratives tackle the female conflict between creativity and domesticity. From an early age, Byatt took refuge in literary and fantasy worlds, mainly belonging to the realm of fairy tales and myths, a long-life passion that is reflected in many of her writings, Possession being a suitable paradigm in this respect. The problems of female vision, art, thought and independence become one of her most recurrent themes throughout her fruitful career, accompanied by the image of the frozen and stony woman so reiterated in folk tales. [Are these features to be found in Possession?]. •

Events that emphasize the social barriers that prevent intellectual women from reaching their goals. Maud constitutes another archetypal heroine of Byatt’s novels, divided between her sentimental drives and her professional aspirations, and looking for autonomy and freedom.

As in Possession, literary theory becomes a serious obstacle for the scholar and realism is counterpointed by myth and fantasy in a superb exercise at postmodern metafiction. A. S. Byatt has attempted to amalgamate what, at first sight, appear to be contraries: a successful career and domestic life; criticism and fiction writing; narratives both meditative and passionate, realist and romantic. The best example of this is provided by Possession (1990), that rara avis of a book.

Works that formulate the same themes as Possession •

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The Virgin in the Garden (1978), set in 1953 —the coronation year of Elizabeth II— and concerning again two sisters, Frederica and Stephanie, the latter representing female despair when she falls in love with Daniel Orton, a curate, and the regrets to have become sentimentally involved with him. Byatt’s ventriloquist capacity is exemplified by the insertion in the narrative of the invented allegorical verse-drama of a certain Alexander Wedderburn, based on the life of Elizabeth I. Babel Tower constitutes a brilliant portrait of the sixties in England. The novel contains a metafictional novel-within-a-novel —Babbletower—. The Biographer’s Tale (2000), another example of Byatt’s fictional progression and a reflection on the limits of biography, presents a Chinese box structure. The narration deals with the impossible construction from the part of a scholar (Phineas G. Nason) of the biography of a fictional biographer (Scholes Destry-Scholes) that wrote the lives of the biologist Carl Linnaeus, the eugenieist Francis Galton and the playwright Henrik Ibsen.

Key points to be analysed in Possession Rejecting a linear temporal pattern, and assuming instead a cyclical and parallel plot, Possession takes the reader back and forth from the present-time narrative to the middle of the nineteenth century through a collection of miscellaneous texts. The cyclical nature

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Antonia S. Byatt. Ventriloquizing the Victorian Past from the Perspective of the Postmodern Present: Possession (1989)

of the plot contributes to the reader’s constant immersion in the two fictional worlds, which become embedded into each other, the past illuminating the present. Another major structuring device of Byatt’s novel, is “the repetition of scene, action, phrase, object, color, and even personae”. They are texts-within-the-text, creating a metafictional crucible, a ventriloquist climax, showing the desire of transcending the barriers of the traditional fictional work. Literary allusions are legion in this novel, which makes the readers aware of the fictional essence of literature while, at the same time, they suspend their disbelief and enter the magical worlds of the novel enjoying the plot it tells, marking the frontier between reality and fiction. •

There are many instances of ventriloquism in the book, a multiplicity of voices and texts. These writings (poems misinterpreted by the critics) serve as clues for Roland and Maud to pursue their quest, in the manner of literary detectives, at the same time that they reinforce the attraction between each other and their connection with the Victorian lovers

Possession is a masterful rewriting —a pastiche— of Victorian literature, told from a postmodern perspective. Byatt brilliantly agglutinates several apparently heterogeneous texts and genres that end up by composing an articulate unity. The novelist vindicates the depth and complexity of Victorian attitudes and thought, deploring the present-day vision of that fascinating period of English history. Byatt defended Victorian thinkers (for whom art and science were reciprocally inspiring rather than reciprocally restricted) against contemporary literary theorists . •

In general terms, it can be stated that Ash is modelled most closely on Robert Browning and Tennyson, also with some features of Wordsworth, Arnold, Morris, Ruskin and Carlyle, whilst Christabel is a composite of Emily Dickinson, Christina Rossetti and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, with some minor characteristics of George Eliot and the Brontës. On her part, Ellen Ash finds her parallel in Jane Carlyle, whose marriage to Thomas Carlyle was never consummated.

Possession is also a romance in the popular sense of a love story, or, to be more specific, the development of two parallel love stories: that of the Victorian literary writers Randolph Henry Ash and Christabel LaMotte on the one hand, and that of the academics Roland Michell and Maud Bailey. The latter couple represents the reserved nature and the reluctance to engage in a sentimental affair on the part of academic professionals who are suspicious of emotional attachment. Significantly, Roland will eventually reach the end of his quest by becoming a poet, like Ash himself: the passionate and clandestine Victorian love affair teaches both characters that love is worth living, even though they may be suffering. The allegorical folk and fairy tales inserted in the narrative produce a similar effect, providing links with the main plots and exploiting analogies between the characters through the use of imagery and metaphor. An example of this would be the green, white and gold imagery associated with Christabel, the Princess in the glass coffin, Melusine, and Maud. Possession is much more than a metaliterary exercise: it provides an existential and epistemological reflection on the restrictions of human (and therefore academic)

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Antonia S. Byatt. Ventriloquizing the Victorian Past from the Perspective of the Postmodern Present: Possession (1989)

knowledge, the (im)possibility of reaching the abyssal depth of other people and the influence that the past has on the present (and, maybe, vice versa). •

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The postscript of the novel exposes the impossibility of acquiring a complete understanding of, or return to, the past, no matter how symbolically alive this past may be, demonstrating to the contemporary characters the power of love and the meaning that it gives to life. Total solitude and isolation are rejected as healthy options for the human quest: no man/woman is an island. The final lesson —validated by the Postscript— is that the life of human beings with their joys and sufferings, their greatnesses and miseries, is too complex to be reduced to a simplistic amalgam of conventions and archetypes.

Byatt “rejects the academic tendency to reduce literary works to a convenient label” Being a perceptive literary critic, a biographer, and a theoretician herself, Antonia S. Byatt is fully aware of the limits of these tasks, subordinated to the greater importance of literary creativity. Biographers (like the avid Mortimer Cropper and Leonora Stern) are especially censured for their desire to “possess” and know everything about their subjects, mostly emphasizing psychoanalytical and sexual events of their lives that they can never prove in full. In fact, they live the lives of other people. She even parodies Leonora Stern’s essays, representative of feminist/lesbian criticism at worst. Maud and Roland also assume this role of biographers, but they are excused because their eagerness to know is brought about by narrative curiosity, by a passionate desire to go on reading. They are “possessed” by the Ash-LaMotte story in a positive, adventurous way. Byatt does not believe in grand narratives either, and mocks those critical works that contain more footnotes than unobtrusive interpretive text as such, as is the case of the barren products of Blackadder’s “Ash Factory”. She also attacks the edition of Ellen Ash’s journals by the disillusioned Beatrice Nest. Sex is an essential issue in Possession With some distinctive nuances, fear of sex or physical intimacy is shared by most female characters in Possession, including Ellen Ash and Christabel LaMotte. Maud Bailey is a clear epitome of the anachronistic vision from our contemporary viewpoint of Victorian sexuality. She is described as “frosty” (like the heroines of many fairy tales), “icily regular, splendidly null” and, consequently, sexually repressed. Like Roland, afraid of romantic entanglement, she craves for solitude and “a white bed” (an emblem of celibacy) . Other symbols of Maud’s self-restraint are the orderliness of her flat and the confinement of her hair in her conspicuous turban. The sexual consummation of Roland’s and Maud’s relationship in the white bed represents the chance of integrating both the sentimental and the professional aspects of life, no matter how open and ambiguous their “postmodern” bond remains at the end of the novel, when Roland finds his poetic voice and Maud preserves her professional and

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Antonia S. Byatt. Ventriloquizing the Victorian Past from the Perspective of the Postmodern Present: Possession (1989)

sentimental autonomy, reaching the symbolic climatic union that Ash and Christabel so much longed for.

The use of irony Ironically, Byatt destroys any attempt from the part of any of the academics at constructing the entire Ash and LaMotte story. Continuous revelations and discoveries show that the knowledge and bold interpretations of scholars are very restricted and superficial. The novel establishes the (humble) limits of the task of the literary critic and biographer: as the “Postscript 1968” at the end of the novel seems to underline, it is impossible for the critic to know all the truth about literary authors, for there are always important details from the lives of human beings that cannot be apprehended. Ironically enough, Byatt aims at demonstrating in this postscript narrated by an omniscient voice that the reader remains to be the principal protagonist of the literary process. Hence the ironically cruel parody of the academic world in Possession (which can be read in this sense as a campus novel), in which (and this can obviously be a prejudiced attitude from the part of Byatt) American scholars like Mortimer Cropper and Leonora Stern are depicted as more academically predatory and superficial than their British counterparts. Paradoxically, many critical perspectives are portrayed in Possession: historical, textual, psychoanalytical, New Critical, structuralist, deconstructive, new historicist, cultural materialist, postcolonial… But they are deployed in a parodic way, in spite of their integral relevance for providing explanations and illuminating the interpretation of literary texts, for, in the end, the whole “truth” about them is a chimera.

Quotes from Byatt •

For the Victorians, everything was part of one thing: science, religion, philosophy, economics, politics, women, fiction, poetry. They didn’t compartmentalize —they thought BIG. Ruskin went out and learned geology and archaeology, then the history of painting, then mythology, and then he thought out, and he thought out. Now, if you get a literary theorist, they only talk to other literary theorists about literary theory. Nothing causes them to look out!

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Possession plays serious games with the variety of possible forms of narrating the past —the detective story, the biography, the mediaeval verse Romance, the modern romantic novel, and Hawthorne’s fantastic historical Romance in between, the campus novel, the Victorian third person narration, the epistolary novel, the forged manuscript novel, and the primitive fairy tale…

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