A.S. Byatt: Critical storytelling

A. S. Byatt

Contemporary British Novelists

Series editor:

Daniel Lea

already published

J. G. Ballard  Andrzej Gasiorek

Pat Barker  John Brannigan

Jim Crace  Philip Tew

James Kelman  Simon Kóvesi

Iain Sinclair  Brian Baker

Graham Swift  Daniel Lea

Irvine Welsh  Aaron Kelly

Jeanette Winterson  Susana Onega

A. S. Byatt

Critical Storytelling

Alexa Alfer and Amy J. Edwards de Campos

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.

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ISBN 978 0 7190 6652 8 hardback

First published 2010

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Contents

Series editor’s preface

Acknowledgements

Copyright acknowledgements

A. S. Byatt: biographical outline

Abbreviations

1 Introduction

2 Fathers, sisters and the anxiety of influence:

The Shadow of the Sun and The Game

3 Writing the contemporary:

The Virgin in the Garden and Still Life

4 Two cultures:

Babel Tower and A Whistling Woman

5 Tradition and transformation:

Possession and fairytales

6 The dark side of the tale:

The Children’s Book, The Biographer’s Tale and Angels and Insects

7 Critical storytelling:

peopling the paper house

Bibliography

Index

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 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

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

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.

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.

A. S. Byatt: biographical outline

Abbreviations

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

1

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 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 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 thought-provoking 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 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-or-hate 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 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 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 ventrilo-quism 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 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