Do people read the verse by Randolph Ash and Christabel

LaMotte that AS Byatt has supplied with her novel? Many proudly
admit not, even while saying they enjoy Possession, as if the
commonsensical reader knows better than to pause over this mockVictorian poetry. Byatt's American publishers initially wanted her to
cut large parts of it, fearing purchasers would be put off.
Certainly the novelist has taken an odd sort of gamble with her
pastiches. Most readers will surely not be able to recognise the genres
she imitates, the verse forms she mimics, the habits of diction and
imagery that she follows. Yet those who do appreciate these will see
that the "Browning" blank verse credited to Ash is ploddingly regular
stuff compared to the original; that in LaMotte's creations Christina
Rossetti's fable-mongering is awkwardly blended with Emily
Dickinson's staccato stanzas.
The gamble seems the greater as the poetry has no obvious
narrative function, except to serve as a kind of authentication device,
hints at a larger imagined world. Formally, indeed, it is not part of the
narrative. It is given without explanation. Other elements of pastiche bits of the "diary" of Ellen Ash, or of the academic biography of Ash
written by Mortimer Cropper - serve the plot. The enjoyable parodies
of feminist or post-structuralist literary criticism, meanwhile, have
sharply satirical purposes.
Yet "quotation" does set the mood for what follows. So, for
instance, LaMotte's sub-Dickinson lyric about the violence pent up
"behind the blinds" of domesticity heads the chapter where Maud and
Roland visit the house LaMotte once shared with her jealous
"companion", Blanche.
The poems provide clues to the relationship between Ash and
LaMotte - read rightly, the imagery of Melusina shows the poets were
in Yorkshire together - but also trigger mistaken interpretations. Byatt
relishes showing how, before Maud and Roland get digging,
academics have found all the wrong biographical suggestions in the
poetry.
"Pastiche" originally meant a medley of different styles, and
Byatt has fabricated a variety of texts from which the past is to be
pieced together. The pastiche poetry, however, suggests the gap
between modern "explanation" and the still mysterious voices of the
literary past.

The custom of opening sections of a novel with poetry has a

peculiar history. It was pioneered by Ann Radcliffe, in so many ways
both a formulaic and an extraordinarily influential novelist. In her
fiction, every chapter begins with its epigraph, usually a passage of
verse. She especially favoured Shakespeare (notably Macbeth) and
moody 18th-century graveyard verse, but she did also compose her
own poetry to make for the right atmosphere. Other gothic novelists
followed her lead.
Later, Sir Walter Scott took to fabricating appropriate, antiquesounding fragments of verse, meaningfully placed at the heads of
chapters. "I believe that, in some cases, where actual names are affixed
to the supposed quotations, it would be to little purpose to seek them in
the works of the authors referred to," Scott disarmingly admitted at the
beginning of Chronicles of the Canongate.
A few Victorian novelists pursued the trend, most teasingly
George Eliot, a favourite of Byatt. Middlemarch is full of mockfragments of verse and drama, carefully forged by Eliot (and
invariably passed over without comment by annotators and critics).
She clearly delighted in manufacturing these perplexing or gnomic
shards of literature, running through various styles and periods, at once
"discovering" wisdom and mocking sententiousness. She is surely one
model for the invention of old verse in Possession.
For pastiche means mimicry that we enjoy without being
fooled. Byatt's versions of Browning are more satisfying in this way
than some of LaMotte's verse, where the poetry sometimes seems in
earnest. Browning was a ventriloquist, a great writer of dramatic
monologues and verse in many different personae. Ash is allowed to
be the same, so pastiche playfully reflects the original.
Byatt's pastiches are emphatically not wonderful poetry, yet
display considerable technical skill (how many academic critics could
produce such things?) and function as a kind of homage to the poetry
she admires. They work best while they remain merely amusing copies
of the surface qualities of 19th-century verse, flattering the attentive
reader. It is only when her imitations get serious that we should worry.
John Mullan is senior lecturer in English at University College
London