(de)Construction of the Postmodern

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(DE)CONSTRUCTION OF THE POSTMODERN IN A. S. BYATT’S NOVELPOSSESSION

«(DE)CONSTRUCTION OF THE POSTMODERN IN A. S. BYATT’S NOVELPOSSESSION»

by Regina Rudaitytė; Marija Barkauskaitė

Source:Literature (Literatūra), issue: 49(5) / 2007, pages: 116-122, on www.ceeol.com .

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http://www.dibido.eu/bookdetails.aspx?bookID=81e7094f-4b22-4aa4-8124-0e322953a745




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ISSN 0258–0802. LITERATÛRA 2007 49(5)

(DE)CONSTRUCTION OF THE POSTMODERN INA. S. BYATT’S NOVEL POSSESSION

Regina RudaitytëAssociate Professor,Department of Literary History and Theory,Vilnius University

The Booker-prize winning novel Possession(1990) by Antonia Susan Byatt is generallyregarded as an emblematic postmodern novelin which texts, authors, literary movementsof the past are transformed and reflected; theyare presented in the form of metafictionalnarrative, of rewriting, of parody and pastiche,giving them a reinterpretation and recoding ina totally different cultural and literary context.However, it seems to me that it is possible to

detect the writer’s ambivalence towards andunease about the postmodern, inscribed in thenovel’s text. My proposition is that althoughByatt’s play with conventions of metafiction,the use of parody and pastiche which is oneof the most important features of postmodernart, are instrumental in the construction of thepostmodern, on the other hand, this post-modern move eventually results in the critiqueand deconstruction of postmodernism itself.Byatt’s parody is also very explicitly directed

at the modern critical theories, particularlypoststructuralism and feminist criticism. Myargument will be based on a discussion of Byatt’s Possession .

It is a truly complex, intricate and multi-layered novel both in terms of its structureand themes, blatantly intertextual and can be

read through other texts incorporated into theauthor’s narrative, referring to transtextualrelations.

The novel’s subtitle – A Romance – pointsto its architextual relations with the genre of the romance and guides the reader into thereception and interpretation of Byatt’s novelas a romance. However, the metatextual layertestifies to Byatt’s novel being a postmoderndouble-coded text: it is both the imitation of

the romance and Victorian poetry as well astheir critical reconsideration and reappraisalfrom the perspective of the contemporarycontext. It is metafiction in which the writerresorts to parody, pastiche and the narrative-destabilizing intertextuality, the moves whichforeground fictiveness. In her book of literarycriticism Passions of the Mind (1992), Byattpoints out that “parody and pastiche areparticularly literary ways of pointing to thefictiveness of fiction, gloomily or gleefully”

(Byatt, 1992, 157).The novel’s thematic complexity is pro-

grammed in its paratext – the title and twoepigraphs. The twofold possession implicatedin the title and defining the duality of presenta-tion and interpretation saturates and connectsthe past and the present as well as two plot



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stories: the novel features the Victorian andpresent-day lovers possessed by love andpassion for each other as well as for poetry;on the other hand, it parodies contemporaryacademics, literary scholars, and biographerspossessed by the object of their search and re-search. Sparing no effort to find the missingmanuscripts of a famous nineteenth-centurypoet, in their maniacal search they resort toany, even the most unscrupulous means, forthe sake of their academic career.

The novel’s first epigraph is taken fromthe Preface to The House of the Seven Gablesby Nathaniel Hawthorn:

When a writer calls his work a Romance, it needhardly be observed

that he wishes to claim a certain latitude, both as toits fashion and

material, which he would not have felt himself en-titled to assume,

had he professed to be writing a Novel. The latterform of

composition is presumed to aim at a very minutefidelity, not merely

to the possible, but to the probable and ordinarycourse of man’s

experience. The former – while as a work of art, itmust rigidly

subject itself to laws (…) – has fairly a right topresent that truth

under circumstances, to a great extent, of the writer’sown choosing

or creation… The point of view in which this talecomes under the

Romantic definition lies in the attempt to connect abygone time with

the very present that is flitting away from us.

(Epigraph)

This paratextual reference to the text of the American romantic writer N. Hawthornehighlights the creative powers of the genre of the Romance, its inherent potential to trans-form reality, the writer’s freedom to contruct

the world according to his wish and fancy, aswell as the attempt to connect the past, whichin Byatt’s novel is recurrently reawakened, with“the very present that is flitting away fromus.” This way Byatt’s intention is stated, andthe romantic context of Possession is mappedand validated. This paratext also points to therelationship between truth and fantasy, realityand fiction, to the fictiveness of the worldconstructed by the writer. Byatt’s double-coded text plays with the tension betweenreality and a fictionalized construct. The fic-tiveness of Possession is also emphasized by theother epigraph to the novel – a long excerpt fromthe Victorian poet Robert Browning’s poem

Mr Sludge, “the Medium” , which closes withthe following lines:

How build such solid fabric out of air?How on so slight foundation found this tale,Biography, narrative?’ or, in other words,‘How many lies did it require to makeThe portly truth you here present us with?’

(Epigraph)

The secret and extremely passionate relation-ship of the fictional Victorian poet Randolph HenryAsh with the poetess Christabel LaMotte, whoremained sunk in obscurity, unfold in parallel withthe romance of the two modern lovers Rolandand Maud (whose names are derived from theMedieval romance and its Victorian rewritings –The Song of Roland and Lord Alfred Tennyson’spoem Maud ) – connecting the past with thepresent and producing the duality of vision. Theauthor plays with time, constantly movingbetween the past and the present. These dislo-cations of time shatter the illusion of reality andhighlight metafictionality of Byatt’s text. Thesame function is performed by the duality of presentation: the novel’s narrative structureurges the reader to interpret the love story of the Victorian poets Ash and LaMotte from thetwentieth-century perspective; the modern



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lovers, literary scholars Roland and Maud,whose research focuses on the writings, biog-raphy, letters and diaries of the two Victorianpoets, often comment on the love story of thenineteenth-century heroes, trying to reconstructfrom the fragments of their poems and lettersthe past, the poets’ personalities and their lovestory.

The Victorian poets’ love story is interwovenwith various other stories, myths, fairy-talesand fables, taken from the tradition of theMedieval romance and its nineteenth-centuryrewritings. In Possession Byatt concentrateson Victorian literature and culture, as it is inthat age that the plot-stories and the forms of the medieval romance were elaborated and trans-formed in prose and poetry. Thus Victorianfiction, poetry and culture is a major intertext of Byatt’s novel, mapping, contextualizing andunfolding the themes of love and creation,inspiration and poetic tradition. A vast intertextualweb of references points to the Pre-RaphaeliteBrotherhood which cultivated the artistic spiritof the Middle Ages and favoured medievalromances rewriting them. Byatt in her turnrewrites the poetic texts of the Pre-Raphaelites,such as William Morris and Christina Rossetti.Thus another important intertext testifying tothe author’s play with the generic conventionsof the romance and their transformation isMedieval literature and myths. In Possessionthere are obvious references to the Arthurianromance refracted through the Victorianrewritings, such as Tennyson’s Idylls of theKing and William Morris’s The Defence of Guinevere . Byatt rewrites the legend “The GlassCoffin”, as if it were the work of ChristabelLaMotte, containing allusions and references tonumerous medieval fables. The author introdu-ces the myth of Melusina, connected to the fe-male protagonist, as narrated by the medievalpoet Jean D’Arras and presented as the best

poem of Christabel LaMotte The Fairy Melusine,a retelling of the old tale of the magical half-woman, half-snake, which is one of the keypastiches of Victorian poetry in Byatt’s novel.(Byatt, 1991, 289–298; further quoting fromthis novel only the pages are indicated). Thesemythical parallels as well as numerous refer-ences to the Romantic poetry in Byatt’s textmap the novel’s main themes and organize thecharacters’ relations. In her last letter to Ash,Christabel identifies herself with Melusine: likeMelusina, she is punished for her passion, forkeeping their daughter from him and giving heraway for adoption: “I have been Melusina thesethirty years. I have so to speak flown about andabout the battlements of this stronghold cryingon the wind of my need to see and feed andcomfort my child, who knew me not.” (501).

Christabel LaMotte is a typical romanticheroine, associated with mystery and imagi-nation; her name and character was obviouslyinspired by S. T. Coleridge’s poem Christabeland J. Keats’s poem La Belle Dame Sans Merci .Keats’s poem is echoed in the “Postscript1868” of Possession in the scene when Ashencounters his little daughter who does notknow her father:

‘There’, he said, crowning the little pale head.‘Full beautiful, a fairy’s child. Or like Proserpine.’(510)*

Then adds in farewell:

‘Tell your aunt’, he said, ‘that you met a poet, who was looking for the Belle Dame SansMerci, and who met you instead, and who sendsher his compliments, and will not disturb her,and is on his way to fresh woods and pasturesnew.’ (510)

* The fourth stanza of Keats’s poem La Belle DameSans Merci reads like this: “I met a lady in the meads,/ Full beautiful – a faery’s child,/ Her hair was long, herfoot was light,/ And her eyes were wild.” (Smith, 1957,369).



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The play of associations and referencesobviously connects the novel’s female protago-nist Christabel both with the heroine of Keats’spoem and with the fairy Melusine of her own poem,and fills the narrative gap by alluding to the littlegirl as the fruit of the two poets’ love (“fairychild” and “Proserpine”). Byatt’s pastiche TheFairy Melusine, which in a way is a rewritingof Christina Rossetti’s poem Eve , contains theimage of a serpent which is the central sym-bol of Possession . In the first place, it standsfor Christabel, “half-woman, half-snake”, whocasts a magic spell on Ash, charms him andeven becomes an influence on his writing. Theparallel with the Biblical myth is also obvious:the serpent seduced Adam and Eve in theGarden of Eden thus bringing on punishmentand death. This symbol can be also interpretedthrough the dialogue with the Romanticpoetry. In Keats’s poem Lamia (1820) a ser-pent is transformed into a beautiful girl who fasci-nates a young Corinthian, Lycius. In ancient mytha lamia was a female demon, enticing young menin order to devour them. In Keats, Lamia, aserpent, stands for imagination and love. InColeridge’s Biographia Literaria (1817) whichis echoed in Byatt’s text the Serpent is the sym-bol of imagination. In one of Byatt’s pastichesof scholarly discourse, Christabel LaMotte’spoem The Fairy Melusine is compared to“Coleridge’s Serpent who figured the Imagi-nation, with its tail stuffed in its own mouth.”(37) As The Dictionary of Literary Symbolspoints out, a serpent with its tail in its ownmouth is an old symbol of eternity, going backto ancient Egypt (Ferber, 2004, 323). Henceone can assume that Christabel LaMotte, whois associated with the symbolic serpent, epito-mizes the eternal creativity and love.

The fictional character of ChristabelLaMotte is a textual mosaic in which the greatnineteenth-century poetesses – Elizabeth Barrett

Browning, Christina Rossetti, Emily Dickinson– are recognizable and their voices are echoedin Byatt’s pastiches. In the beginning Christabel’scharacter is constructed by the correspon-dence between the two poets, in which shestands as a passive, obedient woman whoundervalues herself and her poetry, thus fullyconforming to the image of the Victorianwoman-angel in the house. However, later onshe reveals herself as an educated beautiful po-etess whose belief in the female creative pow-ers is epitomized in her most famous poem aboutthe fairy Melusine, which influenced Ash’spoetry. In her letters to Ash, she mentions herinterest in the myth of Melusina because of the female duality inscribed in it: “(…) I aminterested in other visions of the fairy Melusine– who has two aspects – an Unnatural Mon-ster – and a most proud and loving and handywoman.”(174). Christabel LaMotte is anincarnation of the female creative power: shetries to retain her poetic identity in the unfavour-able for women Victorian age. Although whilealive she and her poetry did not win such acritical acclaim as Ash’s did, it is Christabelwho is presented as the greatest creative forcein the novel.

“The constructed” poetry of RandolphHenry Ash is an imitation of the themes andstyle of several famous nineteenth-century malepoets, such as Robert Browning, Lord AlfredTennyson, Algernon Charles Swinburne. Inthese poetic pastiches one can trace allusions tothe Romantic visionary poetry imbued by fan-tasy and mysticism with the underlying motifsof transience and death which anticipate thebirth of Symbolist and Modernist trends. WalterPater’s emphasis on the present moment, hisurge to make the most of the ecstatic andpassionate possibilities of experience, Keatseanconviction of the interrelationship betweenpleasure and pain, Swinburne’s moments of



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extreme pleasure and delirious ecstasy areactualized in the love story of the Victorianpoets. The context of Decadence and Aestheti-cism is undoubtedly introduced by one of Byatt’s major poetic “forgeries”, Ash’s poemThe Garden of Proserpina , a pastiche, both inthemes and in style, of Swinburne’s poem TheGarden of Proserpine . In this poem the novel’ssemantics is encoded, and major themes – likeseduction, passion, love and the accompany-ing pain and anguish, poetic imagination,creativity – are mapped which are developedin Byatt’s text. The poem is based on the an-cient Greek myth about Persephone (Proser-pine), a radiant beautiful goddess of spring andautumn. But all the while Persephone knewhow brief that beauty was, as it must end withthe coming of the cold and pass like herself into the power of death. The myth of Perse-phone highlights the motif of love and sorrowin Byatt’s novel. The poem’s central image of Persephone (Proserpine) stands for sorrow andpain caused by the awareness of the transienceof beauty, love and life. On the other hand, thepoem is ambivalent: the word “garden” in its titlecan be interpreted as a metaphoric space of loveencounters, an erotisized space of pleasures, inwhich the love story of the two protagonistsflourishes. The Garden of Proserpina , as amajor poetic pastiche in the novel, both struc-turally and semantically frames the love story of the nineteenth-century poets and its develop-ment, their poetic search, articulating the themesof poetic imagination, death, ecstasy, passionand the transience of love. The love story of Ash and LaMotte was short-lived, passionateand wrapped in mystery. Their correspondencedeveloped into a passionate love affair whichlasted only one summer of 1859 in Yorkshire.Much later Ash will confess to his wife Ellen:“For the last year perhaps I have been in lovewith another woman. I could say it was a sort

of madness. A possession, as by daemons.A kind of blinding. At first it was only letters –and then – in Yorkshire – I was not alone.”(453).

Christabel, however, all of a sudden mys-teriously disappears from Ash’s life and doesnot answer his letters in which he imploresher to tell him what became of their child. Thisnarrative enigma is disclosed only at the endof the novel, in Christabel’s last letter to Ashwritten after thirty years when the poet wasdying and was never shown the letter. In Ash’spoem The Garden of Proserpina the samerecurrent image of a serpent symbolizing imagi-nation taken from Christabel LaMotte’s poemThe Fairy Melusine is used, which connects thetwo lovers as well as their poetic search.

Through the fictional characters of the Vic-torian poets Randolph Henry Ash and ChristabelLaMotte constructed from the textual fragments(letters, diaries, poems, fairy-tales), and thepastiches of the poems, Byatt reconstructs,revises and revalues the Victorian poetic tradi-tion from a different twentieth-century per-spective, paying tribute to the poetry andpoets of the past. In an interview, Byattmentions that what moved her to create theseliterary characters was the realisation that “thegreat Victorian poets have never been seen tobe as great or as complex as they are” (Tredell,1994, 59). It is obvious that Byatt gives apositive appraisal of the Victorian poets, suchas Robert Browning, Lord Alfred Tennyson,Algernon Charles Swinburne whose poetry sheimitates in her pastiches. Randolph Henry Ashis presented as a literary celebrity, “the greatventriloquist”, a poet of many voices, an out-standing personality with many diverse inter-ests: “Ash had been interested in everything.Arab astronomy and African transport systems,angels and oakapples, hydraulics and the guil-lotine, druids, and the grande armee, catharists



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and printers’ devils, ectoplasm and solarmythology, the last meals of frozen mastodonsand the true nature of manna.” (28). The great-ness of the Victorian poet stands in contrastto the parodic image of contemporary criticsand academics like Mortimer Cropper, BeatriceNest, and James Blackadder, a disciple of F.R.Leavis, who burn their lives in futileobsession to get a share in the modern ‘Biog-raphy Industry’. The “forged” literary andscholarly discourse in Possession turns into aparody of modern critical theories. Byatt’sirony is directed particularly at poststruc-turalism and feminist criticism. The evidenceof it is satirically described modern criticsLeonora Stern and Fergus Wolff, as well asthe parody of deconstruction and feministcriticism’s texts. The feminist interpretationof LaMotte’s poem about Melusina borders onabsurdity: “The feminists are crazy about it.They say it expresses women’s impotentdesire. (…) the new feminists see Melusina inher bath as a symbol of self-sufficient femalesexuality needing no poor males. I like it, it’sdisturbing. It keeps changing focus. From thevery precise description of the scaly tail tocosmic battles.” (34) Fergus Wolff is presentedas a disciple of Barthes and Foucault; at themoment he “was writing a deconstructiveaccount of Balzac’s Chef-d’Oeuvre Inconnu”and facing the challenge “to deconstruct some-thing that had apparently already deconstructeditself” (32). In the character of Leonora Sternand her “forged” text, the French feministcritics Helene Cixous and Lucy Irigaray and theirrhetoric are recognisable. Leonora’s “first ma-

jor opus, No Place Like Home , a study of theimagery of home-making in ninteenth-centurywomen’s fiction” was “written before Leonora’smilitant middle and later Lacanian phases” (311).The bombast and the double-Dutch of the chap-ter absurdly titled “From the Fountain of Thirst

to the Armorican Ocean-Skin” in LeonoraStern’s book On Motif and Matrix in thePoems of LaMotte , which imitates the styleand themes of the poststructuralist feministdiscourse, turns into a scathing parody. Theimitated scholarly jargon is hilarious indeed inits inanity, pretence and nonsensicalness.

The tension between the past and the present,the duality of presentation in Possessionis condusive to the critique of postmoderncritical theories, poststructuralism in particu-lar. Glorifying the great poets of the past incontrast to the modern critics and literaryscholars presupposes the opposition between“the creative consciousness”, the authority of the writer, versus the poststructuralist ideasof anonymity and “the death of the author”.This opposition is deconstructed in favour of the author who is back and whose presencein the text seems to be vital. Even if Byatt’stext in Possession is intertextual (as I have pre-viously argued in this essay), constructed of various textual fragments, pastiches of poemsand scholarly essays, even if it may conformto Roland Barthes’s definition of the text as “atissue of quotations drawn from the innumer-able centres of culture” (Lodge, 1988, 170),even if Byatt does play with the narrativeconventions for imitation and parody, all themetafictional strategies as if backfire: in fact,Byatt seems to be trying to restore the authorback to the text, displaying her belief inindividual creativity against the anonymityadvocated by poststructuralist theories. Shestresses the strength of the creative author ascontrasted to the impersonality and the loss of subjectivity of the modern critics. Even themost sympathetically described characters inthe novel – the modern critics and loversRoland and Maud – are “symptomatic of wholeflocks of exhausted scholars and theorists”;they can theorise love and desire, romance,

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