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10 Elementals: Stories of Fire and Ice The title of Elementals points in several directions. Its subtitle, Stories of Fire and Ice, indicates that the six stories in the volume have to do with basic powers or forces: not only fire and water or ice (most prominent in “Cold” and “Crocodile Tears”) but earth and air and their psychic equivalents . “Crocodile Tears” and “Cold” are extended narratives, set in climates that mirror the characters’ inner states. The remaining four capture brief, sharp moments of realization. All except “Jael” take place in real or imagined settings of intense heat or cold, where mental as well as physical experiences are intensified. In all six, the central characters are stripped of extraneous facts and possessions; they exist in conditions of fundamental neediness and confront primal experiences of love, loss, and betrayal. Extending the metaphor of the title, the stories also depict the terrors of being displaced, “out of one’s element,” and the possibility of finding or being restored to one’s proper state. In four of the stories , “Crocodile Tears,” “A Lamia in the Cévennes,” “Cold,” and “Christ in the House of Martha and Mary,” this rescue or restoration occurs; in two, “Baglady” and “Jael,” it slips out of reach, and the women are stranded in inauthenticity and equivocation (“Jael”) or collapse and disintegration (“Baglady”). In all of the stories except “Lamia,” which extends Byatt’s reflections on painting (when it first appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, Robert Heilman called it a “Matisse story” [610]), the principal figures are women. In her review of Alice Munro’s collection of short stories The Love of a Good Woman, Byatt comments on Munro’s interest “both in the texture of the ‘normal’ and the shears that slit it” (D16).This description fits many 193 of Byatt’s own stories in Elementals and is especially relevant to the first story, “Crocodile Tears.” Here, death abruptly ends the happy marriage of Patricia and Tony Nimmo, and the narrative traces the process by which Patricia must come to accept the catastrophic disruption of the pattern of her life. Byatt depicts Patricia’s work of grieving—first, denial and flight; then, attempts at suicide; finally, acceptance of the fact of death and return to the place of loss to honour the dead—in terms of physical objects and of Patricia’s body. Placing herself at random in an unfamiliar element, the hot, ancient city of Nîmes, surrounded by stones and fountains, Patricia encounters the images of death that make internalization of her loss possible. Unconsciously and, it seems, randomly, she has found the elemental objective correlatives of her loss. As she painfully connects the things of her new environment with her old world with Tony, she is helped by her friendship with another displaced person , Nils Isaksen, a Norwegian who is enduring his own torment and his own form of denial. Together they construct a new, authentic story. For the Nimmos, the slitting of the normal begins earlier, on the day of Tony’s death, when the middle-aged couple quarrel about a piece of art Tony wants to buy. In their frequent visits to galleries, they usually are attracted to the same pieces: “they lingered in the same places considering the same things. Some they remembered, some they forgot, some they carried away to keep” (4). But on this occasion, while Patricia admires a dandelion clock, Tony is drawn to a piece called The Windbreak , in which ordinary small objects are combined in a beach scene. Patricia dislikes its banality, pointing out the “dreadful predictability” (7) of its colours; Tony argues that predictability is its subject: “It’s a perfectly good complete image of something important” (6). Tony’s heart attack, itself a banal, predictable event, occurs after a heavy meal and before the couple have had a chance to repair the rift between them, cutting short their life together, and Patricia must continue alone, suffering the banality of grief. In shock, her first impulse is to escape to the unfamiliar. Catching sight of Tony’s body lying beneath a painting of an avalanche, she flees unobserved,“quick, quick” (9), packs hurriedly, and, without even contacting her grown son and daughter, catches a train to France. She cannot leave her past life so easily, however: she decides to stop in Nîmes because she knows nothing about it and will not be looked for there, but the narrator points out the “almost coincidence...

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