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12 Babel Tower and AWhistling Woman In the seventeen years between the appearance of Still Life in 1985 and the completion of the quartet in 2002 with A Whistling Woman, Byatt published four volumes of short stories, two novels, and two novellas. As we have seen, these intervening texts mark significant extensions of her range of genres and discourses as well as her increasing skill in narrative . All four volumes of short stories are concerned with women’s lives and art. The Sugar stories place women in relation to narrative in a variety of ways, the Matisse volume explores the impact of painting on women’s minds and bodies, and the Djinn tales construct alternative narratives for women in the fairy-tale genre that was already present as one of the facets of the multi-generic Possession. The tales in Elementals, which, like The Biographer’s Tale, was published between Babel Tower and A Whistling Woman, place their women characters at points of extremity for which the subtitle, Stories of Fire and Ice, is a metaphor. In Possession, Byatt’s most momentous achievement during these years, she advanced on a number of fronts, blending historical and invented characters and worlds, interweaving many plots, keeping the subject of language in the centre of the action, and thoroughly integrating theoretical issues into her text. The objection made by Julian Gitzen and others, that in Still Life Byatt’s inquiry into metaphor “temporarily usurped her role as a novelist, causing her to resort to transparent rhetorical devices” (Gitzen 94), is overcome in Possession, where the nineteenth-century lovers are poets, where Byatt’s ventriloquistic gifts have free rein, and where issues of language and metaphor are a natural and pressing concern in the lives of the pair of twentieth-century lovers as well.The play between fic231 tion and theory is more spontaneous and sophisticated in these later texts. Here, Byatt found a way to create and fully integrate intertexts whose counterparts are only described in The Virgin in the Garden and Still Life. In her interview with Juliet Dusinberre, Byatt confessed that she “had some trouble with Alexander’s play [Astrea] and kept asking myself, what is Alexander writing?” (“A.S. Byatt” 191). In Possession, the problem of inventing intertexts is brilliantly solved, and from this point on— especially in Angels and Insects and The Biographer’s Tale—passages of actual and invented poetry, fiction, travel accounts, scientific writing, and biography occupy central positions. Byatt’s conclusion of her quartet draws on all these achievements of her maturity. In her ongoing formal innovation, her serious play with the conventions of fiction, she has never abandoned realism’s concern for real people. The experimentation with form and the widening of intellectual horizons after Still Life come into play when Byatt picks up the story of the Potter family in the third and fourth volumes of the quartet. Set a decade later than Still Life—the action of Babel Tower begins in 1964, and that of A Whistling Woman ends in 1970—these two texts reflect the fragmented, hectic outer world of the sixties. Babel Tower, the author told Nicolas Tredell in 1990, would be “about the cracking-up of language and the tearing -loose of language from the world,” it would be “about voices as opposed to writing, and it and Volume Four [would] move much more into different areas of visual art as a kind of paradigm” (73–74). This prophecy is fulfilled through the presence of paintings, mixed-media “happenings,” and the activities at the Samuel Palmer School of Art in Babel Tower, and of television in its successor. Although her characters continue to produce and study written language, as well as debating how children should be taught to read, Byatt now directs her attention to a wider issue; as Richard Todd points out,“the articulate expression of thought” itself is in danger (A.S. Byatt 64). In place of a prologue, Babel Tower presents the reader with four separate beginnings.The story could begin, says the narrator, with a thrush hammering its prey, a snail, on its stone “anvil or altar” (3). This first opening into the book provides no narrative thread; instead, it introduces a cluster of motifs.The snail as sacrificial victim is to reappear in the novel’s embedded text, Babbletower; in the persecuted child, Felicitas, curling herself into her cot “like a desperate snail in its shell” (270) in her futile...

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