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Epilogue
- Wilfrid Laurier University Press
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Epilogue In 1993, Byatt published a poem about clichés, taking her epigraph from Toni Morrison, who cites the longevity of clichés as proof of their value. Byatt’s “Working with Clichés” is about Proteus, who is himself a cliché of the paradox of constancy in flux and the impossibility of grasping the meaning of change. In the poem, Proteus displays himself as multiplicity: he is many-coloured, his texture both smooth and rough, his body both cold and warm, seeming “both dead / And alive” (21–22). He both “burns” and “trickles silky” (43). He seduces us with both male and female qualities, yet is “always one fish” (1). The encounter with him is unavoidable, and it must take place in his own element.The speaker does not try to approach Proteus on dry land, where, according to Virgil, he will tell of the future if he is unable to escape into one of his many shapes. For Byatt’s speaker, the prophecy is the encounter with metamorphosis; there is no separate truth: “You must take hold. / You must grasp tight” (10–11), “You must grip” (27), “You must go down” (37), “You must hold on.”As the intensely sensual struggle reaches its climax, Proteus is both gentle, “His soft lips kissing your hurt knees,” (49) and threatening, “The rows of needle-teeth bristling / Inside his ravenous grin” (50–51). He leaves you “gasping and retching” while he “disports himself still / Wreathed in sunlight” (53–55). The poem concludes: “You do not know him. / But you have something to say” (57–58). In her long, loving, and courageous encounter with the living, changing world, Byatt does not achieve a fixity of either knowledge or form. She knows that, in Michael Levenson’s words, “There is no one true metaphor. There are only new 269 attempts to describe the world, resurrecting dead cliché into living speech, and straining to point at a world beyond the words” (“Angels and Insects” 173). Proteus is unknowable, but Byatt’s engagement with process and multiplicity in language, in the experienced world and especially in the lives of women has given her a seemingly inexhaustible number of things to say. epilogue 270 ...