A.S. Byatt and the Heliotropic Imagination

Appendix I: The Placing of Possession

Appendix i: The Placing of Possession In an essay first published in 1996, Jackie Buxton prophesied that critical consensus would eventually place Possession outside “the canon of postmodernist texts” (103): it gives “ideological priority” to the Victorian world (98), advocates “traditional conceptions of readerly and writerly practice” (100), and represents the love relationship of Roland and Maud as “a productive, liberating affair” (102). In fact, Buxton suggests that despite its “postmodern gestures” (98), Possession resists and critiques postmodernism’s epistemology. Other critics also note the traditional values in the book. Kelly A. Marsh finds that the plot privileges “honesty of motivation and emotion” (113) in both scholarship and sexual relationships . Along with other “Neo-Sensation” novelists such as Graham Swift and Margaret Drabble, Marsh argues, Byatt questions “the poststructuralist tenet that morality is socially constructed by asserting that there can and must be truth, at least of feeling” (115). In her exploration of Byatt’s “repossession” of the romance,Thelma J. Shinn stresses the permanence of our need for romance, showing that in Byatt’s text “form is content and the past is the present; when the Romance is realized in our lives, we realize that reality is in itself a Romance and that life is a construct that needs to be retold in the present moment and can be transformed with each retelling” (113). Deborah Morse explores the centrality of the transcending power of the romantic imagination, and also draws attention to the text’s richness of allusion. Two critics who stress the postmodern aspects are Chris Walsh and André Brink; both view language as the novel’s primary subject. Walsh praises the freedom of reading that Possession fosters: the text “shows up 271 restrictive, monologic, authoritarian, closed, coercive readings for what they are, and promotes an ideal that is the product of thoughtfulness— liberal, dialogic, democratic, open, pluralistic” (194). Brink, who provides the fullest and most subtle and cogent account of the book’s postmodern qualities, focuses on language as “the primary form” of possession (292) and sees the text as “a performance to be enacted and entered into” (302). In the course of this process, the difference between Self and Other becomes central, fixed gender roles are called into question along with fixed views of history, and, in fact, the concepts of male and female “are subsumed in one another” (305). For Brink, Possession is postmodern in the primacy it gives to “the fact of narrative, of fiction, of lies, and of language ” (308). He notes, however, Byatt’s “reservations about the extreme Postmodernist view of language as the only reality” (305). The consensus that appears to be forming supports Elisabeth Bronfen’s description of Possession as “a hybrid cross between the postmodern text, whose ethical gesture consists in a self-conscious reference to its own significatory process, and the text of moral realism, aimed at the discovery of an ethical truth” (131). A helpful summary of the book’s dual aspects is offered by Kate Flint. Byatt, she says “refuses the assumptions of post-modernism” in her belief in “character” and in her preoccupation with creating “the illusion of the immediacy of experience” (300). Nevertheless, like David Lodge’s Nice Work and John Fowles’s The French Lieutenant’s Woman, Possession deliberately poses “some of the problematics of identity, of writing history, and of narrative discontinuity ” (303) that are typical of postmodernist writing. Much of the critical response to Possession has consisted of attempts to place the novel in terms of its use of history and of its generic affiliations. Possession has been variously categorized as a “Neo-Sensation Novel” (Marsh), a “NeoVictorian Novel” (Shiller), a “Retro-Victorian Novel” (Shuttleworth,“Natural History”), and an example of “Postmodern Moral Fiction” (Bronfen). In a negative assessment of its treatment of history, Louise Yelin argues that Possession “mystifies past and present alike…. [Byatt] locates Victorianists —those in her novel and those of us ‘outside’ its pages—in a critical wilderness from which we cannot escape. But at the same time, she makes at least an implicit claim to possess Victorian secrets known or knowable by no one else” (40). On the other hand, Frederick M. Holmes, Dana Shiller, Del Ivan Janik, and Sabine Hotho-Jackson see the representation of history as liberating rather than imprisoning. Holmes wisely observes that Possession’s “recognition that the imagination is an intertextual construct is not in itself grounds for dismissing its efficacy in providing us with provisional structures with...