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Marvels & Tales 16.2 (2002) 309-311



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Book Review

On Histories and Stories:
Selected Essays


On Histories and Stories: Selected Essays. By A. S. Byatt. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2001. 196 pp.

A. S. Byatt's collection of essays reflects a writer's timely stance as writer on contemporary literary criticism. The essays also examine writing in relationship to what Byatt calls tales and stories--narratives that owe some debt to traditional oral tales. Byatt calls for a return to an appreciation of writing, of stories and storytelling, and for a fluid approach to modern novels (2-3).

Byatt's primary concern in the first four essays in the collection-- [End Page 309] "Fathers," "Forefathers," "Ancestors," and "True Stories and the Facts in Fiction"--is the relationship between history and fiction. Byatt discusses a large number of historical novels in these essays, questioning the theoretical stance that one cannot know the past (10-11). She argues that some novels (such as Toni Morrison's Beloved) claim a history previously unknown, while some present accurately ideas that were important during the time in which the novel is set, no matter whether the characters existed or are fictional (24-25). Using her own novel Possession as an example, she says, "writing Victorian words in Victorian contexts in a Victorian order, and in Victorian relations of one word to the next" can help one represent that period (46-47). She would like to see historical novels taken more seriously than she thinks they have been (9).

In "Forefathers," Byatt examines the forms British writers have used in their novels about invented pasts, discussing two forms in particular: the maggot and ventriloquism. The former, based on John Fowles's novel of that name, examines the change from a metaphorical larval stage to a winged one; for ventriloquism she gives the example of Browning's dramatic monologues and her own novel Possession. Of Browing's monologues she says later: "It is always said of Browning's various resurrected pasts in his dramatic monologues that they are about the nineteenth century, and of course this is true--but it is not always added that they are also truly about the time when the New Testament was written, or about Renaissance Christianity and Art, though they are, and are illuminating about those matters" (94).

The effect of scientific ideas such as Darwinism and Lyell's geology is the focus of the essay "Ancestors." Byatt shows the effect that concepts of natural law, questions about the place of chance and order in the universe, and the crisis of faith had on novels written both in the Victorian period and more recently. John Fowles' The French Lieutenant's Woman serves as her example of a novel written with understanding of the effect of Darwinism on the time. She continues her discussion of the question of understanding a time period in "True Stories and the Facts in Fiction," where she makes the above quoted comment about Browning's monologues. "True Stories and the Facts in Fiction" also includes her comments on contemporary writers' awareness of the difficulty they face: "The moments in the prose of The Golden Notebook that most excited me [. . .] were little self-correction sequences of sentences about how to say things, how to get things right" (97). In addition, Byatt critiques some contemporary critics' treatment of texts; for example, she dislikes Mary Jacobus's discussion of Wordsworth in Romanticism, Writing and Sexual Difference, which she calls "a kind of rewriting, or writing between the lines which fiction does with more tact, less whimsy and infinitely more power" (100). One should, I believe, take her point seriously. [End Page 310]

Probably of most interest to readers of Marvels & Tales are the last three essays in On Histories and Stories: "Old Tales, New Forms," "Ice, Snow, Glass," and "The Greatest Story Ever Told." In the first of these essays Byatt demonstrates a fine understanding of oral narrative tradition; she quotes Roberto Calasso on story forms and metamorphosis and notes Italo Calvino's network metaphor when he speaks of his fables. Later...

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