An Interview with A. S. Byatt and Lawrence Norfolk

An Interview with A. S. Byatt and Lawrence Norfolk

[Begin Page 319]

In 2002, I interviewed the novelists A. S. Byatt and Lawrence Norfolk together at the University of Cambridge. The event was open to the public and attracted a large audience (so large, in fact, that a last-minute change of venue was necessary). It was inspired by a related lecture series on historical fiction, and as such was sponsored by the Faculty of History. Although most of the audience were understandably more interested in the distinguished interviewees than in the specific theme, the latter was of practical as well as theoretical interest to me, since I am a fledgling novelist and biographer as well as a historian. Thus I saw the interview as an opportunity to learn from two more experienced writers, whose insights were likely to be quite different from those of my academic colleagues.

A. S. Byatt (b. 1936) is one of Britain's foremost living authors. She is best known for Possession (1990), which became a huge international success after winning the Booker Prize. In parallel narratives, it describes a nineteenth-century romance between two poets, and the investigations of twentieth-century academics and biographers into the progress of that romance. Famously, Byatt set herself the task of composing fragments of her protagonists' work, which are interleaved throughout the book. The Biographer's Tale (2000) similarly includes invented documentary fragments, this time concerning identifiable historical individuals such as the geneticist Francis Galton and the biologist Carl Linnaeus. Both books are as much concerned with the nature of historical investigation and knowledge as with creating a convincing fictive past. As a character in the latter work explains, "A biographer must never claim knowledge of that which he does not know. Whereof we cannot know, thereof we must be silent. You will find that this requirement gives both form and beauty to a good biography. Perhaps contrary to your expectations" (26).

The novellas Morpho Eugenia and The Conjugial Angel, published together in Angels and Insects (1992), offer a more direct depiction of Victorian society and literature. In the collection of critical essays On Histories and Stories (2000), Byatt distinguishes her own approach in the second of these novellas (in which the poet Alfred Tennyson and his sister both appear) from that of the idealized biographer quoted above: "If I had been writing biography or literary history I should have ransacked the papers at the Tennyson centre in Lincoln—whereas as a writer of fiction, I felt a strong inclination to stop with the information I had . . . . I had the facts my imagination wanted to fantasise about, and I wanted space for the kind of female consciousness I needed, to which perhaps Emily Tennyson did not quite fit" (105). The implications of this remark for what Pat Barker has referred to as the "ethics of representation" are addressed more fully in the interview below.

During the course of Byatt's career, the "Frederica quartet"—a series of related novels charting the progress of the titular heroine and a richly varied supporting cast through The Virgin in the Garden (1978), Still Life (1985), Babel Tower (1996), and A Whistling Woman (2002)—has also become increasingly "historical." The latter two books in particular describe British culture in the 1960s from a retrospective and critical standpoint, making connections between art, literature, linguistics, biology, religion, law, and television, often via various kinds of invented text. (The only conspicuous absence from this list is popular music.) As a critic, Byatt champions intensive reading of and extensive quotation from primary texts and is hostile to approaches involving a priori application of critical theory. This preference informs the often negative portraits of theory-obsessed academics in Possession and The Biographer's Tale.

Lawrence Norfolk (b. 1963) is one...