A.S. Byatt and the Heliotropic Imagination

3. The Game

3 The Game In a comment published in 1967, the same year as her second novel, The Game, Byatt described the material of her fiction: “habits of mind—the nature of the imagination, the ways in which different people take in the world, the uses they make of what they think or see” (qtd. in Page 214). Her statement defines both the subject of The Game and its form. This novel presents and demonstrates contrasting uses of the imagination and shows the impossibility of the imagination’s ever fully taking in the world, the difficulty of breaking out of private worlds into communication , and the devastation that can result from the misuse of imagination —especially from attempting to invade the mental space of another person. In many ways The Game is Byatt’s most Murdochian novel. Like Murdoch’s fiction, The Game examines complicated relationships among characters and highlights Murdoch’s warning against the dangers of private fantasy and the need to respect both the autonomy of persons and the contingency of events. The Game is filled with documents and fictions, which, in their relations with each other and with the central narrative, prove Murdoch’s point about the incompleteness of experience. In addition , the main characters’ relationships to various forms of interpretation become central to the novel’s meaning. The Game goes beyond The Shadow of the Sun in its investigation of the female imagination.The main characters are two sisters, Cassandra Corbett, an unmarried Oxford don, and Julia Eskelund, a successful novelist who is married to Thor, a social worker, and has a teenaged daughter, Deborah. Cassandra, whose reclusive, celibate life recalls Helen 43 Gardner’s ideal of the dedicated, nun-like existence of the woman scholar, yearns for pure visionary experience like Henry Severell’s in The Shadow of the Sun but is also aware of its destructive power. In creating her, Byatt builds on her portrait of Anna and continues her exploration of female vision. In her introduction to The Shadow of the Sun, Byatt remembers her impression, as a young woman reading about the mythological Cassandra, that traditionally “female visionaries are poor mad exploited sibyls and pythonesses” (x). Cassandra is exploited, only halfintentionally , by her sister Julia. Julia herself writes women’s novels of the kind Byatt dismisses as “self-indulgent creation, the ‘waste fertility’ with which Comus tempts the Lady” (Dusinberre, “A.S. Byatt” 186). Although she is no visionary, Julia also resembles Henry Severell, for she insensitively appropriates the lives of others as material for her novels. Byatt’s division of the qualities of her male writer, Henry, between the two sisters enables her to examine female art more deeply than she had done in The Shadow of the Sun. The plot of The Game shows the dangers of fiction in a very concrete way, for Julia’s new novel, based on her version of Cassandra’s obsessive love for the herpetologist Simon Moffitt, causes Cassandra’s suicide.Through the third major figure, Simon, Byatt represents a form of perception opposite to that of either sister; his ideal is a neutral, impersonal vision that refuses to impose interpretation on what is seen. He is the most extreme example in Byatt’s fiction of the attempt to see nothing beyond “what is there,” and he shows that such perceptual innocence is impossible.1 The Game of the title is, first of all, the childhood game, with its intricate rules, that the sisters created in Brontë fashion from their imaginations and that continues to exist physically in the form of ledgers, a pack of cards divided into four armies, a set of clay figures representing characters in Arthurian legend, and a map.This game, which continued well into adolescence, was their way of taking in the world by making patterns: first the physical conflicts of warfare, then the intrigues and torments of courtly love. When the sisters, with Julia’s Norwegian-born husband,Thor, and their daughter, Deborah, are brought together at the Corbett parents’ Northumberland house by the imminent death of Mr. Corbett, they pass their time by taking the Game out from storage in a window seat and playing at it. As they leave after the funeral, Cassandra packs it away, saying that it has “done enough damage.” She is echoing Thor’s recent rebuke to her: “Don’t you think you’ve done enough damage?” He was referring to Cassandra’s obsession with Simon, whom both sisters had...