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5 Sugar and Other Stories Byatt’s first collection of short stories, Sugar and Other Stories (1987), extends her exploration of the relationship of art and reality. Byatt says that she turned to this form, relatively late in her career, because of her awareness of the shortness of the time for writing: “I suddenly realised that there were more and more and more things in the world that I noticed, and that I haven’t got enough life to write already the novels I have thought of.… And so I started seeing things in this very condensed clear way, as images, not necessarily to be strung together in a long narrative , but to be thought out from” (Chevalier, “Entretien” 26). What the characters and the narrator—who are usually intimately related—make of the images is what the stories are about. The difficult process of “extracting meaning from experience” (Spufford 23), central in the four novels that preceded Sugar, is brought into sharper focus by the compression of the new form. With two exceptions, “The July Ghost” and “Precipice-Encurled,” the stories are narrated from the perspective of their female central characters. Even in the two exceptions, women characters—in each story, women who experience premature loss—are poignant presences. Several of the stories make feminist statements— concerning, for example, the discouragement of girls from academic achievement, the domination of women’s lives by the needs of aging parents, and the social and cultural oppression of postmenopausal women—but Byatt’s most significant feminist contribution is quieter and more pervasive. It lies in the steady, compassionate gaze she directs on the minutiae of women’s lives, in the depiction of the female imagi81 nation, and in the qualities of endurance, courage, and hopefulness that her characters display in painful, often desperate situations. In its progressive melding together of thematic and narrative strands and its steadily increasing focus on the shaping work of the imagination, the ordering of the eleven stories represents the process of confection that is Byatt’s metaphor for storytelling. The first four, “Racine and the Tablecloth,” “Rose-Coloured Teacups,” “The July Ghost,” and “The Next Room,” are linked by the motif of parent-child relationships. Next comes a pair, “The Dried Witch” and “Loss of Face,” both set in Korea. (The nation is not named, however; the reader is left to deduce the setting from the narrator’s clues.) “The Dried Witch” provides an implicit comment on “Loss of Face.” Only with the seventh story does the figure of the writer become central. “On the Day that E.M. Forster Died” and “The Changeling” present two vignettes about women writers: the first is a sympathetic portrait, the second sharply critical. “In the Air” repeats from “The Dried Witch” the figure of the solitary, threatened woman, but transports her from a Korean peasant village to a British urban setting .The last two stories, “Precipice-Encurled” and “Sugar,” openly reflect on the relationship of the imagined and the real. The first features two Victorian males, a poet and a painter; the second a contemporary woman writer and her family history.With “Sugar” the collection comes full circle : the adult narrator shares with her dying father the same respect for justice and truth that the girl Emily in the first story projects onto her imaginary Reader. Both the child Emily in the first story and the adult in the last story contain aspects of the author. Byatt, who suffered at the Mount School from the lack of value placed on individual achievement, has also said that when she began to write, she too constructed an ideal Reader (Dusinberre, “A.S. Byatt” 188; Chevalier, “Entretien” 25). The narrator of “Sugar,” the only first-person narrator in the collection, is Byatt herself, “the daughter of my father, trying desperately to be accurate” (qtd. in Wachtel, “A.S. Byatt” 89). Emily’s understanding, like her power, is limited; the mature woman writer who speaks in “Sugar” exemplifies the richness and variety of women’s creativity.Taken in sequence, the stories move from the more realistic to the more metafictional end of the scale. The confecting process, the imagination’s shaping activity, itself emerges gradually as the subject; simultaneously, the reader, warily addressed in “Racine,” is invoked more confidingly in “Sugar.” The collection fits into the category that Patricia Waugh places at the centre of the spectrum of metafiction: “those texts that manifest the symptoms of formal and...

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