I finished re-reading A.S.Byatt's Possession over a week ago, but I have not yet stopped dwelling on it. Just when I think I have given it enough thought, it surprises me, teases me with its richness, its language, its complicated characters, and Romantic sensibilities in the literary sense. In short, Possession is a novel that continues to delight readers through the sheer volume of questions it raises. Byatt's depth of plot is neatly woven into the intricacies of her language. The book is filled with poetry, prose and everything in between. The chracters are complicated, but I found myself much more interested in the words they exchanged; I was far too engrossed in the literary scene created by Byatt's pen. I found that the book hasn't ceased to possess me, for once I step into its pages, it is hard to pull back and face Reality that is our present age. I was struck by one of the poems in the novel, for it made me question the Art of Writing itself. I did a little excercise in order to understand this riddle, and I'd welcome any readers of this blog to try it as well. So here it is:
I read this poem, which is found in the novel, written by a fictional poet Randolph Ash, addressed to a lady (who is hitherto mysterious).
They say that women change: 'tis so: but you
Are ever-constant in your changefulness,
Like that still thread of falling river, one
From source to last embrace in the still pool
Ever-renewed and ever-moving on
From first to last a myriad water-drops
And you -- I love you for it -- are the force
That moves and holds the form.
When I substituted the word men for the word women the poem read as follows:
They say that men change: 'tis so: but you
Are ever-constant in your changefulness,
Like that still thread of falling river, one
From source to last embrace in the still pool
Ever-renewed and ever-moving on
From first to last a myriad water-drops
And you -- I love you for it -- are the force
That moves and holds the form.
I then showed these two poems to an (unsuspecting) friend of mine and asked her to read them both and tell me which in her opinion seems a "better" poem and which she prefered. She said the first one appealed to her more. I then asked her to give her reasons for why she thought so and she replied, "The first one seemed like it was really addressed to a woman and as I read it I pictured myself as the woman the poem was addressed to. That poem somehow 'spoke' to me." I asked her why she didn't like the second poem as much and she said, "It didn't sound natural somehow. It didn't sound like it could be addressed to a man". I prodded and pried her to expand on her reasons, to give me more concrete evidence to suppliment her claims, but she couldn't come up with any, except the fact that she thought women were more likely to be associated with change, and then she proceeded to give me an example of an Opera where men accused women of changing.
What I imagined as a small riddle turned out to be a larger, intricate puzzle, for my friend and I talked about the matter for a long time, unable to comprehend if there was even a solution. Why is it that ONE word should make a world of a difference in the appreciation of a poem? Why should the shift in gender affect the meaning of the poem? Should it change our pereception of the poem?
I came to the conclusion that perhaps we find the poem more "feminine" because of the density of references to water. Water, being regenerative, life-giving, and nourishing, mimics the nature of a woman, who gives birth and nurtures her young and others around her. But then, what elements constitute the "masculine" if water constitutes the feminine? Air? Earth? Fire? And Why should gender restrict elements in this way, and vice versa? Why, despite the phrase, "The force that moves and holds the form", do we still think that the poem is addressed to a woman by a man? Can the force not mean a man's force?
Why are women considered changeful? (Even Rochester calls Jane a "wicked changeling"), and men the seats of constancy? Are women's affections so fickle? Although I don't necessarily agree, I applaud Anne Elliot (of Persuastion) for trying to argue against this notion of the feeble nature of women's affections at a time when women's constacy was severely doubted, for she claimed that women love longer and stronger than men. Surprisingly, times haven't changed for yet another friend told me today that "it is generally assumed that women are more disposed to change more easily than men, as the latter are more constant, more "strong" in thier resolves".
This labeling of women as "changeful" creatures, unable to stick to their decisions and obey an order, has got to change. I am surprised at how little has changed since
ancient times. According to Paradise Lost it is Eve's susceptiblity to temptation that led to the Fall. She is supposed to have given in when Adam did not, to the temptings of Satan. While she broke the ordained law, she also gratified her curiosity, for it is the eagerness for knowledge that led her to committ such an act. It does not mean she can never be constant in her resolve. She never stopped loving Adam.
I found this poem by Byatt even more interesting because it is written by her, a woman, in the style of a male poet writing to his female muse. What does it mean for a writer who is female to have done so? How are we to interpret this act as readers?
7 comments:
Hi Frankengirl!
"What men write about women seems to be turned into “truth” by the sheer repetition of the claim."
I wonder why women even now more readily accept this claim as truth instead of questioning its source. Does this follow that years are needed to unteach this notion?
"And when a woman writes from her point of view, it can seem unusual and strange to us for this very same reason!"
Could it also be because of the lack of women writers, or the lack of material written by women on this topic?
Just a random thought...I always wondered why Eve has been thought to be the orignal transgressor, rather that Adam. Eve was tempted, but at least she had a mind of her own- to make her own decision. Adam, if you read the Bible's account, didn't question why he should or shouldn't eat the apple as Eve did- he blindly followed her lead. I always thought he was a bit of a wimp. Ever since I was little, I never could figure out what element in the creation story could perpetuate women as being fickle. If women are fickle, then you might as well say that men have no minds of their own. (Which, I don't believe to be true.)Still perplexes me!
Hello :)
I recently watched the movie again and it made me so want to read the book once again. Perhaps I will do so soon. Have you seen the film? What did you think of it? I really like it.
As you say, the book has so many layers, so many influences. I recently read a long article where A.S. Byatt talked about its inspiration and different sources and it's pretty impressive.
I loved reading your post, though I don't feel qualified to add anything.
"If women are fickle, then you might as well say that men have no minds of their own."
This is an interesting point and I've wondered about this myself. It seems like the balance between obedience and discovery is a very precarious one...
Hi Cristina!
Welcome! :)
I have seen it, several times in fact. I watched the movie before I read the book and although I liked the movie then, I love the book much more and now I like the latter more than the former. The film is not a very faithful adaptation of the novel, as it is a very difficult novel to adapt. Possession is best enjoyed read, I believe, for I found the language and the poetry much more engrossing than the characterization and cinematography. The nuances of language is very difficult to explore on film. The best part of the film was Northam and Ehle, who played Ash and LaMotte, the Victorian poets. I somehow couldn't get sufficiently involved in the modern-day lovers played by Gwyneth Paltrow and Aarom Eckhart. The latter specifically didn't seem like a scholar at all, but more like he was on his way to a base-ball game. But on the whole, the film is quite decent. I think you'd like the book too if the film interests you so!
I recently read a long article where A.S. Byatt talked about its inspiration and different sources and it's pretty impressive.
Is there a link to this article, or a way to get hold of it? I'd like to take a look!
Thanks!
Hello!
I think I expressed myself awfully: I have read the book and love it. But I also like the film a lot. I think the film is of course much lighter than the book. But still it's a pretty nice effort. Possession is the kind of book that makes it hard to believe that someone actually did take a shot at turning it into a movie.
And this is going to be awfully long now. Unfortunately I really don't know where I picked this from so I'm just copying and pasting the whole article. I'm sorry for the long, long comment this is going to become, but hopefully you will forget about that once you have read the article, which I think you'll find very interesting. So, here goes:
Choices: On the Writing of Possession
The beginning of Possession, and the first choice, was most unusually for me, the title. I thought of it in the British Library, watching that great Coleridge scholar, Kathleen Coburn, circumambulating the catalogue. I thought: she has given all her life to his thoughts, and then I thought: she has mediated his thoughts to me. And then I thought "Does he possess her, or does she possess him? There could be a novel called Possession about the relations between living and dead minds." This must have been in the late sixties. It was the time of the nouveau roman, of the novel as "text."
When I first recognise a thought as the germ of a novel or story, I form a shape, or file, in a corner of my mind, to which I add things that seem to belong to it, quotations, observations. At that stage this Gestalt is more like the plan for a painting than a novel. It has colour and texture, though I have to think very hard to call these to mind. The ur-Gestalt of Possession was a grey cloudy web, ghostly and spidery, to do with the ghostliness and connectedness of the original idea. I think it was also to do with the nouveau roman, which I still visualise in that form. I imagined my text as a web of scholarly quotations and parodies through which the poems and writings of the dead should loom at the reader, to be surmised and guessed at.
The next decisive choices came in the 1980s when I was teaching Browning and George Eliot, and also lecturing on Henry James and his father, Henry James senior, who had been a leading Swedenborgian. I had had the idea that the word "possession" involved both the daemonic and the economic- Kathleen Coburn had pulled off a notorious coup when she bought the Coleridge notebooks for Toronto. Reading the Browning letters made me see that "possession" had a primary sexual connotation, too. I made a decision: there should be two couples, man and woman, one alive and one dead. The novel would concern the complex relations between these two pairs. My grey cobwebby palimpsest changed colour- it took on a lurid black shot with crimson and scarlet, colours of passion. I was teaching that great novel, The Bostonians, with its world of "witches, wizards, mediums, and spirit-rappers and roaring radicals" to a generation of students involved in the politics of gender, who disliked Henry James's tragi-comic treatment of lesbian passion. It occurred to me that in the world of nineteenth-century spiritualism and feminism, possession had both its meanings at once. So there was a need for the nineteenth-century woman to be a lesbian, or thought to be a lesbian, and the twentieth-century woman scholar to be a feminist. What George Eliot's letters added to this texture of texts to think about was the sense I always have that her real passionate self is splendidly absent from the letters kept by the people who kept them. Her love-letters, unlike those of the Brownings, were buried with her. It is the luck of an unusually devoted marriage between poets once separated that we have the Browning letters. There have been serious proposals to dig up George Eliot. There is a Gothic plot, I thought, of violence and skulduggery. The Gestalt got more lurid, purple, black, vermilion, with flying white forms.
I half-knew that the form of my novel should be a parody of every possible form, popular and "high culture", when I was asked to review Umberto Eco's Reflections on the Name of the Rose. I had already had the idea that Possession should be a kind of detective story, with the scholars as the detectives, when I read The Name of the Rose which combines mediaeval theology, Church history, gleefully bloodthirsty horrors, reflections on the form of the novel, with a hero who is an avatar or precursor of Sherlock Holmes. What entranced me about Eco's Reflections was his pleasure- "I wanted to murder a monk", and his technical reflections on the fact that detective stories and melodramas had to be written backwards. If you want to burn down a library quickly and irretrievably you must make it burnable when you invent its architecture. I had been thinking a lot about the pleasure principle in art. Art does not exist for politics, or for instruction- it exists primarily for pleasure, or it is nothing. It can do the other things if it gives pleasure, as Coleridge knew, and said. And the pleasure of fiction is narrative discovery, as it was easy to say about television serials and detective stories, but not, in those days, about serious novels.
So my novel should be a parody, not of Sherlock Holmes, but of the Margery Allingham detective stories I grew up on. It should learn from my childhood obsession, Georgette Heyer, to be a Romance, and it could learn, simultaneously from Hawthorne, Henry James's predecessor, that a historical Romance is not realist, and desires to "connect a bygone time with the very present that is flitting away from us." I added things- it should be an epistolary novel, which meant writing the letters the scholars should find, it should contain early narrative forms- Victorian women writers wrote fairy tales- and late ones- bits of biographies and critical "accounts" of what was going on.
The Gestalt in my mind changed colour and form and became delicious - all green and gold, the colours of Tennyson illustrations in my mind as a child, of dream landscapes, of childhood imaginings of a world brighter and more jewel-like than this one.
There was a huge problem. I knew that modern forms were parodic- not only Eco, but the intelligent criticism of Malcolm Bradbury had been pointing that out - parodic, not in a sneering or mocking way, but as "rewriting" or "representing" the past. The structural necessity of my new form was that the poems of my two poets, the most important thing about them in my own view, should be in this no-longer ghostly text. And I am not a poet, and novelists who write poems usually come to grief. Robertson Davies, the Canadian novelist, had written a novel with a parodic libretto in fact made up of the poems of Thomas Lovell Beddoes. I said to the poet D.J.Enright at a party, that I was contemplating using the early poems of Pound that look as though they could be by Browning. "Nonsense," he said. "Write your own."
So I tried. My mind has been full since childhood of the rhythms of Tennyson and Browning, Rossetti and Keats. I read and reread Emily Dickinson, whose harsher and more sceptical voice I found more exciting than Christina Rossetti's meek resignation. I wanted a fierce female voice. And I found I was possessed - it was actually quite frightening - the nineteenth-century poems that were not nineteenth-century poems wrote themselves, hardly blotted, fitting into the metaphorical structure of my novel, but not mine, as my prose is mine.
There is one further late choice I should like to mention. There are three passages in the nineteenth-century narrative which are recounted by a Victorian "omniscient" third-person narrator. These three include the Epilogue, and tell what might be thought of as the most important, beautiful and terrible moments in the lives of the Victorian characters. I still receive angry letters from time to time from all over the world, saying these passages are a mistake- that I have cleverly told the story of the past through documents, diaries, letters, poems, and am breaking my own convention incompetently. But my decision was very deliberate. It was partly polemical, for two reasons. I do believe that biographies are a kind of shadow-play, and that what really mattered is likely to elude the piecers-together of lives. (Doris Lessing endorses this view, mischievously, at the beginning of her recent autobiography.) I also believe that the third-person narrator has been much maligned in the recent past - it does not aspire or pretend to be "God"- simply the narrative voice, which knows what it does know. And I wanted to show that such a voice can bring the reader nearer the passions and the thoughts of the characters, without any obligation to admire the cleverness of the novelist. There is a nice irony about this- the writer and reader share what the critics and scholars cannot discover.
And the Gestalt now? A green and gold and blue balloon, far away, untouchable. A writer can't think about novels that have gone away. The Gestalt of the one I am writing, about the 1960s, is a jagged harlequin pattern of coloured fragments and smoking bonfires. And there is something weak about the narrative line, or tension, connecting these, that I'm trying to deal with.
Thank you Cristina! I can't wait to read it!
Post a Comment