Identity and Cultural Memory in the Fiction of A.S. Byatt: Knitting the Net of Culture

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Identity and Cultural Memory in the Fiction of A. S. Byatt

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Identity and Cultural Memory in the Fiction of A. S. Byatt Knitting the Net of Culture Lena Steveker

© Lena Steveker 2009 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No portion of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, Saffron House, 6–10 Kirby Street, London EC1N 8TS. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The author has asserted her right to be identiﬁed as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2009 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Palgrave Macmillan in the UK is an imprint of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan in the US is a division of St Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN-13: 978–0–230–57533–2 hardback This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 11 10 09 Printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Antony Rowe, Chippenham and Eastbourne

To Henning


Contents Acknowledgements

viii

List of Abbreviations

ix

Introduction

1

I. Identity 1. Concepts of Identity in Possession and The Biographer’s Tale 2. Self and Other in Possession and The Biographer’s Tale 3. Concepts of Identity in A. S. Byatt’s Tetralogy 4. The Gendered Self 5. Female Autonomy 6. Reconciling Body and Mind: the ‘Thinking Woman’

7

II. Identity – Cultural Memory – Literature 7. Identity and Memory 8. Figures of Memory: Elizabeth I and Shakespeare 9. Cultural Texts: Identity and Literature 10. Imaginary Museums: Intertextuality and Cultural Memory 11. Memorial Novels: the English Renaissance and the Victorian Age 12. Mnemonic Spaces: Identity and Genre

9 18 39 44 55 65 75 77 87 95 104 116 126

Conclusion

135

Notes and References

144

Bibliography and Further Reading

167

Index

183

vii

Acknowledgements I am grateful to a number of people for the support and the advice they bestowed upon me during the years in which I was writing this study. My thanks go to my teachers and colleagues at the Graduate College Kulturhermeneutik im Zeichen von Differenz und Transdifferenz at the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg, especially to Doris Feldmann. Her critical readings and her insightful comments were indispensable. I also owe a great deal to the other members of the Graduate College, especially to Annette Grigoleit and Maisun Sharif. Further thanks go to Joachim Frenk, Thomas M. Stein and Martin Middeke for their comments on sample chapters and for their encouragement. I am very grateful to Steffi M. Naegele, Susanne Jenkins and Anne Charlton for the careful attention they have given to my manuscript. I would also like to thank Paula Kennedy for her interest in my book and the anonymous reader commissioned by Palgrave whose helpful comments I found most thought-provoking. Without the research grant from the German National Foundation, I would not have been able to write the PhD thesis ‘Knitting the Net of Culture: Individual Identity and the Memory of Culture in the Fiction of A. S. Byatt’ (University of Erlangen-Nuremberg, 2007) from which this book developed. For the kind permission to reproduce Vermeer’s Girl Reading a Letter by the Open Window, I would like to thank the Gemäldegalerie Alter Meister, Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden. I am also grateful for the generous permission to quote from A. S. Byatt’s novels The Virgin in the Garden, Still Life, Babel Tower, A Whistling Woman, Possession and The Biographer’s Tale as well as from her critical essays Passions of the Mind and On Histories and Stories, all published by Chatto & Windus and reprinted by permission of The Random House Group Ltd.

viii

List of Abbreviations SS VG SL P BT TBT WW

Shadow of the Sun The Virgin in the Garden Still Life Possession Babel Tower The Biographer’s Tale A Whistling Woman

ix


Introduction

‘Who is it that can tell me who I am?’ – This question, asked twice by one of the main female characters of A. S. Byatt’s tetralogy (BT, p.520, WW, p.330), encompasses the three aspects that determine my analysis of Byatt’s fiction: identity, literature, and cultural memory. Firstly, this question expresses a longing for identity, which is the key theme pervading all of the six novels I discuss here. Possession (1990) and The Biographer’s Tale (2000)1 are two biographic metafictions, each of which can be read as a double quest for identity as, in either text, the protagonists’ search for their biographical subjects is closely connected to their own search for themselves. The four novels in Byatt’s tetralogy – The Virgin in the Garden (1978), Still Life (1985), Babel Tower (1996) and A Whistling Woman (2002)2 – thematize the negotiation of female identity within the setting of post-war Britain. They have their female protagonist, a young woman called Frederica Potter, develop her identity during social upheavals in Britain in the 1950s and the 1960s. The reader witnesses her struggling to find her place in life during a time of both progress and disorientation, when traditional gender roles start to break up and begin to be redefined, social hierarchies are threatened and the belief in a Christian God is finally supplanted by a belief in science.3 ‘Who is it that can tell me who I am?’ – This question also alludes to the topic of literature, since these words are uttered not only by one of Byatt’s protagonists, but also by Shakespeare’s tragic hero King Lear (King Lear I.4.189). The fact that Byatt’s character quotes Shakespeare when calling for somebody to guide her own processes of identity formation points to the eminent role that Byatt’s tetralogy, as well as 1

2 Identity and Cultural Memory in the Fiction of A. S. Byatt

her other two novels discussed here, ascribes to literature within the context of individual identity. Last, but not least, the Shakespearean quote links the aspects of identity and literature to that of cultural memory, since Shakespeare is one of the most prominent figures of British cultural memory, which Byatt’s novels establish as a system of reference for both their protagonists and their readers. My literary analysis is grounded in several theories that allow me to focus on the complex connections between individual identity, cultural memory and literature, around which the six novels discussed here revolve. Undoubtedly, identity and cultural memory are two terms that have become buzzwords of literary and cultural studies. Therefore, it is all the more important to establish a clearly defined theoretical background. The first part of my book is devoted to the different concepts of identity Byatt’s novels explore. The theoretical concepts informing my analysis define postmodern identity as a temporary construct which, as it is the result of an ongoing process, can only remain incomplete and unfinished (Straub, 2004, pp.279–80). According to Jürgen Straub, postmodern identity is a social norm which people demand for themselves as well as for others, but which can never be fully realized (Straub, 2004, p.280). Thus, identity is an ‘aspiration’ (Straub, 2004, p.279) which enables a person to experience her/himself as a continuous and coherent self. The term ‘self’ as it is used here is informed by Ricoeur’s ‘hermeneutics of the self’ (Ricoeur, 1992, p.4) which, as outlined in Oneself as Another, aims to rescue the self from its critics (Ricoeur, 1992, pp.11–16) while refuting attempts to conceptualize it as a metaphysical substance (Ricoeur, 1992, pp.4–11). Ricoeur’s conception of identity makes it possible to take into consideration the fundamental ‘binary opposition’ of self and the other which he conceives of as ‘the dialectic of self and other than self ’ (Ricoeur, 1992, p.3). As the relationship between self and the other is always an ethical problem (Harpham, 1990, pp.394–5), the topic of identity is also part of an ethical discourse which, according to Doris Feldmann, ‘may become the paradigm-defining concept for post-poststructuralist criticism’ (Feldmann, 2006, p.13). It is from within this theoretical framework that I analyse Possession and The Biographer’s Tale in Chapters 1 and 2. I investigate the notions of postmodern identity which Byatt’s texts explore. Furthermore, my reading offers new critical perspectives not only on these two novels, but also on the whole genre of biographic metafiction.

Introduction 3

Up to now, critical discussions of this genre have dealt with the epistemological, ontological, and methodological problems of lifewriting.4 My analysis however focuses on the hermeneutic impetus of Byatt’s novels and the underlying possibilities and limitations of understanding another’s life while ‘regard[ing] the otherness of the other person’ (Schabert, 1990, p.1). I address the anthropological and ethical implications of the novels’ hermeneutic impetus and I investigate the strategies Possession and The Biographer’s Tale employ in order to relate to the other and to respect her/his unique personhood. Furthermore, I analyse the recalcitrant aspects included in the process of comprehending the other, which I propose to approach through the critically hermeneutical concept of transdifference.5 Turning to Byatt’s tetralogy, the book then focuses on the notions of identity explored in the four novels The Virgin in the Garden, Still Life, Babel Tower, and A Whistling Woman. As I argue in Chapter 3, these texts engage in a critical discussion which conceptualizes narration as the prevailing paradigm of identity in Western cultures.6 Gender is another important aspect of identity formation problematized in all of Byatt’s novels. According to feminist psychologists, female identity radically differs from male identity, as it is determined by aspects of bonding and ethical responsibility (Silke, 2002, p.183). As I argue in Chapters 4–6, Byatt’s texts conceptualize gender as a marker of difference determining the processes of identity construction, as they represent the male self as achieving self-sufficient autonomy and the female self as emerging from a dichotomy of separateness and bonding. Negotiating the female struggle for emancipation in the Victorian Age and British society of the 1950s and 1960s, the novels not only criticize patriarchy for restricting female autonomy, but also aim to deconstruct the gendered dichotomy of (male) mind and (female) body. The topic of memory, which forms another important aspect in the theoretical contexts of identity formation, links the first part of the book to the second part. As with identity, the idea of memory has met with controversial discussion in scientific and scholarly discourses. Having its origins in philosophy, it has been a topic of various disciplines such as theology, medicine, psychology, history, sociology, literary studies, art history, and media studies. Generally speaking, one can define memory as ‘the retention and retrieval in the human mind of past experiences’.7 However, opinions concerning the way


the human mind retains and retrieves past experiences have differed widely throughout the ages. Nevertheless, two main theories about the workings of memory can be distinguished. While philosophers such as Aristotle, Plato, Augustine, Locke, and Hume conceive of memory as a ‘storehouse’ from which exact images of past events and experiences can be retrieved at any time without any loss of information (Shoemaker, 1972, pp.265–74),8 early twentieth-century scientists and psychologists contend that memory constructs rather than reconstructs the versions of the past that it stores. Memory can thus be seen as the creative act of constructing the past – a productive ability of the human mind. As George Herbert Mead and Jürgen Habermas elucidate, it is with the help of their memories that individuals come to an intrasubjective understanding of themselves, which is one of the defining processes on which individual identity depends (Mead, 1913; Habermas, 1992, pp.153, 168–70). As I explain in Chapter 7, the aspects of identity and personal memory are linked to each other – in different ways – in Byatt’s tetralogy as well as in Possession. The novels I discuss here explore the notion of memory in both its personal and collective dimensions. Paradoxically, personal memory is by no means a phenomenon pertaining only to the individual. Since it is inevitably socially conditioned, as Maurice Halbwachs explains, even in what appears to be its most individual aspects, personal memory is framed by collective memory (Halbwachs, 1950, 1994). Consequently, personal memory partakes of cultural memory, which Jan Assmann defines as that part of collective memory which is responsible for storing and transmitting cultural meaning (J. Assmann, 1997, p.21). Since personal memory is an influential factor in individual identity formation and since it is collectively framed, the collective frame constituted by cultural memory necessarily determines not only collective, but also individual identities. Following Ernst Cassirer, culture can be defined as genuinely mnemonic. Cassirer conceptualizes culture as a symbolic system made up of the sum of all symbolic forms through which humans, the ‘animal[ia] symbolic[a]’ (Cassirer, 1954, p.44), understand both reality and themselves (Cassirer, 1954, p.53). These symbolic forms – such as language, art, history, religion, myth, and science (Cassirer, 1954, p.93) – are inherently mnemonic, which is to say they dynamically store and reassess cultural meaning (Cassirer, 1956). In short, culture is

Introduction 5

a dynamic process based on the mnemonic concept of symbolic forms (Cassirer, 1954). Along similar lines, Aby Warburg ascribes ‘mnemic [sic] function’ (Gombrich, 1970, p.269) to cultural objectifications, especially to objects of pictorial art. Jan Assmann, whose work on cultural memory is indebted to both Warburg and Halbwachs, finally argues that verbal and non-verbal cultural objectifications store and transmit cultural meaning (J. Assmann, 1997, p.52, p.139). They serve as media of cultural memory, opening up a way into the past which is closed to historiography.9 Byatt’s tetralogy repeatedly conceptualizes British cultural memory as a system of reference serving to stabilize individual identity. As I argue in Chapter 8, the figures of Shakespeare and Elizabeth I, both of them firmly inscribed into British cultural memory, represent key determinants of individual identity in Byatt’s tetralogy. Furthermore, her novels are concerned with negotiating the function that literature has in cultural memory. Since texts from the ‘high’ canon of (predominantly) British literature exert normative and formative power on the identity of Byatt’s protagonists, as pointed out in Chapter 9, her novels represent these texts as what Aleida Assmann calls cultural texts of British cultural memory (A. Assmann, 1995, p.234). According to Jan and Aleida Assmann, literary texts are only relevant in cultural memories if they serve as cultural texts, that is, if they are seen as objects deemed worthy of cultural remembrance. However, this is too narrow an approach, since it only regards literary texts as forming part of the content of cultural memories, without considering their function as genuine media of cultural memory.10 As I argue in Chapters 10–12, it is above all due to the aspects of intertextuality and genre that literature functions as a medium of cultural memory. Byatt’s tetralogy and her novel Possession exemplify the eminent role pertaining to literature within cultural memory, since they negotiate their protagonists’ processes of identity formation within the context of British memory, which the texts both activate and contribute to through their rich intertextual depositories. In A Whistling Woman as well as in Possession and The Biographer’s Tale, genre patterns are repositories of cultural memory that determine the construction of identity. In short, each of the six novels I discuss conceptualizes literature as a medium of British cultural memory which serves as a stabilizing force for individual identities that have to be negotiated within an arena of competing categories of difference.


A Note on Translations Some of the theoretical texts I refer to and quote from in this book are in German. In almost all cases, these texts are not yet available in English. Unless stated otherwise in the bibliography, all translations of these texts are mine, although I do not, for reasons of readability, give the abbreviation ‘my transl.’ in the parentheses providing the bibliographical data. My translations will, I hope, make these texts accessible to a reading public that does not speak/read German.

Part I Identity


1 Concepts of Identity in Possession and The Biographer’s Tale

Each of A. S. Byatt’s novels discussed in this book negotiates notions of identity. In each novel, Byatt’s protagonists try to find answers to the question of ‘who am I?’ Thus, they explore a prominent issue of the socio-cultural discourses of the late twentieth and the early twenty-first centuries. As several scholars inform us, identity has become a ‘permanent topic’ (Eickelpasch & Rademacher, 2004, p.5), which ‘seems to be omnipresent in our minds and texts’ (Assmann & Friese, 1999, p.11) at the close of the last and the beginning of the present millennium. Individuals and groups ‘strive for and worry about identity with passionate and fearful enthusiasm’ (Eickelpasch & Rademacher, 2004, p.5); companies are keen to develop corporate identities; the media offer us new models of identity daily (Niethammer, 1995, p.39), and self-help manuals recommend ‘identity styling’ (Eickelpasch & Rademacher, 2004, p.5). Within this context, A. S. Byatt’s protagonists seem to represent typical characters of their time1 as each of them is concerned with establishing their identity. What, however, is ‘identity’? Although it has been described as a notoriously vague ‘umbrella term [covering a] myriad of conceptions and connotations’ (Deaux, 2000, p.222) which have emerged from different theoretical and intellectual traditions,2 identity can be seen as an answer to the question of ‘who am I?’ (Keupp, 2001, p.243).3 Identity is ‘one’s definition of self’ (Deaux, 2000, p.224); it subsumes the ways in which individuals4 see and refer to themselves (Straub, 1991, pp.59–60).5 These sociological and sociopsychological explanations are surely still too broad to describe the complex processes from which identity results, but they may suffice as a first working definition. 9

10


A. S. Byatt’s novels Possession and The Biographer’s Tale both feature protagonists whose definition of self is highly problematic. In Possession, Roland Michell and Maud Bailey are faced with profound uncertainty when it comes to knowing who they are. In Roland’s case, psychological and socio-economic aspects add up to the picture of a man whose sense of identity is highly insecure. Having been ‘trained in the post-structuralist deconstruction of the subject’ (P, p.9), Roland sees himself in a very detached way: ‘[h]e had been trained to see his idea of “self” as an illusion’ (P, p.424). Paradoxically, Roland ‘mostly . . . liked this’ (P, p.424), but it leaves him with no possibility of relating directly to himself. In fact, when he is first characterized early on in the novel, the reader learns that he mostly thinks of himself in terms of his relationships with other people such as his boss James Blackadder and his girlfriend Val (P, p.10). Even more than his indirect view of himself, however, it is his precarious professional situation which he regards as the actual threat to his identity. He sees himself as ‘an application form, for a job, a degree, a life’ (P, p.10), a form which has not been filled in successfully, as it were, for he is an unemployed literary researcher (P, p.11) who lives off his girlfriend’s income (P, pp.13–14). In short, he conceives of ‘himself as a failure’ (P, pp.10–11). In contrast to Roland, Maud Bailey finds herself in a stable socioeconomic position since she has ‘a secure job and an international reputation’ (P, p.424) as a feminist literary scholar. Nevertheless, she too is deeply insecure about her identity because her conception of herself depends on the paradigms of poststructuralist theory such as the decentred self and the deconstructed subject. Knowing that ‘there isn’t a unitary ego’ (P, p.267), she regards herself as ‘made up of conflicting, interacting systems of things’ (P, p.267). In fact, she admits to not knowing who she is when she asks herself: ‘who am I? A matrix for a susurration of texts and codes?’ (P, p.251). Furthermore, both Roland and Maud are troubled by their sexual identities or, to put it more precisely, by their identity as sexual beings. As the following paragraph taken from the novel implies, their attitude towards sexuality is deeply influenced by poststructuralist and psychoanalytic theories. As the narrative voice comments: [t]hey were theoretically knowing: they knew about phallocracy and penisneid, punctuation, puncturing and penetration . . . the system of desire and damage . . . the iconography of the cervix

Identity in Possession and The Biographer’s Tale 11

and the imagery of the expanding and contracting Body, desired, attacked, consumed, feared. (P, p.423) Their theoretical knowledge leads Roland and Maud to reject sexual desire. As each of them expresses a longing for an empty white bed in an empty room, claiming that it would be best to be without desire (P, p.267), they betray ‘a deep uncertainty about who they are,’ as Jon Thiem argues (Thiem, 2000, p.426). The same can be said about Phineas Nanson in The Biographer’s Tale. Phineas experiences a predicament similar to that of Roland insofar as his psychological and professional situation causes him to feel deeply insecure about himself. Phineas characterizes himself as driven by epistemological desire which expresses itself in ‘a true intellectual passion for coherence and meanings’ (TBT, p.100) and a ‘search for meaning’ (TBT, p.100). Ironically, this has induced him to ‘g[et] into poststructuralism’ (TBT, p.100) as a postgraduate student of postmodern literary theory. Thus, he has become involved in the scholarly discipline that has been influenced as no other has by Derrida’s concept of deconstruction and by the perpetual deferral of meaning it entails. Once Phineas has realized that postmodern literary theory cannot satisfy his epistemological desire, he decides to turn his back on it: ‘I’ve decided to give it all up. I’ve decided I don’t want to be a postmodern literary theorist’ (TBT, p.3). With his profession gone, Phineas finds himself in a situation that is one of complete disorientation, which he describes as a ‘fluid vacuum’ (TBT, p.18). What is more, his uncertainty regarding his professional future is coupled with his overall psycho-emotional attitude towards himself, which is determined by postmodern theory. He calls himself a ‘modern man, if not a post-modern man’ (TBT, p.120) who does not know who he is, as the following statement implies: It seems likely to me [Phineas] that if I had been born into an earlier generation I might have had to have some idea of my Self. (TBT, p.100) Not only does Phineas lack any sense of who he actually is, but he also seems to be curiously disinterested in himself, for his education has taught him ‘to believe in impersonality’ (TBT, p.250). He feels driven by a ‘healthy desire to eschew the personal’ (TBT, p.214), which culminates in him admitting: ‘I am not interested in myself . . . I am

12


not very interested in finding out who I am’ (BT, pp.99–100). His disinterest in himself is coupled with a curious detachment when it comes to other people. Human company makes him uneasy,6 and he has problems relating to other people (TBT, pp.141–2). Expressing a lack of self-esteem and insecurity, he describes himself as ‘a small, insignificant being’ (TBT, p.216). In a similar way to the protagonists of Possession, Phineas is thus characterized as another late twentiethcentury scholar whose education in postmodern literary theory has left him with a detached sense of self and a blurred self-perception. At first glance, Phineas, Roland, and Maud seem to represent (stereo)typically postmodern subjects of the late twentieth century, who, as sociologists and psychologists emphasize, experience individual identity construction as an ever-increasing problem (Straub, 1996, 2004, pp.277–90; Keupp, 1999, 2001). Ever since the beginning of postmodernity – which is sometimes termed ‘high’ or ‘late’ modernity (Habermas, 1985; Giddens, 1997) – ongoing social and economic processes such as differentiation, pluralization, detraditionalization, individualization, and globalization have destabilized modern concepts of society, consequently threatening stable and unambiguous norms of identity (Eickelpasch & Rademacher, 2004, pp.6–9).7 As the postmodern Western societies of the late twentieth and the early twenty-first centuries have failed to provide their members with ‘an inventory of valid identity patterns’ (Keupp, 2001, p.245),8 individuals have been thrown back on to themselves for providing answers to the question of who they are (Straub, 1991, p.50, 2004, p.280). In fact, they are no longer determined by what they are,9 but by what they make of themselves (Giddens, 1997, p.75).10 Thus, identity has come to be seen as a self-reflexive process of negotiation which lies within an individual’s own responsibility. Theorists agree that it emerges only as the temporary result of permanently ongoing processes of construction (Deaux, 2000, p.225; Straub, 2004, p.279). In other words, postmodern identities ‘always remain . . . incomplete and unfinished’ (Straub, 2004, p.280); they are unstable and fragile (Kellner, 1993, p.143). Indeed, Byatt’s protagonists seem to mirror such postmodern conceptions of identity. Roland, for example, has ‘learned to see himself, theoretically, as a crossing-place for a number of systems, all loosely connected’ (P, p.424), while Maud ‘think[s] of herself as intermittent and partial’ (P, p.251). Phineas’s claim that he has no idea of his ‘Self’ (TBT, p.100) not only reveals his unstable sense of identity, but also


seems to criticize the metaphysical notion of selfhood as a stable and coherent unity, as the use of the capital letter implies. In spite of being experienced as fragile, insecure, unstable and incomplete, identity is however still considered to be a social norm in postmodern societies (Straub, 2004, p.280). Postmodern subjects demand identity for themselves as well as for others, even if it can only emerge in an open-ended process which can never be completed (Straub, 2004, p.280). Byatt’s protagonists apparently represent such notions of identity. They do not know who they are, but they are engaged in filling the void they feel in themselves, thus striving to construct their identities. Trying to find definitions of themselves, Roland and Maud subconsciously turn towards the past, more specifically towards the literary past. Roland is an expert on the Victorian poet Randolph Henry Ash, who is a character invented by A. S. Byatt. Maud’s field of expertise is the work of the equally fictitious Victorian poetess Christabel LaMotte. Literary critic Elisabeth Bronfen claims that Roland’s and Maud’s research on Ash and LaMotte is meant to ‘satisfy th[eir] scholarly desires’ (Bronfen, 1996, p.122). Examining their motivation more closely, however, it turns out that they have both dedicated themselves to their work on Ash and LaMotte not only out of professional interest, but also out of deeply personal reasons, for these two poets are closely connected to their own pre-scholarly lives. Roland regards Ash’s work as part of his upbringing, as part of his own past (P, p.55). His poems exert a certain power on him, for ‘[t]hey were what stayed alive’ (P, p.55) throughout his theoretical schooling. Maud came across one of Christabel’s poems as a child, which then ‘became a kind of touchstone’ (P, p.53) for her later work as a scholar (P, p.54). Taking a closer look at Roland’s and Maud’s attitudes towards the authors whose work they specialize in, one realizes that they conceive of them as models of identification to which they turn in order to stabilize their own insecure sense of themselves. Roland’s fascination with Ash by far exceeds a merely scholarly interest in a poet’s work. He admires him for his quiet way of life which enabled him to produce outstanding poetry (P, p.8). What is more, Roland claims to have ‘knowledge of the movements of Ash’s mind’ (P, p.20). Always having his own copy of the standard edition of Ash’s poetry (P, p.8) on him, he has made the poet his constant companion. He feels so closely connected to Ash that he regards him as a part of himself: ‘He had always seen [Ash and his work] as part

14


of himself, of Roland Michell’ (P, p.472). Roland’s rather obsessive attitude towards Ash can be read as an attempt to flee from his own existence. As Annegret Horatschek argues, Roland identifies with Ash in order to escape from a life he has repeatedly experienced as a failure and to enter the pre-Freudian world of the poet he admires (Horatschek, 1999, p.59). As Thiem comments, he ‘expend[s] his own life in the pursuit of someone else’ (Thiem, 2000, p.425). Maud has a similarly obsessive relationship to Christabel LaMotte. She defines herself not only through her scholarly work on Christabel, but also through Christabel herself: ‘Christabel, defending Christabel, redefined and alarmed Maud’ (P, p.137). She conceives of Christabel as a ‘companion’ (P, p.136) with whom she sympathizes because she sees many parallels between her own life and Christabel’s. Like Christabel, who isolated herself from society in order to live her chosen way of life as a poetess, Maud feels an urgent need for solitude. It is only in the solitude of her flat, ‘her bright safe box’ (P, p.137) as she calls it, that Maud feels secure and self-possessed. She can do ‘nothing with ease and grace except work alone, inside these walls and curtains’ (P, pp.136–7). Therefore, she can relate to Christabel, who – having chosen a secluded life – claims that ‘my Solitude is my Treasure, the best thing I have’ (P, p.137).11 According to Horatschek, Maud identifies with Christabel because she regards LaMotte’s life as a woman poet within the deeply patriarchal society of Victorian England as a key to overcoming the culturally imposed notions of femininity she sees herself confronted with (Horatschek, 1999, p.59). As Roland does with Ash, Maud uses Christabel as a model of identification, which provides her with the stability and security she herself lacks. Both Roland’s and Maud’s interest in the Victorian poets’ works and lives thus turns into a quest ‘impelled by a search for identity through identification’ (Gauthier, 2006, p.40). In a similar way to Possession, The Biographer’s Tale focuses on a protagonist who strives to give his life new meaning by turning towards a figure from the past. Feeling an ‘urgent need for a life full of things . . . [f]ull of facts’ (TBT, p.4), Phineas renounces postmodern literary theory and decides to embark on a biography of Scholes Destry-Scholes, (fictitious) biographer of the (equally fictitious) Victorian polymath Sir Elmer Bole. Phineas sees Destry-Scholes as a role model, for he is impressed by his ‘resourceful marshalling and arranging of facts’ (TBT, p.15). It seems only natural for him to emulate Destry-Scholes by writing the biographer’s biography (TBT, p.20), hoping thus to


satisfy his longing for facts. What indeed ‘could be more factful – facts cubed, as it were’ (Eder, 2007, p.7)? During his biographical research, Phineas develops an obsessive attitude towards Destry-Scholes which expresses itself in his efforts to establish a personal relationship with his biographee. Not only does he want ‘to get to know him, to meet him, maybe make a kind of friend of him’ (TBT p.23), he also tries to map his mind (TBT, p.175). He alternatively experiences ‘frequent fits of wishing to disagree with Destry-Scholes’ (TBT, p.12) and feels delighted by what he believes to be ‘an affinity’ (TBT, p.27) between himself and his biographee. Finally, he falls prey to what Freud regards as characteristic of a biographer–biographee relationship, namely the biographer paradoxically believing that the biographee chose him as his biographer: I [Phineas] found myself, ludicrously, reacting, as if Destry-Scholes had [meant] to baffle and intrigue me, me personally, Phineas G. Nanson. (TBT, p.98) He also admits that he feels, absurdly, as if Destry-Scholes has tried to deceive him (TBT, p.119). In short, Phineas becomes obsessed with Destry-Scholes, apparently believing that his biographical research is the only way to the ‘factual’ life he yearns for. Relating to and even identifying with Destry-Scholes because of his alleged mastery of facts, Phineas sets out on his own search for facts which is nothing but his ‘own quest for a way to look at the world’ and, therefore, a ‘quest for his own identity’ as Hal Jensen puts it in his TLS review of Byatt’s novel (Jensen, 2000, p.23). As outlined above, the protagonists of both Possession and The Biographer’s Tale regard the authors whose work they specialize in as models of identification. Not knowing who they are, Maud, Roland, and Phineas search for their own places in life by turning towards people from the past who seem to provide them with models of life. Their identification with these people serves the therapeutic means of supporting them in their individual processes of identity formation.12 With their protagonists’ processes of identity formation being linked to the lives of others, Byatt’s novels claim that identity depends on a relationship established between self and other. As sociologists, psychologists, and philosophers of the late twentieth century have pointed out, the relationship between self and other is situated at the very ‘centre of personal experience’ (Sexton, 1993, p.620) since

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postmodern individuals define themselves by contrasting themselves with others (Brooker, 2003, p.183).13 It is through the paradoxical act of both referring to and differentiating oneself from the other that somebody becomes who s/he is (Waldenfels, 2006, pp.26–7). As Paul Ricoeur argues in Oneself as Another (1992), self and other are inevitably linked to one another: ‘the selfhood of oneself implies otherness to such an intimate degree that one cannot be thought of without the other’ (Ricoeur, 1992, p.3). In this ‘dialectic of self and other than self ’ (1992, p.3), Ricoeur aims to approach the self from the perspective of otherness (Waldenfels, 1996, p.284). He conceives of self and other as so inherently interrelated that he asserts that selfhood passes into otherness (Ricoeur, 1992, p.3). The otherness Ricoeur has in mind is ‘otherness of a kind that can be constitutive of selfhood as such’ (Ricoeur, 1992, p.3), a kind of otherness that ‘gnaws at selfhood from within’ (Waldenfels, 1996, p.285). The identities of Byatt’s protagonists in Possession and The Biographer’s Tale do indeed depend on their relationship with others. Their involvement with people from the past eventually enables Maud, Roland and Phineas to establish their identities and find their places in life. Phineas’s obsession with Destry-Scholes eventually brings him to choose a professional future as a tourist manager, a parataxonomist, and an author of ecological travel guides (TBT, p.257). Roland’s work on Ash enables him both to take up a position as a lecturer at Amsterdam, Barcelona, or Hong Kong University (P, pp.467–8) and to become a poet (P, pp.472–5). Due to her research on LaMotte, Maud discovers her origins as LaMotte’s great-great-great-granddaughter (P, p.503) and, at the same time, secures for herself the editorship of the formerly unknown LaMotte–Ash correspondence which she and Roland have discovered in the course of the novel (P, p.505). What is more, their involvement in the lives of others enables Byatt’s characters to enter into sexual relationships with other people, thus acquiring their identity as fully-fledged emotional and sexual beings. Having found out that Ash and LaMotte secretly loved each other and that Maud is descended from their illegitimate daughter Maia, Roland and Maud are eventually able to acknowledge their own love for one another (P, p.506). By discovering Ash’s and LaMotte’s relationship, Maud and Roland succeed in freeing themselves from the inhibiting discourses of postmodern literary theory (Bronfen, 1996, pp.125–6). Thus, they widen their ‘emotional susceptibility’


(Löschnigg, 1996, p.111), until they finally admit that they love and desire each other (P, p.507). With Roland and Maud professing their feelings and giving in to sexual desire, the novel suggests that emotional happiness and sexual fulfilment experienced with another person are essential for individual identity formation. The Biographer’s Tale expresses the same idea. The novel’s protagonist experiences a shift of attention from his biographee to himself (TBT, p.214, p.250). This shift has a decidedly physical dimension to it since it is accompanied by Phineas’s developing relationships with two women, Vera Alphage and Fulla Biefeld, with whom he discovers sexual desire and his own body: ‘Fulla set me aglow – with sex, but also with a kind of pleasure in myself. I liked my body. I liked Phineas G. Nanson’ (TBT, p.216). Phineas’s biographical search for Destry-Scholes is indirectly responsible for him discovering his sexuality, for it is through his research on his biographee that he gets to know both Vera and Fulla. The connection between biographical research and sexuality is first hinted at in a scene in which Phineas visits the Linnean Society in pursuit of information about DestryScholes. There, he faints due to a fit of claustrophobia (TBT, p.117). This scene subtly links Phineas’s quest for Destry-Scholes (and for himself) to sexual desire, for it describes how Phineas faints with a ‘questing face’, regaining consciousness ‘staring up inside her [Fulla’s] skirt at . . . her pubic hair’, his nose ‘alive with [her] sex’ (TBT, p.117; emphasis added). His sexual experiences work a profound change within himself as becomes clear when he comments on his first night with Vera: ‘[A]fterwards, I was not the same person’ (TBT, p.187). Experiencing sexual fulfilment, Phineas arrives at a new self-perception, for he no longer regards himself as small and insignificant but rather as a self-confident man, a ‘new, strutting, gleaming Phineas G.’ (TBT, p.216). This means that The Biographer’s Tale – like Possession – conceptualizes the desire and the fulfilment resulting from sexual relationality as constituent elements of individual identity. In sum, Byatt’s novels Possession and The Biographer’s Tale feature protagonists who experience their own identities as precarious and instable. In order to answer the question of ‘who am I?’, Byatt’s characters turn towards people from the past, who function as models of identification stabilizing Maud’s, Roland’s and Phineas’s processes of identity construction.

2 Self and Other in Possession and The Biographer’s Tale

The preceding chapter dealt with the search by Byatt’s protagonists for themselves, but it is not only the identities of Roland Michell, Maud Bailey and Phineas Nanson that Possession and The Biographer’s Tale are concerned with. In fact, each one of her characters is only interested in finding out who s/he is, because s/he is involved in researching another person’s identity. Byatt’s characters are caught up in the ‘reciprocal action of quest and self-quest’ (Thiem, 2000, p.426), which critics have repeatedly identified as a defining element of any kind of biographical writing.1 Typical of biographers both real and fictional, the protagonists of Possession and The Biographer’s Tale search for their biographees’ identities as well as for their own. They not only ask themselves ‘who am I?’, but they also look at other people’s lives and ask ‘who are you?’ In Possession, Roland starts his quest for knowledge about Ash’s life when he comes to suspect Ash of having started a correspondence with a woman Roland identifies as Christabel LaMotte. Together with the LaMotte expert Maud, Roland slowly discovers that neither Ash nor LaMotte were the people posterity has always believed them to be. Driven by their shared desire to find out who Ash and LaMotte ‘really’ were, Roland and Maud begin their biographical research, which eventually changes their knowledge of the poets’ lives. The Biographer’s Tale also features a protagonist who is engaged in the search for biographical knowledge. Having decided to write a biography of Scholes Destry-Scholes, Phineas Nanson is determined to accumulate knowledge about his biographee. Byatt’s novel tells the story of his efforts ‘to get to know [Destry-Scholes]’ (TBT, p.23), to 18

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grasp his biographee’s identity. Like Possession, The Biographer’s Tale is, however, more than a fictional story about a biographer searching for another person’s identity. It is, in fact, a text that problematizes the processes of life-writing itself. Both The Biographer’s Tale and Possession negotiate the possibilities of gaining knowledge about another person’s life. Thus, they belong to the genre of biographic metafiction.2 The term ‘biographic metafiction’ embraces novels such as Julian Barnes’s Flaubert’s Parrot (1984), Peter Ackroyd’s Chatterton (1987),3 Barry Unsworth’s Losing Nelson (1999), and Byatt’s Possession and The Biographer’s Tale, which have, over the past 20 years, given a decidedly metafictional as well as postmodernist turn to British biographical fiction.4 The prevailing critical approach towards biographic metafiction, which is in fact a subgenre of what Linda Hutcheon has termed ‘historiographic metafiction’ (Hutcheon, 1988, p.5),5 is a constructivist one, which is grounded in postmodern historical theory6 and which has proved to be highly influential in literary studies. Eminent scholars such as Linda Hutcheon, Brian McHale, and Ansgar Nünning7 have emphasized that historiographic metafictions such as John Fowles’ The French Lieutenant’s Woman (1969), Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children (1981), Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day (1989), Julian Barnes’s A History of the World in 101/2 Chapters (1989), Graham Swift’s Waterland (1983) and Last Orders (1996), among others, question notions of historical objectivity and truth. These novels explore the epistemological and ontological questions of postmodern historical theory, which Hutcheon phrases as follows: ‘[H]ow do we know the past? What do (what can) we know of it now?’ (Hutcheon, 1988, p.115). What is the ‘status of the traces of that past’? (Hutcheon, 1988, p.122). Raising these questions, the genre of historiographic metafiction discloses the processes of creating historical meaning, thus expressing a ‘theoretical self-awareness of history and fiction as human constructs’ (Hutcheon, 1988, p.5). Analogous to the genre of historiographic metafiction, which problematizes ‘the very possibility of historical knowledge’ (Hutcheon, 1988, p.106), biographic metafiction emphasizes the processes involved in (re)constructing another person’s identity. In contrast to more traditional biographical fiction, biographic metafiction does not recount another person’s life, but lays open and comments upon the processes of selection and construction on which biographical writing

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depends. Hence, biographic metafictions explore the epistemological, ontological, and methodological problems of reconstructing and narrating a life, as several constructivist readings have pointed out.8 Ansgar Nünning’s critical work is of particular relevance within the context of constructivist criticism of biographic metafiction. Although the typology of postmodern biographic fiction Nünning proposes (Nünning, 2000, pp.26–7; 2005, p.201) is only of limited use,9 he was the first to identify the characteristic elements of biographic metafiction. According to him, texts belonging to this genre are typically determined by a high degree of aesthetical and biographical self-reflexivity, a dense net of intertextual references, and a mixture of different genre patterns (Nünning, 1993, p.69; 1998a, pp.154–5, p.164; 2000, pp.19–20, p.24). Indeed, Byatt’s novels Possession and The Biographer’s Tale include all of these elements. Each text features several aesthetical self-reflections, which draw the reader’s attention to the novel’s status as a fictional text. Possession, for example, states that it follows – at least to a certain extent – the generic patterns of romance (P, p.425), thus overtly commenting upon its own fictionality and its formal structure. The Biographer’s Tale explicitly questions its own textual status by having Phineas ask himself: ‘[W]hat sort of a piece of writing is it, for what purpose, for which reader’ (TBT, p.141)? In many biographical self-reflections, both novels also negotiate the problems inherent in life-writing. Phineas, for example, laments ‘the hopeless nature of the project of biographical accuracy’ (TBT, p.236); and he describes himself as a biographer who ‘organis[es] the quarry of secondary materials into an ur-shape, a preliminary form’ (TBT, p.227). One of the characters in Possession remarks that ‘[t]he historian is an indissoluble part of his history, as the poet is of his poem, as the shadowy biographer is of his subject’s life’ (P, p.385). It is through comments such as these that Byatt’s novels ‘foreground the fact that subjectivity, relativity, selectivity, and constructivity are ineliminable features of biographic (re-)constructions’ (Nünning, 2005, p.205). Possession and The Biographer’s Tale also include an extraordinarily large number of intertextual references to the ‘high’ canon of English literature10 and to various genres. As pointed out by several scholars, Possession incorporates features of genres as diverse as the campus novel, detective story, gothic novel, fairy tale, epistolary novel, diary, epic poem, lyrical poem, literary biography, Victorian hagiography, theoretical essay, and last but not least, romance.11 In a

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similar way to Possession, The Biographer’s Tale encompasses several fictional, non-fictional, and even non-verbal genres such as the detective story (TBT, p.23), romance (TBT, pp.10–11, p.18), fictional biography (TBT, pp.37–95), notes on index cards (TBT, pp.140–51), the novel (TBT, pp.1–25), lecture notes (TBT, pp.25–7), drama (TBT, pp.233–4), newspaper article (TBT, p.249), lyrical poem (TBT, p.259), autobiography (TBT, p.250), sketches (TBT, p.228), pictures (TBT, p.183), and reproductions of woodcuts (TBT, p.57). Due to their highly intertextual and multi-generic structures, Byatt’s novels not only blur the boundaries of fact and fiction, as biographic metafictions typically do (Nünning, 1999a, p.41), but they also stress: the discrepancy between the biographee’s allegedly real life in the past and the remembered and textualized versions of his life, foregrounding the insurmountable gap between a person’s life and any written representation thereof. (Nünning, 2005, p.205) Moreover, it is not only through their formal structure, but also on the diegetic level that Possession and The Biographer’s Tale thematize the postmodern ‘paradox of the reality of the past but its textualized accessibility to us today’ (Hutcheon, 1988, p.114), as I will briefly outline in the following. Possession deals with the search for the ‘truth’ about the Victorian poets Randolph Henry Ash and Christabel LaMotte. Ash is generally believed to be a faithful, devoted husband, who led an intellectually rich but otherwise quiet life (P, p.8). Nobody seems to be further removed from this successful poet than LaMotte, a neglected poetess (P, p.402) who is said to have lived a secluded life with her lesbian lover Blanche (P, pp.36–7). As he was ‘[e]verything that she wasn’t’ (P, p.42), it ‘wasn’t known they knew each other’ (P, p.84). However, what is generally considered to be the historical ‘truth’ about Ash as well as about LaMotte turns out to be only part of the story when Roland finds the drafts of a letter that suggests a meeting between Ash and an unknown woman (P, pp.5–6). A short diary entry stating a coincidental meeting between Ash and LaMotte in 1858 (P, p.24) makes him suspect that the unknown woman was Christabel LaMotte. Unfortunately, his attempts to verify the unknown woman’s identity at first remain unsuccessful. There are no historical facts whatsoever which would confirm his suspicion. Maud, however, is able to

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work out a secret clue hidden in one of LaMotte’s poems (P, p.83), which leads Roland and Maud to discover the poets’ secret love affair. The drafted letter found by Roland and the poem unravelled by Maud symbolize the postmodern notion that the past can only be accessed through whatever textual evidence remains of it. It is through these texts alone that Maud and Roland can approach a past that is otherwise closed to them. Phineas, the protagonist of The Biographer’s Tale, is in a similar situation.12 Planning to write the biography of the biographer Scholes Destry-Scholes, he comes to realize that he has to cope with a total lack of verifiable biographical data. He cannot even be sure of his biographee’s date of birth and his date of death, which are the two dates that traditionally frame a life.13 Parodying positivistic approaches to life-writing, the novel has Phineas face a complete lack of biographical material since his biographee simply ‘left no tracks of who he was’ (TBT, p.100). Destry-Scholes turns out to be a ‘faceless writer’ (TBT, p.20) as there are no photographs of him (TBT, p.7, pp.139–40). The only picture that may serve as a visual aid is a picture of his sister which shows ‘something of the face of Scholes Destry-Scholes’ (TBT, p.185) because of the family relationship between him and his sister. But as this picture is blurred (TBT, p.185), it obscures its already vague reference to Destry-Scholes even more. Likewise, the only two people who can vouch for his existence whom Phineas is able to trace fail to provide any useful biographical information. Destry-Scholes’ niece Vera Alphage proves to be a dead end, since she never met her uncle (TBT, p.131). Ormerod Goode, Phineas’s supervisor, is another dead end, for although he met Destry-Scholes (TBT, p.21), he can only come up with a very vague memory of him as blondish and medium-sized (TBT, p.21). Thus, all that Phineas can lay hands on are ‘second- or third-hand facts’ (TBT, p.30) about DestryScholes. Instead of unearthing factual evidence of his biographee, he merely succeeds in finding ‘almost solid evidence’ (TBT, p.149).14 All that is left for him to investigate are Destry-Scholes’ writings. Ironically, Phineas has only just renounced textual scholarship – more precisely, poststructuralist literary theory – before he decides to write a biography. With his research on Scholes Destry-Scholes, he hopes to satisfy his need for a factual life (TBT, p.4). In other words, he gives up poststructuralist theory because he wants to deal with the ‘reality’ of past life. However, the only potentially useful biographical material

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accessible to Phineas is Destry-Scholes’ written work, because facts and objects either do not exist or do not relate to the past at all. As Phineas is forced to return to texts once more, The Biographer’s Tale, like Possession, mirrors the postmodern notion that the past is accessible solely through texts. Byatt’s novels thus highlight the problems and limitations of accessing and presenting an individual’s past and, consequently, of writing about a person’s life. They shed light on the meaning-granting process of life-writing, showing that coherence, causality, teleology, and objectivity are by no means inherent to biographical facts, but result from the biographer’s narrative performance. In The Biographer’s Tale, Phineas experiences complete failure in his biographical efforts; and although Roland and Maud, in Possession, succeed in accumulating hitherto unknown information about their biographees, inevitably, their knowledge of Ash and LaMotte also remains incomplete. The postscript of the novel provides the reader with additional important information, thus implying that the reader has eventually attained complete knowledge of Ash’s and LaMotte’s affair, but Roland and Maud remain excluded from this knowledge. Analysed from the perspective of constructivist criticism, Possession and The Biographer’s Tale negate the possibility of approaching another person’s identity using the means of biography. If analysed from this perspective, Byatt’s novels suggest that there is no sufficiently satisfying answer to the protagonists’ questions of ‘who are you?’ As outlined above, scholarly discussion revolving around the genre of biographic metafiction has so far mainly dealt with the narrative and structural techniques the genre employs in order to problematize the processes of life-writing. In other words, the critical focus has been on the aesthetic means of biographic metafiction, which Martin Middeke concisely summarizes as follows: [A] departure from coherence, the insight that all knowledge of the other is necessarily characterized by difference and affected by perspective and that former teleological, linear forms of representation stressing the hermeneutic determinacy of historical truth have been replaced by auto-reflexive, allusive, collage-like, achronological discontinuities. Prevailing stylistic features include palimpsest, the paradox involved in repetition, travesty, parody, and pastiche. (Middeke, 1999, p.19)

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However, what has escaped critical attention so far is that, generally speaking, biography is not only concerned with the aesthetic problem of representing a life.15 In fact, the prerequisite of representing a life is to comprehend it. In order to comprehend another person’s life in its specific biographical situation and its cultural-historical context, the narrator of a life-story, that is, the biographer, has at least to be willing to understand and to grasp the biographee as another person. In other words, the biographer has to be willing to understand another individual’s identity. Biography is therefore concerned with gaining ‘knowledge of the real, other person’ (Schabert, 1990, p.1), which is why it is at its heart a hermeneutic practice.16 Although biographic metafiction has so far been analysed from an exclusively constructivist – that is an a-hermeneutic – perspective which bars the way to the other, since it sees biographic metafiction as negating any direct access to the past and, therefore, to a person’s life, the genre is part of the hermeneutic practice of biography. Biographic metafiction in fact expresses a hermeneutic impetus, as can be deduced from Ina Schabert’s analysis of Flaubert’s Parrot, which she concludes as follows: Beyond epistemic doubts, beyond the deconstructivist suspicion that language might be like a coarse net unfit to catch the reality of another person, and beyond the disjunctive biographical mode that answers the pessimistic epistemology, traces of the irrational, quasi-religious belief in the possibility of interpersonal knowledge reappear. (Schabert, 1990, p.215)17 The following analysis of Possession and The Biographer’s Tale, which radically differs from constructivist readings of these two texts, reveals them to be negotiating the hermeneutic impetus of biography, which is the impulse to understand another individual’s identity. Each novel is intricately involved in exploring the possibilities of comprehending another individual as other, and of grasping the other’s identity. Both texts point towards an approach to the past in which literature and imagination play a vital role in comprehending the other. A. S. Byatt remarks in Passions of the Mind: [W]hilst it was once attractive (séduisant?) to think whatever we say or see is our own construction, it now becomes necessary to reconsider the hard idea of truth, hard truth, and its possibility. (Byatt, 1993, p.17)

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It is the possibility of the ‘truth’ of the other – or in other words, the other’s otherness – which both Possession and The Biographer’s Tale are concerned with. Possession conceptualizes poetry and imagination as two essential means of comprehending the other. According to LaMotte, ‘poetic and imaginative truth’ (P, p.373) creates a sphere in which ‘the soul is free from the restraints of history and fact’ (P, p.373). This statement turns out to be programmatic for the novel, for Possession privileges poetry and imagination over ‘historical truth’ (P, p.373) as ways to the ‘truth’ of the other. Ina Schabert claims that ‘[p]oetry might be considered as especially apt to capture, through its stylistic resourcefulness, the essence of particular personhood’ (Schabert, 1990, p.2). As poetry does indeed feature prominently in the search for the biographical other in Possession, the novel underlines the relevance that Schabert ascribes to it. Not only are the novel’s biographees poets, but the text itself incorporates a large number of poems, as each chapter opens with verses allegedly written by either Ash or LaMotte. Two chapters – Chapter 16 and Chapter 21 – even consist wholly of poems. As these formal elements imply, poetry plays an important role in Possession. The very fact that it is Ash’s and LaMotte’s poems which set Roland and Maud on the right track towards knowledge of their biographical others, emphasizes the key position poetry claims in the novel. Reading LaMotte’s lines on dolls (P, pp.82–3) ‘like a treasurehunt clue’ (P, p.83) as Maud calls it, the two scholars are able to make their first major discovery – they find Ash’s and LaMotte’s secret love letters (P, pp.82–4, p.91). Starting from that first biographical success, Maud and Roland decide to embark on a literary search for the past, a search that ‘follows the rules of literature’ (Maack, 1993, p.183) or rather that of poetry. Roland suggests reading ‘through the poems – his and hers’ (P, p.236) in the hope that they will provide more information about Ash and LaMotte. Indeed, Maud and Roland come across ‘an echo’ (P, p.237) resonating between two poems by Ash and LaMotte. Sharing an identical line (P, p.237), these poems imply a connection between the two poets which is only revealed through their poetry. What is more, Maud and Roland are able to share their biographees’ experience with the help of LaMotte’s and Ash’s poems. Their texts provide a map which guides Maud and Roland to Yorkshire where they realize that LaMotte accompanied Ash there. Having read LaMotte’s

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epic poem Melusina during his stay in Yorkshire, Roland comes to the conclusion that LaMotte wrote it after spending some time with Ash there: It [the poem’s setting] has to be here [in Yorkshire]. Where do people think it is? It’s full of local words from here . . . She talks about the air like summer colts playing on the moors. That’s a Yorkshire saying. (P, p.264) While they retrace Ash’s Yorkshire journey ‘poems in hand’ (P, p.236), Maud and Roland come to a place called Thomason Foss. Reading LaMotte’s Melusina, they identify this place as having served as part of the setting of the poem (P, pp.265–6). As these examples clarify, Maud and Roland gain knowledge of Ash’s and LaMotte’s love affair by sharing their biographees’ experience via their poems. Since the two scholars are able to use the poets’ texts to enter a past that would otherwise have remained closed to them, Possession conceptualizes poetry as a possible way of gaining knowledge of the biographical other. Although it does not rule out misunderstandings and misapprehensions,18 the novel claims that the reading of poetry enables readers to put themselves in the author’s position, which then leads to a deeper understanding of the author as other. It thus presents poetry as a means of grasping another person’s identity. Since Possession conceptualizes poetry as a way of comprehending another person, the novel quite obviously depends on notions of poetic truth, which Middeke contends is ‘an echo of the Romantic view of the imagination’ (Middeke, 1999, p.20). Thus, Byatt’s novel betrays its leanings towards Romanticism. Although Middeke claims that the echo of Romanticism he detects in Possession is typical of postmodern biographic fiction in general (Middeke, 1999, p.20), Byatt’s novel cannot be seen as a postmodern text, precisely because it emphasizes the hope that it is possible to gain knowledge of an individual as a unique person.19 Thus, Possession defies easy identification with postmodern fiction, even if Byatt describes it as a ‘postmodernist, poststructuralist novel’ (Byatt, 1994, p.62).20 Since it represents poetry as a privileged way to the biographical other, Possession moves within a ‘positive paradox’ (Schabert, 1995, p.229) that, according to Schabert, is ambiguously determined by both postmodern doubts concerning reality, meaning,

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and subjectivity and a human point of reference (Schabert, 1995, pp.229–30). Despite their postmodernist schooling, Maud and Roland succeed in gaining knowledge of Ash and LaMotte through the Victorian authors’ poetry. Discovering the poets’ love for each other and retracing their steps, the two scholars are able to gain access not only to a part of the past, but also to two individuals. Since Possession thus ‘emphasis[es] each individual subject’s particularity’ (Bronfen, 1996, p.119), the novel speaks out against postmodernist concepts of the decentred subject. As Schabert says, the novel expresses a ‘Trotzdem-Menschlichkeit’ (Schabert, 1995, p.132), that is, it accentuates humanity in spite of all (postmodern) doubts. In recentring the subject, Possession crosses the boundaries of postmodernism and moves on into post-postmodernism. Next to poetry, Possession represents imagination as being another important element in the process of comprehending the other. For Ash, imagination is ‘essentially poetic’ (P, p.255). According to Mortimer Cropper, Maud’s and Roland’s antagonist, ‘a vivid imagination’ (P, p.384) is a prerequisite for any biographical enterprise. If read together, these two quotes might imply that Possession claims a constructivist perspective, which sees biography as depending on imaginative, that is, poietic processes. Such an interpretation would, however, mean simplifying the complex representation of imagination in the novel. In fact, Possession outlines imagination as an important hermeneutic force which no biographer can do without. It is their imagination that allows Roland and Maud to put themselves into their biographees’ place. As Roland points out, ‘[i]t makes an interesting effort of imagination to think how they [Ash and LaMotte] saw the world’ (P, p.254; emphasis added). Maud argues that ‘we have to make a real effort of imagination to know what it felt like to be them [Ash and LaMotte]’ (P, p.267; emphasis added). Possession presents the efforts of imagination Maud and Roland refer to as a means of relating to other individuals. Hermeneutically speaking, Possession represents imagination as a means that allows for understanding the other by sharing her/his experience. Hence, the novel conceptualizes imagination as an anthropological force. The novel is, however, far from positing that imagination necessarily guarantees knowledge of the other’s identity. The example of Ash’s biographer Cropper clarifies the fact that the success of the imaginative enterprise depends rather on respecting another person

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in her/his unique otherness. In the context of identity theory, this means that Byatt’s novel is engaged in a discourse which regards identity as being inevitably determined by ethical implications. According to the French philosopher Emmanuel Levinas, the other, to whom the self is inevitably linked, is an ‘absolute other’ (Levinas, 1983, p.214) who always remains absent because s/he cannot be grasped in her/his essential being (Levinas, 1983, pp.226–30; 2000, pp.9–13). Nonetheless, the other is linked to the self, since its total otherness not only questions the self in its own existence, but also forces the self to enter into a relationship from which it cannot withdraw (Levinas, 1983, pp.218–21). This relationship is, according to Levinas, determined by an ‘ethical dimension’ (Levinas, 1983, p.223) because it summons the self to responsibility for the other: ‘The fellow human’s existential adventure,’ Levinas argues, ‘pose[s] from the start the I as responsible for the being of the other’ (Levinas, 2000, pp.XII–XIII).21 He sees the relationship of self and other as determined by the self’s hermeneutic desire to understand the other (Levinas, 2000, p.5), but he also regards this desire as ‘a partial negation [of the other], which is violence’ (Levinas, 2000, p.9).22 Possession uses the character of Mortimer Cropper to negotiate the ethical implications of the hermeneutic impetus of biography, raising the questions whether biographic imagination represents a violent negation of the other. Cropper’s biographical writing is based on minute research of the poet’s life supported by his own powerful imagination (P, p.384).23 However, he does not respect his biographee as an autonomous individual. Instead, he uses his imagination ‘to cut his subject down to size’ (P, p.250), as Maud puts it after reading an excerpt from Cropper’s Ash biography. In this excerpt (P, pp.246–50), Cropper portrays Ash as a ‘typical’ man of the Victorian Age, who is ‘like others of his kind’ (P, p.247). In other words, Cropper deprives Ash of his individuality because he uses his imagination to turn Ash into a mere representative of his age instead of trying to understand him as a unique individual. In the terms of Levinasian ethics, Cropper’s Ash biography constitutes an act of violence against his biographee, because it negates Ash’s singularity as an individual and, consequently, his total otherness (Steveker, 2007, p.126). Possession criticizes Cropper’s biographical imagination as unethical, which is expressed by the fact that it is not Cropper who discovers the ‘truth’ about Ash and LaMotte. The success of this discovery is instead left

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to Maud and Roland, whose notion of imagination is totally different from Cropper’s. Their imagination, which is described as ‘real’ and ‘interesting’ (P, p.267), appears to be of a fundamentally positive quality posing no threat to their biographees. In contrast to Cropper, who uses his imagination to deny Ash’s otherness, Maud and Roland employ their imagination to put themselves into their biographees’ place in order to understand them as individual beings. Their efforts of imagination are therefore presented as ethical acts which respect Ash and LaMotte in their otherness. Unlike Cropper, Maud and Roland respect their biographees as ‘wholly distant and separate’ (P, p.467) others who lived as individuals in their world. Like Possession, The Biographer’s Tale underlines the important role that imagination plays in the search for the biographical other. Phineas describes his biographical project as follows: ‘I wanted . . . to get to know him [Destry-Scholes], to meet him, maybe to make a friend of him’ (TBT, p.23). In other words, he tries to establish a personal relationship with his biographee. In order to get to know Destry-Scholes, Phineas realizes that he has to relate closely to him, to ‘identify’ with him as he calls it (TBT, p.23). With Phineas defining the meaning of ‘identify’ as ‘to see imaginatively, out of the eyes of’ (TBT, p.23; emphasis added), The Biographer’s Tale argues that imagination makes it possible for biographers to relate to their biographees which then enables them to comprehend the biographical other. Imagination is thus conceptualized as an indispensable part of any biographical enterprise. In order to establish a personal relationship with his biographee, Phineas finds it ‘necessary to have some image [of Destry-Scholes], however provisional’ (TBT, p.27). Therefore, he falls back on his imagination in order to create an image of Destry-Scholes which might bridge the gap between himself and his biographee: ‘I had no idea of the shape of his bottom (I imagined it thin) or the cut of his trousers (I imagined them speckled tweed)’ (TBT, p.27; emphasis added). He also uses his imagination to conjure up an image of Destry-Scholes’ birthplace (TBT, p.31). Furthermore, he describes his attempts at getting to know his biographee as ‘an imaginative stab’ (TBT, p.167) with which he, metaphorically speaking, hopes to pin him down. As these examples show, Phineas employs his imagination in order to relate to his biographee. The image of Destry-Scholes that he forms is, however, determined by his own perspective as the frequent use of

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the pronoun ‘I’ shows (TBT, pp.27–31). Instead of genuinely ‘seeing out of Destry-Scholes’ eyes’, he subjects his biographee to his own prejudices. This, for example, becomes obvious when Phineas, visiting Destry-Scholes’ birthplace, realizes that the house he has imagined has nothing to do with the house in which Destry-Scholes was born and grew up (TBT, p.31). The process of imaginatively relating to the biographical other thus turns out to be ethically questionable, as it violates the biographee’s autonomy as a separate individual. By denying Phineas biographical success, the novel finds a way out of this ethically difficult situation. Phineas’s comment on his biographical failure is most revealing in this context: ‘I appeared to have failed to find Destry-Scholes himself. I have to respect him for his scrupulous absence from . . . my work’ (TBT, p.214). Failing to comprehend Destry-Scholes, Phineas can only confirm his biographee’s absence. Respecting this absence, Phineas also respects him as an individual fundamentally different from himself. The Biographer’s Tale can, therefore, be seen as framing Destry-Scholes as a total other who – in the sense of Levinas – is always absent, but for whom the self has to take responsibility. The Biographer’s Tale fulfils this responsibility by letting its protagonist respect the biographical other in his otherness, hence subjecting biographical research to ethical considerations. As argued above, both The Biographer’s Tale and Possession negotiate the anthropological as well as the ethical implications of searching for the biographical other.24 Possession conceptualizes poetry and imagination as a means of relating to other individuals in order to comprehend them in their unique otherness. Like The Biographer’s Tale, the novel further problematizes imagination as a potentially violent act in which biographers run the risk of negating the others’ alterity and, consequently, of violating their autonomy as totally separate individuals. The hermeneutic impetus of biography, both novels contend, is in inevitable conflict with the ethical dimension of the self–other relationship that determines individual identity. Investigating the hermeneutic impetus of biography, Byatt’s biographic metafictions focus on the processes of both comprehending and not comprehending the biographical other in her/his unique identity. Critical hermeneutics argue that the act of comprehension is intrinsically problematic as the production of meaning – and thus comprehension – is based on an ongoing process of negotiating conflicting, competing and overlapping differences.25 The act of

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comprehension always includes recalcitrant elements which manifest themselves in moments of uncertainty, of misunderstanding, and of non-comprehension. In other words, comprehension is always paired with non-comprehension, hermeneutic success with hermeneutic failure. It is possible to approach the recalcitrant elements included in the hermeneutic process with the concept of transdifference. As Helmbrecht Breinig and Klaus Lösch explain, the term ‘transdifference’ was first introduced in order to denote ‘areas of “inbetweenness” that could be applied to synchronic and diachronic relations both of individuals and collectivities’ (Breinig & Lösch, 2006, p.106). According to Breinig and Lösch, transdifference is defined as follows: The term transdifference refers to phenomena of a co-presence of different or even oppositional properties, affiliations or elements of semantic and epistemological meaning construction, where this co-presence is regarded or experienced as cognitively or affectively dissonant, full of tension, and undissolvable . . . As a descriptive term transdifference allows the presentation and analysis of such phenomena in the context of the production of meaning that transcend the range of models of binary difference. (Breinig & Lösch, 2006, p.105) Although the concept of transdifference was first developed in order to appropriately analyse plural affiliations (with regard to, for example, ethnicity, religion, class, and gender) on either group or individual levels,26 it can also be applied to literary texts. Generally speaking, each text includes transdifferent elements because of its inherently intertextual structure. As I will explain in more detail in Chapters 10 and 12, it is through its manifold intertextual references of all kinds that a text is connected to other texts. Thus, intertextuality establishes a net that potentially links all texts to each other. Within the nodes of this net, that is, within the actual texts themselves, texts meet, as it were, negotiating questions of cultural dominance, hierarchy, and influence. Textual boundaries begin to blur as texts reach out to other texts. Such boundaries can be conceived of as contact zones which can be described – in Breinig and Lösch’s words – as ‘zones of interaction and interrelation’ (Breinig & Lösch, 2006, p.112) in which texts negotiate their own identities in their relationship to other texts.

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In analogy to Breinig and Lösch, who conceive of cultural boundaries as ‘space[s] of intercultural dialogue’ (Breinig & Lösch, 2006, p.112), one can define intertextuality as creating a space of intertextual dialogue. This dialogue leaves none of its interlocutors, that is, none of the texts partaking in the intertextual net, unaffected. Each text influences other texts and is influenced by them in return. Due to this influence – or to use Breinig and Lösch’s terminology, due to this ‘contamination’ (Breinig & Lösch, 2006, p.112) – each text both resonates with the voices of other texts and adds its own voice to them. If transdifference is generally understood as a ‘by-product of any process of identity formation’ (Breinig & Lösch, 2006, p.112), it must also be a textual phenomenon, since texts can be said to negotiate their identities in their intertextual dimension. Consequently, intertextuality has to be defined as a phenomenon of textual transdifference. Transdifference is therefore inherent in each literary text, since each text inevitably partakes in intertextuality. Biographic metafictions are of special importance in this context, since they are determined by a high degree of intertextuality, including a large number of intertextual references to genres. As each genre is a set of strategies guiding writing as well as reading processes (Abrams, 1988, pp.73–4), genres qualify as ‘elements of semantic and epistemological meaning construction’ (Breinig & Lösch, 2006, p.105) on which both authors and readers rely. If a text follows more than one genre pattern – as biographic metafictions typically do – these patterns are simultaneously present within it. One can, thus, speak of a ‘copresence’ (Breinig & Lösch, 2006, p.105) of different genre taxonomies within a text. In any biographic metafiction, this co-presence is maintained throughout the text, which means that the text is under the tension of competing and overlapping strategies of creating meaning. By adding genre taxonomy to genre taxonomy, a multi-generic text is subject to a ‘palimpsestic process’ (Breinig & Lösch, 2006, p.110) in which meaning is constantly inscribed and overwritten as different genre markers emerge, thus causing the text to oscillate between various strategies of constructing meaning. This is characteristic of transdifference, as Breinig & Lösch point out: [Transdifference] does not do away with the originary binary inscription of difference, but rather causes it to oscillate or suspends it . . . Thus, the concept of transdifference interrogates the

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validity of binary constructions of difference without deconstructing them. This means that difference is simultaneously bracketed and yet retained as a point of reference. (Breinig & Lösch, 2006, pp.108–9) It is at these moments of oscillation, in which the competing differences within a text – that is, the different elements of semantic meaning construction – are simultaneously both rejected and retained, that the text sends out contradictory and confusing signals. At these moments of transdifference – which literary critics so far have only been able to describe insufficiently as postmodern games of blurring the boundaries between past and present as well as between fact and fiction27 – a text is in a temporary state of dissonance, of indecisiveness with regard to its generic identity.28 Due to this, it demands of its readers what Breinig and Lösch call with John Keats ‘ “Negative Capability”, that quality “when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries [sic], doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason” (Keats 1952:71)’ (Breinig & Lösch, 2006, p.111). However, this is not to say that such a text either deconstructs or synthesizes the different strategies of constructing meaning which compete within it.29 Though questioning the concept of difference by temporarily suspending its underlying binarisms, a text cannot aim to abolish it, since difference is indispensable for the process of constructing meaning (Breinig & Lösch, 2006, p.106, p.108). Having defined intertextuality as a phenomenon of transdifference and having established transdifference as a defining characteristic of biographic metafiction,30 I will now return to the discussion of Possession and The Biographer’s Tale. Byatt’s biographic metafictions problematize the hermeneutic process of comprehending the biographical other by investigating the recalcitrant elements included in this process. Above all, they do so through their multi-generic structures, which also include different narrative perspectives. Possession includes omniscient narration, figural narration, a first-person narrator, and a lyrical I, whilst The Biographer’s Tale includes omniscient narration as well as a first-person narrator. In addition, Possession increases its structural complexity by navigating between the two different time frames of the Victorian Age and the late twentieth century. Due to their highly complex multi-generic structure, both novels are determined by a co-presence of different elements of meaning

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construction, which put the texts under a tension caused by competing genre markers. The moments at which this tension emerges in the novels are moments of transdifference. The Biographer’s Tale explicitly emphasizes the moments of transdifference, which emerge from the co-presence of different generic markers. For example, Byatt’s novel incorporates notes on index cards compiled by its protagonist’s biographee Scholes Destry-Scholes. Phineas repeatedly describes how he mistakes these notes for his biographee’s personal statements. However, they actually turn out to be the unmarked quotes of somebody else’s statements: I [Phineas] hoped, and briefly I believed, that the first-person biographer . . . was no other than Scholes Destry-Scholes himself . . . on my next visit to the British Library I rapidly discovered that the words I had taken to be those of Scholes Destry-Scholes were in fact the measured tones of Karl Pearson. (TBT, pp.162–3) This passage comments upon the working of intertextuality and the moments of transdifference it causes. If an intertextual reference remains unnoticed, the reader believes it to be part of the text that incorporates it. If, however, an intertextual reference is discovered, the reader finds him/herself simultaneously in two texts, the one s/he reads and the one referred to. Phineas learns that many of the statements he first believed to be those of Destry-Scholes are in fact intertextual references to texts written by other people. Time and again, Phineas experiences moments of indecision, as boundaries between texts oscillate more and more, leaving him ‘lost in the penumbra of his [Destry-Scholes’] words’ (TBT, p.167). The blurred textual boundaries cause the difference between Destry-Scholes and Phineas to oscillate, too, as the novel shows through the metaphor of the composite portrait. Such a portrait merges several pictures of individuals into a single picture, thus blurring the individuals’ features, as exemplified by the real composite portraits the novel includes (TBT, p.183). Phineas uses the metaphor of the composite portrait when describing his efforts at analysing his biographee’s own biographical work on Henrik Ibsen, Francis Galton, and Carl Linnaeus: They (the biographical sketches on Galton, Ibsen, and Linnaeus) were like one of Galton’s composite portraits . . . Was the composite

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portrait the face of Destry-Scholes? Was it, seen in some mad mirror, my own? (TBT, p.236) Earlier in the text, Phineas comments on composite portraits as follows: ‘Something had been taken away by being added’ (TBT, p.182). As these two quotes show, Phineas experiences his biographical research as a loss of individuality, as dissolving the differences between himself, his biographee, and his biographee’s biographees. Thus, The Biographer’s Tale sketches transdifference as a potentially destructive and, in the sense of Levinas, ethically problematic force. As expressed in the metaphor of the composite portrait, the moments of uncertainty and indecision, which the novel both describes and creates, are in danger of losing their temporality and, consequently, of turning into a permanent state of negating signification. Too much transdifference, it seems, threatens the process of constructing meaning. The novel escapes this threat by identifying its generic affiliation and by having Phineas give up his biographical project. Having questioned its own generic status at several points (TBT, p.99, p.100, p.141), the novel eventually has its narrator and protagonist Phineas make clear that the text the readers have in front of them is an autobiography: I [Phineas] have admitted I am writing a story, a story which in a haphazard (aleatory) way has become a first-person story, and, from being a story of a search told in the first person, has become, I have to recognise – a first-person story proper, an autobiography. (TBT, p.250) Re-inscribing the generic differences it has suspended before, the novel eases the tension of its multi-generic structure. The novel also emphasizes the binary differences between biographer and biographee, that is, between biographical self and biographical other. It does so by having Phineas admit biographical failure and ‘defeat’ (TBT, p.246): ‘I appeared to have failed to find Destry-Scholes himself’ (TBT, p.214). In the end, his biographee’s only presence is an absence as symbolized by the empty boat floating on the Maelstrom, in which Destry-Scholes is said to have drowned (TBT, p.249). Accepting Destry-Scholes as being absent from his research (TBT, p.214), Phineas is finally able to turn towards himself (TBT, p.214). In other

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words, he is no longer in danger of losing himself to Destry-Scholes. The novel re-establishes the differences between biographical self and biographical other, which it has so far kept suspended, by rejecting the possibility of gaining knowledge of the biographical other. Thus, the hermeneutic process of comprehending the other is shown to fail if it defies the difference between biographical self and biographical other. Seen within the context of Levinasian ethics, the irrefutable difference between self and other is re-affirmed as soon as the hermeneutic tension caused by the moments of transdifference is dissolved. Like The Biographer’s Tale, Possession also includes moments of transdifference caused by the multi-generic structure of its intertextual depository. The first is to be found when the novel moves from Chapter 14 to Chapter 15. Here, the text abruptly jumps from figural narration to Victorian omniscient narration, leaving its readers to adjust to the altered narrative situation in which they find themselves. Linked to this switch of narrative perspectives is a change of time frames, which does not instantly become clear. The end of Chapter 14 is situated in the year 1986; it witnesses the protagonists Maud and Roland in a ‘personal conversation’ (P, p.269) which suggests a slowly growing emotional relationship between them. The opening of Chapter 15 depicts two people, a man and a woman, sharing a railway compartment (P, p.273). As their names are only mentioned several pages later (P, p.279), the reader still believes him/herself in the twentieth-century plot. This impression is emphasized by the poem opening the chapter, since it includes a motif – the ‘kick galvanic’ (P, p.273) – which was first used to describe a meeting between Roland and Maud a good 120 pages earlier (P, p.147). It is only when the terms ‘gentleman’ and ‘lady’ appear halfway down the page (P, p.273) that the reader begins to suspect that the time frame of this chapter is not the twentieth, but the nineteenth century and that, consequently, the two people sitting in the compartment are not Roland and Maud, but Randolph Henry Ash and Christabel LaMotte. The novel blurs the boundaries between its time frames and between its two sets of protagonists by moving from Chapter 14 to Chapter 15, leaving its readers to find their way through this moment of indecision triggered by contradictory textual signals. When the reader proceeds from Chapter 14 to Chapter 15, s/he encounters a moment of transdifference, in which the novel suspends the binary difference between past and present as well as the one between biographers and

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biographees, thus momentarily causing uncertainty if not misunderstanding. However, these differences are re-inscribed as soon as the reader is able to identify the two people in the compartment as Ash and LaMotte. Thus, the text dissolves the hermeneutic tension caused by the moment of transdifference. Within the context of Levinasian ethics, the irrefutable difference between self and other is no longer in danger of being negated. Another moment of transdifference occurs in Chapter 25, in which the text changes from diary entry (P, pp.442–3) to biography (P, pp.443–5) to footnotes (P, pp.445–6) and – seemingly – back to diary entry (P, p.446). On closer inspection, however, this last move turns out to be a deception of the text, because the passage directly succeeding the date which indicates a diary entry (P, p.446) is rendered in omniscient narration typical of the Victorian novel. In the short moment it takes the reader to realize that this passage is no diary entry, since it is not written from the perspective of a first-person narrator, ‘the nature of what is presented is initially unclear’, as Louisa Hadley comments (Hadley, 2003, p.95). In other words, the contradictory genre markers of diary entry and Victorian novel, which are present in the text, make it difficult for the reader to identify the generic taxonomies that guide the text at this moment. However, this is not to say that Byatt’s novel is thoroughly determined by transdifference. On the contrary, Possession ends on a note that leaves no room for uncertainty or indecision. Its last chapter titled ‘Postscript 1868’ (P, pp.508–11) takes the form of a classic historical novel rendered in omniscient narration. While this chapter clearly comments upon the limitations of biographical knowledge of the other,31 it simultaneously abolishes uncertainty and misunderstanding. By having the omniscient narrator claiming to present an authentic picture of past events – ‘This is how it was’ (P, p.508) – the chapter establishes a coherent ending to the novel, which resolves the last uncertainties of the biographical search: Ash knew that he had a daughter, since he met her once when he came to visit LaMotte (P, p.509). Having recognized her as his child (P, p.509), he gave up the idea of visiting, but sent her home with a message to LaMotte (P, p.510). As his daughter lost this message, it never reached LaMotte (P, p.511). This chapter told by an omniscient narrator dissolves, as it were, any unresolved tensions. As Tim Gauthier puts it, ‘Byatt eliminates any indeterminacy by telling it us how it really was

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. . . The closure of Possession creates a totality from which the reader can safely observe the past’ (Gauthier, 2006, p.67). With its postscript, Possession reconciles the moments of uncertainty and indecision that have emerged earlier in the text. Thus, the structure of the novel both discloses and negates the recalcitrant elements included in the hermeneutic process of comprehending the other. As discussed above, Possession underlines the possibility of comprehending the other, while The Biographer’s Tale questions this possibility. In the two novels, the search for the biographical other becomes a literary act that is not so much concerned with investigating the possibility of (re)constructing an individual’s past from a present perspective, but focuses on the inherently problematic hermeneutic processes of comprehending the biographical other and its ethical implications.

3 Concepts of Identity in A. S. Byatt’s Tetralogy

Like Possession and The Biographer’s Tale, the four novels in Byatt’s tetralogy are equally concerned with exploring the notion of identity. The Virgin in the Garden, Still Life, Babel Tower and A Whistling Woman discuss two fundamentally different concepts of individual identity. The first concept, which can be described as narrative identity, is represented by the character of Frederica Potter, who is one of the protagonists in the tetralogy. Frederica is characterized – as indeed are all the members of their family except for Marcus – as verbally gifted and well-educated in literature.1 She establishes her identity through narration and she conceives of her life as a story. As a child she used to sketch her future ‘by telling herself an endless tale’ (SL, p.821; emphasis added). She furthermore regards her unsuccessful marriage as a ‘narrative [that] redefines and changes her’ (BT, p.282; emphasis added); and she realizes that her divorce hearing changes ‘the story of her life’ (BT, p.519; emphasis added).2 Thus, Frederica represents a concept of identity which can be described, in a phrase used by Paul Ricoeur, as ‘a narrative unity of a life’ (Ricoeur, 1992, p.178).3 Establishing narrativity as a central element of his philosophy of identity, Ricoeur supports the narrative paradigm generally accepted among identity theorists of various disciplines.4 Charles Taylor, for example, conceives of narrativity as a ‘basic condition of making sense of ourselves’ (Taylor, 1989, p.47), and Jerome Bruner claims that individuals are constantly engaged in creating ‘self-making narratives’ (Bruner, 2002, p.66). Jürgen Straub states that identity emerges from narrative processes which enable individuals to experience and represent themselves as coherent and 39

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continuous selves (Straub, 2004, p.286). Kenneth J. and Mary M. Gergen employ the term ‘self-narrative’ (Gergen & Gergen, 1988, p.19) in order to describe the narrative processes in which individuals have to engage in order to make themselves intelligible within social contexts and to identify themselves to others and to themselves. If Gergen describes identity as a ‘discursive achievement’ (Gergen, 1998, p.188), he indicates that it is through the act of narrating stories – the stories of oneself – that one’s identity achieves meaning and stability. According to the theorists supporting the narrative paradigm, narrativity does more than shape identity; it actually realizes it. As Gergen puts it by rephrasing Wittgenstein, the ‘limits of our narrative traditions mean the limits of our identities’ (Gergen, 1998, p.190). There are, however, others who reject the idea that identity is inevitably a narrative construct. In two articles published in 2004, the philosopher Galen Strawson emphasizes that individual identity does not necessarily result from a narrative process. He negates the idea that a self has to be formed through narration. According to him, ‘[t]here are deeply non-Narrative people and there are good ways to live that are deeply non-Narrative’ (Strawson, 2004b, p.429). Strawson argues that individuals who construct non-narrative identities have: little or no sense that the self that one is was there in the (further) past and will be there in the future, although one is perfectly well aware that one has long-term continuity considered as a whole human being. (Strawson, 2004b, p.430) As Strawson puts it, such people ‘are likely to have no particular tendency to see their life in Narrative terms’ (Strawson, 2004a, p.13). Byatt’s tetralogy negotiates narrative and non-narrative concepts of identity by juxtaposing Frederica’s identity with that of her brother Marcus.5 Indeed, ‘he is in many ways a stranger in the densely verbal universe the novel [The Virgin in the Garden] projects’ (Plotz, 2001, pp.33–4). In contrast to Frederica, to whom language comes naturally, in whom it is ‘ingrained’ (VG, p.134), Marcus is ‘no good with words’ (VG, p.468). According to Frederica, he is ‘suspicious of language’ (BT, p.290). He is a born mathematical genius who, as a small child,

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had the ability to do ‘instant mathematics’ (VG, p.28), an ability he describes as follows: I used to see – to imagine a . . . kind of garden. And the forms, the mathematical forms, were about in the landscape and you would let the problem loose in the landscape and it would wander amongst the forms – leaving luminous trails. And then I saw the answer. (VG, p.79) Even more remarkable than his outstanding mathematical talent is Marcus’s ability to expand his mind in space, which enables him to perceive his surroundings from several perspectives at once. He refers to this as a game called ‘spreading himself’ (VG, p.30) which: began with a deliberate extension of his field of vision, until by some sleight of perception he was looking out at once from the four field-corners, the high ends of the goal post, the running wire top of the fence . . . he surveyed them from no vantage point, or all at once . . . with impossible simultaneity . . . (VG, p.30) As the spatial metaphors (‘garden’, ‘landscape’, ‘spreading’) above imply, the character of Marcus is closely connected to space. Firstly, his mind works through processes of mapping, that is, through spatialization, and secondly, he also spatializes his mind, and therefore, part of himself. Consequently, Marcus’s identity is not only non-narrative, but also spatial.6 Thus, Marcus represents a concept of identity which, as Jürgen Schlaeger argues, might break the paradigmatic ‘bond between narrativity and the self’ (Schlaeger, 2006, p.430). Schlaeger points out that ‘texts, especially those that deal with lives and selves, have definitely become more spatial’ at the turn of the millennium (Schlaeger, 2006, p.430). In his opinion, novels such as Peter Ackroyd’s London: The Biography (2000) and Ian Sinclair’s Lights Out of the Territory (1997) have not only become more spatial in themselves, but they also represent selves which are spatial in terms of both place and time (Schlaeger, 2006, pp.430–6). According to Schlaeger, such texts suggest a beginning paradigm change in which spatialization might

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eventually replace narrativity: [N]arrativity as a basis for conceptualizing individual lives and as an indispensable ingredient for most life-writing is still going very strong, but the stereo-time effect created by such spatialized forms of life-writing will continue to put pressure on the linear time concept underlying all traditional narrativity and all conventional life-writing. (Schlaeger, 2006, p.436) However, Byatt’s tetralogy is very far from supporting Schlaeger’s claim as a closer analysis of Marcus Potter will clarify. In contrast to Frederica’s identity, which is formed into a coherent life-story by narration, Marcus’s sense of self becomes increasingly precarious throughout The Virgin in the Garden. Not only does his identity lack the specific connectedness of narrativity, but it is threatened by language, which is symbolized by his fear of books (VG, p.153). Language is in fact responsible for the loss of his instant mathematics. When his father wants him to verbalize his vision of a mathematical garden, Marcus first faints and then realizes that trying to put his experiences into words has caused him to lose his ability (VG, p.80). Language, it becomes clear, has driven him out of his mathematical paradise. Having lost his ability to visualize mathematics, Marcus finds it increasingly difficult to control his game of spreading his mind so that ‘[s]ometimes . . . he los[es] any sense of . . . where the spread mind had its origins’ (VG, p.31). In other words, his identity begins to destabilize itself once he has lost his mathematical ability. As a result, he becomes increasingly phobic, feeling more and more afraid of everyday life and the outside world (VG, pp.153–6). His fear, which causes him to experience ‘shocks of consciousness momentarily disconnected’ (VG, p.153), destabilizes his sense of self until he finally conceives of himself as being threatened by ‘annihilation’ (VG, p.156). Without the stability provided by his mathematical ability his spatial identity is in danger of being dissolved. Marcus’s only means of counteracting the uncontrolled spreading of his mind as well as his spreading fear of losing himself is another form of mathematics, namely geometry. For him, geometry is a force that structures space. He comes to rely on it as a ‘network of salvation’ (VG, p.31) which helps him both to reintegrate mind and body and to order and shape his perception of the outside world. For example, Marcus notices the

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geometric regularity of his surroundings (VG, p.118) or he sees a geometric sign, which he thinks saves him during an extreme attack of phobia (VG, p.156). As geometry ‘guarantee[s] that he . . . ke[eps] his identity’ (VG, p.155), it can be said to function as a means of stabilizing his spatial identity, which is in danger of ‘de-spatializing’, that is, destabilizing itself. As the preceding paragraphs show, Byatt’s tetralogy establishes narrativity and spatialization as two opposing paradigms of individual identity. The novels clearly privilege the narrative paradigm, even if they do not claim absolute supremacy for narrative identity, as the happy ending Marcus is granted signifies: having finally overcome his phobia, he comes to discover and to accept his homosexuality, sets up house with his boyfriend and wins a Cambridge fellowship (WW, p.413). The fact that Marcus is significantly described as ‘alone in space’ (VG, p.34) nonetheless ascribes a marginal position to the identity concept he represents. His isolated position within his family, his psychological problems, as well as the fact that his identity is destabilized through language, clearly suggest that the novels represent spatial identity as a less stable and, therefore, inferior concept of individual identity. In other words, narrativity is the predominant concept of individual identity in Byatt’s tetralogy.

4 The Gendered Self

While exploring various concepts of identity, Byatt’s novels repeatedly accentuate the aspect of gender. Her texts represent gender as a marker of difference determining individual identity formation. As I have argued in Chapter 1, Possession and The Biographer’s Tale conceptualize identity as depending on the relationship between self and other. Although all three of Byatt’s protagonists – Maud, Roland, and Phineas – clearly depend on others in order to succeed in establishing their personal, professional and sexual identities, Roland’s and Phineas’s processes of identity formation fundamentally differ from Maud’s. Like Maud, both Roland and Phineas develop an obsession with somebody from the past. However, unlike Maud, each of them is able to end this relationship by distancing himself from the man he admires and identifies with. In Possession, Roland realizes that his research on Ash’s work and life has separated him from Ash, to whom he has always felt related (P, p.470). Having distanced himself from Ash, he comes to regard the poet as ‘wholly distant and separate, not an angle, not a bone . . . comprehensible by him or to do with him’ (P, p.467). On the one hand, he feels isolated and alone when ‘Randolph Henry Ash and his words [are] taken away from him’ (P, p.441). On the other hand, this separation is described as a positive development since it allows him to develop ‘his own primary thought’ (P, p.441). What at first feels like a loss thus proves to be a process of selfempowerment. Breaking up his relational dependence on Ash, Roland is able to establish himself as a separate autonomous individual. The moment in which Roland distances himself from Ash most tellingly coincides with his discovery of his own poetic voice. Near the 44

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novel’s end, Roland experiences an epiphany that enables him to write poetry (P, pp.470–5). Having recognized poetry as the ‘important thing’ (P, p.473), Roland leaves his flat, ‘the dripping cave he had lived in’ (P, p.474), and for the very first time ventures out into the garden behind it, which he had until then been forbidden to enter (P, p.474). Standing there, he can suddenly feel his poetry rising up ‘from some well in him’ (P, p.475), and he can hear his own voice creating poems inside his head (P, p.475). In this scene, with its obvious allusions to both the biblical garden and Plato’s cave allegory, Roland is shown as being in a state of paradisiacal bliss and enlightened knowledge, which he arrives at after he has finally freed himself from his obsession with Ash. Having separated himself from Ash, Roland turns into a poet himself, thus becoming the Victorian’s ‘aesthetic, creative heir’ (Buxton, 1996, p.216). Through Roland, Possession thus ‘adheres to the traditional models of the self-empowered subject as an independent, creative being’ (Horatschek, 1999, p.53). Roland’s epiphany constitutes one of the central scenes of the novel, not only because it enables the reader to witness a key moment of his search for himself, but also because it throws an interesting light on the concepts of both poetry and identity which the novel negotiates through its male protagonist. Two Western traditions of thought merge in Roland: having distanced himself from Ash, he comes to represent the autonomous male individual conceptualized by liberal humanism;1 finding his poetic subjectivity, he represents the Romantic ideal of the poet as a male genius whose separate self is the source of his poetry.2 The Biographer’s Tale is indebted to the same notion of male identity. Like Roland, Phineas undergoes a process of identity formation which is determined by a double movement of first identifying with, and then separating himself from, his biographee. He, too, comes to regard himself as a separate person at the end of this process. This development is emphasized when the text moves away, as it were, from Destry-Scholes and towards Phineas, who comments: I have become more and more involved in the act of writing itself, more and more inclined to shift my own attention from DestryScholes’s absence to my own style, and thus, to my own presence. (TBT, p.214)

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During this process, Phineas’s obsession with his biographee gradually lessens until he loses all interest in him, as his growing reluctance to do any more biographical research shows (TBT, p.238, p.249). Moreover, Destry-Scholes’ presence seems to fade out in the final pages of the novel. The frequency with which his name comes up decreases until he is finally not mentioned any more (TBT, pp.235–60). As in Possession, poetry plays an important role in allowing the protagonist to be able to distance himself from the man he looks up to as a model of identification. At the beginning of his biographical project Phineas carefully tries to employ a factual, impersonal style (TBT, p.100, p.153) and to avoid terms and expressions used in literary theory (TBT, pp.99), but his language grows more and more lyrical. The novel first hints at the attraction Phineas feels for lyrical words when he expresses a liking for the words ‘hurtle’ and ‘periplum’ (TBT, p.195), words which mostly occur in poems, as the Oxford English Dictionary states. Even if he is at first irritated by the way his style is changing (TBT, p.168), Phineas grows more self-confident in using lyrical phrases he did not dare use as a postmodern literary scholar (TBT, p.250). Eventually, his ‘urge to commit [lyricism] is overwhelming’ (TBT, p.219). Since Phineas’s poetic voice emerges as he is freeing himself from the obsessive relationship he has established to his biographee, his identity can be said to depend upon liberal-humanist and Romanticist notions of unity, separateness and self-sufficiency. Thus, neither Phineas nor Roland can be analysed as postmodern characters. Although both of them can be shown to display the insecurity, fragility, and relationality typically associated with postmodern identities, as shown in Chapter 1, their own processes of identity formation are anything but postmodern, since each of them eventually develops a separate, self-sufficient and, therefore, fundamentally non-postmodern self. It is through these two male characters that Byatt’s Possession and The Biographer’s Tale are clearly indebted to liberal-humanist and Romantic notions of identity. Romantic ideals also feature strongly in the four novels in Byatt’s tetralogy. As Judith Plotz convincingly argues, the character of Frederica’s and Stephanie’s brother Marcus links The Virgin in the Garden, to the Romantic ideal of the visionary child who embodies self-sufficient isolation (Plotz, 2001, pp.31–3). Due to his visionary experiences, on which I have commented in Chapter 3, ‘Marcus clearly resembles the Romantic wise child’ (Plotz, 2001, p.39)

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although his mental breakdown at the end of The Virgin in the Garden (VG, pp.525–36, p.559) makes him appear as ‘a victim rather than an adept of vision’ (Plotz, 2001, p.39).3 In addition, the characters of Alexander Wedderburn and Hugh Pink represent the Romantic ideal of the male genius creating his poetry in solitude. In The Virgin in the Garden, the playwright Alexander Wedderburn is characterized as a man of ‘secretly acknowledged delicious solitude, which was both escape, energy and power’ (VG, p.454), which is to say that he is modelled on the ideal of the Romantic poet. In one of its five different openings,4 Babel Tower features a typically Romantic setting, which depicts the poet Hugh Pink walking alone in a forest while composing a poem (BT, p.2). Thus, both Alexander and Hugh represent the Romantic ‘idea of the author as fundamentally apart from, fundamentally separate from society’ (Roe, 2005, p.659). With so many of their male characters depending on Romanticist and liberal-humanist notions of identity, Byatt’s novels clearly inscribe themselves into two distinctly male discourses. The Biographer’s Tale is indebted to yet another predominantly male discourse, since it celebrates natural science as a privileged approach to the world. There can be no doubt that the novel’s protagonist resembles Roland in Possession as he, too, discovers the poet within himself, but he makes it clear that he does not want ‘to become a Writer’ (TBT, p.251). Phineas realizes that his fascination for literature has given way to a new interest in biological research (TBT, p.254). Since literature is, however, ‘threaded in my brain along with my daily language’ (TBT, p.259), as he puts it, Phineas decides on a profession which enables him to reconcile his love for literature, and especially poetry, with his interest in science and nature: I could write . . . useful travel guides, with bits of ‘real’ writing in them . . . I could mix warnings with hints, descriptions with explanations, science with little floating flashes of literature which still haunt me . . . and which will not be exorcised. I could combine my two splendidly dovetailed lives as tourist manager and parataxonomist, with a kind of ghostwriting, a ghost of writing. (TBT, p.257) He comes to embody both poet and scientist, thus uniting within himself the ideals of the male sage of three successive epochs – Romanticism, Victorian Age, and twentieth century.

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What is more, Byatt’s fiction privileges the traditional ‘high’ canon of Western literature which, as Brooker points out, depends on a ‘selective humanist ideology whose representatives are white, male and European’ (Brooker, 2003, p.24). Both her biographic metafictions and her tetralogy inscribe themselves into this decidedly male textual canon, since each novel contains abundant references to Shakespeare, Tennyson, Spenser, Melville, Lawrence, Keats, Forster, Carroll, and Milton, among many others. Indeed, the novels celebrate these canonical authors, especially Shakespeare, whom LaMotte, for example, reveres as ‘sage sorcerer prophet’ (P, p.169) and whose work, Byatt’s tetralogy implies, expresses human ‘truth’ (VG, p.46). The idea of a male canon is further emphasized by the clearly gendered line, which divides the nineteenth-century poets in Possession. The novel’s only female poet, Christabel LaMotte, is depicted as a neglected artist whose work has not been canonized by posterity. In the twentieth century, Christabel’s reputation as a poet is merely modest (P, p.37). The fact that Christabel’s poem The Fairy Melusina sells very poorly during her lifetime (P, p.501) indicates that her poetry was not especially popular with her contemporaries either. Her male counterpart, Randolph Henry Ash, stands in stark contrast to this marginalized female artist. He is a poet who is said to be ‘a central figure in the tradition of English poetry’ (P, p.400). He is considered to be in the same ‘league’ as Shakespeare, as is made clear when James Blackadder calls LaMotte ‘Ash’s Dark Lady’ (P, p.404). Moreover, the novel apparently implies a male bias with regard to the question of whose life is relevant for literary history. Whereas Ash, the proverbial ‘great white man’, is depicted as an eminent object of research for influential literary scholars and biographers, LaMotte’s life and work are merely of interest to feminist literary theorists, who are heavily satirized in the novel5 (P, p.33, pp.244–6). And although LaMotte’s influence on both Ash’s life and his poetry is generally acknowledged once Roland and Maud have discovered their love affair, nobody even considers writing her biography. She thus remains a poetess who has been, and still is, marginalized. In spite of the apparent male gender-bias of her fiction, however, A. S. Byatt has repeatedly made clear that she is deeply interested in issues of female emancipation and women’s struggle for social and

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political autonomy. As she puts it in one of her interviews: I’m interested in women . . . I am a back-to-the-wall feminist on things like tax, divorce laws, equal pay, married women’s property, even abortion . . . (Byatt, 1983, p.186, p.189) In fact, her fiction expresses what Beate Neumeier has termed Byatt’s ‘female vision’ (Neumeier, 1997, p.22), since both Possession and the tetralogy are engaged in exploring the particularities of female identity and in conceptualizing a ‘female self’.6 When gender was first discovered to be an influential factor within the processes of identity formation in the late 1960s and 1970s, feminist theorists started to discuss the specificities of female identity (Silke, 2002, p.183). Until then, influential identity theorists such as Erik H. Erikson had framed the paradigmatic individual achieving identity as male whereas specific female developments were only mentioned as deviations from a male norm (Gardiner, 1982, pp.180–1). This changed when feminist critics exposed the male bias of such theories, attacking them as ideological constructs of humanist philosophy (Silke, 2002, p.183). They argued that male and female individuals are determined by fundamentally different processes of identity formation (Silke, 2002, p.183). Female identity, as has been repeatedly pointed out since then, is more deeply influenced by relationality than male identity. Women undergo specifically female processes of socialization which are determined by categories such as ‘caring’, ‘responsibility’, and ‘interpersonal relationships’ (Freytag, 2001, p.30). As Judith Kegan Gardiner emphasizes, female identity is characterized by a ‘continual crossing of self and other’ (Gardiner, 1982, p.185) in which ‘issues of fusion and merger of the self with others are significant, and ego and body boundaries remain flexible’ (Gardiner, 1982, p.182). It is precisely this notion of female relationality which Byatt’s novels explore. While the male characters in Possession and The Biographer’s Tale establish identities that depend on separation and self-sufficiency, Maud’s identity is characterized by relationality. At the end of her biographical research, Maud discovers herself to be a direct descendant of both Ash and LaMotte (P, p.503). Although her newly found genealogy stabilizes her identity (Maack, 1993,

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p.185), Maud feels threatened by her discovery. ‘I don’t quite like it,’ she says, ‘[t]here is something unnaturally determined about it all. Daemonic’ (P, p.505). For her, finding her genealogy means losing her self-sufficient individuality to her ancestors: ‘I feel they have taken me over’ (P, p.505). As these quotes indicate, Maud’s discoveries strengthen the relationship with LaMotte which she has established by identifying with the poetess. Maud stresses the similarities between herself and her ancestor: ‘I feel like she did’ (P, p.506). By having Maud establish her identity by connecting herself ever closer to LaMotte, Possession represents female identity as a relational construct. The boundaries of Maud’s self merge with that of LaMotte’s not only because she identifies with the poetess, but also because she turns out to be descended from her. While Roland establishes his self by separating himself from somebody else, Maud’s self emerges from a process of bonding with, and even merging with, another person. Like Possession, Byatt’s tetralogy conceptualizes relationality as a significant marker of female identity, but the four novels also problematize relationality as a threat to the female self. They contend that female processes of identity formation are paradoxically determined both by the need for separateness and the inevitable experience of blurring the boundaries of one’s self by relating to other people. The four novels in Byatt’s tetralogy – The Virgin in the Garden, Still Life, Babel Tower and A Whistling Woman – explore questions of female identity with the help of their two main female characters, the sisters Stephanie Orton and Frederica Potter. While the first two novels highlight the processes of identity formation of both sisters, the last two novels mainly focus on Frederica’s struggle for her own identity and her place in life. In the style of the female Bildungsroman,7 all four novels thematize Frederica’s process of identity formation as she develops from a teenage schoolgirl from a middle-class Yorkshire family into an intellectual adult woman during the years 1952 to 1980. Outlining the socio-cultural conditions of these years and exploring the conventions and constraints that determine Stephanie’s and Frederica’s struggle for an independent, self-determined life (Brosch, 1999, p.49), the tetralogy thematizes the negotiation of female identity within the setting of post-war England. Frederica resembles Byatt’s male characters as she, too, attempts to fashion herself into a separate self. She repeatedly insists that her autonomous individuality depends on separateness. Metaphorically

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conceiving of separateness as ‘laminations’ (VG, p.274; BT, p.359), the teenage Frederica realizes ‘that the idea of lamination could provide both a model of conduct and an aesthetic that might suit herself and prove fruitful’ (VG, p.275). As an adult woman, she remembers her younger self discovering ‘her own separateness, and the power that was possibly inherent in keeping things separated – sex and language . . . ambition and marriage’ (BT, p.358). Repeatedly insisting on her separateness, Frederica experiences it as ‘a possible way of survival’ (BT, p.312). Separateness is thus represented as a fundamental prerequisite of the female self. In contrast to the male self, however, the female self is constantly threatened in its separateness in Byatt’s novels. In The Biographer’s Tale, the protagonist’s lyrical urge is interdependent with his developing sexual desire. Phineas realizes, for example, that his lyricisms improve when he writes about his sexual encounters with Fulla and Vera (TBT, p.216). And when he describes making love to Fulla, he comments that he is ‘back in lyrical mode. Note at which juncture’ (TBT, p.240; emphasis added). Thus, the novel suggests that sexuality furthers its male protagonist’s poetic abilities, which eventually enable him to fashion himself into a separate self. The female self, however, is threatened by sexuality. For its idea of female separateness, Byatt’s tetralogy is indebted to the figure of Elizabeth I, whom Frederica admires for having ‘had the wit to stay separate’ (BT, p.312).8 In Babel Tower, Frederica shows herself deeply impressed by: the Virgin Queen, and the . . . fact that her power and her intelligence were dependent upon her solitude and her separation. (BT, p.359; emphasis added) Idealizing the image of the ‘Virgin Queen’ as an embodiment of the autonomous female self, the novel suggests that female separateness can only be achieved through celibacy and that it is, therefore, diametrically opposed to female sexuality. The novel thus supports the view of early feminists, who conceived of autonomous female identity as depending on celibacy (Schabert, 2006, p.17). Throughout Byatt’s tetralogy, female sexuality – more precisely sexual desire9 and being a mother – is explicitly represented as a fundamental threat to the separate female self. In Babel Tower, Frederica criticizes D. H. Lawrence and E. M. Forster for sketching desire – or

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‘passion’ as Forster calls it (quoted in BT, p.308) – as a force that ‘fuse[s]’ (BT, p.311) man and woman into an ideal unity, an ‘undifferentiated All, a Oneness’ (BT, p.310) that transcends the separate selves (BT, pp.308–11). With Frederica finding the idea of fusing ‘a little sickening’ (BT, p.312), Byatt’s tetralogy rejects Lawrence’s and Forster’s notion of oneness. As Frederica explains, both Forster and Lawrence depict oneness through the metaphor of the rainbow, which symbolizes the biblical covenant between heaven and earth (BT, p.311). Having Frederica reject the idea of oneness, the novel also rejects the mythology of Christianity, which Byatt identifies as a deeply male religion in one of her interviews (Byatt, 1994, pp.63–4).10 Byatt’s tetralogy suggests that oneness, that is, the merging of two selves, directly results from sexual desire. In Still Life, the narrative voice describes how Frederica feels when making love to her husbandto-be Nigel: ‘[S]he could not tell, it was true, sometimes where he began and she ended, they were in a way joined’ (SL, p.1001). The heterosexual act – with heterosexuality being the dominant norm throughout Byatt’s tetralogy as well as Possession11 – is thus represented as one that merges two beings together, making them one. While this process is not said to threaten the male self in its individual existence, it is shown to annihilate the female self as a separate entity. Taking a closer look at how sexuality is treated in the tetralogy, it turns out, however, that it is not the sexual act itself that endangers female separateness, but rather sexual desire finding fulfilment in orgasm.12 Even as a young girl, Frederica suspects that sexual desire will endanger her autonomous separateness. During her very first sexual intercourse, she feels sexually aroused, but she senses ‘that at the end of these waves of feeling was a surrender of her autonomy that she wasn’t going to make’ (VG, p.555; emphasis added). Hence, Frederica’s failure to achieve orgasm (VG, p.556) is turned into a means of protecting the autonomy of her separate female self. Her first night with Nigel stands in stark contrast to her first sexual encounter, not only because it is the first time that she actually experiences orgasm, but rather because it spells out the dichotomy of sexual desire and female separateness. She [Frederica] had been right to be afraid . . . She thought, poor Frederica, that she was a woman without the ultimate capacity to

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abandon herself, [but] finally she lost her grip of herself, of separate Frederica . . . not knowing who or where she was . . . [S]he felt ‘Oh, I am dying’ and understood one of the oldest metaphors. (SL, pp.961–2; emphasis added) The novel clearly represents the moment of reaching orgasm as one in which female separateness is abandoned and ceases to exist. At this moment, Frederica not only loses all knowledge of herself, but moreover surrenders her separateness. She later realizes that sexual desire is a threat to female separateness: ‘[Nigel] taught me desire. That destroyed something in me: a separateness that was a strength’ (BT, p.311). Within the logic of Byatt’s novels, Frederica could only permanently maintain her separateness through celibacy, which is, however, an option she chooses for only a very short time,13 for her greed for both intellectual and sexual knowledge (WW, p.137) prevents her from staying celibate. The dichotomic opposition of sexual desire and the separate female self exemplified in the character of Frederica thus remains intact. Byatt’s tetralogy further argues that it is not only sexual desire, but also being a mother which threatens female separateness. As the example of Frederica’s sister Stephanie clarifies, the social role of a mother is presented as destroying the female separate self. Stephanie is a highly educated woman, who loves language and who has always regarded her broad academic vocabulary as an integral part of her identity (SL, p.940). Soon after she has married, given up her job as a schoolteacher and given birth to her two children, however, Stephanie realizes that, in her role as a wife and, above all, as a mother, she no longer has any use for the words she loves. She ‘suffer[s] from having to use a limited vocabulary’ (SL, p.940) since she knows that using her academic vocabulary would be ‘best . . . for her solitary self’ (SL, p.941). Her marriage and especially her role as a mother are, as Tess Cosslett states, ‘presented as involving a gradual and irreversible loss of her “separate self”’ (Cosslett, 1989, p.268). It is however not only the social role of a mother, but also the actual biological aspect of motherhood that is described as destroying the separateness of the female self. The novels argue that a pregnant woman ceases to be a solitary, separate being, since a second being – the unborn child – lives inside her. When Stephanie’s sister Frederica contemplates her relationship with her son Leo, she describes him as

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a human being ‘not altogether [separate]’ (BT, p.126) from her, thus indicating that she respects him as a separate person, but also sees him as still connected to her. Her use of the words ‘not altogether’ is highly illuminating, as it implies that the connection between mother and child continues beyond the period of pregnancy. Indeed, both Still Life and Babel Tower suggest a lasting connection between mother and child. Stephanie feels ‘held as by a long linen binder . . . to the shape of her son in his woven basket’ (SL, p.751); and Frederica explains that for her ‘[i]t’s still like being attached by a rope [to her son Leo], a cord, that stretches for ever’ (BT, p.143). Alluding to the umbilical cord, these two examples evoke the image of a bond between mother and child that metaphorically perpetuates their bodily union beyond the moment of birth. Due to this connection, a mother is shown to be unable to exist as a separate being. In other words, the tetralogy represents female separateness and motherhood as a dichotomy, contending as it does that a mother’s self is determined by bonding, rather than by separateness. Byatt’s novel Possession suggests a similar connection between mother and child, since Christabel gives up her autonomous life at her cottage14 and moves in with her sister’s family once she has given her daughter into her sister’s care. Writing to Ash about her deeply felt ‘need to see and feed and comfort my child, who knew me not’ (P, p.501), she reveals that she still feels closely connected to her daughter, even though the child does not know that she is her mother. In sum, both Byatt’s tetralogy and Possession conceptualize bonding, which blurs the boundaries of the female self, as an essential characteristic of female identity. In these five novels, female identity is defined as depending on an inherently paradoxical relation between the female need for a separate self and the diametrically opposed experience of bonding.

5 Female Autonomy

As well as describing female identity as caught between relationality and separateness, Byatt’s novels also problematize the issue of female autonomy. Although autonomy must not be confused with identity, it is of relevance in identity discourses, since only people who successfully engage in the processes of identity construction can achieve autonomy as individuals (Straub, 2004, p.288). Like identity, autonomy1 is embedded within a social context and is based on intersubjective recognition (Straub, 2004, pp.288–9). As Straub explains, autonomy not only remains of necessity partial, but it can also be endangered by the specific processes of socialization and enculturation on which its realization depends (2004, p.288). If we consider the aspect of gender, such a concept of autonomy raises several questions: How can female autonomy be realized if patriarchy subjects all women to similar processes of socialization that leave little or no space for individual development (Silke, 2002, p.183)? If ‘society shapes self’ (Stryker, 1992, p.872) and if patriarchy subordinates women to men (Brooker, 2003, p.188, Feldmann & Schülting, 2004b, p.513), how can women achieve individual autonomy? Byatt’s novels are engaged in asking similar questions. Her fiction repeatedly represents female autonomy and patriarchy as two diametrically opposed categories. Along with Byatt’s early novels The Shadow of the Sun (1964) and The Game (1967), Possession problematizes female autonomy by focusing on the figure of the woman artist in a maledominated world.2 In this novel, the woman artist is personified in the fictitious Victorian poetess Christabel LaMotte, who fights ‘against Family and Society’ (P, p.189) for her autonomy, not only as a single 55

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woman, but also as an artist. As Christien Franken contends, it is through this character and her poetic work that the novel ‘investigates the subject of a woman artist’s autonomy’ (Franken, 2001, p.101). Jane Campbell argues that Possession ‘shows women’s potential for creative self-assertion and empowerment’ (Campbell, 2004, p.128). Campbell furthermore claims that the novel ‘assert[s] the creative power of women . . . point[s] to a female artistic genealogy, [and] transform[s] old [male] notions of literary history’ (Campbell, 2004, p.146). Such readings are, however, too one-dimensional since they do not take into consideration the fact that Possession marginalizes the only female poet it features. The novel does indeed emphasize LaMotte’s need for artistic as well as social autonomy, but as Susanne Schmid has correctly pointed out, it fails to put forward a successful concept of the women artist, since it denies LaMotte both personal happiness and success as a poet (Schmid, 1996a, pp.124–5). To aid its complex discussion of female autonomy, Possession draws on a story known as the myth of Melusina. This myth narrates the life of the beautiful water nymph Melusina, who, every Saturday, is doomed to turn into a creature that is half woman and half snake. This curse can only be lifted if Melusina marries a mortal who will agree to take a vow never to visit her on Saturdays, as this will enable her to hide her transformations from him. Melusina falls in love with the knight Raimondin, whom she marries after he has taken the necessary oath. However, their happiness is not to last, for, driven by curiosity, Raimondin eventually breaks his oath and spies on her in her bathroom, thus witnessing her transformation into a snake-woman. When he finally discloses her secret to other people, Melusina is doomed to turn into a dragon and is forced to abandon her husband and her children.3 Embodying both beauty and monstrosity, Melusina thus symbolizes the female ‘other’, feared and oppressed by patriarchal society (Lundt, 1991, pp.30–7). This myth plays an important role in Possession. As several of the now numerous articles on and studies of the novel point out, there are many parallels between the mythical snake-woman and the novel’s two female characters, Christabel and Maud.4 The former is, for example, likened to Melusina when another character describes her as ‘some sort of serpent, hissing quietly . . . but ready to strike’ (P, p.366). Maud is likewise shown as resembling the snake-woman when Roland sees her coming out of a bathroom. Not only is she wearing a kimono

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embroidered with a water-dragon, but she has also just surprised Roland kneeling – Raimondin-like – in front of the bathroom door, peering through the keyhole (P, pp.147–8).5 What earlier articles and studies however neglect to consider is the significance of Melusina’s bath as the myth’s central metaphor. Since it is only in the privacy of her bathroom that Melusina is able to live as her ‘true’ self – half woman, half snake – this room symbolizes the autonomy on which her identity depends. Spying on her in the bathroom, her husband Raimondin not only breaks his oath, but also violates her autonomous space. Possession takes up this strategy of thematizing female autonomy with the help of spatial metaphors. Christabel LaMotte describes the cottage she shares with her lover Blanche Glover before she meets Ash as a place of female freedom (P, p.186). What is more, she regards the cottage as a place that enables both women to live independently and to perfect their art (P, p.187). In other words, Christabel’s cottage is her Melusinian bathroom; it is her space of female autonomy, and absolutely necessary to her for writing poetry. Christabel conceives of Ash as a ‘Threat’ (P, p.187) to her autonomy – her ‘solitude’ (P, p.137, p.195), as she calls it – and, therefore, to her artistic talent. The novel thus transposes the Romantic concept of the male poet as a solitary genius on to its concept of the woman poet. When Christabel turns down Ash’s request to call on her at the cottage at the very beginning of their affair (P, p.87), she is, in fact, doing nothing less than defending her autonomous space6 and, with it, her ability to write poetry. The fact that his visit to Bethany cottage does eventually take place (P, p.197) foreshadows her failure as a poet – a failure in terms of both contemporary popularity and canonization – for it symbolizes female artistic autonomy impaired by male invasion. In Christabel’s last letter to Ash, in which she describes how their affair and the birth of their daughter Maia resulted in the loss of her financial independence (P, p.500) and how Ash destroyed her ‘solitude and selfpossession’ (P, p.502), she again talks about her artistic talent in terms of space. She writes: ‘I wonder – if I had kept to my closed castle, behind my motte-and-bailey defences – should I have been a great poet – as you are?’ (P, p.502). The spatial metaphor of the ‘closed castle’ not only refers to Christabel’s initial doubts regarding their correspondence (P, p.184) and their secret meetings (P, p.197), but also to her artistic autonomy as still being inviolate and intact before her affair with Ash. Christabel

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LaMotte thus fits Virginia Woolf’s dictum that ‘a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction’ (Woolf, 1967, p.6). As long as she inhabits her cottage, Christabel is able to keep her financial as well as her artistic autonomy. Losing this ‘room of her own’ by having to move in with her sister in order to prevent herself and her child from the social stigma of illegitimacy, she also loses her autonomy and fails as a poet. A woman artist’s autonomy, the novel thus argues, is incompatible with Victorian patriarchal society. However, Byatt’s novels are concerned not only with the autonomy of the woman poet, but also with female autonomy in general. Both Possession and the tetralogy focus on the (im)possibility of female autonomy in patriarchal societies. In discussing Maud’s autonomy as a woman in late twentieth-century England, Possession again draws on the myth of Melusina through its strategies of spatialization. Maud’s identity as a successful academic depends on her having an apartment of her own, because she needs to be alone in this ‘bright safe box’ (P, p.137) in order to work well. Her flat is represented as a space which provides her not only with safety, but also with solitude, which is again presented as a prerequisite for female work. Maud’s apartment consequently parallels Christabel’s cottage and Melusina’s bathroom in its function as a space of female autonomy. The novel includes two scenes which emphasize the importance of this space for Maud. In the first, Maud explains to Roland that she could not work when her former lover Fergus was in her apartment (P, p.217). In the second scene, Maud realizes that she cannot concentrate as long as Roland shares her flat with her (P, p.430). Each scene underlines the fact that the presence of men robs Maud of her ability to work. The space of her flat clearly symbolizes her autonomy, an autonomy she loses as soon as this space is violated. The two scenes also clarify the fact that Possession represents autonomy as a prerequisite not only of female artists, but more generally of professional women. The novel thus broadens Virginia Woolf’s concept of female autonomy. Speaking in Woolfian terms, Possession contends that a woman must have a room of her own if she is to think. As its spaces symbolizing female autonomy are permanently threatened by male invasion, however, the novel claims that even at the end of the twentieth century, female autonomy is constantly endangered by patriarchy. Representing it as a closed-off space, the novel further thematizes female autonomy as a paradoxical concept implying both freedom

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and captivity. On the one hand, the closed space provides safety by barring the outside world; on the other hand, it shuts its inhabitants in, preventing them from interacting with their environment. Christabel is aware of this paradox, and, using another spatial metaphor, she describes it to Ash as a ‘donjon’ that keeps women safe and at the same time allows them freedom (P, p.137). Through Christabel, the novel implies that Victorian women could only achieve autonomy if they ‘renounce[d] the Outside World’ (P, p.187), as Christabel puts it, which meant leading a life outside Victorian society or at least one without social contacts (Schmid, 1996a, p.123). Maud finds herself confronted with the same paradoxical structure of female autonomy as her Victorian predecessor. She is not literally living outside society, since the socio-cultural circumstances of the late twentieth century enable her to be a financially independent, professionally successful and single woman, which in fact makes her the woman that Christabel could not be. Nonetheless, she appears to be a ‘social outsider’ in late twentieth-century English society, as the constant criticism directed at her behaviour towards other people makes clear. Her former lover Fergus Woolf, for example, quotes Coleridge’s Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner, characterizing her as a woman who ‘thicks men’s blood with cold’ (P, p.34); Lady Bailey – a minor female character in the novel – calls her a ‘[s]tand-offish . . . chilly mortal’ (P, p.144); and Maud herself knows that other people generally regard her as ‘[i]cily regular, splendidly null’ (P, p.506). Even the narrative voice describes Maud as a ‘most untouchable woman’ (P, p.48), thus giving authority to the other characters’ opinions. It is through this repeated critique of Maud that Possession implicitly suggests that a late twentieth-century woman is expected to be ‘warm’ and ‘loving.’ Failing to comply with this clichéd ideal, Maud violates the social norms of what the novel outlines as stereotypically female behaviour. Maud’s and Christabel’s status as ‘social outsiders’ again emphasizes the dichotomic opposition of female autonomy and patriarchal society that Possession criticizes. It takes Roland – who in his way violates the norms of late twentieth-century male behaviour since he is characterized as an ‘atypically’ gentle, unassertive man7 – to overcome the distance Maud creates between herself and others in order to escape emotional involvement (P, p.506). While other men such as Fergus reduce Maud to ‘a property or an idol’ (P, p.506), Roland assures her that he ‘wouldn’t threaten [her] autonomy’ (P, p.507), an assurance

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which the novel again symbolizes in terms of space. Since Roland is about to accept a job in either Amsterdam, Barcelona or Hong Kong (P, p.507), their relationship does not threaten Maud’s space and, consequently, does not endanger her autonomy. With her autonomy remaining intact, Maud is eventually able to overcome her emotional inhibitions. Thus, it is with the character of Maud that Possession goes beyond the dichotomy of emotional happiness and female autonomy, which ruins Christabel LaMotte’s life as both a woman and a poet. While Possession focuses on female life in the Victorian Age and in the late twentieth century, Byatt’s tetralogy revolves around highly educated, intellectual women in English (upper-)middle-class society from 1952 to 1980.8 In the novels, this society is characterized not only as deeply patriarchal, but is also criticized as one restricting female autonomy by ascribing to women the roles of wife and mother. Frederica Potter is a very intelligent, well-educated, and highly ambitious young woman who, having finished her Cambridge degree in English literature, is now looking forward to promising career opportunities in both journalism and academia (SL, p.913, p.956). Like Christabel and Maud in Possession, Frederica is torn between her longing for both independence and emotional happiness. She wishes to marry (SL, p.723), but she is determined to avoid the intellectual emptiness of female life which, the novels suggest, results from marriage and especially motherhood (VG, p.507; BT, p.252). However, English middle-class society of the 1950s and 1960s is depicted as denying married women access to university education (SL, p.793) as well as to a working life (BT, p.252), expecting them instead to stay at home and look after their families. The first three novels in Byatt’s tetralogy are populated by women who give up their freedom as soon as they marry. Frederica’s mother Winifred (e.g. VG, p.112), the local headmaster’s wife (VG, p.297), Alexander’s lover Jenny (VG, p.507), university professors’ wives (BT, p.252), and above all Frederica’s sister Stephanie (SL, p.627) are all illustrative of a similar phenomenon. Each of them is a well-educated, intelligent woman confined to the life of a housewife and a mother, a role which, the novels claim, leads to depression, intellectual boredom, and self-denial (VG, p.507; BT, p.252). Frederica’s older sister Stephanie is the tetralogy’s most outstanding example of a woman whose autonomy is diminished by marriage and motherhood. Although she has willingly married the man she loves,

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she soon feels that she has lost something by becoming a wife and a mother, as her household tasks leave her no time for an intellectual life of her own. As her husband Daniel realizes, she ‘ha[s] been made dumb, by marrying him, about Shakespeare and Wordsworth’ (SL, p.985). As a married woman and a mother, she feels the social pressure to relinquish her own autonomy to attend to the needs and cares of others. When, for example, she leaves her infant son Will in her brother’s and mother-in-law’s care in order to spend some time on her own in the library, she feels that she is ‘being accused of desertion by some powerful representative of motherhood’ (SL, p.751). The fact that Stephanie experiences a ‘moment of freedom’ (SL, p.758) while sitting in the library working on Wordsworth’s poetry, shows that she feels caged in by the life she leads. By having Stephanie die in a household accident, Byatt’s novel ‘suggests some horrible connection between maternity and death’ (Cosslett, 1989, p.268). Within the context of my discussion here, this connection also presents female autonomy and married life as being irreconcilable in English society during the 1950s and 1960s. In contrast to Stephanie,9 Frederica wholeheartedly rejects the life her sister has chosen, for she is ‘afraid of confinement’ (SL, p.906). One of the scenes indicating her fear of what she conceives of as the confined life as a mother and wife is to be found in The Virgin in the Garden, when she visits a department store. Most tellingly, she develops claustrophobia in the kitchen department (VG, p.251). In the bridal department, she watches a couple of young future brides actually fighting over wedding accessories (VG, p.252), whilst she herself is cast in the role of the observer who finds the whole scene touchingly absurd (VG, p.253). ‘Laugh[ing] aloud’ (VG, p.253), she turns away, thus signifying that she rejects the idea of matrimony as the pinnacle of female existence.10 But although she wants to become ‘someone’, an actor or a writer, for example (VG, p.43; WW, p.138), she is deeply rooted in the socio-cultural context of the northern English post-war middle-class society she grew up in. She therefore accepts marriage as being a necessary part of female life (SL, p.903), and she hopes for a way to reconcile her desire to marry with her wish for self-fulfilment: ‘Surely, surely it was possible . . . to make something of [her] life and be a woman’ (SL, p.793). However, Frederica’s marriage to Nigel Reiver, whom she marries because of the shock of her sister’s sudden death (SL, pp.972–4; BT,

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p.308), dashes this hope. She finds herself trapped in a marriage to a man who reduces her to the role of his wife and their son’s mother. He expects her to be fulfilled by this role, which, according to him, marriage necessarily entails for women: ‘I don’t see why any girl would marry, if she can’t put up with being a wife. And a mother’ (BT, p.37). Nevertheless, Frederica regards her life as Nigel’s wife and Leo’s mother as one of ‘confinement’ (BT, p.322), feeling that marriage and motherhood diminish her personality until she has become ‘less real than . . . before’ (BT, p.87). To put it in her own words, she has become ‘someone nobody ever sees anymore’ (BT, p.38). Staying married to Nigel, Frederica realizes, would mean ‘will[ing] her own annihilation’ (BT, p.125). Envying her husband the autonomy which she, as a married woman, is denied (BT, p.88), she yearns for a ‘life of [her] own’ (BT, p.322), an autonomous life beyond that of being Mrs Nigel Reiver. Her husband Nigel, however, does not respect her wish for a life of her own (BT, p.322). He represents a society, Frederica comes to realize, ‘in which woman was man’s property’ (BT, p.324) and which, despite the social changes taking place in the 1960s, still adheres to the traditional role of woman as wife and mother. This view is also expressed by various official representatives of this society such as the judge in Frederica’s divorce and custody hearings, who regards higher education for women as ‘perhaps incompatible with the fulfilled life of wife and mother’ (BT, p.519) and Frederica’s lawyer, who contends that marriage is expected to stop women from being themselves (BT, p.321). Frederica rebels against such views. Although her marriage to Nigel has put her in a financially secure and comfortably well-off position (BT, p.37), she insists that she ‘ha[s] to have something to do’ (BT, p.37), something other than her tasks as a wife and a mother (BT, pp.36–8). To put it simply, she wants to work. Her desire to work is described as a fundamental ‘need’ (BT, p.37) which becomes ‘so terrible’ (BT, p.37) that it almost reduces her to tears when Nigel refuses to acknowledge it (BT, p.37). Again and again, she underlines her need for work, thus expressing her longing for autonomy (BT, p.138, p.139, p.140). It should be noted that her foremost reason for working is not her wish to be financially independent from Nigel, although financial autonomy does play a role, too, after she has eventually left him (BT, p.253, p.279, p.321). The real reason Frederica is unable to do without work is because she conceives of it as an essential part of her existence: ‘I [Frederica] must work or I’ll die’ (BT, p.295). For her, work

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constitutes an important part of her identity as an autonomous individual, as becomes clear when she points out that ‘[Nigel] stopped me from working . . . from being myself ’ (BT, pp.320–1). Consequently, it is not so much the serious physical harm which her husband inflicts on her (BT, p.89, p.120, p.122), but his refusal to let her work which she assesses as ‘the most cruel thing’ (BT, p.321) that happens to her during her marriage. It is only when she has left Nigel that Frederica is finally able to satisfy her need for work. After her separation, she starts a successful career as a teacher and a TV presenter, which enables her to live the autonomous life she has yearned for. Frederica builds up a life of her own during the ‘Swinging Sixties’, which Babel Tower and A Whistling Woman depict as a time of social upheaval, in which women increasingly questioned traditional gender roles. In the late 1960s, Frederica wins for herself the autonomy of the newly emerging ‘free women’, whom the narrative voice in A Whistling Woman defines as ‘women who had incomes, work they had chosen, a life of the mind, sex as they pleased’ (WW, p.415). Like Maud in Possession, Frederica thus seems to have overcome the constraints that society imposes on her autonomy. At first glance, Byatt’s novel suggests that, by 1970, women are eventually able to live autonomous lives as they are free to adopt other roles besides those of wives and mothers, even if they are married and have children. On closer reflection, however, one realizes that male dominance has not altogether been done away with in Byatt’s novel. At the very end of A Whistling Woman, Frederica finds herself pregnant by Luk LysgaardPeacock, who respects her as an independent and intellectual woman. After a time of uncertainty, she at last decides to have the baby and to let Luk know about her pregnancy. In the very last paragraph of A Whistling Woman, the reader learns that Luk and Frederica plan to stay together. Although neither of them explicitly voices any plans for the future, the repeated use of the pronouns ‘they’ and ‘we’ indicate that the two of them now form a union in which neither has to give up their autonomy for the other. It is, however, Frederica who admits that they are at a loss as to what to do, whereas Luk stresses that they will find a solution to their problems: Frederica said ‘We haven’t the slightest idea what to do.’ . . . The world was all before them, it seemed . . . ‘We shall think of something,’ said Luk Lysgaard-Peacock. (WW, p.421)

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While this quote does not imply that Frederica’s and Luk’s relationship might be determined by any hierarchical gender difference, it is worth mentioning that it is Frederica the woman who voices insecurity and indecision, whereas Luk the man expresses optimism and announces activity. It is, in fact, with Luk’s words and his name that the novel ends. Thus, it is ironically a male character – albeit one who is not opposed to female independence – who is given the last word in a tetralogy that criticizes patriarchy for its detrimental effect on female autonomy.

6 Reconciling Body and Mind: the ‘Thinking Woman’

In her collection of essays On Histories and Stories (2000), Byatt points out that she is deeply troubled by the gendered dichotomy of mind and body that connects woman with body and man with mind (Byatt, 2000, p.111), which she first encountered in seventeenth-century Neoplatonism. Differentiating between logos or nous – the mind – and materia – the body – Neoplatonism1 eventually gave rise to a gender differentiation which, by the time of the Victorian Age, had resulted in a ‘completely usual conventional distinction between men and women as creatures of thought and feeling respectively’ (Byatt, 2000, p.110). All of her fiction, Byatt states, problematizes the gendered difference between male mind and female body, and tries to emphasize the fact that ‘both men and women are . . . both body and . . . mind, related in complicated ways’ (Byatt, 2000, p.111). Within the overall topic of female identity, Byatt’s tetralogy can indeed be shown to include a thorough discussion of this difference, as I will describe below. As already outlined in Chapter 4, Byatt’s novels describe work as an essential element of female identity, affording women autonomy and independence. Taking a closer look at the conception of work represented in the novels, one realizes that the privileged idea of work does not embrace just any kind of work. For Frederica, work equals thinking, that is, intellectual activity. Quarrelling with her husband, who does not accept her need for work, she stresses that: ‘I have to think, the way you have to do whatever you do [in your job]’ (BT, p.118). As this quote makes clear, her need for work expresses her need to think, a need that pervades both Babel Tower and A Whistling Woman. 65

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‘I need to work, I need to think’ (BT, p.253), Frederica emphasizes. In Still Life, her sister Stephanie likewise underlines the importance of thought, especially of thinking about literature. She even points out that thinking is necessary for her survival (SL, p.754). Most tellingly, Stephanie dies shortly after she has complained about how her household chores cause her vocabulary of ‘thinking words’ (SL, p.940) to shrink ever more. Although her death occurs unexpectedly and is completely accidental, it seems to be the only possible fate for a character whose life has not left her any room for an activity to which she herself has ascribed existential importance. Since both Stephanie and Frederica identify work with thinking, they resemble not only Maud in Possession, but also Byatt herself, who states in her introduction to The Shadow of the Sun that for her, working has always meant thinking and writing (SS, p.ix). Contemplating her future professional life, Frederica decides that she ‘want[s] to think’ (WW, p.138). Edmund Wilkie, who employs her as the host of his avant-garde TV show Through the Looking-Glass (WW, p.46), calls Frederica a ‘thinking woman’ (WW, p.41). Thus, Wilkie introduces a term into the novel which, even though it only occurs twice throughout the text (WW, p.41, p.291), denotes the key concept of A Whistling Woman. It is through this concept that the novel aims to reconcile the dichotomic opposition of feeling and thought, of body and mind. While it is certainly correct to state that Byatt’s tetralogy does indeed criticize a gendered dichotomy of body and mind, it should not go unmentioned that the four novels persistently fail to deconstruct it. As I have argued in Chapters 4 and 5, the tetralogy presents married life for women as being traditionally determined by household and nursery duties, things which bring about ‘the death of the mind’ (VG, p.507), as one of the many frustrated wives in the tetralogy puts it. Byatt’s novels claim that life as a wife and a mother, which Frederica’s husband Nigel – functioning as a representative of patriarchal society – has been shown to idealize, is incompatible with ‘the life of the mind’ (SL, p.793). Still Life, in particular, argues that for women in the 1950s, the only way to live a ‘life of the mind’ is to remain single. However, the novel problematizes this option, which it exemplifies in Miss Chiswick, Frederica’s Cambridge tutor, by suggesting that a woman who renounces marriage and motherhood gives up part of her female identity. Unmarried Miss Chiswick is said to have ‘sacrificed something at least for the life of the mind’ (SL, p.793), whereas

Reconciling Body and Mind: the ‘Thinking Woman’

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Frederica is desperate to reconcile her professional ambitions with her wish to ‘be a woman’ (SL, p.793; emphasis added). Striving to live the lives both of a woman, which for her entails marriage and motherhood (SL, p.723), and of a professional person, Frederica differs from Christabel LaMotte in Possession, who ‘renounce[s] the outside World – and the usual female Hopes [for a married life]’ (P, p.187) in favour of leading the ‘Life of the Mind’ (P, p.187), which in her case is that of a woman writing poetry. In short, Byatt’s tetralogy suggests that female life in post-war middle-class England was determined by a gender difference which excluded married women, especially mothers, from an intellectually satisfying ‘life of the mind’. Although more explicit examples of this difference and its underlying body–mind dichotomy can be found in each of the four novels,2 I would like to point out one particular quote from Still Life, which very subtly, but effectively, problematizes female life and ‘the life of the mind’ as diametrically opposed categories within the patriarchal society Byatt’s novels depict. In Still Life, a young gynaecologist implicitly criticizes Frederica’s sister Stephanie for propping a Wordsworth edition against her pregnant belly while queuing for an ante-natal examination: He [the doctor] had seen Stephanie before . . . he remembered her vaguely . . . always using ‘the pregnancy’ as a reading-desk. He didn’t think that was quite right, but hadn’t formulated why. (SL, p.589; emphasis added) The text creates an image which pairs a pregnant and, therefore, female body with reading, an activity of the mind. By having a male character judge this image as something reprehensible or at least dubious, the novel presents the Neoplatonic dichotomy of body and mind as a gender difference, established and perpetuated as a social norm by patriarchal society. An equally subtle example can be found in A Whistling Woman. One of the male characters in the novel explains that the mathematician Alan Turing was subjected to oestrogen treatment, which was meant to ‘cure’ his homosexuality. This character claims that the female hormone was responsible for Turing’s mental deterioration as it prevented him from thinking clearly (WW, p.29). Here, the text adopts a male perspective to present the female body – as symbolized by female hormones – as not only being diametrically

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opposed to the male mind, but even as being detrimental to it. Like Still Life, A Whistling Woman thus shows that patriarchy constructs woman as standing in opposition to mind. Byatt’s novels criticize the English patriarchal society of the 1950s for upholding the Neoplatonic dichotomy of female body and male mind as a social norm which makes it impossible for women to lead an intellectually satisfying life of the mind. But although Byatt describes herself as a feminist (Byatt, 1983, p.189) and demands that ‘all feminists ought to deconstruct’ (Byatt, 2000, p.111) the gendered opposition of body and mind, Still Life can be shown as reinforcing this difference by representing pregnancy as a threat to the female mind. It does this through Frederica’s sister Stephanie Orton. On the one hand, Stephanie exemplifies the body–mind dichotomy enforced by patriarchy, for she realizes that her life as a married woman and a mother diminishes her mind (SL, pp.939–41), but on the other hand, Stephanie experiences a decrease of her intellectual capacity during her first pregnancy. Her pregnancy does not change her interest in literature, especially in poetry, which earns her the young doctor’s criticism as outlined above, but she finds it increasingly hard to concentrate on poetry due to ‘a general pregnant incapacity to finish sentences’ (SL, p.585). Gradually, her pregnant body takes over her mind until she states that she is ‘sunk in biology’ (SL, p.586), almost falling asleep while reading Wordsworth, a poet who is most tellingly labelled ‘a man talking to men’ (SL, p.587).3 By delineating how a woman’s mind, once quick and active, is slackened by pregnancy until it becomes too slow and too sluggish to take in Wordsworthian verses, Still Life not only opposes mind and body, but also associates woman with body and man with mind. Even Frederica, who as I will indicate below is the only female character succeeding in reconciling body and mind, is subject to the effects ascribed to pregnancy. When she finds herself pregnant by Luk at the end of A Whistling Woman (WW, p.415), the narrative voice comments that: [p]regnancy disturbs the balance of body and mind and is hard in any case on women like Frederica, who do not give in gracefully, who cannot let slip the habit of logical thought, who do not slumber easily. (WW, p.415) Here, pregnancy opposes logic, logos; it is described as a phase that causes the mind to go into hibernation, as it were. That the mind


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is diminished by the pregnant body is presented as an inevitable part of female existence, as something which a woman has to ‘give in’ to. During the scene in which Stephanie gives birth to her first child, Still Life most clearly suggests that pregnancy diminishes the female mind. Having gone into labour, Stephanie starts to recite Wordsworth by heart, which indicates that her mind is still active. Although the rhythms of rhyme and metre at first help her to cope with the labour pains (SL, p.680), all thoughts of poetry and books are driven from her mind as soon as the bearing-down pains set in. During these last stages of giving birth, the text actually denies Stephanie the status of a human being, for it describes her as ‘moan[ing] wildly’ (SL, p.682) while her body produces ‘animal sounds . . . grunts, incoherent grinding clamour, panting sighs’ (SL, p.682). In this scene, Stephanie slowly distances herself from her own mind until she is eventually reduced to a mere body capable only of feeling. At first, she is still able to think (SL, p.681), then she only ‘hear[s] herself thinking’, and, in the end, her mind is ‘shrinking’ (SL, p.682). The long passage recounting the actual birth is devoted to Stephanie’s feelings; it pictures not only her violent emotions, but also the excruciating pain that grips her body (SL, p.682). The text enumerates her body parts, describing in length and detail her head, her womb, her vagina, her spine, her trunk, her flesh and her bones (SL, p.683). It is only after her son is born that her mind re-emerges from the ‘bloodstorm’ (SL, p.683) of her body expelling the baby: ‘there was her mind, clear, free, shining’ (SL, p.684). This passage is one of the few in British literature that presents childbirth from the perspective of the woman giving birth (Cosslett, 1989, p.263), which is significant in this context as it is a female rather than a male point of view that associates woman with body. Told from a female perspective, this passage naturalizes the opposition of woman and mind, presenting it as resulting from the biological processes of the female body giving birth. According to Still Life, a married woman in the 1950s is confronted with two threats: her mind is in danger of being diminished by her role as wife and mother as well as by her pregnant body. Although both options are shown to be equally detrimental to the female mind, there is a fundamental difference between the two. While Stephanie complains that her life as Mrs Daniel Orton, mother of two, reduces her intellect (SL, p.940), significantly, she does not complain about

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her pregnant body dominating her mind: ‘I [Stephanie] am sunk in biology. The phrase pleased her. It was not a complaint’ (SL, p.586; emphasis added). Not least because of this statement, Still Life turns out to be a very ambivalent text. On the one hand, the novel severely criticizes a socially inscribed role for its negative effects on the female mind. On the other hand, however, it describes the female body as being ‘naturally’ opposed to the life of the mind. Thus, paradoxically, the second novel in Byatt’s tetralogy both criticizes and emphasizes the gendered dichotomy of body and mind. It is through the character of Frederica Potter that Byatt’s tetralogy undermines the gender difference analysed above and its underlying body–mind dichotomy. As early as in A Virgin in the Garden, the character of Frederica undermines any association of woman with body and of man with mind, as she is not only a very intelligent girl, but also one who feels quite uneasy in her body. As her intellectual capacities are more refined than her physical ones (VG, p.93, p.96, pp.378–9), she always seems to feel more at home in her mind than in her body. As a ‘thinking woman’ – who, according to the novels, represents a rare species in the late 1960s – she does indeed embody a contradiction in (Neoplatonic) terms, as it were. As Katharina Uhsadel points out, Frederica’s life is determined by her attempts to reconcile body and mind, to achieve emotional, sensuous, and intellectual fulfilment (Uhsadel, 2005, p.94). Frederica falls in love with Nigel and marries him because sex with him makes her ‘body . . . happy’ (BT, p.40), affording her hitherto unknown sensuous happiness. In Babel Tower, she states that she chose Nigel because life with him enabled her ‘to live in [her] body’ (BT, p.126). Frederica is nonetheless unhappy with Nigel, for he refuses to acknowledge her as an intellectual being.4 She also regards her relationship with John Ottokar, her post-divorce boyfriend, as sensuously satisfying (BT, p.346, p.351), but, in contrast to her body, her mind is ‘unhappy’ (WW, p.252) when he professes his love for her. Wanting to keep her independence, she eventually leaves him (WW, p.340). Frederica is unable to reconcile body and mind with either Nigel or John, as each relationship affords her sensuous, that is, sexual happiness, but prevents her from achieving intellectual satisfaction. John even tries to convince her of the priority of the sexually fulfilled body. When they are in bed together, he refuses to let her talk, which is to say that he stops her mind expressing itself. What


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is more, he tries to persuade her that her sexually active body is the only thing that matters: ‘[D]on’t talk.’ . . . He puts his warm, mute hand suddenly, swiftly, between her legs . . . waits for . . . the very slight relaxation of her tense muscles, and says, ‘This is real.’ (BT, p.403) John’s words and actions bear a surprising similarity to those of Nigel, who also admonishes Frederica for talking when they are in bed: ‘[D]on’t talk . . . Talking hurts.’ He puts a hand, warm, hard, friendly, over the triangle between her legs. (BT, p.94) Nigel’s claim that talking hurts is, of course, highly ironic, because Nigel accuses Frederica of injuring him with speech after he has just beaten her up (BT, pp.89–94), inflicting severe bodily harm on her. Nevertheless, the two scenes quoted above are highly illuminating as they show that both Nigel and John not only reject Frederica’s intellect by commanding her to stop talking, but that they also privilege her sexuality and her body as the essential characteristics of her identity by defining them as real. Frederica is not the only female character in the tetralogy whose body men favour over her mind. Her sister Stephanie is married to a man who is afraid of her intellect because he thinks that it separates her from him (SL, p.986). Like Nigel and John, Stephanie’s husband uses sex to stop her using her intellect (SL, p.939, p.979). In contrast to Stephanie, however, Frederica is able to identify the priority of the sexual body as a myth, which she then succeeds in demystifying. She regards her body as real while she experiences sex, but she also realizes that there is more to her than just her body: ‘[O]utside all this,’ she claims, ‘I am something else, someone else, I walk alone’ (WW, p.149). Having de-essentialized the female body and its sexual sensations, Frederica affirms the importance of knowledge and, therefore, of an intellectually fulfilled life: She had thought [as a young girl] she had wanted womanhood and sex. Knowledge had been there, and she had swallowed it wholesale . . . but it hadn’t seemed to be what mattered. Now, perhaps after all, it did. (WW, p.137; emphasis added)

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As she wants to employ her intellect, Frederica decides to give up her childhood dream of becoming an actress (WW, p.138). In one of the key passages in A Whistling Woman, Frederica actively claims the role of a ‘thinking woman’: ‘I don’t want to act. I want to think’ (WW, p.138). Thus, she deconstructs the Neoplatonic analogy that associates woman with inert matter. No longer wanting to be an actress, Frederica renounces being ‘a vessel’ (WW, p.138), ‘full of Shakespeare’s words’ (WW, p.138). Instead of contenting herself with acting out the verses created by a male mind, she declares her intention to seize the active role of thinking, which she then achieves in her two careers as a teacher and the host of a TV show concerned with the history of ideas. As a woman who thinks, Frederica undermines the gendered dichotomy of body and mind. It goes without saying that the passage analysed above fails to break up the actual dichotomy of body and mind itself in spite of deconstructing the gender difference entailed in it, for it reinforces the hierarchical categorization of Neoplatonism by privileging mind over body. A Whistling Woman nonetheless brings about a reconciliation of body and mind, by establishing Frederica as a ‘thinking woman’ on both a personal and a professional level. Falling in love with Luk, she not only chooses a man who respects and accepts her as a ‘thinking woman’, but she also seems to be able to achieve intellectual as well as sensual happiness. She experiences sex with Luk as satisfying (WW, p.379), whereas he is interested in what she thinks (WW, p.410) and, above all, he resembles her in prioritizing knowledge (WW, p.411). In characterizing Frederica as ‘perturbed in body and mind’ (WW, p.411; emphasis added) by Luk, A Whistling Woman implies that Frederica has finally succeeded in reconciling these two categories. Although the novel depicts her as still depending on a man to bridge the gulf separating body and mind in her personal life, it deconstructs any such gender hierarchy for her professional life. Frederica breaks up the dichotomy while teaching The Great Gatsby to her extra-mural class. Reading out a passage from Fitzgerald’s novel: [s]he felt something she had always supposed to be mythical, the fine hairs on the back of her neck rising and pricking in a primitive response to a civilised perfection, body recognising mind. (WW, p.269; emphasis added)


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It is in her capacity as a teacher and, therefore, as a professional ‘thinking woman’ that Frederica succeeds in bridging the gulf between her body and her mind on her own account. In sum, Byatt’s tetralogy is engaged in overcoming what the author herself calls the ‘false analogies’ (Byatt, 2000, p.111) of Neoplatonism, which associate man with mind and woman with body. In Still Life, Babel Tower and A Whistling Woman, the Neoplatonic opposition of female body and male mind is successfully demystified as a norm of patriarchal society. Byatt’s novels succeed not only in exposing this opposition as a socio-cultural construct, but also in juxtaposing it with the concept of the ‘thinking woman’. According to this concept, the female self embraces both body and mind, thus stepping beyond the binary difference established by Neoplatonism. However, this difference is paradoxically re-inscribed into both Still Life and A Whistling Woman since both texts associate woman with body and, therefore, re-essentialize the Neoplatonic dichotomy. Representing the pregnant body as ‘naturally’ opposed to the mind, Byatt’s tetralogy eventually fails to deconstruct the gendered dichotomy of mind and body.


Part II Identity – Cultural Memory – Literature


7 Identity and Memory

The Byatt novels analysed in this book repeatedly link their discussion of individual identity to aspects of both personal and collective memory. These two different dimensions of memory claim a central position in the various ways in which Possession, The Biographer’s Tale and Byatt’s tetralogy explore the notion of identity. Byatt’s negotiations of personal memory and identity can be examined with the help of socio-philosophical theories. The renowned sociologist and philosopher Jürgen Habermas comments on the importance of personal memories for the processes of individual identity formation when he argues that: [t]he identity of socialized individuals forms itself simultaneously in the medium of coming to an understanding with others in language and in the medium of coming to a life-historical and intrasubjective understanding with oneself. (Habermas, 1992, p.153) While the major means of communicating with others is language, understanding of oneself is achieved through memory.1 As George Herbert Mead, whose work forms the basis of Habermas’s concept of identity, argues, individuals can only observe themselves in retrospective ‘memory process[es]’ (Mead, 1913, p.374). Forming their selfimages by remembering their past actions and thoughts (Mead, 1913, pp.374–5), individuals come to what Habermas calls an intrasubjective understanding of themselves. Frederica Potter, the protagonist of Byatt’s novel Babel Tower, can be seen as engaging in such processes of intrasubjective understanding, 77

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as her thoughts about her identity as an adult woman are interwoven with her personal memories of herself as a teenage girl. In Babel Tower, Frederica twice remembers a trip she went on as a teenage girl (BT, p.312, pp.358–9). On this trip, which is part of The Virgin in the Garden (VG, pp.273–5), she first began to think about the particularities of female identity, and when she remembers the trip in Babel Tower, she also remembers herself contemplating the importance of female separateness (BT, p.312, pp.358–9). When these memories set in for the first time, Frederica is thinking about her marriage, which she realizes failed because her husband did not respect her as an independent being (BT, p.312). Remembering her younger self’s discovery of the importance of separateness and insisting on this separateness (BT, p.312), Frederica comes to understand herself as both the girl she was and the woman she is now. Frederica’s memories of how she realized the importance of separateness set in shortly before she becomes worried about her son (BT, p.313) and again when she is in bed with her lover John Ottokar (BT, pp.359–60). In these two situations, Frederica is shown as having lost her separateness because of her motherhood and her sexual desire. She ‘remembers her son . . . This flesh who is and is not her own’ (BT, p.313). When she is reaching orgasm, she thinks: ‘I lose myself . . . I am not . . . I come to the point of . . . not being’ (BT, p.360). By juxtaposing Frederica’s memories of her own separateness with these two experiences of bonding, Babel Tower represents her as embodying the paradoxical concept of female selfhood which, as I have argued in Chapter 4, is established in Byatt’s tetralogy. Thus, Frederica’s memories serve not only as a means of processing her understanding of herself at different moments in her life, but also establish an intertextual framework, which Byatt uses in order to negotiate her concept of the female self. Personal memory is also a key aspect of Byatt’s Possession, albeit for different reasons. Discussing personal memory in relation to literature, this novel suggests that literary texts store their authors’ memories and that the reading of such texts ascribes identity to their authors. In her introduction to the anthology Memory, Byatt contends that all art both has mnemonic function and is a form of memory (Byatt, 2008, p.xvi). In an essay titled ‘Memory and the Making of Fiction’, she makes clear that she conceives of personal memory and literature as being closely interconnected. She argues that literary texts

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contain their writers’ personal memories which, in turn: are haunted by, and connected to, the memories of the dead, both the immediately dead and the long-dead whose memories constructed the culture we live in and change in our turn. (Byatt, 1998, p.51) According to Byatt, it is the act of reading that activates these long chains of memories. Each time a literary text is read, Byatt claims, ‘the past is present and the burial places of memory give up their dead’ (Byatt, 1998, p.56). Possession represents such a connection between personal memory and literature, for Ash’s and LaMotte’s poems turn out to be the repository of their authors’ personal memories of their love affair, which, once activated by Roland’s and Maud’s reading, become signposts into the poets’ personal past. For example, LaMotte’s doll poem is a mnemonic of where LaMotte hid her love letters (P, pp.82–4), and the beginning of The Fairy Melusina stores memories of her visit to Thomason Foss in Yorkshire (P, p.266). To use Byatt’s words, these poems do indeed serve as burial places of memory which give up their dead when the past becomes present in Roland’s and Maud’s readings. The two scholars are able to unravel the Victorians’ secret through their readings. They find the poets’ love letters hidden away in LaMotte’s old room and come to learn that LaMotte accompanied Ash on his trip to Yorkshire. Thus, they are in fact able to partake in the poets’ memories by reading their poems. Put another way, the Victorian poets seem to make their memories audible for those who are prepared to listen. This brings to mind Stephen Greenblatt’s ‘desire to speak with the dead’ (1988, p.1). Greenblatt contends that literary texts, especially poetry, contain fragments of the author’s life (1988, p.1). In his book Shakespearean Negotiations, Greenblatt describes reading as an act of resurrection, as it were: It was true that I could only hear my own voice, but my own voice was the voice of the dead, for the dead had contrived to leave textual traces of themselves, and those traces make themselves heard in the voices of the living. (Greenblatt, 1988, p.1) Thus, Greenblatt argues, authors, though dead, make themselves heard through their writing. Functioning as their authors’ voices,

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texts furnish their authors with an uncanny ghost-like presence. At first glance, Possession expresses a similar idea, since it is, according to Byatt herself, ‘about . . . literary texts as the voices of persistent ghosts or spirits’ (2000, p.45).2 In spite of these similarities, however, Greenblatt’s approach is fundamentally different from the notion of literature as memory as delineated in Possession. Although Greenblatt is of the opinion that the past does indeed speak to the present in literary texts, he argues that the voice the reader hears in a text is by no means that of an individual. He writes: I had dreamed of speaking with the dead, and even now I do not abandon this dream. But the mistake was to imagine that I would hear a single voice, the voice of the other. If I wanted to hear one, I had to hear the many voices of the dead. (Greenblatt, 1988, p.20) Byatt follows a fundamentally different approach. Since Roland hears ‘Ash’s voice, certainly his voice, his unmistakable voice’ (P, p.472) while reading Ash’s poetry, Possession can clearly be seen as implying that a poetic text contains a particular individual’s voice and, therefore, a part of this individual’s identity.3 Since Possession represents poetry as a form of self-expression both storing and mediating a poet’s personal memories, the novel is once more indebted to the Romantic concept of poetry. The close link Byatt’s novel establishes between a literary text and its author’s identity is further emphasized by Ash’s and LaMotte’s selfconceptions as poets. Both of them regard their lives, even their selves as being indissolubly linked to the texts they write. LaMotte states: ‘I am a creature of my Pen . . . my Pen is the best of me’ (P, p.87). For her, language and with it poetry have an existential quality, which becomes clear when she declares: ‘[W]ords have been all my life, all my life’ (P, p.180). Her self and her poetry are one, as Ash puts it: I love your soul and with that your poetry – [which is] essentially you . . . your thought clothed with your words is uniquely you. (P, p.200) The same unity of work and self is true for Ash, who claims that ‘where my thoughts are, there I am, in truth’ (P, p.181). As these examples


show, LaMotte’s and Ash’s identities – each poet’s unique personhood – both find expression in their poetry and are constituted by it. Thus, it is only fitting that Ash’s and LaMotte’s identities have to be reassessed, once Roland and Maud have discovered their secret love affair by activating the mnemonic potential of their poetry. In the light of Roland’s and Maud’s discoveries, Ash’s identity as a happily married man, a faithful husband (P, p.8) and a slightly misogynist poet (P, p.42) turns out to be a misconstruction of posterity. Likewise, LaMotte can no longer be seen as a childless woman poet whose texts explore her lesbian sexuality (P, pp.33–4, p.37, p.402). Instead, Ash and LaMotte turn out to have been clandestine lovers, whose affair deeply influenced each writer’s life and poetic work. Like Byatt’s tetralogy, Possession can thus be seen as emphasizing the aspect of memory. In her tetralogy, Byatt uses her protagonist’s personal memories both to negotiate her concept of female selfhood and to problematize Frederica’s search for identity. In Possession, Byatt represents poems as a means of storing and mediating their authors’ personal memories, which serve to constitute these poets’ identities for both themselves and their readers. Hence, Possession links its discussion of identity to both memory and poetry. The novel suggests that personal memory and poetry – or, to put it more generally, literature – are interrelated spheres which are of eminent importance for individual identity formation. However, it is not only personal memory that represents an influential factor of individual identity formation in Byatt’s texts. As I will show in the following, her novels are also concerned with exploring the topic of identity within the context of collective memory. Theoretically speaking, collective memory determines personal memory, since personal memories are always framed by a collective dimension. In the early twentieth century, the sociologist Maurice Halbwachs was the first to take the ‘bold intellectual decision to attribute memory directly to a collective unity’ (Ricoeur, 2006, p.210). In contrast to his teacher Henri Bergson and other influential contemporaries such as Sigmund Freud, and Marcel Proust, who regarded memory as a highly individual process, Halbwachs claimed that even the most personal memories can only exist within the socially conditioned frameworks of collective memory (1950, p.2, p.32). In three theoretical studies,4 Halbwachs elaborates in detail on the relationship between personal and collective memory. In Les Cadres Sociaux de la Mémoire, which

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is the first of the three works in which he delineates his theory, Halbwachs rejects the idea that personal memory depends on the individual alone: ‘No memory is possible outside frameworks used by people living in society to determine and retrieve their recollections’ (1992, p.43). Memory, Halbwachs claims, does not lead the way to our most secret selves, since even the most personal memories are always socially conditioned (1950, p.2, p.32). He regards humans as social beings whose thoughts and feelings are rooted within their social environments (Halbwachs, 1950, pp.14–15). This social framework not only enables an individual to acquire social skills and knowledge, but also provides access to memory. According to Halbwachs, each social group has a mémoire collective, that is, a stock of collectively shared memories, which it actively creates through interaction and communication, and on which its group identity depends (1950, p.151). Although personal memory is always embodied by the individual, it is at the same time embedded in the individual’s social frameworks, which means that individual memory is always a social phenomenon: It is in this sense that there exists a collective memory and social frameworks for memory; it is to the degree that our individual thought places itself in these frameworks and participates in this memory that it is capable of the act of recollection. (Halbwachs, 1992, p.38) The collective framing of memory notwithstanding, the individual plays an important part in the mnemonic process as collective and individual memories depend on each other. While individuals draw on collective memories to form their individual memories, collective memories only become observable in individual acts of remembering (Halbwachs, 1994, p.VIII). Each individual memory is, therefore, only one perspective out of many on collective memory (Halbwachs, 1950, p.33). The question, however, remains why individual memories, even those of members of the same social group, differ from each other if they all draw on collective memories. What is it that makes memory individual? Halbwachs answers this question by pointing out that each individual belongs to more than one social group (1950, p.66), each of which has its own collective memory (1950, pp.75–6). Consequently, each individual draws on several collective memories. Halbwachs points out that an individual’s state of consciousness


always results from the complex combination of various connections through which the individual is linked to different social groups (Halbwachs, 1950, p.33). Individual memory, then, is not the act of memory itself, but each individual’s particular combination of different elements of the different collective memories s/he takes part in. Thus, personal memory, even in its seemingly most individual aspects, is always determined by collective memory. Several critics have correctly pointed out that Halbwachs’s concept of collective memory remains theoretically vague and that it raises several questions concerning the location of collective memories, their accessibility, their formation and their hierarchical structures.5 However, I am not concerned with further examining the inconsistencies of his concept or the questions it raises. I have elaborated on the connection which Halbwachs establishes between personal and collective memories because this connection forms part of the theoretical framework I will use to analyse how Byatt’s novels link their discussion of individual identity to that of memory in its collective form. According to Halbwachs, collective memory is a means of constructing the collective identities of social groups such as families, religious communities and social classes (Halbwachs, 1950, p.151).6 However, his concept also provides the theoretical context which allows me to link collective memory to individual identity. As outlined above, individual identity depends on personal memory, because individuals achieve intersubjective understanding of themselves with the help of their memories. Since, if personal memory is inevitably framed by collective memory, the processes of individual identity formation are also very reliant on collective memory, too. What then is ‘collective memory’? Halbwachs uses this term to describe the socially constructed knowledge collectively shared by the members of a social group. According to Halbwachs, the collective memories of such groups are limited as to their temporal horizons. He argues that family memories, for example, reach only as far into the past as the ability of the oldest member of a family to remember past events (Halbwachs, 1950, p.73). As soon as either the communication between the members of a given group breaks off or the social frames of references undergo fundamental changes, the collective memory of this group comes to an end. Although Halbwachs succeeds in conceptualizing collective memory as a social phenomenon, his perspective on this phenomenon remains too limited. Since he regards collective

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memory as being restricted to small social groups as well as to rather short time spans, he does not account for the fact that larger communities such as nation states also have collective memories, which reach much further back in time than, for example, family memories.7 The literary scholar Aleida Assmann and the Egyptologist Jan Assmann rectified this omission in the late 1980s. Generally speaking, they differentiate between two different collective frames of memory, arguing that a social group uses different means of referring to different periods of its past (J. Assmann, 1997, pp.48–9). According to Jan Assmann, social groups store their recent pasts in communicative memory,8 whereas they preserve their distant pasts in cultural memory (1997, p.50, p.52).9 The idea of cultural memory is of particular relevance for my reading of Byatt’s novels, but before I analyse her texts within the context of British cultural memory, I will briefly outline Jan and Aleida Assmann’s approach to both forms of collective memory. Following Halbwachs, the Assmanns10 conceptualize individual memory as being socially framed by what they term ‘communicative memory’ (A. Assmann, 2002, p.184; J. Assmann, 1997, p.21, pp.34–7). Social groups, they argue, construct communicative memories which they use to store their recent past in (J. Assmann, 1997, p.50, p.52).11 Communicative memories thus serve as social shortterm memories (A. Assmann, 2002, p.185), which are based on social interaction. Their medium is interpersonal communication, and their carriers are the members of a specific social group (J. Assmann, 1997, pp.52–4). Communicative memories are typically determined by limited time horizons, which do not reach further back in time than 80 to 100 years, and which move along with the passing of time (A. Assmann, 2002, p.185; J. Assmann, 1995, p.127). Having reached a critical threshold of 40 years, communicative memories start to be in danger of being forgotten, because they lack a stable form (J. Assmann, 1997, p.11, p.51). As the Assmanns argue, social groups are able to remember their distant past in spite of the limited time spans of communicative memories. They relate to their distant past by constructing what the Assmanns call cultural memory.12 According to Jan Assmann: [t]he concept of cultural memory comprises that body of reusable texts, images, and rituals specific to each society in each epoch, whose ‘cultivation’ serves to stabilize and convey that society’s


self-image. Upon such collective knowledge, for the most part (but not exclusively) of the past, each group bases its awareness of unity and particularity. (J. Assmann, 1995, p.132) The collectively shared knowledge Assmann speaks of is ascribed to and transmitted by ‘all kinds of semiotic systems’, which serve as media of cultural memory (J. Assmann 1997, p.52, p.139). Generally speaking, Jan Assmann claims that ‘[c]ulture is memory’ (J. Assmann, 2002b, p.239), but he fails to sufficiently theorize the link he establishes between the categories of culture and memory.13 However, as I will briefly outline, it is possible to do so with the help of Ernst Cassirer’s concept of symbolic forms. According to Cassirer, memory is not only a social but also a cultural phenomenon. Culture, he argues, is a symbolic system; it is the sum of all symbolic forms such as ‘language, myth, religion, art, science, history’ (Cassirer, 1954, p.93) created by humans, the ‘animal[ia] symbolic[a]’ (Cassirer, 1954, p.44). Cassirer defines a symbolic form as ‘every energy of mind . . . through which a mental content of meaning . . . is connected to a concrete, sensory sign . . . and made to adhere internally to it’ (quoted in Krois, 1987, p.50). This energy of mind can be understood as ‘any act of interpretation, either finding or giving meaning’ (Krois, 1987, p.51). According to Cassirer, a symbol stabilizes cultural meaning by fixing it to a form: ‘[t]he act of conceptually determining content goes hand in hand with the act of fixing content to a characteristic sign’ (Cassirer, 1956, p.18). Once ascribed to a form, meaning is not only established, but continues to exist (Cassirer, 1956, p.22). However, meaning fixed to a form does not remain stable. On the contrary, different meanings can be ascribed to one and the same symbol (Krois, 1987, p.52), which means that a symbol is a dynamic entity of form and content. In other words, the act of using a symbol depends on processes of selection through which one of the possible cultural meanings ascribed to the symbol is reproduced. Thus, the act of using symbolic forms is an act of remembering cultural meaning.14 Within this context, it is possible to argue with Jan Assmann that verbal and non-verbal cultural objectifications such as rituals, landscapes, dances, tattoos, jewellery, and myths can serve as media of cultural memory (J. Assmann, 1997, p.52, p.139). Due to such media, cultural memories reach far back in time, relating to what

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social groups often regard as their mythical origins (J. Assmann, 1997, pp.51–2). Both communicative memories and cultural memories are important for the collective identities of the social groups that construct them (J. Assmann, 1995, p.128, p.130). However, cultural memories differ fundamentally from communicative memories, because they transcend everyday communication (J. Assmann, 1995, p.129; 1997, p.53). Unlike communicative memories, which Jan Assmann sees as being ‘characterized by a high degree of non-specialization, reciprocity of roles, thematic instability, and disorganization’ (1995, p.126), cultural memories are determined by ‘cultural formation . . . and institutional communication’ (1995, p.129). Cultural memories function as specifically organized constructs exerting normative and formative power on the members of a given society. Their temporal horizons do not change with the passing of time, as they are bound to what Jan Assmann terms the ‘fixed point[s]’ of collective memory (1995, p.129). With the help of these fixed points – these ‘figures of memory’ as Assmann also calls them (J. Assmann, 1995, p.129) – a society remembers certain events of its past which are particularly important for its collective self-image. Thus, it is through their cultural memories that societies and their cultures become visible to themselves and others. Bringing together the three aspects of society, memory and culture in their theory of cultural memory, the Assmanns succeed in conceptualizing memory as a social phenomenon and culture as a phenomenon of memory. The idea of cultural memory, which has certainly become one of the key paradigms of the humanities in the past 20 years, proves to be highly useful for my subsequent analysis of Byatt’s novels. Read within the context of the Assmann’s concept, her texts can be seen not only as being deeply rooted in British cultural memory, but also as representing cultural memory as an important element of the processes of individual identity formation.

8 Figures of Memory: Elizabeth I and Shakespeare

Byatt’s tetralogy repeatedly alludes and refers to two of the most prominent figures of British cultural memory. One of them is Elizabeth I, who has been inscribed into British cultural memory as ‘the Virgin Queen, solitary but glorious defender of the English Church and architect of England’s greatness’, as Susan Doran and Thomas S. Freeman put it (Doran & Freeman, 2003, p.3). Michael Dobson and Nicola J. Watson aptly highlight Elizabeth’s importance for British cultural memory by arguing that she ‘is perhaps the nearest thing England has ever had to a defining national heroine’ (Dobson & Watson, 2002, p.1). Embodying a period of national unity and increasing international power, ‘the figure of this anomalously powerful unmarried woman has been . . . central to the making . . . of Anglo-British . . . culture’, as Dobson and Watson put it (2002, p.4). Elizabeth I features prominently in Byatt’s tetralogy, especially in The Virgin in the Garden and Babel Tower. The first novel in the tetralogy is heavily indebted to the figure of the Tudor queen, since the construction of Frederica Potter’s identity clearly depends on this prominent figure of British cultural memory. The teenage Frederica plays the young Elizabeth Tudor in a verse drama called Astraea, which is staged in honour of the accession of Elizabeth II in 1953 (WW, pp.329–30). By having her protagonist represent the Tudor queen on stage, Byatt establishes a connection between Frederica and Elizabeth – a connection which she increases by suggesting a certain physical similarity between the two.1 With her red hair (VG, p.113) and sharp nose (VG, p.96), Frederica is said to resemble the official image of the Tudor queen (VG, p.377); and like Elizabeth I, 87

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Frederica was not only born under the sign of Virgo (VG, p.180), but is also a virgin (e.g. VG, p.269). Moreover, by ascribing to Frederica the role of an amateur actress, the text makes use of the notion of theatricality as an element of Elizabethan culture. English Renaissance society, and particularly the court of Elizabeth I, was deeply theatrical, which means that the members of court defined themselves, their positions and their relationships to the monarch by publicly acting them out like actors on stage (Greenblatt, 1980, p.162, Schabert, 2000, p.6). In contrast to feudal times, their identities no longer exclusively depended on predetermined social rank, but resulted from processes of self-fashioning (Greenblatt, 1980, pp.1–2, p.162).2 Alluding to this theatrical form of self-fashioning, the play Astraea offers Frederica a means of constructing her identity by impersonating Elizabeth I (Brosch, 1999, p.52). Indeed, Frederica seems slowly to turn into a twentieth-century version of the Tudor queen. Not only does she claim that ‘I am Elizabeth’ (VG, p.170) during a cast meeting early in the novel, but she also begins to imitate the queen’s alleged manner of speaking (VG, p.257) and to adopt the rigid facial expression associated with her portraiture (VG, p.169). The figure of Elizabeth I, who has been inscribed into British cultural memory as the ‘Virgin Queen’, is of particular importance for the negotiation of Frederica’s sexual development. In order to represent her protagonist’s sexual ignorance, Byatt makes use of the queen’s iconography.3 Frederica is associated with the ‘composed blanched mask-like rendering of the [queen’s] countenance’ (Strong, 2003, pp.88–9) that is typical of Elizabeth’s portraiture. In the prologue to The Virgin in the Garden, Frederica attends a performance staged in front of the painting known as the Darnley Portrait (VG, p.7). Alexander Wedderburn, the author of the play Astraea, describes this portrait as follows: There she [Elizabeth] stood, a clear powerful image, in her airy dress of creamy stiff silk, embroidered with golden fronds, laced with coral tassels, lightly looped with pearls. . . . The bright-blanched face was young and arrogant. Or it was chalky, bleak, bony, any age at all, the black eyes under heavy lids knowing and distant. (VG, p.12)

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This image of Elizabeth I determines the way in which Frederica is described when she watches Alexander having sex in a car with his lover Jenny (VG, pp.272–3). When Alexander realizes that somebody is observing him, he looks up and sees ‘the framed face of Frederica . . . gilded eyelids, gleaming wine-dark mouth, palepowdered mask around them’ (VG, p.272) peering into the car. Her face, framed by the car window, is reminiscent of a framed painting; the description of her make-up alludes to the colour code of gold, red and white of the Darnley Portrait and to its mask-like representation of the queen’s face. Hence, it is the face of this portrait – which in fact became the canonic image of Elizabeth’s face4 – that Alexander perceives when he looks at Frederica. The Darnley Portrait serves to symbolize Frederica’s exclusion from sexual knowledge: Frederica, the virginal girl, is rendered as resembling Elizabeth, the ‘Virgin Queen’, while she is standing outside a locked car in which a sexual act is performed. To use the terminology of the art historian Aby Warburg, the Darnley Portrait of Elizabeth I functions as a pathos formula in The Virgin in the Garden. Like Maurice Halbwachs, Aby Warburg5 conceived of memory as a cultural phenomenon, but he also regarded culture as a mnemonic process.6 He ‘sacrifice[d] one of the most cherished notions of academic art history in his time, the concept of autonomy for both aesthetic values and artists’ (Forster, 1976, p.172). Contrary to the research traditions prevailing at the beginning of the twentieth century, Warburg did not focus on aesthetic traditions (Diers et al., 1995, p.69). Instead, he regarded art as exceeding the sphere of aesthetics, arguing that it does not exist outside society and history, but is instead ‘itself part of the [socio-historical] system and represent[s] it’ (Diers et al., 1995, p.67). Highlighting the cultural function of art (Diers et al., 1995, p.67), Warburg ascribes mnemonic function to works of art (Gombrich, 1970, p.269). Warburg, whose work the Assmanns acknowledge as a further influence on their concept of cultural memory (J. Assmann 1988, p.12; 2002a, pp.8–9), regards Europe as a ‘memorial community’ (Kany, 1987, p.176) based on a collectively shared memory of pictorial symbols.7 According to Warburg, these symbols – which he also calls ‘pathos formulas’ (Warburg, 1998a, p.446) – reappear in various cultural objectifications throughout European art history. Therefore,

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they function as cultural engrams, as ‘trace[s] of the past’ (Emden, 2003, p.217), which dynamically transmit cultural energy from the past into the present. For Warburg, pathos formulas preserve the cultural past and are therefore media of memory (Gombrich, 1970, p.245). However, this does not mean that the mnemonic content of symbols is static: ‘while the energy of past experience remains enshrined in the . . . symbols, this energy may be canalised into different themes of expression’ (Gombrich, 1970, p.248). Although symbols transmit tradition and therefore continuity, they are constantly recharged with new meaning each time they are reused (Kany, 1987, p.166, p.173). In other words, pathos formulas are palimpsests made up by the various meanings they acquire, which is why the symbolic value of the pictures they appear in is also subject to constant changes (Emden, 2003, p.214). Thus, Warburg conceptualizes pictorial art as a medium of European cultural memories, which has continuously changed its forms and contents throughout (art) history. As Byatt’s The Virgin in the Garden offers its readers a verbal reconstruction of the Darnley Portrait, the novel makes use of a painting that is part of British cultural memory, since it is one of the media which have supported the construction of Elizabeth I as a figure of memory. As Dobson and Watson put it, the Darnley Portrait is ‘one of the modern period’s favourite images of Elizabeth’ (Dobson & Watson, plate 3). In the context of Byatt’s novel, this image does not merely refer to the figure of Elizabeth I. In fact, The Virgin in the Garden uses the canonic image of the Virgin Queen’s face as a pathos formula which does not only present Elizabeth I, but which serves as a general signifier of female virginity. As the face depicted in the Darnley Portrait is transposed onto Byatt’s protagonist, the painting functions as a medium of cultural memory whose ‘over-abundant energy’ (VG, p.12) Byatt exploits in order to represent her own protagonist’s sexual ignorance. Interestingly enough, The Virgin in the Garden further uses the iconography of the English royal virgin to thematize not only Frederica’s virginity, but also her sexual initiation. At the beginning of the rehearsals of the play Astraea, its director deems Frederica’s theatrical performance as the young Elizabeth unsatisfactory. When he criticizes her, ‘Frederica, flaming with embarrassment, the red and white rose quartered in her face,’ (VG, p.379) cuts her ankle at the rim of a fountain and starts to ‘bleed profusely’ (VG, p.379). This little


scene, which seems to be unremarkable in itself, gains in importance if one considers the fact that the fountain is shaped like ‘a mermaid with a sly little smile’ (VG, p.377). Thus, the text not only refers to the red and white Tudor rose, which is one of Elizabeth’s traditional attributes (Strong, 1995, p.9), but also subtly alludes to the Armada Portrait, since this painting, too, features a little mermaid in its right bottom corner. Along with the historical event it commemorates – the defeat of the Spanish Armada in 1588 – the Armada Portrait is part of British cultural memory, as it ‘contribute[s] to the shaping of that complex and contingent event into an English national myth’ (Montrose, 2006, p.145). The painting includes many references to the queen’s virginity (Montrose, 2006, pp.146–7), one of which is said mermaid in the bottom right corner. As the mermaid symbolizes female sexuality and as Elizabeth stands with her back turned towards it, the portrait both alludes to the queen’s female sexuality and implies that she has rejected it (Belsey & Belsey, 1995, pp.13–14). As Andrew and Catherine Belsey point out, virginity is a form of both female limitation and female power in patriarchal society (Belsey & Belsey, 1995, p.20), since it enables women to wield the ‘right of prohibition’ (Belsey & Belsey, 1995, p.20). Elizabeth I retained this right by (allegedly) preserving her virginity,8 as the Armada Portrait indicates. In contrast to the Elizabeth of the Armada Portrait, however, Frederica does not reject her sexuality. By having her literally stumble over a mermaid, Byatt’s novel acknowledges, on a metaphorical level, its protagonist’s sexuality long before Frederica herself develops into a sexually active woman. Frederica is characterized by her greed for knowledge9 not only in the intellectual (SL, p.890), but also in the sexual sense. As a 17-year-old girl, Frederica is frustrated by her sexual ignorance and conceives of her virginity as a ‘burden’ (VG, p.431) and a ‘nuisance’ (VG, p.434). Her first three attempts to rid herself of it (VG, p.268, pp.286–7, pp.434–5) – all of them unpleasant as well as unsuccessful – are determined by her ‘unassuaged greed’ (VG, p.430) to become sexually ‘knowledgeable’ (VG, p.269). Realizing that ‘knowledge . . . is power’ (VG, p.274), Frederica is eager to know all about sex and practise it. When her first sexual intercourse finally takes place (VG, pp.554–7) – and it should once again be mentioned that heterosexuality is the dominant norm in Byatt’s novels – Frederica experiences it as a passionless, though highly instructive event which is

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remarkable only in so far as it rather dramatically culminates in her bleeding profusely: ‘Blood was rising and puddling round Frederica, her thighs were scarlet, it was creeping in a puddle up her back’ (VG, p.557). Ironically, Frederica, who as Elizabeth Tudor claimed that ‘I will not bleed’ (VG, p.420), turns out to be ‘a very bleeding sort of girl’ (VG, p.558). Her little accident during the rehearsal thus turns out to point towards her sexual initiation; her bleeding foot foreshadows the bloody loss of her virginity, which eventually leads to the loss of her female separateness, as I have argued in Chapter 4. The figure of the ‘Virgin Queen’, whose iconography pervades The Virgin in the Garden,10 functions as a powerful signifier in Byatt’s text. It serves to represent Frederica’s sexual ignorance, and it is also used to contrast the sexually active Frederica with the English royal virgin. As I have argued in Chapter 4, the figure of Elizabeth I furthermore represents the ideal embodiment of the separate female self which Byatt’s novels establish. And although the character of Frederica does not comply with this ideal, she can still be seen as resembling the figure of the ‘Virgin Queen’, since both Frederica and Elizabeth are women who struggle against the norms of the patriarchal societies in which they live. As Elizabeth I ‘was the ruler of a society that was pervasively patriarchal in its organization and distribution of power, both public and domestic, she embodied an anomaly at the very centre of that system’ (Montrose, 2006, p.1). Frederica represents a similar anomaly, albeit in a less central social position. She violates the social norms of English middle-class society in the 1950s and early 1960s, because she vehemently refuses to be confined to her roles of a wife and a mother, asserting her right to live ‘a life of the mind’ (WW, p.415), as I have argued in Chapters 5 and 6. Frederica’s ‘anomaly’ is most clearly expressed in a scene near the end of A Whistling Woman, when she is said to have wrapped herself in a ‘cloak of feathers’ on which she rests her ‘sharp chin’ (WW, p.406). When she is then told that she, as a woman, must try harder, must in fact ‘whistle harder’ (WW, p.411) in order to be successful in life, it becomes clear that this scene alludes to the proverb quoted in the epigraph of the novel: ‘A Whistling Woman and a Crowing Hen/Is neither good for God nor Men’ (WW, p.i). As a divorced woman and a single mother who acquires a professional career of her own, Frederica becomes the proverbial ‘whistling woman’ who negotiates her identity as an independent woman against the constraints of


patriarchal society. Like the ‘Virgin Queen’ Elizabeth, the ‘Whistling Woman’ Frederica thus represents an anomaly that violates the norms of the patriarchal society in which she lives. As delineated in the preceding paragraphs, Byatt’s tetralogy is indebted to the figure of Elizabeth I, since her texts use her iconography as a means of both representing their protagonist’s sexual ignorance and foreshadowing her sexual initiation. Since Byatt’s novels rely heavily on the attributes and the iconography of one of the most prominent English figures of memory, they at once draw on British cultural memory, but also perpetuate it in its hegemonic form. The second figure of memory that features strongly in Byatt’s tetralogy is that of Shakespeare, who has been inscribed into British cultural memory as ‘the English national poet . . . and the greatest dramatist of all time’ (Encyclopaedia Britannica, 2003, vol. 10, p.690). Babel Tower and A Whistling Woman draw on this important figure of British cultural memory in order to negotiate the formation of Frederica Potter’s identity. In both novels, Frederica resorts to Shakespeare’s plays in times of personal crisis when her own sense of herself is threatened. During her increasingly unhappy marriage, for example, she learns Shakespeare by heart in order to keep ‘something essential alive’ (BT, p.90). When her husband Nigel assaults her during a marital row, she locks herself in the bathroom and reads Much Ado About Nothing before Nigel switches off the mains (BT, pp.90–1), which leaves her sitting frightened in the dark, ‘enfolding Shakespeare in her body’ (BT, p.91). This scene evokes an image of Frederica absorbing Shakespeare’s text into her body, thus making his work part of herself. As these examples show, Shakespeare’s work has an existential quality for Frederica, for it not only supports, but also constitutes an essential part of her being. The existential importance that Shakespeare holds for Frederica is further emphasized by her referring to King Lear in two key situations in her life in Babel Tower and A Whistling Woman.11 In Babel Tower, her sense of her own identity is profoundly shaken by her divorce hearing. She feels that ‘the story of her life has been changed by the way it has been told’ (BT, p.519) in court. Consequently, she is not sure of herself anymore and asks herself: ‘who is she, does she exist?’ (BT, p.519). She phrases her sense of insecurity and disorientation with Lear’s words: ‘Who is it that can tell me who I am?’ (BT, p.520; King Lear I.4.189). She does so again later (in A Whistling Woman) when she

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is at a crossroads with regard to both her professional and private life. Having arrived at a point in her life at which she feels unable either to decide on her future life or relate to her younger self’s hopes and dreams, she asks herself again: ‘Who is it that can tell me who I am?’ (WW, p.330). By having Frederica phrase her question with Lear’s words rather than with those of her own, the novels reveal Shakespeare’s work to be at the heart of her identity. Thus, Byatt’s novels represent Shakespeare as a ‘fashioner of narrative selves’ (Greenblatt, 1980, p.253), who provides the defining text for Frederica’s identity, which is, as I have argued in Chapter 3, determined by narrativity. Thus, Frederica’s identity depends on the texts of an author, who has been inscribed into British cultural memory not only as the English national poet, but also as a playwright who – like no other – is generally believed to have succeeded in expressing the conditio humana in his work.12 Since Byatt’s novels constitute Shakespeare’s plays as a key determinant of Frederica’s identity, they again draw on British cultural memory and affirm it. Throughout Byatt’s tetralogy, Frederica’s identity is repeatedly shown as depending on both Shakespeare and Elizabeth I. Shakespeare’s texts form an essential part of Frederica’s identity and help her to negotiate her view of herself. The figure of Elizabeth I serves as a means of representing Frederica’s development from a sexually ignorant teenager to a sexually active young woman. It further functions as a foil the novels use in order to problematize Frederica’s identity as a woman within a patriarchal society. In short, the figures of Shakespeare and Elizabeth I are presented as the two defining cultural paradigms of individual identity. Being indebted to these two prominent figures of memory, Byatt’s novels not only negotiate their protagonist’s identity within the context of British cultural memory, but also conceptualize cultural memory as an essential prerequisite for individual identity formation.

9 Cultural Texts: Identity and Literature

In Byatt’s tetralogy, Shakespeare’s work is of particular importance for Frederica’s identity, but his plays are by no means the only literary texts that influence her process of identity formation. Indeed, the four novels attribute an important role to literature in their protagonist’s process of identity formation, thus broadening its concept of narrative identity, which I have analysed in Chapter 3. It is not only Frederica’s ‘personal’ narrative, that is, the narrative she creates of herself and her life, but also literary narratives that shape her life and form her identity. Frederica is repeatedly connected to literary characters. For example, she sees herself in a dream as Una from Spenser’s The Faerie Queene (BT, p.522). She is described as Spenser’s Britomart (VG, p.12; BT, p.292) and as a ‘sharp, and knowing, and very adult Alice’ (WW, p.134). Being characterized with the help of such intertextual references, Frederica implicitly partakes in these heroines’ identities. To put it another way, her identity depends on literary texts. Moreover, Frederica regards literature as providing identificatory models for herself. As a young girl, for example, she imagines a potential future husband as a mixture of Lancelot, Mr Rochester, and Athos the Musketeer, and she romanticizes herself as Tennyson’s Elaine or Spenser’s Britomart (SL, p.821). As an undergraduate at Cambridge, her views on gender roles are determined by Austen, Byron, Milton, and Lawrence (SL, p.723). Contemplating Forster’s Howard’s End and Lawrence’s Women in Love, which serve as prominent pretexts in Byatt’s tetralogy,1 she realizes that her fascination with Margaret Schlegel, the female protagonist in Howard’s End, was 95

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one of her reasons for getting married (BT, p.308). In short, Frederica models her life on literary texts (Uhsadel, 2005, pp.118–19), which serve as points of reference shaping her views of herself and her life. Literature is even shown as forming an existential part of Frederica’s identity. In Still Life, the narrative voice comments that ‘[t]he life of English literature live[s] in her like genes for red hair’ (SL, p.890). In Babel Tower, literary texts such as Milton’s Paradise Lost, Camus’ La Chute, Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, Austen’s Mansfield Park, among others, are described as constituting a ‘part of herself’ (BT, p.456). Since Frederica negotiates her identity within a framework of literary texts, Byatt’s novels represent literature as an essential means of individual identity construction. The specific literary texts which influence Frederica’s self-definition again link her identity to the idea of cultural memory, since these texts qualify as what Aleida Assmann terms ‘cultural texts’ (A. Assmann, 1995, p.234). Assmann defines a cultural text as a literary text that is part of a social group’s cultural memory, because this group believes it to express ‘binding values valid beyond time’ and to mediate ‘binding, irreducible, and timeless truth’ (A. Assmann, 1995, p.237, p.242). As an object deemed worthy of cultural remembrance, a cultural text is part of the content of a social group’s cultural memory. According to Assmann, cultural texts are of particular importance for the processes of individual identity formation, because they provide (post)modern individuals with a means of constructing stable identities (A. Assmann, 1995, p.238). Assmann further argues that literary texts enter cultural memory by being turned into cultural texts through processes of canonization as a result of which they gain quasireligious importance: ‘Just as the Church canonizes its saints, society canonizes its poets . . . whom it . . . “sanctifies” and . . . allocates to its cultural long-term memory’ (A. Assmann, 2004, p.13). The Assmanns regard Europe as a homogeneous memorial community, and the canon of those texts which are, according to the Assmanns, part of ‘occidental cultural memory’ (J. Assmann, 2002b, p.243) includes, for example, the works of Spenser, Milton, and Shakespeare.2 Seen within this context, the identity of Byatt’s protagonist Frederica is formed by literary texts which, according to Aleida Assmann, have been ‘inscribed directly into cultural memory’ (A. Assmann, 1995, p.238). In fact, Byatt’s tetralogy conceptualizes the ‘high’ canon of (predominantly) British literature as a canon of cultural texts, since these texts

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are represented as influential cultural forces exerting formative and normative power on Frederica’s identity. In her study Erinnerungsräume, Aleida Assmann discusses various texts belonging to the ‘high’ canon of European literature with a view to their function as cultural texts. Her book aptly exemplifies how literary studies – including the present study – are themselves involved in the processes of canon formation by privileging certain texts while neglecting others.3 Choosing authors such as Spenser, Shakespeare, Wordsworth, Milton, Heine, Proust, and Hofmannsthal as her subject matter, Assmann at once draws on the ‘high’ canon of European literature and re-affirms the canonicity of the works she analyses. Her discussion of Shakespeare’s history plays is especially illuminating in this context.4 In her opinion, these plays are powerful cultural texts (not only) of British cultural memory even if the models of collective identification which they offered their early modern audience have by now lost their validity (A. Assmann, 1999, p.84). This, she claims, is due to the fact that their ‘dramatic energy and anthropological reflections’ make Shakespeare’s texts part ‘not only of [English] national literature, but of . . . world literature’ (A. Assmann, 1999, p.84). According to her: [w]e do not read [Shakespeare’s history plays] with curiosity and continuous fascination, because they offer us identities: We read them because they vividly demonstrate how identities are both constructed and deconstructed. (A. Assmann, 1999, p.84) Since she reads Shakespeare’s plays as mediating knowledge about human identities, Assmann ascribes lasting anthropological value to these texts. Obviously failing to consider the different social and historical factors that determine individual identity formation throughout different cultures, Assmann canonizes Shakespeare’s plays as ‘great’ cultural texts which, according to her reading, transmit binding, timeless, irreducible human ‘truth’ not only for Britons and the members of other European cultures, but for the whole of humanity. Although Byatt’s tetralogy does not credit Shakespeare’s work with quite as much universal importance, it, too, ascribes anthropological value to his texts. In The Virgin in the Garden, several major characters such as Frederica, her father Bill, and her (future) brother-in-law Daniel claim that Shakespeare’s King Lear is ‘true’ and ‘wise’ (VG,

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p.46, p.135) and that it features ‘hugely real’ characters (VG, p.71). A Whistling Woman draws on The Winter’s Tale in order to conceptualize art as a fundamentally human necessity. The end of this play sees a statue of Hermione, queen of Sicilia, miraculously coming to life, thus resurrecting Hermione and restoring her to her husband Leontes – an ending which has always troubled Bill Potter because of its improbability. ‘A man’, complains Bill, ‘does not lose his wife for twenty years and get back an animated statue and profess joy in a deception as though it was a miracle, not so easily’ (VG, p.111). He vehemently rejects an interpretation of the statue as ‘represent[ing] a resolution of the pains of life in Art’ (VG, p.111). However, together with his son-in-law Daniel, Bill experiences a cathartic revelation triggered by The Winter’s Tale. During a performance of the play, Daniel’s daughter Mary, while playing the king’s daughter Perdita, reminds Daniel and Bill of her dead mother Stephanie, who had tragically died in a household accident (SL, pp.972–4): He [Daniel] saw, not his daughter, but his wife. Only for a moment, but entirely, and remembering life he remembered death, automatically, and his eyes filled with tears. He heard a small sound next to him. Bill Potter was rubbing his cuff angrily across his faded eyes. . . . Daniel pushed at his own eyelashes, and with his other hand touched Bill’s knee, to show he knew they knew. (WW, p.394). When the performance arrives at the scene in which the statue of Hermione comes to life, both men suddenly start weeping (WW, p.395), because they are ‘mocked with art’, as Shakespeare has it (quoted in WW, p.395). Tellingly, for Daniel as well as for Bill, this is the very first time that they have been able to weep for Stephanie.5 In other words, Shakespeare’s strategy of fictionalizing and aestheticizing the topics of death and life enable Bill and Daniel to undergo a cathartic experience, which makes it possible for them to accept Stephanie’s death and start mourning her properly. Byatt represents art as a human necessity, since its processes of fictionalization and aestheticization enable her characters to cope with life. Bill explains his experience to Frederica: I’ve just understood. . . . It’s about art, it’s about the necessity of art. The human need to be mocked with art – you can have a happy

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ending, precisely because you know in life they don’t happen . . . (WW, p.395) A Whistling Woman indicates that the human need for art is not exclusively restricted to the art of Shakespeare,6 but the novel emphasizes Shakespeare as the one who best expresses this concept in his plays. As Byatt’s novel suggests that Shakespeare’s work mediates human ‘truths’, it can be seen as belonging to the tradition of glorifying Shakespeare in which both literary authors and scholars have long been engaged. Shakespeare has been celebrated as a writer who ‘was not of an age, but for all time (Jonson quoted in Shakespeare, 1968, p.10), as a ‘blessed heaven-sent Bringer of Light’ (Carlyle, 1904, pp.111–12), as ‘the person who wrote the most important body of imaginative literature of the last thousand years’ (Greenblatt, 2004, p.11), and as an author whose work is ‘true, spoken once and forever’ (Carlyle, 1904, p.111). Byatt’s novels inscribe themselves into this process of canonizing Shakespeare by representing his texts as cultural texts of British cultural memory which support individual identity formation due to the binding, timeless truth they are said to convey. In a similar way to Byatt’s tetralogy, her novel Possession also implies that individual identity is determined by cultural texts and, therefore, by cultural memory. As I have argued in Chapter 1, Roland’s and Maud’s processes of identity formation depend on their search for knowledge about Ash and LaMotte. Due to their research, Maud establishes her identity as LaMotte’s great-great-great-granddaughter (P, p.503), and Roland fashions himself into a poet (P, pp.472–5). Ash’s and LaMotte’s letters and poems are of central importance to Roland’s and Maud’s research, since their texts provide the two scholars with the decisive clues that enable them to discover the truth about the two Victorian poets, as I have argued in Chapter 2. It is, for example, Ash’s drafted letter to LaMotte (P, pp.5–6) which sets Roland on to the right track, and it is LaMotte’s as well as Ash’s poems that further the scholars’ knowledge of the poets’ hitherto secret love affair. Since Roland calls the Ash–LaMotte correspondence ‘some sort of national heritage’ (P, p.91) and since his boss James Blackadder claims that the letters are part of the British ‘national story’ (P, p.404), these texts are elevated to the status of what Aleida Assmann would term cultural texts of British cultural memory. The same is true for

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the biographees’ poetry, more specifically for Ash’s poems.7 By characterizing Ash as a Shakespeare-like figure and as ‘one of the great love poets of our language’ (P, p.403), the novel presents Ash’s poems as cultural texts which are of similar relevance as Shakespeare’s work. Their research enables Roland and Maud to succeed in constructing their own identities, and since this research depends on texts which the novel presents as cultural texts of British cultural memory, Possession implies that individual identity depends on cultural texts and, therefore, on cultural memory. Like Byatt’s tetralogy, Possession thus conceptualizes literary texts, which as cultural texts form part of the content of British cultural memory, as decisive elements of individual identity formation. Representing identity as depending on literary texts which exert normative and formative power on the processes of identity formation, Byatt’s novels depend on certain ideological implications – as too does the Assmanns’ concept of cultural memory. Theoretically speaking, the idea of cultural memory as established by Jan and Aleida Assmann is a homogeneous, even monolithic construction, which lacks more detailed differentiation.8 The fact that the Assmanns consistently use the term ‘cultural memory’ in the singular implies that they do not account for either intercultural or intracultural differences.9 As several critics comment, the Assmanns fail to mention that a society can by no means be regarded as a homogeneous unity with only one cultural memory (Faulenbach, 2002, p.250; Winthrop-Young, 2002, pp.272–3).10 Since every society is divided into several subgroups, each of which has its own communicative and cultural memory, it is indeed more feasible to talk of cultural memories in the plural.11 If I use the term ‘cultural memory’ in the singular, I do not mean to disregard these scholars’ justified objections to the Assmanns’ homogeneous concept. Instead, I refer, on a categorical level, to cultural memory as a socio-cultural phenomenon as such, indicating the mnemonic capacity of culture. Taking into account the basic assumptions underlying the Assmanns’ notion of cultural memory, it turns out that their theory depends on an ‘elitist’, that is, highbrow conception of culture.12 As their research objects suggest, the Assmanns’ perspective on cultural memory is generally limited to the context of ‘high’ culture. Jan Assmann’s work is informed by his research on the ‘high’ cultures, that is the dominant cultures, of ancient Egypt, Palestine,

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and Greece, while Aleida Assmann’s main study on cultural memory, Erinnerungsräume, focuses on canonical authors of European ‘high’ literature such as Shakespeare, Milton, Swift, Wordsworth, and Proust. This canon of texts, which Aleida Assmann conceptualizes as a canon of cultural texts serving to form both individual and collective identities (A. Assmann, 1995, p.238), depends on specific ideological implications, although the Assmanns do not elaborate on them. In fact, any canon-formation depends on socio-historically determined processes of selection and exclusion (Guillory, 1995, pp.233–49). As Trevor Ross puts it, ‘canon-formation has frequently been under the control of an official culture that valorizes only those works that in some way assert or reveal its dominant ideology’ (Ross, 1993, p.515).13 Due to the texts which it includes, the canon of European cultural texts, as the Assmanns see it, is – at least to a very large extent – identical to the canon of ‘high’ European literature, which critics have identified as ‘the embodiment . . . of a selective humanist ideology whose representatives are white, male, and European’ (Brooker, 2003, p.24). Hence, the Assmanns’ concept of cultural texts depends on the dominant humanist ideology of the bourgeois, patriarchal societies of a white Western Europe. Like their concept of cultural texts, the Assmanns’ theory of cultural memory is reliant on the educational norms of liberal humanism. Ascribing ‘educative, civilizing, and humanizing functions’ (J. Assmann, 1995, p.132) to cultural memory, they conceptualize it as a ‘Bildungsgedächtnis’ (A. Assmann, 1999, p.12; J. Assmann, 2002b, p.243), that is, a collective frame of memory which is regarded as serving educational as well as formative means. Byatt’s novels can be seen as relying on the same ideological implications as Jan and Aleida Assmann’s theory of cultural memory. Byatt’s tetralogy depicts individual identity as depending on literary texts. As explained above, some of the literary texts determining the identity of Frederica Potter in Byatt’s tetralogy belong to the canon of cultural texts established by the Assmanns. Furthermore, the identities of the twentieth-century protagonists in Possession are also reliant on texts which the novel represents as cultural texts. Thus, Byatt’s concept of literary identity depends on the ideology of liberal humanism. Her novels further support this ideology by representing literary texts as cultural texts, that is, they conceptualize texts belonging to the ‘high’ canon of English literature as exerting formative and normative power on individual identity formation. In fact, the cultural

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memory on which Byatt’s tetralogy draws by referring to, for example, Shakespeare’s plays as cultural texts is a liberal-humanist ‘Bildungsgedächtnis’ in which elements of British ‘high’ culture serve the educational and formative means of forming individual identity. The character of Frederica Potter is particularly interesting in this context, because she is represented as a very capable teacher of literature. According to Jan Assmann, access to the knowledge stored in and mediated through cultural memory is strictly limited to certain members of society such as shamans, bards, priests, poets, scholars, and teachers (J. Assmann, 1997, p.54). Due to the detailed instruction which they experience in the course of their education, these ‘bearers of cultural memory’ (J. Assmann, 1995, p.131) are authorized not only to interpret the cultural memory of their society, but also to communicate their knowledge to the other members of this society (J. Assmann, 1997, pp.54–5). Hence, cultural memory is an elitist concept – as the Assmanns well know (J. Assmann, 2002c, p.276) – which limits direct access to its cultural knowledge to a closely circumscribed group of specialists. In Byatt’s tetralogy, the character of Frederica Potter assumes the role of such a specialist of cultural memory, since she, as a teacher, introduces her students to British cultural texts and teaches them how to ascribe meaning to them. Frederica’s first lesson is described as follows in Babel Tower: A novel . . . she says, is made of a long thread of language, like knitting, thicker and thinner in patches. It is made in the head and has to be remade in the head by whoever reads it, who will always make it differently. . . . A young woman smiles at her: a young man in glasses writes furiously. They are listening. The group is listening. She has them: the knitting is a fishnet. (BT, p.213) In this passage, the metaphor of the fishnet not only bears biblical connotations as a result of which teaching appears as a quasi-religious task,14 but it also ascribes a position of power to Frederica. In her capacity as a teacher, she decides what to teach, which is to say that she controls a process of selection and exclusion. Teaching, Frederica ‘weaves a net of attention’ (BT, p.221), whereas her pupils appear as her ‘victims’, as it were, entangled in her teaching as fish caught in the mesh of a net. Since the metaphors of knitting and weaving allude to a realm of traditionally female crafts,15 teaching is represented

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as a typically female task. Thus, the novel suggests that women are especially suited as specialists of cultural memory. In sum, Byatt’s tetralogy and Possession represent literature as an essential means of constructing individual identity. The novels conceptualize the ‘high’ canon of English literature as a canon of cultural texts which exercises normative and formative power on the identities of Byatt’s protagonists. Frederica not only embodies the concept of identity rooted in cultural texts, which the tetralogy privileges, but also acts as a specialist of the cultural memory on which her identity depends.

10 Imaginary Museums: Intertextuality and Cultural Memory

As delineated above, Byatt’s novels conceptualize individual identity as depending on literary texts which are canonized – both by scholars such as the Assmanns and by Byatt’s texts themselves – as cultural texts of British cultural memory. As my subsequent analysis will show, it would however apply too narrow a perspective on the role that literature plays within cultural memories if one simply regarded literary texts as objects worthy of cultural remembrance, and as such belonging to the content of cultural memories. But what other functions do literary texts fulfil within cultural memories? Cultural memories depend, as the Assmanns point out, on media transporting cultural knowledge (Assmann & Assmann, 1994, p.120). Applying a conception of culture which defines all cultural practices as texts (J. Assmann, 2002c, p.274),1 the Assmanns argue that not only written texts, but in fact all verbal and non-verbal objectifications of culture can serve as media of cultural memory (J. Assmann 1997, p.52, p.139). Due to this broad definition, one might assume that the Assmanns include literature in their list of possible media of cultural memory. But although they favour written texts as media of cultural memory, since they regard writing and printing as the most important inventions during cultural history (Zierold, 2006, pp.77–9),2 they omit to sufficiently theorize the role that literature plays in cultural memory, which is surprising, because Aleida Assmann is a literary scholar. In the texts outlining their theory of cultural memory, the Assmanns briefly mention literature as a ‘cultural phenomen[on]’ (J. Assmann, 1997, p.11) which they allocate to that part of cultural memory they term ‘storage memory’ (Assmann & Assmann, 1994, p.123). 104

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Aleida Assmann subdivides cultural memory into storage memory (‘Speichergedächtnis’), which stores un-functionalized cultural knowledge, and functional memory (‘Funktionsgedächtnis’), which stores functionalized cultural knowledge (A. Assmann, 1999, p.134).3 Storage memory forms the background of functional memory (1999, pp.136–7), which is why Aleida Assmann terms it the ‘memory of memories’ (1999, p.134). It is ‘uninhabited’ (1999, p.134), meaning that it stores that part of a society’s cultural knowledge which ‘has lost its use, which has become obsolete or alien’ (1999, p.137). It also contains alternative knowledge as well as missed opportunities and chances (1999, p.137). In other words, Aleida Assmann conceptualizes storage memory as a limitless archive containing an ever-increasing mass of dates, information, documents, and memories (1999, p.137). The social institutions that typically manage this mass of cultural knowledge are, according to Aleida Assmann, museums, libraries, archives, research institutes, and universities (1999, p.140). It is through institutions such as these that cultural knowledge can exist without necessarily having to fulfil a social function (1999, p.141). In short, Aleida Assmann regards storage memory as the subversive potential and the corrective of functional memory. In contrast to storage memory, functional memory is an ‘inhabited memory’ (A. Assmann, 1999, p.134) which directly and emotionally connects a social group to its past. From the ‘unformed mass’ of storage memory (1999, p.136), functional memory selects those figures of memory which legitimize a social group’s perspective on its past (1999, pp.134–6). Cultural change can take place if cultural knowledge is transferred from storage memory into functional memory (1999, p.140) and vice versa. During this process, objectifications of culture which have until then remained un-functionalized are charged with cultural meaning, thus being turned into figures of memory, while existing figures of memory are de-functionalized on leaving functional memory. Storing all cultural knowledge which can potentially be formed into figures of memory, storage memory is a ‘reservoir of future functional memories’ (1999, p.140), which eventually enables cultural renewal and change. Consequently, storage memory is no less important than functional memory for a society’s capacity to remember the past. Since storage memory serves as its ‘external horizon’ (1999, p.141), which counterbalances the narrow perspectives of the past that functional memory creates, functional memory can always

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be criticized, be put into perspective, and eventually be renewed (1999, p.141). As Aleida Assmann argues, George Orwell’s novel Nineteen EightyFour exemplifies the danger that lies in ‘shutting down’ storage memory (1999, p.140), since it depicts a society that suffers from the destruction of storage memory. In this society, all alternative cultural knowledge is constantly changed to match the currently valid official version of the past. Therefore, no cultural knowledge exists except for that which is currently charged with cultural meaning. In Orwell’s novel, the ruling ‘Party’ has completely understood the power of memory; it claims that it is possible to control the future by controlling the past (Orwell, 1984, p.26). By constantly changing the past, the Party exercises total control over the past, present, and future of society. Indeed, it is punctilious in its manipulations. In order to strengthen its totalitarian regime, the Party constantly orders the national archives to be changed in accordance with the currently official version of the past. On a daily basis, old copies of newspapers, books, pamphlets, and posters are destroyed and replaced with new ones which include all alterations that are necessary to support the currently ‘correct’ information (Orwell, 1984, p.31). Thus, Orwell’s dystopian society does not have a storage memory that could counterbalance functional memory. Since the only existing version of the past is the one which the Party creates, people cannot be sure of their own memories and, thus, lose their pasts. According to the Assmanns, literary texts such as Orwell’s novel can describe the dangers that lie in collapsing the difference between storage memory and functional memory, but literature itself is not a medium of functional memory. The Assmanns argue that literary texts can only be functionalized – that is, they can only become relevant in cultural memory – if they are turned into cultural texts (A. Assmann, 1995, pp.234–43), thus becoming part of the content of cultural memory. This approach is too limited, because the Assmanns neglect to consider whether literary texts which are not canonized as cultural texts can have any function within cultural memory. That is to say, they do not consider the question whether literary texts have any function within cultural memory other than in forming part of its content as cultural texts. Firstly, this is due to the narrow concept of literature the Assmanns apply, according to which only the works of the

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‘high’ canon of European literature qualify as culturally relevant texts. Secondly, they do not differentiate between literary and non-literary texts, as Astrid Erll points out (Erll, 2003, p.56). Thirdly, the Assmanns do not subcategorize the various semiotic systems which function as media of cultural memory,4 which is why they neglect to examine to what extent literature can be such a medium (Erll, 2003, p.56). In contrast to Jan and Aleida Assmann, Erll argues that literary texts do not only serve as cultural texts within cultural memories. As Erll correctly points out, Aleida Assmann puts so much emphasis on the difference between culturally binding and non-binding texts that she fails to consider the large number of literary texts, especially of popular literature, which support the formation of cultural memories and collective identities although they do not qualify as cultural texts (Erll, 2003, p.65). Erll states: In order to do justice to the role that literature plays in the processes of constructing cultural memories, one has to relinquish the idea that . . . collective concepts of identity and value can only be drawn from so-called ‘high’ literature. Trivial literature in particular5 makes use of symbolic resources which are generally assigned to cultural memory. (Erll, 2003, p.60) Although some of her theoretical assumptions remain vague,6 Erll succeeds in broadening the Assmanns’ narrow perspective on the function of literature within cultural memory. In fact, she is the first to conceive of literature as both forming part of the content of cultural memory and serving as a medium of cultural memory. Drawing on the narratological categories of story and discourse, she develops a concept in which the term ‘story’ refers to the content of collective memory7 (what is remembered), whereas the term ‘discourse’ refers to the ways in which the content is socially created, assessed, and transmitted (how something is remembered) (Erll, 2003, p.71, p.354). While cultural texts, according to Erll, are elements of story,8 literary texts belong to the level of discourse. ‘As media of the discourse level of collective memories, literary texts can take part in the social processes of creating, conveying, and putting into perspective versions of the past’ (Erll, 2003, p.75). Erll argues that, in contrast to literary texts, cultural texts do not function as media of collective memory, but are regarded as objects which are in themselves worthy of cultural

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remembrance (Erll, 2003, p.75). Milton’s Paradise Lost, for example, is a literary text which Erll sees as having become an element of story and, therefore, a cultural text: Nowadays, Paradise Lost . . . no longer conveys to us an idea of paradise and hell. Nevertheless, this poem takes part in configuring not only English cultural memory. Charged with symbolic meaning, this text represents the literary tradition of the western world. (Erll, 2003, p.75) Within the complex theoretical framework she establishes,9 Erll argues that literary texts function as media of both cultural and communicative memories if they qualify as what she terms ‘collective texts’ (Erll, 2003, p.68). With the help of this concept, she aims to examine the specific frames of reception in which literary texts can function as media of communicative and cultural memories (Erll, 2003, p.87). Analysing a number of German and British war novels of the late 1920s and early 1930s as collective texts,10 Erll claims that these novels mediate not only images of the First World War, but also concepts of collective identities as well as cultural values and norms, which are used to both construct and reflect on the post-war memory cultures of Germany and the UK (Erll, 2003, p.351).11 In short, one can say that Erll is the first to redefine the role of literature within cultural memory. The Assmanns regard literature as forming part of the content of cultural memory, thus denying it any functionalized mnemonic power. In contrast, Erll conceptualizes literature as an active force within both communicative and cultural memories. She argues that literary texts fulfil two functions within cultural memory. As cultural texts, they are part of the content of cultural memory. As collective texts, they serve as media of cultural memory. However, Erll’s approach is still too limited to fully conceptualize the role of literature within cultural memories. According to the concepts established by Erll and the Assmanns, the function of literary texts within cultural memories depends on socio-historically determined frames of reception (A. Assmann, 1995, p.243; Erll, 2003, p.91), which means that collective texts are no less reliant on processes of canon-formation than cultural texts. In both cases, a literary text can only be functionalized in cultural and/or communicative memory if it is received, by the members of a particular social group,12 as belonging

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to a particular group of texts, that is, to a canon of either ‘cultural’ or ‘collective’ texts. It would, however, mean applying too narrow a perspective on the functions of literature within cultural memories if one only took into consideration the various forms of canon-formation by which literary texts can mediate and produce cultural memories. In order to provide a more comprehensive concept of literature as a medium of cultural memory, it is necessary to take a closer look at intertextuality and genre,13 since it is above all due to these two characteristics of literature that literary texts not only transmit, but also generate knowledge stored in cultural memory.14 In Byatt’s novel The Virgin in the Garden, the reader learns that: [t]here are fashions in habits of mind as in habits of gear, and memory-banks went out, a little after the time of this story, a little after the Coronation of Elizabeth II, as memory theatres had gone out with the Renaissance, and with memory-banks went works of art that were themselves memory-banks, went tradition and the individual talent, the Bible, the pantheon, the different organisations of other languages. (VG, p.142; emphasis added) The narrative voice laments the loss of works of art as memory-banks, but, in fact, each of the Byatt novels discussed in this book is a memory-bank – or, in other words, a literary space of memory – that constantly draws on British cultural memory through its manifold intertextual references. Theoretically speaking, one can conceptualize ‘intertextuality’ as an umbrella term for all kinds of connections among texts.15 Although the term is often used in a literary context, intertextual relationships are not restricted to literary texts only. With Renate Lachmann, intertextuality can be defined as ‘the contact between texts literary and non-literary’ (Lachmann, 2004, p.173). As poststructuralist scholars such as Julia Kristeva, Roland Barthes, and Jacques Derrida have shown, each text inevitably enters into a dialogical relationship with other texts; a text is a ‘mosaic of quotations’ (Kristeva, 1980, p.66)16 linking itself to all other texts of literature. Intertextuality exists on various levels, and it occurs in various ways;17 it can be either explicit or implicit, either marked or unmarked.18 Furthermore: [t]he [intertextual] reference can be to entire texts, to a textual paradigm, to a genre, to a certain element of a given text, to a

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stylistic device, to narrative technique, to motifs etc. (Lachmann, 2004, p.173) Since it is irrefutably determined by intertextuality, any literary text is a combination of heterogeneous textual material which crosses generic boundaries and transcends epochs (Lachmann, 1997, p.xxiii). In each of its forms, intertextuality causes a text to establish connections to myriad other texts, thus forming ‘a network whose nodes are the actual texts of literature’ (McHale, 1987, p.56). Put another way, one can say that a text evokes the memory of other texts through intertextuality: ‘[t]he memory of the text is formed by its intertextual references’ (Lachmann, 2004, p.173). From this perspective, both writing and reading become acts of memory, as they activate the memory of a text.19 As Lachmann points out, each text establishes both an external and an internal dimension of memory. On the one hand, it writes itself into the ‘mnemonic space’ (Lachmann, 2004, p.173) that exists between all texts (Lachmann, 1997, p.15). On the other hand, it also creates a mnemonic space within itself (Lachmann, 1997, p.15), for it is an ‘intertextual depository’ (Lachmann, 1997, p.16) made up of intertexts. Due to its intertextual references, a text can justly be described as a palimpsest made up of different layers of meaning (Lachmann, 1997, p.22): The intertextual work of deciphering is not an excavation process that would reveal the locus of the primal text . . . This scraping or scratching . . . is not an erasure: older signs appear between the newer and newest one as dismembered parts of text fragments of something that, as a whole, remains elusive. (Lachmann, 1997, p.24) In this amalgamation of signification, which the intertextual space creates, no text can be read without either its predecessors or its successors. This means that each text necessarily carries within itself the memory of other texts. Thus, the cultural meaning produced by texts is transmitted from one text to another by intertextual references. Lachmann emphasizes: ‘In storing and accumulating cultural data, the literary text in its intertextual dimension functions as part of cultural memory’ (Lachmann, 2004, p.165). In other

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words, intertextuality is a bearing element of cultural memory as a result of which literature functions as a medium of cultural memory. The novels in Byatt’s tetralogy as well as her two biographic metafictions create a dense net of intertextual references to both literary texts and objects of pictorial art.20 As I pointed out in Chapter 9, Byatt’s tetralogy refers to the literary oeuvres of Shakespeare, Spenser, Byron, Milton, Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë, E. M. Forster, and D. H. Lawrence, among others. Possession also includes a large number of intertextual references; there are, for instance, both direct and indirect references to Robert Graves (P, p.12, p.149), the Bible (P, p.17, p.139), Tennyson (P, p.39), Spenser (P, p.45), Shakespeare (P, p.105, p.482), Virginia Woolf (P, p.244), Herman Melville (P, p.251), D. H. Lawrence (P, p.278), John Keats (P, p.510), and John Milton (P, p.510). The novel also features references to fairy tales such as The Glass Coffin (P, pp.58–67) and to myths like Melusina’s (e.g. P, pp.289–98). The Biographer’s Tale refers to texts by, for example, Mary Shelley (TBT, p.1), Empedocles (TBT, p.1), George Eliot (TBT, p.19, p.165), Virginia Woolf (TBT, p.24), Wallace Stevens (TBT, p.144), Philip Sidney (TBT, p.259), Arthur Conan Doyle (TBT, p.191), Edgar Allan Poe (TBT, p.256), Henry James (TBT, p.34), Shakespeare (TBT, p.76, p.105), Carl Linnaeus, Francis Galton, and Henrik Ibsen (e.g. BT, pp.37–95). Besides its many references to literary texts, Byatt’s tetralogy repeatedly refers to a number of paintings such as the portraiture of Elizabeth I,21 several pictures by Picasso (SL, p.639), Vermeer’s View of Delft (WW, pp.417–19), his Girl Reading a Letter by the Open Window (SL, p.771), and various paintings by Van Gogh: Poets’ Garden (SL, pp.571–2), Harvest (SL, p.575), The Yellow Chair (SL, p.655), Breakfast Table (SL, p.727), The Sower (SL, p.1003), The Reaper (SL, p.1003), and his paintings of Provençal landscapes (SL, p.659). As Gabriele Rippl points out, some of these paintings are present in Byatt’s texts by way of detailed ekphrastic descriptions (Rippl, 2000, pp.524–6; 2005, pp.271–94). The novels follow the tradition of classical literature with these descriptions,22 and provide each text with a ‘distinctively visual quality’ (Rippl, 2001, p.241).23 Byatt claims that she regards painting and writing as two distinctively different cultural media (Byatt, 1999, p.17, p.23), but her tetralogy often evokes the impression of a verbal drawing. As Worton says, Byatt ‘knows how to make her readers see

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[paintings] through the prism of her . . . verbal descriptions’ (Worton, 2001, p.28). The many references to both literary texts and paintings in Byatt’s novels create intertextual depositories, serving as mnemonic spaces in which the texts and paintings referred to gain presence. Thus, her novels constitute ‘imaginary museum[s]’ (Rippl, 2001, p.242), in which both texts belonging to the ‘high’ canon of (predominantly) British literature, and paintings of the ‘high’ canon of not only British, but also other European pictorial art are continually present through intertextual references. Byatt’s tetralogy exhibits verbal reconstructions of objects of pictorial art, which have been inscribed – along with either their painters, such as Van Gogh, or the people they depict, such as Elizabeth I – into the cultural memories of bourgeois, patriarchal societies throughout Western Europe. Inscribing these paintings into their intertextual depositories, Byatt’s novels function as media of cultural memory which present their readers with objects deemed worthy of cultural remembrance. Her texts can further be seen as mediating the content of British cultural memory, because the literary texts her novels quote from and allude to have been canonized as British cultural texts, as Aleida Assmann claims. Moreover, Byatt’s novels conceptualize literary texts as shaping and stabilizing individual identity, as I have argued in Chapter 9. Both referring to cultural texts and representing the texts they refer to as cultural texts, Byatt’s novels function as media of cultural memory, which at once draw on the cultural texts of British cultural memory and re-affirm their status as canonized texts serving educational as well as formative means. The figure of Van Gogh, who ‘dominates the novel [Still Life]’ (Worton, 2001, p.21), is of particular relevance in the novel. Sue Sorensen points out that Byatt discusses ‘twenty-five or more canvases’ of Van Gogh’s in Still Life (Sorensen, 2004, p.74), for example, his pictures of his garden in Arles, of a sower, and of a reaper, which are present in the opening and the closing pages of Byatt’s novels (SL, p.571, p.1003). His painting Still Life with Books is reproduced on its cover (Worton, 2001, p.21); Byatt’s character Frederica perceives the Provençal coast through her knowledge of his pictures (SL, p.659); at many points, the novel offers its readers verbatim quotes from Van Gogh’s letters (e.g. SL, p.573, p.578, p.579). The fact that Still Life repeatedly refers to the

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Dutch painter through either his letters or the verbal reconstructions of his pictures causes Worton to argue that ‘Van Gogh has almost totemic status’ (Worton, 2001, p.21) in Byatt’s text. However, the Van Gogh to whom Byatt’s novel constantly refers is not the painter whose post-impressionistic visions are seen as expressing both his artistic genius and his mental instability; this is not the Van Gogh who has been inscribed into the cultural memories of bourgeois, patriarchal Europe. As Sorenson puts it, ‘[t]he histrionic van [sic] Gogh who has entered the popular imagination, helped along by bravura film performances by Kirk Douglas and Tim Roth, is not the van Gogh that Byatt uses’ (Sorensen, 2004, p.71). In fact, ‘Byatt reveals to the reader a Van Gogh who is much more than the painter whose luminous works are familiar from art galleries, hospital wards, greeting cards, chocolate boxes’ (Worton, 2001, p.20). By focusing on his paintings and his letters, Byatt ‘aims . . . to redirect us toward a respect for van Gogh’s realistic inclinations and to accept him as a literary artist’ (Sorensen, 2004, p.73). Byatt refers to Van Gogh as a popular figure of memory, but offers her reader an alternative perspective on this man, who has come to represent the archetypically mad genius, failing to reconcile his art and his life. Through its dense net of intertextual references to Van Gogh, Still Life draws on a figure of memory and, at the same time, generates alternative knowledge about this figure. Thus, Byatt’s text serves as a memorial novel which both activates the collectively shared knowledge about Van Gogh stored in cultural memory and adds to this knowledge, thus creating new cultural meaning. What is more, Byatt uses the figure of Van Gogh in order to negotiate her own identity as a writer of (neo)realist fiction. At the beginning of her career as a literary author, Byatt regarded herself as a ‘selfconscious realist’ (Byatt, 2000, p.4). In Still Life, Byatt describes her efforts as a realist writer, when she tells the reader in an authorial comment that ‘I had the idea, when I began this novel, that it would be a novel of naming and accuracy. I wanted to write a novel as Williams said a poem should be: no ideas but in things’ (SL, p.934). In fact, Byatt’s endeavour to represent ‘the thing itself’ (e.g. SL, p.652) is the leitmotif of the whole text, which revolves around the (im)possibility of direct, ‘realistic’ representation.24 As Sue Sorensen explains in her lucid article ‘Something of the Eternal: A. S. Byatt and Vincent van Gogh’, the figure of Van Gogh is central to Byatt’s explorations of

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realist writing. With the help of the numerous references to both his paintings and his letters, Byatt: emphasizes the realist . . . in him [van Gogh]. . . . Alexander, visiting Arles, finds that the site of van Gogh’s Yellow House is instantly recognizable (67); Frederica sees with a shock that the boats at Saintes-Maries are exactly as van Gogh painted them (73). (Sorensen, 2004, p.71) Thus, Van Gogh becomes ‘a talisman’ (Sorensen, 2004, p.68) in a novel in which ‘Byatt explicitly and confidentially sets out to find a written language that will match van Gogh’s plainness and accuracy’ (Sorensen, 2004, p.74). However, Byatt’s attempts to write a realist novel in plain and accurate language fail, as she admits in the same authorial comment from which I have already quoted above: ‘I even thought of trying to write without figures of speech, but had to give up that plan, quite early’ (SL, p.934). In elaborate metacomments, the narrative and the authorial voices of Still Life argue that neither language nor painting is able to bridge the distance between representation and reality (SL, pp.770–1, pp.934–6). As Sorensen puts it, ‘it becomes clear that key images [of the novel] such as [Van Gogh’s] Breakfast Table represent, for Byatt, a time of innocent knowledge, no longer attainable in the era of postmodern scepticism’ (Sorensen, 2004, p.75). Although Still Life asserts the primacy of words (SL, p.659) and insists that ‘words are our common currency’ (SL, p.771), it acknowledges the ‘cultural shock’ (SL, p.771) which was caused when poststructuralism negated any possibility of realistic representation by pointing towards the irrefutable difference between language and reality (SL, p.771). However, even if she takes into account postmodern scepticism in her subsequent novels, Byatt does not abandon her realist project. In fact, Possession, Babel Tower, The Biographer’s Tale and A Whistling Woman are neo-realist novels which engage in ‘metafictional explorations of realism’ (Schmid, 1996c, p.8), thus reconciling the realist tradition with metafictional self-reflexivity, intertextual games and generic instability. As neo-realist texts, Possession and The Biographer’s Tale express the awareness that the human mind is incapable of completely grasping reality (Schabert, 2006, pp.415–16).25 As I have argued in Chapter 2, both novels apply a postmodernist concept of history by underlining the textuality of the past. However, they

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transcend postmodernism, since they contend that the past – though inaccessible through biography – can be approached by the means of literature and that the past is indeed vital to an individual’s process of identity formation, which they by no means present, in spite of all postmodern notions of the fragmented subject, as a hopeless undertaking. In neo-realist fashion, The Biographer’s Tale emphasizes the intransitive materiality of extratextual reality, which is expressed in Phineas’s urgent need for things (TBT, p.4) and in his increasing commitment to nature (e.g. TBT, p.259). Even more tellingly, Phineas comes to realize that the human mind cannot comprehend reality in its totality: There are a very few human truths and infinite variations on them. I was about to write that there are very few truths about the world, but the truth about that is that we don’t know what we are not biologically fitted to know. It may be full of all sorts of shining and tearing things, geometries, chemistries, physics we have no access to and never can have. (TBT, p.237) In short, Still Life is the first of several novels which fashion Byatt into a neo-realist writer. Since she very much relies on the figure of Van Gogh in order to negotiate the possibilities of both (non)realist modes of representation, Byatt’s identity as a neo-realist writer can be seen as depending on her close engagement with (not only) British cultural memory. As I have argued above, Byatt’s texts serve as literary spaces of memory, because cultural texts as well as canonical objects of pictorial art are present in their intertextual depositories. Storing and accumulating this cultural data, Byatt’s novels function – in their intertextual dimension – as media of British cultural memory. Reworking this data – as in the case of Van Gogh – her tetralogy draws on cultural memory in order to negotiate Byatt’s identity as a writer of neo-realist fiction and, at the same time, contributes to cultural memory by offering an alternative perspective on one of its figures of memory.

11 Memorial Novels: the English Renaissance and the Victorian Age

Two epochs of British cultural memory claim prominent positions in the intertextual depositories of Byatt’s fiction: the English Renaissance and the Victorian Age. Much of the cultural data inscribed into the intertextual depository of Byatt’s tetralogy refers to the English Renaissance, whilst the Victorian Age features strongly in her two biographic metafictions. As I have argued in Chapter 8, Byatt’s tetralogy conceptualizes the figures of Shakespeare and Elizabeth I as the two prevailing cultural paradigms that determine Frederica’s search for her identity. As outlined in Chapter 9, the novels represent literary texts of the English Renaissance as cultural texts which form Frederica’s identity. Furthermore, the Elizabethan Age – which is part of the wider historical and cultural context of the English Renaissance – features prominently in The Virgin in the Garden, since the novel alludes to Elizabethan history (e.g. VG, p.130, pp.171–2, p.321, p.376) and discusses elements of English Renaissance culture such as the cult of Elizabeth I (VG, pp.132–3, pp.180–1), colour symbolism in Renaissance clothing (VG, pp.144–5), and Renaissance visual art (VG, pp.186–7). What is more, The Virgin in the Garden is set in the years 1952–1953 and witnesses the accession of Elizabeth II. To honour this occasion, the local grandee of Frederica’s home town, Matthew Crowe, organizes a festival which culminates in the staging of Alexander Wedderburn’s verse drama Astraea. Glorifying the reign of Elizabeth I as the Engligh ‘Golden Age’ (VG, p.85), Crowe intends both festival and play to celebrate what he conceives of as the beginning of a new Renaissance heralded by the young queen’s coronation (VG, pp.83–6). Thus, the novel mirrors the English zeitgeist of the early 116

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1950s and the contemporary hopes for a second Elizabethan Age to begin with the queen’s accession.1 As a historical novel, The Virgin in the Garden depicts Britain after the Second World War trying to re-establish links to the sixteenth-century ‘Golden Age’ of national strength and glory in order to redefine British national identity and the country’s role in the world (Schuhmann, 1990, p.24, p.39).2 However, The Virgin in the Garden and the other three texts in Byatt’s tetralogy are more than historical novels. In fact, they function as what I call memorial novels, since they both activate and contribute to British cultural memory by having their representations of twentieth-century British society depend on their explorations of the cultural past. Byatt’s memorial novels negotiate several cultural concepts which have been ascribed to the Renaissance. It goes without saying that the English Renaissance is not to be confused in either its historical or its cultural settings with the continental Renaissance, which began in Italy.3 However, the ideas and concepts which originated in Italy also affected other European countries, when the Italian Renaissance spread through Western Europe. The cultural concepts of Renaissance humanism influenced English humanism, as Mary Thomas Crane explains: ‘English humanism was, at least in the beginning, closely linked to Italy’ (Crane, 2002).4 Thus, Renaissance humanism forms part not only of the British history of ideas, but also of British cultural memory, in which the English Renaissance and, in particular, the Elizabethan Age claim a prominent position as an epoch of growing international power, internal peace, and flourishing arts.5 Byatt’s tetralogy includes a large number of references to what the Swiss art historian Jacob Burckhardt defined as the ideals of Renaissance humanism. One of the subplots in the tetralogy revolves around the foundation of the North Yorkshire University.6 This university is committed to the Renaissance ideal of the ‘complete man’ (VG, p.20; SL, p.903). In his highly influential study The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy (1860), Burckhardt praised the ‘complete man’ – ‘l’uomo universale’, as he calls him (Burckhardt, 1951, p.84) – for having combined comprehensive learning with the practice of the arts or professions, thereby reconciling theory and practice (Burckhardt, 1951, pp.85–7; Gadol, 2009, p.437). Burckhardt’s analysis of the Renaissance as the cradle of modernity has long been identified as a retrospective construction of the nineteenth century (Davies, 1997,

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pp.15–25) and his notion of ‘complete man’ has been criticized as a ‘cliché of cultural history’ (Hattaway, 2002), but his views on the Renaissance and on Renaissance humanism still exercise lasting cultural power. In Byatt’s tetralogy, the university Vice-Chancellor Sir Gerard Wijnnobel commits himself to shaping his students into ‘complete personalities’ according to the Burckhardtian ideal. In order to achieve this aim, Wijnnobel promotes the Renaissance concept of ‘universal’ education which combines arts and sciences (BT, p.249). This concept finds expression in the institution’s architecture with its ‘beehive’ structure (BT, p.249), in which the buildings that house the different disciplines are connected to each other by walkways, plazas, and canals (BT, p.249; WW, p.26). The concept of ‘universal’ education is also expressed in the university syllabus ‘which require[s] all students to study some science, more than one language, an art form’ (WW, p.27). The university hosts a ‘conference on Body and Mind’ (WW, p.26), which further confirms its commitment to such ‘interconnecting studies’ (WW, p.277), because it brings together a transdisciplinary range of scholars and scientists from disciplines as diverse as physics, biology, neurochemistry, philosophy, theology, linguistics, sociology, medicine, mathematics, literary studies, and psychology (WW, p.26, p.274). Byatt herself alludes to the humanist approach of this conference by stating, in a newspaper article, that she sees this conference as symbolizing ‘an undissociated paradise, where all scholars talk to each other, arts and sciences inform each other, humanism unifies body and mind’ (Byatt, 2004a). A Whistling Woman applies several different strategies in order to support the Renaissance ideal of ‘universal’ education. First of all, it engages the readers’ sympathies for Wijnnobel, who functions as the main representative of the concepts of Renaissance humanism the novels promote. He is characterized as a distinguished, innovative, tolerant, albeit naïvely altruistic scholar and man (WW, p.26, p.213, p.278), who is generally pitied because he was tricked into marrying an insane woman.7 Moreover, with Wijnnobel and the conference keynote speaker elaborating on the ‘beauty’ of Renaissance ideas (WW, p.83, p.354), the novel privileges these ideas due to their alleged aesthetic value. Furthermore, A Whistling Woman includes excerpts from Flight North, a literary fairy tale written by Frederica’s flat mate, Agatha Mond. Flight North is clearly indebted to Renaissance humanism, since it celebrates the combination of theory and practice

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as it tells the story of a learned young prince, a young stableboy, and a nursemaid, who can only survive their adventures by combining their resources of theoretical and practical knowledge (WW, p.2, p.354). Tellingly, Vice-Chancellor Wijnnobel, who favours the Renaissance ideal of ‘universal’ education, approves of this fairy tale (WW, p.345). Most importantly, however, the combination of arts and sciences is one of the structural principles of A Whistling Woman, since the novel itself incorporates various sorts of scientific, scholarly, and fictional texts. It contains, for example, excerpts from a correspondence between psychologists which, although they do not qualify as scientific writing in themselves, include psychological case studies (e.g. WW, pp.54–67, pp.75–8, pp.387–9). The same goes for letters written by a sociologist which later serve as field notes for an ethnomethodological study (e.g. WW, pp.200–4, pp.223–7, p.406). There are passages from Flight North (e.g. WW, pp.1–9, p.338, p.345) as well as from Laminations, Frederica’s own novel (e.g. WW, p.39), and from Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale (WW, p.395). Neurochemical research is described (e.g. WW, p.163), and papers on biology as well as on psycho-linguistics are summarized (e.g. WW, pp.353–5, pp.357–9). Even the odd biblical quotation creeps into the text (e.g. WW, p.100, p.103). In short, A Whistling Woman supports the ideal of a transdisciplinary mixture, since it incorporates sciences, humanities, and art into the whole that constitutes its textual body. The novel contrasts the Renaissance concepts it outlines and promotes with the student revolt of the late 1960s,8 which is represented by the so-called ‘Anti-University’ (WW, p.30) that is set up outside North Yorkshire University (WW, pp.79–86). The Anti-University movement is heavily criticized, even ridiculed in A Whistling Woman and in Babel Tower. Firstly, Frederica, whose opinion carries weight, since she is the heroine of the tetralogy, voices her opposition to it (WW, pp.36–7) and expresses a feeling of displacement in this time of social upheaval and student revolt (BT, p.615; WW, p.37). Secondly, some of its main protestors are heavily ridiculed: Mickey Impey, whom Frederica cannot take seriously (WW, p.45), Avram Snitkin, who is too stoned to take part in the protests (WW, p.365, pp.405–6), and Jonty Surtees and Waltraut Ross, who sit around farting while discussing their plans for attacking the university (WW, pp.88–9). And last, but not least, the fact that the Anti-University is described as permanently smelling of sewage (WW, p.280) also implies that the

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novel expresses a highly critical attitude towards the 1968 student revolt. In spite of its many ridiculous and incompetent leaders, the Anti-University manages to interrupt Wijnnobel’s conference on Body and Mind, bringing it to an abrupt and violent end by starting a fire which consumes part of the university buildings (WW, pp.367–72). During the ensuing outbreak of violence all over the campus, one of the student protestors shatters two Renaissance glass beakers, which the Vice-Chancellor tries to preserve in vain (WW, pp.371–2). With the shattering of these two artefacts, this scene symbolically foreshadows the fate of Renaissance education, which is sealed shortly afterwards by the university authorities; they acquiesce to one of the protestors’ central demands: to abolish its syllabus, which many students find too challenging (WW, pp.83–4, p.381). Hence, A Whistling Woman represents the Renaissance ideas outlined above as utopian educational ideals that had to be given up in the wake of the literally brute force of the 1968 revolt. However, the ideals of Renaissance humanism are not altogether doomed to fail in the last of the novels in the tetralogy, since they survive in the relationship of Frederica and her lover, the biologist Luk Lysgaard-Peacock. Attending the conference on Body and Mind mentioned above, Frederica: realised that though she had understood what he [the speaker] had said . . . she was ignorant, blackly, thickly ignorant, of what he was talking about. She knew the words, neurone, synapse, dendrite, and she liked them because she could do their etymology. But the human world . . . had invented microscopes, and telescopes, and dissected tissues and identified cells, and if it all vanished tomorrow she would not know where to start, though she might be able to write down quite a lot of Paradise Lost by heart . . . (WW, p.355) By having Frederica realize the narrowness of her education, which emphasizes literature and neglects everything else (WW, pp.363–4), the novel not only underlines the increasing concern for natural science, which Campbell finds expressed in Byatt’s fiction (Campbell, 2004, pp.215–6), but also criticizes the English educational system (WW, p.364) and the intellectual snobbery of Leavisite literary studies (WW, p.364).9 Frederica is especially fascinated by Luk’s talk at the conference, for he ‘ma[kes] her see the whole world quite new’ (WW,

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p.407). Thus, she comes to conceive of science as opening up a ‘world of curiosity’ (WW, p.421) which has so far been closed to her literary mind. Having understood that ‘the world [is] bigger’ (WW, p.411) than literary scholarship, she decides against a university career: ‘I don’t want to be in an English Department, stuck with Eng. Lit.’ (WW, p.411). However, it is important to note that Frederica, although criticizing literary scholarship,10 is far from renouncing literature as such. Indeed, it is still important for her: She found herself thinking of Paradise Lost, . . . made of language, and religion, and science, the science of a universe of concentric spheres which had never existed, and had constructed the minds of generations. It was part of her. She thought of The Faerie Queene, and Britomart the female knight, who saw her lover in the magic glass sphere made by Merlin, which was also a tower. (WW, p.420; emphasis added) As this quote makes clear, A Whistling Woman represents literature as an influential cultural force which both represents and mediates cultural concepts such as Milton’s universe of concentric spheres. Since Frederica is convinced that the lasting cultural influence of Milton’s Paradise Lost contributes to her identity, is ‘part of her’ (WW, p.420), the novel suggests that individual identity is established within a context of cultural concepts which are established and circulated by literary texts. These texts, which mediate cultural knowledge, are conceptualized as cultural texts of British cultural memory, which are said to fashion both individual identity and socio-historical discourses. And yet, the tetralogy closes on a more comprehensive note, transcending the ‘primacy of literariness’ which Uhsadel finds expressed in A Whistling Woman (Uhsadel, 2005, p.32). According to Uhsadel, Byatt’s novel overcomes the traditional dichotomy of the humanities and the natural sciences, thereby underlining the importance that it ascribes to literariness (Uhsadel, 2005, p.38). However, the significant turn A Whistling Woman takes at its end does not consist of reconciling two academic cultures, but of representing natural science and art – and consequently, literature (which the novel clearly differentiates from literary studies) – as two epistemological approaches, which both serve to understand the world. As Luk emphasizes, there is no ‘real difference between a really intelligent piece of work and a creative piece

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of work’ (WW, p.408). Frederica finally gets to the heart of the central concept of the novel when, thinking about literature and science, she realizes that ‘all this was one’ (WW, p.421). Frederica’s and Luk’s unborn child allegorizes the connection of the two epistemologies her/his parents embody. By granting Frederica and Luk a happy ending, A Whistling Woman perpetuates the ideal of ‘universal’ education in its protagonist’s future. Through its manifold intertextual references to the ideals of Renaissance humanism, Byatt’s tetralogy explores the mental dimension of the English Renaissance. These references, as well as those to Elizabeth I and Shakespeare, provide the context for Byatt’s depiction of female identity and British society in the 1960s. As memorial novels, the texts in Byatt’s tetralogy activate British cultural memory by repeatedly inscribing the English Renaissance into their intertextual depositories, and they contribute to British cultural memory by using the English Renaissance as a foil against which they discuss the British society of the mid-twentieth century. Negotiating its female protagonist’s identity and its critical analysis of the student revolt with the help of its intertextual references to English Renaissance culture, Byatt’s tetralogy ascribes lasting cultural energy to this epoch, thus depicting it as a key epoch of British cultural memory. While Byatt’s tetralogy is dominated by intertextual references to the English Renaissance, Possession and The Biographer’s Tale are concerned with the Victorian Age. Critics have identified both texts as neo-Victorian novels, since they are ‘explicitly concerned with . . . the Victorian era’ (Hadley, 2008, p.88), ‘reveal[ing] an “unflagging desire” to engage with the past, in spite of a supposedly postmodern “doubt” about the possibilities of recovering the past’ (Hadley, 2008, p.70). The Biographer’s Tale qualifies as a neo-Victorian novel, because it re-enacts, as Erin O’Connor shows, the ‘passionate interest in the individual’ (Goodbrand quoted in O’Connor, 2002, p.385) typical of Victorian biographical writing. However, it is above all the intertextual depository of Possession that is dominated by the Victorian Age, and it is this novel in particular which serves as a memorial novel, since it is engaged in exploring the cultural present within the context of the cultural past of the Victorian Age. Many of the intertextual references of the novel are to this era. Firstly, ‘[t]he names of the twentieth-century protagonists, Maud and Roland, conjure up associations with Victorian fiction’ (Hadley, 2003, p.94), since Roland’s

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name alludes to Robert Browning’s ‘Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came’ and Maud’s name refers to Alfred Tennyson’s ‘Maud’. Secondly, the novel includes references to historical Victorian people such as Crabb Robinson (P, pp.23–5), Hella Lees (P, pp.393–8), and Charles Lyell (P, p.485). Thirdly, Byatt’s fictional Victorian poet Ash is reminiscent of Robert Browning and Alfred Tennyson, whereas the poetess LaMotte is modelled on Emily Dickinson, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and Christina Rossetti.11 Possession includes a large number of pseudoVictorian poems, which are ascribed to Ash and LaMotte, but which were of course written by Byatt herself. It is above all due to these pastiche poems, which most convincingly imitate the poetic styles of the Victorian Age, that Byatt’s novel takes ‘possession of a world of voices and poetic scents from an era long gone, asserting the present of the past’ (Hoesterey, 2001, p.93).12 Thus, Possession not only refers to some of the canonical texts of Victorian literature through its intertextual space of memory, but it also imitates them in order to create a seemingly authentic Victorian atmosphere (Hoesterey, 2001, p.93). As Hadley puts it, ‘Byatt’s engagement with the Victorians is achieved through the incorporation of Victorian texts, both real and imitations’ (Hadley, 2008, p.83). These texts, which form part of the intertextual depository of the novel, serve as a ‘historical foil’ (Middeke, 1999, p.4) used to reconstruct an epoch which, according to Schabert, is by now firmly inscribed into British cultural memory as one of the ‘important’ epochs of British history: [The Victorian Age] has found its place . . . in a frieze of national history in which an intellectual image of the Victorian Age now completes the sequence of images consisting of the Norman conquest and the signing of the Magna Charta, the Wars of the Roses, Renaissance, Civil War and Restoration, Glorious Revolution, American Revolution, and French Revolution. (Schabert, 1995, p.220) Possession is engaged in a double movement: not only does it draw on British cultural memory by constantly referring to the Victorian Age, but it also contributes to the construction of this memory by creating an image of that epoch.13 Byatt’s novel represents the Victorian Age as ‘the great age of humanism before the splintering of the unitary self’ (Holmes, 1994, p.324). This particular image of the Victorian

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Age plays an important role in the novel, since it is this epoch into which Maud and Roland immerse themselves during their biographical research and, thus, during their search for their own identities. In the course of their research, Roland and Maud come to admire Ash and LaMotte for their secure sense of identity. Maud tells Roland: They [Ash and LaMotte] valued themselves. Once, they knew God valued them. Then they began to think there was no God, only blind forces. So they valued themselves . . . (P, p.254) As this quote shows, the Victorian Age is characterized as an era of ‘confident and benign individualism’ (Holmes, 1994, pp.324–5). Thus, Possession re-evaluates the loss of religious certainties the Victorians experienced, as a result of which this epoch is often regarded as a predecessor of (post)modernism (Schabert, 1995, p.220).14 Instead of presenting the loss of a God-centred universe as a loss of certainty, the novel regards it as a rise of humanism that allows humans to ‘love themselves and [to attend] to their natures’, as Roland puts it (P, p.254). In contrast to Roland and Maud, Byatt’s Victorian characters ‘are capable of expressing their thoughts and feelings unrestricted by postmodern doubt’ (Gauthier, 2006, p.37). Their involvement with the Victorian Age, in which emotion and desire are said to have been accessible without the inhibiting distance created by postmodern theoretical knowledge, enables Roland and Maud to fashion themselves into sexual and emotional beings.15 The Victorians’ secure self-esteem and self-respect are juxtaposed with the insecure sense of self felt by both Roland and Maud. Thus, the Victorian Age is presented as being diametrically opposed to the late twentieth century, in which theoretical knowledge throws the subject back on to itself in an endless coil of self-reflexivity, which, according to Roland, is nothing but ‘powerlessness’ (P, p.253). Roland’s and Maud’s ‘descent into the past becomes a descent into the self, bringing to light . . . a longing for identity’ (Löschnigg, 1996, p.111). This longing is fulfilled as the past they encounter is an idealized age of humanism which provides stability and certainty for the twentieth-century protagonists of the novel, who suffer from loss of self-knowledge and insecure identity patterns. Thus, Byatt’s rendering of the Victorian Age represents a means of reshaping identity in the present.

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As the preceding paragraphs have made clear, Possession is a memorial novel that both activates and contributes to British cultural memory. Through its many references to the Victorian Age, which are inscribed into the mnemonic space of its intertextual depository, Possession creates an atmosphere which the reader is able to identify as Victorian. Thus, the novel draws on British cultural memory. Due to the image of the Victorian Age it constructs, Possession can be seen as working on British cultural memory, since it represents the Victorian Age as a secure point of reference for the late twentieth century, which it renders as an age riddled by insecurity and epistemological doubt. As a literary text that evokes the past through its intertextual depository, Possession exemplifies the specific power of literature as a medium of cultural memory which serves to open up the past to the present. As a memorial novel, not only does it conceptualize literature as a medium of cultural memory, but it is in itself a medium of cultural memory which serves as both a means of accessing the past and an ‘antidote to postmodern cultural poverty’ (Shuttleworth, 1998, p.268).

12 Mnemonic Spaces: Identity and Genre

Byatt’s novels repeatedly suggest that writing and/or reading literary texts bestows identity. In the tetralogy, Frederica Potter’s identity is determined by her knowledge of literary texts, as I have argued in Chapter 9. In Possession, the protagonists Maud and Roland gain access to the past by reading their biographees’ poems and letters. It is through these texts that the two scholars are able to discover Ash’s and LaMotte’s ‘true’ identities, which then leads them to establish their own identities, as I have shown in Chapters 2 and 9. In The Biographer’s Tale, the protagonist Phineas is represented as both the protagonist and the narrator of the story; the novel is said to be his notebook (TBT, p.260). During his increasingly frustrating search for his biographee’s identity, which he records in his notebook, Phineas comes to realize that even if he has not been able to gather knowledge of his biographee, his writing has been concerned with somebody’s identity – his own. He observes that ‘in constructing this narrative I have had to insert facts about myself . . . I have somehow been made to write my own story’ (TBT, p.237). As his search for his biographee’s identity triggers the development of his own identity, Phineas ‘discover[s] that it is through writing that one searches for identity, . . . for writing can change, develop or confer identity.’ (Wallhead, 2003, p.294). Since the narrative Phineas constructs is a novel, that is, a literary text, The Biographer’s Tale presents identity to be bestowed not only by writing in general, but by writing literature in particular. In each novel, the question of how literature can be seen as an influential factor in the construction of identity is linked to the aspect of genre. Literary genres are ‘literary forms’ (Abrams, 1988, p.71); 126

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each genre consists of a ‘conventional repertoire of stock motifs and themes, and a set of strategies for the literary representation of these thematic elements’ (Wesseling, 1991, p.17). For both authors and readers, genres function as ‘problem-solving models’ (Guillén, 1971, p.120), since they guide the act of literary composition as well as the reading process. Authors use generic repertoires in order to solve the aesthetical problem of matching matter to form, whilst readers rely on them for orientation during the reading process (Guillén, 1971, p.111, pp.123–4; Wesseling, 1991, p.18). Thus, genres can be regarded as ‘bodies of shared knowledge’ (Wesseling, 1991, p.18), which fulfil the hermeneutic function of steering the process of literary communication. However, genres are more than mere literary phenomena. Speaking from a hermeneutic perspective, Hans Robert Jauss argues that genre is one of the elements determining the horizon of expectation defined by a reader’s literary experience (Jauss, 1970, p.177). According to Jauss, literature fulfils a social function if this experience ‘enters into the horizon of expectations of his [the reader’s] lived praxis, preforms his understanding of the world and, thereby also has an effect on his social behaviour’ (Jauss, 2001, p.1564). Thus, genres have a socially formative function (Jauss, 1970, p.207). They are, as Frow puts it, ‘shared conventions with a social force’ (Frow, 2006, p.102). Seen on a larger scale, genres are part of the ‘complex network of institutions, practices, and beliefs that constitute the culture as a whole’ (Greenblatt, 1982, p.6). According to this perspective, the knowledge stored in genre patterns not only relates to literature but also to the overall context of society and culture. As van Gorp and Musarra-Schroeder comment: it often appears in literary history, [sic] that specific genres originated in a well determined period and context as answers to ‘cultural’ problems, and that, in a later period those genres have been re-used/regenerated for ‘solving’ similar or analogous problems. (van Gorp & Musarra-Schroeder, 2000, p.ii) Genres, it becomes clear, extend their problem-solving power from the aesthetical to the socio-cultural sphere. To put it simply, one can say that genres encode and communicate cultural knowledge. By referring to them again and again, literature constantly draws on

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this knowledge. In other words, genres are elements of literature as a result of which literary texts mediate cultural knowledge. In this sense, genres are ‘[r]epositories of [c]ultural [m]emory’, as van Gorp and Musarra-Schroeder put it.1 In short, genre is an eminent aspect within a theory of literature as a medium of cultural memory. Genres fulfil a hermeneutic function within the horizon of literary expectation as well as within that of experience of life. As culturally pre-formed systems of signification, genres affirm and transform cultural knowledge, thus enabling literary texts to create and mediate cultural meaning. For example, a novel belonging to the genre of the Bildungsroman follows culturally pre-formed patterns of signification which: embod[y] presuppositions about when and how people mature and encourages the reader to see that process of maturation in the terms the novel itself has established, even when he encounters it outside the novel. (Dubrow, 1982, p.4) This is of importance for my discussion of Byatt’s novels, since her tetralogy belongs to the female Bildungsroman. As Katharina Uhsadel convincingly argues, the four novels are rooted in the tradition of this genre (Uhsadel, 2005, pp.173–9).2 The last novel in the tetralogy, A Whistling Woman, can be seen as representing the female Bildungsroman as a repository of cultural memory, since it suggests that it exerts normative and formative power on female identity. As I have argued in Chapter 5, Frederica Potter succeeds in fashioning herself into a ‘free woman’ of the late 1960s by gaining financial, intellectual and sexual autonomy. In the course of this development, Frederica becomes the host of a TV show. Like the novel itself, the second programme of this show revolves around female life in the late 1960s (WW, pp.139–47). Together with her guests, Frederica discusses the notion of femininity presented by various examples of the Victorian female Bildungsroman. One of her guests criticizes the passivity of the heroines of novels such as The Mill on the Floss and Jane Eyre: ‘Staring out of the window – women in novels are always staring out of windows, thinking how to get out, how to be free’ (WW, p.145). In addition, Frederica argues that many Victorian novels feature female protagonists who develop from wise and attractive little girls into ‘monsters, demons or victims, when they become women’ (WW, p.146). Having claimed that characters such as Brontë’s Jane Eyre and Eliot’s Maggie Tulliver

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‘are diminished by womanhood’, Frederica wonders whether women should grow up at all (WW, p.146). By having Frederica critically assess the conceptions of femininity represented by these texts, A Whistling Woman draws on the intertextual references to the genre of the Victorian female Bildungsroman inscribed in the mnemonic space of its intertextual depository in order to engage in an inter-literary discussion of this genre. Furthermore, the way in which Frederica and her guests include several fictional characters in their discussion of female life in the 1960s implies that the novel conceptualizes this genre as an important cultural force, a force which both creates and mediates a concept of female identity that influences its readers’ social reality: the passivity of women in Victorian fiction is directly linked to female ‘enslavement to objects’ (WW, p.145), which, according to one of Frederica’s guests, has kept many women of the twentieth century in the socially subordinate position of housewives and mothers (WW, p.145). Moreover, Frederica’s doubts regarding the feasibility of female adulthood are rooted in the female Bildungsroman, which she regards as demonizing womanhood. Thus, A Whistling Woman negotiates the social function of the Victorian female Bildungsroman, since it sees it as influencing female identity in the second half of the twentieth century. According to Lachmann, ‘[t]he role of literature in a culture is obviously linked with the past of the culture in general and that of its own in particular’ (Lachmann, 2004, p.171). Byatt’s A Whistling Woman does certainly confirm this statement. The novel is linked not only with the literary past, since it stands in the tradition of the female Bildungsroman and engages in an inter-literary discussion of this genre, but it is also linked with the past of British culture, because it presents the notion of passive femininity represented in the Victorian female Bildungsroman as a culturally pre-formed pattern of signification which still influences female identity in twentiethcentury Britain. Identity, the novel argues, is both expressed in generic patterns and determined by them. Byatt’s novels Possession and The Biographer’s Tale also explore the possibilities of literature to mediate cultural knowledge through genre patterns, albeit in a different way from A Whistling Woman. As I have argued in Chapter 2, Byatt’s biographic metafictions negotiate the hermeneutic impetus of biography, as they examine the possibility of grasping another person’s otherness; the novels suggest that another individual’s identity can be understood through poetry and

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imagination. What is more, the novels imply that ‘[k]nowledge of the other finds expression in various literary genres’ (Schabert, 1990, p.2), since they draw on various generic patterns in order to explore the ways in which these culturally pre-formed systems of signification determine the other’s identity. If, as Lachmann argues, intertextual references include references to genres (Lachmann, 2004, p.174), the genre patterns incorporated in Byatt’s biographic metafictions are inscribed into the ‘memory space[s]’ of these texts (Lachmann, 2004, p.174). Byatt’s novels refer to a large number of genre patterns such as campus novel, detective story, Gothic novel, romance, fairy tale, epistolary novel, and fictional biography, to name but a very few.3 Among these genres those of romance, detective story, and Gothic novel are of particular interest here, since they serve not only as non-biographical forms of writing an individual’s past, but also as specific literary modes of detection. Each of these three generic patterns provides culturally coded knowledge of how not only to narrate but also to experience the search for and discovery of a secret lying hidden in the past.4 The motifs of search and discovery feature prominently in all of them. While the romance focuses on a quest motif (Jacobmeyer, 2000, p.39) that derives from the legend of the quest for the Holy Grail,5 the detective story is set upon solving a crime and finding the culprit (Drabble, 1985, p.269).6 The Gothic novel revolves around mysteries, focusing on ‘secrets from the past that haunt the characters’ (Hogle, 2002, p.2) and that they have to solve.7 With the help of these literary modes of detection, which are part of its intertextual depository, Possession takes up the search for its biographical others, namely the Victorian poets Randolph Henry Ash and Christabel LaMotte. Thus, it negotiates the various possibilities of constructing its biographical others’ ‘true’ identities which the literary genres of romance, detective story and Gothic novel offer. Right from the beginning, the genre of romance plays a decisive role in the novel;8 it is in fact linked to various forms of romance. Quoting Hawthorne’s famous definition of this genre from his preface to The House of the Seven Gables, the novel’s epigraph sets the stage for what is to come: as romance, Possession presents ‘the truth [of the human heart] under the circumstances . . . of the writer’s own choosing of creation’ in an ‘attempt to connect a bygone time with the very present that is flitting away from us’ (P, p.ii). The epigraph clarifies that the novel is concerned with both the ‘truth of the human heart’, which

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is represented by Ash’s and LaMotte’s secret love affair,9 and the past, namely the Victorian Age, and its influence on the present. Possession tells the story of a ‘Quest’ (P, p.328), as Roland10 tellingly refers to his and Maud’s biographical research. What is more, it is a twofold quest: Roland and Maud primarily search for evidence of Ash’s and LaMotte’s ‘true’ identities, and they also probe their own increasing feelings for each other (Jacobmeyer, 2000, p.48).11 This romance is supported by elements of detective fiction which surface in various passages of the novel. The detective story contained in Possession starts with Roland having discovered Ash’s letter drafts to an unknown woman and wanting to discover her identity: ‘Who? He must try to find out’ (P, p.21). From this point onwards, Possession turns into a ‘classic detective story’ (P, p.238) featuring, as Maud puts it, two ‘[l]iterary critics mak[ing] natural detectives’ (P, p.237), who look for ‘proof’ (P, p.236) of Ash’s and LaMotte’s love affair and who, again according to Maud, ask the classic question of detective fiction: ‘What is the secret?’ (P, p.238).12 The novel is repeatedly determined by various elements of detective fiction such as the finding of ‘clue[s]’ (P, p.237), an eavesdropping scene (P, p.438), and a case of ‘grave robbery’ (P, p.438). It also includes an ‘arrest scene’ rounded off in perfect detective style with the classic phrase ‘[y]ou’re surrounded’ (P, p.496), in which the ‘detectives’ Maud and Roland confront Mortimer Cropper, the novel’s ‘villain’ (P, p.438). Cropper fails to beat them to the last clue that finally leads to the discovery of Ash’s and LaMotte’s secret or, as one of the characters calls it, ‘the unmasking at the end of a detective story’ (P, p.483). Through this ‘arrest scene’ Possession is also linked to the genre of the Gothic novel. The figure of the villain as represented by Cropper is, for example, one of the stock characters of Gothic fiction.13 In fact, the whole scene is worthy of a Gothic novel. Not only is it set in a graveyard – next to mysterious abbeys and old castles, one of the favourite settings of the genre (Hogle, 2002, p.2) – but it also plays with typical generic elements such as ghosts and the savage forces of nature, thus evoking a highly ironized Gothic atmosphere: The wind moved in the graveyard like a creature from another dimension, trapped and screaming. . . . The air was full of noises. [Cropper] saw the yew tree throw up his arms and a huge gaping white mouth

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appear briefly in the reddish trunk . . . a dark figure spoke to the air. (P, pp.494–6; emphasis added) In true Gothic spirit, a secret from the past is literally unearthed in this scene. The villain Cropper robs Ash’s grave, digging up a box (P, p.494) which holds not only the love letters of Ash and his wife Ellen, but also LaMotte’s last letter to Ash from which the novel’s protagonists as well as its readers learn ‘the end of the story’ (P, p.498): they finally find the answer to the last question of ‘what became of [Ash’s and LaMotte’s] child’ (P, p.482), the offspring of the poets’ love affair, born in secret after their joint trip to Yorkshire (P, p.500). Christabel did not murder her daughter Maia as Ash suspected (P, p.500), but gave her into the care of her sister Sophia, who raised Maia as her own child (P, pp.499–500). Disclosing this secret, Roland and Maud not only construct Ash’s and LaMotte’s ‘true’ identities as lovers and parents, but they also succeed in establishing their own identities. Like a Gothic heroine, Maud discovers her origins, when she learns that she is directly descended from LaMotte (P, p.503), whilst Roland resembles the dispossessed Gothic hero who comes into his inheritance by finding his own voice as a poet (P, pp.472–5). At this point, the elements of Gothic fiction, romance and detective story merge, since the discovery of LaMotte’s last letter enables Roland and Maud, the literary ‘seekers and hunters’ (P, p.499), to fulfil their quest and solve the mystery that began with Roland finding Ash’s draft of his first letter to LaMotte (P, pp.5–6). As the preceding analysis has shown, Possession is indebted to modes of detection provided by several literary genres. These genres establish a frame in which the novel carries out its search for the identities of both its biographers and its biographees. Drawing upon the culturally pre-formed patterns of signification provided by romance, detective story, and Gothic novel, Possession constructs a mnemonic space within which another person’s identity can manifest itself.14 Due to the cultural knowledge it refers to, the novel can construct another person’s identity. It presents the search for identity as a challenge one can rise to by the means of literary genres. Like a romantic quest brought to a happy ending, like a crime successfully solved and a mystery disclosed, the biographical other is represented as a secret that – if successfully detected – offers the possibility of identity construction. Thus, Possession is an example of a literary text being able to mediate

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knowledge stored in cultural memory. Serving as a medium of cultural memory, the novel voices an assumption which, according to Schabert, ‘modern epistemology, unable to either prove or disprove it, is inclined to doubt’ (Schabert, 1990, p.1): it is possible – at least to a certain extent – to ‘acquire genuine knowledge of the other person’ (Schabert, 1990, p.1) with the help of genres as repositories of cultural memory. Byatt’s second biographic metafiction, The Biographer’s Tale is also indebted to literary genres and their modes of detection, but uses them in a subversive manner. The mode of detection most easily identified is that of the detective story. Phineas’s academic supervisor Ormerod Goode describes Phineas’s search as ‘[d]etective work’ (TBT, p.23). When speaking of his biographee, Phineas often uses expressions borrowed from detective fiction; he declares that he wants to disclose his biographee’s ‘true motives’ (TBT, p.23) and asks himself ‘[w]hat . . . Destry-Scholes [was] up to’ (TBT, p.165). Furthermore, he wants ‘to find . . . a smudged fingerprint . . . that would indicate the presence – in the past – of Destry-Scholes’ (TBT, p.109). With Destry-Scholes remaining elusive, however, Phineas is presented as an unsuccessful detective. His biographical search is presented as an unsolved – or even unsolvable – case, for Destry-Scholes simply ‘drowned and disappeared’ (TBT, p.248), leaving no clues as to his ‘whereabouts’ (TBT, p.256). As these aspects show, The Biographer’s Tale clearly draws on the generic patterns of detective fiction while at the same time subverting them. Employing a similar strategy of subversion, the novel uses the genre of romance as a second mode of detection. With Phineas regarding his search for Destry-Scholes as a ‘quest for a way to look at the world’ (TBT, p.167; emphasis added), the quest-motif of romance is woven into the novel. As it does with respect to the detective novel, The Biographer’s Tale, however, subverts this mode of detection. As Erin O’Connor puts it, the novel ‘is an academic anti-romance: . . . a chronicle of thwarted research, thwarted dreams, and thwarted career’ (O’Connor, 2002, p.380). The novel undermines the genre patterns of romance by alluding to Cervantes’ Don Quixote, and therefore, to a parody of romance.15 Both Destry-Scholes’ Bole biography as well as Bole’s text Journey Through the Seven Climates (TBT, p.11) refer to Don Quixote by featuring travelling protagonists: Bole’s protagonist is a seventeenth-century Turkish traveller called Evliya Chelebi (TBT,

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pp.9–10), and Destry-Scholes depicts Bole as a traveller of Europe, Russia, Turkey, Africa, and the Far East (TBT, pp.8–9). There are further parallels – like Cervantes, who claims that part of his Don Quixote is a translation of a manuscript he found in a bazaar,16 Elmer Bole ‘claimed to have found the manuscript of Evliya’s fifth volume . . . in an obscure curiosity shop in the Bazaar’ (TBT, p.11). Likewise, DestryScholes bases his account of Bole’s travels on several documents he claims to have found in antiquarian bookshops (TBT, p.17, p.18). Through these allusions to Don Quixote, The Biographer’s Tale subtly undermines the quest-motif of romance, thus setting the tone for Phineas’s futile biographical research. As regards possible knowledge of the other, The Biographer’s Tale is clearly a counterpoint to Possession. Subverting the literary modes of detection as provided by the detective story and the romance, The Biographer’s Tale disregards the culturally pre-formed systems of signification these genres provide. Presenting biographical research as an unsolved detective case and an unsuccessful quest, the novel anticipates biographical failure. It creates an insufficient mnemonic space within which the biographical other’s identity necessarily remains elusive. As outlined in the preceding paragraphs, Byatt’s biographic metafictions Possession and The Biographer’s Tale as well as her novel A Whistling Woman link the question of how literature can serve as an influential element in identity construction to the aspect of genre. A Whistling Woman represents female identity in the 1960s as being influenced by the culturally pre-formed patterns of signification provided by the Victorian female Bildungsroman. Inscribing this genre, which functions as a repository of cultural memory, into its intertextual depository, Byatt’s novel succeeds in linking its negotiations of female identity in the 1960s to both the past of British literature and the past of British culture in general. Possession and The Biographer’s Tale explore the possibilities of constructing identity with the help of the literary modes of detection stored in cultural memory and mediated through literature. The novels constitute mnemonic spaces within which the construction of identity is problematized. Identity, it thus turns out, can be constructed and deconstructed by genres serving as repositories of cultural memory.

Conclusion

The six novels by A. S. Byatt analysed in the preceding chapters are intricately concerned with negotiating the relations between individual identity, cultural memory, and literature. All of Byatt’s novels explore different concepts of identity. Possession and The Biographer’s Tale examine postmodern markers of identity such as insecurity, instability and the irrefutable difference of self and other, which is at the centre of individual identity. As biographic metafictions, these two novels investigate the hermeneutic impetus of biography, which is expressed in an individual’s attempt to understand another person’s identity. That is to say, Byatt’s two texts shed light on the relationship between the biographical self and its biographical other. The protagonists of Possession and The Biographer’s Tale immerse themselves in biographical research because they do not know who they are. It is their engagement with their biographees which eventually leads them to successfully develop their own identities. Hermeneutically speaking, in both novels, the biographical self enters into a relationship with the biographical other which eventually enables the self to immerse in a process of self-understanding. Setting out with the desire to know the other, the self eventually comes to know itself. In short, Possession and The Biographer’s Tale negotiate a relational concept of identity, presenting the self as reliant on the other in its process of identity formation. In The Biographer’s Tale as well as in Possession, the self depends on the other, for it is the self’s desire to comprehend the other that triggers processes of self-understanding which result in individual identity formation. Having their biographer-protagonists succeed in establishing their identities by searching for their 135

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biographical others, both novels argue that otherness is constitutive of selfhood since the self’s search for identity leads through a search for the other. The two novels thus employ what Ricoeur terms an indirect hermeneutics of the self (Ricoeur, 1992, p.17), which leads through the other even though the act of comprehending the other may turn out to be futile. The novels’ means of this hermeneutics of the self is literature in its capacity as a medium of cultural memory, which both novels celebrate as a privileged way of investigating not only the ‘truth’ of the other, but also that of the self. Possession and The Biographer’s Tale frame their indirect hermeneutics of the self as literary acts in which poetry and imagination open the way to understanding the other. The novels represent imagination as a fundamental, though ethically problematic prerequisite of comprehending another individual. Imagination turns out to be a means of negotiating the cultural-historical differences between biographical self and biographical other if it is subject to ethical considerations, which take into account another person’s unique otherness. Through their typically multi-generic structures, Byatt’s biographic metafictions also problematize the moments of textual transdifference in which the recalcitrant elements inherent in any hermeneutic enterprise temporarily unhinge the processes of producing meaning. Although Possession and The Biographer’s Tale depict identity as depending on the relationship between self and other, the male protagonist of each novel fashions himself into a separate, autonomous self. Thus, their identities rely on the ideological implications of liberal humanism and Romanticism, which means that they do not represent postmodern characters. Possession and the four novels in Byatt’s tetralogy conceptualize female identity as fundamentally different from male identity. In contrast to male identity, which is depicted as depending on a separate, autonomous male self in all of Byatt’s novels, female identity is presented as being determined by relationality. Although her texts outline separateness as a prerequisite of both male and female identity formation, they problematize the separateness of the female self and, therefore, autonomous female identity as a paradoxical construct. On the one hand, the characters of Christabel LaMotte, Maud Bailey, and Frederica Potter suggest that women need to develop separate selves in order to develop autonomous identities. On the other hand, these women’s separateness is constantly undermined, which is, according to the novels,

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due to two different reasons. Firstly, women are shown to be robbed of their separateness as soon as they enter marriage. The tetralogy argues that, in the English patriarchal societies of the Victorian Age and the mid-twentieth century, a married woman is regarded as part of her husband’s identity. As wife to her husband Nigel and mother to her son Leo, Frederica experiences the loss of her separate female identity. As criticized in the novels, patriarchal society expects women to give up their lives as separate, autonomous individuals by restricting them to the roles of mother and wife. In Possession, the Victorian Christabel LaMotte realizes that her only chance of defending her separateness and, with it, her autonomy lies in deciding not to marry, thus forgoing a life as mother and wife. In other words, Byatt’s novels represent female autonomy, which depends on the separateness of the female self, as incompatible with English patriarchal societies of the Victorian Age and the late 1950s/early 1960s. The last novel in the tetralogy, A Whistling Woman, claims that, by the 1970s, female life in middle-class Britain has changed, and female autonomy has become possible. As symbolized by the character of Frederica, who is represented as a ‘free woman’ having achieved financial, sexual, social, and intellectual independence, women are no longer bound to the traditional social roles of wife and mother. Byatt’s tetralogy tells of its protagonist’s struggle for autonomy during which she, the formerly idealistic and ambitious young girl, develops from a dependent wife into an independent, professionally successful woman and single mother. Thus, the four novels retrace, in the style of the Bildungsroman, the history of female legal and social emancipation from the early 1950s to the late 1960s. However, the tetralogy and Possession not only problematize female identity from a socio-historical perspective, but moreover maintain that separateness is, in fact, diametrically opposed to femininity. They argue that both female sexual desire and motherhood – which are both conceptualized as forming part of femininity – threaten female separateness. Not only is Frederica’s first orgasm presented as a loss of separate selfhood, but her relationship with her son Leo is metaphorically described as a symbiotic connection. Christabel also feels continually bound to her child; and Maud succeeds in establishing her identity at the same moment as she realizes her familial connection with Christabel. This means that Possession and the tetralogy underline bonding as an essential part of the female self, while

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they also emphasize the necessity of female separateness. Female identity is consequently conceptualized as a paradoxical construct aiming – and failing – to reconcile the female need for a separate, autonomous self and the diametrically opposed experience of bonding. The novels establish a gender difference between male and female identity. Feminist psychologists also emphasize such a difference, attributing it to the different processes of socialization which men and women undergo. In contrast, Byatt’s novels ‘naturalize’ it, suggesting that the paradox of female identity does not wholly result from the socio-historical situation of middle-class female life in late nineteenth/mid-twentieth-century Britain, but is in fact an inherent part of femininity. The same tendency to naturalize gender differences can be found at the bottom of the tetralogy’s discussion of the gendered dichotomy of body and mind, which traditionally connects man with mind and woman with matter. Byatt’s novels severely criticize this dichotomy, which goes back to seventeenth-century Neoplatonism, and attempt to abolish it by establishing the concept of the ‘thinking woman’ who is able to reconcile mind and body. However, Still Life and A Whistling Woman subtly reinforce the dichotomous conception of ‘male mind’ and ‘female body’ which the tetralogy actually aims to deconstruct. The two novels represent pregnancy and childbearing as threats to the female mind, since they suggest that the bodily processes which take place during these phases not only put the mind to sleep, but in fact eliminate it temporarily. By outlining these two biological functions of the female body as detrimental to the female mind, Byatt’s texts not only re-establish the gendered body–mind dichotomy, but in fact naturalize it as part of female biology. Although ‘historically correct’ in their depiction of female emancipation in the 1950s and 1960s, the four novels in Byatt’s tetralogy thus adhere to a binary model of naturalized gender difference which, as Schabert argues, is inadequate for the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, when both theoretical and fictional texts have already deconstructed the binary ‘two-sex model’ (Schabert, 2006, p.15, pp.43–6). What is more, the Byatt novels analysed in this book repeatedly link their discussion of identity to the aspect of memory in both its personal and collective dimensions. Possession is indebted to the Romantic concept of poetry, since it represents poetry as a form of selfexpression both storing and mediating a poet’s personal memories,

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which form part of his/her identity. In Byatt’s tetralogy, Frederica Potter’s personal memories serve as a means of processing her understanding of herself at different moments in her life. They also establish an intertextual framework among the novels, which Byatt uses in order to negotiate her paradoxical concept of the female self. As a form of collective memory, cultural memory is of particular importance for Byatt’s negotiations of individual identity. While all of her novels constitute imaginary museums exhibiting intertextual collections of cultural texts and objects of pictorial art which are part of the content of (not only) British cultural memory, Still Life refers to the popular figure of memory Vincent Van Gogh in order to negotiate Byatt’s identity as a neo-realist writer. Furthermore, Byatt’s novels represent their protagonists’ identities as depending on British cultural memory. Within this context, her fiction closely connects individual identity formation to a discussion of the function of literature within cultural memory. Generally speaking, her novels present literature as a force that forms and supports individual identity. In the tetralogy, identity is outlined as a narrative construct depending on literary texts for coherence and continuity. For Frederica Potter, literary texts provide models of identification and constitute an essential part of her identity. Claiming a prominent position among the texts which influence Frederica’s identity, Shakespeare’s work appears as an eminent cultural force that shapes and stabilizes identity formation. Since the novels contend that Shakespeare’s texts convey anthropological ‘truth’, they continue the canonization of his work and elevate it to the rank of what Aleida Assmann defines as cultural texts. Individual identity is thus conceptualized as depending on British cultural texts and, therefore, on British cultural memory. Possession supports the same concept, since Maud and Roland establish their identities through their biographical research, which they conduct with the help of texts that are, in the novel’s fictional world, within the same league as Shakespeare’s. Representing cultural texts and with them cultural memory as exerting normative and formative power on the processes of individual identity formation, Possession and Byatt’s tetralogy depend on the ideological implications of liberal humanism. It is, however, not only through cultural texts that Byatt’s tetralogy links identity to cultural memory. References to the English Renaissance and, therefore, to one of the key epochs of British cultural

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memory are legion in the four novels. They celebrate the Renaissance ideals of the ‘complete man’ and ‘universal’ education and represent Elizabeth I as the prevailing cultural paradigm determining independent female identity. Byatt makes use of this prominent figure of British cultural memory not only to underline the Elizabethan Age as the founding epoch of English national identity, but also to problematize the processes through which female sexual and social identity forms itself. The figure of the ‘Virgin Queen’ determines the representation of both Frederica’s sexual ignorance and sexual initiation. Elizabeth I further functions as a role model with regard to Frederica’s social identity as a woman fighting for independence. Historicizing Frederica’s struggle, the novels celebrate the figure of the English royal virgin as a stereotype of female life and identity while also indirectly criticizing the fact that, in the middle of the twentieth century, female independence is still determined by social restrictions similar to those of the patriarchal society of sixteenth-century England. All in all, Byatt’s fiction highlights a close relationship between individual identity and cultural memory with the latter forming a constitutive element of the former. To put it more precisely, her novels conceptualize individual identity as depending on a liberal-humanist ‘Bildungsgedächtnis’, that is, a collective frame of memory in which elements of British ‘high’ culture serve the educational and formative means of forming individual identity. Within this context, Byatt’s novels are engaged in negotiating the function of literature within cultural memory. As mentioned above, they ascribe importance to some of the ‘cultural texts’ of British cultural memory – Shakespeare’s work most prominent among them – and depict them as essential constituents of their protagonists’ identity formations. However, the role of literature within cultural memory is not restricted to that of cultural texts, which means that literature does not only function as part of the content of cultural memory. Instead, it is both presented and conceptualized as a medium of cultural memory in its own right. Due to their highly intertextual structures, the texts analysed here serve as imaginary museums exhibiting literary texts and verbal reconstructions of objects of pictorial art, which have been inscribed into British cultural memory. Representing these texts and paintings in the mnemonic spaces of their intertextual depositories, Byatt’s novels

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emphasize that it is due to intertextuality that literature functions as a medium of cultural memory. Furthermore, the four novels of the tetralogy qualify as memorial novels which both activate and constitute British cultural memory. With Shakespeare and the ‘Virgin Queen’, the novels draw on two figures of the Elizabethan Age that claim central positions in British cultural memory. The numerous references to English Renaissance literature and culture function as a foil against which Byatt’s tetralogy depicts both collective and individual identity in mid-twentiethcentury Britain as being intricately influenced by conceptions of the English Renaissance. Connecting post-war Britain to the Elizabethan Age and to Renaissance humanism, the novels not only retrace the British hopes for a second ‘Golden Age’ after the Second World War, but moreover establish a parallel between the 1960s and the Renaissance, which is the epoch in which the notion of male individual identity is traditionally said to have first emerged. According to the Burckhardtian reading, the Renaissance witnessed: the development of a universal capacity to think for yourself, in a fundamental way, as an individual: . . . as a free-standing, selfdetermined person with an identity and a name that is not simply a marker of family, birthplace or occupation, but is ‘proper’ – belonging to you alone. (Davies, 1997, p.16) As the 1960s are the time in which the tetralogy’s protagonist Frederica succeeds in fashioning herself into a ‘free woman’, the novels subtly sketch this decade as a kind of English female renaissance and, consequently, as a time when the conception of women as autonomous individuals started to gain socio-cultural acceptance. Not only the Elizabethan Age, but also the Victorian Age is of central importance in Byatt’s fiction. Both The Biographer’s Tale and Possession are neo-Victorian novels. Possession functions as a memorial novel, since it evokes a literary image of the Victorian Age, an epoch which, like the English Renaissance, forms part of British cultural memory. The text models its nineteenth-century protagonists on canonical Victorian poets and includes a large number of pastiche poems that mirror Victorian poetry; it echoes the epoch’s zeitgeist in its protagonists’ correspondence and sketches the Victorian Age as a

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time of individual self-possession and self-esteem. Thus, the novel successfully creates a feeling of authenticity that ‘convince[s] the reader that he/she is witnessing an immersion into the very realm [of the Victorian Age] that seems to be irretrievably moving away from us’ (Hoesterey, 2001, p.93). The novel represents the Victorian Age as an idealized age of humanism which provides stability and certainty for the twentieth-century protagonists’ search for their own identities. As a memorial novel, Possession activates British cultural memory, hence opening a way into the past, while it also contributes to constituting British cultural memory through the image of the Victorian Age it produces. In short, the novel is in itself a literary text serving as a medium of cultural memory. Along with Byatt’s tetralogy, Possession and The Biographer’s Tale also function as media of cultural memory, because they negotiate various concepts of the British history of ideas. Exploring the topic of identity within the context of Romanticism, Renaissance humanism, liberal humanism, Neoplatonism, postmodernism and the British history of women, Byatt’s novels firmly link their discussions of various notions of identity to the mental dimension of British cultural memory. What is more, Byatt’s novels represent literature as a medium of cultural memory by relating identity to the aspect of genre. The novel A Whistling Woman conceptualizes the genre of the Victorian female Bildungsroman as a repository of cultural memory providing culturally pre-formed patterns of signification, which influence midtwentieth-century constructions of female identity. Possession and The Biographer’s Tale investigate the possibilities of understanding an individual’s identity with the help of genre patterns. The culturally pre-formed patterns of signification provided by literary genres construct mnemonic spaces in which the novels negotiate genuinely literary processes of comprehension and non-comprehension, which either enable or prevent the construction of identity. Undermining the notion of objective, historical ‘truth’, the novels draw on genre patterns in order to investigate the ‘truth’ of the other, thus representing literature in its capacity to gain and convey knowledge about the past. Along the lines of Ricoeur, Byatt’s biographic metafictions make clear that the ‘truth’ of the other gained by and in literature qualifies as ‘attestation’ (Ricoeur, 1992, p.21), which is ‘the sort of certainty that hermeneutics may claim’ (1992, p.21); it is as a ‘kind of belief’ (1992, p.21) that does not offer ‘ultimate and self-founding

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knowledge’ (1992, p.21), but is of its ‘own special fragility’ (1992, p.22), permanently threatened by suspicion (1992, p.22). Within this context, literature is a medium of cultural memory insofar as it provides cultural strategies to understand and, therefore, to access the past of the other, thus leading to an improved understanding of the self in the present. Through Byatt’s fiction, literature appears as a medium that connects the individual to the cultural – or rather Cultural – past of Britain. In Still Life, Frederica’s father Bill claims that ‘[a] good memory [is] a priceless possession, an essential part of human culture. . . . It’s our link with our kind’ (SL, p.890). The six novels by A. S. Byatt analysed in this book represent literature as providing this link, conceptualizing it as a privileged medium of a liberal-humanist British cultural memory which exerts normative and formative power on individual identity.

Notes and References Introduction 1. All subsequent references are to the following editions: A. S. Byatt, Possession (London: Chatto & Windus, 1990). A. S. Byatt, The Biographer’s Tale (London: Chatto & Windus, 2000). 2. All subsequent references are to the following editions: A. S. Byatt, The Virgin in the Garden and Still Life: Two Novels by A. S. Byatt (London: Chatto & Windus, 2002); Babel Tower (London: Chatto & Windus, 1996); A Whistling Woman (London: Chatto & Windus, 2002). 3. For concise and helpful surveys of the socio-historical development in Britain in the 1950s and 1960s and the history of women in the UK from the late nineteenth to the late twentieth century cf. Schabert, 2006, pp.15–42. 4. Cf. Antor, 1998; Henke, 2001; Maack, 1993; Nadj, 2006; Nünning, 1994, 1998a, 1999a, 2000, 2005. 5. For an introduction to this concept cf. Chapter 2. 6. Cf. for example, Ricoeur, 1992, p.113 ff., 140 ff. as well as Gergen, 1998, and Gergen and Gergen, 1988. 7. ‘Memory’ Encyclopædia Britannica, 2007. Encyclopædia Britannica Online. 11 Apr. 2007 . 8. The image of memory as a storehouse goes back to Plato (Shoemaker, 1972, p.266). St. Augustine and Locke compare memory to a cave or a storehouse of ideas (Shoemaker, 1972, p.266). 9. On the difference between history and cultural memory cf. Angehrn, 2004. 10. First steps in this direction have been taken by the Graduiertenzentrum Kulturwissenschaften of the University of Gießen, Germany as well as by the International Comparative Literature Association. Cf., for example, Erll, 2003, 2004a/b/c, 2005; Erll and Nünning, 2004; Nünning, Gymnich and Sommer, 2006; van Gorp and Musarra-Schroeder, 2000; Neubauer and Geyer-Ryan, 2000.

Chapter 1 1. Byatt’s novels discussed here are set in the last five decades of the twentieth century. Possession is set in the late 1980s, The Biographer’s Tale in the 1990s, and Byatt’s tetralogy covers the years 1952 to 1980. 2. The term ‘identity’ is used for numerous and heterogeneous concepts (Henrich, 1979, p.133). After entering the discourses of psychology at

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the end of the nineteenth century through the work of William James (Henrich, 1979, p.134), it has by now been adopted by disciplines as various as theology, psychoanalysis, psychology, social psychology, sociology, pedagogy, ethnology, social and cultural anthropology, literary studies, philosophy, cultural studies, and history (Stryker, 1992, p.871; Straub, 2004, p.277). Also cf. Marquard, 1979, p.249 and p.359. ‘Individual’ is only one of the three key terms that regularly come up when identity theories turn to the actual human being whose identity they are concerned with. The other two terms often to be found in theoretical literature are ‘subject’ and ‘person’. With Jürgen Habermas, a subject is defined as a person ‘who is capable of speech and action’ (Habermas, 1992, p.168) while an individual is a subject ‘who in the face of other dialogue participants presents and, if necessary, justifies him/herself as an irreplaceable and distinctive person’ (Habermas, 1992, p.168). As Annemarie Pieper delineates it, an individual experiences her/himself as a person in the environment of social communities (Pieper 1973, p.736). Manfred Frank differentiates between ‘subject’, ‘individual’, and ‘person’ by relating these terms to self-consciousness. According to his definition, a subject is a general self-consciousness whereas a person is a particular self-consciousness (Frank, 1988, p.9). Last, but not least, an individual is a single self-consciousness (Frank, 1988, p.9). In this book, my interest lies in exploring the question of identity rather than in conceptualizing individuality, subjectivity or personhood. Therefore, I follow Jürgen Straub (1991, p.54, p.60 endnote 1) in using ‘subject’, ‘person’, and ‘individual’ as synonymical non-conceptual terms meant to denote human beings as the agents of identity negotiation. The use of ‘self’ and ‘-selves’ in Straub’s and Deaux’s definitions points towards the term ‘self’, which is as vague as that of ‘identity’ and which is often used as a synonym (e.g. Marquard, 1979, p.349 and Kellner 1993, p.142). The term ‘self’ as I use it here does not have any metaphysical implications, but is used in the sense of Ricoeur’s hermeneutics of the self, which is ‘situated beyond the alternative of the [Cartesian] cogito and the [Nietzschean] anticogito’ (Ricoeur, 1992, p.16). Phineas does not enjoy sharing human company until he comes to work at the travel agency Puck’s Girdle (TBT, p.122). For more detailed information about postmodern notions of identity cf. Brooker, 2003, p.131; Kellner, 1993, p.143; Keupp, 2001, p.245; Straub, 2004, p.280. Also cf. Straub, 1991, p.50. For a helpful analysis of the social landscapes of such societies cf. Giddens, 1997, pp.10–34. The processes of identity formation of (post)modernity differ from those of pre-modern times. In the pre-modern societies of what is now called the Western world, a person’s identity was ‘a given social fact’ (Luckmann, 1979, p.294) determined by stable social structures and a generally binding religious world picture (Glomb, 1997, p.6, 2004, p.277). As Kellner

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puts it, pre-modern ‘[i]dentity was a function of predefined social roles and a traditional system of myths which provided orientation and religious sanctions to one’s place in the world, while rigorously circumscribing the realm of thought and behaviour’ (Kellner, 1993, p.141). This began to change when, at the onset of modernity, identity gradually came to be regarded as being open to negotiation. Although early modern negotiations of identity were still framed by strictly circumscribed sets of social norms and roles in early modernity (Greenblatt, 1980, pp.1–2) and although they were by no means a general social phenomenon since the possibility of negotiating one’s identity was reserved for a social elite (Greenblatt, 1980, p.3; Kellner, 1993, p.141), the idea that individual identity is socially constructed is a ‘fundamentally modern’ one (Wagner, 1994, p.157). Modern identities are thus ‘more mobile, multiple, personal, self-reflexive, and subject to change and innovation’ (Kellner, 1993, p.141) than pre-modern ones. As Straub argues, this does not, however, imply that individuals are totally free to choose their identities since identity is always negotiated within a specific socio-cultural context (Straub, 2004, p.280). Not only Possession, but all of Byatt’s novels often use italics, which are always given as they appear in the texts. For a different reading of The Biographer’s Tale cf. Merle Tönnies’ article ‘Radicalising Postmodern Biofictions: British Fictional Autobiography of the Twenty-First Century’ (2006). According to her, Byatt’s novel defies the possibility of identity formation (Tönnies, 2006, pp.311–13). She argues that Phineas’s ‘self dissolves in the act of writing, and he vainly tries to reassert himself as “me, myself” (BT, p.200), “the ur-l of this document” (BT, p.162)’ (Tönnies, 2006, p.311). However, she disregards the affirmative effect that Phineas’s identification with Destry-Scholes eventually has on the processes of his own identity formation. As Peter Brooker points out, the term ‘other’ is rooted in the philosophy of G. W. Hegel who defines the relation of master and slaves as one of mutual interdependence (Brooker, 2003, p.183). It goes without saying that the binary opposition of self and other is of central importance in many postmodern theoretical concepts of psychoanalysis, postcolonial theory, cultural studies, gender studies, and social interactionism (cf., for example, Brooker, 2003, pp.183–5; Feldmann, 2004; Feldmann & Schülting, 2004a; and Sexton, 1993).

Chapter 2 1. In his influential study Literary Biography, Leon Edel states that ‘there seems to be considerable evidence that he [the biographer] is seeking to know the life of another in order to better understand himself’ (Edel, 1973, p.11). Ina Schabert argues along the same lines by pointing out that ‘[a]ll knowledge of another person is also knowledge about oneself; and all


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writings representing the other also reveal the writer himself’ (Schabert, 1990, p.3). The generic status of both Possession and The Biographer’s Tale has been a point of discussion among scholars ever since the publication of the novels. While some critics conceive of Possession as a (postmodern) romance (e.g. Jacobmeyer, 2000, p.5) or as an ‘artist-novel’ (Franken, 1997, p.155), others rather vaguely describe it as ‘[p]ostmodern [m]oral [f]iction’ (Bronfen, 1996, p.117) or as a ‘pastiche of a postmodern novel’ (Broich 1996, p.633). Still others see Possession as a historical novel of some kind, terming it ‘retro-Victorian fiction’ (Shuttleworth, 1998, p.254), a ‘neo-Victorian novel’ (Shiller, 1997, p.538, p.540), or a postmodern historiographic novel (Antor, 1998, p.428). Annegret Maack and Jon Thiem however stress the element of biography that can be found in Possession, identifying the novel as an advanced fictional biography (Maack, 1993, p.183; also cf. Nünning, 1995, vol. I, p.307) or regarding it as ‘the most achieved example’ of ‘the novel of biographical quest, or bioquest novel’ (Thiem, 2000, p.426, p.421). Nünning describes Possession as ‘postmodernist biofiction’ (Nünning, 1999a, p.45) containing elements of biographic metafiction (Nünning, 1993, p.59). He regards The Biographer’s Tale as fictional metabiography (Nünning, 2005, pp.198– 203), while Merle Tönnies identifies the novel as postmodern ‘fictional autobiograph[y]’ (Tönnies, 2006, p.305). Some scholars regard Flaubert’s Parrot and Chatterton as fictional biographies rather than biographic metafiction (cf. Schabert, 1990, p.203; Maack, 1993, p.179). Nünning, however, convincingly identifies Flaubert’s Parrot as biographic metafiction (Nünning, 1998b, pp.148–67; Nünning, 1999a). Although metafiction and postmodernism are often used as synonyms, metafiction is not restricted to postmodern literature (Wolf, 2004, p.448). Metafiction already features prominently in Cervantes’ Don Quixote (1605, 1615), Fielding’s Tom Jones (1749), and Sterne’s Tristram Shandy (1760–70) (Wolf, 2004, p.448). For a concise summary of metafiction, its various forms, and its functions cf. Wolf, 2004, pp.447–8. In her groundbreaking study A Poetics of Postmodernism, Linda Hutcheon coins the term ‘historiographic metafiction’ (Hutcheon, 1988, p.5) to describe ‘those well-known and popular novels which are both intensively self-reflexive and yet paradoxically also lay claim to historical events and personages’ (Hutcheon, 1988, p.5). Other critics have suggested alternative terms such as ‘postmodernist revisionist historical novel’ (McHale, 1987, p.90) and ‘self-reflexive historical novel’ (Wesseling, 1991, p.90), but it is Hutcheon’s term that literary theorists have generally accepted, even if some of them have criticized it as too broad a term (Imhof, 1991, pp.340–2; Nünning, 1999b, p.23). I use the term ‘biographic metafiction’ in analogy to Hutcheon’s term ‘historiographic metafiction’. Other scholars have introduced alternative terms such as ‘fictional biography’ (Schabert, 1990, p.4), ‘bioquest novels’ (Thiem, 2000, p.421), ‘biofictions’

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(Middeke, 1999, p.3), and ‘new fiction biograph[y]’ (Jacobs, 1986, p.4) in order to label postmodern biographic fiction. In the following, I employ the term ‘biographic metafiction’ even when referring to scholars who use different terms. Postmodern theorists such as Hayden White and Louis O. Mink have convincingly argued that history by no means provides an objective and, therefore, ‘truthful’ account of the past. History, White has pointed out, is a poietic construct based on narrative processes; it is a ‘verbal artefact’ (White, 1973, p.X) which results from the essentially ‘[poetic] process of fusing events . . . into comprehensible totality’ (White, 1976, p.28). Since historical ‘narrative . . . is a product of imaginative construction’ (Mink, 1978, p.145), it is determined by the unreliability of language, the historians’ bias and their selective performance. Objective historical ‘truth’ therefore does not exist. There are, as Linda Hutcheon has claimed, ‘only truths in the plural, and never one Truth’ (Hutcheon, 1988, p.109). Cf. Hutcheon, 1988; McHale, 1987; Nünning, 1993; and especially Nünning, 1995. For detailed constructivist readings of, for example, Barnes’s Flaubert’s Parrot, Ackroyd’s Chatterton, and Unsworth’s Losing Nelson cf. Antor, 1998, pp.434–7; Henke, 2001; Maack, 1993; Nadj, 2006; Nünning, 1994; Nünning, 1998a; Nünning, 1999a; Scott, 1990. Nünning has introduced a typology for both postmodern historical and biographical fiction. He differentiates between the following five types of postmodern historical fiction: (1) the documentary historical novel, (2) the realistic historical novel, (3) the revisionist historical novel, (4) the metahistorical novel, and (5) historiographic metafiction (Nünning, 1995, vol. I, pp.256–8; Nünning, 1999b, pp.25–32). Although he points out that each of them fulfils different functions (Nünning, 1995, vol. I, pp.256–9; 1999b, pp.34–7), his typology does not easily lend itself to an analysis of literature. It promises to establish terminological unambigiousness, but it fails to keep this promise when put to the test. The following example clearly shows the difficulties his typology causes. Nünning argues that metahistorical novels serve as a means of metahistoriographic self-reflection (Nünning, 1999b, p.36) although he also claims that metahistoriographic self-reflection is the main function of historiographic metafiction (Nünning, 1999b, p.37). He solves this obvious contradiction by contending that metahistoriographic self-reflections are of less importance in metahistorical novels than the other functions that he ascribes to this type of postmodern historical fiction, namely transmitting cultural memory, creating historical meaning, and constructing collective identity (Nünning, 1999b, p.36). Moreover, he argues that it is merely the degree of metahistoriographic self-reflection found in a novel which is responsible for identifying the text as either a metahistorical novel or as historiographic metafiction (Nünning, 1995, vol. I, p.286). Metahistoriographic


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self-reflections can doubtless be found in various degrees in postmodern historical fiction, but it is highly questionable whether a mere quantitative element can serve as a marker of generic difference. Nünning’s typology of postmodern biographical fiction raises similar problems. He proposes differentiating between the following four types of postmodern biographical fiction: (1) documentary fictional biography, (2) realistic fictional biography, (3) revisionist fictional biography, (4) biographic metafiction/(meta)fictional metabiography (Nünning, 2000, pp.26–7). In his most recent article on this topic, he introduces biographic metafiction and (meta)fictional metabiography as two different categories (Nünning, 2005, p.201). It is obvious that Nünning proposes a terminology that is too differentiated and unwieldy to be of any real use in literary analysis. For a (by no means comprehensive) list of intertextual references in Possession and The Biographer’s Tale cf. Chapter 10 of this study. Cf., for example, Horatschek, 1999, p.50; Jacobmeyer, 2000, p.35; Nünning, 1995, vol. II, p.343; Peters, 2003, p.233. Byatt herself comments on the generic diversity of Possession by pointing out that her novel includes features of biographical writing, the fairy tale, the detective story, the mediaeval verse Romance, the historical Romance, the romantic novel, the campus novel, the epistolary novel, Victorian omniscient narration, and the forged manuscript novel (Byatt, 2000, p.48). For more detailed constructivist analyses of The Biographer’s Tale cf. Boccardi, 2001; Nünning, 2005, pp.203–7, and especially Nadj, 2006, pp.297–317. Destry-Scholes is said to have been born in a small town in Yorkshire on 4 July 1925, but this information is unreliable. As Destry-Scholes’ birth name had been Percival Scholes Destry, which he later changed into Scholes Destry-Scholes (TBT, p.24), a date of birth cannot be linked to the name Scholes Destry-Scholes. Phineas thinks it reasonable to assume that these two names lead to one and the same man (TBT, p.24), but he is unable to actually prove this assumption. Destry-Scholes’ death is even more mysterious. Although circumstances strongly suggest that Destry-Scholes drowned, his body has never been found and, therefore, no verifiable proof of his death exists (TBT, p.22). Each of Phineas’s efforts to find factual evidence of Scholes Destry-Scholes proves to be completely unsuccessful. He travels to Destry-Scholes’ home town Pontefract (TBT, p.30), but when he stands in front of the house his biographee grew up in he realizes that it does not offer him any clues as to his biographee’s identity. Neither this ‘identity-less’ (TBT, p.35) dwelling nor the ‘blank façade’ (TBT, p.34) of a hotel Destry-Scholes apparently stayed at for a while allow Phineas to draw any conclusion concerning his biographee. The same goes for objects which once belonged to DestryScholes. Neither a pair of old shoes (TBT, p.134), a bag of glass marbles, nor a small notebook (TBT, p.137) provide any information about DestryScholes.

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15. Schabert’s study on fictional biography In Quest for the Other Person is the only exception since it ‘enquires into the ways in which one individual, the writer, may comprehend, and express in writing, another individual . . .’ (Schabert, 1990, p.1). 16. Martina Wagner-Egelhaaf defines hermeneutics as ‘the theory of comprehending the other, of comprehending not only the world or a text, but also the self insofar as human beings confront themselves as objects of reflection, that is, as others’ (Wagner-Egelhaaf, 2000, p.19). In contrast to autobiography, which focuses on the self as other (Wagner-Egelhaaf, 2000, pp.19–26), biography is concerned with understanding another individual as other (Schabert, 1990, p.1). 17. For Schabert’s analysis of Flaubert’s Parrot cf. Schabert, 1990, pp.203–15. 18. Such misapprehension occurs in Possession when Maud construes Christabel LaMotte’s poem on spilt milk (P, pp.381–2) as evidence that Christabel might have been involved in the death of Maia, her and Ash’s daughter (P, p.422). Because of this poem, Maud wrongly suspects that Christabel murdered her child (P, pp.422–33). 19. Ever since the publication of Byatt’s novel in 1990, scholars have debated the question of whether or not Possession is a postmodern text. Some regard the novel as a decidedly postmodern text, whereas others argue that it rather qualifies as a traditionally modern text, and again others conceive of it as an ambivalent text combining traits of both modernism and postmodernism. Jane Campbell provides a helpful survey of the critical debate up to the year 2000 (Campbell, 2004, pp.271–3). For more recent assessments of Possession as a postmodern text cf. Hoesterey, 2001, p.94; Rippl, 2002, p.90; and Nünning, 2005, p.196. On Possession as an ambivalent text cf. Rippl, who argues that not only Possession, but Byatt’s whole fictional work both ‘participate[s] in a postmodern mode of writing . . . [and] belong[s] to a realistic tradition’ (Rippl, 2000, p.527). 20. It should be noted that the present study does not confuse poststructuralism with postmodernism. However, many postmodern novels take into account the insights of poststructuralist theory, which is why poststructuralism here comes under the aspect of postmodernism. For a short overview of the differences between postmodernism and poststructuralism cf. Sim, 2001, p.ix; Berressem, 2004, pp.544–6; Mayer, 2004, pp.243–4. 21. Jürgen Habermas also sees the relationship between the self and the other as determined by ethical implications. He argues that ‘[t]he self of an ethical self-understanding is dependent upon recognition by addressees because it generates itself as a response to the demands of an other in the first place’ (Habermas 1992, p.170). 22. For a more detailed introduction to Levinas’s philosophy of ethics cf. Critchley, 1992 and 2002 as well as Waldenfels, 1996. 23. Cropper minutely documents every tiny detail of Ash’s life, ranging from the poet’s daily appointments, his hiking tours and his journeys throughout Europe, to his behaviour towards servants and his antipathy towards


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flatterers (P, p.99). Furthermore, Cropper is an avid – and indeed ruthless – collector of Ash’s possessions, who owns the poet’s signet ring (P, p.93), his pocket watch (P, p.96), and large parts of his correspondence (P, p.96). For a more detailed analysis of the ethical implications of biography in Possession and The Biographer’s Tale cf. Steveker, 2007. Cf., for example, Ricoeur, 1999 for a philosophical perspective on critical hermeneutics and Soeffner, 2004 as well as Srubar et al., 2005 for a selection of approaches from sociology and cultural studies. Cf. Breinig & Lösch, 2002. Cf. Nünning 1995, vol. ll, pp.225–52; Nünning 1998a, p.164; Nünning 1999a, p.41; Nünning 2005, p.199. In an article on Flaubert’s Parrot, James B. Scott observes that the ‘transgeneric structure [of the novel] . . . leaves the reader in [a] rhizome space . . . free from the delusions of fixed meaning’ (Scott, 1990, p.65). Cf. Breinig and Lösch, who argue that the term transdifference ‘means neither synthesis, nor syncretist combination, nor deconstruction’ (Breinig & Lösch, 2006, p.115). According to current theoretical definitions, biographic metafiction is conceived of as a hybrid genre (Nünning, 1993, p.69; 1994, p.31; 1998a, p.155; 2000, p.15). The concept of hybridity, however, does not do justice to the specific characteristic of biographic metafiction. Since hybridity conceptualizes a ‘third Space’ which causes differences to dissolve, it cannot take into consideration those moments created in biographic metafiction that both reject and retain the construction of binary differences. This chapter provides information about a meeting between Ash and his daughter which the biographers have no means of obtaining as it is not recorded (P, p.508). Hence, the novel argues that no matter how diligent the research and how successful the search complete knowledge of the biographical other can never be gained.

Chapter 3 1. The Potters are described as a thoroughly literary family (VG, p.153). Except for Marcus, they are a ‘verbal lot . . . Words helped them’ (SL, p.594). And all the Potters, again except for Marcus, hold degrees in English literature. 2. For Frederica’s narrative identity also cf. Uhsadel, 2005, pp.160–3. 3. Ricoeur outlines his concept of narrative identity in detail in Chapters 5–7 of Oneself as Another (Ricoeur, 1992, pp.133–203). 4. Having said that, one must not forget that the narrative paradigm is, above all, a concept prevalent in Western cultures, which have been exposed to ‘many centuries of cultural development . . . dominated by print-culture,

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by narrative, by the novel’ (Schlaeger, 2006, p.429). Cf. Gergen and Gergen who likewise emphasize the importance of narrativity in Western culture (Gergen & Gergen, 1988, p.17). 5. Neglecting to include Marcus Potter in her analysis of individual identity in the tetralogy, Uhsadel argues that Byatt’s concept of identity is exclusively narrative (Uhsadel, 2005, pp.160–3). 6. Marcus is not the only non-narrative character in Byatt’s tetralogy. Further examples of non-narrative identity are the twins John and Paul Ottokar, who grew up without ‘ordinary’ language, communicating with each other through a mathematical sign language and through music (BT, p.290, WW, p.59).

Chapter 4 1. Cf. Catherine Belsey, who argues that ‘it is the interest of this ideology [liberal humanism] . . . to represent the individual as a free, unified, autonomous subjectivity’ (Belsey, 1980, p.67). 2. For the Romantic concept of the poet as a male genius cf. Schabert, 1997, pp.371–88. Also cf. Mellor, who offers a helpful analysis of how the self is conceptualized in masculine Romanticist writing (Mellor, 1993, pp.144–54). 3. For a full analysis of Marcus as ‘a Romantic seer – but with a difference’ (Plotz, 2001, p.34) cf. Plotz, 2001, pp.33–43. 4. According to Michael Nobel, the structure of Babel Tower resembles Robert Fludd’s Renaissance memory theatre Theatrum Orbi (Noble, 2001, p.62). He argues that the five different openings of Byatt’s novel serve functions similar to those of the five different doors in Fludd’s memory theatre (Noble, 2001, pp.63–73). 5. Ann Hulbert calls the character Leonora Stern a ‘most merciless satire’ (Hulbert, 1993, p.58) on feminism in general and on French feminist literary theory in particular. For the parody of feminist criticism in Possession cf. Schmid, 1996a, pp.127–8. 6. The Biographer’s Tale differs from Byatt’s other novels in as much as it is her first novel featuring a single male protagonist (Campbell, 2004, p.218). Hence, it will not be included in the following discussion focusing on female identity in Byatt’s novels. 7. Both Jane Campbell and Renate Brosch identify the tetralogy as examples of the Bildungsroman (Brosch, 1999, p.49; Campbell, 2004, p.61). Katharina Uhsadel (2005) provides the first in-depth analysis of Byatt’s tetralogy as belonging to the genre of the female Bildungsroman. 8. Also cf. Byatt’s article ‘Memory and the Making of Fiction’ where she argues that it was above all Elizabeth’s separateness that guaranteed her survival (Byatt, 1998, p.62). 9. As this passage is devoted to a discussion of sexuality as experienced by women, I always refer to female sexuality/female sexual desire when using the terms ‘sexuality’ and ‘sexual desire’. Although various male characters


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are shown to have sex and to experience desire throughout the tetralogy, the novels concentrate on the female perspective. In the same interview, Byatt also relates the feminist potential of her character Christabel LaMotte to her deconstruction of male Christian mythology: ‘I remember thinking, of course, she would write a poem on spilt milk. Now that is a feminist poem at its deepest level. It is really a blasphemous feminist poem because it’s set against the male Christ figure who in every icon pours forth blood and water from his side which feed the people, and here is a woman who has lost her child and is expressing this useless milk . . . The poem says, this flow does not redeem, and Christabel feels excluded from the whole structure of Christianity . . . Christabel is actually inventing a whole feminist religion’ (Byatt, 1994, pp.63–4). Also cf. Buxton, who argues that the ideology of Possession is a ‘heterosexual, humanist one’ (Buxton, 1996, p.216). In the following, the terms ‘sexual desire’ and ‘desire’ always imply that desire has been fulfilled by achieving orgasm, if not otherwise stated. Frederica experiences a short spell of celibacy when her lover John moves from London to Yorkshire (WW, p.148). For further analysis of Christabel’s cottage cf. Chapter 5 of this book.

Chapter 5 1. Referring to the notions of independence and self-determination, individual autonomy is a conception of liberal humanism which has been severely criticized by poststructuralist theorists (Brooker, 2003, p.241). For example, Michel Foucault and Jacques Lacan argue that individual autonomy does not exist since the individual – or, to use Foucault’s term, the subject – is determined by the discourses of power that pervade each society (Clarke, 1993, pp.318–20) as well as by her/his unconscious desires, which escape the individual’s control (Jirgens, 1993, pp.396–9). In the context of individual identity formation, autonomy is nowadays conceptualized as necessarily partial or ‘de-centred’ (Straub, 2004, p.290) since it moves between the two poles of absolute autonomy and absolute heteronomy, neither of which can be realized socially (Straub, 2004, pp.289–90). 2. In her introduction to the 1991 Vintage edition of her first novel The Shadow of the Sun, Byatt even goes so far as to assert that not only the three texts mentioned above, but all of her novels focus on female art, female thought and female vision (Byatt, 1991, p.xiv). For an analysis of The Shadow of the Sun and The Game as female artist novels cf. Franken, 2001, pp.33–81. 3. For the tradition of this myth and its literary development cf. Frenzel, 1963a and also Lundt, 1991, pp.41–184. 4. For example, Campbell, 2004, pp.112–21; Chinn, 2001; Franken, 2001, pp.93–8; Maack, 1999; Schmid, 1996a, pp.120–4.

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5. For more detailed discussions of the parallels between Maud, LaMotte and Melusina cf. the bibliographical information provided in the preceding footnote. 6. Schmid characterizes Christabel as a woman poet living in an ‘ivory tower’ (Schmid, 1996a, p.122), yet she neglects to discuss the spatial implication of this metaphor. 7. Roland is repeatedly described as boring, weak and unsuccessful (P, p.128, p.141, p.426). He thus differs from other male characters in Possession such as Mortimer Cropper, Fergus Woolf, Euan MacIntyre, and James Blackadder, who are characterized as stereotypically successful and assertive men of the late twentieth century. 8. Byatt’s tetralogy covers the years 1952 to 1980, but it does not do so in a linear narrative. The Virgin in the Garden is divided into two time levels, that of the prologue (1968) and that of the main text (1952–53). Still Life opens with a prologue set in the year 1980, while the main body of the text covers the years 1953–57. As Jane Campbell points out, the prologue to Still Life ‘is the chronological end of the quartet; Babel Tower and A Whistling Woman (both without prologues) bring the story only to 1970’ (Campbell, 2004, p.68). 9. Uhsadel claims that Frederica and Stephanie represent two diametrically opposed models of female life (2005, p.94). 10. This idea is symbolized by the women straining themselves to reach the display of bridal crowns (VG, p.252) which, when placed upon their heads, afford them a ‘new self, new world’ (VG, p.253).

Chapter 6 1. For more information about classical Neoplatonism and its seventeenthcentury followers cf. Meinhardt, 1984, Gombocz, 1997; Hutton, 2001. 2. Cf., for example, VG, pp.111–13, SL, p.793, BT, p.280, WW, pp.144–5, WW, p.299. 3. This is, of course, a reference to Wordsworth’s preface to the Lyrical Ballads where Wordsworth defines a poet as a ‘man speaking to men’ (Wordsworth, 2000, p.246). 4. Although the tetralogy is concerned with the Neoplatonic dichotomy of body and mind and the gender difference resulting from it, it would oversimplify matters to assume that it represents all men as creatures of the mind. For example, Nigel is by no means associated with the life of the mind. On the contrary, he is described as being full of bodily life (SL, p.993) and as a man without words (BT, p.126). Hence, he functions as a counterpart to Frederica. Other male characters such as Alexander Wedderburn (Frederica’s first love), Raphael Faber (Frederica’s second love, a poet and a Cambridge don), and Vincent Hodgkiss (a philosopher at the University of North Yorkshire) are, however, associated with the mind.


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Chapter 7 1. The close conceptual connection between memory and individual identity has a long tradition in Western philosophy, with both John Locke and David Hume, for example, conceiving of memory as a prerequisite of individual identity (Locke, 1975, p.336; Hume, 1964, p.247). 2. In her article ‘Spectres of the Past: A. S. Byatt’s Victorian Ghost Stories’, Louisa Hadley links the aspect of ghosts to that of literature, arguing that Possession conceptualizes ‘literature as a form of resurrection’ (Hadley, 2003, p.92). 3. For a different reading of the similarities between Greenblatt’s ‘desire to speak with the dead’ (Greenblatt, 1988, p.1) and Byatt’s conception of her fictional poets’ voices cf. Gauthier, 2006, pp.74–5. 4. Halbwachs delineates his theory of collective memory in three works: Les Cadres Sociaux de la Mémoire (1925), La Mémoire Collective (published posthumously in 1950) and La Topographie Légendaire des Évangiles en Terre Sainte (1941). 5. Noa Gedi and Yigal Elam, for example, point out that Halbwachs does not explain how and why collective memories are formed (Gedi & Elam, 1996, p.37). Furthermore, Gerald Echterhoff and Martin Saar state that Halbwachs neglects to make clear where he locates collective memories (Echterhoff & Saar, 2002, p.29). Martin Zierold highlights the conceptual inconsistencies of Halbwachs’s theory. Zierold criticizes the fact that Halbwachs, on the one hand, uses the term ‘collective memory’ as a metaphor in order to describe the relationship between individual memories and their social frames of reference, while, on the other hand, ascribing ontological existence to the memories of groups (Zierold, 2006, p.66). 6. For a detailed analysis of these different social groups and their collective memories cf. Halbwachs, 1992, pp.52–167. 7. However, Halbwachs makes amends for this omission in his later work La Topographie Légendaire des Évangiles en Terre Sainte (1941). In this study, he ascribes mnemonic power to cultural objects, thus aiming to explain why collective memories are not exclusively bound to the narrow time frame of personal communication. 8. Jan Assmann uses the term ‘communicative memory’ to describe the form of memory which Halbwachs terms ‘mémoire collective’ (collective memory). 9. Between these two periods of the past lies what the ethnologist Jan Vansina terms the ‘floating gap’ (Vansina, 1985, p.24). This gap covers a time in the past which an oral society only rarely remembers, as it lies between its distant and its recent past. The gap is of a dynamic nature, ‘[b]ecause the limit one reaches in time reckoning moves with the passage of generations’ (Vansina, 1985, p.24). Although the members of a given society are not aware of the floating gap, scholars definitely notice it (Vansina, 1985, pp.23–4). In the context of collective memory, however, it is not the floating gap that is of interest to scholars, but rather

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10.

11.

12.

13.

14.


the fact that the various social modes of memory are organized without society being aware of the gap (J. Assmann, 1997, p.49). According to Jan Assmann, a society has the impression that its recent past directly borders on its distant past (J. Assmann, 1997, p.49). Jan Assmann first introduced the concept of cultural memory in his article ‘Kollektives Gedächntis und kulturelle Identität’ (1988), which he re-published in an English translation in 1995 (‘Collective Memory and Cultural Identity’). All further references will be to the English version of this article. Although both Jan and Aleida Assmann have each published widely on this topic, the concept of cultural memory can be regarded as their joint scholarly effort (J. Assmann, 2002c, p.278, endnote 1). Consequently, I ascribe the concept to both of them by using the plural form ‘the Assmanns’ most of the time. Covering the period of a society’s recent past, communicative memory is also the subject matter of oral history (J. Assmann, 1995, p.126; 1997, p.51). However, this does not imply that only oral societies develop communicative memories, because literate societies have communicative memories, too (J. Assmann, 1997, p.59). According to Jan Assmann, the difference between these two social modes lies instead in the different versions of their distant pasts which they create. While oral societies refer to their mythical origins as their distant past, literate societies construct their distant past out of historical facts and events (J. Assmann, 1997, p.51). In their early work on cultural memory, the Assmanns only differentiate between two forms of collective memory, namely communicative memory and cultural memory (cf. esp. Assmann & Assmann, 1994; J. Assmann, 1995 and 1997). In their more recent publications, however, they attempt to further differentiate their theory of memory, introducing the two additional concepts of generational memory and ‘kollektives Gedächtnis’ (collective memory), which is however not to be confused with Halbwachs’s mémoire collective (A. Assmann, 2002; J. Assmann, 2002c). Critics such as Siegfried Wiedenhofer (2002, p.268) and Peter Fritzsche (2002, p.252) reproach the Assmanns for applying far too narrow a conception of culture by defining it as memory. Indeed, Jan Assmann claims that ‘[c]ulture is memory’ (2002b, p.239), but he is also aware of the fact that memory is only one of the many aspects of culture (2002b, p.273). For Cassirer’s concept of symbols also cf. Cassirer, 1972, 1977b.

Chapter 8 1. Also cf. Uhsadel, 2005, p.83. 2. As Greenblatt points out, this is not to say that the individual was then free to fashion her/his identity outside social norms (Greenblatt, 1980, p.162). However, with feudalism giving way to absolutism, traditional models of identity crumbled as social mobility increased – at least for such educated


3. 4.

5.

6.

7.

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middle-class men as More, Spenser, and Shakespeare (Greenblatt, 1980, p.7) – and aristocratic power structures were reorganized (Greenblatt, 1980, p.162). Due to these changes, new forms of individual identity were established, resulting in ‘an increased self-consciousness about the fashioning of human identity as a manipulable, artful process’ (Greenblatt, 1980, p.2). For in-depth analyses of the iconography of Elizabeth I cf. Yates, 1975 and Strong, 1977, 1995, 2003. According to Roy Strong, the Darnley Portrait had a major influence on Elizabethan iconography, because its face pattern appears in all subsequent official portraits of Elizabeth I (Strong, 2003, p.89). Aby Warburg can be regarded as one who paved the way for the discipline of cultural studies (Erll, 2003, p.23). Especially in recent years, cultural studies scholars have increasingly drawn on Warburg’s work on art history and memory (Weinberg, 2001, p.638). In 1921, Warburg founded the Warburg Institute, which he meant to be an interdisciplinary institution to investigate the function of both individual and collective memory (Weinberg, 2001, p.638). Formerly called the Kulturwissenschaftliche Bibliothek Warburg, the Warburg Institute had been Warburg’s personal library before he turned it into a research institute in 1921. In 1933, shortly after Hitler’s rise to power, the library was rescued from the Nazi regime by its then director Fritz Saxl, who transferred it from Hamburg to London (Diers et al., 1995, p.60). According to Ernst Cassirer, who belonged to the circle of prominent scholars around Warburg, the institute has aimed to collect material for scholars of both humanities and cultural studies (Cassirer, 1977a, n. pag.). Cassirer argues that its structure and its organization symbolize the methodical unity as well as the amalgamation of all humanities (Cassirer, 1977a, n. pag.). Unlike Maurice Halbwachs, who developed a thoroughly theorized concept of collective memory, Warburg did not bring together his views on the mnemonic potential of culture into a coherent theory (Gombrich, 1970, p.239; Kany, 1987, p.132); he failed to publish much during his lifetime (Gombrich, 1970, p.14). At the time of his death, his work was largely fragmentary, surviving mostly in notes and jottings (Gombrich, 1970, p.3; Saxl, 2000, p.XIX). Since the 1970s, scholars have edited his lectures and notes and have brought his concept into a coherent theoretical form (cf. Diers et al., 1995; Emden, 2003; Gombrich, 1970; Kany, 1987; Ginzburg, 1995; Warburg, 1998a/b; Warburg, 2000). Warburg’s largest and most ambitious project is his Mnemosyne pictorial atlas (Warburg, 2000) which Diers et al. describe as follows: ‘The plates Warburg collected present an historical corpus of well-chosen examples from the wealth of European pictorial memory; they are meant to be viewed as an attempt to map the paths of the prefigured icons of remembrance [Erinnerungsbilder]. It was Warburg’s aim to turn this atlas into an organ for the history of images, art, and culture in general, achieving this goal through a new form of scientific representation’ (Diers et al., 1995, p.73).

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8. Also cf. Schabert, who points out that Elizabeth’s (alleged) virginity was mystified for political reasons. Her virgin body symbolized the sanctity of the English national territory, while her subjects were supposed to provide her with masculine protection (Schabert, 2000, p.7). 9. Uhsadel argues that Frederica’s greed for knowledge qualifies her as the heroine of a Bildungsroman (Uhsadel, 2005, pp.167–8). 10. In Passions of the Mind, Byatt acknowledges that The Virgin in the Garden is indebted to the iconography of Elizabeth I and to Frances Yates’ academic analyses of this iconography (Byatt, 1993, p.3). 11. Also cf. Uhsadel, 2005, p.162. 12. Also cf. Chapter 9.

Chapter 9 1. Forster’s phrase ‘only connect’ runs as a key motif through Babel Tower (BT, p.18, p.33, p.41, p.309, p.346), and the novelist himself appears in Still Life (SL, pp.724–6). Chapter 4 of The Virgin in the Garden refers to Lawrence, since it is called ‘Women in Love’ (VG, pp.58–60), and Bill and Frederica repeatedly comment on and refer to Lawrence (VG, p.40, p.460; SL, p.829; BT, p.491). 2. Cf., for example, Aleida Assmann’s study Erinnerungsräume (1999), in which she examines texts by Shakespeare, Spenser, Milton, and many others with regard to their role as cultural texts. 3. Ross, for example, argues that the success of poststructuralist and deconstructionist criticism of the works by the English Romantic poets, Rousseau and Nietzsche strengthened the canonical status of these authors (Ross, 1993, p.516). Also cf. Guillory, who outlines the function of institutions such as schools and universities in canon formation: ‘The problem of the canon is a problem of syllabus and curriculum, the institutional forms by which works are preserved as great works’ (Guillory, 1995, p.240, emphasis in the original). 4. In the following, I highlight only some of the aspects which Assmann covers in her discussion of Shakespeare’s history plays. For her complete analysis cf. A. Assmann, 1999, pp.62–88. 5. Daniel is unable to weep for Stephanie although he is utterly devastated by her death (SL, p.979). Instead of mourning her, he suppresses the memory of her and with it his grief (SL, pp.987–9, p.1003; BT, p.25). Like Daniel, Bill does not weep for his daughter; at least he is never seen doing so in the novels. 6. Frederica, for example, writes a book entirely made up of clippings, which is described as a form of art (BT, p.359). This book, which includes passages from Frederica’s letters, from novels, and from lecture notes (BT, p.385; WW, p.39), is a way for Frederica to aestheticize her life, and it enables her to come to terms with her failed marriage and her disappointed hopes.


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7. The fact that LaMotte’s poetry is described as being ‘deservedly forgotten’ (P, p.37) implies that her poems have not attained the status of cultural texts. 8. Erll describes the Assmanns’ theory as static and a-historic (Erll, 2005, p.34). Martin Zierold points out that the Assmanns base their theory on their analysis of pre-modern societies, which is why he questions whether it can be applied at all to contemporary (post)modern societies (Zierold, 2006, p.91). 9. The only difference that the Assmanns take into account is that between oral and literate societies. Jan Assmann claims that although both forms of society develop communicative and cultural memories (J. Assmann, 1997, p.59), the cultural memories of literate societies are more clearly structured than those of oral societies, because ‘cultural memory has an affinity to writing’ (1997, p.59). 10. For a detailed survey of the criticism the Assmann’s theory of cultural memory has met with cf. the journal Erwägen Wissen Ethik (EWE) – Deliberation Knowledge Ethics 13:2 (2002). This issue includes articles on cultural memory by Jan and Aleida Assmann as well as reactions to them by an interdisciplinary range of scholars, those mentioned above among them. 11. The Collaborative Research Centre Memory Cultures at the University of Gießen in Germany uses the term memory cultures in order to indicate the plurality of cultural memories (cf. Erll 2005, pp.34–9). 12. Due to this narrow focus, the Assmanns fail to take into account that part of culture which is commonly subsumed under the term popular culture (for the differences between high and popular culture cf. Fiske, 1995, pp.331–2) and which John Fiske defines as ‘the social circulation of meanings, values, and pleasures [which] serve the interests of “the people”. “The people” . . . is not a class or a social category, but rather a shifting set of social interests and positions that are defined by their subordinate relations to the dominant society’ (Fiske, 1995, p.322). If used by the subordinate social groups which Fiske terms ‘the people’, popular culture subverts the power relations and the norms of the dominant society (Fiske, 1995, p.323). Arguing along similar lines, John Storey regards popular culture as an important factor in the processes of negotiating cultural meaning as it constitutes an arena in which ‘subordinate groups attempt to resist the impositions of meanings which bear the interests of dominant groups’ (Storey, 1994, p.ix). As this – admittedly very brief – outline implies, popular culture can undermine a society’s dominant cultural memory by subverting cultural meaning. Thus, popular culture offers subordinate and marginalized social groups the possibility to resist the cultural meanings implied in their society’s dominant cultural memory. 13. In his study The Western Canon (1994), Harold Bloom has famously refuted this notion, arguing that the Western canon of ‘high’ literature depends on aesthetic values alone. 14. Cf. Matt. 4,18–19: ‘And Jesus, walking by the sea of Galilee, saw two brethren, Simon called Peter, and Andrew his brother, casting a net into

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the sea: for they were fishers. And he saith unto them, Follow me, and I will make you fishers of men’ (emphasis added). 15. Brosch is also of the opinion that the metaphor of knitting traditionally evokes connotations of household and femininity (Brosch, 1999, p.63).

Chapter 10 1. The concept of culture as text goes back to Clifford Geertz, who famously argued that studying cultures ‘is like trying to read . . . a manuscript . . . written not in conventionalized graphs of sound but in transient examples of shaped behaviour’ (Geertz, 1975, p.10). 2. According to Jan Assmann, ‘cultural memory has an affinity to writing’ (J. Assmann, 1997, p.59). 3. According to Aleida Assmann, this subdivision is caused by the invention of writing (A. Assmann, 1999, p.137). She sees writing as an external medium of memory which makes it easier to preserve cultural knowledge and, at the same time, makes it more complicated to access it. On the one hand, writing increases the amount of cultural knowledge stored and preserved, thus improving the potential capacity of cultural memory (Assmann & Assmann, 1994, p.121). On the other hand, it dramatically increases the complexity of cultural memory, thus making it impossible to control or structure the sheer mass of cultural knowledge it stores (Assmann & Assmann, 1994, pp.121–2). As writing stores more cultural knowledge than a society can actually handle (Assmann & Assmann, 1994, p.122), cultural memory develops the two dimensions of functional memory and storage memory. Due to this subdivision, the Assmans claim, it is possible to manage the mass of cultural knowledge preserved in cultural memory. 4. Jan Assmann states that any cultural objectification can be used as a medium of cultural memory. According to him, symbolic function and semiotic structure are more important factors than the medium itself (J. Assmann, 1997, p.139). 5. It should be noted that Erll uses the terms ‘popular literature’ and ‘trivial literature’ as synonyms without considering the normative implications of the latter term. 6. For example, Erll neither explains which concept of popular culture she applies nor does she make clear why she claims a higher social relevance for popular literature than for ‘high’ literature (Erll, 2003, pp.59–60). She also fails to explain whether she conceives of the novels she analyses as texts of popular literature or whether she simply regards them, in Assmann’s terms, as literary, that is, ‘non-cultural’ texts. 7. Erll aims to outline the role of literature in cultural as well as communicative memories, which seems to be the reason why she uses the umbrella term ‘collective memory’ when referring to both of these two forms of socially conditioned memory.


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8. Unfortunately, Erll does not explain in detail how literary texts turn into cultural texts. She argues that this transformation takes place if society becomes aware of the discursive nature of a text, thus awarding it culturally binding value (Erll, 2003, p.75). However, she omits to outline the circumstances of such processes of cultural re-evaluation. 9. It is beyond the scope of this study to retrace the whole of Erll’s theoretical background. The interested reader might want to consult Erll, 2003, pp.15–186 for a complete account. 10. The novels Erll analyses are Edmund Blunden’s The Myriad Faces of War (1928), Richard Aldington’s Death of a Hero (1929), Helen Zenna Smith’s Not So Quiet (1930), Ford Madox Ford’s tetralogy Parade’s End (1924– 28), H. M. Tomlison’s All Our Yesterdays (1930), Ludwig Renn’s Der Krieg (1928), Magnus Weber’s Sieben vor Verdun (1930), Erich Maria Remarque’s Im Westen Nichts Neues (1929), Stefan Zweig’s Der Streit um den Sergeanten Grischa (1927) and Edlef Köppen’s Heeresbericht (1930). 11. For a detailed analysis of the individual novels cf. Erll, 2003, pp.187–351. 12. It should not go unmentioned that neither Erll nor Aleida Assmann elaborates in detail on the social groups that determine the frames of receptions of either collective or cultural texts. In fact, both Erll’s and Assmann’s concepts rely on socio-historically undifferentiated implications when it comes to determining the groups that control the cultural/communicative memories they speak of. As I have already outlined above, Assmann fails to reflect that the cultural memory of Europe she outlines depends on the liberal-humanist ideology of a patriarchal white bourgeoisie. Erll neglects to define the groups that canonize the literary texts she analyses as collective texts. Instead she speaks, in undifferentiated terms, of ‘the’ reading public of the 1920s/1930s in either Germany or the UK (Erll, 2003, p.91, p.94, p.181). This is an oversimplification since ‘the’ reading public as a homogeneous group does not exist (cf. Brooker, 2003, pp.12–14). 13. This is not to say that literary characteristics stand outside historical contexts. As Hans Robert Jauss made clear, the characteristics of literary texts such as genres, forms, and themes depend on historical processes of reception (Jauss, 1970, pp.173–7). 14. Also cf. Erll, who argues in her more recent work that various aspects of literature such as generic repertoires, intertextuality, and literary history have to be included into a theory of cultural memory (Erll & Nünning, 2006; Erll, 2004a/b/c, 2005). 15. According to Hannah Jacobmeyer, there are three different theoretical approaches to intertextuality. First, the structuralist school follows a pragmatic, conservative approach, which simply defines intertextuality as a means of enriching a text (Jacobmeyer, 2000, p.8). Second, the poststructuralist school (Kristeva, Barthes, Derrida) radically negates the binary opposition of hypertext and hypotext, thus placing every text in an unmanageable network of texts and meanings (Jacobmeyer, 2000, pp.7–8, p.9). From the poststructuralist perspective, intertextuality can no longer be regarded as a means of creating meaning between author, text, and

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16. 17.

18. 19.

20.

21. 22.

23.

24. 25.


reader (Jacobmeyer, 2000, p.9). Third, the postmodern school, as Jacobmeyer terms it, merges the contradicting approaches of structuralism and poststructuralism (Jacobmeyer, 2000, p.10). This school of thought aims to conceptualize intertextuality as a means of constituting meaning without falling short of the insights of poststructuralism. According to the postmodern approach, intertextuality breaks through the illusion of textual unity; it is a critical play with the literary canon (Jacobmeyer, 2000, pp.11–12). The postmodern approach underlines the metafictional and the metatextual aspects of intertextuality (Jacobmeyer, 2000, p.12). As Manfred Pfister puts it, ‘[p]ostmodern intertextuality is the intertextuality conceived and realized within the framework of a poststructuralist theory of intertextuality’ (Pfister, 1991, p.214). Roland Barthes has famously described texts as echo-chambers (‘chambre[s] d’échos’) (Barthes, 1975, p.78). This book does not aim to outline the various attempts at creating a taxonomy of intertextuality. For such attempts at a taxonomy cf. Holthuis, 1993; Genette 1982; Pfister, 1985. For a detailed analysis of the forms of marking intertextuality cf. Broich 1985. Lachmann only describes writing as an ‘act of memory’ (Lachmann, 2004, p.173). However, since reading is ‘a traversal of the space between existing texts’ (Lachmann, 2004, p.173) it, too, is an act of memory. As I regard cultural practices as texts, I see the connections to paintings, which Byatt’s novels establish, as intertextual references instead of intermedial references. For an analysis of the portraiture of Elizabeth I in Byatt’s tetralogy cf. Chapter 8. The classical tradition of ekphrasis as a literary mode is rooted in Homer’s Iliad and Virgil’s Aeneid. For the development of ekphrasis in classical literature cf. the entry ‘Ekphrasis’ in Der Neue Pauly (The New Pauly), 1997. This is particularly true for Still Life. This novel not only contains several descriptions of paintings by Van Gogh, but also employs ekphrasis as a general mode of description. Due to detailed ekphrastic passages depicting, for example, a breakfast table (SL, pp.660–1) or a beach scene (SL, p.768), Rippl calls the novel ‘a visual novel’, a ‘verbal still life’ (Rippl, 2000, p.528, p.529). For a detailed discussion of the ekphrastic quality of Still Life cf. Rippl, 2005, pp.271–94. Also cf. Worton, who claims that Byatt’s novels include ‘textual inscriptions of paintings’ (Worton, 2001, p.17). Cf. Brosch, 1999; Westlake, 1989; Worton, 2001; Rippl, 2000, 2001, 2005. Schabert uses the term ‘critical realism’ instead of neo-realism (Schabert, 2006, p.415).

Chapter 11 1. An article from The Times, quoted at length in The Virgin in the Garden (VG, pp.195–7) expresses this zeitgeist. The article stylizes Elizabeth II as a


2.

3. 4.

5. 6.

7.

8.

9.

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reincarnation of her sixteenth-century namesake and her reign as a rebirth of the English ‘Golden Age’. Each of the four novels is a historical novel, since they depict the historical events and social changes taking place in Britain from the early 1950s to 1970: the national hopes for a second Elizabethan Age (The Virgin in the Garden), the situation of women at Cambridge in the 1950s (Still Life), the Swinging Sixties (Babel Tower), the student revolt of 1968 (A Whistling Woman), the medial revolution of television (The Virgin in the Garden, A Whistling Woman), the invention of the pill (Babel Tower), and, in all four novels, the ongoing emancipation of women. For a discussion of The Virgin in the Garden as a historical novel cf. Schuhmann, 1983, pp.112–18 and also Alfer who, quoting Thomas Mann, describes The Virgin in the Garden and Still Life as ‘time novel[s] . . . aim[ing] to evoke the inner picture of a historical epoch’ (Mann qtd. in Alfer, 2001, p.49). Byatt herself refers to her tetralogy as a set of historical novels (Byatt & Murdoch, 1990; Kenyon, 1988, p.75). Cf., for example, Hattaway, 2002. According to Crane, ‘English humanism first began to emerge, in tentative and piecemeal ways, in the fifteenth century. It did not really take root until the Tudor monarchy discovered the usefulness of humanisteducated men in meeting two crucial needs: for propaganda to legitimize a rather tenuous claim to the throne, and for educated personnel to staff the centralized bureaucracy forged to strengthen its position in relation to the feudal aristocracy’ (Crane, 2002). Cf., for example, the New Encyclopaedia Britannica, 2003, vol. 4, p.545. At the beginning of The Virgin in the Garden, the plans for the university have just been completed (VG, pp.19–20); Still Life stages the inauguration of the Vice-Chancellor of the university (SL, pp.901–8); in Babel Tower, the university is being built (BT, pp.248–9), and at the beginning of A Whistling Woman teaching and research have already commenced. It goes without saying that his marriage makes Gerard Wijnnobel appear as a second Mr Rochester. He is clearly modelled on Brontë’s character, since he, too, is married to a woman whom he met abroad and married without knowing about her insanity (WW, pp.33–4). After his wife’s death – she dies, like Bertha Rochester, in a fire (WW, p.404) – Wijnnobel starts a new life with his lover Agatha Mond and their daughter Saskia (WW, p.417), which is another parallel to Brontë’s novel. The revolt of 1968 and the paradigm changes in education, of which the revolt was both cause and effect, feature strongly in Babel Tower and A Whistling Woman. It would, however, be beyond the scope of this book to elaborate in detail on these topics. For a first, albeit short, analysis of Byatt’s covering of the movement of 1968 cf. Cambiaghi, 2005. Uhsadel points out that these passages sketch the historical controversy between English literary studies and natural sciences in which Charles Percy Snow criticized the elitism of literary scholars, who regard themselves as the epitome of intellectual education although they are totally ignorant of natural science (Uhsadel, 2005, pp.137–8).

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10. Byatt’s fiction, in particular Possession and The Biographer’s Tale, often criticizes literary scholarship. 11. Cf. Chinn, 2001, pp.179–203; Hadley, 2003, p.94; Hoesterey, 2001, p.92; Löschnigg, 1996, p.110; Shiller, 1997, p.551. 12. According to Hoesterey, Ash’s and LaMotte’s poems constitute only one of several levels of pastiche in Possession, consisting of the ‘intergeneric shape of the novel’, the ‘vibrant intertextuality of citations and allusion’, and Ash’s ‘epic poems written in the styles of Browning and other Victorians’ as well as LaMotte’s ‘[s]lim, delicate, and eminently more modern verses’ (Hoesterey, 2001, p.93). For further information about Possession as pastiche cf. Neubauer, 1997; Hoesterey, 2001, pp.91–4; Shuttleworth, 1998. 13. This is not to say that Possession itself is already part of British cultural memory as Peters claims (Peters, 2003, p.227). The question of whether or not the novel will one day become a cultural text cannot be answered from the present perspective as this remains for posterity to decide. Yet, the fact that the novel is already included in literary histories such as Schabert’s Englische Literaturgeschichte des 20. Jahrhunderts (Schabert, 2006, p.4, p.337) implies that it is currently undergoing a process of being established as part of the English literary canon. 14. It goes without saying that the loss of religious certainties is only one part of the paradox of the Victorian Age, which is characterized by the binding nature of social values and norms and, at the same time, by a loss of certainties brought about by an erosion of religious faith. Schabert aptly summarizes the Victorian paradox as follows: ‘The world exhibition . . . of 1851 symbolized . . . the hubris with which the Victorian Age self-assuredly ascribed meaning to mankind and the universe, whereas Darwin’s On the Origins of Species symbolizes the total collapse of this certainty’ (Schabert, 1995, p.220). 15. Cf. Lundén, who argues that ‘the literary scholars’ (re)covery of the residue (emotions, desire, instincts) can be seen as an implicit influence from the Victorian plot’ (Lundén, 1999, p.93). For his complete analysis of the concept of residue underlying Possession cf. Lundén, 1999, pp.91–125.

Chapter 12 1. This quote refers to the collection of essays entitled Genres as Repositories of Cultural Memory edited by van Gorp and Musarra-Schroeder (2000). Although the term repository suggests a rather static storage device, literary genres in fact hold the possibility of creating new cultural meaning. This is because generic conventions are ‘formal models’ (Guillén, 1971, p.123) rather than strict norms. Although writers can never totally ignore generic repertoires (Wesseling, 1991, p.18; Dubrow, 1982, p.3), they can still change them or create new ones by violating existing generic rules, parodying them, and mixing various genres together, thus creating new


2.

3. 4.

5.

6. 7.

8.

9.

10.

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cultural meaning. The form of postmodern pastiche, for example, does so by drawing on and playing with traditional genre conventions. In his widely acclaimed pastiche novel The Name of the Rose, for example, Umberto Eco uses elements of various genres such as the historical novel, the detective story, and the philosophical essay. He thus produces a ‘weave of diverse master narratives of Western cultures’ (Hoesterey, 2001, p.96) which both perpetuates existing generic patterns and discloses their strategies of creating meaning and coherence. Changing existing generic repertoires, Eco creates new patterns of cultural signification. In her study Antonia Byatts Quartet in der Tradition des englischen Bildungsromans, Uhsadel provides an in-depth analysis of how Byatt’s tetralogy is indebted to its generic predecessors such as Jane Austen’s Emma, Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss, Virginia Woolf’s The Voyage Out, and Doris Lessing’s Martha Quest (Uhsadel, 2005). Also cf. Chapter 2 of this book. It goes without saying that the literary genres discussed here do not exist independently from each other. On the contrary, the genres of romance, detective story, and Gothic novel have influenced each other as novels such as Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, and her sister Charlotte’s Jane Eyre make clear (Spector, 1991, p.1951, p.1053). Various critics have remarked on the various mutual influences between the genres, for example Kilgour, who calls the Gothic ‘a hybrid between the novel and romance’ (Kilgour, 1995, p.6), and Panek, who points out a ‘love–hate relationship’ (1987, p.6) between the Gothic novel and the detective story. Jessie Weston conceives of the ‘Grail legend proper’ as the central motif, the ‘kernel’, of romance (Weston, 2003, Chapter XI). For an analysis of the various elements and plot structures of romance cf. Fry, 2000 and Fuchs, 2004. For a brief survey of the historical development of the detective story cf. Panek, 1987, pp.1–11 and Drabble, 1985, pp.269–70. Spector outlines the various forms of the Gothic novel from Walpole to Maturin whilst noting the genre’s influence on such writers as Walter Scott, Charlotte Brontë, Charles Dickens, William Faulkner, and Stephen King. In his introduction to The Cambridge Companion to Gothic Fiction, Hogle provides more detailed information about the rise of Gothic fiction and its influence on various national literatures all over Western Europe (Hogle, 2002, pp.1–20). According to Jacobmeyer, the genre of romance determines Possession ‘as a narrative guide [which] combines all other genre-specific elements of this novel into a great quest’ (1999, p.35). Thus, Possession conflates Hawthorne’s concept of romance with another form of romance writing: the love story. For the various forms of romance, which is a notoriously fluid genre, cf., for example, Saunders, 2004. Schmid identifies the name Roland as another allusion to the genre of romance and the quest motif as it refers to Browning’s ‘Childe Roland to

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12. 13.

14.

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the Dark Tower Came’ which tells the story of Roland on his quest for the dark tower (Schmid, 1996a, p.126). It goes without saying that the name also alludes to the medieval Chanson de Roland that tells the story of Roland, chief paladin of Charlemagne (Drabble, 1985, p.840). It is beyond the scope of this book to provide a thorough analysis of all the genres Possession contains. For a more detailed study of Possession as romance cf. Jacobmeyer, 2000, pp.43–54, p.57. On Possession as a detective story also cf. Broich, 1996, pp.627–8, pp.630–1. It goes without saying that villain, hero and heroine are also stock characters of romance. Jacobmeyer argues that Possession sketches Cropper as its romantic villain and features Roland and Maud as its romantic hero and heroine (Jacobmeyer, 2000, pp.49–53). For a more detailed analysis of the protagonists of Possession as characters of romance also cf. Gitzen, 1995. Nadj conceives of biographic metafiction as a critical memory of genres (‘kritisches Gattungsgedächtnis’) (Nadj, 2003, p.218) that discloses the strategies of constructing meaning on which biographical genres are based. Although she also regards genres as culturally pre-formed patterns of signification (Nadj, 2003, p.216), she restricts her analysis to constructivist approaches by pointing out that biographic metafictions employ generic patterns in order to both problematize the specific generic conventions of biography (Nadj, 2003, p.218) and disclose biographical writing as a retrospective act of constructing meaning (Nadj, 2003, p.213). Don Quixote is generally regarded as parodying and, therefore, criticizing various genres such as romance and the picaresque novel (Wild, 1988, pp.820–6). As Ormsby points out, Cervantes claims that he translated the work of Cide Hamete Benengeli whom he tries to pass off as the chronicler of Don Quixote’s adventures (Ormsby, 2007).

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Index Page numbers in italics refer to Notes and References. cultural memory 101, 104–6, 159 cultural texts 5, 96, 99, 101, 139 Erinnerungsräume 97, 101, 158 memory of memories 105 storage memory 105–6 Assmann, Jan 4, 5, 84–6, 100–1, 102, 155, 156, 159, 160 ‘Collective Memory and Cultural Identity’ 156 attestation 142 Austen, Jane Emma 165 Mansfield Park 96 autobiography 35 autonomy 153 female see female autonomy

A Whistling Woman 1, 3, 5, 39, 63, 65, 67–8, 98, 129, 137 Agatha Mond 118, 163 Anti-University movement 119, 120 Avram Snitkin 119 as Bildungsroman 142 Body and Mind conference 118, 120 body–mind reconciliation 72 Edmund Wilkie 66 Flight North 118–19 Frederica Potter 63, 92, 93–4, 120–1 Gerard Wijnnobel 118 John and Paul Ottokar 152 Jonty Surtees 119 Luk Lysgaard-Peacock 63, 72, 120 Marcus Potter 43 Mickey Impey 119 universal education 118–19 Waltraut Ross 119 absolute other 28 Ackroyd, Peter Chatterton 19, 147, 148 London: The Biography 41 Aldington, Richard, Death of a Hero 161 Anti-University movement 119, 120 art human need for 98–9 and memory 78–9, 109 Assmann, Aleida 5, 84–6, 100, 160 collective memory 84

Babel Tower 1, 3, 39, 63, 65, 96 Anti-University movement 119, 120 Frederica Potter 51, 70, 77–8, 93, 102 Hugh Pink 47 John Ottokar 70–1 motherhood 54 personal memory 77–8 Barnes, Julian A History of the World in 10½ Chapters 19 Flaubert’s Parrot 19, 24, 147, 148 Barthes, Roland 109, 162 Belsey, Andrew 91 Belsey, Catherine 91, 152 Bergson, Henri 81 Bildungsgedächtnis 140 Bildungsroman 128–9, 134, 152 183

184

Index

biographic metafiction 1, 2, 19–21, 23, 24, 30, 32–3, 48, 111, 116, 129–30, 133, 134, 142, 147–8, 149, 151, 166 biographical other 130, 135–6 poetry as access to 26 searching for 30 biographical self 135–6 biographical self-reflection 20 biography, hermeneutic impetus of 28, 30, 129, 135 Bloom, Harold, The Western Canon 159 Blunden, Edmund, The Myriad Faces of War 161 body 65 body–mind dichotomy 70–2, 73, 138 Breinig, Helmbrecht 31–2 Bronfen, Elisabeth 13 Brontë, Charlotte, Jane Eyre 128–9, 165 Brontë, Emily, Wuthering Heights 165 Brooker, Peter 146 Brosch, Renate 152 Browning, Elizabeth Barrett 123 Browning, Robert 123 Bruner, Jerome 39 Burckhardt, Jacob 117 The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy 117 Byatt, A. S. art and memory 78–9 biographic metafiction see biographic metafiction biographical self-reflection 20 cultural memory see cultural memory ‘false analogies’ 73 female emancipation 48–9 female identity 1, 3, 49 female sexuality 51–2 ‘female vision’ 49 feminist credentials 68 gender bias in fiction of 48–9

gendered self 44–54 intertextuality 20–1, 32, 34, 109–11 ‘Memory and the Making of Fiction’ 152 omniscient narration 37–8 as ‘self-conscious realist’ 113 work concept of 66 see also individual novels

Campbell, Jane 56, 150, 152, 154 Camus, Albert, La Chute 96 canon 101 of cultural texts 96, 101 literary 5, 20, 48, 97, 101, 103 male 48 Cassirer, Ernst 4, 85, 157 celibacy 51, 53, 153 Cervantes, Miguel de, Don Quixote 133, 147, 166 childbirth 69 collective memory 4, 77, 81–4, 86, 107, 139, 155, 156, 157, 160 communicative memory 84–5, 155 composite portraits 34–5 comprehension 31 contact zones 31 Cosslett, Tess 53 Crane, Mary Thomas 117, 163 critical realism 162 cultural memory 2, 84–6, 96, 100, 102, 104–15, 140, 156, 160 content of 5 functional 105 literature as content of 106, 107 literature as medium of 107–9, 111, 113, 125, 133 storage 104, 105, 106 cultural objectifications 85–6, 160 cultural texts 5, 95–103, 139 as identificatory models 95–6 culture as mnemonic 4–5 as phenomenon of memory 86

Index

Darnley Portrait of Elizabeth I, symbolism of 88–9, 90, 157 deconstruction 10, 11, 151, 158 Derrida, Jacques 109 detective fiction 130–1, 133 detraditionalization 12 Dickenson, Emily 123 differentiation 12, 65, 100 discourse 2, 3, 9, 16, 28, 107, 121, 144, 153 identity 55 male 47 Dobson, Michael 87 Doran, Susan 87 Echterhoff, Gerald 155 Eco, Umberto, The Name of the Rose 165 Edel, Leon, Literary Biography 146–7 ekphrasis 162 Elam, Yigal 155 Eliot, George, The Mill on the Floss 128–9, 165 Elizabeth I (Virgin Queen) 5, 87–93, 140 Armada Portrait 91 as autonomous female self 51 Darnley Portrait 88–9, 90, 157 iconography of 88–9, 90–1, 93 symbols of virginity 91 theatricality 88 emotional susceptibility 16–17 English Renaissance 116–22, 139–41 Erikson, Erik H. 49 Erll, Astrid 107–8, 160–1 ethical dimension 28, 30 ‘false analogies’ 73 Feldmann, Doris 2 female artist 48, 55–7, 58, 153 female autonomy 51–2, 55–64 closed space of 58–9 irreconcilability with marriage 61

185

and need for work 62–3 and patriarchy 55, 58, 64 in Possession 57–8 social outsiders 59 surrender of 52 in tetralogy 60–4 violation of 56, 57 female body–male mind 67–8 female emancipation 48–9, 138 female identity 3, 49, 136–8 separateness see separateness work as essential element of 62–3, 65–6 see also female autonomy female self separateness 50–1, 53 sexuality as threat to 51 female sexuality 51–2, 152–3 femininity 128–9, 137 feminism 68, 153 Fielding, Henry, Tom Jones 147 figural narration 33, 36 figures of memory 86, 87–94 first-person narrative 33–4, 35, 37 Fiske, John 159 Flaubert, Gustav, Madame Bovary 96 floating gap 155–6 Fludd, Robert, Theatrum Orbi 152 Ford, Ford Madox, Parade’s End 161 Forster, E. M. 51–2 Howard’s End 95–6 Foucault, Michel 153 Fowles, John, The French Lieutenant’s Woman 19 Frank, Manfred 145 Franken, Christien 56 free women 63, 128, 137, 141 Freeman, Thomas S. 87 Freud, Sigmund 81 Fritzsche, Peter 156 functional memory 105–6, 160 Galton, Francis 34–5 Gardiner, Judith Kegan Gauthier, Tim 37

49

186

Index

Gedi, Noa 155 Geertz, Clifford 160 gender 3, 31, 49, 55, 63 body–mind dichotomy 70–2, 73 and identity 3, 49 gender bias 48–9 gender differences 64, 65, 67, 70, 72, 138 gender roles 1, 95 gendered self 44–54 generational memory 156 genre 126–8, 132–3 Gothic 130–2, 165 genre taxonomy 32 Genres as Repositories of Cultural Memory 164 Gergen, Kenneth J. 40 Gergen, Mary M. 40 globalization 12 Gothic genre 130–2, 165 Greenblatt, Steven 79–80, 156–7 Shakespearean Negotiations 79 Habermas, Jürgen 4, 77, 145, 150 Hadley, Louisa 37 ‘Spectres of the Past: A. S. Byatt’s Victorian Ghost Stories’ 155 Halbwachs, Maurice 4, 81–3, 157 La Mémoire Collective 155 La Topographie Légendaire des Évangiles en Terre Sainte 155 Les Cadres Sociaux de la Mémoire 81–2, 155 Hawthorne, Nathaniel, The House of the Seven Gables 130 Hegel, G. W. 146 hermeneutic impetus of biography 28, 30, 129, 135 hermeneutic tension 36–7 hermeneutics 3, 23, 24, 30–1 of comprehension 33, 38 of self 2, 136, 145 ‘high’ literature 107 historiographic metafiction 19, 147, 148 Horatschek, Annegret 14

Hulbert, Ann 152 humanism 116–25 Hume, David 155 Hutcheon, Linda 19 A Poetics of Postmodernism

147

Ibsen, Henrik 34–5 identification 29 identity 2, 9–17, 77–86, 144–5 definition of 9 discovery by reading 79 as discursive achievement 40 female see female identity formation 145–6 male 44–6, 51, 136 and memory 155 negotiation of 12 Possession 9–17 postmodern 2, 12, 13, 145 sexual 10–11 The Biographer’s Tale 9–17 the tetralogy 39–43 imaginary museums 104–15 imagination 25, 27–30, 136 individual memory 82–3, 84 individualization 12 individuals 145 intertextuality 20–1, 32, 34, 109–11 intrasubjective understanding 77–8 Ishiguro, Kazuo, The Remains of the Day 19 Jacobmeyer, Hannah 161, 165 James, William 144–5 Jauss, Hans Robert 127, 161 Jensen, Hal 15 Keats, John 33 Keupp, Heiner 9, 12, 145 kollektives Gedächtnis see collective memory Köppen, Edlef, Heeresbericht 161 Kristeva, Julia 109

Index

Lacan, Jacques 153 Lachmann, Renate 109–11 Lawrence, D. H. 51–2 Women in Love 95, 158 Lees, Hella 123 Levinas, Emmanuel 28 liberal humanism 45, 101, 136, 139, 142, 152, 153 ‘life of the mind’ 67 incompatibility with female gender 67–8 pregnancy as threat to 67, 68–9 life-writing 19, 20, 22, 23, 42 Linnaeus, Carl 34–5 literary modes of detection 130 literature expectations from 127 genres 126–8 ‘high’ 126 and identity 126–7 popular 160 as resurrection 155 trivial 107, 160 Locke, John 155 logos 65, 68 Lösch, Klaus 31–2 Lyell, Charles 123 McHale, Brian 19 male canon 48 male dominance 61–3 male identity 44–6, 51, 136 male poet as solitary genius 57 marriage 51, 53, 60–1, 62, 63, 66–7, 78, 93, 137, 163 as confinement 62 exclusion from ‘life of the mind’ 67 renouncement of as sacrifice 66 threats to women 69–70 see also motherhood materia 65 Mead, George Herbert 4, 77 Melusina, myth of 56–7, 79 memorial novels 116–25 memory 3–4, 77–86, 138–9

187

activation by reading 79 collective 4, 77, 81–4, 86, 107, 139, 155, 156, 157, 160 communicative 84–5, 155 cultural see cultural memory functional 105 generational 156 and identity 77–81, 155 individual 82–3 mnemonic spaces 110, 112, 126–35 poetry as key to 80 as social phenomenon 86 storage 104, 105, 106 as storehouse 144 memory cultures 159 ‘Memory and the Making of Fiction’ 78–9 memory of memories 105 mermaids, symbolism of 91 metahistorical novels 148 metahistoriographic self-reflection 148–9 Middeke, Martin 23, 26 Milton, John, Paradise Lost 96, 108, 121 mind 65 Mink, Louis O. 148 mnemonic spaces 110, 112, 126–35 motherhood 52, 53–4, 60, 61, 62, 66–7, 78, 137 connection with death 61 narrativity 39, 42, 43 negative capability 33 Neoplatonism 65, 68, 138, 154 Neumeier, Beate 49 Nobel, Michael 152 nous 65 Nünning, Ansgar 19, 20, 147 O’Connor, Erin 122, 133 omniscient narration 33, 36, 37–8 On Histories and Stories 65 oneness 52

188

Index

Orwell, George, Nineteen Eighty-Four 106 other 1, 16, 18–38, 146 palimpsestic process 32 Passions of the Mind 24, 158 pathos formulas 89–90 patriarchy 55, 58, 64, 137 body–mind dichotomy 68 violation of 92–3 persons 145 Pfister, Manfred 162 Pieper, Annemarie 145 Plotz, Judith 46–7 pluralization 12 poetry 25, 158–9 as access to biographical other 26, 129 as key to identity 129–30 as key to memory 80 poets female 56, 58 male 57 popular culture 159 popular literature 160 Possession 1, 2–3, 5, 99–100, 130–1, 134, 135, 164 Ash–LaMotte correspondence 16, 21–2, 23, 25–6, 57, 99–100, 131, 132 biographical other in 130 Christabel LaMotte 13–14, 18, 21, 36, 48, 54, 55–60, 67, 79, 80–1, 99, 130–1, 136, 137, 150 cultural memory in 99 female autonomy in 57–8 Fergus Woolf 59 generic status of 147 Gothic novel 131 neo-Victorian novel 122–5, 141–2 romance 133–4 identity in 9–17, 129–30 imagination in 27–9 intertextual references in 20–1, 111

James Blackadder 10, 48 Lady Bailey 59 Maia 16, 57, 132, 150 male identity in 44–5 Maud Bailey 10–11, 12–14, 57, 58, 59, 99, 136 Mortimer Cropper 27, 28–9, 131–2, 150–1 motherhood 53–4 myth of Melusina 56–7 other 18–38 personal memory 78–81 poetry and imagination in 25, 138–9 as postmodern text 26–7 Randolph Henry Ash 44–5, 48, 80–1, 130 relationality in 49–50 Roland Michell 10–11, 12–14, 44–5, 47, 99, 130–1, 154 Romanticism in 26, 47, 136, 142 self 18–38 transdifference in 36–7 Trotzdem-Menschlichkeit in 27 Val 10 postmodern identity 2, 12, 13, 145 pregnancy, as threat to female mind 67, 68–9 Proust, Marcel 81 reading and activation of memory 79 and discovery of identity 79–80 relationality 49–50 Remarque, Erich Maria, Im Westen Nichts Neues 161 Renn, Ludwig, Der Krieg 161 Ricoeur, Paul 39 ‘hermeneutics of the self’ 2 Oneself as Another 2, 16, 151 Rippl, Gabriele 111 Robinson, Crabb 123 romance 46–7 Romanticism 26, 47, 136, 142 Ross, Trevor 101 Rossetti, Christina 123

Index

Rushdie, Salman, Midnight’s Children 19 Saar, Martin 155 Schabert, Ina 24, 25, 26–7, 123, 133, 146–7 Englische Literaturgeschichte des 20. Jahrhunderts 164 In Quest for the Other Person 150 Schlaeger, Jürgen 41 Schmid, Susanne 56, 154 Scott, James B. 151 self 1, 16, 18–38, 135, 145 indirect hermeneutics of 136 self-consciousness 145 self-fashioning 88 self-narrative 40 self-reflection biographical 20 metahistoriographic 148–9 separateness 50–1, 78, 137–8 as laminations 51 sexual body 70–1 sexual desire 11, 17, 51–3, 78, 137, 153 and oneness 52 sexual experience 17 sexuality 10–11, 16 female 51–2 ‘realness’ of 70–1 surrender of autonomy 52 as threat to female self 51, 53 Shakespeare, William 5, 93–4, 97, 139 King Lear 1, 93, 97–8 Much Ado About Nothing 93 The Winter’s Tale 98, 119 Shelley, Mary, Frankenstein 165 Sinclair, Ian, Lights Out of the Territory 41 Smith, Helen Zenna, Not So Quiet 161 Snow, Charles Percy 163 social outsiders 59 solitude 14 Sorensen, Sue 112–14

189

Sterne, Laurence, Tristram Shandy 147 Still Life 1, 3, 39, 69–70, 96, 115, 162 Bill Potter 143 childbirth 69 Frederica Potter 52, 61–2 intertextual references in 112–13 marriage 61–2 motherhood 54 Nigel Reiver 61–2, 154 references to Vincent Van Gogh 112–14, 139 Stephanie Orton 60–1, 66, 67, 68 storage memory 104, 105 shutting down 106 Storey, John 159 story as collective memory 107 Straub, Jürgen 1, 39, 145 Strawson, Galen 40 Strong, Roy 157 subjects 145 Swift, Graham Last Orders 19 Waterland 19 symbolic forms 4–5, 85 Taylor, Charles 39 Tennyson, Alfred 123 tetralogy 136–7, 141, 154, 163 female autonomy in 60–4 Frederica Potter 1, 39, 50–1, 60–4, 87–8, 128, 137, 139 Gerard Wijnnobel 118, 163 intertextual references in 111 Marcus Potter 40–1, 42, 152 motherhood 52, 53–4 narrativity in 39, 42, 43 Raphael Faber 154 references to Elizabeth I in 87–8 references to paintings in 111–12 rejection of oneness 52 relationality in 50 Renaissance humanism in 116–22 romance in 46–7

190

Index

tetralogy – continued Stephanie Orton 50, 53 Vincent Hodgkiss 154 Virgin Queen image in 51 see also individual novels textual canon 48 textualized accessibility 21 The Biographer’s Tale 1, 2–3, 5, 115, 133, 134, 135 Elmer Bole 133–4 Fulla Biefeld 17, 51 generic status of 147 detective story 133 neo-Victorian novel 122, 141—2 romance 133–4 identity in 9–17, 128–9 imagination in 29–30 intertextuality 20–1, 34 male identity in 45–6 Ormerod Goode 22, 133 other 18–38 Phineas Nanson 11–13, 14–15, 17, 18, 29–30, 45–6, 47, 126, 133, 145 Scholes Destry-Scholes 14–15, 17, 22, 30, 133, 149 self 18–38 sexual desire 51 transdifference in 34 Vera Alphage 17, 22 The Game 55 The Shadow of the Sun 55, 66, 153 The Virgin in the Garden 1, 3, 39, 61, 90, 97, 109, 116 Alexander Wedderburn 47, 88, 116, 154 Bill Potter 97–8 Frederica Potter 70, 91–2 Marcus Potter 42, 46–7 Matthew Crowe 116 Winifred 60 thinking woman 65–73 reconciliation of body and mind 72

Tomlison, H. M., All Our Yesterdays 161 Tönnies, Merle, ‘Radicalising Postmodern Biofictions: British Fictional Autobiography of the Twenty-First Century’ 146 transdifference 31–3 Possession 36–7 The Biographer’s Tale 34 trivial literature 107, 160 Trotzdem-Menschlichkeit 27 Uhsadel, Katharina 70, 152, 154 Antonia Byatts Quartet in der Tradition des englischen Bildungsromans 165 universal education 118–20 Unsworth, Barry, Losing Nelson 19, 148 Van Gogh, Vincent 139 Breakfast Table 114 Still Life with Books 112–14 Vansina, Jan 155 Victorian Age 122–5, 128–9, 141–2 Wagner-Egelhaaf, Martina 150 Waldenfels, Bernhard 16, 150 Warburg, Aby 5, 89–90, 157 Mnemosyne atlas 157 Warburg Institute 157 Watson, Nicola J. 87 Weber, Magnus, Sieben vor Verdun 161 Weston, Jessie 165 White, Hayden 148 Wiedenhofer, Siegfried 156 Woolf, Virginia 58 work, and female identity 62–3, 65–6 writing, as act of memory 162 Zierold, Martin 155, 159 Zweig, Stefan, Der Streit um den Sergeanten Grischa 161

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The House of Difference: Cultural Politics and National Identity in Canada (Studies in Culture and Communication)

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Translation and the Classic: Identity as Change in the History of Culture (Classical Presences)

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Love as Passion: The Codification of Intimacy (Cultural Memory in the Present)

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Debating the Past: Music, Memory, and Identity in the Andes

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