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ABSTRACT
Themes of intellectual design, decorative pattern, color stimulus, visual art, and creativity form the framework of A. S. Byatt’s Sugar and Other Stories. In “Racine and the Tablecloth,” “Rose-Coloured Teacups,” and “Sugar,” Byatt translates emotion, intellect, sense, and memory into a language of “fictionalized autobiography” that self-reflexively sheds light on her creative development. The dramatic language of Racine provides a model of intellectual design that contrasts with the embroidered pattern of a tablecloth. A retrospective vision of rose-colored teacups on a tablecloth signifies Victorian décor, implicitly compared with a still life by Matisse (cover illustration). The mixed colors of molten sugar awaken a child’s aesthetic sense in a way later associated with Van Gogh’s paintings and ekphrastically reflected in the novel Still Life. The three stories examined reveal important aspects of Byatt’s fictional art and aesthetic values.
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Notes
1. Alfer and de Campos call “Sugar” “the most openly and avowedly autobiographical piece of writing A. S. Byatt has produced to date” (1), and Byatt, in “‘Sugar’ / ‘Le Sucre,’” acknowledges that “[the story] does try to be truthful” and “does, indeed, also claim authorship for its author” (18). “The July Ghost,” which relates to Byatt’s loss of her son in an accident at age eleven, has an autobiographical element, but that story concerns handling grief rather than dialectics of art.
2. Wallhead connects the knitting-wool “with the embroidery motifs we find in the first two stories of the collection” (31).
3. Commenting on Virginia Woolf’s “Modern Fiction,” Byatt told an interviewer: “We may be hit by random impressions, but if we’re intelligent we immediately put them into an order” (Tredell 60)—i.e., construct a narrative design.
4. See Stewart, “Still Life in Still Life.”
5. Boyd Tonkin commented on a conjunction of pattern and design in the short story collection Elementals: “on one level, that wonderful sensual explosion of colour […] but at the same time this desire to render it with the utmost precision”—to which Byatt replied: “I think that is what art is for” (Tonkin 23). Byatt depicts and delineates this combination of color and design in “Sugar.”
6. Describing how she read the colors and forms of plastic sheeting seen from a bus, Byatt reflected: “in some way that [visual] experience, which I think is a painter’s experience, always makes me want to write” (Tredell 68). At this stage, pattern precedes design.
7. In Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology, “[v]ision is not the metamorphosis of things themselves into the sight of them [… it] is a thinking that deciphers strictly the signs given within the body” (“Eye and Mind” 171).
8. Byatt, who attended the Mount, a Quaker school in York where her mother had been a teacher, told Dusinberre that “the school’s ethic was against individual achievement” (188).
9. Byatt, in her interview with Kenyon, reveals the autobiographical basis of Emily’s character: “All through my childhood I was thought to be somehow abnormal, partly because I was ill with asthma a lot of the time, and partly because I was vulnerably clever. I was very small and younger than the other girls in my class. They considered I could only do one thing—which was to come top in all the exams” (9). A defining moment from Byatt’s childhood parallels Emily’s dual experience of ostracization and intense vision: “I remember […] sitting up against a barred gate at my elementary school trying to get away from the other children […] and on the other side of the gate […] was a huge meadow full of buttercups […] all of which were reflecting the light back. And I remember thinking, things are amazing […]” (Tredell 67).
10. Byatt declared in an interview: “What I want to do in my novels is to describe varieties of human experience, like thinking very hard in abstract terms [… which] is just as immediate as the experience of standing next to a rosebush” (Tredell 70).
11. Lepaludier notes that “the narrative is marked by a rhetoric which shapes the implied reader (and possibly the real reader), brought into the narrative as a narratee, with an imaginary dialogized form” (43).
12. Kelly observes: “Like rose-colored glasses, which soften the harshness of reality, the teacups symbolize a period of innocence, of hope […]” (39).
13. Cf. Byatt’s “Art Work,” where “Natasha’s face has the empty beatific intelligence of some of Matisse’s supine women. Her face is white and oval […] Her hair is inky blue-black, and fanned across her […] pillows” (34).
14. Campbell points out that “the candy’s name [humbugs] recall[s] the mother’s lies that were ‘sugar-coated pills’” (119).
15. Kelly remarks: “It is hard to resist the clear sound of Byatt’s own voice here, as if she has dropped the mask of the narrator” (54).
16. Cf. Prince Sasan’s glass artwork in Byatt’s “Cold,” the emblematic frontispiece of which is a photograph of a seventeenth-century “Façon de Venise goblet” (113), featuring intricate cobra-like coils of glass around the stem.
17. Eliot, “The Metaphysical Poets,” writes: “When a poet’s mind is perfectly equipped for its work, it is constantly amalgamating disparate experience” (287).
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Jack Stewart
Jack Stewart is the author of Color, Space, and Creativity: Art and Ontology in Five British Writers (illustrated) on texts by Virginia Woolf, D. H. Lawrence, Lawrence Durrell, Joyce Cary, and A. S. Byatt; The Vital Art of D. H. Lawrence: Vision and Expression (illustrated); and The Incandescent Word: The Poetic Vision of Michael Bullock. His essays on literature and painting, ekphrasis and pictorialism, and landscape and travel writing have appeared in numerous journals, including (recently) Symbolism: An International Annual of Critical Aesthetics and the D. H. Lawrence Review.