Indispensable Redundancy: The Poetic Abscesses of A. S. Byatt’s Possession: A Romance (1990)

ABSTRACT

Indulging the impulse to bypass the poems featured in A. S. Byatt’s Possession, this essay explores the ramifications of their integration into the novel beyond the obvious analysis of their content. Starting from the grounds on which readers and critics reject the poems, namely from their designation as paratextual elements and instances of pastiche respectively, it goes on to argue that their creators’ views verify the poems’ value as insightful indicators of the novel’s neo-Victorian quality. However, since the establishment of such a characteristic cannot be easily liberated from questions of originality and authenticity, this essay also proposes an appreciation of the poems through the lens of simulation, which allows them to be approached as self-standing artistic occurrences, proposing, thus, constructive ways of reading neo-Victorian fiction.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. For example, in line with Byatt’s clarifications, Andrea Kirchknopf regards the Brownings and Christina Rossetti as Ash’s and LaMotte’s prototypes (54), and Alan Robinson insists on the similarities between Ash and Browning, providing a detailed discussion of the common themes found in their poems (130, 137–138). Kaplan adds Emily Dickinson to the mix of the nineteenth-century influences echoed in LaMotte’s poems and life (107), while Laura Kilbride suggests in the subsection “Victorian Poets in Possession” of the Cambridge Authors web entry on A. S. Byatt that there is a parallel between LaMotte and the protagonist of Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s fragmented poem, “Christabel,” arguing that the poem’s incompleteness and indefinite closure point to “the unstable future faced by Byatt’s heroine” (n. p.).

2. In the subsection “The Place of Poetry in Possession” of the Cambridge Authors web entry on A. S. Byatt, Kilbride provides a chapter-by-chapter list of the poems featured in the novel, detailing their position either as epigraphs or as embedded in the narrative, and presents a series of questions to help readers determine how their “understanding of the novel itself” is affected by the poems (n. p.). Louisa Hadley argues that the chapters’ epigraphs “frame the twentieth-century events of the novel” and provide the key to interpreting the events that follow” (124), yet their paratextual status cannot guarantee that they can actually be perceived in this way.

3. For a more detailed discussion on Possession’s stance toward the role of the author vis-à-vis poststructuralist and postmodernist criticism, most notably Barthes’s assumption about the “Death of the Author” see Kirchknopf 49–50, 53–54; Pereira 150, 154–155; Gutleben and Wolfreys 38–39; Robinson 128–129. Significantly, the negation of the obsoleteness or irrelevance of the author is manifested in the conflict between literature and criticism that unfolds in Possession’s two storylines. Indeed, as; Ann Marie Adams notes, with her Victorian poets, “Byatt [privileges] what current criticism elides and distorts – the power of great literature manifest in its production” (340). Concerning liteature’s appreciation, Byatt’s conviction that “reading ought to be at the centre of studying literature or why bother” (qtd. in Aragay 156) finds its expression in the fact that, of the novel’s entourage of twentieth-century scholars, it is only Roland and Maud who are able to solve the riddle of the poets’ affair because “they objectively assess the evidence before them and actively work toward a greater understanding of what they firmly believe to be some of the best ‘thoughts in the world’” (Adams 39).

4. For further insights into the parallelisms between LaMotte and Melusine, which partly also invade the twentieth-century storyline since Maud is a descendant of LaMotte and Ash’s daughter, see Julian Gitzen’s essay “A. S. Byatt’s Self-Mirroring Art” (90–92).

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Notes on contributors

Elisavet Ioannidou

Elisavet Ioannidou is a PhD candidate at Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, researching the representation of Victorian space in neo-Victorian fiction, and the revision this effects for Victorian class and gender norms.