The Books: “Sugar and Other Stories” – ‘Precipice-Encurled’ (A.S. Byatt)

Daily Book Excerpt: Adult fiction:

bosugar.jpegThis excerpt is from “Precipice-Encurled”, another short story from the collection Sugar and Other Stories – by A.S. Byatt.

I am not sure what year this beautiful (and ultimately tragic) story was written – but it feels to me like a rehearsal for Possession. We have a scholar – in the present-day – looking back through time at a portrait of a woman … and also at the poems and letters of Robert Browning … the scholar does not have much to go on but he believes that Browning and the woman in the portrait had an unrequited love affair – and he believes that the clues are everywhere, in the poems, the letters … he just needs to piece it all together. The story itself is in pieces, though … We hear about the portrait. We get inside the scholar’s mind. Then – suddenly – we are in Robert Browning’s mind. In the Browning sections he talks quite a bit about Sludge, the medium … and of course that’s a HUGE theme in Possession … It feels to me like Byatt might have been working up to Possession here, so many of the themes and devices are similar. And after that – we are there in Italy, on a trip Browning was supposed to take … but did not … we know from the section about the scholar that the scholar is curious as to why Browning did NOT join the others in Italy … Anyway – it’s a well-written short story, completely with the stamp of AS Byatt on it. Nobody else could have written it. Here’s an excerpt – from the section where we are inside Robert Browning’s head. It was hard to pick an excerpt – the story is rather long, and every page is jammed with great stuff, food for thought, good writing. She is so so good when writing about intellectual and spiritual concerns of a bygone age. It’s not about the fact that they didn’t have electricity or cars … although that is a factor, too. It’s about what they thought and how they thought about it. So much historical fiction is just balderdash with people wearing costumes. Byatt is interested in how they thought, the intellectual influences of the day, where God fits into all of it …. etc.


Excerpt from “Precipice-Encurled”, another short story from the collection Sugar and Other Stories – by A.S. Byatt.

Elizabeth had been a great poet, a captive princess liberated and turned wife, a moral force, silly over some things, such as her growing boy’s long curls and the flimsy promises and fake visions of the seance. She too had not known this world that was so important. One such intimate knowledge as I have had with many a person would have taught her, he confided once, unguarded, had she been inclined to learn. Though I doubt if she would have dirtied her hands for any scientific purpose. His pubic self had a scientific purpose, and if his hands were dirty, he could wash them clean in a minute before he saw her, as he trusted to do. He had his reasonable doubts about this event, too, though he wrote bravely of it, the step from this world to that other world, the fog in the throat, the mist in the face, the snows, the blasts, the pain and then the peace out of pain and the loving arms. It was not a time of certainties, however he might assert them from time to time. It was a time of doubt, doubt was a man’s business. But it was also hard to imagine all this tenacious sense of self, all this complexity of knowledge and battling, force and curiosity becoming nothing. What is a man, what is a man’s soul?

Descartes believed, he noted down, that the seat of the soul is the pineal gland. The reason for this is a pretty reason – all else in our apparatus for apprehending the world is double, viz. two ears, two eyes, etc. and two lobes of our brain moreover; Descartes requires that somewhere in our body all our diverse, our dual impressions must be unified before reaching the soul, which is one. He had thought often of writing a poem about Descartes, dreaming in his stove of sages and blasted churches, reducing all to the tenacity of the observing thinker, cogito ergo sum. A man can inhabit another man’s mind, or body, or senses, or history, can jerk it into a kind of life, as galvanism moves frogs: a good poet could inhabit Descartes, the bric-a-brac of stove and ill-health and wooden bowls of onion soup, perhaps, and one of those pork knuckles, and the melon offered to the philosopher by the sage in his feverish dream, all this paraphernalia spinning round the naked cogito as the planets spin in an orrery. The best part of my life, he told himself, the life I have lived most intensely, has been the fitting, the infiltrating, the inventing the self of another man or woman, explored and sleekly filled out, as fingers swell a glove. I have been webbed Caliban lying in the primeval ooze, I have been madman and saint, murderer and sensual prelate, inspired David and the cringing medium, Sludge, to whom I gave David’s name, with what compulsion of irony or equivocation, David Sludge? The rooms in which his solitary self sat buzzed with other selves, crying for blood as the shades cried at the pit dug by Odysseus in his need to interrogate, to revive the dead. His father’s encyclopaedias were the banks of such blood0pits, bulging with paper lives and circumstances, no two the same, none insignificant. A set of views, a time-confined philosophy, a history of wounds and weaknesses, flowers, clothing, food and drink, light on Mont Blanc’s horns of silver, fangs of crystal; these coalesce to make one self in one place. Then decompose. I catch them, he thought, I hold them together, I give them coherence and vitality, I. And what am I? Just such another concatenation, a language and its rhythms, a limited stock of learning, derived from my father’s consumed books and a few experiments in life, my desires, my venture in dragon-slaying, my love, my loathings also, the peculiar colours of the world through my two eyes, the blind tenacity of the small, the single driving centre, soul or self.

What he had written down, with the scratchy pen, were one or two ideas for Descartes and his metaphorical orrery: meaningless scraps. And this writing brought to life in him a kind of joy iin greed. He would procure, he would soak in, he would comb his way through the Discourse on Method, and the Passions of the Soul: he would investigate Flemish stoves. His private self was now roused from its dormant state to furious activity. He felt the white hairs lift on his neck and his breath quickened. A bounded man, he had once written, may so project his surplusage of soul in search of body, so add self to self … so find, so fill full, so appropriate forms … In such a state a man became pure curiosity, pure interest in whatever presented itself of the creation, lovely or freakish, pusillanimous, wise or vile. Those of his creatures he most loved or most approved moved wiht such delighted and indifferent interest through the world. There was the tragic Duchess, destroyed by the cold egotism of a Duke who could not bear her equable pleasure in everything, a sunset, a bough of cherries, a white mule, his favour at her breast. There was Karshish, the Arab physician, the not-incurious in God’s handiwork, who noticed lynx and blue-flowering borage and recorded the acts of the risen Lazarus. There was David, seeing the whole earth shine with significance after soothing the passionate self-doubt of Saul; there was Christopher Smart, whose mad work of genius, his Song to David, a baroque chapel in a dull house, had recorded the particularity of the world, the whale’s bulk in the waste of brine, the feather-tufts of Wild Virgin’s Bower, the habits of the polyanthus. There was the risen Lazarus himself, who had briefly been in the presence of God and inhabited eternity, and to whose resuscitated life he had been able to give no other characteristics than these, the lively, indifferent interest in everything, a mule with gourds, a child’s death, the flowers of the field, some trifling fact at which he will gaze “rapt with stupor at its very littleness.”

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4 Responses to The Books: “Sugar and Other Stories” – ‘Precipice-Encurled’ (A.S. Byatt)

  1. Paul says:

    Good historical fiction often is more appealing than historical non fiction !

  2. red says:

    I don’t quite agree with that – but that’s mainly because I’m not a big fan of historical fiction (obviously!!). I like Byatt’s stuff because it’s smart and rigorous. Intellectually curious and deep. Like her story Morpho Eugenia … it seems to almost have even been WRITTEN in the mid 1800s ..

    I read a great review of Byatt’s writing somewhere and it said, “She writes as though Joyce never existed.”

    Which is so hysterical to me (any modern writer has to contend with the shadow of Joyce – either by rejecting him, embracing him, railing against him – whatever – if you don’t deal with Joyce you aren’t worthy of being called a writer) – and you can really see Byatt’s sensibility in that comment. Her form, her structure – is strictly 19th century. Like Middlemarch.

    TS Eliot said that Joyce killed the 19th century.

    Byatt imagines herself back into that time with such vivid-ness … I absolutely love her stuff. I have to be in the mood for it – whereas I am pretty much always in the mood for Joyce … but I love Byatt’s voice. A lot of the times I feel like she has put certain elements of my own personality into words … stuff that is ineffable, hard to pin down … I wrote a bit about it in my post about Possession. It’s funny to take a writer so personally. But I just feel like she “gets” me. She doesnt’ even know I exist – but she “gets” me.

    Going back through this short story collection (I haven’t read it in years) has been really fun. Reacquainting myself with all these stories. There’s one more in the collection and then I’ll move on to her NEXT book on the shelf.

  3. Ken says:

    That’s an interesting set of insights. By way fo contrast, as much as I love C.S. Forester, Horatio Hornblower is much more a man of the 20th Century than the early 19th in attitude (bathing every day, horrified by the customary use of corporal and capital punishment to enforce discipline in the Royal Navy, etc.–Captain Bush stands in for the “traditional’ view). I think Forester may have believed that the 20th Century reader needed a point of view with whom to identify…I also have the vague suspicion that this has come up in this salon before.

    Maybe that’s why, for all that I admire Hornblower, if I finally grow up I would rather be Pug Henry. ;-)

  4. red says:

    Interesting points about Hornblower!

    I think there’s a lot that is unpalatable in history (to us in the modern-day) – and authors who want to write about the past have to grapple (and honestly) with that. It’s an interesting theme in Possession in terms of the sexuality of Christabel LaMotte, one of the poets the two modern-day scholars are investigating. Decades of scholarship has developed around the “fact” that Christabel LaMotte was a lesbian poet. Whole women’s studies departments are erected around this … people hover over that fact protectively – lesbians feel like she is “ours” … It becomes their OWN validation for their OWN sexuality, their OWN justfication … whatever. It’s kind of a weak basis to “like” someone as an author – and Byatt brings that point home like nobody’s business.

    So when it starts to become obvious that while Christabel may have been a lesbian … she also had a huge love affair with a male … the edifice in the current day begins to crumble.

    The modern-day mantra of “absolutely queer” is just that: modern-day. History doesn’t line up so simply and that can make unimaginative or insecure people who are looking for validation (rather than truth) uncomfortable.

    Really interesting thoughts – I like Byatt because she always has some kind of distancing technique in stories like this.

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