{"id":5225,"date":"2006-08-28T17:48:02","date_gmt":"2006-08-28T21:48:02","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/?p=5225"},"modified":"2015-05-23T20:08:48","modified_gmt":"2015-05-24T00:08:48","slug":"possessed","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/?p=5225","title":{"rendered":"A.S. Byatt: “Possessed”"},"content":{"rendered":"

Great essay by AS Byatt <\/a>about her thought process while creating and writing Possession<\/a>\"\"<\/i>, one of my favorite novels.<\/p>\n

This part amazed me:<\/p>\n

There was a huge problem. I knew that modern forms were parodic- not only Eco, but the intelligent criticism of Malcolm Bradbury had been pointing that out – parodic, not in a sneering or mocking way, but as “rewriting” or “representing” the past. The structural necessity of my new form was that the poems of my two poets, the most important thing about them in my own view, should be in this no-longer ghostly text. And I am not a poet, and novelists who write poems usually come to grief. Robertson Davies, the Canadian novelist, had written a novel with a parodic libretto in fact made up of the poems of Thomas Lovell Beddoes. I said to the poet D.J.Enright at a party, that I was contemplating using the early poems of Pound that look as though they could be by Browning. “Nonsense,” he said. “Write your own.”<\/p>\n

So I tried. My mind has been full since childhood of the rhythms of Tennyson and Browning, Rossetti and Keats. I read and reread Emily Dickinson, whose harsher and more sceptical voice I found more exciting than Christina Rossetti’s meek resignation. I wanted a fierce female voice. And I found I was possessed – it was actually quite frightening – the nineteenth-century poems that were not nineteenth-century poems wrote themselves, hardly blotted, fitting into the metaphorical structure of my novel, but not mine, as my prose is mine. <\/p><\/blockquote>\n

It amazes me because frankly, that is how it feels when I read the book. The poems are certainly not to the level of Dickinson or anything like that- but they are good enough. Good enough to convey that they could possibly be “real”. That is what is needed to give the book its authenticity, its whiff of reality. You have to feel like you are reading someone else’s work, looking through someone else’s old letters … the author herself must disappear in this type of novel. And yet … she doesn’t. That’s part of Byatt’s trickery. That’s part of the point she is making, about writers, about the writing of biographies, about literary research … What IS invisible? What IS literary possession? What is left unsaid? We only have the treasure trove of the author’s actual WORDs … but what did he or she leave unsaid? You can see how literary theorists can become “possessed” by this kind of thinking (Byatt mentions the driving urge to dig up George Eliot’s grave to get the letters that were buried with her). There is a sense that all CAN be known. Which is obviously untrue – because how can we ever know everything about a life? Isn’t so much of life in what is between the lines?? To learn that Byatt was not a poet is quite extraordinary – but again, I am not surprised. I have read this book over and over, and I never skip the long long poems (some of them are 10, 12 pages long), although you would think I might. Because what you’re seeing there on the page IS an act of possession – and it really shows. Two different poets, speaking with two different voices, written in the styles of the 19th century. It is an extraordinary feat.<\/p>\n

I also love all the bits about colors – how as the book developed in her mind the colors for it changed:<\/p>\n

There is a Gothic plot, I thought, of violence and skulduggery. The Gestalt got more lurid, purple, black, vermilion, with flying white forms. <\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The green and gold of Maud … how she shimmers with the golden hair and all that … the deep dark dirt of the ending scene …<\/p>\n

But to read about how carefully she constructed all of that is really inspirational.<\/p>\n

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