Possession

This pushed buttons I wasn’t even sure a book could push. Academia, critique and celebration of? Check. History and how we approach it? Check. Victorian literature, impeccably recreated? Check. Passion for books and language? Check. Feminism and sexuality? Check. Folklore and mythology? Check. Gorgeous writing and excellent plotting? Double check. I can’t even begin to imagine how Byatt managed to get so much into this, so tightly, so layered. She even manages to get lines of poetry to further the plot, my gods.

You’ll notice I’m not going much into the plot here. That’s because this is one of those books that’s so complex that any attempt at the plot winds up reductive. Basically, I loved it and you should all read it.

10/10

There are readings—of the same text—that are dutiful, readings that map and dissect, readings that hear a rustling of unheard sounds, that count grey little pronouns for pleasure or instruction and for a time do not hear golden or apples. There are personal readings, which snatch for personal meanings, I am full of love, or disgust, or fear, I scan for love, or disgust, or fear. There are—believe it—impersonal readings—where the mind's eye sees the lines move onwards and the mind's ear hears them sing and sing.

Now and then there are readings that make the hairs on the neck, the non-existent pelt, stand on end and tremble, when every word burns and shines hard and clear and infinite and exact, like stones of fire, like points

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of stars in the dark—readings when the knowledge that we shall know the writing differently or better or satisfactorily, runs ahead of any capacity to say what we know, or how. In these readings, a sense that the text has appeared to be wholly new, never before seen, is followed, almost immediately, by the sense that it was always there, that we the readers, knew it was always there, and have always known it was as it was, though we have now for the first time recognised, become fully cognizant of, our knowledge.

47. Possession by A. S. Byatt
OPD: 1990
format: 555-page paperback
acquired: April read: Jun 30 – Jul 31 time reading: 26:46, 2.9 mpp
rating: 5
genre/style: Fiction theme: Booker legacy
locations: London, Yorkshire and French Britany in 1986 and in the 19th-century
about the author: 1936 –2023: an English critic, novelist, poet and short story writer born in Sheffield. Her sisters are the novelist Margaret Drabble and the art historian Helen Langdon.

It's little hard for me to adequately explain how much I enjoyed this book, was obsessed by it (possessed), and was so unrelentingly curious. I was aware of this while reading, from about page 7 when it fully struck that I wanted to be involved. And that feeling never spoiled. I adored this book. I want to tell you it's the best book written in my lifetime, and why. But I can't adequately express that. Nor do I know if that kind of evaluation makes sense. But, what's weird is that this was all fiction. It's just a book. My obsession was for information, fictional information about fictional characters. When characters discuss illegally digging up a buried body to find lost letters, my brain said, "dig! Justify it later. Just dig! I want those letters!" Although I can't say my brain used any words exactly.

Byatt's first really successful novel, a hugely successful one, was planned this way. She wanted to write about academic stuff, ideas she was interested in. And she thought that if she could hook readers on a mystery, then she could write anything she liked, and we would read it. So, she opens with 19th-century poetry (which she wrote herself, in time-period mimicry, stylistic flaws included), then has us sit with a meek research assistant to a professor studying this 19th-century author, when he, the meek assistant, makes a little discovery of unclear meaning. He finds a draft of a letter hinting at...something. And he steals the relic form the research library! I was hooked.

Then Byatt piles stuff on. More mystery, more discovery, romance, ancient and contemporary, and she can do romance gorgeously; but this romance is all newly found, layering the sense of discovery. oh. Mythology, standing stones. And poetry. Poetry everywhere. We learn about our researchers and their academic squabbles, and about their 19th-century subjects and 19th-century secret affairs. All this mad stuff works. I was fully possessed.

It's so strange to close this book and separate yourself from that that feeling. It's all fiction. It's just a book. But it's a magnificent book. I was obsessed, and it lasted and stayed with me a long time. I loved how reasonable the whole thing was. Just researchers acting crazy, and 19th-century poets acting like 19th-century poets. Ultimately, despite seance's and the quest for ghosts, there is nothing supernatural here. Except what occurs to the reader.

Byatt was very aware of what she was doing and how well it worked. She has talked about it. She also wrote about it here, giving us a beautiful section on the experience of reading, on what it does to the mind, on all the different ways we read (partially quoted above). And then immediately follows that with a pseudo-19th-century poem on hunger, which we all must process, at least in some mindset, as hunger for information. "we must have more... We are driven/By endings as by hunger. We must know/How it comes out...". This is curiosity, an obsessive form of it. These sections together near the end are not an accident. It's a compression of everything the book has just done to the reader, into a few pages. It's the author creating magic out of nothing, and aware of it, and taking time to tell her reader about it. That's just beautiful.

Recommended to anyone who likes post-1950's literature.

2024
https://www.librarything.com/topic/362165#8596175 show less

Review of A.S. Byatt, Possession: a Romance., Various editions (first published by Chatto & Windus 1990; edition used and referenced here is London: Vintage, 1991).

I first read Possession in 1991. Though I am a diarist I said little: “Phwarr” was roughly my reaction, loosely translated. It still is. As I began to re-read after 28 years it was if I were reading for the first time. I vaguely recalled big picture familiarities, but anything more precise than that was lost in the mists of time. Really big picture: some book about literary critical sleuthing, Romantic literature, and romance itself. Some sense perhaps that the subtitle “a romance” was ironic, that something goes around and comes around, that “possession” was an show more important motif.

It is and it isn’t. There is romance, yes. There are two romances, and perhaps two more. There are anti-romances, too … break-ups, historic and contemporary. Because of course there are also two timelines: that of the Romantic-era poets, and that of the PoMo literary critical sleuths.

There are some ironic subtleties too, as minor characters become key players in terms of the narrative development, introduced wholly sans fanfare: “in an inner room, beyond the typewriter cubicle, was a small cavern constructed of filing cabinets, inhabited by Dr Beatrice Nest, almost bricked in by the boxes contained by the diary and correspondence of Ellen Ash” (27).

Do not forget Beatrice. Professor Blackadder (who, Byatt notes, was a protégé of the terribly PoMo-unfashionable F. R. Leavis) later notes, acerbically, “Poor old Beatrice began by wanting to show how self-denying and supportive Ellen Ash was and she messed around looking for every recipe for gooseberry jam and every jaunt to Broadstairs for twenty-five years, can you believe it, and woke up to find that no-one wanted self-denial and dedication any more, they wanted proof that Ellen was raging with rebellion and pain and untapped talent. Poor Beatrice. One publication to her name, and a slim book called Helpmeets doesn’t go down with today’s feminists” (31: italics in the original). Another death on the altar of academic fashion.

The flags Byatt raises to the theme are significant. The recurrent Melusine myth (see, for example, at 33), is one robust presentation of an intellectual, creative woman’s need for unviolated independence, privacy, artistic autonomy: as character Maud Bailey puts it, “I feel as she [character Christabel LaMotte] did. I keep my defences up because I must go on doing my work [original italics]. I know how she felt about her unbroken egg. Her self-possession, her autonomy” [506]. Here resides, as the character Fergus Wolff suggests, “the essential androgyny of the creative mind” (34), and the academic mind no less. Central character Roland Michell’s partner Val (does she ever gain a family name? she is eventually merged with a subsequent partner and his identity: “Maud was followed by Val and Euan McIntyre” at 477) submerges her life with Roland in cat pee and in drudgery in order to finance her lapsing-lover’s academic pursuits. Ellen Ash, quiet, suffering seer, submerges herself in her husband’s literary career. Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose, perhaps?

Yet Maud Bailey, who co-sleuths, co-conspires and indeed at times co-habits with Roland, nudges liberation a notch or two further. She represents at least in part a twentieth-century (and twenty-first, though Byatt was not yet to know that) feminist struggle to juggle academic prowess and intellectual discipline with expectations of domesticity and subservience. The autonomy she seeks is never wrested from her. She is more fortunate than her literary forebear-sisters Ellen Ash and Christabel LaMotte. And more than Val, maybe?

What goes round stays round, one might say, in contradistinction to the more common apothegm. Byatt’s character Leonora Stern, a stern lion(ess) indeed, presents a delightful, larger-than-life representation of feminist literary-criticism. Before sleeping in a virginal, white-sheet bed that Maud Bailey has prepared for him, Roland finds Stern cheerfully discovering representations of “female auto-erotic fantasies of generation without copulation” in the writings of Christabel LaMotte. Roland falls asleep, and Stern is proved to be not absolutely correct.

Byatt plays with literary and literary-critical fashions with keen wit. There can be little doubt that Byatt the individual has plenty of sympathy for feminism. But Byatt the authorial voice is not to be backed into an ideological corner. Byatt herself is of course a literary critic: Unruly Times is the title of her study of Wordsworth and Coleridge. Is she playing with us here? Did the literary critical fashions of 1970, when that study was published, experience the tsunami of new literary-critical fashions as the seventies swept across humanities departments, producing, by the 1980s, Roland’s apparently sterile academic investigations? Byatt’s academic formation is not available to me in any depth, but her earlier novels have been described as showing the influence of D. H. Lawrence; the fictional Blackadder’s historical Leavis was, inter alia, a fine if now disregarded Lawrence scholar. Would Byatt, were she writing Possession today, lament the near obliteration of literary criticism by vocational-formation departments masquerading under the title “English Department”?

Blackadder is a masterstroke of Byatt’s literary creativity. Blackadder: Leavisite by fearful formation, a Leavisite authority on Ash (Blackadder and Ash are a fiction, of course, while Leavis is not: the boundaries often shapeshift). He lives in constant fear of rival colleague and Ash scholar Mortimer Cropper. Blackadder is never likely to be a fan of feminist literary critics, and his “poor old Beatrice” sentence of cynicism reveals his myopia. But is it myopic? Blackadder is a stringent scholar (10), even if, under Leavis’ tutelage “he became an expert on Ash in Ash’s most unfashionable days” (28). For all his faults he is immeasurably preferable to the ostentatious American Cropper, who thinks himself “the lord and owner of Ash” (29). But is he? Blackadder at least seems to admire his subject. Cropper all but obliterates him with his ego. But, while Byatt is not altogether a fan of Christianity, she might “hear, hear” St. Paul’s infamous observation that “all have sinned.” They do, rather.

The central character is Michell. His doctoral thesis played with historical analyses of the poetry of Ash (9). He is reading Ash’s annotations of the Principj di Scienza Nuova of Giambattista Vico when we meet him (2). Vico is the eighteenth century theorist of cyclical human history (though to say that is to cut a long story short), and may well be an important clue to Byatt’s thinking as she tells her fictional history of creative minds in different centuries. Do eternal returns cycle within individual lives, in the corporate life of academic “schools” and preferences, as well as in the history of civilizations and of humanity-at-large? Humanity, in Vico’s writings, episodically descends into “second barbarism.” Is this at least one of the forms of “possession” Byatt is flagging? Humanity possessed, just as Cropper and Michel and Blackadder are possessed by Ash (but they others are possessed by other nineteenth century figures, and there’s an awful lot of mutual possession and dispossession, too). Vico will return, forcefully, as the denouement surges: Roland “heard Vico saying that the first men were poets …” (472).

Roland thinks of himself as a failure (11) and a latecomer (10) in his realm of scholarship. Byatt doesn’t leave him there, but his lack of confidence renders him a Prufrock-figure throughout much of the narrative: “do I dare and do I dare” could as easily have come from Michell’s interior monologue as Prufock’s. Yet ultimately, and arguably, Roland gains more than his friend and rival Fergus Wolff (“Roland liked Fergus because Fergus seemed to like him”, 32) through his dedicated prevarications. Previous¬ly Roland had been generating no more than “solid approbation” (14) but in the end something more emerges from his prevarications as he dedicates himself to his opportunistic, unexpected quest. His literary muse Randolph Henry Ash prophesied no less than this in his “general pantechnicon of a sentence” (9) that Byatt’s authorial voice presents close to the opening of the saga: “A man is the history of his breaths and thoughts …” (ibid.). Roland breathes and thinks and becomes, finds possession and love and life, “a single flame which in every way obeys the laws that pertain to Fire itself” (ibid.)

The vision that conquers is that of Vico. I cannot translate either “Plus ça change …” or “what goes round …” into Italian, let alone eighteenth century Italian, but in Byatt’s magisterial saga of human duplicity, love, greed, and occasional intellectual largesse (yet perhaps like much that is philanthropic or humanitarian, largesse is rarely without self-interest), history more or less repeats itself. As others have noted less garrulously, duplicity bookends all. And perhaps human self-interest is that which possesses all within and without Byatt’s wonderful pages. Those pages have now possessed me twice, and anyway, isn’t reading in itself a self-indulgent act and possession by an Other?

Note: as I knocked up these thoughts two sources guided my otherwise chaotic ruminations:

Shmoop Editorial Team. "Minor Characters in Possession." Shmoop University, Inc., 11 Nov. 2008. Web. 11th Jul. 2019, at https://www.shmoop.com/possession/minor-characters.html
Kieda, Susan Marie, "Metafiction, Fairy Tale, and Female Desire in A.S. Byatt‘s Possession: A Romance" (2015). Masters Theses. 771. http://scholarworks.gvsu.edu/theses/771 show less

Multi-layered and at times dense with its poems written in a 19th century style, this book demands a certain patience from its reader in order to savour all its richness, to peel back all its layers. A tale within a tale, it is the story of two modern day scholars of English Literature and their quest to learn the truth about the connection of two famous 19th c. poets. As Dr. Maud Bailey and Dr. Roland Michell unravel the mystery within the conundrum of Randolph Henry Ash and Christabel LaMotte, others join in to lead the chase across into Britanny and back to England, with a couple of American scholars thrown in for good measure.

Byatt pokes fun at a certain kind of academic, with a wry insider’s look at their behaviour, while show more respectfully using the framework of real scholarship for her story. Fusty libraries, moors, the English seaside, diaries and letters are all employed to unfold the double love stories at the heart of the book. The result is a wonderful tale, skillfully told, with moments of genuine magic. Highly recommended. show less

Roland Michell is an academic barely scraping by as a researcher, an expert on the poet Randolph Henry Ash. One day, he finds what he believes to be a previously unknown draft of a letter from Ash to an unnamed woman, who he determines from other sources to be the poet Christabel LaMotte. Not certain what exactly the letter means but with a gut feeling that it might be important, Roland does something he's never thought of doing before and takes the letter from the British Museum. Hot on the trail and determined to see if he can learn more about Ash and LaMotte's relationship, he meets Maud Bailey, a LaMotte scholar, and together they manage almost accidentally to gain access to LaMotte's ancestral home -- where amazingly, hidden away, show more they uncover Ash and LaMotte's passionate, previously entirely unknown correspondence. As Maud and Roland frantically continue their research, lying about their whereabouts to other scholars in their fervor to keep what they have found under wraps and solely their own, something blossoms between them. But other scholars are becoming suspicious, and it won't be long before Roland and Maud have to come clean about their discoveries.

I tried to read this book for the first time ages ago, when I was in college, and bounced off it then -- perhaps it was too close to home at the time. This time, I absolutely loved it. Byatt has so intricately crafted these interweaving stories and histories that I almost have trouble remembering that Ash and LaMotte weren't real poets. The book is composed of various types of prose -- the present day narrative, the past narrative, the letters themselves, various poetic works by both Ash and LaMotte, and a journal of a relative of LaMotte's, to name a few. I'm actually glad I listened to the audiobook because it's very possible I could have been bogged down by some of the poetry in print -- I enjoy shorter poetry, but can find longer works challenging. (Yes, I'm that person who skips all the songs when I read LOTR, sue me.) Possession is subtitled "a romance" -- but it's really multiple romances, wrapped up in a mystery, with a dose of historical fiction to tie it together, all written in the most intricate, lovely prose, and plotted and put together with exquisite detail. 5 stars. show less

This is a real page-turner, which is almost the last thing I expected. I've no ear for poetry so I thought it might be a slog, but Byatt has crafted an intriguing mystery around research being conducted into two 19th century poets, with a layer of romance over top. Perhaps it's the echoes of my own genealogical forays that made it interesting to me, or maybe it's Byatt's incredible evocation of two entirely fictional poets (Randolph Henry Ash and Christabel LaMotte), brought so vividly to life that I was at first certain they must actually have lived. I've as little ability to critique poetry as I do appreciation for it, but their fabricated work certainly sounds convincingly like what I'd expect from poets of that era.

What my show more compulsion could not have been due to is any kind of stakes, which I felt were practically non-existent. True, the main characters have minor personal issues to work out but it does seem as if they could carry on as-is without great harm. It also seems as though their discoveries will be preserved and shared for posterity no matter whose hands they fall into, so there's no threat there. I was forced to face the fact that I was being drawn in by the same snoopy eagerness as the modern characters have to see what they'd tripped across and what it might contain, nosing into others' private secrets. Byatt addresses this directly, challenging the reader to wonder why this is so compelling and what it says about people. From this, the stakes do emerge - and they were there all along, Byatt was only waiting for me to see it.

In retrospect, I can see that it is brilliantly constructed. It is also a romance without any of the tropes that annoy me in that genre; a romance for the non-romantically-inclined. With every page I loved it more and more, and became more and more sorry about A.S. Byatt's death last autumn. She's left us an enormous treasure. show less

What a phenomenal book. A college professor from my undergraduate days, who I admired very much, recommended this to us as leisure reading. I picked a copy up at the time and then let it linger on my shelf for years, which is a shame, as this was a fantastic novel. I see why this book appealed to her so much, as she was a professor in English literature, just as it drew me being a graduate of English literature studies. The story is saturated with the academic world of reading in many of its facets, from textual analysis to historical research to personal connection.

The story begins with Roland Michell, a scholar who has dedicated his life's work to the study of Victorian writer Randolph Henry Ash. During the course of routine research show more one day, he discovers the draft of a letter that Ash wrote, tucked away in one of Ash's old books on Vico. The letter appears to be a passionate appeal to a woman, and that not his wife - a missive completely out of keeping with what the rest of the world believes about the contemplative writer. Ashe has become a hot topic in academic circles, and Roland thinks that this letter could reveal information that would revolutionize his world. In his excitement over his prize, Roland chooses an unorthodox approach; he keeps the letters a secret and decides to pursue this lead on his own.

Once he discovers that the intended recipient of the letter was Christabel La Motte, another author of great interest in the literary world, especially among feminists, Roland knows that he will need help. He asks around and discovers that Maud Bailey is one of the leading experts on La Motte. He seeks her out, and soon his lead turns to more than a hunch, as he realizes that without a doubt Ash and La Mott had some sort of connection. The clues he discovers in Bailey's collection of reference material suggest that more answers will be found in La Motte's home, and to gain access there, he will need Maud's cooperation; to win it, he reveals the secret letters to her.

At first, Maud is horrified by his apparent theft of valuable materials. She grudgingly listens to his explanation, and slowly accepts that Roland is not trying to advance his own career or seeking monetary gain, but is enchanted by a personal quest to discover the truth before others can intervene and crowd him out. Maud starts to share his conspiratorial attitude, and they form a pair of literary sleuths, tracking the relationship between Ash and La Motte through correspondence and journals, hidden letters and undisclosed information that they find across various towns and houses all over England.

The novel is much more complex than the story line suggests, however. The mystery between Ash and La Motte is central to the book, but this narrative is interspersed with multiple perspectives. We read Ash's poetry, La Motte's poetry and her short stories, excerpts from research books written by Roland and Maud's contemporaries, excerpts from biographies and imagined biographies, journals written by Ash's wife, and letters written by just about everyone. The way that Byatt gives each of these different pieces of her book a new voice, a distinct personality, is amazing. These fragments twine together around the central narrative between Roland and Maud, as the reader becomes as much an investigator as the main characters of the novel, and the clues all mesh together in the conclusion.

Yet even more is at work in the story. The themes that Ash and La Motte write about in their stories are echoed in the book as a whole, the idea of solitude, of love breaking that solitude and destroying it, but creating a new life in the destruction. Motifs about artistry are, understandably, rampant in this book. Spirituality and its connection to literature is explored. The lives of Roland and Maud begin to echo and amplify the relationship between Ash and La Motte, and dizzying questions of art imitating life, life imitating art, how much influence written ideas have on our mental states, what is real and what is fiction, are posed. The book is so full of ideas and relationships, but they are explored fully and satisfactorily. Needless to say, I loved this book. Everyone should read this book. Go find a copy now. show less