Possession: a Romance by A. S. Byatt (1990)

[lightreads]

Two scholars in the late 1980’s, one the devotee of a famous Victorian poet and the other a successful feminist literary theorist, embark on an academic adventure as they discover and trace a startling and unknown love affair between their respective Victorian subjects, and begin to have one of their own.

I’m going to say up front and flatly that this book is very, very clever, and that I was disappointed with it.

I’ll take it in order, though – cleverness first. The style and the writing are nothing short of exquisite. Byatt interjects the modern narrative with large swaths of fictionalized historical material – love letters, journal entries from a spurned lesbian lover and a quietly devastated wife, forgotten correspondence. The language is beautiful and note perfect, and I don’t think I really need to explain why I was so thoroughly charmed by the literary building of the historical relationship, and by this passage in particular written just after the first face-to-face meeting of significance.

And did you find-as I did how curious, as well as very natural, it was that we should be so shy with each other, when in a papery way we knew each other
so much better? I feel I have always known you, and yet I search for polite phrases and conventional enquiries; you are more mysterious in your presence
(as I suppose most of us may be) than you seem to be in ink and scribbled symbols. (Perhaps we all are so. I cannot tell.)

The broken parallelism is also quite cleverly done. Byatt aligns the repressive constraints of Victorian sexuality against the militantly sexualized present. Her purpose is not to judge – which is refreshing – but rather to comment dryly upon the ways every relationship is subject, is contextual, is broken and constrained by the outside while the heart of that possession, that thing universal and a-historical that we call love won’t ever change.

"Do you never have the sense that our metaphors eat up our world? I mean of course everything connects and connects---all the time--and I suppose one studies--I study--literature because all these connections seem both endlessly exciting and then in some sense dangerously powerful—as though we held a clue to the true nature of things? I mean, all those gloves, a minute ago, we were playing a professional game of hooks and eyes—mediaeval gloves, giants' gloves, Blanche Glover, Balzac's gloves, the sea-anemone's ovaries--and it all reduced like boiling jam to--human sexuality. Just as Leonora Stern makes the whole earth read as the female body--and language--all language. And all vegetation in pubic hair."

Maud laughed, dryly. Roland said, "And then, really, what is it, what is this arcane power we have, when we see that everything is human sexuality? It's
really powerlessness. ""

"Impotence," said Maud, leaning over, interested.

"I was avoiding that word, because that precisely isn't the point. We are so knowing. And all we've found out, is primitive sympathetic magic. Infantile polymorphous perversity. Everything relates to us and so we're imprisoned in ourselves--we can't see things. And we paint everything with this metaphor--"

"You are very cross with Leonora."

"She's very good. But I don't want to see through her eyes. It isn't a matter of her gender and my gender. I just don't."

Maud considered. She said, "In every age, there must be truths people can't fight--whether or not they want to, whether or not they will go on being truths
in the future. We live in the truth of what Freud discovered. Whether or not we like it. However we've modified it. We aren't really free to suppose--to
imagine he could possibly have been wrong about human nature. In particulars, surely--but not in the large plan--"

She examines romance and academia with this same cool perceptiveness, as in the passage above, and there’s a well-figured larger thematic design – the possessive ownership of the biographer for subject, the self-possession to be sacrificed in love, the way the very looking at the thing changes it by owning it, all overlaid with a subtle net of the reader-writer relationship and how it tugs at both. And goodness, I missed books as intricately layered as this.

Yet, for all that cleverness – and I say again, it’s truly and excellently done . . .

I don’t know. I think it’s partly that it took me so very long to warm up to anybody. The academics are drawn with such vividness in their various commentative roles that, in their commentary, they are almost universally laughable, pathetic, or simply repulsive. And though it’s thematically right that our modern-day couple be so defined by the way the world has defined them – painfully neurotic, and of that particular type of scholar who possesses a plodding intellect that is fit for only one narrow subject, respectively – rather than how they truly are, it puts the reader in the awkward position of, well, needing over four hundred pages to get an inkling of giving a damn about them.

I did give a damn, eventually. A small one. But it struck me around page 500 that I could not think of a single occasion in the entire book when anyone, anywhere laughed. Ever. And sociological commentary can be as sharp-eyed as this, it seems, but if absolutely no one in the book can manage to crack a single smile over some of the deliberate absurdities, it seems the whole thing will grate on my nerves. Which it did.

It’s a good book, really I swear. It’s also designed specifically to bother me, the more I think about it. I imagine the people who recommended it to me didn’t have that problem, and in spite of that I thoroughly enjoyed the conceit, the literary execution, and the clever, perfect stitch placed at the very end. Still, it left a vaguely unsettled feeling, and not, I think, how it was intended to.

Comments

[yunitsa.livejournal.com]

Thank you for articulating exactly how I felt about Possession, as I've never been able to do. I'd heard so many things about it, and I so wanted to like it because it seemed like exactly my sort of thing, and it is incredibly clever, but - yeah. I think if I reread it now that I, too, am immersed in English Lit. academia, I would be even more impressed by the clever bits (I didn't recall the passage you quoted above, but it's very good), but it still wouldn't click with me. The lack of laughter, yes - one only has to compare it with Dorothy Sayers: the only sin that passion can commit is to be joyless, and this sort of is.

[lightreads.livejournal.com]

one only has to compare it with Dorothy Sayers: the only sin that passion can commit is to be joyless, and this
sort of is.



Oh yes, there really is no comparison, is there? Which also puts paid to my initial 'oh, it's just very very British' response. Neither accurate or fair of me.

[treewishes.livejournal.com]

I think there was a movie about this topic that was utterly vapid a couple of years ago. Did they make it into a movie with.... Paltrow?

But yes -- I agree that a book with no overt humor where humor was warranted is either dull or British....

[lightreads.livejournal.com]

Yes, I believe there was a movie made of the book some time ago. I don't remember much about it -- a movie I've seen, I know! -- and have no idea who was in it. I suspect it was vapid and insipid though. Seems a safe bet.

[josanpq.livejournal.com]

I tried this one several times. Never got past page 50. Can't believe that Byatt is...shoot, Not Drabble's sister, but someone else's, who also writes. (Darn this memory!)

I remember hearing on CBC radio an interview with the sister...who laughed and made the interviewer (and the listeners) laugh a lot. In contrast to the interview with Byatt, who was so filled with pomposity that she quite put me to sleep.

Byatt refused to talk about her sister, while the sister (damn it all, what *is* her name!!!???) mentioned that Byatt didn't like it when she spoke about her.

That and Byatt's anti-J K Rowling 'essay' (which read so much like sour grapes) has put me off her completely.

[charlie-ego.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I read that essay, and although I very much love Possession, it did leave me with a bad taste in my mouth. Because Byatt is really a good writer, and she doesn't need to sour-grapes, and her essay is completely fallacious. You can love Dante and Rowling both. In fact, I do.

[lightreads.livejournal.com]

Oh good grief, I'm really glad I didn't realize that was her while I was reading. Would have put me right off.

[lightreads.livejournal.com]

Had to look this up, and it in fact is Margaret Drabble. Haven't read her fiction, but I've quite liked some of her criticism.

Oh, that was her with the HP editorial? I completely didn't connect the dots on that. I'm sort of glad I didn't know that while reading . . .

[charlie-ego.livejournal.com]

Ah, well, as one of the people who loved it and recommended it to you, I'm sorry that it didn't fit.

Though I understand what you mean... although I personally very much like Maud (which given my strong predilection for characters-i-like, is probably what saved the present-day stuff for me), and empathize with Roland (though I don't much like his character, I... identify with parts of it)-- and I just adore the poets (I suspect they laugh, if no one else does)-- I can see that the other characters could leave one with a slightly annoyed taste.

(This discussion reminds me a little of Doomsday Book in this way-- have you read this?-- which also alternates between present-day-slightly-future and long-past, where the present-day stuff is kind of irritating in a supposedly-comedic sort of way, and the long-past is just heartbreaking. And I know a lot of people who hated the book because they got annoyed at the present-day stuff, whereas I mostly have forgotten about those parts and love it for the long-past bits.)

And it's telling that although I do love the book, and it really is one of my favorites, it's never been one of my comfort reads, the way most (all?) of my other favorites are. It's like it's a favorite because I admire its beauty rather than because I adore its soul.

[charlie-ego.livejournal.com]

Another thought: I possibly identified with Maud and Roland a bit more than most because I was for a number of years (including when I first read the book) steeped in the academic world, and really, Maud's neuroticism and Roland's plodding narrowness? Spot on. And it's not really particularly either funny or pathetic, it's just the way things are.

[lightreads.livejournal.com]

Oh, I know. I did admire the accuracy of some of the characters. Particularly Cropper, who was the one receiving the "repulsive" for the way his personal ego was so bound up in the collection. Quite painfully accurate, in that case. In actuality, many of my negative feelings about the academics were focussed on the secondary characters -- Blackadder and Beatrice Nest, specifically. Who, as you say, are quite accurately drawn, if a tiny bit overblown for effect.

Now for context I should also say that there was a time in my life when I considered graduate work in lit -- half of my degree is in lit, actually -- and then I realized that if I did that I would inevitably end up in a clock tower with a high-powered rifle someday. I did say the book was designed specifically to get at my buttons.

[charlie-ego.livejournal.com]

Yes, that's true-- I have an utter love for books where the secondary characters are as compelling as the main ones (*cough*Bujold), and this didn't really do that. Well. The secondary characters past-time (Ellen Ash springs most prominently to mind) were pretty good.

At the time I read Possession I was still totally in love with the academic world. And I loved grad school. But once I got out of grad school I was ready to get out of academia-- there's a particular sort of person (my advisor was one, which was probably a large part of why I loved grad school) who doesn't get either mildly corrupted or insanely quirky as a result of living the weird academic lifestyle, but they are relatively rare. I wouldn't've lasted another five years. So yeah, if I read it now for the first time I might have a rather different outlook :)

[lightreads.livejournal.com]

Oh, I did quite like the poets, and you're right, I think they did laugh a bit, even if it was only behind their hands.

I started Doomsday Book enough to know what it's about. I'll pick it up again sometime soon when I'm in the proper mood and can appreciate it more. It's a delicate dance, those multi time thread stories . . .

It's like it's a favorite because I admire its beauty rather than because I adore its soul.


Yes, that's precisely put. Which is something I feel for more books than I'd like. I think in this case it's that I went in hoping to be emotionally swept up in the romance, and instead it felt quite coldly calculated -- the modern-day side, I mean.

Ah well. Still well done.

[charlie-ego.livejournal.com]

Yes, I wonder if you'll have the same problem with Doomsday Book that you had with this one. I'll be interested to find out :)