MAN BOOKER PRIZE 1990
Booker club: Possession by AS Byatt
Book club: A zest for pastiche
John Mullan on Possession by AS Byatt. Week one: satire
John Mullan
Saturday 20 June 2009
B
efore AS Byatt wrote Possession she had been teaching English literature at University College London, and it is often observed that her fiction has an academic quality. Possession is seamed with learning and allusion, like the writing of Randolph Henry Ash, the great Victorian poet whom it creates. Yet this story, whose hero and heroine, Roland and Maud, are academic researchers, is an acid satire on academia. Sometimes it offers secret pleasures of recognition to those readers who might have been through the same seminars and known the same professional absurdities as the author herself.
Famously, Byatt has composed passages of 19th-century verse for her two poets, and has invented extracts from Victorian journals and letters. Her zest for pastiche also runs to academic documents. Possession includes mock versions of academic citations and titles, footnotes to scholarly editions and even extracts from imaginary critical essays. Christabel LaMotte, whose unsuspected love affair with Randolph Ash is discovered in the course of the novel, has been made the possession of feminist literary criticism, which is the special target of Byatt's satire. Her poetry is analysed in articles with titles such as "A Docile Rage: Christabel LaMotte's Ambivalent Domesticity" or "Melusina, Builder of Cities: a Subversive Female Cosmogony". Maud herself has written the latter; she is destined to find the more human truth about her chosen author.
Like many satirists, Byatt has given us representative "characters" of a profession. There is the dour Professor James Blackadder, who at Cambridge learned the arts of discouraging aspiring students at the feet of FR Leavis. (The novel includes a vivid cameo of one of Leavis's classes at Downing College, where the "lean and agile don" gives a crowded room of undergraduates a demonstration of "analytic brilliance" by enticing them into errors.)
There is the irresistible Fergus Wolff, who has trumped Roland to the only tenured job in the English department of Prince Albert College by developing a specious expertise in literary theory. He has used post-structuralism to seduce Maud at a conference in Paris on "Gender and the Autonomous Text". His own paper on "the phallogocentric structuration of Balzac's hermaphrodite heroines" shows him au fait with the theories of French critic Luce Irigaray, and allows him to lure Maud to his hotel bedroom. ("We two are the most intelligent people here, you know".)
And there are the Americans. The villain of Possession is Professor Mortimer P Cropper of Robert Dale Owen University in New Mexico, who uses his wiles and the unlimited wealth of his institution to take possession of Ash. He invites the knowing reader to think of those rich American universities that have acquired status by buying up the manuscripts of famous British authors. Rather less odious is his compatriot, Leonora Stern, Professor of Women's Studies at the University of Tallahassee. Large, loud and irrepressible, Leonora has made a successful career of finding traces of repressed erotic feeling in Victorian women's writing. Naturally, Leonora's intellectual bravado cloaks ignorance in humbler matters: when she receives a crucial letter about Christabel LaMotte from a French woman she has to ask Maud to perform a close translation. "I got the general gist of it ... What it is to have an English education."
Some of the satire will be obscure to the majority of readers. Leonora's first husband, we learn, was "a happily meticulous New Critic" who "had totally failed to survive Leonora and the cut-throat ideological battles" of literary theory. Only academic readers will recognise that the school of criticism to which poor Nathaniel Stern belonged - dedicated to the fine nuances of highly wrought literary texts - was as doomed as his marriage. Leonora has decided that "the empowering force" behind Christabel LaMotte's writing was her "lesbian sexuality". This, of course, is in the absence of evidence of any actual lesbian attachment. Writing to Maud to persuade her to take part in an academic conference on "the study of the female erotic in nineteenth-century poetry", Leonora acknowledges that ... "I accept that her inhibitions made her characteristically devious and secret." Many a reader who has studied English at university since the 1980s will have enjoyed recognising the recent academic habit of finding evidence for a theory in the very lack of evidence.
The narrative of Possession is an admonition to the literary academic. Roland explains to Maud that he works on Ash's poems be cause they were "what stayed alive, when I'd been taught and examined everything else". "That's it," she replies. "What could survive our education." Roland and Maud uncover an unsuspected love affair between two long-dead writers. In doing so, they show - empirically, irrefutably - that the most sophisticated academic analyses of LaMotte's and Ash's work have been wrong. Literary academics, it seems, invite satire, for they bring most ingenuity to what they cannot know.
• John Mullan is professor of English at University College London.
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