Possession by A. S. Byatt ~ Book Club Online for June

[ginny]

The Book Club Online is  the oldest  book club on the Internet, begun in 1996, open to everyone.  We offer cordial discussions of one book a month,  24/7 and  enjoy the company of readers from all over the world.  everyone is welcome to join in.

Interview with A.S. Byatt on Possession Submitted by Jude S.

A Zest for Pastiche by John Mullan on Possession by AS Byatt. Week one:  Satire: (Possible spoilers within).  Submitted by Marcie

Characters and Plot   by our Readers

Schedule of Discussion:

June 7-13    Chapters 6-11 (126pp)
June 14-20  Chapters 12-17 (102pp)            
June 21-27  Chapters 18-23 (123pp)
June 28-30  Chapters 24- end  (90pp)  

Week II: June 7-13:  

1. (Chapter 6) What are your impressions of Mortimer Cropper? How would you characterize his studies of/relationship with Randolph Ash?

2. (Chapter 7) What are your impressions of Beatrice Nest and her work related to the journals of Ellen Ash?

3. (Chapter 7) What does Roland discover in the journals of Ellen Ash?

4. (Chapter 8 ) What do we learn about Randolph Ash and Christabel LaMotte from their first exchange of letters?

5. (Chapter 8 ) What are some things you noticed about Roland and Maude early on in their quest to read the letters? Do you see parallels between the two pairs?

6. (Chapter 9) What do you make of LaMotte's story "The Threshold"?

7. (Chapter 10) What are your thoughts about the events and the imagery in the correspondence and poems in this chapter?

8. (Chapter 11) What are some of the themes and imagery that made an impression on you in Ash's poem "Swammerdam"? Do you see anything of LaMotte's influence there?  Ash said she was his muse and influenced the poem, can you point out to her presence or influence?

9. Why does LaMotte capitalize every other word in her letters and not her poetry or fairy tales?

Discussion Leaders: ginny & Marcie

 

[ginny]

These last two posts have been especially helpful to me in getting who is real and who is not straight, and I agree, Jonathan: Along with the good advice from Mr Sludge in Browning's monolgue, I think it's a good key to the labyrinth into which the author has taken us.

Labyrinth, I really like that image.That's what it is, all right, with many twists and turns, one has no idea what's waiting around the corner.

Marcie that omniscient narrator explains a lot here. I kept wondering whose thoughts we see, that's a brilliant addition to our discussion, thank you. Seems so clear when she sets it out.

I thought this was also telling in Jonathan's bit:   The dating handout contained a troubadour lyric, a piece of dramatist Jacobean verse, some satirical couplets, a blank verse meditation on volcanic mud and a love sonnet. Blackadder, schooled by his grandfather, saw immediately that all these poems were by Randolph Henry Ash, examples of his ventriloquisms, of his unwieldy range.

  He recognized it right away, a blank verse meditation on volcanic mud...what a hoot. This thing is a hoot.

I can't however, get a feel for Ash.  Can any of you?

Thank you Kidsal for that super addenda to the cast. I'm going to combine both of them and we can put a list of the characters in the heading. Until Marcie's post I did not realize Leavis  was real. I knew Blackadder wasn't. I've added Leavis to our list of characters also.

So in this book so far, is there only the one real person? Leavis?  


Marcie says "I am feeling sympathetic to Roland," ok here before we have to go on can you say which of the characters YOU feel most connected to and why?

I can't get any feel at all for Christabel. She of the white fairy tales, the glass coffins, purity set apart waiting for the handsome prince.

But I do see now, once we winnow out the characters and some of the plot how simple it really is, and it makes a lot more sense. Does it for you?

BECAUSE of Blackadder and all the rest of these guys have staked their very reputations and lives, and all the thought they possess UPON Randolph Henry Ash's being ....what?

Joan R, this, I thought, was fabulous:   By prying into her secret, the husband is supposed to be representing male control over female power.

This is probably important later when we meet Cristabel.  Such fun, this is!!

We haven't met Christabel yet, have we? Thank you for the Melusina legend. I am getting the white maiden in the tower feeling from her and so IF she were  found to be having a love entanglement with Ash, then all the feminist theory would be out the window too.


 So these letters really do have power over the people who are so determined to make the writings of these two fictional Victorian writers mean something that possibly they don't, at all. And if you stake your reputation on a blank verse on volcanic mud and  you have come to the conclusion  that Ash "neither liked nor understood women, that his female speaker were constructs of his own fear and aggression, that even the poem cycle Ask to Embla was the work not of love but of narcissism, the poet addressing his Anima."  Page 16. What will you do when it's found in private, in secret, that the reverse was true?

I believe we've got it.

Bellamarie,  hahaha on the golden Christmas tree, that's a case in point: I can say that and enjoy being wrong but a distinguished scholar who has based his entire life on the "golden Christmas tree" theory can't: disgrace, and embarrassment would follow. One time when NOT being a professional helps, tho we do need all the insights we can get from them before WE decide which one is right.

This is also  a good point: I'm pondering that, because when he stole the letters and made copies of them I was furious.  He knows the importance of them, yet he feels entitled to possess them for  his own selfish reasons.  His competitive nature to outdo Cropper's collection seems a bit bizarre to me.  Also in the case of Sir George, the emphasis seems to be on who's got these letters and we can see why now: it's like a Wall Street Broker having put everything he has into..what do they call those short bids? Selling short?  And he's about to lose them. Roland also never returned the originals,  did he?

Are they, the London Library,  that lax with these documents?

Marcie feels sympathetic to Roland. How do the rest of you feel about him? The characters in the first 5 chapters to me are not fleshed out, he, however, has the most character insights  of all, but none of the rest are, they are like...I don't want to say caricatures but they move across the stage here occupying a purpose, and they have JUST enough background and emotions not to be stick figures. Val is a good example. Just enough bitterness and sharpness to be interesting, but we don't know how she feels about anything positive.

How , I wonder, are we going to find out anything about Christabel?  And Ash? Only thru the letters ourselves? Or their works? Do we have enough of Ash in the first 5 chapters to tell anything? I'm sure if we don't that's by design.

 So these letters are going to be VERY important? Or are we to guess,  based on the images of female whatever in her locked tower glass coffin works? What an intriguing book this is once you get past all the extra stuff.  The blizzard of....are they red herrings then?

So which character stands out the most for you at this point? Any?

NOW I'm going back, here in the last days of this first section and pick UP what all these references to Proserpina are. Somewhere here it says she's the same thing as Ceres, she was not. Why is Ash writing about Proserpina? What does she symbolize? OR is this more volcanic mud musings?

Does anybody happen to know anything about  Victorian writing? What period it might have been? What characterizes it? Is this book in the style of Victorian prose?

What a wonderful discussion you're making of it!

[Mippy]

The glass coffin is right out of a fairy tale, isn't it?  What is it doing in here?   I keep mixing up Ash's writing with stories of real authors, and guess I'm not alone in that.
                                                     
Victorian period authors and essayists!  There's a topic I can jump into, although it was an eon ago when I was in college (Wheaton, MA,  not IL)  and took a wonderful course which compared poets, essayists and scientists of the so-called Victorian period.

Having been trained to be a scientist, I loved the Voyage of the Beagle and other works by Darwin more than I liked the poets.   But the prof. did open up to me the world in which Darwin and Russell lived, the poets they would have read and loved, and the essays they would have pored over.  Perhaps that insight would help here, trying to think like a researcher in earlier times, someone who does not have instant access to the internet and all the old literature on line, which we now take for granted!
                                                     
I can appreciate the enjoyment of finding tidbits and letters and diaries if you are a researcher looking for insight into someone like Ash.   But me?  I could never do it.  I took so few literature courses in the old days, so that I'm playing catch up here in SeniorLearn. 
Then I had no interest in poetry, which is odd since I love opera and music.   I have little empathy with the researchers in this book, either, but I have curiosity.  I hope to learn a lot!

[Gumtree]

F.R Leavis  : It's interesting that Byatt studied under F.R. Leavis and that she cites George Eliot's Middlemarch in the interview as it was Leavis whose re-evaluation of George Eliot's novels brought her work to critical attention again after many years in the wilderness. In his book The Great Tradition he contends that there are:

 ...four truly great English novelists - Jane Austen, George Eliot, Henry James and Joseph Conrad ...and that a common tradition links the finest work of each.

The book gives a detailed critical analysis of those books which best exemplify their author's genius - in Eliot's case Romola, Middlemarch and  Daniel Deronda. He appears to have admired her 'life enhancing moral seriousness'.

Leavis seems to have been a controversial figure in academic circles though nothing of that appears in the Cambridge Guide to Literature in English which (in part) has this to say about him.

In the early 1930s he wrote a series of cultural manifestos -Mass Civilisation and Minority Culture (1933) - For Continuity (1933) and Culture and Environment (with Denys Thompson, 1933) which propose the study of English literature as a base from which to rally the discriminating educated minority against the threats to cultural continuity posed by the processes of industrialism, especially by the cinema, advertising and the spread of 'mass' culture. These arguments formed the basis of the critical campaign undertaken by 'Scrutiny' which Leavis guided as co-editor from 1932 to 1953. His New Bearings in English Poetry1932 began a thorough revision of the English literary tradition, championing Gerald Manley Hopkins, T.S. Eliot, Pound and Yeats as the creators of a modernist tradition...

Leavis refused to define the theoretical basis of his judgements, though it can be inferred from numerous asides. Historically considered, he belongs to the tradition of Arnold, Ruskin and other writers on 'the condition of England'. The almost religious seriousness which he introduced to criticism inspired a generation of followers (Leavisites) with a sense of vocation in teaching a subject deemed central to civilisation. His reevaluation, not just of the canon of English literature, but of the status of criticism, established him as the most important English speaking critic of his time  

I daresay there are some among us today who still deplore the 'threats to cultural continuity posed by the effects of industrialism, especially cinema, advertising and the spread of mass culture'. There is of course a downside to all that but without the toys of industrialism and mass culture we surely wouldn't be here enjoying this discussion in cyberspace.  


The Great Tradition has this blurb on the dust jacket -
This book contains great criticism, some of the greatest of our time, and it tells more truth about the novel than we are accustomed to hear
Gerard Hopkins (Time and Tide) -

and although it is a very long time since I opened it I can still say that some of it makes good sense and his critical appraisal of Middlemarch, and by extension of Eliot herself, is still worth reading today.

[ginny]

I think you've brought up some important points, Mippy. Darwin for one in the age of Victorian literature and  The glass coffin is right out of a fairy tale, isn't it?  What is it doing in here?   I keep mixing up Ash's writing with stories of real authors, and guess I'm not alone in that.

I just reread the first 5 chapters, armed this time with what we've said here and it's amazing the difference it makes.

You still have all the allusions but they fall into place and did you notice that in chapter 5 how the allusions were virtually silent? It's almost like they are gibbering ghosts or something but they are all silent, pretty much, except for Lord Leighton's Proserpina which is in the heading. Which Sir George illuminates with a torch when the letters are found.

Clearly then this myth of Proserpina (called Persephone by the Greeks) is important. Interestingly enough,  Tennyson, referenced here many times in the text, also wrote a poem on Proserpina.

I heard a fascinating talk at the U of PA in 2006 on this myth and a comparison with it to that of Inanna, a Sumerian myth which also contains a woman going down into Hell and her return or freeing back to the world of the living. It dates from 5300-4100 BCE, the Ubaid period.

So it's a very old story and concept. Homer wrote it down about 700 BC, it's a charming tale of Demeter (Ceres) goddess of the harvest and her daughter Persephone whom Pluto, god of the underworld, snatched away and took her to be the Queen of the Underworld.

While Demeter searched for her daughter she planted no crops, she aided no flowers to grow (the seasons) and so everything died. Finally the people prevailed upon Zeus, the king of the gods, to restore Persephone, but Pluto (Hades) had tricked her into eating the seeds (some say 6, 4,3, etc., depending on the culture) of the pomegranate (that's why the references to it here) and that's the number of months she had to stay in the underworld.

Lord Leighton's golden painting in the heading shows her return.

Return from the dead is a powerful metaphor of the ancient world. The Inanna myth, I found on (gasp) wilipedia so it may not be worth a hill of beans, but for interpretation they say: Since Inanna embodies the traits of independence, self-determination and strength in an otherwise patriarchal Sumerian pantheon, she has become the subject of feminist theory.[18]

That fits in, too.

What's NOT particularly explained, at least to me, is how this quite all fits in. Randolph Henry Ash has written a poem called The Garden of Proserpina, but I don't know what that refers to and   we don't have enough of it to tell anything. The jury at least here, must be still out... I can't figure out the connection, at this point, do any of you have any insights here?

What's also not particularly clear to me is the poems themselves. Do you think the book or so far would have been just as good if not better if the poems of Ash and LaMotte had been removed?

The Glass Coffin, to me, is marvelously written, I loved it. It occupies almost all of  Chapter 4 so you can't throw it away easily.  It's Sleeping Beauty, and a fair knight rescuing the fair damsel princess,  In the form of a tailor. It's got lots of Kidsal's color, lots of gold, green,  it's got allusions to Vergil's Aeneid and Aeneas and the golden bough lighting the way into the prison (Hell in Vergil's case) but of course Aeneas  had the Sibyl of Cumae to instruct him in the use of the golden bough. And some may want to put a religious interpretation on both of these stories.

So the princess in the glass coffin is rescued, Aeneas finds his way back from Hell and Proserpina is freed from Hell also.

Why would Christabel write fairy stories about a princess who is released from a prison brought on by a black magician who is saved, not by her own cunning but by a hero? Isn't it interesting that in the story when he could have claimed as  his prize a bride, the little tailor thought nothing of the sort and was content while the restored brother and the ..is she unnamed...princess...happily hunted thru the woods, the tailor being content to sew brilliant clothes.

I like that story and I'm glad it's in there. What it may MEAN about Christabel I am not sure. "Victorian alienation from the voice of true feeling? " (page 32) Coleridge's Christabel http://www.eliteskills.com/c/4702 has Christabel using a key to save Geraldine and lock her up in a tower for safety: Geraldine glows white by the way.


The lovely lady, Christabel,
Whom her father loves so well,
What makes her in the wood so late,
A furlong from the castle gate ?
She had dreams all yesternight
Of her own betrothéd knight ;
And she in the midnight wood will pray
For the weal of her lover that's far away.

So that Christabel, called by one reviewer the perfect Victorian lady (who precedes LaMotte's as Tennyson lived and LaMotte did not) also was waiting for a knight.  But she took matters in her own hands. It's hard for me to tell if this is, in fact, about homosexuality because of the time in which it was written.  Certainly looks like it but Coleridge never finished it, so who knows? It's got Roland and a snake in it, too. Still I think if you mention "Christabel," these are the images which pop out at you, however uninformed they may be.


One thing that DID strike me in the first 5 chapters is the repeated knell almost as if a warning, that "It may be a wild goose chase. It's almost nothing really.' (page 44).

"All that ponderous obfuscation." (page 48)

"The whole thing is a wild goose chase." (page 54)

I also  liked the parallels, Lady Bailey tells Sir George, "she has "been rescued by a knight." (page 84).

I like the humor, Lady Bailey has "the brown coins of age" on her face (page 82).

And I like 5 ending with some tension: who is going to get the letters, and shouldn't we be rooting for the museums etc., who will pay Sir George enough to keep up his home rather than these academics? It's a perfect place to stop. Marcie did the schedule and I like the way she divided it.

Do YOU think that the poems of Ash add, detract or have no effect on the book so far? How about the writings of LaMotte, specifically (all done by Byatt of course) The Glass Coffin, do THEY add to, detract from or make no difference to the book so far?

[Jonathan]

'...the writings of LaMotte...do they add to, detract from or make no differenc to the book so far?'

Byatt as the author wants us to consider them in getting to know Christabel, doesn't she? In the link provided by Marcie, to the interview with Byatt, we read about her publisher wanting to remove some or all of these extraneous compositions from the book. And it would seem that initially many readers skim or ignore them. In the same interview Byatt talks admiringly of Dostoyevsky 'orchestrating his omniscient narrator(s) Why couldn't we see POSSESSION as a symphony of sorts? Obviously many instruments.

Also this from the interview: 'JN & JF: Do you see Possession as a Rubicon in your career as a writer?

ASB: I see it as a comedy, although it makes people cry.'

Anyone crying at this point must be mired in the sea 'vulcanic mud'.

Ginny, speaking no doubt for many of us, asks:

I can't get any feel at all for Christabel

How, I wonder are we going to find out anything about Christabel?

So there is only the one real person? Leavis?

No, there is another real person. It's the diarist and party giver, Crabb Robinson. At least my Oxford Companion has this:

Robinson, Henry Crabb (1775-1867) after spending some years in a solicitors office in London, travelled in Germany, where he met Goethe and Schiller....He was afterwards a barrister. He was acquainted with many notable people of his day and was one of the founders of the Athenaeum Club  and of University College, London. Part of his famous diary and correspondence throwing light on many literary characters, such as Wordsworth, Coleridge, Lamb, and Hazlitt was published in 1869.

Crabb tell us something about Christabel at the breakfast, on page 29:

All appealed to Miss LaMotte on the question of the rapping spirits; she declined to express an opinion, answering only with a Mona Lisa smile.

A good way to think of her as we read  along. She gets it beautifully in the movie.

[Jonathan]

I have a stack pass to a library that should have the Robinson diary. I'll check it out. June, 1858. It shouldn't be too difficult to confirm Christabel's presence at the party.

I'm not convinced that Roland is guitly of theft in removing the two loose papers from the Vico book. I would consider them found treasures. I would have no qualms in taking possession of same. It's the name of the game.

[bellamarie]

Jonathon...

I'm not convinced that Roland is guilty of theft in removing the two loose papers from the Vico book. I would consider them found treasures. I would have no qualms in taking possession of same. It's the name of the game.

Oh heavens, I am shocked by this remark.  These do not belong to him, they belong to the archives of the library, and taking them would be breaking the law indeed.  This may be a game to Roland,  Cropper and Blackadder, but it most certainly does not give any of them the right to take what is not theirs.

I was a bit surprised that Cropper had not gotten to the Vico and found the letters way before Roland.  As Blackadder stated, he was sure Cropper already would have.  At this point Byatt sort of breaks the trust and validity with me as a reader.  I'm thinking NO WAY someone as obsessed and wealthy as Cropper would have overlooked Ash's Vico so accessable as it was for Roland to view.

My most interesting character so far is Val.  She may not say alot, and we are led to believe she may suffer from some sort of depression or mental illness, but what she does say has stuck with me.  I haven't trusted in Roland, Blackadder or Cropper for some reason.  From their actions I have wondered why Byatt did not title this book "Obsession" rather than Possession.  Isn't there a fine line between being possessed and being obsessed?  Kind of like that saying, love/hate relationship.  Even though Byatt drops us lines of Roland being concerned for Val, I sense he does not truly love her and has taken advantage of her by allowing her to work while he dabbles in his fantasy, as she put it, "You have this thing about a dead man, who had a thing about dead people."  Then this statement has me really thinking, "Oh its all very interesting, my menial keyhole observations, make no mistake.  Just it doesn't make sense and leaves me nowhere, only where does that leave you, Old Mole?"

Val knows so much more than anyone is giving her credit for.  The mention of child abuse in the photos on her boss's desk, and other sexual connotations, seems to find their way into many of the books, yet never comes to mean much in the end.  Red herrings???  Possibly. Roland sees his obsession not only as a game as Jonathon put it, but its a race to see who can own the right to Ash.  What about the fact Ash's body vanished?  That in and of itself is a mystery no one seems to be exploring.  All this about Ash's mistress, yet no mention of him vanishing. Hmmm.. I'm off to finish chapter 5.

[marcie]

Roland indicates that he took the two letters spontaneously and doesn't intend to keep them.  I think he wants to peruse them in private and he does feel closer to Ash by being able to see these very personal thoughts in his own handwriting. He doesn't have a monetary profit motive though I do think he wants to be the first to find out if the letter was actually sent and if there was a response. I wouldn't want him to suffer any legal ramifications. I think he is somewhat possessed by Ash and protective of him/his work and reputation.

Val is interesting. She is a different person at home and at work. She dresses very differently in each location. I don't see her as victim of Roland. She does seem to rely on him emotionally, or think she does. I think that, whatever their relationship was in the beginning, they are no longer a good match for each other. I have sympathy for both of them.

[kidsal]

Use of color to define character:

On visit to Mrs Wapshott:
Mortimer Cropper:  BLACK rubber torch, black box, black silk dressing-gown, black silk pyjamas, mole-black velvet slippers, onyx signet ring, black Mercedes
Daisy Wapshott's bath – Grayish violet tiled floor, purple and pink tiles, pink soap, dusky pink pottery, lavender bath mat.  Pink angora sweater

[kidsal]

From Wiki:
Phalanstery:  A phalanstère was a type of building designed for a utopian community and developed in the early 1800s by Charles Fourier. Based on the idea of a phalanx, this self-contained community ideally consisted of 1,620 people working together for mutual benefit. Though Fourier was able to publish several journals in Paris, among them La Phalanstère, he created no phalanstères in Europe due to a lack of financial support. Several so-called colonies were founded in the United States of America by Albert Brisbane and Horace Greeley.
Fourier believed that the traditional house was a place of exile and oppression towards women. He believed gender roles could progress by shaping them within community, as they were in Kibbutzim, more than by pursuits of sexual freedom or other Simonian concepts

The Planchette (Ouija board) was an instument designed for the purpose of communicating with spirits.
It was made of a thin heart shaped piece of wood, that was mounted on two small wheel castors and carrying a pencil pointing downwards.
The hand is placed on the wood and the spirit uses the pencil to write, operating through the psychic force of the medium.

[ginny]

Gum! We were posting together and  I never would have seen that great post except that for rereading all your great posts daily! I like to go back thru the discussion for a second (or third ) time, I often pick up lots of things I missed which are important, and so well expressed.

That's so interesting about Leavis. Can we conclude from that he was a brilliant analyst but not as a teacher? I keep thinking of Helene Hanff of 84 Charing Cross Road, whose admiration of "Q" (Quiller Couch) led her into such raptures over literature that I bought a book of his lectures. Another Cambridge professor, strangely missing so far in this great list of professors at Cambridge. Perhaps he was of a different genre.

I still don't know much about Victorian literature!

(In looking up Quiller Couch's name which I had forgotten, I find there are several signed editions of Helen Hanff's work available at reasonable prices, too).

At any rate, Leavis is certainly skewered here by Byatt, perhaps she experienced the dread English Lit syndrome where her work was not appreciated. Not particularly my idea of a teacher, where you inspire the student with your own brilliance while simultaneous robbing him of the same.

[ginny]

Jonathan! Thank you for the Crabb, I did not realize he was real!!  I am very interested in what you find on Crabb with your library pass, this is most exciting! Talk about life imitating art!

I have a stack pass to a library that should have the Robinson diary. I'll check it out. June, 1858. It shouldn't be too difficult to confirm Christabel's presence at the party.

Since Christabel did not exist, it will be surprising to see her at the party. I am interested, however, at who WAS!

BellaMare, what a super point: At this point Byatt sort of breaks the trust and validity with me as a reader.  I'm thinking NO WAY someone as obsessed and wealthy as Cropper would have overlooked Ash's Vico so accessable as it was for Roland to view.

I agree with you, as we read into the next section we will see how obsessed Cropper IS concering Ash, there's no way he would have missed it. I think.

Loved this! From their actions I have wondered why Byatt did not title this book "Obsession" rather than Possession.  Isn't there a fine line between being possessed and being obsessed?

What a fabulous point! What IS the line? Marcie says that she thinks Roland is possessed by Ash and actually we're about to see the use of the word for the first time in just a couple of pages, but I also wonder at the difference. If you're possessed do you lose all your ability to make that choice whereas if you're obsessed it's still your choice?

Kidsal, thank you for the definitions of Phalanstery especially. I never heard of it. But I have tried the Ouija board a time or two, is there anybody here who has not? Silly thing but a lot of people don't think so.

On the colors, I think she is using them to say something. White seems virginal, pure, anybody in white is pure or something else possibly. Gold seems the color of…what? WHAT?  Golden apples, Leighton's Proserpina, etc., etc., etc. You've got gold and white and brilliance and then you have dark and half dark, the way she described that bathroom with the grey and pink made me uneasy.

[ginny]

We've explained Melusina and Proserpina but there's one more who hasn't played a big direct part in this: The Cumaean Sibyl.

The Cumaean Sibyl shown here in Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel Ceiling    has several myths about her.

The Sibyls prophesied in an ecstatic state, and were believed to be possessed by a god, usually Apollo, who spoke through them (ventriloquism?)  Male ventriloquism?


The Sibyl of  Cumae was called that because of her location at Cumae,  on the coast of Italy. She was one of the prophetesses of the  Greek and Roman world and the most famous,   whom Vergil represented as being visited by Aeneas. She assisted his descent into Hell by providing the golden bough for Proserpina to light his way.

Her cave still exists: here is the approach to it:   and the interior:

 The prophesies, which were often ambiguous, were said to have been inscribed on palm leaves.

According to legend she offered nine volumes of oracles to the last king of  Rome, Tarquinius Superbus, at a high price. When he refused to buy she burned three volumes and offered the remainder at the same price. When he again refused she burned three more and finally sold the last three to him at the original price.

These prophesies definitely existed in Rome and were consulted thru the ages. They were kept in a chest in a stone vault under the temple of the Capitoline Jupiter. In 496 BC they were consulted during a famine, etc. The last known consultation was in 363 AD and was still in existence when the temple of Apollo on the Palatine Hill where they were then housed,  was destroyed early in the 5th century  A.D. Because of Christian interpolations in the Sibylline oracles, the Sibyls came to be thought of equal to  Old Testament prophets, and frequently figure with them in Christian literature and art. (That's why there are so many of them in the Sistine Chapel ceiling).

A famous story about the Cumaean Sibyl is that once Apollo said he would grant  her anything she wished if she would take him as a lover.  She asked to live as many years as there were gains of sand in a pile of sweepings, and these numbered a thousand, but she failed to ask for continued youth.  She then hung, in a bottle or basket and when children asked her want she wanted, she used to replay, "I want to die." As late as the 2nd century AD a jar was shown at  Cumae to travelers said to contain her bones.


Her presence here is somewhat of a mystery to me, unless it's the male ventriloquism/golden bough/ Proserpina link/ kitchen sink syndrome.   As noted, she helped Aeneas light his way into the underworld with the famous golden bough, which Aeneas needed to give to Proserpine before he could enter the Underworld. This seems to have been an invention of Vergil's for his Aeneid. Sir James Frazer then took up the interpretation, and developed his great work by the same name on the evolution of religious beliefs and institutions (The Golden Bough…1890-1915).


(Oxford  Companion to Classical Literature).

[Gumtree]

Ginny -

It is surprising that Byatt doesn't reference Quiller Couch somewhere - his time at Cambridge would have been before Leavis,  so he was too early for Blackadder and of course too late for Ash/LaMotte to know anything about him - but he did write tales about the supernatural and he rewrote or I should say retold some of the old fairytales like Beauty and the Beast etc. so there's really no reason Byatt couldn't have worked him into the fabric of the novel along with all the others.

I'm wondering if we both have the same Q essays - I have two volumes  The Art of Reading and the companion The Art of Writing. I've had them many long years but was inspired to reread them after reading the Hanff book. Now tonight I've found them on the shelf again - thanks to you 

Here's one of his jottings that I've always liked: Literature is not a mere Science, to be studied; but an Art, to be practised.

[Jonathan]

Since Christabel did not exist, it will be surprising to see her at the party. I am interested, however, at who WAS!

What would we find in the Crabb Robinson diaries? They were published; but in all likelihood  would be found only in rare book collections. Byatt, the scholar certainly accessed them, and found material to give her novel a fine twist. If the text is corrupted in its transition to her novel she should be held accountable.

What really happened at that breakfast party (p29) at which Christabel and Ash met for the first time? What drew them together? The seance? Robinson says Christabel came 'to speak  to her dear Father.' But he's dead. Of course! Robinson writes about the tapping spirits! Can we look for more of the same farther along in the book?

There was talk of Mrs Stowe's claim to have conversed with the spirit of Charlotte Bronte. And the spiritual manifestations about which Lady Byron wrote to me with great feeling./b]

Would anyone care to guess at the identity of Mrs Stowe? Could it have been Harriet Beecher Stowe? It seem to me she spent considerable time in England in these years.

More later. I also enjoyed your interest in Val, bellamarie. She's taken herself out of this scholarly loop after working so hard on her ASH paper. And now Ash is a greater presence in the rooms she shares with Roland than she herself. But it seems she will always remain his first love. He's very caring, isn't he?

[Gumtree]

I have been intrigued to know what the Vico book was in which Roland found the drafts of the two letters - even to know if Vico really existed - he did!

Wikipedia (sorry Ginny) tells us:

Giovanni Battista Vico 1668-1744 Italian philosopher, rhetorician, historian and jurist. His magnum opus is titled Principi di Scienza Nuova

The work is explicitly presented as a 'Science of Reasoning' and includes a dialectic between axioms and reasonings linking and clarifying the axioms

Vico is often claimed to have inaugurated modern philosophy of history.

Relying on a complex etymology, Vico argues that civilisation develops in a recurring cycle of three ages: the divine, the heroic and the human. Each age exhibits distinct political and social features and can be characterised by master tropes or figures of language. The giganti of the divine age rely on metaphor to compare and thus comprehend human and natural phenomena. In the heroic age, metonymy and synecdoche support the development of feudal or monarchic institutions embodied by idealised figures. The final age is characterised by popular democracy or reflection via irony: in this epoch, the rise of rationality leads to barbarism of reflection, and civilisation descends once more into the poetic era. Taken together, the recurring cycle of three ages - common to every nation - constitutes for Vico a storia ideale eterna or ideal eternal history.

Vico's work was poorly received during his own life but has since inspired a cadre of famous thinkers and artists including: Benedetti Croce, James Joyce, Thomas Pynchon, Bertrand Russell, Samuel Beckett, Isaiah Berlin, Giovanni Gentile, Erich Auerbach, Jose Faur, Northrop Frye, Harold Bloom, Julius Evola, Edward Said, Marshall McLuham etc.

Easy to see why our friend the poet, Ash would have a copy of that book on his desk and why clever clogs Byatt has referenced Vico - she really does keep us on our toes and makes us work to get the most out of this complex book. Love it.

[marcie]

Hello, everyone. We can still continue talking about the first five chapters but we're also moving on to Chapter's 6 through 11 this week. We've put up some questions in the heading at the top of this page but welcome any and all thoughts as Roland and Maude finally get the chance to start reading Ash and LaMotte's letters.

[ginny]

WHAT? Vico lived? Gum, that's amazing. Vico Vico Vico, said with such authority throughout the beginning, "his Vico," turning out to be  a real person. And I found (I don't trust clever clogs Byatt one inch) in a book by The Poetry of History: the contribution of literature and literary ..by Emery Edward Neff - 1947 - Literary Criticism, the passage on  page 6 or some of it about the golden chains by Vico. That much is Vico.

I have a feeling that sources, even the real ones are being twisted. I don't know why I feel that way but I do so I am on the watch now, thank you Gum for that, we'll add it to our  list of characters.

Clever clogs? hahahahaha She may be TOO clever for us.

Why, one wonders, could she not have taken extant poets, she seems well enough read, and taken their own works and found in them enough  reference to interpret for her own use? Certainly it would fit her mantra of you can make up anything you like, you can apply any analysis to anything and make it your own. Why did she not?

Why invent two Victorian poets?

It could simply have been that she did not want to appear wrong in analysis of extant poets so she made up her own. I still can't tell the poetry of the two apart other than the different styles of versification, to me they are the same voice in different forms. In the poetry.

But in the fairy stories, LaMotte takes on a voice of her own. Or Byatt, whoever it is, it's different.

As Marcie says we're moving on but we're dragging the chapters 1-5 with us as foundation baggage and I've got a lot more to say on them, but first, on these chapters 6-11 (and wasn't that a long dreary haul?)

Plot at last. A developing romance. Going back to the first questions (what did you most dislike so far) I hated the italics. To me italics are ...just not for reading an entire chapter in and what's happened here in the plot? Reading italics, which to me are an aside for SUCH a long time is...irritating. Almost as irritating as her sprinkling of small Latin phrases (why? Are we out of allusions and need to still appear erudite?) Oh dear,  sorry. Bad reader. But really. I know Eco does this too, but translate, translate translate, don't show off. There's a tiny element here (these are not well known Latin phrases everybody should know they are just school boy attempts to throw in Latin), of.....I sense something else here.

It amazed me that in my last couple of posts made how I went on about Coleridge and then finally turned to chapter 6 and behold  Coleridge, she's LEADING us on, if you can see it? Perhaps she has possessed us?

If so it's quite unwilling on my part.

Now we have a new plot at last the plot shines thru, some of it a mystery as well.

Who stole the letters and why?

And it appears there was a definite romance and maybe more here, and both are the others Muses.

I'll be dashed if I can see ANYTHING whatsoever of LaMotte in Swammerdam, another chapter in and of itself. I think maybe Ash should have kept his day job, what did you make of that buzzard?

[ginny]

But first:   Gum says that Q:  did write tales about the supernatural and he rewrote or I should say retold some of the old fairytales like Beauty and the Beast etc. so there's really no reason Byatt couldn't have worked him into the fabric of the novel along with all the others.

But she didn't. Perhaps she did not want to imitate Hanff or felt she was going closer to the source, wouldn't you love to have heard Q's opinion of this?

Now tonight I've found them on the shelf again  I wish I could find mine, they are lost in this giant house of books. I have two volumes as well tho.

____________________

Jonathan: Byatt, the scholar certainly accessed them, and found material to give her novel a fine twist. If the text is corrupted in its transition to her novel she should be held accountable.


I have a feeling there has been a lot changed from original sources,  a LOT. I am not taking anything she says at this point, anything, at face value. The book is full of lies. If the poems at the beginning did not tell us so, the book IS.

Roland lifts the letters. Oh he intends to put them back, he does not intend to keep them, but we know what the road to hell is paved with, and the fact is he snuck (is that a word?) them away.

"How could you deliberately mislead me so?"  (page 208) on the dog.

"What else have you so  mischievously misrepresented to me?" (page 208) on Bethany House.

Ash had had his own ideas but the truth turned out to be something different.

I have a feeling those two quotes, how could you deliberately mislead me so and what else have you mischievously misrepresented to me, are   going to be an epitaph for the readers of this book. There are too many references to lies and dishonest behavior, poste restante, sneaking about for whatever reason, hidden this or that. I think something else is hidden here but am not sure what it is, but IF it is, it will fit in with the rest.


But he's dead. Of course! Robinson writes about the tapping spirits! Can we look for more of the same farther along in the book?

I don't know but let's do. Was that medium a real one? I bet she was. I want to look up some of these references now I have slogged thru the plot.  With only a few allusions, another to Pluto and Persephone, more to Psyche, not sure what we can make of that one, wonderful paintings and art work on Psyche, Byrne-Jones for one, but can't put it here, British Museum etc.

And now Ash is a greater presence in the rooms she shares with Roland than she herself. But it seems she will always remain his first love. He's very caring, isn't he?

Who is very caring? Ash or Roland? They seem to be following an identical track here.  I don't see  Roland caring about anything but Ash, and perhaps his own ascent as a scholar, you're very perceptive there, our Jonathan.

This Muse business is interesting. I  just watched Valentino The Last Emperor and he has a Muse, too, a princess from somewhere, a pretty girl, but he himself is in a long standing relationship with Gian Carlo Giametti I believe the name is, a very handsome business partner. So your Muse can inspire you apparently without being in love with that person.

I hate that I'm reminded here of Governor Sanford and his soul mate.  Do you think that Ash's soul mate (while he loves his wife) is LaMotte? He seems to think so. But there's one slip there, one tiny slip in his letter,  where it seems it's really all about him, did you catch it?

Roland may have been right about him after all despite all the romance here.

Why is Christabel capitalizing every other word?

I'm going to spend some time looking up an authoritative explanation (not wikipedia) of the characteristics of Victorian literature.  And some of these characters to see how many were real. Even IF they were real that does not mean they wrote things which fit here.

For the first time I want to finish the book to see how this all comes out. We've got two parallel plots, Ash and his wife Ellen and his soul mate Christabel.

Roland and his live in Val and Maude? or would we want to say Ash and Lamotte, Roland being possessed.

The word "possessed" seems to have first occurred in this second bit,  unless you see it earlier, on page 144 on the bottom, concerning Roland and Ash.

I'll put the entire paragraph here:

At first Roland worked with the kind of concentrated curiosity with which he read anything at all by Randolph Ash. This curiosity was a kind of predictive familiarity; he knew the workings of the other man's mind, he had read what he had read, he was possessed of his characteristic habits of syntax and stress.

So here the word possessed in this connotation seems to mean he owned or understood and "had down" his ways of writing.

But in the case of Mortimer Cropper, it appears he truly WAS possessed, by Ash himself, to the point of buying anything he had touched or owned. A peculiar obsession, his, or did you think so? Have you known anybody to be so over the top about an enthusiasm or is this normal?

[ginny]

Not to hog the discussion but am finding a lot of things:

Characteristics of Victorian Literature:

http://www.waycross.edu/faculty/selby/2120/viclit.html


The Victorian Age
1837-1901


• This was a period of ferment and doubts and conflicts characterized by what Matthew Arnold called “the dialogue of the mind with itself.”  To the English intellect, traditional forms of Christianity no longer held water.  Most writers began as fervent Judeo-Christians, lost the faith of childhood, and ever after sought to regain that faith.  Very often these writers drew on the Bible; their phraseology reflects Biblical formulaism.  They tried to speak to their audiences in modes the audiences would understand.  A lot of the poetry was versified didacticism.

• The major philosophy was that of utilitarianism, with such proponents as James Mill and Jeremy Bentham.  The School of Utilitarianism divided the useful from the beautiful; a great many Victorian writers thought literature should be useful.  All the Victorian philosophers had similar educational backgrounds: Greek & Latin classics, humanities, writing imitations of the classic forms.  There was a big difference in what was useful and what was beautiful in literature.  The School of Utilitarianism looked at the past, then looked at the present and decided that anything not useful was worthless; they suffered emotional repression; they contrasted the primitive with the civilized and argued for the civilized.

• The Victorian era saw the western world move from an agricultural rural lifestyle to an industrial urban lifestyle.  The printed page became the most important cultural medium in the world.  Reading was both a mode of instruction and a means of entertainment.  Poetry, however, was often regarded as a rather suspect frivolous form (Tennyson tried to turn poetry into an art form).  A good deal of Victorian literature attempts to regain a lost Eden.

• One common bond among Victorian writers was the preservation of the privacy of their private lives (by adopting pseudonyms, masking, and role-playing).  The 1890s saw an attempt at breaking down or merging artistic genres; Victorians loved paintings which told stories.

• The ability to read Middle English and Old English had died out in the Victorian era and people like Tennyson founded societies to study this literature.  There was a great deal of interest in things medieval, in travel, and in archaeology.

• The Victorians knew how to jerk tears and they loved it.  Audiences preferred melodrama to good straight drama.

• Many Victorians were noveau riche—they came from humble origins but amassed great wealth, not always legitimately.  Education reforms, voting reforms, and prison reforms took place during this era.

• Multiplicity and extreme variety of style and belief are the principal characteristics of the period.  The theme of alienation assumed prominence perhaps because of the bestowing on the poet of the role of prophet, paying excessive tribute to his power for social good, which led to the problem of communication, the split between the poet and his audience.  Utilitarian philosophy tended either to ignore poetry altogether or to deplore it as a species of fiction that impeded rational perception.

• Another significant reflection of the status of the Victorian poet is the tension that every major poet expresses between devotion to individual sensibility and commitment to the social and moral needs of the age, the autonomy of poetry vs. public duty.
 

[Mippy]

Ginny ~ Excellent link, but the last paragraph is questionable, to me:
Another significant reflection of the status of the Victorian poet is the tension that every major poet expresses between devotion to individual sensibility and commitment to the social and moral needs of the age, the autonomy of poetry vs. public duty.  

Wordsworth, one of the major poets, for example, wrote an amazing quantity of poetry which did not fit the above statement.   Some of his poetry is almost like lyrics to a song, and some is like a letter to a lover.   This is getting toward my objections to literary analysis, when an author states "every major poet"  does this or that ...     do you think it's true?

[Jonathan]

from ginny: But in the case of Mortimer Cropper, it appears he truly was possessed by Ash....

Wonderful posts, ginny. Lots to think about there. I think we all share some of your criticisms regarding Byatt's unique storytelling methods. Isn't she a juggler with all those balls in the air? And she's just as good a ventriloquist as Ash ever was. There is no use in thinking her dishonest with lots of scholarly failings, guilty of mischievous representation and filling her book with lies. Many books as Burns the poet said, are full of lies from cover to cover. and besides, Byatt has covered her ass very nicely  with the Hawthorne and Browning quotations. 'Romance' covers a lot of ground coming into the19c. And we get fair warning with 'How many lies did it REQUIRE to make the portly truth you here present us wih?'

How marvellous to see possession turning into obsession. Cropper is not the only one possessed. Roland and Blackadder share his enthusiasm. But each, it seems to me, is possessed in a different way. Roland as a devotee (Val has him in the ASHRAM. The stolen notes are relics). Blackadder is the dedicated scholar. Cropper, of course, is the compulsive collector.

again from ginny: that sprinkling of small latin phrases...are we out of allusions and need to still appear erudite?

Isn't Byatt just reproducing a stylistic form of writing so common until not that long ago? Latin was a significant part of the scholars baggage, and was used and apprecitated by the cognescenti. I think even yet lawyers cannot practice without their Latin phrases.

Let's keep in mind the question posed by Mr Sludge:

'How did you contrive to grasp the thread which led you through this labyrinth?'

[Gumtree]

I just checked the catalogue of a library I have access to - and guess what - they have the Crabbe Robinson Diary:
Diary, Reminiscences and Correspondence of Henry Crabbe Robinson - 3 vols - 2nd edition - Macmillan 1869

they also have:
The Diary of Henry Crabbe Robinson: an abridgement - Oxford U. P. 1967
 Henry Crabbe Robinson on Books and their Writers - Dent 1967
The London Theatre 1811-1866 by Henry Crabbe Robinson - Society for Theatre Research 1966

Judging from those publication dates there was obviously some interest in him during the 1960s.

I'll go look at them just as soon as I can and see if I can find the now famous breakfast. Though seriously, I am intrigued to see them.

[Gumtree]

And I just googled for the Crabbe Robinson Diary and there are copies available for sale - reprints as late as 2009.

[kidsal]

CHAPTER 8:  Ash’s letter to Christabel:  “….poets don’t want homes – do they?  -- they are not creatures of hearths and firedogs, but of heaths and ranging hounds.”
“…friendship is rare, more idiosyncratic, more individual and in every way more durable than this Love.”
“…poems are not for the young lady, the young lady is for the Poems.”


Christabel to Ash:  “An Egg is my answer.  What is the Riddle?” “…how I sing in my gold cage.----.  Shattering an egg is unworthy of you.”
Is Ash telling her that she is his muse but there is no future for them.  She is telling him that she is expecting their child but he is not to interfere.

[bellamarie]

LOL  Oh Ginny, just seeing the Sybyl of Cumean once again tickles me.  Seems she pops up in so many of our books for discussion.  Why do you suppose that is?

Okay, I admit I am dallying along and have not yet finished ch. 5, but..if I am understanding Maude and Blanche, then I am to deduce that Christabel and Blanche had a love for each other, so does our dear Christabel fancy flirting with men, even though she is lesbian?  Guess my answers will come or a least reveal themselves in the chapters to follow.

Ginny...

Who is very caring? Ash or Roland? They seem to be following an identical track here.  I don't see  Roland caring about anything but Ash, and perhaps his own ascent as a scholar, you're very perceptive there, our Jonathan.

Well, I in no way see Roland so caring.  I may be a bit hard on him but...even though Byatt drops us a few lines of his concern, I don't see him "in love" with Val, so as far as she being his first love, I am not so sure.  He seems like having the company of someone, and yes does not mind letting Val pay his way, while he goes off and enjoys his little game of sleuth with Blackadder and Cropper, but actually love Val I'm not seeing it.

So, Maud was not the least bit impressed at learning Roland stole those letters either.  I don't know if I believe he intended to put them back.  He is competeing with Cropper to possess whatever is of meaning where Ash is concerned so there is no way he would want to let go of these letters.  Although, I  must say I'm still not believin Cropper would have not known about them.  Let us not forget Fergus, lurking about the library where Blackadder and Roland are discussing Ash and the finds.  Coincidence he be there at the same place and time?  Maude was not comfortable mentioning Fergus when she did so, and she sure does not seem to like Ash even being considered important in Blanche's diary or at the breakfast.  Why is this I wonder?

Okay off to finish ch 5 and on to 6 - 11. 

[kidsal]

Chapter 8 – “Despite the snow, despite the falling snow”  Roland in his bedroom at the Bailey’s tries to remember where, when heard and the importance of this verse?  From Chapter 2, the poem that Val recited by Robert Graves:  “She tells her love while half asleep, in the dark hours, with half-words whisepered low:  As Earth stirs in her winter sleep and puts out grass and flowers despite the snow, despite the falling snow.”

[Mippy]

Just to follow up on my earlier post, regarding poetry in this period:

The poets Wordsworth, Byron, Shelley and Keats, to give only a few examples, were not only known as poets of the Victorian age  but as artists and poets of Romanticism. 
This was a movement in the arts and literature that originated in the late 18th century, emphasizing inspirations and the primacy of the individual.   To augment this information, the music composers in this movement included Schubert, Schumann, and Liszt, while the artists included William Blake, J.M.W. Turner, and Delacroix.
                         extracted from:  New Oxford American Dictionary.

[ginny]

Kidsal!

What a bomb! I wondered if I were reading the same book, totally missed this one, what do you all think?


Christabel to Ash:  “An Egg is my answer.  What is the Riddle?” “…how I sing in my gold cage.----.  Shattering an egg is unworthy of you.”
Is Ash telling her that she is his muse but there is no future for them.  She is telling him that she is expecting their child but he is not to interfere.

I didn't understand that one at all, tucked away in the millions of italicized words, is that what you all made of it? When I read your post the first thing that came to my mind was Wind Egg, an expression I first saw in EF Benson (an Edwardian).

This is getting interesting!

___________________________

Bellamarie, I don't know why the Sibyls keep cropping up in  our discussions, maybe the authors are stuck on them, but it's good to know what one can about them, possibly. (Especially the Sistine Chapel and 9 books bit). It's believed Michelangelo used male models for his Sibyls and the one of Cumae looks like a stevedore, but hey, that was in her pre cage or jar appearance.

_____________________________

Mippy I don't know on the last paragraph, that was a source on Victorian LIterature not from Wikipedia, which looked good to me. Is Coleridge of that genre? Then I think the Ancient Mariner fits that mold, but I totally know almost nothing of Wordsworth except what was read in English Lit Survey classes, loved the daffodils, have forgotten most of the rest. What a thing, to quote Possession is our English Education (or to paraphrase).

Anybody who does know, please stand forth.

I am still puzzled over the capital letters in correspondence, went thru 9 pages of google and can find no authoritative source,just people saying shall we go all Victorian and capitalize every word? Then why not do it all the time in your writings? Why only in your letters?

[ginny]

On the various Diaries of Crabb, I will be fascinated to hear (and nobody rip out a page hahaha) what they say. I bet they are exceedingly dusty and not taken out, and worn. They probably have not seen the light of a reader till 1990 when Byatt won the Booker or 1991.

I've got an interview here from her, and it's quite recent, about a year old: she mentions  Eco, too:

This explains a lot about her style, the question is as always for the READER, we've got the intent, did she pull it off?   From:  http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2009/jul/04/as-byatt-possession-book-club

   
          o AS Byatt
          o The Guardian, Saturday 4 July 2009
         

Possession was, for me, a fortunate book to have written, though at first it appeared to be the opposite. It was written during two summers when I had just given up the teaching appointment I had held for 11 years, at University College London, and it turned out to be the only one of my novels which was not interrupted by other problems, projects, illnesses and responsibilities.
I had been thinking about such a novel for at least 15 years, and it had changed a great deal in my head during that time. Unlike anything else I have written, it began with the title. I was sitting in the old round reading room in the British Museum, watching the great Coleridge scholar Kathleen Coburn pacing round and round the circular catalogue, and I realised that she had dedicated all her life to this dead man. And then I thought "Does he possess her, or does she possess him?" And then I thought there could be a novel, "Possession", about the relations between the living and the dead. It would be a kind of daemonic tale of haunting.

I then realised that there was a blunt economic sense to the word. Who "possesses" the manuscripts of dead writers? I turned this over in my mind, and quite a long time later I realised that "possession" also applied to sexual relationships. At that time I was working on the wonderful letters of Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and I had the idea of two pairs of lovers, one modern, one high Victorian, possessing each other in all these senses.

My original plan had been to write a kind of experimental novel, a ghostly palimpsest of literary, theoretical and intrusively biographical texts, behind which the lovers and poets could be glimpsed, but not seen clearly. What changed everything was my reading of Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose, with its parodic medieval detective story. My husband's friends in the City were all engrossed in this book, and interested in all the medieval theology it contained. The secret, I saw, was that if you tell a strong story, you can include anything else you need to include. So I started inventing a detective story like those I read in my childhood.

I discovered that detective stories have to be constructed backwards - the plot has to be invented to reach a denouement that is already worked out. Things have to be hidden in order to be found at strategic moments. In psychological novels, the characters make the plot as their feelings become clear. The rigour of this new form was a liberation. I found myself parodying scenes from Dorothy L Sayers and Georgette Heyer.

The "idea" of the novel was that poems have more life than poets, and poems and poets are more lively than literary theorists or biographers living their lives at second hand. I always feel a kind of shock when I turn back to a poet's work after reading things written about him/her. Formally my novel needed the presence of real poems. I don't write poetry. Robertson Davies had written a novel about an opera, and had used the poems of Thomas Lovell Beddoes as a phantom libretto. My editor at the time was that very good (underrated) poet, DJ Enright. I told him I was thinking of using Ezra Pound's early "Victorian" verses. "Nonsense," said Denis. "You will write them yourself."

So I went home and wrote a Victorian poem about a spider. I found the poems came easily; they were written as they were needed in the shape of the novel, as part of the run of words - I see a novel as a piece of knitting, all one continuous thread.

People ask me about my "research", implying that this is a chore, and not the delight of discovering things one didn't know. But in my case I was, and had always been, already possessed by the poems of Tennyson and Browning. I read them as a small child - my mother was a Browning specialist. Their rhythms sing in my head, and indeed crop up oddly in passages of my novels where they are not needed.

When the book was finished, publishers on both sides of the Atlantic were troubled and dubious. They begged me to cut out the poetry, to cut down the Victorian writing. "You have ruined a nice intrigue with these excrescences," said the only American publisher brave enough to take it. I wept in the early mornings. Then it won the Irish Times Aer Lingus prize, and the Booker prize, and to everyone's astonishment - including my own - became a bestseller. People write theses on my imagined poets. It is translated into more than 30 languages. I owe a great deal to Umberto Eco.

[ginny]

That explains a great deal I think. I haven't read Eco, but wasn't he also in the habit of sprinkling Latin phrases throughout?

Jonathan, again from ginny: that sprinkling of small latin phrases...are we out of allusions and need to still appear erudite?

Isn't Byatt just reproducing a stylistic form of writing so common until not that long ago? Latin was a significant part of the scholars baggage, and was used and apprecitated by the cognescenti. I think even yet lawyers cannot practice without their Latin phrases

There used to be a time when people studied the classics so that when references appeared in books they would understand them. I guess there was a time when Latin was also sprinkled (along with Greek) into the texts of authors and was as you say "appreciated by the cognoscenti." And perhaps this is what she is angling for. But I guess I want to say I am surprised and a tad disappointed in this particular sprinkling, perhaps her muse is underground eating pomegranates, it's 4th grade schoolboy Latin, not what you'd expect. The  pantheon of Latin quotes from the  literature  which might have fit are totally missing, this looks to me like "oh let's insert 2-3 Latin words in school boy Latin for that phrase and look smart." After you read them you are not enlightened nor do you feel smart.

I haven't 'read Eco but the result here is kind of painful to look at, to me. And I repeat, especially if you're making up 90 percent of your erudite Latin, do translate it, don't sprinkle without translating, you may as well make up Sanskrit.


My opinion of which I seem to be over fond this morning.


____________________________

Roland as a devotee (Val has him in the ASHRAM. The stolen notes are relics). Blackadder is the dedicated scholar. Cropper, of course, is the compulsive collector.

Let's look at some of the fine items in the heading, the first about Cropper.

Do you watch a program on TV called The Finders is it? On the History Channel? These people go about buying junk and reseling it but they are enthusiasts of things, old cars, etc., and they meet other "collectors," or "hoarders," who are like enthusiasts.

I like this topic in the heading:


1. (Chapter 6) What are your impressions of Mortimer Cropper? How would you characterize his studies of/relationship with Randolph Ash?

My impression is of a man who has stumbled on something on which he can hang his hat, fame, reputation and honor, his whole being and who then becomes obsessed with the object (Ash) and whose entire life then becomes a fixation to possess everything about Ash there is, his collection his Stant collection. He wears Ash's watch was it? Anything Ash had he wants. This, to me, is a tad bizarre. Tho why it should be I don't  know.

Are any of you collectors? If so what do you collect?

I have, myself, made trips to Rye England and toured the home of EF Benson and on one hilarious and memorable pilgrimage, made a trip to see his grave which involved the entire town in relay, an extraordinary experience. There are two EF Benson Societies at war with each other, or there used to be, and very serious about plodding out in all weather to visit the grave.

This summer I am going to retrace Caesar's voyage across the English Channel for his Invasion of Britain, and walk the beaches where he landed,  so it's not totally certifiable to do these things.  I hope.

But I think Cropper, by his total immersion (he admits himself all his thoughts are another man's thoughts and when he retires his thoughts will, too),  has sublimated his entire life to Ash and this type of possession is dangerous: to Cropper and may make him desperate. I've only read thru Chapter 11, but I can certainly see the desperation borne of his own need peeking out.

But don't we all need hobbies? Interests? How odd is Cropper's obsession/ possession of Ash to you? Good question.

[ginny]

Kidsal thank you for the Robert Graves, it would be Robert Graves, wouldn't it, Robert Graves:  “She tells her love while half asleep, in the dark hours, with half-words whisepered low:  As Earth stirs in her winter sleep and puts out grass and flowers despite the snow, despite the falling snow

I've also found a couple of interesting things. I hope they are interesting:

 Jan Swammerdam  real person: (1637-1680)

Jan Swammerdam, a 17th century Dutch microscopist, made major discoveries in medicine and anatomy. Above all, he made a decisive contribution to the development of biology and a materialist understanding of nature.

His greatest contribution to biology was his understanding of insect development and his demonstration that the same organism persists through its various stages. Using meticulous dissections and careful experimentation, he showed the errors of spontaneous generation and laid the basis of the modern understanding of development.

His science was profoundly marked by his mystical and emotional response to nature, which sometimes entered into contradiction with his avowed “experimental philosophy” and even led him to abandon science for a period. It has also been argued that this led him to put forward the idea of “preformationism".

Insects again.

One reference in the book was driving me NUTS till I looked it up and behold another bit of arcane knowledge.

Ariachne. The Myth was of  Arachne not Ariachne. Drove me nuts. Guess who it is?

Shakespeare! We should have known.

Check it out:

Ariachne's Broken Woof

Shakespeare Troilus and Cressida:

Within my soul there doth conduce a fight
Of this strange nature that a thing inseparate
Divides more wider than the sky and earth,
And yet the spacious breadth of this division
Admits no orifex for a point as subtle
As Ariachne's broken woof to enter.     (V.ii.146-51)

In Shakespeare and the Question of Theory By Patricia A. Parker,  and Geoffrey H. Hartman, the point is made that:

By what devious detours of the imagination does this apocryphal "Ariachne" find her way into the texture of  Troilus and Cressida? How subtle is "a point as subtle as Ariachen's broken woof?"  What are we to make of this pointed figure, sharp enough to penetrate the impenetrable, yet obstructed by breakage and division how Ariadne, who provided Theseus with the clue of the thread to guide him out of the Cretan maze, came to be enmeshed in Arachne's web, whether by a printer's carelessness or an author's slip of the pen or daring of the imagination, is probably beyond conclusive recovery. "Ariachne" may be an "original," a felicitous neologism spun spider-fashion out of the creator's own gut; or she may be no more than the accidental issue of a typesetter's clumsy fingers. In either even she is a new creation who also carries incontestable traces of prior origins.

That quote, taken from the book above, totally sums up, to me, what's happening here. "...a felicitous neologism spun spider-fashion out of the creator's own gut; or she may be no more than the accidental issue of a typesetter's clumsy fingers. In either even she is a new creation who also carries incontestable traces of prior origins."

Yes, devious detours of the imagination, a felicitous neologism spun spider- fashion out of the creator's own gut, a typesetters clumsy fingers, or a new creation.

Is it ENOUGH to sprinkle your book for Victorian effect with enough snowflakes of reference to bury a tractor?

And what, if you've gotten there at all, DO you make of Swammerdam? Where is LaMotte's influence? If we could solve THAT one we could know how Ash sees her? I think perhaps Ash is more patriarchial than we'd like to think. Something in one of his letters to her, sort of a put down, I'll go find it, what do you think? What DID Roland discover in the Journals of Ellen Ash, I must have read chapter 7 too quickly, I don't even remember Ellen Ash, back to the Merlin's book to see if the answer will rise like an 8 ball.

What's on your mind today? Is the Egg a baby? Or an  Edwardian Wind Egg?




   

[bellamarie]

Thank you Ginny, I loved reading the interview.  So now I am more convinced that choosing to read Possession as the  mystery/romance as it is intended to be was a good choice on my part.  I wanted a light read for the opening of summer, yet of course this book club rarely chooses "light" reads, so I told myself, okay I can overlook the gooblely gook and focus on the mystery/romance.  I love looking at the actions of people and their interactions with other characters.  I generally like to try to NOT focus on the main characters, because I sense the ones introduced early on then fade away for awhile tend to have more meaning than we realize.  I like how Byatt stayed true to herself and kept the poems in, even though I have not spent much time reading them.  And yes, good for Byatt, she is showing off her knowledge, imagine growing up with Tennyson and Browning as a child.  I grew up with no books whatsoever in my home, and no visits to the library.  It is through SeniorLearn that I have been introduced to the classical authors and poets and the Victorian style.  Alas!  I am so grateful to have stumbled onto SeniorNet years ago.

So, now I am going to sit back, relax, and enjoy the rest of this novel as it was meant to be, a mystery romance with some mythology and poetry peppered in for seasoning. 

[Mippy]

Umberto Eco as an influence on this book?   Interesting and unexpected.  I've read almost all of his novels, and the Name of the Rose was well worth reading twice.  Yes, he puts in Latin phrases, but when writing about monks, it's right in context.  

I find most of Eco much easier to understand than this puzzle, and I'm still slogging through, trying to ignore the plethora of italics and attempting to catch up.

That sure was a goofy scene about sharing the bathroom when they were snowed in, and Roland peaking through the bathroom keyhole.   The last appears to be a parody of the Melusina myth, doesn't it?   What does the reader get out of that?  

[Jonathan]

Cribbing Crabb, hahaha. Isn't this beginning to seem like a road to xanadu?

Chapter 6. Mutatis mutandis. This Cropper sounds like a bit of a Pickwickian to me. An expatriate Dickens character, with his 'gleaming white house fronting the mesa' in the American southwest. Everblest House. What a contrast to that other Ashman's home, the cat-pissy place in Putney.

What an interesting road to riches with his great-grandmother Priscilla's Regenerative Powders, allowing him to pursue his collecting mania at full throttle.

Ginny, I think you're right. With Chapter 6 we seem to be out of the woods. At least to the point where we can begin to enjoy the trees. The story. Without the fog of literary smoke and mirrors. One of us suggested that we leave the endless references and allusions as a retirement project. A good idea. But what of those of us who are five, ten, fifteen years into our retirement? Let's take the cash and let the credit go?

Here he is. Cropper. Copying letters surreptitiously at three in the morning in Mrs Wapshott's bathroom, perched on the toilet seat, with his photographic equipment on his knees:

His face in the mirror was fine and precise, his silver hair most exquisitely and severely cut, his half-glasses gold-rimmed, his mouth pursed, but pursed in American, more generous than English pursing, ready for broader vowels and less mincing sounds. His body was long and lean and trim; he had American hips, ready for a neat belt and the faraway ghost of a gunbelt.

Cropper knows all there is to know about Randolph Ash. If only he knew as much about himself. He has made several attempts at autobiography; but it always leads to, and ends with the letter from Ash to Cropper's very own great-grandmother. And what a letter. Written when Ash was an old man. What strong feelings Ash has about attempts at communicating with the dead. How indignant he becomes at the thought of Coleridge

...of this bright spirit, having made his painful way out of our weary and oppressive earthly life, being constrained to heave mahogany tables, or float partially embodied, through firelit drawing rooms...

And what can we make of this from Ash:

I have known a good soul and a clear mind, quite unhinged by such meddling, and to no good end, indeed to a bad one.

And this foreboding information:

I do have deep-rooted convictions -  and a certain amount of apposite experience of my own, which precludes my receiving your communications - your SPIRIT communication - with any great interest or pleasure. I must ask you to send no more such writings.

[marcie]

CHAPTER 8:  Ash’s letter to Christabel:  “….poets don’t want homes – do they?  -- they are not creatures of hearths and firedogs, but of heaths and ranging hounds.”
“…friendship is rare, more idiosyncratic, more individual and in every way more durable than this Love.”
“…poems are not for the young lady, the young lady is for the Poems.”


Christabel to Ash:  “An Egg is my answer.  What is the Riddle?” “…how I sing in my gold cage.----.  Shattering an egg is unworthy of you.”
Is Ash telling her that she is his muse but there is no future for them.  She is telling him that she is expecting their child but he is not to interfere.

I don't think that Ash and LaMotte had gone away together yet when they wrote those letters so Christabel isn't pregnant yet.

 I think Ash is wooing LaMotte in that letter. She keeps her distance from him by writing letters  about her need for her own private space while still expressing her deep interest in him.

He says in the letter that he appreciates her "intelligence, your marvellous quick wit-- so that I may write to you as I write when I am alone.... so that in me which has never addressed any private creature, feels at home with you. I say "at home"--what extraordinary folly--when you take pleasure in making me feel ... least of all at home, but always on edge, always apprehensive of failure, always certain that I cannot appreciate your next striking thought or glancing shaft of wit. But poets don't want homes--do they--they are not creatures of hearths and firedogs, but of heaths and ranging hounds.”

He says that he feels at home with her as he does with no other person but then self-mocks his own choice of words. He doesn't know his place with her. He feels their growing passion but isn't sure if it's only one-sided on his part. She is keeping him on his toes but he admits that is what poets do. He is making the case that poets don't want to create the comforts of home in their poems; they want to take people outside of themselves, into the greater world. He wants to take Christabel into the greater world.

In her egg metaphor, I think that Christabel is creating a fairy-tale-like story. She is saying that she finds life, creativitiy and happiness within the egg/enclosure of her life. "I am my own riddle. Oh, Sir, you must not kindly seek to ameliorate or steal away my solitude. It is a thing we women are taught to dread--oh the terrible tower, oh the thickets round it--no companiable Nest--but a donjon.....within it's confines we are free in a way you, who have freedom to range the world, do not need to imagine. I do not advise imagining it--but do me the justice of believing--not imputing mendacious protestation--my Solitude is my Treasure, the best thing I have."

In LaMotte's era, women had few choices and couldn't live out in the world as men (at least men of some wealth) could. She had made choices to be as free as she could be within those restraints. Ash is threatening that, not through any malicious intent.

[marcie]

Jonathan, yes the chapter (6) on Cropper does have Dickensian descriptions of the characters. I laughed out loud finding Cropper on the seat of the loo, stealthily making copies of Ash's letters. I loved the poem that Byatt wrote for Ash that prefaces this chapter. Byatt says in the audio interview that is linked in the heading at the top of this page that she wrote all of the poems and stories specifically for this book and for the specific chapters, to augment the story/characters/plot.

Jonathan, Ash does have strong feelings against mediums. It seems that "spiritualism" and mediums were quite prevalent in Victorian times.

[bellamarie]

So, chapter 6 has given us an insight as to what has driven Cropper's obsession with Ash.  I daresay with no disrespect intended, I found myself dozing off through this chapter. One thing I found interesting was this remark from Cropper, "Ash's poetry, for Victorian poetry is knowledgeable about sexual mores and indeed about sensuality. There is no record of any early peccadillo on Randolph's part, let alone any later one-he was always, as far as we can tell, the preux chevalier."

Well hold that thought my dear Cropper, because me thinks you are about to be "invalidated."

How weird is this?  Cropper.....pg. 124 drew out those other photographs of which he had a large and varied collection- as far as it was possible to vary in flesh or tone or angle or close detail, so essentially simple and activity, a preoccupation.  He had his own ways of sublimation."

Hmmmm... what are in those photos he is preoccupied with and submits to?  I find him a very strange character.

In chapter 7 I am finding where Byatt is paralleling Val, Roland, Ellen and Randolph.  pg. 128 Ellen says, "I can never say enough in praise of Randolph's unvarying goodness and forbearance with my feebleness and inadequacies.  I could never write as well as Randolph, but then no one can or could, and so it was perhaps not worth considering as an objection of doing something.

This is much like when we learned Val tried writing and Roland made her feel inadequate and so she stopped.

Ellen was a bit of a recluse and when Roland asks Val what has happened to them she replies, "Too much confinement, too little money, too much anxiety, and too young.  You want to get rid of me."  Then the creepy part when he decides to have sex with Val because he wants a more pleasant evening, he has no desire for her, so he envisions the portrait of Ellen Ash in order to make love to Val.  

Ellen and Val must realize that Randolph and Roland are staying with them more out of obligation rather than for true love.  Randolph is described to want to possess Ellen, yet he is unfaithful to her through his desires for Christabel in this letter writing. Interesting how Randolph says to Christabel, "I should add that my poems do not, I think, spring from the Lyric Impulse-but from something restless and myriad-minded and partial and observing and analytic and curious, my dear, which is more like the mind of the prose master Balzac, whom, being a Frenchwoman, and blessedly less hedged about with virtuous prohibitions than English female gentility, you know and understand." Just how far does Randolph go in those letters?  Then we have Roland who is obsessed with Ash, to the point he neglects Val.  Is Roland acquiring feelings for Maud?  I am only up to chapter 8 so I can't tell, but when he kept glancing at her while she read the letters and wanted to sit "heads together" it made me wonder.

Okay enough for now, must go finish chapter 8 and beyond.  I do like how Byatt has finally cleared the way to the story.  

[marcie]

bellamarie, I agree that Cropper is a creepy fellow. I'm assuming he's indulging in some pornographic photos.

I don't have the negative response that it sounds like you have toward Roland and Randolph. I think that the women contribute about equally to the dysfunction in the relationships between Roland and Val and between Randolph and Ellen. At the end of the scene you quote, it says that "They comforted each other." I have the impression that Roland does care for Val and vice-versa but that neither is in love with one another any longer. There does seem to be something flickering between Roland and Maud, but very tentative-- both value their solitude.

I have the impression that Randolph does love Ellen... but he is becoming in love with Christabel too. Neither wants to hurt the other people in their lives (primarily Ellen and Blanche) but there is a powerful attraction between them.