Possession and the Possessed

Possession: A Romance, 1990, by A. S. Byatt, Chatto and Windus. Pictured: first American edition.

Possession: A Romance, the 1990 Booker Prize winner (oops, sorry, the, er, Man Booker Prize), is one of those relatively few modern novels to command respect from both an avid general readership, and critical and academic elites. It was also the breakthrough success for Oxford-schooled Professor Antonia Susan Duffy, for whom Byatt is a pen name, inherited from her first husband. Byatt for a long time lived, as a writer, in obscurity compared to her younger sister, Margaret Drabble, but finally made her academic experience and comprehension of the buzzwords of literary theory work for her in composing Possession, a novel which cunningly invokes and utilises much of the contemporary panoply of academic paradigms. It’s also a sneaky revenge on these notions, in celebrating the traditions of the good old fashioned yarn and the still-towering authority of the Victorian English cultural firmament, and offering a swathe of artful pastiche, but also interrogating these forms, breaking them into fragments and turning them over, provoking questions relevant to the English faculty and also to general readers. How well do we know our great artists? Do we do them any favours with our contemporary obsession with biography and life circumstance, in an age in which, ironically, the celebrity of the artist and an industry of grubbing biographers and scholars has reached fever pitch, long after literary theorists had tried to cast biography out the window when it comes to understanding writing? How are heroes created, and are alterations in our picture of them damaging to their art? Are the new voices of the post-modern, post-colonial, post-patriarchal culture doomed to repeat crimes of the old? Is romantic passion a liberation or a distraction, especially for female artists and intellectuals, when it comes to achieving lives of creativity? Is life without creativity worth living, and is creativity worth anything when constantly subordinated to the effort to reduce it to coherent theories?

Possession succeeds then in being a genuinely, intellectually rich and thought-provoking novel, as well as one that plays out with a thriller’s verve and a Shakespearean comedy’s sense of mirth and human frailty. It has limitations, for the omnipresence of Byatt’s technique and layering renders her main characters, both contemporary and period, more than a little opaque, and leaves the admirably multi-levelled plot’s progression frustratingly jerky. And yet Possession is as much about those layers, or more, as its story. The framework is a scholarly detective story: one day in the mid-1980s, young researcher Roland Michell makes an unexpected discovery with the potential to unbalance whole literary universes. Having failed to advance into the major teaching posts his academic efforts have been aimed towards, Roland is working part-time for James Blackadder, a crusty senior don at Oxford who’s also the editor of an official complete volume of the works of Randolph Henry Ash, a famous, idolised (and reviled) poet of the mid-1800s, chiefly modelled on Robert Browning with dashes of Tennyson and other major figures of the period. Roland himself, a dedicated Ash fan, is a man quietly suffocating in his ignominious job, and his relationship with his partner Val, a romance that commenced at college but is slowly foundering as she takes on all the pressure of breadwinning in working as a legal secretary, to keep them in their dingy basement flat, located under a house owned by an eccentric old lady whose army of pet cats infects the place with the eternal odour of feline urine.

When in the course of a minor research errand for Blackadder, inspecting a book owned by Ash, kept by the British Museum and not apparently opened since being placed there over a century before, in search of some ephemeral point, Roland discovers what appears to be the drafts of a love letter that Ash started writing to some woman he had met at a literary luncheon. Tantalised and comprehending a mystery that no-one else seems privy to, Roland steals the drafts and begins a hunt to find who these letters were intended for. Roland’s investigations, conducted with some guilt behind Blackadder’s back, produce a definite candidate: one Christabel LaMotte, an Anglo-Breton poetess whose own oeuvre has only recently begun finding fame and favour thanks to feminist efforts to expand the literary canon. Roland presents his discovery to Maud Bailey, a descendent of LaMotte’s sister who is herself an academic, a teacher of Women’s Studies at Lincoln University and an expert on LaMotte. Maud’s a talent and a beauty, but reputed to be a bit of an ice queen, as Roland is informed by Fergus Wolfe, a former classmate of Roland’s who beat him out for a prestigious position, and who had an affair with Maud a couple of years before. Maud is highly sceptical of Roland, both of his claims and of his relevance as a human, but he captures her attention sufficiently, so that they set out to visit the house in which Christabel lived her final few years and poke around for clues. Through a series of fortuitous accidents, Roland and Maud befriend the house’s highly cranky old holder, Sir George Bailey, a distant relative of Maud’s, and his wheelchair bound wife, whom Roland gallantly saves from a sticky wicket.

Allowed to stay the night in the house, Maud decodes one of Christabel’s poems as directions to finding a stashed secret, and uncovers a trove of letters which prove, indeed to be the collected correspondence of Ash and LaMotte, establishing that they did embark on a romantic affair, in spite of the fact that Ash was married and that Christabel has been assumed to have been a lesbian, having lived for many years with another female artist, the painter Blanche Glover. Learning the sometimes exhilarating, often sad twists of this ill-starred romance, then, become an obsession for Roland and Maude, whilst they try to keep a few steps ahead of other interested parties, of whom Blackadder is the least threatening. Most problematic is Mortimer Cropper, a wealthy Midwestern American, an Ash aficionado and author of a popular but pompous biography of the poet, who uses his vast family capital to buy anything and everything relating to the man, and places them in the mordantly named Stant Collection back in his home town’s university. Maud also declines to share the information with her fellow in LaMotte scholarship and tough-minded feminism, the pushy, garrulous American scholar Leonora Stern. It soon becomes apparent that Ash and Christabel’s affair, fired by real intellectual, sexual, and artistic kinship, nonetheless swiftly foundered as a distraught Blanche tried to interfere by bringing the affair’s attention to Ash’s wife, before committing suicide. Christabel fell pregnant to Ash, fled England to have her baby whilst living with her cousins in Brittany, wracked with guilt and shame, and caused Ash to eventually think she might have killed the child. Whilst divining this tale, the edgy, uncertain, romantically disinclined Maud and Roland, in spite of many barriers and misgivings, seem themselves to be forming an attachment.

A.S. Byatt

The title of Possession: A Romance is a fruitful nexus of polysemy, from which the novel’s story and themes spread like limbs on a tree. Both “possession” and “romance” have multifarious meanings which entwine and threaten to choke one-another throughout. The journey of Roland and Maud, in echoing that of their mutual idols Ash and LaMotte, dovetails several definitions of, as well as objects of, possession: that of lovers, that of social and cultural institutions, of knowledge, of lineage and heritage, and even of the innermost self. Throughout the novel, the manifestations of possession, as well as attending ambiguities, are interrogated, as Byatt’s narrative calls into question the ownership that individuals and institutions can claim over art and artists, language and discourse, even private emotions and sexual instincts. Roland’s stealing the draft letters is a breach of law, and of the rules of scholarly trust and hierarchy, and yet the arbitrary revelation stimulates impulses within Roland as both scholar and aficionado, and he feels this dictates his action. He will later describe himself as possessed by the urge to pursue the mystery to its solution. His act suggests, initially, motives of worldly self-interest, for such a discovery might revolutionise his career. Roland is presented as a man of no status, peripheral to the people and institutions in his life, except for Val, the woman to whom he is tethered in a relationship failing, ironically, partly because of a successful inversion of traditional gender roles. His grasp at possession seems sourced in desperation to escape this rut. And yet his choice of career is bound up with his admiration of Ash, and provides a personal impetus subtler.

Possessions are a measure of status, wealth, and power, expressed through many properties in the novel, from Cropper’s grasping at any object relating to Ash, an acquisitiveness that approaches a fetish, to the basement flat where Roland and Val live, which seems to belong more to the landlady’s cats than to the tenants. Roland’s recompense, his muse and joy and millstone, is the commonwealth of words offered by poets like Ash, who rebuild worlds out of nothingness. Cropper is armed with money and unscrupulousness that dwarfs Roland: he will literally rob a grave to complete his quest. The desire to possess a totem of obsession, to commune in tactile, erotic immediacy with that object of affection, is inherent in both the romantic and scholarly travails of the main characters. And yet to possess is to be possessed, as Roland learns, and as Ash himself puts it in his love letter to his future wife Ellen, where his “most ardent desire is to be possessed entirely by the pure thought of you.” This contradiction is the central enigma of the novel, apparent in many forms.

Cropper’s ultra-modern stasis for the objects he places in the Stant Collection contrasts the mess of the English scholars’ workplaces. His method is, in a way, more caring for the material he takes ownership of, and yet he is removing it from a living tradition, the realm of accumulated cultural immediacy. A certain thematic kinship here is found not only with the isolated, closed-off state of Victorian femininity that Byatt attempts to elucidate and also to subvert, but also with the unfeeling stasis that Maud asserts on herself which is beyond physical and emotional intimacy, thus beyond potential damage, and yet rendering Maud alienated from herself within an emotional vacuum. Sexual politics, their evolution and perpetual agonies, are part of both the plot and texture of the novel to an inextricable extent. A key irony Byatt explores throughout is her passion for feminist ideas and ideals, and her mild but urgent dismay as to some of their joyless interpretations. Her celebration of the great worlds those ideals opened up in the reclamation of hidden histories and artistic produce, the exploding possibilities and hugely expanded freedoms, is matched by frustration with the more censorial, reductive attitudes in merely human adherents, which she presents as being potentially as forbidding and restrictive as the patriarchal oppression it replaced. Maud is emotionally drained and rendered rigidly uncomfortable in being squeezed between a sisterhood that had once hissed her en masse for her physical attributes, and aggressive sexual conquest on the other, the casual masculine-skewed licentiousness that was second-wave feminism’s death-dance partner in the ‘70s and early ‘80s. That is partly embodied by the coolly manipulative predations of Fergus Wolfe, who used his knowledge of deconstructive theory and nose for sexual insecurity to first bed Maud and then keep her on a kind of short rhetorical leash, so that even though the affair ended long ago, Fergus still retains a kind of power over Maud in presenting himself as the only man worthy of her, the only one comprehending her inner nature. Maud’s memory of the affair then is encapsulated in the image-totem of a soiled, despoiled bed. But the alternative, the kind of wilfully political lesbianism that Leonora has embraced, builds only to a kind of bedroom farce in which Maud dodges her fellow scholar’s efforts to seduce her. Roland, for his part, feels perpetually dizzied and invaded by the pretentious sexualisation of all language and expression by so much modern theory, as particularly exemplified by Leonora’s writing, an inspired satire on Lacan-esque psychological symbolism mated in ungainly fashion with feminist ballyhoo.

Another major irony is the notion that art – here, chiefly, poetry – is a public possession, one which can inspire a deeply personal desire to take custody of the art and artist, and yet which is ethereal in nature, communicated by signifiers that possess a life of their own. Just as, in its own way, romantic love does. Roland’s act late in the novel of listing words that he can’t reduce to an academic meaning, as the basis for creative endeavour, is his attempt at mediation: a deliberate dispossession of concept, and an attempt grasp the entirely suggestive texture of words, in an embrace of fluidity, for fluidity is Byatt’s own Eden. His act is a purposeful one in as far as the problems of cultural possession, ownership of language, institutions, and artistic figureheads and heroes, encage all the characters. Christabel and Blanche Glover’s effort to create a space in which female artists can work, shared by LaMotte’s cousin Sabine de Kercoz, mirrors the achievement of an independent space by Maud and her “sisters” a hundred and twenty years later. LaMotte’s efforts, like Byatt’s own, attempts to restore the centrality of the female voice of folk mythology in her writing, as a key to subverting rigid structures within artistic discourse. The war between camps of theory and scholarship, Roland and Blackadder with their passion for Ash, Maud and Leonora for LaMotte, each determined to foist their hero, and the mutual hostility highlights how possession of the literary canon is at stake. Moreover, the designation of the poets according to various dogmatic identities – the feminist camp is compelled to regard Ash as a stolid, misogynist Victorian establishment figure, whilst celebrating LaMotte as lesbian and proto-feminist. The shock of revelations entailed by the discovered affair blurs firm battlelines and generates new dialogue, as the personal impetus behind much of both poets’ writings becomes clearer. The uncomfortable atmosphere of ‘80s academia, struggling to keep alive the radical questions of ‘60s and ‘70s movements in a time that is nonetheless swiftly going out of tune, is evoked with grim accuracy throughout the novel.

The notion of the kinds of traps and truths that social position presents another type of possession also recurs. Maud’s membership of a privileged class has given her life and career lustre, contrasts middle-class Roland’s frustrated efforts to ascend, becoming a device that further inverts the balance of apparent power between this man and woman. Sir George Bailey, in his fraying Tory disdain, is a more extreme figure of that fading pre-eminence. His possession of LaMotte’s legacy, for which he has nothing but contempt, is a by-product of his class’s retention of power in terms of property, if no longer possessing social and financial clout, and cultural heritage becomes a commodity to relieve waning fortunes. Byatt tempers her semi-comic portrait of the aggressive, irascible Sir George with awareness of his feeling of being assailed, and tethered to a property and a wife that are both crumbling. Roland’s discomfort at failing in the traditional masculine value of being a breadwinner, and Maud’s with her physical beauty, pinion them, in a way, as firmly as Ash’s unfulfilled married life pinioned him. Roland’s embrace of art, a dynamic process, offers a better grasp on himself, as a man and lover, in an act of self-possession. At the same time, he has abandoned any claim on the worldly consequences of his discovery of the letters. Maud echoes the necessity of self-possession in her admiration of LaMotte’s “self-possession, her autonomy”, and her own journey leads to discovering that her nature is the genetic product of a transgressive act rather than a stultifying heritage. She too gains a deeper awareness, a new self-possession, than she had before.

We learn that Ash’s affair with LaMotte was at least partly the result of the fact Ellen, having been forced to wait many years to marry Ash, finds intercourse unbearable and so they have never had a sexual relationship, an interesting mitigation in Ash’s actions: Ellen tolerates his affair because he has tolerated her. Ellen seems therefore locked entirely into the surface role of the Victorian wife. And yet she’s a subtle kind of rebel, too, in both her permissiveness and her actions as guardian of legacies and privacy. The process of women taking command of language and lives, just commencing in the time of LaMotte, Blanche, and Sabine, has advanced since into a freer yet still uncomfortable place, where the need to avoid the patriarchal role as enthralled and suppressed females, has been supplanted by Maud’s estrangement from emotional immediacy and Leonora Stern’s liberated, essentially good-natured bisexuality. A recurring, persecuting disparity manifests between the desire for autonomy in both LaMotte’s and Maud’s lives, and the nature of romance, the act of being possessed, the corny trope of masculine sexual prowess in “taking” a woman, alchemised into the final, purposeful passage in which Roland takes “possession of all her white coolness that grew warm against him”. Sexualised possession is also apparent in Cropper’s purchasing of Ash ephemera, a proof on a kind of impotence, of his inability to come close to his love-object. The risk of possession is, naturally, loss of possession, and the destructive potential of possessiveness is most tragically present in the fate of LaMotte’s probable lover Blanche, in which self-destruction is also an eternal wound against her spurning former partner. LaMotte’s final self-reprehending exile is partly in repudiation of her failure in her responsibility in the mutual possession of love. Simultaneously, LaMotte’s failure of self-possession degrades her as an artist and a person, in spite her own intentions and that of her lover Ash.

LaMotte refers to her obedience to love with words like “necessity”, binding herself to a course of action in full awareness of the likely consequences; it is as if she is possessed, just as surely as Roland later feels possessed by the urge to uncover her and Ash’s story, by an instinct that courts chaos. Although Roland, Maud and their confederates set out to catch Cropper in the act of defiling Ash’s grave for ostensibly punitive reasons, they, in turn, possess him, by using him as their instrument to perform the grubby last act in uncovering the story’s end. The twofold nature of possession is both one in which some kind of ownership is presumed, but also includes a responsibility, one of protection and guardianship, encapsulated in Roland’s final vow, “I’ll take care of you, Maud,” and yet also inherent in other actions in the novel, such as LaMotte’s preservation of hers’ and Ash’s correspondence, and, it is suggested, Blanche’s art trove too, and even, in his way, Cropper’s collection. And yet there is danger perceived here, the danger of entrapping things, be it potential and talent, emotional and intellectual fecundity, or the right to common access that scholars thrive on. The threat of stasis and entropy, of the removal of self-will, is the constant refrain, especially for the female characters. Maud’s problematic relationship with her own beauty, and her fear of becoming “a property or an idol” of men for whom the possession of beauty is a boon of status, is a clear personal correlation. Self-possession is a vital aspect of the journey of Roland and Blanche as well as mutual possession, as each in essence discovers a new identity for themselves by the end that allows them to reconcile their heretofore conflicted inner natures.

Jennifer Ehle as Christabel LaMotte and Jeremy Northam as Randolph Henry Ash in Neil LaBute's 2002 film of Possession.

The artistic voice, too, is beholden to possession. Ash, dubbed by Cropper as “the Great Ventriloquist” for his ability to mimic many voices, has his consequential effect on LaMotte’s poetry – Roland swiftly recognises the impact of his voice on hers as he familiarises himself with her work – and vice versa. The advance of plot and story is itself a form of possession, the expression of the author’s intention for their characters. Passages late in the novel that describe Roland’s, Maud’s, and Leonora’s awareness of the different genres and archetypes that the investigation has invoked draws attention to how the figures on the page are being controlled – possessed – and driven towards a certain end, and the novel in particular reproduces the format of the quest narrative, always defined by a transfer, of a power, a totem, or status. Roland’s name, tethered to his modest person, evokes the heroic tradition of western poetry, and the status of romantic hero claims Roland, like many classical heroes, thanks to his initial transgression. In a similar way, LaMotte’s tale “The Glass Coffin” invokes, in the most naïf fashion, the roles which Roland, Maud, and Cropper play out. Such are “the kind of device that effectively conveys the author's claim to total control over his/her work”, as P. C. Domínguez put it in her 1995 essay on the novel. The notion of actual spiritual possession, an undercurrent found not only in the language of the characters but also in the subplot of Ash and LaMotte’s discussions of spirituality, and climactic encounter at a séance, becomes conflated with this sense of outwardly directing influences on Byatt’s protagonists. The protagonists relate to the narrative of Ash and LaMotte as readers of the novel do, with vicarious pleasure, but where the elder poets’ crucial acts and inner truths are often unknowable, in a profoundly frustrating fashion, Maud and Roland are accessible to the readers of the novel, and yet hardly at all to each other. The inner lives of those heady poets cannot be possessed, only inferred intuitively and therefore vulnerable to misinterpretation. The incapacity to grasp these remote love objects is confirmed.

By revealing much of this narrative through many texts, the poems, letters, diaries and essays supposedly composed by the characters, Byatt mimics a kind of post-modern coup in trying to explore past and present through various voices that create a textured perspective. Some of this gets a bit strained – there’s a couple of proto-feminists too many in the historical context – but she tries to authentically encapsulate, through this narrative style, the very real processes of scholarship, and to fragment the story and the perspectives contained within it, according to modern principles, producing a kind of cultural map of the evolution of feminism and the devolution of expressive literate culture as a central social force. Ash’s wife Ellen, within the story, performs an equal, opposite function of withholding information, hiding private truths from public analysis: if Byatt’s narrative deliberately synthesises the reader’s possession, Ellen within it obfuscates and removes facts from public grasp, writing a diary she knows, as the writings of the wife of a famous writer, will be turned over by scholars, and so is composed in the most frustratingly opaque terms. Such is a subversive act that gives her a unique kind of power over the truth, and a cunning inversion of her status as the archetypal dutiful, suffering, asexual Victorian hausfrau. Ellen repudiates all inquisitors, even her own author, and acts like a sphinx in guarding the secret from all but the bravest inquirers.

And yet, simultaneously, Byatt makes mischievous sport of all these variegations, drawing attention to the way her characters are aware of their own themes and their shifts between genres. Roland and Maud disdain the idea of romance, partly because they’re aware of how it’s been constructed, and then deconstructed, as a story form. Roland and Maud’s subjugation by an emotional reflex that is pointedly not under their control, is an ironic end of a journey that has ransacked their lives and presuppositions: their dread of the mess of passion, which has ruined so many lives before theirs, is nonetheless an irresistible force, and one not worth resisting. Byatt defends her own pretences to classical authorship with wit, for in the last chapter of the novel she makes a gift of knowledge to the reader cheated of the novel’s characters, in an epilogue that confirms Ash learned his daughter’s identity and assured himself of her security. Byatt is overt here in her defiance, in the same sort of way Roland learns to defy academic reduction of art, and her reasons for this are intuitively honourable. She finally stands to defend the right of the author to synthesise resolutions of dichotomous, sparring ideas and to be a creator of new paradigms. Thus her finally bringing Maud and Roland together isn’t merely a sop to romantic expectation; it’s a way-station in the search for a new harmony and a way of living.

Both Maud and Roland remain, in spite of all the detail about them, nonetheless remain somehow ill-focused, as if standing in for principles Byatt wants to animate but never quite imbues with self-animation: in spite of its thematic appropriateness as noted above, Roland’s inner life, beyond his perpetual queasiness about his situation, is never presented with the kind of immediacy that lends credibility to his eventual transformation into a poet (one of the few good ideas of Neil LaBute’s sloppy film of the novel was to put this aspect of Roland more up-front). He feels, on occasions, more like a fantasy sketch of a Sensitive New-Age Guy. Considering that one of the novel’s most riveting passages is the direct flashback that confirms Roland and Maud’s theory about a trip Ash and LaMotte took together – the interior perspective used to convey Ash’s fascination with the guarded and altogether mysterious LaMotte, especially when he contemplates how it seems he’s taken the virginity of a woman who is nonetheless very sensually experienced – it’s odd that she’s so choosy about what she flashes back to. The dark central tragedy of the period romance, Blanche’s death, remains problematically out of reach, feeling not so much purposefully as conveniently elusive. The story never quite recovers the impetus of the first quarter when it’s happy to be a realistic novel where the rush of discovery, the everyday grubbiness of Roland and Val’s life, and the oppressiveness of the major characters’ circumstances, are outlaid with keen, occasionally beautiful writing. The clashing textures of romanticised historicism and contemporary drear, all but suffocating in their irreconcilable natures, are excellently conveyed. But a lot of the subsequent pastiche, whilst technically brilliant, nevertheless often defies penetration in lacking the essential musicality of their models, and Byatt to a certain extent proves her own sneaking preference for the old-fashioned novel. Nonetheless, Byatt pulls off the novel’s last segment with a magician's touch, revealing many of the oppressive qualities to be shadows Roland and Maud have been boxing, as characters who seem threatening and one-dimensional blossom into contradictory, likable creatures, like the amusing, accidental partnering of chalk-and-cheese couple Blackadder and Leonora as they chase after Roland and Maud.

Possession is still finally an excellent book, and one with a strong final meaning, looking beyond both the cordoned-off repressions of Victorian patriarchal society and the stifling culture wars of ‘80s academia, but also rifling those eras for their worthy aspects, in searching for a life that treasures the sensual and the intellectual, the immediate and the ageless, the male and female. Byatt’s interests and arguments finally lead to an interesting and revitalising place, in her desire to return magic, passion, force, immediacy, and empathy to the modern novel, whilst not abandoning the critical, rebellious, and awareness-raising aspects of contemporary permutations of literary theory. Possession, as a word, initially seems to be a word that indicates clasping greed, ownership’s prerogatives, and battlefields between the many camps. And yet finally it comes to mean something more respectful and honourable, the role of the custodian, lover, nurturer, and artist. The limitations of possession, the inviolability of some mysteries and experiences, are also firmly underlined, in suggesting that nothing can be truly possessed.