“He felt unable to urge the unbuckling of the
trunk. He felt as though he was prying, and as though he was being
uselessly urged on by some violent emotion of curiosity – not greed,
curiosity, more fundamental even than sex, the desire
for knowledge.” -A.S. Byatt, Possession
Ever since a week ago I completed the second draft
of my novel and handed it over to my agent, I’ve been feeling out of
sorts. I always feel this way when my writing project goes on hold
again … kind of melancholy, on pins and needles,
unsure of what I even feel like reading. Over the past month while I
was hibernating in my head and writing for glorious chunks of time every
day, the down side was that I did very little reading. So in a way
it’s nice to come out of the cave for a while
and breathe and read again.
A.S. Byatt’s mammoth Man Booker prize-winning novel Possession
has been sitting on my bedside table for some time, but I’d been
putting off reading it because the topic – a simmering romance between
two literary scholars, who bond
over discovering an illicit romance between their respective authors of
study – struck me as a tad all too reminiscent of my own former life as
an English prof, burrowing myself away in dusty rare books libraries.
Once I got used to Byatt’s longwinded descriptions
of clothing, gestures and the interiors of houses, to name just a few
instances (perhaps meant as a kind of parody or luxuriant love affair
with the conventions of the Victorian novel, depending on how you look
at it), I found myself settling into the rhythm
of her prose and getting immersed in the inner lives of the central
characters. Currently two hundred and fifty pages in, what’s most
striking to me is the way the novel is bringing back fond memories of
the life of the mind, but memories I could never acknowledge
having while I was caught up in climbing the ladder of the Ivory
Tower. These disavowed memories, which I suspect most academics
have, are brilliantly illuminated by this novel. When Roland, our
unlikely hero, a mild-mannered postdoc trying to eke
a living studying the Victorian poetry of Randolph Ash, unearths from
an archive a couple of thinly veiled love letters that Ash appears to
have penned to the poet Christabel La Motte, his pulse quickens; his
interest is deeply personal, prurient. Seeking
the advice of Maud Bailey, a scholar who specializes in La Motte,
Roland is drawn on increasingly obsessive journey. Compelled to go on a
trip together to La Motte’s country home, the two discover a full set
of letters that sparkle with a vibrant interchange
of ideas about faith, crisis of faith, art, poetry and desire. Most
importantly, it appears that Roland and Maud are the first scholars to
lay eyes on the letters and gain such insight into Ash’s illicit
relationship with La Motte (Ash was married to another
woman, not a poet, with whom he exchanged some comparatively drab
letters).
It's precisely this kind of rare connection with
the private life of a favourite author that I lusted after during my
short-lived career as an academic, even though I could never admit it at
the time; in order to have any cred as a scholar,
you’re forced to pretend that your perspective is far more serious,
aloof and remote – couched in the interests of the latest “ism.” And
yet, what inspired me to keep poring over the papers of Edith Wharton
and Willa Cather was this more primal desire to
get inside the author’s unconscious and discover something secret,
illicit maybe, deeply personal always, giving me some special private
insight into why that author wrote the way she did. This would be, as
Byatt’s title suggests, absolute
possession.
I’ll be interested to see where the plot goes in
the second half. I’m tucking this novel into my overnight bag as I get
ready to leave for the Niagara Literary Arts Festival, where I’ll be
giving a reading from my memoir
The Reading List at 2:00 pm later today, at the Niagara on the Lake Library, before seeing a play (Misalliance)
with my mother at the Shaw Festival. Niagara on the Lake is so
picturesque I feel it could almost be out of Byatt’s novel. Hope to
see you there!
Photo from: here
1 comment:
I hope the rest of the book was just as great as the first 250. I like the way you described this one. Thanks for sharing. :)
~Jess
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