Michèle Roberts on A.S. Byatt’s Possession: a passionate dance between reader and text

Literary prizes turn dazzling spotlights on writers who have been quietly working away for years, writing the books they want to write, rather than the ones fashionable opinion or marketing persons deem they should. Winning a major prize, suddenly the writer, not just the lauded book, becomes illuminated; outlined in gold. A.S. Byatt became famous in 1990, when she won the Booker Prize for Possession. As her many fans all knew, she had been producing fascinating, thought-filled novels for decades.  

Her first novel, Shadow of a Sun, came out in 1964, and others swiftly followed, such as The Game in 1967, The Virgin in the Garden in 1978, and Still Life in 1985. After the success of Possession she went on producing ambitious and stirring novels, and also collections of short stories. She worked as an academic, too, lecturing on literature, and publishing two critical studies of Iris Murdoch, an edition of George Eliot, and an introduction to Willa Cather.   

I had always read her novels. I first met her when, in the mid-Nineties, the British Council invited me to join her, Julian Barnes and John Burnside on a writers’ tour of certain German cities. Panels and discussions with local writers, public readings of our own work followed by Q&A sessions; that kind of thing. We travelled around by train. Lots of time for talking. Antonia preferred to be addressed as A.S. I remember her delight in passionate conversations about books, the way her face lit up with pure, childlike pleasure as she plunged into discussion, how she would smilingly declare her enjoyment of weaving the cat’s cradle of ideas. She resembled a gleeful cherub. She seemed interested in everything on that journey: modern art in the galleries we visited, street design, glass sculptures seen in a shop window. She shocked and disconcerted me by asserting that there were no contemporary female writers she admired. Although she made an exemption for me, and for Jane Rogers (author of many acclaimed novels), I did not want to be complimented at the expense of other women.  

Byatt foregrounds the acts of reading and writing as necessary and important for our human life. Her novel’s title refers not just to a noun or a state, but to an action. In old-fashioned romances the hero finally possesses the heroine: possession means male penetration. However, in Byatt’s version possession is explored also through literary/social relationships and more generously defined as a dance of active and passive, of give and take. That is powerfully summoned in what for me is the core of the book: a beautiful paragraph (too long to quote here) summing up the astonishing joy and delight a reader feels on encountering a text that elicits a passionate and fulfilling reading, one fuelled by imagination, eager discovery, creativity. The encounter between reader and text is erotic, in the deepest, widest sense; numinous, rapturous, sexual. Byatt is perhaps echoing the French philosopher, Julia Kristeva, who used the word for coming, la jouissance, to indicate the bliss of reading. Byatt’s hero Roland, fired by his delighted reading, suddenly discovers he is a poet: ‘He had time to feel the strangeness of before and after; an hour ago there had been no poems, and now they came like rain and were real.’   

Possession is simultaneously a post-modern work, juggling classic tropes, questioning the relevance of originality, delighting in pastiche, playing games with doubles, invoking genres such as fantasy and hagiography with affectionate mockery. It’s a ghost story, too, taking seriously the idea that the past can haunt us through the medium of written and printed texts.   

I re-read Possession when I was invited to give a lecture on it at Birkbeck (the extra-mural college of London University) in front of A.S. herself. I praised its richness and complexity, also the way it invites the reader actively to join in, to seize clues and decode them. My account of my re-reading involved suggesting that while the novel demonstrated the freedom of equals possible in the passionate imaginary dance between reader and text, this equality was not matched inside the novel’s hierarchy of forms of sexual love. Possession’s particular vision of romance places heterosexual relationships firmly above homosexual ones, as more mature, less egotistical and skittish. In the 19th-century story, Blanche Glover, the close live-in friend of poet Christabel LaMotte, appears neurotic, jealous and clingy, while in the interwoven 20th-century story, Leonora Stern, a literary scholar who is a lesbian, not only epitomises the excesses of fashionable feminist literary theory but is a bit of a sexual bully as well. A.S. listened to my talk in gracious, tolerant silence. She didn’t mind being wrestled with as well as respected.