The Multiple Dimensions Of Historical Narrative In A.S.Byatt's Major Fiction

A.S.Byatt(1936-)is a distinguished contemporary English novelist and critic.Over the course of her career,both literary and academic,she has revealed a prevailing concern for the past and the meanings we derive from it.Her propensity towards history-writing is due,in part,to a rejection of “solipsism” in favor of the imagination of worlds,minds and lives other than the self.Privileging ventriloquism over soliloquy,Byatt sees herself as performing an analogous activity to 19th-century spiritualism,where the medium communicates the voice of the dead to the living.Through ventriloquism she engages in an attempt to resurrect the ghosts in history,bridging the gap between the past and the present.Byatt's interest in history is also inseparable from the resurgence of “new historical fiction” in Britain in the final quarter of the twentieth century,largely propelled by the trend of New Historicism.However,it will do her historical fiction a disservice attempting to fit it into the postmodernist literary taxonomy,for Byatt merely takes this reconsideration of history's relation to narrative as her point of entry to probe into the multifaceted issue of narrating history.Although quite a few studies have explored Byatt's historical narrative in an incidental way,it has not constituted their focus as it should do in a more systematic treatment.Meanwhile,the relevant criticism is often narrowly circumscribed,boiling down to narrative techniques and strategies at the expense of other perspectives.Furthermore,the Booker-Prize-winning Possession: A Romance has monopolized the scholarly attention accorded to Byatt,and discussions about her fictional output other than Possession are burgeoning yet inadequate.On this account,this dissertation explores the multiple dimensions of historical narrative as evidenced in Byatt's fiction by taking into the analytical scope her three representative mid-career works,with two works prior to and subsequent to Possession.The study identifies a distinctive variation of historical narrative predominant in each text—the textualized history in The Virgin in the Garden,the therapeutic history in Possession,and the revisionary history in Angels and Insects.Through a close and comprehensive investigation of the crucial issue of the historical narrative,this dissertation endeavors to make a contribution to the existing Byatt scholarship.The dissertation is composed of three chapters plus an introduction and a conclusion.The introduction contains a clarification of the major concepts,a contextualization of Byatt's concern for history,a suggestion of the idiosyncrasies of her historical narrative,and an exposition of her view of history on which the historical narrative is grounded.It also includes a survey of English and Chinese scholarship on Byatt,and a claim of the critiquing methods as well as the organization of the dissertation.Chapter one deals with the textualized history in The Virgin in the Garden.While Byatt has faith in historical narrative's claim to truth,she views history as a textual product constructed through language.This chapter first analyses how Byatt attempts a truthful reconstruction of the 1950 s by retracing the retrogressive ideology of femininity and the ethos of consumerism that prevail in the fifties.It then explores how she simultaneously constructs textualized history by adopting two strategies: blending history with story,and intertextualized history.Byatt employs Bildungsroman as an overriding mode of emplotment so as to show the past to be crafted and shaped by textual structures.Both Frederica's metamorphosis from childhood to adult consciousness and Stephanie's passage into fully realized womanhood fit the generic pattern of Bildung,underlining the mediation of history through narrative forms.The blurring of the boundary between history and story is also stressed by some metafictional strategies such as framing through the prologue,non-linear timeline,and extra-textual authorial commentary.Moreover,Byatt utilizes intertextualized history to highlight history's status as verbal construct.The personal histories of the two Potter sisters are encoded with references to two mythical texts—that of Persephone and that of Virgin Queen.Through echoes of other texts,Byatt shows that any account of history is a node in an intertextual network,and that history can only be accessed through literary narratives of it.Chapter two examines the therapeutic history in Possession: A Romance.The underlying argument is a view of history not as contained,once and for all,in the past textual remains and documents,not a fixed and transcendental existence,but rather a present interest and pursuit,that which lives in the mind of the contemporary people when they criticize and interpret those archival materials.In other words,the re-enactment of the past through the minds of the present-day historians generates positive,remedial effects,showing the present to be immeasurably enriched by the past.First,the preoccupation with history-as-text has shifted attention away from the actual events of the Victorian past,towards the interpretation of those events.History is not objective;it is how the present subjectively interacts with the past.It consists in the process of the historians' “conversational” exchange with the past that entails an act of imaginative identification.The exercising of imagination and the assuaging of the desire to know,achieved in the interpretative act,hints at the therapeutic function of history.Secondly,the two historian-characters not only relive,in their own minds,the beliefs and principles of the Victorian world,but are shown to replicate,in corporeality,the very lives of the two Victorian poets.By structuring an uncanny parallelism between the modern-day plot and the Victorian plot,Byatt emphasizes history's impingement on the present.Thirdly,penetrating into the mystery of the Victorian love affair sets the modern historians on a journey towards self-knowledge,psychological growth and emotional fulfillment.The forays into the past,driven by truth-seeking through literary archaeology,exert therapeutic power that delivers the characters from their malaise,occasioning their salvation.Chapter three discusses the revisionary history in Angels and Insects.This narrative mode is undergirded by a powerful impulse,in Byatt's own words,“to write the histories of the marginalized,the forgotten,the unrecorded”(OHS 11).Byatt is involved in a feminist revisionary project of recuperating the history of women who have been excluded from official versions of the past.“Morpho Eugenia” throws into relief the tyrannical ruling of the male perspective.By sieving the narrative mainly from the male protagonist's point of view,and thereby exposing the way he constructs and names the two central female figures from his narrative vantage point of mastery,Byatt debunks the oppressive male perspective.Meanwhile,the surfacing of the sub-narratives about the two female protagonists from their submerged locations secretly works to counter the male perspective,so as to make possible the smooth re-integration of the erased female voices back into the Victorian past.“The Conjugial Angel” is a vehicle for the exploration of alternative versions of history,bringing to the fore what exists in the original nineteenth-century narratives only as subtexts.Byatt imagines a life for Emily Tennyson that extends beyond the parameters of a footnote to Tennyson and Hallam.By granting her a voice,she engineers Emily's self-liberation from the patriarchal story.She also brings the peripheral figures of female mediums to central podium,suggesting the subversive function of automatic writing in granting a degree of linguistic freedom and bringing to light the repressed desires in female unconscious.Through debunking the male perspective and reinscribing the female voices,Byatt constructs revisionary history.The concluding part makes a brief summary of the major contents in each chapter of the dissertation.It argues that the ensemble of the three variations,corresponding to the motive,manner,and effect of history-writing,is indicative not only of Byatt's persistent fictional preoccupation with history,but of her profound probing into the diversified aspects that the construction of history can take.It reiterates the relevance of Byatt's historical writing to our time,reaffirming her contribution to contemporary British fiction.