The spaces between: A. S. Byatt and postmodern realism

Antonia Susan Byatt has written that she believes it is “possible for a text to be supremely mimetic…and at the same time to think about form, its own form, its own formation, about perceiving and inventing the world” (“Sugar/Le Sucre” 22–3). This self-conscious attention to form is characteristic of the majority of Byatt's novels and much of her short fiction as well. Byatt's style, which is best described as “postmodern realism,” enables her to acknowledge her debt to and her appreciation of nineteenth-century realism, while reflecting on the impossibility—and indeed, the undesirability—of employing this mode uncritically. Through her frequent use of irony, intertextuality, parody, and pastiche, Byatt redefines the parameters of contemporary realism within the context of postmodern literary theory.; Kathleen Coyne Kelly has observed that Byatt's novels are often “sites of controversy,” which reflect a blend of discourses from the literary to the critical (A. S. Byatt xiii). Indeed, Byatt's writing can be interpreted as metafiction: fiction that “self-consciously and systematically draws attention to itself as an artefact in order to pose questions about the relationship between fiction and reality” (Waugh, Metafiction 2). Through this type of literature, Byatt succeeds in troubling the “boundaries between fiction and criticism” (Currie 3), while reflecting her interest in some of the issues commonly associated with postmodernism. By writing fiction that is so closely connected to contemporary theoretical ideas, and which insists on her audience's participation in recognizing and thinking about those ideas, Byatt continually dramatizes the communication between reader and writer that is at the center of her work.; Byatt's interest in exploring connections between fiction and reality leads to her determination to reveal “a theoretical self-awareness of history and fiction as human constructs,” for the purpose of showing both the narrative links between historiography and fiction and what Linda Hutcheon refers to as an “acknowledgment of [their] inescapable textuality” (Poetics 5, 129). This type of fiction, which Hutcheon calls “historiographic metafiction,” is concerned with demonstrating the discursive nature of fiction and history through the understanding that “the meaning and shape are not in the events, but in the systems which make those past ‘events’ into present historical facts” (Poetics 89). Through novels such as Possession: A Romance or Angels and Insects, Byatt examines current theories about historical recovery and applies them to fiction which is designed to question not only how we attempt to know the past, but also whose perspective of the past gets told, and why. In so doing, Byatt in her fiction is able to recapture the qualities of the nineteenth-century novel that have given her, as a reader, so much pleasure, while endeavoring to show how realism can be adapted to reflect the theoretical and literary practices of the late twentieth century.