A Study Of Cultural Memory In The Fiction Of A.S.Byatt

A.S.Byatt(1936-)is a prestigious contemporary English novelist and literary critic,enjoying a reputation as one of the most imaginative and intelligent writers of English today.Importantly,Byatt has represented a shift from one kind of British fiction writing which prevailed in the immediate post-war years to a brand-new type,namely from novels concerned about subtle small relationships and delicate social problems to works attentive to larger issues of history,art,and the life of ideas.Meanwhile,another element of Byatt's contribution,both literary and academic,should be her lately increasing participation in cultural memory studies,specifically embodied in her compilation and connotation of the influential topical encyclopedia Memory: An Anthology(2009).Since her great accomplishment in Possession: A Romance which won the Booker Prize of literature in 1990,Byatt has attracted internationally widespread critical attention.Scholars have attempted to unlock or interpret the unique glamour of Byatt's art in terms of literary themes or critical theories from diverse perspectives,such as history,the influence of pictorial art upon literature,the relationship between postmodern narrative experiments and realist tradition of British novels,and feminist or gender issues.Studies on Byatt and her fiction in China,however,has had a relatively late start and a comparatively narrow scope.Although the two decades after the smash hit of Possession has witnessed momentum in Byatt studies,scholars in China have mainly focused on the historical or the feminist issues in primarily a couple of Byatt's long novels headed by Possession,with some of her other novels and lots of short stories left almost unnoticed.One aspect deserving further exploration should be Byatt's investigation and involvement in the studies of cultural memory in her fiction.While Lena Steveker has done a marvelous research on the relationship between identity and cultural memory in Byatt's six major novels,arguing that some key characters in these works construct their identities via a wide range of cultural experiences,Steveker has simply focused on the issue of identity from the perspective of cultural memory.So far,little attention has been paid by either English or Chinese scholars to the major areas of cultural memory on the concrete level as well as cultural schemata on the abstract level in the fiction of Byatt.Therefore,this dissertation aims to unlock and interpret Byatt's literary art from the perspective of cultural memory,investigating both what major areas or specific topics of cultural memory Byatt is engaged in throughout her fiction,and how she deals with such areas or topics of cultural memory,especially how she senses,understands,remembers and conveys such knowledge or information of cultural memory—namely the cultural schemata running through her cultural memory.The twentieth century witnessed an intermittent development of the theory of cultural memory.The present research on cultural memory can date back to two strands of tradition in the 1920 s.In 1925 the French sociologist Maurice Halbwachs put forward the theory of the dependence of individual memory on social frameworks and the concept of“collective memory” as the present shared reconstruction of the past,while the French art and cultural historian Aby Warburg studied the interplay between continuity and recombination of cultural symbols,cultural images and cultural signs in artworks throughout western artistic history and developed the concept of “social memory” in 1929,referring to the memory function of artistic images.Then memory studies almost disappeared in over half of the twentieth century and it was not until the 1980 s that memory studies revived in humanities and social sciences.In 1984,Pierre Nora coined the term “sites of memory”,which can be understood as loci calling up the memory images of the French nation.In 1988,Jan and Aleida Assmann provided the most influential concept of memory studies—“cultural memory”—a purposefully established and institutionalized memory by which societies imagine their self-images and maintain an identity over the course of generations.Another scholar in the field of cultural memory whose research is important to this study should be Sir Frederic C.Bartlett,who puts forward the significant concept of “cultural schemata”.According to Bartlett,cultural schemata refer to the culturally and socially influenced patterns of thoughts and behaviors,through which individuals perceive,interpret,remember and transmit knowledge or information of cultural memory.In Byatt's fiction,three major areas of cultural memory stand out: the historical memory of the Victorian England,the mythological memory of the pre-patriarchal goddesses,and the artistic memory of distinguished western painters and their paintings.Byatt's historical memory of the Victorian England in her neo-Victorian fiction—including the novel Possession: A Romance,the collection of two novellas Angels and Insects,and the short story “Precipice-Encurled”—features her choices of the strategy of historical memory and the mode of cultural memory.Firstly,concerning the two strategies of historical memory put forward by Jan Assmann,Byatt prefers “hot remembering”(establishing some form of respectful relationship with the past so as to attain a better understanding of the present)to “cold remembering”(treating the past with condescending detachment),and this is embodied in the plot that in Possession,rather than the characters who adopt cold remembering,it is Roland and Maud who follow hot remembering that succeed in discovering certain aspects of historical truth.Thus,Byatt refuses to live in historical uncertainty as stipulated by Linda Hutcheon that a postmodernist should,though Byatt acknowledges the postmodern idea about the literary construction of history,and such an ambivalence reveals her postmodern-realist epistemology.Secondly,Byatt draws upon “antagonistic mode” of cultural memory:favoring the genre of “romance” while denying “historiography” which treats historical events and figures in a scholarly objective way.Genres are in essence repositories of cultural memory,because literary texts mediate cultural knowledge as a result of them.With the genre of romance,Byatt relishes the authorial freedom to combine literary imagination with historical facts so as to reach some historical truth.Moreover,two unique narrative techniques are employed by Byatt to render a coherent and entire historical truth: “omniscience” and “ventriloquism”.Meanwhile,Byatt's historical memory also features her specific concern about Victorian women--such as her favor of the poetess Christabel La Motte,pity of the female artist Blanche Glover,sympathy for the housewife Ellen Ash,and approval for the female celebrity Emily Jesse Tennyson--thus revealing her liberal feminist political stance.Then since the “monumental mode” of cultural memory matches exactly with mythology,Byatt's mythological memory of the pre-historical or pre-patriarchal goddesses straightforwardly follows this mode and explores four big women issues:female self-sufficiency,love and marriage,procreation and construction,and punishment and dispossession of women,which are manifested in her palimpsests of the mythic tales about such powerful goddesses.Firstly,“The Fairy Melusine”—Byatt's retelling of the French mythic tale dating back to the Middle Ages about Melusine the self-sufficient goddess—witnesses the change between the two dynamics of mythological memory come up with by Jan Assmann,namely from the “foundational dynamic” of legitimizing the existent patriarchal institution to the “contra-present dynamic” of remembering the great pre-historical goddess as well as the peaceful pre-patriarchal society.Secondly,both Byatt's epic “The Fairy Melusine” and her short story “A Lamia in the Cévennes”highlight the love and marriage between a snake goddess and a mortal man,and demonstrate the two basic processes of cultural memory: the religious source of the Middle Ages about Melusine and John Keats' s long poem “Lamia” serve as the respective“pre-mediation”,while Byatt's two fictional works constitute the “remediation” of them.Thirdly,in “The Fairy Melusine” Byatt lauds Melusine's devotion to her ten sons and her establishment of the Lusignan Dynasty;likewise in “Arachne's Broken Woof” Byatt praises the spider-woman Arachne's perfect craft of spinning and weaving.And these palimpsests also reflect the topos—a term in the field of cultural memory by Ernst Robert Curtius referring to the commonly set schemata of thought and expression in ancient mythology—of female as the source of life and creativity.Fourthly,Byatt's epic “The Drowned City” and short story “Medusa's Ankles”,which include the element of punishment and dispossession of women,also witness the transformation of Aleida Assmann's two roles of cultural memory,namely from the hidden and dormant “stored memory” into the dominant and identity-establishing “functional memory”.Obviously,Byatt's palimpsests of these pre-patriarchal goddesses are written from a liberal feminist perspective.Meanwhile,as she renders such coherent and entire rewritings in a de-patriarchal,de-Christianized and thus de-centered way,the epistemological postmodern realism is also manifested throughout her mythological memory.Finally,Byatt's artistic memory of distinguished western artists and paintings adopts the “experiential mode” of cultural memory,because she draws upon “ekphrasis”—giving voice and verbal description to the otherwise mute art object—in her intertextual references of certain famous paintings,thus rendering the reader an experience of the artwork through reading her fiction.Firstly,Byatt employs certain well-known paintings to mirror the unique personality or beauty of some of her female or androgynous characters in her fiction,or to discuss female aesthetic imagination,exploring both the art in life and the life of art concerning women.Secondly,Byatt juxtaposes the artistic memory of several prestigious western pictorial artists and their paintings with the import of their artistic techniques or styles into her own fiction creation.For example,in the novel Still Life Byatt not only remembers Vincent Van Gogh and dozens of his paintings,but also struggles to imitate Van Gogh's “personal realism” and his pursuit of “pure sight”and “direct expression” with a height of accuracy.Eventually Byatt's project fails,and then her postmodern doubt about the dependability of artistic representation increases.She switches to remember Henri Matisse in The Matisse Stories,and tries to adopt his ideal balance between realism and expressive kind of abstraction.And as Matisse tends to describe and exhibit the energy and power of what he calls “women thinkers”,Byatt taps into such potential of Matisse's paintings to discuss her concern about women issues.Finally Byatt also follows the realist Spanish artist Diego Velásquez's special technique of framing paintings,which definitely falls into the category of postmodernism,in her fiction such as the short story “Christ in the House of Martha and Mary”.Clearly,both Byatt's aesthetic postmodern realism and her political liberal feminism are revealed throughout her artist memory.Consequently,this dissertation concludes that the cultural schemata on the abstract level,through which Byatt perceives,interprets,remembers and transmits all the three areas of cultural memory in her fiction,lie with her aesthetical or epistemological postmodern-realism and her political liberal feminism.And these two aspects together constitute the core characteristic of her as a new British novelist.