| Each of the first three books of A. S. Byatt's projected quartet, The Virgin in the Garden, Still Life and Babel Tower, has at its thematic heart an object or a figure which is 0best described as a cipher. These ciphers, which I will refer to as empty centres, are absences or empty metaphors without any intrinsic meaning, like floating signifieds without any signifiers, which are made meaningful in a network of language, limits and imposed definitions produced by the characters in the novels. The main centre sets off echoes of itself throughout each novel, forcing the characters to create new mechanisms, both imaginary and intellectual, to define the encroaching undefinable. The novels become illustrations of how people defend against metaphoric emptiness.; I will deal with each novel separately, since I believe each to say very different things about the nature of emptiness and intellectually-based structures. With The Virgin in the Garden, I will focus on the figure of Queen Elizabeth as the central image of emptiness. In Still Life, the role of the centre is taken on by Van Gogh's "The Yellow Chair," which is a painting of absence. Babel Tower's centre is the tower itself. (Abstract shortened by UMI.)... |
