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THREE AT ONE BLOW: USING POSSESSION TO INTRODUCE THEORY By Julia Whitsitt
Lander UniversityIf your students are anything like mine, they frequently and insistently ask, “Why can’t we just read the literature? Why do we have to interpret?” The seemingly self-evident phrase “just read,” as distinguishable from interpreting, is the key here—it assumes the model of reading as an uncomplicated transaction in which text fills the mind, yielding “pleasure” or “information” or “philosophy” or “morals.” No amount of professorial preaching seems to dissuade students—even many English majors—from their belief in the primacy of “just reading.” Nor can “theory” per se, with its usually impenetrable prose and high level of abstraction, do much to help undergraduate students make the link between self-consciousness and the reading process, the link necessary for them to become aware of themselves as readers.I do not mean to disparage reading for fun, reading to pass the time, reading for its own sake (we’d be better off if our students read anything rather than spending so much time in the e-womb, but that’s another polemic). However, we all need practice to become conscious of the processes of reading, canon-formation, textualization, even “myth making” in the literary-cultural sense, if we wish to understand our culture and to control our participation in it rather than be controlled by it. Catherine Belsey suggests the helpful idea of “problematisation” as important to our understanding of literature’s role in forming consciousness. Starting from the premise that only when we question what we usually regard as self-evident and natural can we begin to observe the limits of our own consciousness, Belsey maintains that an important role of literary texts is to invite us to see issues where none were evident before (408). That’s why A. S. Byatt’s Possession is such a find; it calls our attention to the issues involved in literary scholarship, including authorial biography and intention, the place of scholarship in our culture, and the impossibility of “just reading” any text. When students read Possession, they in fact confront at least three main principles against “just reading” at one blow.
“The novel thus foregrounds and problematizes
the processes of studying literature from the past,
highlighting the many ways readers can approach any text.”Possession tells a two-level main story: how two literary researchers discover—more than a century after the events—the secret that a famous and famously conventional Victorian poet had a liaison with a less famous and somewhat reclusive poetess, resulting in an unacknowledged child. Along the way, the two researchers find adventure, love, and a radically new critical/scholarly interpretation of the two Victorians they are studying. In good postmodernist fashion, the major Victorian characters, Randolph Henry Ash and Christabel LaMotte, are fictional (and Byatt brilliantly provides not only characters but also the “texts” of major works and correspondence by each), yet “real” Victorian characters are mentioned, and the links with the same kinds of discoveries in the “real” world (the cases of Wordsworth, the Brownings, George Eliot, Carlyle, and Dickens seem especially apt) are clear. Similarly, the two young researchers and the “old guard” scholars are fictional but operate in the setting and flavor of late–20th-century academic life. The novel thus foregrounds and problematizes the processes of studying literature from the past, highlighting the many ways readers can approach any text.I Byatt embodies textual and biographical scholarship (those two academic enterprises in our field that seem least problematical and closest to “just reading”) in the characters James Blackadder and Mortimer Cropper. Blackadder is the general editor of the standard edition of Ash’s works, on which he has been engaged for 26 years. He represents the notion of disinterested, “scientific” literary scholarship, in which the text is assumed to be an autonomous object of study and the scholar able to establish some objective and timeless truth. His own writing, therefore, takes the form of footnotes, and the hallmark of his writing process is erasing “the traces of his own views [which are] unnecessary” (325). (How many students have asked you, “Can we put our own opinion into this paper?”) When he realizes that scholarly problems requiring footnotes are “like the heads of the Hydra, two to solve in the place of one solved” (33), Byatt makes us aware of the intertextuality of every text and of the consequent impossibility of tracing every link between a text and other texts.
Blackadder’s task, like the task of every other editor, is neither objective nor limited; he is always choosing what to trace and what to annotate, and his choices are clearly determined by his own conception of what matters. “His own views” are necessarily everywhere is the project. Furthermore, as he painstakingly searches libraries for every possible source, allusion, and analogue to Ash’s work, he spectacularly misses—can we say misreads?—important information. He simply is not looking for a “minor” woman poet to be the source and inspiration of a significant part of Ash’s work. Thus, it is appropriate that a young scholar steeped in “theory” discovers the connection. Ironically, when he does, he is working for Blackadder, tracking down a Renaissance Italian source in a library.
Cropper, the parody of the evidence-obsessed biographer/collector, is from a nouveau-riche university in New Mexico (the Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas during the oil-boom days of the early ’70s is an irresistible parallel), trying to retrace every footstep of Ash’s life. Like Blackadder, he misses the crucial facts. But whereas Blackadder’s obsession is with words and ideas, Cropper’s is with artifacts and physical movements. He sees himself “fluently documenting every last item of the days of Randolph Henry Ash, his goings-out and his comings-in, his dinner engagements, his walking tours, his excessive sympathy with servants, his impatience with lionising” (110). He wants to buy every manuscript and every object having to do with the poet. In his black Mercedes, open checkbook in hand, he represents the voracious appetite to own the text, and the consequences of making history and literature into physical commodities.
“Both . . . demonstrate clearly to readers the first
principle against ‘just reading’: We see what we go
looking for when we read.”Both Blackadder and Cropper demonstrate clearly to readers the first principle against “just reading”: We see we what go looking for when we read. Blackadder likes to think of himself as the mere extension of Ash, “all his thoughts . . . another man’s thoughts” (33), but he thinks along only with the scholarly, intellectual side of his subject. Cropper similarly creates his own R. H. Ash, engaging in what one of the young researchers characterizes as “a peculiarly vicious version of reverse hagiography: the desire to cut his subject down to size” (272) as he records day-to-day activities. When the two young scholars find the same line in works by each poet (258), the scene—and all the revolutionary facts to be discovered about the two writers—might be summed up by Maud’s saying later, faced with a similar discovery, “no one has noticed it before because they weren’t looking” (287). We can understand clearly from Blackadder’s and Cropper’s successes and failures not only why readings continually beget other readings, but also how our mental grids determine what we can find when we read. Cropper and Blackadder represent sophisticated versions of “just reading” as many of us were taught to understand it and as many students understand it to this day. By problematizing their activities, Byatt helps us see some of the usually hidden truths about their kind of work.II The main plot of the novel, however, concerns Roland Michell and Maud Bailey, the two young researchers (he a post-graduate assistant to Blackadder, she a professor at a provincial English university) who find the previously unknown letters and figure out the Ash-LaMotte connection. They are onto the latest in narratology and gender theory, and they know from beginning to end that they are not “just reading.” As stereotypically postmodern scholars, they are only too aware of the multi-valenced textuality of everything: Yet this hip sophistication is also a mental grid, as we see when Byatt problematizes it by having Michell ask, “What is this arcane power we have, when we see that everything is human sexuality? It’s really powerlessness. . . . All we’ve found out is primitive sympathetic magic. . . . [W]e can’t see things” (276). Maud’s reply sums up what students need to remember about their situation today, and more generally about every reader’s situation:
In every age, there must be truths people can’t fight—whether or not they want to, whether or not they will go on being truths in the future. We live in the truth of what Freud discovered. (276)In this process of rereading the literary past in the light of “the truth of what Freud discovered,” Michell uncovers the first two letters, while seeking more grist for Blackadder’s footnote mill in a library. Maud finds the next cache, in the tumble-down estate house of her distant kinsman George Bailey, descendant of Christabel LaMotte. Cropper robs Ash’s grave to find the final pieces of the puzzle, letters interred with Ash. Also crucial to the mystery are two unpublished journals: Ellen Ash’s, under the control of Beatrice Nest, who has been editing it for almost as long as Blackadder has been editing Ash’s poems, and that of LaMotte’s cousin in Brittany, located by the American feminist scholar Leonora Stern. Thus everyone “possesses” some part of the Ash/LaMotte complex of texts, and in the multifarious conflicts among Cropper, George Bailey, Maud Bailey, Stern, Nest, Michell, and Blackadder, problems of textualization and cultural appropriation come into the foreground.“The second principle against ‘just reading’ . . .
is that texts . . . are made available in specific
forms by people with specific reasons for
wanting them made available.”Readers must problematize a whole series of questions: When, how, by whom, and for what purposes are texts created, promulgated, and valued? Who “owns” a letter? A personal journal? Ideas for poems or novels? Who (if anyone) can or should buy and sell, publish or choose not to publish, another’s writings? What is the relation between such physical remains as letters, the dead who wrote them, and the texts written on them and related to them? Byatt’s perspective on this issue is in one interesting way peculiarly English, with the Americans appearing as rich, ham-handed parvenus who appropriate and buy what is not theirs by right. Yet Roland’s use of the original two letters, Maud’s theft from Leonora Stern, and even Blackadder’s efforts to thwart Cropper are all symptoms of the desire to own the literature—and to be able to control how it is read. Roland pockets the two letters as soon as he runs across them, does not tell Blackadder about them, and begins his freelance search for their significance. All of the academics want to further their careers by publishing their findings, but Sir George Bailey’s assertion—“‘I believe in letting dead bones lie still. Why stir up scandals about our silly fairy poetess?’” (96)—problematizes the academic enterprise itself. The second principle against “just reading,” as suggested by these issues, is that texts do not simply appear; they are made available in specific forms at specific times by people with specific reasons for wanting them made available. Texts may in several senses transcend their time and place, but time and place cannot be ignored.III The problem of what evidence means and how it should be handled has another dimension too: Foucault’s most famous question (“what is an author?”) reverberates through Possession. Did/does Randolph Henry Ash exist? Did/does Christabel LaMotte exist? How do we know? Did/does Robert Browning exist? Did/does Elizabeth Barrett Browning exist? How do we know? If we have texts attributed to someone with a name, an address, and dates, can we confidently say that we can deduce an author? A colleague several years ago assembled a chronology and bibliography of works by Ash and LaMotte, a fascinating enterprise in a number of ways. It helps one to appreciate the complex artistry of Byatt’s historical constructs and the mystery of the main plot. But the vertigo I feel in the face of this bibliography results, I think, from how real it looks, identical to lists and chronologies I’ve been looking at (but not really seeing as texts) almost as long as I’ve been in school.
“[T]he third principle against ‘just reading’:
Knowledge is socially constructed.”Students can very quickly become more sophisticated than I’ve been by discussing these questions and thus raising the third principle against “just reading”: Knowledge is socially constructed. That is, what kinds of questions we can ask and what kinds of answers count as reasonable are a product of community. Most of us, and most of our students, regard bibliographies and chronologies as objective knowledge; after reading Possession, we won’t be able to see them that way any more. Behind these scholarly constructs are the literary/biographical paradigms, old and new, that we apply as we construct knowledge. The traditional ones—the “great man” supported by “helpful, self-effacing female,” “intellectually gigantic author has sources and analogues from everywhere,” “major author influences secondary author”—and the newer ones—“major poet neglected because she was female,” “male author cannot be at peace until he dominates and overwhelms female author/friend/lover,” “nobody was ever asexual, self-effacing, pure,” “the intellectual giants of the past were no better than anyone else, not heroes”—are equally paradigmatic, essential to our thinking but neither value-neutral nor self-evident products of nature.I know that I have done the novel a disservice in a way, by making it sound dry as dust and theoretical as DerrideManfouhartfish. The novel isn’t that way to read at all; it provides one of the best examples I know of the pleasures of the text, with lots of enlightenment along the way. But to be aware of how it helps us to enact these three principles against “just reading,” how it in fact gives us all three at one blow, is to appreciate Byatt’s achievement and to see how this work can be used effectively in our curricula.
Works Cited
Belsey, Catherine. “Literature, History, Politics.” Modern Criticism and Theory: A Reader. Ed. David Lodge. London and New York: Longman, 1988. 400–410.
Byatt, A. S. Possession: A Romance. New York: Vintage International, 1991.