Narrative and Power: The Ballad and the Source

Abstract

‘I could have listened all day to Mrs Jardine for the sheer fascination of her style’, declares Rebecca Landon in an early chapter of The Ballad and the Source (p. 23). The remark underlines one of the major topics of investigation in the novel: the dominance of art. The source of Sybil Jardine’s charismatic personality, the pivot of the novel, is her ‘style’, a style that incorporates both verbal fluency and visual effect. For Sybil makes herself into a work of art — the ‘Enchantress Queen in an antique ballad of revenge’ (p. 238) — and it is the examination of the compelling nature of narrative in particular as well as with power relations in society that this novel concerns itself. Although Rosamond Lehmann’s earlier work clearly pays attention to the question of forms of dominance, especially in its social and sexual aspects, The Ballad and the Source takes the topic a stage further in its parallel concern with forms of artistry: theatrical, visual, literary. In its special concentration on the power of narrative and in its construction of a series of Chinese boxes of stories within the main story, the book creates a sequence of elaborate puzzles that form a comment on their own artifice. In this sense the novel seems to anticipate the work of later twentieth-century writers whose post-modernist questioning of the nature of narrative exhibits itself in the ludic self-reflexivity of their fictive structures.