Abstract
The realistic rendering of Self-Conscious Thought in A. S. Byatt’s Possession is an evidence of Byatt’s success in making abstract ideas concrete. Possession, as an encyclopedia of theories and thoughts, Victorian or modern, is a novel in which ideas are less obtrusive and the author’s presence is intrusive. The twentieth-century part of the novel embodies Byatt’s confrontation with modern literary thoughts which are different in nature than the ideas incarnated in Victorians i.e. George Eliot’s fiction. Although such ideas are difficult to be turned into immediate daily concerns yet in Possession they fit into immediate personal dilemmas and gain a sense of urgency. A. S. Byatt, successfully, represents the universal ideas of man, faith and love, with a skeptic twentieth-century background in this novel. In addition, while George Eliot begins to generalize these ideas with an authorial voice, Byatt knows that these ideas have become equivocal, thus overthrowing authority of the author.
Highlights
Among the British realists, who exhibit diverse points of emphasis in their treatment of reality, George Eliot is a rare case who gives special attention to ideas —moral, religious, philosophical— as essential part of the reality
The skepticism of Roland and Maud, does not merely derive from the fact that their knowingness surpasses their Victorian predecessors; instead, it is determined by what they know. Their theoretical questioning of the foundation of language, knowledge, or even humanity leaves them no other enemy to fight with than their own doubt, or doubt over their own doubt. Shuttleworth, in her discussion of Byatt’s neo-Victorian novella Morpho Eugenia, comes up with a brilliant comment on the distinction between the Victorian’s loss of faith and the skepticism of the postmodern era, which is an accurate description of the difference between the dilemma of Ash and LaMotte and that of Roland and Maud: For the Victorians there was a decisive crisis of faith, a sense that the world was shaking under them, an ecstatic agony of indecision
After the brief examination of how Byatt actualizes her reflection on the ideas of man, faith and love in Possession, we come back to see her own comment that the Victorian are more living and real than the papery modern characters
Summary
Among the British realists, who exhibit diverse points of emphasis in their treatment of reality, George Eliot is a rare case who gives special attention to ideas —moral, religious, philosophical— as essential part of the reality. What Byatt has to consider is the capacity to understand society or individuals and the possibility to find adequate language to express what she thinks Her problem has been tackled by the other writers of her time and there are various ways to integrate the self-conscious and skeptic ideas into fiction, but Byatt’s choice is different from that taken by many of her contemporaries, especially the postmodernists. Byatt avoids the formal illustration of postmodern thoughts but intends to instantiate how such ideas are thoughts by real people and how the skeptic and self-conscious ideas affect the way they live or perceive the world What she wants to convey is that “the experience of thinking very hard in abstract terms is just as immediate as the experience of standing next to a rosebush” and she likes “thinking very hard” (Tredell 1994: 70). In this matter she follows George Eliot but with a difference that is being discussed in this study by analysis of her representation of Victorians and the Contemporaries in her novel Possession (1990)
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