Van Gogh and Myth in A. S. Byatt’s Still Life

Abstract

ABSTRACT Van Gogh is a character that appears in a verse drama entitled The Yellow Chair, a story within a story, in A. S. Byatt’s Still Life, the second novel of the Frederica Potter Quartet. In this novel, both Van Gogh’s paintings and a major life event – his agon with the French artist Paul Gauguin in Arles – are represented on stage. This paper argues that Van Gogh’s self-mutilation is a mimesis of the various facets of the myth of the sun depicted in his numerous paintings (i.e. the life and death of vegetation in nature, the rising and setting of the sun in the sky, and the division of the white sunlight into both complementary and spectrum colors). The myths of fertility incorporated in Van Gogh’s narrative in the novel epitomize the main character Frederica Potter’s erotic experiences, who, as a Cambridge undergraduate, believes that the body is the ultimate source of all good in the world and that “marriage [is] the end of every good story.” 1