Choices: On the Writing of Possession
A. S. Byatt
The beginning of Possession, and the first choice, was most unusually for me, the title. I thought of it in the British Library, watching that great Coleridge scholar, Kathleen Coburn, circumambulating the catalogue. I thought: she has given all her life to his thoughts, and then I thought: she has mediated his thoughts to me. And then I thought "Does he possess her, or does she possess him? There could be a novel called Possession about the relations between living and dead minds." This must have been in the late sixties. It was the time of the nouveau roman, of the novel as "text."
When I first recognise a thought as the germ of a novel or story, I form a shape, or file, in a corner of my mind, to which I add things that seem to belong to it, quotations, observations. At that stage this Gestalt is more like the plan for a painting than a novel. It has colour and texture, though I have to think very hard to call these to mind. The un-Gestalt of Possession was a grey cloudy web, ghostly and spidery, to do with the ghostliness and connectedness of the original idea. I think it was also to do with the nouveau roman, which I still visualise in that form. I imagined my text as a web of scholarly quotations and parodies through which the poems and writings of the dead should loom at the reader, to be surmised and guessed at.
The next decisive choices came in the 1980s when I was teaching Browning and George Eliot, and also lecturing on Henry James and his father, Henry James senior. I had had the idea that the word "possession" involved both the daemonic and the economic- Kathleen Coburn had pulled off a notorious coup when she bought the Coleridge notebooks for Toronto. Reading the Browning letters made me see that "possession" had a primary sexual connotation, too. I made a decision: there should be two couples, man and woman, one alive and one dead. The novel would concern the complex relations between these two pairs. My grey cobweb by palimpsest changed colour- it took on a lurid black shot with crimson and scarlet, colours of passion. I was teaching that great novel, The Bostonians, with its world of "witches, wizards, mediums, and spirit-rappers and roaring radicals" to a generation of students involved in the politics of gender, who disliked Henry James's tragi-comic treatment of lesbian passion. It occurred to me that in the world of nineteenth-century spiritualism and feminism, possession had both its meanings at once. So there was a need for the nineteenth-century woman to be a lesbian, or thought to be a lesbian, and the twentieth-century woman scholar to be a feminist. What George Eliot's letters added to this texture of texts to think about was the sense I always have that her real passionate self is splendidly absent from the letters kept by the people who kept them. Her love-letters, unlike those of the Brownings, were buried with her. It is the luck of an unusually devoted marriage between poets once separated that we have the Browning letters. There have been serious proposals to dig up George Eliot. There is a Gothic plot, I thought, of violence and skullduggery. The Gestalt got more lurid, purple, black, vermilion, with flying white forms.
I half-knew that the form of my novel should be a parody of every possible form, popular and "high culture", when I was asked to review Umberto Eco's Reflections on the Name of the Rose. I had already had the idea that Possession should be a kind of detective story, with the scholars as the detectives, when I read The Name of the Rose which combines mediaeval theology, Church history, gleefully bloodthirsty horrors, reflections on the form of the novel, with a hero who is an avatar or precursor of Sherlock Holmes. What entranced me about Eco's Reflections was his pleasure- "I wanted to murder a monk", and his technical reflections on the fact that detective stories and melodramas had to be written backwards. If you want to burn down a library quickly and irretrievably you must make it burnable when you invent its architecture. I had been thinking a lot about the pleasure principle in art. Art does not exist for politics, or for instruction- it exists primarily for pleasure, or it is nothing. It can do the other things if it gives pleasure, as Coleridge knew, and said. And the pleasure of fiction is narrative discovery, as it was easy to say about television serials and detective stories, but not, in those days, about serious novels.
So my novel should be a parody, not of Sherlock Holmes, but of the Margery Allingham detective stories I grew up on. It should learn from my childhood obsession, Georgette Heyer, to be a Romance, and it could learn, simultaneously from Hawthorne, Henry James's predecessor, that a historical Romance is not realist, and desires to "connect a bygone time with the very present that is flitting away from us." I added things- it should be an epistolary novel, which meant writing the letters the scholars should find, it should contain early narrative forms- Victorian women writers wrote fairy tales- and late ones- bits of biographies and critical "accounts" of what was going on.