“In certain moods we eat our lives away
In fast successive greed; we must have more
Although that more depletes our little stock
Of time and peace remaining. We are driven
By endings as by hunger…”

Possession deserves the numerous blurbs on its covers and in its front matter. Like Angels & Insects, two of Byatt’s novellas sandwiched between one cover, Possession pits relationships against the foibles and schemes designed to prevent or sever them (society being one such foible). R.H. Ash, a long-dead poet who seems based around the later Romantics, might note that government is one folly of man. I use “man” in its broad, Victorian sense. Yet its chief characters are hypermodern academics who would no doubt circle “man” in their students’ papers as an example of sexist language. They have their own potential love story, though as both would probably note, conventional narratives seldom play out in reality. Yet in their investigation they look vicariously for connections between the subjects of their own research.

In large part the academics are trying to overcome themselves—especially the barriers they erect to financial and emotional success This one-sentence description makes the novel sound dry, and yet it is lush with description and lyricism that never get in the way of a plot whose last hundred pages makes one turn them madly just to find out what happens, and in doing so it’s easy to miss the subtle beauty of the writing itself.

The story is superficially about academics, but it is not an academic novel; like Mating, which I’ll write about later, it uses academics as a focal point because of their highly developed analytical skill. The fact that some academics can be as conniving and cunning as mobsters or thieves helps, as does Byatt’s ability to keep the flow even during long epistolary poems. I wanted to know what happened between two dead poets almost as much as I wanted to know what would happen between two barely-alive academics—like whether they would come to life.

And—not to give it away—they do.

“That was the way you came to know people, by the stories they told and the manner of telling.”

Later:

“Harry’s story was appropriated by his son in the way that any story is remembered fully, then retold in a fashion that suits the teller.”

The Weather in Berlin

And so it is with all stories: writers become aware of the problems and powers of narrative. Shakespeare at his most self-reflexive in The Winter’s Tale, while Woody Allen’s latest movie, Scoop, revels in its own self-reference—or at least that is the only way I can make sense of a movie with nothing for a plot and a resolution so ridiculous that the butler might as well have done it.

I guess writers love stories about storytellers because those are stories about the writers themselves, and we understand ourselves in terms of stories. Irving wrote short stories bordering on novellas in Garp, and much pleasure from Lord of the Rings comes with the flashes of the ancient, legendary world that ended long before the Frodo receives the ring. Much of the knowledge is conveyed through song and poetry—stories within the story.

Are we reading their stories to learn about ourselves or the teller? Just seems to indicate the latter, or at least the latter to the extent it can be separated from the former.