|
3. Analysis of depicting family relations in the Game by A.S.Byatt
Byatt has been both praised and criticized for her intellectual scope and her willingness to deal with complex ideas in her fiction. Reviewers often note Byatt's fascination with the creative process and the artist's craft. Critics have also called attention to her interest in painting as an artistic expression and her use of painterly language to create a visual picture. Merle Rubin stated, “A. S. Byatt is an artful writer, craftsmanlike in her approach and drawn to themes involving art and artists. An academic critic as well as a novelist, she has a painter's eye for form and color, a scholar's respect for significant detail.” Several reviewers credit Byatt for her scholarship, but some complain that her fiction gets bogged down under the weight of her erudition. However, many critics assert that the strength of her storytelling keeps her narratives compelling. Byatt's recreation of the Victorian novel of manners has also sparked discussions concerning the role of the postmodern novel and the relationship between history and contemporary fiction.
Once you’re aware of it it’s impossible to approach this book without assuming that it’s autobiographical, at least in part. Of course there’s a smattering of autobiography in most fiction but when Byatt’s sister read the book she was less than forgiving:
She may not have known what she had done until she had written it. Writers are like that. But it’s a mean-spirited book about sibling rivalry and she sent it to me with a note signed 'With love,’ saying 'I think I owe you an apology’. – ‘Margaret Drabble: “It’s sad, but our feud is beyond repair”’, The Telegraph, 13 July 2011
Since then, the only book of Byatt’s that Drabble has apparently read has been Possession; she thinks sent her a postcard telling her it was “a wonderful book”. That would be about 1990; The Game was written in 1967.
It’s interesting that in the novel itself Byatt writes: [Y]ou can both destroy and create reality with fiction. Fictions—fictions are lies, yes, but we don’t ever know the truth. We see the truth through the fictions—our own, other people’s…
So if we imagine that when we read The Game we’re getting at the truth behind the animosity that exists between Drabble and Byatt we’re clearly deluding ourselves. The characters have some similarities but there are enough differences too. I’m not sure that I can be as generous as Drabble when she writes that her sister “may not have known what she had done until she had written it” because central to the plot is Juliet’s writing a novel, A Sense of Glory which clearly leans heavily on her sister Cassandra as a subject. Byatt acknowledges: I think that no one has any necessary right to publish what they know – however good it may be for them to write it. Or even if what they have written is very good. That a piece of writing is good doesn’t override other considerations – moral considerations – when it comes to damaging others. That’s an absurd overvaluation of the printed word…That said, “a book was a book, and life was life”. The character of Emily Juliet admits in her novel is “a composite portrait, like any. And of course Cassandra and me – it’s a composite creature, in a way, a sort of binary fission” so it’s probably unwise to assume that Cassandra is Byatt and Juliet is Drabble and yet I found it hard not to.
A. S. Byatt married Ian Charles Rayner Byatt in 1959 and had a daughter, as well as a son who was killed in a car accident at the age of 11 so she has as much in common with Juliet (who’s married and has a teenage daughter) as Cassandra who’s an unmarried Oxford don and yet I couldn’t help but think of Cassandra as Byatt, perhaps unfairly since (ironically) it’s she who’s ‘attacked’ by her sister.
Hard to approach this novel without thinking about Cocteau’s Les Enfants Terribles and yet I can see anyone else making the connection: While nursing Paul it is revealed that the siblings enjoy a relationship characterised by a psychodrama known in the book as "The Game", which can only be played in their shared bedroom, elevated by the Game-play into "The Room". The game devised by Paul and Elisabeth often involves the siblings trying to annoy or irritate each other, by histrionic behaviour on the part of Elisabeth and by a taciturn refusal to be affected by Paul, where the winner is the one that leaves the contest with the last word, a sense of superiority and ideally having caused a display of angry frustration from the other. This game continues after Paul recovers and their mother has died. –
The Game played by Cassandra and Juliet is not that dissimilar. Theirs is an incredibly elaborate Brontësque fantasy world they had built for themselves beginning when they were aged seven and nine, governed by complicated rules of their own making. They continued to play this until their late teens but even when we first meet them as adults, having travelled home because their father is dying, they’re still willing to sit down and play together. What becomes clear as the book progresses is that the Game has moved from the board (it’s an oilskin actually) into the real world.
Games need to be played with a purpose. There needs to be something to win. That something proves to be a man called Simon. Cassandra writes: With J[uliet]’s television appearances I have a sense of a diminishing reflection. With his, on the other hand, I have the illusion of a world infinitely extended through dissolving glass, the Looking Glass. This must be untruth, and dangerous. Somewhere, in an unseen jungle, across an ocean and a continent, a real man, Simon, whom I love, is at this moment paddling through real water, or grubbing in real dirt, or losing real red blood from hands scraped, or cut, or sucked by flies. Here, now, I walk through unreal creepers, I study unreal dirt and water.
What I see on the screen is an image, but an image, not only of myself, but of a real man. And some of my thoughts about him are not fantasy, but knowledge. What he says, what he shows, I am occasionally, by careful attention, able to know and predict. I can accurately describe plants he must see that the screen does not show and I do not see. More than that, I know to a certain extent what he is afraid of – how well I know it I shall never tell – and what he thinks. Love is attention, though that is only a part of the truth. Between fantasy and reality are infinite degrees, and I bring myself, occasionally, to the illusion (or more) that we do share an experience or a thought. If, by denying my own solidity, I could see him as he is? Even so, the glass barrier is solid; screen, window or looking-glass. If it were not solid? No. Solidity is fact, is fact, it cannot be translated into pure threat.
Do'stlaringiz bilan baham: |
