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INTRODUCTION
A. S Byatt’s ambivalent relationship to postmodernism is evident in two of her most
recent novels,
Possession and
The Biographer’s Tale. The
novels critically engage
with postmodernism’s strengths and weaknesses, as Byatt sees them.
This study
considers her ideas about postmodernism as portrayed in the novels and a selection of
her critical essays. It examines how her sceptical mindset has contributed to the
creation of
a complex and successful novel,
Possession. The study focuses on this
novel and uses
The Biographer’s Tale as an informative backdrop to the discussion.
The latter
builds on some similar themes, and although it was written after
Possession, provides a useful background to Byatt’s concerns about postmodernism.
Possession is foremost a love story and a detective story, set primarily in a university
environment. It is also one of Byatt’s most successful works.
It won her the
prestigious Booker prize in 1990 and has been made into a film, but it is also studied
in an academic environment. Perhaps one of the secrets of its popularity is that it finds
a balance between Byatt’s characteristic erudition and more playful, popular modes of
fiction. Indeed, it is the only novel she has intentionally “written to be liked” (Byatt
quoted in Jeffers 136).
Possession’s main characters are the scholars, Roland Mitchell and Maud Bailey, who
are investigating a secret love affair between two nineteenth–century poets, Randolph
Ash and Christabel LaMotte
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. The love affair has remained undiscovered until Roland
chances on a copy of an unfinished letter written by Randolph in the London library,
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For the sake of clarity, this thesis sometimes refers to these characters as “the scholars” and “the
poets”.
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which sets him on an exciting journey of discovery. Roland and Maud are
postmodern, poststructuralist scholars and their theoretical
mindsets are continually
satirised throughout the novel.
Possession challenges postmodernism through a satire
of these characters who are afraid to embrace life. Ironically,
in the process of
discovering the secret love affair they become so involved in the story that they begin
to embrace what postmodernism undermines – they begin to invest personally in the
importance of history, they forget the principle that there is no such thing as an error-
free text, and they fall in love, even though they see love as a “suspect
ideological
construct” (
Possession 323). The metanarratives that they view, in theory, as flawed,
begin to hold meaning for them. Investigating the secret affair allows them to suspend
their disbelief. Similarly, although it acknowledges that our understanding of the past
is textual, the novel’s focus is on a rich past that has many gifts for the present. In
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