Final thesis contents to hyperlink July 08

Possession critiques the scholars’ tendency to over-analyse. The professional reader is 
encouraged to read this novel as a ‘set text’ and engage with its historical literary 
references; however the reader is also meant to enjoy the process. As the “only novel 
written to be liked” (Byatt qtd. in Jeffers 136), Byatt created the novel with the 
intention of creating pleasure in her readers. In analysing a text of pleasure, Barthes 
realises that it his own individuality that he encounters (62), making it impossible to 
completely analyse what it is that makes a text enjoyable - it is experiential and 
personal. The pleasure of a text is unpredictable, a “friable pleasure, split by mood, 
habit, circumstance” (52). Possession appears to encourage its own analysis but 
finally resists it.
Stepping away from academia and theoretical analysis, Possession encourages reader 
and character to return to a more human world. The novel does not allow the scholars 
to remain distanced from life; rather it throws them into a world of scandal, passion 
and excitement and forces them to negotiate with these things, drawing them out of 
their secluded academic lives. Doing this, Byatt attempts to create a balance in an 
unbalanced world, where, despite postmodernism’s claim to playfulness, it does not 
create much joy in the lives of those who take its theories seriously. The discovery of 
the past enables the scholars to embrace the present and live a more fulfilled life.

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53 
4. POSSESSION’S HISTORY AS CHALLENGING POSTMODERNISM 
 
Possession is a fictional historical narrative. The poets’ history is discovered by the 
characters through textual evidence. However, Byatt is aware that this cannot offer the 
full picture of the past. Byatt’s work shows her commitment to truth and to the 
meaningfulness of history by using more than just textual evidence to tell the story of 
the past. Possession privileges readers with information unavailable to the novel’s 
characters through the device of the third person narrator. Through a discussion of the 
postscript and other moments when the omniscient narrator is used, this chapter 
considers how Possession challenges Lyotard’s definition of postmodernism as 
“incredulity toward metanarratives” (xxiv). It examines how Possession restores the 
value of the past by showing the profound pleasure that can be had from knowing the 
whole story – something that is possible only in fiction. Byatt accepts the postmodern 
idea that history is elusive, yet she still finds a way to capture the full story of the past, 
managing to negotiate her respect for tradition with a postmodern principle. She 
creates a text that is and is not postmodern.