A.S. BYATT’S POSSESSION: READING WITH – AND AGAINST – THEORY

Résumé

This essay reads A. S. Byatt’s Possession: A Romance with and against theory, arguing that the novel models critical tact: use theory when it sharpens perception, resist it when singular form and voice demand listening rather than system (Byatt 1990). The epigraphic hinge – Robert Browning’s “Mr Sludge, ‘The Medium’” and Nathaniel Hawthorne’s definition of “Romance” as a latitude governed by “the truth of the human heart” – authorizes imaginative truth without abandoning rigor and turns principle into method (Hawthorne 1851). First, the polysemy of possession – haunting, property, erotic attachment – precedes any scheme and keeps the plot ethically charged around the archive: Who owns the dead, their letters, their silence? Adapting Jacques Derrida’s account of the archive as both domiciling and commanding, I read the scholars as custodians rather than conquerors and the ending as conversion of possession into care (Derrida 1996). Second, Byatt’s pivot from a “ghostly palimpsest” of theory to story-first design follows Umberto Eco’s counsel that a strong narrative can include anything, which the detective scaffolding proves: clues and chases catch what they’re made to catch while also displaying what escapes (Eco 1984). In this arrangement theory clarifies but does not command; narrative timing and focalization decide what matters when. Third, the book makes poems livelier than their makers by treating imitation as inquiry. In dialogue with Linda Hutcheon’s account of parody as repetition with critical distance, Byatt’s invented Victorian poems and letters perform criticism from within, testing biography and intention without losing the sensuous work of style (Hutcheon 1985; Byatt 1990). Finally, influence becomes hospitality: to be “already possessed” by Browning and Tennyson is to host prior voices and preserve their difference (Byatt 1990). Possession thus demonstrates narrative rigour as the best vehicle for ideas and converts the will to possess into practices of attention, responsibility, and care (Eco 1984; Derrida 1996).