The Tale of Melusine in A. S. Byatt’s Possession: Retelling Medieval Stories

Abstract

Possession: A Romance is a novel in which old stories echo. It is a tapestry of different times, genres and voices. Within the frame of a realist novel, Byatt invokes the narrative forms of myth and fairy tale to pare back individual consciousness and focus more upon story: ‘the archaic — and religious — power of tales in which individual consciousness is not the important thing’ (Byatt, 2000, 134). Byatt is more interested in ‘the Fate of consecutive events’ (131), in drawing ‘characterless persons’ (131) and interweaving stories within stories, in resisting the inference of identity from activity and allowing actions and events to stand as they are. For Byatt ‘to feel and analyse less, to tell more flatly’ is to tell ‘more mysteriously’ (131). What Byatt is describing here is very medieval. Medieval romances tend to be a serial representation of events, protagonists are more appropriately thought of as ‘figures’ rather than fully developed characters, and individual consciousness is not described, although it can sometimes be inferred from words and gesture. Actions and events dominate. Byatt invokes the medieval explicitly in Possession, celebrating particularly Victorian medievalism through the characters Randolph Henry Ash and Christabel LaMotte, and their poetry.

I began to think myself about storytelling, about the irrepressible life of old stories.

(Byatt, 2000, 124)