A. S. Byatt
On Histories and Stories: Selected Essays
Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000. Pp. 196. $22.95

Reviewed by Jane Campbell

In the seven essays in this collection A. S. Byatt continues her lifelong meditation on the art of storytelling. Five of the chapters were originally delivered as lectures: the first three as the Richard Ellmann lectures at Emory University, the fourth as a paper in an Oxford symposium, and the fifth as the Finzi-Contini lecture at Yale. Two shorter pieces appeared in an anthology and in the New York Times Magazine respectively. Byatt's theoretical writing characteristically looks both outward and inward; the book will engage readers of British and European fiction during the past sixty years as well as admirers of Byatt's own novels and stories. "Formidable" has become the obligatory term to describe this author's accomplishments, and On Histories displays her learning at its most multilingual and comprehensive. It is a demanding read, but it will not daunt those who enjoy sharing "passions of the mind" (the title of Byatt's 1991 essays), discovering new ones, and reflecting on why fiction matters.

The Ellmann lectures are about historical fiction. The first, "Fathers," explores war novels by a range of writers from late modernists such as Henry Green and Elizabeth Bowen to contemporary writers such as Pat Barker and Martin Amis. Next, in "Forefathers," Byatt argues more theoretically for the relevance of history, the attractions of narration and linearity, as opposed to stream-of-consciousness, plotlessness, and other forms of experiment, and examines the treatment of time, eternity, and endless recurrence by John Fowles, Anthony Burgess, Julian Barnes, Penelope Fitzgerald, and others. The third in the series, "Ancestors," focuses on the consequences for fiction of the displacement of the biblical master narrative by Darwinian versions of history, including the current apocalyptic horror of environmental destruction.

The centerpiece of the volume, "True Stories and the Facts in Fiction," documents the process by which research was transformed into fiction in Angels and Insects. Before writing its two novellas, Morpho Eugenia and The Conjugial Angel, Byatt read, for the first, nineteenth-century travel narratives, the histories of ant colonies, and insect taxonomies; for the second, Swedenborg, studies of Victorian spiritualism, In Memoriam, and letters and papers of the Tennyson family. She recreates Emily Tennyson Jesse--the poet's sister, who was first engaged to Arthur Hallam--using a combination of factual accounts, recorded dialogue, and her own perception of Emily as "excluded" from the very story of which she was the presumed center. Byatt says that in this book, as in Possession, she hoped to rescue the Victorians from parody and mockery, and at the same time to follow Wallace Stevens's injunction that one must struggle to "find," rather than to "impose," meaning.

In the remaining three sections Byatt moves to consider the tale, especially the fairy tale. In "Old Tales, New Forms," she insists on the vital life of "the tale … as told, the story itself, not this or that ascribed meaning or interpretation" (129). Here, Italo Calvino, Roberto Calasso, and Cees Nooteboom are key figures. "Ice, Snow, Glass" is a personal exploration of images of distancing and enclosure in such stories as Snow White, The Snow Queen, and "The Lady of Shalott." Byatt recalls her sense, even as a child, that glass and ice are ambivalent symbols, "both chilling and life-giving, saving as well as threatening" (156). Those who have been intrigued by the presence of glass in Byatt's fiction, where it appears as a riddling image (to use a favorite critical term of hers), will be led back to her texts again. She ends by proposing the Thousand and One Nights as "The Greatest Story Ever Told," the story that "has everything a tale should have" (165). Scheherazade offers us not endings but endless beginnings; in a sense, she is the heroine of Byatt's whole collection of essays.

Sometimes openly, sometimes obliquely, Byatt sketches in these essays her own progression from a young novelist uncomfortable with the constraints of the social novel, developing her form of "self-conscious realism" in the first two volumes of her planned quartet, The Virgin in the Garden and Still Life, moving into historiographic metafiction in Possession and Angels and Insects, and, influenced by Karen Blixen, writing stories of "quickness and lightness" in her recent volumes of tales, The Djinn in the Nightingale's Eye and Elementals. Her critical methods and position are always evident. She puts the reader in touch with texts by quotation and summary (a welcome strategy to readers who may be familiar with Graham Swift, Hilary Mantel, and Peter Ackroyd, for example, but not with W. G. Sebald, A. L. Kennedy, or Tibor Fischer); she is sharply dismissive of what she identifies as the current practice of substituting theoretical arguments for close reading; she prefers character to ideology in fiction (even when the character, as in Barnes's A History of the World in 10 1/2 Chapters, is a woodworm). Less clear, I think, is the new paradigm of fiction that she proposes to provide, a map to replace those which highlight class, feminist, or postcolonial issues, or privilege radical formal experimentation. Her book is a record of voracious reading and astute thinking; illuminating connections among works are made; but I did not find a total argumentative structure even in the Emory lectures, nor did I wish for one. Some of the most enjoyable parts of the book are the spin-offs, when Byatt lets one thing lead to another. Energy and curiosity are key words and prized qualities for Byatt, and On Histories demonstrates again and again the riches that accrue when the two collide.

There are inevitable losses when lectures become books, and perhaps these should be mentioned. The inflections and pauses of Byatt's speech would better convey her humor, accommodate her asides, and soften the occasional effect of sententiousness in the written text. A bonus for the reader is the fulness of the index and notes; despite a few errors (G. M. Hopkins is indexed as Anthony, Jeanette Winterson's name is misspelled in two different ways), these will be indispensable to readers who have been stimulated by Byatt's arguments to enlarge their reading lists.