Possession

by A. S. Byatt

  He disposed himself for sleep. The sheets were white and felt slightly starched; he imagined that they smelled of fresh air and even the sea-salt. He moved down into their clean whiteness, scissoring his legs like a swimmer, abandoning himself to them, floating free. His unaccustomed muscles relaxed. He slept.

  On the other side of the plaster-and-lath partition Maud closed The Great Ventriloquist with a snap. Like many biographies, she judged, this was as much about its author as its subject, and she did not find Mortimer Cropper’s company pleasant. By extension, she found it hard to like Randolph Henry Ash, in Cropper’s version. Part of her was still dismayed that Christabel LaMotte should have given in to whatever urgings or promptings Ash may have used. She preferred her own original vision of proud and particular independence, as Christabel, in the letters, had given some reason to think she did herself. She had not yet made a serious study of Ash’s poems, with which she was reluctant to engage. Still, Cropper’s account of the Yorkshire trip had been thorough:

  On a bright June morning in 1859 the Filey bathing-women might have noticed a solitary figure striding firmly along the lone and level sands towards the Brigg, armed with the impedimenta of his new hobby: landing-net, flat basket, geologist’s hammer, cold chisel, oyster-knife, paper-knife, chemists’ phials and squat bottles and various mean-looking lengths of wire for stabbing and probing. He had even designed his own specimen box, made to be water-tight even in the post, an elegant lacquered metal case containing a close-fitting glass inner vessel, in which tiny creatures might be hermetically sealed in their own atmosphere. He carried also to be sure the sturdy ash-plant from which he was hardly to be parted, and which was, as I have already indicated, a part of his personal mythology, a solid metaphoric extension of his Self. (It is a matter of great regret to me that I have never been able to procure an authenticated examplar of this Wotanstave for the Stant Collection.) He had been observed on earlier forays, stirring rock-pools at twilight with this staff, much in the manner of the Leech-gatherer, to observe the phosphorescence caused by those minute creatures, the Noctilucae, or Naked-Eye Medusas.

  If, like many of his kind, pursuing a compulsive migration to the water’s edge, he appeared more than a little ridiculous, a kind of gimcrack White Knight of the seashore, with his boots strung around his neck from their knotted laces, let us remember also, that like others of his kind, he was not harmless in his fashionable enthusiasm. The critic Edmund Gosse, that great pioneer of the modern art of biography and autobiography, was the son of the tragically misguided naturalist, Philip Gosse, whose Manual of Marine Zoology was a sine qua non on such collecting expeditions. And Edmund Gosse believed he had observed during his lifetime a rape of an innocent Paradise, a slaughter amounting to genocide. He tells us:

  The ring of living beauty drawn about our shores was a very thin and fragile one. It had existed all those centuries solely in consequence of the indifference, the blissful ignorance of man. These rock-basins, fringed by corallines, filled with still water almost as pellucid as the upper air itself, thronged with beautiful sensitive forms of life—they exist no longer, they are all profaned, and emptied, and vulgarized. An army of “collectors” has passed over them, and ravaged every corner of them. The fairy paradise has been violated, the exquisite product of centuries of natural selection has been crushed under the rough paw of well-meaning idle-minded curiosity.

  Even so, not exempt from the blunderings of common men, the poet in search as he put it of “the origins of life and the nature of generation” was unwittingly, with his crashing boots covered with liquid india-rubber, as much as with his scalpel and killing-jar, dealing death to the creatures he found so beautiful, to the seashore whose pristine beauty he helped to wreck.

  During his stay in the blustery North, then, Randolph spent his mornings collecting specimens which his indulgent landlady housed in various pie-dishes and “other china receptacles” around his sitting-room. He wrote his wife that it was just as well she could not see the artificial rockpools amongst which he took his meals and in the afternoons worked with his microscope, for her orderly mind would never have tolerated his “pregnant chaos.” He made a particular study of the sea anemone—which is abundant in various forms on that coast—thereby, as he himself acknowledged, doing no more than subscribe to a general mania which had overtaken the British, who were keeping the tiny creatures in various glass tanks and aquaria in thousands of respectable drawing-rooms around the land, their murky colours vying with the dusty colours of stuffed birds or pinned insects under glass domes.

  Sages and spinster schoolmistresses, frock-coated clergymen and earnest workingmen at that time, all were murdering to dissect, parting and slicing, scraping and piercing tough and delicate tissues in an attempt by all possible means to get at the elusive stuff of Life itself. Anti-vivisection propaganda was widespread and vehement, and Randolph was aware of it, as he was also aware of the charges of cruelty that might be levelled at his enthusiastic operations with scalpel and microscope. He had the squeamishness and the resolution of his poet-nature; he did various precise experiments to prove that writhings which might be thought to be responses to pain in various primitive organisms in fact took place after death—long after his own dissection of the creature’s heart and digestive system. He concluded that primitive organisms felt nothing we would call pain, and that hissing and shrinking were mere automatic responses. He might have continued had he not come to this conclusion, as he was willing to concede that knowledge and science laid “austere claims” on men.

  He made a particular study of the reproductive system of his chosen life-forms. His interest in these matters dated back some time—the author of Swammerdam was well aware of the significance of the discovery of the ova of both human and insect worlds. He was much influenced by the work of the great anatomist Richard Owen on Parthenogenesis, or the reproduction of creatures by cell fission rather than by sexual congress. He conducted rigorous experiments himself on various hydras and plumed worms which could be got to bud new heads and segments all from the same tail, in a process known as gemmation. He was greatly interested in the way in which the lovely Medusa or transparent jellyfish were apparently unfertilised buds of certain Polyps. He busily sliced off the tentacles of hydra and lacerated polyps into fragments, each of which became a new creature. This phenomenon fascinated him because it seemed to him to indicate a continuity and interdependence of all life, which might perhaps assist in modifying or doing away with the notion of individual death, and thus deal with that great fear to which, as the certain promise of Heaven trembled and faded, he and his contemporaries were all hideously subject.

  His friend Michelet was at this time working on La Mer, which appeared in 1860. In it the historian also tried to find in the sea the possibility of an eternal life which would overcome death. He describes his experiences in showing to a great chemist and subsequently to a great physiologist a beaker of what he called “the mucus of the sea … this whitish, viscous element.” The chemist replied that it was nothing other than life itself. The physiologist described a whole microcosmic drama:

  We know no more about the constitution of water than we do about that of blood. What is most easily discerned, in the case of the seawater mucus, is that it is simultaneously an end and a beginning. Is it a product of the innumerable residues of death, who would yield them to life? That is without doubt a law; but in fact, in this marine world, of rapid absorption, most beings are absorbed live; they do not drag out a state of death, as occurs on the earth, where destructions are slower.

  But life, without arriving at its supreme dissolution, moults or sheds, ceaselessly, exudes from itself all which is superfluous to it. In the case of us, terrestrial animals, the epidermis is shed incessantly. These moults which could be called a daily and partial death, fill the world of the seas with gelatinous richness from which newborn life profits momently. It finds, in suspension, the oily superabundance of this common exudation, the still animated
particules, the still living liquids, which have no time to die. All this does not fall back into an inorganic state but rapidly enters new organisms. This is the most likely of all the hypotheses; if we abandon that, we find ourselves in extreme difficulties.

  It can be understood why Ash wrote to this man at this time that he “saw the inner meaning of Plato’s teaching that the world was one huge animal.”

  And what might a stringent modern psychoanalytic criticism make of all this feverish activity? To what needs in the individual psyche did this frenzy of dissection and “generative” observation correspond?

  It is my belief that at this point in time Randolph had reached what we crudely call a “mid-life crisis,” as had his century. He, the great psychologist, the great poetic student of individual lives and identities, saw that before him was nothing but decline and decay, that his individual being would not be extended by progeny, that men burst like bubbles. He turned away, like many, from individual sympathies with dying or dead men to universal sympathies with Life, Nature and the Universe. It was a kind of Romanticism reborn—gemmated, so to speak, from the old stock of Romanticism—but intertwined with the new mechanistic analysis and the new optimism not about the individual soul, but about the eternal divine harmony of the universe. Like Tennyson, Ash saw that Nature was red in tooth and claw. He responded by taking an interest in the life-continuing functions of the digestive functions of all forms, from the amoeba to the whale.

  Maud decided she intuited something terrible about Cropper’s imagination from all this. He had a peculiarly vicious version of reverse hagiography: the desire to cut his subject down to size. She indulged herself in a pleasant thought about the general ambiguity of the word “subject” in this connection. Was Ash subject to Cropper’s research methods and laws of thought? Whose subjectivity was being studied? Who was the subject of the sentences of the text, and how did Cropper and Ash fit into Lacan’s perception that the grammatical subject of a statement differs from the subject, the “I,” who is the object discussed by that statement? Were these thoughts original, Maud wondered, and decided almost necessarily not, all the possible thoughts about literary subjectivity had recently and strenuously been explored.

  Elsewhere in his chapter, almost inevitably, Cropper had quoted Moby Dick.

  Still deeper the meaning of that story of Narcissus, who because he could not grasp the tormenting, mild image he saw in the fountain, plunged into it and was drowned. But that same image we ourselves see in all rivers and oceans. It is the image of the ungraspable phantom of life; and this is the key to it all.

  Narcissism, the unstable self, the fractured ego, Maud thought, who am I? A matrix for a susurration of texts and codes? It was both a pleasant and an unpleasant idea, this requirement that she think of herself as intermittent and partial. There was the question of the awkward body. The skin, the breath, the eyes, the hair, their history, which did seem to exist.

  She stood by the uncurtained window and brushed her hair, looking up at the moon, which was full, and hearing a few faraway airy rushings off the North Sea.

  Then she got into bed, and, with the same scissoring movement as Roland next door, swam down under the white sheets.

  Semiotics nearly spoiled their first day. They drove out to Flamborough, in the little green car, following their certain predecessor and guide, Mortimer Cropper in his black Mercedes, his predecessor, Randolph Ash, and the hypothetical ghost, Christabel LaMotte. They walked out, in these footsteps, to Filey Brigg, not sure any more what they were looking for, feeling it impermissible simply to enjoy themselves. They paced well together, though they didn’t notice that; both were energetic striders.

  Cropper had written:

  Randolph spent long hours poring over rockpools, deep and shallow, on the north side of the Brigg. He could be seen stirring the phosphorescent matter in them with his ashplant, and diligently collecting it in buckets, taking it home to study such microscopic animalcules as Noctilucae and Naked-eye Medusae “which are indistinguishable to the naked eye from foam bubbles” but on inspection turned out to be “globular masses of animated jelly with mobile tails.” Here too, he collected his sea-anemones (Actiniae) and bathed in the Emperor’s Bath—a great, greenish rounded hollow in which a legendary Roman Emperor disported himself. Randolph’s historical imagination, ever active, must have taken pleasure in this direct connection with the distant past of the region.

  Roland found a sea-anemone, the colour of a dark blood-blister, tucked under a pitted ledge above a layer of glistering gritty sand, pink and gold and bluish and black. It looked simple and ancient, and very new and shining. It was flourishing a vigorous crown of agitating and purposeful feelers, sifting and stirring the water. Its colour was like cornelian, like certain dark and ruddy ambers. Its stem or base or foot held the rock and stood sturdy.

  Maud sat on a ledge above Roland’s pool, her long legs tucked under her, The Great Ventriloquist open on her knee. She cited Cropper citing Ash:

  “Imagine a glove expanded into a perfect cylinder by air, the thumb being removed and the fingers encircling, in two or three rows, the summit of the cylinder, while at the base the glove is closed by a flat surface of leather. If now on that disc which lies within the circle of fingers we press down the centre, and so force the elastic leather to fold inwards, and form a sort of sac suspended in a cylinder, we have by this means made a mouth and stomach.…”

  “A curious comparison,” said Roland.

  “Gloves in LaMotte are always to do with secrecy and decorum. Covering things up. Also with Blanche Glover, of course.”

  “Ash wrote a poem called The Glove. About a mediaeval Lady who gave one to a knight to wear as a favour. It was ‘milky-white with seed-pearls.’ ”

  “Cropper says here that Ash supposed wrongly that the ovaries of the Actinia were in the fingers of the glove.…”

  “I couldn’t understand, as a little boy, where the knight wore the glove. Still can’t, as a matter of fact.”

  “Cropper goes on about how Ash meditated on his own name. That’s interesting. Christabel certainly meditated on Glover. It produced some fine and disturbing poems.”

  “Ash wrote a passage in Ragnarök about the time when the god Thor hid in a huge cave which turned out to be the little finger of a giant’s glove. That was the giant who tricked him into trying to swallow the sea.”

  “Or there’s Henry James on Balzac, saying he wriggled his way into the constituted consciousness like fingers into a glove.”

  “That’s a phallic image.”

  “Of course. So are all the others, in one way or another, I suppose. Not Blanche Glover, exactly.”

  “The Actinia’s withdrawing. It doesn’t like me poking it.”

  The Actinia presented the appearance of a rubbery navel, out of which protruded two or three fleshy whiskers, in the process of being tucked away. Then it was there, a blood-dark, fleshy mound, surrounding a pinched hole.

  “I read Leonora Stern’s essay ‘Venus Mount and Barren Heath.’ ”

  Maud hunted for an adjective to describe this work, rejected “penetrating” and settled on “very profound.”

  “Of course it’s profound. But. It worried me.”

  “It was meant to.”

  “No, not for that reason, not because I’m male. Because.

  “Do you never have the sense that our metaphors eat up our world? I mean of course everything connects and connects—all the time—and I suppose one studies—I study—literature because all these connections seem both endlessly exciting and then in some sense dangerously powerful—as though we held a clue to the true nature of things? I mean, all those gloves, a minute ago, we were playing a professional game of hooks and eyes—mediaeval gloves, giants’ gloves, Blanche Glover, Balzac’s gloves, the sea-anemone’s ovaries—and it all reduced like boiling jam to—human sexuality. Just as Leonora Stern makes the whole earth read as the female body—and language—all language. And all vegetation in pu
bic hair.”

  Maud laughed, drily. Roland said, “And then, really, what is it, what is this arcane power we have, when we see that everything is human sexuality? It’s really powerlessness.”

  “Impotence,” said Maud, leaning over, interested.

  “I was avoiding that word, because that precisely isn’t the point. We are so knowing. And all we’ve found out, is primitive sympathetic magic. Infantile polymorphous perversity. Everything relates to us and so we’re imprisoned in ourselves—we can’t see things. And we paint everything with this metaphor—”

  “You are very cross with Leonora.”

  “She’s very good. But I don’t want to see through her eyes. It isn’t a matter of her gender and my gender. I just don’t.”

  Maud considered. She said, “In every age, there must be truths people can’t fight—whether or not they want to, whether or not they will go on being truths in the future. We live in the truth of what Freud discovered. Whether or not we like it. However we’ve modified it. We aren’t really free to suppose—to imagine—he could possibly have been wrong about human nature. In particulars, surely—but not in the large plan—”

  Roland wanted to ask: Do you like that? He thought he had to suppose she did: her work was psychoanalytic, after all, this work on liminality and marginal beings. He said instead, “It makes an interesting effort of imagination to think how they saw the world. What Ash saw when he stood on perhaps this ledge. He was interested in the anemone. In the origin of life. Also in the reason we were here.”

  “They valued themselves. Once, they knew God valued them. Then they began to think there was no God, only blind forces. So they valued themselves, they loved themselves and attended to their natures—”