With A.S. Byatt’s Possession (1990) I have been thinking about how the novel addresses issues of exclusion and erasure. The inclusion of the postscript at the end of the novel provides a plot twist for readers, but it’s also an excluded text, hidden from the main characters of the story. This exclusion leaves Roland, Maud, and company without an intriguing piece of context that relates to the intertwined lives of Ash and LaMotte. Is it fair to question if the postscript was erased too? If it does exist as a salvageable text in the “present-day” of Roland and Maud, and they did happen to find it, would it not change the way they interpreted LaMotte’s final letter to Ash. If the postscript is not available to the characters in Possession then that means that Ash never met his daughter according to everyone, except Byatt, the reader, Ash, and Maia. This narrative choice by Byatt strengthens two arguments: 1. that the narrator of Possession is untrustworthy and 2. that history can never be known in full. In class, we have discussed the idea of history existing in a liminal space (thanks to Dr. Jennings for the new word), and history as an unstable narrative throughout time, constantly shaped and reshaped as we learn more context. If Byatt is suggesting that history is in a constant state of shifting interpretations, then can the postmodern techniques she uses throughout the novel be ventriloquized by authors of color who are attempting to write through an African-American lens? Possession is a Neo-Victorian novel that holds many references to the Victorian era of the late 18th and 19th centuries. Byatt plays on readers’ knowledge of that past while then expanding on what was possible in said past. An example of this is how Byatt positions LaMotte amongst the gendered expectations of the 19th century (not to say that they no longer exist but they’re changing). LaMotte was living a rather independent life with another woman, while also writing poems that were more epic than society thought they should have been at the time, even in their obscurity. In the time of Dr. Maud Bailey though, LaMotte’s works have received their just due in the eyes of literary critics and scholars. This speaks to Maud’s discovery of a great woman poet from the 19th century. One could surmise then that there were other women writers in the same ilk as LaMotte even if they were buried under the ground of societal expectations and excluded from the “historical rendering of the Victorian era” (from Jenaya’s question in the Zoom chat, Week one). I believe wholeheartedly that there were African-Americans who were “well to do'' or successful that also went unnoticed throughout the sphere of U.S. history. I also believe that that history has been erased, undiscovered, and buried. African-Americans have endured the infamy of slavery, which can still be seen and felt in America to this day, but there is also a lack of depth to the story. When the past is said to be everything but freedom and promised civic liberties one could wonder what comes next if it is not the same thing. For me, the exclusion of African-American history is nearly as bad as knowing that my ancestors were taken as property against their will. This sentiment stems from a twenty-three-year-old graduate student who is blessed to live in relative comfort and outside of the poverty-stricken and neglected areas of so many others who look like me. The dichotomy presents a nauseating social dynamic in my everyday experience. Okay, it’s not really nauseating, that was the fiction writer rising out of me, and I don’t want to sound overdramatic, which is how I sounded just now. To bring this post back to Possession, I guess I’ll conclude by wondering whether or not, if I wrote a novel in a similar vein as Byatt, it would do more harm than good for the African-American community and its history at large. If the postmodernist ideal of history is correct (that it’s a (narrative) text), then what space is left for other marginalized groups? Would cynics of U.S. history read said work of fiction and believe that slavery was a hoax, or overblown, or that it never really happened? Would those same readers believe that racial inequality wasn’t a real thing because history showed that there were some “privileged” people of color? Is history liminal for everyone? *Image of Possession by A.S. Byatt was taken from Goodreads through Google images. I don't own the rights to the photo
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