The mystery begins when impoverished scholar Roland Michell discovers drafts of a letter written by Randolph Henry Ash to a woman he met at a literary gathering. Through research, Michell determines the woman is Christabel LaMotte and teams up with LaMotte scholar Maud Bailey to find out more. They discover a cache of love letters between the two and trace the poets on two journeys, all the while attempting to keep friends and fellow scholars at bay so that they have the time needed to solve the mystery. However, the incentives of prestige among the scholarly communities focused on these two poets put other scholars on Michell and Bailey's trail. Eventually, all the major players end up at Ash's grave, disinterring a box with the final clue, a sealed letter from LaMotte to Ash. Solving the mystery of Ash and LaMotte's relationship also impacts the lives of Michell and Bailey, who fall in love with one another.
Possession tells the story in chunks of narrative depicting Michell and Bailey's work and also of the other scholars hot on their trail. In addition, it includes many other texts: Ash's and LaMotte's poetry, the many letters, entries from diaries of various witnesses, excerpts from scholarly texts on Ash and LaMotte, and narration of a few of the experiences of the historical characters. This patchwork represents a postmodern narrative approach that allows the reader to work alongside the scholars in attempting to solve the mystery: the reader juxtaposes this text with this text with this text, just as scholars do, and meaning arises from those connections. I like that this depiction demonstrates scholarly work as an interesting puzzle, something students of literature might wish to try. In solving mysteries associated with literary meaning, scholars contribute meaningfully to a community whose store of knowledge is always growing and changing.
I also like that Possession depicts scholars Michell and Bailey as having life-changing interaction with their work and with one another. A really important aspect of reading is that it teaches us to reimagine ourselves. Each reading encounter is an opportunity to better understand who we are and what we need to do with our lives. Michell, for example, lives a sad existence in a run-down underground flat with a woman who supports him but doesn't understand or love him. As he escapes that environment through his research, he doesn't simply transfer his depressing dependency onto Bailey. Instead, he comes into his own as a scholar whose work is important and as an individual whose life has meaning and who can become a good partner to another person. It's this aspect of reading that I think today's emphasis on assessment completely misses: we don't read just so we can turn around and identify protagonists and antagonists. We read because those characters come to matter to us, to live beside us, and to act as an educational mirror in our life journeys.
Toward the end of Possession, there is an eloquent discussion of the pleasure of reading. This passage indicates that reading "remake[s . . .] the primary pleasures of eating, or drinking, or looking on, or sex" (510), and reading does this not through a reader reading alone but through a reader reading in the presence of the writer and also of all the other writers in all the other works to which this one text interconnects. As Byatt writes, "all these voices sang" (511). As with hearing beautiful music, there are some readings that create combinations of voices
that make the hairs on the neck, the non-existent pelt, stand on end and tremble, when every word burns and shines hard and clear and infinite and exact, like stones of fire, like points of stars in the dark--readings when the knowledge that we shall know the writing differently or better or satisfactorily, runs ahead of any capacity to say what we know, or how. In these readings, a sense that the text has appeared to be wholly new, never before seen, is followed, almost immediately, by the sense that it was always there, that we the readers, knew it was always there, and have always known it was as it was, though we have now for the first time recognised, become fully cognisant of, our knowledge. (512)In this moment when a reader lives fully and deeply through a text, she has a profound experience that the text tells her own truth and puts into words her own lived experience, even when that experience is not depicted at all in the text. This reading moment is one of transcendence. We might try to put it into words, and the best scholarship makes a valiant attempt, but because the relationship between reader and text is always growing and always accompanied by those many voices, the meaning cannot be pinned down. Yet, the reader is changed and will never return to life or even that same text in the same way.
In the end, Possession is a book about reading. It insists that reading is intellectually fun and profoundly important to humans as individuals and also as cultures.
Work Cited
Byatt, A. S. Possession. New York: Random House, 1990. Print.
Image Source
Possession Cover Image. amazon.com. n.d. Web. 20 Nov. 2012. <http://www.amazon.com/Possession-A-S-Byatt/dp/0679735909/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1353513908&sr=8-1&keywords=Possession>
