In Elementals by A.S.Byatt there is a surprising lack of magic for a collection that is so indebted to the fairy tale form. Byatt is interested in what is magical but not magic of the miraculous kind. She likes the simplicity of the tale and likes to subvert them similarly, but very differently, from Angela Carter by making them not quite de-mytholising feminist stories but meditations of how reality is perceived and reflected through art.
What A.S.Byatt writes is self-conscious realism. Though it is a contradiction it is this tension between the real and the aware that gives her writing a post-modern classification. Byatt doesn’t write fairy tales but uses the form as a device for exploring the possibilities of art and narrative. The illusion she employs is the post-modern characteristic of metafiction; stories with an awareness of there own artifice.
Her writings are trying to be non-realist representations, within narratives that strive for realism like the artworks that feature regularly in her fiction. Even before a story in Elementals there is a picture by favored artists Matisse, Haggar, Velazquez as well as anonymous makers of sketches and objects. The very fact that she places these slight pieces by unknown persons in with the great and famous says a lot of how she views art and of it’s importance and value, particularly in Crocodile Tears as I will show later.
Art in these stories is the illusion that clouds and distorts natural reality, like a Claude Glass. Or maybe it is reality that is the illusion and art helps dispel these shadows from the caves. Or possibly art does both; as Byatt’s contemporary John Fowles suggests: ‘“If you want to be true to life, start lying about the reality of it”’(Bradbury, The Modern British Novel 1878-2001). Art could be the illusion that revels reality by being both educational and personal and therefore spiritually beneficial.
At the beginning of Crocodile Tears there is an account of Patricia and her husband, Tony, having an argument over a painting of an English beach. Objectively Patricia states that it is ‘banal’ but her partner disagrees:
‘It’s just simple and it reminds you of things, of whole- of whole- oh, of all those long days of doing nothing on beaches, you know, the mixture of misery and being out in the air and sort of free- of being a child’.[1]
What is important about art for Tony is the personal connection that is made. This, for him, is where it gets its value. Art can be objectively good, but it is the subjective judgment that is ultimately of worth. This connection is also made more personal in Christ in the House of Mary & Martha where the character and the painting are the same. This is the glass nature of art and the self-reflexive nature of Byatt’s stories where art looks back on life in infinite mirrors.
For Byatt magic is the ability to see life from different angles and art is a good medium of illusion to supply it. Life is seen differently through art and therefore can replenish and provide contentment to life.
From this point of view it would make sense that the most content characters would be those who have made art as a part of their life; either by contemplation or creation.
The character of Patricia in ‘Crocodile Tears’ is content but only superficially so. She has options about art but art for her does not touch her at any deeper emotional level. When her husband unrepentantly dies Patricia runs away to the south of France. She meets the northern Scandinavian Nils who is also grieving. Nils tries to educate Patricia about artworks but she is entirely disinterested with art. Byatt has said that portraits are like death in their immovable, frozen nature.[2] For Patricia this has become literal because art for her is now linked with death, with something personal, and so in escaping grief she also has to shut out art. She does not want to think about the coldness of death or let it touch her and the heat of a foreign country becomes a metaphor for her comfort of indifference to life, death and art. The heat tries to be oppressive but slips of coolness enter in to chill her. Nils has also had a death but his outlook is different. He has not traveled to escape the cold but to let the cold be part of his life and his attempts at helping Patricia to come ‘out of the sun’ is not for any pompous reason of intellect but of kindness. Because Nils’ origins are from an unknown cold country, and his willing exposure to art, he is also linked to the death that Patricia tries to escape, as she does not want him as a friend, as a reminder. Through continued interactions he does become personal, as does art, as does death as the story ends with the two grieving strangers walking away from a grave.
‘Cold’ treats the titled element in a very different manner. This story, incidentally the only true fairy tale in the collection, shows the ice nature of art where coldness can be read as the intellectual introspection of artists or of ideas themselves. Separate and isolated from other people but in possession of a melancholy beauty. Byatt subtly suggests that being cold does not bring pure happiness or total tragedy but different sorts of joys and pains not experienced by other people. Her experience of love is very different from other people’s:
‘She had been so much loved, as a little child, and all that heaping of anxious love had simply made her feel ill and exhausted. There was more life in coldness. In solitude. Inside a crackling skin of protective ice that was also a sensuous delight.’[3]
Fimmarosa thrives on the chill of ideas but wilts on the warmth of the sentimental feeling of ‘anxious’ love. Though Fimmarosa believes that she is better off alone, and that she is ‘unlovable’, the King believes that she should be married. She starts getting peculiar gifts made from glass, gifts that do not impress her parents but intrigues her abstract mind and entices her preference for coolness. Glass is a lot like ice, but as Hugh warns her ‘Glass is not ice’ and any similarities is just an illusion. Glass is different to ice in the fact that the origins of glass is from flame. For Fimmarosa the thought of cold coming from heat makes her tremble. Heat in this story works not as an oppression of indifference but as an abundance of emotion, and death. The gift seduces the Princesses desire but also makes her anxious of the danger it might bring. The Prince, like Nils, is connected with death. She travels with the Prince who made her the gifts and lives with him in his hot land. Happy to be living with a man who makes her wonderful glass the Princess is also pained with having to live in such a hot country. She tries to get help from her old friend Hugh. However Hugh insightfully states the condition of the Princess’ pain and pleasure by saying that ‘extreme desires extreme’ and he does not desire extreme. Unable to survive the heat the Prince takes the Princess to a castle of glass in the middle of the desert. Although it is glass and not ice she lives happily ‘in a mixture of currents of air, first warm, then cool’.
James Woods has said the intelligence is Byatt’s biggest problem as a writer[4] and ‘Cold’ works well as an allegory of this problem. It is about the life of art and artists, of the painful marriage of intellect and emotion, of ideas and creation, and the need to have a balance and mediation between extremes them for contentment in life.
Even though the artist of ‘A Lamia in the Cevennes’ is offered the chance to marry a mythical creature he is more preoccupied with capturing the lamia as an artwork. ‘Everything is a mystery, serpents and water and light’, he highlights the fact that natural elements and colours of the weather can be just as mysterious as fabulous beasts if one only looks at them in a different view. This story is the clearest example of being contented with the mystery of ordinary things.
Lady Scoop of ‘Baglady’ is also a clear example of being unable to be satisfied with the mundane and consequently being the least content character in Elementals. It is not accidental that the unhappy events of that occur to Lady happen in a place devoid of art. She finds it difficult to orientate her life without the bearings that art gives to life. Jess in ‘Jael’ also inhabits a place devoid of art but tries to slip in the artful into the industrial happy in ‘making art and colour’.
Dolores in ‘Christ in the House of Mary and Martha’ is unhappy about ordinary work until her work is captured on canvas in an unique way to how see had always seen it. Allegorically it can be interpreted as a depiction of the upper and lower classes but it would be more accurate to say that this story is more about the nature of work than of the working class, as the painter says:
‘“The important lesson…is that the divide is not between the leisured and the workers, but those who are interested in the world and its multiplicity of forms and forces, and those who merely subsist.”’[5]
Each characters value and judgment of their own life is shown to be dependant with their relationship with art. Contentment doesn’t just come through reflecting on art but also in the making of art and work in general. In this sense those who narrow the gap between work and art are content to be satisfied with the mystery of ordinary things. This contentment is true of Byatt who has combined work and art in her own life saying in an interview:
“I think of writing simply in terms of pleasure. It's the most important thing in my life, making things.”[6]
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Bradbury, Malcolm, The Modern British Novel 1878-2001, (Great Britian: The Penguin Group, 1993)
Byatt, A.S., Elementals, 1st edn, (Great Britian: Vintage, 1999)
Fernades, Isabel, ‘Matisse and Women: Portraits by A. S. Byatt’, in Writing and Seeing: Essays on Word and Image, ed. by Lambert, Maria de Fátima (Amsterdam, Netherlands: Rodopi, 2006), pp. 201-10, 403
Leith, Sam, ‘Writing in Terms of Pleasure’, in The Guardian (2009),
Tiffin, Jessica, ‘Ice, Glass, Snow: Fairy Tale as Art and Metafiction in the Writings of A. S. Byatt’, Marvels & Tales: Journal of Fairy-Tale Studies, (20:1), 2006, 4, 47-66
http://aberoccupied.blogspot.com/2011/02/aber-is-occupied-again.html
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