The Victorian Narrator

[Melissa_W Moderator]

There are three sections of Possession - Chapter 15, Chapter 25 (interrupted by a chunk of Cropper's The Great Ventriloquist) and the Epilogue - where the narrator is not a first-person Victorian, but intead an omniscient third-person Victorian narrator. Byatt has mentioned she recieves

angry letters from time to time from all over the world, saying these passages are a mistake - that I have cleverly told the story of the past through documents, diaries, letters, poems, and am breaking my own convention imcompetently (p xv, Modern Library edition).

How do you think the inclusion of the third-person Victorian sequences bears upon the possession and pursuit of "truth" in the novel?

[CallMeLeo]

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pedsphleb wrote:
There are three sections of Possession - Chapter 15, Chapter 25 (interrupted by a chunk of Cropper's The Great Ventriloquist) and the Epilogue - where the narrator is not a first-person Victorian, but intead an omniscient third-person Victorian narrator. Byatt has mentioned she recieves

angry letters from time to time from all over the world, saying these passages are a mistake - that I have cleverly told the story of the past through documents, diaries, letters, poems, and am breaking my own convention imcompetently (p xv, Modern Library edition).

How do you think the inclusion of the third-person Victorian sequences bears upon the possession and pursuit of "truth" in the novel?

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These parts worked seemlessly for me. I was ready, actually delighted, to experience their lives first hand. Byatt gave privileged information that only an author can give a reader, but uncomfortably, she also put me in the position of being a voyeur peeping in on the intimate details most scholars craved for a biography -- Maud and Roland left Yorkshire without having proof other than textual that Ash and Christabel were there together, but I knew for sure they were really there and had consummated their relationship. Perhaps the reader would have been frustrated not knowing for sure at that point. It was bait to keep us hooked, and it fed the need for romance. It also worked to give me a glimpse of lives and intimacies and thoughts of the dead poets that in reality we could never know.

[Peppermill]

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pedsphleb wrote:. . . How do you think the inclusion of the third-person Victorian sequences bears upon the possession and pursuit of "truth" in the novel?

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Neil Labute makes a point about the ending of the movie -- the viewer (reader) is "possessed" of knowledge not available to the characters themselves, e.g., that Ash indeed did know that his daughter lived without having read the letter entombed with him.

That aspect of Possession would have been difficult, if not impossible, to attain without an omniscient narrator, i.e., by literary evidence alone, especially since Ash's diaries had been scrupulously devoid of clues.