Sometimes the biggest challenge for a critic is getting to know a new writer. That's kind of a misstatement, in this case, however. For one thing, not only is the English novelist A.S. Byatt an established name in her own right, she's also one of those authors who often gets touted as a very Important Name. Entertain conjecture of a time when it was possible to speak of something known as an Ivory Tower. It is, or was (once upon a time) something like a catch-all term to describe the hallowed halls of academe. To tell you the truth, I don't know what that's like. I never got the chance to experience whatever this type of setting was supposed to be. However, everything I've either read or heard on the subject tells of a brief span of time (possibly from an inception dating to somewhere in or about the 1920s, all the way to a quiet and unremarked upon downfall at or near the mid-60s) when this academic establishment was meant to be a summation of all the best and brightest in terms of the Arts and Sciences. In the fields of literary study, this amounted to the creation of a kind of hierarchy of what was considered the "Best Kind" of literature, if you can believe it. I'm not sure that this was a mindset that ever took a real hold of the general audience, yet it was a criterion of a collection of critics and college professors such as Edmund Wilson, William Empson, and F.R. Leavis. If you don't know who I'm talking about, let that be history's verdict on guys like them.
In retrospect, it becomes easy to see just how misguided the whole idea of an Upper Echelon of the Written Word is, when you stop and think it over. There will always be too many stories for even a single lifetime (at least I hope that's true), and beyond a general ability to say that this narrative works while the other one doesn't. it's always going to be perhaps impossible to claim any one text as the Greatest Novel Ever Written! I think the best any of us will ever be able to do is to point to which stories are our favorites, and then see if we have it in us to defend our enthusiasms. As long as you're not hurting anyone while doing so, then go nuts, I say. Still, the historical record does show that there was a time when a lot forgotten critics and English Lit 101 instructors seemed to have concocted a shared mission to both define and limit whatever it was that constituted a real book. Looking back on all that now, the one defining feature that probably still stands out the most about the thought of guys like Wilson and Harold Bloom is that most of them saw fit to dismiss the Literature of the Fantastic as beneath consideration. This is something they took as a fundamental, axial type of mindset. It meant there was always going to be this disconnect between what Bloom thought Literature with a capital L was supposed to be, and the actual reading and movie going habits of the public at large. They were all working with a picture which, due to their snobbery, was always going to remain incomplete.
It meant that there was always going to be a very short list roster of Important Names that would ever be considered worthy of the Ivory Tower. Here is where you'd find the likes of John Cheever, John Updike, Eudora Welty, Williams Carlo Williams, and Henry James. The upshot of all this academic hoarding was that it now looks like this close guarding and proselytizing means that there were a lot of good literary talents that had their chances at fame squandered by a bunch of opinion makers who were more concerned with being the In-Crowd, rather than alerting readers to the merits of the artist. It's a categorical shirking of the critic's proper job, and perhaps that's the most telling verdict of the efforts of Bloom, Leavis, and the artistic outlook they once represented. The funny part is that they claimed to set their sights forever against the Popular Genres, while also allowing in a handful of scribblers who just so happened to give Horror, Fantasy, and Science Fiction their modern identities. Hence the Tower could admit the presence of Fantasists like Vladimir Nabokov, Jorge Luis Borges, John Milton, Dante, Homer, and or course, Shakespeare and Charles Dickens. The idea that any of these guys might have considered themselves popular authors writing to entertain the popular masses never seems to have occurred to Bloom, or a lot of the former chalk dusted gate keepers of the Tower who preceded him.
A.S. Byatt was one of the few women authors who were allowed to have a seat this once so vaunted table. Looking at the works that bear her name, it's kind of easy to see why they would be willing to let her past the gate (even if she was just a girl). Not that sexism ever had anything to do with it, heavens no. After all, didn't Jane Austen and the Bronte sisters have their own spot in the Tower (they'd helpfully point out, all while ignoring the emergence of new talents like Shirley Jackson, Flannery O'Connor, Angela Carter, and Toni Morrison). The Tower cares nothing for the gender of a writer, of course it doesn't. All that matters is that you write what we deem
our kind of story. I guess the subgenre of Slice of Life social dramas of the kind pioneered by the likes of Updike and Arthur Miller in the 40s and 60s was considered the "right kind" of literature for them. Let's just ignore the presence of a Gothic bodice ripper like
The Witches of Eastwick, or the haunted presentation of the Salem Witch Trials in
The Crucible. A bit of dystopian Fantasy such as
Toward the End of Time, meanwhile can always be written away as a one-off. Let's just bury these facts under a tailor-made identity that we've constructed for all of these ink-stained wretches, one that is meant to occlude their otherwise obvious liking for, and considerable skill in both the Popular and Dramatic forms of art and storytelling.
Looking back on her career now, it makes the most sense to claim that a combination of luck and timing was one Byatt's side. When she was allowed entrance to the Tower, her two biggest works at the time (Shadow of a Sun, and The Virgin in the Garden) could both be said to have fit the mold the gatekeepers were looking for. Both works just mentioned almost deserve to be described as a pair of roman a clef as more than anything else, and so it's it's not too difficult to see why the Ivy Covered Citadel might have thought her to be a worth addition to their trophy collection Library. As time went on, Byatt proved herself to be one of those literary types who also possessed a deft skill at handling the settings and characterizations from the worlds of Myth. This appears to have always been something of a latent ability with Byatt, though I think it's telling that she never brought this aspect of her skills as far out to the fore until sometime starting in the early 90s, when it was clear that the heydays of the Tower had begun their long recede into the current level of cultural obscurity that it continues to enjoy today. It was with novels like Possession, The Children's Book, and in particular short story collections like The Djinn and the Nightingale's Eye that the writer began to show the extent her true literary colors.
The curious thing about all this lies in the way she almost had to allow, or learn to grant herself permission to shrug off the demands of the Ivory Tower, and learn how the realm of Myth might be a safe haven for her own true voice. It's curious because there's the sense of the author learning how to work her way toward an understanding of the proper expression of the Fantastic that she was able to call herself comfortable with. It's this idea of struggling to know how to be at ease in the world of once upon a time that is the most striking and permanent feature of just about every word that Byatt wrote. It starts out as a muted background note in early novels like
The Game, until it becomes the over-arching theme in
Ragnarök which was her last published work. It's this notion of finding out if you can ever be at ease with the Fairy Tale that is the hallmark not just of Byatt's novels, but also of the semi short story that's placed under the microscope here today. This is the modern myth of
The Thing in the Forest.
