Possession

by A.S. Byatt

The truth is—my dear Miss LaMotte—that we live in an old world—a tired world—a world that has gone on piling up speculation and observations until truths that might have been graspable in the bright Dayspring of human morning—by the young Plotinus or the ecstatic John on Patmos—are now obscured by palimpsest on palimpsest, by thick horny growths over that clear vision—as moulting serpents, before they burst forth with their new flexible-brilliant skins, are blinded by the crusts of their old one—or, we might say, as the lovely lines of faith that sprung up in the aspiring towers of the ancient ministers and abbeys are both worn away by time and grime, softly shrouded by the smutty accretions of our industrial cities, our wealth, our discoveries themselves, our Progress.

“You are very cross with Leonora.” “She’s very good. But I don’t want to see through her eyes. It isn’t a matter of her gender and my gender. I just don’t.” Maud considered. She said, “In every age, there must be truths people can’t fight—whether or not they want to, whether or not they will go on being truths in the future. We live in the truth of what Freud discovered. Whether or not we like it. However we’ve modified it. We aren’t really free to suppose—to imagine—he could possibly have been wrong about human nature. In particulars, surely—but not in the large plan—”

And is love then more Than the kick galvanic Or the thundering roar Of Ash volcanic Belched from some crater Of earth-fire within? Are we automata Or Angel-kin?

Might there not, he professionally asked himself, be an element of superstitious dread in any self-reflexive, inturned postmodernist mirror-game or plot-coil that recognises that it has got out of hand? That recognises that connections proliferate apparently at random, apparently in response to some ferocious ordering principle, which would, of course, being a good postmodernist principle, require the aleatory or the multivalent or the “free,” but structuring, but controlling, but driving, to some—to what?—end.

Coherence and closure are deep human desires that are presently unfashionable. But they are always both frightening and enchantingly desirable.