Possession

by A.S. Byatt

Think of this—that the writer wrote alone, and the reader read alone, and they were alone with each other.

There are personal readings, which snatch for personal meanings, I am full of love, or disgust, or fear, I scan for love, or disgust, or fear. There are—believe it—impersonal readings—where the mind’s eye sees the lines move onwards and the mind’s ear hears them sing and sing.

Personal and impersonal reading

Now and then there are readings 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.

Reading - goes to ones head

He saw too that Christabel was the Muse and Proserpina and that she was not, and this seemed to be so interesting and apt, once he had understood it, that he laughed aloud. Ash had started him on this quest and he had found the clue he had started with, and all was cast off, the letter, the letters, Vico, the apples, his list.

…that he laughed aloud

He had been taught that language was essentially inadequate, that it could never speak what was there, that it only spoke itself.

Essentially inadequate

What had happened to him was that the ways in which it could be said had become more interesting than the idea that it could not.

Overly scrumptious

Roland was not sure why he felt so happy. Was it the letters, was it Ash’s poem, was it the opening of his future, was it simply being alone, which was something he needed ferociously from time to time and lately had missed?

as he saw he had things to say which he could say about the way shapes came and made themselves.

He had time to feel the strangeness of before and after; an hour ago there had been no poems, and now they came like rain and were real.

The strangeness of before and after

Of time and peace remaining. We are driven By endings as by hunger. We must know

she ignored the currents of tension between her guests, the things not being said, the things substituted for what was not being said.

Beatrice naturally noticed a certain complicated silence surrounding Blackadder’s nod of recognition directed at Roland, but she failed altogether to read the omissions of information or accusation in the long dramatic embrace between Leonora and Maud.

“I felt possessed. I had to know.”

“The value is partly the value I set on it.”

It was all so unreal, and the sense of communal survival was so powerful that they sat stupidly good, smiling weakly, damp and chill.

You will think—if the shock of what I have had to tell you has left you any power to care or to think about my narrow world—that a romancer such as I (or a true dramatist, such as you) would not be able to keep such a secret for nigh on thirty years (think, Randolph, thirty years), without bringing about some peripeteia, some dénouement, some secret hinting or open scene of revelation.

“in calm of mind all passion spent”

“No, I’m not. That is, yes, I have been. You have your certainties. Literary theory. Feminism. A sort of social ease, it comes out with Euan, a world you belong in. I haven’t got anything. Or hadn’t. And I grew—attached to you. I know male pride is out of date and unimportant, but it mattered.”

Your certainties

to use an outdated phrase, entered and took possession of all her white coolness that grew warm against him,