A. S. Byatt’s Possession: A Romance as a Hi...

A. S. Byatt’s Possession: A Romance as a Historiographic Metafiction

Author Name : Aswathy G. Babu

ABSTRACT

A. S. Byatt is an intensely intellectual British novelist, who displays in all her works an interest in the repercussions of literature. The Booker- prize winning novel Possession: A Romance (1990) is the most varied and inclusive novel in her oeuvre. In this post-modern novel, two twentieth century scholars, Roland Michell and Maud Bailey underwent a vigorous investigation of the past and unraveled a well concealed relationship between two (fictional) Victorian poets Randolph Henry Ash and Christabel LaMotte. The discovery of this hitherto unknown romantic relationship between these two Victorian poets threw a new light on the much trammeled and precious academic world. This inevitably changed the modern literary world's interpretation of the poems of Ash and Christabel as well as altered their image. The two scholars, thus, reinterpreted history by reconstructing the past of the two poets and retold a reality that had failed to get recorded, by their persistent quest which was a historiographic operation.

My Paper purports to elucidate that the past cannot be completely conquered and history is not always a truthful record of the past by a historiographic reading of Possession: A Romance, a reconstruction of history and culture. There is no doubt that the real past did exist, but the past that is accessible to us is only a narrative construct made of empirical facts, transmitted in a textualized form. My attempt is to substantiate that history is a mere human construct and that there is a lack of authenticity in written documents and historical records.

Keywords: Culture, History, Historiographic, Metafiction, Reconstruction.