The purpose of this essay is to compare the interpretation of Thomas Hardy’s novels that I have made in my 2024 blogs with interpretations of more recent novels, namely those of A.S. Byatt. Byatt’s style reflects Victorian prose with a contemporary sense of individual characters’ psychological transcendence of story. The importance of character, and the contemporary interpretation of characters from past times (especially the emotional side of the Victorian era) renders the novel’s forward momentum more complex and more under the microscope than traditional formal views of structural writing.
For simplicity’s sake, I shall in this brief introduction to the Hardy/Byatt comparison examine Byatt’s early novel The Game. Byatt’s novel reflects the themes of individual in angst with society, and character involvement with both the intellectual and the emotional. I find these these themes have much in common with Milan Kundera’s exploration of The Art of the Novel (19 ). Kundera’s emphasis on the novel’s ability to convey multiple perspectives – a character’s need to confront an oppressive society coupled with his/her need to declare their own identity -- is echoed in Byatt’s multilayered narrative techniques. Lisa Steiby examines Kundera’s transformation of character determined by self versus society in “beyond Modernity” in Kundera and Modernity, especially Chapter 10, “The End of Modernity, the End of the Novel?” (207-226). Byatt frequently constructs her novels with shifting points of view, alternating between historical and contemporary perspectives, and between different characters’ inner lives. In The Game, the historical perspective is the created world of “the game” the sisters invented as children, a game that echoes themes from the Biblical Eden, themes or good and evil as well as lust and purity.
The Game concerns two sisters. Julia is a novelist who has married a robust figure of a fisherman named Thor. Incongruously, Julia is the deterministic one of the two, a cynical rationalist, while Thor exhibits total immersion in romantic emotionalism. In contrast to Julia is her sister Cassandra, enthralled with a scientist, Simon, whose examination of biology is totally rationalistic while Cassandra, who, as a science lover, should be also that impersonal, cannot escape the angst of emotion that she felt in her youth, largely due to the psychological games she played with her sister.
My posts of 2024 interpreted Thomas Hardy’s novels The Return of the Native and Jude the Obscure in terms postmodern ideas of reader approach theory, especially that reminiscent of Sontag’s “Against Interpretation” in which immediate feelings by the reader to the impact of the text become the important aspect of the reading experience. This reader’s impact confirms the “absence” of the author theory of Roland Barthes that influenced Sontag. Barthes writes, “There is supposed to be a mystique of the text. – On the contrary, the whole effort consists in materializing the pleasure of the text” (58). Thus, the author’s mystical purpose becomes secondary ot the reader’s immediate pleasure. Applying the sense of immediacy to the reading of classic deterministic novels such as Hardy’s makes the reader question the sense of fatalism that Hardy shows society has over the individual. For if the individual is the important thing about interpretation, then the individual and their role of self-determination, no matter how small and/or ineffective it may be, stand out as the important interpretation of the novel.
While Hardy, a 19th-century novelist and poet, is often associated with his tragic portrayals of rural life and the struggles of individuals against societal forces, A.S. Byatt, a contemporary novelist, engages with history, myth, and complex psychological portraits of characters. In The Game Byatt posits a man confronting a woman as a herpetologist with subliminal sexuality, a scientist specializing in snakes. The woman is one of two sisters who create the contrast in theme in The Game. The meeting between this first sister, Julia, and the herpetologist is virtual, her watching him on videotape. The meeting is nonetheless suggestive of an emotional Garden of Eden scenario wherein she is tempted by him as he holds his snake and bemoans the fact that the natural world does not cherish the snake but is repulsed by it. (13-15)
Byatt here
chooses to write on Chastity, the decision to refrain from physical passion – she
questions the ability of the individual to retain a purity of the spirit,
“uninvaded and complete”?
“We shall do better…to think of chastity as purity, a scrupulous purity, and to associate it with innocence, if we are to apprehend at all the moral force either of Lancelot’s sin or of Galahad’s virtue…,” and “We shall do better if we think of ‘that which the maiden would never have again’ as an original innocence.”(16)
Julia (on pages 13-15) is confronted
with symbols of sexuality that she posits from a scientific situation (sexual
only in a blatantly unemotional type of way) contrasted with another situation
of rhapsody about Chastity (p. 16). This confrontation of the sexual and the
chaste concerns much of Byatt’s writing about the human condition. The reading
of sexual situations into science and the miasmic meanderings about whether or
not to remain chaste in the emotional life provide a stark contrast in human
life in Byatt’s presentation of it.
But the other sister, Cassandra, comes forward in the narrative. The serpent plays a significant role in both sisters’ worldviews. Cassandra revels in the poetry of the serpent, ascribing to it many layers of symbol. Cassandra revels in the words of a professor as he describes the snake: “They are worshipped in association with running water and with lightning. As a symbol—for the life, the life that drives us” (22). Also, “The people here tell me that during the night the anaconda changes into a dark boat with white sails, and skims over the swamp….I don’t know whether the wings and sails turn the creature into a ship of death, or a more ambiguous symbol of some kind of release from the earth” (22).
In The Game, the reader views the Eden
symbolism that obsesses the sisters, making them create complex relationships
with their romantic and scientific partners. Society denies the sisters the
openness in which to pursue this symbolism, so they do so in secret in the
guise of a created “game.” Despite their different historical contexts, both Hardy
and Byatt explore themes of fate, the tension between individual desire and
societal constraints, and the complexities of human relationships.
__________
References
Barthe, Roland. The Pleasure of
the Text. Richard Miller trans., Farrar, Straus, & Giroux., 1975.
Byatt, A.S. The Game. Random
House, 1967.
Kundera, Milan. The Art of the Novel. [1986] trans. by
Linda Asher [1988], Harper, 2000.
Sontag, Susan. “Against
Interpretation.” The Susan Sontag Reader edited
by Elizabeth Hardwick, New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1984, pp. 95-104.
Steiby, Lisa. Kundera and Modernity.
Purdue UP. ebook Academic Collection (EBSOhost), Comparative Cultural
Studies, 2013. Accessed Feb. 2025.
Nicholas Harris
Blog. March
1, 2025.
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