A.S. Byatt: how an obsession with works of art made the novelist become one

What is it about?

English novelist A. S. Byatt (1936-2023) is known for her complex, layered historical fictions, her sophisticated renditions of individual and collective memory, and for depicting the human condition as that existential experience which is determined by a drive to think, to create, to make art, and to be embodied within the matter that constitutes the world. While her writings are not often autobiographical, Byatt's own obsession with works of art and the pleasure of encountering them is crucial to the two texts examined in this chapter: her neo-Victorian and neo-Decadent novel, The Children's Book (2009), and Peacock and Vine, a joint biography of the two nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century artists, William Morris, and Mariano Fortuny. In this chapter, I argue that Byatt uses the strategies of ekphrasis, or the verbal rendition of a visual artwork, to reflect on how artworks are shaped by gazes and touch alike: while gazing at an artwork, or at an artist, can produce inequalities and tensions, touch can instead lead to collaboration and more liberating relationships between artist, artwork, text, and reader. Finally, in her photograph amidst the collection at the Fortuny Museum in Venice, Byatt closes the circle of the ekphrastic gaze. She becomes herself part of a work of art, and, through her defiant gaze towards the camera, she challenges viewers who may look at a museum piece as an inert object. Just like the matter of life, I argue that, by entering and by writing on the Fortuny collection, Byatt demonstrates how art objects are alive and have an agency of their own.

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Photo by Eric Prouzet on Unsplash

Photo by Eric Prouzet on Unsplash

Why is it important?

This chapter is important and innovative for three reasons: firstly, it analyses Byatt's last book, Peacock and Vine, in conversation with her neo-Victorian fiction, and her neo-Victorian fiction about visual artists in particular. It is also, to date, the first essay to analyse Peacock and Vine, and The Children's Book, through the lens of ekphrasis. Finally, it is part of a new and exciting collection of essays arguing for the subgenre of neo-Decadence as a category of neo-Victorian, all the while complicating the periodisation that the term neo-Victorian entails.

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