“Are we automata / Or Angel-kin?” (Byatt, 1991, p.273) wonders R. H. Ash in A.S. Byatt’s masterpiece Possession. This central dilemma also recurs throughout the two intersecting novellas “Morpho Eugenia” and “The Conjugial Angel” contained in Angels and Insects. The novellas, an attempt to bring the Victorian Period and its conflicts back to life are a reflection on the relationship between art and science, and on the place of spirituality in an age when cold rationality was superimposing itself over religious faith. In them, Byatt explores “the contrast between subjective faith and objective science, enchanted stories and Enlightened reason” (Wheeler, 2014, p. 303). Byatt’s novellas are a celebration of liminality: the unifying title Angels and Insects perfectly conveys the paradoxes and parallels investigated in both novellas between the contrasting forces of the divine and the human, science and religion, reality and fiction, the immanent and the transcendent, the living and the dead. Despite being historical narratives that display the attempt to recover a feeling of the past as it was, the novellas also intriguingly reveal a preoccupation with the artfulness of art and indulge in imaginative freedom and poetic licenses. The two novellas fluctuate between a faithfulness to realist depictions of historical accuracy and a love for the tricks of imaginative fiction. Byatt has termed them “historical fantasies” (Byatt, 2001, p.102): they are (hi)stories and inspect the dynamics of narrative, poetry and metaphor. In Angels and Insects Byatt highlights the importance of the role of the imagination in real life and reflects on the way in which language lives in us.
“Morpho Eugenia” is a story about the role of metaphor and form and a celebration of the fertile gap of ambiguity that is inherently present in language. The novella does not provide the reader with answers but rather leaves him with unresolved questions that have the function to both complicate and enhance meaning. Not only is Byatt herself intensely interested in the ways in which names and language shape our world; her work also exhibits a peculiar ‘literariness’, and her characters in Angels and Insects are also writers and self-conscious storytellers. The choice of a third-person narration in “Morpho Eugenia” is particularly revealing: dense narratives intersect, nesting minds inside other minds in a constant play with meaning. The novella is a cornucopia of words brimming with interlocking, disparate texts: there are Harald Alabaster’s personal, poignant and ultimately unconcluded ruminations on spirituality in a post-Darwinian world, and his desperate attempts to undermine Darwin’s cold science through natural theology; there is The Swarming City, Matty and Adamson’s meticulous study on ant colonies; there are Adamson’s own agonized musings on science, nature, religion and humanity; and finally, there is Matty Crompton’s wonderful fable on insect life, “Things Are Not What They Seem”.
The text’s fertile ‘plurivolcity’ does not solely derive from its presentation of a complex intersection of narratives, but also in the paradoxes and parallels achieved in it through its abundance of metaphors and analogies, its numerous correspondences between insect life and human life at Bredley Hall. Metaphors are “obvious vehicles for ambiguity” (Hansson, 1999, p.455) that always carry multiple meanings. One example is the ‘women are butterflies’ analogy that is introduced at the very beginning of the novella, when Eugenia and her sisters are presented as “three pale-gold ivory creatures” (Byatt, 1995, p.4), and later carried on when women are described as “egg-laying machines, gross and glistening, endlessly licked, caressed, soothed and smoothed” (Byatt, 1995, p.102). This analogy has the function to problematize the reader’s conception of women in the Victorian Period; in relating women to butterflies, Byatt links them to an idea of ephemeral, spotless beauty; yet she also condemns their entrapment in a male-dominated society, “veritable prisoners of Love” (Byatt, 1995, p.102). In “Morpho Eugenia” a parallel between humans and insects is constantly drawn, as the reader is invited to take the insect world as a metaphor for human behavior; yet he is also warned not to take the comparison too seriously – after all, “men are not ants” (Byatt, 1995, p.100). Thus, metaphors, symbols and analogies in the novella have the function to equivocate meaning; in the novella, “absence of information starts the imagination working” (Byatt, 2001, p.102). Byatt has remarked that her intention when writing “Morpho Eugenia” was to “interweave the images of the two communities – ants and people – so as at once to reinforce the analogy and to do the opposite – to show the insects as Other, resisting our metaphorical impositions” (Byatt, 2001, p.116-117).
Intriguingly, the key that leads to an understanding of the novella and to its culmination and plot-twist is to be found in Matty Crompton’s ‘story in the story’, which is both a triumph of metaphorical thinking and a fable of reality, a perfect balance of “realist prose and poetic fantasy” (Wheeler, p.298). Matty’s story “Things Are Not What They Seem” instructs the reader on a way of thinking and perceiving the world which is definitely different from William Adamson’s purely rational thinking and Harald Alabaster’s blind faith. In the novella, Adamson is discouraged by the failed attempt to “[catalogue] Harald’s collection” (Byatt, 1995, p.73) of specimens, a collection which reveals itself to be too “random” and “intermitted” (Byatt, 1995, p.73), whereas Harald struggles to see the world as a harmonious unity in the hands of a caring God. Matty’s story shows that one cannot simply divide the world into precise categories nor believe in a unifying principle over which the universe’s order rests. Even though William Adamson in the novella sees himself as a rational being he is also “at once detached anthropologist and fairytale prince, trapped by invisible gates and silken bonds in an enchanted castle” (Byatt, 1995, p.21). The moral of Matty’s fable lies in the concept that meaning is an evolving process that is carried through living metaphors; it exemplifies Wendy Wheeler’s idea that “human language does not depend upon the prior identification of universals … but upon the evolution of sensate particulars via recognised patterns of similarity and difference” (Wheeler, p.301).
Matty’s fable instructs the reader not to fear the change that is embedded in the world and in language. Seth, the main protagonist in the fable learns that the constant change and dynamism present in nature and language are not the cause of chaos and destruction; he comes to the realization that nature is “Dame Kind” (Byatt, 1995, p.139). In the fable, he has a dream:
…he dreamed of kind hands touching his brow, and of hot, bloody breath in his ears, and he heard a voice crying, ‘Fear no more,’ and another saying, ‘I care for nothing, all must go,’ and he saw in his dream everything that was, like a great river hurrying to the lip of a huge fall, and going over, in one great rush of mingled matter, liquids and solids, blood and fur and feather and leaf and stone. [Byatt, 1995, p.138]
Seth’s dream reveals that the change that is present in the world of language and in nature is not a cause of death but of dynamism and transformation; in the fable, what “looks like decay and putrefaction … is the stuff of life and rebirth itself” (Byatt, 1995, p.133). The story exemplifies Byatt’s idea that words and things “are woven, like a sort of great net of flowers on the top of the surface of things” (Byatt quoted by Shuttleworth, 2001, p.164). A central theme in Matty’s story is the activity of name-making and name-giving that is embedded in language. In her story, she makes this interesting reflection: “names, you know, are a way of weaving the world together, by relating creatures to other creatures and a kind of metamorphosis, you might say, out of a metaphor which is a figure of speech for carrying one idea into another” (Byatt, 1995, p.131, emphasis in original). Her story encapsulates the idea that “language does not create a world; it weaves the world beyond itself, inventing connections, illuminating obscurities. Because the making of metaphors is the central act, language can never be a stable instrument; it is an active, mobile instability, and as it evokes the world, it changes worldly experience” (Levenson, 2001, p.173). The wondrous creatures that Seth meets in Mistress Mouffet’s garden “tell terrible lies about themselves” (Byatt, 1995, p.129); yet “their names are like delightful poems” (Byatt, 1995, p.131). The characters in the novella undergo a kind of metamorphosis when we actually realize that things really are not what they seem; Eugenia’s ‘alabaster purity’ is overturned by the shocking discovery of her poisonous relationship with her brother Edgar – revealing Bredley Hall for what it has always been, a monstrous ‘Breeding Hall’ plagued by incest – and Adamson finally sees Matty for what she is for the first time. The observation that language is a living thing confers to Adamson the power of change, through the epiphanic moment at the end of the novella when he has to work through the riddle of INSECT – INCEST, and when he realizes that Matty is the ‘sphinx’ that will allow him to be reborn from the ashes of his past life, like a ‘phoenix’.
Thus, “Morpho Eugenia” does not rely on a textual design but rather presents the reader with “an abundance, a plenitude”, “the lush production of many analogies” (Levenson, 2001, p.170); its power lies in its resistance to interpretation. In the novella, the appearance of things is turned upside down through plot-twists and metaphors that create fertile plots of ambiguity where the flowers of the imagination can grow and blossom. The novella is a reminder of the fact that a work of art, just like the butterfly, is subject to various levels of metamorphosis; in it, meaning is a living thing that undergoes constant change – art is not ‘still life’. Metaphors allow us to dwell in the golden palace of ambiguity, in a state of “consistent resistance to totalizing answers” (Hansson, 1999, p.452). As Wendy Wheeler has argued, “the inexactitudes and indeterminacies of aesthetic semiosis and metaphor are the contemplative and creative practices of all human expression, which underpin innovation” (Wheeler, 2013). Meanings grow and evolve; signification is an evolutionary process. Thus, in art as in life, “everything is single and double. Things are not what they seem” (Byatt, 1995, p.140). In “Morpho Eugenia”, the bareness of a world drawn of its spiritual meanings is taken over by the erupting creativity of an open mind that refuses to pin the world down to weightless and colorless bones of fact.
“The Conjugial Angel” is also a story about narrative, belief, and the relationship between language and our perception of the world. The term ‘conjugial’ in the title is taken from one of Emmanuel Swedenborg’s most controversial works, Conjugial Love; in this book the 18-th century mystic examines the nature of true love, the interaction between the spiritual and the material world and the idea of a possible communion between the two. Byatt’s novella also explores the point of intersection between the dimension of the dead and spirits and the physical world of objects. The two key characters in the novella are Lilias Papagay – a medium – and her protégé, Sophy Sheekhy. Even if only Sophy Sheekhy is gifted with real psychic abilities, the two figures are closely linked and their roles in the story are not, after all, much different from one another; Lilias Papagay does not possess visionary powers, yet she practices automatic writing and has a very vivid imagination. Byatt has commented on her novella by saying that “Mrs Papagay represents one reason for involvement in spiritualism – narrative curiosity. … She is interested in people, their stories and secrets, she will imagine, she is … the medium as artist” (Byatt, 2001, p.107, emphasis in original). The novella is a reflection on the motives for spirit-seeking; clearly, in “The Conjugial Angel” Byatt is not exactly interested in proving the existence of spirits and ghosts, but rather in the reasons why we want and need to believe in them. The novella is a reflection on spiritualism as “the religion of a materialist age” and on the importance of belief in life and in fiction. Byatt’s novella deals with the supernatural and is haunted by the presence of spirits and ghosts. Yet it is also a reflection on the hauntings of words and the role of poetic absences. The text is interspersed with pieces of automatic writing – spirits speaking through the media of language – and poems, which are defined in the story as the “ghosts of sensations” (Byatt, 1995, p.251). Hallam’s ghost speaks the same language of poets. The voices of the dead are embedded in texts, and texts are living things.
The novella reflects on a kind of knowledge that can be obtained through intuitive rather than rational thinking and on the nature of belief. The degree of belief that needs to be exercised in order to take part in a séance and feel the presence of the dead equals the same willing suspension of disbelief that lovers of fiction constantly indulge in. In “The Conjugial Angel” Lilias Papagay knows that the séances are “all a parlour game, at one level, a kind of communal story-telling, or charade” (Byatt, 1995, p.173), yet she also knows that that does not really matter. The whole novella relies on readers’ belief in fiction, on a logic of the heart; the function of Byatt’s story is to rid her readers of the temptation of rational thinking so that they can immerse themselves fully in the story-world. “Does Arthur Hallam really appear to [Sophy Sheekhy]? Are her visions real or imagined?” (Levenson, 2001, p.166) asks Michael Levenson in his critical piece on Byatt’s novella; “the labor of the story” he continues, “is to sap that distinction of its force” (Levenson, 2001, p.166). The novella does not rely on accuracy, but rather on the reader’s imaginative powers: “what finally matters is not that [the characters in the novella] were images of the real, but that they were” (Levenson, 2001, p.166, emphasis in original). Byatt’s argument in the novella is that readers of fiction see ghosts all the time, in that to believe on the visionary power of literature is to believe in ghosts. Readers and writers of fiction must be prepared to believe, like Harald Alabaster “[believes] without question in the Divine Birth on a cold night with the sky full of singing angels” (Byatt, 1995, p.59, emphasis in original); according to Byatt, reading is “the training of vision” (Levenson, 2001) and teaches us how to “feel [one’s] way through an argument” (Byatt, 1995, p.263, emphasis in original).
Thus, the characters in Byatt’s “The Conjugial Angel” believe “in what they [need] to believe” (Byatt, 1995, p.250). The novella leaves the reader with the marvelous concept that “in stories … the cold and the sea give back what they have taken” (Byatt, 1995, p.290); a narrative can resurrect a drowned sailor. “Tennyson, we cannot live in Art!” (Byatt, 1995, p.269) is the reproach directed towards the poet at one point in the novella, and also, in part, towards the reader of the novella. Byatt surely tells the reader – through Tennyson’s voice – that “you [cannot] make a man into a poem” (Byatt, 1995, p.268), foolishly “singing away like the Nightingale” (Byatt, 1995, p.269). Yet she is also swift in adding “and yet, and yet, and yet, if there was one thing [Tennyson] knew, it was that his poem was beautiful and alive and true, like an angel” (Byatt, 1995, p.269, my emphasis). The unsaid words of the dead are alive within the language that lives in us, “all held together with threads of living language like strong cables of silk, or light” (Byatt, 1995, p.269). In the novella, Tennyson comments on In Memoriam by saying that “the world was a terrible lump of which his poem was a shining simulacrum” (Byatt, 1995, p.269). Our lives are narrative experiences; we must be able to tell ourselves a story that we can survive. Mrs Papagay does not desire to elope to a spiritual, transcendental dimension through her séances: “it was not really for the reassurance of immortality that she travelled to séances, that she wrote and rapped and bellowed, it was for now, it was for more life now, it was not for the Hereafter, which would be as it was, as it always had been… she wanted life” (Byatt, 1995, p.171, emphasis in original).
The message conveyed through the novella is that literature is the reader’s conjugial angel, the perfect union between the spiritual and the physical, reader and writer, cold concepts and living ideas, science and imagination. Byatt in the novella asks the question: “how can we accept the corrosions of science and still retain ideals of hope, visions of beauty?” (Levenson, 2001, p.168). Angels and Insects is thus an admonition against the bareness of rational thinking and advocates towards the idea that science and art are not two separate entities but closely interrelated. It “exposes the hollowness of the analogizing mind, the cozy notion of similitude that defends against vivid experience”(Levenson, 2001, p.169). In “The Conjugial Angel”, Byatt quotes Keats’s famous line “Oh for a life of sensations rather than of thoughts!; a line which encapsulates the core message conveyed by Angels and Insects. As Michael Levenson has put it, if we “[overcame] the weak temptations of analogic thinking … we could love a world unredeemed by concepts” (Levenson, 2001, p.167).
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Byatt, S. A. Angels and Insects. London: Vintage, 1995.
Byatt, S. A. Possession. London: Random House, 1991.
Byatt, S. A. “True Stories and the Facts of Fiction”, On Histories and Stories: Selected Essays. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2001.
Hansson, Heidi. “The Double Voice of Metaphor: A. S. Byatt's ‘Morpho Eugenia.’” Twentieth Century Literature, vol. 45, no. 4, 1999, pp. 452–466. Retrieved from Jstor. Online resource: www.jstor.org/stable/441947.
Levenson, Michael. “Angels and Insects: Theory, Analogy, Metamorphosis”, Essays on the Fiction of A.S. Byatt: Imagining the Real, pp.161-175, ed. A. Alfer & M. J. Noble. London: Greenwood Press, 2001.
Shuttleworth, Sally. “Writing Natural History: ‘Morpho Eugenia’”, Essays on the Fiction of A.S. Byatt: Imagining the Real, pp. 147-161, ed. A. Alfer & M. J. Noble. London: Greenwood Press, 2001.
Wheeler, Wendy. “’Tongues I’ll Hang on Every Tree’: Biosemiotics and the Book of Nature”, The Cambridge Companion to Literature and the Environment, pp. 121-135, ed. Louise Westling. Cambridge University Press, 2013. Online resource: https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/cambridge-companion-to-literature-and-the-environment/tongues-ill-hang-on-every-tree-biosemiotics-and-the-book-of-nature/1A4D5329A4E3F22940FF146550EB25F8/core-reader
Wheeler, Wendy. “Thought Without Concepts in Angels and Insects: A.S. Byatt as Crypto-Biosemiotician”, The Semiotics of Animal Representation, pp. 291-313, ed. Kadri Tüür & Morten Tønnessen. New York: Rodopi, 2014.
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