“Why bother, why make representations of anything at all?”. It’s a question asked by Debbie Dennison—an artist who has, through the constraints of family and financial need, become a magazine editor—in the short story “Art Work”, one of a trio in AS Byatt’s collection The Matisse Stories from 1993. Debbie is not talking about her own efforts at representation (the “slow, careful work” of “unmade wood-engravings”), but those of her husband, Robin.
Since they met at art school, Robin has dedicated himself to his art with an “austere separateness”. He paints what he sees: “metal surfaces, wooden surfaces, plaster surfaces”; he is a “neo-realist before neo-realism”. His work, Debbie knows, is “a serious attempt at a serious and terrible problem, an attempt to answer the question every artist must ask him or herself”.
In this story we find one moment—one of many across her oeuvre, from her Booker prize-winning Possession to her criticism on everyone from Wordsworth to William Morris—in which Byatt herself ponders this same “serious and terrible problem”: why does anyone try to paint? To write? Why do we want to represent one thing, life, in the form of another? For Debbie, the question is almost all-consuming. Why does she hate Robin for stopping her from creating her own art? Why does she love him for his dedication to his own? Why are they both hurt—betrayed, even—when they discover that their cleaner, Mrs Brown, has long been making her own “squashy sculptures” with bits of fabric she has taken from them?
Byatt, who died aged 87 last week, has been called many things: a “realist outlier” in a sea of poststructuralism; a purveyor of ethical, moral fiction, like her mentor and friend Iris Murdoch; a writer of fiction from a decidedly academic standpoint, as if her imagination was simply squeezed through the cracks of her theory and research.
In Byatt’s world, her characters are often writers or artists themselves: striving to represent within a world of representation. Her first novel, Shadow of a Sun from 1964, was about a young girl who is expelled from boarding school and has to return to living with her novelist father. It was followed in 1967 by The Game—about two sisters, an Oxford don and a novelist, who are dragged back into a childhood fantasy world—before she took a break from writing fiction: in 1972, her 11-year-old son died in a car accident.
It wasn’t until 1990 and the publication of her novel Possession—about two academics struggling to uncover the truth about the relationship between two Victorian poets—that Byatt became a household name. All of a sudden, a story about the drudge work of biography—about the hours of sitting in the London Library, scouring footnotes and bibliographies—was winning awards and making it onto bestseller lists. In 2002 it even became a film starring Gwyneth Paltrow.
But fame didn’t turn Byatt’s head. Possession was followed by more novels with a decidedly academic focus, including the last two instalments of her The Virgin in the Garden quartet (in a 2003 interview, Byatt expressed surprise that anyone had been able to finish the first book); more novels about academics and critics; and short stories about artists and writers. Her last book, published in 2016, was a study of two artists: Mariano Fortuny and William Morris.
Throughout this life’s work—this huge range of fiction and criticism, of biography and imagination—what might we say is Byatt’s answer to that “serious and terrible problem”, of why any artist tries their hand at representation in the first place?
Many critics have read that answer as Byatt making a stand for realism, of the virtues of representation in its oldest form; of verisimilitude in an age of postmodernism, an age where the building blocks of meaning and language were being constantly scrutinised. Byatt is the heir, in this telling, to John Ruskin and George Eliot; the truth-seeking chaser to Iris Murdoch’s shot.
Byatt was engaged with realism, with its philosophy and the limits it put upon her fiction. She defended it in many of her essays. But it feels wrong to say she was simply, or only, a “realist”—as if that definition could encompass her fiction and tell us how we should read it.
Her work is teeming with people pursuing and striving towards the facts—the academics in Possession want to uncover the reality of the poet’s love affair; the biographer in The Biographer’s Tale scrabbles around the papery detritus of another writer’s life; the writers and artists in The Matisse Stories want to translate their own experience into art. Not one of her novels lets her readers forget these attempts; these machinations sit on the surface.
True realism—as Byatt knew, and wrote—is not about the truth at all. It’s about an awareness of its impossibility: the gap between the life and the representation; the messy legwork of research, love affairs and life that comes between the idea and the printed pages.
In losing Byatt, we’ve also lost a master of that slippery art.
