« Through a Glass Darkly » : the Opaque Transparence of « The Glass Coffin » by A. S. Byatt

• Main Author: Catherine Delesalle-Nancey
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Presses Universitaires de la Méditerranée 2013-09-01
• Series: Études Britanniques Contemporaines
• Subjects: Byatt; conte; énigme; intertexte; Possession; transparence
• Online Access: http://journals.openedition.org/ebc/484

Opening The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye, a collection of short-stories published in 1994, “The Glass Coffin”, through its very title and its reference to the familiar world of the fairy-tale, seems to promise its reader a transparent reading. However, its “palimpsestuous” depths soon reveal opaque recesses which call into question the classical interpretations it first seemed to call for. The slight distortion the short-story brings to the traditional happy ending–the hero has to share his princess with her twin-brother–encourages the reader to look for interpretation keys in the intertexts, the short-story having first been published in Possession. But the very superposition of these intertexts, which fail to coincide, further blurs interpretation. It is therefore the metatextual dimension of the short-story which needs to be probed into as “The Glass Coffin” offers a multi-facetted portrait of the artist and his creation, eventually revealing transparence as a point of opacity.