The Art of Recording Li(v)es in A.S. Byatt’s Fiction

• Main Author: Armelle Parey
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Presses Universitaires de la Méditerranée 2018-04-01
• Series: Études Britanniques Contemporaines
• Subjects: biographer; ‘A. S. Byatt’; ‘Bioquest novel[s]’; ‘historiographic metafiction’; memory; ‘neo-historical fiction’
• Online Access: http://journals.openedition.org/ebc/4330

The questions about the representation of the past that are the centre of historiographic metafiction or neo-historical fiction also feature at the heart of Antonia Byatt’s œuvre. A number of her texts stress first how the past, whether it be personal collective or cultural, is difficult to know, and second, how it is the product of art, a fabrication. This paper looks in particular at ‘Precipice-Encurled’ (1987), Possession, a Romance (1990) and The Biographer’s Tale (2000) that evoke the process of unearthing the past, piecing it together and arranging it into a tale notably via characters of scholars or biographers who record lives, and in doing so may be telling lies. These characters will provide an entry into the process of (re)-construction at work in Byatt’s fiction before we move on to ‘Sugar’ (1987), an autobiographical text that features the unofficial reconfiguring or fictionalising at work in personal memories of a family’s past.