Possession by Antonia Susan Byatt

Author:Antonia Susan Byatt [Byatt, Antonia Susan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Classics, Poetry, Mystery, Romance, Historical, Contemporary, Man Booker Prize
ISBN: 9780679735908
Google: 4mUrVvGTeewC
Amazon: 0679642382
Barnesnoble: 0679642382
Goodreads: 41219
Publisher: Modern Library
Published: 1991-10-01T04:00:00+00:00

Even so, not exempt from the blunderings of common men, the poet in search as he put it of “the origins of life and the nature of generation” was unwittingly, with his crashing boots covered with liquid india-rubber, as much as with his scalpel and killing-jar, dealing death to the creatures he found so beautiful, to the seashore whose pristine beauty he helped to wreck.

During his stay in the blustery North, then, Randolph spent his mornings collecting specimens which his indulgent landlady housed in various pie-dishes and “other china receptacles” around

his sitting-room. He wrote his wife that it was just as well she could not see the artificial rockpools amongst which he took his meals and in the afternoons worked with his microscope, for her orderly mind would never have tolerated his “pregnant chaos.” He made a particular study of the sea anemone—which is abundant in various forms on that coast—thereby, as he himself acknowledged, doing no more than subscribe to a general mania which had overtaken the British, who were keeping the tiny creatures in various glass tanks and aquaria in thousands of respectable drawing-rooms around the land, their murky colours vying with the dusty colours of stuffed birds or pinned insects under glass domes.

Sages and spinster schoolmistresses, frock-coated clergymen and earnest workingmen at that time, all were murdering to dissect, parting and slicing, scraping and piercing tough and delicate tissues in an attempt by all possible means to get at the elusive stuff of Life itself. Anti-vivisection propaganda was widespread and vehement, and Randolph was aware of it, as he was also aware of the charges of cruelty that might be levelled at his enthusiastic operations with scalpel and microscope. He had the squeamishness and the resolution of his poet-nature; he did various precise experiments to prove that writhings which might be thought to be responses to pain in various primitive organisms in fact took place after death—long after his own dissection of the creature’s heart and digestive system. He concluded that primitive organisms felt nothing we would call pain, and that hissing and shrinking were mere automatic responses. He might have continued had he not come to this conclusion, as he was willing to concede that knowledge and science laid “austere claims” on men.

He made a particular study of the reproductive system of his chosen life-forms. His interest in these matters dated back some time—the author of Swammerdam was well aware of the significance of the discovery of the ova of both human and insect worlds. He was much influenced by the work of the great anatomist Richard Owen on Parthenogenesis, or the reproduction of creatures by cell fission rather than by sexual congress. He conducted rigorous experiments himself on various hydras and plumed worms which could be got to bud new heads and segments all from the same tail, in a process known as gemmation. He was greatly interested in the way in which the lovely Medusa or transparent jellyfish were apparently unfertilised buds of certain Polyps.

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