On Histories and Stories: Selected Essays by A.S. Byatt

Author:A.S. Byatt [Byatt, A.S.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780674008335
Amazon: 0674008332
Barnesnoble: 0674008332
Goodreads: 253304
Published: 2014-07-01T00:23:05+00:00

· 5 ·

Old Tales, New Forms

In 1990 I was chairman of the judges for the first presentation of the European Literature prize. I had spent eleven years teaching English and American Literature, and I was curious about what went on in the contemporary Europe of which I, and my writing, were also a part. I can remember the moment when I realised I had discovered a pattern of forms and ideas new at least to me – and at the same time as old as Western literature. I began to read Roberto Calasso’s Le Nozze di Cadmo e Armonia late one night in bed in the summer on a French mountainside. I was still reading at dawn, hanging over the edge of the bed, and what I was reading was something I already knew – the Greek myths retold at a gallop, sensuous and immediate, and at the same time threaded through with brilliant and knotty reflections on the relations of myth, story, language and reality.

Looking at the other books that excited me amongst the entries I began to discern a general European interest in storytelling, and in thinking about storytelling. There was the Austrian Christoph Ransmayr’s Die Letzte Welt – a tale set ambivalently in the ancient and modern worlds, of a search for the exiled Ovid, in which the tales of the Metamorphoses are retold in a Black Sea iron town. There was the Basque Atxaga’s Obabakoak, which is a compendium of linked tales, ancient, modern, plagiarised, mirrored, full of energy and invention, reflecting on the absence of a Basque Literature and the need to invent one. There was Gesualdo Bufalino’s Le Menzogne della Notte, in which a group of condemned conspirators in an island fortress spend the night telling the tales of their lives. There was also Hans Magnus 123

Copyright © 2000 The President and Fellows of Harvard College

ON HISTORIES AND STORIES

Enzensberger’s Ach Europa, not at first sight connected to ancient storytelling, since it is a kind of political travel book about the edges of Europe, the unconsidered parts – but it felt to me, with its chain of connected and disconnected cultural anecdotes, its jigsaw-like bricolage, to be somehow part of what I was looking at. I began to think myself about storytelling, about the irrepressible life of old stories.

Some of this interest in storytelling is to do with doubts about the classic novel, with its interest in the construction of the Self, and the relation of that Self to the culture, social and political, surrounding it.

A writer can rebel in various ways against the novel of sensibility, or the duty (often imposed by literary journalists) to report on, to criticise, contemporary actuality. You can write anti-novels, like the nouveau roman, deconstructing narrative and psychology. Or you can look back at forms in which stories are not about inner psychological subtleties, and truths are not connected immediately to contemporary circumstances. There are the great compendious storytelling collections. The Arabian Nights, Boccaccio’s Decameron, the Canterbury Tales, Ovid’s Metamorphoses.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.