David's Reaction to Byatt -- Northwest Nerds Bookclub

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Date Posted: 09:24:55 04/28/00 Fri
Author: David (via Marla)
Subject: David's Reaction to Byatt

Editor's Note: In cleaning out my email, I found Dave's original message to me regarding the Byatt book. I thought it was lost forever! Anyway, I know we've moved on to "Following the Equator," but I figured you might be interested in David's comments. Plus, he obviously put a lot of thought into them, so they deserve to be seen. Comment at will...

As soon as I began to imagine the narration and dialogue in an English accent, these stories became so pleasant to read. Initially I had a hard time visualizing the characters saying the things they did. Once I associated them with
images and sounds that I knew--not from the United States--the diction, the settings, even the personalities, became much more vivid. This book strikes me as unmistakably English.

It's a random association, I guess, but Byatt made it much more understandable. She puts into words the power of vision and images to make sense of experience. Sometimes she sounds skeptical of language--"words, mere words, go for nothing, fly by whilst the memory of a chipped tooth, a strayed red dot, an inappropriate hair, persists and persists" (19)--
but I was swayed by her writing, mainly because it found such a comfortable home in a set of images I had stashed away. Byatt certainly takes a risk by trying to let words evoke a world of people who live by observing distinctive colors, shapes, and objects. She does it well, although some of the syrupy color (colour?) imagery only got by me because I had that accent playing in my mind.

And what other options would Byatt really have if she didn't use language? Music, mime, puppetry? More refracted images? We always seem to struggle to describe things as well as
we'd like. It is, as Debbie realizes, a"terrible problem, an attempt to answer the question every artist must ask him or herself, at some time, why bother, why make representations of anything at all?" (51). Byatt's obviously conscious of the limits of representation, but I can't decide if she goes
far enough in considering the limits of observation. I'm curious to hear what you guys think. When it came to colors, I was less gripped by her evocative descriptions because
they depended on connecting specific objects to specific colors, linkages that I sometimes confuse because of my color-blindness. (The violets on page 62, for example.) Don't get me wrong: I'm not invoking victimhood here. But
there's a gap between what Byatt wants me to imagine seeing and what I'm capable of visualizing.

I lent this book to a Cuban friend at the beginning of the week, and he fired a few rounds of questions at me this afternoon. He read the first story and couldn't imagine the environment of the hair salon--from the (bourgeois) emphasis
on decor to the mirrors and lights that let Susannah and Lucian view each other so intensely. It occurred to me that there are more profound "blindnesses" than my own that
limit our powers of observation. Given the importance of visual experience, what should we do make of our blindnesses, the gaps between what should be and actually can be seen? Byatt is respectful of the different ways that her characters see, but maybe overconfident in their, and our, abilities to do so. Or maybe not, for what better image to leave us with than of her greatest observer, Matisse himself, anticipating blindness: "He thought that he had
better acquaint himself with the dark. And then he added, 'and anyway, you know, black is the colour of light'" (125)?

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