“The Dead Man Touch’d Me From the Past”:

Reading as Mourning, Mourning as Reading in A. S. Byatt’s ‘The Conjugial Angel’

Abstract

At the centre of nearly every A. S. Byatt novel is another text, often Victorian in origin, the presence of which stresses her demand for an engagement with, and a reconsideration of, past works within contemporary literature. In conversing with the dead in this way, Byatt, in her own, consciously experimental, work, illustrates what she has elsewhere called “the curiously symbiotic relationship between old realism and new experiment.” This symbiotic relationship demands further exploration within Possession (1990) and Angels and Insects (1992), as these works resurrect the Victorian period. This paper examines the recurring motif of the séance in each novel, a motif that, I argue, metaphorically correlates spiritualism and the acts of reading and writing. Byatt’s literary resurrection creates a space in which received ideas about Victorian literature can be reconsidered and rethought to give them a new critical life. In a wider sense, Byatt is examining precisely what it means for a writer and their work to exist in the shadow of the ‘afterlife’ of prior texts.