Possession: A Romance by A. S. Byatt

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Há anos, quando encontrei Possession de A.S. Byatt, na livraria Buchholz em Lisboa, senti-me uma privilegiada. A leitura era difícil (mais de 600 densas páginas cheias de informação sobre o Romantismo literário inglês do século XIX), mas o esforço foi compensado pelo brilho de tal leitura. Em breve, Possession - digo-o sem hesitações - tornava-se um dos livros da minha vida.

Distinguido em 1990 com o Booker Prize, este romance decorre paralelamente em duas épocas e conta duas histórias de amor - a dos poetas oitocentistas Randolph Henry Ash e Christabell La Motte e a de dois jovens universitários que, no final do século XX, são surpreendidos pela pujança de tal ligação (adulterina) em plena época vitoriana. Ao mesmo tempo, descobrem que, também para eles, filhos da revolução sexual, há espartilhos e contingências nascidos, não tanto das conveniências sociais, mas do medo da dor e da perda.

A extrema beleza do romance de A.S.Byatt assenta, pois, em dois grandes pilares: a análise dos sentimentos dos protagonistas e dos lugares de vulnerabilidade a que estes os conduzem, por um lado, e o rigor de linguagem com que reconstitui o universo mental e cultural dos românticos, através de duas figuras fictícias mas que a autora torna dignos pares de autores britânicos e irlandeses de meados do século XIX como William Butler Yeats, o casal Browning ou Thomas Hardy.

Correspondência entre Randolph Henry Ash e Christabel LaMotte:

De Randolph Henry Ash para Christabel LaMotte:

I remember your face turned aside a little-but decisive-I remember your speaking with such feeling-of the Life of Language-do you remember that phrase? I began so ordinary-polite-you said-you hoped to write a long poem on the subject of Melusina-and your eye partly defied me to find fault with this project-as though I could or would-and I asked-was the poem to be in Spenserian stanzas or blank verse or in some other metre-and suddenly you spoke-of the power of the verse and the Life of Language-and quite forgot to look shy or apologetic, but looked, forgive me, magnificent-it is a moment I shall not easily forget…

C. LaMotte para R. H. Ash:

You understood my very phrase-the Life of Language. (…) words have been all my life, all my life-this need is like the Spider’s need who carries before her a huge Burden of silk which she must spin out-the silk is her life, her home, her safety-her food and drink too-and if it is design anew-you will say she is patient-so she is-she may also be savage-it is her nature…

R. H. Ash para C. LaMotte:

I have dreamed nightly of your face and walked the streets of my daily life with the rhythms of your writing singing in my silent brain. I have called you my Muse, and so you are, or might be, a messenger from some urgent place of the spirit where essential poetry sings and sings. I could call you, with even greater truth-my Love- there, it is said-for I most certainly love you in all ways possible to man and most fiercely. It is a love for which there is no place in this world-a love my diminished reason tells me can and will do neither of us any good, a love I tried to hide cunningly from, to protect you from, with all the ingenuity at my command.

A minha visão deste romance:

The Beguiling of Merlin, Edward Burne-Jones

O romance em si, Possession, narra com uma tal vivacidade de detalhe a relação amorosa entre dois poetas, C. LaMotte e R. H. Ash, que o tempo contemporâneo parece, em comparação, vazio e desprovido de sentido. Maud e Roland, dois académicos que descobrem a verdade do caso amoroso, são eles próprios obscuros, desinteressantes, cheios de dúvidas e inseguranças. E é quando Byatt evoca o mundo vitoriano, por vezes cruel, que o romance adquire cores vibrantes. O amor desse tempo contrasta com o tempo presente, o nosso tempo, que desconfia do amor, mas no qual prolifera a linguagem sexual. Sobre Roland e Maud, a autora escreve:

"They were children of a time and culture that mistrusted love, “in love”, romantic love, romance in toto, and which nevertheless in revenge proliferated sexual language, linguistic sexuality, analysis, dissection, deconstruction, exposure."

E apenas uma académica como a própria Byatt poderia fazer pouco das instituições académicas e do sistema de dissecação e apropriação das vidas de antigos poetas, muitas vezes interpretadas à luz de teorias literárias contemporâneas inapropriadas. É delicioso ler os ensaios académicos petulantes e ridículos que se escrevem sobre Ash ou LaMotte, totalmente irrelevantes. Faz-nos pensar acerca da utilidade da teoria e crítica académica literária, que muitas vezes se assemelha a um bisturi a dissecar camadas de significados que não existem.

Não deixam de existir muitas referências artísticas subtis. Christabel é o modelo feminino para a pintura da sua amiga Blanche sobre o encantamento de Vivienne e Merlin (ver quadro acima de Burne-Jones,The Beguiling of Merlin, que serve de capa ao livro). E de facto, essa história do feiticeiro é a que melhor expressa o encantamento de LaMotte (ela própria, Melusina, a mulher meio-serpente) tecido em volta de Ash, cativo das suas palavras poéticas.

O que sinceramente me deu prazer em ler foi a descoberta gradual da relação entre Ash e LaMotte através das cartas e poemas. Se por um lado, Byatt ridiculariza e destrói o academismo moderno e fechado, por outro, ela revela a verdadeira profissão do estudioso literário na forma como Maud e Roland descobrem as pistas deixadas nos poemas, cartas e textos da época.

E nos capítulos em que a narração assume a primeira pessoa, do ponto de vista de Ash ou da sua esposa, Ellen, conseguimos ver todo o talento de Byatt em evocar esse mundo perdido, para sempre fascinante, feito de honra e cavalheirismo, de sacrifício e devoção, de paixão e talento, de palavras, tantas palavras, que ficam por dizer.

Sinopse em Inglês:

"(...) Possession begins when Roland, a scholar of the fictitious Victorian poet Randolph Henry Ash, discovers a letter Ash wrote to Christabel LaMotte, one of the era's first feminist writers. Roland's sleuthing for more information regarding a possible link between the two poets leads him to Maud Bailey, a somewhat haughty and distanced LaMotte scholar. The two embark on a quest together, determined to uncover the truth and find out the extent of the Ash-LaMotte relationship, which could radically alter their lives' work and scholarship. Their journey takes them to the English countryside and France as they unearth old letters and journals that weave the story of this previously unknown romance.

A simple plot summary does not even begin to do justice to this multi-layered novel. Byatt's narrator presents the parallel stories of the present-day scholars and their Victorian subjects through a variety of literary forms, including poetry, letters, diary entries and fairy tales. This postmodern romance also tackles some interesting themes, such as the nature of literary biography and scholarship in light of our incomplete access to the full truth about the stories of authors' lives. Yet for all its intellectualism and wealth of literary allusions, the narrative of Possession seldom lags, and you will soon find yourself wrapped up in the mystery surrounding Ash and LaMotte, which increasingly consumes Maud and Roland. Possession won the 1990 Booker Prize (...)".

Reviewed by Renée Bosman, Government Information Librarian

Edição em português do romance - Editora Sextante:

O que Byatt diz do seu romance:

"(...) 'I write novels because I am passionately interested in language. Novels are works of art which are made out of language, and are made in solitude by one person and read in solitude by one person - by many different, single people, it is to be hoped. So I am also interested in what goes on in the minds of readers, and writers, and characters and narrators in books. I like to write about people who think, to whom thinking is as important and exciting (and painful) as sex or eating. This doesn't mean I want my books to be cerebral or simply battles of ideas.

I love formal patterning in novels - I like to discover and make connections between all sorts of different people, things, ways of looking, points in time and space. But I also like the idea that novels can be, as James said, 'loose baggy monsters', a generous form that can take account of almost anything. Temperamentally, and morally, I like novels with large numbers of people and centres of consciousness, not novels that adopt a narrow single point-of-view, author's or character's.

I don't like novels that preach or proselytise. (I fear people with very violent beliefs, though I admire people with thought-out principles.) The novel is an agnostic form - it explores and describes; the novelist and the reader learn more about the world along the length of the book.(...)"

in http://www.asbyatt.com/

Biografia de A.S. Byatt:

Foto de motivatedphotos.com

"Dame A(ntonia) S(usan) Byatt was born on 24 August 1936 in Yorkshire. She was educated at a Quaker school in York and at Newnham College, Cambridge, Bryn Mawr College, Pennsylvania, and Somerville College, Oxford, where she studied as a postgraduate. She taught in the Extra-Mural Department of London University and the Central School of Art and Design, and in 1972 became full-time Lecturer in English and American Literature at University College, London (Senior Lecturer, 1981). She left in 1983 to concentrate on writing full-time. She has travelled widely overseas to lecture and talk about her work, often with the British Council, and was Chairman of the Society of Authors between 1986 and 1988. She was a member of the Literature Advisory Panel for the British Council between 1990 and 1998. She has served on the judging panels for a number of literary prizes, including the Booker Prize for Fiction, and is recognised as a distinguished critic, contributing regularly to journals and newspapers including the Times Literary Supplement, The Independent and the Sunday Times, as well as to BBC radio and television programmes. She was also a member of the Kingman Commitee on the Teaching of English Language (1987-8).

A. S. Byatt's first novel, Shadow of a Sun, the story of a young girl growing up in the shadow of a dominant father, was published in 1964 and was followed by The Game (1967), a study of the relationship between two sisters. The Virgin in the Garden (1978) is the first book in a quartet about the members of a Yorkshire family. The story continues in Still Life (1985), which won the PEN/Macmillan Silver Pen Award, and Babel Tower (1996). The fourth (and final) novel in the quartet is A Whistling Woman (2002).

Her most successful book, Possession: A Romance (1990), won the Booker Prize for Fiction and the Irish Times International Fiction Prize, and continues to enjoy enormous critical and popular success. Part romance, part literary thriller, the story involves two contemporary academics, Roland Michell and Maud Bailey, whose research into the lives of two Victorian poets, Randolph Henry Ash and Christabel LaMotte, reveal inextricably linked destinies, like those of their researchers. Angels & Insects (1992) consists of two novellas, The Conjugal Angel, an exploration of Victorian attitudes toward death and mourning, and Morpho Eugenia, the story of a young Victorian explorer and naturalist, William Adamson, and his relationship with the daughter of his employer, adapted as a film in 1996. Her novel The Biographer's Tale was published in 2000.

A. S. Byatt's collections of short stories and fictions include Sugar and Other Stories (1987); The Matisse Stories (1993), three stories each with a connection to a particular Matisse painting; The Djinn in the Nightingale's Eye (1994), a collection of fairy tales; Elementals: Stories of Fire and Ice (1998); and Little Black Book of Short Stories (2003).

Her published criticism includes two books about Iris Murdoch: Degrees of Freedom: The Early Novels of Iris Murdoch (1965) and Iris Murdoch: A Critical Study (1976), as well as Wordsworth and Coleridge in Their Time (1970). In A. S. Byatt's last book, Portraits in Fiction (2001), she writes about instances of painting in novels, with examples from work by Zola, Proust and Iris Murdoch, a subject she first explored in a lecture given at London's National Portrait Gallery in 2000. She was awarded a CBE in 1990 and a DBE in 1999, and in 2002 was awarded the Shakespeare Prize by the Alfred Toepfer Foundation, Hamburg, in recognition of her contribution to British culture."

Her latest book, The Children's Book (2009), was shortlisted for the 2009 Man Booker Prize for Fiction."

By Cora Lindsay, 2001 http://www.contemporarywriters.com

Adaptação do romance Possession ao Cinema :

Foto de motivatedphotos.com

Realizador: Neil LaBute

Intérpretes: Gwyneth Paltrow, Aaron Eckhart, Jeremy Northam, Jennifer Ehle, Lena Headey, Holly Aird, Toby Stephens

EUA, 2002

"(...) Este filme de Neil LaBute pode ser resumido como uma ilustração exemplar dessa aritmética das ambivalências sexuais e humanas. E isto porque estamos perante histórias de dois pares ligados pela imponderabilidade do tempo: de um lado, Randolph Henry Ash (Jeremy Northam) e Christabel LaMotte (Jennifer Ehle), dois escritores vitorianos envolvidos numa paixão secreta; do outro, Maud Bailey (Gwyneth Paltrow) e Roland Michell (Aaron Eckhart), dois investigadores universitários contemporâneos que seguem a pista de algumas cartas perdidas, trocadas entre Ash e Christabel — como é óbvio, e o título sugere, Maud e Roland vão ficar possuídos pela intriga que investigam, a ponto de descobrirem que algo na sua existência é o eco insolúvel desse passado tão estranhamente presente.

Digamos que este é, no mínimo, um filme desconcertante. Porquê? Porque não se esperaria de um cineasta americano, associado a narrativas urbanas de um certo «cinema independente» americano — lembremos «Betty» (2000), estreado entre nós, mas também «Your Friends & Neighbors» (1998) e «In the Company of Men» (1997) —, este mergulho numa certa intimidade very british, para mais consumado com uma subtileza e elegância que fazem de «Possessão» um dos mais transparentes, e também mais inclassificáveis, filmes de 2002.

LaBute consegue, afinal, formular a hipótese de um romantismo moderno, consciente do seu próprio «anacronismo» formal, e também alheio a qualquer facilidade nostálgica. Nesta perspectiva, «Possessão» é um filme de um esplendoroso intimismo, por assim dizer alheado de qualquer derivação nevrótica, antes em paz com a sua inevitável pulsão de angústia. Uma verdadeira pedra preciosa.(...)".

critica de João Lopes em http://www.cinema2000.pt/

Foto de motivatedphotos.com

Possession foi sem dúvida um dos livros da minha vida.

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