The Correspondence Between Neo-Victorianism and Renaissance

3In one of the earliest conceptions of the neo-Victorian movement, Hilary Schor associated the ‘uncanny life’ of the ‘Victorian past . . . in contemporary fiction’ with ‘ghostwriting,’ that is, with ‘speaking with the dead’ or with ‘the raising of the dead,’ an ‘image of resurrection which runs deep’ (Schor 237, 247). In a much more recent approach of neo-Victorian writers, Laura Savu argues that they ‘bestow new (textual) bodies as it “pleaseth” them upon the dead, “raised up” to relive their lives for us once more’ (Savu 162), Roberta Gefter Wondrich recalls neo-Victorianism’s ‘resurrectionist slant’ (Gefter Wondrich 119) and Emma Miller reformulates the idea that this type of contemporary literature ‘focuses on the resurrection of the dead’ in order to stipulate ‘that we co-exist with the dead and that they, their ideas and practises can and do become a reality again at any given moment’ (Miller 198, 199). The journal Neo-Victorian Studies provides similar definitions, notably in its inaugural issue in which Marie-Luise Kohlke binds neo-Victorianism with the ‘recurrent spiritualist trope that acts as both metaphor and analogy for our attempted dialogue with the dead’ (Kohlke 9), in which Andrew Williamson points out the metageneric importance of ‘the resurrecting motif of the séance’ (Williamson 110) and in which Kate Mitchell sees neo-Victorian fiction as an attempt ‘to cheat time, and allow access to the past, facilitating the resuscitation of the dead’ (Mitchell 82).

4Naturally, the concepts of resurrection, resuscitation and revival are manifestly figurative and what is at stake in these neo-Victorian works is the self-conscious, sometimes ironical and always problematic retrieval of a whole textual tradition with its ideological and aesthetic specificities. As Ann Heilmann and Mark Llewellyn have demonstrated, the ‘texts themselves become shadows, spectres and written ghosts that never quite materialize into substantive presences but instead remain simulations of the “real”’ (Heilmann and Llewellyn 2010, 145). These spectres that keep recurring or are systematically reanimated constitute particularly suitable conceptual tools since they signify, like the return of the Victorian dead, a reality that is not real, the presence of an absence, the past in the present, an immaterial matter or insubstantial substance. Far from being restricted to a Gothic past, spectres have become dominant in our contemporary culture according to Derrida who defines this ‘unnameable element’ as ‘something, between something and someone, anyone or anything, some this, “this thing”, but this thing and not any other, this thing that looks at us, that concerns us, comes to defy semantics and ontology, psychoanalysis as much as philosophy’ (Derrida 6). Such spectral deconstruction of ontology, such ‘hauntology’ (Derrida 10 and passim), again coincides with neo-Victorianism’s aesthetic guidelines since, in its intersection with postmodernism, the revival of the nineteenth century illustrates Brian McHale’s central assumption that ‘the dominant of postmodernist fiction is ontological’ and that ‘postmodernist discourse is precisely the discourse that denies the possibility of ontological grounding’ (McHale 10, 27; original emphasis).

6The concept of hauntology is also crucial because it destabilises smooth delimitations in terms of historiography, temporality and textuality. The resurrection of the Victorian subject means the advent of ‘a revenant, an apparition which returns and disrupts temporal linearity’ (Arias and Pulham xvi). Neither past nor present or both past and present, the spectral Victorian justifies the junction, combination and porosity between the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries, between realism and postmodernism. The revenant fulfils then the function of hyphenation not only in terms of thematics but also of aesthetics. What ought to be stressed finally about the implications of neo-Victorianism’s emphatic hauntology is the inevitable linguistic faltering or wavering inherent in a literature of exhumation straddling two ontologies and two temporalities. ‘Haunted writing,’ according to Christine Berthin, necessarily ‘throws light onto the jarring element within language in order to account for the excommunicated within communication’ (Berthin 39). The rehabilitation of the excommunicated word may well be a crucial idea explaining the boom of neo-Victorian fiction for it validates the return of all sorts of linguistic and narrative forms deemed obsolete or suspicious. To take the sole examples of Possession and Ever After, one may notice the restoration of the language of affects in the diaries, the restoration of the language of literary correspondence in the letters, and the restoration of the language of allegory in the intradiegetic tales and myths. These nineteenth-century narrative forms are mingled and conflated with the deconstructionist language conveying the contemporary characters’ heterogeneous subjectivity and with the elliptic, chaotic and eclectic thoughts of Ever After’s protagonist terrified in front of ‘the polymerization of the world’ (Swift 7), a patent illustration of the postmodern ‘orders of simulacra’ (Baudrillard 152). The excommunicated word is thus compounded with the up-dated word and this hybridisation represents the very essence of neo-Victorianism’s poetics.

The Pasts Never Die

7When Byatt inserts a poetic quote about Proserpina in the very last section of Possession, she wilfully creates a looping effect since the epigraph to the very first chapter bears on the same mythical figure. The circular pattern thus generated conveys the idea of recurrence and this all the more so since Proserpina incarnates the myth of rebirth, of cyclical regeneration. The concepts of restoration and renaissance might then be said to be squared, expressed as they are not only in the narrative structure of repetition but also in the framing importance of the myth of eternal resumption. As often in this novel peopled with scholars specialised in exegesis and interpretation, the signification of the myth of Proserpina is indicated in a sort of meta-hermeneutic fragment as ‘the myth of Resurrection’ (Byatt 1990, 4). Further significations of this myth are given in the course of the narrative and in other quotes from the (fictional) poem dedicated to it, notably the suggestion that the mythical context is one ‘where past and future mixed’ (Byatt 1990, 464). Such temporal mixture and cyclicity provide the model and the justification for the novel’s central precept: the regeneration of the nineteenth century in the twentieth century in which the contemporary academics strive to bring back to life the works of their Victorian forebears. Just as Proserpina stands for the celebration of natural rebirth, Possession is conceived so as to highlight the celebration of literary rebirth.

8In addition to the epigraph relating to Proserpina, the opening of Possession deals with the possible sources of the Victorian treatment of the myth focusing in particular on Vico’s main historical work, Principi di Scienza Nuova. And since, in this treatise, Vico develops his hypothesis of the cyclical nature of history, the principle of ‘corsi e recorsi,’ the ideas of recurrence, of eternal return and hence of the negation of disappearance appear reinforced and underlined as the programmatic paradigms of the novel. When, through the embedded figure of the writer, the novel stresses the belief that ‘[t]he Historian and the Man of Science alike may be said to traffic with the dead,’ mentioning Cuvier and Michelet in addition to Lyell and Vico as thinkers who ‘have heard the bloodless cries of the vanished and given them voices’ (Byatt 1990, 104), the revival of the dead becomes not only a timeless, iterative attempt but a scientific necessity. Strategically, the reference to Milton’s phoenix in the female poet’s testimonial letter transforms a poetic quote into a specular formula: rising from one’s ashes emerges as the poet’s privilege, the seventeenth-century as well as the Victorian poet, both ‘vigorous most / When most unactive deemed’ thanks to their ‘ages of lives’ (Byatt 1990, 502–503). The plural form ‘lives’ is of course crucial to emphasise the novel’s creed in the possibility of resumption or the prerogative of resurrection and to signal the timelessness of such literary prodigies. Synthetically then, Byatt takes great pains to provide mythological, scientific and poetic evidence demonstrating the importance of reviving the dead, the usefulness and fruitfulness of ceaselessly giving new life to things and people, to works and writers apparently vanished.

9In Ever After also the reader is presented with various scientific references validating the imperative to resurrect the dead starting with the recurrent presence of Lyell (also patent in Possession) who understood ‘that mysterious paradox by which the study of dead stones offered the clue to Life itself’ (Swift 93) and including Mary Anning, the finder of fossils, who ‘resurrected’ a rare ichthyosaur ‘into the amazed consciousness of another race of animals’ (Swift 144). To give weight to the paramount importance of giving back life to the past and the allegedly disappeared Swift uses the extended metaphor of acting since the protagonist’s wife ‘was an actress, wasn’t she? It was her job: to represent life to people’ (Swift 120). Representation as the resurrection of historical or literary characters again can be perceived as a self-reflexive concept applicable to Swift’s novel and to neo-Victorian fiction as a whole. It is, however, poetry itself which, in Ever After, appears as the prodigy that has always indispensably to be revived, that has always vitally to be risen from its ashes. It is poetry which is presented as a paradigmatic ‘redeeming balm’ thanks to which ‘life is reconciled with death’ (Swift 71); it is poetry which, for the protagonist’s putative Elizabethan ancestor, for his Victorian forebear and for himself, ‘strikes our hearts at such a magic angle’ (Swift 234). As the subject of poetry and as the specular metaphor for poetry itself, the phoenix is then the unifying device of both novels, a device implying rebirths in the plural and the redemptive return of the pasts in the plural. And since Shakespeare, the ‘charismatic Renaissance’ figure (Swift 5), looms large in both novels, in addition to Milton in Possession and Sir Walter Raleigh in Ever After, it becomes manifest that these neo-Victorian novels celebrate not only the revival of Victorian motifs but also the renaissance of Renaissance. What characterises these novels, typical as they are of today’s Zeitgeist, is then, as Andreas Huyssen rightly observes, the ‘desire the pull all the various pasts into the present’ (Huyssen 15). In this syncretic restoration of traditions from various pasts can be seen neo-Victorianism’s main intersection with postmodernism.

Re-naissance and Poetic re-construction

Postmodernism and Neo-Victorianism as Meta-renaissances

12Neo-Victorian fiction, such as it is illustrated by Byatt’s and Swift’s novels, cannot be restricted to the imitation of dead voices or the reproduction of bygone codes not only because of its labour of recontextualisation and restructuration but also because of its flaunted degree of artistic self-awareness and self-reflexiveness. In self-reflexiveness appears the notion of reflexiveness and indeed what is noteworthy in neo-Victorianism and postmodernism is the inclusion of analysis in the midst of diegesis, of exegesis in the midst of mimesis. Starting with the interpretation and the ramifications of the myth of Proserpina, Possession develops an astonishing number and variety of self-reflexive analyses about the cultural material borrowed or illustrated in its own textual practices. The legend of Melusine is another case in point generating as it does the novel’s longest poetic creation as well as numerous, necessarily self-referential, interpretations about its origins, meanings and aftereffects. An initial presentation of the paradigmatic legend occurs in the mouth of a deconstructionist character who carries on his semiotic gloss of Melusine as figure of ‘the limen and the liminal’ (Byatt 1990, 138) several chapters later. The second version appears in the guise of an extract from a published monograph on the author of the poem and the third reading of the same text is effectuated by a Victorian housewife pointing out ‘its virtues so far removed . . . from those expected by the weaker sex’ (Byatt 1990, 121). There is also a contemporary feminist explanation identifying the poem as a sexual manifesto but the most extensive form of metatextual commentary can be found in the correspondence between the two Victorian poets. This epistolary chapter relates the genesis of the fairy poem, a remarkable case of intradiegetic, self-referential, genetic auto-criticism, just as it reveals how the ideas of one poet can be found in the text of the other and how certain ideas are borrowed from other canonical poets, yet another form of textual resurrection. The embedded poem, that is, the novel’s very textual component, is thus presented, analysed, dissected from various perspectives and in various epochs and in order to grasp the complexity and sophistication of Byatt’s metacritical apparatus one has to add that this form of specular hermeneutics affects other embedded poems so much so that Possession appears as much fictional as metafictional, as much narrative as exegetic. Similarly, in Ever After, the contemporary enunciator’s narrative revelations are constantly interrupted by and interspersed with hermeneutic comments or questions about the embedded Victorian documents. Quite typically, when, after having quoted the diary of his Victorian ancestor, the contemporary narrator observes, ‘Let’s read between the lines. Let’s be brutal and modern and take apart these precious Notebooks’ (Swift 211), he forsakes his narrative function and becomes a textual critic, a diegetic hermeneut, an embedded double of the reader. Just as the Victorian poems are presented as original texts in Possession, just so the nineteenth-century diary appears as an archival document in Ever After and the contemporary academics produce a series of interpretations which become ipso facto self-informing since they affect parts of the works in which they appear. Crucially, these interpretations also shed new light on the nature, ideas or feelings of their authors and the whole system of metatextuality comes then also close to a strategy of characterisation thus blending and blurring text and metatext, diegesis and self-interpretation, fiction and non-fiction. As Andrea Kirchknopf argues, neo-Victorianism tends to associate ‘representations of life and writing, literary reception and reactions to literary reception, increasingly collapsing the boundaries between text and critique in the process’ (Kirchknopf 73).

13The high degree of self-reflexiveness in these novels is not only meta-critical it is also meta-generic. When Bill Unwin confesses, ‘I am not in the business of strict historiography’ (Swift 90), his generic comment becomes of course a definitional mise en abyme for the whole novel. Trying to retrace the life of a historical character without being an historian, using ‘facts infused with a good deal of theory, not to say imagination’ (Swift 90), Unwin and Swift commit themselves to a genre that has come to be known as biofiction, that is, the ‘novelisation of biography’ (Kaplan 65). As the term indicates, there is here an ontological hybridity, not to say contradiction, in the association of real life and imagined facts, reality and fiction. And so, not content with exploring the paradox of giving new life to the present by resurrecting the past, neo-Victorian fiction, like its nineteenth-century forebear and like the poetry it revives, develops at great length the paradox of finding the truth in imagination. Trying to account as faithfully as possible for the life of his forebear, the diegetic life-writer, mirror image of the extradiegetic life-writer, reveals his modus operandi: ‘You have to picture the scene. You have to reconstruct the moment, as patient palaeontologists reconstruct the anatomies of extinct beasts’ (Swift 185). The analogy between the biofictionalist and the palaeontologist seems far-reaching for both resort to a combination of evidence and hypotheses, and both reach new theories or new narratives by delving into dead substance. The paradox of ‘original remakes’ (Huyssen 15) is then also highlighted in the novel’s metageneric dimension.

15To conclude, it seems crucial to emphasise the semantic and aesthetic convergence of the prefixes linking postmodernism, neo-Victorianism and renaissance. In each case, it is not simply retrieval or repetition which are implied but the ideas of going’ (‘post-’) and of renewing or remoulding (‘neo-’ and ‘re-’). Resurrecting the past, the dead or the forgotten, does not mean necrophilic exhumation or nostalgic imitation for neo-Victorian fiction, on the contrary it gives birth to the principle of poetic revoicing, creative recontextualisation and updated, hybrid restructuration. Such thematic and literary revivals have major ethical and ideological consequences for one of the main purposes of neo-Victorianism and postmodernism is ‘to problematise the pastness of the past and the deadness of the dead’ (Kohlke and Gutleben 38), just as they entail fundamental aesthetic issues raising the problem of creating newness out of oldness, life out of death. One of neo-Victorianism’s solutions to achieve innovation is to commingle nineteenth-century and twentieth-century themes, languages and discursive modes so as to engender both mixture and comparison, both hybridity and symmetry. Another solution resides in the conception of an ontologically double text associating, juxtaposing or superimposing narrative fiction and textual criticism, addressive telling and self-reflexive analysing, a chronicling activity and a hermeneutic activity. The importance of such metafictional hermeneutics underscores the specular inclusion of the reader and neo-Victorianism celebrates then also the renaissance of active reading. As Linda Hutcheon has noted about the implications of metafictional practices: ‘To read is to act; to act is both to interpret and to create anew—to be revolutionary, perhaps in political as well as in literary terms (Hutcheon 161).