2‘Crocodile Tears’ rewrites what could be considered as a topos: running south here means running to a place where erasure and oblivion are sought and where something like a physical dissolution seems to be desired. The main character, Patricia Nimmo, nevertheless gets thwarted in her attempt to take refuge in what she comes to describe, rather mildly perhaps, as a state of ‘indifference.’ In fact, the attempt to cancel tensions and oppositions triggers their reappearance in spectral form: the ‘elemental’ South, which sustains the dream of driving story and history out of the landscape, comes into contact with a text which creeps back at every turn. In the midst of the disorientation that ensues, the character is saved, miraculously, by a stranger from the North who will accompany her back to England and help her come to terms with her past. Byatt is not averse to the simplicity of fables and fairy tales, rather the opposite; yet the clear storyline which restores polarity does not completely cancel the disturbance introduced by the spectral and the hybrid which forbids neat and hermetic separations. The north and south polarity provides a simple narrative frame where the opposition between the acceptance of death and the temptation of forgetfulness finds a geographical translation. But the challenge to both plain geography and plain chronology remains: indifference finds itself unsettled from the beginning by a principle of difference which blurs landmarks and disturbs the fixity of oppositions themselves. The complexity of the text also lies in the ambivalence of this so-called ‘indifference’, its indiscriminate nature turning it potentially into an exploratory mode. The numbing or freezing of emotions offers a vantage point to conduct as experiment in seeing that welcomes whatever presents itself to the eye. The desire for ‘elementality’ is not immune to fantasy and fiction, and yet it is also the name for a visual language stripped bare of discourse, where the various elements or components of the picture command attention through their material presence, their density and opacity. The journey south which starts in a London gallery and moves to the deep yellow South of van Gogh recounts an imaginary escape which is not just an illusory escape. It takes the form of an intensely physical experience which results in a series of striking pictures, an intricate landscape that remains after the journey has ended.

3The aim of this paper is to trace the transformations of the South in the course of the story: the South of oblivion becomes a South formed by multiple stories, associations and ghostly presences; the changing and composite tableau that emerges retains an elemental quality which lies not only in the strong presence of natural elements but in the way its various features impose themselves and compose themselves to produce a sense of elementality. Determined by what the characters make of it or what their various stories turn it into, Byatt’s South also asserts itself through a recalcitrant simplicity.

Running Away, Running South

4The south at the beginning of ‘Crocodile Tears’ is at first a mere direction towards which Patricia Nimmo is headed as if drawn by a magnetic force. The woman who is on the run has just left her husband lying dead on the floor of an art gallery, after he was struck by a violent heart attack. The couple, whom we are told had been happily married for years, had just been enjoying one of their leisurely Sundays—marred only in the latter part of the day by a heated argument over an English seaside scene to which Tony took a liking while Patricia reviled the ‘dreadful predictability of [its] colours’ (Byatt 1999, 7). Nothing prepares the reader for the sudden death of the husband and even less for his desertion by his long-standing wife. Nor is anything offered in the way of explanation as the narrative takes us away from the scene to describe the escapee gathering a few essential personal items before getting into a taxi and heading for Waterloo. Patricia Nimmo buys a ticket to Paris but gets off at Lille; there she buys another ticket to Nice but gets off at Avignon; finally, she takes a train going to Montpellier and Barcelona but finally stops at Nîmes.

5Throughout this journey no mention is made of any particularly strong emotion. The reader who might have expected panic, fear, or anguish finds nothing of the sort. Patricia does at one point worry about money and credit cards and she ‘nearly burst[s] into tears’ (Byatt 1999, 10) when she realises she is still wearing her high-heeled sandals or later when she sees herself wearing her bright yellow suit (this is the very first mention of tears in the story). During this perfectly smooth journey where she can be seen ‘flow[ing] with the crowd’ (Byatt 1999, 10), the character even feels a vague elation, ‘a light-headed pleasure’ (Byatt 1999, 12) at the idea of having no clear destination. The dark tunnel under the Channel where she wakes up ‘not know[ing] who or where she was’ (Byatt 1999, 11) symbolically enhances the process of erasure that has begun at the very moment when Patricia caught sight of the body of her husband lying on the floor of the gallery. The repetition of the phrase ‘she did not know where she was going’ confirms what Patricia’s constant change of destination already makes clear: the escape is inventing itself as she goes along. And yet one thing remains certain: Patricia is ‘going south’ (Byatt 1999, 12), her body is taking her south unless the south is pulling her body in its direction. The south becomes the name that Patricia gives to her headlong flight, an escape as blind as it is imperious.

6The journey could have gone on and on, but it comes to a halt: ‘The train stopped at Nîmes and there she got out, it was perhaps the coincidence, the almost coincidence of names, Nîmes, Nimmo that decided her’ (Byatt 1999,13). The ‘coincidence’ which is, and yet of course is not, a coincidence can be interpreted in different ways, but in the light of Patricia’s desire to ‘vanish without a trace’ (Byatt 1999, 12), it suggests the possibility of disappearing by merging with the city. Nimmo is temptingly close to Nemo, the nobody that Patricia is trying to become in a place where nobody knows her. The south may have been sought instinctively as the polar opposite of the north, but it feels as if the north has stopped to exist in the light and heat of the city. Patricia’s space becomes reduced to a few elements: narrow streets, stony courts and bright squares, tiled roofs, fountains and plane trees. When she walks out in the middle of the day, hatless, she exposes herself to something even more ‘elemental’, allowing the four elements (earth, air, water and fire) to come together or turn into one another: Nîmes, Patricia hears is ‘uncooled by coastal breezes or mountain winds, a city on a plain, absorbing heat and light’ (Byatt 1999, 33); the sun is described as ‘pouring’ (Byatt 1999, 31) into the Arènes’; on top of the Carré d’Art, the hot air is described as ‘solid as glass’ (Byatt 1999, 53). At the same time, one colour, a ‘deep yellow’ (Byatt 1999, 29) dominates and seems at times to make all the other colours disappear. Even when they are preserved, multiplicity and diversity have the power to resolve themselves into ‘simplicity’, something Patricia voices explicitly as she is taking her meal out on the terrace: ‘There was an excess of pleasure in simplicity: stars, flames, water, the scent of cedar and burned fennel, the salt of olives, the juicy flakes of the fish, the gold wine, the sweet berries, the sharp chocolate, the warm air’ (Byatt 1999, 19). While the narrative repeatedly brings into play the four elements, here it is the senses that merge through a process that can be described as alchemical as much as chemical. The South becomes the word for this one sensation that binds a number of key components and conveys some quintessential sense of place: ‘There were tall cedars and pointed yews; there was a group of silver olives, and cypresses. There was bright light, shade. It was the South.’ (Byatt 1999, 15)

Cancelling Polarity, Unleashing Spectrality

7As the long story (77 pages in the 1999 Vintage edition) unfolds, the urge towards simplification and fusion is caught in an opposite movement of amplification and complexification. Patricia’s journey through the city is marked from the beginning by the avoidance of certain places—for reasons that remain partly unclear. No explanation is given for example when Patricia ‘turns the other way’, having seen ‘in the distance a fountain [that] rose and shone in a high foaming spray’ (Byatt 1999, 16). Yet, the character’s ability to remap the city according to her own wishes or to an invisible urge or fear quickly encounters limits. This, in particular, is emblematized by the regular appearance of the crocodile, a motif that is to be found on ‘bronze studs in the streets’, that is ‘repeated in windows, on street signs’ (Byatt 1999, 17) and that is also reproduced as an illustration as on the front page of the story. The crocodile does not just seem content to remain attached to its palm tree on the small studs but can leap out—or so it seems: ‘A life-sized bronze monster crawled over the edge of a fountain in a quiet square. She sat beside the water’ (Byatt 1999, 17). The oxymoronic ‘unmoving energetic crocodile’ (Byatt 1999, 38) can also make its way into dreams: ‘[she] slept. A crocodile slipped through a dream, and went under the surface as she woke. She breakfasted on the terrace . . . (Byatt 1999, 20). As noticeable as the brevity of these apparitions is the absence of comment that goes with them, a silence that could be inversely proportionate to the effect they produce.

8The ‘ubiquitous’ (Byatt 1999, 22) crocodile works as a polymorphous sign whose function and nature deploys itself throughout the story. One of its effects is to remind Patricia of the presence of history, or of layers of history that always leave more to be unearthed. The emblem is said to derive from an Augustan coin, dug up in the Renaissance. We read that Nîmes was a large Roman colony ‘peopled by Augustus’s legionaries, to whom he had given the land in gratitude for their victory over Antony and Cleopatra, on the Nile’, or so ‘it was believed’ (Byatt 1999, 22). Patricia’s guidebook indicates that this may well be only a myth that François I of France has ‘perpetuated’ in ‘giving the city the same coat of arms’ (22). But myth or not, this story causes Patricia’s own story to resurface as a line from Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra comes back to her:

‘Your serpent of Egypt is bred now of your mud by the operation of your sun: so is your crocodile.’ He had played Lepidus. He had wanted to play Anthony but had had to be content with Lepidus. She remembered, with her fingertips, smoothing artificial sun-tan into his white English tennis-playing thighs, sinewy and pale. She remembered the toga. She stood up again, leaving her coffee untouched, and began to walk. (Byatt 1999, 17)

9The absence of transition between the quote and the undetermined ‘He’, whom we quickly gather is Tony, Patricia’s former husband, seals an association that leads to multiple ghostly encounters: ‘Patricia, sitting by the solid and gleaming bronze crocodile in the Place de l’Horloge, had a sudden vision of Tony in a toga, white against the white light and the white spray of the fountain’ (Byatt 1999, 22). By the time the ‘sudden vision’ has turned into a fully-fledged memory, the crocodile has turned into something dark and potentially threatening: ‘All this she acknowledged and did not acknowledge, seeing and not seeing the lines of Hector’s harness, the folds of Lepidus’s toga on thin air and trickling water, beyond the dark crocodile’ (24).

10The crocodile has the power to take Patricia back to the northern place she ran away from when it might have conjured up a more southern South, bathed by a fiercer sun. Polarity finds itself replaced and displaced by spectrality. Far from having disappeared the North can return at any moment with an intensity made greater by the attempt to cancel it. The image of the crocodile swimming underwater adds another dimension to the north-south line down which Patricia has travelled, a verticality that reaches down below the surface of the earth. As it turns out, the crocodile also appears to Patricia in mummified form when she finds herself in the reptiles section of a museum room containing all sorts of stuffed animals. The notice, in French, reads: ‘Le crocodile, animal sacré des anciens prêtres égyptiens, était embaumé après sa mort. On le trouve en abondance dans les tombes’ (Byatt 1999, 46). As psychopomp, the crocodile comes as a reminder of something Patricia failed to accomplish, having left others to take care of her dead husband and to accompany him to his grave.

11The crack that has formed and shows that the earth can open at any time under Patricia’s feet while she is staring at the sun does more than simply add another dimension to the escapee’s map. Spectrality works as a force of displacement that means that Patricia never knows where she is stepping, never knows where she really is. Besides the unwanted irruptions of a South from which she recoils, the South of gladiators and matadors conjured up by the nearby Arènes, the character runs the risk of seeing the north she has fled from rise in the very sights that are supposed to erase it. Irony thus dogs the character’s footsteps and can transform whatever seems safe into its opposite. Nîmes after all is perhaps not the perfect place to become a nobody, but the place where Mrs Nimmo will not be able to escape her name, Tony and England. One of the first shops Patricia walks into is a bathroom boutique where, as the former manager of a business called Anadyomene, she finds herself at ease. The multiple items she buys and the endless baths that she takes may help her imagine that she will be born again, like Venus rising out of the water, and restored to an original state of virginity. And yet the informed reader knows that Anadyomene owes her existence to a bloody act of castration: birth or rebirth requires that part of the story be cut off. The irony is more explicit when Patricia eats some delicate ‘quails’ eggs in aspic’ that suddenly look very much like ‘translucent coffin-shapes of jelly’ (Byatt 1999, 38). Like the crocodile, the ‘aspic’ reappears under many guises throughout the story, whether it be on Patricia’s plate, in the name ‘Rue de l’Aspic’, or in multiple jars collected in the reptiles section of the museum, suggesting that instead of Venus’s wondrous birth it is Cleopatra’s dark fate that looms in Nîmes.

12Spectrality does not only potentially alter everything on which the character lays eyes, it involves a decentering which turns her into the object of the gaze. Patricia, we are told, had meant to be a theatre designer, but as it turns out, the longer she stays in Nîmes, the less she manages to hold things in place or hold them in her stare. As she walks into one of the rooms of the museum, the character finds herself ‘face to face with two stuffed bulls’, ‘pointing sharp horns, staring from liquid brown eyes’ (Byatt 1999, 44). The bulls, so emblematic of Nîmes and the South, also take the reader back to the moment when Patricia finds herself alone in the London gallery after her argument with Tony: ‘She turned back to the walls—a blown sheep on moorland, a huge black bull, staring furiously out of the canvas, a fragile bunch of teasels. Later all this would come back, without hypnosis’ (Byatt 1999, 8). But one may also think of the last time Patricia ‘looked round her [London] drawing-room’: ‘A few photographs smiled at her: Tony in tennis things on the bookshelf, the children twenty years ago. She turned these faces down’ (Byatt 1999, 10). The eyes that follow Patricia can move from one place and one body to the next. What cannot be made to stand in place is also never identical to itself. Not seeing ghosts does not mean that they are not out there: even when the Nîmes sun has the power to dissolve everything, its pure light cannot completely erase the images of the past it makes invisible.

13More quickly than we might have imagined the escape south seems to reach a dead end. The desire for erasure and fusion is expressed almost literally by the fact that Patricia foregoes anything that would protect her head from the sun: ‘Let it bake her brain, something said’ (Byatt 1999, 34). At this stage, the initial power of oblivion has gone and the attempt to wipe the North off from the map has come up against stubborn forms of revenance. Interestingly the three brushes with death that occur in the story are never named and never described as such from the point of view of Patricia, through which the whole story is focalised. When Patricia nearly gets run over by a car, we read that ‘the heat and light dazzle her’ and cause her to ‘plunge[s] forward’ (Byatt 1999, 37); when she nearly throws herself off the roof of the Maison Carrée, she is described as ‘float[ing] over to the balustrade’ before ‘her feet [leave] the ground’ (Byatt 1999, 53); and when she tries to drown in two inches of water in a fountain, she is said to ‘fall on her face towards the water like a desert traveler in a film’ (Byatt 1999, 54). It takes an outsider to put an end to the headlong flight, someone who increasingly ‘interfer[es] in [Patricia’s] life’, as she claims, or perhaps rather in her ‘death’ as he points out (Byatt 1999, 54).

From Polarity to Hybridity: Difference at Work

14The impossibility to disappear into the South finds its most obstinate materialisation in a blond man with ‘pale curls’ (Byatt 1999, 15) who has taken up residence at Patricia’s hotel. The man whom she has spotted early on is immediately identified as a Northerner when Patricia hears his English, ‘the excellent English of the Scandinavian North’ (Byatt 1999, 26). The overall trajectory rests very heavily on this figure who saves Patricia against her will, gets her to come to terms with what happened and eventually accompanies her back to England to find Tony’s grave. The guardian angel appears very much like a deus ex machina and the symmetry is almost too perfect when it turns out that the Norwegian too has run away and has abandoned a close relative he had looked after for years. Not only does the polarity that Patricia had tried to cancel get restored, but it gives the entire story its backbone and its direction; correlatively the story seems to hold North and South in a tight discursive net where the South is associated with oblivion and death and the North with the possibility of mourning and the return to life.

15While the clear narrative line asserts polarity as an overall structuring principle, the text also shows difference constantly at work, difference as distinct from opposition and displacing fixed oppositions. As is often the case in Byatt’s fiction, the frames—discursive or visual—that hold her stories together are subjected to forces that unsettle the limits they delineate. The main exchange between her and Nils, her guardian angel, revolves around ‘curiosity’ and the ‘temptation of indifference’ (Byatt 1999, 40) which the Northerner says ‘becomes cement’ after a while. To this he opposes a ‘curiosity’ which keeps you alive:

I should like to recommend curiosity. You must take an interest. Curiosity and indifference, Mrs Nimmo, are opposites, you will say. But not truly. For both are indiscriminate. You may sit there, glass-eyed while things slip past, what did you say, eggs in aspic, crocodile fountains, the stones of this city. Or you may look with curiosity and live. (Byatt 1999, 40)

17As we progress through the narrative, ice and fire come more and more closely into contact, find ever new combinations, as in the various ‘eau-de-vie’ that the protagonists drink night after night ‘over shattered fragments of ice’: ‘The taste was fire and air, a touch of heat, an after-space of emptiness. And the mere ghost of a fruit’ (Byatt 1999, 29–30). Extreme heat and extreme cold become exchangeable when Nils Isaksen tells Patricia a tale which features a dead man standing upright in a block of ice and declares: ‘when I think of you, walking up and down in the heat with no hat . . . I think of the block of ice’ (Byatt 1999, 56). Finally, the lines get further blurred as the curiosities to which the Northerner draws Patricia’s attention carry their shadows and turn out to be chosen less randomly than the man claims. In fact, the encounter with Patricia has awakened Nils Isaksen’s own ghosts as is shown when he literally goes ‘berserk’ in the presence of bullfighters. What made him mad, he confesses later, is the fact that he lied to Patricia and has been making up his whole story from the start: the Northerner never buried his wife and never put up a Labradorite tombstone for her since he never married in the first place. Nils Isaksen’s profession of ‘indiscriminate curiosity’ proves to be flawed after all while it becomes obvious that the haunting presences that shape his own map cannot be so easily removed.

18Nor should they be perhaps, as they contribute to making that map complex, rich and interesting. As much as the contrasts between North and South, it is the entwinements between them that prove fascinating. The crocodile which holds pride of place in Nîmes speaks of the Nile but also of the Renaissance men who found it on Roman coins; it also speaks of Antony and Cleopatra through Shakespeare whose lines it brings back. Hybridity appears on the one hand as the result of multiple thrilling encounters between North and South but also as a force of displacement that displaces the fixity of place itself. The Northern country from which Nils Isaksen comes is quite different from the mild and temperate North to which Patricia returns, this typically English landscape which she found so bland in the London gallery. The South in which the two characters meet cannot be confused with the more southern regions across the sea from which the crocodile originates. North and South stand as floating signifiers, open to a difference that can always remap their contours, determined by a textuality that challenges geography but also defeats plain discursivity. They stand as names through which reality, story and imagination get inseparably woven. This tight knot also endows them with a particular resistance and opacity: whether one longs for a South that can be called ‘elemental’ or for a South teeming with stories and images, the narrative draws its power from the moment when, in spite of everything, one can simply exclaim: ‘It [is]/was the South.’ While underscoring the instability of what this may mean, the story explores, through and beyond Patricia, the power of an imaginary that cannot be considered simply as a flight from reality but as that which grounds the significance of place in the materiality of the body—and, conversely, that which grounds the body’s individual history in the materiality of place.

Writing, Painting a Recalcitrant South: Indifference at Work

19The South in which the escapee takes refuge can be treated as a fiction that screens and silences haunting images. At the same time Patricia’s ‘indifference’ turns out to be a condition by which the presence of her immediate environment is heightened. From the moment Patricia catches a glimpse of the dead body of Tony, the focus is on the way vision may operate once thoughts, questions or feelings have been blanked out. The description of the man who has dropped dead in the London gallery looks very much like another painting:

. . . Patricia saw Tony, lying on his back, on the carpet, below a large painting of an avalanche. His red face was ivory. The doctor had closed his eyes but he did not look peaceful. His jacket and shirt were opened; the gray hairs on his chest was springy. His belly was a proud mound. His shoes were splayed. (Byatt 1999, 9)

20The focus on springy hairs and splayed shoes appears both incongruous and incredibly apt to describe what may take place at that moment: something is both looked in the face and unable to be faced, hushed and at the same time made ‘real’ in the most concrete manner. Later on in Nîmes, Patricia’s several brushes with death come to form a series of pictures where the description of the moment of contact with the elements can be considered to avoid the reality of death or, equally, the abstraction of death. One may think of a passage from ‘The Chinese Lobster’ in The Matisse Stories, where the pull towards death is described as ‘[an impulse] that is white, and clear, and simple. The colour goes from the world . . .’ (Byatt 1994, 125).

21It is no detail of course that the man encountered in Nîmes, the pale Northerner and his straw hat should resemble Vincent van Gogh or one of his self-portraits and that numerous descriptions conjure up his paintings. It is no doubt Van Gogh the ‘elemental’ painter that is celebrated in the story, the painter to which Byatt devotes a very long essay called ‘Van Gogh, Death and Summer’ in Passions of the Mind:

Van Gogh painted the light of the sun, and the earth under the sun. He painted what men had made of it, and he painted it naked, as far as any man can. This nakedness, and ways of representing it, are part of a modern apprehension of reality I find deeply moving because of what has been stripped from it. (Byatt 1992, 284)

22The way Patricia is described in her ventures in the midday sun evokes one of Van Gogh’s description of himself in one of his letters, which Byatt quotes: ‘As for myself I feel much better here than I did in the North. I work even in the middle of the day, in the full sunshine, without any shadow at all . . .’ (Byatt 1992, 300)

23Interestingly, Byatt declares in this essay that she is not so much fascinated by the man who may have died for daring to look straight at the sun and fought with ‘the fundamental forces of the universe’ (Byatt 1992, 276), (a reminder of Bataille’s ‘solar sacrifice’ on which she elaborates), but by the painter who gave the things he painted such a powerful material presence. Repeatedly, as she quotes from Van Gogh’s letters, Byatt finds this power not only in the painter’s paintings but in his own descriptions of his paintings. Antonin Artaud, according to Byatt, is one of the commentators who most eloquently celebrated the power of these descriptions, and she chooses to quote Artaud at length:

How easy it seems to write like this . . .. Well, try it then, and tell me whether, not being the creator of a Van Gogh canvas, you could describe it as simply, succinctly, objectively, permanently, validly, solidly, opaquely, massively, authentically, and miraculously as in this little letter of his. (Byatt 1992, 279)

24The elemental force that transpires both from Van Gogh’s paintings and his letters finds itself translated in Artaud’s string of adverbs, all of which point to a thereness of the object, a recalcitrance which suggests the impossibility to appropriate what is offered to the gaze. One may feel that the creator has effaced himself to convey the ‘nakedness’ which Byatt refers to. Yet rather than an absence of mediation (antithetic of ‘creation’), the effort seems to lie in the invention of a ‘miraculous ‘authenticity’. ‘Opacity’ can be attributed to a ‘simplicity’ that comes from a process of ‘stripping’; equally it may emerge from the recalcitrance of what is inseparably woven: whether it be the knot formed by the encounter between subject and object, the blurring of perception and imagination or the merging of multiple sensations into one. Byatt’s long essay is entirely built around De Quincey’s idea of the ‘involute’, defined as ‘a perplexed combination of concrete objects’ or ‘compound experience incapable of being disentangled’ (Byatt 1992, 265). In ‘Van Gogh, Death and Summer’, Byatt notes that she has produced her own involute by writing on Artaud writing on Van Gogh writing on his own paintings and by including in this gallery so many others like Rilke and Wallace Stevens. The South which Byatt creates in ‘Crocodile Tears’ also partakes of the involute: the pictorial and the textual, the elemental and the historical all combine to produce this ‘compound experience incapable of being disentangled’. with a powerful accent on the ‘combination of concrete objects’ described ‘solidly, opaquely, massively’.

25The ‘story of fire and ice’ remains a story in which images are narrative components arranged in linear succession, and yet what the reader is left with at the end of the story is perhaps more like a picture made of pictures, or ‘patches of time’ to take up the first words of the story. The resistance to linearity lies not only in the entangled overall composition but in the fragments that jut out with particular sharpness and come back while others disappear. To the power of ‘indifferent curiosity’, which Byatt uses artistically, one should add the effect of involuntary memory which allows images to impose themselves in a random and unpredictable way. Projecting a long stay in Nîmes, Patricia happens, interestingly, to have set herself the task of reading Proust in French and buys the three Pléiade volumes of À la recherche. Something comes to disturb the professed logic of a ‘glass-eyed’ (Byatt 1999, 40) indifference that would give the same attention and the same importance to everything: what comes to matter always remains partly beyond the control of the ‘indifferent’ mind and the ‘indifferent’ gaze. At the same time indifference continues to prevail in the sense that what potentially matters is not pre-determined on principle; it lies in concrete objects whose power can never be entirely elucidated—in a recalcitrance which brings out the indifference of the objects themselves. The South that paints itself in ‘Crocodile Tears’ is, and is not, Patricia’s.

26All the way through and right till the end, the story explores the power of the detail, of the fragment or the shard. On the last page, as Patricia is standing in ‘a green English churchyard’ in front of the tombstone others have erected for Tony, her eye is arrested by ‘the glittering expanse of white chips framed in a white stone square’:

She remembered Nîmes, like a hot blue and golden ball, containing creamy stone cylinders and cubes. She thought of the unknown North, the green fjords, the ice, the lights, the one tree. She said:

‘You would like me to accompany you?’ (Byatt 1999, 67)

27Conjured up by glittering white chips, the South can find itself summed up in an image that could be called ‘elemental’ if we accept that it may mean ‘minimal’, stripped to something essential—and that in this case will feed the desire for a sort of elemental North.

28One question voiced on the first page runs through the story: ‘How do you decide when to stop looking at something? It is not like a book, page after page, page after page, end’ (Byatt 1999, 3). Byatt resists the pull of the arrow that drives the narrative forward. We could argue that the traumatic event that takes Patricia Nimmo south is only a pretext for the writer to indulge in a visual experience, to go once more in search images and colours with the help of words. That the South she is after should be sought for some elemental quality is something that transpires page after page and that is underlined by the powerful presence of Van Gogh in the story—a reference that also points out that the precise nature of that elementality remains open.

Conclusion

30Paradox is after all contained in the title chosen by Byatt. The story goes that crocodiles shed tears while eating their prey—and at the same time keep tearing their prey to bits as they shed tears: hence the phrase, ‘crocodile tears’, popularised by Shakespeare, and its association with hypocrisy and deceit. In the case of Patricia, tears tend to flow when not expected and remain imprisoned behind ‘a glass-eyed indifference’ when expected. Whether one is led to ponder on the startling presence of tears or on their baffling absence, the title places the accent on a form of disjunction, heightened by shock or trauma, which becomes a way of seeing. While suggesting that one cannot stop at what one sees, the tears of the crocodile can compel us to stop and look and consider the extraordinary image the reptile presents without trying directly to make sense of it. Byatt’s appeal to our gaze is confirmed by the fact that the image of the crocodile finds a material inscription in the reproduction of the little coin placed at the forefront of the story, although in this case the crocodile is tied to a palm tree. The tiny emblem of the city is also the fragment that stands as a synecdoche of Patricia’s South, tying together history and her story. For this reason, too, the crocodile holds far more than meets the eye. The pleasure of the reader may reside above all in the possibility to unfold the multiple layers of meanings contained in the title. But it is also Byatt’s power to condense, materialise and entangle so many ideas in one single image that delights. Without any contradiction, her South manages to be both profuse and elemental, both eloquent and indifferent.