Intro      Writing       Les mots et les noms       The unspeakable Other       Painting       Mathematics       The Thing Itself       Bibliography

Writing the thing itself

From the outset, in the contents page and the epigraphs, Still Life asks to be regarded as a serious work. Some of the chapter titles suggest didactic expositions, such as 'Culture' and 'History'. Others allude to canonical literature, such as 'A l'Éclat des Jeunes Gens en Fleurs'[1] and 'Behold the Child'[2]). No less than four epigraphs preface the text: one in Latin, translated, and three in French, untranslated, two of which are taken from Proust, and one from Cuvier, quoted by Michel Foucault. Its literary credentials and its cultural expectations of its readers are flourished from the outset. One of these epigraphs, taken from Proust's Du côté de chez Swann (volume one of À la Recherche du Temps Perdu), sets out the most idealised relationship between words and things:

Les mots nous présent des choses une petite image claire et usuelle comme celles qu'on suspend aux murs des écoles pour donner aux enfants l'exemple de ce qu'est un établi, un ouiseau, une fourmilière, choses conçues comme pareilles à toutes celles de même sorte.[3]

In this schema, the world of things can be exactly represented in language, a view which in the opening pages of the prologue and throughout the novel is problematised.

Two artistic projects confront the relationship between words and things: Alexander Wedderburn's struggle to write a verse-drama about Van Gogh, and Byatt's own struggle to write the novel, foregrounded in a series of authorial interventions so that her putative intentions for the novel become part of it. In the prologue, set in 1980, Alexander reflects back on his play while looking at Van Gogh paintings and recalls how

At first he had thought that he could write a plain, exact verse with no figurative language, in which a yellow chair was the thing itself, a yellow chair, as a round gold apple was an apple or a sunflower a sunflower. (SL, 2)

At first glance, this seems a reasonable ambition. However, it was, he concludes in retrospect, an impossibility:

But it couldn't be done. Language was against him, for a start. Metaphor lay coiled in the name sunflower, which not only turned towards but resembled the sun, the source of light. (SL, 2)

The arguments and illustrations in the novel of why 'it couldn't be done' are frequently contradictory, and clustered around three central points: language as 'against us'; metaphor; and the 'busy automatically connecting mind' (SL, 199). For Alexander, in the passage quoted above, the inherent metaphoricity of names brings too many associations in the wake of a word: one cannot talk about a sunflower itself when through the name one is already talking about the sun and drawing comparisons between the two. Elsewhere, again, we are told 'Language is against us' (SL, 284) in connection with Darwin's attempts to avoid personifying the forces of natural selection. The problem lies with metaphor, which is unavoidable, being inherent in language.

Another example will illustrate the ubiquity of metaphor. In the chapter 'Names of Grasses', Marcus, studying for his A-levels and recovering from a nervous breakdown, finds peace and calm in the deliberate, scientific naming of things. A list of seventeen Latin and common names of grasses is given as an example of naming which is 'not consuming, not even humanising but simply naming the multitudinous things to be seen, for the sake of seeing them more clearly.' (SL, 363) This is close to Proust's ideal relationship between words and things. Literary naming, it is suggested, might fail, but scientific naming can preserve the neat correspondence between word and thing, without inviting a host of associations. This, however, is swiftly undermined:

But even in the act of naming, we make metaphors. Consider the grasses, so carefully distinguished one from the other. They are little figures of speech. Glastridium — nit-grass, from gastridion, a little swelling. Aira — hair-grass, from airo, to destroy (a destructive grass). Panicum, or panick-grass, from panis, bread, because the seeds of this grass can be milled and eaten. Arrhenatherum is from arrhen, male, and ather, an awn... And then the vernal grass, anthoxanthum anthos, a flower, xanthos, next to phalaris — phalos, shining, and suddenly, do we have a description, or an evocation of the fields of light? (SL, 365)

If one has read Virgin in the Garden, the first book of the tetralogy in which Marcus's mathematical visions and nerves reached a crisis point, the origins of the Latin names gain further meaning: it was the 'field of light' — perhaps a mathematical vision, perhaps photosensitivity — that sent Marcus into a panic, the cause of his first seeking out the cheery Biology teacher, Lucas Simmons; it was on one of their pseudo-scientific, pseudo-religious outings that they picnicked on bread in a field, attempted a ritual burning of hair and grass using a magnifying glass and sunlight (a destruction with light); on this outing Marcus reluctantly, momentarily held Simmons's swollen genitals until — in Byatt's words — they 'flowered' (The Virgin in the Garden, 411); the whole relationship proved profoundly destructive to Marcus's already frail sense of reality, and led to both Lucas and Marcus having breakdowns. The individual words are metaphors; taken as a whole, they refer back to the very experience from which Marcus is recovering through the enumeration of these Latin names.

Byatt's own aspirations for accurate naming in her novel are similar to Alexander's: 'I had the idea, when I began this novel, that it would be a novel of naming and accuracy.' (SL, 364) In order to achieve this, we are told, she attempted — and failed — to avoid the metaphoricity which in the prologue was declared inevitable. In one passage, she writes, 'I had the idea that this novel could be written innocently, without recourse or reference to other people's thoughts, without, as far as possible, recourse to simile or metaphor' (SL, 131) and again, later, 'I even thought of trying to write without figures of speech, but had to give up that plan quite early.' (SL, 364) Here, metaphor has become avoidable, at least hypothetically: 'It may be possible to name without metaphor, to describe, simply and clearly, to categorise and distinguish... There would be a heavy emphasis on nouns, on naming, in such a hypothetical book, and also I suspect on adjectives, those unfashionable categorisers.' (SL, 364) This is the second time adjectives are lauded as the potential solution to the possibility of accurate representation: in the midst of Alexander's struggle for the right words to describe a plum, comes the observation that adjectives, generally 'felt to be a sign of looseness and vagueness', are 'in fact... the opposite, at their best, an instrument for precision.' (SL, 199)

We can, it transpires, write 'against the grain of the language we have' (SL, 284) and metaphor may not be inherent in language, but another problem awaits us regardless. Consider the description which is posited for the plums, in which the words chosen are, the text insists, not metaphoric:

You may use the word 'bloom' for the haze on this plum, and it will call up in the mind of any competent reader that the plum is glistening, overlaid with a matt softness. You may talk about the firm texture of the flesh, and these words will not be metaphors, bloom and flesh, as the earlier 'cleft' was certainly not a metaphor... But you cannot exclude from the busy automatically-connecting mind possible metaphors, human flesh for fruit flesh, flower-bloom, skin bloom, bloom of ripe youth for this powdery haze, human clefts, declivities, cleavages for that plain noun. (SL, 199)

Here, the text argues that the metaphoricity dragging other meanings in a word's wake is inherent not in language but in the 'busy, automatically-connecting mind'. This phrase is echoed later: 'we cannot resist the connecting and comparing habit of the mind'. Analogy is irresistible, inherent in the human mind, and more than that is a precondition of thought: following on the heels of the impossibility of describing a plum as a plum, the thing itself, without involving human flesh, human blooming skin, human clefts, comes the observation that 'analogy was a way of thought and without it thought was impossible.' (SL, 6) Frederica, studying at Cambridge, finds she cannot avoid the associations she has learnt; even her knitting, despite her best attempts, is informed by the Freudian interpretations of images with which she is surrounded. She has 'moments of wishing to see pens as pens, hats as hats, keys as keys... But she could not do it.' (SL, 256) One cannot, in a post-Freudian context, evade the thoughts others have had about pens, hats, keys; Byatt's idea of writing 'without recourse to reference to other people's thoughts' (SL, 131) is doomed, as she acknowledges: 'This turned out to be impossible: one cannot think at all without a recognition and realignment of ways of thinking and seeing we have learned over time.' (SL, 131)

Analogy, by this logic, is inescapable. Elsewhere in the novel, however, it is condemned as a specific fault:

Frederica's friends would have pounced on Marcus's history and the cleistogamous flower[4] and thought they had understood something because they had seen an analogy. Whereas in fact, part of such an instant vision is the closing-off of other ways of seeing. (SL, 364-5)

Here, the automatically-connecting mind becomes not merely a regrettable but unavoidable condition, but something to be criticised, and something specific to the academic world of Frederica's friends. The 'other ways of seeing' to which the passage refers is the categorisation and naming of grasses that proved so metaphoric, thus bringing us full circle.

One cannot say, looking back over these excerpts, that the text has posited any consistent thesis about the relationship between words and things. Contradictions abound. To recapitulate briefly: language is against us, but we can write against the grain of language; metaphor is inherent in language, even in individual words, but one can write without metaphor, hypothetically at least; analogy, the basis of metaphor, is inherent not in language but in the human mind, and is a precondition of thought, but it is to be criticised as a closing-off of other ways of seeing. It must be remembered also that in the novel these contradictory ideas do not succeed each other in the order given here; rather, they are littered throughout the text and so remain contradictory rather than advancing towards any synthesis or conclusion. Poor philosophy, or deconstruction's ideal free play? That question will be suspended, for the time being, as we cannot advance much further without a firmer theoretical basis.

1 This refers to the second volume of Marcel Proust's À la Recherche du Temps Perdu, titled À l'Ombre des Jeunes Filles en Fleurs. 

2 Line 87 of Wordsworth's Ode (Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood). 

3 'Words give us a clear, ordinary little picture of things, like the ones hung up on school walls to show children what a desk is, or a bird, or an anthill, things thought of as exactly the same as all the others of their kind.' 

4 The cleistogamous flower is self-fertilising and never opens; Marcus, since his experiences with Lucas Simmons, has 'a deep, consciously formulated desire not to be sexual at all' (SL, 37).