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A. S. Byatt and Intellectual WomenAfterword: Ragnarok: The End of the Gods

A. S. Byatt and Intellectual Women: Afterword: Ragnarok: The End of the Gods [It seems fitting to conclude this study with a reading of Ragnarok: The End of the Gods (2011), arguably the book most overtly concerned with myth and with the value of women’s thinking and creative lives in Byatt’s oeuvre. This is, in part, because of Byatt’s forays into memoir in the latter part of this short book. By the time these allusions to her biography appeared in Ragnarok, regular readers of her work and its criticism were familiar with the key details of her life, and how they relate to her fiction. She has discussed the ‘story’ of herself as a bookish, sickly child, afraid of the frustrations represented by her housewife mother (in the 1991 Preface to The Shadow of the Sun, ix), her time as a student at Cambridge being taught by some of the ‘great men’ of English studies whilst secretly writing her first novel, and of her life as a ‘desperate faculty wife’, trying to finish that novel and see it published (xiii). The fascination she exerts for interviewers and readers is no less than a fascination with a formidable intellectual woman, whose status and legitimacy as an intellectual appear secure, although they were plainly hard-won. In her case, it seems that a process of ‘lamination’ has proved successful. Myths, in the sense of imaginative narratives with certain ties to the ‘real’, are the forces driving her fictions and they are also a significant part of the ‘material’ of her own biography. In Ragnarok, she reclaims this idea and puts it to work, turning that biography back into mythology in order to reveal the dialogues between the two kinds of narrative and, I contend, to attach greater meaning and discursive power to the mythic, as opposed to the narrowly, supposedly ‘factual’, accounts of the lives of other intellectual women. A key message to draw from Ragnarok is that when myth and fact are ‘laminated’ skilfully enough (although Byatt does not mention lamination, here, directly), real changes to lived experience are possible.] http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png

A. S. Byatt and Intellectual WomenAfterword: Ragnarok: The End of the Gods

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Publisher
Springer International Publishing
Copyright
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022
ISBN
978-3-031-08670-0
Pages
217 –223
DOI
10.1007/978-3-031-08671-7_7
Publisher site
See Chapter on Publisher Site

Abstract

[It seems fitting to conclude this study with a reading of Ragnarok: The End of the Gods (2011), arguably the book most overtly concerned with myth and with the value of women’s thinking and creative lives in Byatt’s oeuvre. This is, in part, because of Byatt’s forays into memoir in the latter part of this short book. By the time these allusions to her biography appeared in Ragnarok, regular readers of her work and its criticism were familiar with the key details of her life, and how they relate to her fiction. She has discussed the ‘story’ of herself as a bookish, sickly child, afraid of the frustrations represented by her housewife mother (in the 1991 Preface to The Shadow of the Sun, ix), her time as a student at Cambridge being taught by some of the ‘great men’ of English studies whilst secretly writing her first novel, and of her life as a ‘desperate faculty wife’, trying to finish that novel and see it published (xiii). The fascination she exerts for interviewers and readers is no less than a fascination with a formidable intellectual woman, whose status and legitimacy as an intellectual appear secure, although they were plainly hard-won. In her case, it seems that a process of ‘lamination’ has proved successful. Myths, in the sense of imaginative narratives with certain ties to the ‘real’, are the forces driving her fictions and they are also a significant part of the ‘material’ of her own biography. In Ragnarok, she reclaims this idea and puts it to work, turning that biography back into mythology in order to reveal the dialogues between the two kinds of narrative and, I contend, to attach greater meaning and discursive power to the mythic, as opposed to the narrowly, supposedly ‘factual’, accounts of the lives of other intellectual women. A key message to draw from Ragnarok is that when myth and fact are ‘laminated’ skilfully enough (although Byatt does not mention lamination, here, directly), real changes to lived experience are possible.]

Published: Aug 31, 2022

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