Tag: German novellas

L’Arrabbiata and Other Italian Novellas – Paul Heyse

During the nineteenth century the great prestige form of prose literature in German-speaking Europe was not the novel, but the novella. The best writers of the time were hard at work crafting powerful, rich, narrative prose at lengths that allowed works to be read in a single sitting, works which were of at times incredible quality. Polished, focused, though they often were, the Novelle-tradition was also incredibly varied, ranging from the ecologically-minded ghost story of Theodor Storm’s Rider on the White Horse to the murder mystery of Annette von Droste-Hülshoff’s Jew Beech Tree, from the moral tales of Gottfried Keller to the modernist-inspiring intensity of Georg Büchner’s story of madness, Lenz.  

With so much writing in a specific form, there soon came attempts to theorise, classify, exclude and include. Goethe called novellas a “sich ereignete unerhörte Begebenheit” (an unprecedented, extraordinary event that has nevertheless occurred), which, like his own novella (called Novella) confused as much as it clarified things. For Ludwig Tieck, it was all about the Wendepunkt – the turning point. Theodor Storm, in my favourite definition, called novellas “the sister of the drama and the severest form of prose fiction.” None of these is suitable for every novella, but each gives a sense of how at least some of these stories worked. They were mainly short-to-medium length narratives with a high symbolic charge, focusing on an important event in the life of a single individual.  

One other writer whose theory is known to students of the Novelle-tradition is Paul Heyse, one of Germany’s first Nobel Laureates and creator of the “Falkentheorie”. As described by Idara Crespi in the introduction to a new edition of four of Heyse’s novellas translated by Renata Lenz, L’Arrabbiata and Other Italian Novellas, this is “a pivot. The point where all the accumulated pressure of the narrative tilts and pours in one direction.” It is also something specific which sets the story apart from all others – a particular thing, or even just a moment that seems utterly unique. In the title story a girl bites the man who tries to seduce her, in another what is special is a work of embroidery.

I had not read Heyse before, so when Crespi’s Espresso publishing house, which aims to focus on furnishing unjustly-forgotten European works with new translations, asked me whether I would like a copy, I agreed without difficulty. This blog’s own focus is similar, after all. The review, however, comes only from me.  

The Stories 

Paul Heyse was born in Berlin in 1830, but he spent most of his long life in Munich, where he passed away in 1914, after winning the Nobel Prize two years earlier. The time when Heyse was not in Munich he largely spent in Italy. Like many German artists, most famously Goethe, Heyse found in the southern country a wellspring of inspiration. The four novellas collected in L’Arrabbiata and Other Italian Novellas showcase the extent of that inspiration. The title story is a drama set in a coastal fishing village. The Embroiderer of Treviso is a historical tale from north Italy, while The Wedding on Capri is a kind of comedy of manners where German tourists come up against Italian mores. The last, Nerina, is a dramatization of a key moment from the life of the Italian poet Giacomo Leopardi. Each is entirely unlike the others, which does mean that the enjoyment of such a collection is bound to be a matter of personal taste.  

For me, my favourites were the first story, L’Arrabbiata, and the last one, Nerina. I liked the The Embroiderer of Treviso as well, while I felt The Wedding on Capri was more like a weak version of the kind of tale Stefan Zweig (or even Henry James) would later perfect. 

L’Arrabbiata  

Laurella, a poor young woman in Sorrento across from the island of Capri, is “L’Arrabbiata” – the angry one. Her father is dead, her mother ill and unable to survive without her daughter’s support. One day Laurella crosses over to Capri, intending to sell some materials to two women there. The boatman is a young man, Antonino. They avoid one another’s eyes. The only other passenger is a priest. After chatting about her mother’s health, the priest chides her for her reputation as one who will not dance or sing with others, and mentions a suitor who was rejected in the past by her. She explains that she has a private reason for her actions and decision “to be subject to no man who would ill-use me and then caress me”. It is the abuse she witnessed her mother receive at the hands of her father which makes her determined to defend herself as her mother could not.  

The priest is to stay the night on Capri to tend to a sufferer there, leaving Antonino to take Laurella back on her own later that day. During the journey they sit “like the bitterest enemies”, before eventually an argument breaks out. The boatman declares “that here you are in my power, and must do what I will” and seizes her, only to find his hand bitten and bloodied. “Must I do what you will?” Laurella asks, then leaps into the open sea. But when Antonino recovers himself and tells her she is too far from land to survive she climbs back in and rows with him back to the shore in silence. Later that night, however, she comes to him with healing herbs and apologises, even breaks into tears. Love, at least of a sort, is admitted, and with that the story draws to a close. 

L’Arrabbiata was one of the first novellas Heyse wrote and remains his most famous. That bite is strange and unforgettable. But that does not quite answer what makes it interesting. One way to look at that, as it often is with novellas, is through the idea of determinism. Fate, in other words. 

L’Arrabbiata as Tale of Fate 

All but the most inventive fiction is determinist by its very form, as the words are fixed upon the page long before we open up the book. But with novellas this feeling is particularly stark. They are simply not long enough even to give the illusion of an alternative, of branching paths. Instead, we often have a sense of characters hurtling towards their doom. So it is, in a way, in L’Arrabbiata. Laurella knows what fate wants for her – a marriage – and fears the violence, the “look in his eyes” that men have when they alternate between abuse and tender words. Her rejection, before the novella begins, of another suitor, seems to indicate her victory in the struggle with her fate. In becoming “the angry one”, she has let herself be defined in a way that makes her safe at a cost of partial isolation from her community.  

But she is not safe. Antonino loves her and does not resist his own feelings. At first, he tries to use the weight of society’s judgement to force her into his arms – “one day you’ll grow lonely, and then, wild as you are, you’ll take the first man who comes”. When that does not work, he turns to force. Laurella’s bite seems at first glance like her successfully resisting him, but I read it much more negatively. She gains a moment, but soon enough she has to return to the boat. Like trains in 19th century fiction, the boat of L’Arrabbiata is ultimately a symbol of the limited choices people, but especially women, had in life. Laurella can drown, or she can get back in. She chooses life over principles. But also, I think, because those principles have already been damaged beyond repair.  

In reacting with force herself, by drawing blood, Laurella essentially discovers to herself that she is no better than the men. (Though, perhaps she had no choice.) This is reflected too by the tears (another liquid) that pour down her cheeks when she meets Antonino later in the evening. Her surrender to him is, on the one hand, an acknowledgement of her own repressed romantic feelings. On the other, it’s a surrender to the idea that she is, like the men, at base capable of cruelty and violence. That, in a way, they deserve one another. L’Arrabbiata is a love story with a happy ending, but it’s also a kind of tragedy, as Laurella’s idea of herself is crushed by the reality of her feelings and actions. The end result is that the forces of patriarchal society, emphasised by the priest – who gets the final word – are victorious.  

Freedom was mere illusion, the woman who tried to be an individual was crushed. But as often happens with novellas, it made for a good story.   

Nerina  

My second favourite of the novellas collected in L’Arrabbiata and Other Italian Novellas was Nerina. This is a tale of a moment from the life of the marvellous pessimist Giacomo Leopardi, an Italian poet of the early 19th century beloved by Schopenhauer. As with L’Arrabbiata, indeed with all the stories here, it’s a love story. Leopardi, returned to his family home in Recanati, meets his neighbours’ daughter, Nerina, much older now than when last he saw her, and like Laurella, an independent spirit. She has even read Leopardi’s poems, even though they have been censured by the Church. Her youthful spirit makes an impression on Leopardi, whose gloom is the overriding characterisation Heyse gives us of him besides his well-known ill-health. At the same time, Leopardi is shocked by the effect he has had on her – “forget the premature and mournful wisdom you have learned from my poems!” 

That night, they exchange, from window to window, his latest poem for a bouquet of carnations and some of her hair. But like a miserable figure in a work of Dostoevsky’s, Leopardi is confused and unnerved by his own feelings and resolves to avoid her thereafter. It does not work. Her father wants to enlist Leopardi to convince Nerina to marry a suitor she does not wish to, turning him into the agent of the forces of society he has little respect for. Nevertheless, he agrees, telling her off for “hav[ing] nothing to do with the happiness [the suitor] has chosen for you”. She listens, responds by reciting his own poetry to him with its “bitter joys”, and the two of them end in an embrace. Yet still he goes, encouraging her to ignore his poetry and its messages: 

“Promise me – when I am gone – that you will try to find your way into life as thousands do. I am not asking you to do violence to your heart. But you are young, Nerina, and life transforms us in wondrous ways.” Leopardi leaves and, perhaps predictably, a few months later learns of her death. She did not, it seems, find her way into life after all. 

Ways into Poetry 

As with L’Arrabbiata, we can read Nerina through the lens of fatalism, but here it is less interesting. The novella is trapped not by its form, but by the facticity of at least one of its central figures. (Nerina’s identity and reality remain debated by scholars). The story here can only end one way. Nerina will become a poem; Leopardi will continue being a poet.  

Instead, what I liked about Nerina was the how it worked in Leopardi’s poetry. Many 19th century novellas took artists as their subjects, from Grillparzer’s The Poor Musician to Mörike’s Mozart on the Way to Prague, but Nerina, taking as it does a poet as the artist, is able to achieve a better integration of creation into itself. The story begins shortly after Leopardi has finished writing his most famous poem, “L’infinito”, in 1819, and finishes with him considering the lines to Nerina he placed within his later poem, “Le Ricordanze” (Memories), written in 1829 while at home again. But Nerina takes Leopardi’s ideas and tries to integrate them into her own barred, limited life at home. She poeticises her life.  

When she meets the poet there’s a shock, because he had not appreciated the impact his own words might have had. That in a way, living, she has become more of a poet than he is. Leopardi is not the hero of this work, as the title should have warned me. He tries to turn her away from the kind of poetically-charged life he allows himself, and acts as an instrument of a society he himself has no belief in. She, meanwhile, dies for beauty. Leopardi’s despairing response, the text argues, is creation. He may have failed to be true to her while alive, but at least he can be true to her in his verse. The outcome is bittersweet, but true enough to my understanding of Leopardi’s pessimism. In his failure before Nerina, we can see an example of the way that his own actions might have fed into his disappointment with life, a disappointment that runs through all his work.  

Conclusion 

The other stories are all novellas serious enough to handle a blog post’s worth of analysis, especially the The Embroiderer of Treviso, which combines the historical writing of C.F. Meyer and the bloodiness of Kleist, but space is limited and so is our time. I have been glad to get a little acquainted with Heyse even if, at this point, I am still not quite sure how far I like him or even really know who he is. A collection like L’Arrabbiata and Other Italian Novellas shows his range, but there seems no solid commonality under all these works, nothing distinctly “Heysian”, in the in the way that I think there is for Storm, Stifter, Kleist, or E.T.A. Hoffmann. This, maybe, makes the collection a good first introduction to the kind of things that were possible for the magicians who wrote novellas, even if, the title story perhaps excepted, I would not say these are the best novellas I have yet read.  

Nevertheless, I can easily recommend this book to those who are interested in the craft of writing. I think novellas in particular are incredible teaching devices for writers. More expansive than short stories, they guide us on shape, on prose, on narration, in ways that novels can do but often fail to do, with so much else going on. The inventiveness of the form has not yet been exhausted, as contemporary fiction, in German and not, has shown on this blog. (See Grass, Walser) Reading something like this collection a good introduction to just some of the possibilities on offer, and I hope that the translator, Renata Lenz, is able to translate more novellas from the original. The tradition really is wonderful and thoroughly underappreciated outside of Germany.  

Thanks to Chiara and Espresso for the copy. More details on their website, or in the usual places where books are sold online.

The book was provided without an obligation to review or link onwards attached. While I wouldn’t mind continuing to read similar new old texts from time to time as it is in line with what I write about anyway, if regular readers of the blog would much prefer this to be my only foray into Bookfluencing, feel free to reach out privately via the contact form / email.

A Midlife Crisis Novel – Martin Walser’s Runaway Horse / Ein Fliehendes Pferd

Based on the way I was taught German, it was hard to avoid the manifestly silly impression that Germany is made up entirely of old people and people “with a migration background”. This novella, Runaway Horse (Ein Fliehendes Pferd), by the German author Martin Walser, does admittedly deal with the first of these groups, so at least my knowledge of Germany’s aging society was not entirely wasted. As societies everywhere are aging, I suppose we simply have to get used to the increasing ubiquity of the midlife crisis novel. This one, from 1978, considers the effects of meeting someone whose life choices are completely different to our own not quite too late for us to turn things around if we decided theirs were actually better.

The novella follows closely a schoolteacher, Helmut Halm, and his wife Sabine as they enjoy a holiday on Lake Constance. There, an old schoolfellow of Helmut, Klaus Buch, likewise on holiday with his own much younger wife Helene, encounters them one day. This sets the stage for a clash of values, because the two couples, in particular the two male figures, have very different ideas of life. Both, however, are middle aged and having to consider the shapes of their lives, both what has passed and what is to come.

The Halms are bourgeois. Helmut has brought a five-volume set of Kierkegaard’s diaries with him on holiday, and he and his wife can think of nothing better to do of an evening than drink wine and smoke. He is detached from the world, “his dream became to be unreachable”. There’s a sense that he enjoys the irony of the difference between his inner world, which filters the novella’s action, and the perception of him that others have. The Halms as a pair do not represent passivity so much as a resignation from the ambition of trying to sit at the centre of the world. Gladly on the margins, they enjoy what life has to offer them – good food, good wines, predictable holidays (they have been visiting Lake Constance for eleven years), and the life of the mind.

Klaus Buch and his wife are the opposite. Successful writers, they seem all action and good health. They avoid sugar, only drink water, and are always out running. They embody that German passion for aktiv holidays and the great outdoors. Several of the book’s set pieces take place on the boat that Klaus sails, or else in nature. If the Halms have given up on participation in life in their middle age, Klaus Buch resolutely refuses the same course. He memorably describes having “had to part with [his first wife] because he did not want, like a plant, to keep growing in a pot that was too small for him.” His new wife Helene, eighteen years younger, serves to keep him younger.

Seeing Helmut and Sabine at a café, Klaus and Helene decide to join them (and ruin their holiday). Helmut remembers next to nothing about the past, which in Klaus Buch’s telling becomes “more alive than the present”, and where Helmut was a considerably more impressive a figure than he has now become. (“Klaus Buch said… how happy he was to see that Helmut was no petit bourgeois. / Helmut thought: if there is anything I am, it’s a petit bourgeois”) Thus begins a story of incredible awkwardness, of sailing trips, hikes, and dinners, as Klaus Buch explains who Helmut was and how amazing he was, and Helmut is forced to keep up a kind of mute pretence that it was indeed so.

One of the elements of ein Fliehendes Pferd’s formal mastery is that this is all that the story works with, this opposition of worldviews and two couples. There literally are only these four characters with speaking roles – Helmut and Sabine, Klaus and Helene. Yet the whole thing becomes rich through an intensity of language created out of its apparent simplicity. The word “adventure” is repeated like a mark of shame for Helmut, whose life lacks so much of it. Likewise, the mineral water that the Buchs drink versus the wines of the Halms are obvious symbols of their two attitudes to life. “You don’t like me anymore, eh?” Klaus says to his wife so many times that eventually it becomes more performance than affection, and then there are the references to “flight” or “trotting” that mark Helmut’s own thoughts, as the fleeing horse of the title.

By being so normal in content – a fairly standard lakeside holiday – the text elevates what it does say into something almost mythical. Everything becomes intense and symbolic. The German here relies heavily on reported speech, which is its own grammatical construction in the language, requiring no “he said” or similar verbs to keep us aware that we are deep within someone else’s words (and world). Like in Thomas Bernhard, we are immersed in another’s world for pages at a time, but unlike in Bernhard, (with the possible exception of Correction), we are shifting from consciousness to consciousness as they battle. First Klaus Buch will speak for pages, with us trapped in his vision, then Helmut will go home with Sabine, and spend a few pages musing in his own mind. Finally, near the novella’s end we get to see a little of Helene’s thoughts too.

The ruination of the Halm’s holiday is less significant than the shaking of their world, once Klaus and his wife step onto the scene. With their enthusiasm, zest, pep, or however you want to call it, the Buchs are dangerous. Klaus talks a lot about sex – Helmut and his wife don’t even do it anymore. (“How often do you bang your wife, eh?” Being one of the more crass things Klaus says when he and Helmut are alone.) At first Helmut is just grumpy, but gradually he realises there is real danger here. He quite likes Helene, whose breasts he keeps stealing furtive glances at, just as he realises Sabine quite likes Klaus. There’s no risk that either of the Buchs is interested in an affair, but there is a risk that just by being there they reveal the weaknesses of the Halms’ lives. Beauty and energy always have their attractions.

For me they certainly do. At first, it was hard not to prefer Klaus, with all that inner drive. Perhaps he will get Helmut out running and ditching the fags and booze, I thought. Sure, Klaus is annoying, but he’s not wrong to be living life the way he was. (Just as Helmut wasn’t wrong either, just less exciting to read about). When Klaus quite literally leaps onto a wild horse dangerously attempting to flee a field, it’s an obvious representation of him saving the moping Helmut. Why seem and be passive, I thought, as Helmut does, when you can be?

It may be true that Klaus undermines himself by seeming something of a parasite. He claims he needs Helene to remain physically young, just as he eventually admits he needs Helmut to remain mentally young. However, ultimately, when he and Helmut go on a sailing trip alone and the weather becomes stormy, the overall impression is that Klaus is a heroic, Nietzschean (a name mentioned in the text) figure, while Helmut is a coward who wants to go home. As the weather worsens, Klaus “laughed and danced towards the mast”, truly Dionysiac. Then, moments later, the waves catch him and he is lost overboard, leaving Helmut to make his way back to shore however he can. So much for the other’s worldview, eh, triumphantly though it is lived even at the end.

The final chapter of the novella provides the necessary correction to our idea of Klaus. Helene joins Helmut and Sabine the next day and she decides to drink as much wine as she can with the other woman. Now, for the first time, the dominant consciousness of the novella is not Klaus or Helmut’s, but rather Helene’s, as she presents the private version of her husband. In this portrayal, Klaus is obsessed with his writing while utterly unsuccessful at it, controlling towards his wife (he practically tries to turn her into his daughter and literary inheritor), and a total “fantasist.” While readers go through ein Fliehendes Pferd thinking that it is Helmut who loves the distance between his inner world and appearance, ultimately Klaus seems the one who lives this disjuncture. Until they saw Helmut and Sabine, Helene says, Klaus talked about his idea of living far more than actually living it.

While all this is going on, Helmut himself is wracked with guilt over Klaus’s death, even though he bears no responsibility for it. He doesn’t drink with the women, and before Helene had turned up he had actually gone with Sabine to get activewear so they can change their lives. In other words, taken as a clash of ideologies, it appears that Klaus, dying, had won.

But then he actually turns up, having miraculously survived the storm at sea in something like a tragicomic moment of brilliance, and drags away Helene back into the hell of her life with him. Sabine and Helmut throw off their sports clothes and light up new cigarettes. It’s a very strange ending, insofar as it leaves us right back where we began. This connects the story to the novella’s epigraph from Kierkegaard’s Either/Or, where Kierkegaard, behind one of his typical masks, asks whether we could write a story between clashing worldviews where an “event” is not used to provide the grounds for the victory of one or the other of them. Because the story ends up right back at the beginning, with the Halms and the Buchs separated, and neither pairing having changed their views, we can say that Walser has delivered just that.

The problem is that nobody likes reading a story only to get back to the beginning. Even if the externals are the same as before, many cyclical stories imply a kind of internal revaluation of things. But here we have two worldviews that clash, are bruised, but then reconfirmed on each side. There’s not really a sense that anyone has learned anything. The novella has this obsessive normality to it – you can sit on a bench at a national park, like I did yesterday in my part of Germany, and imagine the whole thing playing out among the middle aged couples you see walking past with their dogs – and then at the last moment Walser delivers Klaus incredibly from the jaws of death. It’s quite silly.

The idea of stasis or stagnation is one that I think does make for interesting literature, and the topic of how our decisions shape our lives, including from middle age onwards, can never not be important to people who have to deal with questions like that during their own time on earth far more than they have to consider, for example, how they would react if they woke up one morning and discovered they were a bug. But I find Walser’s treatment of his topic here, his sudden renunciation of the exploration of the ideas, a little sad in the end. To go back entirely to where we began as perfectly as Ein Fliehendes Pferd does, (whose last words are the novella’s first words), at least when trying to tell this story, all seems to say the story was not worth telling to begin with.

It’s a sharp contrast with the obvious mastery of the nuts and bolts of writing which Walser displays, from his careful use of symbols to his powerful portrayals of contrasting consciousnesses in the narration, and does leave a bit of a bitter taste in the mouth. I am glad it was only a novella.  

Two Postmodern novellas – A. S. Byatt’s Angels and Insects

A friend of mine is named Antonia, after A.S. Byatt, which was reason enough for me to want to read the author. If any writer can inspire someone so much that they are willing to name their child after them, then that author must be doing something right. I asked my Antonia where to begin with Byatt (thankfully, Antonia is a fan of her namesake) and she suggested I try this collection of two novellas, Angels and Insects. The two stories here, “Morpho Eugenia” and “The Conjugial Angel” are both set in the Victorian period and engage with anxieties relating to the advance of science and its relation to the spirit.

“Morpho Eugenia” tells the story of how a young explorer’s experience of the Amazon and study of Darwin draw him into conflict with the patriarch of an English country home who does not want to see science undermine his religious beliefs. “The Conjugial Angel”, meanwhile, is the story of a group of spiritualists at a séance and the relationship between Emily Jesse, née Tennyson, and her dead fiancé, Arthur Hallam, who was immortalised through her brother Alfred’s poem “In Memoriam”.

Byatt is often named as a postmodernist English writer, and Angels and Insects provides ample evidence for that claim. These novellas are formally inventive, with scientific quotations, real characters, stories-within-stories, and plenty of poetry. At the same time, their settings and topics make them cousins to the German novellas of the nineteenth century, which like Angels and Insects were highly symbolic works, densely packed and interpretatively complex. Byatt’s intelligence is unmissable – she clearly did her reading, whether it be on mediums or on entomology. But is there a heart here, too? I propose to focus on the first story, “Morpho Eugenia”, to answer.

Morpho Eugenia

Morpho Eugenia is a clever and decidedly strange novella. It begins with William Adamson having returned to his benefactor’s home from an expedition to the Amazon, penniless after a shipwreck. Lord and Lady Alabaster have a great many children, and William finds himself falling in love with the eldest daughter, Eugenia. A marriage would be inappropriate, because of the differences in their stations, but William so impresses Lord Alabaster that eventually he grants him his daughter’s hand, and the two end up wedded together. At the house and surrounding estate, William works to sort through Lord Alabaster’s collection of scientific specimens – though the old man does not leave the house himself, still he has his passions and interests.

In addition, William helps Lord Alabaster with a book the latter is working on. Lord Alabaster is determined to prove the “argument by design” – that nature’s complexity proves God’s existence. William, a Darwinist, is to help Alabaster by challenging his ideas. William’s final role is to provide some education for the younger Alabaster children, and to this end he builds various exhibits in the house – anthills to be monitored, and the like. In this he is helped by the servants and by a young woman attached to the household, Matty Crompton.

Insects and People

At first “Morpho Eugenia” appears to set itself up to be a standard tragic love story, as so many novellas are – I thought of Storm’s “Aquis Submersus” and Hofmann’s “Sandman” when William wrote in his diary that fatal phrase “I shall die if I cannot have her”, referring to Eugenia. Instead, William marries Eugenia quite successfully, and they produce many children of their own over the course of the story. But at this point the story seems to take on another classic novella idea – that of madness. William has returned from a world untouched by civilization, as his fellow Englishmen might understand it, to a luxurious country estate. Yet from the first moments, when William takes part in a ball, he finds himself noting many similarities between the two worlds- from the elaborate dresses of Amazon women and young British ladies, to the dances themselves.

As time goes on, these comparisons become more and more forceful. Eugenia, whose name connects her to the butterfly, morpho eugenia (of the novella’s title) is described like an insect in her pregnancy: “his wife slept alone in her white nest, and swelled slowly, developing large breasts and a creamy second chin.” When Eugenia keeps producing twins, the comparison gets even stronger – she seems less and less human to him. Meanwhile, the aristocratic house and the anthills are also a site of obvious comparison. For the powerful figures of both places are served by countless servants, darting through dark corridors. William’s sanity seems constantly under threat of splitting in this world, and he longs for the Amazon he left behind. 

But with that said, I think Byatt’s story hints at a madness that never truly arrives. William does not do anything in the novella, and his thoughts ultimately remain more or less under control. Perhaps the place where the insect-human comparison is most forceful is in the story’s treatment of the aristocracy, who are depicted as either indolent, or selfish, or outright cruel. Edgar Alabaster, who despises his new brother-in-law, is once found by William as he forces himself upon one of the servant girls. When William tries to stop him, Edgar declares that she – still a child – is “a nice little packet of flesh”. What appears to be William’s unstable psyche is used more effectively for social critique, suggesting that human beings may not be nearly so respectable as our insectoid brethren.

Religion and Science

William’s father, a butcher, believed in a God of hellfire and brimstone. William himself has little sympathy for religion as a result. Both stories in Angels and Insects are set after Charles Darwin’s work had revolutionised our understanding of the development of life on earth, and many of the key characters feel the impact of Darwin’s views upon the validity of their faith in God. Lord Alabaster has collected crate upon crate of animal and insectoid specimens from around the world, and he asks William to “make sense of it, lay it all out in some order or other” during his stay. His decision reflects a feeling that religion can no longer order the world, and that it must surrender that right to science. At the same time, Alabaster – who trained as a priest – is unable to relinquish his faith. Over the course of the novella, he makes spirited – but unbelievable – defences of God’s creation. At one point he suggests that love provides evidence of God’s existence. But William is ultimately only annoyed by these suggestions, based as they are not on reason at all.

There are many who refuse to believe in a world without God. When William raises the possibility to Alabaster the latter is aghast: “I cannot believe that, Mr Adamson. I cannot. It opens the path to a dark pit of horrors.” And “Morpho Eugenia”, with the constant presence of insects, reducing human beings into creepy-crawlies, certainly hints at what a horrific world such a godless world would be for some of its inhabitants. And yet at the same time, it falls into the clear anti-aristocratic undertone of the work. If there is no God, then why do the idle rich inhabit great country houses, while servants toil and suffer rape and abuse without a word of complaint. The Alabaster house becomes a microcosm of the world, and it shows how fragile that world is.

Formal Ingenuity

“Analogy is a slippery tool” says William at one point. “Men are not ants”. This is perhaps one of the key phrases of the novella. Another is “things are not what they seem”, which Matty Crompton offers. Byatt is great at confusing us by the sheer density of her reference and allusion. She quotes from the scientific treatises of the day freely alongside poetry, so that we feel she is hinting at much more than what she spells out. Men may not be ants, but “Morpho Eugenia” asks us to what extent a comparison is valid, and what kind of a comparison. Each metaphor is developed constantly, and always taken in new directions. My only complaint is that Byatt’s descriptions are far too rich, too colourful, so that she can belabour her ideas too heavily at times. The story would have been better, shorter, in other words.

To be told that things are not what they seem is to encourage us always to be on the lookout for new interpretations. Byatt includes a story, written by Matty Crompton, alongside scientific descriptions written by William himself. Each of these appears only tangentially related to the story, at least at first. But we know that something is there, and if we have the energy for it, certainly the story has a wondrous richness to it that will reward further thought and analysis.

The Heart of the Story

Yet I cannot say it came together perfectly. Leaving aside the overly flowery descriptions, and the occasionally clunky dialogue – characters often speak as though they are scientific treatises themselves – another problem in “Morpho Eugenia” is a certain absence of heart. William’s love for Eugenia turns out to be false, and this is understandable. There’s an easy moral in that about the fallibility of the heart and whirlwind romances. But the actual meat of the story has very little to get us emotionally invested. William’s madness never goes anywhere, meaning that we just have to read repeated unpleasant descriptions of women as egg-laying ants and vice versa without there being anything at stake. In the final ten pages of the story there is a turnaround, suddenly there is a character worth caring about and some action we might call heroic, but it is rather too late. There’s too much mush beforehand.

The Conjugial Angel

The second novella of Angels and Insects, “The Conjugial Angel”, is focused on a group performing seances to communicate with the world beyond. This kind of thing was popular in the latter part of the 19th century – there’s a bit of it in Anna Karenina, for example – and was inspired by the works of the Swedish mystic, Emanuel Swedenborg, who had apparently visited Heaven and had a guided tour. There are several characters at the séance, but the focus is on Emily Jesse, who was once Emily Tennyson, sister of Alfred, Lord Tennyson. Emily was once engaged to Arthur Hallam, about whom Tennyson wrote his great long poem “In Memoriam”. That poem is quoted liberally throughout the text, which is nice because it’s a lovely piece of work.

During the séance Emily hopes to hear from Arthur. Though she has now married – and been married for decades – still she treasures the memory of her first love.

Representing the dead

I do not want to go into the details of “The Conjugial Angel” – it has an even weaker plot than “Morpho Eugenia”, and the themes do not come together quite so well. However, what it does do of interest is depict the dead. Authors regularly use real figures in their stories – after all, it is part of the appeal of historical fiction. But using dead people is another matter. Even today, in our comparatively godless world, there is something of a taboo on the dead – we try not to speak ill of them. Byatt brings Arthur Hallam back as a spirit to guide the automatic writing at the séance, and I felt more than a little uncomfortable by the whole idea. I began writing in my margins that this was hugely inappropriate and morally absurd.

But then Byatt gives our medium, alone at home, another vision of him. I shall not spoil the details but it is one of the most extraordinary sequences I have yet read in a work of fiction. There was a gruesome, terrifying intensity to it. I felt as though Byatt truly had brought the dead man, maggot-stained, back to life, and I was so impressed. For that reason alone this novella is worth reading.

Conclusion

German novellas, which I know well, are focused on individual characters much more than on the plot or society which form the centres of novels. The force of a strong character can sustain a novella-length work, but rarely manages to sustain something longer. The plot of a novella cannot be a situation, because these are better suited for short stories; while a drawn-out plot often needs the development of a novella to truly draw us in. For that reason, though novellas are jewel-encrusted – densely symbolic and full of things to think about – they work best when driven by a character. The character of William Adamson does not provide sufficient backbone in “Morpho Eugenia” to make us want to keep reading, however clever the work is. The really interesting character is hidden from view until near the end, at which point we’ve already decided whether we’ll read the story or not.

I anticipate criticism from those who’ve read the story that even this is part of Byatt’s argumentation, such as: the character cannot be more prominent, because the story is drawing our attention to certain oppressive structures, class and gender among others. Even so, a story must make us want to read it. “The Conjugial Angel”, meanwhile, is burdened by the focus Byatt places on the different characters. Emily Tennyson’s story is the most interesting, and with less of the trimmings and lengthy descriptions, it could have been even more effective.

Byatt is extremely intelligent, and I like her formal ingenuity. But my criticism actually has nothing to do with her postmodernism, and everything to do with the foundations of stories, such as they have existed for thousands of years. Her descriptions are too long, too florid; her characters don’t always speak like human beings; and the stories would be more effective, thematically and from a storytelling perspective, if they were a bit shorter and more focused.

Yet all the Angels and Insects collects two provocative and interesting examples of the novella genre, and it is a book well worth trying.