Novella Archives - Mostly About Stories

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 19^th 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.

Thomas Mann’s Gladius Dei and the Challenge of Modern Art

I confess I’ve never really gotten the hype with Thomas Mann. Or rather, the moment I start reading him I’m usually left either disappointed or confused. I blame his reputation. German students like me flock to read him but soon find they spend more time in the dictionary than the stories themselves. Death in Venice is a particular pain to understand the language of, and that’s not even half the battle of making sense of that tale. Nonetheless, once I read it in English (the poor Cambridge academics who supervise me are doubtless shaking their heads in disappointment) I found it rather enjoyable, and intellectually challenging too. Nevertheless, due to the arcane rules of Cambridge examinations I can’t talk about Death in Venice next year, though Mann himself remains on the syllabus. Looking for alternatives, I turned to “Gladius Dei”, hoping it would have something interesting to say.

“Gladius Dei” – I was attracted by the title, meaning “the sword of God” – is not nearly as action-packed as its title suggests. And nor is it as focused on the past as the Latin hints at either. Instead, it shows the clash between modern art and the sensibility that drove it with the older ideas that once justified artistic creation but which, in 1902 (the time of the novella’s composition), had very much fallen out of fashion. It is the tale of one man, Hieronymus, and his struggle against modernism as a whole.

Translations are from David Luke’s Death in Venice and Other Stories.

Introduction: Munich, the Fallen City

“Munich was resplendent.” “Gladius Dei” begins with a description of Munich, and Munich in some way is the main character of the novella. The German Jugendstil, their Art Nouveau, was at the height of its popularity in the city at the time the novella was written. From the very first paragraph, listing “festive squares” and “colonnades” and “fountains” we are immersed into this world of art. We meet the people, particularly women, who live in the city – as types, rather than as people. They are all relaxed and indolent. There is no rush about them.

Then we are taken into “the elaborate beauty-emporium of Herr M. Blüthenzweig”, where artistic reproductions and books are all on display, ranging in topic from the very modern to the classical. And here there is the first sense that art and its creation are not done in isolation, but influenced by consumers and their tastes – “among all this the portraits of artists, musicians, philosophers, actors and writers are displayed to gratify the inquisitive public’s taste for personal details.”

Next, we meet the key reproduction, which forms the focal point of the novella – but we don’t learn what it is in the novella’s first part. Instead, we are introduced to it through (literal) framing – “there is a large picture which particularly attracts the crowd: an excellent sepia photograph in a massive old-gold frame”. The frame is significant – its age contrasts with the contents, which are “sensational” and highly modern, promoted by “quaintly printed placards” and “this year’s great international exhibition”. Ironically, like the citizens of the novella, we are shown modern art by means of its popular reputation rather than its particular contents.

The narrative then moves back onto the street from its focus, completing the framing of the central picture. The final paragraph discusses the popularity of the art while returning to the novella’s opening words. “That it should continue so to thrive is a matter of general and reverent concern; on all sides diligent work and propaganda are devoted to its service; everywhere there is a pious cult of line, of ornament, of form, of the sense, of beauty… Munich is resplendent.” Though “Gladius Dei” ends its first part with the same words that begun it, here the tone is changed. From the purely celebratory beginning, now there is something seedy about the art – hinted at by words like “propaganda” and “cult”. It is this tension and seediness that the centre of Mann’s tale hinges upon.

Hieronymus and the Madonna

With the second section of “Gladius Dei” we are introduced to Hieronymus, whose name, reminding me of the artist Bosch, immediately conjures up images of the past. Against the brightness of resplendent Munich we are told that “when one looked at him, a shadow seemed to pass across the sun or a memory of dark hours across the soul”. He is inscrutable, but we are told he resembles a portrait in Florence of a monk who also raged against the world. In this way, Mann connects the present anger of Hieronymus with a historical precedent, that of the priest, Girolamo Savonarola. The two of them also share the same name.

A painting of Girolamo Savonarola, a priest who shares many characteristics with Hieronymus in Gladius Dei — Girolamo Savonarola, the Dominican priest who shares a passionate hatred of modernity with Hieronymus, alongside some physical features too.

Hieronymus first goes to a church on the Ludwigstrasse to pray, and then he comes across the art house of Blüthenzweig. Going inside, he sees the reproduction first mentioned in part 1 of “Gladius Dei”:

“It was a Madonna, painted in a wholly modern and entirely unconventional manner. The sacred figure was ravishingly feminine, naked and beautiful. Her great sultry eyes were rimmed with shadow, and her lips were half parted in a strange and delicate smile. Her slender figures were grouped rather nervously and convulsively round the waist of the Child, a nude boy of aristocratic, almost archaic slimness, who was playing with her breast and simultaneously casting a knowing sidelong glance at the spectator.”

This is sacrilege. A holy image turned lustful – “ravishing”, “sultry”, and the “knowing sidelong glance” all suggest that the glorification inherent in such a choice of subject has taken a back seat. Hieronymus overhears two young men discussing the painting, neither of whom respects its religious subject matter. “She does make one a bit doubtful about the dogma of the Immaculate Conception” one says. But they inform the reader that the painting has been bought by the Pinakothek Gallery and that its artist is being feted around the city. Their language is almost comically cultural, as if – to use the modern phrase – they are a bunch of posers. I would be surprised if this was not exactly what Mann has in mind. Hieronymus, meanwhile, finishes looking at the painting, and leaves, ending part 2.

Part 3 is only a page long, but it describes Hieronymus’ struggles to rid himself of the image of the sexualised Madonna. At last, however, “on the third night” he receives what he perceives to be a command from God, and decides that he must go and protest the display of such a work of art. And now the story approaches its climax.

Action and Inaction – the Bloodless Climax of Gladius Dei

Part 4 begins as Hieronymus heads onto the street, filled with righteous rage. “It is God’s will”, he thinks to himself, echoing the cries of “Deus Vult” that launched the first crusades. Outside the weather has begun to worsen, and a storm appears to be approaching. He reaches Blüthenzweig’s shop and goes inside, seeing evidence all around him for the spiritual decay of humankind. For example, there is a “gentleman in a yellow suit with a black goatee” who has a “bleating laugh” – both the laugh and the goatee suggest something animalistic about him. Coming across Blüthenzweig as he’s finalizing a transaction Hieronymus hears him call it “most attractive and seductive”.

Blüthenzweig is a capitalist, an art dealer with little appreciation for art itself. That is Hieronymus’ interpretation anyway, as he claims the dealer despises him “because I am not able to buy anything from you.” Meanwhile, Hieronymus is entirely concerned with the non-monetary value that art has. Is it good for the spirit, or not? In the case of the Madonna, he sees it as actively pernicious – “vice itself.” Blüthenzweig rejects this immediately – “The picture is a work of art… and as such it must be judged by the appropriate standards”. The painting has been bought by the gallery and is universally acclaimed. Both Blüthenzweig and Hieronymus have their own idea of what the “appropriate standards” are, but Blüthenzweig’s idea is marked by a focus on the external – acclaim – while Hieronymus’ is internal – “the spiritual enrichment of mankind”.

Hieronymus does not let Blüthenzweig convince him. He cries of hell, of the torments of purgatory. Beauty is a lie used by the representatives of Jugendstil to avoid considering the health of the soul. Instead, art ought to be “the sacred torch that must shed its merciful light into all life’s terrible depths, into every shameful and sorrowful abyss”. It must be about compassion, not beauty. Hieronymus demands that Blüthenzweig burns the reproduction, which naturally he does not have any interest in doing. He calls in Krauthuber, one of his workers, to throw Hieronymus out of the shop. Krauthuber is “a son of the people, malt-nourished, herculean and awe-inspiring” and with “heroic arms.” He represents, it seems to me, a sidestepping of the Christian view of art that Hieronymus represents towards the Classical, where art, especially if one takes Nietzsche’s view, was all about advancing the spirit and glorifying it.

Just not in the Christian sense of the spirit or glorification. Alone on the street, Hieronymus falls into madness, surrounded by the markers of a depraved age – “carnival costumes”, “naked statues”, and “the busts of women”. He sees them all piled into a pyramid and set to flames. It is here, as the novella ends, that he quotes Savonarola, who had had a similar vision of God’s vengeance, “Gladius Dei super terram… Cito et velociter” – “behold there is the sword of God above the Earth, fast and swift”. He has achieved nothing for his madness, but perhaps Hieronymus succeeded in saving his soul. Who can say?

Theories of Art and the Modernism of “Gladius Dei”

By the time that Mann is writing “Gladius Dei” Hieronymus’ view of art was well out of date. Even in the 19^th century, art had already become popular, its form and content determined by market forces – think of Dickens in England during that time, or Dumas in France. That’s not to say that lofty goals had departed from artistic endeavours, but rather that they were often secondary to the need to feed oneself and one’s family, especially as artistic production became democratised and a new generation of writers and artists who were not aristocratic in background came to prominence.

But that doesn’t mean it’s easy to see where Mann sits in all this. Though in “Gladius Dei” he shows the vapid banality of Blüthenzweig and his customers, Hieronymus is a ridiculous figure too. The contrast between the violence of the novella’s title and the ultimate lack of action and change seems to mock Hieronymus’ hopes to change society’s relation to art for the better. Likely, Mann sits somewhere in the middle – he respects Hieronymus’ love for the spiritual mission for art, while acknowledging the historical forces that make this view secondary, and indeed challenging to hold. The old values, in a world where “God is dead”, simply aren’t reliable anymore.

It’s also worth considering how the form of “Gladius Dei” reflects modernism in its composition. For one, there’s Mann’s ambivalence towards all of his characters, so that it’s not clear who is worth supporting, if anybody. Then there is also the satirical use of religion (just like the Madonna itself) and its language when Hieronymus thinks God is commanding him to defeat Blüthenzweig and the reproduction. It’s clear that Mann doesn’t think Hieronymus is really hearing God or want the reader to think so either. The inconclusiveness of the novella’s conclusion is also, in its own way, modernistic. We are given no guidance – it’s not even clear if we should pity Hieronymus. All, I think, that is clear is that the Jugendstil movement and the Christian artistic sensibility of Hieronymus are both inadequate in Mann’s view. But what is good art – Mann’s ideas on that are impossible to work out.

A photo of Thomas Mann in 1905 — Thomas Mann in 1905, three years after “Gladius Dei” was completed. I’m not sure how far I approve of the coldness of his writings. Intellectualism alone is not what I’m after as a reader.

Conclusion

Personally, I’m closer to Hieronymus than Mann is. Not in the sense that I think literature and art should be about fulfilling a Christian message, but rather that I do think there should be a strong message in them about the value of humanity. A literature must be affirmative, glorifying our lives and life itself in all their complexity, whether good or bad. This is the secret to Tolstoy’s greatness. Mann doesn’t care enough about people for that. In this, he reminds me a little bit of Isaac Babel, another writer who is much more intellectual than emotional. It can make stories that are thought provoking, but terribly cold…

I thought “Gladius Dei” was ok. I mean, it’ll be easy to write about it next year once I’m back at Cambridge. But the measure of a book’s value isn’t how easily I’ll be able to ram it into an essay. I’ll keep reading Mann, but I hope one day I’ll understand where he keeps his heart locked away. Irony just doesn’t cut it for me – our own world is too ironic, too dispassionate, already. The solution to an ironic and dead world isn’t acceptance, but a conscious search for meaning and value, like Kazantzakis managed in Report to Greco. But perhaps I’m asking too much.

If you’ve read “Gladius Dei” and have an opinion on it, why not drop by the comments and let me know what you thought?