The Romance of the Past

Abstract

In their foregrounding of the textuality of the past and in the pervasiveness of traceable intertextual references to realist and Modernist representational modes that characterises their narrative re-encodings of that past, Fowles, Farrell and Jhabvala raise a problem of referentiality which is pursued from a consistently theoretical angle in the three novels discussed in this chapter, Lindsay Clarke’s The Chymical Wedding: A Romance (1989), A.S. Byatt’s Possession: A Romance (1990) and Graham Swift’s Ever After (1992). Theory, whether it be a recognisable academic discipline, as in Possession, or philosophical and individual instability more generally, as in The Chymical Wedding and Ever After, is at the basis of these novels’ approach to the representation of the past and their recuperation of a sense of the nation in the context of millennial anxieties. The novels examined in Chapter 1 metonymically invested physical locations with the task of providing models of national identity in reaction to the tendency towards disaggregation produced by the novels’ reliance on texts. The novels under consideration here, on the other hand, pursue the implications of acknowledging the textual nature of the past and articulate a representational model that situates the nation in the very texts which seemingly fragment it, attempting to reconstitute it by an act of the imagination and through the narrative mode of romance.