The Ghosts of the Past: Alfred Tennyson's Life Story in A. S. Byatt's "The Conjugial Angel"

Abstract

The following paper concentrates on the second novella in A .S.Byatt's Angels and Insects, and it aims at showing that an attempt to reconstruct a person 's life and to recapture the past might remind of occult practices, or conjuring up the ghosts. A similarity between a biographer and a spiritualistic medium is indicated: both are provided only with scraps of information, on the basis of which they try to construct a coherent story. Both in the case of biography and reading the messages from the other world, a large dose of imagination is necessary to construct a plausible interpretation of the incomplete data. "The Conjugial  Angel" seems to imply that any attempt to read the life of a poet from his verse or letters must be futile, because even if connected with real events, poetry might "encode" them producing a cipher incomprehensible even for the poet himself, as his subconscious emotions might have gone into his creation. Similarly, the messages from the spirits tend to be rather obscure, or adulterated by the consciousness of the medium. An additional problem might be a deliberate distortion of f acts either by "malicious spirits" or by Great People guarding their privacy. Consequently, both messages from the dead and biographical works are necessarily fictitious..