Elementals

A. S. Byatt's Elementals: Stories of Fire and Ice contains six loosely linked stories, all of which dwell to some extent on the power of vision--especially in relationship to art.  But vision also functions metaphorically, as a means of imagining how people craft their own lives and the lives of others.  The stories themselves are "painterly," in the sense that they emphasize both visual imagery and the interplay of vibrant, often jewel-like colors; for once, the prose truly justifies the adjective "lapidary."  "Crocodile Tears" sets the collection's agenda in one of its early questions: "How do you decide when to stop looking at something?" (3) While this question immediately applies to a painting that our protagonist dislikes and her very-soon-to-be-late husband enjoys, it soon encompasses her attitude to her entire life.  When she discovers that her husband has suddenly died of a heart attack, she fulfills an old fantasy by simply abandoning her life: "The idea that it was possible to vanish, that there was nothing ineluctably necessary about her work, or her home, was a condition of her pleasure in those things" (11).  Abroad, she runs into a man who has also abandoned something, and the encounter eventually forces her to realize that some things are, after all, "necessary."  While the fantastic element in "Crocodile Tears" resides precisely in the wife's yearning to disappear, it takes more concrete shape in "A Lamia in the Cevennes."  The misanthropic painter at the heart of this story, Bernard, discovers a lamia in his swimming pool.  Given the opportunity to choose between turning her into the woman of his dreams or painting her as a snake, Bernard chooses art; his world consists less of human beings than of delightful aesthetic difficulties.  "He had been at least as interested in the problems of reflection and refraction when he had had the lovely snake in his pool as he had been in its oddity--in its otherness--as snakes went" (110).  While Bernard dreams of a detached gaze that leaves both painter and subject free, he is nevertheless still entrapped by the possibility of a different sort of betrayal, since, as he inadvertently acknowledges at the end, the subject may leave: "Don't go, he begged it [a butterfly], watching and learning, don't go" (111).  As in "Crocodile Tears," there is no escaping the tendrils of emotional connection, even in the most seemingly disconnected relationship. 

"Cold," by contrast, is a fairy tale.  (In a nice ironic touch, it's also the only story literally about fire and ice.)  A young princess, Fiammarosa, turns out to be an ice woman--a woman whose energy derives from extremes of cold instead of warmth.  Her equally cold heart is finally melted by a prince from the desert, a master glass-blower.  In a sense, this story returns to the lesson of "Crocodile Tears"--that, after all, human relationships are "necessary"--in its moral, namely, that "no one has everything she can desire" (182).  But it also revises "A Lamia in the Cevennes": Fiammarosa's own artistic and intellectual impulses need the alternating stimuli of heat and cold in order to flourish. 

"Baglady" is less fairy tale than nightmare: a well-off but socially isolated woman visits a shopping mall, ironically named the "Good Fortune Mall," and proceeds to lose all external markers of her identity, finally becoming the baglady of the title.  Here, the gaze is all about commercialism run amok.  After the protagonist buys a purportedly rare item, she discovers "a whole window full of the rare fishes, better embroidered than the one in the bag" (190); the beautiful objects quickly multiply into valuelessness.  By the end, the mall has apparently taken over the entire planet, full of "excavated identical caverns of shopfronts, jade, gold, silver, silk, lacquer, watches, suiting, bonsai trees and masks and puppets" (192).  In a world of endless objects, the woman finds herself reduced to nothing because she lacks the requisite "objects" of her own--an externalized version of her earlier sense of alienation among a group of far wealthier women. 

"Jael," the only first-person narrative in the collection, continues the collection's tonal downswing.  Now a reasonably successful ad executive, the narrator reminisces about her girlhood as part of "a fringe of girls [. . . ] who hung around the edges of the gangs, not sure if we were admitted as members or not" (210).  Like "Baglady," "Jael" explores the mental life of those on the border of social belonging, but it also returns to the earlier stories' reflections on art--especially the artist's decision in "Lamia" to give up the possibility of human interaction for the aesthetic problems of color.  In "Jael," the narrator claims that "the Scriptures were both dead and nasty" (200), but it becomes clear that she has been indelibly marked by the story of Jael and Sisera, which she finds alluring because of its "amazing rhythms" but, nevertheless, a "nasty piece of work" (202).   Fearing the prospect of losing herself in "boredom" (214), the narrator's younger self silently breaks down the boundaries between fictional narratives and the real world--with, apparently, terrible consequences.  But the narrator swerves away from confession, slipping out of first person ("I") and into third ("the traitor") before questioning whether the events took place, after all:

I have the opposite of Alzheimer's, I remember things I think really didn't happen.  After all, my job is scenarios, is finding props, is imagining lighting, the figure entering the frame, and ACTION.  I remember Jael because the story doesn't quite make sense, the emotions are all in a muddle, you are asked to rejoice in wickedness.  I remember Jael because of the delicious red, because of the edge of excitement in wielding the pencil-point, because I had a half-a-glimpse of making art and colour.  (215-16)

The narrator's ambivalence about her own memory apparently points to the difference between fictional (or scripted) and real happenings: the fictional/scripted happening is bounded by the limits of its "frame," whether visual or textual, whereas the real happening has potentially lifelong ramifications for all concerned.  In that sense, the story riffs on the centuries-long anxiety about fiction's (or theatre's or television's or...) effect on the unwary, unprepared mind.  But it also raises questions about reading, and especially about reading works that seem to come equipped with ready-made meanings.  After all, Jael's story is Biblical--therefore, suited to youthful minds, right? What happens when the reader stops to think? And what happens when a moral agent interprets everyday human relationships in terms of aesthetics and narrative construction? Whereas the painter in "Lamia" cuts himself off from humanity and desire in order to create art, the advertising exec tries to order life according to artistic "principles," as it were; the painter's decision may be implicitly self-destructive, but the exec's decision destroys both her psychological fabric (she cannot narrate the event without refusing it) and the lives of others.

The final story, "Christ in the House of Martha and Mary," is a brief historical tale that circles back to some of "Crocodile Tears"'s concerns, although it also returns to "Jael"'s point about the destructive effects of boredom.  Velasquez tells Dolores, his model for Martha, that "[y]ou must learn now, that the important lesson [. . . ] is that the divide is not between the servants and the served, between the leisured and the workers, but between those who are interested in the world and its multiplicity of its forms and forces, and those who merely subsist, worrying or yawning" (226).  What divides us, that is, is our relative capacity for attentiveness, focused observation.  The angry Dolores, a thoroughly unattractive woman, finds redemption in the moment that she sees herself as Velasquez sees her--a moment of both estrangement and self-recognition.  In her laughter, "[t]he momentary coincidence between image and woman vanished, as though the rage was still and eternal in the painting and the woman was released into time" (230).  This moment perhaps reverses those famous Victorian images of women killed into art, like Browning's Duchess or Tennyson's Lady of Shalott; in confronting the woman with one aspect of her being, Velasquez inadvertently liberates her into self-consciousness.  And the story's convivial ending, in which the artist and his two models dine together, suggests how art can free human beings into emotional connections, as in "Crocodile Tears" and "Cold."