Wednesday, April 15, 2009

"July Ghost"

Yesterday I was reading a story by A.S. Byatt for my summer Writing 1 class, "July Ghost." I am calling the class "Haunted," and focusing on people who are either being literally haunted (or think they are) or are simply obsessed. The first text and paper will be about the Byatt story, which I read for the first time a few days ago. It really stays with you.

In this story, which is set in London, a man is telling an American woman in a party about how he needs to move out of the apartment he lives in. He has gotten caught up in his landlady's tragedy, and things have become too awkward to stay around. The story is framed by this device of story-telling, but, intriguingly, it also has an omniscient narrator who also informs us of what the man isn't telling the American woman and filling in the blanks that the man leaves deliberately in his telling of the story.

For this telling curiously echoes an earlier one, when the man (unnamed in the text) told his present landlady a similar story about wanting to move out of the place he was living in with his girlfriend or wife, who had packed up without a word and left him, with no warning at all, or so he says. That landlady, Imogen, lives in a rather too-large house on the London commons with her journalist husband, who is usually not around. The house seems attractive to the man (I'll just call him "the lodger") because of its garden, where he ends up spending much of his time.
He seems to be a graduate student in literature, or perhaps a junior professor, who spends time writing papers about modern poets out in the garden, and Imogen too, he speculates, is an academic type, but he doesn't know what kind and never asks her, even though he has become quite intimate with her, listening in on her marital quarrels and learning something of her history.
Imogen has lost her young son, who was killed some time in the past when he was hit by a car out in the Commons, and his former friends still climb over the garden wall as if they own the place. So the Lodger is not surprised when he sees a young boy sitting in the tree in the garden, whom he describes in detail. Though this is of course the ghost of the title, there is little of the dark or spooky about him. He is sunny and more present than his mother, even responding with nods and smiles to the questions the Lodger poses to him.
He also seems to communicate with the Lodger telepathically, communicating the idea that he wants to get through to his mother, but she, frozen in time by the shock of his death, and absolutely rigidly rational, cannot allow herself to be receptive to the possibility of such a vision or of the continuance of life in any form, life before death or after it.
Since the husband has left, frustrated by the impossibility of continuing a relationship with a person so immured in "rigor mortis," as the Lodger describes it, the Lodger is the only available man capable of making Imogen pregnant, so that the soul of her son can slip into the new child, and he tries, but cannot, as he says "get through" any more than her husband could, though the woman also feels that this is what the child would want.
So he finds himself talking to another, American woman about wanting to move out of his place, and feeling that this meeting will also be followed by a change in venue and a new relationship. Yet the child, so much more present than anyone else in the story, is still there, and there is, it seems, a possibility that he will not let the Lodger go until he gets what he wants.
The story ends inconclusively, with the reader unsure of what the Lodger will do and whether he will move or manage to "get through" to Imogen at some future time.
The story is interesting not just for its plot, but for the way it works against the conventions of the gothic. The house is haunted, yes, but the haunting is by far the greatest sign of life in the house. The living people are mostly shells, haunted by loss, and unable to avail themselves of life--far less so apparently than the dead child.
It is interesting too for its mode of telling, the frame of the conversation at the party, the double of another conversation the Lodger has had, as well as its omniscient narrator, who slips in and out of his consciousness like a ghost, amending the "bowlderized" narrative he feeds his listener for the reader.
In my usual way, I want to ask the students why they think the story has been told in this way, rather than directly, through the perspective of the Lodger. Perhaps we are to distrust the Lodger, and doubt whether the ghost really appeared at all. Or perhaps??? It will be an interesting thing to examine with the class.

2 comments:

Lou said...

Oh the richness of a story that suggests so many meanings. I am so glad you found this, and thank you for taking the time to share the tale.

Robbi N. said...

You're welcome, and I hope that you can find a use for it sometime.