Reviewed by Margaret Rustin.
Consultant Child Psychotherapist & Dean of Postgraduate Studies, The Tavistock Clinic.

This book offers the fruits of a learned and immensely lively collaboration between the novelist and literary critic, A.S. Byatt, and the psychoanalyst Ignês Sodré. Byatt's literary exploration of unconscious processes will be know to readers of her novel Possession, a story which unravels the impact of unconscious projective identification. Sodré's clinical insight and passion for literature make for a splendid pair of minds at work. The two met to talk over six classic novels by women writers, and their dialogue centres on the characters and relationships explored in their chosen texts.

The novels they selected were intended to span the whole period of great novel-writing, and to provide an opportunity for reflection on cultural and historical themes, as well as the exploration of character. They offer a reading of Jane Austen's Mansfield Park, Charlotte Brontë's Vilette, George Elliot's Daniel Deronda, Willa Cather's The Professor's House, Iris Murdoch's An Unofficial Rose and Toni Morrison's Beloved. A final chapter discusses the relationship between 'Dreams and Fictions', and describes their understanding of each other's approach to literature. They share a fascination with the human mind's need for fictions, and a belief in the importance of the distinction between defensive day-dreaming and the psychic work of both dreamers and writers. Dreams and works of art are seen as both representing aspects of the internal world in symbolic form. Their dialogue addresses Byatt's experience of herself as a reader and writer of fiction and some of the similarities between the analytic couple and the writer/reader dyad. Their immense enjoyment of the books they talked about, and of each other's ideas, offers a delightful backdrop to the challenge of what they have to say.

The book is not an easy one to review, since appreciating the intricate and absorbing details of their conversations depends on a good knowledge of the works concerned. As an enthusiastic reader of novels, I started out with a prior acquaintance with five of the six, but I felt that to get the most out of this book, I should have re-read the lot, and added the missing one, since their chapter persuaded me that I had unfairly neglected Iris Murdoch's writing. There is a plot summary at the opening of each chapter, to help the reader, but this really serves only as a useful reminder of the basic story-line, so this adds up to a caveat relevant to the readership of this journal - to reap fully the rewards the book has to offer, a lot of reading-time is needed! A splendid project for a long summer holiday, or an on-going reading group.

To give the flavour of the book, I shall discuss the chapter on Beloved, Toni Morrison's magnificent novel tracing the psychic consequences of slavery. 'Beloved' is a ghost, in a 'non-Gothic ghost story'. Morrison's book is about memory, and Sodré describes it thus:

"A book written so that the past [the appalling cruelties of slaveryl is not forgotten, about people who desperately want to [but cannot] forget".

It is of the stature of Greek tragedy, and Sodré and Byatt expose us to the painful experience of reading a book in which we are repeatedly exposed to our moral inadequacies. The narrative records the fragmentary memory consequent on severely traumatic experience, and we are led to understand the way in which the meaning of the book is hard to grasp on first reading: memories of such great pain can only be digested in small pieces; and the reader, as well as the characters, have to struggle to grasp the whole picture. Problems of unresolved mourning and oedipal conflicts are central to Beloved, and are explored with a subtlety worthy of Morrison's masterpiece.

Byatt's literary scholarship offers the reader fascinating links to the Song of Solomon, and contrasts with the male-bonding themes of most of the great American novels. Sodré's compassionate description of the state of mind of Sethe, the ex-slave who had killed one of her own children, and whose intense need is to convince the child's ghost that the act was done out of love, and of Sethe's daughter, who both longs for the companionship of a sister and is tormented by jealousy of the ghost's hold on her mother, is deeply moving.

The form of the book demands of its readers that they tolerate the intimacy of two minds engaged in a creative interchange, as well as the intimacy of critic and writer.

There are, of course, some differences of emphasis. For example, Byatt's respect for the intelligence of fictional characters contrasts with Sodré's concern to understand the damaging effects of narcissistic character structure, but overall the interweaving of the two voices has so much flow that one is often unsure which of the two is speaking. It is an enormously rewarding read, and should help to build mutual respect and extended interest between students of literature and of psychoanalysis.

MARGARET RUSTIN

Copyright © 2000 British Psychoanalytical Society & Institute of Psychoanalysis.