And There Will Be Conflagration: Grandeur and Empathy in A.S. Byatt’s Possession and the Films of Terrence Malick — Sean Hooks
In 1990, A.S. Byatt rose to the apogee of literary stardom on the strength of the best-selling and Booker Prize–winning Possession. She subtitled her work not a novel but a Romance, and through this Romantic worldview it aligns with the oeuvre of director Terrence Malick. At the time of Byatt’s ascendance, the Malick filmography was in the midst of one of the more pronounced lacunae in the cinematic canon, the twenty-year gap between 1978’s Days of Heaven and 1998’s The Thin Red Line, so the connections between these two artistes were not readily apparent. Malick had only released two films, and though already an accomplished and much-loved filmmaker, he was essentially a retired eccentric, the development of his signature palette still in a relatively nascent stage. Twenty-plus years and six films later—The New World, The Tree of Life, To The Wonder, Knight of Cups, Song to Song, and A Hidden Life—we have a more holistic picture of his perspective, a standpoint best described as social non-realism. He’s a director who elides many of cinema’s expectations, who works largely outside of traditional systems, who abjures celebrity and continually stretches the forms and functions of film, as Byatt’s novel so thoroughly diverged from pre-existing modes of fictional discourse.
The purview of Terrence Malick is that of a man obsessed with the natural world, an aesthetic descendent of American artists like Georgia O’Keeffe, Andrew Wyeth, and Ansel Adams. The Vintage International trade paperback of Byatt’s Possession features on its verdant green cover Edward Burne-Jones’s 1877 painting The Beguiling of Merlin, a forest scene depicting an oft-alluded-to mythological incident, jacketing a book scaffolded around two pairs of lovers, the first a male and female poet in the Victorian era and the second young British academics in the late 1980s. Byatt’s text is a dense and referential web of poetry and prose that rose to further prominence alongside the emerging internet. Possession swirls with dualities and doubling, a postmodern take on the period piece that remains an ensorcelling wonder, an example of literature as time travel, full of parallelism, satire, and tergiversation that traces a titanic tapestry of influence. It’s a feast for the well-read, a farrago of ingenuity, an audacious blend of artistry and scholarship wherein Byatt etches out an inventory of the olde world and the new, marching back even before the Victorian age, through the Medieval period into antiquity. Her storytelling bursarship has few literary peers in this regard. George Eliot and Iris Murdoch are oft-cited forebears, and her protean body of feminist work calls to mind Margaret Atwood and Joyce Carol Oates, but of living writers only Anne Carson really approximates the breadth of Byatt’s achievement in applying an academic touch to the creative realm. The Malickian grandeur that characterizes Byatt is one of scale and content, a philosophical sprawl that calls to mind a trove of literary antecedents, from the aforementioned Eliot to the heights of Dostoevsky by the end of Possession, a book that references Melville, Keats, Marvell and a slough (literally hundreds) of other allusions from Tennyson poems to medieval chanson de gestes. The Malick connection is made even more substantive when one considers that both artists are continually and centrally, even centrifugally, invested in the timeless nature of our planisphere.
Byatt uses that Ptolemaic word in Chapter 10 of Possession, a standalone foray which inspires one to heap this singular chapter with laudatory phrases like “riotous tour de force” or “turbulent river of prose.” Her writing makes hyperbole suddenly seem not histrionic but apropos. Few texts this side of Ulysses, The Waves, and Under the Volcano feature such a vulcanized yet magnanimous and reader-pleasing surfeit. The media vita in morte sumus tropes so well-wrought by Joyce, Woolf, and Lowry surface and proliferate in Possession, and they are as intrinsic to its textuality as the recurrent and abundantly lyrical mise en scene of radiant imagery is redolent of the Malick canon. It’s easy to imagine this epistolary chapter of Possession—wherein the reader gets a most extended encapsulation of the two great invented Victorian poets, R.H. Ash and Christabel LaMotte (modeled, most agree, on Robert Browning and Christina Rossetti)—scored with some of the symphonic sounds from across the Malick spectrum: the “La Crimosa” of the world-birth sequence in The Tree of Life, the Wagnerian eddies which majestically conclude The New World, the bouncy cadence of Badlands’ use of Carl Orff’s “Gassenhauser,” Morricone’s sooty and spectral Americana dirge in Days of Heaven, the meditations on divinity and the evocations of love, sublime or sublimated, from Haydn and Berlioz in To The Wonder, even the foreboding and dissonant rumble that opens The Thin Red Line. Words are extraneous in these scenarios, much as the imagery that accompanies the correspondence via which Ash and LaMotte fall in love is quite necessarily elemental. Both Byatt and Malick are fixated on water, sky, earth, and fire.
Fomented in these two artists is a fascinating simultaneity of the foreign and the familiar, a meld of the tangible and the evanescent. The world is viewed with curiosity, with an inextinguishable amazement. Possession’s varied dualities consistently ring Malickian chimes. It is a novel concerned with the emergence of cosmopolitanism, with the human individual and the human species. Byatt has lavished praise on the novelist David Mitchell, whose works address such global and timeless concerns, and while Malick has yet to inherit a truly worthwhile successor, filmmakers like David Gordon Green, Andrew Dominick, Shane Carruth, Alejandro González Iñárritu, and Chloe Zhao have made their bids. The past/present duality is pervasive in both Possession and in Malick; in inscribing the historical, they don’t stop at decades or centuries but extend back sometimes for millennia. As the dualities move to theism/atheism, Christianity/paganism, the human world/natural world, and civil law/natural law, their echoes and resonances grow clearer.
Consider the opening monologue from The Thin Red Line: “What’s this war in the heart of nature? Why does nature vie with itself? The land contend with the sea? Is there an avenging power in nature? Not one power, but two?” Compare this with Ash’s explorations in Possession, described by Byatt as “dealing death to the creatures he found so beautiful, to the seashore whose pristine beauty he helped to wreck.” Exploration and curiosity are inextricable from conquest and damage, and in his search for the origins of life and the nature of geniture, Ash is similar to the explorers in The New World, the geologist in To The Wonder, the self-abasing screenwriter in Knight of Cups, and the brutal patrimony that is the inculcation of masculinity in The Tree of Life. Study also that last film’s closing images: the bridging of science and spirituality, the conflation of Darwinian evolution with the prose-poetry combination that is the Book of Job, the expansions of a juvenile cosmos paralleled with a set of brothers growing up and that earthbound sibling maturation contrasted with the unheard voice of God and the humans who pray to him, most notably Jessica Chastain’s character, a distraught mother, who opens the film in the midst of suffering because she has lost a child, one of those brothers.
The sheer largesse (and largeness) of the undertaking is often what resonates in Malick’s films, and it’s a cornerstone of Possession as well. In both cases, the artist aims for awe, a splendid richness served up in generous portions. One of Possession’s most enduring motifs is comparison between the microscopic and the telescopic, between the infinitely small and the infinitely large (the Swammerdamian and the Galilean, according to Ash, whose works are intricate but speculative, and which seek, above all, balance). This also operates at a metaphorical level, as an examination of literature and its role as a never-ending and perspicacious human endeavor. The encompassingly grand (the “story”) must be balanced against the intricately small (the “details”). Too much of either makes a work either an unliterary page-turner or a didactic philosophy treatise, transmogrifies a film into Hollywood schlock or navel-gazing pseudo-experimentalism.
One of the details Byatt’s novel occupies itself with is the presence of animals, most markedly ants and spiders. She renders the human species anew as a series of limbs, looks, and glances, acts of tenderness or of violence, choices made by invented characters in embedded fairy tales, all while unfurling a multitude of odes and homages to form. In Malick, human-animal content is equally persistent, ingested in his perambulating camera style and an obsession with surfaces, with how the skin receives light, with how the sky, depending on the angle of the shot, can look like an empyrean heaven or a smoldering hell. Malick is also a man possessed (as possessed as any of the nineteenth-century writers or twentieth-century treasure hunters in Byatt’s novel) when it comes to the perfectionism of his presentations, famously shooting Days of Heaven almost exclusively during twilight or “magic hour,” and in almost all his films winnowing down hours and hours of footage in editing, sometimes drastically changing storylines or leaving famous actors on the cutting room floor. This esoteric approach adds to Malick’s mystique, painting the filmmaker as the most dutiful and dedicated of auteurs. Even ugliness is romantic in Malick, as it is in Possession’s well-funded American art hoarder Mortimer Cropper, the closest thing to an adversary in the novel, with his too-big-for-rural-England black Mercedes, eventually reduced to gravedigging alongside one of Ash’s descendants in a quest for buried documents. Though even Cropper is not an outright predator, more a victim of his own selfish altruism, the conqueror who wants to preserve for posterity’s sake (and for the sake of glorifying his own ego) artifacts of the past, devotedly storing them in a museum where temperature, light, and access can be regulated and history can be maintained. He is a malefactor but not a malicious villain. At the end of the novel, the other characters share with him the reading of the unearthed letters, and one could even argue that they need his hubris to unquestioningly open a sealed communique, the copyright and ownership of which has yet to be determined.
There is also encasement, or enlizement, in both Byatt’s narrative Romance and Malick’s filmed ones, a ubiquitous sense that the characters are trapped, as predestined as the insects and other animals Byatt remains so engrossed by, as fated as the flora and fauna upon which Malick’s viewfinder lingers. They are part of a finite timeline, and we as readers or viewers are offered but a glimpse of a glimpse. We’re all insects, we’re all animals, we’re all part of an ecosystem. None of us are more “significant” than an owl or a fern, an ox or an oak. An entire human life is minuscule compared to the scale of the universe or when contrasted with the extent of one’s genealogy, a common thread of concern in contemporary works ranging from Dave Eggers’s The Circle to Maud Newton’s Ancestor Trouble to the television program Finding Your Roots hosted by Henry Louis Gates to popular genealogy websites like Ancestry.com and 23andMe.
The determinism of ancestry fascinates both Byatt and Malick. To what extent are we all constrained and defined by nature and nurture, by our upbringings and our genetic make-up, the time, place, and generation we’re born into? These are not approximations that Malick’s films and Byatt’s novel offer us, these are excerpts. The earth in “big history” has survived numerous apocalypses of flood and fire, dust to dust and ashes to ashes, as in our short lives we endure triumphs and tragedies that supersede honor or morality, but which never surpass mortality. Our lives are random and brief, yet we can leave behind through our art an approximated immortality, monuments to our existence. Despite our gestures at collectivism and our acknowledgements and admissions to anthropocenic arrogations, our identities, our selves, even our individual solitude, seem to mean so much more to us, as they do to Byatt’s Coleridge-inspiring Christabel LaMotte, a poet lightly regarded in her own time but retrieved by feminist scholarship, as many would argue that the works of Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Emily Dickinson, and Christine de Pizan have been. Our capacity for connection is meaningful when personified by the married man, distinguished poet, and celebrity in his own time, Browning avatar Randolph Henry Ash, who’s deeply in love with LaMotte, a truer peer than his own wife, or at least a more passion-inciting fellow artiste, a woman both muse and equal. Like Malick, Byatt offers polysemous and polymorphous texts about polysemous and polymorphous loves, the deepest connection not the temporal ignition of tenderness or satiation that is connubial love, but what Byatt calls in Chapter 13 of Possession “a continuity and interdependence of all life,” an idea that offers hope for a form of thanatopsis, a regenerative rejection of death.
The eternal riddle of existence and perishment persists, and we are perceived by Byatt and Malick as mediated, dual. “After all those eons, what does it mean to be us?” Cate Blanchett intones in Malick’s 2016 documentary Voyage of Time: Life’s Journey. Every day, every incident, every love affair ignited or extinguished, every poem published or lost, every social positioning granted or denied speaks to this, and such is the twentieth-century component of Byatt’s narrative, wherein the approximate protagonist, Roland Michell, deals with the comparatively piddling but also very pressing modern-day concern of: How are we going to make money yet somehow do what we love?
This is not a minor issue as we endure it, this is utilitarian reality. The quest for sustainability and the aspiration to improvement drive us. We are the central characters in our own stories. We are also, as Malick’s films remind us, little more than a tiny fragment of a cosmic sneeze. Or, to take it from Byatt, “Can we not find a small space, for a limited time—in which to marvel that we have found each other?” Ash asks LaMotte this question in a letter, conjuring up the plot (limited as they often are) of essentially every Malick film. Though his visions are far from shallow, informed as they are by his studies in Continental Philosophy and Hermeneutics at Harvard and later his time as a Rhodes Scholar who taught at MIT, one could argue that Malick’s worldview is “light,” optimistic, whereas the LaMotte character’s response in Byatt is darker, more conflicted, modulated by chronic vision-inspiring headaches, imaginings of a Wordsworthian drowned world, a denuded earth governed by chaotic clinamen, and all within a universe so vast that a million random pricks on the fabric would not land you on a planet or a star but only on empty space, an un-atmosphered non-sky devoid of light, an ocean of dark matter, a stratosphere burnt to cinders. LaMotte imagines: “I shall go up—like Straw on a Dry Day—a rushing wind—a tremor on the air—a smell of burning—a blown smoke—and a deal of fine white powder that holds its spillikin shape only an infinitesimal moment and then is random specks.”
Malick’s films show us, amidst all their humanism, that our lives are irretrievably and irrevocably brief. LaMotte is wary of her love of Ash, of being consumed by it, of losing her freedom, her individuality, her “self,” of having to subsume her identity into a union with a man’s imbalanced “we.” She knows he will argue with rationality and eschew emotion (another classic and oft-gendered dichotomy) but when she says there will be between them a combustion, she contradicts his ideal of love, the rainbows and glittering salamanders which he’s written of in his letters, and she phrases it thusly: “But I say—your glowing salamander is a Firedrake. And there will be—Conflagration—” Via fire come the ruins at the end of Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, another touchstone in the literary canon and an oft-noted antecedent to Byatt, and in Malick it is hard not to picture his recurrent fiery vistas as well: the panavistic wheat fields aflame in Days of Heaven; the cauldron of pre-human volcanic activity in The Tree of Life; the torching of a Native American village in The New World; in Badlands not just the incineration of a childhood home but the resultant corpses of more allegorical ignited fires, of Kit and Holly (avatars of real-life teenage mass murderers Charlie Starkweather and Caril Fugate), their petulant and unfiltered adolescent love, the bodies of her father and others strewn at their feet in a Nebraskan killing spree, even the blood-hued sky captured in its classic movie poster, a silhouetted Sheen and Spacek centered in a seventies’ frieze, an Americana dream gone askew, the sun going down on two teenagers standing beneath a tree, a car nearby, the semblance of a fender creeping into the frame, but also the looming presence of a shotgun, and above the picture a disturbing text announcing their killing spree and lending the mural-like whorl a sanguine quality; the flames of addiction which flicker across the hollowed-out faces of emaciated addicts visited by Javier Bardem as a priest or by Cate Blanchett as a doctor in astounding neo-documentary sequences in To The Wonder and Knight of Cups; the fire of artillery and tracers which prefaces the casual torture of Japanese prisoners in Thin Red Line, and also the enfilade of fire absorbed by Jim Caviezel’s pacifistic Private Witt in that film as he commits a form of suicide, the bullet-riddled body of a Christ-like soldier surrounded by his enemies who consigns himself to death rather than surrender to imprisonment and torture of his own or expose the position of his fellow soldiers, and enters, both literally and metaphorically, the opposite of fire, the eternal coolness of water, his death apotheosized in an image of transfiguration as he imagines in his dying moment his calmest and least warlike days, swimming with the native islanders of Melanesia while AWOL from the battlefield.
“I have known—Incandescence—and must decline to sample it further,” says LaMotte in Possession. She says she feels herself getting “overheated.” She cannot will herself to a temperament of calm and cool like Ash, a stately man who longs to be the stalwart husband, an edifice of loyalty, but he is scintillated by this new woman and wants to rush through the blaze with her, knowing she has the strength to be born again as a phoenix from the pyre, but not knowing what it was like to be a talented and educated woman under the yoke of systemic and societal oppression in the binded era of the 1850s. We can be “warm and human and safe, in the circle of trees,” he offers her in a moment of undiluted idealism. Malick knows this imagery well. And he knows, like LaMotte, that such idylls, no matter how sagely imagined, are not long-lived. The bucolic is temporary, as is safety, even today, in this most regulated and consumerism-constructed and safe-by-dint-of-surveillance First World America. Look simply at the aftermaths of 9/11 or Hurricane Katrina, or the way peaceful protest can quickly to turn to riot over dissatisfaction with a police shooting or a contested election to see how quickly we devolve, become in the worst ways animalistic.
Ash’s yearnings are thrown into relief by LaMotte’s firedrake image, her sense of unfortunate and imminent immolation, at which point he offsets her Dionysian visions of the charred ruins of conflagration with an Apollonian image, a worldly man’s Eastern import, the Chinese Lung dragon. Feeling that their incipient love is no threat to her cherished solitude, he knows they will not have a permanent union but can at least pursue some oasis of stolen time together, a walk in the park, a lover’s weekend in Brittany. He writes to her:
I am reluctant to take my pen from the paper and fold up this letter—for as long as I write to you, I have the illusion that we are in touch, that is, blessed. Did you know, speaking of dragons as we were, and of conflagration and intemperate burning—that the Chinese dragon, who in Mandarin is Lung—is a creature not of the fiery but exclusively of the watery element? And thus a cousin of your mysterious Melusina in her marble tub? Which is to say, there may be cooler dragons, who may take more temperate pleasures. He appears, blue and winding, on Chinese dishes, with a sprinkling mane and accompanied by what I once took to be little flakes of fire, and now know to be curlings of water.
Ash admits that this attitude may be one of a “reckless Anarchist,” an order-seeker who will inherently if inadvertently bring chaos. Philosopher Simon Critchley sees these themes in Malick, and acknowledges the director’s apparent engagement with Eastern/Taoist philosophy in his 2002 essay “Calm – On Terrence Malick’s The Thin Red Line.” While in Possession, there is a teenagerly love-will-prevail confidence in Ash’s wish for commiseration, inspiration, and the chance-taking required to opt for “true love,” but his deepest wish is to, even if only momentarily, retake an unattainable innocence.
In Malick, invocations of innocence abound. In The Tree of Life, one of the most honest films ever made about childhood, the narrative continually harkens back to depictions of a torrent of marauding, of youthful and unsupervised exploration contrasted with instruction, be it a father teaching a son how to throw a punch or the image of a child little more than a baby learning to say the word “alligator” to his mother while handling a wooden toy approximation of that ancient animal. Consider also the Swiss Family Robinson arcadia briefly inhabited by Kit and Holly in a pastiche of domestic bliss in Badlands, their most sedate and serene moment of redoubt, of undesire and lustlessness, a respite from the fame-hunger and the shotgun. View the migrant worker camaraderie of rail-riding farmhands in Days of Heaven and the beatific but prematurely broken-in voice of Linda Manz in that film, one of cinema’s most indelible, poetic, and perfectly cast narrators. Admire the abiding pacifism of a war-protesting priest in A Hidden Life or the music-moved couples in Song to Song. Absorb also the baby-faced soldiers’ terror in The Thin Red Line as they prepare to storm the beachhead at Guadalcanal or as they are held captive by their American counterparts, or be dizzied by the whirlings of the lithe and lissome Marina in To The Wonder, womanly but always retaining a slant of the childlike and neotenic.
Artists are not just scribes or Pollock-esque paint-drippers or post-Eisensteinian photogs mulling their montages, they are apothecaries, experimenters, mixmasters. They offer us, in Byatt and Malick, majesty. In the latter’s cinema: tree-filled skies shot from ground-level; Mozart sonatas that accompany beseechings aimed at God, asking why a child was born if he was destined to die; an itinerant-festooned locomotive crossing a trellis; a willowy young Sissy Spacek twirling her baton; a mid-forties Christian Bale dwarfed by abandoned buildings, movie sets, and minimalist houses mid-earthquake; disembodied WWII soldiers’ voices and a multiplicity of monologists and a single face radiant amid a screen full of dirt; man-made palaces juxtaposed against natural worlds large and small, the quicksand footprints left by a pair of young paramours, their faces and bodies works of art as well, his jaw rigid, her hips frangible, his gait cautious, her feminine back bending this way and that; a single imprisoned human, redwood-like in his refusal to bend to the whims of Nazism. Within the chaos, majestic life.
“I sought to know the origins of life. / I thought it lawful knowledge” writes Ash in “Swammerdam,” one of his longest poems, a sure source of majesty. Later in that same stanza, “I saw a new world in this world of ours— / A world of miracle, a world of truth / Monstrous and swarming with unguessed-at life.” The phrase “new world” recurs three more times in Possession, first in “Ragnarok,” another of Ash’s epic poems, secondly spoken by Sabine, the young daughter of a relative LaMotte stays with while deciding what to do with her pregnancy out of wedlock, the girl an aspiring writer (both intimidated by and inspired by LaMotte) who uses the phrase to describe Christmas and New Year’s rites in a description of candles “lit to signify the new world, the new year, the new life,” and lastly pronounced by the contemporary feminist-theorist Leonora Stern, an imposing woman more Odysseus than Penelope, who from the Breton isles looks out across the sea and declares, “Over there must be Nantucket, and the soft green breast of the New World.” This is a sentiment out of Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, yet one that could’ve been uttered by any of the explorers or settlers whose endeavors would lead to the coupling of John Smith and Pocahontas and the romance detailed in Malick’s The New World—the carting across of food to the hungry new arrivals, the indigenous people wearing animal pelts for warmth, the invaded quietude of an imperialism met by the humanity of shared meals and proffered gifts, a potential for healing that goes mostly but not completely unrealized.
Artists do for the soul what doctors do for the body; this is Byatt’s implication in Possession. And complex metamorphoses, be they inspired by Ovid or Kafka or otherwise, link Byatt and Malick as well; an infatuation with mutability resounds in both. An author or a filmmaker is one who categorizes, who distills things down to the irreducible and essential, the permutations of the metamorphosis, of the lifespan, the graduations which delineate the journey from youth to maturity. Is it age, though, that determines behavior? Should one be daring and wild or practical and grounded based primarily on the number of years they have notched? Is it a matter of opportunity, of culture? Americans are often taught that anyone can be successful, can pull themselves up, it just takes gumption and hard work. Entrepreneurs talk incessantly about innovation, and we do somewhat more universally seem to champion those who take risks—groundbreakers, self-made men and women. The risk-taker seizes the day and it is hard to deny the importance of ambition in art and science, another duality explored by Byatt and Malick—those standby clichés of male mechanical logic and feminine intuition, of caution vs. curiosity, the difference between eros and agape, between pleasure reading and critical reading, or passive and active viewing, getting “caught up” in the book or film versus the methodical theoretical picking apart practiced in various forms of close reading from New Criticism to Deconstructionism to Gender Studies.
Whatever theory camp you hew closest to the tent of, Possession is an astounding example of literary ventriloquism. Byatt not only convincingly mimics the style, meter, sound, and content of Victorian poetry, she thoroughly inhabits both sides of the gender paradigm. Though there’s a bit of shorthand with Ash inspired by Robert Browning and with the Dickinsonian quiddities in punctuation and capitalization which pervade the writings of Christabel LaMotte, Byatt superbly encapsulates the strangeness with which men perpend women and with which women perceive men. Malick’s corollaries here would include the heartrending through line of Ben Chaplin as Private Bell in The Thin Red Line, whose love of his wife Marty (portrayed by the picturesque Miranda Otto) and his continuous memories of her swinging on a swing, or sepia-toned in taupe dresses in gauzy light, slowly deteriorate and dissolve into depictions of her utter loneliness and, eventually, her infidelity; the desperate hedonism of Christian Bale’s lovelorn screenwriter in Knight of Cups; the adoration of the priest and subsistence farmer in A Hidden Life, Franz Jägerstätter, a real-life hero portrayed by August Diehl whose unquellable resistance in the face of a nation that has made a god of Hitler is matched only by his affection for his wife and daughters; Brooke Adams’s gaunt-hard itinerant and Sam Shepherd’s well-heeled, sanded-by-the-sun farmer in Days of Heaven cleave to this paradigm as well, as do the looks that Kit and Holly give each other which reveal so much more than callous murderers, exposing their inhibited youthfulness, their Midwestern reticence, their shared shyness, hers that of an implacable witness to brutality and his buried beneath a carapace of gesturing and cool, the learned façade of aping James Dean that hides the essential nothingness that is Martin Sheen’s portrayal of the most lizard-brained level of the American soul, that quality D.H. Lawrence famously described as “stoic, isolate and a killer.” The notions of love in The Tree of Life are not in the relationship of Brad Pitt and Jessica Chastain as father and mother so much as in their boys and how they vacillate between characteristics of masculinity and femininity, how they later recall their mom and dad and how the mother remembers her deceased child—an open-faced and radiating love that pulses both ways, boys for mother, mother for sons, ludic and uncontrived. Song to Song is Malick’s weakest film, but the Austin music scene is presented lovingly, and the scads of canonical musicians who appear gratis are compelling if in appearance alone. Though Ben Affleck was in some quarters criticized as a bland cipher in To The Wonder, this was perhaps an intentional casting move by Malick, as Affleck’s character Neil is closed and incommunicative, a counterbalance to the explosive otherworldly beauty of Olga Kurylenko which certainly calls to mind a word prized by Byatt—incandescent. And Malick’s gaze is not limited to his actresses. Bale and Colin Farrell as brooding men of different stripes in The New World are no less fetching, their marmoreal and hirsute white bodies contrasted with the tawny adolescent hues of Q’orianka Kilcher in all her hybridity, her not-quite-girl-not-quite-woman quality another flickering presence, candle-like and brief in the cross-language romances she has with her two lovers, who are also her invaders, some would even say captors, as her transformation from woodswoman to corseted doll is a constriction, an oppression as cynical as anything in Malick. True to his deeper humanism and optimism, however, she divests herself of those shackles in a most transcendent and earthen reappropriation, an act of self-liberation that concludes with Pocahontas, now a mother, bonding with her young son and quite literally reconnecting with nature.
Faith and progress are dichotomized as well. Is Malick lionizing the former and treating the latter with skepticism? And Byatt, as well, opts to imbue otherworldly things with real substance. A medium named Mrs. Lees holds an unironic séance that even the skeptic and rationalist Ash treats kindly, if only because he thinks she may hold the key to revealing what LaMotte did with their child, Ash admitting that artists themselves are little more than mediums, vessels working in paint or clay or words, knowing little of from where inspiration truly comes. Face-to-face conversation vs. the exchange of letters is another central duality in Possession, for correspondence is a form of technology. Long before we had air travel and email, the world was cosmopolitan, globalized, and flat via the advances of the printing press and the mailing of cross-continental letters. Most of the nineteenth-century action in Possession takes place, not coincidentally, during the time of the dissemination of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species. When technology appears in Malick, however, it is often shown as a golden calf. His meditative approach comes from a nearly theologian perspective on grace. Guns and backhoes, equipment and machinery, disturb the natural peace. Houston skyscrapers pierce the sky, fracturing it in a way that Malick’s trees and clouds never do. A mid-continental vista is clouded by locomotive smoke, an amplifier is sliced into by a chainsaw, fields are bisected by railroad tracks. Malick repeatedly stages scenes to declaim that the most organic and delicate thing of all is the natural world. The human equivalent of this easily tarnishable state is the precarious and precocious thing we call love.
“Connection is possible” vs. “Connection is an illusion” presents another shared aspect of Possession and Terrence Malick’s films. Byatt’s Christabel LaMotte seems to exist inside a jar, and Malick’s personal reclusion and Christabel’s hermitage also dovetail. Few working artists are as cloistered and averse to the memes of the present as Malick, who it’s difficult to find even particularly variant photos of, as he’s often hidden under a white beard and a broad-brimmed hat. Byatt isn’t exactly a regular on the touring circuit either or someone who was putting out online interviews during the Covid lockdowns, and like Malick she took a long hiatus from her craft, a decade-long absence from publication after her eleven-year-old son was killed in 1972. In the Byatt entry in The Salon.com Reader’s Guide to Contemporary Authors, Laura Miller comments:
Possession marks the debut of a new Byatt, a gifted storyteller and astonishing literary mimic, who can produce verse uncannily like Browning’s and Rossetti’s, plausibly ‘Victorian’ letters, and wicked parodies of contemporary academic blathering. Like the Browning figure in Possession, she merits the epithet ‘The Great Ventriloquist.’ What makes this aptitude more than a parlor trick and Byatt more than a smirking postmodern jester are her motivating passions and beliefs—in the power of reading and writing to rescue human beings from dull, confining lives and in the transformative capacities of the mind.
This sort of anti-misanthropic hope for the species is reflective of Malick’s point of view. He is a rare American commodity, one whose skill set and singularity are as regional as Byatt’s. Brits often seem to get tabbed with that literary ventriloquist label, the reputation as steadier and less enamored of explosions, authorial voice, and scenery-chewing characters than their American counterparts. The classic notion that the British thespian does a better American accent than vice-versa is endemic of this as well. Malick is a center-cut American, born in Illinois and associated with Texas, and someone who also experienced great personal loss, a brother to an early death, probably a suicide, as posited in Peter Biskind’s Easy Riders, Raging Bulls.
In Thirteen Ways of Looking at the Novel, Jane Smiley sees Possession as “a display of literary virtuosity,” one “so multivoiced that it is hard to believe it is the work of a single novelist,” though “it may seem so erudite as to be inaccessible.” Malick too, while continuously praised for the virtuosity of his cinematic images, recently in collaboration with cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki, and certainly noted for his inordinately polyvocal films, also comes in for criticism, as alluded to by one of his modern champions, film/TV critic Matt Zoller Seitz, who admits that Malick is “divisive, even alienating for some viewers,” and can inspire a snark in other critics that amounts to calling Malick’s work obtuse or resorting to “jokes about voice-overs and perfume ads and twirling in fields.” Byatt’s steady sprawl could be called bombastic, but it’s never overly academic or stuffy and it’s continuously infused with wit and whimsy. This is an area where she detours from Malick, for the most part. There are moments of awe and wonder aplenty in his films, but they also contour to some widely deployed terms of critique; Malick’s films could, quite rightly, be called humorless, self-serious.
There’s a wonderfully satiric commentary in Possession when, late in the novel, James Blackadder, essentially the chair of Roland Michell’s department and an Ash scholar of high order, needs to go on television and make a plea for funds to keep Ash’s exculpated letters in England. The Minister for the Arts doesn’t like Ash’s work and states, “They did go on so, don’t you think, those Victorian poets, they took themselves so horribly seriously … So pompous, don’t you think?” Blackadder replies, “That’s not the worst thing a human being can do, take himself seriously,” but realizes that this makes no impression on the cultural arbiter, so, at the advice of Leonora Stern, when he gets his five minutes on TV he sells the Ash-LaMotte correspondence as a love story, playing up the mystery angle and the sexiness quotient. On the filmic side of the ledger, regarding this conundrum of seriousness versus mass appeal, I am reminded of Francis Ford Coppola’s ostinato in Hearts of Darkness about how the pitfalls of solipsistic pretension on one hand and banal art-free entertainments on the other is the thinnest of tightropes to be walked:
Nothing is so terrible as a pretentious movie. I mean, a movie that aspires for something really terrific and doesn’t pull it off is shit, it’s scum, and everyone will walk on it as such. And that’s why poor filmmakers, in a way, that’s their greatest horror, is to be pretentious. So here you are on one hand that’s trying to aspire to really do something, and on the other hand you’re not allowed to be pretentious. And finally you say: Fuck it. I don’t care if I’m pretentious or not pretentious or if I’ve done it or I haven’t done it. All I know is that I am going to see this movie. And that for me it has to have some answers. And by answers I don’t mean just a punchline; answers on about forty-seven different levels.
You’re on that high wire and you can’t fall off either way, every step is precarious. Lean too much in one direction and become an affected and self-impressed bore, tilt too much to the other side and become popcorn movie tripe or mass market paperback at the supermarket check-out line next to the tawdry tabloids and bodice rippers. Malick seems content to cultivate a cult audience, and he has the privilege of top-line acting talent who’ll line up to say they’ve been in one of his films, taking far less money than they’d require from almost anyone else.
This leads us back to recluses, as another linking quote from Possession is Maud Bailey’s assertion that “all scholars are a bit mad.” This is one way to explain Malick’s intransigent seclusion and his filmless period of contemplation, the madness of a scholar-filmmaker, someone who, like Byatt, toiled in academia but never fully became an academic. Christabel LaMotte is a hermit and at one point her cousin Sabine considers her in a tri-layered portrayal of observation, of female gazes. Byatt (the author) describes the cousin Sabine (who writes of LaMotte in letters) observing LaMotte (the poetess) who is observing Mother Nature, with the reader herself as then the final level, the grande dame observer, the omniscient overseer imbibing it all. Sabine describes Christabel LaMotte as follows:
I thought she might run with me along the beach, or climb rocks, despite a chill wind. But she simply stood at the edge of the water, with her boots sinking in the wet sand, and her hands tucked into her sleeves for warmth, and listened to the breakers and the gulls crying, quite still, quite still. Her eyes were closed when I came up to her, and with every breaker her brows creased in a little frown. I had the fanciful idea that they were beating on her skull like blows, and that she was enduring the sound, for reasons of her own. I went away again—I have never met anyone who so gave the impression that normal acts of friendliness are a deadly intrusion.
LaMotte produced much less quantitatively than her counterpart Ash, as similarly almost all the other 1970s-emergent American directors were extremely prolific compared to Malick, notably Martin Scorsese, Steven Spielberg, Robert Altman, Clint Eastwood, and Woody Allen.
Yet another area of confluence is that Malick’s films are intensely apolitical. Take, from Possession, the exchange where Maud calls herself a “textual scholar” and says “I rather deplore the modern feminist attitude to private lives.” She is not an ideologue, as satirized in the large, loud, lesbian scholar Leonora Stern, who is nonetheless a likeable and sympathetic character despite her volubility and despite publishing a book titled Motif and Matrix in the Poems of LaMotte with chapters like “From Venus Mount to Barren Heath” and “Female Landscapes and Unbroken Waters, Impenetrable Surfaces,” a tome replete with words like “phallocentric,” phrases like “the emasculation of Father Time by his Oedipal son,” and stocked with references to Hélène Cixous and Luce Irigaray. Byatt implements Leonora as a way to deflate self-righteousness and lampoon academese but without denigrating that brand of scholarship or making Leonora into a two-dimensional punching bag. The Maud character is simply saying that type of political reading isn’t her particular cup of bergamot. In the Malick realm, his films are paeans, poems, politics-free zones. The Thin Red Line is not explicitly an anti-war film, nor is A Hidden Life. The murders in Badlands are dispassionate, cold as can be, the opposite of crimes of passion, and the characters who commit them are not vilified, judged, or portrayed as in any way demonic or insane. Knight of Cups is as phantasmagorical as The Tree of Life is spiritual, even biblical, but never doctrinaire or even abjectly “religious.” The New World is downright withdrawn in assaying the arrival of Europeans on American shores and avoids anything as didactic as portraying colonialism as simply “evil.” The astringent farmer in Days of Heaven is tormented and bereft, the music scene in Song to Song is not marked by politicking or bohemian artist tropes, and the priest in To The Wonder is doubt-dominated and questioning his faith. Even the implicit environmentalism in Malick’s films is devoid of rah-rah sloganeering or pastoral absolutism. The section of Possession alluded to above where Maud Bailey condemns the personalization of certain sorts of feminism concludes when Maud divests herself of the personal as well, a near confession to Roland which ends with the following cinematic moment:
“You can be psychoanalytical without being personal—” Maud said. Roland did not challenge her. It was he who had suggested they come to Richmond to discuss what to do next, and now they were here, the sight of the little house was indeed disturbing. He suggested that they go into the church at the end of the road, a huge Victorian barn, containing modern glass-walled galleries and a quiet coffee bar. The church was full of children’s activities, prancing and bedizened clowns, fairies and ballerinas, easels and scraping violins and piping recorders. They settled in the coffee bar, in a reminiscent patch of stained-glass light.
A filmic version of Possession that worked was possible, they just needed Malick to arrange and film scenes like that one. The director of the adaptation, Neil LaBute, is a fine playwright who has shown flares of subversive talent as a filmmaker, and he is adept at dark comedy and post-Mamet gender warfare, but he was ill-suited to the nuance and historicity of Byatt’s novel, abandoned at the helm to cobble together a long-shelved studio system film that Americanized and prettified the male lead. The take-home is that philosophical questions like those posed by Malick and Byatt are hampered by overtly commercial concerns.
Possession name-drops John Ruskin, his enthrallment with water as the most universal element, and also the conception of a glass of water as a lens, clear liquid in curved glass which can transform and magnify whatever is put under it for study. When not mired in identity politics, contemporary literary theory has moved away from deconstruction to embrace the precepts of evolutionary biology, expanding from Jaussian reception theory to Bill Brown’s thing theory to Franco Moretti’s data collation methods of distant reading. In Possession, the genius Victorian poets and the contemporary academic scavengers are searchers, seekers. Whether they construct history from documents and speculations or whether they were the authors of the documents in the first place, they were scouring the earth for Prima Materia, for Nature’s Shape, for the source of all metamorphoses. In nature, there are laws, there are discernible patterns, there is the legacy of Darwin’s research and all it encompasses, there is what Einstein called “spooky action at a distance,” there are the revelations in physics provided by the Hadron collider and the Higgs-Boson “god particle” and our growing knowledge of the foaming out of the universe, the very earliest cosmological resonances and ripples from the beginnings of time. Byatt’s characters seek what Ash calls, in Chapter 11, in the unfinished poem “Swammerdam,” the “source of life, of generation,” as he probes the biosphere itself, inspecting earth’s creatures and revealing oneness through the existence of the many, a connectedness of laws and forms.
In Malick we see the director’s obsessions as items placed under the microscope. We see babies, we see young love, we see men still boys sent to war, we see white soldiers taken in and sheltered by black and brown tribes, trespassers met with munificence, monogamy struggling to hold off polyamorous incursions, marriages crimped or torn or shattered, we see the dying of Witt’s “beautiful light” memorialized by his superior officer and antagonist Sergeant Welsh, played brilliantly by Sean Penn in a moment of nugatory elegy near the film’s end, the last man to leave the makeshift grave, pinching back tears as he memorializes the extinguished spark of human life, a calloused seen-it-all nihilist who nonetheless gives the departed idealist a moment of reconsideration and recollection, a vulnerable eulogy, a relinquishing of male bravado, a reflection seen by no one but the viewer. We see the ugliest grasping for homicidal fame in Martin Sheen’s Kit Carruthers. We see the violation of the terra firma in To The Wonder, corporate-grade tractors and mega-machinery despoiling unblemished soil to prepare it for tract housing. Malick traffics in the surreal and the ethereal, and fables require nemeses. Both he and Byatt offer fairy tales of a sort (the poet R.H. Ash calls them wonder-tales, and wonder is the most defining and persistent element in Malick), the best ones in Possession incarnated in Christabel LaMotte’s stories, brilliant self-contained matryoshka dolls with titles like “The Glass Coffin” and “The Threshold.” This harkens back to Galileo and Kepler, to Shakespeare and whoever authored the book of Genesis, those who on a meta-level truly try to apprehend, to grasp how it all works, to push the proverbial envelope and to exceed the endpoint of what was previously thought attainable by science or art. This is what Byatt does in her postmodern volume and this is what Malick does in his films; they hold existence itself up to the light.
Their similarities are, as argued throughout, multifarious, but where do they fundamentally disagree? Byatt likes plot, Malick not so much. Possession has few loose ends. Things are tidied up. There is a beautifully ambiguous epilogue but it is an epilogue nonetheless, bringing together two characters for their only meeting, an unabashed finishing flourish, the author applying her signature to the corner of the canvas. The arc of Malick’s movies is much less parabolic. They are plateaus, not roller coasters, where loose ends go unbraided and untied. His spectrum is wide, his aperture yawning, but the canvas is flat, containing its own signature elements yet unpunctured by third-dimensional projections. Malick is more of a throwback, almost quaint, perhaps analogizable to Sherwood Anderson; the swell before the onset of Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and Faulkner, the tidal wave of modernism they ushered in and the tsunami of postmodernism that came after. Malick does not embrace games(wo)manship as Byatt does. Her book is, as stated earlier, ancient, medieval, Victorian, Romantic, modern, and postmodern all at once, a Hadron collider of its own. It is, despite its love of musty libraries and handwritten old letters, set in the world we live in, a world that is interwoven, interleaved, and overlaid. With its specters of technology and commerce already dominant uber-realities, Possession is predictive of imbricative works like David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest or David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas (novels not often enough compared to Possession, for reasons that may have to do with gender and genre both). In Malick, there is an uber-skepticism of technological and commercial entities, a legitimate fear of what awaits us in the near future. In his films, technology and commerce are weeds that choke the human good away. While Byatt crafted a highbrow page-turner, full of whodunnits and will-they-fall-in-loves, Malick increasingly moves away from drama, and is sometimes met with moviegoers seduced by the promise of big-name Hollywood stars shaking their heads or even asking for their money back. Despite her games and gambitry, Byatt’s is not full-on experimental or avant-garde fiction, whereas Malick is more and more the realm of Cineastes Only, best appreciated by a true art house audience. He is meant to be viewed on the big screen, but in a theater for those not averse to plotlessness or meandering narratives. Byatt also seems more conflicted than Malick, who is nothing if not dedicated to his own inimitable brand of sumptuous austerity and complete radio silence regarding interviews or press. While Byatt is more accessible and forgiving, maybe even more naturally of a piece with the present, it would still feel rather criminal to peruse Possession on a screen instead of the page. This is a literature clearly invested in the article, the artifact, the enduring piece of technology that is the book.
I will close with a contemporary anecdote of my own and admit that as part of my research for this piece, I search-engined various incarnations of “A.S. Byatt and Terrence Malick.” One of the things that turned up was the OKCupid profile of a thirtysomething man using this British author born in 1936 and this American filmmaker born in 1943 as touchstones; a man from a tiny town seeking love and connection of his own, an Ash looking for his Christabel, a Roland looking for a Maud, a guy tired of watching the Malick movie all by himself, of hunting for a book group with which to meet up and discuss Byatt. He wants face-to-face interaction but can find only our modern simulation of letters and correspondence, the internet, and not just the internet but a dating website. He claims to be a cubicle slave who adores music, movies, and literature. Reduced to a summary, bland and trivial, simultaneously sad-making and voyeuristically intriguing, this consumer of twentieth-century culture’s listed favorites include: Faulkner, Dorothy Parker, The Great Gatsby, Mystery Train, and Possession; Preston Sturges, the Coen Brothers, Wes Anderson, and Terrence Malick; jazz, indie rock, folk, blues, Cole Porter, Joni Mitchell, and PJ Harvey; The Wire, Arrested Development, and Community.
Maybe he’s not so sad after all. Or at least in possession of broad taste, is what he appears to be claiming. As Christabel LaMotte and R.H. Ash share a love of Shakespeare and of all great literature. And Maud and Roland share their love of Ash and LaMotte.
OKCupid guy who didn’t make his profile private is choosing to share these things with the world, so I feel no compunction in mentioning him. And I, in this essay, via this means of expression, this writing down, this typing out, this transcription and inquiry and distribution, am asking you to concentrate on the shared visions of Byatt and Malick, to make this connection.
The dating profile man I found? I hope it’s not insulting to refer to him as “meek,” a recurring word in Byatt’s description of her nominal hero, Roland Michell, and a recurring concept in Malick in terms of depicting our eternal human meekness in the face of the giants that are nature, history, and time. This man is meek in that he is impoverished of company, of companionship, of love.
Like our four main characters in Possession, he is educated, cultured, and relatively well-off, but he is lonesome, a human seeking, questing, and thus deserving of mention at the conclusion of this exegesis on empathy in the timeless novelic interpolations of A.S. Byatt’s Possession and in the spectacular but anti-spectacle film oeuvre of Terrence Malick; a woman and a man, a Brit and an American, an author and a film director who I, like a matchmaker, have conspired to bring together.
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Sean Hooks was born and raised in working class New Jersey. After stints in Las Vegas, Berlin, and Los Angeles, he moved to Dallas this year and now teaches at the University of Texas at Arlington. He has written about literature, film, and music in a wide variety of publications. His website is www.seanhooks.com.