How we cite our quotes: Possession: A Romance. London: Vintage Books, 1991.
Quote #1
In 1986 he was twenty-nine, a graduate of Prince Albert College, London (1978) and a PhD of the same university (1985). His doctoral dissertation was entitled History, Historians and Poetry? A Study of the Presentation of Historical 'Evidence' in the Poems of Randolph Henry Ash. He had written it under the supervision of James Blackadder, which had been a discouraging experience. Blackadder was discouraged and liked to discourage others. (2.3)
Roland Mitchell's experience as a graduate student wasn't particularly pleasant (although who has a pleasant experience as a graduate student?), but once we readers learn a little bit more about the experiences of his senior colleagues, his experience doesn't seem so bad by comparison.
Quote #2
He made applications and was regularly turned down. When one came up in his own department there were 600 applications. Roland was interviewed, out of courtesy he decided, but the job went to Fergus Wolff, whose track record was less consistent, who could be brilliant or bathetic, but never dull and right, who was loved by his teachers whom he exasperated and entranced, where Roland excited no emotion more passionate than solid approbation. Fergus was also in the right field, which was literary theory. (2.13)
This passage suggests that as scholarly fashions burst in and fade out of existence, there's a risk that alternative methodologies, practices, and perspectives will be overlooked or ignored. Then again, characters like Maud Bailey and Leonora Stern would argue that the status quo can be just as exclusionary.
Quote #3
Blackadder was fifty-four and had come to editing Ash out of pique. He was the son and grandson of Scottish schoolmasters. His grandfather recited poetry on firelight evenings: Marmion, Childe Harold, Ragnarök. His father sent him to Downing College in Cambridge to study under F.R. Leavis. Leavis did to Blackadder what he did to serious students; he showed him the terrible, magnificent importance and urgency of English literature and simultaneously deprived him of any confidence in his own capacity to contribute to, or change it. (3.15)
As we learn, James Blackadder's undergraduate experience was just as discouraging as Roland Mitchell's graduate experience. Any hopes that he once had of being a poet were quickly stamped out when he imagined what F. R. Leavis would say about them.
Quote #4
Blackadder, schooled by his grandfather, saw immediately that all these poems were by Randolph Henry Ash, examples of his ventriloquism, of his unwieldy range. He himself had two choices: to state his knowledge, or to allow the seminar to proceed, with Leavis enticing unfortunate undergraduates into making wrong identifications, and then proceeding to demonstrate his own analytic brilliance in distinguishing fake from authenticity, Victorian alienation from the voice of true feeling. (3.15)
Possession isn't satisfied with portraying the real-world historical figure F. R. Leavis as a man who crushed young undergraduate dreams: it also suggests that his teaching style was self-indulgent and contrived. Don't hold back, A. S. Byatt: tell us how you really feel.
Quote #5
'And you? Why do you work on Ash?'
'My mother liked him. She read English. I grew up on his idea of Sir Walter Ralegh, and his Agincourt poem and Offa on the Dyke. And then Ragnarök.' He hesitated. 'They were what stayed alive, when I'd been taught and examined everything else.'
Maud smiled then. 'Exactly. That's it. What could survive our education.' (4.146-48)
One of the first things that draws Maud Bailey and Roland Mitchell together is their shared sense that university education can threaten our appreciation for literary works. What about you, Shmoopers? Have you ever watched a novel, short story, or poem grow dull and lifeless through too much classroom attention and examination? Or—even worse?—too much of the latest trendy theory?
Quote #6
She told Professor Bengtsson that she wished to write her doctoral dissertation on Ask to Embla. He was very doubtful about this. It was uncertain ground, a kind of morass, like Shakespeare's sonnets. What Contribution to Knowledge did she hope to make, could she be sure of making? (7.4)
As we learn, Beatrice Nest's graduate education was just as disappointing as James Blackadder's undergraduate education. Rather than pursuing the topic that she really wanted to research, she was steered into "safer"—and more traditionally "feminine"—territory.
Quote #7
I did know, that I had a Papa who told better Tales than any other Papa—or Mama—or nursemaid—that could possibly be imagined. Now, he was in the habit of talking to me some of the time—when his tale-telling fit was upon him—as though he were the Ancient Mariner […]—But some of the time he would talk as though I were a fellow-worker in the field, a fellow-scholar, erudite and speculative—and he would talk in three or four languages—for he thought in French—and English—and Latin—and of course in Breton. (10.85)
Christabel LaMotte's letters to Randolph Henry Ash reveal that she owed much of her early education to her father, the folklorist Isidore LaMotte. Through him, it seems, she gained her lasting love of stories, language, literature, and literary study.
Quote #8
Great Galileo, with his optic tube
A century ago, displaced this Earth
From apprehension's Centre, and made out
The planet's swimming circles and the Sun
And beyond that, motion of infinite space Sphere upon sphere […] (11.14)
On top of taking a sometimes satirical look at academic life in the late twentieth-century, Possession also explores the ways in which new knowledge can force whole societies to see themselves differently. In his poem about the biologist Jan Swammerdam, Randolph Henry Ash reflects on the enormous stir—and serious controversy—that was caused by Galileo's astronomical discovery that the Earth orbits the sun.
Quote #9
I don't think you can imagine, Miss Bailey, how it was then. We were dependent and excluded persons. In my early days—indeed until the late 1960s—women were not permitted to enter the main Senior Common Room at Prince Albert College. We had our own which was small and slightly pretty. Everything was decided in the pub—everything of import—where we were not invited and did not wish to go. (12.117)
Beatrice Nest's experience makes it clear that universities aren't simply ivory towers of higher learning: they're also political institutions that reflect the realities (including the ideologies and injustices) of the world around them. As Maud Bailey knows all too well, those ideologies and injustices may also determine what is taught in universities, and how.
Quote #10
He had been taught that language was essentially inadequate, that it could never speak what was there, that it only spoke itself.
He thought about the death mask. He could and could not say that the mast and the man were dead. What had happened to him was that the ways in which it could be said had become more interesting than the idea that it could not. (26.47-48)
In the end, Possession suggests that some forms of knowledge and understanding are only possible when we put aside the perspectives and methodologies that we've learned through formal education. What's your take on that, Shmoopers? Does it ring true for any kinds of knowledge in your own lives?