SOURCE: “The Hunger of the Imagination in A. S. Byatt's The Game,” in Critique, Vol. XXIX, No. 3, Spring, 1988, pp. 147-62.

In a comment made after the publication of her second novel, The Game （1967）, Antonia S. Byatt described the subject matter of her fiction: “habits of mind—the nature of the imagination, the ways in which different people take in the world, and the uses they make of what they think or see.”¹ Her statement defines both the subject of The Game and its form. This novel presents and demonstrates contrasting uses of the imagination and shows the impossibility of its ever fully taking in the world, the difficulty of breaking out of private worlds into communication, and the devastation that can result from the misuse of imagination—especially from attempting to invade the mental space of another person. The Game examines the perils of fiction as well as those of human relationships. It takes its place beside other “self-reflexive” pieces of contemporary fiction in which novelists examine the procedures of their art, and it also explores the moral themes of betrayal and self-deception. Its plot, which relates moral and aesthetic concerns, perfectly suits this duality. The story of two sisters in their thirties—Cassandra Corbett, an unmarried Oxford don, and Julia Eskelund, a successful novelist, married to a social worker and mother of a teen-aged daughter Deborah—shows the dangers of fiction in a very concrete way, for Julia's novel, based on her version of Cassandra's obsessive love for the naturalist Simon Moffitt, causes Cassandra's suicide. At the same time, Byatt's handling of her materials constitutes in itself a questioning of the possibilities of art.

The Game of the title is, first of all, the childhood game, with its intricate rules, which the sisters created in Brontë fashion from their imaginations and which continues to exist physically in the form of ledgers, a pack of cards divided into four armies, a set of clay figures representing characters in the Arthurian legend, and a map. This game, which continued well into adolescence, was their way of taking in the world by making patterns: first the physical conflicts of warfare, then the intrigues of torments of courtly love. When the sisters, with Julia's husband Thor and their daughter Deborah, are brought together at the Corbett parents' Northumberland house by the imminent death of Mr. Corbett, they pass their time by taking the Game out from storage in a window seat and playing at it. As they leave after the funeral, Cassandra packs it away, saying that it has “done enough damage.”² She is echoing Thor's recent rebuke to her: “Don't you think you've done enough damage?” He was referring to Cassandra's obsession with Simon, whom both sisters had, in different ways, loved and lost years earlier, and especially to Cassandra's feeling that Julia stole Simon from her. “Why don't you let go?” Thor urged, “Julia is afraid of you. Let him go, let Julia go” （107）. Cassandra's repetition of Thor's words shows that she understands the relationship of the Game to her estrangement from her sister. Before they met Simon, there had been an earlier instance of theft, directly involving the Game and bringing its shared story-telling to an end. Julia had taken a story of Cassandra's concerning “paths taken and escapes made” by Sir Lancelot, revised it, adding control and irony, and published it as her own. This, as Cassandra recognized at the time, was not simple theft, since “the story was, or had been, common property” （84）, but she had deeply resented it. The overlapping of the sisters' inner lives has continued, with unusual intensity, although they have seldom met as adults. Cassandra has found that Simon's appearances on television have made him “accessible to the imagination, to disputes, to thoughts, to dreams,” but still feels herself “an object of Julia's speculation, Julia's tale-telling” （108）. For her part, Julia has felt shut out and judged inadequate by her older sister. While Cassandra puts away the Game, the two sisters achieve a moment of adult understanding, each confessing to a sense of loss arising from what Cassandra calls “a gulf between the life we created and the life we lived.” She says that she “had hoped to be able to bridge it, in time,” but does not say whether she hoped to use her scholarly work on Malory's Morte D'Arthur, her devotion to Anglo-Catholicism, or her fantasy life with Simon for this purpose. She, then, in an attempt to act on Thor's plea, tells Julia that “one should make a real moral effort to forgo one's need for a sense of glory,” and that she and Julia should try to see each other “more on the surface” （123）. Yet Julia, despite her hope that she and Cassandra can attain ordinary friendship, and despite pity for her sister, whom she sees as betrayed by the Game into a life of solitude, feels “a little flicker of irrational envy; Cassandra had appropriated their world, taken it over” （123）. （Julia herself, by contrast, has turned away from the particular imaginative demands of the Game to transfer her daily life into novels.） The Game thus becomes a symbol for the sister's continuing relationship as well as for their childhood interdependence, and it represents both their invasion of each other's mental territory and their shared awareness of the “gap.”

The Game also provides language for Byatt's novel and its basic structure. Julia's publication of her version of Cassandra, in a novel that marks a new departure for her as a writer, is described as “one of those destructive moves we are only enabled to make by rigidly refusing to consider their nature, until too late” （260）. In fact, it causes Cassandra's death. The evidence at the inquest into Cassandra's suicide includes a psychiatrist's statement that it was, “in these cases, just possible to assume that there was an obsessive attempt to ‘play fair’”; the thoroughness with which she had sealed herself into her room, before taking pills and turning on the gas, suggested a concern “to prove she was no gambler” （279）. Later Julia tells Simon that she has felt controlled by Cassandra: “She always made the rules. … She made me what I am” （280）. The language of games is used also in the activity of the imagination. Simon tells Cassandra of his attempt to see with the eyes of his dead friend Antony Miller—“a silly game … that got to be not a game” （241）. Earlier, Cassandra, after watching one of Simon's television presentations, writes in her journal about her need to pursue metaphors “to the death.” “Is this a game or an action? Is that a real question?” （170）.

The structure of the novel is patterned on that of a game with two players, alternating between Cassandra's and Julia's perceptions and between retrospective and present narrative. The question of who has won this larger game becomes crucial. When Julia publishes her novel, using Cassandra's phrase, “a sense of glory,” as its title and Cassandra's relationship with Simon as its subject, Cassandra, who has painfully achieved, at last, a real relationship with Simon, feels that the book's existence destroys their new-found freedom. She tells Simon that they can never say anything to each other “that cannot be seen in terms of Julia's fiction” because “our course is plotted for us in it.” The theme of A Sense of Glory, she says, is “what Dr. Johnson called ‘the hunger of the imagination that preys incessantly on life’” （271）. Shortly after this conversation, she kills herself. Nevertheless, we are left at the end of the novel with the question of who has been the winner. “Who had stolen whose action?” Julia asked herself when she heard that Simon, as she had “made” him do in her book, had gone to Oxford. She saw that “she could not now, if Cassandra had possibly seen Simon, ask Cassandra to forgive her for a book in which she had imagined such a meeting” （252）. And as, with Simon's help, she clears Cassandra's papers from her Oxford rooms, she fears that her sister's death may have “simply loosed” the imaginary Cassandra who will “gnaw intolerably at her imagination in the future” （285）. Malcolm Bradbury observed in his review of The Game that “in one sense the triumph of Julia is the triumph of this world”³—but, as he saw, Julia's triumph is open to question. Both sisters are trapped by the Game. Julia sees that in trying to “come to grips with” Cassandra she has imprisoned herself. “We think … that we are releasing ourselves by plotting what traps us, by laying it all out to look at—but in fact all we do is show the trap up for real” （251）.

Clearly, The Game is more than a study of sibling rivalry or of obsessive love, although it takes both these topics seriously. It is also an exploration of the imagination and of the activity of perception, and it reaches the conclusion that reality can never be contained within any of our linguistic forms. Iris Murdoch, of whose work Byatt has written with clarity and insight, has warned that brute reality is “more and other than our descriptions of it”⁴—and Byatt's novel is designed to demonstrate and ponder this fact.

The Game is filled with documents and fictions, which, in their relations with each other and with the central narrative, prove Murdoch's point. In addition, the main characters' relationships to various forms of interpretation become central to the novel's meaning.

Each time Julia raids Cassandra's imaginative life, the resulting product is a distortion. Julia's reworking of Cassandra's earlier story （already extensively revised by Cassandra for her own public version） had a more elegant, less “lumpy” form. Similarly, A Sense of Glory gives shape to Julia's version of Cassandra's imagined relationship with Simon, and inevitably, distorts it. Annexing for her purposes Father Rowell, Cassandra's priest and friend—and, in the process, neglecting his suggestion that she try to enlarge the possibilities of Cassandra's daily life—Julia makes the imagined lover a priest rather than a naturalist. She succeeds, according to one reviewer, in telling the story of “hopeless love, felt in intelligent if cranky middle age” （264） with genuine sympathy for the central character, whom, with an obvious allusion to Emily Brontë, she calls Emily Burnett. Her book has an open ending. After Emily's meeting with the flesh-and-blood man whom she has nourished in her imagination for so long, the reader is left, says the reviewer, with the question

of whether the cold breath of reality on the glittering imaginative structure will prove absolutely destructive, or be the beginning of a more restricted, but more mature existence.

（265）

As Julia tells her lover Ivan, she tried to give her character some freedom; she wanted to convey both limitations and possibilities. But her imagination was not equal to the task she set herself; she has failed to recognize what Murdoch calls the “opacity of persons” and to allow for “contingency.”⁵ Since she has used real-life models whose emotional states are precarious, the results are disastrous. Deborah, who had herself resented being material for her mother's novels, points out that Julia's use of Cassandra is more damaging than her use of her husband and daughter, because earlier books “weren't really about me, they were about you, what you felt about me. But this was about her” （273）. In a sense this is true, yet, as Ivan shrewdly observes, it is also about Julia: he sees—and Julia admits—that Emily is to some extent a composite portrait of Julia and Cassandra. The “sense of glory” and the failure of reality to measure up is something both women understand. Ivan also observes that Julia's story provides a “one-sided equation” because Julia has “left out the persecuting female novelist” （176）. Further, the irony implicit in the art-life relationship is greatly deepened by Julia's failure to imagine the possibility that Cassandra might be able to reach out to Simon despite the “forests of imagination between them.” In her version, she tells Ivan, when Emily meets her priest in Oxford “she lets him go, she won't put out a hand” （176）. In fact—as we learn later—Cassandra, after the first shock, was able, with great effort, to reach out to Simon. After Simon, in Cassandra's college rooms, had told her the story he had to tell—of his friend Antony's being eaten alive by piranhas before Simon's eyes—Cassandra was able to respond to his emotional and physical needs and to discover that “it was surprisingly painful to be in a position to consider what was good for him” （236）. When Simon, after making an incoherent sexual proposition and falling into a drunken sleep, wakes and asks her out to dinner, Cassandra reaches an important realization:

The romantic moment of recognition would not happen—although she had come closer to that than she could possibly have considered likely, and she had refused it. But what she had now, though not absolute, was more than that grey recognition of defeat, of pure limiting impossibility, that was the romantic recognition reversed. Simon, chatty, gossipy, nervous, kindly—which?, having made of her pictures—what? and of herself, too—what? was asking her out to dinner. And she had preached to him that the complete, the absolute feeling was not desirable. She did not know what he thought, and would not know. But she would take what was offered. Painfully, deliberately, still terrified, Cassandra, for the first time in her life, rose to an occasion.

（247）

She is able to put into words what went wrong between them years earlier: “you didn't like things to mean too much. I loved you too much” （247）; to smile at him; and—until Julia's book ends their relationship—to enjoy a release into an ordinary friendship. Julia tells Ivan that Cassandra believed in the prophetic function of literature; “I only have hindsight” （176）. Her failure to conceive of Cassandra's freedom and potential for growth proves fatal. When A Sense of Glory is published, Cassandra feels trapped in the book and rejects Simon's pleas that she try to live in the world with Julia. Knowing that we all create each other in normal life, she insists that Julia has gone beyond what is allowable: “she does a little more than simply see me, and that little is intolerable” （276）.

Failing to do justice to the autonomy of Cassandra, Julia has also failed to imagine Simon. In her book, she tells Ivan, the priest “sort of remembers” Emily, “and the pathetic thing is he likes her, he really likes her” （176）. Simon, in fact, has dreamed of Cassandra in the years between their meetings, has made professional use of quotations she gave him, and has unconsciously saved up things to tell her. He has needed Cassandra, and Julia has been incapable of imagining either his need or her sister's response. She has, however, been dimly aware of other possibilities lying beyond her creative scope. Her own love for Simon, she reflects after the completion of A Sense of Glory, has remained （as she had imagined Cassandra's as remaining）, that of a child for “an imaginary hero, or a television idol.” Yet she thinks that “another kind of love, from another person might … call out in him another reality; but that was only idle speculation. She had imagined him” （261）. She also admits to Ivan that she may not have tried hard enough to “tug” the story away from Cassandra, and that perhaps she ought simply to have written the book for her private satisfaction, not published it. She has been guilty of self-deception and, in Bradbury's words, of “moral clumsiness”⁶ rather than of deliberate cruelty. Her book is an example of what Murdoch would probably label fantasy rather than imagination, and in this case, reversing Murdoch's description of what should happen, fantasy is destructive of real people.⁷

If Julia uses her fiction to give shape and finality to the persons and events of her life at the risk of distortion, Cassandra leaves behind her only unfinished pieces of writing: her journal （once intended to grow into some larger work）, her edition of Malory, her poems about Morgan le Fay. It was in her journal that she had tried to contain her imaginative life after Julia's first theft, which ended their shared story-telling. The function of the Game as a recorder of romantic imagining has also been continued in Cassandra's professional life by her work on Malory （where, Julia thinks, her sister's inner life has been sterilized with footnotes） and by the poems. The journal has helped Cassandra to escape from her sense that her life is “weightless and meaningless.” By recording details she has distinguished “between what is real and what is imagined” （26–27）. It has another function: in it she carries on a sporadic one-sided conversation with Simon, commenting on his television presentations and continuing arguments they had had in the past. Shortly before Simon's arrival in Oxford, she turned to painting as a way of coping with reality, creating a version of Simon's world and of Simon himself. These paintings, she tells Simon, were a way of making the world “manageable.”

It's a matter of weight. If one doesn't occupy one's space in the world, the world does have to be warded off—immobilized, reduced, kept down. Trimmed to size.

（254）

From this experience of what an earlier journal entry called the “tyranny of objects” （117）, Simon releases her. In turn, she, by listening, has released him from his nightmares of Antony's death. As she and Simon find themselves able to talk like old friends, Cassandra experiences a new world, transfigured by its ordinariness.

Buses, pillar-boxes, telephones, staircases were there to be used. Food was there to be bought and eaten. She balanced on her feet, she had weight and was related to things. Distances were measurable and each distance was the proper distance. The air shone.

（254）

She no longer needs either the paintings or her journal. Julia's book drives Cassandra back to the journal to make one last entry that repudiates the “limp doll” that Julia has made of her:

My shoes, my nightdress, my pens, my papers, little dirty details of me lifted. Pinned out—oh yes, even my underwear—like a limp doll to be filled with puffs of her breath. What was missing filled in by her with dotted lines, pieces of new string to jerk the joints, or wood to replace limbs, as they do in museums, and never a footnote to say, this material is conjectural. This is an eclectic and conflated text.

（276）

Like A Sense of Glory, Cassandra's papers have power: the last journal entry is read out at the inquest, and the papers taken from her room became the final image of The Game. The last sentence describes Simon and Julia driving away from Oxford while behind them in the trunk of the car, “closed into crates, unread, unopened, Cassandra's private papers bumped and slid.” The papers' continuing existence, like that of the Game in the window seat, undercuts the apparent optimism of what immediately precedes—Julia's determination to be a new woman, free of Cassandra and Simon and of the judgments of the past. Cassandra's papers, with their capacity to hurt Julia but also—perhaps—to educate her, refute Julia's naive hope and suggest that genuine growth is more difficult and less tidy than her idea of it.

Simon, at the other extreme from Julia, does his best to avoid interpretation. He insists that he chose his work because it was something neutral, “where curiosity was simply curiosity.” “You watch a snake eating. You watch it eating,” he tells Ivan's television panel. “You might just be curious about how it does it” （196, 195）. He is angry when the other members of the panel want to interpret his snakes, and his interest in them, in psychological or religious terms, and bewildered when they talk of him as an artist. If there was an artist in the programs, he says, it was Antony, his collaborator. After the program, he complains to Julia that he felt “savaged,” made “food for thought” by the discussion and that he finds “all this tying up of loose ends” dishonest （200）. When A Sense of Glory is published, he tries to make Cassandra resist its impact, arguing vehemently that their relationship is real whereas the book is “a lie at worst and—and a piece of imagination at best. You can't destroy a reality with fiction” （270）.

A remainder of the distortion inherent in all interpretation is provided by the reviews of A Sense of Glory. Even the fullest and most thoughtful review view exemplifies the reductiveness of all reviewing, as it notes that Julia “can sum up a whole woman by describing … the distressing juxtaposition of a dangling crucifix and tinned college spaghetti” （264）. A second review provides facts we had not known. We learn that Julia betrays not only Cassandra and Simon but Julia's accomplice, Professor Storrin, who had planted the seed of the book in her mind and who is portrayed as a “suave don” with a “false charm.” We also observe how Julia has coarsened Cassandra's intellectual interests by replacing Malory with the Earl of Rochester. The third review, a brief snippet, airily summarizes: “Miss Gee had nothing on Julia Corbett's Emily Burnett” （265）. Together, the reviews cannot sum up the original, which remains inaccessible within The Game.

When the characters in Byatt's novel try to imagine each other—and this is the central action of the book—the result must, then, be failure. Julia has tried all her life to “come to grips with” Cassandra. At Oxford, as she renews her scrutiny of her sister, she feels that they have “at last reached a point where the inevitable knowledge of long acquaintance could become intelligent love” （135）. But Cassandra's reality escapes Julia. Cassandra is more successful in her imagining of Simon. In the course of her long study of him, she has begun to find that despite the unreality of television some of her thoughts of him are “not fantasy, but knowledge. What he says, what he shows, I am occasionally, by careful attention, able to predict. … I know to a certain extent what he is afraid of … and what he thinks. Love is attention, though that is only a part of the truth” （168–69）. When Simon, in her presence, compulsively relives his experience of Antony's death, “she thought she saw what he saw; this was what, over the years, she had been training herself to do” （233）. She has not yet, however, grasped Antony's relation to Simon. Antony, according to Simon, made the films and therefore stood, unknown to her, between herself and Simon; it was often his voice which she took as Simon's. The shock of this information forces Cassandra to make a further effort of imagination, and this effort in turn leads to new uncertainties but also to new understanding. Remembering the Looking-Glass world of Lewis Carroll, which she has earlier used as an analogy for Simon's world on the screen, she sees Antony as the Red King who （according to Tweedledum and Tweedledee） dreamed the whole story. “We create each other,” Cassandra thinks.

Through hard glass, one comes across the Red King, snoring and dreaming. Wake him, look him in the eyes, break his dream and you vanish. Apparently this dead man was the Red King; Simon and the programmes were his. And thus myself? And Julia? Again, I pursue metaphors. Nothing is as we see it, as we imagine it. But we must go on seeing and imagining.

（244）

After this recognition, she is able to meet Simon on the level of friendship. Her tragedy is that although she intuitively understands more than Julia does about the relationship of love and imagination she finally refuses to try to live beyond her role in Julia's book. Now that Julia has replaced Antony as the creator of Simon （and of Cassandra herself）, Cassandra can think only of escape through death. In killing herself, she fails to do justice to Simon's reality and to her own—and thus, in the book's final irony, mirrors failure of creativity and love.

Byatt's use of symbols, myths, and allusions is extremely subtle and intricate, as we would expect from a writer who is so much concerned with the play of the mind with its materials. She has taken to heart Murdoch's warning against too heavy a reliance on a controlling myth: much more difficult than finding a structural myth for a novel, Murdoch has said, is preventing it from becoming rigid and interfering with the contingency of the characters. Art, she argues, “must not be too much afraid of incompleteness,” since reality itself is incomplete.⁸ In her use of symbols and their controlling myths, Byatt sacrificed completeness and consistency in order to let the structure grow in a more natural way.

In The Game, the dominant myth is the story of the Lady of Shalott, but it does not function alone, and it does not become a straightforward parallel to the action. Like the Lady, Cassandra has woven a web of reflected images that has become her world. In a note in her journal that is at once a self-revealing description of her own activities and a gentle parody by Byatt of academic language, Cassandra says that Tennyson's poem, with its images of “the mirror, the knight with the sun on him, reflected in the mirror and woven into the web,” is “a great deal more intelligent than we give it credit for. Tennyson has here both indulged, and provided a commentary on, his mediaevalist romanticism cf. the Palace of Art. Solitude concerned with reflections” （171）. This entry follows Cassandra's realization that through her sympathy with Simon's presentation of his snake she has reached a point where “the Church seems to me （to its discredit） to diminish him and his serpents”—a point that recalls the crisis of the Lady's story. “The threads of thought I had believed securely fastened to seem suddenly loose, floating wild and unattached” （170）. Later, watching her Sir Lancelot, the sleeping Simon, and recognizing that “nothing will be the same” now, she again remembers Tennyson's poem. “When the Lady looked out of the tower—seeing simply, a lump of flesh and blood and a patch of sunshine—the mirror cracked and the web flew out” （244）. When Julia enters Cassandra's room after the inquest, she too recalls Tennyson's lines:

Out flew the web, and floated wide
The mirror crack'd from side to side
The curse is come upon me. …

（283）

and experiences a recurrence of the old terror that Cassandra's story-telling had caused in her as a child. Like the Lady, Cassandra has seen the real world, left her weaving and her mirror, and died. Byatt gives the story a revealing twist, however. What killed Tennyson's Lady was entering so belatedly into the real world, leaving behind her shadow-world of art; what kills Cassandra, who has safely completed that task, is her sister's world of art. The problem of perception is basic to both Tennyson's work and Byatt's. As Simon tries to show Cassandra, she is trapped by Julia's book only if she lets herself be—only if she creates her own version of its power, weaving it into her web. “You spin ideas, Cassandra, so you can't see for them. After all, here I am. Here I am,” says Simon （271）. But Cassandra is now convinced that she can never escape the “grotesque shadow” created jointly by herself and Julia, and like the Lady, she is sick of shadows. The fact that her death comes after her brief taste of a life free of shadows deepens its poignancy.

If the myth of the Lady charts the course of Cassandra's entrapment by Julia, it also represents Julia's imprisonment by Cassandra. When they were children, Cassandra controlled the Game, and her refusal to allow happy endings caused nightmares for both the child and adult Julia. In their adolescent narrative, Julia wrote about Malory's Elaine—the original of Tennyson's Lady—and came to see both herself and Cassandra as Elaine figures. When Simon appeared on the scene, he naturally became Lancelot, the object of Elaine's hopeless passion. Cassandra's possessive intellectual relationship with Simon prompted Julia to pursue—and briefly achieve—a sexual one; and the result of so much intensity was Simon's withdrawal from both sisters. Both sisters have continued to imagine him, however. When Simon returns, Julia, who has already completed her fictional version of him, knows that although he is no longer Sir Lancelot, he is still not available to be loved by her in any ordinary way. Her writing of A Sense of Glory, intended to free herself from the Game's “veiled subtlety” （147） and thus from Cassandra, does not do so completely. Julia knows that Cassandra has always been “the mirror where she [Julia] studied the effects of her actions” （283） and fears that after her death Cassandra will continue to do so. By using the myth in this twofold way, Byatt has made it suggest, in a more complex usage than Tennyson's short poem could do, the limiting patterns formed by the imagination.

Byatt also extends the myth's main symbols, web and mirror, and in doing so demonstrates the incompleteness of all structures. The web appears as the “beautiful network of designed movement” that first Simon, then Cassandra, believed to be the structure of the universe. When Simon was a Christian, suffering and sin were “rents in the network” （90）. Cassandra, after finding Christianity inadequate, continues to use the same image, replacing suffering and sin, which in Simon's earlier faith were capable of being mended, with the less reassuring concept of “accident” （256）. Here, as in Julia's hope that her visit to Cassandra in Oxford will knit up “a rent that ran across the whole web of her life,” the web holds possibilities of order, whether God-created or man-made. The image also has associations with webs that can trap us. Julia, on arriving in Oxford, briefly thinks of Cassandra as sitting in the college “like a spider in a web, waiting” （134）, and the narrator briefly extends the spider image by telling of the college's Havisham room which has, because of its name, connotations of “dedicated and cobwebbed emotion” （136）. Most obviously, the web links the story to the other weavers of webs, the Brontë sisters. One of The Game's two epigraphs is from Charlotte Brontë's poem “Retrospection”: “We wove a web in childhood / A web of sunny air,” and Cassandra's suicide provides proof that the web, in the words of the poem, had “spread its folds” into adult life. This menacing aspect of the imagination's weaving work is reinforced by the use of the Brontës' biography and fiction as further examples （along with Great Expectations） of the “images of unsatisfied desire” in which Cassandra's medieval studies have enmeshed her. Julia thinks she knows that Cassandra has felt like both sisters: “like Charlotte Brontë, cut off from Branwell and Zamorna, like Emily, silently pining for another world” （122）. Despite Emily Burnett's name （and despite the fact that Cassandra has “always despised Jane Eyre's prudery” [243]）, it is Charlotte and M. Héger whom the first reviewer of A Sense of Glory sees in Emily and the priest. The web shows both the human longing for pattern and the absence of any pattern that is finally adequate.

The symbols of mirror and glass are even less open to a tidy interpretation. The images move into a different world of nineteenth-century images, Lewis Carroll's Looking-Glass world, but are not contained there. Like the web, this group of symbols has to do with the question of how we create what we see, and it also relates to our ability to visualize what we have never seen, as when Julia compares Cassandra's room to “the room you have seen just a corner of in a mirror” （132）. Like the web, it offers dual possibilities, of imprisonment and of creative freedom. Four lines from George Herbert's poem “The Elixir” sum up the possibilities for Cassandra:

A man that looks on glass
On it may stay his eye
Or if he pleases through it pass
And then the heaven espy.

（166）

She has occasionally passed through the barrier, at moments when the television screen, usually simply a “mirror of our desires,” has yielded her “an image, not only of myself, but of a real man” （167–68）. But such accesses of visionary love are rare. Perception and our preoccupation with it can trap us, and the effort to share in another's world can bring us to the point of madness, as both Cassandra and Simon know. “I live in two worlds,” Cassandra concludes.

One is hard, inimical, brutal, threatening, the tyranny of objects where all things are objects and thus tyrannical. The other is infinite: heaven, through the pane of glass, the Looking Glass world. One dreams of a release into that world of pure vision and knows that what would be gained would be madness; a single world, and intolerable.

（170–71）

The tyranny is felt when the mind does not take in the objects of perception: they remain, in Coleridge's words that Cassandra recalls, “fixed and dead” （167）. The opposite experience is also described by Coleridge, in lines which Cassandra has shared with Simon: “We receive but what we give / And in our life alone does nature live.” Yet too much effort of vision can be dangerous. As Father Rowell warns Julia just before Simon's unexpected return, Cassandra is in danger of losing touch with reality and knows it. The characters discover that the possibilities of perception are less clear-cut and less easily controlled than Herbert's lines would suggest. Julia, usually less vulnerable than Cassandra, experiences panic when her dead sister's possessions refuse to remain neutral, but become “heavy with Cassandra” （282）.

Mirrors, as reflections of one's own features, are threats to both sisters. Cassandra dislikes their superficiality: “They do not reflect the hollow in the skull” （167）. Julia, usually gratified by her own reflection, breaks down before Cassandra's mirror when she senses the presence of Cassandra's dead face as well as her own.

Glass also represents the worlds we create for ourselves. Even before she knows of Julia's book, Cassandra has a premonition of her glass-house retreat, which she and Simon share, being “bombarded with stones” （257）. Her last words are “I want no more reflections” （277）. Julia, who has felt sympathy for the anaconda in the zoo, lit up and exposed in its glass box, tries to believe that she can live the rest of her life free from other's judgment, but acknowledges that her growth will be hard. Even in solitary thought, there is no permanent escape from the glass as barrier or reflector. The division of the self into the experiencing and the watching creature, Cassandra tells Simon, forces each of us to become “both the suffering creature under the glass and the watching eye over the microscope” （241）.

Finally, glass becomes the image of the novel itself. Cassandra in her meditation on perception notes that “mirrors are partial truths, like certain putative works of art. Like almost all works of art” （167）. A clear foreshadowing of the shortcomings of Julia's novel, her statement has implications for Byatt's as well. Through Cassandra, Byatt acknowledges the failure of “almost all” works that attempt to reflect reality.⁹

The last major symbol, the snake, also proves the impossibility of final interpretations. Its obvious reference is to the Genesis story; Julia, who has always hated snakes, thinks that “we are meant to be repelled by them” （13）. Simon studies the snake as the thing-in-itself, which demands respect by its simple existence. He admits to loving snakes—although he does so less as he knows more about them. Curiosity, he tells Julia, is the beginning of love, and “most of us would do well to stop there since we aren't capable of anything better” （211）. Cassandra has made a much greater effort than Julia to see as Simon does; Julia's gift to her sister of a glass snake shows, perhaps, her recognition of this difference between them. Nevertheless, Cassandra's need for metaphor draws her to mythical interpretation. The story of how Psyche's curiosity led her to discover Eros embodied as a serpent, Cassandra “tells” Simon in her journal, is interpreted as showing the transformation of spiritual love into lust. The snake is thus “a symbol for our horror at finding ourselves physically embodied” （27）. She quotes Coleridge's poem “Psyche,” which depicts the snake as deforming and killing what it feeds on, and presents this activity as the usual human lot: the reptile is a more apt image for humans than the butterfly. This allusion links the snake with the activities of predation and ingestion and thus with the novel's main subject, the devouring power of the imagination. “There is no love,” writes Cassandra grimly, “that does not deform and kill” （28）. In her last conversation with Simon, she returns to Coleridge's lines. She sees that she, in the hunger of her imagination, has fed on Simon, sees that Julia has depicted this process, and also sees that Julia has engaged in the same predatory activity. （The most extreme instance of predation is, of course, the devouring of Antony—a story which Ivan, whose imagination lacks subtlety, finds funny.）

The snake has other traditional associations, however. It is also an emblem of life, creativity, and eternity, and Coleridge uses it in this way as well. In a passage that Byatt takes as her second epigraph, Coleridge makes the serpent, “by which the ancients typified wisdom and the universe,” an emblem of the imagination. Simon, on television, speaks of the worship of the snake “in association with running water and lightning” （22） and of its connection with the idea of rebirth.

The snake, like the web, glass, and mirror, carries both hopeful and depressing possibilities, and like them it contains opposing meanings. These images come together in Cassandra's journal entry, although their implications are not exhausted there:

We wove a web in childhood, a web of sunny air. … But there is no innocent vision, we are not indistinguishable. We create each other, separate. It is not done with love. Or not with pure love. Nor with detachment. We are not simply specimens, under the bright light, in the glass case, in the zoo, in the museum. We are food for thought. The web is sticky. I trail dirty shreds of it.

（276）

Byatt has made her own combination of myths, symbols, and allusions, but her method of doing so constitutes her own admission that no order of language can hold the chaos of experience. As she does so often, Cassandra appears to speak for the author when she tells Simon that “fictions are lies, yes, but we don't ever know the truth. We see the truth through the fictions—our own, other people's” （271）, and adds that no metaphors—not even, as she had once believed, those of religion—are true. In life as in art, we cannot avoid interpretation; Thor's uninflected English, the speech of a foreigner, frustrates Julia since she is often uncertain of his meaning. Yet all interpretations must ultimately fail.

A great deal of the effectiveness of The Game comes from Byatt's skill in using the novel-within-the-novel. This device is one that has attracted her in Murdoch's work. Byatt has shown how, by having novelists as characters in both Under the Net and The Black Prince, Murdoch has communicated “the tension between the attempt to tell, or see, the truth. The inevitability of fantasy, the need for concepts and form and the recognition that all speech is in a sense distortion, that novelists are fantasy-mongers.”¹⁰ The contrast between Julia's novel, as we hear of it from her and from the reviewers, and The Game itself embodies Byatt's struggle to respect the contingency of events and the autonomy of persons. Simon's visit to Cassandra in Oxford is the best instance of contingency in The Game: it arises from a need Julia could not have imagined and produces results she could not have foreseen. It also precipitates two “firsts” in the lives of the sisters: Cassandra, confronted by Simon, rises to an occasion for the first time, and Julia, facing the probability that his visit will have disastrous consequences, for the first time loses her novelist's curiosity: she does not want to know what he is doing there. Byatt recognizes the limits of freedom—that we have, as Simon says, an extraordinarily small area of choice—but her respect for individuality enables her to create, as she has praised George Eliot for doing, “characters who are both determined and free.”¹¹ By including the novelist in her novel—as Julia did not in hers—Byatt takes account of the moral problems of art and shows herself to be a better novelist than Julia. Yet Julia has her own claim to sympathy, and it is one of the strengths of The Game that she receives her due. She has felt oppressed by Cassandra and the lingering influence of the Game; she has felt patronized by Thor's self-containment and exploited by Ivan; she is unable to reach sexual satisfaction. As an artist, she is capable of humility: she knows that the use of external details to sum up a character somehow misses the “essence” （131）. Despite her wistful self-justification, Ivan's facile reassurance, and Thor's refusal to judge her, she knows that she cannot escape guilt for Cassandra's death. When Deborah tells her that she should not have published A Sense of Glory, Julia thinks “Here was judgement” （273）. Although we sense, at the end, that Julia's determination to live as a “new woman” will be frustrated, there is reason to forecast a better relationship with Deborah, resulting from the outburst of creative anger between mother and daughter as well as from Julia's realization that her daughter is the only one who has made real allowances for her. The ending is left open. “Can Julia learn?” parallels the question about Emily's future which, according to one reviewer, was implied at the end of Julia's novel, and Julia's opacity is preserved.

Like her sister Margaret Drabble, Antonia Byatt has refused to make feminism by itself the subject of a novel. However, as Elaine Showalter has observed, Byatt shares with Drabble, Murdoch, and Charlotte Brontë a concern for the “old fashioned” question of the ethics of the novelist in relation to the rights of the subject¹²—a concern which, Showalter argues, is characteristically female. The story of The Game shows the possibilities of domination （however unintentional） of females by males, but it does so much more thoughtfully than （we are led to believe） Julia's earlier novels did. Byatt's understanding of the female imagination does not blind her to the suffering of the male; she evokes sympathy for Simon, who sees himself as the victim of too much female imagining, as well as for Thor and Father Rowell. In a review of The Lesbian Body, whose author, Monique Wittig, devises an experimental language for lesbian experience, Byatt wrote, “I like subtle distinctions within a continuing language, not doctrinaire violations.”¹³ In The Game as in her more recent novels, The Virgin in the Garden and Still Life, she makes her own distinctions within the continuing language of the world in which both sexes inhabit.

Notes

1. A. S. Byatt, in Contemporary Novelists, ed. James Vinson （London: St. James Press, 1972）, p. 214.

2. A. S. Byatt, The Game （London: Chatto and Windus, 1967）, p. 121. All further references are to this edition and are indicated in parentheses.

3. Malcom Bradbury, “ On from Murdoch,” Encounter, 30 （July 1968）: 74.

4. Iris Murdoch, Sartre, Romantic Rationalist （London: Bowes and Bowes, 1953）, p. 13; quoted by Byatt, Degrees of Freedom: The Novels of Iris Murdoch （London: Chatto and Windus, 1965）, p. 12.

5. Murdoch, “Against Dryness,” Encounter, 16 （January 1961）: 20, quoted by Byatt, Iris Murdoch （Harlow, Essex: Longman Group, 1976）, p.12.

6. Bradbury, “On from Murdoch,” p. 74.

7. Murdoch, “Against Dryness,” p. 20. The relationship between Murdoch's concept of fiction and Byatt's third novel, The Virgin in the Garden, is helpfully discussed by Juliet Dusinberre in “Forms of Reality in The Virgin in the Garden,” Critique, 24, No. 1 （Fall 1982）: 55–62.

8. Murdoch, “Against Dryness,” p. 20, quoted by Byatt, Iris Murdoch, p. 12. Cf. Byatt, Degrees of Freedom, p. 186.

9. In an essay on modern fiction Byatt quotes Murdoch's observation （in Sartre, Romantic Rationalist, p. 75） that “we can no longer take language for granted. … We are like people who for a long time looked out of a window without noticing the glass—and then one day began to notice this too.” See Byatt, “People in Paper Houses: Attitudes to ‘Realism’ and ‘Experiment’ in English Postwar Fiction,” in The Contemporary English Novel, Stratford-upon-Avon Studies, 18 ed. Malcolm Bradbury and David Palmer （London: Arnold, 1979）: 30–31.

10. Byatt, Iris Murdoch, p. 35–36.

11. Byatt, Introd., The Mill on the Floss, by George Eliot （Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin, 1979）, p. 29.

12. Elaine Showalter, A Literature of Their Own: British Women Novelists from Brontë to Lessing （Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1977） p. 303.

13. Byatt, “Give Me the Moonlight, Give Me the Girl,” The New Review, 2 （1975）: 67.