I watched the film of Possession yesterday, based on the novel of the same name by A.S. Byatt. I read the Byatt novel years ago; I have read it multiple times in fact, though it is a... heavy text and moreso than most of her work. It's a novel about literature and literary academia, about love of the story as opposed to study, about the concept of the value of the physical and original object, and about passion and romance and love. The action of the novel revolves around the discovery of an original draft of a letter written by a famous (fictional) Victorian poet to another unnamed literary figure and it leads into a pair of academics following the clues to discover a love affair between the two literary figures that the pair (individually) study.
Which leads me to two different (though related) trains of thought. (More than that really but only two I'm going to mention now.)
The first of these is the Letter. A piece of correspondence from one individual to another, hand-written (for preference) on an actual piece of paper, its only relation to a computer being the possibility that it was typed before it saw that paper.
There is nothing like a letter. It is personal in a way an email never can be. It encourages a process of thought that an email cannot reproduce: it is slow, gives you time to think, to ponder, to linger on a topic without the pressure to complete and send, without the immediacy of 'delete'. An email is the most business-like and pedestrian of mediums. A letter encourages romance and discussion of the most idle and interesting sort. Not least because it is a physical object, something you can hold in your hands, fold and unfold. Touch. Smell. Experience richly.
Which brings me to the other thought: the importance of the the physical object. I've had this discussion any number of times with a number of different people: about books as a physical object as valuable and not something easily replaced by anything computerised. It's not the terms in which it is discussed in Possession, of course, but it is the same thing as a letter. Like Giles says in Buffy: "Smell is the most powerful trigger to the memory there is. A certain flower or a whiff of smoke can bring up experiences long forgotten. Books smell... musty and rich. The knowledge gained from a computer is... it has no texture, no context. It's there and then it's gone. If it's to last, then the getting of knowledge should be tangible. It should be, um, smelly." Texture is a good word for it, to hold something firm and real in your hands. And smell. Always the smell. These things make it real, in a way that something printed in a computer screen never is.
In Possession, the discussion of the physical object is more about... something owned and touched by a once living person, now dead. The stories it holds, the reality of it and the reality of the individual who owned it. Like the value of a first edition. But that's another discussion entirely.
Which leads me to two different (though related) trains of thought. (More than that really but only two I'm going to mention now.)
The first of these is the Letter. A piece of correspondence from one individual to another, hand-written (for preference) on an actual piece of paper, its only relation to a computer being the possibility that it was typed before it saw that paper.
There is nothing like a letter. It is personal in a way an email never can be. It encourages a process of thought that an email cannot reproduce: it is slow, gives you time to think, to ponder, to linger on a topic without the pressure to complete and send, without the immediacy of 'delete'. An email is the most business-like and pedestrian of mediums. A letter encourages romance and discussion of the most idle and interesting sort. Not least because it is a physical object, something you can hold in your hands, fold and unfold. Touch. Smell. Experience richly.
Which brings me to the other thought: the importance of the the physical object. I've had this discussion any number of times with a number of different people: about books as a physical object as valuable and not something easily replaced by anything computerised. It's not the terms in which it is discussed in Possession, of course, but it is the same thing as a letter. Like Giles says in Buffy: "Smell is the most powerful trigger to the memory there is. A certain flower or a whiff of smoke can bring up experiences long forgotten. Books smell... musty and rich. The knowledge gained from a computer is... it has no texture, no context. It's there and then it's gone. If it's to last, then the getting of knowledge should be tangible. It should be, um, smelly." Texture is a good word for it, to hold something firm and real in your hands. And smell. Always the smell. These things make it real, in a way that something printed in a computer screen never is.
In Possession, the discussion of the physical object is more about... something owned and touched by a once living person, now dead. The stories it holds, the reality of it and the reality of the individual who owned it. Like the value of a first edition. But that's another discussion entirely.
3 comments:
Amen
- The Grumbler
And the movie was ...?
Possession? It was a mediocre translation of the novel but worth the watching. If only for the hotness of Lena Headey as Blanche. ;p Gwenyth Paltrow didn't entirely suck and Jennifer Ehle was good as Christabel la Motte. It missed some of the major points of the book but since you'd need it to be a book for a whole chunk of that to work, it;s understandable. It was okay as a film.
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