"More than words": the elusive language of A.S. Byatt's visual fiction

Abstract

All over her vast work Byatt has shown a long lasting concern both with the potentialities and limits of language to render reality and with the way this rendering is made by colour and form (or colour as form) in painting. Throughout her work, thus, Byatt has raised interesting theoretical questions concerning the limits and the potentialities of representation by the pictorial and the textual, which I intend to address in this paper. My aim in this paper is to analyse some of Byatt's work so as to understand the comparisons she makes between the language of fiction and painting. On the other hand, I would also like to address questions related to the way she uses painting in her work so as to enhance the visual quality of her writing. In order to do so, I will be focusing particularly on the novel that best addresses these issues, Still Life.