ABSTRACT
Equally at ease in the fields of literature, history, art, science, mythology, folklore, and theory, contemporary British novelist A. S. Byatt has, over the years, become known for her abundant and erudite use of intertextuality and interpictoriality in extremely intricate and finely wrought pieces of fiction and non-fiction alike. “A Lamia in the Cévennes,” the second short story of her 1998 collection entitled Elementals: Stories of Fire and Ice, is no different as it skillfully weaves together references to French poetry (Ronsard and Baudelaire), English poetry (Keats), Greek poetry (Homer’s Odyssey), French painting (Matisse and Bonnard), English painting (Hockney), abstract painting, Dutch and Spanish silk painting, in addition to well- and lesser-known male and female creatures from legends, fairytales, and Greek myths, such as mermaids, mermen, sirens, and lamias—female monsters depicted with a snake’s body and a woman’s head and breasts. One difference, though, is that “A Lamia in the Cévennes”—which stages the fantastic encounter between an English painter, Bernard, who has fled London for the light and solitude of the Cévennes, and a voluptuous and flirtatious lamia, who suddenly emerges “out of the blue” of his swimming-pool—is not just another typical Byattian (or, should we say, Arachnean) web of intertextual echoes and connections. It is also, as I will argue, a fascinating case of what Genette calls intratextuality or autotextuality, in that it prolongs and synthesizes, both formally and thematically, the three short stories of an earlier collection published by Byatt in 1993, namely The Matisse Stories. Drawing from the abundant literature that this critically acclaimed collection has generated, as well as from the scarcer, but no less interesting, criticism on “A Lamia in the Cévennes,” this chapter aims at showing how this particular short story may be seen as a “Matisse story” in its own right, by presenting the very same Matissean elements Byatt used in the Matisse Stories for her textual and visual tribute to the great master of colours and lines: a pictorial epigraph (in this case, a 1948 drawing by Matisse entitled Sirène); a main pictorial intertext (Matisse’s painting Luxe, calme et volupté); color (blue) as compositional principle; and the quest for balance and light. More broadly, however, by providing a synthesis of all the formal AQ AQ: Intended meaning clear here? Please check and confirm. and contentual elements of The Matisse Stories, what “A Lamia in the Cévennes” achieves, as Bernard relinquishes his quasi-metaphysical “battle” for the right shade of blue for the all-embracing multi-coloredness of the rainbow, is the celebration of Matisse as a “raison d’être,” aesthetically, poetically, and politically. Thanks to his “fierce impulse,” Matisse was striving to achieve the “silent bliss” of life in all its complexity and power, and called that quest “the religion of happiness.” “A Lamia in the Cévennes” ends with Bernard preparing to paint the rainbow-colored butterfly: “[Bernard] was happy, in one of the ways in which human beings are happy.”
