Critical Outakes: A.S. Byatt and story-telling

Q: You have written nearly as many short story volumes as novels. Did you ever think you'd write so many short stories?

A: Yes. If you'd have asked me twenty years ago if I could write a short story, I would have said no. No, I can't. But I got to feeling that pure storytelling was more and more important, and partly because I knew there was something terribly wrong with the French noveau roman, and this caused me to see that storytelling mattered. One of my theories of British literature is that it suddenly began to flower -- the British novel -- in the 1970s because the novelists realized they didn't give a damn about literary theory. Or literary critics. And they started telling stories. And the reviewers were still saying, you know, stories are vulgar. Everything is random and haphazard and kind of a miasma. But the storytellers, people like Salman Rushdie and Angela Carter, continued telling stories. I'm sure it has to do with a kind of split in my generation between university and being a writer.

Q: And you straddle this.

A: I do straddle this divide, yes. My work looks more peculiar than it is because of the death of my son, because I would have stopped being the kind of realist that I am in [the Federica Quartet] if I could have got those books written as fast as I could had he not been killed, which is better to say because everything got rather out of cync. And then I had to finish those four books because they required to be finished. I had already become a quite different writer, but I owed those books. They needed to be written, so I made a lot of discoveries and a lot of compromises about how you could put things into English realism that weren't in English realism, like all the awful fairy tale stories in "Babel Tower."

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