Études Britanniques Contemporaines (Nov 2024)
The ‘Temptation of Indifference’ and the Search for an Elemental South in A.S. Byatt’s ‘Crocodile Tears’ (Elementals)
Abstract
Heading south to seek oblivion or erasure may be considered as something of a topos. What the aptly named Patricia Nimmo in Byatt’s ‘Crocodile Tears’ chooses to call ‘indifference’ is a mild word for the character’s mystifying reaction to the death of her husband, struck by a violent heart attack in an art gallery: catching a glimpse of the body, Patricia runs off, leaving it for others to deal with. Her escape involves several brushes with death from which she is saved, as it happens, by a Northerner encountered in the city of Nîmes. The overall trajectory of the story seems almost too simple: the headlong flight south comes to an end when the first step is taken towards a process of mourning which is not only marked by a return to the North but by the restoration of polarities threatened by ‘the temptation of indifference’. Such simplicity is nevertheless challenged from the beginning by the tension at work between the dream of an ‘elemental’ South, associated with the possibility of driving story and history out of the landscape, and a haunting textual south which creeps back at every turn. As storylines multiply and get woven into Patricia’s own story, the 75-page long text turns into a dense visual and textual network and Byatt’s South into a place in the making that transforms itself at every step at the same time as it transforms the character. ‘Indifference’ itself becomes ambivalent as it turns into an exploratory mode. The numbing of emotions offers a vantage point to conduct an experiment in seeing which welcomes whatever presents itself to the eye. The journey which starts in a London gallery and moves to the deep yellow South of Van Gogh recounts an imaginary flight which is not just an illusory flight. It takes the form of an intense material encounter which produces a series of striking pictures, an intricate landscape that remains after the journey has ended.
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