Material and Geographical Intertextualities in Elementals: Stories of Fire and Ice

In A. S. Byatt's Elementals: Stories of Fire and Ice (1998), natural elements enmesh with opposite colours, geography, texts, artworks, and the human experiences they generate. With the first three stories preoccupied with intercultural encounters, Elementals defines individual identities at the crossroads between this very entanglement and its material effects on the characters interacting with them. Combining intertextuality with new materialist approaches, this article argues that Byatt's protagonists need to travel south and immerse themselves in a strange culture in order to articulate their sense of belonging within, or without, their country of origin. Indeed, echoes of canonical European texts such as Shakespeare's Anthony and Cleopatra in "Crocodile Tears," Baudelaire's and Keats's poems in "A Lamia in the Cévennes," and Andersen's fairy tales in "Cold" are in dialogue with stones, water and fire/ice to shape the stories' north-south trajectories. For the highly perceptive and artistically inclined protagonists of these stories—an art collector, a painter, a scientist-princess—such interlinkages between texts, art and materials are not merely experiences of passive consumption, but life-defining encounters with matter qua matter. Intertextuality expands towards "transposition" (Braidotti) and "transcorporeality" (Alaimo), encompassing spatial and bodily dimensions into the intercultural dialogue enabled by interactions with texts. A crucial aspect of such material intertextuality is rendered by the tropes of snake women, stone women and icewomen. By embodying mythical legacies of the female experiences of love, childbirth, ageing and loss in the flesh, Patricia Nimmo in "Crocodile Tears" and Fiammarosa in "Cold" experience estrangement in the very south they initially chose to escape domestic reality. Only a return home ("Crocodile Tears"), or an elemental compromise between the cold of ice and heat of the desert ("Cold") offers them the solace they need to escape the cyclicality of the female body. Bernard Lycett-Kean in "Lamia," conversely, encounters the paradigm of chimeric femininity not in his own, but in the titular Lamia's body, who becomes his muse and platonic love interest. By refusing to engage in sexual encounters with her, he retains the freedom that women are denied and is able to fully embrace his adoptive French home precisely because he experiences it through the prism of material art alone. Ultimately, the move from the familiar north to the, at times alienating, at times welcoming, south opens intertextual crossovers towards material elements and embodiment. Such potentialities are, nonetheless, defined by strictly coded gender norms.