CRITIQUE: Studies in Contemporary Fiction, June 22nd, 2006
When, in Possession, Byatt's Randolph Ash looks at Christabel LaMotte, he thinks of her "as an hour-glass, containing time, which was caught in her like a thread of sand, of stone, of specks of life, of things that had lived and would live" (287). Byatt connects the ideas of life, waist, navel, and the movement through the present moment from future to past. In the hour-glass the waist is the mark of the present, and the navel, "which is where our separate lives cast off" (287), becomes a matrix of past, present, and future, a mark at once of our individuality and of our connection to a wider ...
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