“A woman’s relation with her hairdresser is anatomically odd. Her face meets his belt, his haunches skim her breathing, his face is far away, high and behind.”
Two pages into A. S. Byatt’s The Matisse Stories,the narrator offers this striking description, and it makes us expect…what? Soft porn, perhaps? Instead, the short story “Medusa’s Ankles,” and the collection of stories in which it appears, offers an exploration of the complex and odd relations that emerge between everyday people—like a hairdresser and his client—and between people and art.
While most readers have come to know A. S. Byatt through novels, such as Possession, or the movies made from them, Byatt has also written several collections of short stories. This one, The Matisse Stories, includes “Medusa’s Ankles,” “Art Work,” and “The Chinese Lobster,” all three of which link the plight of their characters with emblematic artworks by Henri Matisse. “Medusa’s Ankles” involves works by Matisse that feature luxurious hair and full-figured female bodies at odds with the contemporary equation of female beauty with thinness and youth. Ironically, the story links Matisse’s voluptuous nudes with a threatening female figure, the mythical “Medusa,” who can turn men to stone simply by getting them to gaze upon her. Yet, the Medusa of the story is also the main character, Susannah, an aging professor of classics, who is all too aware of her middle age and the cultural aversion to aging women. Caught between an inattentive husband and an obtuse hairdresser, this Medusa finally surprises everyone, including herself.
“The Chinese Lobster,” the collection’s final story, involves sexuality more directly than the first, and with a grimmer purpose, as suggested by its introductory Matisse drawing of a nymph and faun. Dr. Gerda Himmelblau, a professor of fine arts and Dean of Women’s Studies, incredibly, discusses not only a student’s charge of sexual harassment but also the student’s mental health, over lunch with Dr. Perry Diss, the professor charged with the offense. The “Chinese lobster” of the title is arranged at the restaurant’s entry, and it lies in a living decorative tableau with two crabs. It is an eerie metaphor for Dr. Himmelblau, Dr. Diss, and their student, all faced, as it turns out, with the struggle to survive in a world unfriendly to their needs. Art, as it turns out, proves to be a central defense against despair, and “Art Work,” the collection’s centerpiece, shifts from a focus on the work of the art critic to the work of the artist herself. What is art? Who can make it? What is it good for? These are the questions these stories turn into urgent human questions, that is, into matters of survival.
Yet, for all their struggles, the stories are also comedies, though admittedly of the darker sort. Occasional flashes of wit relieve the tension. Ultimately, we can think of Byatt and this book in the very terms her fictional reviewer regards the artwork of one of her own characters: “Her work is full of feminist comments on the trivia of our daily life, on the boredom of the quotidian, but she has no sour reflections, no chip on her shoulder, she simply makes everything absurd and surprisingly beautiful with an excess of inventive wit.”
-- Judy Hale Young, Instructor, Department of English
