THE BIOGRAPHER’S TALE
By A.S. Byatt
Knopf, 305 pages, $24
Phineas Gilbert Nanson is a very small man (” `Small but perfectly formed,’ ” his father would say) in what A.S. Byatt likely thinks is a very big novel (“Big but perfectly formed”?). But this latest offering is not the ticket.
A novelist of brainy reputation, particularly for her 1990 Booker Prize-winning “Possession,” Byatt seems to have gathered scraps from the cutting-room floor of that novel and stitched this one together. The result: a ponderous, pedantic, self-congratulatory and ultimately boring fiction called “The Biographer’s Tale.”
Though it is a relatively modest novel in length, it is anything but modest in the way it draws attention to the author’s cleverness, learning and memory. The first few pages are stuffed with references to Empedocles, Lacan, Frankenstein, Freud, Foucault, Tolkien, Donne and Marvell. Bakhtin, Barthes and the usual postmodern, postanything-and-everything suspects show up before long, rest assured.
Little Phineas enters as a mid-1990s graduate student in literature who abandons sexy postmodern literary theory, declaring “an urgent need for a life full of things.” Then the head of the department lends him a three-volume biography of 19th Century polymath Sir Elmer Bole, written by one Scholes Destry-Scholes, a prestructuralist critic of the 1950s. Nanson devours the text and embarks on an exhaustive quest to learn all that Destry-Scholes learned about his subject. That leads Nanson to his new doctoral project: a life of the biographer. Cute enough for starters, writing the life of the life writer?
Nanson’s quest allows Byatt to pose clearly important questions about the whole biographical enterprise: How much can be known about any biographical subject? With what degree of certainty? What methods are appropriate? To what extent can sources be trusted? Can research findings be organized into a coherent pattern of meaning? Do life writing and ethics intersect? How much creative license can the biographer assume? Where is the biographer in the whole enterprise? Byatt extends the parameters of discourse far enough to include reflections on the whole proposition of reading and writing as well as objectivity, subjectivity, identity, epistemology, even ontology.
At an important juncture, Nanson recognizes that his difficulty in discovering Destry-Scholes’ identity is linked to his own lack of identity. His doctoral adviser pins the little man to the wall when he asks, ” `Have you got a life yourself, Nanson? What do you do with your spare time?’ ” Phineas takes a job as dogsbody at a travel agency whose owners ” `have a Fourieriste ambition to cater to all tastes’ ” in literary holidays. Nanson continues his work on Destry-Scholes, meeting Fulla Biefeld, a bee taxonomist, who will assist not only with his research (Bole studied leaf-cutter bees) but with filling his spare time as well. A most improbable affair, theirs. Destry-Scholes’ niece, Vera Alphage, a radiographer as ethereal and “shockingly beautiful” as Biefeld is not, invites Nanson to examine a cache of her late uncle’s things (shoeboxes of index cards and photos, 366 marbles), and another affair blossoms. The two affairs parallel Bole’s two relationships, one with an earthy mistress, the other with an angelic, proper wife.
Nanson’s compulsive clue hunting reduces him to what Joyce called a “biografiend,” as he rabidly pursues his research and his life–or rather, lives–with the assistance of these two women. Obsessive attention to all the material at his disposal, especially those index cards, produces cataracts of facts but puts Nanson no closer to the biographer himself. Rather, his quixotic quest yields alarming insight into the biographer’s methods and, more importantly, pulls Nanson into the web of life. His research, while not producing what he’d intended, leads him to a number of hardly original or earth-shaking conclusions (“There are a very few human truths and infinite varieties on them. . . . Reading and writing extend . . . the variations we can perceive on the truths we thus discover.”). Shortly thereafter he declares, “I have nearly reached the end of this story. Not of my life . . . ,” and we can all breathe a sigh of relief.
The telling of this tale lets Byatt demonstrate her well-known abilities for satire, parody, sendups, jokes and puns. Her own academic experience supplies her with what she needs to skewer the world of academe, but she has done that before, and better, in “Possession,” and there nowhere near as well as the likes of Kingsley Amis and David Lodge. In “The Biographer’s Tale,” the verbal games are often forced, the attempts at wit feeble. Byatt likes to play with names, and so we have something made of Phineas’ short stature (“Its only disadvantage is the number of cushions I need to see over the dashboard when driving”) because his surname, we are told, is derived from a Latin word for “dwarf.” A professor whose lecture on “Lacan’s theory of morcellement, the dismemberment of the imagined body” opens the novel is named Gareth Butcher. The vaguely dark and mysterious presence who becomes Phineas’ new adviser, leading him into a labyrinth of failure, is named Ormerod Goode. And of course there’s Fulla Biefeld, linked to the site of her life’s activity. Enough already. As far as these antics are concerned, Byatt seems to have followed Wilde’s witty remark that the only thing to do with temptation is give in to it.
But the greatest problem with “The Biographer’s Tale” is the deadly dull, lifeless narrative–if you will forgive the expression. It’s not just that there’s precious little story here (Phineas goes from reading a life, to failing to write a life, to getting a life for himself–how’s that for unbounded excitement?). It’s that “The Biographer’s Tale” is padded with long, though not entirely irrelevant, digressions: 65 pages given over to Destry-Scholes’ notes about three men, two of whom (Linnaeus and Ibsen) you likely know, the third (Francis Galton, a 19th Century eugenicist) you likely don’t, unless you’re Byatt; another 65 pages or so given over to detailed descriptions of research note cards kept by Destry-Scholes–then 15 more pages of the same; and that omits the cataloging of a shoebox stuffed with heaps of photographs Nanson pores over, as well as the collection of 366 marbles, which he seeks to classify.
Occasional comic interludes and touches–Nanson stops at the Jolly Corner Hotel; works for a time at a most unusual travel agency run by two comic, if stereotypical, gay eccentrics, called Puck’s Girdle; and is seduced by Biefeld amidst bees in the tournament glade of Richmond Park–are nowhere near enough relief to inflict the reading of “The Biographer’s Tale” on yourself or anyone you hate, let alone love. Some readers and reviewers who delight in postmodernist literary antics will treasure the astounding range of references and allusions, and revel in playing all the semiotic games. But the fact remains that most who pick up this novel will not have the heart or courage to read beyond the first pages. At nearly every turn–and even in the acknowledgements, where Byatt is the real focus of attention–the reader feels the pressure of the writer’s need for recognition. Further, Byatt has not solved the problem of how to write a novel of ideas that seamlessly weaves those ideas into the narrative texture. Despite her professed admiration for George Eliot and Iris Murdoch, she has not absorbed what Murdoch did in nearly every fictive instance: charge ideas with the essential narrative dynamics that engage the reader’s heart and mind.
Then, too, one thinks of the extraordinary lyricism that embraced Virginia Woolf’s musing on the very same questions about identity and biography, from first to last novel. Byatt’s fiction lacks not only that lyricism, but what Nanson ascribes to Destry-Scholes–“the primitive virtue of telling a rattling good yarn and . . . the capacity to make up a world in every corner of which his reader would wish to linger, to look, to learn.”
For the minority of readers who treasure every word A.S. Byatt writes, or fear to say they do not, “The Biographer’s Tale” will be another tour de force, but for nearly everyone else, it will be a tedious, pretentious, postmodern parlor game not worth the effort.
Phineas Nanson’s efforts to the contrary, biographies are still being written. Edmund White, himself the distinguished biographer of Genet and Proust, once noted that “biography is a form by which little people take revenge on big people.” Perhaps “The Biographer’s Tale” is a pre-emptive strike against any little person who would dare to attempt a biography of Antonia Susan Byatt.
