Vol. 4, Number 2	Summer 2001 issue

 

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A.S. Byatt's Possession was a brainy, unexpected hit--a national bestseller and winner of the Booker Prize--that made literary scholarship seem like an inspiring, entrancing detective hunt. Her newest book, The Biographer's Tale, could have been an equally fine effort. It is conceptually airtight and, occasionally, an intellectual treat. She creates a narrator, Phineas G. Nanson, who is anxious, preening, and thoroughly infected by literature. He sometimes shows the depth of another, greater twentieth century character, Saul Bellow's Herzog. Further, Byatt, a distinguished literary critic, has proved with Possession that she can create high-voltage narratives out of hopelessly soporific subjects, like postmodern literary theory.

Why, then, is The Biographer's Tale so monotonous? For some baffling reason, Byatt picks a tired theme--the human inability to put together a true, ordered history of anything --and she smothers it with layer upon layer of irony, breaks it up with long stretches of historical tedium, and at the end gleefully points out that this kind of irony is irksome and inhuman. But the boredom is not intended and this is not a sort of postmodern joke on the reader. Byatt offers no end of romantic details and outrageous touches to try to keep us interested. Against all odds, she sometimes succeeds. Byatt is clearly an erudite and well-read author, but her book brims with an intellectualism that, at times, drowns her story.

At the start of The Biographer's Tale, Phineas is looking out the dirty window of his graduate school literature seminar. A dirty window is, he knows, "an ancient, well-worn trope for intellectual dissatisfaction and scholarly blindness," but he also sees it as a "real, very dirty window... a thing." Looking at the window, he realizes that he wants a "life full of things" and "facts." So he abandons his life as a postmodern literary critic to write a biography about a biographer.

The tropes of a man looking out a window, of a student rejecting intellectual convention, and of a story within a story should, by rights, feel trite. And despite Byatt's gymnastic attempts to explain away these clichés--her narrator is an inexperienced writer who ironically, self-effacingly calls attention to the situation's banality--the novel stills feels flat-footed. I groaned, for instance, when she ended the first paragraph: "It was May 8th 1994. I know that, because my mother had been buried the week before, and I'd missed the seminar on Frankenstein." The next paragraph begins: "I don't think my mother's death had anything to do with the decision [to quit graduate school], though as I set it down, I see it might be construed that way."

From its doddering start, The Biographer's Tale reads, despite its patchwork organization, like a contrived pastiche. Still, Byatt's considerable power as a storyteller, her ability to create atmosphere, and her romantic use of exotic detail--often subtle, creepy, Dickensian detail—do much to keep the reader interested. Phineas's rotund, whisky-saturated advisor--an expert on obscure Norse place names and a compulsive doodler of erotic and grotesque cartoons-- suggests that he read a biography of Sir Elmer Bole, a Victorian polymath, travel writer and pornographer, written by one Scholes Destry-Scholes. Pleased to be engaged in something more solidly factual than literary criticism, Phineas sets out to construct a biography of Destry-Scholes. He is, of course, unsuccessful.

We are afforded some amusement by watching him struggle through his research; in the end all he can find of Destry-Scholes is a marble collection, a tool for drilling holes in skulls, an unfinished manuscript (which is a strange and mystical mixture of biography and fiction) and a collection of note-cards presumably used to write the manuscript.

Phineas' exploration of Destry-Scholes' manuscript and note-cards occupy almost the entire novel – a mistake in emphasis for a storyteller of Byatt's power. The Destry-Scholes’s manuscript is really three biographies, of the taxonomer Carl Linnaeus, of a Victorian named Francis Galton, and of playwright Henrik Isben. Destry-Scholes's writings are interesting enough--tinged, as they are, with Byatt's fine fictional additions--but then we come upon Phineas's interminable note-card sorting.

He finds he can arrange the note-cards into almost any sort of grouping he likes, such as "hybrids and mixtures," "composite portrait (photography)," or "(composite) portrait photography." This is intended as a ridicule of modern literary criticism and the impossible task of creating a true biography. The satire works, but the reader's frustration soon mimics Phineas's.

At least in Phineas, a "very small man" but "perfectly formed," we have an idiosyncratic, enjoyable narrator. He is part Owen Meany and part Stephen Dedalus, utterly committed to his literary quest, strangely self-absorbed, at once feisty and sullen. In most writer's hands he would be improbable and grating; somehow Byatt makes him improbable and comic.

The pity is that the novel centers on Destry-Scholes who, of course, is faceless and impenetrable. Byatt knows this, and so Phineas's narrative gradually takes over the novel, which shifts from fictional biography to fictional commentary to fictional autobiography. Yet, the many small pleasures of The Biographer's Tale--often obscure details that Byatt culls from history and science books--never make up for an irritating, embarrassing flaw: Byatt has picked a worn theme and relentlessly hammered it home. The book is at once unmistakably intelligent, and shamefully uninteresting.