The Review of Contemporary Fiction

The Biographer’s Tale by A. S. Byatt
Patricia Laurence

A. S. Byatt. The Biographer’s Tale. Knopf, 2001. 307 pp. $24.00.

Phineas Nanson, an unhappy graduate student, abruptly decides to leave the study of literary criticism in the middle of one of Gareth Butcher’s famous theoretical lectures on Lacan’s theory of morcellement, the dismemberment of the imagined body. He feels “an urgent need for a life full of things.” His advisor steers him toward a biography of Scholes Destry-Scholes (wonderfully named, as are the other characters) who had written three fragmentary narratives on Linnaeus, the taxonomist, Francis Galton, the eugenicist, and Ibsen. So begins Phineas’s merry, scholarly quest for “things” and “facts” about the elusive Destry-Scholes. Along the way there are scientific and love adventures with Miss Vera Alphage, the niece of Destry-Scholes, and Fulla Biefield, a student of bees. But what begins as Phineas’s flight from poststructuralist theory and revulsion at the idea of body parts in search of each other, ends with his writing about his split experience of the bodies of Vera and Fulla. Phineas’s best writing “flows from the body”; his scholarly reading turning into the pleasures of writing; his search for another’s life, biography, turning into his own story, autobiography. Seamlessly, ingeniously, Byatt has written a double plot: first about Phineas’s tracking of the life of his strange subject; the second, about Phineas discovering the secrets of his own experience along the way. But it is not only the plot that is double: so are Byatt’s worlds, vision, and language. It is this double consciousness that gives her language a peculiar energy. It is a book filled with learning, allusions, and long passages of information—for example, on the life of bees—that makes, at times, excessive demands upon the reader. Yet after all this learned discourse what are we left with? Surprisingly, magic. Putting down the zany Biographer’s Tale, the image of Phineas and Vera abandoning scholarship and examining Destry-Scholes’s marble collection remains: “We developed a ritual of holding them up and staring into them, like many-colored crystal balls with a variety of fantastic features.” With erudition and a sense of play, Byatt offers her novels, many-colored crystal balls, through which to imagine and join these worlds. [Patricia Laurence]


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The Review of Contemporary Fiction The Biographer’s Tale by A. S. Byatt Patricia Laurence A. S. Byatt. The Biographer’s Tale. Knopf, 2001. 307 pp. $24.00. Phineas Nanson, an unhappy graduate student, abruptly decides to leave the study of literary criticism in the middle of one of Gareth Butcher’s famous theoretical lectures on Lacan’s theory of morcellement, the dismemberment of the imagined body. He feels “an urgent need for a life full of things.” His advisor steers him toward a biography of Scholes Destry-Scholes (wonderfully named, as are the other characters) who had written three fragmentary narratives on Linnaeus, the taxonomist, Francis Galton, the eugenicist, and Ibsen. So begins Phineas’s merry, scholarly quest for “things” and “facts” about the elusive Destry-Scholes. Along the way there are scientific and love adventures with Miss Vera Alphage, the niece of Destry-Scholes, and Fulla Biefield, a student of bees. But what begins as Phineas’s flight from poststructuralist theory and revulsion at the idea of body parts in search of each other, ends with his writing about his split experience of the bodies of Vera and Fulla. Phineas’s best writing “flows from the body”; his scholarly reading turning into the pleasures of writing; his search for another’s life, biography, turning into his own story, autobiography. Seamlessly, ingeniously, Byatt has written a double plot: first about Phineas’s tracking of the life of his strange subject; the second, about Phineas discovering the secrets of his own experience along the way. But it is not only the plot that is double: so are Byatt’s worlds, vision, and language. It is this double consciousness that gives her language a peculiar energy. It is a book filled with learning, allusions, and long passages of information—for example, on the life of bees—that makes, at times, excessive demands upon the reader. Yet after all this learned discourse what are we left with? Surprisingly, magic. Putting down the zany Biographer’s Tale, the image of Phineas and Vera abandoning scholarship and examining Destry-Scholes’s marble collection remains: “We developed a ritual of holding them up and staring into them, like many-colored crystal balls with a variety of fantastic features.” With erudition and a sense of play, Byatt offers her novels, many-colored crystal balls, through which to imagine and join these worlds. [Patricia Laurence]

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