=2013 Books Read=

The Biographer's Tale
by A.S. Byatt

This is a book I had no intention of reading. I was just sitting there on my couch and it fell from the ceiling right into my hands. I was watching television at the time, "Pawn Stars," I think it was, or some show with wildlife in it, perhaps a Kardashian sister. These things happen. Truth is stranger than fiction.

Anyway, I'd read A.S. Byatt's The Virgin in the Garden and enjoyed it immensely. Originally, and ever since, I've been looking for her Booker Prizewinning masterpiece Possession at the library but can't find it. Seems it's always checked out to some fellow Brooklynite or other. The Virgin in the Garden was a dense, challenging read in very tiny print. But well worth the considerable effort it took to squint my way through it.

Byatt is a thorny, wry, puckishly funny, prickly author of vast intellect. You get the sense that she'd cross a Viking battlefield to rewrite a sentence that didn't suit her. I saw an interview done with her on Youtube in which the young woman doing service as her interlocutor asked why she didn't write autobiographical novels. Why she always seemed to write about characters, lives, and time periods other than her own. Her answer was that in writing about subjects outside of herself she was able to learn things that she didn't already know. For Byatt, writing wasn't about self-discovery. It was about discovering the "other." She went on to observe that she often suspected that so-called "self-expressive" authors, those who drew on their own emotions and experience to write novels were, perhaps, trying to convince themselves that they had the emotions they wrote about. For Byatt, it is unnecessary to write about what she feels. Feeling it is more than enough.

I'm paraphrasing, of course. And I'm digressing, too. You could say that sums up my entire life: a parenthetical footnote lasting something less than a century. In this case, though, my meandering trickle of thought does bear relevance to the book at hand. Well, it's not at hand any longer. It's back on the shelf at the Brooklyn Public Library where you can take it out yourself the last time I checked. And I suggest you do.

It's about a young graduate student of postmodern literary studies, Phineas G. Nanson. Practically by the end of the novel's first sentence Phineas declares that he's sick of being a graduate student of postmodern literary studies. He's tired of deconstruction, sick of structuralism, sicker, still, of post-structuralism. He's lost his taste for the intellectual mind-games that never resolve a thing, the perambulations through halls of mirrors with no destination, the navel gazing, the endlessly sterile mystifications that don't just seem to be the inevitable unfortunate result of postmodern literary theory, but the desired end in itself. What Phineas wants is to pursue the study of something substantial. Something he can grab hold of. Something he can really sink his teeth into--intellectually speaking, that is.

What better field to pursue than biography? The objective study of the life of another person. A person who indisputably existed outside of oneself. An individual who was born, who lived, and who died. It's all right there on record. Right? And there's even an interesting subject right to hand. The once (modestly) celebrated, now all-but-forgotten biographer Scholes Destry-Scholes. 

You can see it coming, perhaps? How by choosing a biographer as a subject for his biography that Phineas has fallen write back into the postmodern mirrored trap that he sought to escape. For by writing a biography about a biographer, Phineas is confronted by the same problems of relativity, of slippery identity, of truth versus relativity that made his former studies seem so vapid and insubstantial. The closer Phineas gets to Scholes Destry-Scholes the less there seems to see of the man. When he discovers some papers that the great biographer was working up--a sort of comparative study of the seemingly disparate lives of Henrik Ibsen, Francis Galton, and Charles Linnaeus (you'll learn who they are in the book if you don't know already)--Phineas is disconcerted to discover that Destry-Scholes wasn't as objective as one might wish a biographer to be. He distorted known facts (known facts: ha!), repeated what he knew to be his subject's fantasies and fictions, and added a few of his own. What Phineas discovers is that Destry-Scholes, even as a biographer, is writing as much about himself as he is about the lives of his subjects.

And, in writing about Destry-Scholes, so Phineas is writing as much about himself. 

Is all writing, then, really autobiography on some level? 

Was the answer that A.S. Byatt gave to that young interviewer all B.S.? Or just partly B.S.?

Can we ever escape the relativist, solipsistic maze? Or is it, as the postmodernists seem to imply, a necessary "evil"? And, if so, being necessary, being the very ground of our existence, perhaps not evil at all?

I suspect that this is but one way to read this fascinating novel. In truth, it is not an easy read and I suspect that a lot of it went sailing right over my head, especially inasmuch as I didn't devote as much time to picking it apart as it probably deserves. As a novel about a writer writing a book, Byatt employs a lot of entertaining metafictional devices, which surprised me, as she can sometimes strike one as  a rather conservative, stodgily traditional writer. But in The Biographer's Tale she's playful and entertaining, even light-hearted, which is to say, light-hearted for her.  It's the kind of book that pretends to contain research gathered for Phineas's book: which means, in this case, photographs and drawings. They are a nice break. As is the humor. And the occasional erotic hijinks and descriptions of insect battles. It's the kind of book where you learn a lot of ancillary stuff that Byatt learned during her research, which is one of the reasons she gave for writing about other lives...even if she wryly suggests in this novel that, in the end, we can only really write about ourselves.

A.S. Byatt is indisputably somewhere in these pages. She's said so herself without saying so at all. And that is a large part of what makes this novel so infinitely beguiling.