Transitioning to The Biographer’s Tale

Steiby writes of Kundera’s use of characters as all too human with the supreme character failing of an untrustworthy memory. Kundera turns to the novel as the means of dealing with the physical human frailty. He deals with D.H. Lawrence’s insistence on the novel as a means of dealing with human physicality, or the physical body is all we can know of the spirit (Lawrence, 43). But Kundera takes this insistence one step further, into the realm of memory and its inconsistencies. The novel tells of the dilemma of human existence as the individual attempts to escape the inescapable. The social situation of the individual is as much a reflection of this attempt to escape as is the limitations of the body. Steinby describes Kundera’s search to escape as a search for happiness. Through pleasure, therefore, the search of the individual becomes a hedonistic philosophy; but this hedonism “appears as a possibility no longer available to contemporary individuals” (209). The limitations of the body render hedonism ineffective.

The sisters of Byatt’s The Game show a need to achieve an identity that transcends their constrictive reality. Kundera might say this is the purpose of all novels, to show characters like these. The sisters’ game represents “a longing for a devouring love which, one sees, wisely, to be impossible” (The Game, 56). The sisters see the absurdity of games humans develop in order to pursue happiness through love. An absurd character, an academic named Storrin, presents himself at a party thrown by Julia as someone who “saw himself as a man of the world”; he attacks would-be romantics among the women at the party, “He gave her a gem of a lecture on the dangers of being a fat red woman and in love with la vie boheme or Baudelaire” (142, italics Byatt’s). Julia finds delight in sparring with men like Storrin, but Cassandra “was not the sort of woman who would have called out in Storrin the lively malice he now displayed” (143). But their various ways of presenting their game still betray a linear representation of how the sisters progress toward their goal of victory. Though the reader grapples with the sisters’ dilemmas of identity, the narrative progression is still fairly easy to understand.

Perhaps with her novel The Biographer’s Tale, Byatt goes one step deeper into Kundera’s search for beyond the limits of physical limitations. This “Tale” is one of not only the subject of the Biographer, but the Biographer himself. The novels were first published thirty-three years apart, 1967 and 2000 respectively, and the evolution into a more fragmented narrative is apparent. In stepping into the muddy waters of identity in The Biographer’s Tale, Byatt makes the reader contend with the object’s search for identity as well as the storyteller’s search for identity. Ultimately, the two will become confused. The Biographer’s search for resolution of his subject’s identity becomes the biographer’s own search for identity. The happiness brought about by one outcome, that of defining the object, becomes intertwined with the Biographer’s own search for happiness.

In contrast to The Game, The Biographer's Tale takes a more fragmented approach to the theme of storytelling, as Byatt writes of the academic Phineas G. Nanson as he attempts to research and write a biography about another literary biographer, Roland Michell, who, in turn, wrote about great adventurer’s from Britain’s colonial period. Fragments from the writing of all these subjects become intertwined. Two women surface to help Phineas in his research, only to become a part of romantic relationships with him, intensifying his search for his own happiness, often at the expense of his objects. Michell, it turns out, has told a few beyond-truths in order to help himself into resolutions he wished to make about his characters, finding his own happiness.

__________

References.

Byatt, A.S. The Biographer’s Tale. London: Chatto & Windus, 2000.

-----. The Game. Random House, 1967.

Kundera, Milan. The Art of the Novel. [1986] trans. by Linda Asher [1988], Harper, 2000.

Lawrence, D.H. “Why the Novel Matters” in The Book of Twentieth Century Essays, ed. Ian Hamilton. Penguin, 1999, 43-48.

Steiby, Lisa. Kundera and Modernity. Purdue UP. ebook Academic Collection (EBSOhost), Comparative Cultural Studies, 2013. Accessed Feb. 2025.

 

Nicholas Harris

Blog. March 13, 2025.