Byatt’s The Biographer’s Tale and Barthes’ Wrestling

Before likening Byatt to both a Neo-Platonism of her stoic contemporary novelists (if British literature of the late twentieth century reflects this obedience to logic, as I think it does) and the neo-Aristotelianism of the search for Ethics in Literature reminiscent of the work of Martha Nussbaum, but perhaps best used in the context of Byatt’s other contemporary novelist, Milan Kundera, we should liken the reading of Byatt to Sontag’s wrestling, to use the Barthes metaphor, with high culture and popular culture. The entire reading of A.S. Byatt’s The Biographer’s Tale is an exercise in wrestling. The main character delves into the research of his subject with a juxtaposition of himself onto the object that ends up in a tussle both literal and figurative. The literal tussle is one of form; the author presents the novel in fragmented bits contrasting the biographer’s life with that of his object who is, in turn, a biographer himself with an object of his own. Therefore, a multi-layered swirl of activity arises from the very form of the novel. The wrestling of the points of view around each other lead to a confusion for the reader as to who is literally whirling by at any one time.

Barthes calls this interpretation of narrative as “wrestling” as the purest form of theater. He symbolizes the novel with the sport of wrestling in which emotions are always front and center, even though confounded in a whirlwind of excitement. “The virtue of all-in wrestling is that it is the spectacle of excess” (Mythologies, 15). This spectacle is on display in The Biographer’s Tale from the beginning. “”I made my decision, abruptly, in the middle of one of Gareth Butcher’s famous theoretical seminars…. I’m not going to go on with this anymore” (The Biographer’s Tale, 3). Thus, our biographer abandons his academic pursuits in lieu of a more exciting premise. He pursues academic research, true, but on his own terms, on a vibrant and electric pursuit of the life of another biographer.

But in The Biographer’s Tale, Nansen’s intensity of purpose leads him increasingly into a crazed obsession with Gaston. As the chapters go by, he identifies more and more with the biographer is using as his subject. He finally becomes so disoriented in his cross-referencing of Gaston's quotations and his own notes on Gaston that he hallucinates.

 

"In the day I was trembling, calm and collected. At night I inhabited a phantasmagoria....Erik and Christophe stalked through my dreams, in many guises,

 all appalling...They pranced across the veldt in leopard skins and feathers, they

crawled out of the jungle in enormous penis-gourds carrying pathetic, shrinking, decomposing heads....Once I saw the crucified man Galton had seen—that is I saw

his vision, of a completely identifiable hanging figure in agony" (232-233).

 

He accepts the confusion of Galton's visions with his own. "It was of course my mind, the mind of Phineas G. Nanson that was doing all this work of redesign and recombination. [np] It wasn't nice" (BT 233). Through hallucination Nanson becomes one with his subject, Calton, and with Galton's subjects, Erik and Christophe, in a swirling miasma of grotesque imagery. The wrestling metaphor becomes increasingly pronounced as the images tumble and twirl around each other on the mat of Nanson’s imagination.

 

Nanson has left the academic world, but not the world of high culture. He seeks to find the beauty and the worthiness behind research of a complicated subject. Not only does he question the validity of his subject’s findings, but he also questions the validity of his own work, and it sends him reeling.

 

Byatt thus brings the reader not to resolution, but to further questioning of purpose, questioning of goodness, and questioning of the beauty of interpretation. As an author, she causes her reader to question his own role in the research, for the act of reading is a research tool in itself. Reading a Byatt novel becomes the at of playing a game of interpretation, a game that asks the reader about his/her own purpose, the search for beauty and the search for what is right and good, if readers can equate the concepts of validity and goodness.

 

__________

References

Barthes, Roland. Mythologies. (1957) translated by Richard Howard and Annette Lavers, New York: Hill and Wang, 2012.

Byatt, A.S. The Biographer’s Tale. New York: Random House, 2000.

 

Nicholas Harris

Blog 04/07/2025