The Biographer’s Tale was published by Chatto & Windus in 2000. Phineas G. Nanson, a postgraduate student, abandons his thesis on poststructuralist literary theory — rejecting abstraction for the “thingness” of the real world. He decides instead to write the biography of Scholes Destry-Scholes, a fictional biographer who wrote three great lives (of Carl Linnaeus, Francis Galton, and Henrik Ibsen) before disappearing mysteriously.
Phineas’s research produces fragments — Destry-Scholes’s notes, drafts, and unfinished passages about his three subjects — but never a coherent picture of the biographer himself. The more Phineas seeks facts, the more he encounters the irreducible mystery of other people: you cannot know another person completely, no matter how many documents you accumulate. Biography, the novel suggests, is as much a fiction as fiction itself — a narrative imposed on the chaos of a life.
The novel is Byatt’s most comic work: Phineas’s obsessive research, his absurd romantic entanglements, and his gradual realization that the “solid facts” he sought are as elusive as the theories he rejected are handled with dry wit. But beneath the comedy runs a serious argument about the relationship between knowledge and understanding, facts and meaning.
Collecting The Biographer’s Tale
First edition (Chatto & Windus, London, 2000): Cloth with dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition, fine/fine: $20–$50
- Very good: $10–$20