The Pleasure of Biography

A..S. Byatt's Possession is a novel about research. It is a mystery story that starts with a serendipidous and tantalising clue, and leads its characters on a dramatic chase after the truth. Her protagonists are literary scholars each concerned with one particular figure. There are a couple of passages early on where these characters wonder about their own personalities, their own lives, being so completely submerged in the personality and life's work of another person. And although they are, as I said, ostensibly literary scholars, interested in their subject's writing (and the hero makes that point explicitly), it is quite certain that the interest of the writing is the revelation of the life.

One aspect of the book's irony is that of course the subjects only have their life in the fragments of their own writing - letters, diaries, and poems - that are offered in the pages of the book. Except in Possession that is not quite true, for near the end are a few passages that narrate part of their lives directly. In these passages, we readers see what the protagonists cannot, the lives that were behind the paper. It is a curious manouevre. Is it to be taken as an admission that a novel's potential for completeness - there is no life that fails to find the page, there is as Derrida would say 'nothing outside the text' - makes it a superior form to the irretrievably incomplete biography of a real person?

A novel Byatt wrote ten years later, The Biographer's Tale, is a starker picture of the frustration of research: the fragmentation and the fading of truth. There is here far less contact with the putative biography's subject, and there is no trail of clues that leads to revelation, only broken lines that force us back in on ourselves. If this later work is more honest, or more pessimistic, about the task of biography, perhaps it says the same thing about novels too. There can be only that life which is born onto the page, all frail and thin: nothing beside remains. However many worlds within worlds we create, however we rebuild past lives and past civilisations in books, there are still only words and this world, here.