When your hero attempts to escape the bottomless pit that is post-structuralism for the material comforts of biography, his project immediately disintegrates: the subject he has chosen is not a sturdy collection of facts, but something of a chimera. Phineas ends up, rather unwillingly, filling in the gaps in his narrative with scenes from his own life, making the resulting text a sort of demonstration of the very postmodernism Phineas rejects. Once you've become postmodern, is escape impossible? Or, is the only escape the one that Phineas chooses at the end—to simply quit writing (analyzing) and actually live?
A.S. Byatt: The answer to this is very complicated, and in a way the whole finished tale embodies the answer—which is, more or less, the question as you ask it. Phineas leaves postmodernism because it is endlessly repetitive and self-referring. He chooses biography out of a kind of not-thought-out desire to "get a life." But I suppose I myself began writing this because I felt that the false coherence of biography was peculiarly and rightly susceptible to deconstructionist readings, searches for the invisible or implied author of the biography. Many modern biographers—Richard Holmes for instance—are aware of the provisional and suspect nature of their version of another man's life. The great Victorian biographers did ask those questions too, more than we now think. And it follows that if you start thinking about a "whole life" and which bits are significant, and which bits make up the essential individuality (or social significance, or literary importance, depending on your approach to the biography), you will start worrying about your own life. And the central activity of the biographer's life is to be secondhand, in the Lady of Shalott's mirror, not living a "real life"—whatever that is. It has to be faced that Phineas, whom I came to like, would never make a good biographer, because he respects his own and other people's private mysterious selves, and because he can neither find people to interrogate, nor enjoy interrogating them. He wasn't a good critic, either. All my own life I have believed uneasily that if you couldn't be very good at secondary things (writing fiction, writing criticism) you ought to find something really important to do. I used to think it was social work and saving lives (Vera). I now think it's saving biodiversity, just as much (Fulla). And in Phineas's case, both women and their activities offer him access to a sensuous and emotional complexity he didn't have—though that has a fairytale neatness. Read more…
