A Descent into the Maelstrøm. The Quest for the
Fictional Author in Byatt’s The Biographer’s Tale,
Nabokov’s The Real Life of Sebastian Knight
and Bolaño’s The Savage Detectives.
MA Thesis | Literature and Culture – Comparative Literature Korneel de Ruiter
Supervisor dr. H.H. Stuit 23-06-2014
Table of Contents
Introduction 2
Chapter 1. “I Must Have Things.” Order, Knowledge and the Quest for the Sensory in A.S. Byatt’s
The Biographer’s Tale. 2
Chapter 2. “Sebastian’s Mask Clings to my Face.” Subjectivity and (Auto)biography in Vladimir
Nabokov’s The Real Life of Sebastian Knight. 20
Chapter 3. “A Story From the Edge of Civilization.” The Reader, the Labyrinth and the Quest for
the Real in Roberto Bolaño’s The Savage Detectives.” 30
Conclusion 43
Bibliography 2
Introduction
A recurring theme in modern literary fiction is the search, in the form of a quest, for a (fictional) author. In novels by various authors, among which Roberto Bolaño, A.S. Byatt and Vladimir Nabokov, the fictional author is the object around which the narrative circles. Although this theme is recurring in twentieth- and twenty-first century literature, and is even considered as central theme of Roberto Bolaño’s fiction,1 so far it has not been subject to research. I have chosen to investigate
this quest, thereby focussing on three works by the aforementioned authors: A.S. Byatt’s The Biographer’s Tale, Vladimir Nabokov’s The Real Life of Sebastian Knight and Roberto Bolaño’s The Savage Detectives.
Although they all revolve around the quest for the author, these works differ greatly in scope, setting and narrative. The Biographer’s Tale takes place in contemporary academic circles, The Real Life of Sebastian Knight is set in early twentieth-century Europe, and The
Savage Detectives mostly portrays Mexico City’s bohemian poets and artists. Nonetheless, the three works are all metafictional in nature, calling attention to their status as fiction, and – both implicitly and explicitly – reflecting on literature and the role of the author.
The fact that these so wide-ranging novels share the same theme, makes it interesting to use the search for the author as symbol for a wider contemporary phenomenon, intricately tied to contemporary thought. This is complicated, however, by Nabokov’s novel. Although Byatt’s and Bolaño’s works could be considered contemporary – The Savage Detectives was published in 1998, The Biographer’s Tale in 2001 – Nabokov’s The Real Life of Sebastian Knight was published in the early 1940s. This makes it less convincing to make conclusions about the quest for the author as contemporary phenomenon. However, as I will demonstrate in the first chapter, the quest for the author is intricately tied to Foucault’s conceptualisation of the Modern episteme, the beginnings of which are situated in the 19th century. Furthermore, I will draw mostly on post-structuralist thought – which can be thought of as building on Foucault’s theory. It is there that the “death of the author,” famously proclaimed by Roland Barthes, is situated; it will serve to gain an understanding of what it is exactly that is searched for in the quest for the fictional author.
I hope to create a dialogue between this theoretical framework and the three works of fiction. Nabokov’s novel will thereby serve as a bridge between The Biographer’s Tale and The Savage Detectives; as such, is essential in the creation of this dialogue. This, then, is the reason I have chosen not to treat the works in chronological order. In my first chapter, I will examine A.S. Byatt’s The Biographer’s Tale. It is a novel that is very much concerned with matters of knowledge and order. Through its direct engagement with post-structuralist literary theory, the work
1 In her afterword to Bolaño’s The Savage Detectives, Natasha Wimmer’s calls the search for the fictional author “the quintessential Bolaño quest” (590).
poses itself both within and against post-structuralist discourse. Reading the work as a dialogue with post-structuralist literary theory, I will examine how the quest for the author manifests itself as a quest for a different form of knowledge in The Biographer’s Tale. Drawing on Michel
Foucault’s concept of epistemes, I will situate the novel’s narrative as response to the emancipation of language and, subsequently, the death of the author. Moreover, I will introduce the image of the Maelstrøm, which is central to The Biographer’s Tale, and which will be used in the
subsequent chapters of my thesis as metaphor for the quest for the author.
The first chapter of this thesis thus focuses on the epistemological side of the quest for the author. In my analysis of Vladimir Nabokov’s The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, which constitutes the second chapter, my attention shifts from the object of the quest to the subject. I will analyse the changes that take place in the subject, and on a wider level, to the concept of
subjectivities. To do so, I will make use of theories by Jacques Derrida. His writings on biographies and autobiographies make for an excellent starting point in the analysis of The Real Life
Sebastian Knight, a novel in which the boundaries between these genres are blurred. Such a deconstructive reading of Nabokov’s novel will shed a new light on the quest for the author, as it exposes the complicated relation between subject, object and text.
Finally, I will turn to Roberto Bolaño’s The Savage Detectives. In this novel, the quest for the author is twofold: the protagonists search for a long-lost poet, and we as readers are involved in a quest for the protagonists. By creating a dialogue with The Biographer’s Tale and The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, I hope to explore the depths that underlie Bolaño’s
complicated construction. First, I will focus on the quest for the lost poet, and the consequences the outcome of this search has for the protagonists. Byatt’s engagement with literary theory, and the deconstructive reading of The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, will serve as a framework. The inclusion of the reader in the quest for the author will mark the final point in my investigation of the quest for the author.
This final step will bring me to an answer to the meaning of the quest for the author. I hope to gain an understanding of this quest within the framework of the Modern episteme and
post-structuralist thought. Overall, the quest for the author will expose the tensions between literature and the conception of language in the Modern episteme.
Chapter 1. “I Must Have Things.” Order, Knowledge and the Quest for the Sensory in A.S. Byatt’s The Biographer’s Tale.
A.S. Byatt’s The Biographer’s Tale is the tale of the search for an author – a biographer, to be more precise.2 The novel’s protagonist, Phineas G. Nanson, embarks on this quest after being
disappointed by his studies in postmodern literary theory. His Head of Studies presents to him a biography by Scholes Destry-Scholes, in which he finds what he considers to be facts, as opposed to the interpretations that his studies produce. After reading this biography, Nanson decides to quit his studies and embark on quest for the author, by writing a biography on the biographer Destry-Scholes. Although his subject has died, Nanson still hopes to get to find and know him through his texts.
The Biographer’s Tale constitutes a framework that allows for reflection on the object-side of the quest for the author. Through a reading of the novel, the author as object of study can be examined. The tensions that underlie the search for the author, and its unsuccessful outcome, will be exposed. Through its direct engagement with post-structuralist literary theory, the work poses itself both within and against post-structuralist discourse. Implicitly and explicitly, it interrogates notions of knowledge and order that are associated with the search for the author. This leads to a self-reflexivity that makes The Biographer’s Tale an ideal starting point for my research. It will constitute a framework of thinking about the search for the author, which I will use in subsequent chapters. Nonetheless, I will also attempt to offer an answer to the questions that the novel raises: why a search for the author? What is there to be gained? And what does the eventual failure mean?
In starting to create such a framework, Linda Hutcheon’s conception of postmodernism provides a useful point of departure. Twelve years before The Biographer’s Tale was
published, Linda Hutcheon attempted to define and conceptualise postmodernism in A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory. To do so, she coined the term “historiographic
metafiction” for what she considers true postmodern novelistic fiction. Historiographic metafiction stems from the postmodern problematisation of the distinction between fact and fiction, history and story.3 The historiographic metafictional novel “asks us to recall that history and fiction are
themselves historical terms and that their definitions and interrelations are historically determined and vary with time” (Hutcheon 105). In Hutcheon’s conception, historiographic metafiction
2 It could be argued whether or not these two are the same; probably, a clear distinction could be made. However, Scholes Destry-Scholes eludes such a distinction; his biographical work is, to a certain extent, fictional – consisting of made-up facts about non-fictional characters. Moreover, Nanson seems to make no distinction between his approach to Destry-Scholes’ work and literary works. Because of this, I will refer to him as both biographer and author.
3 A small selection of the examples Hutcheon mentions: García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, Gunther Grass’s The Tin Drum, Fowles’s A Maggot, E.L. Doctorow’s Looon Lake etcetera (Hutcheon ix).
transcends mere self-reflexivity; it becomes possible to use the genre as a framework, a starting point to interrogate categorisations that occur through language and thought.
A.S. Byatt’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Possession: A Romance has already been read as an example of historiographic metafiction (Campbell 111). In the work, a couple of academics set out on a textual search for a secret and yet undiscovered relationship between two Victorian poets. By intermingling past and present, Victorian literature and contemporary scholarship, Byatt touches upon several of the themes that Hutcheon distinguishes: the complicated relation between history, fiction and (literary) theory, and the incorporation of the past in the present. As the subtitle A Romance hints at, the result is a narrative quest of optimism and fulfilment. Ultimately, as Dana Shiller argues in “The Redemptive Past in the Neo-Victorian Novel,” Possession
demonstrates that acknowledging that we can only know the past through its textual traces does not mean that historical events are irretrievable, or not worth retrieving. Indeed, [Byatt suggests] that although historical rigor may take on new meaning, it continues to have value, and remains compatible with approaches to history that accept the existence of many possible narratives for any given set of historical facts. (541)
Building on Hutcheon’s definition of historiographic metafiction, it is possible, like Shiller did for Possession, to research the ways in which The Biographer’s Tale challenges the traditional notions of history and knowledge. Doing such analysis would lead to similar conclusions as
Shiller’s. It would, however, overlook certain aspects specific to The Biographer’s Tale. While the novels are thematically related, in “Reading The Biographer’s Tale,” Erin O’Connor argues that, in many ways, the work is actually an inversion of Possession (380). Whereas
Possession’s protagonists successfully conclude their investigation on their subjects – in other words, possess them – Nanson fails in his search for Destry-Scholes. Among other things, it is precisely this lack of success that makes The Biographer’s Tale such an interesting starting point for my research. The disappointment of failed research and a general feeling of being “lost” complicate the properties that Hutcheon attributes to historiographic metafiction. This results in a novel that explores the boundaries of knowledge and literary studies through the search for the author.
In Possession, Byatt already showed her affinity with contemporary literary research by referring to (and ridiculing) contemporary literary criticism. In The Biographer’s Tale, she takes this even further. The novel is clearly deeply embedded in contemporary literary theory; the narrator is a postgraduate in literary studies, and both implicitly and explicitly, this is often apparent. The result is very a self-conscious style that shows Byatt’s awareness of the theoretical
implications of her novel. In “Reading The Biographer’s Tale”, O’Connor goes as far as calling the novel “the most exciting work of literary criticism I have read recently” (379). Because of this, merely pointing out the ways in which The Biographer’s Tale interrogates the themes that Hutcheon distinguishes, would not take into account the novel’s engagement with literary theory.4
While The Biographer’s Tale does challenge the boundaries between fact and fiction, history and story, it at the same time offers a critique of the larger theoretical implications of reading a novel as such. In my research, I will take The Biographer’s Tale’s theoretical self-awareness as a starting point. It will enable me to envision a framework that encompasses the epistemological issues that underlie the quest for the author.
I
It is exemplary that the protagonist’s quest starts off with a rejection of his classes on contemporary literary theory:
All the seminars, in fact, had a fatal family likeness. They were repetitive in the extreme. We found the same clefts and crevices, transgressions and disintegrations, lures and deceptions beneath, no matter what surface we were scrying. I thought, next we will go on to the phantasmagoria of Bosch, and, in his incantatory way, Butcher obliged. I went on looking at the filthy window above his head, and I thought, I must have things.5 (Byatt 1)
Phineas G. Nanson, The Biographer’s Tale’s protagonist, thus comes to his decision to end his studies in literature. He has a need for things and facts in his life, instead of the infinite web of interpretations and meanings, in which always the same “clefts and crevices” are found.
The Head of the Department of his studies, upon hearing of Nanson’s plan, understands his concerns. As a response to Nanson’s need for things and facts, he presents to Nanson a three-part biography, written by Scholes Destry-Scholes, and apparently a brilliant work of scholarship. It tells the life of Sir Elmer Bole, traveller, adventurer, writer and translator. To Nanson’s initial surprise, reading the biography gives him the sense that he is, actually, reading about facts. The realisation that he can “escape” his background in postmodern literary theory through the biography makes him want to take it a step further:
“I could write a biography,” I said to myself, possibly even aloud, “of Scholes
Destry-Scholes.” Only a biography seemed an appropriate form for the great biographer. I never had
4 Moreover, such research has already been conducted; see for instance Rodríguez González, “A Dialogue with Literary Theory: A.S. Byatt’s The Biographer’s Tale.”
any doubt about that. I had discovered the superiority of the form. I would write one myself. (Byatt 20)
Nanson thus sets out on a quest to find Scholes Destry-Scholes, the biographer who only wrote Elmer Bole’s biography. Little to no personal information of him is known.6 At the start of
Nanson’s research, Ormerod Goode, the Head of Studies, invokes the image of the detective at work: through clues and snippets of information, Nanson will uncover the truth behind this biographer. Nanson begins his task with optimism, but soon his confidence fades. He almost immediately finds out that Destry-Scholes has died in the Maelstrøm, some years prior. By trying to contact Destry-Scholes’s publisher, reading the notes for a lecture on biography the biographer once gave, and, mostly, close-reading his work, Nanson hopes to find the facts that he is looking for. His initial results are extremely meagre, and he realises that reading and examining Destry-Scholes’s work is not bringing him any closer to his subject – “I was not discovering Destry-Scholes, beyond his own discoveries” (Byatt 30). For a while, he employs a different technique: visiting the house where Destry-Scholes was born. None of this provides interesting information on Destry-Scholes or his work. Yet it is emblematic for the quest for the author; often, it involves visiting places that are of importance to the fictional author.
Things take a different turn when Nanson receives a packet of papers from a university archivist. These thirty-seven pages contain three fragments, written by Destry-Scholes, on three subjects: “CL”, “FG” and “HI.” The fragments turn out to be parts of biographies on taxonomist Carl Linnaeus, statistician Francis Galton, and playwright Henrik Ibsen. The three biographical fragments are included in The Biographer’s Tale; we thus read about Linnaeus’s journey to the Maelstrøm, Galton’s experiments and trip to lake Ngami, and Ibsen’s public life and conversation with his son. Interestingly, it is only at the end of the three fragments that the identity of the subjects – up until then only called by their initials – is revealed. Like Nanson, the reader is at first
disoriented: what to make of these fragments? Why do they so forcefully intrude the novel’s
narrative? Mystifying and disordering as they might seem, they are Nanson’s most important lead in his “detective work.” Nanson struggles with making sense of the fragments and the way in which they are supposed to help him in his quest for Destry-Scholes. He rejects following up the clues and leads that the fragments provide, with the argument that there is “no end to the pursuit of
knowledge” (Byatt 102) – realising that this won’t bring him any closer to his subject.
His quest to gain an understanding leads Nanson to the Linnean Society, where he, for the first time, gets the experience of physical, tangible things, as opposed to texts and meaning. In there, as Nanson’s narrative digresses into an explanation of Foucault’s use of Linnaeus within his
6 The biographical information on the back of the first part of Sir Elmer Bole’s biography: “Scholes Destry-Scholes was born in Pontefract, Yorkshire, in 1925. He is working on further volumes of this Life” (Byatt 7).
wider system of thought, the doors suddenly lock and the lights go out – plunging Nanson and the rest of the visitors into darkness. For a novel that depends heavily on the use of metaphors, this is probably no accident.
II
The work of Michel Foucault is, both implicitly and explicitly, present in The Biographer’s Tale. “I suspect the germ of the novel lies long ago in my own first reading of Foucault’s remarks on Linnaeus and taxonomy in Les mots et les choses,” Byatt writes in the
“Acknowledgements” to the novel (263). Phineas G. Nanson, as a student of literary studies, is of course well-known with Foucault’s ideas, and aware that they underlie most of his thinking. But, the “clefts and crevices, transgressions and disintegrations, lures and deceptions” he finds in texts – no doubt, influenced by Foucault – no longer engage him. There even seems to be a tiredness in Nanson’s appropriation of Foucault:
I have resisted the temptation to insert several pages of Foucault. One of the reasons why I abandoned—oh, and I have abandoned—post-structuralist semiotics, was the requirement to write page upon page of citations from Foucault (or Lacan or Derrida or Bakhtin) in support of the simplest statement [...]. (Byatt 114)
Though clearly very much engaged with Foucault’s ideas, The Biographer’s Tale is thus not a straight-forward adaptation. Rather, the work can be read as a dialogue, mainly with Foucault’s The Order of Things. Through this dialogue, the quest for Destry-Scholes becomes an engagement with post-structuralist thought, which is both deeply embedded and rejected.
The Order of Things is Foucault’s attempt at writing a history – or rather, archaeology – of the concept of knowledge. According to Foucault, the conditions that make knowledge possible are subject to historical change. Because of this, the way knowledge is generated, and thus
knowledge itself, differs between various periods. In The Order of Things, Foucault’s theory is built around three periods, or epistemes. As he summarises his own main thesis: “In any given culture and at any given moment, there is always only one episteme that defines the conditions of possibility of all knowledge, whether expressed in a theory or silently invested in a practice” (183). Apart from the Renaissance episteme, which is treated rather briefly, Foucault distinguishes the Classical and the Modern episteme. The difference between these two modes of thought is of importance for my research to the quest for the author. As will become clear, the quest for the author is, indirectly, a response to the problems inherent to knowledge produced within the Modern episteme.
In The Order of Things, Carl Linnaeus’s conception of natural history is exemplary for the Classical episteme. He created a system with which it should be possible to name every animal and plant. These names functioned as ordering mechanisms, thus creating a classification of nature. Foucault explained this as taxinomia, the ordering of things into tables to distinguish and classify them. It is the way identities and differences are designated, and the knowledge of beings is made possible. This concept is closely intertwined with mathesis and genesis; the former being the science of equalities, attributions and ultimately truth, the latter being the presupposition of
progressive series. Together, taxinomia, mathesis and genesis constitute the general science of order that made knowledge possible in the Classical episteme (Foucault 79-84).
Language takes a special place in Foucault’s conceptualisation of epistemes.7 Linnaeus’s
attempt to order and name the world, and his desire for a complete taxonomy of nature, are analogous to the goals of the Classical episteme: to “bring language as close as possible to the observing gaze, and the things observed as close as possible to words” (Foucault 144). Language, in the Classical episteme, was a part of the world, intrinsically connected to things. It served no other purpose than to represent. Yet a change in the way language is perceived and, ultimately, the way knowledge is created and validated, takes place at the end of the eighteenth century. This, according to Foucault, marks the end of the Classical episteme:
The whole Classical system of order, the whole of that great taxinomia that makes it possible to know things by means of the system of their identities, is unfolded within the space that is opened up inside representation when representation represents itself, that area where being and the Same reside. Language is simply the representation of words; nature is simply the representation of beings; need is simply the representation of needs. The end of Classical thought – and of the episteme that made general grammar, natural history, and the science of wealth possible – will coincide with the decline of representation, or rather with the emancipation of language, of the living being, and of need, with regard to representation. (226)
This “emancipation of language” lies at the base of the Modern episteme, one that is still prevalent today. In this episteme, order through taxinomia, mathesis and genesis no longer qualifies as valid knowledge. The permanent, singular identities that they produce are replaced by organic structures. In other words: it is no longer things, but it is the internal relation between these things that now generates meaning (Foucault 274). In the new episteme, “it will show that these organic structures are discontinuous, that they do not, therefore, form a table of unbroken simultaneities, but
that certain of them are on the same level whereas others form series or linear sequences” (Foucault 274).
Of course, this has a large impact on all forms of science and knowledge. Foucault
researches a wide range of disciplines, in all of which this change occurs. Not only does he examine natural history and biology, philology and political economy, he also turns towards philosophy and literature. Concerning the latter, Foucault states:
Don Quixote is the first modern work of literature, because in it we see the cruel reason of identities and differences make endless sport of signs and similitudes; because in it language breaks off its old kinship with things and enters into that lonely sovereignty from which it will reappear, in its separated state, only as literature; because it marks the point where
resemblance enters an age which is, from the point of view of resemblance, one of madness and imagination.8 (54)
There are interesting resemblances between Don Quixote and The Biographer’s Tale. Analogous to Phineas G. Nanson, Don Quixote lives a life among books. Of course, for the latter, this leads to delusions and madness. Foucault’s further analysis of the Quixote focuses on these themes, which were central to his research previous to The Order of Things. Yet most important for my topic is that Foucault argues that at the heart of the novel, that which defines it as “the first modern work of literature,” is “the mark of a new experience of language and things” (55). It is this same mark that plants the seed for Nanson’s quest for the author.
Ormerod Goode, the man who introduces Nanson to biography, is himself studying place-names. “Public property, can’t move off, he said. Stay put. Interconnected. Satisfactory” (Byatt 246). In his conception of place-names, words and things are still tied together. And it is exactly this that Nanson is looking for in his search for the author, using the form of biography to validate his search. Goode describes it to him as “a despised art because it is an art of things, of facts, of arranged facts” (Byatt 4-5). Those things and facts are exactly what Nanson needs. He wishes for a world in which words and things are connected again, where language hasn’t yet obscured
everything that lies beyond it. This naiveté accounts for his search for the author; it is through finding the author, as the source of the language, that he can gain a grasp of what lies beyond it. However, it is not only the Modern episteme that accounts for Nanson’s sudden quest. I will turn to Barthes’s notion of the “death of the author” to gain an understanding of what it is that Nanson looks for in the author.
8 The asynchronicity of this statement is remarkable, considering the Don Quixote was published early in the seventeenth century – and would thus be a product of the Classical episteme.
Since the emergence of the Modern episteme, the emancipation of language has, in
literature, ultimately lead to the proclamation by Roland Barthes of the “death of the author.” In his classic essay, Barthes argues that literary meaning is not to be found in the author or critic. Instead, a “birth of the reader” has occurred. “As soon as a fact is narrated no longer with a view to acting directly on reality but intransitively, that is to say, finally outside of any function other than that of the very practice of the symbol itself, this disconnection occurs, the voice loses its origin, the author enters into his own death” (Barthes 1466). The parallel to Foucault’s periodisation of the Modern episteme is easily made. With the emancipation of language, a rupture or disconnection between thing and sign emerges. When Barthes mentions that “no doubt it has always been that way” – referring to his statement quoted above – “always” should thus be understood as within the Modern episteme. But even then, a shift has occurred in the twentieth century. Foucault argues there was still a privileged place for literature in the Modern episteme: “literature is that which compensates for (and not that which confirms) the signifying function of language. Through literature, the being of language shines once more on the frontiers of Western culture” (Foucault 48-49).
Barthes, who has a background in structuralism, levels literature with all other forms of text. The result is a complete opening up of the text: “Once the Author is removed, the claim to decipher a text becomes quite futile. To give a text an Author is to impose a limit on that text, to furnish it with a final signified, to close the writing” (1469), Barthes summarises his main point. Yet within his structuralist thought, there is still the idea that texts are to be ordered according to some
underlying structures. This changes with the emergence of post-structuralist theory. Because of the lack of an authorial figure in generating meaning, and the abandoning of structures as organisational principle, there is theoretically an infinite amount of meanings that can be read in a text.
Yet whereas Barthes is optimistic about the death of the author and the new ways of
thinking about text and literature, the ultimate consequences are what make Nanson quit his studies in literature. For him, the infinite amount of possibilities, regressions, intertextualities and
interpretations that have sprung from the death of the author lead to an “anything goes”-idea, in which there are no limits anymore to what can be read in text. Nanson, consequently, calls into attention the negative side of the “birth of the reader” in post-structuralist thought:
One of the reasons I had given up post-structuralist thought was the disagreeable amount of imposing that went on in it. You decided what you were looking for, and then duly found it— male hegemony, liberal-humanist idées reçues, etc. This was made worse by the fact that the deconstructionists and others paid lip-service to the idea that they must not impose—they even went so far as half-believing they must not find, either. And yet they discovered the
same structures, the same velleities, the same evasions quite routinely in the most disparate texts. (Byatt 144)
Once Nanson reads Destry-Scholes’s biography on Elmer Bole, he rediscovers the authorial figure, which leads him the way. It is exactly “the over-determinism of Literary Theory, the meta-language of it” that “threw into brilliant relief Destry-Scholes’s real achievement in describing a whole individual, a multi-faceted single man, one life from birth to death” (Byatt 214). Nanson thus sets out on his own quest for an author, in order to re-create the authorial figure, to regain a sense of control and being controlled. This remarkable ambiguity is present throughout the narrative. Nanson places emphasis on the ordering of the things he encounters, just to be able to “grasp” the author. Here, he is the actor and the creator of the sort of knowledge he longs for. Yet as he desperately tries to make sense of the fragments Destry-Scholes left behind, he becomes more and more aware of the infinite amount of interpretations that still can be read into them. In other words, he cannot escape post-structuralist thought. He desperately longs for the person that possesses the authorial intent behind the texts. Unfortunately, that person has drowned in the Maelstrøm.
III
After the lights turn on and the strongroom of the Linnean society is unlocked again, the plot further unfolds. Up until then, Nanson, somewhat like Don Quixote, has been losing his mind by diving into the enigmatic biographical fragments Destry-Scholes left behind. It is at this point that he meets two women – with whom he both begins a relationship, in which the women remain unaware of each other’s existence – and through which he regains a sense of control. At the Linnean Society, Nanson encounters Fulla Biefeld, a Swedish pollination ecologist – or rather, as she calls herself, bee taxonomist. The second woman is Vera Alphage, Scholes Destry-Scholes’s niece. She invites him to her house, where he finds Destry-Scholes’s things, tangible artifacts that he so desperately longed for.
They consist of a bag full of glass marbles and two shoeboxes, containing a list of names, a seemingly random collection of photographs, a trepanning instrument,9 and a large number of index
cards. All of these items lack any form of order. By ordering them, Nanson hopes to come to an understanding of the fragments of Scholes that he previously read and ultimately, Destry-Scholes himself. He begins his attempt at “mapping the mind of Destry-Scholes Destry-Destry-Scholes” by
ordering the index cards that are in the shoeboxes (Byatt 175). These contain fragments of text by or about Galton, Linnaeus and Ibsen, without references. By ordering them thematically, Nanson
9 An old instrument, used to drill a hole in a skull. As I noted before, Byatt doesn’t eschew obvious metaphors; in this case, the trepanning instrument symbolises Nanson’s quest to gain access to Destry-Scholes’s thought.
hopes to “find the author.”10 It is an attempt at using taxinomia, mathesis and genesis – in
other words, the pillars on which Classical knowledge was built – to gain access to the mind of Destry-Scholes. He had given up writing a biography simply based on biographical facts; attempting to return to a previous episteme seems Nanson’s last resort at finding the form of knowledge he looks for. This knowledge, he believes, will ultimately lead him the way to the author.
Of course, he doesn’t succeed. A large number of the cards is displayed in The
Biographer’s Tale, yet it is rather impossible to make sense of the snippets of information that they present. Their function merely seems to be to let the reader experience Nanson’s struggle, his sense of disorder and despair.11 He is not able to create (a valid form of) knowledge out of the
fragments, although he manages to point out some traces that Destry-Scholes must have been interested in. Rather than facts, he realises, he is merely giving his interpretation:
I was finding it increasingly difficult to disentangle his ideas about his three Personages—and the threads ran out all the time, from Linnaeus to Artedi, from Galton to Darwin and Pearson —from my own quest for a way to look at the world, for some kind of direct collision on my part with things. All right, also with facts. (Byatt 167)
A taxonomist, a statistician, a dramatist. Students in their own ways of the connectedness of things and people. Who separated out different aspects of these things and people for study. Like three nets laid over the nature of things with different meshes and weaves (Byatt 236). This meta-interpretation of the interconnectedness between Destry-Scholes’s subjects hasn’t brought Nanson any closer to Destry-Scholes. The interpretation of Linnaeus, Galton and Ibsen as students of the connectedness of things and people is obviously very subjective. As seen in the upper citation, Nanson is aware of this subjectiveness, and thus, his inability to “find” the author.
Neither is Nanson able to account for the incongruities in Destry-Scholes’s biographical fragments. As it turns out, Destry-Scholes’s narrative of Linnaeus’s Lapp journey is completely fictional – “inauthentic fabrics [...] suspended from authentic hooks” (Byatt 118-119). Since Linnaeus himself did claim in his diaries that he visited the Maelstrøm, this can be explained. Yet the case of Francis Galton is even more enigmatic. As it turns out, he never reached Lake Ngami –
10 This project bears a remarkable resemblance to Roland Barthes’s Michelet (1954), which is based around passages from historian Jules Michelet’s work. Index cards with these passages, collected and compiled by Barthes, were published with Barthes’s commentary. This takes on the form of an extremely subjective analysis, in which Barthes tried to uncover the structures of thought that underlie Michelet’s work. The result is an “organized network of obsessions,” unconsciously manifest in Michelet, that Barthes tries to order thematically (qtd. in Culler 32; Leitch (ed.) 1458). Likewise, Nanson’s project with index cards is to group them, assign a thematical order, and trying to find out the structures of thought that will help him to make sense of the index cards – and ultimately, of Destry-Scholes. The main difference is that Barthes is aware of the subjectivity of his project, whereas Nanson still hopes to gain facts. 11 I will come back to this in the third chapter of my thesis.
contrary to what Destry-Scholes’s biographical fragment states. But other than Linnaeus, Galton never claimed to have reached the lake; the biographical fragment is completely fictional. The impossibility of finding out Destry-Scholes’s implications makes Nanson acknowledge his defeat: “I appeared to have failed to find Destry-Scholes himself. I have to respect him for his scrupulous absence from my tale, my work” (Byatt 214).
IV
The issues with contemporary literary theory that Nanson experiences, and his consequent
alienation, are not new. In Against Interpretation, Susan Sontag struggled with the same issues that the post-structuralist Nanson encountered: the endless digressions of meaning and interpreters’ constant struggle to find – or impose – more meaning in the same works of art. The alternative Sontag offers, sheds a new light on the developments that take place in the final part of The Biographer’s Tale. According to Sontag, there should be a cut back on criticism “so that we can see the thing at all” (14, my emphasis). Commentary on art and literature should turn to a
descriptive, rather than interpretative, analysis of art.12 As a result, it will cease to cloud the work,
but instead make it more real and transparent. This is Sontag’s ideal, as “transparence means experiencing the luminousness of the thing in itself, of things being what they are” (Sontag 13). Ultimately, this will lead to the “erotics of art” she pleads for (14).
In The Biographer’s Tale, too, such a manifest against interpretation can be read. More importantly, Byatt follows Sontag in ending on a more optimistic note. She is able to offer this through writing an alternative to the post-structuralist issues that underlie Nanson’s disappointment. This alternative, the recovering of an “erotics of art,” is not found through the quest for the author. Neither does Nanson return to his studies, after his quest has failed. Instead, he becomes
parataxonomist and “writer.” The former is inspired by his girlfriend Fulla, who introduces him to the pressing matters in contemporary taxonomic research on bees. There, he finds the return to the things being what they are, which Nanson longs for. As Rodríguez González writes on this transformation:
“Phineas must acknowledge the existence of analogies in scientific discourses as well as in any system of representation, that is, the fact that words ultimately determine our
understanding of the world, but most importantly, he has managed to enter the realm of things too by now” (453).
12 Cfr. my earlier analysis of Foucault’s epistemes in relation to The Biographer’s Tale: prior to the disconnection between words and things, this was the only possibility; it is only the distinction between these two that makes interpretation possible.
According to this understanding, there is a way out of the disconnection to all tangible things that Nanson experiences at the beginning of the novel. Interestingly, it is not through the quest for the author, which he hoped would counter this post-structuralist void. “The senses of order and wonder, both, that I had once got from literature, I now found more easily and directly in the creatures,” Nanson states (Byatt 254). Although the knowledge produced there is still embedded in the Modern episteme, as Rodíguez González indirectly points out, it is in bee taxonomy that Nanson really gains a sense of the things that surround him.
The second alternative is found in writing. Near the end, it becomes clear that The Biographer’s Tale is a memoir, written in retrospective by Nanson himself. It is important to note that Nanson considers this writing as merely a recording of his thoughts, not literature. Indeed, he even proclaims a “farewell to Literature” (Byatt 255). The use of the capital is important, as is further emphasised when Nanson writes:
in terms of writing, this looks like a writer’s story. PGN was a mere Critick, steps centre-stage, assumes his life, Finds his Voice, is a Writer. [...] But I feel a kind of nausea at this fate for my hero, myself. It doesn’t seem very much of an anything. To be addicted to writing is not to want to be, to become, a Writer. (Byatt 251)
Here, he it becomes clear that with “Writing” and “Literature”, he doesn’t refer to writing as an activity, but to a certain concept of writing literature. This passage, too, entails a change in perspective. Rather than analysing and interpreting – in other words, writing from his
post-structuralist background – Nanson turns to a descriptive form of writing. This is exemplified in the citation above; he transcends himself as “Critick” and through writing, tries to forget all the limiting factors that his studies have posed, all digressions and “clouds” that obscure what he tries to
convey. As Carla Rodríguez González notes in “A Dialogue with Literary Theory: A.S. Byatt’s The Biographer’s Tale,” throughout the novel, “Phineas’s writing begins to show the
transformation of its narrator into a less academic scholar who, in spite of his strong postmodern background, is beginning to lose the fear of transcending the rigid norms of the system and is in the process of turning ‘from an innocent into a writer’” (454).
Transcending these norms enables Nanson the use of “forbidden words, words critical theorists can’t use and writers can” (Byatt 250). For critical theorists, these words have endless connotations that complicate their meaning to the extent that they become “forbidden.” Using these “loaded” words – for instance, “goat and aromatic,” “[c]ool and rooty” – he is able to describe the scents of his girlfriends. With these descriptions of sensations, he appeals to Sontag’s sense of loss that occurs through interpretation, which “takes the sensory experience of the work for granted, and proceeds from there” (Sontag 13). In his writing, he ultimately tries to attain the state of description,
rather than interpretation, that Sontag’s erotics call for. He thus returns to the sensory experience that is crucial to finding the things he looks for.
The quest for the author had been Nanson’s first attempt at recovering the sensory experience, as a remedy to the alienation associated with interpretation, that both he and Sontag feel. In his quest, he focused on the things Destry-Scholes and his subjects had seen and touched, the places they had been and lived. Yet the author remained a void. Ultimately, Nanson finds the “erotics of art” in nature, where he discovers the experience of things. In descriptive writing about nature, he is able to escape his background as post-structuralist theorist and escape the alienation that haunted him. Through this ending, Byatt is able to resolve her protagonist’s issues – despite the general sense of aimlessness and feeling “lost” that permeate the novel.
V
The Biographer’s Tale’s narrative is made up of many loose ties. Yet what connects most of these is the image of the Maelstrøm, which is recurrent through the novel. At some point, Nanson takes on a job at Puck’s Girdle, a travel agency specialised in “experiences.” Prominently featured in their shop window is an origami figure of the Maelstrøm. It draws him towards the store, and towards his new job. Yet the origins of his fascination with the Maelstrøm are situated earlier, when he finds out that it was the place that Destry-Scholes drowned. The biographer was there in his investigation on Linnaeus. And, of course, the traces go back further, as Nanson narrates: “did I say that Destry-Scholes’s fabrication of Linnaeus’s fabrication of his visit to the Maelstrøm was a pastiche of Edgar Allan Poe?” (Byatt 256).
Recurrent as it is throughout the novel, the Maelstrøm ultimately represents Phineas G. Nanson’s quest for Destry-Scholes, and all the implications it encompasses. Drawing on Poe’s tale, it is a gradual descent into its depths. Moreover, the old man in “A Descent into the Maelström” actually tells he feels “a wish to explore its depths,” hinting at a mysterious, hidden centre at the bottom of it all (Poe 116).13 Of course, the old man realises his fallacy: entering the void that is the
mysterious centre at the bottom, would undeniably lead to his death. Likewise, Nanson gets trapped in his quest, making circular motions around the centre – the absent author, as a void that he can never truly reach.
“The numerous things that floated in our company” (Poe 118, my emphasis) actually mean the rescue of the old man, once he realises cylindrical objects go around the Maelstrøm much slower. Yet as much as Nanson tries to use things to get to the centre of his quest, he never gets
13 In “Metaphors for the Self in A.S. Byatt’s The Biographer’s Tale,” Celia Wallhead notes that radiology (Vera’s profession) and onions, two other recurrent images in the novel, also suggest a hidden and mysterious centre. She contrasts this to several other metaphors in the work – mosaics, Rubik’s cubes – which suggest the idea of creating a whole out of several pieces. But in the end, she admits, the image of the Maelstrøm prevails (Wallhead 294).
through to his subject. Destry-Scholes continues to elude him. As such, the Maelstrøm symbolises, too, the loss of control that Nanson experiences in his research. He stumbles upon his clues,
artefacts, things, but they never really help him get to the centre. Continuously, he is aware that all he really gathers are new interpretations, which finally evolve into his own narrative. And this loss of control is not merely confined to his quest; as Rodríguez González argues, “in spite of being a first-person narrator, Phineas shows an obvious lack of control over his text” (450, my emphasis). But, although the things don’t bring him any closer to his subject, Nanson is saved by clinging onto them. The descriptive form of writing and the turn to taxonomy, both concerned with things, underlie the positive outcome of The Biographer’s Tale.
The Maelstrøm and the narrative converge at the end of The Biographer’s Tale, when the travel store where Nanson works sends Vera and him on a vacation. As destination, Nanson – of course – chooses the Maelstrøm. In Norway, the next day they will visit the actual Maelstrøm, Nanson writes the first of two epilogues: “I shall look at the current – I can imagine its heaving and racing and rushing and suck, but what I shall see will be different – and I shall know no more than I know now about the whereabouts of Destry-Scholes,” Nanson concludes – thus announcing the absolute end of his quest for the author (Byatt 256). Still, the possibility of drowning is left open. Taking the plunge into the Maelstrøm would be the final attempt at getting to know Destry-Scholes. A second epilogue reassures us that Nanson has not taken this path. Nanson survives the Maelstrøm and abandons his search for the author. Yet this abandoning, the leaving of the Maelstrøm, entails an entire departure from “Literature” – capitalised by Nanson, to emphasise the connotations.
It is a surprising outcome to the search for the author. Whereas Possession built its romance on an unmistakable belief in literature, The Biographer’s Tale is a tale of doubt. As historiographic metafiction it, too, challenges traditional notions of history, fiction and knowledge, but it does not manage to satisfactorily tie these together. Like the Maelstrøm, the novel’s narrative circles round and round, without ever coming to a solution. Yet by this continuous circling through texts, Byatt is able to expose the tension between the desire for facts and things, and the knowledge that is generated within a contemporary discourse. The quest for the author in The Biographer’s Tale shows the ambiguities that underlie this tension: the initial belief that, through taxinomia, mathesis and genesis, a previous state of knowledge – of facts – can be regained. What follows is the disappointment when this fails, and when it becomes clear that after the death of the author, there is no way back. Consequently, Nanson proclaims his farewell to Literature, to the rigid constrictions that, under the influence of post-structuralism, have been imposed upon language. The failure to find the author leads to a return to nature, for which Nanson has no regrets: “as long as we don’t destroy and diminish it irrevocably, the too-much-loved earth will always exceed our power to describe, or imagine, or understand it,” he concludes (Byatt 259).
While his circling through the Maelstrøm has not immediately left Nanson an old man – as in Poe’s tale – it cannot be argued that a change has taken place within him throughout The Biographer’s Tale’s narrative.14 In this chapter, I have mostly focused on the epistemological
questions that underlie the search for the author. Yet the consequences of the search for the novel’s subject might be equally important. Gradually throughout the novel, the self is more and more foregrounded. The logical outcome of this is that the narrative of his quest, at its end, takes on the form of an autobiography:
I have admitted I am writing a story, a story which in a haphazard (aleatory) way has become a first-person story, and, from being a story of a search told in the first person, has become, I have to recognise—a first-person story proper, an autobiography (Byatt 250).
Ultimately, the quest for the author is just as much a quest for the self. The role of the protagonist in the quest for the author deserves more attention. And thus, in the next chapter, I will turn to
Vladimir Nabokov’s The Real Life of Sebastian Knight.
14 In his words: “If I were telling the ‘1920s’ version of Phineas G. Nanson, it would end with an ‘epiphany.’ (Another forbidden word, though still allowed in Joyce criticism.)” (Byatt 251).
Chapter 2. “Sebastian’s Mask Clings to my Face.” Subjectivity and
(Auto)biography in Vladimir Nabokov’s The Real Life of Sebastian Knight. In the previous chapter, I investigated how the search for the author in A.S. Byatt’s The
Biographer’s Tale manifested itself as a search for a previous form of knowledge. The author would be able to counter the alienation from the physical world that Phineas G. Nanson, the novel’s protagonist and a product of post-structuralist thought, experienced. But, as Nanson himself
acknowledges, his tale is just as much a quest for the author as a quest for the self. He undergoes a transformation throughout the narrative, in which he goes from post-structural scholar to writer and parataxonomist. The novel, which takes on the form of his own narration, is more
bildungsroman than a biography of Scholes Destry-Scholes. In this chapter, I will continue on the notion of the quest for the author as a quest for the self, by reading Vladimir Nabokov’s The Real Life of Sebastian Knight – a novel in which the boundaries between subject and object of the quest are interrogated even further.
The Real Life of Sebastian Knight’s subject and narrator is V., whose full name is never disclosed throughout the novel. He intends to write a biography on his recently deceased half-brother, the well-known writer Sebastian Knight. V. starts his narration with chapters devoted to Knight’s childhood and youth in Russia, where they grew up together in the years prior to the Revolution. In 1918, the half-brothers and V.’s mother – the boys’ father died years earlier – escape the then-tumultuous Russia. They live in Finland shortly, but then depart ways: Sebastian moves to England, V. and his mother to Paris. In V.’s recollection of this history, it is apparent that their age difference and Sebastian’s lack of interest in V. result in a distant relationship. To V., Sebastian has an indifferent attitude. It thus turns out that writing a biography on Sebastian Knight is more
difficult than V. expected initially.15 Even a visit to Lausanne, where their governess resides, three
months after Sebastian’s death, does not offer any additional information. “The task eludes me,” V. realises himself; his reminiscences on their shared years in Russia brings him little further
(Nabokov 16).
The fourth chapter thus marks the realisation that merely recounting his memories,
consisting only of “a few bright patches,” is not sufficient for writing Sebastian Knight’s biography. V. has to embark on a quest to “find,” discover, the story behind his half-brother. He takes several steps to do so; first, he goes through Sebastian Knight’s documents, which he inherited. Before his death, Sebastian requested that most of the documents should be burned, which V. duly does. The
15 In V.’s words: “Sebastian's image does not appear as part of my boyhood, thus subject to endless selection and development, nor does it appear as a succession of familiar visions, but it comes to me in a few bright patches, as if he were not a constant member of our family, but some erratic visitor passing across a lighted room and then for a long interval fading into the night” (Nabokov 16).
remainders offer him no personal information on his half-brother. His next hunting-ground is Cambridge, where Knight spent his college years. Here, too, he only receives snippets of
information. At the end of this visit, V. reflects on his research. He longs for a novelistic form, in which a “Voice in the Mist” could suddenly come forward and tell him the real story of Sebastian Knight’s college years. “But alas, nothing of the kind really happened. That voice in the mist rang out in the dimmest passage in my mind.” It served merely to remind V. that “what you are told is really threefold: shaped by the teller, reshaped by the listener, concealed from both by the dead man of the tale” (Nabokov 49).
Up until this part, it remains unclear why V. intends to write a biography on his half-brother. He does not seem especially qualified; he is not a biographer or writer. However, he does claim to possess a form of “inner knowledge” about his subject. “I imagined actions of his which I heard of only after his death, I knew for certain that in such or such a case I should have acted just as he had,” V. writes (Nabokov 31). Although his reasons are never explicitly stated, his motivation becomes more clear after a visit to Mr Goodman, who acted as Sebastian Knight’s secretary. At that point, V. already has the intention of writing the biography, which he explains to Mr Goodman. The secretary tries to persuade V. to abandon his project. As it turns out after their conversation, Mr Goodman has been writing about Sebastian Knight himself; The Tragedy of Sebastian Knight would be published soon after their meeting. Although well-received and a commercial success, V. absolutely condemns The Tragedy of Sebastian Knight – even renaming it “The Farce of Mr Goodman” (Nabokov 66). Although it seems not to be his primary concern, V. is absent from Mr Goodman’s work; the secretary is even unaware of the existence of Knight’s half-brother.
V. goes to great lengths explaining the faults of the biography – the title The Real Life of Sebastian Knight could even be read as a response to The Tragedy of Sebastian Knight. Interestingly, as Dabney Stuart notes in “The Real Life of Sebastian Knight: Angles of Perception,” both in their methodology and in their depiction of Sebastian Knight, there are many similarities between V. and Mr Goodman (316-320). Both biographers struggle to give a complete picture of Sebastian Knight’s life. They use fragments from his life and work, but both have to complement this with a significant amount of interpretation. For V., this is the “inner knowledge” which he talks about, and which he feels gives him a privileged position. Mr Goodman considers Sebastian Knight as a sensitive, romantic artist, trapped in himself and unable to cope with the world around him.
I
In “Angles of Perception,” Stuart concludes that “the assumption that the novel dramatises is that human knowledge is an accumulation of fragments, a collection of brief and incomplete reflections, and the only way one arrives at even a hint of a “real” life is to assemble as many reflections as possible” (320). Of course, this conclusion isn’t too different from my analysis of The
Biographer’s Tale in the previous chapter. Byatt’s work, too, problematised the notion of human knowledge. What Stuart’s conclusion does not take into account, however, is the twist that takes place in the second part of the The Real Life of Sebastian Knight. Ultimately, through the search for the author, V. and his subject become one. The beginning of this is marked by V.’s description of Sebastian Knight’s work. Having narrated Sebastian’s childhood and mostly drained of resources, his biographical sketch starts to lean on Sebastian’s literary work. V. connects content from the four novels and three short stories to Knight’s life; he firmly believes that he can get to know Knight through his work.16
While he is unraveling his half-brother’s work, V. stumbles upon another aspect from Sebastian’s past. In one of their spare meetings, there was a girl present, Clare Bishop. Later in the narrative, V. is approached by Goodman’s secretary, Helen Pratt. She turns out to be a friend of Clare’s. From Helen and another friend, V. learns that Clare and Sebastian had been in a
relationship, but it was broken off rather abruptly after Sebastian’s stay in a hotel in Blauberg, Switzerland. There must have been another woman in Sebastian’s life, V. concludes. From a glimpse he caught of the burning correspondence, he assumes that the woman is Russian. Like a detective, he sets out to find this mysterious woman. “She is the missing link in his evolution, and I must obtain her–it’s a scientific necessity,” he states (Nabokov 112). His search thus leads him to Blauberg, where Knight presumably met her. There, the hotel manager refuses to give him the names of women that Knight could have met in the hotel.
At this moment of desperation, an intrusion of the fictional into the “real” occurs. Returning by train, V. meets Mr Silbermann, a rather curious character who helps him in his quest. Silbermann is an almost exact representation of Mr Siller, one of the characters in Sebastian Knight’s story “The Back of the Moon.” Although this is not explicitly mentioned, it is interesting to note that Siller is introduced as follows: “It is as though a certain idea steadily growing through two books has now burst into real physical existence, and so Mr Siller makes his bow” (Nabokov 97). This Mr Silbermann turns out to be a private detective, who presents to V. a list of four Russian women who stayed in the hotel in Blauberg when Sebastian was there. V. is thus able to solve the mystery. The
16 An example of such an interpretation: “If we abstract from this fictitious letter everything that is personal to its supposed author, I believe that there is much in it that may have been felt by Sebastian, or even written by him, to Clare. He had a queer habit of endowing even his most grotesque characters with this or that idea, or impression, or desire which he himself might have toyed with. His hero's letter may possibly have been a kind of code in which he expressed a few truths about his relations with Clare” (Nabokov 107).
third woman on the list, Helen von Graun, isn’t home. There, V. does meet her friend Madame Lecerf. He accepts Madame Lecerf’s offer to arrange a meeting between V. and Von Graun in her house in the country. Through some clever detective work, V. finds out that Madame Lecerf is Sebastian’s femme fatale. She is the missing link that should give V. a complete picture of his half-brother.
In this search, more of the intrusions between Sebastian Knight’s literature and V.’s quest occur. Knight’s second novel, Success, tells of the narrator’s quest of unraveling the encounter between two people. Meticulously, their histories are examined. As it turns out, they had a few near-meetings, in which they just missed each other, prior to their first real encounter. Exactly the same happens when V. nearly meets Clare Bishop (Nabokov 74-75). When V. visits the women on the list he received from Mr Silbermann, one of these – the “fat Bohemian woman” – later appears in V.’s summary of Sebastian Knight’s The Doubtful Asphodel. Something similar happens too when V. meets the ex-husband of the second woman on the list, Madame de Rechnoy. This Mr de Rechnoy is at that moment playing chess against his brother, who is merely called “Black” – analogous to “Schwarz”, a chess playing character in Sebastian Knight’s novel The Doubtful Asphodel.17
This isn’t the end to the convergence of Sebastian Knight’s fiction and the quest for the author. The solution to the mystery of Sebastian’s woman is followed by a sort of epilogue to The Real Life of Sebastian Knight’s narrative. Here, Knight’s final novel, The Doubtful Asphodel, is summarised. It is a novel about a dying man, whose identity remains unknown. Apparently, the dying man possesses some absolute truth, an “answer to all questions of life and death, ‘the absolute solution’” (Nabokov 167). But as the man is about to utter this word, he dies. “We hold a dead book in our hands. Or are we mistaken? I sometimes feel when I turn the pages of Sebastian’s masterpiece that the ‘absolute solution’ is there, somewhere, concealed in some passage I have read too hastily” (Nabokov 169).
Subsequently, V. tells of the death of his half-brother, where an analogy with Knight’s debut novel, The Prismatic Bezel (1925), becomes clear. That work is a twist on the classic detective story, in which the dead man – G. Abeson – turns out to be alive, as the “old Nosebag” that had been lurking around the crime scene. The novel’s detective itself takes extremely long to arrive due to several mishaps along the way. Analogously, Sebastian Knight is in France, and has planned a meeting with V., who suddenly receives a telegram that Knight is in critical condition in the hospital. V. hurries to Paris, where he makes a desperate attempt at getting to his half-brother in time, afraid he might be too late. Hindered by a blizzard, forgotten money and an unwilling taxi driver, he finally reaches the hospital. There, he sits in a dark room with Sebastian Knight while
thinking about the things that they need to discuss, while Knight’s “gentle breathing was telling me more of Sebastian than I had ever known before” (Nabokov 190). The gentleman in the room, however, turns out to be a different patient. Sebastian Knight died a night before. But – the twist, which occurs in the novel’s final sentences:
So I did not see Sebastian after all, or at least I did not see him alive. But those few minutes I spent listening to what I thought was his breathing changed my life as completely as it would have been changed, had Sebastian spoken to me before dying. Whatever his secret was, I have learnt one secret too, and namely: that the soul is but a manner of being–not a constant state– that any soul may be yours, if you find and follow its undulations. The hereafter may be the full ability of consciously living in any chosen soul, in any number of souls, all of them unconscious of their interchangeable burden. Thus–I am Sebastian Knight. [... T]he hero remains, for, try as I may, I cannot get out of my part: Sebastian's mask clings to my face, the likeness will not be washed off. I am Sebastian, or Sebastian is I, or perhaps we both are someone whom neither of us knows. (Nabokov 191-192)
In this scene, which bears a remarkable resemblance to The Doubtful Asphodel, V. becomes Sebastian Knight. This, in turn, makes it possible to re-read and re-interpret The Real Life of Sebastian Knight in different ways. In “From Biography to Autobiography and Back: The Fictionalisation of the Narrated Self in The Real Life of Sebastian Knight,” Julian W.
Connolly gives an overview of the different interpretations that the novel’s last words have evoked. Several critics consider Sebastian Knight himself the author of the text; The Real Life of
Sebastian Knight is his sixth and last novel, and V. is merely another fictional character. A second reading considers V. as unitary author of both The Real Life of Sebastian Knight and of the passages that are cited from Knight’s works. Thirdly, some interpreters consider V. and Sebastian Knight separate entities, yet the latter has a distinct influence over the former, even after his death (Connolly 1).
Yet ultimately, the novel doesn’t resolve these conflicting interpretations. It is exactly the impossibility of this choice that defines The Real Life of Sebastian Knight. The same stance is taken by Shlomith Rimmon-Kennan, who in A Glance Beyond Doubt. Narration,
Representation, Subjectivity researches the destabilisation of subjectivity in fiction, with special regards to the narrative. She demonstrates how specific forms of narrative and storytelling can manipulate the problems of subjectivity (Rimmon-Kenan 1-5). In her analysis of The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, she too remarks on the specific form of the narrative. Taking the lack of closure as starting point, Rimmon-Kenan argues that the “coexistence of opposed hypotheses dramatises a complex attitude to subjectivity via narration” (57). Traditionally, subjectivity via
narration means either, in the case of autobiography, a (re)construction of the self, or, in the case of biography, a (re)construction of the subjectivity of an other. In the case of The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, this coexistence has a different effect, which Rimmon-Kenan describes as “both alienation of the subject through the other and the constitution of the other through the narrating subject” (60). The quest for the author has alienated V. from himself in the search for his half-brother. The ultimate consequence of this alienation is, of course, enclosed in the final words of the novel: “I am Sebastian, or Sebastian is I, or perhaps we both are someone whom neither of us knows” (Nabokov 192).
II
These events are not congruent with a traditional notion of subjectivity and the autonomous self. As Mieke Bal already noted in “The Rhetoric of Subjectivity,” “the view of the subject as a whole human being, consciously endowing objects with meaning, has been generally abandoned by now [...] It has been replaced by a conception of the subject as a position, a locus where different systems cross” (343). Of course, this entails large debates on autonomy and the politics of identity. In my research, however, I will confine to the work of Jacques Derrida. His notions of subjectivity and alterity, self and other, have been essential for the new understanding of subjectivity that Bal describes. Exactly the seemingly impossible coexistence of multiple hypotheses, which many theorists have attempted to eliminate in their reading of the novel, make Derrida’s notions extremely relevant for The Real Life of Sebastian Knight. Whereas a more traditional analysis of literary works focuses on eliminating the contradictions and paradoxes that underlie them, Derrida uses these incongruities as a starting point. He places these within his wider
framework of deconstruction. For Derrida, the binary oppositional logic on which modern Western thought is based, is not sufficient to understand the self, language and the world, and the relation between these. In his system of deconstruction, the ‘remainder’ – that which cannot be eliminated through its opposite – opens the way for a new interpretive system, not based on binary oppositions (Bellou 21-28, Leitch 1815-1819).
The traditional notion of subjectivity, based on the René Descartes’ philosophy, posits the self within the opposition self/other. In his work on (auto)biography, Derrida tries to avoid this oppositional distinction through a deconstruction of the subject. By doing so, he seeks a “post-subjectivist mode of thinking, based on the deconstruction of identity and the idea of self” (Bellou 142). Central to this project is writing. In language, the self loses its unity. According to Derrida, the subject is shattered and erased through representation. Building on the notion that “there is nothing outside of the text,” the idea of a self cannot exist without incorporating the other.
writing, there cannot be a referral to the self. Writing thus lies beyond the life and death of the subject. (Bellou 153-154). Consequently, “our prime engagement is with the other: it belongs to and comes from the other, and inscribes all relations between self and other as non-relations. The notion of the subject and the self is subsumed under the notion of the other” (Bellou 23).
This has far-reaching consequences for the writing of autobiography – a central theme in Derrida’s work. Through autobiography, the space between subject and object is infinitely narrowed, as the narrative identity of the subject is absent. The death of the subject is the starting point of the writing of autobiography – or rather, thanatography – in which a new space is opened. (Bellou 165-166, Smith 135-137). And while The Real Life of Sebastian on the surface doesn’t seem an autobiography, it can be considered as one within Derrida’s definition; for him, autobiography is not a form of self-representation. It is an in-between space, as Derrida writes:
But who is it that is addressing you? Since it is not an “author”, a “narrator”, or a “deus ex machina”, it is an “I” that is both part of the spectacle and part of the audience; an “I” that, a bit like “you”, attends (undergoes) its own incessant, violent reinscription within the
arithmetical machinery; an “I” that, as functioning as a pure passageway for operations of substitution is not some singular and irreplaceable existence, some subject of “life”, but only, moving between life and death, reality and fiction, etc., a mere function or phantom. (Derrida, Dissemination 325, qtd. in Smith 137)
Through this reconceptualisation of (auto)biography, a reading of The Real Life of Sebastian Knight becomes possible in which the boundaries between biography/autobiography, and thus the need for a closing, eliminating interpretation of the work, are superfluous. It becomes possible to think of V. and Sebastian Knight neither as one, nor as subject/object. Even before the novel’s famous last passage, the story of a painting that is made of Sebastian Knight serves as a metaphor for this idea. As part of his quest, V. interviews the painter that made a portrait of his half-brother. The painting itself depicts only a head. “The general background is a mysterious blueness with a delicate trellis of twigs in one corner. Thus Sebastian peers into a pool at himself (Nabokov 111-112).” The spectator thus sees Sebastian, reflected, through his own eyes. It is at the same time autobiographical – the image of the self as depicted by the self – and biographical – a painting by a third person.18 The duality is present in the form of the narration: while V. describes what is seen in
the painting, he simultaneously describes what Sebastian Knight sees in his painting. Thus, through
18 As Derrida writes in Memoirs of the Blind, on self-portraits: “at the very moment when we are instituted as spectators in (the) place of the mirror, no longer see the author as such, can no longer in any case identify the object, the subject, and the signatory of the self-portrait of the artist as a self-portraitist” (62). There, too, the
