Finding things and facts from within: comments on The Biographer's Tale

Phineas G. Nanson abandons his study of postmodern literary theory and sets out to write a biography of the great biographer Scholes Destry-Scholes because, as Nanson articulates to one of his professors, “I need a life full of things, full of facts,” (page 7). Nanson begins to find, however, that Destry-Scholes has left few things or facts behind, and the little that is left behind is difficult to understand. Instead, Nanson increasingly derives his facts from himself as the novel becomes more about his interactions with various people and his responses when put in different situations than about his research of Destry-Scholes. Nanson thus discovers that “things and facts” can only come from within, and that his search for knowledge of a concrete nature has ultimately led to his own self. This connects with Rene Descartes often quoted line “I think, therefore I am,” as Nanson finds that the only true knowledge he can acquire is that which regards himself. In the end, this idea is all that Nanson or any human being can count on as true fact. One can attempt to find concrete knowledge of another through biography, but as Destry-Scholes illustrated in his embellishments and falsifications of the adventures of Linnaeus and Galton, everything is tainted by the biographer’s own presuppositions. Nanson comments on the impossibility of removing the writer from the story on page 248, “I now wonder…whether all writing has a tendency to flow like a river towards the writer’s body and the writer’s own experience?” He is correct in his assessment that all writing eventually leads back to oneself, as to write is, at its heart, to attempt to find concrete things or facts, and these things and facts can only be derived from within.

As a part of discovering the things and facts about himself, Nanson finds that the sense of order he seeks is present in science. Specifically, he comes to appreciate nature and its beings as genuine indications of a higher order. He remarks that “the senses of order and wonder, both, that I had once got from literature, I now found more easily and directly in the creatures,” (page 294). Similar to how Linnaeus found order in his classification system of biota, Nanson derives a sense of order from observing the interrelatedness of creatures in the natural world, from the way beetles joust for a mate to his own interactions with Fulla and Vera. Nanson himself, as a human being, is one of these creatures of the natural world, and it is fitting that his exploration and fascination with nature coincides with his discovery of the things and facts within him. As is remarked with regard to Henrik Ibsen in one of Destry-Scholes’ passages, all humans in some way possess the same qualities as creatures in nature. Perhaps by looking at nature Nanson was actually looking inside himself, and as such, establishing another means to achieve “things and facts.”