The Relevance of Collections

The concept of collection is a recurring motif in The Biographer’s Tale. Destry-Scholes’ collection of marbles mystifies Nanson and Vera, Fulla reminisces about collecting insects as a child, and even some of the seemingly random lists that Nanson comes across can be interpreted as collections of “things and facts.” Fulla talks to Nanson about her childhood fascination with insect collection on page 246: “Then I got interested in fitting the bugs together. Then into fitting the insect world into the rest of the world. Boxes in boxes.” This comment illustrates that collecting is one of the numerous ways in which humans attempt to construct order out of the world around them. When assembling collections, the collector generally strives to have at least one of each type of whatever they are collecting. For example, Destry-Scholes’ marble collection most likely had at least one marble of every color in addition to marbles with further color variations. The next logical step to making a collection is to group items into different categories according to some attribute. This is essentially what Fulla was doing when she was “fitting the bugs together” – putting, for instance, the flying insects in one category and the crawling insects in another. This act of classifying collections seems to be ingrained in the human mind, and we often perform it without conscious effort. To observe this phenomenon, simply give out packets of Skittles to a class of third grade students during a lesson. It is likely that many students will absentmindedly pour out the candies onto their desks and make neat little groupings according to color. The point is that humans cannot help but to attempt to make order out of everything with which we interact, and collections are but one method in which we go about doing this.

Though collections are commonly associated with children, adults perform the same act, albeit with more advanced methods. Taxonomy, for example, is essentially a more scientific form of making collections, as the taxonomist assembles a large assortment of whatever he/she is studying before grouping the subjects and making judgments on their interrelatedness. Thus, Linnaeus was in a way going through the same process that children go through when he was journeying around Lapland, collecting specimens, putting them into classes, and giving them genus and species names accordingly. Perhaps this is why Destry-Scholes was so interested in Linnaeus, because he saw Linnaeus as someone who was following that fundamentally human desire to collect, classify, and ultimately order that which we do not completely understand.