Biographer's Tale,The

Description

The Biographer’s Tale is the story of Phineas G. Nanson, a disenchanted graduate student who, yearning for reality, decides to abandon his arcane studies in postmodern literary theory and write a biography, for what could be more concrete than a biography, the "art of things, of arranged facts"? As he follows the traces of his subject, the biographer Scholes Destry-Scholes, Phineas finds that the facts of Destry-Scholes’s life prove to be elusive. Scholes Destry-Scholes’s niece has found a box of her uncle’s papers and note cards, which seem to be pieces of a project on three historical figures: the taxonomer Carl Linnaeus, the statistician and eugenicist Francis Galton, and the dramatist Henrik Ibsen. But these fragments of Destry-Scholes’s works in progress turn out to be a pastiche of fact and fiction, with fantastic elements written in by the supposedly scrupulous seeker after truth, Destry-Scholes himself.

In the meantime, Phineas has taken a job working at Puck’s Girdle, a travel agency run by a gay couple who caters to a clientele with educated, aesthetic, and otherwise highly specialized tastes. Here Phineas is alarmed by the repeated appearance of Maurice Bossey, who seems to want Phineas to arrange a tour designed to satisfy Bossey’s pedophilic propensities. Back on the track of Destry-Scholes, Phineas becomes involved with Fulla Biefeld, a golden-haired Swedish bee taxonomer, as well as Destry-Scholes’s beautiful niece Vera–and soon finds himself in love, with a plenitude of experiences he never dreamt of in the university’s dusty seminar rooms. He also finds, much to his surprise, that in seeking to write a life of Destry-Scholes he has slipped into writing an autobiography–and that his own life is now his primary interest. For the reader, too, the story of Phineas’s journey from the shadow-life of scholarship into a well-rounded contentment is deeply satisfying.