A Composite of Thoughts

“There are very few human truths and infinite variations on them…we don’t know what we are not biologically fitted to know, it may be all sorts of shining and tearing things, geometries, chemistries, physics we have no access to and never can have. Reading and writing extend—not infinitely, but violently, but giddily—the variations we can perceive on the truths we thus discover…we put a whole lifetime…to discovering what these things mean for us—dark, shadows” (274).

Nanson’s two lovers seem to embody the two (opposing?) forces he attempts to balance throughout the novel: robust Fulla with her knowledge of bee life representing the pursuits of science and the tangibility of “things” while Vera, isolated and obsessive, represents the arts in her attempts to capture the delicate and morbid “inner life” of humanity. But I’ve been imposing…Fulla is perhaps as isolated and obsessive as her darker counterpart. Perhaps these qualities were less apparent (to me) because I subscribe to the stereotype of the “haunted” artist in books…as well as life, and life reflected in art.

Byatt’s interesting play on words on page 205 (“a writer’s task is essentially to see, not to mirror”) brings to mind the double meaning of the word “mirror”—to mimic another or look at oneself. This double meaning seems to sum up the role of the writer/artist in this novel. Through mimicking DS in the role of the biographer, Nanson is able to look at or into himself; in writing and conducting research about another’s life, he is looking into his own in a way unparalleled by his days as a post-modernist scholar. “I am not very good at finding out who Scholes Destry-Scholes was because I am not very interested in finding out who I am” (pg 118). It is in the process of writing about another's life that his own experience becomes the focal point…however, Scholes Destry-Scholes cyclical and repetitive name in itself seems to serve as a metaphor for the futile search for an “end”: there is no end in the acquirement of knowledge, just as it is impossible to fully know and understand one’s true self (if there is such a thing).

On a side note, I’ve started counting the white Subaru Outbacks I encounter in Bozeman and am a little creeped out by how many “find” me when I start imposing.