Mnemonic Spaces: Identity and Genre

Abstract

Byatt’s novels repeatedly suggest that writing and/or reading literary texts bestows identity. In the tetralogy, Frederica Potter’s identity is determined by her knowledge of literary texts, as I have argued in Chapter 9. In Possession, the protagonists Maud and Roland gain access to the past by reading their biographees’ poems and letters. It is through these texts that the two scholars are able to discover Ash’s and LaMotte’s ‘true’ identities, which then leads them to establish their own identities, as I have shown in Chapters 2 and 9. In The Biographer’s Tale, the protagonist Phineas is represented as both the protagonist and the narrator of the story; the novel is said to be his notebook (TBT, p.260). During his increasingly frustrating search for his biographee’s identity, which he records in his notebook, Phineas comes to realize that even if he has not been able to gather knowledge of his biographee, his writing has been concerned with somebody’s identity — his own. He observes that ‘in constructing this narrative I have had to insert facts about myself … I have somehow been made to write my own story’ (TBT, p.237). As his search for his biographee’s identity triggers the development of his own identity, Phineas discover[s] that it is through writing that one searches for identity, … for writing can change, develop or confer identity.’ (Wallhead, 2003, p.294). Since the narrative Phineas constructs is a novel, that is, a literary text, The Biographer’s Tale presents identity to be bestowed not only by writing in general, but by writing literature in particular.