Looking back on my own times, what most strikes me is that we have developed endlessly subtle styles and techniques to reveal the secret meaning behind the apparent meaning, to open up the desires and assumptions behind what people say and explain about what they feel and believe. And all that can really be read into what we write is our own desire to translate everything, everyone, all reasoning, all irrational hope and fear, into our own Procrustean grid of priorities.
In the end, all I can do, is read the biographer’s paragraph on his subject’s dead body and make an imaginative stab at the penumbra of his words. My own ideas of the duties of a “biographer” ….confer life, but not necessarily more truth, on what Pearson had, in his own terms, quite adequately expressed.
But no string has an end. Like spider-silk unrealing (194-195).
Throughout my investigation of Byatt’s The Biographer’s Tale, this has been the passage that has had the greatest impact for me at this stage in my pursuit to find meaning in this novel. This meditation by Nanson on the nature of human analysis discusses the compulsive process that each one of us unconsciously has to theorize upon the motives behind a creator’s art. Nanson states that humans have a desire to translate the art “into our own Procrustean grid of priorites”. What does this mean? Procrustes in Greek mythology was a son of Poseidon who would invite any unlucky voyager passing by his mountain home to spend the night on his iron bed. He then would stretch his victims with a smith’s hammer in order for them to fit. However, his subjects always ultimately emerged too tall and their limbs would be amputated to be the “right” proportions.
Therefore, this “Procrustean grid of priorities” I have discovered is an inevitable downfall that Nanson has recognized in himself through his quest for facts and things and that I have identified within myself through my attempt to piece together the puzzle of The Biographer’s Tale. I haphazardly impose my views and translations of the text and at times invent significance to the writer’s language and techniques to create “order” that’s tailored to my own limits in imagination. This I know is a folly of mine, but is one that in an individual’s search for order is embedded into the human psyche. Nanson states that the only solution to finding meaning in life is to make an “imaginate stab” at it. Like Bizz theorized in her blog that by Scholes Destry Scholes imposing his priorities into the lives of Ibsen, Galton, and Linnaeus he just “reordered what we know as life. It's an art, which reveals some truth.” Through contemplating this I believe that this correlates to Nanson’s meditation in this passage. In a Procrustean analysis matter must be cut or added to fit a specific static model. However, life does not have a limited imaginative grid. Instead “no string has an end” and the truth can be manipulated and interpreted endlessly. Interpretation of language creates life, but I find all language arbitrary with no fixed shape or limits as Nanson I believe has determined.
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