In the opening of A.S. Byatt’s novel The Biographer’s Tale, the protagonist Phineas G. Nanson has a sudden revelation while gazing out a dirty window that he wishes to tread down a path away from studies of post-modern literary theory and consume himself in a world full of “facts”. To look at this “eureka” moment in a divergent light, Nanson wished to escape from the abstract that modern day scientists believe is controlled by the right hemisphere of the brain and instead focus on concrete deductive thinking is processed and interpreted using the left hemisphere. This causes Phineas to venture into an analysis of the science of biographies (the recollection of “facts” and “things” of a human’s life). Phineas wished to accomplish this task by creating a biography on the ingenious biographer Scholes Destry-Scholes.
Despite the protagonist’s thorough investigation of the author, he haphazardly received another epiphany of sorts. There was a new understanding that Phineas discovered by stating that “an imaginary narrative had sprung out of the scholarly one, and that the compulsion to invent was in some way related to my own sense that in constructing this narrative I have had to insert facts about myself, and not only dry facts, but my feelings, and now my interpretations” (274). Phineas’ second epiphany emphasizes a theme in the novel that art and science are complexly intertwined within all aspects of life. This connection is reiterated on page 117 with “the true literary fanatic, the primeval reader is looking for anything but a mirror-for an escape route, for an expanding horizon……Also for meaning, for making sense of things, always with proviso that complete sense of things.” This correlation between science and imagination can be illustrated in countless matters of the world, with one of the most intriguing to me being one that pertains to every human being, the mysteries of neurophysiology and the creation of ideas and thoughts in our mind. In Jonah Lehrer’s article “The Eureka Hunt”, scientists construe that an epiphany such as one that Phineas experiences involves aspects of both the left or conscious mind and right hemisphere or subconscious mind.
The scientific outlook on the reasoning that one uses perceive the world around them is induced by electrical impulses in the prefrontal cortex of the brain. For example, when a word is read in a literary text, the declarative memory formed by the left hemisphere informs the mind of the word with plain “facts” while the right hemisphere connects a person’s emotions and senses to that word. The combination of these two key elements is what allows works of great literature and art to have such an incredible impact. The amazing feature of this is that the consciousness is limited in facts it can contain whereas the subconscious mind has an unlimited capacity that we only can catch a glimpse of when the opportunity presence itself such as a revelation. A physiological answer to this puzzle can be answered through neuroscientist Jung Beeman’s observation that “cells in the right hemisphere are more broadly tuned than cells in the left hemisphere with longer branches and more dendritic spines that allows the right hemisphere to collect information from a larger area of cortical space that is less precise but better connected” (Lehrer). This I believe also pertains to the universe as a whole; with everything being connected in an immense web that entangles all thoughts and ideas. The mystery of it all is how enlightenment can arise through the dogmatic subconscious mind but fails within the strong analytical mind. It is an enigma that evokes the perplexing question of how definite is science and how esoteric is our own mind’s “imagination”. It is an exploration that I find absent of any kind of stable “fact” or “thing” and that in my frivolous attempt in discovering a resolution to the question I am ultimately drowning in the Maelstrom of ideas such as chaos and order, fact and fiction in what is illustrated in “The Biographer’s Tale “ as the science of biographical literature.
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