Metaphors for the Self in A.S. Byatt’s the Biographer’s Tale

Abstract

When novelists create their characters and biographers re-create their subjects, both types of writer are either explicitly or implicitly applying a theory of personality through which they investigate the selfhood of the person. However, while many examples of novels and biographies in recent decades have emphasized the similarities between the two genres, especially in the area of character or person as subject, there appears to be no consensus on such a theory. A.S. Byatt is a novelist and biographer who is particularly concerned with the issue of creation or re-creation of the self. In this article, I have turned to a recent metaphorical model of analysis of the self from cognitive linguistics to see if this sheds more light on how personalities can be examined and discussed both by the subjects themselves and by their biographer or creator. Lakoff and Johnson’s elaboration of a body-based linguistic model of metaphor for the self is discussed here and applied to one of Byatt’s most recent novels, one which consciously discusses biography, language and creativity: The Biographer’s Tale(2000). The results show that Byatt is well aware of the underlying patterns for self analysis in everyday language, and tries to match these inherent metaphors with arresting, self-conscious, artistic metaphors that are, nonetheless, connected logically in different ways with the former. Byatt is thus able to articulate in interesting new ways ideas on abstractions concerning selfhood, language, biography and creativity.