Continuing about my thesis on the romance of research which is brought up more in the end of Byatt's novel. To me I came to the conclusion that A.S. Byatt despises google to a point. If we go back to page 277 towards the end where Nanson discovers that Destry-Scholes was more interested in what was the same about the three people instead of unique as she puts it. The end of the first paragraph after explaining the type of person Bole is states: "We are held together by threads of dependence as much as the ants. Mechanics and pilots, air traffic controllers and clerks etc. -- we're all part of each other. Maybe your Destry-Scholes was trying to describe that. Without the Internet, before the Internet, we were a super-organism." That was Fulla Biefeld that said that to Nanson and after that she states "I like oddities and rarities." I felt like the author came out in Fulla at this point and that Byatt likes the rare human being that yearns to learn and do everything like Bole or just research things until they find their passion like Nanson does in the end, and to me that is the romance of research.
There is a dark side to the romance of research that we talked about a little in class especially in the poem "The Idea of Order at Key West." Romance becomes obsession and then becoming completely unrelated with the your surroundings. Destry-Scholes had disappeared completely and Nanson to the point where he snapped on his two bosses. Card no. 26 on page 175 that starts "I amused myself very frequently with this new hobby, and being most interested in the act of reading, constantly forgot that I was nearly suffocating myself," The book does not tell use who this passage is about although I believe that it is Sir Francis Galton because through process of elimination with the phrase "I described at the British Association in 1865" it could not be Lennaeus for he did not live that long and I am just guessing it was not Ibsen because he was Norwegian where Galton was British. But back to the importance of the quote, it describes the similarities of all three of these men and Nanson and Destry-Scholes, because all of them were emerged in their research to the point where it nearly killed them or at the very least separated them from society. If we go back to Stevens poem "The Idea of Order at Key West" and the line "The maker's rage to order words of sea" we see that it plays a part in this place in the book. The maker who ever it may be in the novel (because many characters fit this role) tries to find order in what they see (or the sounds of the sea) through research and discovery. But with this process comes the rage or destructiveness of ones self (body or mind) to find order. For Nanson this order in what he saw lead to his epiphany of becoming a Writer for writers sake. This is said on page 290 "But I feel a kind of nausea at this fate for my hero, myself. It doesn't seem very much of an anything. To be addicted to writing is not to want to be, to become, a Writer."
Phineas G. Nanson found himself through finding order in what he was doing. This was not order that others could easily recognize but chaos that made sense to himself. A.S. Byatt seems to emerse he own personality in the characters and show an obvious preference for those that search and refereeing back to Stevens create their own song for what they feel. Organized chaos as we talked about in class defines this book and defines Byatt and Nanson. They are artist, they are writers that find facts and organize them. Their organized chaos may not make sense to us but it is our job to be detectives to find the facts and organize them, being an artist is never easy.
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