[four] Puck’s Girdle + Periplum

                “Would you change the name of the shop? “ asked Christophe, as though he read my thoughts.

                 

                 I replied that I had wondered. It was hard to know how to take a word like ”girdle” on a modern shop. But I decided it was totally memorable. Once seen, never forgotten. And representing exactly the desired travel connotations.  (page 127)

In Shakespeare’s play, “A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Puck says “I’ll put a girdle round about the earth/In forty minutes” when Oberon orders Puck to fetch a magical flower (line 175-176). When used in the context of The Biographer’s Tale, “Puck’s girdle” becomes a metaphor for the acquisition of knowledge (Oberon’s “magical flower”), through the “odd holidays” organized by Erik and Christophe to places like “Brontes’ Brussels [and] the battlefields of the Hundred Years War” (page 125). Participants in these “odd holidays” become biographers in themselves, like Nanson, as they travel along the same “paths” previous writers, poets, artists and scientists traveled. Puck’s Girdle is unlike normal travel agencies, that only offer the “banal” travel itinerary. Instead Erik and Christophe offer a real/“Periplum” view of the world rather than the “artificial/constructed” perspective offered by normal travel agencies. (A “periplum” is a map or drawing that shows how land looks from a point out at sea rather than the constructed/abstract “bird’s eye view” employed by most cartographers).

When I was younger, I desperately wanted to know all the information in the world—a seemingly “easy task” when one is naïve to what kinds, and how much knowledge has existed in the world since the dawn of time. (If I knew all the information in the world, I would undoubtedly become both a great ambassador between cultures and a walking threat to myself since the information I would have knowledge of would present itself as either a gift or a curse—in the case of classified data and information concerning the national security of every nation on earth. But I digress.) In The Biographer’s Tale, Puck’s Girdle also caters to the desire of many men and women to become great explorers like their predecessors (i.e. Marco Polo, and Richard Burton), who were considered worldly/”Renaissance Men”/“walking encyclopedias” because they knew and experienced so much about the world. (In Richard Francis Burton’s case, he knew more than 25 different languages, was the first westerner to enter the Muslim holy city of Mecca and traveled extensively around the globe). This is one of the reasons why I found A.S. Byatt’s description of Puck’s Girdle so fascinating. There is still part of me that wants to be “a sponge” and absorb as much information as I can about the world around me. But like Nanson’s doomed quest to find the “real” Scholes Destry-Scholes, I know that I will never be able to know “everything”—nor would I want to shoulder such a responsibility. 

(Painting of Richard Francis Burton by Frederic Leighton-National Portrait Gallery)