[three] The Maelstrom

“I was in one of those little streets around Bond Street when I saw the Maelstrom. It was in the window—narrow but deep—of a small shop which advertized itself, in sky-blue lettering on pine green, as Puck’s Girdle. The Maelstrom was made of a kind of bravura and exaggerated origami, a funnel of scissored and foaming navy-blue paper with spiring silver coils and feathery snipped and streaming froth. It was suspended on nylon thread in a slight current of air, and swayed in a gyre” (page 123).

In The Biographer’s Tale, A.S. Byatt goes to extreme lengths to describe the detail Phineas Nanson sees when he first encounters the travel shop of “Puck’s Girdle”. In the window are paper and cardboard “replicas” of famous destinations like the rainforest, Alhambra and the Maelstrom. Although Nanson appreciates the beauty of all these creations, he is particularly attracted to the reconstruction of the Maelstrom not only because of its exquisite construction but also because the Maelstrom has become a metaphorical barrier between himself and his exhaustive studies of Scholes Destry-Scholes. The Maelstrom, an obliterator of all matter, seems to not only have consumed the physical body of Destry-Scholes but also any “true facts or matter” that might have existed about his life. Indeed, at the end of The Biographer’s Tale, Nanson believes he might finally get to see the face of the elusive biographer from a newspaper clipping about his demise in the Maelstrom (page 287-288). Unfortunately, the newspaper article, and the accompanying picture, offer no further information beyond what Nanson has already dredged up from the life of the enigmatic biographer and concedes to himself that he will never truly know who Scholes Destry-Scholes really was.