Phineas makes his entrance all a-smother beneath his poststructuralist graduate dissertation. Neither is much found in any of the three writers, as Byatt mischievously expects us to know. Right at the start, Phineas tumbles off both theory and dissertation. Besides, the classroom window is grimy. That grimy window is his epiphany.
Narration is as much a part of human nature as breath and the circulation of the blood.
Modernist literature tried to do away with storytelling, which it thought vulgar, replacing it with flashbacks, epiphanies, streams of consciousness. But storytelling is intrinsic to biological time, which we cannot escape. In his magnum opus, Destry-Scholes made a point of learning more about his subject's dozens of fields than the subject knew himself, and of writing it all down. A dazzling beacon for the new Phineas, but he stumbles against the rocks on the biographer's road. From no material to too much, and utterly confusing.