All that we have of people.

The book starts conventionally (for this kind of book, anyway), with a search for the historical personage. Brocardus’s line had gone extinct. What few tracts remained with his name appended have been increasingly questioned as his autograph. Even the memory of him, in once-vital brains, has faded with timely attrition. What remains are the references to him, in his students’ and friends’ works. How can a man be remade from words? Sooner reconstitute the dust of his corpse then reanimate scribbles on a page.

The interesting part comes midway through. As much as is possible is gleaned from the old writings and a franken-Brocardus stitched together, very seamy. The author then turns to the problematization of the search for real personages. “The archaeologist, even, can’t get at a real person, but at bones only, plates and spear-points, about which he bends his imagination, same as we do with the writings about Brocardus.” If real evidence is unsatisfactory, what hope from tracts? Indeed, she makes a point of isolating the moment of inflection: “There is a clear separation. One time anyone can go see him, talk to him; after, no one can. He is gone. This time is the afterlife. He is effectively sublimed away into a grammalogical ghost. Compare the pure soul of a heavenly saint to the sin-immerded body below.”

What many critics find annoying—her constant proposition and contradiction—I find to be a delightful narrative device. For no sooner has she expounded the ghostliness of reference, than she demolishes all distinctions. “Even knowing the man brings no real person to the mind, for it is always filtered through words, actions, interpretations. It is masked by the stencil of the meeting, incomplete insofar as no one but he could have known him the entire time. Incompletable insofar as the state in which we are interested—his mind—is inaccessible, even in life.”

She ends the section humbly. “All that we have of people are the intentions out of our own inventory we ascribe to them. All that we have of them is ourselves.”