Visions of Alterity: Representation in the Works of John Banville

VISIONS OF ALTERITY Representation in the Works of John Banville

Elke D’hoker

Acknowledgements Since the original work for this book was done as my dissertation at the Catholic University of Leuven, Belgium, I would like to take this opportunity to thank some people who have had a formative influence on this work. I am greatly indebted to my supervisor, Ortwin de Graef, for his astute comments and valuable advice, and to Hedwig Schwall for her unfailing enthusiasm and support. My colleagues and friends at the Department of literature and literary theory I wish to thank for providing both a fruitful climate for research and a pleasant atmosphere for work. I am grateful to Anne Fogarty, Derek Hand, Rüdiger Imhof and Ingo Berensmeyer for the interesting discussions on John Banville’s work. Special thanks are due to the Fund for Scientific Research Flanders and the Onderzoeksfonds of the K.U.Leuven, for without their generous financial support this book would never have been completed. My greatest thanks, finally, go to my husband, Philip Van Damme, and our little son, Jonathan, for providing the diversion needed to reach a fruitful balance between life and work.

Leuven, April 2003

Contents

Introduction 1

PART ONE: SELF AND WORLD 15

1. Books of Revolution: The Scientific Quest for Truth 17

2. Books of Revelation: Epiphany in the Science Tetralogy 49

PART TWO: SELF AND ART 69

3. Better Than Life: Banville’s Explicit Poetics 71

4. Struggle and Strife: Banville’s Implicit Poetics 85

PART THREE: SELF AND OTHER 129

5. To the Other: Banville’s Ethical Turn 131

6. A Portrait of the Other: Ethics in the Art Trilogy 145

PART FOUR: SELF AND SELF 171

7. Self as Other: The Double 173

8. Masks and Mirrors: Autobiography in The Untouchable 201

Conclusion 217

Bibliography 227

Index 239

Introduction “I am, therefore I think. That seems inescapable.” This inverted Cartesian dictum, the first line of Banville’s first major novel Birchwood, is an apt illustration of what is perhaps the single most striking feature of Banville’s writing: the quintessential modern voice. It is the voice of modern man who is thrown into the world (I am) and tries to make sense of it (I think). Banville’s solitary heroes are scientists who contemplate the mysteries of the world; actors who stand in the middle of the stage and want to connect with whatever it is that falls outside; or artists who try to capture in words and images the chaotic diversity of the world and the bewildering activities of “the creatures that inhabit it”.1 Put differently, the male voice in Banville’s texts is always that of a slightly grotesque, slightly uncanny outsider who contemplates the world and its creatures, others and himself. Important is therefore not what happens to him, but what he makes of it. In Banville’s novels, plot is subservient to reflection, narrative to narration and meaning to signification, as the protagonists are observed in the process of placing the world, others and themselves in coherent pictures and meaningful frames. In short, what concerns Banville in all of his novels is the process of representation.

The problem of representation – which can roughly be defined as the way human beings make world, self and others present in language – pervades Banville’s novels on the level of author, narrator and protagonist alike. Firstly, the implied author, a by-product of John Banville himself, can be seen to represent certain facts and figures of referential reality in his fiction. This is most obvious in the science tetralogy, which stages historical figures such as Kepler, Copernicus and Newton. Yet, also in the apparently fictional art trilogy, historical facts are represented. The Book of Evidence draws on an actual murder in Dublin some twenty years ago and Athena fictionalises the famous art robbery from Russborough House in 1986. In his last novels, Banville returns to the pseudo-biographical mode of Doctor Copernicus and Kepler. In The Untouchable he fiction-ally represents the eventful life of Cambridge Spy Anthony Blunt and Shroud is loosely based on the life of Paul de Man. Through appendices,

1 John Banville, Birchwood (1973), London, 1991, 175.

Visions of Alterity 2

footnotes and obvious distortions, moreover, the author raises the nature and truth of his representations to the level of problem in his novels.

In Banville’s first-person narratives, secondly, the author’s represen-tational activity is mirrored in the narrator’s earnest attempt to frame his life in a meaningful story. Banville’s never fully reliable first-person narrators can be observed in the process of representing their traumatic past, their tormented thoughts and divided selves in a coherent narrative so as to achieve a sense of self that is unitary, solid and clear. The problems and obstacles they encounter in this process form again a much-favoured topic for self-reflection. Equally worth considering in these highly solipsistic narratives are the representations of other people, especially women, since certain stereotypical figures tend to recur in many different novels. On the level of the plot, finally, the topic of represen-tation is foregrounded in a thematic way as the tensions and problems involved in representation are staged in the events and narrative development of the novels. The scientific quest for true knowledge in the four science novels addresses the achievements as well as the limits of this mode of knowledge as representation and tentatively suggests alternatives. The circular structure of Birchwood reflects on the virtual impossibility of exact historical representation and the gruesome plot of the art trilogy quite explicitly exemplifies the ethical problems involved in representation. In The Untouchable, Eclipse and Shroud, the problem of self-representation receives a new impetus through the focus on acting, masquerade and dissimulation. In all, it is precisely on this level of plot that the problem of representation receives its most varied exploration.

Yet, however great the variety in type and topic of representation in Banville’s novels, further analysis soon reveals these instances to share several common features. Similar tensions pervade the representations of narrator, author and protagonist alike; similar problems are presented, and similar solutions offered. Since the aim of this study is to arrive at an overall picture of the problem of representation in Banville’s work, precisely these tensions, problems and solutions require careful analysis and discussion. Given the philosophical terms in which they are couched in Banville’s oeuvre, this analysis will have to take into consideration the rich theoretical framework that has developed around the philosophical concept of representation throughout the centuries. Although a detailed overview of the conceptual history of representation would lead us too far, a brief presentation of the various philosophical approaches to the problem of representation is clearly a prerequisite here.

Introduction 3

The history of representation The feasibility of this brief presentation is, however, compromised by the diversified and wide-ranging uses made of the term representation in a variety of scientific disciplines, ranging from theology to computer linguistics and from political sciences to aesthetics. Even if we limit our analysis to the core use of the term in fundamental philosophy, a large number of different conceptions of representation can be seen to circulate. Some philosophers associate representation with imitation or mimesis, others equate it with Kant’s rational faculty, and still others with the creative activity of the imagination. These diverse interpretations of the concept of representation evidently influence its critical reception as well. While some critics have declared war on representation and the truth-based philosophy it is taken to represent, others hail representation as the champion of difference and the necessary antidote against a logocentric tradition. In order to make this overview possible, therefore, a common denominator has to be decided on which I take, with Brenda Judge to reside in the mediating role of any mode of representation:

Representation is always an act [which] involves a relationship between three terms: the represented item, the representative item, and the agent by whom or for whom something is represented.2

Representation always mediates between subjective thought on the one hand, and some form of reality on the other. It tries to install a relation between inner and outer world, mind and matter or, quite simply, self and world. Precisely because of this mediating function, whatever the way in which it is subsequently conceived, the concept of representation is clearly crucial to problems of knowledge, truth and art that have always occupied mankind.

The same holds true for the central tension involved in representation: the opposition between mind and matter. Already in Plato’s Timaeus, the human soul is compared to a carriage drawn by two horses whereby the soaring spiritual flight of the one horse is inevitably checked by the downward physical pull of the other. In Mediaeval Christianity the opposition between evil flesh and divine spirit continues to reign supreme, even though God and man are still counted on to keep both in harmony. With Descartes however, the split between mind and matter, or cogito and res extensa, grows more radical. Hence, representation is more

2 Brenda Judge, Thinking about Things, Edinburgh, 1985, 193.


strenuously appealed to for its mediating role. In spite of widespread critical objection to this Cartesian duality, the tension between subject and object, or mind and body continues to haunt philosophy until this day. Traces of this binary can for instance be found in the Nietzschean conflict between eternal recurrence and will to power, in the Heideggerian distinction between Sein and seienden, or in the postmodern opposition of same and other. In short, even though this opposition is in several ways quite rightly reconsidered and destabilised, it cannot simply be dismissed. With the necessary cautions and restrictions, therefore, it will also be the focal point of this analysis of representation in John Banville’s novels.

In the history of representation itself, the subject-object split plays a crucial role. The philosophical theories that have developed around this conflict can in fact easily be classified according to the emphasis they place on either the representing subject or the represented object in the process of representation. In their introduction to Mimesis: From Mirror to Method, John Lyons and Stephen Nichols present both options in a series of aesthetic questions:

Does it help to fix an image of objective reality in the mind of the viewer, in order to show how reality really is? or does it rather demonstrate the performative role of artist and viewer, speaker and reader, in determining reality as an idea, as a subjective experience of the world?3

In more general philosophical terms, these questions read: does representation aim at an adequate imitation of objective reality or is it rather a subjective construction of the human mind? Does representation require an openness to reality itself? Or does it rather depend on the creative interpretation of the human imagination? Is representation a reflection of physical reality or of ideas innate in the human mind? The answers historically given to these fundamental questions are, one could argue, responsible for such age-old philosophical oppositions as imitation vs. creation, realism vs. idealism and nominalism vs. empiricism. Although a full historical overview of these philosophies falls outside the scope of this introduction, a brief presentation of a few exemplary thinkers should clarify matters somewhat.

As so often in Western philosophy, the germs of both the subjective and the objective approaches to representation lay concealed in nuce in

3 Mimesis: From Mirror to Method, eds John Lyons and Stephen Nichols, Hanover (NH), 1982, 1.

Introduction 5

Plato’s philosophy. As Heidegger demonstrates at length in “Plato’s Doctrine of Truth”, it is with Plato’s introduction of eidos (idea) that a fundamental change in the conception of truth takes place. Truth is no longer understood as un-concealment (aletheia) but as adequation (orthothes). Hence, truth comes to reside in the correspondence between intellectual or artistic representation and the ideal image. Yet, while intellectual representation or knowledge is described by Plato as a concretisation of the invisible ideas present within the subject itself, artistic representation is considered as but a faithful imitation of concrete reality, which is itself but a shadowy mirror image of the idea. Twice removed from the idea, artistic representation is but a poor second to intellectual apprehension of the idea. Aristotle subsequently developed Plato’s notion of representation along realist or objective lines. He considered representation as the mental intermediary between sensation and reason, thereby granting it a more important place in the production of knowledge. In The Wake of the Imagination, Richard Kearney writes in this respect, “The legitimate function of the mental image ... is to represent reality to reason in as faithful a manner as possible.”4

This objective or mimetic view of representation remains very powerful throughout the early Christian period and the Middle Ages, as the writings of philosophers such as Augustine and Thomas Aquinas demonstrate. About Augustine’s theory of the imagination, Kearney writes:

[It] largely conforms to the classical schema of “mimetic” representation. The image, no matter how interiorised or mentalized, continues to refer to some original reality beyond itself. It cannot create truth out of itself but must always observe the strict limits of reproduction. The image remains a derivation. It can never lay claim to the status of originality. That is the prerogative of the divine. (117)

In spite of the changes that the concept of representation underwent in the modern period, the mimetic view of representation continues to exert considerable influence today. Especially in the Anglo-Saxon philosophical tradition, the view that representations, whether artistic or scientific, are to be judged as true or false according to their resemblance to an objective reality, continues to be adhered to. An exponent of this empirical tradition is J.D. Nutall, who argues in A New Mimesis, “Truth is primarily deter-

4 Richard Kearney, The Wake of the Imagination: Toward a Postmodern Culture, Mineapolis, 1988, 112.


mined by the fabric of reality. A string of meanings will be true if it composes a sentence which is satisfied by the real world.”5 While he has to concede that representations are partly determined by conventions and formal preoccupations, Nuttall refuses to follow this argument to its radical conclusion and persistently turns back to assert the value of experience, intuition and common sense. This ambivalence, which makes his position sometimes hard to defend, stems from the curious fact that his argument is both “a vehement rejection of cultural or structuralist subjectivism” and a reluctant acceptance of the basic tenets of this subjectivism as they have been formulated by Immanuel Kant (47). The upheaval Kant wrought in the philosophy of representation has indeed been thus that even the most conservative of empirical realists finds his claims impossible to ignore.

Kant’s Copernican Revolution in epistemology is described by Kearney as follows:

According to the traditional perspectives of classical and medieval thought, being was the source of all human knowledge. To know reality was to secure an adequate representation of being. And this was generally to be achieved by means of a rational judgement which ensured that the human understanding was in conformity with external reality. Hence the famous scholastic definition of truth as adaequatio intellectus ad rem (the correspondence of the mind to the things). Being was the centre of the universe and the human mind was like a planet which revolved around it. Kant reversed this model. He proclaimed a “Copernican Revolution” in philosophy whose aim was to remove the human mind from its peripheral role and place it at the very centre of the universe. Being would henceforth be conceived not as the transcendent origin of meaning, but as a representation of the human subject – or, more precisely, as a production of the human imagination. (157)

While Kant did perhaps not go as far as Kearney suggests here, he did in any case initiate a revolution in the thinking on representation by making knowledge no longer solely dependent on objective reality but also on the human mind itself. Although Kant retained the traditional role of representation as a mediator between reality and the categories of the mind, he made the latter determine the former rather than the other way round. In order to safeguard the truth or certainty of our representations,

5 A.D. Nuttall, A New Mimesis: Shakespeare and the Representation of Reality,

London, 1983, 49.

Introduction 7

however, Kant limited their reign to phenomenal reality. The American philosopher Stanley Cavell claims, “the price Kant asks us to pay is to cede any claim to know the thing in itself, to grant that human knowledge is not of things as they are in themselves”.6 Yet, Kant acknowledges that human reason is inevitably drawn to think about the noumenal realm of das Ding an Sich and gladly ventures into the realm of ethics and religion. If Kant’s philosophy remained nevertheless fundamentally dualistic, thinkers and poets of the German Idealist and British Romantic tradition took Kant’s philosophy one step further. They believed that it lay within the power of the subjective imagination to heal the dualism of mind and matter and to fully grasp das Ding an Sich. Needless to say, their theories came under heavy attack from the empirical realists, of whom Nutall has been quoted as a modern representative. In its original and more moderate form, however, Kant’s theory of representation remains a milestone in philosophy as the number of both his followers and his critics testify to.

An exemplary figure among those who have tried to radicalise the subjective strand in Kantian philosophy is Nelson Goodman, who situates his own line of thinking within the history of representation:

I think of this book as belonging in that mainstream of modern philosophy that began when Kant exchanged the structure of the world for the structure of the mind, continued when C.S. Lewis exchanged the structure of the mind for the structure of concepts, and that now [with Goodman] proceeds to exchange the structure of concepts for the structure of the several symbolic systems of the sciences, philosophy, the arts, perception, and everyday discourse. The movement is from unique truth and a world fixed and found to a diversity of right and even conflicting versions or worlds in the making.7

By his own admission, Goodman sets out to radicalise Kant’s critical philosophy by emphasising the subjective or representing pole of representation. More explicitly than Kant, Goodman rejects any mimetic theory which equates representation with imitation; knowledge with reproduction; or truth with adaequatio, arguing, “we cannot test a version of the world by comparing it with a world undescribed, undepicted, unperceived” (4). There is, for Goodman, not one world, but an endless variety of different worlds, which are made by an endless variety of

6 Stanley Cavell, In Quest of the Ordinary: Lines of Skepticism and Romanticism,

Chicago, 1994, 31. 7 Nelson Goodman, Ways of Worldmaking, Indianapolis, 1978, x.


individuals. In practice, this world-making takes the form of a world-re-making as older representations are transformed through processes of (de)-composition, repetition, deformation, deletion, ordering, etc. into new representations of the world, or – as Goodman would have it – new worlds. If Kant’s universal categories of the understanding still guaranteed a certain objectivity of knowledge and representation, Goodman puts a strong emphasis on the idiosyncratic validity of individual representations, which makes him more susceptible to charges of relativism. Goodman duly defends himself against this charge by introducing the concept of “rightness of fit”: “A statement is true, and a description or a represen-tation right, for a world if it fits.” Apart from referring half-heartedly to our “common practice” of comparing representations with other represen-tations to see if they suit our purposes or to “certain requirements which have to be satisfied” depending on the kind of representation, Goodman fails to specify this rightness of fit so that its exact difference from the traditional concept of truth as adaequatio remains rather unclear (131-32).

A notable critic of Kant’s epistemology and of the modern world it helped bring into being is Martin Heidegger. In “The Age of the World Picture”, Heidegger interprets certain discerning traits of the modern age, which he defines in terms of Cartesian philosophy but traces back to Plato, as the result of the equation of knowledge with representation. For Heidegger to represent means “to bring what is present at hand before oneself as something standing over and against, to relate it to oneself, to the one representing it, and to force it back into this relationship to oneself as the normative realm”.8 Because of the pervasiveness of representation in the modern age, therefore, “Man becomes that being upon which all that is, is grounded as regards the manner of its Being and its truth” (128). In this subject-centred mode of knowledge, Heidegger argues, the Being of beings has got lost. For knowledge as representation fails to do justice to reality as such, which consequently withdraws from this epistemo-logical grasp. This is also evident for Heidegger in the modern concept of “world picture”, another by-product of knowledge as representation, which undertakes to grasp and conceive the world in its entirety, as a system. Yet, Heidegger argues, something ultimately escapes from this world-picture, something “which is denied to us of today to know” because of our reductive idea of knowledge, but which can nevertheless

8 Martin Heidegger, “The Age of the World Picture”, in The Question Concerning

Technology and Other Essays, trans. and ed. William Lovitt, New York, 1993, 131.

Introduction 9

be expressed in poetry. A model for this non-representational epistemology, Heidegger finds in pre-Platonic philosophy. Instead of knowledge as imaginative representing, the Greek philosophers favoured knowledge as apprehending, which Heidegger describes as:

The apprehending of whatever is belongs to Being because it is demanded and determined by Being. That which is, is that which arises and opens itself, which, as what presences, comes upon man as the one who presences, i.e., comes upon the one who himself opens himself to what presences in that he apprehends it. (130-31)

This mode of knowledge, which Heidegger discusses in more detail in other essays, requires an openness on the part of man to the truth of Being which shows itself in unconcealment. Consequently, the powerful subjective activity of knowledge as representation is replaced by a specific form of receptivity, which requires openness rather than determination, and presencing rather than representation. Although in this form of truth as aletheia all mention of object, subject or representation is to be abandoned, it is worthwhile to indicate, against Heidegger, that in this conception of knowledge, the pendulum recoils from its dependence on the subject and swings back again to an emphasis on things, beings, in short, reality itself. Far from returning to mimetic representation, however, Heidegger offers a kind of knowledge which favours suggestion over direct naming and which allows for the uncanniness of a reality that eludes or disrupts our representations.

Heidegger’s arguments against representation have also found a ready ear among pragmatist philosophers, eminently represented by Richard Rorty. In Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, Rorty argues against philosophy’s central concern with truth and exact representation. As an alternative he proposes a holistic form of thinking, an “edifying philosophy” which “aims at continuing a conversation rather than at discovering truth”.9 Clearly inspired by Heidegger’s appeal to poetry, he writes:

Edifying philosophers want to keep space open for the sense of wonder which poets can sometimes cause – wonder that there is something new, something which is not an accurate representation of what was already there, something which (at least for the moment) can not be explained and described. (370)

9 Richard Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, Princeton, 1980, 273.


However admirable this ideal might be, a note of warning should be sounded against the conclusion “all representation is bad”, which Rorty and other contemporary thinkers all too easily arrive at. As Derrida has shown extensively in his reading of Heidegger’s anti-representational thinking, representation thoroughly infuses our language and thinking:

the authority of representation constrains us, imposing itself on our thought through a whole dense, enigmatic, and heavily stratified history. It programs and precedes us and warns us too severely for us to make a mere object of it, a representation, an object of representation confronting us, before us like a theme.10

Moreover, any downright rejection of representation also runs the serious risk, according to Derrida, of substituting representation by presence:

a criticism or deconstruction of representation would remain feeble, vain and irrelevant if it were to lead to some rehabilitation of immediacy, of original simplicity, of presence without repetition or delegation and presence, if it were to induce a criticism of calculable objectivity, of criticism, of science, of technique, or of political representation. (311)

In an attempt both to counter this danger and to destabilise the dualistic opposition on which representation is based, Derrida proposes a reading of representation that retains the re of representation, signalling repetition, return and renvoi, while renouncing the notions of presence, unity or reality, also contained in representation. In reference to the realm of art, Derrida describes this alternative mode of representation as follows:

The referent is lifted, but the reference remains: what is left is only the writing of dreams, a fiction that is not imaginary, mimicry without imitation, without verisimilitude, without truth or falsity, a miming of appearances without concealed reality, without any world behind it, and hence without appearance.11

What is left after deconstruction, it seems, are art and knowledge as a mime miming reference, a copy of a copy, or a representation of a representation in endless regression. Even though Derrida’s deconstruc-tive move still needs the binaries to operate, his attempt to destabilise the rigid opposition invites one to rethink the binary on which representation

10 Jacques Derrida, “Sending: On Representation”, Social Research, 49 (1982), 304. 11 Jacques Derrida, “The Double Session”, in Acts of Literature, ed. Derek Attridge,

New York, 1992, 163.

Introduction 11

is based. And this re-consideration, albeit in a very different way, is also offered to us in the novels of John Banville.

The presence of representation In order to address the various aspects of the problem of representation as it is presented in these novels, the following study will discuss representation in its relation to “world”, “art”, “self” and “others”. While these are of course four major aspects of any traditional philosophical inquiry into representation, this choice has primarily been dictated by the precise thematic concerns of Banville’s works. The relation of the subject to the concerns of self, world, art and others runs indeed through all of Banville’s novels. At the same time, his more explicit fictional exploration of these issues clearly follows a more or less sequential pattern. From an interest in the representation of the world in art and science, Banville’s work moves to a investigation of the relations between self and other, and self and self, as negotiated in representation. Put in terms of the relevant philosophical disciplines, one could argue that Banville’s oeuvre charts a development from a concern with epistemology and aesthetics in Birchwood and the science tetralogy, over an exploration of ethical questions in the art trilogy, to a further development of psychology (for want of a better term) in The Untouchable, Eclipse and Shroud. The four main parts of this book will follow this trend.

In the first part, the protagonists’ relation to the world, in terms of knowledge, mastery or synthesis, will be considered from an epistemolo-gical perspective. An analysis of the form and content of these represen-tations, whether as science, history or narrative, will lead to a discussion of what disrupts these representations and of what they exclude. A second part will then investigate representation from an aesthetic point of view. By comparing Banville’s theoretical statements on art with the artistic theories as they are discussed and realised in the novels, I hope to shed new light on Banville’s much-debated aesthetic ideals as well as on his place in the contemporary literary scene. Part Three proposes to examine the ethical consequences of representations as they are realised in Banville’s novels. Through an analysis of the representation of female figures in particular, I hope to gain new insight into the moral dimension of the relation between narrator and other people in the novels. In a fourth and last part, instances of doubling and splitting will be analysed so as to gain insight into the curiously twisted self-representations of Banville’s


first-person narrators. This part will conclude with a consideration of confessional and autobiographical discourse in The Untouchable.

Given the rich philosophical and theoretical history of the representational dilemmas in any of these fields, the critical analysis of Banville’s work has to take account some of the insights that have emerged in philosophy and literary theory concerning representation and its side-aspects. An additional benefit of this theory-informed approach is, I trust, that certain details, recurrent patterns or specific meanings in the texts will come to stand out more clearly. Yet, because theoretical glasses can obfuscate as well as clarify, I have chosen to include several different theoretical perspectives in this investigation so as to widen its scope as much as possible. After all, selecting only one theory or method would not only fail to do justice to the rich history of representation, but also severely compromise my reading of Banville’s texts. The most important of these theoretical approaches are Stanley Cavell’s theory of scepticism, the literary history of the epiphany, the classic aesthetic paradigms, current theories concerning ethical criticism, psychoanalytic accounts of the Doppelgänger and genre theories about autobiography. Far from having been arbitrarily established, the choice of these specific theoretical approaches has largely been determined by the themes and subjects of the novels themselves. In this way I propose to establish several critical dialogues between text and theory, avoiding the related pitfalls of either using the literary text as an extended example of a philosophical or literary theory, or of applying the theory as a ready-made frame to the literary text. Instead, I hope that my interpretation may show at once how Banville’s texts can extend and perhaps subvert the theoretical problems by placing them in a new light and, conversely, how these theoretical approaches can enrich the texts, by articulating their stakes in a different diction. In order to facilitate this dialogue, close readings of different novels will alternate with more general summaries of themes, structures and developments in Banville’s fiction.

Given the thematic and theoretical bias of my reading, moreover, I will refrain from joining in the tradition of discussing Banville’s novels separately in the manner of the existing studies of his work. Rather than analysing every novel chronologically and in a more or less exhaustive way, I intend to trace certain themes and structures within Banville’s oeuvre as a whole. Still, within each chapter, one or two novels will be considered in a more detailed and exemplary way because a close reading of all novels in every chapter would overtax the attention of even the most

Introduction 13

interested reader. Within this framework I intend to focus on Banville’s most important ten novels to date. This means that I have excluded Banville’s respective débuts in prose and the novel, Long Lankin and Nightspawn, from consideration. Although it would no doubt be interesting to trace the emergence of the questions of representation in these works, I have judged them not appealing enough to merit an in depth reading within the scope of this study. Moreover, they have already received ample attention in the studies mentioned before. Similarly neglected will be the two adaptations of Heinrich von Kleist’s plays which Banville made for the Dublin stage: The Broken Jug and God’s Gift. The potentially rewarding reading of these plays in the context of Kleist’s influence on Banville or even as part of the still unwritten analysis of Banville’s Irishness, will therefore have to find a place outside this study. Finally, since Banville’s most recent novel, Shroud, appeared after the completion of this work, it will also be left out of consideration here. The remaining novels form a rich enough corpus as it is, on which the following reading hopes to shed “a little light”, allowing things to be “not explained, not forgiven, but merely illuminated” (Birchwood, 33).

PART ONE

SELF AND WORLD

Chapter One Books of Revolution: The Scientific Quest for Truth

Human reason, in one sphere of its cognition is called upon to consider questions, which it cannot decline, as they are presented by its own nature, but which it cannot answer, as they transcend every faculty of the mind.

Kant, The Critique of Pure Reason

To chart the development of modern science in the form and content of the postmodern novel: this is the science project John Banville boldly embarked upon with his 1979 novel, Doctor Copernicus. The project entailed a stylistic as well as a thematic challenge because Banville not only sought “to portray the men and their times”, but also “to illustrate something of their ideas by an orchestration of formal movement and rhythm in the prose”.1 In addition, the four books he envisaged were to take the strict form of a classical Greek tetralogy with The Newton Letter functioning as the satiric “interlude”.2 Even though Banville already aban-doned the historical aspect of his project – “the men and their times” – with this novella, the four novels that constitute the science tetralogy do form a closely-knit structure.3 They share not only protagonists and thematic concerns, but are all built around a very similar line of development. This pattern of evolution, which can also be traced in the

1 John Banville, “Physics and Fiction: Order From Chaos”, New York Times Book

Review, 21 April 1985, 42. 2 In an interview with Rüdiger Imhof, Banville elaborates at length on the structure

and aims of his science tetralogy (Rüdiger Imhof, “My Readers, that Small Band Deserve a Rest: An Interview with John Banville”, Irish University Review, XI/1 [1981], 12).

3 Some critics prefer to consider Doctor Copernicus, Kepler and The Newton Letter as a science trilogy, arguing that Mefisto does not share the historical concerns of the other books. Their arguments have recently been backed up by the republication of these three books in a separate volume, called Revolutions. Still, Banville’s own statements on the subject and the similarities in theme, content, form and characters between the four novels warrant the notion of a tetralogy here. Although Birchwood also has a lot in common with the other novels, it does stand somewhat more apart given its lack of explicit scientific content.


earlier novel Birchwood, is usually recognised as one of disappointment.4 The protagonists gradually lose their belief in a Romantic quest for unique and true knowledge and in the power of language to render this knowledge. The development, in short, is taken to go from Romantic idealism to sceptical despair. Drawing on the first and last words of Birchwood respectively, Rüdiger Imhof writes,

His [Gabriel’s] journey thus is from the Cartesian certainty of “I am, therefore I think” to the Wittgensteinian despair of “whereof I cannot speak, thereof I must be silent.” But that despair emerges at the end only.5

Elsewhere he repeats this analysis for the protagonist of Mefisto, arguing, “Both characters move from Cartesian certainty to Wittgensteinian despair”.6 In his readings of Doctor Copernicus and Kepler similar conclusions are arrived at.

Although the protagonists of Birchwood and the science tetralogy do indeed move from an epistemological search for truth to an awareness of the limits of human knowledge and language, the philosophers referred to by Banville and appealed to by Imhof tend to destabilise this straightforward development in several ways. Firstly, although Imhof associates Descartes with epistemological certainty, modern philosophy tends to remember him chiefly as the instigator of sceptical doubt. Descartes’ entire philosophy is based on a radical doubt about the possibility of human knowledge given the profound ontological gap between self and world. Since Descartes’ cogito could only partly accommodate this gap in representations, the actual correspondence between mind and matter had to be further guaranteed by a benevolent God, a kind of Deus-ex-machina who miraculously establishes epistemo-logical certainty. Given this ultimate appeal to faith in Cartesian epistemology, it is no surprise that his philosophy is now considered as the first in a long tradition of modern scepticism. It is interesting to note, secondly, that Descartes’ very grounding of existence in knowledge, his famous “cogito ergo sum”, is inverted rather than directly quoted in the

4 See for instance Joseph McMinn, John Banville’s Supreme Fictions, Manchester,

1999, 48; Derek Hand, John Banville: Exploring Fictions, Dublin, 2002, 80; Ingo Berensmeyer, John Banville: Fictions of Order, Heidelberg, 2000, 99.

5 Rüdiger Imhof, John Banville: A Critical Introduction, Dublin, 1997, 62. 6 Rüdiger Imhof, “Swan’s Way, or Goethe, Einstein, Banville – the Eternal Recur-

rence”, Etudes Irlandaises, XII/4 (1987), 116.

Chapter One: Books of Revolution 19

first lines of Birchwood as “I am, therefore I think. That seems inescapable.” While holding on to the division between mind and matter – an inescapable fact in all of Banville’s novels – Gabriel argues against Descartes that the only certainty concerns existence and that thinking only comes after that fact. Knowledge is always a posteriori, something hastily devised to explain that existence rather than the other way round. With the same stroke Gabriel brings a blow to the philosophical supremacy of the spirit, suggesting instead that the human mind still has to pay tribute to material reality. Finally, while Wittgenstein’s ordinary language philoso-phy, especially in his Tractatus Logicus Philosophicus, is certainly concerned with the limits of language and knowledge, it cannot really be associated with despair. In his Philosophical Investigations Wittgenstein tries to counter sceptical doubt by returning to our “ordinary language games”, the way in which we commonly and successfully deal with the world. Moreover, precisely by confining certain knowledge to the limits of our language, Wittgenstein opens the door for more poetic ways in which das Mystische may be expressed. This is also implied in the wider context of Gabriel Godkin’s reference to Wittgenstein, as he talks about “Intimations” which “are felt only, and words fail to transfix them” (175).

In short, the implications of Banville’s philosophical references compromise the straightforward development from scientific certainty to sceptical despair, which critics have traced in the science tetralogy. If his novels do indeed chart a move from Cartesian metaphysics to Wittgenstein’s ordinary language philosophy, it could equally be interpreted as a development from scepticism to Romanticism, rather than the other way round. The answer to the dilemma lies no doubt in a more detailed investigation of how the problem of representation is dealt with in Birchwood and the science tetralogy. In the critical reception of Banville’s work this problem is usually placed in a historical framework: the chronological move from Copernicus and Kepler, over Newton, to Einstein and Heisenberg, is taken to depict the evolution in scientific representation. Yet, as Banville’s casual reference to Descartes and Wittgenstein suggests, the epistemological tensions evoked in the novels run much deeper than these historical instantiations and bear witness to more fundamental philosophical tensions, which involve our capacities as human knowers. Since Doctor Copernicus is certainly the novel in which the representational ideals and disappointments are most pronounced, it will be discussed in detail as an exemplary case so as to set a general framework in the light of which the slightly different situations in


Birchwood, Kepler, The Newton Letter and Mefisto will more briefly be considered.

Childhood happiness destroyed It is, in a way, ironic that a novel so caught up with death and despair as Doctor Copernicus should start with primal scenes cast in the rosy glow of prelapsarian harmony. Nicolas’ childhood, depicted in a manner and style reminiscent of Joyce’s opening pages in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, is indeed a happy and harmonious one.7 The child Nicolas feels one with all beings and things around him – “[the tree] was a part of the world, and yet it was his friend”– and is convinced of the essential nature of the self and of the unity of mind and body. This feeling of oneness with the world is evident in the peaceful description of Nicolas’ dropping off to sleep:

Their voices were like the voice of sleep itself, calling him away. There were other voices, of churchbells gravely tolling the hours, of dogs that barked afar, and of the river too, though that was not so much a voice as a huge dark liquidy, faintly frightening rushing in the darkness that was felt not heard. All called, called him to sleep.

It is just like in all fairy tales: people, animals, rivers and trees talk to the child and are felt and understood.

Contrary to what some critics have argued, this feeling of unity is not destroyed with Nicolas’ introduction to language.8 For when the boy learns the name for “his friend”, the linden tree, this name seems to express precisely the tree’s unchanging essence which Nicolas had previously experienced: “In wind, in silence, at night, in the changing air, it changed and yet was changelessly the tree, the linden tree.” Even though these words “were nothing in themselves, they meant the dancing singing thing outside”. There is, in other words, a relation of mimetic dependence between the word and “the vivid thing”, between

7 John Banville, Doctor Copernicus (1979), London, 1990, 3-6. 8 I disagree here with Imhof (Introduction, 78-81), Berensmeyer (Fictions of Order,

133) and Hand (Exploring Fictions, 75) who read the first page of Doctor Copernicus as depicting Nicolas’ fall from grace at the introduction of language. I argue, rather, that his loss of innocence and harmony only comes about at the death of his father.


representation and reality, which Nicolas perceives as harmonious.9 The same holds true for the word “love”. Although Nicolas does not at first know what it means, when “[his mother] spoke that name that named nothing, some impalpable but real thing within him responded to him as to a summons, as if it had heard its name spoken”. As in any mimetic view of representation, moreover, Nicolas recognises that the world exists as such, totally independent of the words we attach to it: “although every name was nothing without the thing named, the thing cared nothing for its name, had no need of a name, and was itself only.” Language is dependent on reality and words are subordinate to things. The representation and the thing represented can clearly be distinguished and the one merely and temporarily stands in for the other. A similar conception governs the idea of money, as Nicolas’ father explains it to him:

Coins, you see, are only for poor people, simple people, and for little boys. They are only a kind of picture of the real thing, but the real thing itself you cannot see, nor put in your pocket, and it does not jingle.

Nicolas’ happy world is also a conveniently ordered one, whereby the order of reality is simply mirrored in language:

The sky is blue, the sun is gold, the linden tree is green. Day is light, it ends, night falls, and then it is dark. You sleep, and in the morning you wake again. But a day will come when you will not wake. That is death. Death is sad. Sadness is what happiness is not. And so on. How simple it was, after all! There was no need even to think about it. He had only to be, and life would do the rest.

As in the opening lines of Birchwood, existence precedes representation and being precedes thinking. The reference to death further discloses a form of acceptance as the corner stone of the boy’s universe. Nicolas accepts the place of death in his world unquestioningly, hence implicitly acknowledging the limitations of human existence. Even when his mother dies, Copernicus’ worldview is not disturbed. In death, he remarks, “[she]

9 The notion of “the vivid thing” recurs time and again in Doctor Copernicus,

together with such concepts as “the thing itself” or “the real thing”. Although Banville does not explicitly refer to Kant’s das Ding an sich in Doctor Copernicus (in Birchwood, however, he uses the translation “thing-in-itself”), the idea of a transcendental essence of reality/life/other people is implied here. It is this ideational or noumenal aspect of reality which cannot really be known, but which Copernicus in his childhood both feels and understands.


seemed ... to have arrived at last at a true and total definition of what she was, herself, her vivid self itself”. And since she is, they tell him, no longer “his mother”, the primacy of things over words is once more confirmed. In a primal scene of prelapsarian harmony, in short, Nicolas’ childhood depicts a Romanticised version of humanity’s pre-modern faith in a basic unity of self and world, mind and matter, or words and things. Although no explicit reference to God is made, one can just imagine a bearded old man on a cloud drifting over the scene, deciding that all is well.

Not surprisingly, this harmony cannot last and Nicolas is abruptly thrown in the ruptured, secular world of modernity at the sudden death of his father. “Life”, the boy feels, “has gone horribly awry, and nothing they had told him could explain it, none of the names they had taught him could name the cause” (12). The words no longer express real things, but have become an obstacle to it. The vivid thing seems lost. Hence, when Uncle Lucas talks to him, “Nicolas could distinguish only the meaning of words and not the sense of what was being said” (14). At the destruction of his harmonious world-view, Nicolas experiences for the first time a feeling of loss, which he describes as “the small dull ache that was within him always, the ache that a severed limb leaves throbbing like an imprint of itself upon the emptiness dangling from the stump” (17). The loss of his father comes to symbolise the more profound loss of his childhood world of wholeness and unity. From now on, Nicolas’ world will be divided by a fundamental gap that radically separates not only words from things, but also mind from matter within his very own self:

In this he was out of step with the age, which told him heaven and earth in his own self were conjoined …. There were for him two selves, separate and irreconcilable, the one a mind among the stars, the other a worthless fork of flesh planted firmly in earthly excrement. In the writings of antiquity he glimpsed the blue and gold of Greece, the blood-boltered majesty of Rome, and was allowed briefly to believe that there had been times when the world had known an almost divine unity of spirit and matter, of purpose and consequence .... Well, if such harmony had ever indeed existed, he feared deep down, beyond admitting, that it was not to be regained. (27)

This fear puts Copernicus not so much behind as ahead of the spirit of the times. For the humanist belief in man as unified and whole merely replaced an earlier religious belief in a divinely sanctioned unity. Copernicus’ radical body-mind dualism pre-echoes indeed a modern


secular predicament, which has haunted philosophy since Descartes. Whether it is a fake philosophical distinction or an inescapable fact, for Copernicus it is in any case an intensely felt conviction, not easily dismissed.

The division between self and world is reinforced in the novel by the opposite metaphorical schemes in which both poles are rendered. Thus, the ordinary world is evoked as both “glorious” and frightening, inspiring “terror and awful glee” (7). It is invariably “chaotic and clamorous”, confusing and dark. This physical world is also metaphorically represented by the motif of hawklike creatures and shining birds. This metaphor is first introduced in the scene of Nicolas’ masturbating which follows immediately on his reflections about the pristine purity of the heavens, a sequence which in itself already exemplifies the mind-body opposition:

Monstrous hawklike creatures were flying on invisible struts and wires across a livid sky, and there was a great tumult far off, screams and roars, and howls of agony or of laughter .… It was as if he had tumbled headlong into some beastly black region of the firmament …. Dimly he sensed someone near him, a dark figure in the darkness, but he could not care, it was too late to stop, and he shut his eyes tight. The hawks bore down upon him, he could see their great black gleaming wings, their withered claws and metallic talons, their cruel beaks agape and shrieking without sound, and under that awful onslaught his self shrank together to a tiny throbbing point. For an instant everything stopped, and all was poised on the edge of darkness and a kind of exquisite dying, and then he arched his back like a bow and spattered the sheets with his seed.

In this scene several aspects of the physical world are illustrated: the noise, the darkness, the terror and glee, and the “dark figure”, who can be recognised as Copernicus’ brother, throughout the novel quite literally physicality incarnate. The same holds true in fact for women, whom Nicolas finds “hopelessly corporeal creatures”, for what he seeks is “something other than ordinary flesh, … something made of light and air and marvellous grave gaiety” (24-25). Worth noting in this excerpt finally, is the reference to death or dying. It draws attention to the close connection between physical nature and mortality, which is one of the central topoi of Banville’s novels. The corporeal world is experienced as a finite, temporal, and essentially human one. And it is precisely this world,


which Copernicus strives to leave behind in his yearning for the intelligible purity of the sky.

This transcendent world of the “vivid things”, on the other hand, is usually “blue and golden”, “bright”, “chill” or “icy”. It is related to skies, clouds, the sun as well as to mathematics and astronomy. Thus, Nicolas finds the dull torpor of his school life interrupted once in a while by brief glimpses of the intelligible world of order and harmony:

Only now and then, in the grave cold music of mathematics, in the stately march of the Latin line, in the logic’s hard bright lucid, faintly frightening certainties, did he dimly perceive the contours of some glistening ravishing thing assembling itself out of blocks of glassy air in a clear blue unearthly sky, and then there thrummed within him a coppery chord of perfect bliss. (19)

As the metaphorical schemes readily reveal, the dualistic opposition between mind and body is not quite an equal one. Copernicus values the spiritual over the physical and attributes to the world of the mind qualities of perfect harmony and beauty, which the physical world sadly lacks.

In perfect Cartesian vein, moreover, Copernicus cannot rest at ease with this duality, nor with the threat of death concealed in it. He resolves to devote his life to an overcoming of the gap between self and world, which has suddenly sundered his Arcadian universe. It is his aim, as he puts it, to discover “the eternal truths of the universe” (81). He wants to grasp the physical world in absolute knowledge so as to lay bare the order he believes to exist underneath the chaos of the commonplace. In the encounter with Professor Brudzewski, Copernicus formulates his bold endeavour in public for the first time:

“It seems to me, magister, that we must revise our notions of the nature of things. For thirteen hundred years astronomers have been content to follow Ptolemy without question, like credulous women, Regiomon-tanus says, but in all that time they have not been able to discern or deduce the principal thing, namely the shape of the universe and the unchanging symmetry of its parts.” (34)

This formulation is the first of many and it contains some of the essential elements of Copernicus’ quest. His target is “the principal thing”. The phrase, which is repeated at regular times in the text, is reminiscent of the vivid thing of the opening paragraphs. It refers to the essence of reality, what Copernicus calls: “the deepest thing: the kernel, the essence, the


true” (79). Just like the linden tree, the principal thing he seeks is “unchanging”. It is the changeless essence of a forever changing reality.

Unlike in his childhood experiences, however, Copernicus is no longer content to have this vivid thing as a friend. He does not merely want to experience, see, or sense it. Instead, he wants to “discern” this changeless essence: to perceive, investigate, know it, as his scientific credo amply demonstrates:

Knowledge, magister, must become perception. The only acceptable theory is that one which explains the phenomena …. I believe not in names, but in things. I believe that the physical world is amenable to physical investigation. (36)

Faithful again to his childhood beliefs, Copernicus believes in the superiority of things over words and the dependence of the latter on the former. Yet, the specific things he seeks are now no longer available at surface level but have to be unearthed by the creative powers of the human mind. In the novel itself, Copernicus’ scientific quest is incorporated in a historical context: the emergence of a modern and initially humanist scientific project in opposition to the more conventional methods of the Schoolmen.10 Still, Banville’s historical references in Doctor Copernicus are often far from accurate, which makes it more interesting to place Copernicus’ ideals and disillusions in the context of the representational tensions discussed before.

Stanley Cavell Following the sudden breach in Copernicus’ world-view, the scientist can indeed be seen to trade his objective, mimetic theory of representation for a modern subjectivist epistemology, which believes in the imaginative and perceptive powers of the mind to discover truth through representation. Since the truth he seeks is not to be found on the surface of reality, Copernicus will try to discern Reality behind reality: das Ding an sich beyond the realm of the phenomena, or the Platonic eternal and unchanging Ideas of which our reality is but a poor reflection. Nietzsche

10 Imhof and Warren have investigated the historical context of Doctor Copernicus against the background of the historical sources mentioned by Banville, especially Koestler’s The Sleepwalkers. While their readings illustrate the historical dimension of this work, they also show that Banville has to a large extent adapted the historical facts to suit his own purposes (Rüdiger Imhof, Introduction, 78-106; Wini Warren, “The Search for Copernicus in History and fiction”, Soundings, LXXVI/2-3 [1993], 383-406).


would probably castigate Copernicus’ quest as an instance of scientific hubris. Through this vanity, Nietzsche would argue, Copernicus fatally defies his position within physical nature and puts himself on a par with the Lord of creation. In a Heideggerian context, Copernicus’ quest for certain knowledge could be read as yet another violent attempt “to bring what is present at hand before oneself ... and to force it back into this relationship to oneself as the normative realm” (“The Age of the World Picture”, 131). Inevitably, Heidegger would argue, the world picture arrived at in representation fails to attend to the “Being of beings” itself. The American philosopher Stanley Cavell, finally, would probably consider Copernicus’ quest as a classic example of scepticism, expressive as it is of a desire to transcend the limits of human knowledge in an attempt to know the unknowable. Because Cavell’s analysis of scepticism could help to further clarify the precise nature of Copernicus’ hubristic quest, it may be worthwhile at this point to consider his arguments in some more detail.

Stanley Cavell is something of an outsider in the modern debates about scepticism. He does not seek to defend nor reject scepticism, but wants to engage with “the truth of scepticism” as an essential aspect of the human condition. In The Claim of Reason, his first substantial analysis of scepticism and ordinary language philosophy, Cavell associates scepticism with the modern conception of knowledge as exact representation.11 In the absence of Descartes’ divine guarantee of the correspondence between subject and object, he argues, representation can never provide absolute and certain knowledge of reality. Dissatisfied with the limits imposed by the gap between self and world, the sceptic tries to overcome that gap and to know the world in its entirety. As one of Cavell’s interpreters puts it, “The philosophical sceptic’s quest for certainty about the world’s existence does conceal a desire to overcome the world’s separateness from him, to possess it utterly.”12 This makes the scientific quest for absolute truth a typical instance of human hubris. For in order to reach absolute truth, the sceptic has to transcend the traditional rules that govern our knowledge in the ordinary world. The sceptic tries to deny the human conditions of knowing and the finite nature of the human

11 Stanley Cavell, The Claim of Reason: Wittgenstein, Skepticism, Morality and

Tragedy, Oxford, 1995. 12 Stephen Mulhall, Stanley Cavell: Philosophy’s Recounting of the Ordinary,

Oxford, 1994, 149.


condition. Yet Cavell also emphasises that this disappointment with and rejection of language is inherent in the nature of our ordinary language and the nature of our being human.

For a more technical explanation of this denial, Cavell appeals to Wittgenstein’s ordinary language philosophy and interprets the sceptic’s hubris as the desire to speak outside our ordinary language games. A well-known sceptical argument constructs an artificial “best case for knowledge”, which is emptied of all the particularities of subject, context or circumstances and thereby disregards our common language criteria. These criteria, Cavell argues, determine what it is for anything to fall under a given concept. Hence, they draw attention to “the astonishing fact of the astonishing extent to which we do agree in judgement, eliciting criteria goes to show that our judgements are public, that is, shared” (Claim, 31). Yet, the mere existence of these language criteria does not negate scepticism. After all, they can only determine what the thing is, but not, as the sceptic would like it, that it is. It is precisely because of these limits that the sceptic decides to reject the criteria and the larger framework of our ordinary language altogether. From a disappointment with the limits of knowledge, further, the sceptic proceeds to doubt the existence of the world in its entirety. Or more particularly, from the failure of the “best case for knowledge”, which is bound to fail given its artificial and abstracted nature, the sceptic extrapolates to the impossibility of all knowledge and the uncertainty of all existence. By way of example, Cavell quotes Descartes’ famous sceptical argument:

Everything I have thus far accepted as true has been acquired from the senses or by means of the senses. But I have learned by experience that these senses sometimes mislead me, and it is prudent never to trust wholly those things which have once deceived us. (130)

That the sceptic infers from the limits of knowledge a fundamental doubt about the existence of the world is only possible because he conceives of his relation to the world solely in terms of knowledge. Cavell concludes therefore: “scepticism is inherent in every view that takes the existence of the world to be a problem of knowledge” (46).

The ultimate result of scepticism, moreover, is nothing more or less than “a death of the world”. For in determining “what counts as some-thing”, criteria also specify “what counts for human beings” (483-96). Refusing to adhere to these criteria comes down to withdrawing all interest or value from the world. As Stephen Mulhall puts it:


The sceptic’s drive to strip words of their criteria strips the objects of the world of their variegated specificity and value. He annihilates the world by annihilating its capacity to elicit his interest, he is driven past caring for it, it goes dead for him and recedes from his grasp.

Put differently, speaking outside language games results in a freezing or fixing of the world as it is deprived of all complexity, interaction and value. The world’s deadness, which the sceptic interprets as a lack in the world, is in fact caused by himself: “The world disappoints him precisely because he interprets his goal of achieving and maintaining certainty about the world’s existence as a matter of achieving and maintaining an undispossessable possession of that world.” And Mulhall summarises the “three senses of the world’s death at the hands of scepticism” as “the claim that scepticism constitutes a failure to acknowledge the world, that it freezes or fixes the world, and that it annihilates the specificity and value of the world” (Stanley Cavell, 151-54). Any antidote to scepticism, in this view, has to try and bring this stupefied world back to life.

The impossible quest for the vivid thing As I hope to make clear in what follows, Copernicus’ quest reveals itself as essentially sceptic in several respects. Firstly, in his hubristic endeavour to discern the truth of the universe or to possess the world in its entirety, Copernicus rejects all dogmas, theories and stipulations, which previously governed scientific knowledge. He boldly claims:

The closed system of the science must be broken, in order that it might transcend itself and its own sterile concerns, and thus become an instrument of verifying the real rather than merely postulating the possible …. [This new science] would be objective, open-minded, above all honest, a beam of stark cold light trained unflinchingly upon the world as it is and not as men ... wished it to be. (83)

His main reproach against his predecessors is therefore that they have not been concerned with “the nature of things”: “Ptolemaic astronomy is nothing so far as existence is concerned; it is only convenient for computing the nonexistent” (81). As a rather anachronistic representative of a modern, positivist view of science, Copernicus finds himself in opposition to his teacher Brudzewski, who defends the old mimetic view of knowledge. If Copernicus’ bold desire is “to discern the principal thing”, it is Brudzewski’s modest aim to “save the phenomena”: “to devise a theory grounded firmly in the old reactionary dogmas that yet


would account for the observed motion of the planets” (29). For Brudzewski, astronomy should restrict itself to the phenomenal surface level of reality and “save” or mirror it in representation. In addition, also the theories of the ancients should be “saved” because they are based on universal mathematical notions of harmony and divine truth. Brudzewski, moreover, counters Copernicus’ yearning for the principal thing, arguing, “We are here and the universe, so to speak, is there, and between the two there is no sensible connection” (34).13 Astronomy, therefore, “does not discern your principal thing, for that is not to be discerned” (34-35). It can mirror the phenomena, but it cannot explain them. Copernicus, however, refuses to accept this “metaphysical finitude” and construes it instead, as Cavell puts it, as an “intellectual lack”.14 In other words, he perceives the scientific failure to discern the essence as a lack of the reigning theories rather than as evidence of human finitude itself. As is to be expected, also Copernicus’ denial of the limits of knowledge and human existence further manifests itself in a negation of the physical world at large.

This commonplace world is not only too concrete and too chaotic for Copernicus, it is also changeable and bears witness to human finitude, which he seeks to deny. Because in ordinary reality “Nothing was stable: politics became war, law became slavery, life itself became death, sooner or later”, Copernicus withdraws all attention from it and focuses instead on the eternal laws of the universe. Copernicus’ leave-taking of Fracastoro is highly revealing in this respect. The period with Fracastoro is depicted as Copernicus’ first and last enjoyment of the physical world of the senses and his farewell to Italy is definitely a final rejection of life. As a true sceptic, Copernicus will henceforth limit his relation to the world to that of knowledge only and he will flee from the physical in the world of science, for “scholarship ... endistanced [the world]” and although “the

13 According to Arthur Koestler’s popular history of astronomy The Sleepwalkers

(London, 1986), Brudzewski’s arguments should be read as representative of the older Ptolemaic belief that “heavenly bodies, being of a divine nature, obey laws different from those to be found on earth. No common link exists between the two; therefore we can know nothing about the physics of the skies” (77-78). Although Banville clearly tries to give these scholastic beliefs a Postmodern flavour by emphasising the limits of knowledge they try to observe (cf. Heidegger, Nietzsche, and Derrida), it should be pointed out that while modern epistemology is inspired mainly by doubt, the Ptolemaic and Scholastic universe was firmly grounded in faith, in religious doctrine and dogma.

14 Stanley Cavell, In Quest of the Ordinary: Lines of Skepticism and Romanticism, Chicago, 1994, 51.


real world would not be gainsaid”, “he must gainsay it, or despair” (27-28).

Even before epistemological doubts set in, Copernicus’ scientific quest reveals itself as a sceptical quest at heart. And the “death of the world” which is the inevitable result of this, betrays itself first of all in the metaphors of fixing and freezing with which the effects of Copernicus’ quest are described. Upon finding the solution to a conundrum for instance, Nicolas imagines that “the glass blocks sailed in silence through the bright air, and locked. Done! Harmonia” (20). Similarly, one of the only moments the physical world appears of any interest to the young boy is when it is covered by snow and ice. The world is “transformed” by the snow, everything is “lost in that white emptiness”. The attraction for Copernicus lies indeed in the fixity, the immutability, and “the absence of things”. The physical world, for a moment at least, resembles the pure order of the transcendent universe:

The sky was a dome of palest glass, and the sun sparkled on the snow, and everywhere was a purity and brilliance almost beyond bearing .... His young soul swooned, and slowly, O, slowly, he seemed to fall upward, into the blue. (25)

This image of a perfect crystal-clear order prefigures Copernicus’ moment of greatest success at the end of Part I, when he finally finds “the solution”. At last, Copernicus has been able to cast off the burden of traditional astronomy; he has cleared away all the names and has come to the vivid thing. It was, the narrator writes, “as if the channels of his brain had been sluiced with an icy drench of water”, allowing our scientist to think with “a miraculous objectivity”. It is again expressive of his fundamental dualism that it is “his brain” which “had made that leap that he had not had the nerve to risk”. His mind has transcended the phenomenal and headed straight for the essence: the eternal position of the sun in an expanded universe. The comparison of his theory to a jewel is in this respect an apt one: “He turned the solution this way and that, admiring it, as if he were turning in his fingers a flawless ravishing jewel. It was the thing itself, the vivid thing” (84-85). One is reminded here of a similar image in Wallace Stevens’ Notes Towards a Supreme Fiction, a long poem which is referred to repeatedly in Doctor Copernicus:

They will get it straight one day at the Sorbonne. We shall return at twilight from the lecture Pleased that the irrational is rational,


Until flicked by feeling, in a gildered street, I call you by name, my green, my fluent mundo. You will have stopped revolving except in crystal. (III, 10) 15

In both cases, the image of the precious stone is an ambiguous one. While capturing the stunning beauty of the solution, it also suggests the coldness, sterility and even lifelessness of that solution in view of the rich variety of life as a whole. Copernicus’ Book of Revolutions might have put a symbolic end to the earth’s revolutions altogether. The suspicions which the imagery of ice and glass already raises, become gradually more explicit when Copernicus himself starts to cast sceptical doubt on the nature of his intellectual achievement.

His doubt largely falls into two categories, which can be characterised as a “weak” and a “strong” doubt. Early versions of this twofold despair are found in Nietzsche’s ambivalent reaction to modern science. On the one hand, Nieztsche argues that the truth cannot be known, since our position as natural, contextual and physical beings is inevitably limited: “We see all things through the human head and cannot cut this head off.”16 Yet, his doubt becomes far more nihilistic when he claims that truth and order simply do not exist, as the world is made up of blind force, chance and chaos only:

The total character of the world ... is for all eternity chaos, not in the sense of a lack of necessity but of a lack of order, organization, form, beauty, wisdom, and whatever else our aesthetic anthropomorphisms are called.17

In a characteristic move, however, Nietzsche turns this negative conclusion into a positive challenge by arguing that truth does not have to exist as we have no need of it: it does not help us to lead our lives. All we can (and have to) do, therefore, is to accept chance and affirm our fate in a heroic mode of Amor Fati.

Returning to Doctor Copernicus, it can be noted that already at the time of his great discovery, Copernicus realises, “The verification of this theory … would take weeks, months, years perhaps, to complete”. Yet, he believes that it is “nothing”, “mere hackwork”: an expression in words

15 Wallace Stevens, Notes Towards a Supreme Fiction, in Collected Poems, London, 1984.

16 Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human, I, Stanford, 1995, §9. 17 Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, Cambridge, 2001, §109.


and figures of his imaginative perception (85). Yet, this task turns out to be more difficult than expected and he watches in despair and “mute suspended panic his blundering pen pollute and maim those concepts that, unexpressed, had throbbed with limpid purity and beauty”. It is, he thinks wryly, “hacking indeed, bloody butchery”. Searching for an explanation, he ponders, “It was not that the theory itself was faulty, but somehow it was being contaminated in the working out.” Echoing his teacher’s former advice, he adds:

There seemed to be lacking some essential connection. The universe of dancing planets was out there, and he was here, and between the two spheres mere words and figures on paper could not mediate. (93)

Since Copernicus had to discard all names, or in Wittgensteinian terms all criteria of our ordinary language, in order to perceive the thing itself, it is hardly surprising that this perception cannot simply be communicated by finding new names. Similarly, having rejected the straightforward mimetic theory of saving the phenomena, Copernicus is unable to simply mirror his discovery in words. It is Copernicus’ peculiar predicament, therefore, to have invented a new science, which he is incapable of passing on.18 His attempt to transcend the limits of language has been blown to pieces in the face of these limits themselves. Pre-echoing Wittgenstein, Andreas formulates these limits as follows: “We say only those things that we have the words to express; it is enough” (240, italics added). And in a similar statement, to Rheticus this time, Copernicus takes the matter even further: “We think only those thoughts that we have the words to express” (207, italics added). If “the vivid thing” cannot be represented, it cannot really be known either. Representation, Copernicus is forced to acknowledge, cannot mediate between the human mind and “the universe of dancing planets”. Hence, Copernicus curbs Rheticus’ youthful zeal with:

You imagine that my book is a kind of mirror in which the real world is reflected; but you are mistaken, you must realise that. In order to build such a mirror, I should need to be able to perceive the world whole, in its entirety and in its essence. But our lives are lived in such a tiny, confined space, and in such disorder, that this perception is not possible. There is no contact, none worth mentioning, between the universe and the place in which we live. (206)

18 Cf. Joseph McMinn, John Banville’s Supreme Fictions, Manchester, 1999, 47-51.


Although Copernicus seems to echo the Ptolemaic wisdom of his teachers, his argument is not born from faith, but from sceptical doubt. As such, it resembles more strongly Nietzsche’s perspectivism, his weak doubt. Reality, in that radical subjectivist conception, cannot objectively be mirrored in language, because any representation of reality is determined by our own limited perspective as human beings located in space and time. Kant’s solution to this problem, that of limiting certain knowledge to phenomenal reality only, is in fact an affirmation of this weak sceptical doubt, which easily blossoms into a more explicit sceptical despair.

Copernicus’ doubts grow steadily more intense, encompassing not only our capacities as human knowers, but also the existential conditions of the world itself. A first indication of this despair is his loss of religious faith: “Suddenly one day God abandoned him.” His crisis, characterised only by “a lack of feeling, a numbness”, is a strange one:

his faith in the Church did not waver, only his faith in God. The Mass, transubstantiation, the forgiveness of sin, the virgin birth, the vivid truth of all that he did not for a moment doubt, but behind it, behind the ritual, there was for him now only a silent white void that was everywhere and everything and eternal.

If Copernicus had always been convinced that beyond the ritual lay the truth, beyond the names the vivid things, now he is no longer sure. Perhaps the form hides but a lack, an emptiness. The names are no longer subservient to an essential reality, as the very existence of reality has come to be doubted. A Nietzchean strong doubt has now taken over: das Ding an sich, which the weaker doubt considered beyond intellectual grasp, is now questioned in its very existence. Forms, rituals, and names are all that is left. As Canon von Lossainen puts it to Copernicus: “Perhaps, Nicolas, the outward forms are all that any of us can believe in. Are you not being too hard on yourself?” (115-16).

This pattern of emptiness at the core of things is repeated on several levels in the text. About the scientist himself, his fellow canons note, “a certain lack, a transparence” at the heart of his impeccable behaviour:

It was as if, within the vigorous and able public man, there was a void, as if, behind the ritual, all was hollow save for one thin taut chord of steely inexpressible anguish stretching across the nothingness. (132)

Copernicus himself, secondly, notices the void at the heart of his book itself, for instead of approaching the truth, it is “flying off in a wild eccentric orbit into emptiness” (116). His book is “not about the world,


but about itself”; it is but words, mere “saying”. Hence his conclusion: “It [the book] is nothing, less than nothing” (209).19 And as if to confirm this absence, Copernicus’ initial vivid thing, the linden tree, is cut down. Rheticus, thirdly, never ceases to make explicit that “Copernicus did not believe in truth”. He argues that “all that mattered to him was the saying, not what was said; words were the empty rituals with which he held the world at bay” (176). In life, science, and religion, in short, all that is left to the despairing Copernicus are empty names, forms, and rituals, which serve to hide an emptiness. Since all names are but metaphors, there is no difference between the ancient philosophers who called the lights in the sky “torches borne by angels” or “pinpricks in the shroud of heaven”, and modern scientists who call them “stars and planets” (207). “It is”, as Copernicus puts it to Rheticus, “all merely an exalted naming”.

Finally, Copernicus’ nihilistic world-view finds an apt illustration in his solar system. As Rheticus expounds with great relish, the centre of the Copernican universe is not the sun, but “the centre of the earth’s orbit”, a point in empty space. The universe revolves on emptiness and his book merely serves to hide this lack. De revolutionibus, Rheticus writes, “was assembled simply in order to prove that at the centre of all there is nothing, that the world turns upon chaos” (218). And Copernicus himself summarises this bleak world-view as follows:

“When you have once seen the chaos, you must make some thing to set between yourself and that terrible sight; and so you make a mirror, thinking that in it shall be reflected the reality of the world; but then you understand that the mirror reflects only appearances, and that reality is somewhere else, off behind the mirror; and then you remember that behind the mirror there is only chaos.”

This passage cleverly charts the epistemological development of Copernicus in full. Out of an initial lack, symbolised by the death of his father and consequent ruin of his harmonious world, Copernicus sought to find a theory, which expressed the eternal order of the world. Failure and

19 This sense of an emptiness at the heart of Copernicus’ theories echoes Nietzsche’s

and Wittgenstein’s rejection of metaphysics as empty, as not worth the trouble. Thus Nietzsche famously called the “thing in itself” (das Ding an sich), “another very ridiculous thing” (The Gay Science, §335); and about Wittgenstein’s anti-metaphysical statements, Cavell writes: “This is what Wittgenstein has against metaphysics, not just that it produces meaningless propositions – that, even in the sense in which it is true, would be only a derivative of its trouble. His diagnosis of it is rather that it is empty, empty of interest, as though philosophy were motivated by a will to emptiness” (In Quest of the Ordinary, 7).


frustration subsequently lead to the awareness that language and understanding could never reach truth and that his theory was limited to appearances only. Carrying this line of thinking to its radical conclu-sion, finally, Copernicus is forced to admit that there is no truth, essence, or order – only chaos, nothingness and despair. That despair is inevitable is confirmed when Copernicus anachronistically quotes Kierkegaard:

“If at the foundation of all there lay only a wildly seething power which, writhing with obscure passion, produced everything that is great and everything that is insignificant, if a bottomless void never satiated lay hidden beneath all, what then would life be but despair.”

This despair or “nihilism”, as Rheticus calls it, will ultimately lead to death. When “the people” learn of his theory, Copernicus fears, “they will begin to despise the world, and something will die, and out of that death will come death” (207-209). An oddly similar reflection on the devastating consequences of the Copernican Revolution can be found in Nietzsche’s Die Fröhliche Wissenschaft:

What were we doing when we unchained this earth from its sun? Where is it moving to now? Where are we moving to? Away from all suns? Are we not continually falling? And backwards, sidewards, forwards, in all directions? Is there still an up and a down? Aren’t we straying as though through an infinite nothing? Isn’t empty space breathing at us? Hasn’t it got colder? Isn’t night and more night coming again and again? ... God is dead! God remains dead! And we have killed him! (The Gay Science, §125)

With this nihilistic despair, the sceptical thrust behind Copernicus’s scientific quest has finally become fully explicit. Quite literally exempli-fying the outcome of the sceptical quest, the world has “died” for Copernicus. His despair is what Thoreau would call “quiet desperation”, Coleridge and Wordsworth “despondency or dejection” and Cavell, quite simply, scepticism.20 Copernicus’ hubristic refusal to accept the limits of human knowledge and the finitude of the human condition has lead to a sceptical negation of the world instead. For, as Cavell would argue, it is only when the world is conceived of exclusively in terms of knowledge, that failure of that knowledge leads to loss of the world. Similarly, it is only when truth is identified with absolute order, that the absence of such order leads to a rejection of the possibility of truth in general. Although despair seems the inevitable conclusion of Copernicus’ sceptical quest,

20 Stanley Cavell, In Quest of the Ordinary, 9.


some alternatives are tentatively suggested, especially in the last chapter where Copernicus is taught “how to die”.

Acceptance, acknowledgement, affirmation A first alternative is, however, realised by Rheticus. At first he is infected by Copernicus’ despair, exclaiming, “Frauenburg killed the best in me, my youth and enthusiasm, my happiness, my faith, yes, my faith. From that time on I believed in nothing, neither God nor Man.” Like Copernicus, moreover, he links this scepticism with death: “Frauenburg had been a kind of death, for death is the absence of faith.” Yet, upon the arrival of his own disciple, Valentine Otho, Rheticus regains his faith. He believes that the future will bring him fame and truth, and exclaims, “God, I believe: resurrection, redemption, the whole thing, I believe it all”. Although the change is sudden and the scene hilarious, Rheticus’ newly found belief is none the less real and it transforms his attitude towards the commonplace world into one of affirmation:

I am doctor Rheticus! I am a believer. Lift your head, then, strange new glorious creature, incandescent angel, and gaze upon the world. It is not diminished! Even in that he failed. The sky is blue, and shall be forever blue, and the earth shall blossom forever in spring, and this planet shall forever be the centre of all we know. I believe, I think. Vale. (210-20)

For Copernicus, however, this form of simple faith is no longer a possibility. When at his deathbed the last rites are being administered, the Andreas-figure tells him, “Do not heed it, brother .... All that is a myth, your faith in which you relinquished long ago. There is no comfort there for you” (238).21 Similarly, when Copernicus listens to the voice of the priest intoning: “Only after death shall we be united with the All, when the body dissolves … and the spiritual man, the soul free and ablaze, ascends through the seven crystal spheres of the firmament, shedding at each stage a part of his mortal nature”, Andreas interrupts him with, “Redemption is not to be found in the Empyrean” (241). For Andreas, as for Cavell, redemption from sceptical despair cannot be reached in a transcendent

21 Although the imaginary dialogue between Andreas and Copernicus is in fact a kind

of interior monologue of Copernicus, as becomes clear by the disappearance of quotation marks at the end, I will for simplicity’s sake refer to the voice defending the scientific quest as Copernicus and the voice propagating an alternative of acceptance as Andreas.


realm, but only within earthly life. It is not to be achieved by a rejection of “mortal nature”, but by an acceptance of the physical body and its commonplace existence. Hence, it is Andreas’ mission as the “angel of death” to teach Copernicus “how to die” (225). He wants to make him accept, as Cavell would have it, the inevitable finitude of the human condition, which Copernicus has always sought to deny. Moreover, the precise form of the alternative taught by Andreas is highly reminiscent of Cavell’s notion of “acknowledgement”.

Seeking to rekindle the sceptic’s interest in the world, Cavell proposes in The Claim of Reason a “recounting” of criteria, a return to our ordinary ways of dealing with the world: an “acknowledging” of the world:

The philosopher should acknowledge the world – acknowledge it as his necessary other whose existence is thus both separate from and essential to his own. Acknowledging that it is essential to him would presumably mean acknowledging his interest and need for it, which means accepting the fact that it attracts him – that he is drawn to and by it; and acknowledging its separateness would mean accepting the independence of what attracts him, not imposing his interests and needs upon it but rather allowing it to elicit the responses it requires and requests from him in its own way and according to its own nature.22

Replacing scrutiny by acknowledgement and transcendence by acceptance, the sceptic has to learn to accept the limits of our human condition and to be open towards the irrecoverable strangeness of the commonplace as something that is other to us. This entails a respect for the gap between self and world as inherent in human existence. In In Quest of the Ordinary Cavell further explores the Romantic undercurrent of this notion of acknowledgement, arguing:

The sense of the ordinary that my work derives from the practice of the later Wittgenstein and from J.L. Austin, in their attention to the language of ordinary or everyday life, is underwritten by Emerson and Thoreau in their devotion to the thing they call the common, the familiar, the near, the low. (4)

Cavell reads this Romantic literary tradition in terms of its attempt to “bring the world back, as to life” by way of “a return to the ordinary” (52). Given the separateness of the world, which is accepted in acknowledge-

22 Stephen Mulhall, Stanley Cavell: Philosophy’s Recounting of the Ordinary,

Oxford, 1994, 158.


ment, this return mostly happens under the aegis of the uncanny, the odd, and the fantastic. The ordinary becomes the object of a quest: “The everyday is what we cannot but aspire to, since it appears to us as lost to us” (171).

This quest for the ordinary is also part of what Andreas proposes to his brother at the end of Doctor Copernicus (239-42). Following Cavell’s notion of acknowledgement, Andreas argues that what is required is not a rejection of all knowledge, but merely another manner of knowing. Aptly summarising his brother’s sceptical quest, Andreas claims:

We know the meaning of the singular thing only so long as we content ourselves with knowing it in the midst of other meanings: isolate it, and all meaning drains away.

In rejecting the traditional names, which govern science and astronomy as well as our relations to other people, Copernicus effectively let all meaning drain away. This resulted in a meaningless and empty world, which was unable to sustain his interest. In opposition to this artificial isolation, Andreas proposes an estimation of meaning in the midst of other meanings, or as Cavell put it, a recounting of our accepted criteria for knowledge within ordinary language games. Andreas echoes Cavell even further by repeating to his brother that a relation to the world solely in terms of scrutiny and mastery ultimately leads to nothingness or death:

The world will not bear anything other than acceptance. Look at this chair: there is the wood, the splinters, then the fibres, then the particles into which the fibres may be broken, and then the smaller particles of these particles, and then, eventually, nothing, a confluence of aetherial stresses, a kind of vivid involuntary dreaming in a vacuum. You see? The world simply will not bear it, this impassioned scrutiny.

Acceptance is the key word of Andreas’ deathbed lesson to Copernicus. And also in this he ties in nicely with Cavell’s alternative of acknowledgement of the everyday. The acceptance, which Andreas propagates, concerns the human condition as well as the ordinary material world in which it is embedded. Unlike Cavell, however, Andreas also draws attention to the truth of the ordinary. Instead of Copernicus’ nihilistic conclusions about the absence of truth behind the world, Andreas proposes a truth, which is within the world, and within ourselves. Countering Nicolas’ retort “how are we to perceive the truth if we do not attempt to discover it, and to understand our discoveries?”, Andreas maintains:


There is no need to search for the truth. We know it already, before ever we think of setting out on our quests .... We are the truth. The world, and ourselves, this is the truth.

And this truth, Andreas claims, may be “shown” – rather than “spoken” – “by accepting what there is”. This truth, it seems, is quite simply “acceptance”, or even “love”, though “these are poor words, and express nothing of the enormity”. Since Andreas proposes an acceptance of the truth of the commonplace, which turns out to be itself acceptance, his argument would certainly qualify as circular in a logical context, and perhaps even as sentimentally conservative. Still, Andreas offers yet another meaning of acceptance, which opens the way for more active contribution.

Denouncing again Copernicus’ “quest for truth” and for “transcendent knowledge”, Andreas asserts that it stems from “vanity” and “the cowardice that comes from the refusal to accept that names are all there is that matter, the cowardice that is the true and irredeemable despair.” He refers of course to Copernicus’ childhood belief that “every name was nothing without the thing named” and his attempts to discard the names in order to get at the “vivid thing”. Yet, as we have seen, Copernicus himself increasingly came to realise that names, forms, rituals are all we have, and sorely need. Yet, whereas Copernicus considered the necessity for ritual as something negative, a measure of human failure, Andreas proposes to turn it into something positive, the creation of supreme fictions, arguing:

“With great courage and great effort, you might have succeeded in the only way it is possible to succeed, by disposing the commonplace, the names, in a beautiful and orderly pattern that would show by its very beauty and order, the action in our poor world of the otherworldly truths.”

If no essential order can be found, order will have to be created. And what better way to create order than in supreme fictions, which one knows to be fictions but nevertheless wholeheartedly believes in. What matters is the “exalted naming” as well as the creativity and beauty of that brave attempt.

Cavell’s notions of acceptance and acknowledgement have made way here for affirmation. This artistic ideal of creating fictions or myths in which we can believe, is not only a reference to Wallace Stevens, but also to Nietzsche. For Nietzsche recognised as no other the need for illusions, for “mirrors” when we are confronted with a chaotic and meaningless


world. He argues in The Gay Science, “Human beings have developed through their mistakes. If one takes away the effect of these mistakes, one equally abolishes humanity, humanness and human worth” (§115). Still, it is of primary importance that we know that these illusions are just that: mere fictions, mere names with which we keep the world at bay. Hence also Andreas’ claim that “We are the truth …. There is no other, or, if there is, it is of use to us only as an ideal, that brings us a little comfort, a little consolation, now and then.”

Nevertheless, this idea or ideal of “another truth” hovers over the closing passages of Doctor Copernicus. It is invoked in Andreas’ “otherworldly truths”, but also in “the great miracle” which Copernicus “glimpsed briefly in our father, in Sister Barbara, in Fracastaro, in Anna Schillings” and which is only partly accounted for by words such as “love” or “acceptance”. Finally, it is suggested in the mysterious harmony Copernicus seems to regain at the end, a near replica of his childhood experience of unity: “something immensely far and faint, a music out of earth and air, water and fire, that was everywhere and everything and eternal.” It is this sense of secret significance which Gabriel Godkin refers to as “intimations”, which Kepler calls “the mystery of the commonplace” and the narrator in The Newton Letter “the innocence of things”. This mystery is finally evoked in epiphanies, which provide small glimpses of an elusive alterity all through the science novels. The mysterious sense of significance realised in these novels is indeed closely related to the idea of what postmodern theory calls alterity: a form otherness that eludes all attempts at representation and has to be experienced and expressed in a different way. Before turning to an analysis of the epiphanic mode in Banville’s novels, therefore, it will be useful to revisit the role of alterity and its accomplice, mortality, in the sceptical quests of the different scientists. This will also allow us to briefly sketch the epistemological development in Birchwood and the remaining novels of the science tetralogy.

From Romanticism to scepticism? Far more than any involvement in science or mathematics, what unites Kepler, Newton, Copernicus, the biographer and the two Gabriels is their profound engagement in a quest. All protagonists are searching for something, whether it is the eternal nature of the universe, the truth of the past, the hidden order of reality or the significance of life itself. With an


obvious wink at Proust’s La Recherche du temps perdu, Gabriel Godkin claims that his is a “search for time misplaced”, for the elusive “thing-in-itself, which is realised at plot-level as the true nature of the conspiracy surrounding his ancestral house (11-13). Kepler, on the other hand, resembles Copernicus in his dogged quest for “the eternal laws that govern the harmony of the world”. He claims to be after “the true causes of things” or “the real answers to the cosmic mystery”.23 The motto of The Newton Letter refers to a similar project in terms of “the great ocean of truth” which Newton sought to discover. In this novella the quests proliferate again on several levels. Newton’s search for the true causes of the world is mirrored in the narrator’s quest for the true meaning of Newton himself and in his attempt to discern the “secret pattern” of the Lawless’ family relations. 24 On yet another level, these quests can be read as but realisations of the narrator’s more profound quest for the sense of his life and the significance of the world around him. “The secret order of things” is, finally, also the objective of Gabriel Swan’s quest, which he eloquently presents as follows:

From the start the world had been for me an immense formula. Press hard enough upon anything, a cloud, a fall of light, a cry in the street, and it would unfurl its secret, intricate equations. But what was different now was that it was no longer numbers that lay at the heart of things. Numbers, I saw at last, were only a method, a way of doing. The thing itself would be more subtle, more certain, even, than the manner of its finding. And I would find it, of that I had no doubt, even if I did not as yet know how.25

Following the example of Copernicus, in short, all protagonists are searching for a form of order or meaning, which is hidden underneath the chaos of the world.

Just like in Doctor Copernicus, moreover, all these different quests are born from lack or loss. In The Newton Letter for instance, the narrator claims to have lost his “faith in the primacy of text” (1). He no longer manages to establish a relation between word and thing, as evinced in his failed attempts to match up “real” birds with the specimen in his guidebook (5). Gabriel Godkin is confronted with this dualism between words and things when he tries in vain to conjure up the presence of his

23 John Banville, Kepler (1981), London, 1990, 19, 137. 24 John Banville, The Newton Letter (1982), London, 1992, 42. 25 John Banville, Mefisto (1986), London, 1993, 185.


mother by means of words: “Words. I cannot see her. When I try I cannot see her, I mean I cannot find any solid shape of her” (27). In this novel and in Mefisto, furthermore, this lack of wholeness is quite literally represented by the loss of the protagonist’s twin sibling. Contemplating the “discovery” that “somewhere I had a sister, my twin, a lost child”, Gabriel Godkin writes, “Half of me, somewhere, stolen by the circus, or spirited away by an evil aunt, or kidnapped by a jealous cousin .… I was incomplete and would remain so until I found her” (83). And his namesake in Mefisto offers the death of his twin – “I seemed to myself not whole” – as an explanation for his “gift for numbers”:

From the beginning, I suppose, I was obsessed with the mystery of the unit, and everything else followed. Even yet I cannot see a one and a zero juxtaposed without feeling deep within me the vibration of a dark, answering note. (9, 18)

If they find the truth, both protagonists believe, they will also overcome division and finitude within. “And with it [that formula] surely would come something else, that dead half of me I had hauled around always at my side would somehow tremble into life, and I would be made whole”, Gabriel Swan reasons wistfully (186). As these quotations illustrate, this feeling of lack symbolises the limits of human nature. The experience of division is, as it were, a first herald of finitude, an “intimation of mortality” which the protagonists want to overcome at all cost.

In the four novels under consideration, this overcoming takes the form of an epistemological quest. Gaining knowledge equals gaining or regaining harmony and denying death. These immodest aims already betray the sceptical thrust of this project, its desire, dixit Cavell, to heal the gap between self and world and to possess the world in its entirety. The way in which these quests are described, moreover, is suggestive of the imagery of grasping, perceiving and mastering which characterises the Cartesian project of knowledge as representation. In The Newton Letter, for instance, the narrator writes about the Lawless family, whose truth he wants to unearth: “Now I had another house to gaze at, and wonder about, with something of the same remote prurience.” And he describes his scrutiny of Charlotte’s doings as a “fix[ing] on her with the close-up lens of love” (11-12, 45). In Kepler, to give another example, the scientist’s quest is appropriately presented in terms of hunting: “He was after the eternal laws that govern the harmony of the world. Through awful thickets, in darkest night, he stalked his fabulous prey” (19). Just like the


hunter wants to master the wild animal, so the scientists want to submit anything strange and mysterious to the rational powers of the mind. In their pursuit of this high aim, the protagonists sceptically defy the limits of the human condition and go beyond what knowledge is traditionally considered capable of. In a hubristic attempt to grasp the truth of past, universe or self, they ignore, pace Nietzsche, the perspectival position of all knowledge and, pace Kant, the division between the phenomenal and the noumenal world. All protagonists conceive of their scientific work as something that brings them to a transcendent realm of order and harmony far removed from the chaotic diversity of commonplace existence. Kepler calls his astrological work “a thing apart, a realm of order to set against the ramshackle real world in which he was imprisoned” (20). And Gabriel Godkin seeks access to a “second, silent world which exists, independent, ordered by unknown laws, in the depth of mirrors” (21).

Yet, as their sceptical quest develops, the insistent denial of the commonplace world becomes more extreme. In order to reach their high aim, the protagonists feel they have to gainsay their corporeal nature and the concrete materiality of the world at large. Kepler’s negation of the physical for instance, manifests itself in the repeated protestations that he is “not ill” and that he will “Never die, never die” (29, 191-92). Even though Kepler is at times greatly attracted to the commonplace, much more so than Copernicus, he is always poignantly aware of the temporality of this physical world. Contemplating his children, for instance, he realises: “This is the world, that garden, his children, those poppies. I am a little creature, my horizons are near.” Yet, this apparent acceptance of the human condition is thwarted by “the thought of death”, like “a sudden drenching of icy water ... with a stump of rusted sword in its grasp” (96). In Birchwood, to give another example, Gabriel’s revul-sion of corporeality is evident in his disgusted discovery of the vagina:

I had imagined [it] as a nice neat hole, situated at the front, rather like a second navel, but less murky, a bright sun to the navel’s surly moon. Judge then of my surprise and some fright when … [I] found not so much a hole as a wound, underneath, uncomfortably close to that other baleful orifice. (13)

Later on, he employs the image of the wound again to describe his sexual encounter with Mag: “it was as though she had split open, had come asunder under my eyes. I knelt and goggled at the frightful wound, horrified” (131). The female wound is of course an apt metaphor for the


stain of physicality and mortality which women in Banville’s novels are generally tainted with. As Gabriel’s reaction indicates, this physicality is not something to explore but rather to flee from in horror, a reaction that the protagonists of Kepler, Doctor Copernicus and The Newton Letter share.

The results of these attempts to deny the physical and recuperate all forms of otherness in a rational theory of perfect harmony amounts also in these novels to a virtual death of the world. As in Doctor Copernicus, it is again in the imagery that the destructive nature of their quests is first revealed. In a revelation outside a pub, for instance, Gabriel Godkin believes he glimpses something of the eternal and unchanging Ding an Sich when he realises “that all movement is composed of an infinity of minute stillnesses” and thereby discovers what he calls “fixity within continuity” (128). Gabriel Swan, similarly, describes the effect of his mathematical representations on the world as follows:

Always I had thought of number falling on the chaos of things like frost falling on water, the seething particles tamed and sorted, the crystals locking, the frozen lattice spreading outwards in all directions. I could feel it in my mind, the creaking stillness, the stunned, white air. (109)

When he resolves to (more or less) give up science, on the other hand, he writes, “A frozen sea was breaking up inside me” (232). In short, the protagonists’ attempts to evade death have ultimately yielded but destruction – and death.

All protagonists, however, sooner or later realise the impossible and destructive nature of their scientific quests. If in Doctor Copernicus this realisation took the form of increasing doubt and despair, in the other science novels the various faults and failures are diagnosed with some more equanimity, causing the protagonists to waver between different positions. In Birchwood, for instance, Gabriel constantly alternates between an awareness that the truth cannot be grasped and a strong urge to do precisely that. Early in his narrative, Gabriel realises that “the past is incommunicable” (29). Yet, immediately afterwards he tries to capture the meaning of a childhood experience, or the precise nature of past events. Similarly ambivalent is his attitude towards his lost sister. Although he knows from the start that she is but an illusion, he continues to search for her. Like the audience of Prospero’s circus, he simply wants to be deceived: “I knew too that my quest, mocked and laughed at, was fantasy,


but I clung to it fiercely, unwilling to betray myself, for if I could not be a knight errant I would not be anything” (118). In spite of this quasi-permanent ambiguity, the last chapter of Birchwood offers not only a solution to the detective plot but also an acceptance of transcendent failure:

I began to write, as a means of finding them again, and thought that at last I had discovered a form that would contain and order all my losses. I was wrong. There is no form, no order, only echoes and coincidences, sleight of the hand, dark laughter. I accept it. (174)

If in Birchwood the scientific quest is primarily impossible, in the remaining novels of the science tetralogy, its restrictive and destructive qualities come to the fore. While Kepler hardly ever doubts the truth of his scientific discoveries, he does question their value at the end of his life:

What was it the Jew said? Everything is told us, but nothing explained. Yes. We must take it all on trust. That’s the secret. How simple. He smiled. It was not a mere book that was thus thrown away, but the foundation of a life’s work. It seemed not to matter. (191)

Following Nietzsche, Kepler comes to realise that even if scientific truth exists, it cannot show us how to live. What science can teach us, at best, is the meaning of things, but not their infinitely more interesting significance. As the Jew formulates it: “at the beginning God told his chosen people everything, so now we know it all – and understand nothing” (47, italics added).26 That some essential and basic quality of the world has slipped through their intellectual embrace is also what the other scientists painfully realise. In The Newton Letter, Newton echoes Kepler when he realises at “the loss of his precious papers” that “it doesn’t matter. It might be his life’s work gone, the Principia itself, the Opticks, the whole bang lot, and still it wouldn’t mean a thing.” His profound knowledge notwithstanding, Newton “no longer knows how to live” (22-23). Even in Birchwood, this distinction between knowledge and

26 The distinction between knowledge and understanding, or meaning and

significance is often made in Banville’s novels. Banville himself explains it as, “I would see meaning in the sense of an explicable, translatable content. You cannot translate a ‘life’ into another medium .... So it has no meaning, there is no meaning you could extract from it, but it has significance” (Hedwig Schwall, “An Interview with John Banville”, The European English Messenger, VI/1 [1997], 15). Meaning, it could be argued, stands for knowledge as certainty, fact, and truth, whereas significance refers to the more profound sense of things, which may help us to live our lives.


understanding is invoked, albeit less explicitly, in Gabriel’s realisation that while he has discovered the meaning of the plot hatched against him, he still fails to discern its deeper significance. He has solved the facts, but does not understand the mystery. In Mefisto, finally, explicit mention is made of this opposition when Gabriel rejects his scientific quest with: “the more I knew, the less I seemed to understand” (187). His knowledge of numbers has told him nothing about the significance of life itself.

What this significance exactly amounts is impossible to determine. Yet, the novels do provide some hints as to the qualities of life, which always elude our intellectual grasp. Likening his biographical enterprise to the work of an “embalmer”, complete with “syringe and formalin”, the narrator of The Newton Letter soon realises that he has but “fixed” a unified image of Newton, explaining away anything that diverged from it (21). Similarly, his mistaken interpretation of the Lawless family is the result of personal preconceptions and literary clichés, which simply overruled any odd or divergent elements. About Ottilie he remarks, “from the first I had assumed that I understood her absolutely, so there was no need to speculate much about her” (53). He realises his mistake only when she is gone and he recognises in a photograph her “essential otherness’, “Something … that when I was with her I missed” (78). The significance, which his representations fail to understand, is related to a sense of alterity that defies the subject’s self-centeredness. It is this significance, finally, which the narrator also locates in “commonplace things”: the things and people of ordinary life.

In Mefisto this mysterious sense of alterity is further related to death, that most elusive of categories which can never fully be known or represented. Twice in this narrative made up of parallels and mirrors, Gabriel Swan’s mathematical theories founder on the material insistence of death. When his mother dies, Gabriel locks himself into his room so as to “solve” her death with mathematics: “Ashburn, Jack Kay, my mother, the black dog, the crash, all this, it was not like numbers, yet it too must have rules, order, some sort of pattern” (109). Yet, he sadly fails to give death a place in his symmetrical universe, since he is simply unable to represent it. In the second part of the novel, however, he takes up the thread of his quest again, renewing his faith in a transcendent order. Predictably, his faith in the omnipotence of knowledge is destroyed again following Professor Kosok’s bitter query at the death of Adèle, “Where is your order now?” (233). The brute fact of death, in other words, cannot be overcome in scientific theories of harmony and order. It is an essential


aspect of ordinary reality which has to be accepted but cannot be explained.

Just like Copernicus, therefore, the scientists have to learn “how to die”, how to accept death as an irrecoverable dimension of human existence. In all five novels, this acceptance takes the form of a return to the ordinary, since it is in commonplace reality that human finitude is most intensely felt. Because of this opposition between the protagonists’ sceptical denial of the ordinary and their sudden confrontation with it, the ordinary in these novels is often described as the extraordinary. The commonplace is also the odd, the unexpected and the strange. This is especially clear in the many epiphanies, which punctuate Banville’s novels, and in which the ordinary gives way to a transcendent revelation. In addition, this sense of awe at the commonplace is associated with a child’s perspective on the world, which precedes habit and predetermination. In Birchwood, it is Ida who personifies this view. Gabriel writes about her:

The world for her was a perpetual source of wonder. She had never recognized the nature of habit, the ease which it brings, and therefore it was the continuing oddity of things that fascinated her. It was not innocence, but, on the contrary, a refusal to call ordinary the complex and exquisite ciphers among which her life so tenuously hovered. (122)

For Ida, the commonplace is always unique. This attitude of childlike wonder characterises at times Kepler as well. Going against habit and abstraction, Kepler can sometimes be seen to gaze at the commonplace with absolute attention, remarking: “Always I am being met with these shocks, when the thing before my nose turns out suddenly to be other than I believed it to be” (112). In Birchwood, finally, this notion of the ordinary is, in a Cavellian mode, linked to both Wittgenstein and Romanticism, as Gabriel closes his narrative with obvious references to both:

Spring has come again, St Brigid’s day, right on time. The harmony of the seasons mocks me. I spend hours watching the sky, the lake, the enormous sea. This world. I feel that if I could understand it I might then begin to understand the creatures who inhabit it. But I do not understand it. I find the world always odd, but odder still, I suppose, is the fact that I find it so, for what are the eternal verities by which I measure these temporal aberrations? Intimations abound, but they are felt only, and words fail to transfix them. Anyway, some secrets are not to be discovered under pain of who knows what retribution, and whereof I cannot speak, thereof I must be silent. (175)


Having foresworn his quest for the meaning of the past, Gabriel fixes his attention on the present again. He considers the world and its people and wonders anew at the commonplace oddity of these things. In Romantic fashion, he interprets the ordinary as infused with a sense of mystery, which can neither be known nor expressed. Instead this mystery is felt or experienced in Wordsworthian “intimations”. This Mystische, as Wittgenstein calls it, lies outside language games and to try to capture it in words is to be guilty of scepticism and scientific hubris. The retribution Gabriel refers to may well be the death of the world – precisely a “transfixing” – which Cavell diagnoses as the fate of scepticism.

Still, none of the protagonists can really be satisfied with a mere registering of the ordinary in epiphanies or with a silent tribute to its mystery in childlike wonder. In this merely passive mode of acknowledgement, it seems, the hierarchy between self and other has simply been turned upside down and the self is lost in the process. Hence, in one way or another, the protagonists try to find an alternative beyond acceptance, a new mode of representation which would achieve a better balance between the opposite poles of self and other, or mind and matter. In Doctor Copernicus, this alternative mode of representation took the form of supreme fictions and in Birchwood Gabriel attempted to show Das Mysthische. Given the poetic or aesthetic terms in which these alternatives are couched, they will be further investigated in Part Two. In the next chapter, however, I intend to focus on the more fleeting “visions of alterity” in Banville’s epiphanies.

Chapter Two Books of Revelation: Epiphany in the Science Tetralogy

The moments of happiness – not the sense of well-being, Fruition, fulfilment, security or affection, Or even a very good dinner, but the sudden illumination – We had the experience but missed the meaning,

T.S. Eliot, Four Quartets, The Dry Salvages, II

From Banville’s first short stories onwards, epiphany has been the hallmark of his writing. In several fleeting moments throughout his novels, the narrative grinds to a stop, the plot is interrupted and the oddness of the ordinary is focused on. Whether in the form of memories, reflections or sudden discoveries, these moments usually impart a lyrical quality to the writing, which makes them a crucial part of Banville’s frequently praised poetic style.1 In novels such as Birchwood, Mefisto and Ghosts, this lyrical, dreamlike dimension is more pronounced than in the plot-bound narratives of Doctor Copernicus, Athena and The Untouch-able. Hence, it is also in the former novels that epiphanies are most profusely present. Given this abundance, it is surprising that no thorough investigation of epiphany in Banville’s writings has as yet been attempted. Perhaps these moments are considered too self-evident to merit in-depth treatment; or perhaps they are judged too strong a part of every novel in particular to justify a more general investigation. In any case, the critical remarks on Banville’s epiphanies are few and when they are made, they often restrict the notion of epiphany to its Modernist, or Joycean

1 Banville himself often expresses this poetic ambition in interviews, as when he talks

about his attempts to “make prose have the weight of, and be as demanding as poetry” or acknowledges “Maybe they’re right, maybe the novel shouldn’t be turned into something that could have the same density and concentration that poetry strives for. But I’m not interested in writing anything else” (John Banville, “A World Without People”, The Irish Times, 29 September 2000; Fintan O’Toole, “Stepping into the Limelight – and the Chaos”, The Irish Times, 21 October 1989).


conception.2 Faced with an Irish author, critics seem to forget that the tradition of epiphany is a long one, which need not be restricted to Joyce and Modernist literature.

Epiphaineia, revelation, epiphany The term epiphany derives from the Greek epiphaneia, and denotes in Greek culture the beneficial manifestations of gods and goddesses to ordinary mortals. The Dictionnaire de spiritualité writes in its definition of epiphany: “Cette présence de la divinité est beaucoup plus qu’une manifestation visible, c’est une présence efficace.”3 The manifestation of god or goddess is efficacious, in the sense that he or she actively intervenes in human life, providing an explanation of the way things are for subsequent generations. In early written literature, accounts of the epiphanic manifestation of gods in human life are equally common. In the Old Testament the term is used “pour exprimer le caractère lumineux de la face de Yahvé à son peuple”; and in the Epistles of Paul, it refers to “la ‘venue’ du Seigneur dans la chair”. The word then became fixed in its reference to the miracles of Christ as manifestations of his divine power and was subsequently canonised in the Feast of Epiphany. In short, in its biblical use epiphany again denotes the way in which the spiritual reveals itself in the material for the purpose of intervening in a beneficial way in the lives of ordinary mortals. In this theological sense, the term rested at ease until James Joyce chose to appropriate it for his aesthetic theory.

It is well known how Joyce came to collect what he called epiphanies – dream-fragments, overheard conversations, descriptions of objects and experiences – for the benefit of art and the whole of mankind. As Robert Langbaum points out, Joyce’s secular appropriation of the religious epiphany is part of his attempt to establish “art as a rival religion”.4 In Stephen Hero epiphany is defined as “a sudden spiritual manifestation,

2 Imhof, detects Joycean epiphanies in certain stories in Long Lankin (Introduction,

26); Joseph McMinn remarks on the importance of “special moments of revelation, like Joyce’s epiphanies” in Birchwood (“An Exalted Naming”, Canadian Journal of Irish Studies, XIV/1 [1988], 21) and Claude Fierobe writes in relation to Mefisto, “Banville, qui avait été fasciné par Dubliners, se souvient des épiphanies Joyciennes” (“Cygne et Signes”, Etudes Irlandaises, XVI/3 [1991], 102).

3 Dictionaire de spiritualité, ed. Charles Baumgarten, Paris, 1958, 863-65. 4 Robert Langbaum, “The Epiphanic Mode in Wordsworth and Modern Literature”,

in Moments of Moments, ed. Wim Tigges, Amsterdam, 1999, 39.

Chapter Two: Books of Revelation 51

whether in the vulgarity of speech or of gesture or in a memorable phase of the mind itself”, and related to Aquinas’ aesthetic quality of “claritas”: “After the analysis which discovers the second quality the mind makes the only logically possible synthesis and discovers the third quality. This is the moment which I call epiphany.”5 Although theoretically, epiphany is here presented as a quality of objects, in Joyce’s literary practice itself it has more of a subjective meaning, as a trivial experience is invested with personal or artistic significance.

Although Joyce’s definition of epiphany has been of enormous influence on Modernist writing and literary scholarship, he appears not to have been the first to use the term in a secular sense. Meyer Abrams points out that R.W. Emerson introduces for

the Moment of revelation in the trivial fact … a term which to the modern ear is portentous. “The aroused intellect”, he says, when it confronts “facts, dull, strange, despised things”, finds “that a fact is an Epiphany of God”.6

In this way, Emerson extends the theological meaning of epiphany so that it meets up with the Romantic return to the ordinary and its cult of “the Moment”, which Abrams defines as “a deeply significant experience in which an instant of consciousness, or else an ordinary object or event, suddenly blazes into revelation; the unsustainable moment seems to arrest what is passing, and is often described as an intersection of eternity with time” (385).

This development of epiphany – from religious inspiration through Romantic revelation to Modernist symbolism – is usually placed in a chronological framework. Still, it might prove equally worthwhile to consider whether these three instantiations of epiphany could not exist side by side as distinct modes of the same literary moment. After all, the religious, Romantic and Modernist epiphany are but variations on the same theme. They are all visible manifestations of a spiritual truth, regardless of whether this truth is religious or psychological; objective or subjective; individual or universal. In order to define the distinctive traits of Banville’s epiphanies, it seems, all three existing variants should be considered and described. This classification is therefore the preliminary exercise I will embark on before turning to the epiphanies themselves.

5 James Joyce, Stephen Hero, London, 1969, 216-18. 6 M.H. Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism, New York, 1973, 413.


Incidentally, Ashton Nichols already clears the way for such a classification in his interesting study The Poetics of Epiphany. He distinguishes the earlier religious or “traditional” epiphany from what he calls the “literary” one.7 Although the latter includes for him both Romantic and Modernist epiphanies, his detailed investigation of concrete realisations of this literary epiphany betrays more distinctions between both than his classification allows for.

The “critical difference” between religious and Romantic epiphanies exists, according to Nichols, “in the attribution of the source and the significance of the experience” (27). “The religious convert or the religiously inspired poet always ascribes a specific source and meaning to the event”, while for the Romantic, “the experience itself is more important than any particular interpretation of its meaning”. In Nichols’ further description of the religious epiphany, the prophet or poet is curiously both passive and active. On the one hand, Nichols argues, the theological epiphany is in the true sense of the word an inspiration: “a spirit inspires the prophet or poet with a truth that comes from outside the self and is incorporated into the soul of the recipient” (13). Consequently, the prophet presents himself as “a vessel, a passive recipient” for the external manifestation of the divine in the mundane. On the other hand, the seer also has an important role concerning the interpretation of the event. As Nichols puts it, “The recipient of divine visitation is always the one who reports the meaning of the event”. In this sense, the theological epiphany is primarily intellectual. Interpretation takes precedence over experience; the spiritual truth which is revealed is far more important than the trivial incident through which it is revealed.

Precisely the opposite holds true for the Romantic epiphany in which experience and perception are valued over interpretation. Hence, if the religious epiphany bears witness to the power of God, the Romantic epiphany testifies to the power of the poetic mind, which is considered peculiarly sensitive to the mysterious significance of the everyday. “The emphasis”, Nichols writes,

is not on seeing a new thing, but on seeing a familiar thing in a new way …. The feeling of the experience – its expansiveness, its atemporality, its mysteriousness – always seems greater than any interpretation placed on its objects. (28)

7 Ashton Nichols, The Poetics of Epiphany, Tuscaloosa, 1987.


Still, in Romantic poetry the epiphany is frequently couched in terms highlighting the harmony between self and world which made it possible for the epiphany to be experienced in the first place. The epiphany exceeds subjective experience by reflecting a world which is “shared by all those who recognise its significance” (21). In the Romantic epiphany, finally, the trivial object also gains importance, since it is in ordinary reality that its mysterious significance manifests itself.

Although the Modernist epiphany has a lot in common with these Romantic spots of time, some crucial differences can nevertheless be discerned. These can be related to the use of epiphany in a narrative rather than a lyric structure and to the dimensions of character, plot and narration thus added to it.8 For what distinguishes the Modernist epiphany from its predecessors is its greater psychological significance. In Joyce’s epiphanies, Nichols observes, “a theological concept takes on psychologi-cal application” (11). While the Romantic epiphany reveals a universal unity of being, to be shared by all kindred spirits, in the texts of Joyce and Virginia Woolf epiphanies are limited to a particular individual. A second difference concerns the verbal or stylistic importance of the Joycean epiphany. From a more Romantic conception of the epiphany as a “spiritual manifestation”, Modernist writers move to a use of the epiphany as a stylistic device:

Epiphany in Joyce moves from Aquinas’ epistemological claritas to become a completely verbal strategy …. As Joyce evolved a more conscious literary theory, he moved away from autobiographical epiphanies to the suggestion that the artist could represent a symbolic imaginative essence as an epiphany in literature. (10-11)

The epiphany becomes a moment of art, whereby the consciously created outer experience is symbolic for an inner state of mind. The Modernist epiphany is the product of the creative imagination of the artist, which the reader is invited to recognise and affirm.

From the foregoing brief sketch it becomes clear that the characteristics distinguishing the three modes of epiphany – interpretation vs. inspiration; self-effacement vs. self-assertion; creation vs. revelation – are also those which governed the different conceptions of representation.

8 Interesting in this respect is Robert Langbaum’s observation that “the epiphanic

mode appears in fiction just at the time when fiction begins to approximate the intensity of lyric” (46). Epiphanies interrupt the narrative and make it more static whereby the intensification of objects and scenes gains precedence – momentarily at least – over plot.


Like representation, after all, epiphany mediates between mind and matter in an attempt to make sense of the world. Yet, if in epistemological representation, as we saw earlier, the role of the subject tended to dominate, in epiphany the mysteries of the objective world gain prominence. Hence, it is not surprising that the epiphanies in Banville’s science tetralogy and Birchwood are usually presented as welcome alternatives to the sceptical project of science.

The “answering angel” of science Given the Anglo-Irish literary tradition to which Banville is usually taken to belong, critics have tended to identify the lyrical moments in his novels with Joycean epiphanies. However, only in the stories of Long Lankin – which the author himself called “bad imitations of Joyce” – can Modernist epiphanies be found. The stories all culminate in a Joycean epiphany, which provides the protagonist with a sudden insight into the meaning of his/her life or present frame of mind. Towards the end of “Nightwind”, for instance, Morris suddenly realises how much he has lost by marrying into a world where he will forever be an outsider:

On the table beside him a half-eaten sandwich lay beside his bottle. There was an olive transfixed on a wooden pin. Muted voices came in from the hall, and outside in the fields a shout flared like a flame in the dark and then was blown away .... He felt something touch him, something of the quality of silence that informs the saddest music. It was as if all the things he had ever lost had somehow come back to press his heart with a vast sadness. (67)

The shout blown away and the olive transfixed on a pin can both be read as symbols of Morris’ creative talent silenced and solidified by the oppressive material world of his wife’s family. Even if this is but “an unsophisticated attempt at conjuring up an intricate and delicate emotional situation”, as Imhof puts it, the influence of Joyce’s epiphanies is never-theless evident (Introduction, 27). In his subsequent works, however, Banville seems to have found an alternative epiphanic voice. From Birchwood onwards, Banville’s epiphanies no longer resemble Joyce’s but adhere more closely to the earlier Romantic and religious traditions. As will become clear in what follows, moreover, both modes are realised in the novels in ways that place them, initially at least, at the opposite sides of the representational tensions played out in these novels.


A first important function of epiphany in the scientists’ various quests concerns its role in the process of discovery itself. In a number of epiphanic moments the true nature of reality is revealed in a flash of divine inspiration. In the case of Doctor Copernicus and Kepler these epiphanic discoveries reveal the true laws of the universe; in Birchwood and Mefisto they provide insight into the true nature of life itself. When Gabriel Godkin is playing an idle game in a country pub, for instance, the following fundamental fact transpires to him:

It came to me with the clarity and beauty of a mathematical statement that all movement is composed of an infinity of minute stillnesses, not one of which is exactly the same as any other and yet not so different either. It was enormously pleasing, this discovery of fixity within continuity. (128)

Later on, Gabriel further interprets this revelation as his personal discovery of the temporal nature of human existence. In several other novels as well, the pub is a privileged place for epiphany. Watching “the goatish dancers circling in a puddle of light from the tavern window”, Kepler suddenly discovers his important physical law:

all at once, out of nowhere, out of everywhere, out of the fiddle music and the flickering lights and the pounding of heels, the circling dance and the Italian’s drunken eye, there came to him the ragged fragment of a thought. False. What false? That principle. One of the whores was pawing him. Yes, he had it. The principle of uniform velocity is false. (72)

In a similar moment outside a pub, Gabriel Swan suddenly rediscovers the principle of order which makes chance but the misleading appearance of things (183). Even that most rational of scientists, Copernicus, receives his greatest scientific discovery in a sudden revelation. When Copernicus is pondering the clouds, the wind and the rain “beat[ing] upon the window”, the true nature of the universe is suddenly revealed to him: “Calmly then it came, the solution, like a magnificent great slow golden bird alighting in his head with a thrumming of vast wings” (84).

That the foregoing fragments – only a representative selection – are all epiphanies of a kind, will be clear. Most of the defining characteristics of the epiphany are indeed satisfied.9 The scientific discoveries are unexpected and brief; they are brought about by a trivial situation; and the

9 Robert Langbaum lists most of these criteria as “incongruity”, “insignificance”, “suddenness”, “fragmentation”, and “momentaneousness” (44).


spiritual truth revealed is in discrepancy with these trivial surroundings. Furthermore, even though these revelations are not in any sense religious, their peculiar structure suggests a connection with this traditional mode of epiphany. After all, in these, what I would call, scientific epiphanies a transcendent truth is suddenly seen. Even if a markedly religious meaning is absent, this truth transcends the material reality through which it manifests itself, as it is concerned with the super-sensible, though rational, realm of order and harmony. Therefore, both Gabriels discover “fixity within continuity” or “order beyond chaos” and the astronomers receive the eternal laws that govern the universe. The transcendent nature of the epiphanies is further borne out by the imagery of sky, ice and light, which has been shown to characterise the spiritual realm of harmony and truth in Banville’s science novels.

As in the religious epiphany, Banville’s protagonists are all presented as passive recipients of this transcendent truth, as phrases such “It came to me”, “there came to him”, “something surged within me”, and “Calmly then it came” indicate. The revelation is described as welling up from some subconscious realm, or even descending from a super-conscious one. The transcendent truth comes from the outside and merely enters the inspired individual. The metaphors with which these visitations are most powerfully expressed in Banville’s novels are those of bird and angel. In Doctor Copernicus the solution is likened to “a magnificent great slow golden bird” and Kepler’s first major epiphanic discovery is described as follows: “He had seen it once, briefly, that mythic bird, a speck, no more than a speck, soaring at an immense height. It was not to be forgotten, that glimpse” (19). This mythic bird is then joined to the much more loaded image of angel: “He waited, listening for the whirr of wings. On that ordinary morning in July came the answering angel” (27). Similarly, the morning after his second scientific revelation Kepler wonders, “And why had this annunciation been made to him, what heaven-hurled angel had whispered in his ear?” (73). The account of Kepler’s third and final epiphanic discovery reads:

When the solution came, it came, as always, through a back door of the mind, hesitating shyly, an announcing angel dazed by the immensity of its journey. One morning in the middle of May, while Europe was buckling on its sword, he felt the wing-tip touch him, and heard the mild voice say I am here. (182)


The angel, traditionally a mediating figure between the spiritual and the material world, is of course in itself an apt image for the epiphany. Additionally, the religious references of this image as well as of the ominous words “I am here” should not be overlooked. They suggest an even closer analogy between our scientists and the divinely inspired prophets, who claimed to have heard the mild voice of God in the wilderness.

The triviality of the perception which brings about the epiphanies quoted above, finally, has already been remarked upon as a discerning trait of the epiphanic mode in general. The revelations occur while the protagonists are drinking in a pub, watching people dance or idly gazing at the stars. Several other scientific epiphanies in the novels are also induced by entirely ordinary events, as when Kepler pricks in his finger with a compass, or Gabriel Godkin perceives a single rose on his bedside table. As in the religious epiphanies, moreover, the trivial incident is soon superseded by the intellectual interpretation subsequently accorded to it. Thus Gabriel Godkin interprets the fixity he glimpses through his fingers as a manifestation of the fundamental order of the world, and Kepler reads the “general rout” he witnesses as a negation of uniform velocity. The intellectual dimension of these interpretations bears further witness to the religious structure of Banville’s scientific epiphanies.

In spite of this rational aspect, however, the epiphanic discovery remains manifestly irrational when compared to the traditional presenta-tion of scientific discovery as the result of research and reasoning. On a first level, the irrational dimension of the scientific project is part of Banville’s explicit intention to demonstrate, following Koestler, that science often proceeds through dreaming and sleepwalking rather than active, rational research.10 Still, the sometimes all too obvious references to theological inspiration and the often absurd discrepancy between trivial circumstances, irrational vision and scientific discovery could also point to another conclusion. Perhaps Banville is merely poking fun at the

10 Koestler outlines this argument in the Preface to The Sleepwalkers: “The progress

of Science is generally regarded as a kind of clean, rational advance along a straight ascending line; in fact it has followed a zigzag course, at times almost more bewildering than the evolution of political thought. The history of cosmic theories, in particular, may without exaggeration be called a history of collective obsessions and controlled schizophrenias; and the manner in which some of the most important individual discoveries were arrived at reminds one more of a sleepwalker’s performance than an electronic brain’s” (11).


possibility of these revelations. Perhaps he sees these pseudo-divine inspirations as but part of the illusions concerning order and harmony which delude the protagonists for much of their lives. After all, towards the end of their narrative the protagonists come to the conclusion that the transcendent meaning revealed in the epiphanies is false. Or rather, it is neither true nor false but simply not adequate. Gabriel Godkin comes to accept that the existence of a lost sister, which he saw as the ordering principle of his life, is a myth and that the single harmonious plan he is searching for, the “form which would contain and order all [his] losses” cannot be found (174). Copernicus realises that the physical laws of the universe he believed to have revealed are but saving the phenomena. Even Gabriel Swan has to accept that his mathematical co-ordinates cannot decompose the chaos of the universe into the underlying patterns and particles of order. In short, if the truth revealed in the epiphany is somehow wrong, this inevitably tarnishes the image of the epiphany as well. In addition, the sceptical nature of the protagonists’ deluded quests cannot but fail to influence our reading of the scientific discoveries. For, if the quest for order is a hubristic attempt to grasp the world in its entirety, perhaps the epiphanic method of this quest is not entirely free from mastery and manipulation either.

These suspicions concerning the truth or value of scientific epiphanies are further strengthened in The Newton Letter, the satiric interlude of the tetralogy. In this novella the narrator receives a revelation which grants him a whole new understanding of life. The epiphany arrives rather unexpectedly at a moment of inebriation at a party, and these trivial circumstances blossom into a grand revelation about the meaning of life in general. Like his fellow scientists, furthermore, the scholar in The Newton Letter has to concede at the end that this conception of the order of life is somehow wrong, that it is defied by reality itself. In short, this epiphany conforms rather well to scientific-religious epiphanic mode defined before. The single but very significant deviation from this standard is, however, that this revelation does not really concern the laws of the universe as in Kepler and Doctor Copernicus, nor the hidden temporal order of the world as in Birchwood and Mefisto, but merely the organisation and interpretation of a personal life. The epiphany does not reveal an otherworldly truth, but the comparably trivial fact that the narrator is in love with his landlady. In itself, this would not be so ridiculous – a very serious epiphany in Birchwood provides Gabriel with the insight that he has his lost twin-sister – were it not for the fact that


Banville obviously exaggerates the discrepancy between this trivial insight and the importance the pompous narrator attaches to it:

And then all faded, Bunny, her fat husband, their brats, the chairs, the tattered cups, all, until only Charlotte and I were left, in this moment at the end of a past that was now utterly revised. I hiccupped softly. (40)

It is evident that Banville is poking fun at the narrator’s “revelation” which causes him to think that his life – past, present and future – is all of a sudden crystal-clear: “the secret pattern of the past months was now revealed” (43). The epiphany is simply too much the revelation the narrator had been waiting for all along, yearning as he did for some event that would bring significance to his life. By thus ridiculing the epiphanic mode and the absurdity of the narrator’s ordering schemes, Banville clearly lives up to the satiric potential of The Newton Letter. Yet, in the context of the tetralogy as a whole this satiric epiphany cannot but affect the other, more heroic ones as well. For, if the epiphany in this novella is very much a self-fulfilling prophecy, the same could be said of the other discoveries. After all, all of Banville’s protagonists are longing for inspiration. Hence, as befits the satire of a classical Greek tetralogy, The Newton Letter re-enacts the tragedies of the other three novels in a manner that highlights not only the absurdity of its own story, but affects that of the supposedly tragic failures as well.

Finally, the value of the scientific epiphanies is qualified by their opposition to the Romantic intimations of the everyday. As we have seen before, the scientists’ arrogant quests for transcendent truths, in which the scientific epiphanies play a constituent part, are most strongly questioned in the novels through their opposition to the everyday. An acknowledge-ment of the ordinary world and an acceptance of the limitations of being human stand in stark contrast to the hubristic quest when the protagonists realise that science has not provided the longed-for understanding of life, but merely empty categories of knowledge and meaning. Truth can perhaps not be grasped or spoken, but merely be felt and shown. According to Gabriel Godkin this is all human beings are ever granted:

Listen, listen, if I know my world, which is doubtful, but if I do, I know it is chaotic, mean and vicious, with laws cast in the wrong moulds, a fair conception gone awry, in short an awful place, and yet, and yet a place capable of glory in those rare moments when a little light breaks forth, and something is not explained, not forgiven, but merely illuminated. (33)


As Gabriel’s description suggests, the antidote to the quest for knowledge is realised, once again, in occasional “rare moments” in which – in literal illustration of the world epi-fainein – something of the elusive significance of the world comes to “light”.

“Those rare moments” Indeed, in Birchwood and the science tetralogy several other moments can be found which are not part of the protagonists’ transcendent quest for order, but interrupt this quest with sudden wonder at the concrete manifestations of the commonplace. In these epiphanies the habitual perception of the world is suspended and a familiar thing is seen in a new way. Kepler’s amazed perception of a crawling snail is a case in point: “God’s mute meaningless creatures, so many and so various. Sometimes the world bore upon him suddenly, all that which is without apparent pattern or shape, but is simply there” (31). In their focus on the everyday, these glimpses closely resemble the Romantic mode of epiphany. A particular perception – of nature, music, or ordinary surroundings – suddenly inspires the sensitive beholder with a transcendent feeling of mysterious significance. In Romantic vein, moreover, the experience is usually embedded in nature and prompts a sense of harmony with the world at large. In the science novels, in particular, these are the moments when the protagonists come closest to an experience of sheer happiness. Upon watching his children play at a pond, Kepler feels how “The great noisome burden of things nudged him, life itself tipping his elbow”, and wonders, “Was it possible, was this, was this happiness?” (108). Even when this expansive feeling is expressed or interpreted later on, the interpretation remains rather vague and never reaches that intellectual all-encompassing dimension of the scientific epiphanies. The trivial percep-tion remains the focal point of the epiphany, since it is within the ordinary that the transcendent comes to light, thereby heightening its beauty and truth. Because of this embeddedness within and attention to the commonplace, the epiphanies most closely realise the lesson of acknow-ledgement, which the protagonists are confronted with at the end of their narrative. In this way, they function as an antidote to the scientific quest and its epiphanic discoveries.

Copernicus’ deathbed lesson, for instance, appropriately closes on an epiphanic moment in which the headstrong scientist, called again by his first name, finally resigns himself to the call of the everyday:


Nicolas, straining to catch that melody, heard the voices of evening rising to meet him from without: the herdsman’s call, the cries of children at play, the rumbling of carts returning from the market; and there were other voices too, of churchbells gravely tolling the hour, of dogs that barked afar, of the sea, of the earth itself, turning in its course, and of the wind, out of huge blue air, sighing in the leaves of the linden. All called and called to him, and called, calling him away. (242)

Incidentally, music or song are favourite images of Banville to denote this “action in our poor world of otherworldly truths”. Kepler’s Easter day epiphany is associated with “the sound of bells, and it is with “a deep black note booming through the world’s limpid song” that Gabriel Godkin characterises his sense of revelation upon witnessing the love-making of his parents. Describing the event with the typical terms of flowers, music and air, Gabriel concludes: “I felt, what shall I say, that I had discovered something awful and exquisite, of immense, unshakeable calm.” Later on, he further interprets this as follows:

I am not saying that I had discovered love, or what they call the facts of life, for I no more understood what I had seen than I understood Mama’s tears, no, all I had found was the notion of – I shall call it harmony. How would I explain, I do not understand it, but it was as if in the deep wood’s gloom I had recognized, in me all along, waiting, an empty place where I could put the most disparate things and they would hang together, not very elegantly, perhaps, or comfortably, but yet together, singing like seraphs. (32-33)

In a typical Wordsworthian move, in other words, Gabriel recollects an epiphanic childhood experience and subsequently interprets it in terms of a general harmony of self and world. The uncertainty accompanying his interpretation in remarks such as “how would I explain” or “what shall I say” seems to illustrate that the sense of significance experienced in the Romantic epiphanies can never be resolved in a single meaning. Yet, viewed from a more sceptical perspective, the hesitation can also be taken to cast doubt on the authenticity of the epiphany itself, as it emphasises


the Nachträglichkeit of the meaning revealed.11 Perhaps Gabriel’s epiphany does not really afford a glimpse into the hidden harmony of life; perhaps this sudden sense of order is not really experienced, but retrospectively established in function of his narrative. Or, in the words of Victor Maskell:

I was pondering the question, which I have pondered before, of whether such great revelatory moments really do occur, or if it is only that, out of need, our lives so lacking in drama, we invest past events with a significance they do not warrant.12

In other sly ways too, doubt is cast on the value of the Romantic epiphanies in the early science novels. Take the following “rare moment” from Kepler. The scientist and his wife have taken refuge in Baron Hoffman’s house after quarrels with Tycho Brahe. Kepler is busy explaining how the Dane has mistreated him when the following fragment occurs:

But there he faltered, and turned, listening. Music came from afar, the tune made small and quaintly merry by the distance. He walked slowly to the window, as if stalking some rare prize. The rain shower had passed, and the garden brimmed with light. Clasping his hands behind him and swaying gently on heel and toe he gazed out at the poplars and the dazzled pond, the drenched clouds of flowers, that jigsaw of lawn trying to reassemble itself between the stone balusters of a balcony. How innocent, how inanely lovely, the surface of the world! The mystery of simple things assailed him. A festive swallow swooped through a tumbling flaw of lavender smoke. It would rain again. Tumty tum. He smiled, listening: was it the music of the spheres? Then he turned, and was surprised to see the others as he had left them, attending him with mild expectancy. (60-61)

At first blush this fragment has all the characteristics of a standard Romantic epiphany. While perceiving entirely ordinary things – a wet garden, birds, a small tune – Kepler suddenly becomes aware of

11 In Vocabulaire de la Psychanalyse, this Freudian term (in French, après coup) is defined as follows, “des expériences, des impressions, des traces mnésiques sont remaniées ultérieurement en fonction d’expériences nouvelles, de l’accès à un autre dégrée de développement. Elles peuvent alors se voir conférer, en même temps qu’un nouveau sens, une efficacité psychique” (Jean Laplanche en J.B. Pontalis, Vocabulaire de la Psychanalyse, Paris, 33). In more general terms this temporal structure can be interpreted as the result of the constant rewritings of the past which consciousness performs in view of its current project.

12 John Banville, The Untouchable, London, 1997, 219.


something extraordinary, something mysterious, which transcends these commonplace things as well as himself. Moreover, the epiphany is not the result of an inspiration from outside, but of Kepler’s very own sensitivity, which is not shared by the other people present. The others merely look at him and Barbara “moaned softly in dismay”. The epiphany clearly disrupts the habitual perception of things, which results in a sudden awareness of the mystery or oddness of the commonplace.

Unlike the standard Romantic epiphany, however, Kepler’s revelation is part of a narrative situation. This particular moment will bring Kepler to apologise and make up with Tycho, and for this decision he will be rewarded with Tycho’s astronomical observations later on. The pragmatic quality of this epiphany inevitably desublimates its transcendent or Romantic nature. This undermining gesture is continued in the interpretation which Kepler adds to his transcendent experience. The lovely face of nature is first considered too much of a “mystery” to understand. Yet, no sooner is this mystery declared than it is denied in a remnant of folk meteorology which reads like a parody of the archetypal augural exercise: the dance of the swallow, this earthly counterpart of the scientific epiphanies’ angelic herald, is simply read as announcing rain. Just as abruptly does Kepler reduce the mysterious music, which he initially translates into the transcendent “music of the spheres”, to the mindless “Tumty tum” of a hackneyed little tune. If reality, in its meaningless beauty, transcended at first every interpretation, it is in a second movement brought down again to the concepts and categories of the rational subject. Kepler’s epiphany illustrates in this way the recuperative move which characterises many of Banville’s Romantic epiphanies where the otherwordly experience is brought down to worldly, or rather human, standards, through being named, classified, and incorporated into narrative and world-view. The mystery of the commonplace is given a quasi-rational explanation; the oddness of the ordinary is brought back again to the normal; and the otherness of reality is recuperated within the same. While the interpretative closure of these Romantic revelations brings them closer to the scientific or religious


prototype, their dialectical structure also links them to that other typically Romantic category of the sublime.13

In his standard interpretation of the sublime in The Critique of Judgement, Kant assigns to the sublime feeling a tripartite structure. In a first movement, the subject finds itself in its normal cognitive relation to objective reality, whereby the imagination synthesises the manifold sense perceptions into one concrete representation. In a second phase, this harmonious state is disrupted when the object perceived turns out to be excessive and overwhelming to such an extent that understanding and imagination can no longer synthesise the sense perceptions into a single representation. In the third, reactive phase of the sublime, the mind recovers the balance of subject and object by linking the greatness of nature, which can not be represented, to the greatness of man’s own Ideas of Reason which can not be represented or cognitively understood either. For, as Kant puts it,

we should esteem as small in comparison with ideas of reason everything which for us is great in nature as an object of sense; and that which makes us alive to the feeling of this supersensible side of our being harmonizes with that law.14

In short, much more than a hymn to Nature, the sublime is, for Kant, a glorification of the subject and the greatness of the human mind, capable of mastering reality and submitting it to Reason.

Returning to Kepler’s epiphany, it is clear that also here this dialectical structure can be recognised. The habitual perception of reality, shared by Kepler’s listeners, is disturbed when particular sense perceptions lead to a transcendent feeling of mystery. Yet, this feeling is quickly recuperated again through Kepler’s pseudo-rational interpretations which bring this mysterious significance back again to the realm of the

13 As far as popularity is concerned, the concept of the sublime seems to have passed

through a development that runs counter to that of epiphany. A hot topic in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries with philosophers such as Boileau, Burke and Hume, and poets such as Shelley and Wordsworth, the sublime was largely forgotten from the middle of the nineteenth century to the early twentieth (the heyday of the epiphany) and was only rediscovered at the end of the twentieth century. This resulted in several interesting studies such as Thomas Weiskel’s The Romantic Sublime (Baltimore, 1986) and Jack Voller’s The Supernatural Sublime (DeKalb, 1994). Both studies also provide a detailed analysis of that most profound investigation of the sublime and the beautiful in Kant’s Critique of Judgement.

14 Immanuel Kant, The Critique of Judgement, Oxford, 1952, 106 (§27).


subject. What distinguishes Kepler’s experience from the Kantian or Romantic sublime, however, is the air of triviality, which infuses both the objects invoking the revelation and the rational interpretation later accorded to them. In this way, Kepler’s epiphany heightens rather than resolves the gap between subject and object which opens up – albeit temporarily – in the Romantic sublime. Firstly, it is not just the inconceivably great which unsettles the epistemological adequation between subject and object in the understanding. It is, rather, ordinary reality itself that turns out to be suddenly strange and incomprehensible. Precisely that which is usually regarded as known and understood, reveals itself as elusive and obscure. Put differently, what human beings traditionally regard as same suddenly turns out to be other, causing the gap between self and world to be felt all the more strongly. Secondly, the inexpressible greatness of nature which Kepler experiences in the second phase is not matched by the transcendence of the Kantian Reason, but rather by an entirely trivial and only quasi-rational interpretation. Again, the discrepancy between subject and object which emerged earlier is not completely resolved and the subject’s rational or moral superiority fails to materialise. In short, by being too absurd, trivial or hesitant, the interpretative move of the Romantic moments in the early science novels fails to fully recuperate significance into meaning. Instead of realising an affirmation of the rational or Romantic subject, they allow for the objective dimension of the epiphany to manifest itself. In this way, they pave the way for yet another – perhaps postmodern – instantiation of the epiphanic mode, as the following analysis of curiously failed epiphanies in The Newton Letter and Mefisto proposes to demonstrate.

Postmodern epiphanies If in The Newton Letter scientific epiphanies are held up to ridicule, also the process of the Romantic epiphany is questioned and satirised. On several occasions in his narrative, the biographer draws attention to small, commonplace things which suddenly stand out with a certain significance: some boots left in the garden, the word succubus, or the queer back-side of the houses watched from the train. Unlike his predecessors, however, the narrator raises these elements on a platform without offering an explanation for their strange significance. However much he pines after a “fiery revelation to account for [his] crisis of faith”, he simply fails to resolve their significance into meaning (23). On his journey towards the


Ferns, for instance, he notes, “Out on Killiney bay a white sail was tilted at an angle to the world, a white cloud was slowly cruising the horizon” and wonders, “what has all this to do with anything? Yet such remembered scraps seem to me abounding in significance.” Again there is significance, but no meaning. The interpretation he offers, interestingly, is one which symbolises this lack of meaning itself: “Perhaps just that: the innocence of things, their non-complicity in our affairs” (1-2).

A similar consideration applies to the epiphanies in Mefisto, even though they are less obviously satirical. Returning home from one of his visits to Ashburn, Gabriel describes how,

Things shook and shimmered minutely, in a phosphorescent glow. Details would detach themselves from their blurred backgrounds, as if a lens had been focused on them suddenly, and press forward eagerly, with mute insistence, urging on me some large mysterious significance.

That trivial details – “A wash of sunlight on a high white wall, rank weeds spilling out of the windows of a tumbledown house, a dog in the gutter nosing delicately at a soiled scrap of newspaper” – acquire a special significance is certainly a trademark of the Romantic epiphany. However, something is lacking to make this epiphany genuine. This becomes evident when Gabriel continues, “They were like memories, but of things that had not happened yet”. Unlike the epiphanies in the previous novels, no feelings of harmony, unity or happiness can be attached to them. Instead, these “detached” things are strangely threatening, precisely because a meaningful frame is lacking. Reality remains “mute”, distant and indifferent (77).

This becomes especially clear when one confronts this would-be-epiphany with a very similar, successful one, which occurs in the story “Lovers” from Long Lankin. The protagonist in this story also observes a “lame dog that stood in the gutter sniffing delicately at a soiled scrap of newspaper” (18). Yet, the perception of this and other trivialities leads her to an epiphanic insight into the loneliness and emptiness of her life. The confidence of meaning of the Joycean epiphany is something Gabriel is totally deprived of. His sense of withdrawal of meaning is asserted even more directly in two related epiphanies in the second part of Mefisto. The lights of an aeroplane remind Gabriel of

a moment from long ago, when I was a child, there was nothing in it, I don’t know why I remembered it, just a moment on a bend on a hill


road, somewhere, at night, in winter, the wet road gleaming, and dead leaves spinning, and the light from a streetlamp shivering in the wind.

He then ventures to assign some meaning to this remembered moment: “Absence, I suppose, the forlorn weight of all that was not there” (158). As in The Newton Letter, it is but the meaning of meaninglessness which is revealed, the sense of an entirely mute significance.

This feeling of the strange absence or “non-complicity” of things is again repeated near the end of Mefisto, following an almost identical perception: “The hill road gleamed, the pines sighed, the light of the lamp over the door of the pub shivered in the wind. Absence, absence, the forlorn weight of all that was not there.” Significantly, this small epiphany occurs immediately after a most decisive one. The scene is Gabriel’s visit to a secret room in Dan’s pub where the latter keeps his old overweight mother amidst a room crowded with little objects. The scene strikes Gabriel immensely, yet he has to admit: “She had no meaning. She was simply there. And would be there, waiting, in that fetid little room, forever” (230). Although the special transcendent quality of the experience is felt, it cannot be solved in an interpretation.

In the context of the representational tensions played out in the science novels, it is clear that the meaningless epiphanies of The Newton Letter and Mefisto realise to an even greater extent the lesson of acknow-ledgement presented at the end of the science novels. After all, in the Romantic epiphanies found in Birchwood and Kepler, the openness to the everyday is still, however absurdly or tentatively, foreclosed in subjective attempts at interpretation. In The Newton Letter and Mefisto, on the contrary, such recuperative moves are only present as failures, which makes them a powerful witness of precisely those limits of human knowledge, and existence which the scientific epiphanies sought to deny. In these failed epiphanies, therefore, the existent discrepancies – between ordinary event and extraordinary experience or between objective mystery and subjective interpretation – are highlighted as lasting evidence for protagonist and reader alike that the gap between self and world cannot really be healed. Since the irreducible alterity of the world is thereby poignantly expressed, these negative epiphanies become the most powerful visions of alterity in the science tetralogy. Paradoxically, it is in their failure that they are successful, just as it is through lack of meaning that significance is strongly suggested. In this way, Banville’s visions of alterity might be considered peculiarly postmodern instantiations of epiphany. In an era which is no longer certain of religious dogma,


Romantic harmony or psychological truth, these failed revelations might be the ultimate way in which a sense of transcendence or spiritual significance, however vague and tentative, is registered. In these postmodern epiphanies, the essential alterity of the world is felt in the all too human attempts to deny it. Banville once said, “the only reason for doing art, is to show the absolute mystery of things”.15 There is probably no better way to show this mystery than in Banville’s own staging of so many inadequate attempts to reveal it.

15 Hedwig Schwall, “An Interview with John Banville”, The European English

Messenger, VI/1 (1997), 16.

PART TWO

SELF AND ART

Chapter Three Better Than Life: Banville’s Explicit Poetics

The great conquest is the conquest of reality. It is not enough to present life as, for a moment, it might have been.

Wallace Stevens, Opus Posthumous

However unsettling or significant Banville’s postmodern epiphanies may be, they nevertheless fail to realise a full-fledged alternative to the modern project of subjective mastery and sceptical despair presented in Birchwood and the science tetralogy. For one, these fleeting visions of alterity depend for their success on their sudden and momentaneous character and cannot be cultivated into a more lasting sense of wonder at the mystery of the world. Furthermore, the most powerful epiphanies tend to reverse the hierarchy between subject and object rather than achieve a better balance between both. The subject becomes overwhelmed by the alterity of the object world and can no longer deal with it in representation. That this state of passive acceptance or awe is not a possibility for ordinary human beings is demonstrated very clearly at the end of The Newton Letter and Mefisto where the narrators start to work again in spite of earlier misgivings. For “such a renunciation is not of this world”, as the narrator of The Newton Letter has it. And Gabriel Swan confesses that he “[has] begun to work again”, even though he adds apologetically: “It will be different this time, I think it will be different.” Instead of a total rejection of representation – only briefly realised in epiphanies – another mode of representation is required in which a new and better balance of subject and object can be achieved. In Doctor Copernicus, as we have seen, this alternative is referred to in terms of Wallace Stevens’ concept of supreme fiction. And also in the other novels, this alternative ideal is couched in terms of art rather than science, suggesting that it is in the specific representational domain of aesthetics that these solutions have to be considered. This is not to say that art is presented in the science tetralogy as an alternative or even a remedy to science.1 On the contrary, Banville

1 Tony Jackson is one of the only critics who defends this idea, see “Science, Art and the Shipwreck of Knowledge”, Contemporary Literature, XXXVIII/8, 510-33.


likens science to art in his novels as the scientific struggles of the different scientists are closely related to the problems the artist encounters in the process of artistic creation.

In several theoretical statements, first of all, Banville himself insists on this link, arguing:

As science moves away from the search for blank certainties it takes on more and more the character of poetic metaphor, and since fiction is moving, however sluggishly, in the same direction, perhaps a certain seepage between the two streams is inevitable.2

Scientist and artist are alike in their attempt to “impose a synthetic order upon the chaos”. It is this shared ability which Banville claims to have investigated in the science tetralogy. In these novels indeed, several descriptions and remarks can be found which invite a double reading in terms of science and art. In Doctor Copernicus, for instance, a lot of emphasis is placed on the creative and artistic nature of Copernicus’ discovery: “a radical act of creation” (83). Similarly, Kepler calls the result of his scientific work “a perfected work of art” (182); and Gabriel Swan’s appreciation of Kasperl’s mathematical formulas is signalled in his use of terms such as “intricacy” and “elegance” (69). Another sly hint can be found in Banville’s version of Osiander’s Preface to Copernicus’ De Revolutionibus. Whereas the original refers to Copernicus as “the present author”, Banville has written “the present artist”. In the same passage, Banville substitutes “art” for the original “work” in: “For it is sufficiently clear that this art is profoundly ignorant of the causes of the apparent movements” (Koestler, 527; Doctor Copernicus, 236).

While critical consensus has adopted this analogy between science and art, the conclusion of this comparison usually concerns Banville’s view on science. Critics read the tetralogy as showing that “scientific theory comprises much fiction”; or as “making statements about modern intellectual history and about the ways different disciplines interact in making that history”.3 In the following two chapters, however, I propose to reverse this line of inference so as to determine whether and how

2 John Banville, “Physics and Fiction: Order from Chaos”, The New York Times Book

Review, 21 April 1985, 42. 3 Brian McIlroy, “Patterns in Chaos: John Banville’s Scientific Art”, Studies,

LXXXI/1 (1992), 74; Keith M. Booker, “Cultural Crisis Then and Now: Science, Literature and Religion in John Banville’s Doctor Copernicus”, Critique, XXXVIII/2 (1998), 177.

Chapter Three: Better Than Life 73

Banville’s staging of scientific representation in the science tetralogy can teach us something about the processes and problems of artistic representation. This exercise will hopefully yield an insight into the rich meta-poetic dimension of Banville’s early novels as well as teach us something about the aesthetic allegiances of the author himself. At the same time, this analysis might help to clarify one of the hot topics in Banville studies, namely whether Banville’s novels should be read as modern or postmodern literary works.

A major stepping-stone in this investigation is the intertextual link which Banville installs between his science tetralogy and four modern, meta-poetic literary texts. Doctor Copernicus is linked to Wallace Stevens’ Notes Towards a Supreme Fiction and Kepler is paired off with Rilke’s Duineser Elegien. The structure of The Newton Letter is based on Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s Ein Brief and that of Mefisto on Goethe’s Faust. Although these literary texts are by no means the only ones referred to in the novels, their position is rendered especially prominent through repeated references in the text, the motto and/or the acknowledgements of the different novels. Frequently, the novels’ plot and thematic structure also betray the influence of these literary predecessors so that an intertextual dialogue concerning artistic methods, aims and paradigms ensues. Hence, a brief reading of the poetics advanced in these literary texts will provide a privileged way of access to the artistic paradigms which Banville foregrounds in his novels. An analysis of the extent to which Banville adopts or changes, agrees or disagrees with the poetics of Stevens, Rilke, Hofmannsthal and Goethe will therefore be the main issue of Chapter 4.

Before proceeding to this analysis, however, another source of information about Banville’s poetics needs to be considered, namely the author’s theoretical statements about art and aesthetics in essays, reviews and interviews. Although many critics draw on this material for occasional quotations in support of their own analyses, it has not yet been studied in any consistent way. In fact, Joseph McMinn explicitly warns the reader against such an attempt: “while we are certainly privileged to be offered ‘clues’ to Banville’s artistic process and his aesthetic, we should exercise some critical reserve in our impulse to see a consistency between opinions, ideas and practice.”4 He then proceeds to advise future critics to

4 Joseph McMinn, “Versions of Banville: Versions of Modernism”, in Contemporary

Irish Fiction, eds Liam Harte and Michael Parker, London, 2000, 80.


read Banville’s work in other contexts than those offered by the author himself.5 While McMinn is certainly justified in his reservations about Banville’s sincerity in interviews and essays – Banville may very well be “inventing Banville” – the author’s aesthetic consistency can only be judged when both practice and theory are subjected to detailed investigation. Since this is precisely the comparative project I will embark upon, I will take McMinn’s advice to heart and try to display the “critical reserve” needed in dealing with such deceptive matters. In order to be better armed for this tricky encounter, I will frame Banville’s often contra-dictory remarks about art in the context of three major artistic paradigms which circulate in traditional theories of aesthetic representation: art as mimesis, art as aletheia and art as poesis. Following the larger philosophical framework of representation sketched in the introduction, the tensions between these theories will again revolve around the familiar opposites of subject and object, or in this case, imagination and reality.

Art as mimesis In a double review of Vladimir Nabokov and Vladimir Maximov, Banville, with a boldness characteristic for his early reviews, divides writers into two classes:

One, the bluff honest fellow who thinks Wittgenstein is a place in Germany, for whom language is simply a tool for telling It like It is, and two, that rarer spirit in whose work content and style are inseparable.6

Nabokov is then hailed as a writer of class two and Maximov doomed to be the representative of class one. Far more than philosophical ignorance, what Banville berates the class-one-writers for, is their use of language as

5 Over the past thirty years, Banville has written a large number of reviews, mainly for Hibernia, The New York Review of Books and The Irish Times. A second important source of information are the largely meta-poetical essays which Banville has written for various collections or special journal editions. Although far less numerous, they contain more explicit statements about artistic and scientific paradigms than his reviews. Finally, there are the interviews, which Banville seems to give with growing frequency over the last years. Occasionally they contain interesting statements by the author on his own work, but often they reflect Banville’s peculiar skill at evading difficult questions or providing them with stereotypical answers. A near exhaustive list of Banville’s theoretical writings can be found in Ingo Berensmeyer’s Fictions of Order. I wish to thank Ingo for his help in gathering some of the material, especially the hard-to-find reviews from Hibernia.

6 John Banville, “Bread or Madeleines”, Hibernia, 30 May 1975, 20.


a mere tool for depicting reality, a mere means for bringing across a certain clear-cut meaning. This position can easily be recognised as mimetic in the strictest sense since it perceives of art as but a faithful imitation of reality. Art is considered heteronomous and object-centred as it is answerable to standards outside itself. While certain thinkers have, for this very reason, denounced art as deceitful, others have hailed mimetic art for religious and moral instruction. Either way, the paradigm of art as imitation has been very influential in Western culture and many variants have been developed, several of which mitigate an all too rigid mimeti-cism by appealing to other paradigms.7 Popular understanding of art is also of a mimetic nature, although several of its implications and precon-ceptions often remain unacknowledged. It is precisely against these that Banville likes to wage war in essays, reviews and interviews alike.

Firstly, the mimetic theory of art usually presupposes that artistic form is a neutral means for transmitting a specific content from sender to receiver, allowing the latter to decode the message and to secure the original meaning. In an interview with Hedwig Schwall, Banville emphatically rejects this: “You cannot translate ‘life’ into another medium. I cannot translate my life into ‘story’, ‘image’. So it has no meaning, there is no meaning you could extract from it” (17). A second premise concerns the content of art which the mimetic paradigm believes to exist before its encoding in a symbolic system and to remain unaffected throughout the process. In an early programmatic essay, Banville puts himself again on the other side of this belief:

The realist, as I understand him, takes the world as given: it is mountains and emotions, it is art and it is us. The artist’s job, therefore, is not to say the thing itself, but to speak about it. Narrative is all. Not the voice counts. Greatness in this conception of art is not achieved through form but content …. I wish I could believe it.8

Finally, the Platonic suggestion that art has to be judged by its correspondence to external reality, to the way “It [really] Is” is also countered by Banville who insists instead on the autonomy of art, on the artist’s secret desire “to write about nothing, to make an autonomous art,

7 In his seminal work Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature

(New York, 1953), Erich Auerbach links his conception of mimesis to that of art as construction, when he argues that realist art not only mirrors reality, but also contributes in an important way to the construction of that reality itself.

8 John Banville, “A Talk”, Irish University Review, XIV/1 (1981), 16.


independent of circumstance. (The artist, as Kafka puts it, is the man who has nothing to say.)”9 The novel form has to be “freed of its obligations to psychologize, to spin yarns, to portray reality” (“Physics”, 42).

Banville’s denunciation of the mimetico-realist tradition is further apparent in his vehement rejection of three distinct artistic forms: art as a means of political engagement, art as a personal expression and art as a form of moral education. Banville repeatedly cautions for an all too great dependence of art on reality, which easily develops into the total subordination of art to the claims of reality. Instead, the autonomy of art should be preserved, by avoiding explicit references to a political, personal or moral reality. In an early review of a former Eastern-bloc-writer, Banville provokingly claims, “Literature is one of the few human pursuits that transcends politics, and those with an axe, or a sickle to grind should keep their sweaty paws off it” (“Bread or Madeleines”, 20). A recent review of Coetzee’s novel Disgrace, to give another example, opens very tellingly with “Woe betide the novelist who lives in interesting times, or, more woeful still, in an interesting place”. In other reviews, Banville praises Coetzee as a writer who has kept sufficiently “aloof from any direct literary activism”, yet Disgrace he finds,

shockingly … crowded with the burning, or at least smouldering, and in some cases barely sputtering, issues of the day, including, unavoid-ably, racial antagonism, but also political correctness, animal rights, rape, gender conflict, the decline in academic standards, and more. 10

Of course Banville also recognises that literature is inevitably coloured by the circumstances of the writer’s place and time and even concedes that political concerns may be raised in art, but always indirectly, in a thoroughly aestheticised manner. In this respect, Banville often approvingly cites Adorno’s statement that

the unresolved antagonisms of reality reappear in art in the guise of immanent problems of artistic form. This, and not the deliberate injection of objective moments or social content, defines art’s relation to society.11

9 John Banville, “Samuel Beckett Dies in Paris Aged 83”, The Irish Times, 27 Dec.

1989, 19. 10 John Banville, “Endgame”, The New York Review of Books, 20 Jan. 2000, 23-25;

John Banville, “A Life Elsewhere”, The New York Review of Books, 20 Nov. 1997, 25. 11 Quoted e.g. in John Banville, “Writing on Life Support”, The New York Review of

Books, 16 Dec. 1993, 43.


Hence, Banville’s celebration of Coetzee’s earlier novels which are so intensely mediated, that they are wholly autonomous, and do not depend for their power on our knowledge of where and in what circumstances they were written. Surely, this is one of the identifying marks of authentic, enduring works of art.12

In a less immediately political context, Beckett is also praised for achieving an enviable autonomy in his art: “The failing light and the encroaching silence, the tedium and the laughter and the sorrow, these are not things transposed from the life into the work, but, rather they are the processes of the work itself” (“Samuel Beckett”, 19). If Banville thus considers it “the worst mistake to treat art as a commentary upon … the times of the artist”, he finds it as misguided to consider art an expression of the artist’s life. In “A Talk” Banville states provokingly, “when I hear the term self-expression applied to art I reach for my revolver” and defends instead a theory of art as understanding: “I believe, with Hermann Broch, that art is, or should be, a mode of objective knowledge of the world, not an expression of the subjective world” (15). Yet, if art is a mode of understanding, it is so for reader and writer alike. Commenting on the advice often given to young writers, namely “write about something you know”, Banville replies, “I always feel you should write about what you don’t know. Find out something.”13 In other words, it is only in and through the artistic form that knowledge and understanding, should come into existence.

Thirdly, Banville’s depreciative statements about the political and personal content of art also apply to the so-called moral value of art. In the interview with Fintan O’Toole, he claims: “Art is amoral, that is neither moral nor immoral.” And in a review of Susan Sontag’s The Volcano Lover, one reads, “Ms Sontag cares too much. Art is amoral; it does not take sides. The finest fictions are cold at the heart.”14 Yet, in a review of Ian McEwan’s The Innocent, Banville appears to contradict these statement when he reflects, “Something is out of balance in this book,

12 John Banville, “A Life Elsewhere”, The New York Review of Books, 20 Nov. 1997,

26. 13 Ciaran Carty, “Out of Chaos Comes Order”, The Sunday Times Tribune, 14 Sept.

1986, 18. 14 John Banville, “The Earth Moves”, The Irish Times, 3 Oct. 1992, 9.


some moral weight is missing”.15 Similarly, Banville disapproves of Nabokov’s Transparent Things because it has substituted “friendly warmth” for a tone that is “detached, falsely jocular and smug”.16 Still, the contradiction is only apparent. While Banville dismisses the idea that art should teach us moral lessons, he does attribute a certain ethical dimension to art: “art is a moral gesture in itself, is on the side of the good against the chaos and nihilism of the world” (O’Toole). Banville does not so much deny art any political, personal or moral dimension, as deplore the arrogance with which many realist writers claim to represent object-ively a pre-existent reality. To put it in Banville’s own self-confident diction, “only the second-rate imagine they have messages to deliver”.17

While Banville clearly rejects the mimetic paradigm in its strictest, Platonic sense, he does invoke a more modified, Aristotelian form of mimesis when he advocates the necessary engagement of art with reality. Although he repeatedly refers to the ideal of l’art pour l’art and to the artist’s secret wish to “write a book about nothing”, he also admits that, even if this ultimate form of closedness were desirable, it is simply not possible: “Even the most abstract art is grounded in the mundane, composed, like us, of Eros and dust. Life will keep breaking in.”18 That this is, for Banville, as necessary as it is inevitable is evident from the definition of art he provides in “A Talk”: “literary art, as I conceive of it, engages the world of action, the world beyond the ivory tower, with immediacy and a special kind of honesty” (13). The artistic necessity of dealing with life also emerges in his reviews. About Beckett, for instance, Banville writes admiringly, “what he is dealing with is no less or more than life, the commonplace thing itself, in all its disorder, hilarity and pain”.19 And in The Irish Times obituary for Samuel Beckett, he praises the way “[his] writings are rooted in the solid, the commonplace”. In short, Banville argues for a fine balance between engaging and contending with reality; a matter of dealing with the world without letting oneself be swept away in the attempt. He writes:

15 John Banville, “In Violent Times”, The New York Review of Books, 25 Oct. 1990, 25.

16 John Banville, “Inutile Genius”, Hibernia, 19 Jan. 1973, 13. 17 John Banville, “Waiting for the Last Word”, The Observer, 31 Dec. 1989, 36. 18 John Banville, “The Personae of Summer”, Irish Writers and their Creative

Process, ed. Jaqueline Genet, Gerrards Cross, 1996, 120. 19 John Banville, “The Last Word”, The New York Review of Books, 13 Aug. 1992,

18.


I do believe that the art of fiction does deal with the world, that world which in our arrogance we call “ordinary”, but that it deals with it in very special and specialised ways. (“Personae”, 118)

That art should engage with the world is something most artists would agree to. What matters is the manner of this engagement. In the same essay, Banville seems to uphold a mimetic paradigm as when he wonders, “Is it not a curious thing, this true-to-lifeness that fiction manages?” or argues, “The only way to portray life in art is to be as lifelike as possible” (120-21). In many of his reviews, in fact, Banville invokes this rather vague sense of lifelikeness. Thus he praises John McGahern for letting us “experience life itself” in his novels, and Nabokov for “catch[ing] with such precision and relish and heartbreaking tenderness the very texture and taste of the commonplace”.20 Nadine Gordimer’s short stories, on the contrary, are denounced for not being “lifelike” enough and Banville rather cryptically adds, “truth to life is not always truth to art”.21 If lifelikeness is then not to be equated with mimetic realism, and the “specialised way” in which the artist has to deal with reality is not that of imitation, then it is to the other artistic paradigms we should turn for an explanation, following Banville’s hint that if realism is concerned with speaking about things, true art tries to say the things themselves.

Art as aletheia What is striking in Banville’s words of praise for Beckett, McGahern and Nabokov is the recurrence of the term “itself”: “life itself”, “the common-place thing itself”, “things themselves”, etc. It reminds one of Kant’s das Ding an sich, which is inaccessible to human knowledge. If Banville argues that Beckett deals with “life itself”, that he comes close to expressing “how things are”, or that in his work “the thing shines”, the implication is not that Beckett adequately reflects reality, but rather that he successfully reveals something of the very essence of reality.22 Clearly, a theory of art as aletheia is hereby referred to, since art is considered the privileged way in which some essential truth can be discovered.

20 John Banville, “In Violent Times”, The New York Review of Books, 6 Dec. 1990, 22; John Banville, “Nabokov’s Dark Treasures”, The New York Review of Books, 5 Oct. 1995, 4.

21 John Banville, “Winners”, The New York Review of Books, 21 Nov. 1991, 27. 22 John Banville, “The Last Word”, The New York Review of Books, 13 Aug. 1992,

17-20; John Banville, “Waiting for the Last Word”, The Observer, 31 Dec. 1989, 36.


Radicalising the Aristotelian conception of art as a special mode of understanding, this aesthetic paradigm considers art capable of discover-ing truth over and beyond any scientific or empirical knowledge. If in the mimetic paradigm, art only imitated the surface of reality, here art is given the power of revealing what lies beneath this surface. Far more than in the first paradigm, therefore, the actual form of the artwork is considered essential in bringing about this special knowledge. In the Romantic era, this artistic ideal gained prominence in response to Kant’s restriction of knowledge to the phenomenal realm. For the Romantics claimed that precisely the unattainable realm of the noumenal could be accessed through art, and especially poetry. A more theoretical articulation of this aesthetics, finally, can be found in Martin Heidegger’s philosophy. In “The Origin of the Work of Art”, he argues that an artistic mode of understanding as aletheia can replace the restrictive modern form of knowledge as exact representation. About Van Gogh’s painting of peasant shoes he writes in this respect:

Van Gogh’s painting is the disclosure of what the equipment, the pair of peasant shoes is in truth. This being emerges into the unconcealment of its Being. The Greeks called the unconcealment of beings aletheia … the essence of art would then be this: the truth of beings setting itself to work.23

In a postmodern context, any reference to “truth, “essence”, or “being” is of course highly precarious. It should therefore come as no surprise that Banville remains rather vague about this paradigm in his theoretical writings, even while it is of evident importance in his novels. Still, oblique references to Heidegger could be taken as sufficient evidence of the fact that this essentially Romantic paradigm does fascinate Banville, even though he is wary of its essentialist implications. About Beckett’s work, for instance, Banville has argued that it is “just pure statement of ‘being’”:

It is the kind of thing Heidegger tried to get at in this involuted, weighty style, whereas Beckett in these marvellous simple, light works at the end of his life actually lets “being” “free”, and actually makes “a house for being”. I think that’s the ideal of what the artist should be. (Schwall, “Interview”, 16)

23 Martin Heidegger, “The Origin of the Work of Art”, in Basic Writings, ed. David

F. Krell, New York, 1993, 161-62.


Commenting on Rilke’s “Ninth Elegy”, to give another example, Banville invokes Heidegger’s “Dasein” to describe the “true object” of literary art (“A Talk”, 15). This peculiar cognitive dimension of art is finally also invoked in the following extract, be it in a slightly different way:

Far from allowing us to know things with any immediacy, art, I believe, makes things strange. This it does by illuminating things, literally: the making of art is a process in which the artist concentrates on the object with such force, with such ferocity and attention, that the object takes on an unearthly – no, an earthly glow .… its result is a different order of understanding, which allows the thing its thereness, its outsideness, its absolute otherness.24

Possibly alluding to the Russian Structuralist term ostranenie (defamiliarisation, or “making strange”), Banville suggests that by taking objects out of their characteristic surroundings, and by placing them in an exciting new light, an unusual, even uncanny, dimension of reality may be revealed. Elsewhere this process is referred to as “the project that all artists are embarked upon”, namely “to subject mundane reality to such intense, passionate and unblinking scrutiny that it becomes transformed into something rich and strange while yet remaining solidly, stolidly, itself”.25 And again in reference to Rilke, Banville argues how “the true poet was an agent of transfiguration whose sole function was the almost magical movement of matter into mind”.26 While an understanding of the essence of reality continues to be the ultimate aim of art, this essence is discovered, as it were, through a mode of transformation. The artist imaginatively transfigures reality in an attempt to understand it. Even if the precise manner of this transformation remains unspecified in Banville’s theoretical writings, it is clear that this artistic ideal embraces to a certain extent all three artistic paradigms, as an engagement with reality (art as mimesis) is combined with an imaginative transformation of reality (art as poesis) in order to reveal some essence of reality itself (art as aletheia).

24 John Banville, “Survivors of Joyce”, in James Joyce: The Artist and the Labyrinth,

ed. Augustine Martin, London, 1990, 78. 25 John Banville, “Beauty, Charm, Strangeness: Science as Metaphor”, Graph, III/2

(1998), ix. 26 John Banville, “Rilke”, The Irish Times, 12 Feb. 2000, 19.


Art as poesis Of a kind with the subjectivist paradigms of representation, the theory of art as poesis emphasises the role of the creative imagination in the construction of an artistic reality. Meaning, order and truth are not to be searched for underneath the surface of reality, but are rather arbitrarily imposed on an indifferent reality. In its most radical form, this constructivist paradigm claims that there is nothing outside the text, that all meaning comes into existence with language and in the interplay of language. Banville’s defence of this artistic theory, however, is usually more moderate, as in his insistence on the tightly constructed form of art. In this respect he often quotes Henry James’ statement, “In literature we move through a blest world in which we know nothing except through style, but in which also everything is saved by it”. It is through form and style that art constructs a reality and eventually becomes itself a thing. Just like James, whose Prefaces trace the development of his novels from certain preconceived structures, Banville tells us in rather more mystical terms,

Before I put down even a note for a novel, there exists in my mind … a figure … a sort of self-sustaining tension in space, tangible yet wholly imaginary, which represents, which in some sense is the completed thing. The task is to bring this figure out of the space of the potential and into the world, where it will be manifest yet hidden, like the skeleton beneath the skin. (“Personae”, 199-20)

In his assessment of other works of art, Banville’s insistence on form is evident both in his admiration for well-structured or closed works of literature and in his dismissal of “formlessness”. Hence, he rejects such “large, loose, baggy monsters” as Aidan Higgins’ Balcony of Europe, John Fowles’ Daniel Martin and Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow.27 About the latter writer, for instance, he complains, “He is feeding the people a mess of literary wordage, a kind of literary porridge under the guise of art”. And Banville adds the following piece of advice: “with a good strong dose of discipline, Pynchon would be an excellent writer.” Still, Gravity’s Rainbow is also charged for its exaggerated experimental-ism and merely playful Postmodernism. Contrary to what his anti-realist statements might lead us to suspect, Banville repeatedly defends tradition

27 John Banville, “Colony of Expatriates”, Hibernia, 6 Oct. 1972, 18; John Banville, “Highbrows and Honkies”, Hibernia, 19 Jan. 1973, 13; John Banville, “An American Monster”, Hibernia, 14 Dec. 1973, 33.


and classical balance for the novel-form. “Beckett”, he writes, “is a traditionalist in the finest sense, is, indeed, a classical novelist, whose books communicate an equilibrium and a formal beauty far beyond anything the sad scribblers of ‘experimental’ writing could achieve”.28

The result of this perfect balance and formal unity is that art, far from being dependent on nature, achieves itself the status of a natural object. By far the greatest praise Banville bestows on a work of art therefore, is to call it a thing: perfect, complete, defying – like Stevens’ “Jar in Tennessee” – reality which stands around. About Aidan Higgins’ Langrishe, Go Down, for instance, he writes: “reading it one had the sense as with all really fine works of art, of some enormous intricate thing dancing, in sadness, brief happiness, pain.” McGahern’s Amongst Women equally deserves to be praised, because “This sense of the organic, of things growing and flowering and fading, is what marks Amongst Women as a work of a high art” (“In Violent Times”). Conversely, Paul Auster’s New York Trilogy is considered not autonomous and self-contained enough: “a text as relentlessly referential as this can have no true, proper, organic life of its own.”29 And Banville advises Auster to reread Beckett’s trilogy, for “there he would find that even the most outlandish fancies and predicaments are incorporated seamlessly into a text that appears to us, in its passion and fury and tragic vision, not literature at all, but a part of nature itself”.

From this ideal of art as an organic or living thing created by the artist it is but a short step to another aspect of the artistic theory of poesis, namely that of a work of art as a separate world created by the artist. This world can be set side by side with other versions of reality and frequently opposes meaning and order against randomness and chaos. In his essay “Physics and Fiction: Order from Chaos”, Banville summarises what he calls the joint “rage for order” of science and literature:

Humankind, says T.S. Eliot, cannot bear too much reality. By “reality” he can be presupposed to mean that chaotic hostile and boundless medium into which we are thrown at birth and out of which death unceremoniously plucks us, inside us, however, somewhere in our head or heart, there exists another version, a separate reality, which has shape and significance, which we think of as some kind of truth, and which is endowed with a beginning, a middle and an end.

28 John Banville, “A New Form of Chaos”, Hibernia, 24 Aug. 1973, 11. 29 John Banville, “Three in One”, The Irish Times, 24 Jan. 1988, 9.


What ties the scientist and the artist together, Banville continues, is their wish to externalise this other version of reality and “to impose a synthetic order upon the chaos” (40-42). And in a more recent essay, he claims, “One of the greatest attractions that art holds for us is that it offers what Kermode identifies as ‘the sense of an ending’. The kind of completedness that is characteristic of the work of art is not to be found elsewhere in our lives” (“Beauty”, ix).

In his theoretical writings, in short, Banville shies away from an all too radical strand of constructivism. Instead, his statements frequently imply a solid belief in a world which is “out there”, a world which “simply is”, even if it can never fully be known or reached. The role of the artist is similarly described in a humanist vein:

I am enough of a deconstructionist to acknowledge that the novelist’s intentions for his novel may in the end not count for as much as he imagined or desired that they would. In saying this, however, I do not mean to agree with those critics … who look on the novelist as a dead hand which performs a kind of automatic writing. (“Personae”, 118)

Not surprisingly, it is, for Banville, the artist who stands at the origin of a work of art, rather than context, symbolic system or literary tradition. In several of his reviews, furthermore, Banville shows his appreciation for a certain kind of humanism. Graham Swift, he praises for “an unfussy subtlety of style, a sly wit, and a deep humanistic strain”.30 And about John Fowles’ artistic task he writes approvingly:

He is on the side of tradition and social commitment (of a kind, of a kind), and is heading … toward an art which will be based not in neurosis, but in an impersonal concern for what is humane and civilising, in a regard for ordinary life, and in (I suppose one may as well take the plunge) love.31

While this quote contains many elements of Banville’s own theoretical aesthetics – engagement with the world, anti-expressionism, traditional form – it remains of course to be seen how much of it is realised in his works of art themselves.

30 John Banville, “That’s Life”, The New York Review of Books, 4 April 1996, 8. 31 John Banville, “Fowles at the Crossroads”, Hibernia, 14 Oct. 1977, 27.

Chapter Four Struggle and Strife: Banville’s Implicit Poetics

Man errs as long as he strives. Goethe, Faust I

It bears witness both to the reviewer’s brashness and to the novelist’s subtlety that the aesthetic tensions which remain largely unacknowledged in Banville’s theoretical writings, are brought to the fore in his artistic practice. In his essays and reviews, Banville defends to some extent all three poetic paradigms. He argues for a close adherence of art to reality as well as for art’s radical autonomy; he praises the artistic revelation of a hidden reality; and he defends the artistic construction of a parallel, synthetic reality. In all, Banville rarely attempts a synthesis of the three artistic theories, but neither does he make the tensions between them more explicit. In the novels, on the other hand, artistic oppositions are foregrounded and several modes of synthesis are tentatively introduced. In this chapter, I propose to analyse precisely these aesthetic tensions and solutions through an analysis of Banville’s dialogue with other meta-poetic literary texts. I will limit my readings to the science tetralogy in which the aesthetic dimension is most pronounced, but, by way of conclusion, I will briefly consider the function of art and aesthetics in the art trilogy as well.

Supreme fictions in Doctor Copernicus: Banville vs. Stevens In the whole of Doctor Copernicus, strife, struggle and conflict dominate and this holds true for the aesthetic issues raised in the novel as well. The novel foregrounds different artistic paradigms and demarcates problems and tensions. In doing so, it effectively clears the way for the different modes of aesthetic synthesis which will be considered in the rest of the tetralogy. Although the tensions and conflicts in Doctor Copernicus are primarily scientific in nature, the novel’s sustained references to Wallace Stevens’ long poem Notes Towards a Supreme Fiction establish a close connection to the artistic tensions which Stevens recognises in his artistic


quest for “supreme fictions”. A brief analysis of both texts proposes to make this connection explicit.

Stevens’ poem is first referred to in the motto of Doctor Copernicus: You must become an ignorant man again And see the sun again with an ignorant eye And see it clearly in the idea of it.

These lines can be read as an injunction to Copernicus to abandon the old certainties of medieval science in order to discern the truth of the world, its prime idea, uninhibited and with a clear mind. Translated in the terminology of Doctor Copernicus, the motto encourages the scientist to discard the old names, to discover the vivid thing – incidentally also the sun – and to realise a supreme fiction. In the Notes itself this inherently Romantic ideal is first described as follows:

Begin, ephebe, by perceiving the idea Of this invention, this invented world, The inconceivable idea of the sun. (I,1)

The young poet is called upon to discover the sun itself in its idea, “its transcendent informing principle”, as Lentricchia calls it, even though this idea is really inconceivable, or falls within the unreachable realm of the noumenal. 1 Since our ordinary experience of the world is really one of an “invented world”, the poet has to discard all the names and metaphors previously given to the sun in order to see the sun “clearly in the idea of it” (I,1). Yet, the difficulty of this artistic project, which can be recognised as that of aletheia, becomes evident in the paradoxical injunction: “the sun/Must bear no name, gold flourisher, but be/In the difficulty of what it is to be” (I,1). For even if the poet manages to imaginatively see the sun “in its idea”, he can only express it in art by giving it a new name, “gold flourisher”, which runs the risk of distancing das Ding an sich again, so that “the first idea becomes/The hermit in a poet’s metaphor” (I,2). The predicament of the poet expressed here is very much that of Copernicus. Having discarded all traditional names and having finally seen his vivid thing, the scientist finds it impossible to express his discovery in

1 In his interesting study of Stevens’ poetics, The Gaiety of Language (Berkeley,

1968), Frank Lentricchia traces the different aesthetic tensions in Stevens’ poetry which he describes as a battle of two distinct voices: the lyric and the ironic voice. On his analyses as well as on studies by Harold Bloom, J. Hillis Miller and Rajeev Patke, my reading of Stevens’ work is primarily based.

Chapter Four: Struggle and Strife 87

language. Hence, his frustrated rejection of this practical work as “bloody butchery”, and his disappointed realisation that the vivid thing is lost again.

In the Notes this lyric ideal of art as revelation is frequently undercut by Stevens’ ironic voice, which emphasises the hopelessness of the Romantic quest and prefers to celebrate art as a creative activity – an “exalted naming” as Copernicus has it – which imposes a self-made order on reality. In the third part of the Notes, for instance, the poems of “Canon Aspirin” are praised for including “the whole,/The complicate, the amass-ing harmony” and for offering a cure to the suffering and despair of the modern world (III, 6). Yet, Stevens undercuts this praise again with the wry remark that “to impose is not to discover”, which suggests that the tension between revelation and construction; between aletheia and poesis; or between Stevens’ lyric and ironic voice remains unresolved (III, 7).

In Doctor Copernicus a similar indeterminacy can be noted in the opposite scientific projects which circulate in the novel. The scholastic beliefs of Brudzewski are placed against the humanist or positivist zeal of Copernicus. While the latter, to put it all too succinctly, believes that science can penetrate behind the surface of reality so as to reveal “the kernel, the essence, the true”, the Schoolmen claim that this is impossible and that science should limit itself to constructing theories which “save the phenomena” (79, 29). In the scientific debates of the old canon and Rheticus, these positions are revisited – couched in the lofty phrases of philosophers and scientists:

I said: “I hold it true that pure thought can grasp reality, as the ancients dreamed.” He said: “Science aims at constructing a world which shall be symbolic of the world of commonplace experience.” I said: “If you would know the reality of nature, you must destroy the appearance, and the farther you go beyond the appearance, the nearer you will be to the essence.” He said: “It is of the highest importance that the outer world represents something independent of us and absolute with which we are confronted.” (208)

One can clearly recognise in these positions the opposite aesthetic theories of revelation and construction as well as the continuous bickering of


Stevens’ lyric and ironic voice. In Doctor Copernicus, however, the theory of poesis seems to gain precedence in the end. This is not only because Copernicus finally realises that he has failed to discern the vivid thing in his scientific theory, but also because his scientific/artistic quest itself has been exposed as ultimately reductive and destructive of commonplace reality. In Doctor Copernicus, after all, the sceptical under-current of what appears to be a Romantic quest is clearly exposed, as the novel suggests that “to discover” is always “to impose”, especially when it is not recognised as such. More than Stevens, in short, Banville is aware of the destructive potential of the imagination and the Romantic paradigm of revelation with which it is most strongly associated. Still, this does not mean that the aesthetics of aletheia are totally conquered by the apparently more lucid theory of poesis. For, as we have seen before, the closing lines of Doctor Copernicus continue to invoke some kind of otherworldly truths, which “It must be possible”, as Stevens rather desperately puts it, to experience or reveal in other ways (Notes III,7).

Another tension dominating Stevens’ poetics is a version of that age-old duality of mind and matter. It addresses the fundamental question of artistic representation: how should the artistic imagination deal with reality? In his theoretical writings, Stevens tends to give a two-fold answer. He claims, “The imagination loses vitality as it ceases to adhere to what is real”, but stresses at the same time, “A possible poet must be a poet capable of resisting or evading the pressure of reality”.2 While the artist has to engage with reality, he or she must also be wary of an all too close dependence on that very same reality. In Stevens’ poetry, however, the difficulty of combining these positions of transcendence and engagement becomes evident. In “Anecdote of the Jar”, for instance, Stevens both celebrates the power of the imagination in transcending the natural world and mourns the loss of the world which is the inevitable result of this. In “The Snow Man”, conversely, Stevens shows what happens when the poetic mind totally converges with reality: the self is progressively reduced until all that is left is “nothing”. In the Notes, finally, Stevens tries to establish a synthesis of imagination and reality. Yet, this harmony remains a bright ideal only, which leads J. Hillis Miller to conclude:

Between the two poles of a submission of the mind to the authority and substantiality of reality, on the one hand, and an assertion of the mind’s

2 Wallace Stevens, The Necessary Angel, London, 1984, 6, 27.


power over nature, on the other hand, Stevens’ poetry fluctuates, now affirming the dominion of one pole, now the other, never able finally to adjudicate the quarrel or the antagonism between them.3

In Doctor Copernicus this tension between art as an imaginative transcendence of reality and art as an engagement with that same reality, is most clearly embodied in the opposition between the two brothers, Nicolas and Andreas, who are styled as complementary alter egos in the text. As we have seen before, Copernicus is a paragon of transcendence, both in his work and in his life. From the start, he uses the scientific imagination as a means of escape from the awful reality he finds himself imprisoned in. And his scientific theory itself transcends reality to the extent of having severed all links with experience. This is evident in part from Copernicus’ avowed aversion of stargazing and is further suggested in his argument that “Out of nothing … he would have to weld together an explanation of the phenomena”. Consequently, the basis for his creations is not reality but “nothing”: the “speculation and fantastic dreaming” of pure mind. That his scientific construction lacks any basis in reality is further evident in the ironic remark with which the narrator rounds off the account of Copernicus’ heliocentric discovery: “there was to be no sun today” (83-85). The astronomer who grasps the sun in the abstraction of pure thought, fails to see it in commonplace reality. The radical break between Copernicus’ theory and reality could not have been illustrated more aptly. In ordinary life too, Copernicus seeks to distance himself from the commonplace, which causes him to remark wryly at the end of his life, “The world had shrunk until his skull contained it entirely” (223). As Stevens’ “Anecdote of the Jar” predicted, the richness of the world has been reduced in Copernicus’ never-ending attempts to transcend it. Against this all to negative picture of artistic transcendence, it is important to recognise that the novel is also pervaded by a sense of admiration for Copernicus’ intensely artistic quest as well as for what turned out to be after all a great discovery – the sudden creative vision of a peculiarly gifted mind.

If the valuation of Copernicus’ transcendence moved from positive (for creative, daring, beautiful) to negative (for destructive and solipsistic), Andreas’ intensely physical way of life is first described in rather negative terms only to be hailed as absolutely positive at the end.

3 J. Hillis Miller, “William Carlos Williams and Wallace Stevens”, in Columbia Literary History of the United States, ed. Emory Elliot, New York, 1988, 989-90.


As in Stevens’ poems, Andreas’ full dependence on life has its negative consequences as well. His attitude is often portrayed as nihilistic, selfish and even destructive. After all, Andreas dies from the pox, from an over-exposure to life, as it were. In the gradual decay of Andreas – he loses lips, limbs, hair, face – Stevens’ loss of self due to an all too great adherence to reality achieves a rather literal representation. Still, in the last chapter of Doctor Copernicus, Andreas’ way of life is suddenly seen in a more positive light, since his engagement with reality shows the necessary openness to and acceptance of the commonplace. In this way, Andreas paves the way for a new artistic ideal, which turns out to be a synthesis in the manner of Wallace Stevens.

Returning to the motto of Doctor Copernicus, it is clear that a more thorough investigation of both Stevens’ and Banville’s poetics has changed its meaning in many ways. Stevens’ lines can no longer be interpreted as a straightforward celebration of an artistic paradigm of Romantic discovery. Neither can it be read as a sure method to arrive at that ideal synthesis: a supreme fiction. Given the evident problems associated with the notion of artistic transcendence in Doctor Copernicus, furthermore, it is highly questionable whether the term can be applied to Copernicus’ achievements at all, even though this is precisely what most commentators of Doctor Copernicus do. McMinn extends Stevens’ concept to the scientific/artistic constructions of all of Banville’s narrators. In doing so, he interprets supreme fiction rather loosely as a fiction which comes to replace religious belief in a secular age and ignores other crucial aspects of Stevens’ aesthetic ideal (Supreme Fictions, 55). Imhof, for his part, even more explicitly considers Copernicus’ heliocentric theory as a supreme fiction when he writes:

Copernicus became a maker of a supreme fiction because, for one, his theory was not true. Secondly … because he was ultimately not so much concerned with establishing a new science, was essentially less interested in the propositions of his theory than in the combining of them in “the act of creation”. (Introduction, 86)

While the misappropriation of Stevens’ concept of supreme fiction is largely due to the fact that the critics have not paid much attention to Stevens’ works themselves, it can also be traced back to the author, who has Albrecht, Grand Master of the Teutonic Knights, call out to Copernicus, “You and I, mein Freund, are the lords of the earth, the great ones, the major men, the makers of supreme fictions” (136). Yet, given


Copernicus’ appalled reaction and Albrecht’s characteristic arrogance, this exclamation can also be read as a piece of the latter’s bragging megalomania, especially since the use of “major men”, another crucial concept in Stevens’ aesthetic, suggests that Banville is well aware of the function of supreme fiction in Stevens’ poetics.

Following Stevens’ use of the term, Copernicus’ achievements cannot be called supreme fictions because they lack four essential characteristics. Firstly, Copernicus’ theory fails to realise the engagement with reality which Stevens considers a prerequisite of supreme fictions. Secondly, Stevens’ supreme fiction is aware of its status as fiction, whereas Copernicus really believes his theory to lay bare the essence of the universe. “The astronomer’s greatness lies in his passionate determination and ability to construct a symbolic order; his tragedy lies in his inability to recognise the fictionality of that order”, McMinn writes in this respect (Supreme Fictions, 63). Thirdly, an essential function of Stevens’ supreme fiction is that it has to “help people to live their lives” (Necessary Angel, 29). Copernicus’ theory, on the contrary, only leads to nihilism and despair. For Stevens, finally, supreme fiction is primarily an ideal, which the artist is always striving for but never successfully achieves. If this idea of continuous striving precludes the possibility of considering Copernicus’ achievement a supreme fiction, it does allow for a reading of the affirma-tive ideal which Andreas proposes at the end of the novel as, precisely, a supreme fiction:

With great courage and great effort you might have succeeded, in the only way it is possible to succeed, by disposing the commonplace, the names, in a beautiful and orderly pattern that would show, by its very beauty and order, the action in our poor worlds of the otherworldly truths. But you tried to discard the commonplace truths for the transcendent ideals and so failed. (240)

In this alternative artistic paradigm, both tensions we have so far discussed, appear to be resolved. On the one hand, it is only through the construction of “a beautiful and orderly pattern” (poesis) that “otherworldly truths” may be revealed (aletheia). Notice here that Andreas speaks of truths and not of the one truth which Copernicus sought to uncover and, similarly, of showing rather than knowing these truths. On the other hand, art as engagement with the commonplace peacefully co-exists with art as a transcendent revelation of otherworldly truths.

Stevens’ notion of supreme fiction similarly seeks to reconcile the opposites of imagination and reality as well as of discovery and


imposition. It offers a means of engaging with reality through art, through a sustaining and meaningful fiction, which should nevertheless be recognised as indeed only a fiction. Since this alternative only appears at the end of Doctor Copernicus, it is uncertain whether it can, or will, be realised at all. After all, it forms part of the delirious dying vision of Copernicus, which makes it perhaps no more than a final resignation, insufficient either to fully deny the value of Copernicus’ scientific work, or to redeem his radical rejection of the commonplace. Moreover, this vision not only occurs at the end of Copernicus’ life but also at the end of the novel, so that its realisation, if feasible at all, is postponed to the other science novels. Still, the very insistence of these struggles in Doctor Copernicus as well as the universality which their occurrence in Stevens’ work gives them, suggest that such a synthesis will not be easy. After all, more even than Stevens’ poetry, Banville’s novels are haunted by the nagging thought that the imagination all too often leads to fictions which are abysmal rather than supreme, destructive rather than life-giving.

Poetic transformations in Kepler: Banville vs. Rilke “Preise dem Engel die Welt …”, with this sentence from Rilke’s Duineser Elegien, Banville boldly introduces Rilke as the literary patron saint of the novel Kepler. And even though Banville replaces by three dots the significant “nicht die Unsagliche” which follows, the reader most likely interprets this quote in the context of the opposition staged in the science tetralogy between a transcendent scientific quest and a simple acceptance of the commonplace. Kepler is warned in advance, as it were, not to lose himself in otherworldly stargazing but to be receptive to the beauties of the commonplace. And this interpretation is further supported when the quote is repeated within the novel on the occasion of the important Hoffmann-epiphany, which befalls Kepler at the beginning of the second chapter. In perfect circularity, Kepler recalls this vision at the end of this chapter:

He remembered that vision he had glimpsed in Baron Hoffmann’s garden, and was again assailed by the mysteriousness of the commonplace. Give this world’s praise to the angel! He had only the vaguest notion of what he meant .… Where did these voices come from, these strange sayings? It was as if the future had found utterance in him. (86)


This brief acknowledgement of the mystery of the everyday is again placed against Kepler’s more common urge to masterfully transcend this mystery in art or scientific theories. This interpretation is also the one we find with most critics, who argue, like McMinn, that “a celebration of the ordinary and visible reality of God’s design” is called for as an alternative to “Kepler’s unworldly scientific pursuits” (Supreme Fictions, 75). Yet, a closer look at the place of Rilke’s quote in the whole of the Duineser Elegien qualifies this straightforward opposition, which, even if it is valid for describing Doctor Copernicus, does not do full justice to the world of Kepler.

“Wer, wenn ich schriee, hörte mich denn aus der Engel Ordnungen?” (I, 1-2).4 The opening line of the Duineser Elegien goes straight to the heart of the human condition lamented in the elegies: its radical separateness from the realm of the angels, which is the realm of transcendence, absolutes, and sublime beauty.5 This leads to “a pervading sense of deprivation, a lack of existential assurance, or again a lack of the certainty of faith”.6 In different images and varying tones of regret, this human condition is evoked in the elegies until, in Elegy Seven, the tone radically changes into exuberant affirmation: “Hiersein ist herrlich” (VII, 39). In one long stanza, Rilke celebrates the beauties of the natural world: spring and summer, day and night, life and death. In the following stanzas of this Elegy, however, Rilke immediately supersedes this celebration again, arguing that it is not external, natural reality which deserves the greatest praise, but mankind’s interiorisation and transformation of this reality. Clearly, Rilke is not satisfied with a rapturous acknowledgment of the beauty of the temporal world. Instead, a spiritual transformation of mere matter is called for. Rilke thereby arrives at his first formulation of the task of the poet, “Sichtbar/wollen wirs heben, wo doch das sichtbarste

4 “Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the ranks/of the angels?” All quotes from Rilke, both in the original and in translation, are taken from Rilke’s Duino Elegies, eds Roger Paulin and Peter Hutchinson, London, 1996. The number of the elegy and the line of the quotation will be indicated between brackets in what follows.

5 In Kepler too, frequent reference is made to angels in the context of Kepler’s discoveries, as we have seen in the first chapter. Bearing in mind Rilke’s characterisation of the transcendent, the true, the absolute as the realm of the angels, Kepler’s revelatory discoveries might be interpreted as brief glimpses of the absolute. That Banville’s use of these angels could be construed as a – perhaps ironic – comment on Rilke is especially evident from such formulations as “the answering angel” which may be contrasted to the decidedly non-co-operative angel of Rilke’s elegies.

6 Peter and Sheila Stern, “Elegy One”, in Rilke’s Duino Elegies, 2.


Glück uns/erst zu erkennen sich giebt, wenn wir es innen verwandeln” (VII, 46-49)7. The poet should not try to transcend the physical world but rather transform the physical through consciousness. That Rilke here attempts to unite the poetics of aletheia with the poetics of poesis is also evident from the explanation he gave of this passage: “our task is to imprint upon our minds this temporary, frail earth so deeply, so painfully and passionately, that its essence may be resurrected ‘invisibly’ within us.”8 Creatively transforming reality becomes a way of revealing its essence. Rilke then extends his praise to the larger field of human transformative or creative achievements – “Säulen, Pylone, der Sphinx, das strebende Stemmen,/grau aus vergehender Stadt oder aus fremder, des Doms” (VII, 73)9 – since these are the accomplishments which merit the approval of the angel: “O staune, Engel, denn wir sinds,/wir, o du Großer, erzähls, daß wir solches vermochten, mein Atem/reicht für die Rühmung nicht aus” (VII, 75-79).10

In Elegy Nine, Rilke further elaborates on this transformative task of mankind and it is in this context that Banville’s quotation should be considered:

Preise dem Engel die Welt, nicht die unsägliche, ihm Kannst du nicht großtun mit herrlich Erfühltem; im Weltall, Wo er fühlender fühlt, bist du ein Neuling. Drum zeig ihm das Einfache, das, von Geschlecht zu Geschlechtern gestaltet, als ein Unsriges lebt, neben der Hand und im Blick. Sag ihm die Dinge. (IX, 53-58)11

The poet, in other words, should not celebrate the realm of beauty and truth, to which he has no access anyway, but neither should he simply celebrate the natural world as Kepler seemed advised to do. What he

7 “We must lift it/up, visibly, when yet the most visible joy reveals itself/only when

we transform it, within.” 8 Quoted in Peter Hutchinson, “Elegy Seven”, Rilke’s Duino Elegies, 122. 9 “Columns, pylons, the Sphinx, the striving upward thrust of the minster,/grey

against background of fading, or foreign, town.” 10 “Oh gaze in wonder, Angel, for it was us,/oh Great Being, us, recount that we

managed such things, my breath/cannot last for the praise which is due.” 11 “Praise this world to the Angel, not the unsayable. He/cannot be impressed with

the world of splendid sensation; in the universe/where he feels more feelingly, you are a novice. So show/him a simple thing, fashioned from generation to generation,/so that it lives on as ours – near the hand, in the gaze./Tell him things.”


should say, are things created or fashioned by man. Or, as Rilke puts it in another famous passage:

Sind wir vielleicht hier, um zu sagen: Haus, Brücke, Brunnen, Tor, Krug, Obstbaum, Fenster, – Höchstens: Säule, Turm… aber zu sagen, verstehs, oh zu sagen so, wie selber die Dinge niemals innig meinten zu sein. (IX, 31-35)12

To all these human artefacts, which are subject to time and decay, the poet can offer a more permanent and a more powerful existence in his poetry. For, precisely “these simple artefacts which are being or have been transformed in our souls, are things fit to bring before the Angel .... [who] will be amazed at the human ingenuity to form aesthetic significance beyond the physical”.13 The task of the poet is a transformation to the second degree, since the things the poet has to celebrate are certainly no simple natural things, but human artefacts: spiritual transformations of mere matter. In celebrating these artefacts, the poet intensifies these human creations, which achieve an added beauty and timelessness. If in Elegy Seven, Rilke renounced his yearning for the angelic realm of the absolute, in Elegy Nine he has found a roundabout way of satisfying this desire nevertheless, since precisely these artistic creations enable the poet to achieve something of the very beauty and truth which Elegy One confined to the sphere of the angel.

In order to judge the importance of Rilke’s poetics for the scientific and artistic project in Kepler, it is helpful to consider the differences between this novel and its precursor, Doctor Copernicus. Although both novels admittedly share similar circumstances, themes and characters, one could argue that Kepler succeeds where Copernicus fails. This opposition is already evident in their different personalities. While Copernicus’ plight is most readily characterised by terms like austerity, despair or contempt, Kepler’s human kindness, his perennial search for happiness and his sense of wonder make him a much more loveable protagonist. “Doctor Copernicus is about the tragedy of personality; Kepler about the triumph of character”, as McMinn puts it succinctly (Supreme Fictions, 65). The reason for this sense of happiness pervading the novel, even in spite of

12 “Are we perhaps here to say: House,/Bridge, Fountain, Gate, Jug, Fruit-tree,

Window, –/at most, Column, Tower… but to say them – you understand –/oh to say them more intensely than the things themselves/ever dreamed they could be?”

13 Karen Leeder, “Elegy Nine”, Rilke’s Duino Elegies, 164-65.


Kepler’s financial and domestic misfortunes, is that while the haughty Copernicus fails in the task exemplified by Stevens’ supreme fictions, Kepler succeeds in realising a similar artistic task. Banville’s novel thus achieves a celebration of human creativity, which is similar to Rilke’s affirmative elegies in many respects.

Like Rilke, who asserts the existence of a “realm of the Angel”, Kepler has an unwavering faith in the existence of order, harmony and truth. Moreover, following his religious belief that “God had created the world according to the same laws of harmony which the swineherd holds in his heart”, Kepler believes that the order which he constructs in his theories is the same as the one which is to be discovered underneath the apparent chaos of the world:

Years before, he had defined harmony as that which the soul creates by perceiving how certain proportions in the world correspond to prototypes existing in the soul. The proportions everywhere abound, in music and the movements of the planets, in human and vegetable forms, in men’s fortunes even, but they are all relation merely, and inexistent without the perceiving soul. (179-80, italics added)

In this way, Kepler can easily reconcile the opposition between construction and revelation, which so frustrated Copernicus. Because of his eager involvement in life, moreover, Kepler also resolves the second tension of Doctor Copernicus, that between engagement and transcen-dence. Unlike his predecessor, Kepler always seeks to base his theories on what he calls “precise observations of a visible planet, coordinates fixed in time and space” (73). And conversely, he also applies his astronomical discoveries to the commonplace human world around him: “Everywhere he began to see world-forming relationships, in the rules of architecture, in poetic metre, in the complexities of rhythm, even in colours, in smells and tastes, in the proportions of the human figure” (48). The result is, once again, a transformation of the world into something wonderful, harmonious and beautiful. As Banville puts it in the essay “Beauty, Charm, Strangeness”:

When Johannes Kepler recognised that the planets move in elliptical orbits and not in perfect circles, as received wisdom had for millennia held they must do, he added infinitely to the richness of man’s life and thoughts. (viii)

In many different ways, in short, Kepler realises Rilke’s (and Stevens’) aesthetic project. Through an intense scrutiny of the ordinary world,


Kepler interiorises it: “He brooded in consternation on the complexities of the honeycomb, the structure of flowers, the eerie perfection of snowflakes” (49). Affecting it with his vision of harmony, he transforms the world into something different, something beautiful, “a perfected work of art” (182). About his work on the orbit of Mars, Kepler proudly claims, “I have transformed the very shape of things” (111). And in relation to his private life, Kepler also upholds this transformative ideal. He writes:

Life … is a formless & forever shifting stuff, a globe of molten glass, say, which we have been flung, and which, without even the crudest of instruments, with only our bare hands, we must shape into a perfect sphere, in order to be able to contain it within ourselves.

Hence, the “task” of every human being is for Kepler: “the transformation of the chaos without, into a perfect harmony & balance within” (134). Like in Rilke’s Duineser Elegien, therefore, the injunction to “praise this world” does not so much ask for a celebration of the natural world as for a celebration of humankind’s transformation of this world. Kepler’s astonished awe at the world – “Was it not wonderful, the logic of things?” (25) – concerns his transformative vision of reality, rather than reality itself. Far more than an opposition between scientific mastery and a simple acceptance of the world, we find in Kepler a fundamental similarity between these two attitudes. Both concern a creative reshaping of the world, achieving a kind of beauty and harmony. Similarly, the apparent conflict between the transcendent and the immanent involvement of the two approaches is resolved by the artistic claim that through an attentive refashioning of the everyday something of the very beauty and truth of the transcendent realm of the angels may be achieved.

That Kepler’s scientific work as well as his occasional contemplation of the everyday testify to the same artistic ideal of transformation is evident even in the apparently innocent moments in which Kepler merely seems to contemplate the mystery of the natural world. For even in these epiphanic moments his creative mind can be seen at work. Consequently, the interpretative move, which was traced in Kepler’s Hoffmann epiphany in the foregoing chapter, might achieve a new, more positive valorisation as it bears witness to Kepler’s transformative aesthetic power. When Kepler is contemplating a flock of sheep grazing in the meadows, to give another example, he sighs:


God’s mute meaningless creatures, so many and so various. Sometimes like this the world bore upon him suddenly, all that which is without apparent pattern or shape, but is simply there. (31)

If, at first sight, this might lead us to infer that Kepler has found himself suddenly confronted by reality as such, his description of the bucolic scene which precedes this revelation clearly betrays his transformative, anthropomorphic vision, “their lugubriously noble heads, their calm eyes, how they champed the grass with such fastidiousness, as if they were not merely feeding but performing a delicate and onerous labour”.

Similarly, Kepler’s description of the snail moving on the window pane testifies to his very active interiorising perception, which transforms the mere crawling of a snail into something strange and beautiful:

The moment came back to him now, wonderfully clear, the washed sunlight in the garden, the dew, the rosebuds on the tumbledown privy, that snail .… Pressed in a lavish embrace upon the pane, the creature gave up its frilled grey-green underparts to his gaze, while the head strained away from the glass, moving blindly from side to side, the horns weaving as if feeling out enormous forms in air. But what had held Johannes was its method of crawling. He would have expected some sort of awful convulsions, but instead there was a serious of uniform small smooth waves flowing endlessly upward along its length, like a visible heartbeat. The economy, the heedless beauty of it, baffled him. (99)

In all, Kepler’s scientific theories as well as his descriptions of the everyday have been shown to be artefacts: human, spiritual trans-formations of mere matter. If Kepler effectively lives up to an aesthetic theory close to Rilke’s own poetic credo, the novel Kepler is again a transformation to the second degree, as it celebrates human achievements which are wonderful and grand enough to duly impress the angel.

Yet, Kepler would not be a novel by John Banville if it did not contain traces of doubt and failure as well. Take for instance Kepler’s urge, upon finishing a scientific theory, “to destroy the past, the human and hopelessly defective past, and begin all over again the attempt to achieve perfection” (183). Or consider Kepler’s sneaking suspicion that he has perhaps missed out on life after all:

Suddenly now he recalled Tycho Brahe standing barefoot outside his room while a rainswept dawn broke over the Hradcany, that forlorn and baffled look on his face, a dying man searching too late for the life


he had missed, that his work had robbed him of. Kepler shivered. Was it that same look the Billigs saw now, on his face? (190)

Also the reader wonders at this sudden despair. For has not Kepler, unlike Copernicus, been constantly concerned with happiness, often wondering, “Was it possible, was this, was this happiness?” and even affirming, “She had brought him happiness” (108, 159). Rather than having missed out on life or happiness in general, what Kepler registers here is that awful fact of human separateness from the absolute realm of the angel, which is also lamented by Rilke. While this separateness is to some extent remedied by the creative work of art and science, it is at the same time aggravated by it. For transforming the world through consciousness and art, is an intensely mediated way of dealing with it whereby all immediate or absolute contact with reality is lost even further. Kepler’s scientific work, however valuable, may have cancelled out a more immediate and unconscious enjoyment of reality, and hence the possibility of a more profound experience of the absolute. Worse, Kepler suggests, interiorising and creatively transforming things might even equal destroying them. It is this suspicion, more strongly realised in the other science novels, which Kepler’s friend Winklemann alludes to in his comparison of the Christian and the Jew, “You think nothing is real until it has been spoken. Everything is words with you.” But in the Jewish religion, “There are things … which may not be spoken, for to speak such ultimate things is to…to damage them” (47).

Rilke too registers an awareness of the potentially destructive quality of his transformative poetics when he contrasts the roundabout route to beauty of the poet with the immediate access to the absolute of the animal, the child, the hero and the dying man. If “die Kreatur”, in the terminology of Elegy Eight, sees “das Offene” “mit allen Augen”, human beings, on the contrary, self-consciously look at themselves – “unsre Augen sind/wie umgekehrt und ganz um sie gestellt/als Fallen” – and fail to perceive the absolute (VIII, 1-4).14 For “wo wir Zukunft sehn, dort sieht es Alles/und sich in Allem und geheilt für immer” (VIII, 41-42).15 Because of the double-edged gift of consciousness, human beings find themselves preoccupied with past and future, while the animal world simply lives

14 “With both its eyes the creature-world sees/the open. But our eyes are/as though

reversed and set around it/like snares.” 15 “where we see future, it sees there all things/And itself in all things and healed

forever.”


amidst “all things”. It is only the child who enjoys a similar immanence in life and a happy unawareness of mortality: “O Stunden in der Kindheit,/ da hinter den Figuren mehr als nur/Vergangnes war und vor uns nicht die Zukunft“ (IV, 65-67).16 The child finds itself quickly alienated from this unconscious existence by the forceful intervention of adults. Most likely, one has to wait for death before becoming part of “das Offene” again:

… Als Kind verliert sich eins im Stilln an dies und wird gerüttelt. Oder jener stirbt und ists. Denn nah am Tod sieht man den Tod nicht mehr Und starrt hinaus, vielleicht mit großem Tierblick. Liebende, wäre nicht der andere, der Die Sicht verstellt, sind nah daran und staunen (VIII, 19-25)17

It is, finally, up to the poet to try and regain some of the child’s sense of wonder at the world.

In Kepler this immediate and absolute experience of life is rendered in the figure of Felix, whom Kepler “envied” for his “life” (178). Having nursed Felix through an illness, Kepler to his disappointment, does not get in return that hoped for

awful comradeship, by which he might gain entry to that world of action and intensity, that Italy of the spirit, of which this renegade was an envoy. Life, life, that was it! In the Italian he seemed to know at last, however vicariously, the splendid and exhilarating sordidness of real life. (69)

His retarded brother Heinrich – “a forty-year old child, eager and unlovely, and always hugely amused by the world he had never quite learned how to manage” – and the blinded fool Jeppe – graced with a “childlike attentiveness, so that he seemed to be listening constantly past the immediate to something far away” – seem to Kepler to be similarly in touch with life itself (94, 175). Finally, Kepler’s children and his own childhood also provide a picture of the absolute: “he carried within him a vision of lost peace and order, a sphere of harmony which had never been,

16 “Oh those hours in childhood,/when behind the figures there was more than

simply/what was past, and no future stretched before us.” 17 “As a child/one loses oneself in silence to this and is/jolted out of it. Or someone

dies and is it./For near to death one no longer sees death/and stares out, perhaps with the creature’s wide eye./Lovers, were not the other there,/blocking out the light, are close to this and marvel.”


yet to which the idea of childhood seemed an approximation” (159). Yet, it is only in Kepler’s dying itself that Rilke’s vision of “das Offene” is most fully realised. Pre-echoing Rilke, Kepler had written to his daughter Regina some years before:

It is said, that a drowning man sees all his life flash before him in the instant before he succumbs: but why should it be only so for death by water? I suspect it is true whatever the manner of dying. At the final moment, we shall at last perceive the secret & essential form of all we have been, of all our actions & thoughts. Death is the perfecting medium. This truth – for I believe it to be a truth – has manifested itself to me with force in these past months. It is the only answer that makes sense of these disasters & pains, these betrayals. (134)

And at the end of his life Kepler is effectively rewarded with a dream which cast “a silvery glimmer” over the last months of his life:

That night he had a dream, one of those involuntary great dark plots that now and then the sleeping mind will hatch, elaborate and enigmatic and full of inexplicable significance .… The Italian [Felix] came forward, clad as a knight of the Rosy Cross. In his arm he carried a little gilded statue, which sprang alive suddenly and spoke. It had Regina’s face. A solemn and complex ceremony was being celebrated, and Kepler understood that this was the alchemical wedding of darkness and light. He woke into the dim glow of the winter dawn .… A strange happiness reigned in his heart, as if a problem that had been with him all his life had at last been decided …. (178-79)18

This vision Kepler recalls again in his very last moments, sitting feverish and delirious before the fire in Billig’s house: “Such a dream I had Billig, such a dream” (227). Even though Imhof omits to mention this dream and McMinn links it to an epiphanic vision of Kepler in Part III, I would suggest that the dream referred to is precisely the one which hovers over Kepler’s final years. For only a few lines prior to his mention of the dream, Kepler thinks:

I know he will meet me here, I’ll recognise him by the rosy cross on his breast, and his lady with him. Are you there? If I walk to the

18 Kepler uses here the hermetic imagery of the Chemical Wedding, one of the great

Rosicrucian texts. Frances Yates describes this text in The Rosicrucian Enlightenment (London, 1979), to which Banville also refers, as “an alchemical fantasia, using the fundamental image of elemental fusion, the marriage, the uniting of sponsus and sponsa, touching also on the theme of death, the nigredo through which the elements must pass in the process of transmutation” (64).


window now shall I see you, out there in the rain and the dark, all of you, queen and dauntless knight, and death and the devil…? (191)

The delirious Kepler moves here from the realist realm, his visit to the emperor, to the fantastical realm of his earlier dream, which includes not only Regina and Felix as knight and queen, respectively, but also death and devil from Dürer’s engraving “Knight with Death and Devil”, which Kepler calls: “an image of stoic grandeur & fortitude from which I derive much solace: for this is how one must live, facing into the future, indifferent to terrors and yet undeceived by foolish hopes” (131).

In order to interpret this dream, it is important to consider the value which Felix and Regina have for Kepler. If Felix personifies an immediate and immanent experience of life, Regina stands for the perfection and beauty of a work of art. From the start, Regina is to Kepler the very opposite of her mother, “she represented, frozen in prototype, that very stage of knowing and regard which he had managed to miss in her mother” (43). Kepler admires her “inwardness” and “equilibrium”, the “air of ordered self-containment” which she shares with his second wife. He describes her as “a gilded figure in a freeze” and as “a marvellous and enigmatic work of art” (100, 66). Felix’s and Regina’s unity in the “alchemical wedding of darkness and light” would then signify the possibility of a sublime harmony between art and life, or mind and matter. This absolute artistic ideal could very well solve the “problem that had been with [Kepler] all his life”: the apparent irreconcilability of an uncon-scious, immediate enjoyment of life, and a conscious, inner transformation of that very same life. Therefore, Kepler’s vision embodies but a version of that familiar image of absolute unity between subject and object, mind and matter, art and reality, which determines the artistic/scientific quests in Birchwood and the science tetralogy. One could argue that in the Harmonia Mundi, the great work of synthesis, which Kepler wrote in the aftermath of this dream, Kepler achieves this absolute harmony of life and art. However, bearing in mind that in Rosicrucian imagery the alchemical wedding only takes place through death and that the whole of the last chapter is wedged between two scenes in Regensburg which represent a dying Kepler, it is more correct to maintain that this powerful image is part of the absolute the dying Kepler is allowed a glimpse of. After all, the four figures he recognises in his dream, “queen [Regina] and dauntless knight [Felix], and death, and the devil”, represent the totality of existence, the harmony of life and death, which only Rilke’s dying man can fully accept.


Compared to this absolute, Kepler’s scientific work, however successful and beautiful, is but a meagre achievement. Hence, Kepler’s final acceptance of the words of Wincklemann:

What was it the Jew said? Everything is told us, but nothing explained. Yes. We must take it all on trust. That’s the secret. How simple! He smiled. It was not a mere book that was thus thrown away, but the foundation of a life’s work. It seemed not to matter.

A similar relativisation of man’s creative achievements is predicted by Rilke in the Fourth Elegy: “Sieh, die Sterbenden,/sollten sie nicht vermuten, wie voll Vorwand/das alles ist, was wir hier leisten. Alles/ist nicht es selbst” (IV, 62-65).19 Still, in spite of having denied his scientific claim to fame and posterity, Kepler’s last words in the novel are “Never die, never die” (191-92). His dying vision seems to have inspired him with the hope for an absolute and immediate unity with the world, which falls outside the limits of language and consciousness; outside the finite duality of subject and object. Since Kepler’s death makes any further exploration of this Romantic ideal once more impossible, the reader has to wait again for Banville’s next novel.

Negative aesthetics in The Newton Letter: Banville vs. Hofmannsthal At first sight, The Newton Letter seems to break with the pattern of expectation, which Banville set with Doctor Copernicus and Kepler, in the sense that its motto does not refer to a literary text. It is a quotation from Newton which addresses epistemological questions rather than poetical or artistic ones. Nevertheless, Banville does not refrain from coupling his meta-scientific text with another famous meta-poetic one, but the reference occurs in the “Note” at the end of the novel: “The ‘second’ Newton letter to John Locke is a fiction, the tone and some of the text of which is taken from Hugo Von Hofmannsthal’s Ein Brief (‘The letter of

19 “Think, shouldn’t/the dying be able to intuit how everything/we accomplish is full

of pretence. Nothing/is itself.”


Lord Chandos’).”20 This acknowledgement, however, is a misleading understatement because Ein Brief, first published in 1902, is a far more insistent presence in The Newton Letter than Banville’s vague mention of “tone” and “text” allows for. Banville not only incorporates direct quotations of Hofmannsthal’s text in Newton’s fictional letter to Locke, he also reproduces the whole crisis-structure of Ein Brief in the larger framework of The Newton Letter. In addition, the epistemological and literary paradoxes of Banville’s novella are determined to a large extent by the German text. A brief interpretation of this famous meta-poetic, Modernist text might thus provide an interesting way into the poetic problems articulated in The Newton Letter.

In Ein Brief Philip Lord Chandos addresses Francis Bacon “to apologise for his renunciation of all literary activity”, at the same time seeking an explanation for his sudden Sprachkrise.21 He begins his letter with a description of his earlier literary achievements and goes on to give an account of the literary plans he cherished. He then summarises this characterisation of his pre-crisis state:

In the enduring drunkenness that was my state of mind at the time, all existence was one single entity: there was no contradiction between the intellectual and the physical world, or between higher and bestial existence, art and non-art, solitude and company; in all of them I felt Nature, … and in all of Nature I felt myself .… Or I suspected all was symbolic, and every creature was the key to another, and I felt I was the man capable of seizing them all in turn, and using each one to disclose as much as it could disclose of the others. (7-8)

20 Ein Brief is not the only literary text which Banville refers to in The Newton Letter.

Rüdiger Imhof identifies references to Goethe’s Die Wahlverwandtschaften, Henry James’ The Sacred Faunt, John Ford’s The Good Soldier and Aidan Higgins’ Langrishe, Go Down in his article “The Newton Letter by John Banville, an Exercise in Literary Deviation” (Irish University Review, XIII/2 [1983], 162-67). An introductory comparison between Ein Brief and The Newton Letter can also be found in Imhof’s Critical Introduction (145-48). About the poetics of both writers, Imhof only notes that “the re-shaping of traditional material” characterises the creative process of Banville and Hofmannsthal alike. A more detailed analysis of the relation between Goethe’s text and The Newton Letter, finally, can be found in Gordon Burgess’ “An Irish Die Wahlverwandtschaften” (German Life and Letters, XIV/2 [1992], 140-48).

21 Hugo von Hofmannsthal, The Chandos Letter, trans. Michael Hofmann, London, 1995, 2. I have decided to use the translation throughout, as it is also the one Banville quotes from.


Apart from feeling a unity with the whole of nature, in other words, Chandos also seeks to express this unity in language so as to arrive at a full grasp of reality. In doing so, Chandos sets great store by the power of symbolic language to bridge the gap between subject and object, between mind and matter, achieving “truth and poetry at the same time” (6). Yet, his faith in language gradually crumbles together with his own magical power in wielding it. This decline progresses from a failure to handle abstract concepts, over an inability to pronounce judgements to a complete loss of all linguistic capacities. As a result, he argues, “Individual words swam around me; they melted into eyes, which stared at me, and which I had to stare back at”. Chandos abandons all literary and intellectual work and turns instead to his simple, everyday occupations. This existence, however empty, is “not without its moments of joy and liveliness”. Indeed, through a close attention to commonplace things – “a watering-can, a harrow left abandoned on the field, a dog in the sun, a poor churchyard, a small farmhouse” (11-13) – Chandos sometimes experien-ces a revelatory feeling, which comes surprisingly close to his pre-crisis impressions of unity:

I feel an enchanting limitless counterpoint within me and around me, and among the substances playing against one another, there is none in which I could not flow. At such a time, I feel as though my body consisted entirely of ciphers, which reveal everything to me. Or as though we could enter into a new, intuitive relationship with the whole universe, if we began to think with our hearts.

What distinguishes this experience from the previous one is, first of all, that Chandos no longer stands apart to judge and interpret this world. Instead of “seizing” things as “symbols” of each other, he has himself become a “cipher”, a symbol, a sign. Standing completely within experience, Chandos’ relationship to reality has become “intuitive” rather than intellectual; one of feeling rather than knowing. Moreover, in being “unable to say anything about it”, Chandos has also lost the ability to master reality in words (16). Being equally incapable of bringing about these revelations, Chandos is in fact reduced to a passive position throughout. At the end of the letter, Chandos quite explicitly renounces all literary activity, all writing in English and in Latin because, he writes somewhat cryptically,

the language in which it might perhaps have been given to me not only to write, but also to think, is neither Latin nor English nor Italian nor


Spanish, but a language of which I do not know even one word, a language in which dumb things speak to me, and in which I may once, in my grave, have to account for myself before an unknown judge. (20)

Even in this rough outline, Hofmannsthal’s text immediately raises two questions: why does this linguistic and literary crisis occur? and how, if Chandos claims to “have quite lost the ability to think or speak on any subject in a coherent fashion”, is he nevertheless able to explain the nature of his crisis in a letter? The precise nature of Chandos’ literary crisis has in fact generated considerable discussion in the critical reception of Ein Brief, not in the least because this fictional letter is generally regarded as a reflection of the writer’s own poetic crisis. Around 1902 Hofmannsthal, who had been a poetic prodigy from an early age, gave up writing poetry altogether and turned his attention to prose. However, far more than in the biographical circumstances of the author, the reasons for Chandos’ poetic renunciation are to be found in Chandos’ own characterisation of his pre-crisis poetic ideals. For it is clear that the abilities Chandos claims to have lost are also those he rejects. Therefore, Chandos’ proclaimed inability to make general statements, pronounce judgements, or handle abstractions stems from his new awareness that “all these [are] quite untenable, mendacious and full of holes” (11). Chandos can no longer live with the intellectual and linguistic superiority he prided himself on earlier. In a last, ironic address to Bacon, therefore, he quite explicitly denounces everything the rational philosopher stands for:

I shall write no English and no Latin book: and this for a reason whose – to me – distressing strangeness I leave it to your boundless intellectual superiority to place with an undazzled vision there where it belongs in the array of spiritual and physical manifestations that are harmoniously spread out before you. (20)

What Chandos renounces is the arrogance and certainty with which Bacon – as Chandos himself in his pre-crisis state – claims to understand and express the totality of the physical and spiritual world. Chandos’ descriptions of his earlier literary achievements indicate, furthermore, that the poetics the young Chandos adheres to have clear symbolist overtones. His works clearly embody the belief that language can easily cross the gap between subject and object, uniting them within the single unit of the natural image. Hofmannsthal himself characterised this ability as “die


magische Herrschaft über das Wort das Bild das Zeichen”.22 This belief in the power of language is part of his essentially Romantic worldview, which takes for granted the universal harmony of self and world, or mind and matter.

However, in Chandos’ own rendering of this prelapsarian unity and its concomitant poetic ideal, the paradox inherent in this symbolist poetics becomes clear. Chandos feels “one” with nature, arguing, “in all of them I felt Nature .... and in all of Nature I felt myself”. Yet, at the same time, he is called upon to “seize” things; to stand apart from Nature in order to interpret, explain and express it. As Michael Morton puts it,

[Chandos] was to be both object and subject – mir and ich – both experiencing a kind of mystical unity with (or, perhaps better, of) the totality of Being and at the same time aware that that was what he was doing, both absorbed in the All and yet sufficiently distinct from it to articulate it in all its significance. His situation, in short, was the ultimately impossible one of the self-conscious mystic.23

The duality of language and consciousness, working as it does within the framework of object and subject, is at odds with the unconscious feelings of unity with nature they want to express. Hence, it is inevitable that Chandos should come to doubt the power of words and images to truly re-present the world, to make it present in language. Failing to reach reality, his words “are like whirlpools, it gives me vertigo to look down at them, they turn without cease, and transport you into nothingness” (11). His words bring not presence but absence, or “bottomless emptiness”. Chandos’ arrogant project of “seizing it all” backfires as he realises that what he comes to know is not the outer world but only himself. This solipsistic undercurrent of his symbolist poetics is hinted at in the projected title of his all-inclusive encyclopaedia: “Nosce te Ipsum”, know thyself.

Turning with renewed attention to the commonplace, Chandos is rewarded for his renunciation by epiphanic moments in which he experiences a certain oneness with nature, while being unable to say anything about it. This brings us to the second question: how, or by what alternative poetic paradigm, is Chandos able to explain the nature and

22 Quoted in Benjamin Bennet, “Chandos and his Neighbours”, Deutsche

Vierteljahrschrift, XLIX (1975), 327. 23 Michael Morton, “Chandos and His Plans”, Deutsche Vierteljahrschrift, LXII

(1988), 519.


circumstances of his crisis in a letter? Although this question is clearly a crucial one for a meta-poetic text such as Ein Brief, I have found only one critic who directly addresses it. Michael Morton identifies Chandos’ alternative poetics as a “negative aesthetics”: “through a kind of via negativa, Hofmannsthal in the Chandos-brief succeeds, like Wittgenstein in the Tractatus in conveying by means of language what cannot be expressed in language” (535). Morton gives two examples of this negative aesthetics, the first of which concerns the fact that Chandos does not really explain his crisis but describe it, or in Wittgensteinian terms, that he does not so much tell it as show it. According to Morton, Chandos experiences one of the epiphanic moments which from time to time enlighten his post-crisis life in the act of letter-writing itself: “by effectively using the crisis as its own representation, Chandos is able to achieve, not an explanation of his state (or at least not one that he can recognise as such), but rather, as he puts it in, for him, apposite fashion, a ‘Schilderung eines unerklär-lichen Zustandes’” (538).24 Secondly, this via negativa is evident in the abundant use of the negative or subjunctive in the letter, by means of which Chandos cleverly succeeds in suggesting what he claims is impossible to say. At the end of his letter, for instance, Chandos proclaims his own inability to express his love and gratitude to Bacon, yet through this very negation does he convey his gratitude after all:

I wish it had been given to me, in the last words of this presumably last letter I shall write to Francis Bacon, to concentrate all the love and gratefulness, all the unmeasured admiration for the greatest benefactor of my spirit, and the foremost Englishman of my time that I hold in my heart, and will keep there until it breaks in death. (20)

This pattern occurs repeatedly in Ein Brief and can also be applied to the structure of the letter as such. In suggesting presence indirectly – through affirming absence – this via negativa is the very opposite of his pre-crisis use of imagery which tried, but failed, to make reality present by directly naming it.

In The Newton Letter the literary crises of Chandos and Hofmannsthal are further duplicated in the crises of Newton and of his unfortunate biographer. Newton’s scientific crisis, though only of minor importance of the novel, is most explicitly modelled on Ein Brief. Following the loss of

24 It is ironic that in the English translation this sentence has become, “this protracted account of the inexplicable condition” (19, italics added). For the term “account” implies of course precisely the kind of causal explanation that Chandos is unable to give.


some papers in a fire, Newton recognises the relativity of his scientific work:

It’s not the loss of the precious papers that will drive him temporarily crazy, but the simple fact that it doesn’t matter. It might be his life’s work gone, the Principia itself, the Opticks, the whole bang lot, and still it wouldn’t mean a thing. (22)

He abandons science and turns instead to “that darker work in alchemy”, writing a letter to Locke in which he seeks “a means of explaining the nature of this ailment, if ailment it be, which has afflicted me this summer past” (50). As Banville already indicated, this fictive letter to Locke is modelled on Chandos’ letter to Bacon. In addition, this letter is further duplicated in the letter the narrator of The Newton Letter writes to Clio, an old friend and the muse of history, in order to account for the sudden crisis which has led him to abandon his biography of Newton:

I have abandoned my book. You’ll think me mad. Seven years I gave to it – seven years! How can I make you understand that such a project is now for me impossible, when I don’t really understand it myself. (1)

Nevertheless, the narrator goes on to describe his stay on the Lawless estate and his failure to finish his work. Like Chandos, he turns his attention instead to “the ordinary, that strangest and most elusive of enigmas” (11).

Although he experiences some near-epiphanic moments in nature, clearly modelled on Chandos’ revelations, the narrator mostly focuses on the people on the Lawless estate. When the grand interpretations he fixes on them turn out to have been mistaken, he leaves the estate and ponders in retrospect, “Where is the connection between all that, and the abandoning of a book? I don’t know, or at least I can’t say, in so many words” (79). In all, Banville’s novella clearly invites the same questions as Ein Brief: why did the narrator abandon his biography? and how is he still able to write this letter in spite of assertions such as “words fail me” or “I’ve lost my faith in the primacy of text” (1). As with Ein Brief, the answer to the first question can be found in the narrator’s own descriptions of his pre-crisis state, since his scientific crisis also comes about through a rejection of earlier beliefs rather than through their loss.

A first indication of the narrator’s earlier scientific methods can be found in his deprecating description of the work of another Newton-biographer:


You may say, as Newton himself said, that he saw so far because he had the shoulders of giants to stand on : but you might as well say that without his mother or father he would not have been born, which is true all right, but what does it signify? …. But would you believe that all this, this Popovian Newton-as-the-greatest-scientist-the-world-has-known, now makes me feel slightly sick? Not that I think of it as untrue, in the sense that it is fact. It’s just that another kind of truth has come to seem to me more urgent, although, for the mind, it is nothing compared to the lofty verities of science. (21-22, italics added)

Truth in the sense of verified fact has become an empty category for the narrator, who consequently dismisses the whole idea of knowledge as an accurate representation of reality. This traditional conception of truth has come to be superseded by “another kind of truth”, which, though only vaguely defined here, may correspond to the notion of significance, referred to elsewhere in the text. If the traditional biography may have historical meaning, the narrator realises, it is utterly devoid of significance. In short, the narrator’s first disillusionment is a familiar one. For with similar qualifying gestures, Kepler, Copernicus and Newton renounced their scientific achievements, arguing “it seemed not to matter” or “it wouldn’t mean a thing”. Yet, not only truth and fact have become totally empty for the narrator, also the words in which this truth is rendered, are shown to be hollow and meaningless. Like Chandos, the narrator has the uncomfortable experience that words are rhetorically spinning into the void. Commenting on some quotations from Popov’s biography on Newton, the narrator shows how Popov’s rhetorical phrases mean nothing at all:

I like his disclaimer: Before the phenomenon of Isaac Newton, the historian, like Freud when he came to contemplate Leonardo, can only shake his head and retire with as much good grace as he can muster. Then out come the syringe and the formalin.

The result is the same as in Ein Brief: once the organic unity of word and thing is revealed as illusory, language proves to be generating absences rather than producing presences.

The second charge which the narrator lays against Popov, and against his pre-crisis self, is that of claiming to fully understand Newton and hence unilaterally fixing and determining the object of his biography:

I met him once, an awful little man with ferret eyes and a greasy suit. Reminded me of an embalmer. Which, come to think of it, is apt …. That is what I was doing too, embalming old N.’s big corpse, only I did


have the grace to pop off before the deathhead’s grin was properly fixed. (21)

Incorporating another human being in a self-serving unified structure effectively comes down to destroying him or her.25 That this is also the biographical project the narrator himself sought to realise is evident from his description of its proposed contents, “a celebration of action, of the scientist as hero, a gleeful acceptance of Pandora’s fearful disclosure, wishy-washy mediaevalism kicked out and the age of reason restored” (22). Like Chandos, in other words, the narrator considered himself “the man capable of seizing [it] all”. Realising the destructiveness of his own paradigm, he comes to reject this arrogant notion, at least as far as his work is concerned, and he will henceforth concentrate on the crisis of Newton, the “lump” which made a hole in his grand interpretative construction (6).

That the narrator’s renunciation of intellectual mastery in his biography is connected to a larger loss of faith in the power of language to truly represent the world is suggested in his failed attempts at understanding nature around him. Observing birds with the help of a guidebook, he remarks:

I couldn’t get the hang of them. The illustrations would not match up with the real specimens before me. Every bird looked like a starling. (5)

The same discrepancy exists between the names and schemes he arrogantly fastens on the Lawless family and the reality of that family itself. For even while he has renounced intellectual mastery in his biography, the narrator continues to interpret the people around him according to his own literary preconceptions and beliefs. About Charlotte and Edward’s marriage, he declares, “he was a waster, Charlotte kept the place going, everything was a mistake, even the child”; and about Ottilie he proclaims, “more than sex … she wanted company” (19, 27). It is only after these and similar rash interpretations have been exposed as illusory and void that the narrator realises he has been totally wrong about the Lawlesses: “I dreamed up a horrid drama and failed to see the

25 The destructive capacity of the sceptical quest – as a “fixing” of the world – has already been discussed in Chapter 1. It is ironic that precisely while denouncing Popov for using, fixing and destroying Newton, the narrator himself effectively incorporates – hence, uses and destroys – Popov in the self-serving and deprecating little pun, “pop off” which is part of the foregoing quote.


commonplace tragedy that was playing itself out in real life” (79). At the end of his stay, in other words, his faith in the subject’s ability to understand and express reality has been dealt a decisive blow. Finally renouncing any belief in a unity of self and world, he appropriately describes his leave-taking from the Ferns in terms of the Fall, featuring the boy Michael as the Archangel driving Adam from Paradise: “He was no longer a Cupid. Not a golden bow and arrow, but a flaming sword would have suited him now” (76). Yet, if it is only at the end of his narrated story that the narrator fully relinquishes his narcissistic belief in truth, language and knowledge, what must interest us here is that his narrative itself, written after this renunciation, already reveals an alternative approach to truth and language.

About Newton’s second letter to Locke the narrator comments: It is the only instance in all his correspondence of an effort to understand and express his innermost self. And something is expressed, understood, forgiven even, if not in the lines themselves, then in the spaces between, where a pitiful tension throbs. (50)

This passage is both an accurate description of the via negativa we saw at work in Hofmannsthal’s text and a meta-poetic comment on The Newton Letter itself. Indeed, like Chandos, Banville’s narrator can be seen to describe rather than explain his situation, leaving it up to the reader to read between the lines. Moreover, the narrator also manages to give descriptions and to draw conclusions precisely by denying the possibility of doing so:

So much is unsayable: all the important things. I spent a summer in the country, I slept with one woman and thought I was in love with another; I dreamed up a horrid drama, and failed to see the commonplace tragedy that was playing itself out in real life. You’ll ask, where is the connection between all that and the abandoning of a book? I don’t know, or at least I can’t say in so many words. (79)

In this and similar examples, the narrator ingeniously manages to state and negate his assertions. Like Lord Chandos in Ein Brief, the narrator of The Newton Letter manages to show what he denies is possible to say. In a slightly different way, this via negativa is also at work in the new biography the narrator plans to write. For rather than approaching Newton’s life in a grand and totalising gesture, he claims to be “concentrating with morbid fascination, on the chapter I had devoted to the breakdown and to those two letters to Locke. Was it a lump I felt


there, a little, hard, painless lump…?” (6). Consistent with the negative use of absences in order to suggest a presence, the narrator concentrates here on what he has always considered a minor aspect of Newton’s biography, as a tentative and roundabout way of access to Newton’s life and work.

Apart from these already familiar versions of the negative aesthetics, The Newton Letter importantly offers a third way out of the predicament that naming things comes perilously close to destroying them. The narrator himself formulates this paradox as follows:

When I search for the words to describe her [Charlotte] I can’t find them. Such words don’t exist. They would need to be no more than forms of intent, balanced on the brink of saying, another version of silence. Every mention I make of her is a failure. Even when I say just her name it sounds like an exaggeration. When I write it down it seems impossibly swollen, as if my pen had slipped eight or nine redundant letters into it.

The attempt to name Charlotte, to define her in order to make her present only achieves the opposite result: she disappears into emptiness. Therefore, other words are necessary, words that are themselves on the verge of nothingness and absence. The narrator goes on to describe this alternative poetics:

I must concentrate on things impassioned by her passing. Anything would do, her sun hat, a pair of muddied wellingtons standing splay-footed at the backdoor. The very ordinariness of these mementoes was what made them precious. That and the fact that they were wholly mine. Even she would not know their secret significance.

With what he calls “the concentration of the painter”, the narrator bestows on these trivial things another significance. This significance is not in any way organically connected with the things, but rather the result of the narrator’s arbitrary associations, the result of contiguity rather than correspondence. That this roundabout way of painting Charlotte – focusing on “things impassioned by her passing”, rather than on “her passing” itself – proves to be much more effective is suggested by the narrator’s description of the mental pictures he has of Charlotte:

In the best of them she is not present at all, someone jogged my elbow, or the film was faulty. Or perhaps she was present and has withdrawn, with a pained smile. Only her glow remains. Here is an empty chair in rain-light, cut flowers on a work-bench, an open window with lightning


flickering distantly in the dark. Her absence throbs in these views more powerfully, more poignantly than any presence. (44-45)

This indirect way of describing Charlotte is the very opposite of the definitions the narrator otherwise foists on the Lawless family. Far from trying to grasp and define Charlotte, the narrator approaches her in the tentative, roundabout way of focusing on the trivia and absences that surround her. Instead of wanting (and always failing) to say Charlotte’s identity, the narrator is trying to show something of her presence. Put in the terms of Hofmannsthal’s negative aesthetics, the narrator can be said to turn denial into affirmation and absence into presence.

Incidentally, The Newton Letter itself suggests a term for this poetic process, which is also at work in other places in the text. Depicting Newton’s crisis, the narrator writes,

Newton’s mouth opens and a word like a stone falls out: Nothing …. Nothing. The word reverberates. He broods on it as on some magic emblem whose other face is not to be seen and yet is emphatically there. For the nothing automatically signifies the everything. (23)

Just like Charlotte’s sun hat or wellingtons, the word “nothing” suddenly acquires an additional significance. This significance in neither organically connected to the original word, nor does it in any way replace it. Instead, both word and significance remain present on either side of the emblem. On a more general level, finally, the phrase, “the nothing automatically signifies the everything”, indicates very clearly that it is through absences, trivialities, nothingness that powerful presence, “everything”, may be achieved. The notion of emblem is itself of course host to a whole number of significances. The reference which comes most readily to mind in the context of Irish literature is no doubt Yeats’ definition of “emblems” in his essay “Symbolism in Painting” as having “their meaning by a traditional and not by a natural right”.26 In the article “Image and Emblem in Yeats”, Paul de Man further elaborates on the distinction between symbol and emblem in Yeats’ poetry.27 If the symbol postulates an organic unity between word and thing, the emblem constitutes the relation between word and thing as contiguous, traditional or personal. Moreover, since the emblem foregrounds the materiality of

26 W.H. Yeats, “Symbolism in Painting”, Essays and Introductions, London, 1969, 147.

27 Paul de Man, “Image and Emblem in Yeats”, The Rhetoric of Romanticism, New York, 1984, 145-238.


words and things, sign and significance do not merge into a larger unity but continue to exist in a relation of tension and difference.

The characteristics of the Yeatsian emblem, as de Man interprets them, can easily be applied to the narrator’s negative aesthetics as realised in the examples quoted above. The narrator uses entirely trivial things – Charlotte’s boots, cut flowers, an empty chair – to suggest a significance which is not in any way organically connected with the thing, but rather the result of an entirely personal, contiguous relation. This additional meaning, furthermore, does not replace the original meaning and materiality of these things as boots, flowers, or chairs. On the contrary, the narrator’s secret meaning exists but on the other side of the emblem, as The Newton Letter succinctly puts it. Yet, far from simply adhering to the Yeatsian conception of the emblem, the narrator often plays around with the traditional connotations of emblems, adding a personal significance. To the emblematically charged word “Finisterre”, for instance, he adds this significance:

Once, listening idly to the shipping forecast on the radio, I saw her come out on the steps in the tawny light of evening and call to the child, and even still always I think of her when I hear the word Finisterre. (43)

Unlike Yeats, moreover, the narrator does not always know the significance of his emblems himself, as when he writes, “I brood on certain words, these emblems, Succubus, for instance” (80). All he does is to lift a word or thing out of its commonplace context and to raise it to the position of emblem, thereby giving it a special, if often undetermined, significance, as in the following and final example:

Out on Killiney bay a white sail was tilted at an angle to the world, a white cloud was slowly cruising the horizon. What has all this to do with anything? Yet such remembered scraps seem to me abounding in significance. (1)

In conclusion, I would like to draw attention to an aspect which distinguishes The Newton Letter from Ein Brief. Although both texts reject a poetics involving mastery and illusions of unity as well as advance an alternative in terms of absence and indirect suggestion, they do so to different degrees. In The Newton Letter any form of unity between subject and object is most radically rejected and an alternative poetics based on the indifferent materiality of words and things is most fully embraced. A possible explanation for this might reside in Hofmannsthal’s


unwillingness to completely renounce the notion of a fundamental unity between self and world, even if it is a unity which can never be expressed. Since Yeats, in de Man’s reading at least, shows a similar reluctance to completely renounce natural imagery, this tendency could be construed as a crucial aspect of Modernism. As an exponent of a postmodern culture, then, Banville appears to have less difficulty with this renunciation of symbolic unity in favour of random emblematic significance. The narrator of The Newton Letter accepts without further qualms the notion that the significance of words, signs and images is not to be found in some anterior or ulterior transcendent unity. Instead, he gladly embraces the emblem as an alternative mode of expression based on plurality, difference and otherness. This difference in context is succinctly illustrated in the different readings which the same sentence, “a language in which dumb things speak to me”, invites in both texts. Whereas in Ein Brief the paradox – dumb things don’t speak – is simply taken as proof of the powerful and all-encompassing unity between self and world, in The Newton Letter the discrepancy is crucial. Precisely because things don’t speak, they don’t lend themselves to an easy recuperation in any programme of symbolic unity. Instead, in their very dumbness and materiality, they suggest and invite a whole array of indeterminate significances.

The differences between both texts can finally also be noticed in their distinctive use of epiphany. In perfect illustration of the standard form of Romantic epiphany, the epiphanies in Ein Brief are brief but visible manifestations of a spiritual truth. For Chandos trivial things suddenly blossom into a revelation of the underlying unity of self and Nature. In the emblems which have just been traced, on the contrary, the very process of epiphany is actually used to conjure up a significance of the narrator’s own making. After all, such trivial things as a “sun hat, a pair of muddied wellingtons” are focused on, to suggest a significance which goes beyond their ordinary meaning. “Concentrat[ing] on things impassioned by her passing”, the narrator tries to poetically create meaning. This meaning does not point to some pre-determined unity of self and world, but is entirely contiguous, personal, and often absurd. As we have seen in Chapter 2, also in the narrator’s near-revelatory moments, a strange significance cannot be resolved into a single meaning. In short, in The Newton Letter both emblems and failed epiphanies effortlessly generate a wide range of possible and often mutually exclusive significances. That reader and narrator alike feel the strong urge to pick one, on the other


hand, can be considered as evidence of the necessary attraction which meaning and unity have for us in the absence of any transcendent justification. This also explains why it is Banville’s narrator rather than Chandos, who writes at the end of his letter, “in the end of course I shall take up the book and finish it: such a renunciation is not of this world” (81). If Chandos’ total renunciation of literary activity is only possible at the expense of his continuing belief in transcendental harmony, the narrator’s resigned conclusion bears witness to the postmodern predicament, which suggests that the battle against mastery, symbolic expression and illusions of unity is as necessary as it is unending.

The war on chance in Mefisto: Banville vs. Goethe “Chance was in the beginning”, Gabriel Swan boldly declares in the opening lines of Mefisto. And a few lines further down, in a nicely chiasmic structure, he reaffirms, “The end also was chance”. Yet, in between those two lines, Gabriel implicitly negates this claim by detecting order all around him. In a first attempt to discern meaning, he writes: “I am thinking of that tiny swimmer, alone of its kind, surging in frantic ardour towards the burning town, the white room, and Castor dead”, thereby invoking ancient myth as an explanation for his own survival as well as for his brother’s death. He also summons “the banal mathematics of gemination” to suggest that his birth can be accounted for by logic and reason rather than chance. Gabriel then proceeds to search for a justifi-cation of his aborted twinship in the genetics of his family history:

We were not the first, of our kind, in our tribe. On my mother’s side there had been another pair, monovular also, though they both perished, their lives a brief day.

Finally, he discerns a structural or aesthetic explanation in the similarity of his grandparents: “There is a more subtle echo in the symmetrical arrangement of grandparents, Jack Kay and Grandfather Swan and their miniature wives.” Having effectively denied the chance he asserted at the beginning, Gabriel concludes:

Thus the world slyly nudges us, showing up the seemingly random for what it really is. I could go on. I shall go on. I too have my equations, my symmetries, and will insist on them. (3-4)

The war between chance and order acted out in this introductory paragraph strongly haunts the whole novel. Gabriel’s mathematical quest


and his artistic venture as a narrator are caught between the opposite poles of subject and object, mind and matter, or in the terminology of Mefisto: order and chance. To make matters even more complicated, the very nature of that order is a point of confusion from the start. For the explanations with which Gabriel implicitly negates the chancelike nature of his life fall apart into two distinct categories. The references to myth, literature and aesthetics betray the work of a narrator who constructs parallels so as to order reality. But Gabriel’s genetic explanation might very well reveal one of the real causes of his traumatic birth. Similarly, while Gabriel’s concluding reference to “the seemingly random” suggests a paradigm of art as aletheia, his subsequent insistence on “my equations” and “my symmetries” proves his adherence to a poetics of poesis. In this last novel of the science tetralogy, in short, Banville revisits the artistic tensions which he presented in Doctor Copernicus: firstly, the tension between a receptive engagement with and a creative transcendence of ordinary reality and secondly, the opposition between the revelation and the construction of order, beauty or truth. In what follows, I propose to reinvestigate the opposition and possible synthesis of these poetic positions against the background of Goethe’s Faust, in order to see whether Banville’s aesthetic odyssey in the science tetralogy has changed his outlook on art and on life.

That the legendary Dr Faustus, whose unbounded ambition inspires all of Banville’s scientists, should finally make a more explicit appearance in the tetralogy is hardly surprising. More puzzling, perhaps, is Banville’s choice of Goethe’s treatment of the Faust-myth, rather than Christopher Marlowe’s early play or Thomas Mann’s novel Doktor Faustus. The latter, especially, would have fitted somewhat better in the pantheon of Modernist writers which Banville has elected for his science tetralogy. With these writers Banville clearly shares a yearning for unity, beauty and truth even though he is more strongly aware of the inaccessibility of these ideals. Because Banville’s poetic affinities with Goethe’s more classicist literary ideals are much less pronounced, the influence of Faust bears more on the plot and structure of the novel than on the aesthetic syntheses searched for.

We have seen before how Gabriel’s quest for order is challenged twice in Mefisto. In the first part of the novel his desperate attempt to discover the hidden meaning of his existence fails when he is confronted with the death of his mother. However hard he tries, he cannot “solve” her death and fails to discern its secret “pattern” (109). In the second part, his


mathematical quest is once again brought short by the strange and stubborn fact of human finitude. Both the death of Adele and his confrontation with the intensely material figure of Mammy bring it home to him that things and people simply are, without any underlying meaning or significance. At the end of his narrative, therefore, Gabriel renounces his quest for order, “I woke up one morning and found I could no longer add together two and two .… Things crowded in, the mere things themselves.” He announces instead a greater openness to ordinary reality; a closer engagement with “simple things” and “chance”:

I have begun to work again, tentatively. I have gone back to the very start, to the simplest things. Simple! I like that. It will be different this time, I think it will be different. I won’t do as I used to, in the old days. No. In future, I will leave things, I will try to leave things, to chance. (230-34)

Still, the tone of these lines is highly ambiguous. While proposing a greater adherence to chance, Gabriel at the same time announces that he has taken up his work – the quest for order – again. Hence Imhof’s conclusion that Gabriel, like the narrator of The Newton Letter, has not learnt anything; that “ultimately he does not relinquish his belief in order”.28 In support of this claim Imhof refers to the symmetrical form of Gabriel’s narrative as well as to his peculiarly Nietzschean concept of chance. Gabriel’s final affirmation of chance, Imhof argues, “only appears to be negativistic” because for Gabriel as for Nietzsche, “Chance is the completion and manifestation of necessity, of order of a specific kind” (Introduction, 159). And Laura Izarra concurs with this interpretation, arguing, “Gabriel is enlightened with a revelation of order within chaos, of a synthesis that contemplates determinism and chance”.29 Although Nietzsche does indeed link chance to determinism in his philosophy – as both are but different sides of the same coin – he strongly distinguishes determinism from order. While order entails causality, meaning and rationality, necessity implies determination, blind fate and, indeed, chance.30 Even though some of our actions may suggest reason or

28 Rüdiger Imhof, “Swan’s Way, or Goethe, Einstein, Banville – The Eternal Recurrence”, Etudes Irlandaises, XII,4 (1987), 116.

29 Laura Izarra, Mirrors and Holographic Labyrinths, San Francisco, 1999, 120. 30 In Nietzsche et la philosphie (Paris, 1962), Gilles Deleuze uses Nietzsche’s image

of the dice to explain the way in which chance and necessity are fundamentally related: “Les dés qu’on lance une fois sont l’affirmation du hasard, la combination qu’ils forment en tombant est l’affirmation de la nécessité” (29, italics added).


causality, Nietzsche claims, these are in fact but the ways in which we dress up the ultimately random and chaotic nature of reality. In short, if Gabriel accepts chance as “the beginning” and “the end” of his existence, he simply cannot support a parallel belief in order or meaning as the underlying structure of reality.

As the tight structure of Mefisto reveals nevertheless, Gabriel has not fully renounced all belief in order. Imhof concludes therefore:

The form of Mefisto thus bodies forth the order, harmony, symmetry and completeness underlying the seemingly contingent world of Gabriel’s near-Faustian experiences in a Mephistophelian world. It is simply Swan’s way of establishing sense. (“Swan’s Way”, 124, italics added)

Once again, Imhof wrongly equates two ideas of order, which the novel keeps separate. What the order and symmetry of Mefisto bear witness to is but Gabriel’s adherence to the artistic paradigm of poesis, which imposes an order on the chaotic randomness of events. What Gabriel after several disappointments is forced to renounce, however, is an aesthetics of aletheia, which stipulates that order can be discovered underneath the apparent chaos of reality. If Gabriel the protagonist still hesitates between both paradigms, the poetic beliefs of Gabriel the narrator are clearly those of poesis: he self-consciously constructs a beautiful and meaningful structure, which wages war against the chance. Since the very form of Mefisto makes it Banville’s most committed realisation of the paradigm of poesis so far, its artistic methods need to be looked at in more detail.31

The artistic tension between poesis and aletheia which haunts the science tetralogy thus finds a resolution in the fairly radical aesthetics of construction exemplified in the form of Gabriel’s narrative. The self-conscious construct of this narrative is realised both through sustained references to Goethe’s Faust and through an overly symmetrical structure. By imposing on his life the structure and thematic interest of Goethe’s

31 Banville comments in a recent interview: “You asked me earlier about the notion

of order. Copernicus and Kepler certainly were obsessed with the notion that they could find the secret order of the universe, and it seems to me that this is what artists try to do all the time. It’s an absolutely impossible task. It can’t be done, because I don’t really believe that there is any order. But it’s the pathos of the quest that fascinates me, the pathos of highly intelligent human beings who know that the world is built on chance but are still going ahead, saying, I will not accept this: I’m going to manufacture order, if necessary and impose it on the chaos” (quoted in Dawn Duncan, “Banville’s Fiction Comes of Age as it Lays to Rest Old Ghosts”, ABEI Journal, 2 [2000], 56, italics added.)


Faust, to start with, Gabriel gives his experiences a coherence and explanation, which they would otherwise lack. To give a brief example: through his peculiar depictions of Felix – his perennial mocking laughter, his constant pointless activity, his borrowed clothes and his sly temptations – Gabriel effectively casts him in the role of Goethe’s Mephistopheles, conferring on this figure the additional significance of cynicism and evil power. Gabriel’s explicit mention of the “big black dog” which caused the accident in which his mother died, similarly explains this accident as the result of Felix’s devilish or magical powers (101). At the same time, however, Gabriel is at times over-emphasising Felix’s Mephistophelean nature, when he depicts Felix in “Goat Alley” in Part I and in “The Goat” in Part II, or when he calls the computer in Part II a “Reizner 666”. These exaggerations create the uneasy impression that Gabriel is mocking or undermining his own Faustian parallels and equations. In a similar way, the rowdy pub-scene with the two German sailors in the second part of Mefisto grotesquely mirrors Auerbach’s Tavern Scene from Faust I, and Gabriel’s visit to Mammy ironically reflects on Faust’s descent to “The Mothers” in Faust II. In fact, most of the other characters in Mefisto are modelled – ironically or by inversion – on characters from Faust.32 Gabriel’s aunt and uncle, Philomena and Ambrose, are the distorted mirror images of Philemon and Baucis, the poor peasants who are destroyed by Faust and Mephistopheles in Goethe’s play. Banville’s pair not only inverts the Greek myth in which these poor people kindly serve the gods without being aware of it, but also comically distorts Goethe’s tragic figures. If Philemon and Baucis are pious and honest peasants, the slightly pathetic Swans in Mefisto are money-grubbing and fame-seeking representatives of the Irish lower middle class. In these and many other examples, Gabriel first describes a particular person or scene according to Goethe’s Faust. In this way he installs a similarity that confers a certain meaning, explanation or added significance. Immediately however, he mocks his own similarities through exaggeration, inversion or grotesque distortion, hence partly undermining the parallels and equations he imposed earlier. Although more examples can be adduced in support of this analysis, I will now turn to the more general compositional design of Gabriel’s narrative in which a similar pattern of distorted mirroring can be observed.

32 Rüdiger Imhof gives a very detailed analysis of all allusions and references to

Goethe in Mefisto (Introduction, 155-70).


In the first place, the peculiar form of Gabriel’s narrative is an important part of his attempt to contain, order and explain his experiences. A principal way in which he achieves this is by dividing his story into two parts: “Marionettes” and “Angels”, respectively. This binary structure further determines Gabriel’s representation of events. Through a consis-tent repetition of metaphors, descriptions, sentences and characterisations, Gabriel constructs the two parts as subtly distorting mirror images of one another.33 This means that the characters of Part I are likened as well as opposed to the characters of Part II. Kasperl and Kosok, for instance, are alike in terms of physiognomy, occupation and dependence on Felix, but differ significantly in their respective scientific beliefs. Similarly, Felix’s helpers in Part II (Liz and Tony) are the tragic variants of their grotesque counterparts (Philomena and Ambrose) in Part I. Gabriel’s mother and silent father find their inverse Doppelgänger in silent Matron and chatterbox Father Plomer. In relation to the two girls, finally, this paradigm of distorted similarities is especially significant. Sophie and Adele are alike in their vagueness and strange absence; both have a similar “milky odour” and are often compared to birds. If Sophie shows Gabriel all sorts of places in Ashburn House, Adele, he tells us, “showed me places in the city” (153). Moreover, both girls are equally uninterested in the mathematical figures and formulas Gabriel tries to show them in return. These and many other repetitions effectively install a similarity between both girls, which makes the oppositions between them all the more striking. If Sophie, for instance, is dressed in flowered skirts, always smiles or laughs and is often pictured amidst sunlight, Adele is a creature of dark or twilight, whose occasional laugh sounds more like a “high shriek”, and who is dressed in a crackling “plastic raincoat” or a “moth-eaten fur coat” (174-77, 144). In Faustian terms, the skinny, chain-smoking, but worldly Adele is clearly the (inverted) Helena-figure to the (apparently) naïve and innocent, Gretchen-like Sophie.

This distorted similarity between the two girls contributes for an important part to the thematic opposition which Gabriel installs between the two parts of his narrative. “Marionettes” he fashions as a version of paradise and “Angels”, conversely and ironically, as a version of hell. In this way, Gabriel imposes a pattern on his experiences which has mythical, literary and religious overtones and which, or so he thinks,

33 As if to hint at this procedure, Gabriel, mentions “mirrors” in his narrative with

surprising frequency, e.g. 3, 81, 125, 132, 133, 234.


might figure as an explanation for what happens. In Gabriel’s description of the setting of each part, this thematic opposition is also invoked, witness the sharp distinction between the lush garden of Ashburn and the dark and derelict streets of the city. Yet, on other occasions, this opposition between paradise and hell is presented in such an exaggerated manner that it is again mocked and undermined. About his stay at the hospital, for instance, Gabriel remarks with extravagant emphasis, “For this is hell, after all”, and about Ashburn Felix says mockingly “What a paradise it seems, all the same” (135, 57). Gabriel’s initial description of Felix, finally, has exaggerated prelapsarian overtones. Felix is “leaning against a riven tree, or twined about it”, like the slyly tempting snake in paradise (35).

In short, if Gabriel does indeed shape and structure his experience, both through installing similarities with Goethe’s Faust and through imposing a parallel binary structure, he at the same time subtly undermines his own attempts at mastering the chaos through the insertion of grotesque distortions or mocking exaggerations. In other subtle ways too doubt is cast on the success of Gabriel’s artistic achievements in Mefisto. Consequently, the comparison between Faust and Mefisto demonstrates not only that Gabriel uses this text to organise and clarify his own but also that in doing so, he mirrors Faust’s own artistic efforts.34 In Faust II, to give but one example, Faust undertakes the endeavour of gaining land on the sea, an effort which is usually read as Goethe’s metaphor for the artistic quest for classical beauty and truth. This high aim is presented as both positive and negative in Goethe’s text: “[Faust’s vision] is tainted with perfectionism, corrupted with the fantasy of omnipotence, and yet there is still something noble about it: the artist’s pride and ruthless absorption in his own work.”35

A similar ambiguity pervades Gabriel’s attempts to conquer through art the forces of chance and chaos which he experiences all around him. For if Faust endeavours to impose his own design upon the indeterminate and threatening mass of the sea, Gabriel likewise forces a Faustian scheme as well as a highly symmetrical structure onto his narrative in an attempt

34 In describing Gabriel as Faustian figure, I take issue with Imhof and McMinnn

who consider Kosok and Kasperl the principal Fausts in Mefisto. After all, it is Gabriel who is principally tempted by Felix and implicated in several evil deeds. It is also Gabriel who has the greatest scientific ambitions and who falls in love with Sophie and Adele.

35 David Luke, “Introduction”, in J.W. Goethe, Faust, Part Two, London, 1994, lxiii.


to explain the strange and enigmatic events that befell him. Both Faust and Gabriel, in other words, pursue a similar goal: to transcend the random natural world through the creative workings of the mind. However brave and creative this attempt may be, the reader cannot but wonder at the truthfulness and moral consequences of this aesthetic project: is Gabriel’s narrative still a lifelike representation of reality? and who are the people Gabriel sacrifices in a Faustian manner in order to realise his symmetrical work of art? Yet Gabriel’s narrative is the only version of the events, so the reader ultimately has no way of knowing beyond Gabriel’s own sly attempts at undermining and questioning his narrative.

Consider therefore again the final paragraphs of Gabriel’s narrative, which apply equally well to the achievements of this narrative itself. At first, Gabriel explicitly admits to having had a strong hand in the form and structure of his narrative. He self-consciously styles himself as the creator of his story when he asks, “Have I tied up all the ends? Even an invented world has its rules, tedious, absurd perhaps, but not to be gainsaid”, or reflects, “I lost the black notebook, misplaced it somewhere, or threw it away, I don’t know. Have I not made a black book of my own?” (233-34). Like Kasperl’s black notebook, indeed, Gabriel’s book contains “symmetries”, “mirror equivalences”, and “palindromic series” which betray his quest for meaning. Yet, Kasperl’s equations and formulas are also described as “elegant but enigmatic” and as “unsoluble problems” (69-71). If Kasperl’s notebook thus forms an exceedingly beautiful structure while explaining preciously little, the same may be said of Gabriel’s narrative. His heroic attempts to conquer chance through art, have resulted in a neat symmetrical form, a beautiful structure, but have failed to provide an explanation for the events, a reason for the destruc-tion. Hence, Gabriel’s final resolve to “do things differently” and to “leave things to chance” may signal his growing awareness that his attempts to create meaning have perhaps not had the desired results. If his artificial patterning has indeed produced a tight and beautiful form, it does not seem to have brought him closer to the significance of his experiences. Like Faust, Gabriel discovers that sacrifices have been made by his insistence on order over and against chance. In future, therefore, he is resolved to adhere more to reality, to let more of the commonplace into his narrative, to be more responsive to the ordinary chaos of existence.

In short, the artistic tension between imagination and reality, which appeared resolved in the blatantly aesthetic structure of Mefisto, is introduced once again at the end. It is interesting, in this respect, to return


to Banville’s explicit poetical statements. In an interview with Fintan O’Toole, Banville expresses his personal artistic intention to do things differently:

I’ve come to an end of that idea in my work that what’s central is what’s not there. I’m in transition …. I want to allow in more spontaneity .… My ideas about how one should live were for a long time too solemn. I forgot about the element of play in art, as in life .… I do feel I should be open to a more chaotic world.

And the interviewer aptly summarises this: “He wants, like the narrator of Mefisto in other words, to let in more of the chaos, more of the spontaneity of life, and this is to do with the man as well as with the novelist.” Both Banville and his narrators, it seems, will forever hesitate between Gabriel’s dictum “Chance was in the beginning” and that older, enticing and far more famous one: “In the beginning was the word.”

The artist as critic in the art trilogy Since the end of Mefisto leaves us with more or less the same tensions and problems Doctor Copernicus set out with, one may well wonder whether Banville himself “has not learnt anything”. In the course of the science tetralogy, several forms of synthesis have been proposed in terms of supreme fiction, transformative poetics or negative aesthetics. Yet, in typical move all of them have been criticised and undermined again, either because of some even more perfect vision of unity (as in Kepler), or, conversely, because of the resigned awareness that the symbolist poetics of meaning and presence will always be more powerful than a poetics of absence, significance, or the emblem (as in The Newton Letter). In Mefisto finally, this last idea is more radically followed through in a celebration of art as a joyful and masterful construction of meaning, only to be qualified again through an opposition to chance, chaos and alterity. In this way, the science tetralogy as a whole can be read as powerful testimony to the forces of self and other – or imagination and reality – which permanently divide artistic representation. All the artist can do, the four novels ultimately suggest, is to try and strike a temporary and imperfect balance between the two. Just like the other novels, Mefisto ends on a note of promise, which seems to await fulfilment in the next novel. The question whether Banville has learnt anything from his artistic investigations in the science tetralogy can therefore only be answered by a reading of the art trilogy. Since a detailed analysis of these novels will be the main concern


of Chapters 5, 6 and 7, I will make do with briefly commenting on the status of art in the trilogy in what follows.

Although art is indeed an important presence in the trilogy, it has ceased to be a problem. Art is something which is lived, celebrated and talked about but which no longer causes the tensions and problems encountered in the science tetralogy. Paradoxically therefore, the meta-poetic tone of the trilogy (and of The Untouchable and Eclipse) is more that of the erudite art critic than that of the struggling artist. This further explains the frequent crossover between Banville’s explicit poetics and the opinions voiced in these novels. As in Banville’s theoretical statements, similarly, the tensions between the three artistic paradigms are subdued and the qualities which art is given in each of these paradigms reinforce rather than combat one another. As concerns the crucial tension between imagination and reality, first of all, this is resolved in a manner already hinted at in Mefisto: a radical celebration of the poetics of poesis. From The Book of Evidence onwards, the first-person narrator self-consciously imposes an aesthetic order and idiosyncratic meaning on things and people around him. Like in Mefisto, moreover, the order which Freddie Montgomery creates, is strongly influenced by earlier artistic represen-tations and his narratives abound with references to paintings, movies, literature and popular culture at large. If the question whether art mirrors reality in his narrative or rather the other way round is still an issue in The Book of Evidence, as we will see in Chapter 7, it ceases to be so in Ghosts and Athena, where paintings, plot and narrative mutually influence each other. In these novels, ultimately, so-called art and reality are revealed as essentially alike. Both are creative representations of the omnipotent narrator. Rather than either defending or reversing the mimetic paradigm, in other words, the boundaries between art and reality are effaced – and hence the problem solved – as both are shown to be but different worlds, which exist in a network of equations and oppositions to one another.

Even though art and reality are considered essentially alike in the art trilogy, the first receives the greatest praise. Banville’s protagonists generally prefer art to reality for mainly two reasons. Firstly, given its qualities of clarity, abstraction and autonomy, art is praised for its ability to resolve the paradoxes which haunt ordinary reality, such as life and death, stillness and movement, or presence and absence. Examples of this abound in the trilogy because Freddie Montgomery invariably describes paintings in terms of opposites transcended in a greater unity: “The creatures will not die, even if they have never lived. They are wonderfully


detailed figurines, animate, yet frozen in immobility”; or “She is the pivot of the picture, the fulcrum between two states of being, the representation of life-in-death and death-in-life, of what changes and yet endures: the witness that she offers is the possibility of transcendence.”36 It is precisely this realisation of transcendent closure which confers on great art the quality of a thing. Mysterious, inscrutable, yet palpably there, art is experienced as ultimately more real than reality itself. Secondly, Banville’s first-person narrators are convinced that art is superior because of its ability to present a truer picture of reality or to grant an insight into the heart of things. In the art trilogy therefore, art frequently reveals a purer vision of the world than is accessible in real life. Witness Freddie’s judgement of the woman in the painting:

In her portrait she has presence, she is unignorably there, more real than the majority of her sisters out here in what we call real life …. It is being he has encountered here, the thing itself, the pure, unmediated essence. (Ghosts, 84-85)

Because of the power of revelation, in short, art is frequently more lifelike than ordinary life itself.

In these and other terms of supremacy, art is celebrated in the art trilogy and The Untouchable. To the great power of art, however, a significant drawback is attached as well. If art is justly admired for its ability to reveal a more truthful dimension of reality as well as for the way in which it sets perfection and closedness against the chaos of the world, Banville’s novels also suggest that a price has to be paid for this admiration. Firstly, there is the danger, embodied mainly by Freddie in The Book of Evidence, of escaping into an artistic or art-determined world and of losing all contact with reality. Secondly, there is the attractive but equally dangerous attitude of preferring art to people, which may result in denial of chaos and difference for the sake of the order and harmony of art. Following from both of these relatively minor perils, is the fundamental risk involved in caging other people in art – which is perhaps the most central question haunting the art trilogy. At stake are the ethical consequences of celebrating art at the expense of reality, or the ethical problems attached to an all too radical form of art as poesis. Yet, the novels also pose the question whether these dangers are inherent in art, or whether they are merely the result of a misuse or even a betrayal of art, for

36 John Banville, Ghosts, London, 1993, 285; John Banville, Athena, London, 1995, 105.


which art itself cannot be held responsible. As theoretical problems of knowledge and art thus give way to practical questions of morality and ethics, the so-called ethical turn in Banville’s oeuvre clearly manifests itself. Nevertheless, these ethical questions continue to be firmly rooted within the general context of representation and it is therefore by way of an analysis of the representation of self and others that they will be investigated in what follows.

PART THREE

SELF AND OTHER

Chapter Five To the Other: Banville’s Ethical Turn

… all those high cold heroes who renounced the world and human happiness to pursue the big game of the intellect.

Banville, The Newton Letter

In the field of literary theory and criticism, the Sixties, Seventies and early Eighties were a time of intense discussion about Postmodernism. Key words in this discussion were “intertextuality” and “textualism”, “meta-fiction” and “specularity”, “criticism” and “experiment”. And the key texts of Postmodernist literature sought to deconstruct the remaining vestiges of the traditional realist novel and its attendant humanist values. In this period the English-speaking world saw the publication of the great experimental novels of John Barth, Thomas Pynchon, and William Gaddis alongside the Postmodernist re-writings of canonical texts by Jean Rhys, Julian Barnes and J.M. Coetzee. The more playful and self-reflexive texts of writers such as John Fowles and Vladimir Nabokov were also readily subsumed under this new movement. In short, the Postmodernist debate gathered all that was radical and exciting in the field of literary culture and it is therefore hardly surprising that also an emergent and ambitious writer like John Banville sought to align himself with this international movement. Banville’s early experimental novels in particular betray his desire to be part of this fashionable literary trend, witness his concern with meta-fictionality in Nightspawn, the narratological experiments in Birchwood and Doctor Copernicus and the historical re-writings in Kepler. The success of his literary self-styling in this respect can easily be measured by Imhof’s appreciation of Banville as the only Irish Postmodernist or by Linda Hutcheon’s reading of Doctor Copernicus and Kepler as exemplary forms of “historiographic metafiction”.1

From Birchwood onwards, however, another strand in Banville’s writings became gradually apparent, a Post-Romantic or Modernist preoccupation with truth and knowledge, with the divide between self and

1 Linda Hutcheon, Narcissistic Narrative, New York, 1985.


world, and the mediating role of language. Banville’s recycling of Modernist themes is evident in his choice of literary texts as aesthetic examples in the science tetralogy as well as in his repeated questioning of statements concerning the relativity of art, truth and language which Postmodernism considers self-evident.2 With the virtual disappearance of Postmodernist experiment in The Newton Letter, a third preoccupation in Banville’s novels slowly asserted itself, in the form of a growing concern with ethical questions. While this ethical interest remains secondary to problems of self and world in The Newton Letter and Mefisto, in the art trilogy notions of the Other, others and otherness become especially prominent. In The Book of Evidence, aesthetic and epistemological questions about the representation of the world can actually be seen to give way to questions concerning the ethical consequences of representations, in particular representations of other people. It is interesting to note that with this renewed focus on the other Banville joins in once again with the current and fashionable literary climate. For, if in contemporary philosophy at large the traditional dominance of epistemology has given way to an insistence on ethics, also in literary theory and criticism notions of otherness, alterity and difference are replacing such Postmodernist terms as text, inter-text and meta-text.

In fact, from the second half of the twentieth century onwards, philosophy and literary theory have gradually sought to free themselves from their extremely subject-centred tradition and have moved towards an exploration of otherness in general and an ethics of the other in particular. The first of these interrelated moves – the turn to otherness – has its distant roots in postmodern theory. Derrida’s notion of “différance”, Foucault’s erasure of “man”, the post-colonial term “hybridity” and the feminist concept of “gender” betray an insistence on otherness which has grown more explicit in recent years. In the last two decades, this new investigation of otherness and difference has merged with a renewed attention for ethical questions in philosophy (particularly in Levinas’ ethical theory), which has resulted in a new ethics, an “ethics of the other”. Evidence of this ethical turn in literary criticism can be found in trauma theory, gender studies and ethical criticism. Yet contemporary literature too bears witness to this new development. An exploration of ethical questions with a focus on the other is evident in the work of such

2 If Imhof is the foremost commentator on Banville’s Postmodernism, McMinn gives

a Modernist reading of Banville’s work.

Chapter Five: To the Other 133

new writers as Alan Warner and Mary Morrissy as well as in the recent novels of more established writers such as Julian Barnes, J.M. Coetzee, Ian McEwan, Toni Morrison – and, of course, John Banville. Although Banville’s concern with ethics and otherness from the art trilogy onwards is indeed part of a wider literary and theoretical climate, it is clearly motivated by an internal development as well. The Nietzschean element in Mefisto in particular can be recognised as an immediate preparation for Freddie Montgomery’s preoccupation with guilt and evil in The Book of Evidence, but in the other novels of the science tetralogy ethical questions are also present, albeit in a more marginal way. In a preliminary exercise, therefore, I propose to analyse the internal consistency of Banville’s ethical turn by tracing the presence of ethical questions in the four science novels. Following the central concerns of this third part as a whole, this introductory investigation will focus on the representation of other people in these novels in particular.

Scepticism of other minds Pondering Newton’s reputed crisis, the narrator of The Newton Letter writes,

I thought of Koppernigk at Frauenburg, of Nietzsche in the Engadine, of Newton himself, all those high cold heroes who renounced the world and human happiness to pursue the big game of the intellect. A pretty picture – but hardly a true one. (49-50)

In spite of the narrator’s misgivings, this description can very well be applied to Banville’s portrayal of his various protagonists. His scientists are all, to a greater or lesser extent, Faustian heroes, who sacrifice human love and happiness in their quest for a super-human knowledge and truth. If they gladly escape from the ordinary world into the transcendent realm of science and art, their relations to other people suffer most from this. Barbara often berates even Kepler for not paying enough attention to the practicalities of common life around him. “You recognise nothing!”, she shouts, “Are you alive at all, with your stars and your precious theories and your laws of this and that and and and...” (78). Locking himself in his study is not infrequently Kepler’s response to the chaos and pain of family life around him. The same holds true for Gabriel Swan who baffles his mother by spending the summer holidays in his room to do his sums. Like the other protagonists, Gabriel is an outsider who prefers watching over participating and retreats into the uncontaminated realm of science when


things become too difficult. Not surprisingly, the outside world and the people that inhabit it are described in the novels as all too difficult, strange and baffling. Upon leaving Ferns and the Lawless family, the narrator of The Newton Letter characterises his situation with the following metaphor:

I was like a man living underground who, coming up for air, is dazzled by the light and cannot find the way back into his bolt-hole. I trudge back and forth over the familiar ground, muttering. I am lost. (79)

Notwithstanding the Faustian intertext of Mefisto, Copernicus is the most Faust-like of all Banville’s protagonists. He quite explicitly renounces the ordinary human world in order to devote himself to science:

The Church had offered him a quiet living, the universities had offered academic success, Italy had even offered love. Any or all of these gifts might have seduced him, had not the hideousness intervened to demonstrate the poverty of what they had to offer …. The Church, academe, love: nothing. Seared and purified, shorn of the encumbering lumber of live, he stood at last like a solitary pine that stands in a wilderness of snow, aching upwards fiercely into the sky .... (78-79)

This retreat from life is further aggravated by Copernicus’ legendary coldness and lack of feelings. After witnessing brutal rape and murder on his journey through the Alpes, tellingly represented as “heaps of wriggling white flesh”, Copernicus ponders:

It was not the sufferings of the maimed and dead that pained him, but the very absence of that pain; he could not forget those terrible scenes, the blood and mud, the bundles of squirming flesh, but, remembering, he felt nothing, nothing, and this emptiness horrified him. (43-44)

Other people also notice the Canon’s “lack of feeling”, even in spite of his strict observance of clerical duties. Andreas calls these “false concern”, Canon Giese detects behind them “a certain lack, a transparence”, and even Copernicus has to admit that “these were not true feelings, only empty rituals”. In short, what characterises Copernicus’ attitude is a profound indifference (109-32).

In the last chapter, appropriately devoted to Copernicus’ mortal illness, the essence of Copernicus’ indifference is evoked in a weird little poem: “Word! O word! Thou word that I lack!” (229). These cryptic lines are taken from Schoenberg’s opera Moses und Aron and function in the context of Moses’ inability to express his vision. In the context of Copernicus’ struggle, they can be read as signalling his inability to capture


the truth in words. However, the emphasis on thou in this little quote suggests yet another interpretation. Taking leave of Girolamo, for instance, Copernicus suddenly realises “that even yet they did not call each other thou” (78). Secondly, on his deathbed, taking leave of the world in general and Anna in particular, he notices how Anna has aged and “it struck him as odd that they had never in all the years learned to call each other thou” (227). What Copernicus also lacks, in other words, is a fundamental thou-relation to other people, more profound than his superficial manifestations of duty. When he is plagued in his delirium by little figures from his past, “at once comic and sad”, he comes to the following explanation of this lack:

At first he knew them to be hallucinations, but then he realised that the matter was deeper than that: they were real enough, as real as anything can be that is not oneself, that is of the outside, for had he not always believed that others are not known but invented, that the world consists solely of oneself, while all else is phantom, necessarily? (228-29)

Copernicus’ reflections effectively entail an extension of his epistemo-logical scepticism into his relations to others. If after growing doubts and despair Copernicus has come to the conclusion that the world as such cannot be known and does, perhaps, not even exist, he now applies this sceptical doubt to the existence of others as well. Or, as with his external world scepticism, Copernicus can be seen to generalise the absence of certainty concerning the application of psychological concepts on other minds into a radical doubt about the existence of other people. This scepticism of other minds, as it is usually called, has also been analysed by Stanley Cavell in The Claim of Reason. Stephen Mulhall conveniently summarises his main argument:

Thus, scepticism about other minds cannot – as many Wittgenstein-ians are prone to think – be blocked by the invocation of criteria as the guarantors of certainty, but it does not follow that such scepticism is thereby vindicated; for the sceptic is wrong to view the fact that criteria do not confer certainty as a failure of the criteria rather than as an indication that the concept of certainty is not applicable at this level or depth of the human relation to the world.3

These impossible demands regarding other people reveal the sceptic’s profound inability to engage with people other than in the restrictive mode

3 Stephen Mulhall, Stanley Cavell, Oxford, 1994, 109.


of certainty. Discussing the sceptic’s contention that a person’s body blocks out any access to his or her inner thoughts or feelings, Cavell writes:

The block to my vision of the other is not the other’s body but my incapacity or unwillingness to interpret or to judge it accurately, to draw the right connections. The suggestion is: I suffer a kind of blindness, but I avoid the issue by projecting this darkness upon the other.4

Or as Mulhall puts it, “[the sceptic’s] description of this situation as a failure of knowledge is itself a failure of acknowledgement” (114).

Therefore Copernicus’ sceptical analysis could also be seen as an attempt to cover up a much more profound unwillingness to really know other persons or to enter into an emotional relationship with them. Evidence of this can also be found in Copernicus’ fear or unwillingness to be truly known himself. As he confesses to Girolamo, “I could not bear to be known thus”. Incidentally, a similar refusal can be found in the other science novels. In The Newton Letter for instance, the narrator shies away from Ottilie’s insistent gaze:

This passionate scrutiny was too much for me, I would feel something within me wrapping itself in a dirty cloak and turning furtively away. I had not contracted to be known as she was trying to know me. (29)

Like Copernicus, the narrator refuses to become emotionally entangled with other people as when he turns down Edward’s “mute plea. For what, for sympathy?” or wonders about Charlotte, “What was expected of me? Whatever it was I could not give it” (60, 46). Being known by or emotionally committed to other people, Banville’s protagonists fear, would endanger their spiritual sanity, weaken their precious independence and, hence, confront them with the inevitable lack within themselves. For the sceptical scientists, any form of emotional or physical dependence equals a loss of mastery, unity and self-containment, which they want to uphold at all cost. Or, put differently, entering into a relationship with other people is a sign of incompleteness, finitude and death, the reality of which they have always sought to avoid. In short, the protagonists’ lack of intimate or significant thou-relations to other people is but another version of the same sceptical desire to transcend human finitude which put the scientists on their hubristic quests.

4 Stanley Cavell, The Claim of Reason, Oxford, 1979, 368.


If in Doctor Copernicus, and to a lesser extent Kepler, the protagonists’ unwillingness or inability to really know other people is rendered in the absence of close relations with other people, in The Newton Letter and Mefisto this unwillingness achieves an extra dimension in the first-person narrators’ peculiar representations of other people. Very often indeed, these representations bear witness to a fundamental self-centredness, from which they can hardly escape. In The Newton Letter, as we have seen before, the narrator’s restrictive interpretations of the Lawless family form an ironic counterpart to his symbolic fixing of Newton in his biography. In an obsessive attempt at mastering and defining reality around him, the narrator cages the Lawlesses in preconceived literary clichés. His very first description of them is highly revealing in this respect:

I had spotted them for patricians from the start. The big house, Edward’s tweeds, Charlotte’s fine-boned slender grace that the dowdiest of clothes could not mask, even Ottilie’s awkwardness, all this seemed the unmistakable stamp of their class. Protestants, of course, landed, the land gone now to gombeen men and compulsory purchase, the family fortune wasted by tax, death, duties, inflation. But how bravely, how beautifully they bore their losses! Observing them, I understood that breeding such as theirs is a preparation not for squiredom, but for that distant day, which for the Lawlesses had arrived, when the trappings of glory are gone and only style remains. (12)

Yet, his “Big-House”-reading of people and events receives many blows and at the end the narrator is forced to admit, “I dreamed up a horrid drama and failed to see the commonplace tragedy that was playing itself out in real life” (79). He also realises that his blindness regarding the Lawless family is the result of a certain arrogance and self-absorption which has prevented him from compassionately understanding the family’s real problems. In this way, the narrator’s representations render concrete the reduction and destruction inherent in the more theoretical attempts at mastering reality witnessed in Doctor Copernicus and Kepler.

While in The Newton Letter the story of the narrator’s misreading is held up as an awful warning, in Mefisto this misreading is more obliquely embodied in the narration itself. Since Gabriel’s narrative is not reinterpreted or contradicted in a later stage, his representations of other people cannot be judged in comparison to any other version of people or events. Still, some characteristics of his narrative do shed doubt on the


moral value of his representations. Firstly, suspicion is raised by the strongly authorial way in which the narrator renders the inner thoughts and feelings of the people around him. As if anticipating the reader’s questions on this point, he comments ironically: “How do I know these things? I just do. I am omniscient sometimes” (27). Secondly, some of the thoughts he confers on other people look suspiciously like his own thoughts and feelings. In representing his mother’s revulsion of physicality, or her feelings of duality and strangeness during her pregnancy, for instance, he merely projects his own sentiments on the figure of his mother. As in The Newton Letter, in other words, Gabriel’s representations betray a self-centredness and indifference, which preclude any true understanding or just representation of the people around him. At the same time, these representations are also part of his project of mastering and ordering the chaotic world around him. Hence, they are but another successful way of keeping the strangeness, alterity and materiality of the world at bay. In keeping with Cavell’s analysis of a scepticism of other minds, the fear of being exposed as dependent, incomplete – and hence mortal after all – inspires the protagonists to strongly assert their own selves and to impose their categories and identities on other people. A peculiar case of this process, finally, can be found in the representations of women in Birchwood and the science tetralogy.

The virgin and the whore It may already have struck the careful reader of John Banville’s novels that his female figures – never protagonists or narrators – usually appear in pairs: Beatrice and Martha in Birchwood, the whore and the green girl in Doctor Copernicus, Barbara and Regina in Kepler, Ottilie and Charlotte in The Newton Letter, Sophie and Adele in Mefisto. Frequently, these pairs have contrasting characteristics, which they share with the female figures in other novels. In Kepler, the opposition between the two foremost women in the protagonist’s life is perhaps most striking. On the first page already, the reader notices the distinction between Barbara’s “fat flushed look”, which makes Kepler wince, and Regina’s “accustomed mild gaze” (3). And this impression is confirmed when Barbara is introduced as a fat, physical and foolish woman in stark opposition to Regina, Kepler’s frail, bright and graceful stepdaughter. If Barbara is constantly wailing, babbling, prattling, moaning, sobbing and complaining, Regina likes to sit with Kepler in his study in silent


observation. In fact, throughout the whole novel she hardly says anything at all. Next to her constant moaning, Barbara’s overwhelming physicality is repeatedly stressed:

Aglow and faintly steaming she displayed herself, big-bummed, her stout legs braced as if to leap, a strongman’s shovel-shaped beard glistening in her lap. Her breasts stared, wall-eyed and startled, the dark tips pursed.

Precisely because of her manifest physical otherness, Barbara frightens Kepler: “From the start he feared the prospect of the young widow. Women were a foreign country, he did not speak the language.” Still, her insistent materiality is a form of wealth as well, “a kind of burgeoning fortune of the senses”, even though their love-making is compared to “grappling with a heavy hot corpse”. In short, Barbara “was flesh, a corporeal world, wherein he touched and found startlingly real, something that was wholly other and yet recognisable”; and Kepler “flared under her light, her smell, the faintly salt taste of her skin” (38-42).

The complete opposite of her mother, Regina is a paragon of spirituality rather than physicality, of mind rather than matter. All too soon repelled by Barbara’s temperament, Kepler turns to Regina “for she represented, frozen in prototype, that very stage of knowing and regard which he had managed to miss in her mother” (43). With her “air of completeness” and balanced self-sufficiency (13), Regina is often compared to a work of art. Kepler sees her as “a gilded figure in a frieze” (66) and ponders,

She was like a marvellous and enigmatic work of art, which he was content to stand and contemplate with a dreamy smile, careless of the artist’s intentions. To try to tell her what he felt would be as superfluous as talking to a picture. Her inwardness, which had intrigued Kepler when she was a child, had evolved into a kind of quietly splendid equilibrium. She resembled her mother not at all. She was tall and very fair, with a strong narrow face. (100)

Kepler clearly favours Regina over Barbara and when he marries again it is because Susanna’s “silence” and “air of ordered self-containment” remind him of Regina (158).

If in most of Banville’s novels women only play the second fiddle, in Doctor Copernicus they are virtually inexistent. From the first, Copernicus does not want to have anything to do with women, “those hopelessly corporeal creatures”, and when he accompanies Andreas to the


whorehouse, the narrator comments wryly, “it was as he expected”. The prostitute is described as “an anatomical specimen” and as “tangles of humped, pale, phosphorescent flesh, ... grinning and whimpering” (47). The complementary female figure in Doctor Copernicus is the “green girl”, the mad daughter of Professor Brudzewski. Though Copernicus only briefly sees her, he is immediately captivated by her: “Briefly they glimpsed, as they entered by one door, a smiling girl in a green gown going out by another, leaving behind her trembling on the air an image of blurred beauty” (31). In Mefisto the complementary opposition between Sophie and Adele is somewhat muted by the similarities which also exist between them. Still, Sophie clearly functions as the gay, natural and fleshy counterpart of the skinny, absent, and mysterious Adele.

The two female figures in The Newton Letter, finally, are near-exact duplicates of their sisters in Kepler. Charlotte and Ottilie, dark and blonde in a literal sense, but “light to dark” metaphorically, are represented as complete opposites in the narrator’s story (53).5 Like Kepler’s first wife, Ottilie is an overbearing, passionate, “big blonde girl” (4, 43), whose insistent bodily presence is repeatedly stressed. She offers the narrator her body “without conditions”, as he puts it, and their love making is described in starkly physical terms:

When she took off her clothes it was as if she were not merely undressing, but performing a far more complex operation, turning herself inside out maybe, to display not breast and bum and blonde lap, but her very innards, the fragile lungs, mauve nest of intestines, the gleaming ivory of bone, and her heart, passionately labouring. I took her in my arms and felt the soft shock of being suddenly, utterly inhabited.

Before all this corporeality, “her baroque blonde splendour”, the narrator feels frightened and lost: “In the city of the flesh I travel without maps, a worried tourist: and Ottilie was a very Venice.” Another trait that Ottilie has in common with her decidedly less agreeable counterpart in Kepler, is her endless talking, giggling and babbling. “More than sex”, the narrator ventures, “she wanted company. She talked. Sometimes I suspected that she had got into bed with me so that she could talk” (25-27).

5 For an analysis of the female figures in The Newton Letter against the background

of the genre of the Big House novel, see Ruth Frehner, “The Dark One and the Fair: John Banville’s Historians of the Imagination and their Gender Stereotypes”, BELLS, 2000/11, eds Mireia Aragay and Jaqueline A. Hurtley, Barcelona, 2000, 51-64.


The distinctive traits of Charlotte can almost by inverse deduction be inferred from Ottilie’s personality. If Ottilie is talkative, Charlotte is silent, mysterious and often “lost in thought”. Ottilie’s body is foregrounded, whereas Charlotte is called a “pure spirit of the night, immune herself to the itch of the flesh” (43-45). And while Ottilie is energetic, dominant and overbearing, her aunt is absent, vague and withdrawn. In all this, Charlotte clearly resembles Kepler’s stepdaughter, even if the comparisons to a work of art are lacking. Still, the narrator calls Charlotte “die ferne Geliebte”, after Beethoven’s famous song-cycle, thereby invoking an age-old artistic ideal of spiritual love. The opposition between both women is, to give a final example, also evident in the different depiction of their crying: “With great wet sobs”, the narrator writes, “[Ottilie] came apart completely in my arms, grinding her face against mine, her shoulders heaving” (67). Charlotte, conversely, “began distractedly to cry” (73). Ottilie is styled as a sensual, whore-like creature, about whom the narrator writes, “no witch could have worked at her dark art more diligently than she” (53), and Charlotte is pictured as a curiously asexual “sprite” hovering over their love-making with “delicate wings” and “silken wisps” (48).6

In short, in Banville’s science tetralogy, the female figures are not only variants of each other, they mostly appear in oppositional and complementary pairs. Banville’s protagonists fall in love with frail, mysterious, artistic and spiritual women, and experience a mixture of fascination and revulsion for boisterous, corporeal and passionate women. It is clear that these two categories have strong affinities with the literary stereotypes of virgin and whore, angel and femme fatale, which keep recurring in Western literature. Since complementary characteristics, such as mind and body, art and nature, and, consequently, good and bad, are distributed over oppositional pairs, this stereotyping is traditionally described in terms of a splitting of the female figure.

In an attempt to explain this process, feminist criticism has turned to psychoanalysis. The concept of splitting or Spaltung was introduced by Sigmund Freud to account for certain symptoms of hysteria and

6 In The Newton Letter a first critical – or perhaps satirical – note concerning these opposite feminine types is sounded when Charlotte’s admirable aloofness turns out to be the result of her being doped to the gills with Valium. In the end, therefore, the narrator’s eyes are opened and the physical Ottilie turns out to be the most desirable of the two women. Still, even if the narrator’s love for Charlotte “ended, with a vast soft crash”, the female ideal she represents does not go down with her.


psychosis. Yet, in the object relations theory of Melanie Klein, this process of splitting is given a far more central place in the development of the child and the affective world of the adult. Klein argues that the child’s love and hate relationship with its mother leads to a division of the mother figure into a good and a bad part, or more precisely a good and a bad breast: “The good breast – external and internal – becomes the prototype of all helpful and gratifying objects, the bad breast the prototype of all external and internal persecutory objects.”7 The infant attempts to assimilate or introject the idealised good part, whereas the hateful part is projected out of the child’s mental world. According to Klein, this pattern of splitting is an important defence mechanism which remains at the basis of adult types of judgement and emotion, in particular in relation to the figure of the mother. Hence, the representation of women as either virgins or whores can be seen as an expression of this mechanism.8

Incidentally, this psychoanalytic explanation proves particularly interesting in the context of Banville’s complementary female figures because the very first instantiation of an oppositional female pair can be found in the split mother figure in Birchwood. As Frehner has noted, the absent and artistic angel we recognised in Regina, Charlotte and the green girl, is first realised in Gabriel Godkin’s mother Beatrice.9 She is portrayed as “neither young nor old, but thirtyish, you might say, awkward and yet graceful, … I think she had a beautiful face, long and narrow, as pale as paper, with big dark eyes.” That Gabriel is uncertain about her physical appearance – he adds, “I cannot find any solid shape of her, as I can of Granny Godkin for example” – is of course highly significant. His mother is primarily a spiritual figure, graceful, pale and perfect. Like Regina and Charlotte, she is compared to a work of art, “something in Rembrandt” (26-27). Yet, by the end of his narrative, Gabriel has learnt that Beatrice is not his real mother and that he is in fact the offspring of the incestuous relationship of his father and his aunt Martha. As her name already indicates, Martha is a boisterous, down-to-earth and passionate figure, the very opposite of Beatrice. This “virago” with her “aromatic bosom” is first introduced as “a small intense young

7 Quoted in Robert Rogers, Self and Other: Object Relations in Psychoanalysis and

literature, New York, 1991, 11. 8 See for instance Rogers, 163-64 and Patricia Waugh, Feminine Fictions: Revisiting

the Postmodern, London, 1989, 66-69. 9 Frehner, “The Dark One and the Fair”, 62.


woman, quick as a bird with short red hair and a pale, pointed face” (38). While Beatrice is wont to look at Gabriel with wide eyes, Martha takes him, to his “disgust and intense discomfort” into her arms (48). In short, Gabriel’s symbolic mother is represented as an angelic figure, whereas his biological mother is described as a witch, “ready to strike with the claws out” (173). Interestingly, Gabriel strips his “good” mother of all corporeality by letting her remain a virgin, at the same time burdening his “bad” mother, whom he refuses to call thus, with the taint of sexuality. In the novel itself, Beatrice provides the model for Gabriel’s ultimate female ideal, his “lost” sister Rose, and aunt Martha is ironically revisited in the actual girls, Rosie and Mag, whom he encounters on his quest. Yet, in a more general sense, most if not all female figures in the science tetralogy can be seen to descend from this split mother figure.

In the thematic context of the novels themselves, this splitting of the female figure can further be explained in terms of the mind-body opposition that haunts the science tetralogy as a whole. The scientists’ awed admiration for the silent, artistic girl is then of a kind with their more general yearning for order, harmony and beauty, whereas their disgusted fascination for the femme fatale is part of their ambivalent attempts to transcend the finitude of the everyday. That the female body itself is perceived as the prime icon of human finitude, is made very clear by Gabriel’s discovery of the vagina in Birchwood:

The vagina I had imagined as a nice neat hole, situated at the front, rather like a second navel, but less murky…. Judge then of my surprise and some fright when, in the evening wood, tumbling with Rosie through the lush wet grass, I fingered her furry damp secret and found not so much a hole as a wound, underneath, uncomfortably close to that other baleful orifice …. that chance encounter left me with an abiding impression of the female as something like a kind of obese skeleton, a fine wire frame hung with pendulous fleshfruit, awkward, clumsy, frail in spite of its bulk, a motiveless wallowing juggernaut. (13-14)

Women, Copernicus already knew, are “hopelessly corporeal creatures”, who wear their corporeality as a “wound” and are the living proof of human finitude. As we have seen in Chapter 1, this finitude is something the protagonists try to escape from at all costs. That the split representation of female figures in the science tetralogy might be part of this attempt is confirmed by an interesting study of Sarah Kofman.


In Le Respect des Femmes, Kofman analyses the moral command-ments vis-à-vis women in Kant and Rousseau and she concludes that the stereotypical representation of female figures is indeed due to a deep-seated fear of women. According to Kofman, the moral law of respect for women is highly suspect, since this moral idealisation merely dissembles an actual subjugation. Moreover, Kant and Rousseau maintain that not all women deserve the same respect: the idolisation of the “angel in the house” goes hand in hand with the castigation of the “fallen woman” or whore. Like Klein, Kofman attributes this “clivage masculin” to “leur impossibilité de supporter l’ambivalence de la figure maternelle”.10 “Respecter les femmes”, Kofman argues, “c’est les regarder d’un tour autre regard que les putains; c’est les placer assez haut et assez loin pour ne pas risquer d’avoir avec elles un rapport de proximité immédiate, ne pas riquer d’être fascinés par elles”. For by being spellbound by women, and especially by their body, men risk losing themselves as virile and rational human beings. Thus, the notion of respect which Kant and Rousseau advocate, averts a double threat:

celui de se laisser aller à la volupté, c’est-à-dire à l’abus de la faculté sexuelle, et donc à une dépense excessive pouvant conduire à la mort … celui de laisser triompher en soi l’inclination sur la raison, c’est-à-dire le “féminin” sur le “masculin”: risque d’émasculation par perte de la raison, … et d’être rabaissé à un objet naturel, à la nature animale et de devenir un objet d’horreur et de dégoût. (39-40)

In both cases, in short, the idealisation of the virgin and the corresponding rejection of the whore, have to ward of the dangers of self-loss and death.

Returning with this information to the science tetralogy, it becomes clear that it is especially the fascinating and threatening corporeality of the “whores” which drives Banville’s protagonists to a Platonic love for the “virgins”. The artistic metaphors which describe the latter, effectively place them on a safe and distant pedestal. In short, the split representation of female figures in the science tetralogy presents but another way of containing otherness and warding off mortality. Still, as we will see in Chapter 6, women are not always easily contained and both the virgin and the whore continue to influence the protagonists’ behaviour in significant ways.

10 Sarah Kofman, Le Respect des Femmes, Paris, 1982, 15.

Chapter Six A Portrait of the Other: Ethics in the Art Trilogy

There are no moral facts, only moral interpretations of facts.

Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil

If ethical questions can be traced throughout the science tetralogy, they remain secondary to the issues of epistemology and aesthetics, which dominate these novels. It is only when the murder story of The Book of Evidence puts notions of responsibility, respect and retribution at the centre of attention that a more focused and profound elaboration of ethical questions takes place. In moving from an analysis of the structure, certainty and beauty of representations to an investigation of the ethical dimension and/or consequences of representations, Banville ties in with a major trend in philosophy and literary theory, the so-called ethical turn. Indeed, from the late Eighties onwards a renewed attention to ethics pervades various theoretical and philosophical traditions, which has resulted in a variety of approaches under the common denominator of ethical criticism. In order to structure this complex debate, commentators tend to distinguish two different approaches, one from the right and one from the left:

Those on the right claim that the “restoration” of ethics to its rightful place in contemporary discourse would produce a return to humanism and reaffirm a battered tradition; while for many on the left, ethics names the obligation to empower the hitherto deprivileged, silenced or colonized other.1

Given the orientation of those on the right to the moral thematic of a literary text and the underlying value commitments of its author, their form of ethical criticism is often called moralist criticism. Still, in view of its salient characteristics it had perhaps better be called hermeneutic or neo-humanist criticism. The critics on the left, who, diverse and manifold though they are, are often grouped under the cover term of poststructuralist ethical criticism, are all inspired by an idea of otherness

1 Geoffrey Harpham, Getting it Right, Chicago, 1992, 1.


that remains other, that resists any form of appropriation or reduction of the other to the same. The difference between right and left can therefore also be construed as a difference between self and other, with the neo-humanists concentrating on the growth of the subject as a moral being and the poststructuralists focusing on the demands the other places on the self. As far as the philosophical heritage of both approaches is concerned, those on the right find their main source of inspiration in Aristotelian moral theory, which argues for the concrete embeddedness of moral judgements, while those on the left rely on Kant and Levinas, both of whom emphasise the categorical imperative, the “ought”, in ethics. Representatives of neo-humanist ethical criticism are philosophers and critics such as Wayne Booth, Alasdair MacIntyre, Iris Murdoch, Richard Rorty and Martha Nussbaum. The poststructuralist strand, on the other hand, owes a lot both to Jacques Derrida’s introduction of the thought of Emmanuel Levinas in literary theory and to Paul de Man’s analysis of the ethical imperative in literature. Different versions of these twin “turns to the other” are defended by critics such as Geoffrey Harpham, J. Hillis Miller, Robert Eaglestone, Derek Attridge and Simon Critchley.

The neo-humanist view is perhaps best known as it draws on popular and widespread beliefs about art, life and morality. Still, the references to Paul de Man in Banville’s latest novel, Shroud, possibly allude to the author’s knowledge of the poststructuralist tradition as well. Yet, whether or not Banville is familiar with these ethical strands, it remains a fact that many of the issues raised in the art trilogy, show considerable points of convergence with the theoretical debate concerning ethics and literature. In this chapter, therefore, I propose to discuss these novels anew in the context of these theoretical considerations. Seeking neither to supplement ethical criticism with an appropriate example, nor to supplement the novel with an alien method, I merely want to stage a confrontation between ethical theory and Banville’s novels, hoping to ultimately enrich them both.

The power of the imagination Although there is no other narrator in Banville’s oeuvre who matches the self-centredness of Frederick Montgomery and no novel in which this solipsistic obsession is more poignantly rendered than in The Book of Evidence, the plot of this first art novel revolves around others, or more precisely, around women. In Freddie’s narrative at least, Anna and

Chapter Six: A Portrait of the Other 147

Daphne are the sirens who lure him away from the straight path of science and rectitude; Joanna and his mother are the witches who send him on his doomed course to Whitewater and Josie Bell is the hapless victim whom he murders in result. Yet, judging by the number of pages devoted to her, the single most important woman in Freddie’s narrative is not a woman of flesh and blood, but the painted woman in a seventeenth-century portrait, called “Portrait of a Woman with Gloves”.2 Describing his first encounter with the painting, he relates how the woman seemed to look at him “with careful cold attention”. And he continues,

It was not just the woman’s painted stare that watched me. Everything in that picture, that brooch, those gloves, the flocculent darkness at her back, every spot on the canvas was an eye fixed on me unblinkingly.3

In an attempt to account for this insistent gaze, Freddie writes, There is something in the way the woman regards me, the querulous, mute insistence of her eyes, which I can neither escape nor assuage. I squirm in the grasp of her gaze. She requires of me some great effort, some tremendous feat of scrutiny and attention, of which I do not think I am capable. It is as if she were asking me to let her live. (105)

And Freddie responds to this mute plea by several pages of detailed description in which he fashions an imagined life for the woman in the painting. Incidentally, the strong claim the painted woman places on Freddie is cast in terms strikingly reminiscent of Emmanuel Levinas’ ethical imperative, whereby the face of the other – here represented in the strong gaze of the woman – challenges the self to the heavy task of respecting the alterity of the other, of letting the other live – as other. In the ethical encounter, according to Levinas, the self is placed under the absolute obligation to respect the other and to resist the appropriation of the other to the same. For, Levinas argues, “If the other could be possessed, seized and known, it would not be other. To possess, to know, to grasp are all synonyms of power.”4 Whether or not Banville consciously used Levinasian diction to describe the irreducible

2 The painting Freddie describes is an existing painting, which has been variously attributed to Vermeer, de Groot and Valentiner, and is known under various names, such as “Portrait of a Lady in Dark Blue” (Imhof, Introduction, 256); or “Portrait of a Woman” (McMinn, Supreme Fictions, 172).

3 John Banville, Book of Evidence, London, 1989, 79. 4 Quoted in Jacques Derrida, “Violence et métaphysique”, in Acts of Literature, trans.

Alan Bass, London, 1978, 85.


responsibility Freddie owes the work of art, his description installs an analogy between the encounter with a work of art and an interpersonal encounter, which has become a commonplace in contemporary literary theory, both in the neo-humanist and the poststructuralist traditions. Yet, while the neo-humanists traditionally perceive of the literary text as a “friend” or moral guide to the reader, a poststructuralist critic like Derek Attridge proposes the work of art as a “stranger” to whom one owes respect. For if, following Levinas, the ethical encounter entails “the acknowledgement of the other’s uniqueness and therefore the impossibility of finding general rules and schemata to fully account for him or her”, then reading likewise involves “working against the mind’s tendency to assimilate the other to the same, attending to that which can barely be heard, registering that which is unique about the shaping of language, thought, and feeling in a particular work”.5

In The Book of Evidence, this analogy between reading a work of art and reading another person is further enforced, when the insistent gaze of the woman in the portrait is echoed in the gaze of the maid who comes upon Freddie when he is stealing the portrait. Behind the stare of the woman in the painting, as he carries it out of the room, Freddie senses “another presence, watching me”. And he repeats it later on, “The maid was watching me” (110-11). The recurrent stress on the eyes and gaze of the maid, “Her eyes were wide”; “She had the most extraordinary pale, violet eyes” (79; 111), further establishes a close connection with the demanding scrutiny of the woman in the painting. With her mute, insistent gaze, the maid places a second ethical claim on Freddie, asking him to respect her singularity and otherness. Freddie however, responds to this second call in what seems like a different way altogether. He violently drags her to his car, and when she struggles and screams he kills her. Just before the fatal blow with the hammer, however, we get the following passage:

I could not speak, I was filled with a kind of wonder. I had never felt another’s presence so immediately and with such raw force. I saw her now, really saw her, for the first time, her mousy hair and bad skin, that bruised look around her eyes. She was quite ordinary, and yet,

5 Derek Attridge, “Innovation, Literature, Ethics: Relating to the Other”, PMLA,

CXIV/1 (1990), 24-25. In this interesting article, Attridge draws a three-fold parallel between reading, writing and the ethical encounter as a “creation of the other”. With this ambiguous phrase he wants to emphasise both agency (creating the other) and passivity (being created by the other) as part of the ethical act.


somehow, I don’t know – somehow radiant. She cleared her throat and sat up, and detached a strand of hair that had caught at the corner of her mouth. You must let me go, she said, or you will be in trouble. (113)

Freddie responds by bashing her head in. Throughout his extended narrative, Freddie comes up with several

explanations for his atrocious deed. Following Nietzsche, he denies the possibility of free will and proclaims the general drift of things; following Freud, he blames the brute beast inside himself and provides proof for his schizoid identity. At the end however, he comes to what seems like a final conclusion with:

This is the worst, the essential sin, I think, the one for which there will be no forgiveness: that I never imagined her vividly enough, that I did not make her live. Yes, that failure of imagination is my real crime, the one that made the others possible. What I told the policeman is true – I killed her because I could kill her, and I could kill her because for me she was not alive. And so my task now is to bring her back to life. I am not sure what that means, but it strikes me with the force of an unavoidable imperative. (215)

Freddie’s explanation implicitly opposes his failed reading of the maid to his successful reading of the woman in the portrait. Because he sees the imaginative life-story which he fashioned for the woman in the portrait as a triumphant way of bringing this painted character to life, he blames his lack of imagination for the death of the former. Freddie did not sufficiently see her and as a consequence she did not really exist for him.

Although Freddie’s interpretation is only one of many presented in the book, the finality with which he pronounces it as well as its importance for the other novels of the art trilogy lend it a more fundamental value. Moreover, Freddie’s lack of imaginative understanding is prefigured in the absence of detailed description of the woman he killed. The reader learns something about her eyes and hair as well as, later on, some newspaper facts about her life. But, all in all, these are but meagre descriptions compared to the detailed portrayal of the woman in the portrait. Hence, most critics of The Book of Evidence have taken Freddie’s diagnosis at face value and regard Freddie’s lack of imagination as the prime moral failure of the book. Therefore, they argue that The Book of Evidence is “about the power of the imagination”, that it is “a celebration of the ethical value of the imagination”, or even “an elaborate homage to


the imagination”.6 Freddie’s temporary if fatal failure of the imagination, conversely, is attributed to the fact that it is “overstocked with artistic and literary analogies, leaving him little or no room for direct encounter with the real world”.7 Interestingly, Banville himself also underwrites Freddie’s explanation in response to a question about the political dimension of his books:

I realized many years after I had written it that The Book of Evidence was, in many ways, about Ireland because it was about the failure of imagination and the failure to imagine other people in existence. You can only plant a bomb in Omagh Street if the people walking around in the street are not really human. And what happened in Ireland in the last 30 years was a great failure of the imagination. But I didn’t set out to do that in the book, but we’re never free of our time. We like to think we are but we’re not.8

Finally, it is remarkable how close Freddie’s interpretation of the murder adheres to the neo-humanist tradition in ethical criticism, especially in the version Martha Nussbaum propagates in studies such as Love’s Knowledge and Poetic Justice. Against the background of an Aristotelian ethics which values concrete moral judgements over universal and impersonal ethical laws, Nussbaum contends that a clear and imaginative perception of other persons, first in art and then in life, is the key to one’s moral behaviour. This ethical ideal she finds concretely embodied in Henry James’ The Golden Bowl. Nussbaum reads its moral as,

See clearly and with high intelligence. Respond with the vibrant sympathy of a vividly active imagination. If there are conflicts face them squarely and with keen perception. Choose as well as you can for overt action, but at every moment remember the more comprehensive duties of the imagination and emotions.9

Apart from being a useful source for such and other meta-values, great art is also considered valuable as a moral training. In mirroring reality

6 Imhof, Introduction, 188; Berensmeyer, Fictions of Order, 239; Roberta Gefter Wondrich, “Postmodern Love, Postmodern Death and God-like Authors: The Case of John Banville”, BELLS, 2000/11, eds Mireia Aragay and Jaqueline A. Hurtley, Barcelona, 2000, 81.

7 Joseph McMinn, John Banville’s Supreme Fictions, Manchester, 1999, 112. 8 “Oblique Dreamer: Interview with John Banville”, The Observer, 17 September

2000. 9 Martha Nussbaum, Love’s Knowledge: Essays on Philosophy and Literature, New

York, 1990, 134-35.


objectively and truthfully, in fact, literature allows us an unusually clear view of reality, thereby helping us to become better moral judges in real life. Nussbaum claims, “In the war against obtuseness the writer is our fellow fighter, frequently our guide” (Love, 164). The writer can perform this task because he or she engages in art the human capacity of “fancy” or “imagination”, which, for Nussbaum, “lies at the heart of ethical life”.10 Our imagination not only helps us to “see one another as fully human, as more than ‘dreams and dots’”, it also teaches us to “understand the complexity of our own lives and the lives of others”. More specifically, certain novels, for instance those of Dickens, may “take us into the lives of those who are different in circumstance from ourselves and enable us to understand how similar hopes and fears are differently realised in different social circumstances”. In other words, literature allows us to imaginatively understand the situation of what Nussbaum calls “the poor and the excluded” because it helps us to realise that underneath their masks of difference, human beings with an inner life very much like our own may be found. The novels of Dickens and James should therefore be enlisted in the struggle for the poor, “with a view to improving their lot and ameliorating their suffering”.11

Following Nussbaum, Freddie’s murder of the maid can indeed be blamed on what she considers the greatest moral defect: “refusal and obtuseness of vision” (Love, 148). Because Freddie was unable to clearly see or imaginatively understand the maid, she did not really exist for him and could easily be killed. Yet, if according to Nussbaum this moral failure may be remedied through an imaginative engagement with the characters in a work of art, Freddie’s moral education somehow fails to materialise. After all, his perceptive reading of the portrait does not lead to an equally successful reading of the maid. One could still argue, and Nussbaum would no doubt agree with McMinn here, that Freddie’s criminal act is the result of his over-investment in art and his failure to re-apply his imagination the everyday world. “The remedy for that defect”, Nussbaum argues in Poetic Justice, is “not the repudiation of fancy, but its more consistent and humane cultivation” (xviii). In this view, Freddie’s inhumane and unimaginative deed does not undermine Nussbaum’s view

10 Martha Nussbaum, “Exactly and Responsibly: A Defense of Ethical Criticism”,

Philosophy and Literature, XXII (1998), 350. 11 “Defense”, 348-51; Martha Nussbaum, Poetic Justice: The Literary Imagination

and Public Life, Boston, 1995, xiii.


of ethical criticism as it can be construed as a perversion of a nevertheless sound moral practice.

Yet, a more profound objection to this traditional analysis is that it fails to account for the urgency of Freddie’s crime. Throughout his narrative, Freddie often remarks that he simply had to kill her: “I killed her, I admit it freely. And I know that if I were back there today I would do it again, not because I would want to, but because I would have no choice” (150). Freddie’s lack of imaginative understanding of the maid only explains that he could kill her, but not that he could not but kill her. This sense of necessity and urgency cannot be clarified by the standard interpretation. The same holds true to an even greater extent for the fact that Freddie clearly sees the maid in the moment before he kills her. If, as he records, he “saw her now, really saw her”, why, a Nussbaum-reader might ask, does he kill her? After all, “clear perception” and “the effort to see” are Nussbaum’s prime moral virtues. Freddie himself asks as much when he wonders, speaking about himself in a hypothetical third person:

He recalls with fascination and a kind of swooning wonderment the moments before he struck the first blow, when he looked into his victim’s eyes and knew that he had not known another creature – not mother, wife, child, not anyone – so intimately, so invasively, to such indecent depths, as he did just then this woman whom he was about to bludgeon to death .... How, with such knowledge, could he have gone ahead and killed?12

In the remainder of this chapter, I will try to provide an alternative answer to this question, through a careful rereading of the key-passages that have just been discussed. While this alternative analysis does not aim to displace Freddie’s interpretation, it hopes to provide a necessary supplement to the standard reading, so that the indeterminacy at the heart of The Book of Evidence can be more accurately addressed.

Women as mirrors We have discussed before how the insistent gaze of the woman in the portrait places an ethical imperative on Freddie, demanding attention and respect, asking him to let her live as other. That Freddie’s response to the insistent claim of the portrait will be different from the ethical ideal proposed by Attridge and Levinas, an acknowledgement of her singularity

12 John Banville, Ghosts, London, 85-86.


and difference, is already prefigured in Freddie’s initial reaction to the portrait: “I turned then and saw myself turning as I turned” (78). When Freddie turns to the portrait, he sees himself turning. Similarly, as we saw earlier, when he stares at the portrait, he finds himself being stared at in return. The properties thereby ascribed to the portrait are not so much those of a painting, but look suspiciously like those of a mirror, suggesting – even if still only tentatively – that what Freddie encounters in the portrait is perhaps only a mirror image of himself.

This suspicion is confirmed by Freddie’s imaginative reading of the woman in the portrait later on. Although he recognises, “There is no she, of course. There is only an organisation of shapes and colours”, he immediately dismisses these qualms again and aims straight for the represented contents: the woman with the gloves (105). In his elaborate description of the woman’s life, social background, thoughts and feelings, he mimetically repeats what in this repetition he recognises as the mimetic gesture of the painter and represents the woman as though she were a real person.13 Moreover, this imaginative engagement with the inner life of the painted woman ignores the obstacles and hesitations which the materiality of the painting originally posed and which he still recorded in his description of the outward characteristics of the painting. For instance, his earlier doubts about the object the woman is holding, “a folded fan or it might be a book”, are dispelled in his imaginative reconstruction with “she has never learned to read or write.” Similarly, his hesitant description of the surroundings, “Part of a couch can be seen, or maybe a bed, with a brocade cover”, is authoritatively replaced with the following sentence in her imagined life-story: “He has her stand before the couch” (78, 104). With the self-assurance of an authoritative narrator, Freddie overrules any resistance the painted figure may present.

A second striking characteristic of Freddie’s imaginative reconstruc-tion is that the woman, who seemed so different at first (she is after all a seventeenth-century middle-aged spinster), turns out to be a human being with thoughts and feelings very similar to Freddie’s own thoughts and feelings. In Freddie’s reconstruction the woman is also struck by the gaze of another, the painter this time, and feels strangely known. Furthermore,

13 Freddie’s essentially mimetic reading of the “Portrait of a Woman with Gloves”,

echoes Nussbaum’s stipulation that writers should truthfully mirror reality. Additionally, Freddie’s reading mimics Nussbaum’s reading practice in which (painted or written) characters are judged and interpreted as though they were real people.


Freddie understands her as experiencing the same dividedness and alienation he himself records throughout his narrative. Like Freddie, finally, who registered a strong experience of turning in his first confrontation with the portrait, the woman is “taken by the mere sensation of stopping like this and turning” upon first catching a glimpse of the very same portrait (108).

Far from really understanding the woman in the portrait, let alone the portrait itself, Freddie simply creates the woman as a mirror image of himself. By projecting his own thoughts and feelings on the painting, he reduces the woman to his own plans and purposes, effectively destroying her singularity and difference. In doing so, Freddie fails to respond adequately to the ethical call of the other in Levinas’ terms, since Levinas strongly rejects this form of imaginative identification: “‘Decency’ and ‘everyday life’ incorrectly lead us to believe that the other is known through sympathy, as an other like myself, as alter ego.”14 Firmly believing in precisely the power of sympathy, Freddie admirably fulfils Nussbaum’s neo-humanist ideal of ethical criticism, whereby the reader should respond to a work of art by imaginatively identifying with its characters in an attempt to understand their complex situation as after all entirely human and therefore similar to the reader’s own situation. The painting has enabled Freddie, to quote Nussbaum again, “to understand how similar hopes and fears are differently realised in different social circumstances” (italics added). Yet, Freddie’s situation clearly shows the defects of Nussbaum’s type of ethical criticism, based as it is on the inherent moral value of the human imagination. If Nussbaum is often accused of “look[ing] in literature for a mirror of [her] own values”, Freddie faces a similar charge.15 Instead of respecting the alterity and singularity of the woman in the portrait, he has appropriated the woman to his own categories, values, and experiences. As his initial confrontation with the portrait already prefigured, Freddie has substituted the portrait of the woman for a mirror only ever reflecting himself.

Therefore, if Freddie’s reading of the portrait is not the successful ethical act the standard interpretation considers it to be, but instead a destruction of the alterity of a work of art, then perhaps Freddie’s literal

14 Quoted in Jacques Derrida, “Violence et métaphysique”, Writing and Difference,

trans. Alan Bass, London, 1978, 125. 15 Richard Posner, “Against Ethical Criticism: Part Two”, Philosophy and Literature,

XXII (1998), 403.


destruction of the maid constitutes not such a different reading at all. At first sight, though, the differences are obvious. Instead of imaginatively and thoroughly reconstructing the life, thoughts and feelings of Josie Bell, Freddie simply furnishes her with a few servant stereotypes. Upon his first confrontation with the maid, for instance, Freddie has her look at him and then discreetly retreat, as any ideal servant, paying heed to class distinctions, should:

A maid was standing in the open french window. She must have come in just then and seen me there and started back in alarm. Her eyes were wide, and one knee was flexed and one hand lifted, as if to ward off a blow. For a moment neither of us stirred .… Then slowly, with her hand still raised, she stepped backwards carefully through the window, teetering a little as her heels blindly sought the level of the paved pathway outside. (79)

In his account of his second, fatal, meeting with the maid, Freddie again invokes this image – a stereotype in Irish literature – of the shy, discreet obedient country girl who has gone to serve in the Big House. After he has pushed her into his car, he notices how she sits crouched between the seat and the door, “like the cornered heroine in a melodrama”. When she makes a feeble attempt to open the door, he roars at her and “she stopped at once, and looked at me, wide-eyed, like a rebuked child” (112).

In short, what Freddie does is to try and contain the otherness of the woman within the mould of stereotype, thereby denying her alterity and singularity. In fact, his response is not all that different from his attempt at hermeneutic understanding of the woman in the portrait: in both instances Freddie reduces the women to his own categories. Still, the stereotypical images he applies to the maid enable him to keep her at a further distance from his own personal feelings than he allowed for in his description of the woman in the portrait. The fact that the woman Freddie deals with in this way is a servant certainly contributes to this difference. It places Freddie’s descriptions in a long tradition of literary representation of servants. In a perceptive analysis of this tradition Bruce Robbins remarks on the “annoying sameness of these formal manifestations of literary service” and he continues, “much has changed between Homer and Virginia Woolf, but the literary servant has not undergone proportional changes; servants are the commonplaces of many times and places”.16

16 Bruce Robbins, The Servant’s Hand: English Fiction from Below, New York,

1986, x.


According to Robbins, this typecasting of servant representations is most striking in the nineteenth-century realistic novel, in spite of its boasts about a “rediscovery” of the lower classes. For rather than “grapple with the new and exotic industrial worker”, novelists turned to the domestic servants, which continued to be represented not in their singularity as human beings, but in the stereotypical images which were handed down from “Roman, Elizabethan and Restoration comedy” (xi). Far from reflecting social reality, these stereotypes conveniently brought the servant as a type into conformity with traditional, pre-industrial models of duty and obedience, which were no longer a reality in the emerging capitalist state. The notion of servant character in short, was a powerful means of confining the alterity of the lower classes to the reassuring and idyllic commonplaces of tradition. What Robbins’ readings interestingly also demonstrate is how the servants presented in these novels manage to wriggle out from these stereotypes, often with surprising and far-reaching results.

This brings us back to Freddie’s convenient containment of “his” servant character. However much Freddie tries to hold the maid’s person-ality and difference within pre-determined literary clichés, the woman literally breaks free from this constraint. After her initial, or perhaps even feigned, obedience, she suddenly launches herself at Freddie:

She pounded on the glass with her fists. I spun the wheel and the car lumbered out into the road, the tyres squealing. We were shouting at each other now, like a married couple having a fight. She pummelled me on the shoulder, got a hand around in front of my face and tried to claw my eyes. Her thumb went up my nose, I thought she would tear off the nostril. (112-13)

Freddie is “dismayed”, as at an actress not sticking to her lines. He turns to her with the hammer and it is then that the near-epiphanic passage occurs in which Freddie suddenly sees Josie Bell and is struck by her startling realness (113). If this brief description is indeed different from the lavish terms with which Freddie evokes the woman in the portrait, this is exactly because Josie Bell breaks loose from the images and definitions with which he tries to contain her. In doing so, she effectively exposes Freddie’s grasp of the world as illusionary and void. Furthermore, by resisting Freddie’s imaginative appropriation, the maid suddenly asserts herself as truly other, strange and threatening. Not knowing how to respond to this sudden confrontation, Freddie wields the hammer and smashes the woman’s head in.


Hence, Freddie’s murderous act represents quite literally Freddie’s failure to acknowledge Josie Bell as autonomous and different. The hermeneutic strategy of imaginatively recuperating any alterity to one’s own categories, which Freddie performed successfully on the woman in the painting, fails here, since the maid is a “real” person, whose complex-ity and alterity is not as malleable to imaginative or stereotypical reconstructions as her painted counterpart. In her startling realness and raw immediacy, the maid defies Freddie’s categories and resists being reduced and appropriated.17 This is also – almost cynically – evident in Freddie’s amazement and dismay when even in her dying the maid does not act as literary stereotypes postulate. “When I struck her the first time”, Freddie recounts afterwards, “I expected to feel the sharp, clean smack of steel on bone, but it was more like hitting clay, or hard putty.” Similarly the well-read Freddie thought “one good bash would do it, but, as the autopsy would show, she had a remarkable strong skull” (113).

The blind spot in the traditional reading, the inconsequential suddenness with which Freddie kills Josie Bell after he has just really seen her, can therefore, at least partly, be explained by the threat the maid poses to Freddie in being too strange, too other for him to accommodate her. Yet, Josie Bell is not only a servant, she is also a woman – and an ugly woman at that. As I hope to show, this further explains why she poses such a threat to Freddie’s identity. In representing Josie Bell as a maid, distant and dissimilar to himself, Freddie could contain her in the conveniently neutral paradigm of a servant. Yet, when the maid suddenly and violently asserts herself and Freddie’s classificatory categories break down, Freddie finds himself confronted with the maid’s body. This is evident in the description of her sudden attack, which mentions “fists”, “shoulder”, “hand”, “nose”, “face”, “eyes”, “nostril”, as well as in the near-epiphanic moment where he suddenly really notices her “mousy hair”, her “bad skin”, her “eyes”, her “throat”, in short, her material presence. That this is indeed threatening to Freddie is revealed in his remark about hitting her a second time: “Perhaps I would have stopped then, if she had not suddenly launched herself at me across the back seat, flailing and screaming” (113-14). Obviously, the danger the maid poses to Freddie is not of a concrete, physical nature. It should rather be interpreted

17 The maid’s startling “realness” can also be interpreted in terms of Lacan’s concept

of “Le Réel”, which denotes reality unmediated by language or any other symbolic system. A confrontation with this raw reality is considered extremely threatening and horrifying.


as an extreme instance of what Sarah Kofman calls “le risque de la féminité”. As we have seen in Chapter 5, this femininity is experienced as threatening by the male ego because of the notions of excess and death, which it is traditionally taken to imply. The maid’s sudden excessive behaviour represents for Freddie the possibility of self-loss, which is to be avoided at all cost. Adding to the threat of Josie Bell’s sudden physical presence, moreover, is Freddie’s recognition of this presence as “another’s presence”, different but also similar to his own. The maid can no longer be held at arm’s length, since her entirely human corporeality has brought her into a form of relationship with Freddie, which is too close for him to bear. Moreover, in her physical nearness as another human being, Josie Bell confronts Freddie painfully and suddenly with his own body. That this is indeed horribly threatening for Freddie has, of course, to be considered in the context of The Book of Evidence as a whole.

Throughout his narrative, first of all, Freddie frequently expresses disgust and revulsion at the sight or thought of his own body. He recalls, for instance, “Suddenly, I had a vivid, queasy sense of myself, not the tanned pin-up now, but something else, something pallid and slack and soft. I was aware of my toenails, my anus, my damp, constricted crotch” (48). When he is in prison, later on, he reflects at length on the personal disgust he feels towards the body in which he is permanently imprisoned:

Disgust, now, that is something I know about. Let me say a word or two about disgust. Here I sit, naked under my prison garb, wads of pallid flesh trussed and bagged like badly packaged meat. I get up and walk around on my hind legs, a belted animal, shedding an invisible snow of scurf everywhere I move. Mites live on me, they lap my sweat, stick their snouts into my pores and gobble up the glop they find there. Then the split skin, the cracks, the crevices. Hair: just think of hair. And this is only the surface. Imagine what is going on inside, the purple pump shuddering and squelching, lungs fluttering, and, down in the dark, the glue factory at its ceaseless work. Animate carrion, slick with gleet, not ripe enough yet for the worms. Ach, I should – (114)

Other people’s bodies also invite an incredible revulsion in Freddie. About his mother, for instance, he writes: “The sight of her bunions and her big yellow toenails annoyed me .… I tried not to show too much of the disgust I felt” (59). And in Athena he oracles, “This I am convinced is what sex is, the anaesthetic that makes bearable the flesh of another” (121). Just like the protagonists in the science tetralogy, Freddie tries to counter this physicality – and in particular that of the women around him


– by presenting them in terms of art. About his wife Daphne, he writes, “always when I saw her naked I wanted to caress her, as I would want to caress a piece of sculpture” (8). When he suddenly meets his former friend Anna in an art gallery, he explains his attraction with, “she might have been a piece on show, standing there so still in that shadowless light behind sun-reflecting glass” (62). And his mother he recalls as “a constant but remote presence, statuesque, blank-eyed, impossibly handsome in an Ancient Roman sort of way, like a marble figure at the far side of a lawn” (41-42). Like the servant stereotype for Josie Bell, these art metaphors, serve the double purpose of both containing these women in Freddie’s artistic categories and of stripping them of their threatening physicality. In this way, Freddie’s violent reaction to the close corporeality of the maid makes sense as a desperate response to the threat of death and self-loss, a threat which the normal procedure of stereotypical or artistic caging could no longer contain.

In all, I have argued that Freddie feels threatened both by Josie Bell’s sudden difference from what he had taken her to be and by her equally sudden similarity and proximity to him as a physical and entirely un-artistic human being. In killing her, Freddie both fails to accommodate her alterity and singularity and rejects her as a fellow human being. The ethical conclusion that follows from this seems paradoxical: a person should be recognised both in her or his sameness and in her or his otherness. Or, in other words, it is as misguided to reject any form of similarity, as it is to completely reduce any form of difference. The two-sidedness of this ethical law is often overlooked by theorists and philosophers who stress the value of a radical or absolute alterity – tellingly rendered in capitalised form as “the Other” – which resists any form of assimilation or appropriation, thereby forgetting the importance of a common ground which is necessary for the other to be recognised and respected at all. Against Levinas’ concept of the “infinite other”, Derrida contends that the other can only appear to me as an “ego”: “if the other was not recognised as an ego, its entire alterity would collapse .… The egoity of the other permits him to say ‘ego’ as I do; and this is why he is Other, and not a stone” (“Violence”, 125). Derek Attridge for his part tries to solve the problem by arguing that “to be other is necessarily to be other to”. The relatedness implied in the term signals the duality of familiarity and strangeness necessary for the other to appear at all: “An entity without this relation would simply not impinge on me; as far as I was concerned, it would be nonexistent.” In short, if the other should be respected as


different and irreducible, he or she should also be recognised as “another” human being, “with a selfhood equivalent to mine”. “If I succeed in responding adequately to the otherness and singularity of the other”, Attridge argues, “It is also that relating – which is always in a specific time and place – to which I respond, in creatively changing myself and perhaps inventively changing a little of the world.” In the ethical encounter as in the act of reading therefore, “the other is transformed from other to same, but the same is not the same as it was before the encounter” (22-24).

That Freddie, for the time being, fails to grasp this lesson is evident from the final explanation he gives for the murder: “I never imagined her vividly enough” (215). The maid’s resistance to any imaginative recupera-tion is precisely the ethical moment, which Freddie did not, but ought to, respond to. For what Freddie’s considers as his personal failure, is in fact expressive of the profound otherness of another human being, which can never be fully appropriated or reduced to one’s imaginative categories. Freddie’s failure to recognise this truth becomes even clearer in his attempt at restitution in the sequel to The Book of Evidence, Ghosts.

Ghostly and mythical women Already at the end of The Book of Evidence, Freddie determines the form of his penance with, “And so my task now is to bring her back to life. I am not sure what it means, but it strikes me with the force of an unavoidable imperative.” And he muses, “How am I to make it come about, this act of parturition? Must I imagine her from the start, from infancy?” (215-16). Having failed, or so he claims, to sufficiently imagine Josie Bell, he is determined to make amends by taking on the ethical “imperative” of imagining another girl or woman into existence. Imagining his future imagining, he writes hopefully:

It even seemed that someday I might wake up and see, coming forward from the darkened room into the frame of that doorway which is always in my mind now, a child, a girl, one whom I will recognise at once, without the shadow of a doubt. (219)

Referring back to the framework of painting and window in which the painted woman and the maid, respectively, appeared, this image of someone figuring in a doorway also links The Book of Evidence to its sequel. Indeed, many characters are depicted in the framework of a door or window in Ghosts: Licht “hovered in the dimness of the doorway” (15),


Flora “shimmered in the doorway” (43), Mrs Vanden “appeared, rising up suddenly in the dim doorway” (75), and the “shadow [of Croke] fell in the doorway” (130). Freddie even pictures himself as “a half figure, a figure half-seen, standing in the doorway” (40). Still, of all these people it is Flora about whom Freddie writes:

I had spotted her straight away, with my gimlet eye, the moment I had walked into the kitchen and seen them sitting there barefoot with their mugs of tea. She sprang out from their midst like the Virgin in a busy Annunciation, calm as Mary and nimbed with that unmistakeable aura of the chosen. (69)

Following the preferences of previous protagonists, Freddie chooses the spiritual, withdrawn and art-like Flora to imagine into being. It soon becomes clear, moreover, that Freddie will model his attempts at restitution on his imaginative creation of the woman in the portrait, since he considered this a successful way of bringing this painted character to life. The “painted” status of Flora herself further enhances the similarity between both. Flora is part of a group of castaways who bear a close resemblance to the figures on a painting by Vaublin, which Freddie is studying. In short, either Freddie has reinterpreted his visitors along the lines of the painting, as it were caging them in art; or he has imaginatively read the figures in the painting into real life, following his imaginative reading of “Portrait of a woman with gloves”.18 As in his reading of the portrait, Freddie imagines, with the boldness of an authorial narrator, the childhood memories, thoughts and feelings of Flora in order to make her live. Whether or not he will now succeed in this attempt is therefore one of the central questions of the novel.

Initially, success seems within reach. For at the end of Part I, Freddie reports how Flora starts speaking to him: “And then without warning she began to talk”, an occasion which he jubilantly receives as the culmination of his imaginative feat:

18 As will be discussed in the next chapter, the precise status of the characters

remains largely unclear: are they real castaways, mere figments of Freddie’s imagination or an uncomfortable mix of both at once? Patrick Lennon maintains that the whole narrative in Ghosts (and Athena) is the product of Freddie’s imagination (Patrick Lennon, “The Real and the Duplicate: John Banville’s Frames Trilogy”, BELL 2002, 85-92). Yet, his arguments fail to produce a convincing alternative reading of the novel. Imhof argues more sensibly, “Perhaps it is best to suppose that the whole is a product of Freddie’s imagination, albeit based on fictional ‘fact’” (Introduction, 199).


And as she talked I found myself looking at her and seeing her as if for the first time, not as a gathering of details, but all of a piece, solid and singular and amazing. No, not amazing. That is the point. She was simply there, an incarnation of herself, no longer a nexus of adjectives but pure and present noun. (146-47)

Flora has finally and fully come to life and Freddie not only sees, but also understands her completely: she is “No longer Our Lady of the Enigmas, but a girl, just a girl”. She is “no longer figment, no longer mystery, no longer a part of my imagining”, but instead a real girl, a true other, or quite simply, “an incarnation of herself”. Still, a careful rereading of Freddie’s descriptions of the scene casts some doubts on his success. For instance, immediately after proclaiming that he finally perceives Flora whole, “of a piece, solid and singular and amazing”, he focuses on little details of her body: “I noticed the little fine hairs on her legs, a scarp of dried skin along the edge of her foot, a speck of sleep in the cantus of her eye”, as if these are only important in so far as they prove his epiphanic vision of her as “just a girl”. In an even more blatant manner, this reduction can be observed in Freddie’s description of Flora’s conversa-tion. Instead of objectively rendering the contents of her speech, he boldly and hastily replaces her words with his own opinions and beliefs. His celebratory “And then without warning she began to talk” is followed by, “I hardly listened to the sense of it”, and he concludes straight away,

The content was not important – to either of us, I think. What interested her was the same thing that interested me, namely … namely what? How the present feeds on the past, or versions of the past. How pieces of lost time surface suddenly in the murky sea of memory, bright and clear and fantastically detailed, complete little islands where it seems it might be possible to live, even if only for a moment. (146-47)

If this meditation is typical of Freddie, one can justifiably wonder whether it is also what occupies Flora. Rather, Freddie seems to have single-handedly dismissed the details of Flora’s dream and to have authoritatively subsumed them under an interpretation of his own. Freddie’s recuperative gesture is reminiscent of his reductive reading of the woman in the painting. If Flora turns out to be similar to Freddie in spite of all the outer differences, this is not so much a moral feat of the perceptive imagination, as Nussbaum would claim, but a recuperation of the other to Freddie’s own categories. Far from having made Flora truly


and independently alive, Freddie has conceived her as his alter ego and made her into a mirror image of himself.

This interpretation is further backed up by Freddie’s description of the inner thoughts, dreams and feelings of the different castaways throughout his narrative. Apart from assuming – as in his reading of the portrait – the manner of the authorial narrator, Freddie’s description readily reveals that the inner life of these various people is very similar to his own thoughts and feelings. To give but one example: when Freddie first arrives in the dilapidated house on the island, he remarks on “the strangeness of things. The strangeness of being here – being anywhere” (207). And he has most of the imagined or re-imagined castaways experience a very similar feeling. About Sophie and Kreutznaer, for instance, Freddie writes, “both are thinking how strange it is to be here” (72), and Flora ponders repeatedly, “everything felt so strange” (48). It gives Freddie the fanciful satisfaction of truly understanding his girl.

Unlike in The Book of Evidence, however, this satisfaction is shattered and Freddie himself comes to realise that he has failed to successfully make Flora live. This is evident in Freddie’s own re-interpretation of the earlier climactic scene in the last part of the novel. Freddie begins this final part – as so often in the art trilogy – with a confession:

I confess I avoided them all day. Oh, I know I pretended that I recognised in them what I had been waiting for since I first came here, the motley troupe who could take me into their midst and make a man of me, but the truth is I was afraid of them. (235)

He then proceeds to give another, possibly more truthful, version of the visit of the castaways in general and of his memorable meeting with Flora in particular. He describes how Flora starts to talk, not about the lofty mechanisms of memory, but about entirely trivial things. Moreover, rather than summarising and defining her conversation as in Part I, Freddie renders it in free indirect speech:

What she wanted, she was saying, was to stay here, on the island, just for a little while. She was sick, she was sure she was getting the flu. She stood for a moment frowning and biting her lip. The thing was, she said, she had made a mistake and now Felix had the wrong idea and she was afraid of him.

The greater authenticity of this second representation is reinforced when Freddie goes on to quote Flora’s moaning remarks in direct speech – quite a rarity in Ghosts:


“I don’t want to go back to that hotel,” she said, narrowing her eyes. “They’re not nice to me there. They boss me around. The parents expect me to do everything and the manageress is a bitch.”

Far from being exulted as in the first scene, Freddie is annoyed that she is not exactly as he imagined her:

Stop! I wanted to say, stop! you’re ruining everything .… She went and sat down on the bed and hugged the blanket around her and stared at her bare feet. A girl, just a girl, greedy and dissatisfied, somewhat scheming, resentful of the world and all it would not give her. But that is not what I saw, that is not what I would let myself see. (238-39)

Although he repeats the exclamation “a girl, just a girl” from his first description of the scene, the meaning is different in both instances. In the first case, he was overjoyed to find that Flora had become an ordinary, hence real, girl; that he had finally succeeded in imagining her into existence. Now, on the contrary, he is disappointed to find out that she is but an ordinary girl, that she is different from him and from the way he imagined her to be.

If Freddie tried to imagine and construct Flora in a manner similar to his construction of the woman in the portrait, ultimately Flora turns out to be more like the maid. Not only does Flora break free from the imaginative and identifying interpretation he fastens on her, she also wriggles out from the artistic metaphors in which he tried to contain her. If in his first representation of the conversation, Freddie described her in terms of the autonomy and self-sufficiency of art – she is “all of a piece, solid and singular and amazing” or “it was as if she had dropped a condensed drop of colour into the water of the world” – in his second rendering, Freddie writes: “I had an extraordinary vivid sense of her as she stood there with her arms folded around herself and her shoulder-blades unfurled, barefoot, in all her wan popliteal frailty.” This sudden perception of Flora’s body is reminiscent of Freddie’s epiphanic vision of the maid. Moreover, just as with the maid, Freddie is struck by the fact that her body is “similar, despite everything”. And he continues:

I go along imagining myself to be unique, a sport of nature, a sort of tumour growing on the world, and suddenly I am brought up short: there it is, not I but another and yet made of skin, hair, clothed bone, just like me. This is a great mystery. (237-38)

Incidentally, “skin” and “hair” were also the body parts which struck Freddie in his sudden clear perception of Josie Bell. As if to strengthen the


similarity between the maid and Flora at this moment, Freddie tries to imagine what it would be like to break and kill this body. Yet he refrains from testing it and remarks instead “there was never any question that I would lift her up and let her go; what else have I been doing here but trying to beget a girl” (244).

That Flora’s human nature, both different and similar to Freddie’s own, does not inspire the same violent reaction as that of Josie Bell, is probably indicative of the development Freddie has undergone in Ghosts. Still, Freddie acknowledges that his life-giving attempt has not yet been entirely successful and he concludes: “I still had, still have much to learn. I am, I realise only at the beginning of this birthing business” (239). In short, he has to accept that the imagination necessarily encounters obstacles in the human being, that bringing a woman to life entails not imaginatively subsuming her under his own categories, but letting her exist as an alien other with different and irrecoverable thoughts and feelings. Although Freddie has gone beyond his awareness in The Book of Evidence, precisely by realising that his solipsistic imaginings are not an ethical response to the “imperative” he labours under, he still fails in effectively realising the task of painful scrutiny and self-effacing perception, which he knows is required of him. Hence, as Felix points out at the end of Ghosts, Freddie remains a Frankenstein figure in dogged pursuit of the creature forever eluding him.19

In the final novel of the art trilogy, Freddie starts his penitential rites all over again. Just as in Ghosts, he comes to focus with obstinate attention on a young woman he calls A. in order to imagine her into existence. At regular intervals in his letter, he reminds the reader of this creative mission with rhetorical questions such as “Yes: I. Who else was there, to make her come alive?”20 As in Ghosts, moreover, the correspondences between the woman and the six paintings which Freddie is studying are conspicuous, to say the least. Again, several interpretations

19 Even though Freddie’s sense of failure thoroughly suffuses the last part of Ghosts,

critics have so far been unable to successfully account for it. The reason for this is their reading of Freddie’s attempts at imaginative creation as a successful way of giving life, exemplified first in his Nussbaumian identification with (or rather of) the woman in the portrait. If the imagination is indeed viewed as a uniquely positive creative force, Freddie’s sense of failure at the end of Ghosts is difficult to explain. This becomes tellingly evident in McMinn’s and Imhof’s attempts to deny that Freddie really failed (Supreme Fictions, 119, Introduction, 212).

20 John Banville, Athena, London, 1995, 175.


present themselves. Firstly, Freddie may have attempted the same gesture as in The Book of Evidence and Ghosts, reading the painted goddesses into real life. Secondly, as has also been suggested in relation to Ghosts, his lavish portrayals of A. may have been determined by his study of the paintings. Exclusive to Athena is a third interpretation which proposes that Freddie’s presentation of the paintings is influenced by his experiences with A. Unlike in The Book of Evidence and Ghosts indeed, the manipulation no longer runs in a straight line from art to life. Rather, a mixture of both can be noted. The growing interference of Freddie’s life in his descriptions of the paintings, the fact that the events of his life are repeated and commented on in subsequent paintings, and Freddie’s projection of his inner life on the paintings: all these arguments support this third option. Yet, a final decision is forestalled and the ambiguity is kept up till the end. At one time, for instance, Freddie remarks, “you became animate suddenly and stepped out of your frame”, only to contradict himself later on with, “They all look like you; I paint you over them” (83, 168). Perhaps, the reader has to be satisfied with Freddie’s statement, “You were the paintings and they were you” (83), suggesting a dialogue between art and reality rather than a one-sided influence.

The depiction of A. as stepping “out of [her] frame” and “into the world” clearly refers to the “doorway” in Ghosts from which the different characters could be seen to emerge. Moreover, Freddie’s halting descrip-tion of this scene invites a comparison with the climactic scene in Ghosts when Flora starts speaking to the narrator:

This morning, not half an hour ago, I, that is Flora and I, that is Flora, when I...Easy. Go easy. What happened after all except that she began to talk .… The kitchen, midsummer morning, eight o’clock .… I am sitting there at the old pine table. (145-46)

In Athena this has become, Here is what happened. This is what happened, the first time. Not the first time but the first time that you that I that we…Here it is .… Morning .… I am at my table, …. (83-84)

In both scenes, the woman suddenly materialises: she steps out of Freddie’s fevered imagination and into the real world. If in Ghosts Freddie confidently summarised Flora’s words and interpreted her appearance, in Athena he tentatively describes the outward particularities of A., her clothes, her words, her smell, her body:


I could smell her. That was the first thing, really the first thing, her smell: at once staleish and tart, with a tang in it like a tang of nettles that made my saliva glands tingle. She smelled of childish things, of seasides, of schoolrooms. (85)

In fact, Freddie’s reticence can also be noticed in the larger framework of Athena. Whereas in Ghosts, he assumed the attitude of the authorial narrator, imagining and defining the characters’ thoughts and feelings at will, in Athena he is content with the power and abilities of any ordinary first-person narrator. He merely describes A.’s outward appearances, reports her words and renders her actions. Inferences as to her feelings and thoughts are cautiously proposed rather than boldly asserted.

In his description of A.’s sudden appearance, Freddie explains his reticence and lack of definition as follows, “And yet, what did happen? Nothing to speak of, nothing that can be spoken of in words, adequately” (83). Even though he wishes to interpret the scene, he acknowledges the impossibility of doing so: while A. is finally there for him, she cannot be made present in words. This paradox haunts Freddie’s attitude towards A. in most of his narrative. For instance, while he confesses that he desperately sought to know A. and even briefly believed he had really reached her, he admits later on, “Now it seems I was wrong, wrong again” and is reminded of “ineffable mystery of the Other” (47). Elsewhere he tries to convince himself that he found the “real she” and actually “had her”, adding immediately afterwards, “And already I am forgetting her …. This is part of the price I must pay: in order to have had her I must lose her” (97-98). This is the catch Freddie learns to live with in Athena: only by losing A. can he really have had her; only by being unable to know her, has he really imagined her; only by letting her go has he succeeded in making her live. Freddie realises as much when he ponders,

She had been mine for a time, and now she was gone. Gone, but alive, in whatever form life might have taken for her, and from the start that was supposed to be my task: to give her life .… What I had not bargained for was that the life I was so eager she should embark on would require me in the end to relinquish her. (223)

Despite his misgivings, Freddie comes to accept this part of his creative mission in Athena. He acknowledges that A. can only really be there when she is gone, that she can only really be autonomous and different when, as he puts it, she has become “a glistening new creature I hardly recognised” (175). In the passage quoted above, moreover, Freddie


can be seen to relinquish her already, as he admits that he does not know what form life will take for her. That this is more than Freddie was prepared to accept or act upon in Ghosts is evident in the imagery he uses to describe both girls. In Ghosts, Flora is given a dream in which she imagines climbing into the head of the Pierrot, one of Freddie’s alter egos, “pulling the heavy, stiff tunic shut behind her” (64). In Athena, on the contrary, Freddie describes A. as stepping forth out of his head in a symbolical remake of the birth of Athena: “The god has a headache, his son wields the axe, the girl springs forth with bow and shield. She is walking towards the world” (232). This change in imagery is indicative of the change Freddie has undergone in Athena. He has accepted that in order to give life, he should not enclose the other in his own categories and preconceptions, but instead let the other go, allowing him or her to exist as an “unrecognisable” other with irrecoverable thoughts and feelings. As Attridge put it, “It is in the acknowledgement of the other human being’s uniqueness and therefore of the impossibility of finding general rules or schemata to account fully for him or her that one can be said to encounter the other” (24). At the end of Athena, therefore, Freddie is no longer Frankenstein in search of his creature. Instead, he writes:

There is the she who is gone, who is in some southern somewhere, lost to me forever, and then there is this other, who steps out of my head and goes hurrying off along the sunlit pavements to do I don’t know what. To live. If I can call it living; and I shall. (233)

Yet, by introducing two different “others” Freddie adds another twist to the picture. As if to make clear that he has not in reality “begot a girl”, he distinguishes between the real A. and her fictional look-alike. Even if he has successfully created A. as another person in his letter, he realises that he has not replaced that “other” other, who is “lost to [him] forever”. In this way, Freddie’s distinction captures very well the opposition between “absolute Other” and “other to me” as it is drawn in poststructuralist ethical criticism. If the real A. is completely beyond his grasp, a distant mirage in a southern clime, the A. he has created in his representations is both other and same. Although she “steps out of his head”, she will lead a different existence about which Freddie renounces all knowledge. In short, in Athena Freddie finally manages to represent and relate to the other as “an other to”, by granting that the other is both another human being and a stranger to himself. Hence, Freddie is probably right in pronouncing, in the last paragraph of the novel, his birthing mission a success.


Reading Banville It is, of course, tempting to read the art trilogy as belying Nussbaum’s all too optimistic hopes of an easy transference of imaginative identification from the realm of art into the real world, and at the same time, her confidence in the moral value of the imagination. As Banville’s text points out, the imagination is often all too short-sighted and tends to appropriate the other to the same. Yet, this reading would not only in itself be an appropriation of Banville’s novel to my own evaluative categories, it would also perpetuate Nussbaum’s mimetic reading, the illegitimate extrapolation from the realm of art into the real world. Finally, this reading would fail to do justice to the complexity of the relation between art and reality as it is articulated in Banville’s novels. Admittedly, Freddie speaks for many a Banville protagonist when he sighs, upon confronting the “real” Flora at the end of Ghosts, “I am told I should treasure life, but give me the world of art anytime” (239). Art gives him and the other protagonists the illusion of order and control as it is more easily incorporated in the characters’ own sense of order and purpose. Yet, Banville’s novels are also haunted by the insistent feeling that art, like reality, ultimately escapes all that and is infinitely more solid, self-contained and different than any attempt at appropriation can allow for. An awareness of this resistance is signalled in the half-hearted remark with which Freddie interrupts his reading of the portrait in The Book of Evidence, “Do not be fooled: none of this means anything either” (108). If the other and the work of art reach a point of convergence in Banville’s novels, it is in this sense of resistance to any logical reading or imaginative recuperation.

This qualification does not of course redeem my reading of Banville’s texts. In its attempt at closure it is also and inevitably a reduction of the indeterminacy and resistance at work in Banville’s works of art themselves. In The Book of Evidence, this indeterminacy is evident in the two contrasting interpretations that the text can be seen to uphold. Several critics have interpreted the novel as a celebration of the imagination as a moral force and a remedy against obtuseness and refusal of vision. The creative imagination is then of primary moral value in making people alive for us, because of its capacity to overcome differences. Yet the text can also be read as a warning against the destructiveness of the imagination and its authoritarian tendency to deny difference and recuperate the other to the same. The ethical response to others involves


then a checking of the imagination and its concomitant certainties by a close attention to the radical alterity of texts, people and ideas. If the second reading is the one I have chosen to defend, this does not mean that I can easily reject the other. That the imagination is a powerful creative force in Banville’s novels can hardly be gainsaid. Yet, an assertion of its power need not imply a conviction of its moral value. After all, a similar indeterminacy concerning the subjective imagination has been detected in the science tetralogy, where a celebration of the great creative achievements of the different scientists is opposed to a rejection of these achievements as destructive of a simple acceptance of the mysteries of the commonplace. Ultimately of course, this indeterminacy and resistance to interpretation contributes to the very attraction of Banville’s novels and to their great value as artistic achievements.

Nevertheless, in any specific reading the reader has to choose, for in the end both interpretations cancel each other out. Geoffrey Harpham has interestingly interpreted this necessity in terms of the opposition between ethics and morality. If the ethics of reading postulates that the reader should respect the alterity of the text, by resisting the tempting quest for meaning, closure and edification; “Morality”, Harpham argues,

represents … a particular moment of ethics, when all but one of the available alternatives are excluded, chosen against, regardless of their claims. At the moment of morality, the circumstance of choice that defines and is defined by ethics is closed off by a decision that crushes all opposition in its drive to self-actualization.21

In other words, if “Reading” is ethical, morality, “is what happens when you stop reading”.22

21 Geoffrey Harpham, Shadows of Ethics: Criticism and the Just Society, Durham,

1999, 29. 22 Geoffrey Harpham, Getting it Right: Language, Literature and Ethics, Chicago,

1992, 56.

PART FOUR

SELF AND SELF

Chapter Seven Self as Other: The Double

I hope you have not been leading a double life, pretending to be wicked and being really good all the time. That would be hypocrisy.

Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest

The foregoing investigation into Freddie’s representations of others has lead to the paradoxical conclusion that the ego is exceedingly central after all. Even when describing others, Freddie is primarily interested in himself. Because of his extreme self-absorption, Freddie’s ego puts an emphatic stamp on his narrative and world-view. Still, this self is far from a uniquely defined or stable entity in the art trilogy. On the contrary, the images and pictures the reader receives of Freddie – and of Victor Maskell, Alex Cleave or Axel Vander for that matter – are usually contradictory, confusing and blurred. Since this lack of unity also worries the protagonists themselves, the plot of these novels is to a large extent determined by their stubborn quests for wholeness and identity. In a similar way, the issue of self-representation determines form and structure of the novels, as the first-person narrative mode seems to offer the possibility of meaning and control not available in real life. In short, the question, how is the self represented in Banville’s novels? opens up three distinct perspectives, which will be discussed separately in what follows. In Chapter 7, both the content and the plot-related consequences of Freddie Montgomery’s self-representations will be discussed in the light of the ethical views forwarded in the art trilogy as a whole, while Chapter 8 investigates the narrative dimension of the protagonists’ self-representations in relation to The Untouchable. For even though the autobiographical mode shapes every Banville novel since The Newton Letter, Victor Maskell’s confession in The Untouchable will be discussed as an exemplary case because it interestingly adds the skilled duplicity of the master-spy to the inherent ambiguity of the autobiographical genre. Given the duality and duplicity of self-representations on all of these levels, a focal point of analysis readily presents itself in the form of the Doppelgänger or double. This archetypal figure has a long and diversified


heritage in literature, theory and psychoanalysis and might therefore provide a fruitful way into the Gordian knot of selves, others, twins and alter egos in each of Banville’s novels.

In his impressive study Der Doppelgänger, Otto Rank describes how the figure of the double makes its first appearance in primitive legends and folktales where, in close connections with the soul and the shadow, it is hailed as a protection from death, an insurance against immortality. Gradually, however, the tables are turned and the double becomes a harbinger of death, the very mark of human mortality. This ambiguity vis-à-vis death further characterises the appearance of the double in the course of literary history: in the Romantic period, the double becomes a hallmark of fantastic literature together with such other death-like figures as ghosts and devils; and in the nineteenth century, the Doppelgänger is used to visualise the human split between mind and body. In the psychoanalytic theories of Otto Rank and Sigmund Freud, subsequently, different manifestations of the double find a partial explanation in processes ascribed to the ego’s unconsciousness. In Freud’s “On Narcissism”, for instance, the double is considered a feature of narcissism, both as a normal stage in the child’s development and as a pathological adult state. If the child construes the outer world as part of the self so as to ward off destruction and death, the narcissistic adult replaces the other by the self as an object of affection for highly similar reasons. In both cases, the other is construed as part of the self, thereby readily granting the self illusions of mastery, unity and immortality.

Yet, to this creation of the double in response to a narcissistic fear of death, Freud adds in other essays the obverse process whereby the ego develops a super-ego, which stands apart from the self, criticising and censoring it. In this process of splitting, part of the self is construed as an other. In this way, the fundamental duality of the self, consisting of mind and body, comes to the fore and the threat of human mortality is more strongly felt. However, both mechanisms at work in the creation of the double cannot always firmly be distinguished. The double created as a wish-defence against destruction often reappears as a threatening other who further alienates and undermines the self. Even though this instability seems to make the double a figure of deconstructive resistance against hierarchical binaries or clear-cut oppositions, several critics have expressed doubts regarding the viability of the double in contemporary literature. The Doppelgänger would have become too much of an empty stereotype, psychoanalysis would have taken away all mystery, or

Chapter Seven: Self as Other 175

narcissism would simply have become the normal modus vivendi in postmodern culture.1 As the following analysis proposes to show, quite the opposite is the case in Banville’s novels. They host a wonderful collection of doubles in all types and varieties and exploit the inherent duplicity of the double to the full.

Seeing doubles For a first manifestation of doubling in the art trilogy, let me quote the Romantic writer Jean Paul who defines Doppelgänger as “Leute, die sich selber sehen”. Andrew Webber further explains this: “The autoscopic, or self-seeing, subject beholds its other self as another, as visual object, or alternatively is beheld as object by its other self.”2 In the art trilogy, these autoscopic instances of doubling are numerous. “I saw myself”, Freddie records upon his first visit to Whitewater, “as if from one of those sunstruck windows, skulking along here in the dust, hot, disgruntled, overweight, head bowed and fat back bent, my white suit rucked at the armpits and sagging in the arse, a figure of fun, the punchline of a bad joke, and at once I was awash with self-pity”. On another occasion he remarks, “I saw myself in their eyes, a big, confused creature, like a dancing bear, shambling along at the steel-tipped heels of Cunningham’s friendly boots” (Book, 80, 206). In Ghosts, the narrator remembers his first encounter with Sergeant Toner in autoscopic mode: “For a moment I saw myself as a person of consequence; a serious person, deeply flawed and irremediably damaged, it is true, but someone, all the same: definitely someone.” And notwithstanding a, perhaps telling, typing error, the following exclamation also belongs to the list: “For an instance I say [sic] myself as if lit by lightning, a stark, crouched figure, vivid and yet not entirely real, an emanation of myself, a hologram image, pop-eyed and flickering” (Ghosts, 37, 179).

Characteristic of these and many other similar remarks is the introductory “I saw (see, could see) myself”, which installs a curious distinction between the I who perceives and the I (myself) who is perceived. The subject beholds its other self as object, which becomes the

1 See the following studies: Robert Rogers, A Psychoanalytic Study of the Double in Literature, Detroit, 1970; Tzvetan Todorov, Introduction à la littérature fantastique, Paris, 1970; Christopher Lasch, The Culture of Narcissism, New York, 1979.

2 Andrew Webber, The Doppelgänger: Double Visions in German Literature, Oxford, 1996, 3.


Doppelgänger of the beholder. In Banville’s novels, moreover, the beholder is even further alienated by interjections such as “through her eyes”, or “as they would see me”, which locate the perception in a third position. The perceiving subject places itself in the position of another and becomes in turn a Doppelgänger, both to the other and to the self. Sigmund Freud gives the following summary of this situation:

The ego is in its essence a subject; how can it be made into an object? Well, there is no doubt that it can be. The ego can take itself as an object, can treat itself like other objects, can observe itself, criticise itself, and do Heaven knows what with itself. In this, one part of the ego is setting itself over against the rest. So the ego can be split; it splits itself during a number of its functions – temporarily at least.3

Clearly, these autoscopic visions form a first indication of Freddie’s fundamentally split personality. In seeing himself, he separates himself into subject and object, perceiver and perceived, and, quite often, mind and body.4

When we consider the content of Freddie’s autoscopic visions, we are confronted with a startling variety of images. Within a few pages of The Book of Evidence, for instance, Freddie successively sees himself as a disgusting figure, a frog prince, a circus-bear, a gifted orator, a painter, a cultured killer, a psychopath, a hologram image, etc. Very often these images are blatantly contradictory:

I gave her one of my special, slow smiles, and saw myself through her eyes, a tall, tanned hunk in a linen suit, leaning over her on a summer lawn and murmuring dark words .… Suddenly I had a vivid, queasy sense of myself, not the tanned pin-up now, but something else, something pallid and slack and soft. (Book, 46)

The split in this passage – between the handsome Don Juan and the fleshy animal – is part of a consistent pattern of superior versus inferior self-images in The Book of Evidence. To give but one example: about his life on a Southern islands, Freddie recalls how they “presided among this

3 Sigmund Freud, “Splitting of the Ego in the process of Defence”, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Works of Sigmund Freud, XXIII, London, 1964, 275.

4 In less stylistically marked instances, the opposition invoked can also be that between first-person narrator and protagonist, as the narrator “sees” or “pictures” an earlier version of himself. About his weekly outings to Kingstown, for example, Freddie remarks, “I see myself, the frog prince, enthroned on the high back seat of the Morris Oxford” (Book, 27). In this way, the split between narrator and protagonist, so often forgotten or dissembled in first-person narratives, becomes especially marked.


rabble … with a kind of grand detachment, like an exiled king and queen”. Yet, immediately afterwards he debunks his feelings of superiority with an expression of disgust at his being “a paltry, shivering thing, … afraid, racked by doubts and dying” (10-11). It is interesting to note, furthermore, that the same scene can achieve two distinct and contradictory representations in Freddie’s narrative. Describing his capture at the beginning of The Book of Evidence, Freddie pictures himself as important, in control, standing above the animal hordes who “clawed at each other to get a look at me” (3). Yet, when the same scene is repeated near the end of the novel, an inversion of images has taken place. Freddie represents himself as weak, frightened and largely inferior compared to the ordinary decent people shouting abuse at him in the street. Styling himself as a film star or notorious criminal in the first instance, he is but “a child, or a very old man” in the second (211).

Throughout his narratives in fact, Freddie tends to distinguish himself from different groups of society. For instance, although he invokes the first person plural when talking about the prison inmates, he suggests at the same time that he stands apart from them, either above (“they seemed to feel that I was special”) or below (“It may be of course, that this solemn mien was only a way of hiding their hatred and disgust”) (Ghosts, 21). Elsewhere he associates himself with the judge – “people of our kind” (Book, 49) – with the intellectual elite, and with the outcasts –“I have a distressing weakness for the low life” (Athena, 135).

These double feelings of superiority and inferiority, of being high above or far below the rest of mankind constitute, according to Karl Miller, a “dialectic [that] is pervasive in Romantic writing”:

The Romantic writer who endeavours to say goodbye to his fellow creatures may also be aware that the attempt to rise above humanity, while it may lead to some spiritually-privileged condition … may just as well lead to an irrecoverable fall, to the condition of the outlaw, the monster and the beast. 5

The suggestion that the fall typically implies a plunge into the physical is confirmed by the preceding examples. Freddie’s negative self-images are linked up with a disgust at his bodily self, whereas his superior self-representations relate to his intelligence or wit. This body-mind dualism, a familiar feature in all of Banville’s novels, appears to be a classical

5 Karl Miller, Doubles: Studies in Literary History, Oxford, 1987, 10.


example of splitting: “Body-mind dualism suggests, among other things the dissolution of the body image which is often encountered in people suffering from autoscopic hallucination” (Rogers, 10). On the basis of the few examples adduced above, one could surmise that one of Freddie’s contradictory attitudes – the superior one, perhaps – is a pose, a mask he likes to assume, whereas the second one, which shows him weak and frightened, presents us with Freddie’s “real” self. Alternatively, one could argue that Freddie is hiding his real, emotionless and superior self behind a mask of humble and self-conscious inferiority in order to engage the sympathy of jury and readers. Freddie himself often invokes these real-fake or true-false oppositions as he worries about the precise nature of his true self. Yet, whether these distinctions are tenable at all will have to be verified through a close reading of the passages concerned.

Real vs. false doubles Some half-ironic references to his “real self” notwithstanding, it is mostly in the less marked diction of inner and outer that Freddie comments on his split identities in The Book of Evidence. His life as a student, he recalls as follows, “I laughed and whooped and boasted with the best of them – only inside, in that grim, shadowed gallery I call my heart, I stood uneasily, with a hand to my mouth, silent, envious, uncertain” (16-17). And about his wife Daphne, he writes that they understood each other, but did not share “the essential secretness of our inner selves” (9). That inner self is subsequently revealed as a kind of Freudian super-ego: “I had inside me too an exemplar of my own, a kind of invigilator, from whom I must hide my lack of conviction … that stern interior sergeant.”6 Yet, Freddie reverses the inner-outer dynamic immediately afterwards, wondering,

But why the past tense? Has anything changed? Only that the watcher from inside has stepped forth and taken over, while the puzzled outsider cowers within. (17)

Indeed, his inner self has now taken the place of the outer self, a gesture which, according to the inside-outside logic, undermines its credibility as

6 In his essay “On Narcissism: An Introduction”, Freud defines the superego as “a special psychical agency which performs the task of seeing that narcissistic satisfaction from the ego ideal is ensured and which, with this end in view, constantly watches the actual ego and measures it by this ideal”. Freud considers the superego similar to “what we call our conscience” and as such it is one of the familiar forms of the double in adult life (The Standard Edition of the Complete Works of Sigmund Freud, XIV, London, 1957, 95).


“real self” substantially, since it is the poor “puzzled outsider” who has now the highest claim to being the real one. Entirely different interpreta-tions of the inner-outer divide are hinted at when a, outwardly bored and irritable Freddie remarks, “deep inside me somewhere, hardly acknow-ledged, grief dripped and dripped” (45). Some pages further on, the same formula is used to oppose horror and exultation: “despite the horror … deep inside me something exulted” (54). The confusion resulting from this is more explicitly addressed when Freddie tries to decide whether he is feeling “utterly unlike [him]self” because of the strangeness (read: insincerity) of his inner or outer self:

it was as if I – the real, thinking, sentient I – had somehow got myself trapped inside a body not my own. But no, that’s not it exactly. For the person that was inside was also strange to me, stranger by far, indeed, than the familiar, physical creature. This is not clear, I know. I say the one within was strange to me, but which version of me do I mean? (95)

After this sample of inner selves, the reader of The Book of Evidence certainly shares Freddie’s confusion. Is Freddie’s real self a stern sergeant or a dangerous brute, a “child” or an “ogre”? Is it grieving, exultant or afraid? No definitive answer can be given to these questions as the precise identity of Freddie’s inner self is, even to Freddie himself, far from clear. To make it worse, the equation of inner self with true or real self has also crumbled as Freddie’s conflicting selves are engaged in a struggle for hegemony. All we can conclude is that Freddie suffers from more than one split identity and that in this profusion of doubles his real self has been lost. Still, in spite of all this diversity, there is one inner self who is referred to more or less consistently in The Book of Evidence, so that most critics identify him as the double of Freddie Montgomery. Whether the infamous “Bunter” does indeed personify Freddie’s true self, remains to be investigated.7

When referring to Freddie’s evil double, critics tend to repeat Freddie’s own inner-outer logic, witness the following description:

7 It is in fact ironic that out of the different literary and historical evil figures which

Freddie introduces in his narrative (such as Moosbrugger and Gilles de Rais), Freddie chooses a cartoon figure, Billy Bunter, to symbolise his evil self. A pathetic, greedy, annoying, stupid and mean boy from the immensely popular public school books – later comics and TV-series – written by Frank Richards, Billy Bunter is hardly evil incarnate. This ties in with the ambiguity concerning Freddie’s alter ego in the art trilogy as well as, of course, with Freddie’s attempts at undermining the notion of “pure evil” in his narrative.


Looking back on his solitary childhood, he [Freddie] now sees the tragic dualism of his personality: outside, the cultured intelligent son of the Big House, but inside a violent sadistic brute trying to be free, a monster he names “Bunter”. (Supreme Fictions, 107)

Therefore McMinn suggests that Bunter is Freddie’s real self, whereas the gentleman-self is only a mask assumed in order to hide that inner self. Yet, as we have seen before, there are some problems with this dualistic logic. For Bunter is not the only real self crouching inside Freddie. Other candidates have been discussed already: the “interior sergeant”, the weak and frightened insider or the sad and humble self. Additionally, there is the question as to what remains of the inside-outside logic when Bunter takes over, as Freddie puts it, and the outer man – McMinn’s gentleman, but again there are other candidates – cowers within. The confusion about this process of doubling is ironically mirrored in Imhof’s account of the psychological mechanisms behind the creation of Bunter, “Freddie invents his alter ego, Bunter, the Mr Hyde to his consciously adopted stance as Dr Jekyll” (Introduction, 178, italics added). For even while recognising Bunter as Freddie’s derivative (because invented) self, Imhof suggests that Freddie’s cultivated stance of Dr Jekyll is only pretence, a mask “consciously adopted”. Hence, in manifest contradiction with the psychological mechanisms through which he claims Bunter is created, Imhof also subscribes to the inside-outside logic according to which Bunter is Freddie’s real self hidden behind a gentleman’s mask. Considering precisely these psychological processes, moreover, it will become clear that Freddie’s alter ego is not the result of the imagination, nor of “sublimation”, as Imhof suggests as well, but of a splitting process whereby an unwanted aspect of one’s personality is cast off and objectified.

Otto Rank already stressed the importance of the ego’s conscience in this process, arguing

ein mächtiges Schuldbewusstsein … den Helden nötigt, für gewisse Handlungen seines Ichs die Verantwortung nicht mehr aufzunehmen, sondern einem anderen Ich, einem Doppelgänger aufzubürden, der entweder im Teufel selbst personifiziert ist oder durch die Teufelsverschreibung geschaffen wird.8

Freud further investigated this process in his article “Splitting of the Ego in the Process of Defence”, where “ego-splitting” is described as a

8 Otto Rank, Der Doppelgänger: Eine Psychoanalytische Studie, Leipzig, 1925, 104.


defence mechanism, adopted in order to escape psychic conflict arising from contradictory or incompatible reactions or attitudes. Joseph Francavilla aptly summarises Freud’s argument:

The psychic conflict of such incompatible attitudes or unrepressible impulses (e.g. the urge to kill, to self-destruct, to torture oneself, to hate friends, siblings, parents, etc.) forces part of the ego to become exteriorized, thrown outward, in order to protect the self. In a sense this action not only temporarily avoids the pain of conflict, it also allows the unmanageable attitude or unrepressible impulse to be indulged in by proxy, as it were, disowned by the primary self.9

It is interesting to note how these psychoanalytic explanations endorse a unified paradigm of the subject, which considers every split an abnormality waiting to be cured. Additionally, the early psychoanalytic description of splitting subscribes to a fixed hierarchy in which host and double, or original and derived self, can clearly be discerned. This is the case in Mefisto, which stages Felix as the split-off evil self of Gabriel Swan. Yet, the hierarchy between host and double is not always easy to maintain, as the confusion concerning Freddie’s real inner selves has already demonstrated. Whether it holds true for the more substantial splitting case of Bunter will be discussed in what follows.

It is quite obvious, first of all, that Bunter does represent destructive drives and desires which Freddie wants to repress as unacceptable and dangerous. At a certain moment, however, these noxious feelings have become too strong to be repressed and are therefore cast off by the ego and projected onto another self or alter ego. Following this Freudian logic, Bunter is a derivative self, preying on Freddie’s real self. In The Book of Evidence, however, this picture is complicated, firstly, by Freddie’s explicit comments on the, normally unconscious, process of splitting or decomposition. Freddie calls himself “bifurcate” and quite consciously blames his crime on this other self. These and other thematisations tend to make the reader wary of the narrator’s claims. Is he poking fun at the reader, trying to excuse himself, or merely being honest? Unlike Felix, moreover, Bunter is no fully-fledged separate character in Freddie’s narrative. He remains firmly within the narrator’s control. Finally, the strange inside-outside logic to which Freddie’s split self is subjected reverses the traditional hierarchy of selves. If according to

9 Joseph Francavilla, “The Concept of the Divided Self”, Journal of the Fantastic in

Arts, VI/2 (1994), 113-14.


Freudian theory, Bunter is Freddie’s secondary or false self, in Freddie’s own narrative, the tables are turned and Bunter becomes the original or true self, all too long locked up. In exteriorising his destructive drives Freddie transfers all responsibility onto his alter ego and thereby effectively rids himself of all guilt. Yet, by making Bunter his true inner self, conversely, Freddie takes all responsibility upon himself again. This paradoxical situation may account for the reader’s uncertainty as to whether or not Freddie is trying to excuse himself and to shirk his responsibility. In short, the confusion concerning Bunter’s precise status merely enforces the earlier conclusion that no fixed binary system can be found amongst Freddie’s many different selves and doubles.

In general, the case of Bunter shows the fate of all splitting processes. For it is clear that every Doppelgänger is capable of turning the tables and making the host into a double (to the double), or a stranger (to itself). In this way, the double effectively undermines the hierarchies – of inside and outside, original and secondary, true and false – which his being brought into existence in the first place. This ambiguity can further be associated with the ambivalent relation of the double with death. While often created to protect the self from destruction, the double also exposes a lack in the self, making it aware of its finite nature. As Banville’s novels show, host and double or original and secondary selves simply become interchange-able doubles, all equally suffering from an irrecoverable feeling of lack.

Ghosts and doubles “The basic devices of all fantastic literature are only four in number: the work within the work; the contamination of reality by dream; the voyage in time and the double”, Borges argued in one of his essays.10 That the reverse is not always true is demonstrated by Bunter who does not add any fantastic flavour to The Book of Evidence. He is presented too self-consciously as the ironic result of a psychological process to inspire any fear at all. A far uncannier figure is Gabriel’s split-off self in Mefisto, and Ghosts, too is a novel deeply steeped in the fantastic. Although Freddie’s Doppelgänger makes frequent appearances in this novel, he is no longer called Bunter. Instead, various hints and similarities install a similarity with the Mephistophelean Felix from Mefisto. Still, neither Felix’s

10 Neil Cornwell, The Literary Fantastic: From Gothic to Postmodernism, New

York, 1990, xiii.


mephitic qualities, nor the gothic setting of Ghosts seem sufficient explanation for the fantastic quality of the novel. In fact, the gothic references to mirrors, ghosts, devils and haunted houses are often exaggerated to the point of self-deflating parody. Moreover, in theoretical works on the uncanny or the fantastic, we often find not so much a lists of features responsible for creating a fantastic work, but a feeling produced in protagonist and reader alike. In Freud’s essay on the subject, for instance, the uncanny is associated with uncertainty, doubt and hesitation, for instance as to whether something is alive or dead, natural or supernatural, real or imagined.11 In his Introduction à la littérature fantastique, Todorov also defines the fantastic along these lines, “le fantastique est fondé essentiellement sur une hésitation du lecteur – un lecteur qui s’identifie au personnage principal – quant à la nature d’un événement étrange’’ (165). In these sceptical times, this uncertainty concerning the supernatural quality of things and people is of course difficult to uphold. It is therefore all the more remarkable that Ghosts successfully generates fantastic hesitation, mainly through the mysterious figure of Felix.

In Part II of Ghosts, chronologically the first part of the narrative, the reader meets with a mysterious dark-haired man who appears to be following Freddie who has just been released from prison. He pops up in unexpected places and as suddenly disappears again, shabbily dressed, slyly smiling and strangely familiar. These characteristics further connect him to the Felix figure in the rest of the novel whom Freddie imagines as “that prowler, my dark other, whom I imagine stalking back and forth out there in the dark”, trying to catch the girl (34). Several similarities and odd coincidences confirm Felix in the role of Freddie’s Doppelgänger, his externalised bad self. Yet, Felix not only knows about the criminal record of Freddie, he is also in on the hidden past of the other characters. Many characters feel that he is “like someone [they] had known once and forgotten and who now had come back” (47). Felix’s strange omniscience together with his role as firebrand and tempter cast him in the more universal role of Mephistopheles as well. Finally, some doubt is shed on the reality of Felix within the narrative of Ghosts. Apart from his mysterious appearances, he is also identified as one of the characters in the painting Freddie is studying. The ensuing hesitation as to whether

11 Sigmund Freud, “The Uncanny”, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Works

of Sigmund Freud, XVII, London, 1955, 227.


Felix is a real character or a figment of Freddie’s imagination is illustrated in such ambivalent statements as, “he looked flat and one-sided like a figure cut out of cardboard” and “his overpowering presence pressing itself against me in awful intimacy, insistently physical, all flesh and breath and that stale whiff of something gone rank” (155, 241). And the final words of the novel, “No riddance of him”, cast Felix in the role of Freddie’s double once again.

In short, there is only one thing that is certain, namely that the status of Felix is highly uncertain. Is he Freddie’s malevolent guardian angel or Mephistopheles himself? Is he Freddie’s alter ego and externalised bad self or quite simply a scheming human rogue? Is he a figment of the imagination or a real character in the novel? Is he merely a painted figure or perhaps one of the ghosts the title refers to? Is he Bunter or the Felix of Mefisto? The questions are endless and the answers perpetually uncertain. What can be concluded, however, is that Banville has created a Doppelgänger in the tradition of fantastic literature in Ghosts, rather than a split resulting from psychological processes as in The Book of Evidence. Still, as with Bunter, the double can be seen to prey on the self, alienating the host and making him into a double. Freddie calls Felix “a ventriloquist’s dummy”, but one who does all the talking himself, which is an interesting metaphor for the subversive role of the Doppelgänger who reverses the hierarchy and assumes the guise of the authentic self.

The uncertainty of Felix’s position, and consequently the fantastic nature of the text, is further heightened by the ambiguous status of the other castaways is the novel, which is the result of the strange correspondences between the castaways and Vaublin’s painting, “Le Monde d’Or”. In Freddie’s lengthy description of the painting, the different characters can easily be recognised: “The boy … puzzled and frowning” and “his wizened companion … prey to a sort of angry longing” are Pound and Hatch, respectively; “The woman dressed in black” can be identified as Sophie and “The little girl with braided hair who leads the woman by the hand”, is Alice. Croke can be recognised as “the old man in the straw hat”, and Flora is the “young woman … waiting perhaps for some figure out of romance to come and rescue her”. Licht, finally, figures as “the donkey”, with “that single, soft, auburn, unavoidable eye” (230-31). The absence of Professor Kreutznaer in the painting may be explained by the fact that he allegedly either made or ordered the painting. Apart from these correspondences between painting and characters, the strange narrative situation of Part I as well as Freddie’s


emphasis on his powerful imagination may also be held responsible for the air of mystery in Ghosts, which is of course further deepened by the frequent references to ghosts, shadows and other parallel worlds. In short, the result is a truly fantastic novel with an “air of mystery and profound and at the same time playful significance” (Ghosts, 227).

Double worlds “The double represents the subject as more or less pathologically divided between reality and fantasy in cases of what Hoffmann diagnoses as ‘chronischer Dualismus’”, Webber argues in his introduction to The Doppelgänger (1). After all, the subject’s “misreading” of imagined inner selves as exteriorised outer beings can be considered part of larger inability to distinguish between fantasy and reality in general. While the existence of Bunter or Felix would in itself be enough to diagnose “a chronic dualism” in the case of Freddie Montgomery, much more evidence of Freddie’s failure of judgement can be found. In fact, his misinterpretation operates in two ways. He persistently reads reality in terms of fiction, fantasy or art and at the same time, he fully believes these fantastic interpretations to be real, consequently shaping his actions according to them. Both of these misreadings are of course related and converge in Freddie’s tragic inability to tell apart fact from fiction.

That Freddie reads reality as fantasy, and hence fails to take it seriously, is so evident throughout The Book of Evidence that a few examples will suffice. Freddie’s stay on the unnamed southern isle, for instance, is consistently represented in terms of films and literature. His description of the bar in the harbour has clear overtones of English expatriate literature, “a few tables and plastic chairs outside, and crooked sun-umbrellas advertising Stella or Pernod, and a swarthy, fat proprietor leaning in the doorway, picking his teeth”, and Randolph, the American drug dealer who speaks with a twang “learned from the movies”, is styled as the harmless thug of gangster movies (10). The whole situation on the island is in fact described as “a supporting feature” “played by a comic cast of ruffians” and Freddie consistently fails to take it seriously (21). He asks Randolph for a loan and teasingly refuses to pay it back: “I was amused, and rather pleased with myself, playing at being the blackmailer” (14). That Freddie also judges events and people according to their adherence to or divergence from artistic stereotype becomes clear from his pleasure when “reality banal as ever, was fulfilling [his] worst fantasies”


(3). A telling examples occurs towards the end of the novel when Freddie is arrested by the police:

Was it coincidence, I wonder, that the policeman made his move just at that moment, or had he been listening outside the door? In films, I have noticed, the chap with the gun always waits in the corridor, back pressed to the wall, the whites of his eyes gleaming, until the people inside have had their say. And this one was, I suspect, a keen student of the cinema.

And when Charlie interjects “Is that necessary, inspector?” at exactly the right moment, our film connoisseur comments, “It was such a grand old line, and so splendidly delivered, with just the right degree of solemn hauteur, that for a second I thought it might elicit a small round of applause” (190).12

Freddie’s fictional representations in these and many other instances can in fact be interpreted in two ways. Firstly, they can be read as another instance of Freddie’s characteristic caging of reality in art – as with Josie Bell and the Dutch lady – in order to contain its threatening realness and difference. Yet, in judging reality by art, Freddie also brings about a reversal of the Platonic hierarchy in which art is considered as secondary to reality. In Freddie’s reading, art becomes the parameter by which the truth of reality is to be gauged. Freddie’s reversal of the hierarchy is in fact similar to the one effectuated by the Doppelgänger in general. The double has the power to make the host into a double, effectively undermining the hierarchies of outer and inner, or original and secondary, which it initially seemed to uphold. Just like Bunter alienates rather than cures Freddie, so fantasy and art succeed in alienating reality, in making it strange and unreal and, hence, secondary to art, which was itself secondary in the first place.

In itself, however, Freddie’s representation of reality in terms of art is relatively harmless. The problems only start when he proceeds to act upon this misreading and conceives of his fantastic representations as the only true reality. It is in this way that Freddie’s failure of judgement can be construed as one of the main causes of the murder. As with the situation on the island, Freddie persistently perceives the events in and around Whitewater as somehow not real. About his vague plan for stealing the

12 For more examples of the way Freddie represents reality – scenes, people, nature –

in terms of paintings, see Françoise Canon-Roger, “John Banville’s Imagines in The Book of Evidence”, European Journal of English Studies, IV/1 (2000), 25-38.


portrait, he writes, “so it was out of a muddled conflation of ideas of knight errantry and rescue and reward that my plan originated” (91). In his fantasy world, rescuing Anna is mysteriously connected to stealing (or rescuing) the portrait. After a bad night, he makes the necessary arrangements for his theft all the while emphasising that it took place as if in a dream or childhood fantasy: “it was playtime. In this pretend-world I could have anything I wanted” (97). Precisely because Freddie has all along been interpreting reality as fiction, the seriousness of his actions fails to dawn on him and rescuing one damsel unproblematically leads to the murder of another.

If however, we blame Freddie for not distinguishing between reality and fantasy, we as readers, become ourselves progressively more uncertain about the facts of Freddie’s narrative. Although at the beginning, the distinction reality-fantasy seems one easily made, the persistent influence of art, literature and movies on the narrator’s descriptions slowly leads us to wonder how much of his representations are true. Freddie’s tendency to correct himself further undermines our certainty. Describing the last moments of his father’s life in theatrical detail, Freddie suddenly interrupts himself, “Stop this, stop it. I was not there. I have not been present at anyone’s death. He died alone, slipped away while no one was looking” (51). While these remarks can still be considered as a mark of honesty on the part of the narrator and, hence, as a paradoxical proof of the fact-fiction distinction, this is no longer the case for Freddie’s increasingly confusing narrative at the end of Part II. Freddie has just been describing how he was “posing as Charlie’s factotum”, when he suddenly switches to the present tense with “now what shall I do”, and continues,

I went upstairs to the drawing-room. No, I went into the kitchen. Madge: wig, false teeth, white apron, I have done all that. Out again. In the hall I found Foxy. She had wandered out of the dining-room. Under the stairs was a dark place, there we met. (178-79)

The present tense, the auto-correction and the short sentences make the setting and the love scene that follows distinctly improbable. The reader is likely to dismiss the whole scene as spawned by Freddie’s overheated imagination. Although this judgement is confirmed when Freddie rejects the event with “poor Foxy was hardly more substantial to me in my frantic condition than a prop in a wet dream”, the reader is outwitted again when Freddie declares immediately afterwards, “I remember her clearly, with


tenderness and compassion. She is, and will most likely remain, the last woman I made love to” (182). By now, the reader’s bewilderment is so great as to make Freddie’s final denunciation of the truth – “True inspector? All of it. None of it. Only the shame” – but a confirmation of an already established confusion. In short, if we blame Freddie for not being able to distinguish between reality and fantasy, we as readers also stand accused, as we are equally incapable of telling reality apart from fantasy in Freddie’s narrative. More than merely reversing traditional binaries, Freddie’s narrative cleverly shows how reality and fantasy ultimately cannot be distinguished. For our reality is as much determined by art, fantasy and literature as these and other art forms are determined by reality. The result is not necessarily a Baudrillardian hyperreality of simulacra, but an indistinguishable compound of fiction and fact, of reality and fantasy as the hallmark of all our representations.

Creating doubles “The double is a powerful metaphor for the act of fiction. In telling a story the writer too becomes someone else”, Banville argues in an interview with Ciaran Carty. This specific relation of doubling between the author and one or more of his characters has often been commented on in critical studies on the double as well. Otto Rank initiated the psychoanalytic research tradition which links the appearance of Doppelgänger in a literary work to the pathological disposition of its author, while Freud more cautiously remarked on “the inclination of the modern writer to split up his ego, by self-observation, into many part-egos, and, in consequence, to personify the conflicting currents of his own mental life in several heroes”.13 In less psychoanalytic terms, Karl Miller underscores this view, arguing, “an author may be thought to lead a double life, or to achieve a second self, an alter ego, in the art he creates, and he may also be thought to lose himself there” (Doubles, 22). Paul Coates, finally, dwells on the motives that lead the author to create doubles in his writing: “Stamping one’s own features upon the face of a character may be a fearful authorial manoeuvre intended to limit the dangers, posed by his or her otherness, of the character assuming independent, vampirical life.”14 Fashioning

13 Sigmund Freud, “Creative Writers and Day-Dreaming”, in The Standard Edition of

the Complete Works of Sigmund Freud, IX, London, 1952, 150. 14 Paul Coates, The Double and the Other, London, 1988, 1.


characters as mirror images to oneself is then a way of containing their otherness and keeping them under authorial control. In more general terms, Coates writes,

The materialisation of the Double can be interpreted as a pathological attempt to replace the image of the other with that of the self .… The very persistence of the Double is a sign of the unrepressed vitality of the Other, which the self continually strives to cocoon in projections. (2)

The psychological processes Coates detects in writing bring us back to poststructuralist ethics, discussed in Chapter 6, which criticised the reduction of the other to a mirror-image of the self in reading, writing or the interpersonal encounter.15 In tracing the trilogy’s remaining doubles from the perspective of the author, the ethical dimension of representation will again come to the fore. Since a psychoanalytic investigation of Banville’s possibly neurotic pathologies is certainly not the aim here, the authorial creations to be analysed are those made by Freddie Montgomery who consciously styles himself as artist, creator and writer of the art trilogy.

While it are of course the various nooks and crannies of his own ego which Freddie pays most attention to, characters such as Charlie, his mother and father, Daphne and Anna are also portrayed in some detail. That Freddie’s representation of his father – his “resentment and indignation”, his self-portrayal as “a tragic figure, a gentleman of the old school displaced in time”, his “distaste for the world”, etc. – to a large extent applies to himself as well, is, hereditary laws taken into account, perhaps not such a surprise. Yet, it is certainly stranger, when also the woman in the portrait and Daphne can be seen to share Freddie’s character traits. In the first chapter of The Book of Evidence, Freddie introduces his wife with, “she was not nice, she was not good. She suited me.” He then accuses her of “moral laziness” and proceeds to illustrate this contention: “She neglected our son, not because she was not fond of him, in her way, but simply because his needs did not really interest her.” That it is Freddie rather than Daphne to whom this portrayal applies becomes evident some

15 It should be noted that Coates and Levinas use the concept of double or alter ego

in a different way. Whereas Levinas considers the alter ego as the negative result of the reduction of the other to a mirror-image of the self, Coates focuses more on the subversive characteristics of the double – the unintended half-way result of the self’s appropriating gestures – as it is capable of destabilising the self.


pages later, when Freddie confesses, “I have always been prone to accidie” (7-10). Moreover, it is Daphne, not Freddie, who has their son medically tested, as she is worried about his odd behaviour. And when she explains the results of these tests to her husband, the latter remarks “I was only half listening” (147). On other occasions, Freddie speaks in generalising tones about his wife and himself, assuming that his wife is very much like himself: “There was a reticence, a tactfulness, which from the first we had silently agreed to preserve” (9). How wrong these assumptions really are, becomes evident when, on a prison visit, Daphne suddenly bursts out: “You knew nothing about us, nothing!” Freddie then renders the scene as follows:

She went back over the years. What I had done, and not done. How little I knew, how little I understood. I sat and gazed at her, aghast, my mouth open. I could not speak. How was it possible, that I could have been so wrong about her, all this time? How could I not have seen that behind her reticence there was all this passion, all this pain. (213-16)

Freddie’s extreme self-centredness is clearly to blame for his blindness. Instead of wanting to know Daphne as another person, he has simply projected his own thoughts and feelings onto her, even blaming her for his own mistakes and failures. Equally guilty, however, is Freddie’s powerful imagination, which leads him to construct a fantasy world that differs in important respects from ordinary reality. By substituting Daphne with a familiar portrait he has imagined for her, Freddie effectively creates her as a double to himself.

If in The Book of Evidence Freddie more or less adhered to the traditional form of a retrospective first-person narrative with focalisation through the protagonist, in Ghosts Freddie assumes the characteristics of the omniscient narrator. Even while being a character in the story of Ghosts, Freddie displays a strange insight in other characters’ feelings, thoughts, unconscious desires and memories. As a true authorial narrator, he comments on their limited knowledge, predicts the future, and draws general conclusions. In this way, he transgresses the common narratological “law” which limits a bird’s eye view to external focalisa-tion. As Rimmon Keenan succinctly puts it, “a panoramic or simultaneous view is impossible when focalization is attached to a character or to an unpersonified position internal to the story” or, conversely, “the knowledge of an internal focalizer is restricted by definition: being part of


the represented world, he cannot know everything about it”.16 This is of course in stark contrast with Freddie’s attitude. While acting as one of the characters, he at the same time styles himself as “Little god”, giving life to “[his] foundered creatures” and creating them according to his own likeness (4-5). As a narrator, Freddie is all-seeing, all-knowing, and powerfully creative:

I am the pretext of things, though I sport no thick gold wing or pale halo. Without me, there would be no moment, no separable event, only the brute, blind drift of things. (40)

Unlike the standard nineteenth-century novelist, however, Freddie also comments on the processes of creating and imagining, thereby implicitly undermining the truth-value of his narrative again. After describing how his characters suddenly and rather unaccountably experienced a moment of happy harmony, for instance, he ironically remarks, “I must be in a mellow mood today” (7). And about his first visit of Mrs Vanden, Freddie reflects: “I peered greedily through the open doorway: that’s me always, hungering after other worlds, the drabber and more desolate the better, God knows why: so that I can fill them up, I suppose, with my imaginings.” While drinking tea on the same occasion, he spins a long yarn about Eastern tea-pickers and concludes, “Lives, other lives! a myriad of them, distilled into this thimbleful of perfumed pleasure” (75-79).

Apart from showing what Freddie is capable of (and what Nussbaum thinks we should do), Freddie’s unusual narrative mode in Ghosts as well as his more explicit remarks on the imagination, highlight the creative process inherent in all narrative fiction. After all, the stipulation that a first-person narrator should narrate from a limited point of view could be seen as a mere realist convention, intended to make the reader believe that “it really happened”. The traditional first-person narrator thereby hides his own creativity behind a realist facade. In Ghosts, on the contrary, this facade is broken down and the narrator is revealed in his true occupation: inventing characters, constructing plots, conferring meaning and creating doubles.

16 Schlomith Rimmon Kenan, Narrative Fiction: Contemporary Poetics, London,

1983, 77-79.


The most obvious example of projection in the text is Freddie’s invention of the painter, Vaublin.17 Freddie has taken over the task of writing Vaublin’s biography from Professor Kreutznaer and throughout Ghosts he gives some telling illustrations of his work. He pictures Vaublin as a “man on the run”, “a self-made man”, a “painter who is always outside his subjects” and “is the master of darkness, as others are of light” (35). Freddie might just as well be talking about himself. Freddie even creates a double for Vaublin, whom he has record in his diaries: “I seem to hear a mocking laughter ... and someone is always standing in the corner behind me, yet when I turn there is no one there.” When Freddie goes on to suggest that Vaublin “wants to confess something but cannot, something about a crime long ago; something about a woman”, it has become all too blatantly obvious: the biographer has styled his subject as another of his Doppelgänger (128). Freddie’s comment at the end of his narrative, “my writing is almost done: Vaublin shall live!”, is therefore highly ironic, since it is Freddie who has come to live once more (245).

That Vaublin is by far not the only Doppelgänger Freddie-the-writer creates becomes clear when we consider the descriptions of the other castaways in Part I of Ghosts. However successful the portrayal of these characters as different personalities, they do share characteristics, thoughts and experiences to an uncommonly large degree. To give some examples, Freddie’s desire “to be elsewhere” is repeated by most other characters in the novel and his rosy reflections on childhood are also echoed in similar memories of the other castaways. Like Freddie moreover, Alice and Licht feel they are being laughed at by “figures lurking unseen all around her” or by “the world” at large. Freddie’s uncanny feeling of “having been here before” also reverberates throughout the novel. Flora tells everyone “she felt strange”, “so strange”, and Felix responds impatiently: “Yes, yes … everyone feels they have been here before.” About Kreutznaer and Sophie we read, “both are thinking how strange it is to be here and at the same time to be conscious of it, seeing themselves somehow reflected in each other”. Licht asks Alice, “do you ever think … that you are not here?”, Croke feels “odd”, Sophie hardly recognises herself and Flora feels

17 About the name of this painter who is an alter ego of Watteau, Freddie remarks, “Even his name is uncertain: Faublin, Vanhoblin, Van Hobbellijn? Take your pick” (35). These names, which recur in Athena, are all near-anagrams of John Banville. It is clearly one of the many ways the author of the art trilogy creates doubles of himself in his narratives. The result is a whole line of created and creating doubles: Banville-Freddie-Felix-Vaublin-Vaublin’s double.


“detached from things”. Freddie’s love for Flora is also projected on the other characters. Felix is the “prowler” lusting after “the girl”, while Sophie confesses that she is jealous of Felix on precisely that account. Licht and Croke have clearly fallen for the girl as well and the narrator even notes about Alice, “she is in love with Flora”. Many more examples could be given, but it may be clear that all of the characters experience and express precisely those feelings the reader had come to know as distinctive of Freddie himself, which further confirms the impression that Freddie is only creating Doppelgänger to himself. Freddie imagines a life and personality for “his creatures” clearly based on his own image, thereby reducing the alterity of the others to his own categories. In this way, Ghosts finally makes explicit a process already anticipated in other novels, witness the reductive misreading of the Lawless family in The Newton Letter, Gabriel Swan’s authoritative representation of his mother and Freddie’s creation of doubles in the figures of Daphne, the Dutch woman and Josie Bell in The Book of Evidence. Given the pervasive character of this aspect of representation, therefore, a closer investigation of the motives behind this generation of alter egos seems required.

Firstly, this process can be related to the besetting solipsism and self-centredness of the narrator. Freddie is not really interested in other people, however much he may want to be part of them, as he himself admits in relation to Mrs Vanden: I was “incurious as to the nature of her inner life, her thoughts, her opinions, if she had any” (79). Secondly, these projections reflect Freddie’s desire to control his creatures and to submit them to his own desires and purposes. His creation of so many Doppelgänger is, as Coates puts it, “a fearful authorial manoeuvre intended to reduce the dangers of otherness” (Double, 2). It is both another by-product of the fear of alterity, physicality and finitude haunting all of Banville’s protagonists, and a version of the archetypal function of any double as a protection from death. In more general terms, further, Freddie’s attitude simply highlights what every author does when telling a story: inventing characters and styling them to his or her own likeness. In fact, his creation of Doppelgänger also neatly characterises our ordinary way of dealing with people, characters or texts. As Attridge has convincingly shown, what is other is inevitably drawn within the realm of the same. Yet, it is our business to attend to the limits this process reaches in the radical alterity of the other. If in the everyday encounter, as Freddie also experienced, these limits become evident when a person turns out to be different from what one expected, in the relation between author and


double, this alterity is less easy to discern. Still one could argue that as soon as the writing is finished, the double becomes “other” again, leading a life of its own, separate from the creator. For the writer this entails a “letting go”, as Freddie came to realise at the end of Athena. For the reader, this means being sensitive to the alterity, the unexpected autonomy the characters assume vis-à-vis the intentionality of their creator.

The quest for a stable self As the foregoing investigation into the different modes of doubling in the art trilogy has made abundantly clear, identity is not a stable category in the case of Frederick Montgomery. Throughout his narratives, Freddie presents himself as split between reality and fantasy, body and mind, subject and object, inner and outer, superior and inferior, true and false, etc. Yet, his lack of a strong and unified identity not only infuses his self-representations, but also his representations of other people. Bunter has already been read as the result of Freddie’s exteriorised rejection of an unwelcome part of himself; and also the many other Doppelgänger created in The Book of Evidence and Ghosts can be considered as part of Freddie’s attempt to strengthen his self or stabilise his identity. Yet, the paradoxical nature of the double backfires these intentions: instead of a defence, the double becomes a harbinger of death; instead of solidifying identity, it only further destabilises and alienates the self. Since the resulting dualities neither abate nor solve Freddie’s yearning for a strong identity, the protagonist of the art trilogy continuously devises new ways to solve this dilemma. As a result, Freddie’s actions throughout the three novels are to a large extent inspired by his desire for presence, unity and solidity. Before analysing the different modes of realising this desire throughout the art trilogy, the precise terms in which Freddie’s lack of identity is registered need to be looked at in closer detail.

Apart from the frequent references to being split or “bifurcate”, Freddie mostly renders his annoying duality as a lack of presence, solidity or “thereness”. The metaphor in which these feelings are frequently expressed is not surprisingly, that of the ghost or phantom. Already in The Book of Evidence, he refers to himself as “something without weight, without moorings, a floating phantom” or “a kind of ghost, hardly there at all, a memory, a shadow of some more solid version of myself living, oh, living marvellously, elsewhere” (16, 144). In Ghosts these shadowy feelings are even more numerous and Freddie tries to clarify his feeling of


being “like something suspended in empty air, weightless, transparent” by appealing to phantoms: “This is how I imagine ghosts existing, poor, pale wraiths pegged out to shiver in the wind of the world like so much insubstantial laundry, yearning towards us, the heedless ones, as we walk blithely through them” (37). Insubstantiality, weightlessness, yearning; lack of reality, solidity, or being: these terms eminently capture Freddie’s sad plight. His ideal form of existence, on the other hand, invariably contains words such as presence, being, thereness, weight, and solidity:

When I was young, I saw myself as a masterbuilder who would one day assemble a marvellous edifice around myself, a kind of grand pavilion, airy and light, which would contain me utterly and wherein I would be free. Look, they would say, distinguishing this eminence from afar, look how sound it is, how solid: it’s him all right, yes, no doubt about it, the man himself. (Book, 16)

In Ghosts this ideal of solidity and presence is modified – probably in reaction to Freddie’s multiple doubles – into one of pure, simple being. Remembering a perfect childhood day, Freddie describes his happiness as a feeling of “pure existence, pure existence and nothing else” (202). And elsewhere he writes, “I was determined at least to try to make myself into a – what do you call it? – monomorph, a monad. And then to start again, empty” (26). Consequently, Freddie’s yearning for presence comes to border on a state of nothingness or non-being, which makes his ideal the seemingly paradoxical one of being “real and yet mere fancy” (Ghosts, 221).18 Freddie wants being and non-being to merge in his striving to be simple and single, “to be here and not here”, to achieve pure existence (Athena, 63).

In The Book of Evidence, as we have seen before, Freddie’s experience of decomposition reaches its highest point in the split between Gentleman-ego and Bunter-id. Although Bunter can be considered as Freddie’s split-off and exteriorised bad self, he is also often styled as Freddie’s true self. Following this inside-outside logic, Freddie conceives of two ways to achieve unity in The Book of Evidence, namely by eliminating either of the binaries. Freddie characterises the first solution

18 Imhof has read Freddie’s yearning for nothingness and non-being in Ghosts as but a stage in Freddie’s development: “[Freddie] starts out wishing not to be, but he finds that he can redeem himself only by achieving a state of being” (Introduction, 209). However, the text itself does not support such a development and given the proximity of his yearnings for being and non-being, it seems better to consider them as part of the same ideal of a pure and singular being.


with the ominous phrase: “To do the worst, the very worst thing, that’s the way to be free.” Freddie refers here to the murder with which, so he argues,

I had struck a blow for the inner man, that guffawing, fat foulmouth who had been telling me all along I was living a lie. And he had burst out at last, it was he, the ogre, who was pounding along in this lemon-coloured light, with blood on his pelt, and me slung helpless over his back.

If all his life he has “been doing one thing and thinking another”, now, he exults, “I would never again need to pretend to myself to be what I was not” (124-25). Through his terrible deed, Freddie has effectively eliminated his ostensibly false gentleman-self, thereby achieving the longed-for freedom of a pure, if horrid, identity. Since this identity still needs to be recognised by others, Freddie impatiently awaits his capture:

And when everything was gone, every shred of dignity and pretence, what freedom there would be, what lightness! No, what am I saying, not lightness, but its opposite: weight, gravity, the sense at last of being firmly grounded. Then finally, I would be me, no longer that poor impersonation of myself I had been doing all my life. I would be real, I would be of all things, human. (162)

If capture and imprisonment bring about Freddie’s “apotheosis”, the euphoria does not last long and, finally alone in his cell, Freddie sighs, “I was no longer myself. I can’t explain it, but it’s true. I was no longer myself” (202-203). Once his false self has been discarded, in other words, it becomes an essential part of himself and Freddie feels once more bereft, untrue and alienated. Moreover, in the stench and dirt of prison, Freddie’s gentleman-self soon reasserts itself and Freddie tries to distinguish himself from the other inmates through language, hygiene and manners.

Still, all is not lost. For in Part II of The Book of Evidence, Freddie devises another strategy to free himself of his haunting doubleness. If freeing the real self has not been effective (and in any case disastrous), it remains for him to further cultivate the mask. If he could only “play [his] part sufficiently well, with enough conviction”, Freddie ponders, he could “take [his] place among the others, the naturals, those people on the bus and all the rest of them” (133). By strengthening his outer self, Freddie feels, he will ultimately annihilate the inner man, Bunter. Following a theory that will be repeated in Ghosts and The Untouchable, Freddie believes that by playing his role convincingly enough, he will fully


become what he is playing: “To act is to be, to rehearse is to become” (Ghosts, 199). Paradoxically, Freddie’s yearning for an authentic and unified identity induces him to emphasise acting and pretence. Yet, this very paradox and the distorted hierarchy of real self and mask preclude this solution. After all, Bunter and gentleman are both an essential part of Freddie. Strengthening one self at the expense of the other will therefore inevitably increase rather than resolve any feelings of duality or lack. If Freddie’s first solution can be read as a liberation of the body, his second one amounts to a domination of the intellect, social codes and morality. Given the necessity of both aspects for the human being, frequently demonstrated in the science tetralogy, Freddie’s stratagems predictably rebound and the tension between mind and body is as acute as ever.

Nevertheless, at the end of The Book of Evidence Freddie is surprisingly positive and hopeful. He explains his resolve to bring the woman “back to life” and remarks,

I am puzzled, and not a little fearful, and yet there is something stirring in me, and I am strangely excited. I seem to have taken on a new weight and density. I feel gay and at the same time wonderfully serious. I am big with possibilities. I am living for two. (216)

Paradoxically, Freddie’s only feeling of “weight” and “density” is here linked to being double, or “living for two”. While he previously associated his duality with ghostlike unreality, it is here precisely this doubleness that gives him a new sense of being and belonging. Though still rather vague at this moment, this passage suggests an alternative direction for Freddie’s search for identity, since it hints at the awareness that a sense of self is intimately connected with the presence of the other. As Levinas has argued, only in the encounter with the radically other can the self come into existence. Only the other can give me an identity, precisely by laying an ethical claim on me as other. Additionally, as Freddie’s remarks suggest, achieving an identity requires accepting the otherness within the self as well. Rather than attempting to destroy one’s alter egos, this entails coming to terms with all these different masks or selves. That these lofty notions are not so easily achieved, however, will become evident from Freddie’s repeated attempts in the art trilogy to link his own fate to that of others.


Seeing, knowing, being Given the dubious role of the “Portrait of a Woman with Gloves” as the instigator of Freddie’s crime in The Book of Evidence, it is of crucial importance to account for the extraordinary attraction the painting exerts on Freddie. Judging from the different descriptions Freddie gives of woman in the painting, what captivates him are “the fortitude and pathos of her presence” (Book, 79); the fact that “she has presence, she is unignorably there, more real than the majority of her sisters out here in what we call real life” (Ghosts, 84). What Freddie admires in the woman is precisely what he misses in himself. Similarly, Flora and A. arouse Freddie’s interest precisely on account of their solidity and presence. In all three instances, moreover, Freddie expresses the desire to study and scrutinise the woman, to get to know her intimately, while being studied and known in return. For if Freddie feels he is “being scrutinised” by the painted woman, he at the same time reads her as demanding “some tremendous feat of scrutiny and attention” (79, 105). In Ghosts, Freddie retrospectively explains his attraction to the portrait as “a sort of lust for knowledge, the passionate desire to delve my way into womanhood and taste the very temper of its being” (69). And in Athena this lust is further explained as a desire for possession, for “having” A. (97). From seeing, through knowing and possessing, Freddie’s desires further progress to the ominous “living and “making live”, which have been shown to be crucial aspects of the relation between self and other in the art trilogy. The woman in the portrait seems to ask Freddie “to let her live”; in Ghosts he talks about “the hunger only to have her live and to live in her” (70); and in Athena he formulates it even more explicitly: “Come live in me, I had said, and be my love. Intending of course, whether I know it or not, that I in turn would live in her” (223).

A crucial aspect of the relationship Freddie hopes to establish between himself and the Dutch woman, Flora and A., respectively, is reciprocity. He not only wants to see, know and make live, but wants to be seen, be known and, most importantly, be made to live truly and strongly in return. About the painted woman, he writes “It is being that he has encountered here, the thing itself, the pure unmediated essence, in which, he thinks, he will at last find himself and his true home, his place in the world” (Ghosts, 85). In the epiphanic moment in Ghosts, this desire seems briefly realised when Flora suddenly starts to speak and “made he things around her be there too”, allowing Freddie to ask hopefully, “and I, was I there amongst


them, at last?” (147). And in Athena, Freddie’s wishes have come true in this moment of pure bliss:

I held her to me, this sudden familiar stranger, and felt her heart beating and listened to the rustle of my breathing and thought I had come at last to my true place, the place where, still and at the same time profoundly stirred, feverish yet preternaturally calm, I would at last be who I was. (Athena, 118)

Although the mode is still hypothetical, Freddie’s yearning for identity seems finally fulfilled. In and through his relation to another person, he achieves a sense of being known, of having found “his true home, his place in the world” (Ghosts, 86). Still, as we have seen, these moments of bliss turn out to be but short-lived, since they are compromised by the reductive and solipsistic representations he offers of the others in question. Instead of really getting to know the women as singular beings, he construes them as so many mirror images of himself. This is in fact prefigured by Freddie’s twisted version of a quotation from Marlowe in Athena: instead of the famous phrase “Come live with me and be my Love”, Freddie writes, “Come live in me and be my love” (223). Following the familiar processes of doubling, he makes the woman a part of himself, achieving only an illusory sense of wholeness and presence. This can further be clarified by means of Lacan’s analysis of identificatory processes in what he calls, “le stade du mirroir”. For Lacan it is part of the child’s development to identify with its own specular image so as to achieve a brief but satisfying sense of wholeness. This unity is founded on an illusion of identity between self and other, which will be exposed as false in a later, symbolic, stage of development. In the art trilogy, the process through which Freddie achieves a sense of being is highly similar. He confers on the women in question such desirable characteristics as wholeness and presence, which he then, in an inverse mode of identifica-tion, brings on himself again by constituting these women as mirror images, or as doubles to himself.

The sense identity briefly experienced in Ghosts and Athena turns out to be illusory. In Athena consequently, Freddie realises that he can only bring A. to life, by letting her go, by losing her as part of himself. Paradoxically however, this loss of A. brings about a greater sense of self, as when Freddie claims after A.’s departure that he has never felt “so vividly alive, so quick with the sense of things, so exposed in the midst of the world’s seething particles” or sees himself finally as “a singular figure,


a man heroically alone” (3, 226). It is, Athena suggests, in the process of letting go, rather than in that of possessing, that the clue to one’s selfhood lies. Or, to put it in the terminology of the double, identity is reached not when the other is constituted as the self, but when the self is recognised as the other. An acceptance of alterity is in other words a crucial component of the alternative self-representation which Freddie envisages. Just as in the scientist’s acknowledgement of the everyday, or Freddie Montgom-ery’s awareness of the other as other, it is here only in the acceptance of alterity – of the other as an inevitable part of the self – that the key to selfhood lies. At stake is, once more, the very difficult but equally necessary recognition of mortality as an essential aspect of the human condition.

Chapter Eight Masks and Mirrors: Autobiography in The Untouchable

No one can wear a mask for very long. Seneca

If Freddie’s autoscopic self-representations and his representations of others show clear traces of his split identity, this fragmentation is even further magnified in that sustained self-representation which is his first-person narrative. Already in Mefisto we saw how the narrative mode provides an excellent means for the discovery or construction of meaning concerning one’s personal existence. In a similar way, Freddie’s “testimony” in The Book of Evidence or his “letter” in Athena bear witness to his earnest efforts to get a grasp on himself and his misdeeds. These extended self-representations offer explanations and withdraw them again, trace patterns and evolutions, gather some memories and repress others, in short, they frame Freddie’s life into a story with beginning, middle and end. This idea of a coherent life-story is foregrounded to an even greater extent in The Untouchable, which presents the life of Victor Maskell, as told by himself. Maskell self-consciously styles his narrative as a “confession”, a “memoir” or an “autobiography”, thereby invoking, however ironically, the genre of autobiography and its attendant stereotypes. In addition, the author himself plays with the complex relation between fact and fiction as part of the biographical genre, since The Untouchable is the fictionalised life-story of Anthony Blunt – English gentleman, art historian and Russian spy. All this makes The Untouchable an ideal case study for the narrative dimension of self-representation in Banville’s oeuvre, in close connection to the genres of biography and autobiography alike.

Masks Having started rather hesitantly to write his “last testament”, Victor Maskell muses on his motives for doing so:

Am I, like Querrell, out to settle old scores? Or is it perhaps my intention to justify my deeds, to offer extenuation? I hope not. On the


other hand, neither do I want to fashion for myself yet another burnished mask …. Having pondered for a moment, I realise that the metaphor is obvious: attribution, verification, restoration. I shall strip away layer after layer of grime – the toffee-coloured varnish and caked soot left by a lifetime of dissembling – until I come to the very thing itself and know it for what it is. My soul. My self.1

With a metaphor appropriate for an art historian, Maskell describes the purpose of his autobiographic narrative as one of “self-restoration”. Successive layers of dirt and fake paintings will be removed in order to uncover the one and only true painting: his authentic self. Or, with an equally appropriate metaphor of play-acting: the dissembling masks, which Maskell has been wearing for years will be discarded so as to reveal his real face. Not without irony, Maskell’s narrative intentions refer to the unwritten conditions of the autobiographical mode which stipulate, firstly, that the author should not merely reproduce his or her public image, but invite the reader behind this façade for a glimpse at the real person crouching behind. Consider for instance Rousseau’s famous remark at the beginning of his Confessions, “J’ai dévoilé mon intérieur”.2 A second unwritten law concerns the truth-value of the autobiography. If the writer promises to reveal his or her inner self, it follows that his account is supposed to faithfully mirror reality. Or, as one of the early theorists of the autobiography puts it,

In opposition to all forms of fiction, biography and autobiography are referential texts: exactly like historic or scientific discourse, they claim to convey information about a “reality” which is external to the text and hence to be subject to the test of verification.3

These two principles of the autobiography have not remained unchallenged in modern literature and criticism. In the fictional autobio-graphies of Joyce and Proust, for instance, the illusion of a true mirroring of reality in art is abandoned, even though both writers do retain the conviction that the self has a coherent biography, which can be uncovered and retold. Twentieth-century writers and critics further dismantled this illusion of wholeness and identity, by emphasising either the constructed nature or the inherent division of the autobiographical self. One of the

1 John Banville, The Untouchable, London, 1997, 7. 2 Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Les Confessions, Paris, 1973, 34. 3 Philippe Lejeune, “The Autobiographical Contract”, in French Literary Theory

Today, ed. Tzvetan Todorov, Cambridge, 1982, 211.

Chapter Eight: Masks and Mirrors 203

interesting poststructuralist analyses of the genre can be found in an article by Paul de Man, “Autobiography as De-Facement”. Because de Man’s analysis revisits the two traditional aspects of the autobiography, authenticity and referentiality, and because its terminology shows a surprising convergence with Maskell’s metaphoric diction in The Untouchable, his approach will provide the guiding thread of my reading in what follows.

Explicitly rejecting any attempt to define autobiography as a distinct genre, de Man offers an alternative approach in terms of the tropological idiosyncrasy of the confessional mode. He argues convincingly that far from faithfully mirroring reality, “the autobiographical project produces and determines life”.4 The referential moment is produced by the linguistic and tropological structure of the text rather than the other way round. De Man further develops this claim through a reading of Wordsworth’s “Essays upon Epitaphs”, which he recognises as governed by the trope of prosopopeia. This metaphorical structure, the defining trait of the autobiographical mode, he defines as,

the fiction of an apostrophe to an absent, deceased, or voiceless entity, which posits the possibility of the latter’s reply and confers upon it the power of speech. Voice assumes mouth, eye, and finally face, a chain that is manifest in the etymology of the trope’s name, prosopon poien, to confer a mask or a face (prosopon). Prosopopeia is the trope of autobiography, by which one’s name … is made as intelligible and memorable as a face. Our topic deals with the giving and taking of faces, with face and deface, figure, figuration and disfiguration. (75-76)

Since autobiographical discourse confers “a mask or a face” to an otherwise empty name, de Man calls it “a discourse of self-restoration”, and more precisely, “self-restoration in the face of death” (74). The interpretation of autobiography as a defence against death further links this genre to the creation of Doppelgänger, discussed in Chapter 7, since the autobiographical self creates an alter ego in his narration. The inherent instability of any doubling processes might thus lead us to suspect that the autobiographical discourse is not as straightforward as it seems.

De Man’s metaphors of “face”, “mask”, “figuration” and “restoration” are highly reminiscent of Maskell’s characterisation of his autobiographi-

4 Paul de Man, “Autobiography as De-Facement”, in The Rhetoric of Romanticism,

New York, 1984, 69.


cal project in terms of “attribution, verification, restoration”. Yet, this similarity masks an underlying difference. For de Man, the autobiographical narrative fashions a speaking mask for the voiceless I of the narrator, whereas for Maskell this mask making is precisely what the writing of an autobiography should cure him from. Similarly, if de Man defines self-restoration as assuming a mask in the face of death, Maskell believes that self-restoration entails stripping oneself of every possible mask. After all, putting on masks is what Maskell has been doing all his life. The whole of Maskell’s narrative is indeed an account of how he came to assume different masks in order to veil what he saw as his lack of authenticity. The origin of this lack is to be found, Maskell’s narrative implies, in his Northern Irish background. His father was a Protestant minister in a predominantly Catholic town; and his forefathers readily betrayed their creed and Irish heritage in exchange for power and privileges. In short, a feeling of alienation and inauthenticity characterises Maskell from the start and further shapes the rest of his life into a constant search for a solid identity. Just like Freddie Montgomery, Maskell never looks for identity within himself but tries to copy the masks or faces of people around him. And whether these masks are those of English gentleman or Russian spy, promiscuous homosexual or devoted father, stoic or Romantic, he plays them all with equal conviction. Yet, in several stray comments Maskell also undermines the validity of these identities, by making explicit the dubious motives that lie behind them. About the mask of patriotism, fashioned for the sake of the endless discussions of the Thirties, he writes: “it was all no more than a striking of attitudes to make ourselves more serious, more weighty, more authentic” (34). Similarly, his role as master-spy for both the MI5 and the Soviet Republic is recognised as only “a substitute for some more simple, more authentic form of living that was beyond me” (46).

The endeavour to cure one’s lack of “thereness”, identity or strength by taking on masks is of course a familiar one in Banville’s fiction. If only he had acted more strongly, Freddie argues in The Book of Evidence, he could have ultimately become one with his mask, which would cancel his preternatural decomposition. And in Ghosts, he calls upon Nietzsche to back up his acting theory with a quote subsequently repeated in The Untouchable in the form of a question: “Must not anyone who wants to move the crowd be an actor who impersonates himself?” In order to have success, Maskell boasts, acting and being must in some way merge – “I am a great actor, that is the reason of my success” – and he further


supports his conviction by appealing to the theories of Blaise Pascal and Denis Diderot (7). Maskell explains Diderot’s moral theory as follows:

Diderot said that what we do is, we erect a statue in our own image inside ourselves – idealised, you know, but still recognisable – and then spend our lives engaged in the effort to make ourselves into its likeness. (86)

This is exactly what Maskell is doing: he creates a beautiful mask or an ideal image of himself, and then tries to convincingly live up to it. Yet, the problem is that Maskell deems one role not sufficiently strengthening, which prompts him to embody an endless proliferation of equally convincing, but mutually exclusive statues.

Maskell seems to have mastered the difficult crux of convincingly playing a belief or a role, following the “Pascalian Wager”. This wager stipulates that since belief in God is the best option – if you believe and God turns out not to exist, you merely lose out on truth; but if you don’t believe while God does exist, you lose out on everlasting life – you can acquire a belief by going through all the outward motions of the religion, acting as if you believed. And at the end of this process, Pascal maintained, you will find yourself a believer. Similar to Diderot’s theory, this wager eminently captures Maskell’s yearning for an identity and his acceptance of anything that will provide it. While he did not initially subscribe to the tenets of Marxism, he played the role of a Marxist – even going so far as to become a spy – and at the end, he convinced others and himself that he did believe. Still, looking back on his life, Maskell is no longer so sure:

But what comfort does belief offer if it contains within it its own antithesis, the glistening drop of poison at the heart? Is the Pascalian wager sufficient to sustain a life, a real life, in the real world? (104)

Similarly, doubt is slowly raised about the ultimate success of his role-playing quest for authenticity. During the war, when his profusion of selves has reached a climax, Maskell comments:

My life had become a kind of hectic play-acting in which I took all the parts. It might have been more tolerable had I been allowed to see my predicament in a tragic, or at least a serious, light, if I could have been Hamlet, driven by torn loyalties to tricks and disguises and feigned madness; but no, I was more like one of the clowns, scampering in and out of the wings and desperately doing quick-changes, putting on one mask only to whip it off immediately and replace it with another, while


all the time, out of the footlights, the phantom audience of my worst imaginings hugged itself in ghastly glee. (315)

Instead of the longed for weight and seriousness, his masks only have a comic effect and instead of providing him with a singular identity, they only bring further confusion and dissent. This is the paradox of Maskell’s predicament: experiencing a lack of authenticity and seriousness, Maskell wants to veil this by putting on masks, which in themselves are responsible for the aggravation of the lack they sought to remedy. All this leads to the predictable result that any shred of originality or authenticity disappears even further, or as Maskell puts it, “Am I real at all? Or have I double dealt for so long that my true self has been forfeit?” (317). Consequently, his attitude becomes even more deceitful and distant, causing his wife to remark wryly, “I never seem to see you anymore, just your statue” (181). Her perceptive comment also hints at Maskell’s failure to consider the role of the other in his self-realisation, an oversight Freddie Montgomery was also guilty of. After all, one’s identity is in fact always constructed and conveyed by others and hence ultimately beyond one’s control. If Maskell’s earnest attempts at fashioning himself a fixed identity fail to be recognised by Vivienne as authentic, the reason lies perhaps precisely in his earnest trying. For by wanting to control his identity, he distances himself from others, thereby depriving himself of the very means of this identity. Maskell’s attitude of distance – captured in his epithet, the untouchable – robs him of the identity he sought to procure with it. The autobiographical narrative in which Maskell now engages, threatens to perpetuate these predicaments. Firstly, his narrative is again an attempt to control his identity, to uniquely determine the image to be carried to posterity. Thereby he fails to recognise that his identity is in the end only constituted by the reader. Secondly, even if Maskell aims to restore his authentic self in his autobiographic narrative, the means for doing so are, as de Man has argued, precisely the mask-making tropological antics he sought to combat.

In “Autobiography as De-Facement” de Man also recognises the risk inherent in the trope of prosopopeia as the possibility of losing all vitality and turning into a hollow mask or a cold statue. Just like Diderot, de Man refers to the lifeless marble of a stone statue, when he quotes the following lines from a poem by Milton: “Then thou our fancy of itself bereaving/Dost make us marble with too much conceiving.” De Man paraphrases these lines as follows, “our imaginations are rapt ‘out of ourselves’ leaving behind our soulless bodies like statues” (78). “By


making the death [sic] speak”, de Man argues, “the symmetrical structure of the trope implies that the living are struck dumb, frozen in their own death”. Therefore, the dangers of the prosopopeia as the trope of autobiography entail that by conveying a mask or applying a face to the narratological I, the very life of this I, its authenticity and immediacy, may be struck dumb. The paradoxical predicament of prosopopeia reads:

As soon as we understand the rhetorical function of prosopopeia as positing voice or face by means of language, we also understand that what we are deprived of is not life but the shape and sense of a world accessible only in the privative way of understanding. (81)

The predicament of autobiography is that in conferring a mask or a face to the empty and dead name it deprives that name of authenticity, immediacy and liveliness, the lack of which it sought to remedy. In the words of de Man:

The restoration of mortality by autobiography (the prosopopeia of the voice and the name) deprives and disfigures to the precise extent that it restores. Autobiography veils a defacement of the mind of which it is itself the cause. (81)

We have seen how this predicament is doubly enacted in The Untouchable. In the context of Maskell’s autobiographical narrative, a desire for authenticity and real life lead him to take on masks which destroy this life in an attempt to save it. And this predicament will inevitably repeat itself on the level of the autobiographical narrative, as the paradoxical result of Maskell’s desire for self-restoration. It should perhaps be noted that Maskell himself is aware of the illusory nature of this desire, witness the remark between brackets with which he immediately mocks his purpose of finding his real self while escaping from masks: “When I laugh out loud like this the room seems to start back in surprise and dismay, with hand to lip. I have lived decorously here, I must not now turn into a shrieking hysteric” (7). Still, Maskell holds on to his self-appointed quest in defiance of his scepticism as is evident in reflection upon the obvious question, “why did you do it?”:

I am the answer to her question, the totality of what I am; nothing less will suffice. In the public mind, for the brief period it will entertain, and be entertained by, the thought of me, I am a figure with a single salient feature. Even for those who thought they knew me intimately, everything else I have done or not done has faded into insignificance before the fact of my so-called treachery. While in reality all that I am


is of a piece: all of a piece, and yet broken up into a myriad selves. Does that make sense? (34)

In this passage, Maskell still upholds to some extent his nostalgic longing for a true and unified self. Yet, he no longer wants to achieve this by stripping himself of all possible masks, which the prosopopeian logic of the autobiography makes impossible anyway. Instead, Maskell suggests that his self is the total combination of all these masks. Perhaps, this is Maskell’s way out of the prosopopeian predicament: to present an endless variety of masks and faces, which in their never-to-be-contained totality make up his infinitely unstable identity. Maskell’s sought after “real self” is then but the totality of his different selves, the selves he has gained and the selves he has lost. This does not mean, however, that his autobiographical narrative has finally succeeded in presenting his real self, since this totality can never be properly presented. Still, at the end of his narrative, Maskell is surprisingly resigned, to the point of realising an “acceptance of self”, which J.M. Coetzee claims is the final stage of any confession.5 Maskell realises that he has not succeeded in finding a single true self and that his memoir is a “fictional memoir” at best (405). Yet, he renounces his claim over it and leaves it to Miss Vandeleur, the ultimate reader of The Untouchable, to “decide how to best dispose of it” (405). In other words, having accepted alterity as part of himself, he renounces his self to that arch-Other of any autobiographical narrative: the reader. In the end, Maskell’s identity is for the reader to decide in her or his role as referee in the face of the undecideable.

Mirrors Questioned on the identity of Victor Maskell, the reader will probably not fail to judge this identity against the life of Anthony Blunt, one of the famous Cambridge Spies. In spite of the obvious fictionality of the work, the reader makes the transition to the referential level of the autobiography, which is, in the case of The Untouchable, also the biographical level of John Banville and Anthony Blunt. This move towards reality is in fact invited by the list of historical and biographical

5 In “Confession and Double Thoughts: Tolstoy, Rousseau, Dostoevsky”, J.M.

Coetzee discusses the possible ways of ending confession in a secular context. The end-point of a confession, he argues, does not reside in truth, or in the approval of the reader, but in the confessant’s own acceptance of and responsibility for his or her confession.


works on Blunt, which Banville appends at the end of the novel.6 Judging Maskell against Blunt, which I propose to do in what follows, therefore equally entails judging Banville’s biographical feat against the supposedly more truthful one of other biographers. Before doing so, however, it is worth looking at Banville’s own views on the pseudo-biographical project he returned to with The Untouchable. For several interviews readily reveal that his intentions are not those of the average biographer. To start with, far from simply mirroring the facts of the Blunt case, Banville wants to depict his version of a man like Blunt in his novel. In doing so, he has a clear corrective aim in mind:

In the things one reads about Blount [sic], he’s denigrated as cold, calculating, mendacious …. No matter what he does, they completely write him of as an evil character ... Even people who knew Blount said they thought he was cold, that he lacked passion. But nobody who wrote as he did about the paintings of Poussin could be without passion.7

If Banville intends to adjust the traditional picture of the inhuman and cold-blooded spy in his novel, he claims to do so not through the traditional “explanation of character”, but through an “illumination of character”. Banville, in the diction of The Book of Evidence, wants to bring a character to life. Or as he puts it elsewhere, “I want to talk about the absolute essence of existence. How it feels to live …. Art is the reflection that shows us what it means to live.”8 Whether and how Banville realises these aberrant biographical aims in The Untouchable will further be investigated in what follows.

Even if Banville wants to present an alternative version of Blunt, he does make sure that his real-life model can easily be recognised. Like Blunt, Maskell studies art history at Cambridge, becomes a member of the Communist Party and is asked to become a Russian spy. He finds a job as teacher, subsequently director, at the prestigious Courteauld Institute of Art, and is appointed Keeper of the King’s Pictures. During the war he

6 Of the books which Banville mentions in his acknowledgement, the following are relevant for this discussion: Barrie Penrose and Simon Freeman, Conspiracy of Silence, London, 1986; John Costello, Mask of Treachery, New York, 1988; Yuri Modin, My Five Cambridge Friends, London, 1994.

7 Ron Hogan, “John Banville”, http://www.beatrice.com/interviews/banville. 09/12/99.

8 Herman Stevens, “Het terloopse kwaad”, HP/De Tijd, 12 September 1997, 68-70 (my translation).


enlists for service at the MI5 and is in the position to do valuable work for the Russians. After the defection of other members of the spy ring, his identity becomes known to the secret services, but it is only in 1979 that the British Prime Minister publicly exposes him as a spy. Apart from these general facts, Banville also incorporates numerous anecdotes, characters and scenes from the historical works in his novel. In this way, he installs an unmistakable link between his novel and the historical biographies, which is subsequently problematised in three distinct ways. Firstly, as is to be expected in a work of fiction, Banville imaginatively enlarges many interesting scenes or striking characters by adding hilarious details or convincingly filling out the surroundings. John Costello’s Mask of Treachery for instance relates how Blunt, on a counter-intelligence mission in France during the war, discovered that his corporal had never eaten oysters. He promptly took the man to a restaurant to remedy this. Banville has Maskell perform the same noble if patronising gesture, but he amplifies the incident by including the French matron of the restaurant, the oysters and the rest of the menu in his descriptions. In short, the life and adventures of the fictional Blunt are told with a liveliness and imagination which the traditional biographies largely go without.

Far more important than these common fictional enlargements, secondly, are the actual deviations from the historical truth, which Banville has also abundantly wrought in his narrative. Unlike Blunt who belonged to the English gentry, first of all, Maskell is a Protestant Irishman who tries to style himself into an English gentleman – an attitude that makes him a perpetual outsider in both communities at once.9 Similarly, while Blunt was a confessed homosexual since his Cambridge days, Banville has Maskell marry and have children before he discovers his sexual inclination, which forces him to play a double role in his personal life as well. As far as ideology is concerned, to give another example, Maskell’s split personality is heightened by the mutually incompatible doctrines of Romanticism and Stoicism, which he defends

9 Banville in fact styled Maskell’s childhood on that of Blunt’s school friend, the poet

Louis MacNeice. Like MacNeice’s father, Maskell’s father is a Protestant rector and Home Ruler who marries a rich Quaker woman after his first wife dies. Maskell also has a mongoloid brother who is, perhaps ironically, called Freddie, which was the first name of MacNeice himself. Banville in fact takes over several anecdotes from Jon Stallworthy’s biography of MacNeice, such as the embarrassing scene in which MacNeice’s mother-in-law asks for a medical certificate to prove that his brother’s condition is not hereditary (Jon Stallworthy, Louis MacNeice, London, 1995).


with equal zeal. Unlike Blunt moreover, Maskell is by far not a faithful follower of Soviet doctrine, but something of an elitist Marxist, which makes him the odd-one-out in the Communist party as well. Banville’s largest change, finally, concerns his addition of the fictional arch traitor Nick Brevoort, Maskell’s friend and brother-in-law. At the end of his life therefore, Maskell discovers that he himself has been but a pawn in a larger network and that he has twice been betrayed by the only person he really loved. Hence, Maskell is given yet another role in The Untouchable, that of the traitor betrayed or the sadly manipulated master spy. Maskell himself aptly summarises his diverse identities:

By day I was husband and father, art historian, teacher, discreet and hard-working agent of the Department; then night fell, and Mr Hyde went out prowling, in mad excitement, with his dark desires and his country’s secrets clutched to his breast. (315-16)

In all, it has become clear that Banville rather drastically changes certain historical “facts” from the biographies in order to present his interpretation of the Blunt case to the reader. His Blunt is a tormented traitor who becomes entangled in a web of lies and masks and is ultimately slain by betrayal himself. In this way, Banville makes the familiar concerns of authenticity, betrayal and identity the key problems of the novel. By multiplying Maskell’s masks, Banville turns him into an archetypal figure who comically exposes the inherent instability of identity and selfhood in general.

In short, despite appearances, Banville’s Blunt is a far cry from the cold and ambitious traitor depicted in the existing biographies. And Banville further drives home this point by ironically re-writing certain passages from the existing biographies from a different perspective. In Mask of Treachery, the biography that goes furthest in promoting Blunt as a cruel traitor, John Costello describes a scene in which Blunt stands on Hampstead Heath looking down on the terrible scene of London during a German air raid. On the basis of the testimony of a policeman who claims to have been there with Blunt, Costello describes “the dome of the cathedral rising above a sea of spreading flames” and continues,

There was a terrible awesomeness to the devastation, but Blunt remained detached. It was as if he were in some Olympian gallery studying the details of one of the demonic Last Judgements painted by Hieronymus Bosch. (398)


In The Untouchable, Banville repeats this scene. Maskell comes from a visit to his wife in Oxford when “an eerily cheerful policeman” stops him on Hampstead Heath. He looks out over the “city submerged in a sea of flame” and remarks,

I should have been thinking of Bosch or Grünewald and Altdorfer of Regensburg, those great apocalyptics but really, I cannot remember anything in particular going through my mind except what might be the best route to take to Poland Street. (287)

With this ironic reference, Banville not only undermines the standard image of the insensitive master spy, he also questions the reliability of Costello’s witness, the “eerily cheerful policeman”. Moreover, his marked repetition of Costello’s reference to Bosch reveals it to be but a fictional detail invented by the biographer to underwrite his own subjective interpretation.

A similar intertextual short-circuit can be found in Maskell’s description of his “heroic” escape from France aboard an ammunition ship. Although several sources testify to Blunt’s courage at the time, John Costello interprets Blunt’s sangfroid in the light of his inhuman coldness:

There was something unnaturally calculated about Blunt’s glacial coolness under fire. His demeanour had more to do with cold-blooded intellect bent on testing itself to the limit than with bravery in the accepted sense .… Blunt’s intellectual iron-pumping seems to have been a psychological necessity to maintain his sense of superiority over ordinary mortals. (368)

But in The Untouchable this event is presented as the moment at which Maskell “took on fear”:

I hoped my terror was not visible. I smiled at him, and shrugged, trying to seem ironic and insouciant, as an officer should be, though for all the stiffness of my upper lip, I had to bite the lower one to keep it from trembling. (219-20)

Again, Banville’s rewriting offers an alternative perspective on the event, which is neither more nor less accurate than the one of Costello. Both versions are but psychological readings of an external event, and hence, inevitably determined by the interpretative framework that precedes it. In the following passage, finally, Banville even more explicitly denounces the image of the spy world as it is depicted in such historical works as Costello’s Mask of Treachery or Yuri Modin’s My Cambridge Friends:


All the commentators nowadays, all the wiseacres in books and in the newspapers underestimate the adventure-story element in the world of espionage. Because real secrets are betrayed, because torturers exist, because men die … they imagine that spies are somehow both irresponsible and inhumanly malign … when really what we most resembled were those brave but playful, always resourceful chaps in school stories .… That anyway is how we saw ourselves, though of course we would not have put it in those terms. (154)

Apart from providing us with an alternative picture of Blunt, Banville also undermines the image promoted in the biographies by pointing out the subjective and frequently unfounded character of their readings. Both Banville’s “fictional” and the biographies’ “historical” reading of the events are ultimately based on an often all too personal interpretation of an attitude, reaction or event. In addition, these interpretations are themselves clearly influenced by the public image of the spy as it is perpetuated in movies, novels and the media. An investigation of the referential dimension of The Untouchable easily demonstrates how biographies, fictionalised biographies and historical novels figure on a gradual scale of fact and fiction so that strict boundaries between any of these genres can no longer be upheld. If these alterations do not therefore make Banville’s picture of Blunt better or more accurate than those offered in the biographies; neither do they make Maskell himself a better person than his real-life model Blunt. After all, Maskell is also often ruthless, ambitious and cold. Moreover, as his denigrating descriptions of his stepmother, brother or friends reveal, he can be as arrogant and elitist as Blunt is usually is taken to be. Still, in The Untouchable these character traits are part of a very complex and convincing whole, which do make Maskell, if not a better person, at least a better person than the Blunt of the biographies will ever be. In The Untouchable, Banville has succeeded in creating “a life”, in showing what it means to live, for an uncommon figure like Anthony Blunt. Summarising, one can discern two distinct ways in which this sense of a “life more lifelike than life itself” is achieved in the novel.

Firstly, Banville’s changes do make the master spy a much more human character, who appears to have a lot in common with the average human being. The master spy too, The Untouchable suggests, is often weak and lonely and in extreme circumstances primarily concerned about his own safety. Moreover, just like everyone else he is frequently uneasy about himself and his ambitions; or worries about the meaning of his


personal existence. By emphasising Maskell’s common humanity, Banville cleverly exploits the identificatory potential of all literary fiction, inducing readers to feel sympathy for this tormented soul who grotesquely realises a familiar lack of purpose or identity. Recognising common traits or shared reactions, the reader is inevitably drawn into the novel and, for a time at least, lives the life of the protagonist. In his other novels, Banville has also shown a perverse satisfaction in seducing the reader into sympathy with murderers, misanthropes or master spies. And his greatness as a literary artist lies perhaps precisely in the fact that neither murderer, nor misanthrope or master spy lose any power or conviction in the process. In The Untouchable, however, Maskell’s liveliness or lifelikeness is not just the result of the power of the literary imagination. A great deal of his conviction derives from the rich complexity of Maskell as a character. By depicting different masks or highlighting various sides of his personality, Banville paints a more lifelike picture of the master spy than that of the biographers who have mostly fallen into the biographical trap of furnishing Blunt with a single petrifying mask. In this way, Banville cleverly skirts the dangerous cliffs of the prosopopeia, which tend to reduce a living person to a lifeless statue in the very process of imaginatively creating him or her into existence. Unlike the other biographers, Banville draws attention to what distorts the traditional picture of the spy, without thereby denying the validity of these character traits themselves. As a subversive biographer, moreover, he frequently offers a psychological motivation, only to undermine it again later. Finally, just like Maskell in his autobiographical narrative, Banville often leaves it up to the reader to draw conclusions, which he then, with sardonic pleasure, exposes as false further on. Through a subtle manipulation of the genres of biography and autobiography alike, Banville succeeds in avoiding the deadly trap of the prosopopeia, making Maskell into a man rather than a mask, whatever else it is his name implies.

And yet, the reader familiar with Banville’s work probably finds it hard to suppress a sceptical smirk at Banville’s fictional recreation in The Untouchable. After all, the picture of Blunt so convincingly realised there is far from unexpected. Maskell’s split personality, his cynicism and arrogance, his ambiguous attitude towards women, his erudition and self-mockery are all familiar characteristics in Banville’s oeuvre, shared by characters as diverse as Copernicus, Gabriel Swan or Frederick Montgomery. Despite the diversity and complexity of Maskell’s personality in The Untouchable, Banville might after all have confined


him within a single mask: that of the typical Banville protagonist. Even though his approach is certainly more subtle and subversive than that of the traditional biographies he quotes from, Banville is unable to fully escape from the prosopopeian logic, since the liveliness or lifelikeness of his fictional creation always runs the risk of turning into the lifelessness of the mask. The question can therefore be raised whether this biographical autobiography is not at the same time an autobiographical biography, in which Banville creates a Doppelgänger to himself rather than a full-fledged other. Put differently, if it is clear that Banville successfully realised an “illumination of character” in his novel, it remains a moot point whether the character in question is that of Blunt, Maskell or Banville himself.

Conclusion If at the outset of this study, its main objective was announced in the clear terms of the subtitle, the time has now arrived to have a closer look at the main title for a summary picture of its results. The investigation into the problem of representation in Banville’s works has indeed revealed a surprising wealth of “visions of alterity”, which pervade Banville’s self-centred novels in a variety of ways. Passing glimpses of otherness were realised in the Romantic epiphanies of Birchwood, in Gabriel Swan’s confrontation with the meaninglessness of existence, and in Kepler’s awe before the mystery of the commonplace. Other examples are Maskell’s sudden recognition of division within himself, Freddie’s fatal confrontation with the reality of Josie Bell, and the scientists’ astonished perception of the unexpected strangeness of the female figures around them. These visions of alterity are always brief. In the way of traditional epiphanies, they suddenly disrupt the subject’s usual perception and composure and ask for a response. Like the metallic birds attacking Copernicus, moreover, these instances of alterity are considered both “glorious” and “frightening”, inspiring “terror and awful glee”. Consequently, the protagonists’ reactions amount to a peculiar mixture of attraction and revulsion alike.

The terror the other usually inspires, is due to its power to challenge the self out of itself, out of its secure environment, steady convictions and subjective opinions. As we have seen, the other dangerously confronts the self with its own limits, as human knower and as human being, so that the presence of the other always threatens to bring about the absence of the self. The threat of death thus embodied by the other is repeatedly realised in the novels through the representation of alterity in terms of physicality or materiality, which the protagonists always seek to evade. In short, in Banville’s novels visions of alterity are also visions of mortality. They are liminal moments in which the protagonists are confronted with their own mortality and finitude, an experience so threatening that it has to be resolved, recuperated or violently repressed. Representation especially is called upon to deal with this otherness, to overcome this loss of self, by mediating between the two poles that stand opposed: subject and object, same and other, self and world. Depending on the prominence or power


accorded to either of these poles, two different modes of representation may be realised, which have in various forms and contexts been traced and analysed in the preceding chapters. Since the close reading of texts and passages may at times have obscured the general stakes of this opposition, I will briefly rehearse it in what follows through an analysis of two complementary concepts in the novel Eclipse.

Shaping

In this neck of the woods, when we were children, we used to say of show-offs in the school playground that they were only shaping; it is something I never got out of the habit of; I made a living from shaping; indeed, I made a life. It is not reality, I know, but for me it was the next best thing – at times, the only thing, more real than the real.1

Cleave’s notion of “shaping” refers here to his personal and professional habit of taking on roles and personae “bigger, grander, of more weight and moment than I could ever hope to be”. Like Freddie Montgomery and Victor Maskell, Cleave constantly fashions for himself new masks, aiming for “a making-over of all [he] was into a miraculous, bright new being” (36-37). Like his fictional predecessors, he is obsessed with his lack of natural wholeness and solidity, and seeks to give form, shape and unity to his ego, creating a self more lustrous and lifelike than ordinary life itself. Yet, as Cleave himself recognises, his efforts go further than a simple shaping of the self and extend to the creation of a whole new reality. Following Gabriel-the-narrator in Mefisto, Cleave wants to shape his life, his past, the world around him into a beautiful and meaningful structure. Searching for “a perspective on things, a standpoint from which to survey my life”, Cleave installs causal links, points out repetitions and incorporates everything “into the plot” (51, 122). His extended first-person narrative is a means of achieving a coherent self-representation, which brings meaning, unity and wholeness where before there was only chaos, division and lack. While it is shaped into a harmonious narrative structure, reality also acquires a more definite purpose and meaning. As the very term shaping suggests, this representational activity often follows subjective or pre-existing frames and structures. The subject construes reality according to what is familiar, known, or shared. In Doctor Copernicus and Kepler for instance, the laws of the universe are fashioned

1 John Banville, Eclipse, London, 2000, 10.

Conclusion 219

according the scientists’ mathematical or geometrical principles, while in The Newton Letter, the problems of the Lawless family are construed following pre-determined literary clichés. This tendency to subjectively shape reality in terms of the same is even more pronounced when other people are involved, witness Freddie Montgomery’s creation of Doppelgänger in Ghosts, his mimetic reading of the women in the portrait, or his representation of Daphne, Flora and A. as mirror images to himself.

Cleave, too, is constantly shaping people according to his own private dreams and desires. When he first fell in love with his wife, he made up “lives for her”, styling her as “the runaway daughter of an aristocratic family of fabulous pedigree” or as “a rich man’s mistress, in hiding from his agents”. He imaginatively fashioned her a glamorous life and even gave her a new name, Lydia, only to be disappointed when she turned out, like Flora in Ghosts, to be “Just another girl, after all” (34). Still, Cleave continues to consider his wife as a twin-star to himself, just as he interprets his daughter’s strangeness along the lines of his own exaggerated self-consciousness, or fashions Lily as his “surrogate daughter”. More than his fictional predecessors, however, Cleave reflects in a very explicit manner on these moves:

Up to then, and, indeed, as I have done most of the time since, the mind being a lazy organ, I conceived of [Lydia] as I did so much else, to be a part of me, or at least of my immediate vicinity, a satellite fixed and defined within the gravitational field of the body, of the planet, of the red giant that is my being. (158-59)

Yet, the solipsistic arrogance of Cleave’s representations is sometimes brought short by small and momentary manifestations of alterity. In a peculiarly vivid dream, for instance, he is made aware of his wife’s “absolute otherness, not only from me, but from everything else that was in the world, that was the world”. And in a similar way, his imaginative representations of Quirke and Lily are checked by his discovery that they have been living a secret life all along:

I feel that I am seeing them, too, for the first time. They have come into focus, in a way that I am not sure I like, and that certainly I did not expect. (122)

In this way, Cleave’s “shaping” reveals itself as “only shaping”: only the construction and imposition of a beautiful and meaningful frame on


reality, which often fails to engage with the particulars of that reality itself.

In the passage quoted above, Cleave attributes this peculiar mode of subjective or shaping representation to the mind’s laziness, which Freddie in The Book of Evidence referred to as “accidie”. Representing the other in terms of the same or fitting reality into familiar patterns is seen as a result of the mind’s lazy self-centredness, which makes responding to “the other as other” simply too much of an intellectual or ethical effort. In a more positive vein, however, this laziness can also be associated with the subject’s dependence on safety and meaning. Human beings, Banville’s work suggests, cannot do without order, harmony and meaning in a world which is by its nature the very opposite of this. Hence the supreme attractiveness of subjective representations, such as Copernicus’ bright new astronomical theory, Kepler’s construction of harmony, or Gabriel Swan’s imaginative creation of a symmetrical universe. The scientists’ achievements are also aesthetically valued as the product of a creative imagination, a daring originality and an aesthetic vision, while in the art trilogy and The Untouchable it is only in the beauty and harmony of art that the protagonists find solace from the absurd chaos of reality.

When viewed from the opposite perspective, however, this need for order and harmony can also be read as a cowardly escape from the chaotic reality of the everyday. Confronted with the lethal threat of alterity and materiality, the protagonists take recourse to this shaping mode of representation as the surest way to manifest themselves and to overcome difference. In this way, the excess of self, manifested in these shaping representations, is but a way to counter the threatening loss of self that the experience of otherness invariably entails. If the protagonists’ representa-tion of reality in terms of the pure and rational categories of the mind is an effective way of cancelling its elusive mystery, the same holds true for their reading of others in terms of the self. Consequently, the biographer’s suppression of details in his literary representation of the Lawless family is clearly of a kind with Freddie’s narrative attempts to overcome any form of duality within himself. Similarly, Freddie’s violent repression of the insistent materiality and difference of Josie Bell only differs in degree from Kepler’s pseudo-rational recuperation of the commonplace mystery in his epiphanies. In short, in this tendency to reduce the other to the same, a more negative aspect of this first mode of representation is revealed. For however beautiful the result may be, shaping reality or other people according to predetermined patterns of unity and harmony always

Conclusion 221

runs the risk of destroying their singularity and difference. If in Doctor Copernicus this sceptical denial only results in a symbolic “death of the world”, in the case of The Book of Evidence, the same reductive move results in the death of a young woman. In all, even though Banville’s novels frequently stand in awe before the artistic realisations of this subjective mode of representation, they also warn for its possibly reductive and destructive qualities, often hinting at an alternative mode of representation, which Eclipse interestingly recapitulates with the concept of “making strange”.

Making strange Just like the other protagonists, Alexander Cleave frequently meets with visions of alterity, which disrupt his representations and throw him off-balance. An encounter with an old woman, a near-accident with an animal on a country road, the apparition of a ghost: these are all moments in which the ordinary is revealed as the strange and in which Cleave encounters the limits of his habitual representations. Similarly, the ghostly figures Cleave keeps seeing cause everything to “bathe in a faint glow of strangeness, an unearthly radiance”, as if, Cleave muses, “The world seemed tilted slightly out of the true” (45). No longer content with these momentary visions of alterity, however, Cleave wants to perpetuate them so as to cultivate the alienation they trigger. At the beginning of his narrative, Cleave describes this alternative mode of dealing with reality:

To be watchful and attentive to everything, to be vigilant against complacency, to resist habituation, these were my aims in coming here. I would catch myself, red-handed, in the act of living; alone, without an audience of any kind, I would cease performing and simply be. And what would be my register of being if not things, the more commonplace the better? …. Making strange, people hereabouts say when a child wails at the sudden appearance of a visitor; how was I to make strange now, and not stop making strange? How was I to fight the deadening force of custom? (46)

In Cleave’s application of the term, “making strange” equals a disruption of habitual perception and the attainment of a surprising new perspective on things and people, which would make him experience the otherness of reality to the full. Because of the odd circumstances of his life in the haunted house, Cleave’s attempts are, initially at least, successful.


Focusing on such trivial things as a chair, some flowers, an open window, he notes:

The actual has taken on a tense, trembling quality. Everything is poised for dissolution. Yet never in my life, so it seems, have I been so close up to the very stuff of the world, even as the world itself shimmers and turns transparent before my eyes. (49)

Occasionally, Cleave also attends to the people around him in this way. Upon noticing Quirke’s hidden life in the basement, he exults:

Talk about making strange! Everything was askew .… I was seized by a peculiar cold excitement, the sort that comes in dreams, at once irresistible and disabling. If only I could creep up on the whole of life like this, and see it all from a different perspective! (114)

This discovery brings about another “transformation” in Cleave’s representations: “It is as if they had stood up in their seats and ambled on to the stage while the play was going on, interrupting me in the middle of an intense if perhaps overly introspective soliloquy” (122). If this final image is an apt metaphor for the disruption of Cleave’s solipsistic shaping by these uncanny perceptions, the double meaning of “making strange” itself eminently captures the ambiguous characteristics of the second mode of representation in Banville’s fictions.

As Cleave’s new way of living amply demonstrates, the notion of “making strange” implies a certain passivity, a certain loss of self. In order to see reality as “other”, the self has to stand back, keep a distance, refrain from imposing itself, just like the suspicious child holds back from those who want to cuddle him. Put differently, in this mode of representation the subject has to subordinate its personal claims and desires to those of reality. Still, Banville’s novels also suggest that representation is not possible when the subject is completely overwhelmed by the otherness of reality and is reduced to nothingness instead. Yet, this threat of death is averted in the mode of “making strange” by a sense of activity, which the term also implies. Just like the unruly child, Cleave can be seen to “make strange” by looking at reality from various angles, by focusing on small details and cultivating an open stance to any possible difference. This purposeful aspect of “making strange” is also affirmed by the meaning of the phrase in literary theory as a translation of the Russian Structuralist term ostranenie, which denotes:

the process or result of rendering unfamiliar; spec. of literature, in which formal devices are held to revitalize the perception of words and

Conclusion 223

their sounds by differentiation from ordinary language or (subsequently) from other habituated formal techniques.2

“Making strange” or defamiliarisation is then an eminently artistic process in which ordinary reality is made into something unfamiliar, uncanny or strange or, put differently, in which habitual perception is disturbed and an other or unusual quality of reality is revealed.

Taken together, these two definitions suggest “making strange” as a mode of representation, which proposes a better balance of subject and object or a middle way between the equally dangerous poles of excess and loss of self. Since total self-effacement annihilates the possibility of representations, “making strange” is perhaps the closest the artist can actually get to an acknowledgement of reality or to what Banville himself has called a mode of “disengagement”.3 In this aesthetic paradigm, artistic transformation is tempered by a deference to reality and, conversely, total self-loss avoided by a necessary measure of self-manifestation. In his theoretical writings Banville also refers to this poetic ideal:

Far from allowing us to know things with any immediacy, art, I believe, makes things strange. This it does by illuminating things, literally: the making of art is a process in which the artist concentrates on the object with such force, with such ferocity and attention, that the object takes on an unearthly – no, an earthly glow.4

If in representational terms, this poetic ideal strives for a balance between self and world, in aesthetic terms, a mixture of mimesis (close adherence to reality), poesis (transformation of reality) and aletheia (revelation of the oddness of reality) is advocated here.

As has been discussed earlier, this is also the aesthetic ideal the science tetralogy aspires to in different ways. It was briefly suggested in the notion of supreme fictions in Doctor Copernicus and found its first realisation in the transformative poetics in Kepler. In the realm of science as well as in his attendance to the commonplace, Kepler seeks to attend closely to the singularity and strangeness of things – a snowflake, a snail, the orbit of Mars – thereby interiorising and imaginatively transforming them. The result is very often a new, if anthropocentric, perspective on

2 The Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd Edition, CD-rom. 3 John Banville, “The Personae of Summer”, in Irish Writers and their Creative

Process, ed. Jacqueline Genet, Gerrards Cross, 1996, 78. 4 John Banville, “Survivors of Joyce”, in James Joyce: The Artist and the Labyrinth,

ed. Augustine Martin, London, 1990, 79.


things, which places them in an exhilarating new light. If Kepler “makes strange” in a rather direct manner, the alternative representations of the Newton narrator proceed through the roundabout route of the via negativa, as he attends to the singularity of reality by approaching it through absences and unexpected little details. In this way, his emblematic repre-sentations draw attention to reality’s odd and mysterious significance.

A second, though perhaps less self-evident, version of “making strange” concerns the relations between self and other as investigated in Chapters 6 and 7. Neither Freddie’s shaping of others as Doppelgänger or mirror images to himself, nor his abysmal experience of the radical and material otherness of Josie Bell presented an ethical way of dealing with reality. In the first instance, the other person is represented as but a part of the self while in the second instance, he or she is experienced as too radically other to connect with. Hence the alternative mode of represen-tation suggested in Ghosts and realised in Athena: that of responding to the other as an “other to”, as another human being who is both familiar and strange. In analogy with the aesthetic mode of “making strange”, therefore, these ethical representations achieve a balance of self-manifestation and self-effacement. In this permanent interaction of same and other, the other is not only transformed by the same, but the same is also touched and transformed by the strangeness of the other.

The same holds true for the self-representations in Banville’s novels. Initially the protagonists of the art trilogy, The Untouchable and Eclipse seek to reduce any form of duality or otherness within themselves, shaping their multiple selves into a single version of solidity and wholeness. Yet, frequent failures in this respect point the way to an alternative mode of representation, a “making strange” of the self, which entails, in different ways, an acceptance of otherness within oneself. In the art trilogy this is realised primarily through a renewed engagement with other people, while in The Untouchable Maskell’s confessions make strange by representing a whole array of different selves. In Eclipse, finally, several events interrupt Cleave’s habitual self-perception and make him a stranger to himself.5

Still, in all of the instances mentioned, this alternative mode of representation receives only a limited realisation. Whether through laziness, need, or fear, Banville’s protagonists often revert back to the

5 As so often in Banville’s work, the name of the protagonist in Eclipse is significant

here: Cleave is “cloven”, divided, perpetually other to himself.

Conclusion 225

shaping mode of representation and its enticing promise of transcendence, unity, beauty or truth. Even if the representational mode of “making strange” can never fully be reached, however, Banville’s novels present it as a tantalizing ideal, which should always be aspired to. In short, showing us ambition as well as failure, Banville’s novels realise many poignant illustrations of the split condition of human life. They portray the extreme limitedness of human beings as well as their strong wish to move beyond those limits. They make us aware of the tragic impossibility of ever fully balancing subject and object in representation, yet urge us to continue trying. They celebrate heroic dreams of immortality and show with great relish how even the most solipsistic lives are checked by disturbing visions of alterity.

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Long Lankin (1970), Oldcastle: Gallery, 1991. Nightspawn (1971), Oldcastle: Gallery, 1993. Birchwood (1973), London: Minerva, 1992. Doctor Copernicus (1976), London: Minerva, 1990. Kepler (1981), London: Minerva, 1990. The Newton Letter (1982), London: Minerva, 1992. Mefisto (1986), London: Minerva, 1993. The Book of Evidence (1989), London: Minerva, 1990. Ghosts (1993), London: Minerva, 1993. The Broken Jug. After Heinrich von Kleist, Oldcastle: Gallery, 1994. Athena (1995), London: Minerva, 1995. The Untouchable (1997), London: Picador, 1997. Eclipse (2000), London: Picador, 2000. God’s Gift. A Version of Amphitryon by Heinrich von Kleist, Oldcastle:

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Psychology of Transcendence, Baltimore: John Hopkins UP, 1986. Yates, Frances, The Rosicrucian Enlightenment, London: Routledge,

1979. Yeats, William Butler, “Symbolism in Painting”, Essays and

Introductions, London: Macmillan, 1969, 146-52.

Index Abrams, M.H., 51 Adorno, Theodor, 76 Aquinas, Thomas, 5, 51, 53 Aristotle, 5, 78, 80, 146, 150 Attridge, Derek, 1, 146, 148,

152, 159-60, 168, 193 Auerbach, Erich, 75n. Augustine, 5 Auster, Paul, 83 Banville, John Athena, 1, 49, 125-28, 158,

164-69, 173-200, 201, 224 Birchwood, 1, 2, 11, 13, 17-

21, 40-48, 49, 54-68, 71, 102, 131-44, 217

The Book of Evidence, 1, 125-28, 132, 133, 145-60, 163, 165, 166, 173-200, 201, 204, 209, 220, 221

The Broken Jug, 13 Doctor Copernicus, 1, 17-

68, 71, 72, 73, 74, 75, 85-92, 93, 95, 96, 99, 103, 110, 118, 125, 131-44, 214, 217, 218, 219, 221, 222, 223

Eclipse, 2, 11, 218-25 Ghosts, 49, 125-28, 160-66,

173-200, 204, 219, 224 God’s Gift, 13 Kepler, 1, 18, 19, 20, 40-

48, 54-68, 72, 73, 92-103, 110, 125, 131-44, 217, 224

Long Lankin, 13, 54, 66

Mefisto, 17, 20, 40-48, 49, 54-68, 71, 73, 117-25, 132-44, 181, 182, 184, 201, 218

The Newton Letter, 17, 20, 40-48, 54-68, 73, 103-17, 125, 131-44, 173, 193, 219

Nightspawn, 13, 131 Shroud, 2, 11, 13, 146 The Untouchable, 1, 2, 11,

12, 62, 125-28, 173, 196, 201-15, 217, 218, 220, 224

Barnes, Julian, 131, 133 Barth, John, 131 Beckett, Samuel, 77-83 Beethoven, Ludwig, van, 141 Bennet, Benjamin, 107n. Berensmeyer, Ingo, 18n.,

20n., 74n., 150n. Big House novel, 137, 140n.,

155, 180 Bloom, Harold, 86n. Blunt, Anthony, 1, 201, 208-

15 Booker, Keith M., 72n. Booth, Wayne, 146 Borges, Jorge Luis, 182 Canon-Roger, Françoise, 168 Carty, Ciaran, 77n., 188 Cavell, Stanley, 12, 25-29, 35-

39, 42, 47-48, 135-38; The Claim of Reason, 26-27, 37, 135-36; In Quest of the Ordinary, 7, 29, 34-38


Coates, Paul, 188-89, 191-93 Coetzee, J.M., 76, 77, 131,

133, 208 Cornwell, Neil, 182n. Costello, John, 209-12 Critchley, Simon, 146 Deleuze, Gilles, 119n. De Man, Paul, 1, 114-16, 146;

“Autobiography”, 203-207; “Image and Emblem”, 114

Derrida, Jacques, 10, 29n., 132, 146; “The Double Session”, 10; “Sending”, 10; “Violence”, 147, 154, 159

Descartes, René, 1, 3-4, 8, 18-19, 23, 24, 26, 27, 42

Dickens, Charles, 151 Diderot, Denis, 205-206 Duncan, Dawn, 120n. Einstein, Albert, 19 Eliot, T.S., 83 Emerson, Waldo, 37, 51 ethical criticism, 14, 132; neo-

humanist, 145-46, 148, 150-54, 169, 170; post-structuralist, 145-46, 147, 148, 152, 159, 160, 169, 170

feminist criticism, 132, 141-

44, 158 Fierobe, Claude, 50n. first-person narrator, 2, 12,

126, 127, 137, 167, 191 Foucault, Michel, 132 Fowles, John, 82, 84, 131

Francavilla, Joseph, 181 Freeman, Simon, 209n. Frehner, Ruth, 140n., 142 Freud, Sigmund, 141, 149,

180-83, 178; “Creative Writers”, 188; “On Narcis-sism”, 174; “Splitting of the Ego”, 176, 180

Gaddis, William, 131 Goethe, J.W., 73, 104n.

Faust, 117-23 Goodman, Nelson, 7-8 Gordimer, Nadine, 79 Hand, Derek, 18n., 20n. Harpham, Geoffrey, 145n.,

146, 170 Heidegger, Martin, 4, 5, 8-10,

80, 81; “The Age of the World Picture”, 8-9, 26; “On the Origin of the Work of Art”, 80

Heisenberg, Werner, 19 Higgins, Aidan, 82, 83, 104n. history 11; and fiction, 1, 23,

131, 213; Cambridge Spies, 208-212; of representation, 2-12; of science, 17, 19, 25, 28, 29, 72, 110

Hofmannsthal, Hugo, von, 73 Ein Brief, 103-17

Hogan, Ron, 209n. Hutcheon, Linda, 131 Hutchinson, Peter, 93n., 94n. Imhof, Rüdiger, 17n., 18,

20n., 25n., 50n., 54, 90, 101, 104n., 119, 120, 121n., 123n., 131, 132n., 147,

Index 241

150n., 161n., 165n., 180, 195n.

Ireland, Maskell and, 204, 210; Banville as Irish novelist, 3, 131; Irish literature, 50, 54, 114, 155

Izarra, Laura, 119 Jackson, Tony, 71 James, Henry, 82, 104n., 150,

151 Joyce, James, 20, 49-54, 66,

202 Judge, Brenda, 3 Kant, Immanuel, 3, 6-8, 21n.,

33, 43, 79, 80, 144, 146; The Critique of Judgment, 64-65

Kearney, Richard, 5, 6 Kierkegaard, Søren, 35 Klein, Melanie, 142, 144 Koestler, Arthur, 25n., 29n.,

57, 72 Kofman, Sarah, 143-44, 158 Lacan, Jacques, 157n., 199 Laplanche, Jean, 62n. Langbaum, Robert, 50, 53n.,

55n. Lasch, Christopher, 175n. Leeder, Karen, 95n. Lejeune, Philippe, 202n. Lennon, 161n. Lentricchia, Frank, 86 Levinas, Emmanuel, 132,

146-48, 152, 154, 159, 189n., 197

Luke, David, 123n.

Lyons, John, 4 MacIntyre, Alasdair, 146 MacNeice, Louis, 210n. Mann, Thomas, 118 Marlowe, Christopher, 118,

199 McEwan, Ian, 77, 133 McGahern, John, 79, 83 McIlroy, Brian, 72n. McMinn, Joseph, 18n., 32n.,

50n., 73, 74, 91, 93, 95, 101, 123n., 132n., 147n., 150n., 151, 165n., 180

Miller, J. Hillis, 86n., 88, 89n., 146

Miller, Karl, 177, 188 Modernism, 104, 116, 118,

131, 132; Modernist epi-phany, 49-54

Modin, Yuri, 209n., 212 Morrison, Toni, 133 Morrissy, Mary, 133 Morton, Michael, 107-108 Mulhall, Stephen, 26n., 27,

28, 37n., 135n. Murdoch, Iris, 146 Nabokov, Vladimir, 74, 78,

79, 131 Nichols, Ashton, 52-53 Nichols, Stephen, 4 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 4, 25,

26, 33, 39, 43, 45, 119-20, 133, 149, 204; The Gay Science, 31, 34n., 35, 40; Human, all too Human, 31

Nussbaum, Martha, 146, 150-54, 163, 169, 191


Nutall, J.D., 5, 7 O’Toole, Fintan, 49n., 77, 78,

125 painting, 80, 114, 126, 165,

166, 202; “Le Monde d’Or”, 161, 162, 183-85; “Portrait of a Woman with Gloves”, 127, 147-160, 162, 197

Pascal, Blaise, 205 Patke, Rajeev, 86n. Paulin, Roger, 93n. Penrose, Barrie, 209n. Plato, 3, 5, 8-9, 25, 75, 78,

144, 146 Pontalis, J.B., 62n. Posner, Richard, 154n. Postmodernism, 82, 116, 117,

131, 132; postmodern, 4, 17, 40, 75, 80, 175; epiphany, 65-68

Proust, Marcel, 41, 202 psychoanalysis, and the

double, 174, 176, 178, 180-82, 188, 189; and splitting, 141, 142, 144, 180

Pynchon, Thomas, 82, 131 Rank, Otto, 174, 180, 184,

188 Rhys, Jean, 131 Rilke, R.M., 73, 81

Duineser Elegien, 92-103 Rimmon-Kenan, Schlomith,

190 Robbins, Bruce, 154, 156

Rogers, Robert, 142n., 175, 178

Romanticism, 7, 18, 19, 40, 47, 174, 175, 177, 210; Romantic, 174, 204; epiphany, 51-53, 60-68, 116, 217; return to the ordinary, 47, 48, 51; sublime, 64, 65; aesthetics, 80-81, 86, 87, 88, 90, 107; Post-Romantic, 131

Rorty, Richard, 9-10, 146 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 144,

202 scepticism, 12, 17-48, 54, 58,

61, 71, 88, 187, 207, 214, 221; of other minds, 133-38

Schoenberg, Arnold, 134 Schwall, Hedwig, 45n., 68n.,

75, 80 Sontag, Susan, 77 Stallworthy, Jon, 210n. Stern, Peter and Sheila, 93n. Stevens, Herman, 209n., Stevens, Wallace, 39, 71, 83,

85-92, 96, 97; The Neces-sary Angel, 88; Notes To-wards a Supreme Fiction, 30, 31n., 73, 85-92

Swift, Graham, 84 theatre, as metaphor (acting),

2, 190, 196, 201, 201-206; Banville’s work for, 13

Todorov, Tzvetan, 175n., 183 Voller, Jack, 64n.

Index 243

Warner, Alan, 133 Warren, Wini, 25n. Waugh, Patricia, 142n. Webber, Andrew, 175, 185 Weiskel, Thomas, 64n. Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 18-19,

27, 32, 34n., 47, 48, 74, 108

Wondrich, Roberta, 150 Woolf, Virginia, 53, 155 Wordsworth, William, 35, 48,

61, 64n., 203 Yates, Frances, 101n. Yeats, W.B., 114-16

Visions of Alterity: Representation in the Works of John Banville

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