Visions of Alterity: Representation in the Works of John Banville (original) (raw)

Precarious Subjectivity in the Works of John Banville: A Lacanian Reading

2015

The present project sets to complement the previous readings of the “self” in John Banville’s fiction by reproblematizing the precariousness of the author’s “subject of narration.” It examines the way in which the author constantly manipulates various narrative elements and consequently creates new experiences. Jacques Lacan’s understanding of the relation between the subject and the signifier, I argue, provides an excellent set of tools to address the way in which the notion of subjectivity is dissected, enhanced, and even extended, in Banville’s philosophically imbued fiction. The central thesis is that Banville creates a narrative universe in which his protagonists’ perception moves in interesting ways as the aspects of the Lacanian triad (the Symbolic, the Imaginary and the Real) are reshuffled, resulting in a precarious sense of self and reality. Although other thinkers (especially the ones hinted at in the narrative, most notably, de Man, Kleist, and Nietzsche) are drawn upon,...

“Cloud’s red, earth feeling, sky that thinks”: John Banville’s Aesth/ethics

ABEI Journal - The Brazilian Journal of Irish Studies, 2020

John Banville's long career can of course conventionally be viewed as a linearity, but it would be better seen as a form of spiral. This spiral is the hermeneutic process and concomitantly the movements of eternal recurrence in the oeuvre. In accordance with Nietzsche's concept, these recurrences are not to be construed as returns of the identical. Rather, this ethic and aesthetic dimension in Banville is explicated as an attunement to the overall force of becoming. In agreement with Wallace Stevens' poetics, Banville's aesthetic is seen primarily as process. Through the immediate access to metacognition and reflection in the intentional act, Banville, through his protagonists, maintains a sense of wonder as hope in a fictional world often permeated by loss, melancholy and despair. This fictional trait is argued to have been there since the debut up to Banville's more recent creative work. Keywords: Stevens; Nietzsche; Deleuze; Husserl; intentionality; metacognition; eternal recurrence; becoming; aesthetic; hope; The Blue Guitar; Long Lankin. Resumo: A longa carreira de John Banville pode, evidentemente, ser vista convencionalmente de modo linear, contudo seria melhor se fosse vista como uma forma de espiral. Essa espiral representa o processo hermenêutico e, concomitantemente, os movimentos de recorrência eterna na obra. De acordo com o conceito de Nietzsche, essas recorrências não devem ser interpretadas como retornos do idêntico. Em vez disso, essa dimensão ética e estética em Banville é explicada como uma sintonização com a força geral do devir. De acordo com a poética de Wallace Stevens, a estética de Banville é vista principalmente como processo. Por meio do acesso imediato à metacognição e reflexão no ato intencional, Banville, através de seus protagonistas, mantém um sentimento de admiração como esperança em um mundo fictício, muitas vezes permeado por perda, melancolia e desespero. Argumenta-se que esse traço ficcional está presente desde a sua estréia até a escrita mais recente de Banville. Palavras-chave: Stevens; Nietzsche; Deleuze; Husserl; intencionalidade; metacognição; recorrência eterna; devir; estética; esperança; The Blue Guitar; Long Lankin. 183-196

John Banville’s „Ghosts”: “A different way of being alive”

Anglica Wratislaviensia

This article analyses the ontological status of the characters who inhabit the world of John Banville’s novel Ghosts. While the problem of volatile selfhood recurs in Banville’s fiction, in this novel the very existence of the characters within the fictional world remains doubtful. It is argued here that the numerous metafictional elements in the text are central to its interpretation. The novel itself should be treated as a work in progress or a design for a novel rather than a completed project. The narrative initiates and ultimately resists familiar patterns; the characters’ peculiar way of being alive seems to stem from an intersection of empirical reality and an obscure realm of fantasy, imagination as well as textual and artistic allusions. Correspondingly, the narrator’s status as a literary character is ambiguous. The article suggests that the narrator is the most likely creator of the characters within the fictional world and is himself a playful author-substitute in the no...

John Banville (Contemporary Irish Writers series), Bucknell University Press, 2018

John Banville, 2018

The monograph, "John Banville," offers a close analysis of most of Banville’s major novels, as well as the ‘Quirke’ crime novels he has written under the pseudonym Benjamin Black and his dramatic adaptations of Heinrich von Kleist’s plays. From the beginning, Banville’s work has been marked both by the presence of a complex, embedded discourse about the significance of art and by a concurrent self-conscious obsession with its own status as art. His novels perpetually reveal an overt fascination with the visual arts in particular, and with the aesthetic principle of literature as art. This study argues that, as a whole, Banville’s work presents an elaborate and richly-textured coded account of his relationship with art and with the self-referential fictional world that his novels have conjured. It is from this critical context that John Banville’s central argument is derived. This book asserts that Banville’s fiction can be viewed both as an extended interrogation into the meaning and status of art as well as itself being a representative of the type of art that is admired in the pages of the novels. As such, it also represents an extremely sophisticated enactment of the novel form that goes beyond the “self-reflexivity” of late twentieth-century fiction to chart new developments in the literary arts. The book’s critical process involves several specific reference points. Firstly, Banville’s own theoretical statements about art in interviews, essays, reviews and journalistic writing over the past 40 years are synthesized into a coherent interpretation of the author’s artistic vision which is thereafter used as a conceptual touchstone when considering his major works of fiction. This is done in conjunction with investigating specific theoretical perspectives about the relationship between literature and art by critics such as Denis Donoghue and Susan Sontag, and by philosophers of art, Graham Gordon, Etienne Gilson, Peter Lamarque, and Susanne Langer.

The Poetics of “Pure Invention”- John Banville’s Ghosts

ABEI Journal — The Brazilian Journal of Irish Studies , 2020

This essay argues that John Banville's Ghosts (1993) may in fact be Banville's most technically inventive novel, replete as it is with multi-layered ontological levels that repeatedly bring its primary diegetic discourse into communion with other artistic forms-music, paintings, statues, as well as a narrative saturation with other literary antecedents that exceeds anything found elsewhere in his work. Ghosts demonstrates an implicit layering of dialectical levels, in effect a narrative enactment of the multiple worlds theory that so fascinates several of Banville's narrators. Nowhere else does he generate so comprehensive a model of a multi-level ontological system in which the levels intersect so purposefully as Ghosts. This essay maps out a topography of what is effectively a sophisticated fictional variant on the scientific multiple worlds theory in Ghosts, and offers some perspectives on the significance of this aesthetic model.