LITERARY CRITICISM: ANNE FOGARTY reviews John Bavilleby John Kenny, Irish Academic Press, 200pp, €19.95
PARADOX IS the very essence of John Banville. Devotees of his fictions have become accustomed to what have long since acquired the stamp of authorial signatures. Amongst these may be numbered their mannered style, their eschewal of traditional plots and their disaffected, inward-looking narrators. Linguistic fastidiousness, a brooding but ironised existentialism and doomed sexual fixations are the staple ingredients – it would seem – of a Banville novel.
But, as John Kenny uncovers in this incisive and revelatory study, the fundament of Banville’s oeuvre resides elsewhere. It is to be located in the constant working through of a series of key but intractable philosophical questions. These may be resourcefully re-imagined from novel to novel. Yet, they constitute the core of the artistic quest and vocational drive of this critically acclaimed and quintessential Irish author. Kenny’s method in this combative and prodigiously knowledgeable inquiry is to use Banville contra Banville. He draws on numerous interviews with the author in order to interrogate many of the key presuppositions about his work. In this way, he not alone delves into the essentials of Banville’s literary method but also on occasion challenges the writer’s own strategically evasive formulations about his intent.
All of the bugbear questions that have bedevilled the reception of Banville are given due consideration here. His oft-proclaimed refusal to assume the mantle of an Irish author duly commenting upon aspects of Irish society and politics is scrutinised. Kenny shows that, despite Banville’s insistence on the self-conscious pursuit of the role of literary outsider, he still routinely invokes many of the traits of the Irish literary tradition, such as a formalistic wariness and and a pervasive preoccupation with language.
Moreover, even though in Birchwoodand The Newton Letterhe discarded hackneyed Irish genres such as the Big House or the historical novel, his unremitting contestation of the expressive power of fiction still has pronounced social and, above all, ethical dimensions. Banville's retreat into aestheticism and what Kenny dubs a "Europe of the mind" is merely a strategy that disguises, but never entirely removes from view, an unremitting belief in the facility of art to articulate central facets of the human condition.
Metaphysics may be seemingly in abeyance in Banville’s writing. But key postulates such as the nature of Being, the problem of evil and the all-defining reality of death still residually govern the imaginations of his protagonists and shape the contours of his narratives. Indeed, amongst the many startling claims of this study, is the argument that Banville is at core a spiritual writer. The success of The Sea may be due, in part, to the fact that it most overtly draws out these humanist dimensions of Banville’s questioning of the world.
But, in keeping with his elusive subject, Kenny’s sinuous arguments never rest for long on any one single view. He successfully teases out many of the paradoxical features of Banville’s fiction: its refusal of, but underlying alignment with, an Irish aesthetic, its advocacy of a post-modern playfulness with form that yet coincides with a late modernist belief in the philosophical potency of narrative and its simultaneous pursuit of silence and of an exacting eloquence. However, he also shows that Banville remains a slippery author who cannot easily be categorised. Not least amongst these contradictions is the fact that he now straddles the domains of the literary and the popular, in a defiant retort to his own critical reception to date. Readers of John Banville, the creator of high-minded, literary works, must accommodate Benjamin Black, the author of accomplished and readily accessible detective stories.
Kenny is, above all, adept in eliciting the infinitely complicated array of literary intertexts of Banville’s writings. ‘He contends, rightly, that these are never merely a posture. Banville’s novels are literary echo chambers with a purpose. The interconnections with a host of carefully denominated European writers and philosophers – including Beckett, Rilke, Nietzsche, van Hofmannsthal, Nabokov and Sartre, amongst a host of others – flag moments of deep-seated engagement and point up some of the fundamental considerations of his fictions, such as the nature of authenticity and the quest for order in a chaotic universe. Additionally, Kenny performs a hugely valuable service in tracking for the first time the extent to which Banville’s prolific output as a reviewer throughout his career informed his writing. His journalism, we discover, has always underpinned his fiction.
The foremost theme in Banville’s fiction is that of art itself. As Kenny persuasively contends, all of the author’s novels might be considered aesthetic autobiographies. The scientists Copernicus and Kepler, and the homicidal aesthete Freddie Montgomery, all act as artist analogues. Yet, Banville’s novels persistently critique the artistic detachment on which they insist.
The positions of the twin figures of Alexander Cleave in Eclipseand of Axel Vander in Shroudare shown to be deeply flawed and hopelessly mired in a dubious sexual politics. The feminine sublime that is at the core of their world-views, and of the author's own understanding of the aesthetic, is suspect and opened to ridicule. But, despite this deep-seated distrust, as Kenny proclaims, Banville's novels ultimately attest to the necessity of art as a precondition of existence. Fiction may not penetrate reality, but it can at least bear witness to it. For Banville, narrative is doomed to failure but it is our only mainstay.
John Kenny’s exacting and erudite study is an acute commentary on the evolution and lasting significance of John Banville as an author. With obvious gusto and facility, it opens up Banville’s painstaking artistry for both the novice and long-standing reader alike.
- Anne Fogarty is professor of Joyce Studies at UCD and director of the UCD James Joyce Research Centre