John Banville’s Performance of Passion

Abstract

AbstractChapter 4 argues that John Banville’s contribution to late modernism resides in his playful exploitation of the modes of reading and interpretation taught to readers of postwar fiction by modernism’s signature techniques, encouraging us to see in every inflection of style a potential revelation of concealed feeling or desire. His lamentation that postwar novelists have followed Samuel Beckett into experimentalism notwithstanding, Banville’s understanding of the history of the novel is archetypally late modernist—like Vladimir Nabokov, for instance, he venerates Ulysses (1922) whilst expressing doubts about the verisimilitude of its interior monologues. No less late modernist is Banville’s preoccupation with the representability of affective experience, the elusiveness of the past, and the performative inauthenticity of the self. What is distinctive, this chapter suggests, is the characteristically equivocal tone of his narrations, which so often leave us uncertain if emotion is being sincerely expressed or archly performed at our expense. This tonal balancing act is most brilliantly executed in Ancient Light (2012), a novel in which the narrator’s grief for his dead daughter troublingly mingles with recollections of a teenage affair with his best friend’s mother, and where evocations of loss always threaten to metamorphose into the burlesque. The chapter concludes with the suggestion that, because of their eschewal of experimentalism, Banville’s exquisitely crafted novels ultimately lack the paradigmatic force of Nabokov’s or Beckett’s and seem unlikely to catalyse new formal innovations in the twenty-first century—unlike those of his contemporary, J. M. Coetzee, the subject of the next chapter.