<?page no="1"?> Schweizer Anglistische Arbeiten Swiss Studies in English Begründet von Bernhard Fehr Herausgegeben von Andreas Fischer (Zürich), Martin Heusser (Zürich), Daniel Schreier (Zürich) Band 144 <?page no="3"?> Alexander G. Z. Myers Pastoral, Identity, and Memory in the Works of John Banville <?page no="4"?> Umschlagdesign: Martin Heusser, Zürich Bibliografische Information der Deutschen Nationalbibliothek Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek verzeichnet diese Publikation in der Deutschen Nationalbibliografie; detaillierte bibliografische Daten sind im Internet über http: / / dnb.dnb.de abrufbar. Die vorliegende Arbeit wurde von der Philosophischen Fakultät der Universität Zürich im Frühjahrssemester 2017 auf Antrag der Promotionskommission Prof. Dr. Martin Heusser (hauptverantwortliche Betreuungsperon) und Prof. Dr. Ana Sobral als Dissertation angenommen. Die Druckvorstufe dieser Publikation wurde vom Schweizerischen Nationalfonds zur Förderung der wissenschaftlichen Forschung unterstützt. © 2018 · Narr Francke Attempto Verlag GmbH + Co. KG · Dischingerweg 5 · D-72070 Tübingen Das Werk einschließlich aller seiner Teile ist urheberrechtlich geschützt. Jede Verwertung außerhalb der engen Grenzen des Urheberrechtsgesetzes ist ohne Zustimmung des Verlages unzulässig und strafbar. Das gilt insbesondere für Vervielfältigungen, Übersetzungen, Mikroverfilmungen und die Einspeicherung und Verarbeitung in elektronischen Systemen. Internet: www.francke.de E-Mail: info@francke.de Satz: pagina GmbH, Tübingen Printed in Germany ISSN 0080-7214 ISBN 978-3-7720- 5 647-2 <?page no="5"?> 1 9 II 16 2.1 16 18 21 24 2.2 26 28 30 32 2.3 34 35 38 41 2.4 46 46 50 51 2.5 56 56 59 62 III 68 3.1 68 68 72 74 Contents Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Always Pastoral: The Architectonics of Arcadia . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . What is Pastoral? - Problems of Definition . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Pastoral of Form, Genre and Mode . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Many Uses of Pastoral . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Towards a New Definition of Pastoral . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . What is Pastoral? - Myths, Motifs, Origins . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Pan and the Original Arcadians . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Two Kinds of Arcadia . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Pastoral as Social Praise and Implicit Critique . . . . . . . . . . . . . Pastoral Nature and the Nature of Pastoral . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Pastoral’s Dialectics and Dichotomies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Relative Nature of Pastoral . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Towards a Contemporary Pastoral in Andrew Marvell’s “The Garden” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Otherwhile and Elsewhere: Pastoral Space and Time . . . . . . . Virgil’s Arcadia and the Golden Age . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Pastoral and Nostalgia . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Et in Arcadia Ego: Pastoral Death, Elegy, and Memory . . . . . . Pastoral, Post-/ Modernism, and the Works of John Banville . Pastoral and Post-/ modernism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Post-/ Modernism, Nostalgia, and Identity Discourse . . . . . . . . Towards a Post-/ Modern Pastoral: John Banville’s Narrative Identities . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Always Already Identity: Pastoral, Self, and Narrative . . . . . . . . . . . The Book of Evidence: In Search of a Grand Narrative (as) Identity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Pastoral, Self, and Narrative Identity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Morality and Identity in The Book of Evidence . . . . . . . . . . . . . Grand Narratives, Grand Identities . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . <?page no="6"?> 3.2 77 77 82 86 3.3 94 94 97 101 IV 108 4.1 108 108 116 125 4.2 131 131 141 146 4.3 160 160 171 5 182 6 193 6.1 193 6.2 195 6.3 202 7 214 223 Ghosts: Pastoral Retreat, Postmodern Return . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ‘I Have Embarked for the Golden World’ . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ‘That Particular Shade of Green’ . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Freddie’s Ghosts of Focalisation and Fiction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Art, Arcadia and Athena . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . A Search for Authenticity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Art as Arcadia . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Art as Atonement . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Always Already Elsewhere: Mapping Arcadia in Memory and Mind From Birchwood to The Newton Letter: Banville’s Post-/ Modern Pastoral Elegies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Memory, Narrative, and Identity in Theory . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Birchwood: The Big House as Pastoral Space . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ‘A Time out of Time’: The Newton Letter as Counter-Memorial Pastoral . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ‘Possessed of a Past’: Pastoral, Identity, and Memory in Eclipse, The Sea and Conversation in the Mountains . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Past as Pastoral in Eclipse and The Sea . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Avatars of Memory . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Between Trauma and Nostalgia in Conversation in the Mountains . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Et in Arcadia Ego: Death in Arcadia, Death in Banville . . . . . . Death, Love, and (Im)mortality in The Sea and The Infinities . ‘A Tune Beyond us, yet Ourselves’: John Banville’s Man with The Blue Guitar . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Conclusions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Bibliography . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Primary Works . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Secondary Works about Banville . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Other Secondary Works . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Appendix . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . List of Figures . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6 Contents <?page no="7"?> On sharkskin legs, the lamb gambles with our gullibility, floating in formaldehyde, fleecing us for all its worth. Brassed off, the art historian turns away. Rustic simplicity parodied in woolly counterpoint has no place on his Earth. Ilissos, wrapped in thought; the child, the artist, all recoil: Arcadia must have its tomb; Pan died here. We seek the thrust, extrapolate: what words are running through each oil-fired head? Right now the paint speaks best, for voicing sheer disgust. — Elizabeth Kay <?page no="8"?> Index of Abbreviations BW Birchwood (1973) NL The Newton Letter (1982) BoE The Book of Evidence (1989) G Ghosts (1993) A Athena (1995) U The Untouchable (1997) E Eclipse (2000) S The Sea (2005) CitM Conversation in the Mountains (2008) I The Infinities (2009) BG The Blue Guitar (2015) <?page no="9"?> 1 Introduction No other literature is so botanical as English, so seeded with delight and melancholy in the seasons. […] Boundless as its empire be‐ came, England remained an island, a man‐ ageable garden to its poets, every one of whom is a pastoralist. — Derek Walcott, “The Garden Path” This study is driven by the dialectic of two paradoxical truths: first, that “Arcadia has always been a pretty lie” (Schama, Landscape and Memory 297), and second, that despite this, the pastoral mode has always been relevant. Indeed, pastoral acquaints literature with strange bedfellows; it is “a piece of cultural equipment that, for more than two millennia, Western thought and literature has been un‐ able to do without” (Buell, Environmental Imagination 32). Texts as different in design and concern as Virgil’s Eclogues, Shakespeare’s As You Like It or John Banville’s Ghosts are taken in by its generic embrace. Each has a sort of pastor‐ alism in common: Virgil’s poems stand as a timeless testimony to Leo Marx’s aphorism “No shepherd, no pastoral” (The Machine in the Garden 45); As You Like It is a classic instance of Renaissance pastoral drama, and Ghosts attempts no less a task than to rewrite the perennial human aspiration for a ‘golden world’ as a poetically imagined if distinctly postmodern Arcadia. To place side by side Virgil’s poems, Shakespeare’s play and Banville’s novel is also to admit that pastoral is neither a genre, nor formally restricted to its traditional beginnings in which, as deriving from early Greek and Roman poetry set in an idealised bucolic landscape, shepherds declaim pentameters about work, love and the world. Seamus Heaney, arguably one of Ireland’s foremost Twentieth-century pas‐ toralists, celebrates the mode’s astonishing staying power and flexibility in his “Eclogues in Extremis”: “What keeps a literary kind viable,” Heaney declares, “is its ability to measure up to the challenges offered by new historical circum‐ stances, and pastoral has been confronted with this challenge from very early on” (“Eclogues in Extremis” 2). Similarly, Hans-Ulrich Seeber ascribes pastoral’s continued presence in literature to its semantic versatility: “The pastoral idyll is conditioned by great semantic potential and ambivalence; its structure is re‐ markably adaptable and can be used for many different purposes” (Idylle und Modernisierung [Idylls and Modernisation] 10, translation my own). One could argue at this point, albeit with a certain amount of world-weariness, that anyone <?page no="10"?> who has attempted to write the literary history of the pastoral mode may as well have attempted to write a history of English-language literature. Nevertheless, too much by way of pioneering insight and analysis would be lost without such pastoral devotees as William Empson, Peter Marinelli, John Alpers and Terry Gifford, to name but a few. It is also due to their thorough contributions that the pastoral has been experiencing somewhat of a renaissance today, for the mode has returned to contemporary fictions, and returned with a vengeance: [T]he modernization and rationalization of modern Western societies has initiated a revival of primitivist and mythical configurations in literature, art and film. Therefore, a massive return of idyllic motifs and themes can be observed, albeit in transforma‐ tions, permutations and subversions. (Heiler, “Transformations of the Pastoral” 331) Pastoralists abound, among present-day authors and critics alike. This revival of the mode in contemporary literature should not be deemed as a “primitivist,” sentimental regression, however, but as a progressive diversification of the mode into a cornucopia of new writings, readings and interpretations. Consequently, the return of the pastoral mode may be viewed as the expression of a broader phenomenon, namely that of a growing need for reorientation in the literary landscapes of the modern and the postmodern, where all is blurred, borderland, and where even such fundamental categories as time and space are falling prey to relentless scrutiny and interrogation. Pastoral as Identity Discourse Pastoral is a mode used to question the complex relation between self, the other(s) and our place in the world, whether in political, socio-cultural or his‐ torical contexts. Thus, it is always already identity discourse. Though the precise nature of this impulse changes continually, pastoral represents social orders in complex, carefully constructed ways, “providing an imagined ideal as an outlet for fantasy onto which a society’s ideals can be projected, but also subtly har‐ monising and enabling social processes” (Hess, “Postmodern Pastoral” 75). Though Virgil modelled his Eclogues on Theocritus’ Idylls, for example, he in‐ troduced political turmoil largely absent from the latter. There runs an eviction theme through the first part of the Eclogues, for example, that evokes the pastoral as a poetics of resistance against the big land confiscations organised in order to resettle Julius Caesar’s legionaries after the civil war with Pompey, and to which Virgil’s family also fell victim (Heaney, “Eclogues in Extremis” 3). The title Eclogues, moreover, can be translated variously as “selections” or “reck‐ oning.” Shakespeare’s Forest of Arden, likewise, is a space both concurrent with and contrary to the historical pastoral conventions of the time. It is at once an 10 1 Introduction <?page no="11"?> 1 I henceforth use the spelling post-/ modern to refer simultaneously to modernist and postmodernist theory, culture and literature. idyll removed from the realities of the court and a testing ground for previously accepted social codes of proper comportment and human interaction. Thus using the flexibility of the pastoral mode as both an ‘enabler of social processes’ and a poetics of resistance, Virgil’s Eclogues and Shakespeare’s As You Like It hold up a mirror to the political power relations and to the cultural conventions of their age. Pastoral becomes a particularly interesting mode for identity discourse in post-/ modern and contemporary literature. 1 To construct a story or a narrative in such contexts after all, is to transform language into a landscape of Lacanian lacunae, to labour endlessly in Baudrillard’s labyrinths of self-referentiality or to focus like Foucault, on ‘technologies of self ’ and on heterotopias of crisis, deviance, and disorientation. Thus “[i]t can sometimes happen,” Brian Friel warns in Translations (1980), “that a civilization becomes imprisoned in a lin‐ guistic contour that no longer matches the landscape of […] fact” (43). A renewed search in literature for Arcadia is not surprising in the light of such overbearing cultural abstraction and literary theorization: pastoral offers an aesthetic re‐ sponse to a prevailing mood of discontent and disorientation. The bucolic back‐ drop, moreover, can function as an idyllic escape from the ever-increasing com‐ plexities and differentiations of the postmodern condition. Placed side by side, the terms pastoral and the postmodern do indeed evoke a fundamental paradox. After all, the pastoral is a literary form with a long historical tradition as “a landscape of the human spirit, where love, history, politics, religion, work, poetry, and power converge and live” (Okri, In Arcadia 207). As for postmodernism, it can be summarised as the liberation movement of a Western culture that mistrusts the inherited metanarratives and overarching mythologies that once structured human interaction and comportment (Wor‐ thington, Self as Narrative 2), and pastoral must, to an extent, be regarded as such a metanarrative. On second thoughts - and this acknowledgement is quin‐ tessential to understanding this study’s approach - pastoral should be consid‐ ered a far broader term, one that moves beyond specific literary forms, recurrent throughout literary history, encompassing many areas of content, including the postmodern. To put it differently, the pastoral mode and the postmodern mood are consi‐ lient on several levels. Firstly, pastoral can in many ways be seen as a defining precursor, or at least harbinger, of post-/ modern self-reflexivity and metafiction. “As a mode of writing,” Heaney reminds us, “the pastoral requires at least a 11 1 Introduction <?page no="12"?> minimal awareness of tradition on the part of both the poet and the audience” (“Eclogues in Extremis” 1). On the one hand, the mode is all literariness, all al‐ legory and illusion; it is an escapist “discourse of retreat” from the various com‐ plexities, problems and tensions of reality (Gifford, Pastoral 46). If pastoral “is concerned with appearance,” on the other hand, “that is only because it wants to show up or to get behind other appearances” (Heaney 4). Thus, Virgil’s Ec‐ logues can be read as much as a celebration of the bucolic viva contemplativa as a cultural critique of the social and political passivity of the Roman zeitgeist. As You Like It may be said to pioneer the development of the pastoral from a pre‐ viously conventional literature about natural beauty and timeless harmony, ac‐ cordingly, to a self-reflexive mode critical of the self-same elements that con‐ stitute its own literariness. John Banville’s novels and fiction, in particular, use the pastoral as a kaleidoscopic lens through which the postmodern formation of a narcissistic personality and identity can be read (and re-read) in a mode designed to construct - and simultaneously deconstruct - an Arcadian land‐ scape contoured by the nature of language, identities in crisis, and narrativity. Second, and to reiterate, the pastoral mode offers postmodern writers a ple‐ thora of constructs and contexts for identity discourse. As previously stated, political, cultural and social questions of identity are inherent to many writings within the mode. Twentieth-century pastoralists, however, are much more con‐ cerned with constructing a ‘secularised pastoral’ in survey of such concepts as the self, other and identity. Indeed, pastoral and postmodernism both facilitated the rise to supremacy of the self as a nucleus inherent to all narrative, fiction and literature. Postmodern texts celebrate the formation of a narcissistic self, yet at the same time the postmodernist author also feels duty-bound to question, test and subvert the authenticity of such a self. The “narcissistic self, is, above all, uncertain of its own outlines, longing either to remake the world in its own image or to merge into its environment in blissful union” (Lasch, The Minimal Self 19). Similarly, the pastoral of post-/ modern fiction can function as a narcis‐ sistic retreat into counterworlds, as a quasi-paradise of the mind and the imag‐ ination where an Arcadian landscape is constructed as an artifice in order to “escape” from the complexities that appear to be governing current modes of thinking and being. It can, however, also be used to explore and gain insight into the complex maps, topographies, and countless other scapes that make up one’s atlas of self, others, and the world. A considerable body of recent and contemporary literature provides ample evidence of a postmodern pastoral. Where some writers have been directly in‐ spired by the mode - Tom Stoppard, Ben Okri and Jim Crace are three of the better known examples - others, such as Ireland’s foremost living author, John 12 1 Introduction <?page no="13"?> 2 I am referring to Jim Crace’s Arcadia (1992), Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia (1993) and Ben Okri’s In Arcadia (2002). Banville, harness the mode’s potential in more subtle and complex ways. In contrast to Stoppard, Okri or Crace, each of whom has published an Arcadia to call their own, it may at first glance be difficult to see how the bucolic tradition, established in classical culture by the Idylls of Theocritus and Virgil’s Eclogues is cogent for John Banville’s fiction. 2 Yet, I contend that the pastoral mode and the postmodern come together, in his later writing especially, as a canon of identity discourse, where one voice explores such post-/ modern perennials as the question of self and authenticity in relation the other, and another voice pastoralizes the attendant findings into a quest that leads through the narrator’s eye, constructing fictional counterworlds and idylls, ever vulnerable to a human condition in purgatory between modern doubt and postmodern disingenuous‐ ness. Always Already Elsewhere Lastly, pastoral is always already set in the past, bereft of reality and imbued with nostalgia; the mode, then, is always already elsewhere. It is difficult if not futile to argue against pastoral as a construct of nostalgia and retreat; the ide‐ alised countryside of the pastoral text is, after all, an Arcadia that uses language to create a world different from what is perceived to be real. This retreat, how‐ ever, may function simply as an escape from the complexities of urban life, so‐ ciety, and even the reality of the present, or it may be used as a means of ex‐ ploration (Gifford, Pastoral 46). Similarly, nostalgia is not simply a feeling that urges one to look back at void, an absence of something or someone, an else‐ where or an-other. More than a feeling, rather, nostalgia is an impulse, a thrust that involves an act, and what nostalgia acts out, or causes to be enacted, is nostos, the act of return. This desire to return home, moreover, is brought about by algos, or extreme pain, grief, and distress (Boym, The Future of Nostalgia xiii). Nostalgia, then, as a literary device saturated in the pain of longing and the attendant (re-)enactment of nostos, is driven towards a point of origin, situated both in a space and a time where the protagonist used to be. Pastoral also always points to something that is elsewhere, at a condition of absence that comes into being in its narrative landscapes, in the lacunae of the resultant crises of identity, and in the architectonics of Arcadia. Nostalgia thus also conditions pastoral with a subtext of crisis, a crisis of identity, authenticity, and narrative. In pastoral narratives, the longing for what one no longer has becomes a question of be‐ longing, a quest-like return to what one used to ‘be.’ Post-/ modern iterations of 13 1 Introduction <?page no="14"?> the pastoral mode thus often turn this self-same quest onto its head and in‐ side-out, resulting in a text where the enactment of return, and the desire for a self one thought one used to be, is itself questioned and emplotted into the nar‐ rative. To re-iterate, questions of time, place and identity all meld in pastoral to create versions of the mode so versatile that it continues to influence and provide impulses for fictions today. No contemporary author demonstrates this more iconically than John Banville. He is seen in equal terms as an old-fashioned modernist and a newfangled postmodernist (McNamee, A Postmodern Spiritu‐ ality ii)as much “a man with nothing to say” as an author with “too much to write” (Kenny, John Banville 37). Banville’s oeuvre wavers indecisively between modernism and postmodernism; his fiction embodies the viewpoint that “the anxiety of contamination in modernism is concerned with preserving the in‐ tegrity of the autonomous art work so that it can conceptually counterbalance the potential senselessness and chaos of our world” (Kenny, John Banville 17). In many ways, all this makes Banville a present-day pastoralist, for pastoral too has survived as an autonomous mode that spotlights the significance of the construction of an aesthetic literary form, even when it is deemed equally im‐ portant that the stability of such constructions be called into queston (and often within the same body of writing). Pastoral, albeit in its various post-/ modern transformations, is well suited to John Banville’s works because both author and mode are prone to query their (meta-)narrative constructions in a self-conscious discourse that swings back and forth between pastoral regression and post-/ modern reflexion. Freddie Montgomery, Alexander Cleave, Max Morden, Gabriel Godkin, Adam Godley and Oliver Orme: Banville’s protagonists are all “possessed of a past” (Bell, A Banville Reader 3) which they paint in the post-card colours of a post‐ modern pastoral. Variously as writers, historians, actors, mathematicians, lit‐ erary critics, con-artists, criminals and spies, they are all characters in search of a grand narrative with which they can impose some sense and meaning onto the world. Their obsession with the past is only matched by their fixation on memory: “all thinking is in a sense remembering” (Birchwood 11). To remember, in this sense, is to try to return to one’s past its constitutive elements in order to stabilize one’s sense of self in a crisis-ridden and conflicted now. Thus, Ban‐ ville’s novels transform the pastoral mode from a vehicle of socio-cultural, public identity discourse to one that encompasses the private process of re-identifica‐ tion located in the individual subject as a result of continuous interpellation. In doing so, the Irish author shows that identity discourse can build a bridge of consilience between postmodern literature and a seemingly outdated, irrelevant 14 1 Introduction <?page no="15"?> mode - between two seemingly paradoxical cultural tools that have shaped countless literary and cultural texts. As a result, the pastoral mode has greatly enriched and diversified the postmodern survey of the processes of identity for‐ mation, deconstruction and reification. Although not applicable to reading all of Banville’s works, the pastoral mode opens new vistas of analysis for his central concerns, namely the collaboration of ethics and aesthetics in art and the topography of the mind as subject to the literary concomitance of narrative, imagination, and memory. In contrast to traditional forms, Banville’s pastoral contexts manifest themselves more within than without, be it in the construction of imaginative otherworlds and idylls, or as narrative meditations on the power games of fiction, reality, and illusion. This narrative thrust of Banville’s fictions is elegantly mirrored and summarised in St. Augustine’s elaborations on the soul’s turn inward to discover external truths: “ab exterioribus ad interiora, ab inferioribus ad superiora [from the outer to the inner, from the lower to the higher]” (Augustinus, Enarrationes in Psalmos, XL , p. 2108). Ultimately, Banville’s protagonists often harbour an Ar‐ cadia of the unconscious conditioned by a subtext of childhood nostalgia and a desire to return to a state of innocence. Brought to the surface by a moment of crisis, the attendant process of narrative emplotment results in a pastoral retreat, sojourn and return, in search of a higher, metanarrative or truth. Banville’s re‐ sultant fictions explore, subvert, and transform the pastoral mode into an am‐ biguous landscape and a quest for a stable self-identity. Finally, I would like to cite Harold Toliver’s Pastoral Forms and Attitudes (1984): “Whether or not the texts examined here need all be considered ‘pastoral’ is not as important as our discovering something in them through this lens that would be less noticeable through another” (vii). While the classification of Ban‐ ville as a pastoralist, accordingly, is by no means a straightforward endeavour, it is not the aim of this study to examine his works as pastoral in an overdeter‐ mined and exhaustive fashion. I do not wish to cast the net of this study too wide, in other words, only to discover that not all in it is fish. Thus, I exclude from my survey Banville’s first novel Nightspawn (1971), his foray into short stories, Long Lankin (1970), the novels The Untouchable (2000) and Shroud (2002), most of his plays as well as his novel Ancient Light (2013). 15 1 Introduction <?page no="16"?> II Always Pastoral: The Architectonics of Arcadia The woods of Arcady are dead, And over is their antique joy; Of old the world on dreaming fed; Grey Truth is now her painted toy; Yet still she turns her restless head: But O, sick children of the world, Of all the many changing things In dreary dancing past us whirled, To the cracked tune that Chronos sings Words alone are certain good. — W. B. Yeats 2.1 What is Pastoral? - Problems of Definition The best actors in the world, either for tragedy, comedy, history, pastoral, pas‐ toral-comical, historical-pastoral, trag‐ ical-historical, tragical-comical-histor‐ ical-pastoral, scene individable, or poem unlimited. — William Shakespeare, Hamlet 2.2.333-336 It is not what pastoral is that should matter to us. On that, agreement is impossible[.] — Annabel Patterson, Pastoral and Ideology Pastoral is a problematic poetic. There are, it seems, as many versions of pastoral as there are scholars writing about it. Historically, pastoral has hardly been al‐ lowed to settle, provoking relentless and considerable debate among critics and practitioners alike. For Shakespeare, pastoral was either “scene individable or poem unlimited” (Hamlet 2.2.336); the bard aptly uses the mode to intensify the catalogue of absurd categories employed by Polonius in his attempt to sell the newly arrived actors to the Danish prince. Alexander Pope, perhaps eager to outdo Polonius, posits pastoral as a paradox: “There are not, I believe, a greater number of any sort of verses than of those which are called Pastoral, nor a <?page no="17"?> smaller, than of those which are truly so” (“Pastorals” 32). The paradox has con‐ tinued well into the twentieth century, as has pastoral, proving an insistent and versatile form, ready to respond to shifts in culture and ideology to ensure its survival. Pastoral, it appears, cannot be made concrete; versatility and a tenacious pro‐ pensity to remain relevant are its hallmarks. Especially in its early form, as deriving from Greek and Roman poetry of shepherds declaiming pentameters about work, love and the world, modern critics have attributed a happy confu‐ sion of definitions to pastoral. Accordingly, pastoral “is a double longing after innocence and happiness” (Poggioli, The Oaten Flute 1); it is based on the phil‐ osophical antithesis of art and nature (Kermode, English Pastoral Poetry 37; Marx, The Machine in the Garden 35) and has been drawn upon in the founding of ecocriticism (Garrad, Ecocriticism 37). Its universal idea is the golden age (Greg, Pastoral Poetry 5), and thus it also engenders hostility to urban life (Williams, The Country and the City 5), wherefore it additionally expresses the ideal of otium, or, alternatively, of the philosophical vita contemplativa (Bernard, The Pastoral Epistles 10). Even in the most recent studies of pastoral, the mode has at once been reduced to “three kinds” and expanded to include a “post-pastoral”, an “urban pastoral” and an “anti-pastoral” (Gifford, Pastoral 2000). Definitions of pastoral have become so heterogenous that one scholar concludes, after a painstaking survey: Critics are justifiably unsure whether to locate the identity of pastoral in certain en‐ during literary norms and conventions, or in a specific (if perennial) subject, or in some continuity of feeling, attitude, “philosophical conception,” or mode of con‐ sciousness which informs the literary imagination but originates outside it. (Halperin, Before Pastoral 76) Halperin touches on a key problem: we cannot hope to adequately define the pastoral if there is no consensus on either a unified terminology, or on how it affects and is effected by literature. Critics have variously called pastoral a his‐ torical tradition or literary ideal (Poggioli, Oaten Flute), a genre and ideology (Patterson, Pastoral and Ideology 1987), then a mode (Loughrey, The Pastoral Mode; Alpers, What is Pastoral? ; Gifford, Pastoral), and finally, a literary trope (Garrard, Ecocriticism 2012). And yet pastoral has imbued literature and texts of all kinds for over two millennia, including the poetic Idylls of Theocritus, Shake‐ speare’s pastoral dramas, and John Banville’s post-/ modern fictions. 17 2.1 What is Pastoral? - Problems of Definition <?page no="18"?> The Pastoral of Form, Genre and Mode To place side by side Theocritus’ poems, Shakespeare’s plays and Banville’s novels is also to admit that pastoral is neither a genre, nor formally restricted to its traditional beginnings. It is perhaps more fruitful to consider pastoral nei‐ ther as a historical form nor as a literary genre, but as a mode that sheds light on the very same discourse threatening to eclipse it. Such a shift of the pastoral, away from an oversimple yet overreaching attempt at definition, to a critically informed and consistent terminology, presupposes two steps. First, pastoral needs to put at a distance its historical definition based exclusively on form, genre or literary ideals, and move towards a definition based on what it can do as a mode. Second, it is vital to develop a coherent terminology in order to close the gap between the pastoral mode and contemporary literature, and thereby to develop a new chapter of criticism and analysis that uses the pastoral mode as a lens through which to view post-/ modern fictions. Let us first move away from pastoral as a genre. Presently, genre is often conceived as a “more or less arbitrary form of classification, whose justification is [its] convenience in discussing literatures” (Abrams, A Glossary 116). Some critics, in an attempt to provide a more crisp and tangible definition of the term, have applied Ludwig Wittgenstein’s concept of ‘family resemblances’ to genre instead. The generically grouped family of works constitutive of genre, that is, share no essential defining features, but only a family of resemblances. Each member, moreover, “shares some of these resemblances with some, but not all, of the other members of the genre” (Ginzburg, “Family Resemblances” 541). Therefore, if genre is to be defined by a set of formal relationships and structural principles that govern a taxonomy of literary kinds based on certain combina‐ tions of narratives and their attendant tonalities, pastoral is not a genre in the sense that comedy and tragedy have been so classified. Pastoral, after all, can hold together tragedy, comedy and many other typical genres, and it does so without resorting exclusively to a family of forms and resemblances. Faced with these pressing difficulties, critics such as Northrop Frye have come close to abandoning the concept of genre altogether. His Anatomy of Criticism (1957) talks mostly of modes instead, arguing that genre is at its most useful when highlighting affinities that might otherwise go unnoticed (245). To comb through the Anatomy for a viable definition of mode is to search in vain, how‐ ever, as even Frye’s glossary entry struggles to satisfy: “A conventional power of action assumed about the chief characters in fictional literature, or the cor‐ responding attitude assumed by the poet toward the audience in thematic lit‐ erature” (333). Frye’s scheme of five “thematic modes” (49) convinces nonethe‐ less through his extensive use of examples. As Paul Alpers points out in “Mode 18 II Always Pastoral: The Architectonics of Arcadia <?page no="19"?> 1 See also: Le Corbusier. 1954. The Modulor: A Harmonious Measure to the Human Scale, Universally Applicable to Architecture and Mechanics. Basel and Boston, 2004. in Narrative Poetry,” Frye never elucidates his reasons for using the term, how‐ ever (27). Alpers reiterates this criticism in What is Pastoral? (1997) and points out that though the term is in ordinary use today, it remains ordinarily undefined. He proposes a more precise definition of mode that simultaneously corrects Frye’s formalist separation of mythos (plot) and dianoia (thought). In addition, Alpers argues that the acts of the audience are an enhancing dynamic that cannot be left out: [M]ode is the literary manifestation, in a given work, not of its attitudes in a loose sense, but of its assumptions about man’s nature and situation. This definition in turn provides a critical question we implicitly put to any work we interpret: what notions of human strength, possibilities, pleasures, dilemmas, etc. are manifested in the rep‐ resented realities and the emphases, devices, organisation, effects, etc. of this work? (Alpers, What is Pastoral? 50) Given the difficulties with pastoral, its tendency that is, to appear in many lit‐ erary kinds and still be called something ‘pastoral,’ Alpers’ definition spotlights an interplay among the various elements of a work that is essential to its unity, regardless of the specificities of the kind. Alpers is not the first, however, to highlight how mode interacts with genre, a point that remains to be clarified in order to better understand the nature of pastoral. We must therefore turn to the essays of Angus Fletcher and Alastair Fowler. Angus Fletcher achieves what Frye did not, namely a justification for the latter’s use of modes as categories. Frye’s use of the term in his scheme of five thematic modes “is appropriate,” Fletcher argues, “because in each of the five the hero is a protagonist with a given strength relative to his world, and as such each hero […] is a modulor for verbal architectonics; man is the measure, the modus of myth” (“Utopian History and the Anatomy of Criticism” 34-5). Fletch‐ er’s sublime “verbal architectonics” have equally subliminal implications for pastoral as a mode. If a mode manifests itself in the protagonists as something ‘modulor,’ it turns itself, quintessentially, into something highly flexible and personal, and as such suddenly becomes reconcilable with all texts and litera‐ tures. The modulor, as developed by Le Corbusier, functions as a visual bridge between two incompatible scales, t150 he imperial and the metric system. 1 Accordingly, Fowler uses the modulor as a metaphor to show how modes can function like the modulor, capable of 19 2.1 What is Pastoral? - Problems of Definition <?page no="20"?> building a literary bridge between seemingly incompatible literary genres, ideologies and forms. Though structurally dependent on many literary kinds, Fowler argues that the mode is simultaneously “able to enter into new com‐ mixtures and to continue in combination with kinds still evolving” (Fowler, Kinds of Literature 167). Indeed, one could extend Fowler’s argument to the pas‐ toral mode, and I would like to argue that, in order to develop a new, flexible, yet reliable definition of the pastoral mode, it is particularly fitting (and neces‐ sary) to view it as a modulor. The true value of the pastoral mode for contem‐ porary and post-/ modern literature is precisely in this modulor quality, which consists in its ability to break old moulds, and to do something new with estab‐ lished conventions and forms of expression. In the light of this adaptability, we can convincingly speak of pastoral as a mode without having to exclude texts or literature it effects or is affected by. As Annabel Patterson argues with a certain prescience in Pastoral and Ideology (1987): It is not what pastoral is that should matter to us. On that, agreement is impossible, and its discussion inevitably leads to the narrowing strictures of normative criticism, statements of what constitutes the “genuine” or the “true” to the exclusion of exem‐ plars that the critic regards as “perverse.” What can be described and, at least in terms of coverage, with some neutrality, is what pastoral since Virgil can do and has always done; or rather, to put the agency back where it belongs - how writers, artists, and intellectuals of all persuasions have used pastoral for a range of functions and inten‐ tions that the Eclogues first articulated. (Patterson 7) More than as a mode, we can dwell on pastoral as a new-found modulor for contemporary and post-/ modern literature itself. Just as Le Corbusier introduced the mathematical modulor as a scale of visual measures that would unite two virtually incompatible systems - the Anglo-Saxon foot and inch and the French Metric system - I would like to propose that the pastoral mode possesses qual‐ ities that enable it to function as a literary modulor, and whereby it can build a bridge of compatibility between the seemingly old-fashioned, outdated version of itself, and postmodern, contemporary fictions. After all, a consistent vocabu‐ lary should form the basis of any definition; as Kenneth Burke argues in A Grammar of Motives, we seek for vocabularies that will be faithful reflections of reality. To this end, they must develop vocabularies that are selections of reality. And any selection of reality must, in certain circumstances, function as a deflection of reality. Insofar as the vocabulary meets the needs of reflection, we can say that it has the necessary scope. In its selec‐ tivity, it is a reduction. Its scope and reduction become a deflection when the given 20 II Always Pastoral: The Architectonics of Arcadia <?page no="21"?> terminology, or calculus, is not suited to the subject matter which it is designed to calculate. (A Grammar of Motives 59) Burke’s argument that any vocabulary, “in its selectivity […] is a reduction” is uncanny in its prescience of William Empson’s iconic definition of pastoral as a “process of putting the complex into the simple” (Some Versions of Pastoral 22). Consequently, it helps to view the pastoral mode itself as a vocabulary ‘sought by men’ as a ‘selection of reality,’ which, “in certain circumstances” - discussed in considerable detail in further sections of this study - “function[s] as a deflection of reality.” The scope of this pastoral ‘vocabulary,’ moreover, has continually widened at crucial literary turns and cultural moments when “the given terminology” was deemed unsuitable to the subject matter which the mode was “designed to calculate.” The Many Uses of Pastoral Beyond the discussion of pastoral as a mode, problems of definition have also arisen because the term requires a thorough disambiguation from its many uses, both within the historical scope of the last two millennia, and the various literary and cultural productions indebted to it. In this vein, Terry Gifford sets a con‐ vincing precedent, distinguishing between “three kinds of pastoral” (Pastoral 1-12). There is, first of all, pastoral as a historical form, with a long-standing tradition in poetry that can be traced back to the Idylls of Theocritus: [T]o refer to ‘pastoral’ up to about 1610 was to refer to poems or dramas of a specific formal type in which supposed shepherds spoke to each other, usually in pentameter verse, about their work or their loves, with (mostly) idealised descriptions of their countryside. […] For the reader or audience, this literary device involved some form of retreat and return, the fundamental pastoral movement, either within the text, or in the sense that pastoral retreat ‘returned’ some insights relevant to the urban audi‐ ence. (Gifford, Pastoral 1) Gifford refers to this first kind of pastoral as “a historical form”; his second type of pastoral goes “beyond the artifice of a specific literary form” and uses ‘pas‐ toral’ in a much broader sense “to refer to an area of content” (Pastoral 2). Pas‐ toral now encompasses “any literature that describes the country with an im‐ plicit contrast to the urban” (2). The third kind of pastoral moves away from the second’s “simple celebration of nature” towards a “sceptical use of the term - ‘pastoral’ as pejorative, implying that the pastoral vision is too simplified and thus an idealisation of the reality of life in the country” (2). In the briefest of summaries, the first kind of pastoral is “a historical form” mired in myth and 21 2.1 What is Pastoral? - Problems of Definition <?page no="22"?> poetic tradition; the second kind revolves around dichotomies and tensions, es‐ pecially between the urban and the rural, and the third kind of pastoral has become a vehicle for the criticism of the comforts and complacences put forth and celebrated by the first two. While there is an undeniable elegance to Gifford’s ‘three kinds of pastoral,’ he glosses somewhat quickly over these definitions, and the inner workings of his differentiations are not altogether as self-explanatory as the first chapter implies. Indeed, his separation of the pastoral into ‘three kinds’ soon reveals itself to be somewhat arbitrary, as any and all texts and literatures can exhibit any and all of these three kinds of the mode. The consequent sections of his Pastoral, “Constructions of Arcadia”, “The Discourse of Retreat” and “The Cul‐ tural Contexts of Return” focus heavily on retreat and return - “the fundamental pastoral movement” (Pastoral 1), and though pastoral tendencies are easily iden‐ tified by treating the sojourn as the main dynamic, the myths, motifs and critical attitudes that modulate the mode are only implicitly woven into Gifford’s fabric of definitions. Crucially, Gifford’s attempts at defining contemporary pastoral fall short; his section on ‘post-pastoral’ focuses too heavily on twentieth-century ecocriticism and the various parallels it exhibits with the mode. Other discourses heavily linked to contemporary pastorals - of identity, time, memory, nostalgia, postmodernism and parody, to name a few - are neglected in favour of ecocrit‐ ical and environmental concerns. Gifford’s achievement, nevertheless, is in the way his Pastoral is very different from Peter Marinelli’s Pastoral (1971), written for the first series of The Critical Idiom. Whereas Marinelli asserts that “all post-Arcadian pastoral is pastoral that has usurped a name,” and that even the “very private Arcadia created by a modern author or discovered by a modern critic really looks back to the original one as the source,” (Marinelli, Pastoral 3) Gifford pleads for an expansion of the “disciplinary boundaries” of pastoral criticism (Gifford, Pastoral 147). Where Marinelli “is devoted largely to the complexities of the older pastoral” (Marinelli, Pastoral 3), Gifford seeks to do justice to the protean nature of the mode by including cultural studies and “modern ecological perspectives,” (Gifford, Pas‐ toral 4) such as those articulated in the works of Laurence Buell, a leading ex‐ ponent of ecocriticism. This approach, Gifford argues, entails both a re-situating of pastoral within a larger field of criticism, in this case the emerging field of ecocriticism, and “a reversal of focus in the elements of the pastoral” (Gifford, Pastoral 148). His imperative, ultimately, is to endow pastoral with a new term, one “that is aware of the anti-pastoral and of the conventional illusions upon which Arcadia is premised, but which finds a language to outflank those dangers with a vision of accommodated humans, at home in the very world they thought 22 II Always Pastoral: The Architectonics of Arcadia <?page no="23"?> 2 The six qualities that Gifford identifies are: “an awe in attention to the natural world; […] the recognition of a creative-destructive universe equally in balance in a continuous momentum of birth and death, death and rebirth, growth and decay, ecstasy and dis‐ solution; […] the recognition […] that our inner human nature can be understood in relation to external nature; […] an awareness of both nature as culture and of culture as nature; […] that with consciousness comes conscience; […] the ecofeminists’ reali‐ sation that the exploitation of the planet is of the same mind set as the exploitation of women and minorities” (Pastoral 152-153, 156, 160, 164-165). Gifford exemplifies these six qualities of post-pastoral by way of an inclusive analysis of Hughes’ ‘Cave Birds’ (1978), describing it as “perhaps the major achievement of contemporary post-pastoral to date” (Pastoral 171). themselves alienated from by their possession of language” (Gifford, Pastoral 149). Gifford’s search for a new term culminates in a chapter on “post-pastoral”, a neologism he coins and reifies, at least in part, with his own research. Though his endeavour is ambitious and his examples somewhat recherché, the chapter is meticulously researched. His aim: “rather than to make firm definitive dis‐ tinctions,” he desires to show “how much these strands [i.e. the ‘three kinds of pastoral’] can overlap” (Pastoral 146). Overall, he acts on this imperative con‐ vincingly. The term ‘post-pastoral’ he defines by six qualities, for example, each of which he illustrates with reference to a work of literature or poem. 2 These qualities, he adds, will not all be present in every post-pastoral text (Pastoral 169), which in turn begs the question, how many, then, must a text exhibit to qualify as ‘post-pastoral’? Gifford, in an attempt to pre-empt such and similar reservations, cautions that his explication of the post-pastoral is an inevitably crude simplification, as its six defining qualities can be expanded and reduced in number (Gifford, Pastoral 170). Nonetheless, he remains inconclusive as to how the notion of post-pastoral, by now a seemingly all-inclusive ‘complex pastoral’ (Pastoral 172), can justify itself on the threshold of postmodernism, which has, as Gifford himself acknowledges, “blurred literary categories” and made “all literature borderland” (Pastoral 173). As Paul Alpers observes in his own study of pastoral, a “literary definition is revealing and useful […] not when it plants its banner everywhere, but when it is clear about what does and does not count as an example of the phenomenon in question” (Alpers, What is Pas‐ toral? ix). Furthermore, it is particularly hard to acknowledge these shortcomings when, reading on, one recognizes that, on the verge of a genuine breakthrough, Gifford is blinded by his adherence to ecocriticism. For he begins to connect the concerns towards which pastoral has been driven with those of postmodernist identity discourse, a connection at the very heart of this investigation too. He points for 23 2.1 What is Pastoral? - Problems of Definition <?page no="24"?> 3 This is particularly true of the narrow definitions of pastoral offered by J. C. Scaliger (Poetics Libri Septem [1594] - the pastoral is discussed in 1.4 and 5.5). As Rosenmeyer observes, “the quarrel between the camps of Rapin and Fontenelle […] helped to relax the canon” (Rosenmeyer, The Green Cabinet 5). this to Andrew Lawson, who argues that “a modern society of sundered selves”, that is to say the very tension between self and community, is what “modern pastoral is incapable, yet oddly prescient of.” This “philosophical pastoral”, Lawson continues, offers a “supreme modernist disenchantment” and “a sensual scepticism pending further illumination” (Lawson, “On Modern Pastoral” 41, qtd. in Gifford, Pastoral 173), and is thus consonant with the post-/ modernist tenet. Gifford dismisses Lawson’s arguments as soon as he has quoted them, however, because they “will not answer to an ecological crisis” and are remi‐ niscent of “modernist scepticism that is perilously close to ‘sentimental pas‐ toral’” (Pastoral 173). In his concluding paragraph Gifford talks of the “circle of postmodern mobi‐ lity” which informs a new and “necessary impulse towards retreat, renewal and return” (Pastoral 174). It is unfortunate, then, that he does not manage to close this circle. Lawson’s pioneering interrelation of the pastoral with the “sundered selves” of post-/ modern literature is deserving of more than such arrested de‐ velopment. If pursued instead of short-circuited to ecocriticism, it may just ex‐ pand the very same circle into a cornucopia of new criticism and analysis. Towards a New Definition of Pastoral Current pastoral criticism moves between two polarising principles: exclusion and inclusion. Some critics have operated primarily with the first, arguing for overly specific forms, themes or even moods of pastoral. 3 Elsewhere critics con‐ cede, for example, “that we will have a far truer idea of pastoral if we take its representative anecdote to be herdsmen and their lives, rather than landscape or idealized nature” (Alpers, What is Pastoral? 22). Such an approach of exclusion did not convince for long, however, as the most recent critics have opted for a more inclusive approach, either, as William Empson or Renato Poggioli, to ac‐ commodate a cornucopia of pastoral experiences and styles, or, as Terry Gifford or Greg Garrard, in order to make room for previously neglected or undervalued aspects of the mode. Although both approaches have produced fine studies of pastoral in their own right, the results are either too conventional, and ulti‐ mately unoriginal, or rely too ostentatiously on unusual literary examples in order that they might appear original. 24 II Always Pastoral: The Architectonics of Arcadia <?page no="25"?> 4 In the most recent criticism, pastoral has been subjected to a quietly comical, if bewil‐ dering range of designations, including “subversive pastoral” (Reid, “Idylls of Mascu‐ linity” 2010), “counterpastoral” (Pilar Blanco, “The Poetics of the Jungle” 2010), “enig‐ matical pastoral” (Tew, “Jim Crace’s Enigmatical Pastoral” 2010), “black pastoral” (Grene 2000) and “radical pastoral” (Newman 2011). 5 See also Nick Hubble’s “Intermodern Pastoral: William Empson and George Orwell” 2009, pp. 123-135 and Elise Martucci’s “‘How Real the Landscape Was’: Americana as Pastoral Critique” 2007, 31-48. As T. G. Rosenmeyer eloquently observes, “[t]radition, imitation, continuity of artistic purpose: these were the auspices under which the pastoral lyric was transmitted to the modern world” (The Green Cabinet 4). The pendulum appears to have swung the other way in recent pastoral criticism, towards a celebration of the obscure, marginalized strains of the mode. 4 Thus, it has become a bewil‐ dering task, for any scholar who desires investigate pastoral aspects in contem‐ porary literature, to establish and operate within a consistent and balanced def‐ inition without first retreating into the last two thousand years of pastoral criticism, only to return with yet another regurgitated chronology of the mode. My own retreat into pastoral criticism has shown that what makes pastoral so fascinatingly complex is the way certain aspects of the mode are expressed in literature only synchronically, while others return diachronically and mani‐ fest themselves in texts of all shapes and sizes. To talk of shepherds in pastoral after Thomas Hardy would be more than a little absurd, for example, but to exclude the shepherd from pastoral before the seventeenth century is equally impossible. And yet, transmutations of the shepherd, as a philosopher, as a fool, an artist, a clown, a recluse or even as a successful businessman in a mid-life crisis of identity can be traced from Shakespeare’s comedies to George Orwell’s Coming Up for Air (1939), Isabel Colegate’s A Pelican in the Wilderness (2002), or Don DeLillo’s decidedly postmodern Americana (1971). 5 Despite this conundrum of pastoral eclecticism, a selection of recurrent fea‐ tures of the mode can be made, as there are aspects of the mode that remain consistently valuable and relevant to literature throughout. Thus, it remains the task of this first section of the study to complement the most contemporary efforts of pastoral criticism with a definition that can reconcile the hitherto neglected aspects of the mode with contemporary texts and fictions. In a search for such consistency, I have already outlined my approach of using a new defi‐ nition of the pastoral mode as a modulor or bridge between its other, somewhat démodé iterations, and post-/ modern literature. Through my research, I have narrowed down my definition to the following crucial features, and I will ded‐ icate a section of my ‘brief history’ of pastoral to explaining each of them: pas‐ toral myths, motifs and origins; notions of pastoral space and time; the dialectic, 25 2.1 What is Pastoral? - Problems of Definition <?page no="26"?> 6 Greg Garrard provides an excellent, up-to-date interrelation of the pastoral mode and ecocriticism, with a particular focus on North American literature, in the chapter “Pas‐ toral” of his Ecocriticism for The New Critical Idiom (2004, 33-58). Other studies that focus on the relation of ecocriticism to the pastoral in twentieth-century literature in‐ clude Elise Martucci’s The Environmental Unconscious in the Fiction of Don DeLillo. (2007) and George Guillemin’s The Pastoral Vision of Cormac McCarthy (2004). 7 Der Zauberberg [The Magic Mountain] vol. 2, no. 13: “The youthful faun was very happy in his summer meadow. Here there was no ‘Justify yourself! ,’ no responsibility. […] Here reigned oblivion, the blissful arrest of motion itself, the innocence of timelessness. It was lightheartedness in quiet conscience, the picture-perfect apotheosis of each and every denial of the Western imperative of action” (transl. Daniela Langer, 2009). dichotomous ‘nature’ of pastoral; pastoral death and elegy. Each section of this ‘history’ will, on the one hand, offer a definition of the selected aspects, pro‐ viding a consistent terminology with which to return to each feature as neces‐ sary, while tracing said features’ development to contemporary and post-/ modern literary examples. Lastly, and despite this ambitious endeavour of developing a new definition of the pastoral, it is not the intention of this study to denounce the overt con‐ nections that exist between ecocriticism and the pastoral mode. As Laurence Buell has argued, “even if […] pastoral interposes some major stumbling blocks in the way of developing a mature environmental aesthetics, it cannot but play a major role in that endeavour” (The Environmental Unconscious 32). Literary critics around the world have expanded in abundance upon Buell’s pioneering interrelation of the pastoral mode with ecocritical perspectives. 6 Rather, I wish merely to complement the “ecocentric repossession of pastoral” (The Environ‐ mental Unconscious 52) with a critical repossession of my own. Once a consistent definition for the pastoral mode has been developed, moreover, it is essential to use that definition to re-evaluate the pastoral as a mode in post-/ modern liter‐ ature of its own right, with a particular focus on how it affects contemporary identity discourse, concerns of nostalgia, as well as literary treatments of the relationship between identity, memory and time. 2.2 What is Pastoral? - Myths, Motifs, Origins Der junge Faun war sehr glücklich auf seiner Sommerwiese. Hier gab es kein «Re‐ chtfertige dich! », keine Verantwortung […] Hier herrschte das Vergessen selbst, der selige Stillstand, die Unschuld der Zeitlosigkeit: Es war die Liederlichkeit mit bestem Gewissen, die wunschbildhafte Apotheose all und jeder Verneinung des abendländi‐ schen Aktivitätskommandos. — Thomas Mann, Der Zauberberg 7 26 II Always Pastoral: The Architectonics of Arcadia <?page no="27"?> The origins of pastoral are among the few aspects of the mode that critics agree on, and they are consistently traced back to the Idylls of Theocritus (c. 316-260 BC ), who sought to entertain the Alexandrian court of Ptolemy with a number of vignettes about the countryside peasantry of his native Sicily (Loughrey, The Pastoral Mode 8). Almost all the motifs appropriated by Theocritus’ immediate successors can be found in the opening lines of this first poetic form of pastoral: Thyrsis: Sweet is the whispering music of yonder pine that sings Over the water-brooks, and sweet the melody of your pipe, Dear goatherd. After Pan, the second prize you’ll bear away. If he should take the hornèd goat for his meed, to you shall fall The kid; and dainty is kid’s flesh, till you begin to milk them. Goatherd: Sweeter, O shepherd, is your song than the melodious fall Of yonder stream that from on high gushes down the rock. If it chance that the Muses take the young ewe for their gift, Then your reward will be the stall-fed lamb, but should they choose To take the lamb, then yours shall be the sheep for second prize. (Theocritus, Idylls 1.1-11) More than a pastoral with strict formal or poetic constraints,the Idylls and their immediate successors are perhaps best defined as containing certain motifs that are continuously re-interpreted and expanded upon, especially when the pas‐ toral enters other genres. It is clear that many critics place more emphasis on the formal constraints of this “traditional” pastoral. This often leads to lamenting the mode’s early inconsistencies. By focusing on the pastoral mode’s shared motifs, however, this can be avoided, and the attendant criticism can do justice to mode’s versatility (as opposed to lamenting its idiosyncrasies as inconsisten‐ cies. These motifs include shepherds who indulge in improvised song contests (Idylls 1-2), who praise the beauty of country life (Idylls 6-7), and who recount anecdotes from folklore and tales from mythology (Idylls 3-5; 8-11). Perhaps one of the most elegant commentaries on the origins of this idyllic pastoral of shepherds was formulated by René Rapin, a pioneer of serious pastoral criticism, in his extensive A Treatise de Carmine Pastorali”: Yet what beginning this kind of poetry had, I think I can pretty well conjecture: for ‘tis likely that first shepherds used songs to recreate themselves in their leisure hours whilst they fed their sheep; and that each man, as his wit served, accommodated his songs to his present circumstances: to this solitude invited, and the extreme leisure that attends that employment absolutely required it: For as their retirement gave pleasure, and solitude a fit place for meditation, meditation and invention produced a verse. (Rapin, Carmine Pastorali 13-14) 27 2.2 What is Pastoral? - Myths, Motifs, Origins <?page no="28"?> In collaboration with these motifs of the shepherd’s song, solitude, a life of lei‐ sure and innocence, pastoral begins to take form, both within its poetic origins and in a canon of literary criticism. These first motifs, courtesy of their recurrent and perennial nature, help create a unified terminology for the pastoral mode, whilst elegantly avoiding the constraints of a “traditional” pastoral poetic, within which the mode does not remain for long. It is therefore crucial to take into account and, where necessary, to return to these motifs as we continue to survey the chronology of the mode. Pan and the Original Arcadians Although Theocritus’ Idylls suggest a fairly limited and stable sense of pastoral as a literature that portrays, in an idealised manner, “the life of shepherds, or of the country” ( OED online), they are also already atypical of this ‘original pas‐ toral,’ because “they contain considerable elements of realism and sometimes dwell on the harsher aspects of the lives led by an entire rural community, con‐ sisting not just of shepherds, but of farmers, serfs, goatherds, fishermen, neat‐ herds and housewives” (Loughrey, The Pastoral Mode 8). For all the living at one with nature, for example, herdsman Corydon warns Battus he ought to wear sandals, as the ground is one thorny ambush: Battus: Zeus save thee, Corydon; see here! It had at me as thou said’st the word, this thorn, here under my ankle. And how deep the distaff-thistles go! A plague o’ thy heifer! It all came o’ my gaping after her. […] Corydon: Aye, aye, and have got him ‘twixt my nails; and lo! Here he is. Battus: (in mock-heroic strain) O what a little tiny wound to overmaster so mighty a man! Corydon: (pointing out the moral) Thou should’st put on thy shoes when thou goest into the hills, Battus; ‘Tis rare ground for thorns and gorse, the hills. (Theocritus, Idylls 4.50-57) The realism Theocritus gave to his Idylls hints at other origins of pastoral, often ignored in criticism. For Theocritus’s Arcadia has its own origin story, steeped in Greek mythology, and presided over by Pan, whom all ancient sources call Arcadian. Indeed, much of pastoral’s versatility and many of its recurrent motifs must be traced back to the this first and ‘original’ Arcadian: 28 II Always Pastoral: The Architectonics of Arcadia <?page no="29"?> Pan has long been thought of as the complete product of the Arcadian mountains and pastures, the divine projection of their shepherds and goatherds. Evidently everything follows from this: Pan’s music (the pastoral syrinx); his activity as a huntsman; his erotic solitude (and the perversion it induces); the distance he keeps from urban life. […] In him, through his primitive homeland, the original life of the Greek coun‐ tryside speaks to us, and Pan in the end touches something universal. The Greek peasant is still latent in each of us; his ‘experience’ is not extinct. (Borgeaud, The Cult of Pan 3) In the oral traditions and myths, as collected by Pausanias, the primitive bru‐ tishness of Pan and his fellow Arcadians was explained in their immeasurable antiquity. Arcadian Pan presents “a universe radically different from that of the Greece we call classical.” Therefore, it is somewhat difficult, perhaps even im‐ possible, to “understand him while clinging to a humanistic phenomenology that assumes a continuous inheritance from ancient Greece to the people of our times.” Due to his distant origins, and an impulse to face his own past, Arcadian Pan thus “takes on a kind of otherness” (Borgeaud, The Cult of Pan 4), that has remained a stratum of pastoral as we know it today. Arcadians, additionally, were considered to be the oldest inhabitants of the Peloponnese; they were con‐ sidered autochthonous, or, if Aristotle’s interpretation is preferred, from elsewhere, but before the moon, the Arcadians never separate themselves from the place where they made their temporal appearance. As compared with their neighbors, they are consequently equivocal be‐ ings, at once in time and timeless” (Borgeaud, The Cult of Pan 9). Although pastoral’s timelessness can thus be traced back to the autochthonous nature of Pan and the original Arcadians, it is not how we usually imagine the Arcadian landscape, largely due to Theocritus’ systematic elimination of almost all features of Pan’s ‘primitive,’ original Arcadia: Many an aspen, many an elm bowed and rustled overhead, and hard by, the hallowed water welled purling forth of a cave of the Nymphs, while the brown cricket chirped busily amid the shady leafage, and the tree-frog murmured aloof in the dense thorn brake. All nature smelt of the opulent summer-time, smelt of the season of fruit. Pears lay at our feet, apples on either side, rolling abundantly, and the young branches lay splayed upon the ground because of the weight of their damsons. (Theocritus, Idylls VII, 105) Through music, Theocritus softened the brutishness of Arcadian life: “Pan, the nymphs, and the goatherds are still in residence, but the wild notes of the syrinx have been replaced by melodious fluting and endless song contests.” Pan, too, 29 2.2 What is Pastoral? - Myths, Motifs, Origins <?page no="30"?> has become much more akin to the “custodian of flocks and amiable prankster the Romans would recognise” (Schama, “Arcadia Redesigned” 527). Two Kinds of Arcadia Crucially, Theocritus’ lyrics are the product of a much more sophisticated, ur‐ bane taste, and it is here that we first see how the pastoral mode was intended for an urban audience. Ultimately, “both kinds of Arcadia, the idyllic as well as the wild, are landscapes of the urban imagination” (Schama, “Arcadia Rede‐ signed” 525). In England, for example, both the wilderness of a primitive Arcadia and the life of bucolic love, simplicity and shepherded idyll were sources of imitation for cityscapes and aristocratic country life alike. The great Palladian villa of Kenwood, for example, supplied with graceful iconic columns, pilasters on the garden facade and an elegant pediment, was considered by many to be the epitome of an ‘Arcadian’ Hampstead: The beautifully elevated situation of this estate, happily ranks it above all others round London, as the most charming spot where the Gentleman and the Builder may exercise their taste in the erection of Villas, as many of which can be so delightfully placed as to command the richest home views of wood and water and the distant views of the Metropolis with the surrounding counties of Essex, Surrey and Berkshire. (Morning Herald, July 8 1789) Kenwood was a living catalogue of an aristocratic Arcadia, with almost all the key ingredients carefully orchestrated into the estate (see Fig. 1: Robertson, A View of Kenwood 1781). As Simon Schama observes: Sheep safely grazed not ten miles from where the objects of the lord chief justice’s attention danced on the Tyburn gallows. The house […] was full of paintings of itself, or of similar estates that testified to the elegant pastoral taste of the ruling class. In the graceful Orangery a Gainsborough couple posed before their park, beaming with self-satisfaction. [… M]usic played from a pavilion on the far side of the lake[.] (Schama, “Arcadia Redesigned” 521) Not far from Kenwood “it is an easy thing to stray into the other Arcadia: a dark grove of desire, but also a labyrinth of madness and death” (“Arcadia Rede‐ signed” 522). What is interesting is not that both Arcadias are found in imme‐ diate vicinity of each other, but that considerable investments were made to keep pristine the first (Kenwood), and to maintain the heath-adjacent other. The sheep were still there in 1960, Schama notes, and when, in 1829, Thomas Maryon Wilson, “Lord of the Manor,” proposed an enclosure for part of the heath, and 30 II Always Pastoral: The Architectonics of Arcadia <?page no="31"?> 8 See also William Empson’s study of The Beggar’s Opera as a mock-pastoral: “The Beg‐ gar’s Opera: Mock-Pastoral as the Cult of Independence.” Some Versions of Pastoral: A Study of the Pastoral Form in Literature. Harmondsworth, Penguin Books, 1966, pp. 195-252. to turn it entirely into a picturesque park, a confrontation between developer and conservationists ensued. While Wilson fiercely fought for precut fencing and a pristine landscape architecture, the conservationist campaigners argued that “the great city needed a wilderness for its own civic health” and that “it was precisely the unkempt and uncultivated nature of the heath that was said to be its special gift to the people” (Schama, “Arcadia Redesigned” 524). Although it is thus tempting to view the two kinds of Arcadia, the wild and the idyllic, as constantly defined against each other - one evoking the ideal of the park, the other civility and harmony, it is just as easy to view them as mutually exclusive and as contentious landscapes. The quarrel between them “even persists at the heart of debates within the environmental movement,” but “their long history suggests that they are, in fact, mutually sustaining” (Schama, “Arcadia Rede‐ signed” 525). The pristine, constructed Arcadia of Kenwood stands at the polar opposite of the ‘original’ Arcadia of myth, where men looked and behaved like beasts. Thus we can see a mutuality that would become crucial to any further developments of the pastoral mode, namely between town and country, especially when the poetic contradictions of this gardened Arcadia took the form of a country villa like Kenwood. Naturally, such mutual contradictions were also borne from the “ancient ideal of country life as a corrective to the corruption, intrigue and dis‐ ease of the town,” and thus it was, and would always be a “spur to rustication in a locus amoenus” Indeed, this “redesigned Arcadia” became “a product of the orderly mind rather than the playground of unchained senses” (Schama, “Ar‐ cadia Redesigned” 529-30). The strain of realism witnessed in some of Theocritus’ pastorals is not only at the heart of the mode’s first dichotomies, moreover, but it often also creates elements within the mode that are amusing, elements of what would later be‐ come the mock-pastoral. 8 Realism and humour thus produced two main strains of pastoral: first, the shepherd was re-appropriated and turned variously into philosopher, artist, recluse or a fool who could provide comic relief, implicit social critique, and opine about the nature of love. Shakespeare’s clown Feste (Twelfth Night), his clever, cynical fool Touchstone (As You Like It) or Thomas Hardy’s ‘heathfolk’ in The Return of the Native are but the most often referenced examples of this reappropriation. In such comic spectacles of bucolic love, the simple life is increasingly equated with the bitter-sweet simple-mindedness of 31 2.2 What is Pastoral? - Myths, Motifs, Origins <?page no="32"?> 9 Examples include Christopher Marlowe’s “The Passionate Shepherd to His Love,” Sir Walter Raleigh’s “The Nymph’s Reply to the Shepherd,” and Thomas Campion’s “I Care Not For These Ladies.” 10 See also Lindheim, Nancy. The Virgilian Pastoral Tradition: From the Renaissance to the Modern Era. Duquesne University Press, 2005. the boukolos, or herdsman: “the word ‘bucolic’ […] can be used to mean ‘of the country,’ but the implications of simplicity of life in this usage have come to be associated with the comic” (Gifford, Pastoral 17). Shakespeare’s contemporaries, among them Christopher Marlowe, Sir Walter Raleigh and Thomas Campion, each produced such pastoral songs of courtship and seduction. 9 Pastoral drama and romance of the time was heavily indebted to poems of the Italian Renais‐ sance, including Tasso’s Aminta (1573) and Guarini’s Il Pastor Fido (1590). Ex‐ amples for pastoral drama and romance of the English Renaissance include Sid‐ ney’s Arcadia (1590), Rosalynde, by Thomas Lodge (Shakespeare’s model for As You Like It), The Faithful Shepherdess by John Fletcher (1610) and Ben Jonson’s The Sad Shepherd (1637). Pastoral as Social Praise and Implicit Critique Elsewhere such pastoral imitations provide both explicit social praise and im‐ plicit critique; while Edmund Spenser, in Eclogue 4 of his Shepherd’s Calendar (1579) and Mary Herbert, in “A Dialogue Between Two Shepherds” (1599), both praise Queen Elizabeth, John Milton’s Lycidas (1637) condemns the corruption of the clergy, and Eclogue 10 of Spenser’s Calender denounces those responsible for the demise of poetry. 10 Theocritus’ mock-realistic tendencies thus helped produce a “proletarian pastoral” that “gives a natural expression for a sense of social injustice.” The shepherd, “outside society because too poor for its benefits” gains a sort of artistic independence and becomes “a critic of society” (Empson, Some Versions of Pastoral 16). As George Puttenham observes about one of the first English definitions of the mode: “under the veil of homely persons, and in rude speeches [pastoral is able] to insinuate and glance at greater matters, and such as perchance had not been safe to have been disclosed” (Puttenham, The Art of English Poesie 31). Puttenham’s astute observations on the nature of pastoral are echoed in Wordsworth’s “Michael,” where a traditional setting of “pastoral mountains” and “rocks and stones and kites, that overhead are sailing in the sky” (The Art of English Poesie 5; 11-12), allow the poetic voice to “feel / For passions that were not my own, and think […] On man, the heart of man, and human life” (30-34). Indeed, Wordsworth’s “Michael: A Pastoral Poem” (1800) is a striking example 32 II Always Pastoral: The Architectonics of Arcadia <?page no="33"?> of how the shepherd in literature could transform and be used by the poet to challenge pastoral conventions, even if that same poem begins conventionally enough: Upon the forest-side in Grasmere Vale There dwelt a Shepherd, Michael was his name; An old man, stout of heart and strong of limb. His bodily frame had been from youth to age Of an unusual strength; his mind was keen, Intense, and frugal, apt for all affairs, And in his shepherd’s calling he was prompt And watchful more than ordinary men. Wordsworth, “Michael” 40-47 Although Wordsworth paints Michael as an ideal shepherd, “stout of heart and strong of limb,” his focus quickly shifts to the “unusual strength” of this shep‐ herd’s “keen” mind, “apt for [more] affairs” and “watchful more than ordinary men.” This elevation of the shepherd’s “mind” above his more traditional strengths echoes Puttenham’s analysis of the shepherd as “able to glance at greater matters.” Thus, “Wordsworth’s shepherd has a maturity, integrity and dignity that is both produced by his work and extends beyond it” (Gifford, Pastoral 6). Wordsworth goes further, addressing the reader as he attacks “the patronising simplification” of other pastoral conventions. Indeed, “Wordsworth has used the pastoral mode to subvert conventional assumptions about the shepherd by making a realistic and broader portrait of an actual person in an actual village” (Gifford, Pastoral 7). In addition, “Michael” places the shepherd in an intense, partly georgic rela‐ tion to the land, and focuses on a need for living with misfortune. Like Michael, Wordsworth’s poetic speaker lacks the occasion for song, and instead, as Nancy Lindheim notes, “often becomes a teller of tales.” Although “the poetic theory announced in the preface to Lyrical Ballads places Wordsworth in the pastoral tradition, therefore, […] his characteristic poetic practice is inflected by what is actually an unpastoral emphasis on nature” (Lindheim, The Virgilian Pastoral Tradition 238). It is due to this “unpastoral emphasis on nature,” moreover, that the circle of pastoral realism - traced to Theocritus’ mock-heroic exchanges between Battus and Corydon - closes prominently with the contemporary ecocritical novel which portrays a dystopian landscape, as devastated by human hand, and to such an extent that it threatens survival. Exponents of ecocriticism have written 33 2.2 What is Pastoral? - Myths, Motifs, Origins <?page no="34"?> 11 See also Martucci, Elise. The Environmental Unconscious in the Fiction of Don DeLillo. Routledge, 2007, and Guillemin, Georg. The Pastoral Vision of Cormac McCarthy. Texas, A&M University Press, 2004. abundantly about such novels, including The Road (2006) by Cormac McCarthy, and Don DeLillo’s White Noise (1985). 11 This brief survey of pastoral’s myths, motifs and origins has shown that the nature of the mode is truly complex, and thus it is not surprising that critics have tried to do justice to this complexity by using various frames of literary criticism. Annabel M. Patterson regards pastoral as an “ideology” with a locus very specific to the historical and social backdrop in which its texts were written: “By ideology,” Patterson explains, “I mean both a more capacious and a less to‐ talizing concept than is sometimes invoked by that term: not only the dominant structure of beliefs ina society, but also the singular view (heterodox, subversive, maverick” (Pastoral and Ideology 8, original emphasis). Each age, according to Patterson, thus interprets the pastoral in terms of those values held dear by that age’s context of interpretation. Similarly, Lawrence Buell concludes that pas‐ toral, with its multiple frames, “cannot be pinned to a single ideological position” (Buell, The Environmental Unconscious 44). Lastly, Terry Gifford offers yet an‐ other explanation for the protean nature of the mode: It is this very versatility of the pastoral to both contain and appear to evade tensions and contradictions - between country and city, art and nature, the human and the non-human, our social and our inner selves, our masculine and our feminine selves - that made the form so durable and fascinating. (Gifford, Pastoral 11) Binary oppositions, contradictions and dialectics reveal the truly complex na‐ ture of the pastoral mode, as the next section of this study will attempt to show. 2.3 Pastoral Nature and the Nature of Pastoral There have always been two kinds of ar‐ cadia: shaggy and smooth; dark and light; a place of bucolic leisure and primitive panic. - Simon Schama, Landscape and Memory Nature did not exist until we invented it one eighteenth-century morning radiant with Alpine light. - John Banville, Ghosts 34 II Always Pastoral: The Architectonics of Arcadia <?page no="35"?> Pastoral’s Dialectics and Dichotomies Duality, ambiguity and the consequent dialectics, whether between town and country, idealisation and realism, celebration and regret, or retreat and return, are fundamental to pastoral. The nature of the mode is such that it has been marked by tension and ambivalence from the beginning: already in its earliest forms, it was written for an ‘urban’ audience as a testing ground for hitherto concepts of town and country, the life of the court and the life of the shepherd, and various other contexts of retreat and return (Gifford, Pastoral 15-16). Nat‐ urally, tension feeds on ambiguity, and the Idylls of Theocritus readily testify to this symbiotic relationship. Whether in an Arcadian society of peace and plenty or in a secluded place of enclosed quiet, any pastoral scene is also likely to be exposed to various opposites, including invasive industrialisation, death, unre‐ quited love, unjust property division, or simply opposing ideas of beauty and perfection. Indeed, pastoral is a mode of dichotomies that structures and expresses itself dialectically, and throughout its development in literature, the resultant dualities have manifested themselves differently, exhibiting various dialectical potentials. Harold Toliver provides a first table of such juxtapositions for several of pas‐ toral’s most ostentatious “contrasts,” in his Pastoral Forms and Attitudes (1984),starting with ‘nature’ and ‘society,’ and concluding with ‘nature’ and ‘cel‐ estial paradise’: Nature Society freedom constriction organicism mechanical formality democracy hierarchy plainness and honesty masked artificiality innocence, simplicity experience, complexity barbaric violence cultured order When opposed to art, nature becomes something quite different: Nature Art rough, inchoate ordered, ornate open, indefinite timeless, permanent, enclosed existential, immediate artificial, imitative 35 2.3 Pastoral Nature and the Nature of Pastoral <?page no="36"?> Divided against itself, it becomes: Idyllic Nature Anti-Pastoral Nature vernal or cyclical wintry humanised indifferent or cruel place of love and renewal place of unrequited love, age Or finally, if divided into levels: Nature Celestial Paradise temporal garden or Gorden Age apocalyptic sacred place lesser gods (Venus, Pan, Cupid) Hebraic or Christian God shepherds and rustics angels mechanical or botanical nature sublime nature (Toliver, “Pastoral Contrasts” 11) Toliver argues that “such contrasts permeate the pastoral tradition from Theo‐ critus to the eighteenth century” (“Pastoral Contrasts” 2), and although the na‐ ture of pastoral is such that any one or several of these dichotomies may be expressed in any given example of the mode, Toliver’s concept is too susceptible to criticism. First, Toliver fails to provide specific examples to illustrate the val‐ idity of his table of “contrasts.” Second, the table’s juxtapositioning of “nature” variously to to “society,” “art”, “itself ” and as “divided into levels” is an over‐ simplification; pastoral’s dichotomies are, after all, expressed dialectically, whereby each ‘contrast,’ by virtue of antithesis, creates something new, ex‐ plaining much of the mode’s inventiveness and longevity. Lastly, Toliver’s table [of contrasts] does not take into account that the mode also utilizes dichotomies that have little or nothing to do with a traditional understanding of “nature.” Binary oppositions proliferate in the pastoral, after all, including, but not re‐ stricted to, the following: town, city, court farm, countryside, forest urban citizens rural shepherds negotium (work, duty) otium (leisure, rest) art, ornament, artificiality nature, natural beauty literacy, reading, intellect creativity, song, dance 36 II Always Pastoral: The Architectonics of Arcadia <?page no="37"?> 12 Paul Fussel provides an illuminating analysis of First World War poetry as “Arcadian Recourses” in his monumental work, The Great War and Modern Memory, 2013, pp. 251-292. ambition, disappointment contentment, happiness order, prohibition, predictability disorder, license, spontaneity crime, corruption, war innocence, tranquility, peace restraint, respectability freedom, fecundity, sexuality sophistication simplicity conflict, crisis escape, exploration adulthood, ageing childhood, youth winter, autumn spring, summer machine, technology, future garden, wilderness, past mortality, loss, death immortality, rebirth, memory Any analysis of how certain dichotomies modulate pastoral must also take into account that the mode’s binary nature is often expressed as part and parcel of the dynamic of retreat and return. In other words, what happens in Arcadia cannot stay in Arcadia: “there must in some sense be a return […] to a context in which the results of the journey are to be understood” (Gifford, Pastoral 81). Even in the purely escapist pastorals that convince the reader to resist return, in an attempt to perennially extend their elaborately constructed retreat - such as in the Georgian poetry of the First World War, the retreat is expressed in‐ trinsically within the text in the address to an ‘urban,’ ‘courtly’ or otherwise removed audience: 12 [W]hether the author’s choice of Arcadia is classical Greece, the only-just-disappeared Golden Age, the present Golden Age, a utopian future, an Alpine summit, Antarctica, Arden or the garden, that choice will be made with its contemporary audience in mind. The discourse of retreat will exploit the location in order to speak to the cultural context of its readership. If the pastoral is successful, the audience will know that what is perceived to be happening in Arcadia has relevance for them in their own time and (urban place), with its own anxieties and tensions. (Gifford, Pastoral 81-82) The dynamic of retreat and return which makes up the pastoral sojourn, more‐ over, affects the mode itself dialectically: on the one hand, the retreat acts upon the reader as a force that drives an implicit desire to escape the present by cre‐ 37 2.3 Pastoral Nature and the Nature of Pastoral <?page no="38"?> 13 See in particular Empson’s “‘They that have power’: Twist of Heoric-Pastoral Ideas in Shakespeare into an Ironical Acceptance of Aristocracy” in Some Versions of Pastoral (1950): 89-118, Young, D. The Heart’s Forest: A Study of Shakespeare’s Pastoral Plays. London: Yale University Press, 1972 or Kronenfeld, Judy Z. “Social Rank and the Pastoral Ideals of As You Like It.” Shakespeare Quarterly 29.3 (1978): 333-348. ating an Arcadian space-time of wish-fulfilment islanded from conflict, crisis and uncertainty. On the other hand, the return, equally inescapable, acts upon said audience and forces, through the artificial lens of the Arcadia created, an exploration, a re-evaluation of the self-same tensions, struggles and ambiguities that govern the target audience’s present. We see this dialectic played out, perhaps for the first time, in As You Like It. Uncertainties abound, from the beginning of the play, as three groups of cour‐ tiers are exiled to an Arden of generosity, first, and of harsh economic realities, second. Corin the shepherd, for example, has to admit that he is “shepherd to another man,” does “not shear the fleeces that [he] graze[s],” and that his mas‐ ter’s “cote, his flocks and bounds of feed / Are now on sale” (As You Like It 2. 4. 74-80). In stark contrast, when Orlando stumbles upon the Duke Senior’s invitation for food, he is eloquent in his defence: O R L A N D O Speak you so gently? Pardon me, I pray you. I thought that all things had been savage here, And therefore put I on the countenance Of stern commandment. (As You Like It 2.7.107-110) These contrasts serve a dual function, though criticism has focused primarily on the first. 13 The Forest of Arden runs both concurrent with and contrary to the pastoral settings and conventions of Elizabethan England; it is at once an idyll removed from the realities of the court and a testing ground for previously accepted Elizabethan social codes, issues of love, gender and identity. As such, As You Like It’s pastoral setting holds up a mirror to the political power relations and to the cultural conventions of its age. For, by the end of the play, each char‐ acter has not only discovered who they are and returns to court married to their ‘true love,’ but each returns also reconciled with their true self. The Relative Nature of Pastoral As for contemporary pastorals, many critics believe pastoral to be dead after Hardy, because the ‘nature’ of pastoral no longer relies on the traditional inter‐ 38 II Always Pastoral: The Architectonics of Arcadia <?page no="39"?> pretation of pastoral nature, and because the fundamental distance between town and country, between urban and rural, has been eroded away by modern technologies and urbanisation. Perhaps none state this more clearly than Barrel and Bull in their Penguin Book of English Pastoral Verse (1974): The separation of life in the town and in the country that the pastoral demands is now almost devoid of any meaning. It is difficult to pretend that the English countryside is now anything more than an extension of the town; that the industrial and techno‐ logical processes of urban production differ at all significantly from those of the ‘Fac‐ tory-Farm’; that the function of the modern farm-manager is essentially any different from that of his urban counterpart; that the Pastoral has not become in fact just another trip, another Sunday afternoon drive. (Barrell and Bull, The Penguin Book of English Pastoral Verse 433) It is indeed difficult to pretend that the pastoral as defined by Barrell and Bull is still being written in the Ireland and Britain of today. The editors go further to suggest that pastoral as envisioned through these traditional dichotomies persists only “in the Third World, or in North America perhaps - where there are still occasional frontiers to confront the regulating effect of urban develop‐ ment” (The Penguin Book of English Pastoral Verse 433). The situation (and thus the presumed death of pastoral) is compounded by the fact that, all over the world, the idea of wilderness and of a rural human existence sympathetic to nature is continuously threatened by urban develop‐ ment. As Bill McKibben argues in The End of Nature, “We have changed the atmosphere, and thus we are changing the weather, […] and by changing the weather, we make every spot on earth man-made and artificial” (The End of Nature 54). Although pastoral has always been an artificial mode, it is thus dif‐ ficult to sustain a tradional pastoral vision, because there is no such nature, by humans untouched, no ‘original’ to modify into the pastoral purpose, which, after all, is to reflect human concerns. Pastoral is nothing if it cannot look to nature in order to understand human nature and our place within the world. Pastoral cannot be called pastoral if it cannot reclaim that distance between itself and reality, between natural and human existence. An understanding of pastoral as propagated by Barell and Bull, thus relies on the distinction between the non-human and the human, between the urban and the rural. Modern and contemporary pastoral is marked by an imaginatively more productive perspective, as propounded by John Gray: “Cities are no more artificial than the hives of bees. The internet is as natural as a spider’s web” (Gray, Straw Dogs 16). What the pastoral mode relies upon, then, is not just a 39 2.3 Pastoral Nature and the Nature of Pastoral <?page no="40"?> distinction or dichotomy between two oppositions, but a relativistic duality of presence and absence. As Iain Twiddy astutely observes: The parameters of the desirable and the immutable create a large imaginative range, in which pastoral may be rural or urban. It can be as simple as life rather than death. It can be the past: two days ago, a holiday last year in France, a less industrialized century.”(Twiddy, Pastoral Elegy 3) This is to say, then, that the pastoral is not characterized by absolute dichoto‐ mies, but by dualities that express themselves within the mode in relative terms - relative to the author and the target audience. Perhaps this is best observed in the many transformations that pastoral space and time have undergone in literature: Ovid’s Metamorphoses paint a Golden Age different from Theocritus, Virgil or all their descendants, and each is imbued with characteristics contemporary to the author’s own time and place. The pas‐ toral landscapes mapped out by Jonson, Pope, Wordsworth or Hardy find little resonance in Irving’s “sleepy hollow” (1844) or Thoreau’s frontiered wilderness, and yet each has been variously called and analysed as pastoral: For some, […] ideal nature is clearly the pristine wilderness […] for others ideal nature is the pastoral countryside or the small town, while others would celebrate the suburb or even the city as the natural home of humankind. It hardly needs saying that nothing in physical nature can help us adjudicate among these different visions, for in all cases nature merely serves as the mirror onto which societies project the ideal reflections they wish to see. (Cronon, Uncommon Ground 36) It is precisely this relativism that has contributed greatly to pastoral’s range and flexibility, simultaneously creating a constitutional openness within the mode that is not always unproblematic or easy to understand. In all cases, however, pastoral is but a “mirror onto which [authors] project the ideal reflections [of society] they wish to see” (Cronon 36). Pastoral’s relativistic nature, moreover, highlights the artificiality that is so fundamental to the mode, and the dialectic between reality and the pastoral text is part and parcel of this relativism, itself a fictional construction capable of reshaping nature in(to) art. To make poetic is to pastoralize, ultimately, and a crucial aspect in the development of the pastoral mode is the ever-shifting re‐ lationship between the mode’s poetically imagined enclosures and the reality of the world exterior to it. An inherent distance is created between the poet and his efforts to imagine it, so that the description itself becomes a self-conscious artifice. Thus, pastoral implicitly suggests that its paradise is beyond the reach even of poetry. As W. H. Auden writes, “Every good poem is very nearly a 40 II Always Pastoral: The Architectonics of Arcadia <?page no="41"?> Utopia,” an “idyllic community of substances forced to yield their disagreements for the sake of the poem,” and therefore “an attempt to present an analogy to that paradisal state in which Freedom and Law, System and Order are united in harmony” (Costello, Auden at Work 283). Towards a Contemporary Pastoral in Andrew Marvell’s “The Garden” One English lyric deserves a special mention at this point, namely Andrew Marvell’s “The Garden” (1681). This poem warrants a close reading not only for its significance and quality as a pastoral poem, but also because it documents the historical development of the mode with that unparalleled brevity and dense complexity so paradigmatic of the metaphysical tradition. Crucially, Marvell’s nature poetry, and “The Garden” in particular, should be classified as neither traditional nor concurrent with nature poetry of his contemporaries, because, as Andrew McCrae argues, “nature is rarely - if ever - just nature for Marvell.” Indeed, “[i]n the tradition of pastoral poetry, the natural world provides an avenue [for Marvell], with its own rich and highly stylized stock of imagery, for reflecting on wider issues of human life, ranging from love and sexuality through to matters of state. (McRae, “The Green Marvell” 122). As such, “The Garden” presents a masterly poetic cross-section of the history of pastoral, and uses metaphysical conceits and imagery to come to terms with the mode’s complex, often contradictory collusion with motifs of innocence, escapism, wishful thinking and identity - as expressed by the universal idyll that is Arcadia, and by the dialectical dynamic of retreat and return. According to William Empson, “The chief point of [“The Garden”] is to contrast and rec‐ oncile conscious and unconscious states, intuitive and intellectual modes of ap‐ prehension” (Some Versions of Pastoral 119). “The Garden” is a poem ahead of its time, moreover, as it also anticipates the mode’s encounter with post-/ modernist identity discourse. For “The Garden” contains some of the seventeenth century’s “most sensitive reflections,” not only “on relations between humanity and the natural world[,]” as McRae observes, but it also showcases Marvell as an astute “observer of the process of thought itself ” (McRae, “The Green Marvell” 123; Friedman, “Andrew Marvell” 278). Marvell opens “The Garden” with a meticulously constructed conceit; his poetic voice takes up the commonplace tropes of the original pastorals and, by functionally turning them upside down, adversely uses their arguments to his own advantage. With what zeal and passion—the first lines complain rhetori‐ cally—does man exert himself, the warrior to win his palm, the statesman his oak, the poet his laurel, that “single herb or tree,” in short, the symbolic reward 41 2.3 Pastoral Nature and the Nature of Pastoral <?page no="42"?> for their efforts (1-4). Yet the shadows projected by these emblems of fame are not nearly as lasting, the voice observes sententiously, as the shadow produced by a grove where all plants conjoin to weave not meritocratic coronets of glory but “garlands of repose” (5-8). And such a grove can only be sought in a garden, a hortus conclusus into which the poet has withdrawn from the world. There he has found not only the two sister nymphs “Quiet” and “Innocence,” but also their sacred plants, which, unlike the symbolic flowers of human vanity, are genuine flora of nature. It is in their midst that the poet is now enjoying a state of “sol‐ itude” more “delicious” than the most refined fellowship or “society” could offer: Fair Quiet, have I found thee here, And Innocence thy sister dear? Mistaken long, I sought you then In busy companies of men: Your sacred plants, if here below, Only among the plants will grow: Society is all but rude, To this delicious solitude. (9-16) Up to the second stanza the poet’s withdrawal is treated as a flight from society, but in the consecutive stanzas the poetic voice claims that the main motivation for such a retreat is to find rest and relief from the labours and sorrows of love. In unison, the figurative devices paradox and personification mark out the poet’s own retreat from love as if it were love’s retreat from itself: “When we have run our passions’ heat, / Love hither makes his best retreat” (25-6). Having suc‐ ceeded in his withdrawal from love, the poet finds in the garden new (and dif‐ ferent) objects of love—not fair women but “fair trees,” whose beauty far exceeds that of his “mistress” (20-22). And, when indulging in the pastoral pastime of engraving the trunks, the letters will not evoke a sweetheart but merely spell out the names by which these trees are known (22-4). Marvell builds his next metaphysical comparison into a striking anticlimax: the poet compares his new-found ‘botanical’ love to those gods of Greek and Roman mythology who pursued a maid or a nymph only to see her transformed into a flower or a tree. Unlike the disappointed gods, however, the poet treats these metamorphoses as if they were a consciously expected or wilfully pro‐ voked outcome, and thus the fulfilment, rather than the frustration of the gods’ desire: The gods, that mortal beauty chase, Still in a tree did end their race; Apollo hunted Daphne so 42 II Always Pastoral: The Architectonics of Arcadia <?page no="43"?> Only that she might laurel grow; And Pan did after Syrinx speed Not as a nymph, but for a reed. (27-32) Thus Marvell expertly creates a garden as “metaphor for integrating passion, mind and soul in an image of order that resolves the human relationship with the natural” (Gifford, Pastoral 71). This represents a first master-plot of the pas‐ toral of retreat, namely to sublimate and transform the traditional manifesta‐ tions of love and passion into the creation of the arts, of poetry and song. The poetic speaker further reinforces this metamorphosis by submerging the hues and colours that traditionally connote amorous acts in the anonymity of green, the most dominant colour of the hortus of Arcadia. The poetic speaker further insists that nature’s colours are more lovable than the skin tones of feminine beauty: “No white nor red was ever seen / So amorous as this lovely green” (17-8). Thus surrendering to the garden, the “wondrous life” the poet conse‐ quently describes is itself an enactment of the very sensations of the (lost) golden age: The luscious clusters of the vine Upon my mouth do crush their wine; The nectarine and curious peach Into my hands themselves do reach; (35-8) And though the poet stumbles, “insnared” by the bounteous flora, his “fall on grass” is harmless (33, 39-40). Indeed, there is an ascent from this acme of pre‐ lapsarian innocence, from these ingenuous “pleasures less” onto a fresh plane of thought to which the mind “withdraws.” Both figuratively and literally, nature remains all too fenced in, a true hortus conclusus. Though its maintenance may not require any human labour, every garden’s beauty still needs the artifices of wit and the mind, “that Ocean” which can retreat further into itself, and thereby be more imaginative than anything the “happy Garden-state” (57) of Arcadia could offer: Yet it creates, transcending these, Far other Worlds, and other Seas, Annihilating all that’s made To a green Thought in a green Shade. (45-8) Marvell’s lines applaud the transcendent and creative faculties of the mind, whereby he anticipates the self-reflective and imaginative tendencies of the post-/ modern imagination. What are the “other Worlds” to the ones we know, for example? Is Marvell’s annihilation a process of artistic distillation which 43 2.3 Pastoral Nature and the Nature of Pastoral <?page no="44"?> serves to clarify or intensify the meaning of things and their place in the world, or is it rather a narcissistic, self-aggrandising, and ultimately destructive process? Then, in true metaphysical fashion, and as if to pre-empt such dialec‐ tics, Marvell constructs a conceit that turns his hortus conclusus into that abode most suited to the soul, for if in the ‘golden age’ man could proudly wander in the splendid nakedness of his body, in “The Garden” he may linger outdoors in the pure and luminous nudity of his spirit: Here at the fountain’s sliding foot, Or at some fruit-tree’s mossy root, Casting the body’s vest aside, My soul into the boughs does glide. (49-52) Although “The Garden” uses conventional pastoral imagery, its speaker does not think in conventional pastoral terms. By now, the poem’s Arcadia has un‐ dergone several metamorphoses, from an all too Italian garden, to an orchard of joy and plenty, to a celebratory peregrination through the transcendent mind, and finally to the neo-Platonic dove by which the soul prepares for its destined ascent: There, like a bird, it sits and sings, Then whets and combs its silver wings, And, till prepared for longer flight, Waves in its plumes the various light. (53-6) This metaphysical conceit is steeped in Reinaissance Platonism and philosophy, which saw the physical body as inessential, as a kind of temporal clothing for the eternal soul. Accordingly, the rational Platonic lover should not only aspire to rise above the baseness of sensuality, but hope to advance beyond even the purely spiritual union with the soul of a woman, progressing up the steps of the ‘Stair of Love’ until his love is finally consummated by a spiritual union with God in the ‘Mystic Experience.’ To an opposing school of thought, one that found its main literary exponent in Ovid, love was bodily passion, unbridled by reason. True love, according to the Ovidian tradition, was the irrational and satisfying consummation of lust. Marvell’s use of the dove, turning the poet’s soul into a bird, is significant be‐ cause the dove is an originally religious emblem and Marvell’s is a bird of a decidedly different feather than that which symbolises the Christian soul. This is shown by its main concern - to groom its gorgeous plumage and make it shine like a rainbow in the changing light. Indeed, far from being an allegory for the religious soul, which trains itself in the viva contemplativa to return to its eternal 44 II Always Pastoral: The Architectonics of Arcadia <?page no="45"?> abode, Marvell’s bird-soul stands for a neo-platonic “green Thought” retreating from the world of society into “Far other Worlds” as to contemplate its self. Thus, Marvell turns his “Garden” into a vehicle for the secularisation of the Christian soul in order to argue for the neo-platonic spiritual union with God in the ‘Mystic Experience,’ thereby anticipating the pastoral mode’s own secularisation in con‐ temporary literature. This ‘secularisation of pastoral’ continues as the tripartite metamorphosis ends and the speakers places the reader outside the garden, whence to take a wistful, almost nostalgic look back: Such was that happy Garden-state While man there walk’d without a mate: […] But ’twas beyond a mortal’s share To wander solitary there: Two paradises ’twere in one, To live in Paradise alone. (57-8, 61-4) The poetic speaker likens his own retreat to man’s state in the Garden of Eden before the Fall, thereby suggesting that pastoral’s Arcadia has existed from the beginning of human life itself. Or perhaps the the speaker’s experience is not a representation itself, but time textualised, and thus transformed, and the “Garden-state” either marks the story of Eden, or is it simply an utterance the reader mistakes for a version of Eden. The comparisons Marvell offers in his last stanza are particularly powerful when read as metaphysical conceits that prefigure the post-/ modernist concerns of narrative and temporal authenticity. At first, the poet creates a continuity that is held together by its insistence on the purity of solitude and on the disruption caused by passion. Then, a discontinuity is created in that newly imagined floral sundial, more “real” in the poem than the remembered glories of the golden age, as it is perceived by sight, touch and smell (63-4). Indeed, the measurement of time (hours, minutes, seconds) may be a human invention, but the sun runs through this “fragrant Zodiack” with equal measure; and the bee “Computes its time as well as we” (68, 70), thereby unknowingly teaching a sense of practicality and modesty as it simultaneously honours and uses the work of the “skilful Gard’ner” (65). In brief, though pastoral’s “delicious solitude” can be realised within such an Arcadian “Garden-state,” it can only be a momentary experience, and hence must always hover between the mode’s inherent contradictions, in a pastoral purgatory of otherwhile and elsewhere. 45 2.3 Pastoral Nature and the Nature of Pastoral <?page no="46"?> 2.4 Otherwhile and Elsewhere: Pastoral Space and Time If we reject the present, we must choose be‐ tween an Arcadian retrospect and a Utopian prospect. The spatial and the temporal dis‐ tances may prolong one another, as they do in exotic imaginings that took place far away and long ago. [… B]oth the expectation of an afterlife and, on a more worldly plane, the resolve to build a heaven on earth through social planning share a common expectancy, which might be viewed as chiliasm or mil‐ lenialism […] These are the possibilities that lie open to the visionary, whose area of spec‐ ulation is bounded only by what a German scholar calls wish-space (Wunschraum) and wish-time (Wunschzeit). — Harry Levin, “The Golden Age” Virgil’s Arcadia and the Golden Age After Theocritus, we turn to the next great literary contributor to the pastoral mode, Virgil, for whom the Idylls provided a model upon which he based his earliest known works, the Eclogues. Although the motif of the shepherd’s love returns, Virgil included a number of innovations which would decisively influ‐ ence later authors of pastoral, widening the mode’s functional vocabulary con‐ siderably in the process. Specifically, Virgil transferred his own herdsmen to Arcadia, constructing for pastoral its very own time and space. Yet Virgil did not place his shepherds in the geographically eponymous Arcadia, the central alpine region of the Peloponnesus, encompassed on all sides by mountains, but in an Arcadia of his own artifice, “a poetic landscape whose woods and moun‐ tains were haunted by the Olympian Immortals” (Loughrey 1984: 9). The Arcadia of Virgil’s Eclogues was “an imaginary topography where the currents of myth and empirical reality flow into one another and gods mingled freely with men” (Snell, “The Discovery of a Spiritual Landscape” 281). Virgil’s relocation of Theocritus’ shepherds from Syracuse to Arcadia was also motivated by social and political changes Sicily had undergone when it became a Roman province: 46 II Always Pastoral: The Architectonics of Arcadia <?page no="47"?> Sicily had become a Roman province, and her shepherds had entered the service of the big Roman landlords. In this new capacity they had also made their way into Roman literature; witness Lucilius’ satire on his trip to Sicily. But they could no longer be mistaken for the shepherds of song and love. Thus Virgil needed a new home for his herdsmen, a land far distant from the sordid realities of the present. Because, too, pastoral poetry did not mean to him what it had meant to Theocritus, he needed a far-away land overlaid with the golden haze of unreality. (Snell, “The Discovery of a Spiritual Landscape” 282) Using Arcadia as a new home for the shepherds allowed Virgil to create a dis‐ tance between reality and “unreality”; where Theocritus had provided a realistic, albeit ironic and humorous description of Sicily’s herdsmen, “Virgil regarded the life of the Theocritean shepherds as a sublime and inspired existence” (Snell 282). Corydon and Alexis, the love-entangled protagonists of Theocritus’ first pastoral poem had, to Virgil and his audience, an exotic ring to them, and thus echoed the mythical heroes the Roman poet had elsewhere borrowed from Greek poetry (Snell 283). It comes as no surprise, then, that from Virgil onwards, pas‐ toral became preoccupied with such and similar tensions of reality and the imaginary. Additionally, it is by virtue of this first and decisive dichotomy that pastoral also becomes “self-conscious of its own aesthetic nature, concerned far more with exploring the meaning of its conventions than in depicting any actual countryside” (Loughrey, The Pastoral Mode 9). Pastoral now became strongly involved with the classical myth of the Golden Age as “a far-away land overlaid with the golden haze of unreality” (Snell 282); the mode began to express an elegiac lament for a lost world of innocence and plenty. Conceived as a locus at the dawn of time, when Saturn and Aestraea ruled in the Garden of the Hesperides, the season of the Golden Age was spring perpetual, rendering clothes superfluous in a nature so fertile that it provided food and sustenance without toil. Ovid, in his Metamorphoses, provides one of the most famous renderings of this Golden Age: The golden age was first; when Man yet new, No rule but uncorrupted reason knew: And, with a native bent, did good pursue. […] And happy mortals, unconcern’d for more, Confin’d their wishes to their native shore. No walls were yet; nor fence, nor mote, nor mound, Nor drum was heard, nor trumpet’s angry sound: Nor swords were forg’d; but void of care and crime, The soft creation slept away their time. 47 2.4 Otherwhile and Elsewhere: Pastoral Space and Time <?page no="48"?> The teeming Earth, yet guiltless of the plough, And unprovok’d, did fruitful stores allow: Content with food, which Nature freely bred, On wildings and on strawberries they fed; Cornels and bramble-berries gave the rest, And falling acorns furnish’d out a feast. (Ovid, Metamorphoses 1.89-91, 102-113) The keeping of flocks was deemed to be the original employ of humankind, and thus the life and denizenship of the Golden Age was increasingly equated with the shepherds of Arcadia. As René Rapin eloquently observes: Pastorals were the invention of the simplicity of innocence of [the] Golden age, if there was ever any such, or certainly of that time which succeeded the beginning of the world: For though the Golden Age must be acknowledged to be only in the fabulous times, yet ‘tis certain that they manners of the first men were so plan and simple, that we may easily derive both the innocent employment of shepherds, and pastorals from them. (Creech, Rapin’s Discourse of Pastoral 14-15) This encouraged poets to develop escapist elements as further central motifs of the mode (Loughrey, The Pastoral Mode 10). The geographical distance created by Virgil’s Arcadia between reality and imagination was now accompanied by a chronological distancing that created a space of wish-fulfilment, an always already elsewhere between a happier, idealised past and a problematic, con‐ flicted present. Significant to the development of the pastoral is the way in which the idealised country values and harking back to the Golden Age is explicitly contrasted with urban life. This contrast is best evidenced in Virgil’s Georgics: But happy too is he who knows the gods Of the countryside, knows Pan and old Silvanus And the sister nymphs. Neither the people’s gift, The faces, nor the purple robes of kings, Nor treacherous feuds of brother against brother Disturb him, not the Danube plotting raids Of Dacian tribesmen, nor the affairs of Rome And crumbling kingdoms, nor the grievous sight Of poor to pity and rich to envy. The fruit of his boughs, the crops of his fields, produce Willingly of their own accord, he gathers. (Virgil, Georgics 2.493-514) 48 II Always Pastoral: The Architectonics of Arcadia <?page no="49"?> The afore-mentioned distance created by the Golden Age is thus reinforced by Virgil in this dichotomy between the urban life of toil and political instability and the idealised existence in the country. As Gifford observed, “The Georgics are not pastoral, taken as a whole. […] But they reveal the process by which a natural enjoyment of working in harmony with the seasons can become, in the pastoral, an idealisation of stability that provides an implicit criticism of turbu‐ lent city affairs” (Gifford, Pastoral 20). Furthermore, Virgil relied on his audience knowing of the nature and artifice of the Arcadia he had created in his Ec‐ logues, in order that, by contrast, it would create the desired distance necessary to initiate a kind of escape to the past. The myth of the Golden Age represents “a connection between the spatial and the temporal concepts, between the ideal landscape - Arcady, Sicily, or wherever else - and the ideal epoch, whenever that may have been or might be” (Levin, “The Golden Age” 6). It is the ultimate recollection that looks back to‐ wards time immemorial and aims to restore an innocence by later ages blem‐ ished. The “pastoral’s celebration of retreat […] is its strength and its inherent weakness,” for “when retreat is an end in itself, pastoral is merely escapist” and there can be little diversity in such a mode (Gifford, Pastoral 47). Nonetheless, out of this interplay of space and time in the myth of the Golden Age, out of pastoral’s dynamic of retreat and return, the mode has borne a series of recurrent motifs, themes and modalities that have remained relevant to literature throughout. As a prototypical space-time for the ontogenesis of human civilization, the Golden Age has, for example, become more and more embroiled with the joys of childhood, the attendant motifs of innocence, and the impulse for nostalgia. Kenneth Grahame, in his novel The Golden Age (1950), refers to his adults as the Olympians, implying that children are the true Saturnians, re-enacting the in‐ fantile fantasies of the human race. As Novalis said: “Wo Kinder sind, da ist ein Goldenes Zeitalter” [Where children are, there is a Golden Age] (Novalis qtd. in Richter, Das Fremde Kind 21). The child, one can argue, has replaced the shepherd in many instances of modern pastoral literature, and in contemporary pastoral novels in particular. Thus, “[d]istant time has succeeded distant place as the great focus of pastoral interest, and the golden pastures of Arcadia have yielded to the golden time of childhood” (Marinelli, Pastoral 76). It is an essentially Romantic innovation, this emphasis on childhood, and it is based on the notion that the vision of the child is unadulterated, and in its clarity and innocence, is superior to that of the adult man. The motif of the innocence of childhood, more often than not, is “a pro‐ jection of the author’s imaginings about that earlier state of life, and they are 49 2.4 Otherwhile and Elsewhere: Pastoral Space and Time <?page no="50"?> bound to be coloured by his experience and by his nostalgia” (Marinelli, Pastoral 78). Pastoral and Nostalgia Nostalgia, indeed, is that aspect of pastoral, in which the mode’s collusion with a space-time of desire for a re-instated, balanced identity becomes most appa‐ rent. Essentially a looking back, a longing for what one no longer has, nostalgia is neither simply a symptom of pastoral nor does it make pastoral into something exclusively escapist. It is difficult, if not futile, to argue against pastoral as a discourse of retreat; the idealised countryside of the pastoral text is, after all, an Arcadia that uses language to construct a world different from what is perceived to be real. This retreat, however, may function simply as an escape from the complexities of urban life, society, and even the reality of the present, or it may be used as a means to explore possible futures (Gifford, Pastoral 46). Harry Levin, more eloquently than any other critic to date, has formulated nostalgia’s force of influence on the poetic voice’s perception of itself within the space-time of Arcadia as follows: Nostalgia for a happier day would be a sterile emotion, if it merely sighed for what was not; encouraged by the rotation of the seasons, it is transfigured into a hope for recurrence, […] and hence [moves] from retrospection to prophecy. […] If our longing to escape - or more positively, to better our condition - has any goal, however dimly envisioned, it must be located elsewhere or otherwhile. Standing here and wishing to be there, we are given a choice, at least by imagination; we may opt for some distant part of the world, a terrestrial paradise, or for an otherworld, a celestial paradise. (Levin, The Myth of the Golden Age 9) There is a psychological difference, therefore, between what W. H. Auden terms “the backward-looking Arcadian” and “the Utopian dreamer.” For the Arcadian is fully aware of the wishful thinking that has constructed their Golden World as a past idyll, in which the contradictions of the present either have been ne‐ gated or have not yet arisen. The future-oriented “Utopian,” on the other hand, believes that theirs is a paradise which remains to be realised, and which requires actions that are necessary elements of that dream (Auden, “Arcadia and Utopia” 90). It is with a clear awareness of this fundamental psychological difference that Thomas More defined his own ‘Utopia’: Utopia, our name for the best-known model of all model commonwealths, means no‐ where. Its namer, Sir Thomas More, intended a pun in Greek on Eutopia, the good place, that happy realm which never existed on land or sea or in the air. In much the 50 II Always Pastoral: The Architectonics of Arcadia <?page no="51"?> same fashion, taking up a hint from Charles Renouvier, we might speak of Uchronia or Euchronia to signify either never or the good time. (Levin, The Myth of the Golden Age 8) Interestingly, nostalgia has the means to meld the ‘uchronian’ glance of the utopian with the ‘euchronistic’ glance of the golden-age pastoralist. For nos‐ talgia is not simply a feeling that urges one to look back at a void, an absence of something or someone, an elsewhere or an-other. Nostalgia is more than a feeling, it is an impulse, a thrust that involves an act, and what nostalgia acts out, or causes to be enacted, is the nostos, the act of return. The desire to return home, moreover, is brought about by algos, or extreme pain, grief, and distress. A protagonist in desire of nostos is not where they want to be, does not have what they want, and is not at home with the self. It is no coincidence that the opening lines of Book One of The Odyssey speak of algea and noston, the many pains Odysseus “suffered […] by sea while trying to save his own life and bring his men safely home” (Homer, The Odyssey 1.4-5). There is also another sense in which The Odyssey exemplifies the meaning of nostalgia - its principles and roots in the pastoral mode in particular. For the pastoral poetic is perhaps further removed from Ulysses’ epic struggles than any other mode imaginable. Yet, with regard to the discourse of return so quintessential to pastoral, it shares with Homer not only the return home, but through this nostalgia also that device of retreat which betokens both with the ability to glance at matters greater than a voyage by sea or a poetic counterfeit of the idyllic country life. Nostalgia, then, as a device and a discourse saturated in the pain of longing and the attendant (re-)enactment of nostos, is driven towards a point of origin, situated both in a space and a time where the protagonist used to ‘be.’ Pastoral also always points to something that is elsewhere, at a condition of absence that comes into being in its narrative forms, fictions, and the linguistic landscapes that construct the artifice of Arcadia. Nostalgia thus conditions pastoral with a subtext of crisis, a crisis of identity, authenticity and memory best encapsulated by the mode’s own epitaph: Et in Arcadia Ego. Et in Arcadia Ego: Pastoral Death, Elegy, and Memory Et in Arcadia Ego: no other phrase is more readily associated with the pastoral mode, nor more easily misinterpreted. It permeates the literature of the pastoral mode in many forms: in numerous quotations and misquotations and in just as various translations and mistranslations. Ambiguity is immanent in the Latin wording; where William Faulkner rearranges the inscription to read “Et ego in Arcadia” (The Sound and the Fury 41), Lady Croom of Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia 51 2.4 Otherwhile and Elsewhere: Pastoral Space and Time <?page no="52"?> famously (mis)translates the Latin into: “‘Now I am in Arcadia! ’” (12). Who or what exactly, then, is the “I” in ‘And I too am / was in Arcadia? ’ Tracing the etymology of the phrase is best done through art, for Et in Arcadia Ego first appears in Giovanni Francesco Guercino’s The Arcadian Shepherds (see Appendix, Fig. 2). Here, the phrase is spoken by a lugubriously Christian death’s-head, asserting, with a detectable degree of Counter-Reformational piety, the omnipresence of death. The skull serves as a memento mori for two young, shocked shepherds, spellbound by this symbolic yet certain presence of death, even in the ideal, pastoral world of Arcadia. Additionally, Guercino adorned his skull with a fly and a mouse: the former is an age-old symbol of death and decay, and the latter, voraciously gnawing at the skull, is a “very well-known symbol for all-devouring time” (Panofsky, “Et in Arcadia Ego” 297). As Panofsky argues, “According to the rules of Latin grammar the ‘et’ in this epigrammatic and elliptical sentence can refer only to ‘in Arcadia’ so that the sentence must be supposed to be pronounced by Death in person: ‘Even in Ar‐ cady,’ says he, ‘there am I’” (Panofksy “The Tomb in Arcady at the ‘Fin-de-Siècle’” 298). If Guercino pictures Et in Arcadia Ego through glasses darkly, two paintings by Nicolas Poussin show the Latin phrase in an altered light. The first Et in Arcadia Ego (See Appendix, Fig. 3) by the French master still leans heavily on Guercino: the two young shepherds, here accompanied by Alpheius, Arcadia’s river god and a shepherdess, approach the scene from the left (much like the original) and are once again arrested by a skull placed upon a curvilinear sar‐ cophagus inscribed with Et in Arcadia Ego. The skull, however, is much smaller here (and thus less distinguishable). Nevertheless, “the picture still conveys, though far less obtrusively than Guercino’s, a moral or admonitory message” (Panofsky, “The Tomb in Arcady” 312). Any traces of Guercino’s influence or of the death-head as moralistic memento mori have all but disappeared from Poussin’s second Et in Arcadia Ego (see Ap‐ pendix, Fig. 4). Its three young men and one young woman, easily recognisable as Arcadian shepherds, “are no longer surprised and arrested in their movement but symmetrically poised in calm, reflective attitudes, pointing at or pondering over the enigmatical inscription” (Panofsky, “The Tomb in Arcady” 6). The death’s head has been omitted completely. The contemplative absorption with which Poussin replaces the shepherds’ dramatic encounter with Death and the absence of the skull made it increasingly difficult for contemporary interpreters to stay linguistically true to Et in Arcadia Ego’s Latin grammar. André Félibien, Poussin’s biographer and well acquainted with him, took the first step towards “bad Latinity and good artistic analysis” by attributing it not to Death, but to 52 II Always Pastoral: The Architectonics of Arcadia <?page no="53"?> 14 For a collection of essays on the interrelation of death and love in the pastoral novel of the late Renaissance, see also Damiani, Bruno Mario, and Barbara Louise Mujica. Et in Arcadia Ego: Essays on Death in the Pastoral Novel. University Press of America, 1990. the tomb’s occupant: “Par cette inscription on a voulu marquer que celui qui est dans cette sépolture a vécu en Arcadie et que la Mort se rencontre parmi les plus grandes félicitez” (1740, qtd. in Panofsky, “The Tomb in Arcady” 301). From then on, the process of Et in Arcadia Ego’s re-interpretation reached its artistically logical conclusion with surprising speed: Félibien had not bothered with the Et, he simply left it out, as did Richard Wilson in his Ego Fui in Arcadia (1755), and thus the phrase slipped into its ubiquitously proverbial usage on the Con‐ tinent. In his Pervonte (1778), Chr. M. Wieland translates it variously into “Auch ich lebt’ in Arcadia’” or “‘Du arme Vastola. Auch du warst in Arcadia’” (211); Goethe famously used it as a motto for his Italienische Reise (1786): “Auch ich in Arkadian,” and Schiller even paraphrased it into “Auch ich war in Arkadien geboren” (Resignation, 1835, qtd. in Panofsky, “The Tomb in Arcady” 303). As this brief overview of its etymology shows, it is not what Et in Arcadia Ego translates to that should matter to us, but how it has been variously interpreted and represented in artistic and literary texts. Notably, although the original no‐ tions of Death and memento mori have had to give way to a wistfully elegiac and nostalgic epitaph for a pastoral idyll once enjoyed and then lost, Et in Arcadia Ego can simultaneously embody all or none of these ‘original’ associations. What Et in Arcadia Ego shows, however, is that, love and death have been closely intertwined in myth and literature since antiquity. The psychoanalyst Rollo May, in a chapter of his Love and Will entitled “Love and Death,” explains that myth‐ ology is the gauge of the extent to which love and death are related in the human psyche, and thus to the process of identification: [D]eath is always in the shadow of the delight of love. […] When we love, we give up the centre of ourselves. We are thrown from our previous state of existence into a void; and though we hope to attain a new world, a new existence, we can never be sure. […] The World is annihilated; how can we know whether it is ever built up again. We give, and give up, our own centre; how shall we know that we will get it back? ” (May, Love and Will 101, italics my own) Love and death are essential ingredients to the pastoral, whether expressed through the existential psychology at the heart of every myth, or as the elegiac nostalgia that characterises many a pastoral’s retreat and return. 14 As the struggle for love is a struggle against death, so the pastoral mode’s retreat is a struggle against the memento mori that Et in Arcadia Ego represents. This in‐ terrelation of love and death makes the pastoral mode and the elegy frequent 53 2.4 Otherwhile and Elsewhere: Pastoral Space and Time <?page no="54"?> cohabitants of one and the same literary landscape. Karen Weisman’s introduc‐ tion to The Oxford Handbook of the Elegy (2010) uncannily echoes many of the tropes of pastoral’s Et in Arcaida Ego: When taken in the more contemporary sense as the framing of loss, elegy can be pulled between the worlds of the living and the dead, between the present life of sorrow and the vanished past of putative greater joy. Between the extremes of life and death, joy and sorrow, the receding past and the swiftly moving present, falls the elegy as we know it today. (Weisman, “Introduction” 1) Where elegy is “the framing of loss,” the pastoral mode expresses a yearning for what is always already elsewhere; both elegy and pastoral test “the limits of our expressive resources precisely at the very moment in which we confront our mortality,” thus throwing into sharp relief “the inefficacy of language precisely when we need it most.” Much like pastoral, elegy “inhabits a world of contra‐ diction” for which “an implicit self-reflexivity is inevitable” (Weisman, “Intro‐ duction” 1). Not surprisingly, then, the pastoral elegy covers a large scope of literature. Traditionally, “the subject matter of elegy ranged from funeral lamentation to political satire to chagrin d’amour” (Watterson, “Nation and History” 138); modern iterations include not only texts that lament a human loss, but also those that mourn an ever-endangered environment. In “The Dark Ecology of Elegy,” Timothy Morton argues in dialectical tautologies such as, “If ecology is often elegiac, elegy is also ecological,” or “Elegy works as much against ecology as for it, despite the overwhelmingly environmental quality of elegiac tropes” (Morton, “The Dark Ecology of Elegy” 251, 256). Iain Twiddy’s study of Pastoral Elegy in Contemporary British and Irish Poetry even postulates that “pastoral elegy” exists in “three main forms.” In the first - “artificial pastoral elegy” - nature mourns human death, and the dead are “transformed” into a permanent existence or landscape. In “non-pastoral” or “natural” elegy, the role of nature is such that it is neither benevolent nor cruel, and neither is there a “pre-eminent place in nature for humanity. Consolation in a “natural elegy” may instead be derived simply from “the dispassionate changes endemic in natural processes.” The third form, “anti-pastoral” elegy, “differs from non-pastoral elegy, since […] the former suggests a poetics of undermining in which pastoral conventions are deployed or alluded to, in order to suggest or declare the limitations of those conventions, or their downright falsity” (Twiddy, Pastoral Elegy 4). To delve deeper into such and other vague definitions of the ‘pastoral elegy’ is to come to a critical cul-de-sac, however. While it cannot be denied that the pastoral and the elegy exhibit a multitude of parallels, it would be misguided to 54 II Always Pastoral: The Architectonics of Arcadia <?page no="55"?> give this interrelation its own explicit category in modern literature. “For all intents and purposes,” William C. Waterson notes, “‘pastoral elegy’ is an aca‐ demic category invented by scholars seeking to establish a link between Theo‐ critus’ first ‘Idyll’ (Thyrsis’ lament for Daphnis) and all subsequent mourning poems set in the locus amoenus or green world” (Watterson, “Nation and His‐ tory” 139). Examples of pastoral elegy abound, nevertheless, especially in the early seventeenth century. In 1614, Drummond of Hawthornden published his collection Poems: Amorous, Funeral, Divine, Pastoral in Sonnets, Songs, Sextains, Madrigals. In Song One, a shepherd mourns the death of a nymph at the site of her tomb. And William Alexander’s ‘A Pastoral Elegy on the Death of Sir An‐ thony Alexander’ bears more than a passing resemblance to Milton’s ‘Lycidas,’ often taken as the prototypical pastoral elegy of its time. Despite the proliferation of the pastoral elegy in seventeenth-century English literature, studies that focus on the pastoral elegy appear to neglect a crucial difference between the two modes: while elegy sets out to explicitly mourn a loss, pastoral does not, even if Et in Arcadia Ego can function as a memento for an idyll once enjoyed and then lost, and even if the mourning for a loss may be lived out in a pastoral sojourn. Where pastoral is about the past and foregrounds a reality in which all art is about the past, elegy is about the past, but foregrounds that past so as to create a reality in which the mourner(s) may accept their future. Rather, pastoral is often elegiac because, as the dialectical nature of the mode has shown us, it is characterized not by absolute contrasts, but by hetorotopia that are governed relativistically by a multitude of contrasts. The nature of pastoral’s relativism is particularly well expressed in the elegiac iteration of the mode because the elegy, as a poetics of loss, relies on the relative distance between the space-time of that loss and the Arcadian space-time in which its life is relived or re-imagined. “As the presentation and representation of the mourning process,” moreover, “elegy must record change, must demon‐ strate a progression away from the dead.” Elegy thus “requires a space for com‐ munion, a space for memory, and in the production of the memorial image, a space to create consolation” (Twiddy, Pastoral Elegy 31), and it is in pastoral’s Arcadia that writers often find both such a space and such a time. Et in Arcadia Ego thereby becomes a space-time wherein the author or the mourner may con‐ template and learn to accept the nature and inevitability of death. Pastoral is so well suited to this task, moreover, because the mourner can create a heterotopia of memory and time according to their own “memorial image” and as a mirror of their own, personalized Arcadia. 55 2.4 Otherwhile and Elsewhere: Pastoral Space and Time <?page no="56"?> 2.5 Pastoral, Post-/ Modernism, and the Works of John Banville On sharkskin legs, the lamb gambles with our gullibility, floating in formaldehyde, fleecing us for all its worth. Brassed off, the art historian turns away. Rustic simplicity parodied in woolly counterpoint has no place on his Earth. — Elizabeth Kay Pastoral and Post-/ modernism Our retreat into the literary history of the pastoral has culminated in one over‐ bearing conclusion: pastoral is as significant as ever, and the pastoral mode and post-/ modernism are historically intertwined and exhibit a multitude of paral‐ lels. The most prevalent of these is that of cultural and literary secularization, which shapes both in various ways: where pastoral has undergone a develop‐ ment towards it, postmodernism is defined by it, and is exercising it still. The response to the postmodernist exorcism of subservience to extra-personal met‐ anarratives, however, has been deeply ambivalent: uncertainty and the menace of meaninglessness threaten to usurp the celebration of autonomy, and the “re‐ lease from systematisation and order” is perceived as sliding too readily “into a nostalgic lamentation for lost certainty and a fear of relativistic anarchy” (Wor‐ thington, “A Devious Narrative” 4). Pastoral too, can be perceived as having come close to a similar dialectic. The demise of the pastoral of form and convention, on the one hand, has allowed it to be recognised as a mode, liberating it from the mentality it had been designed to cultivate and express. Literary treatments of this ‘secularised pastoral,’ on the other hand, call for a re-evaluation of the semantic field in which the constructs of Arcadia have hitherto been embedded. Critics such as Alpers, Buell, Lawson and Gifford speak “in favour of a more knowing,” albeit more inclusive, “adver‐ sarial sense of ‘environment’ rather than ‘nature’” (Gifford, Pastoral 174). This revision is necessary, they argue, in order to save pastoral from being associated with a form of nostalgia or deferment, whence it could ‘fall back’ into modernist scepticism, which not few critics somewhat derogatorily refer to as ‘sentimental pastoral’. Such an approach is itself a deferment, however, as it ignores issues para‐ mount to the critical reception of the pastoral mode today. For one may confi‐ 56 II Always Pastoral: The Architectonics of Arcadia <?page no="57"?> dently declare pastoral dead after Hardy, but if our lives now lack a separation between urban and rural existence, other dialectical caesurae and interdepen‐ dencies have taken its place. Certain scholars of literature have recognised this, whence their studies by-pass questions of form and mode in order to directly analyse pastoral as a vehicle for the expression of tensions and ambiguous sen‐ timents. Renato Poggioli, for example, begins his study of pastoral by speaking of its “psychological root,” specifically as “a double longing after innocence and happiness,” which can only be regained by means of “a retreat” (The Oaten Flute 1). Although Poggioli’s study at first glance promises much, it ultimately delivers too little by way of refined literary criticism. Though his relation of seemingly disparate elements, such as aspects of the “psychological” within the pastoral, is in many ways a first, the resulting reading of the mode is, to say the least, incomplete. Indeed, further reading of The Oaten Flute throws into sharp relief several limitations in both Poggioli’s critical approach and argumentation. Poggioli’s collection of essays, for one, offers next to no critical basis on which to ground its analysis of the pastoral mode. In terms of evaluation it offers even less; the introduction offers all but an aphoristic admonishment that pastoral is inherently vested in limitations, which on its own is too damning of the mode: “Man has walked farther under the burden of Christ’s cross than with the help of the shepherd’s rod” (The Oaten Flute 2). Poggioli then goes on to categorise the mode in an index of feelings, and a shallow one at that; he introduces the pastorals of friendship, melancholy, innocence, happiness, mirth, the self, soli‐ tude and love, where one half expresses emotions directly and the other half associates with feelings innately: “Shakespeare, for instance, identified the pas‐ toral of solitude with the pastoral of melancholy, and saw in both the opposite of the pastoral of happiness and love” (The Oaten Flute 22). This exclusive focus on feelings produces a disagreeably reductive reading of pastoral. The result is a pastoral of sentimentality, the vaporous nature of which Poggioli warns against in his introduction specifically: “the pastoral ideal shifts on the quick‐ sands of wishful thought” (The Oaten Flute 2). Poggioli then tries (but fails) to justify his sentimental treatment of the pastoral mode by referring to Friedrich Schiller’s conceptions of sentimental poetry, because he sees Schiller placing the pastoralist among the sentimental poets (The Oaten Flute 4). In an attempt to make more of Poggioli’s own naïveté, Frederick Garber takes up this reference to Schiller’s terminology, on another line of thought. Garber places much emphasis on how Schiller in fact prefigures Poggioli, whereby he “slip[s] quickly past the difficulties of free-floating emotionalism” dogging the latter. To do this, Garber takes up Schiller’s concept of Empfindungsweise, which he translates variously as “modes of feeling” or “modes of perception,” and then 57 2.5 Pastoral, Post-/ Modernism, and the Works of John Banville <?page no="58"?> as “modes of feeling as modes of perception,” (Garber, “Pastoral Spaces” 437) attributing to it a particular relevance for his own reading. Schiller’s Empfindungsweise, according to Garber, affects pastoral by means of a reciprocal or “mutual conditioning” that is in turn effected in the “senti‐ mental state” of the mode’s Innenraum or “inner topography”. In other words, the pastoral becomes a mode of perception for “that landscape of uncrossable gaps, that unsettling spatiality, which gives the sentimental state its tone and determines its existential status”. Schiller’s arguments and terminology support this ‘spatial pastoral,’ moreover, because he sees the purpose of the idyll as a means “to represent man in a state of harmony and peace with himself and his surroundings, separated out from the artificial relations” or “künstlichen Ver‐ hältnissen”. Schiller thereby puts away pastoral in the tradition of sentimental poetry. His terminology stands in stark contrast to such a conclusion, however. The concept of Empfindungsweise prefigures the pastoral as a mode able to express and perceive a particular perspective on human experience where the concept of Innenraum constitutes an “inner topography,” a subtext that con‐ structs within the mode a narrative other (Garber, “Pastoral Spaces” 438). The ambiguities of pastoral, to put it another way, play against each other in a tense dialectic that has no precise counterpart in the mode’s historical form, but must instead seek a way of expression as something other. For though the conventional pastoral finds stability in the formal expression of the bucolic condition, this stasis and stability—as the pastoral’s development in literature shows—is only temporary. The tense dialectic inherent to pastoral prevails, ever conditioned by the plethora of ambiguities that govern its content, tonality and its expression in language and narrative. Taken together, these engender the mode with a subtext that carries with it always the potential to rise up to the surface and undermine the assertions of the bucolic ideal, its very presence, with lamentations for loss and an irremediable absence (Garber, “Pastoral Spaces” 439-40). Garber’s essay, if not new, represents a much needed stepping stone towards reading the pastoral mode within post-/ modern and contemporary discourse. Its critical approach re-situates pastoral as a mode that, when expressed in nar‐ rative, is concerned with the dialectics of presence and absence, of being-in-the-world, and what Jacques Lacan calls the process of identification of the self through “an-other” (Homer, Jacques Lacan 25). The pastoral mode, it thus becomes clear, identifies strongly with the post-/ modernist concerns of subject and subjectivity. Or, to put it more precisely, the pastoral mode is not only prescient of the post-/ modernist transcendental philosophy of the ego, it also anticipates the post-/ modern prioritisation of language as a narrative mode 58 II Always Pastoral: The Architectonics of Arcadia <?page no="59"?> that uses the linguistic landscapes and the constructs of Arcadia as its artifice of expression, to mediate between (and meditate on) the intersubjective con‐ sciousness of the self. Both pastoral and postmodernism facilitated the rise to supremacy of the individual in literature. Pastoral, on the one hand, was ever sentient of the crisis of the “sundered self ” (Lawson, “On Modern Pastoral” 41); indeed, one could say the pastoral mode itself, throughout literary history, has been engaged in a socio-cultural process of identification and reification, the very process and concerns the mode has been used to express. Postmodernism, on the other hand, represents the apotheosis of subjectivity in literature and cultural theory. It is consilient with pastoral because, in utilising language and narrative as a “kind of fictional liberation movement” (Worthington, “A Devious Narrative” 4), it turns the pastoral mode, that has up to now expressed a public crisis of identity (by way of social, political, and ecocriticism), into one that can also express the most private identity crises. Moreover, post-/ modernism has helped raise the bucolic tradition to a mode that can express a pastoral crisis of intersubjectivity, language, and self. It is the subtext, the narrative landscape of pastoral that allows it to become such a modulor for the acrobatics of post-/ modern literature which gives such primacy to the crisis of identity and self-consciousness. This subtext, as Garber expounds, is what constitutes pastoral’s “inner geography, … a space of gaps and lacunae” (Garber, “Pastoral Spaces” 443). Post-/ Modernism, Nostalgia, and Identity Discourse Furthermore, postmodernism is consequential because the term has become “the code-name for the crisis of confidence in Western conceptual systems; ” this “crisis of confidence” goes well beyond any empirical or social self to include the transcendental self (Holstein & Gubrium, The Self We Live By 56). Postmod‐ ernism is at sharp odds with any overarching cultural sensibilities as regards the way we perceive ourselves: Postmodernism is born out of the uprising of the marginalised, the evolution in com‐ munication technology, the fissures of a global multinational hypercapitalism, and our sense of the limits of Enlightenment rationality, all creating a conjunction that shifts our sense of who we are and what is possible. (Lather, “Postmodernism, Post-Struc‐ turalism” 102) Postmodernists differ in how radically they articulate this crisis of confidence, especially in their responses to the question of the existence of the self. James A. Holstein and Jaber F. Gubrium distinguish between “affirmative” 59 2.5 Pastoral, Post-/ Modernism, and the Works of John Banville <?page no="60"?> (moderate) and “sceptical” (radical) postmodernists, providing an inclusive yet crisp disambiguation. Affirmatives seek to sustain the notion of reality as some‐ thing socially constructed, yet evidentiary that includes an experiencing, if equally constructed, self. In this sense, the postmodern condition multiplies and hybridises our identities, resulting in “a polysemic self, a self refracted, but not displaced, by all manner of signification” (Gubrium and Holstein, The Self We Live By 57). The self of everyday life is hereby affirmed, not eliminated. In con‐ junction with this, postmodern commentators such as Kenneth Gergen (The Saturated Self 1991) and Noram Denzin (Images of Postmodern Society 1991), speak of a world exploding with images and representations of who we are that skews our sense of self (The Self We Live By 58). In contrast, “sceptical” or “radical” postmodernists altogether mistrust modern reality, the reality of the self in particular. For such postmodernists the real is just another myth of Western rationality. Jean Baudrillard speaks of a “hyperreality” where the self is no more than an image for conveying identity that exists in a myriad gallery of others (Baudrillard, Simulations 1983). Any conceptual anchors are hoisted as this “reality” removes the self from its tradi‐ tional moorings, disabling it as an agent of experience altogether. The post‐ modern thus conditions a world in which objects do not exist distinct or separate from their representation (Gubrium and Holstein, The Self We Live By 57). Depending on which path is or is not taken, the self walks through different stories to different endings. According to Holstein and Gubrium, the post‐ modern self has two options: The first option entails a range of reactions which correlate with the affirmative / sceptical distinction. Those postmodernists who choose to “react” attempt to “reaffirm familiar renditions of identity, entrenching in ‘tried and true’ versions of the social self formulated by the early pragmatists,” a narrative or plot that formulates a strategy for the social self to “withstand the current siege, adapting to postmodern (or late modern times) … but remaining essentially in tact as it has been known for decades.” Other ‘reactionary’ thinkers, more sceptical, “dismiss the self as an empirical reality, effectively putting an end to its narrative by catapulting it into an altogether different uni‐ verse” (The Self We Live By 57). The second option desires to transform the crisis of confidence rather than simply relegating it or capitulating to it: “Acknowledging the hard, complex times that confront the social self, this transformation reconceptualises the self as a form of working subjectivity” (The Self We Live by 57) The attendant panel of postmodernists, including such commentators as Ludwig Wittgenstein, Jean-François Lyotard, and Michel Foucault, thereby formulate “a self that not only is a polysemic product of experience, but is also a by-product of practices 60 II Always Pastoral: The Architectonics of Arcadia <?page no="61"?> that diversely construct it in response to varied senses of what it could be, or need be” (The Self We Live By 57). Now to close the circle of argument by relating the two options of the post‐ modern self to the pastoral mode and its subtexts of nostalgia and identity dis‐ course. As previously discussed, nostalgia is a prevalent impulse that engenders the pastoral mode with a crisis of authenticity, reality and self. It has also been pointed out that pastoral may either use nostalgia as a vehicle to simply escape from this crisis, or as a vessel with which to explore it. Indeed, this is not dis‐ similar to the postmodernist self that can either capitulate to the crisis of con‐ fidence or use it as a catalyst for metamorphosis and development. At the core of both the pastoral of nostalgia and the postmodern debate of self, in sum, is a crisis of identity as expressed within a narrative’s text, space and time. Indeed, both the pastoral and the postmodern use a continuum of spatial and temporal imagery in their incessant survey of the self, in search of a voice to express themselves within own narratives. “I am therefore I think”: John Ban‐ ville’s Cartesian inversion (Birchwood 3) aptly illustrates both the single most prominent feature of his writing and the singular postmodern obsession with thinking and narrating the self. The technologies of self construction are not only constituted in language, as Madan Sarup succinctly infers, but also within the space and time of the resulting narrative: “We apprehend identity not in the abstract but always in relation to a given place and time” (Sarup, Identity, Culture and the Postmodern World 15). The narratology of the self - to invoke Banville’s inversion again - preconditions a modern voice (text, story, narrative) of the modern individual, thrust into a space (I am) they must make sense of (I think). And it is the pastoral mode, in conjunction with its subtext of nostalgia, its narrative topography, and its constructions of Arcadia that offers the linguistic, spatial and temporal technologies which allow this process of identification to move and progress towards that which is desired. Nostalgia provides a first and relentless impulse within pastoral that creates a crisis of perceived time discordant to the hitherto experienced self in that time. This causes the self to act, to act out nostalgia, more precisely, and to try and unify the past and the desired future with the present. This reification of one’s experience of time is in turn a necessary part of the process of identification: “The impulse to preserve the past is part of the impulse to preserve the self. […] The nostalgic impulse is an important agent in adjustment to crisis; it is a social emollient and reinforces public [as well as private] identity when confidence is weakened or threatened” (Sarup, Identity, Culture and the Postmodern World 97). Since it is always in the process of emerging, moreover, the present is by definition always uncertain, and thus it is only through recollections of past 61 2.5 Pastoral, Post-/ Modernism, and the Works of John Banville <?page no="62"?> events and experiences that the self can hope to be represented to others. The past, however, consists of a set of selectively chosen and appropriated memories and discourses, which makes the act of recollection—and hence the process of identification - something equally ephemeral, discontinuous and fragmented. Once again, it is the pastoral mode with its linguistic landscapes and attendant constructs of Arcadia that provides a space within which identity can at least hope to move towards a reconciliation with this temporally fragmented kalei‐ doscope of the self. In John Banville’s later works, for example, the narrative self (“I am therefore I think”) is re-invoked, reversed and re-inscribed as into an anti-Cartesian Arcadian self. Towards a Post-/ Modern Pastoral: John Banville’s Narrative Identities For John Banville as well as other post-/ modern authors, the self-reflexive nar‐ rator of the first-person novel is not enough. Relentlessly, Banville’s writing is looking for ways to accommodate the self-reflexive, personalised narrator of the first-person novel without giving up completely the idea of an existential rela‐ tionship between narrator and character. Traditionally, the first-person novel links narrator to character in an ‘existential’ way as opposed to the ‘functional’ way found in the third-person novel: “The personal narrator is embodied in the world of the characters,” and both a narrating self and an experiencing self are characterised by this “corporeality” (Edmiston, “Focalisation and the First-Person Narrator” 735). This in turn implies certain characteristics of the first-person narrator. The first-person narrator, for instance, tells a story he calls his own, not someone else’s, and does so in the first person. Such a narrative voice is also “restricted” spatially, temporally and psychologically “to what a fictional human being could logically know”. Furthermore, where the traditional first-person narrator is placed in the here-and-now of the narrating of the story, the character is placed in the here-and-now of the story told. These two loci are connected in time. A standard way to overcome this issue is to distinguish between a ‘narrating I’ (the narrator as narrator) and the ‘experiencing I’ (the narrator as character) (Edmiston 734, 736). The structuralist treatments of narrative reject such a ‘personal narrator’, however. This tenet of literary theory places the emphasis instead on narrative agents or functions rather than fictional human beings. Character is assigned to the story level and narrator is assigned to the discourse level, and neither story and discourse nor character and narrator should be confused with one another, which is precisely what the idea of a ‘personal narrator’ does. The functions of 62 II Always Pastoral: The Architectonics of Arcadia <?page no="63"?> the first and third-person narrator, from this point of view, are identical: “There is the same difference between narrator and character, and the same functional relationship between them” (Edmiston, “Focalisation and the First-Person Nar‐ rator” 734). Consequently, the first-person novel loses its singularity and unique position in narrative theory. To return to Banville, by putting the narrator centre stage, he constructs an‐ other character in such a way as can perhaps be best explained using Paul Ric‐ oeur’s concept of “narrative identity”. Ricoeur develops the notion of narrative identity from the idea that life is equal to the story (or stories) one can tell about it: “life … appears to us as the field of a constructive activity … through which we attempt to recover … the narrative identity which constitutes us” (Ricoeur, “Life: A Story in Search of a Narrator” 130). The notions of subjectivity that characterise Ricoeur’s narrative identity call to mind the obsession for a ‘new’ kind of subjectivity relentlessly driving the various—and yet clearly connected—narrative voices of Banville’s novels: “that which we call subjectivity is neither an incoherent succession of occurrences nor an immutable substance incapable of becoming. It is exactly the kind of identity which the narrative composition alone, by means of its dynamism, can create.” To do this, narrative identity mediates between two disparate forms of identity: idem identity (“identity understood in the sense of being the same”) and ipse identity (“identity understood in the sense of oneself as self-same [soi-même].” Identity as ‘same’ relies on a set of strict and objective criteria of identification which remain immutable through time. Self-same identity, on the other hand, proves more flexible and develops with or in the temporal becoming of personal identity (Ricoeur, “Life: A Story in Search of a Narrator” 437, 439). Furthermore, Ricoeur develops the concept of “emplotment” as that aspect of narrative which can not only integrate what appears to be the contrary to idem identity (diversity, variability, discontinuity and instability), but can also pro‐ duce a “dialectic of character which is quite clearly a dialectic of sameness and selfhood” (Ricoeur, “The Self and Narrative Identity” 141). Ricoeur describes the resulting dialectic as a “discordant concordance,” where “concordance” refers to “the principal of order that presides over what Aristotle calls the ‘arrangement of facts’ and “discordance” implies ‘the reversals of fortune that make the plot an ordered transformation from an initial situation to a terminal situation’” (“The Self and Narrative Identity” 142). In Self as Narrative, Kim Worthington provides a crisp synopsis of how Ric‐ oeur’s concept of emplotment, its dialectic of “discordant concordance” in par‐ ticular, constitutes narrative as a process of identification: 63 2.5 Pastoral, Post-/ Modernism, and the Works of John Banville <?page no="64"?> [T]he construction of a subject’s sense of selfhood should be understood as a creative narrative process achieved within a plurality of intersubjective communicative pro‐ tocols. In the act of conceptualizing one’s selfhood, one writes a narrative of personal continuity through time. That is, in thinking myself, I remember myself: I draw to‐ gether my multiple members—past and other subject positions—into a coherent nar‐ rative of selfhood which is more or less readable by myself and others. (Worthington, Self as Narrative 13) Worthington’s illuminations also help clarify how Banville’s novels are them‐ selves the “emplotment” of Ricoeur’s concepts par excellence. For the Banvillean œuvre “depends utterly on the drama of voice, a consciousness which feeds off its own imagination and memory, and which consoles itself with its own fic‐ tions” (D’hoker, “Self-Consciousness, Solipsism, and Storytelling” 69). His pro‐ tagonists, first scientists, then art historians or actors, or distinguished aca‐ demics, are solitary heroes constantly in survey of the self. As the narrative drives towards an established identity, plot is created from and within its char‐ acters. The main characters, one could say, are themselves the plots. Freddie Montgomery lives “amongst ghosts and absences … hungering after other worlds” so that he can “fill them up … with imaginings” (Ghosts 75). Alexander Cleave is “after nothing less than a total transformation … into a miraculous, bright new being” (Eclipse 37). And Max Morden, seeking to assuage the “heaviness of heart” haunting him since the death of his wife, moves within “the waxworks of memory” in search of a narrative to call his own, “if only [he] could make a sufficient effort of recollection” (The Sea 160). The writer, for Ban‐ ville, “is not a priest, not a shaman, not a holy dreamer. Yet his work is dragged up out of that darksome well where the essential self cowers” (“Fiction and Dream: An Interview” 26). Banville’s characters are themselves such writers, authoring mainly meta-fictional memoirs or autobiographies, to bring into light a self in purgatory, hovering between texts and fictions, between the authen‐ ticity of the real and the art of existence. In monologues of “monotonous murmur” - Banville “is not much interested in dialogue” (“John Banville and Derek Hand in Conversation” 201, 210) - the characters ruminate on ideas that haunt them, speaking in narrative voices that seem to transcend time. For each book represents a “progression from the past to the following one … it’s an absolute logical progression from one to the other” (“Interviewing John Banville” 235). The narrative effectively haunts the char‐ acters as perceived within a threefold present: that of the past, that of the present, and that of the future. What is principally at stake, however, is not time, but truth, and through truth, the self. By resorting to first person narratives, in par‐ ticular, the author’s act of representation is mirrored in the narrator’s adamant 64 II Always Pastoral: The Architectonics of Arcadia <?page no="65"?> attempt to frame his life in a story of significance. To reflect on the self, after all, is to reflect on the first-person novel as a genre, and to reflect on the first-person novel as a genre is to question the self. These notions of narrative (as) identity evoked by “I am, therefore I think” are re-invoked and re-inscribed in Banville as a post-/ modern pastoral of the unconscious. This process might best be described as a re-writing of the narra‐ tive self into an Arcadian self. Especially in his early texts, Banville stages nar‐ rative identities saturated in Beckettian poetics, supreme stylists whose primary “concern [is] with language,” incessantly trying (but ultimately failing) “to find forms that will accommodate the chaos” (Banville, “A Great Tradition” 7). The early Banvillean narrator was a “scientist-like manipulator … ‘the devised de‐ viser devising it all’” (“Fiction and Dream: An Interview” 26). In his later novels, Banville begins to let things happen on the page; the narrative voice returns to a prelapsarian, dreamlike state, invoking a retreat to ‘‘childhood, to those Ar‐ cadian fields where memory and imagination merge” (Eclipse 137). Banville as‐ serts, accordingly, that “as you sit down to write … it’s important that you get it just right. Then the language starts to do its own thing, it starts to write itself - it starts to write you! ” (“John Banville and Derek Hand in Conversation” 208). This dreamlike way of writing, this “getting it just right,” permeates the his works not only in mode of narration and content, but also in the way they are written. It persists throughout the ‘art trilogy’—The Book of Evidence (1989), Ghosts (1993), and Athena (1995)—The Untouchable (1997), the chiastic duo Eclipse (2002) and Shroud (2003), Booker-Prize Winning novel The Sea (2005), The Infinities (2009) as well as his latest novel The Blue Guitar (2015). Each Banville protagonist, his identity thrown into crisis, embarks on an Ar‐ cadian sojourn which “usually entails some psychological adjustment in the characters” (Young, The Heart of the Forest 20) to find and re-write the self. This Arcadian sojourn takes place on various levels; it is a storied process that moves between the various focalisations, fictions, narrative identities and meta-fic‐ tional texts Banville and his ‘authors’ present to the reader. Banville’s protago‐ nists—as is the case in many first-person novels—narrate what one might call a peregrination through the courtyards of the brain, the countrysides of the mind, or, to quote Axel Vander in Shroud, “the topography of the mind” (Shroud 25). Banville’s literary artifice is a means of representing the narrative self as med‐ itating on the way modern spaces and the space of imagination (itself an Arcadia of the (un)conscious) are interdependent. Intimate registers and narratives betoken Banville’s protagonists with a “bi‐ ofictional” space where a metafictional reconfiguration of contemporary sub‐ jectivity and authenticity takes place. The protagonists thus experience a search 65 2.5 Pastoral, Post-/ Modernism, and the Works of John Banville <?page no="66"?> 15 Axel Vander is citing Nietzsche, but the citation is incomplete: “There exists neither ‘spirit’, nor reason, nor thinking, nor consciousness, nor soul, nor will, nor truth: all are fictions that are of no use” (The Will to Power 480). for “totality without completeness,” a perfect state of prelapsarian innocence moving towards that “infinite proximity” of the mind to a metaphysical knowl‐ edge of existence and self (Izarra, “Disrupting Social and Cultural Identities” 184). Banville uses constant recapitulations of self-disrupting identities to lead his readers towards an awareness of the quintessential inauthenticity that cuts through narrative and self: “There exists neither ‘spirit’, nor reason, nor thinking, nor consciousness, nor soul, nor will, nor truth: all are fictions” (Shroud 6). 15 These recapitulations, moreover, are localised in places and times, feelings and affections that are constantly re-interpreted, re-placed and re-written. Every location in Banville’s later novels is highly symbolic and resonant of the character’s search for an almost-Arcadian space of metaphysical under‐ standing. Freddie Montgomery, upon his release from prison, immediately seeks out an island, “a place of seclusion and tranquility,” he says, “where I could begin the long process of readjustment to the world” (Ghosts 20). Max Morden sud‐ denly finds himself “in that Edenic moment at what was suddenly the centre of the world, with that shaft of sunlight and those vestigial flowers” (The Sea 90). And Alexander Cleave, before entering Hotel Halcyon, “imagined behind that revolving door a secret world of greenery and plashing water and sultry mur‐ murings” (Eclipse 35). On the one hand, these recurrent pastoral settings act “as a mirror to the action” and as “symbol[s] of the social and psychological har‐ monies aimed at and attained” (Young, The Heart of the Forest 20-1). On the other hand, Banville simultaneously juxtaposes elements disharmonious to these Ar‐ cadianisms, thereby creating a parallel discourse that drives towards discord‐ ance, disenchantment and deconstruction. Banville’s novels often oscillate between postmodernist and modernist con‐ cerns, for his writing utilises language as a “kind of fictional liberation move‐ ment” (Worthington, Self as Narrative 4). One must, nonetheless, also recognise “the deep sense of critical sympathy in Banville for those … who dreamed of metanarratives and unifying visions” (McMinn, John Banville: A Critical Study 7). Most of his characters wish there were a convincing master narrative that could explain their place in the world. The rupture thus created in the relation‐ ship between human imagination and reality is central to any understanding of John Banville’s art, and the notions of Arcadia and the pastoral sojourn betoken the narrative voice with a means to both meditate on and mediate between these issues. All this, in order to overcome the postmodern rift between narrative and 66 II Always Pastoral: The Architectonics of Arcadia <?page no="67"?> experience, reality and fiction, self and other, and “to find forms that will ac‐ commodate the chaos” (Banville, “A Great Tradition” 7). 67 2.5 Pastoral, Post-/ Modernism, and the Works of John Banville <?page no="68"?> III Always Already Identity: Pastoral, Self, and Narrative My garden, like my life, seems to me every year to want correction and require alteration. - Alexander Pope 3.1 The Book of Evidence: In Search of a Grand Narrative (as) Identity To write is to be. To write is to be read. To write is to be read and to be re-read. To write is to be read and to be re-read is to be re-written. I do not seek, my lord, to excuse my actions, only to explain them. That life, drifting from island to island, encouraged illusions. The sun, the salt air, leached the significance out of things, so that they lost their true weight. How could anything be dangerous, be wicked in such tender, blue, watercolour weather? - The Book of Evidence 11-12 Pastoral, Self, and Narrative Identity To write is to be: most, if not all narrative identity theory builds upon this one apophthegm. The process of identification can be understood as a creative act of authoring “achieved within a plurality of intersubjective communicative pro‐ tocols” (Worthington, Self as Narrative 13). The result, a storied self, can provide a subject with a sense of continuity and stability through time: Narratives are a primary embodiment of our understanding of the world, of experi‐ ence, and ultimately of ourselves. Narrative emplotment appears to yield a form of <?page no="69"?> understanding of human experience, both individual and collective, that is not directly attenable to other forms of exposition or analysis. (Kerby, Narrative and Self 3) The concept and the value of narrativity as a means of ordering and under‐ standing reality has undergone much debate among postmodern thinkers and essayists as they continue to draw from the deep well of wisdoms that constitute Paul Ricoeur’s three-volume magnum opus, Time and Narrative (1984-1988). As he concludes, [S]elf-understanding is an interpretation; interpretation of the self, in turn, finds in the narrative, among other signs and symbols, a privileged form of mediation; the latter borrows from history as well as from fiction, making a life story a fictional story, or, if one prefers, a historical fiction, interweaving the historiographic style of biog‐ raphies with the novelistic style of imaginary autobiographies. (Ricoeur, Oneself as Another 114) Understanding, or perhaps more accurately, reading the self in this way offers the subject a myriad of possibilities. By leaving the narrative open to revision it acknowledges potential misreadings or misinterpretations (to write is to be read and to be re-read). At the same time, the subject can hope to acquire continuity and coherence of self, which in turn enables the projection of desires and in‐ tentions towards any number of imagined futures (to be re-read is to be re-written). In brief, though the act of authoring is by no means authoritative, it does authorise the subject to function as a purposive and morally responsible agent. A subject authoring their functional identity within narrative holds great power. To command this power is also to wield a double-edged blade, however, where one edge represents the aforementioned wealth of possibilities, and the other a dangerous deferment of morality and agency that follows from - and still haunts - poststructuralist readings of narrative identity theory. Poststruc‐ turalists see subjectivity as something indefinite and always already deferred; it can always only be understood as an endlessly inconclusive ‘text,’ a herme‐ neutical endeavour eternally frustrated by linguistic structures which both pre‐ exist and further its construction. This leads to the conclusion that there can be no autonomy or individuality, because human beings must be understood as always vulnerable to or violated by the linguistic constructs in which they know themselves and are known by others (Worthington, Self as Narrative 12). If, however, “texts (and selves understood as texts) are to remain readable […] they must conform to certain intersubjective requirements of referentiality and expectation” (Worthington, “A Devious Narrative” 197). As Jacques Derrida writes in Of Grammatology, texts cannot be destroyed from the outside by re‐ 69 3.1 The Book of Evidence: In Search of a Grand Narrative (as) Identity <?page no="70"?> bellious acts or narratives; “they are not possible and effective, nor can they take accurate aim except by inhabiting those structures” (Derrida, Of Grammatology 24). Again and again, the textual process is tethered to the dialectics of loss, absence, denial, destruction, homelessness, exile and, ultimately, oblivion. Ro‐ land Barthes places particular emphasis on the ‘text’ as something quintessen‐ tially non-identifiable and self-eradicating: the ‘text’ “is that neutral, composite, oblique space where our subject slips away; the negative where all identity is lost, starting with the very identity of the body writing” (Barthes, “Death of the Author” 142). There is even something redemptive, according to Charles Scott, in the postmodern language in which “words might leave one without the book that they seem to compose, or with a non-word (e.g. différance) to which the words seem to give place” (Scott, “Postmodern Language” 33). To get to the pith and core of things, such “purportedly revolutionary claims” lead to little more than “fallacious fiction[s] of heroic exile and self-erasure” (Worthington, “A Devious Narrative” 198). Their liberating value is question‐ able, for they seek to destroy what or the way human beings are. Textual or personal non-identity can have no redemptive meaning; there is no aesthetic worth to a notion that leaves the human subject “without books or a language that leaves us only with ‘non words’” (Worthington, “A Devious Narrative” 199). Any sense of identity and self must, after all, be placed (or at least orientate itself) in a physical space (a sense of where we are), even if the resulting sen‐ sations are ultimately conditioned by artificial, linguistic constructs. Conse‐ quently, though the postmodern yearns to acquire unqualified self-authorisation free of the tethers of judgment and morality, the self, especially in crisis, seeks a relation to communal frameworks of value and the vision of the good life. In Sources of the Self: The Making of Modern Identity, Charles Taylor takes the notion that identity must be oriented within a physical space and time a step further. Physical placement, he argues, is not only analogous to moral orienta‐ tion, but an intuition inherent to being: “To know who you are is to be oriented in moral space.” (Sources of the Self 27). This is not to say that a sense of mapped moral orientation restricts the prerogative of individual liberty or that it must necessitate a coercion to determined, objective constitutions. Choices within frameworks and their respective maps always remain possible. Though the human subject needs moral and discursive maps, its subjective freedom is native to the choices it makes with regard to the maps it will use (Taylor, Sources of the Self 28). The question of how to map morality and self is also central to John Banville’s The Book of Evidence (1989). More than that, it must be regarded as the raison d’être of his entire ‘Frames’ trilogy - The Book is followed by Ghosts (1993) and 70 III Always Already Identity: Pastoral, Self, and Narrative <?page no="71"?> Athena (1995). Protagonist Freddie Montgomery poses the question of morality right in the beginning: “I am merely asking, with all respect, whether it is feasible to hold on to the principle of moral culpability once the notion of free will has been abandoned” (BoE 16). Freddie continues to examine the question thor‐ oughly as the consequent narrative unfolds: “The question is wrong, that’s the trouble. It assumes that actions are determined by volition, deliberate thought, a careful weighing-up of facts” (BoE 38), until he finally shatters the concept of free will using Nietzsche as his intellectual weapon of choice: “There are no moral facts, only moral interpretations of facts” (Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, qtd. in BoE 34). Just as The Book of Evidence interrogates the imperatives of free will and moral culpability, Ghosts, as a logical continuation, tries to provide an answer, and to do so it draws heavily on Nietzsche’s vision of a humankind that is integrated into the scheme of nature and sin. For Nietzsche envisions humanity as living in harmony with nature as part of a great, undifferentiated whole. At the same time humankind is capable of recognising things other than itself, according to the German philosopher. This vision, Brendan McNamee observes, is both “cen‐ tred in the imagination and decentred in the recognition that this imagination lays down no laws and knows itself to be only one half of a whole” (McNamee, “The Human Moment” 70). Ghosts maps out this vision in the discourse of ab‐ sences and lacunae that Freddie obsesses over, and that he fills with his own imaginings. Where Nietzsche uses the imagery of nature to map out his concepts of mor‐ ality semantically, Ghosts thrives on the relation between nature, morality and culpability, transforming the resulting medley of concepts into a pastoral des‐ cant about the crisis of identity and self. For a crisis of identity often entails a desire to act out a retreat and a return within the contexts and the narrative landscapes of an Arcadian otherwhile and elsewhere. Pastoral can thereby func‐ tion not only as a map, a means of orientation, but as a grand narrative of identity discourse in Banville’s post-/ modern novels. Indeed, the entire trilogy is con‐ cerned precisely with how a “decentred,” irrational subject in crisis maps out a moral space in a narrative that mirrors the pastoral sojourn. In simpler terms, but with more pathos, Freddie uses language to create an Arcadian grand nar‐ rative sans moral culpability, and while the resulting discourse is fictitious and imagined, he can at least call it his own. 71 3.1 The Book of Evidence: In Search of a Grand Narrative (as) Identity <?page no="72"?> Morality and Identity in The Book of Evidence Frederick Charles St John Vanderveld Montgomery is a man of many names and a polyvalent character. Convicted of the senseless murder of a young woman, he is writing a Book of Evidence from a dank, damp, Dublin prison cell. Maol‐ seachlainn, his attorney, has negotiated a plea of guilty to the lesser charge of manslaughter, in exchange for a shortened sentence. But, by preventing a pro‐ longed trial, Maolseachlainn has shortened Freddie’s ‘sentences,’ too, thereby inadvertently pre-empting Montgomery’s wish to have his say in the courtroom, and to indulge in a moment of self-affirming, narcissistic tribunal histrionics: I’ll plead guilty, of course - haven’t I done so all along? - but I do not like it that I may not give evidence, no, that I don’t like. It’s not fair. Even a dog such as I must have his day. I have always been myself in the witness box, gazing straight ahead, quite calm, and wearing casual clothes, as the newspapers will have it. And then that authoritative voice, telling my side of things, in my own words. Now I am to be denied this moment of drama. (BoE 182) Freddie’s testimonial is never intended as an “apologia” or “defence” (BoE 16), however, but as a means of self-reification, a coming to terms with his deeds, desires, and defects. The result is a solipsistic narrative that hovers between facts and fictions. In the beginning, Montgomery professes to recount truthfully and accurately the circumstances of the murder: “I wish to claim full responsibility for my actions - after all, they are the only thing I can call my own” (BoE 16). By the end of the novel, however, Freddie wants nothing to do with his Book; he orders to have it put away “with the other, official fictions” (BoE 220). He is not interested in an authoritative account of the murder, but through the act of writing, desires to re-discover an authentic sense of self: “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 yet wherein I would be free” (16). His identity, he claims, is in ruins, a ghost of its former self. He feels “un‐ housed” and “at once exposed and invisible […] as something without weight, without moorings, a floating phantom” (BoE 16). Freddie, it appears, has enor‐ mous difficulty with asserting himself as an individual and his project of iden‐ tification seems always already deferred: “I was always a little behind, trotting in the rear of my own life. […] Stuck in the past, I was always peering beyond the present towards a limitless future. Now, I suppose the future may be said to have arrived” (BoE 38). Only in the act of murder itself do the past, present and future finally come together: violently, suddenly, but completely and compre‐ 72 III Always Already Identity: Pastoral, Self, and Narrative <?page no="73"?> hensively: “To do the worst thing, the very worst thing, that’s the way to be free. I would never again need to pretend to myself to be what I was not” (BoE 125). Prison provides Freddie with temporary shelter, even if it also robs him of “something essential,” as if “the stuffing has been knocked out” (BoE 6). There he is given “a space and a distance to reflect upon himself in an attempt to discard all masks and discover authenticity” (Berensmeyer, John Banville: Fictions of Order 207). This is altogether too simple, however. Freddie is a man of deviance - masks are his métier. He is “a quick-change artist” who “place[s] all faith in the mask […] the true stamp of refined humanity. Did I say that or someone else? ” (BoE 191). In this reference to Yeats, Freddie confesses an informed under‐ standing of the art of masking and unmasking. He revels in such fantasies, moreover, as he adopts and discards a large number of make-shift identities at will. His masks are taken mostly from literature; he is at once an “exotic animal, last survivor of a species they had thought extinct” (BoE 1), “Jean-Jacques the cultured killer (BoE 5), then Gilles de Rais (BoE 32), Raskolnikov (BoE 91), and finally, Moosbrugger (BoE 163). According to Freddie, masks offer a veneer of veracity; paradoxically, they are “the only way another creature can be known,” because they remain on “the surface […] where there is depth” (BoE 72). The ambiguities of acting and actions and of masking and unmasking are a recurring theme in many of Banville’s novels. Freddie comments on the subject in length in Ghosts, even quoting Diderot on acting: He [Diderot] knew how much of life is a part that we play. He conceived of living as a form of necessary hypocrisy, each man acting out his part, posing as himself. It is true. What have I ever been but an actor, even if a bad one, too much involved in my role, not detached enough, not sufficiently cold. […] This is why I have never learned to live properly among others. People find me strange. Well, I find myself strange. I am not convincing, somehow, even to myself. (G 198) Right from the start, Freddie places himself on the periphery as an outsider, cut off from the rest of humanity. “Other people,” he says, “seemed to have a density, a thereness, which I lacked” (BoE 16). He has done nothing but assume a series of roles in his life, and he has treated each and every one of them with penchant triviality, as a joke. They enabled him to establish an ironic distance from which to observe and present himself with a mixture of self-loathing and sardonic pride, conscious of the equally prefigured perceptions of others and thus progressively integrating the subjective and objective perspectives (Berensmeyer, John Banville: Fictions of Order 207). 73 3.1 The Book of Evidence: In Search of a Grand Narrative (as) Identity <?page no="74"?> Yet, for all his culture, reading and intellect, neither his many masks nor his Book of Evidence, his ‘autobiographical fiction,’ can truly unmask the real, au‐ thentic self, nor offer in its pages that “marvellous edifice” of innocence and freedom he so ardently desires: Yes, to be found out, to be suddenly pounced upon, beaten, stripped, and set before the howling multitude, that was my deepest, most ardent desire[. …] Then finally I would be 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. (BoE 161-162) In truth, Freddie’s autobiographical assertions quickly turn on him, as they turn on themselves. According to Paul De Man, the autobiographical project pro‐ duces and determines life. Masks are an inherent part of the trope of autobiog‐ raphy; they manifest themselves “in the etymology of the trope’s name, prosopon poien, to confer a mask or a face.” To write an autobiography, in other words, is to give and take away faces, to face and to deface (De Man, “Autobiography as Defacement” 924, 926). Kim Worthington goes a step further and interprets Freddie’s play with masks, roles and faces as a pretentious posture of “calculated deviance” (“A De‐ vious Narrative” 206). Freddie “feigns excommunication (and irresponsible de‐ tachment),” she argues, “from the constraints of rational placement.” Though he seeks to enter a “utopia of excommunicative freedom,” he can never quite reach it, because such a state is “beyond or without language and rationality” (Wor‐ thington, “A Devious Narrative” 206). Freddie writes in order to assert his self; he never intends for any of his words to be read by others, however, and that is his fatal flaw. Thus he condemns his self to the periphery, but within the boun‐ daries of the rational communicative protocols that provide the means of com‐ prehension of his claims. He has, for example, always lived the life of an itin‐ erant, whether in southern Europe with his wife and autistic son, on a Mediterranean island, at the detached and secluded family home Coolgrange in the country, or on the ‘island’ in Ghosts. Rather than escaping all community, he has situated himself, much like the shepherd of pejorative pastoral, “at con‐ testational marginal sites within the communities” (Worthington, “A Devious Narrative” 207), thereby to observe, criticize and through that social criticism, narcissistically attempt to realign his “bifurcate” (BoE 95) sense of self. Grand Narratives, Grand Identities Despite the various professions and apparent confessions to that effect, Freddie does not, ultimately, hanker after authenticity through narrative, or at least not 74 III Always Already Identity: Pastoral, Self, and Narrative <?page no="75"?> exclusively. He does not have this luxury. The “density, the thereness” that he feels as something palpable in “others” (BoE 16) is what he wants to bestow on himself, and thereby achieve a tangible sense of corpo(reality). The narrative emplotment of his self is an attempt to achieve embodiment, to become some‐ thing unmistakably tangible, physical, and ultimately visible, not only to others, but also to his own, estranged sense of self. The Book is fraught with passages that mourn this seeming lack of corpo(reality): I felt that I was utterly unlike myself. […] It was as if I - the real, 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. […] This is not clear, I know. I say the one within was strange to me, but which version of me do I mean? […] But it was not a new sensation. I have always felt - what is the word - bifurcate, that’s it. (BoE 95) In truth, at this point of the story the endeavour to achieve corpo(reality) brings Freddie closer to self-destruction than self-reification. For he is more than aware of his power to use language as a vessel to fill with facts and fictions at will, and he utilises this dialectic so as to construct a narrative Arcadia, a linguistic bor‐ derland where fiction and lies can thrive without moral culpability: “Lying makes a dull world more interesting. To lie is to create” (G 191). Furthermore, he mocks and parodies the self he describes throughout, and he is not able to achieve an objective, authorial distance from reality: “There was something ir‐ resistibly funny in the way reality, banal as ever, was fulfilling my worst fanta‐ sies” (BoE 3). This artistry, this narrative ‘deviance’ is driven by an over‐ whelming, egotistical desire for authorial recognition. To become “a master of the spare style, of the art that conceals art” (BoE 202), he claims, is what he now desires most. This aim, to achieve the “ruthless suppression of the ego for the sake of the text” (BoE 203), moreover, stands in stark contrast to Freddie’s self-adorning, narcissistic narrative. When the narrative frame of The Book fails him, Mont‐ gomery turns to an anti-narrative descant of fictions and consequently sets himself up as “the pawn of extra-personal determination” (Worthington, “A De‐ vious Narrative” 214). All this artistry reveals that, between the lines of The Book there beats a timid heart, tentative and full of doubt: “in that grim, shadowed gallery I call my heart, I stood uneasily, with a hand to my mouth, silent, envious, uncertain” (BoE 17). Montgomery’s eyes set their sights backwards, hoping to move forwards: “The myriad possibilities of the past lay behind me, a strew of wreckage. Was there, in all that, one particular shard - a decision reached, a road taken, a signpost followed - that would show me just how I had come to 75 3.1 The Book of Evidence: In Search of a Grand Narrative (as) Identity <?page no="76"?> my present state? ” (BoE 37). By looking back, Freddie seeks comfort in the grand narrative of the human experience of time and nostalgia, and there are countless other examples of master narratives that Freddie uses to his own advantage. Life, according to Freddie, is “a prison in which all actions are determined ac‐ cording to a random pattern thrown down by an unknown and insensate au‐ thority.” The world is one big, “unpredictable, seething [..] swirl of chance col‐ lisions” (BoE 16, 18). The entire symphony of The Book of Evidence is orchestrated meticulously around a bass register of such grand narrative (author)isations. Freddie’s iden‐ tity is in crisis, and the possibility to escape from the constraints of intersub‐ jective rationality to the linguistic borderland of Arcadian nostalgia strikes a harmonious chord with this “child among adults” (BoE 16). Unwilling to move forward, he hankers after a time when all was right with the world, a lost age of innocence: “I always feel like a traveller on the point of departure. Even ar‐ riving I seemed to be turning away, with a lingering glance at the lost land” (BoE 40). Like his father - who saw Ireland as “the only worthwhile world,” Freddie too wants “to believe in this fantasy of a great good place that had been taken away from us and our kind” (BoE 29). As a site of pastoral, Ireland itself can be traced as far back as Spenser: “in its otherness on the edge of Europe, in its greenness and difference, Ireland has provided for the modern western world an equivalent of the ancient world’s remote rural Arcadia (Grene, “Black Pastoral” 1). The Book of Evidence, in ac‐ cordance with this, can be read as Banville’s pastoralisation of the literary ‘oth‐ erness’ and the cultural ‘difference’ that prevails through his country’s heritage. Indeed, Banville’s entire œuvre pays homage to “the human fall-out of this legacy of disinheritance with an array of characters who exist anxiously in the world, unable to access any shared or generally accepted beliefs that will tell them who they are” (Hand, John Banville 136). It is in this vein that pastoral begins to take on the role of a soothing, self-as‐ serting grand narrative for Freddie in the excommunicative exile he has, with his narrative art, crafted for himself. Though it manifests itself most notably in references to childhood, the past and a “lost land,” it is through Freddie’s desire to create a selfhood by means of authorship that the linguistic borderland of Arcadia and its powerful subtext of nostalgia first become textualised. The Book of Evidence, above all else, draws attention to Freddie’s amazing creative, au‐ thorial powers. He demonstrates an unparalleled capacity to situate, circum‐ scribe and control characters through narrative. This power, however, also strikes a discordant note with claims that his writing is nothing more than the 76 III Always Already Identity: Pastoral, Self, and Narrative <?page no="77"?> 1 Ghosts 128 precipitate of “puppet-show twitchings which passes for consciousness” (BoE 38). Banville has said that he imagines Freddie caught between the living and the dead, between imagination and (corpo)reality: “[H]e is trying to find ground to stand on. He’s in purgatory, and he’s trying to find a solid corner in it, and he can’t” (Schwall, “An Interview with John Banville” 1997, 14). By manipulating the text and its countless characters, what Freddie is trying to do is to create a ‘golden world’ that will not only accommodate the living and the dead, but him also, a criminal who sees himself as something in between: “It is not the dead that interest me now[.] […] Who then? The living? No, no, something in be‐ tween; some third thing” (G 29). And Ghosts is a seamless, masterful continuation of this grand narrative endeavour. 3.2 Ghosts: Pastoral Retreat, Postmodern Return The pastoral is an ironic form, based on a perceivable distance between the alleged and the implied. It lets us know either that its point of view is significant largely be‐ cause it contrasts with some other point of view, or that its real subject is something in addition to (or perhaps even instead of) its ostensible subject. - Ettin, Literature and the Pastoral 12 Viewed from a certain angle, these polite ar‐ cadian scenes can seem a riotous bacchanal. — Ghosts 98 ‘I Have Embarked for the Golden World’ 1 If The Book of Evidence is Freddie’s narrative gateway to excommunicative exile, Ghosts documents his arrival on the other side, at a ‘golden world’ islanded from the problems of reality. The Book was an exercise in exorcism, to banish the phantoms of Josie Bell’s murder and its consequences. Freddie’s crime, ulti‐ mately, was “a failure of imagination, a failure to realise that someone other than 77 3.2 Ghosts: Pastoral Retreat, Postmodern Return <?page no="78"?> himself was real” (McNamee, “The Human Moment” 70). It is somewhat para‐ doxical then, that in Ghosts he uses imagination as a source of power to try and come to terms with the resulting exile, and the results amount to a ghostwriter’s dead letters focalised around the fictions of others and their (in)authentic lives: words doomed to remain in purgatory, neither delivered nor returned. At first, the narrator of Ghosts is far away from this anti-climactic truth, however, and for now he continues to write and address his ‘letters.’ The nar‐ rative, at least in the beginning, is under his control as he breathes life into any number of characters: “A little world is coming into being. Who speaks? I do. Little god” (G 4). Indeed, this “little god” endows his narrative not only with characters, but also complements it with a seemingly coherent structure. Ghosts divides into four parts, and Part One sees Freddie on an island off the coast of Ireland; he has served the ten years of his prison sentence. The island is unspe‐ cified and Freddie is never named, though his identity becomes clear when, as narrator, he recounts a murder that mirrors Josie Bell’s fate in The Book with ominous accuracy (G 83-87). In all else, Freddie remains as unreliable a narrator as ever. On this island Freddie paints a picture of himself as the “amanuensis” to a Professor Silas Kreutznaer, sharing a house with the art expert and his other assistant, Licht. He then invents and narrates the arrival on the island of an altogether disparate group of day-trippers, and goes on to meticulously pen down their thoughts. Freddie paints their actions with the obsessive brush strokes typical of a master of the narrative art. He pays particular attention to a young woman called Flora. All this, Freddie maintains, is but “a fiction that, for reasons not wholly clear […] it suited [him] to maintain.” Indeed, Part One takes up almost half of the entire novel, however, and though he asserts assid‐ uously that he is simply “playing the part,” (G 33) there is much less that speaks for such thespian trickery than for the machinations of something far greater, the pretext of a hidden agenda. First things first, the island; when the authorities ask Freddie where he would like to go upon his release, he immediately replies: “Oh, an island, where else? All I wanted […] was a place of seclusion and tranquillity where I could begin the long process of readjustment to the world.” There he would also continue his “studies of a famous painter,” later revealed to be a certain Vaublin, an al‐ most-anagram of ‘Banville.’ Islands have a great appeal for Freddie. They give him “the sense of boundedness […] of being protected from the world - and of the world being protected from [him]” (G 21). What Freddie is trying to achieve through the island setting, first and foremost, is a retreat from the self: 78 III Always Already Identity: Pastoral, Self, and Narrative <?page no="79"?> And so I had come to this penitential isle […] seeking not redemption […] but an accommodation with myself […] and my poor, swollen conscience. [… W]hen I arrived I felt at once as if somehow I had come home[.] […] I was trying to get as far away as possible from everything. […] I was determined to try to make myself into a - what would you call it? - a monomorph: a monad. […] And then to start again, empty. […] I had retreated into solitude […] I was living in a fantasy world, a world of pictures and painted figures and all the rest of it. (G 22, 25-27) The island functions as a mythical place where time, reality, and imagination hold sway. It is very much a means of retreat for Freddie, a purgatory peniten‐ tiary, a “pilgrimage isle” (G 30) that can offer him “disconnection, an escapism from complexity and contradiction” (Gifford, Pastoral 71). Throughout litera‐ ture, the island setting has been used as a heterotopia for those stranded on foreign shores of the self. Banville - or Freddie, rather - invokes numerous literary parallels in every part of the narrative. Kreutznaer, for one, is Robinson Crusoe’s ‘original’ name, before it turns into Crusoe “by the usual corruption of words in England” (Defoe, Robinson Crusoe 5). Countless other castaways from literature make an appearance: there is “the Swiss family Robertson” (G 52); at one point Freddie sees himself as “Jim Hawkins” from Treasure Island “off on another adventure” (G 38); at another point the island suddenly mirrors Swift’s Laputa - “I had no desire to realight from Laputa into the land of giants and horses” (G 34). All these references and allusions, to name but a few, come to‐ gether in an artful amalgamation of mythologies based on a fabulous journey to an island, and Freddie is both painter and curator of the result, “Le monde d’or, […] one of those timeless images that seem to have been hanging forever in the gallery of the mind” (G 94-5). Le monde d’or: the island and its colourful assortment of castaways is a setting Banville, or rather his narrator, has constructed in order to ‘speak’ life into a specific painting by a certain Jean Vaublin. Both painter and painting are an invention, it is needless to say, but they are inventions whose historical foot‐ prints and provenance are accurately documented in the novel. Freddie bestows on the “long dead and not quite first-rate master” of his monde d’or an eight‐ eenth-century Dutch pedigree whose name oscillates between numerous near-anagrams of Banville: “Faubelin, Vanhoblin, Van Hobelijn” (G 315). In sum, it is no coincidence that the narrator and the painter share elusive identities: “He changed his name, his nationality, everything covering his tracks. I have the impression of a man on the run. There is no early work, no juvenilia, no remnants of his apprenticeship. Suddenly one day he starts to paint. Yes, a man‐ ufactured man. Is that what attracts me? ” (G 35). 79 3.2 Ghosts: Pastoral Retreat, Postmodern Return <?page no="80"?> 2 Matters are further complicated by the presence of two versions of “The Embarcation.” The first version now hangs in the Louvre, in Paris (See Appendix, Fig. 5), while the second version is in the Charlottenburg Palace, in Berlin (See Appendix, Fig. 6). For a comprehensive scholarly account of these paintings, see Posner, Donald. “The Fêtes Galantes” Antoine Watteau. 1984, pp. 116-195). Banville acknowledges a regard for Watteau in an interview with Hedwig Schwall: “I love Watteau, but I don’t really like him as an artist: technically he is not very inter‐ esting. His pictures are rather wan; yet I love the way Watteau’s figures seem to have their own light. There is an extraordinary picture, it is in the Wallace collection in London - people sitting in a woodland scene at night, and they are like glow-worms. I love that, I find a pathos in that. These glowing figures are very moving; this is poetry. Yet I wouldn’t admire Watteau as a painter, whereas I admire Cézanne. You can love things without admiring them and you can admire things without loving them” (Schwall, “An Interview with John Banville” 1997, p. 18). As for the painting, it is described as one of Vaublin’s typical “pélerinages or a delicate fête galante” (G 30), and is ostentatiously modelled on Antoine Wat‐ teau’s L’Embarquement pour Cythère (see Appendix Fig. 5 and Fig. 6). The exact translation of the title is still a matter of debate among scholars, though the choices have been narrowed down to a disambiguation between “The Embar‐ cation for Cythera” and “The Embarcation from Cythera,” where both bear sig‐ nificance to Ghosts. 2 Just as Watteau’s paintings can be said to focus on both an imminent departure to and a return from Cythera, so Ghosts, its characters, narrator, and narrative alike, are “poised between sea and sky, suspended,” as if “floating in some heavy, sluggish substance, the Dead Sea of the mind” (G 202, 205). Indeed, the fête galante as a genre is perfectly suited to bring such chance arrangements to the canvas: The term [fête galante] characterises those gatherings of men and women, usually dressed with studied refinement, who flirt decorously, dance, make music or talk freely, in a landscape or in a sumptuously unreal architectural setting. The shimmering coloured silk of their theatrical clothes […] raises the question […] who are these figures, and who are they supposed to represent? (Roland, Watteau 171) In sum, Ghosts is the narrative emplotment of the fête galante. Freddie uses Cy‐ thera, the mythical birthplace of Aphrodite, as a typical Arcadian setting to evoke the genre’s “sumptuously unreal” sense of suspension. Already at the shipwreck, one of the castaways lets fly the curse “Cythera, my foot” (G 3), and this very imprecation returns at regular intervals throughout the novel, almost like a leitmotif (G 3, 31, 221). Where the painting acknowledges the fête galante as an escapist activity, then, Part One of narrative celebrates pastoral poetry as escapist literature. Its mesmerising monologues drift back and forth, between 80 III Always Already Identity: Pastoral, Self, and Narrative <?page no="81"?> past and present, and between the various characters. Part One is a medley of exquisitely descriptive writing, peppered with beautifully rendered cameos that capture Freddie’s intense, distracted gaze upon this odd texture of people and landscape. There is a sense that neither the narrator nor Banville are under any pressure to advance the plot, placing each brush stroke with careful content‐ ment, willed to prolong the escape for as long as possible. For all this celebration of escapism, crucial questions remain: does the “pen‐ itential isle” truly offer a delightful escape? Does the ‘golden world’ lead Freddie closer to wish-fulfilment, or does it take him further away from authenticity, even leave him more astray and in more doubt than before? Freddie’s wish is to enact in the idyllic life on the island a pastoral retreat from the problems and sophistications of ethics and society; he would, at least in Part One of Ghosts, concur with Alexander Pope’s observation that “Pastoral is an image of what they call the Golden Age. […] We must therefore use some illusion to render a Pastoral delightful” (Pope, “Pastorals” 25-27). He would also gladly accept Terry Gifford’s reading of pastoral as “the historiography of wish-fulfilment,” whence the latter itself must be “an illusion,” since it is born from a fabricated aesthetic convention or mode (Pastoral 41-2). Wittgenstein conversely argues that “ethics and aesthetics are one and the same” (Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus 6.421), and Freddie would agree with this equivalency too. Amidst this purgatory of veri‐ similitudes and doubt, Le monde d’or epitomizes Freddie’s endeavour to assuage ethics with aesthetics, to transform such and similar convolutions into lesser matters, but with more art. And the island with its many pastoral fictions, he is convinced, can help him in this “process of putting the complex into the simple” (Empson, Some Versions of Pastoral 23). The result is an obsessive and incurably solipsistic search for a satisfactory aesthetic. Yet the painting also holds an uncanny significance for Freddie: “Even in Le monde d’or, apparently so chaste, so ethereal, a certain hectic air of expectancy bespeaks excesses remembered or to come” (G 95). Freddie sees the painting as darkest pastoral and not merely as a fête galante to be taken at face value: “the blonde woman walking away on the arm of the old man - who himself has the touch of the roué - wears a wearily knowing air, while the two boys, those pallid, slightly ravaged putti, seem to have seen more things than they should” (G 96). This is a bucolic scene under threat, an image of innocence waiting for disaster to strike; amidst the eschewal of reality, Freddie senses a latent violence that overshadows his golden world: “Even the little girl with the braided hair who leads the lady by the hand has the aura of a fledgling Justine or Juliette, a po‐ tential victim in whom old men might repose dark dreams of tender abuse” (G 96). Freddie’s Cythera thus becomes an amalgam of the idyllic and the demonic. 81 3.2 Ghosts: Pastoral Retreat, Postmodern Return <?page no="82"?> 3 Ghosts 178. It is at once Aphrodite’s island of love and Aeaea, Circe’s island of dark magic and transformation (G 7). The narrative achieves its mastery in the way Ban‐ ville’s narrator keeps oscillating between these two mythical images of darkness and of light. ‘That Particular Shade of Green’ 3 The collusion of dreams and demons is not simply another means of escape and eschewal, because it offers Freddie a much-needed mode of exploration. Through the island, its characters and its setting in the hortus conclusus of the ‘golden world,’ moreover, Freddie “is trying to find ground to stand on. He’s in purgatory, and he’s trying to find a solid corner in it” (Schwall, “An Interview with John Banville” 14). His endeavour to find such firm “ground” becomes most evident as the ‘visitors’ are about to leave the island. Assuming the role of a melancholy Jacques mourning their departure, Freddie pays homage to the shepherd, the defining character of stock-pastoral poetry: “If the others had stayed […] they might have become a little community, might have formed a little fold, and I could have been the shepherd guarding them against the prowling wolf ” (G 92). Naturally, just as the reader recognises that the pastoral landscape is an Arcadia because its language is idealised, Freddie is also very aware of the interdependency that reigns supreme over his narrative, the char‐ acters, and the idyll he constructs for its telling: “I know that the reality they inhabit is different from mine. […] They are only flies after all, and I am only I. […] They might be a host of shining seraphim come to comfort me” (G 97). At the side of the house Freddie discovers “the remains of what must once have been a kitchen garden” (G 98). It is in the cultivation and rejuvenation of this new-found-land of “good black soil” that Freddie begins to see a means of resolving the problem of reality and representation that has, ever since the murder of Josie Bell, both defined and perplexed his schizoid sense of identity. The first seeds are sown by Freddie’s favourite thinker, Nietzsche, whom he quotes profusely: “Hard beside the woe of the world, and often upon its volcanic soil, man has laid out his little garden of happiness” (Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human 90 qtd. in Ghosts 97). Freddie is all too eager to paint himself in the image of this “man” who first braves to break ground in a “garden of happiness” to call his own and as juxtaposed to the world of woe: “Yes, you have guessed it, I have taken up gardening, even in the shadow of my ruins” (G 97). 82 III Always Already Identity: Pastoral, Self, and Narrative <?page no="83"?> The act of gardening is not only “a relaxation from the rigours of scholarship” for Freddie. It is much “more than that. Out there among these greens, in this clement weather, the irresistible sensation of being in touch with something, some authentic, fundamental thing, to which a part of me I had thought atro‐ phied responds as if to a healing and invigorating balm” (G 97). The garden to Freddie is the first and the most ‘natural’ stepping stone towards atonement and “proper restitution” for his crimes. He seeks solace in the fecundity of nature, to unite the seemingly irreconcilable elements that shape his contradictory character into a reincarnated, innocent self: “Perhaps I shall make a little statue of myself and grind it up and mix it with the clay, as the philosopher so charm‐ ingly recommends, and that way come to live again through these growing things” (G 97). Nature, as discussed previously, is Nietzsche’s map of morality and sin, and Freddie’s “little garden of happiness” epitomises the philosopher’s vision of the (de)centred imagination, where humankind lives both in harmony with nature and through nature is also given the ability to recognise and appreciate things other than itself. By virtue of the garden, “choked with weeds and scutch grass,” Freddie recognises his self in the other. He has developed a “great fondness for the stunted things, the runts, the ones that fail to flower and yet refuse to die” (G 98). Moreover, Freddie sees himself as both the source and enabler of their valiance and tenacity: [I]t is because of me that they cling on […] simply my presence gives them heart somehow, and makes them live. Who or what would there be to notice their struggles if I did not come out and walk among them every day? […] I am the agent of individ‐ uation: in me they find their singularity. I painted them in neat rows, just so, and gave each one its space; without me only the madness of mere growth. (G 98) At this point, however, the attentive reader will not be convinced so easily of Freddie’s renewed sense of agency. The passage ostentatiously reminds us that this is Freddie at his most narcissistic. Not nature is in need of his presence and recognition, but vice versa. Only a little earlier Freddie is repeatedly struck by nature’s indifference: “Nothing surprises nature; terrible deeds, the most appal‐ ling crimes, leave the world unmoved, as I can attest.” But, unlike most others, who “find this uncanny” and are “raging for a response,” Freddie “take[s] comfort from this universal dispassion” (G 65). Why then, should nature suddenly have regard for or have become dependent on him? On the contrary, he is very im‐ pressed by nature’s disregard for human concerns and reciprocates with an equivocally casual fascination for natural phenomena: “Life, growth, this tender green fighting its way up through the dirt, that’s all that interests me” (G 98). 83 3.2 Ghosts: Pastoral Retreat, Postmodern Return <?page no="84"?> The weeds exercise a particular fascination on him: “And then there are the weeds; I know that if I were a real gardener, I would do merciless and unrelenting battle against weeds, but the fact is, I cherish them” (G 99). They are, for the present, his greatest source of reification, they are his “agent[s] of individua‐ tion”: I wonder if they feel pain, experience terror, if they weep and bleed, in their damp, vermiculate world, just as we do, up here in the light? I look at the little sprigs of chickweed trembling among the bean shoots and I am strangely moved. Such stead‐ fastness, such yearning. They want to live too. That is all they ask: to have their little moment in the world. (G 99) The personification of the garden illustrates Freddie’s desire to live out, by means of a kind of symbiosis with nature’s humanoid idiosyncrasies, precisely that “moment of drama” he is denied in The Book of Evidence. It is “what [one] might call a pathetic fallacy, all right” (G 66). The garden functions as an Arca‐ dian, escapist (re)construction of nature and it represents a poignant attempt on Freddie’s part to satisfy his imaginative desire to humanise the world: “that’s me always, hungering after other worlds […] so that I can fill them up, I suppose, with my imaginings” (G 75). Furthermore, these are Freddie’s first earnest steps towards atonement for his crimes, whereby, as if for the first time, the reader should see him in a state of prelapsarian innocence. This image is reinforced by nostalgic references to a pastoral past basking in the “immemorial happiness” of childhood: All this, the garden and so on, why does it remind me so strongly of boyhood days? God knows, I was never a tow-haired child of nature, ensnared with flowers and romping on the grass. […] Yet when I trail out here with my hoe I feel the chime of an immemorial happiness. Is it that the past has become pastoral, as much a fancy as in my mind this garden is, perpetually vernal, aglow with a stylised, prelapsarian sunlight such as that which shines with melancholy radiance over Vaublin’s pleasure parks? That is what I am digging for, I suppose, that is what I am trying to uncover: the forfeited, impossible, never to be found again state of simple innocence. (G 100) Above all else, perhaps, Ghosts is a latter-day pastoral constructed by a nar‐ rator-creator in search of atonement. As such, Freddie sees in the narrative re‐ alization of Le monde d’or a means of reviving Josie Bell, by virtue of his imag‐ inative powers: “What form would such atonement take that would turn back time and bring the dead to life? ” (G 68). At the same time Freddie is convinced - and goes to great lengths to persuade the reader - of a “genetic” disability to relate to women, both real and imagined. In an episode before the castaways 84 III Always Already Identity: Pastoral, Self, and Narrative <?page no="85"?> arrive, he indulges in a brief relationship with a Dutch widow living a hermit’s life on the island, Mrs Vanden. Her sudden death brutally throws his own con‐ fused issues of gender and identity into sharp relief: A sort of lust for knowledge, the passionate desire to delve my way into womanhood and taste the very temper of its being. Dangerous talk, I know. Well, go ahead, mis‐ understand me, I don’t care. Perhaps I have always wanted to be a woman, perhaps that’s it. If so, I have reached the halfway stage, unsexed, poor androgyne that I am become by now. (G 69-70) Amidst Freddie’s ragtag collection of shipwreck survivors the reader finds Flora - Banville’s choice of names is never a coincidence and always significant - a languorous girl-like figure, the archetype of feminine vulnerability. Just as the plants of his “kitchen garden” allowed Freddie to bask in the glow of verbal architectonics and the linguistic landscapes of Arcadian innocence, Flora is Freddie’s avatar of “atonement” (G 91). She is the key to his revival of Josie Bell: “in my imaginings I can clearly see this cleansed new creature streaming up out of myself like a proselyte rising drenched from the baptismal river amid glad cries” (G 69). Freddie’s relation to Flora is particularly suited to a Lacanian reading. Any individual’s “entry into language,” according to Jacques Lacan, is “the precon‐ dition for becoming conscious” (Lacan, “The Mirror Stage” 4). Flora, in a similar vein, is Freddie’s pretext for becoming conscious of human beings and realities other than those he fabricates within his fictions and his imagination: “And somehow by being suddenly herself like this she made the things around her be there too. In her, and what she spoke, the world […] found its grounding and was realised” (G 147). Towards the end of Part One Freddie reiterates that Flora’s arrival has somehow aided him to see and perceive his surroundings with an intimacy and immediacy previously lacking in his consciousness: No longer Our Lady of the Enigmas, but a girl, just a girl. 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. (G 147) Flora, as the name suggests, is Freddie’s “kitchen garden” Arcadia in human form. Her ‘entry’ into his language has rekindled in him a new sense of identi‐ fication. It is through her words that his observing self is suddenly liberated from its own intellectual conditioning and makes its first steps toward a new-found appreciation for the reality of woman. The impact of this epiphany 85 3.2 Ghosts: Pastoral Retreat, Postmodern Return <?page no="86"?> is monumental, especially when contrasted with Freddie’s perception of “wom‐ anhood” in The Book of Evidence: “She. There is no she, of course. There is only an organisation of shapes and colours. Yet I try to make up a life for her” (BoE 105). Flora not only introduces Montgomery to the reality of said womanhood, but to reality as a human experience per se. Previously, Freddie’s fictions func‐ tioned as an eschewal of moral culpability and the causal realities brought about by the murder of Josie Bell. His narrative emplotment of the seven shipwrecked survivors was little more than an intellectual exercise in escapism. Flora, in the beginning, was to him but a vessel for his narrative self, reborn in a prelapsarian state of innocence: It was innocence I was after […] the innocent, pure clay awaiting a grizzled Pygmalion to inspire it with life. It is as simple as that. Not love or passion, not even the notion of the radiant self rising up like flame in the mirror of the other, but the hunger only to have her live and to live in her, to conjugate in her the verb of being. (G 70) Flora has become Freddie’s new “agent of individuation.” She has transformed his language itself into an Arcadia of new possibilities. The ‘linguistic garden’ that he once solely cultivated as a narrative emplacement of his self is no longer a mere means of escape, but has become a viable vehicle for the exploration of previously unchartered realities. Where Freddie previously used his imaginative prowess to exorcise the ghosts of his past, he is suddenly confronted with a pristine “verb of being” that can offer a re-reading - and thus inherently also a re-writing - of these fictions. And as his ‘reading’ of Flora changes, so his ‘wri‐ ting’ of the castaways develops. The Freddie of Parts Two and Three of the novel is not only a “little god,” a Prospero whose authorial magic has brought about this tempestuous narrative and its signature shipwreck so that he may people the island he himself created: it is Freddie the Caliban. Having successfully en‐ tered into language, he now wishes to be acknowledged as part of the golden world, and not just to remain “this thing of darkness” washed up on the foreign shores of the self. Freddie’s Ghosts of Focalisation and Fiction The beauty of the golden world is neither in the brush of the painter nor in the pen of the author. It is in the eye of the beholder and in the point of view of the narrator. Freddie is that narrator and, like Prospero, he has unleashed a narra‐ torial tempest that shipwrecks a band of castaways in search of an innocent ‘agent of individuation’ and atonement. On the one hand, his greatest source of power is his ability to stand apart from this “lambent, salt-washed world” (G 8), 86 III Always Already Identity: Pastoral, Self, and Narrative <?page no="87"?> and whence to behold the island in the golden, calm eye of the storm. His greatest weakness, on the other hand, is at the same time his desire to be a part of this world as a Caliban who, upon successful entry into this islanded hortus, hungers after other ‘adjectives’ and ‘verbs of being.’ In sum, Freddie sets sail for a pastoral sojourn in order “to begin the long process of readjustment to the world,” but upon return from this island of “survivors” he may very well find himself once again shipwrecked “on the pale margin” (G 20) of the inauthentic self. Ghosts, as indeed most of Banville’s novels, oscillates between modernist and postmodernist concerns. In a seemingly fragmented and chaotic world, the modernist author tries to impose meaning and order. Thus, the modernist puts all faith in the power of words, whereby new, experimental and original modes of expression forge connections with reality: [T]o cite the canonical metaphor, the imagination ceases to function as a mirror re‐ flecting some external reality and becomes a lamp which projects its own internally generated light onto things. As a consequence of this momentous reversal of roles, meaning is no longer primarily considered as a transcendent property of divine being; it is now hailed as a transcendental product of the human mind. (Kearney, The Wake of Imagination 155) Where the modernist artist believes the world can be said in words, Freddie Montgomery loses himself in self-indulgent whorls of wordiness. Yet, this is not for a lack of faith in his imagination or polished expressions - “I can imagine anything” (G 31) - but for his propensity to immediately parody all efforts of “readjustment” as if filtered through a postmodern looking glass: “Childe Someone to the dark tower came” (G 116). Or, as Richard Kearney puts more precisely, the postmodernist imagination is characterised by an interplay between multiple looking glasses which reflect each other interminably. The postmodern paradigm is, in other words, that of a labyrinth of mirrors which extend infinitely in all directions a labyrinth where the image of the self (as presence to itself) dissolves into self-parody. (Kearney, The Wake of Imagination 252) Order and meaning are elbowed aside with a flippant shrug of the shoulder, for all is but a “mirroring which mirrors nothing but the act of mirroring” (Kearney, The Wake of Imagination 254-5). While Banville’s writing openly flirts with postmodern techniques and tendencies, it is more fruitful to consider his novels, and Ghosts in particular, as pendular; they swing back and forth between several recurring grand narratives and other metafictional, anti-hierarchical and cynical moods. 87 3.2 Ghosts: Pastoral Retreat, Postmodern Return <?page no="88"?> To put it differently, there is a “deep sense of critical sympathy in Banville for those […] who dreamed of metanarratives and unifying visions” (McMinn, John Banville 7), and Freddie Montgomery epitomises this oscillatory, post-/ modernist stance like no other. The entire Book of Evidence as well as the first two Parts of Ghosts are dominated by Freddie’s desperate search for a grand narrative identity that can assuage ethics with aesthetics and thereby comfort his schizoid, “bifurcate” sense of identity - be it in the form of Diderot on acting, Nietzsche’s map of morality and sin in Nature, Watteau’s fête galante, or the pastoral retreat. In sum, though “[t]here may no longer be any hope of a con‐ vincing master narrative,” Freddie, as most other Banville characters, certainly wishes there were (McMinn, John Banville 8). At the same time, however, Freddie cannot help but make a (meta-)fictional virtue of his narrative retreat. In Ghosts, ascents of pastoral prosody quickly match descants of postmodern parody. There is method to Freddie’s madness, nonetheless: the first section’s pastoral sojourn in search of a grand narrative of redemption and a stable self-identity is systematically deconstructed by a return to postmodern unreliability, disenchantment, and disingenuousness. The journey to the island in Part Two illustrates the complex antagonistic dynamics of the pastoral sojourn and the postmodern return that permeate the entire novel. Indeed, most of the elements Banville and his narrator use to construct their islanded Arcadia now parry with their postmodernist counterparts. The journey to the coast, to start at the beginning, becomes an “Anabasis” (G 124), a march from a coast into the interior - as that of the younger Cyrus into Asia in 401 BC , as narrated by Xenophon in his work Anabasis ( OED online). Freddie at first tries to construct a narrative medley of pastoral song that pays homage to similar musical allusions as they appear in The Tempest: “He heard the music the island makes, the deep song rising out of the earth, and thought he must be imagining it” (G 124). Literally, anabasis means ascent, whence the postmodern circle closes in a return to a point of origin that is invariably de‐ constructed: “It is […] the performance of my life, a masterpiece of dissembling” (G 123). Everything experiences re-reading and reinterpretation. The coast is aban‐ doned in order to explore the island interior. Even the island itself suddenly is “not like an island at all,” but “more like a bit of mainland that has recently come adrift” (G 124). Freddie falls prey to the quicksands of his own “vivid fictions” (G 150). In the beginning there is hope to regain innocence, and this hope is nourished by his narcissistic imagination: “I have a gratifying sense of myself as a sentinel, a guardian, a protector against that prowler, my dark other” (G 34). In similarly self-conscious, mythical terms Freddie - at the beginning of Part 88 III Always Already Identity: Pastoral, Self, and Narrative <?page no="89"?> Two - recalls “that trip south” from Dublin “as a sort of epic journey” where he sees himself as “Odysseus, homeless now, setting out once more, a last time, from Ithaca” (G 188). What was previously a “big, old rain-stained statue of one of the Caesars” (G 11) is now replaced by an itinerant Ulysses, who on a last journey has embarked not to but from his ‘golden world.’ A self-dramatised, mock-epic narrative of the hero’s return follows, “complete with a loyal com‐ panion, fears of domestic betrayal, a mute reunion with a long-forgotten son, and the final humiliation of seeing his ancestral home abandoned by the faithless wife” (McMinn, John Banville 121). Part Two of Ghosts continues the motif of the journey, but it precedes the stranding of the seven voyagers with the story that first took Freddie to the island. On this epic journey Montgomery decides to detour to his former home, where, he informs Billy (a concomitant and another ex-convict) his wife still lives. The landscape and the house epitomise what one might call the archetypal architectonics of nostalgia, where Freddie re-enters his past: Dreamily I advanced, admiring the sea-green moss on the door of the disused privy, the lilac tumbling over its rusted tin roof. A breeze swooped down and a thrush whis‐ tled its brief, thick song. I paused, light-headed and blinking. At last the luminous air, the bird’s song, that particular shade of green, all combined to succeed in transporting me back for a moment to the far, lost past, to some rain-washed, silvery-grey morning like this one, forgotten but still somehow felt, and I stood for a moment in inexplicable rapture, my face lifted to the light, and felt a sort of breathlessness, an inward stag‐ gering, as if an enormous, airy weight had been dropped into my arms. (G 178) Freddie does not want to enter the house at first. Indeed, he “was turning to go, more relieved […] than anything else, when […] in a sudden swoon of anger, or proprietorial resentment,” he breaks the “panes of frosted glass in the door” and steps inside: I shut the door behind me and stood and took another deep breath, like a diver poised on the springboard’s thrumming tip. The furniture hung about pretending not to look at me. Stillness lay like a dust sheet over everything. There was no one at home, I could sense it. I walked here and there, my footsteps falling without sound. I had a strange sensation in my ears, a sort of fullness, as if I were in a vessel fathoms deep with the weight of the ocean pressing all around me. The objects that I looked at seemed insulated, as if they had been painted with a protective coating of some in‐ visible stuff, cool and thick and smooth as enamel, and when I touched them I could not seem to feel them. I thought of being here, a solemn little boy in a grubby jersey, crop-headed, frowning, with inky fingers and defenceless, translucent pink ears, sit‐ 89 3.2 Ghosts: Pastoral Retreat, Postmodern Return <?page no="90"?> ting at this table hunched over my homework on a winter evening and dreaming of the future. Can I really ever have been thus? Can that child be me? (G 180) Thus, the detour to his former home quickly develops into a stand-alone, nar‐ rative enactment of the pastoral sojourn and its return to a postmodern purga‐ tory of uncertainty and disillusionment. First, Freddie embarks on a journey south in search of “a place where the dead have not died, and [he is] innocent” (G 173). The narrative is studded with digressions to many an idyll where “the grass [is] green as it only can be in memory” (G 211); the sum of these diversions then translates into an overwhelming impulse to act out the nostos, the return to where he feels he used to be, and whence to unify a childhood past with the predicaments of the present and that future state of innocence so ardently de‐ sired. But the process of self-reification within a pastoral of nostalgia is doomed to fail from the outset, as this is a ‘mock-epic,’ where all attempts at being “honest” provoke only “general hoots of merriment and rich scorn” (G 27). Here we encounter the pastoral at its most postmodern, for the mode “may easily be parodied, but it equally returns the charge upon the parodist, co-occupying with comedy itself the status of a genre that is at the same time an everyday, multi‐ farious aspect of ourselves” ( James “Introduction: Reenvisioning Pastoral” 15). In this sense, Freddie ‘embarks upon the golden world’ and paints a pastoral scenography as a source for inversion, satiric adaptation and, to some extent, sardonic transposition. Freddie’s feverish, manic musing within the memoirs of his former home is suddenly interrupted by his son, Vanderveld. Handicapped, mute, and mentally challenged, Vanderveld has retained that very innocence the father is so des‐ perately trying to regain: “he is perfectly at peace, locked away inside himself. I picture a far, white country, everything blurred and flat under a bleached sky” (G 183). The son’s ghostly delicacy at once enthrals and terrifies the father: “I used to picture us someday in the far future strolling together down a dappled street in the south somewhere[. …] But while I had my face turned away, dreaming of that or some other, equally fatuous idyll, the Erl King got him” (G 186). Vanderveld’s difficulties to interact with the world around him remind Freddie of his own failure to make an impression on his own surroundings, even those of his past: “I could make no impression. Everything gave before me like smoke. What was I looking for anyway? ” (G 186). Disappointed and frustrated, he turns away from his son in an attempt to abandon memory itself; “all [his] ghosts are gathering here,” and he cannot handle it, for he has “met Death upon the road,” (183) in the form of the son he once had, who died long ago, and who now returns as a phantom reminder of Poussin’s haunting epitaph: Et in Arcadia Ego. 90 III Always Already Identity: Pastoral, Self, and Narrative <?page no="91"?> Yet ghosts, like the beauty of the ‘golden world,’ can only become fully present in the eye of the beholder. Freddie’s narrative, similarly, is not truly concerned with the lives of the castaways, but with the position of the narrator in relation to his narrative, or rather, with the perspective of the painter in relation to his painting: “the centre of a painting […] is never where it should be, is never central, or obviously significant, but could be a patch of sky, the fold of a gown, a dog scratching its ear, anything” (G 127). At first Freddie promises to be the master narrator of “a little world” as he attempts to convince the reader to follow his own focalisations. But as the novel unfolds it keeps falling short of these grandiloquent expectations. Instead, Freddie holds the reader sway, between the expected viva activa of “a little world coming into being” and the viva contem‐ plativa that bespeaks the Arcadian “scenes suffused with tenderness and mel‐ ancholy” (G 95). The “characters themselves remain curiously passive throughout”; what is instead always active is “the creative imagination of the narrator […] who animates all about him” (Hand, John Banville 147). Freddie, moreover, is constantly shifting the focus of his inquiries. One mo‐ ment he is musing over the ordered, secluded charm of the urban hortus con‐ clusus - “What is it about these tidy estates, these little parks and shopping malls, that speaks so eloquently to us? What is still living there that in us is dead? ” (G 165). The next moment he questions the authenticity and the innocence of his creations: Where do they come from, these sudden phantoms that stride unbidden into my un‐ guarded thoughts, pushy and smug and scattering cigarette ash on the carpet, as if they owned the place? Invented in the idle play of the mind, they can suddenly turn treacherous, can rear up in a flash and give a nasty bite to the hand that fashioned them. (G 168) All is a matter of perspective and perception, a question of focalisation and fiction, and Freddie is the ghost(writer) who mediates between the “multiple worlds” (G 172) thus created: “Am I the ghost at their banquet, sucking up a little of their life to warm myself ? [… W]hen I look into that mirror I see no reflection. I am there and not there” (G 169-70). From one point of view, then, the narrator has “embarked for the golden world,” from another he finds himself “down here in the underworld” (G 128, 96-97). The island imagery oscillates in equal measure between Cythera and Aeaea, between presence and absence, and be‐ tween innocence and “concupiscence.” Indeed, as Freddie remarks in a sweeping, preemptively conclusive statement, when “[v]iewed from a certain angle, these polite arcadian scenes can seem a riotous bacchanal” (G 95). This in turn may be read as an allusion to Poussin’s Bacchanalia, which depicts arcadia’s transi‐ 91 3.2 Ghosts: Pastoral Retreat, Postmodern Return <?page no="92"?> tion from bucolic innocence to a celebration of concupiscence (see Appendix, Fig. 7 and Fig. 8). It is perhaps all too fitting that Freddie’s constant shift of perspective finds both climax and anti-climax in Le monde d’or, the painting that holds the entire novel together. For until we get to Part Three, Freddie’s narrative can be de‐ scribed as an act of artistic gymnastics, taking the reader across a string of lies and fantasies tied between the painting’s focal point and its vanishing point. The story’s climax and attendant promise of revelation presents itself in this third, very brief section of the novel; Freddie describes the painting in excessive detail, summarising all that he has hitherto ‘researched.’ In his description the narrator offers himself up to the painting in a loving yet troubled gaze; more accurately, his point of view moves between the constructed objectivity of a catalogue entry and the deconstructive subjectivity of pastoral fictions and fan‐ tasies as elicited by the work itself. The result is a reproduction of Watteau’s Pierrot, dit autrefois Giles (see Appendix, Fig. 9) as superimposed upon the two versions of the same artist’s Embarcation to / from Cythera. Freddie, dit autrefois Pierrot, now “stands before us like our own reflection distorted in a mirror, known yet strange. […] Has he dropped from the sky or risen from the underworld? We have the sense of a mournful apotheosis” (G 225). And like Montgomery, that “child among adults” (BoE 16), Pierrot “is the childish man, the mannish child.” Certain details that are absent in Watteau, moreover, have been added to Le monde d’or. First, Freddie notes, “the X-rays show beneath his face another face which may be that of a woman.” Second, “he does not usually carry a club; in this instance, he does” (G 226). These two dis‐ tinctive elements add to the already numerous ghostly links between the nar‐ rator’s narcissistic point of view and his violent past (McMinn, John Banville 123). Finally, Part Three returns to a question crucial to the entire novel, a question that brings together the mock-epic and the pastoral elements of Freddie’s nar‐ rative golden world: “Is this a calculated irony, a mocking gesture towards our feeble notions of pastoral? ” For this is “the Golden World, or the last of it” (G 229). It is “the eye of Nature itself, gazing out at us in a kind of stoic wonderment.” Like Freddie the narrator of Ghosts, this is where Watteau, dit autrefois Vaublin, has gathered his little group and set them down in this wind-tossed glade, in this delicate, artificial light, and painted them as angels and as clowns. It is a world where nothing is lost, where all is accounted for while yet the mystery of things is preserved; a world where they may live, however briefly, however tenuously, in the failing eve‐ ning of the self, solitary and at the same time together somehow here in this place, dying as they may be and yet fixed forever in a luminous, unending instant. (G 231) 92 III Always Already Identity: Pastoral, Self, and Narrative <?page no="93"?> Ghosts is a philosophical inquiry into the art of perspective and, vice versa, a celebration of the multiple perspectives of art. Curiosity is the catalyst of an entire novel in which [n]othing happens, nothing will happen, yet everything is poised, waiting. […] This is what holds it together, this sense of expectancy, like a spring tensed in mid-air and sustained by its own force, exerting equal force everywhere. And I, I am there and not there: I am the pretext of things. […] Without me there would be no moment, no separable event, only the brute, blind drift of things. (G 40) In a last defiant attempt at self-reification, Freddie concludes: “What happens does not matter; the moment is all. This is the golden world” (G 231). Yet the fact is that “the painting is a fake[.] Yes, more of gilt in it than gold,” and Freddie too is no more than an effigy burning up with guilt, a ghost left in purgatory, haunted by his own imaginings. His overwhelming sense of alienation still re‐ mains, even after attempting to tell his story through the characters he creates. All in all, his imagination, the source of his power, fails him. At best it can conjure up no more than an androgynous “homo verus of myth and legend” (G 124). Finally, Ghosts paints in words the pastoral pilgrimage of a man who as a “Childe Someone to the dark tower came” (G 104) because “he felt more than ever like the hero in a tale of chivalry commanded to perform a task of rescue and reconciliation” (G 240). But his quest has led him to the “Château d’If ” (G 75) of postmodern doubt, where he now resides and dines every day at a “ban‐ quet” of “ghosts and absences.” There his imagination is left “hungering after other worlds” (G 169, 75), and though his “writing is almost done,” and “Vaublin shall live! ” (G 245) there can be no return for him. Ultimately, “language is not commodious enough to encompass the notion of a return” (G 212). All that re‐ mains is to ask: “Which is better, ignorance or enlightenment? ” (G 243). And, as so often with rhetorical questions, the query itself pre-empts all possible an‐ swers. 93 3.2 Ghosts: Pastoral Retreat, Postmodern Return <?page no="94"?> 3.3 Art, Arcadia and Athena [T]he future was no more than a replay of the past; a long suspended moment of still‐ ness and circularity between the rackety end of the classical world and the first, fevered thrashings of the so-called Renaissance. I picture a kind of darksome northern Arcady, thick-forested, befogged and silent, lost in the glimmering, frost-bound deeps of imme‐ morial night. - Athena 80 A Search for Authenticity Freddie Montgomery is a cultured killer in search of an ethics of authenticity with which to find “[a]tonement. Redemption. That kind of thing” (Athena 67). In The Book of Evidence, Banville’s anti-hero shows us not only that he can think, but also that he can speak - “by golly, how he can speak”; in Ghosts, he shows us that he can write and imagine too, “but what is gone is coherence. Meaning has fallen out of [Freddie’s] life like the bottom falling out of a bucket” (Banville, “‘Thou Shalt Not Kill’” 136-7). Crucially, Freddie himself comes to this conclu‐ sion already in the beginning of The Book of Evidence: A washed-blue dawn was breaking in Madrid. I stopped outside the station and watched a flock of birds wheeling and tumbling at an immense height, and, the strangest thing, a gust of euphoria, or something like euphoria, swept through me, making me tremble, and bringing tears to my eyes. It was from lack of sleep, I suppose, and the effect of the high thin air […] I was at a turning point, you will tell me, just there the future forked for me and I took the wrong path without noticing - that’s what you’ll tell me, isn’t it, you who must have meaning in everything, who lust after meaning, your palms sticky and your faces on fire! But calm, Frederick, calm. Forgive me this outburst, your honour. It is just that I do not believe such moments mean anything - or any moments, for that matter. They have significance, apparently. They may even have value of some sort. But they do not mean anything. (BoE 23-24) In the ‘Frames’ trilogy, Montgomery invites the reader to witness, through three self-involved narratives, his attempts at confession, atonement and re-identifi‐ cation, respectively. Solipsistic sojourns of the imagination, carried out within each narrative and characterized by the dynamic of retreat and return, become the constructs of this protracted process, yet in each novel they are shaped with 94 III Always Already Identity: Pastoral, Self, and Narrative <?page no="95"?> 4 The plot is based somewhat on an art robbery that occurred in Ireland around 1986, “when a criminal gang stole eleven paintings from the collection of Sir Alfred Beit, at his home in Russborough House, near Blessington in County Wicklow” (McMinn, John Banville: A Critical Study 130). (un)conscious alterations on the part of the narrator, though their purpose re‐ mains the same: first, as a means of escape into the excommunicative exile of a confessional, if fictional narrative, then as a means of exploration and as an attempt to bring back to life the Ghosts of his past, and lastly, and perhaps most selfishly, for the sake of reincarnation in art and fiction. The resulting narrative, Athena, thus becomes Banville’s third foray into Freddie’s mind and imagina‐ tion, a third attempt at a story that “never really ends, but simply enters another fictional landscape, one in which he is condemned, yet again, like Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner, to relive and retell his ghostly tale” (McMinn, John Banville: A Critical Study 129). Unlike The Book of Evidence or Ghosts, both novels mired in the past, Athena’s narrative thrust is forward, towards “intimation[s] of the future” (A 178). Here is the old Freddie with a new identity: “Morrow: yes, that is my name, now. […] I chose it for its faintly hopeful hint of futurity, and, of course, the Wellsian echo” (A 7). This time, Freddie is enlisted by Morden, a shady character who is part of a gang trading in stolen artworks, to authenticate a series of eight paintings. 4 Almost simultaneously, and suspiciously, he falls in love with a woman on the street, a woman he henceforth refers to as A. Athena, accordingly, becomes a “love letter to a woman who is no more than a letter herself, no more than an indefinite article” (Thomson, “‘Powers of Misrecognition’” 238). Indeed, the letter itself is “not even the initial of her name,” but Freddie chooses it because “of all the ways it can be uttered, from an exclamation of surprise to a moan of pleasure or of pure pain. It will be different every time I say it” (A 48). Montgomery is undoubtedly seduced by the many erudite implications the letter A carries, as it (and by extension the woman) may embody the divine Athena or Aphrodite, and it may personify art, or simply language itself. Inter‐ estingly, her signifier also corresponds to the petit objet a Derrida writes of when he formulates the non-concept of différance, from which he puts forward that the structure of language, and identities within language, becomes apparent. This différance, for Derrida, is unheard, silent, and although his own neologism can make it visible, it cannot be willed into existence; the petit objet a is Derr‐ rida’s epitome of a present absence, an always already elsewhere: “The a of différance, thus, is not heard; it remains silent, secret and discreet as a tomb” (Margins of Philosophy 4). 95 3.3 Art, Arcadia and Athena <?page no="96"?> 5 Ekphrasis was first learned as a tool of rhetoric and then became a skilled way of de‐ scribing art and other aesthetic objects. Using ekphrasis successfully was a means of demonstrating scholastic or authorial prowess, and eventually ekphrasis became “an art that described art” (Welsh, Ekphrasis 1). Ekphrasis occupies a curious place between the realms of the visual and the linguistic. As Peter Wagner writes in his Icons-Text-Icon‐ otexts: Essays on Ekphrasis and Intermediary, “Ekphrasis, then, has a Janus face: as a form of mimesis, it stages a paradoxical performance, promising to give voice to the allegedly silent image even while attempting to overcome the power of the image by transforming and inscribing it” (Wagner 13). Despite all of the changes the word has undergone and no matter the argument making use of the term, the apparent conflict between image and word is central to the concept (Welsh, Ekphrasis 1). Two such “tomb-like” (A 2) rooms exist in Athena: the room in which Freddie works to authenticate the paintings, and the aesthetic space that is his own imagination, his own private Arcadia of the mind, in which, the petit objet a rings true as an Et in Arcadia Ego, the “discreet” tomb of the possibilities he celebrates through A: “[W]hat a thing we made there in that secret white room at the heart of the old house, what a marvellous edifice we erected. For this is what I see, you and me […] labouring wordlessly to fashion our private temple to the twin gods watching over us” (A 2). Freddie goes so far as to suggest he should view A. as a sign without a referent: “there is no real she, only a set of signs, a series of appearances, a grid of relations between swarming particles” (A 97). Thus A. might be viewed as an analogy for the postmodern idea of being without essence and identity, an anomaly amid an infinitely intricate world of signs and signifiers. Nonetheless, Freddie resists this view, certain that he sees an essential being during their love-making, that “she was there at those times, it was she who clutched me to her and cried out” (A 97). It thus becomes painfully clear that Freddie’s search for A. masks his search for authenticity. Athena becomes Morrow’s love-letter to his earlier fictional self, and writing this letter is his way of resurrecting and preserving his fantasy about A., and all she may signify, albeit without a referent. Additionally, the surreptitious fantasy of A. is presented in the form of the ekphrases Freddie writes of the paintings he studies and means to authenti‐ cate. 5 Here the astute reader will notice Banville’s carefully crafted final irony of Freddie’s interpretive efforts when the seven paintings he examined turn out to be fakes, but an eighth painting he did not, The Birth of Athena, proves to be authentic. When Mr Sharpe, “[a] second opinion” from England at first declares “‘They are all copies […] Every one of them,’” Freddie is shocked into utter silence: “There was a beat of stillness, as if everything everywhere had halted suddenly and then slowly, painfully, started up again” (A 208). Sharpe further adds insult to injury when he glances over at Morrow in a “sly, almost flirtatious” 96 III Always Already Identity: Pastoral, Self, and Narrative <?page no="97"?> 6 Mannerism denotes a stylistic phase of European art covering the period from ca. 1520 to ca. 1590, the transitional phase between the High Renaissance and the Baroque. As applied to an artistic movement, Mannerism implies overt stylization and an obsession with artificial conventions. Virtuosity was equated with great facility of execution in the sixteenth century, as well as with the overcoming of difficult problems, and was regarded very highly in the arts, in literature, as well as in human decorum. An obses‐ sion with virtuosity and elegance, then, was the guiding force of Mannerism, essentially an artificial, anti-naturalistic style. As it transgressed moderation, Mannerism appealed to an elite class of connoisseurs, not to the general populace. manner, only to declare: “I cannot imagine how anyone could have mistaken such daubs for the real thing.” It comes as no surprise, however, that “[t]here had been an odd, unidentifiably familiar ring to Sharpe’s announcement; it was like news so long awaited that when it came at last it was no longer news” (A 209). Ultimately, Athena is itself a finely crafted work of faux art; Banville has infused the narrative, at the level of plot, character as well as underlying themes and motifs, with a postmodernist quest for authenticity. The mastermind behind the entire art heist, known as “the Da,” for example, uses the seven fake paintings to smuggle one authentic stolen painting out of the country. And for Freddie, the final irony reveals itself in that single painting’s undiscovered authenticity, because it epitomises the paradoxical nature of his own artistically masked if authentic love for A., despite his poor judgement (or purposeful misrepresen‐ tations). To emphasize this, Freddie’s failure to recognise the paintings as fakes resonates with the subject matter of the paintings themselves, which depict various scenes of pursuit, desire and transformation as inspired by Ovid’s Met‐ amorphoses. Art as Arcadia Banville’s use of ekphrasis in Athena is intimately linked to Mannerism in art as well as to a postmodern playfulness that pervades the entire novel and with which he deconstructs any notions of reality or authenticity behind the text. 6 Literary criticism has long identified striking analogies between postmodern fiction and metahistorical, mannerist traditions. In his Postscript to ‘The Name of the Rose,’ for example, Umberto Eco postulates this comparison by declaring that “postmodernism is not a trend to be chronologically defined, but rather an ideal category - or, better still, a Kunstwollen, a mode of operating.” Indeed, Eco goes on to postulate postmodernism as a self-conscious stylization adopted by the author, and places it as the most important criterion for defining mannerist works of art: “We could say that every period has its own postmodernism, just 97 3.3 Art, Arcadia and Athena <?page no="98"?> as every period would have its own mannerism” (Postscript to ‘The Name of the Rose’ 66). Beyond its functionality as a modus operandi, the mannerist-postmodernist approach is also characterised by an ironic, even at times sardonic disposition towards literary traditions. Elke Pacholek-Brandt argues that mannerist and postmodernist authors share an unmistakably anti-classical attitude (Imagina‐ tion (Un)limited 35-36), one corroborated by the grand-father of postmod‐ ernism, Lyotard himself: [R]ealistic representations can no longer evoke reality except as nostalgia or mockery, as an occasion for suffering rather than satisfaction. Classicism seems to be ruled out in a world in which reality is so destabilized that it offers no occasion for experience but one for ratings and experimentation. (Lyotard et al., The Lyotard Reader and Guide 125) This anti-mimetic, anti-classical Kunstwollen manifests itself in the manne‐ rist-postmodernist text in a number of additional stylistic choices: a desire to create and to surprise, a self-deprecating ostentation, an excessive use of met‐ aphor, a propensity for rhetorical stylization, and a curious affinity for mytho‐ logical themes and mythemes, Ovid’s Metamorphoses in particular. As Petra Tournay has illustrated in her seminal study of Athena (2001), all these manne‐ rist-postmodernist analogies are evident in Banville’s novel, more consciously on behalf of the author than in any other postmodernist text. Banville, she ar‐ gues, knowingly employs mannerist themes and stylistic devices in the text. He functionalizes them by laying bare their operations, by producing an ‘inside-out novel, which wears its skeleton and its nerves on the outside’ (Brown, The Literature of Ireland 230) and thereby under‐ mines and ironically deconstructs this relation. [… T]he deliberate foregrounding of mannerist elements is a reaction to the petrification and deterioration of the post‐ modern discourse and highlights Banville’s awareness that postmodernism too has ‘run its course’ (The Literature of Ireland 17) and has become obsolete. (Tournay, “Into the Heart of the Labyrinth” 109-110) Banville’s mannerist-postmodernist Kunstwollen is nowhere more pronounced than in the seven ekphrases disseminated throughout the novel, which function as spoofs of art criticism that also hold up a mirror to the novel’s plot and to Freddie’s inner turmoils. Tournay goes a step further to suggest that, “if cryp‐ tically attributed to Banville himself, those passages can (almost inevitably) only be read as ironic self-references to his own approach to art and writing and are as such a parody of aesthetic criticism” (“Into the Heart of the Labyrinth” 110). 98 III Always Already Identity: Pastoral, Self, and Narrative <?page no="99"?> 7 Eric Auerbach is the author of the classical study Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature (2013 [1946]). Already in his first ekphrasis, Morrow criticizes Johann Livelb (read: John Ban‐ ville) and his “Pursuit of Daphne” for anti-classical ostentations: Here as in so much of Livelb’s work the loftiness of the classical theme is sacrificed for the sake of showiness and vulgar effects[. …] To quote the critic Eric Auerbach writing in a different context, what we have here is ‘a highly rhetorical style in which the gruesomely sensory has gained a large place; a sombre and highly rhetorical re‐ alism which is totally alien to classical antiquity.’ (A 19) 7 Freddie’s ekphrases overflow with such and similar comments about the exe‐ cution of the paintings, and as Tournay conclusively argues, they thus become “self-ironic mannerist manifestos” that are “immediately programmatic for the novel” (“Into the Heart of the Labyrinth” 110). Although Tournay’s analysis of Athena’s mannerist-postmodernist analogies is exemplary, it focuses somewhat heavily on Banville’s ironic and self-referen‐ tial involvement with the text, ignoring how a postmodernist-mannerist modus operandi also helps Freddie resolve, at least in part, his dilemma of atonement and restitution. Though we can accept Banville’s conscious attempt to decon‐ struct the postmodernist endeavour by making the appropriately mocking man‐ nerist analogies, and thereby turn it into a Kunstwollen devoid of meaning or purpose, we cannot ignore the crucial role the paintings play in helping Morrow achieve atonement and as an aid for the self-preservation of his own naïve ideals. Banville’s mannerist-postmodernist ekphrases also function as a mode of ar‐ tistic suspension which Freddie uses as a kind of aesthetic Arcadia in which he can wax nostalgic about the past without giving up or otherwise betraying the character he has so meticulously constructed for himself in The Book of Evidence and Ghosts: a narcissistic, mock-heroic art lover suspended between multiple self-authored narrative identities. Whenever and wherever Morrow encounters A., partial recollections of a gilted past follow suit: “I basked in this time out of time as in one of those long Saturday mornings of childhood. She would come. We would be there together. Everything would happen” (A 90). Morrow expe‐ riences seemingly unconscious moments of memory upon which he neverthe‐ less confers a carefully crafted sense of being in a pastoral otherwhile and else‐ where: It was a surprise when I stepped out into the world again, how bright and gay every‐ thing seemed, the sun, the gleaming grass, those Van Gogh trees, and the big, light sky with its fringe of coppery clouds; I felt as if I had been away on a long journey 99 3.3 Art, Arcadia and Athena <?page no="100"?> and now all at once had arrived back home again. […] What paradisal longings are these that assail me at unconsidered moments when my mind is looking elsewhere? (A 35-36) Regardless of how often Freddie’s unconscious wills into existence artistically gilded memories, and regardless of how much he wants “to preserve [them] in the crystal of remembrance like one of those little scenes in glass globes” (A 86), he cannot escape the wills of his own narrative art, the ever present mach‐ inations of his (and Banville’s) postmodernist-mannerist Kunstwollen: “Is it hindsight that has conferred on the place a pent-up, mocking air? ” (55). Aptly, he concludes: “I could weep up a blizzard once I got started” (86). Morrow’s ekphrasis of the fictional Job van Hellin’s ‘Syrinx Delivered’ is particularly telling of an irrepressible desire to use the paintings as a means of suspending belief in reality. To do so, the paintings are described as ambiguous mock-pastorals that do not quite match the classical, Ovidian depictions of the golden world that inspired them: The landscape depicted here is not the Arcady of rock and olive tree and harsh, noonday light, but the peaceable northern plain untouched by the riotous passions of gods and heroes yet over which there hangs an atmosphere of indefinable unease. […] Placed in the middle distance, the figures of god and nymph, caught in their little drama of desire and loss, seem almost incidental to the composition, which could easily stand without them as self-contained landscape. Here, in this green and golden world, on this tawny afternoon, their black sheep Pan disports himself: with what skill the artist has depicted this figure, making it at once numinous, comic and terrifying. (A 104) The paintings and their descriptions are also Banville’s most powerful tools for mirroring, in Freddie’s character and love interest A., the novel’s recurrent mo‐ tifs of absence, loss and the attenuation of reality. Petra Tournay’s own analysis of the purpose of A. falls somewhat short in this regard, especially in its con‐ clusion: “if A. is absent, so also is Athena, it is deconstructed into a no-thing. It becomes therefore, another instance illustrative of art-as-failure or language-as failure” (“Into the Heart of the Labyrinth” 115 [original emphasis]). Yet it is precisely due to the failure of Morrow’s narrative art, and his failure to make A. into something tangible, especially as expressed through his failure to correctly assess the paintings, that he preserves something of his own ideals. Accordingly, Freddie neither deconstructs A., nor Banville Athena, into the “no-thing” of an irretrievable absence. In a rare moment of honesty and self-affirmation, Freddie acknowledges that “it is not the anima lost in me that I am after, but the ineffable mystery of the 100 III Always Already Identity: Pastoral, Self, and Narrative <?page no="101"?> Other (I can hear your ribald snigger); that is what all my life long I have plunged into again and again as into a choked Sargasso Sea wherein I can never find my depth” (A 46-47). This marks the starting point of that unique, idealised aesthetic space where his love can finally “come into being.” Freddie constructs A., his beloved other (and thus also an aspect of himself) as the artistic avatar of wish-fulfilment unassuaged. He expresses artistically this love-locked state to her repeatedly in the paintings and their ekphrases, respectively; the descrip‐ tions themselves become expressions of Morrow’s ideal of arrested movement and suspension. Thus, A. expresses the structure of absence epitomised by the objet petit a, even if that structure is itself integrated into the sublime totality of the “familiar otherwhere of art” (A 81), and brought to the surface in the pro‐ tagonist’s irreparable sense of being always already elsewhere. Art as Atonement Art and the artistic imagination are themes central to the entire ‘Frames’ trilogy, brought to life through a series of interrelated and recurring motifs. Art is first of all used as a redemptive project, conceived by Freddie in The Book of Evidence as a possible means of compensation and atonement for the murder of Josie Bell: “In killing Josie Bell I had destroyed a part of the world. Those hammer-blows had shattered a complex of memories and sensations and possibilities - a life, in short - which was irreplaceable, but which, somehow, must be replaced” (BoE 149). Crucially, Freddie’s redemptive project is always also an artistic, aesthetic one, and he repeatedly undermines the necessary questions of morality by di‐ gressing (and escaping to) various forms of art. In The Book of Evidence, it is the art of the narrative (in the guise of a confessional) that preoccupies him: “I do not seek, my lord, to excuse my actions, only to explain them” (BoE 11). Freddie recounts Josie’s harrowing murder without the ethical or moral overtones one might expect of a traditional confessional, however, and paints it as caused by a failure of his imagination, instead, by his inability to see her as a real, live human being: This is the worst, the essential sin, I think, the one for which there will be no forgive‐ ness: that I never imagined her vividly enough, that I never made her be there suffi‐ ciently, 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 that policeman is true I killed her because I could kill her, and I could kill her because for me she was not alive. (BoE 215) 101 3.3 Art, Arcadia and Athena <?page no="102"?> In Ghosts, Freddie is more concerned with the appearance and gilt of his monde d’or than with any atonement of guilt that his narrative incarnations should achieve: “What happens does not matter; the moment is all. This is the golden world” (G 131). A host of pictorial comparisons bespeak the narrator’s painterly eye and betrays an irrepressibly solipsistic artist within. Additionally, Freddie’s is a descriptive mode defined by overly self-referential and metafictional strands, because, in keeping with metafiction in literary theory, his narrative “draws attention to the fact that life, as well as novels, [are] constructed through frames, and that it is finally impossible to know where one frame ends and another begins” (Waugh, Metafiction 29). Finally, the notion of art is combined with mythological motifs borrowed from Ovid’s Metamorphoses, and, alongside Morrow’s love of A. and the attendant ekphrases scattered throughout the novel, create an aesthetic space quintes‐ sentially Arcadian in nature, because only “the familiar otherwhere of art” (A 81) can evoke the kind of space-time alternate reality in which one can re-write the rules and laws applicable to redemption: “In their relation to empirical reality works of art recall the theologumenon that in a state of redemption everything will be just as it is and yet wholly different” (A 105). Unsurprisingly, Freddie’s narrative aestheticism possesses a dehumanizing quality that is befitting of both his murder of Josie Bell and his confused sense of apperance and reality. He admits to a lack of interest in anything but the surface, the superficial, already The Book of Evidence: “This is the only way an‐ other creature can be known: on the surface, that’s where there is depth” (BoE 72). Art is to him infinitely more appealing than reality, the artificial more worthy of his attention than actually living human beings: “I am told I should treasure life, but give me the realm of art anytime”(G 239). Montgomery ac‐ knowledges the consequent shortcomings of his obsessive aestheticism openly, and repeatedly: “unfed by experience or, as yet, by art, my imagination faltered”; “how little I know of what they call the real world” (A 22, 71). In summary, the three novels can be viwed as various dramatizations of one and the same attempt by their narrator-creator to transcend the chasm between reality and art. Ad‐ ditionally, they also function as narrative contemplations on the failure of lan‐ guage and the failure of art-as-language to create this aesthetically ideal, Arca‐ dian space, while having to contend with and acknowledge the postmodern intersections and subversions that inevitably arise. Montgomery perceives the relationship between art and life as a kind of os‐ mosis, where the supremacy of the former resolves many (but not all) of the inconsistencies of the latter. The result is a deliberately self-questioning, ex‐ ploratory retreat from reality into the “familiar” (read: nonthreatening, as‐ 102 III Always Already Identity: Pastoral, Self, and Narrative <?page no="103"?> suaging) otherworlds of art and fiction. Banville thereby enhances the overall ingenuity of Freddie’s narrative; this is reflected in the redemptive project our protagonist embarks upon in The Book of Evidence, when he claims: “What was required was not my symbolic death […] but for her to be brought back to life. That, and nothing less” (BoE 152). And, at the end of The Book, Freddie even appears to be drawing a new life-force from this seemingly unattainable goal, though he has made little measurable progress towards achieving it: 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. How am I to make it come about, this act of parturition? Must I imagine her from the start, from infancy? 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. (BoE 215) Despite this “new weight and density,” redemption remains elusive in Ghosts too, where nothing really happens other than another failed attempt at an imag‐ inative reincarnation in the frail, beautiful Flora, “singled out” by this “little god” as the perfect prey for his rehabilitation. Still Freddie cannot but stay true to his obsession with art and artificiality; in keeping with his painterly eye, he sets out to imagine Flora in meticulous pictorial detail, “assembling her gradually, with great care, starting at the extremities, […] her hard little hands, the vulnerable, veined, milk-blue back of her knees” (94). His efforts are undone by a kind of anti-epiphany in which Flora appears to him no longer “Our Lady of the Enigmas,” no longer “like the Virgin in the middle of the Annunciation,” but “an incarnation of herself […] a girl, just a girl who somehow by being suddenly herself ” makes “the things around her be there too” (G 146). Again, Freddie’s attitude is too solipsistic, self-conscious and artificial, too predatory to bestow upon Flora a life or personality of her own. This is evidenced all the more clearly by how easily he rejects her at the end of Ghosts as “just a girl, greedy and dissatisfied” (G 239). Ultimately, Freddie still finds too much pleasure in the redemptive task of writing someone into existence, and it is all too fitting that he cannot find atonement as long as he revels so openly in his own narrative art. Only in Athena does Montgomery (now Morrow) partly undo the languish of The Book of Evidence and Ghosts as he becomes capable of some amount of atonement. This stems partly from the adoptoin of a new, more direct kind of honesty: 103 3.3 Art, Arcadia and Athena <?page no="104"?> I was always thinking of other things, struggling inwardly with those big burdensome words that, had I had the nerve to speak them, would have made you stare first and then laugh. Atonement. Redemption. That kind of thing. I was still in hell, you see, or purgatory, at least, and you were one of the elect at whom I squinnied up yearningly as you paced the Elysian fields in golden light. (A 67) As his attraction to A. reveals itself to be more fictitious than real, Freddie is once again seduced by the familiar artificiality of art, nevertheless. A. embodies this moral ambiguity: she is the “alpha” of Morrow’s emotions, and the “omega” of his intellect. The reader of Athena follows an amalgamation of fictions, ava‐ tars, disguises and effigies for the sake of A(rt), and in the name of A(rt). In his descriptions of A., the narrator remains stubbornly focused on contrived, arti‐ ficial and exquisitely abstract imagery: Hair really very black, blue-black, like a crow’s wing, and a violet shading in the hollows of her eyes. Identifying marks. Dear God. Absurdly, I see a little black pillbox hat and a black three quarters veil - a joke, surely, these outlandish accessories, on the part of playful memory? (A 38-39) Gradually, A. is unmasked as a figment of Freddie’s imagination, a woman made of the shades and textures of an alluring painting; A. is Freddie’s avatar of art come alive, projected onto his mind’s painterly eye: “I was content there and then and wanted nothing but that this peaceful and phantasmally peopled sol‐ itude should continue without disturbance, content, that is, until you became animate suddenly and stepped out of your frame” (A 83). The active “little god” and narrator-creator of Ghosts has been replaced by a man who acknowledges a passive role in such adventures. Although A. ultimately abandons him, Morrow willingly welcomes the fraud, concedes to her fictive nature as well as the imaginative act by which he has brought her to life. Towards the end of Athena, in fact, A. has metamorphosed into “a pale, glistening new creature […] as if she had just broken open the chrysalis and were resting a moment before the ordeal of unfolding herself into this new life I had given her. I? Yes: I. Who else was there, to make her come alive? ” (A 175). Thus, Morrow’s attempt at “restitution” has been achieved, at least partly, and yet without committing to a spiritual or moral experience - as his passion for A(rt) might suggest - but as an act of the creative imagination, the realm where all the characters and scenes of Athena truly belong: But I knew I must not give in to self-pity. I had nothing to pity myself for. 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 104 III Always Already Identity: Pastoral, Self, and Narrative <?page no="105"?> her life. Come live in me, I had said, and be my love. Intending, of course, whether I knew it or not, that I in turn would live in her. (A 223) Banville does not make it quite so easy for Freddie, of course; in truth, Freddie is framed, in every sense of the word. The frame is one of the most recurrent images and becomes a leitmotif central to the entire art trilogy - or ‘Frames Trilogy,’ as the three novels are also aptly referred to. Scenes are often introduced framed by windows or doorways: “see that dazed green view framed in the white window”; “The window framed a three-quarters view of indistinct greenery and the corner of a sloped field” (G 55, 206). Frames are also used to outline the female characters as they first appear: “A maid was standing in the open window”; “Here comes Sophie now, barefoot, still with her leather jacket over her shoulders, and time shimmers in its frame” (BoE 78, G 55). Freddie also often frames his descriptions of landscape detail, using the sky and the clouds: “See that dazed green view framed in the white window” (G 38). Finally, a pivotal moment of epiphany occurs when Freddie turns the landscape of the golden world he created itself into the frame of his imagination, celebrating his creation as the “little god” accordingly: Look at this foliage, these clouds, the texture of this gown. A stricken figure stares out at something that is being lost. There is an impression of music, tiny, exact and gay. […] Birds unseen are fluting in the trees, the sun shines somewhere, the distances of the sea are vague and palely blue, the galliot awaits. The figures move, if they move, as in a moving scene, one that they define, by being there, its arbiters. Without them only the wilderness, green riot, tumult of wind and the crazy sun. They formulate the tale and people it and give it substance. They are the human moment. (G 38) The frame thus becomes a leitmotif representing the narrator’s relentless im‐ pulse for contemplation as well as his unconscious desire to embrace nature and the imagination. Nature, in its newly framed, ordered, Arcadian state, in turn becomes the outline for Freddie’s aesthetically constructed perception of life and reality. When Freddie’s somewhat impulsive, unbridgled imagination is tamed by these gilded landscapes, they provide an aesthetc epiphany and enclose his “bifurcate” sense of self and identity in “the frame of memory” (A 115). For frames also work as symbols of recollection, and they equally often represent the creative power of the imagination, as when A. “became animate suddenly and stepped out of [her] frame” (A 83). All perception, then, is a framing performed by the narrator, and the narrator is in turn framed by his own narrative. Although frames (and all that they rep‐ resent) can offer Freddie a means to order and attempt to control his otherwise disobedient mind, they provide him with but a stepping stone for his imagina‐ 105 3.3 Art, Arcadia and Athena <?page no="106"?> tion, for his A(rt) into reality; like A., not only do they abandon him, they frame him. Ultimately, frames do not provide him with a means of atonement for his actions in the real world. Thus, art may function as an aesthetic Arcadia, and it may lead Freddie (the cultured killer) one step closer to reality where atonement may be realised, but a final redemptive act must still follow within an(other) reality, of which Freddie knows and acknowledges too little. Accordingly, it is through an(other) female character, not A., that Banville lets his protagonist achieve atonement: Aunt Corky. A bizarre, elderly lady and a distant relative, Morrow visits her and, upon her dismissal from a nursing home, agrees to attend to her needs until she passes away. He bears witness to her death, and the depressing sight of her debilitation and illness stands in dis‐ turbing contrast to Freddie’s aesthetically crafted, narcissistic narrative: What I took at first for a bundle of rags heaped on the floor in the open doorway turned out on closer inspection to be Aunt Corky. She lay with her head pressed at a sharp angle against the skirting board, and with one leg and an arm twisted under her. I thought of a nestling fallen from the nest, the frail bones and waxen flesh and the scrawny neck twisted. I assumed she was dead. (A 192) As Freddie himself admits, “this was the first time [… he] had looked at a naked woman without desire” (A 194). In her death, Aunt Corky forces Freddie to look at the reality of life through her own, most intimate frame of mind, and on her terms, for once, rather than his. By affording Aunt Corky a substantial amount of space in his narrative, Freddie can in some ways restore life to a woman who possesses neither the captivating beauty of Josie Bell, nor the comforting artifice of art, nor Flora’s frail innocence. Rather, she is an old, decrepit woman who wears grotesque make-up and attire. The difference, however, is crucial, for this time he is not moving within the realms of his solipsistic imagination, but man‐ ages to confront the harsh realities of death and decay. His attendant view of the world changes, and the gruelling experience of witnessing Aunt Corky’s death invigorates a man whose own imagination could otherwise but banish him into a purgatory stupor: I stepped along as if on springs, snuffing up the chill air through lifted nostrils and contemplating the mystery of death. This was a world without Aunt Corky in it. What had been her was gone, dispersed like smoke. Forgive me, Auntie, but there was something invigorating in the thought; not the thought that you were no more, you understand, but that so much that was not you remained. No, I do not understand it either but I cannot think how else to put it. I suspect it was a little of what the con‐ demned man must feel when the last-minute reprieve comes through and he is led away rubber-kneed from the scaffold: a mingling of surprise and left-over dread and 106 III Always Already Identity: Pastoral, Self, and Narrative <?page no="107"?> a sort of breathless urgency. More, more - it is the cry of the survivor - give me more! (A 205, original emphasis) If A. remains suspended in the always already elsewhere of Freddie’s memories, fictions, desires and his imagination, between physical prurience and beautified superficiality, whereby she gives substance only to Freddie’s corrupted fascina‐ tion with art, Aunt Corky becomes an authentic link to the real world, finally sanctioning him with a unique if somewhat casual act of redemption. 107 3.3 Art, Arcadia and Athena <?page no="108"?> IV Always Already Elsewhere: Mapping Arcadia in Memory and Mind It was a realm she was able to enter at will because she had lived a life so rich with misery, mistakes and love that she had grad‐ ually found an art of creating pleasant places in her mind[.] … Unhappiness had taught her the art of happiness. And art had taught her the saving graces of escape into the en‐ chanted countrysides of her mind. — Ben Okri, In Arcadia 4.1 From Birchwood to The Newton Letter: Banville’s Post-/ Modern Pastoral Elegies The impulse to preserve the past is part of the impulse to preserve the self. […] The nostalgic impulse is an important agent in adjustment to crisis; it is a social emollient and reinforces […] identity when confidence is weakened or threatened. — Madan Sarup A study of the way we remember is a study of the way we are. — J. Fentress, C. Wickham Memory, Narrative, and Identity in Theory We construct memory and memory constructs us; our identity, both public and private, is a dynamic process because time is itself a dynamo propelled by the repetition of things past. This cycle in turn gives birth - and life - to memory. Time is and always has been akin to memory. Speaking in purely abstract terms, memory is a perpetuum mobile, unending by virtue of repetition, but as it is subject to the whims and idiosyncrasies of the human mind, where it lives, memory can be fickle, unreliable, and forgetful. Thus, narratives have time and again served as mnemonics of memory. St. Augustine, one of the most influential <?page no="109"?> 1 For a crisp, in-depth analysis of Augustine’s concepts of time and narrative see Ricoeur’s seminal essay, “The Human Experience of Time” 101-114. figures in the establishment of the modern Christian church, for example turns to scripture in his Confessions to discuss the human experience of tempo‐ rality; 1 the New Testament, after all, is not only the first Christian narrative, but also the first Christian narrative of time. Our identities cannot be comprehensively understood, moreover, without “a given place and time,” (Sarup 15) where memory and narrative are ample sources for both. As Paul Ricoeur perceptively argues, “narratives, on the one hand, are the modes of discourse appropriate to our experience of time; and time experi‐ ence, on the other hand, is the ultimate referent of the narrative mode.” Ricoeur gives much philosophical thought to narrative as that “mode of discourse, through which the mode of being or temporal being, is brought to language” (“The Human Experience of Time” 107, 99). He uses the notion of plot as a “de‐ cisive concept” in his “inquiry into the temporal aspect of narrative” (“The Human Experience of Time” 99). The notion of plot carries with it several ad‐ vantages, Ricoeur continues; it “provides us with a structure which could be common to both historical and fictional narratives,” whence it also allows us to disambiguate between - rather than dispute over - “the truth-claim of history vs. that of fiction” (105). Additionally, events made into story through plot are “not bound to a merely chronological order of events” (103). Narratives are by definition composite of chronological and non-chronological dimensions, where the former may be called “the episodic dimension” and the latter “the configu‐ rational dimension”. Episodically speaking, events constitute the story; config‐ urationally speaking “the plot construes significant wholes out of scattered events” (106). Despite, or rather thanks to its abstract character, plot carries several temporal implications. It splices narrative time into episodic and configurational dimen‐ sions, and thus a narrative’s beginning can be read in the end and the end in the beginning. To put it differently, plot thereby enables time itself to be read back‐ wards, “as the recapitulation of the initial conditions of a course of action in its terminal consequences. In that way, a plot establishes human action not only within time […] but within memory” (108). Thus memory repeats the course of events not according to chronological order but according to “the counterpart of time as stretching-along between a beginning and an end.” This process, moreover, does not abolish time, but rather, through repetition, imbues the human time-experience with existential depth. Paradoxically, it is in human na‐ 109 4.1 From Birchwood to The Newton Letter: Banville’s Post-/ Modern Pastoral Elegies <?page no="110"?> ture to measure time because the heroes of narrative “reckon with time,” and not vice versa (110-2). The process of narrative emplotment does so much more than merely estab‐ lish individual or collective identities within an “eloquent” time-experience. Our ‘reckoning’ with time is transformed by narrative emplotment into our ‘recol‐ lecting’ it, too. Narratives provide both public and private identities with a means of escape - from the battle of reification in a ‘meaningful’ chronology - on the one hand, and a means of reclusion to the refuge of dechronologization, on the other hand. All this is spearheaded by memory, that process of repetition and restitution of the storied self in the narrative time-experience (113-4). In the oral tradition of storytelling, for example, memorization is achieved by means of repetition; the repetition of formulaic figures and tropes - rhythmic, rhapsodic, even rhyming - produces mnemonic sound patterns that facilitate memorization. The redundancy that results from these repetitive formulations creates homogeneity and univocality. This in turn enables the identities, values and collective memories of an entire civilization to be passed on in oral narra‐ tives, which usually take the form of origin myths, fables, or aetiological tales. (Ong, “Some Psychodynamics of Orality” 31-34) Repetition shapes manifestations of memory in the literate tradition too, though somewhat differently. Where the oral tradition of storytelling remem‐ bers by means of the repetition of larger-than-life figures of speech, written texts memorize through codification. Oral narratives use a relatively small vocabulary but grow every story to the size of legend; literary texts, in stark contrast, can afford to draw on a vast range of expressions, but conserve information regard‐ less of its ‘present’ significance to the individual or the collective memory. The 110 IV Always Already Elsewhere: Mapping Arcadia in Memory and Mind <?page no="111"?> 2 In his ground-breaking study “Some Psychodynamics of Orality” (1982), Walter J. Ong compares and contrasts translations of Genesis 1: 1-5 to illustrate both the preservation of “the ‘additive’ oral style” and its metamorphosis to a version more adjusted to the sensibilities of print and writing. Below is an excerpt from the Douay version (1610) which, “produced in a culture with still a massive oral residue, […] keeps close in many ways to the additive Hebrew original” (37): In the beginning God created heaven and earth. And the earth was void and empty, and darkness was upon the face of the deep; and the spirit of God moved over the waters. And God said: Be light made. And light was made. And God saw the light that it was good; and he divided the light from the darkness. And he called the light Day, and the darkness Night; and there was evening and morning one day. By contrast, the New American Bible (1970), as quoted in Ong, “Some Psychodynamics of Orality” 37: In the beginning, when God created the heavens and the earth, the earth was a formless wasteland, and darkness covered the abyss, while a mighty wind swept over the waters. Then God said, ‘Let there be light,’ and there was light. God saw how good the light was. God then separated the light from the darkness. God called the light ‘day’ and the darkness he called ‘night.’ Thus evening came, and morning followed the first day. significance of the story told is measured in relative terms only, for the medium is considered - in both senses of the word - far more telling. 2 Despite the marked differences between the oral and literate codification of narratives, questions of plot, identity, and memory, are common to both. The process of narrative identification, for one, is at the heart of both oral and literal traditions, though it develops and manifests itself differently in each. Where the oral tradition uses memory to establish and strengthen collective identity, the literate tradition places more emphasis on the singularity of individual memo‐ rization. As Radstone and Hodgkin argue, studies of memory are intimately […] linked with histories of subjectivity and shed light on historical variations in conceptions of subjectivity and experience. […] The history of memory is indissociably linked, then, with the complex story of the emer‐ gence on to the historical stage of a bounded, coherent self who comes to be under‐ stood as the ‘container’ or possessor of memory. The distinction of an ‘outside’ of happenings and an ‘inside’ of their remembrance is inextricably connected with the emergence of this bounded subject. (Memory Cultures 2009: 2-3) It follows then that narratives are to identity what mnemonics are to memory: the former is essential to the forming of the latter. Remembering is always also a reification of identity by virtue of the past that functions as an absence, as ‘an-other’ mirroring the present self - it “is through recollections of the past that people represent themselves to themselves” (Sarup, Identity, Culture and the Postmodern World 40). The process of identification through narrative emplot‐ 111 4.1 From Birchwood to The Newton Letter: Banville’s Post-/ Modern Pastoral Elegies <?page no="112"?> ment corresponds to the process of remembering the storied self in the various codifications of memory. Repetition as a form of remembering is particularly visible in those kinds of narratives in which quests are the catalysts of plot; narratives, more precisely, “in which the quest itself duplicates as a travel in space which assumes the shape of a return to the origin” (Ricoeur, “The Human Experience of Time” 113): quests in which the questions encountered map out the answers sought after. Two paradigms of the quest narrative, as travel and return, are of particular interest to this investigation. The first is best exemplified using Ulysses’ travels, and the second is the pastoral sojourn as preceded by the (narrative) enactment of nos‐ talgia. In The Trial of the Labyrinth (1978), Mircéa Eliade writes about the epic hero that he is “the prototype of man, not only modern man, but the man of the future as well, because he represents the type of the ‘trapped’ voyager.” Indeed, Eliade reads Ulysses’ journey not exclusively as a fated delay, but as a sojourn that results in personal growth: His voyage was a voyage towards the centre, towards Ithaca, which is to say, towards himself. He was a fine navigator, but destiny - spoken here in terms of trials of ini‐ tiation which he had to overcome - forced him to postpone indefinitely his return to hearth and home. I think that the myth of Ulysses is very important for us. We will all be a little like Ulysses, for in searching, in hoping to arrive, and finally without a doubt, in finding once again the homeland, the hearth, we rediscover ourselves. But, as in the Labyrinth, in every questionable turn, one risks ‘losing oneself.’ If one suc‐ ceeds in getting out of the Labyrinth, in finding again one’s home, then one becomes a new being. (109 quoted in Ricoeur, “The Human Experience of Time” 113) Eliade’s evaluation of Ulysses’ travels essentially prefigures the enactment of nostalgia as a narrative of re-evaluation and “rediscovery” of self. As such, the word nostalgia has developed beyond its original Greek definition: “when we say that someone is feeling nostalgic, we suggest that they are in a reverie-like state of remembrance for experiences which, as past, are unrecoverable” (Frawley, Irish Pastoral 3). While it can be argued that nostalgia embodies a “lost, unrecoverable past” as brought about by “a sense of lack in the present and an access to the past through physical and visual objects” (Irish Pastoral 4), we are reminded that it is precisely this form of nostalgia that conditions the pastoral mode with a subtext of crisis, and that this crisis in identity transforms the pastoral sojourn itself from an escapist endeavour to a narrative mode that can explore (and possibly restore) the self. Moreover, it is the intricate interplay of a) nostalgia expressed in narrative, b) the linguistic landscapes of Arcadia, and 112 IV Always Already Elsewhere: Mapping Arcadia in Memory and Mind <?page no="113"?> c) memory, that makes visible the process of identification in the pastoral mode, both within and without. On the one hand, the context of return is externalized by the idyllic constructs of Arcadia: Ulysses’ “rediscovery” of self in The Odyssey is paralleled by a geo‐ graphic return to Ithaca, his birthplace, his “hearth and home” and supposed locus amoenus. Here memory plays a first and quintessential part, for it is in the sketchbook of memory - and we all carry one with us - that sites of remem‐ brance are first constructed. And it is from this gallery that the point of return is chosen. In The Poetics of Space, Gaston Bachelard notes that though memories represent a past to which return is only theoretically possible, “the more securely [memories] are fixed in space, the sounder they are” (The Poetics of Space 9). In other words, the more specifically we can describe a setting, the better we re‐ member it and the more we are ourselves remembered by it. Narratives give space to memory, marking an important shift from modern to postmodern and contemporary mnemonic configurations. In The Poetics of Space, Gaston Bachelard demonstrates a unique prescience of this shift as he intriguingly studies “the topography of our intimate being”; in lyrical chapters he undertakes a systematic “topoanalysis” of the “space we love” (3). In Chapter Nine, ‘The Dialectics of Outside and Inside,’ Bachelard expounds the significance of spatial experiences as metaphors to our thinking and to the metaphysics of our being: “an implicit geometry - whether we will or no - confers spatiality upon thought” (The Poetics of Space 212). Any such conferment of “spatiality upon thought”, moreover, bestows in equal measure a spatiality upon our ca‐ pacity to remember. John Banville shares with Bachelard an appreciation for the idea that mem‐ ories are first spatial before they are perceived on a temporal axis, and it is precisely this insight that provides the foundations on which much of the Irish author’s fiction is housed. Already on page one of Banville’s first successful novel, Birchwood (1973), for example, narrator-protagonist Gabriel Godkin pro‐ claims that “all thinking is in a sense remembering” ( BW 1), and the nar‐ rator-historian of The Newton Letter (1983) takes the metaphor one step further: “There was no sense of life messily making itself from moment to moment. It had all been lived already, and we were merely tracing the set patterns, as if not living really, but remembering” ( NL 58). But it is especially in his later works - Eclipse (2000), The Sea (2005), and The Infinities (2009) - that John Banville turns landscape and architecture into metaphors of thought and into sites of pastoral nostalgia and memory. More specifically, each time-experience, narrated by the protagonists always with supreme eloquence, transforms the natural sites and 113 4.1 From Birchwood to The Newton Letter: Banville’s Post-/ Modern Pastoral Elegies <?page no="114"?> architectural settings into a journey towards a point of pastoral return, “to those Arcadian fields where memory and imagination merge” (Eclipse 137). Indeed, John Banville is as much concerned with the “topography of the mind” as Gaston Bachelard is with a “topoanalysis” of “felicitous space.” The two are connected thus by the concepts of nostalgia and remembrance as expressed in the pastoral mode, which is itself, after all, a poetics of dwelling. The pastoral mode is very well suited to narratives of memory because often it is in its ar‐ chitecture and its landscapes, where memories dwell as idealized, nostalgic con‐ structions of an imagination in search for innocence and stability. As Simon Schama puts it, “[before it can ever be a [pastoral] repose for the senses, land‐ scape is the work of the mind. Its scenery is built up as much from strata of memory as from layers of rock” (Landscape and Memory 7). Landscapes, more‐ over, “are culture before they are nature,” as Freddie Montgomery also reminds the reader in Ghosts: “Nature did not exist until we invented it one eight‐ eenth-century morning radiant with Alpine light” (Ghosts 65). These courtyards of the mind and landscapes of the imagination provide fertile ground for post-/ modern and contemporary pastoralists alike. Therein lies a certain danger of misinterpretation too, because “once a certain idea of landscape, a myth, a vision, establishes itself in an actual place, it has a peculiar way of muddling, catego‐ rizing, of making metaphors more real than their referents; of becoming, in fact, part of the scenery” (Schama, Landscape and Memory 61). In her recent study of Twentieth-century Irish literature, Irish Pastoral (2005), Oona Frawley develops Schama’s concepts of landscape and memory and su‐ perimposes them critically onto the pastoral mode of nostalgia. Frawley argues that nostalgia narratives, pastoral versions in particular, are born within “[c]olo‐ nial or post-colonial cultures” because they “experience a fraught relationship with the nature and the landscape of their homelands.” Irish literature, for ex‐ ample, has always been much concerned with nature and the landscape, because these are nostalgic sites of collective memory and identification. In Irish litera‐ ture, “nature and landscape become signifiers, lenses through which it is possible to examine cultural and historical developments.” Irish landscapes are repre‐ sentative, in other words, of the cultural, historical and political tensions and ambiguities that characterised much of Irish foreign and domestic policy in the late Nineteenth Century. The Emerald Isle and its landscape, moreover, was considered “both ‘Irish’ - in the sense that it is physically attached to the country - and not ‘Irish,’ in the sense that ‘Ireland’ does not exist as an inde‐ pendent nation” (Irish Pastoral 2). Twentieth-century Irish writers - Joyce, Beckett, Heaney, to name the most prominent of Frawley’s examples - found recourse in the pastoral mode accordingly, in an attempt to express the ambi‐ 114 IV Always Already Elsewhere: Mapping Arcadia in Memory and Mind <?page no="115"?> guities and tensions that coursed through the veins of their heartland’s post-col‐ onial history and collective identity. Though Frawley’s study of Irish nostalgia focuses on collective memory and identity, the pastoral is a powerful literary mode within which individual, pri‐ vate crises of identity are also explored, especially as removed or isolated from communal or national concerns. Banville’s novels are particularly good exam‐ ples of this development in the mode and its manifestations in post-/ modern Irish literature, for when Banville looks through the pastoral lens, he adjusts its magnification to look at the characters in more detail. The focus of the pastoral mode and its subtext of nostalgia thus shifts in his novels from the collective to the individual, from the distant to the intimate. This shift can be observed par‐ ticularly well in his early novels Birchwood (1973) and The Newton Letter (1982), in which historical, elegiac metafiction is appropriated for postmodern studies of identities in crisis and despair. These and similar concerns are expressed with more maturity in Eclipse (2000) and The Sea (2005), and they return in his radio-play A Conversation in the Mountains (2006), in which Banville stages (as historiographic metafiction) the famous encounter between Heidegger and poet Paul Celan, in order to show how individual identity is inevitably affected by collectively remembersed experiences. To offer another comparison to the paradigm shift effected by Banville: Michel Foucault, in his seminal essay on heterotopia (1967), shifts the problematic of Bachelardian topoanalysis from “felicitous spaces” to “other spaces - spaces of crisis, deviance, exclusion, and illusion; in other words, to heterotopoanalysis” (Ockman, “Review of The Poetics of Space” 3). Foucault’s paradigmatic shift does for Bachelard what Banville’s latest works do for Twentieth-century Irish liter‐ ature and the pastoral mode. To read Irish literature of the last century through the looking glass of collective identity discourse and ‘Irishness’ - whether po‐ litical, historical, socio-historical or socio-political - though fascinating, is to tread on familiar ground. To do what Banville does, and subordinate these col‐ lective concerns in favour of the contemporary nexus of language and self, is a paradigmatically more difficult, but equally rewarding use of the pastoral mode. Ultimately, Banville turns away from narrative as a collective memory expe‐ rience to create post-/ modern pastorals that explore the intersection of memory and subjectivity; a subject’s memories create subjective memories, after all, and the pastoral offers both a temporal axis (expressed in its dynamic of retreat and return) as well as a spatial architectonic (expressed as Arcadia) within which the individual can reckon with memories and the crisis-ridden self - in their wake.] 115 4.1 From Birchwood to The Newton Letter: Banville’s Post-/ Modern Pastoral Elegies <?page no="116"?> Birchwood: The Big House as Pastoral Space We imagine that we remember things as they were, while in fact all we carry into the future are fragments which reconstruct a wholly illusory past — Birchwood 12 In Birchwood (1973), the aforementioned paradigm shift is effected through Banville’s use of the Big House motif supplied with a postmodern twist to create mock-pastoral elegies about the potentially counter-productive communion of memory, imagination and reality. The dominance of the Big House in modern Irish fiction is directly proportional to the decline of the culture it seeks to por‐ tray. Though its historical counterpart (the country-house of the Anglo-Irish Ascendancy) had all but fallen into obscurity, the Big House remained an im‐ portant part of modern Irish literature, be it as symbol, setting, motif or topog‐ raphy of collective memory, nostalgia and myth (Genet, The Big House in Ireland 215-216). The Big House has as many critics as it has proponents. Seamus Deane, for example, denounces its rise in the modern Irish novel as a “retrograde phenom‐ enon”, one that he aligns with Yeats’ distortion of Irish history into myth: The Big House surrounded by the unruly tenantry, culture besieged by barbarity, a refined aristocracy beset by a vulgar middle class - all of these are recurrent images in twentieth-century Irish fiction which draw heavily on Yeats’ poetry for them. (Deane, “Yeats: The Creation of an Audience” 32) Deane thus profiles the Big House novel as an enemy of realism, and as a “re‐ actionary element in modern Irish writing.” The Big House “syndrome”, in his view, “enshrines a distorted version of Irish history” (“Yeats: The Creation of an Audience” 33). A different, more apologetic perspective is offered by Andrew Parkin, who explicitly rejects Deane’s assessment of the Big House culture in Irish literature as an “artificial process: ” It is, on the contrary, entirely natural: the corpse is exhumed by some for purposes of revenge, by others it is resurrected in the nostalgic and ambivalent imagination, for they are its apologists and critics […] What we are encountering is the tenacious hold of a form of rural culture over the modern imagination, however cosmopolitan. This is partly accounted for by the immense energy of the pastoral - here is an Irish version of pastoral. (Parkin, “Shadows of Destruction” 306-307, 309-10) Here, Parkin is one of the first to explicitly link the persistence of the Big House in modern Irish literature to the pastoral mode, and though his argument does 116 IV Always Already Elsewhere: Mapping Arcadia in Memory and Mind <?page no="117"?> 3 See for example Genet, Jacqueline, et al. The Big House in Ireland: Reality and Represen‐ tation. Rowman & Littlefield, 1991; Rauchbauer, Otto, ed. Ancestral Voices: The Big House in Anglo-Irish Literature, 1992, and Kreilkamp, Vera. The Anglo-Irish Novel and the Big House. Syracuse University Press, 1998. not truly challenge Deane’s view of the Big House as a harbourer of distorted myths, he is right to point to its collusion with pastoral in the psyche of modern Irish authors. Pastoral parallels abound, interestingly, between Ireland’s Big House litera‐ ture and the literature of the American south. The colonial mansion, a prob‐ lematic antebellum memento, relentlessly haunts The Sound and the Fury, for example, and William Faulkner exploits its evocative symbolism accordingly. When complemented by the Gothic tradition, both the colonial mansion and the Big House become symbols of a lost Edenic past, creating a timeless literature of memory, “whereby the Big house fulfils a role not dissimilar to that fulfilled by the ruin for the Romantics, and becomes invested with all kinds of oneiric symbolism - part of a baroque landscape of melancholy or terror” (Genet, The Big House in Ireland 217). Although several studies link the Big House to modern Irish fiction, 3 it re‐ mains both underappreciated and undervalued in the context of postmodern Irish literature. It happens too often, as with Deane, that the Big House remains predictable, even hackneyed as a motif, creating in the reader all but a sense of déjà vu. Elsewhere, as with Parkin, the Big House is relegated to being complicit in the fabrication of the myth of an unspoilt, rural Ireland, turning a blind eye to any political or social reality. And although the Big House novel of modern Irish fiction “must inevitably be identified with a rather parochial, narrowly nostalgic world-view” (Genet, The Big House in Ireland 218), exceptions, such as Banville’s Birchwood or The Newton Letter, do exist. More importantly, these exceptions use the Big House motif to transport the pastoral from the modern to the postmodern. A master manipulator of the novel form who delights in formal symmetries, on the one hand, and who subscribes to modernist despair and alienation, on the other, Banville revels in an overtly self-conscious style, brazen narrative deceptions and clearly loves parody. His oeuvre, then, is at once “impeccably modernist” and blatantly postmodernist; it inhabits a post-/ modernist purgatory simultaneously “possessed of a past” (Bell 2012) and play‐ fully poised on the promontory of a possible but seemingly intangible future - always already elsewhere. Banville “has a deep fascination with the past as a form of consolation for contemporary grief. This suggests a Romantic protected by the Sceptic” (McMinn, John Banville 17) - or, to put it differently, a modernist in the guise of a postmodernist. 117 4.1 From Birchwood to The Newton Letter: Banville’s Post-/ Modern Pastoral Elegies <?page no="118"?> Birchwood (1973) is a perfect example of how masterfully Banville walks the post-/ modernist tightrope. Gabriel Godkin, its predictably solipsistic narrator, convincingly re-invents a past for himself that probably never was, in an order it likely never had, so as to impose a pattern upon his thoughts and experiences that must remain all but elusive. Twists and turns accompany all that the reader may assume to know, and in a typically postmodernist manner. It all starts with thinking, according to Godkin: “I am, therefore I think. That seems inescapable” ( BW 1), and since “all thinking is in a sense remembering” (3), Gabriel’s writing always has the past as both its proper tense and proper subject. It is hardly surprising then, that Godkin feels the need to constantly re-invent, especially when he recalls the tragic relationships of his childhood: “I began to write, as a means of finding them again, and thought that at last I had discovered a form which would contain and order all my losses. I was wrong” ( BW 170). Although Gabriel’s efforts at finding some order and harmony in the world he inhabits are but the attempts of someone trying to “find the truffle embedded in the muck” ( BW 3), his most redeeming quality remains a Romantic persis‐ tence, maintained among all the “sleight of hand, dark laughter” and among all the mocking scepticism he encounters: The harmony of the seasons mocks me. […] 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 under‐ stand 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. (BW 170) Godkin’s narration is entirely fabricated, but, unlike Freddie Montgomery, not because he enjoys presiding as a ‘little god’ over the fictional world he creates, but because his writing invariably drifts into fantasy: “We imagine that we re‐ member things as they were, while in fact all we carry into the future are frag‐ ments which reconstruct a wholly illusory past” ( BW 4). His imagination over‐ powers his memory, and all actual experiences from the past mutiny against any order or system with which he tries to apprehend their reality. Although Birchwood has often been described as a Big House novel, it is one as much as it is not, and it shows how eclectically the Big House motif lends itself to a post-/ modernist treatment; several of the Big House novel’s stock features appear in Part One: a summary of the Godkins’ history ( BW 15-19), numerous descriptions of the family’s “genteel slide toward penury” (49), a fear of upheaval and rebellion, as well as various stock characters. Banville himself says: “Birchwood has all the stereotypes: the dark, angry father; the long-suf‐ fering mother; ghastly grand-parents; the artistic son; the wild son; the strange 118 IV Always Already Elsewhere: Mapping Arcadia in Memory and Mind <?page no="119"?> aunt; it has them all” (Sheehan, “Novelists on the Novel” 83). And although at first sight it may thus appear as “just another Anglo-Irish country house novel,” Birchwood is in no way curtailed by a Big House corset. Rather, Banville parodies the genre; he “takes over and reshapes [the] stereotypes, characters, plot struc‐ tures and social codes [of the Big House novel], working within the form in order to subvert it” (Burgstaller, “‘This Lawless House’” 240). Elements of satire and farce pervade the entire novel, making for darkest mock-pastoral. As William Empson states, it is important for a nation with a strong class-system to have an art-form that not merely evades but breaks through it, that makes the classes feel part of a larger unity or simply at home with each other. This may be done in odd ways, and as well by mockery as admiration. (Some Versions of Pastoral 199) It is hardly surprising that Big Houses and ancestral homes should feature in literature, moreover, since their aristocratic inhabitants were patrons and au‐ diences alike. And yet, as Tom Barry observes in his Guerilla Days in Ireland (1981): [T]he Big House near all the towns was a feature of first importance in the lives of the people. In it lived the leading British loyalists, secure and affluent in his many acres enclosed by high demesne walls. Around him lived his many labourers, grooms, gardeners and household servants, whose mission in life was to serve their lord and master. In the towns, many of the rich shopkeepers bowed before the “great family”, and to them those in the Big House were veritable Gods. The sycophants and lick‐ spittles, happy in their master’s benevolence, never thought to question how he had acquired his thousand acres, his castle and his wealth. (Barry, Guerrilla Days in Ireland 28) Used in its ‘pejorative’ sense (Gifford, Pastoral: 2), the pastoral mode answers this need to “question” accordingly, and with a certain ironic elegance, because “it describes the lives of ‘simple’ low people to an audience of refined wealthy people, so as to make them first think ‘this is true about everyone’ and then “this is specially true about us” (Empson, “‘The Beggar’s Opera’: Mock-Pastoral as the Cult of Independence” 195-196). Crucially, Empson points out that though pastoral writes “about” common people, it is not “by” or “for” them (196), and what Empson says about the pastoral mode in his discussion of The Beggar’s Opera can be applied equally to the Big House in post-/ modern Irish literature, for within the work itself, “it is the clash and identification of the refined, the universal, and the low that is the whole point of pastoral” (“‘The Beggar’s Op‐ era’” 249). This clash is nowhere closer to breaking the surface of deception than 119 4.1 From Birchwood to The Newton Letter: Banville’s Post-/ Modern Pastoral Elegies <?page no="120"?> in the Big House novel. William Empson himself argued that “genuine pastoral could only be reached through burlesque” (Some Versions of Pastoral 229). There‐ fore, by extension, “[t]he only way to use the heroic convention was to turn it into the mock-hero, the rogue, the man half-justified by pastoral” (Some Versions of Pastoral 200). In Birchwood, Gabriel Godkin personifies precisely such a ‘half-justified’ rogue and ‘mock-hero.’ Heir to an explosive Ascendancy family - his grand‐ mother spontaneously combusts! - he purports to narrate “the fall and rise of Birchwood” ( BW 1), though his constant inversions (“I am, therefore I think”) are too conspicuous to hide the subversive intentions that drive the mock-nar‐ rative. Gabriel acknowledges this unreliabilty readily, yet not without insisting on its necessity: “So here then is an ending, of a kind, to my story. It may not have been like that, any of it. I invent, necessarily” ( BW 170). By turning Godkin into a mock-heroic protagonist, Banville can develop his post-/ modern approach to the Big House novel more extensively, harnessing its full potential for farce, parody and satire. The author achieves the postmodern subversion of the Big House novel through farcical characterization, on the one hand, and through the parodied description of the decline of Birchwood itself. Many minor characters are intimately linked to the humour of the novel, which is at times farcical and at other times steeped in black comedy. The deaths of Granny Godkin and her husband coupled with their funeral, are a source of mirth and, in equal measure, of horror. Granda Godkin is a particularly vital minor character responsible for much of the dark hilarity by virtue of his many quirks, antics and disturbingly comical high jinks ( BW 46-47, 51). He passes away soon after, and, aptly, is found dead “in the birch wood, curled like a still‐ born infant in the grass” ( BW 56). Other minor characters, such as Josie the cook, are found “on her hands and knees under the dining room table, motionless, staring at nothing” ( BW 41), or Nockter, the manservant, who delivers Granny Godkin’s death in his own unique and memorable fashion; they too serve to perpetuate Birchwood’s in‐ voluntary transformation into a “madhouse” ( BW 15, 39). As Gabriel summa‐ rises, It was so perfect a picture of bad news arriving, this little figure behind the rain-stip‐ pled glass looming out of wind and violence, that at first I took it to be no more than a stray fancy born of boredom. I looked again. He slipped on the grass, frantically backpedaling an imaginary bicycle, and plunged abruptly arse over tip out of my view amid a sense of general hilarity. I waited, and sure enough a few moments later the house quivered with the first groundswell of catastrophe. (BW 75-76) 120 IV Always Already Elsewhere: Mapping Arcadia in Memory and Mind <?page no="121"?> Birchwood itself slowly becomes a mock-pastoral space saturated in elegiac overtones. Descriptions of its idyllic, natural beauty are always also combined with images of a house, a social class, and a family in ruins: She [Granny Godkin] sat on the iron seat in the little arbour under the lilacs. An early cricket ticked among the bluebells. She heard without hearing it the music fade down in the fallow field. All was still in her little chapel, while, outside, spring whistled in the leaves, the chimneys, ran shrieking through the long grass under the trees. Spring. Perceive the scene, how, how shall I say, how the day quivers between silence and that spring song, such moments are rare, when it seems, in spite of all, that it might be possible to forgive the world for all that it is not. (BW 15) Banville uses yet another aspect of the mock-pastoral, in the person of Gabriel, to effect Gifford’s “pejorative” use of the mode: role-reversal. Role-reversal manifests itself when the ‘fool’ or ‘rogue’ of mock-pastoral becomes at once judge and jury, or at least an externally removed commentator and critic of the proceedings integral to the narrative. Though Gabriel reveals himself as the rightful heir to Birchwood, he deliberately places himself outside the pretensions of the traditional life as an Irish squire. This becomes clear in the relentless conflicts for position and recognition with Michael, his twin brother: “Michael, of course, wanted to be squire, to ride on a black horse around his land and hunt the foxes and thrash the peasants. He wanted all that I had, and hated me for having it and despising it” ( BW 169). As the mock-heroic protagonist of his own mock-narrative turned pejorative pastoral, Gabriel uses the setting of the Big House as a means of private reve‐ lation and re-identification. This is emphasized by the plot structure itself; Birchwood consists of three parts and is circular in both narrative form and design. Part I, “The Book of the Dead,” recounts Gabriel’s memories of “home” and of his family; Part II , “Air and Angels,” follows his travels with a “Dickensian travelling circus” (Genet, The Big House in Ireland 218) after he runs away from home. Part III , finally, titled “Mercury,” brings Gabriel back to Birchwood. Birch‐ wood is thus “the moving spirit” of the novel, as Susanne Burgstaller observes, “determining the fate of its inhabitants and the structure of Gabriel’s tale” (The Big House in Ireland 241). Gabriel’s return to Birchwood itself shows that a real separation from the Big House and his former home is not possible. Once he recognizes this paradox in his efforts to re-invent himself, Gabriel comes to accept a secluded, solitary existence in Birchwood and pursues a new way of life: Perhaps I shall leave here. Where would I go? Is that why they all fought so hard for Birchwood, because there is nowhere else for them to be? Outside is destruction and 121 4.1 From Birchwood to The Newton Letter: Banville’s Post-/ Modern Pastoral Elegies <?page no="122"?> decay. I do not speak the language of this wild country. I shall stay here, alone, and live a life different from any the house has ever known. Yes. (BW 170) Whether this new life is real or imagined, Godkin is clearly building himself a social and spiritual Arcadia by cherishing his inheritance and making repairs, thereby ensuring “the rise” of Birchwood and closing the circle of inversions his narrative opened with. This new way of life gives him licence, moreover, to comment as an outsider, from within: I watched from my window, fascinated. I wanted to go help them, to say, Look, I am not my father, I am something different, but they would have run away from me, hor‐ rified. The poppies languished. I worked on the house, cleared out the attic, boarded up the windows smashed during the siege, tended the flower beds, I do not know why. The summerhouse was invaded by pigeons, starlings, a hive of bees. I let them stay there. They were alive, and I had enough of death (BW 168-169) Gabriel’s journey through the narrative is also defined by the pastoral mode’s dynamic of retreat and return, though the retreat and return happen simulta‐ neously and in a chronologically inverted manner. The narrative begins with Gabriel’s return to Birchwood, which immediately becomes a retreat into the past and bygone days of this Big House ruin: “The past is poised around me. I imagine an arrow whistling through the darkness” ( BW 3). Yet, as so often with Banville’s protagonists, their retreat into the dreams of the past is disrupted by a rude awakening into a nightmarish present reality: “I had dreamed of the house so often on my travels that now it refused to be real, even while I stood among its ruins. It was not Birchwood of which I had dreamed, but a dream of Birch‐ wood, woven out of bits and scraps” ( BW 4). As such, Gabriel’s reconstruction and “search for time misplaced” begins positively, and he at first believes himself capable of retelling Birchwood’s his‐ tory: “These things, these Madeleines, I gathered anew, compared them to my memories of them, added them to the mosaic, like an archaeologist mapping a buried empire” ( BW 4). As the story progresses our narrator becomes less and less assured of the factual accuracy of his account, flirting ostentatiously with an as-of-yet alluring Mnemosyne before admitting, finally, the potential inac‐ curacy of his memories and to his own inclination to invent: Such scenes as this I see, or imagine I see, no difference, through a glass sharply. The light is lucid, steady, and does not glance in spikes or stars from bright things, but shines in cool cubes, planes and violet lines and lines within planes, as light trapped in polished crystal will shine. Indeed, now that I think of it, I feel it is not a glass through which I see, but rather a gathering of perfect prisms. There is hardly any 122 IV Always Already Elsewhere: Mapping Arcadia in Memory and Mind <?page no="123"?> sound, except for now and then a faint ringing chime, or a distant twittering, strange, unsettling. Outside my memories, this silence and harmony, this brilliance I find again in that second silent world which exists, independent, ordered by unknown laws, in the depths of mirrors. This is how I remember such scenes. If I provide something otherwise than this, be assured that I am inventing. (BW 13) Gabriel’s memories of his childhood shift repeatedly and with increasing energy and inevitability from hauntingly beautiful images of a childhood country-house paradise to moments of strange and curious tragedy: Timidly, almost unnoticed, there came a breaking in upon me that music, palpable and tender, which a wood in summer makes, whose melody is always just beyond hearing, always enticing. Dreamily I wandered down through the trees, into the blue green gloom. Down there were flies, not the intricate translucent things which browsed among the birches, but vivid nightblue brutes with brittle bodies, swarming over the rot, and there were black birds too, under the bushes screaming. (BW 24) Gabriel’s look back on his life at Birchwood showcases a tragically nostalgic obsession with his own (in)capacity to remember - taken together, there are no fewer than fifty instances of ‘I can / cannot recall’ and ‘I can / cannot remember’ disseminated throughout the novel. This is a search for meaning through lan‐ guage that is continuously disrupted by moments equally grotesque and violent as they seem (for Gabriel) to be quotidian. Amidst his tale of violent confusion, Godkin repeatedly also finds solace in moments of revelation and joy at the unadorned beauty of nature and its unin‐ volved ‘silence’: 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. (BW 25) Godkin here expresses an unimpeachable redemptive ideal that drives his quest for meaning and love amidst the horrors of his past. This ideal, as so often in Banville, is celebrated in irruptions of epiphanic descriptions of the ordinary splendour of nature; nature, its beauty ever tangible and vibrant, is too often in the blind spot of the human eye, whose selfish and obsessive search for self-iden‐ tity relegates it to an idealised space, always already elsewhere and ever waiting to be perceived, appreciated. As Joseph McMinn concludes in his survey of Ban‐ ville’s early fiction: 123 4.1 From Birchwood to The Newton Letter: Banville’s Post-/ Modern Pastoral Elegies <?page no="124"?> These special moments of revelation […] usually occur in the depths of suffering and present themselves as unspoken images to an imagination heightened and intensified by pain. They are like moments of exquisite serenity in the midst of disaster, when order is suddenly glimpsed in the concrete and the tangible, as if it had been simply waiting to be noticed. (McMinn “An Exalted Naming” 21) As is typical for Banville, the beauty and serenity glimpsed in nature is always coupled with foul and chaotic circumstances, ever colluding to blindside nature’s beauty and to remind the narrator of the absurdities of their world. Godkin’s narrative is littered with such contradictions: “Violets and cow shit, my life has ever been thus” ( BW 126). By contrast, nature’s uninvolved, speechless beauty mirrors a search for simplicity and innocence of which modern ways of knowing, rationality and abstraction are hopelessly deficient. Nature’s harmony, order and beauty are each effortless, where Banville’s protagonists embark on a painful and exhausting quest for this selfsame order and harmony, one they then acknowledge too late as a paradise lost. Godkin searches for this harmony and purpose in all but the right places, and though he does discover “intimations” of it upon his return and in the rebuilding of Birchwood, he also ends the nar‐ rative with an admission of failure: “I was wrong. There is no form, no order, only echoes and coincidences, sleight of hand, dark laughter. I accept it.” Gabriel is forced to recognise that what he set out to express is beggaring description: “Intimations abound, but they are felt only, and words fail to transfix them.” Our narrator, in his search for a form that would accommodate the oxymorons of his past life, admits defeat and resorts in his despair to the safe haven of a Witt‐ gensteinian turn of phrase: “Whereof I cannot speak, thereof I must be silent” ( BW 171). Rüdiger Imhof, in his own analysis of Gabriel’s use of “a wide variety of dif‐ ferent literary genres, conventions and stereotypes to see whether these could assist him in his quest,” concludes that the protagonist has “failed because the old forms were of no use to him, and new, more adequate ones he has as yet not been able to discover.” None of “the conventions and strategies” stood up to the task, Imhof argues, and “all they were suited for was to be parodied” (Imhof, John Banville 72-73). This conclusion is altogether too simplistic, however; al‐ though Gabriel mocks the Big House and despairs at how ineffectually he can reckon with his memories, his Birchwood also provides the beginnings of some redemptive insight and, in its final pages, reads both like an elegy for “the fall” of the Big House as well as a celebration of a new-found life within its walls. The secret to this redemptive success is a shift in the narrator’s focus; upon his return to Birchwood, Gabriel recognizes that the rebuilding of a ruin, be it Birchwood or his own identity and feeling of self-worth, is a process rather than 124 IV Always Already Elsewhere: Mapping Arcadia in Memory and Mind <?page no="125"?> 4 The tetralogy includes Kepler (1981), Doctor Copernicus (1978), The Newton Letter (1982) and Mefisto (1986), each concerned with the lives of their eponymous scientists. a malignant, incorrigible condition. Thus despair is ultimately trumped by a fervent hope and belief in the possibility of a new life, however long and arduous in its remaking: “I shall stay here, alone, and live a life different from any the house has ever known. Yes” ( BW 170). The search for this new life, moreover, is carried over into Banville’s scientific tetralogy, 4 and can be re-traced particularly well in its third instalment, The Newton Letter. ‘A Time out of Time’: The Newton Letter as Counter-Memorial Pastoral It all has the air of a pastoral mime, with the shepherd’s wife and the shepherd, and Cupid and the maid, and, scribbling within a crystal cave, myself, a haggard-eyed Damon — The Newton Letter 12. A plethora of parallels connects Birchwood (1973) to The Newton Letter (1982), though the two novels were published nearly ten years apart, and although they register two different distinct periods of Banville’s writing career. In each novel, the authenticity of memory remains elusive, and both narratives are driven by a desire to shape representations of the self by negotiating (with) the past. Fur‐ thermore, the pastoral mode’s own binary structure of dialectical oppositions is used by each protagonist in an attempt to underpin their respective subjects, while simultaneously subverting the selfsame oppositions. Paradoxically, both narrator’s efforts at absolute control over their self-representation become pain‐ terly narrative elegies mourning the loss of control. The Newton Letter belongs to the tetralogy including Kepler (1981), Doctor Copernicus (1978) and Mefisto (1986), each concerned with the lives of its epon‐ ymous scientist, and thus they are pervaded by similar philosophical questions about the nature of knowledge, purpose, order and identity. Banville conceived the tetralogy according to the “classical Greek notion of the tetralogy - three tragedies and a satire, with The Newton Letter as the satire” (Carty, “John Banville Interviewed” 18). Fundamentally, The Newton Letter satirizes the academic, sci‐ entific approach to life, an approach that proves grossly inadequate in the face of the present and reality. In this vain, the narrator of The Newton Letter is a historian attempting to write a biography of Isaac Newton; for this purpose he retreats to the lodge of a country house (The Ferns) and spends a summer so‐ 125 4.1 From Birchwood to The Newton Letter: Banville’s Post-/ Modern Pastoral Elegies <?page no="126"?> 5 Cf. Lernout, Geert. ”Banville and Being: The Newton Letter and History”; Hand, John Banville 23-66 or McMinn, John Banville 83. journ obsessed with a period of Newton’s own life, the summer of 1693, when the scientist suffered a personal crisis that ultimately resulted in the end of his scientific career. Specifically, the narrator is intrigued by a letter in which Newton supposedly voiced this crisis; Newton’s letter is henceforth suffused with the narrator’s own involvement with the Lawless family residing at The Ferns to become a narrative retreat and revision of his past and flawed view of reality. Like Gabriel Godkin, the narrator of The Newton Letter desires to order the past in an attempt to understand the self. Many delusions and failures follow, and only slowly does it dawn upon our historian that a transition from the learned and academic can only happen when he unlearns his narrow, scientific understanding of life: I had brought guidebooks to trees and birds, but 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. I soon got discouraged. Perhaps that explains the sense I had of being an interloper. Amid those sunlit scenes I felt detached, as if I myself were a mere idea, a stylised and subtly inaccurate illustration of something that was only real elsewhere. (NL 5) As noted by several critics, both novels also share common ground as post-/ modern responses to Irish history. 5 Historical contexts are alluded to alongside the two novels’ subversion of the Big House to create narratives of misrecog‐ nition in which each protagonist constructs views of others that, eventually, are revealed to be delusions of an overly scientific and nostalgic imagination. Ban‐ ville comments on his own use of the Big House as a personal symbol, stating that he chose the Big House setting for Birchwood as well as The Newton Letter to strengthen his parodic and metafictional “literary angle of vision,” because the Big House is “the most clichéd thing in Irish fiction” (Banville and Schwall, “An Interview with John Banville” 19). His own association with Irish history is curiously emphatic, even petulant, warranting a critical move away from his‐ torical interpretations of both Birchwood and The Newton Letter: The only direct statement I’ve ever made in any book that I have written is at the end of Birchwood where the protagonist says: ‘I’ll stay in this house and I’ll live a life different from any the house has ever known’ (BW 171). And that is my statement. I stay in this country but I’m not going to be an Irish writer. I’m not going to do the Irish thing.’ (Banville and Schwall, “An Interview with John Banville” 19) 126 IV Always Already Elsewhere: Mapping Arcadia in Memory and Mind <?page no="127"?> Critics who have insisted on a historical interpretation of the two novels should also consider Banville’s efforts at exclusion from that circle of Irish writers who place themselves squarely in the cross-section of literatures evolving from de‐ bates about Irish identity: “I don’t really think that specifically ‘national’ liter‐ atures are of terribly great significance […] I feel a part of my culture. But it’s purely a personal culture gleaned from bits and pieces of European culture of four thousand years. It’s purely something I have manufactured” (Sheehan 1979: 81). On the one hand, Banville’s active resistance to any kind of nationalist dis‐ course thus forces a re-evaluation of his use of the Big House genre; on the other hand, it also resonates with the outsider figures that repeatedly appear in his novels - “bewildered men, abandoned by the powers of language and frustrated in their desires for knowledge, power and sex” (Thomson, “‘Powers of Misre‐ cognition’” 113). It should be noted, accordingly, that houses big and small remain important in Banville’s later novels too, including Ghosts, Eclipse, The Sea and A Conver‐ sation in the Mountains, creating what Neil Murphy has called the “hallucinatory topos” (“From Long Lankin to Birchwood” 10) of Banville’s architectural spaces: the houses “provide formal image-structures that are integral to the protagoni‐ st’s memory or imagined desires but are rarely linked to socio-economic or his‐ torical contexts” (Thomson, “‘Powers of Misrecognition’” 114). It can be said, accordingly, that both The Newton Letter and Birchwood exploit the genre of the Big House novel in different ways and for different purposes. In Birchwood, for example, the Big House genre is emptied of much of its historicity, and is instead used as an aesthetic device to evoke visions of Anglo-Irish decadence without being tied to a specific space and time. Such use of the Big House has multiple implications for Birchwood. First, it creates “instant associations with decay, po‐ litical crisis and, significantly, the image of a class of people increasingly out of touch with reality” (McMinn, John Banville 32). Second, the Big House becomes an architectonic of personal association and an elegiac articulation of loss. As Victor Sage argues, Birchwood is an interplay between “the entropy of lyric ide‐ alism and the processes of incarnate history” (Sage, 32), but one that ultimately leads to stasis or “moments of the sublime, raised and cancelled in the structural metaphor of ‘petrifaction’” (Sage 36), a metaphor which corresponds to “the fall and rise” ( BW 1) of the Big House in literature itself. Fern House, the Big House of The Newton Letter is pivotal in giving space to the narrator’s delusions and mental development. As it becomes evident at the beginning of the novel, our historian has become disillusioned with texts, lan‐ guage and other academic systems of knowledge: “I’ve lost my faith in the pri‐ macy of text” ( NL 1); his retreat to the Ferns is therefore designed to help clear 127 4.1 From Birchwood to The Newton Letter: Banville’s Post-/ Modern Pastoral Elegies <?page no="128"?> out “the real people[, …] objects, landscapes even” that “keep getting in the way” ( NL 1). The Newton Letter is the narrative that results from this sojourn, and it is presented as a personal letter to a friend who goes by the name of Clio, a clear allusion to the muse of history (Burgstaller 247). The letter itself is a satire of historical writing reinforced by the parallel parody of the Big House genre. The narrator’s exclusively academic outlook on life comes across as cruel and im‐ personal. He is forced, on the one hand, to change his point of view - “My illusions about them soon began, if not to crumble, then to modify” ( NL 15), and towards the end of the novel, to hand in a kind of professional resignation from historiographical endeavours, mirroring, ironically, Newton’s own exodus from academia: “I can’t go on. I’m not a historian any more” ( NL 80). This represents a clear contrast to the narrator’s earlier efforts at trying to capture and use The Ferns, the beauty of its natural surroundings in particular, for his own academic purposes: I recall one day when I was in, appropriately enough, the orchard. The sun was shining, the trees were in blossom. It would be a splendid book, fresh and clean as this bright scene before me. The academies would be stunned, you would be proud of me, and Cambridge would offer me a big job. I felt an extraordinary sense of purity, of tender innocence. Thus Newton himself must have stood one fine morning in his mother’s garden at Woolsthorpe, as the ripe apples dropped about his head. (NL 7) As so often with Banville, compensation for the loss of faith in texts, language or systems of order can be found in the form of an uncomfortable if emancipating rediscovery of the ordinary. Any and all absolutes that the narrator worships in the name of science are undone, ironically, by the simple, idyllic beauty he finds repeatedly at his very feet: “Time is different in the country. [… T]he weather that late May was splendid, sunny and still, and tinged with sadness. I killed whole days rambling the fields” ( NL 5). The Newton Letter thereby becomes a pastoral text that teaches its creator to become mindful again of the beauty of nature. As our historian realizes soon enough, the remembrance of reality as a simple, sensuous experience enriches rather than obscures the search for order: “It wasn’t the exotic I was after, but the ordinary, that strangest and most elusive of enigmas” ( NL 14). Where previously “real people ke[pt] getting in the way” or expectations “would not match up” with his academic surrealities ( NL 1, 5), the narrator finds solace in the following sublime epiphany about what it means to live rather than wallow in memory: It was the notion of a time out of time, of this summer as a self-contained unit separate from the time of the ordinary world. The events I read of in the newspapers were, not unreal, but only real out there, and irredeemably ordinary; Ferns, on the other hand, 128 IV Always Already Elsewhere: Mapping Arcadia in Memory and Mind <?page no="129"?> its daily minutiae, was strange beyond expressing, unreal, and yet hypnotically vivid in its unreality. There was no sense of life messily making itself from moment to moment. It had all been lived already, and we were merely tracing the set patterns, as if not living really, but remembering. (NL 57) As Gabriel Godkin of Birchwood, the narrator of The Newton Letter was at first deluded to think that his scientific imagination would provide the most au‐ thentic version of the past, surpassing even an objective, deductive collection of experiences. Both narrators at first disavow the conventional relation of histor‐ ical knowledge between subjects and objects, whereby objectivity presupposes subjectivity and vice versa, creating an unstable relation between their percep‐ tions of past and reality. It is only in the ordinary splendour of nature, its beauty concrete, vivid and observable, that each becomes appreciative again of the past as they remember it as well as the reality they have disfigured by their previous insistence on “inventing” ( BW 21). What at first “has the air of a pastoral mime” ( NL 14) is slowly replaced by a renewed faith in the natural and the ordinary. Perhaps one of Banville’s favourite quotations from Rilke’s Duino Elegies best expresses the elegance of this experience: Are we, perhaps, here just for saying: House. Bridge, Fountain, Gate, Jug, Fruit tree, Window, - possibly: Pillar, Tower? […] but for saying, remember, oh, for such saying as never the things themselves hoped so intensely to be. Is not the secret purpose of this sly Earth, in urging a pair of lovers, just to make everything leap with ecstasy in them? […] Here is the time for the Tellable, here is its home. (Rilke, Duino Elegies 85) The narrators of both novels exhibit a strong tendency to resist or undermine the traditions of elegiac narrative while they simultaneously obsess on the re‐ membrance and recollection of memories. In this vain, Banville’s use of the Big House is far more counter-memorial than historical. Narratives that at first at‐ tempt to counteract the failure to remember are subverted to create what may be best described as counter-memorial pastorals of personal identity and memory. Both Birchwood and The Ferns are transformed, as Vera Kreilkamp argues, and the physical solidarity of the symbolic, decaying Big House […] dissolves into a pattern of personal evocation. The house is seldom described, but it is obsessively recalled and lamented - with the focus always on the self-consciously literary angle of vision in the act of recollection, rather than on the object that is lost. (Kreilkamp, The Anglo-Irish Novel 250) In Birchwood, for example, Gabriel Godkin presents his own subjective view‐ point as an experience of fragmentation and loss marked by warped and unre‐ 129 4.1 From Birchwood to The Newton Letter: Banville’s Post-/ Modern Pastoral Elegies <?page no="130"?> coverable memories. Although memory offers a tantalising version of things past, it is, ultimately, an incomplete form of access to self-understanding, and one that negatively affects both present and future, since “all thinking is in a sense remembering” ( BW 11). From the very beginning, therefore, Gabriel ap‐ pears to be powerless to shape his own memories into the narrative form of his choosing. Rüdiger Imhof observes that “Gabriel’s [quest] is first and foremost not an epistemological quest, but one directed at making sense of the past by remembering it and, more importantly, by writing it down in the form of a sustained narrative” (Imhof, John Banville 54). Godkin’s final statements over‐ turn his entire narrative efforts, however, when he chooses not to remember Birchwood as it was but to make it new, and to live in an alternative if equally idealized reality that chooses the future over the past: “I do not speak the lan‐ guage of this wild country. I shall stay here, alone, and live a life different from any the house has ever known. Yes” ( BW 174). The Newton Letter follows suit and in many ways finishes the counter-me‐ morial manifesto that Birchwood began. It begins by lamenting the contempo‐ rary philosopher’s loss of hope in the powers of the imagination: Gabriel’s ap‐ propriation of Wittgenstein - “whereof I cannot speak, thereof I must be silent” ( BW 174) is transformed into Newton’s bucolic rediscovery of the spiritual joy to be found in the attention to the beauties of the ordinary, tangible world: I seem to have been only as a boy playing on the seashore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me. (NL 99) Like Newton’s discovery of the “smoother pebble” at the seashore, The Newton Letter ends as a celebration of the unpredictability of existence, for only the unpredictable can create real emotions and true joy. At the end of The Letter, the narrator reveals that his erstwhile love-interest Otillie is pregnant with his child: The child is there. The notion of this strange life, secret in its warm sea, provokes in me the desire to live - to live forever, I mean, if necessary. The future now has the same resonance that the past once had, for me. I am pregnant myself, in a way. Super-numerous existence wells up in my heart. (NL 90) The above marks an important and extremely rare moment in Banville fiction, an instance of acceptance and joy as the character is overcome with the sense of human possibility; previous frustration, confusion and dejection give way to pure and simple tranquillity. The unborn child, “secret in its warm sea” hints at the possibility for redemption in a new-found future. “Super-numerous exis‐ tence”, a phrase lifted from the Ninth of Rilke’s Duino Elegies, encapsulates this 130 IV Always Already Elsewhere: Mapping Arcadia in Memory and Mind <?page no="131"?> spiritual communion with human life and reality experienced so rarely by Ban‐ ville protagonists. The phrase is literally synonymous with a life beyond num‐ bers, letters or words, and it marks an innocence restored. Where previous at‐ tempts at recollecting childhood memories resulted in a desperate if transparent counter-memorialising of the past, acceptance of the present and one’s part in it have transformed our recluse, isolated historian into a man with a life with “super-numerous” futures and possibilities. 4.2 ‘Possessed of a Past’: Pastoral, Identity, and Memory in Eclipse, The Sea and Conversation in the Mountains In that dreamy stillness, like the azure dis‐ tances of a stage set, the summers back to childhood seem present; to childhood, and beyond childhood, to those Arcadian fields where memory and imagination merge. — Eclipse 137 The Past as Pastoral in Eclipse and The Sea “The past beats inside me like a second heart” (S 10): to quote this is to summon, all at once, the quintessential themes and tropes that permeate John Banville’s Eclipse (2000) and The Sea (2005). Though they are not considered partner novels and were published five years apart, when read together, there is more than enough food for thought and comparative analysis. In both novels, for example, a crisis of identity ensues for each protagonist caused by a sudden, traumatic experience. In Eclipse, actor Alexander Cleave “walks out of a performance” never to return to the stage and “retires from life” to his mother’s house and boyhood home (E 20). In The Sea, art critic Max Morden has recently lost his wife to cancer, and “seeking to assuage [his] heaviness of heart” (S 252), journeys to Ballymore, a seaside town where he spent his childhood holidays and where, one fateful summer, he encountered the family Grace. Whether childhood resort or boyhood home, both can be read as sites of memory and nostalgia that house a pastoral past built on the crumbling prom‐ ontory of an identity in crisis. Each crisis of self, and with it the point of depar‐ ture to a sojourn in the past, is paramount to the way each story unfolds and to the consequent attempts at narrative reification. In “Time Enough for Love: The Sea” (2006), Brendan McNamee observes that 131 4.2 ‘Possessed of a Past’: Pastoral, Identity, and Memory in Eclipse, The Sea and Conversation in the Mountains <?page no="132"?> Banville’s protagonists exist in a twilight world between two seemingly irreconcilable extremes: on the one hand, the world in which they physically exist, with all its at‐ tendant loss and pain, and on the other, perhaps created by a need to escape this calvary, an imaginative paradise wherein all earthly strife is unknown. (McNamee, “Time Enough for Love: The Sea 243) Though at first sight Cleave’s breakdown on stage and Morden’s difficulties dealing with death seem somewhat unrelatable, each protagonist confronts the momentous task of resolving their crisis of identity homogeneously. In order to come to terms with their present, conflicted self, both protagonists recollect imagined versions of their childhood as nostalgic, pastoral narratives of retreat. When read in Freudian terms, childhood is a quasi-paradisiacal stage under the reign of the pleasure principle and unburdened by the constraints of a ration‐ alist-utilitarian reality (Heiler, “Transformations of the Pastoral” 334). Accord‐ ingly, both protagonists negotiate their way through the “earthly strife” of the present and the “imaginative paradise” of the past in order to find “peace of mind” and to try and accept “life in all its clouded glory” (S 243). Each nostalgia narrative is also fraught with uncertainty and doubt. First, a caesura in the way both characters perceive time begins to unsettle the minutiae of quotidian life: “it has all begun to run together, past and possible future and impossible present” (S 96); “There is no present, the past is random and only the future is fixed” (E 77). Consequently, the two main “characters enter into a search for an appropriate language that will contain their experience, and render them‐ selves and their lives knowable” (Hand, John Banville 165). But language - and both Max and Alexander are obsessed with language - introduces other varia‐ bles on the strength of its inherent ambiguity. The resulting linguistic, (meta-)fictional constructs of reclusion as well as the various Arcadian memory landscapes and architectonics, the summer houses and their surroundings, most importantly, lead both characters to a retreat into the mind and the imagination: “I am happy, or happiest, at least, in this sealed chamber, suspended in the tide‐ less sea of myself ” (E 131). Cleave’s comparison is evocative of Andrew Marvell’s famous ocean metaphor in “The Garden”: Meanwhile the mind, from pleasures less, Withdraws into its happiness. The mind, that ocean where each kind Does straight its own resemblance find. (41-44) Cleave and Morden, as most of Banville’s later protagonists, are self-celebratory, solipsistic narcissists that use their linguistic prowess to create private, secluded Arcadiæ of the imagination with which to contend their overwhelming sense 132 IV Always Already Elsewhere: Mapping Arcadia in Memory and Mind <?page no="133"?> of displacement between their experience of time, self and their place in the world. They become inhabitants of “a twilit netherworld in which it [is] scarcely possible to distinguish dream from waking” (S 96-7). In purgatory between idyllic day dreams of the past and the nightmarish reality of the present, they continue to suffer from insomnia and bouts of obsessive restlessness. Somnam‐ bulists in the pastoral pastures of their imagined pasts, they are compelled to journey to sites of childhood and memory in search of solace and stability. As Alexander Cleave summarises in Eclipse: “What is it about the past that makes the present by comparison seem so pallid and weightless? ” (E 48). The first premise both protagonists share is, as previously mentioned, a crisis of identity. Alexander Cleave describes his “collapse” on stage as the culmination point of the past months during which he “had been beset by bouts of crippling self-consciousness” (E 88). He sees the main source of what has befallen him in his vocation as an actor: I spoke all the parts, even of the vanquished and the slain. I would be anyone but myself. Thus it continued year on year, the intense, unending rehearsal. But what was I rehearsing for? When I searched inside myself, I found nothing finished, only a permanent potential, a waiting to go on. At the site of what was supposed to be my self was only a vacancy, an ecstatic hollow. (E 33) The moment of histrionic paralysis on stage stems, Cleave claims, not from a failure to recognise the self, but from the opposite, a “hideous awareness” of an “insupportable excess of self ” (88). Cleave, as his name suggests, has always been cleft between the art and reality of his profession: “on stage I cannot act and in life never cease from acting” (152). His entire “life has been given over to im‐ provising identities, losing himself in other people’s words and actions” along the way (Hand, John Banville 166). He feels his only option is to journey to the imagined locus amoenus of his childhood and thereby put himself “out of harm’s way” (E 14). Thus, “on one of those vague hazy days of early June that seem made half of weather and half of memory,” Cleave packs his bags and embarks on a journey to his deceased mother’s house. Lydia, his wife, accuses him of “being a senti‐ mentalist,” shrugging her husband’s resolve off as “some kind of ridiculous nos‐ talgia.” Cleave, always brooding on words, retorts with an attempt to exculpate himself from her scrutiny: “Sentimentality: unearned emotion. Nostalgia: longing for what never was.” At first he assumes that the journey will be no more than “a brief respite from life, an interval between acts” (13). Upon arrival in the southeast of Ireland, however, he soon realizes that he is “after nothing less than a total transformation […] into a miraculous, bright new being” (37). 133 4.2 ‘Possessed of a Past’: Pastoral, Identity, and Memory in Eclipse, The Sea and Conversation in the Mountains <?page no="134"?> As Cleave finds himself “standing in [his] drawers at the window of [his] boy‐ hood bedroom,” he feels he cannot but indulge in a meticulous survey of the past to find “exactly the moment of catastrophic inattention [when he] dropped the gilded bowl of [his] life and let it shatter” (39). If Alexander Cleave is compelled to return to the locus amoenus of his child‐ hood in order “to locate that singular essential self,” (E 51) Max Morden remem‐ bers the past into being first and foremost as a means of escape from the present: “we sought escape from an intolerable present in the only tense possible, the past” (S 99). The main narrative of The Sea takes place exactly a year after Morden and his wife, Anna, first visited Mr Todd, the aptly named oncologist who di‐ agnosed Anna’s cancer, “the bulge that was big baby De’Ath, burgeoning inside her, biding its time” (18). The narrative re-enters a year later, when Anna has passed away, and when, in a dream, the art critic is suddenly compelled to return to The Cedars, his parents’ summer house, site of many holiday memories and secret-keeper of other, darker events that may otherwise go forgotten: “a dream it was that drew me here” (24). Max is walking aimlessly “along a country road […] going home, it seemed” when he experiences the following: Immediately then, and for the first time in I do not know how long, I thought of Ballyless and the house there on Station Road, and the Graces, and Chloe Grace, I cannot think why, and it was as if I had stepped suddenly out of the dark into a splash of pale, saltwashed sunlight. It endured only a minute, less than a minute, that happy lightsomeness, but it told me what to do, and where I must go. (S 26) Morden’s somewhat Beckettian dream sequence expresses an unconscious de‐ sire for nostos, or “homecoming,” (25) invoked by imaginative memories of those childhood summer idylls. Ultimately, this “lyreless Orpheus,” (24) as Morden refers to himself, is attempting to escape the algos that is overwhelming him, hoping to alleviate the grief he is presently experiencing for the loss of his wife. The Sea unfolds as an internal monologue with three narrative strands, all told by Morden: “one, his account of life at the Cedars[; ] […] two, the story of Anna’s cancer and how they both dealt with it along with some history of their relationship; and three, memories of that childhood summer with the Graces” (McNamee, “Time Enough for Love” 244). The third strand represents what one may call yet another version of the seemingly lost, paradisal ‘golden world,’ a feature prevalent in Banville’s later works. By using such sites of memory and time as the sea, the beach and the Cedars summer house, in particular, Banville provides a re-reading of these elements that focuses on questions of the human experience of time, the fickle nature of memory, and the fantastic faculties of language and the imagination to think away all conflicts and contradictions. In 134 IV Always Already Elsewhere: Mapping Arcadia in Memory and Mind <?page no="135"?> summary, Max first seeks refuge in the past in an attempt to play truant from the present, which he experiences as “harsh,” “cold,” and altogether “impossible”: To be concealed, protected, guarded, that is all I have ever truly wanted, to burrow down into a place of womby warmth and cower there, hidden from the sky’s indif‐ ferent gaze and the harsh air’s damagings. That is why the past is just such a retreat for me, I go there eagerly, rubbing my hands and shaking off the cold present and the colder future. (S 60-1) Having returned to The Cedars, Morden, like Freddie Montgomery in Ghosts, retires into the kingdom of his mind to finish a “Big Book,” not on Vaublin, but “on Bonnard” (260). With intimate, impressionistic brush strokes - mimetic of Bonnard’s landscapes, interiors and still lifes - Morden paints in words portraits of his self in an imagined past. These storied representations are, however, al‐ ways in a tussle with the subjectivity of time and the singular idiosyncrasies of memory: “Memory dislikes motion, preferring to hold things still, and as with so many of these remembered scenes I see this one as a tableau” (221). The Cedars, much like Cleave’s boyhood home in Eclipse, thus becomes emblematic of the “Arcadian fields where memory and imagination merge” (E 137), and where the unreliable, always questionable human experience of time and the timelessness of the imagination become interconnected. In Part II of the novel, “the different strands of the narrative begin to weave together and, in one significant section, distant paradisal past and painful present reality are both formally balanced and subtly intertwined” (McNamee, “Time Enough for Love” 245). Banville achieves this equilibrium mainly through his use of the sea as a central image that embodies both the limits of the human experience of time and the imagination’s prowess to overcome these boundaries: “The sea is godlike both in its immensity and its implacable indifference” (McNamee, “Time Enough for Love” 246). Ironically perhaps, it is Alexander Cleave who first muses on the many roles and guises of the sea: “Why do I find the thought of the sea so alarming? We speak of its power and violence as if it were a species of wild animal, ravening and unappeasable, but the sea does nothing, it is simply there, its own reality” (E 67). Where Max looks to the past merely as a “retreat,” Cleave is in need of “re‐ tirement from life” completely. As so often with Banville protagonists, both are uncomfortable with their present, “authentic life,” as Morden calls it, “which is supposed to be all struggle, unflagging action and affirmation” (S 60). They are rather more interested in remembering life than living it: “Really, one might almost live one’s life over, if only one could make a sufficient effort of recollec‐ tion” (S 160); “What is it about the past that makes the present by comparison 135 4.2 ‘Possessed of a Past’: Pastoral, Identity, and Memory in Eclipse, The Sea and Conversation in the Mountains <?page no="136"?> seem so pallid and weightless? ” (E 50). Remembering, we remind ourselves, is always also linked to the process of identification as a means of self-reification, whence the various landscapes, sites and architectonics of memory found in both narratives, and especially in the individuals perceived to be moving through them, also facilitate explorations and re-evaluations of self. Accordingly, sites of memory and recollection take centre-stage in the novels and strengthen the narrator’s obsession with the past as a lost childhood and quasi-paradise. As the third narrative strand of The Sea unfolds, for example, the summer house becomes increasingly significant in Morden’s enactment of nostalgia. The Cedars, in his memories, is pictured as the epitome of Arcadian architectonics, “a museum of sorts, retaining material traces of his childhood” (Friberg, “Waters and Memories Always Divide” 253). It is through this house that Max first entered, the “summer world” of the fittingly named Grace family, whom he saw as “divinities” that singled him out for their favour: “How proud I was to be seen with them, these divinities, for I thought of course that they were the gods, so different were they from anyone I had hitherto known” (S 107-8). The journey to Ballyless takes the adult Morden to “the very sanctum” he first pictured the living room of the Cedars to be. Upon entering the house, the boy Morden feels as if he has by magic “vaulted all the obstacles” and landed “next to an angled, solid-seeming beam of sunlight, with Mrs. Grace in a loose-fitting, flowered dress, light blue with a darker pattern of blue blossoms” (S 85). Soon after, at a picnic outing with the Graces, in his imagination he experiences an “Edenic moment,” where he evokes the hortus conclusus of the golden age in the image of himself “at what was suddenly the centre of the world, with that shaft of sunlight and those vestigial flowers […] Mrs Grace offering me an apple, that was however nowhere in evidence” (90). To say that the “apple,” however, “was nowhere in evidence” is to confuse the “mists from the all too real then” with “the blissfully imagined now” (S 92). The confusion stems not from a moment of inattentiveness, but is in fact an example of Morden’s wilful equivocation of past and future. He has in his imagination returned to the past because he is desirous of a life within its innocent, impres‐ sionistic memories. His “ridiculous nostalgia,” then, to borrow Lydia Cleave’s cogent remark, is not only a retrospection into a bucolic childhood, but the expression of a desire to superimpose that pastoral version of the past onto an equally idyllic possibility of the future: This is […] exactly how I would have foreseen my future self. […] Yes, this is what I thought adulthood would be, a kind of long Indian summer, a state of tranquillity, of calm incuriousness, with nothing left of the barely bearable raw immediacy of child‐ 136 IV Always Already Elsewhere: Mapping Arcadia in Memory and Mind <?page no="137"?> hood, all the things solved that had puzzled me when I was small, all mysteries settled, all questions answered, and the moments dripping away, unnoticed almost, drip by golden drip, towards the final, almost unnoticed quietus. (94) Naturally, the art critic is all too well aware of the “oddly antique cast” which emanates from this blissful “version of the future.” Yet he indulges in it because he is “not so much anticipating the future as nostalgic for it, since what in [his] imaginings was to come was in reality already gone” (96). Alexander Cleave’s story is also one of an identity cleft between progress and procrastination as it clings to the past. Eclipse is a tragedy in five Aristotelian acts that culminates in the cathartic suicide of the protagonist’s daughter, Cass. This eventually leads to Cleave’s return from his pastoral sojourn in the past to the present, disenchanted by the dialectics of identity and (in)authenticity, and eclipsed by the certainty of death - one is easily reminded of Poussin’s Et in Arcadia Ego. Like Morden, Cleave is haunted by dreams that become the point of departure to childhood memories: “‘I dreamed last night I was a child and here again’” he tells Lydia, who replies with a pentameter of perfect pith and exactitude: “‘Of course; you never left here, that’s the truth.’” Cleave follows up this reductio ad absurdum with a pentameter of his own, in admonishment, like Max, of the house and its significance: “The house itself it was that drew me back, sent out its secret summoners to bid me come […] home [sic! ]” (E 4). Such and similar somnambulant summons, seemingly homeward bound, pervade the introductory pages of Eclipse, and they also take up much of the beginning of The Sea. These dream sequences are so similar in style and imagery, moreover, that they could have been experienced by one and the same person: The house itself it was that drew me back, sent out its secret summoners to bid me come […] home, I was going to say. […] For miles I had been travelling in a kind of sleep and now I thought I was lost. I wanted to turn the car around and drive back the way I had come, but something would not let me go. Something. […] I walked forward to the brow of the hill and saw the town then, its few little glimmering lights, and, beyond, the fainter glimmer of the sea, and I knew where unknowingly I had come to. (E 4-6) A dream it was that drew me here. In it, I was walking along a country road, that was all. […] I was determinedly on my way somewhere, going home, it seemed, although I did not know what or where exactly home might be. Something had broken down, a car, no, a bicycle, a boy’s bicycle, for as well as being the age I am now I was a boy as well, a big awkward boy, yes, and on my way home, it must have been home, or somewhere that had been home, once, and that I would recognise again, when I got 137 4.2 ‘Possessed of a Past’: Pastoral, Identity, and Memory in Eclipse, The Sea and Conversation in the Mountains <?page no="138"?> there. […] I was calm in myself, quite calm, and confident, too, despite not knowing rightly where I was going except that I was going home. (S 25-27) We are reminded here of Gaston Bachelard’s elegant observations about the “pre-human” and “immemorial” quality that such “spaces of our past” can have on us in his Poetics of Space, especially when “we return to them in our night dreams” and “daydreams” alike (Bachelard 10). More precisely: [A]ll the spaces of our past moments of solitude, the spaces in which we have suffered from solitude, enjoyed desired and compromised solitude, remain indelible within us[.] […] We return to them in our night dreams. These retreats have the value of a shell. And when we reach the very end of the labyrinths of sleep […] we may perhaps experience a type of repose that is pre-human; pre-human, in this case, approaching the immemorial. (Bachelard, Poetics of Space 10) The striking similarities at the outset of each character’s pastoral retreat also foreshadow the interchangeable conclusions both inevitably come to. For Cleave and Morden share the insight that their return to the pastoral past is an expres‐ sion of their desire for an equally simple, peaceful future. Cleave’s quibbles with Lydia encapsulate this moment of epiphany for both: ‘It’s something to do with the future,’ I said. ‘In the dream […] I’m standing in the doorway, in the sun, on an Easter Sunday morning, and somehow it is the future.’ […] ‘It sounds more like the past, to me,’ she said, losing interest, what little there had been. The past, or the future, yes, I might have said - but whose? (E 8) As the tag-question implies, even this piece of insight is not without qualms and doubt. Rather, each protagonist’s return to the past also amounts in some re‐ spects to more disappointment. The various sites of memory are simultaneously the source of aesthetic recall and self-reflecting tribulations. On the one hand, a first narrative sees Max run away from the twelve-month experience of his wife’s death to the Cedars, where he hopes to summer in many a childhood memory. Cleave follows suit, after choking on stage, and returns to his mother’s old house. Parallel to these gilded evocations, on the other hand, run narrative strands that expose each site of memory and childhood to the ruthless, disillu‐ sioned light of the present. First, the protagonists begin to doubt the veracity of their memories; Cleave interrupts his incessant “obsessing on the past” and asks himself: “Am I remembering anything rightly? I may be embellishing, inventing, I may be mixing everything up. […] These are the telltale threads on which memory snags her nails” (E 56-7). Then, the summer house - the primary site of childhood memories - presents itself robbed of all preconceived charm and nostalgia: 138 IV Always Already Elsewhere: Mapping Arcadia in Memory and Mind <?page no="139"?> The model of the house in my head, try as it would to accommodate itself to the original, kept coming up against stubborn resistance. Everything was slightly out of scale, all angles slightly out of true. […] I experienced a sense almost of panic as the real, the crassly complacent real, took hold of the things I thought I remembered and shook them into its own shape. Something precious was dissolving and pouring away between my fingers. Yet how easily, in the end, I let it go. The past, I mean, the real past, matters less than we pretend. (S 156-7) The image of the house based on past perceptions fails to live up to the house of the present the adult Max re-enters. It is not the present and the past that square off against each other here, but the “real” and the “imagined past.” To deny the significance of “the real” past, however, is to disown that which seem‐ ingly matters most, the “imagined” past. And that idyllic childhood itself, after all, can only exist as an-other to “the real” past, without which neither Morden nor Cleave would have a recourse to the present: “what makes for presence if not absence? - I mean the presence of oneself as a remembered other - and I might as well never have gone away” (E 46). Alexander Cleave is also abruptly brought back to the memories of his “real” childhood upon re-entering his mother’s house. First, he makes his way through its garden: Behind the gate was a mass of overgrown creeper and old brambles […] The garden was grown to shoulder-height in places. The rose trees hung in dripping tangles, and clumps of scutch grass steamed[.] […] I set off toward the house, the untidy back of which hung out in seeming despair over this scene of vegetable riot. Nettles stung me, cobwebs strung with pearls of moisture draped themselves across my face. All of childhood was in the high sharp stink of rained-on weeds. (E 113) We are reminded of Virgil’s Idylls here, in which, ever and anon, the shepherds face similar realisms: “Wherever you tread the ground’s one thorny ambush” (Idyll 7, “Harvest Home” 20-21). Further disappointments ensue for Cleave when he braves entrance, disappointments similar to those experienced by the adult Morden: I was in the kitchen. I might never have been here before. Or I might have been, but in another dimension. Talking about making strange! Everything was askew. It was like entering backstage and seeing the set in reverse, all the parts of it known but not where they should be. (E 114) If “pastoral,” to borrow Terry Gifford’s eloquent phrasing, “is the poetry of illu‐ sion” and “the Golden Age is the historiography of wish fulfilment” (Pastoral 41-2), Eclipse and The Sea can be read as postmodern autobiographies of wishful 139 4.2 ‘Possessed of a Past’: Pastoral, Identity, and Memory in Eclipse, The Sea and Conversation in the Mountains <?page no="140"?> thinking. The Sea in particular beckons to be read through a bifocal lens of the pastoral and the postmodern; Banville’s masterful intertwining of the three nar‐ rative strands is made possible by the narrator’s use of three temporal strata. As Morden observes, “it has all begun to run together, past and possible future and impossible present” (S 96). The pastoral mode in The Sea is tightly linked to the human experience of time and the mind’s attempts to overcome such limitations. A pastoral nostalgia experience thus develops into a discourse of identity by virtue of a multilayered process, around which the narratives of the two novels are conspicuously structured. First, the present is experienced as a physical impossibility because it has been thrown into crisis by sudden experiences of shock, grief or distress. Then, in search of escape and “peace of mind,” the imagination remembers - and conse‐ quently feeds on - memories of the past, tinged with the postcard colours of an idyllic childhood of bliss and ignorance. Lastly, and here the circle of my argu‐ ment closes as time returns to its point of origin, the future is brought into play by the self-same desire for idylls and indifference hitherto reserved for memo‐ ries, the imagination, and the past. The result is a nostalgia narrative that ex‐ plores questions of identity as embedded in temporal signifiers of self and ‘the other,’ which the pastoral mode expresses in the form of a reciprocal subtext of presence and absence. Perhaps Hedda Friberg puts it best in her essay “‘Waters and Memory Always Divide’: Sites of Memory in John Banville’s The Sea”: Running off as they do in opposite directions, and separating irreversibly, Morden’s past and future nevertheless […] remain in collusion. As the future is ‘born,’ Morden’s past which is not born, becomes ‘the other.’ […] Diverging, curving away from the future, the stream of the past nevertheless colludes with that of the future. (Friberg, “‘Waters and Memory Always Divide’” 254) Confronting the fickle nature of memory and the boundaries of human time-ex‐ perience also means confronting the real experiences of childhood versus the imagined; the two stand in stark contrast to each other, one absent as an imag‐ ined, pastoral past, and the other always felt as tortuously disenchanting the present. The resulting tensions condition the displacement experienced so strongly by both characters. Once the summer houses fail to fulfil their function as the Arcadian architectonics of childhood nostalgia and retreat, the previous sense of purpose and significance, in other words, the search for “that singular essential self ” becomes but an absence. 140 IV Always Already Elsewhere: Mapping Arcadia in Memory and Mind <?page no="141"?> The Avatars of Memory She is in my memory her own avatar. Which is the more real, the woman reclining on the grassy bank of my recollections, or the strew of dust and dried marrow that is all the earth any longer retains of her? No doubt for others elsewhere she persists[.] — The Sea 118 Like Freddie Montgomery, both Cleave and Morden are in a state of permanent sulk, for each man’s world and self does not match up to their inner visions and desires. Therefore each tries to find recourse in the various female figures that link them to “the waxworks of memory” (S 118) as they become the focus of each narrative. These women protagonists - for they become crucial to story and narrator alike - at once facilitate and hinder the men’s process of self-rei‐ fication and readjustment. In the second narrative strand of The Sea, for example, the adult Morden relates the story of his wife’s cancer with flashbacks of how they met and their life as a husband and wife, and in the third strand of narrative the young boy Max shares the stage with the Graces. From the earliest days Morden felt that his birth and upbringing were constraining his personal de‐ velopment: “I never had a personality, […] I was always a distinct no one, whose fiercest wish was to be an indistinct someone” (S 216). He experiences for the first time a sense of social betterment in his encounter with the family Grace, whom he sees as “the gods” (3): “How proud I was to be seen with them, these divinities” (145). Chloe Grace, in particular, develops into Morden’s “true origin […] of self-consciousness” (168). Lacan postulates that to exist is to be recognised by an-other; similarly, Morden believes that “no one had yet been real in the way that Chloe was. And if she was real, so, suddenly, was I” (S 168). The adult Morden craves for this childhood experience of self-reification and sees his relationship with Anna as based on the same need: “Anna, I saw at once, would be the medium of my transmutation. She was the fairground mirror in which all my distortions would be made straight” (116). Both Cleave and Morden assign a certain amount of blame for their sense of inauthenticity to a lack of “class,” and seek to compensate it through the women they choose. Alexander Cleave “would happily have exchanged everything [he] had made [himself] into for a modicum of inherited grace, […] class, breeding, money” (E 36). The more the narrative of Eclipse begins to unfold, the more we see Cleave using female figures as lenses through which his storied self must be read. In Part I of the novel Cleave describes how he met Lydia during a brief 141 4.2 ‘Possessed of a Past’: Pastoral, Identity, and Memory in Eclipse, The Sea and Conversation in the Mountains <?page no="142"?> stay at a “summer city” in the autumn of his acting career. The discrepancies between their social background and status dominate his description. Where Lydia was “of an aristocratic family of fabulous pedigree,” Cleave was careful not to “permit certain prominences to show through the deliberate fuzziness of [his] origins” (E 34). He had “a room in a rotting tenement in one of those cobbled canyons off the river” (E 36); she sojourned at the “Hotel Halcyon,” which Cleave describes in the light of idyll and gilded fantasy: “The Hotel Halcyon took on for me the air of an oasis; before I entered there I imagined behind that revolving door a secret world of greenery and plashing water and sultry murmurings” (E 34-5). As the summer houses fail to offer a means of escape and a form of reification in their crumbling topographies, eroded by time, three women in each novel variously become “avatar,” “effigy,” or “demon temptress,” each “conjured up by the force of [the protagonist’s] desire” (S 98, 118) to fulfil his “dreams, fanta‐ sies, […] delusions” of self (E 28). In Part I of Eclipse, Lily, daughter of house‐ keeper Quirke, becomes a first “real, […] physical presence” and begins to in‐ trude upon the ghosts of a “phantom woman and her phantasmal child,” that haunt Cleave’s house and mind: “Her presence makes the house seem impossibly overcrowded. She has upset the balance of things” (E 95). In Part II Lily and Quirke begin to take over Cleave’s life, or more precisely, that life which he has fashioned for himself in his solipsistic narrative: They have come into focus, in a way that I am not sure I like, and that certainly I did not expect. 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, and to save the show I must find a means somehow of incor‐ porating them into the plot (E 122). Whilst wife Lydia is always also present in Cleave’s thoughts and actions, the more important female figure in the process of readjustment is his daughter Cass. Though the novel is ostensibly centred around Cleave’s plight “to cease becoming and merely be” (77), as the story begins to unfold “it becomes in‐ creasingly clear that the person haunting the narrative is his daughter Cass” (Hand, John Banville 170). Cleave’s daughter suffers from a rare strain of schiz‐ ophrenia, Mandelbaum syndrome, and the father envies his daughter for her lack of self-consciousness, as it stands in utter contrast to his own acting self. Unlike Cass, who “does not act, but variously is” (E 72), Cleave must always act and cannot simply be; he cannot do without an audience, and he sees himself as an understudy of the many masks he puts on and the many roles he plays. Cass is for him “a symbol of the elusive completion of himself that he so desperately 142 IV Always Already Elsewhere: Mapping Arcadia in Memory and Mind <?page no="143"?> seeks” (McNamee, “Time Enough for Love” 223). In sum, like Morden, for whom Chloe, Anna and Mrs Grace all embodied “the chance to fulfil the fantasy of [his] self ” (S 105), Cleave is attracted to women out of a similar need to be recognised by their other. He describes the numerous relationships before his marriage to Lydia as an abhorrence of life in a “vacuum”: And things rushed into this vacuum where the self should be. Women, for instance. They fell into me, thinking to fill me with all they had to give. It was not simply that I was an actor and therefore supposedly lacking an essential part of personality; I was a challenge to them, to their urge to create, to make life. (E 33) Paradoxically, neither Max nor Alexander can ultimately have what they want, because the desires of the wanting self inherently entail an absence, a kink of complexity that torments them as it does other Banville protagonists. This ab‐ sence as always already elsewhere is epitomised by various elements throughout both novels. First, the memories of the childhood past are emplotted within pastoral narratives of nostalgia; as previously discussed, the dialectics of pres‐ ence and absence are central to the pastoral mode, and in Banville’s nostalgia narratives absence is most strongly felt in the pastoral past by which each char‐ acter attempts to achieve or re-invent their own presence in the now. This dia‐ lectic of presence and absence, of being-in-the-world, and what Jacques Lacan calls the process of identification of the self through “an-other,” is brought into the narratives by the summer houses and the imaginative collusion of the three-fold temporal strata in each narrative: one of the present, ‘an-other’ of the past and yet another moving towards a future imagined through the lens of the pastoral past. Furthermore, though the various female figures are the human companions that both accompany and link the male protagonists to their pasts, they do not reinforce a sense of self, but counter-act it. Chloe, for example, severs Morden from his imagined quasi-paradise and gilded boyhood world. The self-consciousness she engenders in him “expelled [him] from that sense of the immanence of all things, the all things that had included me, in which up to then I had dwelt, in more or less blissful ignorance (S 168). Similarly, Cleave’s life, lived through the many women he “fell into,” can be seen as “progress from a position of obsession with wholeness, with an absolute order or a pure, unad‐ ulterated self, to an acceptance of life as a process, unending and almost always incomplete, its deplorable dearth of meaning amply compensated for by an abundance of significance” (McNamee, “Time Enough for Love” 227). Thus, to continue to map elements of the pastoral in “the waxworks of memory” and the unconscious is to move to another Arcadian retreat used by all of Banville’s later 143 4.2 ‘Possessed of a Past’: Pastoral, Identity, and Memory in Eclipse, The Sea and Conversation in the Mountains <?page no="144"?> characters, including Freddie Montgomery in Ghosts: a retreat to the imagina‐ tion and the mind. A sense of displacement is central to both novels without which the journey to the summers of the past would not have taken place. Each protagonist feels out of place in their present space and time. Additionally, both perceive “hu‐ manity as being permanently displaced between imagination and the material world (McNamee, “‘A Rosy Crucifixion’” 151). In an attempt to come to terms with the attendant estrangement of self, Max and Alexander retreat to the only kingdom where they feel they hold power and influence: the kingdom of the mind. There the strong hold of language allows them to house in an Arcadia of verbal and intellectual illusions: “‘Harpazein,’ I said hastily, ‘to seize. Greek, that is.’ Playing the fussy old professor, remote but kindly; when in difficulty, act” (E 16). Language, after all, is the voice of the mind, and to Cleave and Morden language has always been more than a key to the “sealed chamber” of the imag‐ ination. It is also a powerful source of solace, certainty and stability in the face of their present crisis of identity. Language to both is a religion; it is the church where they seek refuge and try to heal their hurts. From the very first pages the reader is made aware in both novels that the respective narrative realities cannot be perceived, read or imagined but through the lens of the protagonists’ narcissistic, metafictional obsession with language: “Plimsoll. Now, there is a word one does not hear any more, or rarely” (S 11). Countless other language-related queries and anomalies are dispersed throughout the novel; their resolution more often than not offers, if only briefly, moments of unassailable conviction and comfort that counteract the characters’ sense of permanent displacement between self and the world: “Anaglypta. All afternoon I had been searching for the word and now I had found it” (E 20). Ever and again the narrators try to extend these moments of escape by producing exquisitely written prose that celebrates the significance of nature, or more specifically, “the superabundance of summer” (E 188). In lyrical interludes they paint landscapes of the imagination where the otherwise overwhelming sense of displacement and bifurcation disappears, and where the absence of an idyllic elsewhere is amalgamated with the landscapes of the now: “It was a sumptuous, oh, truly a sumptuous autumn day, all Byzantine coppers and golds under a Tiepolo sky of enamelled blue, the countryside all fixed and glassy, seeming not so much itself as its own reflection in the still surface of a lake” (S 45). Words are Max’s consolation, vocabulary his comfort, and language his Ar‐ cadia. He constructs idyllic retreats and alternate, escapist realities primarily by virtue of his narrative art. “Immersed in words,” Max argues, “paltry as they may be … I had felt myself break through … into another state where ordinary laws 144 IV Always Already Elsewhere: Mapping Arcadia in Memory and Mind <?page no="145"?> did not operate … where I was … more vividly present than ever I could be in what we call, because we must, the real world” (S 97-8). As Roy L. Hunt argues, “[r]eality is given meaning through language. When we learn our language we acquire an arbitrary set of codes which define our concept of reality.” There is, however, a fundamental paradox in attempting to understand reality when that reality is but a construction based on the past as pastoral. Neither Cleave nor Morden, intellectuals in search of a pastoral grand narrative of nostalgia can “stand outside the system [of language] and discuss objective truth in itself be‐ cause without a language reality has no meaning.” Thus, Hunt continues, if the attempt “to discover objective truth involves using an arbitrary symbolic system which immediately places itself between reality and our comprehension of it, […]. once reality is mediated through language, reality is forever displaced” (Hunt, “Hell Goes Round and Round” 155). Arcadia, like language, is inherently bifurcate. There are, after all, “two kinds of Arcadia: shaggy and smooth; dark and light; a place of bucolic leisure and a place of primitive panic” (Schama, “Arcadia Redesigned” 517). In language there is always a subject and an object; in the pastoral mode too, there can be no presence without absence, and in any narrative emplotment no sense of self without an-other. Morden’s pastoral reading of the past consoles and commem‐ orates the absence of self by calling upon the absence of others. On the one hand, his recourse to the mode imbues him with a “sense of the immanence of all things” (S 167). On the other hand, all pastoral can do is to provide the narrative process of (re-)identification and remembering with a symbolic paradigm for “putting the complex into the simple” (Empson, Some Versions of Pastoral 23). Morden’s commemorative nostalgia narrative endows the holiday resort with such a symbolic system: “At the seaside all is narrow horizontals, the world reduced to a few long straight lines pressed between earth and sky” (S 10). Then again, language is a symbolic system, to recall Hunt, that is caught “between reality and our comprehension of it,” whence it is always already “dis‐ placed.” At best it can punctuate the darkness of grief, offer a brief sense of ennoblement to the attendant pain, but it can never truly dispel it. Morden comes to realise this during one of his many hospital visits. There it dawns upon him that he “would never again be able to think of another word to say to [Anna]. […] From this day forward all would be dissembling. There would be no other way to live with death” (22-3). The Sea and Eclipse, perhaps above all else, are elegies about the coming to terms with mortality. And though the retreat into the nos‐ talgia constructions of memory and the imagination cannot truly offer stability and re-adjustment, it does, at its high points, give the protagonists a sense of leaving stronger than upon embarkment for the golden world. 145 4.2 ‘Possessed of a Past’: Pastoral, Identity, and Memory in Eclipse, The Sea and Conversation in the Mountains <?page no="146"?> 6 John K. Roth’s Holocaust Literature. (Salem Press, 2008) provides an up-to-date and ex‐ tensive overview of the holocaust’s literary legacy. 7 See also: Eshel, Amir. “Paul Celan’s Other: History, Poetics, and Ethics.” New German Critique, 2004, pp. 57-77; Bach, Gerhard. “Memory and Collective Identity: Narrative Strategies Against Forgetting in Contemporary Literary Responses to the Holocaust.” Jewish American and Holocaust Literature: Representation in the Postmodern World, 2004, pp. 77-92; Lyon, James K. Paul Celan and Martin Heidegger: An Unresolved Con‐ versation, 1951-1970. JHU Press, 2006; Kligerman, Eric. “The Ethics of an Encounter.” Sites of the Uncanny: Paul Celan, Pecularity and the Visual Arts. Vol. 3. Walter de Gruyter, 2007, pp. 122-137. Lebovic, Nitzan. “Near the End: Celan, Between Scholem and Hei‐ degger.” The German Quarterly vol. 8, no. 4, 2010, pp. 465-484; Marshall, Sheridan. Forgetting to Remember: Religious Remembrance and the Literary Response to the Holo‐ caust. Valentine Mitchell, 2014. Between Trauma and Nostalgia in Conversation in the Mountains People have said that only survivors them‐ selves understand what happened. I’ll go a step further. We don’t. […] I know I don’t. […] So there’s a dilemma. What do we do? Do we not talk about it? Elie Wiesel has said many times that silence is the only proper response, but then most of us, in‐ cluding him, feel that not to speak is impos‐ sible. To speak is impossible, and not to speak is impossible. — Schreiber Weitz, 1990 The act of remembering always also involves a mode of reliving the memories selected for recall - an experience that can be as painful as it is a necessary means of elegiac memorializing. Thus it is that, despite Theodor Adorno’s often misinterpreted statement, “[w]riting poetry after Ausschwitz is barbaric” (Adorno, “Kulturkritik und Gesellschaft” 231), no single historical tragedy of the twentieth century precipitated more literary, poetic and elegiac engagement than the Holocaust, and not many critics give credit to Banville for also at‐ tempting such a task, albeit indirectly, in his Conversation in the Mountains (2008). 6 The short radio play is about Paul Celan, the Holocaust survivor-poet who, on July 25 1967, paid a visit to Martin Heidegger at the alleged Nazi sym‐ pathizer’s mountain cabin or “Hütte” at Todtnauberg. Their meeting remains shrouded in mystery, and, as there is no record of the conversation(s) between these two antithetical intellectual giants of the twentieth century, countless ef‐ forts exist that attempt to divine what may or may not have been said. 7 Banville’s Conversation in the Mountains is one such effort, a semi-fictional account of their 146 IV Always Already Elsewhere: Mapping Arcadia in Memory and Mind <?page no="147"?> meeting in which Celan demanded Heidegger to come clean about his past Nazi enthusiasms. Indeed, Conversation in the Mountains is a play about coming to terms - whether literally, metaphorically, historically or philosophically - with trauma and accountability. The case has been made that Celan was most likely suffering from a form of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder ( PTSD ), in which “the over‐ whelming events of the past repeatedly possess, in intrusive images and thoughts, the one who has lived through them” (Caruth, Trauma: Explorations in Memory 151). The play begins and ends with excerpts from two of Celan’s most famous poems - “Todesfuge” at the outset, and “Todtnauberg” in its final lines, thereby encoding poetically a paradox at the heart of understanding PTSD : [W]hile the traumatized are called upon to see and to relive the insistent reality of the past, they recover a past that encounters consciousness only through the very denial of active recollection. […] Modern neurobiologists have in fact suggested that the unerring ‘engraving’ on the mind, the ‘etching into the brain’ of an event in trauma may be associated with its elision of its normal encoding in memory. (Caruth, Trauma: Explorations in Memory 153) Celan’s poetry embodies this paradox of trauma because it encodes the horrors of the Holocaust into a narrative memory. In his search for accountability (by meeting with Heidegger), moreover, Celan is in search of recountability, a way to integrate his traumatic experiences into a complete story of the past. This process of narrativisation is crucial, because “[t]he flashback or traumatic re-en‐ actment conveys […] both the truth of an event and the truth of its incomprehen‐ sibility [sic! ]” (Caruth 153). As holocaust survivor Sonia Schreiber Weitz ele‐ gantly summarises, “[t]o speak is impossible, and not to speak is impossible” (“Videotaped Interview”). At first, Celan’s poetic quest for justice, accountability and a voice for deeds unspeakable, a “hop, today, for a thinker’s (un-delayed coming) word in the heart” (“Todtnauberg” 11-15) - a word that remains delayed indefinitely and, 147 4.2 ‘Possessed of a Past’: Pastoral, Identity, and Memory in Eclipse, The Sea and Conversation in the Mountains <?page no="148"?> 8 Celan famously sent Martin Heidegger a bibliophile edition of ‘Todtnauberg,’ the poem he wrote shortly after their encounter, and it has been convincingly argued that he thereby “expected or hoped it would elicit an answer from him.” Celan’s unique use of the adverb ‘undelayed’ [un-gesäumt] in the edition he sent to Heidegger can be seen as “an urgent personal appeal to fulfil that hope.” The poet deleted the adverb from his collection of poems Light Compulsion [Lichtzwang] (1970) two years later, however, as he “must have realised that an ‘undelayed’ word from Heidegger condemning Nazism or speaking of the philosopher’s Nazi past would not be forthcoming” (Lyon, James K. Paul Celan and Martin Heidegger: An Unresolved Conversation 188). ultimately, un-spoken, 8 clashes with Heidegger’s own search for philosophical and ideological identity. The way in which Heidegger’s “Hütte” embodies a nostalgic space for the philosopher’s most successful years at the same time that Celan experienced various traumas, makes the encounter of poet and philoso‐ pher in 1967 a unique locus in space-time, in which their conversation hovers between Celan’s traumata and Heidegger’s nostalgia. This tension is what im‐ bues Banville’s entire Conversation with an eerie, intangible quality, and which makes the play so interesting as an elegiac, redemptive pastoral. Thus, numerous aspects of Conversation’s design resonate with Banville’s speculative effort, including its structure - entirely a series of encounters and confrontations that culminate in Celan / Heidegger’s retreat to and return from a locus full of ‘hope’ and the promise of redemption. This retreat and return are underscored poetically by Banville’s inclusion of Celan’s most celebrated as well as most written about poems, “Death Fugue” at the beginning of the play, and ‘Todtnauberg’ at its close. Accordingly, the play begins with Celan’s reading of the final lines of “Death Fugue” to “an auditorium packed with a thousand-strong audience” at the University of Freiburg, “in the old heart of Germany” (Conver‐ sation, Act I, pp. 294-295). Banville’s emphasis on Freiburg, historically a fortified town of free citizens, as “the old heart of Germany,” is particularly significant here, especially if we take into account how comprehensively the topos of the forest captured every realm of Nazi art, politics and ideology after 1933, and with what tenacity “the obsession with a myth of origins” took hold of Ahnenerbe, the organisation founded in 1935 “under the aegis of the SS ” that “promoted and pursued research into Germanic antiquity and racial identity” (Schama, “The Hunt for Germania” 79). Ahnenerbe appropriated German forests into Nazi origin myths based on a “need for an ancestral memory of woodland warriors,” that in turn echoed “the patriotic topographers of the German Renaissance” (Schama 1995: 81, 95). In‐ deed, the protection and conservation of German forests was taken more seri‐ ously by the Third Reich and its Reichforstminister Göring than by any other German government. As Banville’s Celan reminds us in Act III of the play, 148 IV Always Already Elsewhere: Mapping Arcadia in Memory and Mind <?page no="149"?> “When they built the camp at Buchenwald, the SS were careful to preserve Goethe’s famous, favourite oak tree on the site. You have a great feeling for culture, you Germans” (Conversation 300). Simon Schama echoes Celan’s sar‐ casm in his own study of the Nazi ‘hunt for Germania,’ when he states, forcefully: “It is, of course, painful to acknowledge how ecologically conscientious the most barbaric regime in modern history actually was. […] Exterminating millions of lives was not at all incompatible with passionate protection for millions of trees” (Schama, “Hunt for Germania” 119). This deeply perverted paradox, first hinted at in Act I of the play, is further compounded in Act II , in which Gerhart Baumann, the organiser of Celan’s reading, claims, immediately afterwards: “We know what it is for you to come here to Freiburg - what it is for you to be among Germans.” Celan, in the mildest and most ironic of rebukes, as if to suggest how little Baumann or anyone else at the reading could truly ‘know’ what it was like for him ‘to be among Germans,’ simply retorts: “Your language is my mother tongue, Professor. Literally - my mother was a German-speaker” (Conversation, Act II , pp. 295). The poet’s de‐ liberate use of the phrase ‘mother tongue’ and the immediate reminder to Bau‐ mann that his mother, too was a ‘German-speaker’ evokes Celan’s relationship to his mother and to the German language, the tongue shared between mother and son. For it was Fritzi Celan who sowed the seeds of her son’s love for German, and though he grew up in a polyglot environment, “it was the German mother tongue, the Muttersprache, in which he flourished” (Felstiner, Paul Celan 6). Memories of her were to him always bound to the language that so intimately connected them, and yet simultaneously that same language was perverted to word the hideous, traumatic slogan: Arbeit Macht Frei [labour sets you free]: “[T]he motherword led me,” Celan would later write, “so that a single spasm / would pass through the hand / that now, and now, grasps at my heart! ” (Celan, “In Front of the Candle” 43-46). As is typical of Conversation’s structure of flashbacks, Banville provides a metafictional interpretation of the real Celan’s profound pain in Act VI , in which ‘Paul’ has the last conversation - almost an argument - with his ‘Mother,’ and at the end of which the poet recites in a voice-over the elegiac verses: “It’s falling, Mother, snow in the Ukraine: / The Saviour’s crown a thousand grains of grief ” (Celan, Selected Poems 306). Considering the complex biographical and historical backdrop of its delivery, Celan’s response to Baumann can be read as an articulation of his entire poetic being, because it shows how unyieldingly he registered in German the cata‐ strophes made in Germany - catastrophes so intimately linked to his own life. With his world obliterated, Celan held fast to the ‘mother tongue’ that was both 149 4.2 ‘Possessed of a Past’: Pastoral, Identity, and Memory in Eclipse, The Sea and Conversation in the Mountains <?page no="150"?> 9 Celan’s mother and father were deported to an internment camp near Transnitria in June 1942, on a Saturday when Celan had stayed with some friends, and could not return due to a curfew. Banville’s Celan recounts the harrowing experience of returning home as follows: “In the morning when I arrived home it was no longer home: the house was deserted, the front door was sealed, and my mother and father were gone. […] It wasn’t until years later that I learned what had become of them. They were taken in a transport east to Transnitria. […] My father died from typhus in the autumn of that year, and in the winter my mother was shot, being no longer fit for work” (Conversation Act VII, pp. 307-308). his and theirs, perhaps because, literally, it was all he had left. 9 Thus, Celan’s choice to write in German forces an encounter between poet and reader, between the Holocaust perpetrators and its survivors, and between those responsible and those, like Baumann, desperately trying to repair the irreparable. In the after‐ math of “that which happened” to both humankind and the German language between 1933 and 1945, poetry to Celan meant a reaching out: “I went with my very being toward language,” he once said, and “insofar as it was language that had been damaged, his verse might repair that damage” (Felstiner, Paul Celan xvi, xviii). The conversation(s) or speech acts that take place between Celan and Hei‐ degger at Todtnauberg in the play are closely linked to the crucial role speech itself plays in coming to terms with the individual and historical trauma of the Holocaust. As Kevin Newmark observes, only through speech can the trauma‐ tized try “to move away from the experience of shock by reintegrating it into a stable understanding of it” (qtd. in Caruth, Trauma: Explorations in Memory 154). Thus speech presents risks as much as it presents opportunities for healing, for “[t]he danger of speech, of integration into the narration of memory, may lie not in what it cannot understand, but in that it understands too much” (Caruth, Trauma: Explorations in Memory 154). Banville’s extensive integration of Celan’s poetry, coupled with his many allusions to the poet’s conflicted re‐ lationship with German, his “mother-tongue,” shows an acute awareness of the forked nature of speech and language as tools of therapy and injury alike. Speech, or more accurately in this case, conversation, thus is turned not only into a “vehicle of understanding, but also the locus of what cannot yet be un‐ derstood.” Speech becomes “the event of creating an address for the specificity of a historical experience that annihilated any possibility of address” (Caruth, Trauma: Explorations in Memory 155-156). Ultimately, speech and conversation allow for a traumatic re-experiencing of the event which carries with it what Dori Laub calls the “collapse of witnessing,” an impossibility of knowing that first constituted the trauma itself. This impos‐ sibility of knowing in turn coerces us into a new kind of challenge, namely to 150 IV Always Already Elsewhere: Mapping Arcadia in Memory and Mind <?page no="151"?> listen and to witness said impossibility (Laub, “An Event Without a Witness” 80). Celan’s reading of his poem “Todesfuge” at the opening of Conversation expresses this impossibility in its purest and most poetic form, because, as Dori Laub suggests, “[s]ometimes it is better not to know too much” because, speaking as a clinician, “to listen to the crisis of trauma […] is to hear in the testimony the survivor’s departure from it; the challenge of the therapeutic lis‐ tener, in other words, is how to listen to departure” (Caruth, Trauma: Explora‐ tions in Memory 10). At the beginning of the play, Heidegger listens as Celan speaks, or more accurately, as he reads out loud his traumas poetically. Then, as of Act III in particular, Celan mostly listens as Heidegger speaks nostalgically of the ‘hut,’ his philosophy and all that is his at Todtnauberg: “Let me show you my little kingdom. I bought the plot of land here in 1922 or was it ‘21? - So I’ve been a presence in this clearing for forty-five years. (To himself) Lord, so long! ” (Act III , pp. 298). It is in this relation between listening and speaking that the possibility of “a truly pedagogical encounter emerges, an encounter that, by breaking with traditional modes of understanding, creates new ways of gaining access to a historical catastrophe” (Caruth, Trauma: Explorations in Memory 155). Crucially, while the hut functions as a space for the nostalgic recollection of his success and of his philosophy for Heidegger, in Celan, it triggers memories that are traumatic, and this is what creates an impalpable tension between the two throughout their sojourn at Todtnauberg. What makes the situation much more difficult for Banville’s Celan, then, is in the way his reading at the Uni‐ versity of Freiburg, in front of Heidegger, forces a confrontation and return to the trauma of the Holocaust, rather than a departure or retreat from it. Banville has his Celan belie these difficulties in the way the poet refuses to be photo‐ graphed with Heidegger, and in Celan’s overall hesitance and inability to meet Heidegger’s practiced eloquence with more than a few sharp-tongued re‐ sponses: H E I D E G G E R No, no, I mean no flattery, only - But ah, it seems the photographer wishes to take our portrait together. Shall we … ? C E L A N (Sharply) No. (Softens his tone) No, please. I … I have an aversion to being photographed. A moment of awkward silence. H E I D E G G E R realises C E L A N is deliber‐ ately refusing to be photographed with him. H E I D E G G E R Ahem. Yes, of course, I understand … (Pause) And your health has improved, yes? We had heard that you were in hospital. 151 4.2 ‘Possessed of a Past’: Pastoral, Identity, and Memory in Eclipse, The Sea and Conversation in the Mountains <?page no="152"?> 10 Banville showcases the meticulous research that has gone into the lives, history, poetry and philosophy surrounding the unresolved encounter between Celan and Heidegger, when, in an interview, he recommends Felstiner’s biography itself: “First of all, any reader wishing to learn about Celan should read John Felstiner’s definitive biographical study, Paul Celan: Poet, Survivor, Jew, which as well as an account of the life contains some of the finest translations of Celan’s extremely difficult poetry - Felstiner’s English version of “Todesfuge” is a triumph. For Heidegger, Hugo Ott’s biography is very thor‐ ough, though Ott is quite condemnatory, and quite rightly, of the philosopher’s murky politics” (Sarvas, Mark. ‘Conversation in the Mountains - A Brief Q&A With John Ban‐ ville.’ July 01, 2008). C E L A N I was in a Swiss clinic. I suffer from depression. And other things. (Brief laugh) I have bad dreams. Bad memories. (Conversation Act II, p. 296. The way Banville has constructed Celan’s series of encounters at the beginning of the play, first with the University of Freiburg, then his audience and reading-organiser Baumann, and finally Heidegger, shows the author’s keen awareness of the paradox that committed Celan to this poetic decontamination of German, a language previously misappropriated by Nazi jargon and racist thinking. 10 In this context, Celan’s (albeit metafictional) reference to his mother and the German mother tongue epitomizes the subliminal irony of Baumann’s remarks after the reading: “[W]e shall tell our children how on this day, the 24th of July 1967, in Freiburg in the old heart of Germany, we saw and heard the greatest poet of the age, Paul Celan” (Act I, pp. 294-5). Celan’s perception of the irony is brought full circle when, in response to Heidegger complimenting him as “the greatest German poet of our time,” Celan insists that he is “not German, Herr Doctor.” Heidegger’s response betrays both his efforts at reconciliation and that he too is aware of the paradox: “But you write in the German language. That is our common homeland, yours and mine” (Act II , pp. 296-7). If the conversation with Baumann shows a Celan ready to deal with such ironies in responses that mask a haunted mind, the poet is not equally e / quipped for what immediately follows - his first encounter with Heidegger. Where the philosopher is presented as a “vigorous seventy-eight-year old” who “wishes to meet [Celan],” the other, at first, can only respond to Heidegger’s ostentatiously preconceived, artificial compliments with civility and veneration: “I once wrote that all of my work was no more than an effort to say philosophically what Rilke had already said poetically. I might add your name to his in that formulation” 152 IV Always Already Elsewhere: Mapping Arcadia in Memory and Mind <?page no="153"?> 11 It is crucial to note here that “when Celan visited Heidegger in Freiburg on July 24-25, 1967, he was on a leave of confinement in a psychiatric clinic to which he returned after the visit.” Furthermore, “he was not formally released until October of that year” (Lyon, Paul Celan and Martin Heidegger 160). 12 In 1946, on the twentieth anniversary of the death of Rainer Maria Rilke, Heidegger delivered a lecture entitled ‘What are Poets for? ’ [‘Wozu Dichter? ’]. (Act II , pp. 295-296). 11 Historically, Heidegger was certainly more informed and better prepared for the meeting than Celan, whose delicate mental state pro‐ voked from him ambivalent behaviour, including the abrupt declaration that he did not wish to be photographed with Heidegger - mirrored in Act II of the play. 12 In the days that precede the reading, Celan was clearly plagued with doubts he shared with his wife, who replied: “I understand that the reading in Freiburg with Heidegger present will cause some difficulties. Nevertheless I hope it will come off all right” (Celan, Correspondance vol. 1, p. 548 quotd. in Lyon 163). Heidegger, on the other hand, sought to create an opportunity for conciliation rather than confrontation, as indicated by an undated letter sent to Baumann shortly before the reading: I’ve wanted to become acquainted with Paul Celan for a long time. He stands farthest in the forefront and holds himself back the most. I know all of his works, also of the serious crisis from which he managed to extricate himself as much as a person is able. Your are correct in interpreting how helpful a reading here would be. July 24 would be the best date for me. […] It would also be healing to show P. C. the Black Forest. (Baumann, Erinnerungen an Paul Celan 59-60, quotd. in Lyon, Paul Celan and Maritn Heidegger 162). The letter shows Heidegger’s genuine interest in meeting Celan, hints at con‐ ciliatory motives, but also lays bare the philosopher’s considerable arrogance in assuming that “it would be healing to show P. C. the Black Forest” - how can he presume to be able to put Celan on the road to recovery? Given Celan’s mental state and Heidegger’s ulterior motives in arranging the reading, their encounter was always going to be a balancing act between confrontation and conciliation. Accordingly, Heidegger’s walk upon this tightrope is threaded into the play in the form of two plots designed to intertwine various metafictional, historical figures in chance meetings and confrontations that lead up to the primary plot, our eponymous conversation in the mountains. The second plot, told in a series of flashbacks from February 1924 to 1950, functions much like a revolving door of these encounters, mainly between Heidegger’s former student and turbulent liaison Hannah Arendt, and Karl Jaspers, with whom, following his public dec‐ laration of sympathy for the National Socialists in 1933, Heidegger brought upon 153 4.2 ‘Possessed of a Past’: Pastoral, Identity, and Memory in Eclipse, The Sea and Conversation in the Mountains <?page no="154"?> himself an embittered political and personal altercation. In a series of flashbacks, the audience thus witnesses Hannah Arendt’s transformative encounters and relationship with Heidegger, from “a young lady” at Marburg University in Feb‐ ruary 1924 who “would like to take [Heidegger’s] philosophy course” (Act IV , p. 301), to his “darling girl,” whom he promises to “protect,” to “keep […] safe” (Act X, p. 313), to the “muse” who helps him write his “great work” Being and Time (Act XIII , p. 318), and finally to the “briskly” confident and successful phi‐ losopher who “finished [her own] book,” The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), one that “owes everything to those earliest days in Marburg, to [Heidegger] and to what [he was] then” (Act XX , p. 325). These flashbacks are clearly designed to enrich our historical understanding of Heidegger; the ambiguity is evident, especially when intertwined with Hei‐ degger’s exchanges with Celan in ‘the hut’. Banville thus successfully stages a dramatic re-possession of Being and Time, and offers a glimpse of Heidegger’s humanity as juxtaposed to the inhumanity of Nazi ideology. As Arendt herself summarises, Heidegger’s failing is perhaps not so much his declaration of sup‐ port for the Nazis - his relationship with her shows that we all make mistakes, - but the resultant philosophy that she was the apparent ‘muse’ to. As she claims, towards the end of the play, Heidegger’s “is a philosophy of the individual, [hers] of plurality.” For she believes it is “not the authenticity of the individual but the virtuosity of acting together with others that brings into the world the openness that [Heidegger has] always sought.” It is Heidegger’s “tragedy,” then, that he “never understood” how “the world becomes inhuman without the continual talk in it of humans” (Act XX , pp. 326-327). If the first plot re-imagines a series of historical events that result in the birth of a poem - Celan’s ‘Todtnauberg,’ the second plot is much like an elegy that outlines, and to an extent attempts to explain the death of some of Heidegger’s most important and intimate personal relationships, whether between a student he loved and admired, an erstwhile colleague he disenfranchised through his concomitance with Nazi ideology (Karl Jaspers), or Paul Celan, “poet, survivor, Jew” (Felstiner, Paul Celan), with whom he engaged in an antithetical yet reciprocal appropriation of poetry and philos‐ ophy. The setting of the primary plot at Heidegger’s ‘hut’ on Todtnauberg, though historical, is also charged with considerable symbolism and meaning for Ban‐ ville’s overall elegiac endeavour. The hut itself is a particularly potent place / space for Conversation, because it is where Celan’s and Heidegger’s personal and ideological histories and philosophies intertwine to create a seemingly in‐ surmountable tension in an already strained relationship. In his later philosophy, Heidegger contemplated two questions: ‘What are poets for? ’ and ‘What does 154 IV Always Already Elsewhere: Mapping Arcadia in Memory and Mind <?page no="155"?> it mean to dwell upon the earth? ’ - questions that are closely linked, it would seem, and that Celan too dwelled upon his entire later life. For Heidegger, language is the house of being; it is through language that unconcealment takes place for human beings. By disclosing the being of entities in language, the poet lets them be. That is the special, the sacred role of the poet. What is distinctive about the way that humankind inhabits the earth? It is that we dwell poetically (Bate, The Song of the Earth 258). This dwelling poetically is precisely what Banville’s Heidegger is trying to ach‐ ieve in his hut at Todtnauberg. As Celan enters the “famous hut,” Heidegger introduces his “little kingdom” accordingly: “When I secured the professorship at Marburg I knew I’d need a place to escape to” (Conversation Act III , p. 298). Tension mounts as Celan admits: “I envy you such a place. In my apartment where I live in Paris I frequently feel I’m suffocating” ( III , p. 297). Indeed, as Baumann drives Celan into the mountains, the poet explains his philosophical concomitance with Heidegger: “His concerns echo mine - we’re both dwellers in the house of language” (Act III , p. 297). Dwelling, to Heidegger, was the au‐ thentic form of being as set against “the false ontologies of Cartesian dualism and subjective idealism” (Bate, The Song of the Earth 261). It is important to note how subtly Heidegger references his own ‘hut’ in the definition of ‘dwelling’ outlined in his “Building Dwelling Thinking”: Only if we are capable of dwelling, only then can we build. Let us think for a while of a farmhouse in the Black Forest, which was built some two hundred years ago by the dwelling of peasants. Here the self-sufficiency of the power to let earth and heaven, divinities and mortals enter in simple oneness into things, ordered the house. It placed the farm on the wind-sheltered mountain slope looking south, among the meadows close to the spring. […] [I]t made room in its chamber for the hallowed places of childbed and the ‘tree of the dead’ - for that is what they call a coffin there: the Totenbaum - and in this way it designed for the different generations under one roof the character of their journey through time. (Heidegger, “Building Dwelling Thinking” 160) To summarise Heidegger’s concepts, beings exist without human consciousness, but in order that they might attain to ‘Being’ in the sense of becoming a presence, a disclosure, a space must exist. Heidegger names this space, which he equates with human consciousness, Lichtung, a term with very relevant meanings and translations. First and foremost, Lichtung can be translated into ‘forest clearing,’ but it also has the sense of a space in which everything is lit up. Language, then, opens up a Lichtung for human ‘being’ as such. Banville adroitly hints at these 155 4.2 ‘Possessed of a Past’: Pastoral, Identity, and Memory in Eclipse, The Sea and Conversation in the Mountains <?page no="156"?> core concepts of Heidegger’s philosophy when he has his metafictional philos‐ opher state: “Let me show you my little kingdom. I bought the plot of land here in 1922 - or was it ‘2I? s - So I’ve been a presence in this clearing for forty-five years” (Act III , p. 298, italics my own). Banville also uses his metafictional character’s understanding of Heidegger’s philosophy to stage a profound irony that is progressively revealed in Conver‐ sation, because it is Banville’s Celan, not his Heidegger - for all the latter’s building and dwelling in the ‘hut’ of language - who appears to have found a way to “dwell poetically” and through his poetry to ‘build’ “for the different generations [of his people] under one roof [the poetry] of their journey through time.” This irony is also what explains some of Heidegger’s reverence for Celan and his poetry, as well as the all-pervasive unease that relentlessly preys on the two throughout the play. Where Banville’s Heidegger confidently stages himself as the host in his hut of language, it is Celan who quietly disassembles this confidence and unconceals, even unspeaks Heidegger’s philosophical escapism; already in Act III , Celan begins to unbuild Heidegger’s nostalgic, Arcadian ar‐ chitectonics: H E I D E G G E R Yes, yes. Often now the past seems more real to me than the present. (Brief laugh) It’s the way with all old men. (They walk forward) Those trees are mine, on the slope. And this is my well, you see, with the wooden star above it. Now. (He unlocks the door) Please. (They enter the cabin. Pause) History will remember this day, Herr Celan. C E L A N And what will history’s judgement be, I wonder? (Conversation Act III, p. 299) Unconcealment pervades Conversation in the Mountains as both a mode and a motif; as a mode, it is used by both plots of the play, the plot of unveiling flash‐ backs to Heidegger’s time as rector of the University of Freiburg and affair with Hannah Arendt, and the plot of Celan’s reading and conversation with the phi‐ losopher in his hut at Todtnauberg. As a motif, unconcealment pervades all of Celan’s words, poetry and actions in the play. First, Celan’s entire poetic is an act of unconcealment that goes against Adorno’s “To write poetry after Aussch‐ witz is barbaric” (quotd. in Conversation V, 304); the play opens with Celan’s most famous example, “Todesfuge,” and closes with his most frequently analysed and interpreted, ‘Todtnauberg’. There can be no coincidence in Banville’s choice of poems, for each insists upon a presencing of ‘Death,’ whose phonetically German counterpart - ‘Tod’ - is echoed in the titles of both poems, as if to reinforce the age-old pastoral epitaph Et in Arcadia Ego. 156 IV Always Already Elsewhere: Mapping Arcadia in Memory and Mind <?page no="157"?> Heidegger’s concept of presencing is crucial to an understanding of a further dynamic of the aforementioned irony, because it encapsulates the complex re‐ lationship between Celan and the German philosopher perfectly, both linguis‐ tically and philosophically. Much of Heidegger’s early Being and Time (1927) and his later Building Dwelling Thinking (1971), is primarily concerned with the idea that “poetry is the original admission of dwelling because it is a presencing not a representation, a form of being not of mapping” (Bate 2000, 262, italics my own). Yet, linguistically, and thus ironically, a spatial mapping of this concept of be-ing (Dasein) is inevitable if we revert to Heidegger’s own terminology for presence / presencing: Anwesen. For the German noun ‘Anwesen’ is commonly also used to refer to a person’s property, estate or stately home. Celan thus quintessentially deconstructs Heidegger’s entire concept of being or poetically dwelling - first through his reading of ‘Todesfuge’ at the University of Freiburg, where the philosopher was rector until April 1934, and then more systematically during his presence, his Anwesen at the philosopher’s hut, Anwesen, and “little kingdom.” Banville’s Celan calmly and with a certain poetic elegance deconstructs sev‐ eral of Heidegger’s explanations during their first conversations of the play in Act III ; the entire scene is launched by “an awkward pause” to which Celan responds: “There are so many things we may not talk about it’s impossible to know where to begin” ( III , 300). What follows is an exchange between an eerily composed Celan and an easily irritable Heidegger, who, despite his best efforts to be the perfect host, hoping to guide Celan “back inside” his “house of Being” ( IV , 303), is caught off-guard on several occasions by the poet’s innocuous but probing remarks: C E L A N (Dreamily, as if to himself) When they built the camp at Buchenwald the SS were careful to preserve Goethe’s famous favourite oak tree on the site. You have a great feeling for culture, you Germans. H E I D E G G E R rises, goes and pours a glass of water for himself, drinks. H E I D E G G E R Yes, you’re right: the water tastes of the deeps. (Pause) I was never an anti-Semite, you know. I defy anyone to find a single word any‐ where in my writings to indicate otherwise. I see you’re sceptical. You’re thinking, A man may harbour in his heart things he will never allow himself to say. But we’re men of the word, you and I. We know the importance of what’s said and not said, and the distinction be‐ tween the two. C E L A N (Lightly) Are you a man of your word, Herr Doktor? […] H E I D E G G E R If you mean, have I lied, I’ll answer you what Nietzsche said: There are no facts, only interpretations. 157 4.2 ‘Possessed of a Past’: Pastoral, Identity, and Memory in Eclipse, The Sea and Conversation in the Mountains <?page no="158"?> 13 It is important to note that this analysis focuses on Banville’s (meta)fictional, literary Heidegger / Celan, and is not to be interpreted as an historically accurate evaluation of their actual conversation. Indeed, as James K. Lyon concludes in his nuanced study of the encounter: There is not a shred of documented biographical evidence from their entire time to‐ gether to suggest that Celan condemned Heidegger, felt hostility toward him, or was disappointed with him. In fact the opposite seems true. Later attempts to portray this as a failed encounter and an enormous disappointment for Celan are based on consid‐ erations that arose more than a week after the visit (Lyon, Paul Celan 169). C E L A N Six million is a fact. Six million facts. Are they to be denied? (Act III,300-301) Further exchanges follow in Act V, where Heidegger is repeatedly taken out of his comfort zone as he betrays a defiant irascibility: 13 H E I D E G G E R Pah! - that’s Adorno. What was it he said: To write poetry after Ausschwitz is barbaric. Typical Bolshevist thinking. You have refuted him. C E L A N Have I? I wonder. I almost met him once, Adorno. […] H E I D E G G E R He branded my philosophy as fascist. I don’t know which is worse, the characterisation itself, or the shallowness of the mind that for‐ mulated it. […] A total misunderstanding of my position. Jargon! Ha! He should know, he and his fellow-travellers in the so-called Frank‐ furt School. C E L A N And yet in his strictures on modern-day technology he can sound remarkably like you. H E I D E G G E R Nonsense! Adorno is a fool and a coward who sold himself to the Americans, like his pal Herbert Marcuse, my one-time pupil. Don’t talk to me of Adorno. […] A charlatan! (Pause) Forgive me. I’m over‐ wrought. You’ll understand, I hope, something of the causes of my bitterness. (Act V, p. 304) These subtle acts of unconcealment and deconstruction are followed by a sym‐ bolically charged “walk along a mountain path,” during which it becomes clear that Celan has a greater understanding of the plant life around the hut than Heidegger: C E L A N CELAN walks back to him from some paces away. Arnica. Good for bruises. And here’s eyebright, Scrophulariaceae, a cure for the eyes. (Soft laugh) Mother Nature’s pharmacopeia. 158 IV Always Already Elsewhere: Mapping Arcadia in Memory and Mind <?page no="159"?> 14 Historically speaking, Celan’s mental state and health did indeed improve after his conversation with Heidegger: “Temporarily, at least, the meeting with Heidegger had had an undeniable salutary effect on his [Celan’s] mental state, which no one could have predicted and which most critics afterward have ignored (Lyon, Paul Celan 170). H E I D E G G E R You even know the Latin names-I’m impressed. C E L A N How with this rage shall beauty hold a plea, Whose action is no stronger than a flower? (Act XII, p. 315) More important for Banville’s elegiac project in Conversation is the specificity of the herbs that Celan finds along the mountain path, including “Arnica. Good for bruises,” and “eyebright, Scrophulariaceae, a cure for the eyes.” As if to further reinforce the symbolic significance of these flowers, Banville’s Celan then quotes Shakespeare’s Sonnet 65. The “rage” clearly alludes to Heidegger’s pre‐ vious irascibility; the “bruises” are an external, metaphorical manifestation of Celan’s pain, suffering and loss, and the “eyebright” symbolically represents the German poet’s desire for clarity, closure, a way for Heidegger to clear his own name, and Celan’s hope “for a word of explanation, […] even, maybe a word of apology”(Act VI , p. 305). 14 Although the purpose of the radio play is never entirely clear, especially as it takes Banville out of his fictional comfort zone, the conversations between Celan and Heidegger are historically and philosophically charged, and thus provide a potent vehicle for an equally pastoral as well as postmodern elegiac endeavour that eventually leads to concomitance, commemoration and indeed commiseration of the Holocaust. As Banville states in an interview about the play: I’ve always been fascinated by the thought of these two extraordinary figures en‐ countering each other - the philosopher who had been a Nazi, the poet whose parents had been destroyed in a Nazi work camp - at the famous “hut” in the Black Forest. […] The conversation in the hut was not recorded, and neither man gave an account of it. […] Besides the flora and fauna, did they talk about the war, about Nazism and Heidegger’s refusal publicly to account for, much less apologise for, his membership of the Party? I could not resist speculating. (Sarvas,“A Brief Q & A with John Banville” July 1, 2008) Perhaps the only surviving letter that directly relates to their meeting, dated January 30, 1968, sent by Heidegger to Celan, best shows the true value and significance of both the historical conversation and Banville’s metafictional en‐ deavour. In the letter, Heidegger reacts to a copy of an expensive limited edition 159 4.2 ‘Possessed of a Past’: Pastoral, Identity, and Memory in Eclipse, The Sea and Conversation in the Mountains <?page no="160"?> of ‘Todtnauberg’ that Celan had recently sent him. The letter reveals a Heidegger reflecting briefly on their ‘conversation’ six months earlier and thanks Celan for the poem, which he describes as “the word of the poet […] that preserves the memory of a day of various moods in the Black Forest.” Heidegger then makes an unusual observation: “Since then [our meeting] we have exchanged a good deal of mutual silence. I think that someday some of it will be redeemed from unspokenness through conversation” (letter qtd. in Krass, Neue Zürcher Zeitung, Aug. 1, 1997, p. 57). Perhaps it is this idea of redemption from the unspoken which is carried forward most powerfully by the conversation’s legacy, and which, ultimately, Banville is trying to recapture in his unique radio-play. The result is a play that dialectically also disavows Adorno’s famous claim, as if to say that if to write poetry after Ausschwitz is barbaric, not to write, is even more so. 4.3 Et in Arcadia Ego: Death in Arcadia, Death in Banville At the end of their lives, all men look back and think their youth was Arcadia. — J. W. Goethe The secret of survival is a defective imagi‐ nation. The inability of mortals to imagine things as they truly are is what allows them to live, since one momentary, unresisted glimpse of the world’s totality of suffering would annihilate them on the spot[. …] We have stronger stomachs, stouter lungs, we see it all in all its awfulness at every moment and are not daunted; that is the difference; that is what makes us divine. — The Infinities 35 Death, Love, and (Im)mortality in The Sea and The Infinities At times Banville’s novels read like “death-haunted” epitaphs, at other times his focus is on life as a lighthearted, even “comical venture with occasional irrup‐ tions of the tragic” (Barry, “Banville in Interview” 2005). Max Morden’s many confrontations with mortality in The Sea - the suicide of Myles and Chloe Grace, 160 IV Always Already Elsewhere: Mapping Arcadia in Memory and Mind <?page no="161"?> the death of his mother, and Anna’s terminal condition, among others - result in mood swings between “anger, vituperation, violence” (S 149) and the need for comic relief from the attendant grief. So too, when he learns of Anna’s cancer: “In the midst of the imperial progress that was our life together a grinning losel had stepped out of the cheering crowd and sketching a parody of a bow had handed my tragic queen the warrant of impeachment” (19-20). This pendular momentum is not only visible in The Sea, but also in its novel posterior, The Infinities, in which, quintessentially, we find “the gods, at play in the house of mortals” (Corrigan 2010). It was only a matter of time, after the highly cerebral introspections about the human fear of death and its consequences - abundant in Eclipse and The Sea - that Banville’s efforts would move full circle, to musings about the death of immortality itself. Where The Sea is about coming to terms with the inevitability and omnipresence of human mortality, The Infinities cen‐ tres around the gods of the ancient world - Hermes, Zeus et al. - and their perennial, unattainable efforts to die: “Each time he [Zeus] dips his beak into the essence of a girl he takes, so he believes, another enchanting sip of death, pure and precious. For of course he wants to die, as do all of us immortals, that is well known” (I 67). A memorable sentence opens The Sea: “They departed, the gods, on the day of the strange tide” (1), and The Infinities is based upon a reversal of this seem‐ ingly incontrovertible truth: it is set in a world in which the gods never departed at all. They pass their time by observing, wryly commenting on, and occasionally interfering with the affairs of human beings. Already at the outset, Hermes, the self-appointed narrator of the novel, mischievously muses as to “[w]hy in such times as these would the gods come back to be among men? […] But the fact is we never left - you only stopped entertaining us” (I 14). Throughout the novel, Hermes observes, in prose with a propensity for empyrean poetics, the world he and his fellow gods created, deliberating on the fascinating problems of human interaction and behaviour. Indeed, tragi-comical attitudes about love, death and (im)mortality act against and complement each other to create pas‐ toral otherworlds of escape, self-exploration and nostalgia. Accordingly, every‐ thing in both The Sea and The Infinities is suffused with the gods and Arcadia. The setting of The Infinities is a country house aptly named Arden in which the central human character, Adam Godley Sr., lies bed-ridden and dying in the attic, alternatively also known as ‘the Sky Room.’ There, in the prime of his life, he used to work as a theoretical mathematician, and there he is “condemned not to death, not yet, but to a life into which he feels he does not properly fit” (I 4). Adam Sr.’s greatest achievement is his theory of unified time, space and being, and yet, trying to convey his theory to the world at large has so far presented 161 4.3 Et in Arcadia Ego: Death in Arcadia, Death in Banville <?page no="162"?> itself as an insurmountable problem. It is one of the few problems that the divine Hermes truly sympathises with: He always deplored the humble objects out of which his predecessors - so many of whom he helped to discredit - forged their metaphors, all those colliding billiard balls and rolling dice, the lifts going up and coming down, ships passing each other in the benighted night. Yet how else were they to speaks that which cannot be spoken, sat least not in the common tongue? He sought to cleave exclusively to numbers, figures, concrete symbols. He knew, of course, the peril of confusing the expression of some‐ thing with the something itself, and even he sometimes went astray in the uncertain zone between the concept and the thing conceptualized; even he, like me, mistook sometimes the manifestation for the essence. Because for both of us this essence is essentially inessential, when it comes to the business of making manifest. For me, the gods; for him, the infinities. You see the fix we are in. (I 131) Many signature Banville features return in The Infinities, including lyrical, self-aggrandising prose, a confrontation of philosophical issues, and high-cul‐ ture allusions. Unlike in The Sea, these all serve to showcase Banville’s ironic humour. Where The Sea is very clear in its mission of atonement for a childhood tragedy, The Infinities is a clever comedy, its narrator cloaked connivingly in the garb of the ancient Greek tragedy. As Eoghan Smith puts it, “The Infinities is still very much concerned with authenticity, yet the suffocating interiority of [Ban‐ ville’s] middle-aged solipsistic male narrators is at least partially abandoned for a more panoramic gaze” (John Banville: Art and Authenticity 146). The two novels are intimately connected, nevertheless, by their continuous obsession with themes and tropes central to most of Banville’s fiction: dying, death and the various stages of existence in between. Indeed, The Infinities is filled variously with characters either who have died, who are dying, or those who cannot die. Thus, just as in his ‘Frames’ trilogy, these novels sway between tropes of mor‐ tality and immortality, linked inexorably to the author’s own idea of himself as a kind of “deity who feels compelled to relinquish the possibility of an authentic art, but who cannot quite do so” (Smith, John Banville: Art and Authenticity 147). Banville, essentially, is himself musing on the problems of writing novel, for the author creates his setting, creates his characters and imagines his plot, only to then find that he cannot make them stick to the plan intended for them. In the same fashion, Zeus, Hermes, and all the rest of the gods are astonished that, after they created humans, the humans discovered for themselves love, lust, as well as other means of interaction that can serve as both a means of exploration of and an escape from the mortal realities thrust upon them by the 162 IV Always Already Elsewhere: Mapping Arcadia in Memory and Mind <?page no="163"?> gods. The toys crafted by Zeus et al. for their own amusement, have come to life and Hermes, like any author, cannot wait to see what they will do next: [S]ee what they made of this mess of frottage[; i]t is as if a fractious child had been handed a few timber shavings and a bucket of mud to keep him quiet only for him promptly to erect a cathedral, complete with baptistry, steeple, weathercock and all. Within the precincts of this consecrated house they afford each other sanctuary, ex‐ cuse each other their failings, their sweats and smells, their lies and subterfuges, above all their ineradicable self-obsession. This is what baffles us, how they wriggled out of our grasp and somehow became free to forgive each other for all that they are not. (I 67) This pivotal yet elusive issue is expressed in a postmodern style that uses the Arcadian architectonics of solipsistic, self-scrutinizing nostalgia, a return to the seemingly idyllic simplicity of country life, and an obsession with the antics of memory to stage once again not only a crisis of identity but, in a more panoramic, aggrandising manner, a crisis critical of how to live life itself. Banville’s ach‐ ievement in The Infinities lies mostly in the way he turns a setting that echoes Poussin’s pastoral into a postmodern Irish wake, on the one hand, and an elegiac, myth-imbued bacchanal, on the other. The way The Infinities melds the original, Greek myths and grand narratives of literature with the postmodern becomes even more relevant if we take into account how postmodern fiction has always thoroughly exploited love and death, not only as central tropes, but essentially as formally relevant features of the novel. John Banville’s postmodern fiction achieves the humorous exploitation of these two perennial pillars of human existence by systematically establishing and then placing in prominent position the relation between the characters, the reader and the author, and entangling all three into a web of love, seduction and deferred annihilation, ultimately transgressing classical ontological parameters. In this regard, then, John Ban‐ ville’s novels develop and foreground a notion of love and desire as a creative activity, an instance of textual narrative which is necessarily seductive and, fi‐ nally, the time-honoured equation of life with discourse / narration. Banville’s characters essentially engage in a challenge with their sense of impending death - both spiritual and physical - precisely by means of their accomplished storytelling, whereby writing, language and its fictions themselves contain a seductive charge. His characters evoke the problematic ‘tradition’ of the im‐ possibility and necessity of discourse ranging from Beckett to Nabokov, only to name two of Banville’s most revered literary influences: Not only did my Dad set me to monitor the house and ensure he was not disturbed at his illicit amours but I also had to render the lady Helen’s husband sleepless so he 163 4.3 Et in Arcadia Ego: Death in Arcadia, Death in Banville <?page no="164"?> would go night-wandering and vacate the bed. Then - and wait till you hear this - then I was commanded to hold back the dawn for fully an hour, to give the old boy extra time in which to work his wiles on the unsuspecting girl. (I 69) To return to The Sea, The Infinities is a fitting sequel to Banville’s Booker Prize-winning novel, especially if we appreciate, by applying McHale’s obser‐ vations about earlier Banville novels, The Sea’s establishment of death as a meta-object and meta-theme, and how it “characterizes not the fictional inter‐ actions in the text’s world, but rather the interactions between the text and its world on the one hand, and the reader and his or her world on the other” (McHale, Postmodernist Fiction 227). Ultimately, the two novels are mirrors that reflect back upon each other, mutually, an ontological exploration of the pur‐ gatory of (im)mortalty, where The Sea’s Max Morden creates divine, god-like narrative effigies of those he both admired in his past, only to burn them at the altar of a present where immortality does not exist, because it is contingent, after death, on the memories of others, and the gods of The Infinities, on the other hand, who are in fact jealous of human life, love and even death. Refusing to gift Adam Godley Sr. a much-awaited death and extending his bloodline in a pregnancy at the end of the novel is emblematic of an ultimate act of revenge by the gods, against the easy escape available to humans: death. Thus, Adam Godley Sr. is forced to suffer the original conundrum of how to communicate his theory of infinities, and the otherwise highly dysfunctional rest of his family must live out the comically tragic existence they have manoeuvred themselves into, through foolish, self-annihilating acts motivated by lust, love and desire. By stark contrast, The Sea’s protagonist Max Morden is permitted a much more satisfying moment of closure and epiphany. Musing over how Connie lives on in others’ memories, for example, Max reflects: Thus in the minds of the many does the one ramify and disperse. It does not last, it cannot, it is not immortality. We carry the dead with us only until we die too, and then it is we who are borne along for a little while, and then our bearers in their turn drop, and so on into the unimaginable generations. (S 87) Towards the end of the novel, Max also remarks that he is “compiling a Book of the Dead” (S 237), and how Morden is indeed an apposite family name for a self-appointed chronicler of the dead, for ’morden’ in German means ‘to murder’ or ‘to kill.’ Very much in keeping with this “joke in bad taste on the part of polyglot fate” (S 13), Max seems more engrossed in painstakingly recording the passing away of those near and dear to him than in his own life. First and fore‐ most, there was the recent death of his wife. He likewise notes her father’s death shortly after he and Anna were married (S 107), and the deaths of his own parents 164 IV Always Already Elsewhere: Mapping Arcadia in Memory and Mind <?page no="165"?> as well as of Carlo and Constance Grace (S 261). Lastly, but perhaps most sig‐ nificantly, there were the traumatic deaths of Chloe and Myles, who committed suicide “on the day of the strange tide” (S 3) during that otherwise idyllic summer, leaving the boy Max with Poussin’s epitaph - Et in Arcadia Ego - burned like a mnemonic of death into the landscape of all future childhood memories. Beating inside him “like a second heart” (S 13), the past holds great power over Max; it offers him a second life amidst idyllic, childhood memories, yet it also keeps reminding him of his first encounter with death. Thus, the narrative swings back and forth, and Max is continually trying to find himself in this plethora of attitudes towards the past. At times he cannot but eagerly immerse himself in said past, using his imagination as a gateway between the “intoler‐ able” present and the memories of his summers among “the gods.” At other times “there are moments when the past has a force so strong it seems one might be annihilated by it” (S 47). Two deaths, moreover, stand like the tombstone of Arcady at the centre of these polymorphic memory landscapes. The first is the death of the twins, in the distant past, and the second, of Anna, having just occurred in the recent past. These two traumatic events weave a dark, red thread through the three strands of Morden’s already complex self-narrative. The result is a story and narrator that are at a constant tug of war between various ines‐ capable memento mori, where the present reality is encased in a “hebetudinous catafalque” (S 218), and the imagined past is blanketed by the g(u)ilt of memory. Thus death, always in collaboration with Mnemosyne, runs as a leitmotif through the three narrative strands of The Sea. First, Morden’s journey into the summers of his childhood can be read as a commemorative rite for Anna’s death, “a rite performed in a place of refuge - a sanctuary of spontaneous devotion and silent pilgrimage - in which one finds the living heart of memory” (Friberg, “Waters and Memories Always Divide” 257). Though Anna “is lodged in [him] like a knife,” he is also already beginning to forget her; the gilded, innocent image he has of her in his mind is “fraying, bits of pigments, flakes of gold leaf are chipping off.” Eventually, he fears, “the entire canvas [will] be empty” (S 215). He journeys to The Cedars with a desperate desire to counteract that forgetting, and thereby “to find some sort of absolution in the past - from the past” (Friberg, “Waters and Memories Always Divide” 259). His attempts to recall and in a way revive Anna’s life through a retreat into the memories of childhood bring back to life not Anna, but even older conflicts and traumata, for at the heart of his summers among the family Grace, his ‘divinities,’ is the sudden suicide of Chloe and Myles. As a boy, Max witnesses Chloe Grace taking her own life when she walks into the sea and drowns herself; Myles follows her, and Morden is left on 165 4.3 Et in Arcadia Ego: Death in Arcadia, Death in Banville <?page no="166"?> the beach in utter shock as his innocence fails him, confronted with one of those typically Banvillian “irruptions of the tragic” (Barry, “‘As Clear as Mirror Glass’” 2005). Morden’s return to The Cedars is also driven by a search for meaning behind the Arcadian epitaph, Et in Arcadia Ego, for the two most memorable and idyllic moments of his life were both pierced by untimely death. As a consequence of these traumatic experiences, Morden has, all his life, always had to grapple with the seeming paradox of mortality amidst a paradise gained and then lost. Thus, much like Poussin before him, Max paints several versions of Et in Arcadia Ego. At the centre of the first version, or narrative strand, stands Anna: she is the fulcrum around which the two dimensions of time and imagination move. “It is the loss of Anna,” Brendan McNamee observes, “that leads to the entire structure of the childhood memory, which […] may be either ‘real or imagined’ (S 132). It is the loss of Anna which takes him back to The Cedars[. …] The reality of her disease,” on the one hand, “sets her firmly in the world of temporal loss”; Morden raises her to the imagined heights of divinity, on the other hand, “by way of a number of structural and stylistic subtleties throughout the text” (McNamee, The Quest for God in the Novels of John Banville 251). The divinities of Greek mythology, Aphrodite, Eros, and Pan in particular, have always presided over pastoral landscapes, especially those of the Renais‐ sance, and echoes of their presence are superabundant in the nexus of Morden’s memories and imaginings. Accordingly, Anna moves as much between spheres of the “real and the imagined” (S 132) as between descriptions of divinity and mortality. At their first meeting, for example, Morden talks of how it was her size that first caught his eye: “Not that she was so very large, but she was made on a different scale from that of any woman I had known before her” (S 73). Anna is described as possessing a godlike quality which is further strengthened, when, looking at her, Morden “had difficulty fixing a depth of focus” (S 74). To themselves and others, Anna and Max seemed a golden couple: “How grand we must have looked, the two of us, making our entrance, taller than everyone else, our gaze directed over their heads as if fixed on some far fine vista that only we were privileged enough to see” (S 74). Furthermore, Morden describes the world of Anna and her father as “fantastical one wherein the rules as I had known them up to then did not apply, where everything shimmered and nothing was real” (S 77). Accordingly, and as a quasi-apotheosis of these amorous pantheisms, Anna’s proposal of marriage represents to Morden a unique opportunity “to become a denizen of these excitingly alien deeps,” and ultimately also “the chance to fulfil the fantasy of myself ” (S 78). 166 IV Always Already Elsewhere: Mapping Arcadia in Memory and Mind <?page no="167"?> These descriptions of life together with Anna distinctly echo sensations evoked by the Graces, too. Chloe Grace, in particular, is described as possessing a goddess-like capriciousness and cruelty. Chloe and Anna, the two most central “avatars” of love in Morden’s life, are also the two most authoritative voices on all matters of mortality and death. The Et in Arcadia Ego motif of a paradise lived and then lost is strongly brought to life in the narrative strands that detail each relationship. Illness, misfortune, untimely death: such things happen to others, but neither to the “divinities” Chloe and Myles, nor to Anna and Morden. Just as the shepherds in Poussin’s two versions of Et in Arcadia Ego first express shock (see Appendix, Fig. 3) and then acknowledge death in Arcadia in dignified consensus (see Appendix, Fig. 4), so Morden’s attitude towards death experi‐ ences a paradigm shift between Chloe’s suicide and Anna’s passing. The boy Max, for example, is left utterly dumbfounded by the fact that Chloe had gone so suddenly: “How could she be with me one moment and the next not? How could she be elsewhere, absolutely? ” (S 140). By the time Anna passes away, however, the swan song of innocence has long been replaced by a knowing air steeped in experience. Human existence is to the adult Morden but a condition always already overshadowed by death: “But then, at what moment, of all our moments, is life not utterly, utterly changed, until the final, most momentous change of all? ” (S 33-4). If The Sea’s mortal protagonist is driven to Arcadian memories of childhood by his “rueful desire to understand the fragility of human existence,” The Infin‐ ities is a more comic, humorous treatise of classical themes of love, death and desire, and its divine protagonists revel in the many ironies on offer. Adam Sr.’s imminent death generates a tension that infiltrates the thoughts, interactions and the narratives of every character at his deathbed. Adam Jr., the apprehensive son, is more ponderous about his childhood than even his father. The appropri‐ ately named Helen, his wife, is ravished by Zeus. Ursula, Adam Sr.’s wife, cannot make out whether her husband still has his consciousness. Petra, the emotionally and psychologically fraught daughter, timidly awaits her prospective lover, Roddy Waggstaff. Benny Grace, a former colleague of the dying Adam, adds to the tension with his disturbing presence. Each character echoes in their story traits and behaviours of a divinity of Greek mythology itself. Adam Sr. is clearly a kind of omniscient Zeus whose desire to become immortal (through his work in the field of mathematics and his theory of the infinities) echoes the divine counterpart’s own hankerings after mortal delights and adventures. Roddy Waggstaff, in turn, is painted as a kind of Pan, a satyr who presides over the bacchanals of Arcadia itself. His “slightly stooped” posture, the “narrow fawn 167 4.3 Et in Arcadia Ego: Death in Arcadia, Death in Banville <?page no="168"?> slacks”, coupled with “slip-on shoes, and a white shirt” betray these parallels only too easily: Tall and slender and slightly stooped, Roddy has the aspect of a film heartthrob of a former time. He wears narrow fawn slacks sharply pressed, and pale-tan, slip-on shoes, and a white shirt that fairly shines in the sunlight, the collar open over a loosely knotted yellow cravat. His caramel-coloured hair is parted at the side and carefully arranged in a casual sweep across his brow. He has green eyes and a phthisic pallor. (I 87) As ever, Banville leads us mischievously astray here again, because the real Pan later takes on the form of a pudgy, benevolent and entirely undemanding Benny Grace: The name he is going under is Benny Grace. What he is doing here, or thinks to do, I cannot say, although I have my suspicions, oh, indeed, I have. Should I fly down from the roof now […] and give him an admonitory skelp of my serpented staff ? With the likes of him, if he has a like, it is always well to get in early. I know him and his disruptive ways[.] (I 132) Banville also constantly shifts between various narrative voices and perspec‐ tives, to add to the complexity of the playful, yet complex interplay between his mortal and immortal characters - even family dog Rex is given a voice and is apparently “accustomed by now to their [the Godleys’] frequently inexplicable ways” (I 125). The narrative shifts quickly and unexpectedly between first and third person. The author’s use of such sudden changes in perspective implies that “no character is fully in charge of their thoughts” (Smith, John Banville: Art and Authenticity 155), and that Banville has here again created an author-god, much like Freddie Montgomery did in Ghosts. An additional level of sophistication and irony has been added in The Infini‐ ties, because the playful trickster and author-god narrator (Prospero’s Ariel in The Tempest), is here played and mirrored in a real god-author, Hermes. Hermes does not function like an all-knowing authorial figure who can control every‐ thing and everyone in his own narrative, however. Instead, to emphasize both the limitations and the constructedness of the all-powerful deity that he and the other Greek gods represent, Banville plays with the concept of voice. First, the quick alternation between first and third-person point of view create a sense of uncontrolled disorientation; second, the reader at times hears Adam’s interior voice as he lies on his death-bed, only to realize it is actually Hermes who is forcing these thoughts onto the mathematician himself: 168 IV Always Already Elsewhere: Mapping Arcadia in Memory and Mind <?page no="169"?> [I]t seems to him, that he is being born in reverse, so that this garrulous dying he is doing will bring him not to the next world but back to a state of suspended pre-exis‐ tence, ready to start all over again from before the beginning. It is a nice conceit, is it not? I shall let him entertain it for the nonce. (I 33) Here Banville has created a concept of death concomitant with the notions that govern the self and the other and the dynamics constitutive of the identification process. In Ghosts, for example, Freddie Montgomery’s brutal murder of Josie Bell throws into sharp relief a confused understanding of gender and identity, especially as pertaining to the female ‘other’ and his own sense of bifurcation. According to Montgomery, “there is an onus on us, the living, to conjure up our particular dead […] they should live in us, and through us” (G 83). In an attempt to fulfil this “onus,” Freddie tries to bring Josie Bell back to life through the narrative emplotment of the little golden world that is Le monde d’or. This act, supposedly one of atonement, fails, however, because Freddie tries to deny death, and death is undeniable, even in the ‘golden world’: Et in Arcadia Ego. Thus, when face to face with the ghost of his dead son and finally confronted with this irrevocable truth, he can only turn away in frustrated disappointment from the past he had returned to in search of clarity, simplicity, and stability. In writing his “Big Book on Bonnard,” Max Morden attempts something sim‐ ilar. As he continues his research on the French painter, he begins to see several parallels between his own life with Anna and the artist’s last years with wife Marthe. Morden alludes, for example, to a day in 1893, when Bonnard “spied a girl getting off a Paris tram and […] followed her to her place of work, […] where she spent her days sewing pearls on to funeral wreaths. Thus death at the start wove its black ribbon into their lives” (S 151). Morden constructs a second par‐ allel to Bonnard and Marthe’s retreat at Le Bosquet when he compares the way he and Anna shut themselves away in their house during the entire twelve months of her suffering. Thirdly, the contrast between Bonnard’s late, mysteriously veiled self-portraits and the series he painted concurrently of his wife stretched out in the bath, insulated from the mor‐ tifications of age because these pictures always show her much younger than she was at the time, provides an exact correlative to the narrative, which offers similarly veiled self-portraits of Morden - as a boy, in middle-age, and in his sixties (Imhof, “The Sea: ‘Was’t Well Done? ’” 176). As in Ghosts and Athena, Morden’s narrative emplotment of self in art here is fraught with a conflicted, paradoxical relation to his identity. Max openly ad‐ mits, on the one hand, that “the notion of an essential, singular self is problem‐ atic” for him (S 216). On the other hand, his “Big Book on Bonnard” wants to be 169 4.3 Et in Arcadia Ego: Death in Arcadia, Death in Banville <?page no="170"?> the precise counterpart to his “Book of the Dead”; he recreates Anna’s life in the book’s narrative art in an attempt to ward off the ageing process. The project to write about a famous artist and through the narrative emplotment of that artist’s art resolve his own problematic sense of self fails, ultimately, because [p]oking at his memories, insomniac and regularly anaesthetized by his hip flask, Morden sits pushing his paragraphs around, unable any longer to grasp quite what it is writing is supposed to do. He is metaphorically writing against the tide, feeling that he might almost be able to turn back time if he can concentrate sufficiently on the art of recollection. (Kenny, John Banville: Visions and Revisions 178) In the search for a meaning behind the deaths that so suddenly sever him from those carefree childhood days of love, glory and divinity, Morden has become an art historian who in the years immediately before and after Anna’s death, very fittingly and ironically, specialises in studying manifestations of death in art. As Rüdiger Imhof remarks, Morden “perceives reality, the world, in terms of art, thus creating a distance between himself and […] life” (“The Sea: ‘Was’t Well Done? ’” 166). More than that, by using art to distance himself from life, Morden brings himself inescapably closer to its polar opposite, death. The young Max of innocence, who defined himself through a life with and love to others, is replaced by an elderly erudite of experience who believes that he can get a final reading of his own life by writing about the deaths of those he once loved. Yet, at the same time, Morden looks upon himself as a nobody, who doubts the existence of the self. He perceives himself as someone who is “trying to write [his] will on a machine that was lacking the word I. The letter I, that is, small and large” (S 71). It goes without saying that no one can write their will con‐ vincingly without the word ‘I,’ and thus Morden feels condemned to see himself as such a no one, torn between postmodern doubts of the existence of the self and the desire to give his own life meaning in a narrative written against the grand imaginative backdrop of Arcadian landscapes crowned by the golden haze of memory. Perhaps it is Victor Maskell, protagonist of Banville’s The Untouchable (1997), who comes closest to what is at the heart of Morden’s plight. Maskell, ostenta‐ tiously modelled on Anthony Blunt, a leading Poussin expert and Soviet spy, defends the painter’s Arcadia against critics who “spent their energies searching for the meaning of the work,” when, in fact, there is no meaning. Significance, yes; affects; authority; mystery - magic, if you wish - but no meaning. The figures in the Arcadia are not pointing to some fatuous parable about mortality and the soul and salvation; they simply are. Their meaning is 170 IV Always Already Elsewhere: Mapping Arcadia in Memory and Mind <?page no="171"?> that they are there. This is the fundamental fact of artistic creation, the putting in place of something where otherwise there would be nothing. (The Untouchable 343) In “the ever shifting myriad worlds” through which Morden, or for that matter Maskell, Montgomery or Cleave move, death is the “singular, unchanging and wholly authentic thing” (U 343). Max, moreover, sees in the two most traumatic deaths he has encountered the paradigmatic chronotope of his own self. Like death’s ego in Arcadia, his own self must cease trying to become, and simply accept that it is. If The Sea, then, is centred around a coming to terms with the inevitability of death, The Infinities closes the circle by arguing for the affirma‐ tion of life in a narrative that curves asymptotically towards a death that never happens. Indeed, the novel ends with a kind of rebirth in the pregnancy hinted at in the lines of the novel - “She presses a hand to her womb. ‘Oh! ’” - a twist unexpected by all but the immortal gods, who have spent the entire narrative seeking to understand what it is like to live, to be mortal. Thus, The Infinities culminates in a beautiful piece of prose suffused with the divine equanimity of the gods who, it would appear, have finally moved from witnessing the mortals, and understanding their fragility, to a true appreciation of the human condition: This is the mortal world. It is a world where nothing is lost, where all is accounted for while yet the mystery of things is preserved; a world where they may live, however briefly, however tenuously, in the failing evening of the self, solitary and at the same time together somehow here in this place, dying as they may be and yet fixed for ever in a luminous, unending instant. (I 272) ‘A Tune Beyond us, yet Ourselves’: John Banville’s Man with The Blue Guitar The Blue Guitar (2015) appears more than a quarter century after Banville pub‐ lished The Book of Evidence (1989), the masterpiece that turned him into one of Ireland’s most accomplished living novelists. And yet, his latest production could, like so many of the previous, carry the title of his first critical success. Its protagonist Oliver Otway Orme, embodies many of the characteristics of the Banville men who have gone before him. Gabriel Godkin, Freddie Montgomery, Axel Vander, Max Morden or Adam Godley: each of these solipsistic, narcissistic narrators and their story reappears in some form or other as part and parcel of Orme’s identity. Thus, The Blue Guitar closes the circle of many of Banville’s earlier efforts, neatly fitting several of the author’s central concerns into its tightly written narrative, and, in many ways, Banville’s latest novel amounts to 171 4.3 Et in Arcadia Ego: Death in Arcadia, Death in Banville <?page no="172"?> a retrospective of his narrative art, exhibiting his oeuvre in its entirety within the gallery of its two-hundred-and-fifty pages. Oliver Orme is a painter who can no longer paint. Middle-aged, “pushing fifty” ( BG 4), damaged and prone to musing, Orme is “owning up” to the various petty crimes and crises that make up the patchwork of his life so far. The reader is immediately ensnared into playing a kind of stand-in as Orme’s “inexistent confessor” ( BG 16). At the outset of the novel, we find Orme returned with wife Gloria to Ireland, in the long wake of several tragedies. His ability to paint has disappeared; the “embers of inspiration [have] become ashes, and cold ashes at that” ( BG 38). Previously, the affair with his friend’s wife was exposed, and like Eclipse’s Axel Vander, Orme retreats to his childhood home not only to “weather the storm,” but to survey the wreckage. “From now on,” he concludes, “all would be aftermath” ( BG 5, 74). Banville’s latest narrator is a careful creation who, in his voice, manner, ap‐ pearance, character and even origin story is very much an amalgam of previous Banville protagonists. Indeed, much of what makes The Blue Guitar work is the way in which the Irish author infuses it with the entirety of his oeuvre, turning the novel into a retrospective on various levels. Firstly, and most visibly, Oliver’s story can be read as a playfully postmodern, if nostalgic elegy that holds a ka‐ leidoscopic mirror up to the human condition. A second reading transforms The Blue Guitar into a metafictional vehicle that enables a critical retrospective of the “infinity of worlds” created by each of Banville’s previous novels itself, and in which “all possibilities are fulfilled” (I 105). At the end of their professional lives, both Banville and his narrator, Orme, appear to look back and find that neither the author nor the artist as a young man could live up to the much-pro‐ fessed Arcadia of youth: Childhood is supposed to be a radiant springtime but mine seems to have been always autumn, the gales seething in the big beeches behind this old gate-lodge, as they’re doing right now, and the rooks above them wheeling haphazard, like scraps of char from a bonfire, and a custard-coloured gleam having its last go low down in the western sky. Besides, I’m tired of the past, of the wish to be there and not here. (BG 4) Throughout The Blue Guitar, Orme is marked by an involuntary obsession with the past that he would prefer to suppress: “I’m tired of brooding,” he would have his readers believe: “it availeth naught.” Yet soon it returns, “the past, the past”, like a narrative incantation that guides the prose inevitably to a foregone con‐ clusion. The subtle phrases that took The Sea from past to present are gone, however, and instead, bright announcements have taken their place: “Yes, here 172 IV Always Already Elsewhere: Mapping Arcadia in Memory and Mind <?page no="173"?> it comes, the past again.” The past has been transformed, no longer a welcome locus of respite from the present, but an intrusive, unwelcome guest, to whom entry cannot be denied, nevertheless: “Damn it, here’s another digression” ( BG 26, 67, 89). Orme’s survey of his life begins as the staged confessional of a former painter whose first-person voice is very reminiscent of Hermes, The Infinities’ playful narrator, with his penchant for wordplay and the all-too-predicable antics of narrative unreliability: Call me Autolycus. Well, no, don’t. Although I am, like that unfunny clown, a picker-up of unconsidered trifles. Which is a fancy way of saying I steal things. Always did, as far back as I can remember. I may fairly claim to have been a child prodigy in the fine art of thieving. This is my shameful secret, one of my shameful secrets, of which, however, I am not as ashamed as I should be. (BG 1) Orme even introduces himself as the son of Hermes, Autolycus. Clearly, Banville could not resist establishing a proper literary (if fictional) heritage for his latest protagonist, for Autolycus appears as a comic relief character and thief in Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale, where his boast as “a snapper-up of unconsid‐ ered trifles” (4. 3. 26). mirrors almost exactly Orme’s self-appraisal above. Indeed, as a self-proclaimed prince of thieves, Autolycus has a pedigree of great cunning and an even greater ego, which often leads him into undesirable, braggart sce‐ narios. Thus, parallels between Autolycus and Orme are plentiful: both are crafty tale-tellers, men of masks and clothes-changers who serve to advance a variety of themes on art and nature, on appearance and reality. Additionally, it appears that Banville has written The Blue Guitar as a kind of sequel to The Infinities; Orme attests to this not only by proclaiming himself as the apparent son of Hermes, but also in his repeated references to the theory of infinities posited by Adam Godley Sr. in The Infinities: The fact is, I’m not really here, or the here that I’m here in is not here, really. I might be a creature from one of that multitude of universes we are assured exists, all of them nested inside each other, like the skins of an infinitely vast onion, who by cosmic accident made a misstep and broke through to this world, where I was once and have become again what I am. (BG 65) There is more behind the art of Banville’s allusions, nonetheless, because Orme’s recurrent mention of the “multitude of universes” is designed to justify his klep‐ tomania, desperately seeking a way to will it into art, to “transmute the object stolen” into “something sacral” that shines beyond the “profane”: 173 4.3 Et in Arcadia Ego: Death in Arcadia, Death in Banville <?page no="174"?> I’m thinking of those Godley particles we hear so much about, these days, that at one moment are in one place and the next in another, even on the far side of the universe, with no trace whatever of how they got from here to there. That’s the way it always is with a theft. It’s as if a single thing by being stolen were on the instant made into two[. …] It’s a kind of […] transubstantiation, if that’s not going too far. For it did give me a feeling almost of holy awe, on that first occasion, and does so still, every time. That’s the sacral side of the thing; the profane side is if anything even more numinous. (BG 21) Thus, Orme also strongly alludes to The Book of Evidence’s Freddie Montgomery, who emplots various works of art, be they real, counterfeit, or metafictional, into his storied self, thereby carefully crafting a Kunstwollen, an overly self-con‐ scious and stylised discourse for his crisis of identity. In reverse process to Montgomery’s Kunstwollen, Orme steals in order to will the theft (arguably the most profane and base form of criminal activity) into a higher, sacral form of art: “Just as art uses up its materials by absorbing them wholly into the work, […] so too the act, the art, of stealing transmutes the object stolen” ( BG 16). Orme’s delusional, if cleverly argued justifications mirror Freddie Montgomery’s nar‐ cissistic, self-aggrandising explanations: “In this way, is not the thief doing a favour to things by dint of renewing them? Does he not enhance the world by buffing up its tarnished silver? ” ( BG 17). All this makes painfully clear Orme’s fundamental flaw as The Blue Guitar’s tragic anti-hero: as someone who fled to small-town Ireland “out of fear of the world” ( BG 65), and as someone who has become in equal parts loquacious self-explainer and a chronic solipsist who desperately seeks to find meaning and acknowledgement in grandiose justifications, verbal charm and meta-observa‐ tional self-flagellation, Orme is ultimately left stranded, having lost much of what he tried to thieve into possession - for how can we claim to truly possess something that was stolen? Whether it is his petty thievings as a child, his efforts to rob life of its reality in his paintings, or stealing Polly from his best friend, Orme leaves himself impotent, dispossessed of all that he once owned and used to justify his actions, or by which to measure his self-worth. Indeed, he admits this at an early point in the novel: “Painting, like stealing, was an endless effort at possession, and endlessly I failed. Stealing other people’s goods, daubing scenes, loving Polly: all the one, in the end” ( BG 60). Finally, Orme even admits that “things” concern him “not […] as they are, but as they offer themselves up to being expressed. The expressing is all” ( BG 114). Despite these flaws and the sorry state he finds himself in at the outset of The Blue Guitar, Orme’s self-deprecating humour and naïveté endear him to the reader. Although he surrenders to creative impotence, Orme never stops 174 IV Always Already Elsewhere: Mapping Arcadia in Memory and Mind <?page no="175"?> thinking, wondering, musing. Nevertheless, our peripatetic, recidivistic “painster” is undone by the world’s refusal to sit still and be captured by him and his kleptomanic will to steal things into art. We are told that he never paints people, only objects, in part because people are so mutable, but mostly because he is himself handicapped when it comes to seeing and understanding human comportment and interaction. As Polly astutely remarks when Oliver blurts out that he wants to paint her, “But you only paint things,[…] not people, and even when you do you make them look like things” ( BG 114). Recalling his dead daughter, Orme writes, “How well I remember her face, which is a foolish claim to make, since any face, especially a child’s, is in a gradual but relentless process of change and development, so that what I carry in my memory can be only a version of her, a generalisation of her, that I have fashioned for myself, as an evanescent keepsake” ( BG 169). It can be argued that Orme’s wilfully ignorant desire to articulate things not as they are, but to constantly seek out their expressive potential instead, is an essential quality an artist should possess. Banville’s novel is a supreme cau‐ tionary tale of how extending this outlook to an understanding of human be‐ haviour itself can be truly dangerous. To achieve this, he uses an extensive, carefully developed allusion to Wallace Stevens’ poem “The Man With the Blue Guitar.” Indeed, Stevens’ poem epitomises all at once both the central themes of the novel and the quintessential struggles of its protagonist. For Wallace Stevens, as for Banville and Orme, reality is an abstraction with many possible perspec‐ tives and perspective possibilities. Poet, author and artist alike struggle to create original perspectives of reality, and in their efforts to capture said reality, create new, modern, meta-realities. Each creation, in turn, is also always an act of de-creation or destruction of actual reality, or actuality, and herein lies the danger that haunts the trinity of ‘creators’ - Banville, Orme, and Stevens - behind The Blue Guitar. In The Necessary Angel (1951), Stevens defines his modern reality as “a reality of decreation, in which our revelations are not the revelations of belief, but the precious portents of our own powers” (140). Through his long poem “The Man with the Blue Guitar,” Stevens relates the destruction of traditional reality to the epiphany that a poem is not the expression of truth, but the result of the poet’s desire to bring to life the potential any given reality has to be expressed. Thus, Stevens’ poetry, like Orme’s art and Banville’s novels, exists in a kind of pur‐ gatory state of non / existence, in a matrix characterised by the dynamic of re‐ treat and return at the heart of post-/ modern pastoral’s always already else‐ where. A true achievement of The Blue Guitar, accordingly, lies in the way in which it neatly ties up these efforts on the part of Banville, by alluding to Stevens, 175 4.3 Et in Arcadia Ego: Death in Arcadia, Death in Banville <?page no="176"?> and in the postmodern tragedy of Orme’s narrative plight. Stevens’ poem “The Man with the Blue Guitar” begins by metaphorically comparing poets to musi‐ cians: the guitar is the man’s instrument of perception, and thus conceptualizes the artist’s problem of creation. Inspired by Picasso’s painting “The Old Guita‐ rist” (see Appendix, Fig. 10), Stevens stages an imaginary conversation between the old man and his audience: They said, ‘You have a blue guitar, You do not play things as they are.’ The main replied, ‘Things as they are Are changed upon the blue guitar.’ And they said then, ‘But play, you must, A tune beyond us, yet ourselves, A tune upon the blue guitar Of things exactly as they are.’ (Stevens, “The Man With the Blue Guitar” 3-10) The guitar does not, indeed it cannot express reality - just as Orme’s painting, and by extension his retrospective narrative - but instead it creates a new reality based upon a myriad of perceptions. “You see how for me everything is always like something else? - I’m sure that’s part of why I can’t paint any more, this shiftingness I see in all things” ( BG 48). In one of his “Adagia” (1934-1940), Stevens describes the relation of reality and imagination: “The imagination con‐ sumes and exhausts some element of reality” (Opus Posthumous 198). This very process of consumption is paralleled by the many metaphors Orme uses to ex‐ plain his theory of art’s transmutation of reality: As the crisis deepened, it wasn’t long before I recognised and accepted what appeared to me a simple and self-evident truth, namely, that there was no such thing as the thing itself, only effects of things, the generative swirl of relation. [… M]y effort wasn’t to reproduce the world, or even to represent it. The pictures I painted were intended as autonomous things, things to match the world’s things, the unmanageable there‐ ness of which had somehow to be managed. (BG 59) The first section of Stevens’ poem further articulates the artist’s pressures to recreate reality as at once “A tune beyond us, yet ourselves” and as a reflection of “things as they are.” Clearly, the listeners do not understand the dialectic impossibility that governs their own request, especially when the old man shows that his instrument allows him only to represent reality, not to create it. Ban‐ ville’s Orme epitomises precisely this hubris in his firm belief that stealing things can elevate them from the profane to the numinous. Naturally, these parallels 176 IV Always Already Elsewhere: Mapping Arcadia in Memory and Mind <?page no="177"?> can also be applied to what Banville tries to achieve in his entire oeuvre, artis‐ tically, and they can be taken as a mild rebuke of his readers’ expectations to transmute the mundane minutiae of human life to the profane dimensions of the gods of old. Additionally, the first section of the poem provides Banville with a crucial metaphor that helps Orme expose the demands of realism on the artist - ex‐ pectations that both author and his protagonist have fallen prey to: “I cannot bring a world quite round, / Although I patch it as I can. / […] If to serenade almost to man / Is to miss, by that, things as they are” (Stevens, “The Man with the Blue Guitar” 7-10). Commenting on the parallel experience of writing “a Banville novel,” the Irish author expresses similar sentiments in an interview with The Paris Review: “The world is not real for me until it has been pushed through the mesh of language[. …] If I can catch the play of light on a wall, and catch it just so, that is enough for me” (McKeon, “The Art of Fiction” 133). The crisis of representation played out by the artist on a tight-rope of the audience’s expectations, between actual reality and the interpretation of reality, throws Orme into a deep funk of artistic “impotence.” And, as in many Banville novels, this crisis triggers in Oliver a nostalgic return to the childhood home where a survey of adult life as pierced by untimely deaths and disappointments have made the once-painter into a “painster” in search of redemption, once fi‐ nally “undone, a sack of sorrow, regret and guilt” ( BG 65). Indeed, the typically Banvillean preliminary sketches that Oliver provides of himself as an irreparable narcissist are slowly but decidedly replaced by a protagonist who becomes pro‐ gressively more honest about his own pain and the pain he has caused others. The verbal self-indulgence fades, and a powerful drama emerges: “What creature is it that returns to die in the place where it was born? ” ( BG 65) Oliver asks when he has arrived at his supposed locus amoenus, hinting at the sojourn’s true pur‐ pose, namely to reckon with various deaths - deaths of loved ones that have already occurred, as well as with the inevitability of his own demise. Indeed, what keeps Oliver’s story from being just the random broodings of a frustrated middle-aged man is its grounding in loss and its repeated confronta‐ tions with mortality. At first Orme contemplates in typically narcissistic fashion how a fear of death justifies his kleptomania as an act of both literal and meta‐ phorical duplicity, and again he hijacks (and to an extent repeatedly misappror‐ priates) for this purpose the many-worlds theory posited by Adam Godley Sr. in The Infinities: [O]ne of the more deplorable aspects of dying, aside from the terror, pain and filth, is the fact that when I’m gone there will be no one here to register the world in just the way that I do. […] Others will register other versions of the world, countless billions 177 4.3 Et in Arcadia Ego: Death in Arcadia, Death in Banville <?page no="178"?> of them, a welter of worlds particular each to each, but the one that I shall have made merely by my brief presence in it will be lost for ever. That’s a harrowing thought, I find, more so in a way even than the prospect of the loss of self itself. (BG 11) It is striking that there are as many funerals as there are picnics in the pages of The Blue Guitar - a fitting balancing act that pervades the entire novel. Two events appear to have precipitated Orme’s current state of perplexity, in partic‐ ular: the first is the sudden death of his three-year-old daughter, Olivia, as well as its ramifications in his marriage. “Her death had a deadening effect in general on our lives […] something of us died along with her” ( BG 96). With great de‐ liberation and care, as he is wont to, Banville discloses the circumstances that have shaped his protagonists’ lives. The tragic, shared loss of Olivia decisively shaped the aloof, at times prickly relationship between Oliver and Gloria. We come to understand how, by the end of Orme’s story, Polly has come to achieve her ambition, and we gain insight into just how much Oliver had deluded himself about his family, about his wife and even about Polly: Yet oftentimes, too, I entertain the fancy that somewhere in that infinity of imbricated other creations there’s an entirely other me, a dashing fellow, insolent, devil-may-care and satanically handsome, whom all the men resent and all the women throw them‐ selves at, who lives catch as catch can, getting by no one knows how, and who would scorn to fiddle with colouring-boxes and suchlike childish geegaws. Yes yes, I see him, that Other Oliver[. …] Yet would I leave again and try to be him, or something like him, elsewhere? No: this is a fit place to be a failure in. (BG 65) A quintessential desire to return to a simpler time engenders Orme’s nostalgic impulses, a desire that is mirrored in William Empson’s axiomatic description of the pastoral as a “process of putting the complex into the simple” (Some Ver‐ sions of Pastoral 23). This desire is so strong in Orme that he manages to convince himself that he, and indeed his entire world, is in the middle of this very process of reversal from the complex, unbearable reality to a simpler, comforting and soothing past: “Everything is reverting to what it used to be[. …] Retrograde progression, they call it - […] The future, in other words, will be the past, as time turns on its fulcrum into another cycle of eternal recurrence” ( BG 66). Banville evokes this idea of regression by setting the novel in an otherworldly Ireland where present, past and future slowly meld into a multiverse that runs parallel to the readers’ own universe. At first, the world depicted in The Blue Guitar appears ordinary, a forlorn corner of the rain-sodden, windswept British Isles. Yet, soon enough, curiosities begin to appear. The sky is full of airships ( BG 62, 63, 155), and although the narrative time seems to be the present, various aspects of Orme’s world recall late-Victorian or Edwardian society: the muddy 178 IV Always Already Elsewhere: Mapping Arcadia in Memory and Mind <?page no="179"?> 15 See Appendix, Fig. 11, showing one of Caspar David Friedrich’s most iconic paintings (and eponymous skies), Wanderer above the Sea of Fog. airfield where Orme the itinerant art dealer lands his plane is manned by two farm lads, brothers, Orville and Wilbur Wright, for exmaple. Scientists have confirmed the Godley particles, postulated by Adam Godley in The Infinities, as the raw material of all creations. The continent is beguiled by a country called Alpinia, painted by Oliver as a kind of otherworldly, postmordern Arcadia with “a Caspar David Friedrich sky”: 15 It was as if I had set off heedlessly up a gentle grassy slope somewhere in old Alpinia itself, plucking edelweiss blossoms and delighting in the song of the lark, and presently had come to the crest and stopped open-mouthed before a terrifying vista of range upon range of flinty, snow-clad peaks, each one loftier than the last, stretching off into the misty distances of a Caspar David Friedrich sky[.] (BG 29) Despite all the incessant dampness and murky weather, the sun, we are in‐ formed, is heaving with calamitously destructive activity. Interestingly, each and every regressive anomaly of this otherworldly Britain (and Ireland) is always paralleled by the wilful Kunstwollen that colours Orme’s own efforts to return to a simpler time. The violence that is necessary for such a caesura irrupts the narrative time-and-again with fitting imagery: [I]t seems to me something has changed in the decades since I was a boy. I am well aware how spurious can be the glow that plays over remembrances of childhood. All the same I recall afternoons of sun-struck stillness the like of which we don’t seem to have any more. […] I felt just now a sudden sweet rush of fondness for the little boy that I was then. […] There was a smell of sun-bleached timbers and creosote and dust that seemed the evocative whiff of an already lost past. (BG 34-35) So, recalling his sister’s grief when she was scorned by the pimply youth she adored, Oliver remembers that he thought of her weeping figure as a sacrificial victim on an altar, and came to understand, therefore, that out of “transgression and sacred terror the gods were born” ( BG 220). Polly seems to think that Oliver is god-like, and sees herself as an Ariadne rescued by the great god Dionysus. Gloria tends lovingly to a sickly, potbound myrtle, a plant associated with death, rebirth and transformation in classical mythology. And the art dealer Perry in his aeroplane is, perhaps, a would-be deus-ex-machina. Transformation - a form of appropriation in Banville’s scheme of things - thus becomes the novel’s overarching concern. Art transforms reality, or at least 179 4.3 Et in Arcadia Ego: Death in Arcadia, Death in Banville <?page no="180"?> what we think of as everyday reality. Oliver is speaking for Banville, it would seem, when he declares: But no, no, it was more than that I was about: it was nothing less than total transfor‐ mation, the clay made spirit. Pleasure, delight, the raptures of the flesh, such things mean nothing, next to nothing, to a man like me. Trans-this and trans-that, all the transes, that’s what I was after, the making over of things, of everything, by the force of concentration, which is, and don’t mistake it, the force of forces. The world would be so thoroughly the object of my passionate regard that it would break out and blush madly in a blaze of self-awareness. (BG 174) Indeed, a desire for the transformation of reality into art has driven John Ban‐ ville’s entire oeuvre, and the author’s many efforts finds a culmination in the unimpeachably elegant tenets of The Blue Guitar. Inspired by Wallace Stevens’ poem, we can easily discern similarities between Banville’s efforts to write, Or‐ me’s painstaking painting and the music played by ‘The Man with the Blue Guitar.’ In an interview with The New Yorker, Banville provides a rare glimpse into his own childhood efforts at painting: As Banville admits in The New Yorker interview, he too tried to play upon the blue guitar, and, in his various attempts to capture the past, has moved variously between painting and writing. “On weekends”, he explains in the interview, “his mother would take him into Dublin to go to Combridges, a bookstore that doubled as an art-supplies shop. Along with an easel and paints and brushes, he insisted on making her buy him large tubes of zinc white. Then, he would stand in front of his easel for hours trying to paint “mythological scenes of great meaning. But painting never quite clicked, and so Banville, the teenager, traded paintbrushes for pens. Half a century later, Banville thinks about what life may have been like as a painter: I loved all the paint, that whole world, all that beautiful equipment one uses. That’s one thing I hate about being a novelist: I have a nice fountain pen and nice big books to write in, but it’s nothing compared to being a painter and all the wonderful brushes and all that paint and all that turpentine and those wonderful smells, all that mucki‐ ness - it’s like being a child again. (Delistraty, “John Banville on the Utter Mystery of Writing”) The nostalgic qualities of this return to the clean-slate state of childhood throws into sharp relief the similarities between author and protagonist. Like Orme, Banville appears unable to dispossess himself from the relentless hold of the past upon what he is trying to put on paper in his fictions: The past fascinates me obsessively, I suppose, because it’s such a strange phenom‐ enon[. …] The past was the present at some point, and it was just as boring as the 180 IV Always Already Elsewhere: Mapping Arcadia in Memory and Mind <?page no="181"?> present. What makes it so important? What gives it that luminous, exalted quality where it becomes the past? When does the past become ‘the past’? Is yesterday ‘the past’? Is last week ‘the past’? How far do you have to go until the past becomes ‘the past’? These are things I’ve never found an answer to, and that’s why they fascinate me. (Delistraty “John Banville on the Utter Mystery of Writing”) Unlike Orme, however, who sets out in The Blue Guitar on long verbal incanta‐ tions to justify his petty crimes as well as his affair with Polly, Banville has by now abandoned all such pretensions about writing: “Writing,” he has said in an interview with The New Yorker, “is a mysterious process that I don’t pretend to understand” (Delistraty, “John Banville on the Utter Mystery of Writing”). What the Irish author provides in his seductively artistic and intellectual fictions, is “a tune beyond us, yet ourselves”; narratives, in other words, that are post‐ modern celebrations of the expressive qualities inherent to the art of writing, the potential of which is to be exalted rather than suppressed. This epiphany is quintessentially postmodern and counteracts the anti-modernist tendencies one may accuse Banville of. This may also mark Banville’s departure from Arcadia and its nostalgic allure. Indeed, perhaps the best way to summarize the actuality of this turn in the Irish author’s novels is to use P. K. Paige’s poetic response to Wallace Stevens’ poem, a reply that encapsulates the entirety of the postmodern condition: The man replied, ‘Things as they are are not the same as things that were or will be in another year. The literal is rarely true for truth is old and truth is new and faceted - a metaphor for something higher than we are. I play the truth of Everyman I play the truth as best I can. The things I play are better far when changed upon the blue guitar.’ P. K. Page, “The Blue Guitar” 36 181 4.3 Et in Arcadia Ego: Death in Arcadia, Death in Banville <?page no="182"?> 5 Conclusions Is this a calculated irony, a mocking gesture towards our feeble notions of pastoral? - Ghosts 229 This study offers a hitherto little explored vista on John Banville’s fictions, and argues that the contemporary Irish author is in many ways a post-/ modern pas‐ toralist. His entire oeuvre wavers indecisively between modernist and post‐ modernist concerns, as his fictions embody the viewpoint that “the anxiety of contamination in modernism is concerned with preserving the integrity of the autonomous art work so that it can conceptually counterbalance the potential senselessness and chaos of our world” (Kenny, John Banville 38). Pastoral, too, has survived as an autonomous mode that spotlights the significance of the construction of an aesthetic literary form, even when it is deemed equally im‐ portant that, within that very same body of writing, the stability of such con‐ structions should be called into doubt. Thus, pastoral in its various post-/ modern transformations, is well suited as a lens through which to view and to understand much of John Banville’s writing, because both author and mode are prone to query their (meta-)narrative constructions in a self-conscious discourse that swings back and forth, between pastoral regression and post-/ modern reflexion. The pastoral lens opens new perspectives of analysis for Banville’s central concerns: the collusion of ethics and aesthetics in art and the process of self-identification in narrative, as well as the topography of the mind as subject to the literary concomitance of narrative, imagination, and memory. In contrast to more traditional forms, Banville’s pastoral contexts of retreat, sojourn and return manifest themselves more within than without, be it in the construction of imaginative otherworlds and idylls or as narrative meditations on the power games of fiction, reality, and illusion. His protagonists often harbour an Arcadia of the unconscious conditioned by a subtext of childhood nostalgia and a desire to return to a state of innocence. Brought to the surface by a moment of crisis, the attendant process of narrative emplotment produces a text that explores, subverts and transforms the pastoral mode into an ambiguous landscape of the perennial quest for a stable self-identity. <?page no="183"?> IBanville’s pastoral aesthetic finds its most outspoken exponent in Freddie Mont‐ gomery. His Book of Evidence questions how to map morality and self in a social and cultural landscape where “the notion of free will has been abandoned” and where, in echo of Nietzsche, “there are no moral facts, only moral interpretations of facts” (BoE 16, 34). Freddie’s narcissistic narrative is born out of the need to relate culture, morality and culpability to his own decentred sense of identity. The resulting Book thrives on using language to construct for its author-narrator a (meta-)fictional narrative in desire of retreat, protection and absolution from an overwhelming present conditioned by crime and crisis. Thus, The Book of Evidence raises the pastoral contexts of retreat and return onto the meta-levels of language, where a master narrative is constructed to excommunicate and to exculpate Freddie from any sense of morality and accountability: “I saw myself as a master builder, who would one day assemble a marvellous edifice around myself, a kind of grand pavilion, airy and light, which would contain me utterly and yet wherein I would be free” (BoE 16). The architectonics of the resultant narrative, in direct comparison, create “a kind of Crystal Palace, beautifully structured and strong because of inner relationships and symmetries.” As Ban‐ ville instrumentalises the pastoral mode, much like Montgomery, he is “fully aware that artificial conditions [are] being created, but he [is] also proud of his extraordinary ability to contrive the transparent tegument” (Heaney, “‘Eclogues in Extremis’” 6). Arcadia, not unlike Freddie and his ‘edifice,’ wants to be viewed and admired from all sides; it wants the audience (as Montgomery wants the reader) to “enter and to stand back,” to regard it as “both a revelation and an intervention, as a locus amoenus where you can choose to remember or forget” (Heaney, “‘Eclogues in Extremis’” 7). On the surface of the text, Freddie’s emplotment of self in the excommuni‐ cative exile of an Arcadian grand narrative is successful. And yet, such reclusion, however meticulously mapped out and constructed, is not enough for him. This becomes apparent when, immediately upon release from prison in Ghosts, Mont‐ gomery is compelled to act out his retreat in various other ways—be it as a physical sojourn on an island somewhere off the coast of Ireland, to the fête galante of Le monde d’or, or to a pastoral past made “half of memory” and half of reality. Thus, Freddie constructs a fictional narrative where he “speaks life” into a ‘golden world; ’ he is Prospero and the other characters sprites, like Ariel, commanded by the sorcery of his linguistic prowess and imagination. Where The Book celebrates Montgomery’s amazing authorial powers, Ghosts subverts the same narrative art with an authoritative subtext of childhood nostalgia characterised by a crisis of inauthenticity and (corpo)reality. For Freddie can 183 5 Conclusions <?page no="184"?> achieve atonement only if he acknowledges his “bifurcate” self—as much a Pros‐ pero as a Caliban, as much a wordsmith as a ‘thing of darkness’, washed up on foreign shores of the self. Ultimately, Montgomery is captured and progressively framed by the inter‐ locked narratives of Banville’s ‘Frames’ trilogy. In each of the three novels, Freddie (albeit in different guises) emplots various works of art, be they real, counterfeit, or metafictional, into his storied self, thereby carefully crafting a Kunstwollen, an overly self-conscious and stylised discourse for his crisis of identity. Crucially, Banville’s artful narrative relies heavily on various aspects of the pastoral mode, including its characteristic nostalgia, its inherent dynamic of retreat and return, and its elegiac, redemptive project, to create for Mont‐ gomery a storied self who at times eschews the present for the “familiar other‐ where of art,” a nostalgic and excommunicative exile, and at other times explores issues of identity as mirrored against the beautiful if frustratingly untenable artifice of reality: In the first days in that secret room I was happier than I can remember ever having been before, astray in the familiar otherwhere of art. Astray, yes, and yet somehow at the same time more keenly aware, of things and of myself, than in any other of the periods of my life that have printed themselves with particular significance on my memory. (A 78) Montgomery also reminds us that landscape is no natural phenomenon but an aesthetic concept born in culture and literature: “Nature did not exist until we invented it one eighteenth-century morning radiant with Alpine light” (G 65). To regard a landscape is to transform a segment of the visual world into art, whether by sight, or as Freddie does, through narrative. Indeed, “landscape does not exist without the human agent recognizing it as such and transmitting his impression” (Parry, Landscapes of Discourse 13). Just as every landscape is con‐ structed by an observing subject, so the ‘Frames’ trilogy’s Le monde d’or, its artistically islanded golden world, is a narrative construction of an alternate reality painted on the canvas of Freddie’s fictions. It is a mirror in which Mont‐ gomery wants his own subject refracted as an otherworldly shepherd ex‐ changing (and often confusing) the complex for the simple, the guilty for the innocent, and illusion for reality: “I was like some creature of the so-called wild poised on open ground with miraculously refined senses tuned to the weather of the world” (A 78). It is in this vein that pastoral begins to take on the role of a soothing, self-as‐ serting grand narrative for Freddie in the excommunicative exile he has, with his narrative art, crafted for himself. Though it manifests itself most notably in 184 5 Conclusions <?page no="185"?> references to childhood, the past and a ‘lost land,’ it is due to Freddie’s desire to create a selfhood by means of authorship that the linguistic borderland of Ar‐ cadia and its powerful subtext of nostalgia first become textualised. The entire ‘Frames’ trilogy, above all else, draws attention to Montgomery’s authorial powers: he exhibits an unparalleled capacity to situate, circumscribe, and control characters through narrative. This power, however, also stands in a kind of dis‐ cordant relationship with his claims that his writing amounts to no more than “puppet-show twitchings which passes for consciousness” (BoE 38). Additionally, it both pains and pleases Freddie that all is a question of per‐ spective and perception. He is well aware, after all, that the attempts to create an aesthetic paradise - where he can return to a state of innocence and receive atonement for his crimes - cannot escape the uprooting undercurrent of his own post-/ modern impulses. These are forces, moreover, that inescapably result in a gaze at the real, hard and uncompromising truths that govern his bifurcated self. There is in the modernist arts and literature “never simply a mimetic reflection of a predefined reality” (Parry, Landscapes of Discourse 5); any vision of idyll and harmony can easily become a dystopia fraught with profound unease. So too with Freddie’s ‘island’ in Ghosts: from one point of view, he has “embarked for the golden world,” from another he finds himself “in the underworld.” Thus, innocence is displaced by “concupiscence” (G 95). Indeed, when “viewed from a certain angle these polite arcadian scenes can seem a riotous bacchanal” (Ghosts 96-97). It is perhaps useful to consider Simon Schama’s remarks here, that “the mark of the original Arcadians was their bestiality, their presiding divinity. Pan copulated with goats … [and] was taught how to masturbate by his father, Hermes” (Schama, “Arcadia Redesigned” 526). In sum, Freddie Montgomery, perhaps Banville’s finest if most disturbing, creation, transforms the pastoral mode into an identity discourse that tests and questions many modernist and postmodernist tendencies. Banville creates a god-like author-narrator in Freddie and frames him in a trilogy of his own au‐ thoring, in order to transform the traditional mimetic approach to literature and art into a narcissistic, yet melancholy retreat inward. Simultaneously, Banville’s postmodern, authorial kaleidoscope refracts any search for order and meaning into countless reflections, re-readings, and re-interpretations. Thus, a return to postmodern unreliabilty and disingenuousness disrupts the protagonist’s search and sojourn in the grand, Arcadian narratives he has constructed for himself as a retreat into various culturally charged landscapes (and otherwordly escapes). This is visible in Freddie’s narration throughout, where ascents of pastoral pro‐ sody constantly face off against descants of postmodern parody, and where 185 5 Conclusions <?page no="186"?> Freddie the ‘little god’ and puppet-master of various storied others, nonetheless always struggles to comprehend (and thereby offer stability to) his self. II Narratives give space to memory just as much as memory spatializes narrative. As Gaston Bachelard has argued in his Poetics of Space, spatial experiences are often transformed into metaphors for our thinking: “an implicit geometry— whether we will or no—confers spatiality upon thought” (Bachelard, Poetics of Space 212). Any such conferment of “spatiality upon thought” bestows in equal measure a spatiality upon our capacity to remember. John Banville shares pre‐ cisely this insight with the French intellectual, that memories are first spatial before, if at all, they are perceived on a temporal axis, and it provides the foun‐ dations on which the Irish writer’s fiction is housed. In order to achieve this spatial emplotment of memory within narrative, John Banville turns landscape and architecture into metaphors of thought and into sites of pastoral nostalgia and remembrance. More specifically, each time-experience, narrated by the pro‐ tagonists always with supreme eloquence, transforms the natural sites and ar‐ chitectural settings into a journey towards a point of pastoral return, “to those Arcadian fields where memory and imagination merge” (E 137). Indeed, John Banville is as much concerned with the topography of the mind as Gaston Bach‐ elard is with a “topoanalysis” of “felicitous space”. What connects the two are the concepts of nostalgia and remembrance as expressed in the pastoral mode, which is itself, after all, a poetics of dwelling. The pastoral mode is very well suited to narratives of memory because in its architecture and its landscapes is where memory often dwells, as idealized, nostalgic constructions of an imagi‐ nation vying for a return to innocence and stability. As Simon Schama puts it, “[before it can ever be a [pastoral] repose for the senses, landscape is the work of the mind. Its scenery is built up as much from strata of memory as from layers of rock” (Schama, Landscape and Memory 7). What makes Banville’s novels uniquely different from other fictions con‐ cerned with mapping nostalgia, memory and crises of identity onto narrative, however, is in the way the Irish author turns away from narrative as a collective memory experience to create post-/ modern pastorals that explore the intersec‐ tion of memory and subjectivity. A subject’s memories create subjective mem‐ ories, after all, and the pastoral offers both a temporal axis (expressed in its dynamic of retreat and return) as well as a spatial architectonic (expressed as Arcadia) within which the individual can reckon with memories and the crisis-ridden self. We see this particularly well in Birchwood (1973), Banville’s Big House novel turned post-/ modern pastoral. Gabriel Godkin, its predictably 186 5 Conclusions <?page no="187"?> solipsistic narrator, convincingly re-invents a past for himself that probably never was, in an order it likely never had, so as to impose a pattern upon his thoughts and experiences that must remain all but elusive. Twists and turns accompany all that the reader may assume to know, and in a typically post‐ modernist manner, it all starts with anti-Cartesian invocation: “I am, therefore I think. That seems inescapable” ( BW 1), and since “all thinking is in a sense remembering” ( BW 3), Gabriel’s writing always has the past as both its proper tense and proper subject. It is hardly surprising then, that Godkin feels the need to constantly re-invent, especially when he recalls the tragic relationships of his childhood. These playful, unreliable inversions combine to turn Godkin into a mock-heroic protagonist who epitomises the pastoral mode’s pejorative poten‐ tial as a vehicle for socio-cultural and political criticism, parody and satire. Houses, big and small, remain important in Banville’s later works too, in‐ cluding Ghosts, Eclipse, The Sea, A Conversation in the Mountains and The Infin‐ ities, creating what Neil Murphy has called the “hallucinatory topos” (“From Long Lankin to Birchwood” 10) of Banville’s architectural spaces. The houses “provide formal image-structures that are integral to the protagonist’s memory or imagined desires, but are rarely linked to socio-economic or historical con‐ texts” (Thomson, “‘Powers of Misrecognition’” 114). It can be said, accordingly, that both The Newton Letter and Birchwood exploit the genre of the Big House novel in different ways and for different purposes. In Birchwood, for example, the Big House genre is emptied of much of its historicity, and is instead used as an aesthetic device to evoke visions of Anglo-Irish decadence without being tied to a specific space and time. Banville achieves a postmodern subversion of the Big House novel through farcical characterization and through the parodied description of the decline of Birchwood itself. Such use of the Big House has multiple implications for Birchwood. First, it creates “instant associations with decay, political crisis and, significantly, the image of a class of people increas‐ ingly out of touch with reality” (McMinn, John Banville 32). Second, the Big House becomes an architectonic of personal association and an elegiac articu‐ lation of loss. As Victor Sage argues, Birchwood is an interplay between “the entropy of lyric idealism and the processes of incarnate history,” but one that ultimately leads to stasis or “moments of the sublime, raised and cancelled in the structural metaphor of ‘petrifaction’” (Sage, “The Politics of Petrifaction” 32, 36), a metaphor which corresponds to “the fall and rise” ( BW 1) of the Big House in literature itself. Fern House, the Big House of The Newton Letter, is pivotal in giving space to the delusions and mental development of its historian-narrator, and thus turns a narrative that begins with the telling admonition: “Words fail me” ( NL 1) into 187 5 Conclusions <?page no="188"?> a powerful study of how mental topographies are shaped by the elusive nature of memory. Evident from the outset of the novel, The Newton Letter’s historian has become disillusioned with texts, language and other academic systems of knowledge: “I’ve lost my faith in the primacy of text” ( NL 1); his retreat to the Ferns is therefore designed to help clear out “the real people[,] … objects, land‐ scapes even” that “keep getting in the way” ( NL 1). The Newton Letter is the narrative that results from this sojourn in Fern House, and it is written as a postmodern satire of historical writing reinforced by a parallel parody of the Big House genre. All this represents a clear contrast to the narrator’s earlier efforts at trying to capture and use The Ferns, the beauty of its natural surroundings in particular, for his own academic purposes. In this vein, Banville’s use of the Big House in The Newton Letter is far more counter-memorial than historical. Narratives that at first attempt to counteract the failure to remember are sub‐ verted to create what may be best described as counter-memorial pastorals, used to parody a mainstay of postmodernism: the unreliable narrator in search of a stable self-identity. III Alexander Cleave and Max Morden, much like Montgomery, are incurable nar‐ cissists; both seek refuge in the past as both are plagued by flashbacks of an “intolerable present” full of doubt and polyvalence. Their narratives expand Banville’s post-/ modern pastoralism to include re-examinations of nostalgia and the human experience of time. Eclipse and The Sea begin where Homer’s Odyssey left off, as narrative re-enactments of a nostalgia that facilitates the protagonist’s return to a point of origin, an imagined locus amoenus or home; the attendant sojourn functions as a re-evaluation and rediscovery of the crisis-ridden self. At the helm of both Eclipse and The Sea, are narrators, crucially, who try to ma‐ nipulate the nostalgic act of retreat and return with their linguistic and intel‐ lectual prowess, in order to construct memories of a pastoral past where both a vain escape from and a more productive exploration of an identity crisis is pos‐ sible. Terry Gifford points to pastoral as “the poetry of illusion,” where the bucolic construct of a golden age becomes “the historiography of wish-fulfilment” (Pastoral 41-2). Accordingly, the two novels Eclipse and The Sea can be read as post-/ modern autobiographies of wishful thinking. The context and construc‐ tion of a return to a childhood of innocence is closely connected to an incessant debate about the human experience of time and the imagination’s attempts to overcome such limits. Cleave and Morden are narrators who wish to regress to a childhood as an imagined quasi-paradise. Their storied self cannot, however, 188 5 Conclusions <?page no="189"?> but oscillate between nostalgic regression and postmodern reflexion in the here and now. The authenticity of their imaginative retreats is constantly called into doubt by a narrative self writing through the typically post-/ modern looking-glass, tinged in the playful, yet poignant hue of parody and irresolution. Many of Banville’s protagonists also use women as a point of access to return to an imagined prelapsarian state of innocence before they ‘fall,’ variously to crime (Montgomery), to complacency and an overall withdrawal from reality (Cleave), and to alcohol - Morden’s “big baby’s bottle” and “soother” (The Sea 248). The numerous female protagonists are not only effigies of each narrator’s desires and fantasies, but each also functions as a narrative other through which the former seeks to assess and assert their selves. Josie Bell, Flora, Chloe, and Cass Cleave, to name but the most prominent, move through each narrative as “agent[s] of individuation,” (as in The Book of Evidence and Ghosts), to “fill up the vacuum where the self should be” (Eclipse) or as “avatar[s] of memory,” con‐ comitant in the protagonist’s search for “that Edenic moment” of childhood in‐ nocence (The Sea). Childhood is a strong theme in Banville’s later works too, as it offers to the main characters a very potent point of access to the Arcadia of their youth, be it real, imagined, or a commixture of both: “At the end of their lives, all men look back and think that their youth was Arcadia” (Goethe, quoted in Katsumata, Arcadia of My Youth). Montgomery, Morden, and Cleave are elderly men who suddenly find themselves “in the failing evening of the self ” (G 231). In search of authenticity, they become nostalgic for a future that mirrors the “superabun‐ dance” and care-free simplicities of a childhood in a pastoral past. In the Freudian sense, childhood is a quasi-paradise governed by the pleasure principle and re‐ moved from the burdens of rationality and reality (Heiler, “Transformations of the Pastoral” 334). In an attempt to regain this otherwise unparalleled state of innocence, each protagonist, Cleave and Morden in particular, constructs an imagined, second childhood as a regressive, idyllic experience. Childhood and innocence, moreover, are direct counterpoints to ageing and death. Flora, Cass, Chloe: Banville’s main women become vessels in which the protagonists hope to recreate their childhood selves and thus to return to a prelapsarian state of innocence. Each female character constitutes a crucial el‐ ement in the male protagonist’s ceremonial rite of commemoration through which they try to return to the Arcadia of youth. Triggered by grief for a real, physical loss, a nostalgic return to the landscapes of childhood is enacted. The death of his wife, Anna, is pivotal to Morden’s entire narrative return and at‐ tendant sojourn at The Cedars, for example, but death is also a constitutive element of the crises felt by Montgomery and Cleave. Indeed, when Freddie 189 5 Conclusions <?page no="190"?> murders Josie Bell, he at once also kills the Dutch woman in his beloved Portrait of a Woman with Gloves, whose “fortitude and pathos” came upon him “suddenly in a golden room on a summer eve” (BoE 78), and who was more authentic to him than any woman of flesh and bones. Freddie has always been able to see the female other through the eyes of the masters of the Dutch golden age, but he cannot, in his own Le Monde d’Or, frame an adequate artistic parallel with which to return to life Josie Bell. Fiction and imagination, which have long be‐ come Freddie’s only hope, fail him. The shock of this failure liberates him, at first: “I would never again need to pretend to myself to be what I was not” (BoE 125). And yet, the entire first part of Ghosts counteracts this claim in Freddie’s imaginative return to a world where Josie Bell is still alive and he is innocent. A discourse of death also pervades Banville’s Eclipse and The Sea, making for darkest pastoral. Arguably Banville’s most intimate, solipsistic novels to date, both provide narrative space to the various ways in which grief and mortality irrupt the minutiae of daily life. Both Cleave and Morden are suddenly con‐ fronted with painful experiences of loss in the present and seek counsel in the past; both must come to terms with an increased, pervasive awareness of the mortifications of ageing, and both seek to enact a return to sites of memory and childhood, physically and mentally, in search of “a way to live with death” (The Sea 23). Memory merges with imagination, blurring the boundaries of illusion and reality and obscuring the perception of time. Thus, the return to sites of boyhood creates in each narrative an idylllic chronotope, a counter-worldly es‐ cape from the seemingly self-destructive present. And yet, as both Guercino’s and Poussin’s Et in Arcadia Ego testify, there can be no escape from death. What is designed as an anti-modernist “escape from an intolerable present” (Rosner, Conservatism and Crisis 75) at first, quickly brings back to life various ghosts and traumata of the past. The nostalgic act is thus forcefully transformed into a commemorative rite in acknowledgement of death in the imagined Arcadia of youth. The riddle of the mortal form of the self and that of the Arcadian Ego is both resolved and made insignificant, for death is not an absent ‘other’ but a doppelganger, always already present, who shadows, walks alongside, and often even resides within the self: I felt it that first day out in the fields. It was as if someone had fallen silently into step beside me, or inside me, rather, someone who was else, another, and yet familiar. … I stopped, struck, stricken by that infernal cold I have come to know so well, that para‐ disal cold. Then a slight thickening in the air, a momentary occlusion of the light, as if something had plummeted past the sun, a winged boy, perhaps, or falling angel. (E 3) 190 5 Conclusions <?page no="191"?> Where Cleave and Morden parley with the various phantoms of their past in an escapist idyll of their own making, ironically, the same idyll gives narrative space to their grief and distress, and both narratives become prophetic valedictions foreshadowing that “final, most momentous change of all” (S 34). IV In his most recent novels, Banville uses the pastoral mode to affect a transfor‐ mation of a modern search for narrative identity into a postmodern search for authorial immortality. He begins this project in The Infinities (2009), set in a kind of multiverse-acknowledging, parallel future Ireland, and he concludes the project masterfully with The Blue Guitar (2015). Indeed, if The Sea centres around a mortal protagonist driven to Arcadian places (and spaces) of childhood by his “rueful desire to understand the fragility of human existence,” The Infinities provides a more humorous treatise of the classical themes of love, death and desire, and its divine protagonists revel in the many ironies on offer in the mortal world. Adam Sr.’s imminent death generates a tension that infiltrates the thoughts, interactions and, ultimately, the narratives of every character at his deathbed. Adam Jr., the apprehensive son, is more ponderous about his child‐ hood than even his father. His wife, the appropriately named Helen, is ravished by Zeus. Ursula, Adam Sr.’s wife, cannot make out whether her husband still has his consciousness. Petra, the emotionally and psychologically fraught daughter, timidly awaits her prospective lover, Roddy Wagstaff. Benny Grace, a former colleague of the dying Adam, adds to the tension with his disturbing presence. Each character echoes in their story, traits and behaviours of various divinities of Greek mythology itself: Adam Sr. is clearly a kind of omniscient Zeus whose desire to become immortal; through his work in the field of mathematics and his theory of the infinities, he echoes the mythological Zeus’s own hankerings after mortal delights and adventures. Roddy Wagstaff, in turn, is painted as a kind of Pan, a satyr who presides over the bacchanals of Arcadia. Greek divin‐ ities, Aphrodite, Eros, and Pan in particular, have always presided over pastoral landscapes, especially those of the Renaissance, and echoes of their presence are superabundant in The Infinities, where a setting that mirrors Poussin’s pastoral, commingles with a postmodern Irish wake, on the one hand, and an elegiac, concupiscent bacchanal, on the other. Indeed, The Infinities melds the original, Greek myths and grand narratives of literature with the postmodern; this becomes even more relevant if we take into account how postmodern fiction has always thoroughly exploited love and death, not only as popular tropes, but essentially as formally relevant features of the novel. John Banville’s postmodern fiction achieves the humorous exploi‐ 191 5 Conclusions <?page no="192"?> tation of these two perennial pillars of human existence by systematically es‐ tablishing and then placing in prominent position the relation between the characters, the reader and the author, and by weaving all three into a web of love, seduction and deferred self-annihilation, so as to, ultimately, transgress traditional ontological parameters. In this regard, then, John Banville’s novels develop and foreground a notion of love and desire as a creative activity - an instance of textual narrative which is necessarily seductive and, as a result, ceaselessly misunderstood. In The Blue Guitar (2015), Banville achieves a sequel to The Infinities (2009) in various ways. On the one hand, many of the latter’s concerns are echoed in the former as Banville endeavours to create a kind of Hardyesque Wessex-equiva‐ lent of Ireland, by positing and then confirming Adam Godley’s many-worlds theory in The Blue Guitar. As Adam Godley Sr. muses in The Infinities, “the eye makes the horizon. […] The child on the train was a sort of horizon to him and he a sort of horizon to the child only because each considered himself to be at the centre of something—to be, indeed, that centre itself ” (I 114). In The Blue Guitar, the theory of infinities is transformed into a fully developed, globally accepted world-view and offered as a hypermodern pastoral grand narrative to the human condition and existence itself. And yet, in typically postmodern fashion, Oliver Orme cannot but comment on the theory critically, and with curiosity: They tell us of the welter of other worlds we shall never see, but what of the worlds we do see, the worlds of birds and beasts, what could be more other from us than these? And yet we were of those worlds, once, a long time ago, and frolicked in those happy fields, all the evidence assures us it’s the case, though I find it hard to credit. (The Blue Guitar 171) An unabated desire to transform reality into art has driven John Banville’s entire oeuvre, and the author’s many efforts find a culmination in the unimpeachably elegant tenets of The Blue Guitar. Inspired by Wallace Stevens’ poem “The Man with the Blue Guitar,” we can easily discern similarities between Banville’s ef‐ forts and the music played old man post-/ modernism’s “blue guitar.” Ultimately, the Irish author provides in his seductively artistic and intellectual fictions “a tune beyond us, yet ourselves.” Banville offers narratives, in other words, that emplot the self onto the temporal axis of a futuristic nostalgia, where other(s) inhabit the topographies of memory and the mind, and where the resultant nar‐ ratives of love, crisis and regret are willed artistically onto otherworldly land‐ scapes, escapes, and explorations of wishful thinking, in a tireless effort to grasp the intangible in the postmodern condition: always already elsewhere. 192 5 Conclusions <?page no="193"?> 6 Bibliography 6.1 Primary Works Banville, John. Birchwood. 1973. New York, Vintage International, 2007. ——. The Newton Letter. 1982. Boston, D. R. Godine, 1999. ——. The Book of Evidence. 1989. 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Ithaca, NY, Cornell University Press, 1994. 6.2 Secondary Works about Banville Banville, John, and Schwall, Hedwig. “An Interview with John Banville.” European English Messenger vol. 6, no. 1, 1997, pp. 13-19. ——, and Hogan, Ron. “A Blessed World, in Which We Know Nothing Except Through Style.” The Beatrice Interview, 1997, www.beatrice.com/ interviews/ banville/ . Accessed 11 February 2017. ——, and Pfeiffer. Claudia. “‘To Make Fiction as Dense and Demanding as Poetry: ’ An Interview with John Banville”. ‘Do you consider yourself a postmodern author? ’ Inter‐ views with Contemporary English Writers. Münster, Hamburg and London, LIT, 1999, pp. 21-38. ——, and Kampen, Gerd. “An Interview with John Banville.” . Zwischen Welt und Text: Narratologische Studien zum irischen Gegenwartsroman am Beispiel von John McGahern und John Banville. Schriftenreihe Literaturwissenchaft 56. Trier, Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier, 2002, pp. 343-55. ——, and Izarra, Laura P. Z. “Interviewing John Banville.” Kaleidoscopic Views of Ireland. Sao Paulo, Humanitas, 2003, pp. 227-47. ——, and Bittencourt, Luiz Marcello. “Interview with John Banville.” ABEI Journal 6, June 2004, pp. 203-06. ——. “‘Yesterday I was some sort of grown-up, tonight I am a child’.” The Irish Times, 14 October 2005, www.irishtimes.com/ news/ yesterday-i-was-some-sort-of-grownup-tonight-i-am-a-child-1.506177. Accessed 11 February 2017. ——, and Izarra, Laura P. Z.“Fiction and Dream: An Interview” Irish Studies in Brazil. Sao Paulo, Humanitas, 2005, pp. 23-27. 195 6.2 Secondary Works about Banville <?page no="196"?> ——, and Sarvas, Mark. “The long-awaited, long-promised, just plain long John Banville Interview.” The Elegant Variation: A Literary Weblog. 12 September 2005. http: / / marksarvas.blogs.com/ elegvar/ 2005/ 09/ the_longawaited.html. Accessed 11 February 2017. ——, and Sarvas, Mark. “Conversation in the Mountains - A brief Q&A with John Ban‐ ville.” The Elegant Variation: A Literary Weblog, July 01 2008, http: / / marksarvas. blogs.com/ elegvar/ 2008/ 07/ conversation-in.html. Accessed 11 February 2017. Barekat, Houman. “The Thief, The Friend, His Wife, and Her Lover.” Los Angeles Review of Books, 24 December 2015, lareviewofbooks.org/ article/ the-thief-the-friend-hiswife-and-her-lover/ . Barry, Shane. “‘As Clear as Mirror Glass’: John Banville in Interview.” Three Monkeys Online. June 2005, http: / / www.threemonkeysonline.com/ als/ _John_Banville_ interview.html. Accessed 11 February 2017 Battersby, Eileen. “In the Heart of a Chaotic Universe.” Irish Times, 16 April 1997, p. 12. Beck, Andrea. “John Banville’s Eclipse: A‘Gothic Novel’. On Alexander Cleave’s World in Eclipse or a Postmodern Reading? ” Documentation on ‘Kaleidoscope of Postmoder‐ nism’. Frankfurt a. M.,Peter Lang, 2004, pp. 56-80. Berensmeyer, Ingo. “The Crisis of Modernity and the Postmodern Interlude.” 30 No‐ vember,1998, http: / / www.gradnet.de/ papers/ pomo98.papers/ ioberens98.htm. Ac‐ cessed 11 February 2017. ——. John Banville: Fictions of Order - Authority, Authorship, Authenticity. Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag, 2000. Bergonzi, Bernard. “Banville’s Revenge.” PN Review vol. 31, no. 4, March / April 2005, pp. 9-10. Blandy, Doug, et al. “Art, Ecological Restoration, and Art Education.” Studies in Art Edu‐ cation, vol. 39, no. 3, 1998, p. 230., doi: 10.2307 / 1 320 366. Boccardi, Mariadele. “Biography, the Postmodern Last Frontier: Banville, Barnes, Byatt and Unsworth.” Q / W/ E / R/ T / Y: Arts, Littératures & Civilisations du Monde Anglophones 11, October 2001, pp. 149-57. Brown, Terence. The Literature of Ireland: Culture and Criticism. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2011. ——. “Redeeming the Time. The Novels of John McGahern and John Banville.” The British and Irish Novel Since 1960. London, Macmillan, 1991, pp. 159-173. Burgstaller, Susanne. “‘This Lawless House.’ John Banville’s Postmodernist Treatment of the Big-House Motif in Birchwood and The Newton Letter.” Rauchbauer, O. Ancestral Voices: The Big House in Anglo-Irish Literature: A Collection of Interpretations. Vol. 6. Hy Cohen, 1992, pp. 239-256. Canon-Roger, Evans. “John Banville’s Imagines in The Book of Evidence.” European Journal of English Studies 4. 1, 2000, pp. 25-38. 196 6 Bibliography <?page no="197"?> Castaneda, Breanna. “Jean Boulogne and Andy Goldsworthy.” Jean Boulogne and Andy Goldsworthy, 1 Jan. 1970, artwithbre.blogspot.ch/ 2013/ 12/ jean-boulogne-andandy-goldsworthy.html. Accessed 2 Mar. 2017. Cornwell, Neil. “Banville.” The Literary Fantastic: From Gothic to Postmodernism. New York, London, Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1990, pp. 172-84. Corrigan, Maureen. “The Gods, At Play In The House Of Mortals.” NPR. NPR March 08 2010, http: / / www.npr.org/ templates/ story/ story.php? storyId=124153941. Accessed 11 February 2017. Costello-Sullivan, Kathleen. “’My Memory Gropes in Search of Details: ’ Memory, Nar‐ rative, and‘Founding Traumas’ in John Banville’s The Sea.” Irish University Review vol. 46, no. 2, 2016, pp. 340-358. Crespo, Violeta Delgado. “‘Athentic Faking’: Metafictional Images of (Artistic) Creation in Peter Ackroyd’s Chatterton and John Banville’s Ghosts.” Symbolism: An International Journal of Critical Aesthetics 3, 2003, pp. 305-32. Delistraty, Cody. “John Banville on the Utter Mystery of Writing.” The New Yorker 18 September 2015. D’haen, Theo. “Irish Regionalism, Magic Realism and Postmodernism.” International As‐ pects of Irish Literature. Colin Smythe, 1996, pp. 59-68. D’hoker, Elke. “Portrait of the Other as A Woman with Gloves: Ethical Perspectives in John Banville’s Book of Evidence.” Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction vol. 44, no. 1, Autumn 2002, pp. 23-37. ——. ‘Like Frost Falling on Water: Representation in the Works of John Banville from an Epistemological, Aesthetic and Ethical Perspective. Afdeling Engelse Literatuur. Leuven, 2001. ——. “Self-Consciousness, Solipsism, and Storytelling: John Banville’s Debt to Samuel Beckett.” Irish University Review vol. 36, no. 1, Spring / Summer 2006, pp. 68-80. Duffy, Brian. “Banville’s Other Ghost: Samuel Beckett’s Presence in John Banville’s Eclipse.” Études Irlandaises vol. 28, no. 1, 2003, pp. 85-106. Duncan, Dawn. “Banville’s Fiction Comes of Age as it Lays to Rest Old Ghosts.” ABEI Journal 2, 2000, pp. 48-63. Ferguson, Gary. Modernist Influences on the Fiction of John Banville. Diss. University of Ulster, 1997. Jordanstown, JUI, 1997. Festino, Cielo Griselda. “The Construction of Identity in John Banville’s The Book of Evidence.” ABEI Journal 4, June 2002, pp. 95-111. Frehner, Ruth. “The Dark One and the Fair: John Banville’s Historians of the Imagination and their Gender Stereotypes.” BELJLS: Barcelona English Language and Literature Series. Barcelona, PPU, 2000, pp. 51-64. 197 6.2 Secondary Works about Banville <?page no="198"?> Friberg, Hedda. “John Banville’s Shroud: Exile in Simulation.” Re-Mapping Exile: Realities and Metaphors in Irish Literature and History. The Dolphin 34. Aarhaus, Dolphin Press, 2005. ——. “‘In the Murky Sea of Memory: ’ Memory’s Miscues in John Banville’s The Sea.” An Sionnach: A Journal of Literature, Culture and the Arts vol. 1, no. 2, Fall 2005, pp. 1-13. ——. “‘Passing Through Ourselves and Finding Ourselves in the Beyond’: The Rites of Passage of Cass Cleave in John Banville’s Eclipse and Shroud.” Irish University Review vol. 36, no. 1, Spring / Summer 2006, pp. 151-64. ——, et al. “John Banville and Derek Hand in Conversation.” Irish University Review vol. 36, no. 1, Spring / Summer 2006, pp. 200-215. ——. “Waters and Memories Always Divide: Sites of Memory in John Banville’s The Sea.” Recovering Memory: Irish Representations of Past and Present. Newcastle-upon-Tyne, Cambridge Scholars Publishers 2007, pp. 244-262. Garavel, Andrew J. “‘Green World’: The Mock-Pastoral of the Irish RM.” Estudios Irland‐ eses. Journal of Irish Studies 3, 2008, pp. 92-100. Gefter Wondrich, Roberta. “‘The Familiar Otherwhere of Art’: Awareness, Creation, Re‐ demption, Art and the Artistic Imagination in John Banville’s Trilogy of Art.” Prospero 4, 1997, pp. 94-110. ——. “Postmodern Love, Postmodern Death and God-like Authors in Irish Fiction: The Case of John Banville.” BELLS: Barcelona English Language and Literature Series, No‐ vember 2000. Barcelona, PPU, 2000, pp. 79-88. Hand, Derek. John Banville: Exploring Fictions. Dublin, Liffey Press, 2002. ——. “The Ontological Imperative in Irish Writing.” ABEI Journal 5, 2003, pp. 275-85. ——, et al. John Banville. Special Issue of Irish University Review vol. 36, no. 1, Spring / Summer 2006. ——. “Introduction.” John Banville. Special Issue of Irish University Review vol. 36, no. 1, Spring/ Summer 2006, pp. 1-8. Harper, Graeme. “John Banville.” British and Irish Novelists since 1960. Dictionary of Literary Biography 271. Detroit, Thomson Gale, 2003. Hertel, Ralf. “The Visual in the Novel.” Making Sense: Sense Perception in the British Novel of the 1980s and the 1990s. Internationale Forschungen zur Allgemeinen und Verglei‐ chenden Literaturwissenschaft. Amsterdam and New York, Rodopi, 2005, pp. 32-71. Imhof, Rüdiger. “In Search of the Rosy Grail: The Creative Process in the Novels of John Banville.” Irish Writers and their Creative Process. Gerrard’s Cross, Smythe, 1996, pp. 123-36. ——. John Banville: A Critical Introduction. Dubliln, Wolfhound, 1997. ——. “The Problematics of Authenticity: John Banville’s Shroud.” ABEI Journal 6, 2004, pp. 105-27. 198 6 Bibliography <?page no="199"?> ——. “The Sea: ‘Was’t Well Done? ’” Irish University Review vol. 36, no. 1, Spring / Summer 2006, pp. 165-81. Ireland, Ken. “Rococo Paradise. Watteau’s Cythera in Nayantara Sahgal and John Ban‐ ville.” New Comparison. A Journal of Comparative and General Literary Studies 21, 1996, pp. 134-45. Izarra, Laura P. Z. Mirrors and Holographic Labyrinths: The Process of a ‘New’ Aesthetic Synthesis in the Novels of John Banville. San Francisco, International Scholars Publi‐ cations, 1999. ——, et al. Kaleidoscopic Views of Ireland. Special Issue of ‘Humanitas,’ 2003. ——. “‘Endless Beginnings’ in the Criticism of Banville’s Writings” ABEI Journal, 6, 2004, pp. 61-66. ——. “Disrupting Social and Cultural Identities: A Critique of the Ever-Changing Self.” Irish University Review vol. 36, no. 1, Spring / Summer 2006, pp. 182-199. Kampen, Gerd. Zwischen Welt und Text: Narratologische Studien zum Irischen Gegen‐ wartsroman am Beispiel von John McGahern und John Banville. Schriftenreihe Litera‐ turwissenchaft 56. Trier, Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier, 2002. Kenny, John.“Well Said Well Seen: The Pictoral Paradigm in John Banville’s Fiction.” Irish University Review vol. 36, no. 1, Spring / Summer 2006, pp. 52-67. ——. John Banville. Visions and Revisions: Irish Writers and Their Time 3. Dublin, Irish Academic Press, 2009. Lernout, Geert. “Banville and Being: The Newton Letter and History.” History and Violence in Anglo-Irish Literature, 1988, pp. 67-77. Lindorfer, Claudia Helene. Doomed to Failure? The Search for Meaning in Life in the Face of Suffering, Death and Grief: An Interdisciplinary Approach to John Banville’s Novel ‘The Sea.’ Diss. University of Vienna, 2008. McKeon, Belinda. “The Blue Guitar by John Banville: Metafictional Reflection.” The Irish Times, 04 September 2015, http: / / www.irishtimes.com/ culture/ books/ the-blue-guitarby-john-banville-metafictional-reflection-1.2340378. Accessed 11 February 2017. ——, and John Banville. “The Art of Fiction” The Paris Review, No. 200. 2009, pp. 132-153. McMinn, Joseph.“Naming the World: Language and Experience in John Banville’s Fic‐ tion.” Journal of Irish Literature 23. 2, 1993, pp. 183-96. ——. John Banville: A Critical Study. Manchester, Manchester University Press, 1999. ——. “Versions of Banville: Versions of Modernism.” Contemporary Irish Fiction: Themes, Tropes, Theories. London, Macmillan Press, 2000, pp. 79-99. ——. “‘Ah, this Plethora of Metaphors! I am Like Everything Except Myself ’: The Art of Analogy in Banville’s Fiction.” Irish University Review vol. 36, no. 1, Spring / Summer 2006, pp. 134-50. McNamee, Brendan. “‘A Rosy Crucifixion’: Imagination and Time in John Banville’s Birchwood.” Studies: An Irish Quarterly Review vol. 92, no. 365, Spring 2003, pp. 67-74. 199 6.2 Secondary Works about Banville <?page no="200"?> ——. “‘A Huddle Between Earth and Heaven’: Language and Displacement in the Works of Flann O’Brien and John Banville.’ Colby Quarterly vol. 39, no. 2, June 2003, pp. 151-60. ——. “‘A Self-Sustaining Tension in Space’: Myth, History, Tradition and John Banville.” New Voices in Irish Criticism 5. Dublin, Four Courts Press, 2005, pp. 216-23. ——. 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The Duke of Devonshire and the Chatsworth Settlement Trustees, Chatsworth, UK. 216 7 Appendix <?page no="217"?> Fig. 4: Nicolas Poussin. 1637-9. Et in Arcadia Ego. Oil on canvas. Musée du Louvre, Paris. Fig. 5: Antoine Watteau. L’Embarquement pour Cythère. 1717. Musée du Louvre, Paris. 217 7 Appendix <?page no="218"?> Fig. 6: Antoine Watteau. L’Embarquement pour Cythère. 1718. Charlottenburg, Berlin. Fig. 7: Antoine Watteau. The Shepherds. 1717-1719. Charlottenburg, Berlin. 218 7 Appendix <?page no="219"?> Fig. 8: Nicolas Poussin. Bacchanalia. 1631. Oil on canvas. National Gallery, London. 219 7 Appendix <?page no="220"?> Fig. 9: Antoine Watteau. Pierrot, dit autrefois Gilles. 1718-1719. Oil on canvas. Musée du Louvre, Paris. 220 7 Appendix <?page no="221"?> Fig. 10: Pablo Picasso. The Old Guitarist. 1903-1904. Oil on panel. Art Institute of Chi‐ cago, Chicago. 221 7 Appendix <?page no="222"?> Fig. 11: Caspar David Friedrich. Wanderer above the Sea of Fog. 1818. Oil on canvas. Kunsthalle Hamburg, Hamburg, Germany. 222 7 Appendix <?page no="223"?> List of Figures Fig. 1: George Robertson. Recto. 1781. A View of Kenwood, the Seat of the Earl of Mansfield, in the County of Middlesex. Etching and engraving. The British Museum, London. . . . . . . . . . . . 214 Fig. 2: Guercino. Et in Arcadia Ego. 1618-22. Oil on canvas. Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Antica, Rome. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 215 Fig. 3: Nicolas Poussin. Et in Arcadia Ego. 1627. Oil on canvas. The Duke of Devonshire and the Chatsworth Settlement Trustees, Chatsworth, UK. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 216 Fig. 4: Nicolas Poussin. 1637-9. Et in Arcadia Ego. Oil on canvas. Musée du Louvre, Paris. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 217 Fig. 5: Antoine Watteau. L’Embarquement pour Cythère. 1717. Musée du Louvre, Paris. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 217 Fig. 6: Antoine Watteau. L’Embarquement pour Cythère. 1718. Charlottenburg, Berlin. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 218 Fig. 7: Antoine Watteau. The Shepherds. 1717-1719. Charlottenburg, Berlin. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 218 Fig. 8: Nicolas Poussin. Bacchanalia. 1631. Oil on canvas. National Gallery, London. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 219 Fig. 9: Antoine Watteau. Pierrot, dit autrefois Gilles. 1718-1719. Oil on canvas. Musée du Louvre, Paris. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 220 Fig. 10: Pablo Picasso. The Old Guitarist. 1903-1904. Oil on panel. Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 221 Fig. 11: Caspar David Friedrich. Wanderer above the Sea of Fog. 1818. Oil on canvas. Kunsthalle Hamburg, Hamburg, Germany. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 222