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ABSTRACT
A controversy within John Banville scholarship focuses on his seemingly ambivalent relation to his Irishness. The dominance of Banville's philosophical topics has seemingly rendered the specifically Irish issues redundant. However, there are Irish traits that have significance for more subtle themes or motifs in certain novels. These passages often appear as side-paths in the eccentric protagonists' meandering narration. In The Blue Guitar, Oliver Orme mentions that his "namesake Oliver Cromwell" attempted an attack upon the town in which his childhood home is situated, but eventually "the victorious Catholic garrison hanged half a dozen russetcoated captains" on the hill where the house stands and where "the Lord Protector's tent" had been erected. Such casual remarks on violent historical incidents harbor a key to a particular Banvillean ethics. The frequently recurring prose structure of thematized mise en abîme and the mazes of signifiers indicate that no historical ontology in terms of a meta-narrative seems to exist. However, many of Banville's novels revolve around the disclosure of a truth. This alethic element questions an all too convenient reliance on a completely constructivist understanding of history and thereby of Irish historical events appearing in the Banvillean oeuvre. (JW)
KEYWORDS: Banville, ethics, aletheia, Irish history, conflict, mise en abîme
John Banville (1945-) was for a long time seen as the Irish writer who turned to more "universal" topics when he created his prose fiction worlds. With the science tetralogy, he explicitly delved into historical topics that only indirectly concerned Ireland. Linda Hutcheon, most notably, categorized Kepler (1981) and Doctor Copernicus (1976) as "historiographic metafiction," which neatly summarizes and explains a part of Banville's writing strategy. Firstly, he selects a topic, as Shakespeare was wont to do, that somehow attracts his attention and curiosity (for instance, the lives and historical epochs of Kepler and Copernicus), and weaves them into narratives by means of historical facts and inventive imagination. Secondly, he adds an element of ideas and philosophy that may even be anachronistic (as is clearly the case in Doctor Copernicus), but these additions in their "universal" status contribute to literary themes concerning a much vaster range of topics, such as science, the lebenswelt, memory, and history. In that respect, Banville can be regarded as a typical postmodern writer who...