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"Et in Arcadia Ille – This One Is/Was Also in Arcadia"

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99 BARBARA PUSCHMANN-NALENZ "Et in Arcadia ille – this one is/was also in Arcadia:" Human Life and Death as Comedy for the Immortals in John Banville's The Infinities Hermes the messenger of the gods quotes this slightly altered Latin motto (Banville 2009, 143). The original phrase, based on a quotation from Virgil, reads "et in Arcadia ego" and became known as the title of a painting by Nicolas Poussin (1637/38) entitled "The Arcadian Shepherds," in which the rustics mentioned in the title stumble across a tomb in a pastoral landscape. The iconography of a baroque memento mori had been followed even more graphically in an earlier picture by Giovanni Barbieri, which shows a skull discovered by two astonished shepherds. In its initial wording the quotation from Virgil also appears as a prefix in Goethe's autobiographical Italienische Reise (1813-17) as well as in Evelyn Waugh's country- house novel Brideshead Revisited (1945). The fictive first-person speaker of the Latin phrase is usually interpreted as Death himself ("even in Arcadia, there am I"), but the paintings' inscription may also refer to the man whose mortal remains in an idyllic countryside remind the spectator of his own inevitable fate ("I also was in Arcadia"). The intermediality and equivocacy of the motto are continued in The Infinities.1 The reviewer in The Guardian ignores the unique characteristics of this book, Banville's first literary novel after his prize-winning The Sea, when he maintains that "it serves as a kind of catalogue of his favourite themes and props" (Tayler 2009). Indeed, a manor and park in the heart of Ireland2 emerge as the setting of this re- narrativization of death, which forces the reader to look in a new way at one of the writer's frequent topics which he believes he was already familiar with (cf. Hand 2002, 176). Here we are confronted with the expected passing away of the famous mathematician and philosopher of science Adam Godley Sr., who boasts of having revolutionized post-Newtonian physics: "[W]e had exposed the relativity hoax and showed up Planck's constant for what it really is. The air was thick with relativists and old-style quantum mechanics plummeting from high places in despair" (Banville 2009, 164). However, the modified Latin phrase from the novel's motto links the text ambiguously to Poussin's and Barbieri's paintings.3 The grotesque figure, whose ap- pearance in the sophisticated yet neglected setting of Arden House Hermes comments on with "Et in Arcadia ille," is revealed as Pan, the Greek god of pastoral nature, fright and bucolic turmoil. He arrives on the scene of the family gathering at the deathbed of the Godley pater familias in the guise of an unexpected and ungainly visitor by the name of Benny Grace, allegedly an old friend of Adam's. The narrative 1 John Kenny focuses on Banville's expertise shown in pictorial descriptions (2009, 147-51). On ekphra- sis in Banville's work see also Müller (2004) and McMinn (2002). The parodistic function of a pictorial representation is exemplified in Banville (2009, 87). 2 Ireland as the geographical location of Arden is only alluded to (Banville 2009, 100). Critics consider the author a cosmopolitan (post)modernist (cf. Berensmeyer 2000, 247); specifically Irish themes are not characteristic of his work after 1980. 3 "There is, in the world of Banville's fiction, no essential difference between the scientist and the artist. They all arrive at their discoveries by intuition," Imhof states early in the writer's career (1989, 237- 38). Anglistik: International Journal of English Studies 27.1 (March 2016): 99-111. Anglistik, Jahrgang 27 (2016), Ausgabe 1 © 2016 Universitätsverlag WINTER GmbH Heidelberg Powered by TCPDF (www.tcpdf.org) 100 BARBARA PUSCHMANN-NALENZ imitates the paintings: Pan appears in Arcadia, which seems natural, but so does Death. In the end Hermes and Thanatos compete for supremacy (209). Ostensibly, the narrative obeys the rules of the unity of place and time, whereas the action is duplicated – like two of the characters. The fact that the genius Adam Godley is dying in the "Sky Room," his former study, after he has suffered a stroke which leaves him speechless, paralyzed and presumably unconscious, has drawn the family to Arden House. His second wife Ursula, his son Adam Jr. with daughter-in- law Helen, his daughter Petra and her suitor, two servants, the ominous male friend and Rex the dog assemble around his death-bed; yet another presence and activity contrary in mood and effect to the calamity of the occasion accompanies this day from dawn – delayed for an hour at heavenly bidding – to dusk. Helen, an actress and the beautiful wife of Adam Jr., has attracted the attention of Zeus, the Godfather of Greek mythology and father of Hermes. The latter's presence is required on this occa- sion, since one of his tasks, according to himself, is to serve as "usher of the freed souls of men to Pluto's netherworld" (15). Adam Sr., when the moment comes for his departure (18), will also be conducted by him. All this the god narrates as a "voice speaking out of the void" (14), even though "cast in the language of humankind, nec- essarily" (16). Golden-haired Helen, who in outward appearance can compete with her legendary namesake, is designed to play the part of Alcmene in a new production of Heinrich von Kleist's comedy Amphitryon.4 Like Alcmene, Helen Godley becomes Winter Journals for one hour the passionate lover of the godhead himself who, as in the Greek myth, assumes the shape of and marvelously performs the role of her husband, making her pregnant. Hermes colloquially narrates the myth of Zeus and Alcmene who mistook the father of the gods for her husband Amphitryon and became mother of twins, "Iph- icles, who was Amphitryon's son and therefore not much heard of again, and Hera- cles, whom my Dad was pleased to call his own" (211).5 Though this happened aeons for personal use only / no unauthorized distribution ago, Zeus wants to repeat his experience with the beautiful woman who merely plays Alcmene. At daybreak he leaves Helen Godley in a condition of dreamy euphoria, but during the fateful day he jealously accompanies "his girl" (e.g. 187, 298), not without having arranged for her husband's gift, a ring carved with the initial "A" indicative of further ambiguities (A for Adam, Amphitryon, Alcmene, orPowered by TCPDF (www.tcpdf.org) is it a Z? [294]). This joyful entanglement is not the only connection tied by divine intrigues: Hermes spends his time appearing as Duffy the cowman to Ivy Blount, offspring of a country squire and housekeeper-confidante to the Godleys, whom he leaves in such a state that she (successfully) proposes marriage to the cowman after inviting him to lunch at the family table (238-39; 266). Later in the afternoon Roddy Wagstaff, who acts as Petra's friend and has punctually presented himself for old Adam's demise, foolishly – or possessed by a god? – molests Helen and has to leave immediately after a thunder- bolt announces the jealous godhead's anger at this trespassing (256-58). Petra, the nineteen-year-old, obviously autistic girl who has thus been cheated, she believes, resumes her scarifying, thereby calming herself in a ritualistic and frightening scene (270-78).6 The saddening and delightful events, mourning and merriment, are thus presented as occurring side by side in one day and one place. 4 This novel repeats Banville the dramatist's engagement with Kleist (1994, 2000 and 2005). In his novel Eclipse (2000) he assigns to the actor Alex Vander the role of Amphitryon/Jupiter in the drama which stages a game about identities (cf. Radley 2010, 16). 5 The strategies Banville uses in his tetralogy, especially in Athena, to include myths as well as pictorial description are thoroughly discussed in Wilhelmy's study (2004, 338-67). 6 For the character of Petra as representation of a 'posthuman child' see Földvary (2014, esp. 213-14). Anglistik, Jahrgang 27 (2016), Ausgabe 1 © 2016 Universitätsverlag WINTER GmbH Heidelberg Powered by TCPDF (www.tcpdf.org) COMEDY FOR THE IMMORTALS IN JOHN BANVILLE'S THE INFINITIES 101 The Cast The company performing the action of this day belongs to two different spheres. The fact that humorous elements spread far into language is exposed not only by the tell- ing names, but equally by meta-narrative epistemological and phenomenological considerations which only a member of the Olympian family can express, because they relativize and dismiss every imaginative concept as anthropomorphous, inferior and as "your constructions," as Hermes condescendingly says. He goes on: "Were I to speak in my own voice, that is, the voice of a divinity, you would be baffled at the sound – in fact you would not be able to hear me at all, so rarefied is our heavenly speech, compared to your barely articulate grunting." Space and time are to the im- mortals "the infinite here" (16). This divine chronotope will at the moment of death be reflected for the mortals as "fixed for ever in a luminous, unending instant" (300) so that we must conclude that humans can finally somehow participate in the heavenly state of life everlasting. Regardless of their difference in nature, the gods share feelings with men, assum- ing an attitude which is a mixture of condescension, benevolence, and envy of mortal- ity. Besides the humorous, the satirical and the bucolic, the grotesque also permeates the plot, variously commented on as "absurdly" or "sadly comical" (e.g. 10) by the divine master narrator.
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