TELLING STORIES: ALTERITY AND ETHICS IN JOHN BANVILLE’S THE UNTOUCHABLE AND SHROUD

PIETRA PALAZZOLO

Focussing on John Banville’s The Untouchable (1997) and Shroud (2002), this essay looks at the possibility of performing readings relevant to ethics of historical events in the “enlarged” space of fiction. The two novels provide fictional versions of two of the most discussed scandals in recent history: Anthony Blunt’s exposure as the fourth man of the Cambridge spy circle and Paul de Man’s pro-Nazi wartime journalism. This essay illustrates how Banville’s subtle recasting of these two events constitutes an intriguing intervention on the complex issue of alterity and ethics, studying the novels’ exploration of a subjectivity “inmixed with otherness.” To this end, Palazzolo’s discussion focusses on the way the books examine exposure in its many forms (public/personal; historical/ethical), so as to reveal crucial intersections where the characters’ encounter with the many hosting and hosted others is best captured. Her analysis highlights the way in which these intersections depend on a notion of alterity that is mediated through the performative quality of language.

Geoffrey Halt Harpham’s article on ethics in the 1995 edition of Critical Terms for Literary Study links the public disclosure of Paul de Man’s wartime journalism (1987) to a turning point in literary theory that urged a reconsideration of previously neglected ethical issues and a re-reading of de Man’s own works. Harpham identifies a post-1987 period that developed in sharp contrast with “the Theoretical Era (c.1968-87),” and that advanced a “revised” notion of subjectivity: “a subject inmixed with otherness” (1995: 387). It is significant that Harpham’s essay on ethics was added to the second edition of the book, thus confirming the necessity to include an entry which could reflect more recent trends in literary theory. Indeed, the disclosure of de Man’s wartime journalism served to trigger renewed awareness of ethical questions which had persisted even in the preceding years, albeit channelled underground by deconstructionist approaches to literature.1 In recent years,

1 Simon Critchley has extensively argued for the ethical quality of deconstruction and the work of Derrida, by identifying its crucial links with the work of Levinas, 1992. See also his “Post-Deconstructive Subjectivity?” where he elaborates on some of his 146 Pietra Palazzolo together with mushrooming critical studies aimed at addressing this “revised” notion of subjectivity, fiction has greatly contributed to the debate, functioning as a befitting arena for the expression of these concerns with ethics. The selection of two novels by John Banville, The Untouchable (1997) and Shroud (2002), reflects my attempt to focus on ethics not as a series of moral codes and rules mirrored in narrative themes (Nussbaum 1986, 1990; Booth, 1988) but as the irreducible passage of alterity, which, as I argue, is best epitomised in writing and in the creative process as such.2 The focus of this essay, then, is not so much on the representation of the historical events referred to in the two novels—the public exposure of Anthony Blunt as the fourth man of the Cambridge spy circle on 15 November 1979 (The Untouchable) and the revelation of de Man’s pro-Nazi journalism reported in the New York Times on 1 December 1987 (Shroud)—but on the modalities of Banville’s recasting of these events as an intervention on the complex issue of alterity and ethics. Thus, the two novels can be conceived as an intriguing examination of the fundamental “inmix[ing of] otherness” into the notion of subjectivity. With no interest in exculpation, both The Untouchable and Shroud delve into the evasions of the human mind and the issue of agency by providing a fitting fictional arena for questions that history is not, perhaps, at liberty to pose. It is to the intriguing quality of this fictional arena that Miranda Carter refers in the prologue to her biography of Blunt (2001). Explaining her book as the result of her wish to compensate for the lack of compelling non-fiction studies, she also draws attention to the way the slippery nature of such a complex public figure has inspired some of the best fictional works:

It is remarkable that Blunt, in addition to appearing as at least three characters in Louis MacNeice’s work, and providing the inspiration for the central figure in Brigid Brophy’s novel The Finishing Touch, has been the inspiration for two, very different, masterpieces: Alan Bennett’s allegory of identity and personality A Question of Attribution and John Banville’s novel The Untouchable,which gives a subtle and compelling voice to Blunt’s wilful silence. Non-fiction has, for the most part, served him less well. (2001: xviii) earlier pronouncements on Levinas’ ethics and the notion of the subject, 1999: 51-82. For other studies focussing on ethics and its relation to literary studies, see Miller, 1987; Eaglestone, 1997; Rainsford, 1999. 2 In contrast to neohumanist critics who argue for a more direct ethical correspondence between events depicted in fictional works and their relevance to the reader’s everyday life, my analysis aims to explore ethics as an intersubjective relation that is manifested in the demand that the other poses to the self beyond moral constraints.