1 Introduction 2 Banville's Narcissists

Notes 1 Introduction 1. There is a degree of uniformity to these characters, their situations and their mindsets, that allows us to speak of a typical Banville protagonist with as much legitimacy as we may speak of a typical Beckett or Kafka protagonist. There is an undeniable continuity – much more pronounced than mere fictional family resemblance – between all of Banville’s protagonists, stretching arguably from Nightspawn’s Ben White, but certainly from Freddie Montgomery in The Book of Evidence, to The Sea’s Max Morden. 2. Freud’s first use of the term ‘narcissism’ appears in a footnote added in 1910 to his ‘Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality’, to denote a phase in the development of male homosexuality. His interpretation of the classical myth is, in this sense, quite a literal one. 2 Banville’s Narcissists 1. This article of faith is one which character and creator evidently hold in common. In the essay ‘Making Little Monsters Walk’, Banville delivers the following series of excessively lofty aphoristic paradoxes: ‘Nietzsche was the first to recognize that the true depth of a thing is in its surface. Art is shallow, and therein lies its deeps. The face is all, and, in front of the face, the mask.’ (Banville, 1993c: 108). 2. Kleist and Amphitryon have proven enduring inspirations for Banville. The Infinities is plainly based on the story, and contains a number of meta- fictional allusions not just to the story itself, but to Banville’s own, not particularly successful, stage adaptation of it. One of the novel’s central characters, the actress Helen, is preparing for her role as Amphitryon’s wife Alcemene in the play. The version in question is clearly Banville’s own adaptation, as she mentions it ‘all takes place round Vinegar Hill, at the time of the Rebellion’ (Banville, 2009b: 192). 3. A passage such as this one from Lolita – particularly with respect to the comic vainglory of its tone – imparts a strong sense of Cleave’s literary bloodline: ‘Let me repeat with quiet force: I was, and still am, despite mes malheurs, an exceptionally handsome male; slow- moving, tall, with soft dark hair and a gloomy but all the more seductive cast of demeanor. Exceptional virility often reflects in the subject’s displayable features a sul- len and congested something that pertains to what he has to conceal. And this was my case. Well did I know, alas, that I could obtain at the snap of my fingers any adult female I chose’ (Nabokov, 1959: 27). 211 212 Notes 4. It is very likely significant that Lydia’s real, or given, name is Leah: in the Book of Genesis, Leah is the first of Jacob’s wives and the mother of six of the twelve tribes of Israel. 5. This aspect of Vander’s character is modelled on the life of Paul de Man, who was posthumously revealed to have contributed almost 200 articles to the Nazi- controlled Belgian collaborationist newspaper Le Soir between 1940 and 1942. Much of the language and detail of Vander’s pronouncements is evidently appropriated from de Man’s 1941 piece ‘The Jews in Contemporary Literature’, in which he argues that Western civilisation has remained healthy only insofar as it has resisted ‘the Semitic infiltration of all aspects of European life’ and concludes that banishing the Jews to an island colony remote from Europe would lead to absolutely no ‘deplorable consequences for literature’ (Hamacher et al., 1998: 45). Banville also acknowledges a debt to Louis Althusser’s posthumously published autobiography, The Future Lasts a Long Time, in which he discusses his killing of his wife. Readers might also catch fleeting glimpses of Nabokov’s public persona in Vander’s high patri- cian arrogance. When, after a guest lecture in Turin, he is asked what his view of the current state of cultural criticism is, Vander replies that it is ‘“Very fine, from this elevation, thank you”’ (Banville, 2002: 97). The quip is a paraphrase of one of Nabokov’s more notoriously arrogant interview performances, in which he was asked about his position in the world of letters and replied that he had a ‘jolly good view from up here’ (Nabokov, 1990: 181). 6. In this respect, Shroud’s opening powerfully recalls that of The Book of Evidence, where Freddie, as we shall see, is concerned first and foremost with recording impressions of himself as he imagines others to receive them. 7. This view of love and sexuality is prevalent throughout Banville’s work. In The Infinities, for instance, the narrator, ostensibly the god Hermes, char- acterises love among mortals as self- regard projected outward: ‘Show me a pair of them at it and I will show you two mirrors, rose- tinted, flatteringly distorted, locked in an embrace of mutual incomprehension. They love so they may see their pirouetting selves marvellously reflected in the loved one’s eyes’ (Banville, 2009b: 74). 8. The allusion appears to be to the events of ‘Bloody Thursday’, 15 May 1969, when the then California governor Ronald Reagan sent 2700 National Guard troops into People’s Park (a formerly empty lot on the Berkeley campus expropriated and turned into a public park by students and other radicals) to forcibly remove a group of peaceful protesters. The events, in which over 100 people were hospitalised, with one fatally shot and one blinded, came to be seen as a pivotal moment in the tensions between radicals and the establishment which characterise the late 1960s. This is the context to which Banville is alluding. Freddie, however, is merely alluding to the smell of tear- gas: his interest in such things goes no further. It is, it should be noted, merely ‘a faint whiff’. Notes 213 3 Missing Twins 1. These celestial associations are also present in The Sea, where the surname Grace is given to the twins Chloe and Myles. 2. For a comprehensive discussion of Banville’s use of Faustian structure and motifs, see the chapter on Mefisto in Rüdiger Imhof’s John Banville: a Critical Introduction (1997). 3. Felix also repeatedly addresses Gabriel Swan as ‘bird-boy’. This is principally a Dioscurean allusion, linking him to the twins born of Zeus’s rape (in swan form) of Leda. It might also, however, be interpreted as suggestive of Pinocchio’s long, beak- like nose. 4. In Klein’s developmental model of the human psyche, the infant is incapable of reconciling the mother towards whom it feels anger and hatred – the mother, that is to say, who seems to gratuitously withhold the breast – with the mother it loves and desires. Neither is it capable of reconciling its own painful feelings of distress, frustration and dread with its pleasant feelings of contentment and gratification. This leads to a ‘splitting’ process, whereby the child creates a ‘good’ and ‘bad’ mother, a ‘good’ and ‘bad’ breast, and a ‘good’ and ‘bad’ self. It is only after the child is weaned that it begins to integrate, albeit imperfectly, these previ- ously ‘split off’ aspects of self and other and thereby reaches what Klein refers to as the ‘depressive position’. It is worth noting the resemblance between Klein’s notion of the internalised good object and Kohut’s ide- alised selfobject, as well as the correspondence between her ‘depressive position’ and his notion of optimal frustration, as outlined in this book’s introduction. 5. See Lacan’s The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (1997). 6. Elke D’hoker suggests that this Kleinian model ‘proves particularly inter- esting in the context of Banville’s complementary female figures because the very first instantiation of an oppositional female pair can be found in the split mother figure of Birchwood’ (D’hoker, 2004a: 142). 7. The return home of a twin brother in the guise of a cousin seems to point towards Nabokov’s Ada, a novel which exhaustively explores the narcissistic personality, incestuous twin relationships, and the connections between them. Ada’s narrator Van Veen is perhaps the most narcissistic of all Nabokov’s protagonists. His self- infatuation and his erotic obsession with his twin sister Ada, whom he originally believes to be his cousin, are of a piece. The fact that one of the twins in the circus is named Ada might also be taken as a nod toward Nabokov’s novel. 8. In Gnostic mythology the name Sophia is that which is given to the final and, along with Christ, lowest manifestation of God. In most of the Gnostic cosmologies, it is Sophia who gives birth to the demiurge and is thus responsible for the creation of the material universe. She calls the being Ildabaoth, meaning ‘child of chaos’. Sophia, then, is both wisdom and chaos. ‘Chance’ is both the first and the last word of Mefisto, a novel about the failure to impose even a superficial order upon the original 214 Notes chaos of the universe. Whether Banville has this Gnostic sense of the name Sophia in mind is difficult to say with any certainty, but its implica- tions do seem relevant to the novel’s themes of knowledge and chaos. 9. Interestingly, Banville repeats this formulation almost word for word in Athena. In his description of a fictional portrait of his lover, Freddie notes that ‘a crease runs athwart it like a bloodless vein’. The next sentence – ‘Everything is changed and yet the same’ – might well be read as an oblique allusion to the recurrence in a slightly altered form of a sentence from a previous work (Banville, 1995: 232). 10. This description of Gabriel’s defaced condition is suggestive of the bird- like mask worn by doctors in continental Europe during the time of the plague.

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