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The Empathic Paradox. Thirdperson Narration in John Banvilles

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The Empathic Paradox. Thirdperson Narration in John Banvilles Orbis Litterarum 66:6 427–447, 2011 Printed in Malaysia. All rights reserved The Empathic Paradox Third-Person Narration in John Banville’s First-Person Narratives Mark O’Connell, Trinity College Dublin John Banville is a novelist strongly associated with the mode of first-person narration. Where his novels do switch to a third- person perspective – much of Ghosts, parts of Shroud, most of The Infinities – the narration itself becomes highly problematic, and is always revealed as an imaginative attempt by a first-person narrator to move beyond his own narcissistic encounter with the world. The psychoanalyst Heinz Kohut’s theories about the relationship between narcissism and empathy are central to this essay’s examination of instances of third-person narration, primarily in the novels Shroud and The Infinities. Ultimately, it argues for an understanding of these problematic attempts at third-person narration as instrumental in the narrators’ efforts to transcend their narcissism and to advance towards a more empathic, less self-centred position in relation to others. Keywords: John Banville, narcissism, empathy, psychoanalysis, narrative, Heinz Kohut. I. In the period between the completion and the publication of The Infinities (2009), the contemporary Irish novelist John Banville gave an interview with The Paris Review in which he spoke about his initial attempts to write his previous novel, The Sea (2005), as a third-person narrative. Despite working on this version for eighteen months, he claimed, his efforts to break out of his accustomed narrative mode proved unsuccessful. ‘I suspect that the reason I don’t really believe in the third-person mode’, he said, ‘is due to the fact that I’m such an egomaniac. Unless it’s me speaking, it’s not convincing – to me, that is’ (Banville 2009a, 147–148). Although allowances should be made for a certain amount of 428 Mark O’Connell self-ironization, the comment nonetheless deserves to be taken seriously as a writer’s appraisal of his own tendencies. Until the recent publication of The Infinities, each of Banville’s novels since Kepler (1981) had, with occasional deviations, taken the form of the first-person confessional narrative. Where his novels switch to a third-person perspective – a brief section of The Book of Evidence (1989), parts of Ghosts (1993), much of Shroud (2002), most of The Infinities – the narration itself becomes highly problematic, and is, as we shall see, always revealed to be an effort on the part of a first-person narrator to recount a story from a point of view other than his own. This essay explores the ways in which these problematic attempts at third-person narration are instrumental in the narrators’ efforts to transcend their narcissism and advance towards a more empathic, less self-centred position in relation to others. The link, in the novels of the Art Trilogy, between the artistic imagination and ethical engagement with the world outside the self has been well established by a number of critics.1 Though these novels will occasionally be referred to, enough has been written elsewhere about them to obviate the need for a lengthy exploration of them here. My focus is primarily on Shroud and The Infinities, novels in which the question of narrative point of view becomes most intriguingly and intricately entangled with the question of empathy. I depart from existing criticism in two major ways here: first, in my focus on the question of third-person narration and, second, in the broadly psychoanalytic rationale of my approach to that question. In particular, the theories of the Austrian-American theorist Heinz Kohut are brought to bear on the exploration of what I refer to here as the empathic paradox – the problematic overlap of solipsism and empathy – by which these novels are characterized. Although the Freddie we encounter in The Book of Evidence is an extreme case, the distinction between him and Banville’s other protagonists is one of degree rather than kind. These men tend to be characterized by a bewildered scepticism about the inner lives of others; they are, in a sense, reluctant solipsists. This position is outlined in the early pages of The Infinities, when one of the characters watches a young boy through the window of a stalled train and considers the apparent self-contradiction of the existence of other selves. ‘How can he be a self and others others since the others too are selves, to themselves?’ he asks, before concluding The Empathic Paradox 429 that the whole problem is simply a matter of perspective, a kind of existential optical trick: The eye, he tells himself, 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 – and that is the simple solution to the so-called mystery. And yet. (Banville 2009a, 9) What this essay argues is that when we meet these third-person narratives in Banville’s work, what we are essentially encountering is an attempt to solve this ‘so-called mystery’ by addressing the problem of perspective, of illusory horizons. Before setting out this argument in relation to the novels themselves, however, it will be helpful to address briefly the idea of empathy, in particular its relationship to narcissism and to the concept of narrative itself. Heinz Kohut categorizes empathy as one of what he calls the ‘transformations’ of narcissism – as one aspect of the ego’s capacity to ‘tame’ narcissism and to employ it ‘for its higher aims’ (Kohut 1966, 85). Kohut, one of the most important post-Freudian theorists of narcissism, has done more than perhaps any other psychoanalyst (including Freud himself) to define this nebulous concept. In The Analysis of the Self (1971), he argues for an understanding of narcissism as a necessary characteristic of any healthy psyche. His departure from Freudian convention is a fairly radical one, in that he emphasizes interpersonal relationships over Freud’s theory of instincts. He uses the word ‘selfobject’ to point to the way in which the ego incorporates elements of alterity within itself – ‘objects’, as he puts it, ‘which are not experienced as separate and independent from the self’ (Kohut 1971, 3). A young child’s parents are, in Kohut’s view, ‘selfobjects’ in the sense that he or she experiences them ‘narcissistically’, supposing a degree of control which ‘is closer to the concept which a grownup has of himself and of the control which he expects over his own body and mind than to the grownup’s experience of others and of his control over them’ (p. 33). Kohut insists that narcissism is something that must be firmly established and negotiated in order to reach a mature and stable psychological state. Properly negotiated, it gives rise to such noble human attributes as creativity, empathy and humour – attributes that Kohut views as mature forms of narcissism. He links the capacity for 430 Mark O’Connell empathy with the stage Freud outlined as primary narcissism, in which the relationship between an infant and a mother takes the form of a kind of psychic merging: The groundwork for our ability to obtain access to another person’s mind is laid by the fact that in our earliest mental organization the feelings, actions, and behavior of the mother had been included in our self. This primary empathy with the mother prepares us for the recognition that, to a large extent, the basic inner experiences of people remain similar to our own. Our first perception of the manifestation of another person’s feelings, wishes, and thoughts occurred within the framework of a narcissistic conception of the world; the capacity for empathy belongs, therefore, to the innate equipment of the human psyche and remains to some extent associated with the primary process. (p. 85, original emphasis) Empathy, for Kohut, is therefore the ability to place oneself psychically in another person’s mind, to perform a trick of perspective, and this is an ability that must grow out of an initial narcissism. The apparent paradox in this position is resolved in the image of the infant who sees no distinction between itself and its mother. Just as such a merger is inherently narcissistic (in that the mother’s face is a reflection of the infant’s inner state of exultation or distress), it is also a profoundly empathic one. Without a barrier between self and other, that is, the affective interchange moves in both directions. Kohut most lucidly defined empathy as ‘the capacity to think and feel oneself into the inner life of another person’, as ‘our lifelong ability to experience what another person experiences’ (Kohut 1984, 82). As such, empathy involves an imaginative leap akin to the work of the novelist. To ask what it might be like to be another person is, in a sense, to create a character, just as the creation of a character necessarily involves asking what it might be like to be that particular (imagined) person. Others must be brought into focus by the imagination. Banville himself has claimed that ‘the world is not real for me until it has been pushed through the mesh of language’, and this would appear to be a way of phrasing this kind of soft solipsism (Banville 2009a, 135). The artistic imagination, and specifically the medium of narrative, must be brought to bear on the world in order for the self truly to connect with it. Any discussion of such matters as they relate to Banville’s fiction has to take into account the ambivalence with which they are handled.
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