Images and Banville's Fiction

UCC Library and UCC researchers have made this item openly available. Please let us know how this has helped you. Thanks! Title Beneath the penumbral glow: John Banville and the cinema Author(s) Kirwan, Mark Publication date 2016 Original citation Kirwan, M. 2016. Beneath the penumbral glow: John Banville and the cinema. PhD Thesis, University College Cork. Type of publication Doctoral thesis Rights © 2016, Mark Kirwan. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/ Embargo information No embargo required Item downloaded http://hdl.handle.net/10468/4186 from Downloaded on 2021-10-01T15:09:21Z 1 Beneath the Penumbral Glow: John Banville and the Cinema Mark Kirwan DISSERTATION SUBMITTED FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY TO THE NATIONAL UNIVERSITY OF IRELAND, UNIVERSITY COLLEGE CORK. RESEARCH CONDUCTED IN THE SCHOOL OF ENGLISH, UNIVERSITY COLLEGE CORK, UNDER THE SUPERVISION OF PROFESSOR GRAHAM ALLEN AND PROFESSOR ALEX DAVIS JANUARY 2016 HEAD OF SCHOOL: PROFESSOR CLAIRE CONNOLLY 2 Abstract This study focuses on the cinematic aspects of John Banville’s work, aiming to answer how the overt cinematic interest in the cinema in his later work is to be understood in the context of his writing career as a whole. His writing plays on the difficulties inherent in the relationship between appearances and reality, raising questions about how words and images, accurately or otherwise, represent the world. The thesis here is that the cinema has become a significant feature and powerful symbolic image of these preoccupations in the later period of Banville’s career, resonating with his earlier work while bringing a new frame through which to look at his novels and wider career. This cinematic interest continues the Banvillian tradition of appropriating other art forms in the construction of his novels and also is a deeply resonant form considering the predominant themes of surface, appearance and inability to penetrate reality in his work. Following this thread involves the consideration of many of Banville’s novels, naturally, but also brings his scriptwriting credits for film into critical discussion of his writing, as well as the cinematically inflected work of his Benjamin Black writing persona. As such a further aim of the research is to expand the horizons of study around Banville’s writing by looking at the more esoteric and marginal in his oeuvre and how they relate to his prominent, dominant, well-known works. 3 Contents Introduction Why Banville and Cinema? 7 Chapter 1 Gone to the Pictures: Images and Banville’s Fiction 14 Chapter 2 Picturing Theory: Scopophilia, Althusser, and Nabokov’s Cinema in the Cleave Trilogy 54 Chapter 3 “You’re Supposed to be Betraying Me”: Fidelity, Invention, and Intertextuality in Banville’s Adaptations 122 Chapter 4 Black Mirror: The Dark Reflection of Hollywood in the Benjamin Black Novels 194 Epilogue Reel-to-Real 246 Works Cited 255 4 Declaration This thesis is the candidate’s own work and has not been submitted for another degree, either at University College Cork or elsewhere. Signed, _______________________________ Mark Kirwan 5 Acknowledgements I would like to thank my supervisors Graham Allen and Alex Davis who have been so patient and understanding with their time, guidance, and support during my work on this study, and throughout all my years in UCC. I could not have wished for better mentors or more inspiring and dedicated people to work with throughout this process. I would also like to thank Dr. Rachel MagShamhráin for her work and generosity in organising and offering the opportunity meet and interview John Banville, and I would like to thank the staff of the School of English for all their work over the years. I would like to thank the Irish Research Council for funding my studies, without that support I cannot imagine how I would have made it to this stage, and the Higher Education Authority and Wexford County Council before them for their support throughout my MA study. Finally, I would like to thank my parents Éilish and Martin for their unquestioning and unending help over the years whenever I needed it, and I would like to thank Mareike, whose support and patience as I worked on and completed this study has been incredible. 6 “Above us the screen retained a throbbing grey penumbral glow that lasted a long moment before fading, and of which something seemed to remain even when it was gone, the ghost of a ghost. In the dark there were the usual hoots and whistles and a thunderous stamping of feet. As at a signal, under this canopy of noise, Chloe and I turned our heads simultaneously and, devout as holy drinkers, dipped our faces toward each other until our mouths met.” Max Morden, The Sea 7 Introduction: Why Banville and Cinema? John Banville’s writing career now extends over almost fifty years. In this time he has produced sixteen novels under his own name; they were preceded by the collection of short stories Long Lankin and have been punctuated in recent years by a series of novels published under the name Benjamin Black. These are self-consciously defined and marketed as genre fiction without hiding the author’s true identity.1 His output as a novelist has seen him collect a number of prestigious awards throughout his career, and the frequency of these accolades has increased in recent years. The Franz Kafka Prize in 2011 and a Prince of Asturias award in 2014 have affirmed his place as a writer of international standing and suggest that Banville’s canon will have a significant life beyond the lifetime of their author. The range of his work and heightened attention it has received has produced an increased scholarly interest. The major volumes of criticism on his work now extend beyond research projects and the realms of the academy to widely available collections of general critical studies, such as those of Joseph McMinn, Elke D’hoker, John Kenny, Derek Hand, which, in the last fifteen years, have joined and challenged Rudiger Imhof’s Critical Introduction to Banville as the essential texts of Banvillian studies. These works, covering distinct periods and individual novels in chronological 1 Numerous versions of the Black books even feature Banville’s name on their cover. See, for instance, the most recent Quirke mystery, Even The Dead, published in 2015, which announces its author with the introduction “John Banville writing as...” above “Benjamin Black” in larger print. Similarly, the television adaptation tie-in editions of the first three Quirke stories feature this curious supplement to the Black brand. 8 order, have been joined by more specific works by Ingo Berensmeyer and Mark O’Connell, as well as special editions of the Irish University Studies and Nordic Irish Studies Journal dedicated solely to critical essays on Banville. There is also a burgeoning collection of theses and papers by researchers from across Europe and further afield, providing further evidence of the wide appeal and significance of Banville’s work. With this increased interest in Banvillian studies comes increased specificity, where different theoretical approaches and thematic analyses are deployed to consider his work in a more general sense, leaping across texts, comparing and contrasting based on general themes and critical frameworks. The interests of various conference sessions and papers on Banville range across questions considering Banville’s relationship to modernism and postmodernism, to philosophical and psychoanalytical readings of his texts, to questions of how his works relate to other Irish writers, and so on. It is not surprising and, indeed, it is fitting that a writer whose work revolves around questions of identity and decentred narrators should give rise to so many diverse and differing interpretations and readings. These opening comments on the growing diversity of the Banville studies field are made with a view to justifying the central focus of this study. The intention here is to extend the boundaries of Banville studies further by considering the later part of Banville’s career and, in particular, the recurring image of the cinema in his novels, and his work in the film industry. Not only does the thematic content of his later novels prompt a question as to why Banville returns to the cinema again and again in his late period novels, it also forces us to consider the formal influence of the cinema on novel-writing and Banville’s novels in particular. The thesis here is that the cinema 9 is of formal and thematic significance in Banville’s late period, resonating with similar preoccupations of science and painting in the earlier stages of his career. Through close reading of his work since 1997’s The Untouchable this study will show that the cinema acts as a significant image throughout these works and that the world of the movies informs Banville’s aesthetic in the late period of his career, stretching across his different writing modes and personae. Banville’s novels, however, will not be sole focus here. His work in the movie business during the later part of his career coincides with the evident cinematic interest in these later novels. He has adapted his own work for the cinema, both The Newton Letter and The Sea, as well as the work of others for the cinema and, under the pseudonym Benjamin Black, he repurposed several scripts initially intended for television into crime fiction novels. Further to these pursuits, Banville’s writing as a reviewer and screenwriter has seen him in recent years dwell upon the cinema as a physical space and a creative form. While connecting the statements of reviewer or interviewee Banville with novelist Banville can be a questionable enterprise, the clear resonance of much of this material with his novel writing bears consideration when read side by side, shedding fresh light on these later novels.

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