DUBLIN CITY UNIVERSITY Indestructible Treasures: Art and the Ekphrastic Encounter in selected novels by John Banville. by Bevin Doyle Supervised by Dr. Brigitte Le Juez September 2015 2 Declaration I hereby certify that this material, which I now submit for assessment on the programme of study leading to the award of PhD is entirely my own work, and that I have exercised reasonable care to ensure that the work is original, and does not to the best of my knowledge breach any law of copyright, and has not been taken form the work of others save and to the extent that such work has been cited and acknowledge within the text of my work. Signed: _____________________ (Candidate ID No.: _______________ Date:________________ 3 For Roberta Gray 4 Acknowledgements My most heartfelt thanks must go to Dr. Brigitte Le Juez, for her encouragement, advice and endless support. Many thanks also to all in SALIS, and I must particularly acknowledge the help given to me by the SALIS Research Committee. My family, friends and work colleagues have also been a hugely supportive, and have bravely asked the question, ‘How’s the thesis going?’ on a regular basis, despite knowing how long that answer will be. More thanks than I can ever fully express goes to Ciarán, for his unrelenting patience, and for never giving up hope, even when I did (a little). 5 Abstract In the novels of John Banville, the search for authenticity is a well-established preoccupation of what we can refer to (after John Kenny) as the middle period of the author’s work and beyond. Beginning with The Book of Evidence his work is marked by aesthetic shift; primacy is given to visual art, ahead of the scientific motif of the tetralogy that preceded it and significant instances of ekphrasis appear. Ekphrasis is traditionally the domain of poetry and is a natural medium for an author who espouses the novel as a form that must go beyond narrative. Here, three novels are examined, The Book of Evidence, The Untouchable and The Sea. Each novel depends on a dramatic ekphrastic encounter that is the locus of the success and failure of the quest for authenticity that lies at the heart of Banville’s work of this period. 6 Table of Contents Declaration……………………………………………………….…………….………….2 Dedication……………………………………………….……………………………..…..3 Acknowledgements………………………………………….……………….……………4 Abstract…………………………………………………………….………….…………..5 Table of Contents………………………………………………………………………....6 1 Introduction: Research Question and Thesis Outline…………………….…..…9 1.2 Methodology………………………………………………………………….……11 1.2.1 Ekphrasis…………………………………………………………….11 1.2.2 What is Ekphrasis?..............................................................................12 1.2.3 What Does Ekphrasis Do?.................................................................15 1.2.4 The Dramatic Ekphrastic Encounter……………………………...24 1.3 Literary Review: John Banville……………………………………………….…..26 1.3.1 Art, Ekphrasis and Representation in Banville…………………...29 1.3.2 Ekphrasis in The Infinities………………………………………….31 1.3.3 Athena and Ghosts…………………………………………………..41 2 The Book of Evidence ………………………………………………………………..48 2.1 The Ekphrastic Encounter………………………………………..53 2.2 Undoing the encounter ………………………………………...…61 3 The Untouchable…………………………………………………………………….72 3.1 “the Frankenstein’s monster who would be Victor Maskell”…...75 3.2 The Death of Seneca ………………………………………………88 3.3 Maskell and Blunt, Poussin and David…………………………..93 3.4 The Death of Victor Maskell…………………………………….104 3.5 Ekphrasis in The Untouchable………………………………..…108 7 4 The Sea………………………………………………………………………………113 4.1 Pierre Bonnard……………………………………………….….115 4.1.2 Bonnard and Marthe………………………………………122 4.1.3 Bonnard’s work and method……………………………...126 4.2 Ekphrases in The Sea…………………………………………...130 4.2.1 The Grace Family………………………………………….131 4.2.2 Morden and Anna / Marthe and Bonnard ……….........147 4.2.3 Anna’s photographs……………………………………....157 5 Conclusion……………………………………………………………………..167 6 Bibliography…………………………………………………………………...173 7 List of Images………………………………………………………………….189 8 1 Introduction: Research Question and Thesis Outline The original purpose of this study was to investigate the use of ekphrasis in the novels of John Banville. The author’s interest in visual art and use of art in his work is well established, but a truly comprehensive study dedicated to ekphrasis in Banville’s oeuvre is lacking, and many questions remain unanswered: Is there continuity in the author’s use of art over different novels? What are the commonalities and disparities in his treatment of ekphrasis from one novel to another? Is there a particular approach to visual art and ekphrasis in the novel that we may identify as specifically Banvillean? What do Banville’s novels reveal about ekphrasis? However, such is the depth and breadth of the author’s textual engagement with art that a comprehensive study eludes the scope of this thesis also. The research process indicated the need to streamline the original research question, but simultaneously opened up a little researched strain of ekphrasis that remains formally unidentified for scrutiny. For the purpose of this thesis, I focus on The Book of Evidence, The Untouchable, and The Sea, because of how ekphrasis is used within the narrative of each novel. These three novels, more than any other from Banville’s oeuvre, best exemplify the strain of ekphrasis that is the subject of my research: the dramatic ekphrastic encounter. The Book of Evidence and The Untouchable both revolve around a principal ekphrasis in which the protagonist has a fateful encounter with a painting, an encounter that drives all subsequent action. This occurs differently in both texts, but there are also striking similarities, and I regard The Untouchable to be a development of the ekphrasis in The Book of Evidence. The Sea is quite a different novel, and something of a departure within the author’s oeuvre. Visual art is one way in which the novels intersect, and ekphrasis in The Sea is a development from the ekphrases and the ekphrastic approach of the earlier novels. In addition to paintings, photography plays a key role in what can be termed Banvillean ekphrasis. With Freddie Montgomery in The Book of Evidence, an overwhelming response to a painting unleashes something in him that had been heretofore contained. The result is a crime spree of theft and murder, immediate and brief in duration. Victor Maskell in The Untouchable is more circumspect in his reaction to the artwork he encounters, but it sends him on a life-long path of duplicity and treachery. Where Freddie takes ‘his’ painting by force and soon abandons it, Victor acquires his legitimately (or so it would seem) through a friend and lives with it for many years. Both characters find that an artwork unlocks something fatal within them. 9 The Sea is a somewhat different proposition to the other two novels. Max Morden is not a criminal, nor will he become one during the narrative. Morden is grieving for his wife who has recently died, and endeavours to effect a literal retreat into the past by moving to a boarding house in the seaside town where he holidayed as a child. Actual ekphrasis is used in an innovative way in that it is ingrained into the text, with ekphrases of the work of Pierre Bonnard not so much presented in the narrative, as forming part of it. In contrast, the dramatic ekphrastic encounter is of some photographs, and is purely notional. There is now a large, interdisciplinary and still growing body of research about ekphrasis. Likewise, John Banville’s work has proved stimulating for researchers across the span of his now forty-year writing career. A methodology section will to outline the term ekphrasis and elaborate upon some commentaries that have been of essential use to the current study. This is not intended to serve as an overview of research into and critical commentary on ekphrasis generally, which would require an entire volume or more. The literary review will focus on an introduction to John Banville’s work generally, and visual art in the author’s work specifically. In order to contextualise Banville’s use of visual art, some commentary is forthcoming on The Infinities, Athena and Ghosts, which will outline the relevant ekphrases in theses novels, but also clarify the reasons for their omission from the main analyses. I examine the main novels in sequence of authorship, which corresponds to the order of the complexity of the dramatic ekphrastic encounter found in each novel. The Book of Evidence and The Untouchable are considered first, followed by an analysis of The Sea. 10 1.2 Methodology 1.2.1 Ekphrasis Ekphrasis: a Greek rhetorical term for a kind of description.1 The above definition of ekphrasis is the eager student’s first clue that they have wandered into very deep waters indeed. The use of the words ‘Greek’ and ‘rhetorical’ in a companion guide to visual art ominously denotes a lengthy history. The remainder of the definition seems suspiciously general, and the questing student must continue further to find out what ‘kind of description’ could be involved. One will immediately find that definition of ekphrasis is still variable, and somewhat contested. The above wording is a particular example, but in general definitions of ekphrasis, while revelatory on first reading, often prompt as many questions as they answer. As a constituent element of the epic poetry of ancient Greece, ekphrasis is part of the infrastructure of Western literature, and has a history that extends back to the foundation texts of the Western canon, yet it is still being disputed and discoursed upon, still fruitful and dynamic for artist, reader and researcher alike. Comparative literature is the appropriate discipline for the study of ekphrasis, inherently interdisciplinary and comparative in nature. The author to whom this complex term, and concomitantly vast body of research, is being applied, is John Banville. Banville consistently produces writing which, being richly inter-medial and inter-textual, is also perfectly suited to the comparative approach.