To Sound and to Absorb: Art, Solipsism and the Problem of Mediation in John Banville’s the Blue Guitar and Wallace Stevens’ “The Man with the Blue Guitar”

ABSTRACT

This article will explore the intertextual links between Banville’s novel The Blue Guitar and Wallace Stevens’ poem “The Man With the Blue Guitar” in order to examine the correspondences and disruptions which arise when the esthetic frame claims to impose its own unique sense of order upon the world of sensations and phenomenal reality. Taking my cue from Banville’s use of the epigraph “Things as they are/Are changed upon the blue guitar” from Stevens’ poem – which is in the poem a response to the accusation that artists “do not play things as they are” – I argue that the novel and poem stage a confrontation between the irresponsible solipsism of the artist (as figured both by Oliver Orme’s kleptomaniac tendencies and his inclination to reduce the otherness of social reality into the ambit of the Kierkegaardian esthetic attitude toward the world) and the failure to internalize completely the essence of things as they are, which provides the ethical opening toward being affected by a sense of radical alterity which inheres in an awareness of our being in the world, which is itself an esthetic perception.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. See Hand’s assertion (quoted by D’hoker) in his John Banville: Exploring Fictions (Dublin: The Liffey Press, 2002) that Banville is “the true inheritor of two distinct Irish literary traditions represented by James Joyce on the one hand and Samuel Beckett on the other” (12).

2. Stevens could thus not fully subscribe to Marxism as a totalizing system of political and artistic practice. See for instance his letter written in 1935 where he ambiguously states that “Marxism may or may not destroy the existing sentiment of the marvellous; if it does, it will create another” ( Letters 292).

3. See also James Logenbach’s critical approach to the poem, which argues that the poem is “a recognition of the limited scope of poetry in a time when great demands were placed on literature” (171).

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Ian Tan

Ian Tan is a PhD candidate in English at the University of Warwick, focusing on the poetry of Wallace Stevens and philosophy. He is interested in modern and contemporary fiction and the relationship between modernist writing, poetics, literary theory and film, and has written and spoken widely on these topics. His essays and reviews on Wallace Stevens, James Joyce, Flann O’Brien and directors such as Bela Tarr and Alexander Sokurov have been published in the journals Journal of Modern Literature, The Wallace Stevens Journal, Literary Imagination, Exchanges: The Interdisciplinary Journal, Studies in European Cinema and Senses of Cinema. He has written two student literary guidebooks.