“We know nothing except through style”: John Banville’s worldliness

ABSTRACT

John Banville identifies style as an attribute of world literature. As a novelist, he admires authors who make wit, word play, linguistic theatricality and virtuosity literary ends in themselves. In reviews and articles, he praises Henry James, James Joyce, Samuel Beckett, Vladimir Nabokov, Raymond Chandler, and other writers for their highly polished prose styles. In turn, critics single out Banville’s own finely tuned style as the defining trait of his novels. Invoking world literature theory, this essay works towards a definition of literary style and more particularly Irish style, such as Banville perceives it. As an aspect of world literature, certain novels display “extensibility,” which is to say that they borrow from and build upon prior novels, not just by repurposing characters, but also by adopting premises, situations, vocabularies, and style. Banville creates extensions of Nabokov’s Lolita in The Untouchable, James’s The Portrait of a Lady in Mrs Osmond, and Chandler’s detective novels in The Black-Eyed Blonde, published under the pseudonym Benjamin Black. Through such extensions, Banville elaborates a world style that enhances literary prestige and contributes to the system of world literature.

KEYWORDS:

• John Banville
• style
• novel
• world literature
• extensibility
• comedy

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Pater, “Style,” 412.

2. Banville, “A Talk,” 14.

3. Banville, “Foreword,” xi.

4. Banville, Birchwood, 22; original emphasis.

5. Banville, “Heavenly Alchemy,” 28.

6. Banville, “The Only Begetter,” 24.

7. Banville, The Blue Guitar, 3.

8. Ibid., 24.

9. Ibid., 151.

10. Ibid., 13.

11. Ibid.

12. Conley, “John Banville,” n.p.

13. Acocella, “Doubling Down,” 104.

14. Tonkin, “The Wrong Choice in a List Packed with Delights,” 3.

15. Macfarlane, “The World at Arm’s Length,” 19.

16. “scrimshaw, n.” OED.

17. Phillips, “The Case of Isabel Archer,” n.p.

18. Ibid.

19. Flaubert, The Letters of Gustave Flaubert 1830–1857 Vol. 1, 154.

20. Banville, “It Is Only A Novel,” 23. Connolly “In Conversation with John Banville and Ed Victor,” 27:54.

21. Ellmann, Elizabeth Bowen, 145.

22. Hogan, “A Blessed World, in Which We Know Nothing except through Style,” n.p.

23. Arnold, The Study of Celtic Literature, 121.

24. Ibid.

25. Pfeiffer, “To Make Fiction as Dense and Demanding as Poetry,” 27.

26. Boxall, “Unknown Unity: Ireland and Europe in Beckett and Banville,” 48.

27. McKeon, “John Banville: The Art of Fiction No. 200,” 134.

28. Haughton and Radley, “An Interview with John Banville,” 860.

29. Banville, The Singularities 97.

30. Wilde, The Plays of Oscar Wilde, 415.

31. Banville, The Singularities, 175.

32. Banville’s precursors are almost uniformly European and male, as Michael Springer notes, with reference to Banville’s “persistent and searching interrogation of a range of literary, philosophical, and artistic forebears is a way of understanding the place of the work of literature in European culture and thought.” Springer, “Introduction,” 5.

33. Banville, “Bloomsday, Bloody Bloomsday,” 210.

34. Banville, “Waiting for the Last Word,” 36.

35. Kenny, John Banville, 42.

36. Connolly, “In Conversation with John Banville and Ed Victor,” 21:40.

37. Banville, “It Is Only a Novel,” 23.

38. Banville, “Novelist of Swiftean Fury,” 22.

39. Damrosch, What is World Literature?, 5.

40. Ibid., 6. There is debate about whether world literature constitutes a “system” of not. Pascale Casanova uses the term to designate the aggregate of texts from various regional and national origins that are stratified within the field of world literature. World literature functions as a system in that it is self-constituting and changeable. Systemic analysis implies a sociological approach, as taken by Casanova and Moretti, rather than an evaluation of the value of a literary work. Some critics, with Pierre Bourdieu’s analysis of cultural distinction and taste in mind, prefer the term “field” over “system.” Terms and stakes are summarised by Theo D’haen, The Routledge Concise History of World Literature, 100–16.

41. Moretti, “Conjectures,” 152.

42. Ibid., 157, 158; original emphasis.

43. Ibid., 159.

44. Warwick Research Collective, Combined and Uneven Development, 8, 14; original emphasis.

45. Damrosch, Comparing the Literatures, 269.

46. Cleary, Modernism, Empire, World Literature, 155.

47. Ibid., 191.

48. Banville, “Waiting for the Last Word,” 36.

49. Quoted in Cordingly, “Beckett’s ‘Masters,’” 512.

50. Banville, “Waiting for the Last Word,” 36.

51. Beckett, Molloy, 8.

52. Black, The Silver Swan, 220.

53. Banville, The Book of Evidence, 24, 54, 95.

54. Ibid., 4.

55. Black, The Lemur, 9.

56. McKeon, “John Banville: The Art of Fiction No. 200,” 140.

57. Banville, The Book of Evidence, 169.

58. McKeon, “John Banville: The Art of Fiction No. 200,” 140.

59. Ibid., 138.

60. Banville, The Untouchable, 307.

61. Ibid., 252.

62. Ibid., 109.

63. Ibid., 101.

64. Ibid., 321.

65. Ibid., 279.

66. Ibid., 317.

67. Banville, “Bread or Madeleines,” 20. Banville’s opinion of Nabokov sometimes wavers. He complains, “there’s no music in Nabokov” (McKeon, “John Banville: The Art of Fiction No. 200,” 140). To Banville’s nose, Nabokov’s English bears “a smell of dictionaries and grammars,” as well as the lustier odours of meat and flowers (Banville, “Vladimir Nabokov,” 23).

68. Nabokov, Lolita, 9.

69. Ibid., 23, 15, 167.

70. Ibid., p. 262.

71. Banville, The Book of Evidence, 78.

72. Ibid., 49.

73. Ibid., 202.

74. Banville, Athena, 1.

75. Banville, The Blue Guitar, 17, 40.

76. Ibid., 16.

77. Peter Hitchcock, The Long Space, 7.

78. Banville, Mrs Osmond, 15, 55.

79. Ibid., 146, 18.

80. Ibid., 93.

81. Ibid., 235.

82. Ibid., 109.

83. Black, The Black-Eyed Blonde, 291.

84. Springer and D’hoker both see ventriloquism as central to Banville’s stylistic achievements. Springer, “Introduction,” 1; D’hoker, “From Isabel Archer to Mrs Osmond,” 68.

85. Ibid., 39.

86. Ibid., 91.

87. Ibid., 53.

88. Ibid., 137, 179.

89. Ibid., 226, 198.

90. Ibid., 58, 111, 128, 248.

91. Ibid., 37.

92. Casanova, The World Republic of Letters, 86, 85.

93. Ibid., 181.

94. Banville, “It Is Only a Novel,” 23.