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Forum on John Banville's fictions

The Fiction of John Banville (1)
Hedwig Schwall (KULAK Kortrijk / EHSAL, European Business School Brussels KULeuven; Belgium) Mirror on mirror mirrored is all the show: Aspects of the Double in Banville's most recent work.
John Kenny (National University of Ireland, Galway) Connoisseur of Silences: Banville and the Belief in Autonomy
Laura P.Z. Izarra (University of São Paulo, Brazil) “Disrupting cultural identities: fictional memoirs as historiographic critique?”
Debaters: Rüdiger Imhof and Derek Hand.

The Fiction of John Banville (2)
Hedda Friberg, “John Banville’s Shroud”
Desmond Traynor, John Banville’s Eclipsed and Shroud
Jurate Levina (Vilnius) “Generic Definition: Interpretation of Metatextuality in John Banville’s Birchwood”

Debaters: Hedwig Schwall, Rüdiger Imhof and Derek Hand.

PART I

Participants: Hedwig Schwall, John Kenny, Laura Izarra
Debaters: Rüdiger Imhof and Derek Hand

Different readings of Banville's work from a psychoanalytic, language and
cultural perspectives will be the focus of the three papers, which will be
followed by critical interventions from Professor Imhof and Dr. Hand and
subsequent responses to them. The debate will also have the audience
participation adding more thoughts to the forum.

Mirror on mirror mirrored is all the show: Aspects of the Double in Banville's most recent work.
Hedwig Schwall (KULAK Kortrijk / EHSAL, European Business School Brussels /
KULeuven; Belgium)

In Banville's work, the motif of the double is omnipresent, in various forms. Likewise, psychological studies reveal many aspects of this phenomenon, so I want to see first how theoreticians like Freud, Jentsch, Rank and Todorov described the double, and then compare their findings to the ways in which Banville explores the motif. As the twin set of his last novels Eclipse and Shroud deflects, reflects and refracts the problem in surprising ways, I will concentrate on the relationships between Alex and Axel, and the performative language they both use, in Banvillean forms of interaction.

Connoisseur of Silences: Banville and the Belief in Autonomy
John Kenny (National University of Ireland, Galway)

This will be an overview assessment of the oeuvre which will suggest that the most useful term available for holistic consideration of Banville’s aesthetics of writing is Autonomy, and certain attendant coeval meanings he attaches to the terms Silence and Belief. With his central theme of death, Banville is so consistently preoccupied with existential and metaphysical quandaries, and the basic matter of moral regulation, that he can be called a religious writer. The paper will combine discussion of Banville’s position as an Irish writer with a consideration of his more idealised themes and styles.

Disrupting cultural identities: fictional memoirs as historiographic critique?
Laura P.Z. Izarra (University of São Paulo, Brazil)

Banville’s belief in the multiplicity/inauthenticity of the self brings to light the question of identity as a process of “becoming”. Thus, I would like to draw attention to a rather complex cultural issue: how he represents the contemporary debate through the interrelationship of terms like “culture”, “identity”, “displacements/ dislocations” (historical and geographical) and “plurality”. From this perspective my argument is based on the belief that the ‘translational’ (Bhabha 1995) process of individual histories/fictional memoirs creates a symbolic textuality, that in Banville’s case, is resignified by his “aesthetics of existence” when constructing/disrupting cultural identities within specific contextual locations and social systems of value.

Forum on John Banville's fictions
PART II

Participants: Jurate Levina, Desmond Traynor and Hedda Freiberg.
Debaters: Hedwig Schwall, Rüdiger Imhof and Derek Hand.

Different readings of Banville's work, which will be followed by critical interventions from Dr. Hand and Hedwig Schwall and subsequent responses to them. The debate will also have the audience participation adding more thoughts to the forum.

Generic Definition: Interpretation of Metatextuality in John Banville’s Novel Birchwood
Jurate Levina

The paper presents an intertextual reading of John Banville’s Birchwood, focusing on the problem of generic definition of the novel. In my attempt to generically define Birchwood, I will rely on Genette’s concept of genre (or architextuality), defining the genre of a text in its relation to a previously written text/-s in terms of thematic concerns and of narrative mode. Determining the patterns of treatment of different textual units (from characters to genres), I will show that the dominant text in Birchwood is Marcel Proust’s A la recherché du temps perdu and will analyse the implications of the relation for the understanding of Birchwood.

Who Speaks? Who Writes? Who? Who Speaks Who? Who Writes Who? Who?
Desmond Traynor

John Banville has described his last six novels as being ‘a kind of examination of authenticity, how to be real, how to be what one is and not something else, how to be identical with oneself….’ and about ‘What it is to be.’ In my paper, I will concentrate on how power and authority are inscribed and irradiated in the prose of Eclipse and Shroud. What is the connection between Cass Cleave’s relationship with her father Alex and her teacher/lover Axel? Why is she depicted as ‘mad’? Does she threaten each man’s sense of himself?
Thus I will explore the paradox that in these books the authority for the supposed effacement of the author’s voice is none other than the author’s voice itself.

John Banville's Shroud
Hedda Friberg (Mid Sweden University, Härnösand, Sweden)

Filtering John Banville's Shroud through a raster of certain postmodern ideas, I examine what I see as the self in a condition of exile in simulation, in the novel. Reading Shroud in dialogue with Jean Baudrillard's early writings on contemporary culture (his vision of an age of simulation, an "implosive era of models"--especially as expressed in Simulacra and Simulation) I suggest that the novel's protagonist, Axel Vander, can be seen as moving in a state of exile in simulation. The concept of "Exile" in its original sense of banishment, and in the sense of alienation, or estrangement, points out that Vander's exile is triple-levelled: he is exiled from his people and, through a process of falsification, from their history; he is exiled from the (fake) likeness of a divinity; finally, he is exiled from his own self, which has become a copy without an original. A consideration of such metaphoric exile in simulation raises questions of shape-chaning, reduplication and imitation, authenticity and the disappearance of the real, and of the ultimate fluidity of identity.

IASIL 2004 is hosted by The National University of Ireland, Galway