The Poetics of “Pure Invention”: John Banville’s Ghosts

Auteurs

  • Neil Murphy NTU Singapore

DOI :

https://doi.org/10.37389/abei.v22i1.3851

Mots-clés :

Ghosts, Pure invention, Paintings, Intertext, Narrative, Vaublin

Résumé

This essay argues that John Banville’s Ghosts (1993) may in fact be Banville’s most technically inventive novel, replete as it is with multi-layered ontological levels that repeatedly bring its primary diegetic discourse into communion with other artistic forms – music, paintings, statues, as well as a narrative saturation with other literary antecedents that exceeds anything found elsewhere in his work. Ghosts demonstrates an implicit layering of dialectical levels, in effect a narrative enactment of the multiple worlds theory that so fascinates several of Banville’s narrators. Nowhere else does he generate so comprehensive a model of a multi-level ontological system in which the levels intersect so purposefully as Ghosts. This essay maps out a topography of what is effectively a sophisticated fictional variant on the scientific multiple worlds theory in Ghosts, and offers some perspectives on the significance of this aesthetic model.

Biographie de l'auteur

  • Neil Murphy, NTU Singapore
    Neil Murphy is Professor of English at NTU Singapore. He is the author of Irish Fiction and Postmodern Doubt (2004) and editor of Aidan Higgins: The Fragility of Form (2010). He has also co-edited (with Keith Hopper) a special Flann O’Brien centenary issue of the Review of Contemporary Fiction (2011) and The Short Fiction of Flann O’Brien (2013). He has also co-edited (with Keith Hopper) a four book series related to the work of Dermot Healy: a scholarly edition of Fighting with Shadows (2015); Dermot Healy: The Collected Short Stories (2015); Dermot Healy: The Collected Plays (2016); and Writing the Sky: Observations and Essays on Dermot Healy (2016). His monograph, John Banville (2018), was published by Bucknell University Press and he is a co-editor (with W. Michelle Wang & Daniel K. Jernigan) of The Routledge Companion to Death and Literature (2020). He has written numerous articles and chapters on the work of John Banville.

Références

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Weretka, John. “The Guitar, the Musette and Meaning in the fêtes galantes of Watteau,” EMAJ: Electronic Melbourne Art Journal, no.3 (2008): https://emajartjournal.files.wordpress.com/2012/08/weretka.pdf (date accessed 23 April 2016).

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Publiée

2021-02-20

Comment citer

Murphy, N. (2021). The Poetics of “Pure Invention”: John Banville’s Ghosts. ABEI Journal, 22(1), 109-120. https://doi.org/10.37389/abei.v22i1.3851