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  • On Not Being Found:A Winnicottian Reading of John Banville's Ghosts and Athena
  • Mark O'Connell

One of the more striking aspects of the work of the Irish novelist John Banville is its unflagging fascination with postures and impostures. Almost all of his protagonists are performers of roles, men who are constantly arranging themselves in some or other type of pose. Peopled as it is with frauds and masqueraders, his work might productively be viewed as a sustained exploration of the various ways people find of deceiving themselves and others, as a fiction about the fictions people make of themselves. Unsurprisingly, much of the critical response to the novels has focused on their engagement with problematic questions of selfhood and authenticity. The notion of the divided self has, in particular, proven an enduring point of interest. Hedwig Schwall, for instance, has described the oeuvre as "one big enterprise to deconstruct the illusion of (id)entity." "Each of the author's 'in-dividuals,'" she writes, "are utterly dividual, their split is their essence" (120). Brendan McNamee has linked the inauthenticity of Banville's protagonists with both their self-obsession and their self-division, arguing that the three are inseparable. At the heart of the question of authenticity, he argues, lies "the dilemma of self division." "Self-obsession goes hand-in-hand with self-division: a self looking, a self being looked at" (76). And John Kenny makes a similar point when he writes that Banville's narrators all suffer from an "excessive self-awareness" that "brings with it a sense of doubtful self-identity, suspect authenticity, and an agonized yearning for a sublimely idealized, preconscious, and therefore innocent, self" (170).

Critics have tended to view the creation of narrative as offering a form of resolution to this problem of self-division, albeit an incomplete and problematic [End Page 328] one. Elke D'hoker sees Banville's narrators' first-person accounts as not just representative, but constitutive of selfhood. These "never fully reliable first-person narrators," she writes, "can be observed in the process of representing their traumatic past, their tormented thoughts and divided selves in a coherent narrative so as to achieve a sense of self that is unitary, solid and clear" (2). The mode of first-person narrative, she claims, "seems to offer the possibility of meaning and control not available in real life" (173). Likewise, Derek Hand refers to the narrators' "search for an appropriate language that will contain their experience, and render themselves and their lives knowable" (165). Schwall, too, agrees that all of these "cleft protagonists...perform their quest for self through writing" (116).

If it is striking just how much of the critical work on Banville's fiction has focused on issues of selfhood, authenticity, and self-creation through narrative, what is perhaps equally notable is how infrequently (and, on the whole, fleetingly) the theories of psychoanalysis have been employed as a means of investigating these complexities. This, I would argue, constitutes a shortcoming in the criticism on a body of work that is so resolutely interior, so unswervingly concerned with the inscrutable forces and afflictions of personhood, with how the self is never at one with itself. If psychoanalysis could be said to have a single identifiable aim, it would be the scrutiny of peoples' narratives of selfhood, the exposure of their inventions and misconceptions about themselves. In its resolute interiority, in its repeated use of the confessional monologic form, and in its concern with the self and its troubled relationship to others, Banville's work is peculiarly suited to a psychoanalytic critical approach.

In the present essay, I depart from the body of criticism sketched above in two fundamental respects: I present the self-division and fraudulence of Banville's narrators as resulting from an elemental fear of connection and communication, and I analyze the fictions they narrate from a psychoanalytic perspective. I argue that the theories of the British psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott, in particular his notions of the True and False Self, are especially useful in illuminating Banville's complex—and, as we shall see, frequently paradoxical—view of the self and its interactions with the world. My focus here is primarily...

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