Abstract
Freddie Montgomery is captured and progressively framed by the interlocked narratives of John Banville’s Frames trilogy: The Book of Evidence (1989), Ghosts (1993) and Athena (1995). In each of the three novels, Banville’s narrator-protagonist emplots various works of art, be they real, counterfeit or metafictional, into his storied self, thereby crafting a Kunstwollen, an overly self-conscious and stylised discourse for his crisis of identity. Crucially, Banville’s artful narrative relies heavily on various aspects of the pastoral mode, including its characteristic nostalgia, its dynamic of retreat and return and its elegiac, redemptive project. Previous studies have neglected Banville’s use of the pastoral mode to facilitate Montgomery’s solipsistic narcissism and search for redemption and self-reification.
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Notes
- 1.
An earlier version of this chapter was published as part of my doctoral dissertation in Pastoral, Identity, and Memory in the Works of John Banville (Tübingen: Gunter Narr, 2017, 68–107).
- 2.
“I think that all happiness depends on the energy to assume the mask of some other self; that all joyous or creative life is a rebirth as something not oneself, something which has no memory and is created in a moment and perpetually renewed” (Yeats 1986, 306).
- 3.
The plot is based to some extent on an infamous art robbery that occurred in Ireland around 1986, “when a criminal gang stole eleven paintings from the collection of Sir Alfred Beit, at his home in Russborough House, near Blessington in County Wicklow” (McMinn 1999, 130).
- 4.
Ekphrasis was first learned as a tool of rhetoric and then became a skilled way of describing art and aesthetic objects. Using ekphrasis successfully was a means of demonstrating scholastic or authorial prowess, and eventually it became “an art that described art” (Welsh 2007, par. 5). Ekphrasis occupies a curious place between the realms of the visual and the linguistic. As Peter Wagner writes in Icons-Text-Iconotexts: Essays on Ekphrasis and Intermediary: “Ekphrasis, then, has a Janus face: as a form of mimesis, it stages a paradoxical performance, promising to give voice to the allegedly silent image even while attempting to overcome the power of the image by transforming and inscribing it” (1996, 13). Or, as Ryan Welsh puts it: “Despite all of the changes the word has undergone and no matter the argument making use of the term, the apparent conflict between image and word is central to the concept” (2007, par. 5).
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Myers, A.G.Z. (2019). Art, Arcadia and Images of Identity in John Banville’s Frames Trilogy. In: Riquet, J., Heusser, M. (eds) Imaging Identity. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-21774-7_7
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