Versions of Banville: Versions of Modernism

Abstract

John Banville has always spoken highly of literature that has nothing to say. In several interviews over the last two decades, he has repeatedly stressed the silent, or speechless, essence of great literary art and artists. This assertion confirms one common view of Banville, that of a formalist, a stylist who has little regard for political or popular novels with a didactic dimension. When asked to name examples of this unique kind of writing, he usually offers the names of classic modernists — Joyce, Kafka, Henry James, Beckett — writers for whom style is supposedly everything. In an interview with Melvyn Bragg on The South Bank Show he said he liked to think of Kafka’s dictum — the artist is someone with nothing to say — as his personal literary motto.¹ Whatever sense or coherence we attribute to Banville’s many public remarks about literature — both his own and that of those writers he most admires — it is clear that these observations are part of his construction of a special kind of literary persona, that of a ‘man of letters’ who discriminates strongly between competing definitions of ‘great’ art, a writer who uses interviews and reviews to proclaim the gospel of an art without attitude.