“Cloud’s red, earth feeling, sky that thinks”: John Banville’s Aesth/ethics

Authors

  • Joakim Wrethed Stockholm University

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.37389/abei.v22i1.3857

Keywords:

Stevens, Nietzsche, Deleuze, Husserl, Intentionality, Metacognition, Eternal recurrence, Becoming, Aesthetic, Hope, The Blue Guitar, Long Lankin

Abstract

John Banville’s long career can of course conventionally be viewed as a linearity, but it would be better seen as a form of spiral. This spiral is the hermeneutic process and concomitantly the movements of eternal recurrence in the oeuvre. In accordance with Nietzsche’s concept, these recurrences are not to be construed as returns of the identical. Rather, this ethic and aesthetic dimension in Banville is explicated as an attunement to the overall force of becoming. In agreement with Wallace Stevens’ poetics, Banville’s aesthetic is seen primarily as process. Through the immediate access to metacognition and reflection in the intentional act, Banville, through his protagonists, maintains a sense of wonder as hope in a fictional world often permeated by loss, melancholy and despair. This fictional trait is argued to have been there since the debut up to Banville’s more recent creative work.

Author Biography

  • Joakim Wrethed, Stockholm University

    Joakim Wrethed is Associate Professor in the Department of English at Stockholm University and has hitherto mainly worked in Irish Studies – especially on John Banville – but he also explores the contemporary novel in English more generally without any primary emphasis on national boundaries. The current research project involves “Writing the City of Stockholm: from Bellman to Stieg Larsson (1700–2000)” for The Palgrave Encyclopedia of Urban Literary Studies. Phenomenology, postmodernism, aesthetics and theology are overarching topics of his scholarly work. Some of the more recent publications have been on Irish Literature as World Literature, The Postmodern Gothic, John Williams, Tom McCarthy, aesthetics, the anthropocene and the posthuman zeitgeist.

References

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Published

2021-02-20

Issue

Vol. 22 No. 1 (2020): ABEI Journal 22.1 — Word Upon World: Half a Century of John Banville's Universes

Section

Critical Dialogues

License

Copyright (c) 2020 Joakim Wrethed

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.

How to Cite

Wrethed, J. (2021). “Cloud’s red, earth feeling, sky that thinks”: John Banville’s Aesth/ethics. ABEI Journal, 22(1), 183-196. https://doi.org/10.37389/abei.v22i1.3857