Representation and Performance: Dancer (2003)

Abstract

Introducing the work of John Banville, Derek Hand invokes the protracted genealogy of the novel in locating the formal and thematic loci of Banville’s fictions. Hand alludes to Harold Bloom’s recent thoughts on the significance of Miguel de Cervantes’ Don Quixote as an aesthetic symptom of European cultural modernity. Specifically, Hand is keen to highlight the internal paradox that is at the core of the novelistic tradition: ‘On the one hand, it aspires towards certainty, unity, knowledge, and completeness, while on the other, obvious epistemological anxieties and ontological uncertainties are deeply bound up with it.’Latterly, much postmodernist, or self-reflexive, literaryfiction has tended towards the latter pole, reflecting philosophical and theoretical scepticism about the natures of modern society and the so-called modern ‘subject’. The desire to cohere within the limits of a generic form are perpetually confounded by internal anxiety that meaning is always elsewhere, that there is always something absent. Thus, when one approaches the novel, one encounters a deeply anxious and/or defiantly playful form – one that is increasingly conscious of its provisionality. Hand continues: ‘The novel hopes to succeed in its efforts to tell readers everything. However, in the end, it can offer nothing but shards and moments of possible insight.’ Yet such comments should not blind us to the utopian and hopeful dynamics of the novel form: the lack of conclusiveness, which is its necessary condition, does not render the novel devoid of political and cultural agency. ‘Moments of possible insight’ may be provisional but the impulse towards such fleeting epiphanies transfuses the novel with its future-oriented potentialities. From a formal perspective, as Hand maintains, the novel is entirely cognizant of the limits of its unity and the partiality of its representations.