Language, memory and loss

Kristevan psychoanalytical perspectives on intertextual connections in the work of Murdoch and banville

Wendy Vaizey

pp. 192-206

in: Anne Rowe, Avril Horner (eds), Iris Murdoch, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2012

Abstract

The work of Irish writer John Banville appears to have little in common with that of Iris Murdoch. She is a novelist and philosopher interested in questions of morality, the creator of plots of Shakespearean symmetry, and characters whose actions and fates appear curiously internally predetermined or imposed. He is a novelist whose fascination with aesthetics and metafictional modes of writing bears attributes of the postmodern. To underpin their claims for the postmodern elements of his writing, Banville scholars Brendan Mcnamee and Rudiger Imhof have pointed to the richly intertextual nature of his work, citing references to Nabokov, Beckett, Joyce and Proust.¹ I believe that Murdoch, too, merits inclusion in this list, and in particular I want to highlight a dialogic discourse between Banville's 2005 novel, The Sea, and Murdoch's 1978 novel, The Sea, The Sea.² Since both novels deal with questions of memory and loss, my analysis employs aspects of the psychoanalytical perspectives contained in Julia Kristeva's Black Sun, her 1987 study of depression and melancholy, in tandem with her earlier work on metaphor and synaesthesia in Tales of Love, published in 1983.³ I also refer to the work of the cultural historian Alain Corbin. My assessment of the uses of metaphor and, in particular, synaesthesia in the work of Murdoch and Banville focuses on exterior landscape in these two novels, finding common ground and drawing conclusions about the novels' treatments of themes of mourning and loss.

Cited authors

Kristeva Julia

Shakespeare William

Proust Marcel

Murdoch Iris