Pastoral, Identity, and Memory in the Works of John Banville

John Banville's works waver indecisively between modernism and postmodernism; his fiction embodies the viewpoint that "the anxiety of contamination in modernism is concerned with preserving the integrity of the autonomous art work so that it can conceptually counterbalance the potential senselessness and chaos of our world" (Kenny 17). This study offers a hitherto little explored vista on the Irish author's works, and argues that Banville is in many ways a post-/modern pastoralist. Indeed, pastoral, in its various post-/modern transformations, is well suited to John Banville's works, because both author and mode are prone to query their (meta-)narrative constructions in a self-conscious discourse caught between pastoral regression and post-/modern reflexion. Banville's protagonists harbour an Arcadia of the unconscious conditioned by a subtext of childhood nostalgia. Brought to the surface by a moment of crisis, the attendant process of narrative emplotment explores, subverts and transforms the pastoral mode into an ambiguous landscape of the perennial quest for a stable self. von Myers, Alexander G. Z.