POETICS OF THE TITLE OF JOHN BANVILLE’S NOVEL “THE NEWTON LETTER”
The article examines the poetics of the title of John Banville’s novella “The NewtonLetter” (1982). There is a fundamental difference between this text and other novels included in the “scientific trilogy” of the writer, dedicated to the great geniuses of science: elements of a selfreflexive narrative, an introduction of an unreliable narrator-biographer, a departure from the main plot of the biography of the scientist). “The Newton Letter” appears as a postmodernist embodiment of epistemological and ontological doubt, a detailed self-reflection about the crisis of narration and nomination. The very act of writing a letter in its personal dimension emphasizes Banville’s recognition of the incomprehensible complexity of the orders of the universe, the chaotic mundane experience, the strangeness of human relations, and the impenetrability of the consciousness of the Other, as opposed to well-reasoned scientific report. The figures associated with the plot of the creative crisis are the narratorBanville; the narrator-Newton; Newton-Chandos; at different textual levels they all are expressing a deep language skepticism in the form of a letter.