Ian McEwan’s Redescriptions

This chapter focuses on theories of modesty as redescription at work in literary texts. Ian McEwan’s Atonement, Saturday, and Solar demonstrate critical modesty in two interrelated ways. His novels offer a modest vision of literary efficacy as severely circumscribed by literature’s entanglements with the larger world. At the same time, to the extent that McEwan grants some relevance to the literary, it is through a style of epistemologically modest narration that seeks to redescribe a situation without judgment. The chapter illustrates the effects of a critically modest approach to reading McEwan’s fiction by contrasting it with different approaches by critics such as John Banville and Elaine Hadley. In contrast to these critics who find McEwan’s novels to be self-satisfied and politically quietist, I argue that McEwan narrates and formalizes the process of thinking in such a way as to intensify the mismatch between the reader’s experience of the world and the redescription of that experience in the novel. Novels such as Atonement, Saturday, and Solar demonstrate the value of epistemological modesty precisely at those moments when their main characters fail most spectacularly to achieve it.

From “dead saint” to “lyreless Orpheus”: post-traumatic narrativization of myths and fairy tales in John Banville’s The Sea and Anne Enright’s The Gathering

In The Sea (2005) and The Gathering (2007), John Banville and Anne Enright incorporate modernist and postmodernist intertextuality into accounts of bereavement. While the shattered existence of the protagonists is seemingly devoid of religious belief, they mobilize the palimpsestic immemorial past of mythological and fairy-tale intertexts to make sense of broken realities. The narrators’ self-portraits and invocations of lost people and places, oscillating between reminiscence and mythification, underscore postmodernism’s play with canonical stories. Both authors use mythological syncretism to express their characters’ quest for meaning: while Greek, Egyptian and Norse gods invade The Sea’s modern-day “Atlantis” (132), The Gathering is peopled with subverted Christian and Irish figures. However, rather than restoring coherence, myth and fairy-tale tropes are suffused with desperate irony, and the magic spell woven by mythological counterpoints turns out to be a post-traumatic, grimacing reflection of the characters’ troubled psyches, or an obfuscating screen. By interweaving and debunking seminal myths and tales, Banville and Enright give life to personal myths that bespeak the characters’ deep-seated sense of loss and disenchantment. The reader is thus left wondering if, by filling the gaps of post-traumatic memory with mythological rewritings, these defamiliarizing narratives of bereavement convey potential solace or reinforce their protagonists’ post-traumatic loss of landmarks.

The Blitz Gothic: War and Language in Elizabeth Bowen's "The Demon Lover"

The paper intends to explore Elizabeth Bowen’s stylistic choices in her wartime short story, The Demon Lover (1945), wherein the experience of war is rendered in gothic form as a supernatural occurrence. Bowen’s predilection for framing aspects of war in an inverted manner is well-documented in such novels as The Heat of the Day (1949), and her appeal to the fantastic is part of an Irish tradition, ranging from Bram Stoker to John Banville. The paper attempts to analyze the way in which the gothic mode, particularly at the level of language, contributes to a deconstruction of the war experience and a re-examination of the psychological horror of the Other. To this end, the paper employs theoretical concepts pertaining to the sphere of the “war gothic”, while also placing emphasis on modernist theories of style, specifically as they relate to Bowen’s “willfully tortuous syntax” (Teekell 61) which has an almost physical, claustrophobic effect on the reader.

John Banville’s Fictions of Art

This chapter discusses the fiction of John Banville, presenting the case that his complex meditations on the significance of art are central to a proper understanding of his aesthetic formation and development. In order to show how Banville’s work has consistently sought to explore the relationship between the mysteries of art and the enigmas of human experience, the chapter examines a wide range of his fiction, from his metafictional novels of the early 1970s, through the science tetralogy of novels published between 1976 and 1986, to his Frames trilogy of the late 1980s and early 1990s. The chapter concludes with a discussion of his post-2000 fiction, including The Sea (2005) and the series of crime novels Banville has published under the pseudonym Benjamin Black.

The Great Famine in Fiction, 1901–2015

This chapter considers Irish writers’ continual reimagining of the Great Famine and the way it has shaped understandings of the past and present. In doing so, it addresses novels and short stories from nineteenth-century writers such as William Carleton, Mary Anne Hoare, and Margaret Brew, who sought to explain or reinterpret the catastrophe while it was still a living memory. The return of the Famine in later historical and neo-Victorian fiction by writers such as Liam O’Flaherty, John Banville, and Joseph O’Connor is considered in light of the association between Famine fiction and various crises in the post-independence era. The discussion also extends to the resurgence in literary interest in the Famine in the 1990s and early 2000s, which, the chapter suggests, was due not only to the greater exposure of the Famine in public discourse but also to a revival of insecurities that seemed to belong to the past.