'Ah, This Plethora of Metaphors! I Am Like Everything Except Myself': The Art of Analogy in Banville's Fiction (John Banville) (Critical Essay‪)‬

In an earlier study of Banville, I declared him to be a 'poetic novelist', in whose writings 'metaphor is supreme'. (1) Looking back at that study now, I feel that it never really illustrated, even when it tried to explain, what these phrases implied. As in other accounts of Banville's fiction, my own dealt quite extensively with allusions and references to poets who are clearly admired by Banville, notably Wallace Stevens and Rainer Maria Rilke, whose versions of imaginative yearning are extensively visible and audible in the novels. (2) In what follows I would like to illustrate Banville's use of analogies, especially those of simile and metaphor, and explore recurrent patterns of these tropes over the full range of the novels. I trust that this will become more than a trainspotting exercise, which simply lists and classifies dominant figures in the stories. The obsessive and elaborate use of analogy in these stories also raises questions about the nature of the narrators' minds, and about the ways in which experience and memory are understood and communicated. Analogy in Banville is not so much a stylistic choice or preference, but a necessary and vital perspective, the only way of rendering what memory recalls and what imagination creates. One of the most distinctive metaphorical conceits within Banville's fiction is that quizzical, troubled, and fascinated sense of the outer world having a life and character independent of the inner world of the narrator. Very often, this envious and admiring regard for the world outside the self, the world of nature or even that of inanimate objects, suggests that the outer, sensuous world has even more life and soul than anything possessed by the observer. Banville's narrators share this imaginative proclivity of attributing greater humanity to nature than they do to themselves, and are quite aware of the sadness which underlies this irony. For the narrators, everything outside them is animated, bewilderingly and beautifully alive and vital, all the while mocking the individual's effort to match this seeming intensity of being. This 'pathetic fallacy' is fundamental to the metaphoric imagination in Banville's fiction.