Who bagged the Booker: Banville, Black or Bart?
The 2005 Man Booker Prize winner John Banville talks to Sara Sayeed about why his books are an embarrassment, his fans are disappointed when they meet him and he empathises with Springfield’s naughty schoolboy - Bart “eat my shorts” Simpson
With characteristic pomp and flair, Oscar Wilde once indignantly huffed, “I’m not English; I’m Irish, which is quite another thing.” Despite protestations that the legendary Beckett/Joyce faction simply “looms over one”, John Banville seems set to be hauled into that prodigious “thing” that is Irish writing. Having read and been stunned by The Sea, I decided to wheedle my way into a PhD session with the professedly loathe victor of the 2005 Man Booker Prize. There, I became a little better acquainted with the man who “despises and is embarrassed” by his own work - but nonetheless is quick to concede that, regardless, they are indeed “better than everybody else’s books”.
From the sombre density of his novels, one could quite confidently presume that Banville will not be the chirpy sort. For me, however, his reputation as a daunting and austere figure was evoked by Google-folklore, and then reinforced by the somewhat anxious, bated silence that heralded his arrival. And indeed, Banville begins as anticipated - terse, hesitant to over-effuse or enthuse and with a disconcerting shrewdness in the eye. Yet swiftly enough, and perhaps loosened up by the ‘free drink’ so gleefully identified by Hugh Houghton, the threat of ponderousness is swept up and away into a dynamic, often jocular discussion.
Admittedly, it is heavily weighted to one side as Banville so relishes and revels in “writing-talk” that he completely quells our would-be brazen tongues, and impounds us in rapt attention. Well, I can only really speak for myself and, in hindsight, I hope I didn’t physically drool as dotingly as I just did verbally.
Banville is indeed an imposing figure. Author of some sixteen novels, respected critic and frighteningly erudite, it’s little wonder that he is often reverently regarded from a distance, to the extent that such appendages as ‘Banville the Austere’ and ‘Banville the Grave Intellectual’ probably wouldn’t go far amiss. Interestingly, it is not only the critics who displace the author from person into noun; this detachment from identity is felt by Banville himself. When talking about his work he jettisons the expected pronouns; discarding ‘my’ for a ‘John Banville book’, or even a ‘Benjamin Black book’. He utters such terms without flinching, as if multiple identities are quite natural. “Look,” he elucidates, “the person you expected to meet is not me, I didn’t write the books, that’s some other person I left in my study”.
“The person you expected to meet is not me. I didn’t write the books - that was some other person I left in my study.”
For any fellow literature students out there unavoidably bound to that (shudder) Norton Anthology, this ethos is all too reminiscent of when Barthes decided to kill off the author circa 1967. However, gleaned from his own words, Banville’s writing practice seems less the calculated erosion of authorial identity advocated by Barthes and more of a numinous process. “To make art you think down to some strange netherworld, where you’re not yourself. It’s a kind of sleeping and a kind of dreaming”. Banville asserts that this ‘self’ that presents itself - unwillingly - to the public, the one that “sits there wondering about his dinner”, is usually met with a little disappointment. He amusingly notes that many readers who venture to meet him glance around for a man of stature, like his protagonists, only to be thwarted by his wry yelp, “Down here!”
After meeting the author, ‘looking down’ becomes something you start to associate with Banville. Not so much because of any vertical challenge - really he’s comfortably average - but due to his constant, laconic self-deprecation. Granted, as critic Mark Gallagher laments, Banville “doesn’t do cheery”; he is sardonically funny though, which dismantles the pedestal somewhat and renders him remarkably approachable. Really, how can you not warm to a man who ventures, “I’m like Bart Simpson.” To clarify, just as Banville distinguishes between his many selves, this isn’t the haranguing “Eat my shorts!” Bart, but the one in the opening credits dedicating to the blackboard “I must get it right, I must get it right”. This is what Banville constantly aspires to – simply getting it right. And when he finally does? “Well, then I’ll stop writing”.
For Banville, writing seems to be an ever-enthralling escapade – despite all his sardonic compulsions, he expresses an unfailingly genuine relish for language, with its malleable capabilities and challenging ambiguities. Surprisingly, Banville declares, “Now I’ve got to a point, finally, when I’m just about beginning to learn how to write”. This sudden revelation has been arrived at via a new-found feeling of freedom from what has become the shackle of his distinctive first person narrative. He bemoans, “You know, I wrote so many bloody books and they’re all the same!” Christine Falls - authored by his alter-ego Benjamin Black - signified for Banville the first “real transition” and, he ventures, “was a way of breaking away from a rut that I was very deeply in. This was part of the process of change”.
The Sea seems to be a continuation of this process, being a marked distraction from his previous intense and psychologically-fraught protagonists, moving instead towards a more nostalgic account of childhood. However, it is his forthcoming ‘John Banville’ book, tentatively titled First Light - of which only 6000 words have been written and published - which will prove the real turn, as Banville breaks into the alien territory of third person narrative (although the ghostly ‘I’ still lurks fleetingly in the voice of God Mercury, mordantly remarked upon by his publisher as “another crowd pleaser, John…?”)
Yet, the exuberance of this newfound liberation has not gone unmitigated: “I do feel freer than I have in a long time. I do feel less oppressed by my own need to keep speaking in a particular voice. But I don’t know what will happen, if it will work.” This hesitance and uncertainty is a consistent trait throughout the discussion. Although Banville speaks with articulate assurance, at times his comments contradict each other, and even he concedes, “I’m answering as if I know the answers to these questions, but I don’t! I’m just making it up as I go along – as all of us, I don’t know what I’m doing until I’ve done it”. This, yet again, seems to hark back to that mystical experience of writing, where authorship becomes unconscious and instinctive instead of a deliberate act. Banville attributes this to the power of language and argues that “language will write itself, as language always does. I don’t believe that we speak language, but that we are spoken by language”. This comment is a near-perfect echo of contemporary Irish poet and acquaintance Paul Muldoon’s statement, “I don’t speak poetry, it speaks me”.
Banville’s writing reminds me of Muldoon’s poetry – both are pithy yet semantically adventurous, engaging in what I suppose could be termed ‘disciplined linguistic gymnastics’. Muldoon and Banville both have an ability to seamlessly intertwine the dirge and the droll; even the gravest depictions contain minute fluctuations in the language that invoke a lightning glimmer of wit.
Unable to shrug off this uncanny parallel and having been thus far dutifully silent, I decided to recklessly ignore my editor’s assurances to the PhD group that I would be “very well behaved and quiet”, err on the side of brazenness, and ask a question of my own. Having noticed throughout a constant return to the notion of “transition”, I wanted to know in which direction that movement was tending, and whether it was towards a more poetic medium. Unfortunately it seemed my query was more than a little overdue as it was something that Banville had been striving towards all along: “Auden said that the poem is the only art form that you have to either take or leave. You cannot read a poem and fantasise about sex. If your mind drifts from a poem, the poem doesn’t work…I like to write novels like that, in which you have to concentrate. I want it to be as dense and demanding as poetry, and I also want it to give the kind of pleasure that poetry gives”.
Banville distinguishes that “What you’re getting in a John Banville book is concentration, and what you’re getting in a Benjamin Black book is spontaneity”. Such emphasis on concentration and focus threatens to confer a schoolboy tedium on reading Banville. In keeping with this schoolboy metaphor, according to Banville, writing his books - and, indeed, reading them- is more like sex. Granted Auden, you probably can’t read poetry attentively while in a wanton state of mind. Nevertheless, for Banville, the focus you need in order to write poetically “is almost sexual”.
‘Banville’s prose is something of a coquettish sprite - it flirts with the reader, hints at some concealed pleasure, but never succumbs to candid realisation’
Before we arch our eyebrows in sceptical bemusement and wonder if that free wine was really a good idea after all, Banville clarifies: “Concentration on the writing object is like how the lover concentrates on the beloved. The lover knows that the beloved is a flawed creature like himself, but he insists that the loved creature is a Goddess. And that is how the artist treats the world – the world is constantly turning to the artist and saying, ‘Look, I didn’t expect to be noticed in this extraordinary way’. And the object blushes under this depth of concentration, this depth of attention. And that’s when real art is made – when the object becomes self-conscious and blushes.” Arguably, Banville’s prose is something of a blushingly coquettish sprite - it flirts with the reader, always hinting at some concealed pleasure but never succumbing to candid realisation. It is a tantalising puzzle and thus it does “give the kind of pleasure that poetry gives.” According to Banville’s definition, his work is nearing the accolade of ‘real art’: “I think real works of art are always closed, they contain their own enigma and they hide their own enigma, and this is what makes them last because they don’t give up their secret.”
It would seem, then, that language not only “speaks itself” but controls what it decides to say and when – it is its own agent and not, as we would like to assume, merely a serf of the vessel it finds itself in. We have all felt that internal bubbling of words which we cannot channel and subsequently emit in a sort of frenzied babble. But remarkably, Banville rarely succumbs to verbiage. He is Emily Dickinson’s fearful “man of frugal speech… [who] weigheth - while the rest - expend their furthest pound”. Banville’s control and facility with language, only achieved he argues “after forty years of scraping away at the pages” certainly is, as Dickinson suggests in her poem, something of which to be ‘wary’.
Banville’s method now involves writing sentence by sentence: “I finish a sentence before I go onto the next one. So there’s practically no revision”. The result is deceptively spare prose that veils a seething, complex sub-texture of nuance and motif. You don’t look twice when you read a ‘Banvillian’ sentence, you look thrice – and even then you might want to have another glance just to make sure. Certainly, this isn’t a process for everyone. Banville admits that he meticulously crafts the opening paragraph of every novel so that he can “teach the reader how to read. Not your way, my way. Many readers don’t like that and I sympathise with them. But I can do it no other way”.
But it’s not all ‘my way or the highway’. Yes, the novels are linguistically thick, but not opaque. The prose is just sufficiently perforated for the reader to engage and read-in their own perspective - that is to say, sometimes you can flirt back. As Banville says, “The Sea becomes a new book every time it is read. People are constantly telling me things about my books that I didn’t even know!” For example, as ventured by the PhD group, the novels seem rather saturated with gin. Whereas Banville’s interviews almost always seem to include some reference to a “glass of Sauvignon Blanc in hand”, the characters in his novels often have a tumbler of gin conveniently nearby. Banville , unfortunately, has not registered this insight. In contrast, one of the students has even ascertained that the characters usually go for the Bombay Sapphire brand.
Banville’s texts seem to almost invite these misreadings in their quest to be edifices of linguistic art – and language is one puckish slippery snake. That’s how Banville’s wife seems to see it, anyway – when the Book of Evidence was short-listed for the Booker, she exclaimed to her husband, “they must have misread it…but don’t worry, you’ll write another one!”
