Healing Light Illuminates John Banville's New Novel

A review of mine appeared in The Plain Dealer this Sunday, October 28; here's the link to that review posted on the paper’s website: http://www.cleveland.com/books/index.ssf/2012/11/john_banville_makes_ancient_li.html#incart_flyout_entertainment
My post here offers my fuller, original thoughts at about twice the length of the edited version appearing in the newspaper:

A Healing Light Illuminates John Banville’s New Novel Ancient Light.

Alex Cleave has turned sixty-five, an age when the siren song of memory can call with particular urgency. It is a memory of adolescence that fills the character’s mind in this brilliant new novel by award-winning Irish writer John Banville. During the summer Alex was fifteen, his best friend’s mother – Mrs. Gray – seduced him.

The extremity of the subject is complicated in John Banville’s new novel by telling the story from Alex’s doubly unreliable point of view, reflecting both the adolescent’s unsteady initiation into sex and the aging man’s searching yet nostalgic memories of youth.

After young Alex’s first encounter with Mrs. Gray, “the April day that I stepped out into was, of course, transfigured, was all flush and shiver and skimming light, in contrast to the sluggishness of my sated state.” The singing lyricism of memory is shadowed here by irony (“of course”). The disturbing yet compelling beauty of the novel is that it balances luminous prose with a darkly realistic sense of life’s fragilities and fatalities.

In the novel, a series of deaths confront Alex Cleave, including the “decade-long grief” resulting from the tragic and mysterious suicide of his adult daughter, Cass. His grief floods his consciousness, just as it haunts his wife Lydia, yet Alex also manages partly in defense to immerse himself in memories of his adolescent tryst with Mrs. Gray.

Ancient Light – Banville’s latest work after The Infinities, the Booker Prize winning The Sea, and the dark Benjamin Black mysteries – contains many flashes of comedy. Alex Cleave is a stage actor toward the end of his career (he had a disastrous on-stage breakdown ten years before; that experience and the discovery of his daughter’s suicide are narrated in Banville’s earlier novel Eclipse from 2001). To his delight, he has been offered a film role, in a docudrama, playing opposite the beautiful young star Dawn Devonport, “grave and grey-eyed, sweetly sad, omnivorously erotic.”

The mature Alex Cleave is as capable of delight as of profound self-criticism and is the source of the novel’s probing, humane comedy. Compassionate and ironically apologetic, Alex is always as open to life as he is alert to death’s power.

The role he plays in his film is that of the aging and corrupt academic Axel Vander. Even as Dawn, the young star, is seduced by him, she exposes him as a fake, an “old monster” with a fascist past and a false identity. (Vander is the subject of Banville’s Shroud from 2003; he is reminiscent of the disgraced literary theorist, the late Paul de Man.)

Ancient Light is, in any case, an independent work. Its tragicomic power arises from the collision between its plots – the headlong rush of Alex’s often bawdy evocation of being seduced as an adolescent by an older woman versus the developing possibility that the aging Alex may attempt to seduce the young actress. To do so would create a dangerous off-screen echo of their on-screen plot, and such a scenario would also be an inverted repetition of what happened to Alex at fifteen.

Even, as it happens, an incestuous repetition: Alex’s memories of his late daughter continually impinge on his meetings with Dawn, and in one of the novel’s sinister parallels the actress attempts suicide, echoing the daughter Cass’s suicide. Feeling himself become more and more “a thing of fragments,” Alex finds the example of Vander’s rapaciousness almost “overtaking” him. Then, an even more sinister parallel involves the suggestion that Cass was driven to suicide ten years before by the monstrous Axel Vander, whom Alex Cleave plays in the film.

Late in the novel, Alex writes, “But what, you will be asking, what happened” between him and Dawn? In unexpected ways, Alex holds his own against the looming tragic possibilities of the plot; he manages to refuse the pressure to descend to the lowest level or to act out the most destructive roles.

If we were to subtract Alex’s probing, mordant, and humane voice from the novel, the multiple parallels in its plotting could resemble a rather ornate maze, and Banville’s lush prose can verge on the overwritten, that of a “chap who writes like Walter Pater in a delirium.” The words are Alex’s about the screenwriter of the film he is in – known as JB.  Part of the comedy of John Banville’s novel, with its moments of intentional self-parody, is that it includes a self-mocking portrait of the novelist. And it is testimony to how fine a character Alex is that Banville’s surrogate JB remarkably befriends him toward the end of the novel; they are to go to California to attend an Axel Vander conference together.

By the ending of this brilliant novel, Alex discovers that he “was mistaken about everything,” above all about Mrs. Gray, and the plot reversals involving her are as stunning and moving as those in Julian Barnes’ recent The Sense of An Ending. Alex is a wonderfully living character, who honors the elegiac wisdom of Ancient Light, the light from the past, and it is that contingent, fragile, yet healing light which illuminates Banville’s tragicomic new novel: “all my dead are all alive to me, for whom the past is a luminous and everlasting present; alive to me yet lost, except in the frail afterworld of these words.”

Conclusion of "Under Western Eyes" and Silence (plus a note on Alexander Ghindin)

On Friday (August 5^th), I was in the audience of a master class offered by the great Russian pianist Alexander Ghindin to three participants in the Cleveland International Piano Competition. Mr. Ghindin, a member of the competition jury, is a brilliant teacher as well as pianist, offering a wealth of insight and advice without diminishing the student. The second pianist had performed the Rachmaninoff Piano Sonata, op. 36 (original version) during the semi-finals of the competition, and when he played the first bar for Ghindin, the Russian immediately offered extraordinary suggestions to reconceive and release the power of the opening. The most poignant moment in this session occurred when the slow theme sounded out less than two minutes into the sonata. Again, Mr. Ghindin offered a suggestion, and when he illustrated how the passage should be phrased, he played with such sorrow and tenderness that tears came to my eyes. Then he spoke of a Russian notion of pathos – of the isolation of suffering, of sadness, compassion, and yearning for happiness all mixed together. But it was his playing of the single line of music which spoke most eloquently of these things, incredibly tender and piercing. [Here is a link to one of Ghindin's cds: Rachmaninov: Piano Concertos 1 & 4 (Original Versions).]

There is a powerful expression of such empathic sorrow in Conrad's creation of the Russian women characters in Under Western Eyes. These characters struggle for meaning in a world where meaning is silenced; in such a realm, the capacity to empathize and to perceive another without blinders is endangered, for in this world compassion is manipulatively selective or erased from consciousness. Apart from Razumov, most of the Russian men enact totalitarian roles, even the travestied revolutionary Peter Ivanovich, an unholy combination of Kropotkin and Bakunin. Russian women, however, join Razumov in choosing to cast off their erased and betrayed status and to emerge, even if into silence and suffering, "to burn rather than rot" (177), to struggle for meaning within its silencing in a totalized society. [Here, again, is the Amazon link: Under Western Eyes (Penguin Classics).]

These women characters - Sophia Antonovna, Tekla, Mrs. Haldin, and above all the daughter Natalia - ironically and unstably shift between opposed roles, and their ambiguity constitutes a crucial structural tension in the novel. Western romance conventions shadow Razumov’s realization of “the possibility of being loved” by Natalia, but his discovery prompts the nightmare realization of what Sophia calls the “ignominy” of existence in the East (266).  There is a Dostoyevskian role of women, which is searchingly intense, revelatory, yet nurturing – Peter Ivanovich voices the standard cliché: "Admirable Russian women!" (86) – and in this novel it collides with the image of women as traditional heroines from Western fiction, gifted in attuning the community to the "heart's" needs. The instability of these characters - correctively shifting between Eastern and Western images and conventions - reinforces the sense of modern emergency in characterization and narrative convention. The portrait of these women characters enacts a sense of crisis in the silenced and erased status of the "human," a crisis in sustaining the capacity for empathic comprehension in the modern world. 

Perhaps the best way to describe the critical and structural instability achieved by Conrad is to broach the notion of "playing dead" - as a means of exploring the deadnesses of modern existence. The self-hobbling, interiorized, Dostoyevskian confession is a form of such playing dead, simultaneously desired by the totalitarian state yet not perfectly fulfilling its wishes, for Dostoyevskian confession subverts the totalitarian version of confessional rhetoric, making it the instrument for an unpredictable disorder and fullness of possibility, for polyphony to use Bakhtin's resonant term. In the case of Razumov's journal, its apparent "deadness" (with its implicit acquiescence in the act of confession) masks a subversive, invigorating flux of possibility, above all the possibility of contact.

For the victims of such a world of numbing simulation and lies, it is no accident that these characters should exhibit "a generosity in their ardour of speech which removes it as far as possible from common loquacity," as the Professor observes (6). This Russian ethos of contact – this use of language and form – offers a model for many future efforts in modern fiction to draw a voice from the silence of the controlled, "totalized," insulated world its characters inhabit. Thus Natalie Sarraute writes: "[A] continual, almost maniacal need for contact ... attracts all such characters like dizziness and incites them on occasions to try, by any means whatsoever, to clear a path to the 'other,' to penetrate him as deeply as possible and make him lose his disturbing, unbearable opaqueness" (33). 

Razumov's desperate act of "contact" is his confession to the very persons he has betrayed. In this way he subverts and silences the totalized expectations of his speech; after he is deafened for his troubles, he exists in a world of exterior silence, "playing" or appearing dead in terms of the fabrications and prefabrications of the totalized society. Yet as a result he is himself contacted, cared for, and listened to by Sophia, Tekla, and others, and he becomes a source of meaningful speech for the alienated inhabitants outside and silenced by the totalized field. Razumov and his fragile circle of survivors face the haunted, illusory specter - the deadness - of their society, and their role is not only to tell the dangerous, potentially immolating truths, to grieve in advance for all the betrayals their society suffers and enacts; their role is also to testify to the possibility of just and compassionate relations.

In "Autocracy and War," Conrad writes that - in the face of societal delusion and oppression - it is only by using "our sympathetic imagination" that we may glimpse the possibility of any "triumph of concord and justice" (84) [see this link to Conrad's Notes on Life and Letters]. In the end, Razumov and his listeners inhabit the land of the silenced where they struggle to imagine and communicate fragmentary, forecasting images of what community, freedom, truth, and justice might be. These characters thus embody a sort of waiting described by later writers - from Walter Benjamin (264) and Adorno (247) to Derrida (168) - a waiting which places their suffering and grief in the perspective of possibility: that the future may yet exist, obliterated though it now is, decipherable perhaps in the paradoxical cracks and crevices of a narrative which allows the significance of Razumov's silence to manifest itself. 

The idea of "playing dead" - and all it may signify - applies even to the British professor. Concerned always with detachment in manner and sentimental propriety in plot, his narration is "dead" to the motives and issues of the scenes he observes, issues we discover from Razumov's juxtaposed journal. As one reads the professor's narration, its deadness - its clichés, its imperceptions, its incapacity to comprehend or express the lives it attempts to render - becomes a structural paradox, for it is only in the West - inside Geneva and this Professor's denying, sentimentalizing narration - that the utterances of the novel exist at all. The novel thus becomes a model of how to balance East and West with and against one another, in order to allow for the mutual survival of human beings on both sides of the Slavic/Western or any imperial, racial, or national divide. The denials and deadnesses of the West become equally, then, a rhetoric of "playing dead," a paradoxical cover for the struggle to use speech to utter meaning. For Conrad, only in ironic tension and perspective can either language - Slavic or Western - be retrieved from its deadnesses; only so can silence produce meaning. (Rather different approaches to the significance of “silence” in Conrad can be found in studies by Carabine, Fogel, and GoGwilt.)

Conrad's art is based in a language which plays on the edge of silence. This is the core paradox of his modernism: his art would use language as if it utters meaning in order simultaneously to expose language's failure to convey meaning and sustain the vanishing possibility that meaning can be conveyed. Hence, silence becomes the sign of truth, of escape from the being and world of lies: the deaf Razumov at novel's end is visited by the characters whose endurance is nurtured by hearing him utter some form of truth from within his silence. Once again, the narrative emerges from silence and honors its origins. Conrad offers here an image of tragically belated romanticism; when Razumov writes in his journal on Rousseau's Island in Lake Geneva, he asks the same questions which Rousseau's Solitary Traveler posed there a century and a half before (206). Can we use silence and irony, the suspension and negation or "forgetting" of the self's roles, to create meaning?

In the answer offered by modernism's language for the arts, silence becomes speech, fragmentation suggests an absent wholeness, absence implies presence, dissonance is all the harmony there is, and descent into the heart of darkness can yield visionary illumination. In Under Western Eyes, Conrad employs modernist strategies akin to those in Heart of Darkness, where the totalitarian abomination is racist imperialism rather than autocracy. In each text, Conrad indicts the symbiosis of colonizer and colonized, master and servant, the former transformed - with god-like presumption and absolutism - into an instrument of barbaric domination, the latter struggling with desperate absoluteness to overcome dehumanized subjection. In the dialectical vision of each text, the reader is located at the focal point of modernist paradox, where endless interrogation dominates and exposes every facet of the human, where the "human" is driven into silence and negation and the literary text forced into fragmentation and perspectivism. 

In Conrad's novel of 1911, the reader experiences a far-reaching deconstruction of conceptions of the Slavic and of Russia; we are made to explore a paradoxical field where all "truths" are revealed to be compounded with illusion, all speech compounded with silence. Conradian perspectivism exposes the implacable insecurity of basing the struggle for meaning in any national, ethnic, or societal images; meaning is achieved only, if at all, in the shared recognition that it emerges from silence, from its own erasure. Compassion is an imaginative act in this regard, for it operates against all societal prompts to the contrary: "sympathetic imagination" - as Conrad calls it - locates the human and imagines meaning within the silenced and erased "other" who faces one across the divides which society erects. To act "as if" meaning exists, with a continual awareness of its emergence from erased images and silenced voices, is what can be achieved in a world where all manifestations of individual and community are shown to be either instruments or victims of interrogative domination. For Conrad, any conception of individual or community which now arises or endures can emerge only from the resulting silence. As if silence were a form of speech. 

Notes on the modern period - 17 - on Conrad in the twentieth century (part one)

Before I turn to Conrad, I want again to mention the short novel I’ve just published, a political novella about Israel during an international crisis. As I’ve mentioned, I have revised it over the years (with two agents’ help, it was nearly accepted for publication a couple of times), and I’ve now made it available newly revised through Amazon’s free publishing arm, Createspace. With its nuclear theme inside something of a thriller structure as well as its portrait of three generations of Israelis, the difficult political questions it raises sadly remain relevant. The title is Acts of Terror and Contrition: A Nuclear Fable (that’s the Amazon link), and it’s accompanied by eight stories of mine about America in the 80s (i.e., during the Reagan years through the fall of the Berlin Wall). I’m glad that it’s now available to people who might find it moving and stimulating.

The issue of the novel’s relationship to the most harrowing problems in society is, of course, central to Joseph Conrad’s novels. As he engages his (and our) world’s excesses and political extremities, the governing approach or aesthetic of his fiction marks his novels as a product of the twentieth century. Each of Conrad’s narratives embodies and projects, for one thing, the core modernist strategy of perspectivism, which is finally a process of unfolding multiple points of view in a sort of counterpoint of voices. Views and voices mix and collide, altering one another, and this continual (simultaneously spatial and temporal) altering and unfolding is for Conrad a key to the process of understanding reality; finally it is a way of being. His own identity and experience embodies just those qualities so central to his imagination. The sense of his being an alien in British society and of being repeatedly fragmented by his experience and by his society’s fate: all of this is built into his life history – in childhood as a colonial subject of Russian rule in Poland, as a self-exile from Poland at 17 to Marseilles, as a Francophile who adopted English as a merchant marine and then as a writer, finally as a British citizen.

From his birth in 1857, Conrad’s life dramatically embodies the modernist concerns with dangerous excess and with the implacable collision of perspectives. His father, Apollo, reminds Bernard Meyer, who is one of Conrad’s biographers, of Balzac’s comment that if you point out a precipice to a Pole, he will immediately throw himself over, dressed in full regimental regalia. Apollo – a member of the landed gentry, proudly bearing the Nalcesz coat-of-arms – was a member of the Polish National Committee opposed to Russian rule over Poland. A literary and political writer and a translator of French and English literature, Apollo named his son Konrad, after the hero of a nineteenth-century Polish national epic hero. When Conrad was four, he almost died of pneumonia as his parents took him with them into Russian exile, which was Apollo’s punishment for his political opposition to Russian rule. In a remote town, north of Moscow, young Conrad – he was then seven – watched his mother die of tuberculosis; she was also of the landed gentry, but her family was grounded, practical, and disapproving of her marriage. At the age of 11, Conrad moved back to Poland with his ill and dying father, permitted finally to return; after Apollo’s death, the boy was made to walk at the head of the large patriotic funeral procession.

For the next six years, Conrad – initiated into trauma, resilient yet sensitive to disconnection – was raised by his mother’s practical brother, Uncle Tadeuz, in Krakow where he was tutored in his mid-teens (and visited the French-speaking part of Switzerland with his tutor, who reported to Tadeuz that the adolescent Conrad was “an incorrigible Don Quixote”). The Uncle feared that Apollo was influencing his son from the grave, and yet at the age of 16, Conrad was given permission (and funds) to go to Marseilles in order to apprentice as a French merchant marine. This was in 1874, a year in France not unlike 1974 in America – a time of profound disillusionment and realism about the government and the disastrous 1871 Franco-Prussian War. Over the next two years, in his late teens, Conrad shipped to Martenique and to Venezuela, illegally ran guns to Carlist revolutionaries in Spain, squandered most of his money, experienced a disastrous love affair, and attempted suicide by shooting himself in the chest (but missing his heart). The French immigration office understandably cancelled his sailor’s license.

Conrad traveled to England, enlisted in the British merchant Marines, and began his sixteen-year career rising in the ranks to Captain and becoming a naturalized British subject in 1887. He served as Captain of the Roi de Belges, going up the Congo River in 1890, and his experiences during that voyage became part of the basis of Heart of Darkness, written in 1900. His literary career began however when, he says, he was docked in Rouen harbor and started writing Almayer’s Folly in the flyleaf pages of Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, the proto-modern masterpiece of stark realism and exacting style about Emma Bovary’s needy and out-sized ego (Conrad admired Flaubert and especially Maupassant, for they had “the courage to state the hardest truths”). This first novel is about a sort of Pere Goriot, that is, a King Lear-like father, who struggles to protect and control his daughters; already here, Conrad is exploring the creation of a consuming, larger-than-life character, who – tragicomic though he is – threatens to crack open the structure of his family and society. In 1894, when Conrad was thirty-seven, the novel was accepted for publication; also that year, Uncle Tadeuz died, and Conrad formally ended his sea career (which had already been curtailed by his illness after his trip up the Congo four years earlier). He settled in London and married his typist Jessie George in 1896. Mrs. Conrad’s memoir is a suggestive source in documenting the neurasthenic agony of writing for him.

Conrad sometimes buckled under the pressure of writing, for he consistently set himself the hardest tasks as a novelist. The modernist audacity and ambition of his works during the first decade of the twentieth century exacted a great toll, and after the completion of Under Western Eyes in 1910-11, he suffered a serious breakdown. In that work, he summonses the courage to return in imagination to the scene of his earliest traumatic experience of political oppression and extremity and to write a novel about Russian autocracy, modeled in part on Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment (Conrad uses elements of that novel, despite his antipathy toward the Russian novelist). The essay “Autocracy and War” like Conrad’s 1911 novel presents a vision of existence as combat between an inhuman nothingness or “néant” (embodied for Conrad by the political oppression of the Russian Tsar and by Bismarck in Germany) and the capacity to sustain compassion and empathy (the “sympathetic imagination” toward others, on which human community is based and which is often sustained, he writes, by women); Under Western Eyes portrays a group of such women who variously struggle to help each other and the protagonist Razumov to endure oppression’s negation of the human. Thomas Mann greatly admired the novel, particularly for its juxtaposition of narrators and its metafictional perspectivism: Razumov’s journal of being buffeted by the forces of oppression (and his own internalization of them) is “translated from the Russian” by a well-meaning, sentimental and somewhat blinkered English “professor,” who provides his Western reading of the harrowing Eastern tale. The novel is that rare work of art, Mann writes, capable of bridging the divide between and synthesizing the implacably opposed entities of East and West in Europe.

In my next post, I’ll try to indicate other instances of the courage and modernist audacity of conception at work in Conrad’s perspectivist novels and, also, to explain his rendering of the modern novel’s characteristic “gigantism” and particularly the revelatory excess of self-absorption and megalomania in some of Conrad's most compelling characters.