You are a famous actor delivering crucial lines in the middle of a performance when suddenly the consummate thespian nightmare ensues. You freeze up, unable to speak or move, trapped in a nebulous paralytic state of helpless failure, and realize something crushing: the actor within you has died.
Many of the protagonist's lines which occur after such a breakdown in Irishman John Banville's most recent novel, "Eclipse," echo a pair of lines from T.S. Eliot's "The Waste Land": "...I was neither/ Living nor dead and I knew nothing." This novel is a haunting and elegantly crafted work which seeks to excavate that most nefarious region known as the self. Along the way, the reader cannot help but be carried by the sheer lyrical force of Banville's dripping prose as he masterfully creates a mosaic of queries and ruminations on the nature of consciousness and identity.
Alexander Cleave is the 50-year-old protagonist, lost in a sea of temporal and psychological confusion, which is apparent from the very outset of the novel. The story opens after his breakdown and subsequent abandonment of the stage, finding him in a murky world of uncertainty. The death of the actor within him leaves Alex reeling
in a myriad of frustrations and confusions as to who he actually is (the last line he speaks on stage before his collapse is nice: "Who if not I, then, is Amphitryon?") and where he stands in relation to his emotionally distressed wife and estranged daughter.
He flees to the house where he grew up and proceeds to live there alone, turning himself inside out as it were, and engaging with ghosts of all kinds - imagined, real, past, even future. It is fascinating to watch Banville spin the inward monologues, memories, dreams and interpretive realities of this despairing actor together into a portrait of the ephemeral self. This novel asks questions that are as distressing as they are fascinating: Who are you if you have no audience? Can there be any stability within the ever-shifting reality of a subjective consciousness? Is there a "singular essential self" in existence for each of us, or just an endless progression of masks and illusions?
Prepare for a whirlwind of expression and mirrors when picking up this novel; Banville delights in his linguistic facility like any skilled performer. The language's richness glistens, and literary allusions abound. The novel's obsession with self and with possibilities of identity conjure up Banville's countryman James Joyce, while the brilliant, humorous, cunningly insightful and not always reliable voice of the first person narrator clearly recalls Nabokov. Freud makes multiple appearances as well and absorbs a bit of friendly teasing - for instance, this line as Alex is eminently en route to his first sexual encounter: "The icy air was like a shower of tiny needles against my face, and I was reminded of the slap my mother had given me all those years before, on the day of my father's death."
These voices are just a few among the cacophonous multiplicity that emerges as the story develops, a multiplicity that is quite apt due to its subject, the self. The question of how the dissonance within each consciousness can be resolved into anything like a solidified identity is a weighty one. Every person knows they can dissemble quite naturally when dealing with others, but the fact that we can many times deceive even ourselves, to the point where claiming and grasping our definite selves seems near impossible, is a much more disturbing reality. The struggle against (and perhaps even within) solipsism is one that Alex must have if he is to be able to regain a footing on which he can have relationships with his wife and daughter and face the tragedies of life.
The tension between the "insupportable excess of self" borne by the actor and the recurring void of identity within the man is one which Banville draws to the breaking point. Any reader of this book will have two pleasures: Simply reading the effusive and wonderful prose of Banville, a clearly gifted author, and, a more disturbing pleasure perhaps, but important nonetheless - being forced to ask large questions about how we as humans define ourselves and (literally) our selves. As a side-note, anyone particularly interested in contemporary literature dealing with these issues might also want to pick up the (appropriately titled) novel "Identity" by the brilliant Czech author Milan Kundera.
There will also be an opportunity Saturday night at 8 p.m. in the Culbreth Theatre to hear Banville and the talented Indian writer Amitav Ghosh give readings in association with the Virginia Festival of the Book. Come support the Festival and listen to two internationally renowned contemporary authors sharing their work. Who knows, you may even learn something about your self.
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