With modernism, the tectonic plates of the Western literary tradition shifted – or, as Virginia Woolf (in)famously put it, ‘On or about December 1910, human character changed’. It was as if the old ways of doing, or writing, or, better still, representing things no longer held. In the hands of writers as various as Robert Musil or Franz Kafka or Samuel Beckett or James Joyce, literature was taken in dramatically new directions, at once endlessly, often linguistically self-conscious and also endlessly aiming beyond itself, at an absent God, a wasted tradition, a modern myth, an unexcavated interior world.
But what does a writer today make of this seismic shift? To answer this question and more, Ella Whelan spoke to the Irish master himself, John Banville, an author whose rich, reflexive novels, from the Booker Prize-winning The Sea to his trio of trilogies, draw deeply from air thick with modernist sensibilities. Indeed, he has been called ‘the heir to Proust’, ‘a great Irish fiction-writer who takes his bearings… from Beckett (among others)’, and, simply, ‘the best and most intelligent contemporary novelist writing today’.
Ella Whelan: You once said that the novelist cannot unlearn the lesson of modernism, that he cannot go back to realism as if the period between Henry James’ The Ambassadors (1903) and Samuel Beckett’s The Unnameable (1953) hadn’t happened. What do you think the chief lesson of modernism is?
John Banville: Perhaps what I should have said was that the artist cannot duck the challenge thrown down by modernism, the challenge best embodied in Ezra Pound’s famous injunction to ‘make it new’.
The great problem for the novelist is that, since human beings live by illusions, how is one to write about them authentically?
I follow the modernist trail blazed by Henry James, a trail from which avant-garde modernism sharply diverted, thanks to the likes of Gertrude Stein, Joyce and, later, Beckett
In fiction, I feel that Henry James was the first modernist. Obsessed, like his brother William, with the intricate processes that constitute consciousness, he devoted his life, certainly the latter half of it, to finding a mode in fictional art that would catch consciousness ‘on the wing’, so to speak. To a certain extent, he stumbled on that mode by accident, when he developed writer’s cramp and had to resort to dictation. This freed his imagination from the mundane constraints of pen on paper, or fingers on keys, and hence he developed an extraordinarily dense and subtle style that catches exactly the state of being conscious, which, when one thinks about it, is really a state of being semi-conscious.
Joyce acknowledged that no one actually thinks in the form of stream of consciousness – incidentally, a term invented by William James. To read late Henry James, however, is to feel that one is picking one’s way through the fog of consciousness itself, encountering all the barriers, false directions and misapprehensions that we do in our daily lives. James believed himself to be a realist, but for me he is the one who turned the art of fiction into… well, into art. And, nowadays, he is the one whose challenge I am grappling with.
As to Pound’s ‘make it new’, my simple response is: ‘Why?’
Whelan: What do you make of author and critic Gabriel Josipovici’s headline-grabbing claim in What Ever Happened to Modernism? that British fiction has abandoned the legacy of modernism, and become narrow, conformist and parochial?
Banville: I don’t read enough contemporary British fiction to make this kind of judgement. What I do see of it, however, makes me lean in Josipovici’s direction. But then, later modernism did produce some awfully bad stuff – the kind of novels, indeed, written by writers whom Josipovici himself admired and approved of, too heavily indebted to Kafka and cocktail-party existentialism.