Banville and Lacan: The Matter of Emotions in The Infinities

Banville e Lacan são intérpretes freudianos do mundo pós-moderno. Ambos substituem a dicotomia físico-metafísica clássica pelo foco na materialidade da comunicação em um mundo emofísico. Ambos traçam a diferentes maneiras pelas quais os fluxos libidinais combinam partes do eu e vinculam o eu a outras pessoas e objetos. Essas interações ocorrem em três larguras de banda da percepção, que são reorganizadas pelo objeto misterioso a. Esse “objeto” desperta os afetos do inconsciente que infundem as formações identitárias com nova energia. Neste artigo, veremos brevemente como o objeto a é percebido em The Book of Evidence, Ghosts e Eclipse, a fim de focar em como ele funciona em The Infinities, especialmente nas relações entre Adam Godley Júnior e Sênior, Helen e Hermes.Both Banville and Lacan are Freudian interpreters of the postmodern world. Both replace the classic physical-metaphysical dichotomy with a focus on the materiality of communication in an emophysical world. Both chart the ways in which libidinal streams combine parts of the self and link the self with other people and objects. These interactions take place in three bandwidths of perception, which are re-arranged by the uncanny object a. This ‘object’ reawakens the affects of the unconscious which infuse the identity formations with new energy. In this article we look briefly at how the object a is realised in The Book of Evidence, Ghosts and Eclipse to focus on how it works in The Infinities, especially in the relations between Adam Godley junior and senior, Helen and Hermes

“We Had the Experience But Missed The Meaning”: On The Relevance of Lacanian Categories in the Analysis of Fiction

After having shown the three paradoxes of literature (the master being mastered by his literary tools, the reader’s identification versus her critical stance, the text combining thematic unity and vital inconsistencies) we look at how several Lacanian concepts have their impact on a narrator’s style: the twofold psychic system, three phases that mould our perception, the function of the father figure, the notion of the Other, the others and the “objects o”. It is in the relationship to the object o, where the two different energies of our psychic system meet, that we find out which type of person we are: neurotic, psychoticor perverse. As it is mainly the hysteric neurotic and the paranoiac psychotic type who figure most often as narrators in literature, we look at how the former type is realized in Banville’s The Book of Evidence and in Deane’s Reading in the Dark while the latter, the psychotic type, permeates the narrative of Banville’s Mefisto. Indeed, the protagonist’s pathological narcissism which steers him now into megalomania, now into a death wish (unification with the Other he lost at birth), make himutterly confuse inner and outer worlds, literal and metaphorical meanings

Fatal Fathers and Sons in Tom Murphy’s A Whistle in the Dark

Under this general title I want to discuss several instances of “filicide” throughout twentieth century drama. As W.B. Yeats was a great advocate of the importance of the unconscious, I would start with Yeats’s idea of the father, as he goes from Cuchulainn’s slaughter of his son in On Baile’s Strand (1904) to that other infanticide (or rather adulticide) in Purgatory (1939), whereby his two Oedipus plays Sophocles’ King Oedipus (1928) and Sophocles’ Oedipus at Colonus (1934) yield important material to understand the complications inherent in father-son relations. Then I would move to Tom Murphy’s A Whistling in the Dark (1961), where the father has his rival son killed in more contemporary circumstances, to end with the very complex picture of the father-son relations Frank Mc Guinness offers in his Mutabilitie (1997), both in the colonist’s and the colonised households. I would hereby use a Lacanian approach, since this would allow for na in-depth analysis of the problems at stake. This approach, however, has already a respectable tradition, which means that the obvious works like Deleuze and Guattari’s L’anti-Oedipe, capitalisme et schizophrénie (1973) will first have to be nuanced by more recent studies like Philippe Julien’s Le manteau de Noé (1991). While the latter offers an excellent status quaestionis, this can be refined by remarks made by Didier Anzieu in his analysis of father-child relations in Créer détruire (1996), as well as by new representations of the concept of identity and desire by Philippe van Haute (Tegen de aanpassing, 2000).Under this general title I want to discuss several instances of “filicide” throughout twentieth century drama. As W.B. Yeats was a great advocate of the importance of the unconscious, I would start with Yeats’s idea of the father, as he goes from Cuchulainn’s slaughter of his son in On Baile’s Strand (1904) to that other infanticide (or rather adulticide) in Purgatory (1939), whereby his two Oedipus plays Sophocles’ King Oedipus (1928) and Sophocles’ Oedipus at Colonus (1934) yield important material to understand the complications inherent in father-son relations. Then I would move to Tom Murphy’s A Whistling in the Dark (1961), where the father has his rival son killed in more contemporary circumstances, to end with the very complex picture of the father-son relations Frank Mc Guinness offers in his Mutabilitie (1997), both in the colonist’s and the colonised households. I would hereby use a Lacanian approach, since this would allow for na in-depth analysis of the problems at stake. This approach, however, has already a respectable tradition, which means that the obvious works like Deleuze and Guattari’s L’anti-Oedipe, capitalisme et schizophrénie (1973) will first have to be nuanced by more recent studies like Philippe Julien’s Le manteau de Noé (1991). While the latter offers an excellent status quaestionis, this can be refined by remarks made by Didier Anzieu in his analysis of father-child relations in Créer détruire (1996), as well as by new representations of the concept of identity and desire by Philippe van Haute (Tegen de aanpassing, 2000)

Conjuring and Conjecturing: Friel’s Performances

Though most critics were negative about Performances I believe this is a vintage Friel play, first in its theme: (1) its interaction of different languages (whereby music is more important than ever) and (2) its illustration of epistemological questions (especially the question of performativity), but also in its components: (1) the seemingly fruitless journey, (2) the opposition Dionysiac-Apollonian forces, (3) the communication which fails, due to the strong narcissism of one of the protagonists. As Performances is really the staging of the epistemological journey of a PhD student, Anezka, who probes into the force of Janacek’s passionate desire for his muse Kamila Stösslova, desire will be a key concept in the play. This interaction between the student and the dead author’s work is represented by a live Janacek. Though Friel used this device before (in Faith Healer) it is more to the point now, as it allows the playwright to stage the postmodern awareness that “the author is dead”: it is his work that is alive, and challenging both readers and performers. It is interesting that a pronounced division between two kinds of reading is sustained throughout the play. On the one hand, Janacek appears as a self-centred figure who refuses to have his authorial position challenged, and sees language as a representative-imitative tool. Anezka, on the other hand, looks at expressions in a more Deleuzian way, not focusing on the product but on the production, its heterogeneity and inconsistenties. Though Janacek keeps turning Anezka’s interpretations down, she will turn out to be the more convincing, as she discovers the maestro’s discordant desires, not only in his social relations and in his poetics but also in the way he maintains his authorial position. His own solipsistic stance will be unmasked by the echoes in his own text, by his use of shifters and by the “general iterability”Derrida considers essential to language as such, but which is exacerbated in the quoting practice which is even more visibly effective in research work as well as in music performances.Though most critics were negative about Performances I believe this is a vintage Friel play, first in its theme: (1) its interaction of different languages (whereby music is more important than ever) and (2) its illustration of epistemological questions (especially the question of performativity), but also in its components: (1) the seemingly fruitless journey, (2) the opposition Dionysiac-Apollonian forces, (3) the communication which fails, due to the strong narcissism of one of the protagonists. As Performances is really the staging of the epistemological journey of a PhD student, Anezka, who probes into the force of Janacek’s passionate desire for his muse Kamila Stösslova, desire will be a key concept in the play. This interaction between the student and the dead author’s work is represented by a live Janacek. Though Friel used this device before (in Faith Healer) it is more to the point now, as it allows the playwright to stage the postmodern awareness that “the author is dead”: it is his work that is alive, and challenging both readers and performers. It is interesting that a pronounced division between two kinds of reading is sustained throughout the play. On the one hand, Janacek appears as a self-centred figure who refuses to have his authorial position challenged, and sees language as a representative-imitative tool. Anezka, on the other hand, looks at expressions in a more Deleuzian way, not focusing on the product but on the production, its heterogeneity and inconsistenties. Though Janacek keeps turning Anezka’s interpretations down, she will turn out to be the more convincing, as she discovers the maestro’s discordant desires, not only in his social relations and in his poetics but also in the way he maintains his authorial position. His own solipsistic stance will be unmasked by the echoes in his own text, by his use of shifters and by the “general iterability”Derrida considers essential to language as such, but which is exacerbated in the quoting practice which is even more visibly effective in research work as well as in music performances

Word upon World: Half a century of John Banville's Universes

There is a clear engagement with theories of time across Banville’s oeuvre, from his earliest published work through to the twenty-first-century novels. I explore how, in their engagement with age and ageing, Banville’s characters adopt and interrogate Albert Einstein’s and Henri Bergson’s competing ideas of the present and the passage of time, sliding from favouring the former to prioritising the latter. Martin Heidegger’s conception of Dasein, a Being-toward-death, allows me to explore how Banville’s characters evoke either Einstein’s spacetime and series of nows, or Bergson’s psychologised Duration (Durée). This is borne out in Gabriel Godkin’s subverted and anti-atavistic narrative in 'Birchwood' (1973), the battle over authenticity between Copernicus and Rheticus in 'Doctor Copernicus' (1976), and how Hermes controls the mortals’ time and tries his best to age in 'The Infinities' (2009). I conclude that Banville’s characters’ evolving preference for Bergsonian over Einsteinian tropes indicates an acceptance and happy engagement with the ageing process

Interview with Anne Enright

status: publishe

Review of Hereafter. The Telling Life of Ellen O'Hara, by Vona Groarke

Review of Hereafter. The Telling Life of Ellen O'Hara, by Vona Groarke (New York: New York University Press, 2022), 184 pp., ISBN 9781479817511 (hardback

Reknitting Communities: Rita Duffy's vital gestures

In Duffy’s oeuvre, North and South, masculine and feminine, politics and economics, the conscious and unconscious, life and death drives, past and future, are the warp and woof of this life-embracing artist. Different items of textile have been a metaphor and a metonymy for the question of how (texile) art can set people free. This article highlights the importance of the textile items the artist herself selected for inclusion in this issue of RISE showing how each of them point at ways to move from a power system into one of agency, from fate to destiny. Each of the textile works are briefly situated in the context of other painters (Kahlo and Picasso, David and Chagall), writers (Parker and Morrissey, Enright and Tóibín) and thinkers (Bollas, Arendt, Santner, Mouffe, Rothberg). Time and again Duffy’s textiles turn out to be linked to ‘the good enough mother’ and to women’s solidarity, which facilitate the child’s passage from trauma to genera, developing from a negative past to a positive future in which an authentic self can be realized. Duffy’s textile language will be discussed in six sections: (1) four drawings predating the textile items in this issue reflect how the mother enables the artist’s disciplined imagination; (2) clothes belonging to ‘martyrs’ are so ‘othered’ that instead of holding the past they break narrow new moulds; (3) Cloth 1, Duffy’s handkerchief of Bloody Sunday illustrate how reading genera is a ‘seeing with the whole emotionality’; (4) this ‘hankie’ is further contested and contextualized in Duffy’s collaboration with Muldoon; (5) the idea of the hankie and laundry extends into the veronica motif and into an understanding of Duffy’s political art as a realization of Arendt’s natality, which leads to (6) Duffy’s most recent development of the Souvenir Shop method, where connectedness and humour are more articulated than ever and where the politics of culture involve multidirectional memory and economic participation.status: publishe

Boundaries, Passages, Transitions: an Introduction

As this is an introduction it offers no sustained argument but contextualizes the 17 contributions to this volume. Looking at Ireland in Europe in 2000 - 2017 we may think (once again) that things fall apart and the centre cannot hold, but maybe the notions of “centre” and “apart” have to be rethought. With the failure of Irish politicians and the Irish ecclesiocracy, the onslaught of global predatory capitalism taking over agricultural acreage, industrial production and people’s internetted minds, artists and writers take it upon them to reflect on the darker sides of our “individual” egos and move the focus to the many bandwidths of human interaction. Humour and contradiction are recurring “tools” to help protagonists break out of stereotypes: in McDonagh “the art of codding” is part and parcel of his grotesque “comedy of menace” with which he radically questions the human being’s ability to find truth; Nancy Harris’ No Romance offers a more feminine kind of grotesque. Humour is also found in “Ceasefire Cinema” and in John Ford’s representations of hurling in his films, as well as in the three contributions on Joyce. About Wilde Ellmann said “contradictoriness was his orthodoxy”, but that also works to a certain extent for Trollope who considers himself a “reluctant colonialist”, for Bowen who focuses on the big House in her writing as it was disappearing in her life, and for the here “Lilies”, protagonists in three novels who are sent out to the US by an exclusionary (sectarian or nationalistic) logic from which their resilience in the new context liberates them. Finally, the contribution on Dermot Healy’s “creative eclecticism” offers the perfect illustration how “boundaries” only make sense if they strengthen the sense of passage and transition, dynamizing the idea of the “dividual” being who can develop as s/he compares and combines different communal values.status: publishe