The eye in the text: John Banville’s Frames (1989-1995)

by

Ralf Hertel

Frames is the title under which John Banville subsumes a trilogy of novels: The Book of Evidence (1989), Ghosts (1993), and Athena (1995). It is a telling title, for it indicates painting as the central theme of the trilogy. Each novel is centred on one specific picture, and each plot is narrated by a criminal art lover. In fact, the three novels form a unit, albeit a rather loose one. The Book of Evidence tells the story of Frederick Montgomery who, on returning home to Ireland, discovers that his mother has sold the family’s small collection of paintings. In an impulsive attempt to claim them back, he visits the art collector who bought the paintings, only to learn that he himself has already passed them on. While passing through the collector’s gallery, Freddie is suddenly seized by a violent passion for one of the displayed portraits. The following day he returns to steal it but is confronted with a maidservant. He abducts her and finally bludgeons her to death with a hammer. Ghosts begins with the release from prison of a narrator whose name is not mentioned, yet he clearly resembles Freddie. During his ten years in prison, he has studied the Dutch masters and has become an amateur art critic. Once free, he makes his way to an island where he becomes an assistant to Professor Kreutznaer, an expert on the — fictive — Dutch painter Jean Vaublin. During his stay, a group of shipwrecked people are stranded and break the silence of the island for a while before returning home. This is where Athena takes up the narrative thread. After having returned to the mainland himself, the narrator, who has now changed his name to ‘Morrow’, is asked to verify the authenticity of eight pictures for a dubious art dealer. Eventually it emerges that seven of them are fakes of stolen pictures, intended to fool both him and the police. During his work of verification he has, however, fallen in love with a mysterious woman called ‘A.’, who seems to be a somewhat unreal, shadowy embodiment of the only original painting in the collection.

While taking up very similar story lines and being narrated from the same point of view of a criminal art lover, the three novels are not merely sequels. Even though the later novels abound with intertextual allusions to the earlier ones, they never explicitly identify the narrator as the Frederick Montgomery of The Book of Evidence. Furthermore, they never simply take over characters but always introduce them with variations. At first sight, the structure of the trilogy rather reminds one of a sonnet cycle — or a sequence of paintings. Although the same theme and common motifs run through all three novels, they can stand alone as separate works and can be read without prior knowledge of the other books. Yet the texts obviously relate to each other, most prominently in their shared interest in the visual arts. Paintings are so central here that they give an air of what one critic calls ‘pic­torialism’ to the entire trilogy:

The paintings in the novels seem to take the place of plot, characters, motivation, etc. — the ingredients of the traditional novel — or rather, displace them, move them to the margins of fiction to the point of near absence in one of the novels [i.e. Ghosts] […]. Along the trilogy there is a connection between the absence of plot and character and the presence, thematic and structural importance, of painting.[1]

The interest in the visual goes beyond the description of paintings, though, and can be traced down to the very words that constitute the novels. All three texts abound with ex­pressions of the visual. Visual verbs are so dominant throughout the trilogy that it seems the narrator perceives his surroundings almost exclusively through his eyes, and even memory comes to him almost entirely in visual terms. One of the incessantly recurring terms is ‘to see oneself’ or ‘to see someone else’, as in the following instances:

My wife. Daphne […]. I see her, my lady of the laurels, reclining in a sun-dazed glade, a little vexed, looking away with a small frown, while some minor god in the shape of a faun, with a reed pipe, prances and capers, vainly playing his heart out for her. (The Book of Evidence, p. 7)

For an instant he saw himself clearly, sitting here in the broad, headachy light of morning, an indistinct, frail figure. Over the oak wood a double rainbow stood shimmering, one strong band and, lower down, its fainter echo. (Ghosts, p. 104)

That is how I see him that day, posed there in the light under those beetling windows with his arms still folded and one leg thrust forward from the skirts of his coat, a big, deep-chested, brooding man with flattened features and a moneyed suntan and a lovingly barbered thick long mane of lustreless red-brown hair. (Athena, p. 12)[2]

The minute attention even in short descriptions to details of light and shadow (‘a sun-dazed glade’, ‘the broad, headachy light of morning’) and to background and foreground (‘over the oak wood a double rainbow stood shimmering’, ‘under those beetling windows’) serves to heighten the painterly quality of self-perception and the perception of others. The attention to colour (‘lustreless red-brown hair’), posture (‘reclining’, ‘sitting’, ‘posed there’, ‘arms still folded and one leg thrust forward’), and to the composition of the scene has a similar effect. Allusions to Greek mythology (‘some minor god in the shape of a faun’) further heighten the picturesque quality. In this regard, the chosen examples are by no way exceptional. More often than not we find protagonists perceiving themselves or others as though they were looking at paintings. This pictorial quality becomes even more obvious in the frequently used term ‘to picture’ someone, or something, as in the following example.

She pictured herself dressed in white sitting at a little seafront café somewhere in Italy or the south of France, where he had brought her, the hot wind blowing and the palms clattering and the sea a vivid blue like in those pictures, and she so cool and pale, and people glancing at her, wondering who she was as she sat there demurely in her light, expensive frock, squirming a little in tender pain, basking in secret in the slow heat of her hidden bruises, waiting for him to come sauntering along the front with his hands in his pockets, whistling. (Ghosts, p. 49)

‘Like in those pictures’: quite clearly, many of Banville’s protagonists picture themselves in the true sense of the word. They carry with them pictures of themselves, visions of alterna­tive lives that surface in dreamy moments like paintings or film stills. The incessant use of visual expressions such as ‘to see oneself’, ‘to see someone else’, ‘to picture’, ‘to imagine’, or ‘to have visions’ indicates that the visual experience in Frames is not merely of a passive, receptive nature. Rather, the visual is frequently linked to the active construction of mental pictures that show an almost artistic quality. In other words, seeing is creating pictures, is painting for the inner eye. Not merely passive sense perception, it is intricately linked to the process of artistic imagination.

Thus it comes as no surprise that the various forms of looking not only indicate physical acts of perception but are simultaneously charged with symbolic meaning. The direction and intensity of looks or the avoidance of the other’s eyes acquire deeper meanings in Banville’s trilogy. People do not simply look at each other but stare. It is as though they were not quite sure what to make of each other, as if wondering whether they face real people or illusions. When the narrator in Athena visits his aunt after a long time, she stares at him ‘for a long moment, not knowing, I could see, who I was or whether I was real or a figment’ (p. 28). Sometimes, this intense scrutiny acquires the quality of an art expert’s gaze verifying the authenticity of a painting. Morrow, the narrator in Athena whose job is to authenticate several pictures, submits his lover A. to the same scrutiny as the works of art:

I turned on you a gaze so awed, so wide with ever-renewed astonishment, beseeching in its intensity, that I thought you must take fright and flee from me, from such need, such fear, such anguished happiness. Not that you so much as flinched, of course; my poor haggard glare was never fierce enough to dazzle you. All the same I insist that I looked harder at you and deeper into your depths than anyone ever did before or will again. (Athena, p. 120)

The intense stare becomes a means of verifying the authenticity of the other, a means of deciding whether or not he is to be believed.

Furthermore, it gives the protagonists a peculiar appearance. Their view fixed steadily on the object of scrutiny, moving neither head nor eyes, their mode of looking resembles the ‘glassy stare’ of the stuffed owl mentioned occasionally throughout the trilogy: they hardly seem to be alive (The Book of Evidence, p. 153). Their reality status is not quite clear, and the immobility of their gaze makes them appear dead, as motionless puppets or unblinking statues. Indeed, quite often they are explicitly likened to statues: a lover is de­scribed as ‘a ravaged Nefertiti’, Freddie’s mother is ‘statuesque, blank-eyed, impossibly handsome in an Ancient Roman sort of way’, and three girls on the street are described as the three graces (The Book of Evidence, pp. 183, 41, 162; Athena, p. 113). The professor and art historian in Ghosts, resembling ‘a big old rain-stained statue of one of the Cesars’, turns ‘like a stone statue […] slowly on a pivot’ (pp. 11, 142), and the dubious art dealer in Athena shows a ‘Rodin’s pose’ (p. 61). The narrator perceives himself as ‘a marble knight on a tomb’ when lying in bed (The Book of Evidence, p. 203) and seems to turn into a statue when confronted with the paintings he is to authenticate: ‘I was cold. Draggingly I turned myself about, a stone statue turning on its plinth, and walked with granite tread to where the pictures were stacked’ (Athena, p. 115). Subtly adding to these explicit allusions to statu­esque art is the recurrent visual motif of looking over one’s shoulder. The narrator feels constantly on the brink of departure: ‘Even arriving I seemed to be turning away, with a lingering glance at the lost land’, and the inspector interrogating him after the murder glances at him over his shoulder (The Book of Evidence, pp. 40, 196f). Implicitly alluded to here is the myth of Lot’s wife who, glancing back over her shoulder on her way out of Sodom, turns into a pillar of salt — an immobile effigy of herself.

When the narrator himself adopts the stare that is so common in Banville’s trilogy, the immobility of his fixed gaze creates descriptions that resemble film stills. The narrative development of the plot is frozen for a moment and gives way to a detailed and elaborate observation of scenes and persons. In other words: descriptio replaces narratio. His fixed glare seems to empty his narration of time and movement and heightens the awareness of details — it is as though the flow of events was turned into the stasis of a verbal painting. Indeed, the protagonists move through life as though through a painting. There are ‘Dutch days’ on which the sky looks like that in an old master’s painting (The Book of Evidence, p. 186), the island in Ghosts appears ‘clear and delicate, like something by Vaublin himself’ (p. 30), and the narrator remembers the ‘jagged, chocolate-coloured rocks such as the Italian masters liked to set at the back of their madonnas’ on another isle (p. 202). People throw shadows sharp as those by de Chirico (Athena, p. 7), and rooms are steeped in ‘lovely, peach-coloured light such as might bathe a domestic interior by one of the North Italian masters’ (Ghosts, p. 75) or look like ‘a background to one of Jacques Louis David’s revolutionary group portraits’ (Athena, p. 11). A pub scene is ‘like something out of Hogarth’ (The Book of Evidence, p. 163) and the streets are lined with ‘Van Gogh trees’ (Athena, p. 35). The novel abounds with allusion to famous artists whose paintings quickly spring to the reader’s mind, which turns the reading process into a visual experience.

The pictorial in the trilogy is not reduced to these explicit allusions, however. Having been released from prison, the narrator secretly breaks into the house that now belongs to his former wife. It is as though he were walking through a painting, for the scene is purely visual and mysteriously devoid of all auditory and tactile impressions:

Stillness lay like a dustsheet over everything […]. I walked here and there, my footsteps falling without sound. I had a strange sensation in my ears, as if I were in a vessel fathoms deep with the weight of the ocean pressing all around me. The objects that I looked at seemed insulated, as if they had been painted with a protective coating of some invisible stuff, cool and thick and smooth as enamel, and when I touched them I could not seem to feel them. (Ghosts, p. 180)

In instances like these, the protagonists appear to inhabit a world that appears strangely painted. They themselves seem to be part of these painted scenes, turning into works of art themselves. Characters look like ‘one of Fragonard’s pop-eyed, milky-skinned ladies’, like ‘Rodin’s Balzac’ or a ‘Beardsleyan Queen’, and the narrator’s aunt resembles ‘Dürer’s dauntless drawing of his mother’ (Athena, pp. 91, 11; The Book of Evidence, p. 32; Athena, p. 21). A chauffeur sports a moustache that looks ‘as if it had been painted onto his large, pasty face’, and another figure is quite literally a flat character. So pale and unpronounced that she seems ‘to lack a dimension’, she is two-dimensional as in a painting and gives the narrator the impression that if she turned to him head-on she would ‘contract into a vertical line, like a cardboard cut-out’ (Athena, p. 91).

The fact that the narrator frequently feels he is being watched strengthens the equation with paintings even further:

It struck me that the perspective of this scene was somehow wrong. Things seemed not to recede as they should, but to be arrayed before me — the furniture, the open window, the lawn and river and far-off mountains — as if they were not being looked at but were themselves looking, intent upon a vanishing-point here, inside the room. (The Book of Evidence, p. 78)

In a reversal of perspective, the paintings look at the onlooker. The portrait Freddie becomes so obsessed with that he finally steals it acquires a ‘presence’ and seems to gaze at him, ‘sceptical, inquisitive and calm’: ‘it was not just the woman’s painted stare that watched me. Everything in the picture, that brooch, those gloves, the flocculent darkness at her back, every spot on the canvas was an eye fixed on me unblinkingly’ (The Book of Evidence, pp. 79, 92). Freddie enjoys the feeling of being looked at and is relieved when he is arrested after the murder precisely for the reason that he will now be watched over (The Book of Evidence, p. 193). No longer is the prison, this Foucauldian panopticon, a vision of horror; on the contrary, to the narrator, who so strongly desires to be the centre of attention and has ‘always wanted to be watched over’, it is at first a welcome change of surroundings (Athena, p. 211). It is as if he saw his purpose in exposing himself to the gaze of others. He strangely resembles a picture that is intended to be seen; he desires the gaze of others as much as a painting that has mysteriously come alive might do. Instead of being a means of cold surveillance, the prison turns into something like a picture gallery, with each prisoner in his bar-framed cell resembling a painting in a frame, offering itself to the eyes of the spectator. In fact, the narrator himself calls it with Foucault’s term ‘that panopticon where [the prisoner] will not even be able to void his bowels without an audience looking on’ (Ghosts, p. 206). As Joseph McMinn observes, ‘the cell window provides him with a barred frame through which he watches, and is watched by, the ordinary world of sky and tree. This miniaturist perspective on the world is all he needs: his imagination will do the rest.’[3] On the one hand he perceives the world as if it were a painting, on the other hand he himself seems to be framed as though he were in the position of a picture himself. It comes as no surprise, then, that his release can be equated with a stepping out of the frame. Freedom at first seems ‘formless and ungraspable’ (Ghosts, p. 195). He is disorientated, everything is ‘wide air and flat, glimmering spaces’ (Ghosts, p. 152). He has to get used to ‘the breadth of things’ and ‘the far vistas on every side’ after having been encapsulated in the frame of prison for so long (Ghosts, p. 173).

The equation of life and art is, however, most obvious not in the narrator but in his mysterious lover A. She displays an even stronger desire for exhibitionism and delights in being blindfolded and being stripped naked in front of the window, so that all the passers-by in the street below can watch her (Athena, p. 158). Together with Morrow she visits a brothel where they hire a prostitute to watch them while they make love (p. 164). She is also excited by the narrator’s voyeuristic gaze and devises a special procedure of how he should encounter her on their dates. Half an hour before their appointment, he is supposed to watch her through a spyhole while she performs a pantomime of being raped. Only then is he allowed to enter the room and to make love to her (Athena, p. 155f.). Not only is the need to be seen even stronger in her than in him, her mode of existence also aspires more clearly to that of a work of art. At times she seems to be a sculpture. Her conviction that she can stay young forever subtly alludes to the durability of statues (p. 190). Both her coldness and her pale, luminous, and transparent skin remind one of a marble statue, as does the ‘clay-white, hieratic mask’ that is her face, and against the window she seems to turn to ‘shadowed stone’ (pp. 100f., 159, 128).

At other moments she shows pictorial qualities: the ‘grainy inner lining’ of her ‘most secret parts’ (p. 2) resembles the texture of a canvas, as does the ‘grainy, thick texture’ of her skin (p. 121). When the narrator describes her ‘painted, soot-black lashes’ it sounds as if she were not merely wearing make-up but as if her eyes, indeed her whole body, were painted (p. 51). In bed, she adopts ‘her Duchess of Alba pose’ and the narrator refers to their sexual intercourse as ‘the act, as it is interestingly called’, stressing the fact that she was not so much naked but nude (Athena, pp. 164, 120, 116). At times he perceives her as ‘a problem in perspective, a puzzle-picture such as the Dutch miniaturists used to do, which would only yield up its secret when viewed from a particular, unique angle’ (p. 154). He believes that she in turn must have an impression of him like that of ‘an eyed unipod heaving and slithering’ towards her across the floor (p. 2). In other words, her perspective is that of a portrait hung on the wall, perceiving the spectator through its painted eyes as if through a spyhole in the wall.

Is she a painting then? Does her initial ‘A.’ stand for the name of the Greek goddess in Jean Vaublin’s painting Birth of Athena, the only original in the collection? It is the only one of the eight stolen pictures that is not dealt with in a separate ekphrastic chapter in Athena; instead the entire narration seems to form a different type of ekphrasis. It not only puts this Birth of Athena in front of the reader’s eyes but also turns it into a narration. By supplying the fictitious painting with an individual history and the dimension of time and mobility through the act of narration, the narration makes Athena truly come to life. The text does not merely give a description of Birth of Athena but indeed gives birth to Athena herself in the form of A. Thus, she is more than merely a painted figure and, within the fictional boundaries of the novel, acquires a semireal status, as the narrator insists:

I know, I know the objections, I have read the treatises: there is no real she, only a set of signs, a series of appearances, a grid of relations between swarming particles; yet, I insist on it: she was there at those times, it was she who clutched me to her and cried out, not a flickering simulacrum foisted on me by the stop-frame technique of a duplicitous reality. I had her. (P. 97)

Not so much a trompe l’œuil as a Galatea vivified, she indeed comes to life under the loving gaze of the Pygmalion-like narrator, transgressing from the realm of art into reality: ‘[…] you became animate and suddenly stepped out of your frame’ (p. 83). Hence, ‘A.’ is also for ‘allegory’: she is an allegory for a work of art coming to life. Clearly, Banville’s trilogy aims at a fusion: life appears like a painting on a grand scale while simultaneously paintings come alive. The lovers in the last book of the trilogy most clearly embody this fusion of life and art: while the narrator shows qualities of a painting, his mistress A. seems to have stepped out of a frame. The borderline between art and life becomes permeable; in fact, the two realms become at times indistinguishable.

Recurring metaphors support the coming together of art and life throughout the trilogy. One of these is that of the doppelgänger. All three novels are subtle plays with the reflection of characters. Freddie alludes to ‘that other self […], the bad one, the evil, lost twin’, a sort of inner Mr. Hyde that lurks behind his eloquent, educated Dr. Jekyll mask and is identified by Freddie as the driving force behind the murder (Ghosts, p. 181). Similarly, the dubious art dealer Morden in Athena does not merely relate to the narrator Morrow by the sound of his name but at times appears to be the embodiment of his darker side. He reminds Morrow of himself and simultaneously frightens him (Athena, p. 60f.). In fact, he is something of a terrible imperative hidden within the narrator, and his name is to be read in German with an exclamation mark as ‘Morden!’, which translates as ‘murder!’ Thus, he never fails to remind Morrow of his criminal past.

The trilogy abounds with further doppelgänger. A. has a twin sister, and Charlie French and Inspector Haslet from the first novel reappear as Francie and Inspector Hackett in the last, to name but a few. The most prominent form of doppelgänger is that of a character being mirrored by a figure in a painting. In The Book of Evidence, the fate of the murdered maidservant is strangely reflected by that of the stolen portrait which the narrator throws away as carelessly as he throws away the maidservant’s life. In Athena, real life and art reflect each other in so far as the ekphrastic chapters foreshadow or comment upon the events that take place in the course of the narration: for example, The Rape of Proserpine foreshadows the violence of the love affair between Morrow and A., and Pygmalion hints at the coming to life of A. In Ghosts, the entire story is visually encapsulated in the painting Le monde d’or. As McMinn demonstrates, the painting serves indeed ‘as a kind of visual parable of Freddie’s world’.[4] In addition, Jean Vaublin, the fictitious painter of this fête galante, turns into an alter ego of the narrator, who sees himself ‘in a cloak and a slouch hat’, a ‘Vaublin beside the Seine’. The painter, like the narrator, changes his name and wants to confess ‘something about a crime committed long ago; something about a woman’ (Ghosts, pp. 153, 35, 128).

It is not only on the level of fiction that art mirrors life. ‘Jean Vaublin’ is also a near anagram of ‘John Banville’, as are indeed the names of all the painters commented upon in the ekphrastic chapters of Athena, be they ‘Johann Livelb’, ‘L. van Hobelijn’, ‘Giovanni Belli’, or other. Thus, the world of the literary characters not only merges with that of the fictitious paintings described in the text but intermingles as well with the world of the author John Banville. The novels mark transgressions between the realm of reality and that of fiction, subverting the border line of art and reality as if in an application of Freddie’s favourite philosophy, the ‘many worlds theory’ (Ghosts, p. 173):

I have always been convinced of the existence somewhere of another me, my more solid self, more weighty and far more serious than I, intent perhaps on great and unimaginable tasks, in another reality, where things are really real; I suppose for him, out there in his one of many worlds, I would be no more than the fancy of a summer’s day, a shimmer at the edge of vision, something half-glimpsed […]. Oh, if you are really there, bright brother, in your more real reality, think of me, turn all you stern attentions on me, even for an instant, and make me real, too. (Ghosts, p. 181)

This sounds like a character’s pledge to change his reality status, to step out of the book and become real — and it is the trilogy’s program in a nutshell. Central to Banville’s literary play is the transgression of the boundaries between art and reality, between fact and fiction, and Frames provides us with many instances of characters stepping out of frames.

A further crucial metaphor in the process of framing and de-framing reality is that of the mirror. Like a painting, it shows only a segment of reality and through its shape provides an enclosure around the scene it presents. Furthermore it often has wooden or gilded rims very similar to those of paintings. Thus, the onlooker perceives something like a portrait of him­self. A mirror reduces the three-dimensional living being standing in front of it to a two-dimensional image; in other words, it reduces life to art. We witness a reversal of the central motif of The Picture of Dorian Gray, where the portrait became the true mirror of the protagonist: in Banville’s trilogy, the mirror images turn into instantaneous paintings of the onlookers. Looking more closely at the imagery of mirrors, we can see, though, that they do not merely reduce life to a fixed and immobile picture. Rather, the mirrors show living pictures: the depicted persons move, flex their muscles, grimace, and look back. Their perspective on reality might be similar to that of A. who, as mentioned above, perceives the onlooker as a strange, big-eyed unipod as if looking through a spyhole. Indeed, A. appears to be not only an animated painting but also a mirror image come alive. Freddie describes her as ‘a gleaming apparition’ in a dark house that at first looks like his own reflection in a life-sized mirror. Only after a while does the silvering on the back of the looking glass begin to wear away and enable him to look through it and see her (Athena, p. 88). According to this metaphor, A. not only steps out of the frame of the painting entitled The Birth of Athena but also out of a mirror image of the narrator himself. Thus mirrors, like paintings, mark points of transgression from life into art and vice versa. In an optical trick, they conflate the onlooker and his image, art and life. They are mise-en-abîmes, ‘worlds within worlds’ out of which dead, two-dimensional images like A. may step as real life three-dimensional beings and in which reality and images ‘bleed into each other’.

I am at once here and there, then and now, as if by magic. I think of the stillness that lives in the depths of mirrors. It is not our world that is reflected there. It is another place entirely, another universe, cunningly made to mimic ours. Anything is possible there; even the dead may come back to life. Flaws develop in the glass, patches of silvering fall away and reveal the inhabitants of that parallel, inverted world going on about their lives all unawares. And sometimes the glass turns to air and they step through it without a sound and walk into my world (Ghosts, p. 55).

It is as though there were a world behind the mirror, as if it were a window into another form of existence.

In fact, the imagery of windows is similarly central to the trilogy and serves a comparable purpose: they, too, provide frames and mark spaces of transgression. The protagonists are framed when standing in front of a window and looking out. They are bathed in brightness or appear as ‘silhouettes against a haze of white light’ (Ghosts, p. 43). The narrator imagines himself in prison ‘striking an elegant pose, [his] ascetic profile lifted to the light in the barred window, fingering a scented handkerchief and faintly smirking, Jean-Jacques the cultured killer’ (The Book of Evidence, p. 5). Both the posture of the characters and the composition of the window scenes remind the reader of traditional portrait art that frequently employed windows as a background. Furthermore, the framing also works in the opposite direction when the characters in front of the window do not turn into a portrait of themselves but become, in their turn, observers of pictorial views. Like mirrors, windows turn real-life situations into ‘scenes’ (Athena, p. 163). Shaping the view, they function as framing devices for events both outside and inside. Accordingly, the characters in Banville’s trilogy frequently look through windows as if at a painting, and the outside turns into a ‘sunlit scene’ or a ‘classical landscape of meadows and hills and bosky glades, dotted about with statuary and marble follies and dainty, sparkling waterfalls’ (Ghosts, 114, 89). They depict a ‘human spectacle’ as we might encounter it in Brueghel or ‘the slow parade of clouds the colour of smoke and ice’ that we often find in the Dutch masters (Athena, p. 179).

Furthermore, windows frequently take over the symbolic function of eyes. Some explicitly remind the narrator of ‘startled […], wide-open eyes’, and it seems that through them buildings look out at visitors, ‘frowning’ at their presence or staring down on them blankly. They give them the ‘sense of some vast presence, vigilant and malign’ (Athena, p. 233; Ghosts, p. 178; Athena, p. 173). They are not only the equivalents of a building’s organ of vision, however. They also function as an architectonic prolongation of the protagonists’ eyes. Sometimes the window even takes on some of the qualities associated with the eyes of those looking out. Professor Kreutznaer’s window, for instance, not only resembles his eyes by virtue of its circular shape but is also ‘greyed with dust and cobwebs’, looking out at the distant sea and sky (Ghosts, p. 41f). In other words, it is as old and unused as the eyes of the professor, who has completely retreated into himself, shying away from all company and gazing in a dreamy, unfocused way into the distance of his thoughts.

The characters spend most of their time in the seclusion of dark indoor spaces: they meet in dingy pubs or old, derelict buildings and live in sombre towers, prisons, or secluded houses.[5] In a kind of exile from the world, they are shut off from their surroundings, and windows are their only connections to the outside. The characters are forever looking out, and it is as though these windows have become an architectural prolongation of their own organs of sight. By functioning as a metaphor for the characters’ eyes, however, windows acquire a deeper meaning in Banville’s trilogy. They mark the frontier between inside and outside, not only in the obvious sense of indoors and outdoors but also in the sense of separating the inside and the outside of persons. In a change of scale, they become substitutes for the characters’ eyes, while the dark, cavernous indoor spaces come to symbolise the protagonists’ skulls. The characters do not only move through life as though through a painting but also move through these interior spaces as if through their own skull. The eyes are frontiers: frontiers that separate the inside and the outside of the skull, world and imagination, fact and fiction.

Thus, Frames shows an inside perspective: it is as though we perceived everything from inside the narrator’s skull. Not only do we see everything through his eyes, we also seem to roam with him rather freely through his imagination. He is ‘the invisible man’ and a ‘floating phantom’ (Athena, p. 13; The Book of Evidence, p. 16) — or rather a floating eye, since he perceives almost exclusively visually. Everything in his narration seems to be his imagination: the life he makes up for his deceased aunt Corky (Athena, p. 199), magical changes of location (Athena, p. 55), people materialising next to him soundlessly out of the blue (Athena, p. 69), their names and looks (The Book of Evidence, p. 92), or dogs biting other characters at his whim (Athena, p. 210). Not surprisingly, his first task after his release is to ‘image [himself] into existence’ in order to start a new life (Ghosts, p. 195f). In a way similar to Frankenstein’s monster, creatures of his imagination come to life and turn into valid characters:

Where do they come from, these sudden phantoms that stride unbidden into my unguarded thoughts, pushy and smug and scattering cigarette ash on the carpet, as if they owned the place? Invented in the idle play of the mind, they can suddenly turn treacherous, can rear up in a flash and give a nasty bite to the hand that fashioned them.

At first, passages like these seem to mark the narrator as highly unreliable. Yet, it is not failure to deliver reality through narration that shows here but the fact that there is no reality apart from the one the narrator imagines. His poetic motto seems to be ‘to image [others] so vividly as to make them quicken into a sort of life’ (Ghosts, p. 27). In analogy, a failure of his imagination can be fatal for the book’s characters. The maidservant has to die because of his lack of imagination, making ‘that failure of imagination [his] real crime, the one that made the others possible’ (The Book of Evidence, p. 215). In his mind she was dead long before the blow of the hammer; in fact, she had never been brought to life properly. Since there is no world apart from his imagination, there is no space for her to live.

The opposite figure is A.: she is the visualisation of the creative power of imagination. Tellingly, her initial suggests a very close relationship with the Greek goddess in The Birth of Athena: like Athena, A. is not so much born from a woman as from the head of a man; she is not so much flesh and blood as a creature of fantasy. If Athena was born from the head of Zeus, A. is brought forth from the head of the narrator — a true Kopfgeburt indeed. A mirror image of himself, she is a muse that mysteriously disappears as soon as others arrive. Summoning her by the power of his imagination, she becomes an allegory of the narrator’s own creative power. More specifically, A. is an allegory of ekphrasis: a work of art quickening into life in front of the reader’s eyes by virtue of the narrator’s creative description. Thus, she is the product of a male form of auctorial procreation in which the narrator gives birth to literary characters like a mother might to a child. Indeed, the ekphra­sis we find in Banville’s trilogy is highly gendered: we always find a male narrator describing paintings of women. Thus, it becomes a device of gendered metafictionality, describing the potency of the male writer to appropriate the world. At the same time, though, Banville subverts this form of appropriation. More often than not it fails, and the narrator has to fall silent before a painting for lack of words while the paintings seem to evade his narrative grasp, staying strangely vague or developing a life of their own.

How do these paintings develop a life of their own within the novels? How do they come alive in Banville’s narration? How does Banville achieve to enliven visual sensation? In order to answer these questions, we must go beyond an analysis of metaphors and must engage in a study of narrative techniques. Banville’s strategy seems to be twofold: on the one hand, his narration aspires to the condition of painting while on the other hand, the pictures in his novels acquire literary qualities. The texts of the trilogy are frequently imbued with a pictorial quality that goes beyond the obvious use of visual semantics. The fact that, as Behrensmayer observes, Banville’s narrator recalls ‘only the look of things’, and that ‘his recollection of her [i.e. of A.] is almost entirely visual’ is not the only strategy to endow the text with the visual.[6] This ambition is also shown in the narrator’s attempt to turn the chronological art of narration into the static, spatial art of painting. All novels are characterised by rather unspecific temporal settings, and Ghosts especially has a dreamy, unreal quality to it that evades clear demarcations of time and space. Thus, the novels seem to be bound to no particular epoch but rather hover freely outside the realm of time. The ekphrastic passages do much to add to this impression. While most parts of the stories are told in past tense, the description of paintings is rendered in present tense — as if the narrator’s own life was more remote and further away than the scenes on these pictures. To put it in visual terms: the narrator’s autobiography seems to function merely as the back­ground to the painted scenes in the foreground. The present tense of the ekphrastic scenes thus creates a feeling of timelessness: what is depicted on the paintings is taking place all the time. There is no end to it: The Woman With Gloves turns her gaze forever at the on­looker, the inhabitants of Le monde d’or are forever frozen on the brink of departure, and Athena is endlessly being born. Present tense is thus used to emphasise the fact that these paintings, as all paintings, are above the flow of time.

The use of mythology further adds to this atmosphere. Beneath many of the stories lie hidden myths, and all novels abound with allusions especially to biblical and Greek mythology. The narrator’s wife in The Book of Evidence is called Daphne; Pan, Silene, and Apollo all make their appearance in Ghosts, and Athena bears its most central mythology in its title. In fact, Athena juxtaposes the narrator’s account with scenes painted after Ovid’s Metamorphoses, and at times it seems as though the narrator’s tale is nothing more than a translation of these fictive mythological paintings back into language. Furthermore, we have identified the transformative mythologies of Lot’s wife and Pygmalion’s Galatea as emblems of the trilogy’s efforts to permeate the borderline between art and life. This all-pervasive subtext of mythology strengthens the impression of timelessness: the narrator’s individual story appears to be part of a more general, universal tale. From a distance, the characters are not only entangled in their individual struggles but share an eternal fate as emblematically expressed in the underlying mythology. The postman turns into Hermes and the inhabitants of an old people’s home into ancient maenads (Athena, p. 90, 147). The narrator’s pursuit of his lover is that of an ageing Apollo trying in vain to get hold of Daphne, and his love for paintings is mirrored in Pygmalion’s admiration of Galatea. In short, many strands of narration go beyond the purely individual by alluding to mythology.

A good example can be found in Athena, where an entire chapter is obviously modelled on the myth of Charon crossing the river Lethe or, to be more precise, after Arnold Böck­lin’s famous painting Toteninsel (1880) of the same scene (cf. illustration 1). In order to visit his dying aunt, the narrator takes a taxi to a nursing home tellingly called ‘The Cypresses’. The place is ‘set in a semi-circle of those eponymous, blue-black, pointy trees on the side of a hill with a sweeping and slightly vertiginous view of the sea across to the other side of the bay’ and closely resembles the com­position of Böcklin’s painting. A nurse opens with the words ‘Whoa up there, you’ll wake the dead!’ and it emerges that her name is Sharon — a thinly veiled ver­sion of Charon. Unsurprisingly, the di­rector of the place is called Mr. Haddon, his name being an onomastic variation on Hades. Indeed the ‘s’ of ‘shades’ can be deleted in the description of the place: not only is it ‘a house of shades’ as the narra­tor suggests but also the house of Hades. It appears that the whole place is modelled on a painting and the entire scene acquires a pictorial quality — irrespective of whether or not the reader is aware of the allusions to Böcklin.

Another rhetorical device through which the texts assume pictorial qualities is that of the narrator’s gaze. As discussed above, the narrator frequently seems to stare at the scenes he is about to describe, freezing the characters’ movements and turning the scenes into narrative film-stills or tableaux-morts. Thus, the text is emptied of its temporal qualities, and the narration of events gives way to the description of figural arrangements. In the case of Ghosts, this technique seems to apply not only to some ekphrastic paragraphs or scenes perceived in a very visual mode but also to the composition of the whole novel. It is a book strangely devoid of plot: nothing really happens to the protagonists, and the reader is confronted with an arrangement of figures as if in a painting. The novel is full of tension but not of suspense, so the question that arises from Le monde d’or applies directly to the entire novel: ‘Who are these people? we ask, for it seems to matter not what they may be doing, but what they are’ (Ghosts, p. 227f.). In fact, the structure of Ghosts closely mirrors that of the fêtes galantes genre in painting, of which Le monde d’or is an exponent. In arts,

the term characterises those gatherings of men and women, usually dressed with stud­ied refinement, who flirt decorously, dance, make music or talk freely, in a landscape or in a sumptuously unreal architectural setting. The shimmering coloured silk of their theat­rical clothes — their ‘habitats modernes’ — raises the initial question — who are these figures, and who are they supposed to repre­sent? For, although mostly drawn from life, these figures seem to lose all aura of reality when brought together by the chance ar­rangement of the canvas.[7]

Indeed, Ghosts ‘tries to achieve a nar­rative version of a fête galante’, as McMinn observes.[8] By replacing the plot with an arrangement of figures, Ghosts adopts a similar stance. Here, we also find ‘a sumptuously unreal ar­chitectural setting’, ‘theatrical clothes’, and characters that ‘seem to lose all aura of reality’. The novel thus shows the elemental characteristics of a par­ticular visual genre.

Banville’s second ekphrastic strat­egy is that of turning the paintings de­scribed into narration. One way of doing this is to intersperse their descriptions with extrapictorial elements. Thus, when the narrator describes Le monde d’or his characterisation is interrupted by questions such as ‘what is it that looks at us here?’, ‘from whom is he [the Pierrot] hiding?’, or ‘has the tem­pest passed, or is it only gathering?’ (Ghosts, p. 229ff.). The description of a painting gives way to an account of its appropriation: we follow the narrator’s thoughts as he studies the painting. By adding the gradual process of its appropriation, the painting is opened up to the dimension of time. In addition, it widens the perspective: it is not just the painting that is put before our eyes but also the narrator, standing in front of it and trying to make sense of it. No longer are we exclusively confronted with an eternal work of art, but instead a living character enters our point of view and adds the dimension of time to that of space.

The invention of stories is another way of narrating pictures that we repeatedly find in Banville. In The Book of Evidence, the narrator reads the painting entitled The Woman With Gloves as a pictorial autobiography. The picture reveals to him the sitter’s behaviour towards her servants as well as her father’s delicate stomach and the painter’s choleric nature (The Book of Evidence, p. 105ff.). The frozen moment of the portrait is thus resolved into an entire autobiography — which, of course, is entirely speculative. In particular, we often witness a move from the description of paintings towards that of their production, from the timeless work of art to the temporal act of painting. In The Book of Evidence for instance, we learn almost as much about the painting session as we learn about the portrait itself. This is the predominant strategy for translating pictures into language: transferring the attention from the finished work of art to the process of its creation. Thus, the trilogy is not so much a description of individual paintings as an investigation into pictorial imagina­tion. Both painting and writing spring from the same source, and here they are truly sister arts: both are acts of imagination that create illusionary worlds.

Banville’s trilogy does not merely write about these acts of imagination. Appropriating the novels, the reader himself has to perform a similar creative act. The narrator’s unreli­ability mentioned above forces the reader to construct his own story out of the sometimes contradictory pieces of information that the narrator provides. Does the art dealer take a sip of his mineral water or, as the narrator corrects himself, a puff from his cigar (Athena, p. 64)? How come a pub suddenly turns into a hotel (Athena, p. 67)? How can the narrator suddenly emerge ‘pop!’ from a cellar ‘by a wave of [his] wand’ (Athena, p. 55)? How can we trust a narrator who dresses the characters of his story like dolls and whose tale per­forms ‘impossible, magical scene-changes, splicing two different occasions with bland dis­regard for setting, props or costumes’, as he himself admits (Athena, pp. 98, 116)? The reader soon realises that the narrator’s word is not to be taken for granted; instead he him­self has to assemble his own version of the story. He has to add up the various bits and pieces to form a complete picture. At other times the narrator is silent altogether and the reader is left to his own imagination, for the novels are interspersed with narrative gaps or, to be precise, with ellipses and aposiopeses (e.g. Athena, pp. 24, 148, 169, 203). From time to time the narrator breaks off the description of a painting, implicitly admitting that words — even in his highly eloquent language — are not capable of rendering paintings. In cases like these, the reader has to fill in the gaps. His imagination will perform the task of the narrator’s words and will create the image of a painting. Similarly, it is no coincidence that the trilogy is devoid of visual paratexts. There are no reproductions of the paintings men­tioned as in other novels, no maps, and no illustrations. Even the cover pages do not show paintings but merely empty frames (cf. illustrations 2 and 3). This, however, is highly sym­bolic: Banville’s trilogy provides nothing but narrative frames to be filled in by the reader’s imagination. Banville’s paintings are pictures of the mind in more than one sense; not only are they purely fictitious inventions by the author, they are also pictures that only come to exist before the reader’s inner eye.

In Banville’s trilogy life turns into art when characters move through their world as if through paintings and become ‘sculptors of the self’ (Ghosts, p. 196). At the same time, art turns into life as A. demonstrates by stepping out of The Birth of Athena. The conflation of life and art on the fictional level is so strong in these novels that ultimately they become practically indistinguishable. Tellingly, the mirrors and windows, these gates between self and the other, inside and outside, are often smashed or broken; their demolition symbolises that of the border between outside and inside world, reality and imagination, fact and fiction (e.g. Ghosts, pp. 179, 206, 231). It is no coincidence that towards the end of his trilogy the narrator sums up his philosophy in the motto ‘Esse est percipi […] and vice versa’ (Athena, p. 226). Being is being perceived: like paintings, we depend on others to perceive us in order to assure ourselves of our own existence — we need to be looked at. And vice versa, in the narrator’s self-declared ‘bog Latin’, ‘to see is to cause to be’: by perceiving our sur­roundings we create the world we live in and give life to all the characters that populate it like a novel. Life, according to Banville’s trilogy, is a huge palimpsest, an incessant re­shaping of the material which is the self, a constant painting over of old selves with new models of self-perception — finally, it is a piece of art.

On the other hand, the pictures in the three novels are themselves painted over. They are turned into narration through words that put a layer of fictional reality over them; they are hidden beneath the surface of the story. In short, Frames is a constant stepping into and out of frames. Ultimately, it provides frames for our imagination: a narrative structure within which our fantasy brings forth creatures that hover on the edge of art and life. It shows the world as imagination and not least reflects upon how we perceive contemporary reality. One could say that we experience Banville’s novels like we experience postmodern reality, never quite sure of how authentic what we see is. He evokes the visual in order to question it: his trilogy demonstrates that seeing is less a means of verifying authenticity but rather a tool of creative world-making. Ultimately, his playful texts demonstrate that our world is the construction of our imagination — a fiction. In this process, ekphrastic strategies are of crucial importance, for they present the depicted world as though it were in front of our eyes. They are tools for writing the sensuous as well as for sensuous writing that enable us to experience the fictional world as if it were real. Thus, Banville’s Frames provides us with a first example of how literature strives to come to terms with the visual and simulta­neously shows how it depends on engaging the reader’s imagination in this process — in other words, how we make sense of, and in, literature.