Echo and Coincidence in John Banville's Eclipse (Critical Essay‪)‬

John Banville's Eclipse (2000) might appear at first sight less ambitious in scope and purpose than the preceding works of what already constitutes a considerable opus. After the tetralogy devoted to astronomy and scientific knowledge, following the trilogy of interlocking novels about art, Eclipse forgoes the grand design in order to focus upon the solipsistic world of a would-be recluse. (1) While Birchwood (1973) and The Newton Letter (1982) used the Big House theme to explore the 'nightmare of Irish history', Eclipse homes in on an individual who would sever all connections with his past. (2) The novel is inwardly ambitious in that it delves deeply into the creative imagination. If it downplays its Irishness, it remains true to that tradition in Irish literature which sees a solitary narrator take centre stage and self-consciously attempt to tell--and understand--his own tale. Alexander Cleave is the ultimate thespian that Banville's other novels had led us to expect. If narrating is itself a speech act, Banville's spinners of yarn never fail to turn the performance into speech acting. In more senses than one, Eclipse is a novel about the theatre, be it the stage of drama and circus performance, theatre as intertextual backdrop, or as a metaphor for the divided self. In this tale of an actor, identity is performance and, when Cleave's own mask slips, the familial figures of a repressed drama come to the fore, allowing the reader to glimpse into the wings of the creative process. The voice that emerges from behind the actor's fragmented personae belongs to an authorial figure whose confession resuscitates the genesis of the novel. Eclipse tells its own tale. The recurrent image of a solar eclipse combines with the myth of Icarus to sketch patterns which engage us in the same search for meaning as Alexander Cleave. The story of bereavement is also to be read as a raise en abyme of a crisis of creation that culminates in the sacrifice of the ideal child. Drawing upon classical mythology and Shakespeare, the novel recreates its sources to fashion an original myth of artistic creation.