'Mirror on Mirror Mirrored Is All the Show': Aspects of the Uncanny in Banville's Work with a Focus on Eclipse (John Banville) (Critical Essay‪)‬

When we look at Banville's oeuvre we find that his protagonists are all, without exception, prototypes who agonize over their identity or rather over the lack of it. This is reflected in the fact that they feel most at home when they are not quite at home: their element is 'das Heimliche', a paradoxical word in German, as Freud points out, since it conveys both the meaning 'homely' and secretive, (1) which means both splitting and hiding the division in the (id)entity of the protagonist. Indeed Banville's figures are all split: they are actors, spies, or (often paranoiac) researchers looking for their lost twin. But it is not only their profession which indicates their split condition, their names also reveal a heterogeneous nature (like Gabriel Godkin and Gabriel Swan: the former is explicitly linked to the divine, the latter to Zeus, who changed into a swan to rape Leda), or contain blatant oppositions (Felix, Latin for 'happy' renders people unhappy, and 'Goodfellow's' evil eye is threatening). In other instances, the names can also indicate ambiguity by implication, like Myles in The Sea, who recalls the strange children of Henry James's The Turn of the Screw; or they suggest that their bearers have no single entity: Maskell, the spy, has the extra layer in his name, Vander lacks an origin, as this is Dutch for 'of the', thus indicating a belonging but no origin (as if you were to name someone O' and omit the 'Donnell'); Cleave, finally, indicates the very split itself. But apart from ominous professions and names, there is a third aspect that connects all cleft protagonists: all of them perform their quest for the self through writing, as Derek Hand observes. (2) This self-reflexive writing, as Anneleen Masschelein points out, is the very thing that generates the uncanny in fiction. (3) As far as the author is concerned, Banville himself underscores the link between writing and the double in an interview with Ciaran Carty, where he sees the perplexing kind of difference in identical twins as 'a powerful metaphor for the act of fiction: 'in telling the story the writer ... becomes someone else', just as a twin can escape into another name and self while at the same time remaining himself. (4) This ability to be and not to be is shared by the spy: 'This is the secret power of the spy, ... it is the power to be and not be, to detach oneself from oneself, to be oneself and at the same time another'. (5) But Banville is not the only one to see the potential of the phenomenon of twins. The Belgian artist and playwright Jan Fabre sees this motif as 'an indicator of the perfectly unfathomable character of reality'. (6)