In rereading John Banville's Doctor Copernicus nearly thirty years since it was first published in 1976, and twenty years since I first read it, I am struck by its acknowledged reliance on Arthur Koestler's interpretive narrative of the historical Copernicus in The Sleepwalkers, but also by its great intellectual ambition. (1) Whether or not it is useful to view it as a 'historiographic metafiction' as Linda Hutcheon argues in A Poetics of Postmodernism, it is a novel replete with provocative ideas in no small measure because it enacts a fictional scientific biography of one of the most important figures in the history of science. (2) To achieve his task, Banville blurs the genre boundaries of fiction, biography, pure theory, the nineteenth-century historical novel, and twentieth-century modernism. Even as a book reviewer, Banville preferred those works that strove to fuse classical and romantic forms. That ideal is present in Doctor Copernicus. What I wish to demonstrate here with a close reading of parts of the novel are the fusions of scientific theory, narrative form, and documented material history that help us account for Banville's epistemology. The first two sections of the novel cover the astronomer's life up to age sixty-six or thereabouts. A third-person narration dominates (though not completely) these two sections. There then follows the first person discourse of Rheticus, Copernicus's pupil, who continues the narrative and confirms a number of our impressions about the life of the great man hinted at in the previous sections. The novel ends with a fourth section, devoted solely to the day of the astronomer's death. This section is mediated in the third person. Each section provides us with insufficient knowledge to characterize fully the figure of Copernicus. Each section does, however, pose one of the major questions of John Banville's early scientific fiction: to what varying degrees do experiment, experience, and intuition account, respectively, for the complexities of the world as perceived by human beings in general and scientists in particular?
