In this house, what manner of utterance shall there be? (Wallace Stevens, 'Architecture for the Adoration of Beauty'). More than twenty-five years after writing Long Lankin, John Banville, quoting Adorno, offered an indication of what he considered to be a central characteristic of artistic form: 'The unresolved antagonisms of reality reappear in art in the guise of immanent problems of artistic form. This, and not the deliberate injection of objective moments or social content, defines art's relation to society.' (1) This essay will reflect on the centrality of immanent problems of artistic form in Banville's writing from Long Lankin onwards. With specific emphasis on Long Lankin, Nightspawn, and Birchwood, I will illustrate that the early work was already engaged in an artistic discourse with its own condition. While most critics of Banville have observed that his work engages the problem and meaning of art, this essay will argue that the first three texts are constructed around patterns of key topoi that serve as vital intimations of the author's focus. These texts may be read as extended metafictional commentaries on their own making, on the meaning of art and, ultimately, as direct critiques of the meaning and possibilities of what is frequently termed postmodern fiction; in order to effect this extended discourse, Banville establishes a series of metaphorical patterns including, silence, the topographical space of the house (in Birchwood merged with the ancestral home), the twin, the lost sister, the lost brother, or red-haired outsider, the circus (and/or clown-figure), and the island. All of these motifs are evident in Long Lankin, some are developed further in Nightspawn and Birchwood, and extend throughout Banville's work in general, so much so that they frequently act as focal points around which the dominant issues revolve, culminating, via a metaphorical commentary, in a radical reassessment of postmodern self-reflexive fiction. Birchwood, in particular, firmly establishes the direction that Banville's work takes thereafter. Thus, this essay will offer a consideration of the embedded theoretical debate that dictates and conditions the other elements in Banville's first three works.
