Chapter II - B - MA
Chapter 2 - B
The Newton Letter
The Newton Letter (1982), is the third section of the scientific tetralogy. It is a short novel (novella) which pursues the same astronomical theme, but in a more moderate approach. It traces the development which concluded in Isaac Newton’s discovery of the law of gravity and this in itself depended on Kepler’s previous findings. While Doctor Copernicus rejected the imaginative element and concentrated on the intellectual, and Kepler was often lost between the two; Newton managed to reach a mutual harmony between the imaginative and the real.
The book gives us a clear and contemporary Irish scene. It is the story of a writer, who is a product of a peasant Catholic upbringing. He rents a lodge at Farm House in order to finish an academic study about Isaac Newton. But, he is possessed by conflicting inner thoughts and is involved in personal affairs which impede him, affect his plans, and take him far beyond his aim. He falls in love with the landlady of the house Charlotte, but it is not a reciprocated feeling. At the same time he has a sexual affair with her niece Ottilie. He becomes totally frustrated and abandons the whole project which he had decided to accomplish throughout the summer holiday. The story is also full of mysteries that draw the reader’s attention and confuse him.
Charlotte’s husband Edward is one puzzle since he seems to be sick all through the novel, but no one is sure if it is a physical illness or is it due to indulgence in drink and chaos. Another source of doubt is the child Michael whom he believes to be the illegitimate child of Ottilie, but towards the end discovers that it belongs to an ex-servant and an unknown girl who left it and ran away. The writer forms first impression about the inhabitants of the house which become complicated and are later on unravelled as he proceeds.
He watches the owners of the house trying to draw a link between the ordinary and the aristocratic. The discrepancy between Catholics and Protestants creates misconceptions. The character of Charlotte is a symbol of a class trying hard to remain with a strong entity and a sense of reason. The writer is in constant flux between traditional disputes of a Catholic Ireland and the simple reactions and human expression. He admits at the end of the book that he was;
I was like a man living underground who, coming up for air, is dazzled by the light and cannot find the way back into his bolt hole. 78.
While giving a review, seven years later, of his summer at Fern House he feels that he must return and finish his research. “In the end of course I shall take up the book and finish it”79. Seans Lysaght in his article on Banville’s tetralogy stresses the fact that, “The novel opens with an address to Clio, the Muse of History”8. We also notice that the writer approaches Clio as his teacher, friend, and inspirer, but at the same time, he cannot continue being a historian and has to return to the real modern experience. The concluding part of the novel is again an address to Clio relating the writer’s dilemma at Fern House and his decision to go back and finish the work.
The Newton Letter aimed at examining the last period of Newton’s life, when he replaced scientific study by a review of religious thoughts and in particular at a moment of distress when he wrote a letter to John Locke. Yet, the writer could not keep with the historical track and was immersed in the family affairs of the new owners of Fern House. The reality around him engulfed everything else.
Banville excelled here in the use of the narrator as a historical writer who had to confront a real modern frustrated world. In order to reveal to the reader all the conceptions which warred within the writer’s intellect, Banville tackled various themes within this concise novella; trying to achieve a pattern of discovery you feel the need for any achievement or attainment of a solution or a course to follow in spite of all the scruples and obstacles that confront the writer. The themes dealt with include the Big House’s theme, the religious controversy, the relationship between male and female, the scientific and historical fields as well as the complete nihilism, or, in other words, what we call the ‘nada’ which also may imply the Absurd.
The Newton Letter, besides being part of the tetralogy, it stresses the theme of the Big House and how it affected the Irish society. The writer, who is also the protagonist, goes straight forward to the point at his arrival to Fern House. He gives a detailed description of a place whose name, attracted him, but its real shape and appearance was most unexpected:
It turned out to be a big gloomy pile with ivy and peeling walls and a smashed fanlight over the door, the kind of place where you picture a mad stepdaughter locked up in the attic. 81.
He continues giving the reader his own traditional conception of a Big House, “Once there had been a wall and a high pillared gate, but all was long gone, the way of other glories”82. It is that previous state of the Big House with which he was well acquainted; with its gates preventing eyes from looking inside, and on the other hand, eyes from inside viewing the ugly scenes of Irish peasants. Banville forms a link between his studies of Newton and the Big House. He makes a weird comparison between them; He was a great man now, his fame was assured, all Europe honoured him. But his life as a scientist was over .... . The world was turning him into a monument to himself, he was cold, arrogant, lonely. 83.
The place he is staying at, is as ordinary as any other; he saw something in the garden and unconsciously he judged it as a rat, while it was not so; it was only his idea that, for sure, there are rats here as there are any where else with such a ruined picture. The dull image which he witnesses brings back memories of his childhood and what he usually saw;
......at the foot of the hill there was a house, not very big, solitary and square with a steep roof. I would gaze at that silent house and wonder in a hunger of curiosity, what lives were lived there. Who stacked that firewood, hung that holly wreath, left those tracks in the hoarfrost on the hill? I can’t express the odd aching pleasure of that moment. I knew of course that those hidden lives wouldn’t be much different from my own..... It wasn’t the exotic I was after, but the ordinary. 84.
John Banville is one of the few writers of the Big House tradition who occupy the position of the outside view. Most writers, starting from Maria Edgeworth to George Moore, Elizabeth Bowen and Jennifer Johnson, to name but a few, have been from the ascendancy. Banville, like William Carlton are Irish natives who have occupied a different standing point. This could involve either envy, curiosity, false ideas, or any other similar emotions and thoughts.
Later on he will be shocked by the baffling reality and will contradict himself. When he first saw the owners he found certain features that his eyes were searching for, Edward’s tweeds, Charlotte’s fine-boned slender grace and Ottilie’s awkwardness, these were signs of the class. At the same time he was well aware of the misfortunes which befell these owners. They lost their land, the family fortune was devoured by taxes, death and inflation; he admired their courage in bearing all these agonies and disasters. According to his Catholic creed and upbringing, they seemed perfect beings. One of the strange aspects in the house is the presence of the little child Michael, who seems to be the illegitimate son of the lady Charlotte. He was sure that this little boy was not Edward’s and Charlotte’s son. “Michael was not their child: he was, of course, hers”85.
Edward himself, as mentioned before, is another riddle due to his seeming illness and his indulgence in drink. The traditional belief in the Big House’s owners gradually slips out of the narrator’s mind and similarly out of Banville’s pen as he says: “These dull people in their tumble down house in the hollow heart of the country”86.
Having his own preconception about the Big House and its owners as being Protestants, he is completely astonished to realise that they are Catholics. So they are Catholic owners of the Big House, who share a lot with him. Yet, this does not mean that they are natives. The English people who came in the twelfth century and lived in the Big Houses or even towers, did not all turn Protestants. By revealing this fact, Banville broke one of the essential rules of the Big House; in spite of being owners of the Big House, they share the same religious background and deserve another attitude while dealing with or thinking of them.
Throughout reading the novel, we notice the writer’s psychological hunger, which contradicts with his opinion about feeling that there is nothing unusual in this class. He needs to see things that he had expected, but never mentioned, things which have been deeply imbedded within him. For instance, he expects dinner to be served in a gaunt dinning room. Also, when toast is served to the Earl of Mount-Batten, the writer thought that they, “would dare to make a memorial of a drawing-room, tea-party”87.
Banville shows us that nothing remained from this class, and the hero may be saying that this class was still there, but it does not behave as the picture created in our minds, only some rare signs of aristocracy and no more. He reveals one of his latent thoughts and allows the reader a keen awareness of it. This is a usual trend in his writing and this time it is rather significant showing his opinion about those who are living in the Big House at the present time; “They were keepers of that most precious thing, her past”88. In this sentence he referred to Charlotte, the lady of the house, showing the reader that the past was the most valuable thing that remained from the Big House. This past is close to its end, it may remain an interesting image in the memory of people, but not so in reality. The dialogue between him and Ottilie concludes the whole sense of doubt and expectation;
What’s going on I said, are they going to sell the place? They’ll have to, I suppose, they’re not too happy with old Prunty. He’ll get it through, he’s rotten with money. 89.
The whole class tradition is dwindling, the place is ultimately going to be sold. After leaving the place and regaining his intention to compete his studies, he often remembers words that come to his mind and show certain prebodings such as Edward’s suffering;
But what he was, talking about, I suppose, was his sense of oneness now with all poor dumb things, a horse, a tree, a house, that suffer their lives in silence and resigned bafflement, and die unremarked. 9.
Both Edward and the Big House have reached a final situation of loss and a lonely isolated death, a state of non-belonging.
When dealing with the novel Birchwood we will notice that the hero is a member of the house. He speaks about himself, his family, and the whole situation from the inside. But, in The Newton Letter he is an outsider, it is the eye of an observer who had already suffered from the concept of the Big House. He is now shocked to find so many differences after being acquainted with its present inhabitants. Due to his preconceptions about the people living in the Big House, he thinks that they are Protestants, rich and extra-ordinary, people who need high walls and fences to keep intruders away. The reader could almost feel the loneliness of the owners, it is a situation which is a result of their own doings. In Ancestral Voices we have a comment through Banville’s satire of the whole genre,
In order to understand fully Banville’s use of the Big-House motif in The Newton Letter, we must trace the narrator’s mental development throughout the novel, as well as consider Banville’s concept of character and his satiric use of the Big-house genre. 91.
The whole novel centres round the Big-House, but it depicts the personal lives of its inhabitants more fully and comprehensively. The narrator had desired peace and quiet at Fern House in order to accomplish his study of Newton. Yet, his encounters with the family members upset everything, as he becomes intimately involved. At the beginning on his arrival he had been as McMinn explains;
Delighted by the calm and grace of these apparently typical Protestant landowners, who have style if not money, he looks forward to a rural idyll while researching. 92.
The Big-House subject leads to a sequence of frustrating discoveries which end any detachment and there is no achievement but a loss as,
bewildered and saddened by the mysteries of this strange household where appearances always trick him out of confidence and belief, the biographer decides to abandon both his research and the country. 93.
Although the study of the Big House theme can be specifically applied to the Irish society only yet certain critics believed that it is a general trend which could exist anywhere. Rudiger Imhof in Literary Interrelations says:
The Newton Letter, true, the events narrated therein take place in Ireland, some, where in the south, near Dublin; but essentially they could happen anywhere. The Irish backdrop is of secondary significance. 94.
Since this theme of the aristocratic habitation maybe related to any nation or society, similarly the male-female relationships can be a universal subject matter. This theme is clearly stressed in The Newton Letter, with all its implications and frustrations.
If male characters draw the attention of the reader through their adventures, intellectual genius or psychological disturbances, female characters have always been a reflection of most of their age’s social conflicts. In Women and Marriage in Victorian Fiction, Jenni Calder comments:
We have seen how women were tortured to be submissive to their husbands and fathers, how their restricted life was rationalized and reinforced by a great emphasis on the joys of self-sacrifice. 95.
Banville tried to be in keeping with the age he was depicting and to portray real specimens of women who were often traditional; but meanwhile they represented any social revolt or upheaval. In the 1860’s there was a new trend taking place in order to reach a full fledge. This movement revealed women asking for more independence through seeking knowledge, education and self-confidence. They were eager to satisfy their needs and desires, rejecting their past weakness and submissiveness.
Jenni Calder in Women and Marriage in Victorian Fiction explains this attitude:
In the 1860’s women were beginning to translate their yearnings into active campaigning ...... , by the 1870’s most women new more books, worth reading and had seen more with their own eyes.... 96.
In his novel Birchwood, Banville gave a more modern approach of women in the character of Mag, who was no longer repressed, but governing whenever she wished to satisfy her needs.
Nine years later in The Newton Letter he kept the character of the traditional female but with a development in her daring attitude. The novel concentrates on the two women Ottilie and Charlotte. The first description given by the narrator of Ottilie is very emphatic;
Her blonde hair was tied at the back with a rubber band..... . With her hands thrust in her pockets she stood and smiled at me. Hers was the brave brightness of all big awkward girls. 97.
As for Charlotte the lady of the house; the first picture we have of her is “large and blonde”98. Then later on he says, “Charlotte’s fine-boned slender grace that the dowdiest of clothes could not mask”99.
Ottilie is Charlotte’s niece, she is twenty-four years old, she has her desires and needs, but they are covered by emotions and passion. Banville gives every specific detail of the physical relationship between her and the narrator. The situation started as usual, “It’s strange to offered, without conditions, a body you don’t really want”1. He began this affair with the young Ottilie, but he gradually fell in love with the aunt Charlotte though it was not a mutual feeling. McMinn describes the narrator’s conflict saying, “One part of him continues the physical affair with Ottilie, while the other fantasies about Charlotte”11.
The physical attraction wans gradually and he becomes harsh and negligent to the young girl as he yearns for the elder woman believing himself to be a hero saving her from a sick drunken husband. This dual situation of a physical affair and unrequited love causes the narrator confusion and a sense of loss, “so that in his spiritual adultery the two women merged into Charlottilie”12. By the end of the novel we learn that Ottilie who represents the modern view through her behaviour in the sensual scene and her request of more knowledge and political information,(Finland being the first European country to give women the right to vote); “She’s in Dublin now. She abandoned her plan to go to university and is working in a shop.... She feels her life is only starting”13.
The theme of the Big House had proved a frustrating discovery and similarly the narrator’s relationship with women is another failure, as he realises a certain touch of insanity in the whole family which altered with the imposing circumstances and lived in “maniacal laughter, in a half remembered dream”14.
If the pattern of thematic discovery included the Big House and the women affairs, another main theme is the scientific quest or research. The whole narrative was an attempt to recapture the tone or the situation of Newton when he wrote a letter to John Locke blaminghim for trying to entangle him with women. But Newton had only imagined that women affairs impeded him, Banville’s narrator, on the other hand, was really involved in facts. Some critics also believe that the book is modelled on a letter sent by Lord Chandos to Francis Bacon where he explains that he cannot set his knowledge in a meaningful entity. In both cases, Banville’s narrator fails to complete his work as Newton’s biographer as real life becomes an obstacle which draws him away in various misleading directions. The simple time facts of life become more significant than scientific discoveries or achievement. Similarly, Newton himself like his biographer was not really worried about his bundle of papers that were destroyed by a fire in his Cambridge room. He was more concerned about real tangible facts such as the early morning sunshine or the scene of the flames as people were trying to extinguish the fire. Dr. Copernicus, Kepler and Banville’s biographer in The Newton Letter, all share the same quest for the truth and clear explanation. The act of creation in itself has become a real problem, how to depict, to reflect, in other words to observe and to explain. Rudiger Imhof writes referring to the narrator in The Newton Letter,
He finds himself in a predicament exactly like the one in which Newton is said to have been caught: embroiled with women, overwhelmed by the minutial of life, and robbed of his belief in absolutes. 15.
The narrator as used by Banville is aware of the needs of the family at the Fern House but he cannot discover what they are in reality. He is too confused to give, or in other words lacks the power of belonging and is too cold-hearted. There are no absolutes to judge matters, everything is relative. The novel ends by his letter to Clio, which may be taken as a farewell or an end of the attempt to be a historian or proper biographer. He ends without a discovery, a victim of nothingness, although he hopes that the future may be keeping something worthwhile which he can recapture when he returns to his study and research, “hell I awake in a few months in a few years, broken and deceived, in the midst of new ruins?”16.
He ended his early quest and his scientific pattern of life in a confused maze. The achievement meant is not to be ever attained since knowledge or discovery is relative not absolute,
Nothing....... The word reverberates. He broads on it as some magic emblem whose other face is not to been seen and yet is emphatically there. For the nothing automatically signifies the everything. 17.
With this lack of direction we can easily refer to another theme used by Banville to reflect the dilemma of searching for a meaning, a truth, a pattern of discovery: the idea of the absurd. The absurd, again, implies the nada the meaningless. The idea was dealt with clearly in Birchwood and then hinted at nine years later in The Newton Letter. The protagonist, or in other words the biographer finds Newton’s enterprises all frustrating and nothing is really rewarding;
The fire, or whatever the real conflagration was, had shown him something terrible and lovely, like flame itself. 18.
Yet, he did not know what to do or how to act, as nothing was significant, “He does not know what to do, what to think. He no longer knows how to live”19. It is the development of the nothing to signify a hidden everything, there is an unknown future and a disturbed mind which lacks a style or system,“Yet I’m wary. Shall I have to go off again, leaving my research, my book and everything else unfinished”11.
The themes dealt with all express the loss, the deception, the confusion of the human intellect as it fluctuates between the dream, the image and the raw reality. In order to reflect these vain patterns of discovery and non-attainment, Banville employed a certain technique. The Newton Letterdiffers from theprevious science books in the sense that it is more personal and crude. McMinn says “In quite a daring synthesis Banville has produced a Big House version of the scientific mind”111. The novel combines the traditional Irish family as well as the touch of quest and discovery. The tone from the very beginning is ironic and tense, since the academic narrator attempts to realise the causes of his failure and the inadequacy of language, when confronting ordinary life. He believed himself to be a famous scholar but the summer experience at the Ferns revealed the whole design and uncovered the mystery exposed and his own misinterpretations.
The use of the ‘stream of consciousness’ technique is one cause of the complexity of some of Banville’s novels. Otto Rauchbauer in Ancestral Voices says, “he misconstructs date and constructs a fiction about life that has no links to reality except in his mind”112. He creates a new kind of reality which is akin to George Moore and James Joyce. Banville does not follow any sequence of time, throughout the novel he gives the reader little pieces of information, keeping the most important and revealing till the end. In spite of the memories given in bits and pieces and the muddled information. Yet, the presence of one narrator gives the novel a sense of unity and a certain sequence.
Banville’s The Newton Letter is a search for a medium of narrative discourse which can satisfy the needs of the complex modern world. The narrator or the mouthpiece is originally Irish brought up a Catholic and he is the academic university professor who retired to the Big House to write a biography of Isaac Newton. The house, as well as the family, interest him and the narrative becomes more intricate as the story moves backwards and forwards through his mind. The information he provides is gradual and haphazard as he writes about more than one thing at a time: the family, Newton, history, science besides the constant interruptions of his personal involvement with the female members. Living in an old gate lodge he can observe the whole theatrical atmosphere and the secret life of the inhabitants. He becomes absorbed in their life and is even led away from completing his work. In The Big House In Ireland,
The narrative is littered with fragments of lyrical prose which juxtapose the past and the present, illusion and reality, with hallucinatory vividness. 113.
As the story develops he realises that he has misinterpreted many facts, such as his beliefs that they were Protestants, but they were really Catholics. Even the master of the house, Edward, whom he thought viscous and unkind, turned out to be a miserable lonelyman, sick and dying with cancer. The house itself has no mysteries, it is a simple place with tragic lives. The language becomes richer and more revealing as he finally discovers the truth, “I dreamed up a horrid drama, and failed to see the commonplace tragedy that was playing itself out in real life”114.
Banville exploits the narrator, using one voice to give more stress and persuasion and to supply a uniformity to the whole story. He creates this very artistically trying to form order out of chaos, and to gain knowledge out of initiation.
The novel can be considered a parable of the misinterpretation of simple facts, using a wide imagination which confuses between appearance and reality. The writer falls into illusion until he discerns the truth. He feels that he has learnt a lesson, since truths are to be found in, “the ordinary that strangest and most elusive of enigmas”115.
After seven years of trying to write the biography of Newton, he realises its futility and the fact that he is repeating his own ordeal as an author. McMinn in his critical study explains:
This is why there are two alternating tales in the novella: the one set is contemporary Ireland, and the other a biographical recreation of Newton’s crisis of belief. 116.
Banville fluctuated between real intellectual achievement and simple innocence. Although the narrator has doubts concerning his intellectual powers and validity; but, he is never anti-scientific or against knowledge and ambition, “Only such a mind allied to imaginative character, can fully appreciate the limits of intellect so intensely”117.
Language is an asset here also as Banville manages to create an eerie sinister atmosphere from the beginning by using the familiar details coloured and tinged by a deceptive landscape. The style of the descriptive passages and the detailed images is in keeping with the twofold purpose of the novel where the roles of the narrator and the scientist are stealthily exchanged. The subtle design of the whole narrative reflects the similarity between the writer’s fate and Newton’s dilemma. Banville may sometimes reach a poetic eloquence through his careful use of language and figures of speech, besides the flash-backs and the blend of the world of reality and the realm of dreams. McMinn comments:
Faced with confusion and isolation, Banville’s narrators find small, but precious consolation in the fictions of Beauty. Their voices belong to modern literature’s sense of outrage and shock of the irrationality of the world. 118.
One of Banville’s patterns of expression is the use of contrast to juxtapose and give a shocking effect. The contrast is usually between past and present, reality and expectation. For example we have a picture of the Big House in the past with all its glory, riches and aristocracy, and the opposite portrayal of a decaying household which confronts the narrator in The Newton Letter:
I would remark the fact that the actual life I led-burnt cutlets, the bathroom to be cleaned - was far from the ideal which some-how I would manage to think I was leading; the quiet scholar alone with book and pipe and lamplight. 119.
As for the characters of the novella, Banville’s main concern is the narrator, the others are a cast related to the tradition of the Big House. As for example, Edward, the trivial squire, who represents a useless drunkard, Charlotte, his miserable aristocratic wife and Ottolie the merry, free, and sensuous niece. These characters are seen through the eyes of the narrator who supplies his own interpretations. Yet, the reader may manage to have a wider perceptive of the characters and their relationships and reach his own individual conclusions. Susan Burgstaller in Ancestral Voices remarks:
Thus Banville manages to convey.... almost involuntarily - glimpses of their personalities, so that gradually the initial stereotypes dissolve to reveal flesh-and-blood characters. 12.
Through his themes and technique Banville managed to supply the reader with a picture of Newton’s crisis culminating the concept of scientist’s dilemma. His revelation depended mostly on the rhetorical choice of language and the teeming expressions. McMinn declares;
This is Banville’s favourite territory, in which that sense of dislocation and separation between words and experience struggles for fictional harmony. 121.
Newton’s biographer ends with mixture of fear despair and hope. The fear is a result of the unfinished work and the hope ensure from the correspondence with Ottilie, who is expecting his child. The whole cast, within the novel, is softened by memories and shocked by experience.
Banville used a complex pattern of moving from painful mental achievement to a pure innocence and the use of the imagination anticipating a different future.
This reversed movement from experience to innocence has also been used in Doctor Copernicus and Kepler, where each protagonist ends with a childish ray of hope. Copernicus ended as it also began with the linden tree a memory of childhood. Kepler ended by the image of a child and mother travelling to the moon. The Newton Letter in the same pattern with the hero pressing his face, like a child, against the cool glass pane of knowledge, expecting to learn more yet. The scientists as well as the historians, according to Banville, reach the glory of truth through their questioning of their painstaking research or of their intellectual achievement. This is similar to a religious isolation which enhances the beauty of natural creation. Since The Newton Letter is the shortest novella, McMinn admires it saying, “the novelty lies in its economy, its sustained mood of hypnotised fascination with images of the past”122.
Banville’s tetralogy started by purely scientific heroes in Doctor Copernicus and Kepler with their attempt to apply their knowledge to create a uniform pattern of the whole universe. But, with The Newton Letter and Mefisto, we have a different approach towards religious strife, personal affairs, and universal traditions. Banville moves as Sean Lysaght remarks, “a decisive gesture away from the confines of nationalist definition”123. His aesthetic creed prompted him to deal with the universe as such with people regardless of time and place.
Mefisto is more detached from the tetralogy than The Newton Letter and it will be dealt with in the following chapter since its themes and style are closer to the other novels. Sean Lysaght explains that both The Newton Letter and Mefisto;
An essential facet of the two ‘Irish’ novels is the tension between community and isolation, between love and scholarship; and it is Banville’s particular merit to have raised this conflict out of the confines of the Irish national situation..... 124.
Mefisto is a pathetic human quest which shows Banville opening a new page of aesthetic contrivance and inquiry.
Notes
1. Rudiger Imhof: John Banville, A Critical Introduction, Dublin: Wolfhound Press, 1989, p. 8.
2. Ibid., p. 8.
3. Ibid., p. 17.
4. Joseph Mcminn: John Banville A Critical Study, introduction., p. I.
5. Ibid., p. 5.
6. Ibid., p. 11.
7. Rudiger Imhof: “An Interview with John Banville” in Irish University Riview (John Banville Special Issue)., p. 10.
8. Ibid., p. 14.
9. Rudiger Imhof: John Banville, A Critical introduction., p. 138.
10. Ibid., p. 16.
11. Joseph McMinn: John Banville, A Critical Study, introduction., p. 2.
12. Sean Lysaght: “Banville’s Tetralogy: The Limits of Mimesis” in Irish University Review (A Journal of Irish Studies). Vol. 21, No, 1, ed. Christopher Murray, Dublin: Spring / Summer, 1991, p. 84.
13. Rudiger Imhof: “An Interview With John Banville” in Irish University Riview., p. 8.
14. John Banville: Doctor Copernicus, London: Paladin, Crafton Books, 1987., p. 32.
15. Ibid., p. 37.
16. Ibid., p. 128.
17. Joseph McMinn: John Banville, A Critical Study., p. 46.
18. Ibid., p. 48.
19. John Banville: Doctor Copernicus., p. 105.
20. Ibid., p. 105.
21. Joseph McMinn: John Banville, A Critical Study., p. 52.
22. John Banville: Doctor Copernicus., p. 128.
23. Ibid., p. 112.
24. Ibid., p. 254.
25. Ibid., p. 252.
26. Ibid., p. 252.
27. Ibid., p. 219.
28. Joseph McMinn: John Banville, A Critical Study., p. 62.
29. John Banville: Doctor Copernicus., p. 44.
30. Ibid., p. 96.
31. Rudiger Imhof: John Banville, A Critical Introduction., p. 83.
32. John Banville: Doctor Copernicus., p. 83.
33. Rudiger Imhof: “John Banville’s Supreme Fiction” in Irish University Review., p. 54.
34. Ibid., p. 70.
35. Ibid., p. 73.
36. Joseph McMinn: John Banville, A Critical Study., p. 48.
37. Ibid., p. 60.
38. John Banville: Doctor Copernicus., p. 15.
39. Ibid., p. 254.
40. Rudiger Imhof: John Banville, A Critical Introduction., p. 88.
41. Francis C. Mallory: “The Search for Truth, The Fiction of John Banville” in Irish University Riview (John Banville Spacial Issue)., p. 48.
42. Sean Lysaght: “Banville’s Tetralogy: The Limits of Mimesis” in Irish University Review (A Journal of Irish Studies)., p. 85.
43. Joseph McMinn: John Banville, A Critical Study., p. 67.
44. Ibid., p. 67.
45. John Banville: Doctor Copernicus., p. 165.
46. Ibid., p. 241.
47. Ibid., p. 249.
48. Rudiger Imhof: John Banville, A Critical Introduction., p. 97.
49. Rudiger Imhof: “John Banville’s Supreme Fiction” in Irish University Review., p. 55.
50. Joseph McMinn: John Banville, A Critical Study., p. 73.
51. John Banville: Kepler, Dublin: Walter Allen Irish Press, Granada Paperbacks, 1983., p. 9.
52. Rudiger Imhof: John Banville, A Critical Introduction., p. 105.
53. John Banville: Kepler., p. 73.
54. Ibid., p. 23.
55. Ibid., p. 23.
56. Ibid., p. 9.
57. Rudiger Imhof: John Banville, A Critical Introduction., p. 109.
58. John Banville: Kepler., p. 11.
59. Ibid., p. 11.
60. Joseph McMinn: John Banville, A Critical Study., p. 70.
61. John Banville: Kepler., p. 16.
62. Ibid., p. 90.
63. Ibid., p. 93.
64. Ibid., p. 93.
65. Joseph McMinn: John Banville, A Critical Study., p. 72.
66. John Banville: Kepler., p. 124.
67. Joseph McMinn: John Banville, A Critical Study., p. 77.
68. Ibid., p. 80.
69. Rudiger Imhof: “John Banville’s Supreme Fiction” in Irish University Review., p. 76.
70. Ibid., p. 76.
71. John Banville: Kepler., p. 131.
72. Rudiger Imhof: “An Interview with John Banville” in Irish University Riview (John Banville Special Issue)., p. 16.
73. John Banville: Kepler., p. 9.
74. Ibid., p. 185.
75. Rudiger Imhof: John Banville, A Critical Introduction., p. 133.
76. Ibid., p. 135.
77. Joseph McMinn: John Banville, A Critical Study., p. 79.
78. John Banville: The Newton Letter, London: Panther Granada Publishing, 1984., p. 90.
79. Ibid., p. 92.
80. Sean Lysaght: “Banville’s Tetralogy: The Limits of Mimesis” in Irish University Review (A Journal of Irish Studies)., p. 92.
81. John Banville: The Newton Letter., p. 11.
82. Ibid., p. 11, 12.
83. Ibid., p. 14.
84. Ibid., p. 19.
85. Ibid., p. 28.
86. Ibid., p. 31.
87. Ibid., p. 49.
88. Ibid., p. 56.
89. Ibid., p. 75.
90. Ibid., p. 91.
91. Susanne Burgstaller: “John Banville’s Post Modernist Treatment Of The Big-House Motif in Birchwood and The Newton Letter” in Ancestral Voices, The Big House In Anglo-Irish Literature, ed. Otto Rauchbauer, Dublin: The Lilliput Press, 1992., p. 240.
92. Joseph McMinn: John Banville, A Critical Study., p. 89.
93. Ibid., p. 90.
94. Rudiger Imhof: “German Influence on John Banville and Aidan Higgins” in Literary Interrelations Ireland, England and The World. Vol, 2, eds. Wolfgang Zach and Heinz Kosok, Germany: Gunter-Narr Verlag Tubringen, 1987., p. 335.
95. Jennie Calder: Women and Marriage in Victorian Fiction, Playmouth: Latiner Trend and Company Ltd., 1976., p. 82.
96. Ibid., p. 55.
97. John Banville: The Newton Letter., p. 20.
98. Ibid., p. 11.
99. Ibid., p. 20.
100. Ibid., p. 34.
101. Joseph McMinn: John Banville, A Critical Study., p. 93.
102. Rudiger Imhof: John Banville, A Critical Introduction., p. 140.
103. John Banville: The Newton Letter., p. 89.
104. Ibid., p. 67.
105. Rudiger Imhof: John Banville, A Critical Introduction., p. 145.
106. John Banville: The Newton Letter., p. 92.
107. Ibid., p. 31.
108. Ibid., p. 31.
109. Ibid., p. 31.
110. Ibid., p. 92.
111. Joseph McMinn: John Banville, A Critical Study., p. 90.
112. Otto Rauchbauer: “The Big House and Irish History” in Ancestral Voices The Big House In Anglo-Irish Literature., p. 247.
113. Gearoid Cronin: “John Banville and Subversion of The Big House Novel” in The Big House In Ireland Reality And Representation, ed. Jacquline Genet., p. 224.
114. John Banville: The Newton Letter., p. 90.
115. Ibid., p. 19.
116. Joseph McMinn: John Banville, A Critical Study., p. 91.
117. Ibid., p. 97.
118. Ibid., p. 2.
119. John Banville: The Newton Letter., p. 51.
120. Susanne Burgstaller: “John Banville’s Post Modernist Treatment Of The Big-House Motif in Birchwood and The Newton Letter” in Ancestral Voices, The Big House In Anglo-Irish Literature., p. 252.
121. Joseph McMinn: John Banville, A Critical Study., p. 96.
122. Ibid., p. 97.
123. Sean Lysaght: “Banville’s Tetralogy: The Limits of Mimesis” in Irish University Review (A Journal of Irish Studies)., p. 84.
124. Ibid., p. 100.