Ghosts (novel)
Geister (original title: Ghosts ) is a novel by Booker Prize winner John Banville from 1993, which was published in German in 2000.
The first-person narrator , a murderer, lives with a few people on a nameless island after serving his sentence. He has found asylum in the house of an art professor, whose research on Vaublin he is continuing. One day an excursion boat runs aground and a group of people invades the refuge.
The work is the second part of a trilogy, the first volume of which, The Book of Evidence , was published in 1989. There, while trying to steal a portrait of a young woman, the main character Freddie Montgomery had murdered perhaps a picture of Vermeer , the living likeness of this portrait, a young domestic servant of the owner. Even Athena , the third volume of so-called "killer trilogy", is available in German.
content
Like Shakespeare's drama The Tempest , the novel begins with a shipwreck. The drunken captain steers a small excursion boat onto the beach in a completely undramatic manner, a motley group of people begins to discover the island: Sophie, a successful photographer, the attractive flora that resembles a portrait of Modigliani , Felix, an art forger and drug dealer, Croke, an ageless man with a Panama hat, and two leprechaun boys.
You invade the world of the first-person narrator, a murderer who has served his 10-year sentence and has withdrawn into the solitude of the island. He lives in the house of Professor Kreutznaer with his former assistant Lux and the girl Alice and has begun to continue the professor's research on the painter Vaublin.
As random as the shipwreck seems at first glance, connections between the figures gradually emerge. The stranded Felix knows about the professor's homosexual predilection for little boys, about events in the field of art forgery, and maybe also about the murder of the first-person narrator.
In the seclusion of the island, the guests only stay for one day and yet in dreams, conversations and encounters, fragments of the actors' stories develop, and short, intense relationships develop in which everyone abuses the other as a projection surface for people from their past.
At the center of the action, however, is the narrator's past, which unfolds primarily in internal monologues . The narrator's senseless murder of a young woman whom he kills when she catches him stealing art, his time in prison and the trip to the island with a former inmate appear in fragments in scraps of memory and dreams.
For the narrator, the island is a place to deal with guilt. However, his Faustian hope to atone for his guilt completely by bringing a young woman to life fails, as does Flora, whom he worships, leave the island.
subjects
Pygmalion
The prehistory of the novel is the narrator's senseless murder of a young woman. After serving his sentence, he is driven by the idea of bringing this woman back to life with a work of art. If this wish appears in Banville's later novel Die See as an orphan project, here it is more in the tradition of Pygmalion.
Like the lonely sculptor Pygmalion , who falls in love with the statue he has created, which the goddess Venus breathes life into, the narrator wants to give new life to those who have been murdered by him.
In the case of Banville, it is the characters from the painting Le monde d'or by the fictional painter Vaublin that come to life. Banville himself cites an English television show as the profane source of this motif:
"Struck by" the ravishing image "of people walking out of a painting, which he saw on a British television show, he strove for the same effect in his latest novel," Ghosts. " "I wanted these still figures on a landscape to come alive briefly when the narrator turned the spotlight of his attention on them." "
The narrator wants to bring the figures of the old landscape painting by Vaublin to life through intensive viewing. Conversely, the process of aesthetic production is a stopping of the world. As in a painting, Banville repeatedly depicts moments of life frozen into pictures.
"What happens is not important, the moment is everything."
Banville exemplifies this with the description of fictional paintings. The golden world of Vaublin is a mysterious world in which nothing happens and in which the characters unfold their peculiar life, "here, in this place, possibly dying, and yet captured forever in a shining, endless moment" (Banville, Geister, P. 274). Banville cites childhood memories of a black-and-white picture as a source of the novel idea, a picture that people in city clothes with suitcases showed on the beach.
This oscillation between life frozen into a work of art, photography or statue and the enlivening of the life fixed here in the fictional world of literature is a central motif of the novel.
“Statues. I think of statues. I always find them somehow creepy, these frozen figures, how they suddenly stand so motionless between moving green or at the back of an avenue and observe something that is not us, that is beyond us, an endless, permanently petrifying spectacle that nobody besides them can see. For them, time moves just as slowly as the mountains. (...) these impetuous, weathered creatures that stand there as if they wanted to jump down from their pedestal at any moment and run away with great strides, throwing up thick clouds of dust behind them. "
In this context the novel quotes Denis Diderot's theory of statues. One way to morality is to make yourself a sculptor of yourself. By creating an ideal image of oneself, one can follow an example, shape oneself. Diderot respected the hidden life of the statues, their dream of entering our world.
“ Such beautiful statues , he writes in a letter to Sophie Volland, his mistresses, who hide in the most remote corners and far from each other, statues that call me, that I visit or that I meet, that stop me and with them I have long conversations ... I love to imagine how the cheerful philosopher in St. Cloud or Marly or in the great park of Sceaux speaks to the putti on the amphorae or gives a stone pygmalion lessons on the superiority of the senses. "
So art freezes what is happening, captures it in images and moments. The figures freeze again and again into images, for example the professor who looks "like a big, old, rain-stained statue of a Caesar". The figures appear as art products of the narrator, composed of past and present images. Felix seems like "piecemeal, somehow provisional, as if it had been hastily put together from lots of parts by other people."
Death and murder
The entire Pygmalion complex revolves around the narrator's attempt to undo his murder. The works of art, the past should be brought to life so that the stolen life can be brought back.
The first-person narrator is downright obsessed with his crime, "it crouches inside me like a second, parasitic self and wrapped around my cells with its tentacles." The murderer describes this in the style of Edgar Allan Poe :
“With the Chinese, or maybe it was the Florentines in Dante's time - one of those wild, merciless peoples at any rate - a murderer was tied head and feet to the body of his victim and this gruesome package was lowered into a dungeon and the key thrown away"
So the narrator feels in a posthumous in-between world, neither really dead nor really alive, comparable to the lifelike figures in a painting, the ghosts of classical literature.
Literary form
Unity of place and time
As in the classic drama, the action takes place in a few places, mainly around the house on the unknown island. The story is told of a day in May, the day that the castaways spend on the island.
"Ghosts is a story of castaways washed upon a shore both alien and yet familiar, benignly hospitable and yet vaguely threatening. The island setting allows Banville to set to flight a flock of sly and unusual allusions, from Robinson Crusoe to The Island of Dr. Moreau and Gilligan's Island. "
- “Geister is a story of shipwrecked people who found themselves on a coast that is at the same time strange and yet familiar, hospitable and yet vaguely threatening. The setting on an island allows Banville a plethora of cunning and unusual allusions, from Robinson Crusoe to Dr. Moreau's island and Gilligan's island . "
In contrast to drama, the novel form opens up a wide range of possibilities to transcend this narrow framework through dreams, inner monologues and storytelling. In this respect, the refuge on the island is like Thomas Mann's magic mountain .
“Most of the time, however, I was satisfied, or at least had peace within me, the feverish calm of the chronically ill. That is it, that above all this is this place, not a prison, not even a pilgrimage island, but one of those sanatoriums, of which there were so many in my childhood, when half the world suffered from lung rot. "
Banville makes various connections through the symbolic name Kythera for the Irish island. On the one hand, Kythera was the island of the love goddess Aphrodite , on the other hand there are parallels to the history of Ireland. Like the island on which the novel is set, Kythera has been abandoned by many residents due to scarcity and hunger. The connection to the painter Watteau and his famous paintings about the "Embarkation for Kythera" play a role for the novel because the inhabitants of the island see themselves as researchers of the fictional painter Vaublin, who is strongly reminiscent of Watteau. Sophie gives the island another mythical name, "Aia", the short form for the island Aiaia , where the golden fleece was hidden, another reference to Vaublin's fictional main work, "Le monde d'Or" , the golden world.
Literary influences
The influence of Shakespeare's "Tempest" is evident. The seemingly random shipwreck appears as a staging of the all-powerful first-person narrator, who thus takes on the role of Prospero.
“A small world begins to exist. Who's speaking? I. The little god "
Banville's castaways hear a mysterious music when they enter the island:
“Everyone listened with bated breath, even the children, and everyone could hear it, that distant, deep, formless singing that seems to rise from the earth itself. "Like music," said the man in the straw hat dreamily. "
With Shakespeare it is Ferdinand who hears the mysterious music of Ariel in the 5th scene:
“Where can this music be? In the air or on the ground? - - She has stopped - - it is indeed an indication that some deity inhabits this island. While I was sitting on a sandbank and weeping the downfall of my father's king, this music seemed to creep across the waves towards me, and by its loveliness soothed both her anger and my passion; I followed it to this place, or rather it attracted me; - - But it has stopped - - Now it is starting again. "
Another reference to Shakespeare is the "ghosts" that the narrator conjures up. Like Hamlet , the narrator sees his father's ghost in a Kafkaesque dream scene. In a confusing office building, the father and the narrator are desperately looking for his death certificate, which nobody wants to issue him. Through a hidden door, the son finds his father in a hidden office, where it becomes clear that the father cannot get this death certificate only because of the son's guilt.
"Licht" is the name of the professor's assistant in the English original, which the translator changed to "Lux" in the German version, probably to imitate the strange sound of the German word "Licht" in English.
"But light -" there was something old-fashioned about him, as if he actually had to wear a wig and breeches "- is a visitor from another time, from Kleist's" Broken Jug, "which Banville translated into English and skilfully transposed into an Irish setting . "
Banville's writing reminds many critics of Beckett's Malone trilogy.
"Banville's fondness for the grim and occasionally gruesome confession is most famously displayed in his trilogy of novels, The Book of Evidence (1989), Ghosts (1993), and Athena (1995) - a trilogy which is frequently and easily compared with Beckett's Molloy , Malone Dies and The Unnamable. "
The review by Gerhard Schulz mentions other influences.
“Banville's novel is a book of visits. Anyone looking for coherent, purposeful action will thoroughly spoil the pleasure of it. What happens in it is what postmodern theory calls "intertextuality," the haunted spirits are children of such worthy parents as Homer, Shakespeare, Diderot, Goethe, Kleist, Byron, Mary Shelley, Nietzsche, Maeterlinck, Beckett, Lewis Carroll, Wittgenstein, Banville himself and especially Watteau. It has a certain charm to unravel this fabric of allusions and allusions for the sake of recognition. But since there are no real identifications, it remains an idle game. "
Narrative technique
John Banville breaks up traditional literary forms by puzzling out the events and dispensing with a stringent plot. The fictionality of the event is made evident, the first-person narrator presents himself as the omnipotent creator of the world of the novel, as a “little god” who spins the threads.
Nevertheless, the novel does not dispense with the element of tension. The reader's expectations and fears are aroused on the one hand by the latently threatening character of the characters. What violence is still in the former murderer and first-person narrator? What danger does the former drug dealer and counterfeiter Felix pose? What danger are the vulnerable women on the island exposed to?
Another way of creating tension is the entanglement of the characters, which is slowly becoming apparent. As with Shakespeare, the seemingly accidental encounter through the shipwreck is based on gloomy connections from the past.
"I got there," explains Freddie when he reaches his Kythera. The "Golden World", a masterpiece by the fictional painter Vaublin, is supposed to open up to him, and the seven shipwrecked visitors come to the festival, the "fête galante" from Watteau's age. But they will go again because they are just catalysts like all fictional characters. The former murderer will not be able to keep Flora-Aphrodite either - with a goddess one does not father a girl to atone for the crime of yore. "
Another characteristic of postmodern writing is the mixture of classic mythological topics with everyday culture of the present. In addition to allusions to Shakespeare and Goethe, there are film associations from Tom and Jerry or the Marx Brothers . This contrasting mixture suddenly corresponds to a change in language levels: Flora, for example, appears in the same paragraph as “a real Modigliani girl, with heavy black hair, these slanted eyes” and as a “sanctimonious little cunt”.
painting
Banville's writing in the novel "Geister" is also strongly based on painting.
"The achievement of" Ghosts "is to use words as brushstrokes, to create in language an artwork that has all the appeal of a complex painting. Our eye roves over it and back again, not in linear, chronological order but in a state of suspended time, picking up new details and drawing new conclusions with each concentrated gaze. "They have a presence that is at once fugitive and fixed," the narrator says of his characters when he finally, and explicitly, presents them as figures in a Vaublin painting. "They seem to be at ease, languorous almost, yet when we look close, we see how tense they are with self-awareness. We have the feeling they are conscious of being watched." This is the language of sensitive, intelligent art criticism, heightened and transformed into the realm of fiction. "
- ("The achievement of the novel is to use words like brushstrokes to create a work of art with language that has the attraction of a complex painting. Our eye glides over it, back and forth, not linearly or chronologically, but in a state of suspended time, Always discovering new details, drawing new conclusions with every concentrated look. "They have a presence that is both fleeting and fixed," says the narrator of his characters when he last expressly presented them as characters in a Vaublin painting seem calm, almost sleepy, but when we look closely at how tense they are with their self-awareness, they seem to know that they are being watched. "This is the language of intelligent and sensitive art criticism, exalted and transformed into the world of fiction. ")
The fictional painter "Jean Vaublin", who appears in several of Banville's works, is in this respect an alter ego of Banville. Ben Ehrenreich pointed out that the name is a rough anagram of the name Banville.
At the same time, Banville has succeeded in inventing the painter “Vaublin” so well that one is inclined to believe in his existence. The fictional artist's most famous painting, Le monde d'or , is portrayed so vividly that the reader seems to have it in front of their eyes. Banville uses stylistic elements of the great Dutch and Flemish masters Rembrandt , Vermeer and Bruegel to describe Vaublin , but also figures from French painting such as Pierrot and other elements reminiscent of Watteau and Poussin .
In an article for the Neue Zürcher Zeitung, John Banville describes his “first, brief look into the golden world of art”. He said a scene, a mood, stuck in his memory from a meaningless devotional novel of his childhood: a little girl named Maggie skipped school and now guiltily stood by the walls of the convent school and listened to the voices of her classmates from afar.
“When I think of Maggie, dreamily alone there in the sunlight and in the summer silence, then I have a feeling that resembles those dreams in which you believe you can remember precisely a place where you have never been, a place who is at once strange and completely familiar. It is not a magical or enchanted place, but a very mundane place. It is the world as I know it, normal and everyday, and yet charged with an undecipherable meaning. My heart is shaken, just as the heart of Proust's narrator was shaken when he dipped a simple pastry into a very ordinary cup of tea and the entire past opened up in front of him, tender, radiant, dirty, amusing and, contrary to the author's assertion , irretrievably, if not completely lost. "
For Banville, the golden world is about the presence of the past, about images and moments that preserve such moments. The fictional painting by the fictional painter Vaublin, who is so reminiscent of Watteau, Le monde d'or , represents an attempt to capture such a moment, according to Banville. Banville is impressed by a television show ( The South Bank Show ) in which an actor read the description of the painting in the novel and television recreated this image and brought it to life with the help of modern technology.
“It was one of the most beautiful moments I had ever experienced on television, not only because of the technical witchcraft that made it possible, but because suddenly the small image that was still static on the page came into life before my eyes transformed. The breath of the world! "
With his fictional world of novels, John Banville does not want to create an inviting alternative world into which one can flee, but rather accesses to the real world, in which one is at the same time strange and at home. It is not known whether Banville was also inspired by Hölderlin's “Evening Fantasy” or Georg Britting's poem “Golden World”.
reception
Wendy Lesser compares Banville's work in the New York Times with a Peter Greenaway film : fascinating images, an intricate plot, eccentric, somehow threatening characters, a passion for beauty and violence. She sees a decisive literary development in Banville compared to the first part of the trilogy.
"" Ghosts "is a far better novel, though it is also a more difficult one. Where the narrator in "The Book of Evidence" was always striving for effect, the narrator in "Ghosts" quietly achieves it. The irony is that they are intended to be the same person. "
Gerhard Schulz is also enthusiastic in the FAZ on June 14, 2000. He emphasizes the language and the intensity of Banville's linguistic images.
“Banville is a gorgeous, wonderfully effortless, eloquent narrator; every page, often every sentence, reveals the sheer joy of writing. The weaving in the air of an Irish summer morning, the evening glow of the sea, the tobacco smoke in the gloom of a gay bar on the harbor - everywhere an author creates his own, lively picture gallery out of language. "
He sees the work as a testimony to postmodernism, as an abundance of images from a wide variety of sources that remain puzzling “like life itself”.
"Postmodernity basically means that explanations for the ways of the world and people cannot be found:" Nothing makes sense in the end. ""
In the same sense, Tim Conley in “The Modern World” marks the blurriness as Banville's writing principle.
"A fact is offered and then canceled, a story related and then dismissed as manufactured and irrelevant. As solid as the images in his elaborate pictures appear to become with study - so many tantalizing paintings populate the author's works - Banville now and again strokes the frame and throws us back into uncertainty. "
text
- John Banville: Spirits , translated by Christa Schuenke. 2000, ISBN 3-462-02874-X , 335 pp.
- Original title "Ghosts", 1993, ISBN 0-679-75512-8
Secondary
- John Banville: The Golden World . In: Neue Zürcher Zeitung , April 7, 2007
- Gerhard Schulz : Tumult des Windes on Kythera, From the murderer trilogy: John Banville's novel "Geister" . In: FAZ , June 14, 2000, p. 56
- Wendy Lesser: Violently Obsessed With Art . In: New York Times , November 28, 1993
- London Review of Books . XV, April 22, 1993, p. 10
- Los Angeles Times Book Review , Nov. 7, 1993, pP3.
- The Times Literary Supplement , Apr 9, 1993, p. 20.
Web links
- Reading sample
- Review note at perlentaucher.de
- Review in the New York Times
References and comments
- ↑ German: The Book of Evidence . translated by Dorle Merkel (1991). Tb, Kiepenheuer & Witsch, Munich 2004, ISBN 3-442-45582-0 , 253 pp.
- ↑ a b Wendy Lesser: Violently Obsessed With Art
- ↑ Geister, p. 18
- ↑ Geister, p. 18
- ↑ Geister, p. 31
- ↑ quoted from scriptorium ( Memento of the original from June 16, 2007 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.
- ↑ z. B. Geister, p. 42
- ↑ "For some unspecified time past, they have been helped in their research by another art expert, a nameless man recently released from prison, who also serves as the novel's narrator. "Serves" is not exactly right, for this narrator considers himself the novel's master, the Prospero-like figure who has created the entire cast. "A little world is coming into being," he tells us on the second page. "Who speaks? I do. Little god." "Wendy Lesser: Violently Obsessed With Art . In: New York Times
- ^ Quoted from Sturm , act 1, scene 5 in the Gutenberg-DE project
- ↑ quoted from scriptorium ( Memento of the original from June 16, 2007 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.
- ↑ "(Why is Kreutznaer afraid of Felix? What happened in the past with a Vaublin painting called" The Golden World "? And what is the narrator's connection to all this?)" Wendy Lesser: Violently Obsessed With Art . In: New York Times
- ^ "" Hello, Harpo, "cried Hatch happily"; Ghosts, p. 23
- ↑ Geister, p. 22
- ↑ “a Nabokovian wink of a character whose name, Jean Vaublin, is roughly anagrammatic with the author's own”, Ben Ehrenreich, quoted from believermag 10/2003
- ↑ John Banville: The Golden World . In: Neue Zürcher Zeitung
- ↑ John Banville: The Golden World. In: Neue Zürcher Zeitung ; Banville quotes the poet Wallace Stevens in this context : This is the origin of the poem: To live in a place / Which is not ours, and - even more - not ourselves, / And it is hard, despite the brightly colored days.
- ^ Friedrich Hölderlin : Evening Fantasy on Wikisource
- ↑ Georg Britting: Golden World , All Works Vol. 4, p. 303 The poem on the net ( Memento of the original of February 27, 2007 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was automatically inserted and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.
- ↑ "... is a bit like a Peter Greenaway film: the visual elements are entrancing, the mystery plot is intricate and obscure, and the characters are all faintly (sometimes aggressively) threatening oddballs." Wendy Lesser: Violently Obsessed With Art
- ↑ quoted from scriptorium ( Memento of the original from June 16, 2007 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.
