Abstract

In the novels of John Banville, the search for authenticity is a well-established preoccupation of what we can refer to (after John Kenny) as the middle period of the author’s work and beyond. Beginning with The Book of Evidence his work is marked by aesthetic shift; primacy is given to visual art, ahead of the scientific motif of the tetralogy that preceded it and significant instances of ekphrasis appear. Ekphrasis is traditionally the domain of poetry and is a natural medium for an author who espouses the novel as a form that must go beyond narrative. Here, three novels are examined, The Book of Evidence, The Untouchable and The Sea. Each novel depends on a dramatic ekphrastic encounter that is the locus of the success and failure of the quest for authenticity that lies at the heart of Banville’s work of this period.