CHAPTER EIGHT
BANVILLE’S IRISH COMMEDIA DELL’ARTE
STEPHEN BUTLER
POLITECHNIKA KOSZALINSKA
In reviewing John Banville’s novel The Sea, which gained some notoriety by
subsequently winning the prestigious Man Booker Prize, the drama critic Fintan
O’Toole modified Walter Pater’s famous dictum that “all art aspires to the
condition of music” with respect to Banville by claiming that “John Banville’s later
novels aspire to the condition of painting” (17). The later literary criticism of
Banville has kept pace with the later novels in this particular regard. John Kenny
believes that all of Banville’s novels, not just the later ones, contain what he refers
to as a “pictorial paradigm” (52-67). Joseph McMinn claims that the two
preoccupations that Banville always returns to in his fiction are Science and Art,
with the early novels showing a predominance for the former, with the later novels
being dominated by the latter. McMinn refers to the later work as a “feminine
counterpart to the earlier fictions”, but argues firmly that in both cases Banville is
compulsively addressing himself to the same themes, much like his Irish
predecessor Yeats who rhetorically asked himself late in life: “What can I but
enumerate old themes?”. McMinn’s contention is that there is a “theatrical conceit
which plays itself throughout Banville’s fiction, a conceit which suggests, not just
the element of performance in text and character, but also the sense, held by so
many of Banville’s narrators, that the world about them is a ‘staged’ imitation of
Nature” (14). So, not only does Banville’s work aspire to the condition of painting,
but it also aspires to the condition of the theatre, according to McMinn’s analysis.
Medina Barco, Inmaculada (ed.): Literature and Interarts: Critical Essays. Logroño:
Universidad de La Rioja, 2012, pp. 9-22.
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BANVILLE’S IRISH COMMEDIA DELL’ARTE
This was confirmed in the novel Eclipse, whose main character is a thespian named
Alexander Cleave, which Banville published not long after McMinn’s study. The
thematic concerns unique to Banville’s work, as indicated by McMinn, are also very
much in evidence in this novel, but this should not be surprising given that the
theatrical conceit is present in all of Banville’s fiction. However, the theatre is not
just a conceit in Banville, it is another art form that he discusses with as much
regularity as his twin obsessions of Art and Science, particularly in the later novels,
and one that has not garnered much critical discussion in Banville’s oeuvre. The
particular form of theatre that Banville dwells on obsessively is the Italian Comedy,
or Commedia Dell’Arte, and it is the purpose of this paper to focus on the
particularities of this art form, and how Banville uses it in connection with his other
more obvious thematic concerns.
The Italian Comedy was an improvisational form of theatre that flourished
in Italy in the sixteenth century, and which may have descended from the medieval
carnival, itself possibly connected with the ancient Roman Saturnalia festivals. It
was a populist form of street entertainment, employing stock figures and scenarios
for comic effect. It originated in the market place, where amateurs and
professionals alike could draw the attention of the crowd, and attempt to make a
living. Often, it was a theatre situated on the road, with the actors setting up
wherever they thought they could draw a large enough crowd. Another reason why
they were always on the move was to escape the restrictions, and at times
persecution, of the civic and religious authorities. Due to this repression, and the
derogatory attitude afforded it by the professional theatre, it didn’t survive long,
and some locate its demise as far back as the eighteenth century (Rudlin, 10-26). It
did, however, enjoy a significant rebirth in the twentieth century, mainly thanks to
the efforts of theatrical directors, such as Edward Gordon Craig in England, Russia’s
experimental innovator Vsevolod Meyerhold, Jacques Copeau in Paris, and the San
Francisco Mime Troupe. Given the rather arch cultured image that Banville often
portrays, with his frequent references, in particular, to the high modernists in
literature such as Beckett, Rilke and Wallace Stevens, and in painting to classicists
of the caliber of Poussin, Watteau and Rembrandt, it would seem surprising that he
would have an interest in such a populist, socially-oriented form of discourse.
However, it makes perfect thematic sense, given that the Commedia was often a
subject of many of the painters often referred to by Banville (Figure 1). Watteau, in
particular, had a strong affinity with the Commedia, and it may well have been
influential in the creation of his own ‘fête galante’ style of painting. He often
painted the figures from the Commedia, the most famous of which is his Pierrot.
Banville uses both this painting and Watteau’s ‘The Embarkation of Cythera’ in his
novel Ghosts (Figure 2). He does this in an attempt to achieve, according to
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STEPHEN BUTLER
McMinn, “a narrative version of a fete galante, drawing on the genre’s mythical
symbolism and its love of theatrical artifice” (118).
Figure 1. Jean-Antoine Watteau: “Love in the Italian Comedy”
Figure 2. Jean-Antoine Watteau: “The Embarkation of Cythera”
What Banville does in Ghosts is combine the two Watteau paintings to
supply the narrative of the novel. There is no plot in the novel, as there rarely is in
any Banville novel. Instead the novel describes the scenario painted by Watteau in
‘The Embarkation of Cythera’. The main character, art historian and former
murderer Freddie Montgomery, has exiled himself to an island, seeking solitude,
only to have this solitude interrupted by a group of people temporarily
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BANVILLE’S IRISH COMMEDIA DELL’ARTE
shipwrecked on the island. There is a very strong probability, though, that these
people do not technically exist, and that Freddie is simply imagining the figures of
Watteau’s painting into existence to entertain himself during his lonely occupation
on the island. There are numerous hints that this is the case, as when Freddie
states: “I was alone, despite the presence of the others […]. I know how this will
seem: that I had retreated into solitude, that I was living in a fantasy world, a world
of pictures and painted figures and all the rest of it” (68). The painted figures come
from Watteau’s painting, which he in turn purloined from the Commedia Dell’Arte,
and there is a particular figure that both the painter and novelist seem particularly
interested in portraying. Freddie talks of how in the underworld, ghostly
atmosphere of the novel most of the characters can be described as “Pierrots and
Columbines in their black masks” (Figure 3). These are the two figures most often
referred to in all Banville’s later novels, so it would seem pertinent to ask just what
attraction these two stock characters hold for Banville. One of the interests would
seem to be in the relationship between the two. Pierrot, throughout the Commedia
tradition, is eternally infatuated with Columbine, which is never reciprocated, and
so he “suffers eternally unrequited love” (Rudlin, 136). Love, whether requited or
not, is not a theme normally associated with Banville, at least not by literary critics,
although fellow novelist Patrick McGrath described the novel Athena, the successor
to Ghosts with Freddie Montgomery as the main character again, as an “elegiac
love letter” (24). It’s a fairly accurate description as the novel is addressed entirely
from Freddie to his phantom lover, known only as A, with whom he has an intense
passionate sexual relationship before she abandons him inexplicably. Freddie copes
with the loss by writing the novel Athena, as he explains on the last page of the
novel —“Write to me, she said. Write to me. I have written” (212).
Figure 3. Maurice Sand: “Colombine”
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STEPHEN BUTLER
The relationship between Pierrot and Colombine is forever unrequited due
to the fact that Colombine is herself in love with Arlecchino. Pierrot never has the
opportunity to pursue a relationship with her, and even if he does the relationship
is normally based on a deceit perpetuated by Colombine. The end result of this
deception is always the same: “If she deceives him he blames himself for not being
adequate as a lover” (Rudlin, 136). This could just as easily be a summary of the
plot of Athena, as Freddie writes the entire novel to try and make sense of how it is
he has failed A as a lover, even though he knows deep down that she left because
she was involved with a group of criminals engaged in fraud, and they simply
exploit Freddie for their criminal activities. The connection between love and
deception implicit in the Pierrot/Colombine relationship is a common theme in
Banville’s later novels. Often the deception is simply self-deception, as is the case
with Freddie in Athena, and it illustrates a point about human relationships that
Banville often addresses in his work. If Pierrot never really has a true relationship
with Colombine, how can he possibly be in love with her, and what exactly is it that
he is in love with, if he never really knows Colombine? He is in love with his own
image of her, and as is often the case in Banville’s novels, his characters are more in
love with painted images of women rather than actual women. Freddie actually
defends this kind of relationship:
after all it should be perfectly possible to ‘fall in love’, as they like to put it,
with a painted image; after all, what is it lovers ever love but the images they
have of each other? Freud himself remarked that in the passionate encounter
of every couple there are four people involved. Or should it be six? —the two
so-called real lovers, plus the images they have of themselves, plus the
images that they have of each other. What a tangled web Eros weaves!
(Ghosts, 87)
In the Italian Comedy this truth about human relationships is often a source
of amusement, and the stock characters of the lovers manifest this on the stage. As
John Rudlin describes these stock characters:
They relate exclusively to themselves —they are in love with themselves
being in love. The last person they actually relate to in the course of the
action is often the beloved. The Lovers love each other, yet are more
preoccupied with being seen as lovers, undergoing all the hardships of being
in such a plight, than with actual fulfilment. (108)
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BANVILLE’S IRISH COMMEDIA DELL’ARTE
As McMinn mentioned, in the ‘fête galante’ there is a love of theatrical
artifice, and this is also true of the relationships shown on the stage of the Italian
Comedy. The one thing the Lovers in this tradition know is that they are always
being watched, and so they act accordingly (Figure 4).
Figure 4. The Inamorato/The Lovers
The “theatrical artifice” of the Italian Comedy manifests itself in a strikingly
visual way —through the use of the mask (Figure 5). The mask creates the fixed
types of the characters employed in this kind of theatre, sacrificing the idea of the
personality of the actor in favour of the persona of the mask, defined by John
Rudlin as a “metaphysical quality […] because it is of all times and all places, [it]
readily overcomes personality, which is time and place specific. There is no point,
therefore, in looking for values in commedia dell’arte which it cannot provide, such
as psychological realism or comedy of manners” (34). Banville has often made
similar comments about his own fiction, and it is difficult to find a Banville narrator
who doesn’t profess an admiration for the theatrical mask. In The Book of Evidence,
the first novel in which the reader is introduced to Freddie Montgomery, the
narrator’s artistic credo is succinctly declared: “To place all faith in the mask, that
seems to me now the true stamp of refined humanity. Did I say that, or someone
else?” (16). The ‘someone else’ was Nietzsche, as the passage is really nothing
more than a paraphrase of a crucial passage in Beyond Good and Evil. Nietzsche
phrases it thus: “Everything profound loves the mask” (51). For Nietzsche, a
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STEPHEN BUTLER
profound, free, spirit is one that has realized that there is no ‘real’ self, or
personality, to be revealed to others, that the self is persona, and nothing else. As a
result, the free spirit is free to communicate with others using “silence and
concealment” since others will simply create a false image of the spirit’s self
anyway. In other words, the mask is always there in human relationships, whether
personal or social. Freddie believes that this happens due to people’s selfconsciousness, when they know they are being observed, as is the case with the
Lovers in the Commedia, who know that there’s an audience watching them, and
act accordingly. When people know they are being watched, according to Freddie
“something compels them to put on a mask and hide behind it” (32). Freddie is
lucid enough to know that this involves what he calls “inauthenticity and bad faith”,
a strategy fully endorsed by both himself and Nietzsche (Ghosts, 187-88). Banville
purposefully introduces Sartre’s existential term here as in his fiction he introduces
many situations that show the inadequacy of Sartre’s declamation to live
authentically. There are situations in life in which living authentically is arguably not
a recommended strategy; that concealment and “cunning” may be more suitable,
since as Nietzsche remarked: “Something might be true although at the same time
harmful and dangerous in the highest degree” (15). Such a situation is provided in
The Sea, when the wife of the main narrator is about to receive the news that she’s
dying of cancer. To simply blurt out such a harmful truth would be rather tactless,
and so the doctor employs theatrical techniques to cushion the blow. Max, the
narrator, is aware of this, and acquits the doctor of any sense of wrongdoing:
“there was something studied about this hesitancy, something theatrical. Again, I
understand. A doctor must be as good an actor as physician” (16).
Figure 5. The masks of the Commedia dell’Arte
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BANVILLE’S IRISH COMMEDIA DELL’ARTE
Banville is indebted for this idea not only to Nietzsche but also to Diderot,
another philosopher interested in masks. Allen Speight discusses how Diderot was
aware of “the social ‘masks’ of an affected age and how they may successfully be
worn” (82). Freddie Montgomery, whilst reading Diderot, comes to the same
conclusion as the philosopher: “He conceived of living as a form of necessary
hypocrisy, each man acting out his part, posing as himself” (Ghosts, 188).
Specifically, Freddie is reading about “Diderot on actors and acting”, so it’s
reasonable to assume that he’s reading Diderot’s The Paradox of Acting. In this
text, Diderot believes that a successful actor should become a mere imitator who
copies the appropriate gestures and responses that a given theatrical scene
demands, without actually feeling the emotion of the situation. His justification for
this is a pragmatic one: “If the actor were full, really full, of feeling, how could he
play the same part twice running with the same spirit and success? Full of fire at
the first performance, he would be worn out and cold as marble at the third. But
take it that he is an attentive mimic and thoughtful disciple of Nature” (Diderot,
14). Freddie is not a professional actor, but Alexander Cleave in Eclipse is, and
although he doesn’t seem familiar with Diderot’s theory, he has claimed to have
read “Kleist on the puppet theatre” (Eclipse, 36). In this essay, the German
dramatist Heinrich von Kleist discusses the same paradox of acting delineated by
Diderot. Diderot believed that the best actor is a mimic, whilst Kleist believed that
it was a puppet. The superiority of the puppet over a human actor lies in Kleist’s
disquisition on “how consciousness can disturb natural grace” (Kleist). A puppet
doesn’t possess consciousness, as it is inanimate, but even an animal is preferable
to a human as an animal doesn’t suffer from the same self-consciousness exhibited
by Freddie. To illustrate this, Kleist employs his famous description of the battle of
wills between a man and a bear, which the bear wins rather easily due to its
complete self-composure, a faculty that his human counterpart rapidly loses:
the bear’s utter seriousness robbed me of my composure. Thrusts and feints
followed thick and fast, the sweat poured off me, but in vain. It wasn’t merely
that he parried my thrusts like the finest fencer in the world; when I feinted
to deceive him he made no move at all. No human fencer could equal his
perception in this respect. He stood upright, his paw raised ready for battle,
his eye fixed on mine as if he could read my soul there, and when my thrusts
were not meant seriously he did not move. (Kleist)
The conclusion that Kleist draws from this story is that “in the organic
world, as thought grows dimmer and weaker, grace emerges more brilliantly and
decisively”.
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STEPHEN BUTLER
This is also the attraction of the use of the mask in the Commedia Dell’Arte.
When an actor dons a mask, the self-consciousness of the personality disappears,
leaving the impersonality of the persona, which is analogous to the impersonality
of the puppet, as Efrat Tseëlon illustrates: “The mask is simultaneously animated
and inanimate, living and dead: an expressionless mass transformed into expressive
being. On its own it is a lifeless piece of matter, like the marionette without the
puppeteer. But as soon as the mask is worn, or the marionette is pulled on a string,
they come to life. Human interaction infuses them with spirit” (21). The paradox of
the mask, however, is that when it is donned, it becomes unclear whether the mask
is the marionette or the puppet. In Banville’s novels, the preference seems to be
for the former. In other words, the people who inhabit Banville’s fictional universe
are normally being controlled by their masks, not the other way around, or by a
mysterious puppeteer who is never clearly identified. The reduction of the
personality to a puppet is first touched on in The Book of Evidence, when Freddie
attempts to explain how he has no control over any of his actions, subject as he is
to “that puppet-show twitching which passes for consciousness” (34). In treating
other people as similar puppets, Freddie has no qualms regarding the murder of
another human being. There is an unpleasant psychological process that can occur
when dealing with masks, known in psychology as ‘deindividuation’, which can be
used to justify cruel behavior towards others, as explained by Tseëlon: “For many
people their own anonymity or the facelessness of the other washes away all their
humanity” (30). Freddie was able to murder a woman because she wasn’t
sufficiently human, in his eyes. In Ghosts the painted figures he interacts with are
referred to as “manikins in a window”, whilst in Athena his treatment of his lover A
isn’t dramatically different from the way he viewed his earlier murdered victim, as
on one occasion he asks himself: “What shall I dress my dolly in today?” (94).
Freddie does not murder A, which is some form of improvement, but the
nature of their sexual relationship indicates that Freddie hasn’t really evolved much
from the earlier novel. He talks about the “shamefaced pleasure of voyeurism” that
he takes both from his love of painting and his love of A, who herself is not
innocent of this vice. Freddie compares his pleasure with that of “the triumphant
female’s desire to be spied on by one lover while she lies in the arms of another”
(Athena, 186). This describes perfectly A’s exhibitionist and perverse sexual
tendencies that occupy a lot of the subject matter of the novel. She has no problem
having someone like Freddie for a lover, who treats her like a doll, as “she had
always wanted to have a fetishist for a lover” (94). This is another aspect of the
process of deindividuation, which is again linked to masks, as explained by Tseëlon:
“It applies to all masks used in ritual, theatre or carnival, even in sexual
perversions” (20). It also applies to literature that has an obsessive relationship
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BANVILLE’S IRISH COMMEDIA DELL’ARTE
with paintings, a point that Edna Longley makes in her essay “No More Poems
about Paintings”: “addiction to the practice (e.g. Wallace Stevens) can be a form of
imaginative auto-eroticism” (94). Freddie certainly falls prey to this particular vice
time and again throughout the trilogy of novels he narrates. His study of art history,
and his obsessive engagement with different paintings blends, particularly in
Athena, into his predilection for perverse sexual behavior and voyeurism. Even the
supposedly objective pieces of art criticism he engages in in this novel gives way at
the end to his perverse obsession with his lover A: “they all look like you: I paint
you over them, like a boy scrawling his fantasies on the smirking model in an
advertising hoarding” (152).
Many actors perceive working with masks as a deindividuation of their
personality. Rudlin mentions how many modern actors react against the
improvisations of traditional Italian Comedy, due to their “firm basis of faultless
technique”, which is seen to inhibit “creative freedom” (48). The paradox of acting
though, as discussed by Diderot, Kleist and even Nietzsche, is that in focusing
purely on technique, on mimicry, the self is actually expressed with more “creative
power”. Kleist explains this paradox with the example of a dancer on stage:
‘Just look at that girl who dances Daphne’, he went on. ‘Pursued by Apollo,
she turns to look at him. At this moment her soul appears to be in the small of
her back. As she bends, she looks as if she’s going to break, like a naiad after
the school of Bernini. Or take that young fellow who dances Paris when he’s
standing among the three goddesses and offering the apple to Venus. His soul
is in fact located (and it’s a frightful thing to see) in his elbow’.
(Kleist).[*Please, make sure that ‘[…]’ have been correctly situated in the
quote]
When Kleist says that the soul is located in the elbow, he is expressing the
belief that the ‘inner’ soul, the ‘personality’ of the individual can be expressed
through outward gestures. As Rudlin had said, one should not expect
“psychological realism” in the Commedia dell’Arte, precisely because the
psychology of this form of art is expressed solely through external, physical
gestures. This is the first thing an actor has to learn when he dons a mask, the
importance of physical gesture, as the mask has taken away his ability to employ
anything else; even facial expressions have been factored out of this particular art
form. Most facial expressions are merely a social mask, as Freddie had already
observed, and so to truly express the self may paradoxically require something as
impersonal as a mask, a point also made by Rudlin: “Masks live in the eye of the
beholder, not of the actor. Mirror work is therefore prohibited since it leads to self18
STEPHEN BUTLER
consciousness” (42). In Eclipse, Alex Cleave is an actor who has digested Kleist’s
essay, and knows that natural grace is dimmed by thought, which is why for him
the following vignette is a perfect example of his profession:
I had never before witnessed such purity of gesture. All her actions —
brushing her hair, pulling on her pants, fastening a clasp behind her back —
had an economy that was beyond mere physical adroitness. This was a kind of
art, at once primitive and highly developed. Nothing was wasted, not the life
of a hand, the turn of a shoulder: nothing was for show. Without knowing, in
perfect self-absorption she achieved at the start of each day in her mean
room an apotheosis of grace and suavity. (101).
The other figure from the Commedia Dell’Arte that Banville mentions as
often as Pierrot and Colombine is Colombine’s actual lover, Arlecchino, since
known as the Harlequin (Figure 6). What both he and Colombine have in common
is physical grace. Colombine is often a ballerina dancer, and so possessed of
physical adroitness, and the same is also true of the Harlequin. Rudlin describes
him thus: “His paradox is that of having a dull mind in an agile body. Since,
however, his body does not recognise the inadequacy of the mind which drives it,
he is never short of a solution” (79). This is the antithesis of all the narrators that
surface in Banville’s prose works. Alex refers to himself as the “thinking man’s
thespian” who is good at playing ‘inner’ characters, which is why he is so fascinated
by the “purity of gesture” of the woman that he observes, as it’s an apotheosis he
is unable to realize himself. There is a case to be made that all of the narrators in
Banville’s novels are the Pierrot type and so the Harlequin is always the rival figure
precisely because he embodies everything that the narrators most desire for
themselves. In Ghosts, Freddie won’t even discuss such a person, derived as he is
from the Harlequin figure in Watteau’s painting Pierrot, located behind Pierrot on a
donkey with a rather smug look on his face (Figure 7). Freddie discusses the Pierrot
figure in this painting at great length, speculating on his origins and nature, but he
is rather terse with the figure looming over Pierrot’s shoulder —“Of that smirking
Harlequin mounted on the donkey’s back we shall not speak. No, we shall not
speak” (216). Banville has no such qualms in his later novel Shroud, in which we
have a long amalgamated quotation concerning the Harlequin figure culled from
two sources: Pierre DuChartre’s The Italian Comedy, and Joseph deMaistre’s St.
Petersburg Dialogues. Here, there is an inkling of the attraction of this figure for
Banville: “He is the creator of a new form of poetry, accentuated by gestures,
punctuated by somersaults, enriched with philosophical reflections and
incongruous sounds. He is the first poet of acrobatics and unseemly sounds (italics
mine)” (Banville, Shroud, 180). It is his physical grace that is the source of the
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BANVILLE’S IRISH COMMEDIA DELL’ARTE
attraction, as it was for Alex with the women he spied on, his acrobatics and
gestures, which Axel describes as a form of poetry.
Figure 6. Maurice Sand: “The Harlequin”
Figure 7. Jean-Antoine Watteau: “Pierrot”
When Diderot discussed the gestural nature of the actor’s art, he claimed
that the artist had to divest himself of any emotional empathy with the role. Much
of the criticism of Banville, even when positive, is that he often sacrifices feeling for
his technical abilities as a novelist. In reviewing The Sea for The New York Times
Book Review, Michiko Kakutani scornfully commented that Banville is “a highly
cerebral author who emphasizes style over story, linguistic pyrotechnics over felt
emotion”. The implication here is that linguistic skill and felt emotion are
diametrically opposed qualities in fiction, but Banville actually explores the
paradoxical nature of the relation between the two. McMinn comments on how
the most unsettling aspect of Athena is that it is, to all intents and purposes, a
“stylization of cruelty” (133). McMinn sees this cruelty as emanating from the
perverse, fetishistic relationship between the two lovers in the novel, implying
therefore that excessive stylization does induce emotion, only it is a perverse one
connected with the deindividuation of the fetishist. In The Untouchable, however,
Banville directly addresses the connection between stylization and felt emotion, by
focusing on the artist Poussin as seen through the eyes of the main character Victor
Maskell. Poussin, as artist, is often accused of the same defects as the novelist
Banville, even by those critics who admire him. Anthony Blunt, who is the template
for Banville’s character of Maskell, dedicated an entire study to Poussin, but even
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STEPHEN BUTLER
he occasionally comments on the lack of emotion in the artist: “This unusual
method explains many of the features of Poussin’s style: its classicism, its marblelike detachment, and also its coldness, which at some moments comes near to lack
of life” (193). The unusual method he’s discussing here again involves dolls and
manikins, which Poussin would use to construct a three-dimensional model of the
scene he was going to paint, so that he could get the perspective and the lighting
just right. Delacroix believed that such a method resulted in a certain “dryness” in
Poussin’s paintings, which Blunt would certainly have taken to be an emotional
dryness. As is the case with the Commedia dell’Arte, Poussin’s paintings involve
classical types and poses which leave in the eye of many a critic a cold feeling, even
in Blunt.1 The paradox though, is that Poussin used these formal techniques
precisely to invoke an emotional response in his audience. Maskell notices
Poussin’s “stylized, gorgeous cruelty” in certain paintings (Figure 8), and Banville
provides a direct quote from Blunt’s study of Poussin to show that this paradoxical
relationship between style and feeling is a key concern of Poussin’s: “The problem
for Poussin in the depiction of suffering is how to stylize it, as the rules of classical
art demand, while yet making it immediately felt” (234).
Figure 8. Nicolas Poussin: “Et in Arcadia Ego”
1
McMinn sees something similar in Banville’s novel, as he describes Victor Maskell as
Banville’s “coldest” narrator to date.
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BANVILLE’S IRISH COMMEDIA DELL’ARTE
Poussin himself tried to solve this particular dilemma by plagiarizing the
musical theory of Gioseffe Zarlino and introducing his theory of modes. He related
this theory to his patron, who had accused him of producing paintings lacking any
felt emotion. On the contrary, argued Poussin, his paintings do possess an
emotional resonance, due to their use of several modes, derived from the Greeks,
and which are selectively assembled in the painting: “particularly when all the
things which entered into the composition were put together in such proportions
that there arose the capacity and power to arouse the soul of the beholders to
diverse emotions” (Freeberg, 77). What is important is not the emotion of the
subject of the painting, but rather how it is composed; with “proportion” and
“measure” as the primary means to excite emotions in the eye of the beholder.
These characteristics can only be appreciated by a mind fully engaged with the
painting, for as Poussin firmly believed: “Our sense alone ought not to be the judge,
but reason too” (Freeberg, 80). Kakutani uses the word “cerebral” in an almost
sneering tone which would have been looked on unfavourably by Poussin. He
believed, as does Maskell in The Untouchable, that “pictures were more a matter of
mind over eye” (Banville, 4). Emotions are not to be “expressed” in the paintings,
but rather “excited”, a distinction drawn attention to by David Freedman when
discussing the emotional impact of Poussin’s work. They are “excited” by the use of
proportion, which actually produces an effect in the mind of the spectator, similar
to the effect that rhythmical proportion does in music. Poussin believed that in
both music and painting there is a “certain determinate order, [which] has a
closure to it by which the thing conserves its being” (Freeberg, 82). It is the order of
a work of art that produces its emotional effects, not its subject, which was
something that Freddie also comments on in his long disquisition on Watteau’s
Pierrot painting. He employs the same musical terminology as Poussin: “a subtle
harmonics is at work here, which plays upon our expectations of symmetry and
balance […] it is first of all a masterpiece of pure composition, of the architectonic
arrangement of light and shade, of earth and sky, of presence and absence”
(Ghosts, 87).
Freddie is also using the same terminology as David Freeberg, who believes
that in his theory of modes Poussin was trying to describe an aesthetic process
referred to by Kant as “the architectonics […] of mental operations”. Freeberg
believed that Poussin was trying to describe the “innate levels of response” in
observing pictures, and was providing a “syntax of correlations between pictures
and responses” (81). This paper has come full circle, as it was precisely this aspect
of the Commedia dell’Arte and its use of the mask that Banville was most
interested in. To reiterate Rudlin’s thesis: “In the liminal phases of life such as
Carnival and Fiesta, persona, because it is of all times and all places, readily
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STEPHEN BUTLER
overcomes personality, which is time and place specific”. Persona is a syntactical
quality, free of the semantics and semiotics of time and place. The emotional
effects of the mask in theatre, of gesture on the stage, modes in music, or
compositional techniques in painting, are “innate”, they are biologically rather than
socially conditioned, and no matter how technical they may be, they do induce an
emotional response. W.B. Yeats was a fellow Irish writer who knew this truth in his
famous poem “Among School Children” when he wrote: “Both nuns and mothers
worship images […] [that]keep a marble or a bronze repose./And yet they too break
hearts” (244). The emotional response to the image, or the gesture, is often
connected with its status as image, a point made by the art critic John Berger:
The most important thing about paintings themselves is that they are images,
are silent, still […] the experience of this has nothing to do with what anybody
teaches about art. It’s as if the painting, absolutely still, soundless, becomes a
corridor, connecting the moment it represents with the moment at which you
are looking at it. And something travels down that corridor, at a speed greater
than light, throwing into question our way of measuring time itself. (4).
The same is true of the Commedia dell’Arte, which telescopes time in a
different fashion: “The mask enables the spectator to see not only the actual
Arlecchino before him, but all the Arlecchinos who live in his memory” (Rudlin, 36).
By subverting time in this fashion art of any fashion is able to help mankind escape
its seemingly inescapable clutches, offering something that all Banville’s narrators
long for: redemption.2 Despite his perverted and murderous nature, or possibly
even because of it, Freddie perfectly encapsulates what he sees as the redemptive
force of art through his love of both A and his paintings: “the witness that she
offers is the possibility of transcendence, both of the self and of the world, though
self and world remain the same” (Athena, 208).
References
Banville, John. The Untouchable. London: Picador, 1997. Print.
Banville, John. Athena. London: Picador, 1998. Print.
Banville, John. The Book of Evidence. London: Picador, 1998. Print.
2
Fellow Irish writer Derek Mahon expresses a similar yearning in his The Yellow Book: “[an]
uninterruptible dream/of art as redemptive form”.
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BANVILLE’S IRISH COMMEDIA DELL’ARTE
Banville, John. Ghosts. London: Picador, 1998. Print.
Banville, John. Eclipse. London: Picador, 2000. Print.
Banville, John. Shroud. London: Picador, 2002. Print.
Banville, John. The Sea. London: Picador, 2005. Print.
Berger, John. Ways of Seeing. London: BBC and Penguin Books, 1972. Print.
Blunt, Anthony. Art and Architecture in France, 1500 to 1700. London: Penguin
Books, 1953. Print.
Diderot, Denis. The Paradox of Acting. Translated by William Archer. New York: Hill
and Wang, 1957. Print.
Freeberg, David. “Composition and Emotion”. The Artful Mind: Cognitive Science
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Kakutani, Michiko. “A Wordy Widower with a Past”. New York Times Book Review
(2005). Web. 24 Apr. 2010. http://www.nytimes.com/2005/11/01/books/
01kaku.html.
Kenny, John. “Well Seen, Well Said: the Pictorial Paradigm in John Banville’s
fiction”. Irish University Review 361 (2006): 52-67. Print.
Kleist, Heinrich von. “On the Marionette Theatre”. Trans. Idris Parry. Web. 24 Apr.
2010. http://southerncrossreview.org/9/kleist.htm
Longley, Edna. The Living Stream: Literature and Revisionism in Ireland. Newcastle:
Bloodaxe Books: 1994. Print.
McGrath, Patrick. “An elegiac love letter”. The Irish Times (11.02.1995): 24. Print.
McMinn, Joseph. The Supreme Fictions of John Banville. Manchester: Manchester
University Press, 1999. Print.
Nietzsche, Friedrich. Beyond Good and Evil. Translated by R.J. Hollingdale. London:
Penguin, 1973. Print.
O’Toole, Fintan. “The Clank of Irish Bones”. Prospect Issue 111 (2005): 17. Print.
Rudlin, John. Commedia Dell’Arte: An Actor’s Handbook. London: Routledge, 1994.
Print.
Speight, Allen. Hegel, Literature, and the Problem of Agency. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2001. Print.
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Tseëlon, Efrat (ed.). Masquerade and Identities: Essays on Gender, Sexuality, and
Marginality. New York: Routledge, 2000. Print.
Yeats, William Butler. Collected Poems. London: Picador, 1990. Print.
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