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Ian "Marvin" Graye's Reviews > Athena
Athena
by
by
CRITIQUE:
The Collapse of a Questionable Narration
"Athena" marks the conclusion of "the Freddie Montgomery Trilogy", although it's arguable that the narrative of the Trilogy had collapsed well before the end of the third novel, rather than being reinforced by the extended focus.
As with "Ghosts", the first third to one-half of the novel meanders around before it confirms its purpose and sets its course. However, in contrast, the second half shines a light on the plight of the Freddie character (who goes by the pseudonym, Morrow).
A Counterpoint to Proust
Each of the three novels directly or indirectly raises questions about unreliable narrators. However, here, the unreliability doesn't derive specifically from Morrow's psyche. Instead, it's a product of how Banville suspects the mind, in general, and memory, in particular, works.
Banville develops his perspective in opposition to Marcel Proust:
Arguably, desire creates [false] memories of absences, or events that never occurred. They are not just works of invention, or the conscious imagination.
One wonders whether their purpose is to screen, block or conceal other memories (e.g., memories of traumatic events)(i.e., as does (1)
The Continuum of the Mind
While evaluating Morrow and his observations throughout the novel, I tried to locate different aspects of the mind on a continuum that consists of the following functions or actions:
...perception, analysis, understanding, memory, imagination, invention, dreaming, misapprehension, misunderstanding, illusion, delusion, self-deception, deception, misrepresentation, concealment, deceit, fraud...(2)
Free Fall (From the Collapse Board)
Morrow reflects on his wife (who played a bit part in the first novel, and subsequently divorced him while he was in prison) as someone "with whom long ago I wandered the world until one day we found we had used up world and selves, and I left her, or she left me, and I went into free fall."
He implies that there is a sense in which the self (and all that it consists of) is finite and therefore, inevitably, exhaustible. So, too, is a relationship, and Morrow is destined to go into a second free fall at the end of another relationship (whether imagined or invented).
Morrow lives in the present, as do we all. However, in his capacity as narrator, he resorts to the past, as far as he can recall, to make sense of his story and his present. However, what he finds in the past isn't totally reliable:
Thus, at his own peril, he delves back into the past to make sense of where (and who) he is in the present,... and the novel documents his free fall.
"These Swoony Ruminations"
There appears to be (or there has recently been) a woman in Morrow's life (A.)(3). He wishes she had 'taken pity on me and led me to the couch and sat me down and said, "All right now, listen, this is what is really going on..." But no, that is not how you would have done it. You would have blurted it out and laughed, wide-eyed, with a hand over your mouth, and only later, if at all, would I have realised the full significance of what it was you had told me. I never understood you.' (4)
Once again, A. might be a creature/invention of Morrow's imagination or gaze. Alternatively, she might be the subject of a painting come alive (e.g., the Greek goddess, Athena, of the title, who is the equivalent of the Roman goddess, Minerva):
"The Flickering Simulacrum of a Duplicitous Reality"
Banville/Morrow foreshadows opposition to this idea:
At the same time that he is apparently in this relationship with A., Morrow has become ensconced in a criminal conspiracy to forge and distribute some paintings (including a work of Jean Vaublin called "Birth of Athena"). Morrow's role is to be the scholar and expert who can verify the authenticity of the paintings.
Rene-Antoine Houasse - 'The Birth of Minerva" (Minerva (archaic Menerva), a Roman goddess of handicrafts, was widely worshipped and regularly identified with Athena, but most scholars think her indigenous, and connect her name with the root of meminisse [‘to remember’])
He interprets the conspiracy from the perspective of his relationship (which overrides and screens it from memory):
"The Fragile Theatre of Illusions"
Morrow's memory of A. (as unclear as it appears to be) screens other, potentially more important memories (such as the memory of his involvement in the conspiratorial scheme):
A.'s role in Morrow's life is equally unclear:
He wonders whether their intimacy was authentic, or fabricated or fake:
"Transports of Doomy Pleasure"
A. reads de Sade's "Justine" (in the first of two scenes that recall de Sade's sado-masochistic fiction) -
"Her Invented Lives"
Before he lost A., Morrow would sit "in some fake old-fashioned pub listening to her stories of herself and her invented lives."
Her invention gives Morrow a sense of licence, not just licentiousness:
"That Intricate Dance of Desire and Deceit"
To the very end, Morrow can't figure out who or what A. was. Was she real or was she invented? If the latter, was she invented by Morrow or Banville? (Does this answer apply to every character in a novel?)
Banville's novel is no clumping caper or bizarre farce, but it is an intricate dance of desire and deceit. I have dropped it a star rating, because the novel's lyricism doesn't match the quality of the first two volumes of the trilogy, and it took much longer to take off.
FOOTNOTES:
(1). Thanks to Ipsa for pointing me in the direction of Sigmund Freud's concept of "screen memories".
(2). This is a subjective list. It's not meant to be complete.
(3). "It's not even the initial of her name, it's only a letter, but it sounds right, it feels right."
(4). Does the mention of a couch imply that A. might be an analyst?
(5). Banville makes, but doesn't explicitly explore, an allusion to
SOUNDTRACK:
(view spoiler)
The Collapse of a Questionable Narration
"Athena" marks the conclusion of "the Freddie Montgomery Trilogy", although it's arguable that the narrative of the Trilogy had collapsed well before the end of the third novel, rather than being reinforced by the extended focus.
As with "Ghosts", the first third to one-half of the novel meanders around before it confirms its purpose and sets its course. However, in contrast, the second half shines a light on the plight of the Freddie character (who goes by the pseudonym, Morrow).
A Counterpoint to Proust
Each of the three novels directly or indirectly raises questions about unreliable narrators. However, here, the unreliability doesn't derive specifically from Morrow's psyche. Instead, it's a product of how Banville suspects the mind, in general, and memory, in particular, works.
Banville develops his perspective in opposition to Marcel Proust:
"What paradisal moments are these that assail me at unconsidered moments? They are not, I think, involuntary memories such as those the celebrated madeleine is supposed to have invoked, for no specific events attach to them, no childhood landscapes, no beloved figures in rustling gowns or top-hats; rather they seem absences, suddenly stumbled upon, redolent of a content that never was but was only longed for achingly."
"Where do they come from, these mysterious, exalted flashes that are not memories yet seem far more than mere imaginings?"
Arguably, desire creates [false] memories of absences, or events that never occurred. They are not just works of invention, or the conscious imagination.
One wonders whether their purpose is to screen, block or conceal other memories (e.g., memories of traumatic events)(i.e., as does (1)
The Continuum of the Mind
While evaluating Morrow and his observations throughout the novel, I tried to locate different aspects of the mind on a continuum that consists of the following functions or actions:
...perception, analysis, understanding, memory, imagination, invention, dreaming, misapprehension, misunderstanding, illusion, delusion, self-deception, deception, misrepresentation, concealment, deceit, fraud...(2)
Free Fall (From the Collapse Board)
Morrow reflects on his wife (who played a bit part in the first novel, and subsequently divorced him while he was in prison) as someone "with whom long ago I wandered the world until one day we found we had used up world and selves, and I left her, or she left me, and I went into free fall."
He implies that there is a sense in which the self (and all that it consists of) is finite and therefore, inevitably, exhaustible. So, too, is a relationship, and Morrow is destined to go into a second free fall at the end of another relationship (whether imagined or invented).
Morrow lives in the present, as do we all. However, in his capacity as narrator, he resorts to the past, as far as he can recall, to make sense of his story and his present. However, what he finds in the past isn't totally reliable:
"I did not know myself (do I ever know myself?)"
Thus, at his own peril, he delves back into the past to make sense of where (and who) he is in the present,... and the novel documents his free fall.
"These Swoony Ruminations"
There appears to be (or there has recently been) a woman in Morrow's life (A.)(3). He wishes she had 'taken pity on me and led me to the couch and sat me down and said, "All right now, listen, this is what is really going on..." But no, that is not how you would have done it. You would have blurted it out and laughed, wide-eyed, with a hand over your mouth, and only later, if at all, would I have realised the full significance of what it was you had told me. I never understood you.' (4)
Once again, A. might be a creature/invention of Morrow's imagination or gaze. Alternatively, she might be the subject of a painting come alive (e.g., the Greek goddess, Athena, of the title, who is the equivalent of the Roman goddess, Minerva):
"I was like a lover who gazes in tongue-tied joy upon his darling and sees not her face but a dream of it. You were the pictures and they were you and I never noticed."
"I should say that A. herself was almost incidental to these swoony ruminations, which at their most concentrated became entirely self-sustaining."...
"The Flickering Simulacrum of a Duplicitous Reality"
Banville/Morrow foreshadows opposition to this idea:
"...I know, I know the objections, I have read the treatises: there is no real she, only a set of signs, a series of appearances, a grid of relations between swarming particles; yet I insist on it: she was there at those times, it was she who clutched me to her and cried out, not a flickering simulacrum foisted on me by the stop-frame technique of a duplicitous reality. I had her." (5)
At the same time that he is apparently in this relationship with A., Morrow has become ensconced in a criminal conspiracy to forge and distribute some paintings (including a work of Jean Vaublin called "Birth of Athena"). Morrow's role is to be the scholar and expert who can verify the authenticity of the paintings.
Rene-Antoine Houasse - 'The Birth of Minerva" (Minerva (archaic Menerva), a Roman goddess of handicrafts, was widely worshipped and regularly identified with Athena, but most scholars think her indigenous, and connect her name with the root of meminisse [‘to remember’])
He interprets the conspiracy from the perspective of his relationship (which overrides and screens it from memory):
"Was I very ridiculous? I say again, I don't care about any of the rest of it, having been cheated and made a fool of and put in danger of going back to jail; all that matters is what you thought of me, think of me. (Think of me!)"
"The Fragile Theatre of Illusions"
Morrow's memory of A. (as unclear as it appears to be) screens other, potentially more important memories (such as the memory of his involvement in the conspiratorial scheme):
"Belief, trust, suspicion, these are chimeras that arise in hindsight, when I look back from the sad eminence of the knowledge of having been deceived."
A.'s role in Morrow's life is equally unclear:
"She desired to be seen, she said, to be a spectacle, to have her most intimate secrets purloined and betrayed. Yet I ask myself now if they really were her secrets that she offered up on the altar of our passion or just variations invented for this or that occasion."
He wonders whether their intimacy was authentic, or fabricated or fake:
"...but no, fake is not the right word. Unformed: that's it. She was not being but becoming. So I thought of her. Everything she did seemed a seeking after definition..."
"Transports of Doomy Pleasure"
A. reads de Sade's "Justine" (in the first of two scenes that recall de Sade's sado-masochistic fiction) -
"...yearning for some sort of final confirmation of...of what? Authenticity, perhaps. And yet it was precisely the inauthentic, the fragile theatre of illusions we had erected to house our increasingly exotic performances, that afforded us the fiercest and most precious transports of doomy pleasure. How keen the dark and tender thrill that shot through me when in the throes of passion she cried out my assumed - my false - name and for a second a phantom other, my jettisoned self, joined us and made a ghostly troilism of our panting labours...how dirty and even dangerous the games we played...
"In these sleepless nights I go over her inch by inch, mapping her contours, surveyor of all I no longer possess. I see her turning slowly in the depths of memory's screen, fixed and staring, too real to be real, like one of those three-dimensional models that computers make. It is then, when she is at her vividest, that I know I have lost her forever."
"Her Invented Lives"
Before he lost A., Morrow would sit "in some fake old-fashioned pub listening to her stories of herself and her invented lives."
Her invention gives Morrow a sense of licence, not just licentiousness:
"And I, what did I think, what [did I] feel? At first bemusement, hesitancy and a sort of frightful exultation at being allowed such a licence...I saw myself towering over her like a maddened monster out of Goya, hirsute and bloody and irresistible, Morrow the Merciless. It was ridiculous, of course, and yet no her own arm and I would not stop, no, I would not stop.t ridiculous at all. I was monster and at the same time man. She would thrash under my blows with her face screwed up and fiercely biting her own arm and I would not stop, no, I would not stop...Who else was there, to make her come alive?"
"That Intricate Dance of Desire and Deceit"
To the very end, Morrow can't figure out who or what A. was. Was she real or was she invented? If the latter, was she invented by Morrow or Banville? (Does this answer apply to every character in a novel?)
"The streets were thronged with the ghost of her. The world of women had dwindled to a single image."
"These memories. Where is she in them? A word, a breath, a turning look. I have lost her. Sometimes I wish that I could lose all recollection of her, too. I suppose I shall, in time. I suppose memory will simply fall away from me, like hair, like teeth. I shall be glad of that diminishment...
"What galled me, I think, was the way the whole thing, that intricate dance of desire and deceit at the centre of which A. and I had whirled and twined, was turned [by the papers] into a clumping caper, bizarre, farcical almost, all leering snouts and horny hands and bare bums, like something by Breughel."
Banville's novel is no clumping caper or bizarre farce, but it is an intricate dance of desire and deceit. I have dropped it a star rating, because the novel's lyricism doesn't match the quality of the first two volumes of the trilogy, and it took much longer to take off.
FOOTNOTES:
(1). Thanks to Ipsa for pointing me in the direction of Sigmund Freud's concept of "screen memories".
(2). This is a subjective list. It's not meant to be complete.
(3). "It's not even the initial of her name, it's only a letter, but it sounds right, it feels right."
(4). Does the mention of a couch imply that A. might be an analyst?
(5). Banville makes, but doesn't explicitly explore, an allusion to
SOUNDTRACK:
(view spoiler)
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Reading Progress
February 26, 2011
– Shelved
October 24, 2012
– Shelved as:
banville
November 7, 2021
–
Started Reading
November 10, 2021
–
15.38%
"What paradisal moments are these that assail me at unconsidered moments? They are not, I think, involuntary memories such as those the celebrated madeleine is supposed to have invoked, for no specific events attach to them, no childhood landscapes, no beloved figures in rustling gowns or top-hats; rather they seem absences, suddenly stumbled upon, redolent of a content that never was but was only longed for achingly"
page
36
November 10, 2021
–
22.65%
"Where do they come from, these mysterious, exalted flashes that are not memories yet seem far more than mere imaginings?"
page
53
November 11, 2021
–
27.78%
"Belief, trust, suspicion, these are chimeras that arise in hindsight, when I look back from the sad eminence of the knowledge of having been deceived."
page
65
November 13, 2021
–
35.04%
"Did I give myself to the pictures with that sensation of inward falling that great art is supposed to provoke?"
page
82
November 13, 2021
–
35.04%
"I was like a lover who gazes in tongue-tied joy upon his darling and sees not her face but a dream of it. You were the pictures and they were you and I never noticed."
page
82
November 13, 2021
–
37.61%
"I should say that A. herself was almost incidental to these swoony ruminations, which at their most concentrated became entirely self-sustaining."
page
88
November 13, 2021
–
41.45%
"...I know, I know the objections, I have read the treatises: there is no real she, only a set of signs, a series of appearances, a grid of relations between swarming particles; yet I insist on it: she was there at those times, it was she who clutched me to her and cried out, not a flickering simulacrum foisted on me by the stop-frame technique of a duplicitous reality. I had her."
page
97
November 13, 2021
–
49.57%
"Extraordinary, this knack the mind has of holding things, however intimately connected, on entirely separate levels, like so many layers of molten silt."
page
116
November 13, 2021
–
49.57%
"And here memory, that ingenious stage director, performs one of its impossible, magical scene-changes, splicing two different occasions with bland disregard for setting, props or costumes."
page
116
November 13, 2021
–
50.0%
"...I felt for once, for one, rare, mutely ecstatic moment, at home in this so tender, impassive and always preoccupied world."
page
117
November 13, 2021
–
50.0%
"She peered at me closely to see if I was joking and, deciding I was not, laughed."
page
117
November 13, 2021
–
52.14%
"'Tell me things,' she would say, the tip of her sharp little nose turning pale with anticipation, 'tell me about your life.' I was evasive. It did not matter. She had enough fantasies for two..."
page
122
November 13, 2021
–
52.14%
"She lied to me, of course, I know that, yet the things she told me (as distinct from the things that she did not) I think of not as lies but inventions, rather, improvisations, true fictions. The tales she spun had been breathed on and polished so often that the detailing had become blurred."
page
122
November 13, 2021
–
52.56%
"I believed you, I believed you - how could you doubt it? Oh, my sweet cheat, I believed every bit of it."
page
123
November 13, 2021
–
52.56%
"Certain of her outlandish claims retain for me even still a distinct tinge of authenticity at their core, even if the details were shaky. 'My trouble is,' she said one day, frowning, as if into dark inner distances, 'there is only half of me here.'..At last, though, I got it out of her: she was the survivor of a pair of twins..."
page
123
November 13, 2021
–
53.85%
"My memory is up to its tricks again, conflating separate occasions..."
page
126
November 15, 2021
– Shelved as:
read-2021
November 15, 2021
– Shelved as:
reviews
November 15, 2021
– Shelved as:
reviews-4-stars
November 15, 2021
–
Finished Reading
