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Interrupting the Voice in Your Head

Self-improvement isn’t just an industry, it’s an ethos, arguably the most central in modern society. We owe it to ourselves as well as to society to realise our potential, to develop our talents, to discover our true selves. What could be more self-evident? But self-improvement requires, at some point or another, self-diagnosis. And therein lies a problem that is the subject of John Banville’s Eclipse.

Self-improvement is founded on an implicit and verifiable principle: There is no man without his other. The other is there even when one is entirely alone, especially when one is alone. There are always two selves involved, one who acts, thinks, feels and the other who reflects on acting, thinking, feeling. It’s called consciousness and it is an abiding enigma of being human. It also undermines the very principle of its own existence, and with that the prospects for self-improvement. The point of John Banville’s Eclipse is that neither one of the selves, the acting or the reflecting, knows the other very well. Alex, the protagonist is well aware of the problem. “I was an unknown�, he confesses,� unknown even to myself.�

And that situation isn’t helped at all by trying to mould, shape, fix, improve or otherwise transform one or other of the parts of oneself. Alex has spent most of his life as an actor in self-improvement of one type or another - diction, performance, carriage, dance. The result of course is that he has learned how to act, a worthwhile skill in itself but not if one thinks it makes a better person: “The self-made man has no solid ground to stand on,� he has come to realise. He suffers from "...an insupportable excess of self...a malady of selfness." How then to unravel oneself, this most profound of mysteries, if the mystery itself arises and is compounded from trying to manipulate, heal, improve or otherwise modify oneself?

This is where the idea of grace comes from: if either of the two parts of a person is going to change, that change will be initiated from somewhere or someone else - God perhaps, or another human being like a therapist or an unwanted houseguest, or an event as prosaic as children singing. Or, as most notably in Eclipse, an unexplained apparition, sometimes called a ghost.

Whatever it is and wherever it comes from, a ghost interrupts the conversation between self and self. Alex is at first confused about this ephemeral source of help: “So if the purpose of the appearance of this ghost is to dislocate me and keep me thrown off balance, am I indeed projecting it out of my own fancy, or does it come from some outside source? Both, somehow, it seems…� But he eventually understands the new rules of the game; something is real about the ghostly: “…they are not in my head, they are outside.� Ghosts, as Dickens knew, stop the flow of reality so that “The actual has taken on a tense tumbling quality.�

Eclipse for me has echoes of the Oxford Inklings, particularly of the lesser known Charles Williams. Wiliams's novels The Place of the Lion and The Greater Trumps employ similar devices and tropes to Banville to the same end: enlightenment, insight, authentic consciousness. Banville is a much better writer of English prose than Williams ever was. Nowhere in Williams will you find anything like the lovely, lilting, laconic Irishisms such as "The day is damp and fresh as a peeled stick." Nevertheless, the alternative ethos to self-improvement, namely self-abandonment, is something they largely share, and something needed in a world dominated by Trumpian self-will masquerading as morality.