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Advances in Social Sciences Research Journal – Vol. 10, No. 8

Publication Date: August 25, 2023

DOI:10.14738/assrj.108.15324.

Li, H., & Li, J. (2023). The Unreliability of Ageing Narrative in John Banville’s The Sea and Ancient Light. Advances in Social Sciences

Research Journal, 10(8). 280-288.

Services for Science and Education – United Kingdom

The Unreliability of Ageing Narrative in John Banville’s The Sea

and Ancient Light

Huifang Li

School of Foreign Studies, Hebei Normal University, Shijiazhuang City, China

Junlin Li

School of Foreign Studies, Hebei Normal University, Shijiazhuang City, China

Acknowlegement: This article is supported by the Hebei Provincial Fund for Philosophy and

Social Sciences (Grant No:HB21WW005),China.

ABSTRACT

The Sea and Ancient Light were both written after the author John Banville has

reached his sixties. As a writer with a strong consciousness of age identity, Banville

interwove his age concern with his narrative techniques in these two works. Among

them, the unreliability of the protagonists’ narrative is the most distinct feature and

it was carried out through three aspects. First, Banville deliberately inserts self- blurring narratives to indicate the symptom of amnesia which is popular among the

aged group; Second, the recurrent self-referential fabricated details imply a

confusion between reality and fancy in the aged life and the difficulty in maintaining

the aged self; Third, invention and imagination is encouraged as a way to restore

the self-identification of the elders. Therefore, the commonly labelled postmodern

narrative of Banville is rather a realistic depiction of the aged life.

Keywords: John Banville, Unreliability, Ageing Narrative, The Sea, Ancient Light

INTRODUCTION

William John Banville (1945-)is an Irish writer with reputation, his writing has been described

as perfectly crafted, beautiful, and dazzling. Among his works, The Sea won the Man Booker

Prize in 2005 and Ancient Light the Irish Book Award in 2012. The two novels were both

published when he was in his sixties and beyond. Coincidentally, the protagonists of these two

novels are also in their sixties, and the main plots center around the ageing characters. John

Banville was quite conscious of his age and said, “Anyway, I’m old, I’m white, I’m male ...” [1]

Living in an aged society as Ireland, John Banville always feels the need to explain the world,

and the issue of ageing is obviously one of his concerns, “I write to explain the world to myself,

or to account to the world to myself — there’s no explaining it. Because it’s such a strange place.

I’m 76 now, and I’m as baffled by the world as I was when I was five years old.” [1] As a master

stylist of English language, his representation of ageing not only lies in the design of the ageing

characters, but also in the way the stories are told.

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Li, H., & Li, J. (2023). The Unreliability of Ageing Narrative in John Banville’s The Sea and Ancient Light. Advances in Social Sciences Research Journal,

10(8). 280-288.

URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.14738/assrj.108.15324

The Sea was published in 2005, which tells a story about an art historian called Max Morden in

his early sixties. Because of the recent death of his wife Anna, Max left the empty house where

he and his wife once lived for the seaside village Ballyless in which he resided with his parents

during his childhood to get rid of the sorrows caused by the bereavement. He inhabits the

Cedars, a house managed by Miss Vavasour in the village, where he encountered the Graces in

the long-ago summer holiday. There Max begins to recall all events happening between the

Graces and him. Ancient Light is the last volume of the Cleave Trilogy. The novel follows the story

of Alexander Cleave, a retired actor in his sixties, who recalls a passionate and forbidden affair

he had as a teenager with Mrs. Gray, the mother of his best friend Billy. The novel weaves

together the time present and the time past, and the plot developed between Cleave’s

reminiscence of his affair with Mrs Gray and his current life interrupted by an offer to play the

lead in a film entitled The Invention of the Past. The film is to be based on the life of literary

theorist Axel Vander, the man with Cleave’s daughter Cass when she killed herself in Italy. Both

novels are told by a male narrative in his sixties and the narrative of the two novels conveys a

strong sense of ageing.

LITERATURE REVIEW AND RESEARCH METHODOLOGY

The previous studies on the two works are diverse and prolific. Scholars have showed interests

in the narrative methods, postmodern features, psychological analysis and ageing of the two

works. Marta Cerezo Moreno discusses the multi-layer narrative in The Sea. She regards the

structure of The Sea as “a chronological juxtaposition of vignettes” (2018) [2]Elizabeth A.

Weston (2015) discusses the creative narrative to provide the time and space for grief.[3]

Wendy Vaizey (2012) employs aspects of the Kristevan psychoanalytical perspectives to discuss

the novel’s treatments of themes of mourning and loss.[4] Mahya Haji Gholam and Mona

Hoorvash (2019) use the postmodern catena to interpret the ontological indeterminacies of The

Sea.[5] Arka Chattopadhyay (2010) and Mehdi Ghassemi (2016) both interpret Ancient Light

from Lacan’s psychoanalytic framework. [6]

There are a few articles engaging in the ageing studies on The Sea. Sonja Bö ttger thinks the

crossing of narratology with ageing studies allows a better understanding of how identity is

constructed on several levels.[7] Michaela Schrage Frü h (2022) centers on the widowers’

uncanny reflections as manifested in pivotal mirror scenes and how the uncanny influence

Max’s ageing masculinity.[8] The past is still very much presented in Max’s present self, and the

study of his ageing is consequently deepened by the focus on the different identities he had in

the past through narrative techniques such as focalization. Besides, Heather Ingman (2018)

thinks that John Banville’s unreliable, solipsistic, dissembling narrators are often highly

conscious of signs of ageing in themselves. [9] Max’s acute consciousness and anxiety over his

ageing body, like that of Charles in The Sea, the Sea, suggest that men as well as women are

constrained by society’s emphasis on physical perfection.

However, my approach towards these two works is a combination of narrative analysis and

ageing studies. Dominated by structuralist approaches at its beginning, narratology has

developed into a mixture of theories, concepts, and analytic procedures. Narratology as a

discipline subsumes theory and method, acknowledging narratology’s dual nature as both a

theoretical and an application-oriented academic approach to narrative. [10] The narrator’s

unreliability can be applied to interpret the protagonist’s unreliable reminiscence caused by

memory decline, and Genette’s theory of narrative time is suitable to handle the juxtaposition