On the last page of Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan quartet, Elena Greco, or “Lenu,” ascends in an elevator and closes herself in her apartment. There she examines the two dolls that she and her closest friend, Lila, played with as girls—objects once ablaze with meaning, now smelling of mold and seeming, to her eyes, “cheap and ugly.” Confusion surfaces from the dissolving vividness, the passing solidity, of the past. Ferrante, by way of Lenu, then observes: “Unlike stories, real life, when it has passed, inclines toward obscurity, not clarity.” It is true that written stories, by their very nature, are constructed objects, filtering and fashioning life as well as imagined experience. They aspire not only to a netting—and a fixing—of reality, but also to a measure of coherence and order, even if at times they immerse the reader in life’s elusiveness. Whether or not they achieve clarity depends on the tale in question. And yet some degree of narrative integrity, some sense of completeness, remains a virtue. Memories, by contrast—however provisionally coherent—are fickle; we pin them one way and they shift. Over time, too, they fade and change, as we revisit them, and as we ourselves change. We may be left one day utterly puzzled before our old playthings. Ferrante, then, is right in part: The degree of form that fiction confers upon experience is part of the reason why we turn—or at least I turn—to it, because it is the form that tempers the murk. But how can novels render and explore the obscurity so often felt in life? Is obscurity not the antithesis, the sworn enemy, of form? In the representation of lived experience, is not form a distortion and even a lie? John Banville’s acclaimed novel The Sea tests precisely this boundary between obscurity and coherence. Slim in size but rich in sensibility, it is moody and meticulous—a kind of swan song in sentences. The narrator, who goes by “Max Morden,” is a dilettante art historian, attempting to write a book on the French painter Pierre Bonnard. He has retreated to an Irish village by the sea where he spent summers as a child. We know that he has taken a room at The Cedars, but the details of the plot remain tenuous. In this retreat, Max drifts through memories as they threaten to fade, offering in the process what may be a parting account of himself. Of his long-time wife, Anna, who has died, he says: “Already the image of her that I hold in my head is fraying, bits of pigment, flakes of gold leaf, are chipping off. Will the entire canvas be empty one day?” Thankfully, Banville’s account of Anna is intact on the page, preserved with Max’s tone of fond attention, albeit speckled at times with purposeful ignorance and vitriol. At one point he bursts out, as if to her phantom: “You cunt, you fucking cunt, how could you go and leave me like this, floundering in my own foulness, with no one to save me from myself. How could you.” And Max is susceptible to vitriol as well about his and Anna’s daughter, Claire, and her boyfriend Jerome. No, not vitriol exactly—but a vexation and a sort of smug remoteness. Early on, when Max recalls Claire referring to Jerome, he says: “she meant of course the chinless do-gooder—fat lot of good he did her.” (Note the assonance even here: Banville never settles for prose that sloughs off rhythm.) Interwoven with Max’s memories of Anna are his recollections of a childhood summer with the Graces, a family he deems “the gods,” beginning in the haunting first sentence of the novel: “They departed, the gods, on the day of the strange tide.” The gods bring real teacups with saucers to the beach, they boast a motor car, they offer delicacies such as mint sauce alongside their meals. Max’s summer with them zaps his molecules, as he falls in love first with Connie Grace, the mother, whose armpits are to him “excitingly stubbled,” and then with Chloe, Myles’s twin, prone to cruelty and giving off a “cheesy tang” he relishes. Further down in the first paragraph Max goes on, as if to promise himself, “I would not swim again after that day.” Then, to cap the paragraph, he adds once more, “I would not swim, no, not ever again.” Already a sense of loss and foreboding have entered the frame. Max is caught drifting through his past, made bitter and wounded—at times baffled—by the grief that has threaded its way into the present. The Sea has drawn lavish and well-deserved praise since its publication twenty-one years ago, and was adapted into a film starring Ciarán Hinds and Charlotte Rampling. Re-reading Banville’s novel today, I was struck by how its form becomes a microcosm of one of its central themes: the narrator’s desire for cohesion, and the ways in which reality, even within fiction, resists that cohesion. The image of the sea becomes an emblem of this tension. Meanwhile, the novel’s structure, loose and tidal though it is, insists upon a certain coherence. Together, these elements add shade and nuance to Ferrante’s simpler adage. At the level of the sentence, Banville captures the mind’s tentative motion: reaching out to make a judgement, rejecting it, and reaching out again. Consider the following passage, about three-quarters of the way through the novel, in which the narrator lays bare his relationship with alcohol: Have I spoken already of my drinking? I drink like a fish. No, not like a fish, fishes do not drink, it is only breathing, their kind of breathing. I drink like one recently widowed—widowered?—a person of scant talent and scanter ambition … The movement here goes: “X is like Y,” “No, not Y,” “X is closer to Z.” Countless passages throughout the book take on comparable form—they pivot, that is, upon simile or metaphor and then revision. The latter happens here with the “drink like a fish” “no, not like a fish,” “like one recently widowed.”
There's nothing Artificial about our Intelligence