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Desire, Pursuit and Loss: The Making of Athena

Palazzolo, Pietra

Journal of comparative literature & aesthetics, 2019-06, Vol.42 (S1), p.85-0_3 [Periódico revisado por pares]

Cuttack: Vishvanatha Kaviraja Institute of Comparative Literature and Aesthetics

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  • Título:
    Desire, Pursuit and Loss: The Making of Athena
  • Autor: Palazzolo, Pietra
  • Assuntos: 20th century ; Aesthetics ; Allusion ; Ambiguity ; Analysis ; Banville, John (1945- ) ; Consciousness ; Contemporary literature ; Creative ability ; Creative process ; Creativity ; Criticism and interpretation ; Desire ; Epic literature ; Epistemology ; Exegesis & hermeneutics ; Females ; Goals (Psychology) ; Homonyms ; Latin literature ; Literary criticism ; Literary devices ; Literary influences ; Literary translation ; Literature, Modern ; Loss (Psychology) ; Modern literature ; Modernism ; Myth ; Mythology ; Narrative structure ; Narrative techniques ; Narratives ; Novels ; Poetry ; Portrayals ; Writing
  • É parte de: Journal of comparative literature & aesthetics, 2019-06, Vol.42 (S1), p.85-0_3
  • Descrição: Taking a cue from the concept of return in myth--and seeing return as an inherent aspect of myth's structure--this paper considers the recurrence of myth in John Banville's Athena (1995). Several aspects of the novel clearly allude to the creative process as envisioned in ancient mythology with the birth of the goddess of wisdom and the arts from Zeus's head: the title Athena, the mention of a missing painting titled "The Birth of Athena," and persistent references throughout the text to the mind's efforts to imagine and describe A., the girl Morrow--a Dublin art critic--meets in the house where the paintings he has been asked to assess are stored. Yet, the initial A. that Morrow uses to refer to the girl both reinforces the allusion to the myth of Athena and functions as a multiple signifier. This indeterminacy denotes a type of writing that while striving to summon the other into existence expresses a point of crisis in the irreducible alterity of such a process within the context of Banville's oeuvre and of late twentieth-century writing. Morrow's musings on the thought of A. become indistinguishable from the writing process, both in relation to the main narrative and in the critiques of the paintings which depict scenes from Ovid's Metamorphoses centred on the cycle of desire, pursuit, and loss. The paper argues that Banville's use of a number of myths associated with the creative process serves to register a gradual loss of authorial control and a critique of epistemological discourse that characterised late twentieth-century writing. The writer's desire to possess the work of art (Pygmalion) is juxtaposed and pitched against a more problematic idea of the writing of the other into existence through the metamorphoses of Apollo via Banville's inheritance of a Romantic and Modernist aesthetics (Keats and Stevens's poetry), which all contribute to the making of Athena. In this way, the story of A. functions as a living canvas or tapestry (tableau vivant) for a range of mythical counterparts that revisit the Morrow-A. relationship in its many levels of significance. Keywords: John Banville, Athena, Apollo, Ovid's Metamorphoses, Ernst Cassirer, Hans Blumenberg.
  • Editor: Cuttack: Vishvanatha Kaviraja Institute of Comparative Literature and Aesthetics
  • Idioma: Inglês
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  • Realização: ABCD-USP USP   Logos de Redes Sociais: Freepik

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