From “dead saint” to “lyreless Orpheus”: post-traumatic narrativization of myths and fairy tales in John Banville’s The Sea and Anne Enright’s The Gathering

Abstract

In The Sea (2005) and The Gathering (2007), John Banville and Anne Enright incorporate modernist and postmodernist intertextuality into accounts of bereavement. While the shattered existence of the protagonists is seemingly devoid of religious belief, they mobilize the palimpsestic immemorial past of mythological and fairy-tale intertexts to make sense of broken realities. The narrators’ self-portraits and invocations of lost people and places, oscillating between reminiscence and mythification, underscore postmodernism’s play with canonical stories. Both authors use mythological syncretism to express their characters’ quest for meaning: while Greek, Egyptian and Norse gods invade The Sea’s modern-day “Atlantis” (132), The Gathering is peopled with subverted Christian and Irish figures. However, rather than restoring coherence, myth and fairy-tale tropes are suffused with desperate irony, and the magic spell woven by mythological counterpoints turns out to be a post-traumatic, grimacing reflection of the characters’ troubled psyches, or an obfuscating screen. By interweaving and debunking seminal myths and tales, Banville and Enright give life to personal myths that bespeak the characters’ deep-seated sense of loss and disenchantment. The reader is thus left wondering if, by filling the gaps of post-traumatic memory with mythological rewritings, these defamiliarizing narratives of bereavement convey potential solace or reinforce their protagonists’ post-traumatic loss of landmarks.