Sensory modality as a linguistic sign of the ‘divided self’ in John Banville’s novels

Abstract

As one of the master stylists of our time, John Banville has honed his own unique style of writing. The typical Banville novel is a first-person confessional narrative of an aging male character troubled by his painful memories of failure and loss. In a struggle to cope with their traumatic life experiences, Banville’s protagonists attempt to find answers to haunting existential questions and rediscover their identities in the face of emotional fragmentation. This sense of dislocation and displacement thus emerges as a major theme of Banville’s fiction and his works generally revolve around the internal conflicts of a ‘divided self’. The purpose of this study is to investigate how the language of the novels reflects the inner split of the characters and what linguistic mechanisms Banville exploits to create the ‘divided self’ effect. This article examines a particular linguistic structure used as a pervasive narrative feature: sensory modality. I will more specifically explore sensory modality patterns with co-referential subject and object pronouns (referred here as ‘special effects’) analyzing them in the light of Systemic Functional Grammar as mental transitivity processes and will demonstrate how they constitute a powerful stylistic tool for constructing the image of the divided personality and for conveying self-disunity in retrospective novels.