To Sound and to Absorb: Art, Solipsism and the Problem of Mediation in John Banville’s the Blue Guitar and Wallace Stevens’ “The Man with the Blue Guitar”

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article will explore the intertextual links between Banville’s novel The Blue Guitar and Wallace Stevens’ poem “The Man With the Blue Guitar” in order to examine the correspondences and disruptions which arise when the esthetic frame claims to impose its own unique sense of order upon the world of sensations and phenomenal reality. Taking my cue from Banville’s use of the epigraph “Things as they are/Are changed upon the blue guitar” from Stevens’ poem – which is in the poem a response to the accusation that artists “do not play things as they are” – I argue that the novel and poem stage a confrontation between the irresponsible solipsism of the artist (as figured both by Oliver Orme’s kleptomaniac tendencies and his inclination to reduce the otherness of social reality into the ambit of the Kierkegaardian esthetic attitude toward the world) and the failure to internalize completely the essence of things as they are, which provides the ethical opening toward being affected by a sense of radical alterity which inheres in an awareness of our being in the world, which is itself an esthetic perception.