Towards an Ethical Subject: Mourning and Memory in John Banville’s The Sea

Abstract

The article focuses on The Sea (2005) and attempts to investigate Banville’s articulation of the ethics of mourning in the self’s interaction with the world (the dead and the living). Compared with the critical attention on Banville’s narrators’ concerns with memory in their endeavors to construct and reconstruct identity, it is notable that the ethical implications involved in the discussion of selfhood are generally neglected. The essay departs from the existing criticism in two aspects. On one hand, subjective imaginations as fragmented and decentered are socio-historically located in the shifting ethical relationship between Self and Other. On the other hand, Banville’s narrators, who conceive of themselves as character and author, are primarily concerned with examining the ethical dimensions in a narrative of memories. I argue that Banville tells a broader morality tale about the narrative of the past, in which one can recollect and reconstruct memories of the dead, that has a salvationary effect on the narrator’s present relation with the living. The narrated episodes of the narrator’s struggle with the divided and shifty self(s) deal with his ethical concerns embodied in the act of mourning. The mourning of Anna, Chloe and Myles turns out to be an interminable process calling question of ethical responsibility to the Other, in which the relationship between self and other is examined and maintained and further, reconfigured. The act of mourning thus becomes a continued way of, in Jacques Derrida’s sense, “speaking to” the other who is gone because the dead are the ones that the narrators continue to address in reconciling with the examination of selfhood. Memories are transformative and it is through the reckoning of the dead that the self finds meaning in life.