The Sea

“It is still there, that bridge, just beyond the station. Yes, things endure, while the living lapse. The car was heading out of the village in the direction of the town. I shall call it Ballymore, a dozen miles away. The town is Ballymore, this village is Ballyless, ridiculously, perhaps, but I do not care.”

The narrator reflects on the transience of some things and the endurance of others. He attaches names to the places in his story in a flippant, careless manner. This highlights the conscious unreliability of his narrative as a whole.

“The past beats inside me like a second heart.”

Max inhabits the past and present at the same time. The narrative moves freely between his childhood, his life with Anna, her final illness, and his present at the Cedars. The symbol of the “heart” connotes love.

“That was all there was in the dream. The journey did not end, I arrived nowhere, and nothing happened.”

In the dream that inspires Max to return to the Cedars, he is struggling through the snow, seeking a “homecoming” that is perennially deferred. In some ways, the dream is a representation of Max’s life as a whole. Never really coming to terms with the events of his childhood, he feels he has led a kind of half-life, with a not particularly happy marriage, a mediocre-to-failed career, and a daughter with whom he is unable to communicate. In the novel, he makes both a physical and a psychological journey back to the place where his most formative experiences took place. However, it is uncertain whether he really “arrives” at their true meaning or any form of personal closure.

“A nice vignette has Bonnard at the Musee du Luxembourg with a friend. It was Vuillard, indeed, if I am not mistaken, whom he sets to distracting the museum guard while he whips out his paint-box and reworks a patch of a picture of his own that had been hanging there for years. The true workers all die in a fidget of frustration. So much to do, and so much left undone!”

Max frequently presents Bonnard’s artistic process as an analogy to his own mimetic struggles. The reproduction of experience, in art or literature, is an infinitely complex task that can never be satisfactorily completed. Memories are constantly revisited and re-elaborated.

“I found it suddenly dispiriting to hear of them, these offshoots of the Duignan dynasty, so solid even in only their names, so mundanely real, Patsy the farmer and Mary the emigrant and little Willie who died, all crowding in on my private ceremony of remembering like uninvited poor relatives at a fancy funeral.”

Max is at first delighted to revisit Duignan’s Dairy but grows increasingly uncomfortable and frustrated when Avril, who meets him at the door, presents her own set of memories and characters. Max has been dwelling on his own, almost mythologized, version of history for his whole life and has no desire to listen to competing narratives.

“When Anna’s body betrayed her and she became afraid of it and its alien possibilities, I developed, by a mysterious piece of transference, a crawling repugnance for my own flesh.”

Banville’s narrative is located in the mind and the memory, which moves freely between the past and present. Max frequently sets up a dichotomy between the mind and the body, which is associated with sensual desire and pleasure but also with impermanence, death, and decay.

“Speaking of typewriters—I did, I mentioned a typewriter a minute ago—last night in a dream, it has just come back to me, I was trying to write my will on a machine that was lacking the word I. The letter I, that is, small and large.”

The rather jerky rhythm of the prose here, with frequent narratorial interpolations (“I did, I mentioned a typewriter a minute ago” and “it has just come back to me”), foregrounds the thought processes and emotional state of the narrator. His dream of writing his will without a letter “I” can be understood as a metaphor for the narrative as a whole. Max is wholly self-absorbed and is narrating a personal, highly subjective story. Yet he has lost himself.

“I see us turn and walk away towards the gap in the dunes that led to Station Road. A corner of Chloe’s wet towel trails in the sand. I go along with my towel draped over one shoulder and my wet hair slicked down, like a Roman senator in miniature. Myles runs ahead. But who is it that lingers there on the strand in the half-light, by the darkening sea that seems to arch its back like a beast as the night fast advances from the fogged horizon? What phantom version of me is it that watches us—them—we three children—as they grow indistinct in that cinereal air and then are gone through the gap that will bring them out at the foot of Station Road.”

As he pictures himself and the twins leaving the beach, Max ponders the nature of recollection. The adult observer lurking in the shadows and looking at the three children is extraneous to the original scene and cuts a rather menacing, predatory figure.

“The boy who had remarked on her fringe—suddenly I see him, as if he were before me here, Joe somebody, a hulking, big-boned fellow with jug ears and horrent hair—also said that Chloe had green teeth. I was outraged, but he was right; there was, I saw, the next time I had the opportunity to take a close look at them, a faint tinge to the enamel of her incisors that was green indeed, but a delicate, damp, grey-green, like the damp light under trees after rain, or the dull-apple shade of the undersides of leaves reflected in still water. Apples, yes, her breath too had an appley smell. Little animals we were, sniffing at each other. I liked in particular, when in time I got a chance to savour it, the cheesy tang in the crevices of her elbows and her knees. She was not, I am compelled to admit, the most hygienic of girls, and in general she gave off, more strongly as the day progressed, a flattish, fawnish odour, like that which comes out of, which used to come out of, empty biscuit tins in shops.”

The young Max’s class insecurity is evident in his depiction of the other boy from the chalets as vulgar and clumsy and his outraged defense of Chloe, even as, at the same time, he is forced to acknowledge that there is some truth to the boy’s observations. He is torn between sexual attraction to Chloe and her mistreatment of him and others. The immediate, physical presence of Chloe at once attracts and repels him, indicative of this inner conflict and the turmoil of growing sexual awareness.

“I cannot, in short, see her. She wavers before my memory’s eye at a fixed distance, always just beyond focus, moving backward at exactly the same rate that I am moving forward. But since what I am moving forward into has begun to dwindle more and more rapidly, why can I not catch up with her? Even still I sometimes see her on the street, I mean someone who might be she, with the same domed forehead and pale hair, the same headlong yet curiously hesitant, pigeon-toed stride, but always too young, years, years too young. This is the mystery that baffled me then, and that baffles me now. How could she be with me one moment and the next not? How could she be elsewhere, absolutely? That was what I could not understand, could not be reconciled to, cannot still. Once out of my presence she should by right have become pure figment, a memory of mine, a dream of mine, but all the evidence told me that even away from me she remained solidly, stubbornly, incomprehensibly herself. And yet people do vanish. That is the greater mystery, the greatest. I could go, oh yes, at a moment’s notice I could go and be as though I had not been, except that the long habit of living indisposeth me for dying, as Doctor Browne has it.”

Max is baffled that he is unable to fully possess Chloe even in death—that despite the fact she now only exists in memory, he is still only granted fleeting and partial glimpses of her. He is baffled by the transience of living things—“How could she be with me one moment and the next not?” From one point of view, he himself is drawn to the idea of oblivion.

“Happiness was different in childhood. It was so much then a matter of accumulation, of taking things—new experiences, new emotions—and applying them like so many polished tiles to what would someday be the marvelously finished pavilion of the self.”

Max compares the novelty and freshness of experiences in childhood to adult life. The childish expectation that experiences will one day come together to form a complete, “marvelously finished,” and coherent self is ironic given the fragmented state in which the narrator currently finds himself.

“I touched a fingertip to my lips, the lips that had kissed hers, half expecting to find them changed in some infinitely subtle but momentous way. I expected everything to be changed, like the day itself, that had been somber and wet and hung with big-bellied clouds when we were going into the picture-house in what had still been afternoon and now at evening was all tawny sunlight and raked shadows, the scrub was dripping with jewels and a red sail-boat out on the bay turning its prow and setting off towards the horizon’s already dusk-blue distances.

The café. In the café. In the café we.”

After kissing Chloe, Max finds it hard to believe that there has not been some kind of change in his physical appearance to match his inner state. The weather and landscape appear to have become beautiful and idyllic in reflection of his elated state, although a few pages later, he will question this memory, pointing out that it would surely have been dark when they left the cinema. The broken syntax at the end of the passage suggests that words are inadequate to express the experience, or perhaps that adult Max breaks down at this point.

“The Baignoires are the triumphant culmination of his life’s work. In Nude in the bath, with dog, begun in 1941, a year before Marthe’s death and not completed until 1946, she lies there, pink and mauve and gold, a goddess of the floating world, attenuated, ageless, as much dead as alive, beside her on the tiles her little brown dog, her familiar, a dachshund, I think, curled watchful on its mat or on what may be a square of flaking sunlight falling from an unseen window. The narrow room that is her refuge vibrates around her, throbbing in its colours. Her feet, the left one tensed at the end of its impossibly long leg, seem to have pushed the bath out of shape and made it bulge at the left end, and beneath the bath on that side, in the same force-field, the door is pulled out of alignment too, and seems to be on the point of pouring away into the corner, not like a floor at all but a moving pool of dappled water. All moves here, moves in stillness, aqueous silence.”

The Baignoires are a series of paintings by Bonnard of his wife, Marthe, in the bath. In Bonnard’s paintings, Marthe always appears as a teenager, despite the fact that in 1941, she was already 72 years old. In the painting, the artist renders a single moment, transporting it outside of time with the effect that Marthe herself is “as much dead as alive.” The fact that the bathtub seems to swell on one side to accommodate the artist’s vision, together with the fact that it is hard to distinguish between light, liquid, and solid objects, makes it clear that the painting depicts the artist’s impression of the scene rather than an objectified external reality.

Max’s discussions of art are pertinent to understanding the narrative process of the novel as a whole. He repeatedly portrays his own memories as pictorial compositions. Like Bonnard, in recollecting Chloe, he is seeking to render and recapture the object of his desire.

“The staircase was steeper, the landing pokier, the lavatory window looked not on to the road, as I thought it should, but back across the field. I experienced a sense almost of panic as the real, the crassly complacent real, took hold of the things I thought I remembered and shook them into its own shape. Something precious was dissolving and pouring away between my fingers. Yet how easily, in the end, I let it go. The past, I mean the real past, matters less than we pretend.”

As Max revisits the Cedars, he realizes that many details of the house do not conform to his memories. His initial reaction is one of panic, but he soon decides that the actual details of the past—“the real past”—are of secondary importance.

“A thing that always struck me was the contrast between nest and egg. I mean the contingency of the former, no matter how well or even beautifully it was fashioned, and the latter’s completedness, its pristine fulness. Before its beginning an egg is an absolute end. It is the very definition if self-containment. I hated to see a broken egg, that tiny tragedy.”

Max contrasts the fulness and perfection of eggs to the contingency of nests. An egg is fully formed and self-contained, while a nest is gradually constructed, piece by piece. The egg as a symbol of new life and unhatched potential can be associated with the youthfulness and burgeoning sexuality of the three pre-adolescent children. In a certain sense, the adult Max is seeking to piece together a nest for his memories of that period, one fragment at a time.

“Her hair was pale as the sunlight on the floor at her foot…But wait, this is wrong. This cannot have been the day of the kiss. When we left the picture house it was evening, an evening after rain, and now it was the middle of the afternoon, hence that soft sunlight, that meandering breeze. And where is Myles? He was with us at the pictures, so where would he have gone, he who never left his sister’s side unless he was driven from it? Really, Madam Memory, I take back all my praise, if it is Memory herself who is at work here and not some other, more fanciful muse.”

Max realizes that his memory of going to the Strand Café with Chloe after the cinema must be fake. The limitations of memory and the ease with which objective recollection slips into fanciful invention is one of the central concerns of Banville’s novel.

“In her I had my first experience of the absolute otherness of other people. It is not too much to say—well, it is, but I shall say it anyway—that in Chloe the world was first manifest for me as an objective entity. Not my father and mother, my teachers, other children, not Connie Grace herself, no one had yet been real in the way Chloe was. And if she was real so, suddenly, was I. She was I believe the true origin in me of self-consciousness. Before there had been one thing and I was part of it, now there was me and all that was not me. But here too there was a torsion, a kink of complexity. In severing me from the world and making me thus severed, she expelled me from the sense of the immanence of all things, the all things that had included me, in which up to then I had dwelt, in more or less blissful ignorance. Before, I had been housed, now I was in the open, in the clearing, with no shelter in sight. I did not know that I would never get inside again, through that ever straitening gate.”

Max suggests that his relationship with Chloe had such a profound impact on him because it marked the passage from “the immanence of all things,” which characterizes early childhood, to a perception of “the absolute otherness of other people.” He presents this passage in terms of alienation and exile, redolent of the fall and banishment of Adam and Eve from Eden.

“In our early days together I was unwise enough to allow her to persuade me to pose for her on a few occasions; the results were shockingly raw, shockingly revealing. In those half-dozen, black and white head-and-shoulders shots she took of me—and took is the word—I seemed more starkly on show than I would have been in a full-length study and not wearing a stitch.”

The act of recording an image of someone, be it in visual art or memory, is closely associated with desire and possession in Banville’s text. Here, for once, Max finds himself on the receiving end of the representational act, and he does not like it. He feels horribly exposed (“shockingly revealing”) and as if something has been stolen from him (“took is the word”).

“Chloe. Her cruelty. The beach. The midnight swim. Her lost sandal, that night in the doorway on the dancehall. Cinderella’s shoe. All gone. All lost. It is no matter tired, tired and drunk. No matter.”

As on several other occasions in the book, the sentence structure is broken to reflect Max’s emotional distress and incoherent thought patterns. In a book with a narrator who continually seeks to separate intellect and memory from the decaying physical body, the physical effect of alcohol on the mind presents a certain irony.

“I have ever had the conviction, resistant to all rational considerations, that at some unspecified future moment the continuous rehearsal which is my life, with its so many misreadings, its slips and fluffs, will be done with and the real drama for which I have ever and with such earnestness been preparing will at last begin.”

Max reflects on how he has lived in a kind of limbo—in a state of arrested development—since the traumatic event that marked his childhood. Although he is now growing old, he feels as if life has yet to truly begin.

“No, what I am looking forward to is a moment of earthly expression. That is it, that is it exactly; I shall be expressed, totally. I shall be delivered, like a noble closing speech. I shall be, in a word, said. Has this not always been my aim, is this not, indeed, the secret aim of all of us, to be no longer flesh but transformed utterly into the gossamer of unsuffering spirit?”

Max continues to imagine making his grand entry onto the stage of life. However, he now imagines himself not as an actor but as a speech. In a bizarre reversal of the Judeo-Christian paradigm of the word-made-flesh, he imagines being transfigured into language.

“Semolina, my goodness. As we made our way through the stodge, I had a sudden image of myself as a sort of large, dark simian something slumped there at the table, or not a something but a nothing, rather, a hole in the room, a palpable absence, a darkness visible. It was very strange. I saw the scene as if from outside myself, the dining room half lit by two standard lamps, the ugly table with its whorled legs, Miss Vavasour absently at gaze and the Colonel stooped over his plate baring one side of his upper dentures as he chewed, and I saw this big dark indistinct shape, like the shape that no one at the séance sees until the daguerreotype is developed. I think I am becoming my own ghost.”

The scene at the Cedars, as the two paying guests politely and stoically struggle with the stodgy pudding Miss Vavasour has served up, is presented with wry humor bordering on caricature. Max’s sudden sense of himself as a ghost reflects his inability to truly live in the present. Max likens himself to “darkness visible,” an allusion to Milton’s description of hell in Paradise Lost.

“‘They are stopping the clocks,’ she said, the merest thread of a whisper, conspiratorial. ‘I have stopped time.’ And she nodded, a solemn, knowing nod, and smiled, too, I would swear it was a smile.”

Anna’s last words recall the novel’s central theme of time. The novel repeatedly suggests that death is the only way to escape the relentless passage of time. It is worth noting that, even at this apparently private moment between husband and wife, personal experience is given form and expression through literary allusion. “They are stopping the clocks” appears to be a reference to Auden’s “Funeral Blues.”