Overlooked and Better for It

Looking Twice at a Woman in John Banville’s Ancient Light

Abstract

John Banville established the narrative layout of a self-centred man rendering foolhardily self-assured and incomplete narrative representations of women as his preferred thought experiment early in his career. Nevertheless, he evinces an awareness of the history of repressive representations of women, and while he regularly falls into the trap of wielding them to achieve his texts’ primary goals, and more often than not renders them secondary and peripheral, he does so in a way that announces limitation and failure. Billie Stryker, a female detective encountered as a minor character in his 2012 novel Ancient Light is not the object of the narrator Alexander Cleave’s curiosity because her appearance does not inspire the epistemophilic interest, or erotically invested gaze, he and the majority of Banville’s narrators cast on other women. She is therefore freer than most of Banville’s women, and she looms larger than those who are confined to objects of desire. Cleave’s relationship with her borders on what he himself calls “inattention.” She passes through the primary narrator’s unusually amplified disregard, and is therefore an object of curiosity to a reader, who is effectively instructed to look at her again. This article performs that second reading of a character that looms larger than most of Banville’s women, precisely as a result of being less looked at and less desired than those whose role is more curtailed in Banville’s work.