چکیده:
This study aimed at exploring the ontological indeterminacies of The Sea (2005), a novel by John Banville using the postmodern catena put forth by Ihab Hassan. Hassan’s catalogue of the features of postmodern fiction includes indeterminacy, fragmentation, decanonization, selflessness, depthlessness, the unpresentable/ unrepresentable, irony, hybridization, carnivalization, performance, participation, constructionism, and immanence. In the present study, the use of each of these traits was traced in the novel and the appropriateness of these techniques with regard to the world of the novel was studied. Max Morden, the protagonist, desperately excavates his memories in search of a meaning for life, but in vain. The postmodern features incorporated in the narrative of the novel help uncover the inconsistencies of the subject’s mind when faced with an indeterminate world.
خلاصه ماشینی:
Immanent Indeterminacy: Tracing Postmodernity in John Banville’s Neo-Realist Novel The Sea1 Mahya Haji Gholam2, Mona Hoorvash3 Received: 22/07/2018 Accepted: 24/01/2019 Abstract This study aimed at exploring the ontological indeterminacies of The Sea (2005), a novel by John Banville using the postmodern catena put forth by Ihab Hassan.
Hassan’s catalogue of the features of postmodern fiction includes indeterminacy, fragmentation, decanonization, selflessness, depthlessness, the unpresentable/ unrepresentable, irony, hybridization, carnivalization, performance, participation, constructionism, and immanence.
The present study sought to place John Banville’s neo-realist novel The Sea within the current debates over the lingering of postmodernism in contemporary fiction.
The current article applied Hassan’s (1986) catena to study the resurgence of postmodernist attitudes when fiction is dealing with the desperate attempts of human mind in search of a criterion to make sense of the world in an otherwise realist novel.
However, just before the nurse come to him to tell the sad news, Max remembers himself standing before the sea, watching the repetitive movements of the waves and describes the moment as nothing, “a momentous nothing, just another of the great world's shrugs of indifference” (Banville, 2005, chapter 2, para.
Moreover, when Myles and Chloe go far away into the sea and at last disappear, Max witnessing the incident says: “then nothing, the indifferent world closing” (Banville, 2005, chapter 2, para.
Banville (2005) seems to reject the authority of the language of media as a grand narrative of the contemporary world, so that, between the lines of the novel, one can detect the ironic approach that Max adopts in referring to media.