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John Banville's fiction, full as it is of allusions to literature, art, and science, is one of the supreme examples of intertextuality and intermediality in contemporary fiction. Whereas his acclaimed tetralogy (Dr. Copernicus [1976], Kepler [1981], The Newton Letter [1982], and Mephisto [1986]) explores the connections between literature and science, Banville's trilogy (The Book of Evidence [1989], Ghosts [1993], and Athena [1995]) turns science to art, which is also featured as a subtext in his former novels and now takes on a prominent function as a frame of reference, a shift from worldpictures to 'pictureworlds' (Berensmeyer, 237), so to speak. (1) Although intertextuality and intermediality alone do not suffice to make a text postmodern, Banville's trilogy undeniably reveals an explicit awareness of postmodernist and post-structuralist theory that is sometimes displayed so ostentatiously that the narrator of the three novels, Freddie Montgomery, can be read as a caricature of the postmodern storyteller who despairs at his paradoxical endeavor to represent in an age that has challenged the very notion of (see, for instance, Ghosts 26.). (2) Questions of or epistemology indeed surface most prominently in Banville's novels. Plot and character are often said to be less important than ideas, (3) such as the function of imagination as an agent of knowledge and (McMinn, Supreme Fictions 2), the relationship between meaning and significance, (4) or the problematic difference between knowing and understanding. (5) These issues also surface in the trilogy: a historical approach to the novels could, for example, unearth the fact that the representational strategies that the narrator of the three novels uses to represent paintings and women reiterate an aesthetic shift mimesis to poiesis that took place between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries. (6) My major concern, however, is not so much the various aesthetic programs to which Banville frequently alludes, but the process of their fictionalization. In other words, I am interested in how the three novels re(-)present representational strategies, aesthetic positions towards representation, or ideological positions that govern both perception and representation. What, in turn, does this playful handling of aesthetic and epistemological theories imply for the status of itself?. To approach these meta-textual questions, I will focus on one particular example that has so far been widely neglected in Banville criticism: the function of ekphrasis for the of women in the trilogy. Most of Banville's male narrators express a striking obsession with women, but critics have hardly assessed the of women in Banville's novels, particularly the framework in which this is embedded. (7) A similar desideratum can be observed in relation to the intermedial quality of Banville's novels, for although many critics do point at the pervasive allusions to visual art, they scarcely endeavor to go beyond an identification of possible points of reference. In order to assess the complex interplay between word and image in Banville's intermedial novels on a metatextual level, ekphrasis can serve as a useful critical tool. Originally describing a rhetorical figure of vivid depiction, the term has come to denote a of a visual representation including literary and non-literary writing on art (more recently even art criticism) as verbal representations, and a wide range of real or imaginary visual objects as visual representations. (8) Ekphrasis features as a dominant technique for the of women in John Banville's trilogy, appearing in several different guises. On the one hand, it is used in a traditional way in descriptions of paintings. Apart this reproductive mode, ekphrasis is also productively employed whenever the narrator attempts to verbally represent his mental visualizations of women by alluding to paintings or to art in general, in order to bring these women to life, as it were. …
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