Subjectivity as Espionage: The Dark Legacy of Modernism in John Banville's The Untouchable

Abstract

John Banville's The Untouchable functions as a critique of subjectivity after modernism, specifically theories of the decentred subject. The narrator of the book, Victor Maskell, is a fictionalized version of English art historian and Soviet spy Anthony Blunt, and through this fictional memoir, Banville offers a portrait of the self with a terrible absence at its centre, implicating modernism's suspicion that the subject, or cogito, is a discursive fiction as the source of Maskell's treason and nihilism. At the heart of Maskell's identity is the death drive, the ‘blind automatism of repetition beyond pleasure seeking’ (in Slavoj Zizek's terms) that confounds the subject such as Maskell, in search of a ‘true self’, and makes life an absurd black comedy. Through his original narrator, who represents a fiction of a fiction of a fiction – Maskell/Blunt/cogito – Banville suggests that the only authentic existence may indeed lie in deception.