Reviving the House of Fiction: John Banville’s Birchwood

This paper examines the limits of postmodernist techniques and forms through a study of John Banville’s Birchwood (1973), a novel which can be said to overtly question the ‘tools’ a writer/artist has at his disposal to create meaning. Ostensibly about a family saga, the text is really an examination of how art can, and must, be sustained in the face of a dissolution of meaning embodied by the physical decay of Birchwood itself. Chronicling the passing of the era of the big house and yet choosing to remain within the crumbling remains is a clear indication of the artist’s commitment to creating fiction. Birchwood can be considered the first novel in Banville’s oeuvre in which such a position is clearly articulated. In the novel, Banville’s conscious subversion of modernist forms and devices, In addition to other tenets of Enlightenment thought and rationality, puts the limelight on the postmodern shift to ontological concerns and issues and is, as a consequence, a considered study of the act and possibility of writing in the face of such obstacles. The novel’s interrogation of the limits of metafiction and self-reflexivity, for example, and its acknowledgment of the constraints under which they are employed, paves a different way for an artist struggling to create coherence in the contemporary world.