Specters of Art: Hauntology and Limitrophy in John Banville's Frames Trilogy

Sammanfattning: John Banville’s Frames Trilogy, comprising the novels The Book of Evidence (1989), Ghosts (1993) and Athena (1995), presents an account of the ghosts existent in both the reality and art surrounding one’s life. In an intriguing first-person narration, Freddie Montgomery, the protagonist in all the novels, describes spectral apparitions in works of art and is haunted by his violent, ghostly past. The inextricable relation between reality and art, as studied previously, for instance, by Eoghan Smith (2018) and John Kenny (2009), is revealed throughout the novels, yet here I attempt to unlock the trilogy from an alternative, hauntological perspective in connection to these two realms. As an approach invented by Jacques Derrida in his influential Specters of Marx (1994), hauntology will be used as a theoretical framework to scrutinize the ghosts that appear to Montgomery in each novel and, unlike previous criticism on the novels, I claim that the ghosts determine the earlier studied oscillation between the protagonist’s reality and art, while Derrida’s concept of limitrophy coined in The Animal that Therefore I Am (2008) will be used to name and study this oscillation in connection to the ghosts in the narrator’s life. Whereas in scholarly work on the trilogy great emphasis has been placed on Montgomery’s imagination, I intend for it to occupy a secondary position in this essay, as merely a creative tool for the protagonist via which the ghost-generated limitrophy is illuminated. Unlike previous research on the trilogy, this study is a hauntology based one and will thus focus on the hauntological analysis of passages from the novels involving the appearance and specific functions of ghosts as spectral apparitions in Montgomery’s life by claiming that they determine the oscillation between reality and art for the narrator. I will thereby perform a hauntological reading where the functions of the ghosts will be analysed in each novel and I will thus illuminate details about the ghosts generating the aforementioned limitrophy in connection to Montgomery’s violent past and determine what these ghosts finally amount to for the narrator.  Key words: Ghosts; Hauntology; Limitrophy; Reality; Art; Banville.