The past beats inside me like a second heart.
— The Sea, John Banville
I don’t remember where my interest in John Banville’s The Sea comes from. Considering I’ve never heard of John Banville before reading this book, it could be one of those titles that someone somewhere has passingly mentioned and I’ve felt intrigued enough to take a note before it vanished from my mind. But it didn’t take too many pages for The Sea to conquer me, so I guess John Banville would fit nicely into that particular shelf of mine where I place contemporary literature next to classics with no shame whatsoever.
Let me clear the air first. Even though I find it rather peculiar that Banville maintains to be primarily influenced by W. B. Yeats and Henry James when The Sea shows obvious traces of Marcel Proust, I didn’t start what I intend to be a journey through this writer’s oeuvre from this book because of Proust. When I picked The Sea up, it had been months since I made the aforementioned note, so I had no plan nor specific purpose behind my choice either.
After a few pages I felt greatly annoyed by Max Morden, the narrator. It’s been a while since I’ve come across a character so self-aware, arrogant, and petulant. But then it started to make sense. The disparaging comments he has for almost everyone around him serve more as the walls of his internal fortress, the barriers he struggles to overcome in order to reconcile with the past he’s searching for the present to mean something. This becomes particularly explicit when it comes to his relationship with his wife and his daughter. The deeper and harsher the contempt, the more his true feelings for them are calling for him to embrace the here and now.
However, how much can we trust Morden? He’s basing the account of his experiences on the power of his memory, but he acknowledges its limits and more than once he seems uncertain about his telling. One could say that this is how memory works in general, anyway. After all, Morden’s age at the time of his recollection could be the source behind black spots, incoherence, and the overall weakening of his mind. Yet he knows when he’s wrong, he knows when he’s adding too much or leaving out too many details.
During a delightful interview, Banville explained that were he to write his own autobiography he wouldn’t be factual, but it would be true. I don’t know about his other works, but I think this relation between facts and truth marvellously applies to The Sea. Everything Morden tells us may not correspond to actual events in his past, but this doesn’t make them any less true. Truth here is the inevitably relative positioning of a single point of view on a carefully selected set of memories. These memories are true as long as Morden believes them to be so and, more importantly, as long as in them he finds what he’s looking for. He’s not even trying that hard to convince us of their objective truth, nor is he bending the truth a little for pleasure. True for Morden is the act of exposing himself, the opening of private doors to let us in and see for ourselves how meaningful intimacy can be. And nothing is truer than intimacy.
Despite his untrustworthiness, Morden is alone and only his memories seem to keep him company now. Whenever he criticises someone or misremember a specific place or moment in time, we know he’s losing something precious and that this will keep him further away from the reconciliation he’s after. How we deal with our own past is never a simple operation of retelling. The audience doesn’t matter either. Some past is meant to be forgotten, other is here to stay. Sometimes we choose what we can let go, others we are stuck with our remembrances. The truth is that looking forward always implies looking back.
Yet for all that, I cannot rid myself of the conviction that we missed something, that I missed something, only I do not know what it might have been.
— The Sea, John Banville