John Banville

1. John Banville • Kepler

2. John Banville

3. Johannes Kepler 1571-1630

4. Tycho Brahe 1549-1601

5. John Banville • Introduction • The Irish novelist John Banville believes that contemporary writers need to seek "an art which knows that truth is arbitrary, that reality is multifarious, that language is not a clear lens" ("A Talk" 17, Irish University Review, 11.1 (1981: (5-12). • At first glance, this artistic mission would seem to have little in common with the traditional task of science, but Banville's description provides a rather apt description of the state of physics after relativity and quantum mechanics.

6. John Banville • Indeed, Banville himself, in essays like "Physics and Fiction: Order from Chaos," indicates his recognition of important parallels between science and literature. (New York Times Book Review, April 21, 1985). • In particular, he suggests that both disciplines are centrally involved with trying to give a coherent shape to a chaotic reality. • And he suggests that postmodernist fiction is much like post-Einsteinian physics in that both involve a disavowal of the traditional past and a search for new representations of reality that involve an acceptance of uncertainty:

7. John Banville • As science moves away from the search for blank certainties, it takes on more and more the character of poetic metaphor, and since fiction is moving, however sluggishly, in the same direction, perhaps a certain seepage between the two streams is inevitable. • Practicing what he preaches, Banville deals quite extensively with science in his fiction. • His biographical novels Doctor Copernicus and Kepler recount the lives of two of the most important figures in the early history of modern science.

8. John Banville • Using the lives of Kepler and Copernicus as materia poetica would thus seem to represent an especially simple and direct example of the "seepage" between literature and science predicted by Banville, though the emphasis that he places on style and form in "Physics and Fiction" suggests that he has in mind something that goes far beyond simply writing fictions about science or scientists. • In fact, the subtle fictions of Banville tend to be anything but simple and direct.

9. John Banville • Doctor Copernicus and Kepler enact extremely interesting dialogues between science and literature, but those dialogues go far beyond the mere use of scientific history as a basis for fiction.

10. John Banville • In those books Banville explores complex parallels between science and literature as ways of exploring and representing reality. • He uses the parallels to make significant statements about modern intellectual history and about the ways different disciplines interact in making that history. • Banville's specific focus on Copernicus and Kepler also dramatizes the conflict between the new scientific worldview foreshadowed by those thinkers and the religious worldview with which science would come to struggle for cultural hegemony.

11. John Banville • Both Doctor Copernicus and Kepler thus ultimately gain their power not from the depictions of the lives of their protagonists but from their enactment of three-way confrontations among science, literature, and religion as frameworks within which to view the world. • Banville's books vividly convey the sense of cultural crisis produced by those confrontations among powerful discourses of authority in the late Renaissance. • At the same time, they also suggest that the same confrontations remain central to our modem cultural climate.

12. John Banville • At first glance, quasi-historical novels like Doctor Copernicus and Keplerrepresent a significant departure from Banville's earlier experimental and openly metafictional work. Long Lankin, Nightspaw, Birchwood) • Highly allusive and self-conscious works like Birchwood and Nightspawn clearly participate in the experimental literary tradition of Banville's Irish predecessors Joyce, Beckett, and O'Brien, and the extreme disavowal of mimetic realism in Banville's early novels it would seem a far cry from the Copernicus and Kepler books, which are ostensibly rooted in reality, however, they are not.

13. John Banville • Banville's fictionalized biographies of Copernicus and Kepler, are far remove from more conventional examples of historical fiction. • Even if they accord with accepted historical accounts on major points, and they surround the lives of their protagonists with period details that in the main seem reasonably authentic. • In both Doctor Copernicus and Kepler, Banville employs a number of ostentatious literary devices that suggest that those books are anything but straightforward historical novels.

14. John Banville • The real goal of the book is not so much to tell the story of the life of Copernicus as to explore Copernicus's "epistemological predicament," a predicament with great significance for our own contemporary world. • In the case of Kepler, thisis primarily distinguished not by the accuracy of its account of Kepler's life but by Banville's artistic achievement in a producing an extraordinarily complex compositional text interwoven with Kepler’s scientific predicaments.

15. John Banville • Kepler, like Doctor Copernicus, is an extremely self-conscious literary artifact whose subject goes far beyond the biography of its ostensible protagonist. • As with the dialogue of anachronistic quotations in its predecessor, Kepler includes at least one key point at which the pretense of biographical authenticity unravels, and the book openly proclaims its status as a work of fiction. • Late in the text the embattled and excommunicated protagonist continues to work at Ulm while all around him Europe is in the chaotic throes of the Thirty Years War (1618-1648).

16. John Banville • He is, however, given a chance to escape to relative safety when "two kinsmen of Tycho Brahe" offer to take him with them to England (187). • That episode seems innocent enough (especially as Kepler declines the offer) except that the two emissaries happen to be named Holger Rosenkrands and Axel Gyldenstjern. • Banville's modified spellings hardly disguise the link to Hamlet, and the result provides an incongruous moment of intertextual comedy during what is a decidedly serious moment in Kepler's life.

17. John Banville • Any readers who might be caught up in the drama of Kepler's predicament are thus suddenly and forcefully reminded in a moment of Brechtian alienation that they are reading a work of fiction. • Moreover, creative readers can find fertile territory in this seemingly gratuitous allusion.

18. John Banville • Banville's allusion to Shakespeare provides a reminder of contemporary interactions between Renaissance literature and the scientific work of figures like Copernicus and Kepler. • Really creative readers might even recall here Stoppard's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, especially because Banville's book participates in the same dialogue between modernity and the Renaissance that Stoppard invokes by rewriting Shakespeare. • Banville plays more subtle tricks. As with Copernicus, he provides intimate information about the life and thoughts of Kepler that no biographer would be likely to know, or to report even if he did know.

19. John Banville • Those details are related not in the linear form usually associated with biography, but through a complex, postmodernist narrative structure. • Both Doctor Copernicus and Kepler move freely back and forth in time, producing narratives that the reader must gradually re-assemble to place events in chronological order. • That discontinuous mode of narration calls attention not only to the literariness of Banville's project, but to its postmodernity, contributing significantly to the dialogue between Renaissance and modernist worldviews in both books.

20. John Banville • By employing in "historical" novels a complex chronotopic structure of the kind typically associated with the postmodernist novel, Doctor Copernicus and Kepler open a dialogue between history and postmodernist fiction in addition to the obvious dialogues between literature and science and between the sixteenth and twentieth centuries. • Moreover, it is clear that the usual linear chronology of biography and history is closely connected with the Newtonian view of the universe, while the nonlinear chronology of postmodernist fiction is more congruent with the new universe of Einstein and Heisenberg.

21. John Banville • The chronotopic structure of Banville's books reflects the worldview of modem physics even as it tells the story of two important figures who laid the groundwork for Newtonian physics. • As a result, the books open dialogues between the ideologies of two fundamentally different physical systems. • The formal structure of Kepler produces particularly rich interactions between science and literature. • Part IV of the book is a sequence of letters from Kepler to various personages, somewhat in the style of the eighteenth-century epistolary novel.

22. John Banville • In one of the letters, Kepler describes his plans to write a book on "world harmony." • He acknowledges that he does not know what the book will contain but argues that form is, in any case, more important than content: Since, as I believe, the mind from the first contains within it the basic & essential forms of reality, it is not surprising that, before I have any clear knowledge of what the contents will be, I have already conceived the form of the projected book. It is ever thus with me: in the beginning is the shape! (148).

23. John Banville • This privileging of form over content seems more literary than scientific, especially when Kepler goes on to describe the form of his anticipated book--it is to contain five parts, with the number of chapters in each part based upon the properties of the five regular solids, with the initials of the chapters composing acrostics that spell out the names of famous men. • But Banville's depiction of Kepler is here historically accurate. For the historical Kepler, form and content were not really separable.

24. John Banville • As Kuhn notes, Kepler "was a mathematical Neoplatonist or Neopythagorean who believed that all of nature exemplified simple mathematical regularities which it was the scientists' task to discover" (217). • His emphasis on form was thus actually mimetic, corresponding to his firm faith in the formal regularity of nature.

25. John Banville • Among other things, Kepler's Neoplatonism included mystical elements that serve as reminders that early scientists like Copernicus and Kepler were still heavily influenced by religious thinking. • In the case of the plan for Kepler's book, the parallel to literature is obvious as well; Banville himself places a great deal of emphasis on form, explaining in an interview that, as opposed to content, "I consider form far more important. • “Content, I would maintain, is an aspect of form, no more" (Imhof, "Interview" 5). Banville's Kepler goes on in his letters to suggest that his book will include an element of almost Joycean wordplay.

26. John Banville • Also, as a form of decoration, and to pay my due respects, I intend that the initials of the chapters shall spell out acrostically the names of certain famous men" (148). • But it is, in fact, the enlarged first letters of the sections of Banville's book that spell out the names of Johannes Kepler, Tycho Brahe, Galileo Galileus, and Isaac Newton. • *With his typical metafictional gamesmanship, Banville makes clear the link between his Kepler's emphasis on form and Banville's own by constructing his book according to the structure envisioned here by Kepler.

27. John Banville • Also, as a form of decoration, and to pay my due Kepler is divided into five parts, with the number of chapters in each part according precisely with the "signifying quantities (i.e. the number of plane surfaces) of the five Platonic solids. • Thus, the sections of the book have 6, 4, 12, 20, and 8 chapters respectively, corresponding to the number of plane surfaces on a hexahedron, tetrahedron, dodecahedron, icosahedron, and octahedron, in the order specified by Kepler to account for the spacing between the orbits of the six planets that were then known.

28. John Banville • Hexahedron: a solid figure that has six faces

29. John Banville • The hexahedron is bounded by six squares. The hexahedron, standing firmly on its base, corresponds to the stable earth.

30. John Banville • Tetrahedron: a solid figure that has four faces

31. John Banville • The tetrahedron is bounded by four equilateral triangles. It has the smallest volume for its surface and represents the property of dryness. It corresponds to fire.

32. John Banville • Dodecahedron : a solid figure that has 12 equal pentagonal faces meeting in threes at 20 vertices

33. John Banville • The dodecahedron is bounded by twelve equilateral pentagons. It corresponds to the universe because the zodiac has twelve signs corresponding to the twelve faces of the dodecahedron.

34. John Banville • Icosahedron: a solid figure having 20 sides or faces

35. John Banville • The icosahedron is bounded by twenty equilateral triangles. It has the largest volume for its surface area and represents the property of wetness. The icosahedron corresponds to water.

36. John Banville • Octahedron: a three dimensional figure that has eight faces

37. John Banville • The octahedron is bounded by eight equilateral triangles. It rotates freely when held by two opposite vertices and corresponds to air.

38. John Banville • The Platonic Solids • Platonic solids are perfectly regular solids with the following conditions: all sides are equal and all angles are the same and all faces are identical. • In each corner of such a solid the same number of surfaces collide. • Only five Platonic solids exist: tetrahedron, hexahedron, octahedron, dodecahedron and icosahedron.

39. John Banville • The solids and their regularities were discovered by the Pythagoreans and were called originally Pythagorean solids. • The Greek philosopher Plato described the solids in detail later in his book "Timaeus" and assigned the items to the Platonic conception of the world, hence today they are well-known under the name "Platonic Solids."

40. John Banville • Banville does not stop here. Banville presents a detailed discussion of the way the narrative movement of Kepler mimics aspects of Kepler's theories, as when the back-and-forth temporal progression enacts the orbits of the planets (John Banville 131-38). • As Banville notes in his interview with, each section starts at a particular point in time and then describes a loop that brings the narrative back to a point in time close to the beginning, but not exactly, as Kepler's orbits were elliptical, not circular.

41. John Banville • One might fairly ask whether the elaborate formal structure of Kepler really accomplishes anything or whether it is merely empty formalism. • But Banville's own emphasis on the importance of form suggests that there is no such thing as empty formalism.

42. John Banville • The formal structure of Kepler contributes in many ways to the thematic concerns of the book. • For one thing, Banville's use of Kepler's theories as a formal model already constitutes a particularly ingenious attempt to make use of scientific principles in literature and suggests new directions in which such attempts might move. • If nothing else, his formal use of Kepler serves as a reminder that science and literature are not necessarily separate noncommunicating realms.

43. John Banville • But Banville's use of Kepler as a formal model is especially significant because form itself was so important in Kepler's scientific work, suggesting clear parallels between the way Kepler went about his scientific work and the way Banville goes about writing literature. • Kepler, with his rather mystical approach to science, may appear to be a special case of the importance of "formalism" to science, but in fact scientific discoveries always have a strong formal element. • Scientists go about their work with certain preconceived expectations, and those expectations strongly condition the results obtained by scientific inquiry.

44. John Banville • Modern science offers particularly obvious examples of this phenomenon: Bohr's principle of complementarity, or wave particle duality. • If one designs an experiment to demonstrate that subatomic particles are in fact particles, then one will find particles--but one will be unable to see waves at all. • And if one designs an experiment to demonstrate that the so called "particles" are in fact waves, then one will find waves, but at the expense of no longer being able to find particles.

45. John Banville • According to Kuhn's notion of scientific paradigms, the idea that findings of scientists are strongly conditioned by their expectations goes far beyond specific phenomena and is fundamental to the nature of science as a discipline. • What Kuhn, in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, calls "normal" science (the vast majority of scientific activity) proceeds according to certain widely accepted "paradigms" that largely define not only the kinds of problems that science will seek to solve but the kinds of solutions that it will find to those problems.

46. John Banville • Gradually, anomalous observations will accumulate until a crisis occurs, leading to a "revolution" in science that challenges the existing paradigms, only to replace them with new ones after a fairly rapid period of transition. • Kuhn's own acknowledgment of the similarity between his model of scientific history and commonly accepted models of literary history indicates that science and literature may have more in common than is generally recognized.

47. John Banville • Kuhn, who places so much emphasis on Copernicus as a figure of scientific revolution, stresses that it was Kepler who put the system of Copernicus into the form that made it the irresistible force for change that it would become. • One of the unusual aspects of Kuhn's model of the history of Renaissance science is his view of Kepler as a far more important figure than Galileo.

48. John Banville • After the work of Kepler, Kuhn argues, the enemies (religious and otherwise) of the Copernican system had already been defeated, so that Galileo's experimental confirmation of the heliocentric solar system "contributed primarily to a mopping-up operation, conducted after the victory was clearly in sight" (Copernican 220). • Given Banville's suggestion in both Doctor Copernicus and Kepler that language and representation are central to both literature and science, perhaps it is not surprising that the histories of language, science, and literature should be so closely parallel.

49. John Banville • That both literature and science underwent fundamental transformations at very much the same time in both the Renaissance and in the first part of our own century would seem one of the best arguments that the two fields are in some way related. • In both cases, the two disciplines were simultaneously involved in networks of social, political, and intellectual change, though the networks were far more complex than any direct cause and effect relationship (in either direction) between science and literature.

50. John Banville • Banville has expressed the opinion that "[m]odernism has run its course. So, for that matter, has post-modernism.“ • But he does not feel that literature itself is exhausted. Despite his focus on crisis, Banville's vision is ultimately quite positive; he believes that literature holds great promise for finding new ways productively to engage reality as we move into the future. • He goes on to express his hope "that we are on the threshold of a new ism, a new synthesis" ("A Talk" 17).