Coda: Epistemology and Ontology as Pas de Deux in John Banville’s The Singularities
摘要
The Singularities (2022) is said to be Banville’s last non-crime work, and here we relate it to some of the major themes and phenomena discovered in the analyses of the crime fiction works. The overlapping binary of epistemology and ontology is in this novel brought to the fore. The plot almost dissolves—or is strongly downplayed in comparison to the crime works—even though there are snippets remaining so that the novel can be read, but everything appears as episodic and events have the tendency to remain almost isolated monads floating as specks of dust in this fictional ontology. This is done quite deliberately in order to display narrativity as an act of creative imagination in which characters and events are held together by narratological forces, much in the same way as physical reality is held up by cosmic forces no one has really ever seen. The effect of The Singularities in relation to the crime works is that the plot-driven aspects are revealed to be very strongly tied to epistemology, which confirms that epistemological Desire is a relevant concept when trying to pin down how Blackville has structured the fictional world of crime.