Commodified aura from Freddie Montgomery’s perspective in John Banville’s The Book of Evidence

This essay explores how John Banville’s The Book of Evidence presents its narrator, Freddie Montgomery, as a monstrous abstraction of projective drives that mechanized visual experience and altered conditions for aesthetic authenticity, what Walter Benjamin dubbed aura, while accommodating capitalist development. Erwin Panofsky’s argument that linear perspective developed as a symbolic form through which Europeans learned to understand visual experience provides the framework for examining how Freddie attempts to impose his own will onto a world by assimilating it into his own gaze, even as he denies possessing the agency necessary for such willful acts. After explicating how the symbolic form through which Freddie perceives precludes his ability to recognize life outside himself and undermines his pursuit of mastery, I show how Immanuel Kant provides the aesthetic framework through which to understand why Freddie blames his faulty imagination for allowing him to murder a maid while stealing a painting. The absence of authenticity in Freddie’s world proves symptomatic of the postmodern age, yet, as I argue, aura’s transformation from a cultic to a commodified quality leaves open the possibility for ekphrastic art such as Banville’s novel to accommodate a form of reflective judgment that can recognize other perspectives

Aesthetics · Art · Commodification · Epistemology · Freudian slip · Literature · Postmodernism · Psychoanalysis · The Symbolic · Visual arts · Contemporary Literature and Criticism · Philosophy · Psychology