“High Stakes” in the Symbolic Order: John Banville’s Love in the Wars Read through Jean Baudrillard

Abstract

John Banville’s shrouded fictional territory suggests a Nietzschean world in which the notions of truth and reality are questioned and in the center of which humanity might find “an infinite nothing.” From Nietzsche’s bleak vision, the mind readily moves to Jean Baudrillard’s envisioned universe – even bleaker, perhaps – in which simulation is a “dominant mode of perception.” Baudrillard’s ideas are in dialogue with John Banville’s textual explorations of a territory of radical uncertainty. Elements of what can be seen as Baudrillardean third-order simulation are readily discernible in Banville’s late work, but in his play Love in the Wars, at focus in this article, it is Baudrillard’s notion of a pre-Renaissance symbolic order – an age of “the rule,” not of “the roll of the dice” – that has proved a superior analytical tool.