The aim of this lecture is to approach the novels by Irish writer John Banville, Benjamin Black and several other authorial impersonations from the perspective of notions such as “authorial image” and “authorial posture”, as they have been defined by theorists Jerôme Meizoz and Dominique Maingueneau. These concepts will be complemented by Gérad Genette’s distinctions between a peritext and an epitext, as this narratologist defined “thresholds of interpretation”. Using this theoretical framework, my proposal will include a division of Banville’s fiction writing into three main periods, although this paper will particularly focus on the third one, which comprises novels published from 2014 to 2022. It is my contention that Banville’s deliberate adoption of a complex strategy of authorial multiplicities has gone through different phases: it initially contributed to the articulation of his “posture” as an autoritas; then to a later distancing from (or unfolding of) such autoritas posture which made room for the embodiment of the dark twin motif; and, finally, a way to materialise the theme of alterity (or alterities) that haunts his fiction, and that has also gone beyond the borderline of his narrative world and into an extratextual territory. My reading implies a conception of the literary communication circuit as a multi-layered system that finds one of its most transgressive aspects in the unsettling of the frontiers between intra and extratextual realities.
