Possibility of Self-Representation: the Assimilation of Paul de Man’s Theories in John Banville’s Shroud

John Banville's Shroud (2002) can be read as an example of “historiographic metafiction” in which he bases his protagonist, Axel Vander, on the life of Paul de Man, the deconstructionist literary theorist, whose early writings for a proNazi newspaper were posthumously uncovered by Ortwin de Graef. This first person account takes the form of an autobiographical confession while simultaneously drawing on Paul de Man's own deconstructionist theories regarding the question of referentiality and the problem of (self-)representation insofar as it is mediated by language. In addition, according to de Man, the discourse of autobiography entails the process of “self-restoration” whereby the I persona confers upon him/herself a mask through narration in an attempt to hide one's lack of authentic self. However, the problem arises when language becomes the medium of such representation (DE MAN, 1979). Far from mirroring the “true” self, language, as a constructing agent, becomes the very means of mask-making, deterring forever the process of an authentic representation. This, in turn, produces an “uncomfortable” feeling of undecidability with regards to the narrator's notion of self. The aim of this essay is to read Banville's Shroud along with de Man's idea of “autobiography as de-facement” and show how language comes to posit itself as the agent that destabilizes the very discourse it aims to restore, that is, the author's sense of coherent self. After demonstrating how the discourse of autobiography entails a crisis of authorship and representation for the narrator, I will, however, argue that Axel comes across an irreducible kernel which he identifies as an “enduring core” which somehow remains outside what de Man calls “a linguistic predicament”, a kernel embodied by the voice as a dimension of Jacques Lacan’s category of the Real.