ABSTRACT
This chapter will focus on the intertextual link between Stevens's “Notes Towards a Supreme Fiction” and John Banville's scientific tetralogy, arguing that the poem's central search for order as cognitive and aesthetic principle functions as the motor behind Banville's treatment of scientific breakthrough and discovery. The chapter demonstrates how Stevens's dialectic between destruction and recreation raises important questions about perception and knowledge, which are given suitable elaboration in Banville's presentation of scientists and mathematicians, and overall dramatization of complex intellectual figures working at the boundaries of what can be imagined and articulated in language.
