ABSTRACT
This chapter shifts the focus from Banville's scientists to consider Banville's treatment of art in the novel The Blue Guitar as a negative example of the destructive tendency toward solipsism. By juxtaposing Stevens’ pragmatic conception of the boundaries of political art in “The Man with the Blue Guitar” with Banville's narcissistic narrator in The Blue Guitar, a fuller picture of imaginative order in both novelist and poet emerges, which extends the previous chapter's consideration of the failure of language and conceptuality to bridge the divide between appearance and reality, thereby questioning the limits of artistic order and the potentialities of the artist's chosen form.
