LAUSR

This essay examines how Theodor Adorno's criteria for aesthetic redemption provide the organizing principle within John Banville's Athena. By examining aesthetic theories by Sventlana Alpers, Ernst Gombrich, and Adorno himself as they appear within the narrator's descriptions of northern European seventeenth-century paintings, the author illustrates how Banville's novel not only reflects debates about whether seventeenth-century art proves descriptive or narrative but also compels the Adornian reflective process that attends to the nonidentity between one's own categories and the material before one. That process turns readers’ attention back to Banville's confessional narrative, which develops through vivid depictions of the narrator's meandering quest to atone for a murder committed in this trilogy's first novel. By undermining conventions for the confessional format, Banville's novel engages readers in reflection on the dissonance within the novel and provides a portrait of the conditions of contemporary subjectivity that carries guilt for historical suffering yet still aspires toward redemption.