My Own Ghost

Adam Phillips

• The Sea by John Banville
  Picador, 264 pp, £16.99, June 2005, ISBN 0 330 48328 5

‘Just as the pearl is the oyster’s affliction,’ Flaubert wrote in a letter in 1852, ‘so style is perhaps the discharge from a deeper wound.’ It is an arresting image, not because it was news then that the artist was in some way a wounded soul – someone whose suffering was the source and inspiration of his art – but because we would expect the wound to surface in the writing in the form of ideas or preoccupations rather than as sentence structure or rhythm or verbal mannerism. But even if we agree that the sounds of a novelist’s sentences are soundings of his condition, it is difficult to spell out the connections between them: Flaubert isn’t sure whether a style is itself an affliction, or merely the discharge that comes from one. He wants us to believe, as a man of his times, that beautiful things come from terrible things, and that beautiful things are themselves terrible, that writing is the disguised autobiography of the afflicted soul, and that unredeemed nature is precisely this: a producer of styles and pearls and discharges, and indeed of sentences about what nature is like.