LIDIA VIANU

The Desperado Age

British Literature at the Start of the Third Millennium

II/11. JULIAN BARNES (1946)

● By stating that the novelist’s job is ‘to explore all the available points of view,’ Julian Barnes places himself inside the wave of revolt against the stream of consciousness. He chooses to return to the pleasures of a well-told story, restoring plot, and a sophisticated sense of chronology to the novel. He does so while claiming he does not belong to any particular trend, which places him in the Desperado age, as his own trend.

● To prove that the story is a sine qua non, Barnes has written three thrillers under the pseudonym Dan Kavanagh. He claims those are books of atmosphere more than action, but they would not be thrillers if nothing happened, so we might safely conclude that Virginia Woolf would be horrified at this. The point that Barnes is the first wave of dissenters against experimentalism is proved again.

● Barnes develops a religion of the novel, which must tell ‘the most truth about life.’ He admits he loves words, too, but not to the point of using his plot as an etymological adventure, or a tortuous observation of the self. He tries his hand at all these, psychology is important, yet not essential, witty words are indispensable to his basic irony, but the novel is a story before everything else. And this story which is the novel will ‘outlast even God,’ however many changes it may undergo.

● Hybridization and humour are Barnes’ main resources. Talking It Over mixes fiction with incomplete drama, which is what Barnes does in most of his novels, as he is a histrionic creator of characters. His heroes are restless and keep talking. Their discourse offers a deep insight into their inner world. These heroes chat to the reader mostly, but hardly ever engage in a dialogue. They take the reader into their confidence. The author keeps silent. Their fate is therefore inconclusive, incomplete, lasting them for as long as they can keep talking to us. The novel ends when they stop, but it only begins in the reader’s mind at that point. Like all Desperado novels, Barnes’ books are inconclusive, to be followed in our mind.

● Barnes views academic life with irony. Oliver, in Talking It Over, teaches English as a foreign language, occupation which is a source of irony in itself. Flaubert’s Parrot ends with students’ papers on the story of the book, the facts of Flaubert’s life and work.

● Broken families abound in Barnes’ novels, loneliness after the breaking of the couple being a theme we amply find illustrated in Lessing, Ishiguro, Gray, Lodge, Bradbury, almost every Desperado author. Three of Barnes’ novels (Talking It Over, Flaubert’s Parrot, Staring at the Sun) describe people left by a spouse, who either died or just got a divorce. Marital bliss is not the Desperado’s cup of tea.

● Desperado books seldom dive in obvious love affairs. They either obliquely suggest intense love interest, without putting it in as many words, or take refuge in tenderness. The author deliberately denies us closure. The heroes float in their secret soul, they think, talk, remember, yet never reveal. Secretive authors, Desperadoes are misers of sensibility. They weigh lyricism by the ounce, and offer us masks to chase the feeling of emptiness away. Barnes is a lover of masks. His heroes seem haunted by emptiness precisely because of his reluctance to share their soul with us. Yet, Desperado characters are not deprived of a soul. They are just unusually slow in putting it into words. Unwillingness to voice feelings, shyness leading to silence, are a natural reaction to Woolf’s, Joyce’s raging psychological revelations. Who can blame a Desperado like Barnes for keeping his feelings to himself?

● Solitude is an attribute of every character. Barnes, along with all Desperadoes, sees life as a lonely race, and feeling as a bottomless pit. All Desperado characters are significant solitaries, beings who cannot inhabit an already inhabited world, because they need space to be different. They would even be different from themselves if they possibly could.

● The character and the author address the reader directly. It happens with Barnes, Graham Swift, Fowles, and other Desperadoes. They feel free to overstep the boundaries of traditional fiction. What could not be done before is welcome now, in this age of daring discovery. The author finds out how far he can go, even though this may happen too late, when he has already written a novel that shocks the reader. Shock is the Desperado lesson, anyway.

● Hybridization is best illustrated by Barnes’ Flaubert’s Parrot. It mingles narrative, essay, fabulation, literary criticism (which is turned into a thriller), literary history, emotional reactions, examination papers. It is done with a grudging tone, which is Barnes’ favourite. He refuses to entertain. He may shock, impress, irritate, but never wants to merely please. The reader is dislocated into meaning.

● Though clear in expression, Barnes is intricate in intention. He is enjoyable, though impossible to pinpoint to one genre alone. He is real, although his novels debunk reality, disobeying every novelistic convention and mixing them all together. Barnes uses bits of rules in a conventionless text, and demonstrates that freedom can be enjoyed, both in writing and in reading. There is only one major condition for Barnes: the text must be sparkling in order to exist.

● Staring at the Sun is a novel which, like many desperado works, puts us in a blessing mood. It resorts to lyricism, sympathy, metaphor, and mainly to postponed understanding. In Barnes’ other novels, we understand every little pun. In this novel he teaches the reader to take his time. As Eliot used to say about poetry, Barnes seems to be stating, the novel, too, can communicate before it is understood.

● Staring at the Sun ends in 2016, at a dystopic time, when people are solitary beings who talk to computers about life and its possible termination at will. Barnes flirts with the idea of the all-powerful computer, coming close to Orwell, Huxley, Ray Bradbury. Hybridization brings lyricism into action, and we no longer wait for the story to end, but for the dystopic mood to be completed. As it turns out, Barnes is not fond of dystopia, so the mood is one of tenderness, in the end.

● Desperado heroes, Barnes’ heroes, often suffer from a kind of emotional mongolism. The author refuses to allow them the right to confession. As the author is silent himself, and his heroes are not much more talkative when it comes to their inner world, the reader is left to his own devices. A suspicious reader, who can create his own image of a sketched hero and furnish it with his own soul, an involved reader, is the ideal Desperado reader.

● The iron curtain is a theme Barnes treats in Staring at the Sun and The Porcupine, and which he shares with Desperadoes like Orwell, Huxley, Burgess, Bradbury, Greene, Lessing, Brownjohn. Translation from a communist language into English is usually hilarious. In China they explain: ‘The temple was repented. We grow ladies. Here is the sobbing centre.’ Outside dystopias, the Western authors do not understand much of communism, satisfied with the irony directed at the use of language, which they realize is the famous ‘wooden language’ of ready-made, politically correct statements. The Desperado insufficient characters fail to deal with communism in depth, even when they are as much in earnest as Lessing. Communism is off limits to British Desperadoes (Orwell excepted), and their dystopias are imaginary speculations of their worst expectations. The iron curtain is merely a pretext.

● A genuine Desperado, more than other contemporaries of his, Barnes defies: he defies everything, from literature to life. Unlike Lodge, who only smiles, Barnes defies religion. Unlike Gray or Orwell, he defies dystopia. Unlike Swift, he uses lyricism only in order to defy it. Unlike Ishiguro, he defies tenderness, intimacy. Unlike Bradbury and Lodge, he defies humour, preferring biting mockery. And, in conclusion, being so much unlike everybody else is what makes him a true Desperado, all alone, his own trend, refusing similarity.

● In Metroland (1980), his first novel, Barnes touches upon the theme of teenagers, just like Burgess, Lessing, Golding, Brownjohn (To Clear the River, a first novel as well). The outlet for teenage energy is not violence here, but the use of French in English sentences. It is a mild outlet, as compared to Alex in A Clockwork Orange, or the gangs in The Memoirs of a Survivor and The Fifth Child. Barnes stresses the teenagers’ defiance, more than their potential for violence.

● Julian Barnes’ irony and lyricism coexist. They feed on the feelings he hides. He defies both the tradition of sentiment and that of realism, building his own devices as he goes along.