JULIAN BARNES: SOME PARENTHETICAL REMARKS 

ANCA  PEIU

It would not be too hard to become a member in a Julian Barnes’ fans’ club – provided anyone took the trouble to keep a matter-of-fact control over it. The main attraction to his texts remains a matter of style: his typical quick-witticism, whether it be the mark of his (“true”? “pure”?) fiction, his non-fiction (see Letters from London 1990-1995 [1]), or his “dirty” (mock) detective fiction, signed by a tongue-in-cheek Dan Kavanagh, who dedicates his work to the same Pat Kavanagh receiving the gift of Julian Barnes, the “true” novelist [2].

Pious academic readers of this text may feel relieved: the book I am about to deal with here, though mentioning the name of the same mysterious lady, Pat Kavanagh, is not one in the Duffy range. But then neither is it the straightforwardly didactic example of a history – whether or not employable for such purposes as demonstrations (with/without definitions) of that dreadful thing: postmodernism. This is just A History of The World in 101/2 Chapters [3].

One reason for my choice here may be in itself a matter of (my sense of) history: the book was first published in 1989. As irony would have it – that kind of irony above the heads of both writer and reader –, this is a year to remember in the history of this world we both inhabit. It supplied that change, that catastrophe so beneficial to our dialogue, which is thus only made possible by a fact of art, i.e. a book:

How do you turn catastrophe into art?

Nowadays the process is automatic. A nuclear plant explodes? We’ll have a play on the London stage within a year. A President is assassinated? You can have the book or the film or the filmed book. War? Send in the novelists. A series of gruesome murders? Listen for the tramp of the poets. We have to understand it, of course, this catastrophe; to understand it, we have to imagine it, so we need the imaginative arts. But we also need to justify and forgive it, this catastrophe, however minimally. Why did it happen, this mad act of Nature, this crazed human moment? Well, at least it produced art. Perhaps, in the end, that’s what catastrophe is for. [4]

The (classically) postmodern gap between history (as a reality pattern) and fiction runs in parallel to the gap between author and text:

Serious modern fiction has only one subject: the difficulty of writing serious modern fiction. First, it has fully accepted that it is only fiction, can only be fiction, will never be anything but fiction, and therefore has no business at all tampering with real life or reality… Second. The natural consequence of this is that writing about fiction has become a far more important matter than writing fiction itself. It’s one of the best ways you can tell the true novelist nowadays. He’s not going to waste his time over this messy garage-mechanic drudge of assembling stories and characters on paper… Third, and most important. At the creative level there is in any case no connection whatever between author and text. They are two entirely separate things.

Nothing, but nothing, is to be inferred or deduced from one to the other, and in either direction. The deconstructivists have proved that beyond a shadow of doubt. The author’s role is purely fortuitous and agential. He has no more significant a status than the bookshop assistant or the librarian who hands the text qua object to the reader. [5]

For all the biting sarcasm of the tone, this is no more Julian Barnes’ voice: it is John Fowles’. And it only goes to show that the “true” gap is rather one between (theorists of) literary fashion and writers themselves: who is actually entitled to a reliable view on the job of writing? Is it theorists, critics, professors of literature or rather the objects of their common dissection (and subsistence, mere survival), i.e. writers & their texts, whom readers should take seriously? The dilemma – hardly worth the rhetorical question – concerns an entire generation of British novelists. More evidence to this case comes from Graham Swift’s Waterland (1983). The protagonist history teacher tells his pupils such tales as: “About the End of History”, “About the Story-Telling Animal”, “About Natural & Artificial History”, “About the Saviour of the World”; last but not least, “About Contemporary Nightmares”.

Much like John Fowles’ mock-sophisticated voice apparently lecturing on (but actually deploring) the virtues of metafiction, Graham Swift’s history teacher obviously implies that there is no history without fiction, just as there is no fiction without history. They are not only inseparable: for the teller, at least, they are the same.

A good (postmodern) reader would feel inclined to both start and end up reading A History of The World in 101/2 Chapters with the Parenthesis [6]. This is an extra-(half)chapter, a sort of bonus, some necessary addition – much like a mantissa…; occurring as an aside to the text proper. The tone of this appendix betrays a confident collusion between reader and writer – or, at least, that someone from beyond the latter’s mask. The object of this parenthesis is in itself some minor but sine qua non ingredient – if additional – of any history of the world: love:

If we look at the history of the world, it seems surprising that love is included. It’s an excrescence, a monstrosity, some tardy addition to the agenda. It reminds me of those half-houses which according to normal criteria of map reading should not exist. The other week I went to this North American address: 2041 ½ Yonge Street. The owner of 2041 must at some point have sold off a little plot, and this half-numbered, half-acknowledged house was put up. And yet people can live in it quite comfortably, people call it home…Tertullian said of Christian belief that it was true because it was impossible. Perhaps love is essential because it’s unnecessary. (…) Yet it gives us our individuality, our purpose… We don’t need it for the expansion of our race, indeed, it is inimical to orderly civilization. Sexual desire would be much easier if we didn’t have to worry about love. Marriage would be more straightforward – and perhaps more lasting – if we were not itchy for love, exultant on its arrival, fearful of its departure. (…) And when love fails, we should blame the history of the world. (…) But I can tell you why to love. Because the history of the world, which only stops at the half-house of love to bulldoze it into rubble, is ridiculous without it. our random mutation is essential because it is unnecessary. Love won’t change the history of the world (…), but it will do something more important: teach us stand up to history (…). I don’t accept your terms, love says; sorry, you don’t impress, and by the way what a silly uniform you’re wearing. [7]

This is a representative – if somewhat sentimental, despite the writer’s efforts of sounding mostly ironical, even cynical at times – 1989 plea for love and/as truth: and who can say it does not convey the (historical) spirit of its time? To prove the history of the world ridiculous, love has to be brave. It has to play the (true) part of the hero. To stand up to history as heroes genuinely concerned about love, we should have to prove the world itself ridiculous. It has been done before. (If it were but Don Quixote to quote here, we could still claim some solid reference point.)  It is a risky task. But at least it is not the risk of that glorious positive hero: the world’s model of hypocritical conformity. I would call the latter the positive hero’s risk of dullness. One thing we can be sure of – regarding Julian Barnes’ heroes – is that they are not the positive kind. Thus, the kind of risk they plead for in their facing the challenges of history points to anything but dullness.

In tune with the historical spirit of its time, the book’s core metaphor – for all its pretence of plodding prose – is specifically romantic. History means a sound system, order and coherence. In fiction these are secured by the plot and the choice of characters. But what plot is comprehensive enough for a history of the world? What characters could be grand enough for it?                       

One clue to the (kinds of) plots and protagonists living in the ten chapters – let alone the half above-mentioned – of this funny history of the world concludes chapter one, exquisitely entitled “The Stowaway”:

As I was saying, we were euphoric when we got off the Ark. Apart from anything else, we’d eaten enough gopher-wood to last a lifetime. That’s another reason for wishing Noah had been less bigoted in his design of the fleet: it would have given some of us a change of diet. Hardly a consideration for Noah, of course, because we weren’t meant to be there. And with the hindsight of a few millennia, this exclusion seems even harsher than it did at the time. There were seven of us stowaways, but had we been admitted as a sea-worthy species only two boarding-passes would have been issued; and we would have accepted that decision. Now, it’s true Noah couldn’t have predicted how long his Voyage was going to last, but considering how little we seven ate in five and a half years, it surely would have been worth the risk letting just a pair of us on board. And after all, it’s not our fault for being woodworm. [8]        

As a good lesson in narratology, this first person-narrative proves that there is much more to a story than meets the eye: even an Old Testament tale can be made new with a shift in point of view.  The fact that Noah was not alone on his Ark, nay, that he had many more Voyage partners than he could have been aware of, only stands to reason – as respectable as any fact in a history of the world. “The history of the world” is thus proven ridiculous, indeed, by a fact of life (and death, necessarily). By a fact of love. A woodworm may not seem dignified enough for the role of a hero, let alone that of a (more or less reliable) story-teller. Yet who are we to judge? The truth is ultimately a matter of imagination: why not? The postmodern story is a twice-told biblical tale. The “history of the world” is such a preposterous thing that it simply cannot exist. It will always be outlived – or rather proven ridiculous – by a good piece of fiction. The poet is preferable to the historian. And Aristotle’s lesson of poetics is older than even the Old Testament.

Without the Parenthesis, or the half-chapter, the ten chapters of triumph and catastrophe would hardly amount to anything. And if there be any chance for a postmodern brand of wisdom – or way of understanding the world at all – I think we should look for it right here (Between brackets).

 

BIBLIOGRAPHY

 

 

BARNES, JULIAN, History of The World in 101/2 Chapters, Jonathan Cape, London, UK, 1989.

BARNES, JULIAN, Letters from London 1990-1995, Picador, London, 1995.

DOCHERTY, THOMAS, Ed., Postmodernism. A Reader, Harvester Wheat-sheaf, Cambridge, UK, 1993.

FOWLES, JOHN, Mantissa, Jonathan Cape, London, UK, 1982.

HASSAN, IHAB, Postmodern Turn, The, Ohio State Univ. Press, USA, 1987.

KAVANAGH, DAN, Duffy, Penguin Books, London, UK, 1988.

SWIFT, GRAHAM, Waterland, Vintage Books, Random House, USA, 1992.                     

VIANU, LIDIA, British Desperadoes at The Turn of The Mille-Nium, Editura ALL, Bucureşti, România, 1999.