Julian Barnes
Julian Barnes
born in 1946 in Leicester, moved to London
1968: graduates at Oxford (modern languages)
works as lexicographer for OED
from 1977 on: reviewer and literary editor for
New Statesmen, later also The Observer
1980: his first novel, Metroland appears,
followed by 21 other books (novels,
collections of essays) and translations from
French and German
married, his wife died in 2008
www.julianbarnes.com
Pseudonym: Dan Kavanaugh (detective
stories)
Metroland (1980)
Before She Met Me (1982)
Flaubert's Parrot (1984)
Staring at the Sun (1986)
A History of the World in 10 1/2 Chapters (1989)
Talking It Over (1991)
The Porcupine (1992)
Letters from London 1990-95 (1995)
England, England (1998)
Love, etc (2000)
Something to Declare: French Essays (2002)
Arthur and George (2005)
Nothing To Be Frightened Of (2008)
Pulse (2011)
The Sense of an Ending (2011) Man-Booker Prize
Through the Window (essays, 2012)
Levels of Life (2013)
The Man Booker Prize for Fiction 2011
Julian Barnes, The Sense of an Ending Jonathan Cape.
This body of work consistently resists categorization,
challenging conventional expectations: […] reminiscent
of the postmodern texts of Italo Calvino or Milan
Kundera in their elegance, sophistication, and linguistic
playfulness. Unlike these writers, however, Barnes
returns repeatedly, seriously, even obsessively (if often
also humorously), to a series of key themes connected
to the passions and inconsistencies of the human heart,
exploring the unsettling nature of love and (in)fidelity…
Cristina Sandru and Sean Matthews, 2002
http://www.contemporarywriters.com/authors/?p=auth1
http://www.eltereader.hu/kiadvanyok/stunned-into-uncertainty-essays-on-julianbarness-fiction/
Although the Lyotardian postmodern “incredulity
towards metanarratives” is typical of Barnes, a
Barnesian text is never as desperately
experimental or as eager to subvert the existing
order […] I might call it ‘mild postmodern.’
Ágnes Harasztos
the Barnesian character tends to
wonder about life instead of living it
Dóra Vecsernyés
Barnes’s novels draw our attention to trivialities
of life, under which he uncovers the most dazzling
problems of human existence.
Eszter Tory
Man no longer the centre of the universe –
no centre
Rhizome
• Structure, sign and play (Jacques Derrida, 1966)
”even today the notion of a structure lacking any
center represents the unthinkable itself.”
Centerless system (Gilles Deleuze 1925-1995)
JEAN-FRANÇOIS LYOTARD
THE POSTMODERN CONDITION (1979)
Grand narratives
“incredulity toward
metanarrative”
Return of the grand narrative
• aftershock of 1960s radicalism, intellectual
millenarism (all post-s / the past is dead)
• PM: rhetoric of disruption (everything has to
be new, break in human experience)
heroic age of theory
• Incredulity toward metanarratives (Lyotard)
progress, enlightenment, Christianity
Gustave Flaubert (1821-1880)
Gustave Flaubert (1821-1880)
• Madame Bovary (1857)
• Un Coeur Simple (A Simple Heart) (1877)
original title: The Parrot (part of Three Stories)
• Félicité: unconditional love (yet fruitless
existence)
while dying, she imagines the parrot to be an
incarnation of the Holy Spirit
• sweet, simple, and unrewarded life
Flaubert's Parrot (1984)
historical fiction – biography – metafiction
(prize won as a work of criticism)
Geoffrey Braithwaite (elderly doctor, suspiciously deep
literary knowledge): obsession with Flaubert
structural elements to watch for: repetition
variation (= repetition with
difference)
3 chronologies (official, personal, literary, later: animal)
Bestiary: bear, camel, parrot etc.
‘What happened to the truth is not recorded.’
• Homage to Flaubert (to his
person or texts?)
• cf: Péter Esterházy’s homage
to Géza Ottlik’s text: to
celebrate his 70th birthday, in
1982 EP copied the text of
School at the Frontier on a
sheet of paper
• relationship of text and author:
‘Madame Bovary, c’est moi.’
• ‘But if a writer were more like
a reader, he’d be a reader, not a
writer: it’s as uncomplicated as
that’
yet Braithwaite’s obsession with Flaubert is in the context of his
wife’s suicide
personal grief (narration slowly becoming more personal)
stuck in the present, anxiously scanning a fading past
‘Ellen. My wife: someone I feel I understand less well than a
foreign writer dead for a hundred years. Is this an aberration,
or is it normal? Books say: She did this because. Life says:
She did this. Books are where things are explained to you; life
is where things aren't. I'm not surprised some people prefer
books. Books make sense of life. The only problem is that the
lives they make sense of are other people's lives, never your
own.’
• narrator’s life mingles with the object
• A History of the World in 10 ½ Chapters
(1989)
Sir Walter Raleigh’s monumental
The History of the World (1614)
• provocative, ironic
• Raleigh: comprehensive, providence
cf. ‘Historia est magistra vitae’ (Cicero)
• Barnes: fragments with motivic
connections: arc / boats
”worm’s eye view”
• history: necessarily fragmented
• cf. David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas
(consciously interconnected)
A History of the World in 10 ½ Chapters
• a series of digressions from those events normally considered
central to any historical account of the world: an ironic
approach to history as a genre (cf. Flaubert’s Parrot)
cf. Barthes: ‘The Discourse of History’: traditional historical
discourse is ”the fallacy of representation” (ideology);
”establishing positive meaning and filling the vacuum of pure,
meaningless series"
• Hayden White: history as a narrative
• Barnes: "We make up a story to cover the facts we don't know
or can't accept; we keep a few facts and spin a new story round
them"
•
Brian Finney: ‘A worm's eye view of history: Julian Barnes's A History of the
World in 10 1/2 Chapters’ Papers on Language & Literature. 39.1 (Winter 2003)
• Chapter 1: ‘The Stowaway’ Noah’s Ark (biblical re-creation)
quasi historical-realistic description of an allegory
contrast: anachronistically modern language;
deconstructing the myth
(ark as death camp)
• Chapter 10: ‘The Dream’: contemporary heaven
• in between these chapters: no chronological order
• Chapter 2 ‘The Visitors’: modern Arab terrorists hijack a
pleasure-boat (cf. 1985 Achille Lauro)
• Chapter 3 ‘The Wars of Religion’
manuscript of the proceedings of a fictional trial against
woodworms in 1520 in France
animals: instincts, no freedom, moral causation
Chapter 4 ‘The Survivor’
Chernobyl disaster (1986) – dream or mental hospital?
”I’ve started closing my eyes. That’s harder than you think. If
you’ve already got your eyes closed in sleep, try closing them
again to shut out a nightmare.”
Chapter 5 ‘Shipwreck’
1816: Medusa sinks
‘How do you turn catastrophe into art?’
Théodore Géricault: The Raft of the Medusa (1819)
• Chapter 6 ‘The Mountain’
19th century: an exhibition of Géricault’s painting and a
primitive motion picture
after death of father daughter to visit a monastery (Noah’s
vine)
”Where Amanda discovered in the world divine intent,
benevolent order and rigorous justice, her father had seen only
chaos, hazard and malice.”
• Chapter 7 ‘Three Simple Stories’
survivors of accidents on sea: Titanic, Jonah, Jewish refugees
• Chapter 8 ‘Upstream!’ travel in the jungle for a film project
(The Mission, 1986), where an actor is drowned in an accident
with a raft
‘Parenthesis’
• narrator named Julian Barnes offers a philosophical discussion
on love. Cf. El Greco’s The Burial of the Count of Orgaz
• Chapter 9 ‘Project Ararat’
story of a fictional astronaut
• Chapter 10 ‘The Dream’
• fragments?
reader to decide whether interconnected episodes (overarching
narrative) or juxtaposed disparate segments
• ”The history of the world? Just voices echoing in the dark;
images that burn for a few centuries and then fade; stories, old
stories that sometimes seem to overlap; strange links,
impertinent connections"