The title of Julian Barnes' 1989 novel, A History of the
World in 10 1/2 Chapters is at once playful and provocative.
Its first half only differs from Sir Walter Raleigh's The History
of the World in its substitution of an indefinite for a definite
article. Like Raleigh's History it begins with Genesis.
But unlike Raleigh, Barnes does not subscribe to a providential
interpretation of history. Where Raleigh's was a monumental attempt
to record the history of the world starting with the Creation,
Barnes's modest book runs to some 300 pages and eschews any pretence
of continuity or comprehensiveness. His is merely a history
among many possible histories of the world.
The second half of the title of Barnes's book describes a work
that is absurdly brief for such a subject, while its provocative
inclusion of a "1/2" chapter draws attention to itself.
This half chapter, "Parenthesis," is the only section
of the book to use a didactic, mildly professorial voice, with
no apparent hint of irony or humor. It forms the same function
that "The Preface" does in Raleigh's History
in offering a rationale and apology. Interestingly both writers
see history as necessarily fragmented. Barnes's entire book can
be seen as a series of digressions from those events normally
considered central to any historical account of the world. At
the same time Barnes has insisted that this half-chapter is the
one occasion in the book where he dispenses with the masks of
the fiction writer and offers his personal truth, in much the
way that El Greco is the only character in the "Burial of
Count Orgaz" who looks out at the spectator, saying in effect,
according to Barnes, "'I did this. You've got any complaints,
look at me. [. . .] I'm responsible" (Stuart 15). Yet this
rare moment of truthfulness is offered in the form of a digression--a
digression in a work that is nothing but a series of digressions
from the supposed mainstream of history.
Clearly in this book, as in Flaubert's Parrot (1984), Barnes
is adopting an ironic approach to history as a genre. Barnes has
said of A History of the World that it "deals with
one of the questions that obsessed Braithwaite in that book [Flaubert's
Parrot]. And that is: How do we seize the past?" (Cook
12). He would appear to agree with Barthes' objection to what
he calls "the fallacy of representation" attaching to
traditional historical discourse. In "The Discourse of History"
Barthes sees historical discourse as "in its essence a form
of ideological elaboration, or to put it more precisely, an imaginary
elaboration" (16). Barthes believes that "[t]he historian
is not so much a collector of facts as a collector and relater
of signifiers; that is to say, he organizes them with the purpose
of establishing positive meaning and filling the vacuum of pure,
meaningless series" (16). Barnes adopts a similar view of
history in his book: "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" (240).
The strategy that probably most distinguishes this book from the
rest of his fictional work is its use of fragmented episodes from
the history of the world, its use of what Lévi-Strauss
has called bricolage. Asked in what sense his book, A
History of the World in 10 1/2 Chapters, was not just a book
of short stories, Barnes replied: "Well, it was conceived
as a whole and executed as a whole. Things in it thicken and deepen"
(Cook 12). The question that needs asking, then, are whether
and how this book generates discursive meaning(s) over the totality
of its very different chapters. Are some of its meanings produced
by the sum of its multiple texts? Is there a shape, a beginning
and end to this book? Does it qualify as what Frank Kermode has
called one of those fictions "whose ends are consonant with
origins, and in concord, however unexpected, with their precedents,"
fictions which "satisfy our needs" by giving significance
to our lives, seeing that we live our whole lifetime in the midst
of things (Sense 5, 7)? Equally does it live up to Barnes'
own dictum that "art is the stuff you finally understand,
and life, perhaps, is the stuff you finally can't understand"
(McGrath 23)?
It has been pointed out by more than one reviewer that the book
opens with an account of Noah and the Flood (the biblical re-creation,
if not the creation of the world) and that it closes with a final
chapter which envisions a contemporary form of heaven. But between
chapter one's origins and chapter ten's ends the remaining eight
and a half chapters do not progress chronologically. Chapter two
stages a hijacking of a pleasure boat by modern Arab terrorists.
Chapter three transcribes sixteenth century court records of a
case in the diocese of Besançon, France. Chapter four invents
the journey or crazed fantasy of a woman escaping by sea from
a nuclear-ravaged West and is mildly futuristic. Chapter five
is divided between a section recounting the shipwreck of the French
frigate, the Medusa, in 1816, and a section analyzing the stages
in the painting of the "The Raft of the Medusa" by Géricault
three years later. Chapter six recounts a fictional 1840 pilgrimage
of an Irish woman to Mount Ararat where she dies. Chapter seven
is titled "Three Simple Stories." The first story concerns
a survivor from the Titanic, the second Jonah and a sailor
in 1891 both of whom were swallowed by a whale, the third the
Jewish passengers aboard the St. Louis trying to escape
from Nazi Germany in 1939. Chapter eight is a story about a modern
film actor on location in the Venezuelan jungle (suggestive of
Robert Bolt's The Mission). Next comes the half chapter,
"Parenthesis," an essay on love. Chapter nine recounts
another fictitious expedition in 1977 to Mount Ararat by an astronaut
in search of Noah's ark.
Instead of the traditional chronological ordering favored by historians,
this book proceeds by juxtapositions, by parallels and contrasts,
by connections that depend on irony or accident. Additionally
Barnes uses a bewildering variety of narrative voices for the
book's different episodes. It is as if Barnes was straining to
differentiate his "historical" work from that of historians
who aspire to a stance of objectivity. In "The Discourse
of History" Barthes parallels the objective type of historian's
concealment of himself as utterer of his own discourse to that
of the so called "realist" novelist:
On the level of discourse, objectivity - or the deficiency of
signs of the utterer - thus appears as a particular form of imaginary
projection, the product of what might be called the referential
illusion, since in this case the historian is claiming to allow
the referent to speak all on its own. This type of illusion is
not exclusive to historical discourse. It would be hard to count
the novelists who imagined - in the epoch of Realism - that they
were "objective" because they suppressed the signs of
the "I" in their discourse! (11)
As Barthes observes, we now know better than to ascribe objectivity
to either persona, because we realize that the absence of any
signs pointing to the utterer merely substitutes an objective
for a subjective utterer of the discourse.
As if in reaction to this discursive camouflage so frequently
deployed by traditional historians and realist novelists alike,
Barnes positively flouts his proliferation of subjective narrators.
Barnes's book opens with the morally superior voice of the woodworm
for whom "man is a very unevolved species compared to the
animals" (28). There is the absurdly self-important voice
used in the French medieval law courts in Chapter 3. The art historian
takes over in the second part of Chapter 5. There is the egotistical
epistolary voice of the actor in Chapter 8. There are several
first-person narratives, including that of the possibly delusional
Kath of Chapter 4, the eighteen-year-old prep-school master of
the first of "Three Simple Stories" (Chapter 7), and
the dreamer of Chapter 10 who wakes up in a distinctly twentieth
century heaven. Above all, there is the highly personal, mildly
didactic voice of a narrator who comes close to occupying the
position of the author in the half-chapter, "Parenthesis."
Yet Barnes has said: "All the narrators are meant to be touching
in their aspirations, even if often proved to be foolish or deluded"
(Stuart 15). Does this include the narrator of "Parenthesis"?
Barnes manages to summon up within this brief book a remarkably
wide range of speech modes and different voices (those "voices
echoing in the dark" (240) that constitute the history of
the world). Chapter eight, for instance, consists entirely of
letters sent by a second rate actor to his girl friend back home.
Barnes accurately captures the clichés, lack of punctuation
and poor syntax that reveal his derivative mind:
I get out your photo with the chipmunk face and kiss it. That's
all that matters, you and me having babies. Let's do it, Pippa.
Your mum would be pleased, wouldn't she? I said to Fish do you
have kids, he said yes they're the apple of my eye. I put my arm
round him and gave him a hug just like that. It's things like
that that keep everything going, isn't it? (211)
Compare this to the half chapter ("Parenthesis") in
which "Julian Barnes" talks in the first person about
love:
Poets seem to write more easily about love than prose writers.
For a start, they own that flexible "I" (when I say
"I" you will want to know within a paragraph or two
whether I mean Julian Barnes or someone invented; a poet can shimmy
between the two, getting credit for both deep feeling and objectivity).
(225)
In drawing attention to the prose medium he is using, Barnes -
unlike the actor - contrives to complicate and energize his whole
discourse on the difficult subject of love. Style and sincerity
are shown to be closely connected. Barnes shows an equal command
of sixteenth century French legalese, nineteenth century Irish
religious enthusiasm, and contemporary American (with acknowledgements
to his friend Jay McInerney for technical assistance). What all
the chapters and voices have in common is that each subjects a
section of Western history to the imperative of textual narrative.
According to Barnes, "what makes each chapter work is that
it has a structure and it has a narrative pulse" (Smith 73).
Despite the book's chronological and narrational irregularities,
the reader's natural urge to make connections between these disparate
segments of text, to convert this sequence of varying narratives
into a larger overarching narrative, is given encouragement by
various connective devices in the book. Paradoxically, at the
same time the book is the work of a contemporary writer who typically
does not see much coherence or order in the world around him.
Life is "all hazard and chaos, with occasional small pieces
of progress," he told one interviewer (Saunders 9). So the
kind of connections and the kind of coherence found in this book
are made to reflect this late twentieth century sense of dislocation
in human life and history:
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.
(240)
That is a more accurate description of the contents and connections
within this book than might be apparent.
Let us start with those strange links and impertinent connections.
Chapter one reveals among other things that Noah and his family
stayed alive for the duration of their sojourn at sea by eating
to extinction a number of the species who had entered the Ark
two by two. Further Noah and his family discriminated between
what they called the clean and unclean species, only sacrificing
the so-called clean for their meal table. The next chapter describes
the tourists unsuspectingly entering the cruise ship "in
obedient couples." "'The animals came in two by two,'
Franklin commented" (33). Sure enough, when the Arab hijackers
come to start shooting two passengers an hour they adopt a similar
policy to Noah's of segregating those clean(?) nationalities supposedly
most responsible for the Palestinians' predicament and murdering
them first. What are we as readers to make of this narrative connection?
That whichever clique is in power throughout history will always
attempt to solidify their position by creating an other as enemy
or object of hate? That binary oppositions with their appeal to
"natural" kinship are divisive and invariably lead to
the destruction of life? That the recurrent human tendency to
differentiate between groups necessarily ends with a superior
and inferior category?
Barnes is less interested in deconstructing such oppositions than
he is in raising questions. He claims to agree with Flaubert's
dictum, which Barnes paraphrased for one interviewer: "'The
desire to reach conclusions is a sign of human stupidity'"
(McGrath 23). The questions that Barnes raises in this book nevertheless
show a relatedness, though one that is problematized. The same
motif - the division between the clean and the unclean
occurs in the third of the three stories comprising Chapter 7.
This opens by inviting comparison with the Achille Lauro-type
cruise ship of chapter two:
At 8 PM on Saturday, 13th May 1939, the liner St Louis
left its home port of Hamburg. It was a cruise ship, and most
of the 937 passengers booked on its transatlantic voyage carried
visas confirming that they were "tourists, travelling for
pleasure" (181).
In fact they are anything but tourists. They are Jews fleeing
from a Nazi state intent on exterminating them. They might quite
possibly also include some of the Zionists against whom the Arabs
later stage their attack in chapter 2. Unlike that previous fictional
episode involving the terrorists, this "story" is a
factual account of a shameful episode dating from just prior to
the outbreak of the Second World War in which many of the world's
free countries, including the United States, refused to allow
these political refugees to disembark for various spurious reasons.
The original intention was that all the emigrants would disembark
in Havana. When the Cuban authorities held out for more money
than the emigrants could come up with an impasse resulted. One
suggestion was that, as 250 passengers were booked for the return
journey to Europe, at least the same number of Jews might be allowed
to disembark. Barnes continues: "But how would you choose
the 250 who were to be allowed off the Ark? Who would separate
the clean from the unclean? Was it to be done by casting lots"
(184)?
Those three words - "Ark," "clean," and "unclean"
carry an additional semantic burden that has been created
by the earlier narrative episodes and is purely ideological in
content. An Ark/ship that is supposed to protect its occupants
from the storms of the world turns into a prison ship for animals
and humans alike, both of whom are victimized by being categorized
as the other by those in control. For the reader who remembers
that according to Genesis God caused it to rain "for forty
days and forty nights" (7. 4), Barnes' comment in the penultimate
paragraph that the 350 Jews allowed into Britain "were able
to reflect that their wanderings at sea had lasted precisely forty
days and forty nights" (188) resonates with irony. This biblical
period of time is also precisely the duration of Moses' stay on
Mount Sinai and of Jesus's stay in the wilderness. Similarly the
suggestion that the refugees might try "casting lots"
reminds the reader of the biblical accounts of the casting of
lots between Saul and his son Jonathan and of the Roman soldiers
casting lots for the crucified Jesus's garments. What is the final
effect of these intertextual references? They illustrate the fact
that from the beginnings of time humans have sought to validate
their own status by turning on those they choose to designate
the "unclean." Further, humans tend to reinforce these
actions by appealing to the authority of some organized form of
religion. Beneath a postmodern veil of raising questions this
accumulation of instances invites the reader to reach some provisional
conclusions (I would stress the plural) concerning human nature
in all these narratives within narratives.
Some of these seemingly impertinent connections between chapters
are predictive rather than retrospective. In chapter one among
the animals on the Ark who are afraid of Noah are the reindeer.
But "it wasn't just fear of Noah, it was something deeper"
(12). They show powers of foresight, "as if they were saying,
You think this is the worst? Don't count on it" (13). What
it is that so scares them is not revealed until chapter four.
There, after a Chernobyl-type nuclear disaster, reindeer in Norway
that have received a high dose of radiation are being slaughtered
and fed to mink. At first the authorities plan to bury the reindeer.
But that would make "it look as if there's been a problem,
like something's actually gone wrong" (86). The female protagonist
comments: "we've been punishing animals from the beginning,
haven't we" (87)? She concludes, "Everything is connected,
even the parts we don't like, especially the parts we don't like"
(84). That comment equally applies to the narrative organization
of this book as a whole. Noah's presumptuous use and disposal
of the animals committed to his care anticipates a continuing
arrogance on humans' part, the disastrous consequences of which
are just as readily suppressed by the modern media as they were
in the biblical account of Noah in Genesis. The reader's knowledge
that such censorship on the part of the authorities is all too
likely, despite the fictional nature of Chapter 4, retrospectively
bestows a peculiar kind of imaginative authority on Barnes' retelling
of the biblical story of Noah in which he fictionally reinscribes
what he infers are the suppressed elements of the official account
of the episode. His connection of the parts we don't like only
adds to their credibility.
Let us take one more instance of Barnes's apparently insignificant
yet ultimately crucial connections between his parts/chapters.
Chapter 10 pictures heaven as a dreamlike state in which dreamers
"'get the sort of Heaven they want'." The dreamer-protagonist
asks his heavenly informant, "'And what sort do they want
on the whole?'" "'Well,'" she replies, "'they
want a continuation of life, that's what we find. But [. . .]
better, needless to say'" (298-9). What that turns out to
be in practice is principally golf, sex, shopping, and meeting
famous people (such as Noah), all of which activities reveal their
underlying banality as the millennia pass by. Among the famous
people is Hitler (a reference back not just to the St Louis
but to his predecessor in prejudicial discrimination, Noah).
The dreamer is naturally surprised at finding this arch-villain
in heaven. What, he demands, happened to Hell? It turns out there
isn't any Hell, merely a theme park filled with skeletons and
devils played by out-of-work actors. As his heavenly informant
explains, "that's all people want nowadays" (300). Clearly
Barnes's heaven is a collective projection of the twentieth century
psyche. Only in this final chapter is the human need to separate
living beings into the clean and the unclean abandoned in favor
of an anodyne world where everyone is equal - and eventually equally
bored by it all, so bored that they opt to die off for a second
time. The dreamer concludes that, "Heaven's a very good idea,
it's a perfect idea you could say, but not for us. Not given the
way we are" (307). The implication is that the human species
is only happy when it has an artificially created alternative
or other that provides it with its sense of cohesion and identity.
A world in which no one is discriminated against is merely a dream
of what we imagine we want but would actually find intolerably
innocuous and tedious. Dependent on binary oppositions for our
(false) sense of identity, we choose not to deconstruct them.
Although Barnes continually hints at the presence of an overarching
signified throughout the book, he makes his reader establish the
connections between the signifiers scattered throughout the various
chapters and deduce the narrative significance that emerges from
making such connections. If anything he makes it harder on the
reader by offering a bewildering variety of discourses and genres.
His output to date shows him to be a master of a wide variety
of genres and forms, most notably in Flaubert's Parrot,
his literary detective novel, but also in his novel of psychotic
obsession, Before She Met Me (1982), his political courtroom
drama, The Porcupine (1992), and his futurist farce, England,
England (1998). In the different chapters of A History
Barnes offers us a multiplicity of discursive genres - a fable,
a political thriller, a courtroom drama, science fiction (or a
psychiatric case history), a historical narrative, art criticism,
epistolary fiction, an essay on love, and a dream-vision that,
as one reviewer pointed out, recalls one of the most famous episodes
of "The Twilight Zone" (Dirda X4). This bewildering
discursive variety necessarily draws attention to the ways in
which different modes of discourse generate different meanings
regardless of their content. Given the theme of human divisiveness,
each episode offers a very different variation on this theme -
from the historically revisionist mode of the account of the Flood
to the near tragic mode of the Jewish refugees, to the lightly
satirical and humorous mode of the escapist fantasy of heaven.
What emerges by the end is an acute awareness on the part of the
reader of the presence of narrativity and its unavoidable role
in all forms of historical discourse.
Variety and heterogeneity are as important to Barnes's narrative
purpose as are the repetitive phrases, motifs and themes. His
book appears to indicate that there are as many versions of history
as there are forms of discourse, and yet that certain characteristics
of human nature persist in surfacing no matter what discursive
formation is employed. Take for instance his comment on Géricault's
painting that connects it to similar human responses by the occupants
of Noah's ark:
[. . .] how rarely do our emotions meet the object they seem to
deserve? How hopelessly we signal; how dark the sky; how big the
waves. We are all lost at sea, washed between hope and despair,
hailing something that may never come to rescue us. (137)
Or take his assertion in "Parenthesis" that we must
believe in love if we are not to "surrender to [. . .] someone
else's truth" (244). Joyce Carol Oates refers to these residual
truths at the core of what appears to be a quintessentially postmodern
work when, reviewing this book, she called Barnes a "quintessential
humanist [. . .] of the pre-post-modernist species" (13).
Nevertheless he himself insists that "[w]e all know objective
truth is not obtainable." The monologic or unitary version
of the past, what Barnes calls the "God-eyed version,"
is invariably "a charming, impossible fake." On the
other hand, he insists, "while we know this, we must believe
that objective truth is obtainable," or at least that "43
per cent objective truth is better than 41 per cent" (243-4).
Is Barnes' attempting to have it both ways here? Is he insisting
in postmodern fashion on the necessary plurality of meanings while
attempting to avoid the associated charge of relativism? Or is
he implicitly subscribing to that school of postmodern historiography
represented by Hayden White, Michel de Certeau and the like that
insist that their suspicion of the act of historiography "need
not imply radical relativism, or subjectivism and egoism, or an
unconcern with the past" (Lentricchia xiv)? There may not
be a metanarrative to this book, but certain repetitive motifs
are discernible no matter how he retells human history. Do these
recurring patterns have any referential reality? Or are they all
simply products of the web of textuality, interpretation and narration?
Overtly Barnes only replies in narrative terms. If the book works
for you, he has said, "then you see that it sort of thickens
and deepens as it goes on, and that one chapter is set in a precise
relationship to the other chapter" (Kidder E1). He is suggesting
here that each chapter, even the final chapter that appears to
celebrate the thin and the shallow in life (or the afterlife),
gains resonance by its links and parallels to previous chapters.
The structural parallels are numerous. As has been noted, the
opening and closing chapters offer narratives of the near-beginning
and near-end of human history. Chapter one introduces a series
of motifs that recur in subsequent chapters and carry similar
associations with them. Noah's divisiveness has already been seen
to echo down the ages. The motif of his drunkenness ("You
could even argue, I suppose, that God drove Noah to drink"
30) reappears in chapters recounting the wreck of the Medusa,
the actor on location in the jungle, and in heaven. The Ark as
a refuge-cum-prison is reincarnated in the cruise ship hijacked
by terrorists and the Jewish refugees' St. Louis, in the
Medusa, in the small boat in which the (possibly deranged)
woman takes off to escape the nuclear catastrophe, and in the
raft that capsizes and drowns the principal actor in the jungle.
The Ark lands on Mount Ararat at the end of chapter one. Chapter
six concocts a story about the journey that an Irish woman made
in 1840 to Mount Ararat. Her intention is to ask the monks in
the monastery there to intercede for the soul of her dead atheistical
father. On arrival she finds that the monks have forgotten the
tradition forbidding them to ferment the grapes planted by the
drunkard Noah. After an earthquake has demolished the monastery
she stages her own death on the mountain. In chapter nine an ex-astronaut
(reminiscent of Apollo 15's James Irwin) is convinced that God
spoke to him while he was on the moon instructing him to find
Noah's Ark. He mounts his expedition in 1977 and discovers the
skeleton of what he at first assumes to be Noah, only for the
pathologists to inform him that it belongs to a woman who died
there some 130 -50 years before - the protagonist of chapter six.
The astronaut is himself casually mentioned by the actor in chapter
eight as returning like him from a strange land totally transformed.
The identification of the sleazy actor (who ends up significantly
drunkenly - writing to his ex-lover, "Listen bitch why don't
you just get out of my life" 220) with the born-again astronaut
provides a form of anticipatory deflation of the religious zealot's
integrity. Even the half chapter in its discussion of love refers
to his wife as "the centre of my world," just as the
"Armenians believed that Ararat was the centre of the world"
(234).
These motifs and homologous connections proliferate far beyond
what has been outlined above. They suggest in narrative form a
continuity beneath the bewildering variety of human activity over
the ages. The extent (and cultural limits) of that variety is
neatly summarized by the dreamer in heaven. Apart from eating,
golf, sex and shopping, he indulges in more or less all the incidents
that have already been recounted in the previous nine and half
chapters:
- I went on several cruises [chaps. 2 and 7];
- I learned canoeing [chap. 8], mountaineering [chaps. 6 and
9], ballooning;
- I got into all sorts of danger and escaped [chaps. 4, 5, and
7];
- I explored the jungle [chap.8];
- I watched a court case (didn't agree with the verdict) [chap.
3];
- I tried being a painter (not as bad as I thought!) and a surgeon
[chap. 5];
- I fell in love, of course, lots of times ["Parenthesis"
- the half chapter];
- I pretended I was the last person on earth (and the first)
[chaps. 10 and 1]. (297)
There is no master discourse. This book is titled A History
of the World. As Merritt Moseley comments, "No claim is made
that this history is the right one [. . .] there are only histories"
(109). But the repetitions and intertextual allusions also assert
in narrative form that certain patterns of human interaction reappear
over the expanse of history. No matter how you tell it - and Barnes
tells it in a bewildering variety of ways - history seemingly
cannot help revealing certain repetitive aspects of human nature.
Perhaps the most reiterated motif is that of the woodworm related
to that of the numerous reincarnations of the Ark. It is a woodworm
who is revealed in the final sentence of the chapter to be the
narrator of chapter one. He and six other woodworms stowed away
on the Ark and escape undetected after the Flood has subsided.
Yet the status of this woodworm is as ambiguous as that of the
traditional historian who, according to Barthes, contrives to
"'dechronologize' the 'thread' of history" (10). In
the final surprise paragraph of chapter one of Barnes's book the
woodworm speaks "with the hindsight of a few millennia"
(30). This confusion between narrated and narrator's time, according
to Barthes, places the historian in the same position as the maker
of myth: "It is to the extent that he knows what has
not yet been told that the historian, like the actor of myth,
needs to double up the chronological unwinding of events with
references to the time of his own speech" (30). Thus the
woodworm's atemporal status draws attention to its further use
in the book as a signifier of a recurrent signified to be found
in life in all its forms. The woodworm's is the voice of the outcast
- excluded from God's ways and from official history. He is highly
critical of both God and the ways of Noah and his species:
Put it this way: Noah was pretty bad, but you should have seen
the others. It came as little surprise to us that God decided
to wipe the slate clean; the only puzzle was that he chose to
preserve anything at all of this species whose creation did not
reflect particularly well on its creator. (8)
Noah's carnivorous decimation of the animal population is seen
as classist arrogance justified by appeal to a God suspiciously
biased towards the human species that invoked (or invented?) him.
Woodworms constantly crop up throughout the rest of the book.
Fittingly they are responsible in chapter three for eating through
a leg of the Bishop of Besançon's throne which collapses
causing him to be "hurled against his will into a state of
imbecility" (64). As in chapter one they are representative
of those forces of nature that, excluded from human society, cannot
be contained by the human will. The villagers' successful prosecution
of the woodworm who end up being excommunicated (this chapter
is a transcription of the main arguments of an actual court case
of 1520) is ironically undercut by the conclusion in which the
closing words of the juge d'Église have been eaten
by woodworm. The facts excluded from the canon of the church are
reinscribed by Barnes into its history thereby undermining its
unitary version of the past. In chapter eight woodworms are still
the one danger to the survival of the actor-narrator's discourse
(his bizarre love letters) on their journey out of the jungle;
letters have to be protected from them by being placed in a plastic
bag. This is typical of what Barnes refers to as his thickening
effect. By this stage he has turned the insect into a potent metaphor
for that which is excluded or denied by various monologic discourses.
So when he comes to describe the astronaut turned religious zealot
who hears God tell him to search for Noah's Ark in chapter nine,
Barnes is able to undermine the astronaut's sense of truth by
a brief ironic reference to the woodworm: "he knew it [the
Ark] couldn't have rotted or been eaten by termites, because God's
command to find the Ark clearly implied that there was something
left of it" (266). The astronaut shows the same blind faith
in revealed truth that Noah did. He even asserts that as Noah
used only gopher-wood for the Ark it was "probably resistant
to both rot and termites" (266). The survival of the woodworm
convincingly asserts the existence of an alternative, repressed
version of events.
So many of the chapters offer versions of the Ark, boats built
for human survival against the storms of God and/or nature. Yet
these craft are all subject to the caprices of the woodworm eating
away at them from within, or of what they come to represent in
more general terms - the non-human, excluded forces of our world.
Pleasure trips turn into nightmares. Rafts constructed to film
a reenactment of a past disaster on the river repeat that disaster.
Art becomes confused with reality by Indians and film crew alike,
just as historical narrative becomes confused with fictional narrative
by writer and readers alike.
The unsinkable Titanic sinks. So does the Medusa.
Barnes' two-part treatment in chapter five of the notorious shipwreck
of the Medusa in 1816 and the subsequent painting of the
survivors on the raft executed by Géricault in 1819 brings
many of the themes and motifs of the book together. First comes
his dispassionate but carefully shaped account of what happened
to the 150 passengers and crew who spent fifteen days on the raft
before being rescued. They mutiny and fight among themselves (as
Noah's family did). They start eating the flesh of their dead
comrades (as Noah ate his animals). Eventually the survivors are
forced to make a choice between treating the fifteen healthy and
twelve wounded alike, or throwing the wounded overboard to conserve
the diminishing provisions. They choose the latter: "The
healthy were separated from the unhealthy like the clean from
the unclean" (121). We are back on Noah's Ark. Two of the
fifteen who were rescued remind the reader of Noah by concluding
that "the manner in which they were saved was truly miraculous"
(123). But what about the 135 "unclean" who were killed
or drowned before help arrived?
In the second section Barnes turns to the way in which Géricault
chose to portray this incident. It opens: "How do you turn
catastrophe into art" (125)? This is clearly the question
Barnes is asking himself throughout his own attempt to turn the
catastrophes of human history into meaningful, that is fictional,
shape. Géricault had access to the same accounts from the
survivors that Barnes summarized in the first section. Yet the
painting shows not fifteen but twenty men on the raft, five of
them dead. The painter has dragged five of the wounded back from
the sea: "And should the dead lose their vote in the referendum
over hope versus despair?" (131). Barnes wants to demonstrate
the way any artist is compelled to rearrange the facts to give
meaning to his narrative composition. Géricault cleans
up the raft and restores the survivors to healthy muscularity.
Why? In order to shift us as spectators "through currents
of hope and despair, elation, panic and resignation" (137).
According to Barnes Géricault is intent on demonstrating
the equality of optimistic and pessimistic interpretations of
human destiny. So he chooses to depict not the moment of rescue,
but the earlier moment when the survivors sight a vessel on the
horizon that fails to see them or come closer. Much like Beckett's
reference in Waiting for Godot to the two thieves crucified
with Christ one of whom is saved and the other damned, as many
survivors hope that the boat is coming closer as conclude that
it is heading away from them. The painting invites us to read
it as "an image of hope being mocked" (132).
Barnes appears to conclude with the observation: "We are
all lost at sea, washed between hope and despair, hailing something
that may never come to rescue us [. . .] Catastrophe has become
art: that is, after all, what it is for" (137). Barnes here
targets both artist and historian for their similar proclivity
in turning life's disasters into the more satisfying shapes of
narrative. But Barnes next returns to the subject of Noah. Why
did the artistic depiction of his Ark on the flood waters go out
of fashion in the early sixteenth century? Michelangelo's painting
of this incident on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel establishes
a new trend by placing the Ark in the background. "What fills
the foreground are the anguished figures of those doomed antediluvians
left to perish when the chosen Noah and his family were saved"
(138). By Poussin's time "old Noah has sailed out of art
history" (138). The post-medieval world chose to tell a different
story, not a conflicting one, but a complementary one that by
its emphasis on the doomed casts Noah in a less privileged, more
dubious light.
It is surprising, then, that in his half chapter, "Parenthesis,"
Barnes does not treat art as the best response to the false narratives
of the past promoted by religion. "Art, picking up confidence
from the decline of religion, announces its transcendence of the
world [. . .] but this announcement isn't accessible to all, or
where accessible isn't always inspiring or welcome." So,
he concludes, "religion and art must yield to love"
(242-3). Why love? One reason Barnes offers is that love resists
the tyranny of history which is no more than fabulation. "Our
panic and our pain are only eased by soothing fabulation; we call
it history" (240). Love can't change history, Barnes asserts,
but it can "teach us to stand up to history" (238).
Love, then, represents our personal truth. But that truth bred
of pure subjectivity can best be articulated by art. And the woodworm
eats away at love as much as at the frame of Géricault's
painting. So any true artist has to give a voice also to that
excluded other, the woodworm in our midst. Ultimately the woodworm
is a textual presence, signifying the presence of an aporia, reminding
us of the false divisions made by historians in the textual continuum
of the past.
It is remarkable how closely Barnes as pseudo-historian mirrors
the way traditional historians, according to Barthes, organize
their material in the shape of "lists that are to a certain
extent closed, and therefore accessible to comprehension: in a
word, they can form collections, whose units end up by
repeating themselves, in combinations that are obviously subject
to variation" (12). Barnes's "collection" (or recurrent
units of content) is subject to similar rules of substitution
and transformation as those observed by the historians Barthes
uses as examples. His collection includes the shipwrecked and
the excluded as well as the dominant members of the species, the
storms afflicting everyone adrift in the sea of life, the vessels
we all seek shelter in from such storms and the woodworm eating
away at them from within. Barthes further refines his concept
of the historical collection: "In the case of less well defined
collections the units of content may nonetheless receive a strong
structuring which derives not from the lexicon, but from the personal
thematic of the author" (13). In Barnes's case his collection
includes a deliberate confusion or blurring between dreaming and
waking states, between fictional and historical accounts, and
between monologic and dialogic modes of narration.
This brings us to the question of the problematic status of the
final chapter. It opens and closes with a deliberate attempt to
confuse the distinction between waking and dreaming states: "I
dreamt that I woke up. It's the oldest dream of all, and I've
just had it" (281, 307). Is this late twentieth century version
of the afterlife meant to be seen as the ultimate teleological
delusion entertained by humans throughout their history? Why is
the narrator of this chapter so unimaginative, so banal in the
choices he makes, given the seemingly limitless possibilities
offered him? Among other things, the narrator tells us that he
"fell in love, of course, lots of times" (297) and that,
although "reluctant to criticize [his] dear wife," the
sex he has with his nightly female visitor puts his sexual relations
with his wife distinctly in the shade. How are we as readers to
take this dismissal of a belief in monogamous love that the narrator
of the half chapter considers essential to human survival? Although
it appears hard to read any irony into the half chapter, do the
pedestrian desires and fantasies of the narrator of the final
chapter work to ironize the earlier half chapter?
Turning back to "Parenthesis" one notices one of those
"impertinent connections" (240) that Barnes claims make
up the history of the world: "Trusting virgins were told
that love was [. . .] an ark on which two might escape the Flood."
In Barnes's comment the irony is unmistakable: "It may be
an ark, but one on which anthropophagy is rife; an ark skippered
by some crazy greybeard who beats you round the head with his
gopher-wood stave, and might pitch you overboard at any moment"
(229). Love, the only possible resistance to the lies of history,
is itself cannibalistic and highly unpredictable. Other such connections
in "Parenthesis" catch the eye: love will make you unhappy,
he asserts, either sooner due to incompatibility, "or unhappy
later, when the woodworm has quietly been gnawing away for years
and the bishop's throne collapses" (243).
Does the final chapter, then, thicken this earlier half chapter
by retrospectively casting it in an ironic light that escapes
notice when first reading it? Does the last chapter function as
a kind of textual woodworm, undermining whatever certainties the
earlier half chapter appeared to offer the reader? Is the reader
being taught to live without answers, seeing that all the infallible
answers offered to the narrator by his celestial informant only
serve to leave him unsatisfied? Our dreams of a heaven turn out
to be palliatives, something we need because, as the narrator
learns, we "can't get by without the dream" (307). Past
and future belong to the realm of dreams or of the imagination,
the domain of (narrative) art. In dreaming that he has just woken
up, the narrator of the final chapter parallels the reader who
has been induced by the power of the narrative to believe that
he or she has been experiencing the fragmented actuality of human
history, when all that has been shared is a dream of our past
and our future. . This confusion between dreaming and waking states
is elaborated on at the end of "The Survivor." The reader
has no way of deciding whether Kath is on an island and the men
in her dreams are the dreamers or whether she is in a hospital
and she herself is the dreamer.
If history is a product of collective dreaming, why shouldn't
Barnes dream up his own imagistic version of history? It is quite
productive to see the chapters comprising this book as a series
of images, each asking the spectator/reader to make his own mind
up as to their relative truth-value, while each adds to, thickens
or deepens our understanding of the rest. In one interview Barnes
uses this analogy to justify the fictional or artistic coherence
of the book as a whole. The novel is "perhaps more like a
sequence of paintings on a wall," he suggests, "if you
imagine a series of twelve, six on the top and six on the bottom.
You can get pleasure from each in turn if you want to, but if
you look at them together, then you see that they amount to one
big panel" (Kidder E1). At the same time in "Parenthesis"
Barnes calls those "medieval paintings which show all the
stages of Christ's Passion as happening simultaneously in different
parts of the picture" "a charming, impossible fake,"
a "God-eyed version of what 'really' happened" (243).
Barnes eschews a God-eyed narrative perspective in this book.
The relation between his narrative images or chapters is one of
disjunction, ironic juxtaposition, disparity. He rejects the
traditional assumption that "there is some special dispensation
whereby the signs that constitute an historical text have reference
to events in the world" (Kermode, Genesis 108). His
book celebrates the textuality of history, the narrativity of
historical narration. As Barthes writes, "in 'objective'
history, the 'real' is never more than an unformulated signified,
sheltering behind the apparently all-powerful referent" (17).
Barnes points to a signified by using as signifiers those strange
links and impertinent connections that invite the reader to discover
a coherence in the book as a whole. In reviewing this book Salman
Rushdie claimed that what Barnes was attempting was "the
novel as footnote to history, as subversion of the given [. .
.] fiction as critique" (241). Seen in that light, this book
can be seen to belong to the same genre as Rushdie's novels, fiction
written on and about the margins of life that nevertheless manages
to occupy its center.
Works Cited
Barnes, Julian. A History of the World in 10 1/2 Chapters.
New York: Vintage/Random, 1989.
Barthes, Roland." The Discourse of History" Trans. Stephen
Bann. Comparative Criticism: A Yearbook. Vol. 3. Ed. E.
S. Shaffer. Cambridge UP, 1981.
Baker, Herschel, ed. The Later Renaissance in England: Nondramatic
Verse and Prose, 1600-1660. Prospect Heights, IL: Waveland,
1996.
Cook, Bruce. "The World's History and Then Some in 10 1/2
Chapters."Los Angeles Daily News 7 Nov. 1989: 12.
Dirda, Michael. "Voyages on a Sea of Troubles." Washington
Post 22 Oct 1989: X4.
Gascorek, Andrzy. Post-War British Fiction: Realism and After.
London: Edward Arnold, 1995.
Kermode, Frank. The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory
of Fiction. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1967.
---. The Genesis of Secrecy: On the Interpretation of Narrative.
Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard UP, 1979.
Kidder, Gayle. "The World According to Julian Barnes."
San Diego Union-Tribune 5 Nov. 1989: E-1.
Lentricchia, Frank. After the New Criticism. Chicago: U
of Chicago P, 1980.
McGrath, Patrick. "Interview" (with Julian Barnes).
Bomb 18-21 (1987): 20-23.
Moseley, Merritt. Understanding Julian Barnes. Columbia:
U of South Carolina P, 1997.
Oates, Joyce Carol. Rev. of A History of the World in 10 1/2
Chapters, by Julian Barnes. New York Times Book Review
1 Oct. 1989: 12-13.
Rushdie, Salman. Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism
1981-1991. New York: Viking Penguin, 1991.
Saunders, Kate. "From Flaubert's Parrot to Noah's Woodworm."
Sunday Times (London) 18 June 1989: G8-9.
Stuart, Alexander. "A Talk With Julian Barnes." Los
Angeles Times Book Review 15 Oct 1989: 15.
Copyright 1999 Brian Finney