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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
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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 19 other books (novels, collections of essays) and translations from French and German married, his wife died in 2008 www.julianbarnes.com
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 (2012)
The Man Booker Prize for Fiction 2011 Julian Barnes, The Sense of an Ending
This body of work consistently resists categorization, challenging conventional expectations: the fictions, in particular, are formally 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, dislocation, the quest for authenticity and truth, and the irretrievability of the past. Cristina Sandru and Sean Matthews, 2002 http://www.contemporarywriters.com/authors/?p=auth1
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.’
self-contradiction: ‘Why aren't the books enough? Flaubert wanted them to be: few writers believed more in the objectivity of the written text and the insignificance of the writer's personality; yet still we disobediently pursue.’ ‘The artist must manage to make posterity believe that he never existed.” cf. (post)modern media/publicity • Is there a text without an author? Making friends with authors through their books: illusion? (cf. Polish student with Hrabal in Prague in 1968) Cf. Barthes, New Criticism
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
Words came easily to Flaubert; but he also saw the underlying inadequacy of the Word. Remember his sad definition from Madame Bovary: 'Language is like a cracked kettle on which we beat out tunes for bears to dance to, while all the time we long to move the stars to pity.' [...] Loulou'sinability to do more than repeat at second hand the phrases he hears is an indirect confession of the novelist's own failure. The parrot/writer feebly accepts language as something received, imitative and inert. http://mural.uv.es/aconfer/etext/flaubertparrot.htm
A History of the World in 10 ½ Chapters (1989)Sir Walter Raleigh’s monumentalThe History of the World (1614) • provocative, ironic • Raleigh: comprehensive, providencecf. ‘Historia est magistra vitae’ (Cicero) • Barnes: fragments with motivic connections (leitmotifs): 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 allegorycontrast: anachronistically modern language; deconstructing the myth(ark as death camp) • Chapter 10: ‘The Dream’: contemporary secular 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?’
Chapter 6 ‘The Mountain’19th century: an exhibition of Géricault’s painting and a primitive motion pictureafter death of father daughter to visit a monastery on Ararat (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, MS St. Louis • 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’non-transcendental • 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"
