adminLovemore Ranga Mataire The Reader
JULIAN Barnes, an English author, is one writer who, like Zimbabwe’s Dambudzo Marechera, is content with de-constructing traditional norms of reasoning as a way of provoking people to go beyond the boundaries. He seems motivated by the notion that art is a means of exposing truth with the artist having a privileged insight into a common sense of what constitutes reality.
Barnes is a writer of stylist vigour endowed with high critical intelligence who has interspersed his serious novels with several sharp, streetwise mystery stories written under the name Dan Kavanagh. His first novel Metroland (1980) is set in Paris of 1968. It is a story of love and sentimental education, which shows the author’s interest in French life, culture and ideas as well as in the lucid novels developed by Gustone Flaubert.
His interest in Gustone Flaubert culminated in the writing of Flaubert’s Parrot (1984), which is half critical text and half human narrative based on the life and artistic impulse of the great 19th century.
The text takes multiple forms in that it is a research, a meditation, an examination paper, a playful later day documentary and touches on Flaubert’s ambitious realism in a typical post-modernist tradition as it plays with the notions of real and fictional, making its own rules and breaking its own history and leaving behind a trail of ambiguity.
In Staring at The Sun (1986), Julian Barnes takes a firmer stance when the narrator says; “This is how it was.” It begins and returns to a crucial question of the impact of a Second World War starting from the airman angle of vision but the realism soon becomes ambiguous for the novel has several time layers including the future as exemplified in The History of the World in 10 and Half Chapters (1989). This book returns to the question of history in its larger stance. The narrator thus says: “History is just voices echoing in the dark, images that burn for a few centuries seem to overlap; strange leaps unrepentant connections.”
Barnes plays with the limits of fiction and the borders of reportage. The laying and mixing of styles especially in the story of Noah’s Ark in The History of the World in 10 and Half Chapters, which is narrated from the woodworm’s point of view. The woodworm uses a soft-mocking tone which nevertheless chides human beings for being naïve to believe what it calls “nursery versions in painted wood.” He likens the story of Noah in the Bible to childhood fable like Sunday school stories. In a way, the narrator says the sanitised Noah’s story is meant to entertain little minds not grown-ups more sophisticated in understanding history.
“Don’t imagine some Mediterranean cruise on which we played languorous roulette and everyone dressed for dinner; on the Ark only penguins wore tailcoats.” The iconoclastic witty tone is devastating because it belittles and demeans our conception as it suggests that we have again been trapped in our childlike fantasy and rosy perception of recording history. Our concept of seeing the voyage as a smooth one is being caricaturised by the description of the penguins as the only animals that looked luxurious.
The woodworm reminds the reader that “this was a dangerous voyage, lest we cling to our ‘nursery version.’ It taunts the reader’s beliefs in a pre-destined and an omniscient, all-knowing God who creates humankind, schedules in sin and how the flood is handled.
The woodworm tells us that human beings are capable of sin and parodies. All are tied by obscure connections to the Ark, together by metaphoric or mythical rather than conventional narrative associations. The narrator reflects on the randomness of history, the confusion of its deposits and calls for “the need for love”, love of different voices of lovers that provide the triangular structure Taking it Over (1991), a story of sexual threesome, which is as one of the characters says “my word against everyone” as exemplified by Barnes’ other book, The Porcupine (1993), which is one of the early novels to address the European world after the coming down of the Berlin Wall. It is the trial of an East European leader, a dispute about history, a struggle for contemporary fiction, a novel for the 90s. Barnes’ fiction is intensely clever, written by someone self-conscious of a style appropriate to his time.
It is in The History of the World in 10 and Half Chapters that Barnes shows his astuteness. The narration is a subversion of the given order to usher in new realities as indicated by the questioning of Noah’s righteousness. Although the Bible tells us that Noah was a blameless man, the woodworm contradicts this by saying Noah was “an old rogue with a drink problem.”
Although the narrator (the woodworm) begins the narrative in the form of a biblical chronicle in a way that almost resembles the Bible’s own version of Noah’s history, it soon subverts the presumed straightforwardness of the history chronicle itself and adds what would seem to be overlooked material or the material that the official version seems to take for granted.
Online Reporter