Julian Barnes And The Problem Of Truth

Julian Barnes and the Postmodern Problem of Truth

Abigail G. Dalton

Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Prerequisite for Honors in English

April 2008

© 2008 Abigail G. Dalton

Table of Contents I: Introduction II: Chasing the Writer in Flaubert‘s Parrot III: Objective Truth in A History of the World in 10 ½ Chapters IV: Memory and Obsession in Talking It Over and Love, Etc.Bibliography 1 21 45 76 93

I: Introduction ―Of course fiction is untrue, but it‘s untrue in a way that ends up telling a greater truth than any other information system – if that‘s what we like to call it – that exists. That always seems to me very straightforward, that you write fiction in order to tell the truth. People find this paradoxical, but it isn‘t.‖1 Julian Barnes is a name that neitheracademics nor recreational readers are very familiar with. As one of the lesser-known authors among his contemporaries, his work is often overlooked before it even receives the benefit of study. Yet Barnes‘s work, ranging from novels with a traditional narrative, to novels that defy convention, to short stories and essays, experiment with themes and forms which prove that he is, ultimately,worthy of study, and an author to whom readers should look with greater seriousness and academic interest. Those who know him are most familiar with his book, Flaubert‘s Parrot, a novel which is neither story nor biography, intertwining the life of Gustave Flaubert with that of the narrator, Geoffrey Braithwaite, a man whose own story becomes just as convoluted and elusive as Flaubert‘s. But thefascinating thing about Barnes is the extent to which his works differ so distinctly from each other, while clearly and consistently maintaining and exploring specific issues again and again. In each of these works, he pursues subjects central to humanity in different – and innovative – literary contexts. Love, for instance, and its elusiveness and contradictions is explored in nearly every work. Truth,similarly, and the problems in its interpretation and representation, its relation to the ―real‖ and the ―fictional‖, remains a constant source of inspiration and confusion for him – at times to a point of obsession.

1

Rudolph Freiburg and Jan Schnitker, eds. ―Do you consider yourself a postmodern author?‖: Interviews with Contemporary English Writers, 54. 1

My own interest in Barnesbegan entirely by accident, while slacking on the job at work at a Barnes & Noble in high school. While stacking the Bs in the literature section, I came across A History of the World in 10 ½ Chapters, and began to read rather than shelve. It was, I think, a wise decision academically if not professionally; and over the years the breadth of Barnes material – including his novels, essays, andinterviews – has sustained my interest. Each book, I‘ve found, attends anew to fundamental questions: why do people look towards literature as a solution to life? How can a novelist portray truth through a form that is inherently fictional? And what, after all, is the relationship between fiction and reality? Has fiction become more real to us than what we actually experience outside of fiction? Dofiction and reality blend? ―Books,‖ he says in Flaubert‘s Parrot, ―are where things are explained to you; life is where things aren‘t.‖2 But in consistently experimenting with the novel form, in raising again and again the problems provoked by explorations of truth, art, the nature of humanity, he proves otherwise – books, his books, can be just as confounding and uncertain as life. Without everproviding clear truths or answers, he elucidates more about the human condition than most readers acknowledge, and proves how essential the study of literature can be to the study of life. In order to understand Barnes‘s novels, we need context. Barnes has often been categorized as a postmodernist, and an exploration of what, exactly, that term contains is a useful point to begin a discussion of how...