Introduction Part I Preface

Notes Introduction 1. Since 1820 Argentina had claimed the Falkland Islands which lay some 300 miles east of the Argentine coast in the Atlantic. They became a British dependency after being seized by Britain in 1833. In April 1982 the Argentine military junta under General Galtieri invaded and occupied the islands. Margaret Thatcher sent a British task force to recapture the islands. By June the British force had retaken the islands. A thousand British and Argentine troops died fighting over the right of eighteen hundred inhabitants to continue living there under British protection. The out- come ensured the reelection of Mrs Thatcher and her Conservative party in 1983 and the resignation of General Galtieri followed by the restoration of democracy to Argentina. 2. Jean-François Lyotard published La condition postmoderne in 1979, translated by Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi as The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (U of Minnesota P, 1984). In it he argued that “general human emanci- pation” could not be achieved through the grand narratives originating with the Enlightenment. They had been invoked to justify the Soviet gulags and the Holocaust. Allegiance to a universal narrative or standard entails hostility to and violence against those who differ from it. Lyotard therefore championed a respect for diversity, for local differences, and for petits rather than for grands récits (small rather than grand narratives). 3. Had I had more space, I would have included in this book three more chapters on Renegade or Halo2 (1999) by Timothy Mo and White Teeth by Zadie Smith in the second section, and on Great Apes (1997) by Will Self in the third section. I will make available the essays on Self and Mo on my web site at: http://www.csulb.edu/ ~bhfinney, and intend to publish an essay on Smith in a scholarly journal. 4. Émile Henriot coined the term nouveau roman (meaning literally new novel) in an article in Le Monde on May 22, 1957 to describe a group of French writers who sur- faced in the 1950s and who experimented with a new style in each new novel. The authors included Michel Butor, Marguerite Duras, Robert Pinget, Alain Robbe- Grillet, Nathalie Sarraute, Claude Simon, and Phillipe Sollers. In Pour un nouveau roman [For a New Novel] (1963) Robbe-Grillet argues that the traditional novel cre- ates an illusion of order and significance which fails to correspond to the radical- ly discontinuous nature of modern experience. The aim of the nouveau roman is to avoid offering any determinate meaning, placing the reader as the arbiter of meaning and significance. Part I Preface 1. Scanlan is quoting here from Hans Vilmar Geppert, Der “andere” historische Roman: Theorie und Strukturen einer diskontinuierlichen Gattung (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer, 1976): 1. 205 206 Notes 1 Peter Ackroyd: Chatterton (1987) 1. In his book of that name, Bloom claims that among poets “the anxiety of influence is strongest where poetry is most lyrical, most subjective, and stemming directly from the personality” (62). Bloom sees the strong poet in precisely the terms that Ackroyd condemned in Notes. The strong poet’s “Word, his imaginative identity, his whole being,” according to Bloom, “must be unique to him, and remain unique, or he will perish as a poet” (71). To create a space for his or her own uniqueness, Bloom argues, each new writer is forced to misread his literary for- bears, to deny his or her indebtedness to the past. See Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry (New York: Oxford UP, 1973). 2. Susana Onega comments in a footnote that Chapter 8 of Betrayals narrates “a com- plex game of appropriations . that is strongly reminiscent of Harriet Scrope’s and Harrison Bentley’s appropriation of Ackroyd’s plots and titles.” See also Susana Onega, “Textual Selves/Worlds and the Treacherous Nature of Writing: A Misreading of Charles Palliser’s Betrayals,” Alfinge 9: 317–32. 3. See Patrick McGrath, “Peter Ackroyd,” interview with Patrick McGrath, Bomb 26 (1988–89): 45. In the same interview Ackroyd claims to have pillaged Dyer’s voice in Hawksmoor from some three hundred books from the eighteenth century that he had read in the British Museum: “He doesn’t really exist as a character—he’s just a little patchwork figure, like his author” (44). 4. I am partly indebted to a passage in Gibson and Worsley’s Peter Ackroyd: The Ludic and Labyrinthine Text (2000), pp. 132–34 for the discussion of the role death plays in Chatterton and for Derrida’s connection of the trace with absence and death. 2 Julian Barnes: A History of the World in 10 1/2 Chapters (1989) 1. The Whig version of history is epitomized by Thomas Macaulay’s History of England from the Accession of James II (1849, 1855, 1861). He interprets British history as the gradual and inevitable triumph of the Whig party’s views on the supremacy of par- liamentary power over the Crown’s desire for autocratic rule. The phrase was coined by the British historian Herbert Butterfield in The Whig Interpretation of History (1931). 2. Leopold von Ranke (1795–1886) His first book, History of the Latin and Teutonic Nations, 1494–1514 (1824), included an appended section, “Critique of Modern Historical Writing,” in which he proposed to reconstruct the past as it actually was and to avoid interpreting the history of former times in the light of the present. This form of historiography is called historicism. As a historian, Ranke attempted to discount the bias of contemporary theories and by strictly adhering to primary sources to give a straight account of the facts. Because he considered that political power was the principal agent in history, he produced political histories that focused on the deeds of kings and leaders. 3. In an “Author’s Note” at the end of the novel Barnes states that this chapter “is based on legal procedures and actual cases described in The Criminal Prosecution and Capital Punishment of Animals by E. P. Evans (1906).” Published by William Heinemann in London, Evans’s book on inspection contains no reference to a case at Besançon. It does describe the legal career of one of the most successful defend- ers of animals in sixteenth century France, Bartholomew Chassenée, who made his reputation as a jurist defending rats in the ecclesiastical court of Autun. Chassenée is the only participant in Barnes’s fictional court case to be named. Evans’s book Notes 207 also cites a case from the seventeenth century in which Franciscan friars in Brazil prosecuted termites in ecclesiastical court and threatened them with excommuni- cation. The book also contains a large number of appendices reproducing original documents in Latin and French from legal proceedings against animals. 4. I assume that Michael Dirda has in mind the episode, “A Nice Place to Visit” (orig- inally aired 4/15/1960), in which, while committing a crime, Valentine, a cheap hood played by Larry Blyden, gets killed and finds himself in an afterlife in which all wishes are granted. He is attended by Pip, a helper played by Sebastion Cabot. But heaven turns out to be the other place. 5. Michiko Kakutani called it “a ‘novel’ that reads like a hodgepodge of non sequiturs.” (“A Cast of Characters Afloat on History’s Indifferent Sea,” New York Times 29 Sep. 1989, late ed.: C 33). Joyce Carol Oates called it “a collection of prose pieces.” (“But Noah Was Not a Nice Man,” New York Times Book Review 1 Oct. 1989: 12) Mark Lawson calls the author of A History “a brilliant essayist.” (“A Short History of Julian Barnes,” Independent Magazine 13 July 1991: 36) On the other hand Robert Adams sees it as “a novel in deep disguise” (New York Review of Books 26 Oct. 1989: 7), and Michael Wood declared, “Barnes is not an essayist who writes novels, but a novelist who uses his imagination as an instrument of thought” (Times Literary Supplement 30 June–6 July 1989: 713). 3 Martin Amis: Time’s Arrow or, the Nature of the Offense (1991) 1. In an interview in 2002 Amis said of postmodernism, “I always thought it was kind of a dead end, as it’s proved to be, but I thought there were comic possibilities in postmodernism that I hadn’t exploited much.” He adds that postmodernism is now played out, although it is “a theory or an idea with tremendous predictive power, because life became very postmodern, politics became postmodern” (Reynolds and Noakes 16–17). 2. As has been frequently pointed out, there are other precedents for narratives that have been told backwards. James Diedrick lists the following: Lewis Carrol’s Sylvie and Bruno and the White Queen’s claim to live backwards in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland; Jean Cocteau’s Le Testament d’Orphée; Brian Aldiss’s An Age; Philip K. Dick’s Counter-Clock World; F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button”; and J. G. Ballard’s “Mr F is Mr F” (264–65). There are also Alejo Carpentier’s Viaje a la Semilla, Carlos Fuentes’ Aura, and Harold Pinter’s play, Betrayal. In the Afterword Amis also refers to “Jachid and Jechidah,” a story by Isaac Bashevis Singer in which an angel is sentenced to death and begins with her descent “to that cemetery called Earth.” Short Friday and Other Stories (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1964): 82. 3. The novel perversely reverses A.S. Eddington’s image of the second law of thermo- dynamics (imaged as time’s arrow) thereby seemingly defeating the force of entropy that characterizes the movement of history.

Load more