Masaryk University Faculty of Arts

Department of English and American Studies

Teaching English Language and Literature for Secondary Schools

Bc. Radek Nikl

The Concept of Memory in Selected Works by Julian Barnes

Master’s Diploma Thesis

Supervisor: Stephen Paul Hardy, Ph. D.

2015

I declare that I have worked on this thesis independently, using only the primary and secondary sources listed in the bibliography.

…………………………………………….. Author‘s signature

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Acknowledgement I would like to thank my supervisor, Mr Stephen Paul Hardy, PhD. for his patient guidance and to Mr James Edward Thomas for advice in the area of corpora linguistics.

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Table of Contents 1. Introduction 5 1.1 Main Secondary Sources 6 2. Julian Barnes 8 2.1 Biography 8 2.2 Julian Barnes in Literary Criticism 9 2.3 Recurrent Themes 12 3. History in A History of the World in 10 ½ Chapters 17 3.1 Analysis 17 3.2 Chapter Summaries with Examples and Commentaries 18 4. Historiographic Fiction in Arthur & George 36 4.1 Plot Summary 36 4.2 Analysis 37 4.3 Examples with Commentaries 40 5. Memory in The Sense of an Ending 47 5.1 Plot Summary 47 5.2 Analysis 48 5.3 Examples with Commentaries 50 6. Lexical Field of Memory/History in Individual Works 63 7. Conclusion 72 8. Works Cited and Consulted 75 9. Résumé 77

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1. Introduction For my master‘s thesis I have decided to research the concept of memory in three selected works by Julian Barnes. Memory has been a prominent motif in Barnes‘ novels, be it in the form of a satirical account of the history of the world, as was the case of A History of the World in 10 ½ Chapters, or through the personal histories of main protagonists, where biographical facts and fiction indiscernibly blend – as was the case of the novel Arthur &

George. The third case is a short self-reflective novel with autobiographical elements The

Sense of an Ending, dealing mostly with failing memories of an aging main character.

In my thesis I explore the different ways in which Barnes uses the concept of memory in the three selected novels. This will be done through analysis of individual novels drawing from philosophy, contemporary literary criticism and from cognitive psychology. As the selected novels were written over the span of two decades, they will be analysed chronologically and special attention will be given to the way Barnes deals with the concept of memory and how it developed over time. One of my earliest hypotheses is that Barnes has gradually become more subjective, treating memory less in a general, objective way (as history) and has instead started looking at it from the humbler perspective of an individual human being.

Additionally, I will use data extracted from the corpora of the three Barnes‘ novels to illustrate the relative distribution of the lexical fields of memory and history and to support my hypothesis with measurable data.

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1.1 Main Secondary Sources

The literary analyses presented in the thesis draw mainly from The Fiction of Julian Barnes by Vanessa Guignery‘s, Julian Barnes: Contemporary Critical Perspectives by Sebastian Groes and

Peter Childs, Understanding Julian Barnes by Merritt Moseley and Julian Barnes (Contemporary

British Novelists) by Peter Childs. All these authors are renowned scholars who publish regularly on contemporary literary works.

The third selected book, The Sense of an Ending is relatively new – it was published in

2011 – and as such very little scholarly literary criticism on it is available to date. Since the novel is rather self-reflective and partly owes its existence to the qualities of human memory, it will be analysed predominantly within a psychological framework. Most observations will draw from psychological perspectives as they are presented in Daniel

Schacter‘s Seven Sins of Memory.

In his book, Daniel Schacter, a professor of psychology at Harvard University classified the most frequent errors of human memory into seven categories, analogically to the biblical seven sins. He divided them into two categories, sins of omission (failure to recall) and sins of commission (memory is present, but the fidelity is questionable). The first category comprises transience – general deterioration of memory over time, absent- mindedness – having to do with encoding and attention, blocking – often caused by interference of other memories and also includes the tip-of-the-tongue phenomenon. The sins of commission include misattribution – correct recollection, but incorrect source, suggestibility – acceptance of a false suggestion made by others, bias – one‘s current feelings and opinions distort the past memories, and finally persistence – an undesired and disturbing recollection of memories.

The terms for individual types of memory as they are currently used by psychologists were consulted with a seminal textbook on general psychology by Palacký University in

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Olomouc professor Alena Plháková, Učebnice obecné psychologie. The majority of issues discussed further deal with long-term memory and particularly the episodic memory, which is the one responsible for storing and recalling information about specific events.

Embedded in it is the information about what, when and where. The term semantic memory will also be used, which refers to the type of memory that helps people store facts.

Semantic memory issues consist of remembering the fact, but missing the information about when, where and how it was learned.

When addressing philosophical issues of memory or history, Paul Ricoeur‘s comprehensive book Memory, History and Forgetting will be referred to. His hermeneutical analysis of memory explores many issues pertaining to memory and manages to reconcile the unresolvable conflicts or aporias, for instance the one between memory and imagination. He provides many deep insights into the realms of individual, collective and historical memory and discusses a great many thinkers of the past who addressed the issue of memory themselves. These range from the ancient Greek philosophers of Plato and

Aristotle, up to the much more contemporary Friedrich Nietzsche, Sigmund Freud and

Henri Bergson. Among other topics, Ricoeur describes the three levels of historical discourse: the documentary level, the level of explanation/understanding and the level of literary representation of the past (Ricoeur 185). One point of special interest for the subject of this thesis will be Ricoeur‘s ideas on the contrast between history and fiction.

Finally, in the part illustrating the effort to utilize corpora linguistics as a support method which either proves or disproves the initial hypothesis, lexical terms will be explained using Howard Jackson‘s Lexicography: An Introduction. Professor Howard Jackson is a visiting lecturer at Birmingham City University and has written profusely on grammar, vocabulary and lexicography.

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2. Julian Barnes

The aim of this chapter is to introduce the writer Julian Barnes through his biographical data and through an exploration of what contemporary literary critics have to say about him. Before narrowing focus to the concept of memory, a brief consideration of his most utilized literary techniques and the most frequent topics in his books can provide a wider context for Barnes‘ ideas.

2.1 Biography

Julian Barnes was born in Leicester, England on January 19, 1946 to a family of teachers of French. He has an older brother who teaches philosophy in Sorbonne, France.

Barnes graduated (with honours) from Magdalen College, Oxford in 1968; he majored in modern languages (French and Russian). For three years after his graduation he worked as a lexicographer for the Oxford English Dictionary supplement. Then he read for the bar and qualified as a barrister in 1974. However, he never practised law, as writing appealed to him much more. Later he worked as a reviewer and literary editor for the New Statesmen and the

New Review (1977). Between 1979 and 1986 he worked as a television critic for the New

Statesmen and later for the Observer.

Barnes has received several awards for his literary achievements. Apart from many others, he was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize three times before he finally succeeded with his 2011 novel The Sense of an Ending.

His writing, covering, among other topics, parallels between English and French culture brought him a very rare honour from France - he was made a Chevalier de l'Ordre des

Arts et des Lettres in 1988, an Officier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in 1995 and a Commandeur de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in 2004.

Barnes has written a number of novels (eleven to date), short stories, and essays. Some of his works were published under the pseudonym of Dan Kavanagh (detective stories).

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Furthermore, he translated a book by the French author Alphonse Daudet and a collection of German cartoons by Volker Kriegel.

2.2 Julian Barnes in Literary Criticism

In 1992, Julian Barnes was nicknamed a ‗chameleon novelist‘ in the Books section of the New York Times on the Web by Mira Stout, after he continued to surprise readers with new writing styles and techniques. It was argued that each book lent plenty of room for reviewers‘ doubts on whether this time he had written a proper novel or not. Barnes constantly strives to push the borders of the genre of the novel further. In an interview, he provided his reasons for doing so: ‗In order to write, you have to convince yourself that it's a new departure for you and not only a new departure for you but for the entire history of the novel.‘ (Childs, 7).

Barnes is also an essayist and short-story writer, both of which have a marked influence on his novels (e.g. the chapter ―Shipwreck‖ of A History of the World in 10 1/2 Chapters being an essay on art criticism). Many of the elements present in his books could be labelled ‗post-modernist‘, which some critics believe is conflation (Groes, Childs 24). One of the key components of Barnes‘ work is his effort to challenge established readings of the past and conventional social categories. The canonized history is questioned and subverted, and through multifocalization Barnes offers various accounts of history. Other ‗post- modernist‘ components would be: multiple narrators even within a single novel, disrupted chronology, a fragmented storyline related by themes and motifs and self-reflexive writing

(all present in A History of the World in 10 1/2 Chapters). No less important is Barnes‘ habit of interspersing fiction with historical facts – labelled 'historiographic metafiction' by Linda

Hutcheon (Groes, Childs 144) – thus creating an account with blurred borders between fabulation and history.

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Barnes claims his novels start with life and not with an intellectual grid (Smith qtd. in

Moseley 10). This could be observed not only in his novels and other writing, but also in his interviews. In them, he purports his own affinity for making an argument through real- life examples, speaking about personal experiences or citing trustworthy sources. In one of his recent interviews (www.youtube.com), he recalls the significant differences between his and his brother‘s recollections of how their grandfather used to kill chickens. He explores the nature of memory in that neither account is more veritable than the other, yet both are equally vivid, underlining the acutely subjective and untrustworthy nature of memory. Such anecdotes frequently serve as building blocks or even cornerstones in his novels. They could be autobiographical, as it was in The Sense of an Ending, where one of the key characters, who readers only meet through memories of the main protagonists, is based on a person Julian Barnes had known in his youth (www.youtube.com). Or the story is biographical and draws from historical facts to such a degree that it is impossible for non- experts to discern between the fiction and historical events (Arthur & George). The novel revolves around two historical personalities, out of which one is Arthur Conan Doyle. In fact, A. C. Doyle‘s biographer Andrew Lycett gave an opinion on the book and mentioned some minor flaws in Barnes‘ extensive research. The biographer must have been impressed, as he pondered whether it was apropos that the book had entered the Booker

Prize contest in the category of fiction (Groes, Childs, 9).

One of the metaphors Barnes uses is that of a fishing net. He likens it to a web of string for catching fish, while it can also be seen as a collection of holes tied together

(Barnes 1984: 38 qtd. in Childs, Groes 9). When this concept is applied to Barnes‘ writing, the stories shift from being understood as a collection of bits of information, but instead as a string of words. The resulting net connects the information gaps, the untold, omitted, unclear things, perhaps to be revealed or clarified later in the novel.

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In terms of literary inspiration, Barnes expressed his idea on literature and a writing process that shares a lot with his favourite French author, Gustave Flaubert (Childs 1):

In an ideal world, a novelist - me, for instance - would write a book, readers would become aware of it by word of mouth, and, after reading it, they would send a small donation to the writer at a secret address, these donations adding up to enough to keep the writer alive. No publishers, no reviewing, no profiles, just the purest contact between reader and book, and the fullest ignorance about the writer... Only the words should count.'

In striving for this immediacy, this unaffected and unobstructed path between the words in his books and the readers, Barnes‘ consequently asserts a lack of interest in the theories and criticism surrounding his writing. Yet, what is he trying to achieve? Peter Childs believes Barnes appreciates an objectivity in art as it signals a purity of aesthetic approach, which was also something Flaubert sought. But as Childs points out, Barnes affords himself to be quite subjective in his books at some points and it seems he is not necessarily looking for objectivity, but rather for something close to the truth (Childs 1). He certainly does that in A History of the World in 10 ½ Chapters, in the half chapter called the

―Parenthesis‖, to be dealt with later.

Barnes‘ preference for staying anonymous, not revealing who the author‘s personality belongs to might also attest to his wish not to be judged and compared based on his previous works. He has a justified, though unrealistic, wish for his new books to be evaluated as they are. It is the writing, the words that matter, not the author and his oeuvre.

There is other evidence supporting the idea of Barnes‘ yearning for anonymity and that is his pseudonym Dan Kavanagh. Why did Barnes hide under a pseudonym? He wrote four crime novels under this name that were published in the 1980s. At that time he did not know what career he would pursue, be it a literary novelist, crime writer, journalist or an editor. It is nevertheless possible that Barnes wanted to keep his hero, an unorthodox bi- sexual detective Duffy, safe in a separate world, sealed from his higher literary ambitions. It is of course possible readers and critics would look differently on an attempt at ambitious

11 experimental prose made by somebody who had previously written detective stories.

However, Peter Childs claims: ‗The Duffy books are well-plotted, quickly written vernacular novels in a popular genre that could have occupied Barnes if he had not had success as a different kind of author.‘ (Childs 4) Apart from Duffy, Barnes inhabited another alter ego, that of Basil Seal, Tatler‘s restaurant critic.

2.3 Recurrent Themes

Barnes the Francophile

The choice of topics in his writing, his frequent visits to France and his open love for all things French – all these undoubtedly make Barnes a Francophile. The old rivalry between the English and the French has never completely died out, despite the fact that French has had a huge influence on the development of modern English as it is known today, and both cultures have been mutually enriching each other for centuries. It is ironic that the author who is sometimes overlooked in his motherland for being too French is seen as a quintessentially English author in France (Childs, Groes 6). It comes as no surprise that a person whose parents were both school teachers of French and who took him on his first trip to France at the age of 13, to be followed by numerous summer holidays spent touring France with his parents (Guignery 2), grew up to become a Francophile. In 1966

Barnes taught English at a catholic school in Rennes, where he became acquainted with

Francophone popular cultures.

Although Barnes then studied French (and Russian) at college, in his Something to Declare he admits he started seeing France on his own, without the academic and the parental influence as late as in his thirties, when his adolescent revolt against his parents‘ love for

France had died out. Barnes says he originally gave up languages to study philosophy, but realized he was ‗ill-equipped for it, and returned reluctantly to French…‘ (Groes, Childs

118). Unlike his brother Jonathan who bought a house in Creuse, Julian never did so,

12 which encouraged him to travel to different parts of France on holiday and explore the country. He became a connoisseur of French wine and foods which surely reflected in his later job as a food critic. The France Barnes loves is not the one of cities, but rather the under-populated and regional countryside. He admits being partial in his fondness of

France – he came to know the country mainly through literature, the one year he spent there (teaching) and his frequent visits as a tourist (Groes, Childs 39).

Barnes sees himself as 'an English Francophile' (Groes, Childs 37) as he says: '[France] is my other country. There is something about it – its history, its landscape – that obviously sparks my imagination' (Swanson 1996 qtd. in Groes, Childs 37). We can observe this passion for France, its language and its culture in many of Barnes‘ books, especially in

Metroland (1980), Flaubert's Parrot (1984), Talking It Over (1991), Cross Channel (1996), Love, etc.

(2001), Something to Declare (2002) and Nothing To Be Frightened Of (2008). According to Peter

Childs, his love for anything French also reflects in his various essays, reviews and notebooks. His work ‗…is teeming with references or allusions to French culture, their presence justified by the topics and contexts of these books, as well as by the personality of their fictional characters.‘ (Groes, Childs 37). Such an assessment may beg many questions regarding Barnes‘ being so deeply rooted in the French literary (especially the nineteenth century) tradition. The foremost of these questions is whether he has absorbed his French literary models and predecessors and still managed to avoid copying them or writing in their shadow.

The Topic of Love

Another topic prevalent in Barnes‘ writing is love. In his book on Barnes, Merritt

Moseley claims each of Barnes‘ novels

‗is about love in some central if not exclusive way. It is indirect and oblique in Flaubert's Parrot, disturbed and painful in Before She Met Me,

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evanescent in Staring at the Sun, complicated by ambition and duty in The Porcupine, but it is there always.‘ (Moseley 12)

The titles Talking It Over, Love etc. and The Sense of an Ending could be easily added to this group and although it is not a central element in Arthur & George, love and relationships have their place in the book, as well. Barnes‘ Before She Met Me (1982), for example, was in

Moseley‘s words ―a short but intense, funny but terrifying study of love and over-mastering jealousy‖ (Moseley 6). Love is not always depicted as a noble feeling in Barnes‘ books.

Moseley notices that apart from the interest in marriage, there is the subject of infidelity and adultery, even cuckoldry. It is true that in Barnes‘ earlier novels the male protagonists

―are often the ‗victims‘ of their wives' infidelity‖ (Moseley 13). Despite the omnipresent humorous tone of his writing, Barnes is well aware of the fact that love often goes wrong, as he has had a bitter experience himself, when his wife temporarily left him in the 1980s for another lover, author Jeanette Winterson (www.wikipedia.org).

There is one place in Barnes‘ books where he specifically addresses the topic of love, and does it in a contemplative, philosophical and essayistic manner. It is the half-chapter of

A History of the World in 10 ½ Chapters called ―Parenthesis‖. The semi-chapter intentionally stands out from the rest of the chapters, as the author adopts not only the subjective voice of the novel‘s narrator, but his own – the voice of Julian Barnes. He does so in order to philosophically defend love. Vanessa Guignery mentions an interview with Michael

Ignatieff, in which Barnes was asked about the autobiographical nature of ―Parenthesis‖.

He pleaded guilty, admitting it was completely autobiographical (Guignery 59). After several not clearly or visibly related chapters, Barnes sets all the fragments of his story- telling aside for a moment and speaks directly, sharing with readers his thoughts in an intimate moment while lying in bed at night next to his sleeping wife. Guignery believes

Barnes‘ refers to El Greco‘s painting 'Burial of the Count of Orgaz' (1586—88), because he wants to show an analogy between him and the painter (Guignery 59). The painting is

14 famous for the fact that one of the mourners is looking outside the scene, right into the

‗camera‘, into the eyes of those who look at the painting. This unconcerned mourner is supposed to be the painter himself. In ―Parenthesis‖, one can observe how Barnes steps back from telling his story, takes a break, checks on reality and realizes what things in life are important. ―Parenthesis‖ feels like a musical intermezzo, although in opera it is used to lighten up the atmosphere after a serious main part, whereas the earnest and serious tone here gives evidence of the contrary.

Barnes goes on to meditate over the qualities of love. Andrew Tate notes how

―Parenthesis‖ depicts ‗a kind of pastiche of St. Paul's trinity of faith, hope and love in 1

Corinthians 13 - and offers a robust defence of love‘ (Groes, Childs 61). Barnes has made an analogy of love and faith here, using the words of an early Christian author: 'Tertullian said of Christian belief that it was true because it was impossible. Perhaps love is essential because it's unnecessary' (Barnes 1990: 236). He further claims: ‗If we look at the history of the world, it seems surprising that love is included. It‘s an excrescence, a monstrosity, some tardy addition to the agenda.‘ Judging from other Barnes‘ novels dealing with love, often in the form of a love triangle, love at least complicates matters. Barnes argues that love is people‘s chance for transcendence, since without love ―the history of the world becomes brutally self-important‖. Perhaps what he hints at is also that the needlessness of love manifests a man‘s free will. People might be victims of history, but at least they can freely decide whether to love and who to love. Barnes adds: ―Of course, we don‘t fall in love to help out with the world‘s ego problem; yet this is one of love‘s surer effects.‖ (Barnes 1990:

201) Here the author might refer to the very fundamental level of how love operates. When one truly loves somebody or even something, one tends to shift the focal point of one‘s being from selfishly considering only one‘s own interest to incorporating the needs and wishes of the beloved other. Love is a perfect cure for realizing it is not all about ourselves.

Barnes further expounds that since religion gets corrupted and not everybody can do or

15 even perceive art, ―religion and art must yield to love‖ (Barnes 1990: 244). It seems that as personal and form-changing as love might be, it is the most universal force of the trio.

Despite all the credit given to love in ―Parenthesis‖, the author admits that love will eventually also fail us. People should nevertheless go on believing in it. In Barnes‘ claim that love 'represents the closest we may come to truth' one can see how he identifies the ego, after being solved in empathy and sympathy with truth, which may be seen as transcendence. At the same time, Barnes is aware of the uncertainties and does not want to identify with those who use rational thinking to ―bolster power or to alienate' (Childs

2009:128 qtd. in Groes, Childs 62). Here an opposition between heart and reason is implicit, as love leads to transcendence, whereas the excess of reason at the expense of empathy leads to egocentrism. Andrew Tate also believes that for Barnes love presents ―a necessary mode of resistance to the oppressive forces of history‖ (Groes, Childs 6).

Barnes is not afraid of writing about topics that have been written on profusely, such as love, carnality and sexuality, but chooses to conceive them newly and often in the context of a humorous investigation (Groes, Childs 4). Furthermore, Barnes‘ sources of inspiration are frequently revealed by the protagonists of his novels. In Metroland for instance, one of the characters regularly quotes French eighteenth-century moralist Chamfort, specifically with regards to love. Questions of morality are certainly not unfamiliar concepts to Barnes.

In ―The Revival‖, a story from the collection The Lemon Table (2005), he asks 'whether the heart drags in sex, or sex drags in the heart' (Barnes 2005: 94 qtd. in Groes, Childs 104).

Ultimately it could be said that although Barnes promotes love as a transcendental force fighting against ego and resisting the forces of history, he also explores relationship pitfalls, love‘s unpleasant surprises and its inevitable expiration. As he put it in his ―Parenthesis‖ with a pinch of irony so trademark of him, back-referring to the initial chapter called ―The

Flood‖:

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Trusting virgins were told that love was the promised land, an ark on which two might escape the Flood. 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.

3. History in A History of the World in 10 ½ Chapters 3.1 Analysis

The book was published in 1989, as Barnes‘ fifth novel and was compared to Flaubert’s

Parrot, the most successful novel of his until then. As the author admits, his original idea was to take the main protagonist of Flaubert’s Parrot’s George Braithwaite and let him be the voice of Guide to the Bible. This bible would be adjusted to modern use and thus ridden of boring parts and written by an ―agnostic sceptic rationalist‖ (Guignery 61). Although

Barnes dropped the idea, he partially used it in writing the first chapter of A History of the

World in 10 ½ Chapters, which deals with the biblical deluge and its aftermath, as seen by a rather improbable passenger on the Ark – a woodworm.

In terms of form and structure, A History of the World in 10 1/2 Chapters is a novel comprising of ten full chapters and one semi-chapter called ―Parenthesis‖. At first glance, the ten chapters seem quite random, presenting various scenes from history that are told by a range of highly heterogeneous narrators. The chronology is disrupted and the book lacks a unifying plot. This, together with the fact that some chapters had been published separately in the New Yorker, was the reason why some critics refused to look at it as a novel, but rather referred to it as a collection of short stories (Guignery 61). However, the author himself asserts forcefully that it is a novel, as it has been conceived and written as a whole (Guignery 62) and it contains motifs which reappear throughout the book (ships, sea, objective truth, woodworm, catastrophes). The novel could be seen as a juxtaposed puzzle of stories and motifs that tend to make more sense as the reader advances through its chapters.

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The very title suggests the rather contradictory idea of the book‘s nature. It is mostly the contrast between the indefinite article, suggesting there is not one account of history but many, and the lengthy and ambitious rest of the title, by which Barnes most probably refers to The History of the World by Sir Walter Raleigh that also starts with Genesis, as was pointed out by Brian Finney in his essay. Nevertheless, by providing the number of chapters in the title of the book, Barnes indirectly undermines the majestic intention of putting the whole of human history into a book of only a few chapters and about 300 pages long. It becomes clear from the first chapter, ―The Stowaway‖, that the author‘s intention is not to give the reader a polished, carefully selected, well-arranged and completely objective account of history. On the contrary, Barnes strives to upend the notion of history as something well known, fixed, given and ultimate and to wake the readers to their realizing each history is dependent on its writer. The historian has his or her final say in the matters of what facts to include and which could or should be omitted, as well as in the choice of the form in which the history is presented. (Ricoeur 185)

3.2 Chapter Summaries and Examples and Commentaries In order to analyse the concept of memory, several extracts will be analysed, especially parts containing the word history, as it is the prevalent form memory took in the novel.

“The Stowaway”

The chapter humorously pretends to be an apocryphal account of the Deluge and presents an account meant to correct people‘s knowledge. Despite the fact that more scientifically oriented readers would not take the story of the biblical flood as an account of human history, it surely is a perfect example of a ―history‖ that is well known even among non-believers, and moreover represents a part of western cultural heritage. Barnes takes something established, canonized and to some even sacred and provides a ―true‖ version.

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The identity of the narrator is not to be revealed until much later, but it is mentioned at the beginning that he belonged to the species that had not actually been chosen to be saved on the Ark.

By choosing a woodworm as the narrator of the story, Barnes achieves several things.

First of all, he decentralizes the story. It is not Noah‘s perspective or some omnipresent voice serving as a witness to the events, and is instead the perspective of a seemingly minor character who represents a species that is unimportant or perhaps even dangerous to the success of the mission. The minor character, a vermin, a parasite, serves as the furthest possible counterpart to the noble Noah to whom God himself entrusted the great task of saving humanity and animal species. The woodworm sets himself apart from both the humans and the rest of the animal species and claims his account of events could be trusted, as he has no sense of obligation or feelings of loyalty towards Noah, who had no intention of saving his species.

Now, I realize that accounts differ. Your species has its much repeated version, which still charms even sceptics; while the animals have a compendium of sentimental myths. But they‘re not going to rock the boat, are they? Not when they‘ve been treated as heroes, not when it‘s become a matter of pride that each and every one of them can proudly trace its family tree straight back to the Ark. They were chosen, they endured, they survived: it‘s normal for them to gloss over the awkward episodes, to have convenient lapses of memory. But I am not constrained in that way. I was never chosen. In fact, like several other species, I was specifically not chosen. I was a stowaway; I too survived; I escaped (getting off was no easier than getting on); and I have flourished. I am a little set apart from the rest of animal society, which still has its nostalgic reunions: there is even a Sealegs Club for species which never once felt queasy. When I recall the Voyage, I feel no sense of obligation; gratitude puts no smear of Vaseline on the lens. My account you can trust.

Here the biblical story is not just another story, but is a history that really happened. The narrator nevertheless admits the account might have become distorted over time. This is a clear hint for the reader to expect an unreliable narrator. The woodworm‘s role is to amend the biblical story (people‘s version) or supplement some important missing information.

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Through the voice of the main hero, Barnes makes several observations about history.

For instance, he is saying that the individuals or societies to whom certain historical developments have been favourable tend to forget unpleasant details about their experience, as they suppress the memory of them. The narrator conversely claims he has no reason for having a lenient look at past events, and feels no gratitude to Noah as the woodworms saved themselves without anybody‘s help. The implication here is the narrator has no reason to lie and will recount the events as they truly happened.

There were times when Noah and his sons got quite hysterical. That doesn‘t tally with your account of things? You‘ve always been led to believe that Noah was sage, righteous and God-fearing, and I‘ve already described him as a hysterical rogue with a drink problem?

The existence of multiple accounts of the Flood is from now on taken for granted and the narrator shocks the reader by sharing some unflattering information about Noah and his sons. This disrespectful depiction has a humorous effect and the sheer difference between the biblical version and the woodworm‘s account propels the reader to read further and invites him to ―compare his notes‖ with the woodworm‘s account. In a way, the woodworm creates an atmosphere not unlike the one present in tabloids, where people learn shocking or even nasty things about celebrities, which however often raises their interest and curiosity.

That is nearly the end of my revelations. They are intended – you must understand me – in a spirit of friendship. If you think I am being contentious, it is probably because your species – I hope you don‘t mind my saying this – is so hopelessly dogmatic. You believe what you want to believe, and you go on believing it. But then, of course, you all have Noah‘s genes. No doubt this also accounts for the fact that you are often strangely incurious. You never ask, for instance, this question about your early history: what happened to the raven?

...; but that Noah decided it was ‗more appropriate‘ to say that the dove had discovered it.

Through the voice of an outsider Barnes manages to step aside and assess how humans deal with their history. He claims people are dogmatic and believe only facts that actually

20 match their ideas (of themselves or about history). The partiality of the human species is accredited to their pedigree, which based on the Bible goes back to Noah‘s genes. Barnes further criticizes how people take things as they present themselves and do not scrutinize them nor question their veracity. The second excerpt sentence repeats the claim that the human species is prone to improve the image of past events.

The raven, I need hardly add, felt hurt and betrayed at this instant rewriting of history, and it is said – by those with a better ear than mine – that you can hear the sad croak of dissatisfaction in his voice to this day.

In the Stowaway story, the raven is deprived of being the first one to report on having spotted the land towards the end of the flood once the waters subside. To add credibility, this revelation is supported by an explanation of the raven‘s typical croaky voice. This creative argument goes hand-in-hand with other known biblical explanations, such as the one of the serpent, who now needs to crawl on its belly since he tempted and deceived Eve in the Garden of Eden (Genesis 3).

“The Visitors”

The second chapter describes a hijacking of a cruise liner. The events presented are in fact quite similar to a similar incident that took place in 1985, the hijacking of Achille Lauro

(Guignery 62). The main character Franklin Hughes is a TV star who entertains rich clientele on board a cruise liner with his witty remarks about historical events and facts.

What his special area of knowledge was nobody could quite discern, but he roved freely in the worlds of archaeology, history and comparative culture. He specialized in the contemporary allusion which would rescue and enliven for the average viewer such dead subjects as Hannibal‘s crossing of the Alps, or Viking treasure hoards in East Anglia, or Herod‘s palaces.

As Barnes/the narrator introduces the main character to the readers he conveys a deeper message. In order to make history attractive and accessible, historians present the scientific facts in a way that creates an illusion of a nearly perfectly informed narrative. Yet

21 the links between individual bits of information are mere assumptions, interpretations or even speculations, influenced by the personality and erudition of the author, as well as by the process of information selection. Analogically, one might recall Barnes‘ metaphor of a fishing net mentioned earlier.

Many of the passengers commented to one another on Franklin‘s obvious enthusiasm for his subject, how refreshing it was in these cynical times, and how he really made history come alive for them. If Franklin described himself as a writer, then this might nudge him into becoming one. Next time round, there was a definite chance for a book-of- the-series; and beyond that he was toying with something serious but sexy – like a personal history of the world – which might roost for months in the bestseller lists.

Franklin‘s words here could be seen as the author‘s technique of simultaneously staying in character and removing himself from it at the same time. The book Barnes ascribes to his main character‘s ambition is in fact what the readers are reading - an actual attempt on the world history in a comprehensive, yet amusing, understandable and definitely very personal way. Imperfectly hidden, there is also the author‘s wish for his book to sell well.

‗The world is not a cheerful place. I would have thought your investigations into the ancient civilizations would have taught you that. But anyway … I have decided to take your advice. We shall explain to the passengers what is happening. How they are mixed up in history. What that history is.‘

Further into the chapter, the ship is hijacked by terrorists and the passengers are taken hostage. The lines above are the words of one of the terrorists intended for Franklin. The innocent tourists from different countries find themselves in the middle of an attempt to achieve a prisoner exchange. They get ―mixed up in history‖, as Barnes put it. Calling an event in progress ―history‖ is nevertheless usually preposterous. Not only is the real impact of actions nearly impossible to predict, but history only seems coherent when looked at retrospectively. Then one can claim that this led to this and this to that. But trying to evaluate the consequences of an action taking place at the moment is not advisable, as the perspectives of both time and space have yet to develop. People do not live history, they

22 live their present lives that mostly advance by very small everyday steps. Occasionally people end up being a part of historically important events, but however big the events are, their importance can only be correctly evaluated much later.

“The Survivor”

They say I don‘t understand things. They say I‘m not making the right connections. Listen to them, listen to them and their connections. This happened, they say, and as a consequence that happened. There was a battle here, a war there, a king was deposed, famous men – always famous men, I‘m sick of famous men – made events happen. Maybe I‘ve been out in the sun too long, but I can‘t see their connections. I look at the history of the world, which they don‘t seem to realize is coming to an end, and I don‘t see what they see.

The story speaks about a woman who is trying to escape the effects of an apocalyptic war on a stolen boat with two cats (an ark of sorts) and intends to start a new and purer life. Through Kathleen‘s meditations, Barnes contemplates the nature of history. It is made of connections between events and their consequences. It appears that here the events got out of hand and led to a catastrophe. No wonder men are held accountable for it, as they often look in only one direction and tend to miss the overall picture. Additionally, it was not women who started the greatest wars in human history. The excerpt refers to a grand illusion of mankind that holds that people can control events and by means of their perfect navigation they will escape the devastating storms of history.

“Shipwreck”

The first part of the chapter tells of the historical events of the shipwreck and the survival of the crew members of the French frigate, Medusa. The second part is basically an art criticism essay, analysing the aesthetics of Géricault‘s painting of the event, The Raft of the Medusa, and considering his motivation to paint the scene the way he did.

Adam and Eve, the Expulsion, the Annunciation, the Last Judgment – you can have all these by major artists. But Noah and his Ark? A key moment in human history, a storm at sea, picturesque animals, divine

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intervention in human affairs: surely the necessary elements are there. What could account for this iconographical deficiency? Perhaps the lack of a single Ark painting great enough to give the subject impetus and popularity. Or is it something in the story itself: maybe artists agreed that the Flood doesn‘t show God in the best possible light?

As the major motifs of Barnes‘ novel recur regardless of the shift in time, narrator or the topic of each chapter, this excerpt brings the reader back to the Ark. Barnes wonders how it is possible that no great painting exists depicting the Ark, while there are many portrayals of shipwrecks significantly less important than ―a key moment in human history‖, as he sees the Ark. Since all the dramatic elements suitable for artistic rendition are present, he ascribes the lack of great painters‘ interest to the fact that there had not been any great model, any precursor to inspire later attempts. In a subversive spirit, he nevertheless casts a shadow of doubt when suggesting artists did not think the best of God, knowing what the Flood was all about.

What did he paint, then? Well, what does it look as if he painted? Let us reimagine our eye into ignorance. We scrutinize ‗Scene of Shipwreck‘ with no knowledge of French naval history. We see survivors on a raft hailing a tiny ship on the horizon (the distant vessel, we can‘t help noticing, is no bigger than that butterfly would have been). Our initial presumption is that this is the moment of sighting which leads to a rescue. This feeling comes partly from a tireless preference for happy endings, but also from posing ourselves, at some level of consciousness, the following question: how would we know about these people on the raft if they had not been rescued?

In this excerpt Barnes suggests that historical events only make true sense if one knows the background of events and is familiar with what preceded and what followed. Without context, one is left at the mercy of historians‘ or, in this case, artist‘s interpretations. He also poses a question of the knowability of history, as one learns about events either from witnesses or from some physical evidence. Neither of these is perfectly trustworthy and each could be turned into a distorted image of history. Barnes exemplifies it in this chapter when he claims Géricault included certain elements in his paintings that he must have known did not reflect the real event, as he had consulted naval sources and even

24 interviewed two of the survivors. In the end he still chose to present his own vision of the events.

Nowadays, as we examine ‗Scene of Shipwreck‘, it is hard to feel much indignation against Hugues Duroy de Chaumareys, captain of the expedition, or against the minister who appointed him captain, or the naval officer who refused to skipper the raft, or the sailors who loosed the tow- ropes, or the soldiery who mutinied. (Indeed, history democratizes our sympathies. Had not the soldiers been brutalized by their wartime experiences? Was not the captain a victim of his own pampered upbringing? Would we bet on ourselves to behave heroically in similar circumstances?) Time dissolves the story into form, colour, emotion. Modern and ignorant, we reimagine the story: do we vote for the optimistic yellowing sky, or for the grieving greybeard? Or do we end up believing both versions? The eye can flick from one mood, and one interpretation, to the other: is this what was intended?

By saying that history democratizes our sympathies, Barnes probably means that when looking back at events one has a tendency to relativize. Rarely do people have a full sum of information about an event and thus they refrain from assigning guilt to an individual force. Ultimate verdicts are consequently avoided. Another method of softening the strictness of one‘s judgement is to place oneself in the position of the actors. This might perhaps refer to another popular quote from the Bible: ―Let he who is without sin cast the first stone.‖ (John 8:7)

In the second part of this excerpt, Barnes offers a radical solution – instead of choosing sides, choosing the presentation of history one favours, can one perhaps believe both (or multiple) versions of history? Analogically, one can think of the famous scientists (e.g.

Albert Einstein, Max Planck, Erwin Schrödinger or Philip Henry Gosse) who managed to reconcile their scientific knowledge with faith (www.famousscientists.org).

What has happened? The painting has slipped history‘s anchor. This is no longer ‗Scene of Shipwreck‘, let alone The Raft of the Medusa‘. We don‘t just imagine the ferocious miseries on that fatal machine; we don‘t just become the sufferers. They become us. And the picture‘s secret lies in the pattern of its energy.

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By ―slipping history‘s anchor‖, Barnes probably means that despite historical inaccuracies in the painting, the resulting image is still powerful enough to have a tremendous effect on the viewer. In plain words, artists authors and historians are all more concerned with less with the veracity of their work and more with its success and how popular, captivating or aesthetically pleasing it is to both themselves and their audience.

Whatever the reason, Michelangelo reoriented – and revitalized – the subject. Baldassare Peruzzi followed him, Raphael followed him; painters and illustrators increasingly concentrated on the forsaken rather than the saved. And as this innovation became a tradition, the Ark itself sailed farther and farther away, retreating towards the horizon just as the Argus did when Géricault was approaching his final image. The wind continues to blow, and the tides to run: the Ark eventually reaches the horizon, and disappears over it. In Poussin‘s ‗The Deluge‘ the ship is nowhere to be seen; all we are left with is the tormented group of non-swimmers first brought to prominence by Michelangelo and Raphael. Old Noah has sailed out of art history.

Here Barnes illustrates how artists who actually did paint the Flood were not as concerned with those who survived on the Ark but rather with the tragedy of those left on the shore to meet their demise when the water rose up. Human fascination with tragedy, possibly arising from the fear of one‘s mortality, makes it the centre of interest. One can also feel the pinch of satisfaction the narrator felt from the revenge on Noah (in being left out of the picture), whose dislikeable personality had been described in ―The Stowaway‖.

“The Mountain”

Whereas the Rotunda displayed a mere twenty-four feet by eighteen of stationary pigment, here they were offered some 10,000 square feet of mobile canvas. Before their eyes an immense picture, or series of pictures, gradually unwound: not just one scene, but the entire history of the shipwreck passed before them. Episode succeeded episode, while coloured lights played upon the unreeling fabric, and an orchestra emphasized the drama of events.

Here Barnes compares two ways of depicting and exhibiting the tragic event, one is the above-mentioned painting by Géricault and the other was a type of cinema predecessor, mobile canvas showing the events of the Medusa scene by scene. The message hidden in

26 the comparison could be that the way history is presented to us is not unimportant.

Despite the impressive dimensions of the painting (491 x 716 cm), it cannot compete with a new medium that utilizes motion and accompanying music. People will generally give preference to more sensational, eye-catching and captivating presentations and again, putting veracity second.

“Three Simple Stories” I Beesley was – not surprisingly – intrigued by the reborn and once-again- teetering Titanic. In particular, he was keen to be among the extras who despairingly crowded the rail as the ship went down – keen, you could say, to undergo in fiction an alternative version of history. The film‘s director was equally determined that this consultant who lacked the necessary card from the actors‘ union should not appear on celluloid.

The main character of the first of the three stories, Lawrence Beesley, was among the survivors of the SS Titanic. A real person, he published a book about his experience and became a consultant during the shooting of the film A Night to Remember, where he attempted, disguised as an extra, to remain on the ship as she was sinking

(http://www.encyclopedia-titanica.org/). As Barnes is suggesting, Beesley might have wanted to relive the history, but this time he would not leave the sinking ship. This is yet another case by means of which Barnes persuades the readers to believe that history repeats itself, in various versions and often under strange circumstances. The final words of the first ―simple story‖ confirm this assumption.

Being a violently educated eighteen-year-old, I was familiar with Marx‘s elaboration of Hegel: history repeats itself, the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce. But I had yet to come across an illustration of this process. Years later I have still to discover a better one.

“Upstream”

This chapter is written in an epistolary form - the story is told through letters from an actor filming a historical film (being shot on the river Orinoco in South America) to his

27 girlfriend. Since a tragic death occurs during the filming that very much resembles the events that inspired the film, Barnes reasserts that history repeats itself.

It seems to me that the Indians – our Indians – knew what had happened to Father Firmin and Father Antonio all those years ago. It‘s the sort of thing that gets handed down as the women are pounding the manioc root or whatever. Those Jesuits were probably quite big in the Indians‘ history. Think of that story getting passed down the generations, each time they handed it on it became more colourful and exaggerated.

In the excerpt Barnes considers different channels through which history is passed on and muses on the nature of oral history, in which the account of events tends to change drastically over longer periods of time. The suggestion is also made that the impact of the first encounter of significantly different cultures usually remains long in people‘s memory.

“Parenthesis”

This chapter mostly revolves around the topic of love and has been dealt with earlier.

However, it is a chapter in which the author intentionally assumes the role of a narrator and ponders the meaning of love, history and art.

This is difficult territory. We must be precise, and we mustn‘t become sentimental. If we are to oppose love to such wily, muscled concepts as power, money, history and death, then we mustn‘t retreat into self- celebration or snobby vagueness.

The first example relates history to concepts such as power, money and death, claiming it is wily and muscled. Similar to time, history is a mental construct arising from the need to connect events and make sense of the world. It might be a useful tool for understanding the nature of the world, nevertheless it does not exist on its own - it only exists in the intellectual realm.

(speaking of love) Is it a useful mutation that helps the race survive? I can‘t see it. Was love implanted, for instance, so that warriors would fight harder for their lives, bearing deep inside them the candlelit memory of the domestic hearth? Hardly: the history of the world teaches us that it is the new form of arrowhead, the canny general, the full stomach and the prospect of plunder that are the decisive factors in war, rather than sentimental minds drooling about home.

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Here history is personified and functions as a teacher. Regardless of the figurative language and the traditionally reversed agent (it is people who may or may not learn from history), this is a very prolific idea. Additionally, the rhetorical question introduces an idea that memory, a feature pertaining to individual subjects, serves as a medium that preserves love.

If we look at the history of the world, it seems surprising that love is included. It‘s an excrescence, a monstrosity, some tardy addition to the agenda.

Here the word history is preceded by a definite article, suggesting there is one complete and coherent history of the world. This goes partially against the general idea of the book, which holds that there are many accounts, strongly dependent on perspective, on who is looking at history or who is telling, writing or depicting it. On top of that, there are different ways of reading the same histories. Barnes might be rather referring to history as an abstract compendium of all known human experiences. He is not arguing who has the only correct account of events anymore, but perhaps he is saying: no matter whose account one chooses to use, one will always find examples of love in it.

But I can tell you why to love. Because the history of the world, which only stops at the half-house of love to bulldoze it into rubble, is ridiculous without it. The history of the world becomes brutally self-important without love. Our random mutation is essential because it is unnecessary. Love won’t change the history of the world (that nonsense about Cleopatra‘s nose is strictly for sentimentalists), but it will do something much more important: teach us to stand up to history, to ignore its chin-out strut. I don‘t accept your terms, love says; sorry, you don‘t impress, and by the way what a silly uniform you‘re wearing. Of course, we don‘t fall in love to help out with the world‘s ego problem; yet this is one of love‘s surer effects.

Regardless of the arguments Barnes provides in his philosophical defence of love, it is worth noticing how the concept of memory has transformed once again. History here roughly equals life, the sheer human existence that ultimately would not make sense, were it not for love. Since love is depicted as a means of transcendence and put into opposition with history, which, conversely, is tied closely to egotism and arrogance, history itself

29 comes out of the contemplation as a force limiting people‘s freedom and binding them by its terms, by its repetitive and standardized dictate.

How you cuddle in the dark governs how you see the history of the world. It‘s as simple as that.

Barnes argues that one‘s personality and especially temperament and confidence determine one‘s love-making. It ranges from shy slow exploration to the act of a fast and brutal conquer. Naturally, one‘s personality thus exposed and materialized in the act of love also manifests in one‘s attitude toward the world. Depending on one‘s personality, people become victims, mere witnesses of events or the initiators, the movers of the world.

We get scared by history; we allow ourselves to be bullied by dates. In fourteen hundred and ninety-two Columbus sailed the ocean blue

And then what? Everyone became wiser? People stopped building new ghettoes in which to practise the old persecutions? Stopped making the old mistakes, or new mistakes, or new versions of old mistakes? (And does history repeat itself, the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce? No, that‘s too grand, too considered a process. History just burps, and we taste again that raw-onion sandwich it swallowed centuries ago.)

In this example, history is comprised of dates that themselves stand for important past events. However, Barnes suggests people should not be intimidated by dates, perhaps because the importance of many exact dates is illusionary and artificial. Not only does it usually not matter if a certain event happened one day (month, year) before or after the actual date, but it usually takes a long time before the moment arrives and certain changes finally occur. Thus what preceded and what followed might be of much greater importance than the actual date. Also, as Barnes points out, these milestones do not do any work in terms of changing history, nor do they stop bad things from happening – it is up to people to do so. Barnes‘ final remark claims the events do not repeat themselves as perfect copies, but are instead processed or recycled, only to resurface after centuries, reminding people of the original.

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Dates don‘t tell the truth. They bawl at us – left, right, left, right, pick ‘em up there you miserable shower. They want to make us think we‘re always progressing, always going forward. But what happened after 1492? In fourteen hundred and ninety-three He sailed right back across the sea

That‘s the sort of date I like. Let‘s celebrate 1493, not 1492; the return, not the discovery. What happened in 1493? The predictable glory, of course, the royal flattery, the heraldic promotions on the Columbus scutcheon. But there was also this. Before departure a prize of 10,000 maravedis had been promised to the first man to sight the New World. An ordinary sailor had won this bounty, yet when the expedition returned Columbus claimed it for himself (the dove still elbowing the raven from history). The sailor went off in disappointment to Morocco, where, they say, he became a renegade. It was an interesting year, 1493.

Calendars that simply add more days, months and years to history are merely a product of a simplified understanding of time, which is conceived as linear. The illusion thus created is that since the number is growing, mankind is progressing, evolving. As much as this might be true, Barnes hints that it is not a straightforward but rather cyclic progress, in which the timeline could be seen as a spiral.

The second part presents another case of historical injustice. Unlike the comparison of the woodworm‘s account of the Flood to the Biblical one - revealing the truth about the raven being the first to see the land, here Barnes presents a repeated version of history that really happened (Davies, 186). From a marketing point of view, both the dove and

Columbus are more presentable, the success suits them better, they conform better to the general image of heroes/victors. As the majority of chronicled events recorded is a result of the process of careful selection, censorship and improvement of the image in favour of the ―ordering party‖, trusting history is a difficult matter. Ricoeur has addressed the issue by saying:

―It is within the framework of this reflection on the limits stemming from a critical philosophy of history that the confrontation between intending the truth of history and the aim of that veracity or, as I shall put it, the intention of being faithful to memory (part 3, chapter 1) can be brought to a good ending‖ (Ricoeur 135)

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History isn’t what happened. History is just what historians tell us. There was a pattern, apian, a movement, expansion, the march of democracy; it is a tapestry, a flow of events, a complex narrative, connected, explicable. One good story leads to another. First it was kings and archbishops with some offstage divine tinkering, then it was the march of ideas and the movements of masses, then little local events which mean something bigger, but all the time it‘s connections, progress, meaning, this led to this, this happened because of this. And we, the readers of history, the sufferers from history, we scan the pattern for hopeful conclusions, for the way ahead. And we cling to history as a series of salon pictures, conversation pieces whose participants we can easily reimagine back into life, when all the time it‘s more like a multi-media collage, with paint applied by decorator‘s roller rather than camel-hair brush.

Here Barnes adds his observation that since people always look for meaning in everything, they tend to see patterns in past events. He takes readers on a fast-track tour of modern history and concludes with the purpose of history. History should provide guidance, help people orient themselves and find the correct way forward. Interestingly,

Barnes argues here that people suffer from history. How do they suffer? What type of history do people suffer from? Do they suffer from history as an abstract total sum of all past events (that nobody knows)? Or from the illusionary imperfect history built on the intentional selection and omission of data that is created by historians? And do people not suffer more from misreading history? Or finally, from history as a series of events that tend to recur throughout time where people are sentenced to re-enacting its episodes? Barnes contrasts the idea of history as a result of historians‘ sensitive and precise work with a more realistic depiction in which history lacks precision and frequently covers inaccuracies or missing data by assumptions and speculations.

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. We lie here in our hospital bed of the present (what nice clean sheets we get nowadays) with a bubble of daily news drip-fed into our arm. We think we know who we are, though we don‘t quite know why we‘re here, or how long we shall be forced to stay. And while we fret and writhe in bandaged uncertainty – are we a voluntary patient? – we fabulate. We make up a story to cover the facts we don‘t know or can‘t accept; we keep a few true facts and spin a new story round them. Our panic and our pain are only eased by soothing fabulation; we call it history.

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The paragraph above presents an interesting shift. The line between readers of history

(the sufferers) and those who create history becomes blurred. Barnes moves from the global criticism of historians‘ approach and techniques to the observation that the misinterpretation and distortion of history is a general human error, embedded in each individual human being. He further claims that the made-up history – the fabulation, eases people‘s pain of not knowing why they are here.

There‘s one thing I‘ll say for history. It‘s very good at finding things. We try to cover them up, but history doesn‘t let go. It‘s got time on its side, time and science. However ferociously we ink over our first thoughts, history finds a way of reading them. We bury our victims in secrecy (strangled princelings, irradiated reindeer), but history discovers what we did to them. We lost the Titanic, forever it seemed, in the squid-ink depths, but they turned it up. They found the wreck of the Medusa not long ago, off the coast of Mauretania. There wasn‘t any hope of treasure, they knew that; and all they salvaged after a hundred and seventy-five years were a few copper nails from the frigate‘s hull and a couple of cannon. But they went and found it just the same.

Once again, a personified history does things for people. This time history finds evidence of one‘s past deeds, even though one might have wanted to keep certain things buried forever. At this point Barnes presents another pair of contrasting ideas. Previously he ascribed history the quality of distorting the real account of events, whereas here he claims it also functions in the opposite direction, unearthing the unexpected, unhoped for or even undesired evidence of the past. Curiously, in Barnes‘ mind history and people are often interchangeable – ―history doesn‘t let go‖, but ―they went and found it just the same‖

(people).

We all know objective truth is not obtainable, that when some event occurs we shall have a multiplicity of subjective truths which we assess and then fabulate into history, into some God-eyed version of what ‗really‘ happened. This God-eyed version is a fake – a charming, impossible fake, like those medieval paintings which show all the stages of Christ‘s Passion happening simultaneously in different parts of the picture. But while we know this, we must still believe that objective truth is obtainable; or we must believe that it is 99 per cent obtainable; or if we can‘t believe this we must believe that 43 per cent objective truth is better than 41 per cent. We must do so, because if we don‘t we‘re lost, we fall into beguiling relativity,

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we value one liar‘s version as much as another liar‘s, we throw up our hands at the puzzle of it all, we admit that the victor has the right not just to the spoils but also to the truth. (Whose truth do we prefer, by the way, the victor‘s or the victim‘s? Are pride and compassion greater distorters than shame and fear?)

In this excerpt, Barnes relates history to objective truth. He claims that despite looking at events from multiple perspectives, the resulting image of history is still not true, it is a fabulation. Perhaps he is saying that one cannot reconstruct objective truth – history as it really happened – no matter how many fragments of evidence are collected. He also addresses the illusion of simultaneity, as this is a form in which history is often presented.

The events are all connected, all in one place and at one time only in historical books, they never actually occur in such a way. Yet Barnes claims one‘s only option is to still believe in objective truth and, by the same token, in history, even though it is true only to a certain degree. Not doing so would lead perilously into relativity and a complete confusion. One can easily see in such relativity a parallel to today‘s world in which contradictory news reports present themselves with such vehemence and purported credibility that people, flooded with differing information end up not knowing what to believe.

And so it is with love. We must believe in it, or we‘re lost. We may not obtain it, or we may obtain it and find it renders us unhappy; we must still believe in it. If we don‘t, then we merely surrender to the history of the world and to someone else‘s truth.

In his meditation, Barnes claims one should make a similar leap of faith in case of love, despite the fact there are no assurances of fulfilment or happiness. Apparently, belief is a key here to both the objective truth and to love, the force strong enough to stand up to history. History shows its negative face once again, the one that binds us by its repetitive dictate.

It will go wrong, this love; it probably will. That contorted organ, like the lump of ox meat, is devious and enclosed. Our current model for the universe is entropy, which at the daily level translates as: things fuck up. But when love fails us, we must still go on believing in it. Is it encoded in every molecule that things fuck up, that love will fail? Perhaps it is. Still we must believe in love, just as we must believe in free will and objective truth. And

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when love fails, we should blame the history of the world. If only it had left us alone, we could have been happy, we could have gone on being happy. Our love has gone, and it is the fault of the history of the world. But that‘s still to come. Perhaps it will never come. In the night the world can be defied. Yes, that‘s right, it can be done, we can face history down.

In the final extract from the ―Parenthesis‖, Barnes further posits love, objective truth and free will as forces opposing history (and possibly winning over it), which by implication also pairs history up with determinism, fatalism and even defeatism.

“Project Ararat”

This chapter tells the story of an astronaut who decides to find the Ark after his return from space.

Longest pass in the history of the NFL, four hundred fifty yards into the leaping hands of a volcanic crater.

This sentence from the chapter mentions history, however in this context it is a much more narrowed term and basically stands for the chronicle or perhaps a journal of an

American football club.

“The Dream”

The dream is a fantasy and through the words of the main character describes New

Heaven, where not everything is as one would expect it to be.

He‘d read all my papers, he said. And there they were, at his elbow, the history of my life, everything I‘d done and thought and said and felt, the whole bloody caboodle, the good bits and the bad. It made quite a pile, as you‘d imagine.

The scene describes a situation at a reception office, where the work that would traditionally be done by Saint Peter, the evaluation of one‘s life is carried out by some office staff in New Heaven. The notion ―history of my life‖ could be understood as the sum of events that occurred to an individual from one‘s birth until one‘s death.

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4. Historiographic Fiction in Arthur & George 4.1 Plot Summary The historical novel Arthur & George is set in Edwardian England and narrates two parallel, yet very different life stories that intersect at a certain point in time. One is of

George Edalji, a son of a Parsee Vicar and a Scottish mother, and the other of Arthur

Conan Doyle. While George comes from humble origins and has to fight racial prejudice,

Arthur‘s family is well-situated and he has a bright future ahead of him. The two main heroes are very different in many aspects. While Arthur is a promising athlete and scholar,

George is myopic and depicted as having no imagination and no friends. Their lives are observed separately in great detail up to the point when George becomes a solicitor and

Arthur a trained doctor, already famous for his detective stories. Then some strange and unfortunate events bring them together. George is accused of having written vicious anonymous letters and later of having committed animal mutilations not far from where he lives. He is imprisoned and his prospects are dim. Luckily for him, Arthur Conan Doyle learns about his case and helps him to dispel the accusations, as he believes George could not have committed those crimes. Arthur tries to solve the case as Sherlock Holmes would.

Despite the fact that he might have in the end revealed the real culprit, the evidence is not sufficient for building a case and the local police do not seem to be in favour of looking in the suggested direction. During the years Arthur spent helping George get out of jail and solving the case the two men become friends. Arthur manages to direct public attention to the case through the media and George is eventually released, although without being completely cleared of guilt. Proving their friendship, Arthur even invites George to his wedding. The story also follows Arthur‘s later turn towards spiritism and ends with a séance that George attends, during which a crowd tries to communicate with the recently deceased Arthur through a medium.

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4.2. Analysis

Arthur & George differs from other Barnes‘ novels in many aspects. Primarily, it is the amount of historical evidence used in the book. As Barnes states at the end of the book:

'Apart from Jean's letter to Arthur, all letters quoted, whether signed or anonymous are authentic; as are quotations from newspapers, government reports, proceedings in Parliament, and the writings of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle' (360).

Barnes spent two years researching the historical documentation of the Wyrley case (Edalji case) and the main protagonists (Childs 140) and included a great amount of historical detail in his novel. The book thus turned out to be historical, biographical and fictional, all at the same time. For common readers not specialized in history it is impossible to tell where Barnes sticks to history and where his writing wanders into fictions However, one year after Arthur & George was published, Gordon Weaver published an in-depth study on the Edalji case in the journal International Commentary on Evidence. The study revealed the narrator of Arthur & George is not completely reliable and does not always stick to the known facts (Childs 139). For instance one of the two photographs included in the book in order to support its veracity, showing the wedding invitation from A. C. Doyle to George

Edalji, is not a photocopy of the real thing, but most probably a computer-generated replica, differing from the original in significant details (Groes, Childs 133). This might be an intertext from the author, testing the readers‘ ability to discern manipulation or simply a message confirming his previously expressed ideas about the questionable nature of history in terms of its accuracy and veracity. Paul Ricoeur said:

If the contrast between history and fiction were to disappear, both would

lose their specific mark, namely, the claim to truth on the side of history and

the ―voluntary suspension of disbelief‖ on that of fiction. (Ricoeur 242)

It could be argued here, whether Ricoeur‘s words proved themselves true in the case of

Arthur & George. The reader learns interesting facts from history – a majority of them being

37 true – and in the end, not knowing when to activate or forego disbelief, gets used to the uncertainty presented in the book.

Barnes‘ effort was to create the impression of England of the time and the way he did it was by looking at the world through the eyes of the two main characters, both of them historical personalities (Guignery, Conversations with Julian Barnes 135). In line with his intention, Barnes narrates the story in the third-person singular and adjusts the narration to the size and nature of the protagonists‘ mental world, thus reflecting their age and their social and intellectual background. Barnes lets the characters think and speak without correcting their prejudice or misperceptions, which adds a realistic feel to the story (Groes,

Childs 126). Although there are not as many narrators as in A History of the World in 10 1/2

Chapters and the story is mostly told by the title characters, Barnes additionally presents secondary characters‘ points of view (Guignery 127).

With some exceptions, Arthur & George sticks to chronological narration. For instance,

Arthur Conan Doyle was born seventeen years prior to the birth of George Edalji. Thus when reading about their growing up, switching from Arthur to George, readers do not find themselves in the same historical time. This shifted parallel chronology is reconciled when the two characters finally meet. Vanessa Guignery suggests that the alternate narration also emphasizes the dichotomy between truth and fiction, since the small George is supposed to tell the truth, whereas Arthur was much more attracted to legends and fiction than the truth of the Bible (Guignery 128).

To a certain degree, Arthur & George could also be read and understood as a detective story. Not only does it include a crime investigation by the ―father‖ of Sherlock Holmes, but it contains an unresolved mystery, suspense and a seemingly false accusation. In reality as well as in Arthur & George, Arthur Conan Doyle discovered the methods of his detective were not universally applicable, or they did not yield the desired results. For instance,

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Arthur manages to steal the weapon used in the mutilations from the person he suspects, but by doing so he destroys any chance of using it as evidence in court.

The novel taken as a whole could be understood as an attempt to come to terms with the guilt preserved in the collective memory. Barnes mentions in his interview how he learned about the Edalji case through reading a book on a related case of injustice that happened in France, the Dreyfus case. He wanted to find out more about the Edalji case, but surprisingly, nothing had been written after Doyle‘s article in support of George Edalji.

This in turn gave him the impetus to write on the topic (Groes, Childs 119). When considering the relation of the duty of memory to the idea of justice, Ricoeur suggested that ―among those to whom we are indebted, the moral priority belongs to the victims‖

(Ricoeur 89). Consequently, if Edalji was a victim of injustice people have a moral obligation to hold the case in memory.

Ricoeur further reminds us of Freud‘s theory of suppression, in which people suppress negative and/or traumatic experiences into inaccessible parts of their memory. The traumas may however later manifest in various mental issues. Such patients undergo

Durcharbeiten, as Freud called it, In English working through or reworking. The repressed material has to be brought to light and the patient needs to reconcile with his trauma. What

Ricoeur suggests is ―to transpose the clinical analysis to the level of collective memory‖

(Ricoeur 70, 71).

Barnes‘ writing about a case of injustice in relatively recent English history could be seen as a parallel of the process both on the individual and collective level. By re-exposing the case of injustice with roots in racial prejudice and intolerance, he attempts to revise history, to rework it. Perhaps when a nation does so, its people find reconciliation with their past.

In therapy, the desired result is a patient cured of a trauma. On the level of collective memory, the healed nation might gain new knowledge and experience. Analogically to the

39 patient who can then go on living free from the past traumas, the nation might freely forget the actual event.

4.3 Examples with Commentaries

What he saw there became his first memory. A small boy, a room, a bed, closed curtains leaking afternoon light. By the time he came to describe it publicly, sixty years had passed. How many internal retellings had smoothed and adjusted the plain words he finally used? Doubtless it still seemed as clear as on the day itself.

An encounter in a curtained room. A small boy and a corpse. A grandchild who, by the acquisition of memory, had just stopped being a thing, and a grandmother who, by losing those attributes the child was developing, had returned to that state.

George does not have a first memory, and by the time anyone suggests that it might be normal to have one, it is too late. He has no recollection obviously preceding all others – not of being picked up, cuddled, laughed at or chastised.

The first three examples illustrate the thought that people‘s first memories are of special importance. Perhaps the logic behind the idea is that if one still remembers the event, the impression must have been powerful and must have consequently influenced the person‘s later life. As Peter Childs suggests, it is possible Barnes used the image in order to prepare grounds for the later topic of Arthur‘s spiritualism (Childs 144).

The first two excerpts belong to Arthur and apart from Barnes‘ repeatedly expressed idea about memories being distorted over time and by constant retelling, he ponders on the cycle of life, in which old people eventually become childlike and fully dependent on the help of others, whereas the child sets out in the opposite direction. George‘s part on the first memory demonstrates the difference between the two characters. The lack of positive early memories also suggests he was not a child carefully and lovingly cared for.

When he left, Arthur had imagined that Waller would soon set up his own Edinburgh practice, would acquire a wife and a little local reputation, and then fade into the status of an occasional memory.

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The occasional memory could be seen here as an interstage between a state of full awareness and a state of oblivion. However, memory seems to be synonymous with fame or popularity here.

When the parlourmaid admitted him, he tried to suspend his natural professional habits: working out the likely probity and income of the occupants, and committing to memory items worth stealing – in some cases, items perhaps already stolen.

Metaphorically speaking, in this part memory functions as a storage room where one safely keeps valuable items. The room is almost without boundaries, but its dimensions make it difficult to find and collect the previously committed treasures.

'No, Inspector, let me explain.' George had sensed a hardening in Campbell's attitude, and thought it good tactics to relax his rules of engagement. 'When I was four, I was taken to see a cow. It soiled itself. That is almost my first memory.'

Later in the text, Barnes readjusts the account of George‘s first memory. If George claims seeing a cow and soiling himself was ―almost his first memory‖, he must have some idea what his first or earlier memory was, he must have cognizance of its existence. This partially contradicts George‘s previous words and supports the reader‘s suspicion of an unreliable narrator.

'Oh, I see,' said George, his temper suddenly returning. 'You want me to say I am loony.' He used the word deliberately, in the full memory of his father's disapproval.

'You have a memory of each night?' 'I do not see the point of that question.' 'Sir, I do not ask you to see its point. I merely request that you answer it. Do you have a memory of each night?' The Vicar looked around the court, as if expecting someone to rescue him from this imbecilic catechism. 'No more than anybody else.'

This excerpt refers to the fact that the reliability of people‘s memory is often questioned in court. Not only do people not remember things entirely (and forever), but they are also susceptible to various distortions of memory (Schacter 4).

Maud, whom he had expected to be wailing, surprised him. She had turned her whole body in his direction and was gazing up towards him,

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gravely, lovingly. He felt that if he could retain that look in his memory, then the worst things might possibly be bearable.

Despite its abstract nature, memory can provide intellectual and emotional consolation in a difficult moment or period of time. The image of the once perceived thing could be recreated at any time and in any place in one‘s mind through a process similar to imagination.

He feels as if he has learned the most beautiful love-speech in Shakespeare and now that he needs to recite it his mouth is dry and his memory empty.

This example might attest to the sin of blocking, as the love-speech was clearly learned, but the access to the memory was lost, perhaps due to stress or stage-fright.

From time to time, Arthur's eye is caught by the silhouette of a cat slipping along the wall and keeping well clear of Waller's boot. A sinuous form, easing its way through the shadows, like the memory of a wife discreetly absenting herself. Does every marriage have its own damn secret? Is there never anything straightforward at the heart of it all?

The analogy between a cat slipping past the wall and a wife that is gradually leaving

Arthur‘s life (dying of tuberculosis) might imply a shared quality - both his wife and his memories will eventually end in oblivion.

'When I was a small boy, I was much pained by the poverty to which my mother was reduced. I sensed that it was against the grain of her nature. That memory is part of what has always driven me on.'

True or false (distorted) and however immaterial, some memories work as powerful forces changing people‘s life. Not always are people able to pinpoint a precise moment in their past representing the origin of their future course.

But when they wed, at Thornton-in-Lonsdale with that fellow Waller at his elbow, he had felt a sense of… how could he put it without being disrespectful to her memory?

This is another case of memory being personified, where in the way of metonymy, memory equals a deceased person.

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'It was a happy day,' he said firmly, holding to the memory he had made into certainty by repetition. 'The Belle Vue Hotel. The tramway. Roast chicken. Not going to pick up pebbles. The railway journey. It was a happy day.'

People hold to a memory especially when it is a pleasant one. They cherish it and often recall it as something precious. The process described here nevertheless illustrates how by frequent repetition the memory is actually created or at least adjusted in the present. This would attest to the sin of bias from the sins of commission, where one‘s current emotions and opinions distort past memories (Schacter 25).

The trail of memory, and all that came with it, had set off in him the tenderest of emotions towards Maud, and a realization that these had been, and would continue to be, the strongest feelings of his life.

The trail of memory might be seen as a cue securing access to one‘s memories. The neuronal network is activated by an association or perception, which in turn brings about a memory (Plháková 301). It is also an interesting metaphor, suggesting memory leaves traces as time progresses.

England was a quieter place, just as principled, but less keen on making a fuss about its principles; a place where the common law was trusted more than government statute; where people got on with their own business and did not seek to interfere with that of others; where great public eruptions took place from time to time, eruptions of feeling which might even tip over into violence and injustice, but which soon faded in the memory, and were rarely built into the history of the country

This might be the author‘s allusion to the gist or perhaps even the purpose of the book.

While back in the time of the novel some eruptions of violence and injustice ―soon faded in the memory‖, Barnes through his novel brought such memories back to life, so that the nation can reflect upon its own guilt and reconcile with its history.

Interestingly, the metaphorical language used in the excerpt likens a photograph or a painting and a memory, emphasizing the visual aspect of it.

No, George thought, this was ungracious of him. Sir Arthur was doubtless working from memory, from the version of events he had himself told and retold down the years. George knew from taking witness statements how the constant recounting of events smoothed the edges of

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stories, rendered the speaker more self-important, made everything more certain than it had seemed at the time.

The qualities or rather deficiencies of memory described here correspond with the sins of bias and possibly of suggestibility, where memories could be implanted by leading questions, comments or suggestions, while a person is trying to recall a past experience

(Schacter 15).

They are now asked to stand in silence for two minutes to honour the memory of their great champion.

This could be seen as another case of personification, in which memory – similar to a statue, stands for a person usually long dead. It is a commonly held tradition that such representations are treated with great respect, proportionate to the significance of its model.

Examples with History

'Her lungs are gravely affected. There is every sign of rapid consumption. Given her condition and family history…' Dr Dalton did not need to continue, except to add, 'You will want a second opinion.'

The meaning of the word history is quite personal here and even though in some cases it could actually represent the history of a particular family, in this case the meaning is narrowed to a medical history, the serious illnesses her relatives had to deal with.

At school, additional stories and explanations of life were put before him. This is what science says; this is what history says; this is what literature says… George became adept at answering examination questions on these subjects, even if they had no real vivacity in his mind. But now he has discovered the law, and the world is beginning finally to make sense. Hitherto invisible connections – between people, between things, between ideas and principles – are gradually revealing themselves.

The way history is presented in the excerpt, as a school subject, suggests its definite nature, its authoritative voice and power. A complete and final version would stand in strict opposition to Barnes‘ thoughts on the multiplicity of historical accounts, as he presented them in A History of the World in 10 1/2 Chapters.

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He joined the Rationalist Association, and found their work necessary, but essentially destructive and therefore sterile. The demolition of antique faiths had been fundamental to human advancement; but now that those old buildings had been levelled, where was man to find shelter in this blasted landscape? How could anyone glibly decide that the history of what the species had for millennia agreed to call the soul was now at an end? Human beings would continue to develop, and therefore whatever was inside them must also develop. Even a clodhopping sceptic could surely see that.

The excerpt above addresses several aspects of memory in the form of history. One of the ideas is that the old must yield to the new, based on the premise of human advancement, or intellectual development. Barnes uses the metaphors of buildings as places protecting people from the outer world. Perhaps the shelter of faith helped people fight the uncertainty that the modern age brought into their lives. The soul being a concept could either transform or eventually end up in oblivion, as even its long history cannot save it forever.

'I would suggest you look into the history of crime in Great Wyrley and its environs in the last years. There have been some… peculiar goings-on. And I suggest you work with those who know the area best. There's a very sound Sergeant, can't remember his name. Large, red-faced fellow…'

George borrowed a history of recent British art, only to discover that all the illustrations of work by Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema had been neatly removed by the official razor.

The searches continued, the rub-downs and the dry baths. He read more history than he knew existed, had despatched all the classic authors and was now proceeding through the lesser ones.

He encourages self-sufficiency, sports, riding; he gives Kingsley books about great battles in world history, and warns him of the perils of military unpreparedness.

Whether he needed a lepidopterist or an expert on the history of the longbow, a police surgeon or a chief constable, his requests for an interview would normally be smiled upon.

The history of Zoroastrianism is not helping make the smooth transition she has somehow hoped for. Also, it feels dishonest, against her view of herself.

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There were worse fates, George decided, than to be a footnote in legal history.

All these excerpts illustrate the narrowing of the concept of history. From history understood as the sum total of past events, the meaning moves to a temporarily and thematically limited one of a book chronicling some specialized field of human (not necessarily) activity.

From a linguistic point of view, one might reflect upon the ambiguity of the third excerpt from the top - what does one do when he ―reads history‖?

What story did it all tell? One of money, breeding, taste, history, power. The family's name had been made in the eighteenth century by Anson the circumnavigator, who had also laid down its first fortune – prize money from the capture of a Spanish galleon.

In the last excerpt, Barnes places the word history in interesting company. As if all these were connected, at least in its self-replicating quality. Money brings power (or the other way round), which in turn ensures breeding that eventually cultivates a rich family‘s taste, and all these make it certain the family is inscribed in history books.

5. Memory in The Sense of an Ending 5.1 Plot Summary

The story starts as a series of recollections, in which Tony, the narrator, returns to his school days. He introduces the readers to Adrian Finn, a new boy at school who quickly becomes the fourth member of their clique, together with Alex and Colin. They experience the atmosphere of the 60s and the main protagonist speaks about his outlook on the world at the time of his adolescence. They are eager to take the reins of their life fully into their hands. Tony describes how Adrian stuck out of the class, as he was very bright, well-read and sophisticated.

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Tony later starts dating Veronica Ford and during their short relationship he gets to meet her posh family. They eventually break up and as Tony moves to study at university in Bristol, he focuses on his studies and falls out of contact with the rest of the clique, who start studying in other places. Unsurprisingly, Adrian gets a scholarship to Cambridge.

Tony lives a usual student life, but towards his graduation he receives a letter in which

Adrian asks for his permission to go out with Veronica. Tony first accedes, responding to

Adrian with a postcard, but later he becomes emotional and angry and writes a mean letter, in which he mentions that not everything is right with Veronica. He advises Adrian to consult Veronica‘s mother in that matter and implies there might have been a history of sexual abuse in her family. Tony never receives a reply and since he does not feel like seeing Adrian (possibly with Veronica), he does not contact the rest of the clique either.

After he graduates he goes on to work and travel for half a year in the United States.

Upon his return, he receives sad news of Adrian‘s suicide. The suicide note mostly asserts that from a philosophical standpoint, Adrian was justified in taking his own life. Tony‘s mom ascribes the act to Adrian‘s too high intelligence, whereas the clique seems to believe it was Adrian‘s way of dealing with the philosophical issue of life. The first part of the story ends when Alex, Colin and Tony go separate ways and start living their own lives.

In a few paragraphs that follow, Tony informs the readers in a telegraphic manner what his next forty years of life looked like. He starts working in arts administration, meets

Margaret, gets married, buys a house and they have a daughter, Susie, who has her own family now. After some time he and his wife become estranged and eventually divorce.

They stay in touch and remain friends, but never get back together again.

Then one day Tony receives a solicitor‘s letter informing him of the death of Veronica‘s mother who bequeathed him 500 pounds and Adrian‘s diary. Tony is confused as he nearly forgot all about Veronica and her family, does not know what the money is for and has no

47 idea how Veronica‘s mother came into possession of Adrian‘s diary. Tony contacts

Veronica in order to get the diary and learn more about the matter, but her replies are cryptic and she is reluctant to comply with his requests. Tony does not understand the situation, but the mental strain and some clues from the past help him gradually remember more about the events that transpired forty years earlier.

The rest of the story describes Tony‘s effort to come into possession of the diary, for he believes it to be the key to understanding the tragic outcome of the past events, as well as the key to his true memory. Once he regains most of his memory, he also needs to come to terms with his past deeds and their consequences and ponders his own responsibility.

5.2 Analysis

Unlike in A History of the World in 10 1/2 Chapters and Arthur & George, The Sense of an

Ending is related by only a single narrator. From the very beginning, Barnes gives readers clues or perhaps warnings regarding the reliability of the narrator‘s account, with Tony making comments such as: ―This last isn‘t something I actually saw, but what you end up remembering isn‘t always the same as what you have witnessed.‖ (Barnes 2011: 10). The more the main character recalls from his past, the more it becomes clear he is an unreliable narrator. It turns out not everything the readers were told at the beginning of the story happened the way Tony presented it. However, it seems Tony did not mean to lie and the inaccuracy of his account is rather the result of years of time blocking out or distorting various parts of his memory. The structure of the novel helps Barnes feed us important facts in small doses. While the first of Tony‘s versions of events comes out of poisoned or distorted memory, the later effort presents an antidote helping him recover his memory.

What Barnes has illustrated on a larger scale in A History of the World in 10 1/2 Chapters about the qualities of history is still present here (multiple versions of history, factual gaps

48 being filled with speculation etc.), but the focus shifts from the assessment of history and a struggle for global objectivity to the dynamic nature of subjective memory. While Barnes strived in A History of the World in 10 1/2 Chapters to philosophically appraise history and in

Arthur & George he walked the thin line of historiographic metafiction, The Sense of an Ending deals with a past of an individual through the main character‘s recollections and truth- seeking. In the case of Tony Webster, it is the past that he has lost access to, perhaps because the emotions connected with it were too painful and unpleasant, or possibly because the events from his twenties were later replaced by other events. More to the point, some of his memories were surely forgotten due to the sin of transience.

The main protagonist‘s motivation for seeking the truth lies in several areas. First of all, he is an elderly man whose life has been quite dull and therefore can afford to spend time digging up skeletons from the garden of his memory. Second, it is a common thing for elderly people (not exclusively) to do a certain stock-taking as they reach their last days.

And thirdly, in Tony‘s case, his ―peaceability‖, as he puts it, his complacency with his own life as he is living it, is seriously disturbed by the solicitor‘s letter. On top of that, the rediscovered fragments of memory shed a new and unflattering light on the image he held of himself. The last point is certainly an arguable element of motivation. Do people really have a twisted desire to delve into and explore their own past misdeeds? Do they seriously want to face the parts of their psyche or memory they have been ignoring, suppressing or possibly trying to forget all their lives?

By giving the readers one piece of information at a time, having first presented an account of events that gives them very valid reasons to doubt its accuracy, Barnes achieves a level of ongoing suspense, not unlike in detective stories. The readers need not necessarily be expected to identify with the tedious and cowardly character of Tony, but they share in his sincere effort to find the truth about his past. Similar features were

49 employed both in A History of the World in 10 1/2 Chapters, for instance in ―The Stowaway‖

- where the readers are eager to find out who the narrator is, and in Arthur & George, where until the very last pages it is not clear whether the perpetrator of animal mutilations will be convicted or not.

5.3 Examples with Commentaries

Let us now have a look at the examples from The Sense of an Ending containing the subject of memory. The excerpts are ordered chronologically, as they appear in the novel.

We liked a game that ended in a win and loss, not a draw. And so for some, the Serbian gunman, whose name is long gone from my memory, had one hundred per cent individual responsibility: take him out of the equation, and the war would never have happened. In this excerpt, Tony recalls events from his high school history classes. Apart from introducing the topic of responsibility – and the chain of responsibility, as is explored later in the novel – he refers to his memory. This case of forgetting could be either ascribed to transience – the information has not been recalled for a long time, as it was not needed – or to blocking. According to John Stuart Mill, "Proper names are not connotative"(Schacter 63). Consequently, one might be able to recall people‘s faces, their occupation or other characteristic features, but unless their names evoke something familiar, the access to the memory becomes blocked.

Was this their exact exchange? Almost certainly not. Still, it is my best memory of their exchange.

Apart from a signal to the reader that the narrator might be unreliable, the example illustrates a possible sin of bias, which has been a ubiquitous theme in Barnes‘ novels. He claims that by applying one‘s current knowledge, feelings and opinions on past events,

50 these become distorted (in memory). Barnes addresses the same issue in several places in

The Sense of an Ending:

But of course, my desire to ascribe responsibility might be more a reflection of my own cast of mind than a fair analysis of what happened. That‘s one of the central problems of history, isn‘t it, sir? The question of subjective versus objective interpretation, the fact that we need to know the history of the historian in order to understand the version that is being put in front of us. While in the case of history the sin of bias projects itself in grander dimensions – since history ultimately seeks a certain level of objectivity, the same principle is responsible for the distortion of personal, subjective memories.

I was so ill at ease that I spent the entire weekend constipated: this is my principal factual memory. The rest consists of impressions and half memories which may therefore be self-serving:

Here Tony uses the expression ―factual memory‖, meaning this is the only thing he remembers for sure, the rest might have become distorted. According to Tulving (Tulving,

1972 qtd. in Plháková 207), factual information is stored in people‘s semantic memory.

Even facts are usually learnt in particular episodic situations, although due to the nature of the semantic memory the circumstances are usually forgotten. Another important point with this example is that while the constipation (the remembered fact) might have been a result of the emotional distress from a new environment and a socially stressful situation, it might have also been the other way round. The physical condition would certainly negatively affect his experiencing. Furthermore, as Tony suggests, the rest of his memories might have been distorted – the sin of bias would manifest in the projection of his present feelings on the past experience.

I wish I‘d kept that letter, because it would have been proof, corroboration. Instead, the only evidence comes from my memory—of a carefree, rather dashing woman who broke an egg, cooked me another, and told me not to take any shit from her daughter.

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The main character wishes to have some hard evidence that would confirm what he remembers. It would not only confirm his memory, but it would help him preserve the image he currently holds of himself. In the part on autobiographical memories, Plháková nevertheless mentions that people have a tendency to remember their own behaviour in various situations in a favourable way – they believe they said or did the right things, although the reality might have been different (Plháková 220).

Yes, why her, and why then; furthermore, why ask? Actually, to be true to my own memory, as far as that‘s ever possible (and I didn‘t keep this letter either), what he said was that he and Veronica were already going out together, a state of affairs that would doubtless come to my attention sooner or later; and so it seemed better that I heard about it from him.

Tony keeps undermining the readers‘ belief that what he is remembering and saying is true and/or complete. The author sets the scene for a gradual reconciliation of the facts regarding the past events. Furthermore, Tony‘s constant doubts might be the reaction of his mind to the confrontation with unpleasant details from his past that had been inaccessible for a long time.

Again, I must stress that this is my reading now of what happened then. Or rather, my memory now of my reading then of what was happening at the time.

Another issue is addressed here through the voice of the main character. One‘s memories might be true, but the more often an attempt to recall them is made, the more distorted they might become. The memories may comprise mere fragments, images, sensory perceptions, but it is the mind‘s nature to adjust them so they make sense. Thus they are turned into meaningful narratives, despite the fact that the original memories were fragmentary or even illogical. The two mentioned principles would fall under the sin of commission and specifically that of suggestibility (Schacter 115). On top of that, all this would be irrelevant had Tony not understood the situation at the time.

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But our lives were already going in different directions, and the shared memory of Adrian was not enough to hold us together. Perhaps the lack of mystery about his death meant that his case was more easily closed. We would remember him all our lives, of course.

"Shared memory‖, a commonly used idiom, is an illusion of sorts. People may naturally remember the same things from the past, but they tend to remember them in their own specific way. Barnes here also points to the idea that missing facts, incompleteness of information and mystery add to one‘s curiosity. Everyday experience as well as laboratory studies show that a heightened level of emotion increases a person‘s ability to remember

(Schacter 162).

We live with such easy assumptions, don‘t we? For instance, that memory equals events plus time. But it‘s all much odder than this. Who was it said that memory is what we thought we‘d forgotten? And it ought to be obvious to us that time doesn‘t act as a fixative, rather as a solvent. But it‘s not convenient—it‘s not useful—to believe this; it doesn‘t help us get on with our lives; so we ignore it.

The first part of the statement clearly contradicts what the main character has been discovering about the nature of memory throughout the novel. Also, the claim ―memory equals events plus time‖ seems like an intentional oversimplification. The second part – memory as what one thought one had forgotten – could refer to the fact that long-term memory stores the information for a very long time (Plháková 203), sometimes for one‘s whole life. This is true unless the information is replaced by another piece of information, especially a very similar one. Connectionist theories assert that it is only a matter of having the right key to access the memory stored in people‘s long-term memory (Plháková 22).

But my memory has increasingly become a mechanism which reiterates apparently truthful data with little variation. I stared into the past, I waited, I tried to trick my memory into a different course. But it was no good.

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The key words here are ―apparently‖ and ―variation‖. Whatever the original memory might have been, the result of many recollections and perhaps retellings will probably be quite different, affected by the sins of transience and especially the sin of bias. So the account seems so truthful to Tony mainly as a result of clinging to the reconstructed version coherent with his image of himself for a long time.

I recognised at that moment another reason for my determination. The diary was evidence; it was—it might be—corroboration. It might disrupt the banal reiterations of memory. It might jump-start something—though I had no idea what. This extract might present the sin of blocking, where the diary would serve as a retrieval cue that could trigger recall (Schacter 62).

And now I began to elaborate a different life for Veronica‘s brother, one in which his student years glowed in his memory as filled with happiness and hope—indeed, as the one period when his life had briefly achieved that sense of harmony we all aspire to.

This excerpt presents another example of a possible bias. Veronica‘s brother made a certain impression on Tony that over the years grew into Tony‘s idea of what the brother‘s further life must look like. This invented life would be congruent with the memories that

Tony has now and his memories would on the other hand be affected by Tony‘s current opinions and attitudes. It is a rather complex cycle that can only produce a distorted memory, or an alternative life of somebody‘s, as it was in this case.

But I‘ve been turning over in my mind the question of nostalgia, and whether I suffer from it. I certainly don‘t get soggy at the memory of some childhood knickknack; nor do I want to deceive myself sentimentally about something that wasn‘t even true at the time—love of the old school, and so on. But if nostalgia means the powerful recollection of strong emotions—and a regret that such feelings are no longer present in our lives—then I plead guilty.

Rather than the word memory used in the excerpt, the part ―that wasn‘t even true at the time‖ could be explained within the framework of sins of memory. To be more precise, it

54 would again correspond with the sin of bias, where one‘s current state tends to interfere with one‘s past memories, even changing their polarity. Aesop‘s Fable ―The Fox and the

Grapes‖ comes to mind, with its resolution – the grapes were sour anyway. The love surely could not have been true, as it did not last. The bias would help reduce the psychological discomfort arising from conflicting thoughts and feelings, called ―cognitive dissonance‖ by psychologists (Schacter 130).

At the same time, it made sense that Veronica didn‘t give me a simple answer, didn‘t do or say what I hoped or expected. In this she was at least consistent with my memory of her.

The phrase ―being consistent with my memory‖ has many possible layers of interpretation. First of all, Tony had an experience, a life encounter with Veronica during their brief relationship. This and the fact she later dated one of his friends, and very much to his dismay, must have influenced his thinking about Veronica. It is also implied in the story that Tony believed for some time Veronica was responsible for Adrian‘s death. All these things are combined in an idea, impression, opinion or even judgement that Tony held of Veronica at the time of the tragic event. But over time these memories became prone to the sin of bias, as Tony unknowingly adjusted his image of Veronica, however inaccurate from the beginning, to the image compatible with himself and the version of his personal history that would generally support his present self-image.

When you are in your twenties, even if you‘re confused and uncertain about your aims and purposes, you have a strong sense of what life itself is, and of what you in life are, and might become. Later … later there is more uncertainty, more overlapping, more backtracking, more false memories. Back then, you can remember your short life in its entirety. Later, the memory becomes a thing of shreds and patches. It‘s a bit like the black box aeroplanes carry to record what happens in a crash. If nothing goes wrong, the tape erases itself. So if you do crash, it‘s obvious why you did; if you don‘t, then the log of your journey is much less clear.

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Barnes establishes in this excerpt that memory at a young age allows people to remember their short life in its entirety. Such a claim seems bold and generally untrue and the issue could be addressed differently. Do people, in their youth actually feel the need to look back and to remember their short life in its entirety? Do they not rather focus on the present and perhaps on the future? Do they care about their past memories much? While saying no to these questions, it could be said in accord with Barnes that with a gradual accumulation of life experiences and knowledge the memory becomes fragmentary, as it also has its limits (Plháková 203).

You‘re doing it for yourself, of course. You‘re wanting to leave that final memory, and make it a pleasant one. You want to be well thought of—in case your plane turns out to be the one that‘s less safe than walking to the corner shop.

The ―final memory‖ refers to one‘s wish to live in the minds and hearts of people (in their memories) after one‘s death, but the desire is not only to be remembered, but to be remembered ―correctly‖, in a way that is congruent with one‘s self-image. Could such a polished, censored, neat version of who one is make its way into the memories of one‘s friends and relatives? Considering the sin of bias in which one‘s current emotions and opinions also affect one‘s memories, this is entirely possible.

After his death, her mother had sold the house in Chislehurst and moved up to London. She did art classes, started smoking, and took in lodgers, even though she‘d been left well provided for. She had remained in good health until a year or so ago, when her memory began to fail. A small stroke was suspected. Then she started putting the tea in the fridge and the eggs in the breadbin, that sort of thing. Once she nearly set the house on fire by leaving a cigarette burning. She remained cheerful throughout, until she suddenly went downhill. The last months had been a struggle, and no, her end had not been gentle, though it had been a mercy.

This reference is a reminder of the physical nature of memory, as it is closely related to the functions of the brain. The described erroneous behaviour bears signs of the sin of misattribution, which is the usual impact of a stroke on memory functions (Schacter 92).

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The second part concerned with the burning cigarette would attest to the sin of absent- mindedness, in which the event is not encoded properly into memory due to one‘s lack of attention (Schacter 167).

When you start forgetting things—I don‘t mean Alzheimer‘s, just the predictable consequence of ageing—there are different ways to react. You can sit there and try to force your memory into giving up the name of that acquaintance, flower, train station, astronaut … Or you admit failure and take practical steps with reference books and the Internet. Or you can just let it go—forget about remembering—and then sometimes you find that the mislaid fact surfaces an hour or a day later, often in those long waking nights that age imposes. Well, we all learn this, those of us who forget things.

The second half of the excerpt most resembles the sin of blocking, where in some cases the blocked memory pops up when one‘s attention is directed elsewhere. Perhaps one‘s effort and clinging to some abstract cloud of desired memory prevents one from accessing and retrieving the blocked information (Plháková 229).

But we also learn something else: that the brain doesn‘t like being typecast. Just when you think everything is a matter of decrease, of subtraction and division, your brain, your memory, may surprise you. As if it‘s saying: Don‘t imagine you can rely on some comforting process of gradual decline—life‘s much more complicated than that. And so the brain will throw you scraps from time to time, even disengage those familiar memory loops. That‘s what, to my consternation, I found happening to me now. I began to remember, with no particular order or sense of significance, long-buried details of that distant weekend with the Ford family.

Similar to the example above it, this excerpt might attest to the sin of bias. Additionally, the process in which some parts of one‘s memories reappear may be explained by the theory of loss of cues within the connectionist network. The information is stored in one‘s long-term memory, but one needs a cue to trigger its retrieval (Plháková 229).

On the train up to town, there was a girl sitting opposite me, plugged into earphones, eyes closed, impervious to the world outside, moving her head to music only she could hear. And suddenly, a complete memory came to me: of Veronica dancing. Yes, she didn‘t dance—that‘s what I 57

said—but there‘d been one evening in my room when she got all mischievous and started pulling out my pop records.

Again, this recollection could be ascribed to a spontaneous trigger allowing the retrieval of a seemingly lost memory. Apart from blocking, the sin of bias might be observed, as the opinion presently held by Tony was that Veronica had never danced.

At first I couldn‘t make any sense of this: she was the one who had told me I was now on my own. But then I had a memory from a long way back, from the early years of our marriage. Some chap at work gave a party and invited me along; Margaret didn‘t want to come. I flirted with a girl and she flirted back. Well, a bit more than flirting—though still way below even infra-sex—but I put a lid on it as soon as I sobered up.

The part attesting to a sin of memory would be – ―I put a lid on it‖. Enclosing a certain memory in order to protect one‘s integrity or self-image is connected to the process of directed forgetting and retrieval inhibition. These processes are related, although not identical to the Freudian notion of repression. The retrieval inhibition is especially common in the category of people named ―repressors‖, who tend to report low levels of anxiety and stress in a reaction to a person or situation, even though the physiological measures indicate the contrary. Since such people do not admit these feelings, they also have a tendency to block the negative events from a future recollection, compared to ―non- repressors‖ (Schacter 81).

At least, that‘s how I remember it now. Though if you were to put me in a court of law, I doubt I‘d stand up to cross-examination very well. ―And yet you claim this memory was suppressed for forty years?‖ ―Yes.‖ ―And only surfaced just recently?‖ ―Yes.‖ ―Are you able to account for why it surfaced?‖ ―Not really.‖ ―Then let me put it to you, Mr. Webster, that this supposed incident is an entire figment of your imagination, constructed to justify some romantic attachment which you appear to have been nurturing towards my client, a presumption which, the court should know, my client finds utterly repugnant.‖

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The judge‘s assessment of the situation would attest to Tony‘s sin of commission and specifically that of bias, where the present feelings and opinions retrogradely affect one‘s memories. Tony‘s description of the situation would on the other hand point in the direction of the sin of transience, or perhaps the sin of blocking, where again a certain cue can help bring back memories buried deep in one‘s unconscious.

I could only reply that I think—I theorise—that something—something else—happens to the memory over time. For years you survive with the same loops, the same facts and the same emotions. I press a button marked Adrian or Veronica, the tape runs, the usual stuff spools out. The events reconfirm the emotions—resentment, a sense of injustice, relief—and vice versa. There seems no way of accessing anything else; the case is closed. Which is why you seek corroboration, even if it turns out to be contradiction. But what if, even at a late stage, your emotions relating to those long-ago events and people change? That ugly letter of mine provoked remorse in me. Veronica‘s account of her parents‘ deaths—yes, even her father‘s—had touched me more than I would have thought possible. I felt a new sympathy for them—and her. Then, not long afterwards, I began remembering forgotten things. I don‘t know if there‘s a scientific explanation for this—to do with new affective states reopening blocked-off neural pathways. All I can say is that it happened, and that it astonished me.

Based on the sin of bias, it is rather the other way round with ―the events reconfirm the emotions‖. One‘s emotions help the memory retain and recall mainly things that are congruent with one‘s current state of emotions, opinions and self-image. The second part of the excerpt, mainly the phrase suggesting ―affective states reopening blocked-off neural pathways‖ would quite closely correspond with both the sin of blocking and the theory of cues, which draw from connectionist theories and the role of neurons and synapses in both encoding and recalling information (Plháková 301).

The time-deniers say: forty‘s nothing, at fifty you‘re in your prime, sixty‘s the new forty, and so on. I know this much: that there is objective time, but also subjective time, the kind you wear on the inside of your wrist, next to where the pulse lies. And this personal time, which is the true time, is measured in your relationship to memory. So when this strange thing happened—when these new memories suddenly came upon me—it was as

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if, for that moment, time had been placed in reverse. As if, for that moment, the river ran upstream. This philosophical reflection on the nature of time and its relation to memory might remind readers how some people tend, as they get older, to focus more on the events long past and take no notice of current events. As if they were saying the past is their real life, whereas the present, negatively affected by illnesses of old age and especially by the deterioration of memory, has nothing to offer to them.

She didn‘t reply. I shouldn‘t have been surprised. From my knowledge and memory of her, outdated though it was, car talk was never going to be Veronica‘s thing.

The image one has of other people, especially of those one has not seen for a long time, might remain conserved to a certain degree, but it is also a subject of decay, due to the sins of omission. The image could also become a victim of one‘s reassessment or selection of information due to the sin of bias. In a way the old image lives its own life and develops independently of the actual person. As a result, when the two images meet after years of separation, some of the features match and some of them are completely divergent.

What had begun as a determination to obtain property bequeathed to me had morphed into something much larger, something which bore on the whole of my life, on time and memory.

The regained memory cast a new light on Tony‘s past deeds and consequently on the life he had been living until then. By facing the unpleasant unearthed facts, Tony corrected his self-image and reassessed his role in the past events accordingly.

I didn‘t know why I wanted to know. But as I say, I had no sense of urgency. It was like not pressing on the brain to summon a memory. If I didn‘t press on—what?—time, then something, perhaps even a solution, might come to the surface.

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Here Barnes refers to the mechanism described earlier in which mental strain may function as an active component in blocking certain memories, whereas a relaxed state of mind provides space for some cues that can help a seemingly lost memory reappear.

Examples Regarding History

There are a few places in the novel where Barnes meditates on the subject of history, although with far less frequency than in A History of the World in 10 1/2 Chapters.

What was the line Adrian used to quote? ―History is that certainty produced at the point where the imperfections of memory meet the inadequacies of documentation.‖

What Barnes might be hinting at here is that history is easily established in the absence of both living people and relevant or sufficient documentation to contradict the version of history, the narrative, the story a historian decides to tell.

Narrative Therapy

There is one part in the text that seems to overlap into the area of narrative psychotherapy.

I was saying, confidently, how the chief characteristic of remorse is that nothing can be done about it: that the time has passed for apology or amends. But what if I‘m wrong? What if by some means remorse can be made to flow backwards, can be transmuted into simple guilt, then apologised for, and then forgiven? What if you can prove you weren‘t the bad guy she took you for, and she is willing to accept your proof?

The main character wishes his remorse had the power to change his past, or at least the past in the eyes of people he cares for. Interestingly, narrative psychotherapy allows for a similar thing. By retelling one‘s life story and by creating new narratives one‘s life

61 story is gradually transformed from a difficult, indigestible form into an acceptable one. As a result, the client is able to change their past along with their self-image (Plháková 221).

Similarly, Schacter believes that disclosing difficult experiences to others and creating narratives can have profoundly positive effects (Schacter 152). An analogy with the process of writing could be observed here, where converting one‘s traumatic or otherwise emotionally charged experiences into a fiction can have similarly positive effects on the writer.

6. Lexical Field of Memory / History in Individual Works

In order to compare how the concept of memory was dealt with in the selected works by the author, statistical methods were used. A corpora were created out of individual novels as well as all three of the three books combined and these were processed by The

Sketch Engine, an online software tool used in corpus linguistics.

The main interest lay in the proportion of the words related to memory in individual works. The questions of whether the linguistic means used for writing about memory could be divided further into subjective and objective expressions and whether these roughly correspond with the words memory and history presented a significant challenge.

In order to determine the ratio and compare individual works, it was necessary to define the lexical or semantic field of the word memory and subdivide it further into the subjective and objective fields.

The very definition of lexical field presents a certain issue. How does one delineate a set of words that are semantically related? How does one decide on the size of the set and its limits?

"A lexical field is a set of lexemes that are used to talk about a defined area of experience; Lehrer (1974), for example, has an extensive discussion of the field of 'cooking' terms. A lexical field analysis will attempt to establish the lexemes that are available in the vocabulary for talking about the area under investigation and then propose how they differ from each other in meaning and use.

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Such an analysis begins to show how the vocabulary as a whole is structured, and more so when individual lexical fields are brought into relationship with each other. There is no prescribed or agreed method for determining what constitutes a lexical field; each scholar must draw their own boundaries and establish their own criteria. Much work still needs to be undertaken in researching this approach to vocabulary. Lexical field analysis is reflected in dictionaries that take a 'topical' or 'thematic' approach to presenting and describing words." (Jackson 106)

Lexical field has to be defined based on one‘s judgment, the unifying aspect of which being the semantic relationship between the words.

Oxford Thesaurus – An A-Z Dictionary of Synonyms memory n. 1 recall, recollection, retention: My memory of the incident is very vivid. She has a poor memory for faces. 2 recollection, reminiscence, thought: The interviewer was drawing on grandfather's memories of the 1920s. 3 remembrance, honour, homage, respect, tribute, celebration: He wrote a sequence of poems in memory of a dear friend.

The words related to memory that were found in the thesaurus were carefully selected based on their supposed relevance to memory/history. Words coming from the area of synonymy and hyponymy, as well as antonymy were considered. Words that did not occur in the corpora were eliminated. The final list was further divided into subfields of memory and history, where the first one was to represent a more subjective aspect of the concept and the second a more objective one. However, since some words could easily express either category depending on their use, the desired accuracy would require a check of individual occurrences. For that reason these words were included into both subsets.

The data about relative frequency of lemmas specified in the lexical field (and subfields) were extracted through the function ―Word List‖ in the Sketch Engine.

The Sketch Engine is for anyone wanting to research how words behave. It is a Corpus Query System. It lets you see a concordance for any word, phrase or grammatical construction, in one of the corpora that we provide, or in a corpus of your own. Its unique feature are word sketches, one-page, automatic, corpus- derived summaries of a word's grammatical and collocational behaviour (http://www.sketchengine.co.uk/).

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In order to extract precisely the specified set of words (lemmas), a whitelist containing the words in the required format was uploaded to The Sketch Engine. Two whitelists were used in this task – one for the subfield of memory and one for the subfield of history.

The results are presented in the following tables, comprising mainly of printscreen images of the data exported by The Sketch Engine.

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Lexical Subfield for MEMORY Lexical Subfield for HISTORY

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Lexical Subfield for MEMORY Lexical Subfield for HISTORY

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Lexical Subfield for MEMORY Lexical Subfield for HISTORY

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Lexical Subfield for MEMORY Lexical Subfield for HISTORY

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Lexical Subfield for MEMORY Lexical Subfield for HISTORY

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MEMORY MEMORY MEMORY

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HISTORY HISTORY HISTORY

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7. Conclusion

This master‘s thesis has analysed three selected novels by Julian Barnes with regards to the concept of memory in its various forms. The hypothesis claiming Barnes has over time shifted in his writing from objectivity to subjectivity was tested and seems to be defensible.

The first selected novel, A History of the World in 10 ½ Chapters (1989) deals mainly with memory in the form of history. As the title suggests and the number of analysed samples confirms, history is a focal point of the novel. Its fragmentary nature with a structure comprised of short stories results in an image of the world in which there is no single history, but as many as there are historians, narrators and generally those who try to grasp an understanding of the past.

Although the novel is fiction, the critique of history that supposedly manipulates facts and distorts memories resonates with Paul Ricoeur‘s division of historical discourse into the documentary level, the level of explanation/understanding and the level of literary representation of the past. Furthermore, according to Ricoeur, the historical discourse is a subject of interpretation on each of these levels (Ricoeur 185) which in turn attests to

Barnes‘ satirical depiction of history.

Barnes ponders the cyclical and deterministic quality of history and claims a proper understanding of it is necessary should its fatalistic dictate be rejected. The novel emphasizes the struggle of individuals to resist its intimidating and manipulative forces.

When he deals with individual memory, Barnes usually refers to a larger time perspective, to a particular history. Finally, Barnes suggests the negative force of history could only be overcome by love, as both art and religion fail to offer any assistance.

In spite of the disrupted chronology, various styles of writing and an unreliable narrator, the resulting image of history is coherent and serves as an analogy of the process of historiography, which is susceptible to interpretation on every level of the process.

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The novel Arthur & George (2005) proves its relationship with the concept of memory by the very choice of the topic, in which Barnes brings to light a hundred-year old case of criminal and judicial injustice that draws from historical facts known about the Wyrley case.

The concept of memory here oscillates between its individual and collective forms. The first being presented by a subjective third-person narration of the main characters who at times refers to various aspects of human memory, mainly its unreliability. The second is manifested in Barnes‘ effort to revise and rework a relatively recent history, in order for the nation to cure its past trauma and come to some reconciliation with its past. Despite the huge amount of historically accurate details, it has been exemplified that Barnes is not always faithful to history and at times subjects the story‘s veracity to his artistic license.

This is however congruent with his previous claims about the nature of art with regards to truth and history.

The resulting effect of his writing leaves the readers in a state of uncertainty about the reliability of the source. It is neither a true historical novel nor is it purely fiction, as it contains a lot of accurate biographical data. Perhaps this is exactly the message Barnes is trying to convey – neither artistic nor historic rendition of the past is absolutely dependable and one has to manage it with common sense and keep faith that the accounts presented at least strive to narrate the historical truth.

The third selected novel, The Sense of an Ending (2011), puts forth the concept of memory in a very personal manner, through the main character‘s gradual retrieval of the memories long lost. This self-reflective novel with autobiographical elements lent itself naturally to an interpretation based in cognitive psychology and more specifically, with the focus on various types of memory distortion. Although the novel occasionally refers to history, its gist lies in the meditation on the qualities of individual memory and reflects on the topics of personal guilt and responsibility. Similarly to Arthur & George, the re-working of the past

73 allows for reconciliation. However, in this case the discovered trauma and the re-worked personal history does not necessarily lead to the main character being healed, but it helps him to re-adjust his self-image and come to terms with his life.

Finally, based on the selected topics, the general structure and the techniques used in the above-mentioned Barnes‘ novels, it could be argued Barnes‘ way of treating the concept of memory has changed over time, shifting from the more objective to the more subjective.

This has been exemplified in the provided literary analysis and the idea is also supported by the statistical data extracted from the books‘ corpora, showing the overall increase in the occurrence of expressions pertaining to the lexical subfield of memory in contrast with history.

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8. Works Cited and Consulted

Primary Materials

Barnes, Julian. A History of the World in 10½ Chapters. New York: Random House/Vintage,

1990. Print.

Barnes, Julian. Arthur & George. London: Vintage, 2006. Print.

Barnes, Julian. The Sense of an Ending. London: Jonathan Cape, 2011. Print.

Secondary Materials

Guignery, Vanessa. The Fiction of Julian Barnes. Basingstoke [England: Palgrave Macmillan,

2006. Print.

Groes, Sebastian, and Peter Childs. Julian Barnes: Contemporary Critical Perspectives. London:

Continuum, 2011. Internet resource.

Childs, Peter. Julian Barnes. Manchester: Manchester UP, 2011. Print.

Barnes, Julian, and Vanessa Guignery. Conversations with Julian Barnes. Jackson: U of

Mississippi, 2009. Print.

Moseley, Merritt. Understanding Julian Barnes. Columbia, S.C.: U of South Carolina, 1997.

Print.

Ricœur, Paul, Kathleen Blamey, and David Pellauer. Memory, History, Forgetting. Chicago, IL,

Etc.: U of Chicago, 2004. Print. Pellauer. Chicago & London: The University of Chicago

Press, 2004. Print

Plháková, Alena. Učebnice obecné psychologie. Prague: Akademia, 2004. Print.

Schacter, Daniel L. The Seven Sins of Memory: How the Mind Forgets and Remembers. Boston:

Houghton Mifflin, 2001. Print.

Jackson, Howard. Lexicography an Introduction. London: Routledge, 2002. Print.

Barnes, Julian. Flaubert's Parrot. London: Picador, 1985. Print.

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Roberts, Ryan. "Julian Barnes Website: Homepage." Julian Barnes Website: Homepage. Ryan

Roberts, 11 May 2014. Web. 28 May 2014. .

Brown, Jeffrey. "Conversation: Julian Barnes, Winner of the 2011 Man Booker Prize." PBS.

PBS, 8 Nov. 2011. Web. 28 May 2014. .

Gillett, Sarah, and Susanna Nicklin. "Writers: Julian Barnes." Julian Barnes. British Council,

2011. Web. 28 May 2014. .

Stout, Mira. "Chameleon Novelist." Books, The New York Times on the Web. N.p., 22

Nov. 1992. Web. 19 Jan. 2015.

"Julian Barnes @ Passa Porta Festival 2013, Brussels." YouTube. YouTube, 28 Mar. 2013.

Web. 27 Apr. 2015.

Amanda Smith, "Julian Barnes," Publishers Weekly 236 (3 November 1989): 73.

Rackham, Arthur. "The Fox and the Grapes." Aesop's Fables. Dover ed. New York: Avenel,

2009. Print.

"25 Famous Scientists Who Believed in God." Famous Scientists. Web. 29 Apr. 2015.

.

Cook, Pat, and Phillip Gowan. "Titanic Survivor | Mr Lawrence Beesley." Encyclopedia

Titanica. N.p., n.d. Web. 21 Apr. 2015.

"Brian Finney Essay on Julian Barnes." Brian Finney Essay on Julian Barnes. Web. 29 Apr.

2015. .

Davies, Glyn. A History of Money: From Ancient times to the Present Day. Cardiff: U of Wales,

1994. Print.

Holy Bible: English Standard Version. Wheaton, Ill.: Crossway Bibles, 2001. Print.

"Sketch Engine: Text Corpus Query System for All." Sketch Engine: Text Corpus Query System for All. Web. 27 Mar. 2015. .

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Résumé This master‘s diploma thesis analyses the concept of memory in three novels by the British novelist Julian Barnes: A History of the Worlds in 10 ½ Chapters (1989), Arthur & George (2005) and The Sense of an Ending (2011). The thesis explores the hypothesis that Julian Barnes‘ writing about memory has over time shifted from objectivity to subjectivity, from reflections on memory in the form of history and its truthfulness to his later focus on the individual memory and its (un)reliability. The chapters analyse the novels from the perspective of literary criticism, philosophy, cognitive psychology, and, in small part, corpora linguistics.

Abstrakt Tato magisterská práce analyzuje koncept paměti v románech Historie světa v 10 ½ kapitolách (1989), Arthur a George (2005) a Vědomí konce (2011) britského spisovatele Juliana Barnese. Práce zkoumá, jestli se autor v úvahách o paměti časem neposunul k větší subjektivitě, od psaní o pravdivostní povaze historie, k myšlenkám o (ne)spolehlivosti paměti jednotlivce. Jednotlivé kapitoly poskytují rozbor z pohledu literárního kriticismu, filozofie, kognitivní psychologie a v malé míře také korpusové lingvistiky.

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