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 2 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. 3 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 4 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. 5 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 6 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. 7 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). 8 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).