History of the World in 10 1/2 Chapters
The title of Julian Barnes' 1989 novel, A History of the World in 10 1/2 Chapters is at once playful and provocative. Its first half only differs from Sir Walter Raleigh's The History of the World in its substitution of an indefinite for a definite article. Like Raleigh's History it begins with Genesis. But unlike Raleigh, Barnes does not subscribe to a providential interpretation of history. Where Raleigh's was a monumental attempt to record the history of the world starting with the Creation, Barnes's modest book runs to some 300 pages and eschews any pretence of continuity or comprehensiveness. His is merely a history among many possible histories of the world.
The second half of the title of Barnes's book describes a work that is absurdly brief for such a subject, while its provocative inclusion of a "1/2" chapter draws attention to itself. This half chapter, "Parenthesis," is the only section of the book to use a didactic, mildly professorial voice, with no apparent hint of irony or humour. It forms the same function that "The Preface" does in Raleigh's History in offering a rationale and apology. Interestingly both writers see history as necessarily fragmented. Barnes's entire book can be seen as a series of digressions from those events normally considered central to any historical account of the world. At the same time Barnes has insisted that this half-chapter is the one occasion in the book where he dispenses with the masks of the fiction writer and offers his personal truth, in much the way that El Greco is the only character in the "Burial of Count Orgaz" who looks out at the spectator, saying in effect, according to Barnes, "'I did this. You've got any complaints, look at me. [. . .] I'm responsible" (Stuart 15). Yet this rare moment of truthfulness is offered in the form of a digression--a digression in a work that is nothing but a series of digressions from the supposed mainstream of history.
Clearly in this book, as in Flaubert's Parrot (1984), Barnes is adopting an ironic approach to history as a genre. Barnes has said of A History of the World that it "deals with one of the questions that obsessed Braithwaite in that book [Flaubert's Parrot]. And that is: How do we seize the past?" (Cook 12). He would appear to agree with Barthes' objection to what he calls "the fallacy of representation" attaching to traditional historical discourse. In "The Discourse of History" Barthes sees historical discourse as "in its essence a form of ideological elaboration, or to put it more precisely, an imaginary elaboration" (16). Barthes believes that "[t]he historian is not so much a collector of facts as a collector and relater of signifiers; that is to say, he organizes them with the purpose of establishing positive meaning and filling the vacuum of pure, meaningless series" (16). Barnes adopts a similar view of history in his book: "We make up a story to cover the facts we don't know or can't accept; we keep a few facts and spin a new story round them" (240).
The strategy that probably most distinguishes this book from the rest of his fictional work is its use of fragmented episodes from the history of the world, its use of what Lévi-Strauss has called bricolage. Asked in what sense his book, A History of the World in 10 1/2 Chapters, was not just a book of short stories, Barnes replied: "Well, it was conceived as a whole and executed as a whole. Things in it thicken and deepen" (Cook 12). The question that needs asking, then, are whether and how this book generates discursive meaning(s) over the totality of its very different chapters. Are some of its meanings produced by the sum of its multiple texts? Is there a shape, a beginning and end to this book? Does it qualify as what Frank Kermode has called one of those fictions "whose ends are consonant with origins, and in concord, however unexpected, with their precedents," fictions which "satisfy our needs" by giving significance to our lives, seeing that we live our whole lifetime in the midst of things (Sense 5, 7)? Equally does it live up to Barnes' own dictum that "art is the stuff you finally understand, and life, perhaps, is the stuff you finally can't understand" (McGrath 23)?
It has been pointed out by more than one reviewer that the book opens with an account of Noah and the Flood (the biblical re-creation, if not the creation of the world) and that it closes with a final chapter which envisions a contemporary form of heaven. But between chapter one's origins and chapter ten's ends the remaining eight and a half chapters do not progress chronologically. Chapter two stages a hijacking of a pleasure boat by modern Arab terrorists. Chapter three transcribes sixteenth century court records of a case in the diocese of Besançon, France. Chapter four invents the journey or crazed fantasy of a woman escaping by sea from a nuclear-ravaged West and is mildly futuristic. Chapter five is divided between a section recounting the shipwreck of the French frigate, the Medusa, in 1816, and a section analyzing the stages in the painting of the "The Raft of the Medusa" by Géricault three years later. Chapter six recounts a fictional 1840 pilgrimage of an Irish woman to Mount Ararat where she dies. Chapter seven is titled "Three Simple Stories." The first story concerns a survivor from the Titanic, the second Jonah and a sailor in 1891 both of whom were swallowed by a whale, the third the Jewish passengers aboard the St. Louis trying to escape from Nazi Germany in 1939. Chapter eight is a story about a modern film actor on location in the Venezuelan jungle (suggestive of Robert Bolt's The Mission). Next comes the half chapter, "Parenthesis," an essay on love. Chapter nine recounts another fictitious expedition in 1977 to Mount Ararat by an astronaut in search of Noah's ark.
Instead of the traditional chronological ordering favored by historians, this book proceeds by juxtapositions, by parallels and contrasts, by connections that depend on irony or accident. Additionally Barnes uses a bewildering variety of narrative voices for the book's different episodes. It is as if Barnes was straining to differentiate his "historical" work from that of historians who aspire to a stance of objectivity. In "The Discourse of History" Barthes parallels the objective type of historian's concealment of himself as utterer of his own discourse to that of the so called "realist" novelist:
On the level of discourse, objectivity - or the deficiency of signs of the utterer - thus appears as a particular form of imaginary projection, the product of what might be called the referential illusion, since in this case the historian is claiming to allow the referent to speak all on its own. This type of illusion is not exclusive to historical discourse. It would be hard to count the novelists who imagined - in the epoch of Realism - that they were "objective" because they suppressed the signs of the "I" in their discourse! (11)
As Barthes observes, we now know better than to ascribe objectivity to either persona, because we realize that the absence of any signs pointing to the utterer merely substitutes an objective for a subjective utterer of the discourse.
As if in reaction to this discursive camouflage so frequently deployed by traditional historians and realist novelists alike, Barnes positively flouts his proliferation of subjective narrators. Barnes's book opens with the morally superior voice of the woodworm for whom "man is a very unevolved species compared to the animals" (28). There is the absurdly self-important voice used in the French medieval law courts in Chapter 3. The art historian takes over in the second part of Chapter 5. There is the egotistical epistolary voice of the actor in Chapter 8. There are several first-person narratives, including that of the possibly delusional Kath of Chapter 4, the eighteen-year-old prep-school master of the first of "Three Simple Stories" (Chapter 7), and the dreamer of Chapter 10 who wakes up in a distinctly twentieth century heaven. Above all, there is the highly personal, mildly didactic voice of a narrator who comes close to occupying the position of the author in the half-chapter, "Parenthesis." Yet Barnes has said: "All the narrators are meant to be touching in their aspirations, even if often proved to be foolish or deluded" (Stuart 15). Does this include the narrator of "Parenthesis"?
Barnes manages to summon up within this brief book a remarkably wide range of speech modes and different voices (those "voices echoing in the dark" (240) that constitute the history of the world). Chapter eight, for instance, consists entirely of letters sent by a second rate actor to his girl friend back home. Barnes accurately captures the clichés, lack of punctuation and poor syntax that reveal his derivative mind:
I get out your photo with the chipmunk face and kiss it. That's all that matters, you and me having babies. Let's do it, Pippa. Your mum would be pleased, wouldn't she? I said to Fish do you have kids, he said yes they're the apple of my eye. I put my arm round him and gave him a hug just like that. It's things like that that keep everything going, isn't it? (211)
Compare this to the half chapter ("Parenthesis") in which "Julian Barnes" talks in the first person about love:
Poets seem to write more easily about love than prose writers. For a start, they own that flexible "I" (when I say "I" you will want to know within a paragraph or two whether I mean Julian Barnes or someone invented; a poet can shimmy between the two, getting credit for both deep feeling and objectivity). (225)
In drawing attention to the prose medium he is using, Barnes - unlike the actor - contrives to complicate and energize his whole discourse on the difficult subject of love. Style and sincerity are shown to be closely connected. Barnes shows an equal command of sixteenth century French legalese, nineteenth century Irish religious enthusiasm, and contemporary American (with acknowledgements to his friend Jay McInerney for technical assistance). What all the chapters and voices have in common is that each subjects a section of Western history to the imperative of textual narrative. According to Barnes, "what makes each chapter work is that it has a structure and it has a narrative pulse" (Smith 73).
Despite the book's chronological and narrational irregularities, the reader's natural urge to make connections between these disparate segments of text, to convert this sequence of varying narratives into a larger overarching narrative, is given encouragement by various connective devices in the book. Paradoxically, at the same time the book is the work of a contemporary writer who typically does not see much coherence or order in the world around him. Life is "all hazard and chaos, with occasional small pieces of progress," he told one interviewer (Saunders 9). So the kind of connections and the kind of coherence found in this book are made to reflect this late twentieth century sense of dislocation in human life and history:
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. (240)
That is a more accurate description of the contents and connections within this book than might be apparent.
Let us start with those strange links and impertinent connections. Chapter one reveals among other things that Noah and his family stayed alive for the duration of their sojourn at sea by eating to extinction a number of the species who had entered the Ark two by two. Further Noah and his family discriminated between what they called the clean and unclean species, only sacrificing the so-called clean for their meal table. The next chapter describes the tourists unsuspectingly entering the cruise ship "in obedient couples." "'The animals came in two by two,' Franklin commented" (33). Sure enough, when the Arab hijackers come to start shooting two passengers an hour they adopt a similar policy to Noah's of segregating those clean(?) nationalities supposedly most responsible for the Palestinians' predicament and murdering them first. What are we as readers to make of this narrative connection? That whichever clique is in power throughout history will always attempt to solidify their position by creating another as enemy or object of hate? That binary oppositions with their appeal to "natural" kinship are divisive and invariably lead to the destruction of life? That the recurrent human tendency to differentiate between groups necessarily ends with a superior and inferior category?
Barnes is less interested in deconstructing such oppositions than he is in raising questions. He claims to agree with Flaubert's dictum, which Barnes paraphrased for one interviewer: "‘the desire to reach conclusions is a sign of human stupidity'" (McGrath 23). The questions that Barnes raises in this book nevertheless show relatedness, though one that is problematized. The same motif - the division between the clean and the unclean occurs in the third of the three stories comprising Chapter 7. This opens by inviting comparison with the Achille Lauro-type cruise ship of chapter two:
At 8 PM on Saturday, 13th May 1939, the liner St Louis left its home port of Hamburg. It was a cruise ship, and most of the 937 passengers booked on its transatlantic voyage carried visas confirming that they were "tourists, travelling for pleasure" (181).
In fact they are anything but tourists. They are Jews fleeing from a Nazi state intent on exterminating them. They might quite possibly also include some of the Zionists against whom the Arabs later stage their attack in chapter 2. Unlike that previous fictional episode involving the terrorists, this "story" is a factual account of a shameful episode dating from just prior to the outbreak of the Second World War in which many of the world's free countries, including the United States, refused to allow these political refugees to disembark for various spurious reasons. The original intention was that all the emigrants would disembark in Havana. When the Cuban authorities held out for more money than the emigrants could come up with an impasse resulted. One suggestion was that, as 250 passengers were booked for the return journey to Europe, at least the same number of Jews might be allowed to disembark. Barnes continues: "But how would you choose the 250 who were to be allowed off the Ark? Who would separate the clean from the unclean? Was it to be done by casting lots" (184)?
Those three words - "Ark," "clean," and "unclean" carry an additional semantic burden that has been created by the earlier narrative episodes and is purely ideological in content. An Ark/ship that is supposed to protect its occupants from the storms of the world turns into a prison ship for animals and humans alike, both of whom are victimized by being categorized as the other by those in control. For the reader who remembers that according to Genesis God caused it to rain "for forty days and forty nights" (7. 4), Barnes' comment in the penultimate paragraph that the 350 Jews allowed into Britain "were able to reflect that their wanderings at sea had lasted precisely forty days and forty nights" (188) resonates with irony. This biblical period of time is also precisely the duration of Moses' stay on Mount Sinai and of Jesus's stay in the wilderness. Similarly the suggestion that the refugees might try "casting lots" reminds the reader of the biblical accounts of the casting of lots between Saul and his son Jonathan and of the Roman soldiers casting lots for the crucified Jesus's garments. What is the final effect of these intertextual references? They illustrate the fact that from the beginnings of time humans have sought to validate their own status by turning on those they choose to designate the "unclean." Further, humans tend to reinforce these actions by appealing to the authority of some organized form of religion. Beneath a postmodern veil of raising questions this accumulation of instances invites the reader to reach some provisional conclusions (I would stress the plural) concerning human nature in all these narratives within narratives.
Some of these seemingly impertinent connections between chapters are predictive rather than retrospective. In chapter one among the animals on the Ark who are afraid of Noah are the reindeer. But "it wasn't just fear of Noah, it was something deeper" (12). They show powers of foresight, "as if they were saying, You think this is the worst? Don't count on it" (13). What it is that so scares them is not revealed until chapter four. There, after a Chernobyl-type nuclear disaster, reindeer in Norway that have received a high dose of radiation are being slaughtered and fed to mink. At first the authorities plan to bury the reindeer. But that would make "it look as if there's been a problem, like something's actually gone wrong" (86). The female protagonist comments: "we've been punishing animals from the beginning, haven't we" (87)? She concludes, "Everything is connected, even the parts we don't like, especially the parts we don't like" (84). That comment equally applies to the narrative organization of this book as a whole. Noah's presumptuous use and disposal of the animals committed to his care anticipates a continuing arrogance on humans' part, the disastrous consequences of which are just as readily suppressed by the modern media as they were in the biblical account of Noah in Genesis. The reader's knowledge that such censorship on the part of the authorities is all too likely, despite the fictional nature of Chapter 4, retrospectively bestows a peculiar kind of imaginative authority on Barnes' retelling of the biblical story of Noah in which he fictionally reinscribes what he infers are the suppressed elements of the official account of the episode. His connection of the parts we don't like only adds to their credibility.