The use of symbolism and structure is also a definite link between the two books. Both are divided into sections, which function as an entity. Forster's novel contains three sections which unite to form a whole, whilst Barnes book has been described by Swanson as "Sharing Certain properties with a book of short stories". Barnes however states that the book "was conceived as a whole and executed as a whole". The structure of Barnes work is good, beginning with Noah and the flood and finishing with a view, perhaps not the view of heaven though. Although its certain methodological its contents fails to progress in a chronological manner in its chapters. Barnes has left it to his readers to have their own opinion on the connections; a task hardened by the bricolage technique of varying genres he uses. In each chapter, Barnes uses a different style of narrative. Through each of his styles; fable, political thriller, courtroom drama, essay and vision, art criticism, historical narrative, science fiction, epistolary fiction, he distorts meanings and offers versions to your thought. Like Forster, Barnes offers symbols and recurring motifs as links. The ark and the cruise ship both contain the issue of clean and unclean. They can also both be seen as a sanctuary or a prison, the plight of Jewish refugees, and the raft in the jungle all have an ambiguity of purpose. The recurring theme of Mount Ararat is a link between the opening chapter of the ark and chapters one, six and nine. Another image from the first chapter is the woodworm and this also resurfaces in chapters three, five, eight and nine. Salman Rushdie described the book "as footnotes to history, as subversion of the given…Fiction as a critique". Barnes aims to raise the prospect of uncertainty in his book and does so using many footnotes to question the main text to take the readers thoughts in a slightly different direction. The book questions reality and art, "art is the stuff you finally understand, life is the stuff you can't understand". For the majority of Barnes book the predominant if not the only theme that is free from Barnes' sarcastic and sardonic destruction is love. It gains the appearance of resisting the tyranny of history and fabulation and yet appears to be a beacon of genuine truth with a midst of confusion; in Parenthesis love made sense; love could be seen as actuality. Doubt is cast however in the last chapter due to the extra marital affairs which are the final twist in the gut for a reader who has remained uncertain after all what appeared to make sense in this world is rubbished in a matter of syllables. Does this leave a reader thinking on what they have to adhere to?
The narrative used by Forster guides the reader as they progress through the quest of the book. Barnes however offers the readers questions but omits the answers, although answers are sometimes offered but they usually subvert as opposed to reassure. History is frequently questioned in Barnes and is questioned on page 242. "History is not what happened. History is just what historians tell us". Instead of using history to provide answers as it does for many he eliminates the sound effect of history by subverting it, "The history of the world? Just voices echoing in the dark". He shows the social problems as does Forster but unlike Forster they are not colonial but mans interaction and reaction with tomorrows history; 'we lie here…With a bubble of daily news drip fed into our arm". Barnes in this passage provokes his audiences' response by subverting what they felt to be secure. This segment of the novel succeeds in tying up the threads of the specifically conflicting genre that function within the book, "We bury our victims in secrecy (strangled princelings, irradiated reindeer"…"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 of the coast of Mauritania". All of Barnes stories that are in use in the novel come together in this one passage to support this one concept - that is the concept of what we are, based on our past and in our present art, religion, politics and love. While politics, religion, and art are subjected to Barnes scathing analysis, he offers a small glimmer of hope with love, "we must be precise about love" (242). Love in this passage appears to be the one thing Barnes will not subvert, his deconstructing manner that destroyed the security that history, politics, religion and art (all themes in his novel) brought to the reader are subjected to a final subversion in less than a page. Love is not "love is anti-mechanical, anti-materialist", "Love and truth, that is the prime connection". For this passage, love offers the reader hope.
In a passage on page 299, love is a false hope and is torn down not only to serve as a link between the themes but also the stories within the book themselves. He encounters in heaven an inventory of experiences, "I went on several cruises, I learned canoeing and mountaineering, ballooning; I got into all sorts of danger and escaped; I explored the jungle; I watched a court case (I didn't agree with the verdict); I tried being a painter (not as bad as I thought!) And a surgeon; I fell in love, of course, lots of times; I pretended I was the last person on the earth (and the first)." In this passage Barnes choices of form, structure and language show the way in which he emphasises past actions. The bulleted structure of the passage gives an extra level to his ideas and make them more appealing for the reader to interpret the written word. The bullets are eye catching and draw in the readers interest. The passage is a brief description of what he has done with the repatition of "I" and the first person narrative structure, it is his personal account. This account is however, a past account, the use of past tense verbs shows that it is what he has done as apposed to what he is going to do. The passage summarises what Barnes has done the whole way through the novel. After each of the chapters events are so briefly summarised the final shots against love are fired and we are told earlier in the chapter that he had sex with different women, yet he appears to at least try and justify it. He now simply says "I had sex with lots of women, sometimes simultaneously", "my mind wasn't on the sex, even though they all did their very best" (302). This again shows the idea that Barnes merely asks questions to subvert the reader's answers and Forster seeks to answer questions.
Characteristically both Forster and Barnes use different methods of writing in their novels. Both ' A Passage to India' and 'The history of the world in 101/2 chapters' are novels. There are similarities between the differences in the texts; in the same way they are similarities between Wuthering Heights and Wise Children - they are both novels despite different styles, because they reflect the passage of time and the evolving response to literature and indeed the world, that occurred between their publication. Critics writing about the innovation of postmodernism such as the work of Barnes in the 1980's sought, as so many commentators of history and literature do, to find revolution not evolution, stressing the distinctions over the plethora of parallels, by ignoring the similarities that are evident between texts such as ' A Passage to India' and 'A History of the World in 10 1/2 Chapters'. The postmodernist revolution was born. The production of evolution no revolution as a form brought characteristics to the genre. As Anderson pointed out the descriptions of postmodernism in its previous regime of representation, "No critical break was discernible", and as Alex Callinicos said that postmodernism thrives on a type of blindness to the presence with modernism of the very features that are supposed to make postmodernism what it is, "Virtually every aesthetic device or feature attributed to postmodernism - bricollage of tradition, play with the popular, reflexivity, hybridity, pastiche, figurality, decentering of the subject could be found". As the novel has evolved since its conception, symbolism which developed throughout the Victorian era, through 'windows' in Wuthering Heights is further developed in A Passage to India by the inclusion of the 'wasp' and the 'caves' and as a structural linkage in A History of the World in 10 1/2 Chapters in the form of the symbolism of clean and unclean and in the images of 'boats' and 'woodworm'.
Over night the novels features did not change radically but a significant change occurred at some point in the 1950's. Novels reflect the world going on in reality around them and what changed in the novels were how the features were used. Modernism and postmodernism are cultural formations, which accompany the phases' of capitalism according to Frederic Jameson. Forster being an author in the second phase of the theory was preoccupied by answering the questions on the uncertainty of a world revolutionised by the death and destruction of the first world war, the world obsessed with elitism and class struggles in the wake of the Russian Revolution and a world of imperial empires struggling to maintain order. Due to massive cultural change Forster himself was forced to admit after his completion of 'A Passage to India' that he could no longer write fiction based on the world around him. By 1989 Barnes was faced by a world of multi-media information technology and a fragmented and rapidly evolving world; driven by the computer technology, a world rebelling against global capitalism rather than philosophical, political and ethical ideas. It was a secular society where religion was either in the fanatical extreme or totally superfluous to everyday life. Challenging and addressing the different issues that effect what are two totally different worlds is what both Barnes and Forster have done, hence the evolution of techniques used by them. Where Barnes questions religion as a whole, Forster questions each religion. The ideals of Christian society such as heaven are shaken in a manner Forster and his society would have struggled to comprehend in ' A History of the World in 101/2 Chapters'. Barnes has 101/2 distinct sections where as Forster has only three. Where Forster looks back to the old religions in the form of Mrs Moore's open mindedness to find the answer, Barnes throws out history and art as offering only questions not answers. Where Forster looks at present day cultural motives for the problems in recent history, such as public school culture not by questioning history itself as Barnes does.
The novel will continually change and progress or regress over the coming decades and the features that are present in the modern and postmodernist novels will continually evolve. A fact that will not change is that novels represent their time. The issues concerning the generation of the author will be inherent in the style and topic of the novel. For Barnes it meant asking questions about the foundations of society and destroying them, highlighting the superficiality of the world in which we live but for Forster it meant a desire to answer questions posed by the first world war. The novel is therefore in its most enveloping definition; encompassing not just the twentieth century but the centuries before it, a work of literature, written in many or one style that seeks to reflect through a character or a series of characters the events and questions of a society and a writer in either a realistic narrative or an abstract construction. The most prevalent feature of a novel being not how it is written but the motivation behind why it is written. It is society itself that has experienced the overwhelming transformation that has occurred between 1921 and 1989 not the techniques used to write a novel which have continued to evolve at a steady progression from the work of the great Victorian novelists through the modern and realism eras to the apparently revolutionised work of authors such as Barnes and his post-modernist contemporaries.
Bibliography
JULIAN BARNES A HISTORY OF THE WORLD IN 10 1/2 CHAPTER (Picador 1990)
M BRADBURY CASEBOOK SERIES E.M. FORSTER: A PASSAGE TO INDIA (Palgrave 1970)
M BRADBURY THE MODERN BRITISH NOVEL (Penguin 1994)
E M FORSTER A PASSAGE TO INDIA (Penguin 1998)
E M FORSTER ASPECTS OF THE NOVEL (Penguin 2000)
S CONNOR POSTMODERNIST CULTURE: AN INTRODUCTION TO THEORIES OF THE CONTEMPARY ( Blackwell 1989)
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