In 'The Visitors' Barnes makes fun of history enthusiasts. The passengers of the Santa Euphemia are interested in history, in Knossos' past and Minoan civilisation. However, they become actively involved in the political history of the Middle East, more involved than they would like to be! Barnes is implying that you cannot extricate yourself from history.
Throughout the novel Barnes's treatment of history is very ironic. He challenges the reader's expectations of an historical book. Barnes's combination of historical fact with pseudo-historical stories in the novel cleverly illustrates his argument regarding fabulation. This argument points out that historical narratives can never provide objective truth and that stories that pose as such are a sham.
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 from the Creation to the Roman conquest of Britain followed by a history of the British people, an attempt that broke off after some million words with the Roman subjugation of Greece in 168 BC, 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.
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 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 lawcourts 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 a remarkably wide range of 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. 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)
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 will always attempt to solidify their position by creating an other 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?
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.
Let us take one more instance of Barnes's apparently insignificant yet ultimately crucial connections between his parts/chapters. Chapter 10 pictures heaven as a dreamlike state in which dreamers "'get the sort of Heaven they want'." The dreamer-protagonist asks his heavenly informant, "'And what sort do they want on the whole?'" "'Well,'" she replies, "'they want a continuation of life, that's what we find. But [. . .] better, needless to say'" (298-9). What that turns out to be in practice is principally golf, sex, shopping, and meeting famous people (such as Noah), all of which activities reveal their underlying banality as the millennia pass by. Among the famous people is Hitler (a reference back not just to the St Louis but to his predecessor in prejudicial discrimination, Noah). The dreamer is naturally surprised at finding this arch-villain in heaven. What, he demands, happened to Hell? It turns out there isn't any Hell, merely a theme park filled with skeletons and devils played by out-of-work actors. As his heavenly informant explains, "that's all people want nowadays" (300). Clearly Barnes's heaven is a collective projection of the twentieth century psyche. Only in this final chapter is the human need to separate living beings into the clean and the unclean abandoned in favor of an anodyne world where everyone is equal - and eventually equally bored by it all, so bored that they opt to die off for a second time. The dreamer concludes that, "Heaven's a very good idea, it's a perfect idea you could say, but not for us. Not given the way we are." The implication is that the human species is only happy when it has an artificially created alternative or other that provides it with its sense of cohesion and identity. A world in which no one is discriminated against is merely a dream of what we imagine we want but would actually find intolerably innocuous and tedious. Dependent on binary oppositions for our (false) sense of identity, we choose not to deconstruct them.
In the different chapters of A History Barnes offers us a multiplicity of discursive genres - a fable, a political thriller, a courtroom drama, science fiction (or a psychiatric case history), a historical narrative, art criticism, epistolary fiction, an essay on love, and a dream-vision
These motifs and homologous connections proliferate far beyond what has been outlined above. They suggest in narrative form a continuity beneath the bewildering variety of human activity over the ages. The extent (and cultural limits) of that variety is neatly summarized by the dreamer in heaven. Apart from eating, golf, sex and shopping, he indulges in more or less all the incidents that have already been recounted in the previous nine and half chapters:
- I went on several cruises [chaps. 2 and 7];
- I learned canoeing [chap. 8], mountaineering [chaps. 6 and 9], ballooning;
- I got into all sorts of danger and escaped [chaps. 4, 5, and 7];
- I explored the jungle [chap.8];
- I watched a court case (didn't agree with the verdict) [chap. 3];
- I tried being a painter (not as bad as I thought!) and a surgeon [chap. 5];
- I fell in love, of course, lots of times ["Parenthesis" - the half chapter];
- I pretended I was the last person on earth (and the first) [chaps. 10 and 1]. (297)
There is no master discourse. This book is titled A History of the World. As Merritt Moseley comments, "No claim is made that this history is the right one [. . .] there are only histories" (109). But the repetitions and intertextual allusions also assert in narrative form that certain patterns of human interaction reappear over the expanse of history. No matter how you tell it - and Barnes tells it in a bewildering variety of ways - history seemingly cannot help revealing certain repetitive aspects of human nature.
Perhaps the most reiterated motif is that of the woodworm related to that of the numerous reincarnations of the Ark. It is a woodworm who is revealed in the final sentence of the chapter to be the narrator of chapter one. He and six other woodworms stowed away on the Ark and escape undetected after the Flood has subsided. Yet the status of this woodworm is as ambiguous as that of the traditional historian who, according to Barthes, contrives to "'dechronologize' the 'thread' of history" (10). In the final surprise paragraph of chapter one of Barnes's book the woodworm speaks "with the hindsight of a few millennia" (30). This confusion between narrated and narrator's time, according to Barthes, places the historian in the same position as the maker of myth: "It is to the extent that he knows what has not yet been told that the historian, like the actor of myth, needs to double up the chronological unwinding of events with references to the time of his own speech" (30). Thus the woodworm's atemporal status draws attention to its further use in the book as a signifier of a recurrent signified to be found in life in all its forms. The woodworm's is the voice of the outcast - excluded from God's ways and from official history. He is highly critical of both God and the ways of Noah and his species:
Put it this way: Noah was pretty bad, but you should have seen the others. It came as little surprise to us that God decided to wipe the slate clean; the only puzzle was that he chose to preserve anything at all of this species whose creation did not reflect particularly well on its creator. (8)
Noah's carnivorous decimation of the animal population is seen as classist arrogance justified by appeal to a God suspiciously biased towards the human species that invoked (or invented?) him.
Woodworms constantly crop up throughout the rest of the book. Fittingly they are responsible in chapter three for eating through a leg of the Bishop of Besançon's throne which collapses causing him to be "hurled against his will into a state of imbecility" (64). As in chapter one they are representative of those forces of nature that, excluded from human society, cannot be contained by the human will. The villagers' successful prosecution of the woodworm who end up being excommunicated (this chapter is a transcription of the main arguments of an actual court case of 1520) is ironically undercut by the conclusion in which the closing words of the juge d'Église have been eaten by woodworm. The facts excluded from the canon of the church are reinscribed by Barnes into its history thereby undermining its unitary version of the past. In chapter eight woodworms are still the one danger to the survival of the actor-narrator's discourse (his bizarre love letters) on their journey out of the jungle; letters have to be protected from them by being placed in a plastic bag. This is typical of what Barnes refers to as his thickening effect. By this stage he has turned the insect into a potent metaphor for that which is excluded or denied by various monologic discourses. So when he comes to describe the astronaut turned religious zealot who hears God tell him to search for Noah's Ark in chapter nine, Barnes is able to undermine the astronaut's sense of truth by a brief ironic reference to the woodworm: "he knew it [the Ark] couldn't have rotted or been eaten by termites, because God's command to find the Ark clearly implied that there was something left of it" (266). The astronaut shows the same blind faith in revealed truth that Noah did. He even asserts that as Noah used only gopher-wood for the Ark it was "probably resistant to both rot and termites" (266). The survival of the woodworm convincingly asserts the existence of an alternative, repressed version of events.
So many of the chapters offer versions of the Ark, boats built for human survival against the storms of God and/or nature. Yet these craft are all subject to the caprices of the woodworm eating away at them from within, or of what they come to represent in more general terms - the non-human, excluded forces of our world. Pleasure trips turn into nightmares. Rafts constructed to film a reenactment of a past disaster on the river repeat that disaster. Art becomes confused with reality by Indians and film crew alike, just as historical narrative becomes confused with fictional narrative by writer and readers alike. The unsinkable Titanic sinks. So does the Medusa.