Art as the search for true meaning

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.

A History of the World in 10 and a Half Chapters has become one of Julian Barnes’ most studied and talked about novels. The novel is full of philosophical existential questions to which he doesn’t suggest any answers. Such an approach is quite in line with postmodernist idea about indeterminacy, playfulness and openness of the narrative. The key question the author is longing for through the whole novel is about history; whether it is possible to discover the truth about the past. What role does Art play in this process? Why is the past beyond our grasp?

The above mentioned issues are discussed in detail in the fifth chapter of J. Barnes’ significant novel. Occupying a central position in the book, this chapter constitutes a meta-narrative offering a prolonged meditation on the relationship between historical and artistic narrative. The concept of art as a source of true meaning connecting the present and the past of mankind is the basic in this chapter. Despite of the fact that the novel is a collection of different stories told by different narrators and set in different locations, there are links and motifs that make up the unity of it. The recurrent motifs: catastrophes, religious wars, terrorist attacks, and the image of ships alluding to Noah’s Ark are vividly observed in the novel. In the mentioned above chapter we can also note such intertextual references: the survivors mutiny and fight among themselves as Noah’s family did; eating the flesh of their dead comrades as Noah ate his animals; separating healthy from unhealthy like the clean from the unclean in the first chapter. The fifth chapter, ‘Shipwreck’, 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 scene by Gericault three years later. Barnes experiments with the narrative plane combining the description of the events leading to the shipwreck and the analysis of Theodore Gericault’s painting. Moreover, we can infer that the narrative voice belongs to an art historian, a professional (using ‘we’ to lure the reader into the discourse). There is a surprisingly colourful foldout of his work which serves the purpose of creating a powerful image in the readers’ minds long after reading the chapter.

As I have already pointed out the author asks a lot of questions but the central one here is why art can’t be a reliable source of truth about the past either. The answer is in the following passage to my mind: about the echo. We can speak about the echo symbolism applied to all forms of art and their interpretations throughout the history. The author focuses on the greatest catastrophe of all times - The Flood following its historical quite opposite transformations from the very first images of Noah and the Ark to Michelangelo’s and Raphael’s paintings ‘increasingly concentrated on the forsaken rather than saved’ (Barnes 2009:138). Theodore Gericault’s masterpiece power lies in its surging emotional response it arouses in us people and in being an everyday reminder of our catastrophic past.

Time dissolves the story into form, colour, and emotion. Modern and ignorant, we re-imagine the story: do we vote for the optimistic yellowing sky, or for the grieving greybeard? Or do we end up believing both versions? (Ibid; 133).

However, the decaying process has set in already and in future the masterpiece is likely to ‘slip history’s anchor’ too like many other art works or texts.

So any text or piece of art is compared to the echo effect-the further it moves in time the more interpretations it obtains. History is always subjective. And at the same time history is cyclical. According to Barnes’ view, the life events seem to follow the pattern and history repeats itself. Indeed, if we look at our past it is a succession of wars, disasters, catastrophes, religious conflicts. People naturally are searching for explanations but existential issues can’t be logically determined. And here comes Art fulfilling its soothing, fabulating and consolatory role. Art is not a mere reflection of life; art continues living its own life influencing people’s minds: ‘What has happened? The painting has slipped history’s anchor1 (Barnes 2009:137).

However, this is no reducing process. Emotionally people haven’t changed much since the past times. Stating this fact the author also warns us about the future if mankind didn’t change for better:

How hopelessly we signal; how dark the sky; how big the waves. We are all lost at sea, washed between hope and despair, hailing something that may never come to rescue us (Ibid; 137).

We can clearly observe Barnes is in the pursuit for truth about history of mankind himself. In “Parenthesis” (the half chapter of the book) he (more exactly the narrating voice which is identical with the voice of the implied author) states:

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’ (Ibid, 245).

Obviously, the absolute truth is a utopia; as far as the Raft Medusa is concerned Gericault’s version of the shipwreck is flawed by the inevitable subjectivity of his eye but at the aesthetic level his painting stirs our feelings and can’t leave anyone unaffected. The desire for truth, understanding is only natural for a human being, on the one hand. On the other hand, we are all longing for some order of things and harmony. And Art - literature and paintings help us in reconstructing it. Barnes doesn’t draw any final, overall conclusions to the serious questions he raises; it seems to run counter to his poetics and postmodernist assumption in general. In one of his interviews he said: ‘The desire to reach conclusions is a sign of human stupidity’. Thus, the concepts of history, art, love, religion are open to further discussions.