Major oppositions in the light of history and religion in A history of the world in 10 1/2 chapters by Julian Barnes

From the very beginning and on readers are confronted with the anthropomorphous metaphor realized through the opposition of the animal and human worlds in historical and religious contexts. In Barnes’ prose the animal kingdom which suffers injustice, slander, violence and blaming in human faults from men is endowed with the best humane qualities of decency, self-sacrificingness, wit, conscience, tolerance, faithfulness. In the course of the narration the law of nature turns up to be more equitable and righteous than the canons and codes of people’s social institutions. This thought is articulated by the outcast woodworm:

I know your species tends to look down on our world, considering it brutal, cannibalistic and deceitful (though you might acknowledge the argument that this makes us closer to you rather than more distant). But among us there had always been, from the beginning, a sense of equality. Oh, to be sure, we ate one another, and so on; the weaker species knew all too well another, and so on; the weaker species knew all too well what to expect if they crossed the path of something that was both bigger

and hungry. But we merely recognized this as being the way of things. The fact that one animal was capable of killing another did not make the first animal superior to the second; merely more dangerous. Perhaps this is a concept difficult for you to grasp, but there was a mutual respect amongst us. [Barnes 2005: 1])

This dichotomy which can be reduced to the opposition of concepts ‘equality - hierarchy’ as well as the other omnipresent ones such as ‘majority - outcast’, ‘religion - faith’, ‘dogma -freedom’, ‘history - love’ run through the axis of Barnes’ quasi-historical discursive narration.

The concept of history serves different functions in the novel. The first one is human reconsideration of the unpredictable disasters. It can be summed up in the following saying: ‘History ... begins with the question ‘Why?’ when things go wrong.’ (Hewitt 2001: 164) In this role history interweaves with art. It helps us to interpret the catastrophes, abrupt calamities ruining suddenly and irrevocably a human world outlook. This history representation is expressed to full extent in chapter Shipwreck which is logically and formally divided into two parts: the description of sailors’ disastrous sufferings on the raft of the Medusa and the story of creation and introduction to the public of painting The Raft of the Medusa by Gericault. This second part starts with a direct question put to the reader: ‘HOW DO YOU turn catastrophe into art?’ and continues with a rhetorical answer:

We have to understand it, of course, this catastrophe; to understand it, we have to imagine it, so we need the imaginative arts. But we also need to justify it and forgive it, this catastrophe, however minimally. Why did it happen, this mad act of Nature, this crazed human moment? Well, at least it produced art. Perhaps, in the end, that’s what catastrophe is for. (Barnes 2005: 149)

Secondly, history is used for demonstration of a riot against conformity with dogma generating inequality. During the whole text of the narration Barnes uses this Socratic technique of argumentation, i.e. of questions and answers, for finding the truth. In Plato’s dialogue Gorgias the proof of prevalence of equality over the hierarchical divisions can be found. Socrates says to his interlocutor:

And philosophers tell us, Callicles, that communion and friendship and orderliness and temperance and justice bind together heaven and earth and gods and men, and that this universe is therefore called Cosmos or order, not disorder or misrule, my friend. But although you are a philosopher you seem to me never to have observed that geometrical equality is mighty, both among gods and men; you think that you ought to cultivate inequality or excess, and do not care about geometry.

Barnes purposefully selects proverbial historical events such as Old Testament Noah story, 20th century terrorist attacks, 19th century shipwreck for scrutinizing the essence of the status quo. Status quo is often linked with the notion of ‘duty’ which ‘requires submission to the laws of society’. (Hewitt 2001: 159) Moreover, duty is something that is universally regarded as a very positive and solid benchmark. This contradiction is well expressed in terms of English moral convictions:

Thirdly, history serves as a chronotope, i.e. representation of time and space in language and discourse. The author selects some history material for the expression of his humanitarian ideas. Barnes writes not as much about concrete events, historical figures or political processes (though partially about them as well), as more about his perception of history. Rethinking canonical moments Barnes creates his own version of them:

History isn’t what happened. History is just what historians tell us. There was a pattern, a plan, a movement, expansion, the march of democracy; it is a tapestry, a row of events, a complex narrative, connected, explicable. One good story leads to another. (Barnes 2005: 291)

History becomes a sophisticated plot line different from the conventional understanding of the concept:

... a history is a flow of consecutive events developing over a period of time. Still in the stories (chapters) which might probably be called ‘Barnes’s chapters of history’ the order of the recounted events will enable the reader to make sudden leaps through centuries backwards and forwards. (Polyakova, Zharskaya 2008: 55)

In this function history is transformed into a time profile representing the consistency of human nature with all its beauty, ugliness, impulses, aspirations, fears and principles at all times in different contexts.

The other important concept in the book is religion in history.

... in 10 У2 Chapters, Barnes shifts his theological emphasis from abstract, philosophical questions regarding the existence of God to specific aspects of the Judeo-Christian grand narrative.” (Tate 2011: 58)

Barnes opposes this narrative by representing strictly hierarchical religious institutes as fighting for power, full of intolerance, hypocrisy and enmity. Chocolate-box pictures of Biblical events imprinted in the minds of the masses are subject to the detailed, witty and ironically-sarcastic reconsiderations of different narrative voices given by outcast witnesses of the happenings. It is done to nudge the readers to the thought that reality is never the same as it is depicted by any form of propaganda, as it seems from outside, at a distance. That the religious ‘duty’ imposed on believers can be not what God really wants, but a mere instrument of manipulation in the hands of humans desiring power and submission:

... in late twentieth century Britain, the concept of ‘duty’ is treated with suspicion. We do not trust governments and official authorities to tell us what we ought to do; we value the individual’s inner truth. We see no reason why we should accept ‘that place in life to which it shall please God to call me’. We consider that this is an authoritarian, not democratic view, and if God exists, he probably prefers initiative to submission. Individual values have become more important than communal values or values pronounced by authorities. (Hewitt 2001: 159)

Although the novel subjects the institute of religion to reconsideration, the notions of true faith and love appear to be constants determining and justifying human existence on the reference axis of history. The author creates his own philosophical version of understanding the omnipotent divinity in which God is a person’s inner individual freedom, faith in supernatural, all-permeating love to everything alive in the World Ocean, the universe, ‘the incongruous persistence of belief-against-the-evidence’, which ‘is another thematic connection between the stories in Barnes’s nonconformist world history.’ (Tate 2011: 62)

Rethinking the famous statement by Voltaire - ‘If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him’ - Barnes makes us feel a certain disappointment because of our inability to find consolation and salvation in church:

while Barnes writes out of the secular sensibilities of the present his work is frequently energized by a sensation of wonder and mystery such that the loss of the ‘beautiful lie’ or ‘supreme fiction’ of religion is for him a cause for grief similar to that felt at the close of a great novel. (Tate 2011: 51)

However, in Barnes’ narration having lost the beautiful lie the readers are not forsaken in the waters of history, they are given a life buoy in Parenthesis - a ‘nonconventionally didactic’ ‘essay where the author attempts to define the essence of love.’

(Veliugo 2012: 21) The structure of the novel with this small half chapter about affection within ten chapters about dates and events adds to the opposition ‘history - love’:

Because the history of the world, which only stops at the half-house of love to bulldoze it into rubble, is ridiculous without it. The history of the world becomes brutally self-important without love. Our random mutation is essential because it is unnecessary. Love won’t change the history of the world ..., but it will do something much more important: teach us to stand up to history, to ignore its chin-out strut. I don’t accept your terms, love says; sorry, you don’t impress, and by the way what a silly uniform you’re wearing. Of course, we don’t fall in love to help out with the world’s ego problem; yet this is one of love’s surer effects. Love and truth, that’s the vital connection, love and truth. ... Love makes us see the truth, makes it our duty to tell the truth. (Barnes 2005: 289-290)

Parenthesis helps to make the protagonist of the novel clear:

Just as the boatman sits in his small boat, trusting his frail craft in a stormy sea that is boundless in every direction, rising and falling with the howling, mountainous waves, so in the midst of a world full of suffering and misery the individual man calmly sits, supported by and trusting the principium individuationis. (Schopenhauer 1969: 352-353)

The half chapter starts with the description of the narrator trying to fall asleep nearby his tenderly loved, sleeping wife. The essential discourse about the vital necessity of love starts from this point of overlap between the worlds of reality and dream. Reasoning about a rather illusory, yet key thing the narrator is as half awake, half dreaming. Smoothly parenthesis overflows in the tenth chapter - The Dream - where again the margin between dream and reality is blurred. This mix of illusion and wakefulness arouses allusions with Nietzsche who wrote about philosophical and artistic inclinations in people capable for this condition and the necessity of ability to dream for a human:

The beautiful appearance of the world of dreams, in whose creation each man is a complete artist, is the precondition of ... art... the philosophical man has the presentiment that under this reality in which we live and have our being lies hidden a second, totally different reality and that thus the former is an illusion. And Schopenhauer specifically designates as the trademark of philosophical talent the ability to recognize at certain times that human beings and all things are mere phantoms or dream pictures. Now, just as the philosopher behaves in relation to the reality of existence, so the artistically excitable man behaves in relation to the reality of dreams: he looks at them precisely and with pleasure, for from these pictures he fashions his interpretation of life; from these events he rehearses his life for himself. ... our innermost beings, the secret underground in all of us, experiences its dreams with deep enjoyment and a sense of delightful necessity. ... The higher truth, the perfection of this condition in contrast to the sketchy understanding of our daily reality, as well as the deep consciousness of a healing and helping nature in sleep and dreaming, is at the same time the symbolic analogy to the capacity to prophesy the truth, as well as to art in general, through which life is made possible and worth living. (Nietzsche: 11-12)

The last chapter has a circular composition beginning with the narrators wakening in a dream and ending with the wakening from the dream. This illusory semi-vigilance produces a version of Paradise, rather hackneyed ‘democratic

Heaven’, designed according to people’s needs and wishes which are reduced to ‘a continuation of life ... but ... better, needless to say’. (Barnes 2005: 362) History of the world at the background of which goes the story of a human life starting in the cradle of the ark and ending with the posthumous rebirth stops its linear flow and as if makes a loop in this heavenly abundance of everything where only the boundaries of phantasy determine the existence. All souls, spirits, historical figures are co-existing simultaneously and in parallel together able to reincarnate again if they wish so. These motives of reality turning into dream and vice versa, saving art and love, parallel existence in one space of various history personages, water as an ambitious element symbolizing the eternal ocean surrounding us, the omniscient narrative voice with the ideas opposing the conventional ones makes the novel close to film by Alexander Sokurov Russian Ark, the very final words of which are a perfect resume for these two pieces of art creation:

Sir... Sir... What a pity that you are not near. You would have understood everything. Look, the sea is around. And we will sail eternally, and we will live eternally... (Сударь, сударь... Как жалко, что Вас нет рядом. Вы бы всё поняли. Смотрите, море вокруг. И плыть нам вечно, и жить нам вечно.)