The 'chameleon of British letters', a brilliant
essayist with an engaging ironic touch, the architect of a renaissance in the
'novel of ideas', a conspicuous francophile, and (in
the person of his alter-ego, pulp-fiction writer Dan Kavanagh)
the master of suspense, Julian Barnes cuts a distinctive figure even within
that striking group of gifted British male writers that includes Martin Amis,
Ian McEwan, Graham Swift and Peter Ackroyd.
After initial success as reviewer and ultimately literary editor for the New
Statesman and the New Review, then as a freelance television critic and foreign
correspondent (in London) for The New Yorker, Barnes published his first
novel, Metroland (1980), relatively late in
his career, though - as if to make up for lost time - he has been startlingly
productive since then, publishing 13 more novels (including the four thrillers
published under the pseudonym of Dan Kavanagh), a
book of short stories and a recent collection of essays, Something to
Declare (2002). This body of work consistently resists categorization,
challenging conventional expectations: the fictions, in particular, are
formally reminiscent of the postmodern texts of Italo
Calvino or Milan Kundera in their elegance,
sophistication, and linguistic playfulness. Unlike these writers, however,
Barnes returns repeatedly, seriously, even obsessively (if often also
humorously), to a series of key themes connected to the passions and
inconsistencies of the human heart, exploring the unsettling nature of love and
(in)fidelity, dislocation, the quest for authenticity and truth, and the
irretrievability of the past.
Barnes's distinctive blend of narrative experimentation and psychological
realism is already apparent in Metroland, a highly intelligent,
humorous and touching 'coming of age' novel, a bildungsroman
for middle-class suburban
Barnes's third and most widely acclaimed novel, Flaubert's Parrot
(1984), sets an intricate intertextual web of
allusions, references and literary improvisation within the
apparently realistic story of Geoffrey Braithwaite, a retired English doctor
now freely indulging a lifelong interest/obsession with Gustave
Flaubert. Beneath this narrative, however, runs a further personal drama,
concerning the infidelity and death of the narrator's wife. The search for
'authenticity' - in art as well as in love - thus forms the unifying motif of
the work, which evolves in the form of a hybrid, subjective, incomplete and
contradictory collage of fiction, literary criticism, satire, biography, as
well as medieval bestiary, 'train-spotter's guide' and even examination paper. This
medley of prose genres subverts all conventional taxonomic boundaries yet,
despite its textbook 'postmodern' techniques ('bricolage,'
unreliability of the narrative voice, linguistic self-consciousness), the novel
remains relentless in its quest for historical truth, stressing the necessity
of both acknowledging the irretrievability of the past and learning to cope with
its present effects.
The multiplicity of discursive genres is also the distinguishing feature of A
History of the World in 10 1/2 Chapters (1989); so much so that the work
generated lively critical controversy as to whether it was actually a novel at
all. Despite its looseness of form, the book does cohere around its persistent
questioning of our knowledge of the past. Underlying the variety of narrative
voices is a gentle, humane, self-reflexive meditation insisting on the
necessary preservation of love as the only viable way of coping with the burden
of history - there are echoes of the questioning course and gentle envoi of
Philip Larkin's 'An Arundel Tomb', 'What will survive of us is love'. This
theme, and its various unpredictable permutations, returns more overtly in Talking
It Over (1991), a novel written as a series of private monologues directed
to the reader, in which we are presented the alternative, often contradictory,
versions of a love triangle. At the same time, Barnes's capacity for irony
receives its most powerful expression to date in the sarcastic figure of
Oliver, a character whose outbursts foreshadow in many ways the anger and
satire of
The tripartite structure of England, England allows for a contrastive juxtaposition
of tones - the keen, childlike Martha of the first part gradually transformed
into the tired figure leading a harsh, uneventful life in a poignantly imagined
'olde' pre-industrial England. In between these
passages stretches a dystopian vision - the '
The preoccupation with contemporary life, further evident in the essayistic and
philosophical aspects of his work, is a constant point of reference for Julian
Barnes. He has declared himself a 'moralist', and there is always in his novels
a longing for a territory of the imagination in which love could indeed be an
effective remaining hope. Despite the unsettling ambivalences and
deconstructive tendencies most powerfully at work in such celebrated
'post-modern' novels as Flaubert's Parrot and A History of the World,
his is the imagination of a 'quintessential humanist, of the pre-postmodern
species' (Joyce Carol Oates) and the voice of one of the most distinguished and
refined intellectuals in the literary scene of contemporary Britain.
© British Council
URL: http://www.contemporarywriters.com/authors/?p=auth1#bibliography
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Universitat de València
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Creada: 28/10/2008
Última Actualización: 03/11/2008
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