What is Julian Barnes afraid of?
By Mark, Thursday
20 March 2008 at; 12:50 :: Personal
observations :: #888 :: rss
I've been enjoying the serialisation of Julian Barnes' memoir Nothing
to Be Frightened Of on BBC Radio 4.
(Listen again for up to seven days.) It starts: 'I don't believe in God, but I
miss him.'
However, I do have the faint
feeling of something not quite realised or resolved
in Barnes' writing. I've sensed it in his novels. There's nothing wrong with
that necessarily: arguably it's a product of that thing called life. But I do
wonder whether if he were somehow able to be just a little more committed in
his thoughts, he might touch something about that life more profoundly.
It came home to me in two of his
reflections on religion from the memoir. He talks of Christianity as a great
fiction - a kind of noble lie that whilst entirely understandable just isn't
plausible any more. Fair enough. Except that if fictions are lies, the best are
lies that aim to tell of deeper truths. So I wanted Barnes to say more about
what kind of truth he thought Christianity is latching onto, and so say more
about what is lost. The serialisation is abridged so
maybe he does this in the book itself.
Alternatively, he reflects on how
we, today, look at Cycladic figures, as serene tokens of human transcendence.
Except that the creators of these figures would have seen nothing of this in
them: originally they were gaudily painted and buried with the dead. This
becomes an allegory for how Christianity, and perhaps religion as a whole, will
be lost. But surely the really interesting point is that we see something in
the Cycladic figures still. What is that? Why do they move us? Again, it seems
as if his atheism prevents him from delving further into the questions he so
lyrically raises.
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Creada: 28/10/2008 Última Actualización:
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