HUSSE- Temptation to Believe

Today, I wish to discuss one of the most-widely acclaimed authors of contemporary British fiction, namely Julian Barnes. I’m sure you all heard about his latest novel, Sense of an Ending, which won the 2011 Man Booker Prize. However, I’m also sure you haven’t heard that it actually only took 31 minutes for the judges to reach their final decision, which is definitely a record.

In this presentation I wish to focus on his book, History of the World in 10 and a 1/2 Chapters (1989). The book opens with the story of Noah’s ark narrated by a stowaway. Certainly most of you are familiar with the original story, which emphasizes rescue, redemption and the divine judgment in Jewish-Christian tradition. However, in Barnes’ opening story we are told how the animals were maltreated, separated into clean and unclean groups, from which the former were eaten by Noah and his family. Only at the end of the chapter is the identity of the narrator revealed: a woodworm, parodying the authoritative voice of the Genesis. The rest of the novel is said, by many, to be like a collection of thematically related short fictions, in which we encounter different tales with returning themes (all originating from the first chapter) such as desperate voyage by ship, human narrow-mindedness, thirst for power, oppression and discrimination of others.

The book’s main goal, according to Frederic Holmes, is to “demolish any confidence of the readers to obtain objective truth about the past and the history of the world”. Therefore, the author uses textual fragmentation to hinder the totalizing representation of the past. The short stories/chapters are written from numerous different perspectives in a variety of stylistic registers and genres varying from fables to legal transcripts. According to Claudia Kotte, “the novel’s mixture of the factual and the fabulous violates the standard expectations that historiography must treat actual rather than fictional events” (Random Patterns 108). However, according to Barnes, historians themselves mix the factual with the fictional to avoid writing mere descriptions of documents and artefacts; it has to be a sort of literary genre (Vanessa 67).

However, with the mixture of the factual and the fictional the authority of historical texts is strongly undermined. The title of the book mocks the mere fact that such comprehensive history could be written. According to Linda Hutcheon postmodern parody uses and abuses narratives, in this particular case the form of historical writings and the bible. How? It strongly builds on these authoritative texts, but simultaneously shatters their validity, along with its own, by the instruments of parody. Therefore, while the chapters give a different account of the history of the world, they implicitly decompose their authority.

“The Survivor” chapter that I will discuss today utilizes this simultaneous reinforcement and decomposition of the factual and fabulous, in which an unexpected semantic layer/ dimension appears, namely the spiritual. The spiritual undercurrent of Barnes’ writings is a less examined dimension by literary scholars. It would be easy to categorise Barnes into the irreligious, soundly materialist tradition in postmodern thought due to the secular, ethical, humanist and liberal qualities of his writings. However, I strongly agree with Andrew Tate, who regards Barnes as a writer who although “writes out of secular sensibilities of the present, his work is frequently energized by sensation of wonder and mystery…the loss of the ‘beautiful lie’ or ‘supreme fiction’ of religion is for him a cause for grief (OPM, 51). I now wish to demonstrate, in a specific chapter, the binary use of the word ‘temptation’ which

reflects Barnes sceptic attitude towards both postmodern spiritualism and rationalism, on the one hand, and his suppressed desire to believe in the unordinary/unexplainable.

“The Survivor” chapter is set in a world in which the Chernobyl disaster was "the first big accident". On the brink of nuclear war the protagonist, Katherine escapes. She sets out to sea with her cats heading east. On her voyage, she starts having nightmares of strange men, and we slowly get an insight into what seemingly is Katherine’s unconscious. These men in white coats try to persuade her of having paranoid delusions due to the trauma of her violent relationship.

If for a moment we put aside the possibility of Katherine being a schizophrenic , what might her character represent? Katherine believes in supernatural things, such as “if only you could believe that the reindeer can fly, then you’d realize anything is possible” (84). “Everything is connected” is a line she keeps on repeating, which refers to some organic unity between man and nature. Nature in her eyes is superior to the imprisoning forces of man’s rationality. Katherine states women are more in touch with the world as they are more closely connected to all cycles than men. This chapter could certainly have a feminist reading. She contrasts natural cycles with the violent history of man and concludes that what is wrong with the world is that “we’ve given up having lookouts. We don’t think about saving other people, we just sail on…Everyone below deck” (96). On the one hand referring to the loss of our humanity and of our concern for non-materialistic things, which is how she sees the patriarchal history of the world. On the other hand this also underscores the lack of belief in ordinary and extraordinary, a force which fundamentally permeates the modern world.  

Katherine calls the men in her dreams ‘tempters’; in the bible giving into to temptation means committing some kind of act that goes against the will of God, therefore considered a sin, which if not repented will surely lead to the damnation of the soul. Katherine’s tempters charge against her spiritual self that believes the world is more than humanity made of it. Katherine identifies her tempters as her rational self striving to destroy her spiritual: “the mind was producing its own arguments against reality, against itself, what it knew” (100).

However, the interpretation of temptation is challenged in the following: “She didn’t believe in God, but now she was tempted. Not because she was afraid of dying. It wasn’t that. No, she was tempted to believe in someone watching what was going on, watching the bear dig its own pit and then fall into it. It wouldn’t be such a good story if there was no-one around to tell it. Look what they went and did-they blew themselves up. Silly cows” (103). Katherine’s willingness to believe in a God, who is although just a passive observer, is also a form of temptation, but not in a traditional sense. Barnes ingeniousness lies in the fact that by staying with the biblical meaning of temptation he assigns a sinful characteristic to spiritual belief. Yielding to this temptation would mean defying the predominantly secularized and rational thought of man. In this light, Faith in God and the spiritual is inherently something that has to be overcome.

The binary use of the word temptation reflects Barnes sceptic attitude towards both postmodern spiritualism and rationalism, but also gives room for hope, for a suppressed belief in the unordinary/unexplainable to surface. The chapter ends with Katherine being back on the island she came upon her voyage, witnessing the birth of five kittens and closes with the lines “She felt such happiness! Such hope!”(111). Nevertheless, as I mentioned at the beginning, the factual and the fabulous do undermine each other’s authority, therefore an undeciadability permeates the reading of the story. This writerly text allows the reader to decide whether we got an insight of a delusional mind or witnessed a spiritual redemption, if not both, side by side without neutralizing each other’s meaning.

But still, the spiritual dimension of Barnes writings is discernable; other characters of his often face temptation to believe in something which is unordinary, magical, mystical, sacred, something opposing postmodern materialistic thinking. Although these desires are mostly presented as irrational or, in some cases, lethal, they serve as some kind of hope. A hope for what? A hope to break the cycle of  human history, which is seen by Barnes as a desperate voyage on which people are usually vainly seeking deliverance from various kinds of disasters, a hope in  a spiritual realm that would nurture a virtuous mode of existence both on the physical and spiritual level. However, it was not by accident I chose temptation to believe for my title. Although the question of spiritual existence and redemption is frequently present in Barnes’ writings, but due to the fact that he is unable or unwilling to deny his sarcastic nature, spiritualism remains on the level of temptation, which is always overcome by the author.