Julian Barnes Wiki Project: Julian

Julian Barnes

Wiki Project: Julian Barnes

About the Author: It should come as no surprise that Julian "Jules" Barnes, also known as Dan Kavanagh, sometimes known as Edward Pygge or Basil Seal, is generally introduced as "the chameleon of British letters." His novels are noted for relentless formal experimentation and, taken collectively, refusal to dwell on past points of style or subject matter; change and risk are central to his body of work.

After a suitably varied early career (the suburbs, Oxford, a three-year stint at the Oxford English Dictionary, law school), he entered the orbit of Martin Amis and quickly evolved into a freelance journalist and critic. His novelistic career began relatively late in life. (His first book, Metroland, emerged in 1980, when Barnes was 34.) However, he caught up fairly quickly, producing another nine novels, two collections of short fiction and three of essays, and most recently the autobiographical Nothing To Be Frightened Of. In addition to these works under his own name, he is also the author of four formulaic detective novels under the name Dan Kavanagh and various reviews under the bylines of Pygge and Seal.

Barnes often features in lists of great contemporary British writers, usually appearing in the company of names like Ian McEwan, Graham Swift, and Peter Ackroyd as well as Amis. While three of his books have made the short list for the Booker Prize, the fact that he has never won the award has caused consternation in some quarters. He has received various other honors in both the United Kingdom and France, where he was made a Chevalier of the Order of Arts and Letters in 1988.

His work is distinguished by precise and occasionally ornate language, rhythmic prose, an abiding interest in love, and a great capacity for humor. His Facebook presence is also both active and amusing.

Oeuvre

Barnes has revealed a fondness for Gustav Flaubert's desire to avoid writing the same book twice. As such, his body of work is unusually varied, with even the genre-bound Kavanagh cycle serving as an example of his willingness to "experiment" even with conventional narrative and characters. Likewise, it can be argued that the decision to create a sequel to Talking It Over (1991) in Love, Etc… (2000) is evidence that he can work in a multi-volume format while acknowledging the passage of time between installments.

Otherwise, his oeuvre ranges from the earnest, early roman-a-clef Metroland (1980) to overtly "postmodern" games of form and metafictional concerns (Flaubert's Parrot (1984), arguably his breakthrough book) to meditations on national identity and personal responsibility (The Porcupine (1992), set in post-Soviet Russia) to painstaking reconstruction of historical detail (the recent Arthur & George (2008), set in Victorian England). Talking It Over and Love, Etc… form an interlocking sequence in depicting a tragicomic French love triangle over the course of a decade. With its somewhat shambolic episodic structure, A History of the World in 10-1/2 Chapters (1990) is arguably not a true novel at all, but remains one of Barnes' most widely read works nonetheless.

So far, two films have been based on Barnes' novelistic output: a relatively straightforward adaptation of Metroland (1997) and a slightly less conventionalized 1996 French production of Talking It Over under the title Love, Etc. (Barnes has expressed pleasure in both films and was so taken with the French title that he later used it for his own sequel to the original story.) Talking It Over has also been adapted for the stage, appearing in Chicago and Slovenia; a stage version of Arthur & George recently closed at the Birmingham Repertory Theatre.

Criticism:

Barnes' work has often been criticized for its abstract formal nature, in which essays, lexical material, chronology, encyclopedia entries, and other nominally non-fictional genres are brought to bear as support for a central story. These auxiliary techniques are sometimes dismissed as "contrivances" of postmodern literature that render his books outside the novelistic realm:

"Barnes writes books which look like novels and get shelved as novels but which, when you open them up, are something else altogether. Flaubert's Parrot was for the most part a set of studies of Flaubert and his parrot. His new book, A History of the World in 10-1/2 Chapters, is even odder. The 10 chapters contain 10 quite different stories, some factual, some not. They are related only by image and theme" (David Sexton, Sunday Telegraph, 11 June 1989; quoted in Moseley 8-9).

While this criticism may have some relevance in a purely classical novelistic context, Barnes and his fans are not interested in the question of whether the books are "novels" or not. He considers himself simply an artist working in an extended fictional form, aligning himself with Milan Kundera and other modern experimentalists as well as with predecessors like Rabelais. In any case, U.S. (and French) critics have been more forgiving of the postmodern formal pastiche than their British counterparts.

Quotations:

"I don't believe in God, but I miss Him. That's what I say when the question is put." (Nothing To Be Frightened Of)

"As a journalist, I deal in checkable fact, and I will produce an appealing assemblage of facts which will lead to a conclusion which either I will draw or will be clearly implicit. It's quite opposite with a novel where you are not dealing in facts but dealing in truth." (2000 interview with the author; http://identitytheory.com/people/birnbaum8.html)