Julian Barnes

Peter Childs

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780719097607
• eBook ISBN: 9781847797612
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World War II
• Index: History

A detailed study of the fiction of Julian Barnes from Metroland to Arthur & George. Approachable, student friendly and comprehensive analysis of all Barnes's novels

1

About to be less deceived: Metroland

Verlaine’s brother-in-law described Rimbaud [aged 17 when he met Verlaine] as ‘a vile, vicious, disgusting, smutty little schoolboy’, but Verlaine found him an ‘exquisite creature’.1

One of the few unsurprising steps that Barnes has taken in his literary career concerns the subject of his first novel. This is alluded to in Flaubert’s Parrot, whose narrator advocates ‘A partial ban on growing-up novels (one per author allowed)’ (FP, p. 99). In a long-established tradition, and after many years of drafting and honing, Barnes produced a debut that inclined towards the autobiographical and focused upon the evolution of one suburban schoolboy’s artistic temperament alongside his significant life-experiences, from adolescence through to young adulthood and parenthood.

However, written self-consciously in the shadow of numerous ‘first novels’, Bildungsromans, and French cultural touchstones from Alain-Fournier’s 1913 novel Le Grand Meaulnes to François Truffaut’s 1962 film Jules et Jim, Barnes’s debut is a contemplative and reflective fictional memoir that affirms the value of simple pleasures and resists the Larkinesque temptation to believe that ‘life’ lies somewhere else: beyond suburbia, at political riots and protests, or in leading a Bohemian existence. The story is told by the protagonist Christopher Lloyd, looking back on periods of his life, borrowing some of the texture and geography of Barnes’s own youth. The retrospective narration, common to first-person novels such as Great Expectations and Jane Eyre, is primarily apparent through small asides (‘To this day, I have a preference for sleeping on my left side’, M, p. 54) rather than any direct commentary by Christopher on his younger self. The book’s narrator thus appears to be Christopher on the day after the book’s final scene (‘Last night, Amy woke …’, M, p. 175) but this is not explicitly stated. The narrative moves gently and unsentimentally towards its conclusion that, caught between the unexciting but satisfying domesticity he has with Marion and the superficially attractive but ultimately hollow hedonism of schoolmate Toni, Christopher has matured into what he considers life-learned ‘happiness’. Meanwhile his emotionally arrested friend has sought to remain true to the spirit of his schoolboy self and ideals at the expense of adult responsibilities or a capacity for either life-enabling adaptation or reflective self-awareness. Toni continues to live without a sense of compromise, while Christopher perceives happiness to reside in fitting in with society and with the shape of others’ lives, establishing a niche rather than a stance of rebellion.2

That adolescent identity, to whose principles Toni wishes to remain narrowly true, is first sketched in the novel’s opening pages. In 1963, two 16-year-old schoolboys at the City of London School on the Embankment look for signs of the effect and affect art produces in the observer. They make notes, hoping to discern and record the visible traces of quasi-religious experiences in visitors to the National Gallery in Trafalgar Square. Sounding a note that will resound through Barnes’s works, Christopher’s appreciation of art also has a deep root in his fear of death: ‘Belief in art was initially an effective simple against the routine ache of big D’ (M, p. 55). At home he is caught between a sister, Mary, who is too sensitive, and a brother, Nigel, who is insensitive to Christopher’s fears of death. The rest of his family figure only little, though Christopher’s relationship with his Uncle Arthur provides a comical education in truth and lies, which is to be repeated in Jean Serjeant’s relationship with her uncle in Staring at the Sun.

Christopher and Toni make art, music, and literature the focus of their lives’ interest, leaning towards all things French and assessing potential heroes on the basis of how much they advocate bohemian living and despise the bourgeoisie’s placid domesticity. To the two boys everything also contains ‘more symbolism’ (M, p. 13) than other and ordinary people realise. Their belief, embedded in late-nineteenth-century aesthetics, is that life is open to meaning, interpretation, and correspondences, provided it is studied closely enough. A woman’s reaction to a Van Dyck painting suggests to them she ‘scented new correspondences’ (M, p. 12) in the painting, making her a symbolist if only she knew it. The boys conduct similar aesthetic experiments on themselves when listening to music, seeking to document the civilising force of exposure to artistic excellence. Their thoughts are hemmed in by the large abstractions they idolise, elevating but also reifying their lives in terms of a search for truth, art, love, language, self, and, ironically, authenticity.

As is common in his writings, Barnes works with a three-part structure in Metroland, but there is little sense of dialectic movement from thesis through antithesis to synthesis; instead Barnes shapes a there-and-back-again traveller’s tale which suggests Eliot’s famous lines on the end of exploring in ‘Little Gidding’: ‘to arrive where we started / And know the place for the first time.’ The Parts follow Christopher’s life from 16 to 30, each phase expressing his current attitude to the relationship between art and life. In Part One, he and Toni believe in the Decadent aesthete’s mantra of ‘art for art’s sake’ and have no life to speak of in the sense of any degree of independence, self-determination, or responsibility. Unaligned with others but still situated in the burgeoning principles of youthful rebellion, they are ensconced in 1963, the year in which Philip Larkin said in his poem ‘Annus Mirabilis’ that sex began; but they are rootless in terms of the practicalities of life. Reference to Larkin is made when Toni and Chris discuss, in the terms of Larkin’s poem ‘This Be the Verse’, how parents ‘fug you up’ but ‘were fugged up in their turn’ (M, p. 39). The poem itself was not written until 1971 and so the reference is retrospective on the part of either Christopher or Barnes, but the spirit of Larkin’s 1955 collection The Less Deceived permeates the darker aspects of the novel in its emphasis on a dread of death, the state of Englishness, and the waning of affect. Toni and Chris see themselves as part of the postwar ‘Anger generation’ contemporary with Larkin but infused with the existential angst of Camus and the alienation of his character Meursault from L’Étranger: ‘independent existence could only be achieved by strict deconditioning.’ (M, p. 41) While Toni’s parents are religious, disciplinarian, loving, and poor, Chris’s are, he believes, simply dull: his parents’ outlook and morality are to be rejected and reversed, his siblings both have ‘bland, soft-featured, unresentful faces’, and all the family live what Chris perceives to be an unendurably empty existence (M, pp. 40–2). Chris is located squarely in Metroland while Toni is an inner-city child, but they are united in their hatred of ‘unidentified legislators, moralists, social luminaries and parents’ (M, p. 14) while they themselves ponder Love, Truth, Authenticity, and ‘the purity of the language, the perfectibility of self, the function of art’ (M, p. 15).

A single spoken word begins Chapter 5 of the novel’s first Part: ‘Rootless’. Barnes says: ‘I grew up in a place that looks like a settled community but is in fact full of rootless people. You have this psychic rootlessness which is characteristic of who we are.’3 That Metroland is a commuter zone underlines this point when Christopher finds travelling between identities replaces a unified sense of self with a ‘twice-daily metamorphosis’ (M, 58). He travels from his home identity, house-trained adolescent, to his school identity, anti-social flâneur, donning and doffing his feelings of teenage inexperience or his affectations as a post-industrial Rimbaudian aesthete. Art appears a form of compensation for the necessity of vicarious living, as well as a consolation for mortality. Another compensation in this closely structured three-part commuter novel, where Paris more than London is in fact both the metaphorical and the literal destination before Chris’s return to Metroland, is travel. In the rootlessness of Chapter 5, and anticipating the end of the story that concludes Cross Channel, ‘Tunnel’, Christopher encounters a middle-aged gentleman travelling on his train. The man explains something of the history of the rail lines that run through Metroland, situating Christopher’s recent understanding in the context of Victorian expansion and ambition, lionising the very society that Chris’s heroes spurn: ‘He was an old sod, I thought; dead bourgeois’ (M, p. 35). Chris’s preference for art over life reveals itself again in his ignorant dismissal of the Victorian railway pioneer Sir Edward Watkin merely as someone ‘who couldn’t tell Tissot from Titian’ (M, p. 37). Watkin’s grand idea of connecting the northern English cities to the Continent using one vast railway line is contrasted with Chris’s parochial, unambitious mental and physical Metroland, which the old man dismisses as ‘nonsense … Cosy homes for cosy heroes. Twenty-five minutes from Baker Street and a pension at the end of the line … a bourgeois dormitory’ (M, p. 38). The man’s self-recognition as a bourgeois himself puzzles Chris, who is at present unable to reconcile the often different aspirations of art and life or to appreciate that an individual’s choice of life’s respon­sibilities over art’s priorities might be defensible, let alone condon­able. This attitude of art-inspired rebellion he terms ‘Scorched Earth’: ‘systematic rejection, wilful contradiction, a wide-ranging, anarchic slate-wipe’ (M, p. 41).4 Yet, it is central to the narrative that this rejection of values is aesthetic not anarchic, unmatched in Christopher by any strong political motivation, which in many ways marks his split from the increasingly radical Toni and his own segue into leftist liberalism.

The lack of historical recognition in particular highlights this aspect of Chris’s life. Across the carefully dated three parts, the impact of the Beatles in 1963, the student protests in Paris in 1968, and the Punk movement in 1977 are all overlooked by Christopher at the time, with only the middle one acknowledged at all by his solipsistic narrative. Even in the first part, Christopher is largely indifferent to politics because he agrees with Osborne’s Jimmy Porter that there are no brave causes left. He tells Toni that they are of course part of the Anger Generation and that the fact they are studying John Osborne’s work at school means they are being institutionalised: ‘heading off the revolt of the intelligentsia by trying to absorb it into the body politic’ (M, p. 41). This apparent awareness of Marxist thought is then undermined by Chris’s paradoxical joke that ‘maybe the real action’s in Complacency’ (ibid.), whereas Toni at least has stronger revolutionary potential because he has stricter parents than Chris. Most clear here is in fact the importance of not action but language and rhetoric in the boys’ self-development.

Part One’s epigraph reads: ‘A noir, E blanc, I rouge, U vert, O bleu’. It is taken from Rimbaud’s sonnet ‘Voyelles’ (‘Vowels’, 1871), a poem that builds on his hero Baudelaire’s poem ‘Correspondences’ (1857). In intellectual terms a precursor to structuralism, Rimbaud’s poem creates a link between vowels and colours that emphasises synaesthetic correspondences, putatively connecting objects and the individual’s private world. A key importance of this to Metroland is that Barnes’s novel records one adolescent’s rendering of the world through his own imaginative equations between life and art. Christopher and Toni are so appalled by the disjunction between life and art that they try to observe any influence that the latter has on the former. Their activity tries in the simplest way to make manifest the belief not only that art civilises but also that there is a correspondence between the art observed and the observer that they observe. It is a leisured, adolescent, idealistic, and naive enterprise that characterises their lack of experience and their estranged, essentially voyeuristic engagement with life, amounting to a pretentious, but amusingly absurd, equivalent of trainspotting. The boys believe they are ‘hunting emotions’: aesthetic ones at art galleries, loving ones at railway termini, fearful ones at doctors’ surgeries, spiritual ones at church. The National Gallery is their most regular haunt because

Art was the most important thing in life, the constant to which one could be unfailingly devoted and which would never cease to reward; more crucially, it was the stuff whose effect on those exposed to it was ameliorative. It made people not just fitter for friendship and more civilised (we saw the circularity of that), but better – kinder, wiser, nicer, more peaceful, more active, more sensitive. If it didn’t, what good was it? (M, p. 29)

This last question is one that has itself remained constant in Barnes’s writing, with working answers appearing in diverse places from A History of the World in 101/2 Chapters (art commemorates if not ameliorates catastrophe) to Nothing to Be Frightened of (art conveys truths, unlike religion).

The adolescent Chris conjectures that, if individuals are in some way improved when they are exposed to art, the process could be visible. The 30-year-old Chris concludes, by contrast, that life is more important than art. But Barnes’s novel implies something in-between may be the case: first, that art leaves an after-image, and, second, that virtues Christopher has as an adult can be partly traced back to his teenage influences. In the story’s narrative trajectory, this is the arc of the journey Christopher has been on, when thinking about commuting and grander travels. Talking of his suitcase, he says at the end of Part One that ‘One day I shall fix the real labels on myself’; and this is what has happened by the end of the novel, as he has moved from ‘mentally stick[ing] labels’ to being labelled himself. The suitcase is one of the key objects of Chris’s adolescence, informing his still unformed sense of self.

The final chapter of each Part of Barnes’s book is entitled ‘Object Relations’. At the close of Part One this chapter locates the juvenile Christopher’s memories and awareness of self in the objects that surround him in his bedroom: ‘I remember things’ (M, p. 71) is his own response to his question about first and strongest adolescent memories. The confines and contents of his room are ‘objects redolent of all I felt and hoped for’. Also, ‘The whole room is full of things I don’t have’ (M, p. 72), exposing his sense of both expectation and frustration. This is partly because these badges of identity are not necessarily selected by him: ‘Is that so strange? What else are you at that age but a creature part willing, part consenting, part being chosen?’ (M, 72). In such places, the interstices of the novel, Barnes allows the older Christopher less to judge than to understand his younger self, making sense of his relationship to hi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Prelims
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Series editor’s foreword
• Acknowledgements
• List of abbreviations
• Introduction: Pleasure in form
• 1 About to be less deceived: Metroland
• 2 Silly to worry about: Before She Met Me
• 3 What happened to the truth is not recorded: Flaubert’s Parrot
• 4 Intricate rented world: Staring at the Sun
• 5 Safe for love: A History of the World in 101/2 Chapters
• 6 Tell me yours: Talking It Over and Love, etc
• 7 We won’t get fooled again: The Porcupine
• 8 History doesn’t relate: England, England
• 9 Retrospectively imagined memorials: Cross Channel and The Lemon Table
• 10 Conviction and prejudice: Arthur & George
• Select bibliography
• Index