“Parenthesis” and the Unreliable Author in Julian Barnes's A History of the World in 10½ Chapters

Abstract

This paper focuses on the ambiguous status of the half-chapter in Julian Barnes's novel A History of the World in 10'½ Chapters (1989). "Parenthesis" stands in contradistinction to the other ten chapters in that it offers a concerted riposte to the provisionality of postmodern history by installing love as a structuring logic by which the terrifying randomness of the past can be negotiated. Much of the distinctiveness of "Parenthesis" derives from the intrusion of an authorial-narratorial figuration of Julian Barnes which, it is argued, lends the half-chapter a degree of authorial privilege and narrative stability that is not evident elsewhere. By reading the 'honesty' of Barnes's discourse on love as a postmodern strategy of seduction, it is claimed that the redemptive potential of love as a way of making meaning from chaos is compromised. To recognise this is to face the prospect that Barnes lulls his readers into believing that "Parenthesis" offers an escape from the scepticism of postmodernism only to confront them with their own naive desire for order in narrative as in history.