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BIANCA
LEGGETT
University of Nottingham
Abstract
This paper
examines Julian Barnes’s ambivalence towards the postmodern
literary tradition in novels which both exhibit Lyotard’s
“incredulity towards metanarratives,” and yet are predicated
upon the need for meaning through legitimating narratives.
Flaubert’s Parrot, A History of the World in 10 ½
Chapters and England, England could all be
described as literary detective novels, as in each the
central consciousness is driven by the twin desires to
reject delusion and pursue truth. The alleged reliability of
the narrators is thus part of Barnes’s attempt to resist the
beguiling relativity which he considers to be a pernicious
element of the postmodern mentality. The writer’s
problematisation of truth, authenticity and morality in his
historical narratives leads to a paradoxical conclusion
which both wistfully acknowledges the indeterminacy of
objective truth and yet insists that we believe in it
anyway. Through an application of the theories of Michael
Riffaterre in Fictional Truth, I argue that
Barnes’s chameleonic form is suffused with ethical and
epistemological significance which together make up an
authorial argument in favour of literature as the medium
which tells us the most truth about life.
Keywords:
meta-narrative, history, postmodernism, Michael Riffaterre,
Gustave Flaubert, narratology, ethics, metafiction, pure
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