Nothing To Be Frightened Of by Julian Barnes
March 2nd, 2008, 1:01 am Hobbies Ideas
Heaven, in Julian Barnes%26rsquo;s 1989 novel A History of the World in 10%26frac12; Chapters,
is a place of boundless luxury where your every wish is granted. You can
sleep with a different film star every night, hole-in-one every time at
golf, score 750 not out against Australia at Lords %26ndash; or you can choose
annihilation. And sooner or later, out of sheer boredom, everyone chooses
that. Barnes%26rsquo;s fable seems meant to convey how unbearable eternal life would
be, so it comes as a shock to find, from his new book, that actually he
thinks just the opposite. Terror of death has tormented him as long as he
can remember. He wakes in the night, beating the pillow with his fist and
shouting, Oh no Oh No OH NO. Nor is it just senility and the pain of dying
that frighten him, as they do most people. It is the idea of annihilation,
of not existing any more, that makes him shiver.
He quite sees that this is unreasonable. It does not worry us to think that we
did not exist before we were born, so why should we fear not existing after
our death? Seneca, who first pointed this out, has been failing to convince
death-fearers for 2,000 years, and he fails to convince Barnes. The time
before his birth was different, he protests, because then the universe was
labouring to produce something of decided interest, namely, him. After his
death, it will have no such purpose. Only joking? Well, yes and no. His book
is, designedly, a maze of doubt, where questions are raised, dropped, and
brought back looking different. Stirred into the mix are cagey fragments of
autobiography, with his adult life and marriage omitted, and friends%26rsquo; names
hidden behind initials. Allusions to musicians, artists and writers abound,
especially French ones, and ones whose horror of death matches, or even
outdoes, his own.
He finds a kind of alter ego in Jules Renard, the 19th-century French author
who said. I don%26rsquo;t know if God exists, but it would be better for his
reputation if he didn%26rsquo;t. Barnes used to be an atheist but is now an
agnostic. He sometimes catches himself defending God against stupid and
ignorant detractors. I don%26rsquo;t believe in God, but I miss him, he admits %26mdash; a
perfect summary of the modern western predicament. He rightly insists that
you would have to be very foolish to suppose that the generations who
believed in God were less intelligent than you. Besides, religion gave life
seriousness. Without it, it is just an ephemeral natural occurrence, like
the weather. The more he goes on, the more you feel he would make rather a
good priest %26mdash; a bit austere perhaps, but that would add to his gravitas, and
the church could certainly do with his brains. He says that he has had one,
or possibly two, out-of-body experiences, which is surely a good start, and
he feels it would be distinctly interesting to talk to saints in the
afterlife, if there were one. Perhaps, if he had taken holy orders, he would
have been canonised himself.
There is even something reminiscent of the church fathers in the way he fixes
on the decay of the human body. The church fathers did it to raise the mind
to God. Why Barnes does it is not so clear, but it seems to be something to
do with his ruthless writerly integrity. He describes his father%26rsquo;s long
decline, his difficulties with the Zimmer frame, the day he urinated by
mistake on his electric razor. He describes his mother going batty and
saying ridiculous things. Is it indecent, he asks, to dwell on his
parents%26rsquo; decline %26mdash; one of the many questions he leaves unanswered. The
coldness that pervades his writing is perhaps genetic. Tender emotions do
not seem to have thrived in the Barnes family. He was taken aback to find
that a leather pouffe he had often sat on was stuffed with the torn-up
letters his parents had written to each other in their courtship and early
marriage.
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