10 Minutes On... Julian Barnes' A History of the World in 10½ Chapters with Dr Catherine Brown
10 Minutes On... Julian Barnes' A History of the World in 10½ Chapters with Dr Catherine Brown
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Content
2.03 -> 10 minutes on... Julian Barnes's A History
of the World in Ten and a Half Chapters.
8 -> The title is clearly provocative
historians never advertised the numbers
13.5 -> of their chapters because that would be
to emphasise form over content which
17.76 -> historians generally don't want to do.
But then in English the words history
22.71 -> and story were barely distinct until a
gap opened up in Shakespeare's time and
28.14 -> then grew and grew until postmodern
historiography began to narrow it again.
33.86 -> But I say this that is precisely the
kind of broad historical statement which
39.48 -> this novel if we can call it that
distrusts. It tells stories rather than
45.57 -> stating abstractions. The narrator of the
books parentheses says in a resounding
51.45 -> summation of the postmodern
historiographical attitude we all know.
56.51 -> Objective truth is not obtainable but
when some event occurs we shall have a
61.2 -> multiplicity of subjective truths which
we assess and then fabulet into history
66.36 -> into some God ID version of what really
happened. This god ID version is a fake.
74.54 -> Certainly God in this book is largely a
fake to the woodworm on Noah's Ark in
81.6 -> Chapter 1 he appears only through Noah's
mediation as very unlike the God
87.12 -> represented by the Old Testament. God is
something you can choose to believe in
92.88 -> or not. In heaven as dreamt in chapter 10
he stands and falls alongside the kind
100.98 -> of history which elevates and isolates
the fact that in 1492 Columbus sailed
106.65 -> the ocean blue so the book teases
history and the reader this anti history
113.7 -> offers no continuity in time or space
except between chapters five and six
119.46 -> which involves a transition from a
painting by sherry core to a young woman
125.1 -> looking at that picture. Significantly a
transition which it takes the form of
130.8 -> art not historical cause-and-effect
135.44 -> between chapters we as readers are moved
as on a rendition flight. We know not
141.77 -> whither and are tipped out at the
beginning of a new chapter where we have
145.82 -> to look round and orientate ourselves as
best we can. There are patterns though
151.94 -> which hold the book more or less
together. The woodworm which is our first
156.89 -> narrator worms its way through several
of the other chapters and when he
161.33 -> doesn't appear then and arc does or a
ship or sometimes the sea. The clean and
169.22 -> the unclean racism and survival are
persistent tropes but this is the kind
176.21 -> of patterning one expects in a novel, not
a history. The transcendent persistent
183.65 -> factors such as they are are implicit
rather than explicit and are encountered
189.32 -> through aesthetic response to the book
rather than as argument, Most of the
195.14 -> chapters are set though in a defined
time and place and make reference to
200.51 -> what we know as historical events the
earthquake which destroyed the village
205.55 -> of Argyron, Mount Ararat or the 1960s
moon landings but they nearly always
211.1 -> deviate from these. Barnes could have
written about the Achille Lauro the
217.1 -> Italian cruise ship which was hijacked
by Palestinian terrorists in 1985 off
222.02 -> Egypt but instead he writes about the
Santa Eufemia which picks up its
227.48 -> Palestinian terrorists in roads and then
the boat is on its way to Crete. The actor
232.79 -> Charlie is making a film in the
Amazon which resembles the British 1986
238.58 -> film The Mission but clearly isn't it
because Charlie isn't Robert De Niro nor
244.19 -> Jeremy Irons. There is one historian in
this book.
249.59 -> Franklin Hughes the guest lecturer on
the Santa Eufemia. Of all the book's
255.35 -> characters i think that the narrative's
tone is most attached from and skeptical
260.15 -> of Hughes particularly at the beginning
of the chapter. He is represented as
265.43 -> sleazy, shallow,
self-dramatising and of course he owes
270.79 -> it his existence being fictional to a
novelist. The chapter about the wreck of
276.67 -> the Medusa contemplates how jury court
turns quote catastrophe into art. At one
283.72 -> level it tries to undo Géricault's
process of fictionalising by showing how
289.09 -> his painting deviates from what are
known as the facts of the wreck of the Medusa.
293.65 -> But on another level it performs
its own version of turning catastrophe
299.38 -> into art. In this case verbal art and yet
in the chapter about the terrorist
306.79 -> hijacking competing accounts of history
are worth arguing about and killing for.
313.26 -> Franklin Hughes considers risking the
execution of his girlfriend because of
318.61 -> his belief that the version of Middle
Eastern history as stated by one of the
323.2 -> terrorists is wrong and the narrative
too seems to think that it is wrong. The
331.54 -> test case which is often used by people
who wish to argue against postmodern
335.68 -> historiography is the Nazi Holocaust. If
there is no historical truth then the
342.97 -> door is open to Holocaust denial.
Barnes himself uses this case in the
349.18 -> third of his three simple stories in
Chapter 7. He concerns the ship of Jewish
355.66 -> refugees turned back from America in
1939 and this is as close as this book
361.96 -> comes to offering history rather than a
story. Here there is no struggle for the
368.95 -> reader with orientation the chapter
begins quite precisely at 8 p.m. on
374.71 -> Saturday 13th of May 1939. The Linus and
Louie left its home port of Hamburg. The
382.72 -> author's note at the end of the book
states the third part of chapter 7 takes
386.89 -> its facts from The Voyage of the Damned
by Gordon Thomas and Max Morgan-Witts.
392.229 -> Hodder, 1974. This story is told
without self-consciousness or distancing
400.21 -> devices.
It ends with a measured historical
403.939 -> statement: estimates of how many survived vary. It will not in the absence of
411.65 -> historical evidence guess or make it up.
The narrator of the parentheses says
418.939 -> that quote "We must still believe that
objective truth is obtainable or we must
425.36 -> believe it is 99% obtainable or if we
can't believe this we must believe that
429.919 -> 43% objective truth is better than 41%. We
must do so because if we don't we fall
439.009 -> into beguiling relativity." Overall the
novels ten and a half chapters suggest
446.75 -> that certain factors are constant in
human history. The classification of
452.93 -> humans by type and the discrimination of
some types against others. The fact that
461.569 -> as the lead terrorist says in Chapter 2: "The world is not a cheerful place. I
467.33 -> would have thought your researches into
ancient history would have taught you
470.93 -> that. Humans fawned these ancient
civilisation ought onwards have had a
477.02 -> hunger for God or gods and connectedly
for stories". When Franklin Hughes begins
485.27 -> to give his story of Palestine under the
most stressful possible circumstances
491.689 -> his audience begins to relax. They were
being told a story and they were
497.24 -> offering themselves to the storyteller
in the manner of audiences down the ages.
502.96 -> This book offers itself to to us as a
collection of stories to entertain us
508.75 -> but also to instruct us not just in
toleration of many kinds of people as
515.3 -> well as in skepticism of their
historical and religious narratives but
520.49 -> also to instruct us in certain
historical facts readers are meant to
525.14 -> come away knowing more about the Medusa,
Mount Ararat and the
529.37 -> Saint Louis than they did before and also
wanting to find out still more to
534.95 -> distinguish to what extent any of the
chapters are in fact based on historical
539.45 -> truth. In this sense this book is an anti-
history in service of history. This is
547.22 -> the paradox perhaps of the woodworm: an
animal which cannot speak or write but
552.26 -> which asks us to trust its account of a
mythical event and which rightly
559.94 -> challenges us: "You aren't too good with
the truth either. Your species: you forget
567.44 -> things or pretend to." Thank you.
Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8lo9Lk_HO7Q