A Paradox of the Postmodern: Julian Barnes’ ‘The Stowaway’ — A Literary Analysis
This article close-reads ‘The Stowaway’ in Julian Barnes’ A History of the World in 10½ Chapters via Linda Hutcheon’s ‘Historicizing the Postmodern: The Problematizing of History’ in A Poetics of the Postmodern.
“You have elevated [the dove], I understand, into something of symbolic value. So let me point this out: the raven always maintained that he found the olive tree; that he brought a leaf from it back to the Ark; but that Noah decided it was ‘more appropriate’ to say that the dove had discovered it. […] The raven, I need hardly add, felt hurt and betrayed at this instant rewriting of history.”
In the first chapter of A History of the World in 10 ½ Chapters, Julian Barnes showcases the discursive nature of history through the reconstructions of the metanarratives and ultimately calls into question what the ‘systems of signification by which we make sense of the past’. In ‘The Stowaway’, Barnes demonstrates, what Linda Hutcheon calls, one of ‘the paradoxes that characterize all postmodern discourses’ when he assumes the ‘genuine historicity’ of the Bible narrative in an attempt to destabilise its authority as the determining source of historical knowledge.
‘Postmodern historicism’ favours the ruptures, gaps and contradictions in any given narrative—be it in fiction writing or in historiography—over a single, coherent strand of some antiquarian canon and its didactic monopoly on the past (Hutcheon 1988, 89). This means that the postmodern ‘return to history’—via the rewriting of it—is a refusal to propagate past-reality as adhering to any single truth-strand. To the postmodern, the reality of what came before is unknowable in its purest form; historical facts, which are accessible to us today, have been socialised and signified through the meaning-making process, whereas past events, from which we derive our meanings, carry no political agenda and symbolise no moral trajectory.
This notion is exemplified in ‘The Stowaway’ wherein Barnes retells the Genesis flood narrative through the temporally transcendent voice of the woodworm. As a literal ‘stowaway’ on the ‘flotilla’ of the monotheist metanarrative, the woodworm states that unlike ‘the rest of animal society, which still has its nostalgic reunion’, it ‘feel[s] no sense of obligation’ to ‘smear […] Vaseline on the lens’ of ‘history’ (4). In this way, Barnes successfully sets up a narrative which is ‘wilfully unencumbered’ by the formalism of previous systems of signification (Hutcheon, 89). This in turn makes possible a critical and ironic examination of the historicity of the Bible narrative.
With ‘The Stowaway’, Barnes reconstructs the creationist myth by anchoring it to concrete reality, doing away with all romantic pontifications and inflated self-importance of our species. This can be seen when the woodworm asks crushingly practical questions about the Flood myth, and then answers them for the readers, filling in the gaps caused by ‘convenient lapses of [human] memory’ (Barnes, 4). This is evident in the lines: ‘what the hell do you think Noah and his family ate in the Ark? They ate us, of course. I mean, if you look around the animal kingdom nowadays, you don’t think this is all there ever was, do you?’ (11) and ‘How could a drunkard possibly be chosen by God? I’ve told you—because all the other candidates were a damn sight worse. Noah was the pick of a very bad bunch’ (29).
In this way, the narrative embodies the postmodern preoccupation with the question: if this past really did exist, ‘how can we know that past today—and what can we know of it?’ (Hutcheon, 92), which is the basis upon which postmodern texts reconstruct the constructed past. Barnes accomplishes this through his construction of the specific, lived experiences of marginalised, peripheral figures—the ‘stowaways’—in the biblical canon. In this vein, the chapter brings to light the logical absurdities of a system of signification which, in the woodworm’s own words, ‘makes very little sense’ (Barnes, 11).
Moreover, ‘The Stowaway’ further destabilises the authority of the Bible through the semiotic transfer of pre-existing symbols. This can be seen when the woodworm points out that the readers ‘have elevated [the dove] into something of symbolic value’ (25) and goes on to contradict the biblical symbolism of the dove by rewriting the myth from which that particular symbol derived: ‘the raven always maintained that he found the olive tree; that he brought a leaf from it back to the Ark; but that Noah decided it was “more appropriate” to say that the dove had discovered it’ (25).
Firstly, the raven, as a marginalised figure in this given ‘past’, has come to be associated with death and ill-omen in the West. Therefore, by claiming that the raven ‘found the olive tree’, the narrative semiotically transfers the signs proverbially associated with the dove and the olive leaf onto the bird of ill-omen. The irony of this semiotic transfer is that the signs can be read in multiple ways: since the bringing back of the leaf signifies the end of the Flood, the raven then may be read as the bringer of silver linings, but equally so, the end of the Flood may also be read as a sign of ill-omen since it is the raven who brought back the leaf.
In this way, the narrative points to the discursive, and often convoluted, nature of the signifying systems by which we imbue symbolic value onto events and objects that are fundamentally void of meaning. In so doing, the narrative causes ruptures in our understanding of ‘historical facts’ as determinate and asks us ‘to shift the level of our analysis out of our traditional disciplinary divisions’ (Hutcheon, 97).
Secondly, this passage problematises the notion that historical knowledge is singular when it asserts that those who believe in the creationist myth have been ‘betrayed’, much like the raven, by their first father’s ‘instant rewriting of history’ (Barnes, 25). The story’s subversion of the biblical truth—by presenting an alternate version of that truth—exemplifies the postmodern desire to close the gap between the past and the present through the intertextuality of ‘history’ and fiction, treating both as ‘exertions of the shaping, ordering imagination’ (Hutcheon, 89).
Furthermore, the chapter demonstrates one of the ‘paradoxes that characterize all postmodern discourses today’ (89). In order to challenge the validity of received historical facts—via the ‘deliberative contamination of the historical with didactic and situational discursive elements’ (92)—Barnes ends up ‘reinstalling’ those ‘facts’ as ‘significant, and even determining’ (89). For instance, in the passage:
You aren’t too good with the truth, either, your species. You keep forgetting things, or you pretend to. […] Such naivety can be charming; alas, it can also be perilous. […] you won’t even admit the true nature of Noah, your first father – the pious patriarch, the committed conservationist. (Barnes, 29)
The narrative asserts that the Flood myth is real and really did happen because it claims a linear, essentialised ‘history’ and genealogy of the human species. With the line, ‘Noah, your first father’, the woodworm presumes that the entire human species is not only familiar with the biblical canon but is also hyper-reliant on it to signify their collective reality. In this way, the narrative ends up exaggerating the universality and significance of the very metanarrative it has set out to disrupt, demonstrating a paradox of the postmodern discourse and challenging the problematic assumption that historical facts are accurate representations of any given past. Every representation is, in a postmodern sense, a misrepresentation of actual events due to the epistemological limitation in our ability to truly know the past, and in ‘The Stowaway’, the woodworm asks us to, at the very least, learn to acknowledge that.
In conclusion, ‘The Stowaway’ in A History of the World in 10½ Chapters cautions us against accepting unquestioningly any received version of history. The narrative showcases its semiotic awareness by giving voice to marginalised figures on the ‘flotilla’ of the monotheist metanarrative, creating ruptures in our assumption about the historicity of any textualised past. Lastly, Julian Barnes successfully repopulates our impartial histories with discursive figures who partake in the making of those histories, in turn, reminding us that we are participants in the historical process, spectators in retrospect, and creators of the convoluted ‘systems of signification by which we make sense of the past’.
References
Barnes, J., [1989] 2009. ‘The Stowaway’. In: A History of the World in 10½ Chapters. London: Vintage. 3–30.
Hutcheon, L., 1988. ‘Historicizing the Postmodern: The Problematizing of History’. In: A Poetics of Postmodernism. London: Routledge. 87–101.
Originally written for Postmodernism in Autumn 2019.
