Reading the Archives: The Construction of Character in Julian Barnes’s Talking It Over and Love, etc.
The aim of this article is to examine the meticulous way in which Julian Barnes created his characters in the diptych Talking It Over (1991) and Love, etc. (2000) through an exploration of his archives, more specifically his preliminary notes, sketches and drafts. These archival documents shed light on the protagonists’ main characteristics and functions which Barnes sketched from the start. They also reveal the writer’s great care in devising idiosyncratic languages for each character, which are reflective of their personalities. The paper comments in particular on the linguistic choices made by Barnes to ensure that each voice was singular. The writer was also attentive to the balance of power between the characters and the genetic dossier for the two novels reveals that he devised the female character in the trio as the “prime mover”. By casting light on the living process of literary creation, this article uncovers the intricate palimpsest of Barnes’s work and helps understand the writer’s unique approach to characterisation.
Anahtar Kelimeler:
Julian Barnes, archives, characterisation, genetic criticism
Reading the Archives: The Construction of Character in Julian Barnes’s Talking It Over and Love, etc.
The aim of this article is to examine the meticulous way in which Julian Barnes created his characters in the diptych Talking It Over (1991) and Love, etc. (2000) through an exploration of his archives, more specifically his preliminary notes, sketches and drafts. These archival documents shed light on the protagonists’ main characteristics and functions which Barnes sketched from the start. They also reveal the writer’s great care in devising idiosyncratic languages for each character, which are reflective of their personalities. The paper comments in particular on the linguistic choices made by Barnes to ensure that each voice was singular. The writer was also attentive to the balance of power between the characters and the genetic dossier for the two novels reveals that he devised the female character in the trio as the “prime mover”. By casting light on the living process of literary creation, this article uncovers the intricate palimpsest of Barnes’s work and helps understand the writer’s unique approach to characterisation.
Keywords:
Julian Barnes, archives, genetic criticism,
___
- Bakhtin, Mikhail. The Dialogic Imagination, edited by Michael Holquist, translated by Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. U of Texas P, 1981.
- Barnes, Julian. “Diary. Ambushed in Streets of the Sneaky Pun.” Guardian 17 June 1989.
- Barnes, Julian. Talking It Over. 1991a. Picador, 1992.
- Barnes, Julian. “U.” Hockney’s Alphabet, edited by Stephen Spender with drawings by David Hockney. Faber & Faber, 1991b, unpaginated.
- Barnes, Julian. Letters from London 1990-1995. Picador, 1995.
- Barnes, Julian. “‘Merci de m’avoir trahi’.” Nouvel Observateur 1675 (12 December 1996), p.114.
- Barnes, Julian. Love, etc. Jonathan Cape, 2000.
- Barnes, Julian. “The Case of Inspector Campbell’s Red Hair.” The Anthology of New Writing, Volume 15, edited by Maggie Gee and Bernardine Evaristo, Granta Books, 2007, pp.289-99.
- Bayley, John. “Getting to Know You.” New York Review of Books 5 Dec. 1991: 25-26.
- Berlatsky, Eric. “‘Madame Bovary, c’est moi!’: Julian Barnes’s ‘Flaubert’s Parrot” and Sexual ‘Perversion’.” Twentieth Century Literature, vol. 55, no. 2, Summer 2009, pp.175-208.
- Buchan, James. “An Unsuccessful Likeness.” Spectator 20 July 1991: 25-26.
- Childs, Peter. Julian Barnes. Manchester UP, 2011.
- Cooke, Rachel. “Julian Barnes: ‘Flaubert could have written a great novel about contemporary America’.” Guardian 29 January 2018, https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/jan/29/julian-barnes-interview-the-only-story. Accessed 26 April 2020.
- Depmann, Jed, Daniel Ferrer and Michael Groden, ed. Genetic Criticism: Texts and Avant-Textes. U of Pennsylvania P, 2004.
- Girard, René. Deceit, Desire and the Novel: Self and Other in Literary Structure. Translated by Yvonne Freccero. Johns Hopkins UP, 1972.
- Guignery, Vanessa. The Fiction of Julian Barnes. Palgrave Macmillan, 2006.
- Guignery, Vanessa. Julian Barnes from the Margins: Exploring the Writer’s Archives. Bloomsbury, 2020.
- Guignery, Vanessa and Ryan Roberts, eds. Conversations with Julian Barnes. U of Mississippi P, 2009.
- Hamilton, Craig. “La narration bakhtinienne dans Talking It Over et Love, etc. de Julian Barnes.” Imaginaires, vol. 10, 2004, pp.177-92.
- Hateley, Erica. “Erotic Triangles in Amis and Barnes: Negotiations of Patriarchal Power.” Lateral: a Journal of Textual and Cultural Studies, vol. 3, 2001. https://eprints.qut.edu.au/27266/1/c27266.pdf. Accessed 26 April 2020.
- Hay, Louis. “History or Genesis?” Translated by Ingrid Wassenaar. Drafts, Special issue of Yale French Studies, vol. 89, 1996, pp.191-207. Originally “Histoire ou genèse?” Les Leçons du manuscrit, Special issue of Études françaises, vol. 28, no. 1, 1992, pp.11-27.
- Hay, Louis. La littérature des écrivains. Questions de critique génétique. José Corti, 2002.
- Heller, Zoe. “The Square and the Other Two Sides.” Independent on Sunday 14 July 1991: SR28.
- Holmes, Frederick M. Julian Barnes. Palgrave Macmillan, 2008.
- Imlah, Mick. “Giving the Authorized Version.” Times Literary Supplement 4606 (12 July 1991): 19.
- Jouve, Vincent. L’Effet-personnage dans le roman. Presses Universitaires de France, 1992.
- Kelly, Kathleen A. “Humors, Neuroses, and Falling in Love in Julian Barnes’s Talking It Over and Love, etc.” The International Journal of the Humanities, vol. 9, no. 9, 2012, pp.179-92.
- McInerney, Jay. “Julian Barnes and Jay McInerney.” 7 March 2001, New York Public Library. Unpublished.
- Moseley, Merritt. Understanding Julian Barnes. U of South Carolina P, 1997.
- Moseley, Merritt. “Crossing the Channel: Europe and the Three Uses of France in Julian Barnes’s Talking It Over.” Julian Barnes, edited by Sebastian Groes and Sean Matthews, Continuum, 2011, pp.69-80.
- Moseley, Merritt. “Julian Barnes and the Contemporary English Sequel.” Prequels, Coquels and Sequels in Contemporary Anglophone Fiction, edited by Armelle Parey, Routledge, 2019, pp.128-141.
- Nicholl, Charles. “Oliver’s Riffs.” London Review of Books 13.14 (25 July 1991): 19.
- Pateman, Matthew. Julian Barnes. Northcote House, 2002.
- Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire. Columbia UP, 1985.
- Taylor, D. J. “Fearful Symmetry.” New Statesman and Society 19 July 1991: 35.
- Todd, Richard. “Domestic Performance: Julian Barnes and the Love Triangle.” Consuming Fictions. The Booker Prize and Fiction in Britain Today, Bloomsbury, 1996, pp.260-280.
- Valera Bravo, Eduardo José. “Faulty Logic and Love Affairs: A Pragmatic Interpretation of a Passage from Julian Barnes’s Talking It Over.” Atlantis, vol. 18, no.1-2, June-December 1996, pp.416-432.
- Watt, Ian. The Rise of the Novel. Studies in Defoe, Richardson and Fielding. U of California P, 1965.
- Wood, James. “Bedizened by Baggage.” Guardian 4 July 1991: 26.
- ISSN: 1309-6761
- Yayın Aralığı: Yılda 2 Sayı
- Başlangıç: 2004
- Yayıncı: Çankaya Üniversitesi
Sayıdaki Diğer Makaleler
Irony and (Dis)Obedience to Authority in Julian Barnes’s The Noise of Time
Julian Barnes: Toward a Minor History
The Porcupine and the End of History
Deconstruction of the Phallogocentric View in Julian Barnes’s Flaubert’s Parrot
Julian Barnes’s The Lemon Table as a Collection of Stories of Absence
Mourning and Melancholy in Julian Barnes’s Levels of Life and The Only Story