The World We Live In, Where Reality and Illusion Intertwine — A History of the World in 10½ Chapters
The World We Live In, Where Reality and Illusion Intertwine — A History of the World in 10½ Chapters
The World We Live In, Where Reality and Illusion Intertwine — A History of the World in 10½ Chapters
At the beginning of the classic work of historical writing A Global History, Professor Stavrianos writes: “Every age must write its own history. Not because earlier histories were written incorrectly, but because every age faces new problems, raises new questions, and seeks new answers.” These words capture the essence of history as a discipline: it serves the present more than the past. People study history in order to draw from past experience directions and ideas for solving current problems, and those solutions in turn become history to be revisited and studied by later generations.
If the original purpose of writing history is to serve the present, then after countless rounds of rewriting and revision, what exactly is the history we are able to see? Could all the events that took place over thousands of years be completely different from what we think we know? We can probably imagine the enormous gap between historical legend and historical reality. The contrast between the classic novel Romance of the Three Kingdoms and historical texts such as Records of the Three Kingdoms, Book of the Later Han, or Book of Jin makes this especially clear. Lü Bu was not truly the invincible warrior of legend, and Guan Yu, Zhang Fei, Zhao Yun, Ma Chao, and Huang Zhong were far less central to the Three Kingdoms era than popular imagination suggests. But after all, that is a novelist’s tale. We know full well that it is filled with invention and dramatization, yet we are still drawn to and moved by its stories and characters. Perhaps, in the subconscious of many readers, compared with Records of the Three Kingdoms, Romance of the Three Kingdoms may actually feel more like “real” history. What the truth is—who really knows, and who truly cares?
A History of the World in 10½ Chapters distills this reflection on and exploration of history into ten and a half absurd yet fascinating stories. Through an extraordinarily imaginative narrative style, it presents us with a completely different possible history and worldview. Its author, Julian Barnes, received rigorous academic training, graduated from Oxford, and even worked on the Oxford English Dictionary. This novel is also one of his most discussed and studied works. Barnes’s method of inserting outrageous stories into “serious” historical events is somewhat reminiscent of Jin Yong’s playful treatment of history in his fiction, though Barnes is even more wildly absurd. If Jin Yong occasionally rewrites bits of history to make his stories more vivid, Barnes reconstructs history itself into an entirely different story.
The stories in the book are independent yet interconnected. They begin with what is supposedly one of the “most important” events in human history—the story of Noah’s Ark—told from the perspective of a woodworm. In this version, God is a tyrant, Noah an old drunk, and which animals are taken aboard the ark—or rather, the fleet—is decided according to Noah’s own will. Some species are taken in large numbers, some are not taken at all, some are eaten by Noah’s family during the voyage because they taste good, and others are thrown into the endless sea for misbehaving on the journey. After the flood recedes, it is the raven that first discovers land, but because Noah thinks the dove is prettier, he sends it out again with an olive branch to appear as the messenger of peace. As the author lets his imagination run delightfully unchecked, his intelligence and insight keep flashing through the narrative like diamonds. Of course, the history seen through the woodworm’s eyes is not the Noah’s Ark story we know so well—but might that simply be because, due to its lowly status, its voice was never heard or recorded? The history we know has, of course, been authenticated by authorities like Noah. In that very process of authentication, how much alteration and beautification has already been woven in so deeply that later generations can no longer separate or restore the original?
The story in the book that comes closest to Noah’s Ark is another tale about survivors of a shipwreck. If someone were to say that Ang Lee’s Life of Pi was influenced or inspired by “The Shipwreck,” I would not doubt it at all. “The Shipwreck” likewise recounts the harsh and brutal realities of a maritime disaster. Yet after the survivors are rescued, when a painter “reconstructs” the event through his artwork, the truest parts are altered one by one because they lack artistic beauty. The victims’ bodies no longer look like those of people who have endured a shipwreck; instead, they are rendered with the aesthetic grace of figures from Greek myth. Elements such as mutiny and killing are completely ignored by the painter. Even such details as how many people sat on which side of the raft, or what posture the rescuers took, are all changed for the sake of the painting’s visual balance. In the end, the work satisfies artistic standards of beauty, while stripping away symbolism, drama, sorrow, and all the emotions the real event should have contained, becoming a pure example of art for art’s sake.
The other stories differ in content, but their style and technique are broadly similar. Between the eighth and ninth stories, Barnes inserts the “half” chapter: an essay-like meditation on love and history. Then, in the tenth chapter, he no longer uses history as his main vehicle for writing and reflection. Instead, relying on his unrestrained imagination, he tells a story about heaven that is at once ideal and absurd. It feels both reasonable and ridiculous, and yet somehow impossible to refute—highly entertaining.
When I reached the tenth story, I suddenly thought of Lu Xun’s Old Tales Retold. It is probably the book closest in form and spirit to Barnes’s work. Yet Lu Xun wrote with a more immediate and concrete social purpose. So compared with Barnes, Old Tales Retold contains a little less open-ended exploration and reflection, and a little more sharpness and edge. But both writers, through reinterpretation and imaginative expansion of history, seek the meaning and value of the present. Their stories unfold within the world we inhabit, where reality and illusion are interwoven. And when we read such books within what we take to be “real” life, we cannot help but feel a bit like Zhuang Zhou dreaming he was a butterfly.
