Julian Barnes: Toward a Minor History

Abstract

Julian Barnes is predominantly known for his radical experiment with the notion of history. He uses and abuses official accounts of history in order to register a history of the unvoiced in his novels. In his attempt to foreground what is unregistered in history, he often ends up embracing a very strong dystopian mode, depicting a world full of terrors, disasters and crises. As this article argues, he presents a "hystopia," that is, a history of dystopia or history as a dystopia. In Barnes, history is a hystopia not only in the sense that it is full of catastrophes, but also in the sense that it is subjective, unreliable and even fascistic in imposing only a single version of the past. Barnes creates alternative histories which downplay the absoluteness of the official accounts and create ruptures in the causal lines of hystopia. In this sense, these alternative accounts can be seen as "minor" history in Deleuzian terms, which is nonlinear, rhizomatic and eventful. Against this background this article aims to elaborate on these new notions of "hystopia" and "minor history" in Barnes's novels, addressing the relation of his understanding of history to minoritarian politics in the light of Deleuze and Guattari's philosophy.