A Parenthesis on Truth and Love: Ethics in Julian Barnes's A History of the World in 10 ½ Chapters

This essay focuses on the unnumbered half chapter titled “Parenthesis” in Julian Barnes’s A History of the World in 10 ½ Chapters (1989), which throws into question the effects of postmodern conceptions of history and the decentering of the human subject that the novel as a whole supports. Many literary texts published between the late 1980s and the 1990s deal with the question of what happens when we acknowledge the ‘fluidity’ of late modernity while at the same time feeling the need for some sort of guiding principle that might inform our choices and help us live our lives. In particular, they ask: how can we can fight death/dissolution and work for survival? why do we need to assume responsibility for the future? how/where can we can begin to create a space for the subject as an ethical being? where should we turn to find an antidote to history’s horrors, to the lack of future? These questions sometimes find an answer in the notion of love, the idea that “there is more to us than us” (J. Barnes)—love as an emblem of the relationship with alterity and the figure of moral responsibility. What is interesting in contemporary fiction is an attempt to engage with love as a regulative idea, as a notion enabling moral decisions. “Parenthesis” is a non-fictional meditation on love, truth and history. As a half chapter, it makes sense as a negotiated position that enables Barnes to discuss his “love ethics” and to assume responsibility for his stance as an author and human being on the verge of the abyss.