BookJack talks about the new novel "Elizabeth Finch" by contemporary English classic Julian Barnes. The main character of the book is a former actor who decides to get higher education. At university, he meets a teacher, Elizabeth Finch, who changes his life, but remains a mystery to him. We tell you why this novel, hovering somewhere between fiction narrative and philosophical speculation, can both deter and surprise readers.
Julian Patrick Barnes is a contemporary English writer of postmodernism in literature. He has been shortlisted three times for the Man Booker Prize - Flaubert's Parrot (1984), England, England (1998), and Arthur & George (2005), and won the prize for The Sense of an Ending (2011). He has written crime fiction under the pseudonym Dan Kavanagh.
Of all the books by the Englishman Julian Barnes, this one is the strangest and most imperfect. Barnes has long begun to move away from traditional fiction into the philosophical novel-essay, but this time he stops at perhaps the most uncomfortable point for the reader--strictly in the middle of the road, equidistant from a fascinating story on the one hand and a full-fledged treatise on the other.
Neal, a former actor and, as his own daughter puts it, "the king of abandoned projects," decides to finally get a college degree at the night school, and meets a teacher there named Elizabeth Finch. Her course is called "Culture and Civilization," but in reality Elizabeth is teaching her overgrown students (the younger ones are in their 30s, the older ones are in their 40s) an outlandish mixture of critical thinking and traditional rhetoric, encouraging them not so much to learn new things as to think, question the obvious, argue and find new angles on things that seem to have been said many times over.
For some students, Elizabeth Finch's Socratic method proves frustrating and even irritating-for instance, her suggestion that we read Hitler's Table Talks as a source for our opposing point of view causes a micro-scandal in the classroom with far-reaching consequences. For Neel, however, both her teaching techniques and, most importantly, herself- aloof, benevolent, clear and enigmatic-become crucial sources of light and meaning for all the years that followed. Their cool yet deeply emotional friendship (a few letters and three or four lunches a year together) continues after graduation, and after her death Neal learns that she left him her library and notebooks, either simply because there were no other candidates for the role of executor, or with a hint of the need to finish the essay Neal never finished writing years ago at university.
If the reader waits at this point for a radical plot twist, seemingly perfectly organic and even partly inevitable in such a novel structure, he waits in vain - nothing in the notebooks and other documents left by Elizabeth Finch will allow Neil or the reader to unravel what kind of person she was, how she became that person, what passions determined her path, and whether those passions were there at all.
In fulfillment of a long-standing promise (or, rather, just longing for a friend who has passed on) Neal takes up an essay on one of Elizabeth Finch's most important historical characters--Julian the Apostate, the last Roman emperor, in the fourth century, 50 years after Constantine the Great's baptism, who tried to return the world to the fold of Greco-Roman paganism. Having analyzed all available sources (the Russian reader is not without regret to learn that Dmitri Merezhkovsky's famous novel about Julian will end up in Neil's "Bibliography not yet read" section), the hero realizes the total impossibility of saying anything definite about his hero. Despite his best efforts, Julian the Apostate will remain a vague, blurred and, in fact, completely incomprehensible figure, and the essay about him (which takes up almost a third of Julian Barnes' novel) will come out naturally awkward and unclear - it is unlikely that Elizabeth Finch, had she had the chance to read it, would have given the work a high score.
The realization of the impossibility to understand Julian is only a prelude to Neil's realization of the fundamental impossibility to understand anyone at all, either in life or after death.
All the hero's attempts to reach out through the veil of non-existence to Elizabeth Finch, to penetrate into her inner world, to look retrospectively into her soul meet a wall of not even a lack of facts (although there are few, indeed), but, surprisingly, an abundance of them. A straight line can be drawn through any two points, but if the points become not two but three, or, scary to say, four, any conceptualization, any consistent description turns into a rubbish.
As soon as Neal's own memories are added to those of Elizabeth's brother, a simple-minded, good-natured villager; Anna, her former student and Neal's former lover; or Jeff, their classmate, who could not stand Elizabeth Finch in life and despised her after her death, the picture falls apart, losing its comfortable unambiguity. The key to the entire novel, however, is a couplet by the Greek poet Konstantinos Kavathis, which Neal recalls in the context of a tragic inability to come close to understanding another person: "Of all that I have done and said, let no one try to understand what I was."
In the protagonist of "Elizabeth Finch," if you wish, you can recognize Anita Bruckner, the English writer and art historian, Booker Prize winner and beloved elder friend of Julian Barnes. For example, Neil's conversation with Elizabeth during their lunch together in a restaurant, where, contrary to tradition, he orders not pasta but escalope, almost verbatim reproduces a scene from Anita Bruckner's obituary, written by Barnes for The Guardian newspaper in 2016.
However, Julian Barnes' novel is by no means an attempt at a biography of Bruckner - rather, on the contrary, it is an explanation of the impossibility and unnecessity of such a biography, and of any reliable biography in general. If I may put it that way, Elizabeth Finch is a kind of pamphlet directed against biographical literature and, more broadly, against self-loving attempts at posthumous appropriation of a person through his fixation in the word.
As mentioned above, having moved from the traditional novel-history to the treatise novel, in Elizabeth Finch Barnes has made a halt strictly halfway through, and the point he has chosen can hardly be called a point of equilibrium. The heroes of the book are never fleshed out, remaining, in fact, faceless extras, but the philosophical component, burdened by the attachment to the characters and the realities of their lives, can not manifest itself with complete freedom and clarity. Well, the decision to place a 70-page historical and cultural essay in the center of the novel, the main purpose of which is to demonstrate the impossibility of writing such an essay, can hardly be called a compositional success.
However, "strange" and "imperfect" (these are the epithets with which we began this text) do not in any way mean "weak" or "unnecessary.
On the contrary, Barnes's polyphonic novel, with its compulsory unanimity as a state principle, and his heroine in particular, with her doubting mind that stubbornly resists all ideological clichés, is a necessity for present-day Russia. Elizabeth Finch, who calmly and confidently puts forward points of view contrary to those of the majority, and who has no fear of the consequences that such intellectual freedom can entail, looks not so much like the heroine of Barnes' novel as like the heroine of our times in general. And her sober, stoic view of the world, which makes a clear distinction between what is yours--that which you can influence--and what is not (which, according to Epictetus, the stoicist and spiritual mentor of Elizabeth Finch, includes body, career, good name, wealth and other things), can be a comfort and support to people tormented by feelings of powerlessness and guilt.
This article was sponsored by Bianca Lazu
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