BookJack talks about a new essay novel by British writer Julian Barnes "Portrait of a Man in Red". Describing the life of Samuel Pozzi - the hero of the painting by John Singer Sargent, a successful surgeon and a favorite of the high society - the author draws a portrait of the European Belle Epoque. And draws the reader's attention to the modern world in which Great Britain is cut off from its neighbors.
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.
All of Julian Barnes's novels fall into two broad categories: those that are actually more novels, and those that are actually more extended essays. The writer's last book for today, "Portrait of a Man in Red", belongs to the second category: not so much prose in the full sense of the word, as a complex collage of documentary fragments, the artistic value of which is born from a whimsical and unexpected combination of them, and takes the place of a static plot frame flexible and mobile author's thought.
The book's starting point is, in fact, the title picture - a portrait by American artist John Singer Sargent, depicting a young (and, according to Alice, Princess of Monaco, "disgustingly handsome") French surgeon named Samuel Pozzi. Seeing the painting in 2015 at the exhibition, Barnes became interested in the fate of the man depicted on it, and the result of this interest was a small book that today can be held in the hands of a Russian reader as well.
Samuel Pozzi, a native of a bourgeois family of Italian Protestants who settled in France, was a bright figure even by the standards of his exceptionally generous time for bright figures (Pozzi was born in 1846 and died in 1918, so his heyday fell on the famous belle epoque - the golden age, primarily of French, but of all European culture as a whole). Handsome, free-thinker and Darwin's translator (it was he who first introduced the French reader to the work "Expression of Emotions in People and Animals"), lover, and then the closest friend of the incomparable Sarah Bernhardt, friend and interlocutor of almost all Parisian celebrities, Pozzi at the same time remained one of the largest surgeons of his time, the founder of gynecology, and most importantly - a true revolutionary in matters of asepsis and antiseptics. It is this combination of the painstaking, everyday work of a doctor in a large public hospital with the involvement of the dazzling social life of Paris at the turn of the century that makes Pozzi the ideal hero for Barnes - colorful and self-sufficient, but at the same time capable of providing an excellent entry point into his era.
To be honest, this second role of the hero of "Portrait of a Man in Red" for the most part turns out to be much more important and interesting for the author than the first. Endless branching paths, scattering in different directions from Pozzi's figure, fascinate Barnes much more than the complex relationship of "Doctor God" (as the name of the hero who saved her from a huge ugly cyst, grateful Sarah Bernhardt) and his wife happened to participate as a duelist, not a medic.
Here Pozzi goes "for shopping", as we would say today, to London as part of a "strange trio" - together with him, a middle-class man, and besides a heterosexual, his influential friends, two brilliant aristocrats, are sent to the British capital, aesthetes and homosexuals - Prince de Polignac and Count de Montesquieu. The Comte de Montesquieu is a person notable primarily for the fact that it was from him that the French decadent writer Joris-Carl Huysmans copied his Duke des Esseintes, the hero of the novel "On the contrary", an exemplary jaded dandy lecher, who, in turn, inspired many Oscar Wilde's insanity and became (the belle epoque treated literature with exaggerated seriousness) an indirect reason for Wilde's conviction in court. As for Polignac, in an effort to improve his shaky well-being, he marries the heiress of the famous Singer empire, who, by the way, is also prone to homoeroticism, and at the same time shares the cultural preferences of her husband, so that contrary to all forecasts, their marriage turns out to be extremely harmonious and happy. The Polignacs create a fashionable salon where all the European elite, from Wagner to the Rothschilds and from Redon to Prokofiev, visit.
Sometimes - as in the example above - we are still able to reconstruct the author's line of reasoning leading us from Pozzi to Prokofiev. Sometimes it turns out to be difficult: many characters and circumstances appear on the pages of "Portrait of a Man in Red" due to some non-obvious associations that arise in Julian Barnes's head and are indicated on the surface of the text by a broken dotted line at best. However, the main idea is read, in general, without difficulty: in a somewhat simplified form, it boils down to a fascinating connection between everything and everything in Europe at the end of the 19th - beginning of the 20th centuries. The British, Germans, Italians, French, quite openly disliking each other and caustically joking at each other, learn a lot from each other (for example, it is from the great Scottish surgeon Lister that the French Pozzi adopts a new way of stitching), English and French art feed each other , and in general, European culture appears as a continuum - diverse, extremely variegated, not to say ideally friendly, and at the same time, absolutely definitely single, holistic and harmonious.
In principle, the same technique - to show culture as a universal mycelium, penetrating and uniting the most seemingly distant regions from each other, we have already observed in the best, perhaps, Barnes essay novel "Flaubert's Parrot." However, in "Parrot" the point of intersection of all threads was Gustave Flaubert himself - a true favorite of Barnes, which provided the book with much greater compositional integrity and harmony. For all his charm and charisma, Samuel Pozzi is obviously not able to awaken love of comparable strength in the author's heart, therefore Portrait of a Man in Red remains largely a novel without a center: the web woven by Barnes does not bend under the weight of the protagonist, the force field around him does not fill exciting tension and does not spark.
However, this property (it would still not be entirely correct to call it a disadvantage) of the "Portrait" has an explanation, which, however, lies almost entirely outside the text itself - except for the short author's conclusion, which serves as a kind of key to the novel. And this explanation fits into one painful word for every English intellectual - "Brexit". Dr. Pozzi, a patriot and a cosmopolitan, liked to say that "chauvinism is one of the forms of ignorance," and, according to Barnes, it is the triumph of chauvinism (and with it blatant ignorance) that Britain is now experiencing, artificially rejected from common European values. And in this context, a reminder of how rich, complex and beautiful the world can be, abiding in a fruitful and active symbiosis - such as in the turbulent and brilliant times of the belle epoque, becomes a thing more important than the harmonious harmony of the novel structure. And in this capacity - as an alarming reminder and an attempt to present an encouraging example from the opposite - "Portrait of a Man in Red" works, if not flawlessly, then at least quite effectively.
This article was sponsored by Rita Vilner
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