User:MyNameIsNotBob/tenhalfchap

Question One

The title of Barnes novel, A History of the World in 10 1/2 Chapters is a play on Sir Walter Raleigh's The History of the World, except Barnes' title uses an indefinite term. The second part of the title highlights the absurdity of having such a short book on such a large topic as well as drawing attention to the "1/2" chapter, labeled "Parenthesis" in which the author changes voice.

Question Two

Barnes does not subscribe to a providential interpretation of history. His is merely a history among many possible histories of the world.

Question Three

Bricolage and this novel The strategy that probably most distinguishes this book from the rest of his fictional work is its use of fragmented episodes from the history of the world, its use of what Lévi-Strauss has called bricolage. Asked in what sense his book, A History of the World in 10 1/2 Chapters, was not just a book of short stories, Barnes replied: "Well, it was conceived as a whole and executed as a whole. Things in it thicken and deepen" (Cook 12). The question that needs asking, then, are whether and how this book generates discursive meaning(s) over the totality of its very different chapters. Are some of its meanings produced by the sum of its multiple texts? Is there a shape, a beginning and end to this book? Does it qualify as what Frank Kermode has called one of those fictions "whose ends are consonant with origins, and in concord, however unexpected, with their precedents," fictions which "satisfy our needs" by giving significance to our lives, seeing that we live our whole lifetime in the midst of things (Sense 5, 7)? Equally does it live up to Barnes' own dictum that "art is the stuff you finally understand, and life, perhaps, is the stuff you finally can't understand" (McGrath 23)?