Nothing to Be Frightened Of
by Julian Barnes
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Book Reviews of Nothing to Be Frightened Of
Book Review: Julian Barnes does not need a Memento Mori
Summary: 4 Stars
Barnes writes: "This is not, by the way, `my autobiography'." The book is, however, intensely autobiographical, in a discursive rather than chronological or comprehensive way. It deals mainly, but not exclusively, with two themes that have occupied much of Julian Barnes' life: the fear of death which, despite the book's title (ah! but what if you take the word Nothing to mean Nothingness?), has become an essential part of me" and his attitude to religion: "I don't believe in God, but I miss Him."
Julian has an elder brother Jonathan, a rather donnish philosopher, and he uses Jonathan's views as a foil to his own, for Jonathan seems genuinely not to be bothered by the prospect of death, and is philosophical not just in an academic but in a temperamental way.
And Julian discusses his memories with Jonathan who points to the unreliability of memories. (And this will be demonstrated beautifully towards the end of the book by a long and fascinating passage about a visit by Stendhal to the Church of Santa Croce). No matter: Julian's memories are recalled so vividly, so stylishly and so wittily that one can only say "si non e vero, e ben trovato" (if this francophile will pardon an Italian instead of a French expression). Besides, in another fine passage towards the end, Julian finely describes the craft of the novelist as the interplay between and the merging of memory and the imagination.
Julian draws richly on what other philosophers, composers and writers have said about death and how they have died. In the context in which this information appears, it is infinitely more rewarding than the lists Simon Critchley has provided in The Book of Dead Philosophers (see my recent review.) Julian must have made a note throughout his voluminous reading whenever the subject of death came up.
For he had always feared death, resented it, protested about it, and, in one of several incongruously vulgar expressions which mar an otherwise delicious and elegant prose, is `pissed off' about one of Montaigne's consolatory statements about it (And I find it depressing to see this fine stylist stoop to the wholly gratuitous use of the F Word on a couple of occasions.)
He has progressed from very early atheism to agnosticism in his later years, but there is always a strong whiff of regret, a feeling that atheists and even agnostics miss something important. "God is dead, and without Him human beings can at last get up off their knees and assume their full height; and yet this height turns out to be quite dwarfish."
There are some fascinating meditations about the response to religious art by people who no longer share the ideas that went into its creation. He wrestles, not all that originally but with his usual elegance, with age-old problems: whether we have Free Will or not; whether, and if so, how we differ from animals in this respect; of whom or what the `I' consists; what is our place in a world which is billions of years old and has billions of years to come; reflections that a good writer can expect go out of print a decade or two after his death (if not during his life-time), and even a great one will no longer be read a few centuries later: so not much of an after-life there either. And there are some delicious and, as far as I know, original extended metaphors: a particularly felicitous one is that perhaps God has set up a kind of labyrinth without exits to an after-life, just to watch us, as an experimental scientist watches rats scurrying around to find a non-existing piece of cheese behind a door that won't open.
This book wonderfully articulates what not only Julian Barnes but many other people have thought about death - though perhaps most of us have such thoughts only in the small hours of the morning when we cannot sleep, in the occasional conversations we might have with family or friends, or at times when our friends or relations have a distressing and lingering end. Julian Barnes conveys the impression - perhaps wrongly, because this is after all NOT an autobiography, but mainly musings on Death, God, and The Human Condition - that he thinks about these things obsessively all the time; and I have to say that, in the end, I found 250 pages of it just a little excessive.
Book Review: On Death and Dying
Summary: 5 Stars
Julian Barnes in NOTHING TO BE FRIGHTENED OF has written a thoughtful, sometimes humorous treatise on death that begins with the lines: "I don't believe in God, but I miss him." He contrasts his views-- an atheist at twenty but now an agnostic at sixty-two-- with those of his philosopher brother, who remains an atheist. His story meanders-- or in his words it "lollops"-- in the way we expect from a novelist; and I am sure it is far more interesting, at least for me, than a more logical one that his professor brother would have written.
Mr. Barnes attempts to be brutally honest about both himself and his family although he is quick to admit the unreliability of memory and quotes many events from his family's past where he and his only brother have totally different recollections about the same event. His parents, at least as he remembers them, are an interesting pair. "I'm sure my father feared death, and fairly certain my mother didn't: she feared incapacity and dependence more." Barnes regrets that he father never told him he loved him although he is pretty certain that he did. He reserves his harshest criticism, however, for his mother. She would prefer deafness to blindness, were she given a choice, because she wanted to be able to do her nails. After the death of his father, Barnes, though attentive to his mother, would never spend the night with her. "I couldn't face the physical manifestations of boredom, the sense of my vital spirits being drained away by her relentless solipsism, and the feeling that time was being sucked from my life, time that I would never get back, before or after death."
Barnes, rather than quoting the clergy and medical community, for the most part quotes from many of his favorite writers and other artists on death: Shostakovich, Ravel, Zola, Flaubert, Somerset Maugham, Jules Renard, even William Faulkner who said that a writer's obituary should simply read "He wrote books, then he died."
Some of Mr. Barnes' observations and conclusions: We escape our parents only to become them. Religion makes people behave no better or worse. He fears both death and what it takes to get there, the loss of memory ("memory is identity") and the loss of bodily functions. He is fairly certain that he will die in hospital and alone. The fear of death, at least for Barnes, doesn't "drop off" after the age of sixty as one friend of his believes. Finally he concludes that as a youth he was sure that art survived the temporal. He now reminds us that "Even the greatest art's triumph over death is risibly temporary. A novelist might hope for another generation of readers--two or three if lucky-- which may feel like a scorning of death, but it's really just scratching on the wall of the condemned cell. We do it to say: I was here too."
When Barnes asks a Catholic friend of his with whom he has lunch on his [Barnes'] sixtieth birthday why he is a believer he responds he wants to believe. I was reminded of Reynolds Price's many books on religion in which is asserts that he has had at least two actual physical visits from Jesus and am fairly certain what Barnes would conclude about that. He is quick to say that the God he misses is not the fundamentalist God of the United States and goes into a rant of how much he dislikes the narcissism of New Yorkers. I was all ready to be up in arms like the man who can complain about his wife but no one else can until Mr. Barnes has difficulty with "such fantasies as The Rapture" and America's obsession with Cabbage Patch dolls. It is difficult to find fault with those observations.
You may find that this book brings out the melancholia in you. Mr. Barnes, however, would probably-- quoting Richard Dawkins who said that the universe does not owe us consolation-- invite us to make the best of the short time we have on this planet and get on with it.
Book Review: memoir on mortality
Summary: 5 Stars
Novelist Julian Barnes (b. 1946) was never baptized and has never attended a church service in his life, and so he's never had any faith to lose. He came by this unbelief honestly; his father was an agnostic and his mother said that she didn't want "any of that [religious] mumbo jumbo." But the certainty of total extinction, both personal and cosmic, and the terror which absolute annihilation provokes in him, causes Barnes to admit in the first sentence of his book that while he doesn't believe in God, he misses Him.
The title for his disquisition on death comes from one of his journal entries over twenty years ago: "People say of death, 'There's nothing to be frightened of.' They say it quickly, casually. Now let's say it again, slowly, with re-emphasis. 'There's NOTHING to be frightened of.' Jules Renard: 'The word that is most true, most exact, most filled with meaning, is nothing.'" Exactly where the emphasis on nothingness rightly falls is what occupies Barnes' considerable talents. The result is a book characterized by deeply personal candor and broad-ranging critical inquiry that encompasses art, music, philosophy, science, literature, and family memories.
The Christian story claims that Jesus "conquered death and brought life and immortality to light through the Gospel" (2 Timothy 2:10). This story succeeded, says Barnes, not because people were gullible, because it was violently imposed by throne and altar, because it was a means of social control, or because there were no other alternatives. No, the Christian story succeeded because it was a "beautiful lie" (53) or "supreme fiction" (58). It's the stuff of a great novel, "a tragedy with a happy ending." And good novelists, says Barnes, tell the truth with lies and tell lies with the truth. There's always a "haunting hypothetical" for Barnes: what if this Grand Story is true?
The strictly secular-materialist option is simple enough. When your heart and brain cease to function, your self ceases to exist. But in this view the "self" is nothing more than random neural events. There's no ghost in the machine to begin with, so in fact there's no "self" that ceases to exist. In post-modern parlance, personal identity is a social construction. But Barnes has nagging suspicions about this neat and clean scientific scenario. Even if they are hard to define or describe, a common sense outlook, endorsed by the vast majority of humanity that has ever lived, is that intelligence, aesthetic imagination, our moral impulse, consciousness, love, gratitude, guilt, regret, and the longing for immortality -- all of these seem to point beyond themselves. They have the ring of truth that makes them hard to define by mere biology.
And so Barnes wonders, given his genuine lack of religious faiith, is it proper to seek and to assign any meaning to his personal story? Does his life enjoy a genuine narrative? Or is it only a random sequence of events that ends with total extinction, such that any and all meaning-making is pure "confabulation?" One thing you can be sure of, Barnes reminds us -- in the end, it doesn't matter what you think. The divine reality, or lack thereof, is what it is, and so "the notion of redefining the deity into something that works for you is grotesque." There's a deep irony here. In his review of The God Delusion by the Oxford atheist Richard Dawkins, Jim Holt observes that if "the after-death options are either a beatific vision (God) or oblivion (no God), then it is poignant to think that believers will never discover that they are wrong, whereas Dawkins and fellow atheists will never discover that they are right" (New York Times, October 22, 2006).
Book Review: What's There to Like?
Summary: 4 Stars
The truth is, I did not like this book except where it permitted me to escape its main topic. I am not an embracer of death, nor is Barnes, who hates and fears it, as I do. But he wrote a whole book about it. Are his death obsessions rooted in vanity or cowardice or, golly, mortality? Barnes admits to waking up in the dead of night yelling, "No No NO!" as he dreams of being swallowed up into blackness. And death weaves its way into his entire opus of novels because Barnes has always been obsessed with its ultimate appearance for every living thing.
Who can really accept death? Barnes gives us lots of small talk about the topic from such giants as Flaubert, Stendahl, Stravinsky, and Phillip Larkin, all of whom faced that moment in various states of terror. These are the good parts of his ramblings. In fact, when he's off topic, which is rarely, that's when this book is bearable. But I must say, 240 pages of musings, twistings, and turnings from Barnes on the ultimate moment are enough to depress the hell out of anybody, as there is no escape, not even blind, idiotic acceptance, which perhaps a handful of people have achieved. And even though Barnes poo poos the notion of being a father and passing on the genes as being a mild antidote to our shared mortal dilemma, I wonder how his life would have changed had he been one. Not all the moments he's spent dwelling on death, and death dwelling on him, would even have been available to him, as he'd have been changing nappies and going to parent-teacher meetings instead.
I've always admired Barnes, and this book of unpleasant musings only adds to that admiration. As you might tell, I have mixed feelings toward this book and its grisly theme. Hah! What does it really matter what feelings I have toward death, which also holds true for Mr. Barnes. No spiritual transfigurations here. No comforts, not even that of "artistic immortality." In fact, Barnes does not claim that he writes to overcome death. He writes because he writes, as plumbers plumb and butchers butcher. It's his job. It's what he does.
This book has been reviewed in The New York Review of Books by Frank Kermode and in the New York Times book review section, front page, by Garrison Keillor. They found it meritorious. I found it annoying, like a poisonous growth on my lower lip. So why 4 stars? Because poisonous growths are embedded in true art, and Barnes fully understands that. Besides, just about anything Barnes has to say is worth hearing, even if it's poured into your ear like deadly bile.
Book Review: Amateur, do-it-yourself stuff
Summary: 2 Stars
On page 39 Barnes writes, "Perhaps I should warn you (especially if you are philosopher, theologian, or biologist) that some of this book my strike you as amateur, do-it-yourself stuff," and on page 165 he warns that his mind "lollops from anecdote to anecdote." No kidding, Joolz. On the backcover Kate Summerscale claims this book is a "disquisition" on death. Uh, not quite. This book is an assortment anecdotes and quotes from a gang of Frenchmen that Barnes was unable to pull together into a coherent whole---and his "lolloping", coincidental expository style is rather maddening (just try to follow the "argument" on pages 144-149).
A strange book. He is an unbeliever that cant stop talking about the Big G. I should have thought after reflecting on the ideas of Newton, Darwin and Freud Barnes would have, like other intellectuals, adopted some mechanistic view of the universe and the self. None apparent here.
Of course neither Barnes nor the parade of Frenchmen have an answer about death or God. How could they?
Since there is nothing conclusive to say about death other than it concludes life as we know it, Barnes brings in other subjects to discuss: his family, memory (curiously he makes no mention of Proust) and some observations on writing that I will delve into a little further. "Fiction...balances precise observation with the free play of imagination." Nice. "Literature can tell us best what the world consists of. It can also tell us how to live in that world, though it does it most effectively when appearing not to do so." Interesting, although it would be better to say that some literature makes suggestions of how one might live in the world; but keep going, tell me how. (I end disappointed). "...[the novelist] wants to tell the one true story." Losing interest, there isnt one true story. "....novelists conspire to present human life as a story progressing toward a meaningful conclusion" Okay, I'm done. I would argue Chekhov and Joyce, for instance, are counterexamples to that statement. In any event, it is pretty silly to try to say what "the novelist" is attempting to present, it would seem to be as varied as there are authors.
Oh! He did write a very funny bit about his last reader. I should like to extend my arms across the years and embrace that man as my brother.