But Noah Was Not a Nice Man

By JOYCE CAROL OATES

http://www.nytimes.com/books/01/02/25/specials/barnes-history.html

Post-modernist in conception but accessibly straightforward in execution, Julian Barnes's fifth book is neither the novel it is presented as being nor the breezy pop-history of the world its title suggests. Influenced to varying degrees by such 20th-century presences as the inevitable Borges, Calvino and Nabokov, as well as by Roland Barthes and perhaps Michel Tournier among others, ''A History of the World in 10 1/2 Chapters'' is most usefully described as a gathering of prose pieces, some fiction, others rather like essays.

Mr. Barnes's concerns throughout are abstract and philosophical, though his tone is unpretentious; his foreground subjects - Noah's Ark, the hijacking of a Mediterranean cruise ship by Arab terrorists, the wreck of the French ship Medusa, Jonah in the whale's belly, a sleeping woman, a film maker's accident in Venezuela, an American astronaut transformed by a conversion experience, a situation-comedy vision of heaven - are but starting points for speculation. Very like Borges, Julian Barnes has a predilection for tracing leitmotifs through a variety of metamorphoses. Marx's famous elaboration upon an idea of Hegel - ''History repeats itself, the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce'' - quoted by Mr. Barnes, is one of the principles of organization in ''A History of the World in 10 1/2 Chapters.'' Another might be the bemused query: ''Does the world progress? Or does it merely shuttle back and forth like a ferry?'' posed by the narrator of Mr. Barnes's earlier work, ''Flaubert's Parrot.''

Given the principle of repetition, of permutations and combinations, it is inevitable that some of Mr. Barnes's prose pieces are more successful than others. I will confess that my heart sank a bit when I discovered that the first chapter was a chatty mock-history of Noah's Ark as recounted by one of seven stowaway parasites of the Anobium domesticum species (woodworm or termite), complete with fantasy animals - the behemoth, the salamander (the real salamander, that lived in fire), the basilisk, the griffon, the hippogriff, the unicorn, et al. - and a revisionist interpretation of Noah: ''I don't know how best to break this to you, but Noah was not a nice man. I realize this idea is embarrassing, since you are all descended from him; still, there it is. He was a monster, a puffed-up patriarch who spent half his day grovelling to his God and the other half taking it out on us.''

Nor does the affable prose of the second piece, ''The Visitors,'' about the hijacking of a Mediterranean cruise ship by Arab terrorists, inspire confidence; the episode is wholly unbelievable, and the head terrorist speaks a stagey, mock-Hollywood lingo: ''The world is not a cheerful place. I would have thought your investigations into the ancient civilizations would have taught you that. But . . . we shall explain to the passengers what is happening. How they are mixed up in history. What that history is.'' But as ''A History of the World in 10 1/2 Chapters'' progresses and leitmotifs recur, often in comically ingenious combinations, the book becomes increasingly engaging and entertaining; and, allowing for the distortions of art, informative. As the more polished voice of the essayist dominates over the less certain voice of the fiction writer - ''When I say 'I' you will want to know within a paragraph or two whether I mean Julian Barnes or someone invented'' - the book attains that genial mastery of tone that characterized ''Flaubert's Parrot.''

One of the more effective chapters is ''Shipwreck,'' which consists of a factual account of the wreck of the French ship Medusa in 1816, and a close analysis of Gericault's great painting, ''Scene of Shipwreck'' (popularly known as ''The Raft of the Medusa''), completed in 1819. ''How do you turn catastrophe into art?'' Mr. Barnes inquires; he then proceeds most convincingly to answer his question. Perhaps his discussion of the painting would not strike art historians as original, but to the layman, especially to the layman with literary interests, it has the ring of truth. Mr. Barnes traces Gericault's steps in painting the canvas, seeing how, like most imaginative artists, he worked through discarded ideas (''excitements''), falsifying details when necessary, supplanting ''truth to life'' with ''truth to art.'' Reality becomes myth as, in other instances, myth becomes reality: ''Time dissolves the story into form, colour, emotion.''

It is only by slipping history's ''anchor'' that the painting now known to us as ''The Raft of the Medusa'' emerges as transcendent allegory: ''The picture's secret lies in the pattern of its energy. Look at it one more time: at the violent waterspout building up through those muscular backs as they reach for the speck of the rescuing vessel. All that straining - to what end? There is no formal response to the painting's main surge, just as there is no response to most human feelings. Not merely hope, but any burdensome yearning: ambition, hatred, love (especially love) - how rarely do our emotions meet the object they seem to deserve?'' Catastrophe becomes art: perhaps that is its purpose.

Though Mr. Barnes remarks in passing that ''Irony may be defined as what people miss,'' it is the undercurrent of a gentle, humane, self-reflective irony that gives to ''A History of the World in 10 1/2 Chapters'' its dominant tone. And its humor: an analysis of the story of Jonah and its iconographic rendering in art includes an aside on the Old Testament God that pits present-day common sense against mythical logic: ''It's not much of a story, is it? As in most of the Old Testament, there's a crippling lack of free will around - or even the illusion of free will. God holds all the cards and wins all the tricks. The only uncertainty is how the Lord is going to play it this time: start with the two of trumps and lead up to the ace, start with the ace and run down to the two, or mix them around. And since you never can tell with paranoid schizophrenics, this element does gives the narrative some drive.''

In ''Parenthesis,'' the narrator is an insomniac musing upon love as he lies beside his sleeping wife. He realizes that he scarcely understands what love is just as he is impatient too with the ''obliquities of fiction.'' The monologue is rambling, inconclusive, unadorned by artistic flourishes, frank: ''I don't know if prudent or reckless love is the better, monied or penniless love the surer, heterosexual or homosexual love the sexier, married or unmarried love the stronger. I may be tempted towards didacticism, but this isn't an advice column.''

In fact it is a bit of an advice column: ''We must believe in [ love ] , or we're lost. We may not obtain it, or we may obtain it and find it renders us unhappy; we must still believe in it. If we don't, then we merely surrender to the history of the world and to someone else's truth.''

Though somewhat hampered by its epistolary format, ''Upstream!'' is a suspenseful account of an accident that befalls an American film crew in the Venezuelan jungle. It too becomes a meditation upon ''reality.'' Are the Indians employed by the film crew primitive, or more sophisticated in ways than the white men who take their own superiority for granted? Are they re-enacting, in an act of violence, a legendary aspect of their own history, or rebelling against it? Are they who have seemed so trustworthy really treacherous opportunists, not only causing the death of one of the stars (a missionary Jesuit in the film) but running off with the camp equipment? The surviving co-star becomes unstrung trying to sort out the answers.

''Everything is connected, even the parts we don't like,'' a female persona thinks, ''especially the parts we don't like.'' This young woman's particular concern is with survival in a polluted, war-threatened world, but the motif of connectedness persists through each of the chapters, confronting us repeatedly with a fixed set of images, ideas, phrases, ironies - like one of those comically intricate drawings for children in which human or animal figures can be detected in the innocent lineaments of foliage, clouds, landscapes. One does begin to flinch a bit as, one by one, there come wormwood, Noah's Ark, the Flood, survival - or death - by sea, a raft, the division of beings into ''the clean and the unclean.'' Were it not for Mr. Barnes's unemphatic tone one might suspect him of a parody of structuralist thinking; but the overall aim seems rather more comedy, comedy-of-ideas, ''fabulation.'' (Fabulation: ''You keep a few true facts and spin a new story around them.'') A vision of heaven so familiar as to consist of endless fulfillment of material wishes, with the inevitable consequence of ennui and a desire to die, is perhaps a weak ending to a provocative book, but the final paragraph is ideal: ''I dreamt that I woke up. It's the oldest dream of all, and I've just had it.''

''A History of the World in 10 1/2 Chapters'' demystifies its subjects and renders them almost ordinary: ''Myth will become reality, however sceptical we might be.'' In so doing it deconstructs, perhaps even mocks, its own ambition. If the reader does not come to the book with certain of the expectations of prose fiction - that ideas will be dramatized with such narrative momentum that one forgets they are ''ideas,'' and that complete worlds will be evoked by way of prose, not merely discussed - this is a playful, witty and entertaining gathering of conjectures by a man to whom ideas are quite clearly crucial: a quintessential humanist, it would seem, of the pre-post-modernist species.

Joyce Carol Oates is the Roger S. Berlind Distinguished Professor in the Humanities at Princeton University.

Appendix 3

Render the text into the English language and tell your group mates about the history of Arab-Israeli conflict.

От Декларации Бальфура до Билтморской программы (1917-1942)

Во время Первой мировой войны секретарь иностранных дел Великобритании Артур Бальфур издал документ, получивший впоследствии название Декларации Бальфура. В нём декларировалось, что Британия «смотрит положительно на основание в Палестине национального дома для еврейского народа». Как следствие этого, еврейские добровольцы-сионисты сформировали еврейский легион, который оказал британским войскам помощь в завоевании Палестины.

В 1919—23 годах (Третья алия) в Палестину прибыли 40 тысяч евреев, в основном из Восточной Европы. Поселенцы этой волны были обучены сельскому хозяйству и могли развивать экономику. Несмотря на квоту иммиграции, установленную британскими властями, еврейское население выросло к концу этого периода до 90 тысяч. Болота Изреэльской долины и долины Хефер были осушены и земля сделана пригодной для сельского хозяйства. В этот период была основана федерация профсоюзов, Гистадрут.

Арабские протесты против еврейской иммиграции привели к Палестинским бунтам, и в 1920 году на основе еврейской организации самообороны Ха-Шомер была сформирована новая еврейская военная организация — «Хагана» (на иврите «Оборона»).

В 1922 году Лига Наций вручила Великобритании мандат на Палестину, объясняя это, кроме прочего, необходимостью «установления в стране политических, административных и экономических условий для безопасного образования еврейского национального дома». Из-за Яффских бунтов в самом начале Мандата, Британия ограничила еврейскую иммиграцию и часть территории, планировавшаяся для еврейского государства, была отдана под образование Трансиордании.

В то время страну населяли преимущественно арабы-мусульмане, однако самый крупный город, Иерусалим, был преимущественно еврейским.

В 1924—29 годах (Четвёртая алия) в Палестину приехали 82 тысячи евреев, в основном в результате всплеска антисемитизма в Польше и Венгрии. Эта группа состояла во многом из семей среднего класса, которые переехали в растущие города, основав малые предприятия торговли и общественного питания и лёгкую промышленность. Впоследствии, однако, приблизительно 23 тысячи эмигрантов этой волны покинули страну.

Подъём нацистской идеологии в 1930-х годах в Германии привёл к Пятой алие, которая состояла в репатриации четверти миллиона евреев, спасавшихся от Гитлера. Этот период закончился Арабским восстанием 1936—39 годов и изданием Британией в 1939 году «Белой книги», которая фактически сводила на нет иммиграцию евреев в Палестину.После 1945 года Великобритания оказалась вовлечена в нарастающий конфликт с еврейским населением. В 1947 году британское правительство заявило о своём желании отказаться от мандата на Палестину, аргументируя это тем, что оно не способно найти приемлемое решение для арабов и евреев. Созданная незадолго до того Организация Объединённых Наций на Второй сессии своей Генеральной Ассамблеи 29 ноября 1947 года приняла план раздела Палестины (резолюция Генеральной ассамблеи ООН № 181). Иерусалим должен был стать международным городом (corpus separatum) под управлением ООН, чтобы не допустить конфликта по его статусу. Еврейский «Ишув» принял этот план, но Лига арабских государств и Высший арабский совет отвергли его.

В течение первых десятилетий существования еврейского государства арабские страны продолжали оспаривать легитимность его создания, а арабские националисты, возглавляемые Насером, продолжали призывать к его уничтожению. В 1967 году Египет, Сирия и Иордания стянули свои войска к границам Израиля, изгнали миротворцев ООН и заблокировали вход израильским кораблям в Красное море и Суэцкий канал. На юге продолжались атаки боевиков-федаинов. В своём выступлении по радио Насер призвал арабские государства сбросить Израиль в море.[76] Эти действия стали для руководства Израиля поводом для превентивной атаки и начала войны (casus belli), вошедшей в историю под названием Шестидневная война. В этой войне Израиль в считанные дни достиг убедительной победы, захватив Синайский полуостров, сектор Газа, Западный Берег реки Иордан, Восточный Иерусалим и Голанские высоты. Зелёная черта 1949 года стала административной границей между Израилем и новыми территориями. Границы Иерусалима были расширены и на восточную часть города. Закон об Иерусалиме, принятый в 1980 году в очередной раз подтвердил границы города и вызвал международный спор о статусе Иерусалима.

Поражение арабских государств в 1967 году привело к росту арабского радикализма и терроризма — была активизирована деятельность ООП, целью которой было «вооружённая борьба, как единственный путь освобождения Родины». В конце 1960-х — начале 1970-х палестинские террористы предприняли по всему миру первую волну атак на израильтян.

Appendix 4