The Wenshan Review of Literature and Culture．Vol 2.1．December 2008．1‐29.

The Postmodern Writer and

His Alter Ego:
Julian Barnes versus Dan Kavanagh
Pao-I Hwang

ABSTRACT

This paper is an examination of the postmodern writer’s

dilemma: Should a writer be good by serving a higher literary
purpose or by playing to the book market? Unlike those who have
been writing merely two centuries ago, the literary reputation of
writers today rest fundamentally on financial success. The career
and the works of British writer Julian Barnes closely reflect his
struggle with this dilemma. On the one hand, Barnes writes
“serious” works in the sense that they are crafted with a “literary”
purpose in mind. On the other hand, his pseudonymous alter-ego,
Kavanagh writes “popular” works that are aimed at making
some quick cash. Although Barnes’ growing oeuvre evidences
an egotistical conciliation between the “serious” writer and the
“popular” writer, they are never far from suggesting that the
struggle is near the surface and the differences are more
insurmountable than can be seen at first glance.

KEY WORDS: postmodernism, literature, “popular” fiction,

“serious” fiction, aesthetics, novel

* Received: February 8, 2007; Accepted: January 16, 2008

Pao-I Hwang, Assistant Professor, Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures,
National Taiwan University, Taipei, Taiwan
E-mail: [email protected]
2 The Wenshan Review of Literature and Culture．Vol 2.1．December 2008

The difference between acceptance and approval is subtle, but

distinct. Acceptance means having your work counted as the
real thing; approval means having people like it.1

Julian Barnes is a prolific contemporary writer. Mainstream bookshops

in England stock his books, and reviewers and critics allude frequently to his
most famous novel—Flaubert’s Parrot (1984). However, for a writer who has
written some highly acclaimed works, it may come as a surprise that he is not
as “popular” as he ought to be. In fact, a lot of people do not even know who
he is. This is because Julian Barnes is a writer of “serious” literature, and it is
his alter-ego, Dan Kavanagh, who is the writer of “popular” literature. What is
the difference between the two and why does the writer have two names?
Although Barnes is more well-known for his “serious” postmodernistic works
such as Flaubert’s Parrot, A History of the World in 10 1/2 Chapters and
England, England, it is important to note that he also attempted to write a
more “popular” Duffy series. His steadily growing oeuvre reveals a unique
writer’s experimentation and struggle with individual preference and popular
acceptance, creative novelty and formulaic reproduction, story-telling with a
higher moral purpose and story-telling for pure entertainment. This paper will
attempt to explain the postmodern writer’s dilemma: Should a writer be good
by serving a higher literary purpose or by playing to the book market? For
many writers today, literary reputation is closely tied to financial gain, and
there is no writer who has considered this issue more seriously than Julian
Barnes, aka Dan Kavanagh.
It is an agreed fact that novel-writing—suggesting the production of
fiction in prose form—did not have a very respectable beginning. Pseudonymous

1
David Bayles and Ted Orland, Art and Fear (Santa Cruz: Image Continuum Press, 1993) 47.
 The Postmodern Writer and His Alter Ego: Julian Barnes versus Dan Kavanagh 3

authorship was in fact the norm for early novelists because: “For aristocratic
and upper middle-class authors in the nineteenth century, fiction-writing was
little less than trade and little more than diversion with a possible hint of
immoral earnings to boot,” and later on, when writers of the lower class
cottoned on to this genre, pseudonyms provided a second twist suggesting
both a lower class of writers as well as writers from the lower class. 2
Pseudonyms were used to create glamour for the lower class writers who did
not own a saleable name or background, and conversely, they were also used
by upper class writers who wanted to remain anonymous when writing for
such an un-glamourous genre. This combination maligned the novel-writing
practice and haunted its practitioners. Even though the appearance of Jane
Austen and George Eliot went a long way to redeem the novelist’s reputation,
the sense of shame linked to fiction production as a whole has remained and is
now arguably more palpable in the genre’s polarised division into “serious”
literature and “popular” fiction.3
Novels, or prose-writing, was popularised by the industrial, capitalist
society. It was the growth of the population, the improvement of financial
circumstances and the spreading of literacy in the eighteenth to the nineteenth
century that helped popularise the novel. However, there are three main
problems associated with producing “literature” for the masses. First, how
was a writer to begin gauging and consolidating the tastes and demands of his
audience? Second, how was it possible to “elevate” a form in the literary

2
Clive Bloom, Bestsellers: Popular Fiction Since 1900 (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2002) 11.
3
Bookshops often place “serious” writing under the heading “literature” and mix them in with writers
of “classics”, whereas the more “popular” writing, sometimes also called bestsellers and belonging to
the horror, sci-fi, fantasy, pulp “subgenres”, are lumped under a separate heading such as “fantasy” or
“fiction”. This paper will use the terms writer and novelist interchangeably to refer to producers of
fictional stories of any real length because the argument does not require and does not seek to define
the novel. Instead, it is prepared to concede to the fact that many writers today produce novel-like
works that specifically disregard literary niceties.
4 The Wenshan Review of Literature and Culture．Vol 2.1．December 2008

sense when it was trying to cater to a newly-educated readership? Thus, what

exactly was the writer’s purpose: To win his readers and sell his books or to
elevate his readers and attempt to improve their tastes?
These questions probably led to Q. D. Leavis’ publication of Fiction
and the Reading Public (1932). 4 Like her father, who tried to mould a
tradition and dictate a taste in The Great Tradition, Leavis attempted the task
but approached it from the opposite angle by analysing and criticising the
questionable tastes of the reading public. Leavis referred condescendingly to
bestsellers as popular fiction that catered for the majority who were low-brow,
uncultured and even uneducated. Although she considered the novel a good
medium for educating the public, she felt that the quest for popularity had led
to a peculiar form of writing that was produced and consumed by parties that
were equally disinterested in their own social and cultural development. As
evidence, she gave several examples of writers who refused to be named but
were sincerely apologetic for degrading the novel by catering to the public.
Her arguments against “popular” writers included blandness and conformity,
what she viewed as “Giving the Public what it wants.” As she observed,

[I]t is more profitable to make use of man’s suggestability as a

herd animal than to approach the reader as if he were what used
to be called “the thinking man”; fear of the herd, approval of
the herd, the peace of mind that comes from conforming with
the herd, are the strings they play upon and the ideals that
inform their work.5

4
Q. D. Leavis, Fiction and the Reading Public (New York: Russell, 1965).
5
Leavis 156.
 The Postmodern Writer and His Alter Ego: Julian Barnes versus Dan Kavanagh 5

The goal such writers aimed for was “in soothing and not disturbing sentiments,
yet with sufficient surface stimulus to be pleasing . . . . [Thus the] readers are
left with the agreeable sensation of having improved themselves without
incurring any fatigue.”6 In other words, giving the public what it wanted
involved pleasing them as well as deceiving them. Not only did they want an
entertaining, easy read, but they also wanted to feel a sense of achievement
after having read the book. If any form of improvement or expanding of
knowledge was sought, it had to entail minimum mental effort so as not to
“fatigue” the reader. In fact, as Leavis pointed out, the Anglo-American
Manuscript Service’s advice to writers was: “Remember that serious thought
is not looked for in the majority of American magazines” so “write so a blind
man can read it.”7 In short, the public wanted the ready-made, the easy, the
unchallenging, which signified mental laxity and an aversion to mental exertion
or improvement, which was the reason behind the film industry’s instant
success. According to Leavis, reading was quickly dropped for the American
“talkie,” which gushed ready-made dialogues and delivered picture-perfect
situations. The distinguished man of letters was quickly replaced by the film
star, an even better symbol of popularity, mass taste and brainlessness.
The causes and issues behind the development of the “popular” branch
of writing are further examined by Clive Bloom, who is more sympathetic to
the masses and regards the writer as a spokesman for their needs. For Bloom,
“popular” writing conforms to its own aesthetic principles and these, even
when they are capital-oriented, are not less valuable to the world or less
deserving of praise.

6
Leavis 42-43.
7
Leavis 37, italics mine.
6 The Wenshan Review of Literature and Culture．Vol 2.1．December 2008

It is organised into aesthetic categories that often correspond to

sociological, political and economic categories. . . . Popular
fiction is always commercially oriented and its production and
marketing is essentially corporate and industrial, aimed at the
maximum distribution and sales of units (books) . . . . Popular
fiction releases a desire in language to become the very life that
is being portrayed by it. Here language looks beyond itself and
into the world, but a world already distributed and arranged to
the geometry of its own trajectory.8

The “trajectory” would be that of the audience who is tied to the flow of the
capital, thus creating a loop which is as reprehensible as it is true. Mass taste
is to a large degree dictated by capitalism and popular fiction carries certain
characteristics: it is repetitive, it is formulaic, it is sentimental, it appeals
alternately to familiarity and exoticism, it is often sensational and it does not
shy away from the erotic. That is to say, anything that sells works. Nobody
has observed this tendency and worded it better than Frederic Jameson:
“aesthetic production today has become integrated into commodity production
[where it is an economic necessity to] . . . find recognition in the varied kinds
of institutional support available . . . [which is] grounded in the patronage of
multinational business, whose expansion and development is strictly
contemporaneous with it.”9 Publishers fund writers with good track records
or whom they believe will sell well, writers aim to garner a large audience and
attract big publishers which will ensure their works receive maximum funding
and publicity, and readers purchase books they believe are good because it is

8
Bloom 17, 21.
9
Frederic Jameson, Postmodernism, Or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham: Duke
University Press, 1991) 32-38.
 The Postmodern Writer and His Alter Ego: Julian Barnes versus Dan Kavanagh 7

readable enough and has been guaranteed by the name of the publisher
endorsing the writer.
If popularity corrupted writing, what was good writing? To write well,
as Leavis suggested, is to excel, to exceed, to generate new ideas and explore
beyond the boundaries—to forge a culture “such as no modern writer is born
to but must struggle for as best he can, unaided, or else accept the materials
the age offers.”10 To interpret this idealistically vague idea more carefully, it
would probably mean that a good writer is capable of producing writing that
is exemplary in its innovative difference and its cultural contribution. In other
words, a good work must lead the way, be individualistic and yet also
applicable for the good of the society.
Walter Nash is more specific about the definitions and role of good writing.
“Serious” writing entails “serious lessons”—it has to be thought-provoking
writing that continues to inspire its readers with passing time. Nash believes
that nobody could leave a Conrad or a Henry James in a hotel room “because
they have served their turn and have nothing left to offer,” rather “the lessons
of ‘serious’ art are not quickly learned,” and in dealing with significant works
we need to remember that “judgements on matters . . . are so far from
straightforward that they may appear in different lights at repeated
readings.”11 Thus, “good” authors are those who produce works from which
we can repeatedly draw important lessons at different times in our lives. As
our relationships and understanding of life evolve, so does our appreciation of
the good book, which provides materials so profound as to be able to sustain
new interpretations in a new light. Popular fiction, by contrast, has nothing of
this kind to offer. After the first reading, it is disposable because its content

10
Leavis 62.
11
Nash 2,3,15.
8 The Wenshan Review of Literature and Culture．Vol 2.1．December 2008

becomes predictable. Although it is equally the product of someone’s

imagination, Nash believes that the lack of meaning and complexity and the
following of convention without much diversity or originality indicate that
reading and rereading of such works cannot bring new forms of enlightenment.
Hence with “serious” writing we would want to read the books again and
again, with “popular” writing we would only want to read more of the same
kind of books but never the same one again.
On another level, definitions of good literature are often tied to
questions of scholarship. Why are certain writers canonised and why are
certain books classics? As Bloom has pointed out, a classic may not have been
a popular work in the writer’s lifetime but it remains popular afterwards
because there is no threat of diminishment, especially when it is sold to
schools in large quantities as compulsory reading material. Classics become
popular and in that sense they are also bestsellers because of the unit of their
sales. Alternatively, infamy can also be the root of fame, popularity and,
finally, canonisation. As Leavis argued, James Joyce’s Ulysses made it to the
literary reading list “probably owing to the factitious fame censorship has
conferred upon it.”12 This leads to the next question: Should certain works be
studied and others dismissed? This question, difficult to answer as it was, has
become even harder to answer because of the global breakdown of language
barriers and the skyrocketing of title sales. Not only are sales-figures
confusingly ambiguous, but the sheer amount of works being printed makes
the sifting of good/bad or necessary/unnecessary reading an impossible task.
Hence in certain aspects, the argument about what is literature is very much
like the argument about what is art. In a postmodern age, theoretically
anything can be literature just as anything can be art.

12
Leavis
 The Postmodern Writer and His Alter Ego: Julian Barnes versus Dan Kavanagh 9

As I. Q. Hunter and Heidi Kaye argue in their introduction to Trash

Aesthetics: Popular Culture and Its Audience, who should be in the position
to decide whether one text is a classic whilst another trash? “We are urged . . .
not to take aesthetic judgments for granted. We should understand them instead
as forms of ‘cultural capital,’ both exertions of social power and exercises in
self-description.” Furthermore, “The obvious drawback of the
post-structuralist/postmodern emphasis on audience is that, with aesthetic
judgements put on hold and audiences boldly reinvented as active generators
of meaning and pleasure, few positive reasons are left to prefer one text over
another.”13 Although it is easy to say let capital, the reading public and the
publications dictate the aesthetic trends, the advice only leads to the loop that
Jameson mentions. Hunter and Kaye have noticed that critics are reluctant to
take this advice seriously and often seek to legitimise popular taste through
literary criticism. This is a very interesting method for gauging
serious/good/valuable writing since criticism involves “thinking” in both
senses. The critic has to apply his thoughts to the work and the work itself has
to supply ideas that hold up to deeper analysis. They have discovered that
while not all popular works contain junk, under scholarly scrutiny it is
possible to separate the more meaningful ones from the less ambitious ones.
To prove this beyond doubt, they looked at the analyses of films like
Showgirls or Independence Day. They discovered that attempts at analysing
these films often led to over-interpretation where critics would put ideas into
the film, even when the examples carried little food for deeper thought.14
Therefore, they concluded that a division between “serious” writing that is
“good” literature and “popular” writing that is so-to-speak “bad” existed to

13
I. Q. Hunter and Heidi Kaye, “Introduction” to Trash Aesthetics: Popular Culture and Its Audience
(London: Pluto Press, 1997) 3, 5.
14
See Hunter and Kaye 4.
10 The Wenshan Review of Literature and Culture．Vol 2.1．December 2008

some degree.
Dan Kavanagh, Julian Barnes’s pseudonymous alter ego, is a good
example of an aspirant ‘popular’ writer. Kavanagh’s novels were aimed at
monetary success and popularity, as he admits in an interview: “Had they been
more successful [but] . . . They were perfectly reasonably successful in their
own right.”15 In other words, it was not a success in any respect other than
fulfilling the requirements of the genre. Barnes is painfully aware of his
deviant alter-ego. Interviewers enjoy asking Barnes about Kavanagh, but he
prefers to dissociate himself, claiming: “He comes from a different part of my
brain”; “Some nasty road accident in north London may be necessary to get
rid of Kavanagh. Traditionally the author kills off his characters, but I don’t
see why an author shouldn’t get killed off as well. Crushed by a beer barrel
falling off a truck as he leaves a pub, or something.”16 When asked to
elaborate on the writing process of the books, he simply replies that they were
“a way of burning off excess energy,” “a sort of relaxation after two or three
years spent writing novels under my own name. I enjoy them very much but
don’t re-read them.”17 When asked whether he signs copies of the books, he
explains that he is “perfectly happy” to sign them, but in a different signature,
“a barely literate signature.”18
Barnes is clearly not too proud of Kavanagh and there are many reasons
why a “serious” writer prefers not to be associated too often with a degenerate
“popular” writer, even when that writer is his alter ego. A closer look at the

15
Robert Birnbaum, “Robert Birnbaum Interviews Julian Barnes”(1999)
http://www.julianbarnes.com/resources/birnbaum-ee.html.
16
Phillip Marchand, “English Novelist Re-creates God in His Own Image” The Toronto Star (17
October 1989) E1.
17
David Streitfeld, “Barnes’s Albatross” The Washington Post Book World (22 October 1989) X15.
Marchand.
18
Birnbaum.
 The Postmodern Writer and His Alter Ego: Julian Barnes versus Dan Kavanagh 11

Duffy series explains why.19 It is “successful in its own right” because it

displays all the features of its genre: it portrays a shallow character, it is
sensational in content and setting, it has a catchy but simple plot, it is
formulaic, it uses repetitive diction, it does not treat any significant issues.
The protagonist, Duffy, is frequently described as “a faggot,” a ‘queer, bent
cop’ who wears a gold stud in his left ear and “plugs in both ways.” In
descriptive language that is more formal, he is a corrupt bisexual policeman.
The gold stud is his characteristic trademark, but more eccentric features that
differentiate him the score of “popular” protagonists like himself are: an
intense dislike for clocks and wrist watches (which he keeps hanging outside
his window or in Tupperware boxes), a need to store his food in layers of
plastic bags (because he hates crumbs on his floor) and a habit of never saying
“Yes” but “All right.” The story is that he has been fired from the police force
because he was set up to have sex with an under-aged, black boy. As a result,
he cannot sleep with the only woman he loves, a colleague called Carol, and
ends up only having sex with random men and prostitutes. In order to get
revenge, he refuses to leave “his patch” and sets himself up as a private
security adviser so that he is constantly rubbing shoulders with his old
colleagues. Downtown London—Duffy’s patch—is described as a “fetid
knot” of cinemas, street markets and brothels. In fact, he lives next to escort
agencies, sex shops, massage parlours, strip clubs, “porno cinemas” and dirty
bookshops. Although he is conscientious in his work, he makes a point of
earning extra cash when the customer is rich, or when he dislikes the customer.
His moral standing is “like most coppers, had a slightly flexible approach to
the truth. . . . Most of the time you stuck to the truth as closely as you could,
but were prepared to bend with the breeze if necessary” (48). As Barnes

19
Dan Kavanagh, The Duffy Omnibus (London: Penguin, 1991).
12 The Wenshan Review of Literature and Culture．Vol 2.1．December 2008

himself laconically commented, “The AIDS crisis . . . made it a tad more

difficult to have a hero who was a carefree bisexual.”20
In the first novel, Duffy, the story begins: “The day they cut Mrs.
McKechnie, not much else happened in West Byfleet” (3). In the second novel,
Fiddle City, the story begins: “The day they crashed McKay, not much else
happened on the M4” (181). The almost identical start is a telling sign of
Barnes’s literary attitude towards his popular endeavours. The plots of all the
stories are simple, for example, in the first one Mrs. McKechnie is wounded
by two gangsters because her husband’s rival in the porn industry (which she
knows nothing about) wants to take over the neighbourhood business. Duffy
is hired because the police are ineffective. Slowly he discovers that Big Eddy,
the villain, is blackmailing all his victims with destructive information and
photos. Not only is McKechnie, who is cheating on his wife with his
secretaries, a victim, but even the chief superintendent of police, Duffy’s old
boss and sworn enemy, is also a victim. Big Eddy’s character is built on the
reiteration of his most profound mantra: “Knowledge is power.” At the end of
the story, Duffy destroys him by breaking into his office and burning the
building down. He then also gets his revenge by sending photocopies of Big
Eddy’s file on his old boss to all the police departments. It is safe to say that
all the other stories follow this simple mould.
Duffy does not pretend to teach any lessons, an important element that
more than likely contributed to its “success.” All the morals are questionable:
a policeman who believes that “fiddling” is a necessary part of police work, a
security man who installs security systems despite having no faith in them and
is burgled twice himself, a bisexual who compares sleeping with men or
women as “choosing between bacon and egg and bacon and tomato.

20
Streitfeld.
 The Postmodern Writer and His Alter Ego: Julian Barnes versus Dan Kavanagh 13

Whichever you decided on you had a good time” (81). In fact, on one
occasion the protagonist actually breaks into a house, albeit the villain’s, and
sets fire to it. Taking the law into his own hands turned out to be the most
effective solution, but it certainly is not justifiable or laudable. What is
probably reprimandable in the novel is the use of ethnic stereotypes and
political incorrectness. Duffy frequently refers to Paddies, Chinks and Malties
in a very offhanded manner. One recognises a “Paddy” when he says things
like “focking caht”, or a “Malty” when he says, “Mr Salvatore no speaka da
English, only speaka da Eyetalian. Tutto his life” (27). Since this novel has no
lessons to teach, political correctness is ignored when Duffy refers to all
foreigners as “these immigrants”, or compares killing cats and microwaving
them to “Islamic methods of punishment”, or accuses the Chinese for having a
frustratingly impenetrable community. To him a Malaysian is a Chink with slit
eyes and Asian women are small creatures who walk gracefully in and out of
the toilets they clean. Abroad is a “hot country where the grub is spiced and
the natives unfriendly”, therefore, “he’d rather take a long lease in an English
cell than paddle in the wildest foreign luxury” (339). We cannot, indeed
should not, analyse these statements further because, first, there is nothing to
analyse in seemingly offhand remarks like these, and second, to do so would
be to take something that surely cannot be taken serious too seriously.
Similarly, to analyse Duffy’s sexual orientation or gender politics would be
futile because his coarseness evades serious treatment. Such a novelistic
stance, if the associations were made, would undermine Barnes the “serious”
writer, hence his need to create an alter ego. But, can a different identity really
help him escape writing like this: “she played with tits and pubes while she
danced, as the other girl had done. But she also leaned right over, stuck her
bum in the air, and pulled her cheeks apart so that you could see her cunt and
bum-hole. Then she would bounce over towards a letterbox and put her leg
14 The Wenshan Review of Literature and Culture．Vol 2.1．December 2008

right up in the air, resting her foot against the wall of the booth while she
dabbled at her cunt with her fingers” (64)?
In writing Duffy, Barnes clarified two branches of popular fiction. The
first is the “bestseller.” Bestselling fiction can be like the work of J. K.
Rowling, which everybody knows something about now, but may with time,
like the work of Marie Corelli, turn into something that most people will
know nothing about. As Bloom points out, Thomas Hall Caine and Marie
Corelli were giants in their own time, commanding great title, fame and
wealth, but their fame rested on the foundations of “exoticism, eroticism,
spiritualism and anti-materialism beloved of ordinary [people at the time].”21
It is understandable that sales based on sensationalism wanes quickly; hence it
is easy for such fame to disappear following the death of the writer because it
is a reputation gained from the simplistic appeasement of a shallow appetite.
The inference is that the average, ordinary reader is mainly interested in
works that provide short-term amusement and familiar philosophies. The
second is “pulp” fiction. Pulp writing epitomises all the suspect qualities that
the success of a popular work may be cross-examined for. In fact, if an
attempt at “popular” fiction fails to reap financial rewards, it is often because
it falls into the “pulp” category. Although this problematic, pseudonymous
authorship can be intentional too, its trademark characteristics include
vanishing without a trace, a limited readership, explicit contents that challenge
censorship and, sometimes, such disinterest in its own worth as a piece of
writing that it borders on illiteracy. Sold to court obscurity, these are books
also best forgotten as an embarrassment. As a matter of fact, pulp fiction is
often termed ideologically and morally unsound, created for and usually by a

21
Bloom 2.
 The Postmodern Writer and His Alter Ego: Julian Barnes versus Dan Kavanagh 15

literary underclass.22
A blasé disregard for others and a visible contempt for social rules is
one of the main reasons why the pulp genre is looked upon so unfavourably. It
is true that popular fiction has often been categorised as low-brow, and in this
day and age it is only correct to argue that the class orientation of such writing
should be left out of the equation, but it cannot be wrong to argue that the
nature of genre contents can go some way to define its audience. If writers are
not obliged to teach moral lessons or aim to do “good” with their writing,
should their blatant defiance of social codes or carelessness about harming
others be accepted as suitable contributions to “serious” writing? However, it
goes to prove that even if taboo subjects and shocking descriptions may not be
the norm in most writing, there is a point in the treatment or implicit enjoyment
of such subjects that could justify the label “low-brow.” In clarifying this
point, a certain validity is given to the existence of what might be termed
“high-brow” writing and the engagement of “serious” topics that pertain to
“good” literature.
Flaubert’s Parrot is, on the literary scale, at the opposite end to Duffy.
This book represents Barnes as a “serious” writer in two main ways: it is
categorically different and it is usefully postmodern. In the first place, Barnes
explained: “It takes me 2-3 years to write a novel; it used to take me 2-3
weeks to write a thriller. That’s about the relative level of importance I accord
them.”23 When a writer spends more time on his work is he putting more
effort into it because it is a more important work? As an experienced writer of
two very different types of books, it makes sense to take Barnes’ at his word.
If a book is harder to write, it may also be harder to read. This is probably

22
Bloom 8.
23
Lidia Vianu, “Interview with Julian Barnes” Romania Literara (December 2000) 13-19.
16 The Wenshan Review of Literature and Culture．Vol 2.1．December 2008

because the writer hopes to achieve different results. It was a calculated move
on Barnes’ part to choose Flaubert to parrot in Flaubert’s Parrot. Flaubert is
famous for his painful cogitations and studied appropriation of the art of novel
writing. Many English writers like Joseph Conrad, Henry James and James
Joyce looked to French experimental writers like him to produce works of art
that were time-consuming to write, revise and read. As Leavis approvingly
remarked, these so-called high-brow artists “set out to develop the
possibilities of [the] medium for ends outside the understanding of the
ordinary reader.”24 Thus the gulf was created between those who wrote like
Marie Corelli and those who wrote like Henry James. In Flaubert’s Parrot,
Barnes follows the more serious tradition of experimenting with writing
techniques, revising with stylistic scrupulosity and engaging in subjects with a
literary attempt.
The story of Flaubert’s Parrot is a pastiche of stories with many levels.
There is Flaubert’s life-story, the life of Geoffrey Braithwaite the narrator,
situations lifted from Madame Bovary, Barnes’s implied authorial experience
and the reader’s semi-guided involvement.
Although the novel is seemingly based on historical facts about Flaubert,
as can be seen by the biographical chronology of his life at the start, the
question is whether the facts of this history exist. Hence Braithwaite’s search
for Flaubert’s parrot as evidence, but his discovery that there were two
contending parrots plus a convincing parrot’s perch; and, finally his reluctant
concession that “The bird has flown” (63). Like Flaubert’s life, which was
filled with contradictions—he was a literary genius but socially and
financially inept, he had a desire for adventure and new experiences but was
addicted to the solitude of his home, he was addicted to one woman but

24
Leavis 139.
 The Postmodern Writer and His Alter Ego: Julian Barnes versus Dan Kavanagh 17

couldn’t remain devoted and faithful to her—Braithwaite’s life is hung-up on

similar discrepancies. He describes Croisset as having “the air of a chapel and
a bazaar,” where trivial knick-knacks laid beside solemn relics, and he was the
devout pilgrim who could turn junk-shop treasure hunter (13). Rather than
satisfying answers, his quest takes him down split roads: he finds both
Flaubert the genius and Flaubert the lunatic and he finds both the past and also
the present. As if this level of complication is not enough, Braithwaite’s
personal, albeit fictional, history plays a part too. He is a retired doctor whose
wife, Ellen, committed adultery before committing suicide. Braithwaite’s
emotionless passivity and Ellen’s consolation in adultery is directly lifted
from Madame Bovary. Braithwaite proudly makes this comparison and in
other ways tries to prove his devotion to Flaubert. Not only does he boast
about knowing “a dead foreigner” better than his wife and children, but
secretly he yearns to be like that foreigner. He fancies himself a writer who,
like Flaubert when writing Madame Bovary, was on a “heroic quest for style.”
He writes: “How many times have I fallen flat on my face, just when I thought
I had it within my grasp. Still, I feel that I mustn’t die without making sure
that the style I can hear inside my head comes roaring out and drowns the
cries of parrots and cicadas” (61).
Whilst Braithwaite carries out painstaking research yet fails in his great
plan to write a story worthy of Flaubert, Barnes is successful. What Barnes
has done so successfully is to re-master Flaubert’s style in a postmodern
format. Flaubert’s Parrot embodies what critics hail as one of the most recent
literary developments.

Barnes conducts his revision of traditional modes of historical

knowledge through a novelistic technique known as
historiographic metafiction, a form which combines fictional
18 The Wenshan Review of Literature and Culture．Vol 2.1．December 2008

reflexivity and historical narrative in order to expose the

intrinsic discursiveness (and thus the concomitant ethical and
epistemological limitations) of both genres.25

According to Patricia Waugh, “for metafictional writers the most fundamental

assumption is that composing a novel is basically no different from
composing or constructing one’s reality. Writing itself rather than
consciousness becomes the main object of attention.”26 Flaubert’s Parrot
magnifies Flaubert’s early practice of making style the mirror of the author’s
control over his fiction, a moment when the writer’s reality intrudes into his
writing and blurs the line between fact and fiction. Clearly, Flaubert’s Parrot
has taken this even further by integrating the subject’s, the narrator’s and the
writer’s worlds in such a way that is it difficult to tell which is which.
In fact, Barnes has gone so far as to offer the reader a novel that is
incomplete and requires the reader to step in to fill the missing links. Are the
facts on Flaubert’s life truth or fiction? Is Braithwaite’s presence useful or
frustrating? Consider his contributions to the story and as a narrator. He is
“huddled into the interstices of a fictional structure” and protected by a
distance that the author set and the reader cannot breach.27 Ultimately, why
does Julian Barnes appear and always seem to make an appearance in his
stories? As Jean Baudrillard has noted, postmodern viewers are no longer
happy to remain mere spectators, but have to be actors in the performances

25
Bruce Sesto, Language, History, and Metanarrative in the Fiction of Julian Barnes (New York:
Peter Lang, 2001) 10.
26
Patricia Waugh, “Metafiction: The Theory and Practice of Self-conscious Fiction” A Companion to
the British and Irish Novel: 1945-2000 (Oxford: Blackwell Press, 2005) 24.
27
David Leon Higdon, ‘‘‘Unconfessed Confessions’: The Narrators of Graham Swift and Julian
Barnes” The British & Irish Novel since 1960 (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1991) 180.
 The Postmodern Writer and His Alter Ego: Julian Barnes versus Dan Kavanagh 19

going on around them. 28 Reality has been replaced by virtuality and

postmodernist writers are not content with simply writing a story, especially if
it is about someone else’s life, without taking part in it too. Hence Bruce
Sesto’s deduction that “postmodernist authors frequently insert themselves
into their texts in order to expose ontological ‘seams’ and thereby reveal the
inherent ‘constructedness’ of fictional works.”29 It is not enough that “fiction”
is not “real” anyway, but writers have to throw in a little “reality” to make it
more complicated. Ultimately, not only is the writer’s life included in the text
but the readers too have to vigorously question the roles they play within the
text. Thus postmodernism may be about variety and freedom of choice, but on
the other hand it is undeniably about purpose and the search for it through
some very serious thinking.
In many ways Flaubert’s Parrot epitomises the postmodern quest for
innovation and answers. It embraces Jean-Francois Lyotard’s argument for
heteromorphity, experimentation and the idea that evasion of authority and
conformity is necessary despite the knowledge that nothing can ever be
completely independent or completely new. According to Lyotard, heterogeneity
is a form of speculation and its need for difference is good because it brings
tensions that force systems, even the most ossified, to adjust and therefore
learn a new set of skills. This adjustment can only be interpreted positively as
an improvement in performativity, and the best example of this performativity
is language as game. The process of sentence formation is like moves in chess
where playing the game is not necessarily about winning but about the sheer
pleasure of inventing new moves, or rather new turns of phrases, words and
meaning. It is reasonable to argue that goodness in writing means educating

28
Jean Baudrillard, The Perfect Crime (London: Verso, 1996) 27.
29
Sesto 4.
20 The Wenshan Review of Literature and Culture．Vol 2.1．December 2008

learners in such a way as make the knowledge being passed on purposeful if

not necessarily useful. Since language games are heteromorphous, “subject to
heterogenous sets of pragmatic rules,” progress can be defined in two ways:
the first corresponds to a new move within the established rules, the second
involves the invention of new rules and changes that will bring forth a new
game. Thus paradoxically, the stronger the “move” the more likely it is to be
denied consensus, because it is precisely upon these rules that the game originated
and may have relied on for its existence.30 In other words, the benefits of
heterogeneity is twofold: it encourages experimentation and it defies authority.
Experimentation gives us the opportunity to play with possibilities and
resistance to authority allows us to break away from conformity.
Lyotard upheld the state of heterogeneity but also proposed moments of
temporary consensus as signs of futuristic reconciliation. “Consensus has
become an outmoded and suspect value. But justice as a value is neither
outmoded nor suspect. We must thus arrive at an idea and practice of justice
that is not linked to that of consensus.” 31 The postmodern condition is
precisely one of disintegration and fragmentation, but it does not necessarily
have to be one of aesthetic dissolution, although that has increasingly become
a hot ground for contention. Can justice be practised if it is not preached?
Lyotard proposes a little “severity” in the formation of the fragile postmodern
collective framework, for despite philosophy being delegitimated, i.e. lost its
power to legitimise and unify life because most people have lost the desire for
a unified narrative, “[i]t in no way follows that [people] are reduced to
barbarity”; it is rather a realisation or acceptance that through continued
linguistic practice and communication maybe one day some form of

30
Lyotard 43, 63.
31
Lyotard 66.
 The Postmodern Writer and His Alter Ego: Julian Barnes versus Dan Kavanagh 21

knowledge and legitimation will be regained.32 If we are to continue hoping

for answers we need to create new games and believe that playing them will
eventually help us find the answers.
This spirit for novelty is one of the main reasons why Barnes is
categorised as a serious writer; for not only does he focus on difficult social
issues such as racism or nationalism, but he spends a great deal of time doing
researching and then creating elaborate “games” with his subjects, styles and
techniques. And, not only is this true in Flaubert’s Parrot, but it is true of
what Barnes is trying to do with his entire writing career.

I’m the sort of writer who tends to write about different subjects
in different modes from book to book. . . . I like to try new
things with each book.33

Writing and researching seriously yet throwing in the irreverent and ironic is
another experimental characteristic in Barnes. In Alex Webb’s words, he has
“a style which combines a conversational matter-of-factness with the ability to
undertake complex explorations of art, philosophy and emotion.”34 And in
her review of Flaubert’s Parrot, Nadine O’Regan also notes: “As the narrator
attempts to track down the stuffed parrot that once sat on Flaubert’s desk, he
relays snippets of information about the author and analyses his prose. In this
way, the book combines fiction with literary criticism.”35 Barnes’s decision to
focus on the parrot instead of the famous French writer is very playful, but he

32
Lyotard 62, 41.
33
Birnbaum.
34
Alex Webb, “Barnes and France: Love Requited” BBC News Online (18 January 2002).
35
Nadine O’Regan, “Cool, Clean Man of Letters” The Sunday Business Post Online (29 June 2003).
22 The Wenshan Review of Literature and Culture．Vol 2.1．December 2008

also incorporates some serious researched details. For example, he inserts a

factual chronology in his second chapter, uses a dictionary format for the
twelfth chapter and ends the novel with an appendix and a section on literary
criticism. This curious mixture of playfulness and seriousness makes Barnes’s
voice and style unique, what his admirers like to describe as satirical or
ironical but his more cautious critics label as ambitious and notorious.36
There are many times in the novel when Flaubert, Braithwaite, Barnes
and even the reader feels torn by dualities and confused by infinite
possibilities. Under such circumstances it would seem futile and even wrong
to try and define Barnes or Flaubert’s Parrot as “serious”. It would amount to
putting limits and boundaries where none are desired. Returning to Bloom’s
observation,

Serious literature . . . [sets] itself an arbitrary genealogy and in

believing its own myth of moral ascendancy and aristocratic
(aesthetic) hauteur, can decline, for it alone can fall into
popular idiom, be tainted by what it attempts to refuse or to
ignore and thus become illegitimate, become popular—a
bestseller. Only a serious artist can become a literary prostitute,
too closely associated with disguise, convention, titillation and
commercial reward.37

36
Daniel Candel, “Julian Barnes’s A History of Science in 10 1/2 Chapters” English Studies (3:2001)
253-261. Candel writes, ‘it is open to question whether with A History [of the World In 10 1/2
Chapters] Julian Barnes is ultimately able to present issues which are at present satisfying from an
intellectual point of view. It may be that the predominance of certain themes over others, and thus the
unavoidable caricaturisation of marginal themes, threatens the balance of the novel’ (253). These
queries are not only true of A History of the World In 10 1/2 Chapters, but they strike at a precarious
balance in all of Barnes’s works.
37
Bloom 19.
 The Postmodern Writer and His Alter Ego: Julian Barnes versus Dan Kavanagh 23

In other words, any sense of superiority in serious writing is a construction.

The genealogy it upholds belongs to scholars whose academic existence
depends on its maintenance. Definitions of seriousness are thus arbitrary, not
only because it is in the hands of a certain group, but also because
paradoxically it may take countless forms and be influenced in countless ways.
On the one hand, it is restricted, but on the other, it is also limitless. The
attempt to differentiate common English once it enters print in order to create
something superior is, in Bloom’s view, doomed to reproduce what are
ultimately indeterminable differences of convention, mode and intention. We
may accept this view and agree that writing cannot be categorised in terms of
superiority for all writing may be tainted by capitalist goals, go popular and be
vulgarised. The differentiation of “serious” writing does not have to rest on
superiority, it can be about the goals. Serious writers can be commendable
because they search for, experiment with and explore new avenues. Even if
the results should become popularised and turn conventional, in the initial
discovery there may have been an opportunity to elevate the human condition,
and who is to say it hasn’t after the idea has been disseminated?
The line that divides literacy competence and literary competence is very
fine, but it is not all about class and gender hierarchies. It would be dangerous
to follow Leavis in stating that the best works are produced by the “higher”
class because it is traditionally about the “higher” class. It is impossible to argue
that the “lower” class cannot be trusted to think, that the “cultivated” write
literature because only they were brought up with the necessary background
and good taste. It would be wrong to continue in the belief that the Romantic
writers had debased literature by elevating the “common” man and bringing
down the level of literature to facilitate their understanding. 38 Indeed,

38
Leavis 184.
24 The Wenshan Review of Literature and Culture．Vol 2.1．December 2008

illiteracy may be merely a “technical” question, possibly determined by

“moral-medical ethics” that include mental laziness, to biological dysfunction
(dyslexia) or simple incompetence. However, it must actively avoid being “a
metaphor for cultural degeneracy” where “the very subject matter of [all]
popular reading was denigrated as trivia for the half-educated,” especially
women.39 In the present day and age, the ability to work on an “intelligent” or
“challenging” piece of writing should no longer be a class issue.
Barnes’s forage into “pulp” fiction may be regarded as a diversification,
an enrichment to his search for originality, new forms and new techniques.
Flaubert’s Parrot is very postmodern, but it could yield to a modernist or an
as yet undiscovered interpretation, and it certainly does not make Barnes
specifically a postmodern writer. There is no point in trying to force Barnes
into a category.40 To some degree, Barnes experiments with extremes to
evade categorisation.

This is one of Barnes’s intellectual habits. Two opposing ideas

are selected; but as they collide, each exposes the absurdity and
vulnerability of its opposing extremity. This is neat enough to
watch, but seems easy, for what is difficult is not the
vulnerability of extremity, but the troublesome solidity of what
is in the middle, of what is not extreme.41

However, if Barnes relishes complicating the simple in order to simplify the

39
Bloom 9-10.
40
Merritt Moseley, “Julian Barnes’s Flaubert’s Parrot” A Companion to the British and Irish Novel:
1945-2000, 490.
41
James Wood, “Julian Barnes and the Problem of Knowing Too Much” The Broken Estate: Essays
on Literature and Belief (New York: Random House, 1999) 242.
 The Postmodern Writer and His Alter Ego: Julian Barnes versus Dan Kavanagh 25

complicated and if he enjoys playing with extremes, it is because he never

forgets to question the purpose of his game and what lies between the
extremes. This has been the case with his serious and his popular writing
throughout his career.
In his first novel, Metroland, two boys from the suburbs try to escape
their bourgeois upbringing and promise to rebel against all their parents’
values. Near the end of the novel, the friends meet up again and one has kept
his promise but the other is married and living with his children in the very
same suburb. Toni, the writer who is still battling the herd instinct, complains
to Chris, his friend and the narrator of the story.

“But why doesn’t anyone take books seriously any more? I

mean, apart from academics, and what the fuck good are
they—they’re only reviewers delivering their copy a hundred
years late. Why does everyone sneer when a writer makes a
political statement? Why does anything left-wing have to be
trendy before it’s read, and by the time it’s trendy it’s already a
force for conservatism? And why the fuck’ (he seemed to be
drawing breath at long last) ‘why the fuck don’t people buy my
fucking books?”
“Too dirty?” I suggested.42

Toni clearly expresses a writer’s frustrated struggles for acceptance and

approval. On the one hand, he notices that academics are responsible for
deciding whether a work counts as “the real thing” and yet they are not in
control of the market. On the other hand, he is annoyed that the public

42
Julian Barnes, Metroland (London: Picador, 1990) 176.
26 The Wenshan Review of Literature and Culture．Vol 2.1．December 2008

constitute the market but do not like “political statements” or anything

“left-wing”. To work for acceptance would mean writing for the academics,
who want left-wing political statements, but to do so would mean giving up
the public’s approval, for they only want “trendy” things that have been tried
and tested. This is where an alter-ego comes in handy: the writer can please
one audience and the alter-ego can please another. Having such a split
personality allows you to write things you normally cannot and, at the same
time, the personalities can keep each other in check by reminding themselves
of their limitations. Toni is the voice of this concern. But, it is Chris’ remark
that concludes the argument. In the book Trash Aesthetics, which is seriously
dedicated to the examination of “trash”, it is telling that the writers believe
that “postmodern hedonism needs to be tempered by the recognition that
while political correctness may be anathema, political apathy is far worse, in
criticism as elsewhere.”43 Indeed, the blessing of postmodernity is choice, but
that does not mean anything goes.

Works Cited

Primary Sources:
Barnes, Julian. Flaubert’s Parrot. London: Picador, 1985.
──. Metroland. London: Picador, 1990.
Kavanagh, Dan. The Duffy Omnibus. London: Penguin, 1991.

Secondary Sources:
Bayles, David, and Ted Orland. Art and Fear. Santa Cruz: Image Continuum
Press, 1993.

43
Hunter and Kaye 6.
 The Postmodern Writer and His Alter Ego: Julian Barnes versus Dan Kavanagh 27

Baudrillard, Jean. The Perfect Crime. Trans. Chris Turner. London: Verso,
1996.
Birnbaum, Robert. “Robert Birnbaum Interviews Julian Barnes” (8 January
2008). <http://www.julianbarnes.com/resources/birnbaum-ee.html>.
Bloom, Clive. Bestsellers: Popular Fiction since 1900. Basingstoke: Palgrave,
2002.
Candel, Daniel. “Julian Barnes’s A History of Science in 10 1/2 Chapters.”
English Studies (3:2001). 253-261.
Gibson, Andrew. Postmodernity, Ethics and the Novel. London: Routledge,
1999.
Hassan, Ihab. The Postmodern Turn. Ohio: Ohio State University Press, 1987.
Higdon, David Leon. ‘‘‘Unconfessed Confessions’: The Narrators of Graham
Swift and Julian Barnes.” The British & Irish Novel since 1960.
Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1991. 174-191.
Hunter, I. Q., and Heidi Kaye, eds. Trash Aesthetics: Popular Culture and Its
Audience. London: Pluto Press, 1997.
Jameson, Frederic. Postmodernism, Or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism.
Durham: Duke University Press, 1991.
Leavis, Q. D. Fiction and the Reading Public. New York: Russell, 1965.
Lyotard, Jean-Francois. The Postmodern Condition. Trans. Geoff Bennington
and Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: Minnesota Press, 1984.
Marchand, Phillip. “English Novelist Re-creates God in His Own Image.” The
Toronto Star (17 October 1989). E1.
Moseley, Merritt. “Julian Barnes’s Flaubert’s Parrot.” A Companion to the
British and Irish Novel: 1945-2000. Ed. Brian W. Shaffer. Oxford:
Blackwell Press, 2005. 481-492.
Nash, Walter. Language and Popular Fiction. London: Routledge, 1990.
O’Regan, Nadine. “Cool, Clean Man of Letters.” The Sunday Business Post
28 The Wenshan Review of Literature and Culture．Vol 2.1．December 2008

Online (29 June 2003). <http://archives.tcm.ie/businesspost/2003/06/29/

story382420037.asp>.
Sesto, Bruce. Language, History, and Metanarrative in the Fiction of Julian
Barnes. New York: Peter Lang, 2001.
Streitfeld, David. “Barnes’s Albatross.” The Washington Post Book World (22
October 1989). X15.
Vianu, Lidia. “Interview with Julian Barnes.” Romania Literara (December
2000). 13-19.
Waugh, Patricia. “Metafiction: The Theory and Practice of Self-conscious
Fiction.” A Companion to the British and Irish Novel: 1945-2000. Ed.
Brian W. Shaffer. Oxford: Blackwell Press, 2005. 65-82.
Webb, Alex. “Barnes and France: Love Requited.” BBC News Online (18
January 2002). <http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/arts/
1766800.stm>.
Wood, James. “Julian Barnes and the Problem of Knowing Too Much.” The
Broken Estate: Essays on Literature and Belief. New York: Random
House, 1999.
 The Postmodern Writer and His Alter Ego: Julian Barnes versus Dan Kavanagh 29

後現代作家中的第二個我：
朱利安‧拔恩斯對抗丹‧卡瓦納
黃寶儀

摘 要

本文審視後現代主義作家面臨的困境—作家究竟應
該因能實踐更高的文學理念而出類拔萃？還是應該因能
迎合出版市場而揚名立萬？有別於僅僅兩個世紀前的作
家，現今作家的文名主要植基於作品的銷售成績。英國作
家朱利安．拔恩斯的作品和寫作生涯，貼切地反映出他在
此困境中的掙扎。拔恩斯一方面以追求文學境界為念而創
作了一些「嚴肅」作品；另一方面，拔恩斯的第二自我以
卡瓦那為筆名寫了一些意在快速求現的「通俗」文學。雖
然拔恩斯持續增加的作品證明了他對於調和純文學作家
和通俗作家這兩種身分的自信，但純文學和通俗文學間的
拉鋸在他的作品中一直隱然若現，二者間的差異比乍看之
下更難以化解。

關鍵詞：後現代主義、文學、「通俗」文學、「嚴肅」作品、
美學、小說


黃寶儀，國立台灣大學外國語文學系助理教授。
E-mail: [email protected]