In his latest book, FarewellsJulian Barnes looks pityingly at poor Jimmy, his hesitant old dog, who not only doesn’t know what breed of dog he is, but doesn’t even know he’s a dog. “We at least know that we are human beings. Or not?” Barnes also comments hesitantly, without losing his English humor. But is his humor English? In 1986, when he published Flaubert’s parrothis admirers took it for granted that he was “the most French of the English writers of his generation.”
Has it changed or was it always very English? After years of lukewarm and incomprehensible oblivion, yesterday I returned to Flaubert’s parrotwhich was a decisive book for me. I bought it in February of ’86, not only not knowing what kind of novel it was, but also not knowing that it had little of a novel. And what was it then? A bold combination of memoirs, fiction and essays, with an unusual and not at all academic bookish support that dazzled me with the self-confidence with which it treated literature.
How could I almost forget such a “memorable” book? Don’t worry, Barnes himself would say, it is a law of nature that leads us to forget things, names; to forget, for example, the last name of that critic, of that bastard who spared our lives in a review and who last week we thought we saw at a party and we didn’t even know if it was him, which to our surprise left us relaxed, and even indifferent. But how could we not stay relaxed if we couldn’t even confirm that that bird was the one we once hated so much?
And isn’t it true that the experience of forgetting sometimes leads us to wonder why the brain does this to us and, furthermore, why it is so indiscriminate that it erases names, both of friends and enemies?
“It’s just the universe doing its thing,” Julian Barnes of Farewells (Anagram). And also his phrase could relax us. Or does it make sense to continue searching for human purpose, or divine punishment for what is, after all, just the blind, impersonal workings of nature?
The Universe doing its thing! And memory too, of course, the memory that goes at its own pace, cultivating that capricious method that prevents us, over the years, from achieving a fixed, reliable identity and ending up wondering if there isn’t more “truth” in the vision that others build about us with impunity than in our personal memories.
The others! They are hell, we already know, and those that lead us to wonder why we go around theorizing so much in novels about unreliable narrators, or half-reliable ones, if we never really know who we are. Wasn’t this what the solitary man who, one night, I saw in Barcelona at the top of Verdi Street, was implying or, rather, shouting at the top of his voice, shouting with a naturalness that stunned: I’m nobody, nobody! Who did you want to impress? To the universe that continued doing its thing?