The Porcupine: Facing the Past?

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THE PORCUPINE: FACING THE PAST? When, in 1992 The Porcupine appeared, readers of Julian Barnes were, at best, confused. Again, Barnes managed to write something completely different from all the works he had written until then. Firstly, in this novel, he dealt with political thematics, which was, given the statement that ’The writer who imagines that the novel is the most effective way of taking part in politics is usually a bad novelist, a bad journalist and a bad politician.’ , quite unusual for him. Secondly, appart from the content, the formal characteristics of the novel were also very ’un-Barnesian’ – simple, relatively linear plot, starightforward realistic narration, almost flat characters, no experimentation of any kind – all in all, the least postmodern of all Barnes’ novels. But is it really so non-postmodern as many have claimed? If we leave aside the surface story about the crush of the Communism in an Eastern European country and the effects it had on generations of people who experienced it, there is one major issue here that Barnes is trying to disect and explain – the issue of past. One of the central ideas in The Porcupine is the question of how we face our past, how we gain knowledge of it and how we formulate that knowledge and Barnes’ approach to this issue is, actually, very postmodern. If we focuse on the surface story only, and avoid engaging into a deeper analysis of the novel, we can easily fail to notice that the novel is really built on the foundation of theoretical ideas about the status (or rather unstability) of human ability to attain the knowledege of the past events, to understand them, and to articulate them. Consequently, The Porcupine should be understood as much more than a lukewarm political novel; it is a very successful analysis of the processes and mechanisms involved in creation of history - the account of the
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