Julian Barnes from the Margins: Exploring the Writer's Archives by Vanessa Guignery (review)

Vanessa Guignery's Julian Barnes from the Margins: Exploring the Writer's Archives achieves several successful ends. For readers who are interested in Julian Barnes's books, this unparalleled look at how they evolved into their published form provides a wealth of information, information that has been selected, contextualized, and analyzed for maximum lucidity and utility. Barnes readers and admirers will be richly rewarded by what they (we) can find out in this book. A secondary outcome is a demonstration of what genetic criticism can be and do at its best. There is a mass of data here (distilled from a much greater mass of data in the archives): but data on their own are inert. The author shows how the best genetic criticism wields and converts facts into subtle critical insights.

The conditions for such an enterprise are propitious. Barnes is a painstaking novelist and one who, fortunately, saves almost everything. He composes on an electric typewriter (with the exception of one late book written in longhand) and his drafts survive, often with his corrections, questions and exhortations to himself ("last line soppy?" [130]). And he agreed, beginning in 2002, to donate these papers to the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas where, examined by the right researcher, they could bear rich fruit.

The right researcher is Vanessa Guignery, Professor at the École Normale Supérieure de Lyon in France. One of the premier scholar/critics of recent British fiction, she is undoubtedly the leading Barnes expert. She is the author of The Fiction of Julian Barnes (2006), the co-editor of Conversations with Julian Barnes (2009), and author and editor of numerous other critical works on the author. She has, of course, read everything by Julian Barnes and, as the documentation of this book makes clear, she has read everything about him. She has spent a substantial part of her life for a number of years in Texas, working in the Barnes archives.

Moreover, she is his friend, and the confidence he reposes in her adds much to the usefulness of this book. Many of the clarifying insights come from his emails to her. In her Acknowledgements, she writes that he "offered help and encouragement for this book, patiently answering my queries, giving me access to unarchived material, authorizing me to quote from it and providing invaluable information on his writing process" (x). One more extra among the Barnes papers is a history of critical reactions by biographer and critic Hermione Lee, with whom Barnes has been sharing his work in progress since his second novel, and whose letters offering her thoughts and suggestions about the work are in the archives.

The book focuses on eight Julian Barnes novels, from his first, Metroland (1980) to The Sense of an Ending (2011), a terminus dictated by the archival resources. Guignery devotes a further chapter to Nothing to Be Frightened Of, his nonfiction family reflection cum meditation on death, as a node of ideas and themes that ramify through the fiction. There is also much here, it should be noted, about the other books not given their own chapters, the novels published since 2011, the collections of essays and short stories, and the uncollected journalism.

Dr. Guignery's chapters are assigned to one novel (with exceptions noted below), but in each case, they take a different thematic approach as well. With Metroland it is the author's faltering starts, not surprising for a first novel that took six years to complete, his search for a title, his planned chapters and which of those were eliminated and why. With Flaubert's Parrot, much attention to the narrator Dr. Geoffrey Braithwaite accompanies an accounting of how the chapters were arranged for greatest effect. With Arthur & George, she uncovers his use of historical research; with The Porcupine the relations with his Bulgarian translator as informant and uninvited and unwelcome truncator.

One additional...