Talking It Over

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Talking It Over

• By Julian Barnes
• 
  (NY Vintage, 1992)
• Prepared by Cecilia H.C. Liu

2
Julian Barnes

• Born in Leicester, England on January 19, 1946.
• Educated at the City of London School,
  1957-1964, and at Magdalen
  College, Oxford, from which he graduated in
  modern languages (with honors) in 1968.
• Worked as a lexicographer for the Oxford English
  Dictionary supplement for three years. In 1977,
  Barnes began working as a reviewer and literary
  editor for the New Statesmen and the New Review.
• From 1979 to 1986 he worked as a television
  critic, first for the New Statesmen and then for
  the Observer (London).

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• Received several awards and honors for his
  writing including the Somerset Maugham Award
  (Metroland 1981), two Booker Prize nominations
  (Flaubert's Parrot 1984, England, England 1998),
  E. M. Forster Award and the Prix Femina (Talking
  It Over 1992).
• Barnes was made a Chevalier de l'Ordre des Arts
  et des Lettres in 1988 and became an Officier de
  l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in 1995. In 1993
  he was awarded the Shakespeare Prize by the FVS
  Foundation.

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• Barnes has written nine novels, two books of
  short stories, and two collections of essays.
• His writing has earned him considerable respect
  as an author who deals with the themes of
  history, reality, truth and love.
• As Dan Kavanagh (pseudonym), Barnes has written
  four crime novels centered around Duffy, a
  free-lance security system specialist.
• Barnes currently lives in London where he is busy
  writing.

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Talking It Over

• A love triangle and two marriages
• Multiple first-person point-of-view
• Dramatizes the difficulty of memory
• Each of the narrators addresses the reader as a
  confidante, as if the reader were interviewing
  the narrators or taking depositions from them.
• Each character strives for fidelity to the truth
• many different events as well as conflicting
  interpretations of the same events.
• Reader re-establish what the true story of the
  characters pasts really was
• A novel more overheard than read

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He lies like an eye-witness. (p. 222)

• The novel announces its theme in its epigraph
• a Russian saying
• Quotation in the memoirs of 20th cent. Soviet
  composer Dmitri Shostakovich Testimony The
  Memoirs of Dmitri Dmitriyevich Shostakovich as
  Related to and Edited by Solomon Volkov.
• Writing of history

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The Writing of History

• The details of Shostakovichs life, especially
  his relationship to the Soviet regime, have been
  a point of heated debate in recent years.
• Some hold the Testimony to be little more than an
  anti-Soviet propaganda piece, designed to arouse
  the spirits of westerners and having little to do
  with the composers actual allegiances others
  take it as a genuine autobiographical document.
  Whatever the truth-status of the Testimony, the
  statement itself is compelling, reminding us that
  one of the bases of our notions of what happened
  in the past, the testimony of eye-witnesses, is
  not something we can take for granted.

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Stuart, Oliver and Gillian

• Gillian the love interest of both men, more
  taciturn when she does speak, her view is often
  at odds with those offered by the other
  characters.
• Stuart Practical-minded focusing on the
  details with minimum of the rhetorical flourishes
  or elaborate theorizing we see in Olivers
  account

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• Stuart is the conservative, practical, and dull
  man who falls in love with Gillian and managed to
  get her to marry him. Oliver is the wild,
  bohemian man-child who managed to steal Gillian
  away from Stuart.
• The novel traces the many thoughts of Stuart,
  Ollie, and Gillian, and the people who knew them,
  thoughts from their first encounter, the
  betrayal, and the thereafter.

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First meeting at a singles social gathering
Stuart and Gillian give similar accounts, try
to keep secret from Oliver (22-23, 25-26, 60)
Gillian reveals the circumstances of the first
meeting with Stuart after she and Oliver become
romantically involved (148). Later, Oliver
accidentally reveals his knowledge of the secret
to Stuart (160). The circumstances of Olivers
inadvertent revelation to Stuart are remembered
differently by the two participants (161-62).
11
The nature of history and memory

• The characters occasionally make
• observations about the nature of
• history and memory.
• Gillian how form shapes content (75)
• Her lack of ability to pinpoint a moment when
  she and Stuart fell in love (75). She maintains
  that only reason anyone would feel compelled to
  pick a particular moment is that other people
  require it.

12
Knowledge Perception

• A problem of philosophy dates back to Platos
  dialogs
• In Theatetus Socrates, Theatetus, and Theodorus
  have a debate about knowledge and perception.
• Their task is to discern what can be perceived
  truly, apart from the obvious limits of
  subjectivity.

• In the end, Socrates concludes that the soul
  perceives certain things (truth, beauty)
  directly, while other, lesser things are
  perceived through the senses, which may introduce
  error.

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• The determining of important things like what
  is true and what is beautiful is removed from the
  realm of human confusion and opinion. But such an
  argument is more than a bit idealistic for most
  contemporary readers.
• Without a soul which perceives directly, we are
  left with the limitations of our senses and thus
  must find other ways to determine the true and
  the beautiful.

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Testimonies? !

• These testimonies disagree in places
• Each of them is to be shaded by the motives and
  personality of the character who speaks it.
• Were invited to mentally construct our own
  master narrative of the true events.
• Therere certain secrets that only one character
  knows without that character, our understanding
  the facts and motivations involved in this
  history would be diminished.

15
The ending sequence

• Gillian Oliver France. But Stuart
  spies on them from a hotel room across the
  street.
• Gillian stages an elaborate scene in which she
  antagonized Oliver to such an extent that he
  finally strikes her. And it has, as Gillian
  expected it would, the desired effect.
• Stuart gives up his obsession with the past and
  goes back to his life.
• Gillians strategy works, but without her
  testimony of it we would not have the same
  understanding of the events.

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Gillians job in painting restoration

• Serves symbolically as a model for historical
  research (122)
• G reveals to Oliver that it is the removing of
  dirt and overpaint which is the true joy of
  restoration, not the retouching.
• Theres no way of knowing exactly
• Theres no real picture under there waiting
  to be revealed, if thats what you mean. (122)

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Recording or rediscovering of History