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In this paper I will isolate two broad concepts from the essay “Toward a Concept of Postmodernism” by theoretical thinker Ihab Hassan and then apply them to a short-story of fiction-author Julian Barnes. Why did I choose Hassan? Allen Thiher, a professor of 20th-Century French Literature and Critical Theory once wrote in a review about him:

”I have reconciled myself with his work by granting him the right not exactly to be a critic or a historian or even a philosopher. Rather Hassan must often be taken as a postmodern practicioner of intertextual collages which means that he demonstrates the very thing that he seeks to explain in his essays.”[1]

Thus Hassans work is not only helpful for this paper in terms of content but also in those of style since I intend a direct comparison between postmodern literary theory and practice to evaluate both of them in contrast to each other.

2.   Theoretical problems

First of all, it is necessary to sketch out some fundamental problems in the definition of the word “postmodernism” or “postmodernity”. Indeed, the terms suffer from a widespread vagueness or even full-fledged confusion. Hassan puts it like this:

”The term, let alone the concept, may thus belong to what philosophers call an essentially contested category. That is, in plainer language, if you put in a room the main discussants of the concept–say Leslie Fiedler, Charles Jencks, Jean-François Lyotard, Bernard Smith, Rosalind Krauss, Fredric Jameson, Marjorie Perloff, Linda Hutcheon, and, just to add to the confusion, myself–locked the room and threw away the key, no consensus would emerge between the discussants after a week, but a thin trickle of blood might appear beneath the sill.”[2]

What seems to be something between a crude fantasy and an ironic allusion to academic disagreement nevertheless rests on some very problematic thoughts concerning the concept of postmodernism. Furthermore, this may not just be caused by different personal interests of contemporary thinkers alone but seems to be inherent in the topic as a whole. To take an in-depth approach we should have to take all the various theoreticians listed above and let everyone bring their problems and definitions to the table. As interesting a task it may seem, this short paper does not hold the space for a herculian task like this. So instead of that, I want to focus on Hassan directly. In his essay “Toward a Concept of Postmodernism” he enumerates ten conceptual problems in the definition of “postmodernism”:

1.       “The word postmodernism [...] evokes what it wishes to suppress, modernism itself. The term thus contains its enemy within, as the terms romanticism and classicism, baroque and rococo, do not.”[3]

2.       “[...] postmodernism suffers from a certain semantic instability: that is, no clear consensus about its meaning exists among scholars.”[4]

3. “A related difficulty concerns the historical instability [...] There is already some evidence that postmodernism, and modernism even more, are beginning to slip and slide in time, threatening to make any diacritical distinction between them desperate.”[5]

Point 1 concerns the morphological constitution of the word postmodernism. It refers back to modernism of course, but with the prefix “post” which means “after”. But if postmodernism really wants to be something on its own, it has the problem of not being able to get rid of its predecessor. And thus, however you define modernism or what you make of the whole discussion of it, will determine your idea of post-modernism to an extent which is almost total. Point 2 should be clear without any further explanations. Hassan’s “trickle of blood beneath the sill” from the quote above exemplifies the colossal disagreement referred to here.

Point 3 is related to the first one but in terms of historical sequence. Postmodernism does not only contain “modernism” on a morphological level but due to the prefix “post” we also have the problem of historical succession.  By definition, modernism comes first and then postmodernism follows. Not only does this imply some sense of linear time (a concept often questioned by postmodern literature and art in general) but as Hassan says, both of the concepts are beginning to “slip and slide in time”[6], which means that, as time proceeds, a distinction based on temporal terms is getting more and more “desperate”[7] because to the same extent the anchor-point of modernism is receding into the past we are losing touch with postmodernism, at least in a historical way of speaking.

To sum it up, the definition of postmodernism suffers from three built-in instabilities: a) morphological[8], b) semantic and c) historical. Of course these three are only a small part taken from Hassan’s list of ten conceptual problems but even so I have no doubts that even the number ten does not fully exhaust the galaxy of problems, postmodernism presents us with. Linda Hutcheon, one of Hassan’s colleagues in the field of postmodern theory puts it like this: “Postmodernism is a contradictory cultural enterprise, one that is heavily implicated in that which it seeks to contest.”[9]

The “provisional”[10] solution Hassan proposes for this dilemma goes like this: He distinguishes “three modes of artistic change in the last hundred years [and] call[s] these avant-garde, modern and postmodern.”[11] The avantgardists, he says “assaulted the bourgeoisie with their art [...] but their activism could also become suicidial.”[12] Modernism, according to Hassan was “more stable, aloof, [...,] hypotactical and formalist.”[13] Postmodernism then is “by contrast as playful, paratactical and deconstructionist [...] cooler, less cliquish, and far less aversive to the pop, electronic society of which it is a part, and so hospitable to kitsch.”[14]

3.   Indeterminacy & Immanence

After juxtaposing modernist and postmodernist ideas from various fields like rhetoric, linguistics, literary theory, philosophy, anthropology, psychoanalysis, political science and even theology in a two-column table, Hassan puts the words “determinacy” and “transcendence” in the column of modernism, and “indeterminacy” and “immanence” in the column of postmodernism. Whether all of the dichotomies in this table are apt remains to be discussed at another time and place. Its author is conscious that “the dichotomies this table represents remain insecure, equivocal [and] concepts in any one vertical column are not all equivalent; and inversions and exceptions, in both modernism and postmodernism, abound.“[15]

Having said that, he proceeds with a brilliant elucidation of immanence and indeterminacy as two defining traits of postmodernism:

1. “By indeterminacy, or better still, indeterminacies, I mean a complex referent that these diverse concepts help to delineate: ambiguity, discontinuity, heterodoxy, pluralism, randomness, revolt, perversion, deformation. The latter alone subsumes a dozen current terms of unmaking: decreation, disintegration, deconstruction, decenterment, displacement, difference, discontinuity, disjunction, disappearance, decomposition [...]” and so on. Hassan goes on to explain that “through all these signs moves a vast will to unmaking, affecting the body politic, the body cognitive, the erotic body, the individual psyche – the entire realm of discourse in the West. In literature alone our ideas of author, audience, reading, writing, book, genre, critical theory and of literature itself, have all suddenly become questionable.”[16]

2. “[...] I call the second major tendency of postmodernism immanences, a term that I employ without religious echo to designate the capacity of mind to generalize itself in symbols, intervene more and more into nature, act upon itself through its own abstractions and so become, increasingly, im-mediately, its own environment.”[17]

If we now provisionally accept these two concepts as essential traits or defining characteristics of postmodernism and apply them to a postmodern work of art, namely the short-story “The Survivor” by Julian Barnes, we should not only be able to say just how postmodern (according to Hassan) the story really is but we can also see if or how far the two ideas of indeterminacy and immanence really can get a hold of a piece of literature whose author is widely considered a spokesmen and representative of postmodernism.

  4.   “The Survivor” in focus of immanence and indeterminacy

“The Survivor” is a short-story about a woman named Kathleen Ferris who is running away from a world in which she feels left out to find “salvation” in the past. Trying to escape from both her relationship and her personal history in a small boat, accompanied only by two cats she is haunted by reflections about the world left behind. She starts to have dreams, recurring nightmares in which she has semi-conscious conversations with representations of her own mind. The layers of dream and reality become deeply intertwined. She sees men in her nightmares who talk to her about the psychological implications of her escape. She resists, defends herself but slowly, very slowly she begins to acknowledge the power of her own mind to generate the blame she was fleeing from and finds herself awakening on a lonely island.

 “The Survivor” is a story which brilliantly shows the mechanisms of self-deception, the nuts and bolts of being disempowered by one’s own mind and projecting the feeling of defeat out onto the world where then one sees only enemies to gloss over the original cause within. That aspect alone would not make a great short-story but could just as well be a part from a textbook for students of psychology. To really appreciate the material presented here we have to look at the details of Kathleen’s imaginative crusade against the world and her historical context, the way she tries to desperately justify her deceptions by thinking up a great scheme in which she is right because everybody else is wrong.

Everything started with her belief in the flying reindeer. “She was a girl who believed what she was told, and the reindeer flew.”[18] Of course “people tried to argue her out of it, they said if you believe that you’ll believe anything.”[19] And then the accident in Chernobyl happened. “The cloud had come over where the reindeer grazed, poison had come down in the rain, the lichen became radio-active, the reindeers had eaten the lichen and got radioactive themselves.”[20] This heavily upset Kathleen. But the world around her did not seem to understand. They said “[…] you can’t go on having silly romantic ideas all your life, you’ve got to grow up in the end, you’ve got to be realistic […]”[21] The radioactive reindeers originally were supposed to be buried but then their carcasses were fed to the mink. Kathleen was further upset. “Most people had stopped paying attention to what she was telling them by now, but she always carried on.”[22] She said that “we’ve been punishing animals from the beginning […] killing them and torturing them and throwing our guilt on to them.”[23] This statement, I believe, has less to do with a judgement about human beings as a social “we” but stands more as a referent to Kathleen’s own guilt which she was throwing onto the world. She gave up eating meat after Chernobyl and went south because “[p]eople didn’t listen to her arguments” and the reindeer “couldn’t fly up in the north any more.”[24]

Her boyfriend Greg didn’t share her opinions. They “used to row about animals”[25] He said “politics was men’s business”[26] and her worries about whales being transformed into soap may just be caused by “pre-menstrual tension.”[27] Greg was “an ordinary bloke”[28] and the perfect backdrop for Kathleen to add gender-issues to her sense of victimhood. “[…] maybe women are more in touch with the world”[29], she thought and went out to “borrow” Greg’s boat, boarded it with two cats and tin-food and set out to sea. Filled with thoughts about poisoned fish in the ocean and exploited butterflies in the air she “left the world behind.”[30] Time passed and Kath became delirious:

“We’ll have to go back to some older cycle, sunrise to sunset for a start, and the moon will come into it, and the seasons, and the weather – the new, terrible weather we shall have to live under. How do tribes in the jungle measure the days? It’s not too late to learn from them. People like that have the key to living with nature. They wouldn’t castrate their cats. They might worship them, they might even eat them, but they wouldn’t have them fixed.”[31]

Here as well as in the case of the reindeer, what sounds like a critic’s view on human history has less to do with history or cycles of measuring time than with Kathleen’s stubborn romanticism which she herself just wouldn’t have “fixed”.

Alone on the boat with the two cats she became feverish[32] and the nightmares started. “These dreams of mine go on after I’ve woken up. It’s like having a hangover. The bad dreams won’t let the rest of life go on”, she noted to herself. Without any sense of direction she imagined being rescued by a boat, being overrun by computer-driven tankers and told herself that “[t]he old way of doing things had to be rediscovered: the future lay in the past.”[33], which meant nothing else but that she just let her boat be blown by the wind in whatever direction. Her hallucinations grew as the fever and nightmares persisted. She used the infamous “They” as a target of her accusations which are, again, only self-accusations for not being able to cope with the world around here.

“They say I don’t understand things. They say I’m not making the right connections. This happened, they say, and as a consequence that happened. There was a battle here, a war there, a king was deposed, famous men – always famous men, I’m sick of famous men […] I look at the history of the world, which they don’t seem to realize is coming to an end, and I don’t see why.”[34]

In the quote above there’s an interesting reference to the laws of cause and effect which are of course the foundation of scientific thinking as opposed to Kathleen’s romantic fixation with the past. By denying the laws of cause and consequence, she cuts herself loose from the most basic principle of history to replace it with her own version, “her-story” instead of “history”. As she was drifting on the ocean she lost touch with the world around here and reality. Her nightmares fully occupied her consciousness.  She found herself wrapped in conversations with men, representatives of her own mind. “The mind was producing its own arguments against reality, against itself, what it knew. […] The mind, being in a state of shock because of what had happened, was creating its own reasons for denying what had happened. She should have expected something like that.”[35] She wondered how many people there were like her, drifting around on the oceans with animals in their boats. “It was the mind, she decided; that was the cause of it all. The mind simply got too clever for its own good, it got carried away. […] You couldn’t imagine an animal inventing its own destruction, could you?”[36] A dream character pointed out to her the “feelings of guilt [and] rejection […]”[37] concerning her boyfriend Greg and her escape. She told him that there’d been “a bloody nuclear war.”[38] But he just referred back to her relationship with Greg and then unleashed a small glimmer of the truth as he said: “There’s a lot of denial in your life, isn’t there? You… deny a lot of things.”[39] Of course Kathleen denied this as well, the man being nothing more or less than a representation of her own psyche. He told her the whole boat trip was just an imagination, how she was found, how the cats were “terribly thin. They only just survived.”[40] And then he told her the whole truth:

“We find that those with persistent victim syndrome often experience acute guilt when they finally take flight. Then there was the bad news from the north. That was your excuse. You were exteriorizing things, transferring your confusion and anxiety on to the world.”[41]

The man told her she was found “going round in circles”[42], “the technical term is fabulation. You make up a story to cover the facts you don’t know or can’t accept. You keep a few true facts and spin a new story round them. Particularly in cases of double stress.”[43] A while after that she “made a decision not to speak to the men again.”[44] She didn’t seem to care anymore. She even felt ready to die. “It was all about her mind being afraid of its own death, that’s what she finally decided.”[45] And then she woke up on a small island to find that one of her cats had given birth to five kittens. “She felt such happiness! Such hope!”[46]

4.1.      Indeterminacy

The “complex referent” Hassan describes as a “vast will to unmaking” is present throughout Barnes’ short-story, most obviously in its structure. It consists of 28 disjunctive paragraphs which are separated by asterisks. The shortest one consists only of 12 words, the longest one covers almost 5 pages. The paragraphs seem to be arranged in a linear succession at the beginning but as Kathleen loses the distinction between dream and reality, the reader is presented with a certain randomness in which one paragraph could easily be interchanged with another one without affecting the narrative. If we remember Hassan’s list containing the different aspects of indeterminacy we find almost all of them in the way Barnes structured his story. In addition to that, the further the narrative proceeds the more disintegrated, decentered and displaced narrative and narrator seem to become. Time seems to progress in a discontinuos fashion. Kathleen is “going around in circles”[47]. Her psyche is deconstructed by the characters in her dreams. As her sense of self disintegrates, her outer appearance is beginning to decompose. She pulls out her hair, her skin is falling off.[48] She is deformed by her own psychological choices and physical actions, lost in a boat on the ocean of her own ambiguities.

In addition to all that the narrator’s point of view persistently switches from first-person to third-person 9 times throughout the story, which, to a large degree makes the madness of Kathleen believable to the reader, the madness of oscillating between one’s own feelings and thoughts and being haunted by other people’s perceptions, opinions and judgements, losing touch with oneself and scattering any sense of integrity throughout the outer world, just to spiral back again into the hermetically sealed realm of personal experience. Of course we also have the questioning or deconstruction of concepts of history as a built-in part of Kathleen’s character (and her deception), a theme which appears throughout Barnes’ “A history of the world in 10 ½ chapters”. (I’ll pick up this thread again at the end of this paper) Having located almost all of Hassan’s referents we now can say, this short-story is truly postmodern, at least in its sense of indeterminacy.

4.2.      Immanence

As quoted above Hassan speaks of immanence as “the capacity of mind to generalize itself in symbols, intervene more and more into nature, act upon itself through its own abstractions and so become, increasingly, im-mediately, its own environment.”[49]

The story of Kathleen Ferris is actually one of constructing a mental environment and losing touch with the world due to an imagination which is not appropriate to the surrounding reality.

She forms an ideal of flying reindeers. She comes in conflict with other people’s opinions but this only reinforces her “mental environment”. She adds feelings of guilt and rejection to her fortification and hangs the banner of blame above the world around here, starting with “normal blokes”[50] like her boyfriend and ending with politicians and “famous men”[51] in general. As the story proceeds, the reader witnesses Kathleen becoming increasingly wrapped in her imagination or “fabulation”[52] as the dream character calls it. With the approach of the nightmares, Kathleen’s hallucinatory reality is reaching its peak. The denouement follows slowly but steady until she finds herself “awakening” on a lonely island, coming out of the endless conversations with her own mind and making contact again with a tangible world around her.

Barnes shows very clearly in this story how human beings can build their own reality, taking a very extreme example of someone who fortifies her opinions and worldview in spite of other people’s disbelief and mockeries, spite being the key word here. It even looks as if in the case of Kathleen Ferris there’s a relation of proportions, which one could put like that: The more people doubt, mock or deny your worldview the more you hold on to your valued beliefs. This implies of course the cognitive capacity of justification, the basic medium for channelling blame and blocking out feelings of guilt and rejection. In Kath’s case these justifications are very explicit and often repeated in the story, as e.g. “the future lays in the past”. This short sentence holds a lot of the foundations for Kathleen’s value system and world-view from which many conclusions can be drawn.[53]. I will try to give a simplified three-step mechanism of justification as possibly seen from Kath’s perspective:

1.       Because the future is in the past, no one in the present can be right.

2.       Because no one is right and I know that, I must be the only one who’s right.

3.       Because I am right, I must be right as well about my basic assumption that the future lays in the past and so I am a victim of history instead of responsible for my present experience.

In this way or other an irrational “loop-hole” is set up, in which the mind, as Hassan says, indeed “increasingly [becomes] its own environment.” Barnes shows us the “dark side” of the capacity of the mind to generalize itself in symbols although one could probably propose more positive examples as well in which this capacity does not necessarily lead to auto-aggressive behaviour or self-denial but to heightened states of creative imagination and speculative abstraction. Nevertheless the point both Hassan and Barnes make is, that the mind has the power to construct realities which are relatively independent of other minds and their realities, and, if fuelled by denied emotions can be very hard to deconstruct.  This whole idea questions any notion of reality with a capital, meaning a pre-given plane of “the real” in which each and every human being is rooted and bound to act from. On the contrary we are presented here with the idea of as many realities as there are individuals, the agreement of social networks on certain grades of “reality” and therefore validity being a highly intersubjective matter of exchange and/or connection of belief-systems rather than a collective reference to a singular pre-given reality. Linda Hutcheon puts it like this:” Postmodern novels like Flaubert’s Parrot [also written by Julian Barnes] […] imply that there are only truths in the plural, and never one truth; and there is rarely falseness per se, just other truths.”[54]

4.   Conclusion

In applying the referents of indeterminacy and immanence as two factors of postmodernity to Julian Barnes’ short-story, most of it holds true and the theory of Hassan proves to be helpful in understanding an author who is largely considered a representative of postmodern thinking.

Indeterminacy, the “will of unmaking” and immanence, “the capacity of mind to generalize itself in symbols [and] become its own environment” are very clearly observed in both structure and content. But what do we make of the rest of the book “A history of the world in 10 ½ chapters”? In this paper I have isolated “The Survivor” as if it was a stand-alone short-story, even though it is only published and sold as part of a novel.

Brian Finney, an associate professor of literature at the California State University, Long Beach writes in an essay published on his website about Barnes book:”

“Barnes eschews a God-eyed narrative perspective in this book. The relation between his narrative images or chapters is one of disjunction, ironic juxtaposition, disparity. He rejects the traditional assumption that “there is some special dispensation whereby the signs that constitute an historical text have reference to events in the world” [...] His book celebrates the textuality of history, the narrativity of historical narration. As Barthes writes, “in ‘objective’ history, the ‘real’ is never more than an unformulated signified, sheltering behind the apparently all-powerful referent” (17). Barnes points to a signified by using as signifiers those strange links and impertinent connections that invite the reader to discover a coherence in the book as a whole. In reviewing this book Salman Rushdie claimed that what Barnes was attempting was “the novel as footnote to history, as subversion of the given [. . .] fiction as critique” (241)”[55]

There is a debate among scholars whether “A history of the world in 10 ½ chapters” is really a novel on its own or just a collection of short-stories. I don’t think that this is a problem, since we have stories which are both relatively independent of each other but they are also connected through allusions to other chapters’ themes. Barnes uses a lot of different themes in his book, all presented rather disjunctively under the umbrella-term of “history”. Nevertheless there are these “strange links” and “impertinent connections” between them, e.g. we have the frightened reindeers on Noah’s ark in the first chapter. And “it wasn’t just fear of Noah, it was something deeper”[56] They show powers of foresight, “as if they were saying, You think this is the worst? Don’t count on it” “[57], their „foresight“ probably being nothing more than a loose reference to the accident in Chernobyl, told in detail by Kathleen Ferris a few chapters later. Apart from the reindeers, the strongest over-arching reference to the rest of the book is Kathleen’s comment: “Everything is connected, even the parts we don’t like, especially the parts we don’t like”[58] which can be viewed as a general theme of Barnes’ novel.

To sum it up, “A history of the world in 10 ½ chapters” contains many different stylistic devices, themes, characters and structures but they all question historical assumptions in one way or another. Hassan’s “vast will of unmaking” is tunnelling through the chapters like the woodworm presented as an outcast on Noah’s ark at the beginning of the book, and as a consequence ideas of religious origin, historical truth or aesthetic representation are all being questioned. On the other hand we have a great sense of “immanence” in the way the different characters are all living in their own “parallel universes”. There’s Noah, the old “drunkard” in chapter one, there are the terrorists from chapter two, there’s the Christian fundamentalist in chapter six, the second-class actor in chapter eight, the ex-astronaut in chapter ten and of course Kathleen, the girl who believed in flying reindeers from chapter four. All of them, although they don’t seem to have much in common, are constructing their own reality, choosing fact and fiction rather freely according to their bias. The mind increasingly becomes its “own environment”, as Hassan said. But if this should be a realization indicative of postmodernity, one might ask, if this hasn’t always been so? I’d say, indeed it has always been like that. Human beings have always been wrapped up in their imagination, even, or probably more so, if they thought it to be the “truth”. But on the other hand I think this realization has come very slowly, through the first ideas of psycho-analysis, prime time TV-programs on the deceptions of dictators and warlords to become more and more integrated into common knowledge and pop-culture until we become so accustomed to the idea, that we cannot understand how people in the past couldn’t see it. But on the other hand, what is increasingly obvious to inhabitants of the Western industrialized world, is still totally foreign to most countries and cultures less developed, where mythic gods and totalized narratives reign every aspect of life. Postmodernist discourse may thus be a small part of the cure to global imbalances of power and knowledge because, as Hassan says, it: ”veers toward open, playful, optative, provisional (open in time as well as in structure or space), disjunctive, or indeterminate forms, a discourse of ironies and fragments, a “white ideology” of absences and fractures, a desire of diffractions, an invocation of complex, articulate silence.”[59]

Cited Works

 Primary literature:

Julian Barnes: A history of the world in 10 ½ chapters. Random House, New York.1989

Ihab Hassan, Postface 1982: Toward a Concept of Postmodernism, in: The Dismemberment of Orpheus. Toward a Postmodern Literature, The University of Visconsin Press 1982, p. 259-271.

Secondary Literature:

Linda Hutcheon: ’The Pastime of Past Time’: Fiction, History, Historiographic Metafiction“ Chapter 2 in: “A Poetics of Postmodernism”. London, 1988

Allen Thiher: Postmodernism’s Evolution as Seen by Ihab Hassan, in: Contemporary Literature, Vol. 31, No. 2 (Summer, 1990), pp. 236-239

Ihab Hassan: From Postmodernism to Postmodernity: the Local/Global Context, on: http://www.ihabhassan.com/postmodernism_to_postmodernity.htm

[1] Contemporary Literature, Vol. 31, No. 2 (Summer, 1990), pp. 236-239
[2] http://www.ihabhassan.com/postmodernism_to_postmodernity.htm
[3] Ihab Hassan, Postface 1982: Toward a Concept of Postmodernism, in: The Dismemberment of Orpheus. Toward a Postmodern Literature, The University of Visconsin Press 1982, p. 148
[4] ibid p. 149
[5] ibid
[6] ibid
[7] ibid
[8] Unlike Hassan’s mentioning of “historical” or “semantic” problems, he does not speak explicitly about a “morphological“ instability. I use this term simply to help sketch out the different levels or layers on which the concept of postmodernism creates friction with itself.
[9] “’The Pastime of Past Time’: Fiction, History, Historiographic Metafiction“ Chapter 2 in: “A Poetics of Postmodernism”. London, 1988
[10]Ihab Hassan, Postface 1982: Toward a Concept of Postmodernism, in: The Dismemberment of Orpheus. Toward a Postmodern Literature, The University of Visconsin Press 1982, p. 151
[11] ibid
[12] ibid
[13] ibid
[14] ibid
[15] Ihab Hassan, Postface 1982: Toward a Concept of Postmodernism, in: The Dismemberment of Orpheus. Toward a Postmodern Literature, The University of Visconsin Press 1982, p.152
[16] ibid, p. 153
[17] ibid
[18] Julian Barnes: A history of the world in 10 ½ chapters. Random House, New York.1989, p. 83
[19] ibid
[20] ibid, p. 85
[21] ibid, p. 85
[22] ibid, p. 86
[23] ibid, p. 87
[24] ibid
[25] ibid, p. 88
[26] ibid
[27] ibid
[28] ibid, p. 87
[29] ibid
[30] ibid, p. 91
[31] ibid, p. 93
[32] ibid, p. 94
[33] ibid, p. 96
[34] ibid, p. 97
[35] ibid, p. 100
[36] ibid, p. 102
[37] ibid, p. 105
[38] ibid, p. 107
[39] ibid, p. 108
[40] ibid
[41] ibid, p. 109
[42] ibid
[43] ibid
[44] ibid, p. 110
[45] ibid, p. 111
[46] ibid
[47] ibid, p. 109
[48] ibid, p. 107
[49] Ihab Hassan, Postface 1982: Toward a Concept of Postmodernism, in: The Dismemberment of Orpheus. Toward a Postmodern Literature, The University of Visconsin Press 1982, p. 153
[50] Julian Barnes: A history of the world in 10 ½ chapters. Random House, New York.1989, p. 87
[51] ibid, p. 97
[52] ibid, p. 109
[53] But if the basic assumption is false, of course, then all conclusions will be false as well.
[54] ’The Pastime of Past Time’: Fiction, History, Historiographic Metafiction“ Chapter 2 in: “A Poetics of Postmodernism”. London, 1988, p. 290
[55] http://www.csulb.edu/~bhfinney/Barnes.html
[56] Julian Barnes: A history of the world in 10 ½ chapters. Random House, New York.1989, p. 12
[57] ibid, p. 13
[58] ibid, p. 84
[59] Ihab Hassan, Postface 1982: Toward a Concept of Postmodernism, in: The Dismemberment of Orpheus. Toward a Postmodern Literature, The University of Visconsin Press 1982, p. 153