Julian Barnes's "Shipwreck": Disaster & Art

Last week in Ann Arbor and again today, home in New York, I thought of "Shipwreck," a chapter in Julian Barnes's A History of the World in 10 1/2 Chapters. I was first introduced to the chapter and the book seven years ago by the writer Eileen Pollack, and I've taught it in nonfiction classes a few times since. Tonight I went back and read "Shipwreck" for the first time in a while.

Barnes published it  in The New Yorker in 1989 as a short story, but it could easily have been called an essay--or a history. Let's call it a story in two parts. The first part artfully but dispassionately narrates the wreck of a French ship, the Medusa, in 1816. A taste:

By misfortune, they had struck the reef at high tide, and, the seas becoming violent, attempts to free the ship failed. The frigate was assuredly lost. Since the boats it carried were not capacious enough to contain the whole personnel, it was decided to build a raft and embark upon it those who could not be put into boats. The raft would then be towed to the shore and all would be saved. This plan was perfectly well laid; but, as two of the company were later to affirm, it was traced upon loose sand, which was dispersed by the breath of egotism.

Before those "two of the company" are rescued from their hellish raft,  a great deal of dying and a fair portion of cannibalism has taken place. It's a masterful, suspenseful bit of narrative history, this first part, but what keeps me returning to "Shipwreck" is the second part of Barnes's story, a sort of making-of documentary about the famous painting, by Géricault, that the wreck of the Medusa inspired.

The Ruthless Imagination of a Child

As a few of my twitter buddies pointed out, this review of Steven Millhauser's new and selected stories by Salvatore Scibona is exemplary, an essay as much as a review, which is what the best reviews are. And it contains this exquisite little meditation on childhood:

Many of the stories are set amid the 19th century passion for sophisticated mechanical inventions that were revolutionizing daily life at the time. But for all the formal and historical erudition here, the stories maintain a saving innocence. They are immigrants from the country of childhood, where the imagination, seeing a thing repeated, wonders what would happen if it were repeated again, and another time, and again forever? What if the rain never stopped and it flooded the whole world?

They more or less beg you to ask them what they are about. They seem to follow an inverted motto: A story should not be, but mean. As to the aboutness, here's a stab: These are stories about the adult's experience of the life his childhood self continues to lead after he has grown up. The adult mind doesn't destroy the child's mind, but only subsumes it. The clockwork automatons in this book, and the ladders of light up which a character can climb into the sky, and the sometimes asphyxiating lack of adult passion - all draw the reader toward the ruthless imagination of a child. Everything moves very slowly. The future will never come. The speed of growing up, from the adult's vantage, is dizzying; from the child's it is glacial.

So while these stories don't aspire to the pleasures and agonies of a dramatic narrative - the tales of change within a comprehensible world that children ask adults to repeat for the same reason it comforts babies to be swaddled - they do aspire to that other moment of childhood: You were alone in the dark, your imagination demanding, What if ... and then what if ... and then what if?

Scibona was one of the fiction writers The New Yorker anointed in its 20 under 40 series last year. Read his story "The Kid"--available online to subscribers--and you'll see why he made the list.

Cole on Sebald: "Why shouldn't an essay be a novel?"

Teju Cole, author of Open City, which I'm presently reading, compiled for the Guardian a list of ten novels "of solitude." Here he is on Sebald's Rings of Saturn:

A novel of ideas with a difference: it is nothing but ideas. Framed around the narrator's long walks in East Anglia, Sebald shows how one man looks aslant at historical atrocity. Formally dexterous, fearlessly written (why shouldn't an essay be a novel?), and unremittingly arcane; by the end I was in tears.

I like that last sentence especially, though I'd quibble a little with the emphasis he places on "nothing but ideas." There are also in Rings vignettes, facts, a potted history of the silk-industry, a potted biography of Joseph Conrad. The ideas are the threads with which Sebald weaves together the factual debris he finds on his walking tour. They create patterns out of the entropy of history.

At some point I want to consider Sebald as a nature writer--a European nature writer. The contrast with American nature writing would be revealing, I think. As with John Berger (whose essay "Why Look at Animals?" was a crucial point of departure for many of my own thoughts on the bestiary of the imagination), the categories of natural history and human history are not in Rings of Saturn discrete. There's no hint of nature as timeless, apart.