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Challenging Generic Conventions

The works of Julian Barnes have always been powerfully resistant to the "law[s] of genre[s]" and have eagerly welcomed generic "impurity, anomaly, or monstrosity" (Derrida 1980, 204). In a recent interview with Mark Lawson, Barnes confessed to a sense of unease as far as labelling and strict categorisation of his works are concerned: "If they [booksellers and readers] ask me to label it, I would just say a 'book.' Or, I would say, the author's name is the label" (Lawson 2013, n.p.). Violation of norms and refusal to fulfil a singular generic designation appear to lie at the very heart of Barnes's rich oeuvre. His best known piece, Flaubert's Parrot of 1984, is, in the words of its creator, an "upside-down novel" (ibid.), a truly hybrid text where "clarity is the hardest thing of all" (Barnes 2002, 116). Hence, the fictional story of the retired doctor Geoffrey Braithwaite is supplemented by, among others, critical and scholarly essays on Flaubert's writing, a biographical study as well as excerpts from the writer's letters and diaries, a chronology of Flaubert's life, a "train-spotter's" guide to his life and works (including animal imagery in the novels of the French master entitled "The Flaubert Bestiary"), and examination papers. Transgressing the laws of genres is even more apparent in Barnes's A History of the World in 101⁄2 Chapters of 1989. The volume, which one critic aptly compared to a "symphony" (Moseley 1997, 115), comprises of highly heterogeneous chapters some of which can be classified as an essay on art history ("The Survivor"), a travelogue ("The Mountain"), a memoir ("Parenthesis"), and a collection of letters ("Upstream!"). An interplay of factual and fictional genres also comes to the fore in Barnes's novel of 2005. Arthur & George narrates selected episodes from the life of Arthur Conan Doyle and, true to its generic provenience, i.e. a "biographical-novel-about-a-writer" (Lodge 2007, 10), it boasts the characteristics of a borderland text. Essentially, a 'biographical-novel-about-a-writer'