Special issue “Literature and Globalism: A Tribute to Theo D’haen,” guest-edited by Lieven D’hulst.

What is it about?

The English writer Julian Barnes (Leicester, 1946) published Levels of Life (2013) a few years after the sudden and untimely passing of his wife Pat Kavanagh, in October 2008. The three parts of the text are very subtly intertwined, the first two being an exercise in historiographic metafiction with French real-life characters from the past and the last, a trenchant intimate portrait of the author’s own grief. Inventiveness is a distinctive trait of this postmodern British narrator who has cultivated it with generic blending in the metafictional practice, excelling in the tension between fictional and non-fictional writing because of the unreliable nature of reconstructing the past accurately, whether far-removed or immediate, unconnected or personal: “As memory researchers from fields as diverse as neuroscience, cognitive psychology, and philosophy have argued, remembering involves a reinterpretation of the past in the present”(Smith and Watson 22).

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Why is it important?

The originality of this category-defying book lies with Barnes’s staunch Francophile, borne out of a thorough knowledge of the French language and culture —Gustave Flaubert being his personality cult—, which permeates both his fiction and non-fiction oeuvre. In the vein of Montaigne’s essayistic style and deeply influenced by him, his inspiration also stems from the posthumous journals of Alphonse Daudet (1840-1897) and Jules Renard (1864-1910): La Doulou (1931), translated by Barnes himself, and Journal (1887-1910), respectively.

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