Julian Barnes Faces Death

In yesterday’s daily article , R.R. Reno describes Simon Critchley’s treatment of death as typically postmodern posturing. It projects a “self-congratulating honesty that protests against old hypocrisies and evasions—all in close conjunction with a winking lack of seriousness that insulates us from any real engagement or commitment.”

Novelist Julian Barnes’s attitude towards death makes for an interesting contrast. The Washington Post ‘s review of his memoir, Nothing to be Frightened Of , quotes him as saying that he “periodically finds himself bolting upright from sleep screaming, ‘No, no, no.’” Not much postmodern insulation there.

Barnes is an agnostic (which, as the title slyly indicates, in his case amounts to practical atheism) but he admits to envying believers and has a wholesome distaste for what human life becomes without hope of heaven:

Bumper stickers and fridge magnets remind us that Life Is Not a Rehearsal. We encourage one another towards the secular modern heaven of self-fulfillment: the development of the personality, the relationships which help define us, the status-giving job, the material goods, the ownership of property, the foreign holidays, the acquisition of savings, the accumulation of sexual exploits, the visits to the gym, the consumption of culture. It all adds up to happiness, doesn’t it—doesn’t it? This is our chosen myth, and almost as much of a delusion as the myth that insisted on fulfillment and rapture when the last trump sounded and the graves were flung open, when the healed and perfected souls joined in the community of saints and angels. But if life is viewed as a rehearsal, or a preparation, or an anteroom, or whichever metaphor we choose, but at any rate as something contingent, something dependent on a greater reality elsewhere, then it becomes at the same time less valuable and more serious. Those parts of the world where religion has drained away and there is a general acknowledgment that this short stretch of time is all we have, are not, on the whole, more serious places than those where heads are still jerked by the cathedral’s bell or the minaret’s muezzin. On the whole, they yield to a frenetic materialism; although the ingenious human animal is well capable of constructing civilizations where religion coexists with frenetic materialism (where the former might even be an emetic consequence of the latter): witness America.

In the end, the reviewer suggests, Barnes’ own answer to death appears to be Epicurean: “Work hard at what you care about and enjoy moderate pleasures.” This is not, I think, ultimately an effective strategy for coping with the elemental terror of extinction. But it has great pedigree and a believer can respect it.