The Problem of Eternity in Barnes' "The History of the World in 10 1/2 Chapters"

"The Dream," the final chapter of Julian Barnes' novel in stories The History of the World in 10 1/2 Chapters (1989), takes place in heaven.  It begins with the unnamed narrator of this chapter declaring that "I dreamt that I woke up.  It's the oldest dream of all, and I've just had it." Heaven is the place where you get everything you want.  To the narrator's delight, he has unlimited access to the best food, he can play golf every day, and have sex with beautiful women every night.  As one of heaven's employees (whether they're angels, or former people, or something else entirely is never clarified) states, "'the principle of heaven [is] that you get what you want, what you expect.'"  There's no hell, just "something we call Hell.  But it's more like a theme park.  You know, skeletons popping out and frightening you..."  The only positive thing on earth that's absent in heaven is dreaming.  But as perfect and wonderful as heaven is, "there aren't an infinite number of possibilities."  The narrator eventually gets so good at golf that he hits a hole in one on every shot.  Eventually, he completely masters every sport.  Asking one of the employees what will happen, eventually, and what heaven was like in the old days, he discovers that "If you want to die off, you do.  You just have to want it long enough and that's it, it happens" and "everyone takes the option [to die], sooner or later."  Eventually, the narrator decides that the time has come, so he goes to bed, planning to decide on death once he wakes up.  The next and final line of the story is "I dreamt that I woke up.  It's the oldest dream of all, and I've just had it."  While it's possible to read this line as a simple restatement of the opening, the fact that this line takes place immediately after the narrator goes to bed and decides to start dying, and the fact that Barnes specifically established that people don't dream in heaven, suggests that the story is cyclical.  Once you get so tired of eternal paradise that you want to die, you start over.  The idea of a cyclical afterlife is not rare in fiction. But it usually describes hell.

The earliest work I know of to present a cyclical afterlife is Flann O'Brien's The Third Policeman (written in 1939-40, though not published for a couple decades), in which an unnamed narrator finds himself awaiting execution in an increasingly surreal environment until, at the end, he discovers that he has been dead throughout, and the sequence of events that unfolded, and which he has already begun to forget, will repeat as a punishment for his sins. A sort of Dante in Wonderland.  I can think of a few other examples off the top of my head.  "Judgment Night," an early Twilight Zone episode, features a German waking up on a British cruise liner during WWII, not knowing how he got there or why he is certain the ship is going to be sunk.  It turns out he was a Nazi submarine captain who ordered the passenger ship torpedoed, and now spends eternity living and reliving the suffering he caused.  Stephen King and Neil Gaiman have both written stories that deal with a cyclical hell ("That Feeling You Can Only Say What It Is in French" and "Other People," respectively, although I personally think the latter may be purgatorial rather than infernal). In Joshua Fialkov's comic series, "The Life After," suicides relive the same day for eternity.

So why, if endless repetition is consistently presented as divine punishment, is it heaven in Barnes's novel?  Perhaps the answer lies in how we construe heaven.  Putting aside religious literature* for the moment, how is heaven, as an afterlife, portrayed in modern fiction?  Well, when it is portrayed, it often ends up as a kind of "happily ever after" scenario (as in, e.g., the Albert Brooks movie Defending Your Life (1991)).  Other times, it serves as a useful plot element, usually as a way to let the dead speak (e.g., Alice Sebold's The Lovely Bones (2002) or Vonnegut's God Bless You, Dr. Kevorkian, a series of radioplays where Vonnegut interviews dead historical figures).  The point I'm getting at, is that the experience of an eternal life in heaven is rarely dealt with in modern fiction.  What would something like that look like?  One example that sticks in my mind comes from Jhonen Vasquez's graphic novel, Johnny the Homicidal Maniac (1997) in which the titular character, touring the afterlife, visits heaven, only to find millions of people sitting quietly and staring into space.  When he asks what the deal is, he's told that all the people there are perfectly content.  And so they sit there.  Eternally. (Well, except for a brief spate of hyper-violence, anyway).

If this endless, passive contentment doesn't sound appealing, what type of eternity could we have? We could consider an eternal soul that is stripped of our human desires, that becomes something fundamentally different from what we were when we were alive, but then you can't say that it is "you" who are in eternal paradise, anymore than it is "you" who would be absorbed into the soil after burial. What Barnes has realized is that perhaps eternity is inherently hostile to human consciousness.   As Barnes' narrator concludes, "Heaven's a very good idea, it's a perfect idea you could say, but not for us.  Not given the way we are."  But the alternative is non-existence.  The underlying unease in this chapter can be summed up by one question: What if this is the best possible scenario?


*By religious literature, I mean works that are specifically aimed at a religious audience and that claim some spiritual value, whether this be a Lloyd C. Douglas biblical epic or Left Behind.  Heaven, for these writers, is a oneness with god, and is a theological issue, not a narrative one.

Some Kafka

A couple oool videos for you today.  The first is an illustrated reading of Kafka's parable "Before the Law," read by Orson Welles.

The second is a little stranger.  It's Christopher Plummer recreating one of Nabokov's lectures, in this case, his lecture on Kafka's The Metamorphosis.  

David Lynch's Industrial Symphony No. 1 (1989)

Hey, wouldn't it be weird if David Lynch directed a made-for-tv musical starring Laura Dern and Nicolas Cage?  Well, weird is what David Lynch does.  Enjoy.

(Note: some nudity, so don't watch this at work.  And don't try to hard to make sense of it (at work, or anywhere else).)

1989: Clear and Present Danger by Tom Clancy

The Author:

Tom Clancy (1947-2013) was born and raised in Baltimore, Maryland.  He attended Loyola College.  While there, Clancy joined the ROTC, but was unable to serve due to poor eyesight.  He graduated in 1969, and married Wanda Thomas King, with whom he had four children.  Throughout the 1970s, he worked as an insurance agent, eventually buying a small firm from his wife's grandfather.  A military history buff, Clancy began writing a novel, The Hunt for Red October, which was published by the Naval Institute Press in 1984, to unexpected commercial success.  His second novel, Red Storm Rising (1986), and his third novel, Patriot Games (1987) were the second-bestselling novels of their years of release.  His fourth and fifth novels, The Cardinal of the Kremlin and Clear and Present Danger, respectively, took the number one spot.   

Since then, Clancy has written or co-written fourteen novels, ten of which have ended up on the annual top ten list.  He has also written or co-written thirteen books of non-fiction.  As well as creating series bearing his name, written by other authors. 

Clancy and his wife separated in 1996, divorcing in 1999.  Later in 1999, he married Alexandra Marie Llewellyn, whit whom he had one daughter. Clancy died at Johns Hopkins in 2013.

The Book:

Length: 656 pages
Subject/Genre: International Drug Trade/ Military Thriller

Clear and Present Danger details a covert war between the U.S. government and the Colombian drug cartels, who have enlisted the services of former Cuban spy Felix Cortez.  The plan is put into motion by the president amid reelection concerns and with pressure from the new national security advisor, James Cutter.  Jack Ryan is promoted to Deputy Director (Intelligence) after his superior/mentor is diagnosed with terminal cancer.  Much of the novel is split between the details of the campaign against the cartels, and Ryan's attempts to uncover evidence thereof.  

The campaign itself mostly follows Clancy staple John Clark, and a young light infantry soldier, Domingo Chavez.  Domingo is part of an elite crew air-lifted in to the Colombian mountains, at first only identifying drug planes (which are later shot down by the American fighter jets), but then moves to destroying drug production sites and everyone in them, and even later, full-on missile strikes against cartel strongholds.    

More so than The Cardinal of the Kremlin, Clear and Present Danger gets bogged down by its own attention to detail.  This can be annoying, but generally only lasts for short periods at a time.  It also gets didactic at points.  The novel ends with a character basically asking Jack Ryan to tell him the moral of the story.  As a military/political thriller, though, it's a fun read.

After the fall of Berlin Wall in 1989, and the close of the Cold War in general, a new enemy was needed for a Clancy novel.  Rather than imagine a shadowy conspiracy a la Ludlum, Clancy looked to the U.S.  Clear and Present Danger was written near the end of what's become known as the crack epidemic, the period from 1984 until the early 90s

On the one hand, Clancy does a good job of explaining the difficulty in launching full scale military action against the cartels, on the other, he ignores U.S. involvement in the international drug trade.  The Kerry Committee Report, published in 1989, found strong evidence of U.S. intelligence agencies providing money to drug traffickers. In another case of historical irony, similar to that of the funding of the Mujaheddin in The Cardinal of the Kremlin, the US Army School of the Americas (now known as WHINSEC) trained two of the founders of the notorious Los Zetas cartel.  As with the previous Clancy novel on the list, he tends here to portray the U.S. government as being exclusively composed of well-intentioned individuals, who occasionally act in error.

In 1994, Clear and Present Danger became the third Clancy novel to receive a film adaptation.

 Harrison Ford plays Jack Ryan (reprising his role from 1992's Patriot Games.  Ryan was played by Alec Baldwin in 1990's The Hunt for Red October.  In 2002's The Sum of All Fears, he would be played by Ben Affleck, and is played by Chris Pine in 2014's Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit).  John Clark is played by Willem Dafoe (and played by Liev Schreiber in The Sum of All Fears).  The film was directed by Phillip Noyce, best known for his action movies (most recently Salt (2010) and The Giver (which, I know, wasn't action-packed in the books, and probably shouldn't have been an action-ish movie at all).   The film was a major financial success.

Overall, Clear and Present Danger, like The Cardinal of the Kremlin, is a book for people who are already fans of the action/military thriller genre.  It's got its flaws, but remains an entertaining read.

Bestsellers of 1989:

1. Clear and Present Danger by Tom Clancy

2. The Dark Half by Stephen King

3. Daddy by Danielle Steel

4. Star by Danielle Steel

5. Caribbean by James Michener

6. The Satanic Verse by Salman Rushdie

7. The Russia House by John le Carré

8. The Pillars of the Earth by Ken Follett

9. California Gold by John Jakes

10. While My Pretty One Sleeps by Mary Higgins Clark

Also Published in 1989:

A History of the World in 10 1/2 Chapters by Julian Barnes

Geek Love by Katharine Dunn

The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro

Hyperion by Dan Simmons

The Joy Luck Club by Amy Tan

Sources:

Clancy, Tom. Clear and Present Danger. New York: Putnam, 1989. Print.

"Tom Clancy." Contemporary Authors Online. Detroit: Gale, 2014. Literature Resource
      Center. Web.