The History Of Forking Paths:Arks As Thirdspace In A History Of The World In 10 1/2 Chapters

Julian Barnes,a celebrated contemporary British novelist well-known for versatility and profundity in his writing,has devoted much concern into the interpretation of history,with most of his works regarded as post-modernist historical writings.Among them,A History of the World 10 1/2 Chapters is a typical representation of history which purports to narrate it into spaces of recurrent ark motifs.The fierce conflicts of different historical patterns and values reflected by ark spaces have attracted and puzzled many of its researchers.Combining Soja's thirdspace theory with Ranciere's threefold acts of ark event,this thesis explores the paradoxical coexistence implied by ark spaces respectively with their functions as storyworld,discourse and narration.It discovers that the novel itself,along with the history it represents,is a transcending composite where various contradictions collide and coexist,a Borgesian labyrinth with forking paths where multiple times and spaces can be true,and a meta-fiction which is open to all interpretations.The thesis unfolds in three chapters.Chapter one takes the ark as storyworld where real historical event takes place,and the sense of ending is created.Contradictory values towards utopian perfection are addressed,which reflect contradictory attitudes towards time and differences,and remain in ambiguous tension rather than in pure dichotomy.Chapter two discusses arks as imagined communities constructed by discourse.The contradictions in Chapter one are transformed into semiotic opposition between Self and Subject,and the inter-subjective relations keep on changing in such construction.Power is everywhere in such discourse,both oppressing and enabling its inner body,and indicating the bodily and spatial feature of the novel's text.Following the space-text-body analogy,Chapter three considers the whole novel as a thirdspace which represent meta-fictionally different historical patterns with ark motifs.By self-reflexive details designed in textual organizations,this novel offering readers various possibilities for the labyrinthine history instead of any ultimate answer or solution.