The Noise of Time

Shostakovich’s life story as a composer behind the Iron Curtain is told here by Julian Barnes in the style of limited-omniscient third person narrative, combined with a narrator who intervenes indirectly but is always present. Writing about power is not new to Barnes – his 1992 novel Porcupine concerned a former dictator in a post-communist society. He has also written before about famous artists, most notably in Flaubert’s Parrot (1984). One might say he brings these two themes together here, with a sympathetic view of a composer whose work and political outlook are compromised by the era in which he lives; yet he strives to compose all the same, and to make use of such tools are irony to deal with the question of State approval under a totalitarian system.

I’ve encouraged my students to read The Noise of Time because we are studying literature and film about (and written during) the Cold War era. Much of this is western in outlook; here an established western writer looks back on an era when propaganda and censorship were part of the daily life of citizens of Europe on either side of the ‘wall’, but where those on the Communist side faced the reality of purges and prison-camps. Standing up for principles, in the manner of Clooney’s depiction of Murrow in Good Night and Good Luck, only tells half of the picture; can we expect the same personal integrity when not only your career and reputation is on the line, but your life and the lives of your relatives and associates as well? One might ask, of course, if it is merely a case of Cold War nostalgia to write about Russia in the 1930s-1960s today. It might be the case, however, that the dilemmas of the artist are timeless and/or that darker times may be with us again soon. Literature isn’t always about the here and now, but about the past and the future.

I finished reading The Noise of Time a few months ago, and so I will rely on a few pink bookmarks to include a few quotations of things that struck me. This following anecdote reminded me of how French Fries were renamed Freedom Fries after 9/11 in the period when France was demonised for not supporting the ‘war on terror’ (or, at least, the invasion of Iraq) under George W. Bush. Thinking of Stalin, the narrator recalls: ‘Who said the age of miracles was past? And all done with words. So, for instance, French bread. Everyone use to know it as such, and had been calling it such for years. Then one day, French bread disappeared from the shops. Instead, there was ‘city bread’ – exactly the same, of course, but now the patriotic product of a soviet city’ (p.84). Barnes (or the narrator) goes on from here to consider how in such conditions, ‘truth's disguise was irony’. Further, ‘in an ideal world, a young man should not be an ironical person. At that age, irony prevents growth, students the imagination’ (p.85). So, our cultural conditions, our immediate history, affect our ways of thinking.

At a time when Shostakovich’s music is banned, and then, by Stalin’s decree, rehabilitated, Barnes has the composer ask the profound questions about the meaning of art and its relationship with time. This quotation below relates to the book’s title, and the central motif (to use a musical term):

‘What could be put up against the noise of time? Only that music which is inside ourselves – the music of our being – which is transformed by some into real music. Which, over the decades, if it is strong and true and pure enough to drown out the noise of time, is transformed into the whisper of history. That was what he held to.’ (p.125).

If this sounds rather grand, remember that Barnes also shows Shostakovich as a terrified man who is aware of his own cowardice and yet survives, something of an achievement in itself. In old age, the composer doesn’t see himself as heroic but simply unable to ‘solve his intolerable dilemma by killing himself’, since ‘he was not Shakespearean …' Indeed, 'now that he had lived too long, he was beginning to see his own life as a farce’ (p.164). This sentiment reminds me of Milan Kundera’s early novel, The Joke, in which an ironic scribble across a postcard changes a party-member’s life forever. I’m not sure I have the life experience of Kundera, or the historical empathy of Barnes to be able to fully comprehend how the themes of such works of art reflect the lived experiences of many millions in the Cold War period, but that, surely, is one of the reasons to read fiction.

Speaking personally, I was probably guilty of being ironic when young without the associated misfortune that might justify the need to disguise truth in irony. I first ready Barnes in my late adolescent years – and I believed him then in a way that is hard to comprehend now. I think it is because he spoke earnestly to my cynicism (I am thinking of such novels as A History of the World in 10 ½ Chapters and Talking it Over). The fact that Barnes has kept writing about such themes as truth and art well into his mature age is, I think, a compliment to his ‘soul’ as an artist. I’m not going to join the Martin Amis camp, in other words, and see this as all either naïve, or posed-idealism. To paraphrase the end of the novel – music belongs to music (not to musicology or history). And writing belongs to writing, not to critics or to schools of thought. All the rest (one only wishes!) is silence - or the noise of time.