“The Noise of Time” by Julian Barnes

As we get hold of sharp and sliding border

And listen to the buzzing sound of chime,-

Don’t we go mad amidst the motley order

And change of made-up reasons, space and time?..

Alexander Blok

It took me eight years and a degree in literary studies to get to love this great postmodernist but it was definitely worth it. I must confess that the first books by Barnes I read as a student were beyond my understanding and therefore beyond my interest but since than I discovered a lot of his works that made me fall in love with his writing. “The Noise of Time” is definitely one of them.

This book is a perfect example of intermediality (several types of art combined) and it throws its reader into the majestic world of classical music telling about one of the most prominent composers of the previous century Dmitri Shostakovich and his complicated relations with Soviet authorities.

It’s widely known that Soviet Union was not the most creative environment because of the great influence of ideology and censorship. Julian Barnes chooses to discuss the opposition of art and censorship during the period of Stalin rule when the problem was the most acute. Not only the topics and ideas that art was allowed to express were strictly limited, the “inappropriate” work of art could lead its creator to Siberian colonies or even right to the better world. In these conditions, young Shostakovich is struggling to find a compromise between the truth in his compositions and the safety of his family, the qualms of his consciousness and the fears about his life.

The author gives the reader many questions to consider: how much space is there for art in a totalitarian state? Can a censored work be considered a piece of art or is it just a form of political statement? Can a composer (writer/actor, etc.) undergo compromises with his consciousness and still be called a genius?  

What I liked most about the image of Shostakovich is that the author doesn’t idealize him, he describes the composer as a simple person with his own fears, doubts and mistakes. Although the novel is not a biography and the main aim of Julian Barnes is to discuss the issues of art rather than to describe a historic personality, the image is very realistic, as the author has done a profound research. Factual and imaginary episodes are so closely connected and blended that for an average reader who hasn’t studied the history of arts and the biography of Shostakovich it is almost impossible to guess which parts were invented by Barnes himself.

The novel is presented in the form of the composer’s contemplations at three different milestones of his life. The first one takes place during one of the nights when Shostakovich was afraid of the sudden knock at the door which would inform him about the arrival of NKVD and the upcoming execution. The second part is set in an airplane flying from the USA to the Soviet Union, in which the composer returns from the official visit and remembers the speeches he had to give and more compromises he had to take. The third part takes place already after Stalin’s death and depict the inner conflict of Dmitri Dmitriyevich where on the one side of wages are his achievements and on the other the shame for the moment when he had to be dishonest to survive.

The problem of honesty in both life and art is of the greatest interest for the author and one of the most disputable in the literary history. The views on this issue have changed depending on the period, county and movement. The decadents proclaimed “art for art’s sake” believing that art impersonates beauty and has nothing to do with the truth about reality. Gustave Flaubert wanted the artists to live within “an ivory tower” taking the problems and themes for their works from within their minds and take no notice of what the readers, the authorities or the criticists say. But how possible was this attitude to Shostakovich if in doing so he literary would have signed a death sentence either for his works which would have remained in his drawer till the end of his days or even more, or to himself and his family? The naturalists beginning from Emile Zola believed that art should depict the reality just as it is, in the smallest detail, which again the censorship would not allow to do.

The times were tough. The criticists were “knew as much about music as a pig knows about oranges”, “bureaucrats assessed musical output as they did other categories of output; there were established norms, and deviations from those norms” all the artists were expected to be “the engineers of human souls” and with their works help to bring up proper Soviet Citizens.

And that is what Barnes calls “the noise of time”. All the factors that surround the composer (or an artist in general), all the restrictions, conventions, censorship, ideology, everything that ties or conditions art in a certain historical period is the “noise”.

“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”.

“The noise of time” and “the whisper of the history” are the main concepts and leitmotifs of the novel. The former was taken by the author from the memoirs of Osip Mandelstam who in his turn used a term invented by Alexander Blok in one of his poems. Although all three of them – Mandelstam, Blok and Barnes’s Shostakovich used it to speak about the 20^th century, it can indeed be applied to any other period as in every period and in every country there are some obstacles an artist has to overcome to be eventually heard and remembered.

“The whisper of history” means something important and memorable that people create and that influences the life of many, like the symphonies and waltzes of Shostakovich or the novels of Barnes. And, however loud is the noise, a real genius can always be heard above it.

“Art belongs to everybody and nobody. Art belongs to all time and no time. Art belongs to those who create it and those who savour it. Art no more belongs to the People and the Party than it once belonged to the aristocracy and the patron. Art is the whisper of history, heard above the noise of time”.