Barnes’s (2016) most recent novel, The Noise of Time, is an account of the Russian composer Dmitri Shostakovich’s life during Stalin’s regime. Barnes’s narrative is a historical biography focalized entirely through Shostakovich’s perspective. By looking back on his life in old age, Shostakovich tries to understand the causes of his own suffering and how his identity has split “under the pressure of Power” (Barnes 2016, 155).1 He focuses on his three stressful encounters with Power, which take place every twelve years from 1936 to 1960, and their impact on his life. This technique is in line with Barnes’s writing since, as Stott (2010, 12) states, “he is very interested in answering questions concerning memory, finding ways of making the past accessible, and dealing with the tendency of wanting to change the view of the past to fit the present.” In Shostakovich’s case, the past is not much different from the present because he vicariously re-experiences his past events. His mind is haunted by a continuous set of memories, ranging from issues with his family during childhood to his artistic and political activities. Condensing the central character’s entire life, with all its contradictions, into a meaningful whole seems to be Barnes’s main concern in The Noise of Time, since in his “fiction, [he] wants to tell all stories, in all their contrariness, contradiction, and irresolvability” (quoted in Suneetha 2013, 58). Barnes’s narrative represents Shostakovich’s irresolvable situations. Following a stream of consciousness mode, the narrative binds together Shostakovich’s familial, artistic, and political life.
The Noise of Time examines trauma as a political apparatus2 of a totalitarian political power. The subject of trauma is an effect of a “perennially ironic and comic” situation (Childs 2011, 9). The central character employs irony—“all his life he had relied on irony” (173)—in order to save his art from Power’s destructive hands. From this viewpoint, The Noise of Time is a typical Barnesian narrative, as his novels, according to Tate (2011, 53), “limn a world of contingency, trauma, and absurdity.” In Preston’s (2016) words, The Noise of Time “traces the lifelong battle of one man’s conscience, one man’s art, with the insupportable exigencies of totalitarianism.” Barnes narartivizes Shostakovich’s struggle with Power and the hysterical behavior of Stalin’s regime. In discussing Stalin’s purge of Russian families, Baker and Gippenreiter (1998, 404) argue that: |
