The Connection between Art and History for Julian Barnes Biclea Karina-Teodora College

The connection between history and art is similar to the law of Causality in physics, otherwise known as the “cause and effect” law. As history progressed through multiple ages, fashions, and mentalities, so did artistic styles and tendencies. Art is important to the historic field because the objects created by man show how different were the points of view of the people living back then compared to our modernized minds. This connection between art and history, which is occasionally marked by irony and incongruity, is addressed in Julian Barnes’s A History of the World in 10 Chapters.

Salman Rushdie describes Julian Barnes’s A History of the World in 10 Chapters as a “fiction about what history might be,” a “brilliant, elaborate doodle around the margins of what we know we think about what we think we know.” It is a novel composed of short stories covering the history of the world, changing the narrative mode in each chapter, thus creating in the reader’s mind different kinds of stories: a drama, a documentary, or a personal narrative. For instance, we experience the point of view of a woodworm who infiltrated Noah’s Ark, only to have the perspective changed and read a complete analysis of The Raft of Medusa, the painting by...