The connection between history and art is similar to the law of causality in physics, otherwise known as the law of “cause and effect”. As history progressed through multiple eras, fashions, and mentalities, so too did artistic styles and trends. Art is important in the historical field because man-made objects show how different the views of the people living then were compared to our modernized minds. This connection between art and history, sometimes marked by irony and incongruity, is addressed in A History of the World in 10? by Julian Barnes? Chapters. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an original essaySalman Rushdie describes Julian Barnes' A History of the World in 10? Chapters as a “fiction about what history might be,” a “brilliant, elaborate scribble around the edges of what we know we think versus what we think we know.” It is a novel composed of stories that trace the history of the world, changing the narrative mode in each chapter, thus creating different types of stories in the reader's mind: a drama, a documentary or a personal narrative. For example, we experience the point of view of a woodworm who entered Noah's Ark, then change perspective and read a complete analysis of The Raft of Medusa, the painting by Theodore Gericault. As Steven Connor states in The English Novel in History, “A particularly marked feature of post-war fiction, (…) which establishes an important link between history and novelistic fiction is the practice of rewriting early works of fiction. Such novels are a particular effect of a more generalized sense of eternal return that seems to characterize post-war fiction.” Barnes is atomizing world history, questioning grand narratives. He is creating micro-stories that no one thought were plausible to challenge the reader to question, divide and analyze even the history of the world seen from different perspectives, which to some may seem untrue, unreliable or simply absurd. As he states in “Parenthesis,” the only chapter that doesn't have a number in front: “We make up a story to cover up the facts we don't know or can't accept; we keep some facts true and build a new story around them. Our panic and pain are relieved only by a reassuring fairy tale; we call it history." Is he telling the story of the world in just 10? chapters, and then “reworks” it or simply transforms it through “translation, adaptation, displacement, imitation, falsification, plagiarism, parody, pastiche,” as Steven Connor describes it. The analysis of the Medusa (Chapter 5: "Shipwreck") is the most relevant chapter of the book in terms of illustrating the connection between art and history. The chapter itself is an analysis of Gericault's painting, The Raft of Medusa. The first half of the chapter explains the historical events of the shipwreck and the efforts made by the crew to survive, describing all the grotesque and inhumane methods they were forced to use (dehydration, starvation and even cannibalism). In the second part, the narrator examines the painting and describes why Géricault felt the need to “soften” the harsh reality to make the story more reasonable, less grotesque, and to respect the guidelines of aestheticism imposed by the Romantic movement. in French painting of the time: “Truth to life, at the beginning, of course; however, once the process has begun, the truth for art is the greatest faithfulness. The accident never happened as described; the numbers are imprecise; cannibalism is reduced to a literary reference... The raft was cleaned as if for... a monarch bysick stomach: the strips of human flesh have been taken away, and everyone's hair is as smooth as a painter's newly bought brush. This quote explains exactly how “Catastrophe became art”: the author actively helps the reader observe how a work of art can be used to manipulate people and history. The first chapter, "The clandestine", however, is the axis of the whole book, each chapter being linked in one way or another to the Ark or to Noah, the novel itself being "a postmodern and post-Christian series of variations on the theme of Noah's Ark". The chapter is written from the point of view of a woodworm, who describes Noah as a common, drunken man, “who thinks of his menagerie as a 'floating canteen' and devours many endangered species.” He never took into account the fact that plovers' feathers turn white during the winter and decided to extinguish it for the sake of other animals. He killed the unicorns who were "strong, honest, fearless, impeccably groomed and a sailor who never knew a moment's nausea" and consumed them (which shocked the entire animal kingdom), despite the fact that the unicorn had saved the Ham's wife from falling into the sea. sea. The worm blames God for Noah's habit because it is an “oppressive pattern.” He then continues the verbal irony when he talks about Noah's keeping methods: “As soon as he saw the plovers turn white, he decided that they were nauseating, and in tender consideration for the rest of the ship's health he boiled them with a little seaweed. sideways." The chapter may provoke some Christians because of the way Barnes pokes fun at one of the most important events written in the Bible. In this respect I agree with Rushdie's comment: "The playful irreverence of this chapter would make informative and no doubt shocking reading for some of today's religious extremists" (Salman Rushdie, 238), finding myself in a position to question the Bible even more than I already do. What if Noah really was a drunk responsible for the extinction of so many mythological creatures? We may never find out the truth. What Barnes's tries to show us, using the theme of Noah and the Ark's hero status, is that the story is heavily influenced by art and the guidelines imposed by people and movements. . Furthermore, we forget that history is written by the victor who, of course, writes it in such a way that his part is not only more glorious than it should be, but also omits details (as in chapter 5), causing us to reject other perspectives that they might actually be truthful and useful. The perspective of the woodworm is still present in the third chapter, "The wars of religion", in which the insects, called bestioles (Latin term for bug or insect), are accused of "criminal intervention" for having devoured the bishop's chair and the church of Saint-Michel until it collapsed. “A church, being a vessel of souls, is also a kind of ark.” (Salman Rushdie, p. 241). The inhabitants ask for the excommunication of the beasts responsible for the "diabolical work". Plaidoyer des habitans, the prosecutor, then described the inhabitant's victimization as "humble faith" and "impeccable honesty", explaining the absence of the bestioles: "too trepid on the part of this court to let anything else flow from their mouths that the clear source of truth." The statements used in these quotes satirize the accusation. However, the court blames woodworms for naturally eating wood by exaggerating the incident in which the bishop of Besanson, Huge, fell from the throne: “O malevolent day! Oh malevolent invaders! And how the Bishop fell… thrown against his will into a state of imbecility”, thus parodying the fall of the Bishop. In describing his examination of the “crime scene,” Plaidoyer says he discovered an “unnatural infestation” inone of the legs of the chair and to add that the criminals had “secretly and darkly carried out their diabolical work, [and] so devoured the leg that the Bishop caused it to fall… from the heavens of light into the darkness of imbecility”. This may be an inappropriate exaggeration because woodworms infest wood naturally. Ultimately, the villager's "successful prosecution of the woodworms who end up being excommunicated... is ironically undermined by the conclusion in which the closing words... have been eaten by the woodworms" (Finney 63). Barnes satirizes recorded history throughout the entire chapter, parodies a real event in history, and tells an alternate history. The half chapter of the total of 10? is represented by "Parenthesis", in which Barnes speaks directly to the reader about his vision of love "like El Greco staring at his masterpiece The Burial of Count Orgaz" (Salman Rushdie, p. 239). Salman further states that this half-chapter "saves the day" because Barnes' vision of the story is "what lets this book down" and "it's just too thin to support the entire fabric." In Barnes' vision, love is a kind of ark on which two people could be saved and Rushdie interprets this idea as "the opposite of the story is love", which for some might seem "like a life preserver, like a raft". Barnes analyzes the phrase “I love you” in different languages ​​(English, German, French, Russian and finally Italian) and compares the different structure of each of them. Imagine a “phonic conspiracy among the world's languages. They make the conference decision that the phrase must always sound like something to be earned, to be fought for, to be worthy of. In German it is a "night whisper, with the voice of a cigarette, with that happy rhyme of subject and object", in French "a different procedure, in which the subject and object are first removed from the way, so that the vowel long time of adoration can be savored to the full", in Russian there is an "underline of difficulties, of obstacles to overcome", and in Italian: "it perhaps sounds a little too much like an aperitif, but it is full of structural conviction with subject and verb, the agent and the action, contained in the same word.” It also describes why love does not mean that the couple is happy, not necessarily because they do not love each other enough, but because happiness is something subjective and can only be found alone and not together with love, but “Maybe love it is essential because it is not necessary”. Rushdie adds, with regret, that “here too one wishes that Barnes the essayist had stepped aside for Barnes the thoroughbred novelist; instead of a disquisition on love the thing itself could have been given. “Don't talk about love,” as Eliza Doolittle sang, “show it to me.” “The History of the World in 10 Chapters is in all these ways a postmodernist joust of the unexpected, a complex novel that speaks on behalf of those who have no voice: the losers of history. Barnes uses irony and uses a wide range of narrative voices to form a single parody of the story limited to just 10 chapters. Using this unusual technique to write his novel, Barnes criticizes the authority of the story is best described by the law of causality. history is the action and art the reaction. Artists told the story as seen by those they worked for, such as kings and the Church in a certain sense, since they only had to paint or sculpt one version of events more that of the winners, they were censoring themselves. Furthermore, they had to respect certain rules of style and morality. This is reflected in the fifth chapter, in which Géricault had to eliminate the grotesque elements of his painting from a singular and subjective perspective. Without a way of