- tY>_"""""'-
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Julian Barnes and the Displacement of Adultery
Merritt Moseley
University of North Carolina at Asheville
As any reader will register and Tony Tanner demonstrates,
adultery is at the heart of the novel tradition-wherever you
choose to locate that tradition, or begin it (it doesn't even have to
be Moll Planders)-and the tripartite relation on which adultery is
constructed provides the structure for many of our classic texts.
Tanner suggests that "it is the unstable triangularity of adultery,
rather than the static symmetry of marriage, that is the generative
form of Western literature as we know it" (12). Tanner goes on to
comment at length on three classic fictions, and it may not surprise
us that two of them are French, and one is Madame Bovary.
Rightly or wrongly adultery has come to seem the subject par
excellence of the French novel, if only because the greater straight-
forwardness of French writers in dealing with it by contrast with
" their English and American counterparts. Madame Bovary was
published in 1857, just ten years after Dombey and Son, but its
attitude to adultery seems more modern by a hundred years.
Where Dickens's adulterer, or would-be adulterer, must be
"smashed to atoms" by a railroad train, Flaubert's looks on with
bland contempt as the ruined husband puts the blame on fate.
Flaubert's narrator declares that "Emma was finding in adultery all
the banalities of marriage" (272). For Anglo-Saxon authors it can
sometimes seem harder to surrender the excitement of adultery
than to acknowledge the banality of marriage.
The relevance of these observations to English novelist Julian
Barnes is multiple. One is that his name is inexorably associated
with that of Flaubert, as the best known of his nine novels is still
the 1984 Flaubert'sParrot. Beyondthat he is a dedicated
Francophile, steeped in the culture, both literary and otherwise, of
France. Most of his novels include French settings in part if not
wholly and France is always available as a norm against which
English life and culture can be measured. It would be surprising,
then, if his fictions did not include the kind of delicate analysis of
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adulterous love which we also find in French literature. His first
novel, Metroland, includes an adulterous wife; so does his last, or
latest, Love, Etc.; and a woman's adultery is at the heart of
Flaubert's_Parrot, Before She Met Me, and Talking It Over, as
well. I am interested in examining Barnes's use of adultery as an
important element in his fiction, particularly in how his adulteries
differ from the usual fictional infidelities.
One important distinction to make is between real adulteries
and pseudo-, or symbolic, or imaginary adulteries. Christopher
Lloyd of Metroland has an adulterous wife, and so had Geoffrey
Braithwaite, the narrator of Flaubert's Parrot. By contrast, Graham
Hendrick, in Before She Met Me, and Stuart Hughes, of Talking It
Over, have less cause for outrage though they get much more out-
raged.
I should also point out that Barnes's works contain adulterous
men as well as women; in the most sensational one of them all,
BeforeSheMet Me, where the husband ends his own life and that
of another man after becoming insanely jealous of his wife, the
marriage at the heart of the plot began in an adulterous affair, and
the wife he marries has had, while single, many affairs with mar-
ried men. Barnes is not claiming a masculine exceptionalism; he is
just more interested in the situation of a married man whose wife
is unfaithful to him. As Tony Tanner points out the classic novel
of adultery is about the wife's unfaithfulness, so Barnes is in good
company.
Mark I. Millington and Alison S. Sinclair, following a survey of
cuckolds in literature, declare that
there are two models or paradigms for the portrayal of the
offended husband: either he is mocked for the situation he
finds himself in, or he is admired for his attitude and action
in the face of his wife's infidelity. That is, he is portrayed
either as a cuckold or as a man of honour. (1)
This sounds eminently sensible, and we can all think of examples
which demonstrate its accuracy, but it hardly applies to Barnes's
works at all.
Let us begin with the genuinely betrayed husbands. In
Barnes's first novel, the underrated Metroland, Christopher Lloyd
is a self-conscious Bohemian from his earliest youth. He and his
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 friend Toni "rebel"-in the safest possible ways-against their
bourgeois milieu. Their rebellion takes the form of "doing"
French:
French writers were always fighting one another-defend-
ing and purifying the language, ousting slang words, writ-
. ing prescriptive dictionaries, getting arrested, being prose-
cuted for obscenity, being aggressively Parnassian, scrab-
bling for seats in the Academie, intriguing for literary
prizes, getting exiled [and, of course, having affairs]. The
idea of the sophisticated tough attracted us greatly. (16)
Despite their officious hostility to suburbia, their histrionic spleen,
their enumeration of epats and ecras (from epater Ie bourgeois and
ecrasez l'infame-their examples consist of acts like making a face
at a middle-aged woman in the museum) scored against the pur-
blind society represented by their parents, the boys are actually
quite conventional. Even Christopher's time in Paris (1968, when
he lived through the student uprisings without becoming aware of
them) leaves him quite conventional. Aged thirty, and challenged
by his friend Toni to explain why he is faithful to his wife, he can
think of only the sketchiest justifications, mostly relying on reci-
procity. This leaves him vulnerable when, rather virtuously reveal-
ing to his wife that a woman at a party had made a pass at him,
he blunders into the following unwanted exchange:
"I only suppose I was thinking, well, if we're both about
thirty now: it was all in general terms really-I suppose I was
wondering if we were going to end up sleeping with other peo
pIe ever."
"You mean, you were wondering if you were." It was like
having someone constantly resetting a table you thought you'd
laid. "And the answer is, or course you will," she said, look
ing up at me. . . . "I mean, probably not now, not here; not, I
hope to God, ever in this house. But some time. I've never
doubted that. Some time. It's too interesting not to."
When Chris protests that he was really only thinking in terms of
"philosophy," Marion calmly replies,
"even if you aren't asking, you may as well know that the
answer is Yes I did once, and Yes it was only once, and No
it didn't make any difference to us at the time as we weren't
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getting along perfectly anyway, and No I don't particularly
regret it, and No you haven't met or heard of him. . . . And
I've never been tempted since, and with Amy now I shouldn't
think I will be, and it's all right, Chris, it's really all all right."
(162-63)
And what follows? Chris decides that jealousy, anger and petu-
lance can wait until later; feels a bit of pride, thinks it's interesting
and quite funny. Is he either mocked for his situation, or admired
for his action? Neither. He takes no action, though as he falls
asleep he thinks "Perhaps it really was all right?"
Reflecting on that "all right" provokes speculation on the con-
nections between adulthood and adultery. Is adultery an inevitable
part of being an adult (a married adult, of course) as Marion
seems to propose? Is it a sign of maturity, or sophistication, that
Christopher responds as he does to her declaration? Is he "being
very adult" about it? We're given little to go on. This is very
nearly the ending of the book, which has an uncomplicatedly
happy tone.
That Barnes does not think adultery is inevitable or simply "all
right" (though perhaps it is complexly_all right) is evident from the
subtle account given by Geoffrey Braithwaite, the narrator of
Flaubert's Parrot. A retired doctor, Braithwaite is a student of
Flaubert. In fact, as he ruefully thinks, in trying to account for his
wife Ellen's despair, "unlike me she didn't have some rash devotion
to a dead foreigner to sustain her" (166). The devotion to
Flaubert, one becomes increasingly aware through the book, is a
distraction from thinking about Ellen. Braithwaite is unusually
painstaking; the novel details his search for the original stuffed
parrot Flaubert may have had access to while writing one of his
Trois Contes.
Onto his discoveries, variously presented, of such matters as a
Flaubert Bestiary and The Train-Spotter's Guide to Flaubert
Braithwaite drops such comments as this one:
Look, writers aren't perfect, I want to cry, any more than
husbands and wives are perfect. The only unfailing rule is,
If they seem so, they can't be. I never thought my wife was
perfect. I loved her, but I never deceived myself. I remem-
ber. . But I'll keep that for another time. (76)
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 -----
After a few more abortive references and teasing hints, he faces up
to his wife's adultery (which his exhaustive Flaubert researches
have been helping him avoid) in a chapter called "Pure Story":
I loved her; we were happy; I miss her. She didn't love
me; we were unhappy miss her. . . . Was she loved too
much? Most people can't be loved too much, but perhaps
Ellen could. Or perhaps her concept of love was simply
different: why do we always assume it's the same for every-
one else? . . . At first I was hurt; at first I minded, I thought
less of myself. My wife went to bed with other men:
should I worry about that? I didn't go to bed with other
women: should I worry about that? Ellen was always nice
to me: should I worry about that? Not nice out of adulter-
ous guilt, but just nice. . . . I didn't have affairs because I
wasn't interested enough to do so . .. Ellen did have
affairs, because, I suppose, she was interested enough.
(162-63)
Braithwaite's most poignant sadness is because his wife is dead not
because she was unfaithful.
Compare him and Christopher Lloyd, those accepting, under-
standing cuckolds, with Stuart Hughes, the furious, uncompre-
hending non-cuckold of Talking It Over. In the course of this
novel Stuart's wife Gillian does, in fact, fall in love with Stuart's
best friend Oliver, divorces Stuart and marries Oliver. Oliver falls
in love with Gillian on her wedding day, decides to win her and,
with considerable dedication and ingenuity, does so. Perhaps
unusually for Barnes, this novel gives the views of all three charac-
ters (and some minor players) as Gillian's marriage to Stuart
morphs into marriage to Oliver. She thinks, for instance, "I feel
guilty because I find Oliver attractive," and "What's happening? ..
.Maybe what I did was an act of complicity" (114, 105). The pivot
in this novel comes not when Gillian and Oliver becomelovers-
for that happens only after her marriage is finished, despite what
her husband suspects-but when she commits an act of emotional
betrayal. Stuart thinks, "That's the proof that she's having an
affair with him-she betrayed me"-by telling the truth, which
they had promised to keep secret, about how they met. The bal-
ance has tipped and by the end of the novel the two men have
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exchanged roles, not just in Gillian's life.
In Love, Etc., Barnes picks up the story of this unstable trian-
gularity ten years on. Stuart, who has moved to America, married
and divorced, and become rich and self-confident, decides to win
back Gillian from Oliver. There is an impressive symmetry in this
variation on the original story, as Stuart makes himself useful and
attractive to Gillian while her husband impotently fumes about
what he suspects is happening. Again the shift in fidelity comes
not in an act of sex but in a betrayal of trust, as Gillian tells Stuart
Oliver's most painful secret.
It is in this two-part story that the betrayed husband behaves
as, classically, betrayed husbands are supposed to do. While fear-
ing that he is being made ridiculous, Stuart actually behaves as a
man of honour, takes decisive action (so decisive, in fact, that he
makes himself once again desirable to his former wife). The pecu-
liar feature is that Stuart's wife is not adulterous in the technical
sense. She has not been sexually unfaithful to him, she has not
adulterated their marriage by the admixture of another sexual
partner; still his pain is powerful and it is the emotional betrayal,
rather than the later and almost unnoticed sexual one which is
serious to him.
Gillian's mother is French, a sort of sage commentator on mat-
ters of the heart, and she says, in Love, Etc.,
Is he [Oliver] faithful to Gillian? Don't tell me if you know
the answer. I hope he is, of course. But not for why you
think-that she is my daughter and infidelity is wrong.
No, I think it would be bad for Oliver. There are many
husbands-and wives-who are made cheerful by adultery,
made better able to ear their lives. Who was it who said
that the chains of marriage are so heavy that sometimes in
needs three people to carry them? (90)
The effect of adultery on both husband and wife, and what consti-
tutes adultery, is at the heart of Barnes's most powerful treatment
of this subject, Before She Met Me. "The first time Graham
Hendrick watched his wife commit adultery," the novel begins, "he
didn't mind at all. He even found himself chuckling. It never
occurred to him to reach out a shielding hand towards his daugh-
ter's eyes" (9). Graham is complacent because he is watching a
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film, one in which his wife, formerly a minor actress, appeared in
bed with a man. His embittered ex-wife has deceived him into tak-
ing his daughter to this film so that the little girl will think the new
wife is a "tart." In idle conversation after he gets home Graham
discovers that during the making of the film Ann had had a mean-
ingles~ affair with her co-star.
This begins an increasingly serious preoccupation with Ann's
previous lovers-both her real ones and, more oddly, the ones she
had on film. Graham travels all over greater London to see his
wife's films, which he watches obsessively, later on questioning her
about her fellow actors. Then lurid nightmares about Ann begin.
For instance,
The Carwash dream was compered by Larry Pitter, with
whom Ann committed adultery in The Rumpus, a stteet-
gang movie Graham had managed to catch twice in the last
few months, once at the ABC Turnpike Lane and once out
at Romford. Ann played "Third Gang Girl" and appeared
in several inept mood-setting scenes where the gang mem-
bers strutted and pranced before their greasy harem. (88)
Soon he is more obsessed. One day he suffers because
He couldn't, today, go to any cinema in London or its
immediate suburbs and see a film in which his wife com-
mitted adultery; nor could he see any film in which his
wife, though remaining chaste on screen, had committed
adultery off-screen with one of the actors. The two cate-
gories, he noticed, were beginning to get blurred in his
head.
That left two further categories of film he could still
catch up on: other films featuring actors with whom his
wife had committed adultery onscreen (but not off); and
other films featuring actors with whom his wife had com-
mitted adultery offscreen (but not on). (92)
The "adultery," we should remember, is all asynchronous. He
wasn't married to her (nor she to anyone else) at the time she
made these films or slept with these actors. Sometimes Graham is
sensible enough to know that retrospective adultery is illogical:
"Why should the past make you crazy with emotion? . . . What if
it wasn't something in the nature of marriage. . . but something in
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the nature of love? That was a much less pleasant thought: that
the thing everyone pursued always went wrong, automatically,
inevitably, chemically" (115, 117).
Barnes has very carefully worked out some of the consequences
of Graham's adultery hysteria. One is his lurid dreams about his
wife's sex life, starring bit actors he knows from her old films;
another is the comic effort to find a place for their vacation where
she has never been with another lover-"he imagined himself in
one of those fringe countries, anoraked against the cold and sip-
ping a glass of goat's-hoof liquor" (98); and another is his wife's
growing distaste for him as his jealousy, which he thinks of as a
tribute to his love for her, makes her love him less.
The short novel comes to a climax when Graham finds, or
thinks he finds, evidence of an old affair between Ann and the
friend who introduced them-this is described as "the clenching
evidence Graham had been looking for" (147)-and murders the
friend. When Ann finds him, still in the friend's apartment, he tries
to comfort her: "he muttered the first words he'd spoken since
arriving in the flat. 'It's all right.' The words calmed her, even
though she knew they shouldn't." (173 The next thing she hears is
his involuntary grunt as he cuts his own throat.
I don't know if Graham's words to Ann-"It's all right"-are
meant as forgiveness for her "adultery" or if they echo for Barnes
the words Marion speaks to Chris in Metro/and. The man whose
wife's adultery was all "before she met me"-i.e. not adultery at
all-is driven mad by dreams of licentiousness, and rage, and dis-
memberment, while Marion, after acknowledging her real adultery,
assures her husband "it's all right, Chris, it's really all all right"
(163). And in the economy of this very different novel, and
Barnes's unusual career-length exploration of this subject, while the
symbolic or imaginary sort is the occasion for bitterness and mur-
der, real adultery is, in some complex and serious way, all all right.
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 - ,- -- - --. - -

Works Cited

Barnes,Julian. Flaubert'sParrot. New York: Alfred A, Knopf,

1985.
Before She Met Me. London: Picador, 1982.
-. Love, Etc.London: Jonathan Cape, 2000.
-. Metroland. London: The Book Club, 1980.
-. Talking It Over. London: Picador, 1991.
Flaubert,Gustave. MadameBovary, trans. Mildred Marmur.
New York: New American Library, 1964.
Millington, Mark 1.and Alison S. Sinclair."The Honourable
Cuckold: Models of Masculine Defence," Comparative
Literature Studies 29 (1992): 1-19.
Tanner, Tony. Adultery in the Novel: Contract and Transgression.
Baltimore:Johns Hopkins UP, 1979.

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