Exploring the Conscience of Art

The Noise of Time (2016), Julian Barnes, Jonathan Cape

I was waiting for Barnes’ new novel for a while now after the Man Booker winning ‘The Sense of an Ending’. This new novel explores the conscience of the Russian composer Dmitri Shostakovich through an intimate third person narrator who meets him at three crucial moments of his life- as a man awaiting the repercussions of a dictator in the beginning, an ambassador of the same regime to world in the second and the torn lonely artist making his private tribulations into music praying that death liberates his art from life in the final moment. What interested me was the way we wind up with Shostakovich as he is thinking to himself what it means to be him, an artist, a Russian, a man hounded by power in public and art in private. We see with him how it all began on the wrong note for him with his name a mere echo of his father and how he shuffled through his life into the inevitable tragedy of betrayal that life set up.

We are faced with two impossible choices- to be honest, brave and dead or to be deceptive, fearful and alive. That is the kind of duality with no middle ground when power of that kind as we found in Stalinist Russia pervades life. There is no meaning to freedom and all roads lead to deception. Shostakovich’s encounters with Soviet tutors are some of the best parts of the book. They are sent to be patient with the genius, deliberately working through his stubborn mind ridden with guilt of living with such uncompromising vicissitudes. How the first tutor of the Stalinist world teaches him to begin with obeisance through remembering what it means to be part of history by teaching it to oneself. And how the last tutor encourages him to forget the past when he has barely begun to forgive. Caught between memory and forgetting, courage and cowardice, life and death, Shostakovich drowns the noise of time with music.

The larger questions we are posed with are who does art belong to? And how do you speak truth to power? Art belongs to everybody and nobody at the same time. As Shostakovich reminisces the posterity is free to do what it wants with his art, his music. It is both theirs to judge and not theirs to understand. That is because the truth in art stands all time while the truth in life is dealt with in small measures till it resembles no truth at all. With these interesting questions to explore, I found the novel intimate and interesting.