Barry Lyndon: Kubrick's Cinema of Disparity

Abstract

When Thackeray in the 1840's wrote The Memoirs of Barry Lyndon, Esq., he did so during a period of experimenting with the aesthetics of parody. While poking fun at the sentimentalities of the first person confessional novel, a form already worn out by Defoe and ridiculed by Fielding, Thackeray toyed with fictive forms and point of view in an age no longer impressed with an 18th century addiction to decorum in language and behavior; the language of good sense was being replaced by a fascination with the various forms and dynamics of language and thought as a means for exploring complex modes of perception. In Barry Lyndon (1844), Thackeray has its first person narrator reveal sides of his nature which remain, to the end, personally unexplored. Barry's self-exposure becomes complete only in the novel's concluding chapters and coincides with a complete absorption in his own inventions, ones which earlier stood as studied responses to the accidents of fortune and his ambition for social rank. The esquire in the novel's title may be Thackeray's initial irony. We come away from the novel realizing that early in his career Thackeray set out to examine levels of social and psychological understanding through the manipulation of such stylistic distancing devices as point of view and disparities between forms of language and perception. By the time of Vanity Fair (1847) and its style of authorial intrusion reminiscent of such 18th century fictionalists as Fielding and Sterne, Thackeray undercuts completely the authority of character and plot and, in the process, growing and alternative 19th century views of the novel as psychological or social history. Such a fictional strategy invites the reader to recognize, if not revel in, the various disparities between the novel's apparent content and its form, and to appreciate the artist's order of perception as existing apart from that of the many characters who inhabit his vanity fair. More emphatically