“I don’t believe in God but I miss Him”: Religion and Nostalgia in the Work of Julian Barnes
“I don’t believe in God but I miss Him”: Religion and Nostalgia in the Work of Julian Barnes

Summary/Abstract: This essay examines the significance of religion in Staring at the Sun (1986), A History of the World in 10 ½ Chapters (1989), England, England (1998) and Nothing to Be Frightened of (2008). The emphasis of the discussion is on the significance and purposefulness of religious belief in an overtly post-metaphysical world. In all Barnes’s texts one can trace a paradoxical conflict between two contending attitudes towards religion. On the one hand, religion is portrayed from the historical perspective as a cruel tool of oppression or is simply dismissed as an obsolete fable. On the other hand, it is perceived as a belief system which promised ultimate meaning, fought off nothingness and was necessary to sustain the illusion of a harmonious universe. Ultimately, Barnes’s attitude towards his loss of religion hovers between postmodern celebration and modernist nostalgia.

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