SAMUEL JEAN POZZI AND THE BELLE EPOQUE IN JULIAN BARNES’ “THE MAN IN THE RED COAT”
SAMUEL JEAN POZZI AND THE BELLE EPOQUE IN JULIAN BARNES’ “THE MAN IN THE RED COAT”

Summary/Abstract: Julian Barnes’ “The Man in the Red Coat”, the biography of the French celebrity surgeon, Samuel Jean Pozzi is, in fact, much more than the life story of an outstanding medical figure. Barnes achieved an inciting historical study of an epoque, ‘la Belle Epoque’, bringing to the foreground the most prominent figures of the time. In doing so, Barnes repeatedly states that a biographer should not refrain from acknowledging that ‘one does not know all the truth’. The Prince Edouard de Polignac, the Count Robert de Montesquiou, Marcel Proust, Oscar Wilde, Joris-Karl Huysmans, Sarah Bernhardt, Henry James, James Whistler, Guy de Maupassant, Stephane Mallarme – and not only – are part of Pozzi’s dazzling circle of contemporaries. But “The Man in the Red Coat” is not a succession of linear events of the epoque. It is the pretext for amazing artistic and literary discussions, and an interesting depiction of the exaggerations and excesses of the period between the 1870s until the First World War. This article aims at showing how Julian Barnes succeeds in bridging the gap between the beginning of the twentieth century and our times. By alluding to recent events, especially Brexit, the author points out similarities between ‘la fin de siecle’ and the present. What we do not know is whether English-European ‘cultural/ literary’ exchanges will be the same after Brexit. Probably not!

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