A Calling for Charlie Barnes

by Joshua Ferris

Now, I know what you’re thinking. Jake Barnes has played his hand. He sides with Charlie and can’t be trusted. He’s unreliable. Yeah, right. Like reliability exists anywhere anymore, like that’s still a thing.

If this history of Charlie Barnes has its breaks in chronology and the occasional gaping hole—if, that is, it seems an individually curated, perhaps even highly selective account of the man, and not the straight dope, as it were—well, I wouldn’t know how to write it any other way. I couldn’t possibly hope to highlight what the man himself would have highlighted or, for that matter, present the arguments he might have presented against what I have chosen to highlight.

Imagine that: for every life, not one history but as many as there are people who observed and participated in that life; hundreds, if not thousands, of accounts for just one of the billions of human beings who have lived and died, a staggering proliferation of competing narratives that, no matter how close, can never be reconciled.

I do not have a lock on the truth, provided there is such a thing, and that, in fact, when we consider the necessarily curated nature of any narrated life, its omissions as well as its trending hashtags, if you will, we are forced to conclude that every history, including our own first-person accounts, is a fiction of a sort. Or, as Wallace Stevens put it much more succinctly, “The false and true are one.”