Brain Text and Sphinx Factor: An Ethical Interpretation of Adultery in Julian Barnes's Fiction

• Main Author: Tang, Yili
• Format: text
• Published: Archīum Ateneo 2024
• Subjects: adultery; brain text; Julian Barnes; Sphinx factor; ethical choice
• Online Access: https://archium.ateneo.edu/kk/vol1/iss37/25; https://archium.ateneo.edu/context/kk/article/1896/viewcontent/KK_2037_2C_202021_2025_20Forum_20Kritika_20on_20Ethical_20Literary_20Criticism_2C_20Brain_20Text_20and_20New_20Readings_20of_20World_20Literature_20__20Tang.pdf
• Institution: Ateneo De Manila University

The theme of adultery occupies a central position in literature as it features intense emotions and conflicts between the self and others in its interplay of loyalty and illicit desire. From the perspective of ethical literary criticism, brain text and Sphinx factor are two critical terms that help us explore the value of adultery as a fictional theme. As one of the basic forms of a material carrier that literary work relies on, brain text stores human beings’ cognition and perception as memory in its special biological form, interacting with the Sphinx factor which is composed of two parts — human factor and animal factor. This article examines the interactions between different brain texts of adultery and the Sphinx factor in Julian Barnes’s novels Metroland, Before She Met Me and The Only Story, and unravels how he opens a space within the plot of adultery and its text for ethical play. It argues that Barnes uses adultery to explore the ethical function of the brain by illustrating each figure’s brain texts and the interplay of the Sphinx factor in the love triangle (the adulterer/adulteress, the betrayed spouse, and the adulterous lover). The protagonists in these novels continuously combine and modify a series of brain texts, resulting in different combinations and the interplay of the Sphinx factor, which in turn affect the formation of brain texts and ultimately lead to different ethical choices. Barnes’s stories of adultery are ethical tales through which aspects of the human condition and human nature are put on display.