Page 49 - Vinkler, Jonatan, Ana Beguš and Marcello Potocco. Eds. 2019. Ideology in the 20th Century: Studies of literary and social discourses and practices. Koper: University of Primorska Press
P. 49
Fiction and Eschatology: The Politics of Fear in Julian Barnes’ The Sense of an Ending 49
tion (‘One’), and then he becomes upset, and as life goes on he almost gets
into a state of panic because of the feeling of a missed life (‘Two’). Web-
ster repeats and contradicts himself, accumulates enough memory to cre-
ate the past and ‘story’ in the traditional sense of the word.
The first part of the novel refers to several episodes related to Tony
Webster’s growing up with his friends, until the moment of separation to
go to studies in the 1960s. It is important to say that the narrator imme-
diately suggests that he tells only one possible version of the events that
actually happened: “Again, I must stress that this is my reading now of
what happened then. Or rather, my memory now of my reading then of
what was happening at the time” (Barnes 2011, 41). What is the content
of that memory? Skepticism was introduced as the principle of under-
standing from the first sentence, which reads: “I remember, in no particu-
lar order” (Barnes 2011, 4). As we shall find out while carefully reading
the novel, Webster remembers a few scenes that have become the con-
tent of his consciousness, whether they have been experienced by him or
he has been obsessively imagining them. The skeptic continues his narra-
tive campaign by claiming that we live in time, but we fail to understand
it. He had in mind the everyday time, not the speculative time of philoso-
phy or physics: “And I’m not referring to theories about how it bends and
doubles back, or may exist elsewhere in parallel versions. No, I mean or-
dinary, everyday time, which clocks and watches assure us passes regular-
ly: tick-tock, click-clock. Is there anything more plausible than a second
hand?” (Barnes 2011, 4).
The narrator has in mind an excerpt from Frank Kermode’s book,
which is worth mentioning in a more comprehensive statement:
Let us take a very simple example, the ticking of a clock. We ask what it
says: and we agree that it says tick-tock. By this fiction we humanize it, make
it talk our language. Of course, it is we who provide the fictional difference
between the two sounds; tick is our word for a physical beginning, tock our
word for an end. … The clock’s tick-tock I take to be a model of what we call a
plot, an organization that humanizes time by giving it form; and the inter-
val between tock and tick represents purely successive, disorganized time of
the sort that we need to humanize (Kermode 2000, 44–5).
Several pages later Kermode adds that in every plot there is an escape
from synchronicity and, at least to a certain degree, deviations from the
norm of ‘reality’ (Kermode 2000, 50). This is exactly what the narrator
tells right at the beginning of the novel: the flow of time is subject to our
opinions; there are earthly time and supposed human destiny. It seems
tion (‘One’), and then he becomes upset, and as life goes on he almost gets
into a state of panic because of the feeling of a missed life (‘Two’). Web-
ster repeats and contradicts himself, accumulates enough memory to cre-
ate the past and ‘story’ in the traditional sense of the word.
The first part of the novel refers to several episodes related to Tony
Webster’s growing up with his friends, until the moment of separation to
go to studies in the 1960s. It is important to say that the narrator imme-
diately suggests that he tells only one possible version of the events that
actually happened: “Again, I must stress that this is my reading now of
what happened then. Or rather, my memory now of my reading then of
what was happening at the time” (Barnes 2011, 41). What is the content
of that memory? Skepticism was introduced as the principle of under-
standing from the first sentence, which reads: “I remember, in no particu-
lar order” (Barnes 2011, 4). As we shall find out while carefully reading
the novel, Webster remembers a few scenes that have become the con-
tent of his consciousness, whether they have been experienced by him or
he has been obsessively imagining them. The skeptic continues his narra-
tive campaign by claiming that we live in time, but we fail to understand
it. He had in mind the everyday time, not the speculative time of philoso-
phy or physics: “And I’m not referring to theories about how it bends and
doubles back, or may exist elsewhere in parallel versions. No, I mean or-
dinary, everyday time, which clocks and watches assure us passes regular-
ly: tick-tock, click-clock. Is there anything more plausible than a second
hand?” (Barnes 2011, 4).
The narrator has in mind an excerpt from Frank Kermode’s book,
which is worth mentioning in a more comprehensive statement:
Let us take a very simple example, the ticking of a clock. We ask what it
says: and we agree that it says tick-tock. By this fiction we humanize it, make
it talk our language. Of course, it is we who provide the fictional difference
between the two sounds; tick is our word for a physical beginning, tock our
word for an end. … The clock’s tick-tock I take to be a model of what we call a
plot, an organization that humanizes time by giving it form; and the inter-
val between tock and tick represents purely successive, disorganized time of
the sort that we need to humanize (Kermode 2000, 44–5).
Several pages later Kermode adds that in every plot there is an escape
from synchronicity and, at least to a certain degree, deviations from the
norm of ‘reality’ (Kermode 2000, 50). This is exactly what the narrator
tells right at the beginning of the novel: the flow of time is subject to our
opinions; there are earthly time and supposed human destiny. It seems
