Page 50 - 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. 50
Ideology in the 20th Century: studies of literary and social discourses and practices
that Webster’s reflections are concise and clear. What follows is a story
that returns us to the storyteller’s school days; the narrator is not sure
about the actual events but claims that he can remain faithful to the im-
pressions that these facts produced. He tells the story of the school as the
place where it all began—so we immediately find out that something im-
portant will happen—by first evoking a trio of friends, joined by Adrian
Finn, a tall, shy boy who will play the most important role in one possi-
ble, but seemingly decisive story about the life of narrator Tony Webster.
The recollection of school days takes place through the evocation of his-
tory classes with a teacher called Old Joe Hunt, and history appears to be
a discipline that interprets but also disciplines the past and our concepts
of time. Adrian Finn, unlike other boys, has his own attitude and is de-
prived of skepticism that serves them as a kind of deviation from reality.
50 He seems to be more free than the others, partially because he does not
stem from a typical middle-class family like them. The three guys were
meritocratic anarchists hungry of books and sex, and Adrian was some-
one who managed to force them to believe in the possibility of applying
thoughts to life.
Why not use the word ‘intellectual’ that has lost its dignity and which
Barnes carefully avoids? This is, then, a quartet of intellectuals who read
‘dangerous’ books: Alex read Russell and Wittgenstein, Adrian Camus
and Nietzsche, Colin Baudelaire and Dostoyevsky, and Tony - who will
later lead the existence of a typical middle-class member - George Orwell
and Aldous Huxley. Of course, they are pretentious, which suits their
age. Various claims are in circulation, which threaten to turn into de-
scriptions on which the young men act: Colin, prone to anarchism, ‘ar-
gued that everything was down to chance, that the world existed in a
state of perpetual chaos, and only some primitive storytelling instinct, it-
self doubtless a hangover from religion, retrospectively imposed mean-
ing on what might or might not have happened” (Burnes 2011, 11; simi-
lar ideas could be found in Kermode’s book); Hunt, however, considered
that such a criticism is a result of inevitable growing up; Adrian continu-
ally manages to outwit teacher Old Joe Hunt in history classes. (The ad-
jective ‘old’ is really used ironically because the history seems to be pre-
sented as a ‘mature’ science, although it appears to be the doctrine of
eternal immaturity and new beginnings due to its constant ideological
delays, as Adrian Finn shows.)
The topic that will become key to Toni’s self-understanding in the
second part raises already in the first part of the novel: it is the suicide of
an unobtrusive schoolmate Robson, who had become really someone be-
that Webster’s reflections are concise and clear. What follows is a story
that returns us to the storyteller’s school days; the narrator is not sure
about the actual events but claims that he can remain faithful to the im-
pressions that these facts produced. He tells the story of the school as the
place where it all began—so we immediately find out that something im-
portant will happen—by first evoking a trio of friends, joined by Adrian
Finn, a tall, shy boy who will play the most important role in one possi-
ble, but seemingly decisive story about the life of narrator Tony Webster.
The recollection of school days takes place through the evocation of his-
tory classes with a teacher called Old Joe Hunt, and history appears to be
a discipline that interprets but also disciplines the past and our concepts
of time. Adrian Finn, unlike other boys, has his own attitude and is de-
prived of skepticism that serves them as a kind of deviation from reality.
50 He seems to be more free than the others, partially because he does not
stem from a typical middle-class family like them. The three guys were
meritocratic anarchists hungry of books and sex, and Adrian was some-
one who managed to force them to believe in the possibility of applying
thoughts to life.
Why not use the word ‘intellectual’ that has lost its dignity and which
Barnes carefully avoids? This is, then, a quartet of intellectuals who read
‘dangerous’ books: Alex read Russell and Wittgenstein, Adrian Camus
and Nietzsche, Colin Baudelaire and Dostoyevsky, and Tony - who will
later lead the existence of a typical middle-class member - George Orwell
and Aldous Huxley. Of course, they are pretentious, which suits their
age. Various claims are in circulation, which threaten to turn into de-
scriptions on which the young men act: Colin, prone to anarchism, ‘ar-
gued that everything was down to chance, that the world existed in a
state of perpetual chaos, and only some primitive storytelling instinct, it-
self doubtless a hangover from religion, retrospectively imposed mean-
ing on what might or might not have happened” (Burnes 2011, 11; simi-
lar ideas could be found in Kermode’s book); Hunt, however, considered
that such a criticism is a result of inevitable growing up; Adrian continu-
ally manages to outwit teacher Old Joe Hunt in history classes. (The ad-
jective ‘old’ is really used ironically because the history seems to be pre-
sented as a ‘mature’ science, although it appears to be the doctrine of
eternal immaturity and new beginnings due to its constant ideological
delays, as Adrian Finn shows.)
The topic that will become key to Toni’s self-understanding in the
second part raises already in the first part of the novel: it is the suicide of
an unobtrusive schoolmate Robson, who had become really someone be-
