Page 57 - 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. 57
Fiction and Eschatology: The Politics of Fear in Julian Barnes’ The Sense of an Ending 57
clearly demonstrates that we do not choose our desires, ‘we’ are not free
when acting on the basis of them.
‘End’ is the figure of one’s own death, a reflection of fear, what Barnes’
narrator calls ‘trauma’, yet not when speaking about himself, but about
her former mistress Veronica. From the beginning of their relationship,
he believes that she has survived the trauma, and as the novel develops,
the word trauma here seems more and more likely to be one of the possi-
ble symbols of the sense of an ending, of the imagination of the end, for
the awareness that the end is immanent to existence. The end, of course,
is about expectations, and we project them to other people, but they are
not and could not even be agents of a conscious realization of our expec-
tations—not only fiction, human relationships are also a matter of con-
gruence (for example, the ancient Greeks considered friends to be matter
of the Kairos, not of our allegedly conscious choices). At some point, Ker-
mode will say that every end is a kind of catharsis (Kermode 2000: 7), but
in the case of Tony Webster, it could be argued that the ends, as forms of
anti-catharsis, serve to make him existentially indifferent. The lack of ri-
gidity in his story actually reveals the inability to live a coherent life and
at the same time create a coherent fiction that would bring about a clear
and understandable eschatology.
“There is accumulation. There is responsibility. And beyond these,
there is unrest. There is great unrest” (Barnes 2011, 142); the last sentence
of Barnes’ novel marks the spirit of our time if it is acceptable at all to
speak about our time. Great unrest has plunged into an optimistic post-
war generation, and for that unrest, even their age is not an excuse since
the problem goes beyond the expected disappointment of old age. Let
us quote a sentence that definitely marks the growing up of our quar-
tet of friends: “All political and social systems appeared to us corrupt,
yet we declined to consider an alternative other than hedonistic chaos”
(Barnes 2011, 10). How are things forty years later? ‘Accumulate, accu-
mulate’, that is, according to Marx, the motto of the capitalist economy
(Marx 1867, 652), but it is obvious that the state-capitalist machine based
on the disposition of progress, development, and consumption is increas-
ingly falling into an empty course, and catastrophism becomes an experi-
ence that marks us, followed by a heightened rhetoric of millenarism and
apocalypse. Does such an ending have any sense? Some people will de-
scribe the present time as the age of the end of ideologies and dreams of
a better world, as well as the period of decline of optimistic utopias relat-
ed to science, technology, and art. Uncertainty makes it possible for any-
thing to become important, and the future is less and less understood as a
clearly demonstrates that we do not choose our desires, ‘we’ are not free
when acting on the basis of them.
‘End’ is the figure of one’s own death, a reflection of fear, what Barnes’
narrator calls ‘trauma’, yet not when speaking about himself, but about
her former mistress Veronica. From the beginning of their relationship,
he believes that she has survived the trauma, and as the novel develops,
the word trauma here seems more and more likely to be one of the possi-
ble symbols of the sense of an ending, of the imagination of the end, for
the awareness that the end is immanent to existence. The end, of course,
is about expectations, and we project them to other people, but they are
not and could not even be agents of a conscious realization of our expec-
tations—not only fiction, human relationships are also a matter of con-
gruence (for example, the ancient Greeks considered friends to be matter
of the Kairos, not of our allegedly conscious choices). At some point, Ker-
mode will say that every end is a kind of catharsis (Kermode 2000: 7), but
in the case of Tony Webster, it could be argued that the ends, as forms of
anti-catharsis, serve to make him existentially indifferent. The lack of ri-
gidity in his story actually reveals the inability to live a coherent life and
at the same time create a coherent fiction that would bring about a clear
and understandable eschatology.
“There is accumulation. There is responsibility. And beyond these,
there is unrest. There is great unrest” (Barnes 2011, 142); the last sentence
of Barnes’ novel marks the spirit of our time if it is acceptable at all to
speak about our time. Great unrest has plunged into an optimistic post-
war generation, and for that unrest, even their age is not an excuse since
the problem goes beyond the expected disappointment of old age. Let
us quote a sentence that definitely marks the growing up of our quar-
tet of friends: “All political and social systems appeared to us corrupt,
yet we declined to consider an alternative other than hedonistic chaos”
(Barnes 2011, 10). How are things forty years later? ‘Accumulate, accu-
mulate’, that is, according to Marx, the motto of the capitalist economy
(Marx 1867, 652), but it is obvious that the state-capitalist machine based
on the disposition of progress, development, and consumption is increas-
ingly falling into an empty course, and catastrophism becomes an experi-
ence that marks us, followed by a heightened rhetoric of millenarism and
apocalypse. Does such an ending have any sense? Some people will de-
scribe the present time as the age of the end of ideologies and dreams of
a better world, as well as the period of decline of optimistic utopias relat-
ed to science, technology, and art. Uncertainty makes it possible for any-
thing to become important, and the future is less and less understood as a
