Page 59 - 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. 59
Fiction and Eschatology: The Politics of Fear in Julian Barnes’ The Sense of an Ending 59
Kermode will say: “Apocalypse is a part of the modern Absurd” (2000,
123), and this is the statement that Barnes will explain in his own way. A
large part of the political thought, inspired by the Enlightenment, starts
from the premise of a conscious and rational individual who freely prac-
tices his or her political convictions. Nietzsche’s genealogy, which secret-
ly operates here, has long since argued that the individual performs a very
small number of authentic and really independent choices. Tony Web-
ster is a man of exhaustion and denial, which in his case results in cultur-
al pessimism and political analphabetism. Barnes’ ironical approach will
keep repeating that Tony Webster has an instinct for survival and that, in
fact, unlike Adrian, he survives. Barnes manages to be just towards cha-
otic reality, he knows very well that too much rigidity makes fiction less
convincing, despite our anti-political addiction for romantic illusions.
The novel creates an interactive dissonance between humanity and con-
tingency and still tells us something, relying on some kind of a sense of re-
sponsibility, about the ways to determine the consensus between the hu-
man spirit and the things they are or what they might be. At the end of
the novel, the rival versions of the same set of events coexist without final
reconciliation. There are two rules of the game: 1) no fiction is necessar-
ily above any other fiction; 2) there is always the possibility of a personal
disaster. Barnes’ novel does not make things clear, does not explain, does
not harmonize contradictions. Fictional modeling is the cognitive opera-
tion (Schaeffer 2001, 330), and here it is fiction inside fiction at work, that
is, an attempt to show through fiction the way of creating one’s own ‘real’
life in the story, that is, once again in fiction.
Such an artistic vector of personal identity criticizes the unbearable
ease of contemporary identity politics. The ethical question is: how indif-
ferent we are to all expectations? The Sense of an Ending is a self-conscious
philosophical novel on the subject of literature and its ways of dealing
with the past, the present, and the future. This is another chance to em-
phasize that Tony Webster does not understand clearly that the end can
happen at any moment, that the end is immanent to existence. This also
has a political effect: namely, when it seems that the end is going on con-
stantly, then we call it a crisis, the word that marked our age. At the heart
of our civilization, there is a myth of a crisis, a deep and complex one that
could, after reading Barnes’ novel, be called a ‘myth of great unrest’. Since
the crisis, medically speaking, signifies a turning point in the develop-
ment of a disease in which it can go either better or worse, it seems that
our history can be most accurately compared with a raw onion sandwich.
This, at the same time, undermines Kermode’s optimism in terms of the
Kermode will say: “Apocalypse is a part of the modern Absurd” (2000,
123), and this is the statement that Barnes will explain in his own way. A
large part of the political thought, inspired by the Enlightenment, starts
from the premise of a conscious and rational individual who freely prac-
tices his or her political convictions. Nietzsche’s genealogy, which secret-
ly operates here, has long since argued that the individual performs a very
small number of authentic and really independent choices. Tony Web-
ster is a man of exhaustion and denial, which in his case results in cultur-
al pessimism and political analphabetism. Barnes’ ironical approach will
keep repeating that Tony Webster has an instinct for survival and that, in
fact, unlike Adrian, he survives. Barnes manages to be just towards cha-
otic reality, he knows very well that too much rigidity makes fiction less
convincing, despite our anti-political addiction for romantic illusions.
The novel creates an interactive dissonance between humanity and con-
tingency and still tells us something, relying on some kind of a sense of re-
sponsibility, about the ways to determine the consensus between the hu-
man spirit and the things they are or what they might be. At the end of
the novel, the rival versions of the same set of events coexist without final
reconciliation. There are two rules of the game: 1) no fiction is necessar-
ily above any other fiction; 2) there is always the possibility of a personal
disaster. Barnes’ novel does not make things clear, does not explain, does
not harmonize contradictions. Fictional modeling is the cognitive opera-
tion (Schaeffer 2001, 330), and here it is fiction inside fiction at work, that
is, an attempt to show through fiction the way of creating one’s own ‘real’
life in the story, that is, once again in fiction.
Such an artistic vector of personal identity criticizes the unbearable
ease of contemporary identity politics. The ethical question is: how indif-
ferent we are to all expectations? The Sense of an Ending is a self-conscious
philosophical novel on the subject of literature and its ways of dealing
with the past, the present, and the future. This is another chance to em-
phasize that Tony Webster does not understand clearly that the end can
happen at any moment, that the end is immanent to existence. This also
has a political effect: namely, when it seems that the end is going on con-
stantly, then we call it a crisis, the word that marked our age. At the heart
of our civilization, there is a myth of a crisis, a deep and complex one that
could, after reading Barnes’ novel, be called a ‘myth of great unrest’. Since
the crisis, medically speaking, signifies a turning point in the develop-
ment of a disease in which it can go either better or worse, it seems that
our history can be most accurately compared with a raw onion sandwich.
This, at the same time, undermines Kermode’s optimism in terms of the
