Page 61 - 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. 61
Fiction and Eschatology: The Politics of Fear in Julian Barnes’ The Sense of an Ending 61
If, as often claimed, the goal of writing is to change its object, to se-
duce it, to make it disappear in its own eyes, then Barnes succeeded, be-
cause life as a story (a necessary fiction) disappears in the eyes of Tony
Webster, the narrator. The Sense of an Ending is a convincing image of the
contemporary crisis of experience which Giorgio Agamben discusses in
his essay Infancy and History, with an inevitable reference to Walter Ben-
jamin’s famous diagnosis of the ‘poverty of experience’: “The question of
experience can be approached nowadays only with an acknowledgment
that it is no longer accessible to us” (Agamben 1993, 13). Barnes clever-
ly raises this question immediately at the beginning, in a brief memory
of his schooling: there were no more maxims and proverbs because in the
background of such words there was experience as an unquestionable au-
thority. The classes of history are a place of conflict, not a sojourn in the
classroom of life. Maybe in that classroom the answer is hiding to the is-
sue of the end, in accordance with Kermode’s reading of the apocalypse
as an absurdity. But the ending appears to be as long as the whole novel:
although Tony Webster’s story is full of aphorisms, sumptuous insights,
and wise sentences, it is a fact that none of this helps him master the expe-
rience better and overcome the split between knowledge and life.
“We have our loneliness / And our regret with which to build an es-
chatology”. Metaphors, including the metaphor of the end, affect the
mind in many ways that remain unnoticed. Barnes’ novel, with his me-
diated speech, shows how dangerous this self-oblivion is. The continu-
ous discourse of the life after men, climate cataclysms, and economic col-
lapses manipulate us to accept immanence and imminence (immediacy)
of the worst possible end, but also relieve the hard-earned human rights
more easily. Unfortunately, the contemporary power of fear does not de-
pend on a precise assessment of the threat. We live in a period of crisis of
causality, that is why many seek explanations in conspiracy theories, in
some sort of excess of sense that is coherent, in contrast to the experience
that is allegedly or really decaying. In his attempt to regain the meaning
of the action, causality, responsibility, Tony Webster is trying to create
such a conspiracy theory of his own life, which is one of the obvious man-
ifestations of the threat of subjectivity. But everything that this histori-
an without a career perceives is disorientation. The subject of history is
also a subject in history, he or she builds its own wrong world equally in-
wards and outwards. The attempt to convert serious mistakes into some
positive value results in their normalization. If the rise of literary fiction,
as Kermode argues, “happened at a time when the revealed, authenticated
account of the beginning was losing its authority” (Kermode 2000, 67),
then it could be said that Barnes, in his ironic and perhaps sarcastic novel,
If, as often claimed, the goal of writing is to change its object, to se-
duce it, to make it disappear in its own eyes, then Barnes succeeded, be-
cause life as a story (a necessary fiction) disappears in the eyes of Tony
Webster, the narrator. The Sense of an Ending is a convincing image of the
contemporary crisis of experience which Giorgio Agamben discusses in
his essay Infancy and History, with an inevitable reference to Walter Ben-
jamin’s famous diagnosis of the ‘poverty of experience’: “The question of
experience can be approached nowadays only with an acknowledgment
that it is no longer accessible to us” (Agamben 1993, 13). Barnes clever-
ly raises this question immediately at the beginning, in a brief memory
of his schooling: there were no more maxims and proverbs because in the
background of such words there was experience as an unquestionable au-
thority. The classes of history are a place of conflict, not a sojourn in the
classroom of life. Maybe in that classroom the answer is hiding to the is-
sue of the end, in accordance with Kermode’s reading of the apocalypse
as an absurdity. But the ending appears to be as long as the whole novel:
although Tony Webster’s story is full of aphorisms, sumptuous insights,
and wise sentences, it is a fact that none of this helps him master the expe-
rience better and overcome the split between knowledge and life.
“We have our loneliness / And our regret with which to build an es-
chatology”. Metaphors, including the metaphor of the end, affect the
mind in many ways that remain unnoticed. Barnes’ novel, with his me-
diated speech, shows how dangerous this self-oblivion is. The continu-
ous discourse of the life after men, climate cataclysms, and economic col-
lapses manipulate us to accept immanence and imminence (immediacy)
of the worst possible end, but also relieve the hard-earned human rights
more easily. Unfortunately, the contemporary power of fear does not de-
pend on a precise assessment of the threat. We live in a period of crisis of
causality, that is why many seek explanations in conspiracy theories, in
some sort of excess of sense that is coherent, in contrast to the experience
that is allegedly or really decaying. In his attempt to regain the meaning
of the action, causality, responsibility, Tony Webster is trying to create
such a conspiracy theory of his own life, which is one of the obvious man-
ifestations of the threat of subjectivity. But everything that this histori-
an without a career perceives is disorientation. The subject of history is
also a subject in history, he or she builds its own wrong world equally in-
wards and outwards. The attempt to convert serious mistakes into some
positive value results in their normalization. If the rise of literary fiction,
as Kermode argues, “happened at a time when the revealed, authenticated
account of the beginning was losing its authority” (Kermode 2000, 67),
then it could be said that Barnes, in his ironic and perhaps sarcastic novel,
