Page 47 - 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. 47
Fiction and Eschatology:
The Politics of Fear
in Julian Barnes’ The Sense
of an Ending
Vladimir Gvozden
“We have our loneliness / And our regret with which to build an eschatol-
ogy”. These are the final verses of the poem The Historians Call Up Pain
by the Australian poet Peter Porter. They were used by Frank Kermode
for the motto of the first chapter of his book The Sense of Ending: Stud-
ies in the Theory of Fiction (1966), whose title, but also certain insights,
was appropriated by Julian Barnes’ eponymous 2011 novel, awarded by
the Man Booker Prize. Of course, no one will deny that we can always
have our loneliness, even when we are losing control over our life—or
just because we are losing that control. Likewise, we are often marked by
regret and self-pity on the basis of which we are building the idea of the
meaning of the same life that has already been extinguished from its fit-
tings. The Sense of an Ending is a novelistic commentary on loneliness, re-
gret and self-indulgence of the subject that is trying to conceive an end,
or, better to say, endings of his life. It is known that the ends in the ex-
istence of each individual are numerous: we are talking about the end of
childhood, youth, education, study, friendship, love relationships, work-
ing time, completing a book, a game, a journey... Simply speaking, the end
is immanent to our existence. Of course, if there is an end, there is also
a beginning, and there is a time between them. In fact, establishing a re-
lationship towards the beginning and the end is our deepest need to be-
long to our own species. And it is not necessary for each end to be a prop-
er end; it is just so, a metaphor, and it often happens that the end actually
only looks like an end.
The discussion of the end must begin from the end of the novel be-
cause as Kermode argues in his book, all novels must have an end, even
The Politics of Fear
in Julian Barnes’ The Sense
of an Ending
Vladimir Gvozden
“We have our loneliness / And our regret with which to build an eschatol-
ogy”. These are the final verses of the poem The Historians Call Up Pain
by the Australian poet Peter Porter. They were used by Frank Kermode
for the motto of the first chapter of his book The Sense of Ending: Stud-
ies in the Theory of Fiction (1966), whose title, but also certain insights,
was appropriated by Julian Barnes’ eponymous 2011 novel, awarded by
the Man Booker Prize. Of course, no one will deny that we can always
have our loneliness, even when we are losing control over our life—or
just because we are losing that control. Likewise, we are often marked by
regret and self-pity on the basis of which we are building the idea of the
meaning of the same life that has already been extinguished from its fit-
tings. The Sense of an Ending is a novelistic commentary on loneliness, re-
gret and self-indulgence of the subject that is trying to conceive an end,
or, better to say, endings of his life. It is known that the ends in the ex-
istence of each individual are numerous: we are talking about the end of
childhood, youth, education, study, friendship, love relationships, work-
ing time, completing a book, a game, a journey... Simply speaking, the end
is immanent to our existence. Of course, if there is an end, there is also
a beginning, and there is a time between them. In fact, establishing a re-
lationship towards the beginning and the end is our deepest need to be-
long to our own species. And it is not necessary for each end to be a prop-
er end; it is just so, a metaphor, and it often happens that the end actually
only looks like an end.
The discussion of the end must begin from the end of the novel be-
cause as Kermode argues in his book, all novels must have an end, even
