Page 58 - 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. 58
Ideology in the 20th Century: studies of literary and social discourses and practices
present with more options. One possible world is, for example, the world
of nihilistic consumption and a police-imposed order that would regu-
late the anarchy of materialistic desires. It is even possible to imagine a
world whose inhabitants have gone through the temptations of the 20th
century in vain. Step by step, gloomy facts and indicators are question-
ing our commodity-aesthetics, but also traditionally conceived culture as
a means of emancipation. The fact is that for young people life seems less
enchanting than for their parents’ generation, and the feeling that the fu-
ture could overcome the present has completely vanished. Being old is
no longer just an inevitable stage of life, but a global metaphor of a tired
world, inhabited by passive political subjects like Tony Webster.
Also, the novel is a critique of the contemporary rehabilitation of the
58 idea of destiny in which the traces of the ancient idea of the apocalypse
could be recognized. To make politics working means to deny the idea of
destiny, and the existence of politics depends on the belief that what peo-
ple do makes sense. Eschatology has suppressed the immanence of the
end, the result is the discomfort in our own history and the loss of his-
torical imagination, the transformation of history into ‘a raw onion sand-
wich’. The uncertainty brought about by the future coincided with the
tendency of romantic, aesthetic presentation of the past. This all happens
because manipulation by collective memory takes place in the name of
great hopes in the future: today, by reading backward, society, like an in-
dividual, such as Tony Webster as a kind of Defoe’s or Swift’s Everyman,
perceives his own disorientation and his ‘real’ story as a consequence of
his own hidden history. It all has to do with the widely-spread perspective
that ‘there is no alternative’ (Furedi 2002, 169, 170).
We are locked in the sentence of Adrian Finn, uttered at the high
school history class and attributed to a French named Patrick Lagrange:
“History is that certainty produced at the point where the imperfec-
tions of memory meet the inadequacies of documentation” (Barnes 2011:
17). Since Patrick Lagrange does not exist, this pseudo-quotation acts as
Barnes’ sarcasm towards historiography and its quasi-political and false
optimism about the human knowledge and neutrality of facts we pro-
duce. The historical thinking is, in the paradigm of Enlightenment, the
form of consciousness directed to changing the living conditions of peo-
ple—and since these conditions often change together with manipula-
tions with imperfections of memory and the inadequacies of documen-
tation, then one is not surprised that the future is today dominantly seen
in terms of panic.
present with more options. One possible world is, for example, the world
of nihilistic consumption and a police-imposed order that would regu-
late the anarchy of materialistic desires. It is even possible to imagine a
world whose inhabitants have gone through the temptations of the 20th
century in vain. Step by step, gloomy facts and indicators are question-
ing our commodity-aesthetics, but also traditionally conceived culture as
a means of emancipation. The fact is that for young people life seems less
enchanting than for their parents’ generation, and the feeling that the fu-
ture could overcome the present has completely vanished. Being old is
no longer just an inevitable stage of life, but a global metaphor of a tired
world, inhabited by passive political subjects like Tony Webster.
Also, the novel is a critique of the contemporary rehabilitation of the
58 idea of destiny in which the traces of the ancient idea of the apocalypse
could be recognized. To make politics working means to deny the idea of
destiny, and the existence of politics depends on the belief that what peo-
ple do makes sense. Eschatology has suppressed the immanence of the
end, the result is the discomfort in our own history and the loss of his-
torical imagination, the transformation of history into ‘a raw onion sand-
wich’. The uncertainty brought about by the future coincided with the
tendency of romantic, aesthetic presentation of the past. This all happens
because manipulation by collective memory takes place in the name of
great hopes in the future: today, by reading backward, society, like an in-
dividual, such as Tony Webster as a kind of Defoe’s or Swift’s Everyman,
perceives his own disorientation and his ‘real’ story as a consequence of
his own hidden history. It all has to do with the widely-spread perspective
that ‘there is no alternative’ (Furedi 2002, 169, 170).
We are locked in the sentence of Adrian Finn, uttered at the high
school history class and attributed to a French named Patrick Lagrange:
“History is that certainty produced at the point where the imperfec-
tions of memory meet the inadequacies of documentation” (Barnes 2011:
17). Since Patrick Lagrange does not exist, this pseudo-quotation acts as
Barnes’ sarcasm towards historiography and its quasi-political and false
optimism about the human knowledge and neutrality of facts we pro-
duce. The historical thinking is, in the paradigm of Enlightenment, the
form of consciousness directed to changing the living conditions of peo-
ple—and since these conditions often change together with manipula-
tions with imperfections of memory and the inadequacies of documen-
tation, then one is not surprised that the future is today dominantly seen
in terms of panic.
