“Books say: She did this because. Life says: She did this. Books are where things are explained to you; life is where things aren't. I'm not surprised some people prefer books.”
― Julian Barnes, Flaubert's Parrot
No, don't believe him, that man pictured above. Despite Barnes’ claim above, his Booker winning book, The Sense of an Ending does not explain things at all. In fact Barnes demolishes the role of an omniscient narrator and any attempt to explain life or make any sense of the world – past or present. An utterly hopeless and forgetful storyteller, Tony Webster, the narrator of the book can only underpin the philosophical impossibility of knowing anything for sure.
And there is no “because” offered in the string of events remembered by him or rediscovered through memories of other characters in the story.
Well, you could say, that was another clever technique where the reader is left with her freedom of choice, on an open ended narrative – with more than one possible interpretation - or ending. But that would not qualify The Sense of an Ending in the genre that it has won the Man Booker for, would it? Open ended denouement is the forte of short stories, and that just increases the problematic of my reading.
An Unexplained Literary Excess
I had not intended to write a book review per se. No one had commissioned me to write one, so I wasn't even going to get paid for it. I did not fool myself with the false notion of possessing a critical insight - not anymore. I was a corporate communication specialist. I was paid every month to clip my wings of poesy to court the jargon jester of a technology and consulting paradise. I wasn't engaging in an academic pitch armed with post-modern theories to make a clever dash at deconstructing the narrative. I was an ordinary reader; not an authority on fiction or meta-fiction by any stretch of anyone's imagination. My assessment was bound to be naive, not to mention ungainly, like a precocious toddler attempting to catwalk in high heels.
I didn't want to share my reading of a book with anyone who hadn't read it. Nor did I want to write it for the reader who had. I believe each reading is unique, different from the other. So what good would my review be to anyone? Who would read it? And more importantly, why would anyone? So what was the whole point in my literary exercise or excess? Excess, as if reading the book twice wasn't enough. I had to intensify my involvement by getting myself drawn into a conversation with myself. I assure you, I had reasons.
I am unabashedly a closet writer, and in an open relationship with Literature. "Open relationship" has its benefits. You can come and go as you like. So I am under no moral obligation not to cheat. And I cheat shamelessly - either with Mr Consulting Chatter or Mr Jargon Jeopardy or Mr Techie Twit through my working week. Only my weekends are for Literature. Maybe the freedom he allows me makes me want to go back - again and again.
Many of the literature I have read, though canonical and celebrated all across the published literary world have seldom touched me personally. Reading Marlow, Shakespeare, Milton, Wordsworth, Shelley, Lawrence, and Joyce in university had taken me to new imaginative heights. But not one single of their books had anything to do with the world I inhabited. Very few of the British literature really spoke to us. For that matter, I do not still quite identify with Barnes’ English world. My intermittent sojourns in England have not been potent enough to diminish the glory of the ordinary daffodils to me, yet. While in school, I had imagined the weedy blossom to be an exotic orchid that made poets break forth into lyrical poetry – and I am sure I wasn't the only kid who painted bizarre pictures of red, blue and purple daffodils in the canvas of our third-world minds. Google Image Search had not yet arrived to curb our flights of fancy with real time photographic representations of the first-world flora and fauna.
In that sense, The Sense of an Ending was a rare treat that finally reflected my own narrative crisis. Though I hasten to add, I do not find the story extraordinary in any sense, no matter how striking the Oedipal twist in the end was. I wanted to hold on to and inspect a few emotions that stirred within me like dull dead roots after a spell of spring rain (Is it some beatific irony that I reread the book just at a time when a cold January was waning into an early spring?).
Well, there was another reason. I wasn't sure if I could call my reading of the novella (150 pages, just!) an edifying experience. There wasn't any moral message in the story about life or about storytelling, only the blatant immorality of the absence of any. There was an implicit instruction that memory was an unreliable tool to reconstruct the past. But haven’t we all read too much meta-history or meta-fiction already? Why was it that I could not take an objective view of the book at all like good critics did? Why was it getting personal the moment I wanted to rethink my reading of the book? The fact remained that I had so many conflicting and confused thoughts in me after I finished reading the book, that I thought only writing the bones down would make me feel more at ease and help un-clutter my mind.
Rewriting the Text of Our Lives
Historians, I am told, often write from the political vantage of power and history is what the winning side put down on paper as documented evidence. I have a history too, like everybody else – a personal history. Lately I have been thinking about my life a lot, questioning my worth as a thinking being. I have been revisiting my growing up years to find that maybe I had not done my best. Self doubt is not a good thing when it comes to self appraisal. And to realize that you never really know what happened, what you did, and if you went wrong or right in your past, makes you wobble on your feet a little. Do I see an autobiography coming, somewhere?
My desire to look at myself as a good person, I realized, has changed the way I have rebuilt my past. I wanted to look my memory in the eye. And see how my desire to see myself better had changed my gaze – my reclaiming of past – both real and imagined; fact and fiction. But for that I needed to tackle the issue at hand. The book, and my feelings about it.
The austerely erect cursor blinked at me from the perfect spotlessness of a new MS word document; I hadn't named it. Not just yet. The negotiation between my fingers, my head, and the unrelenting cursor was going to take some time. A re-reading could begin only if I could arrive at one neatly coherent thought. A thought that followed my overwhelmed first reading. There were too many - my first uncensored thought about the book – what, just another psychological novel? That giving way to a subsequent thought – wait, this sounds oddly familiar. And finally – oh boy, I wasn't prepared for this!
Constructing A Recap
The plot recap for the book is kind of easy. It doesn't have much in terms of action. Very quickly, once again let me run through the plot, or the lack thereof. The Sense of an Ending is about closure. About an ending. No, not of a life well spent or anything as cliched as that. It is about the multiple senses or meanings that we make of imagined endings. You see, I couldn't keep my lecture to myself even when I am telling you the story of the story.
So here goes the story. A man in his 60s, Tony Webster is a lonesome divorce who narrates the story of his past, or the past as he has chosen to remember or forget. The novel is divided into two parts, called "One" and "Two".
Part One opens with a claim that the narrator, Tony will only return to “approximate memories which time has deformed into certainty” in his story. He used to be part of a sixth form four-member clique in a central London school in the 1960s along with Alex, Colin, and the precociously philosophical Adrian. It was as much a time of growing up into needless rebellion as for showing off some newly learned philosophical jargon.
Towards the end of their school days, a boy in their school, Robson of Science Sixth had commits suicide. and students around murmur that he had killed himself to escape the shame of getting a girl pregnant. The four friends discuss the philosophical difficulty of knowing exactly what happened.
While at Bristol University, Tony dates a girl Veronica, at whose Chislehurst family home, in Kent he spends an uncomfortable weekend. Their relationship terminates in bitterness - Tony congratulates himself that there is nothing to be guilty of, “No one had got pregnant, no one had got killed”. On a second reading, you nod knowingly at the seemingly innocent irony played out in this statement.
In his final year at university Tony receives a letter from Adrian (who had gone to Cambridge, quite understandably, given his cerebral brilliance) that says he is dating Veronica. Tony replies rather unkindly to the letter. Some months later he is told that Adrian has committed suicide - with a suicide note that ascribes a philosophical duty to examine the nature of life, and then a right to end it - to all rational beings. Tony applauds Adrian's impeccable logic and envies his clarity of mind. Then there is a quick fast forward through the following uneventful forty years of his life - carefully spent - to the present tense, for the reader - that is me. And maybe you.
Part Two begins, with the arrival of a lawyer's letter to Tony informing him that Mrs Ford, Veronica's mother has bequeathed him £500 and a notebook from his dead friend Adrian. In the process of retrieving the legacy from a very reluctant and elusive Veronica, Tony rediscovers his unremembered past - or that part that had been hidden away from him. That past that he had safely and unknowingly taught himself to forget. This leads Tony to re-evaluate the story he has narrated in Part One.
By the time you finish Part Two, you have arrived at an ending of your own, and that negates Part One as a flawed reordering of remembered events. Tony rereads his own letter to Adrian and realizes what a selfish moron he had been in his wish to curse his best friend for dating his ex-girlfriend Veronica. Remorse engulfs him. And a dogged pursuit of Adrian's diary and a group of care workers leads him on to facts that point to an affair between Adrian and Mrs. Ford that might have culminated into a handicapped son born to them. Tony gives up chasing his inheritance after realizing that he did not deserve to be left with Adrian’s diary. In the end, he has no way of knowing if Adrian had died of the same guilt that drove Robson to his death.
Of Memory and Desire
Now why did I choose to remember the first few lines of Eliot’s iconic poem, The Waste Land? It is because the symbolism of The Sense of an Ending resonates so much with that of the poem. Sex and death are two most important thematic principles that appear early in both the book and the poem - holding the narrations together. Phil Dixon’s English class has T.S. Eliot's focus on “Birth, Copulation and Death” – life was about just that. Curiously, both the novel and the poem draw heavily on memory and our way of looking at it. On sex, birth and death. And on mythology too - Eros and Thanatos (mentioned by Adrian); Sisyphus and Oedipus (my references). Fertility rites have gone awry in both the poem and the novella - one cursed with an arid land, a sterile king, while the other with an orphaned and abnormal progeny.
The novel is a confessional prose running along the stream of forgotten and remembered consciousness merging imperceptibly in the fabric of the plot. Tony is admittedly an undependable narrator, an erratic storyteller, who frequently mixes up memory and desire. The book beautifully brings out the contrast between what had really happened and what Tony actually remembers. And most importantly, the role of time, in the order of things remembered. Barnes throws the theme of his story right at your face in the very beginning:
“I remember, in no particular order:
– a shiny inner wrist;
– steam rising from a wet sink as a hot frying pan is laughingly tossed into it;
– gouts of sperm circling a plughole, before being sluiced down the full length of a tall house;
– a river rushing nonsensically upstream, its wave and wash lit by half a dozen chasing torchbeams;
– another river, broad and grey, the direction of its flow disguised by a stiff wind exciting the surface;
– bathwater long gone cold behind a locked door.
This last isn’t something I actually saw, but what you end up remembering isn’t always the same as what you have witnessed.”
Remembrance of things past. Always a challenge, though never really seemingly so, always a task nobody really understood well. Some pasts go missing, until some relic of memory crops up. Some pasts are seized, only to be lost again. And some are never found at all. Tony remembers his youth as he should. There is nothing remarkable in his past. He is an ordinary man with an ordinary past. Until Adrian’s diary surfaces – challenging the limits of his knowledge and remembrance. Tony’s memory of his weekend at Veronica’s house in Kent is fraught with the same uncertainty.
"I was so ill at ease that I spent the entire weekend constipated: this is my principal factual memory. The rest consists of impressions and half-memories which may therefore be self-serving.”
One wonders if the rest of it was all made up, to build up on a deliberately flawed perception of Veronica and her mother - only to be broken in the aftermath. Veronica’s mother is remembered marginally with a rejoinder at the time when Tony was leaving Chislehurst, driven in the family car, by the loud red-faced Mr. Ford, the father. “I like your mum”. A letter from the mum is also mentioned after Tony and Veronica had broken up and although Tony had wished he had kept it as a souvenir, he could now only search his memory for evidence:
“a dashing woman who broke an egg, cooked me another, and told me not to take any shit from her daughter.”
Even the way Tony remembers the beginning of the end of their relationship smacks of manipulative remembering.
"In my mind this was the beginning of the end of our relationship. Or have I just remembered it this way to make it seem so, and to apportion blame?”
We want our history to be kind and lenient to us despite all the wrongs we have done. Either we condone our crimes by deliberate silences, or we recreate it by telling ourselves lies. Writers with caliber do not like to use coincidences in their plots, since readers like me, want to see everything happening for a reason in literature. I am still looking for a reason behind Adrian's death, of what happened to Mrs. and Mr. Ford, of how Veronica had lived her life.
Lest we forget…RIP, Robson, Adrian and HISTORY!
Despite a lack of sentimental nostalgia for his schooldays Tony must begin at the beginning. He begins with his school as a backdrop for a threesome clique that comprised of Alex, Colin and Tony himself. Adrian Finn, the tall shy new guy who had a philosophical answer to every question, was a late entry to their school and eventually to their clique.
Interestingly enough, the first class that Tony finds worth remembering Adrian from is a history class with Old Joe Hunt teaching the reign of Henry VIII. When asked about his thoughts on the period under review, the precocious Adrian sums it up as a time when “something happened”, much like he would sum up all historical periods. This sets the tone for the rest of the theme – history as “something happening” – that “something” open to interpretation, to forgetting and reclaiming – as one desired.
Later in another history class Adrian refuses to ascribe the blame of World War I to any single individual or event, no matter how significantly they have gone down in history. He said:
“That's one of the central problems of history, isn't it, sir? The question of subjective versus objective interpretation, the fact that we need to know the history of the historian in order to understand the version that is being put in front of us.”
Repeatedly Barnes puts down history or time as something of a mutable dimension, frequently changed by dominant emotions. Even the mark of their bond – the wearing of their watches on the inside of their wrist – makes time a personal thing – fraught with shared emotions.
There is talk of great literature in the narration. And how life became worthy only if it imitated great literature. By that standard, Tony, Alex and Colin’s life had looked rather mundane. Only Adrian's life looked like what novels were made of – coming of a broken home. “Maybe your mum has a young lover?” Adrian was asked. Again a premonition of what is to follow in Adrian’s subsequent shape as a “young lover” for an older mother we meet later in the course of narration. We never know what happens for sure.
The utter unknowability of motives behind actions is stressed time and again. In their final history lesson, Adrian quotes a fictitious French historian Patrick Lagrange:
"History is that certainty produced at the point where the imperfections of memory meet the inadequacies of documentation."
Is it not fitting to quote a non-existent imaginary historian for a quote that describes the inaccuracy of memory in constructing any reliable platforms of history? Tony, the narrator is not without self doubts:
“Was this their exact exchange? Almost certainly not. Still, it is my best memory of their exchange.”
The Sense of an Ending sets out to explore the gaps between these memories and the narratives. How clever to create such a passage from a seemingly celebrated historian that exposes the imperfection of memory and the inadequacy of documenting it – and the illusory certainty of all of it? Even the history master in class, Old Joe Hunt had not questioned the veracity of the quote or the historian in question. And with an unreliable narrator in Tony, we don’t know if Barnes intended the invention to be attributed to the faulty storyteller whose memory doesn't serve him right, or is it intended as Adrian’s fabrication to fool Hunt. Does Tony remember correctly? Did Adrian really make such a quote? Or is Tony making it all up? Is it Barnes’s cryptic commentary on the contexuality of novel as an impossible source of all reliable knowledge? And his dismissal of history as a source of known truths?
Barnes’s clever deconstructive narrative technique exposes the lies we tell ourselves, that end up walking around as truths, highlights the repetitions that reinforce inaccurate memories as reality, and how we all write our own histories by telling ourselves stories that are either false or half-truths. Eventually we succeed in grooming ourselves as failed historians – having re-read our own lives in deliberate selections of what we want to remember and how. Selective historicity.
The novel, therefore, mirrors an imperfect reading, not to mention an imperfect writing of itself – of its kind. This explains my confusion with the impact of my own reading of it. This explains why I turned to writing this out to make a semblance of sense. And why I thought writing this would help me understand the novel better. After all it is on the individual reader to agree or disagree with what the book engages us in – the eternal dilemma between personal memory and its inevitable loss.
Ironed Out Beginnings!
The masterstroke of a bit of a dramatic irony is played out early in the story – though we are only aware of it on a second reading, when we have already read the story once. Suicide happens twice. Or rather is made to happen. Suicide is about agency, about controlling one’s destiny. About the exercise of free will in deciding when and how to end one’s own life. So it doesn't happen as chance or accident . It is made to happen. Always. And therein it differs from death that happens to people.
It took an apparently fleeting center stage when Robson of Science Sixth ended his own life, after making his girlfriend pregnant. Later the topic of discussions shifted around ordinary and slip knots and an analysis of which one brought a faster release from life. There was also considerable interest in the character of the impregnated girl – a tarty shop assistant or an older woman? Barnes’ humor is never seemingly obvious. Robson’s suicide had a mathematical analysis to Tony's clique – he was maintaining the numerical constant in the world’s population – you added a life in an unmarried womb, you took away a life, even if it was your own. The nondescript Robson had acquired an exceptional status in their eyes – having found a girlfriend to have sex with, at a time, when their collective life was more or less girl-less and hinged on finding admission into a respectable university. Again to the clique, Robson’s “Sorry, Mum” had fallen far short of a suicide note, seemingly unfair as they thought they had deserved an elaborate disclosure. The absence of the prime actor in the drama of suicide, be it Robson or Adrian, now dead, only stresses the philosophical impossibility of knowing what happened without their living testimony.
Ironically, it is Adrian who had redefined suicide for his clique at school as the only philosophical question, after his intellectual guru Camus. And then had killed himself while he is in college. The book doesn't narrate the incident, nor is there any visual description to describe the scene of the suicide other than Tony's imagined scene of Adrian's bathwater gone cold. No reason for Adrian's suicide is offered, other than his suicide note that emphasized the role of the owner's right in ending one's own life. It is left for the reader to make conjectures. And to me, Robson seems to be an ominous precursor – a prophetic, pathetic prequel to Adrian’s death.
Referring to Robson’s suicide in his final history class, Adrian had challenged the master Hunt into a duel of historiography. Adrian had told the class that with Robson not present among them, nor leaving them any documented evidence, no one could ever vouch for what really triggered his end.
“Did Robson have any other motives or reasons beyond the obvious ones? What was his state of mind? Can we be sure the child was his?...You see the problem, Sir?...nothing can make up for the absence of Robson’s testimony, sir ”
This is a same telling set of questions that would echo in the reader’s mind when the answers go missing years later, in Adrian’s suicide.
The novel ends with Veronica apparently burning Adrian’s diary thereby killing any possibility on Tony’s part (and in turn mine) to find out what really happened to Adrian. To Veronica and to Mrs. Ford. The burned diary amounts to loss – of memory, of evidence, of history. But then our narrator has retreated again into his self doubting paranoia. So I, as a reader have no way of being sure, who is playing with my senses: Barnes, Tony or Adrian? Or me myself enmeshed in a heteroglossia of voices that continue to haunt my readings? Maybe this then is the beginning of my misreading.
And a tiny voice keeps echoing inside the room of my head with what Paula Gunn Allen had said, though in a feminist context: "The root of oppression is loss of memory."
[All images are courtesy Google Image Search - yes, they have killed my ridiculous imaginings but what the heck, also helped me with some visual relief!]
― Julian Barnes, Flaubert's Parrot
 |
| Julian Barnes |
No, don't believe him, that man pictured above. Despite Barnes’ claim above, his Booker winning book, The Sense of an Ending does not explain things at all. In fact Barnes demolishes the role of an omniscient narrator and any attempt to explain life or make any sense of the world – past or present. An utterly hopeless and forgetful storyteller, Tony Webster, the narrator of the book can only underpin the philosophical impossibility of knowing anything for sure.
An Unexplained Literary Excess
I had not intended to write a book review per se. No one had commissioned me to write one, so I wasn't even going to get paid for it. I did not fool myself with the false notion of possessing a critical insight - not anymore. I was a corporate communication specialist. I was paid every month to clip my wings of poesy to court the jargon jester of a technology and consulting paradise. I wasn't engaging in an academic pitch armed with post-modern theories to make a clever dash at deconstructing the narrative. I was an ordinary reader; not an authority on fiction or meta-fiction by any stretch of anyone's imagination. My assessment was bound to be naive, not to mention ungainly, like a precocious toddler attempting to catwalk in high heels.
I didn't want to share my reading of a book with anyone who hadn't read it. Nor did I want to write it for the reader who had. I believe each reading is unique, different from the other. So what good would my review be to anyone? Who would read it? And more importantly, why would anyone? So what was the whole point in my literary exercise or excess? Excess, as if reading the book twice wasn't enough. I had to intensify my involvement by getting myself drawn into a conversation with myself. I assure you, I had reasons.
I am unabashedly a closet writer, and in an open relationship with Literature. "Open relationship" has its benefits. You can come and go as you like. So I am under no moral obligation not to cheat. And I cheat shamelessly - either with Mr Consulting Chatter or Mr Jargon Jeopardy or Mr Techie Twit through my working week. Only my weekends are for Literature. Maybe the freedom he allows me makes me want to go back - again and again.
Many of the literature I have read, though canonical and celebrated all across the published literary world have seldom touched me personally. Reading Marlow, Shakespeare, Milton, Wordsworth, Shelley, Lawrence, and Joyce in university had taken me to new imaginative heights. But not one single of their books had anything to do with the world I inhabited. Very few of the British literature really spoke to us. For that matter, I do not still quite identify with Barnes’ English world. My intermittent sojourns in England have not been potent enough to diminish the glory of the ordinary daffodils to me, yet. While in school, I had imagined the weedy blossom to be an exotic orchid that made poets break forth into lyrical poetry – and I am sure I wasn't the only kid who painted bizarre pictures of red, blue and purple daffodils in the canvas of our third-world minds. Google Image Search had not yet arrived to curb our flights of fancy with real time photographic representations of the first-world flora and fauna.
In that sense, The Sense of an Ending was a rare treat that finally reflected my own narrative crisis. Though I hasten to add, I do not find the story extraordinary in any sense, no matter how striking the Oedipal twist in the end was. I wanted to hold on to and inspect a few emotions that stirred within me like dull dead roots after a spell of spring rain (Is it some beatific irony that I reread the book just at a time when a cold January was waning into an early spring?).
Well, there was another reason. I wasn't sure if I could call my reading of the novella (150 pages, just!) an edifying experience. There wasn't any moral message in the story about life or about storytelling, only the blatant immorality of the absence of any. There was an implicit instruction that memory was an unreliable tool to reconstruct the past. But haven’t we all read too much meta-history or meta-fiction already? Why was it that I could not take an objective view of the book at all like good critics did? Why was it getting personal the moment I wanted to rethink my reading of the book? The fact remained that I had so many conflicting and confused thoughts in me after I finished reading the book, that I thought only writing the bones down would make me feel more at ease and help un-clutter my mind.
Rewriting the Text of Our Lives
Historians, I am told, often write from the political vantage of power and history is what the winning side put down on paper as documented evidence. I have a history too, like everybody else – a personal history. Lately I have been thinking about my life a lot, questioning my worth as a thinking being. I have been revisiting my growing up years to find that maybe I had not done my best. Self doubt is not a good thing when it comes to self appraisal. And to realize that you never really know what happened, what you did, and if you went wrong or right in your past, makes you wobble on your feet a little. Do I see an autobiography coming, somewhere?
My desire to look at myself as a good person, I realized, has changed the way I have rebuilt my past. I wanted to look my memory in the eye. And see how my desire to see myself better had changed my gaze – my reclaiming of past – both real and imagined; fact and fiction. But for that I needed to tackle the issue at hand. The book, and my feelings about it.
The austerely erect cursor blinked at me from the perfect spotlessness of a new MS word document; I hadn't named it. Not just yet. The negotiation between my fingers, my head, and the unrelenting cursor was going to take some time. A re-reading could begin only if I could arrive at one neatly coherent thought. A thought that followed my overwhelmed first reading. There were too many - my first uncensored thought about the book – what, just another psychological novel? That giving way to a subsequent thought – wait, this sounds oddly familiar. And finally – oh boy, I wasn't prepared for this!
Constructing A Recap
The plot recap for the book is kind of easy. It doesn't have much in terms of action. Very quickly, once again let me run through the plot, or the lack thereof. The Sense of an Ending is about closure. About an ending. No, not of a life well spent or anything as cliched as that. It is about the multiple senses or meanings that we make of imagined endings. You see, I couldn't keep my lecture to myself even when I am telling you the story of the story.
So here goes the story. A man in his 60s, Tony Webster is a lonesome divorce who narrates the story of his past, or the past as he has chosen to remember or forget. The novel is divided into two parts, called "One" and "Two".
Towards the end of their school days, a boy in their school, Robson of Science Sixth had commits suicide. and students around murmur that he had killed himself to escape the shame of getting a girl pregnant. The four friends discuss the philosophical difficulty of knowing exactly what happened.
While at Bristol University, Tony dates a girl Veronica, at whose Chislehurst family home, in Kent he spends an uncomfortable weekend. Their relationship terminates in bitterness - Tony congratulates himself that there is nothing to be guilty of, “No one had got pregnant, no one had got killed”. On a second reading, you nod knowingly at the seemingly innocent irony played out in this statement.
In his final year at university Tony receives a letter from Adrian (who had gone to Cambridge, quite understandably, given his cerebral brilliance) that says he is dating Veronica. Tony replies rather unkindly to the letter. Some months later he is told that Adrian has committed suicide - with a suicide note that ascribes a philosophical duty to examine the nature of life, and then a right to end it - to all rational beings. Tony applauds Adrian's impeccable logic and envies his clarity of mind. Then there is a quick fast forward through the following uneventful forty years of his life - carefully spent - to the present tense, for the reader - that is me. And maybe you.
Part Two begins, with the arrival of a lawyer's letter to Tony informing him that Mrs Ford, Veronica's mother has bequeathed him £500 and a notebook from his dead friend Adrian. In the process of retrieving the legacy from a very reluctant and elusive Veronica, Tony rediscovers his unremembered past - or that part that had been hidden away from him. That past that he had safely and unknowingly taught himself to forget. This leads Tony to re-evaluate the story he has narrated in Part One.
By the time you finish Part Two, you have arrived at an ending of your own, and that negates Part One as a flawed reordering of remembered events. Tony rereads his own letter to Adrian and realizes what a selfish moron he had been in his wish to curse his best friend for dating his ex-girlfriend Veronica. Remorse engulfs him. And a dogged pursuit of Adrian's diary and a group of care workers leads him on to facts that point to an affair between Adrian and Mrs. Ford that might have culminated into a handicapped son born to them. Tony gives up chasing his inheritance after realizing that he did not deserve to be left with Adrian’s diary. In the end, he has no way of knowing if Adrian had died of the same guilt that drove Robson to his death.
Of Memory and Desire
Now why did I choose to remember the first few lines of Eliot’s iconic poem, The Waste Land? It is because the symbolism of The Sense of an Ending resonates so much with that of the poem. Sex and death are two most important thematic principles that appear early in both the book and the poem - holding the narrations together. Phil Dixon’s English class has T.S. Eliot's focus on “Birth, Copulation and Death” – life was about just that. Curiously, both the novel and the poem draw heavily on memory and our way of looking at it. On sex, birth and death. And on mythology too - Eros and Thanatos (mentioned by Adrian); Sisyphus and Oedipus (my references). Fertility rites have gone awry in both the poem and the novella - one cursed with an arid land, a sterile king, while the other with an orphaned and abnormal progeny.
The novel is a confessional prose running along the stream of forgotten and remembered consciousness merging imperceptibly in the fabric of the plot. Tony is admittedly an undependable narrator, an erratic storyteller, who frequently mixes up memory and desire. The book beautifully brings out the contrast between what had really happened and what Tony actually remembers. And most importantly, the role of time, in the order of things remembered. Barnes throws the theme of his story right at your face in the very beginning:
“I remember, in no particular order:
– a shiny inner wrist;
– steam rising from a wet sink as a hot frying pan is laughingly tossed into it;
– gouts of sperm circling a plughole, before being sluiced down the full length of a tall house;
– a river rushing nonsensically upstream, its wave and wash lit by half a dozen chasing torchbeams;
– another river, broad and grey, the direction of its flow disguised by a stiff wind exciting the surface;
– bathwater long gone cold behind a locked door.
This last isn’t something I actually saw, but what you end up remembering isn’t always the same as what you have witnessed.”
Remembrance of things past. Always a challenge, though never really seemingly so, always a task nobody really understood well. Some pasts go missing, until some relic of memory crops up. Some pasts are seized, only to be lost again. And some are never found at all. Tony remembers his youth as he should. There is nothing remarkable in his past. He is an ordinary man with an ordinary past. Until Adrian’s diary surfaces – challenging the limits of his knowledge and remembrance. Tony’s memory of his weekend at Veronica’s house in Kent is fraught with the same uncertainty.
"I was so ill at ease that I spent the entire weekend constipated: this is my principal factual memory. The rest consists of impressions and half-memories which may therefore be self-serving.”
One wonders if the rest of it was all made up, to build up on a deliberately flawed perception of Veronica and her mother - only to be broken in the aftermath. Veronica’s mother is remembered marginally with a rejoinder at the time when Tony was leaving Chislehurst, driven in the family car, by the loud red-faced Mr. Ford, the father. “I like your mum”. A letter from the mum is also mentioned after Tony and Veronica had broken up and although Tony had wished he had kept it as a souvenir, he could now only search his memory for evidence:
“a dashing woman who broke an egg, cooked me another, and told me not to take any shit from her daughter.”
Even the way Tony remembers the beginning of the end of their relationship smacks of manipulative remembering.
"In my mind this was the beginning of the end of our relationship. Or have I just remembered it this way to make it seem so, and to apportion blame?”
We want our history to be kind and lenient to us despite all the wrongs we have done. Either we condone our crimes by deliberate silences, or we recreate it by telling ourselves lies. Writers with caliber do not like to use coincidences in their plots, since readers like me, want to see everything happening for a reason in literature. I am still looking for a reason behind Adrian's death, of what happened to Mrs. and Mr. Ford, of how Veronica had lived her life.
Lest we forget…RIP, Robson, Adrian and HISTORY!
Despite a lack of sentimental nostalgia for his schooldays Tony must begin at the beginning. He begins with his school as a backdrop for a threesome clique that comprised of Alex, Colin and Tony himself. Adrian Finn, the tall shy new guy who had a philosophical answer to every question, was a late entry to their school and eventually to their clique.
Interestingly enough, the first class that Tony finds worth remembering Adrian from is a history class with Old Joe Hunt teaching the reign of Henry VIII. When asked about his thoughts on the period under review, the precocious Adrian sums it up as a time when “something happened”, much like he would sum up all historical periods. This sets the tone for the rest of the theme – history as “something happening” – that “something” open to interpretation, to forgetting and reclaiming – as one desired.
Later in another history class Adrian refuses to ascribe the blame of World War I to any single individual or event, no matter how significantly they have gone down in history. He said:
“That's one of the central problems of history, isn't it, sir? The question of subjective versus objective interpretation, the fact that we need to know the history of the historian in order to understand the version that is being put in front of us.”
Repeatedly Barnes puts down history or time as something of a mutable dimension, frequently changed by dominant emotions. Even the mark of their bond – the wearing of their watches on the inside of their wrist – makes time a personal thing – fraught with shared emotions.
There is talk of great literature in the narration. And how life became worthy only if it imitated great literature. By that standard, Tony, Alex and Colin’s life had looked rather mundane. Only Adrian's life looked like what novels were made of – coming of a broken home. “Maybe your mum has a young lover?” Adrian was asked. Again a premonition of what is to follow in Adrian’s subsequent shape as a “young lover” for an older mother we meet later in the course of narration. We never know what happens for sure.
The utter unknowability of motives behind actions is stressed time and again. In their final history lesson, Adrian quotes a fictitious French historian Patrick Lagrange:
"History is that certainty produced at the point where the imperfections of memory meet the inadequacies of documentation."
Is it not fitting to quote a non-existent imaginary historian for a quote that describes the inaccuracy of memory in constructing any reliable platforms of history? Tony, the narrator is not without self doubts:
“Was this their exact exchange? Almost certainly not. Still, it is my best memory of their exchange.”
The Sense of an Ending sets out to explore the gaps between these memories and the narratives. How clever to create such a passage from a seemingly celebrated historian that exposes the imperfection of memory and the inadequacy of documenting it – and the illusory certainty of all of it? Even the history master in class, Old Joe Hunt had not questioned the veracity of the quote or the historian in question. And with an unreliable narrator in Tony, we don’t know if Barnes intended the invention to be attributed to the faulty storyteller whose memory doesn't serve him right, or is it intended as Adrian’s fabrication to fool Hunt. Does Tony remember correctly? Did Adrian really make such a quote? Or is Tony making it all up? Is it Barnes’s cryptic commentary on the contexuality of novel as an impossible source of all reliable knowledge? And his dismissal of history as a source of known truths?
Barnes’s clever deconstructive narrative technique exposes the lies we tell ourselves, that end up walking around as truths, highlights the repetitions that reinforce inaccurate memories as reality, and how we all write our own histories by telling ourselves stories that are either false or half-truths. Eventually we succeed in grooming ourselves as failed historians – having re-read our own lives in deliberate selections of what we want to remember and how. Selective historicity.
The novel, therefore, mirrors an imperfect reading, not to mention an imperfect writing of itself – of its kind. This explains my confusion with the impact of my own reading of it. This explains why I turned to writing this out to make a semblance of sense. And why I thought writing this would help me understand the novel better. After all it is on the individual reader to agree or disagree with what the book engages us in – the eternal dilemma between personal memory and its inevitable loss.
Ironed Out Beginnings!
The masterstroke of a bit of a dramatic irony is played out early in the story – though we are only aware of it on a second reading, when we have already read the story once. Suicide happens twice. Or rather is made to happen. Suicide is about agency, about controlling one’s destiny. About the exercise of free will in deciding when and how to end one’s own life. So it doesn't happen as chance or accident . It is made to happen. Always. And therein it differs from death that happens to people.
It took an apparently fleeting center stage when Robson of Science Sixth ended his own life, after making his girlfriend pregnant. Later the topic of discussions shifted around ordinary and slip knots and an analysis of which one brought a faster release from life. There was also considerable interest in the character of the impregnated girl – a tarty shop assistant or an older woman? Barnes’ humor is never seemingly obvious. Robson’s suicide had a mathematical analysis to Tony's clique – he was maintaining the numerical constant in the world’s population – you added a life in an unmarried womb, you took away a life, even if it was your own. The nondescript Robson had acquired an exceptional status in their eyes – having found a girlfriend to have sex with, at a time, when their collective life was more or less girl-less and hinged on finding admission into a respectable university. Again to the clique, Robson’s “Sorry, Mum” had fallen far short of a suicide note, seemingly unfair as they thought they had deserved an elaborate disclosure. The absence of the prime actor in the drama of suicide, be it Robson or Adrian, now dead, only stresses the philosophical impossibility of knowing what happened without their living testimony.
Ironically, it is Adrian who had redefined suicide for his clique at school as the only philosophical question, after his intellectual guru Camus. And then had killed himself while he is in college. The book doesn't narrate the incident, nor is there any visual description to describe the scene of the suicide other than Tony's imagined scene of Adrian's bathwater gone cold. No reason for Adrian's suicide is offered, other than his suicide note that emphasized the role of the owner's right in ending one's own life. It is left for the reader to make conjectures. And to me, Robson seems to be an ominous precursor – a prophetic, pathetic prequel to Adrian’s death.
Referring to Robson’s suicide in his final history class, Adrian had challenged the master Hunt into a duel of historiography. Adrian had told the class that with Robson not present among them, nor leaving them any documented evidence, no one could ever vouch for what really triggered his end.
“Did Robson have any other motives or reasons beyond the obvious ones? What was his state of mind? Can we be sure the child was his?...You see the problem, Sir?...nothing can make up for the absence of Robson’s testimony, sir ”
This is a same telling set of questions that would echo in the reader’s mind when the answers go missing years later, in Adrian’s suicide.
The novel ends with Veronica apparently burning Adrian’s diary thereby killing any possibility on Tony’s part (and in turn mine) to find out what really happened to Adrian. To Veronica and to Mrs. Ford. The burned diary amounts to loss – of memory, of evidence, of history. But then our narrator has retreated again into his self doubting paranoia. So I, as a reader have no way of being sure, who is playing with my senses: Barnes, Tony or Adrian? Or me myself enmeshed in a heteroglossia of voices that continue to haunt my readings? Maybe this then is the beginning of my misreading.
And a tiny voice keeps echoing inside the room of my head with what Paula Gunn Allen had said, though in a feminist context: "The root of oppression is loss of memory."
[All images are courtesy Google Image Search - yes, they have killed my ridiculous imaginings but what the heck, also helped me with some visual relief!]
