Reflections on ‘A Sense of an Ending’
This novella really speaks to me, as there are so many similarities between Tony Webster, the first person protagonist, and myself. Both are older men looking back on their lives and trying to understand some past events and memories. I think at first I was wanting this book to help me understand myself and my journey, to find my truth. It did more that that, it showed the absurdity of finding any historical truth and the unreliability of memories and narrators, really connecting with my theme of Memories and Time. It also examined the effect of ageing in general and ageing and memories in particular – all this in a work of fiction, what an art!
Ageing is also a concern for me, in my life and art. I’m now 75, but I’m relatively fit I gave up playing rugby and football at the university in my 50s, because I was fitter and faster than the students I played with and ran the London marathon at 54.
Tony, the protagonist of A Sense of an Ending, says, “How often do we tell our own life story? How often do we adjust, embellish, make sly cuts? And the longer life goes on, the fewer are those around to challenge our account, to remind us that our life is not our life, merely the story we have told about our life. Told to others, but – mainly – to ourselves (Barnes, 2011).”
The second part of the book is in this sense a “Vollendungsroman”,an autobiography written late in life where the narrator, Tony, looks back on his past and tries to find a cohesive, satisfying narrative. (Am I doing that?)
Schacter (Schacter, 1996) agrees, “We extract key elements from our experiences and store them. We, then, recreate or reconstruct our experiences rather than retrieve copies of them […]. In other words, we bias our memories of the past by attributing to them emotions or knowledge we acquired after the event.”
[“We both know what memories can bring,
they bring diamonds and rust”,
‘Diamonds and Rust’, Joan Baez, 1975]
Are the key elements the ‘diamonds’ and the dismissed or forgotten parts of memories the ‘rust’?
I think this also supports my hypothesis (not only mine) that memories are subject to change. However, in my present work where the composite portrays a jumbled memory, the memory is based on artifacts which do not (noticeably) change with time and so have some material basis. Do I still believe this?
When I look back on this work with the gold crystal in the 1970s, I’m not relying solely on my memories of that time, but on the scientific data in my thesis. However, and I only thought of this while walking in the woods today, look what I’m doing when making my Found Poetry. I take a page from the thesis, obliterate most of the words and keep just those that can give quite different meaning to that in the thesis. Additionally the added colours and patterns are in rich contrast to the stark white page of the thesis.
Science can be refashioned into Art?
It reminded me of Kaya ÖZÇELİK’s paper (ÖZÇELİK, 2023) The Sense of an Ending: A Postmodern Challenge of Truth, opens with “Throughout the history, one of the interests of humankind has always been to search for what reality/truth is, how they are formed, and how they can be tested, and has thus become a matter of debate among scholars from different fields of study such as sociology, psychology, history and literature.” [Note, not physics, or other natural sciences. ] “…To crown it all, reality/truth based on memories can even have potential for misguiding one in his/her present or future deeds in the wrong way just like the protagonist Tony Webster. “
In his article “The Seven Sins of Memory: Insights from Psychology and Cognitive Neuroscience” , Schacter (Schacter, 1999) states” Though often reliable, human memory is also fallible. … It is suggested that memory’s misdeeds can be classified into 7 basic “sins”: transience, absentmindedness, blocking, misattribution, suggestibility, bias, and persistence. The first three sins involve different types of forgetting, the next three refer to different types of distortions, and the final sin concerns intrusive recollections that are difficult to forget. … Although the 7 sins may appear to reflect flaws in system design, it is argued instead that they are by-products of otherwise adaptive features of memory.”
He goes on to mention the duality of memory or its “fragile power” where the positive side of memory enables us to be effective in our everyday lives, such as the retention of skills, such as driving a car, and facts, simple knowledge of our family, friends, family and surroundings. However, “memory also has a darker, more fragile side. People may forget events rapidly or gradually, distort the past in surprising ways, and sometimes experience intrusive recollections of events that they wish they could forget.”
I was reading some more critique of Julian Barnes’ very interesting and intriguing book again recently, mulling it over on the train home last night, as well as recalling a conversation earlier in the pub.
The author of the paper picked up on two things I’d noticed and that puzzled me, but many other articles on this book had either not mentioned or thought unimportant. (Different viewers see different pictures of the same events).This narrator described 1) that Tony had received a bequest from (Veronica, the girlfriend) a former girlfriend’s mother (Sarah) and 2) he had only met Sarah once at a weekend visit to their home many years previously and spoken to her briefly when they were alone in the kitchen. [Sarah was also the name of The French Lieutenant’s Woman (FOWLES, J. 1969) who lived a less than straight=forward life and was rather devious]. Perhaps Tony had committed one or more of the first three sins of forgetting (Schacter, 1999) here, as he certainly did in the main turning point of the story.
This turning point occurs when Tony recounts that, after his breakup with Veronica, his best friend, Adrian, writes to him saying that he is in a relationship with Veronica. Tony ‘remembers’ that he sent a short, friendly postcard wishing them good luck, but Tony receives back from Veronica, instead of Adrian’s diary in the bequest, a poisonous, vitriolic letter he had sent to Adrian instead of the ‘remembered’ postcard! Tony is vey shocked by this, he had lived his life, believing he had made an honourable act to his friend, who committed suicide sometime later, but this information about the letter throws him into turmoil. How had he misremembered? Had his letter played a role in Adrian’s suicide?
I hope I have not laboured this point too much, but I find it so fascinating and relevant in my interest in unreliable memories, untruthful narrators or even unreliable narrators and untruthful memories. It also provides context to my theme and my art.
Çiğdem Alp Pamuk, in her paper “Memory, Identity and Old Age: The Sense of an Ending as the Story of Ageing”, states, “While trying to solve the mystery of this strange inheritance, he journeys into the past through memories and confronts his self-image both in past and present times. Tony’s journey changes his ideas about life and people. The Sense of an Ending is generally considered to be a novel about the disillusionment and regrets of an elderly person who feels sorry for his past life and hopeless for the future.“(Pamuk, Ç. A. 2020)
She goes on to say, “However, it might be misleading to view the novel merely as the story of a despairing old man who is stuck in present time without the hope of change. Rather, the transformation of the protagonist together with his changing views on life suggest affirmation of life, which makes the novel an example of vollendungsroman. In the novel, the period of senescence is not represented as the phase of decline and stagnancy. Rather, it is rendered as a new stage in one’s life when a new sense of the self is formed and new facets of life – either positive or negative – are (re)discovered. On the whole, The Sense of an Ending is a text in which the old protagonist transforms himself and gains new insights into life in spite of all his losses and mistakes.“(Pamuk, Ç. A. 2020)
I hope what she says is true, when applied to myself and my art.
BARNES, J. 2011. The sense of an ending, London, Jonathan Cape.
FOWLES, J. 1969. The French lieutenant’s woman, Boston,, Little.
ÖZÇELİK, K. 2023. The Sense of an Ending: A Postmodern Challenge of Truth. World Journal of English Language, 13 62-68.
PAMUK, Ç. A. 2020. Memory, Identity and Old Age: The Sense of an Ending as the Story of Ageing. Çankaya University Journal of Humanities and Social Sciences, 14, 11.
SCHACTER, D. L. 1996. Searching for Memory: The Brain, the Mind, and the Past, New York, USA, Basic Books.
SCHACTER, D. L. 1999. The Seven Sins of Memory: Insights From Psychology and Cognitive Neuroscience. The American Psychologist, 22.
