“There Is Great Unrest”: Some Reflections On Emotion And Memory In Julian Barnes’S Nothing To Be Frightened Of And The Sense Of An Ending

Abstract

paper responds to the perception that postmodern narratives which are formally complex might be less emotionally involving than other areas of literature. It considers that perception in the context of a discussion of the relation between memory and affect in English literature and culture, referring to stereotypical constructions and counter-constructions of English reserve and of its representation in both canonical and contemporary (and postmodern) English writing. In its argument, the paper refers initially to contrasting concerns arising from the work of critics like Eliot, Richards, Leavis, Edmundson and Belsey but focusing its attention more particularly on Julian Barnes's memoir Nothing to Be Frightened Of (2008) and his novel Sense of an Ending (2011). From that scrutiny of Barnes's work, a number of insights emerge into the complex relations between memory, emotion, postmodernism and Englishness. is paper considers whether there is any incongruity between the ingenious narrative architectures and metafictional sophistication of postmodernist fiction and the prospect of emotion in the raw. Seeking a case-study where an understated manner with poignant matter might prove revealing, it finds Julian Barnes's Nothing to Be Frightened Of (2008) entirely to the purpose: a memoir where stylistic poise in the mediation of remembrance of things past and present sets up intriguing contrasts between equanimity of form and unrest in the content. e tone of elegant wistfulness seems exactly apt for the analysis indicated, and Barnes's e Sense of an Ending, a novel of agitated reminiscence which won the Booker Prize in 2011 and which tellingly ends on that word, unrest, sets up an intriguingly more rounded inquiry. Admittedly, the affinities with postmodern poetics in both texts are a little less evident than in, say, Flaubert's Parrot (1984) or A History of the World in 10½ Chapters (1989). But the interest, rather and precisely, lies in the representation of very private emotion by an author who had once been more straightforwardly perceivable