Antinomies of temporal and corporeal affect : interrogating Jamesonian realism in Julian Barnes's 'The Sense of an Ending'

The time which abandons chronos is a time replete with what is lost forever. Instead of being able to recollect the past, the subjective history formed by the jigsaw pieces of memory can only arrive at a lacking point where time itself gets dissolved. There is no time in this eternity, and memory can only yield the emotions of the present in the present. As Tony states, 'I must stress that this is my reading now of what happened then. Or rather, my memory now of my reading then of what was happening at the time' (p.41). The past is dissolved as soon as it is invoked in this telling, and we are left with the present of this 'now' which can only fall back upon itself. There is a hesitation here regarding the time of reading: is Tony reading in the present of this 'now' alongside the reader or has he already done his reading in the past? Can his present alter or reconfigure the past or does the past remain dead and buried? These questions regarding narrative temporality are of great interest to Fredric Jameson's 2013 book The Antinomies of Realism, which in my view is not simply a literary defence of the nineteenth century realistic novel but a philosophical revitalization of literary and novelistic realism mediating through the dialectical conditions of modernity and postmodernity. I will read the complex and aporetic temporality of the Barnes novel in the light of Jameson's thoughts on a new historical time of the present in the aforementioned book. Though I will problematize the neatness of Jameson's identifications at various points before going beyond them to propose a Lacanian supplement, I consider this analysis to be in Jameson's spirit in holding up the figure of antinomy as the auto-deconstructive hinge for his notion of realism.