In Julian Barnes’ novel The Sense of an Ending, a precocious schoolboy named Adrian Finn recites, from memory and in reply to a teacher, a definition of history:

History is that certainty produced at the point where the imperfections of memory meet the inadequacies of documentation.

It’s a marvelously provocative sentence. The book’s unreliable narrator, Anthony Webster, recalls the classroom scene in which it was uttered, recalls his friend Adrian’s easy brilliance, even recalls the historian Adrian cites as author of the definition: a Frenchman named Patrick Lagrange.

In their reviews, many critics mention Patrick Lagrange or quote his definition; in a sense, it seems to plainly assert the thesis, so to speak, of the novel. For The Sense of an Ending is concerned with the imperfections of memory —of its narrator’s memory in particular— and inadequate documentation and the illusory certainty we each have about our own history. Beneath this scarcely-interrogated certainty, Barnes posits, is an impenetrable morass of synthesized recollection and invention: experiences deliberately forgotten, lessons we cannot bear to learn, delusions we grasp tightly, fears we will not acknowledge, stories we repeat until we don’t remember the events they misrepresent. The Sense of an Ending explores how we compose the texts of our lives, and how as storytellers we lie to ourselves and others; how as historians we redact our perceptions and later our memories; how as academics we rationalize our behavior theoretically; and how as individuals we read our lives as inattentively and badly as we read novels.

It is fitting, then, that the French historian Patrick Lagrange is himself an invention, his remark a creation of uncertain provenance, his authority on the subjects of history and memory as questionable as our own. Among those reviewers who didn’t uncritically parrot his professorial assertion were some who seemed irritated by the false-flag fiction:

Quizzed by a master at school, Adrian comes up with a breathtaking aphorism: “History is that certainty produced at the point where the imperfections of memory meet the inadequacies of documentation.” It turns out Adrian is quoting a Frenchman, Patrick Lagrange. Proof that Barnes doesn’t have any ideas of his own! Except that Lagrange has been invented by Adrian (on the spur of the moment), and self-evidently by Barnes, which means he does have ideas of his own! But this then throws up a rudimentary technical problem, namely, that we are expected to believe that Adrian could have come up with a formulation — and an alleged source — not only implausibly beyond the capacities of even the most precocious adolescent but distinctly sharper than anything else his creator manages in the course of the book.

This is an astonishingly dim analysis in many respects; notably, there is no evidence whatsoever to suggest that Adrian concocted Lagrange; all we know is that the narrator Anthony Webster claims that he remembers Adrian defining history thusly and attributing the definition to a French historian named Patrick Lagrange. Did Adrian manufacture him? Did Webster remember him incorrectly? Did both occur? Did neither? Did Barnes mean for Patrick Lagrange to have been part of the fictional world of his characters? But in all other historical respects it is identical to our own!

With pristine irony, Barnes lightly enacts for us, for our experiential intellection, a moment of vertiginous epistemic uncertainty. We have not only a muddled and unreliable narrator, telling a story at some decades’ remove from the events which, at this point, can only be said to have “inspired” it; we have this narrator recalling words spoken by a friend to whose dark fate he may have contributed with an act he’s determined not to remember; and the words in question are, according to the friend, a quotation, that is, the friend’s recollection of the words of another; and he recalls that his friend recollects too the name of the author of the words: Lagrange.

There are too many potential points of failure along this chain of recollections and representations to count. Taken in its full context, it is a tidy, carefully-crafted satirization of the idea of epistemic authority, and it’s neither fussy nor demanding: read literally, it supports the novel’s themes; if one ponders the fact that the quotation is remembered, it supports the novel’s themes; if one digs and digs into it, and cross-references it with the world beyond the novel, one suddenly realizes that —as one of the book’s refrains has it— one didn’t understand, didn’t get it; and this supports the novel’s themes.

(That one clings to the authority of the definition, is attracted to its neatness, yet must accept that in its contextual totality it is self-subverting —approaching, from a distance, a sort of liar’s paradox— is delightful as well).

When authors attempt to enact some phenomenon, they must sometimes be clever, must use the structure of their novel or its relation to the outside world or some other element beyond its content to catalyze in readers something not described. This can be necessitated when an author’s themes concern aspects of the phenomenology of consciousness —how we experience deteriorating memory—, for example, or when our language is poorly suited to the task of describing a specific experience of the mind or world. An author may feel that the inner human experience of sorrow is something quite different from even a good description of sorrow, and so may attempt to make a reader feel sorrow deeply without talking at all about sadness, or, in some mysterious cases, anything sad directly (W.G. Sebald in particular excels at making one feel despair without being sure why). For some subjects, describing the experience with which the author is concerned would be to chase it away. To put it in another medium’s terms: you can make a movie about anxiety that shows people experiencing it, or you can make a movie in such a way that it produces anxiety in audiences.

In either case, there is a kind of knowledge being communicated. It could be disputed, by a particularly hard-nosed and reductive scientist, for example, that novels do not communicate knowledge of any real value, or at least none that would not be better-communicated, more clearly and without tricks, games, paradox, or play, by an essay. But this is not at all so. Beyond its capacity to entertain in ordinary senses —a crucial component of most wonderful art— the novel can communicate knowledge which an essay cannot, especially by manipulating the reader without his or her awareness, i.e., by enacting rather than portraying or describing.

The novel is a particularly superlative means for communicating experiential knowledge of an internal phenomenological sort; visualized narratives are too specific, perhaps, for us to inhabit the worlds they describe in the way we inhabit the worlds novels construct within us. We interiorize fiction as we do little else.  For Milan Kundera, this quality of fiction —that it constitutes a form of knowledge— is paramount, the novel’s real raison d’être: 

A novel that does not uncover a hitherto unknown segment of existence is immoral. Knowledge is the novel’s only morality.

The form in which knowledge is expressed is often as important as its content (when they can be distinguished at all); Tom Stoppard once noted of his work that “if I were to write an essay instead of a play about any of these subjects it wouldn’t be a profound essay.” But of course Brazil was profound, especially in its enactment of the hero’s narcissistic, universally-resonant determination to fantasize his private salvation, an enactment that exceeded any possible description by involving you in his self-deceit, in his childishly egotistic romanticism, so that you identify with him rather than judge him. Thus: you might perhaps learn not to judge when you might try instead to understand.

This power that fiction has to unfold inside of you such that you are inside of it, subject to its aims, permits The Sense of an Ending to very gently show you how impossible it is even to know a simple text. It is Barnes’ talent that not only permits him to wield this power but to do so delicately, without making a ruckus. The achievement is such that one does not conclude the novel asking “What really happened?” as one often does in works with unreliable narrators, but instead feels almost in awe of the vagaries of memory, the mysteries of selfhood, will, and morality, and the groundlessness of so much of what we think we are.

Memory is as persistent an enigma as any, so integral to us as to be us yet almost always ungovernable and frequently treacherous. We do not remember as we think we do, as Kundera notes in Testaments Betrayed while remarking on the immense talent Hemingway had for dialogue:

Try to reconstruct a dialogue from your own life, the dialogue of a quarrel or a dialogue of love. The most precious, the most important situations are utterly gone. Their abstract sense remains (I took this point of view, he took that one, I was aggressive, he was defensive), perhaps a detail or two, but the acoustisovisual concreteness of the situation in all its continuity is lost.

And not only is it lost but we do not even wonder at this loss. We are resigned to losing the concreteness of the present. We immediately transform the present moment into its abstraction. We need only recount an episode we experienced a few hours ago: the dialogue contracts to a brief summary, the setting to a few general features. This applies to even the strongest memories, which affect the mind deeply, like a trauma: we are so dazzled by their potency that we don’t realize how schematic and meager their content is.

When we study, discuss, analyze a reality, we analyze it as it appears in our mind, in our memory. We know reality only in the past tense. We do not know it as it is in the present, in the moment when it’s happening, when it is. The present moment is unlike the memory of it. Remembering is not the negative of forgetting. Remembering is a form of forgetting.

Two aims, then, for a novelist to pursue: the first is the expression of the present moment in text with “the acousticovisual concreteness of the situation in all its continuity,” which, for a human, means a great quantity of internal mental processes and experiences in every instant. It was one of Joyce’s aims in writing Ulysses, and it required of him that he undertake significant formal innovations to describe what had never before been described.

The second: to show how one cobbles together from scraps of confused perceptions, bits of tattered abstractions, and naked invention an illusory sense of certainty about oneself and one’s history. Parts of this process are unconscious, parts unavoidable —inadequate documentation and all that— but parts are willed, the result of our nearly magical capacity for self-delusion and our deep need to feel secure, safe, decent.

If one were to write a review of The Sense of an Ending discussing some of these ideas, it wouldn’t be a particularly profound review, and it would stand in absurdly unwieldy contrast to the airy felicity of the novel itself. Barnes does not labor over machinations or belabor ideas; he tells a short, even plain story of a man whose memory has indeed been a forgetting, an array of errors and deliberately suppressed, dream-like visions, and whose present and future remain to him a complete and utter mystery. It is not clear whether he is a good man or a bad man, only that like all of us he had some difficulty seeing himself clearly, and difficulty even in understanding that.

When he was 23 years old, Tolstoy wrote that

[so] many memories of the past start up when your imagination endeavors to resurrect the features of a beloved one that through these memories, as through tears, you see them only vaguely. These are memory’s tears.

In its sentimentality it is clearly the work of his youth, but even then Tolstoy was thinking as Joyce, Barnes, Sebald, and others have about memory, about how even the face of one’s beloved mother can become vague in one’s mind, how this isn’t the negative of forgetting but merely a form of it, and sometimes a dangerously false one at that. One flaw of our invented memory that especially interested Tolstoy was its tendency to overemphasize the agency of the individual; Kundera’s summary of Tolstoy’s thought in War and Peace (again from Testaments Betrayed) and how it relates to the judgment of others, in this case, artists:

Tolstoy argues against the idea that history is made by the will and reason of great individuals. History makes itself, he says, obeying laws of its own, which remain obscure to man. Great individuals “all were the involuntary tools of history, carrying on a work that was concealed from them.” Later on: “Providence compelled all these men, each striving to attain personal aims, to combine in the accomplishment of a single stupendous result not one of them (neither Napoleon nor Alexander and still less anyone who did the actual fighting) in the least expected.” And again: “Man lives consciously for himself, but is unconsciously a tool in the attainment of the historic, general aims of mankind.” From which comes this tremendous conclusion: “History, that is, the unconscious, general herd-life of mankind…”

With this conception of history, Tolstoy lays out the metaphysical space in which his characters move. Knowing neither the meaning nor the future course of history, knowing not even the objective meaning of their own actions (by which they “involuntarily” participate in events whose meaning is “concealed from them”), they proceed through their lives as one proceeds in the fog. I say fog, not darkness. In the darkness, we see nothing, we are blind, we are defenseless, we are not free. In the fog, we are free, but it is the freedom of a person in fog: he sees fifty yards ahead of him, he can clearly make out the features of his interlocutor, can take pleasure in the beauty of the trees that line the path, and can even observe what is happening close by and react.

Man proceeds in the fog. But when he looks back to judge people of the past, he sees no fog on their path. From his present, which was their faraway future, their path looks perfectly clear to him, good visibility all the way. Looking back, he sees the path, he sees the people proceeding, he sees their mistakes, but not the fog. And yet all of them —Heidegger, Mayakovsky, Aragon, Ezra Pound, Gorky, Gottfried Benn, St.-John Perse, Giono— all were walking in fog, and one might wonder: who is more blind? Mayakovsky, who as he wrote his poem on Lenin did not know where Leninism would lead? Or we, who judge him decades later and do not see the fog that enveloped him?

Mayakovsky’s blindness is part of the eternal human condition. But for us not to see the fog on Mayakovsky’s path is to forget what man is, forget what we ourselves are.

Thus a moral purpose for the novelist concerned with memory: to stay our ignorantly un-empathetic judgment of the past (and therefore of the present) by summoning this fog, not by simply describing it but by calling it forth to envelop us. Long after finishing The Sense of an Ending it lingers, and it must be the source of the novel’s title: on our paths within this fog, conducting our fitful, unending investigations of memory, we will not know an ending, a conclusion, a clear terminus to our wandering or wondering; we remain to ourselves a mystery, and can have at best only the sense of an ending to our inquiries. This sense, of course, is as unreliable as our narrator; we can have little confidence in our detection of a ground, an end, a resolution; and our conclusions are liable to be exposed, again and again after we reach them, as illusory. We should judge one another accordingly.

-Milan Kundera, Testaments Betrayed. See also.

“What shocked me most in the great Stalin trails was the cold approval with which these Communist statesmen accepted the execution of their friends. For they were all friends, by which I mean that they had known each other intimately, had lived together through rough times, emigration, persecution, a long political struggle. How is it that they were able to sacrifice their friendship, and in such a macabrely definitive way?

But was it friendship? There is a human relationship called soudruzstvi in Czech —from soudruh, comrade— meaning “the friendship of comrades or companions,” the fellow-feeling that binds those who engage in the same political struggle. When the common devotion to the cause disappears, the reason for the fellow-feeling disappears as well. But friendship subordinated to an interest considered superior to friendship has nothing to do with friendship.

In our time people have learned to subordinate friendship to what’s called “convictions.” And even with a prideful tone of moral correctness. It does take great maturity to understand that the opinion we are arguing for is merely the hypothesis we favor, necessarily imperfect, probably transitory, which only very limited minds can declare to be a certainty or truth. Unlike the puerile loyalty to a conviction, loyalty to a friend is a virtue —perhaps the only virtue, the last remaining one.”

From Milan Kundera’s Encounter, an excellent collection of essays published in 2009.

In discussing posthumous criticism of Thomas Mann, Clive James notes, in a characteristically provocative aside, something of interest:

“…a modern cultural trend: mass therapy for the semi-cultivated, transmitted through supposedly edifying examples of the idol with the feet of clay.”

Mass-therapy for the semi-cultivated. It soothes one’s fragile ego, one’s tender disappointment at being so unremarkable -so bound by the happenstance configuration of one’s self and one’s circumstances-, to believe that none are any better. It is therefore a profitable mission of the democratic institution of journalism to edify one against despair by helping one to conclude that just as one is all foibles and clay, so too is every hero, every idol.

It is an inalienable imperative for the journalist, from the investigative reporter to the tabloid bloviator: expose, undermine, humiliate, bring low whomever one can. We hunger for more, so they bring more; they expand the scope of journalistic inquiry to include those accidentally made noteworthy by some misfortune, those momentarily elevated by some pop-culture episode, those whose claims to fame are tertiary, quaternary. The search for dirt is the search for clay; it appeases a public which cannot abide the idea of exceptionalism except in the narrowest, quantifiable fields, and even there insists that achievement be counterbalanced with hideous flaws.

(Indeed, the cleverest celebrities strategically cultivate and present their flaws as an orchestrated countermeasure against democratic contempt; they choose, so to speak, what sort of clay suits them and how it is to be photographed. This process is a trope to us now, a worn script; the confessional interviews, the stint -always a stint- in rehabilitation clinics, the book; and we find it harder and harder to tell real suffering from artificial suffering, desirable suffering, the sort of suffering which confers a moral aura and makes one culturally invincible).

We’ve inherited a culture in which idols, and many lesser sorts of elevated personages, are hunted, their private lives scoured for signs of imperfection; and technology is extending it such that we are all hunted, and all our lives are similarly scoured: the Internet is fecund territory for judges and critics; here we all are, together. 

In any event, I was reminded of an amusing scene in Milan Kundera’s Immortality, in which a character named Paul argues against the “metaphysical inequality” of great art:

We started to talk about all sorts of things. Avenarius referred a few more times to my novels, which he had not read, and so provoked Paul to make a remark whose rudeness astonished me: “I don’t read novels. Memoirs are much more amusing and instructive for me. Or biographies. Recently I’ve been reading books about Salinger, Rodin, and the loves of Franz Kafka. And a marvelous biography of Hemingway. What a fraud. What a liar. What a megalomaniac.” Paul laughed happily. “What an impotent. What a sadist. What a macho. What an erotomaniac. What a misogynist.”

“If you’re ready, as a lawyer, to defend even murderers, why don’t you come to the defense of writers who have committed no wrong except for writing books?” I asked.

“Because they get on my nerves,” Paul retorted cheerfully, and poured some wine into the glass the waiter had just placed before him.

“My wife adores Mahler,” he continued. “She told me that two weeks before the premiere of his Seventh Symphony he locked himself up in a noisy hotel room and spent the whole night rewriting the orchestration.”

“Yes,” I agreed, “it was in Prague, in 1906. The name of the hotel was the Blue Star.”

“I visualize him sitting in the hotel room, surrounded by manuscript paper,” Paul continued, refusing to let himself be interrupted. “He was convinced that his whole work would be ruined if the melody were played by a clarinet instead of an oboe during the second movement.”

“That’s precisely so,” I said, thinking of my novel.

Paul continued, “I wish that someday this symphony could be played before an audience consisting of the best musical experts, first with the corrections made in those last two weeks, and then without the corrections. I guarantee that nobody would be able to tell one version from the other. Don’t get me wrong: it is certainly remarkable that the motif played in the second movement by the violin is picked up in the last movement by the flute. Everything is worked through, thought through, felt through, nothing has been left to chance, but that enormous perfection overwhelms us, it surpasses the capacity of our memory, our ability to concentrate, so that even the most fanatically attentive listener will grasp no more than one-hundredth of the symphony, and certainly it will be this one-hundredth that Mahler cared about the least.”

His idea, so obviously correct, cheered him up, whereas I was becoming sadder and sadder: if a reader skips a single sentence of my novel he won’t be able to understand it, and yet where in the world will you find a reader who never skips a line? Am I not myself the greatest skipper of lines and pages?

“I don’t deny those symphonies their perfection,” continued Paul. “I only deny the importance of that perfection. Those super-sublime symphonies are nothing but cathedrals of the useless. They are inaccessible to man. They are inhuman. We exaggerated their significance. They made us feel inferior. Europe reduced Europe to fifty works of genius that it never understood. Just think of this outrageous inequality: millions of Europeans signifying nothing, against fifty names signifying everything! Class inequality is but an insignificant shortcoming compared to this insulting metaphysical inequality, which turns some into grains of sand while endowing others with the meaning of being!”

The bottle was empty. I called the waiter to bring us another. This caused Paul to lose the thread.

“You spoke about biographies,” I prompted him.

“Ah… yes,” he recalled.

“You were happy that you can at last read the intimate correspondence of the dead.”

“I know, I know,” said Paul, as if he wanted to counter in advance any objections from the other side. “I assure you that rifling through someone’s intimate correspondence, interrogating his former mistresses, talking doctors into betraying professional confidences, that’s rotten. Authors of biographies are riffraff, and I would never sit at the same table with them as I do with you. Robespierre, too, would never have sat down with the riffraff that had collective orgasms at the spectacle of public executions. But he knew that he couldn’t do without them. The riffraff is an instrument of just revolutionary hatred.”

“What is revolutionary about hatred for Hemingway?” I asked.

“I’m not talking about hatred for Hemingway! I’m talking about his work! I’m talking about their work! It was necessary to say out loud at last that reading about Hemingway is a thousand times more amusing and instructive than reading Hemingway. It was necessary to show that Hemingway’s work is but a coded form of Hemingway’s life and that this life was just as poor and meaningless as all our lives. It was necessary to cut Mahler’s symphony into little pieces and use it as background music for toilet-paper ads. It was necessary at last to end the terror of the immortals. To overthrow the arrogant power of the Ninth Symphonies and the Fausts!”

Drunk on his own words, he got up and raised his glass high: “I drink to the end of the old days!”

Art: cathedrals of the useless, coded biography. Tabloid journalism: an instrument of just revolutionary hatred, hatred of perfection, of the falsified ideal. The end of old days: the end of idols, the advent of the age of the crowd. Does Paul describe our world? Is it better that we never forget that all are clay, fallible, weak? Is this a gradual, undirected, democratic revolution against all forms of the elect, the exalted, and if so, what is given up, what is lost?