Antinomies of Temporality and Corporeal Affect: Interrogating Jamesonian Realism in

Julian Barness The Sense of an Ending

Arka Chattopadhyay

History is that certainty produced at the point where the imperfections of memory meet the
inadequacies of documentation. (Barnes 17) Adrian, one of the characters in Julian Barness
2011 novel The Sense of an Ending attributes this indictment of historical veracity to a
fictitious French historian Patrick Lagrange. The false-citation marks the double-aporia in
this already aporetic vision of history as a locus where truth can only remain in a state of
suspension. What interests me here is a question of time and not space. As we shall see, the
novel reiterates the Modernist trope of unreliable memory in attempting to reconstitute the
past in the light of the present. It begins with a catalogue of six random images thrown up by
free-associative memory and immediately develops what the first-person narrator Tony calls
times malleability (03). The affective images of memory jettison chronological time by
turning it into something as malleable as the affects themselves. Tony elaborates: Some
emotions speed it [time] up, others slow it down; occasionally it seems to go missing until
the eventual point when it really does go missing, never to return. (03) The novel takes its
title from Frank Kermodes eponymous book of literary criticism published in 1966. Barnes
responds to Kermodes central questions of time and literary realism. Barnes, much like
Kermode, unsettles the temporal linearity of the Aristotelian beginning, middle and end by
suggesting what the latter calls a world without end or beginning. (Kermode 67)
The time which abandons chronos is a time replete with whats lost for ever. Instead
of being able to recuperate 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. (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

Jamesons 2013 book The Antinomies of Realism which in my view is not simply a literary
defence of the 19th 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 Jamesons thoughts on a new historical time of the present in the aforementioned
book. Though I will problematize the neatness of Jamesons identifications at various points
before going beyond them to propose a Lacanian supplement, I consider this analysis to be in
Jamesons spirit in holding up the figure of antinomy as the auto-deconstructive hinge for his
notion of realism.
Jamesons Temporal Antinomy: Destiny and Agency
Let me begin with Jamesons definition of antinomy from the essay The Antinomies of
Postmodernity where he distinguishes between antinomy and contradiction. For him,
antinomy is a stronger tool of disjunction than contradiction because it states two
propositions that are radically, indeed absolutely, incompatible, take it or leave it.
Contradiction, for him, on the other hand is only a matter of partialities and aspects only
some of it is incompatible with the accompanying proposition (1998, 51). In the
Introduction to The Antinomies of Realism, Jameson pays homage to Jacques Derrida for
showing that aporia is not a stopping point but a way of proceeding. Jameson observes that
aporetic thinking is precisely the dialectic itself and considers his approach to realism as a
dialectical and hence an aporetic experiment. (2013, 06-07) What is the fundamental
antinomy of realism for Jameson? He sets up this question in his first two theoretical chapters
in terms of various dialectical structures but perhaps the most fundamental dialectic has to do
with temporality and history and boils down to the interlocking of rcit and roman or what he
calls the narrative impulse and the affective time of the body. The time of rcit, Jameson
argues, is a fossilized time of preterite where everything has already happened and the
event is locked away in an irrevocable past while the time of roman offers a present which
can potentially intervene into the ruses of the past and alter both its implication and
intrication (18).
In Jamesons engaged political stance, the novelistic genre cant be reduced to the
story function; its an intervention into the dead time of finished events which reopens the
past in terms of a present and this present stands for freedom. Drawing on Sartre, he
prescribes the novelistic recreation of this open present, in which not even the past is set in

stone, insofar as our acts in the present rewrite and modify it. (18) This present is marked by
an eternity which reduces everything to the body as if all that one can access in this present is
the body. Jameson considers this reduction to the present and a resultant reduction to the
body as a postmodern tendency wherein the body is all that remains in any tendential
reduction of experience to present as such. (28) Jameson characterizes this perpetual present
of the body as the subjects temporal condition where the isolated body begins to know
more global waves of generalized sensations, and it is these which, for want of a better word,
I will here call affect. (28) In Jamesons theorization, this affect of corporeal present resists
language and while emotions are subject to naming, the bodys affects remain a matter of
unnameable singularities and intensities (29). Ill come back to this affective corporeal
present both in Jamesons critical corpus and Barness novel where well be able to locate an
instance of this enigmatic corporeal affect which collapses chronological time and with it, the
antinomy, anchoring realism.
According to Jameson, the inalterable past of the story belongs to a providential
structure of tripartite chronological time which the realistic novel counter-poses with an
existential present of agency. This antinomy between the inertia of the past and what Jameson
calls the perpetual present in all its potential for making real change possible is at the heart
of his dialectical and historical formulation of realism. Jameson conceives this antinomy as
an irresolvable tension:
Now it can be articulated not as rcit versus roman, nor even telling versus showing; but rather
destiny versus the eternal present. And what is crucial is not to load one of these dies and take
sides for the one or the other as all our theorists seemed to do, but rather to grasp the proposition
that realism lies at their intersection. Realism is a consequence of the tension between these two
terms; to resolve the opposition either way would destroy it [] (26)

I will return to this eternal present weaving itself like the readers time which is always
anchored in the present and unpack its associations with body and affect across Jamesons
corpus but before that, let me state that for Jameson, even though to resolve this opposition
between chronological time and the bodys affective present is to destroy realism itself, the
realistic novel does exactly that by prioritizing any one over the other which makes Jameson
conclude that realism can only proceed by dismantling itself. As he concludes in the seventh
chapter titled Realism and the dissolution of Genre, the final generic adversary of the
realistic novel is none but the realistic novel itself (162). In the chapter on Tolstoy, this is

how Jameson points out realisms self-dismantling by way of a Derridean autodeconstruction:

[] a tension between plot and scene, between the chronological continuum and the eternal
present, realized in quite distinct ratios in the various great realists, nonetheless marks out the
space in which realism emerges and subsists, until one of the two antithetical forces finally
outweighs the other assures its disintegration (83)

This passage about the assured self-disintegration of realism which ends up privileging either
chronological time over the affective and corporeal present or vice versa talks back to
Jamesons summation in the Introduction where he seeks to grasp:
[] realism as a historical and evolutionary process in which the negative and the positive are
inextricably combined, and whose emergence and development at one and the same time
constitute its own inevitable undoing, its own decay and dissolution. (06)

In Jamesons view, realism can only exist in the gap of this antinomy between the two
temporalities of the present-past-future and the eternal present and yet it closes the gap by
overlapping one with the other. This collapses realism and yet this collapse is for him the
only way it can continue to operate. In Jamesons dialectic, what remains problematic is thus
a synthesis which would resolve the irreducibility of the antinomy. He critiques the free
indirect discourse combining first and third person points of view precisely because it
synthesizes the two temporalities which can only maintain realism as a tension between them:
And it should be clear from our earlier discussion that such a synthesis of the past (rcit) and the
present (scene) would seem to offer an ideal solution to the realist problem per excellence
except for the fact that realism was constitutively founded on an ineradicable tension between
these two temporal realities, a tension that begins to dissolve into the facile practice of narrative
mind-reading when free indirect discourse becomes the dominant sentence structure of the novel.
(177)

For Jameson, both a synthesis of the two dialectical terms and a prioritization of the one over
the other dissolve the antinomy of realism and all realistic novels dissolve realism by taking
either of these two paths. Julian Barness novel offers a liminal test case for Jamesons
argument because its not a politically engaged realist novel and yet it concerns itself with the
historicity of time and how a disruptive moment, suspended in an eternity of its own, can
dislodge chronological time and realism. Before turning to The Sense of an Ending, lets look
at the remarkable revolution of this notion of eternal present in Jamesons oeuvre.

The Evolution of the Eternal Present: Affect, Body and Capitalism

When Jameson evokes the bodys eternal present in the second chapter of The Antinomies, he
cites Deleuze and Guattaris schizophrenic present. Jameson had previously discussed this
schizophrenic present in his 2003 essay The End of Temporality collected in the second
volume of Ideologies of Theory. In Antinomies, Jameson directs us to this previous discussion
by quoting phrases like reduction to the present, reduction to the body and the end of
temporality (2013, 28). In The End of Temporality, Jameson had diagnosed the
schizophrenic perpetual present as a symptom of the postmodern social order but he was
sceptical about its ability to offer any real alternative. He had related the perpetual present
with freedom but also expressed doubt whether this was just a projection or a real
critique of the late-capitalist order of postmodernity (2008, 649-650). I think Jamesons
problem is built around the complex relations between time, eternity and the present. Can the
eternal present produce a true end of temporality? In other words, can this present,
empowered by the eternal, move out of time itself? :
[] whenever one attempts to escape a situatedness in the past and the future or in other words to
escape our being-in-time as such, the temporal present offers a rather flimsy support and a
doubtful or fragile autonomy. It thus inevitably comes to be thickened and solidified,
complemented, by a rather more metaphysical backing or content, which is none other than the
idea of eternity itself. (651)

Here Jameson is sceptical of the metaphysical solidification of the present when its
reinforced by the eternal. He is suspicious about the extent to which this eternity can support
the existential present. There is a tension between the temporality of the present and the
extra-temporal nature of eternity which gives an oxymoronic charge to eternal present. This
is where Jameson brings in the identification between the reduction to the present and a
homologous the reduction to the body in order to counter the metaphysics of eternity with the
materialism of corporeal present:
It is only fair to add that this position also comes in as it were a materialist version []. For the
reduction to the present, from this perspective, is also a reduction to something else, something
rather more material than eternity as such. Indeed, it seems clear enough that when you have
nothing left but your temporal present, it follows that you also have nothing left but your own
body. The reduction to the present can thus also be formulated in terms of a reduction to the body
as a present of time. (651)

Jameson has difficulty in affirming this materialism of the individual body in the present as a
locus of emancipation due to his position following Foucault, Lacan and Deleuze that the
body itself is framed by the Imaginary ideological functions of capitalism (652). The question
for us here is this: can there be a body in the Real (in the Lacanian sense) which escapes the
specular construction of the Imaginary body?1 As we shall see, in the Barnes novel, the
disruptive moment of suspended eternity is marked by a body which escapes the docile
body of capitalist ideological construction by paying homage to the opacity of the body in
the Real.2 To return to Jameson, he is forced to bracket off this corporeal present of eternity
as a historical tendency of late-capitalism which can only be a tendency and never be
actualized:
The historical tendency of late capitalismwhat we have called the reduction to the present and
the reduction to the bodyis in any case unrealizable; human beings cannot revert to the
immediacy of the animal kingdom (assuming indeed the animals themselves enjoy such
phenomenological immediacy). (656)

Jameson compares the unrealizable nature of the reduction to the corporeal present to the
unrepresentability of psychoanalytic drives (655) which brings us back to the question of the
Lacanian Real body. The bodily drives of psychoanalysis, I would argue, are not far from
Jamesons conceptualization of the unnameable bodily affects in The Antinomies of Realism.
Jameson insists on the resistance of these affects to the process of language which, activates
the category of the Lacanian Real as that which resists the Symbolic order of language (2013,
32). The ultimately unrepresentable drives circulate around the mythical whirlpool of the
Real in which one can posit a body in a state of dissipation (Lacan, 2006, 724).3 We will have
chance to seize a moment of this Real body in The Sense of an Ending.
Jameson with Deleuze: The Divisive Present of Eternity
This detour through The End of Temporality allows us to see a mutation in Jamesons use
of the bodys perpetual present. In the aforementioned essay he is critical of the process of
temporal reduction but in The Antinomies, not only does it become one of the two crucial
terms in the realistic antinomy but its seen as a locus of agency as opposed to the storys
dead past. Perpetual present in Jamesons Valences of the Dialectic seems to be square
bracketed with the market universe (2009, 178) and the tone there is almost dismissive:

Capitalism itself lives in a perpetual present; the human past seems to be a senseless accumulation
of unsuccessful human efforts and intentions; yet the future of technology inspires blind and
unshakeable faith. (224)

Its remarkable how Jamesons irritation with the postmodern tendency of reducing time to
the affective corporeal present changes into a positive engagement as it becomes the
interventionist time of freedom in The Antinomies. We can now see how he attempts to resignify realism by drawing on a fundamental postmodern tendency as its constitutive
antinomy. I would qualify this Jamesonian now in The Antinomies with a positive historical
charge by drawing on his own reflections in Valences of the Dialectic where he turns to
Heidegger and talks about the possibility of my now to expand and include past and
future. (517) He follows it up with a formulation of historicity as the possibility of
including past and future in my time-sense. (517) With recourse to Deleuze, whom Jameson
evokes at regular intervals, I would radicalize these inclusions of past and future by bringing
in the present as the locus from which the two inclusions happen. I would argue that here, in
this present, eternity is undercut by a simultaneous double-movement into the past and the
future and Deleuzes theory of Aion as opposed to the Chronos of time in The Logic of Sense
shows the way. In Twenty-Third Series of the Aion, Deleuze discusses the antithesis
between Chronos and Aion as two dialectical notions of time. In Chronos, only the present
exists in time and both past and future are seen as dimensions relative to the present whereas
in Aion the present becomes a slice between the past and the future:
In accordance with Aion, only the past and the future inhere or subsist in time. Instead of a present
which absorbs the past and future, a future and past divide the present at every instant and
subdivide it ad infinitum into past and future, in both directions at once. (Deleuze, 2004, 188)

Following Deleuzes point that only the past and the future exist in the time of Aion, we can
say that the present is not only divided into the past and the future but also de-temporalized
into eternity. Jameson doesnt evoke Deleuzean Aion anywhere but I think its necessary to
qualify his eternal present with this divided present which suspends the chronology of
Chronos. It produces a divisive moment in eternity from which both the past and the future
expand in two directions at the same time. There is a similar divisive moment which
jeopardizes chronological time and offers a rare glimpse into the Real of the body in The
Sense of an Ending which Ill now turn to.

Reading The Sense of an Ending: The Secret Disclosed and Undisclosed

Julian Barness 2011 Booker Prize winning novel The Sense of an Ending has been received
as a story with a secret and Tonys acts of remembrance arrive at a moment when the secret is
finally disclosed. Tony Webster narrates his story from school days through the winding
paths of memory and eventually returns to the present which has a shocking revelation in
store for him. Adrian Finn, his charismatic school friend who always enamoured Tony and
company with his brilliance, not only went on to romance Veronica, Tonys ex-girlfriend in
college but also committed suicide soon after. It was Tony who had introduced Veronica to
Adrian and when Adrian wrote a letter informing him about his relationship with Veronica,
Tony wrote back and that was the end of their friendship. His irritation to know that his exgirlfriend was going out with his best friend was abruptly turned into a state of shock when
he came to know on his return from the States that Adrian had killed himself by cutting his
wrists in the shower. Tonys memory is anchored on this enigmatic suicide which redramatizes their school friend Robsons suicideanother disturbing and yet fascinating event
for him and his friends, including Adrian. The mystery of Robsons suicide had made the
boys explore the complexities of non-linear history in the history classes with the teacher Old
Joe Hunt. This was the occasion of Adrians Patrick Lagrange citation with which we began.
But unlike Robson, Adrian was someone with the promise of a great life and his
philosophical insights made his suicide even more inscrutable. Veronicas role in his death
was also shrouded in a deep mist of time.
There is an event in the present which reopens this past. After forty years, the end of a
career, a failed marriage with Margaret and a daughter Susie, Tony receives a lawyers letter
which declares that Mrs. Sarah Ford, Veronicas mother has left him a memento and some
money. Tony had met Sarah briefly when he was with Veronica and had been invited to her
country-house in Kent during a college vacation. The narrator describes this visit in detail in
the first part before switching to the present when Tony is informed about Sarahs will.
Veronica is unwilling to let go of the memento which is nothing other than Adrians
notebook. What does this notebook have to say about his suicide? Its couched in a promise
of disclosure. This strange inheritance in the present unlocks the apparently dead past and
animates it with life as we enter into times malleability.
Adrians notebook gives an opportunity for Tony and Veronica to meet after troubled
and occasionally offensive e-mail exchanges. This reopens a subtle relational dynamic

between Tony and his ex-wife Margaret whose second husband has left her for a younger
woman and Tony is in more than friendly terms with her. Margarets advisory role in Tonys
life is complicated by the reopening of his liaison with Veronica. It turns out to be a rather
odd encounter but it does change Veronicas mind and she decides to share a fragment from
Adrians diary. Ill come back to the contents of this notebook which hardly resolves the knot
of his suicide but only tightens it further. The somewhat disconcerting meetings between
Tony and Veronica reach a climax when she meets a group of disabled people under
community care with Tony in the back seat of her car. Tony initially doesnt understand why
Veronica wants him to see them and goes through a series of attempts to meet them again.
This meeting finally brings him face to face with the truth. The youngest of the disabled
group, a boy, also named Adrian, is the son of his dead friend but this is only one half of the
revelation. The shocking other half arrives when Tony comes to know from one of Adrian
juniors friends that Veronica is not his mother but his sister. This means Adrian had an affair
with his girlfriends mother Sarah Ford which led to the boys birth and perhaps Adrians
death.
When the truth finally dawns upon him, Tony considers himself responsible because
on revisiting his letter to Adrian, he finds it much more spiteful than before. Its only in the
light of the truth in the present that he sees the connection, embedded in the past. It was he
who had actually led Adrian to Sarah by advising him to consult her on Veronicas strange
withdrawal of love (44). In the letter, he had cautioned Adrian that Veronica had some
damage which could be an issue with her upbringing. He had also mentioned how Sarah
herself had warned Tony during his stay that he should not allow Veronica to dictate terms.
Tony gets into a guilt trip as he realizes that it was his reference to Sarah as someone Adrian
should consult on Veronicas damages that had triggered their affair. And the chain of
consequences would eventually lead to Adrians suicide. The sentence There was great
unrest, sir (05) which Tonys friend Marshall had used, not knowing what to say to Old Joe
Hunts question about Henry VIIIs reign in the history class now re-turns to him in the
present. The novel closes with Tonys recasting of the same sentence in the present: There is
great unrest (150). The novel not only moves back from the past into the present but also
makes a present of the past when the sentence from the past is re-signified by the present.
Barness narrator is consistently preoccupied with the historical dimension of time
and aware of the slippages in it. This is a private history of individuals, enmeshed in a social
network of relations. And its repeatedly contrasted with the public historywhat Jameson in

The Antinomies would call the history of World-Historical Individuals (275). Tony
considers himself to be a survivor unlike Adrian and what he tells is the history of his own
memory which variously intersects with the lives of others around him. For him, history
changes from being the lies of the victors to the memories of the survivors, most of whom
are neither victorious nor defeated. (Barnes 56) At the beginning of the novels second part,
Tony describes his mistrust of both the public history of his lifetime, punctuated by grand
events like the fall of Communism, 9/11 and so on and the history of his own life in all its
undocumented little mysteries (60). The narrative impulse in The Sense of an Ending aims
at a documentation of this undocumented personal history through an unfolding of the hidden
layers of mnemic images. But what interests me here is not the historical structure of a past
opened by a present event leading to an intervention which radically changes the ethical
significations of the past. In Jamesonian terms, the novel not only shows how the roman can
liven up the dead time of the recit by altering the perception of the past and reading new
problematic connections and causal chains in it; there is something more here. And this
concerns an enigmatic moment which the novels final revelation can only half-illumine. The
other half remains locked in an inexplicable foreshadowing of the future in the past and the
opacity of the gesturing feminine body which belongs to the mystery woman Sarah Ford. To
zero in on this moment which collapses the temporal chronology, we must concentrate on the
episode of Tonys weekend trip to Veronicas country-house.
Horizontal Gesture at Waist Level: A Feminine Secret of the Real Body
The trip to Veronicas country-house was a disturbing experience for Tony, caught in the
complexities of an odd familial assimilation. He was at once tested and taken for granted and
sometimes neglected by the family members. Veronicas father was insolent, her brother
Jack, flippant while Sarah was the mystery element. Sarah and Tony had a significant
conversation when others were away one morning and as Tony remembers, I wasnt
experienced at talking to girlfriends mothers, and he had a difficult time of it. This is when
she warned him about her daughter: Dont let Veronica get away with too much (28). She
was frying eggs while having this conversation and broke one egg in the process. She flipped
the remnants of the broken egg into the bin, half-threw the hot frying pan into the wet sink
(29) and laughed happily to see the small explosion it created. This was as it were the
beginning of a greater havoc she would end up causing. Her carefree slapdash way of
frying eggs was an ominous seed of things to come. Years later, beginning to write his life
story, Tonys memory immediately threw up this image of steam rising from a wet sink as a

hot frying pan is laughingly tossed into it (03). This is the second of the six random images
with which the novel begins and it points to a mnemic trace of the past which the present will
significantly turn around. In spite of his inhibitions, Tony felt relieved to think that Sarah
seemed to like him.
When Tony was leaving Veronicas house he looked back from within Veronicas
fathers car and instead of waving him goodbye, Sarah made a mysterious gesture to him
from inside the house:
As Mr. Ford put the car into gear and spun the wheels on the gravel, I waved goodbye, and she
responded, though not the way people normally do, with a raised palm, but with a sort of
horizontal gesture at waist level. I rather wished Id talked to her more. (30)

This inexplicable horizontal gesture at waist level replaces the vertical gesture of
waving goodbye as it holds onto the secret in the past. Tonys following comment that he
should have talked to Sarah more glosses an urge to explore the mystery of Sarah Ford,
encapsulated in this secret gesture. We can only make sense of this affective gesture from the
standpoint of the present or the terminal point of the book where it becomes an indication of
her pregnancy in the future. But how could Sarah know it back then? It was impossible for
her to know that she would have an affair with Tonys best friend Adrian and become his
sons mother. Veronica hadnt even met Adrian at that point. Unless we try to make sense of
this opaque corporeal gesture with recourse to clairvoyance and the supernatural (the novel
forecloses this by normalizing the moment), we must acknowledge it as a divisive moment in
chronological time which suspends linear motion. It pauses time and becomes a perpetual
present in not only a Jamesonian sense but also in our Deleuzo-Jamesonian inflection of a
divided present from which past and future move simultaneously in two different directions
while the present itself moves out of temporality. Tony has to re-turn to this bewildering
moment in the present at the end by re-marking what he calls a secret horizontal gesture
beneath a sunlit wisteria (149).
This misplaced moment which chronologically speaking should have belonged to a
later time, divides chronos and transits into Aion where it becomes the kernel of sense for
both the past and the future. When Tony looks back at this gesture, it crystalizes the events to
come which were not comprehensible to him at the time but only makes sense in the present.
Insofar as this perpetual present is problematically located in the past of his memory, it also
anchors his past. The moment functions as a lighthouse of eternal present, modulating the

double-movements of future development and a reminiscent knitting of the past. It has an

unmistakable relation with the homologous Jamesonian notion of a reduction to the body as
its located in a corporeal moment without speech. The horizontal gesture produces an
unnameable affect in Tony. His incomprehension makes for the ambivalence if not complete
opacity of this affect which is produced by a movement of body on body i.e. hands over
waist. This gesture opens the sexuated body of a woman which remains almost entirely
opaque to Tonys male gaze. It produces in him a castrating anxiety which doesnt settle even
after the re-reading in the present.
Sarahs is a gesture of cut which suggests the vivisection of the body from waist
down. And in this fragmented body lies the spectre of the Real which makes it an anxietyinducing encounter for Tony. Through this gesture, Sarah not only cuts open her own body
but the future of her pregnancy as well. The divisive gesture gives Tony an insight into the
inner life of the body. This is the Real body we do not see, the body which remains outside
the specular social image of the ideologically marked body. The body opened up by Sarahs
horizontal gesture is the other side of a divided body and it sends shock-waves into the
fictional autonomy of the body as an imaginary totality in Lacans famous figuration of the
Mirror Stage. In Lacanian terms, if there is a Real of the body, it consists of not only the body
in fragments but also the other side of the skin which is not necessarily an object of
Imaginary representation. The horizontal gesture at waist level thus activates the affective
inner fold of this Real body of cuts. It tempts Tony into imagining the other side of Sarahs
body by externalizing its interior with the topological operation of a cut. The horizontal
movement also signifies a temporal oscillation. It insists on not being locatable either in the
past or in the future, like the perpetual present of the pendulum which hovers between two
times.
Sarahs gesture relates to psychoanalytic drives in two distinct ways which
demonstrate another dimension of something Real in her body at the given moment. As we
have seen above, the partiality of drives resonate with the partial nature of the Real which can
only be glimpsed in ephemeral moments as a cipher of the undecipherable. Sarahs gesture is
a physical movement which places one part of her body (hand) over another part (waist). As
all physical movement stems from the circuit of drives where they work as pulsions
(Lacans standard French word for drive) to give the body a decisive movemental push,
this gesture is functionalized by the drives. Moreover, Sarahs gesture is a secret move which
is addressed to Tony alone. Its a performance, dialogically played out against the scopic

drive of the Other. Tonys gaze creates the scopic field of the Other where the gesture is
invested with the drive-function. The unreadable corpo-real cipher can be seen as the lacking
Real around which the fragmented body circulates here.
However, as we have stated above, its not just a body but a female body and its
secret is presented as a riddle for male gaze. Unlike Jameson, Ill highlight the sexuated
dimension of this affective body in the present and see how it reflects the portrayal of sexual
relations in the novel.4 In this final move, Ill transpose the most radical Lacanian thesisthe
sexual relation doesnt stop not being written (Lacan, 1998, 59, 94) or the sexual relation
cannot be written and that it cannot be written must be written from the sphere of logical
and mathematical writing in psychoanalysis to that of literary writing. The point is to see if
this Real non-relation of the sexes or sexuality as an absence of relation can be another
antinomy for novelistic realism. In Lacanian terms, if the sexual relation cant be written in
logical terms on the one hand, the fact that it cannot be written is written again and again and
written per excellence. This installs an antinomy which the realistic narrative has to work
through but cannot simply resolve this way or that. It has to carry on portraying this lack in
sexual relation and it returns us to the impossibility of the Real which grounds and conditions
this logic of (non)-relation.
A New Antinomy for Realism: The Sense of an Ending and There is no sexual relation
In Seminar XX, Lacan argues that there is a tension between loves desire to be One
and the relation between the two sexes which for him, doesnt exist. For him, love makes up
for the lack of this relation (1998: 45; 47; 69) and even though it supplements the lack of
sexual relation, it cannot hide the lack in any substantial way. According to Lacan, love aims
at the being of the subject approaching it through the encounter with the Other (50; 145)
but it fails to unify sexual duality and what we have is a two and not a One of the sexes. The
moment we try to write this relationship between them-two (la relation deux), the
relation itself becomes a third term (06-07) because when we inscribe the relation between x
and y as xRy, the R, instead of unifying x and y into a One, creates an interval between the
two (35). Lacan thus observes that the two of love can only be knotted together by a third
figure which insists on separation. This marks one efficacy of the Borromean knot in Lacans
later teachings because in the aforementioned knot, there is no relation as such between any
two strings and its only the third string which knots the one with the two. Lacan argues that
there is no sexual relation which can make a One. For him, sexual difference remains

irreducible as the jouissance, qua sexual, is phallicin other words, it is not related to the
Other as such. (09) What etches the interval between the two sexes is the phallic signifier
and sexual jouissance cannot produce sexual relation because its related to the phallus and
not to the Other or in other words there is no relation between the sexes which isnt mediated
by the phallus as the third.

The Brunnian link in the Borromean knot

Barness novel makes us think that the failure of the sexual relation as well as the
imperative to continue with the portrayal of this failure constitute a supplementary antinomy
of realism. For Lacan, the impossibility of the Real stems from the antinomic doublenegation of that which doesnt stop not being written. This antinomy surrounds the
portrayal of love, one of the most fundamental themes of a realistic novel. A realistic novel
can portray love either as a positive or a negative relation or even as a relation which doesnt
exist or in other words, a non-relation; but whatever it does, it can only progress by
dissolving the Lacanian antinomy. If the novel depicts love qua a positive sexual relation, the
antinomy dissolves; on the other hand, if it portrays love qua a negative or problematic
relation, it still posits a relation and exits the antinomy. If it portrays love as a sexual nonrelation, it still converts non-relation into a positive term between the two sexes and
terminates the antinomy. The only way to portray this non-relation and also maintain the
antinomy of impossibility is by depicting it not as a positive term but as a gap in the
narrative.

If love is figured as a positive term it shows that the sexual relation exists and can be
written. In Lacanian terms, it would be translated into the necessity5 of the sexual relation
or that which doesnt stop being written. On the other hand, if the novelist portrays love as
a failure which produces a non-relation between the sexes, it would be translated into
Lacanese as the contingency of the relation or that it stops not being written. Here the
contingent encounter which founds the opening moment of love still happens when its having
previously not being written stops as the chance encounter with the amorous Other writes
itself into existence. But it only stops once and cannot repeat the contingent moment of the
encounter. In other words, it cannot turn contingency into necessity (what doesnt stop being
written). When the contingency of the amorous encounter cant be translated into an infinitely
repeatable necessity, it fails. If these are the two dominant ways in which the realistic novel
portrays love, either as success or as failure, we can see in this, Lacans marking of a
fundamental hesitation between contingency and necessity in the field of love. In Seminar
XX, he reflects:
All love, subsisting only on the basis of the stops not being written, tends to make the negation
shift to the doesnt stop being written, doesnt stop, wont stop. (145)

Lacan traces the trajectory of love in terms of a movement from contingency to

necessity. As seen above, these are the two basic choices for the realistic novel, facing the
antinomy of the impossible sexual relation and whichever choice it makes, it can only
dismantle the antinomy and realism in the process. If love tries to shift the negation (not)
from the contingency of stopping (stops not in stops not being written) to the necessity of
not stopping (doesnt stop in doesnt stop being written), the impossible sexual relation
presents us with a doubling of this negation instead of a shift. There are two negations in the
schema of the impossible Real of sexual relation: it does not stop not being written. The
Lacanian impossible is neither the necessity of that which doesnt stop being written nor the
contingency of that which stops not being written. The impossible combines the necessary
and the contingent insofar as it has two negations and in the absence of the law of excluded
middle in Lacans intuitionist logical framework, the two nots cannot neutralize each other.
This means that the impossible sexual relation can only be written through a repeated
negation of writing where the not of non-relation is written ad infinitum but only as a
negative term the hollow of a cut or a gap via narrative omission.

The failed sexual relations in The Sense of an Ending point to the portrayal of a
negation of sexual relation but the problem is that it makes a positive term of this negation.
Adrians parents leave each other. Adrian couples with Sarah while he is in a relation with
Veronica. His relation with neither the mother nor the daughter eventually works out. Sarah
gets into the affair while in a marriage with someone else. Tonys relation with Veronica
doesnt work. His marriage with Margaret falls apart. Margarets second husband leaves her
for a younger woman. Tony remains alone after his divorce with Margaret and Veronica
doesnt get married after Adrians death. Its difficult to imagine that Sarah and Adrians
disabled son Adrian junior getting into a relation. And yet Sarahs will as a third object
brings Tony back in touch with Veronica. Even if they cannot rekindle their old romance, this
means that their non-relation is portrayed as a positive term. Tony hesitates to take his exwife Margarets advice on tackling Veronica after years which goes to show that he still has a
feeling for his ex-wife. Her circumspect responses when it comes to Tonys meetings with
Veronica suggest a lingering presence of some kind of after-love in her as well. Even though
they are divorced, every vacation, Tony wants to take her out for a trip but continues to fail in
expressing this desire. This brief catalogue suggests that Barness novel portrays sexual nonrelation as a nostalgic reminder of relationality. It proposes sexual non-relation not only as a
positive term but also as a latent promise of returning to a relation in time future.
In Barness world of solitary confinement, to use an expression from Kermodes
The Sense of an Ending (155), there is no sexual relation which succeeds but these failed
relations are seen as positive terms in themselves. They are not written through a negation of
narrative gaps but as backgrounds and foregrounds which constitute the narrative body. A
quintessential example of this writing is the encounter between Sarah and Tony where the
time of incomprehension passes into a time of understanding in the perpetual present.
There is no real rapport between the two of them at the end, but what began as an opaque
negation in the form of a secret is eventually spaced out into a slice of understanding. There
is a sense in this ending insofar as it dissolves the narrative gap implicit in the horizontal
gesture at waist level which could have been an indecipherable point to mark the absence of
sexual relation via negativa. If the unreadable gesture was a cut separating Sarah and Tony in
the past, the unfolding of the truth in the present ends up dissolving this gap although this
moment remains an exception to chronological time. Its not unfair to say that Barness novel
eventually explains it away by bringing in the truth of Sarahs future pregnancy. The

impregnable Real in a womans body is codified in retrospect by the Symbolic sense of an

ending activated through re-constitutive remembrance.
As Adrians notebook fragment notes, most relationships can neither be expressed
as a simple plus of multiplication or a simple minus of division (85). He observes that these
signs are limited and they only work for entirely successful and entirely failed
relationships respectively but most relationships belong to a third category which is neither
entirely successful nor entirely failed and this is where he voices the novels persistence
in portraying relations in non-relations and non-relations as another form of relation. Barnes
thus maintains the sexual relation as neither entirely successful nor entirely failed. A trace of
the sexual relation haunts these halfway relationships and the novel becomes what Adrian in
his notebook calls notations which are logically improbable and mathematically insoluble.
(85) These notations probe into the problematic relations of the sexes but fall short of writing
the impossible sexual relation as that which doesnt stop not being written.
To sum up, I have focused on Jamesons temporal antinomy at the heart of novelistic
realism and examined his notion of the bodys affective present both within his own corpus
and also through a necessary Deleuzean qualification which adds a divisive function to his
quasi-Deleuzean notion. With this divisive function in mind, I have traced a disjunctive
moment of corporeal present in The Sense of an Ending and following the thread of feminine
secret and its disclosure, gone on to explore Barness depiction of the sexual relation.
Working on Jamesons implicit Lacanian suggestions around the unnameable bodily affects
and the partiality of the drives in a potential Real register for the body, I have invoked
Lacans late thesis on the impossible and uninscribable nature of the sexual relation qua love
and seen how it can give us a new antinomy for realism by extending as well supplementing
Jamesons thesis. We have been able to formulate that the double-negation of the impossible
sexual relation as that which doesnt stop not being written is yet another realistic antinomy
for the novel. Whichever way it treats love qua sexual relation, it dissolves the sexual
antinomy and realism with it. We have seen how The Sense of an Ending dissolves the
antinomy of realism by affirming love as a non-relational relation of the sexes.

Notes:

See Lacans essay on the Mirror Stage in crits where he develops the notion of the Imaginary body as the

subjects egotistic misrecognition of himself or herself with the specular image in the mirror. For Jamesons
Athusserean reading of the Imaginary body as an ideological construction, see his essay Imaginary and
Symbolic in Lacan.

2

The Real as a Lacanian category that resists linguistic Symbolization would be the map for thinking through

resistance to the Symbolic and Imaginary trappings of Ideology. And for Lacan, the body, among other things,
has an important role to play in framing the Real. The Real of the body, as opposed to the phantasmic totality
and anticipated certainty of the Imaginary body in the Mirror Stage would be about the body as fragment,
the other side of the body that doesnt lend itself to Imaginary capitation. The inner life of the body turned inside
out subverts the very dichotomy of a corporeal inside and outside. The body in its Real register is a partial body
of the famous erogenous zones where the anatomical characteristic of a margin or border such as lips, anal
rim, the slit of eyelids and so on take centre-stage (Lacan, 2006, 692). See The Subversion of the Subject and
the Dialectic of Desire from crits for more on this drive-body of the Real. I will come back to this Real body
in Barness novel.

The Freudian conception of drives as partial objects is extended by Lacan as he defines the montage of

drives circulating around and mythifying the Real lack in the body. The partial nature of the drive-objects
(oral, anal, scopic and invocatory for Lacan) demonstrates the cut of the Real on the body where its Imaginary
totality is invaded by a Real hollow. The Real of the body punches a hole in the Imaginary representation of the
body which is the site of its ideological and institutional appropriation in a Foucaultian line of thinking.

Though I cant pursue the track of feminine sexuality in the limited space and argument of this article, let me

note here that the relation between the Real and the feminine isnt incidental in the Lacanian framework. For
Lacan, a feminine subject isnt as divided as the masculine subject is by the signifying cut of language. This
means there is more Real in a woman than in a man. This is why Lacan famously defines a woman as not-all
(pas-tout) in relation to phallic sexuality (1998, 71-74). A woman embodies the singularity of a position,
excluded from the phallic law. See Chapter XIV Woman, Truer and More Real of Book X: Anxiety for more
on a woman and the Real.

In the final session of Seminar XX, Lacan maps the Aristotelian triad of necessity, contingency and possibility

from modal logic onto three schemas of writing. The necessary becomes that which doesnt stop being
written, the contingent, that which stops not being written and the possible, that which stops being written.
He adds a fourth term to this triad i.e. the impossible which for him is the order of the Real as that which
doesnt stop not being written. By adding the impossible to the Aristotelian modal triad which now becomes a
logical square, Lacan incorporates contradiction or shall we say antinomy in the Jamesonian way into
classical logic as an extension of Freuds thesis that the unconscious doesnt know contradiction. Through this


incorporation of the impossible into classical logic, Lacan installs the Real as an irresolvable antinomy where
the logic of either p or non-p is replaced by an antinomic logic of both p and non-p.

Works Cited:

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Jameson, Fredric. Imaginary and Symbolic in Lacan: Marxism, Psychoanalysis and the
Problem of the Subject. In Yale French Studies 55/56 Literature and Psychoanalysis: The
Question of Reading Otherwise (1977). Pp. 338-395. Web. 23 October 2015.
-, The Cultural Turn: Selected Writings on The Postmodern 1983-1998 London and New
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-, The Ideologies of Theory Parts I and II. London and New York: Verso, 2008. Print.
-, Valences of the Dialectic. London and New York: Verso, 2009. Print.
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Kermode, Frank. The Sense of an Ending. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. Print.
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-, Book X: Anxiety. Ed. Jacques-Alain Miller. Trans. A.R. Price. Cambridge: Polity, 2015.
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-, (1975) The Seminar Of Jacques Lacan: Book XX: On Feminine Sexuality: The Limits of
Love and Knowledge, 1972-73. Trans. Bruce Fink. Ed. Jacques-Alain Miller. New York
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