On The Convergence Of Greenblatt’s New Historicism And Kermode’s Fiction Theory In The Sense Of An Ending

The last decade of the twentieth century has seen the booming and thecontending of various critical theories in British literary domain. Postmodernism, inthe process of cultural diversification, declines in its popularity, but its uncertainty stillmakes a notable impact on British literature. Rooted in postmodernism, Greenblatt’snew historicism reveals the relationship between history and text and inspirescontemporary British novelists’ introspection on history and their writings with itsunique history interpreting experience and history perspective. The core themes ofcontemporary British novels can be illustrated as seeking self-identity and discussingabout the connection between the fictive and the real, the past and the present, whichcan all be typically exemplified by Julian Barnes’ writings. In his previous books,Barnes concentrates on tracing historicity only to end up with such a conclusion thathistory is uncertain, in which the new historicism has obviously been practiced.However, Barnes’ The Sense of an Ending, the winner of the Man Booker Prize of2011, is named after British modernist critical giant, Sir Frank Kermode’s (1919-2010)masterpiece—The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction. In the novel,Barnes interprets the protagonist’s individual history perfectly in Kermode’s fiction paradigm and introduces certain factors—ending and the sense of an ending—intoreinterpreted individual history. The novel also converts the conflicts betweenuncertainty and certainty, disorder and order, which are respectively the cores ofpostmodernism and modernism, into mutual complement and convergence. Thus asignificant literary dialogue has been formed in this experimental writing. And throughthe complication of this novel, Barnes also answered one of his own questions held hismind for a long time from a different perspective: though we perhaps see no certaintyin tracing other’s past history, we can trace our own individual history and judge itshistoricity and certainty with the surviving documents and our immediate memories.And our self-fashioning is definitely benefited from such a process of tracing truth andcertainty.Firstly, this thesis introduces the premise for the convergence of Kermode’s andGreenblatt’s theories embodied in the novel, and how has their resonance on ending,contingency, histories and fragmentation presented in the novel. Kermode andGreenblatt, both being the most prominent contemporary literary theorists and thegiants in Shakespeare research, not only share the same cultural backgrounds andresearch interest, but also resonant with each other in many aspects of history and inthe influence of literature to one’s self-fashioning as well. Secondly, this thesis, withthe fore-grounded cultural contexts at-past-and-present, discusses about how Barnespractices Greenblatt’s new historicism in the novel to construct and reinterpret theprotagonist’s individual history, and to trace the certainty and authenticity in theprotagonist’s narration. And a further effort has been made for an analysis of theinfluence of various social energies and contingent elements to one’s self-fashioning,including some elements with certainty in history interpretation and self-fashioning.Finally, with Kermode’s fiction theory, this thesis analyzes how the two peripeteias inthe novel are plotted with forward memory and immediate memory, and discussesabout the sense of an ending: the ending of a novel reveals the latent senses, while theending of an event unseals the truth and provides certainty for one’s self-identity.The present author probes into how Barnes narrates the protagonist’s reinterpreted individual history in Kermodian fiction paradigm; how the protagonistbeing constantly dominated by different types of memories, contingent elements andhis sense of an ending, traces historicity and the certainty in his individual history withsurviving documents, and then completes his self-fashioning. And the author finds thatthe convergence of the two theories mentioned above announces in Barnes’ novel theinitiation of reinterpreting individual history with certainty, which does offer a criterionfor historicity to Greenblatt’s new historicism, in which history interpretationexperience plays as its core concept. The reader may, therefore, be enlightened toexamine the significance of certainty in the present postmodernism context.