The Sense of a Beginning

Abstract

In his sense of an ending is my sense of a beginning. Frank Kermode’s Mary Flexner Lectures delivered at Bryn Mawr in 1965 set a wholly new standard. Thereafter we had all either to think or else, in a manner, to declare ourselves enemies of thought. The Sense of an Ending exposes the problematic ontology of literary form. It caused my mind to race, even at first reading, between the seemingly antithetical poles of a natural end and a formal ending. At the same time I was obscurely uneasy lest, by some trick of an unperceived conceptual hyposphere, the polarity itself might be resolved into an identity. What if all supposedly natural beginnings and ends are really cultural fictions, read into the world but never, in truth, read off from it? In La Nausée Annie says to Roquentin, ‘Il n’y a pas d’aventures’ (Sartre 1938: 206). There is something heady — even delicious — in the glissando of this thought. For a while it feels a little like flying. Nevertheless, even then, I resisted. Every death is a natural termination. Births really are natural beginnings. And so, I thought, are many other things. The foundation of a new university is, very clearly, an ideological act which is translated into natural fact. In 1936 there was no University of Sussex. In 1966 there was one. The precise moment of its inception between those dates may be indistinct, confused and muffled by pre-echoes and corroborative ceremonies, but we are forced to say, nevertheless, that it had begun to exist.