Anthony Levings, 'Futures Past: The End of the World News', in Alan Roughley (ed.) Anthony Burgess and Modernity, intro. David Lodge (Manchester University Press, 2008)
"Anthony Levings’s ‘Futures past: The End of the World News’ ... adds to our sense of why Burgess’s creativity tended to involve generic experimentation, generic hybridity and narrative structures in which time moves both diachronically and synchronically. Levings argues, after acknowledging that the novel’s origins ‘appear various and overly avant-garde and with it ambivalent’ and that its themes ‘do not guide the reader into a meaningful way of reading the novel’, that the disorientation which The End of the World News tends to produce in readers can be mitigated somewhat if its social, political and philosophical concerns are read in light of Reinhart Koselleck’s Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time. Koselleck’s work offers us a comprehensive reflection on the nature of modernity by way of its exploration of how ideas and approaches to history and the notion of the historical itself changes from the medieval to the modern era. Centred on the French Revolution, Koselleck’s study shows how this event ‘created a shift in terminology from histories to history, and developed the modern conception of the importance of temporality and chronology’.
"Levings’s analysis highlights how Burgess manipulates genre and narrative as part of a process of semantic and epistemological deconstruction, a process which lays bare the importance of narrative to understanding but also its failure to produce understanding – understanding, that is, which leads to change. A key narrative device employed by Burgess to underline the peculiar status of narrative to understanding is anachronism. As Levings sees it, generic deviations ‘highlight the anachronistic qualities of the structuring narratives: the narratives are at once necessary, but at the same time out of place’. Further, Burgess uses anachronism to ‘sensitize’ the reader to the importance of historical interpretation; the work of sensitisation helps to ‘open’ the reader ‘to the possibility that the point in time can be connected to other points in time’. Thus, Burgess’s experimentation should be seen, not as a ‘trick’ played on the less educated and less creative reader, but as Burgess’s confession of ‘his own fallibility in writing’ and his desire that the reader engage in serious and creative interpretation of history." (Carson Bergstrom, 'Introduction', pp. 13-14)
"Anthony Levings’s ‘Futures past: The End of the World News’ ... adds to our sense of why Burgess’s creativity tended to involve generic experimentation, generic hybridity and narrative structures in which time moves both diachronically and synchronically. Levings argues, after acknowledging that the novel’s origins ‘appear various and overly avant-garde and with it ambivalent’ and that its themes ‘do not guide the reader into a meaningful way of reading the novel’, that the disorientation which The End of the World News tends to produce in readers can be mitigated somewhat if its social, political and philosophical concerns are read in light of Reinhart Koselleck’s Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time. Koselleck’s work offers us a comprehensive reflection on the nature of modernity by way of its exploration of how ideas and approaches to history and the notion of the historical itself changes from the medieval to the modern era. Centred on the French Revolution, Koselleck’s study shows how this event ‘created a shift in terminology from histories to history, and developed the modern conception of the importance of temporality and chronology’.
"Levings’s analysis highlights how Burgess manipulates genre and narrative as part of a process of semantic and epistemological deconstruction, a process which lays bare the importance of narrative to understanding but also its failure to produce understanding – understanding, that is, which leads to change. A key narrative device employed by Burgess to underline the peculiar status of narrative to understanding is anachronism. As Levings sees it, generic deviations ‘highlight the anachronistic qualities of the structuring narratives: the narratives are at once necessary, but at the same time out of place’. Further, Burgess uses anachronism to ‘sensitize’ the reader to the importance of historical interpretation; the work of sensitisation helps to ‘open’ the reader ‘to the possibility that the point in time can be connected to other points in time’. Thus, Burgess’s experimentation should be seen, not as a ‘trick’ played on the less educated and less creative reader, but as Burgess’s confession of ‘his own fallibility in writing’ and his desire that the reader engage in serious and creative interpretation of history." (Carson Bergstrom, 'Introduction', pp. 13-14)
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