Assignment : 207 Contemporary Literature

 Name :- Bhavna Sosa

Batch :- 2021-2023

Roll no. :- 02

Enrollment No. :- 4069206420210034

Paper No. :- 207 (Contemporary Literature)

Topic :- The Only Story as Memory novel

Email id :- bhavnasosa211@gmail.com 

Submitted to :- S.B.Gardi Department Of English,MKBU

About  Author  :

Julian Patrick Barnes (born 19 January 1946) is an English writer. He won the Man Booker Prize in 2011 with The Sense of an Ending, having been shortlisted three times previously with Flaubert's Parrot, England, England, and Arthur & George. Barnes has also written crime fiction under the pseudonym Dan Kavanagh. In addition to novels, Barnes has published collections of essays and short stories.

About Novel  : 

The Only Story is a novel by Julian Barnes. It is his thirteenth novel, and was published on 1 February 2018.  The novel is the life story of Paul Roberts, who we first meet as a 19-year-old Sussex University undergraduate returning to his parents' house in the leafy southern suburbs of London (Sutton, in Surrey, is suggested as a model.) The time is the early sixties, and there are a few references to current events. Paul joins the tennis club, which is the one of the few opportunities such places offer for socialising. In a random-draw mixed doubles, he is thrown together with Susan MacLeod, a 48-year-old married woman with two daughters older than Paul. Paul and Susan become lovers and she eventually leaves her family to set up house with Paul in South London. Having nothing to do but a little housekeeping, Susan soon descends into alcoholism and, years later, to dementia. Paul departs and embarks on foreign travels, picking up jobs and women at random.

As Paul narrates his life in this book, he freely admits that memory is unreliable and he may not be telling us the truth.

Memory sorts and sifts according to the demands made on it by the rememberer. Do we have access to the algorithm of its priorities? Probably not. But I would guess that memory prioritises whatever is most useful to help keep the bearer of those memories going. So there would be a self-interest in bringing happier memories to the surface first. (Barnes, 2018, p. 34)

Julian Barnes, according to Groes and Childs, “is perhaps the most idiosyncratic and innovative of contemporary British authors; a writer who with each fictional departure does not just make it new for himself but for the entire history of the novel’” (2011, p. 10). In other words, “with each novel,” as Childs asserts, Barnes “aims to write not just fiction that seems fresh to him but fiction which reinvents the novel itself” (2011, p. 9). 

Barnes’s The Only Story (2018) should be considered as one of his most recent departures and reinventions. Barnes’s “literary tastes,” as Childs asserts, “are broad” (2011, p. 4). The Only Story is about the known Barnesian themes, “some underlying themes” in Barnes’s works, according to Guignery, “can be identified, such as obsession, love, the relationship between fact and fiction, or the irretrievability of the past” (2006, p. 1).

 While exploration of an extended and a sustainable definition of love is the primary narrative concern in The Only Story, finding an appropriate contextual situation for the realisation of love is another important issue. 

The Only Story is primarily about the nature of love, and its impact on the people involved in it. The novel begins with a quotation from the eighteenth-century poet, essayist, and literary critic Dr. Samuel Johnson. In A Dictionary of the English Language (1755), Dr. Johnson defines the newly arising genre of the novel as “[a] small tale, generally of love” (qtd. in Barnes, 2018, p. 9). Unlike Dr. Johnson’s irony, Barnes’s quotation does not tend to challenge either the novel as a genre or love as its main theme.

 Instead, As Barnes proves in his novel, the only story of the so-called “small tale” is, or should be, love. By focusing on the complexities of the concept of love from a continuously transforming perspective, Barnes encourages us to interrogate our conventionalised understanding of love. In this regard, the narrator begins his act of narration with a general statement. He enters into an imaginary conversation with his ideal hypothetical audience on the opening page. By addressing his implied reader, he foreshadows the central theme in his own act of storytelling: 

 

Would you rather love the more, and suffer the more; or love the less, and suffer the less? That is, I think, finally, the only real question. 

 You may point out – correctly – that it isn’t a real question. Because we don’t have a choice. If we had the choice, then there would be a question. But we don’t, so there isn’t. Who can control how much they love? If you can control it, then it isn’t love. I don’t know what you call it instead, but it isn’t love. (Barnes, 2018, p. 11) 

Through a chain of rhetorical questions and the possible answers to them, the narrator tries to persuade the readers into believing the fact that the most fundamental question of being and existence should be a question related to love. Hence, in the opening page the narrator tries to justify the central point of his narration which turns out to be a narration totally dedicated to love: “Most of us have only one story to tell. I don’t mean that only one thing happens to us in our lives: there are countless events, which we turn into countless stories. But there’s only one that matters, only one finally worth telling. This is mine” (Barnes, 2018, p. 11). 

The narrator does not mind admitting that he has been telling his story of love for a long time despite the fact that its reiteration has not brought him any certainty about either the nature of love or its impact on his life. In other words, he does not know whether this time his storytelling, which is mostly based on his act of remembering, will finally reveal to him the “truth” about love and the love affair he experienced five decades ago, “The question then is: do all these retellings bring you closer to the truth of what happened, or move you further away? I’m not sure” (Barnes, 2018, p. 11).

All love is, in some ways, a celebration of the human spirit. To embark on the choppy waters of rapturous love, undaunted by the sea of shipwrecks, is to validate - every time - the triumph of hope over experience. More so when, as happens with protagonists Paul and Susan, it is a love that dare not speak its name.

He, a 19-year-old university student; she, a 48-year-old married woman and a mother of two; they, in London’s suburban “stockbroker belt”, sometime in the 1950s. Their love was by its very nature disruptive, cataclysmic; but then, if it were not, it may not have been love, would it have?

In The Only Story , Julian Barnes, arguably one of fiction’s most elegiac cartographers of the heart and of the human condition, returns to his ‘first love’, the Metroland of his debut novel, with a haunting narrative of an audacious love - and a distant memory of it - mapped over decades.

The increasing of a frown

Fusing clinical efficiency of prose with languid lyricism, Barnes lays bare the anatomy of a heartache, from a time when love’s infinite possibilities render lovers carefree until the time when all that is left of the Grand Emotion is a scar tissue. “I was nineteen, and I knew that love was incorruptible, proof against both time and tarnish,” says Paul, in the first flush of love - or, rather, the flush of first love. It was, he ventures, like the vast and sudden increase of a lifelong frown.

The question, to which Paul returns, over the span of decades, is this: “Would you rather love the more, and suffer the more; or love the less, and suffer the less? That is, I think, the only real question.”

The answer, to some, may be that you don’t always have a choice - and even if you do, you don’t always exercise it in ‘rational’, suffering-minimising fashion.

With the power of hindsight, Paul reflects on the permanence of that first love’s influence. First love, he reckons, “fixes a life for ever… It may not outrank subsequent loves, but they will always be affected by its existence. It may serve as a model, or as a counterexample. It may overshadow subsequent loves; on the other hand, it can make them easier, better. Though sometimes, first love cauterises the heart, and all any searcher will find therefore is scar tissue.”

First love, first person :

Soaring high on love’s light wings, lovers may not be fully aware of the grammar of passion, but, as Barnes observes, first love always happens overwhelmingly in the first person -and in present tense. It takes us time to realise that there are other persons, and other tenses.

And just as lovers wrapped up in themselves may shut out the world, Barnes’s narrative in the first one-third of the novel sways to the urgent, feverish I-me-myself cadence of Paul and Susan’s relationship.

By the time the narrative switches to London and to the second person, realisation dawns on the cohabiting couple that loving each other does not necessarily lead to happiness. And that you cannot outrun your pre-history, which is central to all relationships.

The curdling :

Paul doesn’t quite forsake love, not yet, not even when Susan compensates for the dislocations in her life - which are admittedly harsher on her than on him -by seeking solace in drink. But he bears the guilt of knowing that where once he imagined he was ‘rescuing’ Susan from a loveless marriage, he may have accentuated and accelerated her isolation.

From there onwards, there is an inevitability to love’s end-game, which is played out in the third person, symbolising the distance that has crept up between the two. Paul makes the terrifying discovery that even the most ardent and the most sincere love can, given the correct assault, curdle into a mixture of pity and anger. Worse, he realises to his shock, the emotions that slip in in its place are just as forceful - even as violent - as the love that earlier colonised every fibre of his being.

“Everyone has their love story,” Susan once tells Paul. It may have been a fiasco, it may have fizzled out, it may never even have got going, it may have been all in the mind. But it’s their story, she says. “It’s the only story.” This, then, is Paul and Susan’s story.

And Barnes, working with the clinical precision of a cardiac surgeon, lays open the affairs of their heart with a wrenching narrative that, even when it doesn’t quite validate the redemptive power of love, is curiously therapeutic.

The nature of relationships may be that there always seems to be an imbalance of one sort or another. And yet, though lovers are lost, love is not.

Thank you...