‘The Only Story’ – A Postmodern Novel
Name - Jignesh K. Panchasara
Paper 207: Contemporary Literature in English
Roll No- 8
Enrollment no-3069206420200013
Email id-jigneshpanchasara5758@gmail.com
Batch- MA 2020-2022
Submitted to - S.B Gardi Department of English, Maharaja Krishnakumarsinhji
Bhavnagar University.
The Only Story is a novel by Julian Barnes. It is his thirteenth novel and was published on 1 February 2018.
In the previous chapter Julian Barnes’ twelfth novel The Noise of Time (2016) was analyzed
and it has been shown that the book does indeed contain postmodern elements such as irony
and epistemological issues. In this chapter, Barnes’ latest novel The Only Story (2018) will be analyzed, considering the postmodern elements of the engagement with history, irony, refutation of truth claims, paranoia, and the reflection on epistemological questions.
The Only Story begins in 1960s English suburbia and tracks the story of Paul Roberts.
Paul is a nineteen-year-old, who spends his university summer break at his parents’ house.
On the initiative of his parents, he joins the local tennis club where he meets and falls in love with the forty-eight-year-old married Susan Macleod. Soon they begin a secret romantic relationship. After some years they buy a house in London, move there and live together for ten years. But soon, the great love between the two begins to crumble. Susan becomes an alcoholic and Paul learns that love can be tough. The story is narrated by Paul, adopting three different perspectives, as a young lad, then as middle-aged, and finally as an elderly.
The book has three chapters, simply named ‘One, Two, Three’. In each of these chapters
the point of view of narration changes. In the first chapter, there is a first-person narrator
(Paul); in the second chapter the first-person narration gradually passes over to second-person narration: “You decide that, since you are a student….”81 The third and final chapter is narrated in third-person, except for the last few paragraphs when the narration switches back to first-person. As was argued in chapter two, third-person narration creates a distance from what is narrated. This contrasts with the first-person narration, which projects the reader in Paul’s consciousness. The second-person narration is “extremely rare.”82 A well-known example is If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller, a postmodern novel by Italo Calvino. The choice of narrative point of view becomes especially meaningful if one considers the consideration of events the events consideration of the events narrated in the chapters. In chapter one Paul only narrates
the nice memories he has of his relationship with Susan; at the end of the chapter he even
says, “and this is how I would remember it all it could. But I can’t.”83 Paul foreshadows
some important but ugly memories. These are only gradually revealed to the reader in chapters two and three and each chapter adds a new perspective and details to the story. The
pleasurable memories are told in first-person, but the unpleasant ones are told with more
distance, creating the sense that Paul tries to prevent these memories get too close to him.
Paul, as the narrator of the story, is a typical Barnesian narrator, a “sad English person,
preferably male.”84 He is also a typical “Barnesian character, [who] tends to wonder about
life instead of living it and to meditate on … issues … instead of taking action. Often, he fails to be in control of his life and realizes only in hindsight, when it is probably too late, what has become of him.”85 This also applies to the narrator of The Noise of Time, Dmitri, and has an impact on how the story is told.
“Would you rather love the more, and suffer the more; or love the less, and suffer the
less?”86 This question opens the novel and also introduces its main theme, love. However,
this is not a real question. We cannot choose how much we love, if we can then it is not
love.87 This is only one of the many aspects of love that the novel dwells upon. In another
instance, it contemplates first love and how it influences one’s life:
First love fixes a life forever: this much I have discovered over the years. It may not
outrank subsequent loves, but they will always be affected by its existence. It may serve as
model or a counterexample. It may overshadow subsequent loves; on the other hand, it can make them easier, better. Though sometimes, first love cauterizes the heart, and all any searcher will find thereafter is scar tissue.
The latter is the case with Paul, even though the novel leaves it to the reader to come to this
conclusion. This subtlety was also illustrated in The Noise of Time, which is indicative that
this indeed is something typical of Barnes’ novels. When Paul finally leaves Susan and hands her to Susan’s daughters he works in several countries. He builds a social circle and has new relationships, but he usually moves on after a few years.89 Paul is metaphorically scarred for life as he observes that this lifestyle “was all he felt able to sustain.”90 He also debates whether this coping strategy, “his policy of moving on – from place to place, woman to woman – was courageous in admitting his own limitations, or cowardly accepting them.”
Paul records people’s statements about love in a notebook. One of the entries in the famous quote from Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s poem “In Memoriam”: “’ It is better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all.’”93 Over the years he reads his notebook a couple of times and crosses out quotes he does not believe to be true (anymore). One entry,
however, ‘survives’ several reviews: “’ In love, everything is both true and false; it’s the one
subject on which it’s impossible to say anything absurd.’”94 This quote was written by the French writer Sébastien Nicolas de Chamfort. Paul extends and interprets the quote on his own; his relationship with Susan, “an improbable attachment,”95 is frowned upon by society, nonetheless this “love itself is never absurd, neither are any of its participants.”96 There is also a quote from the Russian writer Ivan Turgenev’s play A Month in the Country: “’ In my opinion, every love, happy or unhappy, is a real disaster once you give yourself over to it entirely.’”97 This is not the first time that Barnes uses this quote; it is also featured in a short story of Barnes in the short story collection The Lemon Table (2004). Thus, we can see a variety of intertextual references, however, they are not marked as such in the text. The assigning of the quotes to their respective authors is part of the research of this paper. In postmodern theory, intertextuality plays a role in expressing the idea that “reproduction takes over from authentic production.”98 Nothing is original, and in the case of love, everyone has already said something about it. So far, the novel presented a variety of definitions regarding love. At the end of the novel, Paul concludes that “perhaps he had always been wasting his time. Perhaps love could never be captured in a definition; it could only ever be captured in a story.”
This is also an instance of self-reflexivity because the novel tries exactly to do this, capturing love by telling the story of Paul Roberts. As love seems undefinable, it seems probable to draw a parallel between Postmodernism and love. As soon as one tries to define either of the terms, it will slip through one’s fingers. The definitions of love are not exactly falsified but the novel subtly undermines the truth claims of these definitions, as love cannot be pinned down in a definition but can only be grasped in an ‘only story’.
In Barnes’ Man Booker Prize-winning The Sense of an Ending (2011), memory is the main
theme. In The Only Story, Barnes returns to this theme. Tony Webster, the protagonist of The Sense of an Ending also struggles with the idea of a malleable memory but Paul delves
deeper into the issue by, among others, openly admitting the deficiencies of his memory. He
openly questions whether retelling memories or in this case the retelling of his story, “bring
you closer to the truth of what happened, or move you further away?”100 There are numerous instances where Paul says that he is not entirely sure about what he remembers.101 An example of this is when he remembers the time when he and Susan are visited by a man in their house in London: “He was a man of fiftyish, I suppose. In my memory, I have given him or he has acquired over the years – a trench coat, and perhaps a broad-brimmed hat, underneath which he wore a suit and tie.”102 In this quote it becomes visible that Paul is very aware of the fact that memories change over time. This makes Paul a more reliable character but as a reader, one should be careful not to believe everything. Paul also comments on the nature of memory. He says that “memory sorts and sifts according to the demands made on it by the rememberer … Memory prioritizes whatever is most useful to help keep the bearer of those memories going. So there would be self-interest in bringing happier memories to the surface first.”103 The last sentence also explains why in chapter one only the happy memories of Paul’s relationship with Susan are retold. But there are also fewer direct allusions to the malleable nature of memory. Throughout the chapters Paul’s memory of Gordon Macleod, the husband of Susan, changes. In chapter one Paul does not really care for Gordon; he feels that Gordon has nothing to do with the relationship between him and Susan.104 In part two, when the reader learns about the abuse of Macleod both towards Paul and Susan that Paulspreviously left out, he develops a more hateful attitude towards him but as he ages, this feeling fades; it becomes irrelevant.105 This process is so subtle that it is questionable that Paul is aware of it as the novel only implies this change very subtly.
Thus, Paul recognizes the bias and unreliability of memory. The elderly Paul contemplates
whether memory is directed towards optimism or pessimism.106 He argues for both
sides but does not come to a final conclusion. On the one hand, he argues that an optimistic
memory “remembers your past in cheerful terms because this validated your existence.”107 On the other, a pessimistic memory that makes all appear “blacker and bleaker than it actually was, then this might make life easier to leave behind.”108 It is typical of Barnes as well as Postmodernism that the question remains unanswered as they refute truth claims. History is addressed in the novel by the concept of ‘pre-history’. However, it is never really explained what this exactly means. The term first appears when Susan tells Paul of her generation, which actively experienced the Second World War. Paul describes this as her prehistory.109 Paul is still quite young at the time and this might explain why he calls it her prehistory. Young adolescents often do not want to realize and understand that the older generation also once was young and had their problems. Pre-history comes with a certain negative connotation if a young person uses it to describe an older generation. However, Paul does acknowledge that “pre-history is central to all relationships.”110 It is quite ironic here
that Paul believes in this but does not try to act upon it. He fails to use this knowledge to
understand Susan’s alcoholism. How successful that would have been, however, is another matter. As the reader knows by chapter three, the relationship did not go too well. Significantly, Paul never really muses about who is to which degree to blame. He simply thinks that “if you wanted to attribute fault, you were straight away into pre-history, which now, in two of their three cases, had become inaccessible.”111 He settles for the easy way; he simply cannot figure it out anymore since the two people involved are dead. Barnes’ novels deal with deeply human issues of life. In the context of the relationship, the novel alludes to shame. Paul and Susan both feel ashamed for various reasons. Susan is ashamed of her unhappy and abusive marriage with Gordon and that she cannot admit this in public and divorce him.112 Susan’s shame expands when she becomes an alcoholic. Paul manages to get her to see a consultant psychiatrist but this attempt to get help fails. In this situation, Paul is ashamed of her being addicted to alcohol.113 When he is older, Paul realizes “that love, by some ruthless, almost chemical process, could resolve into pity and anger. …And anger in a man caused him disgust.”114 This adds a new aspect to Paul’s shame; he is ashamed of his self-disgust. Paul never really specifies what their shame is respectively. It seems as if it is something that the elderly Paul does not want to dwell upon too much. This hints at the unreliability of Paul, even though he endeavors to be honest about his shortcomings. Barnes’ novels are deeply engaged with the “subjectivity and impenetrable nature of knowledge and the illusory nature of the truth.”115 This also holds true for the novel at hand, The Only Story. As it was argued in the preceding chapters, the engagement with epistemological questions is one of many elements of Postmodernism. It is important to stress at this point that Postmodernism is very complex and it is impossible to measure it. However, it is possible to identify elements that are associated with Postmodernism. In the present novel, reflections on life are omnipresent. The main focus lies on love and themes that are associated with love. History and the nature of memory are important themes of the novel as well.
The postmodern element of the refutation of truth claims is limited to the theme of love. The novel does this in a very subtle manner. The general subtlety whereby the novel expresses ideas is typical of Barnes and Postmodernism. In the analysis, some postmodern elements that were discussed in chapter one, such as irony and paranoia, were not found. However, this does not curtail the degree to which this novel might be labeled as postmodern, as it is impossible to measure Postmodernism. This chapter also briefly introduced another postmodern element that was not included before, intertextuality. Intertextuality can be hard to recognize if one is not familiar with the text that is referred to; which is why it has not been explained. In the conclusion of this paper, it will be discussed whether the considered postmodern elements in The Noise of Time and The Only Story are a form of Barnes’ adjusted form of Postmodernism. This idea will be further developed in the following conclusion of this paper, along with the synthesis of the research results.
Reference
Theses.Ubn.Ru.Nl, 2022, https://theses.ubn.ru.nl/bitstream/handle/123456789/8301/R%C3%B6ttgers,_A._1.pdf?sequence=1.
Valarmathy, r.K. Xisdxjxsu.Asia, 2022, https://www.xisdxjxsu.asia/V17I11-37.pdf.
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