Themes in The Only Story
Name-Daya Vaghani
Paper- 207 : Contemporary Literatures in English
Roll no-06
Enrollment no-3069206420200017
Email id- dayavaghani2969@gmail.com
Batch-2020-22 (MA Sem-IV)
Submitted to- S. B. Gardi Department of English,
Maharaja Krishnakumarsinhji Bhavnagar University
Introduction:
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.
(The Only Story)
The Only Story is a novel by Julian Barnes. It is his thirteenth novel and was published on 1 February 2018. The novel is about the life story of Paul Roberts, who we first meet as a 19-year-old Sussex University undergraduate returning to his parent's 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 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. Improbably, 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 dementia. Paul departs and embarks on foreign travels, picking up jobs and women at random.
Paul is a quintessentially alienated character. With no interest in either politics or religion, and no particular ambition, he takes life as it comes. As he narrates his life in this book, he freely admits that memory is unreliable and he may not be telling us the truth.
Themes in The Only Story:
‘The only Story’ is a memory novel. It is based on the memory of Paul Roberts. Sometimes memory should be happy or sometimes it should be somethings that are unbrearble. This novel wildly talks about that Memory sorts and sifts according to the demands made on it by the rememberer.
According to KIRKUS “Much like Barnes’ 2011 novel, The Sense of an Ending, this one involves a man looking back at a youthful error in judgment and considering its consequences. Paul, the narrator, recalls being 19 and falling for 48-year-old Susan, who's in a loveless, sexless, and abusive marriage. Cocksure about their relationship in spite of others’ judgments—Paul’s parents and Susan’s husband are righteously indignant, and the duo are kicked out of the tennis club where they began their affair—Paul decides to move in with Susan to pursue “exactly the relationship of which my parents would most disapprove.” The thrill of independence is short-lived, though, as Susan’s nascent alcoholism intensifies; the first half of the book mentions Susan’s drinking habit, but as if to mirror Paul’s youthful ignorance, Barnes doesn’t overtly signal how deep she’s sunk until she’s practically beyond help.”
Theme of Passion Suffering & Love :
One of the reviewer of this novel Ellen Prentiss Campbell observe that
"Remember,as you read this small book , generally and specifically about love, remember that suffering is,after all, the Latin root for passion".
This is similar to what Amitav Ghosh is doing in etymological study in Gun While discussing this theme we referred to the root of the word passion.
The Etymology of Passion:
The word ‘passion’ is one of those words where the modern application appears disconnected from the original meaning. The word itself comes from the Latin root word, patior, which means to suffer. It’s first use in English appeared around 1175 AD. Oddly enough the word is more frequently used in writing than in speech.Many of the modern applications of ‘passion’ no longer convey the idea of suffering at all. It’s present use is one describing an intense desire, which is often sexual in nature. (Murrah, “The Etymology of Passion.”)
So we can say that love is the passion but it cannot be isolated without suffering.This is how philosophically Barnes wants to explore the idea of love.In the Only Story the passion turn into suffering.The story of youth of 19 years Paul's passionate attraction towards Susan MacLeod 48 years old married woman of two daughters.This is nothing but a story of passion turning into suffering.
"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" (Barnes, 2018, p. 3)
But then we find counter argument by the speaker…
"You may point out – correctly – that it isn’t a real question. Because we don’t have the 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."
Paul is giving his own defence that it was his mistake to fall in love with a middle aged woman.But can we think of all these things when we are in love?well we can't because if we think then we are not in love.That is how he was carried towards suffering, drifted like a wooden log.
“Most of what I’d read, or been taught, about love,didn’t seem to apply, from playground rumour to high-minded literary speculation. ‘Man’s love is of man’s life a thing apart/’Tis woman’s whole existence.’ How wrong – how gender-biassed, as we might now say– was that?
At the early stage of his life Paul thought that love is blissful.But as the end of the novel he himself find it full of pain suffering.
Quotes related to the theme of love
“First love fixes a life for ever: this much I have discovered over the years. It may not outrank subsequent loves, but they will always be affected by its existence.”(P-71)
“Perhaps love could never be captured in a definition; it could only ever be captured in a story.”(P-206)
“In love, everything is both true and false; it's the one subject on which it's impossible to say anything absurd.”(P-169)
“Love was by its very nature disruptive, cataclysmic; and if it was not, then it was not love."
"And who does not want their love authenticated?”(P-65)
Theme of History & Memory :
In this novel, the idea of memory is dealt by Julian Barnes very interestingly.Memory prioritises when we retell the story as the story narrated in this novel The Only Story.It is said that
"History is collective memory; memory is personal history"
"Trauma is memory"
When we look at the history of nation, history of society, history of human beings we may think that what is that and perhaps it is the memory of everybody.And that collective memory becomes history.Then what is memory? Memory is our personal history.It is a personal life that is lived in personal spaces.The life that is narrated or not narrated,told to anybody or not just told to self also or a history is only written for self and we do not share that with anybody else So it's is memory that is personal history which is not perhaps shared with anybody but it is only for us.When We are all alone we may going back to history our past and then we may be taking about that as a collectively.We go back into time and we write history that is what the forefathers the people on this earth in this society that time has lived and have done all this kind of things.
In form of literature we find that when there is one person (Paul Roberts) sitting there in his old age and going back into the past of his personal life and telling us the story of his life.That person will go back into memory that is only way that we can tell the story of the self.We will have to revisit our memory to tell others.So what is memory,how do we look at the memory? When anybody is revisiting the memory and trying to get historical evidence from his life and telling us the life story.Is it reliable or not? Can we say that well this is a true story because histories are normally considered as a true stories.Somebody individually tell a story is it reliable or not?.
We blindly do not rely on history.If there is the connection between history and memory it means that we also do not rely on memory.It may be our own personal memory.Through this novel Julian Barnes wants to prove that we have to be very careful of our memories.While discussing this point in classroom sir has gave some others concerns to understand this novel.
Film - Memento
This film is philosophically more significant.Memento is a 2000 American mystery thriller film written and directed by Christopher Nolan, and produced by Suzanne and Jennifer Todd. The film's script was based on a pitch by Nolan's brother Jonathan, who wrote the 2001 story "Memento Mori" from the concept. Guy Pearce stars as Leonard Shelby, a man who suffers from anterograde amnesia, resulting in short-term memory loss and the inability to form new memories. He is searching for the people who attacked him and killed his wife, using an intricate system of Polaroid photographs and tattoos to track information he cannot remember. Carrie-Anne Moss and Joe Pantoliano co-star.(from wikipedia) Memento is kind of film which seems to unreality because it deals with an idea that somebody has a problem with memory.He is suffering from a kind of a mental disease where he is forgetting everything within 15 or 30 minutes.
Trauma is memory
Dipesh chakravarty in "Memories of Displacement:The Poetry of Prejudice of Dwelling" refers to this not in context of looking at memory narrative or ethical concern or like Memento or Julian Barnes is looking but his concern is more about post colonial about subaltern studies.Sir ga e example of partition literature.
Example : Partition literature is full of trauma,it is all about memory, what went wrong and Nas a part of a memory of what went wrong. Writers were writing stories on that.So that experience is a very traumatic experience.In that way trauma itself is a memory.
Historical narrative and memory narrative goes in opposite way.Historical narrative is public while memory narrative is very personal.Historical narrative speak about outside trauma while memory narrative speaks about internal trauma of individual.If we talk about this novel then traumatic experience lived by Susam Macleod.
In the novel, we come across the story of Eric and his love affair. So it is the best example of a memory novel. Paul suddenly talks about him. Eric had a relationship with American women and Eric was ready to leave earthly things but at the moment he realised that he was going the wrong way and he saved himself but Paul was not able to do this.
“Then there was the case of Eric. Of all his friends, Eric had truly been a man of good intentions, and therefore had always ascribed good intentions to others. Hence the lack of rebuke after he’d received a kicking at the fair. In his early thirties, working in a local planning department, and with a decent little house in Perivale, Eric had become involved with a younger American woman. Ashley said she loved him; a love which expressed itself as wanting to be with him all the time and never wanting to meet his friends. And Ashley wouldn’t sleep with him, no, not now anyway, but certainly later. Ashley had her faith, you see, and Eric, having been religious himself in his youth, could understand and appreciate that. Ashley wasn’t a member of an established church, because look at all the harm established churches had caused; Eric could see that too. Ashley said that if he loved her, and agreed with her contempt for worldly possessions, then he would surely join her in such beliefs. And so Eric, temporarily cut off from his friends, put his little house up for sale, planning to give the proceeds to some cockamamie sect in Baltimore, after which the couple would move there and be married by some cockamamie religious theorist, or shaman, or sham, whereupon Eric, in exchange for his Perivale house, would be granted squatter’s rights in perpetuity in his new wife’s body. Fortunately, almost at the last minute, some survival instinct asserted itself, and he had cancelled his instructions to the estate agent, whereupon Ashley vanished from his life for ever.”............
Another reference is that when Eric was beaten that time Paul was run away and afterward he said that he went to help the police, so all such things describe somehow that Pual is a coward, fails and loses character. He made so many wrong decisions throughout his life and his remorse is never ever accepted.
Work Cited :
Barnes, Julian. The Only Story. Penguin Random House UK. 2018. Book. 24 January 2022.
http://newenglishliterature.blogspot.com/2012/02/julian-barnes.html
“THE ONLY STORY.” Kirkus Reviews, https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/julian-barnes/the-only-story/. Accessed 9 February 2022.
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