Welcome readers! This blog is written in response as a part of my last Semester assignment in Paper No. 207 Contemporary Literature in English. In this blog, I will explore the topic 'Postmodernism in Julian Barnes's novel 'The Only Story.'
● Name :- Hetal Pathak
● Roll No. :- 09
● Semester :- 4 [ Batch 2022- 2024]
● Enrollment No. :- 4069206420220022
● Paper No. :- 207
●Paper Name :- Contemporary Literature in English
● Topic :- Postmodernism in Julian Barnes's novel ‘The Only Story’
● Submitted to :- Smt. S.B. Gardi Department of English, Maharaja Krishnakumarsinhji Bhavnagar University
● Email Address :- hetalpathak28@gmail.com
● Date of Submission :- 26th April, 2024
Postmodernism in Julian Barnes's novel ‘The Only Story’ :-
● Introduction
● About Julian Barnes
● Overview of the novel
● What is Postmodernism
● Postmodern Elements in ‘The Only Story’
● Conclusion
Introduction :-
‘The Only Story’ is Julian Barnes’s 13th novel, coming after The Noise of Time in 2016, which was a quiet follow-up to his 2011 Man Booker Prize-winner, The Sense of an Ending. All three are short works, but only The Only Story fits Samuel Johnson’s definition of a novel, given in this book’s epigraph: “A small tale, generally of love.” Because of the way Barnes tells it, engaging with the themes of storytelling, memory and love, The Only Story feels much larger and worthy of attention from more than the broken-hearted. The novel is divided into three parts. It begins in the early 1960s in a suburb of London. Though Barnes switches among first, second and third person, the narrator is always understood to be Paul, who at the start of the story is at the end of his first year of university. He is 19. At a tennis club, he is paired in doubles tennis with Susan. She is 48. And she’s married, not happily, to Gordon, a man who “seemed to be cross with life.” Susan and Gordon have two almost-adult daughters.
About Julian Barnes :-
Julian Patrick Barnes ( born 19th January, 1946) Leicester, England is a British critic and author of inventive and intellectual novels about obsessed characters curious about the past. Barnes attended Magdalen College, Oxford (B.A., 1968), and began contributing reviews to the Times Literary Supplement in the 1970s while publishing thrillers under his Kavanagh pseudonym.
‘The Sense of an Ending’, a Booker Prize - winning novel that uses an unreliable narrator to explore the subjects of memory and ageing. ‘The Noise of Time’ (2016) Fictionalised episodes from the life of Russian composer Dmitry Shostakovich. In ‘The Only Story’ (2018) Barnes explored memory and first love as a man looks back on his relationship with an older woman. In 2022 he published Elizabeth Finch, which centres on a man whose intellectual crush on one of his teachers has a lasting impact on his life.
He has written several novels, short stories and essays. He has also translated a book by French author Alphonse Daudet and a collection of German cartoons by Volker Kriegel. His writing has earned him considerable respect as an author who deals with the themes of history, reality, truth and love. He has received numerous awards and honours for his writing. Julian Barnes lives in London.
About the Novel :-
The novel opens with a question, the only real question of life,
'Would you rather love the more, and suffer the more; or love the less, and suffer the less?'
The novel is narrated by its chief protagonist Paul Roberts, and it focuses on the relationship of Paul and Susan. The initial part of the novel describes the beginning of their relationship. The novel was published on 1st February, 2018. The Genre of this novel is Memory novel and As Paul narrated his life in this book, he freely admits that memory is unreliable and he may not be telling us the truth. Paul and Susan become lovers, and by the end of the first section, they run away to live together in London. No, they don’t live happily ever after.
Now living in a house purchased with Susan’s “running-away fund,” their relationship begins to strain. They have different ideas about what love is for, and Paul’s idealistic view clashes with Susan’s burgeoning drinking problem. Before long, Paul calls her for what she’s become: an alcoholic. His attempts to get her help fail and his love for her begins to fade:
“Of course, you still love her, and tell her so, but in plainer terms nowadays.”
As their relationship degenerates, lies and suspicion replace honesty, and Paul comes to realise that Susan’s deteriorating mental state has begun to have an effect on him – she is “triggering [his] own version of panic and pandemonium.” That’s when he decides to call it off. He moves out of the house and begins to live his own life.
The final section, told mostly in third person, deals with the narrator imagining an alternate history between Paul and Susan – one that didn’t involve an affair with her, but marriage to one of her daughters – and catches up on Paul’s career and love life after he left Susan. She’s now confined to a hospital, and by any objective measure, Paul’s not doing so well either. In contrast to where the characters end up, Barnes’s writing is exceptional. The Only Story has many sentences worth underlining. The author is skillful in presenting love clichés without eliciting the groans. Rather than a gimmick, switching between points of view serves the novel well, and fits snugly with the novel’s storytelling theme.
Barnes’s protagonists earn our sympathy even if their act of adultery is not laudatory. They’re believable and if you begin to have doubts, Paul’s recurrent rationalisations keep you on his side. Explaining the couple’s compatibility, Paul says,
“Yes, she is older; yes, she knows more about the world. But in terms of – what shall I call it? The age of her spirit, perhaps – we aren’t that far apart.”
Julian Barnes delves into the complexities of love and relationships with exploring the themes like - Difference in age. This novel explores themes of first love, loss, and self-delusion. It also paints a portrait of a generation - Barnes’s own - whose ideals have floundered over the course of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. The novel was generally well received by critics, who found it a “sombre but well-conceived character study”.
What is Postmodernism :-
Postmodernism is known for its rejection of grand narratives, especially history, and general scepticism of reason as the postmodernists argue that there is no universal truth. The movement is represented in literature by the use of fragmented narratives and the embracement of absurd and meaningless confusion. Such recurring themes and writing styles that once portrayed a chaotic post-war world now seem to be becoming irrelevant to our current society as the metamodernist art movement is on the rise. Metamodernism seems to portray the new societal values of authenticity and sincerity that postmodernism disregarded.
Julian Barnes's novel ‘The Only Story’(2018) shares the themes of love, time and memory. Grand narratives are often a focal point in postmodern writings. Novels written by Julian Barnes contradict the predicted demise of Postmodernism when looking at the attitude towards grand narratives of history, memory and truth as well as the use of postmodern writing techniques. Postmodernism continues to coexist next to modernism in the works of Julian Barnes and how this shows that metamodernism does not necessarily mean the end of postmodernism, which critics have been predicting for so long. It will show that postmodernism has not completely ended due to the rise of metamodernism and still coexists next to modernism in these novels.
Postmodern Elements in ‘The Only Story’ :-
Barnes’ latest novel The Only Story (2018) will consider 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.’
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. 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, if I could. But I can’t.”
Paul foreshadows some important but ugly memories. These are only gradually revealed to the reader in chapter 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 getting too close to him. Paul, as the narrator of the story, is a typical Barnesian narrator, a “sad English person, preferably male. 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 realises only in hindsight, when it is probably too late, what has become of him.
'Would you rather love the more, and suffer the more; or love the less, and suffer the less?'
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. This is only one of the many aspects of love that the novel dwells upon. In another instance, it contemplates about 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 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 cauterise the heart, and all any searcher will find thereafter is scar tissue.’
When Paul finally leaves Susan and hands it 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. Paul is metaphorically scarred for life as he observes that this lifestyle “was all he felt able to sustain.” 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 in accepting them.”
The way that the concept of love is represented and discussed in the novel is an example of the postmodern aspect of moral relativism in The Only Story. Throughout his life, Paul attempts to find a universal truth for love. He has a notebook in which he gathers different quotes whenever he hears a new theory on love. Some of the quotes that Paul decides to write down in his notebook those of well-known texts. He records people’s statements about love in a notebook.One of the entries is 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.’
The incorporation of such quotes provides the novel with a level of intertextuality, which is another characteristic that is associated with postmodern writing. Over the years he reads his notebook a couple of times and crosses out quotes he does not believe to be true (anymore).
‘In my opinion, every love, happy or unhappy, is a real disaster once you give yourself over to it entirely.’
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. In postmodern theory intertextuality plays a role in expressing the idea that “reproduction takes over from authentic production.” Nothing is original, and in the case of love, everyone has already said something about it.
Everyone will have different experiences in regard to love. It even states that individual truths can change over time, meaning everyone has multiple truths in terms of love throughout their lifetime. This general theme in the novel correlates to the moral relativism of postmodernism; the larger concept of love does not have one true reality. Realities can vary, depending who experiences them. Paul eventually comes to the conclusion that love itself cannot be defined. He states ;
‘Perhaps love could never be captured in a definition; it could only ever be captured in a story.’
It can be argued that this message is exactly what the entire novel is trying to convey. After all, that is what the novel does; capturing the love story between Paul and Susan, without trying to make it feel universal and applicable to everyone. This is their personal love story. Another postmodern feature in ‘The Only Story’ is the narration by an unreliable narrator. Though there is generally less focus on this fact in The Only Story, it is still an important feature to the novel. Paul recollects his story entirely from memory, which suggests that there is a possibility of it being faulty. He is aware of this himself and mentions this early on as a way of warning the reader :
“You understand, I hope, that I’m telling you everything as I remember it? I never kept a diary, and most of the participants in my story – my story! my life! – are either dead or far dispersed. So I’m not necessarily putting it down in the order that it happened.’’
He indicates that he tells his story in the way he remembers, which shows his comprehension of how the human memory can wane over time. The reader is aware that his story might not be exactly true, but as mentioned by Paul: ‘This is mine.’ He knows others may have perceived things differently, but this is Paul’s version of the story. Paul also made sure to mention that he does ‘not necessarily put it down in the order that it happened,’ which gives this novel the postmodern characteristic of a fragmented narrative. Postmodern novels are known for incorporating a fragmented narrative and that is exactly the way Paul narrates his story.
Barnes’ novels are deeply engaged with the “subjectivity and impenetrable nature of knowledge and the illusory nature of the truth.” This also holds true for the novel The Only Story. As it was argued in the preceding chapters, the engagement with Epistemological questions are one of many elements of Postmodernism. It is important to stress at this point 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. The big issues of life are two examples of epistemological questions that Postmodernists engage with. However, the novels never make definitive statements about either of these themes, which is both typical of Barnes writing and of Postmodernism. The postmodern techniques and themes play a crucial part in contributing to the novel's engagement with epistemological questions.
Another important point that came up in the analyses of the novel ‘The Only Story’ is the fact that elements repeatedly surface in Barnes’ writing. The engagement with epistemological questions is not only an element of Postmodernism but also a characteristic of Barnes’ work in general. Furthermore, it was also illustrated that the narrator of Barnes’s novels tends to be male and does not actively live his life but only lives it through a retro perspective.
Conclusion :-
To Conclude, it can be said that postmodernism is a prominent feature in Julian Barnes's novel ‘The Only Story.’ The novel includes the themes of moral relativism, which is a distinguished characteristic of postmodern writing. The topic of love that is often discussed by Paul is an example of how Barnes translates the idea that there is no truth in grand narratives. Furthermore, Barnes also included the postmodern thought that memory cannot be trusted. This can be seen in this novel through the use of an unreliable narrator and the unchronological structure of the narrative. Therefore, the postmodern features used in the novel are noteworthy as they are a large part of the thought process of the main character.
References :-
Czobit, Michael. “Review: Julian Barnes's The Only Story delivers exceptionally written heartache.” The Globe and Mail, 4 May 2018, https://www.theglobeandmail.com/arts/books/reviews/article-review-julian-barness-the-only-story-delivers-exceptionally-written/. Accessed 25 April 2024.
“Julian Barnes | Biography, Books, & Facts.” Britannica, 26 March 2024, https://www.britannica.com/biography/Julian-Barnes. Accessed 25 April 2024.
Röttgers, Anna. “The Postmodern Moment Has Passed”?!: Postmodernism in Julian Barnes’ The Noise of Time and The Only Story.” 14 June 2019, https://theses.ubn.ru.nl/bitstreams/37fbcb5b-30ca-4635-90a3-83e3018b0e5d/download. Accessed 25 April 2024.
Zanden, Vander. “An Abundance of Truths: How Julian Barnes' The Sense of an Ending and The Only Story prove that postmodernism is not dead.” 2021, https://theses.ubn.ru.nl/handle/123456789/13135. Accessed 25 April 2024.
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