Thinking Activity: The Only Story by Julian Barnes

 

👉 The Only Story 

The short 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. 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.

👉Paul Unreliable Narrator 

In this novel 'The Only story' Julian Barnes said that the Paul is unreliable narrator. Why she said this because Paul told everything based on memory and memory was not reliable. So we can't believe everything that told by Paul. Paul is very vested teller; he is telling a subjective truth he is arguing his case again,  with himself and with us. He is an unreliable narrator. Paul warns the readers early on , in a conversation aside:

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. I think there’s a different authenticity to memory, and not an inferior one. Memory sorts and sifts according to the demands made on it by the rememberer'.(E.book p.20)

Later on he says: " I said never kept a diary. This isn't strictly true." So whatever Paul telling us is unreliable. 

👉Memory Novel - Structurally as well as thematically

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.

👉Susan - madwoman in the attic

The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination is a 1979 book by Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, in which they examine Victorian literature from a feminist perspective. Gilbert and Gubar draw their title from Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre, in which Rochester's wife ( Bertha Mason) is kept secretly locked in an attic apartment by her husband. In their book, Gilbert and Gubar discuss the angel/monster trope in novels written by women, covering the works of Jane Austen, Mary Shelley, George Eliot, Emily Dickinson, and the Brontës. They claim that 19th-century female writers carried a lot of rage and frustration about the misogynistic world they lived in and the predominantly male literary tradition they tried to enter, and that this gender-specific frustration influenced these writers’ creative output. According to Gilbert and Gubar, their rage was often shown through the figure of the mad woman. They conclude by urging female writers to break out of this patriarchal dichotomy and not to let themselves be limited by its impositions.

The title of the book is derived from Jane Eyre‘s Bertha Mason, who is locked away by her husband Mr Rochester in the attic of Thornfield Hall. She is an ominous character, full of uncontrollable passion, violence, sensuality, and madness, almost bestial in her behaviour. We can compare the character of Bertha and Susan Macleod. Bertha was suffered by his husband and here Susan is suffering from some kind of this thing. She becomes an alcoholic. She speaks lies to Paul. Somewhere she is stuck with responsibility. She was beaten by his own husband. She had extramarital affair with Paul, she somewhere wants love, some kind of warmness but she was constantly become a victim of hatred, sexual pleasure and was beaten so many times.  Susan also become a victim of child abuse when she went to his uncle Hemph’s house. When finally she went with Paul there she feel lonely and that time she become alcoholic like anything. In the end, Paul also abandons her and her daughter Clara taking care of her.  Susan’s character is fascinating because there is another character who counterpointed Susan's character.