"The Only Story" shows Julian Barnes's heavy thoughts about love and pain, and he always explains the different layers, aspects and possibilities that a story can have in the confrontation between narrative and speculation. This is the contrast between the "only" story and the multidimensional evaluation, and the narrator who seems to be a "dictatorship" can only lead to an infinitely open meaning retrospective. Although the story is not complicated, if you summarize the theme, it is the dialectical interweaving of love and pain, control and loss of control, experience and remembrance. From the morphological point of view alone, it should be counted as a "classic cliché" - the enduring "year-old love" of newly adult boys and middle-aged married women, experiencing stimulation and betrayal, running away and living together, but in the end they are in vain, torturing each other, and unbearable. Save your emotions by mercy, by reminiscing about the love that has passed.
The Only Story
Author: Julian Barnes
Translator: Guo Guoliang
Edition: Yilin Publishing House
October 2021
Barnes's intention, however, is not to tell a story, but to introspectively examine the obscuration, distortion and beautification of the narrative itself—it is the fabrication of life. "Over and over again, is it closer to the truth, or is it farther away? I'm not sure, but there's a way I might know, which is to see if the story's self is getting better or worse over time. "If it's worse, it may be more realistic, but at the same time it may be untrue and demeaning." This is a survivalist vision, existence can only be grasped in time, can only be clarified in the story. To restate a story is to illustrate the functional needs of life. "Most people have only one story to tell," "Only one story is crucial, and only one story is ultimately worth telling." That's my story. ”
"Ironic lyricism", the setting of the tone of the novel
Barnes writes the opening of a sentimental story briskly and swiftly, accompanied by disrespectful mockery. "Tennis Club – who would have thought the story would start there? Growing up, I used it as an outdoor activity venue for young conservatives. And the writer is like the wonderful landing point and line when playing tennis, and truly realizes the "freedom of writing". In almost every sentence, you can see the arbitrariness and careless cleverness. Casey was deeply disgusted by the vulgar socialism of tennis clubs: artificial, hypocritical and stupid, a botched collection of the conservative life of the British middle class of the era. The club's "test is not only tennis skills, but also speech and behavior, and how to behave in the world, all of which are secretly tested by the most orthodox British standards - if there is no deviation, there will be no mistake in the future, which is the norm. ”
Julian Barnes, born in 1946, is a contemporary British writer. Graduated from Oxford University, he participated in the compilation of the Oxford English Dictionary. In the 1980s, he was shortlisted for the Booker Prize for "Flaubert's Parrot", which he won in 2011 for "The Feeling of End".
The writer begins by embedding the context of class analysis. The club is a space place that marks the circle layer, and it disciplines and trains the same kind of people in batches. So much so that Casey used nicknames to refer to two species in the club: all men were "Hugos" (overly intelligent and self-righteous) and women were "Carolines" (empathetic, somewhat conservative blondes). And what "I" need is parody, to cater to them. Susan's appearance lies in her unique authenticity, breaking the "type pattern" and becoming the cause that evokes Kathy's true feelings. After that, it is the two who flirt with each other in a car and take the risk to heat up. We tend to indulge in the rhythm of indulgence and ignore Susan's "reminders" – the first sentence is that young guys have to have a little fame, and the second sentence is that we are a generation of past.
Two sentences are like a warning, announcing how the story will end. The beginning of the relationship may be accidental, and "I" may not be in love with a middle-aged married woman, but obsessed with the excitement of rebelling against the world. Barnes grasped emotions and states, which can be summed up as "general erections" and "total youthfulness"—impulsive, blind, and chaotic. He intends to ask "the existential meaning of sex." Sex always stays in the immediate, transient excitement, the empty breakpoint of consciousness. Our interests are mostly limited to objects, times, places, and techniques. It encompasses a "hodgepodge of sentimentality, obscenity, and deliberate distortion" that lacks contemplation and "doesn't think much about 'whys' and 'where to go.'" "This is actually a look back at youth, an hermeneutics of the self.
Barnes took lyrical art to a higher level, that is, "ironic lyricism". The sentimentality of lyricism and the playfulness of irony seem to be hedged and dissolved, but it also lays the foundation for the complex confrontation within the novel. The narrator is not only resistant to the previous generation, but also to the evaluation of him by the young people of the future. The "passing generation" is the influence anxiety implied by the novel. At the same time, the characters are rebelling against the moral judgments of potential readers, all the hidden and possible gazes of others. "What kind of words would you use today to describe a nineteen-year-old boy's relationship with a forty-eight-year-old woman?" Maybe use the words 'mature woman' and 'little white face' in popular tabloids? ...... Perhaps, you will also think of those French novels, where older women teach young men the 'art of love'." This pluralistic resistance, both internal and external, gives the novel the "aggressiveness" to deal with questioning at any time.
Not only the narrative, but also the "evaluation" of the story
The means of resistance are self-criticism and imaginative defense. The protagonist's confession and inner activity form a dialogue art similar to the "bullet screen" and the main text. This is different from monologues, or traditional psychological depictions. Because it is the desire of the heart to interact with the outside, and it is objectively insincere. Inner speech and external discourse "synchronic" occur and deviate from each other. This kind of repressed dialogue embodies the significance of argument for the novel, which most writers rarely consider. Barnes constantly "reevaluated" the meaning of the story, supplementing what the narrator was unaware of at the time. "When I wrote this, I was already tacitly aware of it, but I was completely unaware of it at the time." "Everything about me and Susan, then and now, years later, I feel like I can't often find words to describe our relationship... Maybe this is an illusion that all lovers hold - not to fall into the trap, it is wonderful. ”
He wrote another version of "Lolita", almost a sense of taboo between mother and child. Contrast and contrast are the best perspectives to examine the limits and depths of common sense. Such as the age of love, intergenerational gap, and how much motherhood occupies in love. Barnes and Nabokov have in common that the aesthetic confession of recollection makes the backlash fresh and vulgar, and makes the reader temporarily forget moral judgments. The ethics of reality gives way to the ethics of narrative. The two people's interpretation of the "only" also shows that the traces of the early years have archetypal significance for the character's life. Mr. Humbert's memory is fixed on the girl who died of typhus, and Casey's emotions are fixed by the middle-aged woman. Later stories became archetypal anxiety and inability to start a new relationship. He also didn't end up stabilizing his emotions and had to spend the rest of his life with fluid sexual friendships.
Writers have subtle details, such as "I" hinting at himself inwardly, pretending to be a contemporary of Susan. "Joan is about five years older than Susan, but I feel like they're a generation apart." This is not really about how old Joan is, but indirectly leveling her generation with Susan. We can also find several sounds, one is the infatuation of teenagers, one is the image of the guardian lover, and the other is the recounting after leaving. The syllogism belongs to the rising period, the shock period, similar to repeated downward exploration, and finally the emotional "breaking", which is unbearable and chooses to leave. This emotional line is about the same as the swing of investment. And the novel needs this futility. If the realistic attitude is why start if there is an end; then the artistic attitude is to fall in love with you, not regret it, and accept the end of the story. A good novel is that no matter how you look at it, it seems that chicken soup is brewing, but you can't find a pot for soup. Barnes was so lyrical that he controlled lyricism with restraint, pain, and repression everywhere. This technique, in Gide's case, was the ultimate, whether it was "The Bearer" or "Narrow Door", it was this kind of breathing pain.
The self-denial and attack of the story
The title of the novel happens to be an anti-language, the protagonist is determined to be the only one, only the narrator, and the story itself is in different frequency bands, under the gaze. Is the only one that is reliable? Susan is always "narrated", she only exists in the mirror image of the other, and does not speak out. Perhaps she wanted to refute and deny this uniqueness, but unfortunately, she was sentenced by Barnes to be "mentally disturbed" and "addicted to alcohol". As Foucault put it, madness is the absence of rational silence. The writer rejected Faulkner's method of narrating the same story by different characters, and replaced it with the same characters to draw different positions, splitting different perspectives, resulting in a radical confrontation of story meaning.
The book contains first-person passion, assertion of subjectivity, and free will to pursue love; second-person questioning, simulating the accusatory judgment of readers and others, disillusionment with promises of unattainable; third-person silence, distance, and separation, which is a cold-eyed bystander of the tide of things. Barnes switches back and forth with three human names, even with a sense of vertigo and confusion, but he brilliantly uses the person to divide the emotional staging, mental fracture, and mark the "emotional side" of the story. The characters are always competing in a vortex, and this is the flow of narrative. He has to deal with his parents, classmates, Joan, many girlfriends, and "Mr. Elephant", disguise and explain. He almost rebelled against the whole world to fall in love with a middle-aged woman, and he almost had a sense of redemption. It turned out that the woman was ultimately left with resentment and amnesia.
This narrative is very intense, because it is the word self-destruction. Accumulating momentum and repression, and then festering and disintegrating, is the meaning of "self-reflexiveness". The writer describes the novel's own immunodeficiency—the story that attacks itself and destroys itself. Casey went from companion to funeral, and Susan hated her husband's drunkenness the most, but became an alcoholic herself. Pursuit and disillusionment, memory and amnesia, the second part is the first part of the grave excavation, denial and zeroing. The third ending, Susan's "anti-lyricism" of Casey on her deathbed, is to sum up affection with ruthlessness. It shows how the story becomes a "story ruin" and how the characters become godless shells. Relying on emotional memories and illusions to maintain a relationship cannot withstand internal consumption.
The story is unique to the narrator, but what about the reader? It is also true. Because it is the trend of life - you think you can, but in the end you can't, exaggerating the future, disappointing is the ending. It's a collection of stories in capital letters, and we can write stories from countless other areas of this genre. Man is a temporal animal, and the essence of the story is to remember the "past" and say that it has been lost. I think barnes meant to give a consistent panorama of life, to give you a chance to look back with an almost theological moment of revelation, which was a resistance to worldly time.
Author | Yu Gengyun
Edit | Zhang Jin Li Yang
Proofreading | Xue Jingning