Reconstructed Memory of Love in Julian Barnes’s The Only Story

Abstract

Julian Barnes’s novel The Only Story (2018) can be read as a monograph on the complications of love. By focalising the narrative situations and events through the consistently transforming perspective of a failed lover, Barnes shows how digging into the past events through the awakening lens of memory can lead to previously censored selfrealizations. Set in three interconnected parts, The Only Story increasingly changes into a disintegrating process of an unconventional love affair between a late adolescent and a middle-aged married woman. Considering this, the present article has two goals. By relying on Jacques Lacan’s theory of love, the paper shows how in The Only Story Barnes presents an ever-changing, or illusory definition/experience of love. Besides that, and by drawing on Julia Kristeva’s definition of the concept shared singularity, the paper argues how by setting the main part of narrative in the revolutionary decade of 1960s, Barnes presents the difficulty of any cohabitation, combination, dialogue, or sharing between the two opposing egos and discourses. The primary aim of this paper, therefore, is to show how the narrator and his partner fail in maintaining their love affair through building a shared singularity between themselves.