This Blog is an Assignment of paper no.207: 7 Contemporary Literatures in English. In this assignment I am dealing with the topic From Romance to Ruin: A Psychoanalytic Study of Desire and Trauma in The Only Story .
Name: Khushi D. Makwana
Paper 207 : Contemporary Literatures in English
Subject Code: 22414
Topic Name: From Romance to Ruin: A Psychoanalytic Study of Desire and Trauma in The Only Story
Batch: M.A. Sem-4 (2024 -26)
Roll No: 09
Enrollment No: 5108240019
Email Address: khushimakwana639@gmail.com
Submitted to: Smt. S. B. Gardi, Department of English, M.K.B.U
From Romance to Ruin:A Psychoanalytic Study of Desire and Trauma in The Only Story (Julian Barnes 2018)
Introduction :
Julian Barnes's thirteenth novel, The Only Story (2018), is one of the most psychologically penetrating works of contemporary British fiction. Narrated retrospectively by Paul Roberts a man of seventy reflecting on his first and most formative love affair the novel traces the arc of an intense, transgressive romance between a nineteen-year-old boy and Susan Macleod, a married woman in her forties, set in the tennis-club suburbs of England in the 1960s. What begins as a story of exhilarating desire, rebellion, and romantic idealism gradually transforms into a chronicle of disintegration, alcoholism, codependency, and irreversible psychological damage. The novel is, at its core, a meditation on how desire shapes the self and how trauma haunts it often permanently.
This assignment undertakes a psychoanalytic reading of The Only Story, drawing on Freudian concepts of desire, repression, and the compulsion to repeat; Lacanian theories of love as misrecognition and the Real; and Kristevan notions of the abject. The novel's formal architecture its shifting narrative voices from first person, to second, to third will be read as a structural enactment of psychic fragmentation and dissociation caused by traumatic experience. Through close reading and engagement with relevant theoretical frameworks, this essay argues that Barnes constructs Paul's desire for Susan not merely as erotic attraction but as a Freudian wish-fulfilment rooted in Oedipal transgression, and that the subsequent trauma of her decline irrevocably colonises his psychic life, foreclosing further intimacy.
Desire and the Oedipal Economy :
From a Freudian perspective, Paul's attraction to Susan can be read as a classic expression of the Oedipal complex redirected through a socially transgressive object choice. Freud argued that early desire is always structured around prohibition what is forbidden acquires heightened libidinal charge. Paul's first admission about his relationship captures this perfectly: as he confesses, he had "landed on exactly the relationship of which my parents would most disapprove" (Barnes, 2018, p. 8). The desire for Susan is inseparable from the desire to defy his parents, to rupture the suburban domestic order they represent, and to assert an autonomous self through an act of rebellion.
Susan functions as an Oedipal surrogate in multiple senses: she is older, married, experienced, and maternal in her social position, yet she is simultaneously the object of erotic desire. Freud's concept of "object choice" the unconscious process by which a person selects a love-object on the basis of early psychic templates illuminates why Paul fixates on Susan and why the relationship assumes such totemic significance. As Freud observed in Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905), object-choice is often determined by the earliest imprinting of desire, frequently shaped by the parental figures. Paul's passion for Susan carries the energy of both libidinal desire and of the son's rebellion against the symbolic authority of the father Susan's husband Gordon becomes the castrating paternal figure whose domestic authority Paul both transgresses and fears.
Barnes reinforces this reading through Paul's narcissistic self-presentation. The Kirkus Reviews describes Paul as someone "mainly concerned with what made their romance distinct from the usual romantic clichés" a narcissism entirely in keeping with Freud's account of the ego's investment in the love-object as an extension of itself. Paul's love for Susan is, in part, a love of the self he becomes through her: freer, more sophisticated, beyond the bounds of conventional suburban life. This is the mirror stage of romantic desire the beloved reflects back an idealised image of the self.
Lacanian Love as Misrecognition :
Jacques Lacan's theory of love provides an especially productive framework for understanding the central relationship in The Only Story. For Lacan, love is structured around misrecognition (méconnaissance): we do not love the Other as they truly are, but as we project them to be, filling the void in the Other with our own fantasy. In The Seminar, Book XI, Lacan argues that love is fundamentally an attempt to give what one does not have to someone who does not want it. Paul's romance with Susan is a textbook illustration of this structural impossibility.
Academic scholarship has recognised this dimension of the novel explicitly. The article "Reconstructed Memory of Love in Julian Barnes's The Only Story" (Academia.edu) draws on Lacan's theory of love to demonstrate how Barnes "presents an ever-changing, or illusory definition/experience of love," showing the protagonist's "self-centered understanding of love's complexities" (Reconstructed Memory, 2021). Paul constructs Susan as the object petit a the unattainable object of desire that structures his entire psychic life. When she deteriorates into alcoholism and becomes incapable of being the woman he desires, Paul is confronted with the impossibility at the heart of all desire: that the object was always a projection, never the real person.
This Lacanian encounter with the Real the traumatic kernel beneath the fantasy is enacted formally in the novel's structural shift from first to second to third person narration. The movement from "I" to "you" to "he" traces the progressive dissolution of the unified Lacanian subject under the pressure of psychic trauma. When Paul can no longer bear to inhabit his own story in the first person when the memories become too painful to own he shifts to the second person, implicating the reader and diffusing personal responsibility. Finally, the retreat into third person signals a complete dissociation from the self, a psychic severing that reflects the extent of the trauma. Barnes, as the Bibliofreak review notes, "shifts the narrative voice across the novel to underscore Paul's callowness" but it also charts his psychic fragmentation.
Trauma, Repetition, and the Compulsion to Narrate :
Freud's concept of Wiederholungszwang the compulsion to repeat is central to understanding both the psychological logic of Paul's life and the formal structure of the novel. In Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920), Freud argued that traumatic subjects are compelled to return obsessively to the scenes of their wounding, re-enacting them in disguised forms. Paul's retrospective narration is itself a form of this compulsion: the elderly man returning, once more, to the story of Susan is performing a psychic re-visitation of the wound that has defined him. The novel's very title The Only Story signals that Paul has been unable to produce any other narrative for his life, that the traumatic romance has foreclosed all alternative stories of the self.
This is confirmed by what we learn of Paul's emotional life after Susan: he does not form lasting bonds; he remains incapable of sustained intimacy. The trauma has not merely wounded him it has restructured his psychic life around its absence. Cathy Caruth's influential work Trauma: Explorations in Memory (1995) argues that trauma is characterised by its belatedness: it cannot be fully processed at the time of the wounding, but returns, insistently, as flashback, nightmare, and compulsive repetition. Paul's retrospective narration is precisely this belated return an attempt, perhaps impossible, to integrate an experience that was never fully assimilated when it occurred.
Particularly illuminating in this context is the comparative study "Mourning and Melancholy in Julian Barnes's Levels of Life and The Only Story" (ResearchGate, 2020), which draws on Freudian and Derridean frameworks to argue that Barnes presents characters who "loyally internalise and incorporate the memories of the loved one" figures for whom the lost object is never properly mourned and relinquished. In Freud's terms, Paul is a melancholic rather than a mourner: where the work of mourning involves gradual decathexis withdrawing libidinal investment from the lost object melancholy involves the internalisation of the lost object into the ego itself, generating self-reproach, emptiness, and an inability to move forward. Paul's emotional stagnation across decades is the psychic portrait of a melancholic who cannot release Susan.
Susan and the Abject: Desire, Disgust, and the Dissolution of the Other :
Julia Kristeva's concept of abjection developed in Powers of Horror (1980) offers a further layer of psychoanalytic illumination for reading Susan's alcoholic deterioration. For Kristeva, the abject is that which threatens the boundary of the self: the bodily, the uncontrollable, the reminder of our own mortality and materiality. Susan's descent into alcoholism confronts Paul with the abject dimension of human existence that romantic desire had previously obscured. The woman he desired as an image of sophistication, freedom, and maternal-erotic power is transformed, through alcoholism, into a body that is out of control, leaking, humiliated abjected.
Barnes handles this transformation with great narrative intelligence. As noted by the Kirkus review, the early parts of the novel mention Susan's drinking "as if to mirror Paul's youthful ignorance" Barnes replicates within the narrative form the psychological mechanism of denial that operates within Paul's psyche. The reader, like Paul, does not fully register the severity of Susan's condition until it is beyond remediation. This narrative strategy enacts what Freud termed Verneinung (negation) the psychological disavowal through which a feared truth is spoken and simultaneously denied. Paul sees what is happening to Susan but refuses to know it; the narrative structure of the novel performs this refusal.
Susan's increasing abjection also produces in Paul a traumatic bind that Kristeva helps to explain: he cannot leave her (because to do so would be to abandon his love-object and destroy the fantasy structure of his identity), and he cannot save her (because her disorder is beyond the reach of romantic idealism). He is caught between love and disgust, between the desire that originally defined him and the abject reality that now dismantles it. This impossible position loving what revolts, clinging to what harms is the psychological crucible in which Paul's lifelong emotional damage is forged.
Memory, Self-Narration, and the Unreliable Psyche :
The Only Story belongs to what critics have termed the "novel of recollections" a mode in which retrospective first-person narration becomes itself the site of psychic investigation. Paul Roberts, like Tony Webster in The Sense of an Ending, is an unreliable narrator not through deliberate deception but through the distortions that psychological self-protection necessarily introduces into memory. As Freud argued in his work on screen memories (1899), the memories we consciously retain are often substitutions for more painful ones pleasant or neutral memories that screen out what is too threatening to hold directly in consciousness.
The scholarly work "Reconstructed Memory of Love in Julian Barnes's The Only Story" (Academia.edu, 2021) is particularly instructive here, arguing that Barnes shows how "digging into the past events through the awakening lens of memory can lead to previously censored self-realisations." Paul's narration is a process of slow, reluctant self-discovery he gradually comes to understand his own role in the tragedy, his emotional limitations, his failure to fully perceive Susan as an autonomous person rather than as the object of his own psychic needs. This is what the Lacanian framework identifies as the encounter with the Other's desire: the moment when Paul recognises, too late, that Susan had her own interiority, her own suffering, her own story that was not simply a mirror for his.
Barnes reinforces the constructedness of memory through his formal choices. The three-part, triptych structure of the novel identified by the essay on mourning and melancholy as characteristic of Barnes's late fiction mirrors the expressionist triptychs of Francis Bacon, isolating images from each other to resist the consolations of linear narrative. Memory, in this structure, is fragmentary, asymmetric, and ultimately incomplete. The psychoanalytic subject is always a subject of the gap the gap between what is remembered and what occurred, between the story we tell about ourselves and the truth that exceeds our telling.
Conclusion :
The Only Story is, finally, a novel about what desire does to us over a lifetime how it shapes the self, sometimes irreversibly, and how the trauma of its loss or corruption can colonise psychic life to the exclusion of all else. Paul's romance with Susan is not simply an unhappy love affair; it is a psychic event of foundational significance, a trauma in Caruth's sense: an experience that "is not simply an event that took place at a specific point in time, but rather an experience that is not yet fully owned." Paul's retrospective narration his compulsion to return to this one story is the symptom of a wound that has never been integrated, a melancholic incorporation of a lost object that continues to shape his emotional life from within.
Through a combination of Freudian concepts of desire, repression, and melancholy; Lacanian theories of love as misrecognition and the encounter with the Real; and Kristevan abjection, this essay has argued that Barnes orchestrates a profound psychoanalytic drama in The Only Story. The formal features of the novel its shifting pronouns, triptych structure, and retrospective temporality are not merely aesthetic choices but psychic enactments: the novel's form is the shape of Paul's trauma. Barnes, as the academic scholarship has consistently noted, writes fiction deeply attentive to the ways in which love, loss, and memory are constitutive of selfhood. In The Only Story, he shows us how the ruin that follows romance is not an accident of fate but a consequence of the psychic structures through which we love and through which, unavoidably, we suffer.
References
Barnes, Julian. The Only Story. Jonathan Cape, 2018.
"Julian Barnes's The Only Story — Within and Beyond the Author's Idiosyncrasies." American & British Studies Annual, vol. 14, 2021, www.researchgate.net/publication/366399149.
Kirkus Reviews. "The Only Story by Julian Barnes." Kirkus Reviews, 2018, www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/julian-barnes/the-only-story/.
"Mourning and Melancholy in Julian Barnes's Levels of Life and The Only Story." ResearchGate, 2020, www.researchgate.net/publication/348024252.
"Reconstructed Memory of Love in Julian Barnes's The Only Story." Academia.edu, 2021, www.academia.edu/66696119.