Hello Viewers! 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 Memory Hacking: Remembering, Storytelling, and Unreliable Narrators in 'Julian Barnes's novel 'The Only Story' and The Sense of an Ending'.
Assignment
- Name: Payal Bambhaniya
- Semester: 4 ( Batch - 2022-2024 )
- Enrollment No.: 4069206420220002
- Roll no.: 14
- Topic: Memory Hacking: Remembering, Storytelling, and Unreliable Narrators in Julian Barnes’ “The Sense of an Ending” and “The Only Story”
- E- mail Address: payalbambhaniya92@gmail.com
- Subject/ Paper no.: 207
- Paper Code: 22414
- Paper Name: Contemporary Literature in English
- Submitted to: Smt. S.B. Gardi Department of English, Maharaja Krishnakumarsinhji Bhavnagar University
- Date of Submission: 8th May, 2024
Memory Hacking: Remembering, Storytelling, and Unreliable Narrators in Julian Barnes’ The Sense of an Ending and The Only Story
Introduction:
Contemporary literature reflects the multifaceted complexities of our modern world, offering a diverse array of narratives that capture the essence of our time. From exploring themes of identity, globalisation, and technology to delving into social justice issues and the human experience, contemporary literature provides a mirror to society's evolving values and concerns. Through various forms such as novels, poetry, and short stories, contemporary writers engage with pressing issues and challenge traditional literary conventions. This literature often embraces experimentation with form and style, reflecting the fluidity and diversity of contemporary life. By capturing the voices and experiences of marginalised communities, contemporary literature strives to foster empathy, understanding, and dialogue in an increasingly interconnected world.
About Writer : 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 first novel published under Barnes’s own name was the coming-of-age story Metroland (1980). Jealous obsession moves the protagonist of Before She Met Me (1982) to scrutinise his new wife’s past. Flaubert’s Parrot (1984) is a humorous mixture of biography, fiction, and literary criticism. Critics thought Barnes showed a new depth of emotion in The Lemon Table (2004), a collection of short stories in which most of the characters are consumed by thoughts of death. He explored why some people are remembered after their death and others are not in the historical novel Arthur and George (2005), in which one of the title characters is based on Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.
‘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 Only Story
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”.
About Novel: The Sense of an Ending:
The Sense of an Ending is a 2011 novel written by British author Julian Barnes. The book is Barnes's eleventh novel written under his own name (he has also written crime fiction under the pseudonym Dan Kavanagh) and was released on 4 August 2011 in the United Kingdom. The Sense of an Ending is narrated by a retired man named Tony Webster, who recalls how he and his clique met Adrian Finn at school and vowed to remain friends for life. When the past catches up with Tony, he reflects on the paths he and his friends have taken. In October 2011, The Sense of an Ending was awarded the Booker Prize. The following month it was nominated in the novels category at the Costa Book Awards. Tony's unreliable narration, juxtaposing his vivid youthful recollections against the revelations that force him to confront the incomplete and biassed nature of his life story.
The Nature of Memories:-
There is a perennial anxiety about how much and how long we can remember certain things. We used to believe that our memory functions like a video camera, which perceives and records certain moments in our personal history, so we can retrieve those memories later with a fair amount of accuracy. In this analogy, memories are like material possessions to be kept, guarded, and cherished. Modern inventions— paper, pens, phonograph, cameras, videotapes, and social media—are all designed to preserve as many memories as possible. We dread the possibility of forgetting our past like those patients with dementia or Alzheimer’s.
Memory is not a perfect recording like a video camera; instead, it is actively constructed and reconstructed, often influenced by various factors. As Elizabeth Loftus states, "Our memories are constructive. They're reconstructive. Memory works a little bit more like a Wikipedia page: you can go in there and change it, but so can other people."
Memory is subject to distortion and bias, often in a positive or self-enhancing direction, a phenomenon known as "rosy retrospection." Loftus explains, "There is scientific evidence that we distort our own memories in a positive or prestige-enhancing direction without anybody else intervening."
Memory construction is influenced by two forces: the force of correspondence (corresponding to facts) and the force of coherence (consistency with current goals and beliefs). As Martin A. Conway suggests, "The act of accessing a memory easily leads to it being reconstructed."
When gaps or inconsistencies arise in memory, people tend to fill them with imagination, association, or reasoning. As Scott Fraser explains, "our brain abhors a vacuum; therefore, when we put together pieces in one's memory, it is natural to fill the gaps by using our imagination, association, or reasoning."
Memory is susceptible to "imagination inflation," the tendency to convert imagined events into memories. Charles Fernyhough acknowledges, "When I lost my ability to adjudicate between memory and fantasy, I plumped for memory."
Age and life stage can influence the nature of memory. Julian Barnes notes, "Memory in childhood—at least, as I remember it—is rarely a problem... Adulthood brings approximation, fluidity and doubt; and we keep the doubt at bay by retelling that familiar story."
Memory can be self-serving, prioritising happier or more favourable details, as the narrator in The Only Story reflects, "Memory sorts and sifts according to the demands made on it by the rememberer... But I would guess that memory prioritises whatever is most useful to help keep the bearer of those memories going."
The narrator is aware that his memory narratives are not impervious to alteration, distortion, and even manipulation. In the process of making his memories stories, there will be changes, revisions, gaps, and lapses. The authenticity is not “inferior,” just “different.”
Memory Hacking:-
Julia Shaw’s research shows us how our memories are susceptible to distortion because of misleading questions.
In her "memory hacking" experiments, Shaw was able to implant false memories involving minor crimes in 70% of participants by mixing true and fabricated details about their teenage years and having them visualise the events.
The process turned "what could have been" into "what would have been" and eventually "what was" - implanting vivid false memories.
Her research shows that verbalising memories can also change them, contrary to the belief that verbal rehearsal reinforces visual memory. By putting visual memories into words, we simplify and lose nuances, a phenomenon called "verbal overshadowing" .
Each time we verbalise or retell a memory, we potentially alter, reinforce, or lose details, and the revised version can overlap and replace the original memory.
Shaw argues that "putting pictures into words always makes our memories for those pictures worse" and that our attempts to improve memories through verbalization can adversely manipulate them.
The passage also raises thought-provoking questions about the relationship between memory and language, such as whether memories can exist without being verbalised and whether verbalising a memory brings it into existence.
Overall, Shaw's research highlights the susceptibility of our memories to distortion and implantation through various techniques, as well as the potential for our own attempts to verbalise and reinforce memories to paradoxically alter and weaken them.
Remembering and Storytelling:-
The distinction made by Daniel Kahneman between the experiencing self and the remembering self is profound and sheds light on the nature of memory and how we construct narratives about our lives.
We have two inner selves - the experiencing self that lives in the present moment, and the remembering self that recollects and evaluates past experiences.
While we experience around 20,000 moments a day, most are fleeting "psychological presents" lasting only 3 seconds and are lost or ignored.When asked about an experience like a vacation, it is the remembering self, not the experiencing self, that composes the story and provides the answer.
Kahneman states: "This is how the remembering self works: it composes stories and keeps them for future reference". Remembering and storytelling are essential for making sense of our identity and experiences.
In narrating our life stories, we appeal to memories, shaping our past through narrative. This narrative shaping allows us to reconcile past and present, maintaining a continuous sense of self.
Humans piece together disparate life events into coherent narratives to create meaning, exhibiting a "narrative desire" to tell our pasts as stories.
In this process, our memories become fiction, as we select, evaluate, arrange, combine, invent details, fill gaps, and ignore unwanted parts - just as we would in writing a story.
Our memory is never merely a record of the past, but a product of facts, fabrications, and imagination, revised like a story through proofreading and editing.
Kahneman illuminates how our remembering selves construct narratives from memories, shaping and revising the past through storytelling mechanisms akin to fiction writing, in order to make sense of our experiences and maintain a coherent sense of identity over time.
Unreliable Narrators:-
The term “unreliable narrator” was coined by the literary critic Wayne Booth in his The Rhetoric of Fiction in 1961: “I have called a narrator reliable when he speaks for or acts in accordance with the norms of the work …, unreliable when he does not ([1961] 1983: 158–59). Booth sees a compact between the author and the reader in the realm of literature, and seems to identify reliable narrators as unbiased truth-tellers. However, what exactly could be counted as “the norms of the work”? Booth seems to emphasise the moral distance between the norms of an implied or real author and what is revealed by the narrator.3 James Phelan extends Booth’s definition of “unreliable narrator,” claiming that narrators often simultaneously or sequentially perform “three main roles—reporting, interpreting, and evaluating.” He further combines the activities of narrators and readers and identifies six different types of unreliable narratives: misreporting, misreading, mis evaluating/mis regarding, underreporting, underreading, under regarding (2005: 51). Given that a narrator can be reliable in one way, but unreliable in another, it is difficult to determine the extent of a character’s reliability as a narrator
Ansgar Nünning views unreliability as an interpretive strategy by the reader to resolve inconsistencies, locating it in the text-reader dynamic.
Both Tony and Paul are presented as unreliable in certain ways - withholding information, contradicting themselves, admitting memory lapses and fabrications.
However, their unreliability stems from the inherent unstable nature of memory itself - they frequently acknowledge the limitations and biases in recollecting the past accurately.
Techniques like shifting narrative perspectives (in Paul's case) highlight how the act of narrating can lead to reworking and "hacking" one's memories.
Their unreliability connects them to the reader through a "bonding unreliability" that garners sympathy for the difficulties of reconstructing the past.
The passage suggests more neutral terms like "remembering narrator" or "reconstructing narrator" may be preferable to "unreliable narrator" to avoid negative connotations.
It draws a distinction between the literary device of an unreliable narrator and the inherent unreliability of human memory and self-narration, as articulated by Kazuo Ishiguro.
It is worth noting that while “unreliable narrator” is a term for literary techniques, a deliberate construction of language, the unreliability of memory is simply part of human nature. The term “unreliable narrator” in a sense implicates the narrator’s intention to manipulate or deceive the readers; yet human memory is by nature unreliable. While asked why the narrators in his several novels (such as An Artist of the Floating World, The Remains of the Day, Never Let Me Go, etc.) tend to be unreliable in 2005, Kazuo Ishiguro explains that, to him, the unreliability of the narrators is authentic in terms of human nature, rather than a choice of literary technique:
When I started out, I never really thought specifically about “the unreliable narrator.” In fact, that term wasn’t thrown around back then nearly as much as it is now. I just wrote my narrators up in the way I felt was authentic—the way I felt most people would go about telling a story about themselves. That’s to say, any of us, when asked to give an account of ourselves over any important period of our lives, would tend to be “unreliable.” That’s just human nature. We tend to be “unreliable” even to ourselves—maybe especially to ourselves. I didn’t think of it as a literary technique.
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