This document discusses themes of passion and suffering in Julian Barnes' novel The Only Story. It begins with background on the etymology of the word "passion", which comes from the Latin word for "to suffer". Several quotes from the novel are provided that illustrate how the main character Paul's passionate love affair with the older Susan turns to suffering for both of them. The document also discusses psychological interpretations of love from a Lacanian perspective, explaining how the separation between our organic being and our cultural identities as subjects through language gives rise to an unsatisfiable desire.

1. Theme of Passion and Suffering
Theme of Love
The Only Story
Julian Barnes
"Remember, as you read this small book, generally and
specifically about love, remember that suffering is, after
all, the Latin root for passion“: Ellen Prentiss Campbell
on Julian Barnes's new novel.

2. This presentation deal with . . .
• Passion – the Latin root of this words – suffering
• Love = Passion + Suffering
• Jacques Lacan – The Subject of Desire – Love-object
• Love in ‘The Only Story’

3. The Etymology of Passion
• The word ‘passion’ is one of those words where the modern
application appears disconnected from the original meaning.
The word itself comes from the Latin root word, patior, which
means to suffer. It’s first use in English appeared around 1175
AD. Oddly enough the word is more frequently used in writing
than in speech.
• Many of the modern applications of ‘passion’ no longer convey
the idea of suffering at all. It’s present use is one describing an
intense desire, which is often sexual in nature. (Murrah, “The
Etymology of Passion.”)

4. The Etymology of Passion
• The modern use also defines passion as being an irrational force that's also
irresistible. The older version didn't identify whether the force compelling
you to action was rational or irrational nor did it specify whether it could
be resisted. The change in the meaning of the word has increased the
power of ‘passion’ over its original definition.
• The root word carried the idea that a passion was an external force that
made you do something or in some way to suffer. The modern version of
passion is unclear on whether the driving desire originates from inside you
or if it is an outside force working on you.
• The root of the word also contained applications where the word was used
as an intense desire. The root word of passion expresses the idea of being
moved to action where there is pain and suffering.

5. The Only Story – Passion turns into Suffering
• The story of ‘a youth of 19 years, Paul’s passionate attraction towards
Susan Macleod, a 48 years old married woman of two daughters’ – is
nothing but a story of passion turning into suffering.
• This is his story of a life-changing, life-defining passionate love
affair, from innocence to experience, from youth to age, from
infatuation to weariness.
• It is the story of suffering for both Paul as well as Susan, along
with all other family members.
• Illustrate from your reading of the novel The Only Story

6. Illustrations / quotes from the novel ‘The Only Story’
• Would you rather love the more, and suffer the more;
or love the less, and suffer the less? That is, I think,
finally, the only real question. You may point out –
correctly – that it isn’t a real question. Because we
don’t have the choice. If we had the choice, then
there would be a question. But we don’t, so there
isn’t. Who can control how much they love? If you can
control it, then it isn’t love. I don’t know what you call
it instead, but it isn’t love.

7. Quotes – Love / Passion
•Most of what I’d read, or been taught, about
love, didn’t seem to apply, from playground
rumour to high-minded literary speculation.
‘Man’s love is of man’s life a thing apart/’Tis
woman’s whole existence.’ How wrong – how
gender-biased, as we might now say – was that?

8. • I was nineteen, and I knew that love was incorruptible, proof
against both time and tarnish. I have a sudden attack of –
what? – fear, propriety, unselfishness? I say to her, thinking
she will know more, ‘You see, I haven’t been in love before,
so I don’t understand about love. What I’m worried about is
that, if you love me, it will leave you less for the other people
you love.’ I don’t name them. I meant her daughters; and
perhaps even her husband. ‘It’s not like that,’ she answers at
once, as if it is something she too has thought about, and has
solved. ‘Love’s elastic. It’s not a question of watering down. It
adds on. It doesn’t take away. So there’s no need to worry
about that.’

9. • Love was by its very nature disruptive, cataclysmic; and if it was not,
then it was not love.
• You might ask how deep my understanding of love was at the age of
nineteen. A court of law might find it based on a few books and films,
conversations with friends, heady dreams, aching fantasies about
certain girls on bicycles, and a quarter-relationship with the first
woman I went to bed with. But my nineteenyear-old self would
correct the court: ‘understanding’ love is for later, ‘understanding’
love verges on practicality, ‘understanding’ love is for when the heart
has cooled. The lover, in rapture, doesn’t want to ‘understand’ love,
but to experience it, to feel the intensity, the coming-into-focus of
things, the acceleration of life, the entirely justifiable egotism, the
lustful cockiness, the joyful rant, the calm seriousness, the hot
yearning, the certainty, the simplicity, the complexity, the truth, the
truth, the truth of love.

10. • All alcoholics are liars. This was, obviously, not based on a
huge sample or broad research. But I believed it at the time,
and now, decades later, with more field experience, I believe
it to be an essential truth about the condition. I went on: All
lovers are truth-tellers. Again, the sample was small,
consisting mainly of myself. It seemed to me evident that
love and truth were connected; indeed, as I may have said,
that to live in love is to live in truth. And then the conclusion
to this quasi-syllogism: Therefore, the alcoholic is the
opposite of the lover. This seemed not just logical, but also
consistent with my observations.

11. • And here comes a paradoxical one that you initially struggle
with. If you love her, as you unwaveringly do, and if loving
her means understanding her, then understanding her must
include understanding why she is a drinker. You run through
all her pre-history, and recent history, and current situation,
and possible future. You understand all this, and before you
know where you are, you have passed somehow from total
denial of the fact that she drinks to total comprehension of
why she might do so. But with this comes a brute
chronological fact. As far as you know, Susan only drank
occasionally in all her years with Macleod. But now that she
is living with you, she is – has become, is still becoming – an
alcoholic. There is too much in this for you to entirely
acknowledge, let alone bear.

12. • What a long way you have come. Years ago, when you
started off lying to your parents, you did so with a kind of
relish, reckless of consequence; it almost felt character-
building. Later, you began to tell lies in all directions: to
protect her, and to protect your love. Later still, she starts
lying to you, to keep you from knowing her secret; and now
she lies with a kind of relish, reckless of consequence.
Then, finally, you begin lying to her. Why? Something to do
with the need to create some internal space which you
could keep intact – and where you could yourself remain
intact. And this is how it is for you now. Love and truth –
where have they gone? You ask yourself: is staying with her
an act of courage on your part, or an act of cowardice?
Perhaps both? Or is it just an inevitability?

13. You realize that tough love is also tough on
the lover.
• Somewhere, in some novel he subsequently read, he had come
across the sentence: ‘He fell in love like a man committing
suicide.’ It wasn’t quite like that, but there was a sense in which
he had no choice. He couldn’t live with Susan; he couldn’t
establish a separate life away from her; therefore he went back
to live with her. Courage or cowardice? Or mere inevitability?
• An entry from his notebook which had survived several
inspections: ‘In love, everything is both true and false; it’s the
one subject on which it’s impossible to say anything absurd.’

14. Love and Duty
• He remembered, at school, being guided by masters through books and plays in which
there was often a Conflict between Love and Duty. In those old stories, innocent but
passionate love would run up against the duty owed to family, church, king, state. Some
protagonists won, some lost, some did both at the same time; usually, tragedy ensued.
No doubt in religious, patriarchal, hierarchical societies, such conflicts continued and
still gave themes to writers. But in the Village? No church-going for his family. Not much
of a hierarchical social structure, unless you counted the tennis and golf club
committees, with their power to expel. Not much patriarchy, either – not with his
mother around. As for family duty: he had felt no obligation to placate his parents.
Indeed, nowadays the onus had shifted, and it was the parents’ job to accept whatever
‘life choices’ their child might make. Like running off to a Greek island with Pedro the
hairdresser, or bringing home that gymslip-mother-to-be. Yet this liberation from the
old dogmas brought its own complexities. The sense of obligation became internalised.
Love was a Duty in and of itself. You had a Duty to Love, the more so now that it was
your central belief system. And Love brought many Duties with it. So, even when
apparently weightless, Love could weigh heavily, and bind heavily, and its Duties could
cause disasters as great as in the old days.

15. In his youth, hot with pride at his love for Susan,
he had been competitive, as all young men are.
• And by that time he had made the most terrifying discovery of his life, one
which probably cast a shadow over all his subsequent relationships: the
realization that love, even the most ardent and the most sincere, can, given
the correct assault, curdle into a mixture of pity and anger. His love had gone,
had been driven out, month by month, year by year. But what shocked him
was that the emotions which replaced it were just as violent as the love which
had previously stood in his heart. And so his life and his heart were just as
agitated as before, except that she was no longer able to assuage his heart.
And that, finally, was when he had to hand her back. He wrote a joint letter to
Martha and Clara.

16. • But he certainly never regretted his love for Susan.
What he did regret was that he had been too young,
too ignorant, too absolutist, too confident of what he
imagined love’s nature and workings to be. Would it
have been better – in the sense of less catastrophic –
for him, for her, for them both, if they had indeed had
some ‘French’ relationship? The older woman
teaching the younger man the arts of love, and then,
concealing an elegant tear, passing him out into the
world – the world of younger, more marriageable
women? Perhaps. But neither he nor Susan had been
sophisticated enough for that.

17. • He remembered his own early attempts to define
love, back in the Village, alone in his bed. Love, he had
ventured, was like the vast and sudden uncreasing of
a lifelong frown. Hmm: love as the end of a migraine.
No, worse: love as Botox. His other comparison: love
feeling as if the lungs of the soul had suddenly been
inflated with pure oxygen. Love as barely legal drug
use? Did he have any idea what he’d been talking
about?

18. • He took his little notebook from the desk drawer. He hadn’t
written anything new in it for a long time. At one point,
frustrated by how few good definitions of love he could find,
he started copying down at the back all the bad definitions.
Love is this, love is that, love means this, love means that.
Even quite well-known formulations said little more than, in
effect: it’s a soft toy, it’s a puppy dog, it’s a whoopee
cushion. Love means never having to say you’re sorry (on the
contrary, it frequently means doing just precisely that). Then
there were all those love lines from all those love songs, with
the swooning delusions of lyricist, singer, band. Even the
bittersweet ones and the cynical ones – always true to you,
darling, in my fashion – struck him as the mere
counterfactuals of sentimentality.

19. • Here was an entry – a serious one – which he hadn’t
crossed out in years. He couldn’t remember where it came
from. He never recorded the writer or the source: he didn’t
want to be bullied by reputation; truth should stand by
itself, clear and unsupported. This one went: ‘In my
opinion, every love, happy or unhappy, is a real disaster
once you give yourself over to it entirely.’ Yes, that
deserved to stay. He liked the proper inclusivity of ‘happy
or unhappy’. But the key was: ‘Once you give yourself over
to it entirely.’ Despite appearances, this wasn’t pessimistic,
nor was it bittersweet. This was a truth about love spoken
by someone in the full vortex of it, and which seemed to
enclose all of life’s sadness.

20. Psychological interpretation of love &
suffering
• The subject of desire:
• Why is it that the big love stories, those that become legendary when so many
are forgotten, tend to be the ones with unhappy endings? Most people in
Western culture probably know the stories of more than one of the following:
Dido and Aeneas, Antony and Cleopatra, Tristan and Isolde, Lancelot and
Guinevere, Romeo and Juliet, Anna Karenina, Gone With the Wind, Brief
Encounter, Casablanca.
• Why do we remember them? Why have some of the oldest ones been
recycled so many times in opera, novels, and films? Is it that unfulfilled desire
for some reason strikes a particular chord? Lacan would say so.

21. • For Lacan, the human being is an organism-in-culture, and the
disjunction that implies is the source of all our troubles. We are
born organisms (of course), and we become subjects. How? By
internalizing our culture, which is inscribed in the signifying
practices that surround us from the moment we come into the
world.
• We turn into subjects in the process of learning language,
which means that we become capable of signifying. This is an
advantage: we can ask for what we want instead of crying
helplessly, and go on to catch the right bus, write emails to our
friends, make political speeches - or read Lacan, of course,
according to taste.

22. • But the language that permits all this is irretrievably Other. Lacan
uses a capital O to distinguish the Otherness of language and
culture from the otherness of other people, though of course it is
from other people that we learn and internalize the Otherness of
the signifier. They, too, however, are its products.
• The big Other is there before we are, exists outside us, and does
not belong to us. In the course of asking for what we want, for
instance, we necessarily borrow our terms from the Other, since
we have no alternative if we want to communicate. In this way,
the little human organism, which begins with no sense of a
distinction between itself and the world, gets separated off from
its surroundings and is obliged to formulate its demands in terms
of the differences already available in language, however
alienating these might be.

23. • Something is lost here - experienced, perhaps, as a residue of the
continuity with our organic existence, or as wishes that don’t
quite fit the signifiers that are supposed to define them. Lacan
calls what is lost the real. The real is not reality, which is what
culture tells us about.
• On the contrary, the real is that organic being outside
signification, which we can’t know, because it has no signifiers in
the world of names the subject inhabits.
• The real, repressed because it has no way of making itself
recognized in our consciousness, returns to disturb and disrupt
our engagement with a reality that we imagine we know.
• Unable to use the existing language, the lost real makes its
effects felt in dreams, slips of the tongue, puns, jokes, or
symptoms marked on the body, illnesses or disabilities that seem
to have no physiological cause.

24. • The general effect of the lost but inescapable real of our organic
being is a dissatisfaction we cannot specify. A gap now exists
between the organism and the signifying subject, and in that gap
desire is born.
• Desire, Lacan says, is for nothing nameable, since it is
unconscious, not part of the consciousness language gives us. But
it is structural, the consequence of the gap that marks the loss of
the real, and thus a perpetual condition.
• Although desire is unconscious, most of us find a succession of
love-objects, and fasten our desire onto them, as if they could
make us whole again, heal the rift between the subject and the
lost real. In the end, they can’t - though, of course, it’s possible to
have a good time in the process of finding that out.

25. Illustration: Dream of Susan falling down
• An image comes into your head one day, an image of your
relationship to one another. You are at an upstairs window of the
house on Henry Road. She has somehow climbed out, and you are
hanging on to her. By the wrists, of course. And her weight makes
it impossible for you to pull her back inside. It is all you can do to
stop yourself being pulled out with her, by her. At one point she
opens her mouth to scream, but no sound emerges. Instead, her
dental plate comes loose; you hear it hit the ground with a
plasticky clatter. You are stuck there, the two of you, locked
together, and will remain so until your strength gives out, and she
falls. It is only a metaphor – or the worst of dreams; yet there are
metaphors which sit more powerfully in the brain than
remembered events.

26. This image is revisited at the end of the novel
• Damage limitation. He found himself wondering if he
had always misconstrued that indelible image which
had pursued him down his life: of being at an upstairs
window, holding on to Susan by the wrists. Perhaps
what had happened was not that he had lost strength
and let her fall. Perhaps the truth was that she had
pulled him out with her weight. And he had fallen too.
And been grievously damaged in the process.

27. Works cited:
• Barnes, Julian. The Sense of an Ending. 2011.
• Barnes, Julian. The Only Story. 2018.
• Belsey, Catherine. A Very Short Introduction: Poststructuralism. OUP. 2002
• Campbell, Ellen Prentiss. “The Only Story, by Julian Barnes.” Fiction Writers
Review (blog). Accessed January 31, 2022.
https://fictionwritersreview.com/review/the-only-story-by-julian-barnes/.
• Murrah, Jeff. “The Etymology of Passion.” Owlcation. Accessed January 31,
2022. https://owlcation.com/humanities/The-Etymology-of-Passion.
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