| A New Kind of Narrative Truth |
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| Essays and Memoirs | |||
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Lately, I’ve been brooding on the word remember whose mystery for the memoirist is all-important. From the late Latin, the word originally meant "to call to mind" or "to be mindful," implying a mind full of what it’s been called to. Breaking it down further, we trace the re in remember to the Latin ablative of res, which means from a thing, object, or circumstance, the re also referring to repetition. Then there’s member, which comes from the Latin membrum, as in "part." Remember may mean one’s mindfulness of the past and one’s putting the parts of a past circumstance together through repetitious recall—that ever-occurring now in which we brood over past events again and again. When I re-member an incident, I re-assemble its parts—the elements of what happened and the times I’ve recalled it. That which I recall one hundred times is much different than that which I recollect once. For deep memories, the parts I re-assemble are themselves re-assemblages of parts already assembled. It would seem then that the nature of memory is equally creative, constructive, and confusing. How is a memory composed of a single past experience as well as the piled-up/piled-on memories of that experience? An example may help. Let’s say that at age ten you endured what psychologists call a "primal scene": on a family outing in a state park, you and your siblings saw a boy on his bike get hit by a car. You heard the screech of the brakes; you saw the body fly and the head hit the ground; you heard people screaming; you watched the wounded boy bleed; you felt helpless as the ambulance came; and your father told you later that though the doctors did their best the boy had died. The memory haunts you; it comes back again and again, sometimes slightly altered. You re-call the death over the next few years, then, as time passes, less often; you also notice other witnesses—your sister—remembers it differently than you do. As you age, you find new elements coming to mind. You see it as a fate you escaped; you ponder its affect on others; you feel its sense-oriented details more precisely; you mix those details up with a movie that has an eerily similar scene; as you gain distance, you recall it more securely, which may, ironically, be more imaginative. Your remembering the event at eleven or twelve is different from your recall at fifteen, twenty, thirty. When you’re a lot older the memory is less overwhelming; it may grow into myth, a stage where it is less personal, more other worldly. Eventually you will re-member this one event hundreds of times, and it is the compilation of the event in memory that becomes the event far more than the thing you witnessed at ten. The boy’s death has grown exaggerated and porous; even your sister’s recall has led you and her to argue about what happened. Most powerful, your recollecting the trauma is always being integrated into your present life—and perhaps changing its shape to accommodate you now. For example, when a friend loses a child to cancer, your meditating on this event gives a new existential meaning to your sense of self. It may be that only when we arrive at a present predicament that needs a more or less amelioratory re-shaping of the past do we then put that past together as a way to serve our interests now. Each re-assemblage is different because each is based on our emotional need at the time we recall the experience. And each one is similar in that, like a string of pearls, there is a common ancestor, a pre-existing shape. In this sense, to re-member is also to re-cast. And to re-cast is to bear what we haven’t been able or what we may not want to bear. In large part, it is to the plasticity of our memory and to our personal desire to make sense of our mindfulness about the past that current life-writers are devoted. Many contemporary memoirists are concerned as much with how memory works as they are with what memory is recollecting. The medium is the message, and the process of remembering, the product. These memoirists and critics (including some reviewed in this memoir-focused issue of the American Book Review) are exploring what I call the memoirist’s predilection: to generate a dialogical give-and-take between what an author has remembered and why he continues to re-cast it as he does. In this regard, consider Judith Moore’s Fat Girl. Moore, who died in 2006, needed to lay bare her own set of assumptions about the ongoing deception the fat person continually lives with before she tells us the heartbreaking story of how her addiction to food began. In effect, she says, that for me to convince you that my uncontrollable appetite produced a writer who has always been tormented by my disease, here is the fat person creating and critiquing the person who remembers fatness. Thus, we hear two relational ideas at work in contemporary memoir. First is the memoirist’s relating to his or her subject: a parent, a passion, an illness, a loss of self or of a loved one. Second is the memoirist’s relating to his or her long and wishful shaping of the subject in memory. Only if the author tells a true story about how she has re-membered her subject can she recognize how the past has already shaped itself with varying degrees of truth and myth, fact and duplicity. A third relational idea arrives to confound the first two. This occurs when memorists write about the recent past or the current life (see the splendidly over-self-dramatizing Eat, Pray, Love). If the memoirist writes what I call sudden memoir—the story of an experience memory has not yet recounted multiple times—the writer is relating to the indecision and disorientation of current life almost as it happens. Sudden memoir reveals the vicissitudes of our emotions minus the self-mythologizing memory insists on. It both challenges the authority of the memoir as a "remembering form" and upsets the notion that personal narrative should issue from a patient and prior-to-writing processing of events. The best example I know of a writer descending into the throes of immediate loss is Joan Didion’s cerebral self-debriefing of her husband’s sudden death, The Year of Magical Thinking. Writers are also working to counter the fatalism of their beliefs and the delusions of their psyches. When I read memoir, I find authors unearthing just how fatalistic and deluded their thinking about an experience, whether just lived or recollected a hundred times, has been. When I write memoir, I have to write about how I have misrepresented myself to myself—and to others. The hardest part of this task is to catch my self-deception as it happened, for example, in recreating the demise of my marriage during my twenties. Can we say that all this relational give-and-take has a purpose? The endeavor of memoir leads us to reflect on how memory has already contoured our emotional and intellectual patterns, which can be so unconscious in day-to-day life that only self-examination reveals their hold upon us. The burden of memoir is that as we uncover the blueprints which shape our character, we also, in large part, create those blueprints by writing them out. It’s as if we never quite live in the house of the self because we’re constantly building it. It’s true that memoir writing enacts greater self-consciousness. But is that its goal? I’m not sure. To write memoir feels aesthetically and ethically fulfilling. But to know myself is only one of our human prerogatives—not to is a prerogative just as strong. Autobiographers are keen to record what they believe is the purity of their major life events; by contrast, memoirists seek to unmask the self’s vagaries, to deconstruct its narrative authority, to demythologize its conflicted personae. What might this mean for us socially? In the age of memoir some of us want more than ever to liberate ourselves from our family’s and our culture’s molds where we have been, by design, lashed to our roles despite the mantra of the American maverick. What’s more, we have been weighed down for too long by the postmodern anvil that the self is dead, has never existed, is socially wrought out of genetic material and racial suasion, an intractable fate. But the relational passions of the self counter fate, in part, because we have outlived or outsmarted the persons we were supposed to become. The self’s new acumen via the memoir possesses a political mandate as well. Such a form asks me to write (or make graphic stories, videos, oral histories, one-person stage shows) about how recollecting my experience nurtures my individuality and works against a society that demands I kowtow to my social group, my ethnic identity, and my corporate warden be it Pfizer or Pepsi. Finally, what is most impressive about the memoir’s two-decade-long birth is that our new sense of life-writing and memory has arisen via the form’s democracy of authorship. Imagine: writers without MFA’s publishing memoirs! The potential for anyone to write a good memoir—an idea publishers love and hate—impugns the genius tradition of creation and lessens the value of a literature based on a hierarchy of stylistic innovation. Progress in literature will no longer arise primarily from the felicitous expansion of artifice, but increasingly from the authorial exploration of consciousness—because to discover and invent meaning in memoir is a new kind of narrative truth.
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