Memory, Life-writing and conflicting recollections
Notes and quotes on ‘writing the self’ for weblog.
‘Confessionalism has to know when to hold back. Honesty has to be worked at. ‘A little sincerity is a dangerous thing,’ said Wilde, ‘and a great deal of it is absolutely fatal.’
‘Thomas Hardy once said that there was an “infinite mischief” in “the mixing of fact and fiction in unknown proportions”.
‘good non-fiction does inevitably employ many of the devices of fiction: narrative, characterization, suspense, surprise, and a sense of beginning-middle-end.. In other words, selectivity and detachment are as much a part of confessionalism as other forms of writing.’
‘A little wariness seems appropriate, since memoirs depend on memories, which are often false. When an author recalls in exhaustive detail a scene form thirty years ago we may wonder if it happened exactly that way.’
The above quotes are from Blake Morrison’s introduction to Too True. (Blake is my supervisor at Goldsmiths.)
I work at Kingston University and on 11 May 2006 we had a seminar on Biography and Life Writing. Paul Bailey is a writer in residence on the Creative Writing programme and he began his talk by saying, ‘A lot of people think they can write a memoir by sticking to the facts of their life…’
‘Confessionalism has to know when to hold back. Honesty has to be worked at. ‘A little sincerity is a dangerous thing,’ said Wilde, ‘and a great deal of it is absolutely fatal.’
‘Thomas Hardy once said that there was an “infinite mischief” in “the mixing of fact and fiction in unknown proportions”.
‘good non-fiction does inevitably employ many of the devices of fiction: narrative, characterization, suspense, surprise, and a sense of beginning-middle-end.. In other words, selectivity and detachment are as much a part of confessionalism as other forms of writing.’
‘A little wariness seems appropriate, since memoirs depend on memories, which are often false. When an author recalls in exhaustive detail a scene form thirty years ago we may wonder if it happened exactly that way.’
The above quotes are from Blake Morrison’s introduction to Too True. (Blake is my supervisor at Goldsmiths.)
I work at Kingston University and on 11 May 2006 we had a seminar on Biography and Life Writing. Paul Bailey is a writer in residence on the Creative Writing programme and he began his talk by saying, ‘A lot of people think they can write a memoir by sticking to the facts of their life…’
posted by Alp at Wednesday, July 12, 2006
4 Comments:
Hello hello how does this work for gods sake
This is an interesting project, and the website raises some questions about which your introductory page is currently silent - no doubt deliberately so. Your subheading 'lend me your memories' is really asking a great deal for all its lightness of tone - the (apocryphal) scene of the angry or scared 'native' reacting to having a picture taken by accusing the photographer of stealing his soul(usually is a he) keeps coming to mind. If memories are how we narrate our sense of selves and make sense of our lives and past, then offering them up to a website/researcher is not only an act of extraordinary generosity but also one which requires a good degree of faith and trust in how they may be used. The tone of the initial comments on this site (posted by ALP) are at best lively, humorous, provocative but occasionally a little glib or overly simplistic and ultimately offputting to some of those who invested a great deal of energy in an alternative lifestyle (for all the inherent weaknesses, contradictions and compromises which were a reality). From comments I have heard from 'Welsh Hippies' who have viewed this site, this website has generated a great deal of interest, but a certain reluctance to 'lend memories'. Part of this is just inertia, and partly an interest in viewing rather than participating. But beyond this, there is a certain amount of hostility to the site and it might be a valuable excercise in the context of your PhD to consider why (antipathy to tone or content, reluctance to offer anecdotes in general, reluctance to participate publicly etc) and how this impacts on the site.
K. B. Neale
‘That’s not what happened!’: on mediating memories and representing the ‘truth’ in life writing
The public and private spheres are no longer mutually exclusive. And the memoir form has to some extent become democratised: having achieved exceptional things in one’s life is no longer a pre-requisite to having a memoir published; rather, having been affected by compelling cultural events or deeds seems sometimes to be enough.
But with the rise of the confessional form a number of questions and ethical contentions emerge. How far can one justify recounting the history of others who may be adversely implicated or feel that they have been compromised for the purposes of offering one’s own narrative up for public consumption?
[slide 2]
Over the last two years several bestselling ‘memoirs’ have been exposed as being fraudulent, notably James Frey’s A Million Little Pieces, Kathy O’Beirne’s Don’t Ever Tell: Kathy’s Story: A True Tale of a Childhood Destroyed by Neglect and Fear, J T Leroy’s The Heart is Deceitful Above All Things and Augusten Burroughs’ Running With Scissors. Each account’s veracity has been subjected to different types of scrutiny but two key contentions emerge from these (largely American) examples. The first being the antipathy to particular recollections by (extended) families – a cry of ‘that’s not how it happened!’ – as in Burroughs’ case; and the second being simply a cry of ‘that didn’t happen!, as in Leroy and, most notoriously, Frey’s case.
Frey’s brutal ‘memoir’ of drug addiction and recovery was exposed by journalists at The Smoking Gun website as being fraudulent on a number of counts. [cite them] Having capitalised on his fabricated demise, largely due to being an Oprah Book Club choice, Frey was forced to publicly (on Oprah, in fact) apologise for his false claims. And so in the new preface of his book, Frey states that his memoir is ‘a subjective truth’.
This notion of the memoir as a ‘subjective truth’ is all very well in the nuanced and exciting new territories of narrative non-fiction (that is, real lives re-imagined in fictional form) but if, at some level, we wish to query the relativist notion of ‘all narratives being equal’ with the view that fiction serves one function and non-fiction another, then we necessarily find ourselves embroiled in a problematic emergent debate.
This paper will consider these questions from the perspective of two case studies: the first being my editorial negotiations with a contributor to my anthology Bit on the Side: Work, Sex, Love, Loss and Own Goals. The second being my weblog: www.welshhippies.blogspot.com These two case studies approach the issue of disclosure and memory from different perspectives. The former being an attempt largely to minimise collateral damage (in terms of offending others); the latter being an invitation to all parties involved in certain events or the application of particular ideas to offer up their own versions of events.
I will also consider how to ‘manage’ memories for the purposes of publication, looking in particular at ways in which ethical concerns such as Layla’s might be sensitively negotiated so that the integrity of the form, the story and the individual remain (more or less) intact.
[slide 3]
Case study 1: ‘Here come the hippy niggers!’
Bit on the Side: Work, Sex, Love, Loss and Own Goals is an anthology made up of stories based on key moments in the contributors’ lives which allude to broader social, sexual, political and personal contexts.
In addition to featuring work from established writers and journalists it also includes stories by ‘unknowns’ – women who don’t normally reveal their lives in this way. One such story is by Layla Jabero, a half-Iraqi semi-professional footballer who was brought up on a commune in West Wales in the 1970s. Her piece, ‘Here come the hippy niggers’ is a transcription of an interview I conducted with her in 2005.
The title to Layla’s piece can be found in the following excerpt:
We used to get called ‘nigger’ at school, which, looking back, was classic ignorance. Paki, blacky, nigger, they called us. At primary school, Blaenffos, the local kids used to shout, ‘Here come the hippy niggers!’ I used to want to have blonde hair and white skin and I’d say to John, ‘It’s all your fault! If you hadn’t been from Iraq….’ I was deadly serious. But, looking back now, it’s ridiculous.
We learnt very quickly not to mention what went on at home. Little farming villages like Blaenffos were quite conservative. (Kiernan, 2007, 29)
But when I sent Layla the transcript of her interview she was unhappy with the suggestion that there was a clearly defined animosity between the locals and the ‘incomers’. She addressed this by adding the following section:
There were some lovely people in Blaenffos… I was certainly coming to recognise that there were many more positive forces around me than the negative taunts I had experienced in the past.’ (ibid, 31)
A number of other disclosures are tempered retrospectively, such as the following:
X used to drive the tractor. She used to drive the car without a licence because we had a car crash up the track and I ended up with stitches in my head. She used to love driving the tractor and the trailer.
Has changed to:
X used to drive the tractor. She used to love driving the tractor and trailer.
I reluctantly agreed to these changes, not least because Layla is a friend (which presents another ethical issue!). My reluctance stemmed from the shift in tone which reflected the conciliatory nature of the anxiety of being different or ‘other’ being revisited by the more mature and reflective self.
The latter example is clearly intended to pre-empt criticisms that X was behaving irresponsibly. The former, though, seems concerned with not representing a community in a negative light, despite the authenticity of the racial prejudice evidenced in the behaviour recounted. So the desire then is to de-authenticate events from the past by ‘toning down’ their impact. This, in a sense, is the opposite of Frey’s narrative impulse in A Million Little Pieces.
[Slide 4; also open weblog]
Case study 2: www.welshhippies.blogspot.com
My blog opens with the following statement:
Something unusual was happening in SW Wales when I was a child – subcultures, social experiments, naked hippies dancing around maypoles. I'm researching a PhD project into remembrances of things past – how our sense of the past informs our sense of self. This enquiry presumes that the past is not fixed, rather it is partly constructed through a shared or collective consciousness, which is why I’m inviting you now to share your memories of certain events, moments, and ideas. A childhood in Wales gave a lot of us a unique experience and a lot of the ‘hippy’ kids, I think, have a wonderfully insightful way of perceiving and interacting with the world. But we also have a very different past from many of our peers, and some ‘site specific’ hang-ups! There were some amazingly off-the-wall characters around and some pretty weird shit happened. I’d like to know which bits you remember, in words and photos. Some of this stuff might be sensitive, so if you are posting photos or texts or relevant transcripts or notes or poems or songs (you could scan them or send them to me ‘snail-mail’ – I will be very careful) onto this weblog please be aware of that, and do so with an open mind.
The weblog has been viewed 738 times and has had 73 posts (at the time of writing). This means that approximately 10% of those who have viewed the site have contributed to it. In one sense, that isn’t a bad take up. It does however beg the question of why the other 90% (to view the statistics simplistically) have chosen not to contribute.
[slide 5]
One explanation for this can be found in a recent post:
This is an interesting project, and the website raises some questions about which your introductory page is currently silent – no doubt deliberately so. Your subheading 'lend me your memories' is really asking a great deal for all its lightness of tone - the (apocryphal) scene of the angry or scared 'native' reacting to having a picture taken by accusing the photographer of stealing his soul (usually is a he) keeps coming to mind. If memories are how we narrate our sense of selves and make sense of our lives and past, then offering them up to a website/researcher is not only an act of extraordinary generosity but also one which requires a good degree of faith and trust in how they may be used. The tone of the initial comments on this site (posted by ALP) are at best lively, humorous, provocative but occasionally a little glib or overly simplistic and ultimately offputting to some of those who invested a great deal of energy in an alternative lifestyle (for all the inherent weaknesses, contradictions and compromises which were a reality). From comments I have heard from 'Welsh Hippies' who have viewed this site, this website has generated a great deal of interest, but a certain reluctance to 'lend memories'. Part of this is just inertia, and partly an interest in viewing rather than participating. But beyond this, there is a certain amount of hostility to the site and it might be a valuable exercise in the context of your PhD to consider why (antipathy to tone or content, reluctance to offer anecdotes in general, reluctance to participate publicly etc) and how this impacts on the site.
K. B. Neale (my italics)
This response raises a number of questions for the contemporary memoirist interested in investigating sociological and/or anthropological case studies:
1. How the researcher situates her or himself in relation to the research.
2. Tone – humour and the integrity of the discourse used. (Is there something misleading about me using a colloquial style of discourse for an academic project?)
3. Trust – ethics. ‘The angry native’. But I come from that community, so, surely, I am not as the photographer? Or am I, now that I am departed, also some sort of interloper? How does one gain/re-gain trust? (Janet Malcolm in The Journalist and the Murderer speaks of the relationship between the interviewer and interviewee as being similar to the analyst/analysand. Where it differs (Malcolm suggests) is that the journalist cannot be trusted; their line of work ultimately being ‘indefensible’)
4. Public/private. There is a sense in which the communities to which I refer in both case studies sought to transcend boundaries such as public/private (eg being naked in public was largely viewed as ‘normal’). But this project is perhaps a different sort of public/private interface. I am inviting people to reveal private recollections in a public space. So why this reticence now?
5. How does one go about successfully initiating responses across two generations? The project is about how certain narratives in one’s life take on a mythical status. And how when those myths are removed one’s sense of self undergoes a paradigmatic shift. This may be more relevant to the founders of these communities, who invested in certain ideologies perhaps more than those who were born into them. Which might go some way to explaining why responses from the ‘second generation’ are more humorous [see Hannah’s].
6. I am now faced with a dilemma. Should I divulge my own feelings and memories of ‘the past’ I allude to in the blog? Or should my function be as a facilitator – the person who draws forth the stories of others (in a similar way to putting together an anthology)? Or should I simply rethink the tone of the blog, so that its register is more ‘straightforward’ and less humorous?
A final important issue remains too. More men than women of my parent’s generation have posted on the blog. But more women than men (including my mother) have emailed me privately in response to entries they have read on the blog. It seems that men are happier to recount anecdotal stories in which they feature as ‘the hero’ whereas women, in this context, appear to be more sensitive to the possibility of inaccurate accounts being inadvertently articulated. The danger here of course is that those who speak loudest are heard most (ie self-mythologising middle-aged men). Which runs counter to my intention for this blog. What to do?
So far, then, working with the slippery raw material that makes up memories appears to be an area of research that requires site-specific concerns of various sorts to be addressed. I would like to invite any feedback or suggestions or questions that you might have about how I should go about addressing these concerns.
[slide 6]
Indicative bibliography:
Anderson, Linda (2001). Autobiography: The New Critical Idiom, London: Routledge.
Burroughs, Augusten (2004). Running With Scissors, Atlantic. Freud, Esther (1993). Hideous Kinky, London: Penguin. Frey, James (2006). A Million Little Pieces, Random House.
Guest, Tim (2004). My Life in Orange, London: Granta. Jelinek, Estelle C (1980). Women’s Autobiography: Essays in Criticism, Indiana University Press. Morrison, Blake (1993). And When Did You Last See Your Father?, London: Granta. Morrison, Blake (1999). Too True, London: Granta. Taylor, Charles (1992). The Ethics of Authenticity, Harvard. Zizek, Slavoj. The Ticklish Subject. London: Verso, 1999.
www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/memory/share/moreinfo.shtml
www.welshhippies.blogspot.com
Dear K B Neale
In delayed response to your incisive comments I have posted a lengthy response. Stick with it - about half way through it becomes relevant.
Thanks
Anna
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