The story of the memory
September 1st, 2008 | by Ben Hoare |When we tell our autobiographies, are we telling the story of the event itself, or the story of our remembering it?
I’ve come to realise that memory is part invention: by making sense of the disconnected vestiges of our past, we turn them into something else, a new narrative that creates as much as it preserves or recalls. We make sense - turn non-sense into something more orderly.
And writing down our memories is yet another act of invention. Living, remembering and writing are in fact separate acts, but - as I’ve suggested before - most autobiographical narratives create the illusion that they are the same.
The multiplicity of autobiography
When I was looking into collaborative autobiography a few years ago, I came across a really interesting text that isn’t often mentioned in the literature: Matthew Alan Kreib’s ‘Filling a Gap: Authorship and Identity in Collaborative Autobiography’ (unpublished Master’s thesis, North Carolina State University, 1997).
Kreib’s paper endeavours “to examine how autobiographical narratives created through the collaboration of a subject and a writer expose the multiple roles involved in all autobiography.”
Let me explain.
Autobiography is understood to be the biography of the self, and the usual assumption we bring to such texts is that the protagonist, the narrator and the author of the text are one and the same. This is what Philippe Lejeune calls the “autobiographical pact”.
In autobiographies produced collaboratively - for example, the ghostwritten autobiographies of celebrities, or the writing down of oral narratives - this is clearly not true. In these cases, a writer who is not the protagonist assumes his voice in order to deliver his story in writing.
Lejeune says that the problems this scenario poses could be extended to all autobiographies, which - we come to realise - involve a similar multiplicity. When I write down my autobiographical memories, I am conscious that I am a different person now from who I was then - and we are both different from this character I’ve invented in order to put my story in writing.
The autobiographical pact disguises this distinction.
Two stories
Kreib is the joint author of the autobiography of his uncle, Hugo Greinert, who fought in the Second World War. In simple terms, Greinert is the story’s protagonist, and Kreib its writer.
Crucially, Kreib actually gives us two narratives - first, there’s the direct transcript of conversations between Kreib and Greinert; second, there’s a third-person narrative produced by Kreib, based on what he has been told.
Most ghostwritten autobiographies are based on stories that were originally told orally, in conversation between the subject and some third party. But rarely are we shown this first text: what we usually see is the polished, second text - the edited version, written up and judged fit for our consumption.
By showing us both texts, Kreib reminds us that the final text only really shows us the act of writing. The other important part of autobiography, the act of remembering, was performed separately, at an earlier time.
I think it was Philip Pullman who said that, when you write (fiction), you are haunted by the ghosts of what you might have written. This is especially important in autobiography, which is so often presented as a definitive narrative - the truth, the only story that could have been told.
That’s why I think that serial autobiography is so important: because there is always a different way to tell the story; a different way to remember.
Above all, we need to recognise that the telling and the remembering are not the same thing.
