In Lessons from Michaelangelo, Sharon Lippincott challenges us to “experiment with writing a short memory in parable form, or as a short story using third person and an assumed name.”
There are many examples of autobiography in the third person, but I am interested in Sharon’s idea of transforming a memory into a parable. Because parables are stories that mean something – they teach us a lesson in some way.
It seems to me that this exercise emphasises the amount of invention that takes place when we remember. As I’ve argued before, memories are not absolute records of our past, but stories that we conjure up to explain the present. When we remember, and particularly when we write those memories down or tell them to other people, we are constructing our identities, telling the story of how we came to be the person we want people to think we are.
Like fables, satires and nonsense, a parable is also a type of fantasy. You see, all these forms are concerned with telling the truth, but they do so by inventing. The fantasy has a metaphorical value: the truth is conveyed through made-up things rather than through accurately reported facts. This seems quite different from what many people claim for autobiography, where we are often presented with something purporting to be definitive truth.
If we write an autobiographical parable, then, we are acknowledging that our memories are inventions, distorted by narrative form and even an inherent meaning that was lacking in the events themselves.