Coping With The Abyss
Memory As Memoir As Fiction
“We look at the world once, in childhood.
The rest is memory.”
-Nostos, Louise Glück
Memory is an interdisciplinary fascination. An obsession that we humans attempt to root our flags to like ancient conquerors in the name of neuroscience and biology, philosophy and religion, poetry and prose. No one has done more work in the name of traversing the fickle peaks of memory than the memoirists. Particularly with those fiction writers guilty of diving into their own past for inspiration, the line between memoir and fiction can blur beyond recognition when they attempt to tackle the beast of their own history. For the purpose of this essay, I will refer to the genre of memoir, life-writing and auto/biography at large as “memoir.” I argue that the greatest examples of memoir occur when writers relent to the idea that memory is a fiction; when they add flesh to the bones of their historical breadcrumbs - dates, names, places and translations - so that the facts of their lives unveil a deeper, more human truth. In Speak, Memory, Vladimir Nabokov is a man who “rejects the fictionist,” and writes in “a desperate attempt to save what is left” of those “accurate’ depictions of his past (66). Inevitably, he leans on his own imagination to supplement his blindspots and ends up using identifiable dates, outlines of historical figures and nostalgic translations like memory morsels to find his way back to his own past and add credibility to his recollections. Inspired by James Olney’s Memory and Narrative: The Weave of Life Writing, Levitksy asserts that “...[memoir] is the subject’s best “attempt” to work [a] life into an elaborate, important, and connected whole” (Levitsky). Because memory is ultimately unreliable, Nabovok and other writers attempting to reclaim the reality of his or her past ultimately end up crafting a fiction that surpasses the truth of the person; all the while revealing the essence of a culture, a moment in time and an essential component of what it means to be human.
In the modern day we can thank researchers who peek behind the microscopic curtain of the mind and consider the technical mechanisms of fraudulent recollection, but even our earliest ancestors knew the limitations of memory when they painted stories of their travels on their cave walls in case their oral history was misunderstood. Even those heroic writers who call themselves memoirists must lean on the swords and sheaths of imagination and supposition to tackle the beast of the past because of the unreliable nature of our recollections. Dreamers and theorists both know this, particularly the researchers who assert Your Memory Is Like The Telephone Game when their study showed that “a memory is not simply an image produced by time traveling back to the original event -- [the] memory of an event can grow less precise even to the point of being totally false with each retrieval” (Paul, Northwestern Now). Terrible news for eye-witnesses. But anyone looking for truth in memory must also consider similar consequences of a memoir. Nabokov writes in Speak, Memory that “the following of such thematic designs through one’s life should be, [he thinks], the true purpose of [memoir],” and only in fictionalized hindsight, when the psychological healing has finished and the writer has made their peace with those past versions of themselves, can a life be categorized and sorted (12). Simon Critchley’s Memory Theatre and Annie Ernaux’s The Years are two examples of the genre on a wider spectrum of truth and imagination that showcase an overt fictionalization of a life lived and a more sociological excavation of the past, with both poles leveraging aforementioned historical breadcrumbs to weave the tapestry of memory. I argue that memoir and fiction don’t live as isolated and seperate genres. Critchley rebels against the genre entirely as he begins Memory Theatre: “I was dying. That much was certain. The rest is fiction” (7). Ernaux makes peace with the mortality of her breadcrumbs, which she has so rigorously researched and archived as she begins The Years: “All the images will disappear,” but perhaps the fiction will remain (11).
We Can’t Trust Our Memory
“The present changes the past. Looking back you do not find what you left behind.” - Kiran Desai
Vladimir Nabokov delved into memoir in 1936 as he cast his gaze backwards to the image of his boyhood governess whom he lent to past fictions. He begins Mademoiselle O, which would later become chapter 5 of Speak, Memory: “I have often noticed that after I had bestowed on the characters of my novels some treasured items of my past, it would pine away in the artificial world where I had so abruptly placed it” (66). And still time continued stubbornly on and all Nabokov had left of this woman from his youth were dates and ages and places to keep her still in his mind’s eye as the woman herself continued to live on somewhere he never considered. To commemorate Mademoiselle's memory with some artistic value, a memoir so to speak, Nabokov built a fiction around the facts of their time together in the original language of their relationship and later translated it from French to English, with the gift of hindsight. To counter this double duplicitousness (dragging the past back into the present and later translating it into a language neither writer nor character knew at the time), Nabokov lays out his historical and linguistic breadcrumbs to cement the tale into the genre of memoir: Mademoiselle, December 1905, age six, the background of winter and “an exciting sense of rodina, ‘motherland…’” (67). Here Nabokov uses names, dates, ages, seasons and translations as firm tethers into the ‘reality’ of the past and uses them to set the foundation of the ‘truth’ of the story he wishes to tell and explodes into a literary narrative. From here he weaves the tapestry of the past using inferences, subtext, assumptions, imagined views and his gargantuan toolkit of linguistic devices with a deft, writerly perspective.
In Robert Alter’s Nabokov and the Real World: Between Appreciation and Defense, he relays Nabokov’s views that “‘Reality’ – is not a free-standing entity but constituted by the words with which we represent it, the words we inevitably live with which we build the world around us” (6). The word “memory” in the title is important to consider. Nabokov is a writer with particular linguistic control and a certain hyperconsciousness of language; and his original intention was to publish his memoir as Speak, Mnemosyne - Mnemosyne is the Greek Goddess of Memory - but was dissuaded for fear of pronunciation aversion. But by settling on the word “memory” in the title, he shifts his focus to somewhere closer to reality than the myth that originally inspired him. The original name suggests that he originally set his scope on documenting his version of his past versus a historical depiction of events and people and places. Even when we consider Mademoiselle, the original victim needing to be saved from the realm of his fiction, Nabokov never names her or gives any facts or insight into her life beyond the moments they spend together.
As he lays down those breadcrumbs of truth, Nabokov must also grapple with the reliability of his childhood memories, or lack thereof, so oft distorted by his imagination and constant borrowing. In Speak, Memory, Nabokov’s version of memorializing those people turned inspiration for characters had more to do with who they were to him than who they were as autonomous individuals. Even as he recalls the voice of Mademoiselle herself, Nabokov can’t help but insert his own dominion when he recalls: “And that time you and Serge ran away and left me stumbling and howling in the depths of the forest! [Exaggerated.] Ah, la fessée que je vous ai flanquée–My, what a spanking I gave you! [She did try to slap me once but the attempt was never repeated]” (76). Chapter 5 of Speak, Memory is the most fictionalized slice of Nabokov’s memoir and is perhaps the greatest example of him crafting a “meaning” from the guise of memoir. He threads foggy adolescent memory with major assumptions on the character of Mademoiselle and perhaps can’t help but cast a judgemental gaze backwards from his perspective in adulthood. In the end of his chapter dedicated to Mademoiselle Nabokov asks himself: “Have I really salvaged her from fiction?”(84). Perhaps he never could.
The Language of Memory
“All language is but a poor translation.” - Franz Kafka
Almost as an antithesis to Nabokov’s fictionalized memoir, Annie Ernaux uses surgical precision to excavate her past in The Years. Like Nabokov uses historical breadcrumbs to root himself into that lost time by setting his remembered scene of “...spending the summer of 1904 in Beaulieu and Abbazia, and several months in Wiesbaden, we left for Russia in the beginning of 1905” though he admits that he “fail[s] to remember the month” (67); Ernaux uses metamorphosing photographs of her past self along with colloquial, country French to throw the reader backwards in time: ”It is a sepia photo,” she begins The Years, “oval-shaped, glued inside a little cardboard folder with a gold border and protected by a sheet of embossed, semi-transparent paper. Below are the words: Photo-Moderne, Ridel, Lillebonne (S.Inf.re) Tel. 80” (21). Ernaux crafts a memoir overflowing with dates and facts; yet still she weaves in fictions of larger cultural ideals to shine light on a deeper human truth. In the early pages of The Years, Ernaux writes of her youthful cohorts: “In our clothing (bell-bottoms, tank tops, and clogs), our reading (Le Nouvel Observateur), our outrage (at nuclear energy and detergents at sea), our acceptance (hippies), we felt we were hip to our times… We took in [our parents] opinions and advice as pure information. And we would never grow old” (110). She couldn’t possibly have correctly identified every style of clothing, the contents of each individual’s bookshelf and all of the personal gripes of her contemporaries. And yet it’s those imagined assumptions that she blankets over her generation that unite them as a unit against that moment of time, in that particular place and speaking that version of a language.
An immigrant for the majority of adult life, Nabokov made a deliberate home of his new country and set out to master his new language. However, he writes in his memoir that “one is always at home in one’s past” (83). Perhaps it was the exile from his native land that made him tuck himself into the bed of his past, but he ended up making his past a place where everything was as it should be and where everyone acted as he expected them to. But that in and of itself is a fraudulence. Nabokov categorized people by how they made him feel and forgot to mention who they were - their ideas, foibles and histories that made them more than simply inspiration for his characters. From that emotional foundation he built statues of them in his memory to revisit time and time again before planting them firmly in place in his memoirs. Levitsky writes that “...our obsession with life-writing now speaks to the essential paradox of modern drive to search for our “true” selves even while agonizing over the impossibility of successful completion of such a task.” But perhaps language is a key to maintaining a memory’s ‘truth’. By keeping the original language and dialect of a memory, of a person, it holds firmly in place a fundamental reality that holds more historical weight than names or dates or locations alone. The writer’s adult perspective may betray their ability to regurgitate “facts” as they were but Nabokov, Critchley and Ernaux all use language in some way to tether their stories in “autobiographical” truth.
When Nabokov recalls Mademoiselle he allows her native tongue to sneak through his fictionalized depiction of her when he says, “and really, her French was so lovely! Ought one to have minded the shallowness of her culture, the bitterness of her temper, the banality of her mind…” all childlike, classist judgements on the part of the memoirist, Nabokov continues, “...when that pearly language of hers purled and scintillates…” (81). Critchley uses translation in a similar fashion in Memory Theatre when he considers his colleague’s analysis of Nietzsche’s nihilism and uses it as a springboard to jump back into the past but admits that “there was a German word for this – there always is – but I’ve forgotten it'' (13). Where Nabokov and Ernaux both use precise translations to root the memory in historical and cultural truth, Critchley confirms the memory of his friend would have more factual merit if only he could remember the German word but omits it nonetheless, perhaps speaking more truth through this effortlessness in the end.
Nabokov also peppers his memory of Mademoiselle with her French phrases in Speak, Memory; “...je souriais à mes tristes pensées,” “Je suis une sylphade à côté d’elle,” (80) like Ernaux does throughout The Years like “when she hears the little maternelle school girls in the playground singing Cuellions la rose sans la laisser flétrir” (55). It’s important to keep in mind that Nabokov was obsessed with writing in perfect English but reverts to writing certain words or phrases in Russian or French deliberately, while he could have easily translated it into English. The same can be said of Ernaux, The Years was translated from French into English with painstaking care by Alison L. Strayer. But particularly during more nostalgic childhood scenes, Nabokov and Ernaux both regress back to the language of their youth and refuse to translate those selected words into those odd, fraudulent English equivalents. If language does have a memory, memoir in translation presents an issue of corrupting the cultural truth of the story but Nabokov, Ernaux and Critchley all root certain nostalgic moments in its original language to maintain a level of authenticity.
The Facts Are Not Ours To Claim
“Never let the truth get in the way of a good story.” - Mark Twain
In his consideration of Max Saunders Life-Writing, Autobiographical, and the Forms of Modern Literature, James Williams observes that “one of the things books have in common with lives is that their last words can be notoriously easy to miss,” but the first words uttered in a life or a memoir are often the things we never forget. Nabokov begins the observation of his life in Speak, Memory with a stoic contemplation of death: “The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness” (5). Fewer pieces of fiction or poetry carry that same emotional weight. Just as the genre pendulum swings away from Nabokov’s fictionalized memory towards Ernaux’s sociological and historical excavation of the past, so does it swing towards the realm of philosophy and the absurd with Simon Critchley’s Memory Theatre. Like Nabokov, Critchley begins his memoir at death’s door: “I was dying. That much was certain. The rest is fiction” (7). Critchley’s memory is filled with miscommunications, traumas and hallucinations and he begins his memoir with the blatant revelation that the fictional recollection of his life as it felt to him conveys a firmer truth than the naked facts of what occured ever could.
In David Shields Reality Hunger: A Manifesto, he writes that “conventional fiction teaches the reader that life is a coherent, fathomable whole that concludes in neatly wrapped-up revelation. Life, though – … trying to navigate the web or a declining relationship, hearing that a close friend died last night – flies at us in bright splinters” (73). Critchley set out to make something of these ‘splinters’ in jagged, seemingly random scenes after his “close friend and philosophy teacher of [his] in France, Michael Haar… died from a heart attack in the dreadful summer heatwave that swept France in 2003” (10). In subtle contrast to Nabokov and opposed starkly to Ernaux, Critchley abandons historical context, tangible dates, places or “breadcrumbs” in his memoir and instead sets the scope of his memoir on the intensely, hyper-imagined and intimate moments between people. Completely unverifiable or rooted in fact and yet he allows the readers to sink into the feeling of his memory. Like when the vague UPS man abandons a box at Critchley’s door step “in January 2008, during a bitterly cold day when it was almost too painful to inhale the winter air” (53). Even without facts to cling to, this moment feels no less real than the thematic breakdown of Nabokov’s life or the cultural excavation of Ernax’s past.
Alter observes in Nabokov and the Real World that “in his [memoir Nabokov] often evinces a sense that he can actually stage a return to the past by a sufficiently deft and resourceful ordering of his prose medium” (181). Nabokov uses chapters and themes to organize his past and yet, like Critchley, ends up lost in his own memories. Nabokov slips into the realm of fiction in Speak, Memory, for example when he writes a scene for Mademoiselle as being, “...very lovely, very lonesome. But what am I doing in this stereoscopic dreamland? How did I get here? Somehow, the two sleighs have slipped away, leaving behind a passport less spy” (72). When Nabokov casts his gaze back to the hours before Mademoiselle appears in his perspective, he lingers on the possibility of her journey and crafts a fiction to lose himself in: “I was not there to greet her; but I do so now as I try to imagine what she saw and felt at that last stage of her fabulous and ill-timed journey” (68). The early moments of chapter 5 set up the essential oddness of attempting to reclaim a memory of a person back from fiction. Here, Nabokov only has the tools to imagine her at the train station so he sets the scene as it could have been and not as it actually was. He goes further into the realm of imagination by using fictional methods to root himself in the story before he does his work to salvage Mademoiselle as a biography when he interjects “and let me not leave out the moon - for surely there must be a moon…” (69). This creates a paper-thin veil between imagination and history, of fiction and fact; which makes one wonder if those two ideas actually belong on two opposite ends of the spectrum.
Annie Ernaux’s The Years, recollections from 1941 - 2006 and peppered with colloquial French, takes a scalpel to slice up culture, language, advertisements, social impressions, music, photographs, radio, television and news headlines to build an image of the past. Even her sociological take on memoir falls back into fiction to shine a spotlight on the essential truth. She writes that, “everything will be erased in a second. The dictionary of words amassed between cradle and deathbed, eliminated. All there will be is silence and no words to say it… Language will continue to put the world into words. In conversion around a holiday table, we will be nothing but a first name, increasingly faceless, until we vanish into the vast anonymity of a distant generation” (18). Ernaux writes on, all the while knowing her memories won’t last, neither will her words. She knows the past was never hers to claim. Nabokov, however, thought he could grab the past in his hands by giving his memories the proper literary attention. He set out in the beginning of Chapter 5 of Speak, Memory to create a firm distinction between himself as a memoirist and as a fiction writer, but instead uses his memory as a method to flex his fiction muscles. His memoir is yet another representation of him as a fiction writer and the importance of his history falls second to the beauty of his writing.
The Final Appendix Is The Eulogy
“Fiction is the lie through which we tell the truth.” - Albert Camus
The greatest examples of memoir occur when writers relent to the idea that memory is a fiction, even those authors like Ernaux and Nabokov who consider themselves rejectors of fiction. And yet, like Critchley, they both delve into their own past with the full kaleidoscope of their imagination to add flesh to the bones of their historical breadcrumbs - dates, names, places and translations. Lucky for us readers that the facts of their lives unveil a deeper, more essential human truth for us to sink our teeth into. In Reality Hunger: A Manifesto, David Shields poses an important objection to the genre as: “a demonstration of the many becoming the one, with the one never fully resolved because of the many that continue to impinge upon it” (72). A memoir will always be a reverse excavation. Instead of the scientist seeking to understand the smallest mechanisms of life through a microscope, the memoirist casts their scope vastly outwards and backwards and attempts to draw conclusions on something they have very little hope of understanding, all the while knowing that that is the point. The memorist has the additional challenge of attempting to log an essential meaning of a life while they're still actively participating in the thing.
Memories change in hindsight. They shift with new perspectives like a fish caught in a net and it’s only with imagination that a writer is able to hold them still long enough to bash them over the head and make them into a story that readers can tuck into and be nourished. Perhaps that’s why Nabokov was compelled to revisit Mademoiselle after he salvaged the truth of her from his past: “There is an appendix to Mademoiselle's story. When I first wrote it I did not know about certain amazing survivals... in those distant times whose long light finds so many ingenious ways to reach me” (85). Here we see reality and truth wriggle free from the construct and breadcrumbs imposed by the writer. Nabokov is a master of artifice and the addition of these appendices showcases once again that he can’t help but blur the fact and fiction of his past to create something like art.
“One basic meaning of narrative,” says Shields in his Manifesto, is “to create time where there was none (81). Perhaps the basic meaning of memoir, then, is to bring time back to the present. Alter concludes of the success of Nabokov’s Speak, Memory as “not simply a series of virtuoso tricks in constructing the past but a haunting expression of what it means to live in time, circling back on the past, intimately bound to it, yet also forever exiled in another, later world (181). Memoirs, by nature, will never be complete just as we, as people, will never really be ourselves. Both a person’s story and identity will only ever be who they are in the precise moment of writing or considering – one single slice of an unknowable number of slices. The power of memoir comes not from memory, but from the intimate fictionalization of a life into the realm of metaphor, and towards some uncanny potential for knowing. The clock ticks on. Language shifts. The reflection changes in the mirror.
Across the memoirs of Nabokov, Ernaux and Critchley, regardless of how far the pendulum swings between imagination and reality, time is always the essential element. And partially because of the strength of his memory bound with his narrative prowess, Alter asserts that Speak, Memory is ”surely Nabokov’s most intensely personal book, is also the luminous evocation of a universal human experience” (181). And even as the memory shifts in time it’s the fiction that creates the intimacy for the reader to hold onto. The words a writer plucks out of thin air and arrange into a memoir like a bouquet of flowers to present to the world is the meaningful part, more so than the factual validity of the memory itself.
Work Cited
Alter, Robert. Nabokov and the Real World: Between Appreciation and Defense. Princeton University Press, 2021.
Critchley, Simon. Memory Theatre. Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2015.
Desai, Kiran, 1971-. 2006. The Inheritance of Loss. New York, Grove Press.
Ernaux, Annie Thérèse Blanche. Tr. Alison L. Strayer. The Years. Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2022.
Glück, Louise “Nostos”
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Nabokov, Vladimir Vladimirovich. Speak, Memory: An Autobiography Revisited. Penguin Books, 2016.
Paul, Marla | By Marla Paul. “Your Memory Is like the Telephone Game.” Northwestern Now, 19 Sept. 2012, news.northwestern.edu/stories/2012/09/your-memory-is-like-the-telephone-game/.
Saunders, Max. Self Impression: Life-Writing, Autobiografiction, and the Forms of Modern Literature. Oxford University Press, 2013.
Self-Impression: Life-Writing, Autobiografiction, and the Forms of Modern Literature. By Max Saunders, Essays in Criticism, Volume 64, Issue 1, January 2014, Pages 105–112, https://doi.org/10.1093/escrit/cgt031
Shields, David. “Reality Hunger: A Manifesto.” Salmagundi, no. 164/165, 2009, pp. 72–92. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/40550146. Accessed 1 Dec. 2023.
