Autobiography and fiction in postmodern life writing

Acknowledgements I would like to express my gratitude to Michael Sheringham for his invaluable support and encouragement. Many thanks for their insightful comments and suggestions go to Nicholas White, John OBrien, Johnnie Gratton, Laura Marcus, Úlfhildur Dagsdóttir, Orri Vésteinsson, Halldór Guðmundsson and Patrick Crowley. I am also grateful to Thomas MunchPetersen for giving me the opportunity to develop this material in teaching. A special thanks for inspiration and companionship go to Emma Kemp and Svanhildur Óskarsdóttir. And, of course, as ever, to without whom... Örbrún Halldórsdóttir, Guðmundur Georgsson and Dagur Gunnarsson

Borderlines

Postmodern Studies 33

Series edited by

Theo D’haen and Hans Bertens

Autobiography and Fiction

in Postmodern Life Writing

Borderlines

Amsterdam - New York, NY 2003Gunnthórunn Gudmundsdóttir

9706:1994, Information and documentation - Paper for documents - Requirements for permanence”.

ISBN: 90-420-1145-9

©Editions Rodopi B.V., Amsterdam – New York, NY 2003Printed in The Netherlands

I would like to express my gratitude to Michael Sheringham for hisinvaluable support and encouragement Many thanks for theirinsightful comments and suggestions go to Nicholas White, JohnO'Brien, Johnnie Gratton, Laura Marcus, Úlfhildur Dagsdóttir, OrriVésteinsson, Halldór Guðmundsson and Patrick Crowley I am alsograteful to Thomas Munch-Petersen for giving me the opportunity todevelop this material in teaching A special thanks for inspiration andcompanionship go to Emma Kemp and Svanhildur Óskarsdóttir And,

of course, as ever, to without whom Örbrún Halldórsdóttir,Guðmundur Georgsson and Dagur Gunnarsson

Introduction: Autobiography and Fiction 1

1 Memory and the Autobiographical Process

Lillian Hellman, Georges Perec, Paul Auster 11

2 The Use of Narrative in Autobiography

Suzannah Lessard, Peter Handke, Jenny Diski 57

3 Gender and Fiction in Women's Autobiographical Writing

Janet Frame, Marie Cardinal 97

4 Autobiography and Journeys Between Cultures

Eva Hoffman, Michael Ondaatje, Kyoko Mori 141

Autobiography and Fiction

The field of contemporary life-writing offers many avenues forexploration In the last thirty years or so, theoretical writing onautobiography has blossomed, autobiographies written from aspecifically female perspective or from the perspective of members ofethnic minorities have proliferated, and the genre, or - as we shall see

- cluster of genres and sub-genres, has been a fertile ground forexperimental writing The reasons for this interest in life-writing aremany and varied, but one important factor is that autobiography - inits various guises - can capture and address many contemporaryconcerns, for example the status of the subject, the relations andrepresentations of ethnicity and gender, and perhaps most importantlyquestions the individual's relationship with the past Autobiographicalwriting can thereby reflect some of the main preoccupations ofpostmodernism,1 which has often been defined in terms of questionsabout our knowledge of the past and the difficulty of articulating ourrelationship to it.2 Such issues abound in recent life-writing

Postmodernism has also been described as a pluralistic art which'blurs the boundaries between 'high' and 'popular' culture, as well asbetween art and every-day experience'.3 This work concentratesspecifically on the borderlines between autobiography and fiction in

1 See for instance Leigh Gilmore's discussion where she seespostmodernism as being the perfect mode to 'free' autobiographicaldiscourse in 'The Mark of Autobiography: Postmodernism, Autobiography,

and Genre', in Autobiography and Postmodernism, eds Kathleen Ashley,

Leigh Gilmore and Gerald Peters (Amherst: University of MassachusettsPress, 1994), pp 3-21 But note also Michael Sheringham's review of

Autobiography and Postmodernism where he explains that some of the

qualities Gilmore finds in postmodern autobiographies are intrinsic to

autobiography itself in Biography: An Interdisciplinary Quarterly 20 (1997)

472-478

2 See for instance Linda Hutcheon, A Poetics of Postmodernism: History,

Theory, Fiction (London: Routledge, 1988).

3 Terry Eagleton, The Illusions of Postmodernism (Oxford: Blackwell,

1996), p vii

postmodernist life-writing The aim is to see how by demarcating andinvestigating these borderlines we can come to a better understanding

of the role of fiction in autobiography, and this can then enable us toexamine the representation of the past in current life-writing It is not

my aim here to pinpoint one definitive border between autobiographyand fiction,4 rather I attempt to outline various areas whereautobiography and fiction interact in a number of key texts

The term autobiography in this work is used to denote any textwhich is clearly published as such, whether through its title or subtitle,

or through the way its status as non-fiction is indicated by thecircumstances or manner of its publication and presentation In mostcases this entails that the texts have the same author, narrator andsubject, thereby following Philippe Lejeune's definition,5 whichexcludes autobiographical novels But my definition is also wider thanLejeune's, as I include not only: 'Récit[s] rétrospectif[s] en prosequ'une personne réelle fait de sa propre existence, lorsqu'elle metl'accent sur sa vie individuelle, en particulier sur l'histoire de sapersonnalité',6 but also texts where the author writes on the life of his

or her parent(s), as these types of text constitute a large part of currentlife writing.7 The vogue for memoirs and non-fiction, so apparent inrecent years - especially in Britain, has meant that this kind of text iswidely published and discussed as part of autobiographical writing I

4 Suzanne Gearhart has questioned the existence of fixed borders betweenhistory and fiction, and maintains they are always in some ways fluid See

especially her introduction to The Open Boundary of History and Fiction: A

Critical Approach to the French Enlightenment (Princeton: Princeton

University Press, 1984)

5 See Philippe Lejeune, Le Pacte autobiographique: Nouvelle édition

augmentée (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1996), pp 27-28.

6 Ibid., p 14 'A retrospective prose narrative by a real person on his ownlife, with emphasis on his individuality, in particular a story of hispersonality.'

7 As in the tradition of Edmund Gosse's Father and Son (1907) Many such

'memoirs' have been published in Britain for instance in recent years, for

example Blake Morrison, And when did you last see your father? (1993), Tim Lott, The Scent of Dried Roses (1996), Susan Wicks, Driving My Father (1995) and Linda Grant, Remind Me Who I Am, Again (1998).

would maintain that these texts must also always be to a large extentautobiographical and therefore of relevance to our enquiry.

Generic differences and questions about the definition of the genre

of autobiography are inevitably constant preoccupations for anyonewriting on autobiography I work in this study from the premise thatthere are generic differences between autobiography and the novel.This has, of course, been contested, most notably by Paul de Man,8 but

I would hold with Ann Jefferson when she argues that it is necessary:

to presuppose that there are generic distinctions betweennovels and autobiographies, even while the fiction is beingrevealed as autobiographical and the autobiographies asfictional, since in this sphere (if not in all others) genericdifferences need to be respected as an effect of reading,even if they cannot be defined as intrinsic qualities of thetexts in question.9

In accordance with this view I specifically examine the relationshipbetween autobiography and fiction in autobiographical works, but donot attempt to extract the autobiographical from works of fiction

From Philippe Lejeune's Le Pacte autobiographique (1975) onwards,

a strand runs through autobiographical theory which claims that there

is a difference between autobiography and the novel, and that thisdifference lies in the referentiality of autobiography, as Paul de Man'sassertions in 'Autobiography As De-Facement' have been rigorouslyrefuted.10 Autobiography is, therefore, considered here as a referentialart, without denying the complexities involved in that referentiality

8 See Paul de Man, 'Autobiography as De-Facement' in The Rhetoric of

Romanticism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984), pp 67-81.

9 Ann Jefferson, 'Autobiography as Intertext: Barthes, Sarraute,

Robbe-Grillet', in Intertextuality: Theories and Practices, eds Judith Still and

Michael Worton (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1990), pp

108-129, p 109

10 Michael Sheringham claims that: 'To eliminate the question of literal truthand reference in autobiography is to pay insufficient heed to a differenceperceptible to most readers and which conditions different kinds of reading.'

French Autobiography: Devices and Desires: Rousseau to Perec (Oxford:

The question of fictionality is a constant preoccupation throughoutthis work The word 'fictional' is used here to designate conventionsand practices one associates with creative writing - such as structure,poetic or literary descriptions of people and places, ordering of events

to create certain effects - rather than simply things that are 'made-up'.This follows Johnnie Gratton's view:

The non-existence of my life story also makes it necessaryfor me to produce 'fiction' in a good sense: fiction asmaking and not just making up; fiction as the corollary ofimagination, fantasy and desire; fiction as the supplement

of memory (a supplement probably always already in

memory) In short, fiction is coextensive with the idea of aperformative dimension It affirms the increasinglyhighlighted 'act-value' of autobiographical writing at theexpense of its traditionally supposed 'truth-value'.11

I consider here fictionality to be a necessary part of theautobiographical process itself and not something external to it, orincompatible with it It is not my aim to enter into any simplistic 'fact'versus 'fiction' debate, but rather to examine how autobiographers

Clarendon Press, 1993), p 18 And Paul John Eakin points out that 'thecritic's concern with reference, with the author and his intention, is built intothe very structure of autobiography considered as a figure of reading.'

'Philippe Lejeune and the Study of Autobiography', Romance Studies 8

(1986) 1-14 (p 11) Reference in autobiography is Paul John Eakin's main

theme in his two books, Fictions in Autobiography: Studies in the Art of

Self-Invention (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985) and Touching the World: Reference in Autobiography (Princeton: Princeton University Press,

1992) He not only examines biographical reference, but also historical,social, and cultural reference What brings him to this subject is the basicassumption that what differentiates autobiography from the novel is exactly

this question of truth and reference See also John Sturrock, The Language of

Autobiography: Studies in the First Person Singular (Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press, 1993)

11 Johnnie Gratton, 'Postmodern French Fiction: Practice and Theory', in

The Cambridge Companion to the French Novel: From 1800 to the present,

ed Timothy Unwin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), pp.242-260, p 253

negotiate the borders and boundaries between autobiography andfiction This type of negotiation, I maintain, is especially apparent inany autobiographical text where the autobiographer deals activelywith the problematics of the writing process itself Life-writing can besaid always to contain both autobiographical and fictional aspects, but

an awareness of the problematics involved means the writer hasconstantly to negotiate the way in which the autobiographical and thefictional aspects of the writing process interact in the text

In discussing how one critic of Marguerite Duras's L'Amant (1984)

wanted to emphasise the text's literary quality over its referentialaspects while continually referring back to Duras's own comments onthe text, (thereby at once removing the author from the text and

reinstating the author's presence), Leah D Hewitt points out:

What surfaces in this paradox is autobiography's slipperyrelation to distinct conceptual models - traditional andmodern - as it stirs its mixtures of literature in life and life

in literature, making it difficult to keep the 'purely' literaryand the 'purely' referential in their 'proper' (opposed) places.Autobiography, particularly in the postmodern era, balancesprecariously on the mobile borderline between opposingconceptions of literature.12

Autobiographical writing clearly invites this kind of confusion andhence there is no intention here to differentiate between the 'purely'literary and 'purely' referential, rather to attempt to identify aspects ofthe fictional within the autobiographical Fictionality here, therefore,

12 Leah D Hewitt, Autobiographical Tightropes (Lincoln: University of

Nebraska Press, 1990), p 1 Robert Smith explains that: 'there appear to bethree enclosures within the field of autobiographical theory: 1 Theories andsurveys of the theory [ .] showing perhaps the tendency of much recentwork on autobiography to cancel out both itself and its subject 2 Suspicions

as to whether autobiography can be theorised as a genre since as Candace

Lang points out, it seems to get everywhere, like sand 3 Positivistdefinitions of autobiography, merging with quasi-existentialist claims about

self-knowledge.' Derrida and Autobiography (Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press, 1995), pp 55-56

can denote not only conventions in creative writing but alsoconventions deployed in autobiographical writing.

Autobiographies can, for instance, create the illusion that we arepresent to something that happened earlier This happens for instancewhen autobiographers attempt to write from the viewpoint of the past,

as for instance Frank McCourt in Angela's Ashes (1996) This method

implies fictionality, as we can never speak authoritatively from thepast, and it highlights the problem of the representation of the past, asthe past is always in one way or another already mediated.Autobiographers often attempt to retrieve a sense of the past, and themethod they choose for that retrieval can involve a degree offictionality

Fiction also plays a part in the dichotomy between the universal andthe individual always present in autobiographies As the individualautobiographer writes on universal experiences, such as mother-daughter relationships, experiences of crossing cultures, or the death

of a parent, he or she has to deal with the universal structure of theseexperiences Universal structures necessarily contain a componentderiving from conventions of representation, so they are in some sensealways already 'made-up' When many texts follow similar patterns inrelating such experiences this invites questions about the role of thepublic versus the private, about how individual experiences fit in withuniversal structures Autobiography is, of course, always about stating

an individuality while at the same time making it public, therebygiving individual experiences universal connotations

The approach I have chosen in this work allows me to address manyissues, such as gender, cultural transplantation, memory, narrative, therelationship between autobiography and biography, and the use ofphotographs in autobiography There is no attempt here to cover each

of these issues in full, rather continually to focus on how theautobiographer constantly encounters borderlines between fiction andautobiography when tackling these issues I hope to throw light on therole of these borderlines through close readings of key texts, whilealso examining recent trends in autobiography theory But thetraditional areas of study in literary theory, namely theme and genre,will also have a place in my work, although they have a problematic

relationship with postmodern theory.13 The issue of genre has alreadybeen touched upon, and themes - such as gender and crossing cultures

- are examined in terms of the fictional aspects at work within certainthematic concerns in the genre of autobiography

I bring together a number of texts from the last thirty years written inEnglish, French, and German This study is, however, not based oncultural comparisons, but aims at a broader understanding of recentautobiographical writing My contention is that autobiographies in theWest have followed similar patterns, whether they are written inEnglish, German, or French, and the autobiographers have to grapplewith similar concerns and ideas I believe it, therefore, to be of value

to look at these texts together, without minimising the differencesbetween them, in order to establish a broad base from which toexamine the different ways in which autobiographers wrestle with theborderlines between autobiography and fiction

The choice of texts has been guided by a sense of the vitalimportance of borders I have, therefore, based my choice on texts thatexperiment with autobiography, more than on any similarities such aslanguage The authors discussed include the Austrian Peter Handke;the British J R Ackerley and Jenny Diski; the Americans PaulAuster, Lillian Hellman, James Ellroy and Suzannah Lessard; theCanadians Michael Ondaatje and Eva Hoffman; the New ZealanderJanet Frame; and the French writers Marie Cardinal, Roland Barthes,Georges Perec and Annie Ernaux In choosing these texts I am notclaiming them to be directly representative of postmodernistautobiographical writing, but rather contend that in one way or

13 Ralph Cohen explains why genre theory poses a problem inpostmodernism: 'Postmodern critics have sought to do without genre theory.Terms like "text" and "écriture" deliberately avoid generic classifications.And the reasons for this are efforts to abolish hierarchies that genresintroduce, to avoid the assumed fixity of genres and the social as well asliterary authority such limits exert, to reject the social and subjective

elements in classification.' 'Do Postmodern Genres Exist?', in Postmodern

Genres, ed Marjorie Perloff (London: University of Oklahoma Press, 1988),

pp 11-27, p 12

another these texts negotiate the borderline between autobiographyand fiction in ways that reflect postmodernist tendencies.

Despite the fact that all the authors are literary figures - playwrights,novelists, or critics - the texts cover a wide range of types ofautobiographical writing: from Peter Handke's short memoir of hismother, to Janet Frame's three-volume account of her life fromchildhood to the time of writing; from Michael Ondaatje's descriptions

of his travels in his home country, to Marie Cardinal's account of hermental illness and treatment The texts I have chosen are therefore notall what one might call 'straight-forward' autobiographies, since some

of them have as their primary subject not the writer him- or herself buthis or her parents or parent It could be said that my sample of texts isnot representative of mainstream or indeed popular autobiography, but

my task in this work is to look at what literary experimentation withborders can bring to autobiographical writing

Transgression is probably a good term to apply to these texts as theystraddle the borders between travel writing and autobiography (as inMichael Ondaatje's case), biography and autobiography (where peoplewrite on their parents such as Annie Ernaux and Paul Auster), anddifferent research methods, such as sociology, history, anthropology,and psychoanalysis These writers all in one way or another challengeour perception of the role of fiction in autobiographical writing bytransgressing borders, thereby highlighting the existence of theseborders and questioning conventional modes of autobiographicalpractice

My work is divided into six main chapters The first chapter studiesthe role of memory in the autobiographical writings of LillianHellman, Georges Perec, and Paul Auster It examines how writing anautobiography involves negotiation between the public and theprivate, and between individual histories and history writ large I alsoinvestigate the other side of memory, i.e forgetting, in order to lookmore closely at the role fiction plays in the texts Of interest here isthe treatment of memory and history, and manifestations of theprocess of remembering in the texts and what these tell us about theprocess of writing autobiography

The questions I raise in the second chapter on narrative inautobiography concern the way in which autobiographers organisetheir memories, and how narrative structure affects the relationshipbetween autobiography and fiction in the works of Suzannah Lessard,Peter Handke, and Jenny Diski I examine the use of narrativestructure, that is how the ordering of events produces meaning, andwhat the autobiographers' experiments with narrative structure tell usabout the role narrative plays in representing the past.

In the third chapter I explore the role of gender and its relationshipwith personal mythologies I examine how self-invention worksthrough narrative and structure in women's autobiographies Thestatus of the autobiographical process is highlighted here as a means

of controlling, creating, and projecting an identity in the works ofJanet Frame and Marie Cardinal Two themes are touched upon thatsurface again and again in autobiographies by women writers:becoming a writer and the relationship with their mother I focus onhow the writers represent these two elements in their lives and the rolegender has in that representation

In the fourth chapter I look at how autobiographers who describecultural crossings - Michael Ondaatje, Eva Hoffman, and Kyoko Mori

- can highlight the fictional elements of autobiography in theirawareness of two cultures, and two languages I examine the structurethey use to represent their experiences, and the special importance oftheir use of language I look at how they use descriptions of landscape

to represent the difference between the old and the new world, andtheir use of other genres, such as travel writing I explore how theirunique problems can highlight the general in autobiography, that is thestruggle between the past and the present The past in autobiography

is always to some extent an imaginary past, and this is even moreprominent when autobiographers are writing on a past in a differentcountry, a different culture

The fifth chapter centres on the relationship between autobiographyand biography in texts where autobiographers write mainly on theirfamilies, most often one parent I explore the difference betweenwriting about oneself and writing one's autobiography via thebiography of a parent, or via a search for identity through exploration

of family history The aim is to see what writing biography throughautobiography adds to the discussion of the borderline betweenautobiography and fiction In the first part of the chapter I look atseveral writers who have written on their families, such as J R.Ackerley, Suzannah Lessard, James Ellroy, Margaret Forster, AnnieErnaux, Henry F May amongst others, but in the second part I focusmainly on Paul Auster's work which explores many issues aboutwriting on an other.

In the sixth chapter I examine what the use of photographs can tell

us about ideas on the past and how they can highlight the main themesand preoccupations of autobiographies, such as memory, relationship

to parents, to the past, fictionality, self-invention and self-image.Discussions of Roland Barthes's autobiography, and his book onphotography, make up the first part of this chapter, with a specificemphasis on his thoughts on the image and the truth-value ofphotographs In the next section I look at the links between memoryand photographs in Georges Perec's autobiography, at photographs asclues to the past in Auster's text and finally at Ondaatje's use ofdocuments in his book on Billy the Kid and in his autobiography,

Running in the Family.

In attempting to demarcate the borderlines between autobiographyand fiction in recent life-writing I hope to show that these borderlinesexist at the level of both theme and structure, and that in negotiatingthem autobiographers grapple with how they can represent the past.They not only face the problem confronted by historiography withregard to the representation of the past, but also more private issuesappropriate to the nature of autobiography, such as the role ofmemory, and the place of the unique, and the private, in the publicsphere

Memory and the Autobiographical Process Lillian Hellman, Georges Perec, Paul Auster

It is also true that memory sometimes comes to him as a voice It is a voice that speaks inside him, and it is not necessarily his own It speaks to him in the way a voice might tell stories to a child [ .] At times it willfully distorts the story it is telling him, changing facts to suit its whims, catering to the interests of drama rather than truth[ .]

At other times it sings to him At still other times it whispers And then there are the times it merely hums, or babbles, or cries out in pain 1

Longtemps j'ai cherché les traces de mon histoire, consulté des cartes

et des annuaires, des monceaux d'archives Je n'ai rien trouvé et il me semblait parfois que j'avais rêvé, qu'il n'y avait eu qu'un inoubliable cauchemar 2

1 Introduction: Recollection as Investigation

Writing an autobiography involves a dialogue with, in Paul Auster'sterms, the voice of memory, since, as some critics have stressed,autobiography is inherently the genre of memory In this chapter I willexamine the role of memory and how it marks out one of theborderlines between fiction and autobiography There are three mainareas, I believe, where memory and fiction interact in autobiography:firstly in memory's relationship to writing, secondly in the role offorgetting in life-writing, and thirdly in the connection betweenprivate memories and public events In her study of the role ofmemory in medieval culture Mary Carruthers explains that in thememory schemes so common in that era, iteration - or reciting texts in

1 Paul Auster, The Invention of Solitude (London: Faber and Faber, 1988)

p 124 (Hereafter quoted in the text.)

2 Georges Perec, W ou le souvenir d'enfance (Paris: Denoël, 1975) p 10 (Hereafter quoted in the text with David Bellos' translation in footnotes.) 'For

years I sought out traces of my history, looking up maps and directories and piles of archives I found nothing, an it sometimes seemed as though I had dreamt, that there had been only an unforgettable nightmare.' W or The Memory of Childhood, trans David Bellos (London: Harvill, 1988) p 3.

a parrot-like fashion - was not considered vital, but the 'crucial task of

recollection is investigatio, 'tracking-down', a word related to vestigia,

'tracks' or 'footprints''.3 In writing an autobiography writers embark onthis kind of 'investigation', tracking down memories that have lefttracks or footprints, and attempt to lend these memories form andcoherence

The underlying theme of this chapter is the relationship betweenwriting and memory In the first section I focus specifically on thatrelationship, asking, for example, what are the connections betweenwriting and memory and what processes are at work in writingmemories, and how do we remember in writing? The writers I discuss

in this chapter are all very much concerned with an aspect of memoryone can term recollection as investigation In this context theinvestigation is twofold: on the one hand the writers investigate theirown memories and on the other they investigate the possibilities ofwriting these memories One could say that memory is what is crucial

to autobiography and must, therefore, help define the border betweenautobiography and fiction The statement 'I remember' has anunimpeachable status, others can challenge facts, not 'memories' It isalso what makes autobiography a unique genre It is not only thememories themselves that are the autobiographer's subject, but also

memory itself and the process of remembering is engaged with in all

of the texts examined here That process becomes visible in the waythe autobiographers display a willingness or unwillingness toremember, as in some cases they voice a need, either to forget or toremember The writing process reveals a need to confirm or denymemories, and the memories themselves are embellished,interrogated, or conjured up

Writing an autobiography signals a drive towards remembering, but

I maintain that the autobiographical process must also involveforgetting, as the writer chooses one memory and discards another,writes one version of that memory at the cost of another, probablyequally valid, version This leads to the second section of this chapter

3 Mary J Carruthers, The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval

Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), p 20.

and its central question: to what extent does writing one's memoriesconstitute a process of forgetting? I attempt to pinpoint moments offorgetting in a number of key texts and explore how these momentsaffect their structure and what this tells us about the role of forgetting

in life-writing If the autobiographers display a need to remember, dothey also long to forget? The relationship between private memoriesand public events can highlight some questions autobiography raisesabout our relationship with the past, and our representation of it, and

in the third section I look at how that relationship manifests itself inthe texts I examine how each author has forged a unique conjunctionbetween their own memories and public events and how thatconnection impinges on the borderline between fiction andautobiography

The attempt to hear the sometimes unclear voice of memory is a

theme common to the texts examined here: Georges Perec's W ou le

souvenir d'enfance (1975), Lillian Hellman's autobiographical works

and Paul Auster's The Invention of Solitude (1982) It is not only the

imperfection of human memory that concerns them, but morefundamentally the sense that the past will not, in simple terms, explainthe present Nevertheless, what unites these otherwise very differentworks is the emphasis on the importance of remembering even if onefails to come up with the 'truth' Although they could not be moredifferent in style and structure, these works are also fine instances ofthe complex dialogue between public and private memory and theindividual's relationship to history While the authors show aconsiderable distrust towards their own memories there are at timespowerful moments of memory in the texts These moments of memory

do at times overcome the doubts the writers express towardsremembering They can illuminate some points in their lives and tosome extent their reasons for writing their lives

Paul Auster's autobiographical work, The Invention of Solitude, was

written shortly after the death of his father, and the first half 'Portrait

of an Invisible Man', which I will discuss in a later chapter, is mainly

a memoir of his father The second half is called 'The Book ofMemory' Here Auster ruminates on themes such as chance, father-sonrelationships, memory, and writing, among other things The central

theme is how and why we remember, how remembering connects toother aspects of our lives and how remembering relates to writing.The narrative is by no means linear, rather Auster travels throughother stories, other works of art, literature and philosophy, hischildhood memories, and recent events in his life and in the life of hisson, in order to examine the role of memory in his existence.

The autobiographical project of the American playwright and writer Lillian Hellman can shed light on the complex relationshipbetween memory and forgetting in autobiography Hellman wrote four

script-autobiographical works: An Unfinished Woman (1969), Pentimento (1973) and Scoundrel Time (1976), which were later collected in one volume, Three (1979) with new comments by the author, and a year later Maybe: A Story which chronicles Hellman's relationship with a woman called Sarah An Unfinished Woman is the work that most

resembles a 'conventional' autobiography It is a relativelystraightforward account of her life, although Hellman movesbackward and forward in time, and includes excerpts from her diary

As the title suggests, Hellman not only feels that she herself wasunfinished, but also that her autobiographical project was just starting:

her memories were unfinished So she continued with Pentimento, a

series of portraits of people and places from her past and a chapter onthe theatre Some of the people Hellman writes about in this volumehad not been mentioned in the first work, as if they had beenforgotten, and their importance only now comes to light; others are

people she revisits and reappraises Scoundrel Time is an account of

what happened to her during the McCarthy era, when she was calledbefore the House Committee of Un-American Activities Here, she is

at once writing about public events and her own private history

Maybe: A Story is the most curious work of the four as Hellman charts

her relationship with a woman she does not seem to know muchabout, but whose life has been strangely intertwined with Hellman'slife Throughout these works she questions, interrogates and rewritesher past.4 The texts are all marked with the belief that her explanations

4 Maurice F Brown describes these works as follows: 'In brief, thesequence of volumes suggests an underlying philosophical concern which

and analyses of the past will not yield as much as she hopes for What

is interesting for our purposes is her constant questioning of the past,

of her own and other people's motives and actions, and how shecovers significant events of the twentieth century, such as the SpanishCivil War, the Second World War and the McCarthy era

Perec's W ou le souvenir d'enfance is also pertinent to my enquiry.

Here, the mixture of childhood memories and an adventure storyconstitutes a remarkable attempt at writing the painful, almostforgotten, past, a private loss that has been overshadowed by publicevents and the death of millions Perec's unique way of intertwiningfictional chapters and autobiographical chapters, shows that aninvestigation of memory can be a fertile ground for experimental life-writing

2 Writing and Memory: The Presence of the Past

Writing and memory have long been entwined in people's perceptionand Carruthers traces this connection from Plato through Cicero to StAugustine.5 But what kind of process does remembering entail? David

F Krell explains that:

Remembering instigates a peculiar kind of presence It 'has'

an object of perception or knowledge without activatingperception or knowledge as such and without confusingpast and present For while remembering, a man tellshimself that he is now present to something that wasearlier.6

increasingly dictates autobiographical form Hellman's life-writing turnedinto a quest for her "true" life - a quest which pushed both her historical andpoetic commitments to their ragged edges.' 'Autobiography and Memory: The

Case of Lillian Hellman', Biography: An Interdisciplinary Quarterly 8

(1985), 1-11, (p 3)

5 Carruthers, op cit., p 21

6 David Farrell Krell, Of Memory, Reminiscence and Writing: On the Verge

(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), p 15

Autobiographers often attempt to capture this peculiar kind ofpresence of the past in writing.7 They not only write on memories, but

on the process of remembering, and on that presence which, although

it does not confuse the past and the present, still blurs the edges of thepresent

Paul Auster in his 'Book of Memory' proclaims more than once that

he feels he is no longer living in the present: 'His life no longerseemed to dwell in the present [ .] Later, in a time of greater clarity,

he would refer to this sensation as 'nostalgia for the present'' (The

Invention of Solitude, p 76) And later he claims:

His life no longer seemed to dwell in the present Each time

he saw a child, he would try to imagine what it would looklike as a grown-up Each time he saw an old person, hewould try to imagine what that person had looked like as a

child (The Invention of Solitude, p 87)

The borderline between the past and the present is blurred, on somelevel they seem to co-exist The present has receded, as the presence

of the past invades its space Auster describes seeing things in thepresent only to be reminded of the past:

And he wondered at this trick his mind continued to play onhim, this constant turning of one thing into another thing, as

if behind each real thing there were a shadow thing, as alive

in his mind as the thing before his eyes, and in the end hewas at a loss to say which of these things he was actuallyseeing And therefore it happened, often it happened, that

his life no longer seemed to dwell in the present (The

Invention of Solitude, p 135)

7 A good example of this occurs in Virginia Woolf's 'A Sketch of the Past'when she explains: 'Those moments - in the nursery, on the road to the beach

- can still be more real than the present moment [ .] At times I can go back

to St Ives more completely than I can this morning I can reach a state where

I seem to be watching things happen as if I were there.' Moments of Being:

Unpublished Autobiographical Writings, ed Jeanne Schulkind (London:

Chatto and Windus, 1978), pp 75-76

Memory has become an almost overwhelming force It is as if thepresent transforms into the past before his eyes, turning one thing intoanother, children into old people, and old people into children Thepast and the present have become interchangeable, as memory is all-invading The structure of the text is marked by this sensibility asAuster connects the present events he recounts to past events Thetime of Auster's writing he describes consists in a couple of yearsfollowing the death of his father and the break-up of his marriage,when he lives alone in a tiny room away from his young son, and for atime takes care of his dying grandfather This is a time of difficulty,change, and transition, and in the way that he describes it, it is as if thepast is more real to him than the present In writing, he fills hisloneliness with memories, removing himself from the present and, inone sense, from himself He writes the 'Book of Memory' in the thirdperson: it is the story of 'A.' he writes, not 'I' In Auster's attempt torebuild his life, his sense of identity and memory, he connectsdifferent parts, people, and places in his life leading up to thismoment Thus, the reader is not introduced to one event or onememory, but to the connections between these events and follows theway in which Auster's memory works in the writing.8

In An Unfinished Woman Lillian Hellman describes feeling the

presence of the past acutely She visits Moscow for the first time intwenty years since she spent a few eventful months there during theSecond World War On the aeroplane coming into Moscow she isovercome by sadness She is apprehensive about meeting people shehas not seen in over twenty years so she hides away in her hotel roomthat night to be alone with her memories:

8 Auster also mentions memory systems: 'To follow with a detaileddescription of classical memory systems, complete with charts, diagrams,symbolic drawings Raymond Lull, for example, or Robert Fludd, not tospeak of Giordano Bruno, the great Nolan burned at the stake in 1600 Placesand images as catalysts for remembering other places and images: things,events, the buried artefacts of one's own life Mnemotechnics To follow withBruno's notion that the structure of human thought corresponds to thestructure of nature And therefore to conclude that everything, in some sense,

is connected to everything else.' The Invention of Solitude, p 76.

They were not bad memories, most of them, and I was notdisturbed by them, or so I thought, but I knew that I hadtaken a whole period of my life and thrown it somewhere,always intending to call for it again, but now that it cametime to call, I couldn't remember where I had left it Didother people do this, drop the past in a used car lot andleave it for so long that one couldn't even remember thename of the road?9

What Hellman describes in these pages is a physical need toremember, to be by herself and ruminate on this period she claims tohave thrown away Surprisingly the period in question is not the timeshe spent in Moscow during the war but what happened to her afterthe war, events which have marked her life ever since, so that shefinds herself incapable of explaining it to her Russian friends, whowere not there to witness it The sudden resurgence of these memoriesinvades the present Moscow recedes and the memories take over Thedifficulty which Hellman faces is that of explaining one's past; howlife has affected one It is by writing an autobiography that Hellmanattempts to explain the past, and tries to let the past explain herpresent One can speculate that this 'moment of memory' was one of

the reasons why she started writing on her past as An Unfinished

Woman was published only a few years after her return from Moscow.

This physical need to remember can include a need to write downwhat one remembers, and to see if that can explain the present

In her description of her experience in Moscow Hellman emphasises

the need to be alone with her memories The past is there with her to

the extent that she cannot meet people who were not there and do not

know of this past Hellman indulges in this presence and describes

her feelings in some detail but she does not tell the reader what sheremembered as she sat in the hotel room It is the process ofremembering rather than the memory itself that is her subject The

9 Lillian Hellman, An Unfinished Woman in Three: An Unfinished Woman,

Pentimento, Scoundrel Time (Boston: Little, Brown, 1979) p 184 (Hereafter

quoted in the text.)

reader is drawn in by the descriptions of the effects of rememberingwithout knowing what the memory is about For the period Hellmanclaims to have thrown away is the McCarthy era and although she

refers to it in passing in An Unfinished Woman and Pentimento she

does not write about it in any detail until her third autobiographical

work Scoundrel Time She still has not retrieved it from the used car

lot and when she does so it is with a mixture of trepidation and aconviction that she must write on it

This presence of the past never causes nostalgia or any kind oflonging for the past in Hellman's text, neither does it induce a sense ofpeace with the past Her constant doubt and criticism of the past aremuch in evidence throughout her work She explains her relationship

with the past in the last paragraph of An Unfinished Woman:

But I am not yet old enough to like the past better than thepresent, although there are nights when I have a passingsadness for the unnecessary pains, the self-madefoolishness that was, is, and will be I do regret that I havespent too much of my life trying to find what I called 'truth',trying to find what I called 'sense' I never knew what Imeant by truth, never made the sense I hoped for All Imean is that I left too much of me unfinished because I

wasted too much time However (An Unfinished Woman,

All through her autobiographical works Hellman describes thepeople in her life, close friends, casual acquaintances and strangersalike The descriptions are coloured by a constant questioning of herown and other people's motives The book contains anecdotes of

people who have at some point or another been important to her, some

from her childhood, some from her adult life Pentimento is a series of

portraits of other people but through writing on others Hellmaninvestigates the formation of her character, her beliefs, sexuality, andfriendships She tells anecdotes of other people so they come alive ascharacters but at the same time she tells us what her relationship tothose people meant to her.10 Hellman has moved from a rather

straightforward, albeit questioning, account of her own life in An

Unfinished Woman to a series of portraits of people close and not so

close to her in Pentimento.

The writing of Pentimento seems to have been conditioned

completely by memory Here, it seems as if Hellman is waiting for the

voice of memory to speak In a note added to the text in the Three

edition she explains:

'Pentimento' was written by what psychoanalysis calls, innow weary semi-accuracy, a kind of 'free association' I didnot know from one portrait to another what I would donext, with the exception of 'Julia' where, without muchhope, I wanted to try once more I had not, for example,consciously thought of Bethe for perhaps thirty years; theman I call Willy has been dead for over twenty-five yearsand in those years I remember only one conversation abouthim, with his son-in-law, a few minutes of nothing When Ifinished one portrait there was always a long wait Allkinds of people and places came back, of course, but Iknew I was waiting each time not for what hadbeen mostimportant to me, but what had some root that I had nevertraced before.11

10 Marcus K Billson and Sidonie A Smith point out: 'Nowhere, perhaps, isthis latent self-revelation more intriguing than in Lillian Hellman's memoirs,

An Unfinished Woman and Pentimento By eschewing conventional

autobiography and focusing on the people and historical circumstances of herpast, Hellman invites the reader into a world of "others" who, as they cometogether in her memory, become significant in the articulation of her 'self'.'

'Lillian Hellman and the Strategy of the "Other"', in Women's Autobiography:

Essays in Criticism, ed Estelle C Jelinek (Bloomington: Indiana University

Press, 1980), pp 163-179, p 163

11 Pentimento in Three, p 586 (Hereafter quoted in the text.)

Having written An Unfinished Woman, Hellman turned, it seems, to

the not so obvious, to the people and events she had forgotten, waitingfor her memory to help her trace the roots.12 These portraits areconnected to some trait in Hellman's character, to aspects such as hersexual awakening, but not necessarily to specific periods in her life.The people Hellman writes about in 'free-association' are people shehas only tenuous links with, and vague knowledge of, as for instanceBethe and Willy They are not there because they played a large role

in Hellman's life, but they represent a period, episode, or an event thatcan help her trace some aspect of her character, her identity orsexuality It is, therefore, a different form of autobiographical writing

from An Unfinished Woman, and memory seems to perform a different role; from recollecting the past in An Unfinished Woman to

rumination, free-association and letting the forgotten and

not-thought-of take control It is an investigation not-thought-of the smaller things, the details,the overlooked It is a different form, but the tone remains asquestioning and searching as before

This awareness of the gaps and unexplored spaces of memory isvery obvious and the gaps are of great importance in themselves in

Perec's W ou le souvenir d'enfance The focus, in the chapters on

12 It is worth noting here that the chapter on the woman Hellman calls 'Julia'which was later made into a film, has caused some controversy MurielGardiner Buttinger has come forward explaining that her life matches indetail what Hellman describes as the life of her childhood friend Julia, but

Buttinger claims she never met Hellman See William Wright, Lillian

Hellman: The Image, the Woman (London: Sigdwick and Jackson 1987), pp.

402-412 Hellman's memoirs have been fiercly criticised for lack of accuracyand fictionalisation of events by a number of people, for instance MarthaGellhorn and Mary McCarthy, but for some reason not until many years aftertheir publication Hellman sued McCarthy for libel after one particular attack,but died before the case came to trial Wright also gives a detailed account oftheir feud Why Hellman specifically has come under such scrutiny is notquite clear, but one can infer that as she handles many sensitive events andpeople's connections to those events, there are bound to be resentments and aresistance to giving her the last word on events that affected many people'slives

childhood memories, is on its gaps - the family Perec lost and hardlyremembers, his father in the war and his mother in the camps, and thechildhood memories that often prove to be wrong The moment ofmemory is here strongly linked to writing, it is almost as if memorywere not possible without writing and writing impossible withoutmemory As Perec explains in a short introduction to his book:

Le récit d'aventures, à cơté, a quelque chose de grandiose,

ou peut-être de suspect Car il commence par raconter unehistoire et, d'un seul coup, se lance dans une autre: danscette rupture, cette cassure qui suspend le récit autour d'on

ne sait quelle attente, se trouve le lieu initial d'ó est sorti

ce livre, ces points de supension auxquels se sont accrochés les fils rompus de l'enfance et la trame de l'écriture (W ou

le souvenir d'enfance, back cover)13

The structure of W ou le souvenir d'enfance is a complex one Perec

mixes his few, and in some ways insubstantial, childhood memorieswith a strange and ominous fictional tale (or two fictional tales) inalternating chapters in an intriguing juxtaposition.14 The secondfictional part is a story of an island society that is completelyorganised around the cult of sport The fictional chapters and thechildhood memories seem very different at first sight but there aresentences that are almost interchangeable This one is from the

fictional narrator in the first chapter: 'Quoi qu'il arrive, quoi que je

fasse, j'étais le seul dépositaire, la seule mémoire vivante, le seul

13 'Next to it, the adventure story is rather grandiose, or maybe dubious For

it begins to tell one tale, and then, all of a sudden, launches into another Inthis break, in this split suspending the story on an unidentifiable expectation,

can be found the point of departure for the whole of this book: the points of

suspension on which the broken threads of childhood and the web of writing

are caught.' Preface, no page number

14 See a very stimulating study by Philippe Lejeune on the reading of W ou

le souvenir d'enfance in Review of Contemporary Fiction 13 (Spring 1993),

88-98

vestige de ce monde Ceci, plus que toute autre considération, m'a décidé à écrire' (W ou le souvenir d'enfance, p 10).15

To be 'la seule mémoire vivante' is also Perec's lot but it seems that

he writes not because of that fact but almost despite it:

je n'écris pas pour dire que je ne dirai rien, je n'écris paspour dire que je n'ai rien à dire J'écris: j'écris parce quenous avons vécu ensemble, parce que j'ai été un parmi eux,ombre au milieu de leurs ombres, corps près de leur corps;j'écris parce qu'ils ont laissé en moi leur marque indélébile

et que la trace en est l'écriture: leur souvenir est mort àl'écriture; l'écriture est le souvenir de leur mort et

l'affirmation de ma vie (W ou le souvenir d'enfance, p.

59)16

To remember can be a call to write; an impetus to erect some kind ofmonument to the memory or the event, but also to call on others toremember, to raise a monument to the remembering process itself It is

to make concrete the peculiar presence of the past, and the importance

of memory As Michael Sheringham observes:

the inevitable failure of [Perec's] attempt to write about [his

memories] is itself a memento mori, a repetition of absence

and annihilation Regardless of its relative success or

failure, the act of writing - in its inherent endlessness, its

eternal severance from the concrete, its intrinsic incapacity

to grasp the real, its basis in absence - is attuned to thereality of loss.17

15 'Whatever may happen now, whatever I may now do, I was the sole depository, the only living memory, the only vestige of that world That, more than any other consideration, was what made me decide to write.' p 4.

16 'I am not writing to say that I have nothing to say I write: I write because

we lived together, because I was one amongst them, a shadow amongst theirshadows, a body close to their bodies I write because they left in me theirindelible mark, whose trace is writing Their memory is dead in writing;writing is the memory of their death and the assertion of my life.' p 42

17 Michael Sheringham, French Autobiography: Devices and Desires:

Rousseau to Perec (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), p 323.

But the question why one writes is notoriously difficult and one thatPerec has addressed elsewhere: 'to the question of 'why I write', which

I can never answer except by writing, and thus deferring forever thevery moment when, by ceasing to write, that image would visiblycohere, like a jigsaw puzzle inexorably brought to its completion.'18

Amidst the gaps and absence there are powerful, physical memoryexperiences that may have contributed to the urge to write Perecdescribes being rewarded with a medal at school only to have it takenaway from him, unjustly, after a fight:

la sensation cénesthésique de ce déséquilibre imposé par lesautres, venu d'au-dessus de moi et retombant sur moi, reste

si fortement inscrite dans mon corps que je me demande si

ce souvenir ne masque pas en fait son exact contraire: nonpas le souvenir d'une médaille arrachée, mais celui d'une

étoile épinglée (W ou le souvenir d'enfance, p 76)19

This belief that what we remember clearly must be erroneous andtherefore significant has been prevalent from Freud onward Perechere gives a new meaning to this rather innocent memory of a childunjustly treated, believing it to conceal another much more terrifyingmemory with much broader implications This is a good example ofone of the processes at work when writing on memory; the initialmemory is connected to something else, thereby giving it greateremphasis, and a broader significance for the reader All the writersdiscussed here avoid making direct causal links between past eventsand their present situation They do make connections, but oftensurprising ones, and the reader can never be sure where the memorieswill lead

18 Georges Perec, 'Statement of Intent' trans David Bellos in Review of

Contemporary Fiction 13 (Spring 1993) 21-22, (p 22).

19 'the sensation in my whole body of a loss of balance imposed by others,coming from above and falling on to me, remains so deeply imprinted on mybody that I wonder if this memory does not in fact conceal its preciseopposite: not the memory of a medal torn off, but the memory of a starpinned on.' p 54

Moments of interpretation and analysis of the past are stronglylinked in these texts to almost overwhelming memories These points

of luminosity, these powerful memory experiences seem to invite theauthors to write on them, to attempt to make sense of them They arelike sparks of creativity that open up new ways into the past Writingand memory here become so closely linked that it is difficult to tell thetwo apart Such moments of memory become all the more powerfulgiven that the authors we are considering are very sceptical of thepower of memory This does not mean that these moments allow usclear and unobstructed access to the past, what is interesting aboutthem is that they seem to invite rich interpretation and analysis andserve to some extent as catalysts for the writing of a life

Maurice Halbwachs's work on memory provides insights into,among other things, how memories change:

Recollections which have not been thought about for a longtime are reproduced without change But when reflectionbegins to operate, when instead of letting the past recur, wereconstruct it through an effort of reasoning, what happens

is that we distort the past, because we wish to introduce agreater coherence.20

In this view the past is not in itself coherent and we inadvertentlydistort it by making it so This, of course, is very much apparent when

we write on the past But it seems to me that Auster, Perec andHellman show a distinct awareness of this in their writing Hellmanattempts to make the past cohere, while constantly reminding herselfthat this is what she is doing Perec, on the other hand, does notattempt coherence to the same extent, and Auster's search forcoherence is always marked by the belief that if one gives meaning toconnections, coincidences and chance, one makes up an imaginary

world inside the real world; a method he rejects (The Invention of

20 Maurice Halbwachs, On Collective Memory, trans Lewis A Coser

(Chicago, London: University of Chicago Press, 1992), p 183

Solitude, p 147).21 Rather Auster points to possible meanings,possible connections, while at the same time warning against a simplemeaning-making process, which would lead him to some absolutetruth about his past.

Hellman's autobiographical works, with the exception of Maybe, all

include excerpts from her diaries She turns to them when she needs adetailed account of some event, or to check dates of events But itseems that she is mostly unsatisfied with what she finds there One ofthose diaries is from her stay in Moscow in the winter of 1940:

In those five months I kept diaries of greater detail andlength than I have ever done before or since, but when Iread them last year, and again last week, they did notinclude what had been most important to me, or what the

passing years have made important (An Unfinished

Woman, p 144)

The diary is an everyday form, often occupied with the domestic, thedetail, and usually free of any hierarchical interpretation of events; themundane and the eventful are all allocated the same space and form.22

The diary seems to disappoint Hellman with its lack of interpretation,lack of clarity, omissions of what she has later to come to view asimportant and its inability to capture what it was 'really like', as shecomplains of her diaries from her visit to Spain during the SpanishCivil War All the same Hellman includes excerpts from them, andthat reminds us that remembering is an active, ever-changing processthat can never be cast in stone The entries are there as relics from thepast which carry documentary value, but not the 'truth'-value Hellmanseeks Memory, then, is never complete both in the sense that it never

21 Dennis Barone points out that creating an imaginary world inside the real

world is what Auster's characters in the New York Trilogy do and it leads to their downfall See 'Auster's Memory' in Review of Contemporary Fiction, 14

(Spring 1994) 32-34

22 A helpful account of the diary and its relationship to gender can be found

in Rebecca Hogan's essay 'Engendered Autobiographies: The Diary as a

Feminine Form', in Autobiography and the Question of Gender, ed Shirley

Neuman (London: Frank Cass, 1991), pp 95-107

tells one exactly how things were and in the sense that it can never be'completed' That is also why Hellman includes more notes on thetexts in the later edition The reader feels closer to the events inreading the diary entries, they seem to invite the reader to be present

to the past But time, distance, remembering and rewriting all offer ifnot quite another version of events, then at least a differentinterpretation and analysis of what was important and what was not.The main difference between the excerpts from Hellman's diary andthe rest of the text is the analysis and the critical inquiry for somedeeper or different meaning of past events that give theautobiographical text a sense of overall unity of purpose The text islayered here; it is comprised of a description of a memory; description

of remembering; note on the description; diary entry; note on thediary entry; interpretation of the memory, and finally a note on thetext Writing on memory takes place on different levels, with differentdegrees and types of analysis and interpretation, and instigatesdifferent levels of presence of the past

Auster's work is also comprised of layers of text His memories areintertwined with memories of stories and numerous quotations fromother texts, spanning a wide range of texts, from the Bible to

Pinocchio, but all corresponding to or elucidating on a theme in the

text 'The Book of Memory' includes thirteen books of memory (each

a few pages long), each a variation on a theme, similar to a musicalwork In the first book Auster mentions in elliptical sentences all themain themes that he then enlarges on in the text It is only the lastbook, book thirteen, which is different and contains a list of sentences

all starting with 'I remember', reminiscent of Perec's work Je me

souviens (1978), a collection of just such sentences.

Auster is fascinated by all kinds of chance occurrences andcoincidences For Auster there is a very clear correlation betweenwriting and memory, he sees 'the act of writing as an act of memory'

(The Invention of Solitude, p 142) This partly accounts for the

structure of the text: each memory corresponds to another memory, or

a piece of text from elsewhere, or a recent event, or all of those things,and writing calls forth these connections Some texts for him are also

clear instances of memory, as he is certain that Collodi's Pinocchio

must be a book of memory (The Invention of Solitude, p 163) The

understanding of childhood and the magical father-son relationship

described in Pinocchio must be from Collodi's own childhood Auster

concludes; as if it was not possible to write such a book withoutremembrance: 'The puppet had become the image of himself as achild To dip the puppet into the inkwell, therefore, was to use hiscreation to write the story of himself For it is only in the darkness of

solitude that the work of memory begins' (The Invention of Solitude, p.

164) This is the third thread that Auster weaves with writing andmemory: solitude His own solitude, the general solitude of the writer,the solitude of madness and writing (Auster mentions Hölderlin andDickinson) The solitude of those in hiding and exile (he includesAnne Frank, and his Jewish friend's father who hid in an attic room inParis during the war), and Jonah's solitude in the whale He alsomaintains that one shares another man's solitude by translating hiswork, which is also the work of memory as one word is turned intoanother

These three areas: chance, father-son relationships, and solitude, are

so intimately linked in this text, that it is nearly impossible to talkabout one aspect without mentioning the others Auster writes on theplaces of memory: rooms that are filled with memory His own room,Anne Frank's room, Dickinson's room, these are the concrete spaces ofmemory, writing and solitude Places of remembrance that have now(or some of them at least) become monuments to this remembranceand writing This investigation of solitude in 'The Book of Memory' iswhat links it to 'Portrait of an Invisible Man' and gives new meaning

to the title as he invents not only his father's solitude (see chapter 5),but also his own

Auster writes on his life by remembering other lives, other writers,other stories, other texts He writes about himself in the third person,thereby putting himself beside other characters in other texts he hasread But while writing on these connections and coincidences heemphasises strongly that they have a completely different meaning infiction from their place in life-writing Anything that forms a pattern

is a collection of meaningless coincidences in real life, whereas if itwas part of a plot in a novel the pattern would point to a subtext or

symbolism But looking for patterns and correlations in his life is still

an important activity for him, it is his way of making sense of the past,and, of course, all these patterns he charts accumulate and becomemeaningful, even though they never achieve the status of a symbol As

he explains, the meaning of a life can never be as neatly deposited as alife of a character in a novel:

people do sometimes try to understand their lives in terms

of historical conditions, it does not have the same effect [as

in a novel] Something is missing: the grandeur, the grasp

of the general, the illusion of metaphysical truth One says:Don Quixote is consciousness gone haywire in a realm ofthe imaginary One looks at a mad person in the world (A

at his schizophrenic sister, for example), and says nothing.This is the sadness of a wasted life, perhaps - but no more

(The Invention of Solitude, pp 146-147)

For Auster, then, creating such a pattern of a life in autobiographicalwriting would only be an illusion as it would move to the level offiction, although by pointing to these connections in his life, he comesvery close to creating a 'pattern' of his life The 'Book of Memory' is

an account of his life, his work, his reading, his fatherhood, his being

a son: all linked together in one room, and the distinction between pastand present becomes blurred It is as if everything existedsimultaneously in the text, as chronological order is absent Whatmatters is not just the events themselves, but the connections betweenthem and what makes this connection possible is memory; hence thetitle 'Book of Memory' Auster connects many disparate things in thistext; his own father-son theme with other fathers and sons in historyand literature, which he then connects to other things, just as inSherzad's stories, which he quotes, where she never tells what is infront of her eyes, but always a parallel story 'The Book of Memory' is

a collection of parallels, connections and coincidences that hangtogether by the thread of writing and acquire meaning throughassociation

The text starts with the phrase 'it was, it never will be again', which

is repeated time and again throughout the work But it is a phrase

Auster in a way sets out to disprove as he later describes memory as

being 'the space in which a thing happens for the second time' (The

Invention of Solitude, p 83) He also speaks of the importance of

memory in and of itself He commemorates a day each year on which

he and his friend had decided something 'big' was going to happen.Although nothing 'big' ever happened that day, he still remembers thedate Other people's writing and paintings can just as well trigger hisown memory Just as reading other people's memoirs always brings tomind some incident from one's own childhood Van Gogh's paintingstrigger Auster's memory of the first poems he wrote after having seen

an exhibition of Van Gogh's work with his first love He does notremember the poems themselves, but he remembers everything else.'The Book of Memory' is not linear but circular It does not move fromone point to the next, but back and forth continuously, in the sameroom, very much like memory works New associations are found,new glimpses of the same topics, and the constant underlying theme islosing a father or losing a son There is one moment in time, but itcould be a hundred years, it could be tomorrow On the first page hesays: 'It was It never will be again' and on the last page he adds to that

sentence: 'Remember' (The Invention of Solitude, p 172).

In Auster's work the past is thrust into the present by a place, a face,

a text, or a story, which he then connects to a memory, much as in thememory systems he mentions In his text there is a mixture of literaryand historical consciousness, and although he firmly links memoryand writing, they are never quite simultaneous acts:

Memory, therefore, not simply as the resurrection of one'sprivate past, but an immersion in the past of others, which

is to say: history - which one both participates in and is awitness to, is a part of and apart from Everything, there-fore, is present in his mind at once, as if each element werereflecting the light of all the others, and at the same timeemitting its own unique and unquenchable radiance[ .]And yet, the telling of it is necessarily slow, a delicatebusiness of trying to remember what has already beenremembered The pen will never be able to move fastenough to write down every word discovered in the space

of memory (The Invention of Solitude, p 139)

For Auster writing on memories is therefore an attempt to recreate theprocess of remembering, 'to remember what has already beenremembered' In recreating this process, the memories are looked atagain, interrogated and investigated once more, as the writing process

by definition has to be more selective than remembering ever can be.The editing that is evident in these three texts involves corrections ofthe autobiographers' faulty memories, the results of forgetting, ornotes that add some information that they have only learned muchlater It serves to remind us of the difficulty of writing on memory andthe complex relationship we have with the past The editing process is

a long one First it is at work as one remembers, then there is theediting that goes on when the memories are written down, and the laststage - very visible in these texts - as these writers re-read and/orrewrite their memories This highlights the fact that remembering is anever-ending process and so is writing one's memories These textswith their footnotes, corrections, diaries and notes make this processvisible and remind us that the remembering process is never'complete'

3 The Role of the Forgotten

After describing her first memories Virginia Woolf goes on toexplain: 'These then are some of my first memories But of course as

an account of my life they are misleading, because the things one doesnot remember are as important; perhaps they are more important.'23 Inthis section I am concerned with what part the forgotten plays inautobiography If writing is an act of memory, is it perhaps also an act

of forgetting? Thomas Butler says in his essay 'Memory: A MixedBlessing' that:

nonretrieval, forgetting, even limited amnesia under acutestress seem to be an integral part of a normal intelligence,

23 Woolf, op cit., p 78