'Life can sometimes step free from the chaos of contingency and become story!'

“To create a story, a readable and sensible narrative from what are often the unlikeliest preserved traces, to trust in the details, to work with them, using them as prompts and points of access, was, for me, to make a second discovery” - Sven Birkerts

Indeed, memoir is, to Sven Birkerts, the ‘genre of our times’!

Elaborating on the obstacles to the artistic realizations of the memoir, Sven adds to point out the fallacies of the ‘and then… and then…’ catchphrase, because it is just not about ‘telling something’ at all!

To Sven, then, there are such amazing hidden patterns to memory, which, when they are elegantly unearthed and understood, when one is on the watch out for ‘patterns and connections’, would somehow go a long way out in explaining something about himself – his life – to himself! He adds to say that these memories presented themselves ‘discontinuously,’ as found ‘bits of evidence,’ as they arrived, and they were trying to “tell” him something!

Thus possessed by the “stuff” of his own life, he says, he set out —at first hesitantly, later with grim resolution—to write about those years of formation!

He adds,

There is in fact no faster way to smother the core meaning of a life, its elusive threads and connections, than with the heavy blanket of narrated event. Even the juiciest scandals and revelations topple before the drone of, “And then … and then …” because, to Sven, there is not one ‘then’ but any many ‘thens’ galore, which creates for him and his memoir, the very sensation of the lived experience in all its grandeur!

To Sven, then, a ‘Memoir’ begins not with ‘event’ (for once, let’s forget the Derridean take on ‘event’ here, please!) but with the ‘intuition of meaning’ - with the mysterious fact that life can sometimes step free from the chaos of contingency and become story.

How beautifully he’s worded it!

Silber, I mean, Joan Silber has a similar sprightly take on the subject: ‘Fiction imagines for us a stopping point from which life can be seen as intelligible’, he says, in his The Art of Time in Fiction.

That then, indeed, would be a delightful stopping point or a pitstop of sorts! Ain’t it?

Indeed, me thinks it would do well to invite Chinua Achebe into our deliberations on this ’vantage stopping point’: Achebe once gave out his own reasons for writing down his story! He says, “The first is that you have an overpowering urge to tell a story. The second is you have the information for a unique story waiting to come out and third, you consider the whole project worth the considerable trouble!”

For more on an Achebean analysis, you may wish to read Silber’s The Art of Time in Fiction where he cites from Achebe, Arundhati Roy amongst others, to put forth the amazing ways in which ‘time’ unfolds in fiction!

And that’s exactly what Sven does, in his The Art of Time in Memoir! He illustrates, with specific literary illustrations, how time unfolds in memoirs!

Sven, when he looks back at the ‘and thens’ to his past life, from when now he’s in his late forties, he could notice for himself, how his past – all the events and all the feelings of his younger years, - had overnight, without any effort on his part whatsoever, arranged themselves into a coherent, well-ordered perspective!

And it was at this point in his life, somewhere into his late forties, that he finds out for himself how his memories and feelings started coming to him so loud and so clear! All the causes and all the effects to his pasts, had now, fallen into some ‘new alignment’ of sorts, where ‘recollection’ seemed to merge beautifully into the ‘ongoing business of living’, the present!

Hence, the ‘Present, Past’ equation seemed to Sven, the bestest default of all! In fact, the ‘Present, Past’ concoction is to Sven, the very sine qua non of a memoir! with the past deepening and giving authority to the present, and the present (just by virtue of being invoked) creating the necessary depth of field for the persuasive idea of the past.

Praising skyhigh some of the astounding memoirs that he’s loved reading, that includes Mary Karr’s The Liars’ Club, Lucy Grealy’s Autobiography of a Face, Blake Morrison’s And When Did You Last See Your Father?, Michael Ondaatje’s Running in the Family, Annie Dillard’s An American Childhood, Jo Ann Beard’s The Boys of My Youth, et al, Sven feels that these works have some amazing commonalities to them which include their ‘stylistic grace’ and their ‘honesty of disclosure!’

He adds, “Apart from whatever painful or disturbing events they recount, their deeper ulterior purpose is to discover the ‘nonsequential connections’ that allow those experiences to make larger sense; they are about circumstance becoming meaningful when seen from a certain remove,” by gaining access from the present, to the hidden narratives of the past!

And this ‘eureka moment’ happens once events and situations are understood not just in themselves but as stages en route to decisive self-recognition, he quips!

Recounting Ezra Pound’s beautiful lines, “What thou lovest well remains, / the rest is dross,” Sven then proceeds to downplay on the universalized scale of values towards measuring past lived experience!

To Sven, “The ‘remembered detail’ to the past is not the same as the ‘truth’ of one’s own experience!”

Hence, ‘the remembered detail’ should not be taken strictly as an index to importance!

For this he takes for his yardstick, the Proustian distinction between voluntary and involuntary memory.

Although Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past is a novel, Sven counters that of all novels it is probably the closest to memoir; that to write it Proust mined his life in a thousand ways and then applied to the whole the memoirist’s sense of the ‘true scales of mattering.’

For a bit more of an elaborate take on Proust and memory, you may want to read our past post on Proust HERE!

Sven continues –

Proust, heavily influenced by the theories of philosopher Henri Bergson, exhaustively explored the literary dichotomy between voluntary and involuntary memory. In this scheme, voluntary memory is the mechanical retrieval function that gives us access to our assembled picture of the past and allows us to zero in on events and sensations as along a grid of recollection.

Using voluntary memory, we can work our way back to the summer of 1975; we can establish that we were traveling in Europe, spending a week in London, staying in a hostel, visiting museums every day. We all know that patient focus on preserved materials will bring back troves of specific information—what we ate, what we paid—and we could write the account of our lives in this fashion, going over old credit-card receipts and applying the exteriorized procedure of biography to the stuff of personal experience.

Indeed, Proust early on wrote many hundreds of pages in this more formulaic way before he experienced the breakthrough that led him to undertake the all-consuming discipline of Remembrance. It was only when he had his ‘madeleine moment’ that he grasped the power of the other kind of memory, Bergson’s involuntary memory, and understood that this alone was the gateway to the real past.

What happened—at least according to literary legend—was that the author, revisiting as an adult one of the sites of his childhood, stopped to take tea. When he automatically dunked the crusty little cake—the famous petite madeleine—into his tea, he found that his unpremeditated action released a stored association of overwhelming force.

A single taste suddenly swamped him with the charged-up sensation of childhood, over-powering all factual ordering, and in the light of this visceral reaction his former approaches to his remembered experience came to seem irrelevant.

The vital past, the living past, he realized, could not be systematically excavated; it lay distilled in the very details that had not been groomed into story, details that could only be fortuitously discovered. The madeleine experience initiated for him a whole chain of association, and from this he achieved the eventual restoration of an entire vanished world.

We cannot all be the Prousts of our own experience, but most memoirists will probably agree that the creation of their work depends a good deal on the workings of the involuntary memory. Not only do these recouped sensations throw open the door to the felt past, but the logic of their connection then helps determine the narrative strategy and infuses it with an underlying sense of quest. Recovered feeling forces the writer to start thinking about the possibilities of dramatic presentation.

I’d make a gentle request to y’all folks who dabble with delight onto Memory Studies, to take a peek into what Sven has to offer for us all, on a platter, in such simple, easy-to-understand literary allusions and illustrations!

This rubric of Sven, would then, form our guiding light towards analyzing a wonderful memoir of almost a century back, titled, Out of Africa by Isak Dinesen!

‘Footfall echoes down memory lane’ to continue…

images: amazondotcom, pinterestdotcom, oldphonesdotcom, nprdotorg