fall 2003 | The Culture Issue
Fiction, Nonficiton, and Personal Testament: Iris Smyles
In the autumn of 1910, a French hat-maker direct from Paris, specializing in the construction of highly decorative female headpieces designed in a variety of folded felts, carefully crinkled bows, and clever satin convolutions, obtained a position in a small millinery shop on Spirna Street in Athens, Greece. The modest family business he stepped into could not actually afford his elite services, but unexpectedly, they hired him anyway. Thanasis was in his tenth year when his father told him to watch the French milliner who had insisted on working in private and guarded his obscure trade secrets vigilantly. He allowed no one in his workshop, no one except the boy, Thanasis, whose intensity in daydream and uncommonly quiet presence seemed hardly to matter. Day after day, the young Thanasis dawdled about the workshop, seeming only to count the grains of dust that swam through various beams of light, but, all the while was secretly apprenticing the unsuspecting Frenchman. After only one month, three weeks, four days, and a few hours, Thanasis knew five hats by heart and had locked in his memory the basis for countless more. His dreamily inconspicuous eyes had perfectly recorded every fold, every twist, and every stroke of the milliner’s refined movements, and then buried each stolen secret deep within the stillness of his hands. The Frenchman was finally dismissed from the workshop—what became of him no one knows. But Athens remained of course, so did the shop, and so did the ladies and gentlemen of this time and place, for a while at least, with heads adorned in the finest French designs that were inexplicably labeled “made in Greece.” My grandfather was many men: milliner, gambler, factory owner, husband, father to three, and storyteller above all. Years later, he is an American father, returning home from work at sundown. The children rush toward him with eager requests. He removes his hat evenly and sits down in a father’s chair with his three children, even the oldest teenager, gathered at his feet. Absentmindedly, he folds a leaf of paper in his hands, while slowly he commences pulling words from the air, stringing them together, weaving a scenery before them. Opening invisible passageways, he invites strange beings to enter his story. They tread on the words my grandfather lays down, they tiptoe through his watchful pauses, then whisper and run toward the children’s ears—Spartan ghosts march with clanging armor against their shadows at dusk; a mountain vanishes in the melody of a whistle delivered exactly at the speed of wind; a fleeting magic belonging to a past falls like a nickel at the foot of a stranger; the moment composed in the telling of the moment, a moment that will never exist again, takes refuge in the firelight reflected in the children’s eyes. Ancient, impossible sounds waft through this living room sewing the tale and the family close. The children dream into a past, led by my grandfather who holds their thoughts, their histories, their futures, their imaginations spellbound, and in his hands all the while, folding, ripping, and molding some obscure artifact, some undetermined scrap of narrative, until the story ends. The children’s gaze is still far away and returns to this living room only to behold a memento their father has brought back from their journey, a symbol of some history, real or imagined, a paper curiosity—the armor of a Spartan ghost, the key that unlocked the mysterious door, the hat the princess refused to wear, the crystallization of a magic disappearing again into the stillness of his hands. “I remember a few things,” my father begins while sitting in my apartment leafing through old history books. “I remember a few things,” he says, leaving this room to peer into a past. My father is the keeper of a history. Memories rarely escape, are seldom brought to the surface except on some days like today, when the passage opens and forgotten stories, abandoned destinies, pillaged secrets tumble out, mingle together, and become again as long as their shadows, as long as they are remembered, or as short as they are forgotten. I never met my grandfather, but my father is a storyteller too. He tells a story of stories. It is Monday in New York, four in the afternoon, when a young woman opens the door to her apartment. She hangs up her coat and searches her refrigerator before reaching for the remote and resting on her living room couch. She casually tunes the channel to some familiar TV talk show. A woman talks out to her from within the TV. She is telling a story, recounting some important event in her life. The woman on the TV peers into the camera, and out from the TV screen. She speaks to the woman at home, on her couch, in her living room. The woman on the couch listens. Literary debates responding to the overflow of memoir published recently have sparring critics attributing so many conflicting talents and faults to the memoirists that reading a survey of reviews on the subject is more satisfying in its gossipy finger-pointing, critical cat-fighting, and high-mindedly literary roasting than any tell-all I have read so far. Like “Reality TV,” regardless of intellectual merit, memoir does offer a common ground for conversation among its readers and critics, and in that same way, the worst ones are often the best. Genuine heroics, utter shamelessness, heroic shamelessness, artistic lucidity, aesthetic bankruptcy, unethical opportunism, literary ineptitude, and salacious attention-grabbing are all part of an amusingly variegated buffet of witty critical concoctions inspired by the subject. Some have zealously praised particular works of memoir as being both brave and artistic, while others have banished the very same works to the bottom of their stack of old Good Housekeeping issues, loudly reviling them as paper-bound talk show drivel, asserting that these so-called heroic works are nothing more than self-exploitative pulp nonfiction. Though the merits and weaknesses of the form have been the focus of much discussion of late, the roots of the movement have not up to now been thoroughly explored. Certainly, the memoir genre is in no way new. Minzesheimer notes that “St. Augustine wrote his confessions,” and “memoirist Kathryn Rhett [editor of Survival Stories] turns to the Old Testament to ask ‘What was the book of Job but a memoir of crisis?’”1 Notable, though, is the literary eclipse memoir has visited on fiction recently. “‘Books that once would have been written as novels are now written as memoirs,’ says Villard publisher David Rosenthal.”2 Indeed, “never have so many memoirs, often by unknown writers sharing impressions of a slice of their lives, been published,”3 Minzesheimer writes responding to the trend. So why suddenly are readers so hungry for memoirs that depict ordinary lives? Why is this form’s predecessor, the autobiographical novel, no longer adequately satisfying this public need? And why is the nonfiction memoir so personally important to both the writers and readers of the form? Personal testament has seeped into every avenue of public entertainment today. The literary memoir is only one of many venues hosting the outcry of “I.” Many recent films have also been “based on a true story.” From the real life mathematician in A Beautiful Mind to the savvy single mom and unlikely legal hero in Erin Brockovich, films about real people are drawing viewers everywhere. In live theater, too, there has been a burst of frankness, with a bevy of reality-based productions that either dramatize a historical event or provide dramatic lighting for a one-woman confessional show. In Elaine Stritch at Liberty, the headliner, in casual dress, relates her battle with alcoholism, and in God Said Ha!, Julia Sweeny performs an onstage memoir of how she survived cancer. The most hard to miss correlation, though, would be the current proliferation of so-called Reality TV, making its predecessor, the talk show tell-all, seem almost antiquated in its attempt to deliver the “real scoop.” On talk shows, producers bring in real people to tell their extraordinary true-life stories, while Reality TV producers figure why tell it when you can live it? This attitude multiplies the number of Joes and Janes ripe for Reality stardom because to get on these shows you don’t even need a story. Most of these individuals actually lack extraordinary experience, and it is precisely this lack of experience that drives them to participate in the show. They go on TV in search of their drama, and the producers, rather than writing a plot, set up a livable showcase and then watch it unfold. So-called reality has flooded the media. Judging from this, one might suppose that we are a society committed to the exhibition of truth. However, many critics of memoir remind readers that this genre is composed of carefully stylized truths, “creative nonfictions.” They are “life stories” after all, with easy-to-digest themes, manageable moral lessons, meaningfully succinct dialogue, and endings that provide “closure.” This “nonfiction” oeuvre is more slippery than fact, some critics insist, and should be regarded skeptically. However, the verity of these narratives is beside the point, because the societal hunger for this “nonfiction” does not, in my opinion, stem from a desire for a true story, but more from a desire to connect to a true, real, live storyteller. The public is interested in subjective accounts more than objective truths. Similarly, confessions to cameras, audiences, and readers are not driven by the individuals’ need to deliver objective truth, but by a need to exhibit their personal perspective, to carve out a moment within the public’s view for their lives to be witnessed, acknowledged, and affirmed. Over the last century, media became irrepressibly ubiquitous. In the early 1900s, the outlets for entertainment were limited to periodicals, theatricals, literature, and finally and most simply, familial and social exchanges–story-telling. Perhaps this last category, though remote now, was at one time the most consistent form of amusement. Prior to the media’s Herculean developments in fluency and speed, before it secured its far-reaching and tight-fisted grip on the public, ordinary people were the purveyors of their own entertainment. People managed this terrific feat simply by participating in their own lives (as opposed to watching the lives of others, as we do today), by talking to each other, recounting gossip of close or distant relations, and by handing down fables, remembrances, and histories to children. Once upon a time, we were a society that entertained each other in conversation through the propagation of stories. Families had their own storytellers too; story-telling was a well-regarded and thoroughly practiced skill. It was how we kept the family intact, preserved the family’s history and identity. Our cultural identity was wrapped in the stories we told and retold; we were part of an oral tradition whose main venue was most often and most simply our living room. Mid-century: The living room undergoes a seemingly minor change, but one that will eventually transform it completely. A small TV comes to occupy a corner of the room. Over time, the TV grows and the room changes shape; the furniture is rearranged to face the charming device. Gradually the “living room” is more frequently referred to as the “TV room.” It is no longer the center for homegrown stories and conversation, but is filled with foreign stories imported through the TV, to which the entire family is turned. The living room, the traditional venue for our storytellers and family historians, is quietly assumed as families depend more and more on their TVs for entertainment. Time passes around the TV eroding the family stories. Untold, these stories fade, disappear, are forgotten. The oral tradition is all but extinct; the imported fictions have taken its place. Thus thoroughly entertained, society is consumed by its fiction. The “navel gazing”4 to which cultural critics frequently refer, evident in many personal nonfiction forms, is a symptomatic reaction to society’s unwavering gaze outward. Our cultural identity has become that of the consumer. In modern American society, we harvest more than we individually sow, and no amount of prescriptive admonishment from any critic will likely change that fact. Within this steadfast consumption of imported fictions, however, a chasm has developed. A personal or familial bankruptcy has hollowed out a space. The chasm is inhabited by unheard questions: What about my story? I don’t know my own history, my own father, or my own past—who will know mine? Will my life end with me? Will each experience fade into nothing? Posterity is an instinct too. The same fundamental drive to continue behind our reproductive instinct fuels the creation of art and history as well. Humanity’s basic need to perpetuate itself, to thrust toward eternity through reproduction, through the creating and recording of history and of art, has not disappeared, but, on the contrary, has grown hungry from neglect. This hunger, so long ignored across a vast expanse of society, among common people (not the great artists and entertainers whose stories we subscribe to and watch in place of our own, but ordinary women and men), has left individuals famished for a glimpse into their own humanity. The “navel gazing”5 begins with an acknowledgment of this hunger, a hearing of the unheard questions across the chasm, a mapping of the disappearing self. The ordinary individual must also satisfy the productive/creative instinct. The deluge of professional raconteurs in our recent past, delivering fictions through every avenue, has stymied the common person’s opportunity to tell his own story, to witness herself alive. Instead, they watch others act out living before them. There is a silent abyss that has been sensed by many, so they have created public records of themselves to fill it, to thwart the dangerous possibility of complete consumption, the total eclipse of the personal self by the public influence. Since the public gaze cannot be redirected, individuals bring their personal stories into public venues, redeeming a sense of the personal through the act of the public gesture. Unable to counter the powerful shaping influence of media, but, perhaps, able to augment its content, individuals seize opportunities to participate in the public consciousness by writing memoirs or telling their stories on TV. By creating the content of their eventual consumption, they experience a personal return when they inevitably yield to the public thrust, as it contains their own story. In this way, individuals can provide input into and shape the media that will inevitably shape them. The transition in name from “living room” to “TV room” is telling in that the media has become a medium for living. It has become both threat and safeguard to the most rapidly deteriorating and uniquely important artifact of humanity: memory. While present and future generations look through conduits of media, ordering life from the outside world in, a father wanting to recount for his children an adventure from his childhood, the mythic courting of his parents, the evolution of their family name, or how they found their way home, here, to this moment, when moments of telling are all but eradicated, cannot tell his story to them directly, because in this living/TV room, his children, traditionally, listen to what has been recorded. For the past to be salvaged then, he must go through the media, where their attention is directed, and record his story there, where his children will receive and finally keep the diminishing memory locked against time. By making his story public he gives it back to his personal life and perpetuates a history that would otherwise be eroded. In this way, “reality” or “nonfiction” storytelling marks the individual’s reentry into his own life, using the media as a gateway. Today, indirect communication is commonplace, with media functioning casually as intermediary in a variety of fundamentally human pursuits: as a facilitator of revelation, in the construction and consolidation of identity, in interpersonal communication, and as a preservative of memory. Popular tastes in literature reflect this cultural shift. Titles of personal stories suffused the lists of best sellers and literary prizes awarded during the late 1990s and up through the present “turning the phrase ‘a memoir’ into publishing’s favorite subtitle.”6 The literary fashion through most of the twentieth century, however, leaned toward autobiographical fiction, works inspired by the lives of their authors, but shaped and sculpted through literary device. Henry Miller used his experience as a roaming expatriate writer in Paris as the basis for his novel Tropic of Cancer7 and his boyhood in Brooklyn as the subject for the sequel Tropic of Capricorn.8 Sylvia Plath’s novel The Bell Jar9 tells the story of a young woman who is consumed by depression and madness and who ultimately attempts suicide, a close mirror of Plath’s own experience with mental illness. In content these works are barely distinguishable from today’s nonfiction memoirs. The primary distinction between the two genres lies in their claim. Drawing closer to present-day, these semi-autobiographical pieces more eagerly and openly mirror reality. A notable transition, indeed, as some of the most popular contemporary memoirs were originally conceived as fiction. Frank McCourt had first attempted to write his memoir, Angela’s Ashes,10 as a novel, noting, “I still have that version of my book called ‘If You Live in a Lane.’ It was fiction, thinly disguised . . . but it didn’t work because I wasn’t able to continue with the fiction—the reality kept intruding. I really wanted to tell the story.”11 Kathryn Harrison, author of the widely discussed book The Kiss,12 had written a novel prior to her memoir dealing with the very same subject matter. The memoir, like her previous novel titled Thicker Than Water,13 describes a woman’s incestuous relationship with her father. Martha Duffy, not alone in this assertion, claimed that Harrison wrote the first book “to no great reverberance [sic], so in The Kiss she tries the currently fashionable route of confession.”14 Memoirists, having derived their truth-value from the very subjective domain of memory, have critics wondering if these accounts are in fact nonfiction. Justin Cronin, a writing teacher at LaSalle College, explained, “memoirs blur the distinction between what’s happening and what’s constructed . . . A memoir is not a record. It is a memory. And what is the difference between memory and imagination? That’s pretty slippery territory.”15 In her review of The Kiss, Martha Duffy went on further, doubting “the veracity of a book labeled memoir,” because it has been shaped so thoroughly into a stylistically hard-to- believe literary form. She decided The Kiss was “more a purple tale than a glimpse of truth.”16 The various questions of verity, raised in response to many of these personal narratives, belie the memoir’s nonfiction categorization and have caused many critics to conclude that memoir is a distinct genre in its own right. Primarily, it seems that memoirists aim to reach out to their readers and are more concerned with making this connection than with entertaining or conveying insoluble truths. Addressed directly, the reader feels that he is being taken into the writer’s confidence. The reader participates in the experience of a secret, being told a story as if in conversation, one that might have taken place in the author’s living room. Fiction or true nonfiction tends to revolve around itself. When one opens a novel or history book, one looks in on an already complete story. The reader observes the story, but does not participate in it, is not essential to it, whereas memoir includes the reader by putting him in a kind of dialogue with the writer. The memoirist is a storyteller after all, and therefore requires a listener. For the memoirist to complete his journey through the telling, the reader’s ears are needed, and in turn, “lonely readers . . . are yearning for the intimacy of reality literature,”17 notes Carvajal in her estimation of the memoir trend. The self seems obsolete to the movement of modern life, and as a result, the average American is so alienated in his day-to-day existence that he seeks more than just entertainment and more than just truth—he wants more than ever to be acknowledged. Memoir provides that. Old schools of literary criticism judged a work by how well the author sustained an objective perspective throughout it. This critical ideal forced many writers of the early twentieth century to at least feign a degree of objectivity. Following suit, George Orwell’s autobiographical narrative Down and Out in Paris and London18 was labeled realistic fiction and published as a novel. Ironically, now, in a time when people are more removed from their own existence than ever before, art is becoming increasingly personal. Contemporary art is anchored by intense psychoanalytic scrutiny of the self. Being an artist now almost requires the plumbing of identity, and in turn, today’s public craves this personal exhibitionism. Having neglected the self in their subscription to modern life, the masses now want entertainment that is directed at the individual, that is narrowly subjective in scope. Undeniably, modern readers are desperate to see themselves in the lives and stories that they absorb, so much so that reading an objective, third-person fiction (as in a naturalistic novel of the early twentieth century) would simply be deadening for many. However, by reading a novel that engages the personal pronoun “I,” readers can vicariously play a part in their entertainment—even more so in a memoir, where the author is a previously invisible individual, like the reader who turns its pages. Rather than just observing, readers can identify with the storytellers and participate in the experience as they consume it. Within the memoir a variety of sub-forms have emerged. The “confession” is one of the most popular and critically scandalous of the genre. Common to many confessional narratives is the writer’s self-characterization as a blameless victim, almost completely lacking in culpability and often framed doubly as a hero/survivor displaying courage in the trauma’s aftermath, by heroically confronting this victimization through publishing. Many collections of these trauma memoirs have been published in the last few years with titles such as Close to the Bone: Memoirs of Hurt, Rage, and Desire19 and Survival Stories: Memoirs of Crisis20 at the forefront of this confessional craze. Apparently publishers are banking on this notion that heroism, victimization, survival, and confession can be taken as synonyms and, furthermore, as literature. Critical attacks on these confessions often highlight poor writing, however, noting that “candor, daring, and shamelessness are [not] substitutes for craft.”21 In his article “Woe Is Me,” Michiku Kakutani summarizes and denounces the “absurd” assertion of many of the publishers hunting for confessions today, “that you do not need craft or artistry to become a writer: you need only a crisis.”22 Even more telling than the content of these confessions is the question of motive behind the author’s decision to confess. Certainly, the authors of these confessions, whose ethics are a subject of continual controversy, use the media as a personal intermediary more directly than any other. To probe an author’s true intention behind his publishing of a potentially damaging confession would be perhaps to get closer to the truth than does what the author imagines himself to be admitting. If the reason for writing these works is, as their authors frequently claim, to simply get it out of their system, to confess and be free from it, then why is the writing alone not enough? As Wolcott states, “just because she wrote it she didn’t have to publish it.” The act of publishing suggests motives other than those some authors have put forth.23 The more classical “memory” memoir relates family histories, describes cultural moments, and conjures sense memories of time and place. Frank McCourt’s Angela’s Ashes, an account of the author’s impoverished, Irish-Catholic childhood in the river town of Limerick, Ireland, is at the forefront of this genre lately, having won the Pulitzer in 1997 and a bevy of other literary accolades. A stylistic predecessor to these works is Alfred Kazin’s classic A Walker in the City,24 in which he reflects on his discovery of “his” city as a young man growing up in East Brooklyn and “walking” out into the world for the first time. Mr. Kazin evokes the sights, smells, and sounds of his neighborhood as he brings the reader on a journey of retraced steps. An offshoot of the confession is the psychological narrative, which describes an individual’s surmounting of some mental obstacle. Eating disorders, dyslexia, madness, and depression are all popular topics for this form. The reader is usually taken on a journey into some unfathomable, indescribable (but described nonetheless) abyss. By the end, the writer and reader manage to emerge from the experience having learned some hard lesson or value, which the writer often explains is the reason behind his telling of the tale, to impart this difficult wisdom to others (readers). Of this type would be William Styron’s Darkness Visible: A Memoir of Madness,25 within which Mr. Styron relates and confronts the circumstances of his former illness. Returning to the abyss with his pencil, he describes his narrow escape from the clutches of depression, details the survival that enabled him to tell his story, and offers the reader his humble insights into the horribly debilitating condition under which he suffered. In Susanna Kaysen’s Girl, Interrupted 26 (a nonfiction parallel to Plath’s semi-autobiographical novel The Bell Jar), Ms. Kaysen suffers a mental breakdown and is subsequently hauled off to a cushy institution, which ends up providing great material for a book she will one day write. At the end of her narrative, Ms. Kaysen attempts to show that she has learned something about her mental state: that you have to participate in life, just watching won’t do. But what really comes across is a peculiar jubilance over the material she has inadvertently gathered at the former madcap retreat of Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, Robert Lowell, and a host of other literary madmen. This does not go against the lesson learned, however. This book in particular supports this notion that people today are just desperate to participate. Specifically, it was Ms. Kaysen’s malady that she was always only an observer of life, a “borderline personality” who had difficulty making active choices. Ever prey to an overriding sense of displacement from herself and a deadening observational style of living, Ms. Kaysen did not know how to enter life, how to live life rather than watch it all around. “I was in the TV room watching Lisa watch TV,” she says flatly at the beginning of her book.27 Later when asked about her future plans, she mentions her aspirations to write. By the end of the book, the reader understands her need to write. Writing will give her access to her own experience. By writing, by shaping memory, and constructing narrative, she is making choices, participating in her own existence. Ms. Kaysen does write her way into life by creating a record of her own existence. She discovers an entryway into her personal life through literature, as are many other memoirists attempting to publish today.
Memoirs are the scattered remains of our forgotten oral traditions. The critics of memoirs must do more than just critique; they must respond. To respond to a memoir objectively, only critical of its technique, voice, or style is to not have heard it. Every critic of memoir, whose work I have read here, has folded himself into his criticism, unable to resist the call to the personal. To review a memoir is almost like writing a memoir of the read; in her criticism, the reviewer is repeatedly called back to herself, to “I.” Memoirists, for whatever reason, need to be heard; whether their listeners recriminate, praise, or denounce them, the listener’s response makes their memoir complete. The writing of a memoir is only the first part of a “living room” discussion, gossip session, or story time. The reader, or listener, or critic, must complete the conversation, must acknowledge the storyteller in some way—I listen; I judge; I revile; I praise; I care; I don’t; and just like in conversation, I wait for my turn to speak. I am sitting on my living room couch and listening for the unheard questions. I begin to answer them. My grandfather . . . my father . . . and I am a storyteller.
Notes: 1 Bob Minzesheimer, “Suddenly Family Stories are Selling Like Pulp Fiction,” USA Today (16 April 1997), quoted in Contemporary Literary Criticism, ed. Jeffrey W. Hunter, Deborah A. Stanley, Timothy J. White, vol. 109 (Detroit: Gale, 1997), 425.
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Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies
John W. Draper Interdisciplinary Master's Program in Humanities and Social Thought