For some years, I taught a class in memoir. Not memoir writing. The genre. A literature class, or as I came to think over my teaching career, a reading class, as all literature classes are classes in reading, especially for the non aspiring-professional. How to read closely, carefully, insightfully.
Students, who are people, so people, often read carelessly. For instance, they tend to ignore things. Like titles. So basic. Yet often they don’t pause to consider the title, on its own or in relation to the text that follows. How do they seem to work together – or maybe, on the face of it, not? That’s a matter of what’s there.
What about what’s not there? Absences. And their presence. I’m not looking to get very abstruse and theoretical here. There are all kinds of theorizing, in literature, in philosophy and psychology, about present absences. I don’t think we need to go quite there for absences to play their vital role in insightful, valuable reading. If there is something we decide should be present in the text, or that might reasonably have been present – a piece of information, a feeling, some logic, a sense of continuity – and it isn’t present (that is, we notice its absence) then we have absent presence, the presence of absence. There are various technical terms in literary studies that might apply: gap, lacuna, trace, aporia. That last refers more precisely to some noticeable logical contradiction or paradox in a text that seems irresolvable. Deconstructionists liked that a lot. But my interest now is how the aporia my result from an absence.
Adjacent to ignoring what is there, students tend to gloss over what might otherwise noticeably not be there, including their own understanding, of a word or reference, or of an absence. Lazily, hastefully, habitually they just move on, unknowing.
In fiction, poetry, drama, the absence (I’ll speak of it most generally as that) is an element of the text that needs to be integrated into an understanding of it. How do we account for it? I don’t mean causally. We’re trying to find meaning in a text, a poem or story, not the writer’s mind. We’re not speculating about writers’ intentions or proposing that they forgot to put something into the text. We’re reading a story. What do we make of the story, with that particular absence or even aporia, in it?
(The text of the crime scene: what’s present, what’s absent, what's buried, misconstrued and disconnected, revealed, re-envisioned and read.)
Memoir complicates these conditions.
While the presiding principle in literary studies is that we, as serious readers, analyze and interpret a text and not a writer’s (unknowable or irrelevant statement of) intention in the text, a truth is that we are often (fortunately) very interested in the people who produce texts. The writers. And even in professional literary studies, when scholars and professors teach and write about Emily Dickinson or Walt Whitman, for example, they do so, commonly, about the woman, the man, the writer Whitman, that historical figure (who actually lived and breathed and had an intentional project in his poetry) not simply some detached text.
And don’t even get me started on Ernest Hemingway.
In memoir, in contrast, we pointedly, purposefully read for the person. If the person is a non-writer, or not a professional, anyway, but rather someone notable and of interest for other reasons, we hope for a good and interesting conversationalist who knows how to tell a story. To the degree that we get more, some genuine prose style, we begin to approach aesthetic delight. Is what we get in the memoir true? From the non-writer, the only espoused reason for the memoir is a “true account,” at least as that person sees it. But is it really that – a true account? And if we have reason to think not, entirely?
The writer-memoirist presents a more complicated case. We want to know about the life, or a selected portion of the life, if for no other reason than that the perhaps-not-famous writer, by writing about it, purports the life to be interesting, or that he or she will make it interesting by virtue of how they write about it. That is, the text in conjunction with, or independently from, the life will hold meaning for us. If, then, we find a problem in the text – an aporia, let’s say – we have to consider where it resides – in the text, in the life? Are they meaningfully separable?
Case in point, Joyce Carol Oates’s 1995 essay “They All Just Went Away.” In it, Oates reveals her youthful fascination with entering abandoned houses — the more recent the abandonment, the better.
This was a long time ago, yet it is more vivid to me than anything now.
This was when I was too young to think the house is the mother's body, you have been expelled and are forbidden now to reenter.
Always, I was prepared to see a face at a high, empty window.
She comes to focus on a “broken family” of one of those houses, the Weidels, lower income than her own. In true Oates fashion, the story of the Weidels is lurid, as is her fascination, including physical abuse, arson, disappearances, cheap behavior, and what Oates takes as the lies of Ruth Weidel, her high school contemporary.
The essay begins, in its very opening sentence, with a curious uncertainty of memory: “I must have been a lonely child.”
Loneliness being a feeling, not a fact, it’s curious that Oates claims no knowledge of having experienced it, as if somehow detached from her childhood consciousness, instead speculating about it as if it were someone else's life. Might she launch an investigation into her childhood loneliness, to discover evidence of it? If she uncovers a diary entry, will she then know she was a lonely child, but otherwise not? Is that how it works?
After recounting that Mr. Weidel is reported to have beaten Mrs. Weidel and the children, Oates reflects:
Have I said that my father never struck his children, as Mr. Weidel struck his?
….
In fact, I may have been disciplined, spanked, a few times. Like most children, I don't remember. I remember Mr. Weidel spanking his children until they screamed (though I wasn't a witness, was I?), but I don't remember being spanked by my parents, and in any case, if I was, it was no more than I deserved.
“Never.” “May have been.” “Like most children, I don’t remember.” “No more than I deserved.”
I myself was a lonely child. I received, too, as a child, some very small number of times, a mild potch in tuchus from my father, who loved me dearly. (Yiddish – I think you get it.) I recall easily, without any garbled uncertainty, both the feeling of loneliness and the fact of the spanks.
Finally, after briefly befriending Ruth at school and quizzing her somewhat mercilessly about the current facts of her broken family life, Oates relates the following:
Another time, after lunch with Ruth. I left a plastic change purse with a few coins in it on the ledge in one of the girls' lavatories, where Ruth was washing her hands. I don't recall whether I left it on purpose or not. But when I returned, after waiting for Ruth to leave the lavatory, the change purse was gone.
Excuse me?
Oates doesn’t “recall whether I left the change purse on purpose or not?”
And if it wasn’t on purpose, then why did she return only “after waiting for Ruth to leave the lavatory”?
If our task as readers were psychoanalytical talk therapy, this is the point in the session when our therapist stand-in might offer some initial response to whatever were Joyce’s final comments and then continue, “But I want to go back to when you said . . .”.
Our task is different, though, if not entirely so: “They All Just Went Away,” was collected in The Best American Essays of 1996.
However we may understand and evaluate the quality of Oates’ essay, I think there’s reason to argue it isn’t on the basis of its reliable autobiographical representations, either of events or of Oates. And if that’s so, then there is basis to argue that the essay’s value isn’t to be found in its status as memoir at all. It is rather what we now call creative nonfiction, in which the nonfictional element presents itself as a kind of field over which the more telling creativity meaningfully plays out, no differently from fiction but that the purported autobiographical nonfiction is instead now employed as an additional element in creative, artful meaning making.
Next week’s Close Read: Missing in Memoir 2
AJA
Really interesting: and the *absence* in memoir is even more of a *presence* than in fiction, because we know that at one point there really was something there. In fiction, that’s not the case; we fill in the gaps with our knowledge of narrative conventions. (By the way, that’s one of the best scenes in the history of television.)