Abstract
This chapter is devoted to an analysis of texts which use paratextual devices such as extensive footnotes, corrections, or multiple narratives in order to accentuate the complications of writing memory. Texts analysed include the works of Mary McCarthy, George Perec, Dave Eggers, and Martin Amis. By analysing texts that bring to the foreground the memory processes at work in autobiographical writing, we gain insight, not only into the nature of experimental texts of this type, but into autobiographical writing in general. In the second half of the chapter I discuss autobiographers’ search and encounter with the family archive. This is an area which draws attention to the writing moment and to the attempts the authors make at discovering and reworking the past. Among the texts discussed are works by Vladimir Nabokov, Sally Mann, and Linda Grant.
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Notes
- 1.
Michael Sheringham, French Autobiography: Devices and Desires. Rousseau to Perec (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), p. 1.
- 2.
Sheringham, French Autobiography, pp. 1–2.
- 3.
Gerard Genette, Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation, trans. Jane E. Lewin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), pp. 4–5.
- 4.
Genette, Paratexts, pp. 1–2.
- 5.
Genette, Paratexts, p. 2.
- 6.
Sheringham, French Autobiography, p. 2.
- 7.
Mary McCarthy, Memories of a Catholic Girlhood (London: Penguin, 1963), p. 10.
- 8.
Leigh Gilmore, Autobiographics: A Feminist Theory of Women’s Self-Representation (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994), p. 121.
- 9.
Martha R. Lifson, ‘Allegory of the Secret: Mary McCarthy,’ Biography 4.3 (Summer 1981): 249–267, p. 256.
- 10.
Gilmore, Autobiographics, pp. 122–123.
- 11.
Genette, Paratexts, p. 324.
- 12.
Bran Nicol, ‘“The Memoir as Self-Destruction’: A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius,’ Modern Confessional Writing: New Critical Essays, ed. Jo Gill (London: Routledge, 2006), pp. 100–114, p. 108.
- 13.
Dave Eggers, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius (London: Picador, 2001), p. 5.
- 14.
Sheringham, French Autobiography, p. 15.
- 15.
Nicol, ‘“The Memoir as Self-Destruction”,’ pp. 108–109.
- 16.
Gilmore, Autobiographics, p. 123.
- 17.
I have written in more detail on memory in Perec’s work in Borderlines: Autobiography and Fiction in Postmodern Life Writing (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2003), pp. 34–42.
- 18.
Sheringham, French Autobiography, p. 320.
- 19.
David Bellos, Georges Perec: A Life in Words (London: Harvill Press, 1993), pp. 548–549.
- 20.
Lifson, ‘Allegory of the Secret,’ p. 256.
- 21.
Genette, Paratexts, p. 328.
- 22.
Sheringham, French Autobiography, p. 323.
- 23.
Lifson, ‘Allegory of the Secret,’ pp. 252–253.
- 24.
Gilmore, Autobiographics, p. 124.
- 25.
Martin Amis, Experience (London: Vintage, 2001), p. 20.
- 26.
Mary Antin, The Promised Land, Introduction and Notes by Werner Sollors (London: Penguin, 1997), p. 66.
- 27.
Douwe Draaisma, Forgetting: Myths, Perils and Compensations, trans. Liz Waters (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2015), p. 8.
- 28.
Aleida Assmann, ‘Canon and Archive,’ A Companion to Cultural Memory Studies, eds. Astrid Erll and Ansgar Nünning (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2008), pp. 97–107, pp. 97–98.
- 29.
Michael Sheringham, ‘Memory and the Archive in Contemporary Life-Writing,’ French Studies, 59.1 (2005): 47–53, p. 47.
- 30.
Vladimir Nabokov, Speak, Memory (London: Penguin, 1969), p. 9.
- 31.
Linda Grant, Remind Me Who I Am, Again (London: Granta, 1998), p. 30.
- 32.
Sally Mann, Hold Still: A Memoir with Photographs (New York: Little Brown and Company, 2015), p. 174.
- 33.
Assmann, ‘Canon and Archive,’ p. 103.
- 34.
Sheringham, ‘Memory and the Archive in Contemporary Life-Writing,’ p. 49.
- 35.
Marianne Hirsch, The Generation of Postmemory: Writing and Visual Culture after the Holocaust (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012), p. 247.
- 36.
Michael Ondaatje, Running in the Family (London: Picador, 1984), p. 25.
- 37.
Assmann, ‘Canon and Archive,’ p. 106.
- 38.
Harriet Bradley, ‘The Seductions of the Archive: Voices Lost and Found,’ History of the Human Sciences 12.2 (1999): 107–122, p. 116.
- 39.
Bradley, ‘The Seductions of the Archive,’ p. 116.
- 40.
Bradley, ‘The Seductions of the Archive,’ pp. 108–109.
- 41.
Bradley, ‘The Seductions of the Archive,’ p. 119.
- 42.
Sheringham, ‘Memory and the Archive in Contemporary Life-Writing,’ p. 53.
- 43.
Draaisma, Forgetting, pp. 189–190.
- 44.
Draaisma, Forgetting, p. 191.
- 45.
Draaisma, Forgetting, p. 192.
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Gudmundsdottir, G. (2017). Forgetting and the Writing Moment: Corrections and Family Archives. In: Representations of Forgetting in Life Writing and Fiction. Palgrave Macmillan Memory Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-59864-6_3
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