Each week in our face-to-face literary courses we cover diverse content. We read books. We discuss them. We explore the works of literary theorists and see where we can apply their lens to the books that we know, and those that we don’t. This week our focus has been centred on autobiography, in our Life Writing course, and on nonsense, in the study of Children’s Literature. This blog is an opportunity for mental gymnastics, connecting threads that are frayed and perhaps should not meet, but here goes: to what extent do we really ‘know’ our past, or only the stories we tell about it?
For memory is intimate. It is unstable. We look at Georges Gusdorf, a literary theorist, and his discussion of how the construction of an autobiography, or any life writing for that matter, is a process of reconciliation. We take the fragments of our lives, the memories, and look to transform them into something with coherence. We reflect on that with which we are at peace, which we are willing to share with the world, and that which we decide does not fit the narrative.
And memory is distorted. Too many times around the dining table, I will share with my family what I think has happened, only for them to disagree. There might be multiple versions of the same event, and not only in terms of how we felt about it. People will be wearing different clothes. Different actors will be present. The subjects become objects. The weather will be different. The years and the time.
So how to approach the task of writing a narrative based on memory, when we can only sure of the accuracy of what we are writing? One way to approach it is with the view that memory is a creative faculty (Olney), rather than a retrieval system. What you write must feel honest to you in that moment. If not the details, then at least how it made you feel. You might change your mind about the feeling in ten years’ time, but be honest with the author in you in this moment. And then, is honesty in life writing even important? Who is the “I” on the page? Paul de Man, famous deconstructionist, would argue that the “I” is merely rhetorical. It is a device, a mask, that we use to persuade the reader of something. Anything.
“I am honest.”
“I am a good person.”
“I like this cake.”
Seemingly small and inconsequential statements will have an effect on the reader.
“I am honest,” and therefore this account should be trusted.
“I am a good person,” and even when I do wrong it was with good intention. Like me, goddamit!
“I like this cake,” and therefore it is not my fault that I cannot keep off the weight. We blame the sweet tooth.
No matter the extent to which we believe we are presenting the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but, our reader should only assume that they are seeing the truth of the mask, or persona, that the author presents on the page.
Meaning is not fixed.
Language, for de Man, has no fixed meaning. And in the hands of a writer of nonsense literature—think rhyme, absurdity, the grotesque, neologisms—language itself is a tool for play. Lewis Carroll is perhaps the most well-known exponent of this genre. With The Jabberwocky a staple of English classrooms, we know all about how one does ‘gyre and gimble in the wabe’. But why do it? Why take a pernickety language that learners may take a lifetime to learn, and flip, reverse it, lay waste to and multiply the meaning that words can have?
For Bakhtin, the Russian theorist, one may adopt a carnivalesque approach to literature with the purpose of upending hierarchies, to mock authority. For Lacan, there is a value to resisting the symbolic order of language. For Agamben, the act of play in literature is an invitation to return to ‘felt experience’, where we feel, and resist the urge to reflect and dissect why something felt good, to categorise and codify.
In Rushdie’s Haroun and the Sea of Stories, the author has shaped a world metaphor to rail against censorship and the suppression of free speech. This is hardly the type of topic that a child would fall in love with, but through application of the tools of nonsense he imparts an ideological lesson whilst mocking authority. Roald Dahl, famous for his grotesque imagery (think The Twits, or the disgusting appearance of the giants in The BFG) employs absurd description to mock position and signal character type. We are in no doubt that Trunchbull in Matilda is a baddie, that Miss Honey is on the side of the good.
Autobiography and nonsense literature both remind us that there is no fixed truth in words, but that we can make it for ourselves. Where memory is selective, slippery, its recall a creative act, nonsense is play at work, destabilising the very language and structure that we think we need and rely on. Whether we are destabilising authority through personal recollection, or destabilising ‘truths’ through a play on language, both forms are inventive.
For the writer, a study of both forms is a reminder of the play and freedom that this craft can contain. It is not to say that we shy away from truth, but we embrace the fragility and uncertainty that truth invariably possesses. It is not to discard all those hard-earned currencies of spelling and grammar, drummed into us from a young age and painstakingly nurtured by the squiggly red lines under errors on a word processor (which, coincidentally, I have personally turned off), but to recognise that experimenting and writing with greater freedom may lead to other truths on the page, and a new way of sharing those truths with a readership that we want to engage with.
The act of writing is not just recollection. Was I really wearing blue on the third Saturday? Did Mama really say that, and in this exact tone? How do I spell onomatopeeya? Does it rain cats and dogs, chiens and la pluie? Do dogs even visit the desert? Dessert?
Writing is also an act of freedom. Reconciling with self. Playing with words. Having fun.
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