In “The Past Is Never Over,” Larson calls the reliability of memory into question. He discusses the “layered simultaneity” (36) of writing about the self: the past is constructed in the present because writers’ processes of remembering, re-remembering, editing, and intervening on their pasts and memories occurs in the present. These processes can occur intentionally or unintentionally, but regardless, they comprise “the prime relational dynamic between the memoir and the memoirist: the remembered self and the remembering self” (Larson 36). In one example, Larson claims that “it is the memoirist’s current examination of his younger self that propels the book beyond a chronicle of adolescence to a memoir of self-disclosure” (37)--here, it seems that direct action by the remembering self is responsible for creating the crucial self-reflection we discussed in our last class meeting.
Larson also reminds us that the “therapy of memoir….reopens old wounds” (40)--in the act of writing about the self, the writer’s normal existence in linear time is disrupted; the past is transported to the “changeable present” (41) and vice versa. The writer might feel as though they’re experiencing the past all over again, as if the remembering and remembered self has merged. In Larson’s example about “detaching now from then” (42), the writer projects an “other self” (43), using both first and second person to describe her two separate subjectivities. While this is certainly a strategy for separating now from then (and an emotional one--it seems that the writer talked about her other self in the second person to insulate herself from difficult memories), it also seems to me that it’s a blending of the two; the reader becomes aware that an “I” and “she” exist from the same writer’s perspective, and it’s also a very direct intervention into the narrative of remembered self.
I have a lot of big questions about all of this, and I don’t think it’s reasonable to ask everyone to answer all of them, so perhaps we can each choose the questions from the following list that feel the most troubling, significant, and/or urgent to sort through:
- Is intervention by the remembering self into the past inevitable?
- What sort ethical responsibilities do you feel in representing the past? How might this change if present-subject intervention is inevitable?
- If we agree with Larson that different times merge in memoir writing, and that memory is constantly shifting, what does this mean for things we tend to value, like the notion of an authentic self, honesty, and truth?
- To repeat Larson’s questions on page 33: “But what is the truth? Where does it exist?”
- How often do you question your own memories? How might this doubt come into play when you write about yourself, if at all?
- In your own writing, how does time seem to function? Where is the present and where is the past? Why?
- How does your remembering self interact with your remembered self in your writing? Do you intentionally split yourself into multiple selves, or do these selves seem to merge?
- How do emotion and trauma play a role in the politics of remembering, writing about the self, and representing the past?
And some questions about “The Difference Maker”--ideally, I think everyone should tackle at least one of these questions:
- In Daum’s essay, how do you read the relationship between past and present? How does time seem to be working for her as a writer? What about memory?
- What are the selves you see operating in Daum’s essay? Do you think the dynamics of remembering/remembered in her piece are there intentionally? How do you see her relationship with herself change throughout the piece?
- Daum isn’t, of course, only representing herself--her husband and several kids who she tried to mentor appear in the essay. How might she have navigated representing them, and how does this compare to how she represents herself?I'm excited to read your thoughts!
I question my own memories frequently. There are a few select memories that I remember very well, but have become very aware of and internalized knowing that memories can be built upon by other people and altered based on personal perception, etc. Because of learning the psychology of it and always valuing stories, writing, and reading, I have thought about the understandings and presentation of self/selves. This is related to the ethical responsibilities of truth, honesty, and authenticity because the intervention of present-self in past memories is inevitable. How to appease both past and present self is hugely troublesome and important to me.
ReplyDeleteAn example of what I worry about in writing about my past that is anything older than four years ago. Throughout middle and high school I was a quiet, sad, reclusive person. Since undergraduate and now graduate school, however, my personality and emotional tendencies have changed. Now I go for funny instead of sad… and while I want to write about my earlier years I don’t know if I can honestly or successfully recapturing those years. I think the worry for accurate representation is what has stopped me from writing about these times and feelings. How to accomplish this, I do not know… which is why I am drawn to the past versus present self and how honesty and proper representation is so important. At this point in time I think that I interact too much with remembering self as opposed to the remembered self. Anything particularly sad or vulnerable I will now coat with humor or heavy reflection and a then versus now self, unintentionally.
Moving into Daum’s essay the relationship between past and present seems very tied to one another. Beginning briefly with a discussion about how she has never particularly wanted children seems timeless and relevant to both her past and present selves. I am not sure if it is because her stance doesn’t change or how she wrote it, but I trust her and her memories. The self-reflection seems absent from actual events in the essay and then when it is present it is a remembering self that still feels the same as the remembered self. She is conflicted throughout but not in her own feelings, more so how she feels she is supposed to feel. Mentioning dissonance directly, this is her recognizing her relationship with herself then and still now. Not coming to peace with the lack of children present in their lives by the end, Daum does accept that regardless of her own internal struggles she is privileged to have consistency. “Difference Maker” was a great example of representing past and present self when there is no opinion change despite life and event changes (like getting married and working with children, for example).
I remember the first time I read this essay and how floored i was but the realization/claim that, "The very act of remembering my alter may alter what did occur." It seemed to threaten everything I thought I knew about the life I'd had. It was something that in theory felt less true, but once I started writing became inevitable because, "Memory cannot exist without a present stage for it to unfold." I became in writing the filter and the teller and the subject, and I could not unknow what I knew. The way things have played out give me a vantage point that I cannot not see from. Unless, and I'm not even sure this would be possible, one were to simply report dry facts with no story, I think it's inevitable. I'm not sure I am answering any of the questions, but, I do feel more responsible or hold more responsibility to the now narrator, the one remembering. The past me feels less accountable, she didn't know we were going to write this, she is just living her life. The me now is the crazy one who's trying to raise ghosts and ask them to sit down for dinner. It's my job in deciding to write to play by the rules and do as much as a I can to adhere to the truth. And where we are going to stray form it, I am more interested in the examination of why I feel inclined to stray, or why the memories get muddy. I think it's all part of the same beast.
ReplyDeleteOn, The Difference Maker. I'm not convinced she has gotten to or is using that vantage point on this particular topic. I don't know anything about her now life though. I think it's more a musing on time just as much as it's a musing on parenting. She's in a constant battle with time, or how she is supposed to feel at a certain time and such. Maybe that's why I feel unsettled by the perspective, because it's unreasonable to think that anyone might every have the right vantage point while still alive. I'm super curious on everyone's thoughts on the closing statement about Matthew. I was unsure who has or does not have the luxury in the end there? Is it her or is it him. He's not confused about what a shit deal he has. Is that to her a good vantage point. Her room to be confused seems the most plaguing of all to her. Maybe I'm reading it wrong though.
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ReplyDeleteI love the questions, Madison. Here’s the one I’d like to think through here: How does your remembering self interact with your remembered self in your writing? Do you intentionally split yourself into multiple selves, or do these selves seem to merge? For a lot of years, I’ve been teaching my cnf students that there is a distinction between the now and then-narrators, or to use Larson’s terms, the remembered self and the remembering self. His essay blows up that idea. He quite rightly argues that the past is always seen through the feelings and agendas of our present selves, and of course this must be true. One check on this is what Larson calls the “first level of remembering, “ or documentary evidence of what happened—letters, comments from others who were there, fact-checks, etc. He also suggests some tricks to draw the distinction between now and then-narrators, including shifting tenses or point-of view (“I” to “she”). But while I’m willing to accept that these two narrating selves merge, I still think they are distinct because each has their own motives. The motive of the remembered self that attempts to narrate the sexual abuse I experienced at summer camp at age 10 is desperately trying to re-see that world through moments and description. This is difficult work, and while my perception of Camp Anokiji is absolutely filtered through how I feel now about that time—and what I know about its tragedy—it is a largely sensory task. The motive of the remembering self is to steer the work toward possible meanings. This requires not just a reflective stance—what do I know now that I didn’t then?—but a different language for talking about it. This is not the language of the senses but of the mind—more abstract than particular. For me, these a distinctly different ways of looking back.
ReplyDeleteI do see both of these selves at work in “Difference Maker,” and like a lot of wonderful essays, I see them in a dance together, from beginning to end. Time and again, we see Daum shifting from the narrative account to reflection, amending the meaning of what happened with what she knows now. Take the passage on p. 77 when writes about her compulsion to build her weeks around “mundane tasks,” a paragraph that ends with this: “And thought I wanted to believe that I was just bored, the truth was that the decision not to have children was like a slow drip of guilt into my veins.” It’s hard to mistake that narrator for anyone but the now-narrator. And I also think that the writing of that sentence was driven by a distinctly different impulse than the ones before it.
I am intrigued by the idea of “layered simultaneity, time over time” and also this notion that there are “many-voiced narrators” who “speak, listen, and interact.” To that end, I like your question:
ReplyDelete“If we agree with Larson that different times merge in memoir writing, and that memory is constantly shifting, what does this mean for things we tend to value, like the notion of an authentic self, honesty, and truth?”
I’ve felt an evolving sense of truth and memory in writing creative nonfiction. At this juncture, I feel that I owe myself the truth that feels truest. When I read other cnf, I assume the writer feels the same. So I guess, for me, those things we value are personal, and the authentic self and honesty and truth are individual. I would say that we as readers owe the writers our full buy-in, because I think any cnf writer finds a place with those things for themselves, and we in turn should accept that in order to engage with the truths they are sharing with us. I think that, because different times merge, the written word is true in that snippet of time, so it will always exist in that particular realm, and thus, always be true, even if a different truth exists at another time. I guess I’m also answering your next question from Larson: “But what is the truth? Where does it exist?” It exists in the moment, and there are many truths.
For Daum’s essay, I’m thinking about your last question because I read an interview with her a while back. She was discussing her essay collection that “The Difference Maker” also appears in, and the question asked had something to do with her portrayal of the other “characters” in the essay. The main thing I remember about it is that she said something to the effect of not telling Matthew’s story because it wasn’t hers to tell. So I would assume that she approached the writing with that in mind: that she was telling only *her* story and would portray the other people as being a part of her story, if that makes any sense. This is sort of the selfish nature of the genre—anyone else who appears in our writing is really just a character, and subject to our own perspective of them. The best we can do is be true, be careful, and be as kind as possible.
ReplyDeleteI sort of ignore time when I write and tend to gravitate toward using present tense even when I’m occupying the past. I like imagining myself within the memory I’m trying to reconstruct on the page. I don’t try to change the memory while I’m there, but my experiences and removed perspective inevitably change it. The tricky part for me is attempting to layer my point of view now with my point of view then. Going off of Nicole’s response this insertion of my remembered self into my writing makes me slightly uncomfortable. I don’t know how much of this remembered self is retrieved and how much of it is just a false construction. This constructing from memory thing is most troubling when I think about doing it with people other than myself, particularly those that I wouldn't ask permission from. But, I’m thinking that maybe I can be more comfortable writing about people, if I just make it clear that, who they are in the essay, is warped and shaped by how I see them and know them.
I think Daum’s essay is occupied by the two selves, remembered and remembering. Throughout most of her essay, her remembered self (and remembering self?) holds onto the guilt of not having children and feels that her marriage is unstable. Daum’s remembering self has to travel through recollecting this stage of her life, anchored to her foster advocacy of Matthew to uncover the driving questions beneath the presence of a “Central Sadness.” I think that the awareness of Daum’s remembering self grows in strength in the retelling of this stage of her remembered self’s life. I think this is strongest on pg. 86 where Daum begins to move from these recollections of her remembered self to the driving questions beneath the surface of the “Central Sadness,” and leads into the possibility that, “perhaps it wasn’t even sadness we were feeling but simply the dull ache of aging” (86).
I agree with Larson that memory is constantly shifting. Madison poses the question: what does this mean for things we tend to value, like the notion of an authentic self, honesty, and truth? The mutability of memory necessarily complicates all of these ideas. In my view, honesty does not change because honesty implies a filter, implies the world as I see it now. I can be honest while simultaneously being wrong. A psychologist would probably say my honesty is limited by the degree to which I lie to myself, so—there's that. Truth viewed through shifting memory is necessarily elusive. Accepting this goes a long way toward explaining the human impulse to grapple with the same big questions throughout life and throughout the history of human existence. Truth is specific to self and specific also to a particular moment of self. As far as the notion of authentic self, I don't believe the essence of self ever changes but to completely tune in to that is, I think, the concept of enlightenment. I'm more of a Frankenself that seems always to be mutating toward my present inclinations. The beauty I see in all of this is permission to be wrong, to voice a truth of the moment with full knowledge that it refuses to be nailed down. I reserve the right to change my mind.
ReplyDeleteDaum's position in time (the relationship between her past and present selves) seems of particular influence because of the Central Sadness that is attributed throughout most of the essay to her husband's desire for a child that conflicts with her own lack of desire. In a way, the possibility of that child dies at about the age when this essay seems to have been written. The essay operates on one level as grieving. I think her reflective stance is a form of grief and she is interrogating her own idea of childlessness through her various attempts to make peace with it. Grief often results in reflection but I think there is an alternative to reflection that is pure acceptance. Acceptance doesn't make for good essays—it just is.
I think that authenticity and truth are potentially more of a problem than honesty. Honesty and a completely subjective experience of events don’t conflict with each other, as long as one doesn’t project their subjective experience as objective. While we might interpret our memories as objective truths, there are plenty of ways of signalling in our writing their status as subjective while not granting primacy to either the subjective experiences of other people, or some imagined objective reality.
ReplyDeleteSince the past is constantly retroactively constructed, I think truth is an odd concept. We may mean truth as in objectively verifiable occurrences in a plainly materialist sense, but that’s not how we actually experience the world around us. I think that generally speaking the only truth that has any relevance is personal and subjective. It’s like “If a tree falls in the woods and nobody is around to hear it, does it make a sound?” If no one is involved in creating meaning of the material world and events within it, then in what sense is that idea of truth separate from the real in the phenomenological or Lacanian sense? If only one person is involved in witnessing and creating meaning, then wouldn’t their understanding be the only relevant source for truth? If multiple people are involved and they each have their own understanding, then that truth is again necessarily either subjective and personal to each person or found in collaboration from an interaction of subjective understandings. Our subjective experiences may be disproven by some external evidence, or may be inconsistent with each other, but none the less, we don’t actually live and interact on the level of material reality so much as a reality negotiated and interpreted through language.
I think that authenticity is almost useless as an idea, but it also seems kind of inescapable. The idea of a stable singular self which can be authentic is, I think, a fantasy. We have identities on a linguistic level: I am white, I am transgender, I am a grad student, I am a socialist... I can communicate a sense of who I am and what I believe through these words, but in being those things, in performing self in a way that conforms to the definitions of those words, I am constructing my identity in accordance with a series of culturally available conventions. So is it authentic to perform outside that framework, to fight against how identifiers create and limit who we are, or is it authentic to perform identity in such a way that doesn’t question it’s own constructedness?
While I do question my memories of events, I guess I see memory as being more useful in terms of how we can construct the present. Larson focussed on how our memories are constructed in the present, but at the same time, our memories, our ability to make sense of our experiences are how we are able understand who we currently are. My experiences as I remember them are what I use to understand who I am. Even if my memories are absolutely wrong, I am a consequence of those memories, not the reality that was exceeded by those memories. I also think that people engage in gaslighting more often than they recognize in fighting for the primacy of their memory. So recognizing both reality and memory as necessarily subjective allows for truths in excess of mere empiricism.
DeleteMaybe Daum’s identity as someone taking care of foster kids and “little sisters” was incredibly narcissistic. But how much of that narcissism and her objectification of the kids is a result of the need to make sense of herself as a character in her story while respecting the autonomy of her other subjects? As I read it, I think that either in the act of writing this essay, or maybe in the act of volunteering to take care of foster kids, she constructs them as props to her own identity. She is in the position of deciding absolutely who they are, and what their interiority looks like. When she says that she “knew (Matthew) was lying, and (she) told him so” it kind of signals to me that she already saw herself as the arbiter of their interiority, before the act of writing them. Even if she wasn’t, I think that one of the take-aways of the discussion on the subjective, retroactively constructed nature of memories ought to be that writers should respect the independence of the interiority of their real-world subjects. If you are writing a real person, you shouldn’t get to decide upon what’s going on in their minds, only what you can witness.
I’m way tired, sorry if I was a bit rambly and offtopic.
And after refreshing the page, I see that Jackie already said more or less what I did about honesty and truth, but much more succinctly. Dang.
DeleteGood questions Madison. I guess when I write I go into "writer mode," which incorporates the remembering and remembered self, as well as the narrative fashioner and the meaning-maker. Sometimes digging deep into my memories does alter--I'm sure--what happened, especially if you asked the other parties involved. For me, the curse of narrative means shaping memories into coherent stories, which, ultimately, diverge from the plot-less existences we call life. Daum's essay does have a story--one eloquently pointed out by Jackie--and yet so much of her essay is this cerebral exploration of the issue. I kept thinking that by the end of the essay she would adopt Michael, but this me aiming to narrativize her story. Problematic, I know. Additionally, it was interesting for me to see how Daum ended her essay, not with an image but with a realization, and an unexpected and moving one at that. Bittersweet, almost.
ReplyDeleteI love this idea of being truthful yet mindful of how our ‘truths’ are contingent—it forces us, our readers, our audiences to be mindful of the whole picture, rather than retaining simply what was said that one time. I have to agree with Larson that the intervention of the remembering self into the past is inevitable. I am starting to recognize this more in my varied responses to books and movies, regardless of genre. For example, I read Pride & Prejudice every summer. For nearly twenty years I’ve read the same book and every, single, time—my response is different, details are discovered that hadn’t resonated with me before. It seems that what I needed to read, whatever was plaguing me at the time, was affected by my reading at that particular time. I’d like to think that memory recall occurs in the same fashion. Virginia Woolf is often quoted in regard to how our memories are altered by our remembering, thus posing the question of whether we can trust memory. I think this rings true in Larson’s ‘layered simultaneity, time over time.’ Like Emery, I am sensing an evolved sense of truth and memory in regard to CNF.
ReplyDeleteAs far as when I write memoir, the first step until recently has been to purge all of the details out of my head onto the page. Sometimes, especially if these events are recent, I have to let them rest—walk away for sometimes years before I can approach a piece with a fresh mindset. Catharsis is always the initial motivation, but often this writing remains private, unshared. I have to deal with the emotions of the situation and I can’t believe the authenticity of the moment in that first purge of feels—raw, is a good start, but what about the why; the why is what completes the emotion and I am still trying to figure out how to complete the emotion in CNF. I love what Woolf says, “I can only note that the past is beautiful because one never realizes an emotion at the time. It expands later, and thus we don't have complete emotions about the present, only about the past.” I think this relates to what Larson is talking about in the blending of a remembered self and remembering self to show truth in memoir.
Over the past couple of years, I’ve been trying to push myself to try different approaches to personal, memoir-type writing. It’s in these more experimental pieces that I see that time is never linear. Like Daum, these memories are weaved from present me seeking insight, to reflective me—someone I sometimes chat with, someone who, lately, doesn’t seem to want to take my calls—and even further to the narrative of an Allison I thought had died long ago. I feel this is how I saw Daum’s pattern of writing, most evident on pg. 78-9 when, after her miscarriage, she declares to her husband that she didn’t want a baby. Daum begins from the remembered self,
Delete“As I was saying all this, I was lying on the cheap platform bed we’d bought in anticipation of a steady flow of out-of-town company. The curtains were lifting gently in the breeze. Outside, there was bougainvillea, along with bees and hummingbirds and mourning doves. There was a grassy lawn where the dog rolled around scratching its back, and a big table on the deck where friends sat on weekends eating grilled salmon and drinking wine and complaining about things they knew were a privilege to complain about…”
The sensory details from this remembered self, ‘then’ narrator help me, as a reader, to feel the weight of her words to her husband, to understand the heaviness and darkness of them on the moment, “I’d thought I could talk myself out of it, but those talks had failed” (78). This lament strikes me as coming more from the remembering self, or ‘now’ narrator. This weaving of perspectives continues on as she wonders about the validity of everything they, as a couple, had envisioned as a ‘happy’ life. Which, is another element I take issue with, but won’t digress here.
Regarding the last statement about Matthew, like Erin, I have to question the motive or purpose of her ‘moral’ to this narrative. “But if there’s anything Matthew taught me, it’s that having certainty about your life is a great luxury” (87). It seems to be quite the loaded statement and kind of asshole-ish to place such a heavy realization on the shoulders of a foster child she supposedly cared for. Actually, I took issue with a few of the actions she chose to include in this narrative, but, anyway—in phrasing this ‘realization’ in this way, I don’t get the sense that she’s self-aware at the time of her writing this piece. From the last exposition about Matthew’s new placement—his choice to purchase food with his birthday money rather than a luxury item like before, compounded by his responses in the car—I got a sense that he felt pretty fucking certain about his life, which was no luxury at all. Nothing about his defeatist demeanor leads me to believe anyone would think that certainty is a luxury. Not to mention, her husband seems pretty defeatist as well. Perhaps luxury is ironic. It kind of seems like a cheap move to try and squeeze out a ‘moral’ to this piece.
I constantly find myself wishing I could remember the past more clearly, and I am inclined to distrust my memories, so I am aware of the ways my efforts to remember and write about the past impact my actual memories. I can also feel my memories being shaped by my efforts to understand them. I try to always make this effort clear in my writing and admit when I might be wrong about something in an effort to show the tension between what I think happened and how I feel and what may have actually happened. This seems like the natural thing to do, but that may be because I think I’ve read Larson before and that his ideas about memory have already had an impact on the way I think about this. (This was definitely worth reading again, though.) I also think that we see this happening in other writers’ essays and are inclined to mimic it in our own writing.
ReplyDeleteI think the remembering self is always easier for me to express than the remembered self, and this is probably a weakness I should work on. That probably stems from my doubt about the memory and my efforts to include that doubt in my writing.
In Daum’s essay, I felt a sense of remembered self (which was very uncertain and somewhat naïve in the beginning of the essay) and remembering self (which had been through a lot and learned a lot but still has questions at the end of the essay), but as I read back through the essay to decide if I thought these were distinct selves, I realized that these selves are hard to separate. Instead, the remembering self is the voice telling us about the remembered self, and we get a sense of both as that happens but are also able to learn with the remembered self as Daum shares her story with us.
Having been cursed with a somewhat unreliable memory, I've done a bit of research into it in my free time. Memory is associative - periwinkle blue reminds me of my parents' countertops which remind me of my dad cooking Thanksgiving dinner which reminds me of my grandmother's yearly complaints that the turkey is dry. This is useful from an evolutionary standpoint, but can often lead to cross-referencing and the bleeding of one memory into another. On top of that, each time we recall something we strengthen the synapses between neurons, so if we remember incorrectly, it's very likely that the incorrect memory will stick around while the correct one fades. Memory is incredibly malleable, and will always be colored both by how we felt then and how we feel now. And so in a sense I think that there is only the "now" narrator, and an effort to find truth in writing is just being as open and honest about what you see now when you look back at the then.
ReplyDeleteI was really intrigued by the way Daum represented Matthew and her husband. While she was clear about her husband’s feelings and Matthew’s shit life, it never felt like she was speaking for either of them. She was giving us their feelings as she best understood them, and I think that’s really the most that writers can hope for. She has a responsibility to represent them as accurately as she can, but that’s only possible through showing us her interactions with them and telling us how she understood them, not trying to sell her standpoint as the only one.