thanks for the memories: part i
Compulsive memorialising, Annie Ernaux, and the half-truths we tell ourselves
There’s this memory I have: I’m two years and maybe three-hundred and fifty-five days old. My mum is eleven months pregnant with an eight-pound-nine-ounce baby, and my dad has brought the big camcorder out, a sign of the times and of the age of the memory. I’m stood underneath a calendar at the end of our long galley kitchen and my dad is explaining to the new baby that he’ll be here soon, due on my birthday, and that they do not know the sex but that I have already decided he is a boy (I was right). We sweep the old house. I show him his room and mine and jump on the bed. Sometimes I think that I only remember this because I have watched it on video so many times, but at no point in this memory am I looking at myself from a camera’s perspective. It is all from my own eyes, the way I saw it when I was almost-three, the bedsheets consuming to a little body. The general consensus is that first memories form around three to four years old, though some research suggests as early as 2.5 or as late as 4.7. I’m convinced that something in me won’t let anything go.
There’s another memory, although it could be a dream. I’m stuck on the stairs in the old house, the one before the house where we made the video, and I can’t find my toy octopus. We only lived in that house until I was 18 months old, so I’m almost certain it was a dream. But when I look at old photographs I realise I did not imagine the toy octopus. I have retained nothing before this point, and until the memory of the video camera, it is all just vague fragments and primal feelings: being held by my father at the wedding of a relative, helpless, all dappled sunbeams and stained glass and greenery that merges into each other seamlessly, like the point-of-view moment before a character dies and the lens fades into white. After this, everything is in glorious technicolour. Precise. Stunning high-definition detail.
This is why it is so frustrating to me when I ask loved ones whether they remember something that is so vivid in my mind that it could have happened yesterday and they look at me as if I have spawned a third eye. I have unbelievable quantities of information filed away in the brain equivalent of a plastic bag full of plastic bags. Everything is organised chaos, but it is all there, from dates and quantitative data to words and emotion. I remember the date I got my cycling proficiency certificate in year six, which I then proceeded never to make use of again (October 23rd 2009); scripts of entire episodes of TV that I can quote almost verbatim; the passwords to my Club Penguin (RIP) and Marapets accounts that I haven’t used since I was a child. It is a skill that brings endless bemusement to the people around me. I appreciate its many merits, but it can also be incredibly painful. I think people assume that because my long term memory is so sharp, my short term memory will be too, which is the opposite of true. I have ADHD, and I frequently forget appointments and things people have told me just a moment ago. More sinister still is that people tend to assume that because my memory of the past is so intact, I must be lucky enough not to hold any sort of lasting trauma. While my own experiences have not induced any amnesia, the acuity of the memory compounds how distressing it is.
Much of my academic work centres around memory. My undergraduate dissertation was on Holocaust memory, while my master’s thesis was on postmemory of the Pale of Settlement. Even when I veer away from my core academic interest of 20th Century Francophone Jewish Studies, there is always something I am trying to unravel about knowledge and remembering: I briefly flirted with the politics of doubt, deception and epistemology of the Spanish Golden Age (which I have written a little bit about here, if that sounds interesting to you). Predictably, I am infatuated with the work of Annie Ernaux. My own Francophile tendencies aside, there are few others who take such a forensic approach to memory, deconstructing it and putting it back together again, playing with the very fabric of it. That she has managed to maintain this approach well into her eighties feels like proof not only that the long-term memory faculties of the brain are a muscle to be trained, but also that excavating the most tender parts of your past and externalising them can be an infinitely valuable exercise. The main character of the Yale school of Trauma Studies, Cathy Caruth, posits that trauma involves endless aporia. These render traumatic memory unknowable, unspeakable and inaccessible in words.1 We can describe many of Ernaux’s experiences as traumatic, from a backstreet abortion in L’événement (Happening), to domestic abuse in La honte (Shame), and perhaps to a lesser extent, teenage sexual humiliation at a colonie de vacances in Mémoire de fille (A Girl’s Story). I doubt Ernaux would linger too long on that description, in the nonchalant Gallic way which tends to shrug off the anxious, Anglo-American pathology-speak of trauma theory. Instead of grappling with the dialectic of ‘calling attention to the existence of an unspeakable secret and [deflecting] attention from it’ within the work, Ernaux lays bare the reality of the unspeakable, marking the end of decades of quiet rumination.2 Ernaux started my two favourite works of hers, L’événement and Mémoire de fille, as well as her Nobel Prize-winning Les Années (The Years) simultaneously in 1999, recounting memories from the 50s and 60s half a century later, only publishing the latter two in 2016 and 2008 respectively. For Ernaux, it seems the deflection of the unspeakable is outside the frame of the narrative, in the waiting, the processing, the incubating until it comes to the fore.
Alternatively, perhaps the deflection is in a narration that is always skewed in some way, unsure of whether you are hearing the tale from behind the video camera or in front of the TV. Will we ever be sure that we are our own story’s reliable narrator? Rom Harré conceptualises three different selves with regard to autobiography and metaphysics: Self 1, which concerns the perceptive and proprioceptive relation between a person and their material environment; Self 2, which concerns the person’s thoughts and reflections about these perceptions, and Self 3, the way in which the person communicates these in social interactions. A principle of autobiographical writing, he argues, is that the author-narrator tends to remain within the realm of Self 2, performing a selfhood that is ‘generally singular, as an actually unique totality of attributes.’3 In this way, the narration of an experience is filtered both through our limited human ability to absorb our environment in its entirety, and then again through our limited range of processes to reflect on it outside of our own previous experiences. Our capacity for remembering interferes with this even further – it is impossible to retain everything in a memory, and we have to fill the aporia as we go with half-truths and embellishments that we tell ourselves. Ernaux is acutely aware of this. She never claims to know all the answers, and is candid when things become hazy in her mind. But it is something that I did not realise until embarrassingly recently. I like to trust the narratives other people tell me, to give them the benefit of the doubt, but even some of the deftest autobiographers mistrust their own recollection.
Even when I can articulate something I experienced some time ago, sometimes I feel like I am lying to myself. Ernaux, like me, pores over her own diaries and writings in search of past truths. But even for a chronicler like her, in ‘ostensibly, the safest, most honest record of a self,’ she sees ‘her internal narrative being shaped by external pressures, such as laws. Her most private experiences, she sees, were not really her own at all.’4 It would be naive to believe this is all passive, however. Read through my private Twitter account from 2017 and you find a lot of Ernaux-esque first initials of former friends, crushes and flames, no full names but precise concurrent detail about the conversations we had and the way they appeared to me. It reads a lot like I am reporting on my own life as if it was something happening to me and not something in which I actively partook: I was, of course, still a teenager. But when I look back on it, I remember that I had a certain agency in considering the small but important audience of my friends and internet acquaintances in the presentation of my teenage angsts and ennuis. When I read my old written journals, whose audience is me and me alone, I see a lot of the same turns of phrase, and a lot of attempts to sell myself to a wider readership, or a future version of me that I cannot conceive of yet. I cannot even be sure that I constitute a reliable narrator to myself, even when I am writing in present tense. What is unspoken is a desperate need to impress, to make myself feel heard and my experiences sound real. Maybe I’m delusional, but I feel a great sense of kinship between eighteen-year-old me and the eighteen-year-old Annie as relayed to us in Mémoire de fille.
What is left unsaid merits as much scrutiny. The negative space still speaks to us, and can often lead us further towards a ‘totality of attributes,’ a more complete picture. Of course, I can’t get anywhere close to a totality when I think about the video memory. I was so young I could barely process the most rudimentary material aspects of my environment, let alone complex emotional detail. Was my mother scared? I was a particularly difficult birth, and she spent 36 hours in labour. Was my father determined to capture this part, with so many advances in technology at his disposal? 9/11 had happened five months before; New Labour was in power and consent for the Iraq war was being manufactured. With a young child and a baby on the way, the (understandable, if reactionary) impulse to reify and protect the family at all costs had never felt more tangible to them. This is all conjecture, of course, but the evolving ability to reveal new layers of memory as you become older and wiser feels like looking back after stepping into a new dimension. Although humans exist in a three-dimensional space, we are able to perceive two dimensions with our eyes, while merely intuiting a third. The fourth dimension is time. Maybe it is only with time that we can truly see a third dimension to our experiences.
Then there are the pieces of the past which are more within reach. These, too, can be almost as tricky to parse, let alone talk about, despite our temporal proximity to them. The speakable-unspeakable dialectic becomes even more concrete when I feel myself desperate to signpost that something happened, but as soon as the specifics come up for air, they get stuck in my chest like a terrible case of acid reflux. I think of the men whose initials I have museified and about whom I have never told the whole story, the earth-shattering betrayals from teenage friends, cruel things I said and did when I was hurting, and the ritual humiliation inscribed in secondary education. Did I remember it correctly? Am I spinning a lie? Do I even have the right to talk about it? I’m writing a novel at the moment. It’s only half fiction, and intentionally so. The inability to tell which half is the only way I can purge some of this.
There is an odd habit of mine which, in the end, undercuts all of this: archiving, or hoarding, if you want to put it in less positive terms. I cannot bear to dispose of old files, journals or online accounts that I used to cultivate when I was younger, in case I need to remember something left behind by my memory. At the root of it seems to be a fear that I will have no solid proof that things happened the way I remember them. A particular symptom of OCD that I have inherited – it runs in my family – is memory hoarding. Having a compulsion to rifle through years and years’ worth of memories and map them out in my own head, trying to make sure to relive them in exact chronological order, has the perverse opposite effect of making me doubt that any of it ever happened. Past moments that I ruminate over become like well-thumbed photographs that have faded through persistent fiddling. Shining a light on them through a multiplicity of different selves has worn them down. I would love to know if Annie feels the fear, too.
Plage en Normandie, Jean Claude Duteil
Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative and History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996) <http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/warw/detail.action?docID=3318659> [accessed 23 October 2020].
Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence--From Domestic Abuse to Political Terror (New York: Basic Books, 2015), p.1.
Rom Harré, ‘Metaphysics and Narrative: Singularities and Multiplicities of Self’, in Narrative and Identity: Studies in Autobiography, Self and Culture, ed. by Jens Brockmeier and Donal Carbaugh, Studies in Narrative, Volume 1, p. 62 (presented at the Narrative and identity, Amsterdam Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company, 2001).
Madeleine Schwartz, ‘A Memoirist Who Mistrusts Her Own Memories’, The New Yorker, 13 April 2020 <https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/04/20/a-memoirist-who-mistrusts-her-own-memories> [accessed 6 June 2023].