Consciousness, Literature and the Arts

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Volume 3 Number 3, December 2002

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Necessary Fictions: Memoir and Self-Making

by

Jennifer Hansen

Gettysburg College

            Frances Mayes begins the memoir of her painful childhood as follows: “At the frontispiece of childhood, a white goat pulls a painted cart.  A long-haired goat brushed to shine, with a garland of violets around its ears.  True red cart with wooden wheels.  I am standing up in it wearing a sundress: a little Charioteer of Delphi . . .”(Mayes 1997, 131).  Though memoir can support a writer’s fantasies about what could have been, or what should have been, in the end, memoir is bound to the truth of what did happen.  Mayes’ imagines what the frontispiece of the book of her childhood ought to have looked like, but when she gets down to telling her story, she tells us the uncomfortable details of what she actually lived through.  “I wanted to be a child. . . I knew from stories and friends the concept of childhood.  Magic and fairies and castles and the family going on family trips in the car over the river and through the woods.  Picnics at the beach and family reunions and holding hands around the dinner table for silent prayers.  I wanted to be a read-to child with a bedtime and warm milk and snow days . . .” (132). The wish to have been the “read-to child” is crushed under the weight of her memories: “[v]iolent nights: nothing to do except face each other. Southern Comfort, recriminations, and if-onlys.  Therefore, childhood, that time I knew I was entitled to, was impossible” (132). 

Memoir deals with truth, unlike fiction that deals with fables, or philosophy that entertains possibilities.  Yet, how meaningful is it to talk about “truth” in connection with the memories of one’s life?  How much are we truthfully remembering what has taken place in our lives, and how much are we reconstructing, remaking, and reordering the events of our lives in relation to our hopes for the future?  What I will ultimately argue is that memoir, like philosophy, provides us with necessary fictions, something akin to Immanuel Kant’s transcendental ideas, rather than the mere fictions of art.  These necessary fictions, which are neither arbitrary nor merely fictitious, provide us with the structures we desperately need to make sense of our lives.

Following Aristotle’s dichotomy, and therefore hierarchy, in the Poetics, memoir stands in a closer relation to history than to philosophy or poetry.  Poetry is more philosophical than history, claims Aristotle, since “its statements are of the nature of universals, whereas those of history are singulars” (Aristotle  1451b 7-8).  Universal statements are embodied in Characters, who represent “distinctive qualities” such as goodness.  Characters represent what humans could be, or ought to be, rather than what they all too often are.  In telling the story of her life, its singular events lived by a unique and concrete person, Mayes’s work fails to reach the level of the Aristotelian poetic or philosophical, since it is mired in the actual.  Furthermore, because memoir, on this reading, is too bogged down by in world of the particular, then we ought to conclude, if we are following Aristotle’s Poetics, that memoir cannot be a cathartic experience for the reader.  The reader of memoir, it would seem, cannot find herself in another’s story, because the memoirist does not “simplify and reduce [the story] to a universal form” (1455a 8-9).  Or does she?  Because it does not portray the universal element in the unique tragedies of concrete persons, on first glance it would seem that memoir does not serve for its audience as a means for personal catharsis. Therefore, we must ask why it is that memoir has such popular appeal?  Why are we drawn to the personal stories of others, others whose lives may seem in no way like our own lives?  Perhaps we might need to expand Aristotle’s list of media that deal with the universal. 

            Memoir is the means by which memory seeks its origin.  Here origin is understood as arche, or the principle around which one orients one’s life, or from which one acts towards her proper end.  Perhaps, as in the case of Mayes, the memoirist writes in order to discover the origin of the trauma that defines her life: her parents tumultuous marriage, the drunkenness and the fighting which drew most of their energy away from their daughter.  Mayes’ writes to discover an arche from which she might also discover her future.  “I said many things to myself by the age of seven.  If I ever get out of here, I will never select unhappiness” (138).  While it is true that the events of Mayes’ life might be too idiosyncratic to represent a “universal form” of human action, the process by which Mayes’ labors to order her life through memoir is itself, I am arguing, a universal form, what I will later call a necessary fiction. The desire to seek one’s origins, to gather up the shards of memory into a unified whole, is therefore a universal human desire.  The desire for origins, for wholeness, is likewise a desire to understand oneself in time.  Genevieve Lloyd writes “[t]his unifying of the fragments of experience is epitomized in memory . . . and acted out in autobiographical narration” (Lloyd 1993, 20).  Time is the schemata through which we collect the seemingly disconnected events of our lives.  Memoir, or autobiography, is the form that unifies the fragments of one’s life after periods of trauma.  Kathryn Rhett explains, in the introduction to her Survival Stories that, “[p]art of the task of the memoirist is to present the ‘I’—the persistent, changeful self—as wholly and forcefully as possible.  For the writer, constructing the ‘I’ is part of restoring life to wholeness . . . Constructing the ‘I’ is part of surviving . . .” (Rhett 1997, 10). Hence, what we the readers find in memoir is a mechanism for ordering one’s life.

            Before turning to Mayes’s memoir in order to seek clues for how one finds a structure or form with which to order a life, I want to dwell a moment on whether my inquiry is indeed an appropriate philosophical inquiry.  After all, for many philosophers, metaphysical questions concerning the essence of one’s life are meaningless questions[1].  Ever since Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, philosophers have been engaged in dispute over the proper boundaries of philosophy.  Kant, himself, ended the “Transcendental Analytic” with a discussion of the proper terrain of philosophy in his famous metaphor of a island amid foggy banks, threatening ice bergs, and rough waters:

We have now not merely explored the territory of pure understanding, and carefully surveyed every part of it, but have also measured its extent, and assigned to everything in it its rightful place.  This domain is an island, enclosed by nature itself with unalterable limits.  It is the land of truth—enchanting name!—surrounded by a wide and stormy ocean, the native home of illusion, where many a fog bank and many a swiftly melting iceberg give the deceptive appearance of familiar shores, deluding the adventurous seafarer ever anew with empty hopes, and engaging him in enterprises which he can never abandon and yet is unable to carry to completion (Kant 1965, 257).

If we remain safely on Kant’s island of truth, then we must restrict ourselves to what lies within the limits of the island: the phenomenal world or the world that can be experienced through our senses.  Yet, as Kant points out in this passage, we adventurous seafarers will be lured off the island into dangerous and unknown terrain, moreover we will be lured into terrain upon which we will not find stable footing.  This alluring world is the noumenal realm, in which reside purely intellectual ideas, or in other words, what resides in the noumenal realm cannot be experienced through the senses.  Kant writes, “We therefore demand that a bare concept be made sensible, that is, that an object corresponding to it be presented in intuition.  Otherwise the concept would, as we say, be without sense, that is, without meaning” (260).  What lures us away from the well-traveled terrain of the island of truth are ideas which are meaningless because they cannot be intuited by the senses. Ideas such as ‘that which orders my life’ are without any sensory content.  What we do well, claims Kant, is organize sense data into objects of experience which can then be studied through rigorous scientific investigation[2].  What we cannot help but do, however, is search after the answers to questions about things that do not reside on the safe island of truth.  We desire and hope for knowledge above and beyond what is given in experience.  Though we are confronted with the actual events of our lives, events rooted in the spatio-temporal reality of Kant’s phenomenal world, we nonetheless are forced to ask meta-questions about these events, questions such as: “what do these events mean?, what do they suggest about my future?, what I can hope for?”  “…[T]he concepts of reason,” claims Kant “aim at the completeness, i.e., the collective unity, of all possible experience, and thereby go beyond every experience. Thus they become transcendent” (Kant 1977, 70).  That is, though he insists that we need to be critical of reason’s answers to these meta-questions, Kant nonetheless emphasizes that it is the very nature of human reason to seek them out. 

            When Kant turns to the “Transcendental Dialectic,” he explains that one of the functions of the transcendent ideas is to bring unity to the subject’s understanding of herself—to fill in all those details not yet experienced or perhaps not capable of being experienced.  Kant writes “they [the transcendent ideas] have an excellent and indeed indispensably necessary, regulative employment, namely, that of directing the understanding towards a certain goal upon which the routes marked out by all its rules converge, as upon their point of intersection.  This point is indeed a mere idea, a focus imaginarius . . . [which] serves to give to these concepts the greatest [possible] unity . . .” (Kant 1965, 533).  What serves as the focus imaginarius of a life is memoir.  Nancy Mairs writes “the only way I can find out is through language, learning line by line as the words compose me” (Mairs 1993, 1). 

In the writing of one’s life, one strives to give shape, organization, and form to one’s life.  The writer, as St. Augustine explains in his Confessions “gather[s] together ideas which the memory contains in a dispersed and disordered way, and by concentrating our attention we arrange them in order as if ready to hand, stored in the very memory where previously they lay hidden, scattered and neglected” (Augustine 1991, 189, X, v.18).  In memoir, the mind focuses the fragments of one’s life through the locus of memoir: the form.  However, the form, the shape one gives to one’s life is not, in the Kantian framework, something that we can discern from the experience of our life.  What makes our life hang together is not something which we take in through the senses, rather it is a purely intellectual idea, a focal point which reason gives to the mind so as to regulate, or to order one’s life.

            These intellectual ideas, however, in no way refer to anything in the world that we can empirically verify.  Transcendent ideas, like the pure intuitions of space and time, and the concepts of the understanding, for Kant, are a priori principles.  A priori principles do not correspond to real things in the world, nor are these principles “mere fictions.”  Summarizing his deduction of the pure intuitions in his Prolegomena, Kant explains “But in regard to the latter [space] the principle holds good that our sense representation is not a representation of things in themselves, but of the way in which they appear to us.  Hence it follows that the propositions of geometry are not determinations of a mere creation of our poetic imagination, which could therefore not be referred with assurance to actual objects; but rather they are necessarily valid of space . . .” (Kant 1977, 31).  The apriority gives us the necessity of the determination, and the validity comes from the fact that all subjects determine the world through these same principles.  A priori judgments are subjective universals.  Hence, one ought not conclude, in the case of space, for example, that “the space of the geometer would be considered a mere fiction.”  Rather, “this formal intuition, is the essential property of our sensibility by means of which alone objects are given to us, and if this sensibility represents not things in the themselves but their appearances, then we shall easily comprehend, and at the same time indisputably prove, that all external objects of our world of sense must necessarily coincide in the most rigorous way with the propositions of geometry” (31).  The apriori principles of the sensibility and the understanding provide us with the universal, subjective foundations for knowing the world as it appears to us—the well-traveled terrain of the island of truth—whereas the apriori principle of reason provides us with the universal, subjective foundations for making judgments in the non-empirical world—the rough waters surrounding the island of truth.  Kant cautions us not to confuse the concepts of reason, or the transcendent ideas, with the concepts of the understanding because the judgments made by the understanding refer to objects, while the judgments made by reason refer to the subject.  That is, we can never take ourselves as an object for empirical investigation. 

But what is common to all of these judgment is this: they are all of them necessary fictions.  The apriority gives these judgments necessity—all subjects will be led to make these same judgments either about the world, or ourselves.  Yet because these judgments do not correspond in anyway to things in themselves, they are, strictly speaking, fictions.  These are not “mere fictions,” that is creations of our “poetic imagination,” but the necessary structures through which all human beings must think themselves and the world.  We have no immediate intuition of either the world, or intellectual ideas such as what unifies the self.  We must always mediate our comprehension of the world and ourselves through these transcendental structures, which are not “representation of things in themselves,” but nonetheless the necessary structures with which we must all use in perceiving, understanding, and judging.

            Now that we have clarified what is meant by “necessary fictions,” let us return to Mayes’ memoir in order to grasp what seems to be the universal form, or judgment about her life, that she uses to organize the events of her life.  Reflecting on how much her own life fell short of the what a normal child’s life ought to be, Mayes makes a promise to herself “If I ever have a child, I’d say to myself, I’ll give her a normal life” (133).  If her own parents were too narcissistic to give her what any child deserves, then Mayes will take control of the situation and give to her daughter what any child deserves: a normal childhood.  Now, one could conclude that the transcendent idea, or necessary fiction, which brings into focus Mayes’ life is the idea that children ought to have childhood with “[m]agic and fairies and castles and the family going on family going on family trips in the car over the river and through the woods.  Picnics at the beach and family reunions an holding hands around the dinner table for silent prayers . . .” (132), so that she will make certain that this will be the life of her daughter.  However, as one reads on, it becomes clear that the fantasies of what a childhood ought to have been—the rosy picture of the child charioteer and her goat which should lie on the cover of her book like a fairy tale— are mere fictions.  Mayes’ best friend, the one who appeared to her to live this charmed childhood: “their house had French doors that opened onto a long porch with a swing, beds with dips in the middle like nests. Happy mother and daddy who called her by a nickname leftover from baby talk. I could not be there enough.  There was no chink.  Ribbon candy always filled the same dish on the sideboard.  We licked peach ice cream off the wooden beater . . .” tells her years later how “her mother in the kitchen had shot herself in the mouth with a rifle.  Gingerbread on the counter and her teeth stuck in the ceiling” (135).  Mayes’ fantasy of how childhood ought to have been made her blind to the principle which actually structures a life.  Moreover, her promise to give her daughter a normal childhood is broken—not because Mayes lacks the strength of character to give her daughter such a life—but rather because of tragedies which befall her daughter, tragedies that no one can avoid: the death of her daughter’s friend and the death of her horse riding instructor.  Mayes confesses: “I’m striking wet matches if I think I’m in charge of her childhood.  Fealty to the dark will be extracted” (137). 

            “Fealty to the dark,” is the necessary fiction by which Mayes orders the events of her life.  What is most traumatic is the mere fictional belief that we are in control of our lives, that we can actually be in charge of our children’s lives.  The belief that her parents deprived her of what was owed to her, a normal childhood, is a mere fictional belief, a fantasy, which will ineluctably lead her to fragmentation, to breakdowns, and to traumatic disappointments.  What will give her back wholeness is the recognition of this principle: “fealty to the dark will be extracted.”  Either we acknowledge that all “things fall apart” and that is what defines human lives, or we stubbornly hold onto the belief that what ought to be a human life is a life free of darkness, free of suffering, free of trauma.  But this latter belief will continually be challenged by the fact that we do not have control over how our lives will unfold.  Whether we “court danger,” as Mayes claims her mother did, or with white knuckles try to make life for ourselves and our loved one as charmed as possible, “fealty to the dark will be extracted.” 

The presence of light will always be interrupted by the absence of darkness.  Hope will always be punctuated by moments of disappointment.  So the writer who tries to pull together these moments of absence with other moments of presence, will find in the writing, in the structuring of the memoir this principle: while we cannot control what will happen to us, we can control what we think we were owed by the world and others.  Either we can foolishly hold onto a belief that life ought to be “normal,” that is, free from trauma, or we can recognize that life is really a series of events we have far too little control over save what we think we were owed.  Mayes’ childhood housekeeper, Willie Bell, is the one who trys to teach her this simple truth: “She offered me not sympathy, but a steady point of view.  One sass at the table and out I had to go to pick my switch in the yard.  As I stalked through the kitchen, Willie shook her head.  ‘When are you going to learn,’ she said quietly, ‘just don’t talk back’” (143).  

Mayes’ memoir, entitled “Talking Back,” does not turn out to be an indictment of her parents, nor an indictment of the world, for that matter, she is not talking back in this sense.  Instead, this memoir allows her to recover moments of “grace”—it is more a taking back, a reclaiming, than mere, sassy, back talk.  In a life held up to the fantasies of what life ought to be like, there is a nothing but disappointment.  Though no human being, especially the memoirist, can know with objective certainty what a life ought to be like, Mayes shows us the necessary fiction, the transcendent idea, by which we must all live our lives, namely “consequences are random” (143).

Works Cited

St. Augustine.  1991.  Confessions.  Translated by Henry Chadwick.  Oxford: Oxford             University Press.         

Kant, Immanuel.  1965.  Critique of Pure Reason.  Translated by Norman Kemp Smith.                New York: St. Martin’s Press.

----------------.  1977.  Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics.  Translated by Paul      Carus.  Revised by James W. Ellington.  Bloomington: Hackett Publishers.

Lloyd, Genevieve.  1993. Being in Time: Selves and Narrators in Philosophy and             Literature.  London: Routledge.

Mairs, Nancy.  1993.  Ordinary Time: Cycles in Marriage, Faith and Renewal.  Boston:             Beacon Press.

Mayes, Frances.  1997.  “Talking Back,” in Survival Stories: Memoirs of Crisis.  Edited             by Kathryn Rhett.  New York: Anchor Books.

Rhett, Kathryn.  1997.  “Introduction,” in Survival Stories: Memoirs of Crisis.  Edited by             Kathryn Rhett.  New York: Anchor Books.