roachboy

you know, this "issue" has bugged me for a while.

what exactly is a "true" memoir?

why are fantasies that you might have or have had any less "true" than things you may have done in 3-d for example? stuff you make up is as "true" was other things to the extent that the memoir is about your life and your life includes all kinds of stuff that is basically in your head. if you wanted to make a "true" account of your experience, that experience would include a vast array of material that was only "true" because it happened somewhere in that strange zone that links your 3-d vector space and the interpretations you lay over them continually---unless you imagine that perception is itself not--uh---mediated---in which case, it is YOU who are trafficking in fiction.

think about it another way: when you are making a sentence you think of something to do with the sentence that comes out---do you hear sentences before you say them or write them? if you don't, then none of them "represent" anything, they all POSIT and so from a certain viewpoint all sentences are false--or the question true/false has no meaning at this level.

a memoir is a collection of sentences. it does not document the world, it documents a sequence of mediations---experience processed through the genre conventions of memoir, memory processed through them: the involve the construction of a narrator, which is NOT the same as the fiction of an "i" that moves through any particular experience...so the viewpoint from which a memoir is told (that of the I) is necessarily a fiction--unless what constitutes the "real" of the narrator is the process of writing the narrator--but sentences cannot account for the modalities through which they are produced (try it) so that doesn't work either.

so what?

everybody lies about their experience all the time--almost all of our stories are lies at one level or another--it's probably MORE accurate a representation of the status of the information inside a memoir that MOST of the "factual" material turns out to be false--or dubious or suspect. and the MOST accurate memoir, the one that most closely documents your experience, would be indeterminate as to "true" or "false"---because it'd be both, continually---but that would be flattened, irrelevant because they are your experience--and so they'd be TRUE to the extent that your experience--really---is your trajectory along a shifting boundary between "true" (what corresponds to phenomena in the world, to be naive about it) and "false" (the inverse)--so this boundary IS your experience--but record of it necessarily false because the experience of moving along this shifting boundary and that of writing about moving along that shifting boundary are NOT the same. they can't be. they aren't.

what can be "the same" is a one-dimensional account of certain aspects of your experience, the vailidity of which is a function of style. the realism effect, call it.

you could even say that a memoir is predicated on the suppression of the experience it is supposed to record because it substitutes a linear narrative form and causal frame for an experience that is neither. this because it substitutes one temporal relation for another.


where'd the idea that your memory is like a camera and that it records events come from?
and who the thinks that what a camera records is not problematic?
any footage is a VERSION of events, none of it is entirely "true" none of it is entirely "false" there is uncertainty.
there is always uncertainty.

you just have to deal with it.

the fiction is that this is not the case.

__________________
a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear

it make you sick.

-kamau brathwaite