Académique Documents
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Culture Documents
141
Richard Hoffman is writer in residence at Emerson College and the author of Half the House:
A Memoir (2005), Interference & Other Stories (2009), and the poetry collections Without
Paradise (2002), Gold Star Road (2007), and Emblem (2011).
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Even setting aside the naïve reader who believes that the process of writing a memoir
is 1. having an interesting life, and 2. writing it down (that’s what they always say to me
after a reading or a panel: “One day I’m going to write it down”), there are many other-
wise sophisticated readers who choose to believe that the memoir is a species of journal-
ism, albeit gussied up with some techniques borrowed from fiction writers. It seem to
me more accurate to see the memoir, as it has evolved, as a subgenre of the novel, a kind
of first-person historical novel, a dramatic work that agrees to be bound by fact. What is
being explored is not only what happened, but how one has remembered what happened,
including the gaps in the story and one’s lapses of memory. The contract with the reader
one makes, by calling a work a memoir, i.e. nonfiction, is that you honor what actually
took place and write about it, and about the process of remembering it, with honesty.
Although readers want the same pleasures (what Aristotle called delight and instruc-
tion) from a memoir as from a work of fiction, they approach the two very differently.
I am more than willing to suspend my disbelief in order to be entranced by a work of
fiction, but I approach a memoir, because it claims to be nonfiction, with a certain skepti-
cism. A novel need only be consistent with its own imagined world. A memoir needs to
be consistent with the world of facts and events that we share.
One more thing remains to be said before we begin a consideration of who or what is
represented by the ninth letter of the alphabet. Here I want to issue a disclaimer, caution-
ing you to hold what I say here in a kind of suspension. The terms I’ll be using, terms like,
“the engaged I,” “the reconstructed I,” “the reminiscent I,” are provisional terms of my
own. There may be better names and, more to the point, other kinds of “I”s. We’re not
trying to create a filing system for ourselves as readers; rather we’re trying, as readers,
to look at the full potential of this most important and basic component of first-person
narrative. It’s better to think of these terms as refractions through a prism; besides, these
various “I”s shade off into one another as we move from one part of a text to another. In
most authors you’ll find a tendency to shift through these different first-person strate-
gies like moving through so many gears as the story’s changing terrain makes different
demands. Many authors primarily toggle back and forth between a couple of the pos-
sibilities while others use the full array. Let’s have a look.
The engaged I: I want to start with a use of the first-person pronoun I call the “engaged
I” because so many memoirists also start with it, and not because it is a primary kind of
narration. It does have certain virtues, as we’ll see in a moment, that are especially suit-
able for beginnings.
The “engaged I” makes overt editorial or political statements on behalf of a worldview,
belief system, or social/political agenda. We see what the author is engaging in the work:
injustice, ignorance, heresy, misunderstanding, life-threatening illness. It is often a bold
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statement of the reason for the work. Here, for example, is Maxim Gorky expressing his
moral indignation and engagement with the issue of childhood poverty and cruelty:
Sometimes when I recall the abominations of that barbarous Russian life I ask myself
whether it is worthwhile to speak of them. And, with renewed conviction, I answer—
yes, it is; for they are the vicious, tenacious truth, which has not been exterminated to
this very day. They represent the truth which must be exposed to its roots and torn out
of our grim and shameful life—torn out of the very soul and memory of man.
Maxim Gorky, Childhood
Another kind of engagement is that of the writer with his material, with the labor to
translate the vision to the page:
Not long after our arrival, we went to a bookshop; she asked for an English-
German grammar, bought the first book they showed her, took me home immediately,
and began instruction. How can I depict that instruction believably? I know how it
went—how could I forget?—but still I can’t believe it myself.
What’s more, because every memoir, on one level, is also about the act of remember-
ing, this “engaged I” sometimes struggles with memory itself:
I am sorry to be so vague, especially because I am proud of my good memory, and
many have remarked upon it, but all I can remember is sitting on my one suitcase
(I travel light) and waiting for hours to get going. Anywhere.
Neither can I remember how I got to the pier, although obviously it was on the
boat from Paris.
So, what I’m calling “the engaged I” appears most often early in the story, in the first
chapter or even the prologue to a memoir, and then gives up its place to “the reminiscent
I,” “the reconstructed I,” and others we’ll talk about in a moment. Because “the engaged
I” is often didactic, a little of its use goes a long way. Too much or too often and you’re
haranguing your reader who, even if he or she agrees with your view, is no longer in the
thrall of your storytelling.
The reminiscent I invites us to accompany the narrator in her remembering. The simplest
form of this is a sentence that begins, “I remember . . . ,” or, “I recall . . . .” Here the narrator
views the past at least mostly from the vantage of the present. In any case, this “reminiscent I”
straddles two time frames—one foot in the present, one in the past. It is the most usual,
probably because it is the most natural, form of the first-person that memoirists use.
When I first sat down in that great sea of tedium I thought somebody at the Times
was trying to make me feel humble about working for the paper that printed all
the news that was fit to print. Everything seemed aimed at making me feel like the
smallest fish in the biggest pond on earth.
I never had to fight with him, never got stepped on in the way my brothers did. I also
say it because I know the range of my own anger and determination, and my own
awful, unswerving stubbornness.
Mikal Gilmore, Shot in the Heart
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This is a simple and useful tool for filling in gaps in the story. You either remember what
you imagined to be the case when you were a certain age, or you announce “I imagine . . .
now,” meaning that you acknowledge the limits of your knowledge as a writer, and that
you’re going to give us the following scene courtesy of your imagination.
In the hospital room as my father told it all to me I could see the journey through
his eyes: Mrs. Macek moving before him, her shoulders resolute, and before her the
tall figure of Dr. Macek and more distantly, the moving shadow of Pisa. The forest
floor and the mountain fields were a combination of snow, puddles and mud, and
it was cold and raw. Sometimes at the edge of the snowy meadows, they could see
footprints where the border patrol had just been.
Joseph Hurka, Fields of Light
The documentary I is an EYE, really, and not much else. This may be the eye, view,
or vantage of a “reconstructed I” but it is different in the intensity of its connection to
what is going on. This is a narrator who is at one remove from the scene, watching,
and not filtering what’s seen through any feelings or interpretations. It is as if the cam-
era is on the shoulder of the narrator, merely recording what is visible as she walks on
the street, stands in a room, watches and listens. What the reader gets is the place, the
events, the other people. The “documentary I” gets its power from the complete lack of
commentary, and from a tight focus and careful selection of what’s being shown to us.
Afghan rugs. In the 1980s, Afghan rugs, which had drawn their designs from age-
old tradition, developed new patterns: helicopters and tanks.
Any first-person narrative, but particularly memoir with its insistence on at least the
subjective veracity (i.e. honesty) of the tale it tells must engage the reader on several levels
to be successful. The memoirist, like the novelist, must take pains to create a multifac-
eted, emotionally three-dimensional character whose name is I. He or she must be con-
tinually aware of the gap between what the narrator knows, what the reader knows, and
what the character—I—knows, and how to make use of those understandings to create
trust and empathy in the reader. Making use of a number of first-person strategies gives a
story complexity, texture, and authenticity, and results in a dramatic work that will satisfy
even the most sophisticated reader.
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MULTIMODAL COMPOSITION
Audio Memoirs: StoryCorps
StoryCorps is a nonprofit public service project to record the stories of ordinary people.
Since it began in 2003, over ten thousand people have recorded interviews of family
and friends through StoryCorps. Those interviewed get a free CD, and their stories also
appear regularly on National Public Radio and are archived at the Library of Congress,
creating what has become a vast oral history of everyday Americans recalling impor-
tant moments in their lives. In this sense, StoryCorps is a kind of audio memoir project,
to encourage people to record their memories as part of a collective portrait. Visit the
StoryCorps Web site www.storycorps.org to listen to some of the stories. Consider to
what extent they resemble written memoirs in terms of looking at the past from the