Adventures in Memory. Hilde østby
she tells us. The memories Ullmann describes in her book are malleable. They are not static archives that hold perfect representations of things she has experienced. Because memories take many forms, we can approach them in different ways.
“Like the choreographer Merce Cunningham, I am thinking about what happens as our eyes follow the motion of a body from center stage to the outer edge. When I write, a small motion can suddenly become important, and something larger can become insignificant,” she says.
In her book she describes how she celebrated Christmas the only time she ever spent it with her father. She is newly divorced, he is a recent widower. They walk through the snow from his small apartment to the Hedvig Eleonora Church in Stockholm. The snow whirls in front of their faces and around the church spire. She describes how, for a long time, she thought that he needed her because he didn’t want to spend Christmas alone. With time, her understanding of that night changed. He always celebrated Christmas alone—in fact, he preferred it that way. It was she who needed him. The memory turns itself around and becomes another memory.
“I can’t remember if the snow really fell that way. At the end of James Joyce’s ‘The Dead,’ he describes the kind of snowy weather I am talking about. I don’t know if it’s actually his snowy weather I wrote into my story. However, it doesn’t matter; things I have read and things I have experienced have blended together; I am not writing a biographically true story,” she tells us.
Why do so many authors draw on their own memories? Maybe there is something authors can teach us about memory?
“Memory is a basic survival tool. We use it to tell stories about who we are; we are our own stories. Our love stories help us build our romantic relationships. On birthdays and anniversaries, people make speeches about things we have done. We tell stories about ourselves and about each other, on a personal level, on a national level, and an international level, as cultural stories. But our memories are actually fragmented, special, and creative! Memory is a force that both creates and preserves, because it writes new stories at the same time as it maintains our lives in little time capsules. For me, as an author, it is an exciting and unreliable tool. I often remember incorrectly,” she says.
What Ullmann does is not unlike what all of us do, all of the time: we make things up, structure and transform, and suddenly our memories include things we haven’t really experienced—just read, seen, or heard. Like James Joyce’s description of snow that wove itself into the tale of the walk to Hedvig Eleonora Church. Memories are unreliable.
“I wanted to see what would happen if I allowed us to emerge in a book as though we didn’t belong anywhere else. For me it was like this: I remembered nothing, but then I came across a photograph of Georgia O’Keeffe that reminded me of my father. I began to remember. I wrote: ‘I remember,’ and felt unnerved by how much I had forgotten. I have some letters, some photographs, some scattered scraps of paper, but I can’t say why I kept precisely those scraps rather than others, I have six recorded conversations with my father, but by the time we did the interviews he was so old that he had forgotten most of his own and our shared history. I remember what happened, I think I remember what happened, but some things I have probably made up, I recall stories that were told over and over again and stories that were told only once, sometimes I listened, other times I listened with only half an ear, I lay out all the pieces next to each other, lay them on top of each other, let them bump up against each other, trying to find a direction,” Linn Ullmann writes in Unquiet, almost as a report on how she has used memory as a method.
The debate about what autobiographical fiction really is, compared to autobiography, has been going on for a long time—long before Karl Ove Knausgård wrote My Struggle. But the raw material in both cases consists of memories. In autobiographical fiction, memory triumphs over hard sources and personal experience has greater value than objective fact. Memory, with all its creative misinterpretation, gets top priority.
“I discovered that memory isn’t a locked trunk full of true recollections, but a creative sponge—it absorbs everything around it and renews itself,” says Ullmann.
Ullmann’s book is an exploration of the conundrum of constructive memory. What is actually true of what she remembers? While her father was alive, he talked to her about Bach’s cello suites and described the saraband, one of the movements, as being like a painful dance between two people. Ullmann’s book was inspired by their conversations about Bach. The book has six parts, just like the six parts of Bach’s fifth cello suite.
In her book, Ullmann writes: “To remember is to look around, again and again, equally astonished every time.” She probably wasn’t aware of how right she was from a scientific point of view. Our personal memories are always reinventing themselves; new details are added all the time. She says that turning her memories into a novel involved both artistry and hard work. “Nothing is more boring than listening to someone who has just woken up tell you about a dream. It only means something to the one telling it. A dream can be an interesting experience, but it’s not art. It is the structure that makes it into something more,” she says. Memories, too, need conscious elaboration to become literature. What she thought of as a fragment of a memory might have become several pages as she reconstructed it factually and artistically. The title of Unquiet may very well allude to the fundamental nature of memory. Memories are not static, not authoritative, not solid as mountains. They are diffuse, they move around, they collide; they are like seahorses dancing restlessly amid the seagrass. Memory is constructive; it picks up fragments of an experience and builds a framework, a story about what happened. Once, that experience was fresh in our minds. But our senses, our attention, our ability to interpret, and our memory did not manage to absorb everything down to the smallest detail. Still, when that memory is retrieved, it seems as if it is intact. The memory itself becomes a new moment in consciousness, although as from a parallel reality. But beyond our perception, both hard work and artistic effort lie behind each memory.
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