Ajuste / Reemplazo de módulos electrónicos

According to Judith Barrington, ‘memoir is […] a kind of hybrid form with elements of both fiction and essay, in which the author’s voice, musing conversationally on a true story, is all important.’33 One crucial aspect of memoir, then, is the voice that narrates

30 _{Edvige Giunta, ‘“My stories aren’t all true”: Memory, Writing, and Salvation in Vertigo’, in Louise}

DeSalvo, Vertigo: A Memoir (New York: Feminist Press, 2002), pp. ix–xxix (p. xxiv).

31 _{Smith, A Poetics of Women’s Autobiography, p. 46.} 32 _{Smith and Watson, Women, Autobiography, Theory, p. 24.} 33 _{Barrington, p. 22.}

the story. The author of memoir engages in a conversation with herself and the reader in an attempt to shed light on a particular section of her life. In the process of writing, the way the subject negotiates her historical and geographical position is as important as the truthfulness of the events she narrates. According to Smith and Watson, memoir is, however, also a relational genre. It is ‘a mode of life narrative that historically situates the subject in a social environment, as either observer or participant; the memoir directs attention more towards the lives and actions of others than to the narrator’.34 Through memoir writing, the subject gains selfhood by means of connecting her own experience to the experience of the collectivity. Memoir, thus, is an all-encompassing narrative that values both the self and the others. It is a genre that moves roundly. It starts from the self, circumnavigates the broader collective’s life experience, and returns to the subject who, eventually, is enriched and empowered, and whose identity is constructed by her relation with the collective into which she is inscribed. Within this process, the memoir reveals its bevelled, digressive nature. This is because it reproduces, better than any other genre, the narrative flow of memory, and the fragmented structure of memories. Giunta highlights the relationship between the form of the memoir and the way the author perceives her position as precarious in relation to her self-assertion. As she explains – by differentiating memoir from autobiography:

I understand autobiography to be the writing of a life as perceived from a standpoint of achieved cultural as well as personal awareness and certainty. […]                                                                                                                          

34 _{Smith and Watson, Reading Autobiography, p. 198. For a definition of life writing, see also Susanna}

Scarparo and Rita Wilson. Scarparo and Wilson argue that life writing is an overarching term that includes ‘narratives that cross the line between fact and fiction’. What makes life-writing narratives of particular interest is their ‘different strategies for negotiating hybrid identity/identities’. Therefore, life writing is an effective narrative that allows the writing subject to create an in-between space apt to articulate his/her quest for identity. Across Genres, Generations and Borders: Italian Women Writing Lives, ed. by Susanna Scarparo and Rita Wilson (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2004), p. 2.

Unlike autobiography, the memoir – or at least the memoir I write about and teach – lends itself to fragmentary and discontinuous narratives, which bespeak cultural as well as personal dislocation and fracture.35

The memoir, in fact, does not present a homogenous, linear, and complete panorama of memory; conversely, the narrative of memory is represented as blurry, patchy, foggy, and discontinuous. The story often lacks a beginning and/or ending and also the chronological order is subverted. Women writers challenge autobiography through memoir writing by questioning their position in the world, as women, writers, and as split between different cultures. The way the author decides to explore her life, then, tells the reader something about the author’s perception of her own existence and the reasons that underpin the writing itself. As Gail Godwin writes, ‘shapes are the way in which we know who we are and where we are in our universe. Show me the shapes and forms a man give to his life, and I will tell you whether he is a master or a victim of that life.’36

All these definitions address the importance of the writing voice, shift the focus from the sovereignty of the ‘I’ to the process of its identity formation, and reflect on the form of the genre. What we also need to consider, however, is the crucial role memory plays in the process of the writing subject’s evolution and transformation. In her critical work about the growth and affirmation of the genre of memoir in the American literary scene, Romeo highlights that the term autobiography is constituted by the words αύτός, βίος, γραφή: self, life, and writing; memoir, instead, is characterized by the presence of memory. In particular, it is possible to witness a ‘passaggio, scivolamento dell’attenzione dalla vita reale, e quindi in qualche modo dalla verità, al ricordo e quindi

35 _{Edvige Giunta, ‘Teaching Memoir at Jersey City State College’, Transformations, 11.1 (2000), 80–89,}

as quoted in Caterina Romeo, Narrative Tra Due Sponde, p. 56.

alla memoria’37 (passage, a shift from the focus on real life, and therefore, somehow, from the truth, to the memory and the act of remembering). We move from the telling of a life to the remembering of a life. Memoir is indeed a strategy of life writing that is identity-construction oriented. The memoir takes shape as a mode of rereading one’s life as informed by memory. The memoir, more importantly, accounts not for a single truth, but for a collective truth that is pieced together by the author through a process of contestation and negotiation between private and collective memory. In this way, the referential autobiographical ‘I’ leaves its place to an ‘I’ which is constructed in relation to the ‘Other’. The authorial truth asserted by the autobiography seems to provide the reader with a finite product, whereas memoir is a project of collective creation, in which the reader participates in the writer’s identity formation. Relating to the author’s experience, the reader can question his/her own life. The subject takes shape in front of both the writer and the reader as – following Lacan – the ‘Other’ is the locus where the ‘I’ can come to life.38

Definitions of memoir as opposed to autobiography address also the importance of the shift from truth to the authenticity of memory. In an interview with Romeo, Louise DeSalvo stressed how:

Memoir is about memory, it’s about remembering, as opposed to autobiography, which is about verifiable facts. I say to you: ‘When I was a little girl I was sitting on the steps of Sacred Heart Academy waiting for my mother, and I remember sitting on the steps and the steps were concrete’. That’s how I remember it. The steps were hard, I remember feeling how hard they were. That’s memoir. If you are writing autobiography, you go there and you check the steps. You verify things, you check them out. [Memoir] … is about the stories that we hold in our head about our lives, and that’s our reality. My reality is not what really                                                                                                                          

37 _{Romeo, Narrative tra due Sponde, p. 53.}

38 _{Jacques Lacan, ‘The Mirror Stage as Formative of the Function of the I’, in Écrits: A Selection, trans.}

happened when my father and I had that fight. My reality is the way I remember it. And so … memoir … is about what we remember and how we remember, and how we misremember, and how we even change our memories.39

This statement seems to dissolve the relevance of an absolute truth and of an absolute ‘I’ as the main subjects inherent in the process of life writing. It is not the finite subject that matters, rather the process of the making of that specific subject. Memoir, then, originates at the intersection of the events narrated, the way those events are remembered by the writer, and how their rewriting affects the writer’s life. In the process of memoir writing, the author looks at herself, at her own ‘Other’ who she discovers anew. The ‘Other’ of the memoir becomes real as ‘through writing, we revisit our past and review and revise it. What we thought happened, what we believe happened to us shifts and changes as we discover deeper and more complex truths’.40 The memoir, as a mirror, returns the image of the writer as shaped by fragmented memories. As Gardaphé reminds us, ‘memory comes in pieces’.41 Therefore, the way the author gravitates around these pieces of memory and crafts her narrative out of these describes how ‘with these fragments’ she has been able to ‘shore her life’.

The kind of memory employed in the practice of memoir writing responds to what has been defined by Laplanche as ‘afterwardness’.42 The memory retrieved in the present is not a mere appropriation of the past. Rather, it implies a negotiation between the events recalled and the subject who is re-living them in the present. This specific act of remembering includes in the ‘now’ people, objects, events, and emotions that were

39 _{Caterina Romeo, ‘Caterina Romeo intervista Louise DeSalvo’, in Origini – Le scrittrici italo americane,}

ed. by Maria Rosa Cutrufelli, Edvige Giunta, and Caterina Romeo (= tutte-Storie, 8 March-May (2001)), pp. 7–9 (p. 8).

40 _{DeSalvo, Writing as a Way of Healing, p. 11.} 41 _{Gardaphé, Leaving Little Italy, p. 95.}

42 _{Jean Laplanche, ‘Notes on Afterwardness’, in Seduction, Translation, Drives, ed. by John Fletcher and}

unknown in the ‘then’. Memoir, thus, is a process of possible reconciliation, a site of reconstruction, where the present subject meets and interacts with the past subject. The subject who remembers is recalling the past at a present time, thus, unfolding a retrospective narrative that accounts for a reinterpretation of the past in the present. Experiences are remembered and misremembered, enacting what James Olney, in relation to his analysis of St Augustine’s Confessions, has called ‘processual memory’.43 As Olney says:

The weaver’s shuttle and loom constantly produce new and different patterns, designs, and forms, and if the operation of memory is, like weaving, … processual, then it will bring forth ever different memorial configurations and an ever newly shaped self.44

DeSalvo’s idea of remembering and misremembering echoes Olney’s idea of ‘processual memory’ as a metaphor of the act of weaving. To remember and to misremember contributes to the constant rewriting of memory and to how this, in turn,

generates a never ending forging of new selves throughout history. As DeSalvo states in her interview with Romeo, ‘we exist always as several different selves.’45 This statement is reinforced by DeSalvo in another interview in which she insists that

The major reason that you can […] write memoir your whole life […] and you can write about the same subject your whole life […] is that there is no single portrait. […] [Portraits] shift and change through time. That’s the reality. We’re at different stages of the life cycle each time we write.46

43 _{James Olney, Memory & Narrative: The Weave of Life-Writing (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1998),}

p. 20.

44 _{Olney, Memory & Narrative, p. 20.}

45 _{Romeo, ‘Caterina Romeo intervista Louise DeSalvo’, p. 7.} 46 _{Caronia and Giunta, p. 1.}

DeSalvo’s idea of memoir – as opposed to autobiography – then, makes it clear how every subject is entitled to his/her own truth and that the recollection of memory is not a painless and tidy process. Rather, it responds to the idea of ‘postmemory’, as explained by Marianne Hirsch. ‘Postmemory’

characterizes the experience of those who grow up dominated by narratives that preceded their birth, whose own belated stories are evacuated by the stories of the previous generation, shaped by traumatic events that can be neither fully understood nor re-created.47

‘Postmemory’, thus, foregrounds the burden of the inheritance of an emotional baggage deriving from a haunting past passed down from one generation to the next. Because this past is lived through the stories of our forebears, we can understand how ‘postmemory’ also enables subjects to make sense of memory, not through a mechanical method of recollecting memories, rather ‘through an imaginative in-vestment and creation’.48 With regard to Italian American women, the memoir is a literary expression that allows these women to acknowledge the fractures created by the opposition of two distant worlds and the (im)possibility to make these coexist organically in one dimension. Through the practice of memoir, which demands a negotiation between past and present, authentic and truthful, mechanical and processual modes of retrieving memory, Italian American women attempt to create an osmotic process between these polarities to grapple with the way pre-existing narratives are reflected and translated in the process of their Italian American hybrid formation. It is, then, possible to understand that for marginalized and displaced subjects – among whom are women and migrants –

47 _{Marianne Hirsch, ‘Past Lives: Postmemories in Exile’, in Poetics Today, 17.4: Creativity and Exile:}

European/American Perspectives II (1996), 659–86 (p. 659).

the memoir, as a site of reinvention and negotiation, becomes a means of empowerment and identity quest.