ANEXO VI: Recogida de datos Indicadores pueblo II

In order to examine memoir as a “genre”, we must first examine its common characteristics and identify memoir by what it is not. “Memoir is not autobiography—a recounting of linear events from birth to death—but rather a selected aspect of a

life” (Murdock 120). In autobiography, “The life is prior to the writing” (Larson 77), and the writing itself is “indiscriminate” rather than “selective” as in a memoir (Larson 2). Autobiography emphasises summary rather than close examination of life events; the genre “generally avoid[s] introspection and scenic drama and, instead, summarize[s] the significant people and events in the author's life (Larson 12). Autobiographies examine a past that is “over and done with and here it is” (Larson 61) and a self that is “a consequence of one's deeds”, while memoirs instead “present the self as a person disclosing the mutability of the self” (Larson 169).

In other words, if I write a narrative of at least novel-length, chronologically progressing from my birth to February 2011 and giving an overview of key life events, emphasising how those events have shaped me into the successful person I am today (Folkenflik 224), that is an autobiography. If I instead write a narrative concentrating on my experiences from 2008 to today, focusing on immigrating to New Zealand and going into great personal detail about the effect it had on my family and me, that is a memoir rather than an autobiography.

The generic conventions of memoir make it a genre prone to a great deal of authorial subjectivity. Memoir writer and critic Maureen Murdock notes that “for a piece of writing to be called a memoir it must include self-reflection” (119), and critic Jerome Bruner notes this takes form in “a narrator here and now telling about a

protagonist of the same name, there and then” (44-5). Memoir’s analytical approach to the self shows how the self can be split between the authorial self and the narrative self —a characteristic which memoir and metafiction have in common. Critic Robert Folkenflik notes that such writing makes a “distinction between the ‘I’ who is talking and the figure in the past who is described,” and that the narrative “take[s] shape as a way of dealing with the otherness of the figure in the past” (234). This introspection is a “prime stylistic distinction” of memoir and “a give-and-take between narration and analysis, one that directs the memoirist to both show and tell” (Larson 23).

Memoirists’ identification of this split between selves “is both an assertion of difference Rawson 6

and an assertion of identity” (Folkenflik 234) done for a specific purpose: to “connect the past self to — and within — the present writer as the means of getting at the truth of his identity” (Larson 24).

Murdock notes that there are “elements found in most memoirs: remembered event, universal theme, relational style, emotional truth, intimacy, humor and self- reflection” (120). Remembered events, emotional truth, and self-reflection are all highly subjective and prone to distortion, which problematises the idea of “truth” in memoir. However, despite their highly subjective nature, most readers will approach a memoir as a true story from the outset because “[a]cts of story-telling are individuated not just by story-tellers but by the mode of telling” (Lamarque 93), and the reader’s response to a memoir is a critical facet of the genre.

Linda Hutcheon notes that readers’ genre expectations “determine the validity and even the status of the novel's reality” rather than “the subject matter or any supposedly real referents,” and she further writes

There does seem to be a difference in the reader's imaginative process, an increase in the active element of that experience, if the referents are

acknowledged as fictive—by the word ‘novel’ on the book's cover, or even more overtly, through narcissistic thematization [metafiction].

(Narcissistic Narrative 97)

The reverse is also true; if a reader approaches a work labelled as an autobiography or memoir, that reader will accept the work as a true story, oftentimes regardless of its contents. Stephen King is primarily a novelist, but the full title of King’s memoir, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft, alerts a reader to its status as a memoir, written to a different standard and with a different set of rules than King’s fiction. Before reading any of the novels in King’s Dark Tower saga, a reader knows the books are fictional. Worlds populated with fantastic monsters, doorways between dimensions, and death- dealing characters like the eponymous Gunslinger require the reader’s suspension of disbelief. With On Writing, as with all autobiographies, memoirs, and journals, something else happens instead: rather than suspension of disbelief, the reader

undertakes a suspension of incredulity. At first suspension of disbelief and suspension of incredulity may appear to be identical, but the key difference between them is the duration of suspension.

While reading The Gunslinger, readers accept Mid-World, Roland, and the events of the novel as real. Hutcheon notes, “As a reader begins a novel, […] words take on a unity of reference and create a self-contained universe that is its own validity (and ‘truth’)” (Narcissistic Narrative 88), and the “author’s guiding rhetoric”, “narrator’s mediation”, and “accumulation of fictive referents” work together to “force [the reader] to bridge the gap between his own world and the potential fictional universe” (140). However, after finishing a novel, a reader will put it down, drag himself out of that fictional world, and accept that nothing which happened within those pages ever really

happened.

While reading On Writing, readers accept King’s account of his childhood as real, and they accept the world he’s created within its pages just as easily as they accept Mid- World in The Dark Tower saga. After finishing King’s memoir, a reader will put it down, and it’s here that the mental process differs significantly: even after putting On Writing back on its shelf, the reader continues to believe in the memoir’s reality.

Because of this suspension of incredulity, memoirs must be manufactured in a manner that maintains the reader’s trust. Larson notes that “while the fiction reader is supposed to trust the tale more than the teller, that adage doesn't fit memoir” (153), and Murdock writes, “The reader has the right to expect that what you claim to be true will be accurate to the best of your recollection. Remember, memoir is about honesty, not about how you appear to others” (Murdock 147-8). In other words, in order to maintain a memoir’s status as non-fiction, to maintain the reader-narrator/author bond, and to ensure that suspension of incredulity remains intact, authors must not violate the reader’s trust by deliberately falsifying aspects of their memoirs. Authors who do violate their readers’ trust in this manner face very dire consequences.