The last decade has seen a rousing in the long somnolent genre of the memoir. In part, the memoir has returned because fiction has been faltering – has consistently shied away from the great responsibility of literature; to be truthful. Fiction, properly considered, is a distillation of an author’s impression of the world. While not meant to be factually accurate, fiction portrays the world – as experienced and understood by a single individual. For some time fiction has faltered in the task of honesty.
The audacity of falseness in most popular fiction is stupefying. In the Da Vinci Code, the protagonist has marked tendency to deliver flawed art history lectures of surprising detail after having been beaten, stabbed, and shot at and while being chased and dodging bullets. That the art history is misleading is not nearly so important as the emotional and psychological portrayal of the central character. If such a world as portrayed by Dan Brown exists, it has no relation with our own. The melodramatic action acts as a prop for the art history, which acts as a prop for the characters, who act as a prop for the melodrama. Shakespeare got much of his history wrong, but the uses to which he put his flawed history was the truth of his characters – and mankind more generally.
Slightly more literary authors like Tom Robbins follow a similar pattern. He collects odd characters and places them in surprising circumstance. They have a lot to talk and think about and so they talk and think a lot. There is generally a fair amount of sex, drugs, and drinking. In many ways, Robbins follows a model used to great effect by Dostoyevsky. The famous parties of The Brothers Karamzov and Crime and Punishment bring odd characters together to create conflict, revelations, and talk. For Dostoyevsky, however, the characters, while often bent, are rarely caricatures. The talk! The talk is of life and death, salvation and damnation. Dostoyevsky’s characters burn with heat and light, casting large shadows and illuminating whole scenes. Robbins spark and simmer, are entertaining – but little revealing. It is not the technique that is flawed, but the author.
Even our most ‘literary’ authors too often stray. Certain styles are deemed ‘serious’, certain content ‘worthy’. But style and content are tools not truth. Realist fiction does not create truth, nor does magical realism, neither any other ism. The method Joyce Carol Oates has used for decades has betrayed 1,000 other serious writers because, in short, they are not Joyce Carol Oates. And, anyone familiar with her writing will attest, at times her style betrays even her – for it has become for her familiar, helpful, a limit and a crutch. Joyce Carol Oates, you see, is not even Joyce Carol Oates.
The memoir addresses these problems by having an accepted style and being true in the factual sense. Where fiction falters, memoir provides a certified “real truth”. The limits of memoir are often overlooked. Because it is not such a complete distillation, it rarely has the ability to achieve the panoramic power of great fiction. The truth of memoir is most often a narrow and personal truth. This is no fault, as a Bach quartet is not a Beethoven symphony, they are different. When we try to substitute one for the other, however, we are losing a great deal of the power of each. People become upset when memoirs turn out to be “fictionalized” because the promise and power of the genre itself has been betrayed by the author.
The ways of turning from truth are many and each a betrayal. When Toni Morrison is referred to as “A Black Woman” novelist I want to scream NO! She is an author, and a powerful author. Dostoyevsky was a Christian – devout and serious as was Kazanzakis. Are they Christian novelists? Both, in fact, wrote works that are considered blasphemous to many Christians. Not because they weren’t Christians, because they were first and foremost, concerned with the truth as they felt it. Morrison’s goal, and I think her writing supports this, is not to be true to women, or blacks, whatever that would mean, but simply to be as truthful as she can. Even if, particularly if, that means betraying women, blacks, and even herself.