The narrative representation of memory in recent fiction and autobiography

Abstract

This thesis explores the ways in which a group of autobiographical and fictional narratives are informed by theories of, and assumptions about, the operations of memory. The process of memory becomes most interesting and problematic when the site of its foundation is traumatic: all the narratives I discuss reconstruct lives marked by individually painful pasts which, in some cases, are also part of collective historical trauma. The models of memory which I have found most useful and productive are psychoanalytic, but throughout I interrogate the application of psychoanalysis to very different cultural memories and to the analysis of culture itself. In the first chapter, I analyse two models of memory which originate in the work of Freud: one imagines the past as an archaeological site to be excavated and reconstructed, assuming that memory can provide unmediated access to the past. The other foregrounds the work of reconstruction and theorises memory as a continuous process of retranscription and retranslation. The Freudian concept of Nachtraglichkeit or 'afterwardsness' is explored and developed as a tool for the analysis of narratives which, inevitably, reconstruct the past with hindsight, with knowledge and understanding acquired only belatedly. The second chapter analyses two autobiographical narratives - Ronald Fraser's In Seach of a Past and Carolyn Steedman's Landscape for a Good Woman - which show the process of reconstructing the past as one of continuous and always provisonal retranslation. In the third chapter these are contrasted with Sylvia Fraser's 'Memoir of Incest and Healing', My Father's House and Margaret Atwood's novel, Cat's Eye, both of which are constructed on the assumption that the past lies waiting to be rediscovered by the remembering subject, untouched by the translations to which time and changing consciousness subjects it. Chapter Four analyses Georges Perec's W Or The Memory of Childhood, a text which acknowledges the impossibility of reconstructing absent memory. Perec lost has mother in the Holocaust, and here I discuss the relationship between the Holocaust, memory and representation. My final chapter is a reading of Toni Morrison's Beloved in which I foreground the notion of 'rememory' and its relation to history, and the way in which the text articulates the cultural nostalgia for the always already lost memory of the pre-oedipal relation with the mother's body.

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