1. Memoir is not so much a genre as a congery of genres that include essays, autobiography, autofiction and other circus animals. Memoir is, itself, popular in the hinterlands but not so much in the academic canon, where it is difficult to locate its coordinates, its trajectoy, its landings.
Embed the thing in history. That's always been my gambit. Like this:
Andre Chastel, the great art historian, once suggested that Petrarch found, in St. Augustine’s Confessions, a portal to a new sensibility:
“This avowed taste for Saint Augustine, less the theologian than the man, is a great teaching: the example of the Confessions shows the passage from the life of antiquity to that of medieval Christianity – yet Petrarch betrays its spirit, since he uses it as an aid to define a troubled state corresponding to Saint Augustine’s when he had not yet discovered the peace of Christ. The imitation of Saint Augustine led Petrarch to unmake, more or less consciously, what his model had made: he was attracted in St. Augustine to the sickness rather than the cure.”
One wonders whether Castel is moved, perhaps unconsciously, by Michelet’s The Witch here.
In The Witch, Michelet presents that figure of the victim of medieval Christianity, the woman, in herself, as effecting, through her unconscious representative, the Witch, as affecting a diabolical reading backwards, against the grain (as for instance in reciting the Lord’s Prayer backwards) in order to go forwards – indeed, in order to leap over the present.
Chastel was writing in 1953, when the place of Petrarch in the cultural history of modernity was canonically to have represented a new spirit. Petrarch’s ascent of Mount Ventoux had been made into a parable of the individualism of the Renaissance by Burkhardt, and that image was very strong in the first half of the twentieth century.
An ideogram: the cultural history moves forward by way of exempla.
2. Memoir, memory, life. These are the good fairies, or bad witches, that attend the “recounting” that is memoir’s excuse and pattern. I like the notion that memory, instead of showing how things were, is an exercise in “undoing” – a sort of psychoanalytical walkabout. To undo what has come since – this seems to distinguish a certain angry energy in the memoir, even as the traditional memoirist is recalling no matter how turbulent a past from a supposedly peaceful, or at least recollective present.
These are notes I keep as I read Christopher Sorrentino’s excellent memoir of his mother, Now Beacon Now Sea – and not his well known father, Gilbert Sorrentino. Christopher Sorrentino, rather like Noah Baumbach, was raised in the heart of the New York intellectual scene – born in 1963, and patched and pealed in an odd experiment in bohemian welfare, Westbeth, an apartment house located in the Greenwich village. Before the Sorrentinos moved to Westbeth, Gilbert and his wife Vivian and Christopher lived in the dangerous Tompkins Park area. The memoir is addressed to his mother – addressed to his readers, to himself, but mostly to his mother, his dead mother. To undo death is a witch’s work.
The book begins, then, with his mother dead. And in particular, his mother’s decaying corpse. The beginning is overwhelming, and would definitely sink a lesser work.
“I spoke to my mother for the last time on May 27, 2017. Sometime within the next few days, she died. I found her on June 15. The sight of a decaying corpse is horrifying, but it’s also a wondrous thing. My mother’s body lay on its back on her bed, one leg crooked at the knee, identical to the position in which I usually fall asleep. One small, blackened hand lay across the abdomen. The face was a nightmare, although her hair was still lustrous, the corpse wearing it down in a way I hadn’t seen my mother wear it in years. It framed her skull on the pillow. The body seemed simultaneously collapsed and inflated. Maggots were busy at work. Her expensive mattress was ruined. The oxygen machine was still grinding away. The smell was overpowering; I felt that I deserved it. But abruptly, without thinking about it, I cut off my examination. I closed the bedroom door on her; I closed it as if trying to shut out something that threatened to engulf me. That was the last time I saw her.”
He was, indeed, shutting out something that engulfed him. By presenting his mother in the harshest possible light, Sorrentino accuses her – and himself. How could he not have known? How could he have known and started with this paragraph, this smell of a fact?
3. There are many memoirs of NYC bohemia. Most are deflating. But bohemia refuses to be deflated. Rather like adolescence itself, we can leave it, we can hate it, we can try to forget it – but we carry it nonetheless. Anybody who writes carries some bit of bohemia, willingly or unwillingly.
Vivian or Vicky Sorrentino was most unwilling, and this memoir is an act of undoing her son’s resistance or absence from his mother. A corpse is an accusatory thing, which is why humans have always surrounded it with some kind of cult. Sorrentino’s New York is very much of a piece with Baumbach’s. It was a hard place to be a kid, since the kid position is competed for by a hundred adults, all of whom were “older then, but are younger than that now. “ That Ur-60s thought.
Well no. Older just gets to be older. You can’t skip over the second law of thermodynamics, which is infinitely sneakier than the mere human product. You can try, though. You can go back to the Saint Augustine of the stolen apples, rather than the redeemed and terrible saint. But no memoir yet has overcome that stone cold barrier. Sorrentino’s gains its pathos, its depth, by understanding the inherent futility, now, of understanding, investigating, somehow recognizing his mother then. That’s the cosmic sink we are in. In for good
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