Gosh,You're Asking me What I Remember? The Hazards of Subjectivity,the Frailties of Memory,the Comodification of Individual History

Mental health professionals can so easily fall into the socially questionable (if chic) role of spin-doctor. When the psychiatrist/psychologist solicits/elicits a patient's history, this may amount to a collusive feat of biography/autobiography, with all the reconstructive fallibility of any narrative-in-reminiscence. The status of personal chronicle has, in fact, been given a dexterous spin in recent years: for some it has become ‘narrative truth’ (to distinguish it from the commonplace ‘objective’ truth that most of us have to strive for, rely on or steer by). But narrative truth can be just another name for lies, damned lies and elegant memoirs (modified from Disraeli, ‘There are three kinds of lies: lies, dammed lies and statistics’), the cosmetic makeover of careworn personal history. Sun-dried philosopher Jacques Derrida joined the party with his brand of post-modern ‘mytho-creativity’: for him truth had been displaced by narrative. Indeed, he claimed that not only is language too unstable to pinpoint any absolute truth (such as ‘I went to Linwood Avenue primary school’) but human identity is the malleable product of language. (Philosophy…Smoke and mirrors…Language in Disneyland)

Psychiatric histories are not uncommonly a blend of family myth, imaginative distortions and verifiable fact, along with a torching of what is unpalatable in the past and a possible re-fashioning of events for potential advantage (especially, for example, in the overture to compensation claims). It is not readily acknowledged how often the psychiatrist is simply a tame amanuensis, recording the tidy reconstructions, the rosy subjective blether, the cleaned-up recollection of the memoirist-on-the-make.

Cross-confirmed evidence of behaviour is generally held to snuggle closest to the verifiable fact on which one may, with infinite care and without those stunning speculative leaps beloved of the aging psychodynamicist, make sense of the personal past. The rest may well be cheap fiction.

Serious fiction is another matter altogether; as Don DeLillo says, a chance to encounter the crossing-points of insight and memory that the act of writing allows. Estimable writers of imaginative literature spend their working lives spinning real narrative truth. They utilize language, memory and reasoning in general to best advantage, transforming ground-level human memories into something that is memorably meaningful. And of course they have few illusions about common-or-garden ‘remembering’.

Table 1.

Literary comments on narrative truths

William Maxwell, late novelist and long-time fiction editor at the New Yorker: ‘Too many conflicting emotional interests are involved for life ever to be wholly acceptable, and possibly it is the work of the storyteller to rearrange things so that they conform to this end’. ‘In any case, in talking about the past we lie with every breath we draw.’

Jane Austen (1775–1817), peerless English novelist, speaking through Fanny Price, heroine of Mansfield Park: ‘There seems something more speakingly incomprehensible in the powers, the failures, the inequalities of memory, than in any other of our intelligences.’

Bernard Malamud, Canadian novelist: ‘The past exudes legend; one can't make pure clay of time's mud. There is no life that can be recaptured wholly; as it was. Which is to say that all biography is ultimately fiction.’

Doris Lessing, novelist: ‘There is no doubt that fiction makes a better job of truth than biography.’

Literary Review, July 2000: [Whatever the mild interest of his diaries] ‘the truth is that Christopher Isherwood is at his most interesting in those books where fact has been almost entirely digested into fiction.’