On Failed Understanding

The further we go back into our past, the less we can be sure that our memories are really ours. We all know this uncertainty. Is there anything I know about the first two or three years of my life that I was not told later by others? Is there anything I know about the world at large into which I was born that I did not later learn from others? I remember a quarrel between Grandma and Uncle Fred about who had the right story about me when I got lost in a park after I just learned to ride a bike and escaped along the busy road. The escape stories followed me for a long time. There was a photograph of me on my bike, perhaps when I was four, on the wall of my room. It hung there for years and eternalized this early vision of mine. Only much later, I figured out that what I remembered were not some autobiographical primal scenes—Urszenen, as Freud dubbed them—unveiling some early escapism but rather a blend of Grandma’s stories, the photo on the wall, and the short film clips taken by Uncle Fred with his vintage camera. The flickering of the film sequences bestowed on these “memories” the feel of a distant but original and indubitable past.

Visuality looms large in our sense of memories. It attributes to many scenes that we identify as past experiences the air of immediacy and authenticity. Even verbally told autobiographical stories typically are replete with metaphors, images, and other visual language—as in Grandma’s versions of my escapes (“On your little bike you were gone as fast as lightning”), which have allowed me to evoke my flight adventures as a child “as if they happened yesterday.” On the photograph and in the film of Uncle Fred I did not even have to remember myself but had an independent representation before my eyes. I just could see it there as it really was, or so I believed.

Today we are more mistrustful of the assumption that our memory is able to “encode” and “store” primary events that, over the passing of time, can be eventually “retrieved” in their original shape and meaning. We have come to know that many of our much-loved autobiographical memories are composites that conflate various elements—visual, affective, imagined—with their interpretations and reinterpretations. This is even more striking if the putative primal scene turns out to be a palimpsest woven together by stories, photographs, and film clips provided by others.

Moreover, there are forms and strategies of understanding the past that emerge from the awareness of this complex mixture, an awareness that exists not only in hindsight but in the very present of remembering. At times these strategies even consciously capitalize on the blend of recall, imagination, investigation, and interpretation inherent in the autobiographical process in order to extend the understanding of the past. Such extending can go beyond the individual scope of this process. This is what the French novelist Patrick Modiano has tried in a number of books. Writing these books seems to have been a way for him to imagine the memories of other people and stretch his own memories to times and places that connect to the lives of those individuals. Viewed in this way, the idea of the composite nature of memories widens to encompass the mingling of one’s own memories with the memories of others.

Many of Modiano’s novels are hermeneutical investigations into the extended range of real and imagined autobiographical memories. At the same time, they inquire into the limits of the subjunctive and the hypothetical as a form of human understanding or, as I suggest in this essay, as interpretive practices between understanding and nonunderstanding. For these two reasons, I take a closer look at Modiano’s books, especially Dora Bruder. My goal is to gain a better sense of the hermeneutical quality of narrative, on the one hand, and of the narrative fabric of complex forms of understanding and nonunderstanding, on the other.¹

Searching for Dora Bruder

How can one...