Response to Erin McGlothlin: Is a desire for indeterminacy a desire for coherence?

I am truly pleased to respond to Erin McGlothlin's thoughtful and insightful review of my book. I say "respond" rather than "reply," for unlike the usual "right of reply" exercised by authors who have been misunderstood (in their view) by their critics, I feel I am engaging in a dialogue with someone who understands me very well indeed. I cannot think of a better summary of my own thought, for example, than McGlothlin's remark that "In her [that is, my] view, the [literary] text is not a disjointed, timeless entity, but functions as active agent in history, producing memory but also reflecting the larger cultural discourse about memory." This is exactly what a thoughtful reviewer accomplishes, stating an author's views in her own eloquent reformulation. Erin McGlothlin accomplishes something similar when she notes that I identify three types of narrative desire in my discussion of the "Aubrac Affair." In fact, my own articulation of that chapter is not based on types of narrative desire, but on the interactions of three different types of memory: individual, social or collective, and historical. However, McGlothlin's way of presenting my argument makes perfectly good sense, since I do in fact discuss the three desires she identifies: the desire for heroic aggrandizement, the desire for demystification or abjection, and the desire for narrative coherence and plausibility. Here again, she reads creatively, not merely reproducing my own argument but incorporating it into her own way of understanding the problem at hand.

I find it interesting that she chose to focus precisely on the chapter devoted to the Aubrac Affair, which necessitated the most minute examination of narrative details (details of what McGlothlin calls "historical and mnemonic emplotment"), both on my part and on the part of all those who were involved in the "Affair." The text I analyze at great length in this chapter is the transcript of a round-table discussion lasting a whole day, in which the aged French Resistance heroes Lucie and Raymond Aubrac confronted a team of historians—whom they themselves had convened—regarding memoirs they had both published, some of whose crucial details provoked heated debate. The reason this round-table fascinated me—and, I assume, also fascinates McGlothlin—is that it offers a perfect emblem of the desire for narrative coherence, both on the part of historians and on the part of individuals who attempt to narrate their own past. Furthermore, and perhaps even more importantly, it offers a wonderful example of a conflict of "authorities": the authority of the historical witness who can say with conviction, "I was there when it happened" (whatever "it" may be), and the authority of the historian who was most likely "not there," but who can rely on the proper use of documents to reconstruct the past.

As it happened, in the case of the Aubrac Affair neither the historians nor the historical witnesses carried the day. As one historian remarked after the round-table, "areas of shadow" remain; and while both the historians and the witnesses sought narrative coherence, no one in this instance arrived at definitive historical truth. McGlothlin quotes my concluding questions ("What if reality does not follow the logic of plausibility? What if reality is not coherent?"), and rightly notes that I myself "refuse to answer" them. Indeed, what I find compelling about the Aubrac Affair is the way it highlights the most difficult questions concerning the relation between individual memory and historical reconstruction. After the excitement provided by the questions, the "definitive answer," if there ever is one, will be an anticlimax.

In a similar way (and McGlothlin notes this as well), what interests me in the literary memoirs of a Jorge Semprun or an Elie Wiesel is their acute self-consciousness about problems of memory. While both are indubitably authoritative historical witnesses, they are very much aware of the fallibility of individual memory, whether their own or that of others; and both are aware of the "interminable" nature of all attempts to remember (or rather, re-member) and narrate one's past, especially when...