Closer to the Truth Than Any Fact: Memoir, Memory, and Jim Crow

2. Literary Techniques and Historical Understanding

chapter two Literary Techniques and Historical Understanding a well-crafted memoir enables the student of history to “refeel” a past moment from a particular point of view. This emotional understanding of a particular historical reality is not merely a cosmetic adornment that adds an element of human interest to our historical understanding . Rather, these emotions are partially constitutive of historical reality. If we want to recapture a past moment accurately, these emotions cannot be dispensed with. Although all memoirs can provide the historian with important access to affective aspects of the inside of a historical moment, it is my contention that some autobiographers are particularly adept at capturing the felt experiences of a past reality. I am referring to autobiographies written by, to borrow Susanna Egan’s phrase, “artists—not writers by happenstance.”1 The artful use of literary language and the use of literary devices like irony and metaphor do not merely make a literary memoir a more interesting text to read; these elements actually heighten the author’s ability to represent lived experience. The complexity of felt experience simply cannot be as accurately described with literal, nonliterary prose. In order to explore my claim that artfully constructed memoirs have a particular kind of power to illuminate our historical understanding, we must first begin by reflecting on the language used in literary memoirs. How is it different, and thus more historically revealing, than that used in nonliterary memoirs? Literary memoirs utilize language that is distinct from that employed in popular autobiographies (many of which are ghostwritten or collaboratively written) by entertainers, ceos, politicians, and others who are not skilled, creative writers. Unlike popular autobiography, with its titillating claims to “reveal all” and its unabashed allegiance to the { 36 } marketplace, each literary memoir is intended to be a work of art as well as a chronicle of a life. Literary memoirs are generally not written exclusively to sell books or to score public relations points (although these might be partial considerations on the part of the author); they are primarily intended to be works of art that will outlive the memoirist. However, we cannot make the distinction between literary and nonliterary memoirs by appeal to the author’s motivations alone. After all, some authors no doubt set out to create works of art but write critical failures nonetheless. How do some memoirs become works of art while others do not? Why is something like Vladimir Nabokov’s memoir Speak, Memory considered literature, whereas Lee Iacocca’s coauthored autobiography is not? According toTerry Eagleton, “literary discourse estranges or alienates ordinary speech, but in doing so, paradoxically, brings us into a fuller, more intimate possession of experience.”2 How does literary language perform such a remarkable feat? It does so, in part, merely by drawing attention to itself as literary language and causing readers to pause, to reflect, and to analyze the content of what they are reading. To merely say that literature causes us to think more carefully about what we read seems at first a fairly unremarkable claim. However, the endeavor, discussed in the previous chapter, both to “rethink” and to “refeel” the thoughts of historical agents is a slow and deliberate process. The more involved we become in analyzing a text, the closer we come to understanding what the text’s author thought and how she or he felt. Autobiographical texts that do not demand intensive reading or inspire interpretive quandaries simply do not allow the reader to identify as closely with the authors of the texts. A literal text may be read quickly and put aside, but a literary text requires the kind of ongoing interaction between author, reader, and text that helps facilitate empathetic reconstruction of past events in the present. This kind of intense interplay is necessary if the historian is to be in a position to understand the complexity of an author’s thoughts and, as Collingwood would have it, to rethink those thoughts. Eagleton’s claim that literary language “estranges” everyday speech relies on the assumption that we have a consensus on how ordinary language looks and sounds—for how can something be considered strange without a standardized basis for comparison? Because judgments about what makes language “strange” vary chronologically as well as culturally, we cannot have a set basis for comparison. A line from a Keats sonnet such as “Bright star, techniques and understanding { 37 } would I were steadfast...