writes in Unquiet, almost as a report on how she has used memory as a method.
The debate about what autobiographical fiction really is, compared to autobiography, has been going on for a long time—long before Karl Ove Knausgård wrote My Struggle. But the raw material in both cases consists of memories. In autobiographical fiction, memory triumphs over hard sources and personal experience has greater value than objective fact. Memory, with all its creative misinterpretation, gets top priority.
“I discovered that memory isn’t a locked trunk full of true recollections, but a creative sponge—it absorbs everything around it and renews itself,” says Ullmann.
Ullmann’s book is an exploration of the conundrum of constructive memory. What is actually true of what she remembers? While her father was alive, he talked to her about Bach’s cello suites and described the saraband, one of the movements, as being like a painful dance between two people. Ullmann’s book was inspired by their conversations about Bach. The book has six parts, just like the six parts of Bach’s fifth cello suite.
In her book, Ullmann writes: “To remember is to look around, again and again, equally astonished every time.” She probably wasn’t aware of how right she was from a scientific point of view. Our personal memories are always reinventing themselves; new details are added all the time. She says that turning her memories into a novel involved both artistry and hard work. “Nothing is more boring than listening to someone who has just woken up tell you about a dream. It only means something to the one telling it. A dream can be an interesting experience, but it’s not art. It is the structure that makes it into something more,” she says. Memories, too, need conscious elaboration to become literature. What she thought of as a fragment of a memory might have become several pages as she reconstructed it factually and artistically. The title of Unquiet may very well allude to the fundamental nature of memory. Memories are not static, not authoritative, not solid as mountains. They are diffuse, they move around, they collide; they are like seahorses dancing restlessly amid the seagrass. Memory is constructive; it picks up fragments of an experience and builds a framework, a story about what happened. Once, that experience was fresh in our minds. But our senses, our attention, our ability to interpret, and our memory did not manage to absorb everything down to the smallest detail. Still, when that memory is retrieved, it seems as if it is intact. The memory itself becomes a new moment in consciousness, although as from a parallel reality. But beyond our perception, both hard work and artistic effort lie behind each memory.
Конец ознакомительного фрагмента.
Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес».
Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию на ЛитРес.
Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом.
