Reality Hunger (42 page)

The real kinship among genres today is less between the memoir and the novel and more between memoir and poetry. We make a mistake in thinking of memoir as nonfiction. It’s really nonpoetry. I don’t think we can understand the strong impulse of the memoir if we look only to fiction for its roots.

When a lyric poet uses, characteristically, the first-person voice, we don’t say accusingly,
But did this really happen the way you say it did?
We accept the honest and probably inevitable mixture of mind and spirit. The reason we don’t interrogate poetry as we do memoir is that we have a long and pretty sophisticated history of how to read the poetic voice. We accept that its task is to find emotional truth within experience, so we aren’t all worked up about the literal. We don’t yet have that history or tradition with memoir. We persist in seeing the genre as a summing up of life, even though that’s not typically how the genre is used in the great rash of memoirs that have been published in the past twenty years or so. When we house memoir under the umbrella of nonfiction, we take the word “nonfiction” very seriously. We act astonished, even dismayed, when we find out that the memoiristic voice is doing something other than putting down facts. We know that’s not the case, but we’re constantly struggling with this inevitability as if with the transgressions of a recidivist pedophile. We need to see the genre in poetic terms.

contradiction

This sentence is a lie.

Something can be true and untrue at the same time.

The whole content of my being shrieks in contradiction against myself.

“The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.” I’ve always disliked the unnecessary comma in the middle of this famous Fitzgerald dictum, suggestive as it is of an inability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time while still retaining etc.

We are, I know not how, double within ourselves, with the result that we do not believe what we believe, and we cannot rid ourselves of what we condemn.

Negative capability: capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.

It’s natural to enter into dialogues and disputes with others, because it’s natural to enter into disputes with oneself: the mind works by contradiction.

Great art is clear thinking about mixed feelings.