Memory processes in nothing to be frightened of by Julian Barnes

В статье рассмотрена проблема памяти в автобиографической книге Дж. Барнса «Нечего бояться», где личные воспоминания автора иллюстрируют ненадежность и ограниченность памяти, раскрывая основные ее механизмы, такие как субъективная интерпретация, забывание и воображение.

Nothing To Be Frightened Of is a complex text, being a mixture of autobiographical mode of narration and essay pieces, where the facts of the author’s personal life and family history are used as a departure point for his philosophical meditations and speculations on mortality and fear of death, religion, art, family, literature, writing and memory. The death theme is pivotal in the book: in an interview Barnes called it ‘my death book’, emphasizing his obsession with the issue. Though many reviewers thought that all other themes act as subsidiary to the death-theme, I suggest that in this book, probably more strongly than anywhere else, the author’s reflections on the nature of human memory are closely connected with the idea of relativity of truth that underlies Barnes’s postmodern thinking.

From the outset Barnes chooses an intimate tone of narration, grasping the attention of the reader by straightforward address and the spotlight on the very personal topics. He leads his story through his family past to his own present, following the process of his identity construction (being an “all-rounder”, his non-blood ancestry in French literature, etc.) He relates to the reader the most important memories of his formative years: he examines his childhood and his youth, but tells very little about his adult life. Continuous comparison with his brother, a philosopher, allows him to illustrate the limitations of human memory. The brothers naturally shared - or witnessed - many events in their childhood and adolescence; presumably this should result in the same memories of these events. The author contrasts his own memories with his brother's memories while they witnessed their grandfather killing a chicken in his garden shed. Through this episode Barnes introduces the death theme in his book, while stating that “Grandpa introduced my brother to death - and its messiness - better than he did me” [Barnes 2008: 4]. Their memories of the slaughter turn out to be virtually incompatible, especially in rendering the effect it has on the participants, forming their first experience of death:

For me, the machine merely wrung the chicken's neck; for him it was a junior guillotine. ‘I have a clear picture of a small basket underneath the blade. I have a (less clear) picture of the head dropping, some (not much) blood, Grandpa putting the headless bird on the ground, its running around for a few moments...’ Is my memory sanitized, or his infected by films about the French revolution? [Barnes 2008:4]

Not only are the brothers in possession of different memories of the same events, but their attitude to memory is dramatically different, at least this is the point Barnes makes at the beginning of the book. His elder brother ‘believes that memories are often false’, while the author stresses the crucial role of memory in life-writing, as he attempts at conveying real events of his life. He starts with saying that he assumes that all his memories are true.

So, together with the death theme Barnes introduces a series of instances proving the inability of memory to determine the real course of events that closer to the end of the book accumulate a force capable of destroying the texture of the narrative. On many occasions the author’s personal memories and those of his brother ‘diverge into incompatibility” [Barnes 2008:4], he also quotes contradicting lines from the diaries of his grandparents referring to the same day. Barnes illustrates the ‘faded sepia’ of memory with his accounts of family talks, which he tries to search for any direct quote from his mother and fails to do so. However this collection of fragmented memories of personal life of the author, his brother and other members of the family ask questions about the validity of memories in general and make the readers decide on the answer for themselves. Definitely, the logic of the book evolves from the particular to the general. The author puts the question if his memories are true, then he asks if any person in general can trust memory.

In Nothing To Be Frightened Of Barnes persistently reminds us that he is a writer in the first place (a ‘novelist’, he says), not an autobiographer. The task of the writer is not the determining of the truthful or untruthful course of events (which is impossible), but finding the ways that human consciousness transforms the meaning of the memories - finding and revealing the mechanisms of memory, among which is inevitable subjective interpretation of memories. It is again uncertainty and vagueness of a memory that allows for various interpretations: the author doesn’t remember why he started collecting stamp with images of ‘the rest of the world’, while his brother collected ‘the British Empire’: ‘I can no longer remember if this move was aggressive, defensive, or merely pragmatic’ [Barnes 2008:3].

Though treating with suspicion the ability to remember Barnes never doubts the fact that the life of a person is a narrative.

But the novelist (me again) is less interested in the exact nature of truth, more in the nature of the believers, the manner in which they hold their beliefs, and the texture of the ground between the competing narratives [Barnes 2008: 240].

A memory itself, being just a blurred image of the past, means very little without signifying work of the consciousness of the owner of memory. A memory gains value in the context of the life of a person. He describes this process metaphorically as colouring the memories with ‘our favorite hues’: ‘My brother distrusts the essential truth of memories; I distrust the way we colour them in. We each have our own cheap mail-order paintbox, and our favourite hues’ [Barnes 2008: 29].

Using his own memories the author shows how the interpretation changes the value of the memory, and conversely, how the doubts about truthfulness of memory change the picture of the person’s life. For instance, at the beginning of the book the author explained crucial differences between himself and his brother, emotional versus logical, by the fact that Julian was breast-fed whereas his brother was bottle-fed. That for a long time served enough evidence for the purpose of distinction. ‘But one of my last visits to my mother produced an uncharacteristic moment of near-intimacy. ...

she confirmed that I had no more been breastfed than my brother’ [Barnes 2008: 210].

Gradually Barnes undermines the reader’s faith into the truthfulness of the narration. The genre of autobiography implies that the reader trusts the author; meanwhile Barnes suspects that his memories are often false. The conclusion he offers is very troublesome and unsettling - we can’t trust our memories, which form the basis for our personal identity, which anchor our experience in the fluidity of time. The counterbalance to the postmodern entropy he suggests is imagination. As the narrative of the past is always mediated by memory, there is no chance of fixing the past as it was -it exists only in our memory. What is available to us is just our fragmented version of the past, woven into a coherent narrative, as the human mind always strives for ordering of reality. At the end of the book Barnes concludes that he trusts memories ‘as workings of imagination’ as opposed to ‘naturalistic truth’ and shifts the focus from narrow abilities of memory to the creative potential of the mind:

For the older writer, memory and the imagination begin to seem less and less distinguishable. This is not because the imagined world is really much closer to the writer’s life than he or she cares to admit but for exactly the opposite reason: that memory itself comes to seem much closer to an act of the imagination than ever before. My brother distrusts most memories. I do not mistrust them, rather I trust them as workings of the imagination, as containing imaginative as opposed to naturalistic truth [Barnes 2008: 244].

Imagination makes up for the faults of memory, amending gaps, deleting contradictory facts, weaving fragments of memories into a coherent narrative. The image of the writer is positive here, the work of a novelist is seen as productive. Moreover, he is likened to the remembering subject, that edits, processes, fictionalizes memories, invents identities. In this respect every person appears to acts as a writer. Combining inferences about personal memory and his experience as a novelist Barnes leads us to think that a memory, like fiction, can be a construct, recorded and manipulated by it owner. He manages to explicate deeply imbedded processes of memory, listing all mechanisms in one passage: forgetting, insertion (imagining), subjective interpretation:

Repeatedly mentioned (often in the skeptical voice ascribed to his brother), the idea of fallibility of memory undermines the reader’s belief in biographical truth. Barnes shows that memory processes involve imagination as well as the work of structuring consciousness and that forgetting is an equally important aspect of individual memory. If identity - is one’s remembered self, than memory turns to be a shaky basis for constructed narrative. There is no past, as Barnes reveals in Nothing To Be Frightened Of there are only memories of the past. What is available to us is just our version of the past, because memory is tricky, random, and chaotic as reality itself.