In April 1966 Vladimir Nabokov stated to Alfred Appeclass="underline" “I would say that imagination is a form of memory. . An image depends on the power of association, and association is supplied and prompted by memory. When we speak of a vivid individual recollection we are paying a compliment not to our capacity of retention but to Mnemosyne’s mysterious foresight in having stored up this or that element which creative imagination may use when combining it with later recollections and inventions. In this sense, both memory and imagination are a negation of time.”
A fact remembered will be a fact imagined, and the ‘imagined’ fact preserved and culled from a selective memory may well be as close as we will ever get to the rubble of truthfulness. In other words, it will be fiction. Nabokov: “Bare facts do not exist in a state of nature, for they are never really quite bare. I tend more and more to regard the objective existence of all events as a form of impure imagination. Whatever the mind grasps, it does so with the assistance of creative fancy.”
This holds for any passage from the observed to the expressed. The human mind, in its desperate quest for understanding and procreating survival (perhaps understanding is survival) will ‘order’ perceptions and information, highlight some and repress that which is not useful to the purpose or may be too disturbing. Memory is a source, not a neutral receptacle. To put it in the terms of another writer, R. Scholes: poïesis is not about mimesis, but on the contrary about “all writing, all composition, (being) construction. We do not imitate the world, we construct versions of it.”
From this inadequacy to reflect the totality of our experiences and thus from the choices we make in transmission, and from the fact that verbal communication (particularly in its written expression) is a structuring of versions of the world, arises what we may call ‘false consciousness’ — ‘false’ in that it is neither complete nor totally instinctive. But this is not the same as ‘bad faith,’ where we bamboozle and lie to ourselves and to others whilst earnestly believing we are in the true!
To the extent that we can show a mind working at full stretch (is the mind not a mirror to the universe?), and if we can empathize sufficiently with the characters and objects and situations depicted so that the story has both a directed fluidity and an autonomy outside the teller, we will bring about a truthfulness apparently as full-fledged (and fulsome!) as ‘reality.’ The more the story lives up to its own laws and realness, the more it will be (like) life. Charles Olson, the Black Mountain poet, claimed: “Art is the only twin life has.”
I have suggested already that fiction will become true in the relating. First of all, because every creation exists and therefore it constitutes a fact, even if only on paper available to a limited number of eyes. Too, because anything written will take on a given authority. The present war between different parts of the world is a conflict of texts — more precisely, the unquestioned value ascribed to the Word in some cultures where it is fanatically believed that altering the text will be like defacing God and spitting on his tongue — so that, as somebody remarked, “this war will be won by words.” And then in any case, because you have to ground fiction — factor in a life-like unfolding and logic true to the story, where voice and form sound right, making it resemble a plausible reality — to make it work.
One can therefore say that the act of telling, however sober and close to the facts, is a process of invention, but also that the very symbols and signs we use (language) root the telling in ‘reality.’ Language is (a) reality; each word corresponding to a concept or an action is a fact, and the bringing together of three words or more inevitably engenders fiction because of the relations established. Words talk to one another whether you want it or not; they tell stories. Hear them at night! Maybe it is due to the unstoppable fictionalization coming to mouth in the very act of telling, the process of self-invention, that some cultures prefer to leave their gods nameless.
It would seem to be a primary human instinct to want to be reassured /reminded that one is. Memory invisibly threads the substance of reassurance, suggesting that there is continuation and accumulation. Let’s reduce it to a simple equation: I was therefore I am. Furthermore: to the extent that I remember who and where I was, I can situate and recognize this “I.” And if I can recognize it, it must have autonomous existence. “That is me in the photo.” (It is interesting that there can be no recognition of “I” as essence except through being or doing — being is doing.) By remembering we shape and modify and imagine the memory, we bring about continuity. Perhaps we fill in the blanks. We need continuity to make sense of our existence and to have a purpose.
To take it further: this need for reassurance of being — in the face of total unknowingness, the absolutely opaque mystery of ‘before’ and ‘after’ — is normally satisfied through interaction with the ‘other’ (mother, brother, fother, sother. . the family, the species, hence the importance of ‘grooming’), the mirror, or the non-I (things, events, ideas, the environment. .). Or it could be assuaged by an interaction with the imaginary: the projection of self, the memory of self. We fictionalize also to have somebody to speak to and this interlocutor could be an imagination or a memory of the self. This brings about a twinning. You will have ‘yourself’ as doppelgänger. Inside you there is this demanding reader as skeptical observer, a lost soul hungry with anger. You write to placate the fear and to impress the unbeliever. Ultimately to seduce yourself. (Of course the ‘other self,’ the sother, is infinitely more seductive than you are: attractive, intelligent, proud and strong, and panting to be seduced. .)
AN APOLOGY
Reader, I owe you an apology. “Why do you want to be a writer?” was of course a silly question, and in your answer I sensed that you were irked by it. After all, the mere fact of your being here with me in the writing should be an answer, not so?
This note is written a few days after the two towers of the World Trade Center were brought down — but I also want to jump into the future and refer now to an obituary of the poet, Czeslaw Milosz, who will die nearly exactly three years later, written by Leon Wieseltier. In that essay, to be published in The New York Times Book Review of September 12, 2004, Wieseltier will say of his dead friend: “All that he required for a justification of existence was a description of existence.” And then to quote the poet: “Description demands intense observation, so intense that the veil of everyday habit falls away and what we paid no attention to, because it struck us as so ordinary, is revealed as miraculous.”