On Memory and Fiction

Posted on November 14, 2010 by Fred Bubbers

Ian McEwanIn part four of Ian McEwan’s Atonement, aging author Briony Tallis is revealed to be the author of the novel that comprises the previous three sections of the book.  She is dying of vascular dementia, and that this, her last novel, is her final act of atonement for an unforgivable sin that she committed when she was just a young girl.  As her mind and her memory are leaving her, she has written this novel while she still can. Although much of her novel is entirely the product of her imagination, it is the impending loss of her memory that drives her to complete her work. The loss of memory is death for a writer.

At the very end of his life, Ernest Hemingway was convinced that the electroconvulsive therapy that had be used to treat his depression had destroyed his memory and, therefore, his ability to write.  Whether or not shock therapy can actually do that and whether or not it was true in Ernest HemingwayHemingway’s case has been argued ever since then, but Hemingway believed it and it was perhaps the final blow that pushed him into the despair from which he could find no escape.  About a year earlier, he had completed the manuscript for A Moveable Feast, his memoir of his early days in Paris when he was on the threshold of literary stardom.  While one might imagine that memories of true events are crucial ingredients for a memoir, they are not the only ingredients.  In the years since A Moveable Feast was first published it has been extensively fact-checked several times. Major parts of it cannot be verified, including an infamous anecdote involving F. Scott Fitzgerald, a ruler, and a men’s room, that I will forever refuse to believe ever happened. So really, what purpose did memory serve him in creating his memoir, especially since even though much of it may be fiction, it is still vivid and poignant, and a prime example of a literary genre?  For Hemingway, memory was everything and he couldn’t live without it.

So what is it about this fragile and mysterious thing called memory that sustains us, that inspires us, that tricks us, and sometimes horrifyingly eludes us, that makes it so essential to the creation of fiction?  And what is it about memory that is essential to the reading of fiction?

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© 2010 – 2011, Fred Bubbers. All rights reserved.

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Best of Times, Worst of Times

Posted on September 29, 2010 by Fred Bubbers

2010-09-20_14-41-25_545

A couple of weeks ago, my day-job required me to fly to Chicago for a day to attend a meeting.  I’d been to Chicago on business a couple of times before, but on those trips I was visiting companies that were located outside of the city, so I never got a chance to see the downtown commercial center known as The Loop.   Like most Americans, I’m ignorant about the places in our country that I don’t actually live in, much less the rest of the world, so I was quite surprised to see an architectural treasure chest suddenly appear before me on the cab ride to the Hyatt on Wacker Drive, where my meeting was being held.  Thanks to Wikipedia, I now know a lot more about the architecture of Chicago.

After my meeting at the hotel had ended, I had a couple of hours free before I needed to get back to the airport for my flight home, so I took a little walk around the general vicinity.  Some of the buildings were quite captivating and I started feeling nostalgia for an era that I never actually lived in.  I imagined that it was the 1950′s and the hustle and bustle  around The Wrigley Building and the Tribune Tower was comprised of men and women wearing hats.  I had arrived in the city by train.  I had my new Android-based smartphone with me, so I snapped a few pictures.   I had just gotten the phone the week before, so I fumbled a lot with it, trying to figure out how to work the camera function.  The results are rather mediocre and you can probably find much better pictures of these landmarks elsewhere on the internet, but at least I’ve documented my trip there.

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© 2010 – 2012, Fred Bubbers. All rights reserved.

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Shackles, Chains, and Canon

Posted on September 25, 2010 by Fred Bubbers

In his essay, “In Praise of Dead White Men,” Lindsay Johns argues that efforts to make education more “relevant” to black people can be both patronizing and harmful, and that western literary canon should be taught to everyone.  While I agree with him in general, I think that teaching literature written by women and men of color as a genre separate from and in lieu of western literary canon.  The importance of Homer, and Shakespeare, and Milton, and Melville to the culture of western civilization is undeniable, but it’s also about time that the physical and metaphorical shackles and chains applied to people who played as much a role in western civilization as those honored dead white men became an integral part of our literary tradition.

A few days after I posted The Art of the Novella: Seize the Day by Saul Bellow, my brief précis and commentary on Saul Bellow’s 1957 novella, I received an email from an old friend complimenting the piece, but also with an admonishment about my somewhat narrow view of what literature is all about.  Tommy Wilhem’s fight against the abyss, a common theme throughout the history of western literary tradition, from Odysseus to Bloom (Leopold), is certainly one of the major themes of the book, but, as my friend Maria pointed out to me, it is a theme largely owned by middle and upper class white men.  It is one of the dominant themes of western literature largely because western literary canon has always been, and to a large extent still is, defined by Dead White European Males.  Battling the abyss is a luxury of the privileged and empowered.  Literature created by women and minorities, she pointed out, tends to be about more immediate and worldly challenges  –  poverty, discrimination, subjugation — human experiences not common to privileged white men, dead or otherwise.  Essentially, she was telling me as politely as possible, “Fred, your Updikean life in suburbia has made your brain go soft,  you need to get out more.”

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© 2010 – 2011, Fred Bubbers. All rights reserved.

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The Oral Tradition

Posted on August 24, 2010 by Fred Bubbers

Homer (8th century BC)

Last week, I traveled up to Massachusetts to attend the memorial service for my uncle, John Juergen  Bubbers, who died in May after a long illness.  I was reunited with my cousins most of whom I’ve not seen in many years.  Sadly, it has been funerals, first of our grandparents and now parents that have given us the occasion to gather together again.  It’s probably typical that at these events that bring together extended families, we all observe our cousins and the grandchildren and look for our genetic connections.  This person looks like Oma, that person has Opa’s mouth, and so on.  In fairness, we also acknowledge who resembles a spouse who married into our family.

I took particular notice of one of my cousins.  When we were younger we were very similar looking, both of us blond haired and blue eyed and bearing some resemblance to our grandfather.  Now, not so much.  He was always taller and skinnier than me, and now it seems even more so, especially on the skinnier part.  That’s right, Fred. He got skinnier. What struck me was how much he reminded me of his father.  In his physical manner, speech patterns, even the way he carried himself was eerily evocative of my Uncle John.  It’s been decades since he lived in his father’s household, so how strong could his father’s influence be by this time?  When I remarked on this to my sister, she said, “Well, Freddie, I hate to break this to you, but everybody’s been telling me how much you remind them of Daddy.”

“I try not to,” I said.

“There, the way you said ‘I try not to.’  You sound just like him.”

There’s no escape from Gregor Mendel and his wretched wrinkled peas.

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© 2010 – 2011, Fred Bubbers. All rights reserved.

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The Art of the Novella: The Ghost Writer by Philip Roth

Posted on August 14, 2010 by Fred Bubbers

Philip Roth’s The Ghost Writer was first published in two parts in The New Yorker in 1979.  Later that year it was published in book form by Farrar, Straus & Giroux.  It was the first book of his Zuckerman Bound Trilogy, which he completed in 1985.  The Ghost Writer first introduced us to Roth’s alter ego, Nathan Zuckerman, as a twenty-three year old writer at the start of his career.  Nathan has had four short stories published and has been profiled in a magazine as an up-and-coming writer.  He claims to be embarrassed by the profile and the accompanying picture of him with his ex-girlfriend’s cat, but his claim seems to be based on what he thinks is expected of him.

Nathan’s autobiographical short stories have upset his family, particularly his father, who believes they show American-Jewish family life in a bad light and confirm the worst stereotypes of Jews.  It is 1956 and Nathan is writing in the shadow of the Holocaust.  His family is offended by his telling of their internal feuds, portraying them as “conniving Jews,” confirming the worst stereotypes held by Gentiles.  They enlist a respected member of their community, a judge no less, for his opinion.  Nathan receives a letter from the judge asking him, among other things,  “If you had been living in Nazi Germany in the thirties, would you have written such a story?”  Strong stuff.  Nathan, however, is devoted more than anything to truthfulness and art and refuses to take responsibility for the feelings of his family and to take on the weight of history which they are trying to impose upon him.

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© 2010 – 2011, Fred Bubbers. All rights reserved.

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