The Use and Abuse of Literature - Marjorie Garber [104]
False Memoirs and Literary Truth
The phrase false memoir has obvious analogies with the notion of false memories, or false memory syndrome, and repressed or recovered memory. Much has been written on this phenomenon, comparing such false allegations to the witch trials of past centuries and chronicling the capacity for abuse by psychotherapists and other counselors. Pursuing this analogy may well land us in the murky territory of writing as pathology or writing as therapy. Researchers like James Pennebaker have worked on the problem from the side of psychology;20 Freud and Breuer long ago called it abreaction, the liberation of repressed ideas by reviving and expressing them.
The injured person’s reaction to the trauma only exercises a completely “cathartic” effect if it is an adequate reaction—as, for instance, revenge. But language serves as a substitute for action; by its help, an affect can be “abreacted” almost as effectively. In other cases speaking is itself the adequate reflex, when, for instance, it is a lamentation or giving utterance to a tormenting secret, e.g., a confession. If there is no such reaction, whether in deeds or words, or in the mildest cases in tears, any recollection of the event retains its affective tone.21
Catharsis, which means purgation in both a medical and a theatrical sense, was used at this foundational moment in psychotherapy as a way of describing a purgation of the emotions. Psychotherapy, in this sense, is theater performed for an audience of one.
When Freud abandoned his so-called seduction theory in favor of the idea that fantasy, not real experience, was at the heart of many patients’ accounts of child sexual abuse, he developed the theories about infantile sexuality that became central to psychoanalysis. As he wrote to his friend Wilhelm Fliess in a letter announcing his change of heart (“I no longer believe in my neurotica”), this decision was based partly on the unlikelihood that actual abuse was so widespread (“in all cases, the father, not excluding my own, had to be accused of being perverse”), but even more importantly, on the impossibility of distinguishing truth from fiction: “there are no indications of reality in the unconscious, so that one cannot distinguish between truth and fiction that has been cathected with affect.”22 Cathected with affect: that is, highly charged with emotion.
The unconscious, Freud says, has “no indications of reality,” so when a patient describes past events it is not possible from such internal evidence to distinguish between things that really happened and things that feel as if they happened. Indeed, these events have, we might say, “happened” psychically, even if they have no basis in external fact. This theory was controversial then, and it is certainly not less controversial now. But it is, as you can see, closely related to the phenomenon of the false memoir. And—even more directly—it is related to the larger question of creative writing, the literary imagination, and the use and abuse of literature. Indeed, the coincidental presence of the word abuse (borrowed from a celebrated translation of Nietzsche’s essay on history writing) offers a convenient hook or hinge. Is literature a use or an abuse? Is it caused by abuse?
Manifestly not all memoirs are alike. Many have become memorable—and indeed have become literature—because of their style at least as much as their content. Among these works are, for example, the Confessions of St. Augustine and of Jean-Jacques Rousseau but also more recent writing—say, the nonfiction of James Baldwin, Vladimir Nabokov, Maxine Hong Kingston, Tobias Wolff, or Elie Wiesel. But rescuing the baby doesn’t mean bottling and selling the bathwater. The fact that