The Use and Abuse of Literature - Marjorie Garber [105]
The word memoir only gradually began to mean reminiscences (often in the plural, as in “writing one’s memoirs”) and then biography or autobiography; the original uses were more legal or official, related to the memo, or written account containing instructions or facts to be judged. So the memoir has moved, perhaps inexorably, from fact to narrative embellishment, from other to self. But what is this addiction for books about addiction—or gang warfare, or child abuse, or deprivation? Not surprisingly, this kind of personal privation and struggle has often had appeal, and not only in the twenty-first century. It is not enough to say we live in hard times. Nor have other literary genres skated lightly over pain, loss, illness, conflict, betrayal, murder, or untimely death: this is a fair catalog of some of the central incidents of Greek tragedy, early modern English drama, and many classic works of nineteenth-century fiction. But the memoir craze, like American Idol and reality television, makes everyone a hero. Pathos, once a key ingredient in the response to tragedy and lyric, is now evoked in and by the memoir, the personal story, “my” story even if, in written form, it is occasionally “as told to” someone else.
Cause and Effect
Which comes first, the life or the “life story,” the craft of life writing? To what extent is the shape of a life conditioned by our literary expectations about crises, turning points, growth, and change? “We assume that life produces the autobiography as an act produces its consequences,” wrote Paul de Man, “but can we not suggest, with equal justice, that the autobiographical project may itself produce and determine the life and that whatever the writer does is in fact governed by the technical demands of self-portraiture and thus determined, in all its aspects, by the resources of his medium?”23
This is true for “high” or “literary” versions of autobiography (de Man is thinking about Rousseau, St. Augustine, and Wordsworth), but it is equally relevant to popular and celebrity accounts. How did the great man or great woman—or these days the representative, proudly “ordinary” man or woman—become him- or herself? The dramatic or literary arc is already in place: early life, setbacks, signs of genius, promise, or unusual attainment, sundering from fellows or family, the first professional break or breakthrough, a triumph, a tragedy, reflections, recriminations, late style, etc.
The modern autobiography is occasionally written by the subject but more often with (or, functionally, by) a writing partner or amanuensis. These partners are sometimes called ghostwriters, but there is a distinction to be made between the invisible ghostwriter and the credited collaborator, and down the line, these attributions of authorship have something to do with that elusive category of reality, or truth, in writing. Here are a few examples.
The New York Times best-seller-list description for Real Change, “by Newt Gingrich with Vince Haley and Rick Tyler,” included Haley, Gingrich’s research director at the American Enterprise Institute, and Tyler, Gingrich’s director of media relations, as the book’s coauthors. On the Conservative Book Club website and on the book cover, however, Real Change is credited entirely to Gingrich, and the accompanying ad copy tells potential readers that in the book Newt Gingrich explains the role of the conservative majority. Whatever things may be real about Real Change, the claim of authorship is not prominent among them. Plus ça change.
Another book on the Times list that week, I Am America (and So Can You!), like the Gingrich book, bore on its cover a large photo of the credited author, Stephen Colbert, as well as a tagline send-up of book-promotion-speak as “From the Author of I Am America (and So Can You!)” The Times conscientiously