THE MEMOIR: A BRIEF HISTORY
Explore thyself. Herein are demanded the eye and the nerve.
Henry David Thoreau
Walden
If you’re thinking about writing a personal memoir, you’re approaching a literary genre that possesses a rich and winding history.
Wealthy ancient Egyptians (3000 BC) carved first person accounts of their lives on tomb walls. Later (a few centuries years later), Egyptian families began burying their mummified relatives with autobiographies pinned to their breasts. And Egyptian royals, hoping to enter an afterlife, were buried with memoirs close at hand, ready to hand over to their judges—the gods Osis and Isis.
The ancient Greeks, more interested in their city-states than in individual exploits, left behind little autobiographic writing.
Then, around 400 AD, Saint Augustine, the father of the Western memoir tradition, wrote Confessions, a detailed account of his misdeeds—and the mending of his ways. Augustine sought to warn and inspire readers (sinners) through his example—and to transform them into holier beings. His model—life as a dramatic spiritual duel, eventually resolved by God—stood firm until the Renaissance.
The Renaissance goldsmith turned sculptor, Benvenuto Cellini, was the first to shape a nonreligious autobiography—a story with no “conversion” purpose. His model may have influenced the development of the early English novel.
In 1766, Jean-Jacques Rousseau began his Confessions, autobiographic writing that broke new ground. Rousseau’s intent seems remarkably modern: to make a clean breast of it, to hold nothing back. He wanted the world “to behold a man as he really is, in his inmost self.”
With the advent of inexpensive publishing opportunities, some impoverished eighteenth century “independent” women began describing their sexual indiscretions and general waywardness. Their confessions sold like hotcakes and, say scholars, led directly to the advent of the modern novel.
Early American Puritans wrote autobiographies for the same reason they kept diaries—to preserve the congregation’s history and to affirm their “elect” status. Early Quakers and Puritans both focused on the religious confession form, and both insisted on factual accuracy. But imaginative writing soon began to emerge in the form of “pseudo memoirs”—fiction disguised as autobiography.
By mid-nineteenth century, early American feminists, following the path of their earlier seventeenth-century British sisters, began writing (daringly) about unhappy marriages and various taboo subjects.
Other writers began to copy this model, using exaggeration and fabrication to tell a story—and thus was born the “pseudo confession,” a form that has endured to this day. Popular mid-century ex-slave autobiographies eventually began to outsell these domestic stories.
With the rise of the late nineteenth-century realistic novel (Dickens, Dreiser), fiction began to feel more real than autobiography, and the memoir form hit a low point. Some authors, products of the Gilded Age, began to offer descriptions of how they'd achieved status and wealth—carefully avoiding, however, any accounts of their vulnerabilities.
At this point, the autobiography had lost its focus on “life as spiritual duel,” and by mid-twentieth century, the novel had emerged as crown jewel of American letters. Tom Wolfe put it this way:
It’s hard to explain what an American dream the idea of writing a novel was in the 1940s, 1950s, and right into the early 1960s. The Novel was no mere literary form. It was a psychological phenomenon. It was a cortical fever. It belonged in the glossary to A General Introduction to Psychoanalysis, somewhere between Narcissism and Obsessional Neurosis. . . . Not so long ago, I am willing to wager, half the people who went to work for publishing houses did so in the belief that their real destiny was to be novelists. Among people on what they call the creative side of advertising. . .the percentage must have reached 90 percent. . . .Such was the grip of the damnable Novel. Likewise among people in television, public relations, the movies, on the English faculties of colleges and high schools, among framing shop clerks, convicts, unmarried sons living with Mom. . .a whole swarm of fantasizers out there steaming and proliferating in the ego mulches of America.
Autobiographic writing held its “subgenre” status well into the twentieth century. Then some American expatriates (Henry Miller, Christopher Isherwood) began to write a new kind of autobiography—one that blurred the line between fact and fiction. Their subject matter was intimate and revealing; their style novelistic. And some of the best contemporary writers began to explore the New Autobiography.
Contemporary readers, for the most part, now accept this new form. They accept the presence of fiction within nonfiction and nonfiction within fiction—so long as they know what the writer is doing. In his work Fictions in Autobiography: Studies in the Art of Self Invention (1985), the critic, Paul John Eakin, notes that twentieth-century autobiographers “no longer believe that autobiography can offer a faithful and unmediated reconstruction of a historically verifiable past. Instead, says Eakin, modern autobiographies express “the play of the autobiographic act against itself.”
So, the way has been cleared for imaginative and vivid memoir writing. Get on board. The world awaits your story.
Orlo J. Otteson
651-278-4824
otteson@aol.com
