Noted Without (Much) Comment: Quotes from Hampl and Lopate

From Hampl:

“I think of the reader as a cat, endlessly fastidious, capable by turns of mordant indifference and riveted attention, luxurious, recumbent, ever poised. Whereas the writer is absolutely a dog, panting and moping, too eager for an affectionate scratch behind the ears, lunging frantically after any old stick thrown in the distance.”

“A memoirist must acquiesce to selectivity, like any artist. The version we dare to write is the only truth, the only relationship we can have with the past. Refuse to write your life and you have no life.”

From Lopate:

“…but the kinds of students drawn to creative nonfiction usually retain a taste for the unadulterated truth, and a naïve hope that here at last they will not have to lie, so that when you tell them “art is a lie” or some such clever- ness, they look at you with these large disappointed eyes.”

“The greater sensitivity that today’s academy brings to issues of stereotyping seems to have rendered writing students preternaturally cautious, as though making any generalizations were invid- ious. It seems to me obviously desirable for a writing style to be able to move freely and easily from the concrete to the general and back. As for debatable generalizations, when a workshop voices exceptions to this or that generality in a fellow-student’s piece, I point out that we are not in a court of law. I would rather the emerging writer get into the habit of attempting sweeping generalizations, even if they prove not to be true in every instance, so long as they are enough true to stimulate thought.”

I selected these for their imagery or their relevance, respectively. I certainly feel like a pup seeking attention when I write. And like the students with “large disappointed eyes” in Lopate, I am frightened of inaccuracy. I want non-fiction, even creative non-fiction, to be really, really true. Everything I read suggests that this is impossible.

As for the second quote of each writer, I am taking them for advice. Or I’ll try. Not to fear sweeping generalisations. To write even when I know that I can never touch “the whole truth and nothing but.”

An aside: It’s telling about memoirists that both Lopate and Hampl comment on (and decry) the old writers’ adage: “Show, Don’t Tell.”

Another aside: I nearly wrote “It’s interesting to me that both…” but then I remembered that “interesting” is meaningless. All it means is that I noticed it. “Telling” is slightly less vague. “Telling about memoirists” is better (although my browser doesn’t believe that “memoirist” is a word).

Hampl, memory, autobiography, and ethics

Personal narratives teach us about the importance of memory, of not only describing what happened but also explaining why it matters. In her essay “Memory and Imagination,” Patricia Hampl argues that the work of the memoirist is to conjure resonant images from a personal past and transform them into stories that explore “profound matters” such as “life and death,…love, despair, loss, and innocence” (788). These enduring human concerns are what connect us, and we talk with one another about them by sharing our unique life stories. However, just as the memoirist must humbly acknowledge the limits of point of view, the reader must recognize the complexity of truth in autobiographical narrative. A life story can be both factual and conditional, both recalled and fashioned. Further, in Hampl’s view, autobiography is an emotional, ethical, and social act, not a self-absorbed pastime. It is “a personal confirmation of selfhood, and therefore the first step toward ethical development. To write one’s life is to live it twice, and the second living is both spiritual and historical, for a memoir reaches deep within the personality as it seeks its narrative form and it also grasps the life-of-the-times as no political analysis can” (791). In this interpretation, memoir is a critical, creative, and collective exercise in truth-seeking.