Memories under construction : Writing,narratives and dialogues

Introduction

This paper explores the participation of writing in the narrative construction of autobiographical memories, proposing the latter as a process of dialogical negotiations semiotically mediated. Our objective seeks to bring attention to the participation of writing in the dialogical dynamics of narrative constructions of autobiographical memories. Despite stemming from the inner dynamics of a concrete individual, autobiographical memories encompass narratives as social and cultural products (Brockmeier, 2010). Individually and culturally constituted, narrative representations are not preceding memory but on the contrary, memory is the result of ‘carrying out’ in narratives the subject’s autobiographical processes (Brockmeier, 2009). Bearing on this, we will depart from writing as the sociocultural instrument acting as the mediator of this concrete type of narrations (Gillespie & Zittoun, 2010; Vygotsky, 1962; Wertsch, 1991). Taking into account how literacy, and writing in particular, transforms our mental dynamics (Olson, 1996; Ong, 1991), we will propose writing as performing yet another role, suggesting that it acts as the space where the forces of memory narratives take place (Brockmeier, 2002).

This paper analyses both functions on the basis of subjective contents which, not always fully articulated as experiences, trigger the process of narrating memories. In this case, remembering takes place on the basis of narrative dynamics: Selecting which contents will be considered, and how they will be interpreted in organisations that portray a given event or action, and the subjective contents associated to it (Bruner, 1986). This is the frame in which we approach writing to examine how it participates in the narrative articulation of autobiographical memories.

Our objective leads us to consider writing on the basis of individual dynamics, which, grounded on Cultural Psychology (Bakhtin, 1986; Cole, 1996; Valsiner, 2007; Vygotsky, 1962; Wertsch, 1991), we present as intimately related to culture, involving a rich diversity of semiotic vehicles and possibilities of interactions (Valsiner, 2008). As sociocultural practices, the stories casting our memories into narrative forms are the result of cultural and individual factors. Culture is an organising principle that affects all human beings, influencing the meanings stemming from our self-dialogues (Joseph & Valsiner, 1998), and reaching our ways of interpreting and of experiencing our world and ourselves (Bruner, 1987). Our development is embedded in historical and cultural parameters that importantly influence our ways of remembering and of narrating about ourselves (Harbus, 2011; Nelson, 2003). In this sense, autobiographical memory can be seen as ‘an array of practices’ which culturally shapes the subject’s ways of gathering memories, and also, their motives to engage in remembering (Wang & Brockmeier, 2002).

Writing is one of the main instruments participating in these practices and, thanks to its material body, it grants us access to explore the mental dynamics characterising the process in which it participates (Gillespie & Zittoun, 2010). As a literary practice, the process of writing narratives about our memories is a process of individual creativity which is nonetheless historically and culturally determined. Memory writing is thusly connected to Narrative Psychology (Bruner, 1986, 1987; McAdams, 2001; Polkinghorne, 1998), and to a notion of narrative presented as our ‘most advanced way to shape complex temporal experiences, including remembering’ (Brockmeier, 2009). Narratives embrace the manifold horizons composing the temporality of our memories. Although narrative dynamics are emplaced at the moment of writing, the perspectives involved are open to our past, our future, or even, as we will later see, to different and coexisting presents.

Our approach to narrative representations will depart from the concept of dialogical self (Hermans, 2001, 2002, 2003; Marková, 2006; Salgado & Gonçalves, 2007; Zittoun, 2008). In this sense, writing appears as characterised by a notion of dialogicality which, following Linell (2009), we see as ‘some essences of the human condition, notably that our being in the world is thoroughly interdependent with the existence of others’ (p. 7). With dialogue we refer to ‘intra and inter-personal communication in and through language, and other semiotic resources’ (Linell, 2006, p. 157). From here, dialogical as an adjective characterises something as having the features of a dialogue, i.e. interactive yet not reduced to dyads (Linell, 2009).

The dialogicality characterising personal writing involves different type of positions (Cabillas, 2013), bringing narrative writing close to the notion of ‘navigation process’ proposed in what has emerged as the ‘small stories’ approach (Bamberg & Georgakopoulou, 2008). Despite the differences separating our analysis from this approach, and the fact that this term refers to oral narratives, the notion of navigation illustrates well the movements in which writing vehicles the explorations of the ‘sense of self’ (Bamberg & Georgakopoulou, 2008, p. 380) associated to the construction of past memories. Mediating and actively participating in the narrative dynamics representing the events and the meanings composing our past, writing actively participates in the negotiations that will determine the final version of memory.

To complement Linell’s (2009) notion of dialogue with the dynamics associated to these explorations we need to consider the fluidity characterising the subject or, more concretely put, the writer. One of the first accounts of the fluxing nature of our mental dynamics is to be found in James (1994), who explains how we see the same object sometimes as part of ourselves, sometimes as something that is ours, and some other times as if it had nothing to do with us (p. 233). Bearing on this, Cooley (1902) proposes that what we ‘are’ comes close to those contents that we appropriate as part of our selves, and which inspire in us what he calls the ‘my-feeling or sense of appropriation’ (p. 137). The clarity with which we experience this feeling leads him to reject metaphysical and abstract conceptualisations, opting for a notion of self that can be ‘apprehended or verified by ordinary observation’ (p. 136). The self that we feel we are appears connected to those things that we identify as belonging to us, and that stem from a ‘“my” attitude’ that delineates the parameters of who we are (Cooley, 1902, p. 140).

Although so intimately experienced by an individual Cooley (1902) emphasises the importance of the sociocultural dimension, as for him the self is a ‘social self’: ‘Simply any idea, or system of ideas, drawn from the communicative life, that the mind cherishes as its own’ (p. 147). The contents that we appropriate as ours, and which we feel as our selves, are thusly related to the cultural patterns and practices constituting the ‘communicative life’ in which, as social beings, we participate.

In addition to this, our selves are according to him importantly affected to the way in which others perceive us, which relates our emotional dynamics to ‘personal forces, reflected in the mind by a world of personal impressions’ (Cooley, 1902, p. 147). The weight of these two factors on the self becomes especially relevant in what Cooley (1902) conceptualises as the ‘looking-glass self’. In this case social references take the form of definite imaginations conveying ‘the imagination of our appearance to the other person’, and ‘the imagination of his judgment of that appearance’ (Cooley, 1902, p. 152). As the author remarks, the second element influences the third element that is part of this concept: The self-feeling that we experience according to the imagined reactions to our self-representation (Cooley, 1902, p. 152).

Articulating our memories in writing mobilises these three different parameters, as we explore the narrative options that will become part of our selves and the feelings that they elicit. In terms of appropriated contents, we need to select what will become part of the representations that will define our former self, imagining how they will portray us to others, imagining how we will be judged, and feeling accordingly. Yet, the sociocultural models and instruments associated to autobiographical remembering are equally important (Wang & Brockmeier, 2002) and, as we will discuss, they can be considered part of one’s own as well.

Our analysis of the roles of writing in this dynamics is inspired by the use of literary sources found in authors such as Cooley (1902), Bakhtin (1984), and Vygotsky (1962). From their respective perspectives, they importantly relied on material that only literature could provide to develop concepts that would determine their theoretical legacy. Present scholarship in psychology shows that this interest in literature has by no means disappeared, and we can find recent contributions seeking to shed light on the relationship between psychology and literature (Moghaddam, 2004), and studies that directly draw from literary examples to explain inner dynamics (see for example Marková, 2006). In the field of personal narratives we find an increasing awareness about the importance of literature to study the self (Jones, 2010). Following this line of work we have chosen Childhood (1984), ¹ the autobiography of the Russian-French writer Nathalie Sarraute, to study the dynamics characterising the use of writing in memory narratives.

The interest of Childhood (1984) as a study case is that it grants us access to analyse writing about memories in the context of inner dynamics which are semiotically mediated and, thanks to its written body, open to examination. Sarraute’s inner tensions provide us with a material extremely useful to observe the participation of writing in the negotiations and the explorations characterising autobiographical memory. Some of her tensions stem from individual conflicts concerning the representations of her childhood-self. Especially interesting here is her ambivalent desire of differentiating herself from the others, which Jefferson (2000) identifies as a fear of ‘sameness’, which will assimilate her into something that is alien to her own self, and an equal fear to the feelings of rejection and exclusion that her being different will provoke in others (p. 1). Chiming with Cooley’s (1902) looking glass-self this fear reflects Sarraute’s desire to elaborate memories using contents that must be genuinely felt as the self that she was, and her fear provoked by the reaction that she anticipates in others in relation to her being different. A similar tension can be seen in terms of cultural, social and semiotic factors, which delineate patterns of references that constitute the other of Sarraute’s narrative representations. Childhood (1984) grants us access to observe conflicts concerned about narrative practices characterised by different approaches to writing, and different notions about how to represent autobiographical memories.

This autobiography presents writing as marked by inner tensions which are connected to individual and to cultural divergences about memory construction. As a cultural object Childhood (1984) illustrates how Sarraute’s narrative practice, and her understanding of writing as a means of exploration, emerge and are articulated against a narrative practice characterised by an altogether different notion of representation.

Sarraute’s professional writing was part of the Nouveau Roman, a French literary movement that radically contested models of representation based on narratives as faithful depictions of reality (Sarraute, 1963). According to her the corseted realities portrayed by these cultural practices of representation ‘seemed to have no access to what we experienced’ (Sarraute, 1990). Her reaction takes the form of a narrative based on an altogether different type of writing: From merely being an instrument aimed at reproducing narrative models, it becomes a means of exploration intimately related to narrative construction.

Sarraute conceives her writing as lacking any representational model of reference, aimed at the exploration of narrative representation: ‘I’m looking to see what is felt, what we feel. I don’t know what it is, and that’s why it interests me—precisely because I don’t know exactly what it is’ (Sarraute, 1990). In this sense, it could be seen as related to a different narrative practice, as a reaction opposing narratives expected to faithfully depict by means of already existing representational references.

Sarraute’s writing is born from her suspicions about the way in which clear-cut narrative definitions represent real life and subjectivity, drawing upon easily recognisable meanings already articulated in clichés and representational patterns of references. In her writing she is determined to contest this representational canon, coming to writing to find and not to reproduce. As she explains, writing allows her to ‘jump into the void without protections’ (Sarraute, 1990). Sarraute’s approach establishes close connections between writing and the narrative construction of memory, and her suspicion about faithful representations develops into a narrative practice determined to apprehend the fleeting dynamics of experiences and to avoid fixing them into fictionalised, static descriptions. Also, it leads to a constant distrust affecting both the contents of her remembering, like images that come ‘unchanged, permanently engraved’ (Sarraute, 1984, p. 32), and the cultural formulas that at some points coincide with her memories, as in some of her ‘happy childhood memories’ (p. 23). This explains the dilemma from which our study case is born: An autobiographical project in which writing is to pin childhood memories in narrative episodes, without falling into fictive and static accounts of images and meanings.

Extremely aware of the need to avoid traditional autobiographical formulas, Sarraute writes closely supervising her own writing, distrusting and questioning both contents and narrative representation. In this sense, Childhood (1984) differs from most autobiographical practices in the way to understand itself as an autobiographical account. Whereas traditional autobiographies glean memories to elaborate them into episodic accounts of lives, Sarraute’s autobiographical objective seeks to explore the dynamics of her memories. Childhood (1984) was written to discover her memories before they become articulated, and in her writing Sarraute sought ‘to find the mechanism by which fixed ideas start to come’ (in Guerrero, 1993, p. 89).

This approach to memory presents narrative organisations which are portrayed as being under construction, deploying writing to explore possibilities that are dialogically negotiated to construct the final version. As a result of this the memories represented in Childhood (1984) refer to Sarraute’s past memories and to an equal extend, to the dialogical dynamics of their narrative articulation in writing. This is precisely what Childhood (1984) portrays: The complex interplay of Sarraute as she experiences and re-creates those memories in writing, and by means of it, revealing memory as connected to her past as much as, if not more than, to her present.

Sarraute’s use of writing crystallises in an extremely dialogical structure in which memory takes the form of negotiations with herself, and with her cultural cannons of representation, making of Childhood (1984) an interesting case to discuss inner dynamics and cultural influences. Throughout her autobiography, Sarraute dialogically engages in meaning-making processes characterised by tensions related to individual divergences concerning interpretations, and to cultural patterns of narrative representations. In what follows, we will turn to the discussion to look at representations in relation to narratives, to writing, and to the process of remembering.

Narratives, writing and memories

Since its origins in the 80s Narrative Psychology has proposed narratives as paradigmatic ways of thinking (Bruner, 1986), as psychological principles (Sarbin, 1986) and presented it in a myriad definitions (Brockmeier & Carbaugh, 2001). They have been explored in a diversity of manifestations that expand psychological understanding of narrative representations to include vehicles such as perzines (Stockburger, 2008), art installations (Brockmeier, 2002), or bodies (Langellier, 2001). Narratives have become the most fruitful vehicle to convey the stories of the self, establishing the basis on which identity and self-understanding are built (Polkinghorne, 1991, p. 136).

Usually the stories grounding the study of the self and its dialogicality are coming from people’s life-stories. We can find approaches focused on a single person (Zittoun, 2007) and designs in which narratives are studied considering cultural settings and following combined methodological strategies (Skinner, Valsiner, & Holland, 2001). Recent debates have distinguished between the ‘small stories’ of local narrative practices (Bamberg & Georgakopoulou, 2008) and the ‘big stories’ encompassing narrations of broader experiential accounts (Freeman, 2011).

Selecting the autobiography of a writer like Sarraute we are aware of the exceptionality of a narrative construction strongly influenced by the author’s literary practice. We do not seek to generalise its format but to observe in its extreme dialogicality the ways in which writing channels the tensions characterising the narrative dynamics of autobiographical memories. Despite its literary touch, Childhood (1984) fulfils the requisites that Lejeune (1989) establishes to demarcate fictive from personal representations: The coincidence of author and narrator, and the ‘pact’ made by author and publisher about the truth of the claims made in narrative. ²

The truth of autobiographical remembering, Barlett explained already in 1932, is concerned with ‘how people construct versions of their past, their positions in so doing, and the very notion of what it is to remember’ (in Middleton & Brown, 2005, p. 18). Although our material stems from an individual writing alone, Barlett’s description depicts well the notion of autobiographical truth that Childhood (1984) displays. In her writing Sarraute embraces positions which are characterised by different ideas about the elements and the organisation of narrative remembering, presenting memory, as one of our reviewers put it, as multivoiced. Writing from these views Sarraute inscribes different narrative versions which are discussed in semiotically mediated self-negotiations. Autobiographical truth appears thusly marked by the tensions and oppositions characterising the dialogical meaning making of the self (Joseph & Valsiner, 1998) and by the exploration of the versions representing the contents identified as part of the self and the feelings associated to them (Cooley, 1902).

Additionally, and notwithstanding the complex relationship between fictive and self-narratives, the basic elements of narrative construction make of Childhood (1984) an autobiographical account. Todorov (1977) defines these basic elements as follows: ‘Story is what has happened in life, the plot is the way the author presents it to us’ (p. 45). Bearing on this, we can say that in life-narratives the stories feeding the plots stem from the author’s life, whereas in fiction stories are up to imaginative and creative potentials. Childhood (1984) draws from two different dimensions of Sarraute’s life, presenting a double-layered story that includes both her childhood and herself at her eighties writing about it. In this way Sarraute illustrates how the stories constituting our memory are not just merely retrieved from the past, but emerging realities that require decisions involving dialogical dynamics at the present of writing. Autobiographical representations stem from this dynamics, and represent the self ‘as it is becoming, a metaphor of the self as the summary moment of composition’ (Olney, 1981/1972, p. 35). On this basis, our discussion will analyse writing as part and parcel of the dialogical dynamics characteristic of the subject’s selfhood (Cunha & Gonçalves, 2009).

Despite its connection with psychological dynamics, the use of materials stemming from self-writing has not become part of mainstream methodologies in the scholarship of psychology (Zittoun & Gillespie, 2010). Deeply rooted in our everyday life, writing about oneself is possibly one of the most common instruments mediating the subjective articulation of memory into narrative accounts. Due to its involvement in psychological dynamics so intimately connected with subjectivity, it is surprising that the attention devoted to this specific type of writing has not sufficed to make it more popular in fields such as Narrative Psychology and Dialogical Self Studies.

As an instrument related to expression of thoughts and emotions its interest has often appeared connected to literacy and educational contexts, both as methodology (MacBeath, 2006), and conceptually (Shaw, 2010). In addition to this, writing has been used in therapeutic contexts (Pizarro, 2004), and as a means to explore narratives defying the limits of intelligibility (Cabillas, 2012). Recently, works such as Zittoun & Gillespie (2010), Zittoun (2008), and Gillespie (2010), have promoted the legitimisation of the theoretical and analytical potentials of autobiographical texts that reveal ‘the microprocesses of meaning-making engaged by the process of writing’ (Zittoun & Gillespie, 2010, p. 4).

Although these microprocessses relate to inner dynamics taking place in an individual writing alone, cultural influences and social norms play an essential role. Childhood (1984) makes an interesting case to analyse this role, as it reveals how Sarraute’s individual dynamics reflect social and cultural influences. In Childhood (1984) Sarraute’s self-dialogues often adopt the form of those everyday conversations in which, as Middleton & Brown (2005) remark, we revise the endlessly variable versions of our lives and ourselves. If in social interactions we discuss ‘what it is that might have actually, possibly or definitely happened’ (Middleton & Brown, 2005, p. 19), when turning to ourselves we find a very similar picture. The self-conversations that we find in Childhood (1984) are fuelled by the same oil, and it is on the basis of these conversations that memory is forged.

What is interesting in Sarraute’s case is that the inner dynamics of her meaning making are embedded in cultural influences that are articulated, and often contested. As a semiotic means, writing plays an important role in the facilitation of this reflexivity. Literacy in general and writing in particular, have transformed our conceptions of the world, and of ourselves (Olson, 1996). As an external technology, writing importantly transforms our consciousness, our speech and our thoughts (Ong, 1991). Inscribing our words into spatial configurations, writing takes speech from the ‘oral-aural’ towards a sensory based on vision (Ong, 1991, p. 85). It separates us from the immediacy of an actual other and from any extralinguistic information, confining our narrative possibilities to the limits of the text. Writing entirely depends on linguistic structures to articulate interpretations, and this affects the formulas available to implement memory as traditional expressions. As oral cultures illustrate, oral memories emphasise the use of stable formulas and favours ‘heavy characters’ and clichés that facilitate remembering (Ong, 1991, p. 70). Contrasting this, writing and its materiality open our narratives to the realm of the daily life in its insignificancy, relying on patterns and characters that need not be salient.

As Ong (1991) explains, the conservative function of written texts captures thoughts in their lines of ‘continuity outside the mind’ (p. 39) and, free from the need to remember, our mind can turn to speculations. Sarraute’s case is an example of this. Writing channels narrative versions in which she revises and explores the contents and the articulation of her memories, and how each of them feels, delineating a process of dialogical remembering semiotically mediated.

A key factor explaining many of the narrative possibilities that writing concedes is the distance that it introduces, both physical and psychologically. The possibility of detaching ourselves from our selves is essential to understand how writing affects the narrative construction of memory, as Ong (1991) claims: ‘To live and to understand fully we need not only proximity but also distance. This writing provides as nothing else does’ (p. 82). In the case of autobiographical memory the distance that written representations introduce offers the subject the opportunity to look at a given image of her past, facilitating the possibility of imagining and anticipating reactions that it would provoke in others, and being able to react on the basis of the feelings that this provokes. In this sense, the distance that writing permits us to take is precisely what brings us closer to ourselves, and this is how ‘Writing heightens consciousness’ (Ong, 1991, p. 82).

Time is also affected by writing, as it becomes interwoven with the reflective distances of written texts. Whereas in oral narratives temporality is remarkably determined by direct audiences, written texts ‘encourage growth of consciousness out of the unconscious’ (Ong, 1991, p. 150) with temporal margin open to considerations and re-considerations, creations and re-creations. Discussing the notion of time in psychology Valsiner (2000) proposes that it be conceived as ‘irreversible as it flows, intricately linked to our experiencing our relations with our worlds’ (p. 8). Conceptions of linear temporality could never grasp the complex interplay of self-experiences that we undergo when remembering and recreating what we lived, and simultaneously being ‘another and the same’ (Carretero & Solcoff, 2012, p. 20). This process interweaves different layers of temporality: The subject gives meanings to the past, under the influence of their present situations and their future expectations.

The concept of ‘present moment’ proposed by Cunha & Gonçalves (2009) is especially useful to discuss how these meanings relate to time. The authors draw from Stern’s (in Cunha & Gonçalves, 2009) work to consider the dialogical positions of the self in relation to the ‘present-moments’ of subjective experiences (p. 122). For Stern the ‘present-moment’ of our subjective experience is ‘the feeling of what happens to me in a given moment of phenomenological and experiential consciousness’ (in Cunha & Gonçalves, 2009, p. 122). As the authors notice, the notion of present moment relies on the assumption of the self as experiential center, and the awareness about the specific experiences that happen at a given moment. The subjective experience of the present ‘triggers’ specific sense-making and is ‘accompanied by affective tones’ (Cunha & Gonçalves, 2009, p. 122).

With different levels of awareness, the subject dialogically interprets experiences and affects, and elaborating meanings identifying what happened, or how it felt. The distance that writing inserts in this process facilitates the possibility of exploring and moving among different ‘centers’, engaging in dialogues in which we imagine how others will react to our representations, and reacting to the feelings that this provokes when considering alternative meanings and narrative versions. Writing forges a semiotic platform that extends dialogues both in time, allowing us to revise our thoughts after they have been written, and in spaces, allowing us to react to them at the moment of writing from a different perspective. Writing and narratives are intimately related, and their connection is furthermore double, as writing acts as a mediating tool and as a semiotic platform to revisit, and to re-enact feelings of the past as they are narratively organised.

To write or not to write: Childhood (1984)

-Then you really are going to do that? “Evoke your childhood memories,” … How these words embarrass you, you don’t like them. But you have to admit that they are the only appropriate words. You want to “evoke your memories” … there’s no getting away from it, that’s what it is.

-Yes, I can’t help it, it tempts me, I don’t know why.

(Sarraute, 1984, p. 1)

As a semiotic Hamlet, Sarraute’s dilemma traverses the narrative construction of her memories, introducing dialogical negotiations dealing with different types of tensions. On the one hand, Childhood (1984) stems from tensions between traditional narrative cannons and Sarraute’s approach to writing, radically opposed to them. On the other we find individual tensions concerning the narrative representation of the contents attributed to her childhood-self. Sarraute deploys writing as a platform of exploration that mobilises these tensions externalising them into narrating voices who, discussing about how to represent past memories, manage to represent Sarraute’s dialogical self at the present of writing. The reflexivity that this complex representation encompasses benefits as well from the possibilities open by material inscriptions that, as Ong (1991) explained, permit re-actions, re-considerations.

To discuss how the voices’ tensions become a coherent account we will follow Brockmeier’s (2002) distinction of three orders of integration into narrative practices: Linguistic, semiotic and performative. According to him, the symbolic space constituting narrative practices encompasses various cultural symbol systems. In each of these orders several parts acquire their meanings when being organised into a meaningful whole, according to a particular structure of meaning. This mnemonic system delineates temporality as an interaction between past, present and future in which experiences from different temporal frames interact and active each other, surpassing a Newtonian conceptualisation of time.

In the linguistic order of Childhood (1984) we find this interaction between past and present characterising the narrative elements. The integrating structure as a linguistic order acts when someone tells about a given story, conveying the narrative elements into a given plot or discourse. In Childhood (1984) this takes the form of an autobiographical memory composed by loose episodes about Sarraute’s childhood, unconnected and undated. As narrative agents the two different voices stemming from Sarraute’s elder-self co-construct her childhood-self, intertwining temporalities and presenting her past as negotiated in her present. This strategy solves the narrative dilemma challenging her approach to writing about her childhood, i.e. how to fulfil the desire to evoke memories without fixing them into static representations. Sarraute relies on her voices to break the linearity of her narrative construction, intentionally disrupting the past activated by her own representation with reactions informing us about how these representations feel at the present of her writing. Sarraute’s (1984) interjections irrupt in the past created by her narrative provoking fissures in the construction of narrative landscapes of memory with reactions that question this very past, such as ‘Did you really feel that, at that age?’ (p. 48), or ‘Images, words, which obviously couldn’t have come into your head at that age’ (p. 9).

In the second level, Brockmeier (2002) identifies systems of signs constituting the semiotic order. Here we need to consider both the medium conveying the story and the dialogue that it maintains with its contexts. In this sense, Childhood (1984) constitutes an individual account of memory born out of the conflict between two narrative practices. Sarraute’s autobiography reacts to narrative as a practice devoted to faithful representations and to autobiography as a report of experiences fixed into descriptions. This cultural model of representation is present throughout her autobiography, becoming the ‘other’ against which her narration emerges. Each model has its own semiotic elements, and inspire the use (or in Sarraute’s case, the rejection) of elements such as clichés, or conscious fictionalisations filling the gaps of memory.

Running through Childhood (1984) the dialogue between these two models is manifested in a constant revision of the narrative organisation. When writing Sarraute keeps a close eye on the narrative result, lest that her memories would stray into this ‘other’ narrative practice, reporting static memories instead of exploring their construction. Although intimated in the previous examples, the following extract illustrates with more detail the zeal of the narrator acting as Sarraute’s narrative supervisor. After a thorough description of a childhood image, her alarm carefully reminds her of the idealisation of scenes associated to representational models that should be avoided:

-Don’t be angry, but don’t you think that there, with that cooing, that chirruping, you haven’t been able to resist introducing something a little prefabricated … it’s so tempting, you’ve inserted a pretty little piece … completely in keeping … 

-Yes, I may perhaps have let myself go a little … (Sarraute, 1984, p. 13)

As previous extracts illustrate there is a main narrator and a supervisor co-authoring the narrative. Despite being anchored on the same subjective contents, their views reflect diverting narrative tendencies that often lead to confrontations. Their interactions, in and by means of writing, delineate a dialogical narrative construction that illustrate how ‘It is not the narrated event but the narrative event that makes a plot’ (Emphasis in the original) (Brockmeier, 2002, p. 35). Our proposal is that writing plays an important role in the dynamics of the narrative event constituting memory, both as mediator and as space. As a mediator it inscribes different perspectives in the narrative composition, granting Sarraute the possibility of exploring coexisting versions of memories, the feelings that they elicit, and affecting the interactions characterising the narrative event. As the semiotic space hosting these inscriptions writing productively articulates the tensions of diverting narrative tendencies but also, of cultural influences affecting the narrative possibilities of autobiographical memory.

In what follows we will consider this third level of analysis to discuss the participation of writing in narrative representation, proposing the latter as a sociocultural and individual performance characterised by dialogicality.

Memories under construction

The contents in Childhood (1984) divert in many ways from the model of representation in conventional autobiographies. Childhood (1984) presents memory as a co-constructed dialogue that mobilises different accounts of memory in the discussions of narrating voices seeking to impose their respective perceptions. An example of this is the following extract, in which Sarraute’s (1984) discusses the interpretation of her troubling stepmother’s (Vera) words:

It isn’t your home” … It’s hard to believe, but this is, nevertheless, what Vera said to me one day. When I asked her if we were going home soon, she said: “It isn’t your home.

(1)-Exactly what the cruel stepmother might have replied to poor Cinderella. That was what made you hesitate … 

(2)-Yes indeed: I was afraid that in reliving all this, I might find myself making Vera and me into characters in a fairy tale … 

(3)-It’s true that Vera, at times, when you make the effort to call her to mind, gives you a feeling of losing touch with reality, of taking off into fiction … 

(4)-But might we not, this time, to keep within the bounds of reality, try to imagine that she used those words because it was still understood that my mother was going to take me back, I mustn’t get too used to feeling at home in a house that I would soon have to leave … she wanted to spare me a new heartache … 

(5)-Let us suppose that that was so … And let us also suppose that she may have been beginning to fear that you would stay here … it was a heavy responsibility for that young woman … (…) and when she realised that you thought it was your home you were going back to, she couldn’t help herself, she couldn’t restrain the impulse that drove her to uproot you from that house, to prevent your ‘feeling at home’ there … Oh no, not that, ‘It isn’t your home.’

(6)-To rediscover what can have sparked off these words of hers, I would at least have to hear their intonation again … (…) (pp. 115–116)

Marková’s (2003) reading of Rozenweig’s notion of dialogue illuminates the understanding of these voices’ dialogical interaction. Markova proposes communication as dialogues including disputes, fights about ideas and negotiations of antinomies in thinking (p. 256). As she notices, opposed positions interacting with each other confirm each other’s participation in social realities, agreeing or not but in any case, co-authoring representation. In our case the same holds. Mediating Sarraute’s dialogic interactions writing inscribes narrative versions that compete with each other, representing memory on the basis of oppositions stemming from individual and from cultural tensions.

In the case of cultural tensions this co-construction takes the form of a narrative model articulated on the basis of opposed cultural practices of autobiographical memory. An example can be seen in Sarraute’s use of the fictionalised images and cultural motives that characterise the narrative practices against which she writes. As seen in previous extracts, at points Sarraute’s experiences come perilously close to idealisations associated to cultural references such as Cinderella, especially concerning her relationship with her difficult stepmother and with her indifferent mother. Cultural motives offer perceptions and meanings that simplify remembering, identifying our experiences with well-known narratives. Yet, succumbing to these motives would force memories into the procrustean bed of identifications: clichés that would fix her memories into static images, alienating them from contents genuinely part of her childhood-self. Writing makes possible to explore the luring attractive of these influences, explicitly articulating them into representations that allow Sarraute to imagine how her childhood-self would be portrayed in them, exploring how it would feel. As the previous extract reflects, as a result of bringing her exploration to writing her narrative construction is built on the basis of both models, or more concretely, of their opposition.

When turning to tensions connected to individual we find a narrative co-constructed on the basis of different alternatives to memory, and of Sarraute’s reaction to them. In this case the characteristics of writing play an important role. Separating, physical and psychologically, different centers of meaning making and attributing each to a narrating voice facilitates Sarraute the possibility of dwelling in opposed representations of memory, exploring how their respective contents correlate with the ‘“my” attitude’ (Cooley, 1902), and the feelings that each version provokes. Sarraute’s reactions to these versions of memory can be constructed on the basis of contents that do not need to rely on her own memory, as they are available to always-new readings and interpretations that outlive the moment of writing. This contrasts with oral narratives which, were they to encompass this dynamics, would have to rely on the mnemonic prints of what was said, and what was felt. The temporal frames in each narrative type differ as well, and the possibility to reflect about narrative possibilities benefits from lacking the immediate presence of interlocutors characterising oral constructions.

Writing mediates and registers the dialogical negotiation of the oppositions characterising the conversations of Sarraute’s remembering, reflecting how different perspectives and models co-narrate memory. It presents memory as a reality that is explored, felt, and in cases like this one, left open to be decided upon. Considering this intimate connection between representation and subjective contents, we could see autobiographical memory narratives following Bakhtin’s understanding of the novel as ‘essentially a cognitive instrument, a kind of optic that permits us to see with particular clarity the fundamental relation between language and story’ (in Holquist, 2011, p. 363). Mutually influencing each other, the voices reflect the effect that writing can perform on the subject’s inner realm. Just as talk can lead to new thoughts (Gillespie, 2006) written realities lead to writing new possibilities. The following extract presents an example. Sarraute’s lens hones in on herself as a child, departing from a moment in which she was playing in a park:

(…) But I observe other children, and the moment I see one being given his bun and bar of chocolate I rush up … she has seen me coming, she hands me mine, I grab them, thank her with a nod and go off … 

(1)-To do what?

(2)-Ah, don’t try to set a trap for me … To do anything, what children do when they play (…), stop abruptly and gaze intently at the other children, at the people sitting on the stone benches or the chairs … they plant themselves down in front of them, open mouthed … 

(3)-Perhaps you did that more than the others, perhaps in a different way … 

(4)-No, I wouldn’t say that … I did it in the same way as a lot of children do … and probably with observations and reflections of the same order … in any case, nothing of that has remained with me, and you certainly aren’t going to push me into trying to plaster over that gap. (Sarraute, 1984, pp. 15–16)

The main narrator identifies Sarraute as a normal child, just playing as the other children (in 2 and 4), whereas the supervising voice introduces suspicions of her being ‘different’, separating her from them. The apparently innocent question of 1 inspires anomalies that the main narrator rushes to deviate filling the gap with images portraying children’s normality, although she does so in the distance of the third person. Apparently accepting this normality in 3, the revising voice tries again to subtly alienate Sarraute-as-child from it. Sarraute’s ultimate uncertainty is revealed at 4, in which the temptation of ‘plastering’ the gap is accused by the main narrator.

The primal lack of knowledge about who we were that this extract reveals is connected with the impossibility of elaborating a full account of ourselves that Butler (2001) conceptualises as opacity. The social interactions in which we interchange recognition with our others are mediated by cultural instruments that reflect the influence of a horizon of historical, cultural and social norms. The ways in which we learn to feel a self, appropriating contents from our social life, are influenced by the cultural specificity of a horizon of recognisability that goes beyond individuality (Butler, 2001). This explains how the impossibility of fully articulating an account of our memories is at the core of the process of our attempt to do it: We cannot but turn to culture when trying to reach recognition.

Sarraute’s narrative dynamics construct memory on the basis of the limits of representation. This extract exemplifies how in relation to her recurring ambivalence about wanting to be part of a community, and yet different from it. Here desire to be part is expressed in her attempt to represent her childhood-self in a normalised and culturally recognisable motive: being a normal child and doing what they do. With this identification she situates her childhood-self within the horizon of intelligibility, conveying her memories on the basis of its intelligibility. Yet, the feelings evoked by this representation fall short of reassurance and her distrusting reaction manages to undermine her conviction. The connection of her childhood-self to the culturally specific normality of ‘the children’ is a gap that is to remain open, resisting fictionalisation.

The primal lack of certainty about who we are, and were, inspires conversations exploring the many versions of our selves, both socially and individually, building the layers that construct and reconstruct representations that, with different degrees of ephemerality, constitute our memories. The impossibility to fully account for what happened, or what it meant, that the voices address here is at the basis of representation. As Emerson (1983) explains ‘It is the lack, the absence at the center, that keeps the outer word and our inner speech in permanent dialogue’ (p. 260). The previous extracts illustrate how the outer characteristics of words, and in general of cultural models of narrative organisation, are explored and selected according to their capability to portray the inner contents of Sarraute’s childhood memories. Installed in them, Sarraute writes exploring the bidirectional dynamics between the inner contents of her memories and her outer representation of them. In their opposition, her different narrative versions unveil the ultimate lack of certainty, and the explorations underlying the construction of this memory.

To a certain degree, writing permits us to ‘step out’ of ourselves, looking at us from a different perspective (Clark & Holquist, 1984; Gillespie, 2010) and, as Bakhtin suggested (in Clark & Holquist, 1984, p. 71), becoming conscious with new ways of seeing. In our case, we see how when writing Sarraute turns to her childhood-self as a temporally open, unfinished event. Writing reflects the consciousness of alternative memories, revealing their narrative dynamics as being under construction and characterised by individual and cultural tensions dialogically negotiated. The narrative landscapes of actions and subjective meanings (Bruner, 1986) are explored in different versions, granting Sarraute the possibility of exploring the feelings that their respective representations evoke when considering how they represent her childhood-self. The possibility of directly reacting to these feelings, adjusting the narrative articulation of memory, accounts for the intimate interaction between narrative and writing. Bearing on the openness of this dynamic interactions, and considering the distances introduced by writing, we could see Sarraute’s interacting voices as a form of ‘dialogic interaddressivity’ (Matusov, 2011), in which each voice does not fully know the other.

As a space and as semiotic vehicle, writing participates in these dynamics affecting the narrative events from which memory stems. Subjective contents related to past experiences are activated by a process of remembering that is situated in the ‘present moment’ of writing. Stemming from tensions related to different centers of meaning making, and to different narrative models and organisational possibilities, Childhood (1984) brings to the fore the manifold possibilities coexisting in remembering. Underlying the explorations of the manifold versions of our memories, a basic lack of knowledge inspire narratives in which the subject becomes aware of herself, seeing herself from positions stemming from her own otherness, and exploring how these images feel to the eyes of an other.

Conclusion

The objective of this paper was to examine the participation of writing in the narrative dynamics of autobiographical memories. Our discussion has presented writing as intimately related to the dynamics of narrative construction, presenting this as a process directly influenced by cultural patterns of narrating and of remembering. The possibilities of writing as a mediator (Ong, 1991) facilitate the exploration of different versions, and of the feelings associated to them. It opens a space where opposed values and influences can be made explicit and negotiated upon, extending the notion of remembering to include explorations as part of memory. Despite the fact that, as activity, writing takes place at the present of the inscription, the temporalities that it activates are open to past, future, and as our material manifests, different positions in the present.

This psychological dynamics correspond to the inner realm of an individual, and yet they are intimately connected to historical and cultural influences. Approaching inner dynamics from the perspective of a dialogical self our analysis has examined the tensions fuelling Sarraute’s self-negotiations of memory, and the role of writing in them. Far from merely idiosyncratic aspects, the contents and the dynamics reflected in Childhood (1984) have brought to the fore the influence of social, cultural, and semiotic influences in the inner dynamics characterising process of writing to narratively organise memory.

As a sociocultural practice of remembering, our proposal presented writing both as a semiotic mediator of the subject’s inner dynamics and as a symbolic space hosting the narrative results of them. On Sarraute’s autobiography we have revised the negotiations and uncertainties on which memory is built, discussing it as a process of reconstruction of the past in a dialogued present. As a semiotic mediator we have discussed how writing affects the process of narrative construction, inserting a separation in space and time that involves physical and psychological detachment. Additionally, writing offers the possibility of considering different perspectives and of materialising their respective versions, liberating the mind from the imperative of remembering them (Ong, 1991). The attention can then turn to the exploration of memory and to the discussion of the articulated versions.

In this sense, writing has been presented as semiotic space. The dilemmas characterising Childhood (1984) as an autobiographic exploration of memory have granted us access to the dialogical negotiation taking place in this space. The voices’ conversations discuss narratives as they are constructed in each voice’s version and, thanks to their materiality, these versions invite to reactions and re-considerations that surpass the temporal frame of the narrative event.

These two roles have been proposed as characteristics of the participation of writing in the externalisation of mental contents (Gillespie & Zittoun, 2010), suggesting that when writing the subject engages in a process of self-detachment (Cabillas, 2009). To completely be an other to ourselves is an impossible task, yet, as Gillespie (2010) remarks, the attempt that writing makes possible is a productive one.

Discussing the participation of writing in autobiographical narratives we have sought to bring attention to writing as a mediator which helps us to understand the psychological dynamics characterising the dialogues negotiating our memories. Future research would be needed to develop this analysis further, exploring for instance the participation of writing in narrative dynamics of historical memories incarnated in non-linguistic vehicles (as in Brockmeier, 2002). In the field of personal memories, the increasing presence of technological devices and the possibilities that they open in terms of literacy practices are creating new cultural formats of narrating autobiographical memories. The concept of writing should be revisited in order to rethink inscriptions consisting of images (such as selfies), addressing oneself while being open to anyone’s gaze, and reaction (as in blogs), or combining the different narrative vehicles when defining who we are and what we did in social networks. As most of these narratives are directly made public it could be especially interesting to explore the dynamics of their writing to analyse its effects on the dialogical negotiations of the contents representing our selves and our memories.

Our contribution here sought to extend the notion of writing as a mediator and to propose it as a space in which the subject engages in interactions, and narratives take place as multi-layered events. This idea of writing allowed us to approach personal memories as negotiations of possible versions of our former self. Analysing the tensions and conflicts traversing Sarraute’s memories, we have proposed them as narrative events characterised by a dialogical negotiation presenting memory as a material under construction.