Andrea Lešić-Thomas

Memory, Narratology and the Problem of Authenticity: A Story of Pain

Published in: Interpretations, European Research Project for Poetics and

Hermeneutics, Volume No. 2: Memory and Art, ed. by Kata Kulavkova (Skopje:
Macedonian Academy of Sciences and Arts, 2008), pp. 101-118.

One must be silent, if one can't give any help. No one,

through his own lack of hope, should make the condition
of the patient worse. For that reason, all my scribbling is
to be destroyed. I am no light. I have merely lost my way
among my own thorns. I’m a dead end.
Franz Kafka1

…. distinctions that will follow in due course will depend

upon some basic premises that had best be explicit — that
narrative form is a way of seeing, transforming, and to
some extent re-experiencing reality; that basic as it is,
narrative is quite extraordinary in its construction of
integral worlds; that when we back away from these
worlds and think of them by contrast to the worlds of the
lyric or the essay or the picture show we can see how
vulnerable we are to the silent epistemological principles
of our fictions.
Toliver 1974, 4

Abstract: As both memory and narratives provide focus to some of the major trends in social
sciences and the humanities, the question of how literary scholarship can draw from this new
research to illuminate its own problematic is now quite pressing. The paper will explore the
problem of authenticity in literary ‘memory texts’ (with Jergović and Ugrešić as likely
reference points) in the context of new thinking on memory in the cognitive sciences.

At least, the above abstract was my honest prediction of what the paper I was
going to write would be about. Authenticity was meant to be the central problem of
my proposed application of the research on memory and narratives in the human and
social sciences to the study of literary texts. On reflection, what I had in mind was
some kind of play on words to the effect that memories cannot be seen as reliably
representative of the authentic, true past, that authentic memories are, by the force of
the narrative logic that shapes them, always inaccurate and that the past they hold is
largely constructed by the remembering mind eager for meaning and coherence. That,

1
Quoted from Olney 1998, 334.

1
simply put, literary representation of memory had to be tolerant of inaccuracy and
confabulation in order to capture the authenticity of what memory is.
However, in the process of writing, this paper decided to change direction of
my initial course of investigation. The postmodern tolerance with which I had first
proposed to treat the unreliable nature of memory, and the unreformed structuralist’s
glee at finding that narrative structures identified by the high narratologists of the
1960s (and, before them, by Propp) could well be the cause of that unreliability, were
swept aside by the realisation that something else was at stake here. And that, from
what I could gather from my cursory survey of some of the vast research on memory
and narratives of the last two or three decades, was trauma. The narrative
constructions of memory appeared as crucial not just because they showed that we are
storytelling apes who prefer the satisfaction of a well crafted narrative to the mere
truth, but because they showed that unity and coherence that narrative logic brings to
autobiographical remembering are the main mechanisms for overcoming the
unintelligibility of pain, suffering and trauma. In addition, what also became
transparent was that culturally sanctioned scripts for life stories could be blamed for
frequent failure of our life stories to overcome trauma effectively; that when the
cognitive drive for narrative coherence meets the seductiveness of cultural stereotype
and narrative cliché, autobiographical narratives can become harmful, and potentially
as distressing as the non-sense they were trying to replace.
So, what I propose to do here is this:
Firstly, briefly explore the significance of rules for narrative structuring in the
construction or organisation of memories in relation to accuracy, reliability and
authenticity of those memories.
Secondly, examine the effects of different types of narrative coherence in the
strategies for dealing with pain, looking in particular at issues such as cultural
prevalence of certain types of narratives, their capacity to process complexity, and
their effect on the subject’s ability to engage with the world in a satisfying and
productive way.
All these issues will be examined in relation to literary memory texts, although
the latter concern (stories as a tool for a satisfying engagement with the world) will
not be so visible, for the simple reason that, as Tolstoy remarked (loosely
paraphrased) there is not that much interesting to be said about happiness, whilst the
world of suffering holds endless fascination.

2
Narrative Logic in Cognition and Memory
Large part of what Martin Kreiswirth (1992, 2000) has called the ‘narrativist turn’ in
the humanities and social sciences, lasting probably since the early 1980s, has been
predicated on the concept of stories as a particular type of knowledge, or a mechanism
for organising knowledge, a cognitive tool with its own rules and logic (Ricoeur 1984,
Fireman and Flanagan 2003, Nash 1990, McAdams 1988, White 1996/1980). Of
course, as Kreiswirth notes, the concept of narrative has long had an implicit
cognitive aspect to it, coming ‘from the Sanskrit gna vie the Latin gnarus, signifiers
associated with the passing on of knowledge by one who knows’ (2000, 304).
Moreover, the understanding of narratives which underlines the cognitive function is
in some ways reminiscent of narratological theories in high structuralist days, which
noted the all-pervasiveness of stories in all human cultures (Barthes 1993/1966, Lévi-
Strauss 1958) and pointed out that even systems of ideas (such as Marxism) share the
basic deep structure with, say, the fairy-tale (Greimas 1966). However, structuralist
narratology’s basic premise was that language, and sentence structure in particular,
was the central, basic, original concept which needed to determine our understanding
and study of narrative (Barthes 1993 (1966), Genette 1972, Culler 1975, Hawkes
1977, Scholes 1974, Kreiswirth 2000). The narrativist turn has turned this on its head,
and narrative became the crucial, illuminating concept, both in understanding some of
the central problems of human cognition, as well as in understanding the origin of
language (Bickerton 1990, Abbott 2000, Kreiswirth 2000).2
So what of memory, then? Both the theoretical implication and the findings of
much of empirical research are that most of our memories, along with other higher
mental processes (such as understanding and judgement), are structured according to
the rules of story-building, both in our own internal processing of who we are and
how our lives are going, and even more so whenever we talk of our memories to
others. Even though memory itself does not take only narrative form (as the existence
and importance of memories of vivid sensory images testifies to), 3 most recollection
2
This is not to say that the suggestion that narrative may come before and not after language was not
advanced in the structuralist hayday (see Todorov 1971, 128). Also, for a pre-1980 cognitive study of
literary narratives, see Toliver 1974.
3
Rubin and Greenberg argue that ‘visual imagery system, at least as measured by its loss with a visual
memory deficit, is necessary for autobiographical memory.’ (2003, 66) Nevertheless, they also argue
that narrative ‘establishes a major form of organisation in autobiographical memory, providing
temporal and goal structure. […] Inclusions and exclusions depend in part on the narrative structures

3
that acts as sense-making does seem to assume narrative form (see, for example: King
2000, Fireman and Flanagan 2003, Hardcastle 2003, Giddens 1991).
The form itself is perhaps not really a problem; as Lamarque (2004) argues,
many of the theories that insist on the importance of narratives as a cognitive tool
propose a rather minimal definition of what narrative is: as long as two events are
linked in a causal chain, we have a story. This, he suggest, is rather unpromising as a
premise on which to problematize human knowledge; instead, Lamarque’s argument
is that the problem starts when the concept of narrativity is collapsed together with the
concepts of fictionality and invention, and divorced from intentionality and
referentiality. I would agree with him on this, but would argue that there are good
reasons as to why the collapse occurs so frequently in our critical discourse on
memory, and that is because much memory research has shown that the collapse
occurs not just in the mind of the theorists, but also in the minds of the reminiscing
subject. And, as I shall argue later, it becomes hard to get too judgemental about this
when we realise that the reminiscing subject in question is also a traumatised subject.
I shall illustrate my point through a quick review of the findings some oral
historians and cultural anthropologists have reached, and link it to the concerns of
literary studies through a brief analysis of Dubravka Ugrešić’s and Miljenko
Jergović’s novels and essays that deal with the problem of memory.

The Problem with Memory

The underlying notion present in many of the approaches to cognition and memory
from various disciplines for some time now has been what we might call the neo-
Kantian assumption, which rests on the basic premise that the world only becomes
intelligible through the mind’s active engagement which transforms the chaos of raw
experience into a structured, meaningful shape (Toliver 1974, 9, 66; White 1996;
Kreiswirth 2000, 299). At which point in the cognitive process this first starts
happening4 is beside the scope of this essay; however, by the time we get to the level
of memory, it becomes quite clear that the sense-making processes, particularly those
which turn experience into a story, are already well under way. 5 Nevertheless, the
used.’ (2003, 61)
4
Psychologists, much like Kant, would argue that filtering and editing starts at the level of basic sense
perceptions (see Reed 1972 for an overview of what happens when this starts getting wrong).
5
Also, as Rubin and Greenberg’s (2003) survey of literature on links between different types of brain
damage and memory loss attests to, memory can be lost in many different ways, but narrative
reasoning (ability to understand narratives, as well as to produce them) is much more difficult to
damage (as well as being hard to locate in the brain).

4
extent to which this is seen to be the case varies within this broad assessment.
Freeman (1998, 27-28), for example, disagrees with the view that ‘narrative, rather
than being woven into the fabric of life itself, is better understood as an imposition
upon it, a construction or fiction, an attempt to give form to what is essentially
formless and, perhaps, meaningless.’ He argues instead that the concept of intelligible
human reality can be reclaimed if we see it as always already a part of the subject’s
hermeneutic engagement with the world, not as something essentially meaningless
outside of it which only later becomes significant through the subject’s interpretation
(Freeman 1998 and 2003; see also Hardcastle 2003).6 In this, he might be said to be
close to Ricoeur’s (1984, 57) argument that ‘if, in fact, human action can be narrated,
it is because it is always already articulated by signs, rules and norms,’ 7 except that
Ricoeur places human behaviour’s signification in the cultural domain, whereas
Freeman retains it within the signifying power of the subject itself. We could also
argue that the differences of opinion as to the extent of the narrative’s intervention
into the intelligibility and structuring of reality also depend on the concept of ‘chaos’
that underlies the argument. If ‘chaos’ is initially defined as completely shapeless and
unruly,8 then, yes, the structuring intervention of narrative becomes quite substantial
(we could refer to this as the radical postmodernist stance); if, however, ‘chaos’ is
understood in the sense used by the ‘chaos theory’, which is as complexity that is
difficult to predict, then narrative’s role is restricted to editing out of the significant
events and finding their significant causes. I would personally agree with the second
notion; as Freeman’s (2003) argument implies, we cannot really claim that the stories
we tell ourselves about our lives are completely fictional if they contain crucial events

6
As Olney (1998, 20) shows, the hermeneutic model of memory could as old as the history of literature
of rememberance, since St. Augustine’s concepts of memory in Confessions include both an
archeological model (memory as a store-room) and a weaving model, the latter being ‘processual,
[bringing forth] ever different memorial configurations and an ever newly shaped self’.
7
These two views, the one which takes narrative to be an imposition on the chaos of raw experience
and the one which sees it as actively shaping experince from the beginning, and the fairly subtle
difference between them, can also be seen to belong to Kantian legacy, in that they reflect what
Gardner (in his presentation of different interpretative tendencies in critical literature on Kant)
identifies as problematic ambiguity in transcendental idealism, in that, according to some critics, it fails
to prove that there is a world outside of the world of appearances, and making it less than convincing a
refutation of Berkeleyan idealism than Kant would have liked or originally intended. (Gardner 1999,
184-185,194-195)
8
As in, for example, Peneff 1990, 36: ‘The mythical element in life stories is the pre-established frame-
work within which individuals explain their personal history: the mental construct which, starting from
the memory of individual facts which would otherwise appear incoherent and arbitrary, goes on to
arrange and interpret them and so turn them into biographical events.’ Or, more directly, Toliver 1974:
‘Chaos is inimitable; one cannot even make a statement about it without violating its nature.’ (66) In
addition, Toliver makes a direct link between this view and Neo-Kantianism (37-66).

5
such as births and deaths of loved ones, marriages and divorces, and decisions about
schooling and jobs.9 However, as we shall see later, very often at least some of these
events are reshaped in memory to conform to certain patterns of both narrative
coherence and cultural expectations, as well in order to help us handle pain that may
be associated with them; and occasionally the event can be so traumatic that the mind
cannot get a grip on it at all. But we shall return to those points later.
In addition to the distinction to be made between the different concepts of the
relation between reality and stories we tell about it, there is a distinction to be made
between the concept of narratives as a cognitive tool hardwired in the brain (Abbott
2000, Herman 2003a and 2003b) and the concept of narrativity as a largely culturally
learned cognitive process (Nelson 1998 and 2003; King 2000, 5; Fireman and
Flanagan 2003, 5; Emerson and Frosh 2004; Reynolds and Taylor 2005; Carlson
1988; Mattingly and Garro 2000). Even though I have no particular quarrel with the
general usefulness of the first concept, which assumes that the narrative form is a kind
of Gestalt for understanding events in time, 10 I find that the difficulties thrown up by
narrative memory seem to be largely created by an interplay between culturally
learned narrative models and trauma. I shall explain this shortly, but first need to turn
to a brief survey of the memory research which explores the consequences of the
connection between narrative and memory.
In those disciplines, such as historiography, developmental and cognitive
psychology, psychobiography, psychoanalysis and psychotherapy, which deal with
and are reliant on the processes of memory and examine representations of past
events, the narrativist turn has brought its own additional problematic. One
particularly salient example is that of oral history, whose encounter with narrative
mechanisms in the process of creation, recall and interpretation of memories of past
events led to what is a thorough revision of the discipline’s initial core commitments.
The example of oral history shows how the phenomenon of storied memories, as
arguably the principal form of organising the past, radically problematizes any claims
to authenticity that such memories might have. In addition to this, it also shows
another underlying current in memory and narrative research in the social sciences:
that of linking the coherence of storied memory to healing in the broad sense of the
term, its specific meaning ranging from actual recovery from an illness to
9
This conforms to Giddens’ concept of the ‘fateful moment’ (Giddens 1991, 114).
10
On Gestalt see Ash 1998, Lehar 2003 and Crossley 2003. For a different assessment of the usefulness
of the naturalist ‘narrative as tool for thinking’ concept, see Kreiswirth 2000.

6
psychological healing to restored historical justice. With the two issues connected,
that of authenticity and that of healing, the problem of storied memory grows, as we
are faced with the question of whether the two should be perceived together or
separately.
So how are we to tackle this particular problem? Postmodernism’s answer has
been to effectively dismiss the problem of authenticity as non-existent, and to equate
fiction and reality to the shared level of simulacra. In addition, structuralist,
poststructuralist and postmodern dismantling of the notion of the subject and the self
and the suspicion towards the notion of experience has precluded any possible interest
in the suffering experienced by the self (on this, see Frie 2003). But such a solution
does not really help us in interpreting literary texts which actively engage with the
problem of authenticity of memories and examine the link between memory and
trauma, the pain of facing both truth and lies. 11 Moreover, authenticity, regardless of
what has been happening in literary theory, has remained an active concern in a broad
range of social sciences, and I shall illustrate some of the possible implications in a
brief overview of research findings in oral history and memory studies.
Oral historians, in particular, are interested in matters such as authenticity,
concrete historical experience and life stories, that had been largely swept aside by
postmodern literary and cultural theory. Moreover, if the saying that history is written
by the victors and literature by the defeated is to be believed, its ethical involvement
and the subject matter place oral history together with literary memory texts on the
same side of that divide. Discussing the differences between traditional historical
approaches and those of oral history, historian Paul Thompson wrote that if official
historical records reflect ‘the standpoint of authority’, often vindicating ‘the wisdom
of the powers that be’, then oral history ‘makes a much fairer trial possible: witnesses
can now be called from the under-classes, the unprivileged, and the defeated’
(Thompson 1988, 6).12 However, given the initial intention of oral history, its actual
findings turned out to be somewhat different. Oral historians very soon realised that
their informants’ life stories were subject to processes not wholly dissimilar to that of
official historical accounts. Whatever the different methodological and institutional
permutations of the evolving relationship between history and memory (Samuel 1996,

11
Not to mention that it is not really helpful overall, full stop. For a more subtly argued and scholarly
version of this assessment, see Eagleton 1996 and 2004 (2003), and Norris 1990.
12
The quote is from the first edition of 1978, and representative of the early intentions of oral
historians.

7
ix; Radstone 2000a) since the late 1980s, in discussions of both traditional and oral
history, myth, self-justification and a desire for the story to make over-all sense are
seen as extremely important factors in how the story of the past is constructed. So, for
example, Raphael Samuel suggests that ‘[m]emory, so far from being merely a
passive receptacle or storage system, an image bank of the past, is rather an active,
shaping force; […] it is dynamic – what it contrives symptomatically to forget is as
important as what it remembers – and […] it is dialectically related to historical
thought, rather than being some kind of negative to it. […] Memory is historically
conditioned, changing colour and shape according to the emergencies of the
moment’(Samuel 1996, x). Furthermore, Feuchtwang, talking about the interpersonal
transmission of memories, argues that it is enacted ‘situationally, and in genres
ranging from those established in a family mythology to the standard repertoires of
recording and transmitting events, remembering what to respect and what to deplore.
However formulaic, each inscription varies what it re-inscribes’ (Feuchtwang 2000,
65). This genre-bound and genre-dependent nature of the memory text (with the
proviso that the situation of the telling shapes some of the outcome) is further
highlighted by Radstone, who notes that studies of memory have ‘been marked by an
acute awareness of memory’s status as representation’, making it necessary for oral
historians to analyse ‘the emplotments, genres and tropes of particular memories,
producing analyses that contest the notion that either history or memory can deliver
“truth”, but foregrounding, rather, analytic methods that focus on how memory
produces its representations of the past’. (Radstone 2000b, 84-5)

The realisation of memory’s status as representation, as genre-bound type of

storytelling, even lead some memory researchers, such as Frigga Haug, to distrust the
life-stories of their informants to the point where those stories were not even allowed
to be told. Instead, short scenes and episodes would be prompted to surface and be
written down as timed exercises, and would then be analysed as anonymous pieces of
text with no integration into to the full life-story of the informants, neither in the mind
of the researcher, nor (as the method tries to accomplish), in the minds of the subjects
themselves. Haug explains this method with the following argument:

[T]he question of experience implies that we are dealing with matters that are
ideologically determined, with products that have been integrated into dominant

8
 structures; a process that has been endowed with meaning, smoothed over, free
of contradictions and made liveable. It follows, therefore, that as a source of
knowledge experiences are highly deceptive. They are themselves a product, a
botched job, nothing ‘authentic’ or valid in themselves. On the other hand, there
is no alternative reliable source of that production process that constitutes the
historical self, identity, apart from the experiences of the individual. Experiences
are both the quicksand on which we cannot build and the material with which we
build. (Haug 2000, 156)

In their introduction to the volume tellingly entitled The Myths We Live By,
Paul Thompson and Raphael Samuel moved away from oral history as a pathway into
the understanding of the historical experience of history’s losers, to oral history as a
study of mythical thought and its influence on life stories and the representation of
experience (Samuel and Thompson 1990, 4-5). This also meant that oral historians
found themselves sharing the field with folklorists and anthropologists:

Any life story, written or oral, more or less dramatically, is in one sense a
personal mythology, a self-justification. And all embody and illustrate character
ideals […]. In oral narrative in particular we come closer to traditional popular
mythology in the conveying of moral values through the recounting of events.
[…] We are continually hearing the same story – or recognizable local variants
of it – told by different people in different parts of the country and referring to
different points of time: stock incidents that might be better understood in
relation to narrativity than to some empiricist notion of truth. (Samuel and
Thompson 1990, 10)

If we also take into account Tonkin’s argument for a narrativist approach to

the study of both memory and history proper, which assumes that both are
‘representations of pastness’, ‘chains of words, either spoken or written, ordered in
patterns of discourse that represent events’ (Tonkin 1990, 27), then what we are
looking at is an extraordinary methodological turn. From a desire to grasp the
authenticity of historical experience, oral historians moved to a narratological study of
‘representations of pastness’ and of mythical thought, all within a space of a decade.

Stories of Destruction and Stories of Distortion

So what prompted this extraordinary change of direction? At the beginning, oral
history was going to use life stories of history’s minor players to attain a fuller picture
of a historical era, and then it soon discovered that ‘life stories’ are narrative
constructs that have far more connection with the latter part of the term (‘stories’)
than with the former (‘life’). Partly, this is to do with the influence of narrative as

9
temporal Gestalt, and there is a definitive buzz of scholarly satisfaction to be detected
at this discovery. However, what is also an extremely important issue in nearly all of
the oral history research is that it deals with subjects who are, as originally defined by
that research (‘the under-classes, the unprivileged, and the defeated’), traumatised by
their historical experience. I would argue that oral history, faced with so many first-
person narratives of trauma, shifted from the desire to know more about the historical
truth to the desire to understand how human beings can cope with the pain of it. 13 In
the light of this, it is no particular surprise that the Samuel and Thompson volume of
essays on myth in oral history included an interview with a family therapist, who, in
relation to what he termed ‘disabling legends’ that adversely affected human relations
made the explicit distinction that he in his work needed ‘to have a much more active
relationship to these family stories than you would as an historian’ (Byng-Hall 1990,
224).
The concept of a ‘disabling legend’ is a crucial one for our purposes, and
requires careful unpacking. Byng-Hall defines it through contrast with stories people
tell at the end of therapy, which are ‘less moralizing, less rigid, less splitting into good
and bad. [It becomes] a more real picture of people with both strengths and
weaknesses. In a way, the legend becomes less mythical.’ (Byng-Hall 1990, 224) So
what is required for overcoming trauma, it seems, is still a coherent story, but one
which allows for more complexity in modelling the world of human relationships.
This view concurs with that of Bernstein, who argues that ‘[t]herapy is […] the
making of a generalized biography into a specific autobiographical tale,’ (Bernstein
1990, 56) which presupposes a willingness to create an interrelated whole not just of
events in one’s life, but also of one’s goals, desires and values, as checked against the
demands of the outside world. (Bernstein 1990, 68)
So there are two issues here which are interrelated but can often come into
conflict with each other: one is that we humans need coherence and meaning in our
lives, and if our life story so far is disrupted through traumatic experiences, the self
will seek to re-establish some sort of balance and find new stories to tell. According to
some researchers, traumatic memories are potentially non-linguistic in nature (Scott
1996); as they elude understanding by being difficult to put into words, they can be

13
As Loewenberg argues: ‘Social trauma is the crucial bridge to history. We are no longer speaking of singular
cases or a unique psychogenesis. Our history as humans is the story of large-scale traumas of war disease and
epidemics, famine, dislocation and migration, economic crises, droughts, and pestilence. Trauma is the theoretical
link from individual to group, cohort, population, nation, the world.’ (1995, 159)

10
overcome if words are made to come and the story gets to be told (Klein 2003,
Kirmayer 2000, Haidt 2006). The mere process of telling a story of the past and
creating coherence between one’s life and one’s self can be beneficial.
We can see this process in the work of Miljenko Jergović’s essays in
Historijska čitanka. Faced with the physical destruction of the place which provided
the setting for its childhood memories, the subject in Jergović’s memory essays
battles against the fading of those memories by shaping them into stories, with the full
knowledge that the stories may not represent the authentic past. Nevertheless, they
preserve the endangered sense of self, and it is the hard battle for coherence and the
preservation of whatever can be preserved of a disappearing world and the memories
it created that matters here, not veracity (Jergović 2000, 5). The process of story-
telling in Jergović is palliative: it does not restore the past, but it creates a seductive
simulacrum of it which masks the pain of the loss.
On the other hand, sometimes, as Langer’s (2003) research on Holocaust
narratives shows, words fail (or are constantly under the threat of failing) and
reconstruction of the functioning self becomes impossible; but this impossibility is the
mark of a desperate, almost involuntary solidarity with the dead. This also finds its
echo in Jergović, as the phenomenally, unbelievably detailed story of a childhood in
the first part of his novel Mama Leone gives way to the disconnected stories of war
and exile of the second part (which share none of the characters with the first part).
Here, the doubt is cast about the palliative effectiveness of the childhood memory
simulacrum, for the stories of the war and post-war present are those of desperate,
broken and meaningless lives, suffering from the loss of the connection between past
and present identities, between memories and present lives. The disconnectedness
between memories and the present sense of self does not allow for the possibility of
overcoming of trauma; it solidifies the past as an (admittedly, far from perfect)
Golden Age, and fixes the present self in the identity of the one fallen from grace,
surrounded by others suffering the same fate.
The second issue is that when we do manage to achieve narrative coherence in
the face of historical trauma, often we reach for autobiographical scripts offered by
our culture to provide us with the basic framework. This is what many of oral
history’s subjects would do: tell, perhaps for the first time as a coherent narrative, the
tale of their own victimhood, disappointment and puzzlement at the injustices of
history, shaped as easily recognisable myths and legends. This in itself should have

11
been beneficial for many of them; however, as some of the more drastic examples
offered by oral history might show, not all cultural scripts are beneficial, and some
can be harmful if misapplied.
I shall give just one example: that of the good people of Vladimir in the
Khubova, Ivankiev and Sharova’s study of life stories post-Glasnost Russia. Khubova
and her colleagues, having interviewed the same local inhabitants both before and
after Glasnost about the notorious prison in their town, on the second, post-Glasnost,
occasion found that their ‘their whole historical consciousness seemed to have
changed’. As they put it, ‘a good many of them – although fortunately others were
more consistent and reliable – now included recollections of real personal experiences
as well as “memories” which they had clearly picked up from the media […]. Thus
some, who previously had apparently not known of the prison’s existence, now spoke
of themselves as victims of the repression’ (p. 95). Although Khubova and her
colleagues explained this by the inhabitants’ desire to make sense of lives made
incoherent after the political changes (Khubova, Ivankiev and Sharova 1992, 95-96),
it would be difficult to see what long-term beneficial results, both psychological and
political, such imaginary victimhood might bring.14 The researchers’ remark that the
stories came from the media, and were thus a part of the new cultural set of possible
life scripts, is crucial. As others have shown regarding potentially harmful yet
culturally sanctioned scripts for life stories, 15 not all coherence is good, and
oversimplifying unity is often almost as hurtful as nonsense, as it provides a facile
semantic framing that masks persistent inner conflict.
Dubravka Ugrešić’s essays in The Culture of Lies provide us with the wealth
of examples of this. Moreover, her novel The Museum of Unconditional Surrender,
which shares many of the concerns of the essays, shows a strategy for disrupting the
process of harmful cultural reshaping of the past. The narrating subject in the novel,
faced with the political violence acted out by those whose personal lives assumed the
shape of heroic narratives of victimhood and overcoming (such as the character of
Doti), refuses to tell a coherent story at all. Much of the novel consists of disjointed
fragments of memories and other people’s stories about the past; the parts that do tell

14
And if the state of present day Russia holds any clues, then none.
15
Wiersma 1988 on the ‘distorted language’ and ‘broken symbols’ of women’s language about their
careers, and Ochberg 1988 on stories told by career men who buy into the capitalist dream and sacrifice
their personal lives to it; on life scripts see also Carlson 1988. Erich Fromm seems to have been
something of a pioneer in this field of research (Burston, 2003).

12
a story are often told either with a fantasy element to it which makes literal
authenticity impossible (such as the angel episode), or are marked by an acute
awareness that characters act out lies and fantasies (the con-man in the Lisbon
episode). Rather than give in to the story-telling urge which might lead her astray,
Ugrešić’s non-narrator refuses to tell a story of her life, keeping the self fragmented
and its memories disjointed in the desire to preserve their authenticity. The new
culture of lies is not allowed to put its stamp of heroic coherence onto the text woven
from memory fragments, a procedure which is similar to the technique practiced by
Haug in her memory work. That both work with specifically female memories is a
whole new issue; but I shall leave that story for some other occasion.

Conclusion: Coherence, Complexity and Posttraumatic growth

In psychological literature, posttraumatic stress syndrome has been defined by the
subject’s inability to face future conflict and stress without panic and with the faith in
its own ability to overcome adversity. In contrast, the fairly new concept of
posttraumatic growth is defined by the subject’s positive re-assessment of their own
capabilities and the realisation that ‘I can get through this’ (Haidt 2006, 135-149). We
can perhaps link the two reactions to trauma to my two basic issues: that of the need
for coherence and that of the possibility that culturally sanctioned autobiographical
scripts can sometimes foreclose the process by providing deceptive explanations
which disable authentic integration of the self.
Genre-bound, script-bound, and culturally determined on the one hand, and
faced with horrible silences of historical and personal trauma on the other, memories
can now be seen as fragile beyond compare, and not simply because our minds find
satisfaction in narrative coherence. Even more fragile is the remembering subject,
split as it is between the history that harms it and the culture that bandages the wounds
without curing them, whilst needing sense and coherence and meaning to keep it sane.
The self needs coherence, and in peaceful times, in times of humdrum
existence or times of ordinary low-grade happiness or stable low grade unhappiness,
this coherence is easy to maintain, and the cultural models that support it, at least
seemingly, fit well. In times of trauma and suffering, either personal or historical, not
only is the subject’s sense of self shaken, but often, as is the case in times of historical
and cultural change, the cultural models do not fit any more, and the subject reacts to
this either by misapplying them to their present situation, or having to break out of

13
them to recreate a new sense of self. This radical departure from the easy comfort of
the cultural script into the more authentic, better integrated because more complex,
and constantly hermeneutically engaged sense of life and self is curiously similar to
Viktor Shklovsky’s notion of ostranenie (1990/1917), later reworked as ‘energy of
delusion’ (2007/1985), defined as the constantly evolving search for truth in life’s
movement. In the later work, Shklovsky spoke of ‘the usual paths, the paths of
inevitability’ on which ‘real people’ get lost, and he said further:

It is necessary to tear yourself away from home, from the anticipation of

tomorrow or the day after tomorrow, and to fly away, for yourself, urged by
some inner need, not as a bird, though, they fly through old routes, but only as a
working man can fly away, someone who knows the rhythm of possibilities.
(Shklovsky 2007, 64)

Shklovsky’s view of literature as the vehicle of the search for meaning rests on his
belief that literature and art are almost uniquely capable of liberating our thought from
the shackles of stereotype and cliché, from the limits habitual thoughts impose upon
our grasp of ourselves, of others and of the world we share.
I do not mean to imply that Kafka was right about his own writing in that
paragraph with which I started this essay. The principle that literature should be free
and should be our mode of finding freedom from cultural constrictions, should also
apply to counteract the potential suggestion that literature must free us in the sense of
having to make us better or happier or to help us overcome trauma. But what the
example of literature shows is a model of finding authenticity and freedom, which we
could try to replicate in our self-construction, and in the use to which we put our
memories, if we are to grow from adversity and overcome historical trauma.

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