Wiesel's collective memory

I've been reading all of Patricia Hampl's "I Could Tell you Stories" for my final, and what I read today coincides with what Wiesel (and most of our authors, really) is trying to do with his stories in Night. She is talking about writers of the Eastern Europe persuasion, but I think it could be said that non-American writers fall into this category, as she later goes on to explain.Hampl is discussing the idea of memory and continuity in writers who have had to remember not only for themselves but for a whole era, a whole nation. That is definitely Wiesel.

"Remembrance in these writers is less strictly personal than it is in most American autobiography, through the uncanny and formative moments remain, as in any memoir, the basis of the work. But for these writers the past is the nation's finally, not the family's as it so typically is in American memoir. The brush strokes are of history, rather than autobiography" (83).

Hampl is calling attention here to the scope and intent of a memoir; she is saying that for American writers, whose lives and stories are shaped largely by and of their personal experiences and go on to reflect such things, scope and intent is not so all encompassing as it is for other non-American memoirists. Americans have always had a can-do, self-reliance sort of mentality, and even though other societies and individuals have this mentality too (Wiesel certainly does pull him self along), other people don't necessarily focus on the self quite to the point that American writers might. It is the difference between memoir and autobiography, she says.

For Wiesel, who must remember and write for whole countries, families and nation/states, the luxury of focusing on the self has disappeared with the past. Although Hampl is writing about the author Czeslaw Milosz and not Elie Wiesel, what she writes of the former could be said of the latter.


"[He] hinges the personal to the history of the nation. The fusion of these two narrations--one intimate, the other public--creates a powerful call and reply which achieves poetic form. It is a relationship--that bruised word of our own relentlessly psychological culture, reclaimed by the impersonal method [he] suggests" (86).


Wiesel's attempt at creating both personal and public narratives and histories in Night serves a purpose as a historical work, but it goes deeper than that in also capturing the stories of several "smaller" lives. The things he's chosen to include support his scope and intent to make this a literary work; each scene, each individual, each location works with this quality of memoir to highlight and foster discussion about "the greater truth" or the greater truths that must come of such a book.

At home with Thoreau

I'd like to think of Thoreau's writing as memoir because he does cover a specific time frame and series of events, but I'm not exactly sure his story fits into what I think of as modern memoir. To me, modern memoir is more of an examination of a certain time frame that is rife with problems that one has to overcome; problems that the individual has no control over. I usually think that there is some type of personal revelation that comes out of this, and although this exists here, I don't feel like the challenges Thoreau is facing are all that critical to self-development. No, that's not quite it-- the problems he faces are critical to his self-development, but what I'm trying to get at is that they are not do-or-die challenges he's facing.

For instance, in Karr's memoir, she's facing rape, alcoholism, family problems and disinterested parents. Same with Angelou McCourt faced poverty and alcoholism, etc. The problems Thoreau is facing deal with his need to disengage from society and find a simpler life, but this is not as necessary to his livelihood as overcome those other problems is for the other authors.
Now, I realize that Thoreau would argue that simplicity IS necessary to one's livelihood and self-preservation, but really.. in the face of the other memoirs we've read, his problems are pretty tame.

Another reason I question Thoreau's work as "memoir" is that I'm not exactly sure what he's learning about himself in the wild. It seems to me like he's already had some pretty well-formed opinions and ideas; his time at the pond is just testing them out and further reinforcing what he already knows about himself. To me, a literary memoir must have some sort of life-changing conflict that results in a growth process for the reader too. In our time it's almost impossible for anyone to do what he did, so it's unlikely that anyone will "learn" in the way Thoreau did.

However, for all of my inability to see his work as memoir, on of the elements of story that Thoreau utilizes is that of recalling memories. What is memoir, literally, it not that? his diligence to recording his observations in his journal no doubt helped with this, and the of detail he includes helps the reader see/feel the author's landscapes.

A staggering work

I see why Dave Egger's "A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius" has been referred to as "manic-depressive." Bouncing from highs to lows, spun off in a story-telling style that is as intelligent, manipulative and melancholy as it is humorous, Egger's memoir drained me. His "unusual approach" to recounting a specific time period of his life works well because his life was as quirky and unusual as the story (ies) he tells in the book. Eggers' life as a publishing entrepreneur is particularly well-suited to the techniques he uses because these same techniques are used in McSweeney's, his magazine; they are also the same sorts of techniques Gen X grew up on-- sarcasm, self-deprecating humor, indifference, melancholia and depression.

This is not to say any other generation has lacked these traits, it's just to say that many times Gen-X is associated with popularizing these things and making them "cool." What Eggers has done is combined these personality devices and characterizations and figured out a way to put them on paper that remains true to the essence of his young adulthood.

In much the same way Gen X and the dot.com/publishing bubble of the 90s revolutionized those sectors, Eggers injected a particularly clever degree of snark and entertainment into the publishing industry and the memoir genre. Although I am not a fan of Eggers and felt that the ending of the story could have come much sooner, I do believe his ability to craft something from the resources around him and capture a whole time period (and life, in Topher's case) and societal mood speaks volumes to his ability to create and do so as an original. In setting up "Heartbreaking Work" as he did, he's subtly infusing the story with several elements of his life that made him him, elements that contribute(d) to his story.

Personally, I don't like to sustain humor in my writing. I like a turn of phrase, a witty bit of dialogue, a bit of snark, but I'm not the kind of person who writes to entertain in the same way Eggers has in this piece. I feel like self-deprecating/dark humor, while entertaining, is indicative of a deeper problem within the humorists life and a reliance upon passive/aggressiveness to get attention. I'm talking real-life people, not just authors-- so this kind of humor/voice is something I am wary and distrustful of when I encounter it in any form.

For Eggers, however, I think his book reached people, precisely because so many people rely on these attitudes to get by in our society. For example, say a co-worker is having a bad day. Instead of saying he wants to talk about it, he might begin cracking jokes about how much of an idiot he is, or how much he wants to take the boss out and beat him up. On their face, these things may be funny in their presentation, but underneath the words, there's a desire to connect (in the first case) and a malicious need for attention (in the latter). Colleagues laugh and perhaps join in on the ribbing, not knowing what else to do, and everyone leaves the table bewildered about the social interaction that just went on. So, regarding Eggers... I read "Heartbreaking Work" in rapture about 1/3 of the way through, then gave up on because it began to alienate me, not help me see anything new and endearing about the human condition.

Getting a feel for Conroy's life

Frank Conroy's memoir is a departure from the other memoirs we've read in several ways. First, Conroy shows us his poverty but doesn't overtly mention it. Parental dysfunction is observed in young Frank but is less "recognized" by the character, who doesn't seem to know any better or realize that anyone else's parent behave as parent should. Even Tobey's parents, who are more caring, aren't exactly "put together," and Jean's brother's families seem to be a mess too. While these differences make the book more enjoyable for me-- I realized while checking it out how badly I wanted not to read another memoir, but having read it fully enjoyed it--they are not the main feature of the story that makes it stand out to me.

Writing as a musician, Conroy has happened upon, or created, a style of writing that is rhythmic and lyrical, what I'd call the cadence of his inner thoughts and emotions coming out harmoniously on the page. This is no small accomplishment, because what he has done is essentially take a musical, poetic form and stretch it out over 283 pages. In the other memoirs we've examined, the writers have done a good job of evoking a region or time period with their attention to language and sound of each character. While Conroy continues to do this, he also pulls the reader into an internal landscape that hum with a certain sort of sound and energy. What this suggests overall is a form of characterization that we don't necessarily get with the other authors. Conroy's salvation lies in music; he becomes a drifting note in several passages; we learn about this man not so much from the words and scenes and ideas he spells out for us, but in the way he uses dissonance, harmony staccato moments and weaves everything together to make us feel, in the way that music makes us feel. His life has become his art; he has taken an aspect of his art and applied it to his life's story in this writing.

When I think about how these musical techniques work in music, I think about how even when I think I understand a song I'm sometimes left with a vague question of whether or not I really got into its rhythms the way the musicians intended. Conroy manages this effect well in Stop/Time, even overtly relying on the associations readers have with music at certain times.

"I stood as if listening to music, and in something like the way we are told suns are born, that specks of matter nearly empty space begin to fall, rushing across vast distances...I sank down until my knees touched the ground, and sat on my heels, almost reverently, within to disturb nothing in the suddenly harmonious world," he writes on p 139, detailing the moment he watched a girl through shelves at the library. "It was at once frustrating, and for some reason extremely exciting to see only this small part of her... my brain raced... at moments like this, as all men know, one becomes oblivious to to everything else in the outside world..."( 140).

Conroy does an great job of building the scene slowly, moving books, hunkering down, peeking; he lets the pressure build in the reader as it has built in himself, and then, with just a hint, he ends the scene and escapes into the private release of his own action, mentioning, tongue-in-cheekily, "the business--and I choose my words carefully-- at hand" (140).

The sensuality of the moment is made even more intriguing and delightful by Conroy's stop! of time before the scene reaches its climax.