HOW TO RECAPTURE SELECTIVE MEMORIES
111
Director of the fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies, is
the author of
A Critic's Journey: Literary Reflections, [958-1998.
Geoffrey Hartman :
"Realism, Authenticity, and the New Biographical
Culture." It is Friday, March 3
I , 2000.
I am thinking about my essay. It
hardly matters what date it is, but the concreteness of that marker is
strangely comforting.
Two "signs of the times" in
The New York Times
catch my attention.
One is a full-page ad for a Sotheby's auction featuring master photog–
raphers. It reproduces an Edward Weston photo, "Hands against
Kimono," valued at between
$100,000
and
$150,000.
The blurb
describing it reads in part: "This bravura print of Tina Modotti's hands
is one of Edward Weston's most sensitive studies of his lover."
Why would the photo's value be less, I wonder, if its attribution were
uncertain? And how much do the biographical details, the specificity of
the woman's name and role in Weston's life, add to its value?
The second item is a review by Michiko Kakutani of
Blonde,
Joyce
Carol Oates's fictionalized biography of Marilyn Monroe. The review is
unusually harsh, accusing the author of "shamelessly...using the life of
Marilyn Monroe as a substitute for inventing an original story" to cash
in on the star's legend. Oates has changed the real names either into
other or allegorizing nicknames: "the Ex-Athlete"(Joe DiMaggio), "the
Prince" (President Kennedy), "Miss Golden Dreams" (Marilyn herself).
What Oates has done, I surmise from the review, is not all that dif–
ferent from a recent tendency to move historical fiction into the present,
to rehearse or recreate lives and events within the direct memory of
many contemporaries. A genre has emerged that hovers between fiction
and reportage, and even mixes historical actors with invented observers.
The elder novelists, however, unless their purpose is topical satire,
avoid a
roman
a
clef
that needs no key. They elide the source of what
initially inspired them: the "germ" of the whole, as Henry James called
it. At the same time, they may novelize it as a structural trace that con–
veys the feel of contemporary fact. I glimpse such a trace in the striking
and mysterious newspaper advertisement which is the pivot of Kleist's
Marquise of
o.
Also in the quite ordinary request for information about
a missing person in the
Paris-Soil'
of December 31, 194
I,
a notice that,
in December 1988, forty-seven years after its insertion, catches the nar–
rator's attention in Patrick Modiano's
Dora Bruder.
It initiates a quest
that takes up the entire novel.
The impact of the "fait divers" of newspaper (and now TV) signals a
new phase in the rebtion of fiction to contemporaneity. In both Kleist
