HOW TO RECAPTURE SELECTIVE MEMORIES
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both reveals and conceals its meaning. Name-recognition, then, is only
initially an advantage, like having an inside position on the race-track.
The fact is that fictional narratives must generate an interest indepen–
dent of a coincident reality. There is an ironic reversal of the priority of
real to fictive. The "Anne Frank" or "Philip Roth" of a Philip Roth
novel, the "Paul Auster" in Paul Auster's
New York Trilogy,
have their
own confusing and disconcerting lives. That is demanded by the self–
fashioning, self-inventive element associated with modern originality, a
rebellious, break-away quality that competes with the narrative patience
and extensively described settings we find in most great novelists.
Ortega y Gasset noted the novel's power to turn us into provincials
of its world, of settings so carefully observed that they become a milieu,
life-giving or life-im peding. That milieu has disintegrated in Modiano,
though the houses and streets bear mocking vestiges of it, pieced
together by his meticulous recreations. In Sebald, however, a specious
miracle is described: the displaced persons build for themselves a new
milieu with a solidity that camouflages past suffering and deceives for a
time even the narrator. Indeed, Sebald introduces photos into his stories
that claim to represent realia in the life of the emigrants, photos that
function as attestation of his cha racters' nea r-zoologica I ca mouflage, of
their seeming stillness and integration rather than alienation.
If
authors, moreover, borrow historical figures, especially well-docu–
mented ones, the risk grows that the issue of authenticity will surface.
We cannot suspend disbelief when known circumstances are denied or
tinkered with. There is an existential, irreversible quality to those facts
that renders clearly fictive insertions unconvincing.
In certain cases, of course, a penumbra of doubt continues to unset–
tle received history: Oliver Stone exploits this in his film on the Kennedy
assassina tion. Counterfactua I theorizi ng and science fiction's a Iterna te
realities abound. But we sense in these instances, as in detective stories
generally (and
Dora Bruder
is a detective story), a skeptical or even
gnostic element that deprives appearances-the familiar world, received
history-of their apparent truth. An anxiety develops, expressed rather
than alleviated by fictional suspense, that nothing is what it appears to
be, that everything, eventually, will turn out to be deceptive, manipu–
lated, counterfeit.
It should not come as a surprise that received historical fact is felt to
be as fallible as any other. Historians themselves have as their principal
task to affirm or disconfirm it. But while the stylistic demeanor of his–
tory-writing remains, on the whole, impersonal, today it often merges
with a writing in the first person no longer shy about itself. Every
