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advisor at Cambridge as "the pleadings of interested parties." "Memoir
has a lowly place, but still it is a place," O'Brien acknowledged, and he
went on
to
share some of the powerful, personal, shaming dilemmas
posed by accurate recollection in his own life. Quoting Nietzsche,
O'Brien said, "My memory says I did this; my pride says I did not. My
memory yields." In th is ta Ik, however, memory did not yield and
O'Brien told of his failure
to
protect his first wife against the hostilities
of his separatist Irish aunt in
1918.
In
very heartfelt, simple terms he
recalled his betrayal of his wife when he and his just married bride lived
in the house of a fierce, punitive aunt; the aunt brutalized his wife, he
says, unfairly blaming her for a number of insignificant domestic
mishaps because the passions over Irish separation ran so divisively
through the house. He did not protect his bride, he said. "I pretended I
did not see, I lost my voice."
To the question "Is there an authentic self?" both Martin and O'Brien
agreed that shame-a somewhat downgraded emotion in contemporary
life-and the necessity of honest psychological housekeeping are what
keep us morally coherent and human. There can be authenticity in life
and memoir, perhaps, only if one feels shame in telling untruths-and
the person who has no shame is the truly inhumane. Narcissistic audac–
ity is an apparent condition of our time, many presenters seemed to
agree, but "shame still exists," Martin said affirmingly.
Finally, Geoffrey Hartman spoke, in a roundabout way, of the "mem–
ory envy" of many Holocaust testimonies, of the "dead's imaginative
impact which is far greater than the actual living person might have
had." Memoir, Hartman proposed, that "first-person voice no longer
shy a bout itsel f," has now perha ps deva Iued fiction-fiction has come
to
be less esteemed as the first-person narrative becomes more accepted.
"The expansion of gossip comes at the cost of fiction," Hartman
explained, and this is a loss
to
us.
In
this "autobiographical age," he
said, recalling St. Augustine and Rousseau, we have a wish
to
be
"totally embodied and also transparent." Hartman said he feared fraud–
ulence. "I am afraid of inauthenticity," he said. Our belief in our ability
to
transcribe our personal truths are,
to
quote Shelley, "an illustrious
superstition, but only a superstition."
LIKE ALL CONTEMPORARY
academic work in the social sciences and
humanities, the conference was a rich, deeply textured, highly literate
investigation of the postmodern question of who has authority
to
speak
