WAYS Of WRITING ABOUT ONESELF
7S
project as a way of trying a new adventure in writing, hoping that some–
thing interesting may come out if I am forced to do something that I
don't like to do. But I had a tough time with the limitations of any direct
autobiographical writing. I don't see any reason to write such a book, if
you don't reveal, in a very cruel way, everything-or at least the essen–
tial. I would say you need a certain amount of indecency. Now, indecency
today is not as rare as it was fifty or sixty years ago. So, you enter
another type of cliche. I already told you a little about the book. The first
part, which is called "The Past as Fiction" is a search for my roots. For
this you have
to
use imagination because I don't have all the documents
and information and memory abollt the past. The second part of the
book is a straight type of narrative, which is concrete and related to
going back to the place; I thought this combination might benefit each
part and their interaction. Among many other problems, I also faced the
question of style, of strategy of the narrative. I remember I had a discus–
sion a few years ago with an American writer, and she told me, "Look, I
cannot read more Central European literature. It's too claustrophobic for
me." Maybe she was right. Maybe we were formed in a way of elliptic,
oblique writing, which we thought and believed to be more powerful.
Who knows what form is more powerful? ...Probably the one that fits
you as a writer. The one in which your inner self finds and imposes its
own expression, its own form. Flaubert said about Madame Bovary,
"Cest mai."
He put everything in; he put himself in. He didn't need to
write an autobiography. And Proust didn't write an autobiography,
despite the fact that he might have been very good at it. It's, again, the
problem of the temper and talent of the writer; nothing more than that.
Sanford Pinsker: I
have a question for Mr. Manea. We are awash in con–
temporary American culture, with everything on the cheap. Religion on
the cheap, political analysis on the cheap, and certainly memoir on the
cheap. I wanted to give you an occasion to rant about how hard it must
be
to
write a serious memoir in an age when the presiding critic, the
tastemaker, long ago ceased to be
T.
S. Eliot, who talked about the escape
from personality as being necessary. Now it's necessary to be awash in
your persona Iity, awash for everyone to see, a nd the tastema ker of ou r
time is Oprah-even though the
Partisan Review
crowd might not want
to admit that. Each week's daytime TV shows are trumped by next week's
scandalous revelations. There is absolutely nothing you can't reveal. And
the sad mark of this is that even Philip Roth has been outscooped by the
people on
Oprah.
In
that world, what chance does a serious writer have
to
write a serious memoir that serious readers could take seriously?
