It is often said that every book has some autobiographical element. How much of it is fiction and how much true?
Penelope Lively, the British author who writes both for children and adults says memory does inform her fiction. “Try polishing a memory. Place it in a context; what else do you know about that time or place or person?” And so she exclaims,”I think memory is very important in old age for there is an awful lot of it by now!”
Lively says most of us are a combination of what we were and what we are...with this statement she reveals the layers in her book as she says if two characters have known each other for long, they know each other as they are in the present as well have a ‘memory knowledge’ of the other. “There is a curious sense of presence in the novel of the past as well. There is a great deal of the past of the characters and the action, the narrative, however, resides in the present. And I have always wanted to make that clear to sort of play with that and use that.”
In order to be able to juxtapose a hidden past in the articulated present Lively says, “The operation of memory comes rather more into novels than short stories. A short story is a curious thing...it almost always has an immediate prompt: it arises from something seen, overheard or you have heard somebody say...a narrative that will probably have less to do with memory...Fiction can be concerned with absolutely anything...depends on the novelist. I am far from the only novelist interested in memory and the use of memory.”
Conflicting memories
But, just last week we saw memory could be false. Lively counters that saying, “Evidence is extremely interesting and conflicting. After all there would be multiple evidences of the same event. Of course this is particularly true of historical evidences. History is not so much memory as it is an examination of conflicting memories. This is the same for fictional purposes in any scene. There would be as many accounts of the scene as there were people present. I have tried to use this idea, particularly in a novel (of mine) called ‘The Moon Tiger’, where in several places the same scene is shown through the eyes of different participant.”
Lively does not mean history when she refers to memory, “There is a huge difference, of course, between history and fiction. History tries to make sense of conflicting evidences and will always suggest the bias of the historian as well. The novelist can make choices...a novelist can choose which evidence to project and which not to. Historians have to present what is available but a novelist very deliberately makes choices...cheats in fact, after the novelist is making it all up!”
In effect can one say fiction is memory recollected in imagination? Little more conservative than saying all memory is fiction in recollection.
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