Memory In Fugitive Pieces (in draft)
So, I thought I should post something before the night draws in. Need to tidy this up and add some reference to this week's reading.
I'll make this stuff sound good, but I think I need to cut it down, so let me know what you think should go, my lovely group.
- Memory is a vitally important yet unreliable lens through which we make sense of the past
- As a novel fixated with history, identity and the consequence of devastating events, almost every page of Fugitive Pieces is heavily influenced by the processes of memory.
Memory: clarity and obscurity
- One frustration throughout the book is that memory is a process that is largely seen to work according to it’s own rules (this seems tied to the concept of ‘vertical time’).
- Jakob at times is sorrowful and frightened of his past being lost forever as he is ‘contaminated’ by the ‘hallucinogen’ of new experiences, particularly learning new languages, but it’s clear that his past, his memory, is always there at his foundation.
- Athos reveals that one learns ‘new songs in foreign places’, and Jakob does just this in
- The mind makes links which could not be make conciously... connects dots which would otherwise be impossible to connect. Jakob spends much of the first four or so chapters dreading the decay of his memories of Bella – but he is haunted by her throughout the rest of the book.
Memory as a vault
- Athos’s memories freeze with him – Jakob’s catalogue of what Athos’s death meant for him is a list of all the outward expressions of the man’s inner life, but he suggests that the most important elements of Athos are locked in his memory – idea that ‘a man’s life is never complete’.
Memory as burden
- Some memories (history) cannot be communicated or dealt with – Ben’s section is largely centered around
- A) how his father’s memories haunted his father, could not be expressed, could not be resolved conciously – Ben talks about specific memories which seem to have stayed with his Dad as a psychic scarring from the Holocaust, and how
- B) his Dad, in his treatment of Bed, creates psychological bruises patterned after his own. See the 'Eat the rotten apple' scene. Michaels staggers the account of this memory over an entire passage, in choppy sentences, to show how this one incident has claimed so much territory in Ben's memory. It still has a painful resonance.
Memory as insubstantial
- Jakob says early on that 'I did not witness the most important events in my life', and this is a huge issue in his life throughout the text. Not seeing his family slaughtered, not knowing fully where they went, creates a gap in his psychology which becomes a fertile space for his imagination to create new meanings. He dreams of Bella, wonders about the treatment of his family by the Nazis. As Jakob says, ‘the key is not to find the right answer but ask the right questions’ (especially when the answer is unbearable).
History, biography, memory
- Biography, recollection of history cannot assume authority because in laying down events in linear order you miss out vital parts of the story. As Athos says, we have more control over the big picture than we realise, but it’s the little moments and unexpected events that define us.
- Biography is a grandiose medium which assumes that memory, and the 'bare facts' of history, can tell us the whole story. In 'Fugitive Pieces' Michaels adopts a FRACTURED and long-range narrative to show how everything is connected, the past bleeds into the present and our memory is infused with our emotions and state of mind in the moment.
- A man's mental, inner life often develops along different lines to his tangible exterior life, and memory is too often represented as a 'record' of the external life. Michaels uses elaborate metaphors to show how memory binds the two, and the picture presented by this union is elliptical, at times refusing to come together as a whole.
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