On the third page of her memoir Aurelia, Aurelia, Kathryn Davis recalls her teenage encounter with the section of To The Lighthouse titled “Time Passes”:
“I didn’t need a dictionary to read this book, nor did it drive me to the thesaurus. I didn’t need to have experienced true love or sex or marriage or parenthood or old age or death – subjects I continued to write about, energetically, cluelessly – to make a powerful connection with it. I think this was possible because, despite the book’s interest in these matters, the dark drumming heart of it, the place I remember best from when I first read it and the place I still return to with quickening breath, is the shortest and weirdest section, the section that announces itself to be, by virtue of its title and everything in it, pure transition.”
A memoir usually proceeds atop the assumption that a life adds up to something. One of my favorites in this mode is The Art of the Heist in which Myles Connor makes a case for his notorious accomplishments as an art thief. Also beloved is Art Pepper’s Straight Life, by his own account one of jazz’s greatest alto sax players. By these books’ ends, the complete lives envisioned at the outset have accumulated.
But when considering the art of literary memoirs, we usually watch for other effects. To put it severely and perhaps hyperbolically: Unless art produces experiences and values that art-less life cannot, it’s pointless. Our desire for such art may depend on our prior devotion to the world of people and emotions, but the world alone can’t satisfy our desire. If a standard novel fashions a “plausible untruth” (Barthes), then the typical literary memoir fashions an implausible truth, since no one can know that much about themselves with such certainty. I expect memoirs like those of Art Pepper and Myles Connor to flaunt their certainties, and I enjoy the flaunting. But pointless art is erected on an armature of truths and gestures we endorse in advance; if the pointless art is literary, then its mode of presentation may be lively or startling or elegant or sturdily convincing, but it duplicates something already codified, given form and sound, and valorized. Thus, safe.
When a memoir is put forth as a work of literary art, what values can it impart creatively that a truth-y story cannot? This brings us back to Aurelia, Aurelia – and the “pure transition” Davis recognized in “Time Passes.” In a work such as Davis’, the secret sauce is tasted during the leap between sentences and paragraphs, not in the accretion of life facts and their self-assertions. The triggering life event for her narrative was the death of her second husband, Eric, from cancer. She writes, “We’re born into the life bardo, and when we begin to die we’re in the dying bardo, and after that we’re in the death bardo, at which point we make our transition back via rebirth into the birth bardo …” For some of us, life is a cabaret or a box of chocolates or a marathon-not-a-sprint, but for Davis it’s a bardo.
Within the first 14 pages of Aurelia, Aurelia, Davis recalls youthful experiences with Durrell’s Alexandria Quartet, the poetry of Cavafy and a trip to Skiathos with her first husband, Woolf’s To The Lighthouse, Bergman’s The Seventh Seal, Emma Bovary, Jean Seberg, and the tv series “Lost.” Her life is portrayed as one that apprehends its nature through the nonexistent worlds of stories. In her essay “The Enchantment of Death: Briar Rose,” the Italian poet Franca Mancinelli writes, “Every child who learns a story by heart learns his or her own story. Unbeknownst to the child, it speaks inside her, through the forms of the fairy tale, the life knotted in her blood that will dissolve over the years.” Davis traces her story-by-heart back to the Hans Christian Anderson tales read to her by her mother:
“I believed these were my stories. Mine. I didn’t think they’d been written for me, Anderson having ‘had me in mind,’ or that they conveyed my view of things with unusual precision – no, when I heard these stories I was infused with that shivery of ecstasy that is an unmistakable symptom of the creative act. I felt as if I’d created the stories, as if they had their origin in my imagination, as if they were by definition my original work, having ‘belonged at the beginning to the person in question,’ that person being me.”
I felt the shivers while reading Aurelia, Aurelia – and enjoyed that sensation so much that I read it again for the pleasures of its transitional moments and snappy prose. Late in the memoir, recalling her friend Lois playing Beethoven’s Open 126, Davis notes that the music has “a tendency to juxtapose the sublime and the antic” – a phrase, like several others one finds, that informs her own approach to novel writing and this memoir – “this sleight of hand, the moment-between, the ghost-moment …”
[Published by Graywolf Press on March 12, 2022, 128 pages, $15.00 paperback]
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In 1932, amid a global economic depression and the rise of fascism in Europe, Sweden’s Social Democratic Party acceded to power and implemented folkhemmet or “the people’s home,” a set of principles and programs intended to shape a society in which every person has a vital role to play and everyone looks after everyone else. This platform was also referred to as “the Swedish middle way” between socialism and capitalism; it featured a regulated economy, universal healthcare, free college education, and affordable housing projects. Out with privilege and misfortune, in with equality and cooperation. As Lena Andersson’s novel Son of Svea opens, it is 1999 and an ethnologist is about to interview 67-year old Ragnar Johansson for research on “the Swedish mentality in the age of modernity.” But the scholar’s project falls through – and the life of Ragnar, the embodiment of folkhemmet, becomes the focus of the novel’s unnamed narrator. The first sentences of the section “Ragnar” read:
“This is the story of a twentieth-century Swede. A man without cracks but with a great split running through him, and in this he entirely resembled the society he populated and shaped.“
The split in Ragnar is a self-imposed stifling of an early aspiration to break from his father’s haulage business and become a master artisan working with wood, a diminishment related to “Protestantism’s all-embracing mantle of care, severity, and the tendency for self-flagellation.” Ragnar takes his setbacks as signs that he has been found wanting, “he would fall short, he was convinced of it.” He reverts to a life as a teacher, modest pleasures, familiar habits, and reasonableness in social and personal action. At age 34, he marries Elisabet, “born in a different class” from Ragnar’s agrarian simplicities. Listen to how Andersson introduces her as “an impressively social creature” quite unlike her husband. She was:
“… flexible and able to adapt with ease to the views of the company in which she found herself. Truth was not the be-all and end-all; you had to be free to have a nice time, too. Sociable people do not need to worry about understanding the full line of an argument: they can pretend, both to spare others and to avoid embarrassing themselves; it is the taking part that is important … Elisabet had been the queen of the cocktail party, moving on from a conversation with a smile the moment it started getting more profound … She had an enquiring mind, eager for knowledge, though primarily of the restricted and anecdotal kind, vivid snapshots and affirmative slogans that harmonized with the world the way she saw it.”
Son of Svea follows the couple through their marriage’s phases. When their son Eric is nine years old, Ragnar tells him that both Ernest Hemingway and Ragnar’s grandfather had shot themselves to death. The narrator adds, ”He told his son that no human being had the right to take their own life, because people were bound up with each other, and every single person therefore had obligations to others. They were not free to do as they wanted.”
Andersson is interested in how communal values may affect our unexceptional mentalities to create rather strict and narrow perspectives. There is more than a little of the ethnologist’s clinical regard in Andersson’s cool mode. But as in the description of Elisabet above, Andersson’s narrator speaks with candor but without a satirical sneer. There is no suggestion that Elisabet should adopt some other way of behavior. As for Ragnar, his attitude becomes more bland, his core truths more severe, and his criticism of his wife more harsh. Yet Andersson doesn’t treat her characters with disdain. She seems, in fact, to offer a broad critique of the impulse to merge oneself with a values checklist. Ragnar’s values come to substitute for a dynamic engagement with an actual world.
On Ragnar: “He was at one with social democracy itself in feeling the friction between the urge to create an upwardly mobile society and the desire to help ordinary people live so well that they did not want to get away from themselves and their lot in life.” And strangely, this quasi-socialist mentality begins to sound more and more like conservative mainstream cynicism: “Science changed its truths all the time and was not entirely to be trusted, while logic and rationality always stood firm. The ultimate truth of the world was as it was, regardless of what the research was saying at the time.”
Andersson was born in 1970, just a few years before the Social Democrats lost their majority clout in government. Son of Svea was published in Sweden in 2018 — just as the electorate spread its swing to the right and a minority government was formed. The next general election will occur this coming September. The children of Ragnar and Elisabet, skeptical of their father’s fatigued insistence on pure values and sober attitudes, will cast their votes.
[Published by Other Press on February 1, 2022, 278 pages, $16.99 paperback original. Subtitled “A Tale of the People’s Home.” Translated from the Swedish by Sarah Death]
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In January 1839, Louis Daguerre unveiled his invention, soon known as the daguerreotype, to a few select members of the French Academy of Sciences. He had been experimenting for 10 years. That same year, John Herschel coined the term “photography” and informed Daguerre of his discovery that a “hyposulphite of soda” or “hypo” could be effective as a photographic fixer. A young architect named Alphonse Hubert, skeptical of claims for a permanently stable image, imagined “an album of photographs that can exist only ensconced in darkness” – a night album. A public discourse on this remarkable new art commenced, sometimes giddy in its enthusiasm, typified by a statement made in 1855 by the chairman of the Photographic Society: “Nothing that is extraordinary in art … need now perish … everything that can be the subject of visual observation is rendered permanent, so that whatever is noticed now may be noticed by all the world forever.”
Not so fast! It was then observed with alarm that photographs exposed to natural light over time were fading. Reacting to this dire situation, the Photographic Society formed a Fading Committee. However, one of its members, T. Frederick Hardwich, became fascinated with the disappearances. “One can easily imagine him absorbed in the process, and perhaps the wonder, of observing a photograph changing before his eyes,” writes Kate Palmer Albers in The Night Albums: Visibility and the Ephemeral Photograph. The fascination with visibility and vanishing is her subject. She sums up the early years as follows:
“If nothing else, this period makes evident that despite the affirmative rhetoric surrounding photography’s permanence, there is no ‘natural’ or predetermined state of photography as a medium of fixed imagery. The decades it took to reliably produce fixed images demonstrates that the prolonged period of uncertainty, evidenced by these years of discussion and disagreement, is not separate from any history of photography but, in fact, foundational: there is nothing more basic to photography than its capacity to fade, to disappear, to be short-lived. How we think of this is up to us.”
The anxiety over impermanence seems to be permanent, even as Albers gives us a lively gallery tour of works that embrace the unstable. She notes the formation of the Whitney Museum’s Replication Committee intended to ensure the preservation of “highly unstable and fugitive” color prints. Yet at the same time in the early 1970s, Robert Heinecken produced his Vanishing Photographs series invested in “an active sense of not seeing something – or, rather, of seeing only its trace and afterimage.” Also in 1972 came Adrian Piper’s Food for the Spirit, fourteen self-portraits shot in a mirror, in some of which “her form is nearly indiscernible from the darkness surrounding her.” The images, says Albers, “gesture to an expanded photographic experience, a private impulse to render one’s own materiality visible, thereby both visualizing the dissolution of self and ensuring the opposite.” Indiscernibility places emphasis on the dynamics of seeing – and the desire to see in the first place.
[left: Adrian Piper, Food for the Spirit, 1971]In the chapter titled “Future Visibility,” Albers begins with her experiences watching Astronaut.io. Navigating the site, one encounters a series of “modest, vernacular,” untitled five-to-ten-second video clips: “As the clips appeared on my screen, and then disappeared a few seconds later, I felt I had been granted a glimpse into someone else’s everyday … a shared amateur aesthetic, a contemporary update to the old snapshots one comes across in thrift stores … there was no back button, no replay option, no link to follow to an original source …” Once a clip has been seen, the site discards it – you are the only one to see the images. In Astronaut.io, Albers finds that “the cumulative impact of these differences [between this site and YouTube] points to a method of undermining common habitual expectations for social media and modes of sharing and viewing. It speaks to an image economy that is, on the one hand, radically disrupted and, on the other, most alarming for its ready amplification and augmentation of all the structures of visibility reenacted, consciously or not, by those who build and program the sites and new literal codes of sight.”
The main antagonist and danger critiqued in The Night Albums is “the passive scaffolding that accompanies most acts of looking and seeing – that is, the condition of visibility.” We often say that everything in the Internet is eternal; one may remove images from a social networking or transaction site, but one never knows in how many other servers that information is stored. A photo packed away in the bowels of Instagram is always machine-readable but available only via “special circumstances” to a human.
There’s a cautionary element in Albers’ takes on the online world. But for me, the most engaging parts of her book peer at a varied set of numerous works embracing the evanescent – and her foundational questions about photography extend to 0ur work in the literary arts: “How visible does a photograph need to be? And how durational? In short, how much visible substance do we – the viewers – need for photographic experience?”
[Published by the University of California Press on November 30, 2021, $29.95 paperback]