In the writing of my memoir, My Generation, early feedback consistently told me something was missing from the linear narrative, something I can usefully call irony. With a master of the form such as Thomas Mann, the key to the ironic method is a selectivity of realistic detail which is so sharply focused as to tag the character as caricature. A humorous stance is implied, understated, held in dry distance or wry asides.
The chronological composition of My Generation, in its early drafts, was relatively bare of such detail, or of the transforming alchemy of imaginative rendering. Also it lacked a layer of mature commentary from the future self, which might have supplied such a perspective of witness. I had hoped the life itself would speak for itself, naked of pretence to appear politically correct; the pre-mature male of the sixties and seventies not yet facing the feminist critique of the eighties.
The book’s minimalism, in short, failed to convey that the character and his behavior were to be judged askance. Perhaps I preferred to imply that all is forgiven. And that readers might do better to judge for themselves, or not at all. Absent either telling texture or sage commentary from a more evolved future, there is no way to know the writer’s moral stance, or whether he even wants us to have an opinion.
Though I might have been aiming for a kind of existentialist purity, the result came off as mere reportage.
With a writer of poetic realism like Isaac Babel, the reportage seems to be sufficient. The raw injustice of war (in Red Cavalry) is implicit in the facts, told vividly enough. In my case, within the safer confines of American suburbia, reality had been only sketchily rendered, insufficient to give the reader the full experience required to engage. Held at a distance like a voyeur from serial tales of erotic conquest, readers wanted assurance in their moral response, or guidance to a wiser contemplation.
There are too ways to elicit sympathy for a character: in memoir, to bring in the wiser voice from the mature commentator to reflect on the misdeeds of the former self; in fiction, to imbue the character with enough external and internal detail as to animate them with life itself, which elicits empathy when purely expressed.
So another element I learned to grow in my memoir, along with philosophic reflection and visceral detail, was personal emotion. I had to flesh out my boyish exploits with an internal rationale, how it felt at the time, either told or shown. If a given episode lacked commentary from afar, at least the character I was could be allowed to feel from inside that skin, and so to find in the reader a sympathetic companion for the journey.
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Further reading:
Verisimilitude: The Moral Aesthetic of George Saunders
(in Numero Cinq, August 2017)
