ABSTRACT
Memoirs have traditionally occupied a category of their own within the field of ‘life-writing’, and have been distinguished from autobiography as being more flexible and outward-looking. This was Georg Misch’s view in his monumental study of the early history of autobiography: he believed memoirs could be written with a casualness and unpretentiousness in relation to form, which was denied their more anxious and introspective relation. Oddly enough, as Misch saw it, though memoirs summon up memory in terms of their etymology, they tend to avoid psychological depth and concentrate instead on external events of which their writers are ‘merely observers’ (Misch 1907: 15). The versatility and openness of the form – the fact that it can focus on any episode from a life – provides an important key to understanding its contemporary popularity. However, recent commentators have also exhorted its relevance in terms of its being equivocal or ‘dialogical’ (Quinby 1992: 299), neither externally focused, as Misch has argued, nor inward-looking, but rather mediating between these different worlds. Nancy Miller,
for instance, in her own Memoirs of a Parent’s Death, considers memoir to be ‘fashionably post-modern’ in the way it ‘hesitates to define the boundary between public and private, subject and object’ (Miller 1996: 2). Elsewhere she has seen it as primarily a form of ‘cultural memory’, using the personal less for its own sake than as part of a search for community (Miller 2002: 14). Where does the personal acquire meaning? And does memoir provide such a function in a world that can seem not just ‘postmodern’ but frighteningly fragmented? What accounts for the frequency and passion with which we have read memoirs since the 1990s? One, often negative, answer to the last question is that con-
temporary culture is simply obsessed with personality and selfexposure and that the rise of memoir writing from the 1990s onwards has to be contemplated alongside contemporary developments in other popular documentary forms such as reality TV. In television programmes like Big Brother or Survivor, we are encouraged to watch ordinary people become celebrities by virtue of having crossed the threshold into the ritualized spaces of a television programme. The important term here is, of course, ‘ritualized’, since whatever access reality TV seems to offer into the lives of others is compromised by a simultaneous manipulation of documentary content to fit the formats of soap opera or game show. Viewers can enjoy the sense of identification with ‘ordinary people’ who are ‘like them’ but the structures also ensure that ‘real people’ function as characters in a fictional setting. They become celebrities because of the ‘unreality’ of the experience, TV’s moulding of the real into entertainment. The degree of surveillance and manipulation that participants are subjected to is both a social and an ethical issue, yet the viewers’ pleasures in this form of TV are not, in the end, just voyeuristic ones. TV, it could be argued, ensures a distance as well as an intimacy which allows viewers to test out what is presented as ‘real’, even to become part of a community of viewers, joined by the activity of interpretation (Murray and Ouellette 2004: 6). What reality TV shares with memoirs, therefore, may be less an exploitation of the personal, than the need to form ‘ad hoc communities’ (Light 2004: 753), to find provisional settings which can both extend and confirm the meaning of the individual and the personal.
