This need for human interaction also helps explain the popularity of social networking sites like MySpace and virtual reality games like World of Warcraft, which are particularly attractive to those of Generation X and the cohort that has followed us, Generation Next.12 These technologies offer a closer approximation of traditional human interaction than infotainment and reality TV because they allow users to communicate with each other via online texting or chats, enabling a give-and-take essential to face-to-face relationships. Hence my friend who frequently plays World of Warcraft considers a group of players from around the world to be genuine friends who can help him through tough times: during a recent illness, he felt obligated by friendship to get up, log on, and join in, whereas otherwise he might have stayed in bed all day, wallowing in his misery.
Through these virtual human connections, these various media forms seek to salve the very feelings of social fragmentation and isolation in us that they help produce. But they are ultimately unsuccessful. Because no matter how much we may relate to the celebrities on infotainment shows or the “everyday people” on reality TV, we can still only know as much about them as the producers of these programs decide to show us. Even if we could look past this lack of give-and-take, we would still be faced with the commercials, product placements, and other signs of corporate sponsorship that serve as constant reminders that the ultimate goal of these programs is revenues, and that the relationships they attempt to cultivate with us are only a means to this end. And while my friend might experience a sense of community through World of Warcraft, he has actually met only the graphical representations, or avatars, of his online friends. For all he knows, the stunning twenty-five-year-old billionaire heiress with whom he is flirting could be a sixty-five-year-old man, while the muscle-bound warrior who is helping him slay a monster could be a twelve-year-old girl. How connected can we be to someone if we’re not even sure he is who he says he is? How real can a friendship be when it is formed in an entirely unreal world, where common activities involve living the virtual life of a billionaire or slaying monsters? And if he did meet a stunning heiress in person, would he still have the social skills to flirt with her for real?
Like the celebrity-centric media, reality TV, and social networking sites, books of memoir have the potential to both create and salve feelings of social fragmentation and isolation. If viewed as the gratuitous celebration of the self, the genre seems yet another example of individualism trampling community. But because a well-written memoir shows readers an individual’s thoughts and emotions as the author attempts to record and make sense of his or her life, it also generates feelings of human connection. Indeed, because these self-explorations are grounded in the details of an author’s lived experience, they tend to have greater depth than personal stories on TV, greater truth than relationships from social networking sites.
As a result, memoir has the potential to produce in us a strong connection to the author’s humanity, and it is from this connection that the genre also has the potential to build community. As memoirists record and make sense of their personal history, they demonstrate the complexities of their life, no matter how extraordinary or seemingly commonplace, how exemplary or abhorrent. By allowing us access into their private thoughts and emotions as they undergo this process, they encourage us to identify and empathize with them—two important building blocks in the creation of community. For example, although I intellectually understand the social construction of race, June Cross’s memoir Secret Daughter: A Mixed-Race Daughter and the Mother Who Gave Her Away made me identify and empathize with a little girl as she learned from the actions of those around her that she was black, and my emotional understanding of how day-to-day interactions impose a racial identity deepened.
Of course, such identification and empathy is also possible in fiction. But memoir somehow elicits feelings of human connection that are stronger than those generated by fiction. Perhaps we are better able to recognize our own lived experiences in those of others. Or perhaps, because these stories and characters are presented as real, we accept them as real, and the feelings of connectedness seem truer. At the very least, this element of the real serves to counter an increasingly virtual world, in which it is becoming easier to falsify identity. And just as in face-to-face relationships, memoir’s potential to build community is strengthened by such bonds of trust.
Given this potential, I believe that memoir may, in its own modest way, help us meet the challenges of the current historical moment. For while I think the sixties generation gets it wrong when they romanticize their own youth or question mine, they were right when they looked for solutions in togetherness. Confronted by such overwhelming challenges as global climate change, I believe that the future depends upon us thinking more about our common interests as a species and less about our uniqueness as individuals. If memoir can promote these common interests through a focus on individual uniqueness, then its celebration of the self is not gratuitous. It instead has a vital purpose.
Quite an optimistic thought from a supposed slacker...
1 Karen Peterson, “Baby Busters Rise above Elders’ Scorn,” USA Today, September 23, 1993. Quoted in Stephen Earl Bennett and Stephen C. Craig, eds., After the Boom: The Politics of Generation X (Lanham, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield, 1997), 2–3.
2 Jay Stevens, Storming Heaven: LSD and the American Dream (New York: Perennial Library, 1988), esp. chaps. 25, 26.
3 Sara Evans, Personal Politics: The Roots of Women’s Liberation in the Civil Rights Movement and the New Left (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1979).
4 Quoted in Godfrey Hodgson, America in Our Time (New York: Vintage Books, 1978), 326.
5 Stevens, Storming Heaven, 232.
6 Robert Putnam, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000), 129. Putnam suggests that these twentysomethings might belong instead to the generation following Gen X. Because of their birth years in the mid- to late 1970s, however, they could also be considered late Xers.
7 From Joan Didion, Political Fictions (New York: Vintage Books, 2001), 332. For more on the lower level of political engagement among American youths compared with that of older generations, see Putnam, Bowling Alone, 36.
8 Divorce statistics from Peter Hanson, The Cinema of Generation X: A Critical Study (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, 2002), 11.
9 Douglas Keay, “Aids, Education and the Year 2000!” in Woman’s Own, September 23, 1987, 8–10; it is reproduced on the website of the Margaret Thatcher Foundation at www.margaretthatcher.org/speeches/displaydocument.asp?docid=106689&doctype=1.
10 Population numbers for boomers and Gen Xers from Bennett and Craig, After the Boom, 2–3. For more on the differences between the generations, see Donna Gaines, Teenage Wasteland: Suburbia’s Dead End Kids (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 237–61.
11 Putnam, Bowling Alone, 259, 263.
12 Andrew Kohut et al., “How Young People View Their Lives, Futures, and Politics: A Portrait of ‘Generation Next”’ (Washington, D.C.: Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, January 9, 2007), 13–15; see http://people-press.org/reports/pdf/300.pdf.
PATRICIA HAMPL
You’re History
• • •
WITH AN EXCERPT FROM
The Florist’s Daughter
FROM The Florist’s Daughter
These apparently ordinary people in our ordinary town, living faultlessly ordinary lives, and believing themselves to be ordinary, why do I persist in thinking—knowing—they weren’t ordinary at all?
What’s back there? Back there, I say, as if the past were a location, geographic rather than temporal, lost in the recesses of old St. Paul. And how did it become “old St. Paul,” the way I habitually think of it now, as if in my lifetime the provincial Midwestern capital had lifted off the planet and become a figment of history, a
nd from there had ceased to exist except as an invention of memory. And all the more potent for that, the way our lives become imaginary when we try most strenuously to make sense of them.
It was a world, old St. Paul. And now it’s gone. But I still live in it.
Nostalgia, someone will say. A sneer accompanies the word, meaning that to be fascinated by what is gone and lost is to be easily seduced by sentiment. A shameful undertaking. But nostalgia shares the shame of the other good sins, the way lust is shameful or drink or gluttony or sloth. It doesn’t belong to the desiccated sins of the soul—pride, envy. To the sweet sins of the body, add nostalgia. The sin of memory.
Nostalgia is really a kind of loyalty—also a sin when misapplied, as it so often is. But it’s the engine, not the enemy, of history. It feeds on detail, the protein of accuracy. Or maybe nostalgia is a form of longing. It aches for history. In its cloudy wistfulness, nostalgia fuels the spark of significance. My place. My people.
Another old–St. Paul way of thinking: Mother talking about her people, meaning not the nation, but the clutch of family streaming back to illiterate Kilkenny, her Irish grandfather who wouldn’t take up a gun during the Traverse des Sioux “Indian Uprising” (I couldn’t shoot. I played with those boys), her mother one of “the seven beautiful Smith girls, tall as men,” and their one lone brother, feebleminded, wandering the street with a small tin drum. And he the handsomest of them all. Pity, pity.
Or she would say my folks, that mild Midwestern descriptor. My people, my folks, Mother and Dad—M & D in the private patois of the fervent journals I’ve kept all these years as if I were doing research for a historical novel forever incomplete because the research keeps proliferating. Until now. Now the research is almost done.
• • •
You’re History
In May 1975, I quit a perfectly decent, if dispiriting, editorial job in St. Paul, bought myself a sky blue backpack and the cheapest transatlantic ticket I could find, and flew to London. From there, by Channel ferry and then by train, I lurched across western Europe to the Iron Curtain border town of Cheb, a cheerless crossing straight out of a Hollywood Cold War spy movie, where I finally achieved Czechoslovakia, thus reversing the late nineteenth-century journey my paternal grandparents had made when they emigrated, separately, from the Czech lands of the Hapsburg Empire to the American Midwest where they met and married in the Czech enclave of St. Paul near the Schmidt brewery.
On the Czech visa form, under the word “Profession,” I had written with an impostor’s bravado, “Writer.” I hadn’t published anything yet. Nor had I traveled before to Europe—or really, to anywhere. But that was the point: go to Prague, a certifiably exotic setting, and then write a book about it.
I did not undertake this mad Cold War leap “to find a self,” as the dust jackets of so many memoirs routinely proclaim. Like legions of wandering souls of the notorious sixties bearing the hump of a backpack, I possessed more self than I knew what to do with. Though I wouldn’t have put it this way at the time, I had quit my job and alarmed my mother (you can’t go behind the Iron Curtain!) not to find a self but to find a history.
The significance of history was what my life sorely lacked. Of this I was certain. The emphasis here should be on the modifier—how sore I felt, had always felt, nursing the bruise of insignificance. This cultural ache is a heartland heritage, the flyover birthright. And ridiculous partly because it’s inaccurate—as if there were no “history” in the migrations that brought Europeans to middle America and exiled or, as we would say today, “cleansed” its native inhabitants—to name only one strand of the midwestern story.
This moody midwestern petulance has quite a provenance. “Yours from this hell hole of life and time,” Scott Fitzgerald wrote peevishly from St. Paul to Edmund Wilson, his Princeton pal in louche and literary Greenwich Village. And in a late poem John Berryman, my humanities professor at the University, evoked Minneapolis with a bilious contempt I approved—“site without history!” Even the most celebrated Minnesota novel, Sinclair Lewis’s Main Street, was an indictment of the small-mindedness of Gopher Prairie (really Sauk Centre, Minnesota, as I was painfully aware). There it was again: the dread midwestern theme of insignificance immortalized, its author awarded the Nobel Prize for nailing us.
I knew no one in Prague, didn’t have the language, and had no identity or contacts to trade on. Fine. Aware of the paradox that I was traveling to what was, after all, my ancestral homeland, I would be a stranger in a strange land.
And I was. It seemed I was the only American in Prague in spring 1975, certainly the only one staying at the Paríz, a dingy art nouveau cream cake of a hotel. If it was meant to conjure Paris, the Paríz definitely was not, in those bleak Cold War times, a figment of the city of lights. The Alfons Mucha bas-relief decorative figurines wept sooty coal dust tears, the whole place was sepulchral, the dour restaurant and lounge resembling viewing rooms of a down-market funeral parlor. I could say pivo—beer—and often did, and potatoes—brambory. Beyond that I never knew what I would be served, because the purple mimeographed menus that bled onto my hands were in Czech and Slovak, German, Russian. Rarely in French, the only foreign language I could pretend to read. Never, if memory serves, in English.
I couldn’t afford regular meals at the hotel anyway, even at the funny-money prices of Cold War Prague where the dollar bill had the heft of gold bullion. I dined on angry-looking sausages at stand-up canteens and kiosks on Václavské námestí, orange grease oozing onto the flimsy paper plate next to a chunk of damp dark bread and a knob of horseradish-laced mustard. Or I sat in smoky cafés drinking silty coffee, making a meal of caffeine and sugar.
And I walked. And walked and walked. And walked some more.
I was walking—I was sure—in history. I couldn’t read the signs on the buildings or in the museums, I could barely pronounce the street names, sounding them out like the illiterate I was. But the history I was greedily taking in, the necessary nutrient I had been missing, comprised not only old buildings and ancient smells (those medieval wine cellars, dank with the sedge of ages). I was accosted by the raw evidence of political reality and historical destiny on the twisting streets of Malá Strana leading to the Castle. And just as I’d always suspected, if inchoately, history wasn’t just a story reconstructed from the past. It wasn’t quite dead and gone. And it wasn’t the tame pet I had nurtured at home. History was a beast. You could feel its hot breath seething down the city’s miserable byways.
History radiated from living emblems everywhere on display. Before I met or spoke to a single soul, except to say “pivo, prosim” to the gloomy waiters padding over the threadbare carpets of the Parˇízˇ lounge, the city impressed on me its likewise gloomy political history as I wandered its streets. Aggressively primal red-and-yellow banners sagged and flapped from the ghostly neglected buildings attesting, I learned, to fraternal relations with “our Soviet brothers.” Barely six years had passed since the Warsaw Pact invasion crushed the Prague Spring attempt to develop “socialism with a human face.” The faces on the streets were all too human—morose, inward, afflicted. Is it possible that I never saw a smiling face on the street then or during subsequent trips I made to Prague in the late 1970s? Gray, gray—the buildings and the faces. Absurdly, I cannot remember a sunny day either, as if the weather were in sour conspiracy with the politics, held captive by the dark side of history. But that, we know, is memory at work, that most unrepentantly poetic faculty of mind. Still, it’s all I have left as a weather report from that time.
Small, almost diffident plaques punctuated the blackened walls of Malá Strana buildings, noting the place where a boy or girl—the ages always seemed to be barely twenty—had fallen, shot by the retreating Nazis in the final desperate days of the war, early May 1945, exactly thirty years before my own May visit. Most of these shrines were decorated with fresh flowers (it was lilac time, as it had be
en during the uprising) or bore handmade tinfoil wreaths trailing streamers in the Czech colors—the same red-white-and-blue as America’s.
I stopped in front of one glass-encased photograph on Karmelitská, the clattery 22 tram rattling past me, arrested by the black-and-white face of a dead girl—I couldn’t think of her as anything else. Her features were noble as a statue’s. A university student probably. The lilacs tucked into the flower holder attached to her picture were fresh. Who, I wondered idly, had decorated this modest memorial?
Her parents—the thought came as a jolt. All of these private shines affixed to the grimy buildings in the disintegrating city were probably tended by elderly mothers and fathers, still grieving loyally. History was that recent, that alive.
I had been correct, back in St. Paul, to believe that history was what John Berryman called “the rudiments of a soul” that a place must achieve, usually through brutal experience, in order to matter. I had rightly rebelled against the throwaway line: You’re history, we say to indicate you’re nothing, as if “history” were a synonym for forgetfulness, worthlessness, for the absence of memory. Surely it is an American idiom. Impossible to imagine a postwar European saying, “You’re history....That’s history,” meaning fuhgeddaboudit, pal.
But history wasn’t simply the glittery wash of significance I had longed for and imagined in my brooding flyover way. Until Prague, had I ever been able—or willing—to imagine its crushing reality, its indelible stain of dried blood? More to the point, having looked into the photographic face of the dead girl patriot on Karmelitská, how was I to respond to the humbling wake-up slap of historical empathy smarting on my earnest, unmarked, midwestern face?
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