Wrestling with Shadows

An essay by Miranda Gold. Originally published in 3AM Magazine, June 2022.

‘We had the experience but missed the meaning.’ Four Quartets, T.S Eliot

Two rivers run in the home of the shades, Mnemosyne and Lethe; drinking from the former assures recollection, drinking from the latter promises oblivion. Forgetting frees the soul from its previous incarnation. Memory has become so intimately tied to the idea of the self that identity seems to rest upon it. Narrativised into coherence, the impression of an essentially unchanging ‘I’ gathers substance, secures its anchor in the shifting present. I remember therefore I am. And yet, Mnemosyne is also the name given to the mother of the muses: she not only connects humanity to its history, she gives birth to the arts that will find a shape for that history. With the river as source and the goddess as guide, remembrance is characterised as a creative act as much as one of retrieval, involving the artistry it inspires. Understood through this lens, it feels playful, dynamic, even liberating. The paradox is that this concept of memory as fluid demands a level of psychic stability to experience it as such. If we dissolve the notion of memory as static, the fixity of the self who recalls dissolves with it. But rather than simply viewing this as a negation or trivialisation of the crucial role memory plays, it can offer us an opening towards the potential for a more expansive, compassionate narrative. One which recognises memory-making as myth-making, which welcomes stories that break off, fragment, morph.  Stories for which fiction – as bridge between history and recorded testimony – can hold a receptive space, welcoming rather than undermining their mutability.

To claim that memory is malleable is, as any reader of literary fiction will tell you, hardly remarkable. There is a vast expanse between an engagement that arises through the translation of imagined experience into language and the paralysing consequences of unprocessed trauma. Yes, it’s unstable ground – the borders between Before and After are frail; they will not stay still – but this only makes a highly nuanced, sensitive response all the more crucial, renegotiated in each context, conscious of which stories are playing out and how the dynamics of the present moment influences the level of cohesion and safety felt within the subject in relation to those stories. Remembrance as testimony, especially in the aftermath of atrocity, is our means of bearing witness – an inheritance that’s as fragile as it is potent. We enter into someone else’s narrative, we carry the legacy of second and third-hand memories. Never Forget is a commandment we have grown up with, allowing the fallacy that to engage in rituals of remembrance is in itself valuable, but how we remember is as crucial as what. Form is not simply what we do or what props we use. It is more a mode of being than an action, a quality of attention, which cannot be measured or verified, but felt and known. It is this which moves the act from formulaic, even hollow, to reflective and intentional, alive to how it might inform our response to the narratives emerging in our own time. At what point does remembrance of any given narrative, at both the personal and collective levels, repress other narratives, constricting us and even perpetuating the harm remembrance is meant to avert? Even a ‘true’ story can become a distortion if it’s the only story. 

A reader suggested to me that the characters in my second novel, A Small Dark Quiet, don’t remember, they re-live: the past ruptures the present. Identity, eclipsed by a legacy of preverbal and inherited memory, buckles. Drawn back to a series of former selves and stories embedded in the psyche, dormant patterns are vulnerable to stimuli in the current environment which echo (an often necessarily) buried experience. The external prompt – a voice, an image, a texture – may be fleeting but what sustains it is personal reconstruction. The weave of specific detail is as fundamental to the sanctity of recollection as it is to the novelist. The more intricate, the more convincing. The body is memory’s vault, the imagination where it comes out to play. The power it exerts lies partly in its unbidden re-emergence – immediate, unanticipated – putting it beyond questions of authenticity. Involuntary becomes synonymous with true. But once the prompt sends or pulls us back and we slip through the open door, do we become a part of the mental image or merely an observer? Or to put it another way, whose eyes are we looking through? The reader, writer, and the subject, caught by what a friend of mine calls ‘the ghosts in the basement’, are conjoined in this process.

Forming a narrative around involuntary memory restores a sense of agency – the memory displaces the subject from the present moment, but the subject puts the memory in its place, secures it within a structure that demarcates the line separating Before from After. Imprinted under traumatic conditions, however, that line is tenuous and without it the past can threaten to eclipse the here and now – and the ‘I’ trying to orientate itself within it. Self-preservation then seems to depend upon splitting off from oneself. Trauma was once described to me as pain that outweighs the resources to manage that pain. It’s a deceptively simple definition and one I continue to find helpful, particularly now that ‘trauma’ has become so prominent in our vocabulary, and the very speed with which we can use it to categorise an experience weakens our capacity to register its power. Perhaps we need more words for trauma – perhaps it is asked to do too much. 

Non-linear fiction has an affinity with the precarious nature of memory, reimagined by the reader whose context and associations rework the characters’ experience. We often qualify our response to a novel as subjective, but it’s inter-subjective. Shift the angle, defamiliarise, and it starts to come into focus: memory is both antagonist and companion. The tension between the need to split off from one’s past and the urge to recapture that past is at the centre of A Small Dark Quiet. A rhythm surfaced, created through recurring images, which suggested to me a sense of the pattern this tension produces, one of continual flight and return. The image, though, like memory, isn’t quite a replica. However subtle, the discrepancy between image and replica, experience and memory, can indicate that time in the psyche is trying to catch up with time on the clock – finding a way to integrate that Before into After, allowing the subject to engage with this now without either rejecting the past or being destabilised by it. My sense is that the more extreme the disjunction between the timeframe in which the psyche is caught and chronological time, the more the subject becomes paralysed, existing in a no-man’s land between conflicting stories and identities, making the protagonist not only outsiders to the world but to themselves. The subject is both living on the periphery of their experience and consumed by it. Memory becomes not just fantasy, but hallucination, displacing the present altogether. Imagery gives way to sensation. The less concrete the scene, the less the stream of impressions can be tamed or related in the way a clearly defined picture can – it escapes but is inescapable. 

How then, to find a way to communicate the experience of what Eva Hoffman describes in her meditation on the aftermath of the Holocaust, After Such Knowledge, as ‘wrestling with shadows’? Hoffman’s book is an anchor for me, capturing how memories are transmitted and become an ineradicable part of our being even as they take on the quality of myth. It is precisely because they refuse representation that they hold this irreducible power. If we are to attempt to communicate this, perhaps we need  space for the silence and the shadows within the writing, an admission of where language breaks down, where narrative is forced to break off, and an acknowledgment, too, that ‘narrative is not always salvational.’