Messing about with who you are
Hilary Corke
WHITE GLOVES by John Kotre Simon & Schuster, £15.99, pp. 276
The subtitle of this attractive-looking treatise by a professor of psychology at the University of Michigan-Dearborn is 'How We Create Ourselves Through Memory'; and, having just concluded a quarter- million-word tranche of autobiography — a new sort of venture for me — I obviously find it a subject very close. No one, unless he is deaf to interior questions, can indulge in, or even contemplate, such an activity without coming face to face with enforced memory queries; of which perhaps the most pertinent of all is what I dub to myself the Serial Problem. Put crudely, each time we remember, do we remember a 'thing' (to beg every sort of question) or ppd
resurrect our latest recollection of it, re- collection, the end-member of a series? Surely something more approximating to the latter? When we put in a demand-slip to that dark someone in the skull's base- ment, surely he does not send up the origi- nal, nor even a xerox, but simply an ill-written manuscript copy full of errors? And then, the next time, not even that same imperfect copy again but a further even more inaccurate rewrite of it? Chinese Whispers of the recollective power.
At any rate it was soon brought home to me that the act of writing a memory down shifts the goal-posts. Next time we remember less the original memory than our lately written transcript of it. Soon that bulks so large as to quite occlude what gave it birth; and we have lost even the sem- blance of direct touch with everything but that. He who seeketh to save his life by recording it shall surely lose it.
I had expected to find this dire problem, amongst many others, dealt with for me in White Gloves. Not really. Such questions as retrieval-routes are not even envisaged, let alone approached; and Professor Kotre treats of what we may call the natural his- tory of memory rather than its nature. He does not even pause, in his eagerness to heap pathological case-history upon case- history, to consider what he may mean by the very word memory itself. For him, a memory is not a summoning up of a past event but simply any undefined item of the mind's furniture. Thus the white gloves of his title, with which he makes much play, are simply his grandfather's bandsman gloves which he was forced to 'hang up' when he emigrated to the States and realised there was no living to be made in music for him there. But Kotre has never seen these gloves; they may even not have existed; he has never even seen his grand- father. He has not even surmised the possi- bility of the existence of these gloves until ten years ago. Then they became for him a symbol, and a very potent one too; but a symbol is not a memory, and it takes grand academic fluffiness to confuse the one with the other and build a whole volume upon the confusion.
Once one has perceived this one looks a bit more carefully to see just where Kotre is coming from. His chair appears to be a Professorship of Life-Histories, and his academic discipline is carefully to record and transcribe the dictated witless narratives of thousands of representative inhabitants of Middle America. Alas, what more middling than that! Middle-earth's blank nowhere. One must accept that no one's life is ultimately truly boring, but it has to be said that some lives are much more boring than others. There is scarcely a single male 'story' drearily recounted here that has not for its sole happiest hour the day that Dad first took him out to the crik to go fishin', universal rite of folksy passage. It is of course not the facts of a life that terminally weary but the quality of attention given to them by the one who lives. Quality, that non-PC word! Here in every hollow case there is a mindless absence of all meaningful self-regard fruitful shallows, though, for the carnivo- rous shrink to splash about in.
Fruitful shallows too for the mind- benders of even more sinister persuasion; and the chapters upon 'cryptomnesia', false 'memories' deliberately inserted by others, are the most interesting. Prominent, 'obviously, is the discussion of mythical child-abusings, the clearly documented cases where both 'victims' and 'perpetra- tors' have whole-heartedly colluded to produce the false holograms of crimes that never existed and never could have — the ritual satanic slaughter, for instance, of 25 babies in a small hick township in which no babies had ever gone missing.
But, for Kotre, such devil's falsifications are only the shadowed flip-side of perfectly valid psychiatric manipulations. He in no way discriminates, but describes with approval (by way of example) how a woman, traumatised in early childhood by her mother's refusal to let her see her father's dead body, is persuaded by a 'Christian therapist' that it didn't happen like that at all, but Jesus appeared at the critical moment to take her by her tiny hand and lead her into the forbidden room: 'Well, they're not going to stop me!' In the Christian healing of memories the figure of Jesus is inserted directly into the remem- bered image'; and thereafter the lady was largely cured, which was nice for her; but Kotre blandly does no more than describe this rather shocking form of fibbing as 'memory-repair', quoting with approval a dictum that 'a psychiatric patient can never be considered cured until his memories have been altered'.
Are the purlieus of Michigan-Dearborn peculiarly fertile ground for wobbly 'memories' that can easily be benignly or malignly tinkered with? Surely this can only be effected with those whose grips upon their own centres are functionally feeble, and their apprehensions of the personali- ties of their nearest too? I know, to look no further, that I myself was not a victim of childhood sexual abuse; not because I can in any way safely recall the whole of my earliest life but because everything that I know of my parents makes the concept merely grotesque. And I know that I never abused my own children because every- thing that I know of myself makes that grotesque too. But mean average sensual Americans, as we know, are ever much
Is this a grouchy rant — or shall I listen?' concerned to discover 'who they are'. They are at self-risk and thus at memory-risk. It is only in a nation of those who specifically don't know who they are that the memory- repair industry can flourish. Kotre and his brotherhood bid to help those of weak cen- tral apprehension not just to find out who they are but to create who they are as well. Then no doubt they will one day meet themselves coming around a corner to mutual approbation. But it conduces to vertigo, this crypto-Utopian vision of a vast nation busily engaged in making them- selves up: it has always been noted that the self-made is an ill journeyman.
Kotre writes in a smooth, accessible and civilised manner in a Reader's Digestive style, despite a spattering of wilful words like 'nurturance', but with the sort of goofy grin, all good-will and rotten thinking that we are accustomed to see on the faces of the born-again. He provides nothing to help us forward in our Proustian master- classes; and as for the composition of autobiography, I am no nearer an under- standing of what I have been doing after closing White Gloves than before I opened it.
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