A few years ago, I chanced to buy a truly nonessential Goethe, written in his late years: The Man of Fifty. The tale follows a fifty-year-old Army major’s relationships with a maiden and a widow. For the sake of the former, he enters an Age of Seeming and takes up cosmetics; upon losing a tooth and realizing he is more fit for the latter, his Age of Being begins, and the pair seek out each other’s poetry and discussion. Because the major ends up with a well-suited arrangement, the story did not invoke in me any melancholy over aging. (It is another question why I was expecting this.) What did invoke this feeling, however, was a short sentence in the introduction, taken from Goethe’s letters: “I have become historical to myself.”
I now think that the well-written memoir starts at this moment.
Goethe believed history—whether personal, natural, or cultural—trumps all. In his biography of Winckelmann, the founder of modern archaeology, Goethe instructs us to be interested not in what scholars thought, their work, but instead in how scholars thought, their life. He maintained, though less severely than my paraphrase, that knowledge was better called the epoch’s perspective. We are not moving toward or away from a trans-historical golden standard. He believed that no one, dead or alive or unborn, will ever discover beyond the space fixed by their time. However influential these ideas are, they represent Goethe only partially, as philosopher. I want to channel Goethe as writer and see how such a view of history may influence its writing, focusing on one blend of past and prose: memoir.
The wisdom of age is to attain the same relationship with our life that great historians have had with time: we have had our inevitable eras. Yet still more importantly and unlike historicists: these eras were not inevitable because they were transfixed so by a pre-set grand-narrative arc.
I think the modern understanding of life is that it is nothing like Greek tragedy. That is, there is no, “We already know who will die, but how has the Grandmaster written it this time, that is what we came to see.” Rather, the past is a distributed process, with nothing future-conscious or forward-thinking about it. (The future does not exist yet; how can you be conscious of it to develop “accordingly?” According to what?) We should remember that Goethe did not consider his life’s work to be Faust. For him, it was Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahre, the book of stories and poems and aphorisms and letters and clippings, all of which organically made a life.
It seems that I advocate for a kind of Impressionism in writing: wide-angle instead of spotlight; with the passage of time, and the communication of this, being paramount; no overpowering or overt narrative. Take, for example, how the major in The Man of Fifty falls in love with the widow. I mentioned a lost tooth. In fact, no one, and certainly not the young lover, finds out about it or the hole in its place. It affects the major’s life entirely through the lasting impression of certain aging.
There is also an embroidered bag involved. It is a long time in the making, this art project of the widow, at times beheld by the major, at times heard about from other visitors. Stitch by stitch, our man, who has made an enemy of time, comes to appreciate it because it allows for craftsmanship. Beauty by birth fades, but the same passage of time allows skill to recreate beauty for eternity. There are no puncture-like events that lead to this marriage, but slow and disjointed processes, rarely bobbing their heads above the still-water of daily routine. The good archaeologist is fed by every crumb of ruin, and Monet painted with many tiny brushstrokes. We, as historians of our lives, should also try to see what unfolds in the grand scheme through the reverberation of small things.
Impressionism works in painting, but writing, especially nonfiction, may require more sustained coherence than a frame. Can coherence really exist without a grand arc? Does The Man of Fifty work because it is barely 70 pages? I can tell you of a multimillennia-long process that has no grand arc and yet keeps a sense of wholeness: a flower, here evolving toward a thorny stem, now away from squarish petals. It forever alters in appearance, and somehow persists as if an abstracted, eternal concept. It has no consciousness of an ideal, only the external force of transient stimuli and the internal force of adaptation. Similarly, childhood or college or coworker, “friend” continues. Through troughs and crests, “you” stably sail onward.
There is an even stranger thing to settle. If, indeed, historical perspective really starts at a moment, what comes before it? What, if anything, comes after it, or does it represent the final stage of our relation with time? Finally, why do I believe both options, if they exist, produce worse work?
We can write too soon, as I have found from my diaries, logged day-of, which swing between complete minutiae to rabid manifestos. My pages taste raw and crude like unaged wine. This is because events carry some of their meaning intrinsically, simply from how they have come about. The rest, and I think majority, of the meaning is in what they will themselves lead to. I arrest this process sporadically and dilute the catharsis to be had; events can no longer progress to their full intensity because my intermittent awareness acts like a retardant whip, cautioning back to normality and moderation. Similarly, daily doses build an immunity to the fatal poison and mechanical reproductions of masterpieces to the transformative power of art. There is another way in which “too soon” takes away from memoir. I remember a popular post online saying, “all poets write from a central emotion.” I likewise posit all genres have a central expectation, and that of memoir is wisdom. Wisdom is not one reactionary reflex, but rather the remains of many such reactions. You may argue then that by rushing, you, a revolutionary, are breaking genre conventions. I think you are labelling a piece by a category that it never fell under in the first place. Write too soon and you mount the forward arrow of dots, accumulation, life; the core of this backward genre is in lines, deconstruction, study.
On the other side—that is, after historical perspective—comes myth-making. This is akin to the relation of a stone-age society with generations past. Myth is dogmatic, for there is no longer a concrete memory left among its audience that can object to it. Myth is dogmatic because symbols propagate and populate it. By condensing the physicality of events and figures, we (no way around it!) exaggerate and erase; we cool the diffuse mist into a cube of ice and make beads for a string from wide-deposited clay. Myth is dogmatic because it disconnects from its source in reality with every retelling and replaces the events in question to become the main object of study. Take care, we cross the threshold from rational inquiry to artistic appreciation. What use, now, is asking if the Minotaur was right- or left-handed?
For myth to manifest in a contemporary individual’s life, they simply need to remember too late. One example comes from the semiautobiographical trilogy of Tolstoy: Childhood, Boyhood, and Youth. The protagonist Nikolenka’s mother is the only character not to survive past Childhood and is thus the most temporally distant. When Nikolenka tries to remember this Mamma, he visualizes her expressive brown eyes, mole, embroidered collar, and tender hands, but concludes: “Her general appearance escapes me altogether.” Where there is nothing real to grasp any longer, emblematic preferences complete the maternal myth of Mamma. She always plays two composers, Field and Beethoven, whom Nikolenka remembers to be particularly poignant, and poignant because, he thinks, they invoke in him past familial experiences even further back. Pondering more, he finds out he cannot recall any solid experience; only abstract dream-like shapes move about his mind’s eye. He concludes with confused sorrow, the way we feel upon realizing our childhood-self deceived us into nonexistent happiness: “Those feelings were a reminiscence—of what? Somehow I seemed to remember something which had never been.”
Why do I argue that the irrational memoir is bad? More than bad, in fact, I insist it is evil. I cannot, not in my value judgment, separate the genre from its social and political roles of marking and creating identity. The irrational memoir presents an identity created through myth, through a patchwork of predictive text distributed under the name of reality, through causes which can perhaps be felt and believed but cannot be thought about. What fun to be a fanatic singing for a guileless crowd. Forget the outsiders, you do not “do poetic justice to your soul” either! If your “soul”—call it whatever you will: a material mind or an immaterial spirit—grew from animal-like id, the universal love and death drives would make it the same as everyone else’s. There would be no point to writing a memoir as witness to your nonunique experience.
Yet you are more than animal, and you have this “soul” chiefly because of your intelligence. Every piece of evidence you could give for the existence of the “soul” is a humanly rational act: the memory of your mother tinged with guilt, respect for a well-made purse, awe in face of science, and consolation in hearing another’s prayer. Reason is not a soulless thing. Then why not give it room to speak?
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Derin Kutlay is a writer from Ankara, Turkey, who studied physics and classics at Stanford University, where she served as prose editor for Leland Quarterly. Derin’s fiction has been published by The Chamber Magazine and The Quarter(ly), and her poetry was short-listed for the 2022 Erbacce Prize.
