Page 44 - Costellazioni 5

SIRI HUSTVEDT, Pace, Space and the Other in the Making of Fiction

additional level of meaning making and contextual understanding
that arrives with autobiographical memory. It requires the imaginative
recreation of the self as a character moving in another time and anoth-
er space not available to immediate perception. This imaginary realm
of internal words and pictures must build on much earlier experiences,
on dialogical rhythms, repetitions, recollections, and embodied pre-
reflective intentionality, and yet, these foundational experiences
ground many later developments in human life, not only the ability
to tell stories. And a child’s immersion in language and eventually in
linguistic signs changes his perceptions. Think of the time line. Re-
member that its direction depends not on spoken language: it depends
on the habits of literacy.
Delayed imitation research has demonstrated explicit, declara-
tive memory in infants. But as Robyn Fivush and Catherine Nelson
point out in their paper, “The Emergence of Autobiographical Mem-
ory: A Social Cultural Developmental Theory,” the methods used,
which rely heavily on environmental cues — after a delay, the child is
placed in the same spatial situation with the same objects and tested
— do not in themselves demonstrate autobiographical memory, the
often voluntary recollection of the past marked by a particular time
66
and place. It does not necessarily signify mental time travel. Nelson
and Fivush cite increased linguistic skills that include the not-fuzzy
temporal markers “before,” “during,” and “after,” as well as the more
sophisticated concepts of “yesterday,” “today,” and “tomorrow”
(which do not arrive until about age five), and increased narrative abil-
67
ities as requirements for autobiographical memory. Mature narrative
consciousness contextualizes, evaluates, and reflects on events. It is
culturally specific and more and less conventional—influenced by
other stories. I suspect that autobiographical memory is dependent on
the strikingly flexible “I” of internal narration, one that varies from
culture to culture, but which always constitutes a form of alienation

66 Katherine Nelson and Robyn Fivush, “The Emergence of Autobiographical
Memory: A Social Cultural Developmental Theory,” Psychological Review 111,
no. 2 (2004): 488.
67 Ibid., 500.

43