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

of the self from the self in language.
An explicit autobiographical memory, unlike a proprioceptive
memory — riding a bicycle — is subject to shifts and alterations over
time, is reconsolidated, affected by the acts, opinions, and stories of
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others, and may never have actually happened. Indeed, such mem-
ories seem to be shot through with fictions. An autobiographical mem-
ory, the images I retain in my mind, for example, of my spill on the
no-spill cup on 7 Avenue in Brooklyn, is not a story itself, not until I
th
turn it into a comic narrative for me or for you. It is a construction, a
reinvention of the small accident. Explicit autobiographical memory
and the articulations of the imagination in pictures and words are not
easily separable, but I think they are both necessary for narrative. The
big question is whether life and its myriad motions, those waves of
feeling or rhythmic arcs of existence with embodied intentions are al-
ready plo ed in narrative form with a neat and inevitable structure.
The semantics of such arguments quickly become fuzzy. The eager-
ness to link one thing to another, to see time in space and space in time
does appear to be common to many cultures. We symbolize, we make
abstractions, and leaping into a time before we could make them, into
infancy and its wordless dialogues, is fraught with difficulty. Is nar-
rative human time? Maybe cetaceans and pinnipeds tell stories, too. I
don’t know.
In The Unnamable, Samuel Becke ’s narrator moves in and out
of his “story.” Near the end, he says, “But he has no story, he hasn’t
been in story? It’s not certain he’s in his own story, unimaginable, un-
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speakable.” I tell stories, but I often feel like Becke ’s narrator. When

68 For autobiographical, noetic memory as opposed to procedural or propri-
oceptive memory, see Endel Tulving, “Memory and Consciousness,” Cana-
dian Psychology/ Psychologie Canadienne 26 (1985): 1-12. For reconsolidation re-
search, see Cristina M. Alberini and Joseph E. LeDoux, “Memory Reconsoli-
dation, Current Biology 23, no. 7 (2013): 746-50. For memory changes with so-
cial context, see Micah Edelson, Tali Sharot, Raymond Dolan, and Yadin
Dudai, “Following the Crowd: Brain Substrates of Long-Term Memory Con-
formity,” Science 333 (2011): 108-111.
69 Samuel Becke , The Unamable, Three Novels: Malloy, Malone Dies and The
Unnamable (New York: Grove Atlantic, 2009), 406.

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