Knowing in Memoir
Just the other day, I read the news headline “woman in wheelchair hit, killed by car.” Naturally, I was shocked and saddened to learn of such a tragedy. But, as horrible as this news was, it didn’t affect me as much as it could have. How might it have had a greater effect? If I had known her.
It’s the knowing that gives events a sharper sting, lends them deeper meaning. Knowing is also what makes memoirs more meaningful to us as readers.
The Grape
In “A Sketch of the Past” British author, Virginia Woolf creates a vivid metaphor that visually crafts this type of knowing. To do it she uses a grape.
"I describe it sometimes to myself, of lying in a grape and seeing through a film of semi-transparent yellow” – Virginia Woolf
Woolf pulls her readers into the grape with her and we peer out through the glowing moist skin of a grape. Woolf’s “semi-transparent yellow” film represents a key attribute, essential to all memoirs.
My response to this sensual metaphor was to envision of myself, as Woolf describes herself, suspended within a pod of golden jelly gazing out upon the surrounding world. Forming this vivid personal connection with the reader is a characteristic found in all successful memoirs. As readers of memoir, we are looking for and hoping, the writer will find ways to pull us in to see and feel as they did. When this happens that memory lives once more. We take that glistening grape and deposit it among the glowing pods of our own memories.
Pulled by Woolf’s pen, into her plump grape, we witness her childhood memory of Talland House, looking out through the “gummy” yellow lens at the garden “[giving] off a murmur of bees:
“The buzz, the croon, the smell, all seemed to press voluptuously against some membrane; not to burst it; but to hum round one such a complete rapture of pleasure that I stopped, smelt; looked.” – Virginia Woolf
In Grape Shape
The round shape of the grape is important for the way it shapes this moment. First, it rounds the lens the reader is looking through humanizing and imbuing it with a “fish-eye” lens effect that invokes a sense of looking out at the scene through a set of human eyes. This sets the tone for memoir in which we as readers continue to look out through the eyes of Woolf. Incidentally, the roundness of the grape also suggests the interior mental space of both reader and author in which the ripe clusters of our memories are nestled.
And lastly, as a shape the grape rolls about. Placed within a grape-shaped vessel we are curled up in summersault position poised for liquid rolling. This last point directly ties in with a notion of self-knowing described by 15th century French essayist Michel de Montaigne in which he spatially describes his intense self-study using the phrase: “I roll around in myself.”
So, by placing herself and her reader within a grape Wolf crafts a lush metaphor of self-reflection that links with an early classical notion of self-reflection. After all, a vital function of memoir is furthering self-knowing as well as developing a sense of knowing for the reader.
The Importance of Knowing
Self-reflection and the grape skin lens used by Woolf both point to the knowing attribute that is central to all memoirs. Woolf herself directly acknowledges the importance of knowing in her memoir:
"Here I come to one of the memoir writer’s difficulties – one of the reasons why … so many are failures. They leave out the person to whom things happened. The reason is that is is so difficult to describe any human being. So they say: “This is what happened.” And the events mean very little unless we know first to whom they happened." – Virginia Woolf
It seems common sense that the presence of the person writing the memoir should be found in their own story, but it’s also easy to see how writers might mistakenly depend on meaning being inherent within the events of their life. A writer may think if only they can describe the event with enough grit and detail the reader will experience it and therefore understand, feel, the intrinsic meaning behind it.
But just as reading the news headline fails to impart to me, as a reader, the victim’s experience, a factual transcription of an event will not convey to memoir readers, the feelings and effect the event had upon the memoir author. Without the grape-skin layer helping us to know, we will have more difficulty caring about the event.
As readers of memoir, we expect to come to know the person about whom we are reading. If as readers, we are feeling detached from what we are reading we might consider laying the blame at the feet of the writer.
As I read Woolf’s memoir, I was keenly aware of her presence at all times and how she felt about the events happening to her. Woolf identifies “knowing” as a necessity and proceeds to coat "A Sketch of the Past" with her “semi-transparent yellow” grape-skin the whole way through.
What was your experience reading Woolf’s memoir like?
Have you ever read a memoir and just couldn’t get into it? Was knowing the problem? Tell me about it and which memoir it was!
