Memoir Ethics by Martin Mike W.;

Author:Martin, Mike W.;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: undefined
Publisher: Lexington Books
Published: 2012-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

Unified Selves

Markham believes she discovers more than invents the order and unity in her life, with creativity entering in selecting and expressing complexity. Postmodernist skeptics regard “discovered” order as largely illusory. Lives and persons are radically fragmented, and order and pattern are mainly fabricated. Barthes presses this skepticism in his memoir, Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes. Barthes believes there is no unified self about which to tell a non-fiction story. Nor is there anything like an authentic self, for who we are is interminably open to different interpretations.[13] And there are no objective, defensible values around which to build a unified and moral self. Experience is always in flux. So are valuations: “Value (and with it, meaning) thus unceasingly oscillates.”[14]

Barthes scatters his skeptical arguments throughout, but he most forcefully conveys his view by giving his memoir an experimental, fragmented structure. The memoir is structured as an autobiographical journal composed of images and short entries. It contains forty-two (unnumbered) pages of pictures and verbal responses to them, all placed at the beginning rather than the middle as in most memoirs. Then come 146 pages of more or less brief entries. Some entries contain intimate details about his life, but most are literary and philosophical. Entries are tagged with topical words and phrases, serving to further encapsulate them, and they are presented in apparently random order. The title hints that Barthes-as-author is creating fragments that together create Barthes-as-persona in the memoir. This persona is intended as fictional: “It must all be considered as if spoken by a character in a novel.”[15] To reinforce this aim he usually refers to himself in the third person (“he,” “his,”), with occasional first-person references. The result is a memoir lacking in anything like a traditional narrative. To be sure, there are resonances and repetitions, as in novels. Several times, for example, he invokes the image of the Argonaut’s ship that is rebuilt gradually so that the form remains but not a single piece of word endures. A person, a self, is likewise continually changing so that there is no enduring substance, although basic functions and forms remain, such as the function and capacity for pleasure.

In Barthes’s view, persons are not merely divided and conflicted, features readily conveyed in traditional narratives. They are radically fragmented to the point where no coherent “self” exists: “I am not contradictory, I am dispersed.”[16] The implication is that honest memoirs cannot be written in the traditional narrative mode that records unity amidst complexity. He tacitly argues for a new model of memoir: look at my life, radically fragmented as it is, and see if your own life is similar—when you reflect truthfully. Moreover, he contends there are no defensible values that can unify the self, and the only value perspective he officially endorses is a version of hedonism.[17] He contemplates a new philosophy of “preferentialism” that celebrates living by “inclination: in the presence of the world’s fragments, I am entitled only to preference.”[18] The traditional belief in obligatory moral ideals, which

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