Abstract
Returning after many years to a meaningful childhood book can be seductive and painful in equal measures: certainly it offers any bookish adult an intriguing method for exploring memory and subjectivity as several recent memoirists have discovered.1 A range of metaphors have been employed to describe the process of remembering and rereading in relation to readerly identity. In a 1906 essay on reading, Marcel Proust describes childhood books as ‘the sole calendars we have left of those bygone days’,2 suggesting that they have a valuable referential purpose: they are what critic Matai Calinescu glosses as ‘pretexts for remembering, occasions for attempting to re-explore certain spaces of memory and to relive certain events and impressions of our personal past which coincided in time with their reading’.3 Childhood books can also be understood in terms of a spatial, rather than temporal index. Feminist critics Betsy Hearne and Roberta Seelinger Trites explore the way that texts encountered in youth can function as ‘narrative compasses’ to guide readers in their lives and to act as points on a map giving shape to identity.4 But in many cases of remembering early reading experiences these indexical metaphors of calendar or compass seem rather too orderly and precise, suggesting a direct and single correlation between reader and text that can be pinpointed with accuracy in time or space. Is there a metaphor for revisiting books from the past that expresses a messier relationship between remembered book and remembered self, and a more organic process of rediscovery? A psychoanalytical model offers up an option for one commentator, who describes a story by Mark Twain going ‘underwater to drift in the currents of my unconscious mind’, presumably ready to be washed up at a later date on the shores of adult consciousness.5
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Notes
Francis Spufford’s The Child that Books Built is one of the most successful bibliographic memoirs from the last two decades (London: Faber and Faber, 2002)
Other examples include Wendy Lesser’s Nothing Remains the Same: Rereading and Remembering (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2002)
Anne Fadiman in Rereadings (New York: Farrar, Struas and Giroux, 2005).
Marcel Proust, On Reading, with Sesame and Lilies I: Of King’s Treasuries by John Ruskin (1906), trans. and ed. Damion Searls (London: Hesperus Press, 2011), 4.
Matai Calinescu, Rereading (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1993), 96.
See Betsy Hearne and Roberta Seelinger Trites (eds), A Narrative Compass: Stories That Guide Women’s Lives (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2009).
Madison Smartt Bell, ‘A Child’s-Eye Reading of Mark Twain’, in Twice-Told Children’s Tales: the Influence of Childhood Reading on Writers for Adults, ed. Betty Greenway (New York and London: Routledge, 2005).
Marcel Proust, Finding Time Again (1927), trans. Ian Patterson (London: Penguin, 2002), 196.
Steph Lawler, ‘Stories and the Social World’, in Research Methods for Cultural Studies, ed. Michael Pickering (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2008), 39.
Anne Whitehead, Memory (London: Routledge, 2008), 49.
Joseph Appleyard, Becoming a Reader: The Experience of Fiction from Childhood to Adulthood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991).
J. R. R. Tolkien, ‘On Fairy Stories’, in Tree and Leaf (London: Unwin, 1964), 39–40.
Paul Ricœur, Oneself as Another (1990/1992), trans. and ed. Kathleen Blamey (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 115.
Peter Hollindale, Signs of Childness (Stroud: Thimble Press, 1997), 49.
Maurice Halbwachs, On Collective Memory, ed. and trans. Lewis Coser (1941/1952) (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 47.
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© 2016 Alison Waller
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Waller, A. (2016). Rereading the Self. In: Groes, S. (eds) Memory in the Twenty-First Century. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137520586_39
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137520586_39
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