Memory, history, truth

I had the honour and privilege of being in the same room as the great Michael Frayn yesterday at the Cambridge Wordfest. Frayn has recently finished writing a memoir of his father, and came to talk about his father, the book, and the process of writing it. Quite apart from the humbling and inspiring impact of being in the presence of genius, I was struck by Frayn’s comments on memory. As he was writing, he found that he couldn’t be sure which memories of his were true, and which ones were made up. As he said, when we see an event our brains actually construct a coherent picture from the flashes of information that we get, so that even as we experience an event for the first time we are making selections about what is relevant, and filling in details, without ever being conscious of it. And then, when we attempt to retrieve that event, we retrieve that construction. To some extent, that explains why people remember the same event differently. He also talked of the way in which we narrate our memories, and then the next time that we remember the same event we remember the words that we told it in, and those become part of our memories, too. And sometimes the logic of the story takes over and we find ourselves inventing details or exaggerating because the dramatic impetus of the story demands it.

Just that morning I had had my first experience of Traumatic Incident Reduction, a technique which works by enabling you to access memories of traumatic events and replay them until the memory no longer has power to cause pain. I found it a strange process for a number of reasons. First: my episodic memory is not very vivid at all, and that I could not replay the incident in my head, although I was able to remember details as I talked about it that I hadn’t noticed when I was “replaying” the incident silently. Second: as I replayed the memory time and time again, I felt as though the crucial bit of information was still lost to me – the trigger that caused me to react in the way that I did. Third, and most importantly, I found that, like Michael Frayn, I wasn’t sure which details were accurate and which were invented to fit the story that I tell about myself. And this was a recent incident. How much more this is true of my painful childhood memories, which have the shape of patterns of thought and behaviour, where I can recall the pattern and how I felt about it, but not a single specific incident, more a composite of different incidents. But have I created, in some sense, those memories? Have I invented or privileged them in order to fit a certain story that I tell myself about why I have become the person that I now am? This line of reflection led me to wonder about the stories that we tell ourselves about who we are, and how powerful those stories become, and how difficult it is to change the narrative that we have about ourselves. Deciding that the narrative that we have about ourselves is no longer healthy and trying to change how we tell our own story is hard, because it feels as though we are losing some part of ourselves without which we do not quite know how we will be.

But how far can we change the stories that we tell ourselves? Do we have endless freedom to create a narrative of our past which lets us live the way we want to live? Or are we constrained, in some way, by what really happened, by some truth about our lives that we cannot escape? Does memory, eventually, bow before fact? If our brains construct experience to start with, does that mean that we can never be sure that something we remember really happened? I know that I, for one, am more sceptical about the validity of memories than I perhaps was. For me, this raises serious questions about history and historical truth. If we can never be sure if a particular memory was invented, then how can we be sure that historical events happened in the way that they were said to have happened, or indeed, happened at all? As Michel de Certau put it, history is never sure. But at the same time it seems wrong to say that there is no such thing as historical truth. At least the bare facts must be true, mustn’t they? The kinds of things one memorises in school, dates, kings, queens, all of that, must be true. Yet who decides what is selected as a fact? Can we really make a rigid distinction between facts and interpretations, or are we, as Geertz suggested, interpreting all the way down, even down to whether someone winked at us or just twitched? All I know is that I am much more careful now of claiming that my memories are true, or claiming that something is historical fact. But scepticism is an unsettling place to be.