Memory, narrative, and truth in autobiography: Max Frisch’s prose writings
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| Year of publication | 2018 |
| Type | Appeared in Conference without Proceedings |
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| Description | The paper will discuss memory, narrative, and truth in autobiography. I will introduce two types of autobiographical memory that Aleida Assmann differentiates between: active memory, which finds expression in narrative and is coded in language, and passive memory, which is saved in the body and can only be activated by an external trigger. I will link Assmann’s distinction with Mark Freeman’s argument about the power of hindsight to discuss the question of what constitutes “the truth” about our experience: the unmediated experience of the present moment, or the memory of it, a reflection informed by additional knowledge. The second part of the paper will deal with Max Frisch’s writings that question the assumption that life precedes narrative (and not vice versa) and prefigure current constructivist theories of autobiography as a process of narrative self-construction. The main focus will be on Montauk (1975) and its intricate perspective structure. Flouting the intuition that autobiography is a reflection of a pre-existing self, the work stages self-invention by creating a character “Max Frisch” that represents the narrator’s own “I” in his memory. In addition, parallels will be drawn with Frisch’s essays such as “Unsere Gier nach Geschichten” (1960) and his novel Mein Name sei Gantenbein (1964). |