Zack McDermott
Autore di Gorilla and the Bird: A Memoir of Madness and a Mother's Love
Sull'Autore
Opere di Zack McDermott
Opere correlate
Etichette
Informazioni generali
Non ci sono ancora dati nella Conoscenza comune per questo autore. Puoi aiutarci.
Utenti
Recensioni
Potrebbero anche piacerti
Autori correlati
Statistiche
- Opere
- 2
- Opere correlate
- 1
- Utenti
- 128
- Popolarità
- #157,245
- Voto
- 4.2
- Recensioni
- 8
- ISBN
- 10
- Lingue
- 2
What is left of the question of truth-in-representation when the psychotic episode is re-transcribed, retrospectively, with one eye on the reader and the other on the potential movie deal (perhaps it's the third eye which has fixed its gaze on the event).
The problem of the memoir is not dissimilar to the problem of writing "childhood." A question that appears to have regressed since Freud was "in vogue" (though the best works of that era all are anti-Freudian). We are no longer concerned with the notion of the memory or experience which is not directly accessible to the Mind. (Freud's A Child is Being Beaten is worth returning to, at least for its insight into the cathected phantasy in conspiracy-politics.) Naïvité is not "interesting." And the memoir, which is always a naïvité-that-knows-it-is-naïvité, is doubly stale. When the memoirist writes something "interesting," we are already the third party of a joke-with-the-author-at-expense-of-character. The narrator's psychotic episode in which he believes himself to be on a reality television show is entirely "joke" from this perspective (in his relation of a paranoid-thought-process-as-comedy-script). But it is not so easy for the memoir to get beyond this. The recollection of valuable Coca-Cola cans in Ypi's Free (a better memoir) is a cheap laugh. Also a problem in Aciman's Out of Egypt (a much better memoir), which, even as it presents genuine exceptional characters and events, is offering them up for entertainment. Nabokov in Speak, Memory (and more so in Look at the Harlequins) and Hustvedt in The Shaking Woman appear to have, in part, overcome this problem of voyeurism, though only by retreat into prose and technical writing respectively. I remain unconvinced that the memoir is a viable form.
There is an interesting story in Gorilla, though hidden in the interstices. At the end of Chapter 16 we read what appears to be an edited/abridged diary written by the author's mother which splits open part of the narrator's reality-construction (in which there is always the mitigation of exposure / sexual assault / physical assault / murderous racism with the conceit, "Isn't this so funny/weird/scary?!"). This section is redemptive for the same reason that Joshua Oppenheimer may be the only competent Modern-Documentary-Filmmaker i.e. for his study of displacement in the The Act of Killing such that we see the narrative doubly displaced (placed under erasure) in a play written and directed by the killers themselves (The medium of Film is always already displaced and requires feats of ingenuity such as this to overcome such artifice.).
We are often reading good fiction only for the moment of relief which occurs upon returning to bad fiction.
We need Art because it produces Bad Art as a byproduct.
The hospital's cancer ward is decorated with the naïve work of previous patients because it assures us: "It is worth dying just to get away from all the Bad Art."… (altro)