Abstract
In his 2011 NPR interview, Barnes questions the reliability of memory: “Is our life our life or is it merely the story we’ve told ourselves about our life? To what extent do we clearly remember recorded things? And to what extent is that self-delusion?” When we remember, we tend to come up with a convenient and coherent story, and thus there is a difference between what we call our life and what we call our memory. Barnes once poetically puts it, “[t]he past is autobiographical fiction pretending to be a parliamentary report” (Flaubert’s Parrot 101). For Julian Barnes, remembering is storytelling; when we remember, we are all unreliable narrators.
Part of the content of this chapter is the research output of my research project “Ways of Seeing, Remembering, and Forgetting in the 21st Century: Unreliable Narrators and Narrative Paradox in Julian Barnes’ and Ian McEwan’s Novels,” generously funded by the National Science and Technology Council in Taiwan from May 2017 to April 2018 [MOST106-2410-H-038-002].
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Notes
- 1.
This is how Shaw explains the process of memory hacking in PBS’ documentary Memory Hackers.
- 2.
If verbalization complicates and overshadows memory, does that mean we can keep our memory “pure” without words? But what exactly can we do with memory without language? In the first chapter in his book Pieces of Light, Charles Fernyhough has an epiphany when his son asked if he remembers his first fishing experience—at that moment he realizes since he has never been asked this question before, he has “never had to come up with a corresponding memory” (2). A memory comes into existence simply because we talk about it, or we are asked to recall. Can we call it a memory if we do not know what it is (through language)? Can memory exist without words? These are significant questions worth further exploration.
- 3.
See Dan Shen, “Unreliability” The Living Handbook of Narratology. Ed. Peter Huhn. Hamburg: Hamburg UP. 27 June 2011.
- 4.
In The Noise of Time, Barnes refers to the Russian Shostakovich’s first-hand materials and discovers that there are traces of editing and deleting. He calls him “a multiple narrator” (200).
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Tseng, CC.M. (2023). Memory Hacking: Remembering, Storytelling, and Unreliable Narrators in Julian Barnes’ The Sense of an Ending and The Only Story. In: Memory Made, Hacked, and Outsourced. Palgrave Macmillan, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-9251-3_4
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