Rereading the self

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