Narrative Coherence, Fragments, and Truth

Closely related to King’s criticism that Fraser’s memoir is unconvincing because of its insistence on memories as recoveries rather than reconstructions is the

condemnation of Fraser’s narrative as too coherent to be true. This line of argument, like King’s, is compelling, particularly when one considers the structural aspects of most trauma narratives. Laurie Vickroy, in Trauma and Survival in Contemporary Fiction

(2002), argues that traumatic narratives “internalize the rhythms, processes, and

uncertainties of traumatic experience within their underlying sensibilities and structures” (3). According to Vickroy, these narratives reflect the fragmentary and recursive aspects of traumatic experience: “Writers have created a number of narrative strategies to represent a conflicted or incomplete relation to memory, including textual gaps, [. . .] repetition, breaks in linear time, shifting viewpoints, and a focus on visual images and affective states” (29). Fraser’s memoir seeks to compensate for her troubled relation to memory precisely through a narrative that recovers past traumas to make sense of them and to integrate them as a coherent part of her identity. Fraser carefully structures her narrative to make it comprehensible to herself and cogent for her readers. Rather than a series of fragments, as in Danica’s memoir, Fraser begins her story with her childhood in a section called “Remembering,” and then moves through her adolescence and adulthood until she recounts her memory recovery in “Revelation,” and finally her healing process in “Resolution.” Indeed, remembering, revelation, and resolution are part of Fraser’s therapeutic process, which aims to reintegrate and make coherent what trauma severed in her childhood. Trauma narratives as a genre, however, tend to be more fragmentary and shifting than Fraser’s clear and linear memoir.

Kathryn Robson, in “‘Truth’, Memory and Narrative in Memoirs of Child Sexual Abuse” (2010), takes up issues of coherence and form in traumatic autobiographies by comparing Fraser’s memoir to Janice Williamson’s, Crybaby! Published in 1998,

Crybaby! is self-reflexively experimental, on the border between history and imagination, as Williamson tentatively narrates what she admits are sketchy, fragmentary recovered

memories of sexual abuse. The memoir is written in fragments which include photos, poems, captions, magazine excerpts, letters, prose sections, and reflections on scholarly quotations encompassing a range of theorists and philosophers, from French feminists such as Hélène Cixous, Julia Kristeva, Luce Irigiray to the philosophers Maurice Blanchot, Pierre Bourdieu, and Roland Barthes to theorists of memory and trauma such as Shoshana Felman, Cathy Caruth, Judith Lewis Herman, Jennifer Freyd, and Ian Hacking. As an English professor, Williamson has written not only an erudite but a postmodern text that creates a dialectical relationship with and responds to contemporary theories of trauma and narrative. As such, the memoir marks a radical departure from the more traditional form of autobiography taken up by Fraser.

Whereas Fraser attempts to narrate a coherent story of her past, Williamson regards her past as elusive and its narration almost impossible. Writing in the gaps of her memory with full understanding of its fallibility, she asks, “is the fictive my only

alternative to silence and repression?” (73). For Williamson, memory is always a reconstructive process, and therefore an imaginative act of narration. Robson compares Fraser’s memoir to Williamson’s to argue that narratives, like Fraser’s, in which a cohesive, meaningful self is articulated, are “bound up in cultural notions of ‘truth’ and integrity according to which ‘truth’ is somehow connected to coherence. Fraser judges her recovered memories to be ‘true’ because they make sense and cohere to her pre- constructed narrative models” (147). Clearly preferring Williamson’s incredulity towards memory and absolute truths, Robson insists that Williamson’s refusal to create a

coherent, grand narrative of her life makes her story of abuse somehow truer than Fraser’s:

My reading of Crybaby! suggests that the “truth” of child sexual abuse lies

in a fragmented, rather than coherent narrative, and that any attempt to establish a definitive “truth” or to construct a single narrative explanation works at the expense of other possible versions of the past. In the context of child sexual abuse, Crybaby! intimates, “truth” is itself fragmentary,

located in the (crucially shifting) disjunction between different potential stories and subjects. The very attempt to measure and define “truth” is itself shaped by narrative; this does not mean abandoning the possibility of

establishing “what really happened”, but taking on board narrative discontinuities and gaps, exploring narrative’s capacity to invent and experiment, rather than reverting to a coherent and over-told story of villains and victims. (153)

I could not agree more with Robson insofar as she articulates a plea to admit experimental and creative elements into trauma stories. What I take issue with is the way she uses Fraser’s memoir to service her argument. Her suggestion that Fraser reverts to a “coherent and over-told story,” which is also to say a simple, clichéd story, while

Williamson’s fragments complicate well-worn plots and ring true twists Williamson’s approach at the expense of Fraser’s. What Williamson is searching for is not a model that privileges fragments, but rather one that allows for their validity in the absence of more cohesive recollections. As Williamson says, “More work needs to be done in exploring how we can admit variations on stories, half-memories and imagined reveries into our understanding of child sexual abuse” (“Writing Aversion” 222). If memory is always suspect, what, then, is the point of putting one’s recollections into a narrative that makes sense of the past? The value of a coherent narrative, such as Fraser’s, lies in its

therapeutic potential. To criticize, as Robson does, Fraser’s attempt to make sense of a life that eluded her for so many years by insisting that her effort to integrate fragments into a coherent narrative is disingenuous is to forestall her therapeutic process and foreclose alternate healthy plots in her life narrative.