Lucy Black talks to Toronto writer Marlene Kadar about her latest collection of stories.
Lucy Black (LB): Broken Fiction is a deeply personal collection of reflections, memories, stories and poems. The term autofiction (the blending of fiction with autobiography) is compelling and may not be familiar to our readers. Please share a little about the genre you have chosen and why you chose to write this way
Marlene Kadar (MK): Autofiction is not something I chose to “do.” Rather, the generic expectations of autofictional telling better suited the topics of traumatic loss and the frizzy concoction of remembering that is needed to provide a witnessing to an event and reimagine it. Although a fictional plot is central to the shape of the novel and to the expectations of shorter fictive pieces such as the novella and the short story, plot only interests me as a remnant, not as a starting point.
There are too many moments for me to capture in an idea – the time of the (historical) event which could also be the moment of witnessing: the time of the remembering of that event; and the time of the retelling the event which may well be necessarily “belated.” (See Deborah Britzman, Lost Subjects, Contested Objects: Toward a Psychoanalytic Inquiry of Learning. Albany: SUNY, 1998. Britzman’s book focusses on the “curious time of learning” and belatedness in relation to difficult knowledge. This work has taught me a lot about fictionalizing and trauma.)
Moreover, we change the memory of the event each time we recall it. Remembering is the construction of the narrative, not the narrative itself. Memories are filtered by the subject and so also by the writer—in my view.
Patrick Modiano’s writing gave credence to 20th-century suspicions about the accuracy of documenting truths about historical events or about claims to self-representation. Inspired by Modiano’s Dora Bruder (1997 and 1999), I understood that the disappeared 15 – year old Dora, about whom a notice has been published in Paris Soir, symbolizes more than the person whose life has no witnesses on December 31, 1941.
Dora’s memory proves the secret of the deportation of the Jews and others from France. In other words, Dora is an absence whose memory indicates real events, and the “pauvre et précieux secret” of the occupation, of the fact of the Holocaust and the Porrajmos, of the camps and the killing machines. There is more than one version of these complex remembered events and it is in between those differences that wisdom is found, and witnesses are able to recover enough power to make claims on traumatic events, both shared and unshared.
No retelling of the anguish is transparent, not even reliable, because each memory is a personal performance, not necessarily a provable event. The auto-fictional text does not lay claim to the truth, nor to its opposite, but prefers to hover in the “in-between” where ideas and feelings are conditional, unstable, movable and yet always performed.
I think I am moved by stories that are tentative, mutable, and delayed, and in a belief that these tentative, mutable and delayed stories are psychically interesting, not false; viable, not diminished. In the end, I would claim that all fiction is broken, all stories emanate from the autobiography of the writer, and variations are true, not untrue.
See Deborah Britzman, Lost Subjects, Contested Objects: Toward a Psychoanalytic Inquiry of Learning. Albany: SUNY, 1998. Britzman’s book focuses on the “curious time of learning” and belatedness in relation to difficult knowledge. This work has taught me a lot about fictionalizing and trauma.
LB: There is a very rich blending of memory with thoughtful introspection in the book. Please share with our readers how you balanced the key components of your work and the types of editorial decisions you made while you were shaping it.
MK: My thinking is that I must try to represent whatever it is that is felt or thought in the absences, silences, places where things “happen” but places that are not easy to access for various reasons: it hurts too much, or there is too much insistence on verifiable data, access to the details are necessarily belated, or the speaker is forced to lie, or the dreamer was unable to capture the stages of the dream, and on it goes. I assume that meanings that capture my imagination dwell in the in-between spaces, on the thresholds of action rather than in the action itself, in the speech that beckons a mirage or a half-truth, a semblance.
It is not that I think these spaces are of a higher quality in general, but I think they provide a gloss to more official scripts of “the truth” and may aggravate received notions of love and loss, anguish and joy. It is the aggravation that I adore.** **I first encountered this aggravation in “A Postscript for Maria” published in Tessera 1989. doi 10.25071/1923-9408.23606.
LB: Much of the narrative feels very conversational in tone and yet it captures a wide range of emotions, including anger, humour and love. Please speak to the driving force behind this work for you and whether or not that changed as the book came together.
MK: Between the hammer and the sound is a multiplicity of alternate meanings that some of us have no interest in “treating” and others, we want to “know” about the residue such meanings engender. Before the book “came together,” I had a quandary. I had a manuscript of vignettes, and poems that were organized chronologically. The dates represent changes in health status and personal life: in other words, I was well enough to create a story, search my archival photographs and diaries, and compose. But my prescient editor envisioned something more thematic. I tried shifting dates and pieces and figured out that although I could not delete the dates of each piece, I could imagine a restorative paradigm that motivated the larger story of life and loss and the joy that exists anyway. To address your question, the arrangement of pieces changed as time passed and dates were repressed in favour of themes. The irony is: that I was not able to erase the dates of the pieces even when they were rearranged, and I wonder about that resistance—and probably like it. For all my talk about the limits of historical accuracy, this irony made an impression.
I am happy that you identify a “conversational tone,” but I am not sure I can turn this into a revelation. To speak more personally, I feel more at home in the language of theory about autobiography, but I also know there is a dead end in this theory if the author wants something imaginative and forward-moving.
As a result, I conflated the narrator and the subject because I was trying to invoke multiple interpretations.
LB: Tell us about your decision to write this book. What inspired and/or motivated your interest in the subject matter?
MK: I was motivated by a space that had opened in my intellectual life. My usual writing style is academic, but illness forced me out of libraries while it also changed my brain habits including memory. I saw new things from the vantage point of an ill person with limited energy and short-sightedness. I also realized that as a well person I had been on the wrong side of my professed socialist ideals and so this period of illness was also a period of living closer to the bone, another chance to take care of myself and of others who may not have access to the care and privilege that is mine. I am thinking here of Amy Gottlieb’s inspired article, “Cancer changed me, but I’m still the same person” (Globe and Mail, September 11, 2022:https://www.theglobeandmail.com/life/first-person/article-cancer-changed-me-but-im-still-the-same-person/)
LB: What are the key resources that you reference when working on a manuscript?
MK: I rely on two collections of ideas and memories that are part of a kind of domestic archive. I have saved numerous diaries that have been written over the years, and I have saved photographs. The diaries are not always interesting to me now, but they do communicate a sense of at-odds-ness. This sense is an advantage because I interpret it as a productive reluctance to see the light that Leonard Cohen so famously references in that line “there is a crack in everything, that’s how the light gets in.” (Anthem)
LB: How was the title chosen for this book? Who had input and what were the deciding factors?
MK: The title, Broken Fiction, was not really chosen: it came to me as I thought about the matter of genre and especially Jacques Derrida’s proposal for “the law of genre.” Derrida implies that the act of genre-making aims to prevent contamination by other generic implications, especially the ones contained within the original genre. The idea of fiction then, is for me contaminated by non-fictive ideas and memories as long as we understand the memory itself to be a broken feature of the mind. My remembering is faulty. Yet it is the fault lines that are productive. In other words, fictional modes offered me a way to deepen those “facts” in my memory that I do not fully or adequately remember. I understand that as we age our memories, too, age. The ageing memory is a broken fiction that borrows liberally from the auto or life writing genres. The deciding factor was the question: what is that exquisite feeling or remembering or thinking fragment that I need to find words for? What is it that this act is hard for me and for people who experience nether worlds and words to put the experience into language?
Dr. Marlene Kadar is a Senior Scholar and Professor Emerita at York University, Department of Humanities and School of Gender, Sexuality and Women’s Studies. She is the Founding Editor and Co-Editor, Life Writing Series, Wilfrid Laurier University Press, and the Literary Editor, Canadian Woman Studies, York University.
Her research interests include Life Writing and Autobiography, Archival Lives, Interdisciplinary Research Methods, memory, The Holocaust and The Porrajmos.