Charting the narrative unconscious: Cultural memory and the challenge of autobiography

This essay explores the cultural dimension of autobiographical narrative, focusing especially on the way in which cultural texts and “textures” become woven into the fabric of memory. This process is one of which people are often unaware, resulting in regions of history that may be all but unknown. The “narrative unconscious,” therefore, refers not so much to that which has been dynamically repressed as to that which has been lived but which remains unthought and hence untold, i.e., to those culturally-rooted aspects of one’s history that have not yet become part of one’s story. An important challenge for those fashioning autobiographies is thus to move beyond personal life, into those largely uncharted regions of history that find their origins in the shared life of culture. From this perspective, autobiography is not only a matter of representing a life from (sometime after) birth until (sometime before) death; it is a matter of discerning the multiple sources, both proximate and distant, that give rise to the self.