‘Mixing Memory: Discovering and Narrating the Other Selves of Alzheimer”

Even though it is generally perceived as a solid and accountable archival location, memory is unstable. Its longed-for storing fixity is no more than an assuaging fiction, since, as Paul Eakin suggests, any act of rememorialization works to ‘make’ each memory anew and thus prove the unescapable plurality of each self. The capacity for reordering information and narrating oneself is one of the standards by which neurological pathologies are detected and measured and after whose ‘failure’ medicalization is often inaugurated. In this paper I aim at exploring autofiction dealing with dementia, and more specifically with Alzheimer’s Disease. In the view of many, patients included, this diagnosis forces one to confront with ‘death-in-life’, a very contemporary gradation of Agamben’s ‘bare life’, and with gradual yet inexorable memory and language loss. I will work on second-person narratives by carers such as Linda Grant’s Remind Me Who I Am, again, Ishbel Moore’s Daughter and Sarah Leavitt’s graphic Tangles. These works offer the opportunity of diving into the meanders of the ‘exil intérieur’ AD forces into but also of approaching the re- orienting and differently-orienting paths offered by life writing: the constellated, often intermedial, entangled memories that are opened up by the collaborative relationality of patients, carers, spouses, doctors interrogate narrative performativity as well as any prescribed boundary of identity. Rather than being forceful appropriations of the patient’s voice and persona, many of these narratives do more than ‘speak for the other’; they posit the other – and ‘oneself’ as another, as Paul Ricoeur suggests – as always imbricated and implicated in profound ethical relations which are undoubtedly transformed by illness, but which can be and become meaningful, even though from a slanted ‘otherwise’ position. I shall focus on the energy-consuming, painful, yet also illuminating connections between variously-affected subjects which hold everyone ‘hostage’, as Lévinas puts it in Otherwise than Being, in the thought-provoking sense that only “through the condition of being hostage … there can be in the world pity, compassion, pardon and proximity…” (17). References Agamben, Giorgio, Homo Sacer. Sovereign Power and Bare Life, Stanford, Stanford University Press, 1998 (or. ed. 1995) Bryden, Christine, Who Will I Be When I Die, London, Jessica Kingsley, 2004 Eakin, Paul John, How Our Lives Become Stories: Making Selves, Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 1999 Grant Linda, Remind Me Who I Am, Again, London, Granta, 1998 Leavitt, Sarah, Tangles. A Story about Alzheimer’s, my mother, and Me, Canada, Freehand, 2012 Lévinas, Emmanuel, Otherwise Than Being: Or Beyond Essence, Pittsburgh, Duquesne University Press, 1998 (or. ed. 1974) Moore, Ishbel, Daughter, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1999 Ricoeur, Paul, Oneself as Another, Chicago-London, University of Chicago Press, 1992 (or. ed. 1990)