“To remember means to reconstruct, as in telling a story … Memories are like literary works, created in the very moment of remembering, constructed in the psychodynamic conflict between wish fulfilment and self-delusion”, emphasises Phil Mollon in the study Freud and False Memory Syndrome.4F It is precisely the interplay between memory and (re)telling, which suggests that memories are structured according to the rules of story-building, and indicates the mnemotechnic dimension of story-telling, as well as of writing (down), which is also demonstrated in the story of Alma Mahler as a character in the novel, and about Alma Mahler, told/written by novelist Dimoski. This intersection illustrates the act of narrative reanimation of personal memory, which is also projected as a universal and memorable experience. If the mnemotechnic functions cannot be reduced merely to storing and reproducing information, then memory, too, cannot be merely a passive reflection of the past, but rather its meaningful and active reconstruction. Consequently, memory is not reduced to references to the empirical material, contained in the biographical chronology. Hence, Alma’s memories evoke the experiential dimension of the past,5F in the same manner that Dimoski’s novel, as a whole, is not a novelised biography of a historical figure, but, primarily, a novelistic, re-interpretative vision of the timeless dimensions of personal drama. In addition, memories refer to the past, but the act of remembering transpires in the present, thus implying the relevance not only of what is remembered (its content), but also the reasons and contexts inducing the remembrance, which confirms the inevitable (re)interpretative interplay of the past and the present. “I create memories that I will bring everywhere with me … Nothing remains after people go, Gustav. What does remain is only other people wasting their days in remembrance of them” (Dimoski 2014, 15, 22). Therefore, memory, reconstructed in/through the story, is the sole compensation for the absence, the past, of the Other. Thus, Alma contemplates, “people tell stories so that some future generations can remember someone’s dreams and stars, someone’s aches and joys, and, thus, learn” (Dimoski 2014, 36). Against this backdrop, one may begin to understand the novelistic and novelist’s interest in a historical figure that is only available through textual traces and remnants, which are then subjected to interpretative transcontextualisations. It is exactly the novel Alma Mahler that testifies to the conversion of Dimoski’s memory as a reader into an authorial, novelist’s re-interpretation and re-contextualisation of a historical persona and a personal drama. In fact, memory, addressed by and demonstrated in the novel, is also illustrated at a higher level through the novel and its author. This, in a more general sense, confirms that, indeed, literature is a mnemonic art par excellence, in the same way that the novel is still a privileged memory-writing, or ‘memory of memory’, as Andrei Bely terms it (he also names the author a ‘sum of citations’), which enables all that has already been recounted to obtain a narrative legitimacy anew. Indeed, these are the terms in which Dimoski’s own explanation, found in the short foreword to the novel, should be viewed: “Stories exist for the sake of story-telling, and story-telling is nothing but rewriting the past in an eternal present … It is in the collision between life and art that the story becomes worthy of retelling” (2014, 125). Narro, ergo sum.
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1. Translator’s note: In the absence of an official English translation of Sasho Dimoski’s novel Alma Mahler, all quotes from it have been translated into English for the sole purposes of this essay.
2. All quotations have been extracted from the following edition: Sasho Dimoski, Alma Mahler, Skopje: Kultura, 2014.
3. The thematic and narrative aspects of the novel have been supplemented and enriched by language and style traits with remarkable success. The novel consistently articulates an intensely poetised, lyricised emphatic expression, also found in the intonation-punctuation patterns (the emotional amplitudes suggested by the line: “Gustav?Gustav?Gustav!?Gustav!Gustav!!” (Dimoski 2014, 21) serve as an illustrative example), and the stylistically marked syntax, where elliptical constructions predominate.
4. Mollon, Phil. 2001. Freud I sindrom lažnog sijećanja. Zagreb: Naklada Jesenski I Turk.
5. According to Alma Mahler’s confession, based on her experience, “names matter none. What matters are experiences. There were countless cities. Countless faces. Figures, ways, moments” (Dimoski 2014, 57). It is telling that, in the Macedonian language, this union between remembrance and memory, and feeling and experiencing is implied in the dual meaning of the verb ‘remember’: on the one hand, there is the reflexive form of the verb, ‘se sekjava’ (‘remember, recall’), which conveys the sense of remembering something that happened, and, on the other, the non-reflexive form of the verb, ‘sekjava’ (‘feel’), which conveys the sense of feeling, a sensory perception, and experience of certain stimuli. This duality is signalled in Alma’s confession that, in her memory of the past, “what matters are experiences.
the art is inside
