The Bible: A Memoir

I identify myself as an individual across time…. And my doing this is an expression of the deep individuality that is part of the human condition – which is the condition of a creature that can say “I.”  – Roger Scruton

And God said unto Moses, I AM THAT I AM. – Exodus 3:14

Understanding Memoir

When asked about the road trip with her aged mother to visit her late father’s burial site, Ronda jokingly said, “We had a blast. Who doesn’t enjoy spending hours at a graveside?” Then, after a quiet second or two, she said, “No, really, it was good. Found out this interesting fact about mom. She was homeschooled for her last year of high school. She had had Mike and took courses through the American School. I never knew that.”

It is a human desire to understand ourselves, and that desire can be aided by understanding the lives of other people, when we, as Scruton says, being individuals, being an “I,” come to recognize a fellow human being, another “I.” This often occurs, first, in the home. It is highly likely you were once intrigued, if not awed, when hearing stories from your parents’ or grandparents’ earlier days. It is very likely, too, that your own children sit up to hear an account from your childhood or young adult days, especially if the account is unknown and well told; and if the account is well told, the kids might ask for the story to be repeated, for it reveals to them something about themselves. This also occurs outside the home, when engaging with those who aren’t our family. And literature provides a great stage for this to happen.  Consequently, memoir, being a sound literary form, has the potential to entertain and instruct hearers, to play a significant part in our understanding of human beings.

For example, in Joshua Gibbs’ How To Be Unlucky, itself a hybrid memoir, the author recounts an unsettling evening he spent in the home of a young man whose parents had recently died in a car crash. The young man gave the impression that he was fine, even allowing fellow high school graduates to hang out at his late parents’ home, which he inherited. While the group of young adults hung out in the living room, the young man slipped away to another part of the house. A little while later, Gibbs sought out a bathroom, only to discover the young man taking a baseball bat to the walls of his deceased parents’ master bedroom. Both Gibbs and the young man acted as if nothing was amiss, though “the rest of the house appeared in fine condition. No other room had been attacked.” Gibbs offers the following assessment of that moment:

Having destroyed the room, he must live with it. His punishment is being the kind of person who destroys the good things his parents left to him. Or his punishment is having a room in his lovely family home ruined…. The more a man puts himself in the pocket of sin, the less his soul is a companion…. The companion eventually refuses to allow the man into his own soul, and a man is exiled without, incapable of contemplation, meaning, significance, patience. He sleeps when he is tired, eats when he is hungry. He has become like an animal.

For another example, Tobias Wolff’s Vietnam War memoir, In Pharaoh’s Army: Memories of the Lost War, contains a chapter titled “Close Calls,” in which Wolff defines a close call as being: “personal, mysterious, sometimes fantastic.” From there, Wolff supplies three personal illustrations in which he may or may not have almost lost his life, and in the third story, he leaves it up to the reader to decide. The third illustration involves Wolff and fellow soldier Keith Young. Wolff and Keith stood in the headquarters tent, with Colonel Lance, listening to the radio as it relayed the carnage of their infantry company being ambushed. “Screams. Gunfire. The voices of men in terror and pain.” In that moment, the Colonel performs a simple act that gives way to Wolff’s third close call:

[A]s he stood there listening he absently laid one hand on the shoulder of the officer standing next to him, a first lieutenant named Keith Young. He didn’t look to see who it was; he just rested his hand on him the way a football coach will rest his hand on the player he happens to be standing next to on the sidelines. It was one of the paternal gestures that excited my scorn except when they fell on me, and then I always felt a flood of puppyish gratitude. Anyway, Colonel Lance didn’t look to see who was there when he parked his hand. It could have been anyone. It could have been me. It could very easily have been me, as I was standing beside Keith Young at the time, and if Colonel Lance had taken a place between us instead of to Keith’s right it would have been me who got the manly sign of favor.

Before that night, while on R & R in Hong Kong, Wolff and Keith went clothes shopping because Keith had found a price-friendly tailor who’d make suits as good as anything found in Esquire magazine. Wolff purchased a few items, but Keith bought an entire wardrobe. Keith’s death, after being selected by Colonel Lance to give support to the ambushed infantry company, leaves Wolff ending the chapter with the following contemplation:

What about all those clothes? It was a gasp of a thought, completely instinctual, without malice or irony. All those clothes waiting for him — they seemed somehow an irrefutable argument for his survival. Maybe they’d seemed that way to him too, a kind of guarantee, like the wives and fiancées some of us accumulated just before leaving home. They gave us a picture of ourselves in time to come, a promise of a future existence to use as a safe-conduct pass through the present. I sometimes tried to imagine other men wearing Keith’s suits, but I couldn’t bring the images to life. What I see instead is a dark closet with his clothes hanging in a row. Someone opens the closet door, looks at them for a time, and closes the door again.

In a chapter titled “No Name Woman,” from her memoir The Woman Warrior, Maxine Hong Kingston explores human existence by telling a disturbing family story. The family story concerns an aunt who drowned herself in the family well back in China. Due to the aunt’s suicide, Maxine’s mother says, “it is as if she had never been born.” Kingston, however, a child of Chinese immigrants to America, takes over the aunt’s story and investigates what it means to be Chinese and American:

Chinese-Americans, when you try to understand what things in you are Chinese, how do you separate what is peculiar to childhood, to poverty, insanities, one family, your mother marked your growing with stories, from what is Chinese? What is Chinese tradition and what is the movies?

Kingston’s investigation of her family’s story about the aunt, the “No Name Woman,” leads the author to discover that the family wants Maxine to take part in the aunt’s punishment. “The real punishment was…the family’s deliberately forgetting her.” Against the family’s tradition, Kingston decides to remember the aunt. “I alone devote pages of paper to her,” but the consequences of Kingston’s choice are not pleasant, and she ends the chapter with this profound thought:

I do not think she [that aunt] always means me well. I am telling on her, and she was a spite suicide, drowning herself in the drinking water. The Chinese are always very frightened of the drowned one, whose weeping ghost, wet hair hanging and skin bloated, waits silently by the water to pull down a substitute.

Memoir requires that we reveal something about ourselves to those who listen. It demands we share stories from our life and our interpretations of those events. Like with any work of art, too, if our memoir is ignored or misunderstood, it means that we have been ignored and misunderstood. On the other hand, should we gain our audience’s attention and find that they understand us, we could gain more conflict because, rightly or wrongly, listeners might not like what they learn about us. These are valid concerns, and they are worth exploring further.

Two Errors in Memoir

However, the focus of this essay will be that the memoir’s revelation of self, flawed as we humans are, carries with it the risk that we tell the memory wrong and tell it for the wrong reasons, thus, undercutting the memoir’s credibility. But, given the Bible’s claims of authorship, reading Scripture as a memoir seems reasonable and, more importantly, a better means to keeping its author as the focus. 

According to the Online Etymology Dictionary, memory is defined as “remembrance, awareness or consciousness.” Memory derives from a Latin word, memoria, meaning “to remember.” But memory for the human being is a smoky substance. Mary Karr, author of three book-length memoirs, several memoir-heavy poetry collections, and Professor of Literature at Syracuse University says in her work The Art of Memoir, “Even the best minds warp and blur what they see. For all of memory’s power to yank us back into an overwhelming past, it can also fail big time.” Faulty memory removes credibility from a memoirist. In addition to memory being like smoke, when one ventures into writing, especially memoir writing, the requisite introspection can prove too much for us, deceiving us like the serpent in the Garden or overtaking us like the sin that crouched at Cain’s door. While Aristotle contends that the unexamined life isn’t worth living, too much examination leads to the darkness of self. Jonathan Rogers, in one of his The Habit Weekly newsletters titled “Be Less Introspective,” borrows from Saint Augustine the truth of incurvatus in se, meaning “a curving in on the self.” Rogers says, “this truth is nowhere more evident in the neuroses and dysfunctions that so often accompany the act of writing. Self-absorption, self-consciousness, self-promotion, and self-loathing, self-justification, self-doubt, and self-aggrandizement — incurvatus in se.” Consequently, incurvatus in se removes credibility from a memoirist. If untempered, smoky memory and self-absorption produce lies. Lies might sound good. They could very well sound like the truth. And they may appear beautiful.  Nevertheless, lies do not commune with the Good, the True, and the Beautiful. Lies remain always counterfeit. Even if they appear in a well-written memoir.

Classical educators and students are familiar with Saint Augustine’s memoir, Confessions, and with C.S. Lewis’ Surprised by Joy. Even Mary Karr includes both works in the “Appendix – Required Reading — Mostly Memoirs and Some Hybrids” in her book The Art of Memoir. From Karr’s list of roughly 180 titles, Confessions and Surprised by Joy are among a select number of works marked by an asterisk. Karr says this about such books, “the asterisked memoirs are books I’ve taught. Does this mean they’re better written? Absolutely.” Other asterisked memoirs from Karr’s appendix include some personal favorites: The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion and A Moveable Feast by Ernest Hemingway.

A Memoir the Whole Time

As good as the aforementioned memoirs are and worthy of being read repeatedly, we know that they are not perfect because they are written by humans. Yet there is one title absent from any list or discussion I have seen or listened to of memoir, and that is the Bible. Classical educators and students, though, are familiar with the Bible’s claim, in 2 Timothy 3:16, that “all scripture is given by inspiration of God.” Inspiration, according to Strong’s definition, comes from the Greek theopneustos, meaning “divinely or God-breathed in.” In agreement with Paul is The Apostle Peter, who states in his second epistle the following:

We have also a more sure word of prophecy; whereunto ye do well to take heed, as unto a light that shineth in a dark place, until the day dawn, and the day star arise in your hearts. Knowing this first, that no prophecy of scripture is of private interpretation. For the prophecy came not in old time by the will of man: but holy men of God spake as they were moved by the Holy Ghost.

Under the term “Inspiration,” the International Standard Bible Encyclopedia, says this about “private interpretation”: “it is not the result of human investigation into the nature of things, the product of the writer’s own thinking …. [I]t is a Divine gift …. Brought to men by the Holy Spirit.” Memoirs written by humans involve “human investigation into the nature of things,” specifically a thing in the memoirist. The Bible, on the other hand, came about as humans transcribed what the Holy Spirit spoke to them, the text and the forms, be those forms poetry, prose, or letters. It was God revealing Himself to man through God’s Word. In his book, Life Together, Dietrich Bonhoeffer addresses this claim of scripture being God-breathed when he considers the difficulty of the Psalms:

A psalm that we cannot utter as a prayer, that makes us falter and horrifies us, is a hint to us that here Someone else is praying, not me; that the One who is here protesting his innocence, who is invoking God’s judgment, who has come to such infinite depths of suffering, is none other than Jesus Christ himself. He it is who is praying here, and not only here but in the whole Psalter.

Similar to Bonhoeffer, C.S. Lewis, in his Reflections on the Psalms, says, “[T]he Scriptures proceed not by conversion of God’s word into a literature but by taking up of a literature to be the vehicle of God’s words.” Memoir is a literature. It is a literature in which the writer is the subject, and it is a literature that employs the narrative construct of time — beginning, middle, and end — in which a primary relationship between the subject and its desire increases in tensions until reaching a highest dramatic moment, from which comes a resolution. The Bible follows such a pattern. It accomplishes this not only in the Psalms but through all sixty-six books, with their various genres, all of them spoken by one Divine Author. It follows, then, that the Bible is God’s memoir, the revelation of God, the story of God’s conscious interactions with His creation from “the beginning.”

Perhaps such a reading will better help us set ourselves aside so that we may more readily apprehend the Bible’s story that God, and not man, is I AM. Consequently, such a reading would allow for the Beautiful Mystery to set up residence in our souls, an experience Lewis describes in Mere Christianity: “the more we get what we now call ‘ourselves’ out of the way and let Him take us over, the more truly ourselves we become.” Given who the Bible’s author and subject are, that His memory is not smoke, and his heart is not subject to incurvatus in se, we would do well to read Scripture as the memoir of God, for we would gain a more robust understanding of ourselves as we come to a fuller understanding of God.

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