Memories under construction: Writing, narratives and dialogues

Abstract

This paper examines the role of writing in the context of the narrative construction of our memories, proposing this as the dialogical reconstruction of our past into our present. To do this, we will draw from Cultural Psychology, and from Narrative Psychology, focusing on the relationship between writing and narrative in the representation of autobiographical memory. The narrative representations of our memory convey specific images of our former self, affects associated to them, meanings, and interpretations that organise our subjective contents into versions of what happened and what it meant. Bearing on this, we will analyse Childhood (1984), the autobiography of the French writer N. Sarraute, to discuss the dynamics of this process exploring how memory mobilises different narrative versions, and can provoke tensions related to individual and sociocultural factors. Our focus will be on the participation of writing in this process, proposing that it acts both as the mediator of the dialogical negotiation of tensions and as the space where the narrative dynamics of memory take place. Narratives are presented as the organisation of this tension that results in the representations of autobiographical memories which, we propose, are to be seen as under construction.