Neither

Abstract

Neither Marc Blanchard When Senator [Dianne] Feinstein submitted her [censure] resolution (which was never voted on), a key word was changed: shameless became shameful. What's the difference? The difference lies in the word that is modified. If it is the agent who lacks shame—who observes few constraints of modesty or morality—then that person is shameless. If the word being modified is the action itself rather than the person, then the action is filled with shame, or is shameful. If I danced drunkenly through Times Square in the nude on Millennium Eve, I would be shameless. You, if you were clothed and sober, might find my celebration shameful. (William Safire, The New York Times Magazine, May 30, 1999).* IN A WORLD WHERE LANGUAGE IS COMMUNICATION and communication is defined by the positions of interlocutors, there should be no question when to say what to whom. In this paper, however, my purpose is less to rewrite new rules for shameful and shameless conducts than to review the conditions under which the shameable, the a-priori concept which sets criteria for the onset of shame, actually determines our view of history and temporality in the first place. Following the tradition of locating shame in a vision of the naked body, Safire implies that shame occurs when one is seen in the nude—the phrase in the nude describing, literally, a state, of wearing no clothes. Being seen in the nude, in turn, evokes more than a shocking vision. It suggests an end to the power plays associated with clothing. As Bernard Lewis has shown, the root of shame lies in a more general sense, in being at a disadvantage: "in what I shall call, in a very general phrase, a loss of power.'" However, the New York Times column also portends a reality more ominous than at first appears in the instant iconography of shame trumped up by the columnist. Safire's column seeks to provide "common sense" usage rules for speaking and writing "correctly" by supplying clear examples for the application of theory to practice. In this particular case, however, Safire casually introduces as a reference an event, for which no rules have yet been fully developed—perhaps because the change to the incoming millennium far exceeds our capacity to match theory and practice. Though awaited with anticipation, Y2K, which Safire uses as a popular culture prop for staging his semantic fable, remains largely unknown, a major threat in the offing: it will wreak havoc with our computers (they will crash), our psyches (people will no longer be ashamed), and our behaviors (already the kids are killing each 26 Wintcr 1999 Blanchard other en masse). The menace notwithstanding, Safire paradoxically suggests that, in the near future, the shameable might well remain undisturbed and stable through the coming historical watershed. To argue with him on this point would take us far afield. I prefer, instead, to discuss the past and explore one of the arguments of our current Postmodern culture, that shame is less an ingredient of a stable morality than central to the shaping of individual and collective memories over time. Emphasizing writing as a strategy for constructing the present out of the past, I will concern myself with the writing of memories in memoirs, as distinct from that of writing autobiographies or confessions . While the latter two carry their share of shame, the memoir alone is fueled by the hope of negotiating a third, properly shame-less contract, free from both shameful and shameless consequences. Though this hope for a shame-less resolution may be a perverse one, because writers in the end must always find new ways to seduce readers, I will show that the memoir's success is measured by its ability to pass history off as believable fiction, and I will take Chateaubriand's Mémoires d'outre-tombe as an example. What constitutes a memoir? The use of the first person in narrating the story of one's life? If so, what is the difference between memoir, autobiography , and confession? A preoccupation with recording episodes of one's life that might otherwise be lost? If so, is the story of one's life worth...