Abstract
ABSTRACT In this essay, I am in-conversation with Proust was a Neuroscientist, by Jonah Lehrer [2008, Proust was a Neuroscientist. New York: Houghton Mifflin Company]. I engage with Lehrer’s chapters focusing Marcel Proust, Virginia Woolf and Paul Cézanne. This essay is a contribution to an ongoing conversation with Professors Kate Coles and Jen Webb regarding the distinctions, or lack thereof, between narrative and the lyric, within the context of broader discussions about genre classifications (Great Writing 2023, 2024). In this essay, I respond to Coles and Webb’s provocative question: What is it you mean, they ask, when you use the term realism? I consider this question from a practice-led perspective, as a writer who loves to read, and a writer-researcher who is drawn to neuro-psychoanalytic approaches to writing and creativity. I’m drawn to the quagmire of memory, as a primary source of stimulus for creative practice. My understanding of what I have come to call narrative lyricism is that it is a form of writing in which narrative may exist in ghost. Its incompleteness (if evaluated within traditional expectations of complication and dénouement) reflects the complicated (which is to say entangled) nature of the operations of memory.
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