The shaping of memory in Hilary Mantel's personal narration: the benefits of a dialogic approach between memoir and paratext

Throughout her vast body of non-fiction, Hilary Mantel’s narration is interwoven with personal perspectives, and experiential details, enriching “the life story she began in her [2003] memoir, Giving Up the Ghost” (Pearson 2023, p. xiii). As Mantel’s editor, Nicholas Pearson puts it, “a patchwork of a life revealing itself” emerges “in her journalism and essays” (2023, p. xi). Focusing specifically on Mantel’s portrayals of memory in selected passages from two inter-related non-fiction genres—namely, her memoir and two personal essays—this interdisciplinary discussion demonstrates how her self-narration in these differing contexts conveys this personal, experiential patchwork via varying viewpoints on the integral mnemonic components of autobiographical knowledge, prospective memory and human recall’s inherent creativity. The introspective, self-narrational content of memoir—which “derives from the French word for memory” (Couser 2012, p. 19)—is largely constituted by the author’s “memory-bound sense” of self-interpretation (Bartkevicius 1999, p. 134). My analytical framework thereby positions Mantel’s memoir, Giving Up the Ghost (2013), as the primary textual vehicle for her self-narration of personal memories and her understanding of memory processes more broadly. My analyses compare examples of Mantel’s mnemonic viewpoints in the memoir with other insights about memory that emerge in two of her personal essays—a genre widely perceived as the cousin of the memoir. These essays—“Touching Hands with the Lost” (2007) and “The Day is for the Living” (2017)—have been specifically chosen for their thematization of memory. Given the memoir’s analytical framing as the primary self-narrational source of Mantel’s mnemonic perspectives, I position her personal essays’ self-narration of memory processes within the realm of the paratextual—texts that surround, and have connections with the focal text, but are not constituent components of it. Drawing on cognitive research into the processing of memory—particularly autobiographical knowledge, prospective memory, imagination’s role in remembering, and the creativity of memory—my literary analyses highlight mnemonic congruences and discrepancies that emerge in these inter-related self-narrational contexts. I show how perspectival shifts in Mantel’s personal narration can both create possibilities and impose potential limitations pertaining to the textual representation of one’s personal memories and memory function more broadly, while also suggesting how these shifting self-narrational viewpoints may potentially impact the reader’s understanding of memory and remembering. Having highlighted some of the benefits and possible downsides of Mantel’s varying mnemonic viewpoints, my concluding analyses underscore the advantages of adopting a broad, dialogic readerly approach, wherein the memoir’s and the paratexts’ differing narrational mnemonic perspectives are perceived as neither didactic, nor discrete representations, but as an interwoven, self-narrational ‘patchwork’ of insights that collectively shed light on the hidden recesses of memory cognition and the subjective complexities of remembering.