The relationship between personal and cultural-historical memory in life-writing

Abstract

This essay focuses on the relationship between personal and cultural-historical memory in James Baldwin’s collection of essays Notes of a Native Son and Toni Morrison’s essay The Site of Memory. Baldwin’s writing blurs the boundary between cultural-historical and personal memory by using culture to reflect himself personally, by criticising the sacrifice of personal for cultural in fiction, and by consistently utilising history to decipher people, whereas Morrison transfers and translates personal memory into historical memory. In Notes of a Native Son cultural historical memory implies and reflects the personal whereas in The Site of Memory personal memory is transformed into cultural historical memory to elucidate the whole of a person.