earticle

영어

Ford Madox Ford, the early twentieth-century writer most famous for his novel The Good Soldier, perceived his "business in life [as an] ... attempt to discover and to try to let you see where you stand." With this grand purpose in mind, Ford disregarded distinctions of genre in his prolific output of what we would consider novels, memoirs, literary criticism, travel writing, and history. Claiming that "the Novelist ... [is a] historian of his own time," Ford sought his own version of the "truth," a truth that was more faithful to his own subjective impressions than to verifiable "fact." Among these works that depict his age are a series of "memoirs" or "reminiscences," works published from the 1910s to the 1930s which carry out his Impressionistic purpose. What lies behind these memoirs is Ford′s view that his own individual history can be understood as his contemporary society′s collective history. This article explores Ford′s experimentation with boundaries of fact and fiction, and history and narrative, as he employs and expands the memoir form. In particular, 1 focus on two works, Memories and Impressions (1911) and It Was the Nightingale (1933), and Ford′s techniques in these memoirs, such as 1) the adoption of fictional personae from which to comment on his society at large and 2) the use of emblematic "parables" to encapsulate larger lessons of life within the minutiae of existence. Current theorists on the memoir form share interests in these questions of genre and of the social role of the memoir Nancy Miller, for instance, terms the memoir "the record of an experience in search of a community." This article engages these current discussions of the memoir genre by examining Ford′s early twentieth-century examples as innovative experiments that play with the boundaries between fiction and history, and personal impressions and collective truth.