Journal Article

\Speak, Mnemosyne\: Genre Performance and Metagenre in Petina Gappah's Memoir-Novel: The Book of Memory

Berndt, Katrin

2025

Overview

This article contends that the genre of the memoir-novel is inherently metageneric in purpose and design, arguing that it combines the novel's aesthetic and thematic diversity with the memoir's confessional self-reflection in order to produce self-referential comments on the characteristics of both genres, while simultaneously drawing attention to its own, hybrid form. Petina Gappah's The Book of Memory (2015) is a memoir-novel that exemplifies several forms of metagenre. The analysis identifies the novel's foregrounding of its own production as a story, its confessional qualities, the self-reflexive and retrospective construction of memories, and the implementation of telling names as a convention of other genres as explicit forms of metagenre; implicit forms include inter- and transtextual references to Greek mythology, to the writings of Vladimir Nabokov, and to different cultural narratives. Among the implicit forms, there is also the protagonist's suggestion that her narration of her own story is based on unreliable memories, which undermines her credibility and hence deviates from the genre convention of the memoir-novel. Gappah's novel moreover contains examples of implicit metagenre that are transformed into explicit forms: it foregrounds the status of progressive myths as cultural narratives in order to subvert them, and it stages genre conventions of the memoir-novel as motifs. Both conversions are transpositions that have the potential to substantiate as well as undermine the subjective, confessional quality of the memoir-novel, suggesting a more comprehensive understanding of the phenomenon of metagenre overall.

• Publisher: The Connotations Society for Critical Debate / Waxmann Verlag GmbH,Waxmann Verlag GmbH
• Subject: Autobiographical fiction / Autobiographical literature / Autobiographies / Comprehension / Criticism and interpretation / Defoe, Daniel (1660-1731) / Fielding, Henry (1707-1754) / Foregrounding / Gappah, Petina / Gappah, Petina (1971- ) / Genre / Literary characters / Literary criticism / Literary form / Memory / Metalanguage / Mythology / Nabokov, Vladimir Vladimirovich (1899-1977) / Narratives / Novelists / Novels / White people / Zimbabwean literature