Going Down for Air: A Memoir in Search of a Subject

by Derek Sayer, Charles Lemert

What is hidden in the taste of a madeleine - or in snatches of Bob Dylan songs, operatic arias, and the remembered sting of a rattan cane? An exploration of memory, Going Down for Air artfully combines two very different yet connected texts. A Memoir is richly evocative not only of times past, but also of a very English, imperial, queerly masculine subjectivity, caught on the cusp of the extinction of the world in and of which it made sense. Derek Sayer's allusive writing succeeds as few have done before in capturing the leaps and bounds of memory itself. Rich in its detail, unstinting in its honesty, this beautifully written memoir is a considerable literary achievement. The memoir is complemented by Sayer's provocative theoretical essay on memory and social identity. Drawing on linguistic and psychoanalytic theory, photographic images, and literary texts, In Search of a Subject argues that it is memory above all that maintains the imagined identities upon which society rests. Going Down for Air is a bold and strikingly successful literary and sociological experiment, which makes a major contribution to understanding how our memories work - and gives them social meaning far beyond

214 pages, Paperback

First published June 1, 2004

Reviews

[Karla Huebner]

I ran across this in the card catalog when looking up the author's new book on Prague. Its cataloguing suggested that it was not merely a memoir but a book about memory, which piqued my further interest as memory has always been a topic of considerable interest to me (yea verily, even at the age of three or thereabouts).

The book is in two parts, the actual memoir first and an essay of a more academic sort second. The poetic, ruminative memoir immediately pulled me in, although it was not always an easy read. It is neither chronological nor exactly thematic, but meanders by association, as memory does. People recalled are not necessarily placed in the author's personal history or in geography, although in some cases the endnotes help out. A knowledge of history, literature, philosophy, and more is wanted in order to fully savor the allusions; I recognized some, not others (opening a page at random, I recognize from Ulysses "the fine tang of faintly scented urine" but not the lines from Betjeman), which is to be expected.

One gathers glimpses of what were once very private aspects of the author's life, which I found surprisingly discomfiting. This prompted ruminations of my own: why should relatively ordinary revelations disturb me? I think the answer lies in the fact that the author is not an utter stranger, not a celebrity (the naughtinesses of celebrities cannot, I think, shock me), but someone within my professional world, a person I have not actually met but probably someday will, someone who knows my work and whose own work I have assigned my students to read. Thus, I find myself in the odd position of knowing rather personal information about someone before meeting him. At the same time, why should this matter? Do other scholars wish they knew more, or less, about me than they do (I have not published any memoirs; should I refrain?)?

The second part of the book begins quite dryly after the sensuously poetic texture of the memoir; philosophy and semiotics interest me, but not for dessert. Initially, I could not concentrate at all. Once Derrida and Lacan are left (mostly) behind in favor of Baudelaire, Kracauer, Ansel Adams, Dorothea Lange, and of course Freud, Breton, and Kundera, I perked up again. I'll want to reread some of it before returning the book to the library.