Salman Rushdie's Imaginary Homelands explains to me why my idea of home is not the same as it is in reality today. Although I did not move to a different country as Rushdie did after childhood, I did move to a different house after childhood. So, in some ways, I can understand what Rushdie means when he describes his home as being in part a creation of his mind. When I think of the first home I lived in, I believe I can remember many aspects of it. However, being a Psychology major, I know that perhaps most of what I remember is really a creation of my imagination. People cannot remember all of their experiences with great detail, especially experiences from early childhood. Thus, people unknowingly fill in missing details of events with best guesses of what they should be when they attempt to remember events. This is why Rushdie realizes that the India he remembers and writes about is simply "...a version and no more than one version of all the hundreds of millions of possible versions." (10). In reality, I believe what Rushdie is describing is basically the process of writing any work of fiction. Any work of fiction that a writer creates is created by combining his or her experience of past events with other imagined details. No one can completely imagine a story without using any of their own experiences of the world. These experiences are necessary to create the illusion of reality, but because a writer is not simply recording past events, he or she must imagine aspects to create a story. While Rushdie seems to believe the process he describes occurs only when recreating the past in one's mind or on paper, I believe the process he describes occurs when one tries to create any piece of fiction.
This was a good post, made me think. I see it similarly, but perhaps a little bit more specifically. I'm not a psych major, but I took psych 101 and have a basic understanding of the false memory concept. When Rushdie describes the India he remembers as a "version," he is acknowledging that it is only his perception of his home, which is distorted by his own mind. I understand what you are saying about filling in the details being the same process involved in writing fiction, but I see it slightly differently. When someone produces false memories, they are filling spaces, or gaps, in actual memories with imagined details that are dictated by the recollections surrounding the gaps. When someone produces a piece of fiction, while there is still a space that needs to be filled, that space is not a gap, but the story itself. The space is filled with characters and details the author creates using their imagination which is filtered by his or her perception of life experiences. Let me know what you think, and let me know if you find we are saying the same thing.
ReplyDeleteI don't honestly know much of anything about psychology except for what we have minimally covered in my education classes, but I find it interesting to hear from somebody of that perspective. I agree that part of his "version" is imaginary, but I don't think it is out of intent to fictionalize it. You're right that it is impossible to remember everything, but there are times people have convinced themselves of imaginary details, unknowing of the falsity of their memory. Does that make sense? I have a terrible tendency to explain things horribly, even if it makes sense to me.
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