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UNIVERSITÉ PARIS XIII – VILLETANEUSE

ÉLODIE TROLÉ

THE TREATMENT OF TIME IN NICK FLYNN’S MEMOIR,

ANOTHER BULLSHIT NIGHT IN SUCK CITY.

MÉMOIRE PRÉSENTÉ EN VUE DE LA VALIDATION DE LA

PREMIÈRE ANNÉE DE MASTER SCIENCES DU LANGAGE,

DES TEXTES ET DE LA LITTÉRATURE

DIRIGÉ PAR MONSIEUR SYLVANISE

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INTRODUCTION.

Nick Flynn’s work, even though completely unpretentious, is also

highly unusual and remarkable thanks to its heterogeneity. Nick Flynn claims

that he is a poet, and we can consider him as such since he teaches poetry at the

University of Houston, and both his first works - Some Ether, 2000 and Blind

Huber, 2002 - were books of poetry. But at the same time, we can find in both

works many autobiographical details about his father’s absence and his

mother’s suicide when he was twenty two years old for instance. In his first

poems we could already see that Nick Flynn was mixing two very different

genres, poetry and autobiography. It is very rare that a poet should give directly

(meaning not metaphorically) very precise details about his own life. As

Philippe Lejeune put it in Le Pacte Autobiographique, it is difficult to imagine

that poetry and autobiography should meet within the same text: “Comment

poésie et autobiographie peuvent-elles se rencontrer? Confronter deux mots

aux contours aussi incertains, c’est s’exposer à soulever des problèmes vagues

et immenses”1. But Nick Flynn soon realised it was not satisfactory to deliver

his life to his readers through poems anymore; it was like using a far too

abstract method to describe painful and real memories. Indeed, his father was a

void: the first time he had seen him was when he was eight years old. The

second time they saw each other, Nick Flynn was twenty-seven years old. His

father had just been kicked out of the place he lived in – it was at that point that

he became homeless - and he had called Nick, asking him to come with his

truck to take whatever he wanted in his room. When Nick arrived his father 1 Philippe Lejeune, Le Pacte Autobiographique, 1996 [1975], Seuil, p. 245.

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was standing naked in the middle of his room, bathing and drinking vodka.

These kinds of memories are hard to admit and even harder to tell. Writing

about it in poetry did not reflect the reality of the situation as Nick Flynn

wanted to: “With the poems, about my father especially, it was really easy for

people to assume, ‘Okay, this is just made up, it’s just a metaphor.’ [...] It

seemed like I could write a million poems about it and it would always be

assumed as a metaphor”2. Thus Nick Flynn found another way to write his life,

so that people would believe in what he said without questioning anything: he

came up with Another Bullshit Night in Suck City, a Memoir in 2004. Nick

Flynn thought that if he told his life in a memoir, people would just have to

believe him, as is the case with every autobiographical work, as stated by

Lejeune when explaining what the autobiographical pact is: “Le pacte

autobiographique est l’engagement que prend un auteur de raconter

directement sa vie (ou une partie, ou un aspect de sa vie) dans un esprit de

vérité”3. For Nick Flynn, writing a memoir was a way of confirming the events

of his life that he had described in his poems, of giving them a real dimension.

And here again, heterogeneity seems to be Flynn’s signature; his memoir is a

mixture of various literary techniques (he uses prose, verse, theatre, letters,

riddles...), voices, places and most importantly of different periods of time.

Indeed, the way Nick Flynn treats time in his memoir is experimental. By time,

we mean here everything that concerns past events and the way they are told,

but also everything that is related to memory and to the retrieval and

organization of memories. The first obvious point that has to do with time and

2 Jess Sauer, “Interview with Nick Flynn”, the Austin Chronicle, 29 October 2004. 3 Philippe Lejeune, Le Pacte Autobiographique 2 : Signes de Vie, 2005, Seuil, p. 31.

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that one first notices in Another Bullshit Night in Suck City is non chronology.

Indeed, it is quite disturbing since autobiographical texts usually follow a

chronological order, as is explained by Philippe Lejeune:

Quel ordre suivre, pour raconter sa vie? Cette question est

presque toujours éludée, résolue d’avance, comme si elle ne se

posait pas. Sur dix autobiographies, neuf commenceront

fatalement au récit de naissance, et suivront ensuite ce qu’on

appelle ‘l’ordre chronologique’.4

The technique Nick Flynn has chosen is very risky, as he himself admits:

“People heard that the book was a little bit experimental, and they freaked out,

like, ‘[...] I didn’t want to buy something experimental!’ You have to reassure

them, ‘No, no, you can read this’”5. Indeed, the narrative in Another Bullshit

Night in Suck City, a Memoir takes a very special and unusual form. We are

made to jump between times and events which are not linked to one another,

and the author (on purpose) does not create any link or leave any clue for the

reader to understand his point: “I deeply respect readers. I think they have so

much capacity, which is why I didn’t try to answer questions in the book”6. His

memoir has everything of the literary collage, in every respect. Flynn did not

only tell his life in it, but also his father’s. There were details and events he

could not be aware of, and thus not only did he need to recover some of his

forgotten or buried memories, but he also had to gather details about his father.

Both stories (Nick’s and Jonathan’s) are told in a kind of parallel structure.

4 Philippe Lejeune, Le Pacte Autobiographique, 1996 [1975], Seuil, p. 197. 5 Jess Sauer, op. cit. 6 Ibid.

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Indeed, the more we read the memoir the more we see common points between

Nick’s life and Jonathan’s, as if the son’s life echoed that of the father. Flynn

says so himself during his interview with Robert Birnbaum, when the latter

tells him that his father’s story is a ‘harrowing’ one: “On the surface it’s a

harrowing story, but the more you write it and underneath it you get to see

more complexities to it and more similarities to my own story”7. That may be

the reason why memories and facts about his father’s life (which did not

always occur at the same time but nevertheless were relevantly put together in

the memoir) are mixed. And indeed, Nick Flynn explains himself that he did

have a huge work to do, as far as research and organization of fragments are

concerned (this took him seven years), before even beginning to write his

memoir: “Ah, yes, the fragments. It was a labour-intensive project, involving

various timelines, graphs, scissors, and glue”8. Thus depicting his jigsaw

puzzle-like life as an echo to his father’s, Nick Flynn seems to be drawing a

parallel between his father and himself, which implies that his memoir is also

going to deal with the question of identity. We almost feel sometimes as if

Nick Flynn and his father were confounded personalities, as if they were one

mind divided into two bodies, and the author confirms this impression, when

he explains that his book was about “the son as a physical manifestation of the

father”9. Is Nick Flynn trying to differentiate his identity from his father’s? If

he is not, he at least tries to put the facts together and “figure out what it

mean[s]”10. Here it seems relevant to quote Mark S. Muldoon who explains the

7 Robert Birnbaum, “Interview with Nick Flynn”, www.identitytheory.com, 22 March 2005. 8 Wesley Gibson, “Interview with Nick Flynn”, MARY Magazine, February 2007. 9 Jess Sauer, “Interview with Nick Flynn”, the Austin Chronicle, 29 October 2004. 10 Ibid.

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notion of ‘emplotment’, in order to illustrate the relation that can be found in

Flynn’s memoir between narrative, meaning (identity) and time:

Emplotment is what we do in order to organize our ordinary

experience of time into meaningful wholes. Time can be

organized into meaningful wholes because we act and suffer in

time. To the degree we understand how we plot our acting and

our suffering into stories, we will understand how the ordinary

experience of time, borne by daily acting and suffering, is

refashioned by its passage through the grid of narrative.11

Although time is often studied as a notion in literature, it remains very

difficult to understand. We could already see in Augustine of Hippo’s

Confessions, published in 397, that time was a problematic notion: “What,

then, is time? I know well enough what it is, provided that nobody asks me; but

if I am asked what it is and try to explain, I am baffled”12. The question of time

is thus not a recent one, and the debate still continues today among thinkers, as

stated by Christoph Hoerl and Teresa McCormack: “The capacity to represent

and think about time is one of the most fundamental and least understood

aspects of human cognition and consciousness”13. The study of time is all the

more interesting and complicated when it touches autobiography. Indeed,

narrative has very often been related to time, by Mark S. Muldoon whom we

have quoted before, but also by Paul Ricoeur:

11 Mark S. Muldoon, Tricks of Time, 2006, Duquesne University Press, p. 189. 12 Augustine of Hippo, Confessions, 1964 [397], Penguin Books, Book 11, chapter 28. 13 Christoph Hoerl and Teresa McCormack, Time and Memory: Issues in Philosophy and Psychology, 2001, Clarendon Press, Introductory notes.

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The common feature of human experience, that which is

marked, organized and clarified by the fact of storytelling in all

its forms, is its temporal character. Everything that is

recounted occurs in time, takes time, unfolds temporally; and

what unfolds in time can be recounted. Perhaps, indeed, every

temporal process is recognized as such only to the extent that it

can be, in one way or another, recounted.14

This shows that indeed, time is relevant as far as narrative – and for us, more

particularly as far as autobiography – is concerned. How does Nick Flynn treat

time in his memoir? We can also hardly fail to understand how by including

our lives in a narrative, we give the time in which our life unfolds meaning:

“There exists a necessary connection between the activity of telling a story and

our ability to give time, and hence, human existence, meaning”15. How does

Nick Flynn apply this to his memoir, how does he use time, through the collage

technique, in order to reconstruct his past, and thus discover his true self? Can

we say that by using time as he does, Flynn makes the reader draw a parallel

between the organization of his memoir and that of human memory which,

according to some thinkers, is not organized chronologically16?

To answer these questions, we shall first of all explain how Flynn tries

to reconstruct his past, in order to find out his identity. In this part, we will

14 Paul Ricoeur, From Text to Action : Essays in Hermeneutics II, 1991, Northwestern University Press, p. 2. Original quotation: “Le caractère commun de l’expérience humaine, qui est marqué, articulé, clarifié par l’acte de raconter sous toutes ses formes, c’est son caractère temporel. Tout ce qu’on raconte arrive dans le temps, prend du temps, se déroule temporellement, et ce qui se déroule dans le temps peut être raconté. Peut-être même tout processus temporel n’est-il reconnu comme tel que dans la mesure où il est racontable d’une manière où d’une autre” in Du Texte à l’Action: Essais d’Herméneutique II by Paul Ricoeur, 1986, Seuil, p. 12. 15 Mark S. Muldoon, op. cit, p. 190. 16 We will develop this in our third part, by examining more particularly the works of William Friedman.

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study the differences between autobiography and memoir, two literary genres

which differ in some points but are nevertheless close to one another, at least as

far as they both tell a kind of quest for identity. We will then see that when one

is looking for his true identity, one first tries to look at one’s parents. But here,

Nick Flynn’s parents do not seem to be proper models, since his mother is dead

and his father does not play any role in his life. Another Bullshit Night in Suck

City really focuses on Jonathan’s homelessness, but in his poems, Nick Flynn

puts a particular emphasis on his relationships with both his parents. Indeed,

when the memoir tells us a lot about Jonathan, the poems tell us a lot about

Jody, Nick’s mother, and about her suicide. Both works are really

complementary as far as Flynn’s identity is concerned. We will thus connect

his memoir to some poems taken from his book of poetry Some Ether which

has been introduced earlier on. If the style of Flynn’s poems is very different

from that of his memoir, we can nevertheless find a common point: the quest

for his parents’ identities, and as a direct consequence, the quest for his own

identity. But if he wants to find out who he is, Flynn first has to admit his past,

which will be the subject of our next part.

In the second part we are going to explore the effects of time on

memory and on memories. Indeed, time has passed between Nick Flynn’s

childhood and the writing of his memoir. Time can erase, or modify memories.

Moreover, some facts that he found out were probably hard to admit, and even

hard to tell. The difficulty of Flynn’s past and the fragmentation of the

narrative may make the reader wonder if he really sticks to the facts. But then

we realize, thanks to the autobiographical pact and because he seems to be

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completely detached17 from his story, that the author does not have any self-

pity and thus does not exaggerate. Then, we can also see that there are a

number of holes in the narrative, that is, a number of more or less important

details that are not given by Nick Flynn. This shows that when he did not know

something about his past, or when there were things he did not want to tell, he

did not conceal his ignorance behind lies or behind an embellished (and thus

false) ‘truth’. If, as readers, we are not able to know whether Nick Flynn is

telling us his life as it really happened or not, we are at least able to find clues

indicating that the method he uses aims at sticking as closely as possible to the

facts, to the events. For instance, we can notice that even though the whole

memoir is built upon fragments, it is very easy to gather the different pieces of

his life together and thus obtain a coherent whole. This is made possible thanks

to all the dates that we can find at the beginning of different chapters (which by

the way make the memoir resemble a diary at some points) and to a number of

historical events (for instance Patricia Campbell Hearst’s kidnapping) which

help the reader situate Flynn’s story in history. As a result, even if the

fragments are not organized in a chronological way, it is easy to piece the

jigsaw puzzle together. Nick Flynn, by writing his life, builds his identity, as

Paul Ricoeur argues in Oneself as Another, when he explains the notion of

“narrative identity”:

Do we not consider human lives to be more readable when

they have been interpreted in terms of stories that people tell

17 Meaning - by taking a certain distance concerning the narrative. We will indeed see later on that there are recurrent notes made by the narrator within the narrative, such as parentheses indicating for instance that he is not sure that he is telling the events exactly as they happened.

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about them? And are not these stories in turn made more

intelligible when the narrative models of plots […] are applied

to them? It therefore seems plausible to take the following

chains of assertions as valid: self-understanding is an

interpretation; interpretation of the self, in turn, finds in the

narrative, signs and symbols, a privileged form of mediation.18

The idea of “narrative identity” involves the fact that as long as an author has

not written his life and included it in a narrative, he cannot hope to find his

own identity19. It is the method Nick Flynn has chosen, and even though his

story is hard to tell, he has found a way to cope for it: the collage technique,

which will be the subject of our following and last part.

In our third part we are going to study to what extent the collage

technique can be a way to recover, and to tell a difficult past. Nick Flynn uses

it not only in the form, but also in the content of his memoir. In the form it

expresses itself in the use of very different literary genres, like prose, verse,

letters, riddles, theatre plays... This has a greater impact on the reader than

when only one style is used. It gives the impression that Flynn uses the more

appropriate way to tell what he wants the reader to understand, no matter what

form it takes. It is the same as far as the content is concerned. Indeed, Flynn

mixes periods of time, places, voices ... In fact everything is done to make the

18 Paul Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, 1995, the University of Chicago Press, p. 114. Original quotation: “Ne tenons-nous pas les vies humaines pour plus lisibles lorsqu’elles sont interprétées en fonction des histoires que les gens racontent à leur sujet? Et ces histoires de vie ne sont-elles pas à leur tour rendues plus intelligible lorsque leur sont appliqués des modèles narratifs – des intrigues? […] Il sembl[e] donc plausible de tenir pour valable la chaîne suivante d’assertions : la compréhension de soi est une interprétation; l’interprétation de soi, à son tour, trouve dans le récit, parmi d’autres signes et symboles, une médiation privilégiée” in Soi-même comme un Autre by Paul Ricoeur, 1990, Seuil, p. 138. 19 See also Marya Schechtman’s The Constitution of Selves, 1996, Cornell University Press, where the author very interestingly explains by the means of a metaphor how people have to ‘weave’ their lives into a narrative in order to find their true identity.

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memoir livelier, so that the reader can better identify with Nick Flynn, and thus

understand him. The chronological order is broken, and this makes the

functioning of the memoir resemble that of memory. Even if this process is

quite rare, it was sometimes used as a way for authors to protest against the

established conventions, such as for example during the modernist period. Can

we compare Another Bullshit Night in Suck City, a Memoir to modernist works

such as for instance James Joyce’s Ulysses for prose, and T. Eliot’s the Waste

Land for poetry? Was Flynn’s memoir influenced by modernist writings? Here

we will try and show how we can draw a parallel between on the one hand

Ulysses and Another Bullshit Night in Suck City (and more particularly

between – respectively - the chapters “Circe” and “Santa Lear”) and on the

other hand between poems taken from Some Ether and The Waste Land.

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PART ONE: A DISCOVERY OF THE SELF THROUGH THE

RECONSTRUCTION OF THE PAST.

1. Autobiography or memoir? Still a way to discover the self.

Autobiography is a genre which has always been controversial. Its birth

and definition are still debated upon. The word ‘autobiography’ is often

thought to have been coined by Robert Southey, an English poet – even though

he used the word with a hyphen between ‘auto’ and ‘biography’ – when he

described the work of Francisco Vieira:

A beautiful anthology may be formed from the Portuguese

poets, but they have no great poem in their language. The

most interesting, and the one which best pays perusal, has

obtained no fame in its own country, and never been heard of

beyond it. It is the life of Francisco Vieira, the painter, the

best artist of his age, composed by himself. Much has been

written concerning the lives of painters, and it is singular that

this very amusing and unique specimen of auto-biography

should have been completely overlooked. 20

However, it would seem that we can find earlier traces of the word

‘autobiography’. Indeed, it was used by William Taylor in an early review of 20Robert Southey, Quarterly Review, May 1809, vol. 1 p. 283.

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Isaac D’Israeli’s Miscellanies, 1797 – in which the latter had coined the phrase

‘self-biography’ – for the Monthly Review: “It is not very usual in English to

employ hybrid words partly Saxon and partly Greek: yet autobiography21

would have seemed pedantic”22. Even though there was, and still is in fact, a

debate about the origins of the word ‘autobiography’ – which comes from the

Greek: autos – bios – graphein23 – it is commonly thought24 that it was well-

spread by the 1830’s. Nevertheless, autobiographical works began appearing a

long time before the word ‘autobiography’ was coined. Indeed, we can find

several examples spreading from ancient history to the twenty-first century:

“L’autobiographie a toujours existé, même si c’est à des degrés et sous des

formes diverses”25. The first work considered as an autobiography is Julius

Caesar’s Commentarii de Bello Gallico, 58 BC, even though he used the third

person narrative to speak of himself26. We then have the Confessions of

Augustine of Hippo in 397, Peter Abelard’s Historia Calamitatum in the

twelfth century, Jean Jacques Rousseau’s Confessions in 1782 – besides,

Rousseau chose this title because of Augustine of Hippo. As for the twentieth

century, there are many examples since personal writings became more and

more recurrent. We can take Gertrude Stein’s The Autobiography of Alice B.

Toklas, 1933, as an example, but also Vladimir Nabokov’s Speak, Memory,

21In italics in the original text. 22Quoted by Thomas Keymer, “Sterne and Romantic Autobiography”, the Cambridge Companion to English Literature, 1740 – 1830, 2004, Cambridge University Press. The Original quotation can be found in the second series of the Monthly Review, XXIV, 1797, p. 375. 23Hence the definition of the word ‘autobiography’: the writing (graphein) of one’s life (bios) by oneself (autos). 24See Felicity Nussbaum, The Autobiographical Subject: Gender and Ideology in Eighteenth-Century England, 1989, Johns Hopkins University Press. 25Philippe Lejeune, Le Pacte Autobiographique, 1996 [1975], Seuil, p. 313. 26We will see later in this part to what extent this does not correspond to the common definition of autobiography.

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1966, and Roald Dahl’s Boy and Going Solo, 1986 to quote but a few. If it was

a difficult task to create a new genre by defining criteria, and telling whether or

not such or such text belonged to it, the very word ‘autobiography’ was

difficult to define. Philippe Lejeune’s definition is the most recurrent one, that

which is the most often used. According to him, autobiography should be

defined as follows: “Récit rétrospectif en prose qu’une personne réelle fait de

sa propre existence, lorsqu’elle met l’accent sur sa vie individuelle, en

particulier sur l’histoire de sa personnalité”27. There are thus several conditions

for a work to be an autobiography. It must be a narrative written in prose,

dealing with the individual life and the personality of the author who must be

identical to the narrator and the protagonist28. This narrative must also be

retrospective. Nevertheless, even if Philippe Lejeune gives a precise definition

of autobiography, later on he adds that “des transitions s’établissent

naturellement avec les autres genres de la littérature intime (mémoires, journal,

essai), et une certaine latitude est laissée au classificateur dans l’examen des

cas particuliers”29. So even if autobiographies have been written since ancient

history, it remains a literary genre whose characteristics and limits are blurred,

and as a consequence the frontiers between autobiography and neighbouring

genres such as the memoir or the diary are not that clear. The only difference

Lejeune makes between autobiography and memoir resides in the “sujet traité”.

He explains the fact that an autobiography deals with “[la] vie individuelle,

27Philippe Lejeune, Le Pacte Autobiographique, 1996 [1975], Seuil, p. 14. 28This condition excludes any third person narrative. Nevertheless, some famous autobiographies such as Julius Caesar’s are exclusively written in the third person. This shows to what extent the definition of autobiography given by Lejeune is not a closed one which does not admit any narrative that does not fit in the description. 29Ibid., p.15.

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[l’] histoire d’une personnalité”30 when the memoir does not. But it seems

obvious when we read Nick Flynn’s memoir that he is telling the story of his

personality. Can it, then, be considered as an autobiography? According to

several critics, it can. Indeed, if one considers like Roy Pascal that

autobiography relies on “the seriousness of the author, the seriousness of his

personality and his intention in writing”31, we can maybe consider Flynn’s

work as an autobiography. But we should first know whether Nick Flynn, his

personality and his ‘intention in writing’ are ‘serious’ or not. How can we

proceed to find this out? Pascal probably meant that to be able to tell if a work

is autobiographical we should first know some things about the author, such as

why he wrote the book, or if his aim was to give as accurate an account of his

life as possible. The thing is that at that point we can only say that by signing

his work with his name and calling it a ‘memoir’, Nick Flynn must have had a

certain “intention to honour the signature”32. But this, added to the “identity

between the author, the narrator and the protagonist”33 are for Lejeune the most

important conditions to call a work an autobiography. Thus it seems accurate to

call Another Bullshit Night in Suck City an autobiographical work. If we add to

this the fact that memoirs are considered less serious works than

autobiographies, as Laura Marcus argues: “The autobiography / memoirs

distinction – ostensibly formal and generic – is bound up with a typological

distinction between those human beings who are capable of self-reflection and

30Ibid., p.15. 31Roy Pascal, Design and Truth in Autobiography, 1960, Harvard University Press, p. 60. 32Linda Anderson, Autobiography, 2007, Routledge, p. 3. 33Ibid., p.3.

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those who are not”34 we can definitely say that Flynn’s work has to be

classified among autobiographies. Indeed, self-reflection is all about

introspection, about trying not to take sides concerning what happened inside

of us and being able to interpret it not from within, but from the outside, as a

spectator. Flynn’s memoir is all about this: trying to take a certain distance

from the events that happened in his life – which was made easier thanks to the

spatial and temporal distance35 that separated Nick Flynn’s experience and the

time of the writing – and to analyse what happened almost as if he was an

outsider. This is one characteristic of the autobiographical genre also explained

by James Olney who quotes Gusdorf in his work Autobiography: Essays

Theoretical and Critical: “Autobiography [...] requires a man to take a distance

with regard to himself in order to constitute himself in the focus of his special

unity and identity across time”36. But one cannot stick to those quotations to

tell whether Flynn’s work is an autobiography. Maybe Nick Flynn has written

a memoir, and sometimes drifted towards autobiography, which would not be

that astonishing since the frontier between both genres, as we have seen earlier

on with Lejeune, is quite blurred and difficult to define. Jean-Philippe Miraux

describes very accurately the feeling that we have towards Nick Flynn’s

memoir:

34Laura Marcus, Auto/biographical Discourses, 1994, Manchester University Press, p. 21. 35Temporal distance, because Nick Flynn began interviewing his father five years after the latter got off the streets, and it lasted for two years. After that, it took him seven years to finish the book. Thus, the events he related in his memoir (his father’s homelessness) were about 14 years behind him. Spatial distance, because Nick Flynn moved to Europe to take some distance and finish the memoir, which he did in Rome. 36James Olney, Autobiography: Essays Theoretical and Critical, 1980, Princeton University Press, p. 35.

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Le mémorialiste inscrit l’histoire de sa vie dans l’histoire des

événements, et cette inscription constitue la dominante de son

œuvre; cela ne signifie pas qu’il ne sera pas, à certains

moments, un autobiographe. Tout est question de

proportions. A l’inverse, l’autobiographe peut être, dans

quelques chapitres ou fragments de son livre, mémorialiste: il

inscrit alors l’histoire dans le récit de sa vie, particulièrement

lorsque l’histoire, dans sa dimension tragique, rejoint

l’intimité profonde de l’écrivain.37

If we have tried since the beginning of this first part to know whether Flynn’s

memoir is indeed a memoir or if it is an autobiography, there is one point

which matters much more: the author’s mind about it. There is a reason why

Nick Flynn chose to call his book a memoir. The first and most obvious

explanation for this is that he refused the linear quality of temporality in

autobiography. But even if Flynn called his work a memoir, it does not mean

that he wrote a typical memoir. What we mean here is that although he called

his work a memoir it is still in between several genres (prose and poetry,

memoir and autobiography...) and it is important to try and see what genres

meet in Flynn’s book. Indeed we have seen that if it is easy to make a

theoretical difference between autobiography and memoir, it is much more

difficult to classify different works in one of these genres, and only one. What

seems relevant is more to find common points between these genres, than

trying to separate them. If every autobiographical genre (diary, memoir,

37Jean-Philippe Miraux, L’Autobiographie, Ecriture de soi et Sincérité, 1996, Nathan Université, p. 40.

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autobiography...) has peculiarities, they also all have a common point: they are

the answer to a quest for identity, for the self, on the part of the author, as

stated by Olney: “The explanation for the special appeal of autobiography [...]

is a fascination with the self and its profound, its endless mysteries”38. This can

be easily proven by having a look at some very famous autobiographies, such

as Rousseau’s Confessions. In this work, Rousseau is undertaking a quest for

identity but he also wants the reader to understand who he is:

I should like in some way to make my soul transparent to the

reader’s eye, and for that purpose I am trying to present it

from all points of view, to show it in all lights, and to

contrive that none of its movements shall escape his notice,

so that he may judge for himself on the principle which has

produced them.39

If the first obvious aim of autobiographical works is to lead a quest for identity

so that the author should better know and understand himself, there are other

goals to this enterprise. First of all, when people write their stories it is done

most of the time in order to leave an everlasting trace of themselves, a proof

that they have existed as individuals. This is linked to the well-known human

need to have a never ending existence, to be always present in human time.

This gives them the impression that even when they are dead, a part of them

will still be alive: putting their stories on paper gives them a feeling of 38James Olney, op. cit., p. 23. 39Jean Jacques Rousseau, The Confessions of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, 1953, Penguin Books, p. 169. Original quotation: “Je voudrais pouvoir en quelque façon rendre mon âme transparente aux yeux du lecteur ; et pour cela je cherche à la lui montrer sous tous les points de vue, à l’éclairer par tous les jours, à faire en sorte qu’il ne s’y passe pas un mouvement qu’il n’aperçoive, afin qu’il puisse juger par lui-même du principe qui les produit” in Les Confessions by Jean Jacques Rousseau, 1858, Charpentier, p. 170.

20

immortality and transcendence. In a way it allows them to fight against the

passage of time. But there is also another aim to the autobiographical

enterprise. Indeed, it is a very recurrent fact that authors who write

autobiographies should do so for the reader to learn more about themselves.

We can notice that it is the case for Nick Flynn, who explained he did not give

all the answers in his memoir, because he thought that the reader had to find

some things out by himself (see footnote number 6). But apart from Flynn’s

and Rousseau’s autobiographies we can find many other examples of authors

trying to discover more about themselves through autobiography. Memory is

capricious, and some people need the writing process to recover lost memories.

We can quote for instance Michel Leiris’s L’Age d’Homme where the author

tries to interpret his own dreams in order to find secrets he did not even know

about himself, secrets that the passage of time has erased:

Rêvant toutes les nuits, notant mes rêves, tenant certains

d’entre eux pour des révélations dont il me fallait découvrir la

portée métaphysique, les mettant bout à bout afin de mieux

en déchiffrer le sens et en tirant ainsi des sortes de petits

romans.40

Just like Leiris, Simone de Beauvoir does not escape this tradition, since after

having written Mémoires d’une Jeune Fille Rangée she explained that she

intended to begin working on a new autobiographical book (which was going

to be La Force de l’Âge) in which she aimed at a sort of self-reflection work:

40Michel Leiris, L’Age d’Homme, 1973, Gallimard, p. 193.

21

Maintenant, je pense à un essai sur moi-même, mais dans une

toute autre optique. Une sorte de réflexion sur ce que j’ai fait,

sans timidité et sans orgueil, comme si je travaillais sur

quelqu’un d’autre, une analyse de mes rapports avec la

nature, avec les livres, avec mes œuvres et mes amitiés.41

One can hardly fail here to notice the striking similarity between Nick Flynn

and Beauvoir. Indeed, they both wrote autobiographies in which they tried to

look at their lives as spectators, not as actors. Mentioning Beauvoir, we can

hardly fail to quote Jean Paul Sartre as well, who explains that in his

autobiography Les Mots he tells the reader about how he discovered his

identity, about: “Quand et comment j’ai fait l’apprentissage de la violence,

découvert ma laideur – qui fut longtemps mon principe négatif, la chaux vive

où l’enfant merveilleux s’est dissous”42. Thus in his autobiography Jean Paul

Sartre explains how his true self, his personality became clear to him. He also

tells the reader about his discovery of how others saw him, and the effect it had

on him. It is thus a self-reflection process, just as in most autobiographies, just

as in Nick Flynn’s memoir, even though he used different techniques. Indeed,

in order to discover his own identity Nick Flynn first tried to find out who his

parents were, and how their behaviours as well as the relations he had with

them influenced his own personality and helped him forge his identity. The fact

that he describes his parents in both his poems and his memoir is a first step in

his identification process, that is to say, he is trying to find a proper model

41“Interview with Simone de Beauvoir”, France-Observateur, 4 June 1958, in Eliane Lecarme-Tabone commente les Mémoires d’une jeune fille rangée de Simone de Beauvoir, 2000, Gallimard, p. 217. 42Jean Paul Sartre, Les Mots, 1972, Gallimard, p. 211.

22

which he could identify with. Nick Flynn tried to piece his life together. To that

end he reconstructed events and memories about his parents, and settled them

down in time and human history.

2. Looking through your past to find your own identity.

Nick Flynn did not begin to try to find out who his parents were in

Another Bullshit Night in Suck City, but in his first book of poetry, Some Ether.

Indeed, the greatest part of it deals with his mother, Jody, and with her suicide.

Nick Flynn’s tone was not the same in his poems as in his memoir; he was

much more sentimental in the first. It is probably due to the fact that his mother

committed suicide, and to his realization that as a consequence she could not be

a model for him anymore. Jody’s suicide corresponds to a very significant

period in Flynn’s life. The passage of time, which used to be nothing more than

an abstract notion to him, turned all at once into a gloomy and inexorably

concrete reality. This may be the reason why the very first poem of Some

Ether, “Bag of Mice”, deals with her suicide. It seems to be both a very

appropriate introduction to his book of poetry, and also very representative of it

in terms of tone and imagery:

Bag of Mice

1 I dreamt your suicide note

Was scrawled in pencil on a brown paperbag,

23

& in the bag were six baby mice. The bag

opened into darkness,

5 smoldering

from the top down. The mice,

huddled at the bottom, scurried the bag

across a shorn field. I stood over it

& as the burning reached each carbon letter

10 of what you’d written

your voice released into the night

like a song, & the mice

grew wilder.43

This poem is very dark, and gloomy. This is due to the vocabulary used by

Nick Flynn, such as the lexical fields of darkness: “darkness” (l. 4), “night” (l.

11) and of fire: “smoldering” (l. 5), “burning” (l. 9). This shows the effect his

mother’s suicide had on him. The only positive thing in the poem is his

mother’s voice: “your voice released into the night / like a song” (l. 10, 11).

Nick Flynn had read his mother’s first suicide note when he was 17 years old,

and had burned it. After that he had tried to keep an eye on her, but she

nevertheless committed suicide when he was 22 years old. The dream he

depicts in “A Bag of Mice” probably refers to when he had burned his mother’s

suicide note, but it may also refer to her suicide in a more metaphorical way.

Indeed the burning of “each carbon letter” (l. 9) may be a metaphor meaning

43Nick Flynn, Some Ether, 2000, Graywolf Press, p. 3.

24

that Flynn would have liked, even dreamed (see l. 1: “I dreamt”) Jody’s suicide

to be as easy to erase as a suicide note is easy to burn. It seems natural that

Nick Flynn should have been shocked by his mother’s suicide, because they

were very close to one another, as can be seen in the poem “Fragment (found

inside my mother)”:

Fragment (found inside my mother)

1 I kept it hidden, it was easy

To hide, behind my lingerie, a shoebox

above my boys’ reach, swaddled alongside

my painkillers

5 in their childproof orange cups. I knew my kids,

curious, monkeys,

but did they know me? It was easy

to hide, it waited, the hard O of its mouth

made of waiting, each bullet

10 & its soft hood of lead. Braced

25

solid against my thigh, I’d feed it

with my free hand, my robe open

as if nursing, practising

my hour of lead, my letting go. The youngest

15 surprised me with a game,

held out his loose fists, begging

guess which hand, but both

were empty. Who taught him that?44

In this poem, Nick Flynn is speaking in the place of his mother with the help of

the first person narrative, imagining her and her thoughts not long before she

committed suicide. That is why the whole poem is written in italics. But the

italics may also be seen as a symbol. Indeed, it could be a way of showing that

Jody’s voice is more ethereal than substantial. With this technique, Nick Flynn

seems to underline the fact that his mother’s life cannot be seen as being part of

human time anymore. Almost all the poems of Some Ether deal with Jody’s

suicide, but not all in the same way. For instance, unlike the previous poem

that we have seen, the following one tells us in details how Jody killed herself.

She took painkillers, and shot herself. Nick Flynn here tells us how his mother

tried to protect her children. Indeed, she wanted above all to hide her gun, for

44Ibid., p. 4. The whole poem is in italics.

26

her children not to see it. That is why she placed it “above [her] boys’ reach”,

and also why her painkillers were in “childproof orange cups”. By writing that

Nick Flynn emphasizes the fact that even though his mother committed suicide,

she had always been there to protect him and his big brother, Thaddeus. The

poem shows us a good mother, whose only flaw was that she was completely

depressed, almost lunatic. This can be seen if we pay attention to the pattern of

the poem, which can easily be compared to Jody’s mind. Indeed, it has no

structure at all, it is totally disorganized. There is no stress pattern and the

stanzas are irregular (one, two or three lines). The syntactic units are broken

because of enjambments: “it was easy / to hide” (l. 1, 2), “the hard O of its

mouth / made of waiting” (l. 8, 9). What adds to the feeling of irregularity and

disorder is that although generally enjambments occur among the same stanza,

here we very often have enjambments between the last line of a stanza and the

first of the following: “It was easy / to hide” (l. 7, 8), “Braced / solid against

my thigh” (l. 10, 11). More than an effect of disorder, this also gives an

impression of urgency, of a flow of thoughts that we have to read until the end

without stopping, almost without breathing. One feels uneasy, uncomfortable

while reading this poem. That impression is not only caused by enjambments

but also by the numerous caesuras. Indeed they are recurrent in the poem: “in

their childproof orange cups. I knew my kids”: “in their childproof orange cups

//45 I knew my kids” (l. 5), “but did they know me? It was easy”: “but did they

know me // It was easy” (l. 7). Caesuras break the flow of the poem and this is

emphasized by the fact that they occur at different places in the lines. We can

45Used to show the position of the oral pause.

27

indeed find initial caesuras (at the beginning of a line): “to hide, behind my

lingerie, a shoebox”: “to hide // behind my lingerie // a shoebox” (l. 2), medial

caesuras: “with my free hand, my robe open”: “with my free hand // my robe

open” (l. 12) and terminal caesuras: “held out his loose fists, begging”: “held

out his loose fists // begging” (l. 16). This gives a chaotic effect to the poem,

and since the latter (as the title suggests) is supposed to be a “fragment found

inside” Jody, this makes the reader draw a parallel between the chaotic

structure of the poem and her mind. But we can also find a correlation between

the way Nick Flynn uses syntax and the way he treats time. Indeed, we have

seen that syntax is completely disregarded: sentences are cut short and

incomplete, and sometimes do not even make sense. It is the same process with

time: there is no chronology, events are not linked to one another and

everything is chaotic. All rules concerning syntax as well as time are ignored.

But chaos does not seem to disturb Flynn, since although his mother’s mind

was deranged, he never seemed to reproach her for anything, as can be seen in

the poem “And Then, And Then”:

And Then, And Then

1 As a kid I ruled, God Almighty, but it got

so tired. I delivered newspapers, had a route.

If it snowed my mother would drive, I’d read her the headlines

28

as we idled between houses.

5 I read about a man who ate an entire car, bolt-by-bolt,

& another who ate acid

& freaked, landing in jail

where he gouged his own eyes out. I thought

he looked like Jesus, but a lot of people

10 looked like Jesus then.

Patty Hearst was robbing that bank, & Nixon

was led away by the army. Sometimes

before I’d make it back to the car she would start to drive

slowly away, and I’d have to jump in on the run, as if I

were

15 a cowboy, or a gangster. I told her about Superman,

how he’d plough through the crust of the earth for a handful of coal

& compress it to a diamond between his palms,

his blue muscles straining.

I was saving money to buy her a new car.

29

20 Now it’s a story I tell backwards

Across from me on the train a man is having a dialogue with himself,

saying, I got money, you think I don’t got money, shit,

I’m waking up tomorrow morning, going to work, I got

money, I can leave any time, I got a hundred places to

go.46

This poem is very different from the previous one. Even though it is

disorganized as well, it seems to be much calmer. In the previous poems, the

writing was pretty violent because the author had just realized the damages left

by the passage of time. But the poem just above seems to depict another period.

Indeed, the fact that it is calmer shows a certain resignation; the author admits

that time passes and that he can do nothing about it. At the beginning of this

poem Nick Flynn is telling an anecdote about him and his mother: he used to

be a paperboy and when it snowed his mother used to drive him. It was a habit,

which can be seen by the use of the modal auxiliary “would”: “my mother

would drive, I’d read her the headlines” (l. 3). The author is giving historical

details, such as Patty Hearst’s robbing of the bank and Nixon’s arrest, so that

we are able to situate his story in history (besides this process is very often

used in Another Bullshit Night in Suck City). We can see that Flynn and his

mother had rituals, games: “Sometimes / before I’d make it back to the car she

46Nick Flynn, Some Ether, 2000, Graywolf Press, p. 11, 12.

30

would start to drive / slowly away, and I’d have to jump in on the run, as if I

were / a cowboy, or a gangster” (l. 12-15). This shows how close they were.

We can feel a lot of regret and sadness in one of the last lines of the poem:

“Now it’s a story I tell backwards” (l. 20). We almost feel a sort of bitterness

because time has passed and Jody committed suicide before Nick could even

“buy her a new car” (l. 19). The adverbs of time “before” (l. 13) and “now” (l.

20) are meant to draw a parallel between how things used to be, and how things

are at present. This stresses the fact that time has passed, and thus that things

have changed. We feel as if there were many things he would have liked to do

with his mother, but he was unable to and this makes him regret the moments

they had together. This bitterness at the passage of time is really emphasized in

another of Flynn’s poems, which title is suggestive: “Ago”:

Ago

1 I don’t even know

how a telephone works, how your voice reached

all the way from Iron River, fed

across wires or satellites, transformed

5 & returned. I don’t understand

the patience this takes, or anything

about the light-years between stars.

31

An hour ago

you cupped your hands in the tub & raised them up,

10 an offering of steam. Now

we’re driving 66 mph

& one maple is coming up fast, on fire. I begin,

it’s like those fireworks over

the East River, but it’s not enough

15 to say this. By the time I find the words

it will already be past, rushing away as if falling

into a grave, drained

of electricity, the world between something is happening

& something happened. Think of an astronaut, big silver hands

20 & gravity boots, the effort spent

to keep from flying off into space. Think of

the first time your grandparents listened

to a phonograph, the needle falling to black

vinyl, a song without a body. Think of the names

32

25 you see on a map, think of these towns & rivers

before they were named, when “Liberty” & “New Hope”

were a large rock, a stand of birches. It’s what

I’m afraid of, the speed with which everything

is replaced, these trees, your smile, my mother

30 turning her back to me before work,

asking over her shoulder,

how does this look?47

In this poem it is obvious that Nick Flynn is both afraid and bitter at the fact

that time passes so fast. This can be noticed thanks to the contrast he draws

between past and present: “An hour ago [...] now” (l. 8-10), but also thanks to

Flynn’s explicit realization of the fact that everything changes with incredible

speed: “By the time I find the words / it will already be past, rushing away as if

falling / into a grave” (l. 15-17). Here we can notice a certain bitterness, as if

the author was trying to express the fact that he cannot grasp anything because

everything flows before him and he does not have enough time. We could even

sense a wish in him to stop the time, to be able to fix everything as it is,

beginning with his mother’s life. We have the impression that the author has

some remorse at not having said some things to his mother before she died, he

47Ibid., p.15, 16.

33

seems to be saying ‘it is too late now’. This can also be seen in the following

stanza: “the world between something is happening / & something happened”

(l. 18, 19). Even if Nick Flynn notices that time flies, it seems that he does not

understand why things should be the way they are: “I don’t even know” (l. 1),

“I don’t understand” (l. 5). It may be the reason why at the end of the poem

Nick Flynn explicitly writes that he fears the passage of time, and mostly

because of his mother’s death: “It’s what / I’m afraid of, the speed with which

everything / is replaced, these trees, your smile, my mother / turning her back

to me before work, / asking over her shoulder / how does this look?” (l. 27-32).

The fact that the last line of the poem is in italics – along with the context of

the last stanza which is an anecdote from when Nick’s mother was still alive –

shows he is speaking in her place. This could be seen as a way of honouring

her memory, and to tell the reader how much he wishes she could still be here

with him, as a mother and as a model. Because even though her behaviour

clearly influenced Nick Flynn (her suicide was the reason why he had a

nervous breakdown as he tells in his memoir, and as we will see later on), she

could not be a model for him anymore. Thus Nick had now to turn to his father

if he wanted to find out his own identity, and as we have seen it earlier on, if he

tells a lot about Jody in his poems, what reveals us a lot about Jonathan’s

personality is Nick Flynn’s memoir, Another Bullshit Night in Suck City. In the

first chapter we can already see that his father is always hiding his true identity,

always pretending to be someone he is not, and as a consequence we do not

know who he is. He is homeless but pretends not to be. Appearances matter a

lot. In this chapter Jonathan Flynn is pretending to be depositing money in the

34

bank, when he has none. Nick Flynn is comparing this to a “diorama”48 which

he calls “Late Twentieth Century Man Pretending to Be Banking”49. This gives

the impression that Jonathan is always performing, always playing a role as in

a theatre play: “His life became a raging performance piece, scripted by

Jonathan Flynn. This allowed him to stay in control of something in his life. It

became all presentation”50. This is emphasized, in the same chapter, by the use

of verbs such as “to feign” or “to pretend” to describe what he does: “he’ll

feign sleep or pretend he’s absorbed with his banking”51. By the way, it seems

ironical that Jonathan and Jody at the beginning of the memoir should be

reading a passage of Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye where the protagonist is

“concealing the fact that [he] was a wounded sonuvabitch”52, and that Jonathan

should be trying to imitate him, without success at first, since Jody tells him

“No, [...] he’s concealing it”. It is very astonishing since Jonathan is usually a

master of disguise, who as a result seems to have no identity of his own:

Jonathan created blustery characters to protect himself from

being hurt. He was a great absorber of others’ personalities.

He would lift phrases and gestures from those around him,

make them his own. He was like a jigsaw puzzle of different

people.53

48Nick Flynn, Another Bullshit Night in Suck City, 2004, Faber and Faber, p. 4. 49Ibid. 50Ibid., p. 308. In italics in the original text. 51Ibid. 52Ibid., p. 15. 53Ibid., p. 86, 7. In italics in the original text.

35

This was said to Nick by Scotty, during the research he made to write his

memoir. Scotty was “just twenty”54 when he met Jonathan, who was a sort of

father figure to him mostly because he was twice his age. It seems that Scotty

knew Jonathan better than Nick ever did, which is probably why he chose to

ask him about his father. As can be seen in Scotty’s quote, not only has

Jonathan no identity of his own, but he also takes the personalities of other

people, which can be seen thanks to the different “costumes” he puts on:

A pair of leather gloves in his back pocket, a steel hook with

a perpendicular wooden handle. The costume to go with the

job. [...] A few years earlier he’d stalk Beacon Hill in a

flowing black cape, and then for a few years he wore on one

of those two-way Sherlock Holmes hats, to highlight his

eccentric, poetic side. Later, when he robs banks, he will try

to pass as a country gentleman [...]. He will carry a Nikon

camera around his neck, wear a tweed jacket [...]. As a

longshoreman he shows up looking the part of an “old salt”,

tells long-winded, mildly entertaining stories, but by all

accounts a laggard, next to worthless once the boat docked.55

The fact that Jonathan has several facets is also underlined by the numerous

aliases that he uses, such as “Barracuda Buck”56, “Button Man”57, “Buckie”,

“Barracuda”58, “Sheridan Snow”59, “Millard Fillmore”60. This shows that

Jonathan can have numerous identities, provided it is not his own. It may be a 54Ibid., p. 87. 55Ibid., p. 86. 56Ibid., p. 14. 57Ibid., p. 49. 58Ibid., p. 51. 59Ibid., p. 85. 60Ibid., p. 97.

36

way for him to approach immortality. Indeed, stealing other identities, and

even other lives, may be seen as a way to avoid getting old. From this we can

infer that Jonathan probably feels a need to get an everlasting place in human

time. This may be the reason why he absolutely wants his name to become

famous and outlive him. Since there is something unearthly about him, no

wonder he does not act as the average people. He does not seem to take his

responsibilities neither for his acts nor for his name, and not only that but he is

also a pathological liar. This can be noticed thanks to the very recurrent use of

phrases such as “some version”61 or “in this version”62 which shows that

Jonathan never tells exactly the same story twice and thus is lying. There are

plenty of other proofs in the memoir that Jonathan does not think that telling

the truth is a necessity – this probably comes from the fact that there does not

seem to be any link between him and reality – such as for instance near the last

page when Nick pays him a visit and his father lies to him, once more: “He

answers that Tommy was sitting where I am, on the edge of his bed, not three

days ago. But I know it was seven years ago, Tommy told me this, told me he’s

given up on my father”63. There is quite a big difference between three days

and seven years, so one can assume Jonathan is a pathological liar. He even

lied just after Nick’s birth, inventing him a twin brother: “When I am born my

father puts a notice in the local newspaper: ‘TWIN BOYS, Nicholas Joseph

and Edmund Thomas, were born Tuesday...’ though this is not true”64. It seems

that Jonathan cannot stop lying. But it also seems like Nick Flynn is more

61Ibid., p. 96. 62Ibid., p. 97. 63Ibid., p. 313. 64Ibid., p. 132.

37

embittered by his father’s absence than by his lies. From the very beginning of

the memoir we can notice that Nick Flynn seems to have suffered from his

father’s absence: “All my life my father had been manifest as an absence, a

nonpresence, a name without a body”65. Jonathan is often referred to as

“invisible”66. This explains why Nick does not feel like he is Jonathan’s son, as

can be read in the chapter “Shelter”, whose action unfolds in 1983 (Nick was

then 23 years old): “Here, for the first time in my life, I’m Jonathan’s son”. It

means that before that he had never felt as if he was, which seems logical since

he had only seen his father once when he was eight years old and thus did not

know him. He writes it himself several times in his memoir: “I don’t even

know him”67. It even seems that Jonathan has no individuality, he is just a part

of a larger mass of people, as can be seen when Nick talks about his father in

the shelter and writes that he is “Just another new guest”68. We can also notice

this in the chapter “santa lear” where he writes about the fact that his father is

one of the ‘fake Santas’: “Later, walking, I realize I’d never noticed just how

many Santas there are, I pass dozens of them, one on every corner, same black

pot, same worn suit, but from now on I’ll never know if one is my father”69. At

one point, Nick even realizes that Emily, his girlfriend (and also the daughter

of Ray and Clare, two of Jonathan’s friends), “knew him better than [he] ever

would”70. Another thing shows that Nick does not know his father. He very

often gives him nicknames, and even compares him to imaginary characters,

65Ibid., p. 24. 66Three occurrences on page 203. 67Ibid., p. 211, p. 44 (twice). 68Ibid., p. 212. 69Ibid., p. 275. 70Ibid., p. 151.

38

which is a proof that he does not know who he really is but also very

interestingly that he has no link with reality, that he has no temporal

authenticity. Nick compares him to the Cowardly Lion71 who is a character in

The Wizard of Oz, to King Lear (“The Lunatic King”72), a character in one of

William Shakespeare’s plays, to Noah73 (Reference to the Bible). We do not

need to say that these comparisons are not very flattering since these characters

are respectively a coward, a mad man and a drunkard (according to Nick Flynn

for the latter). But he also gives him ridiculous nicknames such as “my drunken

jack-in-the-box”74, “Johnny Bench”75, “Bench boy, box man, rat food”76. The

fact that Nick Flynn uses several aliases to talk about his father indicates that

he could have been anyone, that he had neither identity nor individuality. But

what seems to affect Flynn even more is probably that his father does not even

seem to care for him or his brother. Indeed, Clare once told him that “Jonathan

would never mention [his] brother or [him] at all, that it seemed to her that

[they] just weren’t that important to him”77. The only person Jonathan seems to

care for is himself. What can even be more shocking is that at the end of the

book, Nick Flynn tells how in 2003 (thus thirteen years after his father went off

the streets, had a flat etc...) he was the only one to visit his father, and the latter

did not even seem to recognize his son, whom he confounded with his older

brother, Thaddeus: “You’re Thaddeus, right, named after my grandfather?78

71Ibid., p. 73. 72Ibid., p. 273. 73Ibid., p. 233. 74Ibid., p. 225. 75Ibid., p. 256. 76Ibid., p. 274. 77Ibid., p. 163. 78 In italics in the original text.

39

No, I say, I’m Nicholas, named after the Czar”79. One can easily imagine what

Nick can have felt, after all that he had done for his father. He tried to help him

out of the streets, visited him often so that he would not feel too lonely. He

even felt as if the roles had been inverted, as if he was the father and his father

was his son: “Now I am the older man, the father figure”80. By the way, this

emphasizes the fact that there is something cyclic about time: one day Nick is

the son and Jonathan the father, the other the roles are reversed; we’ve come

full circle. Both the evidence that this cycle exists and the lack of a father

awoke a kind of rage in Nick. He seems to be angry at his father for not having

been there to raise him. At the very beginning of the book, Nick Flynn writes

about his father’s situation at the time of the writing: “Ask now and I’ll say

he’s a goddamned tree stump, it’ll take dynamite to get rid of that

motherfucker”81. But more than insulting his father, at one point Nick wants

him dead, and even thinks about killing him:

Benchy boy, box man, rat food, I want him to be a projection

from the machine hidden inside my head, I want him to fall

from the fifth-story window, I want to unplug the machine.

Some nights I imagine running him over with the Van.82

These are very violent words, all the more so when directed towards one’s

parents. It shows the rage Nick feels about his father. If he hates him that

much, no wonder Nick Flynn fears heredity, all the more so when we know

that the life of the son seems to be an echo of that of the father. This is closely 79Ibid., p. 340. 80Ibid., p. 303. 81Ibid., p. 8. 82Ibid., p. 274.

40

related to time since it shows that some issues never change: there is something

cyclic about time. It is one of the causes of Flynn’s resentfulness towards the

passage of time: some things are erased when we do not want them to, and

other things we want to get rid of (such as heredity) remain forever and are

inescapable.

3. Fear of heredity, fear of the past.

Nick Flynn draws numerous parallels between himself and his father.

For instance, in the chapter “slow-motion car wreck” he describes how his

father was hired to paint a house, and how he decided on purpose to fall from

the ladder to get insurance money. Nick writes what his father must have

thought before he fell from the ladder, and then he quickly adds “Or maybe

that’s just what I have thought, the times I’ve fallen”83. This shows that even he

assumes that there can be similarities between him and Jonathan. And indeed,

we can see for ourselves that there are a lot of events in Nick’s life that remind

us of his father’s, such as the fact that appearances matter a lot to him. A good

illustration of this can be found in the chapter called “Summer of suits” where

Luca (Nick’s previous landlord) gives Nick a trash bag of clothes for the

homeless in which there are beautiful clothes: gowns, furs, suits... In fact, Luca

used to be a tailor in the 1960’s. When Nick and his co-workers see this, they

each take a suit, and “walk [...] like a gang of Mods”84. Thus Nick Flynn, like

his father, likes to disguise himself. Not only that but he also “set[s] [him]self

83Ibid., p. 91. 84Ibid., p. 191.

41

up to look like a writer”85. This means that like his father, he is no writer. And

like his father, he wants to act as if he were one. Father and son also share a

certain taste for alcohol and for that general state of seeing their life from the

outside, of being “outside [themselves]”86, even if they both know that alcohol

is sucking up their life blood: “the booze is eating away [their] talents, [their]

energies”87. When Jonathan was drunk every day, Nick at one point was

completely the same: “a fuckup, high every day”88. Halfway through the novel

Nick Flynn explains that he feels lost and in his explanation we can very well

recognize Jonathan’s state as well as his: “I see no end to being lost. You can

spend your entire life simply falling in that direction. It isn’t a station you reach

but just the general state of going down”89. All these similarities, these

resemblances between father and son may come, just like the ‘Zen master’

points out to Nick near the end of the book, from the fact that “[his] body is the

continuation of [his] father’s body”90. It is a very hard fact to admit for Nick

Flynn, and this is why he fears to become like his father one day. He really

fears heredity, as can be seen in the chapter where he writes about genes:

85Ibid., p. 181. 86Ibid., p. 110. 87Ibid., p. 43. 88Ibid., p. 100. 89Ibid., p. 182. 90Ibid., p. 292.

42

The scientists say that one day I could stand in the exact spot

my father once stood in, hold my body as he did. I could open

my mouth and his words would come out. They say it is only

a ‘tendency toward,’ a warning. They say it is not the future,

but a possible future. I got high not long after.91

Here we can indeed see that Nick was frightened at the idea that one day he

might become like his father, as Mike Miliard rightly points out in his review

of Flynn’s memoir:

When he was at his worst, Jonathan represented a frightening

mirror – an object lesson on how Nick’s life could

disintegrate if he left those feelings about his mother’s death,

about his father’s absence, about his own failures,

unresolved, blunted by a deluge of booze.92

Nick Flynn feels as if he was “accursed forever”93 because of his father’s

behaviour; he is even ashamed to be his son:

The day my father walked through the doors I became

transparent. I couldn’t find a way to talk about him with my

friends, with my co-workers. Some approached, sideways,

crablike, offered support, sympathy, but this was merely fuel

for my shame.94

91Ibid., p. 207. 92Mike Miliard, “The Prodigal Father”, the Boston Phoenix, 24-30 September 2004. 93Nick Flynn, op. cit., p. 237. 94Ibid., p. 219.

43

He is afraid that if he helps Jonathan off the streets he will become like him,

which is why he does not offer to assist him: “If I went to the drowning man

the drowning man would pull me under. I couldn’t be his life-raft”95. Jonathan

is often compared to something drowning: either a man drowning as we have

just seen or a ship which is sinking: “There was a parallel father as well – the

drunk, the con, the paranoid. The father as ship, but taking on water, going

down”96. This shows that Jonathan was never there when Nick needed help,

needed a ‘life-raft’, since he was sinking, going down himself. But even if his

father was not there for him (when he was here for Jonathan), at one point we

can see that Nick decides to be different from his father, to have his own

identity. He reaches a new stage and decides he does not need any model to

live his life anymore. First of all, he takes the initiative to go into therapy and

to quit drinking: “He explained that he wouldn’t waste his time treating me

unless I quit drinking and started going to twelve-step meetings. [...] No

problem, I said, fully intending to give it all up”97. Then, he succeeded where

his father failed: he became a real poet, and published a book of poetry when

his father did not publish anything. Even Jonathan is very astonished by this,

and his son’s success seems to highlight his own failures: “Christ, I’m being

beaten by my own son at poetry. Who would ever believe this bullshit?”98.

Nick Flynn even goes back to the university after he quit drinking and gets his

95Ibid., p. 11. 96Ibid., p. 63. 97Ibid., p. 290. 98Ibid., p. 332.

44

diploma99. All this shows that even if he could have become like his father,

Nick Flynn made the choice not to:

The whole history of my family is one of disembodiment –

my mother grappling with her tenuous grasp to the earth, and

her choice to leave her body; my father with his addictions

and living in a fantasy world – I very much saw that those

two routes were dead ends for me. I really don’t see how

anyone could live that way. So in an effort to ground myself I

stopped drinking so I could try to face the world with

clarity.100

He understood at some point that if his past (and thus his parents) was not

going to determine who he was going to become, he nevertheless had to admit

his past and learn to live with it in order to build a stable future. The whole

point for Flynn, after admitting his past, was to make his story part of human

time, in order to make it (and thus his identity) real.

99Ibid., p. 294. 100Alex Lemon, “Interview with Nick Flynn”, the Bloomsbury Review, 2006.

45

PART TWO: THE EFFECTS OF TIME ON MEMORY AND ON

MEMORIES.

1. Recovering memories: a hard task.

For Nick Flynn, admitting his past is very difficult, first of all because

some of his memories are really painful. His father’s absence is a recurrent

theme in the memoir – but also in his books of poetry – , and one can feel that

it was the first trauma Nick Flynn ever had. At one point, he writes “I crawl

towards my father’s face”101 to describe a photograph that had been taken in

the early 1960’s, when Nick was still an infant. This sentence seems to be a

good summary of Nick’s attitude towards his father. Indeed, even if physically

he never tried to see Jonathan, it seems that psychically he was always looking

for him, waiting for him to fill in the void that had been left vacant inside of

him. It gives the impression that Nick’s and Jon’s souls are bound in some way

or other, against their will. Very early in the novel, Nick even generalizes and

writes:

Many fathers are gone. Some leave, some are left. Some

return, unknown and hungry. [...] All my life my father had

been manifest as an absence, a nonpresence, a name without

a body. The three of us sat around the table, my mother,

brother and I, all carrying his name. Flynn?102

101Nick Flynn, op. Cit., p. 63. 102Nick Flynn, op. cit., p. 23-4.

46

This shows that Nick is really bitter at his father’s absence. He does not

feel as if he had ever shared anything with Jon but his name. The fact that Nick

is ashamed of his father does not help. It is part of his difficult past. As readers

we feel that Jon is a burden to Nick. This is obvious when Nick writes about

the first time he really saw his father (besides the time he saw him with his new

wife and only said ‘hi’):

I find him sitting naked in a galvanized tin tub in the centre of

his room, bathing and drinking straight vodka from a silver

chalice, like some demented king from in the Middle Ages.

[...] Take your time, I mumble, my brain racing. Why was he

naked? Why had he risen as I opened the door? Why had I

come when he called?103

We can note here the recurrence of the interrogative pronoun “why”, which

indicates that Nick Flynn wonders why this is happening to him. We almost

have the feeling that he thinks it unfair, unjustified. This memory is very

painful because of the fact that it was really the first time he saw his father,

who had been absent for twenty seven years, and the latter spoilt everything. If

Nick’s father’s absence was painful for Nick, it must have been equally

painful, if not worse, to see his father for the first time naked in a bath,

drinking vodka. Meaning there was no possibility for Nick to think that his

father was a more or less like the average man anymore. Even though he did

103Nick Flynn, op. cit., p. 195.

47

not have particularly positive feelings about Jon before he met him, since he

did not know him he could not really judge him. But having seen Jon and what

he has become he cannot do anything but despise him. And Nick’s feelings

towards his father become worse when the latter begins appearing at the Pine

Street Inn (the homeless shelter where Nick works). At the beginning Jon has

some kind of dignity, but then he falls into a descending spiral and begins

having problems and being violent at the shelter. Nick Flynn is more and more

ashamed of being his son, and that is why later on he will decide to work in the

Van, that is, to help the homeless outside the shelter. He cannot bear to see his

father anymore, and to feel the compassion of his colleagues. His father is a

real shame to him. There is a very shocking passage, when Jon is at the shelter

and has a frightening identity crisis:

One night in late January the counsellor working Housing

will be unable to rouse my father. Slumped and naked, he

will stare at himself in the funhouse mirror, repeating, But

I’m only twenty-eight years old, why do I look like this? What

happened to my body? The counsellor, new to the shelter,

half believes this man is twenty-eight, half believes the

telescoping of thirty years. [...] I knew he was talking about

my father even before he said his name.104

This identity crisis rejoins what we have seen in our first part, namely that

identity takes a huge place in Flynn’s memoir. That must have been very hard

for Nick because when people see your parents they cannot help drawing

104Nick Flynn, op. cit., p. 231.

48

comparisons and trying to find common points between you and them. In a

nutshell, people cannot stop equating your identity with that of your parents.

This is a fatality which is hard to accept for Nick Flynn. Fatality is recurrent in

the memoir and gives it a dark and pessimistic surrounding. This is quite

logical that fatality should be found more than once in the memoir when one

knows Flynn’s point of view on life. It is definitely evident that Nick Flynn is

completely disenchanted at the fact that time passes – and that we are left

powerless in front of it –, and more again because no traces of things past are

left. If we can do nothing against the passage of time and against death, it

means that indeed fatality exists. One day or another everyone sees people die,

and all of us will die in the end. This is very dark, but it is what we can find in

Flynn’s memoir. And extremely early in fact, in its epigraph:

HAMM: Scoundrel! Why did you engender me?

NAGG: I didn’t know.

HAMM: What? What didn’t you know?

NAGG: That it’d be you.105

This is taken from Samuel Beckett’s Endgame106 and is quite defeatist. It gives

an impression of “inevitability”107, and also reminds us that life is full of

delusions. Both the absurdist style of Beckett’s plays and the name “HAMM”

remind us of the parabola that Nick Flynn makes in the chapter named “ham”.

In it, Flynn refers to Noah’s ark, a passage of the Genesis (Ham is Noah’s son). 105Ibid., p. 1. 106One-act theatre play originally written in French, translated later on in English by Samuel Beckett himself. The play was first performed on 3 April 1957 in London, at the Royal Court Theater. 107Darren Reidy, “The Handmaid’s Tale”, the Village Voice, 14 September 2004.

49

He compares Noah to his father and Ham can be assimilated to himself

(Noah’s ark would be, then, Jonathan’s imaginary novel). What is a bit

absurdist in this parabola is that here Noah is depicted as an insane alcoholic.

This makes it easier for the reader to understand the comparison between Noah

and Jon. A parallel can also be drawn between Hamm and Nick, because in

Endgame Hamm’s father, Nagg, is legless and lives in rubbish bins, while in

Another Bullshit Night in Suck City Nick’s father, Jonathan, is homeless and

suffers a “total case of lethal phlebitis”108. According to himself, his legs are

“completely destroyed”109. We could also add that the title of the play,

Endgame, refers in fact to the end of a chess game, when very few pieces are

left. The fact that Hamm has difficulties admitting the end of the play can be

compared to the fact that usually novice players do not want to accept defeat.

And we can then draw a parallel between this and the highly probable fact that

Nick Flynn feels as if his father was lost, but does not want to admit it and this

is why at the end of the memoir he tries to help him. The only fact that he

wrote a memoir about his father shows that the latter’s self-destructive process

was a huge problem for Nick Flynn. But we can also find memories of that

kind which are related to Nick’s mother, Jody. Indeed, his mother seems to

have had a lot of different boyfriends as is shown in this phrase: “rotating cast

of boyfriends”110, and Nick does not really seem to approve of it as can be seen

thanks to the phrase “rotating cast” which is not particularly positive since it is

quite coarse language. It is not a very balanced situation for a child, and thus

he may have felt the need to exorcise his thoughts and memories through 108 Nick Flynn, op. cit., p. 115. 109 Ibid., p. 114. 110 Ibid., p. 75.

50

literature. Moreover, Jody’s boyfriends were not like the average man. For

instance, Travis had just come back from Vietnam, where he had “spent his

time [...] checking for tripwires”111. As a result when he came back he was

insane enough to show Nick who was then eleven years old photographs on

which one could see “Vietnamese women dancing topless on tables, [...] a

village [...] on fire. Corpses next, pages of corpses, bodies along a dirt road, a

face with no eyes”112. Needless to say that it is not the kind of photographs one

usually shows to eleven years olds. Even if it did not seem to shock Nick as a

child, it leaves images in the mind which are not helping constructing a stable

future. Moreover this is not the only thing of that kind that happens to Nick

because of his mother’s boyfriends. At some point in the memoir she is with a

man called Liam, a “drug smuggler”113, and Nick decides to work with him,

while his mother uses her job at the bank to do the “laundering”114. If by

analyzing Flynn’s writing one cannot find any evidence that he blames his

mother, it is mostly because “[his] mother and [himself] are closer at this point

than [they]’ve ever been. Something about the both of [them] working for

gangsters, the details left unspoken bind [them] together”115. But what

perspires through Flynn’s writing – and as a consequence what appears to have

had a bigger impact on him – is not so much that his mother had lots of

boyfriends, as the fact that she was unhappy. For instance when he was nine he

found “her gun and painkillers”116 hidden with her lingerie, which is not a

111 Ibid., p. 82. 112 Ibid., p. 83. 113 Ibid., p. 137. 114 Ibid., p. 138. 115 Ibid., p. 142. 116 Ibid., p. 73.

51

usual situation for a boy that age. He felt he had to protect his mother because

she was too fragile: “The greater (if unspoken) part for my brother and me was

to be close to our mother, to keep an eye on her. It was clear that she was

slipping away from us, from this world”117. Nick Flynn was only seventeen

when he realized this, and he must have felt really bad. Things got worse when

he saw Jody’s suicide note as he was spending a night at home with his

girlfriend. That night “[they] killed the bottle of whisky, and [he] tore the note

out of the notebook and took it into the yard and burned it”118. This shows that

he was depressed at the idea that his mother had even thought about

committing suicide, but what makes it more evident again is a sentence a bit

further on: “But from then on I kept a closer eye on her, and within four

months (Seek, seek for him, / Lest his ungoverned rage dissolve the life / That

wants the means to end it) I drove my motorcycle into a wall”119. This shows to

what point Nick Flynn was depressed, since he even thought about ending his

life because he felt powerless in face of fatality. Not only this but the above

quotation bears a fascinating literary reference. The quotation in italics in the

parenthesis is derived from William Shakespeare’s King Lear. In the original

play, Cordelia (who is redeemed as King Lear’s faithful daughter) enters the

play for the first time since act one in act four, scene four. She sees a doctor in

order to ask him if there is any hope for her mad father. She speaks as follows:

Seek, seek for him;

Lest his ungoverned rage dissolve the life

117Ibid., p. 103. 118Ibid., p. 125. 119Ibid., p. 125.

52

That wants the means to lead it.120

Nick Flynn only changed one word in this quote: he turned “lead” into “end”

which is much more pessimistic. This shows his state of mind at that point.

References to King Lear are recurrent in Another Bullshit Night in Suck City

since Nick often compares his father to the mad king. Indeed, he calls Jonathan

“some demented king of the Middle Ages”121 and “lunatic king”122 which

obviously refer to King Lear. The fact that Nick in the above quote (see note

20) speaks one of Cordelia’s sentences makes the reader wonder if a parallel

exists between both of them. And very interestingly, it does, in two possible

ways. On the one hand one could perceive common points between Nick and

Cordelia. Indeed, she is Lear’s favourite daughter and even if Jonathan has

strange ways to show it, Nick seems to be his favourite son since he never (or

at least we are not told so) tried to call or see his other son, Thaddeus.

Moreover, he sent Nick many letters, and it is him he called when he was about

to be evicted. At the end of the memoir he even seems to say that Nick will be

the only one to have his inheritance. Furthermore, we can also note that at the

end of Shakespeare’s play Cordelia and her father are united again. It

resembles the end of Another Bullshit Night in Suck City, since Nick and

Jonathan have a relationship which is quite stable, and they see each other

regularly. But there is another way to see things as well: we could on the

contrary say that both stories are different. Indeed, at the end of King Lear we

have quite a happy ending, which also seems to be the case at first in Flynn’s

120William Shakespeare, King Lear, Act IV, Scene 4, lines 15-20. 121Nick Flynn, op.cit., p. 195. 122Ibid., p. 273.

53

memoir. But actually, at the very end of Another Bullshit Night in Suck City,

Jonathan mistakes Nick’s name, and calls him Thaddeus – his older brother’s

name – which breaks every hope Nick could have had to be an individual with

his own identity in front of his father. This end is fairly unexpected, and is

somewhat shocking. Just like Cordelia, Nick Flynn has gone through many

hardships in order to have a relatively balanced life at the end of the memoir,

and some memories still seem to haunt him, such as his mother’s suicide.

There are memories time cannot wipe away. Nick even writes at one point that

he “see[s] no end to being lost”123. He admits himself that his experiences have

left him scarred, as shows this extract of an interview:

Robert Birnbaum: Is there a way in which you recognize

any scars from your mother’s taking of her own life and the

other extreme experiences?

Nick Flynn: Yeah, sure. I’m scarred.124

If Nick Flynn is scarred because of his painful memories, he also writes in his

memoir things that must be difficult to admit. For instance at one point he tells

that when he was eight years old he “began shoplifting, deciding it was wrong

to take money from [his] mother”125. Even though time has passed since he was

eight years old (and thus memories are harder to retrieve) and one could feel

uneasy or ashamed about that kind of memories he nevertheless writes about it

in a very natural way. All at once Nick Flynn seems to be eight years old again,

with the same naive way of seeing things – indeed only an eight years-old 123Ibid., p.182. 124Robert Birnbaum, “Interview with Nick Flynn”, www.identitytheory.com, 22 March 2005. 125Nick Flynn, Another Bullshit Night in Suck City, 2004, Faber and Faber, p. 66.

54

could see the wrong in stealing from his mother, but not in shoplifting. Not

only this, but we can notice plenty of examples of facts that are hard to confess.

For instance when he admits that his family is one of alcoholics: “My mother

says it’s [alcohol] in our family, says it will destroy my muscle tone”126. But

what must have been harder even than this for him to write is his own problem

with alcohol and drugs: “I’ve become a fuckup, high everyday”127, “I drink to

get drunk”128, “We help ourselves to an unhealthy line [of acid] or two”129. The

difficulty in writing about this resides in the fact that his fear of heredity and of

becoming like his father did not prevent him from falling into alcohol and

drugs. Nick Flynn’s writing echoes the state of mind he was in when his

mother committed suicide. First of all the vocabulary which he uses is quite

evocative. But what is expressed implicitly matters much more. One can see

that the sentences are cut and incomplete, and the syntax is broken. The

structure is not regular: short and incomplete sentences are confronted with

long ones. What is more, repetitions are recurrent. This seems to depict the

functioning of a disturbed mind, as is shown by the following extract:

I enrol for classes, show up on time, but I can’t seem to focus

on the second half of Shakespeare, the comedies. Or on

eating. And I can’t stop crying. At one point a few weeks into

the semester I find myself slumming in the Frost Library at

Amherst College, reading Faulkner in one of those

comfortable Ivy League chairs, and after a while I realize I

haven’t turned the page in over an hour. I focus on a 126Ibid., p. 77. 127Ibid., p.100. 128Ibid., p.110. 129Ibid., p.145.

55

sentence, a word, and get hung up – each seems to have its

own set of problems, its own code, until at some point I

understand that I’m holding the book upside down.130

The means used by Nick Flynn to write about his parents may be a way for him

to cope for the fact that both were absent from his life, at one point or another.

This may be done in order to honour his mother’s memory (as has been seen in

part one) , but also maybe to apologize, in a way, for having let his father sleep

in the streets. If he does not tell it, this can be observed through the way Nick

treats the homeless. It is as if he wanted to help them cope for the fact that he is

unable to assist his father:

Nothing in the shelter makes more sense to me, makes me

understand my purpose more, than to kill bugs on a homeless

man’s flesh, to dress him well in donated, cast-off clothes, to

see him the next day, laughing beside a burning barrel.131

Nick can help the homeless first because it is his job, and then because he is

not implied in their lives. On the contrary, he cannot do so with his father

because there are sentimental implications; he risks falling with Jon if he helps

him. He is biased as far as his father is concerned, which is normal. What

shows that his experience is difficult to admit is that Nick Flynn very often

uses images and metaphors, that is to say literary devices that enable him to tell

his story from a distance, such as the parabola we have mentioned about Noah

130Ibid., p. 154-5. 131Ibid., p. 48.

56

and Ham132. One could wonder, at the sight of the difficult experiences that

Nick Flynn has known, if he really sticks to the fact. Indeed, it is not at all

evident, but some clues are here to help us answer this question.

2. Does the distance Flynn takes towards past events make his account of it

reliable?

If Nick Flynn cannot be completely detached from his own story because he is

writing an autobiography, which always implicates the author a lot, at some

points he seems to be watching his life as a spectator. Even he is conscious that

he needed to take a certain distance towards his past memories when he wrote

his memoir: “I felt like it needed a slight detachment because the subject was

so charged”133. We can refer here to what Jacques Lacan called the “mirror

stage”, which can be explained as follows:

The founding moment for the subject and the structure

through which the subject assumes his identity, as the unified

image that is reflected back to him from outside, from the

place of the Other. [...] This also has implications for

autobiography which has often employed the idea of the

mirror as an analogy for the self-reflective project of

autobiographical writing.134

132We will develop this in the third part of our paper. 133Regina Vigil, “Interview with Nick Flynn”, Glass Mountain, May 2007. 134Linda Anderson, Autobiography, 2007, Routledge, p. 65.

57

By studying the structure of Flynn’s memoir, we can see that it completely fits

in Lacan’s “mirror stage”. All the point of it is self-reflection. Indeed, Nick

Flynn very often uses techniques that show he tries to take some distance as far

as his experiences are concerned. In the memoir there is a passage where he

uses a metaphor which is quite representative of this phenomenon: “Alcohol is

the river we sit on the banks of, contemplating. Sometimes we watch ourselves

float past, sometimes we watch ourselves sink”135. Even though the author uses

this image to describe alcohol, we could apply it to his whole memoir, since it

illustrates this detachment which is overwhelming in the narrative. Indeed, this

metaphor represents a man watching himself, which rejoins the self-reflection

process we have mentioned before. Flynn uses many types of devices to that

end. For instance, parentheses are recurrent: “Mary broke her wrist (or, more

accurately, I broke her wrist)”136. The reason why we can say that the

parenthesis here represents a certain detachment is that it is in fact a present

judgement, made by the narrator at the time of the writing, on a past event that

the narrator (who seems to be another narrator, one who told his story in the

past) tells. Nick Flynn thus makes a difference between what he thought then,

and what he thinks now. This marks dissociation between Nick Flynn as an

individual in the past, and Nick Flynn as he is at the time of the writing.

Moreover, “more accurately” means that the narrator can be wrong, but that the

author is here to rectify what is not ‘accurate’. Thus, even if the narrator makes

mistakes, the author makes sure that he sticks to the facts. We can see that

quite often the narrator is not sure of what he is telling, and he indicates it to

135Nick Flynn, Another Bullshit Night in Suck City, 2004, Faber and Faber, p. 78. 136Ibid., p. 120.

58

the reader, so that we know that he is uncertain. This way, if the reader knows

that the narrator is not all-knowing and that he tells it, he has fewer doubts

about what he reads. This is due to the fact that the narrator poses himself as a

human being who can make mistakes, and it makes him trustworthy, as is

underlined by Philippe Lejeune:

Que dans sa relation à l’histoire [...] du personnage, le

narrateur se trompe, mente, oublie ou déforme – et erreur,

mensonge, oubli ou déformation prendront simplement, si on

les discerne, valeur d’aspects, parmi d’autres, d’une

énonciation qui, elle, reste authentique. […] On échappe aux

accusations de vanité et d’égocentrisme quand on se montre

si lucide sur ses limites et les insuffisances de son

autobiographie; et personne ne s’aperçoit que, par le même

mouvement, on étend au contraire le pacte autobiographique,

sous une forme indirecte, à l’ensemble de ce qu’on a écrit.

Coup double.137

This is exactly what happens in Flynn’s memoir. Nick Flynn knows that his

memoir will not relate his life exactly as it happened, he knows his story will

not be perfectly told. But he also knows that by declaring it clearly to the

reader, the latter will be more confident because he will be facing someone

who is honest enough to admit his flaws. That the narrator admits his mistakes

can be seen through different words used by Nick Flynn. For instance,

137Philippe Lejeune, Le Pacte Autobiographique, 1996 [1975], Seuil, p. 39.

59

“maybe”138 is recurrently used, and even several times in the same page – and

very often when he speaks of his father:

Maybe he used some of the rent money he collected to have

the letterhead designed, to have it printed on the heavy-

weight bond. Maybe there is a stash somewhere, under a pile

in his room, or maybe under the same palm tree where he

claims to have buried the money from the bank jobs.139

Moreover, Nick Flynn often admits that he does not know some things with

sentences such as “I don’t know”140, “I cannot say”141, “I couldn’t tell you”142

or with adverbs such as “perhaps”143, “approximately”144 and “theoretically”145.

This indicates he does not want to give the reader an alternative – and thus fake

– truth when he does not remember something. Furthermore, the use of the

modal auxiliary “must”146, which is recurrent, marks uncertainty when placed

in sentences such as “she must have left us with one or the other”147. The

coordinating conjunction “or”148 also marks a hesitation, in this context149, in

sentences such as “I’d been in her room or she’d been in mine”150. Not only

does Nick Flynn take distance as regards his own story, but he also seems to be

138Nick Flynn, op. cit., p. 70, 41, 82, 90, 149, 169, 201. 139Ibid., p. 130. 140Ibid., p. 70, 82. 141Ibid., p. 173, 82. 142Ibid., p. 300. 143Ibid., p. 18, 85, 101. 144Ibid., p. 49. 145Ibid., p. 169. 146Ibid., p. 70 (twice), p. 118. 147Ibid., p. 64. 148Ibid., p. 58 (eight times), p. 69. 149Usually this coordinating conjunction indicates an alternative, or several possibilities. But here the situation is the writing of memories, thus it is past events that are recounted and ‘or’ marks a hesitation due to the fact that the narrator does not totally remember what happened. 150Ibid., p. 58.

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looking at his life from the point of view of a spectator. This means he goes

one step closer to omniscient narration and does not tell his life as if he were

part of it as an actor. For instance, when he writes about the moment when

Richard, a friend of his, tells him that he is HIV-positive: “I am devastated but

(lord help me) I also feel self-conscious – two men crying in a pickup”151. The

part of the sentence that comes after the hyphen is representative of the

detachment we are trying to explain. Indeed, Nick poses himself as an

omniscient narrator, who is above, contemplating two men in a pickup:

Richard, and himself. This proves that Nick Flynn is capable of being remote

from his own experiences in order to emit a judgement on his own behaviour.

It has a special effect on the reader, since he is facing a new narrator who gives

another point of view and who is reliable, since he is omniscient. In the same

page, we can see that Nick Flynn speaks himself of this ‘distancing’: “Even to

this day driving into Scituate takes some effort, a wilful distancing from

myself”. This shows that Nick Flynn knows he has to leave some space

between himself and the events in order to stick to the facts as much as

possible. And he is not the only author who finds this helpful. Indeed, Roland

Barthes also talks of ‘distancing’ in his autobiography: “I had no other solution

than to rewrite myself – at a distance, a great distance”152. This is quite

paradoxical, but it seems that to write an autobiography both means to

introspect oneself (and thus be as close to the self and its feelings and

impressions as possible) and to be able to see some events from some distance,

151Ibid., p. 187. 152Roland Barthes, Roland Barthes, 1994 [1977], MacMillan, p. 147. Original quotation: “Je n’avais d’autre solution que de me ré-écrire – de loin, de très loin” in Roland Barthes par Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes, 1995 [1975], Seuil, p.145.

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and thus to get closer to objectivity. Nick Flynn by the way obviously tries to

be unprejudiced at some points. In some passages of the memoir he gives

several points of view, but does not tell the reader what he thinks. This is the

case for instance when he writes about Patricia Hearst’s case:

At Patty’s trial there are conflicting diagnoses. One is

“Chronic Bafflement Disorder” – “She was simulating

behaviour, but was later convinced that she was not lying but

acting reactively in fear for her life. She had no mental

disease or defect and did it because she was rebellious,

extremely independent, intelligent and well-educated; she

was not mentally competent and her part in the bank robbery

was due to the fact she was upset by her relationship with her

boyfriend and she had a subtle hostility toward her parents

and the establishment [...]153

Here we can see that Nick Flynn does tell about the different ‘diagnoses’, but

he does not tell what he thinks of it. He poses himself as a spectator, and only

relates the facts and the points of views of other people. It seems that he very

often wants the readers to make their own opinion. The author seems to want to

be as objective as possible, and for this he often tells tragic facts without any

self-pity, with a very detached tone. For instance very early in the memoir he

writes about Eddie, a homeless man, who is:

[...] carried in by the cops again – not only did he lose his leg

beneath a bus a few winters before, but now he’s lost his fake

153Nick Flynn, Another Bullshit Night in Suck City, 2004, Faber and Faber, p. 108.

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leg. More than likely he took it off himself and brandished it

at a passerby, some ‘punk-assed bitch’.154

Nick Flynn writes about awful facts without feeling sorry for anything. He tells

it as if it did not touch him in any way, and does not comment on it. We can

also see this phenomenon in the author’s description of Provincetown, which

he describes as “a village of artists, fishermen and sexual outlaws”155. The fact

that Nick Flynn puts the three nouns ‘artists’, ‘fishermen’ and ‘sexual outlaws’

in apposition to the noun ‘village’ shows that on a syntactic level, they are on

the same plan. It thus gives the impression that the author does not try to

differentiate them on a moral and semantic plan. He just tells the facts, without

judging any of the three ‘types’ of people he has enumerated. This shows he is

kind of detached when telling hard facts. This can even be seen when Nick

writes about his father:

The months he sleeps at Fort Point I will not see much of

him. Within six months he will be barred from there as well,

for bringing a bottle of vodka up to his bed one night, after

months of going downhill. It’s February again, and he is

Johnny Bench.156

Flynn writes about his father sleeping in the streets and does not lament on his

situation. His words are even a bit satirical, for instance when he calls his

father ‘Johnny Bench’. If Nick Flynn refuses to lament in his memoir, it is

154Ibid., p. 31. 155Ibid., p. 173. 156Ibid., p. 258.

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because he is conscious that some people in the world are in far worse

situations than his:

The idea of self-pity as a white American living in the

twentieth-century is pretty silly. As a straight, white, male

American, I’d have to be pretty pitiful not to recognize the

privileges that are inherent in being who I am. Earlier drafts

of the book are dripping with self-righteousness, self-pity and

misdirected anger. I don’t think you should edit that stuff out

– you should write everything – but then you have to look it

over and think, “Is that really the truth?” You realize that that

isn’t the truth.157

The fact that Nick Flynn is standing apart from his story makes the reader

aware that he does not exaggerate in what he says. He seems to be telling and

relating the events as they occurred, nothing more, nothing less. The result of

this is that the reader does not question what Nick Flynn tells, which seems to

be authentic. But the autobiographical pact is also here to that end. Philippe

Lejeune defined the autobiographical pact as possible only if there is “identity

between the author, the narrator and the protagonist”158. In Another Bullshit

Night in Suck City this identity is established both explicitly and implicitly159.

Explicitly, since the reader can see that the name on the cover of the book is

the same as that of the protagonist: “Nick Flynn”, and moreover he is facing a

first-person narrative. This identity is also established implicitly, because Nick

157Jess Sauer, “Interview with Nick Flynn”, the Austin Chronicle, 29 October 2004. 158Philippe Lejeune, “the Autobiographical Contract”, in French Literary Theory Today, 1982, Cambridge University Press, p. 196. 159These are the two possibilities of assertion of the narrator-author-protagonist identity, according to Philippe Lejeune. See Le Pacte Autobiographique, 1996 [1975], Seuil, p. 27.

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Flynn called his book “a memoir”, and thus classified it himself as an

autobiographical work. It leaves absolutely no doubt as to the fact that the

author, the narrator and the protagonist are in fact the same person. This makes

possible the existence of an autobiographical pact. That is to say, the reader has

to admit that the author tries to write his life by staying as close to the facts as

possible. This helps the reader trust Nick Flynn, and so do the holes in the

narrative, as we will see in the following part.

3. Holes in the narrative.

Some critics like Michael Mewshaw for instance think that “Flynn’s economy

with the facts of his own life risks undermining the credibility of his memoir

and undercutting his considerable achievement”160. For him, the

autobiographical pact “can’t be squared with the holes in the narrative”161. He

makes a very detailed list in his review of Another Bullshit Night in Suck City

of all the incoherencies of the memoir, all the contradictions that he has found

out. This goes on for about fifteen lines, of which we will give a summary:

[There is] a jarring contradiction of hearing that Flynn had

“forgotten to apply” to college only to learn a few pages later

that he won a full scholarship to the University of

Massachusetts. One’s bafflement deepens as Flynn admits

that he was in the top 10 percent of his high school class.

160Michael Mewshaw, “Fill in the Blanks”, the Washington Post, 28 September 2004. 161Ibid.

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This doesn’t fit the dead-end childhood he described. [...]

Given his harrowing anecdotes about smoking crack,

dropping acid and systematically deranging his senses, who

would guess he had the gray matter to fill-out an application,

scrounge up recommendations and submit writing

samples?162

Michael Mewshaw did not seem to notice that omissions and imperfections

were the very heart of Flynn’s memoir, and that these rhetorical devices were

the bases of its structure. The very contradictions on which he founds his claim

that Flynn’s credibility is ‘undermined’ are the roots of his trustworthiness. The

tradition according to which incomplete writings are the most authentic goes

back to the eighteenth-century, and to diary writers, as explained by Felicity

Nussbaum. She argues that authenticity, to writers of that time, resided in

“something that recounted public and private events in their incoherence, lack

of integrity, scantiness and inconclusiveness”163. This thought has existed ever

since, as critics such as David Gross underline it: “Today, [...] it is not unusual

to see forgetting treated not so much as an obstacle to creative achievement but

as one of its essential components”164. It is the role of the reader to help the

author rebuild his life thanks to the holes in the narrative. And according to

Philippe Lejeune, it is a real pleasure for the reader to play a part in what he is

reading:

162Michael Mewshaw, op.cit. 163Felicity Nussbaum, the Autobiographical Subject: Gender and Ideology in Eighteenth-Century England, 1989, John Hopkins University Press, p. 16. 164David Gross, Lost Time, 2000, University of Massachusetts Press, p. 59.

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Plus l’information manque, plus l’analyse se développe,

prolifère en expansions monstrueuses: moins on en sait, plus

on est obligé de supputer, de déduire et de remplacer le

singulier par l’universel, et plus on prend de plaisir à le

faire.165

The fact that there are holes in the narrative shows that “the past [...] is never

complete”166, as is argued by Paul Ricoeur. That is what narrative identity

copes for. Indeed, Ricoeur explains that one has to build his narrative identity,

that is to say to write his story, since it is “the privileged means by which we

reconfigure our confused, unformed, and at the limit mute temporal

experience”167. In other words, one has to write his story in order to print it and

his self in time, in order to exist as a human being. By the way, we can note

that here Ricoeur admits that our experience is ‘confused’, which is represented

in Another Bullshit Night in Suck City by the holes in the narrative.

Autobiography, as an introspective writing, is a work of meditation and self-

reflection, of penetration of the unconscious. In his essay Time and Free

Will168, Henri Bergson insists that psychic phenomena should not be treated as

objects set side by side, because no causal links exist between them. This

shows that the holes in the narrative in Flynn’s memoir are only the proof that

he is writing his introspection as it occurred, and thus that he is trying to stick

to the facts. According to autobiography and memory researchers, memory

165Philippe Lejeune, Le Pacte Autobiographique, 1996 [1975], Seuil, p. 242. 166Mark S. Muldoon, Tricks of Time, 2006, Duquesne University Press, p. 213. 167Paul Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, 1984, The University of Chicago Press, Introduction. Original quotation: “le moyen privilégié par lequel nous re-configurons notre expérience temporelle confuse, informe, et à la limite, muette” in Temps et Récit, t.1 by Paul Ricoeur, 1983, Seuil, p. 13. 168Henri Bergson, Time and Free Will, 1971, George Allen. French version: Essai sur les Données Immédiates de la Conscience, 1997, Presse Universitaire de France, 192 p.

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records are both “fragmentary and incomplete”169. This is another element

which explains why Flynn’s memoir is built in this way. Indeed, we will see

later on that his memoir is built, and functions like memory. Anyway one

cannot say, as we have just shown it, that Nick Flynn is not trustworthy

because of the recurrent holes in his narrative. By the way many other authors

who wrote autobiographies admitted that they had not told everything in their

work, and it did not make their story unreal. We can take the example of

Roland Barthes who wrote in his autobiography that:

Certain fragments seem to follow one another by some

affinity ; but the important thing is that these little networks

not be connected, that they not slide into a single enormous

network which would be the structure of the book, its

meaning.170

Here Barthes means that the author must not make links between every part of

his narrative. Some work must be left to the reader, and it is what happens in

Nick Flynn’s work. But in Flynn’s autobiography, this is mostly due to the fact

that his memoir very much resembles a diary. When we read Lejeune’s Le

Pacte Autobiographique 2: Signes de Vie, 2005, which is not focused on

autobiography as a genre, but more on one of its subgenres which is the diary,

we can hardly fail to see many definitions which recall Flynn’s memoir. 169Martin Conway, “Phenomenological Records and the Self-Memory system”, in Time and Memory: Issues in Philosophy and Psychology by Theresa McCormack and Christoph Hoerl, 2001, Clarendon Press, p. 243. For further information, see Martin Conway, “Autobiographical Memories and Autobiographical Knowledge”, in D.C. Rubin, Remembering our Past: Studies in Autobiographical Memory, 1996, Cambridge University Press, p. 67-93. 170Roland Barthes, Roland Barthes, 1994 [1977], MacMillan, p. 148. Original quotation: “Peut-être, par endroits, certains fragments ont l’air de se suivre par affinité; mais l’important, c’est qu’ils ne glissent pas à un seul et grand réseau qui serait la structure du livre, son sens” in Roland Barthes par Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes, 1995 [1975], Seuil, p. 131.

68

Indeed, Lejeune writes that the diary is based on several principles. We have

chosen below some definitions related to the diary which can be found in

Flynn’s memoir:

Ecriture fragmentaire, montage, recherche d’une vérité qui

échappe à la prise des récits ordinaires, place généreusement

faite à la collaboration du lecteur […] Le vrai et authentique

journal est discontinu, lacunaire, allusif, […] redondant et

répétitif, […] non narratif. […] L’écriture du journal […] se

compose d’une suite d’ « entrées » ou de « notes » : on

appelle ainsi tout ce qui se trouve sous une même date. […]

Le journal est une dentelle, ou une toile d’araignée. Il est

apparemment fait de plus de vide que de plein. […] Le

continu explicité renvoie à un continuum implicite dont j’ai

seul la clef, sans avoir pour cela besoin d’aucun chiffrage.171

We have here most important aspects of Another Bullshit Night in Suck City.

Indeed, we have seen that the writing is fragmentary (because of the holes in

the narrative, but also of the literary collage which we will study more deeply

in our third part), that the author has worked during the writing of the book on

the montage technique, and that the reader has a great role to play in this

memoir. The second sentence of Lejeune’s definition also completely fits in the

structure of Flynn’s memoir. It is discontinuous (this will be further explained

in our next part, most importantly with the fact that Flynn jumps between

periods of time), the narrative is full of holes, “much is omitted”172 or repeated.

171Philippe Lejeune, Le Pacte Autobiographique 2: Signes de Vie, 2005, Seuil, p. 62-83. 172Roger Peele, “Psychiatric Services”, www.psychservices.psychiatryonline.org, May 2006.

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As Beauvoir argues, “Un des défauts des journaux intimes, [...] c’est que,

d’ordinaire, ‘ce qui va sans dire’ n’est pas dit et qu’on manque l’essentiel. […]

Les évènements [sont] dispersés, brisés, hachurés”173. It would seem that

authors of autobiographies have often met this problem, which seems to be

logical since life cannot be written wholly, without any omission. This is due to

memory174, which is not absolute, and to subjectivity; people do not all have

the same point of view on the same event. To come back to Lejeune’s

definition of diaries, we can see that the third sentence describes the first and

most important characteristic of diaries: the dates. In Flynn’s memoir, a very

high number of chapters begin with a date, between parentheses. This was

necessary for Nick Flynn to help the reader situate chapters in his life, since as

we have seen above he does not at all follow the chronological order. The

memoir would have been really messy without the dates, or rather messier,

since Nick Flynn himself admits that “[he] do[es]n’t think that the book is

some unified monolith; [he] think[s] it’s kind of messy. It contradicts itself

from one piece to the next”175. It is very interesting that Lejeune should

compare diaries in general to spider webs or to laces, because they are mostly

made of holes. It is the very impression one has when reading Flynn’s memoir.

As Laurence Reymond puts it, “tous les souvenirs, parfois faux, réévalués en

cours de route, souvent imparfaits, s’agencent comme dans un puzzle

bancal”176. Flynn’s memoir is like a jigsaw puzzle, but with missing pieces.

The reader has to put the pieces given by Flynn together, and then he has to

173Simone de Beauvoir, La Force des choses, 1981, Folio, p. 377. 174We will explain the phenomenon of memory in our third part. 175Nick Flynn, interview by Regina Vigil for Glass Mountain, May 2007. 176Laurence Reymond, www.fluctuat.net, 19 April 2006.

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make his own opinion as to what is missing, what the author does not tell. We

can also notice that even if Nick Flynn did not want to provide the reader too

great a help, he did all the same very deep researches concerning missing

elements which were necessary and had to appear in his memoir. This can be

seen thanks to the many sources - other than his memory - that he uses. For

instance, we can see that letters are very important and meaningful. More than

that, they are also objective since written mostly by other people than the

narrator, who is only the medium between the letters and the reader. We will

study the letters more deeply in our next part. Nick Flynn also refers to

newspapers and historical facts to situate his own story in history and make it

more real. Nick Flynn often uses the present tense to describe past facts,

probably in order to actualize his discourse and thus be able to remember it

with more accuracy. The risk is to represent the past with too great an accuracy

and to confound past and present, as explained by Martin Conway: “One of the

major issues confronting human memory is how to represent the past without

overwhelming the representation of the present”177. This seems to be hard to

do, there is a balance to be found between narrating one’s past with a liveliness

that makes it more actual and basically alive, and not falling into a too

overwhelming past, since as Bergson states it, “All consciousness is [...]

accumulation of the past in the present”178. But Nick Flynn does not seem to

fall into this trap, since even though he indeed describes a number of past

177Martin Conway, “Phenomenological Records and the Self-Memory System”, in Time and Memory: Issues in Philosophy and Psychology by Teresa McCormack and Christoph Hoerl, 2001, Clarendon Press, p. 247. 178Henri Bergson, Mind-Energy : Lectures and Essays, 1975, Greenwood Press, p. 7-8. Original quotation: “toute conscience est donc mémoire – conservation et accumulation du passé dans le présent” in L’Energie Spirituelle by Henri Bergson, 1924, Alcan, p. 5-6.

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events in the present tense, he nevertheless seems to be at some points quite

detached concerning his experiences, as we have seen earlier on. The reason

why he tries to actualize his narrative is that he wants to make it livelier:

“(1956) Jonathan, years before he will become my father, is back north for

another summer. For the past few winters, since he dropped out of college, he’s

been working on charter fishing boats out of Palm Beach”179. Here we can see

that Flynn tells about something that happened in 1956, four years before he

was born. The fact that he uses the present and the present continuous makes

the story much livelier, more real. He uses lots of devices to that end, and this

will be the subject of our third part. Nick Flynn tries everything to recover his

past, to make it livelier to himself and to the readers. To fight against the

aporias of memory, he uses literary collage very efficiently.

179Nick Flynn, Another Bullshit Night in Suck City, p. 12.

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PART THREE: COLLAGE AS A WAY TO RECOVER THE PAST.

1. Mixing literary genres and techniques.

We have seen in our introduction that Nick Flynn’s writing is very

heterogeneous. We will stress this point in our third part. Indeed, we notice

while reading Flynn’s memoir that he uses many different writing styles, as far

as the literary genres and techniques are concerned. This gives more impact to

his words, since each time he seems to choose the most appropriate genre and

technique to express his thoughts in a way that will touch the reader and make

him react and think. This does not seem to have been planned by Nick Flynn. It

appears on the contrary that it was a kind of improvisation. Nick Flynn said

himself he did not know what form his book would take until it was finished:

When Suck City began it had no form, I had no idea what it

would become, what shape it would take, though it did seem

it would need more narrative connective tissue than usually

found in poetry. At certain junctures it really could have been

anything – a play, a movie, a collection of poems. I still like

to think of it as a hybrid of sorts. 180

This blend of genres can remind us of literary collages such as what one can

find in John Dos Passos’s Manhattan Transfer, published in 1925, during the

180 Wesley Gibson, “Interview with Nick Flynn”, MARY Magazine, February 2007.

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modernist period. Nick Flynn himself is conscious of the fact that his book

resembles a collage: “It’s like a musical. It has lyrics in it, and fragments of

letters. It was actually sort of an interesting hybrid of styles”181. And by the

way, collage is the very technique he used to write his memoir: “Eventually,

over the course of a day, I’ll settle on the three scraps of paper, and then I’ll

force myself to make a collage. I make a collage a day, always from only three

scraps, because anything more becomes chaos”182. One could have thought that

this kind of technique would not have helped an easy comprehension of the

memoir. But in fact, his collage is incredibly readable, and what makes it so is

that we do not have clear limits between the genres that are used. For instance,

Flynn’s writing is always in-between prose and poetry, and we may even think

of his memoir as “distilled prose”183, according to John Keats’s phrase. We will

first see in this part how the fact that Nick Flynn makes use of different genres

makes his memoir resemble a hybrid book. We will then study the different

literary techniques that are at stake.

It is indeed obvious that several genres appear in Flynn’s memoir. We

have of course prose, which is the most recurrent genre in the book. But all the

same some passages sound like free verse, mostly because of the tone and the

meaning of words, as can be seen in this excerpt:

When the water shuts off sometimes the man beneath the

spray beside you doesn’t notice. Hands in his hair, lather

running in streams down his face, eyes straight ahead – the

181 Mike Miliard, “Interview with Nick Flynn”, the Boston Phoenix, 24 September 2004. 182 Rodney Phillips, “Email interview with Nick Flynn”, Tucson and Houston, April 2005. 183 John Keats, the Letters of John Keats, Vol. 1, 1974, Harvard University Press, p. 231.

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sound of water surrounds him, you keep hitting your button,

but this one man is lost – lost in the white tiles, lost in the

fluorescence, lost in the hiss and the fall.184

This style is recurrent in Flynn’s writing. The facts he tells are not that

usual in poetry (a homeless man having a shower…) but the words, the tone he

uses and the repetition of the word “lost” are enough to call this passage

poetry. This is not quite astonishing since as we have seen in our introduction

Nick Flynn is first and before all a poet. But in Another Bullshit Night in Suck

City he is even more than that. Each genre that Nick Flynn uses seems to be

necessary for the memoir to form a coherent whole, but also for Flynn’s

individuality to be reconstructed in time. The different genres are like pieces of

a jigsaw puzzle, which have to be put together to reconstruct Flynn’s life and

personality: “The book is structured as a collection of short chapters that are

like prose poems and that serve as puzzle pieces, each offering a fragment of a

whole”185. Among these different genres we find several mini-plays186 with all

the characteristics of usual theater plays: stage directions, characters, settings,

dialogs. We can also find many letters, which is reminiscent of the epistolary

genre. Most of the letters we have were written by Jonathan to Nick, or by

some of Jonathan’s friends, but we also find letters Jonathan wrote to famous

characters of that time such as Judge Garrity or Patricia Campbell Hearst. They

seem to be used as arguments that cannot be protested against, in order to give

more weight to Flynn’s words. For instance, the letters written by Jonathan’s

184 Nick Flynn, Another Bullshit Night in Suck City, 2004, Faber and Faber, p. 37. 185 Maureen Stanton, “Interview with Nick Flynn”, Michigan University Press, Vol. 7, n° 2, Fall 2005. 186 Nick Flynn, op. cit., p. 242-7, p. 275-86.

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friends seem to be here in order to depict his temper: “All your pals were sorry

to hear about your misfortunes”187, “You’re sorely missed back here on the

Hill”188. But these letters, written by people who do not seem to know Jonathan

as he really is, are right after contradicted by Ray (a lifelong friend of Jon’s)

letters: “You are not able to handle alcohol”189. This confirms the fact that

Jonathan at first seems to be a good friend, but sooner or later betrays

everyone, as we have seen in our first part. This use of arguments one cannot

object against is also expressed through the recurrence of historical facts. They

seem to be used by Nick Flynn to put the emphasis on the fact that his

individual life is part of history. For instance he includes in his memoir facts

about the Vietnam war that begun in 1959, especially when his mother is with

Travis, a former soldier190. Nick Flynn also mentions the 30 April 1975 Fall of

Saigon191 which ended the Vietnam war, Patricia Campbell Hearst’s

kidnapping by the Symbionese Liberation Army in February 1974192 and the

fall of the Berlin Wall in 1990193. All these events make Flynn’s memoir

resemble a history book, and help him situate his individual experiments in the

broader human history. This is obvious when we read sentences such as “By

the time Saigon falls I’m drinking whatever liquor I can get my hands on,

believing, in spite of all evidence to the contrary, that it will get me laid”194.

Here we can see that Nick Flynn is helped in his memories’ retrieval by

historical facts. They play the role of temporal marks in his memory. Nick 187 Ibid., p. 51. 188 Ibid., p. 51. 189 Ibid., p. 52. 190 Ibid., p. 79. 191 Ibid., p.102. 192 Ibid., p. 94. 193 Ibid., p. 164. 194 Ibid., p. 102.

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Flynn is indeed exploiting all his writer’s abilities in order to find his memories

back and to build up an identity of his own. As far as the combination of

different literary genres is concerned, this was a pretty successful method. But

these are not the only genres used by Flynn to try and retrieve his memories.

Indeed, apart from literary genres such as theatre, poetry, epistolary and also

the diary (which we have seen in our second part), he also uses genres which

are not considered literary. For example we can see that his writing of Another

Bullshit Night in Suck City was very much based on the Pine Street Inn log, but

also on plans, images, quizzes, administrative forms, riddles and simple facts.

They are often very proper to the idea Flynn wanted to express. If we take the

example of the quiz, we can see that Nick Flynn at that time was very

disturbed:

At school they take a survey about drug and alcohol use-

Do you drink:

a: to be social.

b: because you like the taste.

c: with meals.

d: to get drunk.

Without hesitation I answer d: I drink to get drunk.195

What Flynn expresses here is his state of mind at that time, which was pretty

poor, and this quiz has much more impact than if he had just told “I was not in

very good spirits”. It is the same principle with the image196 which shows one

of Jonathan’s business cards when he was a longshoreman. We can see on the

195 Ibid., p. 110. 196 Ibid., p. 86.

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picture that Jon did not use his real name, but an alias: “Sheridan Snow”. This

is part of his habits to never show who he really is at first sight. Then the font

which is used, along with the little stars, show he is still very childish and does

not take his responsibilities as he should. The alliterations: “Sea, Sand, Sun,

Surf and Sheridan Snow” show that he thinks himself a poet. This image was

probably the most concise and imaginative way of depicting Jonathan without

seeming to. Even if this is not really usual to come across that kind of elements

in the middle of a memoir – almost wholly – written in prose, here it seems

ordinary. What is all the more interesting is that although it seems banal and

does not shock the reader as being an intruder in the narrative, it goes even so

straight to the point, which is a pretty scathing description of Jonathan. But

what is even more remarkable than that is the recurrence of that sort of

constituents. Indeed, another element almost has the same function in the

memoir: the administrative form that Jon has to fill for the Department of

Health and Human Services197. In it we can see that he keeps complaining and

lamenting on his poor condition: “Cab driving gave me bursitis – I can’t sleep

at all. […] Construction killed my legs – I have lethal phlebitis […] I am also

50% blind”, and that he keeps saying that he is a poet, when he did not write

anything: “I am a poet – I need a low198 rent place to live”199. When reading

these passages it becomes evident that the administrative form is here for us to

understand Jonathan’s personality better, just like with the business card,

without the intermediary of his son. This is perhaps even a way for Nick Flynn

to better grasp his father’s behavior and as a direct consequence to better 197 Ibid., p. 262-3. 198 Underlined in the original text. 199 Nick Flynn, Another Bullshit Night in Suck City, 2004, Faber and Faber, p. 263.

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understand his own personality and the reasons why he is as he is. The collage

of different genres permits him to be able to reconstruct his whole life. We can

also emphasize the fact that he sometimes uses very childish genres and

techniques – as we have seen for instance with the image – such as riddles:

Brothers and sisters I have none,

But that man’s father is my father’s son.200

This is a well-known riddle, of which the answer is still debated upon. Some

people say that the answer is “it is himself”, others that “it is his son”, or that

“it is his nephew”. Anyway, it cannot but be related to an identity crisis, or to a

quest for identity, and depicts very accurately what is at stake in Flynn’s

memoir. Once again he used what style he thought was the more appropriate to

describe his thoughts, and we also find this phenomenon at the end of the

memoir, when Nick finds in the Science, Industry and Business Library in

Washington the plan of the life-raft201, which was invented by his grandfather,

Edmund T. Flynn. When his father Jonathan had told him that his own father

had invented the life-raft at the beginning of the memoir, Nick had not trusted

him. He realized his mistake at the museum, once he had the evidence in his

own hands. This plays a great role in the fact that we are very early in the novel

aware that the narrator is conscious that he can make mistakes, as has been

explained earlier on. To finish with the different genres used by Flynn in his

memoir, we have a very interesting chapter, called “thirteen random facts”202.

200 Ibid., p. 208. In italics in the original text. 201 Ibid., p. 329. 202 Ibid., p. 131.

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This chapter stresses the fragmentary qualities of the book. Indeed, in it Nick

Flynn tells us thirteen facts, which are not written in chronological order.

Moreover they do not seem to be linked to one another in any way on a

semantic point of view. Some of these facts even seem to have no connection

at all with the memoir, such as for instance: “In 1866 Alfred Nobel invents

dynamite”, or “In 1878 Benjamin Disraeli said: You are not listening now, but

one day you will hear me203”. This might seem dislocated but in fact when one

looks more closely at the facts, one notices that they all deal with Jonathan.

This might be a manner for Nick Flynn to tell what went through his mind

concerning his father at some point, in one chapter. Nick Flynn also uses

several literary techniques and devices in order to state at best what goes

through his mind. For instance we often find onomatopoeias: “click click, click

click”204, repetitions: “He thinks […] He thinks […] He thinks”205 and

fragmentary writing: “The sign of the Naked Eye, a woman’s neon legs

opening and closing on an enormous flashing eye. The Glass Slipper.

Playland”206. This makes the form of the memoir very diverse, and Nick’s style

which is very unusual makes the story unfold naturally despite his obvious

disregard for usual writing conventions: “In place of a straight narrative he

builds a spine of interlocking memories and fragments that, for all its gentle

overlapping, still pushes the story forward page by page”207. Flynn’s memoir is

also uncommon as regards dialogues, which are very scarce. There are at most

ten dialogues in Another Bullshit Night in Suck City, and all of them are very

203 In italics in the original text. 204 Ibid., p. 30. 205 Ibid., p. 50. 206 Ibid., p. 10. 207 Kate Bolick, The Boston Globe, April 2005.

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short but go straight to the point, as illustrated by this dialogue between Nick

and his mother:

Your father’s in prison, she says.

Oh yeah, I say.

Interstate transportation of stolen securities, she says.

Hmm, I say.208

This dialogue, the first of the book, seems to carry no emotion at all. It shows

that Nick Flynn did not really care about his father being in prison. Even if he

does not tell it directly, it is really highlighted in this dialogue and has much

more impact on the reader. The literary devices such as metaphors and

comparisons are also used to produce a greater impression on the reader. For

instance this metaphor: “Alcohol is the river we sit on the banks of,

contemplating. Sometimes we watch ourselves float past, sometimes we watch

ourselves sink”209 is quite shocking and has a great impact. Imagery plays a

huge role in Flynn’s writing, and is one of the causes that make us say that in

his memoir the frontier between prose and poetry is blurred. Comparisons play

the same role: “somehow I’d learned to do that, like a tree learns to swallow

barbed wire”210. This is quite an appalling image, but which we cannot fail to

understand. It means indeed that Nick had learnt to do something (in this case,

looking Travis in the eye) reluctantly, because he had no choice, just like a tree

has no other choice sometimes but to learn to swallow barbed wire. Speaking

of imagery, we can also mention the parabola brought into play by Flynn. 208 Nick Flynn, Another Bullshit Night in Suck City, p. 109. 209 Ibid., p. 78. 210 Ibid., p. 82.

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Indeed, the chapter called “Ham” is a parabola telling the story of Noah, his ark

and his son Ham. Noah embodies Jonathan, his ark embodies Jonathan’s novel

(because it is an impossible project to realize, according to Nick) and Ham

embodies Nick. Nick uses this parabola in order to describe his father, but not

directly, with more subtlety. Nevertheless, he compares his father to Noah

himself at the end of the parabola: “My father may not hear voices, but he also

had an impossible project”211. Here the adverb “also” means there is a parallel

to be made between the person we told about before (Noah) and the one we are

telling about now (Jon). This is a more poetic way of telling things. Moreover,

we can also find in Flynn’s memoir the use of another - mainly - poetic

technique, very interestingly made use of in the chapter called “same again”.

Indeed, this chapter is all written with the stream of consciousness technique

and this for four pages. Here is an example of what we can find in it: “The

usual I say. Blood of Christ I say. Essence. Spirit. Medicine. A hint. A taste. A

bump. A snort”212. This represents in fact what one feels when drinking

heavily, as enlightened by Maureen Stanton : “The rhythmic brio, the

kaleidoscopic imagery seems to spiral out of control, and by the end, one feels

legless. “While you’re reading it out loud in front of an audience, you start to

get sort of off-centered, and you start to feel drunk by the end of it”, says Nick,

who quit drinking when he was 30. “It reaches the experience of a night or a

week or a life of heavy drinking, without laying it out in a narrative way” ”213.

This shows again that Nick Flynn tries to give as much impact as is possible to

211 Ibid., p. 234. 212 Ibid., p. 221. 213 Maureen Stanton, “Interview with Nick Flynn”, Michigan University Press, Vol. 7, n° 2, fall 2005.

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his thoughts, and his words. His main purpose is to try and find who he really

is – through his search of who his parents were – in order to reassert his

individual life in the wider human history and universal time. The literary

collage seems to be the best way of doing it, and not only does Nick Flynn

apply it to literary genres and techniques, but he also makes use of it as far as

time, places and narrative voices are concerned.

2. Mixing periods of time, places and voices.

Time takes a huge place in Flynn’s memoir, which is indicated by a

certain number of elements. For instance, the lexical field of time is very often

used. There are a lot of adverbs of time such as “always”214, “ever”215,

“still”216… Their use seems quite logical since “action in our daily lives is

always temporally ordered in the sense we can never do everything possible at

once. This gives way to the vast amount of temporal adverbs with which we

describe our actions: then, after, later, before, since”217. Being aware of this,

we can also consider the recurrence of phrases such as “buy time”218 or “kill

time”219. Moreover the author keeps drawing contrasts between “then” and

“now”, in sentences such as “Once he could outrun them but he no longer

knows the way through his own house”220. This illustrates the fact that “Time

214 Nick Flynn, Another Bullshit Night in Suck City, 2004, Faber and Faber, p. 3. 215 Ibid., p. 3. 216 Ibid., p. 4. 217 Mark Muldoon, Tricks of Time, 2006, Duquesne University Press, p. 191. 218 Nick Flynn, op. cit., p. 202. 219 Ibid., p. 186. 220 Ibid., p. 36.

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is just this – number of motion in respect of ‘before’ and ‘after’”221. We can

also very often find the adverb of time “years after”, which shows that in the

narrative Nick Flynn “jump[s] around in time”222, as in this passage for

instance: “We want to be near the Sandinistas, their revolution a glimmer of

hope in the world, just as a few years later the fall of the Berlin Wall will be

another glimmer”223. This shows that Nick Flynn wants to establish a contrast

between past time and present time, to underline the fact that things change as

can be seen in this excerpt: “Can this be the same sun, the same back road, that

Mary and I just drove this morning in her mom’s car?”224. Here it is obvious

that the author is resentful because time passes and things change. It arouses in

Nick Flynn a sadness which he cannot either deny or wipe away since it is

extremely palpable in the whole memoir. This sour realization that time passes

can be compared to Albert Camus’s The Myth of Sisyphus225, where the hero

becomes conscious just like Nick Flynn of the passage of time. What has to be

learnt from this essay is that we can do nothing against it and thus we have to

live our lives fully: “conscient que je ne puis me séparer de mon temps, j’ai

décidé de faire corps avec lui”226. In Another Bullshit Night in Suck City, this

bitterness is all the more obvious when Nick mentions his mother’s absence:

“That time still passes, ignoring my mother’s absence, somehow overwhelms

221 Jonathan Barnes (ed), The Complete Works of Aristotle, Vol. 1, 1984, Princeton University Press, 219b. 222 Vendela Vida, the New York Times, 19 September 2004. 223 Nick Flynn, Another Bullshit Night in Suck City, 2004, Faber and Faber, p. 163-4. 224 Ibid., p. 118. 225 Albert Camus wrote The Myth of Sisyphus in 1942. This essay was part of the “cycle de l’absurde”, a phrase used by Camus himself to qualify a part of his works comprehending The Stranger (1942), Caligula (1944) and The Misunderstanding (1943). 226 Albert Camus, Le Mythe de Sisyphe, Essai sur l’absurde, 1962 [1942], Gallimard, p. 118.

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me”227. The suffering generated by his mother’s death can be perceived

through his habit of taking it as a temporal mark for everything: “I’m

determined to get her in the water before mid-December, the one-year

anniversary of my mother’s death”228, “We land in Boston just before the ice

comes, near the anniversary of my mother’s death”229. The tragedy of the

passage of time is very well explained by Simone Weil:

Time is the most profound and the most tragic subject which

human beings can think about. One might even say ; the only

thing that is tragic. All the tragedies which we can imagine

return in the end to the one and only tragedy : the passage of

time… It is the source of the feeling that existence is

nothing.230

Nick Flynn does not escape this custom, given that his tragedy constellates

around time. The fact that on the one hand, his story and that of his parents are

not clear in his mind and on the other hand, his memoir resembles more a quest

for identity than a discovery of it causes a complete disorganization of any

temporal notion in the memoir. Or at least, it is not organized chronologically,

and since nothing is chronological in Flynn’s memoir, we also have changes as

far as places are concerned. For instance, the chapter called “The cage”231

227 Nick Flynn, op. cit., p. 176. 228 Ibid., p. 159. 229 Ibid., p. 161. 230 Simone Weil, Lectures on Philosophy, 1978, Cambridge University Press, p. 197. Original quotation: “Le temps est la préoccupation la plus profonde et la plus tragique des êtres humains; on peut même dire: la seule tragique. Toutes les tragédies que l’on peut imaginer reviennent à une seule et unique tragédie: l’écoulement du temps. Le temps est aussi la source de toutes les servitudes” in Leçons de Philosophie (Roanne, 1933-1934) by Simone Weil, 1959, Plon, p. 211. 231 Nick Flynn, Another Bullshit Night in Suck City, 2004, Faber and Faber, p. 28.

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happens in 1984 in Boston, and the next chapter happens in 1963 in Scituate.

This is quite unsettling for the reader, but all the same Nick Flynn gives

enough clues for us to understand the story (for instance, he provides us with

dates and sooner or later in the chapter we are also aware of where it takes

place). We can add to that a point which can also be troubling for the reader;

the fact that very often we have changes of voices. For instance, we sometimes

have paragraphs where it is not Nick speaking, but Jonathan, as can be seen in

this passage: “The police said they found an empty fifth beside me. Said I hit

someone or some fucking thing down by the common. What could I say to

that?”232. Here Nick is actually speaking in his father’s place, but it is easy to

understand since this part is written in italics. We can add to this that the tenses

are also mixed. Indeed, we can have the present tense describing a past event:

“(1964) […] my father stands in the dock”233 or a present event: “(2003) My

father answers the door”234. But we can also have the past tense describing a

past event: “My first summer at Pine Street I drove”235 or a present event: “I

waited for the knob to turn. Beyond that door were the queers and the city. One

toilet in the hall, they come up behind you while you’re pissing”236. This shows

that everything that has to do with time in the memoir is muddled up, which is

linked to the fact that Nick Flynn put his memories as they appeared in his

mind, without trying to order them. What mattered for Nick Flynn was not the

form his memoir would take. What was of importance was to carry his message

to the reader, and one can say he was successful.

232 Ibid., p. 199. In italics in the original text. 233 Ibid., p. 42. 234 Ibid., p. 337. 235 Ibid., p. 257. 236 Ibid., p. 191. In italics in the original text.

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3. A memoir that functions as memory does.

In Flynn’s memoir, there are many small chapters: eighty-one in all, which

follow one another, each one corresponding to a memory or an anecdote. The

different chapters are not organized in order to make sense either in a

chronological or a semantic way. Indeed, the chapters of the novel rather

resemble flashbacks, and are thus disorganized. It is as if the author had written

them down as they appeared in his mind, without wanting to modify their order

after that. This idea is very well expressed in Christopher Priest’s review of the

memoir:

The short chapters describe events in non-chronological

order, in a style sometimes so subjective that it actually

seems to capture the banal, confusing mind of a homeless

drunkard. This is close to how memory must work: moments

of past and present, mingling in no particular order, are

capable of being organized into a semblance of narrative by a

normally functioning mind. Yet when normality is broken

down, by drinks, drugs or a concussive accident, the

randomness comes to the fore.237

We could say that this is a kind of stream of consciousness organization, even

if this very process has more to do with the order of words than with that of

chapters. Indeed, it is defined as a flow of words depicting a flow of thoughts,

237 Christopher Priest, “Poor Lore”, the Guardian, Saturday 2 April 2005.

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without giving any magnitude to grammar or to any syntactic rule. The reason

why we say here that the chapters’ organization looks like stream of

consciousness is that they are not organized as in usual novels, and it may even

seem like they have not been organized at all, from a syntactic point of view.

Actually they are only classified according to the way they appeared in Flynn’s

mind. This is why we can argue that Another Bullshit Night in Suck City

functions like memory, and by the way Nick Flynn admits this fact himself:

I didn’t make up the phrase “memory is a form of fiction” but

it resonates with me, and certainly was an ordering principle

in writing the memoir. I find that as soon as I delve into the

realms of memory, I enter into the realms of imagination, if

only because it is an act of selection.238

In view of the fact that Flynn’s memoir is definitely not chronologically

organized, and if it is true to say that memory is not either, then we can infer

that Another Bullshit Night in Suck City operates like memory. Some people

think that memory is not chronologically organized, such as William J.

Friedman:

There is, to my knowledge, no neurological evidence to

support chronological-organization theories, and most such

theories have proved difficult to evaluate in psychological

experiments because most of their predictions are readily

explained by other theories.239

238 Paper Street staff, “Email Interview with Nick Flynn”, Paper Street, Spring 2005. 239 William J. Friedman, “Memory for the Time of Past Events”, Psychological Bulletin, n°113, 1993, p. 44-6.

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He takes the example of an experiment where subjects were provided several

lists of words, which they had to try to remember. Then they were asked where

such or such word occurred, within the list and within the whole set of words.

It was found out that the subjects could judge with great accuracy the place of

the word if the latter appeared at the beginning or the end of a list, but had huge

difficulties judging its place if it occurred in the middle of a list, and even more

in telling where the word occurred in the whole set of words:

The start and end of a list of words are unavoidable

landmarks in most studies, and participants are more accurate

in their judgments of the times of words presented near these

landmarks than for words in the middle of lists.240

This experiment shows that one does not remember events according to their

temporal distance from the present moment, since the start of a list for instance

is an arbitrary time location. Indeed, if one better remembers the beginning and

end of words lists as is argued by Friedman, temporal distance of events are not

relevant criteria to take into account in order to determine the retrieval ability

of the subject. Friedman thus concludes very accurately that memory is not

chronologically organized. What is very interesting is that Flynn’s memoir

seems to follow the order in which he retrieved his memories, that is to say the

order of memory, and this is only corroborated by Friedman’s study. As Paula

240 William J. Friedman, “Memory Processes Underlying Human’s Chronological Sense of the Past”, in Time and Memory: Issues in Philosophy and Psychology by Christoph Hoerl and Teresa McCormack, 2001, Clarendon Press, p. 147. See also R.A. Block, “Temporal Judgments and Contextual Change”, in Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory and Cognition, n°8, 1982, p. 530-44; Zimmerman and Underwood, “Ordinal Position Knowledge within and across Lists as a Function of Instructions in Free-Recall Learning”, Journal of General Psychology, n° 79, 1968, p. 301-7.

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Morris accurately puts it, “Flynn is faithful to the fragmentary qualities of

memory. Instead of a chronological trudge, the book is a series of short, often

impressionistic chapters”241. This is very unusual, and may destabilize the

reader. But in fact it gives more impact to the memoir. Each chapter seems to

be a story in the story – which is helped, by the way, by the use of several

genres – with its own beginning, development, and end. But nonetheless, the

memoir constitutes a coherent whole, and it is not difficult for the reader to

follow the story, in which no links need to be made for a good understanding.

If Nick Flynn was trying to piece together his jigsaw puzzle-like life in this

memoir, he was successful since we feel no ruptures in the narrative and the

holes in it do not handicap our reading. Once one finishes reading the memoir,

one does not feel as though anything were missing, albeit the narrative is built

on holes. This is part of what makes the memoir unusual, along with the fact

that the author keeps jumping around in time. Nick Flynn does not seem to pay

any attention to the usual writing conventions, first and foremost to the

chronological order of narrative. As we have seen before, almost each chapter

begins with a date, probably because we have no other way as readers to know

when what we are reading is supposed to happen. For instance, the first three

chapters occur in 1989, and the fourth takes place in 1956, when Nick Flynn

was not even born. Then we jump forth in 1989 again. Even if this may seem

disorientating at first, the reading seems very natural, and the diverse anecdotes

are rather well pieced together. The fact that Nick Flynn tries to assemble his

life may be explained by the search for a cure for past pains and sufferings, as

241 Paula Morris, “The Whiskey Talked Daily”, The New Zealand Listener, Vol. 198, n° 3393, 21-27 May 2005.

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is put in plain words by Mark Muldoon: “The possibility of a cure resides in

the hope of substituting a coherent and acceptable story for the fragments of

memories and facts that are unintelligible as well as unbearable”242. We have

seen in our first part that some of Nick Flynn’s memories are unbearable, and

his story indeed forms a coherent whole. Thus we can consider the fact that he

wrote his memoir aiming at a cure as a possibility. Even if he does not seem at

all to be emotional as regards his past, this does not mean he did not suffer, as

is argued by Martin Conway:

Two commonly encountered forms of repression were

repression of the emotion associated with an experience with

preserved access to other knowledge of that experience and

the reverse, repression of the content of an experience with

preserved access to the emotion.243

This could also be an explanation for the holes in the narrative. One also has to

bear in mind that the kind of techniques and the style that Nick Flynn uses

were usually employed by authors in periods of crisis, when they were

suffering and felt apart from everyone but a few people. A change in literature

is often considered to be the first step for a social change, just as during the

modernist period. Indeed, at the beginning of the 1920s the world had

undergone huge changes partly because of World War One and the Bolshevik

Revolution. Several authors had noticed it and so they thought that since the 242 Mark Muldoon, Tricks of Time, 2006, Duquesne University Press, p. 217. 243 Martin A. Conway, “Phenomenological Records and the Self-Memory System”, Time and Memory: Issues in Philosophy and Psychology, 2001, Clarendon Press, p. 249. See also Sigmund Freud, Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety, Hogarth Press, 1957; J. W. Schooler, M. Bendiksen, Z. Ambadar, “Taking the middle-line: can we accommodate both fabricated and recovered memories of sexual abuse?”, in M. Conway, Recovered Memories and False Memories, 1997, Oxford University Press, p. 251-92.

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world had changed, the literary conventions also had to; a new world could not

be depicted with the same methods as an “old” one. Modernist authors such as

for instance Samuel Beckett are often alluded to by Nick Flynn. This is very

interesting, since Nick Flynn’s writing very often echoes what can be found in

modernist writings. It gives the impression that their roots are common, and

indeed they are. Both Flynn and modernist authors chose to destroy writing

conventions because they thought literature did not depict the world accurately

anymore. If their motivations were the same, their writings and methods also

were. Modernist works, in style as well as in form, resonate within Flynn’s

texts. This is true both for prose and poetry which are two very close genres.

Indeed, both are linked to one another and Nick Flynn shows it in his memoir

in which they are reunited. If prose and poetry were that different one could not

use both in the same work. Prose and poetry were recurrently used by

modernists and it is also the case for Nick Flynn. This is the reason why we

have chosen to find the different common points that exist between them. To

illustrate this we are going to draw comparisons between Flynn’s writings and

those of the two first and most famous modernist works: James Joyce’s Ulysses

and Thomas Stern Eliot’s poem “The Waste Land”. There are many common

points between James Joyce’s and Flynn’s style. More particularly, many

critics have seen in Nick Flynn’s chapter “Santa Lear” an echo of the Ulysses

chapter which has been associated to the Circe episode in Homer’s Odyssey,

such as for instance Mike Miliard who explains that “Santa Lear” is

“reminiscent of the “Circe” chapter in Joyce’s Ulysses in form and dark

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psychological implications”244. Indeed, both these chapters resemble very

much one another, first in form because they have all the characteristics of

theater plays. For instance we can find stage directions: “(He swerves, sidles,

stepasides, slips past and on)”245, “(He enters cell, curls up and snores loudly

over the rest of the donut-process recitation)”246 and they are both built upon

dialogs between several characters : Santa one, two, three, four, five and

Daughter One, two, three in Flynn’s memoir, and The children, The idiot,

Cissy Caffrey, The Virago, Stephen, Lynch and Bloom among others in

Joyce’s novel. Moreover both chapters express hallucinations from the part of

the authors. In “Circe”, we find more precisely drunken hallucinations, as

explained by David Hayman: “What has occurred, if not precisely a riot, is an

intellectual chaos appropriate to the drunken high spirits that bear psychic fruit

in the next chapter”247. This makes sense considering the inherent nonsense

that can be found in most dialogues:

244 Mike Miliard, “The prodigal father”, the Boston Phoenix, 24 September 2004. 245 James Joyce, Ulysses, 2008 [1922], Oxford University Press, p. 415. 246 Nick Flynn, Another Bullshit Night in Suck City, 2004, Faber and Faber, p. 277. 247 David Hayman, Ulysses, the Mechanics of Meaning, 1982, University of Wisconsin Press, p. 101.

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THE BELLS

Heigho ! Heigho !

BLOOM

(Desperately.) Wait. Stop. Gulls. Good heart. I saw. Innocence. Girl in

the monkeyhouse. Zoo. Lewd chimpanzees. (Breathlessly.) Pelvic

basin. Her artless blush un manned me. (Overcome with emotion.) I

left the precints. (He turns to a figure in the crowd, appealing.) Hynes,

may I speak to you? You know me. That three shillings you can keep.

If you want a little more…

HYNES

(Coldly.) You are a perfect stranger.

SECOND WATCH

(Points to the corner.) The bomb is here.

FIRST WATCH

Infernal machine with a time fuse.

BLOOM

No, no. Pig’s feet. I was at a funeral.248

We can see here that the dialogues are most unlikely, and so are the characters.

We can find the same kind of process in Flynn’s memoir, in “Santa Lear”. If

James Joyce’s “Circe” episode corresponds to an “intellectual chaos”, it is

quite the same in “Santa Lear”. Nick Flynn says so himself:

It’s a moment in the book, and it was a moment in my life,

when I had a psychic breakdown, and through the play I’m

trying to re-enact that psychic breakdown, without using

those words. Instead, the world becomes surreal, fragmented,

nightmarish.249

248 James Joyce, op. cit., p. 446-7. 249 Barney Haney, “Interview with Nick Flynn”, the Sycamore Review”, issue 18.2, 2006.

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Both the imaginary characters and the nonsensical sentences are redolent of

“Circe”, as is demonstrated by this extract for instance:

Santa Four: (through bullhorn) When the mind’s free the

body’s delicate.

Daughter Three: The wind means something here, the snow

means something. Footprints in the snow mean something.

No footprints lead to this man. The snow began falling at

midnight. He lay down before then. This means something.

Santa Three: Buried most of it below a tree – I’m not telling

you where, you bastard – but know it’s waiting for the dust to

settle.250

As can be seen in both these excerpts, there are many common points between

James Joyce’s writing and Nick Flynn’s. We can also find in both the same

style, with for example a chronic use of onomatopoeias: “Haltyaltyaltyall”251,

“the hoo-hoo, the ha-ha, the goo-goo, the ga-ga”252, and of a quite familiar

language:

THE WHORES

Are you going far, queer fellow?

How’s your middle leg?

Got a match on you?

Eh, come her till I stiffen it for you.253

250 Nick Flynn, Another Bullshit Night in Suck City, 2004, Faber and Faber, p. 281. 251 James Joyce, Ulysses, 2008 [1922], Oxford University Press, p. 414. 252 Nick Flynn, op. cit., p. 278. 253 James Joyce, op. cit., p. 428.

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And we also find that kind of language in Flynn’s memoir with words such as

“cocksucker” for instance. But more than resemblances as far as the style is

concerned we also have similarities on more thoughtful items, which are not

limited to both chapters we have seen. For instance, we can see that in both

novels a great deal is told about the consubstantiality of father and son. It is the

case in Flynn’s memoir between his father and himself, as is shown by the

riddle: “Brothers and sisters I have none / But that man’s father is my father’s

son”254. In Ulysses it is the same between Stephen Dedalus and his father: “He

is in my father. I am in his son”255. This phenomenon is truthfully explained by

Frances Restuccia, who tells that:

The form [Dedalus’s] rebellion took inevitably was a

repudiation of his attachment, of his resemblance, to those

fathers […] which attachment and resemblance had first to be

reconstructed (literarily) in order to subsequently be broken

down.256

We can hardly fail to be struck by the numerous similarities between both these

novels, and thus it is noticeable that Nick Flynn’s writing has been influenced

by modernist works. One could wonder if it is the same for his poems. To try

and answer this question, we are going to study the possible similarities

between some poems from Some Ether and T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land”.

First of all, as far as style is concerned, we have many common points, such as

the use of enjambments: “April is the cruelest month, breeding / Lilacs out of

254 Nick Flynn, Another Bullshit Night in Suck City, 2004, Faber and Faber, p. 208. 255 James Joyce, op. cit., p.187 256 Frances Restuccia, Joyce and the Law of the Father, 1989, Yale University Press, p. 15.

96

the dead land, mixing / Memory and desire, stirring”257, “Your fingers

disappear inside / & my fingers follow. I see myself reflected / in your face,

you smile & I realize / I’m smiling also. There is so much”258. This is part of a

need of the authors to break with the conventions, as explained by Conrad

Aiken: “The poem succeeds – as it brilliantly does – by virtue of its

incoherence, not of its plan; by virtue of its ambiguities, not of its

explanations”259. Mentioning incoherence, we cannot avoid speaking of the

fragmentary quality of both authors’ writing. Let us take an excerpt from “The

Waste Land” to illustrate this:

‘On Margate Sands

I can connect

Nothing with nothing.

The broken fingernails of dirty hands.

My people humble people who expect

Nothing’

la la

To Carthage then I came

Burning burning burning burning

O Lord Thou pluckest me out

O Lord Thou pluckest

burning260

In this poem Eliot completely breaks with the writing conventions of his time.

Indeed at the beginning of the twentieth century literature was pretty

conventional; syntactic rules could not be avoided – thus fragmentary writing

257 Thomas Stern Eliot, the Waste Land and other poems, 1999 [1922], Faber and Faber, p. 23. 258 Nick Flynn, Some Ether, 2000, Graywolf Press, p. 82. 259 Conrad Aiken, “The Waste Land review”, The New Republic, 1923. 260 T.S. Eliot, op. cit., p. 34.

97

had to be banished – the narrative voice had to be unique and the semantic

structure could not be broken. But Eliot defied these rules. First of all his

writing is fragmentary; we indeed have incomplete sentences such as “O Lord

Thou pluckest” which totally disregard syntax. But we also have lines which

are completely incoherent and do not make any sense as can be seen in the

following excerpt: “The broken fingernails of dirty hands / My people humble

people who expect / Nothing”. Not only do these lines make no sense at all, but

they are also not linked to one another in a semantic way. Needless to say that

versification is also disregarded in the poem. One can also find onomatopoeias

such as “la la” which is in the middle of the poem and is not connected to

anything either in a syntactic or in a semantic way. The following lines: “I can

connect / Nothing with nothing” perfectly illustrate the nonsense that can be

found in this extract, and more broadly in the whole of “the Waste Land”.

Incoherence and fragmentary writing are also characteristic of Flynn’s poems,

as has been studied in our first part: “One doctor asks if I hear things / Other

people don’t / One said frostbite said / all your toes said amputate / but I

walked”261. The usual writing conventions are broken by both Joyce and Flynn.

For instance they recurrently use different narrative voices: “And they asked

me in to dinner, to get the beauty of it hot- / HURRY UP PLEASE IT’S TIME

/ HURRY UP PLEASE IT’S TIME / Goodnight Bill. Goodnight Lou.

Goodnight May. / Goodnight. / Ta ta. Goodnight. Goodnight”262. As can be

seen in this passage, we do not even know who the narrator is. This is the case

not only in this excerpt, but in the whole of “the Waste Land”, which is done

261 Nick Flynn, Some Ether, 2000, Graywolf Press, p. 45. 262 T.S. Eliot, op. cit, p. 29.

98

on purpose to underline the fact that individuality means nothing, contrarily to

society. This is also the case in Flynn’s poems, for instance in “Fragment

(found inside my mother)”, where sometimes Nick is the narrator, and

sometimes it is his mother. The difference with “The Waste Land” is that here

we know who is talking thanks to italics, but all the same several narrative

voices are mixed. Moreover, the use of several languages does not really help

the understanding of the poems, which are already very ambiguous: “‘Or with

his nails he’ll dig it up again! You! Hypocrite lecteur! – mon semblable, - mon

frère!’”263, “Elsewhere, Mon Amour”264. In the examples we have given, we

can see that Flynn’s memoir really echoes the style of modernist writings. But

it is also the case as far as ideas are concerned. Both writers are very

pessimistic, and are bitter at the fact that time passes so fast. This can be seen

in “The Waste Land” in part three of the poem: “The Fire Sermon”, where the

author expresses a great melancholy at the fact that everyone has left the city:

“The nymphs are departed. / Sweet Thames, run softly, till I end my song. The

river bears no […] testimony of summer nights. The nymphs are departed. And

their friends, the loitering heirs of city directors; / Departed, have left no

addresses”265. Here we can notice that the poet feels depressed at the fact that

things change so fast, and that no “testimony” of things past is left. We have

already seen this phenomenon in Flynn’s poetry. We feel in both him and Eliot

a kind of gloom and sadness because time flies. They are very pessimistic, and

disturbed, which can be noticed through their writing. Indeed, one of the

narrators in “The Waste Land” tells at one point: “I can connect / Nothing with 263 T.S. Eliot, the Waste Land and other poems, 1999 [1922], Faber and Faber, p. 25. 264 Nick Flynn, Some Ether, 2000, Graywolf Press, p. 59. 265 T.S. Eliot, op. cit., p. 30.

99

Nothing”. The reader feels quite the same when reading this poem and some of

Flynn’s. It is as though the poets had thrown ideas on the paper without making

any links between them. But this was voluntary, as explained by Eliot himself:

Any obscurity of the poem, on first readings, is due to the

suppression of “links in the chain”, of explanatory and

connecting matter, and not to incoherence, or to love of

cryptogram. The justification of such abbreviation of method

is that the sequence of images coincides and concentrates into

one intense impression of barbaric civilization. The reader

has to allow the images to fall into his memory successively

without questioning the reasonableness of each at the

moment, so that, at the end, a total effect is produced.266

This perfectly describes the method used by both Eliot and Flynn. Indeed, even

if their writing first looks like a draft and is not very clear, at the end the reader

has a feeling of wholeness. Nothing is missing, what the authors wanted to

transmit is clear: disorder, chaos and non chronology is the new form literature

should take.

266 Thomas Stern Eliot, Preface to Anabasis by St John Perse, 1970 [1924], Harvest Books.

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CONCLUSION

As has been seen through this thesis, Nick Flynn uses time in a very

peculiar way. He first makes of it a tool to discover his identity, then he

indirectly shows that time has an effect on memory, and lastly we can see that

in order to cope for the damages left by time, Nick Flynn uses the collage

technique. His style is very unusual because of the way time is used. Indeed,

what is disturbing at first for the reader is that the memoir is non chronological.

But then it induces lots of other mixes, such as that of narrative voices and

places. First of all, we chose to explain how Flynn tries to discover his identity

by reconstructing his past. To that aim, we first had to define the genre Flynn’s

memoir belongs to. Memoirs are subgenres of autobiography, and we thought

it was crucial to identify that genre and give its characteristics. It mattered

because we could then try to find out, through different examples of

autobiographical works by various authors of diverse periods, what one seeks

when creating an autobiography. We then observed through this generic

analysis that autobiographical writings put a particular emphasis on the quest

for identity, on introspection and discovery of the self. To illustrate this we

have quoted a number of writers who explained the reasons why they felt the

need to write an autobiography, what they sought during this enterprise, and

the effect it had upon them. It was easy to see that they were all trying, in a

nutshell, to discover more about themselves, but also to settle their identities

down in human time. This is the case for Nick Flynn, who endeavored in his

memoir to discover his identity. However, he was pretty unconventional in the

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method he used. Indeed, when other authors tried to make a profound self-

reflection work – that is to say, only based on an analysis of their own

behavior, feelings and thoughts – Nick Flynn begun with a most insightful

examination of both his parents’ actions. Indeed, we have seen that his first

book of poetry, Some Ether, is almost totally dedicated to his mother Jody,

when his memoir on the contrary can be assimilated to a kind of behavioral

analysis of his father Jonathan – but they are all the same considered as

autobiographical works. This seems quite logical, when one comes to think of

it, since it has been scientifically proven that genes pass from generation to

generation and thus our parents’ lives are a possible representation of our

future lives. Nevertheless, the problem that Nick Flynn faced during this

process of identification is that he could not really see his parents without

thinking he did not want to become like them. His mother committed suicide

when she was very young, and before that she was depressed and we could

even say lunatic. On the other hand, his father is a homeless drunkard. One can

understand, in view of the circumstances, why Nick Flynn is scared of

heredity. There are many signs in his memoir which show that he fears it.

Indeed, one can see that the more Flynn realizes there are resemblances

between his father and himself and the more he notices at what point his life is

an echo to that of his father, the more scared he is of becoming like him. But

what Nick Flynn also fears, through his fear of heredity, is the cyclic aspect of

time. Indeed, as has been studied earlier on, time appears like an unfair notion

in Another Bullshit Night in Suck City. It both makes us forget and lose what

we do not want to, and renders some other things – as heredity – inescapable

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and unchanging when we would like to forget them. This is why Nick Flynn

sees his mother’s suicide but also heredity as unjust damages left by time. By

the way, the fact that Nick Flynn is afraid of turning out to be like his father

must be hard to tell, as many other things in the memoir. If sometimes

memories are hard to retrieve because they happened so long ago – memory

can erase memories, and even sometimes modify them or construct false ones,

others are just unspeakable. Indeed, Flynn sometimes writes memories of

which he is ashamed as we have seen previously – such as for instance the fact

that he at first did not help his own father off the streets – but he tells them all

the same, and very spontaneously. He almost has a detached tone, as has been

studied earlier on, which makes him free of any self-pity, and thus more

reliable than is usual in autobiographical works. What adds to this kind of

confidence the reader cannot help feeling when reading Flynn’s memoir is the

recurrence of holes in the narrative. This could for sure seem quite paradoxical,

but in fact – as was argued by Lejeune, and examined in our second part – they

only make the reader more implicated in the narrative – in view of the fact that

he has to interpret, to make his own opinion about what should fill the holes –

and this role with which usually he is not provided delights him. Even though

one could argue that this is only theory, in reality it is also true in the facts.

Definitely, if the reader feels he has a part to play in Flynn’s story, he cannot

do anything but feel concerned by it. What is more, the autobiographical pact

also backs Flynn’s credibility, given that by signing his memoir with his name

and calling it a “memoir”, it cannot be denied that he has an intention to honor

the signature. Nonetheless, even though we have shown that Flynn is reliable,

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it is clear that his past is confused and blurred in his mind, mostly because of

the passage of time, which leaves huge damages as far as memory is

concerned. Not only does time pass and, like it or not, changes things we do

not want to, but it can also erase or modify memories we were striving to keep

unchanged. Nick Flynn copes for the damages of time with the help of the

literary collage. It is indeed true to say that Another Bullshit Night in Suck City

can be put side by side with a jigsaw-puzzle of Flynn’s life. We have the

impression that in it Nick Flynn is trying to piece together the various pieces of

his life together, but it is difficult since some pieces are missing – hence the

holes in the narrative. The fact that Nick Flynn is trying to piece his life

together and build a narrative upon it shows that he wants to settle down his

memories – but also his identity – in human history and more specifically in

human time. This corresponds in a nutshell to the author’s need to approach

immortality, or at least to make some parts of himself – memories and

anecdotes – eternal. By writing his autobiography, he tries to stop time. Indeed,

the story he has written will never change, it will always remain the same no

matter what happens. One part of Nick Flynn will always be part of human

time, thanks to the collage technique. But the latter is used by Nick Flynn in

quite a peculiar way. Indeed, not only does he combine numerous literary

genres and techniques, but he also mingles periods of time, narrative voices

and places. It can seem fairly disturbing at first – all the more when it is

combined with the holes in the narrative – but actually the memoir is somewhat

agreeably structured and seems to flow in an extraordinarily natural way. One

does not feel as if anything was missing, there is no impression of omission

104

during the reading, but of wholeness. The holes in the narrative along with the

literary collage form the very core of Flynn’s memoir, in which they are in

their right place. The collage technique is often used in literature in periods of

crisis or of change. Nevertheless, this did not happen very regularly which adds

to the peculiarity of Flynn’s work. But his memoir does not resemble other

works which have been written with the same technique. In this, Flynn is really

unconventional. We almost feel as if his memoir did not function as a piece of

literature, but as memory itself. This is easily proven when studying some of

William Friedman’s essays. His thesis, basically, is that memory is not

chronologically organized. Results of some scientific experiments are here to

back his argument. When comparing the results of Friedman’s experiments and

the structure of Flynn’s memoir, it becomes clear that both function in the same

way. Both are not organized chronologically, both sometimes pay attention to

insignificant details when vital elements are just forgotten. This, added to other

items such as the use of different narrative voices, makes us draw a parallel

between Nick Flynn and the modernist period. We have chosen to compare

Nick Flynn’s poems with Eliot’s the Waste Land, and his memoir with Joyce’s

Ulysses. We have decided to opt for these works on purpose, since they are

considered the first modernist writings – they were both published in 1922.

Moreover the fact that we have here one poem and one novel enabled us to

compare them accurately with Flynn’s works since he composed both poetry

and prose. We came across more than a few similarities in this study. For

instance, the three authors rebelled against the writing conventions of their

time, they used the literary collage, onomatopoeias, and to speak more

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generally their style and thoughts were revolutionary. The three of them wrote

in order to make their resentfulness public, and even though the context was

not the same in 2004 as it was in 1922 the voices of the first modernist writers

resonate within Flynn’s narrative.

Having studied in depth these ideas in our paper, we can now say that

our thesis is verified. Indeed, it is true to say that Nick Flynn applies the

collage technique in an autobiographical work in order to find his own identity.

But had he not made such a remarkable use of time, his memoir would not

have been that out of the ordinary. As has been seen earlier on, Nick Flynn

uses time as a tool. By manipulating it, by choosing not to organize his memoir

chronologically, he succeeds in piecing his life and memories together. The use

Nick Flynn makes of time allows him to write a memoir that functions as

memory and this is fascinating. Reading Another Bullshit Night in Suck City is

not at all like reading how Nick Flynn interpreted his own life, thoughts and

memories. It is rather like reading directly into the author’s mind. This is the

method Nick Flynn chose to discover his identity, and this enterprise was

seemingly successful, since at the end of the memoir he appears to have found

a rather balanced life, which may lead the reader to think that he did well in

assembling the pieces of his jigsaw-puzzle like life together.

As has been said above, writing this thesis on Flynn’s memoir was not

an easy task, mostly because of the lack of sources – ironically, it seems to be

akin to the difficulties Flynn encountered – which seems logical since the

memoir was written in 2004. Hence the fact that not that many people wrote

about it. We fortunately had lots of interviews to work with, but absolutely no

106

essay or book was written on Flynn’s memoir. Knowing that we could not

build a thesis only upon interviews, we decided to work with mostly theoretical

books and essays about quite concrete items such as works on autobiography

(Philippe Lejeune’s works helped a lot here), and numerous autobiographical

works (with testimonies of authors, who told their aim in writing

autobiographies). But we also chose more abstract books and essays on

conscience, narrative, time, memory, loss, psychiatry, psychology and others.

This helped us having a rather good idea of the functioning of human memory,

the perception of time, among a number of things that – one could think – have

nothing to do with literature. But in fact literature – and all the more writing of

the self – has a great deal to do with psychology. Indeed, psychology is first

and foremost an introspection work, and we have seen that it is also the case

for Flynn’s memoir. In this, Another Bullshit Night in Suck City is much more

than a literary collage. It is a collage, but not only literary to some extent.

Indeed, it mixes lots of other disciplines such as philosophy, psychology and

others. We could wonder if it is one of the characteristics of autobiographical

works. Indeed, the motivation of autobiographies being the quest for identity –

which is not literary but psychological – they cannot be only literary.

Autobiographies have a great deal to do with introspection and thus they have

to do not only with literature but also with psychology, philosophy and science.

Another common point between Flynn’s memoir and psychology is that time is

a great issue in both. As we have seen earlier on – with Simone Weil for

instance – time is a great mystery but also a huge source of misery. Our human

questions about time cannot be answered and this is why authors, but also

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scientists and even the average man feel concerned about it, and have been

writing about it for so long.

It would be utterly fascinating to try and find if this thesis can be

verified on a broader scale, to see if our thesis can be applied to the other

works Nick Flynn wrote. I think for instance of his last work, a theater play

called Alice Invents a Little Game and Alice Always wins. It would probably

give appealing results to have it compared to a modernist theater play, Samuel

Beckett’s Waiting for Godot. Furthermore it would give a great impact to the

fact that Nick Flynn himself refers a lot to the theater of the absurd, and more

particularly to Samuel Beckett. We could then be able to tell if modernism

vibrates in all of Nick Flynn’s works, which would be an enthralling ground

for exploration. But then we could also be able to tell if Flynn’s theater play

functions as memory too, like Another Bullshit Night in Suck City. Even

though the story in Alice Plays a Little Game and Alice Always Wins is told

chronologically, lots of scientists other than William Friedman – whom we

have studied earlier on – believe that memory is chronologically organized.

One could then study the arguments given by scientists, but also the

experiments and results they found and compare them to the functioning of

Flynn’s theater play. This would enable us to see whether all of Flynn’s pieces

of literature function as memory, either according to chronological or to non

chronological theories.

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CONTENTS.

− INTRODUCTION………………………………………………………..…p. 2.

− PART ONE: DISCOVERY OF THE SELF THROUGH THE RECONSTRUCTION OF THE PAST……………………………...….…p. 12.

− 1. Autobiography or Memoir? Still a way to discover the self…..p. 12. − 2. Looking through your past to find your own identity…………p. 20. − 3. Fear of heredity, fear of the past……………………...….…....p. 36.

− PART TWO: THE EFFECTS OF TIME ON MEMORY AND ON

MEMORIES………………………………………………………...……..p. 41.

− 1. A past hard to recover……………..………………...…….…..p. 41. − 2. Detachment of the narrator: reliability?.....................................p. 51. − 3. Holes in the narrative………………………...………………..p. 59.

− PART THREE: COLLAGE AS A WAY TO RECOVER THE PAST............................................................................................................p. 67.

− 1. Mixing literary genres and techniques………….…..…………p. 67. − 2. Mixing periods of time, places and voices...………..……...….p. 77. − 3. A memoir that functions as the memory does……….………...p. 81.

− CONCLUSION……………………………………………………...…….p. 95.

− SOURCES…………………………………………………...…………….p. 94.

− INDEX……………………………………………………………...…….p. 101.

109

SOURCES.

1. Corpus.

− FLYNN, Nick. Another Bullshit Night in Suck City, 2004, Faber and

Faber, 340 p.

− FLYNN, Nick. Some Ether, 2000, Graywolf Press, 64 p.

2. Other Books.

− ANDERSON, Linda. Autobiography, 2007, Routledge, 176 p.

− BARNES, Jonathan. The Complete Works of Aristotle, Vol. 1, 1984,

Princeton University Press, 1256 p.

− BARTHES, Roland. Roland Barthes, 1994 [1977], MacMillan, 186 p.

− BARTHES, Roland. Roland Barthes par Roland Barthes, 1995 [1975],

Seuil, 159 p.

− BERGSON, Henri. Essai sur les Données Immédiates de la

Conscience, 1997, Presse Universitaire de France, 192 p.

− BERGSON, Henri. L'Energie Spirituelle, 1924, Alcan, 227 p.

− BERGSON, Henri. Mind-Energy: Lectures and Essays, 1975 [1920],

Greenwood Press, 262 p.

110

− BERGSON, Henri. Time and Free Will, 1971, George Allen, 252 p.

− CAMUS, Albert. Le Mythe de Sisyphe, Essai sur l’Absurde, 1962

[1942], Gallimard, 186 p.

− DE BEAUVOIR, Simone. La Force des Choses, 1981, Folio, 512 p.

− ELIOT, Thomas Stern. “Preface to Anabasis by St John Perse”, 1970

[1924], Harvest Books, 110 p.

− ELIOT, Thomas Stern. The Waste Land and Other Poems, 1999 [1922],

Faber and Faber, 80 p.

− FREUD, Sigmund. Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety, Hogarth Press,

1957, 172 p.

− GROSS, David. Lost Time, on Remembering and Forgetting in Late

Modern Culture, 2000, University of Massachusetts Press, 199 p.

− HAYMAN, David. Ulysses, the Mechanics of Meaning, 1982,

University of Wisconsin Press, 186 p.

− HOERL, Christoph and MCCORMACK, Teresa. Time and Memory:

Issues in Philosophy and Psychology, 2001, Clarendon Press, 440 p.

− JOYCE, James. Ulysses, 2008 [1922], Oxford University Press, 980 p.

− KEATS, John. The Letters of John Keats, Vol.1, 1974, Harvard

University Press, 920 p.

− LECARME-TABONE, Éliane. Éliane Lecarme-Tabone commente les

Mémoires d’une Jeune Fille Rangée de Simone de Beauvoir, 2000,

Gallimard, 266 p.

− LEIRIS, Michel. L’Age d’Homme, 1973, Gallimard, 213 p.

111

− LEJEUNE, Philippe. Le Pacte Autobiographique 2: Signes de Vie,

2005, Seuil, 273 p.

− LEJEUNE, Philippe. Le Pacte Autobiographique, 1996 [1975], 381 p.

− MARCUS, Laura. Auto/biographical Discourses, 1994, Manchester

University Press, 256 p.

− MIRAUX, Jean-Philippe. L’Autobiographie, Ecriture de Soi et

Sincérité, 1996, Nathan Université, 128 p.

− MULDOON, Mark S. Tricks of Time, 2006, Duquesne University

Press, 299 p.

− NUSSBAUM, Felicity. The Autobiographical Subject: Gender and

Ideology in Eighteenth-Century England, 1989, John Hopkins

University Press, 264 p.

− OLNEY, James. Autobiography: Essays Theoretical and Critical, 1980,

Princeton University Press, 360 p.

− PASCAL, Roy. Design and Truth in Autobiography, 1960, Harvard

University Press, 202 p.

− RESTUCCIA, Frances. Joyce and the Law of the Father, 1989, Yale

University Press, 208 p.

− RICOEUR, Paul. Du Texte à l’Action: Essais d’Herméneutique II,

1998, Seuil, 452 p.

− RICOEUR, Paul. From Text to Action: Essays in Hermeneutics II,

1991, Northwestern University Press, 360 p.

− RICOEUR, Paul. Oneself as Another, 1995, the University of Chicago

Press, 363 p.

112

− RICOEUR, Paul. Soi-même comme un Autre, 1990, Seuil, 424 p.

− RICOEUR, Paul. Temps et Récit, t. 1, 1983, Seuil, 404 p.

− RICOEUR, Paul. Time and Narrative, 1984, the University of Chicago

Press, 281 p.

− ROUSSEAU, Jean Jacques. Les Confessions, Livre XII, 1858,

Charpentier, 649 p.

− ROUSSEAU, Jean Jacques. The Confessions of Jean Jacques

Rousseau, 2005 [1953], Penguin Books, 608 p.

− SARTRE, Jean Paul. Les Mots, 1972, Gallimard, 215 p.

− SCHECHTMAN, Marya. The Constitution of Selves, 1996, Cornell

University Press, 169 p.

− SHAKESPEARE, William. King Lear, 2007, Penguin Popular Classics,

160 p.

− ST AUGUSTINE. Confessions, 1964 [397], Penguin Books, 13

Volumes.

− WEIL, Simone. Leçons de Philosophie (Roanne 1933-1934), 1959,

Plon, 258 p.

− WEIL, Simone. Lectures on Philosophy, 1970 [1978], Cambridge

University Press, 240 p.

113

3. Essays.

− CONWAY, Martin. “Autobiographical Knowledge and

Autobiographical Memories”, in Remembering our Past: Studies in

Autobiographical Memories by D.C. Rubin, 1996, Cambridge

University Press, p. 67-93.

− CONWAY, Martin. “Phenomenological Records and the Self-Memory

System”, in Time and Memory: Issues in Philosophy and Psychology

by Teresa McCormack and Christoph Hoerl, 2001, Clarendon Press, p.

235-56.

− FRIEDMAN, William J. “Memory for the Time of Past Events”, in

Psychological Bulletin, n° 113, 1993, p. 44-6.

− FRIEDMAN, William J. “Memory Processes Underlying Human’s

Chronological Sense of the Past”, in Time and Memory: Issues in

Philosophy and Psychology by Teresa McCormack and Christoph

Hoerl, 2001, Clarendon Press, p. 139-68.

− KEYMER, Thomas. “Sterne and Romantic Autobiography”, in the

Cambridge Companion to English Literature, 1740-1830, 2004,

Cambridge University Press, p. 173-93.

− LEJEUNE, Philippe. “The Autobiographical Contract”, in French

Literary Theory Today, 1982, Cambridge University Press, p. 196-222.

− SCHOOLER, J.W., BENDIKSEN, M., AMBADAR, Z. “Taking the

Middle-Line: Can we Accommodate both Fabricated and Recovered

114

Memories of Sexual Abuse?”, in Recovered Memories and False

Memories by Martin Conway, 1997, Oxford University Press, p.

251-92.

4. Articles.

− AIKEN, Conrad. “Review of Thomas Stern Eliot’s The Waste Land”, in

the New Republic, 1923.

− BLOCK, R.A. “Temporal Judgments and Contextual Change”, in

Journal of Experimental Psychology, Learning, Memory and

Cognition, n° 8, 1982, p. 530-44.

− BOLICK, Kate. “Review of Nick Flynn’s Another Bullshit Night in

Suck City”, in the Boston Globe, April 2005.

− GIBSON, Wesley. “Interview with Nick Flynn”, in MARY Magazine,

February 2007.

− HANEY, Barney. “Interview with Nick Flynn”, in the Sycamore

Review, n° 18.2, 2006.

− LEMON, Alex. “Interview with Nick Flynn”, in the Bloomsbury

Review, 2006.

− MEWSHAW, Michael. “Fill in the Blanks”, in the Washington Post, 28

September 2004.

115

− MILIARD, Mike. “The Prodigal Father”, in the Boston Phoenix, 24-30

September 2004.

− MORRIS, Paula. “The Whiskey Talked Daily”, in the New Zealand

Listener, Vol. 198, n° 3393, 21-27 May 2005.

− Paper Street staff, “Email Interview with Nick Flynn”, in Paper Street,

spring 2005.

− PHILLIPS, Rodney. “Email interview with Nick Flynn”, in Tucson and

Houston, April 2005.

− PRIEST, Christopher. “Poor Lore”, in the Guardian, Saturday 2 April

2005.

Psychological Bulletin, n° 113, 1993, p. 44-46.

− REIDY, Darren. “The Handmaid’s Tale”, in the Village Voice, 14

September 2004.

− SAUER, Jess. “Interview with Nick Flynn”, in the Austin Chronicle, 29

October 2004.

− SOUTHEY, Robert. “Review of the work of Francisco Vieira”, in the

Quarterly Review, Vol. 1, May 1809.

− STANTON, Maureen. Michigan University Press, Vol. 7, n° 2, Fall

2005.

− TAYLOR, William. The Monthly Review, 2nd series, XXIV, 1797.

− VIDA, Vendela. “Review of Nick Flynn’s Another Bullshit Night in

Suck City”, in The New York Times, 19 September 2004.

− VIGIL, Regina. “Interview with Nick Flynn”, in Glass Mountain, May

2007.

116

− ZIMMERMAN and UNDERWOOD, “Ordinal Position Knowledge

Within and Across Lists as a Function of Instructions in Free-Recall

Learning”, in Journal of General Psychology, n° 79, 1968, p. 301-7.

5. Web sites.

− BIRNBAUM, Robert. “Interview with Nick Flynn”,

www.identitytheory.com, interview posted on 22 March 2005 and

consulted on 15 May 2009 at 08:36 am.

− PEELE, Roger. “Psychiatric Services”,

www.psychservices.psychiatryonline.org, website consulted on 12 May

2009 at 06:56 am.

− REYMOND, Laurence. “Review of Nick Flynn’s Another Bullshit

Night in Suck City”, www.fluctuat.net, review posted on 19 April 2006

and consulted on 12 May 2009 at 08:45 am.

117

INDEX

A

Abelard, Peter Historia Calamitatum, 13

Aiken, Conrad Review of the Waste Land by Thomas Stern Eliot, 93

Anderson, Linda Autobiography, 15, 53

B

Barnes, Jonathan The Complete Works of Aristotle, 80

Barthes, Roland Roland Barthes, 57, 64 Roland Barthes par Roland Barthes, 64

Beckett, Samuel Endgame, 45 Waiting for Godot, 102

Bergson, Henri Essai sur les Données Immédiates de la Conscience, 63 L'Energie Spirituelle, 67 Mind-Energy: Lectures and Essays, 67 Time and Free Will, 63

Birnbaum, Robert Interview with Nick Flynn, 5, 50

Block, R.A. "Temporal Judgments and Contextual Change", 85

Bolick, Kate Review of Another Bullshit Night in Suck City by Nick Flynn, 76

C

Caesar, Julius Commentarii de Bello Gallico, 13

Camus, Albert Le Mythe de Sisiphe, Essai sur l'Absurde, 80 The Myth of Sisyphus, 80

Conway, Martin "Autobiographical Memories and Autobiographical Knowledge", 64 "Phenomenological Records and the Self-Memory System", 64, 67, 87

118

D

D’Israeli, Isaac Miscellanies, 13

Dahl, Roald Boy and Going Solo, 14

De Beauvoir, Simone, 66 La Force des Choses, 66 Mémoires d’une Jeune Fille Rangée, 19

De Beauvoir, Simone, 19 Dos Passos, John

Manhattan Transfer, 69

E

Eliot, Thomas Stern Preface to Anabasis by St John Perse, 96 the Waste Land, 11, 88, 100

F

Flynn, Nick Blind Huber, 2 Some Ether, 2, 20, 98

Freud, Sigmund Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety, 87

Friedman, William J. "Memory for the Time of Past Events", 84 "Memory Processes Underlying Human's Chronological Sense of the Past", 84

G

Gibson, Wesley Interview with Nick Flynn, 69

Gross, David Lost Time, 62

Gusdorf, Georges, 16

H

Haney, Barney Interview with Nick Flynn, 90

Hayman, David Ulysses, the Mechanics of Meaning, 89

Hayman, David , intellectual chaos, 89 Hippo (of), Augustine

119

Confessions, 6 Hoerl, Christoph

Time and Memory, Issues in Philosophy and Psychology, 6 Homer

the Odyssey, 88

J

Joyce, James Ulysses, 11, 88, 100

K

Keats, John the Letters of John Keats, 70

Keats, John, distilled prose, 70 Keymer, Thomas

the Cambridge Companion to English Literature, 1740-1830, 13

L

Lacan, Jacques, mirror stage, 53 Lecarme-Tabone, Eliane

Eliane Lecarme-Tabone commente les Mémoires d'une jeune fille rangée de Simone de Beauvoir, 19

Leiris, Michel L’Age d’Homme, 19

Lejeune, Philippe "The Autobiographical Contract", 60 Le Pacte Autobiographique, 2, 55 Le Pacte Autobiographique 2, 65

Lejeune, Philippe, sujet traité, 14 Lejeune, Philippe, the Autobiographical Pact, 3, 8, 60, 99 Lemon, Alex

Interview with Nick Flynn, 41

M

Marcus, Laura Auto/biographical Discourses, 15

McCormack, Teresa Time and Memory, Issues in Philosophy and Psychology, 6

Mewshaw, Michael "Fill in the Blanks", review of Another Bullshit Night in Suck City by Nick Flynn, 61

Miliard, Mike "The Prodigal Father", Interview with Nick Flynn, 39

Miraux, Jean-Philippe

120

l'Autobiographie, Ecriture de soi et sincérité, 16 Morris, Paula

"The Whiskey Talked Daily", Review of Another Bullshit Night in Suck City by Nick Flynn, 86 Muldoon, Mark S.

Tricks of Time, 5, 79, 87

N

Nabokov, Vladimir Speak, Memory, 13

Nussbaum, Felicity the Autobiographical Subject: Gender and Ideology in Eighteenth-Century England, 13, 62

O

Olney, James Essays Theoretical and Critical, 16

P

Pascal, Roy Design and Truth in Autobiography, 15

Peele, Roger, 65 Phillips, Rodney

Interview with Nick Flynn, 70 Priest, Christopher

Review of Another Bullshit Night in Suck City by Nick Flynn, 83

R

Reidy, Darren "The Handmaid's Tale", Review of Another Bullshit Night in Suck City by Nick Flynn, 45

Restuccia, Frances Joyce and the Law of the Father, 92

Reymond, Laurence, 66 Ricoeur, Paul

Du Texte à l'Action: Essais d'Herméneutique II, 6 From Text to Action, Essays in Hermeneutics II, 6 Oneself as Another, 9 Soi-même comme un Autre, 9 Temps et Récit, 63 Time and Narrative, 63

Ricoeur, Paul, narrative identity, 9, 63 Ricoeur, Paul, temporal experience, 63 Rousseau, Jean Jacques

Les Confessions, 18 the Confessions of Jean Jacques Rousseau, 13, 18

121

S

Salinger, J.D. the Catcher in the Rye, 32

Sartre, Jean Paul Les Mots, 20

Sauer, Jess Interview with Nick Flynn, 3, 60

Schechtman, Marya The Constitution of Selves, 10

Schooler, J.W. "Taking the middle-line: can we accomodate both fabricated and recovered memories of sexual

abuse?", 87 Shakespeare, William

King Lear, 49 Southey, Robert, auto-biography, 12 Stanton, Maureen

Interview with Nick Flynn, 71, 78 Stein, Gertrude

The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, 13

T

Taylor, William, 12

U

Underwood "Ordinal Position Knowledge within and across Lists as a function of Instructions in Free-

Recall Learning", 85

V

Vida, Vendela Review of Another Bullshit Night in Suck City by Nick Flynn, 80

Vigil, Regina Interview with Nick Flynn, 53, 66

W

Weil, Simone Lectures on Philosophy, 81

122

Z

Zimmerman "Ordinal Position Knowledge within and across Lists as a Function of Instructions in Free-

Recall Learning", 85