Remembering Identity: "Wilfred Gordon McDonald Partridge"

"Then, she started to remember..."

I launched this Substack with two intentions: first, to explore story/narrative’s ability to frame the way we look at the world; second, to reflect on what our reaction to narrative works (books, stories, films, plays, television programs, etc.) can tell us about ourselves. My previous posts have focused on the first bit. Today I want to start to plumb the second.

I struggled to pick the first narrative work to write about. I considered choosing a film, partly because I love them and because they’re readily accessible. I also thought of short stories, novels, and plays. But for my first attempt, I decided a shorter work would serve me better, and so I’ll start where the awareness of stories began for me: with a children’s book.

I encountered Wilfred Gordon McDonald Partridge, Australian author Mem Fox’s second book, published in 1984, on LeVar Burton’s miraculous Reading Rainbow in the early in the 1990s. As a new father, I was always looking for high quality children’s entertainment, and I couldn’t resist a show about children’s books. (Don’t be surprised if I discuss other books that appeared on that program again.)

The title character is a young child who lives next door to an “old folks home.” He enjoys his neighbors and knows them well. We’re introduced to several of them, and in particular we meet “his favourite person of all…Miss Nancy Alison Delacourt Cooper because she had four names just as he did.”

But one day, Wilfred hears his parents discussing Miss Nancy and lamenting that at 96 she’s losing her memory. “What’s a memory?” he asks, and dissatisfied with his father’s answer that it’s “something you remember,” he questions the other old folks to get a clearer idea. One describes it as “something warm,” another as “something from long ago.” A third tells him memory is “something that makes you cry,” and a fourth says, “something that makes you laugh.” And finally he’s told that it’s “something as precious as gold.”

To restore her memory, Wilfred collects five objects that fit his young child’s understanding of each of those descriptions, and presents them to her. Miss Nancy is surprised. “Then, she started to remember…”

The rest of the story brings me to tears every time I read it (including twice today); from the beginning it’s affected me deeply. My own children are long past picture books, but a few years ago I bought a hardback copy anyway, and it’s on the short list of my favorite book—children’s or otherwise.

The question is, “Why?” What does it evoke in me? And I think my reaction has a lot to do with a lifelong interest I’ve had in both memory and identity.

My father was a storyteller, partly by temperament and partly by occupation. He spent his working life in the United States Army, from the tail end of World War II through to Vietnam and later. And much of that time he worked in military intelligence, which essentially amounts to turning bits and pieces of information into tentative narratives about your (actual or potential) enemies. When he wasn’t doing that, he told me stories of his childhood and youth in the Virginia coal mining country where he grew up.

After he retired, I met with him in his hometown for a reunion of the Black community in which he was raised. I don’t think I ever saw him happier or more at ease, regaling his friends and relatives with the styles, pastimes, music, relationships, and escapades from the place where he grew up. He could name the teachers, bars and clubs, and whole cast of characters.

My mother was rooted in memory in a different way. Her and my father’s marriage wasn’t a happy one. But rather than full blown stories, she tended to allude to specific incidents, both with my father and in her family of origin. But when she was in the right mood, she also talked about her large family (nine siblings) and life in Panama, where she was born and raised.

The sources of conflict in their marriage were never really explained to my brothers and me in detail, so I remember always looking for clues, trying to piece together how they’d met, why they’d married, and what had gone wrong. I think I believed that if I could figure out what had happened, I could make some sense of our family, escape the secrecy and emotional confusion. I wanted a text. I wanted a story not because I thought it would fix anything but so I could understand where I came from.

Eventually, reading and writing became my ways of continuing that effort. If I couldn’t quite figure out my own family story and identity, I could read about other people’s, or create histories for my characters.

Wilfred attempts something similar, but with much more success than I’ve ever achieved. In essence, he creates a text for Miss Nancy from the material surrounding him. Even though he doesn’t really understand the answers that the other residents of the nursing home have given him, he translates what he’s heard into something meaningful. And in the course of “reading” the five objects Wilfred’s chosen, she translates them into her experiences. In doing so, Miss Nancy regains not only her memories but her identity. She remembers who she is, the family she comes from, the places she’s been. Wilfred’s imaginative creation evokes her memory and restores—at least for a while—her sense of who she is.

I’ve always known my love of reading and writing came from an attraction to language: it’s music and idiosyncrasy, the histories it evokes, it’s power to define communities, fight oppression, create pride, unify and divide. But reflecting on this story, I see my own quest. The frequent moving required by military life cut us off from extended family and any single place. And I think I’ve been trying to find or build a home ever since—or come to terms with not having one.

My reflection also reinforces my belief that a creative work isn’t only an expression of its creator; it also offers us—individually and collectively—a glimpse into our values and expectations. Encountering a narrative work can be as much a dialogue as any conversation with a friend (or adversary). It can generate responses that say as much about us as they do about the work; our reactions paint at least a partial of portrait of the audience. And reflecting on that portrait can reveal to aspects of ourselves that we might otherwise be unaware of.

And here I have to say that this is my chief problems with criticism (both in academia and the popular media). In both cases, few critics reveal (or even seem to consider) how their subjectivity, specific values, and biases influence their reactions to the work they critique. That is, they talk about the what, how, and why of what happens in the work they’re criticizing, but they almost never discuss honestly the what, how, and why of what happens in themselves. They present themselves as blank slates employing objective criteria rather than human beings influenced by their own emotions, values, experiences, and beliefs. That post is for another day, but I promise it will come.

I’d also welcome your reflections on specific narrative works (books, stories, films, plays, etc.) that have had a significant impact on you—for better or worse, and what sense you’ve made of them.