Derrida and narrative: telling stories, saving memories

It is well known that Derrida begins the lecture ‘Mnemosyne’, given some thirty years ago as the first of a series dedicated to the memory of his friend and sometime Yale colleague Paul de Man, with the autobiographical disclosure: ‘I have never known how to tell a story’ (MPD, 3). As he repeats the declaration a few pages later, it becomes clear that this singular revelation shares the uncertain exemplarity characteristic of autobiographical utterances. It is an incapacity that threatens to strike all those who would seek to preserve a memory in narrative: ‘who can really tell a story? Is narrative possible? Who can claim to know what a narrative entails? Or, before that, the memory it lays claim to?’ (MPD, 10) Moreover, in his opening gesture in this lecture, Derrida has already suggested that fidelity to memory may necessarily, rather than coincidentally, entail a lapse in storytelling, asking ‘what happens when the lover of Mnemosyne has not received the gift of narration? When he doesn’t know how to tell a story? When it is precisely because he keeps the memory that he loses the narrative?’ (MPD, 3). But some sort of drive to tell stories nonetheless leads Derrida to punctuate these lectures with anecdotes, for all his proclaimed deficiency in that regard and the more general reservations signalled about the adequacy of narrative in respect of safeguarding memory. He returns to the question of his defective storytelling in the Dick and Kofman film Derrida, in the context of the idea of telling the story of a philosopher’s life. Once again, the acknowledged narrative deficiency is accompanied by a kind of fascination: ‘the question for me is the question of narration, which has always been a serious question for me. I’ve always said I can’t tell a story. I’d love to tell stories, but