SOURCE: "Edwin Muir and Autobiography: Archetype of a Redemptive Memory," in South Atlantic Quarterly, Vol. 77, No. 4, Autumn, 1978, pp. 504-23.

In the following essay, Porter discusses memory and imagination in The Story and the Fable and An Autobiography.

I

Among the appeals of reading an autobiography is its evocation of the writer's past, especially when the writer perceives that time as englobed and inviolable, existing beyond his reach. Like a Joseph Cornell box, constructed of old objects taken from studio cartons labeled "flotsam and jetsam" and "watch parts," an autobiography may charm us through the collecting and assembling instinct of the artist, who reclaims the fragments of his memory and composes them into an image, a unified assemblage speaking a certain remoteness. The fascination for us is exactly the enclosed pastness of the past, and its quality of continually receding behind the one who lived and, in a sense...