Telling the Self: Narrative and the Art of Memory in ＂Ecce Homo and De Profundis＂

Storytelling is a fundamentally human pastime, and here I read Nietzsche and Wilde as representatives of the ”storytelling animal” who can be compared on several levels. I suggest that our memory of the past is always a work in progress, a rough draft with which we constantly tinker in our struggle to impose a meaningful narrative on our lives. The ”art of memory” is therefore that of a self-fashioning narrative, and both Nietzsche and Wilde see the absence of meaning as an invitation to create a self through this art, that is, through storytelling. This is a playful self-creation; the authors have a keen sense of life's groundlessness, its lack of fixed rules, and mainly what we find ”behind” their narratives is a play-drive. Though possibly we readers of ”autobiographical” narratives like ”Ecce Homo and De Profundis” might learn what it is to play from the stories/lives/selves presented to us in these texts, we cannot learn from them how to play; the authors have played, have created themselves in their own unique ways, and we could only truly imitate them by being different, by playing or creating in our own way.