From its conception, Kate Atkinson’s Behind the Scenes at the Museum (1995) begins as an unabashed rewrite of Lawrence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy (1759-67), with notes from the eighteenth-century novel ringing throughout. Ruby Lennox, Kate Atkinson’s protagonist, is ‘conceived to the chimes of midnight on the clock,’ (11) while Tristram is conceived just as his mother asks his father: ‘have you not forgot to wind up the clock?’ (5). Both novels then immediately lurch backwards in time to weave together the narratives of various family members leading up to and beyond the protagonist’s birth. In doing so, they establish a tension between chronological time and the disorderly movements of memories in the consciousness.

Exploring the Intricacies of Memory: Ruby Lennox’s Journey in Kate Atkinson’s Behind the Scenes at the Museum

Through the matter-of-fact voice of Ruby Lennox as she pieces together her family history, Atkinson writes vividly and tenderly about the horrors of the World Wars; the pain passed down between generations of women; the disintegration of marriages; of hope and disappointment; childhood and adolescence.

Simultaneously humorous and moving, the novel captures the awkward act of processing the past whilst living in the present. It is a playful amalgamation of family trees and traits; of associations and digressions; of life and death. Rather than allowing memories of darker times to bleed continuously into the present, the novel urges readers to take a wider perspective—to detect the ridiculous and absurd side of life. Kate Atkinson braids the threads of memory into a chain of extended footnotes to create a sense of order, one required for preserving context and ensuring that memories are coherently passed down to future generations.

Form, Memory, and Narrative Control: A Comparative Analysis of Behind the Scenes at the Museum and Tristram Shandy

When learning the alphabet—the bones of language from which family memories are constructed—Ruby comments: ‘I understand the meaning all right, it’s the form that escapes me’ (111). Just like Tristram and Saleem Sinai in Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, the novel uses genealogy to explore the concept of form; connecting moments of time together in a coherent narrative and drawing meaning from the result. These novels attempt to make sense of the events which happen to us and to our families, using a nonlinear framework to question the extent to which we have power over the actions we set in motion.

Unlike Tristram and Saleem, however, Atkinson’s narrator is not caught in a metafictional battle with the form of her story; the novel jumps backwards and forward in time with the help of many ‘footnotes’ but without the endless frustrations of its narrator. Memories ebb and flow, but Ruby knows how to contextualise narratives in their time and place. Interjecting phrases such as: ‘…a furry locket round her neck (see Footnote (ii)),’ (37) interrupt the flow of Ruby’s sentences and enact the spontaneous appearance of new memories in her consciousness.

But as soon as associative memories appear, they are labelled and assigned a location in the novel’s vast narrative collection. Through the act of curation, Ruby asserts control over the memories which bind her family (and therefore over the form which binds her novel). Moreover, the footnotes do not adopt the conventional form but appear as chapters which serve to embed the memories firmly in their surroundings. This way, Atkinson emphasises the importance of context over chronology when it comes to processing the past.

Working metaphorically behind the scenes at the museum, it is Ruby’s role to curate a story from the archives and objects that connect her sprawling family tree. Through items such as photographs and keepsakes, memory, and therefore emotion can be reignited once more in Proustian fashion. The narrator of Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time (1913) famously eats a madeleine and is involuntarily seized by a recollection of his childhood, causing him to realise that memory is not lost to time but lives constantly within us.

Similarly, Ruby comes to learn that memories are what we are made of, and every effort must be made to unearth them. Through Ruby’s belated remembrance of the death of her twin sister, the novel demonstrates that memories must not remain frozen into their chronological place but rather be free to move fluidly through time, uncovered from their state of loss and exhibited in their context.

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