Saturday, April 25, 2015
the self and the persona and fragile trust
I had already been thinking on this a lot but maybe didn't have the words for it, the situation and the context, or their relationship, their versus, their roles in all of this. Bruce had told us in class an anecdote about a guy wanting to write these memories, and one of them is his going to a vintage store to buy a bowling shirt with his friends at a young age. And it strikes him to write this, but that is just the situation, and it is not enough to have just that, one must also have a context, or an occasion for telling a situation. In a successful essay one cannot survive without the other. Like a chestnut tree you must plant two to see production.
Gornik goes on to talk about the relationship of being trustworthy and creating a persona. In a genre in which one must be honest above all else, how do we remain on the good trusted side of our readers? How do you remain there? How do we stay there when we are admittedly narcissistic, suicidal, sexually ambiguous, drug experimenting, cheaters? (Sometimes one, none, or in my case all of the above. ha) I have no idea. Has anyone read WILD? I am Cheryl Strayed fan. But she does it, doesn't she? She is all of these things and yet her memoir was wildly (hahah) successful. Is it the Orwell persona, the humanizing indictment of the self? And through that the reader knows you, and therefore trusts you, even if you have proven to be not a trustworthy person to others. Do we not trust wholly the person who comes to us as a confessional? "We believe the narrator is telling us all he knows."
So, how do we find "the narrator who can serve the situation and find the story," while keeping mind of their trustworthiness? How do you find that slice of you that is both, other and wholly yourself, at the same time? Who is the right version of you to play matchmaker of story and situation? The you with a keen eye, and clear memory who is gifted at selecting the perfect detail and delivering it all with a smoothed tongue and perfect pitch to language. Where is he/she? Have you met her yet? Glanced at your reflecting and seen him staring back at you if only for a second?
I am not entirely sure but it feels like all of this has a lot to do with the idea of how many selves we have or have been. Can the same idea be constructed and accumulated through our writing years and self the same way it can in life? Is there a self for every essay? Can you recycle your persona? How far away is my persona from myself? And is that only a version of the truth? Warped glass and blind eyes? Is the persona is so far from you then is it still considered being truthful?
To tie this around to Feel Me, See Me. Hear Me. Reach Me. I am interested in how we see these questions enacted. I am curious about you guys think in regards to how much of this feels like a situation, and when or if, it starts to cross into context and story territory. Also, do you trust her and why. For me I think it has a lot to do with the way she opens and her brief admittance to failure in dating, I a immediately in a space of empathy and understanding and interest because of this small moment. But, are you? And why? Do we naturally trust until proven otherwise?
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
I am also a fan of Cheryl Strayed’s Wild. And you’re right, Erin, she does leave a lot of her personal ugliness on the page, and it works. I think it’s the fact that she has done what Gornick talks about in creating this persona/narrator that is detached enough to be able to tell the story in a controlled, consistent, and truthful way. Like Gornick, Strayed had “found the narrator who can bring under control the rushing onslaught of [her] own internal flux,” and who could “find the story riding the tide that” she would otherwise “drown in.”
ReplyDeleteHow do you do that, though? How do you find that narrative sweet spot that resides between intimate self and detached observer?
I also really enjoyed reading Gornick’s ideas on the difference between “situation” and “story” because it touches on the exact struggle I experienced in writing my last essay about my mother. I have this amazing situation, but I am still struggling to figure out what story it contains for me. I just hope it doesn't take thirty years to find it.
What I like about Gay’s essay, “Feel Me. See Me. Hear Me. Reach Me.” is that her style of narration—the persona she creates—seems to invite the audience to join in her discovery of how all the pieces of her “situations” with dating, culture, and race coalesce into a unified story. She is able to lead us to feel as though we are realizing the connections of these intersections of self at the same time as her.
I think the reason I trust her as narrator, and the same reason I trust Strayed, is that she tells me her story in a consistent voice without telling me how I should feel about it. Maybe I trust these authors because they seem to trust me.
Erin asks how we find the narrator who can see the story in the situation, and I think that's a question I've always had after reading Gornick. Hers isn't a "how-to" guide, but there are some hints, I think. Gornick notes that memoir and essay are always about "self-definition," and I wonder if writers who haven't quite grasped that simple fact will never find the narrator they're looking for. In describing the Ackerly memoir, Gornick also writes that his narrator speaks with a "voice" that speaks "with grace and candor whatever is necessary to examine." This "directness" comes from a narrator who writes from "the exactly right distance: not too close, not too far." I've thought often about what this might mean, aside from the obvious--that we can write well from the heat of the moment--and perhaps one answer comes from Gornick herself. To find that distance, she had to write from a position of knowing the story (she had become her mother). And yet, don't we often write essays because we don't know? Is Gornick talking about discovering a narrator in early drafts, and then deploying her in revision, working from the insights she earned? I think so. But then we have her account of rafting the Rio Grande with her husband, and in the midst of the experience, she sees that each of them is "carving out of our separating anxieties the narrator, who, n the midst of all that beauty and oppression, would keep us company--and tell us what we were living through." The implication seems to be that the "distance" one needs may have nothing to do with time at all, but a kind of psychological awareness--a kind of meaning-making instinct--that can be invoked even in the midst of a situation. So the concept of distance is complicated, and I'm curious what the rest of you make of it.
ReplyDeleteBruce a few weeks ago you jokingly mentioned a past professor of yours who when asked if he had finished writing his essay rebutted, "Yes, but now I have to put in the meaning" this is funny especially in light of lit majors (I' guilty) trying to interject meaning/ theory over a piece--but it also speaks to what I think Gornick is illustrating with persona in a piece and her binary of situation and story. Sometimes we write the situation and then we write the story or sometimes we reverse this and seek to find the situation for our story, in any case the "psychological awareness" you discuss becomes apparent when a writer is able to identify both situation and story and analyze where there work seems to be unbalanced with regards to both. In my own work I struggle to balance this binary, I end up leaving the reader with having to do the heavy lifting to find one or the other and I think this leads to an incomplete piece. Orwell's prowess is his "awareness" and ability to offer the reader a set of scales with just enough story and situation to keep them at parity.
DeleteA lot of interesting points in these last two essays. Self-definition is part of it, perhaps more precisely: a self-definition of the chosen or found persona of a particular piece. It strikes me having read some of Gay's other essays on the web, that the voice and persona of this essay is quite different--perhaps more measured, cautious, reflexive,--than her other work. But still about her on-going project to self-define, to root out--and around for--privilege, racial and gender disparities, etc.
ReplyDeleteI like what Gornick notes about George Orwell: "a wholly successful fusion of experience, perspective, and personality that is fully present on the page." This, to me, seems what Gay and Gornick present us with in their respective essays. The distance--whether (or perhaps a combination of) psychological, geographical, time--are central to understanding a past situation and a present story.
I found it very interesting to think about the persona we decide to attach to our pieces of writing. For some reason I've always had a desire to have each of my creative pieces to feel different (ultimately, to switch up the persona). I'm not sure why I feel this way because I can certainly see value in having writing that carries a consistent persona. In much commercial writing, film, and television, there are authors and actors who are paid big money for being a consistent, because their personas are so appealing and they'll generate a consistent audience. However, there are some moments when an artist--especially a performing artist--has to break away from his/her persona if they want to achieve critical acclaim. I think of the brilliance of Robin Williams. Here was a man who had a very distinct persona that was carried through almost all of his films. But I also know, especially later in his career, that he desperately wanted to be recognized as versatile.
ReplyDeleteI obviously don't think there's any wrong or right way of thinking--whether we want to have a somewhat steady persona across our work or whether we desire to change up our tone and style every now and then. It's probably not a fair comparison bringing performing artists and mainstream fiction writers into this discussion since actors rarely act out their own stories and fiction writers have the freedom to imagine whatever tales and characters their minds can create. With nonfiction writing, like we discussed last night, the author (the author's persona, the narrator) is ever-present and must be ever-present, even when the piece isn't about them; they are the ones telling the story, not some omniscient narrator and not some unreliable or crazed narrator. The persona of the author of nonfiction is just as essential to the piece as the story and the situation he/she is trying to tell.
I need to proofread my stuff before publishing. :-)
Delete