As an only child growing up in the middle of nowhere, I needed imagination to get through the stifling boredom of the farm life. I would make up playmates, landscapes and situations to keep myself company and leave the world I knew. Hampl says that our imagination is a vast, powerful thing; memory is not just a "warehouse of finished stories, not a gallery of framed pictures (24). Memory and imagination come together then, and because these elements of persona come together and allow for all sorts of possibilities, we can get lost in the expanse of our own creations.
"By writing about that first piano lesson I've come to know things I could not know otherwise," writes Hampl in her discussion of memory and imagination. When she says that we must all guard our own truths about what has happened to us (class notes), I believe that she's saying if we cannot figure out a way to tell our stories and comprehend the past so that it makes sense for us, no one will be able to. We tell ourselves stories to live (to borrow a line from Joan Didion), and if we have to tell ourselves some little white lies to get through things, that's what we do. Perhaps we begin to believe the truths we've been telling ourselves for so long that eventually we know no other way to tell the story. Then what? Has it become the truth, or is it still a fabrication? Is our cognizance of the untruth a factor in whether or not it's a lie?
"I realized I had told a number of lies," says Hampl on page 25 or our excerpt; when we realize that we're telling a fabricated story that must mean that we know the real story exists out there somewhere, so shouldn't we go after that? If she realized after her initial drafts that she'd been making things up, doesn't she have the responsibility to tell the reader the truth?
I argue that yes, she does, and so does any writer. But like Karr, who pointed out that her memory had fault lines and fissures, Hampl admits to having problems with her memory and the recreation of her childhood stories. In doing so she's being honest with us about the truth of her book, which is a collected organization of memories.
The word memoir comes from memoria, or memory in Latin. Memory means the "mental faculty of retaining and reviving facts, events, impressions, etc., according to dictionary.com. So if memory is the act of "reviving" facts, then no, memoir doesn't have to imply a complete factual story. Definitions aside, I guess I feel like memoir needs to be "real life," since it's someone's life we're dealing with in the story. When I think about my contract with readers I guess I assume they're going to believe what I say is real to have been/be real, so I should just tell the truth. Again it goes back to my question of "why not just call it fiction if it's fiction?"
Both Karr and Hampl lead by example-- when they write a scene to say that time compressed and shifted or that they remembered something in a certain way, they're pointing out their memory problem, and for me, that example is better than any kind of "this is how you should do it" advice.
To safeguard my relationship with readers my intro will discuss the fact that I am writing about a time in my life when I was drugged up and recovering from brain surgery, and therefore my memory was compromised, to say the least. I note that the name changes of hospital staff were made to protect them in their careers; I will note that the time sequence I detail was the time sequence as I lived it, but perhaps it didn't occur that way to those not under the influence of morphine and other drugs. I think that's enough to let people know that yes, this is an accurate portrayal of what happened to me, but I'm not even sure if this is how it happened.
Thursday, October 21, 2010
Wednesday, October 13, 2010
Ignorance as bliss in Hughes' "Salvation"
"My aunt came and knelt at my knees and cried, while prayers and song swirled all around me in the little church. The whole congregation prayed for me alone, in a mighty wail of moans and voices."
Langston Hughes' depiction of this scene toward the end of "Salvation" imparts the biblical idea of hell that many of us have heard since we were younger than the author is in his story.
"Mighty" wails of "moans and voices" are sounds we can hear when we think of "hell" and the atmosphere as it's been written; Hughes' patience and waiting conjures up the idea of purgatory, which is where he's kind of stuck throughout this story. The idea of purgatory, a place where sinners wait until they are prayed out of their limbo, threads through this whole piece, beginning with the happiness of those who have been saved (the adults) praying for others (the children) and ending with his salvation as the church "into a sea of shouting, as they saw me rise. Waves of rejoicing swept the place. Women leaped in the air."
How can one not see the illuminated images of Jesus rising from some glossy portrait into the flaxen beams of heaven?
In our class notes we see that "detail, sensory information and action" are the hallmarks of scene and movement. Hughes uses some dialogue throughout the piece, but what really moves the story, for me, is the imagined lull of prayers and voices that I hear in my head when I think of a congregation in prayer. That noise and reverence, although "holy," hums and buzzes in my skull, pushing me forward and adding to the urgency and tingling sensations the young Hughes must have felt. Added to the power of this feeling is the one recollection of times I've felt conflicted by self or society, much as Hughes is here.
Overall, although this piece moves through the shadows of peaks and valleys created by both Hughes' reactions and the desires of his church, what I find most compelling is that Hughes' salvation comes not so much in way of protecting his soul, but enlightening his mind.
For those who know of Hughes as a writer beyond this piece, it's not stretch to say that he wrote about the freedom and salvation that comes when the mind is loosed of ignorance. In depicting the actions of the little girls who cried and then ran to be saved--fearful for their souls-- and the rest of the "poor sinners," with their "work-gnarled hands"-- it's easy to see that Hughes' final savior is his mind itself, and his own understanding of truth. It's a painful truth for him to learn, that he can no longer believe in Jesus, or the adults who seem so wise, but in the end, his conflicts with the questions he had about Jesus prior to the revival (his aunt tells him all about the "feeling" but his scepticism persists) are answered and he comes to his own beliefs.
As we've looked at memoir from the perspective of the child thus far, we've seen that adults are often wise, confusing and so removed from the realities of childhood that their knowledge seems vastly superior and almost unattainable to the child(ren). But here we have an author who has bucked the conventions of his society and his aunt regardless of what he once thought or wanted to believe. Hughes doesn't tell us how all of this comes together for us; in introducing the characters he does, however briefly, and building the suspense of the moment with the quick snapshots of scenery and action, we come to feel the same flatness and acceptance that he feels.
What this acceptance becomes is not one of Jesus, but an acceptance of "oh, well, I wanted this because everyone told me I wanted it, but now I realize it's not really for me." This is a difficult kind of acceptance for anyone to bear because realizing we don't fit in, at any age, marks us as different, and therefore, potentially unsaved by common knowledge and ideals.
Langston Hughes' depiction of this scene toward the end of "Salvation" imparts the biblical idea of hell that many of us have heard since we were younger than the author is in his story.
"Mighty" wails of "moans and voices" are sounds we can hear when we think of "hell" and the atmosphere as it's been written; Hughes' patience and waiting conjures up the idea of purgatory, which is where he's kind of stuck throughout this story. The idea of purgatory, a place where sinners wait until they are prayed out of their limbo, threads through this whole piece, beginning with the happiness of those who have been saved (the adults) praying for others (the children) and ending with his salvation as the church "into a sea of shouting, as they saw me rise. Waves of rejoicing swept the place. Women leaped in the air."
How can one not see the illuminated images of Jesus rising from some glossy portrait into the flaxen beams of heaven?
In our class notes we see that "detail, sensory information and action" are the hallmarks of scene and movement. Hughes uses some dialogue throughout the piece, but what really moves the story, for me, is the imagined lull of prayers and voices that I hear in my head when I think of a congregation in prayer. That noise and reverence, although "holy," hums and buzzes in my skull, pushing me forward and adding to the urgency and tingling sensations the young Hughes must have felt. Added to the power of this feeling is the one recollection of times I've felt conflicted by self or society, much as Hughes is here.
Overall, although this piece moves through the shadows of peaks and valleys created by both Hughes' reactions and the desires of his church, what I find most compelling is that Hughes' salvation comes not so much in way of protecting his soul, but enlightening his mind.
For those who know of Hughes as a writer beyond this piece, it's not stretch to say that he wrote about the freedom and salvation that comes when the mind is loosed of ignorance. In depicting the actions of the little girls who cried and then ran to be saved--fearful for their souls-- and the rest of the "poor sinners," with their "work-gnarled hands"-- it's easy to see that Hughes' final savior is his mind itself, and his own understanding of truth. It's a painful truth for him to learn, that he can no longer believe in Jesus, or the adults who seem so wise, but in the end, his conflicts with the questions he had about Jesus prior to the revival (his aunt tells him all about the "feeling" but his scepticism persists) are answered and he comes to his own beliefs.
As we've looked at memoir from the perspective of the child thus far, we've seen that adults are often wise, confusing and so removed from the realities of childhood that their knowledge seems vastly superior and almost unattainable to the child(ren). But here we have an author who has bucked the conventions of his society and his aunt regardless of what he once thought or wanted to believe. Hughes doesn't tell us how all of this comes together for us; in introducing the characters he does, however briefly, and building the suspense of the moment with the quick snapshots of scenery and action, we come to feel the same flatness and acceptance that he feels.
What this acceptance becomes is not one of Jesus, but an acceptance of "oh, well, I wanted this because everyone told me I wanted it, but now I realize it's not really for me." This is a difficult kind of acceptance for anyone to bear because realizing we don't fit in, at any age, marks us as different, and therefore, potentially unsaved by common knowledge and ideals.
Sunday, October 3, 2010
Membership in Karr's Club
Mary Karr's idea that "the alleged truth of a given voice makes it somehow more emotionally compelling" and "thus announces itself as real" is one that any writer of character-based nonfiction needs to understand. Voice and "precise, original language" are two of Karr's strongest allies in her work. She's got place as character, of course-- the way she describes the skies or the openness of her Texas childhood serves to further
set the reader in the state of wild abandon that her childhood seemed to have been.
But anyone can write about Texas in the 60s, or fractured families, or men getting together for construction jobs and beer drinking. What makes Karr's story her is the way her language defines her particular social circle, family, region and time frame. And even if the "truth" of an event is different from how it happened, the alleged truths of her characters voices are different truths than the stories those voices tell.
What I mean by that is that no matter whether or not Karr's grandpa really died by hanging or her sister really did act in a certain way or her mom really was Nervous and acted out to such extremes doesn't matter, in the way Karr has written it. The events don't necessarily need to be true, because we can understand the kind of person who might have done those things so well simply by "hearing" their voices on the page.
What this does for readers, then, is create a whole world and a whole way of life out of something that may or may not have happened. The use of voice and language as character gets inside the idea of a larger truth of humanity. We are all unique individuals, with our own ways of talking, acting, thinking and rationalizing things. For Karr, growing up the way she did, her ability to rationalize and understand the world around her had a lot to do with the stories her dad told. These stories gave her a place to be in the world, whether it was literally, as in in a corner of Fishers, or figuratively, as in how she came to know her father and family through stories.
What we, as readers, then take from seeing this is that we too can look at the stories around us and figure out how and where and why we fit into certain places in the world. We're all confused and lost and scared at times, and everyone has at least one memory they'd like to erase or forget or otherwise distance themselves from. There are also the great memories of events that have become even more epic as time passes and we begin to remember these events differently each time. In reading a literary memoir like The Liar's Club we all gain admission into our own story and way of telling it comfortably.
set the reader in the state of wild abandon that her childhood seemed to have been.
But anyone can write about Texas in the 60s, or fractured families, or men getting together for construction jobs and beer drinking. What makes Karr's story her is the way her language defines her particular social circle, family, region and time frame. And even if the "truth" of an event is different from how it happened, the alleged truths of her characters voices are different truths than the stories those voices tell.
What I mean by that is that no matter whether or not Karr's grandpa really died by hanging or her sister really did act in a certain way or her mom really was Nervous and acted out to such extremes doesn't matter, in the way Karr has written it. The events don't necessarily need to be true, because we can understand the kind of person who might have done those things so well simply by "hearing" their voices on the page.
What this does for readers, then, is create a whole world and a whole way of life out of something that may or may not have happened. The use of voice and language as character gets inside the idea of a larger truth of humanity. We are all unique individuals, with our own ways of talking, acting, thinking and rationalizing things. For Karr, growing up the way she did, her ability to rationalize and understand the world around her had a lot to do with the stories her dad told. These stories gave her a place to be in the world, whether it was literally, as in in a corner of Fishers, or figuratively, as in how she came to know her father and family through stories.
What we, as readers, then take from seeing this is that we too can look at the stories around us and figure out how and where and why we fit into certain places in the world. We're all confused and lost and scared at times, and everyone has at least one memory they'd like to erase or forget or otherwise distance themselves from. There are also the great memories of events that have become even more epic as time passes and we begin to remember these events differently each time. In reading a literary memoir like The Liar's Club we all gain admission into our own story and way of telling it comfortably.
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