Vivian Gornick says that the writer of personal narrative needs to discover: "who is speaking, what is being said, and what is the relation between the two?" These questions, if asked persistently, will take you deeper into the work. I have been using this approach with the new essay for this submission, and it is helping me to focus. I am over the hump, that agonizing stage where I feel as if I am groping in the dark, going on faith in the process, struggling to discover what I am trying to say. And besides just logging the hours, which is really the only way to get anywhere, Gornick's questions have guided me. But they are scary questions, questions that demand self-disclosure.
As a writer of personal narrative, one of the things that I am fighting these days is the "who cares?" question. I mean, who cares about the experiences of my life? Why should I think that I have anything of significance to say? When I read some of the great essayists I've been reading lately--Loren Eiseley, C.S. Lewis, Patricia Hampl, James McConkey, Vivian Gornick, John Haines--I am in awe of the way that they manage to build a discussion with universal significance out of the details of their lives. Their lives weren't special, weren't significantly different from anyone else's (well, okay, Haines lived a homesteader's life in the Alaskan wilderness for 25 years, and not many people have done that). So how do they do it? How do they write something that people want to read? If Gornick is correct, it is by nailing the answers to those three questions. There is a clear narrative voice (a narrative persona, she calls it), the speaker has something unique to say, and this speaker is the only one who could have said it. I'm so used to impersonal, scholarly writing, where the main point is to present your work in a way that is as detached from the author as possible. Who I am, what I do, what life I have lived, where I stand in relation to the material...these are all considered to be irrelevant in the academic tradition. What I have been taught to consider irrelevant is suddenly the key to meaningful work.
Who am I? What do I have to say? And what is the relationship between who I am and what I have to say? These are my new questions.
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2 comments:
Great post...and great reminder for me of the questions I must ponder as I, too, grope in the dark with wet fingers and plug them into a light socket.
I'm reading Gornick's book now, and really like it so far. I think you, as a philospher, are in such a great place to be asking these questions about what your work means to the greater public. As for the "what do I have to say question", I truly believe that we all have a story to tell that is meaningful to others--it just takes time and hard work to extract it. I love the idea of the situation and the story being integral parts of a good essay (and, I would argue, fiction). Good luck with your last week!
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