Authorship and the Historical Moment

Each life narrative is set within a historical context. It is necessary to recognize what was historically relevant during the time a specific narrative takes place because life stories do not exist in a vacuum in which society, culture, and time are not present. Each of these factors effect the story that takes place within them. 

The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass represents this idea. When Douglass wrote his narrative in the mid-nineteenth century, the United States was experiencing a massive divide over the issue of slavery. It was North v. South, the union v. the confederacy, and abolitionists v. slave holders. In the midst of this division, their was a lack of strong representation to convey the struggles of the black population. The answer to this issue was Frederick Douglass. He was a former slave who had experienced the injustices of slavery and physical abuse as shown in the scenes with Mr. Covey as well as the hospitality, and then eventual unkindness of the more humane slave holders such as the Hughs. By the time he was free, he had taught himself to read and write where Mrs. Hughs had left off. The account of his life served a greater purpose than to regale readers with a narrative of one's accomplishments; it expressed the truth about freedom as well as illuminated the historical moments in which it was written. 

Personal Take:

I kept a very in-depth journal from the ages of fourteen to seventeen that covered the beginning of freshman year of high school to the summer before I went to college. Every once in a while, I return to its pages and check up on my former self. When I read the entries, sometimes I make fun of myself for how I conveyed my life and sometimes I pat myself on the back for having the type of insight I had about my experiences at the time. When I read the entries and look at the dates, I get a chance to see exactly how I felt at a certain point in my life about specific things that I did or that happened to me. It covers everything from puberty, to my sister's cancer and how it affected me and my family, to the funerals of friends' parents and my own maternal grandmother's, as well as the confusion surrounding SATs and going to college. There is darkness throughout, as well as light, bright, revelations. When I recognize the historical context of the entries, I get a chance to make sense of them, and in a way, make sense of myself and who I was during an incredibly transformative part of my life. 

-Mary Alice Miller

Authority and Authenticity

These concepts are closely related to the concept of "Audience," in that it is the audience who perceives a writer's authority and authenticity. While reading an autobiographical text, it is important for the audience to feel that the narrator is reliable in the sense that s/he has the authority to write about whatever topics s/he is addressing, as well as the ability to be both an active and observing participant in his or her life/narrative.  

Cabeza de Vaca's narrative in relation to authenticity was a hot topic in class.

The general consensus was that Cabeza de Vaca was an unreliable narrator due to his extreme awareness of his primary audience, the Spanish King, who right from the get go, de Vaca refers to as his "Holy, Imperial, Catholic Majesty" (45). What seemed unbelievable to us as readers was that Cabeza de Vaca seemed more effected by the presence of the King's authority than the intensity of his experiences while in the New World. On page 47, he insists that though some of his experiences seem unbelievable, he should be trusted because he acted in the name of service to the King. This statement alone is enough to question his authenticity because at the level of cultural immersion he experienced, there must have been a point where his values adjusted due to concern for himself and curiosity of others. To draw from Smith and Watson’s concepts of the Narrating "I" v. the Narrated "I" in relation to Cabeza de Vaca, it seemed at times that the Narrating "I" was too controlling and    subsequently, didn't leave room for the Narrated "I" to convey historical and factual truth.

Personal Take:

As a student, it is important to feel as if my professors have the authority to be teaching as well as the authenticity that comes with teaching a subject correctly and passionately. By having a sense of authority (that comes with the proper degrees and experiences) and authenticity (that manifests itself in the form of teachers who are both academically and personally invested in their students' successes), great professors are expected to teach truthfully as well as inspire their students with their interpretation of the curriculum. I, like all college students, have been a student since the age of five, and thus, feel pretty knowledgeable on the subject of what makes an effective teacher. This is specifically important to me because my ultimate career goal is to be a creative writing professor. Therefore, when I am in my classes, I am not just a student, I am an observer. With each professor I have, I actively try to identify what is successful about their methods and what I will never, ever do once I am an educator. (Don't worry Vander Zee, you've provided lots of helpful, positive tips for me and my future career.)

-Mary Alice Miller

Audience and Addressee

Part of being self-aware is being conscious of who you are addressing when you represent yourself and your ideas. Thus, when we read autobiographies it is important to question who the writer was intending to speak to when they wrote their narrative. If the piece was intended to be published for the masses, we can agree that one of the audiences is us, the nameless, faceless reader. However, upon further inspection, we can find if the work is addressed to someone specific. If the book is dedicated to someone, or if the text is obviously directed towards someone, then we can infer that the author's writing is influenced by the idea that a specific audience will be reading it.

"And most of all beware, even in thought, of assuming the sterile attitude of the spectator, for life is not a spectacle, a sea of grief is not a proscenium, a man who wails is not a dancing bear... - Aime Cesaire"

This epigraph in Don't Let Me Lonely: An American Lyric by Claudia Rankine shows this kind of self-awareness. Rankine realizes that she is allowing a collection of people, most of which are people she does not know, to witness an intimate recollection of her personal life and of one of her most personal feelings, loneliness. The epigraph is directed to the readers technically as a warning, but in actuality it is more a request of empathy over judgment, or at least of an attempt to understand the content that the reader is about to delve into. 

Personal Take:

I had a very intense connection to Rankine's novel. I tend to get trapped inside of feelings, especially those involving empathy. After passing out directly after talking to a professor about being overwhelmingly elated with the then current state of my life, my circle of friends voted me most likely to die from intoxicating happiness. Paradoxically, I have spent hours crying to my mother over the phone about physical abuse in a new friend's relationship, genocide in Libya, and other varied forms of injustice. It took a long time for me to accept these intense emotions and it's a perpetual battle trying to control them and harness their intensity to produce a positive outcome for myself and for those who I care about. I've never felt totally comfortable showing these intense emotions because I never wanted to be someone's "dancing bear."  My overwhelming sense of empathy caused me to feel the loneliness conveyed by Rankine while I was reading her book and the epigraph was so incredibly fitting for this type of narrative. It is a mantra to remember whether you have been the spectator or the spectacle. 

- Mary Alice Miller

Narrative Plotting and Modes

This section of the Tool Kit is used to describe how the cultural scripts or the historical moment can influence how a narrator presents him or herself. Patterns of emplotment emerge in autobiographies that are often demarcated by the shared customs or beliefs of the epoch. Smith and Watson point out that autobiographies often exhibit different patterns in structuring self-narrative. One mode of emplotment might dominate another because certain patterns can emerge in self-life writing that are contradictory in nature, and thus one pattern tends to stand out amongst the rest. The noticeable changes in patterns of emplotment in self narratives can delineate a shift in the narrator’s perception of himself or a break from the main ideology that dominates the text.  

Smith and Watson urge the reader to “Consider carefully the relationship between narrative plotting and modes of idenity” (RA 246). The autobiographies of the Puritans are certainly dominated by a purely religious script, which basically boils down to a collective identity as a community of God’s chosen people. The Puritan confession, conversion, and jeremiad are the three dominate patterns of emplotment in the writings from the era. Thomas Shepard’s confessions from his congregation demonstrate how Puritan belief in their innate total depravity as sinners. These texts serve as their confessions to god, whom is always revered as the ultimate power and saving grace; the majority of Puritan texts follow this pattern of praising god while condemning individuals as sinful. Shepard implores his son to “give thy eyes, nay, thy heart and whole soul and body, to him that hath been so careful of thee when thou couldst not care for thyself” (Shepard 39). One Puritan woman, Jane Willows, demonstrate the Puritans never ending strife to shed their wicked ways in return for god’s grace when she wrote “I considered what a woeful frame I had, distrusting God’s providence, and so was in a confusion in my spirit…Lord came to me and showed me need of Lord’s strength and support…yet I lost it again. Yet heard Lord would give strength to them that have no strength” (The Confessions 201). The confessional self-examination is one of the most prevalent patterns of emplotment in Puritan autobiographies.

Personal Take:

Have you ever found yourself saying the same old spill when you meet new people. I am referring to small talk and the patterns I find in my dialogue with people who I have just met, and I normally engage in this idle chatter without noticing it. It’s the mundane questions and scripted answers that have caused me to take a new tack when meeting people for the first time. You know what I am talking about. For example, you meet someone in a bar, and during the gaps of the normally deafening music they spark up a conversation by asking the same dead end questions time and time again. Sometimes I feel like I am an unwilling participant in a survey poll:

-          What’s your name…Bob.

-          What are you doing tonight...who knows, what are you doing?

-          How do you know so and so…we go back.

-          Are you from around here…I live here now, yea over that way.

-          Do you go to school…yep

-          What’s your major…communication

-          What do you want to do with that…engage in meaning-full conversation.

Now-a-days, depending on how much I have to drink, I feed people the most ridiculous non-sense that comes to my mind. I don’t really consider it lying, because giving people generic responses means I am lying to myself because these on-call answers don’t speak for my true identity. I bask in seeing the looks on people’s faces when I respond to the questions above with something along the lines of

What’s your name?

            -My name is Robert Paulson!

What are you doing tonight?

            -Trying to stay clear of Dog the Bounty Hunter, he’s a gunnin’ for me.

How do you know so and so?

            -Oh, that guy…me and him used to get drunk together and beat up midgets.

Are you from around here?    

            -I come from the land of Mordor.

Do you go to school?                         

            -No, I’m not technically supposed to be within 300 feet of a school.                                                        

 What’s your major?                            

           -I  majored in living like Charlie Sheen, oh and I minored in blowing shit up.

What…?     

I’m sorry what were you talking about, oh yea that’s right—Nothing—what’s up with all these questions anyways - are you a cop? I’ll tell you what, when you have an original thought let me know so I can blow that shit up like…POW!!! (imagine an obscene hand gesture or something). *This is meant to be absurd.

I realize that if you met someone like this you would be like “this guy is a complete A-hole,” but I feel that even random non-sense is better than engaging in conversation for the sake of conversation. Yes, the questions above are all solid ways to get to know someone, but please people take heed of Emerson’s “Experience” when he calls for spontaneous action. I am just sick of filling out an oral questionnaire when meeting people. Patterns of emplotment like ritualized conversation starters are exactly what I would leave out of my autobiography. If I were to write about someone I met in my memoirs, I might have one sentence dedicated to name, origin, occupation, and background. However, I might write several pages about this person if we spent the night doing extraordinary stuff or talked about truly remarkable and interesting things. However, I guess you have to start somewhere. Next time you find yourself in a similar situation take notice of when people use patterns of emplotment to establish his or her identity. Say things that deviate from the beaten path, and if you do ask questions, ask one’s that call for a real response. 

-Joe Fleming

Voice

Collective Voice:

Voice refers to a number of different aspects of autobiographical texts by delineating the number of different voices in a work. Multiple voices emerge as part of a larger collective voice based on shared ethnic, religious, cultural, or social customs. A collective voice can be heard clearly in dialectic language that employs pronouns such as us, them, we, they, etc. When these words are firmly embedded in autobiographical texts they signal polarized relationality and a sense of the Other. In Cabeza De Vaca’s self-narrative he always refers to the Native Americans as them, while stereotyping their collective identity as barbaric heathens with no souls. This voice stands in stark contrast to the benevolent language De Vaca employs to talk about his fellow brave and virtuous Christian conquistadors that were eventually relegated to complete dependency on the Amerindians’ support in order to survive through the winters in which the noble Europeans turned to cannibalism. However, peculiar passages stand out that demonstrate a radical departure form the dominant voice in break out moments like Cabeza De Vaca’s self-narrative in which he replaces his harsh voice that dismisses the natives as barbarians and completely alien with a sense of wonderment and admiration by writing “These people love their children more and treat them better than any other people the world” (Cabeza 91).

Multi or Poly-vocal Voices:

A change in voice is similar to the change in the tone of a poem; the speaker of a poem might be calm and complacent, and then suddenly becomes soaked in emotions of anger and confusion. Voice in Jonathan Edward’s Personal Narrative take the reader on a emotional roller coaster by being completely filled with the holy spirit that “has appeared as an infinite fountain of divine glory and sweetness” to writing “when I look into my heart, and take a view of my wickedness it looks like an abyss infinitely deeper than hell” (Edwards 395). The radical transitions in Edward’s narrative demonstrate how authors can take on multiple voices within a text. Anne Bradstreet’s poem “The Prologue” evokes gender tension and conflicting voices not typically used in her other works by juxtaposing her social identity as a wholesome puritan mother along side her sharp desire to be acknowledged as a capable and talented female writer.

I am obnoxious to each carping tongue

Who says my hand a needle better firs,

       A poet’s pen all scorn I should thus wrong,

    For such despite they cast on female wits:

    If what I do prove well, it won’t advance,

            They’ll say it’s stol’n, or else it was by chance.

Personal Take:

I have worked in the food and beverage industry since I was old enough to work. Anyone that has worked in a restaurant will tell you that there is a considerable difference in the ‘server’ voice that waiters use at their tables while talking to customers and the voice they use the rest of the time. The tone, mannerisms, and language used are not authentic representations of voice because they have been shaped for, and directed towards a specific audience. Smith and Watson stress the importance of keeping the author’s voice in context by acknowledging the intended audience, perceiving self-constructed agency, and noticing the shifts in the mood or tone of voice in autobiographies. 

-Joe Fleming

The Autobiographical "I"

The Autobiographical "I" consists of four parts that together account for the way a writer conveys his or her life narrative. The Narrating "I" is the part of the Autobiographical "I" that essentially recalls memories in order to tell the story. The Narrated "I" can be thought of the character that the life narrative is about. The Ideological "I" is the part that is influenced by various cultural scripts and is not always evident to the author. The Historical "I" is the part that is concerned with the historical context of the narrative. 

While Philip Lopate's essay "Writing Personal Essays: On the Necessity of Turning Oneself Into a Character," doesn't directly discuss the various parts of the autobiographical "I," it focuses on what the letter and word "I" conveys in stories within the introductory paragraph. While he may not be alluding to Smith and Watson's text, he does talk about how the use of the word "I" alludes to a "lush, sticky past," but doesn't necessarily fulfill the requirement of information that the reader craves. Thus, as he explains, there is the necessity to build upon that "I" by turning oneself into a character by backing up that "I" with the aforementioned four part puzzle that together creates the Autobiographical "I."

Personal Take:

I am a Creative Writing Concentrator within my English Major. Reading the section about the Autobiographical "I" in the Tool Kit made me think about my own work differently. I especially thought of the difference between the Narrating "I" and the Narrated "I" in terms of my own authenticity. Many of my pieces of creative non-fiction are written about my family and often require me to dig up old family memories in order to tell a story. However, I've realized via the concept of the "I" that the farther in time I am from a memory, the less likely my retelling of it is entirely truthful; it is most definitely biased based upon my personal experience of it. So, what's required now in order to reach a truer autobiographical truth, is evidence-- anything to link me to my Narrated "I." Now when I write stories about the past, I turn to my old journal to see just how I felt during the specific events which I retell. 

- Mary Alice Miller

Additionally, I'd like to showcase the work of a fellow student. John Vasoli's hilarious take on the Autobiographical "I:" here. 

Identity

Smith and Watson suggest that one constructs his/her Identity by re-interpreting their experiences and memories and then writing about them with a certain degree of new insight or altered perception. In the Tool-Kit they also articulate that people choose to leave some experiences out while writing about others to illuminate some aspect of their lives they felt was significant. This freedom to choose what one includes demonstrates agency in their text as individuals carefully construct their identity through a conscious creation of an identity molded by the experiences and memories they incorporate in writing about their respective lives. Smith and Watson also talk about a ‘collective identity’ in which individuals identify themselves as part of a larger collective whole through religious, cultural, social, ethnic, or other forms of commonality. The autobiographical texts of the Puritans function as a great example of a collective identity as most identify themselves as a community of god’s chosen people. However, Smith and Watson provide a more complex mode of identity that shows the fluidity of the “multiplicity of identities [that] are not additive but intersectional” (RA 41). One’s identity is almost always complicated by conflicting voices, resistance to the collective, or overlapping and contradictory tropes of self-representation.

Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself” is a great example of intersectional identities because his self-representation contains numerous complex nuances that show the intricate reality of one’s supposed ‘identity’. Rather than identifying with a collective cultural or ethnic group, Whitman identified himself as a member of the human race as a whole when he wrote “For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you” (Whitman 27). However, he then goes on to complicate this notion by writing “I am not an earth nor an adjunct of earth (33)…clear and sweet is my soul…and clear and sweet is all that is not my soul” (29). He identifies himself as something (or someone) that does not exist alone, nor is he a part of something else when he wrote “nor an adjunct of earth” (27). The conflict in his quest for finding the ‘song of one’s self’ is expressed in the line “I am mad to be in contact with me” (27). Whitman’s “Song of Myself” demonstrates Smith and Watson’s intersectional identity, and the fact that defining one’s identity is a slippery slope that often leads to generalization that do not capture the essence of the individual.

Personal Take:

It’s a funny thing—identity—mankind has built fences, persecuted each other, and waged wars over perceptions of identity. It is my opinion that it is impossible to identify yourself…period. Yes you can claim you’re a Christian, but are you not also a human being that is a member of particular nation or ethnic group with different beliefs and customs than other Christians. No one can capture one’s own identity, they can only throw out endless amounts of their personal experiences, thoughts, memories, and ideologies; the final result is that someone else can combine all of this, and come up with their own interpretation of that person. As a kid growing up I used to identify myself as a skateboarder. In my middle school there were the skaters and the jocks, as well as a dozen other groups that we had labels for, but this is how my friends and I identified people. We would ask ‘do you skate?...oh…no. then that must make you a jock or something.” I just think its funny how much time and effort is wasted in trying to identify yourself or others. We should just take people for what and who they are in the moment rather than trying to slap a label on them, or even worse, engage in psychological profiling way of viewing other people.

-Joe Fleming

Memory

Smith and Watson wrote that “Memory is the source, authenticator, and destabilizer of autobiographical acts…remembering involves a reinterpretation of the past in the present” (RA 22). Daniel Schacter claimed that “memories are records of how we have experienced events, not replicas of the events themselves…we construct our autobiographies from fragments of experience that change over time” (RA 22). With the ability to look back in hindsight one’s perceptions of an event could drastically transform the meaning of a memory or generate a whole new revelation about that event. In the tool kit Smith and Watson ask the reader to consider “what acts of remembering are emphasized? What triggers remembering in general, and particular memories?...does the narrator call attention to things forgotten? (RA 245). It is important to keep these kinds of question close to the mind when trying to interpret someone’s else’s memories, especially if there is a pattern of emplotment of certain memories pertaining to a single event or significant other. Try to find the two most profound memories that a narrator discusses in an autobiography. Then analyze why and how the narrator writes about these two memories; what makes the memory stand out, is there an epiphany that is revealed later in the text that addresses this memory, has this memory transformed the narrator’s worldview?

In Smith and Watson’s Tool Kit they also ask the reader to think about “what means of accessing memory are incorporated in the text?” (RA 243). They provided examples such as family albums, photos, objects, family stories, and so forth as sources for remembering. Alison Bechdel’s graphic memoir Fun Home combines all of these para-textually via actually sketching out her past memories and juxtaposing these images with her self-life writing. Bechdel’s memories are recounted through the narrating ‘I’ as she looks back with hindsight into her past; the images she sees in the rear-view memory mirror are then revamped, supplemented, and brought to life via the illustrated ‘I’ and her artistic renditions of her past experiences. Our classmate, Whit discussed the illustrated ‘I’ when he wrote “the unique narrated ‘I’ that the comic style allows is the visual “I,” or like Smith & Watson say in Reading Autobiography, the “version of the self.”  This “version” of the self is what Bechdel processes through her memory and puts down in the comic character playing out her past” (Slagsvol, CW). The aesthetic methodology in Fun Home is not the only peculiar way that Bechdel approaches memory. Her graphic memoir strays very far from your typical chronological styled autobiographies by taking the reader on a leap-frog-like approach to various stages of her life. Professor Vander Zee stressed the significance of the back and forth temporality in Fun Home when he wrote “As she moves back and forth across these layers she weaves a rich tapestry of memory that gains complexity as different layers and textures come into play” (Vander Zee CW). Her memoir takes the reader from childhood, to the emergence of her lesbian sexuality, and beyond. When she learns of her deceased father’s homosexuality her entire world is rattled, especially her memories of her dad. The symbolic and unexplained allusions to her father in the beginning of the text carry new weight with this revelation. Bechdel has the narrating ‘I’ dive head over heels into a series of memories in an effort to re-examine her life. Her re-interpretation of certain memories from various points in her life, when juxtaposed with the various forms of artifice in her drawings, augment to the opaqueness of her identity, memory, and experience, or more presiciely what the reader really remembers, or takes away from the narrator’s version of the self. However, that’s the thing about memory; you take different things away from particular memories at when revisiting them at various stages of your life.

Personal Take:

When I was a growing up my father’s favorite movie of all time was Bruce Brown’s The Endless Summer II. My brothers and I had watched that movie with my dad several hundred times. I would fall asleep and wake up with it own. At one point I am pretty sure I had every single line memorized. Pat and ‘Wingnut’, the stars of the film became idolized in our minds. My dad taught us how to surf, and we became infatuated with the ocean and catching waves. When my brothers and I watched Endless Summer we were thinking about surfing and remembering waves we had recently caught until we were burnt out on the movie and had much rather just go surfing instead. However, my dad never got tired of that movie, and he would watch it on repeat dozing in and out of sleep. The premise of the movie is an endless summer, a trip around the world to exotic destinations where the waves were always rolling in. Looking back, I wondered if all those times my dad had watched that film were really his subconscious desire to just pack up and leave. You know…just throw your stuff in a bag and go live the spontaneous adventure filled lives you had always wanted to, that is before the wife and kids. When my parents separated I often recollected on the memories of watching that movie a hundred times with my dad. I remembered thinking at the time that my dad wanted us to watch that film with him over and over again so that when he did eventually leave we would understand that he was off to explore the world and catch the never ending wave like Pat and ‘Wingnut’ in Endless Summer II. However, my memory of this film does not produce the same interpretation as an adult. My dad loved us, and still does; that movie contained no symbolic message that explains why he and my mom got a divorce. People grow apart, and that’s that. The film Endless Summer II connotes a number of different memories associated with my life, and this film has often made me think about how memory changes. Memories are constantly in flux. They are susceptible to being altered, blurred, or completely transformed. 

-Joe Fleming

Experience

In a nutshell, the act of self-life writing amounts to nothing more than relating one’s experiences by re-telling the occurrences of a life through the interpretation of memories, thoughts, interpersonal relations, and ideologies that an individual has encountered since the beginning of his or her existence. Experience is the knowledge of and process of obtaining knowledge of our lives that can then be memorized, analyzed, and perceived in a number of different ways. Our experiences can be shaped or guided by cultural, social, or historical processes that constitute the reality of our lives. These processes that influence our experiences enable individuals to claim some kind of identity or assert agency as a conscious being that demonstrates a certain degree of knowledge gained from the past. Smith and Watson write that “Experience is the very process through which a person becomes a certain kind of subject owning certain identities in the social realm, identities constituted through material, cultural, economic, and psychic relations” (RA 31). They allude to Joan Scott’s essay on experience by quoting “It is not individuals who have experience, but subjects who are constituted through experience” (RA 31). Experience can be used to establish authenticity or to assert authority. Smith and Watson attribute a discursive nature to forms of experience in autobiographical act by claiming “narrators become readers of their experiential histories, bringing discursive schema that are culturally available to them to bear on what has happened.

Alexi Sherman’s “The Unauthorized Autobiography of Me” is a great example of the how narrators bring discursive cultural, social, and ethnic schema to the fore when writing about identity through the interpretation of past experiences. Alexi Sherman attempts to relate what it means to identify one’s self as a Native American through past experiences. In this article Sherman illustrates how Native Americans have become assimilated into mainstream society. However, despite the significant extent of cultural diffusion that has taken place, Alexi acknowledges the tension that persists between ‘average’ Americans and Indians through certain passages of his that make palpable distinctions between his intended audiences such as “There are only two million Indians living in this country. We could all fit into one medium-sized city. We should look into it” (Sherman 12). He beseeches the reader to consider if they have ever walked into a room full of people that do not like them. He juxtaposes interactions between different ethnic groups to ultimately prove that experience is subjective.

-Personal Take:

I have lots of experience. Maybe not in the way you think about experience. However, that’s just it, experience is subjective. One way in which I consider myself experienced lies in the notion that I know how to enjoy not looking for experience. Don’t get me wrong, I love to experience new things, go new places, and meet new people. I am talking about living my life with a fluidity that is achieved when you simply enjoy the ride. Life is temporary so sit back, relax, and get comfortable. I am not asking you to be inactive, but rather to pursue your life at a pace dictated by the natural flow of how the world presents itself to you. Let the world experience you. You dictate the course of your life through the conscious decisions you make. I have suffered setbacks and traumatic experiences that have altered the way I think about and perceive the world around me, but I refuse to change the way in which I experience life for myself. Only I get to decide what experiences constitute my identity. Just because terrible things have happened to me in the past does not mean that I have to carry around these experiences like dead weight dragging me down every time they emerge in the form of some memory. For example, a soldier who has seen combat does not get to chose if they have PTSD. My brother had PTSD when he returned from Afghanistan and would have nervous breakdowns and anxiety attacks. His experiences with war may have changed the way he experiences life, but not how he experiences life for himself. He told me that these episodes came and went, and that if they came back again he would deal with them as they came. The lesson here is to not let your experiences control your life, assert some agency. The reason I say I have lots of experience is because I have experienced hardships and disasters in my life, and yet I let the negative chi, if you will, roll right over me. Sure, I have to deal with memories of these events and feel the stern emotions they provoke when recollecting on my past experiences. However, I actively chose to let the experiences that I do not want to become part of my identity, or my essence, to simply wash over me like the ocean tide at the shore line.

 There is an exquisite sea shell near the water on the beach. It basks in the sun like and soaks up the rays of life. However, the tide starts coming in and the ocean water begins to wash over the shell and then recede back. The shell remains there, it has only become wet, or soaked by the experience of the incoming tide. Its essence has not changed, it remains a shell. Eventually the tide rises so that the shell is not constantly underwater. As the tide moves ever forwards the waves begin breaking where the shell resides on the bottom underneath the water. The turbulence of the crashing waves causes the shell to move, and the shell gets caught in the commotion of the current. The shell is then tossed around, sent here and there, until once again, it comes full cycle to the shore where it remains the same shell. If for some odd reason you didn’t see this coming, I am the shell. The ocean is life and the incoming and outgoing tides are experience. Life comes at me and I get moved—uncontrollably—this way and that, but I have experience in fluidity. I do not fight the current nor accept where it puts me. Life throws experiences at me whether I like them or not and I am forced to go places I don’t want to go, and yet I am the same exquisite shell. A shell may be scratched or chipped by the movement of the tide, but its essence remains unchallenged, it is still a shell. I try to not let the experiences in life control me, and yet they often do. However, when it’s all said and done, my essence is unchanged. The essence of me—my true self—allows me to take away what I want from the experiences in my life and leave behind whatever I don’t want to become a part of my essence. That is why I am experienced; I live with fluidity. And that is why I say sit back, relax, and get comfortable; because if you fight the tides of life you will loose. You can dictate the course of your life even if you can’t control it by choosing how you ride the tide. 

-Joe Fleming

Agency

Agency describes the act of presenting oneself according to social, political, government, or familial norms, whether the individual is acting within or against them. These cultural scripts and the individual's response to them collectively inform one's identity. An individual's sense of agency is complex in that no one is an agent of a singular pre-existing idea because many aspects of our lives and actions are dictated by cultural scripts whether we are aware of them or not. Rather, to draw from ideas presented by Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson in Reading Autobiography, our identities are "intersectional," meaning that our concept of self is not an additive collection of roles, it is a fabric woven of roles all effecting one another, including the roles that we assume and those that are put upon us by society.

Anne Bradstreet offers several examples of acting as an agent within and against the cultural scripts present within her life, primarily as a Puritan, a woman, a mother, and a wife. Her "Meditations Divine and Moral" is a set of rules in the form of advice addressed to her son for him to live by in order to be a good son and furthermore, a good Puritan man. In this sense she is also prodding her son to act as an agent of her morals. It is important to realize that this grouping of advice was never meant to be published. The fact that she wrote it means that she is acting as an agent of what is expected of a parent to teach a child, however, it also means that she is acting outside of the confines of the Puritan cultural script which looks down upon women who suggest in any way, whether it be textual or oral, that they have the authority to speak in such a way. 

Personal Take:

     My paternal grandmother has always been an advocate for equality in all forms, and taught me the importance of taking a stand for myself and for those who can not stand up for themselves in the name of fairness. Her focus on equality and empowerment came from a lifetime of acting against cultural scripts that discouraged women put forth by society, but within the standards put forth by her own empowered mother. Thus, according to Smith and Watson, my grandmother is one who gained agency by changing the terms of her representation. She grew up in a wealthy family as the oldest daughter of seven, and was a top ranked competitive sailor in the days where sailing was strictly a men's sport. Her accomplishments echoed that of her mother's, which included being one of the first female pilots behind Amelia Earhart, and one of the first female journalists under the pseudonym, Bobbi Burns in order to hide her gender so that she could actually get published. Furthermore, my grandmother had my father out of wedlock and raised him on her own for the first seven years of his life. It is obvious to me now as I watch her at seventy-nine still running her own business, swimming laps every morning, staying up to date on current events and technology, as well as continuing to read a new book every couple of days, that by acting against the societal norms for decades upon decades, her empowerment led to a sense of independence. I could not be more grateful to have such a strong woman to look up to nor could I be more proud to stay that I am an agent of her teachings, evident by my academic and athletic accomplishments, sense of independence and most importantly, my desire to empower others. 

- Mary Alice Miller

Knowledge and Self-Knowledge

Smith and Watson stress the importance of taking into consideration how the narrator writes about various forms of Knowledge or produces forms of Self-Knowledge when examining autobiographical texts. They implore the reader to make connections between the narrator’s knowledge of the world and knowledge of others or self knowledge, and in doing so they ask if the “narrative itself generate alternative sources of knowledge” (RA 245)? Analyzing the different channels of knowledge that the narrator exhibits in his/her self-life writing provides great insight into how they perceive their world, the people in it, and their own knowledge of human understanding.

Ralph Waldo Emerson’s “Experience” serves as a wonderful example of how different forms of knowledge are explored, challenged, and proposed in self-life writing. In this text Emerson discusses his personal experiences to proclaim that mankind is not truly living; humanity is just scratching the surface of life, and there is no real depth or meaning in contemporary society as everyone is blindly engaging in mundane routines and haughty temperaments. Emerson feels that humanity is in a false-conscious state of being which has inhibited true or substantial knowledge to burgeon forth. The Following quotes describe Emerson’s outlook on mankind:

“We fall soft on thought” (Emerson 28).

“Our relations to each other are oblique and casual” (29).

“Temperament [has] shut us in a prison of glass which we cannot see” (31).

“That immobility and absence of elasticity which we find in the arts, we find with more pain in the artist” (33).

“There is no power of expansion in men” (33).

Emerson is beseeching people to live in the moment, be spontaneous, and yet do not live in extremes; find the golden mean. He claimed that “Everything good is on the highway,” which suggest progression and movement; he is tired of mankind’s obsession with superficial knowledge that stagnates in its rigidity. Emerson claims “All good conversation, manners, and action, come from a spontaneity which forgets usages, and makes the moment great. Nature hates calculators” (39). Emerson’s self-life writing generates alternative sources of knowledge for the reader.

Personal Take:

One great way to think about Smith and Watson’s Knowledge and Self-Knowledge section in the tool kit is to consider the multiple forms of knowledge that they allude to. If I were to write an autobiography there would definitely be a paragraph were I would illustrate how both, book and street smarts,  have influenced my mode of thinking, acting, writing, and moreover—how I would write my own biography. I would also distinguish the knowledge I gain everyday from reading literature, listening to music, or any other daily form of exposure to knowledge. However, I feel as if the ‘self-knowledge’ Smith and Watson discuss is more or less equivalent to how people perceive their lives and the things that they experience, a more philosophical kind of knowledge, if you will. For example, in my autobiography I would demonstrate my self-knowledge by writing about things in a platonic sense, or the idea of the ‘form’ put forth in Plato’s Republic. I would also probably demonstrate how I was influenced by my history seminar paper in which I did extensive research into metaphysics and German ‘New Objectivity’. In doing so I would write about things—aesthetic objects, art, music, literature, film, thought—in a sense to capture their essence. By essence I mean I would take an outside approach to something as a whole, not what its various parts constitute its existence, but its ultimate goal or purpose. This is how my version of ‘self-knowledge’ would evince itself in my text by showing the reader the modus operandi of my experience with things, people, and ideas.

-Joe Fleming

Trauma and Scriptotherapy

In Reading Autobiography Smith and Watson explain that the Trauma Narrative and “the

subject of trauma refers to both a person struggling to make sense of an overwhelming experience in a particular context and the ‘unspeakability’ of trauma itself, its resistance to representation” (RA 283). In the tool kit Smith and Watson guide the reader’s understanding of trauma narratives and Scriptotherapy by asking questions such as “Does the narrator struggle to find words to speak the unspeakable?…[or] does the process of writing seem to have changed the narrating ‘I’? (RA 250).

Mary Rowlandson’s captivity narrative is a perfect example of how traumatic experiences can complicate the narrator’s memory of violent events or powerful episodes that they experienced in the past. Mary Rowlandson was captured by Indians in 1675 during King Phillip’s War. She described her village being attacked by writing “Some in our house were fighting for their lives, others wallowing in their blood, the house on fire over our heads, and the bloody heathen ready to knock us on our head” (Rowlandson 138). She witnesses those dearest to her slain in a blood orgy of destruction and fire, and was forced to watch her child die in her arms from a gunshot wound that went through her infant and into her. Re-interpreting ‘unspeakable’ trauma often results in a changed narrating ‘I’ that relies on the therapeutic effects of self-life writing to express a new identity or understanding of the self. Rowlandson expressed the difficulty she had in relating her captivity experience through her self-life writing by saying “I cannot express to man the affliction that lay upon my spirit” (Rowlandson 146). When she emerges from the Puritan Jeremiad, or god’s testing of one’s faith through suffering, there is a certain distance between her past narrated ‘I’ and the narrating ‘I’. The narrating ‘I’ relies on bible verses and god’s providence to articulate her trauma narrative, in doing so she finds a healing or therapeutic aspect in self-life writing. Her traumatic experience had a profound effect on her psyche after returning to Christian society; she wrote “Oh! The wonderful power of God that mine eyes have see, affording matter enough for my thoughts to run in, that when others are sleeping mine are weeping” (Rowlandson 175). This passage demonstrate Smith and Watson’s claim that trauma can alter a person’s identity. Mary Rowlandson ultimately emerges as a stronger person that was saved by the grace of god, a person that is no longer bothered by trivial matters of life as she explains “If trouble from smaller matters begin to arise in me, I have something at hand to check myself with, and say, why am I troubled” (Rowlandson 176). Her captivity experience and the new found faith in god’s providence evinced through her return to civilization created a new identity for her that would make it hard for her to cry over spilt milk.

Personal Take:

I was in a serious relationship with someone that I thought was my soul mate. To make a long story short, our break-up was somewhat of a traumatic experience for me. I could not speak about it with people, other than giving them the whole macho spill; ‘I don’t care about her – it was for the best’. After some time I wrote a poem to vent some of the emotions I was feeling. I was in a pessimistic, nihilistic, and Tyler Durden-like state of mind. Writing this poem was very therapeutic for me, and it was the first thing that came to mind when I read Smith and Watson’s section on Trauma and Scriptotherapy.

Begin at once to loose it all,

let no one thing become your ball,

A chain, winding, binding, one for all.

Poisonous words intertwining,

faceless people wining and dining,

caught in a world, no rhythm, no rhyme.

Begin at once to loose it all.

Break free from your lover’s call!

Break free from your aimless flaw!

Break free from your coffin’s wall!

Break free from your empty eyes,

Looking for solace they will not find.

Catch a glimpse only to watch it pass,

lean back and let it go, but not to fast.

Begin at once to loose it all.

Eat, drink, fuck, and screw,

that is all that one can do.

Let it all fall and shatter on the floor,

what once was, was no more,

every virgin ends a whore.

Begin at once to loose it all.

Let shit hit fan,

abandon your fucking plan!

No hope nor reason will suffice,

leave each to their own device.

Rip mask from face,

all there is, is this place.

Now that she is forever gone,

It does not matter what went wrong.

Begin at once to loose it all.

Set out for something,

become lost in nothing.

Reach out for the skies,

end up covered in dirt.

Find what truth you sought,

then realize it is, but naught.

-Joe Fleming

Coherence and Closure

Smith and Watson encourage readers to look for gaps in coherence in life narratives. These gaps indicate possible revelations or struggles on the author’s part and change how we experience their stories. The digressions or breaks also suggest that the author has multiple, conflicting voices which in turn, present a complex voice to readers.Closure, for some reason, is lumped in with the concept of coherence. Because no writer can extend their autobiography beyond the point of his or her death, s/he must find a suitable point to end his or her narrative. When reading life narratives, it is necessary to consider why the author has chosen to end their story at the point that it has ended-- does it feel finished? Open ended? What is the significance of the ending?

Don't Let Me Be Lonely: An American Lyric by Claudia Rankine is a good example of both coherence and closure. I'd like to address each topic separately. While Rankine's novel is primarily prose, it has moments of poetry and bits of surreal conversation that seem suspended in space somewhere. Each time she inserts these breaks in her prose, it reinforces what she is talking about in the previous paragraph. Visually, her line breaks and inclusion of pictures of television sets between chapters show digressions and transitions that surprisingly contribute to the overall flow of the book by breaking up the chunks of prose. The end of Rankine's book really isn't about her and thus it's not a permanent closure of her life story. Rather, it's about the nature of being present, and how an individual isn't "here" unless there is another individual to recognize his/her existence. In this sense, we are alone and it's something we all have in common, which actually means that none of us are truly, 100% alone.

Personal Take:

I really enjoyed writing a blog post about this book for that week of class. Furthermore, I thought the ending of Rankine's book was phenomenal and I was happy that we got a chance to discuss it in class. The last two pages conveyed Rankine's sense of community and relationships in both a broad and specific way. In doing so, she is appealing to humanity without being too vague. I love that she quoted Paul Celan as saying "I cannot see any basic difference between a handshake and a poem," and then follows it with her understanding of that idea. We also discussed in class her decision to end with a preposition, making the last line kind of open ended and subject to interpretation. In a strange twist, it almost felt more personal that way, like she's letting the reader decide what it means after giving us all the tools to figure it out. "We must both be here in this world in this life in this place indicating the presence of." 

- Mary Alice Miller

Temporality

The Oxford English Dictionary defines Temporality as “the quality or condition of being temporal or temporary; temporariness; [or being] in relation to time” (OED). In Smith and Watson’s tool kit they use this term to try and put a time frame on when the narrator wrote, told, or published his or her self narrative. They note that sometimes the narrator acknowledges the act of telling his story and ask “does he situate the moment of its telling?” RA 249). They also ask the reader to consider the importance of significant shifts in the historical moment of the self narration, or if there are more than one periods in which the author retold his or her life story? If so, what changes between the lapsed time, and how do these breaks affect self-life writing?

In the preface of Benjamin Franklin’s Autobiography and Other Writings the editor notes that “Franklin composed his autobiography at three different times in his life” (Seavy 1). The first part was written in 1771 while Franklin was vacationing in England, the second part was written in 1782 after Franklin had become one of the most affluent figures of the founding era. The last part was written when Franklin was in his early eighties. There was a major shift in the historical moment that his autobiography was written; when he wrote his first America was a word—not a nation. This part establishes a pattern of emplotment that promotes the idea of the ‘self-made man,’ which is arguably the most prevalent rhetorical trope throughout the text. The temporality—or temporary aspect—of certain parts of his autobiography are linked by Franklin’s consistent construction of agency and the development of his character is comparable to a garden that has been nurtured, trimmed, and expanded throughout its existence. However, weeds had begun to blur his memory by the time he was writing his autobiography. Even in his first part he wrote “By my rambling digression I perceive my self to be grown old. I us’d to write more methodically” (Franklin 12). Temporality, or being in relation to time, is also clearly demonstrated by the passages in which he talks about the ‘Errata’ or major errors of his life. He discusses these profound mistakes of his life in temporal terms by dismissing his bad judgments as a temporary phase of his youth with lines like “Perhaps I was too saucy & provoking” (Franklin 22).

Personal Take:

I often look at my life through the lenses of temporality. I have attempted to divide various stages of my life by delineating what I was most concerned with at the time. To be honest I don’t remember much from my early childhood. Of course there are various moments that influenced my life in profound ways, but it was not until early adolescence that I can try to stratify my life in temporal layers. My early adolescence was marked by a rebellious spirit, or I should say a spirit of mayhem. My friends and I would constantly push the envelope for how many rules we could break and get away with it. This temporary phase was replaced with an obsession with the newest fad: diamondback bikes with the pegs, Pogs, Pokemon cards and game-boy, yo-yos, and so forth. My early teenage experiences all the way through freshman year were dominated by anything and everything that had to do with skateboarding. High school ushered in a completely new mindset in which I identify my first Errata. Hormones, girls, the popularity conquest, and smoking marijuana became the norm during this time. However, by junior year I began to grow into myself, and focused on school and working. The next phase came when I finally got my first car, and from that point on I have been on the move ever since. It is an interesting exercise to divide your life into temporal layers; however, they often overlap and are built upon by new episodes in the development of one’s life.

- Joe Fleming

Paratexts

The Tool Kit in Reading Autobiography uses the term paratext to refer to all forms of material inside a book. This includes the pictures on the outside cover, the preface, publishing info, notes, pictures, letters, poems, references, or any material contained in or on a book. Smith and Watson challenge the reader to question the rhetorical purpose of paratextual material in all of its various forms.

Claudia Rankine’s take a very peculiar approach to notions of self-life writing in her book Don’t Let Me Be Lonely: An American Lyric. This autobiographical text is littered with images, poems, diagrams, random dialogue, labels, symbols, advertisements, flyers, and a slue of other meaningful forms of paratexts. Rankine uses a blank page with a picture on a television set to serve as a transition or break between the wide spectrum of issues she addresses in her epistemological approach to understanding human nature and what we dubbed the ‘crisis of relationality’ in class. The television with static on the screen can be read in a number of symbolic ways. Perhaps it connotes ambivalence in contemporary society, or some societal or cultural shortcoming that blocks people from seeing truth or whatever it is they are after. The static also exudes a sense of emptiness, a void where images should be. This might be her way of expressing that the essence of modern society is a mere shell of what it used to be. Smith and Watson claim that paratexts “comprise a threshold that can dramatically affect its [a text’s] interpretation and reception by variously situated reading communities” (RA 100). They go on to suggest that paratexts are received by various audiences and solicit a number of different responses based on the demographic orientation of individual readers. Paratextual images can grab the readers eye and evoke certain reactions that my affect the way the reader perceives the inherent message of the paratext item.

Personal Take:

My grandmother is a ‘scrap-booker’. Oh yes, she is obsessed with splicing newspaper articles, photos, leaves, and whatever she can fit in between the bindings of her scrapbooks. She has a cook-book scrapbook, several family album scrapbooks, and a stout collection of other types of scrapbooks that I will probably never look at. However, there was one scrapbook that caught my eye and actually influenced my life much more than a scrapbook should be able to. She has a scrapbook dedicated to Bear Bryant that I used to spend hours looking at. Bear Bryant was the head foot ball coach at Alabama and is arguably the most prolific iconic figures associated with college football. The black and white checked hat he used to wear has become synonymous with the Crimson Tide’s mascot or school logo. During his 25 year tenure he amassed six national championships and thirteen conference championships. My Crammy’s scrapbook had newspaper articles, photos, magazine articles, signed memorabilia, and an extensive collection of other neat oddities about Bear Bryant and his legendary identity as one of the greatest coaches to have ever paced the sidelines. I would never pull for Alabama if I had not been exposed to the paratexts of this scrapbook. College football is a big part of my life and means a lot to me. It truly influences how I live my life, and thus, believe it or not, the paratext of some old scrapbook sitting in a closet in Birmingham Alabama has affected my agency via which teams I pull for.

***I have to clarify that I am a Carolina fan thru and thru—GO COCKS!!!—however, I pull for Bama every game they play except when they play the Gamecocks, and when football means as much as it does to me, that is saying something.

-Joe Fleming