The Situation and the Story: The Art of Personal Narrative
Vivian Gornick
Language: English
Pages: 192
ISBN: 0374528586
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
A guide to the art of personal writing, by the author of Fierce Attachments and The End of the Novel of Love
All narrative writing must pull from the raw material of life a tale that will shape experience, transform event, deliver a bit of wisdom. In a story or a novel the "I" who tells this tale can be, and often is, an unreliable narrator but in nonfiction the reader must always be persuaded that the narrator is speaking truth.
How does one pull from one's own boring, agitated self the truth-speaker who will tell the story a personal narrative needs to tell? That is the question The Situation and the Story asks--and answers. Taking us on a reading tour of some of the best memoirs and essays of the past hundred years, Gornick traces the changing idea of self that has dominated the century, and demonstrates the enduring truth-speaker to be found in the work of writers as diverse as Edmund Gosse, Joan Didion, Oscar Wilde, James Baldwin, or Marguerite Duras.
This book, which grew out of fifteen years teaching in MFA programs, is itself a model of the lucid inteligence that has made Gornick one of our most admired writers of ninfiction. In it, she teaches us to write by teaching us how to read: how to recognize truth when we hear it in the writing of others and in our own.
creature foolishly self-dramatizing. No, in memoir “alone again” will never do. In fact, exactly the opposite is required. If the solitude of self is the real subject, memoirists generally do better when they speak through the filter of that which passes for a subject well beyond themselves: a solution derived from the hard-won understanding that to speak otherwise is to risk ending in rhetoric or abstraction. Such memoirs often adopt a posture through the narrating persona akin to that of the
it did not encourage in them the value of human connection. Many of these people remained tempestuous spirits, coldly immature, devoted to adventure in the wilderness sense of that word. They loved Africa because Africa had given them the best of themselves, and love of Africa remains the best thing about them. Certainly, it is the best thing about Beryl Markham. Africa, she tells us, “was the breath and life of my childhood. It is still the host of all my darkest fears, the cradle of mysteries
always intriguing, but never wholly solved … It is as ruthless as any sea, more uncompromising than its own deserts … without temperance in its harshness or in its favours. It yields nothing, offering much to men of all races … But the soul of Africa, its integrity, the slow inexorable pulse of its life, is its own and of such singular rhythm that no outsider, unless steeped from childhood in its endless, even beat, can ever hope to experience it, except only as a bystander might experience a
WRITERS, TEACHERS, AND STUDENTS ABOUT THIS GUIDE The discussion question:;, exercises, and suggested reading list that follow were prepared by the publisher to help readers focus their reading of Vivian Gornick’s The Situation and the Story, an incisive exploration of how the personal narrative achieves its power. We hope these will offer a deeper understanding of Gornick’s analysis and suggest ways in which others might apply her approaches to their own writing. QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION
happened” (p. 91). Write about a small but important experience in your life and try to make that large sense of it that Gornick feels is required of strong nonfiction writing. 7. Revisit a piece of personal writing that you worked on before reading The Situation and the Story and revise it with Gornick’s insights and perspectives in mind. SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING Judith Barrington, Writing the Memoir: From Truth to Art; Annie Dillard and Cort Conley, eds., Modern American Memoirs;